But they do do business in the UK, therefore there are sanctions the authorities can take. Also I think they are registered with Companies House, but I cannot confirm whether the The SCO Group Limited listed here is the same company.
During a power cut you can't use the internet or TV anyway. Unless you have a generator or other backup source or surf on a laptop/palmtop (I have none of these).
"you are also legally allowed to resist arrest if you beleive the officer intends to harm you in an unlawful manner -- but just try arguing THAT one in court!"
If the cop knew you and as a result of a previous event had a grudge against you (and you could prove it), you might win using that line of argument.
There is a third option. The could go to the original authors of the GPL'd code and negotiate a different license. This wouldn't be to hard if all the code was written by an individual or single company, but if it was something like the Linux kernel it would probably be impossible. IIRC, they would need permission from everyone whose code is in the version concerned.
This is true in the UK, with a few exceptions. For example, if the police seize some stolen property but it isn't claimed by the original owner within 6 months (IIRC) the police can legally sell it. However I'm not sure of the same is true in other jurisdictions.
The problem with all sender pays systems is that they seriously affect all bulk mailers, whether they are legitimate or not. For example, SourceForge has over 750,000 registered users, and it probably sends its sitewide update email to most of them.
Factoring one number has a negligible CPU cost. Factoring 750,000 definitely doesn't.
Basically the regulators have decided that mobile phone operators charge to much considering what it costs to run the networks. Although they haven't been accused of explicitly arranging price fixing, they have been viewed as not being competative enough.
Establishing itself in poorer countries could be crucial to the succuss of F/OSS. For example, Taiwan was a poor country less than half a century ago, but now it is hi-tech and is a key player in the global economy. If a country develops its economy using F/OSS and becomes a big software market, Microsoft aren't going to get a great response when they start marketing their products there ("You want us to pay for an operating system?").
Why is it so fashionable these days to call things Orwellian when they obvious aren't. I recently saw an excellent BBC documentary on North Korea, and it really reminded of 1984.
Unless you've been commiting serious tax evasion, I doubt you have much to fear. And if you have, I hope this new initiative helps to catch you. People not paying tax raises the amount those of us that do have to pay.
IIRC, you only need a license to broadcast in a particular part of the spectrum, not recieve. So, you'd be in trouble if you used a lightbulb, candle or a computer monitor (that might get rid of some of the trolls on/.).
The UK has a small number(4-5) of major players in the mobile phone industry. However, prices aren't kept down, and regulators have to force the operators to reduce them.
The Linux/Firefox/Thunderbird (or other F/OSS) solution is probably safer than MS IE/Outlook. However a lot of viruses/worms/trojans etc. rely on a bit of social hacking. If Linux dominated the desktop market, there would be plenty of people who would run as root and chmod +x files from strangers.
Remember that there are people who always want the lastest technology, and feel that something more advanced on the market makes what they have useless.
I'm not one of these people, I think my Pentium 90 system is suitably advanced technology when it comes to the world of servers for small LANs.
I my original post I was talking about MS Access specifically, not low-cost database solutions in general. In the case you describe I agree that something like Access would be appropriate.
the complexity of something like an nVidia GeForce GPU is simply too much for a small team of people to reverse engineer.
I don't entirely agree with this, look at what samba has achieved. But obviously the best solution would be for nVidia, ATI etc. to write open source drivers so the community could help maintain them, or give the linux community the information needed to write the drivers.
I agree with what you're saying, But I was talking about a perfect system (i.e. it has been programmed correctly, and hasn't be tampered with). I am aware that humans are still involved in the process when e-voting is used.
Fortunately, I live in Britain were people still trust the pencil and paper, cross in a box approach to voting
The two advantages of e-Voting that I can see are: votes can be counted more quickly and e-voting systems don't involve humans at the counting stage so in a perfect system errors can't be introduced deliberately or accidently.
The first advantage is pretty irrelevant, as I think most of us can wait overnight for something as important as democratic elections to be counted properly. And as for the second one, we all know that a perfect system doesn't and never will exist. Also, so many people are involved in the counting stage of a manual process that errors probably cancel each other out.
Slashdot Mirror
But they do do business in the UK, therefore there are sanctions the authorities can take. Also I think they are registered with Companies House, but I cannot confirm whether the The SCO Group Limited listed here is the same company.
Sco
Brilliant offers on thousands
of computing products.
www.ebay.co.uk
On clicking the link, I found a copy of SCO Unix for just 25GBP. What a bargain! Much cheaper than this $699.00 Linux stuff I've heard so much about.
"I got up early today and it didn't rain. So does that mean that rain is caused by me sleeping late?"
Probably. I got up late today and it did rain
During a power cut you can't use the internet or TV anyway. Unless you have a generator or other backup source or surf on a laptop/palmtop (I have none of these).
"you are also legally allowed to resist arrest if you beleive the officer intends to harm you in an unlawful manner -- but just try arguing THAT one in court!"
If the cop knew you and as a result of a previous event had a grudge against you (and you could prove it), you might win using that line of argument.
When somebody is killed because a driver was taking the test instead of concentrating on driving.
There is a third option. The could go to the original authors of the GPL'd code and negotiate a different license. This wouldn't be to hard if all the code was written by an individual or single company, but if it was something like the Linux kernel it would probably be impossible. IIRC, they would need permission from everyone whose code is in the version concerned.
IANAL etc...
"No sales of stolen property are ever valid."
This is true in the UK, with a few exceptions. For example, if the police seize some stolen property but it isn't claimed by the original owner within 6 months (IIRC) the police can legally sell it. However I'm not sure of the same is true in other jurisdictions.
The problem with all sender pays systems is that they seriously affect all bulk mailers, whether they are legitimate or not. For example, SourceForge has over 750,000 registered users, and it probably sends its sitewide update email to most of them.
Factoring one number has a negligible CPU cost. Factoring 750,000 definitely doesn't.
"Compared to what??"
One word: costs
Basically the regulators have decided that mobile phone operators charge to much considering what it costs to run the networks. Although they haven't been accused of explicitly arranging price fixing, they have been viewed as not being competative enough.
Establishing itself in poorer countries could be crucial to the succuss of F/OSS. For example, Taiwan was a poor country less than half a century ago, but now it is hi-tech and is a key player in the global economy. If a country develops its economy using F/OSS and becomes a big software market, Microsoft aren't going to get a great response when they start marketing their products there ("You want us to pay for an operating system?").
Why is it so fashionable these days to call things Orwellian when they obvious aren't. I recently saw an excellent BBC documentary on North Korea, and it really reminded of 1984.
Unless you've been commiting serious tax evasion, I doubt you have much to fear. And if you have, I hope this new initiative helps to catch you. People not paying tax raises the amount those of us that do have to pay.
Some unlucky group of people will be assigned the goatse.cx pages. This could be a very large group depending on how many mirrors of it there are.
IIRC, you only need a license to broadcast in a particular part of the spectrum, not recieve. So, you'd be in trouble if you used a lightbulb, candle or a computer monitor (that might get rid of some of the trolls on /.).
I know that Knoppix has excellent hardware detection (for a Linux distro at least), but how good is it diagnosing problems with hardware?
The UK has a small number(4-5) of major players in the mobile phone industry. However, prices aren't kept down, and regulators have to force the operators to reduce them.
"I just want to see how the thingends already"
I believe the ending to Episode III is available on DVD already. It's called Episode IV - A New Hope.
The Linux/Firefox/Thunderbird (or other F/OSS) solution is probably safer than MS IE/Outlook. However a lot of viruses/worms/trojans etc. rely on a bit of social hacking. If Linux dominated the desktop market, there would be plenty of people who would run as root and chmod +x files from strangers.
Remember that there are people who always want the lastest technology, and feel that something more advanced on the market makes what they have useless.
I'm not one of these people, I think my Pentium 90 system is suitably advanced technology when it comes to the world of servers for small LANs.
If only slashdot's moderation system could help sort fish.
When I went to nanotech lab open day, one of the speakers said that 98%-99% of the chips on each wafer must work for the CPU company to make a profit.
something like Access
I my original post I was talking about MS Access specifically, not low-cost database solutions in general. In the case you describe I agree that something like Access would be appropriate.
the complexity of something like an nVidia GeForce GPU is simply too much for a small team of people to reverse engineer.
I don't entirely agree with this, look at what samba has achieved. But obviously the best solution would be for nVidia, ATI etc. to write open source drivers so the community could help maintain them, or give the linux community the information needed to write the drivers.
I agree with what you're saying, But I was talking about a perfect system (i.e. it has been programmed correctly, and hasn't be tampered with). I am aware that humans are still involved in the process when e-voting is used.
Fortunately, I live in Britain were people still trust the pencil and paper, cross in a box approach to voting
The two advantages of e-Voting that I can see are: votes can be counted more quickly and e-voting systems don't involve humans at the counting stage so in a perfect system errors can't be introduced deliberately or accidently.
The first advantage is pretty irrelevant, as I think most of us can wait overnight for something as important as democratic elections to be counted properly. And as for the second one, we all know that a perfect system doesn't and never will exist. Also, so many people are involved in the counting stage of a manual process that errors probably cancel each other out.