As of 2004-04-30, SCO has total current assets of $74 million and total current liabilities of $34 million.
After April 30, they paid out $13 million to retire BayStar's preferred shares.
$74 - $34 - $13 = $27 million they have to operate with.
SCO had a net loss from operations of $9.4 million in the quarter ended 2004-04-30.
So they have about 9 months left at their current burn rate. A little bit more, actually, as they have recently cut their expenses so they won't bleed as much in the next few quarters.
Of course, as another poster pointed out, they can sell some more "licenses" to Microsoft and Sun in exchange for cash infusions.
Assuming that people's bodies could be kept at the 20-year-old state indefinitely. All diseases, accidents, violence, etc would happen to you with the probability of a 20-year-old. Consulting medical and acturial databases, how many years would this add to the mean lifespan?
I don't believe that "15 year" answer, so I looked at a mortality table and did the math myself. I came up with an estimate of 800 years.
The acturial tables that you want are called mortality tables. Here is a collection of them from the American National Center for Health Statistics.
Going to the first table, death rates by age, the death rate for 15-24 year olds is 80.7 per 100,000 (all states, 2001).
This means that in the year 2001, in this population group, for each 100,000 people, 99,919.3 of people of these ages lived, and 80.7 of them died.
Or, to scale it down: start with 1000 people. In a year, 1 person dies, and 999 live. What's the average life span of that population? It's a hell of a lot longer than "15 more than normal 60 or so"!
A quick calculation, log(0.5)/log(0.999193)), shows that the median life expectancy of a "perpetual 20 year old", would be 858 more years. That is, if you had 100,000 of these perpetual 20 year olds, after 858 years, 50,000 of them would still be alive.
Calculating average is a bit trickier and I'll leave it alone.
The primary observation was that, while older people are on the average more susceptible to such things than younger people, the difference isn't all that great.
Your comment ignores the fact that average human lifespan has almost doubled already, in the past 100 years.
To be sure, most of the increase is due to reduced child mortality. Maximum human life span has not increased as much, but the chances of (say) a 10-year-old living to see 60 have increased a LOT in every developed country in the world.
So I read your whole comment from the perspective of a gentleman in 1900 deciding whether to adopt technological life-extension measures such as "refrigerated food" and "vaccination". I take these things for granted, and I know I'm enjoying the increased longevity and quality of life that I get from them.
And I haven't noticed much diminuition in technological progress or social change from the 100% increased average lifespan over the last 100 years. So if we can get another 100% over the next 100 years (live to 160... wow!), I'll enjoy it.
Artists Against 419 is a flash mob that meets once a month to download artistic images from 419 scam sites. The more people they get, the faster the 419 sites go down!
When an investor such as Baystar does one of these convertible preferred deals, they can do something called "shorting against the convert".
Here's how it works. At the time Baystar bought their convertible preferred shares, SCOX was trading at about $15 (roughly... I can't be arsed to hit Yahoo Finance right now). Well, Baystar can sell shares at $15. They can sell shares that they don't even own... that is called "short selling", and is a normal transaction on the stock market.
You start with 0 shares, you sell (say) 10,000 shares at $15, now you have $150,000 cash and a position of -10,000 shares SCOX. (That's right, negative numbers!) Later, you buy those 10,000 shares back at $5 per share, leaving you with $100,000 profit and 0 shares of SCOX.
What if you short at $15 and the stock goes to $25? Then you lose $10 per share on every share that you shorted. Except... if you've got a convertible... you just pull out the convertible preferred shares and convert them, in order to have shares.
I'm not saying Baystar did this, but it's a common strategy for holders of convertibles. A convertible is really just a bond + a call option, and shorting against a call option is a common strategy.
In other words, you guys are laughing that Baystar is stuck with a bunch of $5 SCOX shares, but Baystar may have already sold them a few months ago at $15 or $20. They'll just use these conversion shares to deliver back on the shares that they borrowed+sold at $15 to $20.
I get what you're saying (I think). From my point of view, the arguments are separable:
(1) One vermiscripter does more harm than one murderer (2) Some states execute murderers (3) Therefore, some states should execute vermiscripters
(Actually, I've over-simplified (1), because I left out the deterrent multiplier).
To me, (1) is an interesting proposition in itself, without needing to bring in other controversial things like the death penalty. Who causes more damage, a traditional con man who commits a $10,000 fraud, or a spammer who costs 1,000,000 people $0.01 each? I'm interested in that question more than the "... and let's go on to execute them" part.
No, I agree that RFC 822 has a fundamental flaw. The ability to send to my mailbox should have permissions on it.
Both RFC 822 and Windows OS's are insecure by design. But for RFC 822, we assign most of the blame to the exploiters, and for Windows, we assign a lot of the blame to those who wrote the vulnerable system.
The author's point is that executing vermiscripters would prevent more damage than executing murderers Your claim is that executing murderers saves zero lives. Thus, you have to agree with the author that executing vermiscripterswould save more human-hours than executing murderers.
Put it another way: the damage done by one murderer is somewhere around 100,000 to 1,000,000 hours. There are several ways to estimate this. One way is to directly observe that people live 8,766 hours per year and multiply by human life span.
The damage done by one big virus attack is $1 billion, which is 20,000,000 to 50,000,000 hours of damage to the victims' time, although it's spread out over many more victims, so it's not really directly comparable.
The author's point is that if some governments have the death penalty for one crime, they ought to have a death penalty for the second crime, because it causesmuch more damage. Personally, I'm opposed to *any* government having a death penalty for *any* reason, because I think that all governments are too corrupt to be trusted with that power. But I accept that virus-writing and spamming are enormous crimes, up there in the "murder/rape/great-bodily-harm/treason/organized-c rime" category.
You're misreading this point in the article. The point is not that "at least 10 lives are saved per execution." The point is "at MOST 10 lives are saved per execution, probably less".
That's fair. And in a way, more accurate, too. Instead of converting human-hours to dollars, just work directly in the raw human-hours.
The trouble is doing things like multiplying 1 hour by 1,000,000 people to get a million human-hours. Here's an example: suppose that I deprive 1000 people of their water supply for 1 hour (I shut off the pipes to one building). That's major vandalism. Suppose I deprive 1 person of water for 1000 hours. That's murder.
Or suppose I steal $10 from you. Now you can't buy a CD. Then I steal another $10. Now you can't buy a shirt. Eventually I'm stealing your rent money, and that hurts a lot more than the first $10. Thus, it's less harm to steal "entertainment money" * 5 than "entertainment + clothing + medical care + food + rent" from one person.
In technical terms, it's about marginal utility and diminishing marginal returns.
Nevertheless it's still a great crime to skim 1 hour each from 1,000,000 people.
If you think that malware has a positive benefit because it generates publicity for the weaknesses in popular operating systems, how do you feel about spam and the weaknesses that spam reveals in popular mail protocols?
(My view: prison sentences for both malware writers and spammers)
I agree, it's repugnant to place a monetary value on SOMEONE ELSE's life.
However, the author of this article is talking about numerous studies where people show, by their actions, what value they place on THEIR OWN life.
As the author says, people consistently show that they prefer to have $1 in cash rather than improving their chance of living by 1 part in 10,000,000. That's individual people making decisions about THEIR OWN lives and thus revealing their preferences.
For example, do you drive a car? How much did you spend on after-market safety systems, such as a five-point crash harness or a Snell-approved motorcycle helmet? These are expensive ways to lower one's mortality risk, and very few people choose to spend the money for these things.
Have you gotten a $3000 physical exam lately? Chances are better than 1/1000 that it will diagnose something important in your health. And so on. To be sure, a $3000 preference for a 0.1% mortality chance does not equate to $3,000,000 for a 100% mortality chance. Economic preferences are ordinal, not cardinal/additive. But the point is, people place values on their OWN lives, and econometricians merely observe these preferences.
Yup. Free markets are all about enabling the customer to get what they need. It's a feature, not a bug, when the customer gets more value in exchange for less cash to the producer.
To the Native Americans, omnipotence was navigating the seas and the use of novel weapons.... which is obviously false. Omnipotence includes "all powers". To the Native Americans (of which there were many different tribes), these powers would include one or more of: the power to create new stars. The power to survive beheading. The power to change physical form to the animal of one's choice. The power to control lightning.
Your bit about the beings "beyond their conception" is beside the point. We're talking about beings with powers beyond their conception. It's the powers that are beyond conception. Not the beings.
Oh, now you want to get off Native Americans and onto early Egyptians? Okay. Let's unpack your statement.
The logic you use to define an entity worthy of being considered a god...
As stated numerous times, that logic is: the entity is super-potent; it can perform any task that I imagine.... and the logic used by early Egyptians to worship crocodiles is exactly the same, only differing with perspective.
You claim that the early Egyptians thought that a crocodile could accomplish any task they could imagine?
What a crock. A crocodile can't even speak. It can't do arithmetic or geometry. It can't make papyrus or build a boat or brew beer. Any Egyptian who applied my test to crocodiles would immediately see think of many more things that a crocodile can't do. No Egyptian would think a crocoile was omnipotent.
Thus, if Egyptians worshipped crocodiles, it was on very different grounds. You claim that Egyptians worshipped things more powerful than them. That's a legitimate claim. It is not, however, my criterion. "More powerful" or "differently powerful" is not equal to "all powerful".
That's the trivial bit of logic that you don't see. Actually, I think you do see it, but your pride (which you project on others) prevents you from admitting you made such a mistake.
Good bye.
Where's your A Game, Microsoft?
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More From Tanenbaum
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· Score: 2, Interesting
This is some lame FUD... not evil, but lame.
(1) Since when does "Alexis de Tocqueville Institute" sound like an IT consulting group that anyone would want to pay attention to? Check out their website; it's a political think tank (which is what I would expect from the de Tocqueville moniker). (2) "Linus didn't write Linux"... sounds like a dorky meme. Besides looking stupid on a shallow marketing level (why do you think it's called Linux?) and being factually stupid (he sure did write it), it's one of those big yawner don't-care issues. Joe CIO isn't gonna go "oooh! better not deploy Linux after all! Linus didn't actually write it!" (3) If you're gonna write an attack book, how about reading the existing books first, so that the people you talk to don't point your ignorance in public.
Can you imagine us Penguinistas trying this kind of weak shit on Microsoft? "Hey, Boss! I've got a study from the Henry David Thoreau Institute! Bill Gates didn't actually write MS-DOS, he bought it from Tim Paterson, so we better not run anything from Microsoft. Besides, Windows crashes all the time... errr okay I haven't actually RUN Windows since Windows 95... anyways we should run Linux on everything!"
Microsoft says that Linux is their #1 or #2 competitor. I expect a helluva lot stronger attack from Microsoft than this!
My theory is that Microsoft uses AdTI to float many different trial balloons. They'll keep the ones that look good and dump the stinkers. This one's a stinker.
You said: "To the Native Americans, the Europeans were more powerful "beyond their conception"" (emphasis in the original). You claimed that point.
So I picked three tribes who had early contact with Europeans and showed you some of the deities that these tribes had conceived. In each case, the tribes had conceived Gods more powerful than the Europeans turned out to be. Thus I refuted you.
Now you're falling back to a different position, that the Europeans were more powerful than the Native Americans. That's different from what you said before, and it's different from what my position has been all along: entities that are more powerful than anything I can conceive, not just more powerful than me.
To the Native Americans, the Europeans were more powerful "beyond their conception".... To the Native Americans, omnipotence was navigating the seas and the use of novel weapons.
Balderdash.
All you have to do is look at the myths of Native American tribes, and you will find much more powerful Gods than that.
The Taino, the first people to encounter Columbus, believed in a pantheon that included Boinayel, the God of Rain; Guabancex, the God of Winds; and Guataube, God of Lightning. Did the Europeans control rain and wind and lightning, like Boinayel, Guabancex, and Guataube did?
How about Yobuenahuaboshka? The forest dwarfs had caught Yobeunahuaboshka in an ambush and cut off his head. The head bumped its way back to the land of the Cashinahuas.... Can a Europen do that?
Can a European make new stars in the sky? The mother of Jurupari can do that.
These are all things that the Taino conceived that Gods could do.
How about the Wampanoag Indians, who encountered European settlers at Plymouth Rock? Their idea of a legendary figure was Moshup the Giant, who would catch whales with his bare hands, then rip trees out of the ground with his bare hands to make cooking fire for them. Could the Europeans do that?
How about the Algonquin Indians, who sold Manhattan to Peter Minuit? They believed in Michabo, the Trickster, who could assume the shape of any animal he wanted. Can any European do that?
Now you might come back and claim that some Indian tribes believed in a lot of Gods and heros that were weaker than that, so that some Europeans could claim to be stronger than the weakest Indian God. But that's not the point. The point is that many -- probably all -- Native American tribes believed in at least one supernatural being that could control the weather, or change their form, or create new species of animals, or exhibit superhuman strength. The fact that they believed in these Gods obviously proves that they could conceive of those powers.
Indeed, I challenge you to name any tribe in North or South America that did not conceive of Gods who could do things well beyond the powers of the Europeans.
Indeed. That makes it good to stockpile in the back of the cupboard for the next power blackout, severe winter storm, terrorist attack, regional fire, or earthquake.
And because I basically don't like the stuff, it stays in the back of the cupboard until I really need it! (Unlike tuna fish or beef jerky).
Re:Stock price was $1 before SCO started lawsuit
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FSF Subpoenaed by SCO
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· Score: 3, Informative
Stock price was $1 before SCO started lawsuit
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FSF Subpoenaed by SCO
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· Score: 4, Informative
Their stock price is just about the same level as when this whole thing got started.
Well, maybe. Depends on how you look at it.
Here's a table of SCOX stock price, sampled once per month. It starts with Caldera (the former company name) going public during the height of the NASDAQ bubble in March 2000.
SCOX: Historical Prices for SCO Group, Inc.
Some key dates and prices:
2002-07 $1.04 Darl McBride joins SCO 2003-01 $1.35 SCO makes anti-Linux noises 2003-03 $2.88 SCO files lawsuit against IBM 2003-10 $22.29 SCOX hits high 2004-05 $4.78 SCOX right now, 2004-05-20
So SCOX is still up a bunch from when McBride started the anti-Linux strategy. I consider the base price to be $1.50, and SCOX is still trading at 300% of that base price.
In my opinion, the products-and-services side of SCO is worthless, and their only viable business is this lawsuit. And the lawsuit is getting less viable every month.
The attack failed because, basically, the CVS repositories for the linux kernel are not the real source trees -- they are just mirrors of people's bitkeeper trees.
And here is a Trojan FTP attack. Of course CVS and FTP are different protocols, but the idea is similar -- inject malware into the OSS development stream.
See, you put your finger on the right words, but the meaning just slips past you.
Native Americans accepted Europeans as gods because the Europeans were "more powerful". But my criterion is not "more powerful"; it's "powerful beyond my conception". See the difference?
Europeans couldn't fly, for example. They couldn't raise the dead or talk to their spirits. They couldn't control the weather. They could sail up in big-ass ships, and they could kill people with novel weapons, and they brought some new drugs with them. Anything else? That's a far cry from super-potence. The cases are not all parallel.
You don't have to speculate about my religion, because I already stated it in my first post on this subject. Apparently you haven't read that.
I said: "The super-entity has limited power, but its limited power is larger than anything *I* can conceive." You said: "Accepting a creature as your "God" just because it's more advanced than you is no less foolish or ill-fated than the native American's early worship of European settlers."
That's your misreading. As you acknowledge now, we're not talking about simple "more advanced than you."
This is a delicate area of philosophy and it doesn't help for you to misread the previous articles, either accidentally or willfully.
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As usual, finance.yahoo.com has the numbers you want:
The SCO Group Announces Second Quarter 2004 Results Consistent With Expectations
Balance Sheet for SCO GROUP INC
As of 2004-04-30, SCO has total current assets of $74 million and total current liabilities of $34 million.
After April 30, they paid out $13 million to retire BayStar's preferred shares.
$74 - $34 - $13 = $27 million they have to operate with.
SCO had a net loss from operations of $9.4 million in the quarter ended 2004-04-30.
So they have about 9 months left at their current burn rate. A little bit more, actually, as they have recently cut their expenses so they won't bleed as much in the next few quarters.
Of course, as another poster pointed out, they can sell some more "licenses" to Microsoft and Sun in exchange for cash infusions.
Assuming that people's bodies could be kept at the 20-year-old state indefinitely. All diseases, accidents, violence, etc would happen to you with the probability of a 20-year-old. Consulting medical and acturial databases, how many years would this add to the mean lifespan?
I don't believe that "15 year" answer, so I looked at a mortality table and did the math myself. I came up with an estimate of 800 years.
The acturial tables that you want are called mortality tables. Here is a collection of them from the American National Center for Health Statistics.
NCHS Data Warehouse
Going to the first table, death rates by age, the death rate for 15-24 year olds is 80.7 per 100,000 (all states, 2001).
This means that in the year 2001, in this population group, for each 100,000 people, 99,919.3 of people of these ages lived, and 80.7 of them died.
Or, to scale it down: start with 1000 people. In a year, 1 person dies, and 999 live. What's the average life span of that population? It's a hell of a lot longer than "15 more than normal 60 or so"!
A quick calculation, log(0.5)/log(0.999193)), shows that the median life expectancy of a "perpetual 20 year old", would be 858 more years. That is, if you had 100,000 of these perpetual 20 year olds, after 858 years, 50,000 of them would still be alive.
Calculating average is a bit trickier and I'll leave it alone.
The primary observation was that, while older people are on the average more susceptible to such things than younger people, the difference isn't all that great.
Oh yes it is.
ALL AGES: 848.5
0-1 year: 683.4
1-4 years: 33.3
5-14 years: 17.3
15-24 years: 80.7
25-34 years: 105.2
35-44 years: 203.6
45-54 years: 428.9
55-64 years: 964.6
65-74 years: 2,353.3
75-84 years: 5,582.4
85+ years: 15,112.8
A 50 year old has 5 times the chance of dying as a 20 year old. A 60 year old has 12 times the chance of dying as a 20 year old.
NCHS has lots of interesting tables like these; or you can google for "mortality table" and get tables from other sources, too.
Your comment ignores the fact that average human lifespan has almost doubled already, in the past 100 years.
... wow!), I'll enjoy it.
To be sure, most of the increase is due to reduced child mortality. Maximum human life span has not increased as much, but the chances of (say) a 10-year-old living to see 60 have increased a LOT in every developed country in the world.
So I read your whole comment from the perspective of a gentleman in 1900 deciding whether to adopt technological life-extension measures such as "refrigerated food" and "vaccination". I take these things for granted, and I know I'm enjoying the increased longevity and quality of life that I get from them.
And I haven't noticed much diminuition in technological progress or social change from the 100% increased average lifespan over the last 100 years. So if we can get another 100% over the next 100 years (live to 160
It's that time of month again!
Artists Against 419
Artists Against 419 is a flash mob that meets once a month to download artistic images from 419 scam sites. The more people they get, the faster the 419 sites go down!
When an investor such as Baystar does one of these convertible preferred deals, they can do something called "shorting against the convert".
... I can't be arsed to hit Yahoo Finance right now). Well, Baystar can sell shares at $15. They can sell shares that they don't even own ... that is called "short selling", and is a normal transaction on the stock market.
... if you've got a convertible ... you just pull out the convertible preferred shares and convert them, in order to have shares.
Here's how it works. At the time Baystar bought their convertible preferred shares, SCOX was trading at about $15 (roughly
You start with 0 shares, you sell (say) 10,000 shares at $15, now you have $150,000 cash and a position of -10,000 shares SCOX. (That's right, negative numbers!) Later, you buy those 10,000 shares back at $5 per share, leaving you with $100,000 profit and 0 shares of SCOX.
What if you short at $15 and the stock goes to $25? Then you lose $10 per share on every share that you shorted. Except
I'm not saying Baystar did this, but it's a common strategy for holders of convertibles. A convertible is really just a bond + a call option, and shorting against a call option is a common strategy.
In other words, you guys are laughing that Baystar is stuck with a bunch of $5 SCOX shares, but Baystar may have already sold them a few months ago at $15 or $20. They'll just use these conversion shares to deliver back on the shares that they borrowed+sold at $15 to $20.
I get what you're saying (I think). From my point of view, the arguments are separable:
(1) One vermiscripter does more harm than one murderer
(2) Some states execute murderers
(3) Therefore, some states should execute vermiscripters
(Actually, I've over-simplified (1), because I left out the deterrent multiplier).
To me, (1) is an interesting proposition in itself, without needing to bring in other controversial things like the death penalty. Who causes more damage, a traditional con man who commits a $10,000 fraud, or a spammer who costs 1,000,000 people $0.01 each? I'm interested in that question more than the "... and let's go on to execute them" part.
The original author quotes 8 murders deterred per execution. He doesn't cite sources, but you could write him and ask him.
He increased the number from 8 to 10 precisely because he wanted to use a number that nobody would claim was too *low*.
Original author: "each execution deters 10 *or less* people."
You: "each execution deters 0 people."
0 is less than 10!
It's like me saying "a personal computer costs less than a car" and you saying "come on, PC's don't cost $20,000".
No, I agree that RFC 822 has a fundamental flaw. The ability to send to my mailbox should have permissions on it.
Both RFC 822 and Windows OS's are insecure by design. But for RFC 822, we assign most of the blame to the exploiters, and for Windows, we assign a lot of the blame to those who wrote the vulnerable system.
The author's point is that executing vermiscripters would prevent more damage than executing murderers
c rime" category.
Your claim is that executing murderers saves zero lives.
Thus, you have to agree with the author that executing vermiscripterswould save more human-hours than executing murderers.
Put it another way: the damage done by one murderer is somewhere around 100,000 to 1,000,000 hours. There are several ways to estimate this. One way is to directly observe that people live 8,766 hours per year and multiply by human life span.
The damage done by one big virus attack is $1 billion, which is 20,000,000 to 50,000,000 hours of damage to the victims' time, although it's spread out over many more victims, so it's not really directly comparable.
The author's point is that if some governments have the death penalty for one crime, they ought to have a death penalty for the second crime, because it causesmuch more damage.
Personally, I'm opposed to *any* government having a death penalty for *any* reason, because I think that all governments are too corrupt to be trusted with that power. But I accept that virus-writing and spamming are enormous crimes, up there in the "murder/rape/great-bodily-harm/treason/organized-
You're misreading this point in the article. The point is not that "at least 10 lives are saved per execution." The point is "at MOST 10 lives are saved per execution, probably less".
You happen to agree with this point.
I'll do the math in hours
That's fair. And in a way, more accurate, too. Instead of converting human-hours to dollars, just work directly in the raw human-hours.
The trouble is doing things like multiplying 1 hour by 1,000,000 people to get a million human-hours. Here's an example: suppose that I deprive 1000 people of their water supply for 1 hour (I shut off the pipes to one building). That's major vandalism. Suppose I deprive 1 person of water for 1000 hours. That's murder.
Or suppose I steal $10 from you. Now you can't buy a CD. Then I steal another $10. Now you can't buy a shirt. Eventually I'm stealing your rent money, and that hurts a lot more than the first $10. Thus, it's less harm to steal "entertainment money" * 5 than "entertainment + clothing + medical care + food + rent" from one person.
In technical terms, it's about marginal utility and diminishing marginal returns.
Nevertheless it's still a great crime to skim 1 hour each from 1,000,000 people.
If you think that malware has a positive benefit because it generates publicity for the weaknesses in popular operating systems, how do you feel about spam and the weaknesses that spam reveals in popular mail protocols?
(My view: prison sentences for both malware writers and spammers)
I agree, it's repugnant to place a monetary value on SOMEONE ELSE's life.
However, the author of this article is talking about numerous studies where people show, by their actions, what value they place on THEIR OWN life.
As the author says, people consistently show that they prefer to have $1 in cash rather than improving their chance of living by 1 part in 10,000,000. That's individual people making decisions about THEIR OWN lives and thus revealing their preferences.
For example, do you drive a car? How much did you spend on after-market safety systems, such as a five-point crash harness or a Snell-approved motorcycle helmet? These are expensive ways to lower one's mortality risk, and very few people choose to spend the money for these things.
Have you gotten a $3000 physical exam lately? Chances are better than 1/1000 that it will diagnose something important in your health.
And so on. To be sure, a $3000 preference for a 0.1% mortality chance does not equate to $3,000,000 for a 100% mortality chance. Economic preferences are ordinal, not cardinal/additive. But the point is, people place values on their OWN lives, and econometricians merely observe these preferences.
Yup. Free markets are all about enabling the customer to get what they need. It's a feature, not a bug, when the customer gets more value in exchange for less cash to the producer.
I'll take my last word by quoting your words:
... which is obviously false. Omnipotence includes "all powers". To the Native Americans (of which there were many different tribes), these powers would include one or more of: the power to create new stars. The power to survive beheading. The power to change physical form to the animal of one's choice. The power to control lightning.
...
... and the logic used by early Egyptians to worship crocodiles is exactly the same, only differing with perspective.
To the Native Americans, omnipotence was navigating the seas and the use of novel weapons.
Your bit about the beings "beyond their conception" is beside the point. We're talking about beings with powers beyond their conception. It's the powers that are beyond conception. Not the beings.
Oh, now you want to get off Native Americans and onto early Egyptians? Okay. Let's unpack your statement.
The logic you use to define an entity worthy of being considered a god
As stated numerous times, that logic is: the entity is super-potent; it can perform any task that I imagine.
You claim that the early Egyptians thought that a crocodile could accomplish any task they could imagine?
What a crock. A crocodile can't even speak. It can't do arithmetic or geometry. It can't make papyrus or build a boat or brew beer. Any Egyptian who applied my test to crocodiles would immediately see think of many more things that a crocodile can't do. No Egyptian would think a crocoile was omnipotent.
Thus, if Egyptians worshipped crocodiles, it was on very different grounds. You claim that Egyptians worshipped things more powerful than them. That's a legitimate claim. It is not, however, my criterion. "More powerful" or "differently powerful" is not equal to "all powerful".
That's the trivial bit of logic that you don't see. Actually, I think you do see it, but your pride (which you project on others) prevents you from admitting you made such a mistake.
Good bye.
This is some lame FUD ... not evil, but lame.
... sounds like a dorky meme. Besides looking stupid on a shallow marketing level (why do you think it's called Linux?) and being factually stupid (he sure did write it), it's one of those big yawner don't-care issues. Joe CIO isn't gonna go "oooh! better not deploy Linux after all! Linus didn't actually write it!"
... errr okay I haven't actually RUN Windows since Windows 95 ... anyways we should run Linux on everything!"
(1) Since when does "Alexis de Tocqueville Institute" sound like an IT consulting group that anyone would want to pay attention to? Check out their website; it's a political think tank (which is what I would expect from the de Tocqueville moniker).
(2) "Linus didn't write Linux"
(3) If you're gonna write an attack book, how about reading the existing books first, so that the people you talk to don't point your ignorance in public.
Can you imagine us Penguinistas trying this kind of weak shit on Microsoft? "Hey, Boss! I've got a study from the Henry David Thoreau Institute! Bill Gates didn't actually write MS-DOS, he bought it from Tim Paterson, so we better not run anything from Microsoft. Besides, Windows crashes all the time
Microsoft says that Linux is their #1 or #2 competitor. I expect a helluva lot stronger attack from Microsoft than this!
My theory is that Microsoft uses AdTI to float many different trial balloons. They'll keep the ones that look good and dump the stinkers. This one's a stinker.
Wrong again.
You said: "To the Native Americans, the Europeans were more powerful "beyond their conception"" (emphasis in the original). You claimed that point.
So I picked three tribes who had early contact with Europeans and showed you some of the deities that these tribes had conceived. In each case, the tribes had conceived Gods more powerful than the Europeans turned out to be. Thus I refuted you.
Now you're falling back to a different position, that the Europeans were more powerful than the Native Americans. That's different from what you said before, and it's different from what my position has been all along: entities that are more powerful than anything I can conceive, not just more powerful than me.
To the Native Americans, the Europeans were more powerful "beyond their conception". ... To the Native Americans, omnipotence was navigating the seas and the use of novel weapons.
.... Can a Europen do that?
Balderdash.
All you have to do is look at the myths of Native American tribes, and you will find much more powerful Gods than that.
The Taino, the first people to encounter Columbus, believed in a pantheon that included Boinayel, the God of Rain; Guabancex, the God of Winds; and Guataube, God of Lightning. Did the Europeans control rain and wind and lightning, like Boinayel, Guabancex, and Guataube did?
How about Yobuenahuaboshka? The forest dwarfs had caught Yobeunahuaboshka in an ambush and cut off his head. The head bumped its way back to the land of the Cashinahuas
Can a European make new stars in the sky? The mother of Jurupari can do that.
These are all things that the Taino conceived that Gods could do.
How about the Wampanoag Indians, who encountered European settlers at Plymouth Rock? Their idea of a legendary figure was Moshup the Giant, who would catch whales with his bare hands, then rip trees out of the ground with his bare hands to make cooking fire for them. Could the Europeans do that?
How about the Algonquin Indians, who sold Manhattan to Peter Minuit? They believed in Michabo, the Trickster, who could assume the shape of any animal he wanted. Can any European do that?
Now you might come back and claim that some Indian tribes believed in a lot of Gods and heros that were weaker than that, so that some Europeans could claim to be stronger than the weakest Indian God. But that's not the point. The point is that many -- probably all -- Native American tribes believed in at least one supernatural being that could control the weather, or change their form, or create new species of animals, or exhibit superhuman strength. The fact that they believed in these Gods obviously proves that they could conceive of those powers.
Indeed, I challenge you to name any tribe in North or South America that did not conceive of Gods who could do things well beyond the powers of the Europeans.
It keeps forever in that can ...
Indeed. That makes it good to stockpile in the back of the cupboard for the next power blackout, severe winter storm, terrorist attack, regional fire, or earthquake.
And because I basically don't like the stuff, it stays in the back of the cupboard until I really need it! (Unlike tuna fish or beef jerky).
Crud, I bungled the URL.
SCOX: Historical Prices for SCO Group Inc
Their stock price is just about the same level as when this whole thing got started.
Well, maybe. Depends on how you look at it.
Here's a table of SCOX stock price, sampled once per month. It starts with Caldera (the former company name) going public during the height of the NASDAQ bubble in March 2000.
SCOX: Historical Prices for SCO Group, Inc.
Some key dates and prices:
2002-07 $1.04 Darl McBride joins SCO
2003-01 $1.35 SCO makes anti-Linux noises
2003-03 $2.88 SCO files lawsuit against IBM
2003-10 $22.29 SCOX hits high
2004-05 $4.78 SCOX right now, 2004-05-20
So SCOX is still up a bunch from when McBride started the anti-Linux strategy. I consider the base price to be $1.50, and SCOX is still trading at 300% of that base price.
In my opinion, the products-and-services side of SCO is worthless, and their only viable business is this lawsuit. And the lawsuit is getting less viable every month.
That's right. In November 2003, there was an unsuccessful Trojan-CVS attack on the Linux kernel.
Linux kernel development process thwarts subversion attempt
The attack failed because, basically, the CVS repositories for the linux kernel are not the real source trees -- they are just mirrors of people's bitkeeper trees.
And here is a Trojan FTP attack. Of course CVS and FTP are different protocols, but the idea is similar -- inject malware into the OSS development stream.
See, you put your finger on the right words, but the meaning just slips past you.
Native Americans accepted Europeans as gods because the Europeans were "more powerful". But my criterion is not "more powerful"; it's "powerful beyond my conception". See the difference?
Europeans couldn't fly, for example. They couldn't raise the dead or talk to their spirits. They couldn't control the weather. They could sail up in big-ass ships, and they could kill people with novel weapons, and they brought some new drugs with them. Anything else? That's a far cry from super-potence. The cases are not all parallel.
You don't have to speculate about my religion, because I already stated it in my first post on this subject. Apparently you haven't read that.
I said: "The super-entity has limited power, but its limited power is larger than anything *I* can conceive."
You said: "Accepting a creature as your "God" just because it's more advanced than you is no less foolish or ill-fated than the native American's early worship of European settlers."
That's your misreading. As you acknowledge now, we're not talking about simple "more advanced than you."
This is a delicate area of philosophy and it doesn't help for you to misread the previous articles, either accidentally or willfully.
No more talking on the cellphone at the gas pump for me!
Nosirreebob, I'll wait until I'm driving away and merging into traffic, where it's safe!