>>With Google Voice, you have one Google phone number that callers use to reach you, and you pick up whichever phone--office, home or cellular--rings. You can screen calls, listen in before answering, record calls, read transcripts of your voicemails, and do free conference calls. Domestic calls and texting are free, and international calls to Europe are two cents a minute. In other words, a unified voice system, something a real phone company should have offered years ago.'>>

Funny thing - Skype App allows much of the same, and it's not blocked. AT&T does not suffer much from it - I'll still pay my monthly fee. Probably just one more glitch in approval process.

>Anyone with any common sense, including a judge, would immediately note that you're supposed to use text from the article you're claiming to be taking excerpts from.

Yes, the original article just makes fun of AP. But this brain dead software can easily be exploited for profit, too. Here's an outline.

Many real (not fake) parts of AP articles are uncopyrightable. > 6 words, $17.50. But do they own a copyright for these 6 words? And who owns: politician? NBC? Doubt it: political speech. I've already paid the congressmen to pronounce it, haven't I? One thing sure: these words do not belong to AP.

They sold it to me anyway? Nice. If California law sticks, they own me $500: false advertising, deceptive business practices. Under NY law - up to 3 times damages. Just make this quote long enough. NY had some online small claims filing services, $14 per case...

>I like parent post's concept, but suggest that slashdotters with a little extra pocket change license some RIAA protected lyrics from AP.

Their screwed up software is charging per word. Word is counted by blank. So: paste any lyrics, replace blanks with "-" and you will be charged for 5 words only ($12) no matter how long the song...

It's so stupid, I can't believe it.

>You can, however, relicense something that's in the public domain. You're not even obliged to tell them it's public domain.

It will be a deception (if not an outright fraud). New York (AP is in NY, right?) General Business Law #349 prohibits deceptive business practices. Up to 3 times damages.

>These industry groups lobby for strong copyright protections to...guess what...make money! Which does...guess what...increase the tax base! Which leads to...guess what...

Huh? Your reasoning will be correct, if for each song I downloaded for free, my bank balance increased by $1. But it does not! Each month's end there is the same amount in my account: $0 - not matter has I downloaded something or not.

That means: downloading has absolutely no impact on taxes. No social services or programs are damaged by it. Hey, even police are not damaged, bastards.

>Cox -> submits code which apparently caused a bug
>User -> Reports breakage
>Cox -> Can't replicate breakage and asks user for debug info so he can fix it.
>User -> Says they don't know what to debug for, but is willing to work with Cox.

Here they have found the bottom issue: emacs was expecting some reasonable behavior from the kernel: data delivery before notification of producer's termination. The behavior was broken.

>Linus -> Jumps in and calls Cox's code a buggy piece of shit before any debugging took place, and before it is established if the code is buggy or not.

Hello? The code broke a reasonable expectations of its users. Not buggy? That's technically is a DEFINITION of a bug.

>Cox -> Continues to troubleshoot the issue.
>Linus -> Flames Cox personally and says Cox is unwilling to work on the issue.

Cox was proposing some strange solutions.

>Cox -> Takes his ball and goes home, except in this case, it is OSS so he doesn't really take any ball with him. He just leaves.

Then they had a technical discussion, and it appeared that Linus was right.

>It's not Windows vs Linux.
>It's TradElect vs MarketPrizm, which happen to run on Windows vs Linux respectively.

Bank is having problems with its IVRs (strange slowdown in the software). The first thing they do in troubleshooting is... You can guess, don't be shy... R-r-right: they turn off their anti-virus! (Real problem was: logging system was adding 3 new files per minute, not per second! - into the same directory, Windows can't handle such an abuse for long).

But think about it: trouble? turn off antivirus, now!

Do you see the picture? You can't run mission critical applications WITHOUT anti-virus on Windows: too risky. And you can't run mission critical applications on Windows WITH anti-virus: the anti-virus will cause you problems sooner than later.

So, you can write a better application for Windows than some application for Linux, sure. But you will not have a platform to run it.

This worm spreads through laptops? My MacBook laughs at that.