Nice--we do five years at my workplace to just to make them stretch. We also get the monitors so all the equipment matches.

That's not a bad price--what sort of maintenance contract do you get on those?

Link to the actual decision, for those interested: http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/fdocs/docs.fwx?submit=showbr&shofile=09-3379_002.pdf

If he signed a non-compete he waived that right. According to the suit he signed such an agreement.

None that I'm aware of, but having enemies doesn't automatically absolve you of any potential crime. I'm more drawing the parallel that the /. instinctively protects its "own": witness the reaction to Reiser and, for that matter, the deep divisions over Terry Childs. There isn't nearly enough information at this point to make an informed judgement.

Well, the BBC story says "Swedish police have been trying to contact Mr Assange, but have not yet been able to" while Wikileaks says "No-one here has been contacted by Swedish police". Pity you can't serve someone over Twitter. I agree that the timing is suspicious as hell, but after the Reiser fiasco I'm going to wait and see.

In the 1970s there were four schools around the world, and now only a few are left? When you start with four you don't have all that far to drop!

Is there a reliable metric as to which 10% will be needed again at the time the data is written? If not then I don't see what this buys us.

Well, it's a quandary. Publishers want to sell books. Academics and students want to use those books for free, and with a volume of use that would make ever purchasing the book unnecessary for all but a handful of them. I'm sure this will seem a reasonable position to some folks here, but I think it's clear which side is asking for the moon. Incidentally, if you RTFA it's clear Georgia State was operating well beyond what might be considered "fair use" (which Georgia State more or less admitted by tightening its policies after the lawsuit was filed).

Erm, Cambridge University Press has one of the largest academic publishing operations in the world and it's detached from Cambridge itself. This has nothing to do with competition between Cambridge and Harvard and everything to do with academics who don't know anything about copyright law.

That document has no binding legal force in the US and so is irrelevant for this discussion.

Ohh, it's got cel shading!!!

I seem to remember getting all of mine by "borrowing" them from work. I've still got a box with several hundred of these in it. I've been meaning to return them any day, but a) I haven't worked there in over 10 years, b) I'd probably have to delete all the viruses and porn from them first, and c) I don't believe anybody really wants these anymore -- even if they are free.

Is that 'have' as in possess, or consume?