Free Republic

Retiring to the sofa after turkey dinner tomorrow, most Americans may feel they have little in common with the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock. But one defining feature of 17th-century Americans remains: We still migrate for freedom. American mobility is legendary and the notion that it is driven by a desire for liberty is the basis for the methodology behind the Pacific Research Institute's U.S. Economic Freedom Index released last week. Kansas is America's freest state while New York -- home of the Statue of Liberty -- ranks at the bottom. The Index uses five categories -- fiscal, regulatory, judicial, government...

COLUMBUS, Miss., Oct. 1 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Microtek Medical Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: MTMD - News), a leading manufacturer and marketer of infection control products, fluid control products and safety products to healthcare professionals, announced today the signing of an agreement which grants to Eastern Technologies, Inc. ("ETI") a worldwide exclusive license to manufacture, use and sell the Company's OREX materials and processing technology in the nuclear industry, homeland security industry and certain other industrial applications (the "OREX Nuclear Business"). Dan R. Lee, Microtek's President and Chief Executive Officer commented, "The completion of this agreement is a positive development for Microtek and...

Times (New) Roman and its part in the Development of Scalable Font Technology By Charles Bigelow Charles Bigelow posted this article to the Usenet newsgroup "comp.fonts" in May 1994 in response to the question: What's the difference between Times Roman and Times New Roman? I am grateful to Prof. Bigelow for his permission to publish the article. I have taken the liberty of retitling it. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: comp.fonts Subject: Re: What's the difference between Times Roman and Times New Roman? From: Charles Bigelow Date: 5 May 1994 "Times Roman" is the name used by Linotype, and the name they registered...

Pharmacist faces complaint over failure to dispense birth control (Published Tuesday, March 16, 2004 09:10:04 AM CST) Associated Press MADISON, Wis. -- The state Department of Regulation and Licensing has filed a complaint against a pharmacist who refused to fill a woman's birth control prescription because of his religious beliefs. The complaint against Neil Noesen was filed with the Wisconsin Examining Board over an incident that happened in the summer of 2002. It said Noesen, 30, was working as a fill-in pharmacist at the K-Mart Pharmacy in Menomonie and had told the managing pharmacist he wouldn't fill prescriptions for...

A small woodworking tool manufacturer, Stots Corporation, includes a license agreement on its TemplateMaster jig tool. The tool is licensed, not sold, and customers cannot sell it or lend it to others. Nor can they sell or lend the jigs they make with it. We’re all familiar with license agreements on software tools that limit what you can with the product. But what about a license agreement on a real tool limiting what you can with the product and the things you make with it? “Shrinkwrap licenses are showing up everywhere,” a reader recently wrote. “I just bought a jig...

When Burt Rutan rolled out the SpaceShipOne suborbital spacecraft earlier this month (see “Rutan aims for space: A look at SpaceShipOne”, April 21, 2003), one of the biggest surprises had nothing to do with the vehicle’s unique design or flight profile. Instead, despite the fact that the vehicle seemed ideal to win the X Prize and usher in the era of suborbital space tourism, Rutan made it clear there were no plans to put the vehicle into commercial service. SpaceShipOne would fly under an “experimental research and development glider” license on a series of flights to determine what the operating...

<p>Will the licensing efforts of a key patent holder derail Linux's corporate growth?</p> <p>Every so often in the tech world, an intellectual-property lawsuit comes along that gets the coders clucking, predicting that it's the end of the digital world as we know it. A year ago, it was British Telecom's attempt to collect royalties on hyperlinks. And Amazon now and then comes under fire for some of its business-process patents.</p>

Windows 2000 servers are cheaper to run than Linux ones, sometimes, says an IDC study which was by strange coincidence sponsored by Microsoft. The study will come as welcome relief to Microsoft salespeople who have been parroting the 'cheaper than Linux' line to general disbelief, but whether anyone else will believe it is another matter. Nor indeed should we take the study at anything like face value. IDC set itself the task of measuring total cost of ownership of the two server operating systems over a five year period, segmenting this into five areas of server operation. Over a...

Lester Warby is the kind of guy who reads the fine print. And the fine print for the latest updates to Microsoft Windows has him worried. Warby -- who is the chief information officer at Seattle Metropolitan Credit Union -- believes that the terms for the end user license agreement (EULA) for Microsoft's Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 (SP3) and XP Service Pack 1, might well put the credit union in violation of new federal privacy laws. At issue is Microsoft's "automatic update" feature, which allows users to automatically get upgrades and patches to their systems. To get the...

Teenager shot friend dead with airgun The Evening Chronicle, 9/9/2002 A 15-year-old boy has been sent to a young offenders' institution for two years for shooting a friend dead with an airgun. Daryl John Allison was 13 when horseplay with an air rifle ended in tragedy as he shot 14-year-old Matthew Sheffield in the head. A judge said the Government should use the current session of Parliament to address legislation governing the ownership and use of air weapons. Judge Peter Fox QC said: "Such legislation is urgently needed. For Matthew not to have died in vain it would be appropriate,...

Landmark Decision Clears Way For First Commercial Lunar Flight San Diego - Sept 2, 2002 TransOrbital, Inc. has become the first private company in the history of space flight to win approval from the U.S. government to explore, photograph, and land on the moon. The company expects to launch its Trailblazer Mission from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan within the next 9-12 months. The approvals and licensing by U.S. State Department and The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) position TransOrbital as only company presently authorized by the U.S. Government to return to the moon. Once launched, the Trailblazer will...

Filed at 8:26 p.m. ET LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - No-nonsense Sgt. Joe Friday of ``Dragnet'' and the clean-cut cops of ``Adam-12'' never had to do anything like this. But the City of Angels has made it clear that its real-life police department is here not only to serve and protect, but also to collect licensing fees. The city of Los Angeles has threatened legal action against the makers of two new TV police dramas if they use likenesses of the city's trademarked police department badges, logos, or even the LAPD's good name, without city permission. The municipal government is insisting...

<p>SEATTLE - Fierce resistance is brewing to Microsoft's new software licensing program for businesses.</p> <p>By Aug. 1, Microsoft will cut the 30% to 50% discount it has long granted businesses for upgrading to the latest version of its software. Instead, it is pushing companies into paying upfront subscription fees locking them into future upgrades.</p>

Microsoft has come up with another novel way to make its software compulsory - an annual subscription licensing system for schools where you have to pay for all of the computers you're using, even if you don't want them to run the Microsoft software you're licensing. This includes Macs, and although the Ts & Cs of the agreement don't make it entirely clear what you're supposed to do with the Windows upgrades you end up buying for these machines, we bet putting them on E-bay isn't a recommended option. The precise implementation of the agreement seems to vary depending on...

On April 10 an Ohio appellate court unanimously ruled that Ohio's ban on carrying concealed weapons, in effect since 1974, violated the people's right to keep and bear arms. The appellate court also upheld a lower court's dismissal of the prosecution of a pizza deliveryman who carried a handgun in his waistband for protection while making his deliveries. Since 1851, the Ohio Constitution has said, "the people have the right to bear arms for their defense and security." In striking down the ban, the court noted that the framers of the Ohio constitution "put the citizens' rights up front....