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moquist writes: "The approach of Software Freedom Day 2007 brings to mind a question that begs to be asked: what are you doing to inform people in your community about Software Freedom? What kind of event can you imagine holding that would attract the sorts of people who otherwise wouldn't ever hear about or try Linux, Firefox, or OpenOffice? Post your ideas here, or better yet, register a Software Freedom Day team and actually try them out in your community this year!"
An anonymous reader writes: The International Intellectual Property
Alliance — a group that brings together several U.S. lobby groups
including the MPAA, RIAA, BSA, the ESA, and publisher groups, has just
released its Section
301 recommendations, criticizing 60 countries for their copyright
laws. While the report leads to dire
media coverage, Michael Geist has just debunked the
lobby campaign demonstrating how "the U.S. approach is quite
clearly one of 'do what I say, not what I
do' (fair use is good for the U.S., but no one else), criticizing
country
after country for not enacting a DMCA, and blasting national attempts
to improve education or
culture though exceptions or funding programs."
Stephan A. Rickauer writes: "The newly announced "Free Linux Kernel Driver Development FAQ" initiated by Linux Kernel Developer Greg Kroah-Hartman, working for Novell, has provoked more negative reactions from prominent Free Software projects, e.g. OpenBSD. Project leader Theo de Raadt writes to Greg: "It is a fucking farce. You are trying to make sure that maintainers of code — ie. any random joe who wants to improve the code in the future — has LESS ACCESS to docs later on because someone signed an NDA to write it in the first place. You are making a very big mistake."
Though the short term goal of getting Linux drivers more easily seems to be understandable in the first place, signing NDA's will hurt all Free Software projects in the long run. This short-sighted strategy will lead to the situation where companies are even less motivated to reveal free programming documentation. They will point with fingers to NDA'ed GPL code, which needs to be reverse engineered agin. Theo summarizes: "It is people like you who are closed."."
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the everybody-successful-is-failing dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A growing number of people are concerned about where Wikipedia is heading. Some have left Wikipedia for Citizendium, while others are trying to change the culture of Wikipedia from within. A recent essay called Wikipedia is failing points out many of the problems which must be solved with Wikipedia for it to succeed in its aim of becoming a reputable, reliable reference work. How would you go about solving these problems?"
nithinraju writes: "Introducing Quantum Satellite Technology, a new line of $325 to $350 sneakers arriving in stores next month. Whats so special about these high-priced shoes? Because of embedded GPS technology, the wearer can be located anywhere in the world."
An anonymous reader writes: On December 23, Amazon advertised a "buy one get one free" sale on DVD boxsets, but did not test the promotion before going live. When anyone placed two boxsets in their cart, the website gave a double discount — so the "grand total" shown (before order submission) was $0.00 or something very small. Despite terms stating that Amazon checks order prices before shipping, Amazon shipped the vast majority of orders. Five days later (December 28), after orders had been received and presumably opened, Amazon emailed customers advising them to return the boxsets unopened or customers' credit cards would be charged an additional amount. (You can read more threads about this here and here.) Starting yesterday, Amazon has been (re)charging credit cards, often without authorization.
On Amazon's side, they didn't advertise any double discount, and the free or nearly-free boxsets must have cost them a mint. But with Amazon continually giving unadvertised discounts that seem to be errors, is "return the merchandise or be charged" the new way that price glitches will be handled?
JamesD_UK writes: "The BBC reports that the UK's Nationwide Building society has been fined £980,000 ($1.9 million USD) for failures that led to details of 11 million customers being compromised from an employee's stolen laptop. Financial Services Authority found that the employee had put the data on the laptop without the knowledge of Nationwide and that investigations into the loss did not start until three weeks after it was reported. It is not publically known exactly what information was lost; the laptop is still missing."