The best possible option IMO is for IBM to buy SCO out, in as hostile a takeover bid as possible
No, one doesn't stay the chief gorilla by coddling those that challenge you. IBM should sue SCO out of existence and pick over their carcass for any morsels of IP they might want. The other young gorillas out there are watching.
It would be a very interesting comparison to show from start of manufacture to end of life for any and all power sources and their industrial waste.
Actually, what I would like to see is the cost of every item produced include a "tax" that was determined to be the cost of recycling the material to a benign state (which would basically be a tax on the material components), and included the cost of completely neutralizing any chemical process used in the manufacture - i.e. there would be no dumping of chemicals as this tax would pay for the processing of waste material by separate agencies.
But of course this will never happen. For one thing, in the US we do not believe sufficiently strongly that each must pay his own way - if the cost of a car was going to be twice as much, then there were be much gnashing of teeth about the poor - why else do you think one side of our political spectrum whines so much about "tax breaks for the rich" (casually not mentioning that it's their money).
TANSTAAFL - so what we end up with is a society that allows and encourages pollution because it's cheaper for the voting masses that way.
But hey - we can alway make fun of people's pronunciation rather than listen to their vision and assess the potential of their policies to get us there.
Unfortunately it may be easier to solve the engineering & infrastructure problems with fusion or space solar power than it would be to get the newsmedia to engage in a sane discussion about the risks and benefits of nuclear fission.
No kidding - after all, everyone, especially the press and knowledgeable technical people, long ago quit making fun of the chief policy maker's casual pronunciation of the word nuclear because they know their audience is far more interested in the political and technical aspects of such technology. Oh, wait...
what's to stop a thief from carrying around his reader and then summing up how much people in the street have in their wallets...and then just rob her?
Well, in the civilized countires at least, a.45 magnum.
--
"An armed society is a polite society."
-- Robert Heinlein
nVidia, unlike 3DFX at the time, has a huge pile of cash sitting on their balance sheet.
A huge pile of cash is only indicative of the past - during the heyday of the internet bubble there were dozens of companies with huge piles of cash - a year ago United Airlines had billions of dollars in the bank too - they've barely managed to emerge from bankruptcy, and there's still much work ahead.
What matters is that a company knows what to do with the assets they have. It's awfully easy for a company to get lazy and make money in spite of themselves when everyone else is doing so too - the question is can they continue to do so when times are tough.
ATI has indicated they'd be slowing their innovation cycles, whereas nVidia has made no such statement.
... and one of them is more likely than the other to have correctly gauged the future buying needs of their customers. If the future has people less willing to pay for high-end video cards, which is a good possibility if it tracks the steadily declining sales of PCs overall, then spending megabucks to build high-end hardware is not going to do much good for the bottom line.
What most likely happened is that early chimps and our early ancestors lived in slightly different eviornments and thus evolved into different species.
Well, that's a nice idea, but how many investors do you think would buy these shares to finance projects so extremely risky for returns? How long before there could be reasonable assessments of which projects had potential? Would there be enough money to go around? Which projects should get funded and which left to wither?
his arrogance and bragging may very well cost people their lives somewhere, because he published this information.
This information has been available for years and can be worked out from magazine articles by anyone who could gradaute high school. His attempt to do this will only show how easy it is - pretending it's hard and that it is not a threat doesn't make it so.
A cheap cruise missile is not that hard or expensive - especially if the objective is to just kill people and you don't care which group of people it is, or even if it's really a large group. When the terrorist scum destroyed the WTC, they simply wanted to kill as many people as possible to have an effect on the remainder - they weren't targetting a specific leader or a specific objective, though the financial impact of the investment banks was a bonus.
This is the difficulty in defending a large country against terrorism - killing groups randomly causes a much larger population to alter their behavior. When you don't care who you kill, but only how many and the effect that it will have on the living, then you can exert your will on a population, and affect the well-being of that which you attack.
It's much harder to wage a war with precision - it takes significant resources in intelligence, weapons, training, and greater acceptance of risk to attempt to target those in-charge while minimizing the effect on the remainder, while insuring the defense of your own people, and at the same time insure sufficient resources will be brought to bear to permanently alter the course of events.
I'm definitely not in favor of excessive defense spending.
Survivial Exam
1. Define "excessive" in the term "excessive defense spending.
Caveats
1. You do not know the future, but can only guess at it.
2. Production of weapons systems adequate to the task requires at least a decade or prior planning (a supporting factor of caveat #2).
Possible assumptions you may operate from (state those used)
1. Describe the acceptable loss rate of your own population, both military and civilian. This will aid you in determining how effective your weapons need be and at what point they're excessive.
2. Assume that actual war is performed like Hollywood shows the world - a single soldier (bonus points if female, minority, single-parent, who enjoys long walks on the beach, cooking in a wok with low-fat oil, kittens, and body-piercing) who holds a fourth-degree black belt (granted in honorarium after watching jazzersize videos, since violent activities are unacceptable since they're, well, violent), is able to fire every weapon in the inventory (ours, and theirs), fly fighter aircraft better than anyone else, never gets hit in a firefight (or runs out of ammunition), even when using a pistol versus heavy-caliber gatling guns, is able to parachute in at night, pass as a local in looks and language (makeup training and a couple of hours of language tapes), and without a hair ever being out of place, march into Saddam's palace and over a diet-free softdrink (for sponsorship potential), talk him into willingly choosing a different path. Accept the Nobel Peace Prize graciously while wearing a one-off designer outfit, which you later auction off to donate the proceeds to anti-US orgranizations to promote the unjust war you only participated in to develop material for your Pulitzer.
3. You may assume that you will always have the necessary budget and political support to develop the weapons you will need - you won't need to build what you can when you can - and that you will always have the necessary buget for training and maintenance.
4. You may also assume that there are many places to save money in this operation and that all the needed (wo)manpower will be available, with sufficient education and dedication to duty. This can be insured by elimination of the demoralizing practice of testing students for knowledge and ability, and simply giving them scholarships to Ivy League schools.
As a final note, recognize being wrong can lead to the elimination of your country and society.
if you throw in that they can simple "click-and-vote", it's not such a big deal to take 1 minute from surfing to hit your voter site
How brilliant - the last thing we need is people who spend an entire minute on figuring out who to give the nuclear launch keys to.
Voting -- like jury duty -- should be harder to do, not easier. Otherwise we end up with people who put as much thought into who should run the country as the OJ jury did into their statement that "we didn't understand that DNA stuff".
Excepting the calculus and state licensing, I do the same things an engineer in any other field does.
Without the state licensing, you're not an Engineer, and you shouldn't call yourself one.
The problem is that this state licensing issue has been abused for far too long without the state legal system doing anything to insure that when the term engineer is used it has meaning.
In some countries the term Engineer can be used as we do Doctor in the US - if we encouraged this use in the US then people would realize the importance of the label. That won't happen.
I wonder, what will be the total cost to IBM to properly defend themselves in this suit, plus the amount that they spend on "licensing" Unix from SCO? At least $32.9M perhaps?
If IBM takes this to court and points out the whys and why-nots then this suit has every possibility of being considered frivolous - depending on where it's filed, etc. IBM can make SCO pay IBM's expenses - and then what's left of that $32.9 MM won't buy a cup of coffe and a wireless browsing session at your local all night diner.
Slashdot Mirror
No, one doesn't stay the chief gorilla by coddling those that challenge you. IBM should sue SCO out of existence and pick over their carcass for any morsels of IP they might want. The other young gorillas out there are watching.
I won't include you in my ramblings if you don't tell me what I "mean to say".
Especially with anything to do with safe driving!
By accellerating it, in a no-friction non-atmosphere environemnt, to 5400 mph.
Yes, the US's dream to live free seems to bother many weak weanies of the world.
Don't tread on me ... it's not just a cute saying on a flag - it requires backbone.
No, it's fully functional.
Actually, what I would like to see is the cost of every item produced include a "tax" that was determined to be the cost of recycling the material to a benign state (which would basically be a tax on the material components), and included the cost of completely neutralizing any chemical process used in the manufacture - i.e. there would be no dumping of chemicals as this tax would pay for the processing of waste material by separate agencies.
But of course this will never happen. For one thing, in the US we do not believe sufficiently strongly that each must pay his own way - if the cost of a car was going to be twice as much, then there were be much gnashing of teeth about the poor - why else do you think one side of our political spectrum whines so much about "tax breaks for the rich" (casually not mentioning that it's their money).
TANSTAAFL - so what we end up with is a society that allows and encourages pollution because it's cheaper for the voting masses that way.
But hey - we can alway make fun of people's pronunciation rather than listen to their vision and assess the potential of their policies to get us there.
No kidding - after all, everyone, especially the press and knowledgeable technical people, long ago quit making fun of the chief policy maker's casual pronunciation of the word nuclear because they know their audience is far more interested in the political and technical aspects of such technology. Oh, wait ...
Well, in the civilized countires at least, a .45 magnum.
--
"An armed society is a polite society."
-- Robert Heinlein
A huge pile of cash is only indicative of the past - during the heyday of the internet bubble there were dozens of companies with huge piles of cash - a year ago United Airlines had billions of dollars in the bank too - they've barely managed to emerge from bankruptcy, and there's still much work ahead.
What matters is that a company knows what to do with the assets they have. It's awfully easy for a company to get lazy and make money in spite of themselves when everyone else is doing so too - the question is can they continue to do so when times are tough.
ATI has indicated they'd be slowing their innovation cycles, whereas nVidia has made no such statement.
Ah - the old Harvard man vs Yale man routine ...
And a good day to you ... oh by the way, I'd like to introduce to my friend from the IRS.
APL is the only way to fly.
Well, that's a nice idea, but how many investors do you think would buy these shares to finance projects so extremely risky for returns? How long before there could be reasonable assessments of which projects had potential? Would there be enough money to go around? Which projects should get funded and which left to wither?
This information has been available for years and can be worked out from magazine articles by anyone who could gradaute high school. His attempt to do this will only show how easy it is - pretending it's hard and that it is not a threat doesn't make it so.
A cheap cruise missile is not that hard or expensive - especially if the objective is to just kill people and you don't care which group of people it is, or even if it's really a large group. When the terrorist scum destroyed the WTC, they simply wanted to kill as many people as possible to have an effect on the remainder - they weren't targetting a specific leader or a specific objective, though the financial impact of the investment banks was a bonus.
This is the difficulty in defending a large country against terrorism - killing groups randomly causes a much larger population to alter their behavior. When you don't care who you kill, but only how many and the effect that it will have on the living, then you can exert your will on a population, and affect the well-being of that which you attack.
It's much harder to wage a war with precision - it takes significant resources in intelligence, weapons, training, and greater acceptance of risk to attempt to target those in-charge while minimizing the effect on the remainder, while insuring the defense of your own people, and at the same time insure sufficient resources will be brought to bear to permanently alter the course of events.
Survivial Exam
1. Define "excessive" in the term "excessive defense spending.
Caveats
1. You do not know the future, but can only guess at it.
2. Production of weapons systems adequate to the task requires at least a decade or prior planning (a supporting factor of caveat #2).
Possible assumptions you may operate from (state those used)
1. Describe the acceptable loss rate of your own population, both military and civilian. This will aid you in determining how effective your weapons need be and at what point they're excessive.
2. Assume that actual war is performed like Hollywood shows the world - a single soldier (bonus points if female, minority, single-parent, who enjoys long walks on the beach, cooking in a wok with low-fat oil, kittens, and body-piercing) who holds a fourth-degree black belt (granted in honorarium after watching jazzersize videos, since violent activities are unacceptable since they're, well, violent), is able to fire every weapon in the inventory (ours, and theirs), fly fighter aircraft better than anyone else, never gets hit in a firefight (or runs out of ammunition), even when using a pistol versus heavy-caliber gatling guns, is able to parachute in at night, pass as a local in looks and language (makeup training and a couple of hours of language tapes), and without a hair ever being out of place, march into Saddam's palace and over a diet-free softdrink (for sponsorship potential), talk him into willingly choosing a different path. Accept the Nobel Peace Prize graciously while wearing a one-off designer outfit, which you later auction off to donate the proceeds to anti-US orgranizations to promote the unjust war you only participated in to develop material for your Pulitzer.
3. You may assume that you will always have the necessary budget and political support to develop the weapons you will need - you won't need to build what you can when you can - and that you will always have the necessary buget for training and maintenance.
4. You may also assume that there are many places to save money in this operation and that all the needed (wo)manpower will be available, with sufficient education and dedication to duty. This can be insured by elimination of the demoralizing practice of testing students for knowledge and ability, and simply giving them scholarships to Ivy League schools.
As a final note, recognize being wrong can lead to the elimination of your country and society.
Which would you prefer?
It's focused.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, bitch on slashdot.
How brilliant - the last thing we need is people who spend an entire minute on figuring out who to give the nuclear launch keys to.
Voting -- like jury duty -- should be harder to do, not easier. Otherwise we end up with people who put as much thought into who should run the country as the OJ jury did into their statement that "we didn't understand that DNA stuff".
Because Oracle is not a database - Oracle is a career.
Without the state licensing, you're not an Engineer, and you shouldn't call yourself one.
The problem is that this state licensing issue has been abused for far too long without the state legal system doing anything to insure that when the term engineer is used it has meaning.
In some countries the term Engineer can be used as we do Doctor in the US - if we encouraged this use in the US then people would realize the importance of the label. That won't happen.
If IBM takes this to court and points out the whys and why-nots then this suit has every possibility of being considered frivolous - depending on where it's filed, etc. IBM can make SCO pay IBM's expenses - and then what's left of that $32.9 MM won't buy a cup of coffe and a wireless browsing session at your local all night diner.
Then show us the math.