I agree that alarmists need to put a lid on it. Running around like your hair is on fire certainly doesn't inspire confidence in the logic of anothers arguments, and it's the thoughtful objective response that intelligent people are more often swayed by. By the way, you should notice the source of the first link in this article is from the leading conservative think-tank opposing the existence of Global Warming. Not exactly the first place I would have gone to for an unbiased opinion.
The wise person looks a scientific consensus (and yes, makes some accounting for political leanings in either direction.) One looks at many disciplines, meteorology and long term climatology, chemistry, oceanography, biology, ecology, geology. One investigates all the signs, looking for impacts in hydrology and everything from frequency of drought, flood, and changing global micro-climates to large scale animal migrations and the changing timing of spring and fall do the shorter, warmer, wetter winters. You can't argue the ice in the Arctic is vanishing. You can't argue that the chemistry of the ocean is changing (decreased salinity from fresh water melt and rising acid levels from carbonic acid due to rising CO2 levels.) Heat trapping and reflection is incredibly complex. A a single large volcanic eruption (like Mt. Pinatubo) can emit enough SO2 to completely skew the results for any specific decade. That's why you need to look at long term trends over decades and centuries to see where the planet is heading.
I continue to hear critics of "global weather change" cherry pick items to rail against. I see nobody from that camp providing a cohesive response to tens of thousands of different phenomena all pointing in the same direction. There is sadly little informed debate to the contrary, more and more those arguing against the existence of something serious happening to our environment sound like relics from the flat earth society. I won't apologize for people's shoddy work on either side of the issue. When you deal with people there will always be clowns. I will say that folks with personal axes to grind on this topic simply can't address tens of thousands of intelligent, professional, scientists all over the world who've created a consistent, cohesive body of theory and information that concludes with near certainty that we are dangerously close to destroying our environment through the wanton burning of fossil fuels.
I have an open mind, show me a body of work with even 10% of the depth, breadth, and diversity, and I will gladly concede that there is good reason the worlds experts on the topics (many topics) touched by this issue.
If a win-centric network wants to use this as an excuse to exclude OSX, I'd have to call BS. The download comes with a dvd iso, so if you need multiple copies of hard install disks you can burn them till the cows come home. This is just a much more efficient and cost effective way to distribute the release. DUH!
Let's save everyone a lot of time and energy. Have D.C. Bureaucrats duct tape classified documents to one anothers' ass, Then en masse assemble at Radio City doing the Can-Can in a dance line. Whatever you can read... you can keep.
Besides saving tremendous time and energy on all sides, it should prove incredibly entertaining... perhaps we can sell tickets to help reduce the deficit.
Have you ever heard of the Malay Monkey Trap. You put a piece of fruit in a hollow log the bore a small hole where the fruit is. The hole is just large enough for the monkey to reach in and grab the fruit, but too small to get the fist full of fruit out. Logic would dictate the monkey would drop the fruit and leave. Instead, the greedy little monkey will hang onto the fruit even in the face of mortal threat.
It would appear that the corporate controllers of our music and motion picture entertainment have descended from primate ancestors but just barely.
I'm sorry but that's just plain mistaken. The modern university hoards the results of it's researchers as a means to fund their own bottom line and they are every bit as much pandering to Corporate interest as any other industry today. Corporations have cut research spending because they have become myopic and obsessed with quarterly earnings. The idea of investing any significant amount for the possible long term benefit to the company or humanity in some distant future is a quaint idea from some distant past that would get a modern CEO shot before the sun rose. What you say may have had some resonance 30 years ago, today the simple truth is major universities are just another corporate whore looking for their slice
Actually we should fund homeopathics, homeopathically. Give them a dollars and tell them is should have the impact of millions of dollars, then to go and sin no more.
To respond to both of you, modern nutrition is a tremendously open field for research. We still haven't begun to plumb the depths of what is optimally healthy concerning nutrition and how it relates to age, genetics, epigenetics, metabolic pathways, gender, micro vs. macro nutrients, pollution and introduced chemicals in our diets, endocrinology, immune response and allergens, stress, and the complex relationship between food and psychology. It would be a fair thing to say that the vast majority of modern diseases we experience in developed countries today have their roots in diet and nutrition or the lack thereof.
Congratulations, you are player 6,534,862,514.
You can expect to receive the thumb-drive for play some time shortly before this universes energy death. What, no PCs? Huh, no human race? The earth is a cinder and the sun is cold dead lump? Bummer dude.
I'm sorry but this is frightfully myopic. The patent system is precisely the way it is because American Corporations have paid a lot of money to shape it into a bludgeon against small players. What works for Corporations is that every atom of IP is owned and controlled, and forced to earn back the cost of fencing it off by making the IP landscape into a patchwork quilt of defended fiefdoms.
Corporations aren't interested in innovation, they could care less. They aren't interested in human rights, diversity, or social consciousness. They have one goal, PROFIT. PERIOD. Anything else is a vanishingly distant second. Any means by which they can illicit greater profit is good, anything else is bad. Simple. By hijacking the patent system into a machine to help them carve up thought space, and arming their claims to the teeth, they exercise control with impunity, and can force lesser interests to go home empty-handed. It's the same way with recorded art, literature, and more and more that with with meaningful information.
In short, the system no longer serves the people, or the best interest of humanity. It serves its owner, the Corporation. Logic, decency, dignity, even survivability all go out the window in the face of Corporations taking what they want. The Corporate entity is a petulant child with ADD.
Last night on 60 Minutes, Billy Walters was interviewed. He's won hundreds of millions of dollars gambling on sports (of course when you watch him do it, you see how little gambling is involved.) The point he made, was that he lost countless millions on Wallstreet. Exxon, Enron, Worldcom... those are the crooks not Vegas. America Corporate enterprise, is deceitful, short-sighted, greedy, ignorant, and superstitious. It willfully lies, then believes it own lies. Anything to justify one more piece, just a little more please, another cut of the American Pie. Can anybody be surprised by what the Patent Office has become? When the Dons have to yield to the Corpos for being the top scumbags, thats a very telling state for modern America Business.
This is so stupid. Human beings have been making art for most of the last 100,000 years. Art adorning cave walls, painted by the light of torches in iron oxide ochres with chewed sticks, still have the power move and touch the deepest corners of our souls, and shine light into the humanity that created them. The tools are nothing. An artist can paint with a bloody finger. There is no magic in the tool. Some tools are better designed than others and the perfect tools allows the artist to express him/herself without consideration, but in my experience, its the hundreds and sometimes thousands of hours with a given tool that makes it perfect for the given artist. Which is understandably why an artist is hesitant to invest that kind of time in learning a new tool.
There is something sympathetic about the need for freedom in artistic expression. There is a place for libre art.
Sadly the available evidence doesn't bear this out... moderation in excess is death by boredom, and in exercise we learn wind sprints are vital to building functional capacity. So even moderation should at best be done in moderation.
Re:Time to rename the GNU Image Manipulation Progr
on
When Software Offends
·
· Score: 1
Sorry, too late... there're a whole bunch of folks who have gimp fetishes... fact is there's fetish for just about anything. What kind of software would you associate with "scat play with pregnant teenage leather mamas in high heels"? I'm kinda thinking Windows security myself.
By the same token, having some consideration for the feeling and culture of others would be consistent with a community of intelligent adults committed to collaboration and the building of productive resources and societies. I understand that its the easiest thing in the world to accidentally injure anothers sensibilities. We live in a world where trying to keep the peace is at least challenging, but the benefits of showing consideration are well worth the investment. The adult apologizes if a mistake has been made and explains that it was simply an oversight. Working to heal the rift. Grow the relationship. This is civics 101.
Don't confuse a small faux pas, and taking a public dump on the white-house lawn. One is a perfectly reasonable mistake, the other is an act expressly designed to offend and inflame. Calling a software package "Date-Rape" is perfectly within the rights of a developer, but he has no moral or logical ground to stand on when the folks with torches and pitchforks show up... he's a jerk, and for him, the fruits of sin have just ripened. Then if he renames the package "Ruffy", its not an act of conciliation but one of raising a middle finger in childish defiance... "Oh, I named it after my dog "Ruffy"... yeah right.
I'm not a fan of censoring people, nor am I a fan of belligerent childish brats seeing how far they can push people before a house lands on them. That kind of testing of authority should resolve itself at about the same time as pimples. The reason you come down hard on thoughtless behavior like this is because the act of objectifying women results in 1 in 3 women being raped in America in their lifetime. That's a sick statistic, but it points to a fundamentally unconscionable way of behaving. By all means, be playful, have fun, even shake up the narrow minds that would have society be a homogenized mono-culture. Just treat people with respect and dignity while you do it. Waking people up is completely appropriate, beating people up, never is, not for, not against.
Here, Here...
Corporations are forced to be sensitive to certain behavior because we live in litigious times, and being sued for sexual harassment hits them where they live... the bottom line. I'm no fan of either Big Brother or censorship, but to willfully throw people under the bus (in this case an entire gender), because it tickles either your fancy, or some delayed sense of post-pubescent rebellion is simply irresponsible, and worthy of both contempt and pity.
When any person, in any social circumstance feels their best self expression would be puerile, offensive, and grotesque, it is the opportunity of the larger community to simply rise to the occasion. Clearly stating that the community finds this individual a sad little person with some very peculiar axes to grind. Mostly ignoring him until he completely goes away would be the very best way to handle him (childish behavior is often a public attempt at garnering attention.)
"Trollish Behavior" should be its own reward. Antisocial behavior should be responded to with the loss of social contact. In short, act like a jerk and you should spend a little time jerking all by your lonesome... or at least until you get that you are not the center of the universe. People are not objects here for your amusement and that behaving like a perfect rectal pore should gain you the love and popularity of said orifice. Let him call his software anything he wants (perhaps his next package can be titled "Baby-In-A-Blender" tm), and let us simply walk away from him in unison. Things are competitive these days, let him stigmatize his work into oblivion, who's the fool then?
This is exactly right. Thorium is abundant, has no ability to produce nuclear weapons (which by the way is the original reason the super powers avoided it), and is an incredibly clean relatively safe technology available this very moment. Helium cooled pebble bed reactors are also looking very promising. Inherently run-away proof. Easy to scale (from tiny reactors for neighborhoods to huge reactors for entire regions) they have the added benefit of binding the fuel in stable ceramics, allowing you to use them up almost completely, then store the waste safely afterwards.
We unfortunately suffer the same stupid problems with greener and renewable technologies that have made fossil fuels such a problem. Intrenched moneyed interests keep rigging the game to line their pockets, as opposed to actually producing a solution to the problems we currently face. Case in point, the use of ethanol in the United States has degenerated into an economic, social and environmental disaster. The conversion of corn into fuel is brain damaged. It actually takes more carbon to produce that gallon of ethanol than you'll ever save by burning gasoline instead. The impact of corn to fuel on food availability and markets is itself a disaster. Finally, the entire thing becomes nothing more than one more exercise in corporate agro-business pumping our tax dollars into their pockets. Its not even a subtle form of financial rape. Its high time that governments (all too often bought and sold) should fund pure research (ie. not for profit) particularly in the area of producing energy that doesn't create greater problems than it solves. We now have nuclear technologies that can help us get to better and more environmentally sound technologies in 10-50 years. Pursuing this vigorously is the only sane avenue I can imagine under the current circumstances.
I'm sorry, but there are two forces at work that I think will mitigate the impact you speak of;
1. People in out culture now seem to have the attention span of mosquitoes, and the collective memory of mayflies.
2. The rest of the providers out there seem to be screwing over their customer semi annually, and folks are getting numb to the rape.
Which isn't to say that Oracle isn't growing an army of folks who despise it. They are. They just have a customer base that may be sufficiently tied to the technology Oracle provides that it would take more than an occasional ravishing to turn them away.
A wise man once said businesses have tremendous inertia, it is at least as difficult to kill a business as is it to start one. Oracle has a lot of money in it's war chest. It can afford to do stupid things for the rest of this decade if it had to.
All y'all are wasting a lot of clocks debating whether or not this is an act of evil perpetrated by Oracle on loyal Sun customers. I think you're missing the point. Oracle is both pragmatic, and self absorbed. It doesn't give a a fly fsck at a rolling donut about Sun's customers unless they now become Oracle customers, and the sooner it divests itself of what it see's as a cost center (as opposed to a profit center) the happier it thinks its going to be.
If you look at the history and corporate culture of the company, it is not particularly interested in making people warm or fuzzy. It's not fascinated by making close ties to the larger community of tech businesses, open source organizations, or in any meaningful way serving the greater human condition, save its singular focus of making Larry Ellison's deep pocket even deeper.
Is Oracle myopic in burning relationships with potential customers, who should have been a captive audience? You betcha. Is Oracle gutting vital technology, that had promising value for both past and potentially future users of all things Sun? Of this there's no doubt. If a bean counter told Larry he could make an extra million dollars a day by simply pissing on babies, they urinals in the Emerald City would be lined with newborns. He's just that kind of guy. He lives in a world whose vision is a quarter deep, and whose only motive is profit. This is an ignorant, shallow, and mercenary perspective, but that makes him no better or worse than the majority of people running American businesses today. We built the system (or at least let it grow itself) to reward arrogance, blunt force, social stupidity, and a sort of moral vacuum.
We can't honestly complain about anything Larry does, it would be like complaining that a wolverine is a stinking, ill tempered, vicious little bugger, when in fact that's how nature designed it, and you should just make a practice of cutting it a wide berth. The best thing those of us with milder natures, and perspectives based on somewhat broader design, can do, is to happily take away control of that which Oracle will no longer support, and create resources and communities to empower, promote, advance, and evolve these things we love. If Oracle is going to cut us out of its equation, we should simply reciprocate and take the tillers of our collective ships of fate. Sooner or later in his haste and ignorance, Larry will toss the baby out with the bath water. It's a fait accompli.
In the meantime, rather than complaining about the rotten things Oracle does, simply look at solving the problem at hand. It seems that we now have a fairly solid future for Open Solaris. Perhaps its time we all looked at creating an Open Source alternative to Solaris itself, one that supports old and new iron, one that's more interested in creating something really great, than looking for new and exciting ways of squeezing another buck out of its customer base. OR not, your choice. I mean we're free to be stupid too, but then you wouldn't have Larry to blame.
I'm afraid the trade-off between sound and smell will ruin any benefit... plastic with holes will simply not prevent you from getting the full olfactory experience of what your neighbor has been depositing!
One possibility was that the waves of largest amplitude were infrasonic, and only after traveling some distance, could they generate sufficient harmonic scatter that the sound would be audible to human beings.
Not necessarily. Look at the dimples on a golf ball or the irregular surface of whales, and what you find are structures that create small rotating eddies all over the surface of the object, acting like soft ball bearing and significantly reducing drag. So, if you shape the sound reduction holes right, you can actually decrease drag dramatically. As well, if you choose the plastic carefully (laminated sheets of polycarbonate, and perhaps a kevlar or carbon fiber fabric) you should have something stronger than metal, more durable, and able to take the worst possible beating with impunity.
To paraphrase George Carlin "Selfish, Greedy, Stupid, Corrupt, politicians didn't just fall out of some warp in the space-time continuum from a parallel dimension. You get politicians like that from a society like that."
Before you go clubbing the folks in office, you may want to see what its like where come from and who paid to put them there. Crappy politicians are usually the result of crappy voters and even crappier special interests looking to have a politician in their back pocket. So if you're going to indict the failing political system, you may want to look at failings of Big Business, American Education, the kelptocracy that has become our two party system, and the American people who for the most part get their ideas and dogma from a box owned by the those previously mentioned business interests.
Until the pain threshold in this country exceeds the numbness of its people, things will continue to get worse, and the greedy few will take ever more.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that alarmists need to put a lid on it. Running around like your hair is on fire certainly doesn't inspire confidence in the logic of anothers arguments, and it's the thoughtful objective response that intelligent people are more often swayed by. By the way, you should notice the source of the first link in this article is from the leading conservative think-tank opposing the existence of Global Warming. Not exactly the first place I would have gone to for an unbiased opinion.
The wise person looks a scientific consensus (and yes, makes some accounting for political leanings in either direction.) One looks at many disciplines, meteorology and long term climatology, chemistry, oceanography, biology, ecology, geology. One investigates all the signs, looking for impacts in hydrology and everything from frequency of drought, flood, and changing global micro-climates to large scale animal migrations and the changing timing of spring and fall do the shorter, warmer, wetter winters. You can't argue the ice in the Arctic is vanishing. You can't argue that the chemistry of the ocean is changing (decreased salinity from fresh water melt and rising acid levels from carbonic acid due to rising CO2 levels.) Heat trapping and reflection is incredibly complex. A a single large volcanic eruption (like Mt. Pinatubo) can emit enough SO2 to completely skew the results for any specific decade. That's why you need to look at long term trends over decades and centuries to see where the planet is heading.
I continue to hear critics of "global weather change" cherry pick items to rail against. I see nobody from that camp providing a cohesive response to tens of thousands of different phenomena all pointing in the same direction. There is sadly little informed debate to the contrary, more and more those arguing against the existence of something serious happening to our environment sound like relics from the flat earth society. I won't apologize for people's shoddy work on either side of the issue. When you deal with people there will always be clowns. I will say that folks with personal axes to grind on this topic simply can't address tens of thousands of intelligent, professional, scientists all over the world who've created a consistent, cohesive body of theory and information that concludes with near certainty that we are dangerously close to destroying our environment through the wanton burning of fossil fuels.
I have an open mind, show me a body of work with even 10% of the depth, breadth, and diversity, and I will gladly concede that there is good reason the worlds experts on the topics (many topics) touched by this issue.
If a win-centric network wants to use this as an excuse to exclude OSX, I'd have to call BS. The download comes with a dvd iso, so if you need multiple copies of hard install disks you can burn them till the cows come home. This is just a much more efficient and cost effective way to distribute the release. DUH!
I need new glasses... I read ripples as nipples...
"Creating huge nipples throughout the projects..." makes me think they need to turn up the thermostat!
Let's save everyone a lot of time and energy. Have D.C. Bureaucrats duct tape classified documents to one anothers' ass, Then en masse assemble at Radio City doing the Can-Can in a dance line. Whatever you can read... you can keep.
Besides saving tremendous time and energy on all sides, it should prove incredibly entertaining... perhaps we can sell tickets to help reduce the deficit.
Have you ever heard of the Malay Monkey Trap. You put a piece of fruit in a hollow log the bore a small hole where the fruit is. The hole is just large enough for the monkey to reach in and grab the fruit, but too small to get the fist full of fruit out. Logic would dictate the monkey would drop the fruit and leave. Instead, the greedy little monkey will hang onto the fruit even in the face of mortal threat.
It would appear that the corporate controllers of our music and motion picture entertainment have descended from primate ancestors but just barely.
I'm sorry but that's just plain mistaken. The modern university hoards the results of it's researchers as a means to fund their own bottom line and they are every bit as much pandering to Corporate interest as any other industry today. Corporations have cut research spending because they have become myopic and obsessed with quarterly earnings. The idea of investing any significant amount for the possible long term benefit to the company or humanity in some distant future is a quaint idea from some distant past that would get a modern CEO shot before the sun rose. What you say may have had some resonance 30 years ago, today the simple truth is major universities are just another corporate whore looking for their slice
Actually we should fund homeopathics, homeopathically. Give them a dollars and tell them is should have the impact of millions of dollars, then to go and sin no more.
To respond to both of you, modern nutrition is a tremendously open field for research. We still haven't begun to plumb the depths of what is optimally healthy concerning nutrition and how it relates to age, genetics, epigenetics, metabolic pathways, gender, micro vs. macro nutrients, pollution and introduced chemicals in our diets, endocrinology, immune response and allergens, stress, and the complex relationship between food and psychology. It would be a fair thing to say that the vast majority of modern diseases we experience in developed countries today have their roots in diet and nutrition or the lack thereof.
Congratulations, you are player 6,534,862,514.
You can expect to receive the thumb-drive for play some time shortly before this universes energy death. What, no PCs? Huh, no human race? The earth is a cinder and the sun is cold dead lump? Bummer dude.
I'm sorry but this is frightfully myopic. The patent system is precisely the way it is because American Corporations have paid a lot of money to shape it into a bludgeon against small players. What works for Corporations is that every atom of IP is owned and controlled, and forced to earn back the cost of fencing it off by making the IP landscape into a patchwork quilt of defended fiefdoms.
Corporations aren't interested in innovation, they could care less. They aren't interested in human rights, diversity, or social consciousness. They have one goal, PROFIT. PERIOD. Anything else is a vanishingly distant second. Any means by which they can illicit greater profit is good, anything else is bad. Simple. By hijacking the patent system into a machine to help them carve up thought space, and arming their claims to the teeth, they exercise control with impunity, and can force lesser interests to go home empty-handed. It's the same way with recorded art, literature, and more and more that with with meaningful information.
In short, the system no longer serves the people, or the best interest of humanity. It serves its owner, the Corporation. Logic, decency, dignity, even survivability all go out the window in the face of Corporations taking what they want. The Corporate entity is a petulant child with ADD.
Last night on 60 Minutes, Billy Walters was interviewed. He's won hundreds of millions of dollars gambling on sports (of course when you watch him do it, you see how little gambling is involved.) The point he made, was that he lost countless millions on Wallstreet. Exxon, Enron, Worldcom... those are the crooks not Vegas. America Corporate enterprise, is deceitful, short-sighted, greedy, ignorant, and superstitious. It willfully lies, then believes it own lies. Anything to justify one more piece, just a little more please, another cut of the American Pie. Can anybody be surprised by what the Patent Office has become? When the Dons have to yield to the Corpos for being the top scumbags, thats a very telling state for modern America Business.
This is so stupid. Human beings have been making art for most of the last 100,000 years. Art adorning cave walls, painted by the light of torches in iron oxide ochres with chewed sticks, still have the power move and touch the deepest corners of our souls, and shine light into the humanity that created them. The tools are nothing. An artist can paint with a bloody finger. There is no magic in the tool. Some tools are better designed than others and the perfect tools allows the artist to express him/herself without consideration, but in my experience, its the hundreds and sometimes thousands of hours with a given tool that makes it perfect for the given artist. Which is understandably why an artist is hesitant to invest that kind of time in learning a new tool.
There is something sympathetic about the need for freedom in artistic expression. There is a place for libre art.
Sadly the available evidence doesn't bear this out... moderation in excess is death by boredom, and in exercise we learn wind sprints are vital to building functional capacity. So even moderation should at best be done in moderation.
Sorry, too late... there're a whole bunch of folks who have gimp fetishes... fact is there's fetish for just about anything. What kind of software would you associate with "scat play with pregnant teenage leather mamas in high heels"? I'm kinda thinking Windows security myself.
By the same token, having some consideration for the feeling and culture of others would be consistent with a community of intelligent adults committed to collaboration and the building of productive resources and societies. I understand that its the easiest thing in the world to accidentally injure anothers sensibilities. We live in a world where trying to keep the peace is at least challenging, but the benefits of showing consideration are well worth the investment. The adult apologizes if a mistake has been made and explains that it was simply an oversight. Working to heal the rift. Grow the relationship. This is civics 101.
Don't confuse a small faux pas, and taking a public dump on the white-house lawn. One is a perfectly reasonable mistake, the other is an act expressly designed to offend and inflame. Calling a software package "Date-Rape" is perfectly within the rights of a developer, but he has no moral or logical ground to stand on when the folks with torches and pitchforks show up... he's a jerk, and for him, the fruits of sin have just ripened. Then if he renames the package "Ruffy", its not an act of conciliation but one of raising a middle finger in childish defiance... "Oh, I named it after my dog "Ruffy"... yeah right.
I'm not a fan of censoring people, nor am I a fan of belligerent childish brats seeing how far they can push people before a house lands on them. That kind of testing of authority should resolve itself at about the same time as pimples. The reason you come down hard on thoughtless behavior like this is because the act of objectifying women results in 1 in 3 women being raped in America in their lifetime. That's a sick statistic, but it points to a fundamentally unconscionable way of behaving. By all means, be playful, have fun, even shake up the narrow minds that would have society be a homogenized mono-culture. Just treat people with respect and dignity while you do it. Waking people up is completely appropriate, beating people up, never is, not for, not against.
Here, Here...
Corporations are forced to be sensitive to certain behavior because we live in litigious times, and being sued for sexual harassment hits them where they live... the bottom line. I'm no fan of either Big Brother or censorship, but to willfully throw people under the bus (in this case an entire gender), because it tickles either your fancy, or some delayed sense of post-pubescent rebellion is simply irresponsible, and worthy of both contempt and pity.
When any person, in any social circumstance feels their best self expression would be puerile, offensive, and grotesque, it is the opportunity of the larger community to simply rise to the occasion. Clearly stating that the community finds this individual a sad little person with some very peculiar axes to grind. Mostly ignoring him until he completely goes away would be the very best way to handle him (childish behavior is often a public attempt at garnering attention.)
"Trollish Behavior" should be its own reward. Antisocial behavior should be responded to with the loss of social contact. In short, act like a jerk and you should spend a little time jerking all by your lonesome... or at least until you get that you are not the center of the universe. People are not objects here for your amusement and that behaving like a perfect rectal pore should gain you the love and popularity of said orifice. Let him call his software anything he wants (perhaps his next package can be titled "Baby-In-A-Blender" tm), and let us simply walk away from him in unison. Things are competitive these days, let him stigmatize his work into oblivion, who's the fool then?
This is exactly right. Thorium is abundant, has no ability to produce nuclear weapons (which by the way is the original reason the super powers avoided it), and is an incredibly clean relatively safe technology available this very moment. Helium cooled pebble bed reactors are also looking very promising. Inherently run-away proof. Easy to scale (from tiny reactors for neighborhoods to huge reactors for entire regions) they have the added benefit of binding the fuel in stable ceramics, allowing you to use them up almost completely, then store the waste safely afterwards.
We unfortunately suffer the same stupid problems with greener and renewable technologies that have made fossil fuels such a problem. Intrenched moneyed interests keep rigging the game to line their pockets, as opposed to actually producing a solution to the problems we currently face. Case in point, the use of ethanol in the United States has degenerated into an economic, social and environmental disaster. The conversion of corn into fuel is brain damaged. It actually takes more carbon to produce that gallon of ethanol than you'll ever save by burning gasoline instead. The impact of corn to fuel on food availability and markets is itself a disaster. Finally, the entire thing becomes nothing more than one more exercise in corporate agro-business pumping our tax dollars into their pockets. Its not even a subtle form of financial rape. Its high time that governments (all too often bought and sold) should fund pure research (ie. not for profit) particularly in the area of producing energy that doesn't create greater problems than it solves. We now have nuclear technologies that can help us get to better and more environmentally sound technologies in 10-50 years. Pursuing this vigorously is the only sane avenue I can imagine under the current circumstances.
I'm sorry, but there are two forces at work that I think will mitigate the impact you speak of;
1. People in out culture now seem to have the attention span of mosquitoes, and the collective memory of mayflies.
2. The rest of the providers out there seem to be screwing over their customer semi annually, and folks are getting numb to the rape.
Which isn't to say that Oracle isn't growing an army of folks who despise it. They are. They just have a customer base that may be sufficiently tied to the technology Oracle provides that it would take more than an occasional ravishing to turn them away.
A wise man once said businesses have tremendous inertia, it is at least as difficult to kill a business as is it to start one. Oracle has a lot of money in it's war chest. It can afford to do stupid things for the rest of this decade if it had to.
All y'all are wasting a lot of clocks debating whether or not this is an act of evil perpetrated by Oracle on loyal Sun customers. I think you're missing the point. Oracle is both pragmatic, and self absorbed. It doesn't give a a fly fsck at a rolling donut about Sun's customers unless they now become Oracle customers, and the sooner it divests itself of what it see's as a cost center (as opposed to a profit center) the happier it thinks its going to be.
If you look at the history and corporate culture of the company, it is not particularly interested in making people warm or fuzzy. It's not fascinated by making close ties to the larger community of tech businesses, open source organizations, or in any meaningful way serving the greater human condition, save its singular focus of making Larry Ellison's deep pocket even deeper.
Is Oracle myopic in burning relationships with potential customers, who should have been a captive audience? You betcha. Is Oracle gutting vital technology, that had promising value for both past and potentially future users of all things Sun? Of this there's no doubt. If a bean counter told Larry he could make an extra million dollars a day by simply pissing on babies, they urinals in the Emerald City would be lined with newborns. He's just that kind of guy. He lives in a world whose vision is a quarter deep, and whose only motive is profit. This is an ignorant, shallow, and mercenary perspective, but that makes him no better or worse than the majority of people running American businesses today. We built the system (or at least let it grow itself) to reward arrogance, blunt force, social stupidity, and a sort of moral vacuum.
We can't honestly complain about anything Larry does, it would be like complaining that a wolverine is a stinking, ill tempered, vicious little bugger, when in fact that's how nature designed it, and you should just make a practice of cutting it a wide berth. The best thing those of us with milder natures, and perspectives based on somewhat broader design, can do, is to happily take away control of that which Oracle will no longer support, and create resources and communities to empower, promote, advance, and evolve these things we love. If Oracle is going to cut us out of its equation, we should simply reciprocate and take the tillers of our collective ships of fate. Sooner or later in his haste and ignorance, Larry will toss the baby out with the bath water. It's a fait accompli.
In the meantime, rather than complaining about the rotten things Oracle does, simply look at solving the problem at hand. It seems that we now have a fairly solid future for Open Solaris. Perhaps its time we all looked at creating an Open Source alternative to Solaris itself, one that supports old and new iron, one that's more interested in creating something really great, than looking for new and exciting ways of squeezing another buck out of its customer base. OR not, your choice. I mean we're free to be stupid too, but then you wouldn't have Larry to blame.
Hhhmmmm, a taco shell? What might you put in a taco shell? A script??? What kind of sauce do you put on that?
I'm afraid the trade-off between sound and smell will ruin any benefit... plastic with holes will simply not prevent you from getting the full olfactory experience of what your neighbor has been depositing!
One possibility was that the waves of largest amplitude were infrasonic, and only after traveling some distance, could they generate sufficient harmonic scatter that the sound would be audible to human beings.
Not necessarily. Look at the dimples on a golf ball or the irregular surface of whales, and what you find are structures that create small rotating eddies all over the surface of the object, acting like soft ball bearing and significantly reducing drag. So, if you shape the sound reduction holes right, you can actually decrease drag dramatically. As well, if you choose the plastic carefully (laminated sheets of polycarbonate, and perhaps a kevlar or carbon fiber fabric) you should have something stronger than metal, more durable, and able to take the worst possible beating with impunity.
I said "MAX, Raise the cone of silence!!!"
"WHAT?!!! I can't hear you!!!
To paraphrase George Carlin "Selfish, Greedy, Stupid, Corrupt, politicians didn't just fall out of some warp in the space-time continuum from a parallel dimension. You get politicians like that from a society like that."
Before you go clubbing the folks in office, you may want to see what its like where come from and who paid to put them there. Crappy politicians are usually the result of crappy voters and even crappier special interests looking to have a politician in their back pocket. So if you're going to indict the failing political system, you may want to look at failings of Big Business, American Education, the kelptocracy that has become our two party system, and the American people who for the most part get their ideas and dogma from a box owned by the those previously mentioned business interests.
Until the pain threshold in this country exceeds the numbness of its people, things will continue to get worse, and the greedy few will take ever more.
"New Boss, same as the Old Boss..." -- The Who (Won't be fooled again)