Great post, I was skeptical to start with, so I stopped reading TFA shortly after "The key is sodium" statement. IIRC (and I bow to your chemistry knowlage), isn't sodium created in commercial quantities by melting salt? Doesn't the molten salt also create equal quantities of chlorine gas? Is this anymore envriomentally friendly than mixing "Draino" with aluminum and water to produce hydrogen?
PS: You're right, I've never heard of technetium or praseodimiun. When I saw the quote "That side of the periodic table people tend to ignore", I got a mental picture of a bunch of whitecoats (ala "The Farside" cartoons). They were hudled over a poster size periodic table that was spread out on a lab bench. None of them could complete the formula scrawled on the whiteboard because Eric was leaning on the Alkaline metals and nobody noticed them.
"...innumerable global warming studies that the scientific community can't make up its mind on (for example)." - Bad example, climate scientists "know" the planet is warming and also why it is warming, but fossil fuel politics creates an enormous amount of FUD in an attempt to make you and me think the scientists are contradicting each other and basically haven't got a clue. A similar thing occured when medical scientists said tabacoo was bad for your health. Incredibly some of the same "researchers" who "proved" tabacco was harmless have also been involved in "proving" climate scientists are wrong.
"Because in the absence of good parenting, they learn sex about from MTV and Grand Theft Auto."
If a kid is playing GTA and installing sex "hacks", I am sure that downloading porno is nothing new either.
"Illegitimacy" does not mean a fucking thing except the parents are not married.
"Because when teenagers have sex, they are in no position to raise their children properly."
That should read..."no financial position"... teenagers have been bearing and rasing children for millenia.
"The link between this culture's openly permissive sexual attitude is clear."
Well it might be clear if you actually told us what "this culture's openly permissive sexual attitude" is supposed to be linking too? I am assuming that it is linked to...
"locking up every criminal without addressing the more fundamental problems"
having built a massive strawman you can now show that the fundamental problem is...
"Is complaining about nudity going to fix everything? No its not - but its more of a step in the right direction"
Cut the crap, healthy naked bodies are a thing of beauty, sex is an act of love, yet some people still want to put a fig leaf over the statue of David's gentitals.
I agree, however it's not just the US. Controling masses of people has always been made easier by using the secrecy of sex to divide them and the justification of violence to unite and direct them.
I have two grown kids, a boy and a girl, I am happy they have both found that special someone who will bonk thier brains out rather than blow thier brains out.
You are absolutely correct when you say that most fires are started by lightning, the same is true here in Australia. However with regards to the fuel that the fire consumes and Occams razor, don't you think that wiping our most of the large herbivors would induce a change in ground cover?
The problem is that it is never just as simple as one correct answer. Sure the Aborigines changed things by using fire and importing dogs (not to mention snacking on giant wombats who had never seen a hungry human), but before they arrived there were so many low level lightning fires in the Australian bush that much of the vegetation has actually evolved to depend on fire to propogate.
The prevailing wisdom in temperate Australia is to deliberately burn off (or better still mulch) the undergrowth in autum and spring. We still have some of the planets worst bushfires here but that is mainly because of the sheer size of the bush and the fact that we just leave some places up to nature to sort out. We cannot manage the whole of the bush so we burn off and create firebreaks in strategic locations. No matter what we do nothing can stop a wildfire backed by 30knt winds and tempratures of 40+ degC in the shade. When you have spot fires starting several kilometers upwind from the fire front you just have to protect the properties you can and let it run out of fuel (or prey for rain).
A classic population experiment gives a species everything it needs to survive but the available space remains fixed. This invariably ends up with a rapid and total collapse of the system.
We have so far acted "naturally", (we have done what humans do), and are now much closer to the "natural" consequence of our behaviour than ever before. I suspect that if humans do not adapt thier "nature" to suit the "natural order" then rapid human exitinction will be the "natural" outcome.
I agree with you that not enough attention is given to our place as a species. The above is simple high school biology, yet looking around the planet I can't help feeling like a goldfish suffocating in its own shit.
"The species that could not adapt quickly enough died off."
I would say it's more like one large species wiped out 80% of the other large species because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
"I always had a small problem with conservation efforts , I know its lovely to save endangered species and all that , but does it not hamper the natural order further by trying to save species that can not cope by themselves."
No species can cope by itself except perhaps some single cell organisims, but certainly not humans. The reason conservation efforts concentrate on larger animals and birds is because thier demise is a signal that the environment that supports them is in trouble. I suppose you could say that it's the "natural order" for humans to kill anything that moves, after all we are predators. However, following the "natural order" of poulation growth in the absence of any serious restraints we end up by ourselves in a desert, surrounded by dead oceans. Soylent Green anyone? It's a natural product!
The really sad part is that some people are so divorced from thier surroundings they cannot comprehend that the environment tolerates humans not the other way around.
"This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" don't help users feel empowered about their computers.
Let's face it, you have to be knowlageable about the system to fix it. The system you know the best will always seem to be the most "user friendly". The idea behind any GUI (including windows) is to give a consitent visual human/machine interface so as to allow the user to map common functions across multiple applications and machines.
When an application using that interface walks all over itself, ("illegal operation").
I wouldn't expect the user to understand much more than "shit it crashed again?". I would however expect a Windows expert to "know" it means "application X screwed up at address Y and to contact the developer of application-X". Like-wise I wouldn't expect a user to understand the Unix message "Bad magic number." but an expert should "know" it means "bad library configuration, you need...blah, blah, blah".
I once worked with a comms driver that kept an activity log, it had phrases such as, "Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you will get" (meaning it had read, but not yet verified, a packet from the port). In other words you may be able to simplify the message but you can't simplify it's meaning.
I agree, most parrots are smart, my brother has a white cockatoo that can say alot of different phrases, it seems to understand the idea of a "visitor" because it always says "g'day mate" but only when it first sees you. My family have had many (Australian) parrots that have done all sorts of human like things, "Alex" as you say has been trained for a long time and I have seen amazing videos of what he can do (like most parrots, he also has a bad temper). I suppose it's like a human studying for a long time, it's not that the rest are dumb, it's that one particular individual has been highly trainned to display his intelligence to humans.
Love bacon & eggs and I would chew the leg off the lamb if I was hungry. I don't see any moral problem with killing and eating animals. I recognise they have emotions and bacon is also highly intelligent when it is walking around on four legs. However, I also know that pigs are omnivours and (given the chance)wouldn't think twice about munching on my bones. What I do have a problem with is deliberate cruelty or killing for fur, aphrodisiacs (tiger's penis, rihno horn) or any other disrespectful and wastefull form of vanity.
Wiping out a species in an attempt to make someone's dick go hard is morally reprehensible and destined to fail. The only way I could condone it would be the old fashion way. If the patient with the droppy dick were to attack the Rihno with a spear, (instead of using a proxy with a rifle), his dick might actually stiffen up from the massive adrenelin hit. The resulting (short) battle could only be seen as improving both species gene pool.
"I don't have a degree. But seriously just what does having that piece of paper mean in an industry that can change many times a year."
If you think that the industry changes several times a year then I cannot tell you the benifits of that piece of paper until you understand a degree has very little connection to the latest and greatest application or programming language. A degree is supposed to give you a grounding in the basic concepts and the ability to learn the details on your own. For example the conceptual difference between a "while" loop and a "for" loop is... nothing. Fundamental changes in methodology and understanding only happen at the rate of once per decade or so and even that is considered fast compared to other fields. eg: conceptually the p-code of the 70's is not that different to the Java code of the 90's.
"If you move the date of "industrialization" from 1700 to 1500, suddenly, temperatures have cooled since the start of industrialization."
Your post is nothing but a work of mind-numbing fiction, the facts about medieval warming are specifically selected and twisted so that you can bury your head in the sand and feel comfortable in your fantasy world. I can only assume your home is not built on permafrost and is well above sea-level.
"Let me put it this way, when global warming becomes a problem, we'll build a machine to fix it."
Climate change and environmental degredation are already the biggest problems that humanity MUST confront in order to progress, so where is this magic machine that can undo the "sixth great extinction" and refreeze the North Pole?
The same uber-nerds who defined the meter have also defined the second.
Lifted from wikipedia - The second is one of seven SI base units. It is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom at zero kelvins.
Now that we have a definition perhaps someone could tell us what it means.:)
"You on the other hand... how do you like that new Britney Spear album?"
Wow, no kidding, Britney has a new album!
I think the GP was trying to make the point that there is a lot of snobbery surrounding certain types of art and music, ie: some people look down at others because they don't have "sophistcated tastes" that took years to learn...err I mean develop.
By all means share your opinions about what you do and don't like, but running people down because of the music that they enjoy is crass and immature (yes, that also applies to poeple who like B. Spears. or The Bay City Rollers).
Exactly, thats what makes "Frazier Crane" into a sit-com. I like Classical (the 9th was great score for Clockwork Orange) but I also like Pink Floyd, Madona and Eminem. I suppose that means my musical taste is immature? So fucking what? The whole idea of music is to enjoy it's emotions not worship it's practioners.
I think the GP post was pointing out that alchemey was obsessed with the "philosophers stone", nuclear physics IS the "philosophers stone". The idea that silver or gold would kill you is not much of a problem to bussiness, costing more to produce than it is worth is what is holding back glow in the dark jewellry.
"genetics might just be a *wee bit* harder than figuring out the thermodynamics of a new steam engine design."
I agree, thermodynamics is pretty simple, in the sense that a decent engineer could work it out. I wonder why it took humanity so long to find those three obvious rules and turn them into a near optimal steam engine.
Now I come to think of it those cave-men must have been as dumb as dog shit, I mean 1.5 million years and all they invented was fire and some crudely shaped rocks! What about the way people rave on and on about the ancient greeks, as if takes a fucking genius to notice the bath water rises when you get in it!/sacrasm.
Shakespear wrote, "There are more things in heaven and earth...", and information theory gave his intuition a rigourous proof. So why do people still write (let alone publish) this kind of crap? Do they know nothing of art and science or is it a combination of a little knowlage and a lot of arrogance?
Whenever I hear someone talking about the death or decay of technological advancement, "evidence" is presented that the really important stuff happened X yrs ago (where X >= 50). A trully revolutionary discovery is rarely seen for what it is until years later when people have had time to investigate and digest the implications. Even when it is immediately acknowlaged, (eg: Watson & Crick), it takes decades/centuries, to work out the full implications and utility of such a discovery. Maxwell's equations were not particularly "useful" until ~80yrs later when Edison created his Electiric light company and begrudgingly hired a mathemetitian or two. My generation (baby boomer's) were the first to really feel the importance of Darwin on our society and it may yet take another 150yrs to be fully absorbed into our collective phyche.
There are also alot of people in this thread complaining that IP laws are killing innovation. IP laws are killing the profit to be made by a "small shop" creating innovative gadgets. IP laws cannot stop people such as Eienstien, Maxwell, Turing, etc, finding fundemental insights that in turn drive the technological innovations that corporations so desperately want to profit from. There is however a good argument that when IP laws adversely affect communication between individuals and groups then technological progress will naturally slow down.
Einstien's equations have been tested to death but yet there is still something "wrong" with our understanding of gravity (on a large scale, "it just don't add up!"). I don't have a crystal ball but I assume in another 50-100 yrs, something like string theory, (at the moment only "useful" as a head scratching excersice), will be seen as having a profound influence. It will be used as evidence by unimaginitive writters to show that physics is dead, they will be sure to point to Godel, Turing and [insert your favorite genius here] as proof that most of the really important stuff has already been discovered.
Now IBM will just try and make SCO spend as much money as they can to comply with thier timetable and milestones. They will continue to push Linux in the meantime and since the judge is using thier plan I am betting the IBM QA department will be giving SCO orders from now on.
I belive SCO has acted like Cuba during the cold war (all the really stupid stuff is done by proxy). The real struggle is MS vs IBM. MS want time to catch up with *nix like tools built in to the CLI and IBM wan't to push Linux because they are Integrators and realise they no longer need to build thier own basic components. When I worked there in the late nineties, Lou Gerstner declared "All code has been written, it just needs to be managed." I thought it was kind of humurous at the time, but now I think he was right when looked at form a "big picture" point of view .
Slashdot Mirror
Great post, I was skeptical to start with, so I stopped reading TFA shortly after "The key is sodium" statement. IIRC (and I bow to your chemistry knowlage), isn't sodium created in commercial quantities by melting salt? Doesn't the molten salt also create equal quantities of chlorine gas? Is this anymore envriomentally friendly than mixing "Draino" with aluminum and water to produce hydrogen?
PS: You're right, I've never heard of technetium or praseodimiun. When I saw the quote "That side of the periodic table people tend to ignore", I got a mental picture of a bunch of whitecoats (ala "The Farside" cartoons). They were hudled over a poster size periodic table that was spread out on a lab bench. None of them could complete the formula scrawled on the whiteboard because Eric was leaning on the Alkaline metals and nobody noticed them.
"...innumerable global warming studies that the scientific community can't make up its mind on (for example)." - Bad example, climate scientists "know" the planet is warming and also why it is warming, but fossil fuel politics creates an enormous amount of FUD in an attempt to make you and me think the scientists are contradicting each other and basically haven't got a clue. A similar thing occured when medical scientists said tabacoo was bad for your health. Incredibly some of the same "researchers" who "proved" tabacco was harmless have also been involved in "proving" climate scientists are wrong.
"Because in the absence of good parenting, they learn sex about from MTV and Grand Theft Auto."
..."no financial position"... teenagers have been bearing and rasing children for millenia.
If a kid is playing GTA and installing sex "hacks", I am sure that downloading porno is nothing new either.
"Illegitimacy" does not mean a fucking thing except the parents are not married.
"Because when teenagers have sex, they are in no position to raise their children properly."
That should read
"The link between this culture's openly permissive sexual attitude is clear."
Well it might be clear if you actually told us what "this culture's openly permissive sexual attitude" is supposed to be linking too? I am assuming that it is linked to...
"locking up every criminal without addressing the more fundamental problems"
having built a massive strawman you can now show that the fundamental problem is...
"Is complaining about nudity going to fix everything? No its not - but its more of a step in the right direction"
Cut the crap, healthy naked bodies are a thing of beauty, sex is an act of love, yet some people still want to put a fig leaf over the statue of David's gentitals.
I agree, however it's not just the US. Controling masses of people has always been made easier by using the secrecy of sex to divide them and the justification of violence to unite and direct them.
I have two grown kids, a boy and a girl, I am happy they have both found that special someone who will bonk thier brains out rather than blow thier brains out.
Irony - A slashdot post laughing at another's knowlage of computers because they failed to understand plain english.
You are absolutely correct when you say that most fires are started by lightning, the same is true here in Australia. However with regards to the fuel that the fire consumes and Occams razor, don't you think that wiping our most of the large herbivors would induce a change in ground cover?
The problem is that it is never just as simple as one correct answer. Sure the Aborigines changed things by using fire and importing dogs (not to mention snacking on giant wombats who had never seen a hungry human), but before they arrived there were so many low level lightning fires in the Australian bush that much of the vegetation has actually evolved to depend on fire to propogate.
The prevailing wisdom in temperate Australia is to deliberately burn off (or better still mulch) the undergrowth in autum and spring. We still have some of the planets worst bushfires here but that is mainly because of the sheer size of the bush and the fact that we just leave some places up to nature to sort out. We cannot manage the whole of the bush so we burn off and create firebreaks in strategic locations. No matter what we do nothing can stop a wildfire backed by 30knt winds and tempratures of 40+ degC in the shade. When you have spot fires starting several kilometers upwind from the fire front you just have to protect the properties you can and let it run out of fuel (or prey for rain).
A classic population experiment gives a species everything it needs to survive but the available space remains fixed. This invariably ends up with a rapid and total collapse of the system.
We have so far acted "naturally", (we have done what humans do), and are now much closer to the "natural" consequence of our behaviour than ever before. I suspect that if humans do not adapt thier "nature" to suit the "natural order" then rapid human exitinction will be the "natural" outcome.
I agree with you that not enough attention is given to our place as a species. The above is simple high school biology, yet looking around the planet I can't help feeling like a goldfish suffocating in its own shit.
"The species that could not adapt quickly enough died off."
I would say it's more like one large species wiped out 80% of the other large species because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
"I always had a small problem with conservation efforts , I know its lovely to save endangered species and all that , but does it not hamper the natural order further by trying to save species that can not cope by themselves."
No species can cope by itself except perhaps some single cell organisims, but certainly not humans. The reason conservation efforts concentrate on larger animals and birds is because thier demise is a signal that the environment that supports them is in trouble. I suppose you could say that it's the "natural order" for humans to kill anything that moves, after all we are predators. However, following the "natural order" of poulation growth in the absence of any serious restraints we end up by ourselves in a desert, surrounded by dead oceans. Soylent Green anyone? It's a natural product!
The really sad part is that some people are so divorced from thier surroundings they cannot comprehend that the environment tolerates humans not the other way around.
"This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" don't help users feel empowered about their computers.
Let's face it, you have to be knowlageable about the system to fix it. The system you know the best will always seem to be the most "user friendly". The idea behind any GUI (including windows) is to give a consitent visual human/machine interface so as to allow the user to map common functions across multiple applications and machines.
When an application using that interface walks all over itself, ("illegal operation"). I wouldn't expect the user to understand much more than "shit it crashed again?". I would however expect a Windows expert to "know" it means "application X screwed up at address Y and to contact the developer of application-X". Like-wise I wouldn't expect a user to understand the Unix message "Bad magic number." but an expert should "know" it means "bad library configuration, you need...blah, blah, blah".
I once worked with a comms driver that kept an activity log, it had phrases such as, "Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you will get" (meaning it had read, but not yet verified, a packet from the port). In other words you may be able to simplify the message but you can't simplify it's meaning.
I agree, most parrots are smart, my brother has a white cockatoo that can say alot of different phrases, it seems to understand the idea of a "visitor" because it always says "g'day mate" but only when it first sees you. My family have had many (Australian) parrots that have done all sorts of human like things, "Alex" as you say has been trained for a long time and I have seen amazing videos of what he can do (like most parrots, he also has a bad temper). I suppose it's like a human studying for a long time, it's not that the rest are dumb, it's that one particular individual has been highly trainned to display his intelligence to humans.
But can he count --3 red balls?
Parrot: "Let's jump off a skyscraper while I'm counting your balls."
See, you're not so smart are you, eh, bird-brain?
Parrot: "Smart enough to be able to shit on your head and not a damm thing you can do about it."
Love bacon & eggs and I would chew the leg off the lamb if I was hungry. I don't see any moral problem with killing and eating animals. I recognise they have emotions and bacon is also highly intelligent when it is walking around on four legs. However, I also know that pigs are omnivours and (given the chance)wouldn't think twice about munching on my bones. What I do have a problem with is deliberate cruelty or killing for fur, aphrodisiacs (tiger's penis, rihno horn) or any other disrespectful and wastefull form of vanity.
Wiping out a species in an attempt to make someone's dick go hard is morally reprehensible and destined to fail. The only way I could condone it would be the old fashion way. If the patient with the droppy dick were to attack the Rihno with a spear, (instead of using a proxy with a rifle), his dick might actually stiffen up from the massive adrenelin hit. The resulting (short) battle could only be seen as improving both species gene pool.
"I don't have a degree. But seriously just what does having that piece of paper mean in an industry that can change many times a year."
... nothing. Fundamental changes in methodology and understanding only happen at the rate of once per decade or so and even that is considered fast compared to other fields. eg: conceptually the p-code of the 70's is not that different to the Java code of the 90's.
If you think that the industry changes several times a year then I cannot tell you the benifits of that piece of paper until you understand a degree has very little connection to the latest and greatest application or programming language. A degree is supposed to give you a grounding in the basic concepts and the ability to learn the details on your own. For example the conceptual difference between a "while" loop and a "for" loop is
Thanks for the +funny mod, at least one person got the joke. :)
"If you move the date of "industrialization" from 1700 to 1500, suddenly, temperatures have cooled since the start of industrialization."
Your post is nothing but a work of mind-numbing fiction, the facts about medieval warming are specifically selected and twisted so that you can bury your head in the sand and feel comfortable in your fantasy world. I can only assume your home is not built on permafrost and is well above sea-level.
"Let me put it this way, when global warming becomes a problem, we'll build a machine to fix it."
Climate change and environmental degredation are already the biggest problems that humanity MUST confront in order to progress, so where is this magic machine that can undo the "sixth great extinction" and refreeze the North Pole?
"That's just not true, though. US citizens own roughly the same amount of natural resources as Chinese citizens, and there are far fewer of us."
And thus we come to two of the most basic problems found in any proposed universal GHG treaty, an over-populated China and a glutonous USA.
Repeat after me - "There is only one Earth, it's atmosphere and oceans do not recognise national borders, we are ALL in this together".
"Kyoto has been blamed for missing the point by focussing on CO2 (instead of ie. nitrogen-based emmisions and heavy metals)."
Kyoto does not claim to tackle "pollution" in general, it's sole aim is to reduce the rate of growth in GHG emmisions (in particular CO2).
"But sure, even in the area of greenhouse gasses, cow farts are probably a worse threat than all the rest combined"
Sharp as a billiard ball I'd say. - some science for your edification.
The same uber-nerds who defined the meter have also defined the second.
:)
Lifted from wikipedia - The second is one of seven SI base units. It is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom at zero kelvins.
Now that we have a definition perhaps someone could tell us what it means.
"You on the other hand... how do you like that new Britney Spear album?"
...err I mean develop.
Wow, no kidding, Britney has a new album!
I think the GP was trying to make the point that there is a lot of snobbery surrounding certain types of art and music, ie: some people look down at others because they don't have "sophistcated tastes" that took years to learn
By all means share your opinions about what you do and don't like, but running people down because of the music that they enjoy is crass and immature (yes, that also applies to poeple who like B. Spears. or The Bay City Rollers).
Newton was appointed head of the Royal Mint.
Exactly, thats what makes "Frazier Crane" into a sit-com. I like Classical (the 9th was great score for Clockwork Orange) but I also like Pink Floyd, Madona and Eminem. I suppose that means my musical taste is immature? So fucking what? The whole idea of music is to enjoy it's emotions not worship it's practioners.
I think the GP post was pointing out that alchemey was obsessed with the "philosophers stone", nuclear physics IS the "philosophers stone". The idea that silver or gold would kill you is not much of a problem to bussiness, costing more to produce than it is worth is what is holding back glow in the dark jewellry.
"genetics might just be a *wee bit* harder than figuring out the thermodynamics of a new steam engine design."
/sacrasm.
I agree, thermodynamics is pretty simple, in the sense that a decent engineer could work it out. I wonder why it took humanity so long to find those three obvious rules and turn them into a near optimal steam engine.
Now I come to think of it those cave-men must have been as dumb as dog shit, I mean 1.5 million years and all they invented was fire and some crudely shaped rocks! What about the way people rave on and on about the ancient greeks, as if takes a fucking genius to notice the bath water rises when you get in it!
Shakespear wrote, "There are more things in heaven and earth...", and information theory gave his intuition a rigourous proof. So why do people still write (let alone publish) this kind of crap? Do they know nothing of art and science or is it a combination of a little knowlage and a lot of arrogance?
Whenever I hear someone talking about the death or decay of technological advancement, "evidence" is presented that the really important stuff happened X yrs ago (where X >= 50). A trully revolutionary discovery is rarely seen for what it is until years later when people have had time to investigate and digest the implications. Even when it is immediately acknowlaged, (eg: Watson & Crick), it takes decades/centuries, to work out the full implications and utility of such a discovery. Maxwell's equations were not particularly "useful" until ~80yrs later when Edison created his Electiric light company and begrudgingly hired a mathemetitian or two. My generation (baby boomer's) were the first to really feel the importance of Darwin on our society and it may yet take another 150yrs to be fully absorbed into our collective phyche.
There are also alot of people in this thread complaining that IP laws are killing innovation. IP laws are killing the profit to be made by a "small shop" creating innovative gadgets. IP laws cannot stop people such as Eienstien, Maxwell, Turing, etc, finding fundemental insights that in turn drive the technological innovations that corporations so desperately want to profit from. There is however a good argument that when IP laws adversely affect communication between individuals and groups then technological progress will naturally slow down.
Einstien's equations have been tested to death but yet there is still something "wrong" with our understanding of gravity (on a large scale, "it just don't add up!"). I don't have a crystal ball but I assume in another 50-100 yrs, something like string theory, (at the moment only "useful" as a head scratching excersice), will be seen as having a profound influence. It will be used as evidence by unimaginitive writters to show that physics is dead, they will be sure to point to Godel, Turing and [insert your favorite genius here] as proof that most of the really important stuff has already been discovered.
Now IBM will just try and make SCO spend as much money as they can to comply with thier timetable and milestones. They will continue to push Linux in the meantime and since the judge is using thier plan I am betting the IBM QA department will be giving SCO orders from now on.
I belive SCO has acted like Cuba during the cold war (all the really stupid stuff is done by proxy). The real struggle is MS vs IBM. MS want time to catch up with *nix like tools built in to the CLI and IBM wan't to push Linux because they are Integrators and realise they no longer need to build thier own basic components. When I worked there in the late nineties, Lou Gerstner declared "All code has been written, it just needs to be managed." I thought it was kind of humurous at the time, but now I think he was right when looked at form a "big picture" point of view .
You can't beat the borg by using thier plan!