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Dekortage writes
"Have you ever ratted somebody out? If it was a legal case, you might end up on Who's A Rat, an online database of police informants and undercover agents, identified through various publicly-available documents such as court briefings. The data-mined information is now available online at a price. As reported in the New York Times, 'The site says it has identified 4,300 informers and 400 undercover agents, many of them from documents obtained from court files available on the Internet.' Understandably, U.S. judges and law enforcement agents are upset, although defense lawyers seem to like the idea. Where do you draw the line between legal transparency and secrecy?"
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San Muel writes
"In an official statement, Microsoft has said it has no immediate plans to sue after alleging patent infringements by open-source vendors for the time being. The company goes on to say that, essentially, it could have done that any time in the last three years if it wanted to. So what's the purpose of these bold announcements? '[John McCreesh, OpenOffice.org marketing project lead] added that while Microsoft may not have plans to sue, it could be using the threat of litigation to try to encourage corporate customers to move to those open-source product vendors with whom it had signed licensing agreements, such as Novell. "Microsoft has spent time and money accumulating patents. Maybe it has started using that armory to move corporate customers to open-source software that Microsoft approves of."'"
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JustOK writes:
With the first mission scheduled for 2020, NASA plans, among other things, to use "metric units for all operations on the lunar surface"
"NASA's lunar plan also encourages participation by other nations, as well as non-governmental organizations and commercial groups." NASA has nearly 60 space and Earth science projects currently, with about half having some type of international cooperation. North and South lunar poles are being looked at as locations for moon bases. Lunar stays of up to 180 days are being planned.
The project will see "A string of robot spacecraft will shoot for the Moon within the next two years, departing from Japan, China, India, as well as the United States."
According to a report via Yahoo! by Space.com staff, NASA has had informal discussions on using Internet protocols for lunar communications.
