Of course... and Grauniad readers are busily writing to the citizens of Clark County Ohio, imploring them to drop MSIE and switch to Firefox for the good of all mankind...
Space-based assets are simultaneously very valuable and very vulnerable. In a tense international standoff (Cuban Missile Crisis style) they inject a strong "use it or lose it" incentive to go for a first strike. On balance, this is probably not a plus.
Re:A prime example of spin-off technology
on
Hibernating to Mars
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
we could do the research, but without an obvious need such as space flight creates, we generally wouldn't.
Uh huh. Because it's almost impossible to raise funds for medical research. There's just no demand for living longer and surviving incurable diseases, you see. And governments won't touch it with a bargepole; political suicide.
I don't buy this whole line of reasoning, to be honest. For one thing, it's misleading. The USA's Pentagon system shovels money into military tech in the hopes that something genuinely useful will fall out as a side-effect. And it often does, if only because a lot of military-funded research ends up being anything but military. But you can pump that money directly into civilian-oriented research instead. Japan's MITI used to do this (interestingly, their funding breakdown by tech segment was almost identical to the Pentagon's) and was rather more efficient in terms of ROI.
More importantly, though, I think it sets the arena of debate all wrong. It's not about the spin-offs, nice though they are. The Apollo project was IMO the single most heroic and awe-inspiring achievement in human history. It wasn't an R&D lab for non-stick frying pans. Defending it in those terms feels demeaning.
As for this particular problem, I suggest that instead of training humans to hibernate, NASA should consider training groundhogs to fly spaceships.
Does anyone know why the Creative Commons license was used instead if the GNU Free Documentation License?
There are severe problems with the GNU FDL, primarily the fact that it's incompatible with the GPL. As I understand it, that makes it problematic to put docs into code (e.g. Doxygen comments) or code into docs (e.g. API usage examples).
The "invariant sections" provision of the FDL is also a worry, and has already been abused by people making their entire contribution an invariant section, which kind of defeats the object.
Will Parrot, at some hypothetical point in the distant future, be able to decouple languages from libraries in the same way that.NET does? This is IMO the most exciting thing about.NET - once new languages are no longer guillotined in their infancy by the "but there aren't any libraries for it!" hurdle, a veritable renaissance in language design becomes possible, and maybe we can finally crawl out of the backward-compatibility tarpit.
Well, the safety problems are largely a result of having raw pointers in the language, which you can't really "fix". Major, backward-compatibility changes just ain't going to happen, and rightly so. There's room for a new language in the C++ space, but it will have to be just that: a new language.
My personal gripes:
- Being near-impossible to parse correctly and efficiently. Which mostly means the preprocessor, but also name lookup rules, template POI rules etc. This is why the state of C++ tooling is so dire; our IDEs are a sad joke compared to what's available for Java.
- Weak standard library. (cries of "Heresy! Burn him! Burn him!") Yes, the STL is terribly terribly clever, and elegant, and impressive. It's just not terribly useful. Most people use iostreams, vector, list, map, string and not much else. How often have you needed to stable_partition a deque? Compared to, say, needing to portably list the contents of a directory?
- As you say, obsession with templates. The original standard library was bad enough; std::string did not need to be templated, nor did the iostream library. The current metaprogramming craze has made things even worse; it's great as an intellectual challenge, and to discover through experiment which areas need better language support (*cough*typeof*cough*). But not for everyday production code. It's hard to maintain, hard to diagnose when it breaks, and multiplies compile times by orders of magnitude. Trying to do agile development in C++ is a painful experience at the best of times; when it takes MINUTES to compile a five-line file, it's flat-out impossible.
That said, there are still areas in which C++ beats everything else out there:
- Control. It's the only mainstream general-purpose language that supports deterministic destruction and RAII. The importance of this cannot be overstated. GC is all very well, but given the choice between leaking memory and leaking file handles, or DB connections, or mutexes, I know which way I'd go. Similarly, GC pauses still rule out Java/C# for many realtime apps, even soft RT.
- Programming-in-the-large. In my experience, a single C++ source file takes much longer to compile than a single Java or C# file. But a large C++ system can be incrementally rebuilt after a change to one (non-header) file much faster than a Java/C# system. Header files are a repulsive kludge and a royal pain, but they're there for a reason.
Perfectly serious; I didn't think it was a contentious statement, actually. We're a lot more authoritarian and hung-up than the Dutch, but we're not as blatantly corrupt as the US. And, Tony Blair notwithstanding, as a nation we don't share the bizarre US notion that rabid fundamentalist tub-thumping is acceptable behaviour in politics.
(OK, OK, Ian Paisley notwithstanding as well.)
Your second point, alas, is all too true. Buy the US government, get the UK government absolutely FREE!
Wish I had mod points. All the more impressive considering the rather snarky comment it was replying to.
A few random observations:
- I don't think the "treatment of fame" issue is unique to politicians in the US; it seems to apply to business and media celebrities as well. I suspect it's a side-effect of the "Land of Opportunity" myth that's so pervasive in the US; if success is achieved (only) through talent and hard work, anybody with wealth/influence must automatically deserve it. (And, conversely, anybody without wealth or influence is either stupid or lazy and hence not worth bothering about.)
- I *do* worry that the problems seen in the US are at least partly a result of the concentration of power there relative to the size of the economy. Assuming for the sake of argument that all politicians everywhere are equally corrupt, a dollar spent bribing a US Congressman to pass a pro-corporate law will have a far greater payoff than the same dollar spent bribing a Dutch representative, so it stands to reason that corporations would invest a lot more time and money on manipulating the US. I'm generally in favour of European integration, but this issue does bother me. The EC's combined economy is bigger than the USA's; if policymaking becomes similarly concentrated, we can expect to see similar levels of lobbying. Look at the recent pressure on software patents, for example.
- I think you could have made more of the freedom of the press. The Reporters Without Borders 2003 report makes for interesting reading. The Netherlands are joint first for press freedom; the USA is at 31.
Incidentally, I live in the United Kingdom. Politically and socially we're somewhere in between the US and the Netherlands, but from here the Dutch extreme looks vastly more appealing.
I don't think I'd describe their spam filter as "excellent". I don't think I've had any false positives yet, but it only catches about half of my spam.
Curiously, nearly all the spam to my Gmail account consists of 419s - there's very little of the pr0n, v1agra etc that inundates my work account.
On any attempt to claim "Yes, those thoughts were prohibited by law" we simply drag it to the Supreme Court and state "Freedom of Thought" is an inherent and implicit prequisite to "Freedom of Speech". Freedom of Thought as a right is self-evident. [snip] At that point any law attempting to restrict thought is be unconstitutional and invalid
If your argument is, as it appears to be, that
Freedom of speech is an absolute right, and
Freedom of thought is a prerequisite for freedom of speech, therefore
Freedom of thought must be an absolute right
then I'm afraid you're going to be shot down long before you get to the Supreme Court. Freedom of speech is not an absolute right, even in the US, which (unusually) does a pretty good job of living up to its hype in this regard. If I read a story to a fee-paying audience, and that story happens to coincide word-for-word with a copyrighted novel, I'm not going to be able to claim free speech as a defence. If I explain the inner mysteries of my employer's trade-secret sprocket frobnification process to a competitor, I'm not going to be able to claim free speech as a defence. If free speech can be trumped by the copyright and trade-secret legs of the IP tripod, what makes you think a court will view patents any differently?
No, I suspect we'll have more luck with a pragmatic argument. As a first principle, people should be able to think, say or do anything they like, and if anyone says otherwise they'd better be able to come up with a compelling argument for a restriction. I don't think that's a tough one to sell. And if your IP troll runs the "incentive to innovate" line, and that line is as demonstrably false as it is for software patents, I think it should be possible to convince people of that.
No. You have a military primarily because it's a convenient, if not terribly efficient, way for government to pour taxpayers' dollars into the industries they like as part of the giant stimulus policy that's been going on since WWII, and secondarily to force weaker parts of the world to bend the knee to US corporate and strategic interests. It's very obviously not for defence. Who, exactly, do you think would attack you if your military were half its current size? A quarter? An eighth?
Look at 9/11 - IIRC the interceptors available in the continental USA at the time were unarmed and would have had to ram those airliners in order to stop them. This at a time when you had umpteen carrier battle groups, the basic tools of long-range force projection, all around the world breathing down the necks of nations who are never going to attack you in a million years. Does this really look like a defensive posture to you? If so, I want some of whatever you're smoking.
About TFA specifically: I agree, the US military plans for everthing, and it's daft to read too much into it. They probably have plans to invade Belgium. That said, the weaponization of space is a serious concern, and even the perception of capability in this area is risky. Space-based assets are extremely valuable and extremely vulnerable to first strikes; this creates a strong "use it or lose it" pressure which could easily tip a tense standoff into a conflict.
If I in fact preform a demonstration carrying out some simple software patent in my head, were my thoughts prohibited by law?
Yes, would be the obvious answer. Is it wrong, stupid and evil? Sure. But that's certainly the implication of patent law as it stands.
This oddity isn't unique to software patents. If I'm marooned alone on a desert island, and can survive only with the aid of a (patented) sprocket frobnifier I whittled from a piece of driftwood, I'm still breaking the law. Prohibiting actions simply to preserve an artificial monopoly isn't obviously less wrong than prohibiting thoughts in the same cause. If it seems sillier, it's only because it's that much harder to enforce.
All patents are "wrong" in this sense; they reduce the benefits generated by a given invention. It's always a tradeoff between this "wrongness" and the desire to encourage innovation where first-mover advantage alone isn't enough to recoup the cost of research. My problem with software patents is that the tradeoff being made is grossly skewed; empirically, they hinder rather than promote innovation. It's not an objection from first principles. (I wouldn't rule out such an objection, but it would be an objection to patents in general, not software patents in particular.)
I'm not sure what distinction you are seeing there. You need to build up steps in exactly the same way to find a proof or an algorithm.
Fair comment. I think another replier drew a better distinction than mine, between algorithms and theorems.
I do think you could make a case, though. An algorithm is a means to a practical end; it gives you a concrete result, like a nicely sorted list or an efficient route plan. A proof doesn't have these external side-effects; you can't do anything after proving a theorem (except possibly prove another theorem) that you couldn't do before. In that sense, they're maybe more like works of art. You can patent a new sprocket frobnifier that happens to looks beautiful, but you can't patent a sculpture that looks a bit like a sprocket frobnifier.
No, depending on where you're talking about, many countries in Africa did fine and dandy for a couple of decades.
Largely agree. Africa went to hell mostly as a result of the immensely damaging "structural adjustment" programmes forced on heavily-indebted countries by the IMF and World Bank.
The unnatural and often impractical boundaries left as the legacy of colonialism didn't help, and the corrupt regimes supported by Cold War antagonists playing the proxy game didn't help either, but I'd put structural adjustment front and centre. In many ways it was an early, and more extreme, version of the "globalization" now starting to affect first world nations - destroying self-sufficiency and reducing people to economic slavery in the service of foreign investment. Most if not all of the African famines were "economists' famines"; the countries affected were still exporting agricultural produce at the time.
MP3, Ogg, FLAC, you name it. Listen to entire albums before buying, if you like. Most artists allow some discretion in how much you pay, depending on how much you like it and/or how much you can afford. Artist gets 50% and, IIRC, they retain full copyright.
I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but these guys really do Get It. Give 'em a whirl, they deserve it.
Interesting that you mention anti-virus in that list; I consider that to be based on largely empty FUD. Firewall, sure - ZoneAlarm logs pretty much prove the case for that one within 30 seconds of hooking up broadband. But back when I was on dial-up I ran unpatched Win98 and XP boxes with no anti-virus for years, and never had a problem. And since I did install AV it's never caught anything. As long as you have some modicum of a clue - don't use IE, don't use Outlook, show some common sense about what you download - I really do think AV is a waste of money. (I run AVG, 'cos I'm cheap.)
A while back, I built an anti-virus check (based on Sophos; we didn't roll our own) into a document management system for a VERY large corp. They were adamant that they needed it. Well, we implemented it, and tested it from time to time using some "defanged" test viruses, and everything worked fine. But we never got a real virus in 2 years.
1. SCO makes unsubstantiated accusations about fraud.
2. SCO asks court to unseal record.
3. Court quite properly refuses.
4. SCO bleats to press about this vast blue-wing conspiracy which, alas, they can't offer any evidence for because the nasty tricksy court won't let them.
5. SCO stock blips up a bit the way it always does on SCO publicity, no matter how bad.
6. Profit! Or, perhaps more accurately, slightly mitigated loss for a day or two.
Slashdot Mirror
Y'know, your response to the first point would work equally well as a response to the second...
Of course... and Grauniad readers are busily writing to the citizens of Clark County Ohio, imploring them to drop MSIE and switch to Firefox for the good of all mankind...
When the Grauniad and the BBC report this story hours before it appears on Slashdot, you know something's wrong with the world.
Space-based assets are simultaneously very valuable and very vulnerable. In a tense international standoff (Cuban Missile Crisis style) they inject a strong "use it or lose it" incentive to go for a first strike. On balance, this is probably not a plus.
we could do the research, but without an obvious need such as space flight creates, we generally wouldn't.
Uh huh. Because it's almost impossible to raise funds for medical research. There's just no demand for living longer and surviving incurable diseases, you see. And governments won't touch it with a bargepole; political suicide.
I don't buy this whole line of reasoning, to be honest. For one thing, it's misleading. The USA's Pentagon system shovels money into military tech in the hopes that something genuinely useful will fall out as a side-effect. And it often does, if only because a lot of military-funded research ends up being anything but military. But you can pump that money directly into civilian-oriented research instead. Japan's MITI used to do this (interestingly, their funding breakdown by tech segment was almost identical to the Pentagon's) and was rather more efficient in terms of ROI.
More importantly, though, I think it sets the arena of debate all wrong. It's not about the spin-offs, nice though they are. The Apollo project was IMO the single most heroic and awe-inspiring achievement in human history. It wasn't an R&D lab for non-stick frying pans. Defending it in those terms feels demeaning.
As for this particular problem, I suggest that instead of training humans to hibernate, NASA should consider training groundhogs to fly spaceships.
There are severe problems with the GNU FDL, primarily the fact that it's incompatible with the GPL. As I understand it, that makes it problematic to put docs into code (e.g. Doxygen comments) or code into docs (e.g. API usage examples).
The "invariant sections" provision of the FDL is also a worry, and has already been abused by people making their entire contribution an invariant section, which kind of defeats the object.
And no, it's apparently not a FA one.
.NET does? This is IMO the most exciting thing about .NET - once new languages are no longer guillotined in their infancy by the "but there aren't any libraries for it!" hurdle, a veritable renaissance in language design becomes possible, and maybe we can finally crawl out of the backward-compatibility tarpit.
Will Parrot, at some hypothetical point in the distant future, be able to decouple languages from libraries in the same way that
Specifically #11. The question clearly asked for a change of opinion on an issue of national importance. Hot dogs do not qualify.
Well, the safety problems are largely a result of having raw pointers in the language, which you can't really "fix". Major, backward-compatibility changes just ain't going to happen, and rightly so. There's room for a new language in the C++ space, but it will have to be just that: a new language.
My personal gripes:
- Being near-impossible to parse correctly and efficiently. Which mostly means the preprocessor, but also name lookup rules, template POI rules etc. This is why the state of C++ tooling is so dire; our IDEs are a sad joke compared to what's available for Java.
- Weak standard library. (cries of "Heresy! Burn him! Burn him!") Yes, the STL is terribly terribly clever, and elegant, and impressive. It's just not terribly useful. Most people use iostreams, vector, list, map, string and not much else. How often have you needed to stable_partition a deque? Compared to, say, needing to portably list the contents of a directory?
- As you say, obsession with templates. The original standard library was bad enough; std::string did not need to be templated, nor did the iostream library. The current metaprogramming craze has made things even worse; it's great as an intellectual challenge, and to discover through experiment which areas need better language support (*cough*typeof*cough*). But not for everyday production code. It's hard to maintain, hard to diagnose when it breaks, and multiplies compile times by orders of magnitude. Trying to do agile development in C++ is a painful experience at the best of times; when it takes MINUTES to compile a five-line file, it's flat-out impossible.
That said, there are still areas in which C++ beats everything else out there:
- Control. It's the only mainstream general-purpose language that supports deterministic destruction and RAII. The importance of this cannot be overstated. GC is all very well, but given the choice between leaking memory and leaking file handles, or DB connections, or mutexes, I know which way I'd go. Similarly, GC pauses still rule out Java/C# for many realtime apps, even soft RT.
- Programming-in-the-large. In my experience, a single C++ source file takes much longer to compile than a single Java or C# file. But a large C++ system can be incrementally rebuilt after a change to one (non-header) file much faster than a Java/C# system. Header files are a repulsive kludge and a royal pain, but they're there for a reason.
Perfectly serious; I didn't think it was a contentious statement, actually. We're a lot more authoritarian and hung-up than the Dutch, but we're not as blatantly corrupt as the US. And, Tony Blair notwithstanding, as a nation we don't share the bizarre US notion that rabid fundamentalist tub-thumping is acceptable behaviour in politics.
(OK, OK, Ian Paisley notwithstanding as well.)
Your second point, alas, is all too true. Buy the US government, get the UK government absolutely FREE!
Wish I had mod points. All the more impressive considering the rather snarky comment it was replying to.
A few random observations:
- I don't think the "treatment of fame" issue is unique to politicians in the US; it seems to apply to business and media celebrities as well. I suspect it's a side-effect of the "Land of Opportunity" myth that's so pervasive in the US; if success is achieved (only) through talent and hard work, anybody with wealth/influence must automatically deserve it. (And, conversely, anybody without wealth or influence is either stupid or lazy and hence not worth bothering about.)
- I *do* worry that the problems seen in the US are at least partly a result of the concentration of power there relative to the size of the economy. Assuming for the sake of argument that all politicians everywhere are equally corrupt, a dollar spent bribing a US Congressman to pass a pro-corporate law will have a far greater payoff than the same dollar spent bribing a Dutch representative, so it stands to reason that corporations would invest a lot more time and money on manipulating the US. I'm generally in favour of European integration, but this issue does bother me. The EC's combined economy is bigger than the USA's; if policymaking becomes similarly concentrated, we can expect to see similar levels of lobbying. Look at the recent pressure on software patents, for example.
- I think you could have made more of the freedom of the press. The Reporters Without Borders 2003 report makes for interesting reading. The Netherlands are joint first for press freedom; the USA is at 31.
Incidentally, I live in the United Kingdom. Politically and socially we're somewhere in between the US and the Netherlands, but from here the Dutch extreme looks vastly more appealing.
I don't think I'd describe their spam filter as "excellent". I don't think I've had any false positives yet, but it only catches about half of my spam.
Curiously, nearly all the spam to my Gmail account consists of 419s - there's very little of the pr0n, v1agra etc that inundates my work account.
The scene: a tough interview in an Alpine meadow...
JD: So, Mrs. Cow, have you stopped destroying Swiss tourist industry through soil erosion? Cow: MUUUUUUU!!!(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
If your argument is, as it appears to be, that
then I'm afraid you're going to be shot down long before you get to the Supreme Court. Freedom of speech is not an absolute right, even in the US, which (unusually) does a pretty good job of living up to its hype in this regard. If I read a story to a fee-paying audience, and that story happens to coincide word-for-word with a copyrighted novel, I'm not going to be able to claim free speech as a defence. If I explain the inner mysteries of my employer's trade-secret sprocket frobnification process to a competitor, I'm not going to be able to claim free speech as a defence. If free speech can be trumped by the copyright and trade-secret legs of the IP tripod, what makes you think a court will view patents any differently?
No, I suspect we'll have more luck with a pragmatic argument. As a first principle, people should be able to think, say or do anything they like, and if anyone says otherwise they'd better be able to come up with a compelling argument for a restriction. I don't think that's a tough one to sell. And if your IP troll runs the "incentive to innovate" line, and that line is as demonstrably false as it is for software patents, I think it should be possible to convince people of that.
No. You have a military primarily because it's a convenient, if not terribly efficient, way for government to pour taxpayers' dollars into the industries they like as part of the giant stimulus policy that's been going on since WWII, and secondarily to force weaker parts of the world to bend the knee to US corporate and strategic interests. It's very obviously not for defence. Who, exactly, do you think would attack you if your military were half its current size? A quarter? An eighth?
Look at 9/11 - IIRC the interceptors available in the continental USA at the time were unarmed and would have had to ram those airliners in order to stop them. This at a time when you had umpteen carrier battle groups, the basic tools of long-range force projection, all around the world breathing down the necks of nations who are never going to attack you in a million years. Does this really look like a defensive posture to you? If so, I want some of whatever you're smoking.
About TFA specifically: I agree, the US military plans for everthing, and it's daft to read too much into it. They probably have plans to invade Belgium. That said, the weaponization of space is a serious concern, and even the perception of capability in this area is risky. Space-based assets are extremely valuable and extremely vulnerable to first strikes; this creates a strong "use it or lose it" pressure which could easily tip a tense standoff into a conflict.
If I in fact preform a demonstration carrying out some simple software patent in my head, were my thoughts prohibited by law?
Yes, would be the obvious answer. Is it wrong, stupid and evil? Sure. But that's certainly the implication of patent law as it stands.
This oddity isn't unique to software patents. If I'm marooned alone on a desert island, and can survive only with the aid of a (patented) sprocket frobnifier I whittled from a piece of driftwood, I'm still breaking the law. Prohibiting actions simply to preserve an artificial monopoly isn't obviously less wrong than prohibiting thoughts in the same cause. If it seems sillier, it's only because it's that much harder to enforce.
All patents are "wrong" in this sense; they reduce the benefits generated by a given invention. It's always a tradeoff between this "wrongness" and the desire to encourage innovation where first-mover advantage alone isn't enough to recoup the cost of research. My problem with software patents is that the tradeoff being made is grossly skewed; empirically, they hinder rather than promote innovation. It's not an objection from first principles. (I wouldn't rule out such an objection, but it would be an objection to patents in general, not software patents in particular.)
Interesting discussion, btw; thanks.
I'm not sure what distinction you are seeing there. You need to build up steps in exactly the same way to find a proof or an algorithm.
Fair comment. I think another replier drew a better distinction than mine, between algorithms and theorems.
I do think you could make a case, though. An algorithm is a means to a practical end; it gives you a concrete result, like a nicely sorted list or an efficient route plan. A proof doesn't have these external side-effects; you can't do anything after proving a theorem (except possibly prove another theorem) that you couldn't do before. In that sense, they're maybe more like works of art. You can patent a new sprocket frobnifier that happens to looks beautiful, but you can't patent a sculpture that looks a bit like a sprocket frobnifier.
"Mathematical algorithms are discovered, not invented"
I'm strongly opposed to software patents, but this statement just makes no sense to me. Proofs are discovered. Algorithms are invented, surely?
No, depending on where you're talking about, many countries in Africa did fine and dandy for a couple of decades.
Largely agree. Africa went to hell mostly as a result of the immensely damaging "structural adjustment" programmes forced on heavily-indebted countries by the IMF and World Bank.
The unnatural and often impractical boundaries left as the legacy of colonialism didn't help, and the corrupt regimes supported by Cold War antagonists playing the proxy game didn't help either, but I'd put structural adjustment front and centre. In many ways it was an early, and more extreme, version of the "globalization" now starting to affect first world nations - destroying self-sufficiency and reducing people to economic slavery in the service of foreign investment. Most if not all of the African famines were "economists' famines"; the countries affected were still exporting agricultural produce at the time.
Magnatune.
MP3, Ogg, FLAC, you name it. Listen to entire albums before buying, if you like. Most artists allow some discretion in how much you pay, depending on how much you like it and/or how much you can afford. Artist gets 50% and, IIRC, they retain full copyright.
I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but these guys really do Get It. Give 'em a whirl, they deserve it.
as any fule kno
Please moderate +1, Familiar With Molesworth
My mistake - someone I used to know with a thing for Norse mythology and an almost identical sig (albeit with Brie instead of catsup).
Apologies for the confusing commentspam.
Backups are for wimps. Real men put their data on a WinXP internal share and have the rest of the world mirror it.
Interesting that you mention anti-virus in that list; I consider that to be based on largely empty FUD. Firewall, sure - ZoneAlarm logs pretty much prove the case for that one within 30 seconds of hooking up broadband. But back when I was on dial-up I ran unpatched Win98 and XP boxes with no anti-virus for years, and never had a problem. And since I did install AV it's never caught anything. As long as you have some modicum of a clue - don't use IE, don't use Outlook, show some common sense about what you download - I really do think AV is a waste of money. (I run AVG, 'cos I'm cheap.)
A while back, I built an anti-virus check (based on Sophos; we didn't roll our own) into a document management system for a VERY large corp. They were adamant that they needed it. Well, we implemented it, and tested it from time to time using some "defanged" test viruses, and everything worked fine. But we never got a real virus in 2 years.
1. SCO makes unsubstantiated accusations about fraud.
2. SCO asks court to unseal record.
3. Court quite properly refuses.
4. SCO bleats to press about this vast blue-wing conspiracy which, alas, they can't offer any evidence for because the nasty tricksy court won't let them.
5. SCO stock blips up a bit the way it always does on SCO publicity, no matter how bad.
6. Profit! Or, perhaps more accurately, slightly mitigated loss for a day or two.
Film at 11.