fuscata - Slashdot User

Comment Luck (Score 1) 646

by fuscata on Friday July 31, 2009 @12:39PM (#28897771) Attached to: Student Suing Amazon For Book Deletions

Whoever tagged this story "goodluckwiththat" obviously doesn't understand the American legal system. Amazon is already feeling the effects of this, and they will have to pay lawyers to fight it. They'll settle for less than it would cost them. No luck involved.

Comment Re:Strongly worded letter? (Score 2, Insightful) 281

by fuscata on Friday July 24, 2009 @09:26AM (#28806057) Attached to: Patent Trolls Target Small East Texas Companies

Agreed, and I'd say he's setting himself up for a not-so-frivolous defamation suit.

Submission + - FOSS licensing made easy

Submitted by freakalad on Friday July 24, 2009 @04:22AM

freakalad writes: I have quite a few mates that are programmers by trade, and often I get asked why they should bother moving over to Open Source; the economics of the matter don't make sense to them: at present they build a product & keep getting paid for it! Easy money, so why rock the boat?
Also, recently I've been encouraged to help our company move into into the FOSS arena (our continued economic survival may depend on it), but old habits die hard.

So, I'm looking for is a definitive guide to Open Source licenses & all the shades between: GPL 1, 2 & 3, permissive/LGPL, BSD, Mozilla, Apache, MIT, CC, etc.
Something short & sweet & to the point, explained in a manner that is easy to convey to laymen users & that can even be used to convince my old coder mates to license (at least some of) their work accordingly. Something to make sense out of the proliferation of the various licenses, how they may affect one-another, and how a living can be made from creating, or modifying, FOSS systems & software, and what legally needs to be released back into the community (hell, it does my head in).

A "Dummy's guide to Open Source licensing", if you will

I'm sure that if I can succinctly argue the points on their merits, it'll be easier to convince others (and not just arguing some abstract moral ideal)

Any help or insights may help

Submission + - Twitter e-mail hack-in yields secret documents (computerworld.com)

Submitted by

CWmike

on Thursday July 16, 2009 @01:39PM

CWmike writes: "A hacker made off with confidential Twitter documents after breaking into an employee's e-mail account, the company's co-founder confirmed yesterday. "What it boils down to is that people are lazy and lackadaisical about their personal paranoia," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security. "People should be thinking twice about what they're making public [on social networking sites]." The breach occurred about a month ago, said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, when a hacker accessed an employee's Google Apps account, which Twitter uses internally. TechCrunch has reported the details of the breach, which revealed financial projections by Twitter that it will have a billion users, $1.54 billion in revenue and $1.1 billion in net earnings by 2013. PC World's Ian Paul asks of the reportage itself: Will Twitter sue TechCrunch?"

Submission + - Linux Vendor Pays Off Microsoft

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16, 2009 @01:15PM

An anonymous reader writes: A vendor of Linux-based networking products has "settled" patent claims by Microsoft, Infoweek reports. Melco Group, which markets the Buffalo brand NAS devices and routers, will pay an undisclosed fee to Redmond. In return (reading between the lines), Microsoft won't sue Melco or its customers for using Linux code that supposedly contains Microsft IP. The problem, of course, is that Microsoft won't publicly state which parts of Linux allegedly infringe its patents. With vendors like Melco apparently willing to settle, Microsoft is undoubtedly motivated to chase down other so-called "offenders." A while back, Steve Ballmer said the company was even ready to go after Red Hat users.

Submission + - Missing Apollo 11 tapes may have been found (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by

saccade.com

on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @07:31PM

saccade.com writes: "The Register and several other outlets are reporting that the missing tapes of the first manned lunar landing may have been found at a storage facility in Perth, Australia. If found, these could have much clearer pictures than the recordings we currently have that were downsampled for TV broadcast. We don't have pictures yet, though: 'Whether the world will finally enjoy high-quality pics of Aldrin and Armstrong strolling the Moon's surface remains to be seen. When NASA coughed to having lost the original tapes, John Sarkissian of the Parkes Observatory noted that even if a machine could be found to replay them, they would be "so old and fragile, it's not certain they could even be played.'"

Submission + - Seven Arrested for Pics of Out-of-Control Officer (signonsandiego.com)

Submitted by Quothz on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @04:49PM

Quothz writes: When San Diego Deputy Marshall Abbott was called to a Congressional campaign fundraiser on a noise complaint, he went out of control. After the hostess refused to provide her date of birth, he decided it was time to break out the pepper spray. He then pulled out a Taser, dragged a 60-year-old woman to the floor by her arm, and called for backup. Police cars, fire trucks, a K-9 unit, and a helicopter apparently were needed, in case others chose not to reveal their dates of birth — but the real story is that seven people were arrested for photographing the cops with their cell phones and "talking back to an officer". "Most" were released at the scene. It's about time we stopped coddling these photograph-taking, back-talking, birth-date-withholding little old ladies and brought some justice to Congressional campaign fund-raising gangs.

Submission + - The Hidden Cost of Using Microsoft Software (computerworlduk.com) 1

Submitted by

Glyn Moody

on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @05:36AM

Glyn Moody writes: "Detractors of free software like to point out it's not really "free", and claim that its Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is often comparable with closed-source solutions if you take everything into account. And yet, despite their enthusiasm for including all the costs, they never include a very real extra that users of Microsoft's products frequently have to pay: the cost of cleaning up malware infections. For example, the UK city of Manchester has just paid out nearly $2.5 million to clean up the Conficker worm, most of which was "a £1.2m [$2million] bill in the IT department, including £600,000 [$1 million] getting 'consultancy support' to fix the problems, which including drafting in experts from Microsoft." To make the comparisons fair, isn't it about time these often massive costs were included in those TCO calculations?"

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