EU regulates on some spammers.

] "Of course there are no honest spammers - the whole
] profession is based on deceit," he said.

BBC NEWS | Technology | New laws on spam come into force

] Maybe someone can explain to Darl that the GPL is
] designed so that people receive the value of other
] peoples copyrighted works in return for having made their
] own contributions. That is the fundamental idea of the
] whole license -- everything else is just legal fluff.
]
]
] So not only is Darl wrong when he attacks the GPL as
] being somehow against "financial gain;" the notion that
] the GPL has, of "exchange of receipt of copyrighted
] works," is actually explicitly encoded in U.S. copyright
] law. It's not just a crazy idea that some lefty Commie
] hippie dreamed up in a drug-induced stupor.

Linus rebuts Darl, characteristically with a great deal more actual effort and logic.

ITworld.com - GPL is no hippie dream

this is a pretty interesting interview with marc andreessen...

OPSWARE INC. / On the record: Marc Andreessen

well, i suppose we all saw this coming.

they want their quarter mil out of Apple, Diamond, Cannon, Samsung, Olympus, Phillips, SanDisk, Viking, etc, etc. etc.

my initial reaction was to flip out over this, but decided to do some research on the licenses for, say, HFS+, to make sure i'm not being unfair to microsoft. well, it turns out that apple's HFS+ implementation was made available under their APSL as part of the Darwin core. APSL looks to be fairly commercial friendly though IANAL... even so, Microsoft isn't likely to write a filesystem driver for HFS+ and then make the code available to the public as the APSL requires. I couln't find any details on commercial, proprietary licences.

FAT File System Technology and Patent License

they're frickin kidding, right?

if web addresses get international characters, it better get a lot easier to type them.

anyone know how to type the "null set" character that some nordic languages use?

perhaps sites with language specific domain names will prove to only be useful to people in countries where the language is spoken... seems like a bad precedent to me.

having said all that, the specific solution being proposed for handling this is retarded. instead of telling DNS server vendors to support unicode, they're making the DNS records even more obtuse than they already are. hack hack hack.

Slashdot | Internationalized Domain Names Coming Soon

] Red Hat’s use of the Fedora™ brand name and its assertion
] of ownership over that name are of considerable concern
] to the Cornell and Virginia Fedora™ project team. Red
] Hat’s guidelines for use of the Fedora™ brand place
] restrictions on use of a term for which the Cornell and
] Virginia team have over five years of prior use. This
] position seems inconsistent with Red Hat’s stance on open
] source and its prominence in the open source community.

did someone forget to do their homework, or does RH just not care?

The Fedora

] f he is to make good on his promise to improve life for
] the tens of millions of Brazilians who live in dire
] poverty, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva knows that
] one key challenge is to bridge a massive technology gap.
] And if that means shunning Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)
] software in South America's largest country, then so be
] it.

Seems like a lot of governments are embracing OSS these days... good news for linux geeks.

Excite News

TIME's take on this years dopest schwag.

Anyone surprised by the top pick : http://www.time.com/time/2003/inventions/invmusic.html ?

TIME Magazine: Coolest Inventions 2003

] I signed up for the premium service and poked through the
] library. I was listening to Lucinda Williams' album Car
] Wheels on a Gravel Road when I ran into a glitch. I could
] hear all of "Lake Charles," but only 30 seconds of "I
] Lost It," a song from the same album. It turns out "I
] Lost It" was only available if I opted for the a la carte
] feature. I either had to buy the track for 99 cents or be
] content hearing just 30 seconds of it. What a pain.

napster 2.0. what a load of crap. i can only hope that the complexity of licencing and availability built into these non-iTunes services will be their downfall. who wants to fuck with all that.

and also, is streaming media something people want, or are they just willing to take it because it's what's offered. I think it's pretty much crap. I like web "radio" ok, but for a la carte stuff that i'm choosing, thank you, i'll take the tracks permanently.

Wired News: New Napster Off to a Solid Start

] A leading Internet standards-setting organization took the
] unusual step yesterday of urging the director of the
] United States Patent and Trademark Office to invalidate a
] software patent that the group says threatens the
] development of the World Wide Web.

i wouldn't say they're backing MS, but they are acknowledging that this patent would do great damage to the operation of the modern world wide web if Eolas started going after all the other browser makers (though they've said they won't).

Web Group Backs Microsoft in Patent Suit