The only thing pesticides and herbicides do is kill. There are plenty of people that consider killing *anything* an unjustifiable evil. You happen to place only the killing of humans in that category, apparently. That's fine, but it certainly isn't universal.
More to the point, guns and the electric chair kill humans. Is any sort of technical discussion of them unacceptable without tainting it with political and ideological arguments? Cigarettes and cars tend to kill. How about them? Sure, they have other benefits, but so do bombs -- I guarantee you that in the '40s, most US citizens would have praised the Bomb as something that prevented the United States from having to do a bloody invasion of the Japanese home islands. There's clearly someone benfiting there.
Well...I suspect most people would say the same thing about murder, yet duels were once considered quite acceptable -- honorable, in fact.
War's ranged over quite a bit, from a highly ritualized sort that the Mayas engaged in, to "wars" of twenty people in Scandinavia. I'm sure there were folks that disliked these wars, but there were certainly also folks that considered them honorable, and good. Beneficial.
As a matter of fact, a lot of folks will tell you that the only time you get improvement of the human race is *when* you get an evolution-advancing struggle for limited resources. If nothing of a species ever dies, you never evolve.
I, for one, am more than willing to look at war objectively. I'm certainly not going to call war inherently bad. It generally makes some people suffer, but it's quite easy to argue over what's "good". If you're a short-term utilitarian, and the group that loses is not causing massive social damage, then war is clearly bad. However, if you don't simply value "good" as the sum total of all human happiness (and that's a bit fuzzy -- it's been proven to be an impossible metric to use), then you might consider your own happiness, or that of your children to be superordinate to that of a random Mongolian's. The reason the United States is so wealthy and powerful is precisely because of war. Same goes for the United Kingdom, and quite a few other states.
Furthermore, this issue is really about bombs, not even war. If your own nation owns a better bomb -- as the UK does, say, with nuclear weapons -- it's most unlikely that anyone's going to attack you. They can't win. So even if you refuse to ever approve of war, you can still approve of work on improving bombs.
Let's reverse the question. Why hamper a technical discussion about bomb efficiency with irrelevant issues and issues of morality? There are certainly times and places for discussions of the morality of weaponry, and this is not one of them.
Not a couple hundred years ago, if someone mentioned evolution, someone would pop up and ask why you aren't inserting the word "heretical" into the discussion. And if they aren't...well, is that because of guilt? Fear of God? Same thing you're doing here, different topics involved.
Instead of attacking SCO (SCO doesn't care -- their senior management is busy packing their bags and selling stock -- the company and anyone but senior management there is already screwed), let's *fix* this.
Somebody with access to SCO source and anti-cheating tools -- you know, code comparers that look for changed variable names, etc (though I doubt that there are even changed variable names if this is an issue, since they managed to convince the Deutche Bank guy), please run the thing on the SCO and Linux codebases and let us know what, if anything, is duplicated.
Doing such a check does not, AFAIK, violate any terms of SCO's license. An IBM employee should probably check with legal first, but it seems like doing so would be a major benefit to everyone (except) SCO.
Micropayments do NOT comprise a *new* business model. Furthermore, that business model isn't even going to be doable until there's an easy, secure way to use them.
That probably means smart cards or similar deployed all over. AmEx Blue is an interesting idea.
I don't think payments to a single company will ever succeed, with the exception of any companies that come out with truly mind-blowing content, and there can't be many of those.
The only way payments on the Web will succeed in the current economic environment is with a "TV package" style system, Currently, you pay $30/month, and get 50 channels. Same thing is going to have to go with commercial websites. You pay $30/month, and you get access to an assortment of 50 good commercial websites.
Any website that thinks that the general populace is going to pay $10-$30 a month for a single site is really pushing their luck. People pay that for a TV or a phone -- something they constantly get good out of -- not a website.
Google *might*, if they were lucky, be able to pull it off. I can't imagine many other folks doing so, though.
Why doesn't a powerful (rich) Linux supporter like IBM buy out SCO and make all this mess go away?
If *you* were the CEO of a company and another company sued you with bogus claims designed to try to fuck you over in the press as much as possible, would your immediate reaction be to try to make those other execs wealthy and throw away a large chunk of your own money?
It's just that the execs decided to pump-and-dump to gut the investors.
However, it was quite stupid to piss off important people in the US government, who *will* be the people who can start SEC investigations and assign jail time for fraud.
Normally, execs can get away with this, but I'm pretty sure that they're going to get nailed for defrauding investors on this one. Too much publicity. Going after the government was just stupid.
Actually, I'm also interested -- I know that some of the things that can expose executives to personal liability is falsifying corporate information. Does anyone know specifically what these cases are, and whether any of the SCO folks might get hit by this.
That is so mature. This ascii art of an abused rectum will surely convince them that Linux users deserve to be taken seriously, and are nowhere near as mad as mac users.
If I were thinking about buying SCO Openserver for a secure server at *my* business and went to their website, and their website had been broken into, it sure shouldn't strengthen my convictions.
Homeland security needs to get on these terrorists.
Given that the Office of Homeland Security was just charged $699 per copy of Linux they have, I strongly suspect that *some* government legislative action will be taking place.
Does anyone know if SCO is successfully collecting on this? Is money being made?
Lets assume that they are. And lets assume they loose the lawsuit, and are proven not to own any Linux code.
What then? Do those people get their money back?
Well...no. It's a pretty safe guess that SCO isn't dumb. They'll be setting you up with a license (note: one may want to be fucking careful signing into licensing agreements with SCO, considering IBM's situation) that says that they won't press charges against you for any claims they have on Linux, or something along those lines. You aren't *buying* anything.
What happens to the SCO execs?
My guess was that originally, they'd just walk way from this, as a pump-n-dump. If so, it's going to happen soon. You don't go after the US government and expect them to just sit there and not examine the legal issues. They'll probably be dumping within a month.
They may have taken this too far, though. They're in so many newspapers that they may get hung out to dry for fraud. Kinda like Enron. You can only screw N people with M media attention before you start getting into hot water.
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing pesticides and herbicides do is kill. There are plenty of people that consider killing *anything* an unjustifiable evil. You happen to place only the killing of humans in that category, apparently. That's fine, but it certainly isn't universal.
More to the point, guns and the electric chair kill humans. Is any sort of technical discussion of them unacceptable without tainting it with political and ideological arguments? Cigarettes and cars tend to kill. How about them? Sure, they have other benefits, but so do bombs -- I guarantee you that in the '40s, most US citizens would have praised the Bomb as something that prevented the United States from having to do a bloody invasion of the Japanese home islands. There's clearly someone benfiting there.
Well...I suspect most people would say the same thing about murder, yet duels were once considered quite acceptable -- honorable, in fact.
War's ranged over quite a bit, from a highly ritualized sort that the Mayas engaged in, to "wars" of twenty people in Scandinavia. I'm sure there were folks that disliked these wars, but there were certainly also folks that considered them honorable, and good. Beneficial.
As a matter of fact, a lot of folks will tell you that the only time you get improvement of the human race is *when* you get an evolution-advancing struggle for limited resources. If nothing of a species ever dies, you never evolve.
I, for one, am more than willing to look at war objectively. I'm certainly not going to call war inherently bad. It generally makes some people suffer, but it's quite easy to argue over what's "good". If you're a short-term utilitarian, and the group that loses is not causing massive social damage, then war is clearly bad. However, if you don't simply value "good" as the sum total of all human happiness (and that's a bit fuzzy -- it's been proven to be an impossible metric to use), then you might consider your own happiness, or that of your children to be superordinate to that of a random Mongolian's. The reason the United States is so wealthy and powerful is precisely because of war. Same goes for the United Kingdom, and quite a few other states.
Furthermore, this issue is really about bombs, not even war. If your own nation owns a better bomb -- as the UK does, say, with nuclear weapons -- it's most unlikely that anyone's going to attack you. They can't win. So even if you refuse to ever approve of war, you can still approve of work on improving bombs.
Let's reverse the question. Why hamper a technical discussion about bomb efficiency with irrelevant issues and issues of morality? There are certainly times and places for discussions of the morality of weaponry, and this is not one of them.
Not a couple hundred years ago, if someone mentioned evolution, someone would pop up and ask why you aren't inserting the word "heretical" into the discussion. And if they aren't...well, is that because of guilt? Fear of God? Same thing you're doing here, different topics involved.
RH's already put a million dollar war chest on the table for third party people who need it.
The problem isn't that people can't sue SCO -- the problem is that suing SCO wouldn't do any good. SCO is dying fast. SCO management is the problem.
Instead of attacking SCO (SCO doesn't care -- their senior management is busy packing their bags and selling stock -- the company and anyone but senior management there is already screwed), let's *fix* this.
Somebody with access to SCO source and anti-cheating tools -- you know, code comparers that look for changed variable names, etc (though I doubt that there are even changed variable names if this is an issue, since they managed to convince the Deutche Bank guy), please run the thing on the SCO and Linux codebases and let us know what, if anything, is duplicated.
Doing such a check does not, AFAIK, violate any terms of SCO's license. An IBM employee should probably check with legal first, but it seems like doing so would be a major benefit to everyone (except) SCO.
Brings new meaning to the word karma whoring.
Also, I bet people spending time on M1 and M2 wouldn't want to be volunteers then.
Yeah! We comment posters want our share of the loot! :-)
Bandwith, time, etc, all cost money. It has to be funded in some way.
That's what other people are for!
Micropayments do NOT comprise a *new* business model. Furthermore, that business model isn't even going to be doable until there's an easy, secure way to use them.
That probably means smart cards or similar deployed all over. AmEx Blue is an interesting idea.
I don't think payments to a single company will ever succeed, with the exception of any companies that come out with truly mind-blowing content, and there can't be many of those.
The only way payments on the Web will succeed in the current economic environment is with a "TV package" style system, Currently, you pay $30/month, and get 50 channels. Same thing is going to have to go with commercial websites. You pay $30/month, and you get access to an assortment of 50 good commercial websites.
Any website that thinks that the general populace is going to pay $10-$30 a month for a single site is really pushing their luck. People pay that for a TV or a phone -- something they constantly get good out of -- not a website.
Google *might*, if they were lucky, be able to pull it off. I can't imagine many other folks doing so, though.
Annoying as the SCO people are, it's also nice to see stupid investors willing to put money into IP-wielding companies get ripped off.
It sure is a shame that Darl McBride is going to bomb those Senators, isn't it?
Why doesn't a powerful (rich) Linux supporter like IBM buy out SCO and make all this mess go away?
If *you* were the CEO of a company and another company sued you with bogus claims designed to try to fuck you over in the press as much as possible, would your immediate reaction be to try to make those other execs wealthy and throw away a large chunk of your own money?
The sum total due the U.S. government from SCO would then be $157,146,000.
Oh, no good at all. SCO's net assets are slightly under $10M at the moment. They have about $30M in assets, and about $20M in debt.
Oh, SCO was going to die for years.
It's just that the execs decided to pump-and-dump to gut the investors.
However, it was quite stupid to piss off important people in the US government, who *will* be the people who can start SEC investigations and assign jail time for fraud.
Could be a gay male
Or a trans gay female. The world is full of options.
Normally, execs can get away with this, but I'm pretty sure that they're going to get nailed for defrauding investors on this one. Too much publicity. Going after the government was just stupid.
Actually, I'm also interested -- I know that some of the things that can expose executives to personal liability is falsifying corporate information. Does anyone know specifically what these cases are, and whether any of the SCO folks might get hit by this.
That is so mature. This ascii art of an abused rectum will surely convince them that Linux users deserve to be taken seriously, and are nowhere near as mad as mac users.
If I were thinking about buying SCO Openserver for a secure server at *my* business and went to their website, and their website had been broken into, it sure shouldn't strengthen my convictions.
Their position has been solutions for the past 8 years or so.
The day that "solutions" came to mean "custom work" was a dark day for the English language.
Homeland security needs to get on these terrorists.
Given that the Office of Homeland Security was just charged $699 per copy of Linux they have, I strongly suspect that *some* government legislative action will be taking place.
Does anyone know if SCO is successfully collecting on this? Is money being made?
Lets assume that they are. And lets assume they loose the lawsuit, and are proven not to own any Linux code.
What then? Do those people get their money back?
Well...no. It's a pretty safe guess that SCO isn't dumb. They'll be setting you up with a license (note: one may want to be fucking careful signing into licensing agreements with SCO, considering IBM's situation) that says that they won't press charges against you for any claims they have on Linux, or something along those lines. You aren't *buying* anything.
What happens to the SCO execs?
My guess was that originally, they'd just walk way from this, as a pump-n-dump. If so, it's going to happen soon. You don't go after the US government and expect them to just sit there and not examine the legal issues. They'll probably be dumping within a month.
They may have taken this too far, though. They're in so many newspapers that they may get hung out to dry for fraud. Kinda like Enron. You can only screw N people with M media attention before you start getting into hot water.
Now, now. Arson is such an ugly thought.
Dammit, if only they'd go after the RIAA. So many problems would be solved.
The only thing I can't figure out is why www.sco.com is still reachable.
When the RIAA started making noise, they got fucked over on a regular basis.
Which you can be quite sure is not what the Sun employees we're talking about own.
I'd suspect it's just because Solaris for x86 really sucks and most folks probably don't want to buy a SPARC for home use.