Furthermore with every mask bought and used by anyone some big, fat, ACTA-pushing corp earns $$$. Yes, I also see this ridiculous. Should we look for another symbol or is it too much effort to do this ?
The whole thing stinks. Our whole political class was involved in an attempt to pass it as quietly as possible and ram this feudal law down our throats. Those 15 crooks were involved in this scam but - as they're formally an opposition - they weren't directly responsible for passing ACTA, so they could switch sides at any time and they did it as soon as they saw opportunity in it. Neverthless I'm happy to see they've helped raising (bad) publicity about ACTA fiasco with those masks. I'm definitely NOT happy with Tusk who ordered signing this crap despite huge protests and I'm not confident he really means to not ratify this - in my opinion he is a pathological liar. Just one day earlier one of his stooges (M. Dowgielewicz) acknowledged that they (government) are determined to ratify it despite of protests. In their (polish govt) opinion protests are "overreaction of manipulated young people". Geez. What a bunch of fucks (I told you they're all pathological liars).
Our media also didn't help much - media lied at first. Only later, as more and more known and respected persons took side of protesters - media acknowledged some of their concerns - but all reports in our mainstream media seems to be watered down and limited to internet/copyright issues. Not a single word about generic drugs or patented GMO crops - whole debate is as limited as possible.
And there is another thing that stinks even more than all things above combined. In the wake of these protests we had major hiccup in our parliament and reps in one of commision voted and issued a recommendation to suspend ratification process and start public consultations about ACTA. Next day some lady from US embassy started calling those representatives and asking why did they pass this and why party leaders did not enforce 'party discipline' to vote this recommendation down. While previous things did not impress me too much (as I'm used to our crappy political class), the last one made me really furious. If someone is still in doubt who is ruling my country - not President nor Prime Minister - It's some obscure lady from US embassy. (?!?) Few months ago (presumeably) the same lady in meetings of agriculture commision was pushing to legalize patented GMOs in my country ! It seems that we've got rid of Soviets but we haven't got our independence either. Our politicians stopped taking orders from Mockba but started taking orders from Washington and Brussels.
Last but not least I would thank everyone who attended anti-ACTA rallies regardless of cold weather we currently have. I was only on one of these and I feel I did too little. Thank you - all of you who made our lovely government reconsidering (or at least pretending to reconsider) this decision. My feeling is that we should not stop here. Every term our elected officials show disregard for us and do things that directly violate their fiduciary duties (at expense of citizens of course). I think that now as we've scored first meaningful success, we should go further and demand as many elements of direct democracy as possible. Technical means to cheaply perform referendums are in place, it's just politicians that are dragging their feet.
In principle they're right. Hollywood with all its tentacles IS a problem and getting rid of it would be a game changer. In practice we live in a corporate state what won't let that happen. You see, our corporate media is a great tool of mass propaganda and control ("public relations"). We see it over and over again - from Creel commission that pushed Americans into World War One to 2003 US agression on Iraq, to 2011 Libya, to upcoming war in Iran (we already see constant war drum beat on Murdoch media). Corporate media and Hollywood (with jewels like "Black Hawk Down" and other pieces of shit propaganda) are instrumental in this process and will be protected from any meaningful competition and our lovely corporate elite won't pass control over media to anyone.
Go read NDAA, shamelessly passed by Senate (both parties) and shamelessly signed by Obama little more than a week ago. It allows for indefinite military detention of people your lovely govt. calls "terrorists" without charges and without recourse to a court of law as they're free to ignore court orders. With NDAA passed, US is now officialy a police state of kind it used to install in some many Latin countries in the past. You can kiss your freedoms goodbye as your constitution now has been teared down along with all its amendments.
I doubt US millitary will use it to full extent at first as it would be a major PR disaster, but as time passes and popular anger at corporations/government grows you'll see more and more of people in jail just refusing to do that our corporate overlords want.
Greenpeace has confirmed time and time again that their activists are insane. Who keeps giving these people money anyway?
Gazprom is known to give money to Greenpeace, thus we see them attacking every usable energy source except for natural gas. Corruption infects whole societies (including Greenpeace), not just selected groups (eg. banksters, government). Theories like generational dynamics quite well explain why is it so (and explains why things in general will get much worse before they'll get better).
While I agree that current (that is, 50-years old) nuclear reactor designs are inherently dangerous, my question is why research & development of nuclear reactors nearly halted in 70's. Don't tell me about that Three Mile Island incident (and then Chernobyl) is the only cause of this. Part of it might be that both US and USSR stopped developing more and more powerful bombs and moved into different fields (eg. star wars project pursued by Reagan administration). But htat's not all. My (somewhat conspiracy) theory is that progress in this field has been deliberately stopped (eg. molten salt reactor designs - see ORNL fiasco). Should I be greenpeace activist, I would push for modernisation/rebuild/securing of nuclear facilities and ask inconvenient questions about ties of oil/coal industry with (lack of) progress in this field, indirect subsidies to both coal and oil (tax breaks, military support in many regions, breaks from environmental protections), artificially lowering energy cost (and thus making alternate energy sources unprofitable) and corruption inside nuclear industry itself (ignoring safety concerns - you know - 'cost cuts'; corruption in NRC - covering up security issues instead of enforcing them; selling old, expensive+profitable designs instead of less expensive and less profitable [like: molten salt reactors?]).
Regarding Greenpeace: it's been started for noble causes 40 years ago, but now it is just another corrupt political organization, not different from republicans, democrats or any other political party. In their 'fight' against nuclear energy itself they focus on banning it and actively cut off any discussion about safer designs. No arguments needed - removing inconvenient posts from their forums seems to be fine for them. If censoring of (inconvenient), then I see no sense in arguing with them on any topic - its either corruption of sect-like behaviour (which boils down to corruption at the top of said sect). Now let's look at other fields of their activity. Al Gore and carbon credits fiasco: they've helped Al pushing carbon credits scam down our throats which is bad for two reasons: it's a financial scam and it does not solve (very real) AGW problem at all. Regarding Gazprom and Greenpeace - they conveniently ignore environmental impact of extracting gas in Siberia and actively help to make Europe fully dependent on russian gas (by blocking efforts to develop / maintain any other energy sources in european countries). Last example: look how silent they were when BP/Gulf of Mexico fiasco broke off: only after enough people noticed and started asking why greenpeace does'nt react, they've managed to organize one or two silly 'protests' to shut everybody up.
To sum this up. Current nuclear designs are dangerous indeed, but we should NOT rely on Greenpeace help in solving this problem. They're utterly corrupt, corporate-sponsored organization and should be perceived the same as banksters, most politicians and most or our lovely corporate overlords.
With all this marijuana / church crap (add guns ownership, gay mariage and other distractions) your lovely government is trying to keep your attention as far as possible from important things. See, they're making so much noise about this crappy site, yet thousands and thousands of people occupying centers of so many cities, trying to bring attention to THE real issue are completely ignored (and sometimes tear-gased and flash-banged) by the same government, and shamelessly ridiculed / silenced by your corporate media.
Since 2008 crash not a single fraudster who caused this fiasco was sentenced (and don't bring in Madoff - he was jailed because he tried also stealing from other fraudsters, not only from ordinary people). Instead of resolving this issue, government is actively covering up all these crimes and handsomely paying for all bad bets of said fraudsters from your taxes, your future and your children future. There is a lot of budget deficit noise lately but if you look at it closer, you'll see that it will only harm ordinary people and science budgets. Lucrative corporate contracts, army contracts will remain intact (and grow over time). Banksters will surely go back for another round of bailouts (it's easy money after all) and they'll get what they want. Government officials will cover up all corporate wrongdoings in hope to end up on in some well paid corporate job. This vicious circle is called regulatory capture and there is propably nothing left to deal with it - except for (non-violent !!!) civil disobedience.
I'm a foreigner from post-communist country who was growing up in crappy communist system, it strikes me that communism was very similiar to contemporary corporate state (no wonder China succeeds). There are actually two sides of the same coin - both on state level (de-facto central planning in US and EU, lobbied by corporate sponsors) and inside corporations themselves (levels of sillyness and ineffeciencies are comparable, if not greater to those in state-owned enterprises in post-communist countries). There are differences of course - technology went forward a lot, corporate state has way better PR and allows for private enterprises (more and more limited by thousands of corporate-sponsored regulations). Actually, communist China mastered this by keeping their core communist system intact (chinese exporter still needs to give away all his earned dollars in exchange for freshly printed CNYs) and allowing for limited private enterprises (oh, irony - less limited than in the West!). Let me stress this again: communism and corporate state are the two sides of the same coin !
While I'm watching what OWS folks do, I see so many similiarities with what my father in Solidarity movement was doing 30 years ago in Poland. Once again that's striking to me - you're basically at the same point of this process we've been in early 80's. Just don't get distracted by "Hope & Change" crapola, "Republicans vs Democrats" fraud. Don't get distracted by "We The People Petition" - government-sponsored PR scams aren't worth wasting your time. Don't get co-opted by some political party and don't get divided between (fraudulent) political lines (your lovely corporate media will try their best to do this). And don't let violence to outbreak - white shirts from police will be more than happy seeing this. They know how to deal with violence but have no idea how to deal with peaceful protests. That's why see things like Antony Bologna fiasco and I admire how OWS folks dealt with this - it was briliant. And finally, don't let your government to incite next great war (every f*ng estabullshitment tries this when it runs out of options). I wish you good lock goig forward with this.
I suppose those crooks understand all IP issues way better than we do. Just like FED officials, who understand monetary system way better than anyone else and willfuly ignore harm it inflicts on everyone but their cronies from big banks.
What we are dealing with is a bunch of utterly corrupt crooks running WIPO contrary to its stated mission in order to secure warm chairs they sit on and corporate sponsorship they enjoy.
HP is in bed with Microsoft to a great extent. They sell a huge number of PC, servers and various solutions based on Microsoft technologies. HP wouldn't risk Microsoft hiking prices for them or cutting them off their goodies. I was suspecting this was one of motives behind axing WebOS and Palm.
... in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya etc. I don't think US military gives a crap about civilians. Albeit they don't tend to shoot them on purpose, they don't give a shit about collateral damage when bombing their 'suspected targers'. Sorry for being trollish, but I suspect that filtering out civilians isn't on the top on their priority list.
I wonder if creating new language (and presumably VM) is Google response to Oracle efforts to turn Java into a big steaming pile of crap. I like dynamic languages like Python or Java Script but strong types enforcement (or better: strong enforcement for overall programming contracts also known as APIs) and compiler ability to catch as many errors as possible are key issues when choosing language for bigger applications.
You don't look where real bubble is. Apple P/E is misleading at best. Their market cap relies on inflated profits - mostly from iPhone and iTab 'luxury' products with monopoly-like profit margins on both. Take these margins away (hello, Android) and it will pop. With $350B invested into their stock it is clearly visible why not only Apple but half of Wall Street fights teeth and nails with commodization in this area in general and Google/Android in particular.
Being heavily pumped Wall Street Wonder Bubble and having newly assigned crap-MBA CEO they might assume that they can do whatever they want and expect impunity.
I think Apple is becoming desperate. As their market capitalization approached (and even surpassed for a moment) Exxon-Mobile market cap, they're now officially in bubble terrirory. At first glance it does not seem like a bubble as their P/E ratio isn't so high (around 14 as we speak), but their current profits is clearly a bubble thanks to fat profit margins. Most of their profits come from iPhones and iPads - all remaining revenue sources pale in comparison to these two. As they're getting more and more real competition in market they've created, they'll have to compete and they'll experience significant margin compression. In other words, if any real competition emerges, they'll lose support for their insanely high stock price. Don't get me wrong - I don't predict any kind of doom for Apple - I just say that their current stock price is unsupportable in long term.
My take is that they'll fight teeth and nail to keep any meaningful competition out of the market - legally or not. In Samsung case they've got too far - now it appears that they've managed to get injunction without even notifying Samsung about this, so Samsung lawyers had no chance to even respond. This is propably illegal, but it seems that Apple is prepared to pay very high fines/damages in order to keep monopoly on tablet market.
It also strikes me that previously they've always managed to get ahead of competitors in terms of new, better products and now they started using lawyers on grand scale. Why is that ? Is it because of Jobs' deteriorating health their product/innovation pipeline is shortening ? If the only person capable if envisioning a new product in this company is Steve Jobs, then they're a kind of one-time wonder.
In 2025 we'll see $10-$20 a gallon gasoline or even more expensive. That makes me wonder why government introduces a regulation that will be useless at that point. I cannot think of anything other than handing out more bailouts due to "high costs of compliance". As if we did not pour enough gigadollars into GM and other "too big to fail" car manufacturers.
Compared to 2 trillion given to banksters three years ago, 12B is a pocket change. Add another 18 trillions in more opaque forms to the same banksters 12B seems like nearly nothing. We could build both ISS and particle accelerator for tiny fraction of money we just gave away to financial institutions.
Unforunately, Oracle lawyers could go after python as well. They have patent covering stack-based virtual machine after all. It is impossible to write any non-trivial piece of software without stepping into someone's software patents.
You see, those crooks shake down more than enough money from here and there, so Larry can buy up companies and turn them into crap. Larry has that "magic touch" ability: anything he touches turns into shit. This is rare - not many people have this ability. Murdoch comes to mind. Shall we assume that Larry Ellison is like Murdoch in the technology sector ?
And do you believe those drone attacks in Pakistan are backed by any form of international law ? They bomb anyone they call "suspected terrorist" without any court order. It turned out that most of casaulties of drone attacks are just civilians. I've read somewhere that weddings were among their favorite targets as muslims often shoot into the air from their kalashnikovs on weddings but drone operators didn't give a shit about this.
If I'm disilusioning you than I'm sorry. For me it seems that US army and their proxy (IDF) did so many war crimes in so many muslim countries that muslim terrorism has to be logical consequence of this. It is basically state sponsored terrorism (USAF and IDF with some help from other NATO countries) versus muslim terrorism and it will not end until some vested interest in prolonging this war will cease (or western taxpayers will be sucked dry by those war profiteers).
I agree mostly with that - but not in full extent. I've lost faith in this company quite some time ago once I've seen their Authentication Management product (software required to authenticate against tokens). It is clearly a crap-quality product made by MBAs for MBAs. It looks like it's been severely crippled by some cheap outsourced programmers (typical corporate attitude - "cuting costs"). This particular breach mainly confirmed my earlier opinion about RSA.
Losing reputation also takes quite a long time - some MBAs worked hard to turn their products into a very expensive crap. These "5 minutes" is an instant where everybody realizes it.
In March this year polish government tried to ram through draconian law that would require registering web sites in local authorities, allowed some beurocrats from KRRiTV (polish FCC equivalent) to decide which content is appropriate, which is not and charge fines / mandate takedowns of content considered "inappropriate" by those beurocrats. Whole affair of passing this crap was "to harmonize with EU laws" of course.
This caused a huge upheaval, especially in ranks of rulling party electorate that considers itself liberal, so the whole process stopped in its tracks - government officials backed off it, propably because of nearby parliamentary elections and now tries various damage control measures, including meetings with various groups and advertising how open they would like to be (and we don't have much choice as the second largest party in Poland are outright hardline neocons (called "Law and Justice" - which is a joke) who already tried to establish their own totalitarian, failed but still stay strong blocking any meaningful political power from being a viable alternative to Civic Platform).
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Furthermore with every mask bought and used by anyone some big, fat, ACTA-pushing corp earns $$$. Yes, I also see this ridiculous. Should we look for another symbol or is it too much effort to do this ?
Greetings from Poland.
The whole thing stinks. Our whole political class was involved in an attempt to pass it as quietly as possible and ram this feudal law down our throats. Those 15 crooks were involved in this scam but - as they're formally an opposition - they weren't directly responsible for passing ACTA, so they could switch sides at any time and they did it as soon as they saw opportunity in it. Neverthless I'm happy to see they've helped raising (bad) publicity about ACTA fiasco with those masks. I'm definitely NOT happy with Tusk who ordered signing this crap despite huge protests and I'm not confident he really means to not ratify this - in my opinion he is a pathological liar. Just one day earlier one of his stooges (M. Dowgielewicz) acknowledged that they (government) are determined to ratify it despite of protests. In their (polish govt) opinion protests are "overreaction of manipulated young people". Geez. What a bunch of fucks (I told you they're all pathological liars).
Our media also didn't help much - media lied at first. Only later, as more and more known and respected persons took side of protesters - media acknowledged some of their concerns - but all reports in our mainstream media seems to be watered down and limited to internet/copyright issues. Not a single word about generic drugs or patented GMO crops - whole debate is as limited as possible.
And there is another thing that stinks even more than all things above combined. In the wake of these protests we had major hiccup in our parliament and reps in one of commision voted and issued a recommendation to suspend ratification process and start public consultations about ACTA. Next day some lady from US embassy started calling those representatives and asking why did they pass this and why party leaders did not enforce 'party discipline' to vote this recommendation down. While previous things did not impress me too much (as I'm used to our crappy political class), the last one made me really furious. If someone is still in doubt who is ruling my country - not President nor Prime Minister - It's some obscure lady from US embassy. (?!?) Few months ago (presumeably) the same lady in meetings of agriculture commision was pushing to legalize patented GMOs in my country ! It seems that we've got rid of Soviets but we haven't got our independence either. Our politicians stopped taking orders from Mockba but started taking orders from Washington and Brussels.
Last but not least I would thank everyone who attended anti-ACTA rallies regardless of cold weather we currently have. I was only on one of these and I feel I did too little. Thank you - all of you who made our lovely government reconsidering (or at least pretending to reconsider) this decision. My feeling is that we should not stop here. Every term our elected officials show disregard for us and do things that directly violate their fiduciary duties (at expense of citizens of course). I think that now as we've scored first meaningful success, we should go further and demand as many elements of direct democracy as possible. Technical means to cheaply perform referendums are in place, it's just politicians that are dragging their feet.
In principle they're right. Hollywood with all its tentacles IS a problem and getting rid of it would be a game changer. In practice we live in a corporate state what won't let that happen. You see, our corporate media is a great tool of mass propaganda and control ("public relations"). We see it over and over again - from Creel commission that pushed Americans into World War One to 2003 US agression on Iraq, to 2011 Libya, to upcoming war in Iran (we already see constant war drum beat on Murdoch media). Corporate media and Hollywood (with jewels like "Black Hawk Down" and other pieces of shit propaganda) are instrumental in this process and will be protected from any meaningful competition and our lovely corporate elite won't pass control over media to anyone.
Go read NDAA, shamelessly passed by Senate (both parties) and shamelessly signed by Obama little more than a week ago. It allows for indefinite military detention of people your lovely govt. calls "terrorists" without charges and without recourse to a court of law as they're free to ignore court orders. With NDAA passed, US is now officialy a police state of kind it used to install in some many Latin countries in the past. You can kiss your freedoms goodbye as your constitution now has been teared down along with all its amendments.
I doubt US millitary will use it to full extent at first as it would be a major PR disaster, but as time passes and popular anger at corporations/government grows you'll see more and more of people in jail just refusing to do that our corporate overlords want.
Greenpeace has confirmed time and time again that their activists are insane. Who keeps giving these people money anyway?
Gazprom is known to give money to Greenpeace, thus we see them attacking every usable energy source except for natural gas. Corruption infects whole societies (including Greenpeace), not just selected groups (eg. banksters, government). Theories like generational dynamics quite well explain why is it so (and explains why things in general will get much worse before they'll get better).
While I agree that current (that is, 50-years old) nuclear reactor designs are inherently dangerous, my question is why research & development of nuclear reactors nearly halted in 70's. Don't tell me about that Three Mile Island incident (and then Chernobyl) is the only cause of this. Part of it might be that both US and USSR stopped developing more and more powerful bombs and moved into different fields (eg. star wars project pursued by Reagan administration). But htat's not all. My (somewhat conspiracy) theory is that progress in this field has been deliberately stopped (eg. molten salt reactor designs - see ORNL fiasco). Should I be greenpeace activist, I would push for modernisation/rebuild/securing of nuclear facilities and ask inconvenient questions about ties of oil/coal industry with (lack of) progress in this field, indirect subsidies to both coal and oil (tax breaks, military support in many regions, breaks from environmental protections), artificially lowering energy cost (and thus making alternate energy sources unprofitable) and corruption inside nuclear industry itself (ignoring safety concerns - you know - 'cost cuts'; corruption in NRC - covering up security issues instead of enforcing them; selling old, expensive+profitable designs instead of less expensive and less profitable [like: molten salt reactors?]).
Regarding Greenpeace: it's been started for noble causes 40 years ago, but now it is just another corrupt political organization, not different from republicans, democrats or any other political party. In their 'fight' against nuclear energy itself they focus on banning it and actively cut off any discussion about safer designs. No arguments needed - removing inconvenient posts from their forums seems to be fine for them. If censoring of (inconvenient), then I see no sense in arguing with them on any topic - its either corruption of sect-like behaviour (which boils down to corruption at the top of said sect). Now let's look at other fields of their activity. Al Gore and carbon credits fiasco: they've helped Al pushing carbon credits scam down our throats which is bad for two reasons: it's a financial scam and it does not solve (very real) AGW problem at all. Regarding Gazprom and Greenpeace - they conveniently ignore environmental impact of extracting gas in Siberia and actively help to make Europe fully dependent on russian gas (by blocking efforts to develop / maintain any other energy sources in european countries). Last example: look how silent they were when BP/Gulf of Mexico fiasco broke off: only after enough people noticed and started asking why greenpeace does'nt react, they've managed to organize one or two silly 'protests' to shut everybody up.
To sum this up. Current nuclear designs are dangerous indeed, but we should NOT rely on Greenpeace help in solving this problem. They're utterly corrupt, corporate-sponsored organization and should be perceived the same as banksters, most politicians and most or our lovely corporate overlords.
With all this marijuana / church crap (add guns ownership, gay mariage and other distractions) your lovely government is trying to keep your attention as far as possible from important things. See, they're making so much noise about this crappy site, yet thousands and thousands of people occupying centers of so many cities, trying to bring attention to THE real issue are completely ignored (and sometimes tear-gased and flash-banged) by the same government, and shamelessly ridiculed / silenced by your corporate media.
Since 2008 crash not a single fraudster who caused this fiasco was sentenced (and don't bring in Madoff - he was jailed because he tried also stealing from other fraudsters, not only from ordinary people). Instead of resolving this issue, government is actively covering up all these crimes and handsomely paying for all bad bets of said fraudsters from your taxes, your future and your children future. There is a lot of budget deficit noise lately but if you look at it closer, you'll see that it will only harm ordinary people and science budgets. Lucrative corporate contracts, army contracts will remain intact (and grow over time). Banksters will surely go back for another round of bailouts (it's easy money after all) and they'll get what they want. Government officials will cover up all corporate wrongdoings in hope to end up on in some well paid corporate job. This vicious circle is called regulatory capture and there is propably nothing left to deal with it - except for (non-violent !!!) civil disobedience.
I'm a foreigner from post-communist country who was growing up in crappy communist system, it strikes me that communism was very similiar to contemporary corporate state (no wonder China succeeds). There are actually two sides of the same coin - both on state level (de-facto central planning in US and EU, lobbied by corporate sponsors) and inside corporations themselves (levels of sillyness and ineffeciencies are comparable, if not greater to those in state-owned enterprises in post-communist countries). There are differences of course - technology went forward a lot, corporate state has way better PR and allows for private enterprises (more and more limited by thousands of corporate-sponsored regulations). Actually, communist China mastered this by keeping their core communist system intact (chinese exporter still needs to give away all his earned dollars in exchange for freshly printed CNYs) and allowing for limited private enterprises (oh, irony - less limited than in the West!). Let me stress this again: communism and corporate state are the two sides of the same coin !
While I'm watching what OWS folks do, I see so many similiarities with what my father in Solidarity movement was doing 30 years ago in Poland. Once again that's striking to me - you're basically at the same point of this process we've been in early 80's. Just don't get distracted by "Hope & Change" crapola, "Republicans vs Democrats" fraud. Don't get distracted by "We The People Petition" - government-sponsored PR scams aren't worth wasting your time. Don't get co-opted by some political party and don't get divided between (fraudulent) political lines (your lovely corporate media will try their best to do this). And don't let violence to outbreak - white shirts from police will be more than happy seeing this. They know how to deal with violence but have no idea how to deal with peaceful protests. That's why see things like Antony Bologna fiasco and I admire how OWS folks dealt with this - it was briliant. And finally, don't let your government to incite next great war (every f*ng estabullshitment tries this when it runs out of options). I wish you good lock goig forward with this.
I suppose those crooks understand all IP issues way better than we do. Just like FED officials, who understand monetary system way better than anyone else and willfuly ignore harm it inflicts on everyone but their cronies from big banks.
What we are dealing with is a bunch of utterly corrupt crooks running WIPO contrary to its stated mission in order to secure warm chairs they sit on and corporate sponsorship they enjoy.
HP is in bed with Microsoft to a great extent. They sell a huge number of PC, servers and various solutions based on Microsoft technologies. HP wouldn't risk Microsoft hiking prices for them or cutting them off their goodies. I was suspecting this was one of motives behind axing WebOS and Palm.
... in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya etc. I don't think US military gives a crap about civilians. Albeit they don't tend to shoot them on purpose, they don't give a shit about collateral damage when bombing their 'suspected targers'. Sorry for being trollish, but I suspect that filtering out civilians isn't on the top on their priority list.
I wonder if creating new language (and presumably VM) is Google response to Oracle efforts to turn Java into a big steaming pile of crap. I like dynamic languages like Python or Java Script but strong types enforcement (or better: strong enforcement for overall programming contracts also known as APIs) and compiler ability to catch as many errors as possible are key issues when choosing language for bigger applications.
Which is a Good Thing (TM). Why some corrupt german judge would ban me from buying Galaxy Tab in, say, Poland ?
You don't look where real bubble is. Apple P/E is misleading at best. Their market cap relies on inflated profits - mostly from iPhone and iTab 'luxury' products with monopoly-like profit margins on both. Take these margins away (hello, Android) and it will pop. With $350B invested into their stock it is clearly visible why not only Apple but half of Wall Street fights teeth and nails with commodization in this area in general and Google/Android in particular.
Being heavily pumped Wall Street Wonder Bubble and having newly assigned crap-MBA CEO they might assume that they can do whatever they want and expect impunity.
Use CFLAGS="-m-fake-money" as rest of Wall Street do.
I think Apple is becoming desperate. As their market capitalization approached (and even surpassed for a moment) Exxon-Mobile market cap, they're now officially in bubble terrirory. At first glance it does not seem like a bubble as their P/E ratio isn't so high (around 14 as we speak), but their current profits is clearly a bubble thanks to fat profit margins. Most of their profits come from iPhones and iPads - all remaining revenue sources pale in comparison to these two. As they're getting more and more real competition in market they've created, they'll have to compete and they'll experience significant margin compression. In other words, if any real competition emerges, they'll lose support for their insanely high stock price. Don't get me wrong - I don't predict any kind of doom for Apple - I just say that their current stock price is unsupportable in long term.
My take is that they'll fight teeth and nail to keep any meaningful competition out of the market - legally or not. In Samsung case they've got too far - now it appears that they've managed to get injunction without even notifying Samsung about this, so Samsung lawyers had no chance to even respond. This is propably illegal, but it seems that Apple is prepared to pay very high fines/damages in order to keep monopoly on tablet market.
It also strikes me that previously they've always managed to get ahead of competitors in terms of new, better products and now they started using lawyers on grand scale. Why is that ? Is it because of Jobs' deteriorating health their product/innovation pipeline is shortening ? If the only person capable if envisioning a new product in this company is Steve Jobs, then they're a kind of one-time wonder.
They could just turn off those two switches. But hey, this is Oracle. Everything they touch turns into crap.
In 2025 we'll see $10-$20 a gallon gasoline or even more expensive. That makes me wonder why government introduces a regulation that will be useless at that point. I cannot think of anything other than handing out more bailouts due to "high costs of compliance". As if we did not pour enough gigadollars into GM and other "too big to fail" car manufacturers.
Compared to 2 trillion given to banksters three years ago, 12B is a pocket change. Add another 18 trillions in more opaque forms to the same banksters 12B seems like nearly nothing. We could build both ISS and particle accelerator for tiny fraction of money we just gave away to financial institutions.
Unforunately, Oracle lawyers could go after python as well. They have patent covering stack-based virtual machine after all. It is impossible to write any non-trivial piece of software without stepping into someone's software patents.
You see, those crooks shake down more than enough money from here and there, so Larry can buy up companies and turn them into crap. Larry has that "magic touch" ability: anything he touches turns into shit. This is rare - not many people have this ability. Murdoch comes to mind. Shall we assume that Larry Ellison is like Murdoch in the technology sector ?
And do you believe those drone attacks in Pakistan are backed by any form of international law ? They bomb anyone they call "suspected terrorist" without any court order. It turned out that most of casaulties of drone attacks are just civilians. I've read somewhere that weddings were among their favorite targets as muslims often shoot into the air from their kalashnikovs on weddings but drone operators didn't give a shit about this.
If I'm disilusioning you than I'm sorry. For me it seems that US army and their proxy (IDF) did so many war crimes in so many muslim countries that muslim terrorism has to be logical consequence of this. It is basically state sponsored terrorism (USAF and IDF with some help from other NATO countries) versus muslim terrorism and it will not end until some vested interest in prolonging this war will cease (or western taxpayers will be sucked dry by those war profiteers).
I agree mostly with that - but not in full extent. I've lost faith in this company quite some time ago once I've seen their Authentication Management product (software required to authenticate against tokens). It is clearly a crap-quality product made by MBAs for MBAs. It looks like it's been severely crippled by some cheap outsourced programmers (typical corporate attitude - "cuting costs"). This particular breach mainly confirmed my earlier opinion about RSA.
Losing reputation also takes quite a long time - some MBAs worked hard to turn their products into a very expensive crap. These "5 minutes" is an instant where everybody realizes it.
In March this year polish government tried to ram through draconian law that would require registering web sites in local authorities, allowed some beurocrats from KRRiTV (polish FCC equivalent) to decide which content is appropriate, which is not and charge fines / mandate takedowns of content considered "inappropriate" by those beurocrats. Whole affair of passing this crap was "to harmonize with EU laws" of course.
This caused a huge upheaval, especially in ranks of rulling party electorate that considers itself liberal, so the whole process stopped in its tracks - government officials backed off it, propably because of nearby parliamentary elections and now tries various damage control measures, including meetings with various groups and advertising how open they would like to be (and we don't have much choice as the second largest party in Poland are outright hardline neocons (called "Law and Justice" - which is a joke) who already tried to establish their own totalitarian, failed but still stay strong blocking any meaningful political power from being a viable alternative to Civic Platform).
No, they suffer from wanting to justify something they're not actually able to justify.
This is exactly I was thinking about. Whining about lack of comprehension, amnesia etc. does not make sense.
What IMO makes sense is looking who bribed them, was this bribing legal and are we able to make them liable for corruption.
Too bad they haven't bought Sun when time was right. It would solve most problems with both Oracle and Microsoft at once.