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Comment Unconscionable Contract clause (Score 5, Informative) 519

First, it's not clear a contract was established. And even if it was, unilateral changes generally are unenforceable. And even if it were there when the attempted purchase was attempted, this is an unconscionable contract clause, against public policy (1st amendment, etc) and should be thrown out.

This person's best bet is to dispute the credit reports, counter sue for whatever they can think of to recover legal fees.

If it were me, I'd just send them a letter telling them to go F themselves and I'll see you in court. Bring it. My lawyer, however, would likely wish that I not do that.

Comment Re:How hard can that possibly be? (Score 3, Insightful) 663

If you've listened to the instruction that goes along with the test, it would be clear what to do. My first grader has no problem with these problems. He's told me that the teacher has explained the technique and he recognizes it from the questions that are asked.... Without understanding the context in which things are taugh, you can't judge the tests that are used. This test is not ridiculous when you look at it in proper context.

Some people want to make political hay out of this, since they feel that they are losing local control. Or they are secretly against a good public education, so they oppose real attempts to raise the standards, think outside of the box and teach the concepts that will form the foundation of a lifetime...

Comment Need context to judge test.... (Score 1) 663

This test is exactly like what my first grader does. They are taught a method for doing things, and the tests reflect that method. I've seen tests like this with my first grader, and he has no problem understanding what to do and doing it well. The missing context in this outrage is what goes on in the classroom to tease apart these basic concepts and apply them to everyday life. The first question is clear from the context: The whole is 6. I have a physical representation of 5 tokens. How many are left. Answer: 1. the other questions find other ways of expressing the same thing. The instruction in class teaches the technique. What's the deal here? Where's the beef?

Comment Re:The southern ocean doesn't take prisoners. (Score 3, Interesting) 67

The odds are not good, to be true. However, if you ever knew Evi and heard stories from her life, this story will end "and then after X days, they were found having survived using make shift fishing gear and drinking rain water.

The odds are long. However, in the past few years there have been instances of people beating the odds. They survived for 60 or 90 or even 120 days on their life raft after their boat sank. Not many, mind you, but it is possible.

Finally, no wreckage has been found. Usually for these events some wreckage is found. This increases the odds. Not by much.

Looking at the TomNod stuff can't hurt. The worst that would happen is that people waste time looking at snippets of the Tasman Sea rather than watching TV, porn, movies, etc.

Comment Re:License war commencing... (Score 1) 457

As for returning the code to the community... FreeBSD can live with not getting it back: that's why the chose the license they use.

Often times companies using BSD find it in their best interest to contribute back. Sometimes very publicly with lots of publicity, other times privately with almost none. People working at Sony have contributed changes over the years to the FreeBSD project, but I have no idea if they are connected to the PS4 or not.

Often times companies using GPL'd software find it in their best interest to not distribute the code. Just try to get the full sources to the kernel on many of the cheap tablets. You can't, despite this being a clear violation of the GPL. Tracing back to the maker of the chipset through four layers of resellers, rebranders and middlemen is hard.

Then again, I've made millions of dollars in my career having made my naming giving away my source code in FreeBSD. I don't feel like free labor for anybody. I do FreeBSD to scratch an itch, and if people can use it great. If they give back even better, but I don't get dogmatic about it. If people want something specific, then my consulting rates kick in: that's the only time I let others control the pace, direction and scope of development.

Comment Re:A great win for FreeBSD (Score 5, Interesting) 457

Apple has contributed lots of patches back to BSD. Juniper has contributed much to BSD, etc.

In general, people that use BSD contribute patches back because it is in their best financial interest to do so. Not because the license says they must, but because they want to. This generally leads to better quality patches too, in my experience.

But don't expect the video driver: that's likely covered by NDA with AMD...

Comment Re:Never met anyone who uses it. (Score 1) 245

Some companies give to the 503(c)3 as their donations, while others donate code and/or developer time. The latter can add up to a quite substantial amount if you look at the total cost it takes to develop something, rather than just the relatively small cost to integrate the patches upstream. The larger companies make modest cash donations to the foundation, records show, but make even larger donations in code to the project. Many of these donations don't necessarily show up in the commit log as being from $LARGE_COMPANY, but instead show up as individual FreeBSD committers that are paid to put the code into FreeBSD, or small consulting houses that large companies sometimes outsource work to.

Warner

Comment Re:Never met anyone who uses it. (Score 4, Informative) 245

Having worked on FreeNAS and its commercial counterpart, I can tell you that iX Systems, the folks behind FreeNAS, give quite a lot back to FreeBSD. There is much code flowing back into the project from them, they sponsor many FreeBSD developers to attend various events, they leverage their buying power to get cheap/free servers for the project.

Juniper Networks did a port of FreeBSD to mips, and contributed it back, as well as substantial support for different arm and PowerPC platforms.

Yahoo has contributed many things back to the project over the years.

And the lest goes on and on. There is a mutually beneficial relationship between the community, the corporations that use it and the project. To speak otherwise shows a woeful ignorance of reality.

Comment "All Rights Reserved." Is a meaningless phrase (Score 3, Insightful) 218

The phrase "All Rights Reserved" is a totally meaningless phrase. It used to be required to retain certain rights in central american countries. It was created by the Buenos Ares convention, and once everybody in central and south america adopted the Berne convention, the phrase no longer had any recognized legal meaning.

It has falsely been asserted that the phrase "All Rights Reserved" makes the Berkeley Copyright statement non-free. This is false because the copyright notices from the Berkeley Unix code base date to a time when the phrase had meaning.

It's only use today is due to inertia.

In short, this article is quite sensational in its ignorance.

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