Slashback: Hagiography, Oracle, Fusion

Slashback with updates on RMS's biography, PVRs vs. the endangered edifice of Western Civilization, Oracle's funny deal with California, cold fusion and more. Read on for the details! Can't we please have a picture of the winner? obsidianpreacher writes: "Apparently, SETI@Home has just recently released who the winner of the 500 millionth result "contest" is, and posted the news on the SETI@Home site. Too bad it wasn't me (or one of the people who turn in 300 bajillion results per day)."

Even lukewarm fusion would be satisfy me. driggers writes: "I wrote a review of the book "Excess Heat" for /. last year. I thought you might (or might not :) be interested to learn that the U.S. Navy in February 2002 issued Technical Report No. 1862 titled "Thermal and Nuclear Aspects of the Pd/D2O System," Vol. 1 of which summarizes A Decade of Research at Navy Laboratories."

Dr. Frank Gordon, Head, Navigation and Applied Sciences Department, concludes his foreword with the remark, "It is time for the government funding organizations to invest in this research."

If you modify the source you must keep it accurate, like a Mad Lib. An Anonymous Coward writes "I just noticed the biography of Richard M. Stallman, "Free as in Freedom" by Sam Williams is online at oreilly, released under the GNU Free Documentation License."

What vapors rule the modern day Oracle? MarkedMan writes: "The following CNET article outlines Oracle's reply to the State of California's announcement it was canceling a nearly $100 million dollar contract. It should not come as a surprise, as few companies would give up that kind of money without a fight, not to mention the domino effect if they just rolled over. It would be a tacit admission that they ripped off naive customers."

Comments

Re:The editors are morons!

[qslack]

All these stories have been posted before!

Yeah, that's the point. Check the title. It's a Slashback, which is a play on the word "Flashback." In other words, this is where we get to hear about previously-posted stories and their outcomes.

In a word, nah.

[PCM2]

Oracle is not experiencing any kind of market erosion due to open-source software. Anything you run off PostgreSQL could be ported to Oracle, but you'd probably be a dummy to do so. The reverse is rarely true (except the dummy part).

Re:PVRs vs. Western Civ?

[Anonymous Coward]

They may be referring to this story on LawMeme.