LG News

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We look forward to federating with any service provider who shares our belief in enabling user choice and open communications. We do believe, however, that it is important to balance openness with ensuring that we maintain a safe and reliable service that protects user privacy and blocks spam and other abuses. We are using the federation opportunity with EarthLink and Sipphone to develop a set of guidelines by which all members of the federated network can work together to ensure that we protect our users while maximizing the reach of the network. [...]

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Recently we spent a few days on a farm on Saskatchewan, during which I had occasion to help clean the floor of the barn, one of whose inhabitants was a Hereford bull named "El Presidente", being boarded for a friend. So, when I assert that these talking points are, by and large, Dung of Male Bovine (DoMB for short), I do so in an educated voice.

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Yates raises the spectre of "enormous costs" facing Massachusetts in a file format switch.

This is rich.

Yates' hyperbolic sense of moment is unevenly apportioned. He omits the enormous cost of a possible Microsoft upgrade to Office 12 one day, should Microsoft be so lucky.

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Running a program in a public server is not distribution; it is public use. We're looking at an approach where programs used in this way will have to include a command for the user to download the source for the version that is running.

But this will not apply to all GPL-covered programs, only to programs that already contain such a command. Thus, this change would have no effect on existing software, but developers could activate it in the future.

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Article 1 - Objective of the law

Employ exclusively free software in all the systems and computing equipment of every State agency.

Article 2 - Scope of application

The Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches, as well as the autonomous regional or local decentralized organisms and the corporations where the State holds the majority of the shares will use free software in their systems and computer equipment.

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Finally, just to make it clear: not only do I not get a cent of the trademark money, but even LMI (who actually administers the mark) has so far historically always lost money on it. That's not a way to sustain a trademark, so they're trying to at least become self-sufficient, but so far I can tell that lawyers fees to give that protection that commercial companies want have been higher than the license fees. Even pro bono lawyers chanrge (sic) for the time of their costs and paralegals etc.

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In a letter dated 31 August addressed to Perth-based lawyer Jeremy Malcolm, who represents Torvalds, Intellectual Property Australia official Andrew Paul Lowe said: "For your client's trademark to be registerable under the Trade Marks Act, it must have sufficient 'inherent adaptation to distinguish in the marketplace'.

"In other words, it cannot be a term that other traders with similar goods and services would need to use in the ordinary course of trade."

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The issue at hand is fair compensation without loss of fair use. The Open Media Commons is committed to creating an open network growth engine, all the while continuing to protect intellectual property in a manner that respects customer privacy, honors honest uses of media, and encourages participation and innovation.

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• DRM-OPERA: An interoperable DRM architecture that is not dependent upon a specific hardware set or operating system.
• Java Stream Assembly: Java-based server software that allows for distribution of video over a network.
• Sun Streaming Server (SSS): Serves standards-compliant video and audio media over an IP-based network. Generally, SSS serves MPEG-4 video media. It also supports Apple Computer's QuickTime.

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DRM-OPERA's roots lie in Project OPERA, which came out of the Eurescom R&D initiative sponsored by the European Union and the European telecommunications industry. Sun's R&D lab contributed heavily to Project OPERA, which produced an architecture for interoperable DRM in 2003.

OPERA achieves interoperability among DRM systems -- interoperability between Microsoft and RealNetworks DRMs has already been demonstrated -- essentially by reducing DRM licenses down to a lowest common denominator of authenticating users only (as described above) and providing "play once" as an atomic licensing term that all DRM systems can understand and support. Each of the DRM systems involved in a specific instance of interoperability can manage more complex licensing terms internally and communicate them through the OPERA architecture via "play once" licenses.

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Anyway, now that I've been wading through the Bond corpus again, I've noticed something I've never noticed before about the show. It's just not terribly realistic. I mean, come on, who would ever name an organization "SPECTRE?" Good names are important, especially for bad guys. A name like SPECTRE is just too obvious. SPECTRE. Boo! Whooo!! Run away.

You know, if I were going to name an evil programming language, I certainly wouldn't name it after a snake. Python! Run away, run away.

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Everyone my age and older knows that Five-Year Plans are bad for people, unless of course you're someone like Josef Stalin, in which case they're just bad for other people. All good Americans know that good plans come in four-year increments, because they mostly involve planning to get reelected.

I probably shouldn't point this out, but we've been planning Perl 6 for five years now.

Comrades, here in the People's Republic, the last five years have seen great progress in the science of computer programming. In the next five years, we will not starve nearly so many programmers, except for those we are starving on purpose, and those who will starve accidentally.

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Specifically, the companies expect their collaboration to achieve interoperability in several domains:

• Microsoft's Active Directory--so the companies' software has integrated sign-on and federated identity management mechanisms.
• Web services standards, which govern how applications employ services available on a group of often loosely connected servers.
• Management with Microsoft Operations Manager.
• SQL Server, Microsoft's database software, with JBoss' Hibernate and Enterprise JavaBeans software.

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