Groklaw has the story. Stewart Rules: Novell Wins! CASE CLOSED. What follows is a complete wrapup of the long standing case of SCO vs. Novell regarding intellectual property rights to Linux code. SCO has been maintaining that Linux users owe them licensing fees. They say that Linux is based on UNIX code that they, SCO own. See the Groklaw story for complete details of the ruling.

Could SCO appeal? Not too likely since SCO is in bankruptcy and they would have to get permission of the bankruptcy judge to spend any more money on this case. So it seems that a stake has been driven through the heart of this particular vampire.

In reporting this story Yahoo! Finance headlined SCO to Sponsor Next Season of “The Biggest Loser”. Their story is by John Paczkowski The author says this case may finally be over See the Yahoo! Finance article for their details

A good overall view, though dated may be found Wikipedia article on SCO-Linux_controversies One of the strangest parts of this melodrama was when SCO announced that they would not be suing its own customers. Good to know, huh?

Photo Credit: http://taliesinttlg.blogspot.com

Posted by The GNUinator

Santa loading toys produced by slave labor.

Senator Max Baucus [D-MT] has introduced a bill, S1631, which among other things would ban the import of goods produced by child labor, convict labor, or slave labor.

The bill is co-sponsored by Senator Charles Grassley [R-IA] the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee.

Business groups and the Heritage Foundation are working to relax this ban. A story by David Sirota gives the details. Search the Library of Congress website for text of the bill and its status.

Thanks to Rachel Maddow TRMS for bringing this to our attention.

The American people are smart enough to know that the goods they buy come from the store. So how could they be produced in any of these bad ways?

If you have moral objections to goods produced with child, convict, or slave labor, you might want to support this bill. If you believe goods produced this way compete unfairly with American workers, you might want to support this bill.

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Monarchs WNBA Champs 2005

OK, I admit it. My so-called guy friends give me tons of grief when I tell them that I like the Sacramento Monarchs and watch their games.

“You actually watch that?”, one friend asked.

“What’s wrong with the Monarchs?”

“Well, they are a bunch of lesbians”, was the best he could come up with.

My Yahoo! home page lets me know whenever there is a Kings game or a Monarchs game. They don’t always get it right. Sometimes, very infrequently, Yahoo! will make a mistake regarding a Kings game. Wrong starting time, wrong score, whatever.

The Yahoo! track record for the Monarchs is much worse. Again and again Yahoo! reports the score as 0-0 after the game has been played. Or they will report no game when there is a game.

This has happened so often it cannot be a coincidence. The message Yahoo! conveys is that women’s sports is not as important as men’s sports. The WNBA is not as important as the NBA. Is that fair? Certainly the audience for women’s sports is smaller, but that is a different question. And I’d be the first to admit that the WNBA game is different than the NBA game. Still, those ‘lezzies’? are as competitive and as tough as the guys. I love a down-to-the-wire close game with plenty of lead changes. And that’s what I get from the Monarchs. Given the fact that the Monarchs won a WNBA championship (2005) and the Kings didn’t even make the playoffs this year I say go Monarchs. I’ll be watching provided Yahoo! remembers to let me know.

Yahoo! failure to assign resources plays right into the hands of misogynistic men who diss woman’s sports as an acceptable? way to be passive-aggressive. They can’t express disrespect to their wives, girlfriends, sisters or moms without being in trouble. So they diss woman’s sports instead. This makes them feel better. If Yahoo! fails to assign adequate resources to update their web content it must mean that the WNBA is inferior and not worth wasting time on. Heck, nobody’s watching anyway.

The remedy, I think, is for men who don’t hate women to squawk about this.

Complaints from women could be dismissed since they might be coming from [gasp] lesbians.

Yahoo! failure is a failure in sports scores reporting just as serious as it would be for them to consistently get it wrong regarding Kings scores and schedules. And men should speak up.

Posted by Gypsy Chief and Veronica

The End of Days

Tim LaHaye, co-author of the popular Left Behind series of novels appeared on Friday, Febuary 27, 2009 on the Rachel Maddow Show. Tim and Rachel discussed our new president Barack Obama and the assertion that he is moving the U. S. toward socialism. Mr. LaHaye said the Obama is definitely not the Anti-Christ because he is not popular enough.

By this measure, certainly Microsoft Corporation must be the Anti-Christ as many in the open source software movement suspected all along.

Posted by Gypsy Chief

NYSE: MCD 3 Month Chart

There is an Internet spoof going on. Do not fall for it. You get an email promising to add $200 to your account for filling out an eight question survey. As with email like this I turned on full message headers and forwarded it to spoof@mcdonalds.com. Two days later I got an unknown user message from the MAILER DAEMON. There is no email user at mcdonalds dot com known as spoof. Thinking this strange I logged on to McDonaldsto take a look. Buried deep within the site is a notice that McDonald’s is aware of this Internet spoof and is ‘investigating’ . This tells me that McDonald’s does not seek the public’s help in tracking down these criminals.

What Corporate Social Responsibility?

McDonald’s has zero corporate social responsibility for the spoof. This does not mean that they do not have a problem. By not enlisting the public’s help it seems to me that McDonald’s management exhibits a tone deafness to the real world we live in. It sure would not take much action for them to create an email user known as spoof to provide a place for the public to forward spoof emails.

Tracking Down Criminals

Win $200 With McDonald’s
Monday, February 9, 2009 6:31 AM
From McDonald`s Mon Feb 9 14:31:38 2009
Return-Path:
Authentication-Results: mta191.mail.mud.yahoo.com from=McDonalds.com; domainkeys=neutral (no sig); from=McDonalds.com; dkim=neutral (no sig)
Received: from 222.227.72.67 (EHLO ns.sjc-sendai.co.jp) (222.227.72.67) by mta191.mail.mud.yahoo.com with SMTP; Mon, 09 Feb 2009 06:43:25 -0800
Received: from User (static-70-100-8-246.br1.blu.wv.frontiernet.net [70.100.8.246]) (authenticated) by ns.sjc-sendai.co.jp (8.11.6p2/8.11.6) with ESMTP id n19EfLa15109; Mon, 9 Feb 2009 23:41:21 +0900
Message-Id: <200902091441.n19EfLa15109@ns.sjc-sendai.co.jp>
From:
“McDonald`s”

This is a portion of the full message headers I got.
Here is the actual link. Note that it does not point to McDonalds.
To access the form please click the link below :
“nofollow” href=”http://paupas.com/McDonalds/index.htm” target=”_blank”>http://www.McDonalds.com/online.survey/index.html
Who are they? In any event, I hope someone shuts them down. Sorry to see that McDonalds does not seek our help.

AARP Weighs In
Here is a good story from AARP with some details of this and other scams.
AARP Scam Alert
There are several good links as well.
Posted by The GNUinator