You've obviously never worked for a giant multinational corporation.
Any large organization seems to suffer from the problem of the right hand really not having any clue at all what the left is doing.
Watching a large corporation sue itself is almost as amusing as watching a government sue itself. And yet it happens all the time. For example the EPA has sued both the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy before.
It never ceases to amaze me how people are so convinced IBM is innocent without knowing any realfacts about the case. Every time a read something new, IBM looks more like their guilty, and this article is no exception, despite the author's bias. However, I'll reserve my judgement until I see the facts. I hope you people don't apply this irrational decision making process in your jobs. At least this gives me a new perspective on the middle east conflict. I can just hear the same arguements. "Of course Israel or Palestine) is wrong. They're not us."
Um sorry, there really isn't currently enough evidence out in the public eye to make any sort of judgement on this suit. From what I've seen so far it mostly looks like it comes down to a contract dispute regarding Sequent's and IBM's System V licenses along with whatever contract was signed between IBM, SCO, and Sequent regarding project Monterey.
The reason you haven't heard much from IBM is they are currently practicing basic litigation defense 101. In other words they are saying as little as possible regarding the case other than their official filinings with the court.
IBM's lawyers and executives have lots of experience being both plantiffs and defendants in IP and contract dispute lawsuits. They very much know what they are doing and how to handle this.
The biggest hint that IBM isn't worried at all is that you've heard of this suit at all. If SCO had a case it would have been very quitely settled by IBM before SCO announced they were suing IBM. Its pretty standard practice in disputes like this for the plantiff to quietly contact the defendant and attempt to work out a settlement before actually filing anything in court.
Re:Sun is simply mean-spirited
on
My Visit to SCO
·
· Score: 1
The fact is that SCO is a mad dog biting everyone in site. What Sun is doing -- saying 'See, this dog hasn't bitten me yet! Good doggy!'.
While it is entirely possible SCO may try to sue Sun on the same grounds they sued IBM. It would be very stupid of them to do so.
When Sun worked with AT&T on System V R4 they were able to get very favorable license terms out of AT&T as part of the deal.
Ironicly it was the merging of the BSD based SunOS with System V in SysVR4 that ultimately forced AT&T/Novell to settle their suit against UC. It seems at some point between Sun getting the BSD sources and the incorporation of the same code in SysVR4 some of the UCB copyright notices were removed. Very bad for USL as it quickly became apparent that System V was infringing on the BSD copyrights more than BSD was infringing on the System V copyrights.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but Mac have had seriel number accessible by software for a LONG time.
Yea so? Sun systems have had software accessable motherboard serial numbers for years. On the other hand Solaris doesn't require activation keys or tie itself to the node serial number.
There is some software that uses these serial numbers, most notably anything using FlexLM including Sun's own compilers and IDEs.
Freedom is NOT the single most important thing to strive for. Happiness is. What is more important is being able to have a roof over your head, food on the table, a safe environment in which to bring up your kids and having a happy fulfilled life.
So you'd prefer Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia then? Lovely. We save you European idiots from the facists and the communists and what do you do the first chance you get? Go ahead and impose a totalitarian utopian state on yourselves. Fine then, I hope it is as much a failure as the last few utopian states that have come along.
Sort of ironic that the US seems to remain one of the few holdouts who still believe in that quaint Enlightenment notion of Liberal Democracy. Thankfully we have built these principles into the very foundations of our institutions. Is it perfect? No. But I think we get it right more than we get it wrong. The "American Experiment" is still going strong after 200 years.
Perhaps it is just my American POV, but I feel the solution to crap like the KKK or neo-Nazis spew is more speech.
In general the American experience has been that if you let the whackos have their soapbox they will usually hang themselves with their own words in short order. That a few might agree with them and feel what they are saying is "right" is something you have to be willing to accept. However I doubt this sort would think much differently even if the "right of reply" was forced on the publications they choose to read. So called gulible fools aren't going to be helped by forcing people to provide a forum to those who disagree with them.
Oddly enough you seem to fail to recognise that like the US the UK does not impose a "right of reply" on print publications. Oddly enough it would seem that the UK has the freest press in Europe and the most diversity of opinion in mainstream publications. I fail to see why the web should be treated any different than print. If I want to rebut CNN I can very well do so on my own blog.
One thing that many fail to realize is that freedom of the press and freedom of speech also mean the right to ignore things you don't want to listen to. Just because you feel what you have to say is valid it doesn't mean you have any right to make others pay attention to you. Just because I happen to have a popular soapbox why should I be under any obligation to lend it to you?
You claim blogs have no accountablity, I would have to dissagree. Anyone who is at all popular risks other bloggers "fact checking his ass" or "fisking" him if he is spreading untruths. If anything there is more accountablity in the blog community than in the traditional press. Totaly random everyday folks have been able to become very widely read bloggers. You have a diversity of voices: instapundit, samizdata, indymedia, lieks, drudge etc. There really is no barrier to publication on the web other than making others pay attention to you.
As to EU law, as an American I will quite happily ignore it. If I and other Americans have to start worring about being arrested or dragged into court when we travel to Europe for violating EU law on the Internet I think you can kiss US tourist dollars goodbye.
In short I think you are an elitist prick who believes in freedom of speech and the press only if it is just the "right sort" of folks who have that freedom. Well fuck off, we in the US will keep our First Amendment, thank you very much.
Zoiks! $82 billion. That's larger than the GDP of many countries.
Does SCO/Caldera have any concept of the fire they are playing with here? IBM can bankrupt SCO simply by creative use of the discovery process and by dragging this suit out as long as possible. Who do you think is going to run out of money to pay their lawyers first?
In addition there is the strong possiblity of IBM countersuing SCO for patent infringement. When you have a patent portfolio as large as IBM's chances are anyone stupid enough to sue you is probably infringing one or more of your patents.
Wait a minute. $44 trillion? Where did you get that number from. The US Federal debt is like $6.5 trillion, still high but my god! The US GNP is only like $10 trillion. That'd be over 4 times the GNP!
I'm not sure where the $44 trillion number came from, I was just cutting-and-pasting the number from the post I was replying to. Now that I think about it $44 trillion would possibly exceed total yearly global GDP. That's the problem with using big numbers in reference to money, after a while it all stops seeming real.
According to the national debt clock the Outstanding Public Debt as of 17 Jun 2003 at 07:38:50 PM GMT is:
$6,597,991,181,374.68
I don't see why not. Money that is tied up in US Federal Debt is not being used in private investment.
Not really, money that is tied up in the US Federal Debt is money investors don't want to risk in private investment. This is the key liquidity that the US Federal Debt provides to world financial markets.
I agree. Unfortunately the Republicans just want to completely eliminate Social Security, which isn't helping this debate at all.
As I said in my post, "fuck the boomers".
On a more serious note, I believe both the Social Security and Medicare "crisises" could be entirely eliminated by gradually raising the age of eligiblity. While it might screw some people who were counting on qualifing at 62 1/2 or 65 years old it would take care of the problem.
Like $20,000 of consumer debt provides tremendous liquidity to Visa and MasterCard? No way; the national debt is simply a means of passing the buck to the next generation. If the U.S. wasn't selling debt, then that $7 trillion that U.S. common stocks lost since 1999 would likely still be in people's pension and college funds.
Sorry wrong. The US Federal debt is not like a credit card balance. For one thing the lenders have a hell of a lot more faith that the US government is going to pay up than you or I or even GE.
The US government issuing debt has absolutely nothing to do with the decline in the stock market. Ironicly enough if the people who had invested in the stock market had bought money market securities (composed primarily of various Treasury department securities) instead of stock they would still have that $7 trillion and even be a little ahead on inflation.
It wasn't too long ago that our leaders in the U.S. prided themselves that "the buck stops here." It wasn't too long ago that we had a budget surplus. These days, we have neither.
"The buck stops here" went out with the Truman administration in 1952. The budget surplus was a bit of creative accounting involving the Social Security trust fund. Note that while the US government may have been running a year-to-year surplus for a couple of years it didn't really make a dent in the total federal debt.
A good thing for who? Osama bin Laden? Every dollar Uncle Sam pays off the debt is several cents per year saved in interest.
Remember those "money market securities" I mentioned above? If the US debt was paid off it would remove a key component of one of the safest investments in the world financial markets. All of those money market savings accounts, money market mutual funds, and the "cash" item in corprate balance sheets is made up in large part of US Treasury securities. To eliminate this would take away a key way individuals and companies set aside money for later use.
A common error many people make is to assume that debt in any form for any individual, company, or government is a bad thing. This is not always the case, it usually isn't considered bad to use debt to finance capital goods and projects. For instance for an individual to take out a student loan or a mortgage; for a company to issue bonds to buy a factory, build an office building, or lay fiber; or for a local or state government to issue bonds to pay for libraries, schools, roads, or transit systems can be an effective use of debt to finance items or projects that would not be affordable if the entire cost had to be paid up front. In fact debt is one of the key components of capitalism.
Usually when experts are referring to poor uses of debt they are talking about using debt to finance non-durable goods or day-to-day operating expenses. Most consumer credit card debt falls into this category. Companies and state and local governments who do the same thing tend to get punished with higher intrest rates than they would on debt to finance capital spending.
Unfortunately the US Treasury Department doesn't separate capital spending from operating expenses when is issues US Government debt. For most years where there has been a deficit you could probably find at least that much nondefense capital spending by the Federal Government but you would have to dig for it as the Federal government doesn't keep it's books in a way that makes it easy to find. Fortunately the US government is considered to have one of the best "ablilities to pay" of any entity on the planet so they still get among the lowest intrest rates.
That $44 trillion of US Federal debt provides a tremendious amount of liquidity to world financial markets and a "safe" investment to park cash in. Eliminating it or even reducing it below certain levels wouldn't be a good thing.
There is no way we can support the health and pension costs of the baby boomers as they retire without a radical rebracketing of income tax rates
Fuck the boomers. Actually almost every country is facing a demographic crunch. The number of workers availible to support pay-as-you-go pension schemes is shrinking almost everywhere. Both social security and medicare are in need of massive reform. Jacking the tax rates on younger workers is not the way to fix things. Actually a gradual rise in the age where one can collect social security and medicare would take care of most of the "crisis" unfortunately this is politically difficult to do.
There are no new planes that work like that. Thats one reason why F4's are used for research in favor of F16's. You can take a part off, take it to a machine shop and say I want one of these but add one of these research bits. Put it back on the plane and it will still fly just about as well is it ever did.
There is no real reason you can't still make planes like this. True some performance would need to be sacrificed, but in some cases that may be worthwhile.
Remember the b52 1st flew in 1952. In 2040, it will be a 90 yr old design. Some how I don't expect the B2 will still be flying then.
I'm not kidding, the USAF plans to still have B-52s after the last B-1 and B-2 are retired. While the current plans may change, after all who expected back in the 60's that the B-52 would still be combat-ready today, they are expected to be around for a long time to come.
right on. I think the shuttle is the only thing older than the G4 not to be replaced... and the G4 may have just given up on waiting.
Pardon my ignorance but what the heck does "G4" refer to?
As for older than the Shuttle, most of the US and Russian disposable boosters are much older designs than the shuttle. Most of them are based on early liquid fueled ICBM designs. True it's a new vehicle for every launch, but the basic designs are old.
For that matter the USAF has many aircraft still flying that have been around since the early 60's . The B52 is an over 50 year old design and most of the planes still flying were built over 40 years ago. The USAF expects to keep the B52 in service for at least another 40 years.
Because then we won't ever get off this mud ball. If we're going to do that we might as well all just commit suicide now.
We have to dream, have to explore, and have to get a sustainable human population living off of Earth. If nothing else so some big rock doesn't come along and wipe us out like the dinosaurs.
As for risk, life is incredibly risky. People die in mountain climbing and boating accidents all the time but you don't see any serious effort to ban either activity.
Think of everything that was going wrong on Mir toward the end.
Mir was well past the end of it's design lifetime.
The only reason Mir was de-orbited was lack of money and politics. If the Russian space programs hadn't needed cash from NASA Mir would still be in orbit.
The Russians have focused on incremental improvements. For the most part their stuff just WORKS. Even when something goes wrong their KISS designs are much less likely to fail completely unlike the incredibly complicated technological houses of cards NASA favors.
If a NASA mission had suffered a software failure like the Russian capsule did it would have ended up smeared across the landscape. Look at all of the software failures that have caused NASA to lose unmanned probes.
the high launch rate was considered to be one of the contributing causes of the Challenger disaster.
Apparently lots of corners were being cut to meet the pace of launches and there was incredible pressure launch rather than delay due to weather or other problems.
Compare the Shuttle to a B-52, 707, or DC-3. The USAF expects to keep the B-52 flying until at least 2040. There are 707s and DC-3s still in commercial service and probably will be for years.
Why are these aircraft still flying? Because the are able to be upgraded with the latest electronics and engines and are designed to be serviced.
We need a re-usable spaceplane desinged along the lines of a DC3, B52, or 707. With plenty of space availible for upgrades and swapouts and every component except the airframe designed to be serviced and possibly replaced during the vehicle lifetime.
The amazing thing to me is how FEW atronauts have died in such dangerous conditions.
Compared to the early days of aviation, manned space flight has been remarkably safe. Even when measured on a accidents per manned flight/hour basis. Unfortunately we haven't seen the advances in 43 years of space flight that we did in the first 43 years of aviation. Probably due to the fact that nowhere near the same number of flight hours have been logged.
Actually it probably has more to do with the Hubble and ISS being the only missions that need the shuttle. Most of the other NASA missions can be done with unmanned rockets.
NASA still needs to get the program for the ISS crew rescue/service vehicle going and get a new heavy-lift booster progam underway so that most of the remaining shuttle missions can be done with newer/better hardware.
Probably the best hope for US government involvment in space would be either a comitment to a manned Mars mission similar to JFK's speech that launched the Apollo program or Rumsfield getting funding for some of the militarization of space that he wants to do.
In either case I'm not sure NASA is the best agency to carry us forward. While there are some really great people working there, upper management seems broken and the agency as a whole seems to lack the "can do" adittude of the Apollo era.
Worse comes to worse Russia, China, Japan, India, and the ESA all have space programs and a desire to have a manned capablity.
Assuming SCO was in a position to revoke AIX certificates the revocation would last just about long enough for the feds to nationalize SCO with an emergency executive order.
Shutting down things like air traffic control tends to piss people off.
SCO's stock tumbled to $0.01, moments after the opening bell, amid fears of massive lawsuits
well actually no. The stock market would be down too. Yet another reason Darl would find troops with guns pointed at his head if he could actually remote disable every AIX installation.
"The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee."
Or perhaps just:
"Hear me talkin' hillbilly boy? I ain't through with you by a damn sight. I'm gonna get medieval on your ass."
The DPRK analogy is rather apt. SCO is acting like the DPRK because their time is running out and they really have no hope other than to extort the biggest fish in the pond (USA for the DPRK, IBM for SCO).
The response to the crazy threats is similar as well IBM is acting as if it's no great concern and not a credible threat.
I'm sure IBM is going to ignore the license expiration and make SCO take them to court to either obtain damages or get an injunction. The longer IBM is able to drag this mess out the more likely SCO will implode in a puff of unpaid legal fees.
Slashdot Mirror
You've obviously never worked for a giant multinational corporation.
Any large organization seems to suffer from the problem of the right hand really not having any clue at all what the left is doing.
Watching a large corporation sue itself is almost as amusing as watching a government sue itself. And yet it happens all the time. For example the EPA has sued both the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy before.
It never ceases to amaze me how people are so convinced IBM is innocent without knowing any realfacts about the case. Every time a read something new, IBM looks more like their guilty, and this article is no exception, despite the author's bias. However, I'll reserve my judgement until I see the facts. I hope you people don't apply this irrational decision making process in your jobs. At least this gives me a new perspective on the middle east conflict. I can just hear the same arguements. "Of course Israel or Palestine) is wrong. They're not us."
Um sorry, there really isn't currently enough evidence out in the public eye to make any sort of judgement on this suit. From what I've seen so far it mostly looks like it comes down to a contract dispute regarding Sequent's and IBM's System V licenses along with whatever contract was signed between IBM, SCO, and Sequent regarding project Monterey.
The reason you haven't heard much from IBM is they are currently practicing basic litigation defense 101. In other words they are saying as little as possible regarding the case other than their official filinings with the court.
IBM's lawyers and executives have lots of experience being both plantiffs and defendants in IP and contract dispute lawsuits. They very much know what they are doing and how to handle this.
The biggest hint that IBM isn't worried at all is that you've heard of this suit at all. If SCO had a case it would have been very quitely settled by IBM before SCO announced they were suing IBM. Its pretty standard practice in disputes like this for the plantiff to quietly contact the defendant and attempt to work out a settlement before actually filing anything in court.
The fact is that SCO is a mad dog biting everyone in site. What Sun is doing -- saying 'See, this dog hasn't bitten me yet! Good doggy!'.
While it is entirely possible SCO may try to sue Sun on the same grounds they sued IBM. It would be very stupid of them to do so.
When Sun worked with AT&T on System V R4 they were able to get very favorable license terms out of AT&T as part of the deal.
Ironicly it was the merging of the BSD based SunOS with System V in SysVR4 that ultimately forced AT&T/Novell to settle their suit against UC. It seems at some point between Sun getting the BSD sources and the incorporation of the same code in SysVR4 some of the UCB copyright notices were removed. Very bad for USL as it quickly became apparent that System V was infringing on the BSD copyrights more than BSD was infringing on the System V copyrights.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but Mac have had seriel number accessible by software for a LONG time.
Yea so? Sun systems have had software accessable motherboard serial numbers for years. On the other hand Solaris doesn't require activation keys or tie itself to the node serial number.
There is some software that uses these serial numbers, most notably anything using FlexLM including Sun's own compilers and IDEs.
Freedom is NOT the single most important thing to strive for. Happiness is. What is more important is being able to have a roof over your head, food on the table, a safe environment in which to bring up your kids and having a happy fulfilled life.
So you'd prefer Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia then? Lovely. We save you European idiots from the facists and the communists and what do you do the first chance you get? Go ahead and impose a totalitarian utopian state on yourselves. Fine then, I hope it is as much a failure as the last few utopian states that have come along.
Sort of ironic that the US seems to remain one of the few holdouts who still believe in that quaint Enlightenment notion of Liberal Democracy. Thankfully we have built these principles into the very foundations of our institutions. Is it perfect? No. But I think we get it right more than we get it wrong. The "American Experiment" is still going strong after 200 years.
Perhaps it is just my American POV, but I feel the solution to crap like the KKK or neo-Nazis spew is more speech.
In general the American experience has been that if you let the whackos have their soapbox they will usually hang themselves with their own words in short order. That a few might agree with them and feel what they are saying is "right" is something you have to be willing to accept. However I doubt this sort would think much differently even if the "right of reply" was forced on the publications they choose to read. So called gulible fools aren't going to be helped by forcing people to provide a forum to those who disagree with them.
Oddly enough you seem to fail to recognise that like the US the UK does not impose a "right of reply" on print publications. Oddly enough it would seem that the UK has the freest press in Europe and the most diversity of opinion in mainstream publications. I fail to see why the web should be treated any different than print. If I want to rebut CNN I can very well do so on my own blog.
One thing that many fail to realize is that freedom of the press and freedom of speech also mean the right to ignore things you don't want to listen to. Just because you feel what you have to say is valid it doesn't mean you have any right to make others pay attention to you. Just because I happen to have a popular soapbox why should I be under any obligation to lend it to you?
You claim blogs have no accountablity, I would have to dissagree. Anyone who is at all popular risks other bloggers "fact checking his ass" or "fisking" him if he is spreading untruths. If anything there is more accountablity in the blog community than in the traditional press. Totaly random everyday folks have been able to become very widely read bloggers. You have a diversity of voices: instapundit, samizdata, indymedia, lieks, drudge etc. There really is no barrier to publication on the web other than making others pay attention to you.
As to EU law, as an American I will quite happily ignore it. If I and other Americans have to start worring about being arrested or dragged into court when we travel to Europe for violating EU law on the Internet I think you can kiss US tourist dollars goodbye.
In short I think you are an elitist prick who believes in freedom of speech and the press only if it is just the "right sort" of folks who have that freedom. Well fuck off, we in the US will keep our First Amendment, thank you very much.
Zoiks! $82 billion. That's larger than the GDP of many countries.
Does SCO/Caldera have any concept of the fire they are playing with here? IBM can bankrupt SCO simply by creative use of the discovery process and by dragging this suit out as long as possible. Who do you think is going to run out of money to pay their lawyers first?
In addition there is the strong possiblity of IBM countersuing SCO for patent infringement. When you have a patent portfolio as large as IBM's chances are anyone stupid enough to sue you is probably infringing one or more of your patents.
Wait a minute. $44 trillion? Where did you get that number from. The US Federal debt is like $6.5 trillion, still high but my god! The US GNP is only like $10 trillion. That'd be over 4 times the GNP!
I'm not sure where the $44 trillion number came from, I was just cutting-and-pasting the number from the post I was replying to. Now that I think about it $44 trillion would possibly exceed total yearly global GDP. That's the problem with using big numbers in reference to money, after a while it all stops seeming real.
According to the national debt clock the Outstanding Public Debt as of 17 Jun 2003 at 07:38:50 PM GMT is:
$6,597,991,181,374.68
I don't see why not. Money that is tied up in US Federal Debt is not being used in private investment.
Not really, money that is tied up in the US Federal Debt is money investors don't want to risk in private investment. This is the key liquidity that the US Federal Debt provides to world financial markets.
I agree. Unfortunately the Republicans just want to completely eliminate Social Security, which isn't helping this debate at all.
As I said in my post, "fuck the boomers".
On a more serious note, I believe both the Social Security and Medicare "crisises" could be entirely eliminated by gradually raising the age of eligiblity. While it might screw some people who were counting on qualifing at 62 1/2 or 65 years old it would take care of the problem.
Like $20,000 of consumer debt provides tremendous liquidity to Visa and MasterCard? No way; the national debt is simply a means of passing the buck to the next generation. If the U.S. wasn't selling debt, then that $7 trillion that U.S. common stocks lost since 1999 would likely still be in people's pension and college funds.
Sorry wrong. The US Federal debt is not like a credit card balance. For one thing the lenders have a hell of a lot more faith that the US government is going to pay up than you or I or even GE.
The US government issuing debt has absolutely nothing to do with the decline in the stock market. Ironicly enough if the people who had invested in the stock market had bought money market securities (composed primarily of various Treasury department securities) instead of stock they would still have that $7 trillion and even be a little ahead on inflation.
It wasn't too long ago that our leaders in the U.S. prided themselves that "the buck stops here." It wasn't too long ago that we had a budget surplus. These days, we have neither.
"The buck stops here" went out with the Truman administration in 1952. The budget surplus was a bit of creative accounting involving the Social Security trust fund. Note that while the US government may have been running a year-to-year surplus for a couple of years it didn't really make a dent in the total federal debt.
A good thing for who? Osama bin Laden? Every dollar Uncle Sam pays off the debt is several cents per year saved in interest.
Remember those "money market securities" I mentioned above? If the US debt was paid off it would remove a key component of one of the safest investments in the world financial markets. All of those money market savings accounts, money market mutual funds, and the "cash" item in corprate balance sheets is made up in large part of US Treasury securities. To eliminate this would take away a key way individuals and companies set aside money for later use.
A common error many people make is to assume that debt in any form for any individual, company, or government is a bad thing. This is not always the case, it usually isn't considered bad to use debt to finance capital goods and projects. For instance for an individual to take out a student loan or a mortgage; for a company to issue bonds to buy a factory, build an office building, or lay fiber; or for a local or state government to issue bonds to pay for libraries, schools, roads, or transit systems can be an effective use of debt to finance items or projects that would not be affordable if the entire cost had to be paid up front. In fact debt is one of the key components of capitalism.
Usually when experts are referring to poor uses of debt they are talking about using debt to finance non-durable goods or day-to-day operating expenses. Most consumer credit card debt falls into this category. Companies and state and local governments who do the same thing tend to get punished with higher intrest rates than they would on debt to finance capital spending.
Unfortunately the US Treasury Department doesn't separate capital spending from operating expenses when is issues US Government debt. For most years where there has been a deficit you could probably find at least that much nondefense capital spending by the Federal Government but you would have to dig for it as the Federal government doesn't keep it's books in a way that makes it easy to find. Fortunately the US government is considered to have one of the best "ablilities to pay" of any entity on the planet so they still get among the lowest intrest rates.
It sure the hell isn't 70% like it was in the bad old days.
Where, on Neptune?
I think the grandparent post is refering to the old top-bracket rate which I believe was around 70%.
That $44 trillion of US Federal debt provides a tremendious amount of liquidity to world financial markets and a "safe" investment to park cash in. Eliminating it or even reducing it below certain levels wouldn't be a good thing.
There is no way we can support the health and pension costs of the baby boomers as they retire without a radical rebracketing of income tax rates
Fuck the boomers. Actually almost every country is facing a demographic crunch. The number of workers availible to support pay-as-you-go pension schemes is shrinking almost everywhere. Both social security and medicare are in need of massive reform. Jacking the tax rates on younger workers is not the way to fix things. Actually a gradual rise in the age where one can collect social security and medicare would take care of most of the "crisis" unfortunately this is politically difficult to do.
There are no new planes that work like that. Thats one reason why F4's are used for research in favor of F16's. You can take a part off, take it to a machine shop and say I want one of these but add one of these research bits. Put it back on the plane and it will still fly just about as well is it ever did.
There is no real reason you can't still make planes like this. True some performance would need to be sacrificed, but in some cases that may be worthwhile.
Remember the b52 1st flew in 1952. In 2040, it will be a 90 yr old design. Some how I don't expect the B2 will still be flying then.
I'm not kidding, the USAF plans to still have B-52s after the last B-1 and B-2 are retired. While the current plans may change, after all who expected back in the 60's that the B-52 would still be combat-ready today, they are expected to be around for a long time to come.
right on. I think the shuttle is the only thing older than the G4 not to be replaced... and the G4 may have just given up on waiting.
Pardon my ignorance but what the heck does "G4" refer to?
As for older than the Shuttle, most of the US and Russian disposable boosters are much older designs than the shuttle. Most of them are based on early liquid fueled ICBM designs. True it's a new vehicle for every launch, but the basic designs are old.
For that matter the USAF has many aircraft still flying that have been around since the early 60's . The B52 is an over 50 year old design and most of the planes still flying were built over 40 years ago. The USAF expects to keep the B52 in service for at least another 40 years.
Why not abandon manned space missions?
Because then we won't ever get off this mud ball. If we're going to do that we might as well all just commit suicide now.
We have to dream, have to explore, and have to get a sustainable human population living off of Earth. If nothing else so some big rock doesn't come along and wipe us out like the dinosaurs.
As for risk, life is incredibly risky. People die in mountain climbing and boating accidents all the time but you don't see any serious effort to ban either activity.
Maybe it wasn't on so the gyros wern't spun up?
Think of everything that was going wrong on Mir toward the end.
Mir was well past the end of it's design lifetime.
The only reason Mir was de-orbited was lack of money and politics. If the Russian space programs hadn't needed cash from NASA Mir would still be in orbit.
The Russians have focused on incremental improvements. For the most part their stuff just WORKS. Even when something goes wrong their KISS designs are much less likely to fail completely unlike the incredibly complicated technological houses of cards NASA favors.
If a NASA mission had suffered a software failure like the Russian capsule did it would have ended up smeared across the landscape. Look at all of the software failures that have caused NASA to lose unmanned probes.
the high launch rate was considered to be one of the contributing causes of the Challenger disaster.
Apparently lots of corners were being cut to meet the pace of launches and there was incredible pressure launch rather than delay due to weather or other problems.
Agreed.
Compare the Shuttle to a B-52, 707, or DC-3. The USAF expects to keep the B-52 flying until at least 2040. There are 707s and DC-3s still in commercial service and probably will be for years.
Why are these aircraft still flying? Because the are able to be upgraded with the latest electronics and engines and are designed to be serviced.
We need a re-usable spaceplane desinged along the lines of a DC3, B52, or 707. With plenty of space availible for upgrades and swapouts and every component except the airframe designed to be serviced and possibly replaced during the vehicle lifetime.
The amazing thing to me is how FEW atronauts have died in such dangerous conditions.
Compared to the early days of aviation, manned space flight has been remarkably safe. Even when measured on a accidents per manned flight/hour basis. Unfortunately we haven't seen the advances in 43 years of space flight that we did in the first 43 years of aviation. Probably due to the fact that nowhere near the same number of flight hours have been logged.
Actually it probably has more to do with the Hubble and ISS being the only missions that need the shuttle. Most of the other NASA missions can be done with unmanned rockets.
NASA still needs to get the program for the ISS crew rescue/service vehicle going and get a new heavy-lift booster progam underway so that most of the remaining shuttle missions can be done with newer/better hardware.
Probably the best hope for US government involvment in space would be either a comitment to a manned Mars mission similar to JFK's speech that launched the Apollo program or Rumsfield getting funding for some of the militarization of space that he wants to do.
In either case I'm not sure NASA is the best agency to carry us forward. While there are some really great people working there, upper management seems broken and the agency as a whole seems to lack the "can do" adittude of the Apollo era.
Worse comes to worse Russia, China, Japan, India, and the ESA all have space programs and a desire to have a manned capablity.
Assuming SCO was in a position to revoke AIX certificates the revocation would last just about long enough for the feds to nationalize SCO with an emergency executive order.
Shutting down things like air traffic control tends to piss people off.
SCO's stock tumbled to $0.01, moments after the opening bell, amid fears of massive lawsuits
well actually no. The stock market would be down too. Yet another reason Darl would find troops with guns pointed at his head if he could actually remote disable every AIX installation.
more like just about anyone vs. the Old Testament Yawheh.
The plague of locusts should be arriving in Utah any day now.
Once this is all said and done the clear message will be "don't fuck with IBM".
Or perhaps just:
Dunno if there is a Flash plugin for Solaris anyway.
Yep there is a Solaris plugin. I've got Netscape 7 on my Solaris 9 box set up with flash, realaudio, and PDF support.
The DPRK analogy is rather apt. SCO is acting like the DPRK because their time is running out and they really have no hope other than to extort the biggest fish in the pond (USA for the DPRK, IBM for SCO).
The response to the crazy threats is similar as well IBM is acting as if it's no great concern and not a credible threat.
I'm sure IBM is going to ignore the license expiration and make SCO take them to court to either obtain damages or get an injunction. The longer IBM is able to drag this mess out the more likely SCO will implode in a puff of unpaid legal fees.