I hope SCO spends itself out of existence on legal fees.
That would be awful both for Red Hat and IBM (who should otherwise be getting some amount of reparations in their countersuits) and for SCO's current investors, some of whom probably imagine that the US has a swift justice system that wouldn't allow SCO to make outright lies without sanction.
Reserve your ire for SCO's current leaders, particularly the ones whose insider trades (filing to buy stock options and sell shares after SCO's internal discussion of the IBM litigation but before that litigation became public knowledge) and deception have earned them millions of dollars so far. These guys are next to the Enron executives in the United States' ongoingexperiment: "How hard is it to profit from million dollar lies and escape punishment?"
Well now there's the problem -- next time we should just go to a forgiving planet instead. What were we thinking?
Unfortunately, it turns out that there's only one forgiving planet in the solar system, and so naturally it filled up with the kind of people who need to be forgiven a lot.
FYI, the Nephites were from a lost tribes of Isreal that came to America on a submarine a few thousand years ago.
The submariners were Jaredites, who supposedly came straight from the Tower of Babel. Nephi and friends just had an unremarkable ship. Also, in the traditional interpretation the Lamanite ancestors all came on Nephi's ship; it wasn't until people examined Native American DNA that the idea of unmentioned Siberian-descended Lamanite groups became popular.
The Utah Court system is SCO's ace in the hole.
Not yet, it isn't. Judge Wells certainly doesn't seem to have a pro-SCO prejudice, and at the rate the McBrides are going the case may never make it to a jury trial. Even if it gets that far and SCO's lawyers somehow manage to get a biased jury, Novell has as much of a "hometown Utah company" appearance as SCO does, and based on their statements and copyright filings Novell looks like they're going to bat for our side.
Regardless, I would be worried about shorting SCO or any penny stock from Utah, as Provo Stocks have certain irrational characteristics.
I'd be worried about shorting SCO because every stock (especially every thinly traded stock) has certain irrational characteristics. If there are suckers out there who will pay $20 a share for SCO, how do I know there aren't suckers who would pay $40 a share?
Is the philosophy of "The Big Lie". Basically the idea is that if you repeat a falsehood stridently enough and often enough then even your detractors will start to argue about to what degree it is true rather than whether it is true at all.
Right now is a bad time to worry about hypothetical secrets up SCO's sleeve. If they have any evidence more compelling than the slide show fiaSCO, we'll all find out next week after the judge's deadline for them to present it has passed. What's more, since IBM was wise enough to include all of SCO's wild accusations (and not just the limited set they've actually risked saying to a judge instead of a reporter) in their counterclaims and discovery requests, next week we should be able to take a nice long look at everything based on the facts rather than on our trust (or lack thereof) in Blake Stowell and Darl McBride.
Of course, this all depends on SCO being unwilling to try and weasel out of a court order, but if I'm wrong and they have that kind of chutzpah I think it will speak for itself too.
I think the biggest problem I suffered was driving on the right in GTA VC
Do Vice City cops actually enforce traffic laws like that? In Grand Theft Auto you could be driving 80mph through a red light on the left side of the road while knocking some smaller car out of your way, and the police car you sped by wouldn't care unless you bumped his fender along the way.
The problem is that spacetravel should not be a crapshoot.
Sailing across the world hundreds of years ago wasn't.
Fun quotes about Magellan's circumnavigations from Wikipedia:
"One ship, the Santiago,was sent down the coast on a scouting expedition, but it was wrecked on the return trip. Only two sailors returned, overland, to inform Magellan of what had happened."
"Eight crewmen died as they faced 1500 warriors. The crew were forced to leave Magellan to die, surrounded by warriors, in the surf."
"Twenty crewmen died of starvation before Elcano put in to the Cape Verde Islands"
It's not that spaceflight is any more risky than ocean explorations were, it's just still so much more expensive that nobody is willing to plan missions which include much risk.
So far a space race is only impetus that has pushed man to make those giant leaps. But is that a good thing?
Good or bad, it's the way life works. The only reason our distant ancestors even left the oceans was that some other organisms had left first, and we wanted to go eat them.
A scamjet running at mach ten is going to be experiencing much less drag than a regular airliner, because it will be much higher.
I don't think so. The drag on any cruising airplane is an indirect result of the lift the airplane needs to stay aloft: for a given cruising speed and altitude, you try to find a wing shape that will give you an optimal lift-to-drag ratio, and then that ratio and the weight of your plane determines how much drag you have to fight (which, for a trip of constant distance, determines how much work you have to do fighting drag).
And unfortunately, attainable lift to drag ratios get worse the faster you go. See the chart on this page for examples, and for comparison keep in mind that for subsonic aircraft lift to drag ratios of 16-20 are common. If you want to fly at Mach 4 with C_L/C_D = 8, instead, then you should need roughly twice as much fuel (per mile traveled) to do so.
Concorde's massive costs were mostly maintenance, not fuel.
This is probably true, though. I recall reading that jet fuel accounts for less than a third of an airlines budget, so no amount of high speed fuel inefficiency shouldn't do much for your ticket price. I'd be more worried about the additional complexity of hypersonic aircraft affecting those maintenance costs instead.
Daniel Lyons is a troll, but with a big difference: instead of attracting lots of attention to feed a fragile ego, he attracts lots of attention to feed an advertising conduit. All "news media" today seem to understand that fair, credible reporting is only one means (and for an audience produced by the US education system, often a poor means) toward the end of connecting consumer eyeballs with expensive ads. You can be certain that ubercapitalist Forbes isn't unaware of this.
In other words, as long as Lyons manages to successfully piss off lots of geeks in a way that earns forbes.com more hits (say, by getting three links on Slashdot's front page) rather than fewer, he could assert that Linus was a genetically engineered ex-KGB spy without worrying about Forbes firing him.
Send a copy to your state's attorney general and the FTC, along with the information that you have never done business with or received a product from this company. Sending someone an invoice (assuming this is an invoice, not just one of SCO's dubious letters) for a product they purchased from someone else is illegal under federal and state laws - see Groklaw's "Open Letter to Darl McBride" for some references.
I didn't think SCO had actually sent any invoices out - it hasn't made the news, and all the legal types I've seen comment have been pretty confident that SCO wouldn't send anything out without lots of "This is not an invoice" fine print to try and avoid legal consequences.
There are multiple reasons why you might purchase a particular stock. Sometimes it's because you believe it's a good company with great products. Sometimes it's because you're willing to risk some money speculating on a low-probability high-return outcome.
There's a third reason, which should resurge in popularity as the word "dot-com" fades away to it's place next to "tulip auctions" in investment history: because you think the company is a stupid buy, but you expect to find an even stupider buyer to sell to before that becomes obvious. I say that derisively, but this third group (which includes all the SCO Group insiders who have been picking up options and then selling like crazy) are the only ones who have made any money off SCOX that they can be sure of keeping.
SCO have literally come up with the weakest possible argument they could have attempted.
They've attempted weaker arguments before!
"Here is a malloc implementation copied from our proprietary Unix (or possibly from our old public domain Unix, or maybe from an even older Knuth textbook)" might not be this weak, but both attempts are put to shame by SCO's best 'argument': "This packet filtering code looks kind of similar to our code (and even more similar to the public specifications describing that code's interface, and it turns out that 'our' code is owned by Berkeley and we must have illegally stripped their copyright notices not to realize that)"
They've said some stupid and contradictory things to the press and the courts, but nothing that tops the lines they were feeding their NDA suckers.
Linux Weekly News has a copy of the letter. The 65 files don't sound quite as threatening when you discover the first 17 of them are errno.h. Quick, someone go warn the IEEE!
Why is "Don't want to help hegemonic evil spread across the face of the Earth" not one of the options?
Because that's a feature of all large businesses - there's nothing special about MS in that.
1) They're really, really good at it. 2) They're in an industry which because of network effects provides them tons of opportunities to try. 3) They've repeatedly received legal slaps on the wrist for it, so they know that any potential negative consequences for unethical behavior will be outweighed by billions of dollars of positive consequences.
These are all matters of degree (how many people from Enron are serving time?) rather than black and white, but I think they count as special.
"YellowDog Updater, Modified", which refers to the distribution it came from.
Why not just "install programname"?
Because that's already the name of another (less capable, but still appropriately named) command. Also because for Linux still has lots of competition between software products, and so we need naming schemes that reflect that. Microsoft can get away with calling a product "Office", because they know they have the muscle to marginalize any competing office software and so users won't be confused. If Yellow Dog (or Red Hat or Debian) had tried to call their software installer tool something so generic it would have come off as arrogant and insulting to the competing developers.
It's a rhetorical question
Hope you don't mind it being answered anyway.
I'm just trying to point out that calling your software installer "yum" does not make things particularly self-explanatory.
No, but the self-explanatory part comes when you flip through your menus and its GUI equivalent (in my case synaptic) is listed descriptively. It's possible for a command line program to be self-explanatory (basically it has to be easy to find with "apropos" or your documentation's index), but mostly it's name just has to be unique.
If it wasn't for the ability to distill information about imminent danger into a series of colored lights, the government would be forced to release specific information about upcoming terrorist threats, which could eliminate the advantage they have over less important Americans in personally avoiding those threats.
And it's even easier than you stated: you don't even have to talk about something you know, just something you can describe with impressive prose, or something you can crib a highly scored comment about from a previous Slashdot story.
Fortunately, the formula for dealing with it is just as simple:
1) Debunk this particular (apparantly trolling) post. 2) Check the author's prior posts and journals to see if this is a single mistake or a repeated pattern. Check any post that has been downrated or has tons of replies. In this particular case, journal entries like "I forgot how much fun trolling can be" make it too easy. 3) Make use of Slashdot's fun "friend or foe" system to automatically label (and optionally downrate for yourself) the offending user. Karma doesn't mean much when your posts have a big red warning flag on them (like rkz already had for me and any of my "fans") or have been rescored to the point where Slashdot won't even put them on the page.
Politicians currently get access to voting records after elections. Yep, your anonymous vote is not really anonymous. It's only anonymous during the election, to prevent vote buying.
Do you have any references for this? This is the first time I've heard of it. I'd also like to know who thinks it would prevent vote buying, since figuring out how to buy votes with such a system (e.g. pay half now, half when you can confirm the vote) seems so obvious.
But as another poster said..no game before or since has had the attitude and atmosphere that Duke3D did (even if they borrowed a lot of the Dukeisms from the Evil Dead flicks).
Duke3D's magic wasn't the number of wiseass cliches or film references, it was the fact that they made it feel like you were playing in real locations, not just "levels". Every first person shooter I played before Duke3D (Wolf3D, Doom, Heretic, Hexen) had levels that felt like random mazes. Here's some corridors, here's some rooms, here's a random sprinkling of monsters who must live here or enjoy hanging out here for some reason... Instead, Duke Nukem had a red light district with porn shops and nightclubs, a rocket launch facility, a business district with sushi bars and banks and offices, a lunar base. It made up for the cliched "aliens are taking over the world" storyline by giving a surprisingly plausible world to take over.
And while they were still the only ones to have done that for a couple years afterward (Quake in particular comes to mind, although at least Quake II made a weak attempt at interesting levels), the world has now moved on and we've been there and done that. Unreal built up some of the same atmosphere (albeit in an alien world instead of Earth), Half-Life surpassed Duke3D, and then Deus Ex (at least the first; I haven't played the sequel yet) looked at the "interesting protagonist in realistic world" hurdle and flew over it on a nuclear ramjet.
I'm sure that Duke Nukem will have even more appeal in 2005 than it did in 1997... but will it match up to 2001 competition? I wonder how much of the delay is really coming from repeatedly changing game engines to catch up to evolving graphics standards, and how much of it is coming from repeatedly revising the game scripts and data to catch up to evolving gameplay/"immersiveness" standards.
being a currency trader is a risky business to begin with, but trading in FAKE currencies, where the government (in this case, UO patch team) can cause massive (in|de)flation at any time?
How does this differ from the "real" currencies? Are there any countries left that still back their currency with gold (or any tangible commodity)?
Slashdot Mirror
I hope SCO spends itself out of existence on legal fees.
That would be awful both for Red Hat and IBM (who should otherwise be getting some amount of reparations in their countersuits) and for SCO's current investors, some of whom probably imagine that the US has a swift justice system that wouldn't allow SCO to make outright lies without sanction.
Reserve your ire for SCO's current leaders, particularly the ones whose insider trades (filing to buy stock options and sell shares after SCO's internal discussion of the IBM litigation but before that litigation became public knowledge) and deception have earned them millions of dollars so far. These guys are next to the Enron executives in the United States' ongoing experiment: "How hard is it to profit from million dollar lies and escape punishment?"
The right to freely use and change and redistribute doesn't make the Cooperate heads comfortable.
I think you mean "corporate heads". The right to freely use and change and redistribute makes cooperate-heads ecstatic.
Unlike most anime, NGE leaves you to draw your own conclusions.
I could do that without watching it.
Well now there's the problem -- next time we should just go to a forgiving planet instead. What were we thinking?
Unfortunately, it turns out that there's only one forgiving planet in the solar system, and so naturally it filled up with the kind of people who need to be forgiven a lot.
FYI, the Nephites were from a lost tribes of Isreal that came to America on a submarine a few thousand years ago.
The submariners were Jaredites, who supposedly came straight from the Tower of Babel. Nephi and friends just had an unremarkable ship. Also, in the traditional interpretation the Lamanite ancestors all came on Nephi's ship; it wasn't until people examined Native American DNA that the idea of unmentioned Siberian-descended Lamanite groups became popular.
The Utah Court system is SCO's ace in the hole.
Not yet, it isn't. Judge Wells certainly doesn't seem to have a pro-SCO prejudice, and at the rate the McBrides are going the case may never make it to a jury trial. Even if it gets that far and SCO's lawyers somehow manage to get a biased jury, Novell has as much of a "hometown Utah company" appearance as SCO does, and based on their statements and copyright filings Novell looks like they're going to bat for our side.
Regardless, I would be worried about shorting SCO or any penny stock from Utah, as Provo Stocks have certain irrational characteristics.
I'd be worried about shorting SCO because every stock (especially every thinly traded stock) has certain irrational characteristics. If there are suckers out there who will pay $20 a share for SCO, how do I know there aren't suckers who would pay $40 a share?
Is the philosophy of "The Big Lie". Basically the idea is that if you repeat a falsehood stridently enough and often enough then even your detractors will start to argue about to what degree it is true rather than whether it is true at all.
Right now is a bad time to worry about hypothetical secrets up SCO's sleeve. If they have any evidence more compelling than the slide show fiaSCO, we'll all find out next week after the judge's deadline for them to present it has passed. What's more, since IBM was wise enough to include all of SCO's wild accusations (and not just the limited set they've actually risked saying to a judge instead of a reporter) in their counterclaims and discovery requests, next week we should be able to take a nice long look at everything based on the facts rather than on our trust (or lack thereof) in Blake Stowell and Darl McBride.
Of course, this all depends on SCO being unwilling to try and weasel out of a court order, but if I'm wrong and they have that kind of chutzpah I think it will speak for itself too.
You know how when you play risk... ...are going to want Google to "put out"
Creepy mixed metaphor you've got going there.
I think the biggest problem I suffered was driving on the right in GTA VC
Do Vice City cops actually enforce traffic laws like that? In Grand Theft Auto you could be driving 80mph through a red light on the left side of the road while knocking some smaller car out of your way, and the police car you sped by wouldn't care unless you bumped his fender along the way.
Deus Ex: the only game with theme music this good.
The problem is that spacetravel should not be a crapshoot.
Sailing across the world hundreds of years ago wasn't.
Fun quotes about Magellan's circumnavigations from Wikipedia:
"One ship, the Santiago,was sent down the coast on a scouting expedition, but it was wrecked on the return trip. Only two sailors returned, overland, to inform Magellan of what had happened."
"Eight crewmen died as they faced 1500 warriors. The crew were forced to leave Magellan to die, surrounded by warriors, in the surf."
"Twenty crewmen died of starvation before Elcano put in to the Cape Verde Islands"
It's not that spaceflight is any more risky than ocean explorations were, it's just still so much more expensive that nobody is willing to plan missions which include much risk.
So far a space race is only impetus that has pushed man to make those giant leaps. But is that a good thing?
Good or bad, it's the way life works. The only reason our distant ancestors even left the oceans was that some other organisms had left first, and we wanted to go eat them.
A scamjet running at mach ten is going to be experiencing much less drag than a regular airliner, because it will be much higher.
I don't think so. The drag on any cruising airplane is an indirect result of the lift the airplane needs to stay aloft: for a given cruising speed and altitude, you try to find a wing shape that will give you an optimal lift-to-drag ratio, and then that ratio and the weight of your plane determines how much drag you have to fight (which, for a trip of constant distance, determines how much work you have to do fighting drag).
And unfortunately, attainable lift to drag ratios get worse the faster you go. See the chart on this page for examples, and for comparison keep in mind that for subsonic aircraft lift to drag ratios of 16-20 are common. If you want to fly at Mach 4 with C_L/C_D = 8, instead, then you should need roughly twice as much fuel (per mile traveled) to do so.
Concorde's massive costs were mostly maintenance, not fuel.
This is probably true, though. I recall reading that jet fuel accounts for less than a third of an airlines budget, so no amount of high speed fuel inefficiency shouldn't do much for your ticket price. I'd be more worried about the additional complexity of hypersonic aircraft affecting those maintenance costs instead.
Daniel Lyons is a troll, but with a big difference: instead of attracting lots of attention to feed a fragile ego, he attracts lots of attention to feed an advertising conduit. All "news media" today seem to understand that fair, credible reporting is only one means (and for an audience produced by the US education system, often a poor means) toward the end of connecting consumer eyeballs with expensive ads. You can be certain that ubercapitalist Forbes isn't unaware of this.
In other words, as long as Lyons manages to successfully piss off lots of geeks in a way that earns forbes.com more hits (say, by getting three links on Slashdot's front page) rather than fewer, he could assert that Linus was a genetically engineered ex-KGB spy without worrying about Forbes firing him.
Whereas, it was possible to mix Athena and Motif widgets together.
It's possible to mix tunafish and yogurt, too, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Send a copy to your state's attorney general and the FTC, along with the information that you have never done business with or received a product from this company. Sending someone an invoice (assuming this is an invoice, not just one of SCO's dubious letters) for a product they purchased from someone else is illegal under federal and state laws - see Groklaw's "Open Letter to Darl McBride" for some references.
I didn't think SCO had actually sent any invoices out - it hasn't made the news, and all the legal types I've seen comment have been pretty confident that SCO wouldn't send anything out without lots of "This is not an invoice" fine print to try and avoid legal consequences.
There are multiple reasons why you might purchase a particular stock. Sometimes it's because you believe it's a good company with great products. Sometimes it's because you're willing to risk some money speculating on a low-probability high-return outcome.
There's a third reason, which should resurge in popularity as the word "dot-com" fades away to it's place next to "tulip auctions" in investment history: because you think the company is a stupid buy, but you expect to find an even stupider buyer to sell to before that becomes obvious. I say that derisively, but this third group (which includes all the SCO Group insiders who have been picking up options and then selling like crazy) are the only ones who have made any money off SCOX that they can be sure of keeping.
SCO have literally come up with the weakest possible argument they could have attempted.
They've attempted weaker arguments before!
"Here is a malloc implementation copied from our proprietary Unix (or possibly from our old public domain Unix, or maybe from an even older Knuth textbook)" might not be this weak, but both attempts are put to shame by SCO's best 'argument': "This packet filtering code looks kind of similar to our code (and even more similar to the public specifications describing that code's interface, and it turns out that 'our' code is owned by Berkeley and we must have illegally stripped their copyright notices not to realize that)"
They've said some stupid and contradictory things to the press and the courts, but nothing that tops the lines they were feeding their NDA suckers.
Linux Weekly News has a copy of the letter. The 65 files don't sound quite as threatening when you discover the first 17 of them are errno.h. Quick, someone go warn the IEEE!
Because that's a feature of all large businesses - there's nothing special about MS in that.
1) They're really, really good at it.
2) They're in an industry which because of network effects provides them tons of opportunities to try.
3) They've repeatedly received legal slaps on the wrist for it, so they know that any potential negative consequences for unethical behavior will be outweighed by billions of dollars of positive consequences.
These are all matters of degree (how many people from Enron are serving time?) rather than black and white, but I think they count as special.
Why "yum" though? What does it mean?
"YellowDog Updater, Modified", which refers to the distribution it came from.
Why not just "install programname"?
Because that's already the name of another (less capable, but still appropriately named) command. Also because for Linux still has lots of competition between software products, and so we need naming schemes that reflect that. Microsoft can get away with calling a product "Office", because they know they have the muscle to marginalize any competing office software and so users won't be confused. If Yellow Dog (or Red Hat or Debian) had tried to call their software installer tool something so generic it would have come off as arrogant and insulting to the competing developers.
It's a rhetorical question
Hope you don't mind it being answered anyway.
I'm just trying to point out that calling your software installer "yum" does not make things particularly self-explanatory.
No, but the self-explanatory part comes when you flip through your menus and its GUI equivalent (in my case synaptic) is listed descriptively. It's possible for a command line program to be self-explanatory (basically it has to be easy to find with "apropos" or your documentation's index), but mostly it's name just has to be unique.
If it wasn't for the ability to distill information about imminent danger into a series of colored lights, the government would be forced to release specific information about upcoming terrorist threats, which could eliminate the advantage they have over less important Americans in personally avoiding those threats.
And it's even easier than you stated: you don't even have to talk about something you know, just something you can describe with impressive prose, or something you can crib a highly scored comment about from a previous Slashdot story.
Fortunately, the formula for dealing with it is just as simple:
1) Debunk this particular (apparantly trolling) post.
2) Check the author's prior posts and journals to see if this is a single mistake or a repeated pattern. Check any post that has been downrated or has tons of replies. In this particular case, journal entries like "I forgot how much fun trolling can be" make it too easy.
3) Make use of Slashdot's fun "friend or foe" system to automatically label (and optionally downrate for yourself) the offending user. Karma doesn't mean much when your posts have a big red warning flag on them (like rkz already had for me and any of my "fans") or have been rescored to the point where Slashdot won't even put them on the page.
Politicians currently get access to voting records after elections. Yep, your anonymous vote is not really anonymous. It's only anonymous during the election, to prevent vote buying.
Do you have any references for this? This is the first time I've heard of it. I'd also like to know who thinks it would prevent vote buying, since figuring out how to buy votes with such a system (e.g. pay half now, half when you can confirm the vote) seems so obvious.
But as another poster said..no game before or since has had the attitude and atmosphere that Duke3D did (even if they borrowed a lot of the Dukeisms from the Evil Dead flicks).
Duke3D's magic wasn't the number of wiseass cliches or film references, it was the fact that they made it feel like you were playing in real locations, not just "levels". Every first person shooter I played before Duke3D (Wolf3D, Doom, Heretic, Hexen) had levels that felt like random mazes. Here's some corridors, here's some rooms, here's a random sprinkling of monsters who must live here or enjoy hanging out here for some reason... Instead, Duke Nukem had a red light district with porn shops and nightclubs, a rocket launch facility, a business district with sushi bars and banks and offices, a lunar base. It made up for the cliched "aliens are taking over the world" storyline by giving a surprisingly plausible world to take over.
And while they were still the only ones to have done that for a couple years afterward (Quake in particular comes to mind, although at least Quake II made a weak attempt at interesting levels), the world has now moved on and we've been there and done that. Unreal built up some of the same atmosphere (albeit in an alien world instead of Earth), Half-Life surpassed Duke3D, and then Deus Ex (at least the first; I haven't played the sequel yet) looked at the "interesting protagonist in realistic world" hurdle and flew over it on a nuclear ramjet.
I'm sure that Duke Nukem will have even more appeal in 2005 than it did in 1997... but will it match up to 2001 competition? I wonder how much of the delay is really coming from repeatedly changing game engines to catch up to evolving graphics standards, and how much of it is coming from repeatedly revising the game scripts and data to catch up to evolving gameplay/"immersiveness" standards.
being a currency trader is a risky business to begin with, but trading in FAKE currencies, where the government (in this case, UO patch team) can cause massive (in|de)flation at any time?
How does this differ from the "real" currencies? Are there any countries left that still back their currency with gold (or any tangible commodity)?