Even an 9 year old can understand this: it's 90 degrees outside, therefore no snow.
Yes, but 90 degree days have nothing to do with what we're talking about. I live in New England and I can attest that months where the temperature is around 30 degrees are much snowier than months where the temperatures are in the single digits. I can also attest that 30 degrees is much warmer than 10 degrees, but if you don't believe me ask a 9 year-old.
I like the way you've structured this argument, except for one point: while you correctly identify that acting against AGW if it is possible may have costs, you assume that *not* acting has *no* costs. Except for the "taxing your breath" bit (which is silly), one can easily argue that all the negative results you mention could be caused by unchecked AGW.
Instead of "Scientists Solve Mystery of Ireland's Moving Boulders" it should read "Scientists *Deepen* Mystery of Ireland's Moving Boulders."
This is what the linked article amounts to. Scientists believed that tsunamis moved the boulders in question. Comparing aerial photos to old surveys of the islands show that can't be the explanation, because boulders have moved since the last tsunami. The scientists then speculated that it might be rogue waves. Then they ginned up a plausible mechanism by which rogue waves might be more common on Aran than thought. Because it was plausible they concluded that *must* be the explanation, because the next best thing they could think up is little green men.
For the record, I think rogue waves moved the boulders. I've seen what waves can do to stony reefs, and the power of water is not to be underestimated. But I have no proof, and neither do they. If the articles are to be believed (which is often doubtful), they researchers are building models around the *assumption* that it must have been rogue waves. Using such a model as evidence of its assumptions would be begging the question.
Depends on your state. In my state (Massachusetts) there's a heavy emphasis on reasoning skills. Consequently we're at or near the top of the heap in terms of the percentage of 8th graders who test as "advanced" in mathematics (17% vs. 7% for the country as a whole), for reading comprehension (5% vs. 2% for the nation as a whole) and science (5% vs 2.9% nation-wide) . My daughter just returned from an exchange program in Hamburg, Germany, and reports that gymnasium students there don't work nearly as long and hard, and our students don't lag in anything but free time. She's taking 10th grade geometry, and every week there are at least one or two problems that are extremely difficult for *me*, and I was good enough at math to go to MIT. Granted it's honors math, but still.
If you want to see how your state ranks in mathematics or reading, you can go here.. If students in your state are ignorant, illiterate or intellectually passive, don't blame American culture. Blame the people running your state. Chances are they're looking for someone to blame, too.
Really? Are you serious? When Bush was president and Republicans held both houses, the Shuttles were flying, a replacement was planned and funded (Constellation program), and the James Webb Telescope and Mars exploration programs were secure.
Sure, but all this was accomplished with unrealistic budgeting. Here's what the independent review board studying Constellation had to say:
Since Constellation’s inception, the program has faced a mismatch between funding and program content.
Simply extending existing ambitious programs “to fit the money” is seldom a solution to the resource dilemma. The impact of fixed costs and technological obsolescence soon overwhelms any such strategy. In the Committee’s travels, it encountered widespread support for this policy of realism—although it is likely that most proponents were thinking of having more money, not less program. Should the latter turn out to be the case, much of that conviction is likely to vanish.
Constellation was architecturally sound, but the program management and planning were a disaster. Constellation was never funded enough to get done on time, and the plans didn't account for having to pick up fixed costs borne by the Shuttle program after that program wound down. In a nutshell, Constellation Program delays were going to be much more costly than the plans suggested, and its funding pretty much guaranteed delays. The story is much the same with the Webb telescope: good idea, lousy financial planning control.
This doesn't mean that Bush was anti-NASA or anti-space exploration. It just means it was more important to them to state an ambitious goal than to actually achieve it. That is manifest by its budgeting. They spent an enormous amount of money to be able to claim they were were making progress, but not enough to actually accomplish something.
Yeah -- Obamacare is really Romneycare is really Bob Dole's 1993 plan.
People like to say there's no real difference between the Democrats and Republicans, but that's not true. Democrats vote *for* Republican initiatives, Republicans vote against them.
The summary doesn't "blame it all on George Bush"; it points out the reasonably neutral fact that the sanctions he put in place hobbled Syrian game development companies. Since putting economic pressure on the regime is the *point* of sanctions, the fact that it worked in this case is neither here nor there as to whether the sanctions were justified.
Perhaps you think the idea of a Syrian game development company is just silly. I don't see why a county of 22 million people couldn't produce a few successful small time game development studios, especially after the iPhone came on the market. The top two universities in Syria have 180,000 and 56,000 undergraduates respectively. Damascus University offers graduate programs in computer science and informatics through an in-country cooperative program with a British university.
Sounds like a country which could support a few companies in the gaming industry. And it wouldn't be silly at all for some Syrian hackers to start companies to produce games. Remember, it's not about *playing* games; it's about putting bread on the table by *creating* games for others to play. The median income from an iOS app is something like $3000. That's a lot of money in a country with a per capita GDP of $2800.
You just don't know how architects are indoctrinated^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H trained to think.
A building doesn't exist in isolation, it is part of a dialog with its environment, particularly other buildings. The building itself isn't a hash tag -- it's a hash sign; it *converts the buildings around it into hashtags*, thus calling attention to the fact that the implied statements of their architecture *are indeed statements*. This building is a postmodern sigil. Obviously the architect of this thing must be an a**hole. Who does he think he is, reifing the semiotic implicatures of other architects' work?
I remember the feeling in the early 90s, around the time MS released DOS 6 with DoubleSpace, which was that Microsoft had sucked all the opportunity out of the software business. The feeling was that if you came up with anything good, Microsoft would duplicate it and crush you with their distribution power.
Of course, the year DOS 6.0 came out was the year Netscape was founded. They did manage to crush Netscape, but they didn't quite manage to become the kind of gatekeeper to the web the way they were on the desktop, despite a few years where a lot of people made IE only web pages.
I don't see Google Drive as a move to crush Dropbox -- although it may well end up doing so. Google Drive is a natural outgrowth of Google Docs, and in any case it's logical for Google to get into this business because it already has the storage and distribution infrastructure. That said, I don't like Google's terms of service, which allow it to make derivative works of anything you store on Google Drive. That involves more trust than I'm willing to give Google. They have "clarified" what they intend to do, but until they have actually put that clarification in the TOS itself I'm staying away. I may trust Google's management, but I don't want to put my absolute trust in any future Google management.
That may be true, but in my experience business deals require a little trust. If you think you can make a deal with untrustworthy people but protect yourself with contracts, you're naive. When you take the other guy to court because he stabbed you in the back, no result you can hope for beats never having dealt with him in the first place.
These kinds of international business deals that involve technology and design know-how transfers are especially tricky. If your overseas partner suddenly realizes that he can make a lot more money with the technology he's got from you doing something else, it's much harder to go after them. I've seen really savvy business guys lose their shirts on deals where their foreign partner used their capital to develop technological capability, then pulled out when the technology was proven, reorganizing as a different legal entity.
Of course none of this tells us anything really, since what you need for this to be "remarkable" would be to run much faster than the wind,
By that reasoning the only "remarkable" mountaineering ascent would get to the peak faster than being dropped there by a helicopter. The only remarkable marathon run time would be shorter than you could do it in a car. A telepathy based keyboard would only be remarkable if you type faster on it than on a regular keyboard.
For that matter the first automobile crossing of the United States in 1903 took 63 days. Fifty years prior to that, the transcontinental railroad had already made the crossing possible in a mere five days. In 1911 the first transcontinental flight took *84* days. The shortest transcontinental crossing of the US on foot I know about is 46 days (in 1960). It is reasonable to believe that the first auto and airplane crossing of the US could have been beaten at the time by a well planned crossing on foot by an athlete.
The point is not to get from point A to B faster. The point is to demonstrate advances in technological *capabilities*.
The average sea level rise in the last few decades has been about 3mm/year. So the sea level rise in the last thirty years has been about 3 inches since 1980. Your situation may vary due to geology. In Alaska sea levels are falling due to uplift of the land.
Take out a 3mm allen key and ask yourself, would you be able to eyeball that much change from year to year, given that the diurnal tides at Galveston are over two feet, and vary by several inches depending on weather and the moon. That's not counting the effect of wind and waves, which have to be averaged out.
You *can't* eyeball this magnitude of change without special instruments, even if it happened overnight, and you'd still need a long sequence of measurements to know what you are looking at. The practical effects of recent sea level rise are statistical, rather than directly observable.
Actually it goes further back than that. In the 1950s climate scientists, reasoning by extrapolation, expected the next climate swing would be toward cooling. If you do a Google Scholar search you'll find papers starting around 1956 suggesting (tentatively) that anthropogenic CO2 generation would drive climate the other way, toward warming. Scientific consensus shifted over the next two decades toward a warming trend.
My wife was a physical oceanography grad student at the Woods Hole Oceanographic in the early 80s. I distinctly recall her telling me about a symposium in which CO2-driven AGW was discussed. It wasn't controversial -- nobody outside of geophysics and climate research had heard of it. Nor was the position that global warming wasn't happening controversial, although it was increasingly a minority opinion. Over the next two decades I watched the back and forth as evidence for warming per se was challenged, then vindicated in the pages of the journals she read and in geek publications like Science News. It wasn't until about a decade or so ago that the term "global warming" started taking off in the popular press.
Then there was Al Gore's *An Inconvenient Truth*, which was a blow against actual science having any influence in the public debate on pollution. It's not that the movie was scientifically inaccurate on the whole, although it was stated in much more positive terms than scientists are comfortable using. It's that a lot of people had been taught to hate this man, and for those people scientists and science as a whole was tarred with the brush of partisan distrust as well.
I once had a boss who had raging and untreated ADHD. Opening up my calendar in the morning felt like emotional abuse. The last straw was when we got new phones with a walkie-talkie feature. I couldn't get twenty consecutive minutes to myself to get anything done without being interrupted by the damn ba-beep and having to respond to whatever popped into his head.
I can imagine a few useful applications of implanted technology, like keeping all your medical records handy. But even those are only acceptable if you have a simple and fool-proof way of stopping someone from activating them when you didn't want them too. The ease of getting away from a gadget is a pretty important feature, but it's one we take for granted because up until now we *haven't* implanted gadgets in our body. We're understandably more focused on making stuff easier to carry than on getting rid of it. The desire to implant technology because of the current inconvenience of carrying devices around is like a guy who is five feet tall wishing he was twelve feet tall. If his wish were granted pretty soon he'd see the advantages of being only five feet tall.
The only really killer app for a technology like this is enslaving people. Justice Louis Brandeis, in his landmark paper on a legal right to privacy, defined it as:
The right to be left alone—the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by a free people.
Well, he did try to put somebody in charge of an agency who wasn't a tool of the crony capitalists: Elizabeth Warren. Didn't work out that well, did it? Because we bitch and moan about corporate tools being in bed with the government but we still sit up and bark when the plutocrats tell us too, because the whole corporate puppet thing goes way beyond Washington. We're the biggest bunch of sheep on the planet, and we let the wolves herd us.
Actually, my experience with actual CPA's has been that they're a pleasure to work with. For one thing they file kick-ass bug reports. A good accountant knows how difficult it is to track a problem down, because a lot of what they do amounts to financial debugging.
The *really* good accountants I've known also understand something important, which is the limitations of their discipline. That's probably a prerequisite for being really good at any profession, but accountants generally are more aware of the limitations of their profession than, say, lawyers are. So I think the problem is more likely managers thinking they're accountants than vice versa.
It's understandable, because management is an interdisciplinary field in which the only guarantee of success would be a working time machine. Managers out of their depth tend to grasp at straws (like anyone would); sometimes its accounting, other times it is marketing, other times it is quality control. I think a great manager would know the limits of the management discipline, and focus on hiring great people and keeping them working together.
Anyhow, the accountants I've worked with have been terrific, and I've learned a lot from them; so whenever I hear "accountant" casually used as a pejorative, I like to speak up.
You do realize the Microsoft *does* have an embedded operating system: Windows CE. This is not to be confused with Pocket PC, Windows Mobile, Zune, or Windows Smartphones, all of which are built on top of Windows CE profiles. It's quite a versatile system, and has real-time capabilities, something which might be helpful in a telephony context.
And Microsoft *does* have a product targeted at high performance computing: Windows HPC Server, although that's not what you mean by "high performance".But it's likely that if MS was making a recommendation to someone else, they'd steer them toward Windows Server with various secret tweaks that only MS knows about.
The reason to use Linux is that Unix is the go to operating system in this kind of role; always has been since the early days when it was used in telephone switches. The tools and knowledge for doing this stuff is commonplace, and if your criteria for "good business" decision is something that gets the job done on-time and relatively cheaply, a free Unix is an obvious choice. Whether it *is* a good business is probably something an outsider with only superficial knowledge of the company and its plans can answer. It isn't surprising, though, because MS is reputed to have a corporate culture in which other parts of the company are viewed like competitors and you don't do them any favors.
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Even an 9 year old can understand this: it's 90 degrees outside, therefore no snow.
Yes, but 90 degree days have nothing to do with what we're talking about. I live in New England and I can attest that months where the temperature is around 30 degrees are much snowier than months where the temperatures are in the single digits. I can also attest that 30 degrees is much warmer than 10 degrees, but if you don't believe me ask a 9 year-old.
I like the way you've structured this argument, except for one point: while you correctly identify that acting against AGW if it is possible may have costs, you assume that *not* acting has *no* costs. Except for the "taxing your breath" bit (which is silly), one can easily argue that all the negative results you mention could be caused by unchecked AGW.
I dare bet the unabomber, Castro, Manson and Bin Laden all believe(d) in breathing air as well.
Does that make breathing air wrong all of a sudden?
Do you mean *in general*, or as applied to those people *specifically*?
Instead of "Scientists Solve Mystery of Ireland's Moving Boulders" it should read "Scientists *Deepen* Mystery of Ireland's Moving Boulders."
This is what the linked article amounts to. Scientists believed that tsunamis moved the boulders in question. Comparing aerial photos to old surveys of the islands show that can't be the explanation, because boulders have moved since the last tsunami. The scientists then speculated that it might be rogue waves. Then they ginned up a plausible mechanism by which rogue waves might be more common on Aran than thought. Because it was plausible they concluded that *must* be the explanation, because the next best thing they could think up is little green men.
For the record, I think rogue waves moved the boulders. I've seen what waves can do to stony reefs, and the power of water is not to be underestimated. But I have no proof, and neither do they. If the articles are to be believed (which is often doubtful), they researchers are building models around the *assumption* that it must have been rogue waves. Using such a model as evidence of its assumptions would be begging the question.
Ah, well. What would Ireland be without pointless suffering at the hands of stupid, greedy blockheads?
We have inner cities, too.
Are you one of those "economists" who really believe the free market is rational and able to see beyond the next financial quarter?
No.
Depends on your state. In my state (Massachusetts) there's a heavy emphasis on reasoning skills. Consequently we're at or near the top of the heap in terms of the percentage of 8th graders who test as "advanced" in mathematics (17% vs. 7% for the country as a whole), for reading comprehension (5% vs. 2% for the nation as a whole) and science (5% vs 2.9% nation-wide) . My daughter just returned from an exchange program in Hamburg, Germany, and reports that gymnasium students there don't work nearly as long and hard, and our students don't lag in anything but free time. She's taking 10th grade geometry, and every week there are at least one or two problems that are extremely difficult for *me*, and I was good enough at math to go to MIT. Granted it's honors math, but still.
If you want to see how your state ranks in mathematics or reading, you can go here.. If students in your state are ignorant, illiterate or intellectually passive, don't blame American culture. Blame the people running your state. Chances are they're looking for someone to blame, too.
Sure, but all this was accomplished with unrealistic budgeting. Here's what the independent review board studying Constellation had to say:
[HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT Plans Committee]
The report goes on to say:
Constellation was architecturally sound, but the program management and planning were a disaster. Constellation was never funded enough to get done on time, and the plans didn't account for having to pick up fixed costs borne by the Shuttle program after that program wound down. In a nutshell, Constellation Program delays were going to be much more costly than the plans suggested, and its funding pretty much guaranteed delays. The story is much the same with the Webb telescope: good idea, lousy financial planning control.
This doesn't mean that Bush was anti-NASA or anti-space exploration. It just means it was more important to them to state an ambitious goal than to actually achieve it. That is manifest by its budgeting. They spent an enormous amount of money to be able to claim they were were making progress, but not enough to actually accomplish something.
Yeah -- Obamacare is really Romneycare is really Bob Dole's 1993 plan.
People like to say there's no real difference between the Democrats and Republicans, but that's not true. Democrats vote *for* Republican initiatives, Republicans vote against them.
Nah. "We" don't have to do anything. If monitoring climate change is important, the free market will do a better job at it than government.
I dunno. The Democrats *did* pass Romney's health care plan.
The summary doesn't "blame it all on George Bush"; it points out the reasonably neutral fact that the sanctions he put in place hobbled Syrian game development companies. Since putting economic pressure on the regime is the *point* of sanctions, the fact that it worked in this case is neither here nor there as to whether the sanctions were justified.
Perhaps you think the idea of a Syrian game development company is just silly. I don't see why a county of 22 million people couldn't produce a few successful small time game development studios, especially after the iPhone came on the market. The top two universities in Syria have 180,000 and 56,000 undergraduates respectively. Damascus University offers graduate programs in computer science and informatics through an in-country cooperative program with a British university.
Sounds like a country which could support a few companies in the gaming industry. And it wouldn't be silly at all for some Syrian hackers to start companies to produce games. Remember, it's not about *playing* games; it's about putting bread on the table by *creating* games for others to play. The median income from an iOS app is something like $3000. That's a lot of money in a country with a per capita GDP of $2800.
You just don't know how architects are indoctrinated^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H trained to think.
A building doesn't exist in isolation, it is part of a dialog with its environment, particularly other buildings. The building itself isn't a hash tag -- it's a hash sign; it *converts the buildings around it into hashtags*, thus calling attention to the fact that the implied statements of their architecture *are indeed statements*. This building is a postmodern sigil. Obviously the architect of this thing must be an a**hole. Who does he think he is, reifing the semiotic implicatures of other architects' work?
To use the F-22 correctly we'd have to go to war with Russia or China.
See? There's a simple solution to every problem.
I remember the feeling in the early 90s, around the time MS released DOS 6 with DoubleSpace, which was that Microsoft had sucked all the opportunity out of the software business. The feeling was that if you came up with anything good, Microsoft would duplicate it and crush you with their distribution power.
Of course, the year DOS 6.0 came out was the year Netscape was founded. They did manage to crush Netscape, but they didn't quite manage to become the kind of gatekeeper to the web the way they were on the desktop, despite a few years where a lot of people made IE only web pages.
I don't see Google Drive as a move to crush Dropbox -- although it may well end up doing so. Google Drive is a natural outgrowth of Google Docs, and in any case it's logical for Google to get into this business because it already has the storage and distribution infrastructure. That said, I don't like Google's terms of service, which allow it to make derivative works of anything you store on Google Drive. That involves more trust than I'm willing to give Google. They have "clarified" what they intend to do, but until they have actually put that clarification in the TOS itself I'm staying away. I may trust Google's management, but I don't want to put my absolute trust in any future Google management.
incomeptent contracts != corruption
That may be true, but in my experience business deals require a little trust. If you think you can make a deal with untrustworthy people but protect yourself with contracts, you're naive. When you take the other guy to court because he stabbed you in the back, no result you can hope for beats never having dealt with him in the first place.
These kinds of international business deals that involve technology and design know-how transfers are especially tricky. If your overseas partner suddenly realizes that he can make a lot more money with the technology he's got from you doing something else, it's much harder to go after them. I've seen really savvy business guys lose their shirts on deals where their foreign partner used their capital to develop technological capability, then pulled out when the technology was proven, reorganizing as a different legal entity.
Of course none of this tells us anything really, since what you need for this to be "remarkable" would be to run much faster than the wind,
By that reasoning the only "remarkable" mountaineering ascent would get to the peak faster than being dropped there by a helicopter. The only remarkable marathon run time would be shorter than you could do it in a car. A telepathy based keyboard would only be remarkable if you type faster on it than on a regular keyboard.
For that matter the first automobile crossing of the United States in 1903 took 63 days. Fifty years prior to that, the transcontinental railroad had already made the crossing possible in a mere five days. In 1911 the first transcontinental flight took *84* days. The shortest transcontinental crossing of the US on foot I know about is 46 days (in 1960). It is reasonable to believe that the first auto and airplane crossing of the US could have been beaten at the time by a well planned crossing on foot by an athlete.
The point is not to get from point A to B faster. The point is to demonstrate advances in technological *capabilities*.
The average sea level rise in the last few decades has been about 3mm/year. So the sea level rise in the last thirty years has been about 3 inches since 1980. Your situation may vary due to geology. In Alaska sea levels are falling due to uplift of the land.
Take out a 3mm allen key and ask yourself, would you be able to eyeball that much change from year to year, given that the diurnal tides at Galveston are over two feet, and vary by several inches depending on weather and the moon. That's not counting the effect of wind and waves, which have to be averaged out.
You *can't* eyeball this magnitude of change without special instruments, even if it happened overnight, and you'd still need a long sequence of measurements to know what you are looking at. The practical effects of recent sea level rise are statistical, rather than directly observable.
Actually it goes further back than that. In the 1950s climate scientists, reasoning by extrapolation, expected the next climate swing would be toward cooling. If you do a Google Scholar search you'll find papers starting around 1956 suggesting (tentatively) that anthropogenic CO2 generation would drive climate the other way, toward warming. Scientific consensus shifted over the next two decades toward a warming trend.
My wife was a physical oceanography grad student at the Woods Hole Oceanographic in the early 80s. I distinctly recall her telling me about a symposium in which CO2-driven AGW was discussed. It wasn't controversial -- nobody outside of geophysics and climate research had heard of it. Nor was the position that global warming wasn't happening controversial, although it was increasingly a minority opinion. Over the next two decades I watched the back and forth as evidence for warming per se was challenged, then vindicated in the pages of the journals she read and in geek publications like Science News. It wasn't until about a decade or so ago that the term "global warming" started taking off in the popular press.
Then there was Al Gore's *An Inconvenient Truth*, which was a blow against actual science having any influence in the public debate on pollution. It's not that the movie was scientifically inaccurate on the whole, although it was stated in much more positive terms than scientists are comfortable using. It's that a lot of people had been taught to hate this man, and for those people scientists and science as a whole was tarred with the brush of partisan distrust as well.
I once had a boss who had raging and untreated ADHD. Opening up my calendar in the morning felt like emotional abuse. The last straw was when we got new phones with a walkie-talkie feature. I couldn't get twenty consecutive minutes to myself to get anything done without being interrupted by the damn ba-beep and having to respond to whatever popped into his head.
I can imagine a few useful applications of implanted technology, like keeping all your medical records handy. But even those are only acceptable if you have a simple and fool-proof way of stopping someone from activating them when you didn't want them too. The ease of getting away from a gadget is a pretty important feature, but it's one we take for granted because up until now we *haven't* implanted gadgets in our body. We're understandably more focused on making stuff easier to carry than on getting rid of it. The desire to implant technology because of the current inconvenience of carrying devices around is like a guy who is five feet tall wishing he was twelve feet tall. If his wish were granted pretty soon he'd see the advantages of being only five feet tall.
The only really killer app for a technology like this is enslaving people. Justice Louis Brandeis, in his landmark paper on a legal right to privacy, defined it as:
Well, he did try to put somebody in charge of an agency who wasn't a tool of the crony capitalists: Elizabeth Warren. Didn't work out that well, did it? Because we bitch and moan about corporate tools being in bed with the government but we still sit up and bark when the plutocrats tell us too, because the whole corporate puppet thing goes way beyond Washington. We're the biggest bunch of sheep on the planet, and we let the wolves herd us.
To be fair, the Federal Reserve deserves to be scrapped as much, if not more than, the TSA.
Never jump on board a "do away with X" bandwagon until you know what they're planning to replace "X" with.
Actually, my experience with actual CPA's has been that they're a pleasure to work with. For one thing they file kick-ass bug reports. A good accountant knows how difficult it is to track a problem down, because a lot of what they do amounts to financial debugging.
The *really* good accountants I've known also understand something important, which is the limitations of their discipline. That's probably a prerequisite for being really good at any profession, but accountants generally are more aware of the limitations of their profession than, say, lawyers are. So I think the problem is more likely managers thinking they're accountants than vice versa.
It's understandable, because management is an interdisciplinary field in which the only guarantee of success would be a working time machine. Managers out of their depth tend to grasp at straws (like anyone would); sometimes its accounting, other times it is marketing, other times it is quality control. I think a great manager would know the limits of the management discipline, and focus on hiring great people and keeping them working together.
Anyhow, the accountants I've worked with have been terrific, and I've learned a lot from them; so whenever I hear "accountant" casually used as a pejorative, I like to speak up.
You do realize the Microsoft *does* have an embedded operating system: Windows CE. This is not to be confused with Pocket PC, Windows Mobile, Zune, or Windows Smartphones, all of which are built on top of Windows CE profiles. It's quite a versatile system, and has real-time capabilities, something which might be helpful in a telephony context.
And Microsoft *does* have a product targeted at high performance computing: Windows HPC Server, although that's not what you mean by "high performance".But it's likely that if MS was making a recommendation to someone else, they'd steer them toward Windows Server with various secret tweaks that only MS knows about.
The reason to use Linux is that Unix is the go to operating system in this kind of role; always has been since the early days when it was used in telephone switches. The tools and knowledge for doing this stuff is commonplace, and if your criteria for "good business" decision is something that gets the job done on-time and relatively cheaply, a free Unix is an obvious choice. Whether it *is* a good business is probably something an outsider with only superficial knowledge of the company and its plans can answer. It isn't surprising, though, because MS is reputed to have a corporate culture in which other parts of the company are viewed like competitors and you don't do them any favors.