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Michael Newdow may not be a household name to the open-source community. The California atheist sued a Sacramento school district to prevent his third-grade daughter from having to recite or listen to the Pledge of Allegiance because it includes the words "under God." But Newdow's case has some inte...

Lawyers and programmers have a lot in common. Programmers write code and lawyers write legal documents. Both consider the issues, generate written work product, check it for bugs and then release the product. Both professions rely on libraries to avoid reinventing each aspect of the product. There a...

Sometime around 5,000 years ago, Chinese merchants learned to spread their cargo over several ships so that if one were lost, they would not lose their entire shipment. It was the birth of what we now call the insurance industry. Before too long, the concept spread. Phoenician ship owners on the hoo...

The best method known for getting people extremely angry at you is simply to be right where they're wrong -- especially if you give them any opportunity to read a moral subtext into whatever they're wrong about. It's sometimes okay be a tiny bit smarter than the people you work with, but it's always...

Last week a dashboard light in my car (a Volvo V70R) came on, leaving me groping for the manual while trying to survive traffic. As it turns out, an "ETS" light is a failure warning from something called the "electronic throttle system," so the obvious thing to do was find a place to pull off the hi...

In Diamond vs. Chakrabarty, the United States Supreme Court ruled that patents could be granted for "anything under the sun that is made by the hand of man." That includes software. Law practice tip: If you need to argue in court that software is not patentable, point out that Chakrabarty does not a...

At a working lunch last week I had the misfortune of being seated next to some guy from Boston whining about the misery and risk introduced into his life by Sarbanes-Oxley. I kept wanting to ask him what he thought his job was as a CFO, since all Sarbanes-Oxley really does is establish a basis for l...

Several weeks ago we were visiting my mother in law in Victoria, B.C., just across the strait from Port Angeles and close enough to Seattle to share some of its rain. She's proud of her Scottish heritage and rejoices in her ancestral stereotype when it comes to parting with a nickel. I was surprised...

Last week, I examined the nuances of a marketplace for licenses, and its relationship to a parallel marketplace for products that use those licenses. This time, for those readers who might actually be in the market for a license, let's review the one that gets the most ink -- the General Public Lice...

My wife has a Dilbert cartoon on her office door in which one of the characters says: "If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how." She's a Mac user and they were worse even before they all became Unix users too. Or maybe not. But finding out whether the average...

When J.S.G. Boggs needs money, he draws it. He draws one side of a banknote on high-quality paper, actual size, and presents it to the merchant. The merchant, knowing that the banknote is not official, can accept it or ask for real cash. If the merchant accepts it, Boggs writes the details of the tr...

For the last three weeks I've been talking about the impact the new Sony, Toshiba and IBM cell processor is likely to have on Linux desktop and datacenter computing. The bottom line there is that this thing is fast, inexpensive and deeply reflective of very fundamental IBM ideas about how computing ...

Bill Gates was recently quoted as saying, "You know what my toughest competitor is? It's pirated software.... If you really look around, you'll find way more pirated Windows than you'll find open-source software. Way more." Gates couldn't be more wrong. At least in China, his tough stance against pi...

Two weeks ago I looked at IBM's forthcoming cell processor architecture and last week speculated about the impact it might have on the x86 desktop. This week, I want to go beyond that and look at the impact the cell architecture will have on the battle for server dominance over the next five years.

There is a classic scene in the movie "Casablanca" where Claude Raines attempts to close down Rick's Cafe. When Humphrey Bogart demands to know why, Raines says, "I'm shocked! Shocked to think that gambling is going on in this establishment!" Meanwhile, the casino employee walks up and hands him his...