The company I work for have a rather large legacy web app (600mb of code) running on asp and mysql.
Unfortunately at some point we will have to rewrite it in PHP. Before I got to know my way round the system I thought this was a great idea as I am a pretty good PHP programmer and prefer it to ASP. Now I have realised what a huge and difficult job this is going to be (think in man years rather than hours) I am not so keen. Especially as I will probably be entitled to a profit share by the time we do it and obviously a huge internal job like that will not generate as much income for the business.
Consider the OpenBSD approach, where security was a priority from day one, and the excellent track record they have in this area, and contrast it with Microsoft's track record, where only marketing was a priority from day one.
Yes lets.
One has made a very successful product and made lots of money, One has produced a probably vastly superior OS that nobody uses. Windows might be bag of shit but in terms of the aims Bill set out to achieve (Getting filthy rich) it is a runaway success.
Everyone is very down on the whole Tivo thing, but I feel it is perfectly reasonable use of open source software. You take a mishmash of code and build a polished product that anyone can use with very little effort and no technical ability.
You wrote the software, you contributed your time and effort to it and that will be forever appreciated. But if I take some unsupported code (Unsupported in terms of if it doesnt work, then I have no way of getting you to fix it in a reasonable timeframe) and turn it into a working, supported product why should I not be able to then protect my work from plagurism. Why should I be limited to giving my product away for free as well?
Anyone who has had to work in the software development field professionally will probably agree that writing a product is the easy bit (and fun too). The shit bit is having to help users who think the manual is something YOU should read then tell them what is says. But these people do exist and are quite frequently able to throw money at other people so they never even look at a manual.
The reality is that open source software would still be a hobbiest only affair without the freedom that the GPLv2 grants to make professional, user friendly products and then protect that product from being ripped off by a competitor who can produce it cheaper as you have done all the polishing.
The thing that I always disliked about the system though was that, as a student, you had no recourse.
And you best get used to it. When you get a real job you also have no recourse either (Apart from moving to a different company, but you could have done that at school if you asked your parents nicely enough).
The reality is that most people spend at least half their academic lives whining about what piss poor teachers / lecturers they have. Then they grow up, get a full time job and can whine about the boss instead (or co-workers).
It's ironic that although the Founders of this country realized the dangers that having a standing Army presented, they evidently never realized those posed by a sitting Legislature.
Sorry, but not being a US resident (I am British, for the record) I do not understand this with regards to the army. You have a larger, better equiped armed forces than any other country in the entire world.
Besides, the right to arm oneself is a defense against tyranny.
How is poxy handgun a defense against tyranny? The AK47 is available for very little money the world over but we still have plenty of tyrannical regimes.
I know owning a handgun was considered a defense against tyranny when the US constitution was drawn up but that was over 100 years ago and things have changed. Technology has moved on to the extent that a handgun or rifle does not help you overthrow a tyrannical regime who are armed with tanks and apache helicopters.
It is also worth noting that even in the USA, the general public are not allowed armour piercing weapons (eg - P90) as these could be used to mount a serious challenge to police wearing body armour and hence would be slightly more usefull for overthrowing a tyrannical government.
So although the excuse the NRA use to try and keep firearms legal is that they are a defense against tyranny, the reality is that they are not an effective defense in a modern context. The reality is they want to keep firearms legal so they keep making money from selling them, regardless of how many innocent lives it costs.
Handguns were banned in Philly for over a decade and handgun violence still rose.
Banning handguns in Philly alone would not be very effective as there are no internal border controls to stop people carrying firearms in from a neighbouring state. A nationwide ban on the other hand would be alot more effective in the long run as bringing guns in from a neighbouring country would be alot more difficult.
In the short term however gun violence would be pretty much unchanged as most criminals who want a gun would probably get one before the ban came into force.
But I wonder, are you one of those countries we saved/freed in WWII?
This implies that the US singlehandedly won the 2nd World War. This is very far from true as without Russia the outcome of the war could have been very different.
Vietnam Went to war for economic interests of companies such as coke who were about to be thrown out of the country as it turned communist. The communists were comming to power as part of a backlash against US companies and there exploitative employment practices.
Iraq / Kuwait War (Volume 1) Went to war in order to prevent one country getting too much control of the worlds oil supplies.
Afganistan Went to war as Taliban were unwilling to allow the US to build a huge oil pipeline across the country. New govt agreed as soon as they came to power. The pipeline is necessary to get oil from the black sea to the west.
I have spent until 3am watching people fixing a win2000 server in our cabinet in a datacentre.
Since then they have lost it again but thankfully fixing it was quicker second time around.
On the other hand all our Raq550's and RaqXTR's run linux and have not given me any trouble in that regard yet. We also have a pair of win 2003 servers and they seem to do ok too.
The idea of putting win2000 or Winxp in a mission critical role strikes me as asking for trouble. I wouldn't go near vista in a server role for the next 3-4 years either.
Incidentally in the UK drunk cyclying is still illeagal and if you happen to have a driving licence the plod can put points on your licence for it (instant driving ban).
Funny, huh.
Also, you can get fined for riding bikes on the pavement if it has wheels larger than a certain size (all mountain bike and racers ar too big, bmx just fits under)
We really do have some of the most draconian laws in the world but thankfully they are very rarely enforced or we'd all be in the nick.
I think that's a mis-use of the moderation system.
As was some fuckwitt modding your post down as a troll. But that is what happens when you let americans loose on something which invloves them reading something they disagree with strongly but only allowing them to express an opinion by means of a well thought out reply summing up their point of view.
I mean who can be arsed to actually type something for other people to read when it is much eaiser to just try and stop anyone reading the post you disagree with. Isnt that more in tune with the American Way.
(Mod Fuckwitts - Now this is a troll, spot the difference)
If we were bothered about a tiny thing like radiation we would not into space at all. We also would not build nuclear reactors that produce vast amounts of radioactive waste that will be toxic for 1000s of years.
But as we do all these things we are just going to allow oursleves to mutate into genetic supermen and women who are 12 feet tall. Then when we do make it into space we can conquer the galaxy with ease.
Alot of people seem to be missing the poing of asking London taxi drivers. The knowledge (the cabbie exam) invloves knowing every street, postcode and landmark building in an area 50 miles across. If you have to ask for directions you fail the exam and they make you do the exam on a distinctive moped and clipboard so you can't really use a GPS quite so easily. If you were caught cheating by another cabbie you may well get reported.
It is very, very hard to memorise as London is a city which is not based on any sort of grid, it has just randomly sprawled since before the US had a single city to its name.
I have yet to find a city with cabbies who were anywhere near as good.
I had the same problem. I found a better solution was to ditch ATI and use nvidia.
The main thing that sold me was someothing on the nvidia site saying how much commonality there was between the driver under linux and windows.
Before anyone bothers replying talking about binary drivers being bad please see my previous posts on the issue. I think they are fine (and ATI use them anyway from what I remember).
All being said though, I do play most games under windows as the DirectX seems to have more pretty functionality than OpenGL. Every game I have tested has always looked better under windows anyway.
You are essentially arguing that the binary API is necessary so that closed-source drivers can be loaded in the kernel. However, closed-souce drivers CAN be loaded in the kernel without a stable binary API, as proven by the closed-source nVidia driver that is running on the machine I am typing this on.
I also use the nvidia closed source driver on both of my linux boxes. My point was slightly more subtle in that it would be easier for hardware manufacturers to support linux if such a stable binary API existed as part of the kernel which every hardware manufacturer could share. This is not just my point though as I have heard this from a great many hardware manufacturers as one of the reasons they do not write linux drivers for their products.
In the long run, this is a good practice that leads to better systems for end users.
Yes I quite agree, but this wont help linux adoption (Linux is already miles ahead anyway). Companies matter more than end users. Generally end users are pretty clueless about these issues, they just want all the stuff they have paid money for to work. Companies want money, as much as possible for the minimum expended resources.
You have to strike a balance between both sides according to who has the most clout. In the desktop market hardware companies have a huge amount of sway which is why Microsoft do everything they can to cuddle up to them (or at least they did when it mattered before they had a complete stranglehold on the desktop PC market anyway).
No, it is not fraud if you change but not improve the hardware. For instance tweek the hardware by moving the memory management off the board into the GPU and give it a bigger heatsink. You then rebadge it with a higher number than your last product and see who buys it. And if you can get some of the PC press on side by throwing a few comps about you can be sure you will sell enough to make it worthwhile.
It is not fraud because you make no specific claims it is better than the last card you produced you only implied this by increasing the model number. If any LAWYERS out there want to tell me this is fraud and why please post some decent references too, I always like being corrected by people if it helps me learn.
And if you avoid doing business with companies that do this you must have a hole in your PC where the graphics card was as both ATI and Nvidia have done this in the past.
Nvidia even built functionality into the drivers to make old cards run slower in modern games from what I have read on John Carmacks blog a while ago.
Also worth noting is that just when this poor guy was eating polonium-210 the British Govt were signing a treaty to extradite loads of Putins enemys back to the USSR.
These are the people who made a fortune from some dodgy invlovement in the USSR oil industry privatisation some time ago so paying someone to do this is certainly affordable in return for disuading us Brits from extraditing them back to the Gulag.
Although it might be nice to blame all this on the President of Russia it is just as likely it was the ex-KGB wannabe capitalists who escaped Russia with all their money at the earliest opportunity.
I would never have considered this if the guy went quietly (think cyanide), but making sure someone dies a long protracted death from radiation poisoining is far from quiet and was certain to be covered in the British press with lots of photos of some guy looking like he has had too much chemo-therapy which would be sure and cause an emotional response.
It seems that 95%+ of the businesses we deal with are running Exchange.
We are linux based web hosting and development company and we are moving to exchange server for our emails. The boss wants customer relationship management software with a high level of integration with office software. What are the techies supposed to do? Refuse to do what we are told and get the sack?
There is only so much dissuation of the boss you can do before he says the security problem is something you will have to deal with, I need this to enable the sales dept to do their job effecively.
The real problem is that Micorsoft are allowed to use their position as primary OS retailer in order to enforce their dominance in other (Application) sectors over and over again. This is why they will not even try to release a version of Office for any platform except their own. And every time they do step over the legal (monopolistic) line all they every get is a slap on the wrist compared to the huge profits it makes them year in, year out.
And if I was in their position I would never change either. The only thing that will ever change the corporate ethos in their case is if the company is forcibly cut into two halves. But this will never happen as the OS division would never be able to stand on it own feet when having to compete with one side giving the OS away free to earn service revenue (Redhat) and the other side giving their OS away free in order to sell hardware (Apple). Legislators always hate shafting a profit making company in their own backyard especially one with the media ear as much as MS.
And to all the linux enthusiasts who might claim that linux will win in the end - I hope so. But reality is that until linux developers start adapting a more pragmatic, business led point of view this will never happen.
The best example of this blinkered point of view is Linus Torvalds refusing to allow a binary API for driver communication in the kernel.
It is nothing but good business sense to try and hide that you are selling the consumer the same old crappy graphics card from last year with improved driver software. You escape the Moore's Law problem of the same product halving in value by repackaging it. But this would be alot harder if you had to publish all the hardware specs so you avoid this by locking that all away from prying eyes with a layer of intellectual property that nobody else can touch (or reverse engineer).
But if you then have to publish all the internal specs of your card to allow someone you do not know to write the interface software then selling the public last years card becomes alot harder as you have to convince them to play ball. This is why most companies require signing an NDA in order to get the specs of their hardware.
So to anybody who has actually read this far in this rant it should have become clear that the other real problem is capitalism. It is not a system based around doing what is best but in doing what nets you the greatest return on investment in your tenure at that company. So if you agree with this try and change it, otherwise try and make as much money as you can then retire early so it becomes someone elses problem while you live in the Bahamas.
....is that non-experts have an opinion and often when they read something that doesn't align with that opinion, they consider it to be incorrect.
Just take one look at how the moderation on slashdot is used and you will have a case in point (Not troll post). Everytime I see that "Slashdot needs a -1 disagree option" sig I cant help but think these people should never be allowed near mod points.
Whether or not Exxon would actually withdraw their funding is a pointless argument.
But they would undoubtably threaten to and anyone who thinks anything else is just living in cloud cuckoo land.
Any company with as much to lose as Exxon will do anything legal (and a illeagal if they will get away with it) to keep making money. If they did anything else there shareholders (fund managers) would go elsewhere with their money. Actually its probably your pension, but they are looking after it for you so its theirs until you retire.
The other irony being that Saddam was helped into power by the CIA when the country was overrun with lefties and we wanted oil from them. (The same lefties had previously nationalised all the oil industry and forced US companies out when they came to power in a bloodless coup in the 70s)
He only became an enemy of the US when he invaded another country with oil to give himself more market share so he could force the price up. If he had stuck with gassing the Kurds the US would have ingored this and carried on buying oil from him until it ran out.
Look at Saudi. They are a corrupt and non-demcratic kingdom. They fund terrorism (9/11 - Osama Bin Laden is a saudi). Yet they still have US support as long as they pretend to be our allies in public and sell us oil.
Slashdot Mirror
The company I work for have a rather large legacy web app (600mb of code) running on asp and mysql.
Unfortunately at some point we will have to rewrite it in PHP. Before I got to know my way round the system I thought this was a great idea as I am a pretty good PHP programmer and prefer it to ASP. Now I have realised what a huge and difficult job this is going to be (think in man years rather than hours) I am not so keen. Especially as I will probably be entitled to a profit share by the time we do it and obviously a huge internal job like that will not generate as much income for the business.
Consider the OpenBSD approach, where security was a priority from day one, and the excellent track record they have in this area, and contrast it with Microsoft's track record, where only marketing was a priority from day one.
Yes lets.
One has made a very successful product and made lots of money, One has produced a probably vastly superior OS that nobody uses. Windows might be bag of shit but in terms of the aims Bill set out to achieve (Getting filthy rich) it is a runaway success.
Then ask Sony to make the batteries for it.
Everyone is very down on the whole Tivo thing, but I feel it is perfectly reasonable use of open source software. You take a mishmash of code and build a polished product that anyone can use with very little effort and no technical ability.
You wrote the software, you contributed your time and effort to it and that will be forever appreciated. But if I take some unsupported code (Unsupported in terms of if it doesnt work, then I have no way of getting you to fix it in a reasonable timeframe) and turn it into a working, supported product why should I not be able to then protect my work from plagurism. Why should I be limited to giving my product away for free as well?
Anyone who has had to work in the software development field professionally will probably agree that writing a product is the easy bit (and fun too). The shit bit is having to help users who think the manual is something YOU should read then tell them what is says. But these people do exist and are quite frequently able to throw money at other people so they never even look at a manual.
The reality is that open source software would still be a hobbiest only affair without the freedom that the GPLv2 grants to make professional, user friendly products and then protect that product from being ripped off by a competitor who can produce it cheaper as you have done all the polishing.
The thing that I always disliked about the system though was that, as a student, you had no recourse.
And you best get used to it. When you get a real job you also have no recourse either (Apart from moving to a different company, but you could have done that at school if you asked your parents nicely enough).
The reality is that most people spend at least half their academic lives whining about what piss poor teachers / lecturers they have. Then they grow up, get a full time job and can whine about the boss instead (or co-workers).
It's ironic that although the Founders of this country realized the dangers that having a standing Army presented, they evidently never realized those posed by a sitting Legislature.
Sorry, but not being a US resident (I am British, for the record) I do not understand this with regards to the army. You have a larger, better equiped armed forces than any other country in the entire world.
Besides, the right to arm oneself is a defense against tyranny.
How is poxy handgun a defense against tyranny? The AK47 is available for very little money the world over but we still have plenty of tyrannical regimes.
I know owning a handgun was considered a defense against tyranny when the US constitution was drawn up but that was over 100 years ago and things have changed. Technology has moved on to the extent that a handgun or rifle does not help you overthrow a tyrannical regime who are armed with tanks and apache helicopters.
It is also worth noting that even in the USA, the general public are not allowed armour piercing weapons (eg - P90) as these could be used to mount a serious challenge to police wearing body armour and hence would be slightly more usefull for overthrowing a tyrannical government.
So although the excuse the NRA use to try and keep firearms legal is that they are a defense against tyranny, the reality is that they are not an effective defense in a modern context. The reality is they want to keep firearms legal so they keep making money from selling them, regardless of how many innocent lives it costs.
Handguns were banned in Philly for over a decade and handgun violence still rose.
Banning handguns in Philly alone would not be very effective as there are no internal border controls to stop people carrying firearms in from a neighbouring state. A nationwide ban on the other hand would be alot more effective in the long run as bringing guns in from a neighbouring country would be alot more difficult.
In the short term however gun violence would be pretty much unchanged as most criminals who want a gun would probably get one before the ban came into force.
But I wonder, are you one of those countries we saved/freed in WWII?
This implies that the US singlehandedly won the 2nd World War. This is very far from true as without Russia the outcome of the war could have been very different.
Examples of United States killing for profit:
Vietnam
Went to war for economic interests of companies such as coke who were about to be thrown out of the country as it turned communist. The communists were comming to power as part of a backlash against US companies and there exploitative employment practices.
Iraq / Kuwait War (Volume 1)
Went to war in order to prevent one country getting too much control of the worlds oil supplies.
Afganistan
Went to war as Taliban were unwilling to allow the US to build a huge oil pipeline across the country. New govt agreed as soon as they came to power. The pipeline is necessary to get oil from the black sea to the west.
I have spent until 3am watching people fixing a win2000 server in our cabinet in a datacentre.
Since then they have lost it again but thankfully fixing it was quicker second time around.
On the other hand all our Raq550's and RaqXTR's run linux and have not given me any trouble in that regard yet. We also have a pair of win 2003 servers and they seem to do ok too.
The idea of putting win2000 or Winxp in a mission critical role strikes me as asking for trouble. I wouldn't go near vista in a server role for the next 3-4 years either.
Incidentally in the UK drunk cyclying is still illeagal and if you happen to have a driving licence the plod can put points on your licence for it (instant driving ban).
Funny, huh.
Also, you can get fined for riding bikes on the pavement if it has wheels larger than a certain size (all mountain bike and racers ar too big, bmx just fits under)
We really do have some of the most draconian laws in the world but thankfully they are very rarely enforced or we'd all be in the nick.
I think that's a mis-use of the moderation system.
As was some fuckwitt modding your post down as a troll. But that is what happens when you let americans loose on something which invloves them reading something they disagree with strongly but only allowing them to express an opinion by means of a well thought out reply summing up their point of view.
I mean who can be arsed to actually type something for other people to read when it is much eaiser to just try and stop anyone reading the post you disagree with. Isnt that more in tune with the American Way.
(Mod Fuckwitts - Now this is a troll, spot the difference)
Oh, is that why they are different sizes? I wondered why my SUV doesnt start anymore.
If we were bothered about a tiny thing like radiation we would not into space at all.
We also would not build nuclear reactors that produce vast amounts of radioactive waste that will be toxic for 1000s of years.
But as we do all these things we are just going to allow oursleves to mutate into genetic supermen and women who are 12 feet tall. Then when we do make it into space we can conquer the galaxy with ease.
Alot of people seem to be missing the poing of asking London taxi drivers. The knowledge (the cabbie exam) invloves knowing every street, postcode and landmark building in an area 50 miles across. If you have to ask for directions you fail the exam and they make you do the exam on a distinctive moped and clipboard so you can't really use a GPS quite so easily. If you were caught cheating by another cabbie you may well get reported.
It is very, very hard to memorise as London is a city which is not based on any sort of grid, it has just randomly sprawled since before the US had a single city to its name.
I have yet to find a city with cabbies who were anywhere near as good.
I had the same problem. I found a better solution was to ditch ATI and use nvidia.
The main thing that sold me was someothing on the nvidia site saying how much commonality there was between the driver under linux and windows.
Before anyone bothers replying talking about binary drivers being bad please see my previous posts on the issue. I think they are fine (and ATI use them anyway from what I remember).
All being said though, I do play most games under windows as the DirectX seems to have more pretty functionality than OpenGL. Every game I have tested has always looked better under windows anyway.
You are essentially arguing that the binary API is necessary so that closed-source drivers can be loaded in the kernel. However, closed-souce drivers CAN be loaded in the kernel without a stable binary API, as proven by the closed-source nVidia driver that is running on the machine I am typing this on.
I also use the nvidia closed source driver on both of my linux boxes. My point was slightly more subtle in that it would be easier for hardware manufacturers to support linux if such a stable binary API existed as part of the kernel which every hardware manufacturer could share. This is not just my point though as I have heard this from a great many hardware manufacturers as one of the reasons they do not write linux drivers for their products.
In the long run, this is a good practice that leads to better systems for end users.
Yes I quite agree, but this wont help linux adoption (Linux is already miles ahead anyway). Companies matter more than end users. Generally end users are pretty clueless about these issues, they just want all the stuff they have paid money for to work. Companies want money, as much as possible for the minimum expended resources.
You have to strike a balance between both sides according to who has the most clout. In the desktop market hardware companies have a huge amount of sway which is why Microsoft do everything they can to cuddle up to them (or at least they did when it mattered before they had a complete stranglehold on the desktop PC market anyway).
No, it is not fraud if you change but not improve the hardware. For instance tweek the hardware by moving the memory management off the board into the GPU and give it a bigger heatsink. You then rebadge it with a higher number than your last product and see who buys it. And if you can get some of the PC press on side by throwing a few comps about you can be sure you will sell enough to make it worthwhile.
It is not fraud because you make no specific claims it is better than the last card you produced you only implied this by increasing the model number. If any LAWYERS out there want to tell me this is fraud and why please post some decent references too, I always like being corrected by people if it helps me learn.
And if you avoid doing business with companies that do this you must have a hole in your PC where the graphics card was as both ATI and Nvidia have done this in the past.
Nvidia even built functionality into the drivers to make old cards run slower in modern games from what I have read on John Carmacks blog a while ago.
Also worth noting is that just when this poor guy was eating polonium-210 the British Govt were signing a treaty to extradite loads of Putins enemys back to the USSR.
These are the people who made a fortune from some dodgy invlovement in the USSR oil industry privatisation some time ago so paying someone to do this is certainly affordable in return for disuading us Brits from extraditing them back to the Gulag.
Although it might be nice to blame all this on the President of Russia it is just as likely it was the ex-KGB wannabe capitalists who escaped Russia with all their money at the earliest opportunity.
I would never have considered this if the guy went quietly (think cyanide), but making sure someone dies a long protracted death from radiation poisoining is far from quiet and was certain to be covered in the British press with lots of photos of some guy looking like he has had too much chemo-therapy which would be sure and cause an emotional response.
It seems that 95%+ of the businesses we deal with are running Exchange.
We are linux based web hosting and development company and we are moving to exchange server for our emails. The boss wants customer relationship management software with a high level of integration with office software. What are the techies supposed to do? Refuse to do what we are told and get the sack?
There is only so much dissuation of the boss you can do before he says the security problem is something you will have to deal with, I need this to enable the sales dept to do their job effecively.
The real problem is that Micorsoft are allowed to use their position as primary OS retailer in order to enforce their dominance in other (Application) sectors over and over again. This is why they will not even try to release a version of Office for any platform except their own. And every time they do step over the legal (monopolistic) line all they every get is a slap on the wrist compared to the huge profits it makes them year in, year out.
And if I was in their position I would never change either. The only thing that will ever change the corporate ethos in their case is if the company is forcibly cut into two halves. But this will never happen as the OS division would never be able to stand on it own feet when having to compete with one side giving the OS away free to earn service revenue (Redhat) and the other side giving their OS away free in order to sell hardware (Apple). Legislators always hate shafting a profit making company in their own backyard especially one with the media ear as much as MS.
And to all the linux enthusiasts who might claim that linux will win in the end - I hope so. But reality is that until linux developers start adapting a more pragmatic, business led point of view this will never happen.
The best example of this blinkered point of view is Linus Torvalds refusing to allow a binary API for driver communication in the kernel.
It is nothing but good business sense to try and hide that you are selling the consumer the same old crappy graphics card from last year with improved driver software. You escape the Moore's Law problem of the same product halving in value by repackaging it. But this would be alot harder if you had to publish all the hardware specs so you avoid this by locking that all away from prying eyes with a layer of intellectual property that nobody else can touch (or reverse engineer).
But if you then have to publish all the internal specs of your card to allow someone you do not know to write the interface software then selling the public last years card becomes alot harder as you have to convince them to play ball. This is why most companies require signing an NDA in order to get the specs of their hardware.
So to anybody who has actually read this far in this rant it should have become clear that the other real problem is capitalism. It is not a system based around doing what is best but in doing what nets you the greatest return on investment in your tenure at that company. So if you agree with this try and change it, otherwise try and make as much money as you can then retire early so it becomes someone elses problem while you live in the Bahamas.
No, they will find someone else to blame instead.
....is that non-experts have an opinion and often when they read something that doesn't align with that opinion, they consider it to be incorrect.
Just take one look at how the moderation on slashdot is used and you will have a case in point (Not troll post).
Everytime I see that "Slashdot needs a -1 disagree option" sig I cant help but think these people should never be allowed near mod points.
Whether or not Exxon would actually withdraw their funding is a pointless argument.
But they would undoubtably threaten to and anyone who thinks anything else is just living in cloud cuckoo land.
Any company with as much to lose as Exxon will do anything legal (and a illeagal if they will get away with it) to keep making money. If they did anything else there shareholders (fund managers) would go elsewhere with their money. Actually its probably your pension, but they are looking after it for you so its theirs until you retire.
And interestingly enough in the current version of Americas Army the US made guns (M4A1) jam far more often than the AK does.
But the war in Vietnam still ended with the US running home with its tail between its legs. Go figure!
The other irony being that Saddam was helped into power by the CIA when the country was overrun with lefties and we wanted oil from them. (The same lefties had previously nationalised all the oil industry and forced US companies out when they came to power in a bloodless coup in the 70s)
He only became an enemy of the US when he invaded another country with oil to give himself more market share so he could force the price up. If he had stuck with gassing the Kurds the US would have ingored this and carried on buying oil from him until it ran out.
Look at Saudi. They are a corrupt and non-demcratic kingdom. They fund terrorism (9/11 - Osama Bin Laden is a saudi). Yet they still have US support as long as they pretend to be our allies in public and sell us oil.