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Caldera

SCO Terminates Darl McBride 458

bpechter writes "Linux Today reports SCO has terminated Darl McBride and linked to the SCO 8K SEC report. The report found also at the SCO site and states: 'the Company has eliminated the Chief Executive Officer and President positions and consequently terminated Darl McBride.'"

Comment Not everyone has perfect eyesight (Score 1) 1104

Some visually impaired users enlarge the font so that they can read the text, and thereby use the application. Preventing them from doing this means they can't use the application. Visually impaired people have a hard enough time with the internet. There's no excuse for making it harder.

Space

Submission + - Active glacier found on Mars (bbc.co.uk) 1

FireFury03 writes: "The European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft has spotted an icy feature which appears to be a young active glacier. Dr Gerhard Neukum (what a cool name :), chief scientist on the spacecraft's High Resolution Stereo Camera said "We have not yet been able to see the spectral signature of water. But we will fly over it in the coming months and take measurements. On the glacial ridges we can see white tips, which can only be freshly exposed ice". Estimates place the glacier at 10,000 — 100,000 years old."
User Journal

Journal Journal: DRM and the Corporate Dream

So I've been thinking about why there's this big push for DRM. The line sold to the public is that the media companies need this to prevent copyright infringement of their works. The story goes that without _effective_ copyright protection, the incentive to produce good artistic works is diminished, and therefore, good art won't get made.

Privacy

Submission + - Porn Industry gives users what they want to fight

An anonymous reader writes: In a novel form of piracy prevention the adult entertainment industry is giving user what they want. Live performances, user interaction and higher quality than can be found pirated. All of this available by subscription. From Cnet:"Like other online publishers, Kink.com has had to puzzle out ways to deal with the perennial problem of copyright infringement on peer-to-peer networks and Usenet. Kink.com's solution is live shows."
United States

Submission + - Wildlife Deputy Changed Science for Lobbyists

fistfullast33l writes: "In yet another case of a Bush-appointed official creating their own interpretation of science, TPM Muckraker reports on Julie MacDonald, deputy assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and parks in the Department of the Interior in Washington. The Department's Inspector General issued a report today documenting evidence that MacDonald not only overrode opinions of department scientists to benefit lobbyists, political interests, and her own insanity, but also that she shared internal documents with said lobbyists and a friend in an unnamed online roleplaying game. My favorite episode:

At one point, according to Fish and Wildlife Service Director H. Dale Hall, MacDonald tangled with field personnel over designating habitat for the endangered Southwestern willow flycatcher, a bird whose range is from Arizona to New Mexico and Southern California. When scientists wrote that the bird had a "nesting range" of 2.1 miles, MacDonald told field personnel to change the number to 1.8 miles. Hall, a wildlife biologist who told the IG he had had a "running battle" with MacDonald, said she did not want the range to extend to California because her husband had a family ranch there.
Apparently, MacDonald is a civil engineer and has no formal natural sciences training."
United States

Submission + - Serious Magnet Failure at CERN's New Accelerator

GrepNut writes: CERN is reporting that the giant magnets that steer the particle beam in the new and highly anticipated Large Hadron Collider have just failed catastrophically in a stress test, apparently due to a design oversight. It doesn't help that the magnets were designed and built by CERN's US competitor Fermilab. News is still breaking, but blogs are starting here and here.
Censorship

Submission + - Copyright law used to shut down anti-coal site

driptray writes: The Sydney Morning Herald reports that an Australian mining industry group has used copyright laws to close a website that parodied a coal industry ad campaign. A group known as Rising Tide created the website using the slogan "Rising sea levels: brought to you by mining" in response to the mining industry's slogan of "Life: brought to you by mining". The mining industry claimed that the "content and layout" of the parody site infringed copyright, but when Rising Tide removed the copyrighted photos and changed the layout, the mining industry still lodged a complaint. Is this a misuse of copyright law in order to stifle dissent?
User Journal

Journal Journal: AJAXian Canvas, Python, and Web 2.0 goodness 4

Ever had to find your way around a huge college campus? How about ever been late for a class or meeting on a regular?

AJAX to the rescue!

WWU Route Finder is a proof of concept of an AJAX map using Canvas and Python. Click two buildings, and the Python back end, accessed using XMLHTTPRequest of course, shows you the shortest path between your start and destination.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Steve Ballmer, infringement claims, and an open letter

Here recently on /., there was a news item about an open letter to Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, essentially calling Microsoft out on their claims that Linux infringes several patents that Microsoft claims to own. I like the idea; in fact I think it's vitally important that if there is a question of trademark, patent, or copyright infringement in Linux or other OSS/Free Software that it be identified and resolved. After reading the letter, t
Windows

Journal Journal: Microsoft's Real Plan?

What's Microsoft's real plan? With the advent of .Net, the Microsoft/Novell deal, the splitting of Microsoft into three major groups internally, and the impossibility of Windows being developed the same way that Vista was for the the generation of Windows it becomes quite possible that Windows as we know it - with an NT Kernel and all - is no longer the future of Windows. Just how might Microsoft surive? Check out my full blog describing
United States

Submission + - Are we stuck with CYA homeland security?

netbuzz writes: "Security expert Bruce Schneier suggests this morning that "there might not be a solution" to our post-9/11 penchant for making domestic anti-terrorism decisions based on the basic human desire to cover one's backside. He might be right. But shouldn't we at least try to figure out a better way? For example, wouldn't "Commonsense Homeland Security" be a winning political banner, not a risky one? Aren't we sick and tired of taking our shoes off at the airport?

http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/1174 6"
Space

Submission + - Building the Interplanetary Internet

sighted writes: "Internet pioneer Vint Cerf is leading a NASA effort to create a permanent network link to Mars within the next two years. As Cerf outlined in a recent talk, the "InterPlaNet" protocol is designed to handle the delay caused by interplanetary distances. For example, it can take a signal up to 20 minutes to travel between the Earth and Mars, depending on the distance between the two planets."
GNOME

Journal SPAM: Linus fires latest shot in GNOME Wars 4

Linux.com is running a story about the continuing feud between Linus and some GNOME folks.Some bad blood between Linus Torvalds and GNOME developers is flaring up again. Previously, Torvalds has said that Linux users should switch to KDE instead of GNOME because of the GNOME team's "users are idiots" mentality. Now he has "put his money where his mouth is" by submitting patches to GNOME in orde

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