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Please cite a case where copyright law was used to prosecute someone for forwarding an email.

I just read this article. The author has no idea what a summary judgment motion is, nor the significance of having it denied. Summary judgment motions are just long shot motions brought early in a case to try to dismiss it if there are no facts in dispute. The significance of a *denial* of such a request simply means there are facts in dispute, or the law isn't so clear. IT IS A NON-EVENT. Nobody has won -- the case simply proceeds.

The fact is that it's quicker to develop high quality software on the MS platform. Their server OS's are generally quite good, and they have a superior level of integration compared to a similar Linux server performing similar duties (e.g. IIS, SQL, Exchange type stuff). I've developed a whole lot of Linux/UNIX software and a moderate amount of Windows software. Developing in Java is reasonably nice, I'd give the experience a 7/10. Developing in .NET I'd give a 9/10. Most Linux people who blather on about Microsoft aren't real developers, or have little or no experience developing modern application software in Windows. Typically they're sysadmin-cum-developers who made the move from sh/perl to PHP/Ruby type environments and now consider themselves uber-developers.

There are things Linux excels at. Scientific computing. EDA. Supercomputing. Batch systems running certain types of afforementioned applications. "glueware". When we do write Java services for specific reasons (deployment issues into a predominately Linux environment, for example) we do prefer to host them on Linux.

Microsoft continues to hold hearts and minds of developers simply because they've made .NET so nice and because there's nothing like VS2008+TFS. Continued ranting from the SlashDot crowd isn't ever going to change that, no matter how many stars you wish upon.

bitrex writes "Modern Mechanix recently ran a reprint of a 1934 article describing the problem of offshore pirate radio stations broadcasting advertisements and drowning out local, licensed radio programs. 'The primary purpose of the unlicensed broadcast station was to advertise the gambling, liquor, and other dubious pleasure activities of the ship upon which it was built ... they found other sundry rackets, such as a fortune telling program ... After numerous unsuccessful attempts of a local nature, the floating broadcasting establishment was silenced, but only after the state department at Washington, D. C, had made diplomatic representations which forced a Central American country to cancel the ship's registry.' The article also has a great artist's conception of what might be called a machine age 'data haven' bobbing in international waters in the Gulf of Mexico."

DeltaV900 writes to alert us to an auction on eBay of the last Sky Commuter concept car. About 7 hours remain in the auction and the top bid at this writing is $55,100. The seller (with some help from posters in the auction forum) makes clear that the thing won't actually fly, and in fact never did. Other Sky Commuters may have hovered. This one traveled around to air shows and trade fairs.

pegdhcp writes to mention that Apple has applied for a patent on a 'dynamically controlled keyboard' with OLED keys. This may seem remarkably familiar, since an OLED keyboard has been bandied about by Art Lebedev studios for quite a while now. "while the Optimus Maximus is a bit expensive, Apple could certainly mass-produce something similar for less money, perhaps bringing the price into reality for most users. Lebedev has, however, apparently applied for several patents for the Optimus, so it's unclear just what Apple is up to, or what would happen if the company were ever to release such a product."

mlimber sends along a Washington Post story about the immanence of completely artificial life: "The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial — and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive... Some experts are worried that a few maverick companies are already gaining monopoly control over the core 'operating system' for artificial life and are poised to become the Microsofts of synthetic biology. That could stifle competition, they say, and place enormous power in a few people's hands."

This may be old news, but I just noticed myself and thought I'd report it. I've been using the "New Version" of GMail for a couple of weeks (I hardly notice the difference from the "Old Version"), and happened to notice today that the inbox URL still used "http://", even after all the complaints that they didn't maintain "https://" after login. I decided a quick test was in order, and added the all-important "s" to the protocol indicator. It worked fine. After clicking around some, opening mail, using filters, etc., the "https://" protocol remained. This is great news for those of us who use GMail heavily and want some modicum of security while doing it.

alphadogg writes "Microsoft defeated a major patent licensing firm in a lawsuit over technology that helps computers boot up faster Thursday. The suit asked the court to award the patent holder $2.50 per copy of Windows XP sold in the U.S. By Microsoft's account, that could have amounted to $600 million to $900 million. Microsoft argued that there are many ways to improve the boot speed of PCs and that XP uses different technology than that in the patent."
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/111607-microsoft-wins-patent.html

Terms of the deal are secret, but Yahoo has reached settlements with two Chinese journalists who were arrested based on information the company provided to the ruling Communist government. "[...] a source at Yahoo said the company has been 'working with the families, and we're working with them to provide them with financial, humanitarian and legal assistance.' Yahoo has also agreed to establish a global human rights fund to provide 'humanitarian relief' to support dissidents and their families. The source said that details still have to be worked out."

How Appealing reports that a court has struck down age verification requirements for porn sites, as a First Amendment violation. Here is the ruling (PDF). While the average reader here has never been to such a site, porn has been a driving force in the economics and technology of the Net. The age verification requirements of U.S.C. Title 18, Section 2257 were yet another attempt to regulate to death what the government can't outright prohibit. The requirements intruded on the privacy and safety of performers and created headaches for sites like flickr and photobucket that host images. It is has long been thought that the requirements wouldn't hold up in court, but this is the first actual ruling.

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the University of California have analysed P2P traffic and found that the probability of association to a blocklisted (PDF) decoy user is 100%. Additionally they have found that this can be reduced by two orders of magnitude by simply avoiding systems maintained in publicly available and maintained lists. Finally they analyse ownership of the blocklisted domains and attribute 71% to government owned systems, and that less than 0.5% is in fact owned by "content providers" such as Time Warner Inc which support the RIAA."

JAPAN'S agriculture ministry has reprimanded six bureaucrats for shirking their duties after an internal inquiry found that they had spent many work hours contributing to the Wiki-pedia website — including 260 entries about cartoon robots.
The ministry verbally reprimanded each of the six officials, and slapped a ministry-wide order to prohibit access to Wikipedia at work, while disabling access to the site from the ministry.
http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1597342007

Go to TVBoxSet.com and find a remarkable sales site for box sets of TV shows — including not only surprisingly cheap deals, but offerings not found elsewhere, such as all ten seasons of "JAG" in a box set, when the production company is only up to season 4 so far. Oddly enough, they are all described as "region free".

Then Google "tvboxset" and find every link below the first is to a complaint or news website complaining of the scam. Add "gazette" to the query and be quickly taken to this story in the Montreal Gazette ...which states that those who do get a product shipped find it to be a DVD-R apparently recorded off the air.

The really odd thing? They're still in business! The Montreal Gazette story is six weeks old. Now what's in it for the content industry to beat up private citizens with $220,000 judgements or scrambling to get DeCSS sites shut down within hours, while corporate scammers openly sell pirate DVDs for months on end, unopposed?
http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=77befa56-e0dd-484d-ac24-7707a80bcdaf

An anonymous reader writes "Robots have been roaming Iraq, since shortly after the war began. Now, for the first time — the first time in any war zone — the 'bots are carrying guns. The SWORDS robots, armed with M249 machine guns, "haven't fired their weapons yet," an Army official says. "But that'll be happening soon." The machines have actually been ready for a while, but safety concerns kept them off the battlefield. Now, the robots have kill switches, so "now we can kill the unit if it goes crazy," according to the Army. I feel safer already."