An American court would have blocked "Killustrator" as well, as would the courts of most other countries, for trademark infringement. It's pretty much open-and-shut. You can't just slap a K or a G onto the name of a trademarked commercial product and use it as the name of a competing product, and this applies in the US, Canada, Europe, and most other places. Get over it.
Now, the Mobilix/Obelix thing is far more bogus.
Re:What I think MS was up to...
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Today's SCO News
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Even Bush's lame FTC would not allow Microsoft to buy Unix. The FTC has to approve mergers that have anti-competitive potential.
There's only one "act of terrorism", but it was a biggie: Saddam tried to kill Bush's daddy, when Bush Sr. visited Kuwait in the early 90s (after Clinton took office). Of course, if this was just a revenge attempt rather than an attempt to get some political gain, it might not qualify as terrorism by some definitions.
The much-hated French have repeatedly intervened to stop "brushfire conflicts" in Africa, without US assistance. At the moment, they are
intervening in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with UN blessing, to help stop a war that has killed tens of thousands. They've also intervened to try to end civil war in Ivory Coast, among other places.
So your "without exception" claim is incorrect.
It should also be noted that in a parliamentary system, the president's role is extremely limited; it is a mostly ceremonial role. The prime minister has the power.
The Linux people are on much safer ground than the BSD people were. It was stipulated by all parties that the Berkeley folks worked intimately with the Bell Labs source code, and were attempting to gradually replace the proprietary parts with free parts. Given this, it seemed quite likely to the courts that they hadn't done this right, and that BSD was a derivative work.
Linux, on the other hand, is a re-implementation from scratch. Torvalds and his lieutenants didn't have access to proprietary Unix source (though a couple of contributors had been "exposed").
Also, courts aren't casual about granting injunctions that would cause enormous economic harm without evidence. With billions at stake, any injunction would get appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, and SCO would be required to demonstrate that it had a reasonable chance of prevailing. But SCO hasn't sued Linux, it has only sued IBM. You are speculating about some legal action that hasn't even begun yet.
Back in '92, someone made this exact argument to me about the AT&T/BSD case. He was wrong: the BSD people had screwed up (there were several files that had tainted AT&T code), but BSD won anyway.
You forget an important lesson of the AT&T vs BSD case. It was found that AT&T itself was engaging in serious copyright violation (removing all the University of California copyrights from their code). They had to settle.
Similarly, SCO will be found to be violating all kinds of IP rules itself: IBM patents (you can't sneeze without violating an IBM patent, they have so many), remaining BSD code with copyrights stripped, GPLed code copied into their Unix product, etc. Then they have the problem that
they don't own the copyright!. Novell does.
Finally, there's a huge difference: the GPL, and the fact that SCO itself distributed and worked on Linux for years. They can't claim ignorance, as their own engineers worked intimately with the Linux kernel and OS, modified it, and distributed it. By doing so, they granted a GPL license on what they distributed to the world. They can't revoke that.
I'm sure that Linus is getting some legal advice right about now, and that's probably why he's been relatively quiet, other than a couple of general statements. However, I suspect that the lawyers are telling him not to sweat it.
Since Novell is a Linux ally, the way that they would enforce any copyright violations, if there are any, would be to find any alleged violations, and work with Linus and others to track down how they got in, and replace the offending code if any exists. That's generally what the FSF has done many times when it turned out that someone infringed the GPL; they worked it out quietly.
If a mini-black hole that eats us all can be formed in a particle accelerator, it can also be formed by a high-energy cosmic ray (some cosmic rays have vastly more energy than can be produced by any particle accelerator, either existing or on the drawing board). So you can relax -- if such things were possible, we would have been swallowed up long ago.
Who gives a shit what people will think? If something turns you on and it doesn't hurt anyone, by all means do it. If it's a time-waster, so is watching TV.
On the other hand, as someone already pointed out, this is really old news. When Postscript was new, people were doing tons of these things (cute Postscript hacks).
When I travel to Germany, as I often do, people tend to carry around large bank notes. They have to, as a much larger fraction of restaurants and bars are cash-only. When you pay with a 50 Euro or 100 Euro bill (about $58 or $116 at the moment), the merchant will typically scan it with a little machine that looks at the watermark. Once RFIDs become common, the little machine will detect the RFID. If it's not present, the merchant will assume that it's a counterfeit bill. Because of these little machines, no one objects to taking large bills for small transactions (unless they are short of Kleingeld, um, change). In the US, on the other hand, it can be tricky to spend a $100 bill, as most people are reluctant to take one.
So, drug dealers won't accept money with RFIDs destroyed. Assuming that Euros have the RFID and dollars don't, they'll insist on dollars (even though the dollar's value has been dropping like a rock in the last year or so).
You did not read carefully: you are comparing an actual throughput number (10 mbps for a mixed b/g network) to a raw, theoretical data rate number (11 mbps for b). In practice, the actual throughput on an 802.11b network is about 5 mbps.
802.11b is billed as 11, but it can only do 5.
Make sure that you compare apples to apples.
Even if the actual throughput is 10 Mbps, it's still double 802.11b's actual throughput.
Why can't all the David Nelsons get together and sue for damages? The constitution guarantees right to travel and right to equal protection under the law.
Your claim is false; the company Solarex demonstrated this 20 years, ago, by constructing what they called a "breeder" factory for solar cells: the only power input was solar. If, as you say, solar cells cost more energy to produce than they deliver in their lifetime, the concept would not work. And photovoltaics have gotten more efficient since then.
Users tend to ignore such warnings because similar warnings appear far too often for invalid reasons. This is not a new problem; Aesop wrote about the boy who cried wolf.
What you folks may be missing is that efforts like this could actually help Linux, by decreasing the variety of crap that the Linux kernel guys have to support. If PC hardware becomes more uniform, it can greatly simplify the writing of drivers. If driver interfaces become more regular and less baroque, it might even be possible to get a Linux kernel (under restricted circumstances) to use a closed-source driver written for Athens.
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An American court would have blocked "Killustrator" as well, as would the courts of most other countries, for trademark infringement. It's pretty much open-and-shut. You can't just slap a K or a G onto the name of a trademarked commercial product and use it as the name of a competing product, and this applies in the US, Canada, Europe, and most other places. Get over it.
Now, the Mobilix/Obelix thing is far more bogus.
Even Bush's lame FTC would not allow Microsoft to buy Unix. The FTC has to approve mergers that have anti-competitive potential.
There's only one "act of terrorism", but it was a biggie: Saddam tried to kill Bush's daddy, when Bush Sr. visited Kuwait in the early 90s (after Clinton took office). Of course, if this was just a revenge attempt rather than an attempt to get some political gain, it might not qualify as terrorism by some definitions.
The much-hated French have repeatedly intervened to stop "brushfire conflicts" in Africa, without US assistance. At the moment, they are intervening in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with UN blessing, to help stop a war that has killed tens of thousands. They've also intervened to try to end civil war in Ivory Coast, among other places. So your "without exception" claim is incorrect.
It should also be noted that in a parliamentary system, the president's role is extremely limited; it is a mostly ceremonial role. The prime minister has the power.
The Linux people are on much safer ground than the BSD people were. It was stipulated by all parties that the Berkeley folks worked intimately with the Bell Labs source code, and were attempting to gradually replace the proprietary parts with free parts. Given this, it seemed quite likely to the courts that they hadn't done this right, and that BSD was a derivative work.
Linux, on the other hand, is a re-implementation from scratch. Torvalds and his lieutenants didn't have access to proprietary Unix source (though a couple of contributors had been "exposed").
Also, courts aren't casual about granting injunctions that would cause enormous economic harm without evidence. With billions at stake, any injunction would get appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, and SCO would be required to demonstrate that it had a reasonable chance of prevailing. But SCO hasn't sued Linux, it has only sued IBM. You are speculating about some legal action that hasn't even begun yet.
Back in '92, someone made this exact argument to me about the AT&T/BSD case. He was wrong: the BSD people had screwed up (there were several files that had tainted AT&T code), but BSD won anyway.
You forget an important lesson of the AT&T vs BSD case. It was found that AT&T itself was engaging in serious copyright violation (removing all the University of California copyrights from their code). They had to settle.
Similarly, SCO will be found to be violating all kinds of IP rules itself: IBM patents (you can't sneeze without violating an IBM patent, they have so many), remaining BSD code with copyrights stripped, GPLed code copied into their Unix product, etc. Then they have the problem that they don't own the copyright!. Novell does.
Finally, there's a huge difference: the GPL, and the fact that SCO itself distributed and worked on Linux for years. They can't claim ignorance, as their own engineers worked intimately with the Linux kernel and OS, modified it, and distributed it. By doing so, they granted a GPL license on what they distributed to the world. They can't revoke that.
I'm sure that Linus is getting some legal advice right about now, and that's probably why he's been relatively quiet, other than a couple of general statements. However, I suspect that the lawyers are telling him not to sweat it.
Since Novell is a Linux ally, the way that they would enforce any copyright violations, if there are any, would be to find any alleged violations, and work with Linus and others to track down how they got in, and replace the offending code if any exists. That's generally what the FSF has done many times when it turned out that someone infringed the GPL; they worked it out quietly.
Certainly, or use SSH port forwarding.
If a mini-black hole that eats us all can be formed in a particle accelerator, it can also be formed by a high-energy cosmic ray (some cosmic rays have vastly more energy than can be produced by any particle accelerator, either existing or on the drawing board). So you can relax -- if such things were possible, we would have been swallowed up long ago.
Who gives a shit what people will think? If something turns you on and it doesn't hurt anyone, by all means do it. If it's a time-waster, so is watching TV.
On the other hand, as someone already pointed out, this is really old news. When Postscript was new, people were doing tons of these things (cute Postscript hacks).
Most companies are completely ignoring the SCO threats. I know that mine is.
When I travel to Germany, as I often do, people tend to carry around large bank notes. They have to, as a much larger fraction of restaurants and bars are cash-only. When you pay with a 50 Euro or 100 Euro bill (about $58 or $116 at the moment), the merchant will typically scan it with a little machine that looks at the watermark. Once RFIDs become common, the little machine will detect the RFID. If it's not present, the merchant will assume that it's a counterfeit bill. Because of these little machines, no one objects to taking large bills for small transactions (unless they are short of Kleingeld, um, change). In the US, on the other hand, it can be tricky to spend a $100 bill, as most people are reluctant to take one.
So, drug dealers won't accept money with RFIDs destroyed. Assuming that Euros have the RFID and dollars don't, they'll insist on dollars (even though the dollar's value has been dropping like a rock in the last year or so).
If you're in Europe, there are strong privacy laws that would limit the ability of either government or business to look into your legal transactions.
If you're in the US, you would have no privacy protection, of course.
You did not read carefully: you are comparing an actual throughput number (10 mbps for a mixed b/g network) to a raw, theoretical data rate number (11 mbps for b). In practice, the actual throughput on an 802.11b network is about 5 mbps.
802.11b is billed as 11, but it can only do 5. Make sure that you compare apples to apples. Even if the actual throughput is 10 Mbps, it's still double 802.11b's actual throughput.
Why can't all the David Nelsons get together and sue for damages? The constitution guarantees right to travel and right to equal protection under the law.
Certainly the lowest level of the X server, namely the framebuffer, can be put into the kernel, and a number of X implementations have done just that.
Your claim is false; the company Solarex demonstrated this 20 years, ago, by constructing what they called a "breeder" factory for solar cells: the only power input was solar. If, as you say, solar cells cost more energy to produce than they deliver in their lifetime, the concept would not work. And photovoltaics have gotten more efficient since then.
Users tend to ignore such warnings because similar warnings appear far too often for invalid reasons. This is not a new problem; Aesop wrote about the boy who cried wolf.
A case only goes to the Supreme Court if four justices agree to hear the case. Why should they?
Vancouver is not in the Canadian Rockies.
What you folks may be missing is that efforts like this could actually help Linux, by decreasing the variety of crap that the Linux kernel guys have to support. If PC hardware becomes more uniform, it can greatly simplify the writing of drivers. If driver interfaces become more regular and less baroque, it might even be possible to get a Linux kernel (under restricted circumstances) to use a closed-source driver written for Athens.
Whale watching in the Canadian Rockies? Wow, you must have great eyesight, to see so far.