Nail on the head. How in the WORLD could he discount literally hundreds of hours of testimony from extremely credible witnesses (military, intelligence, all with nothing to gain accept ridicule), thousands of books, etc...
Counterexample: There are thousands of Scientologists in the world. If you met many of them, they would seem to be reasonable people, credible, honest. Yet would you believe any of the tenets of the crackpot Scientology "religion" they would tell you if you asked? (and if you don't know how lunatic these teachings are, visit here or here).
Most reasonable people would answer no, they would not believe any of it. So just because a few thousand people make these claims does not make it so, regardless of their motives. You don't have to be seeking monetary reward to be gullible (as those thousands of Scientologists so adequately prove).
Sometime back, we read NASA withdrew funding for DARPA, IIRC. What's so compelling for NASA to pump more funds into SETI? Some kind of social engineering at work here, methinks.
Not necessarily. One of the reasons that SETI is now getting the spotlight is because it has finally stated to lose its "giggle factor". The reason for this is the great advances that astronomy has made in detecting planets around other stars. This alone is proof that it is at least possible for other stars to have planets, so it greatly increases the chances of finding Earthlike planets once the telescope technology is up to snuff. I believe NASA has a new orbital telescope in the works called the Planetfinder or somesuch that may be able to locate planets as small as Earth.
If NASA pulls this off and does find Earthlike planets, you can expect SETI funding to skyrocket, as the idea of intelligent civilizations now starts to fall within the realm of plausibility in the more skeptical community.
sigh.... this idea is >150 years old. it didnt work last time.
From one of the resulting links on this crisis:
The Nullification Crisis of 1832-1833 was resolved without bloodshed in March 1833. Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, who left the vice presidency at the end of 1832 to serve South Carolina in the Senate, drafted a reduced tariff agreement that pacified South Carolina while allowing the Federal government to stand firm.
Sounds like a compromise solution was worked out. So in a way, it did work in that it brought the issue to a head and forced action by Congress.
It's a humbling gesture that keeps sys admins in their place and makes them come up with functional miracles with existing equipment purchases (think of Scotty from Star Trek).
So you're implying that Scotty accomplished his miracles with the warp engines simply to avoid downsizing by Starfleet.
You would think this would be obvious, but sometimes that is exactly the solution is hiding.
Sounds a lot like the time that marketing types were wondering why the Chevy Nova was not selling well in Spanish countries, not realizing that in Spanish, "No va" means "It does not go."
NOTE: This may be an urban legend, so take it with a grain of salt. But it makes for a neat example to further illustrate the point.
Face it. These people (a lot of them) buying the new HP book are buying it because everyone says they have to and to get a preview of the next movie.
Wrong.
Look back at the sales of the previous books. You will find they were just as popular before anyone ever announced that movies were going to be made of the books. And note that WB has not committed yet to movies past book 3 (someone correct me on this if I'm wrong). So there is no guarantee that books 4 and 5 will ever make it to a screenwriter.
Kids are buying the new HP novel for the same reason my wife bought and read it and for the same reason that I read it the day after she did: because they like the story and want to see how it ends.
Your previous example, that of people suddenly buying the LOTR books because of the movies, is on target, though I don't think this is a bad thing. Sometimes it takes people seeing a movie to know that there is some good literature out there (I personally don't care for LOTR, either books or movies, but that's my personal preference).
This whole article asumes that Harry Potter is high art, and that it is a product that can earn 100 million while not being part of the hype machine.
Explain, then, the popularity of the first book, which had little if any hype.
There are different flavors of hype. Hype over a book series like Harry Potter that got its start "honestly" (i.e. people picked up the original book, thought it was cool, and got others to buy it through word-of-mouth) is not the same as hype over something like the Hulk trying to cash-in on recognition of the character from another venue. The HP hype was hardly even necessary, if my wife is typical of the average HP reader. Whe she finished book 4, the first thing she said was "I WANT BOOK 5!!". So people would have bought it without the hype.
I personally read HP because someone I trust and respect (my wife) told me it was good. I personally avoid going to see the Hulk movie because someone I trust and respect (a friend with similar tastes) told me it sucked.
Hype can be effectively ignored. The market continues to drive sales via word-of-mouth. You may get an initial surge of sales from people responding to the hype, then it falls off precipitously when word-of-mouth gets around. This explains why hyped movies will see a great opening weekend, and then plunge into the basement. Sometimes, word-of-mouth can get around so fast that even the opening falls flat (case and point: the disaster area of a movie from Disney that was called Newsies).
My mother-in-law, who once owned a Baskin Robbins (franshise ice cream store for those not familiar with the name), said (and she may have been quoting from someone else): "Give someone good service and they'll tell four people. Give someone bad service and they'll tell ten people."
I am not a fan of fiction anymore, I am an adult, and find the story to be a waste of time.
If you don't care for Harry Potter, that's fine, not everyone does. But by this statement you're implying that you don't read fiction because you're an adult, and I fail to see what one has to do with the other.
My father is in his seventies now and still devours about three novels a week. He is a rather intelligent and well-educated man. He cared for my ailing and home-bound mother for ten years all by himself until she passed away a few months ago. All through that time he read tons of fiction. It helped him remain sane while he saw my mother deteriorate despite his best efforts. A social worker that visited him once said she was astonished at the quality of care he was giving my mother.
Here is a man that is very much an adult. He shoulders his adult responsibilities seriously and with skill. Yet he continued to read fiction during that time. We need fiction as an escape, if nothing else, a way of immersing ourselves in another world as a way of recovering from the harsh realities of real life.
This whole thing reminds me of overzealous copyright lawyers laying the smack down on fanfic. All they do is alienate fans, costing the original author a lot more than money.
In light of this statement, it's interesting that Rowling is specifically NOT going after fanfic. Recent interviews with Rowling indicates that she knows all about Harry Potter fanfic, and even mentioned one of my wife's favorite such sites by name. Possibly this has to do with the fact that the fanfic sites take great pains to announce very clearly that all characters are copyrighted to Rowling and that all works contained in the site are NOT endorsed by the author. Most of all, no money is made on these stories.
This is an interesting insight into how Rowling is operating. So long as you don't try to make money off of it, she appears to be okay with it.
It was trying to be an exact clone of warcraft. You could even play it with the WarCraft graphics.
This is most likely why Freeciv does not have similar problems. They designed their graphics and UI from the ground up. In fact they specifically say on their website that they do not want people contributing graphics lifted directly from the Civilization games. And even though they have rulesets that can simulate a Civ I or Civ II game, look-and-feel cannot be trademarked or copyrighted. The precedent for that was already set when Apple tried to sue Microsoft for copying the look-and-feel of their GUI (or was that the other way around?) and lost.
"So are you saying that the U.S. government might file a "Friend of the Court Brief" to support your case against IBM?" I blurted out. "Don't be surprised" was Sontag's answer.
In a republican big-business-is-good big-business-is-your-friend bow-to-all-corporations administration? I think not. May be the first time in a long while I'm happy to live under a republican president and congress.
What I think they are doing right now is digging out a certain Nancy Sinatra song, looking in their closet for a particular pair of boots, and designing exactly how they are going to stomp all over SCO.
Now there's something I thought I would never see on Slashdot: an apropos reference to These Boots Were Made For Walking. My hat is off to you. I'd mod you up if I had moderator points today.
Re:Be careful of your evidence
on
A Mighty Wind
·
· Score: 1
That said, I wouldn't doubt he's [Bush] on board with H2, simply because it can be generated from oil and coal.
No, he's on board with it because he wants to generate it using nuclear reactors. It's his backdoor means of increasing nuclear power plant construction.
And sheesh! Man DID land on the moon; that whole televised 'conspiracy' (which interestingly, got its own prime time special presentation), was a perfectly executed set piece designed to make conspiracy theory look idiotic. You obviously fell for it. Nice job.
I had to read this several times before I could believe you actually said this. You're actually claiming that someone purposely created a show espousing a conspiracy theory just to make conspiracy theories look bad. If this is not a perfect example of twisting around a fact to make it fit your argument, I don't know what is. Great piece of recursive reasoning there.
It's documented that the CIA tried to kill Castro with explosive cigars, that they tested LSD on unsuspecting subjects, that they withheld syphilis treatment for a group of black subjects for decades as part of a study. The government isn't monolithic, and has regular turnover on people, between politics and just plain old age. And between basic honesty, vengance on political opponents, and an active coverup being work (which is not why they took the job), stuff's going to come out. If the government shot JFK, no one would stand to benefit now from its coverup, and many people would actively try to unsupress it.
Mod this up, dammit.
Thank you for making my point that I mentioned in other posts to this topic. Lots of damning stuff against the government has come out, so why all this and not recovered alien tech? You implied this, but it bears repeating: Everyone in government has an agenda. If letting something leak out that was formerly classified would further that agenda, they would do it without a second thought. Letting an alien coverup leak out would be major kudos for politicians that claim to be on the side of limited government.
You also raised an interesting point about age that further boosts support for the idea that a conspiracy would have fallen apart long ago. As you get turnover from retirements and new hires, there is less of a chance to pass the "coverup baton". Combine this with the fact that the US government documents EVERYTHING and RARELY destroys even the most damning information, and that sets the stage for just about all classified data to be revealed at some point in time.
Then, the Air Force said the *alien bodies* were actually dummies used in testing human conditions at high altitudes (ie. ejecting at high altitudes), yet the tests didn't start for 5 plus years AFTER the *Roswell Incident.*
And the first tinfoil hat conspiracy theories did not come up until years after this
Read my rant titled "Put your tinfoil hats away, please", and educate yourself.
He was asked what was inside the infamous hanger, and he said never to ask that question to him again.
OMG, yes!! Wow!! Thanks for reminding me of that! Yes, wow, that one statement conveys sooooooooooooo much. I'm so, like, totally enlightened now! Of course, when someone answers a question like this, it certainly MUST be code for "There's an alien spacecraft in there, but you didn't hear that from me."
Dude, do you think that just MAYBE his response REALLY meant: "I've been ask that same assinine question before by every single UFO nut out there, and I'm goddamn fucking tired of it."
Put your tin foil hats away, please
on
Roswell Declassified
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Rather than replying to a whole bunch of tin foil hat brigade posts, I'm going to combine what I know of the case into one post. In my younger and more foolish days, I was a UFO nut and soaked up every account of alien visitors. As I got older, I started looking at many of the facts of the case in a more objective light.
The conclusion I have come to is that the Roswell case is a conglomeration of multiple accounts of unrelated occurences occuring over the span of ten years that were later cobbled together into a single, misinformed account.
There is one very important fact that needs to be made clear about the entire Rosewell bru-ha-ha. A lot the publicity for it, namely the theory that an alien spacecraft crashed there, did not come about until well after the incident. In fact, it was not until as late as 1978 that alien bodies were ever associated with the incident.
So, bearing this in mind, here are some of the little factoids about the case that appear to have perfectly logical explanations:
The little alien bodies - For some time durintg the late 1940s and early 1950s, the USAF conducted a series of tests which involved shoving anthropomorphic dummies out of planes from high altitude, usually to test parachute equipment. These dummies often wound up in people's farms. Not only did the USAF not cover this up, they encouraged people to report the location of these dummies, and even paid rewards for them. No coverup here. This is all documented.
The alleged bits of alien spacecraft scattered over the landscape - The oft-repeated refrain from the tinfoil hat brigade is that the government claimed that this was a weather balloon. This term is a misnomer, and was never used by the USAF. This term was invented later. At the time of the alleged crash, the USAF had just started Project Mogul, which involved the launching of several high altitude balloons for various scientific experiments, including the effect of cosmic rays on living tissue samples. In fact, the very first such balloon crashed at about the time that the supposed alien ship crash happened. Once again, this is all well-documented, including the locations where these dummies we retrieved.
The living alien at the hospital - Many accounts of the incident involve an actual living alien being escorted by USAF personnel. The figure is discribed as having the characteric large head of other supposed accounts of aliens. This is yet another case of an unrelated event being tied to Roswell. In 1959, a Captain Dan Fulgham received a nasty head injury that caused a massive hematoma. As a result, his face and head swelled to grotesque proportions. Even his own wife didn't recognize him at first. Documented. No coverup.
Ok, this post is long enough. There are lots of other little factoids from the case (the so-called "Missing Nurse", the alleged "red-headed captain" that threatened people if the said anything, etc) that I could go into, but all of these facts can be found with a little investigation.
But I can predict the responses now: "The government planted those other stories to throw us off the trail!" "They're feeding disinformation to us.!" Bull-fucking-shit. Check your history, people. The US government sucks at covering up anything of importance. Anything that remains classified now from that long ago, it's largely because no one considers the information important.
Finally, here's another one for you: You say we recovered advanced alien tech. You say we recovered alien bodies. Then tell me: Where the hell is this technology? 56 years is a hell of a long time. We've gone from vaccuum-tube ENIAC that fills a room to a 2.6 gigahertz PC that sits in your lap. If we can't in that space of time figure out what made any alleged UFO from Roswell tick in that space of time, then either it never happened, or the government scientists are all idiots. And don't claim that things like stealth tech resulted from alien technology. Give humanity credit for be
Interesting title of this thread. Perhaps SCO is the one who should be sued. I found this article on lwn.net. The most telling piece of this article is the following:
Opinder Bawa, Senior Vice President, Engineering and Global
Services at The SCO Group, sold all his stock last week.
As Vice President of Engineering, Opinder Bawa is in a better position
than most to know who put what where.
Anyone who thinks this action is a coincidence, I have this nice bridge I want to sell you.
This is not proper behavior. I work for Sun Microsystems, and as stock-owning employees, we are constantly being warned about making inappropriate stock purchases or sales during times of certain legal or financial proceedings. I cannot believe that SCO management does not have the same cautions placed on them.
Until nuclear power becomes popular again, there's not enough capacity in our power infrastructure.
You hit the nail on the head.
When I first heard about Mr. "we need to adapt to the higher CO2 levels" Bush advocating hydrogen power, I thought I had accidentally entered a parallel universe. Then I heard that he wants to obtain the hydrogen from nuclear power plants, and then it all made sense.
Mr. Bush is not doing this to further the environmental cause. He's doing this as an excuse to get nuclear power plants built and thus cater to the power company lobbyists.
And to make my position clear on the matter, I am not a rabid anti-nuke person. I happen to believe that nuclear power has its place. But I don't appreciate the backhanded way that Mr. Bush is going about this.
Personally, I am a bit of an inventor and I often come up with different ideas for business software. When I do, I ask myself if I can develop it myself as a stand-alone product. If I can, then I start develop it; and I don't necessarily file a patent.
But sometimes I find that my idea would be most useful as a part of a large existing piece of software. In that case I try to file a patent, and I can then approach a bigger company with my idea. I don't see anything wrong with this.
Software patents are a really sticky mess, so let me pose a question to you to clarify your position on this matter: Are you patenting the idea or the implementation?
If you're not sure, let me throw a hypothetical situation at you, and your answer will determine which of the two you are trying to patent.
You come up with a wonderful idea for making fooble programs faster. You find a way to calculate foobles without having to first obtain a temporary blargle array first, making the programs run three times faster. You patent this.
I'm an open source programmer. I happen to use a program of yours that implements this idea and think, "gee, this is nice, wish I could do this in my fooble programs." I think about it for awhile and come up with a way to do the exact same thing your program does and code it up and release it.
Now, the question is: do you sue me for patent infringement, or not?
If your answer is yes, then you're attempting to patent the intangible idea. If your answer is no, then you're attempting to patent the very tangible implementation
This is why software patents are a very slippery slope. I feel I should not have to kowtow to your patent simply because I found another way to implement it. I feel that if I spent a lot of time and effort figuring out a way to do it without looking at your code, I should be allowed the fruits of my labors. Unfortunately, most people patenting software are patenting the ideas, which causes a great deal of problems where software is concerned.
So if you're patenting the implementation, kudos to you. If you're patenting the idea, then re: your statement:
It's been said here before - if SCO tell us which bits are "stolen", those bits would be replaced very fast by the kernel developers. This would not be optimum for SCO, because they could not then demand licensing from all Linux users.
Except they can't, and any judge worth his salt would see through this for two reasons:
Once a trade secret is out, it is no longer secret and can never be made secret again. Any damages collected are purely punitive in nature, and would be against the infinger and not the end users. End users are NOT LIABLE, period.
When a violation such as this occurs, it is the legal responsibility of the infinged party to mitigate damages. In this case, the ONLY way damages can be mitigated is by revealing the duplicated code so that it can be excised from the kernel. The idea that revealing the code would only allow the Linux developers to "launder" the code as SCO has stated is ludicrous, because there would be ample evidence remaining in the older versions of the kernel.
What SCO is doing is FUD, plain and simple. They're just drumming up publicity for themselves and trying to scare people into compliance with their ridiculous demands. If IBM's lawyers have any balls whatsoever, they will countersue for anticompetitive practices.
Except that IF their claims are valid, they gain nothing by with-holding the evidence. They cannot claim before a court of law that they should get continued damages when they could have allowed the FOSS community to remedy the situation.
In light of this statement, I believe I know of another reason why they have not made the offending code public. They know that the contributions to Linux are many. The moment they disclose the supposed offending code in public, they run the risk of the REAL author of the code suddenly piping up and saying "Hey! I wrote that goddamn code! How dare those bastards claim it's theirs!". The next thing that happens, SCO gets a visit from a lawyer and forces them onto the defensive, thus weakening their case (such that it is).
reminds me of that theme song from mystery science theater 3000 (something like) "if your wondering how they eat and sleap and other science facts, repeat to yourself its just a show you shood realy just relax"
Oh great. That means not only are we a simulation, but I have the likes of Crow T. Robot watching it and making pithy comments about my life.
Slashdot Mirror
Counterexample: There are thousands of Scientologists in the world. If you met many of them, they would seem to be reasonable people, credible, honest. Yet would you believe any of the tenets of the crackpot Scientology "religion" they would tell you if you asked? (and if you don't know how lunatic these teachings are, visit here or here).
Most reasonable people would answer no, they would not believe any of it. So just because a few thousand people make these claims does not make it so, regardless of their motives. You don't have to be seeking monetary reward to be gullible (as those thousands of Scientologists so adequately prove).
Not necessarily. One of the reasons that SETI is now getting the spotlight is because it has finally stated to lose its "giggle factor". The reason for this is the great advances that astronomy has made in detecting planets around other stars. This alone is proof that it is at least possible for other stars to have planets, so it greatly increases the chances of finding Earthlike planets once the telescope technology is up to snuff. I believe NASA has a new orbital telescope in the works called the Planetfinder or somesuch that may be able to locate planets as small as Earth.
If NASA pulls this off and does find Earthlike planets, you can expect SETI funding to skyrocket, as the idea of intelligent civilizations now starts to fall within the realm of plausibility in the more skeptical community.
Irrelevant. The McCarthy communist witch-hunt was unconstitutional regardless.
From one of the resulting links on this crisis:
The Nullification Crisis of 1832-1833 was resolved without bloodshed in March 1833. Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, who left the vice presidency at the end of 1832 to serve South Carolina in the Senate, drafted a reduced tariff agreement that pacified South Carolina while allowing the Federal government to stand firm.
Sounds like a compromise solution was worked out. So in a way, it did work in that it brought the issue to a head and forced action by Congress.
So you're implying that Scotty accomplished his miracles with the warp engines simply to avoid downsizing by Starfleet.
Sounds a lot like the time that marketing types were wondering why the Chevy Nova was not selling well in Spanish countries, not realizing that in Spanish, "No va" means "It does not go."
NOTE: This may be an urban legend, so take it with a grain of salt. But it makes for a neat example to further illustrate the point.
Wrong.
Look back at the sales of the previous books. You will find they were just as popular before anyone ever announced that movies were going to be made of the books. And note that WB has not committed yet to movies past book 3 (someone correct me on this if I'm wrong). So there is no guarantee that books 4 and 5 will ever make it to a screenwriter.
Kids are buying the new HP novel for the same reason my wife bought and read it and for the same reason that I read it the day after she did: because they like the story and want to see how it ends.
Your previous example, that of people suddenly buying the LOTR books because of the movies, is on target, though I don't think this is a bad thing. Sometimes it takes people seeing a movie to know that there is some good literature out there (I personally don't care for LOTR, either books or movies, but that's my personal preference).
Explain, then, the popularity of the first book, which had little if any hype.
There are different flavors of hype. Hype over a book series like Harry Potter that got its start "honestly" (i.e. people picked up the original book, thought it was cool, and got others to buy it through word-of-mouth) is not the same as hype over something like the Hulk trying to cash-in on recognition of the character from another venue. The HP hype was hardly even necessary, if my wife is typical of the average HP reader. Whe she finished book 4, the first thing she said was "I WANT BOOK 5!!". So people would have bought it without the hype.
I personally read HP because someone I trust and respect (my wife) told me it was good. I personally avoid going to see the Hulk movie because someone I trust and respect (a friend with similar tastes) told me it sucked.
Hype can be effectively ignored. The market continues to drive sales via word-of-mouth. You may get an initial surge of sales from people responding to the hype, then it falls off precipitously when word-of-mouth gets around. This explains why hyped movies will see a great opening weekend, and then plunge into the basement. Sometimes, word-of-mouth can get around so fast that even the opening falls flat (case and point: the disaster area of a movie from Disney that was called Newsies).
My mother-in-law, who once owned a Baskin Robbins (franshise ice cream store for those not familiar with the name), said (and she may have been quoting from someone else): "Give someone good service and they'll tell four people. Give someone bad service and they'll tell ten people."
If you don't care for Harry Potter, that's fine, not everyone does. But by this statement you're implying that you don't read fiction because you're an adult, and I fail to see what one has to do with the other.
My father is in his seventies now and still devours about three novels a week. He is a rather intelligent and well-educated man. He cared for my ailing and home-bound mother for ten years all by himself until she passed away a few months ago. All through that time he read tons of fiction. It helped him remain sane while he saw my mother deteriorate despite his best efforts. A social worker that visited him once said she was astonished at the quality of care he was giving my mother.
Here is a man that is very much an adult. He shoulders his adult responsibilities seriously and with skill. Yet he continued to read fiction during that time. We need fiction as an escape, if nothing else, a way of immersing ourselves in another world as a way of recovering from the harsh realities of real life.
In light of this statement, it's interesting that Rowling is specifically NOT going after fanfic. Recent interviews with Rowling indicates that she knows all about Harry Potter fanfic, and even mentioned one of my wife's favorite such sites by name. Possibly this has to do with the fact that the fanfic sites take great pains to announce very clearly that all characters are copyrighted to Rowling and that all works contained in the site are NOT endorsed by the author. Most of all, no money is made on these stories.
This is an interesting insight into how Rowling is operating. So long as you don't try to make money off of it, she appears to be okay with it.
This is most likely why Freeciv does not have similar problems. They designed their graphics and UI from the ground up. In fact they specifically say on their website that they do not want people contributing graphics lifted directly from the Civilization games. And even though they have rulesets that can simulate a Civ I or Civ II game, look-and-feel cannot be trademarked or copyrighted. The precedent for that was already set when Apple tried to sue Microsoft for copying the look-and-feel of their GUI (or was that the other way around?) and lost.
In a republican big-business-is-good big-business-is-your-friend bow-to-all-corporations administration? I think not. May be the first time in a long while I'm happy to live under a republican president and congress.
Now there's something I thought I would never see on Slashdot: an apropos reference to These Boots Were Made For Walking. My hat is off to you. I'd mod you up if I had moderator points today.
No, he's on board with it because he wants to generate it using nuclear reactors. It's his backdoor means of increasing nuclear power plant construction.
I had to read this several times before I could believe you actually said this. You're actually claiming that someone purposely created a show espousing a conspiracy theory just to make conspiracy theories look bad. If this is not a perfect example of twisting around a fact to make it fit your argument, I don't know what is. Great piece of recursive reasoning there.
Mod this up, dammit.
Thank you for making my point that I mentioned in other posts to this topic. Lots of damning stuff against the government has come out, so why all this and not recovered alien tech? You implied this, but it bears repeating: Everyone in government has an agenda. If letting something leak out that was formerly classified would further that agenda, they would do it without a second thought. Letting an alien coverup leak out would be major kudos for politicians that claim to be on the side of limited government.
You also raised an interesting point about age that further boosts support for the idea that a conspiracy would have fallen apart long ago. As you get turnover from retirements and new hires, there is less of a chance to pass the "coverup baton". Combine this with the fact that the US government documents EVERYTHING and RARELY destroys even the most damning information, and that sets the stage for just about all classified data to be revealed at some point in time.
And the first tinfoil hat conspiracy theories did not come up until years after this
Read my rant titled "Put your tinfoil hats away, please", and educate yourself.
He was asked what was inside the infamous hanger, and he said never to ask that question to him again.OMG, yes!! Wow!! Thanks for reminding me of that! Yes, wow, that one statement conveys sooooooooooooo much. I'm so, like, totally enlightened now! Of course, when someone answers a question like this, it certainly MUST be code for "There's an alien spacecraft in there, but you didn't hear that from me."
Dude, do you think that just MAYBE his response REALLY meant: "I've been ask that same assinine question before by every single UFO nut out there, and I'm goddamn fucking tired of it."
Rather than replying to a whole bunch of tin foil hat brigade posts, I'm going to combine what I know of the case into one post. In my younger and more foolish days, I was a UFO nut and soaked up every account of alien visitors. As I got older, I started looking at many of the facts of the case in a more objective light.
The conclusion I have come to is that the Roswell case is a conglomeration of multiple accounts of unrelated occurences occuring over the span of ten years that were later cobbled together into a single, misinformed account.
There is one very important fact that needs to be made clear about the entire Rosewell bru-ha-ha. A lot the publicity for it, namely the theory that an alien spacecraft crashed there, did not come about until well after the incident. In fact, it was not until as late as 1978 that alien bodies were ever associated with the incident.
So, bearing this in mind, here are some of the little factoids about the case that appear to have perfectly logical explanations:
Ok, this post is long enough. There are lots of other little factoids from the case (the so-called "Missing Nurse", the alleged "red-headed captain" that threatened people if the said anything, etc) that I could go into, but all of these facts can be found with a little investigation.
But I can predict the responses now: "The government planted those other stories to throw us off the trail!" "They're feeding disinformation to us.!" Bull-fucking-shit. Check your history, people. The US government sucks at covering up anything of importance. Anything that remains classified now from that long ago, it's largely because no one considers the information important.
Finally, here's another one for you: You say we recovered advanced alien tech. You say we recovered alien bodies. Then tell me: Where the hell is this technology? 56 years is a hell of a long time. We've gone from vaccuum-tube ENIAC that fills a room to a 2.6 gigahertz PC that sits in your lap. If we can't in that space of time figure out what made any alleged UFO from Roswell tick in that space of time, then either it never happened, or the government scientists are all idiots. And don't claim that things like stealth tech resulted from alien technology. Give humanity credit for be
Interesting title of this thread. Perhaps SCO is the one who should be sued. I found this article on lwn.net. The most telling piece of this article is the following:
Opinder Bawa, Senior Vice President, Engineering and Global Services at The SCO Group, sold all his stock last week. As Vice President of Engineering, Opinder Bawa is in a better position than most to know who put what where.
Anyone who thinks this action is a coincidence, I have this nice bridge I want to sell you.
This is not proper behavior. I work for Sun Microsystems, and as stock-owning employees, we are constantly being warned about making inappropriate stock purchases or sales during times of certain legal or financial proceedings. I cannot believe that SCO management does not have the same cautions placed on them.
You hit the nail on the head.
When I first heard about Mr. "we need to adapt to the higher CO2 levels" Bush advocating hydrogen power, I thought I had accidentally entered a parallel universe. Then I heard that he wants to obtain the hydrogen from nuclear power plants, and then it all made sense.
Mr. Bush is not doing this to further the environmental cause. He's doing this as an excuse to get nuclear power plants built and thus cater to the power company lobbyists.
And to make my position clear on the matter, I am not a rabid anti-nuke person. I happen to believe that nuclear power has its place. But I don't appreciate the backhanded way that Mr. Bush is going about this.
Personally, I am a bit of an inventor and I often come up with different ideas for business software. When I do, I ask myself if I can develop it myself as a stand-alone product. If I can, then I start develop it; and I don't necessarily file a patent.
But sometimes I find that my idea would be most useful as a part of a large existing piece of software. In that case I try to file a patent, and I can then approach a bigger company with my idea. I don't see anything wrong with this.
Software patents are a really sticky mess, so let me pose a question to you to clarify your position on this matter: Are you patenting the idea or the implementation?
If you're not sure, let me throw a hypothetical situation at you, and your answer will determine which of the two you are trying to patent.
You come up with a wonderful idea for making fooble programs faster. You find a way to calculate foobles without having to first obtain a temporary blargle array first, making the programs run three times faster. You patent this.
I'm an open source programmer. I happen to use a program of yours that implements this idea and think, "gee, this is nice, wish I could do this in my fooble programs." I think about it for awhile and come up with a way to do the exact same thing your program does and code it up and release it.
Now, the question is: do you sue me for patent infringement, or not?
If your answer is yes, then you're attempting to patent the intangible idea. If your answer is no, then you're attempting to patent the very tangible implementation
This is why software patents are a very slippery slope. I feel I should not have to kowtow to your patent simply because I found another way to implement it. I feel that if I spent a lot of time and effort figuring out a way to do it without looking at your code, I should be allowed the fruits of my labors. Unfortunately, most people patenting software are patenting the ideas, which causes a great deal of problems where software is concerned.
So if you're patenting the implementation, kudos to you. If you're patenting the idea, then re: your statement:
I don't see anything wrong with this.
You're not looking hard enough.
Except they can't, and any judge worth his salt would see through this for two reasons:
What SCO is doing is FUD, plain and simple. They're just drumming up publicity for themselves and trying to scare people into compliance with their ridiculous demands. If IBM's lawyers have any balls whatsoever, they will countersue for anticompetitive practices.
So then, how many ESRs are in a Shatner? What's the conversion rate?
In light of this statement, I believe I know of another reason why they have not made the offending code public. They know that the contributions to Linux are many. The moment they disclose the supposed offending code in public, they run the risk of the REAL author of the code suddenly piping up and saying "Hey! I wrote that goddamn code! How dare those bastards claim it's theirs!". The next thing that happens, SCO gets a visit from a lawyer and forces them onto the defensive, thus weakening their case (such that it is).
Oh great. That means not only are we a simulation, but I have the likes of Crow T. Robot watching it and making pithy comments about my life.