LWN has this to say:
The terms of the Microsoft/Novell deal have been posted at last. There are three parts: the patent cooperation agreement granting the patent non-licenses, the technical collaboration agreement describing the technical work each company will do, and the business collaboration agreement on the business arrangements.
Groklaw also has an initial post about the SEC filing which details the agreement and quotes Novell on how GPLv3 may affect it.
The ABC is reporting that a man has been arrested in Orlando, Florida, for feeding “30 unidentified persons food from a large pot utilising a ladle” (according to the arrest warrant).
The Orlando law, which is supported by local business owners who say the homeless drive away customers, has been challenged in court by civil rights groups. It allows charities to feed more than 25 people at a time within 3.2 kilometres of the Orlando City Hall only if they have a special permit. They are able to receive two permits a year.
Police mounted a surveillance operation to catch him and even took a sample of the food to use as evidence against him in court.
The sort of prejudice against homeless people that seems to have lead to this law getting passed is pretty typical, there was an interesting story in New Scientist recently talking about the neural side of prejudice, and a surprising way of breaking the freezing out of such people in the mind:
Psychologist Susan Fiske from Princeton University and colleagues got students to view photos of individuals from a range of social groups, while using functional MRI to monitor activity in their medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), a brain region known to light up in response to socially significant stimuli. The researchers were shocked to discover that photos of people belonging to “extreme” out-groups, such as drug addicts, stimulated no activity in this region at all, suggesting that the viewers considered them to be less than human. “It is just what you see with homeless people or beggars in the street,” says Fiske, “people treat them like piles of garbage.” In new experiments, however, she was able to reverse this response. After replicating the earlier results, the researchers asked simple, personal questions about the people in the pictures, such as, “What kind of vegetable do you think this beggar would like?” Just one such question was enough to significantly raise activity in the mPFC. “The question has the effect of making the person back into a person,” says Fiske, “and the prejudiced response is much weaker.”
You will need to be a subscriber to New Scientist to be able to read the whole thing online.
If you thought SCO couldn’t stoop any lower, think again. They have filed a motion in SCO versus IBM saying they wish to depose PJ, the creator of Groklaw.
I can say this: SCO in its wisdom has just guaranteed that the judges in SCO v. IBM and SCO v. Novell will have to read Groklaw. So, welcome Judge Kimball. Welcome, Judge Wells. We’ve enjoyed very much learning about the law by watching you at work. SCO told you something that isn’t true. No one tried to serve me that I knew about. No one informed me of any deposition date. That is true. It doesn’t feel so nice to be smeared like this, I can tell you that, and to have to pay a lawyer to deal with this harassment. I view it as such, as a kind of SLAPP suit, a vendetta to pay me back for blowing the whistle, and to shut Groklaw up. SCO wants to put a pin on a map and point to it and say, “Here’s PJ.” Then someone drops by and shoots me, I suppose. I certainly have nothing to tell them that is relevant to this litigation.
Basically SCO have gotten so fed up with PJ and the various other Groklaw contributors poking huge holes in the farcical SCO law suit that they have convinced themselves that the site is a front for IBM and that PJ doesn’t exist and now want to prove it. Sadly for them their fear-induced paranoia can’t change fact into fiction and so, as usual, they’ll loose eventually but they want to make life as painful as possible for anyone who dares to laugh at the emperors new clothes.
I do hope that this motion doesn’t succeed, but I feel that SCO will find it rather painful for their reality if it does.
In 1995 the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was written into Australian Law, and section 268.76 of the Australian Criminal Code 1995 defines “War crime – denying a fair trial“, where:
(1) A person (the perpetrator) commits an offence if: (a) the perpetrator deprives one or more persons of a fair and regular trial by denying to the person any of the judicial guarantees referred to in paragraph (b); and (b) the judicial guarantees are those defined in articles 84, 99 and 105 of the Third Geneva Convention and articles 66 and 71 of the Fourth Geneva Convention; and (c) the person or persons are protected under one or more of the Geneva Conventions or under Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions; and (d) the perpetrator knows of, or is reckless as to, the factual circumstances that establish that the person or persons are so protected; and (e) the perpetrator’s conduct takes place in the context of, and is associated with, an international armed conflict.
The penalty for such a war crime is 10 years imprisonment.
In November 2006 a panel of lawyers (( The accompanying press release says “The Opinion has been signed by The Hon Alastair Nicholson AO RFD QC (Former Judge Advocate General of the ADF, Honorary Professorial Fellow, Department of Criminology, University of Melbourne); Peter Vickery QC (Special Rapporteur, International Commission of Jurists, Victoria); Professor Hilary Charlesworth (Professor of International Law and Human Rights, ANU); Professor Andrew Byrnes (Professor of International Law, Faculty of Law, UNSW); and Gavan Griffith AO QC (Solicitor-General of Australia 1984 – 97); and Professor Tim McCormack (Australian Red Cross Professor of International Humanitarian Law, University of Melbourne).” )) wrote a 30 page legal opinion (there is also a four page summary) titled “David Hicks – Military Commissions Act 2006 – Compliance with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, the Hamdan Decision and Australian Law” on the first and second military tribunals created by the US government and concluded:
Further, the Replacement Military Commission will contravene the standards for a fair trial under Australian law provided for in the Australian Criminal Code, and counselling or urging a trial to take place before any such Military Commission with the requisite knowledge and intention would constitute a war crime under Division 268 of the Code.
This opinion was delivered by the Law Council of Australia to the Attorney General, Philip Ruddock, to inform him of the nature of the crime that was being committed by the government. To date no action to rectify this appears to have been taken.
Thanks to Tim for the pointer to the letter to the editor of The Age newspaper from one of the reports authors, the Hon Alastair Nicholson AO RFD QC, former Chief Justice of the Family Court of Australia and former Judge Advocate General of the Australian Defence Force.
A very interesting development courtesy of the BBC:
EMI said every song in its catalogue will be available in the “premium” format. It said the tracks without locks will cost more and be of higher quality than those it offers now.
These DRM free tracks will cost 99 pence on iTunes, but apparently that’s only for single tracks, you will be able to buy an entire album DRM free for the same cost as one with DRM. Steve Jobs said:
The right thing to do is to tear down walls that precluded interoperability by going DRM-free and that starts here today.
Wonderful repartee courtesy of David Starkoff.
KIRBY J: By the way, is that the form of the State search warrant? I mean, does it still look like that? It is such a tacky little piece of paper. I mean, if somebody presented you with a piece of paper like that that looks for all the world like the roneoed law school notes that I used to receive 40 years ago, you would not take it seriously. It does not even have the State coat of arms on it.
It continues whimsically in that form, worth a read..
Well we know SCO’s stock has been performing sub-optimally (mirroring the company itself, suing your own customers like Autozone & Daimler is not a smart move to get repeat business) but now Groklaw raises the spectre of SCO going under before they can get to trial with IBM!
For instance, SCO’s latest 10Q filed with the SEC says they they:
believe that we have sufficient liquidity resources to fund our operations through October 31, 2007.
Now that may not be a problem for a company making money (they won’t touch their resources), but SCO isn’t. PJ goes on to say:
So do they actually have enough funds to make it to trial? After all, the Novell litigation goes first and is currently set to begin on September 17, 2007. There is currently no date set for the IBM litigation to even go to trial, but we do know it is expected to last for about 5 weeks. If Novell starts on September 17 and runs for even half that long, oops. Insufficient liquidity resources, I’m thinking, to make it to trial with IBM after that. No wonder SCO asked the court to have IBM go first. That’s if either case ever does go to trial. SCO again admits neither may ever make it to a jury.
Strangely enough this is not good news. Even though SCO’s “mountain of evidence” turned out to be a measly 326 lines of “code” (IBM identify 121 as #define, 12 as function prototypes, 164 as structure definitions and a quantity of comments) in 12 files, 11 of which are header files, it would be very useful to get this all out in open court to finally prove how brazen a shakedown attempt this was.
SCO have had enough to worry about recently, but just to add to their troubles their stock is now trading at less than the $1 minimum bid price that the NASDAQ regulations require ($0.94 as I write).
If that happens for 30 consecutive days then they are deemed to be non-compliant and the NASDAQ can begin moves to delist them, unless they manage to trade at more than $1 for another 10 consecutive days.
It would appear that Vista’s DRM protection is for more than just “premium content” – even DRM protected “CD’s” apparently won’t play through S/PDIF (optical) outputs whereas they work just fine under Linux.
My test system’s high-end audio outputs are S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format) compliant. S/PDIF is probably the most common high-end audio port around for PCs today. It also has no built-in DRM (digital rights management) capability, and that turned out to be an important matter. […] When I switched back to Vista, I tried to play Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot CD. Whoops! Not a single sound emerged from my speakers. After a little investigation, I found that Vista disables media outputs that don’t incorporate DRM, when you try to play DRM protected media through them.
Quite sad really given that Vista couldn’t handle his on board RealTek ALC 882 audio chipset either!
That was a kick in the head. I have a fully legal CD in my hand. Any other version of Windows will play it, Linux will play it, Mac OS will play it, and my CD player will play it, but if you’re using S/PDIF for your computer-driven audio and Vista, you’re out of luck. If you have a card with a Toslink optical digital audio port, you will be able to play it.
The BBC is reporting that Abdel Kareem Nabil has been sentenced to 4 years in jail:
He had used his weblog to criticise the country’s top Islamic institution, the al-Azhar university and President Hosni Mubarak, whom he called a dictator. […] During the five-minute court session the judge said Nabil was guilty and would serve three years for insulting Islam and inciting sedition, and one year for insulting Mr Mubarak.