[Quote:]

Microsoft has said it has no immediate plans to sue after alleging patent infringements by open-source vendors.

In an official statement emailed to ZDNet UK, Microsoft confirmed that it would not litigate for now.

“If we wanted to go down that road we could have done that three years ago,” said a Microsoft spokesperson. “Rather than litigate, Microsoft has spent the last three years building an intellectual property bridge that works for all parties–including open source–and the customer response has been tremendously positive. Our focus is on continuing to build bridges.”

[..]

McCreesh added that while Microsoft may not have plans to sue, it could be using the threat of litigation to try to encourage corporate customers to move to those open-source product vendors with whom it had signed licensing agreements, such as Novell.

So they’re not going to sue you but they’ll force corporate customers to license under threat of litigation, even though they won’t sue?

I think Microsoft should buy a dictionary with the word “barratry” in it.

[Quote:]

With CD sales tumbling, record companies and musicians are looking at a new potential pot of money: royalties from broadcast radio stations. For years, stations have paid royalties to composers and publishers when they played their songs. But they enjoy a federal exemption when paying the performers and record labels because, they argue, the airplay sells music.

Now, the Recording Industry Assn. of America and several artists’ groups are getting ready to push Congress to repeal the exemption, a move that could generate hundreds of millions of dollars annually in new royalties.Mary Wilson, who with Diana Ross and Florence Ballard formed the original Supremes, said the exemption was unfair and forced older musicians to continue touring to pay their bills.

Yea! They should be allowed to sit around all day earning money just because they are so great.

Don’t you hate it when The Onion made another correct prediction?

[Quote:]

“This administration, I’ve never seen an organization that learned the lessons of Lenin as clearly as these guys,” said Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) in a Thursday interview. “These guys must tack up Lenin’s philosophy on their bedstand every night. Particularly when Lenin suggested if you say something often enough, with enough conviction, everybody will believe it.”

[..]

Rep. Moran: Well, if they’re the worst of the worst, it seems to me that you can prosecute them, and punish them. You can’t prosecute more than one at a time. If you were just going to go after people that you can drum up any kind of actual charge against, it would still take a lifetime to prosecute, because there’s only one court at Guantanamo.

[Inaudible]

The only prosecution you might get at Guantanamo is not going to be accepted by the rest of the world because it has all the appearances of a monkey trial. So if you’ve got the worst of the worst, it seems like you should try them, so you can punish them.

You know, in Alexandria, Virginia, where I was mayor and I represent, we had the guy that was alleged to be the 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui was his name. And he spouted all this kind of propaganda against the United States. For months, he went on and on and he said the worst stuff about the U.S. [Inaudible] Finally, he went through the trial and he’d sit there, and over time, though, as people came through and he saw the way the system of justice works, he started to quiet down. And when some of the families of the victims of 9/11 said he was not directly involved in the deaths of our loved ones, and so we don’t think he should actually be given the death penalty, Moussaoui fell silent. And I’m told by his defense lawyer that he sits in his cell with his head between his legs because he doesn’t know what to believe now. Going through that trial proved that the US does have principles, values, ideals, that there is a rule of law that applies. It’s everything he was told was not the case. We have disproved that propaganda by putting him through a trial. It seems to me it might make some sense to take the worst of the worst, put them in a prison cell, let them sit in a court room, bring them down to the level of a common criminal, which they are, and try them. That’s a lot better than putting them in a situation where they’re going to be perceived as some kind of martyrs.

[Quote:]

In reactie op agenten die in Zuid-Holland preventief hangjongeren fotograferen, heeft het Zwolse kunstenaarsduo Holsappel en Alkema maandag de site politiefoto.nl geopend. Bezoekers van de site mogen hierop zelfgemaakte foto’s van agenten zetten.

Het fotograferen van hangjongeren is “een uitwas van veiligheidswaan”, zei Wim Holsappel maandag. Bij agenten die niet op de gevoelige plaat vastgelegd willen worden, raden de kunstenaars gebruik van telelens of verdekt opgestelde posities aan.

Wekelijks stelt het duo voor de maker van de leukste foto een chocoladereep beschikbaar. Dit als knipoog naar het uitdelen van chocola aan jongeren door agenten in Schiedam. “Het wachten is nu op de inzet van gummybeertjes tegen hooligans”, aldus Holsappel.

Here is an interesting article describing how spyware and adware makers are earning money.

Now BlockBusters may appear to be a decent company to most, but their marketing people have been tricked into believing that affiliate marketing works for them.

It doesn’t, and they’re swindled just as much as the poor PC owner who has his computer infested with crap.

How to stop this? Well, stop believing affiliate marketing works. For a marketeer, this is incredibly difficult, I’ve found. They’re all saying “but surely this one is legit, they told me so!”. Where did I experience this? I’m sorry I can’t name and shame this company publicly, but believe me, it’s a big one. And besides, it’s an ailment that plagues just about all marketing folks.

So the solution remains: if you’re in marketing, kill yourself.

[Quote:]

A patch of Martian soil analyzed by NASA’s rover Spirit is so rich in silica that it may provide some of the strongest evidence yet that ancient Mars was much wetter than it is now. The processes that could have produced such a concentrated deposit of silica require the presence of water.

Members of the rover science team heard from a colleague during a recent teleconference that the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, a chemical analyzer at the end of Spirit’s arm, had measured a composition of about 90 percent pure silica for this soil.

“You could hear people gasp in astonishment,” said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for the Mars rovers’ science instruments. “This is a remarkable discovery. And the fact that we found something this new and different after nearly 1,200 days on Mars makes it even more remarkable. It makes you wonder what else is still out there.”