If they had control of the system they might actually have to do something like work to earn their living, instead of just buying, selling and litigating bits of paper. They much prefer being part of the something for nothing economy.
Who do you think NTP is? Its the widow of a basement inventor who tinkered with radios and electronics for most of his life. The numbers got out of hand only after RIM refused to pay reasonable licensing fees of roughly $4 million.
Just goes to show, $450 million in the hand is worth more than $1 billion+ in the bush!
RIM should have just paid the $4 million that NTP originally wanted. But no. They were in the habit of using their own patent portfolio stifle their competitors, and couldn't accept the fact that someone else had invented part of the system first. After they refused, egos got involved and the whole thing spun out of control.
RIM has just about the greatest PR people in the world. The real story goes something like this...
Major foreign company hires DC lobbyists and lawyers to deprive the widow of a basement inventor out of her inheritance.
Is that a just a typo? RIM was the one caught falsifying evidence during the trial.
NTP should have acccepted RIM's first offer instead of being greedy.
Actually, RIM should have accepted NTP's first offer (something like $4 million). Before NTP came along, RIM was ruthlessly using their own patents to drive competitors out of business. They refused to pay a reasonable license to NTP. So NTP said "screw you" and sued.
Anyone who thinks that RIM is a bunch of good guys is smoking something. They're about as dirty as SCO. They've controlled the PR better in this case, but basically they're trying to cheat a widow out of her husband's work.
Re:Looking forward to Socialized Higher Education
on
Outsourcing Evolving
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· Score: 1
Throughout my entire life, I've had my surname misspelled by people. Even when I entered it into an online form which was then printed onto a shipping label, somehow an errant "p" crept in. Please, for my sake, be lazy and copy/paste from now on...
DOH!
P.S. I am from the UK.
Don't feel bad. Nobody is perfect.
Re:Looking forward to Socialized Higher Education
on
Outsourcing Evolving
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· Score: 1
Thank you, PatrickThompson, for correctly recognizing and labeling a bigot.
For 200+ years the United States has been a rich and prosperous country because of the contributions of immigrants. I hope we continue to welcome those who want to work hard and build a better life for their families, because they also build a better life for all of us.
Except for the fact that it is a misleading headline....
How is this a "trade"? Al Michaels signed a contract. Disney adhered to their obligations under that contract. Al Michaels requested that he be released from his obligations. Disney requested compensation for that release and NBC paid compensation.
It would be a trade if Disney sold Al Michaels contract to NBC, and Al Michaels had no recourse except to refuse to work.
Second of all, there was a lot more in the trade than just the cartoon.
More importantly, it was not even a trade!
Disney did not go to Al Michaels and say "Pack your bags and report to NBC." Al Michaels requested that he be released from his contract with Disney in order to make a new contract with NBC. Disney and NBC worked out a compensation agreement to compensate Disney for the loss of Al Michaels' services.
When we talk about "trading" people, it generally means they have little or no choice. This was a case of past and future employers working to honor the request made by the person.
he first step in a successful standardization effort will be to ignore languages and instead take stock of what kinds of programs you need to write. Include all those little one-off jobs that you have to do several of every week, eg. the little hack to extract the error messages you're interested in from the logfile. Then, for each kind of program, look at the languages suited to writing that kind of program and see what one your developers are most comfortable with and, just as importantly, what your existing code is written in. An inferior langauge that all your developers know well is superior to a superior language that they're not familiar with, and if you've a large body of code in one language then that language is better than a different language. If several kinds of programs can be served sufficiently well by one language, well and good. If not, well and good too.
Good points.
I have a similar view, though I codify it a little differently. My basic concept is this:
If you are handing a single picture on the wall, pounding the nail with a stapler that was sitting right there might be fine. If you need to hang a bunch of pictures around the house, go to your toolbox and get a hammer, but any old hammer will do. If you are building a deck, you'll really ought to get a good framing hammer, even if you need to go to the store and buy one.
Every programming task has languages that are perfect, good, acceptable, and unacceptable. Every task also has a "weight" for the customer. Build a matrix of the tasks, their weight, and the languages that are perfect, good, and acceptable for each task.
Once the matrix is built, analyze it. Are there one or two tasks that stand out as being far and away more important that anything else? If so, make sure that a "perfect" language is among the languages chosen to standardize upon. If you are building a deck, have a framing hammer.
Now look at the merely important tasks. How many of these tasks have the language or languages chosen in step one in the perfect or good category? Of the remaining tasks, what is the minimum number of languages you can choose from the perfect or good category that cover these tasks? If you are hanging a bunch of pictures, get a hammer, but it doesn't matter whether it is a framing hammer, a tack hammer, or a ball-peen hammer.
At this point, you are left with a set of tasks that, although they are neccessary, are small and unimportant enough that implementing them with less than perfect tools is acceptable. Looking at the languages chosen in step 1 and step 2, are there any tasks left that can't be done with at least an acceptable tool? If there are, can any of the good or perfect tools for those tasks also provide a good or perfect alternative for any of the more important tasks? You can drive these nails with anything. If you already have a good tool use it, but don't sweat it if you don't.
At this point you'll have selected a suite of standard tools that should be broad enough to cover all your expected tasks but small enough that you can share skills and expertise across your group. You should never be stuck doing something important with a bad tool.
You're right that languages are easy. What is hard is architecture.
For apps that are of limited scale, a decent programmer can get the O'Reilly book and google a few things and make it work. But only a fool would think that they could design even a moderately complex J2EE application that way. And I've seen too many people who built SQL databases this way.
Certain tasks are complex and critical to the success of a project. For an app that can be thrown away easily, it doesn't much matter. But basic architecture decisions can be difficult to refactor, and so that planning needs to be guided by people with demonstratable experience and skill in the chosen technologies.
ConEd (Consolidated Edison), the primary electric utility in New York City, actually pipes steam around much of downtown and midtown Manhattan. This steam is used to for heat and to generate hot water for many of the office towers in the area.
Screwing up a case, or not advocating for the client's position IN THE COURTROOM or PROCEEDINGS AND MOTIONS OF THE CASE, would count.
The attorney doesn't have a legal duty to advocate or even not oppose the views of clients of firm ON HER BLOG or in PRIVATE life.
That is nothing like breaking medical confidentiality.
You want it to be illegal for eople to advocate in their private life anything that opposes the positions of the clients at work?!
Pick one and stick with it. Either talk about private or public life.
An attorney, just like anyone else, can hold whatever views they want in private. When they are hired by a client, however, they have a fiduciary duty to the client. What they do in their blog, or in a newspaper interview, or any other part of their public life has a bearing upon their fiduciary duty.
An attorney would not be disbarred for expressing a point of view, but for failing to excercise their fiduciary duty.
I know... like, how the hell does she pirate music and have meaningless arguments with strangers?
You join either the Democrat or Republican parties and attend the party congress. You will get into plenty of meaningless arguments...
Actually, in such a situation you have an extremely small but measurable chance of actually influencing the national direction on something. To be certain of getting into an a 100% meaningless argument, attend meetings of third parties. Or look for the community activist organizations run by old hippies who advocate solutions like "If we hold a big music festival with folk singers and jam bands, it will bring peace and fix the environment."
Unfortunately it appears to be a solid law of economics, removing competetive pressure does not create a more competetive industry, it creates a less competetive industry whose costs will ballon as capital becomes available.
And even more unfortunately, it holds true not only for the software business, but for things like pharmaceuticals as well. They dont need patents because development is horrendously expensive; development (not to mention marketing and administration) has become horrendously expensive because they get patents.
The choice that a pharmaceutical company makes is whether to fully disclose their innovations, allowing other researchers to leverage the work, or keep those innovations as trade secrets. Without providing a way to simultaneously protect and disclose innovation, you automatically slow the advance of the entire industry.
And while you may have a point with software patents, please don't try to tell me that the bulk of the cost of developing a new pharmaceutical is tied up in patenting costs, rather than in labs full of expensive equipment staffed by expensive researchers who spend 99.9% of their time investigating dead ends, and then need to subject the remaining 0.1% of their work to clinical trials and arcan bueracracy in regulatory agencies.
I've been advocating this for a while. Patents should be of variable duration, depending primarily on the sunk costs necessary to innovate in a field.
For example, I can't think of any software innovations that required billion dollar investments. Most innovative research can be done by a lone person or a small group in a basement somewhere. Since the cost of software innovation is low, the potential payback is fast, and so the period of protection should be low as well. I suggest roughly 2 years.
OTOH, fields like materials science might require investments of hundreds of millions of dollars in order to develop new innovations. We can't expect investors to fund this sort of research without some reasonable chance of return, so these areas should be protected longer.
Cheap Patents!! No validation!! And it only starts ticking down after the other guy brings his product to market!!
OMFG!! A Slashdot poster didn't read the article closely!!
The patent is only enforceable when the patent holder brings it to market, not when the other guy brings it to market.
So there is a simple affirmative defense to an infringement claim that could be handled by an administrative judge with no fuss: If you claim that I am infringing on your patent, and I can show that I used the innovation as little as one second before you released it to the market, I win. No grey area to litigate.
The bar can't make it illegal for her to become a lawyer for free speech.
The First Amendment doesn't cover "at will" employment in most cases (public policy and other exemptions notwithstanding).
Making it illegal for her to be a lawyer for her views is a clear violation of the First Amendment.
You are allowed to express any opinion you want - political speech is absolutely protected.
The bar has the right, and does excercise it. The problem is not the speach, but the fact that she was not zealously advocating for her client.
To draw a parallel, imagine you went to a physician and discovered that you had some disease. And then some worker in that office, in performing some sort of political advocacy, revealed to the world that you had that disease. That worker would have shown a disregard for you, the patient, that would rightfully disqualify them from further employment in the medical field, and medical licensing boards would be correct in denyng licensing for ethical grounds.
An attorney has a fiduciary duty to their client, and as such has several duties, including a duty of loyalty. A fiduciary must disregard his own self-interest and act for the benefit of the beneficiary. Benjamin Cardozo, writing in Meinhard v. Salmon, 249 N.Y. 458, 464 (1928), said "Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior."
Example: A defense attorney learns that his client or witness plans to lie on the stand. First, the attorney should first try to convince them not to commit perjury. If that fails, the attorney is required by law to notify the judge and if necessary, stop representing their client.
Aside from the question "How does this apply to the topic we are discussing?" the defense attorney actually has an additional recourse that he must excercise before reporting the perjury. If he believes a client or a witness would respond perjurously to a question, he should not ask the question that evokes the perjurous response. If necessary, he should not even call the witness or allow the defendant to testify. Reporting the perjury should only be necessary when the defense attorney discovers after the fact that the testimony was perjurous, and then only after advising the party or parties to correct their testimony and those parties not taking that advice.
Also, the attorney does not have the recourse to simply stop representing their client. An attorney is only allowed to resign from the case if doing so would not prejudice the client. So if there is a chance that the jury would percieve that the attorney's exit was because "even he didn't believe the defendent was innocent," the attorney cannot resign from the case. Also, if it is unlikely that the client would not be able to find substitute counsel, the attorney can also be prohibited from resigning from the case. If an attorney wishes to resign from a case, he must petition the judge, and is only released upon the judge's satisfaction that the defendent won't be harmed.
Of course, it may be that it's significantly more expensive to maintain a missile shield than anti-shield missiles.
You missed the point. The calculation isn't cost vs. cost. It is our ability to bear the cost vs. their ability to bear the cost.
If we can afford the anti-missile technology, and the enemies that concern us cannot afford the counter-measures, then we win. The cost of either doesn't matter.
A system that makes major mid-course adjustments is outside the capability of enemies that are only now getting basic ICBM capability. Those adjustments require fuel. That fuel must be boosted. Therefore the rocket must be substantially larger or field fewer warheads. Either way, we've forced them to diminish their striking power.
I agree, but in the scenario you suggest the rules are well established and your role as a litigator is very narrow. Your hired to win one specific case.
I think I would be pretty reasonable in assuming that the firm in question was probably retained by at least one of their clients to "help them protect and increase the value of their IP assets." They can not do that and simultaneously publicly advocate stances that could undermine their IP.
I am utterly shocked to learn that there are lawyers out there whose sole motivations are money and power, and that they don't care to further advance the development of society as a whole...
Actually, their motication is neither. Attorneys have a duty solely to their clients. An employee or member of a law firm must not publicly advocate or advance positions against the interests of their clients. Had the firm continued to employ this person without any sort of reprimand, they would would not be zealously representing the clients.
I have my doubts whether this person could now be admitted to the NY Bar.
And i dont agree because MySQL IS found in major operations of major businesses all over the world.
Okay, so perhaps not on evey single critical task for which other (both free and otherwise) databases excel better, but for simple relational, transactional applications, its a pretty damned good database. And its free and simple and has a huge community arround it.
Yeah, so we have no 'native' XML support on it, but is that really critical for every application? NO! Normal and critical client/server apps have been working well for ages on stupidly bad db engines (fox, access), whats wrong with mysql then?
I'm not talking about things like XML support. I'm talking about things like views, triggers, stored procedures, a PL/SQL or T-SQL like language (I know that these objections changed recently/are changing). These are huge issues for lots of clients. I'm not saying that you are not going to find MySQL at big enterprises, but that MySQL is often a niche player running a certain bit of infrastructure, backing a corporate website, behind DNS or LDAP, things like that. MySQL is only now getting features that Oracle/Sybase/DB2 were offering 10 or 15 years ago.
The fact that you compare MySQL to fox and access is telling. MySQL is, of course, light years ahead of those products. But the releases of DB2 and Oracle in production (which are roughly two years old now) are a similar distance ahead of MySQL. MySQL is closing the gap, however, and I expect it to be roughly on the same level as MS SqlServer in by 2008, and a potential threat to Oracle and DB2 at that time forward.
Why the hell should I even bother thinking about switching to these new databases? And, further more, it seems that most of these newly free databases are not intended for corporate use... like DB2's memory limit and the castrations of the other databases... so where do they belong? In the hands of small businesses? A company's "developer camp?"
First of all, the commercial database offerings are far more feature rich than MySQL, though MySQL is getting better all the time. MySQL is fabulous for the hobbyist and small business crowd, but won't be found as a core technology of a major investment bank or backing an SAP installation at a large manufacturer anytime soon.
So the benefit of these free commercial products is that developers can build systems based on these technologies, then scale them easily to both small businesses and large enterprises. No one will start running their self-hosted blog on DB2, but it is easy to build a software product which may target businesses of several different sizes, and using a consistent database engine for small business and large enterprises is useful.
I've seen this before too. It seems that there is a fairly large component of non-crackpot scientists who believe that Pons-Fleischman found something interesting. The experiments have been duplicated, sometimes with positive and sometime with negative results, by others. This indicates to me that the scientific community does not have sufficient understanding of the process that Pons-Fleishman observed to identify and control the variables.
Pons-Fleishman were guilty of performing "bad science" because they announced - in a press conference - results that could not be reliably duplicated, not because their work was valueless. They jumped to conclusions that they could not defend, and sidestepped peer review.
Unless the case is totally without merit it has to go to a jury.
You know that entitled to be judged by a jury of your peers.
It has nothing to do with merit, but it has to do with what kind of outstanding questions are involved with the case.
The American civil law system divides the questions that come up during a litigation into two categories: fact and law. Judges are responsible for deciding questions of law. Juries are responsible for deciding questions of fact.
If the facts of the case are not in dispute, and the case solely hinges on the interpretation of law, the judge will rule on the case directly. On the other hand, if the facts of the case are in dispute, the judge will instruct the jury to decide the facts and the judge will apply the law to the jury's finding of facts.
The fact that the case hasn't been dismissed is because the judge is not satisfied that there are no relevent facts in dispute.
Slashdot Mirror
Who do you think NTP is? Its the widow of a basement inventor who tinkered with radios and electronics for most of his life. The numbers got out of hand only after RIM refused to pay reasonable licensing fees of roughly $4 million.
RIM should have just paid the $4 million that NTP originally wanted. But no. They were in the habit of using their own patent portfolio stifle their competitors, and couldn't accept the fact that someone else had invented part of the system first. After they refused, egos got involved and the whole thing spun out of control.
RIM has just about the greatest PR people in the world. The real story goes something like this...
Major foreign company hires DC lobbyists and lawyers to deprive the widow of a basement inventor out of her inheritance.
Is that a just a typo? RIM was the one caught falsifying evidence during the trial.
NTP should have acccepted RIM's first offer instead of being greedy.Actually, RIM should have accepted NTP's first offer (something like $4 million). Before NTP came along, RIM was ruthlessly using their own patents to drive competitors out of business. They refused to pay a reasonable license to NTP. So NTP said "screw you" and sued.
Anyone who thinks that RIM is a bunch of good guys is smoking something. They're about as dirty as SCO. They've controlled the PR better in this case, but basically they're trying to cheat a widow out of her husband's work.
DOH!
Don't feel bad. Nobody is perfect.
Thank you, PatrickThompson, for correctly recognizing and labeling a bigot. For 200+ years the United States has been a rich and prosperous country because of the contributions of immigrants. I hope we continue to welcome those who want to work hard and build a better life for their families, because they also build a better life for all of us.
Except for the fact that it is a misleading headline....
How is this a "trade"? Al Michaels signed a contract. Disney adhered to their obligations under that contract. Al Michaels requested that he be released from his obligations. Disney requested compensation for that release and NBC paid compensation.
It would be a trade if Disney sold Al Michaels contract to NBC, and Al Michaels had no recourse except to refuse to work.
More importantly, it was not even a trade!
Disney did not go to Al Michaels and say "Pack your bags and report to NBC." Al Michaels requested that he be released from his contract with Disney in order to make a new contract with NBC. Disney and NBC worked out a compensation agreement to compensate Disney for the loss of Al Michaels' services.
When we talk about "trading" people, it generally means they have little or no choice. This was a case of past and future employers working to honor the request made by the person.
Good points.
I have a similar view, though I codify it a little differently. My basic concept is this:
Every programming task has languages that are perfect, good, acceptable, and unacceptable. Every task also has a "weight" for the customer. Build a matrix of the tasks, their weight, and the languages that are perfect, good, and acceptable for each task.
Once the matrix is built, analyze it. Are there one or two tasks that stand out as being far and away more important that anything else? If so, make sure that a "perfect" language is among the languages chosen to standardize upon. If you are building a deck, have a framing hammer.
Now look at the merely important tasks. How many of these tasks have the language or languages chosen in step one in the perfect or good category? Of the remaining tasks, what is the minimum number of languages you can choose from the perfect or good category that cover these tasks? If you are hanging a bunch of pictures, get a hammer, but it doesn't matter whether it is a framing hammer, a tack hammer, or a ball-peen hammer.
At this point, you are left with a set of tasks that, although they are neccessary, are small and unimportant enough that implementing them with less than perfect tools is acceptable. Looking at the languages chosen in step 1 and step 2, are there any tasks left that can't be done with at least an acceptable tool? If there are, can any of the good or perfect tools for those tasks also provide a good or perfect alternative for any of the more important tasks? You can drive these nails with anything. If you already have a good tool use it, but don't sweat it if you don't.
At this point you'll have selected a suite of standard tools that should be broad enough to cover all your expected tasks but small enough that you can share skills and expertise across your group. You should never be stuck doing something important with a bad tool.
You're right that languages are easy. What is hard is architecture.
For apps that are of limited scale, a decent programmer can get the O'Reilly book and google a few things and make it work. But only a fool would think that they could design even a moderately complex J2EE application that way. And I've seen too many people who built SQL databases this way.
Certain tasks are complex and critical to the success of a project. For an app that can be thrown away easily, it doesn't much matter. But basic architecture decisions can be difficult to refactor, and so that planning needs to be guided by people with demonstratable experience and skill in the chosen technologies.
ConEd (Consolidated Edison), the primary electric utility in New York City, actually pipes steam around much of downtown and midtown Manhattan. This steam is used to for heat and to generate hot water for many of the office towers in the area.
Pick one and stick with it. Either talk about private or public life.
An attorney, just like anyone else, can hold whatever views they want in private. When they are hired by a client, however, they have a fiduciary duty to the client. What they do in their blog, or in a newspaper interview, or any other part of their public life has a bearing upon their fiduciary duty.
An attorney would not be disbarred for expressing a point of view, but for failing to excercise their fiduciary duty.
Actually, in such a situation you have an extremely small but measurable chance of actually influencing the national direction on something. To be certain of getting into an a 100% meaningless argument, attend meetings of third parties. Or look for the community activist organizations run by old hippies who advocate solutions like "If we hold a big music festival with folk singers and jam bands, it will bring peace and fix the environment."
The choice that a pharmaceutical company makes is whether to fully disclose their innovations, allowing other researchers to leverage the work, or keep those innovations as trade secrets. Without providing a way to simultaneously protect and disclose innovation, you automatically slow the advance of the entire industry.
And while you may have a point with software patents, please don't try to tell me that the bulk of the cost of developing a new pharmaceutical is tied up in patenting costs, rather than in labs full of expensive equipment staffed by expensive researchers who spend 99.9% of their time investigating dead ends, and then need to subject the remaining 0.1% of their work to clinical trials and arcan bueracracy in regulatory agencies.
I've been advocating this for a while. Patents should be of variable duration, depending primarily on the sunk costs necessary to innovate in a field.
For example, I can't think of any software innovations that required billion dollar investments. Most innovative research can be done by a lone person or a small group in a basement somewhere. Since the cost of software innovation is low, the potential payback is fast, and so the period of protection should be low as well. I suggest roughly 2 years.
OTOH, fields like materials science might require investments of hundreds of millions of dollars in order to develop new innovations. We can't expect investors to fund this sort of research without some reasonable chance of return, so these areas should be protected longer.
OMFG!! A Slashdot poster didn't read the article closely!!
The patent is only enforceable when the patent holder brings it to market, not when the other guy brings it to market.
So there is a simple affirmative defense to an infringement claim that could be handled by an administrative judge with no fuss: If you claim that I am infringing on your patent, and I can show that I used the innovation as little as one second before you released it to the market, I win. No grey area to litigate.
The bar has the right, and does excercise it. The problem is not the speach, but the fact that she was not zealously advocating for her client.
To draw a parallel, imagine you went to a physician and discovered that you had some disease. And then some worker in that office, in performing some sort of political advocacy, revealed to the world that you had that disease. That worker would have shown a disregard for you, the patient, that would rightfully disqualify them from further employment in the medical field, and medical licensing boards would be correct in denyng licensing for ethical grounds.
An attorney has a fiduciary duty to their client, and as such has several duties, including a duty of loyalty. A fiduciary must disregard his own self-interest and act for the benefit of the beneficiary. Benjamin Cardozo, writing in Meinhard v. Salmon, 249 N.Y. 458, 464 (1928), said "Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior."
Aside from the question "How does this apply to the topic we are discussing?" the defense attorney actually has an additional recourse that he must excercise before reporting the perjury. If he believes a client or a witness would respond perjurously to a question, he should not ask the question that evokes the perjurous response. If necessary, he should not even call the witness or allow the defendant to testify. Reporting the perjury should only be necessary when the defense attorney discovers after the fact that the testimony was perjurous, and then only after advising the party or parties to correct their testimony and those parties not taking that advice.
Also, the attorney does not have the recourse to simply stop representing their client. An attorney is only allowed to resign from the case if doing so would not prejudice the client. So if there is a chance that the jury would percieve that the attorney's exit was because "even he didn't believe the defendent was innocent," the attorney cannot resign from the case. Also, if it is unlikely that the client would not be able to find substitute counsel, the attorney can also be prohibited from resigning from the case. If an attorney wishes to resign from a case, he must petition the judge, and is only released upon the judge's satisfaction that the defendent won't be harmed.
You missed the point. The calculation isn't cost vs. cost. It is our ability to bear the cost vs. their ability to bear the cost.
If we can afford the anti-missile technology, and the enemies that concern us cannot afford the counter-measures, then we win. The cost of either doesn't matter.
A system that makes major mid-course adjustments is outside the capability of enemies that are only now getting basic ICBM capability. Those adjustments require fuel. That fuel must be boosted. Therefore the rocket must be substantially larger or field fewer warheads. Either way, we've forced them to diminish their striking power.
I agree, but in the scenario you suggest the rules are well established and your role as a litigator is very narrow. Your hired to win one specific case.
I think I would be pretty reasonable in assuming that the firm in question was probably retained by at least one of their clients to "help them protect and increase the value of their IP assets." They can not do that and simultaneously publicly advocate stances that could undermine their IP.
I'd call this being engaged in lobbying against your client's interest.
Actually, their motication is neither. Attorneys have a duty solely to their clients. An employee or member of a law firm must not publicly advocate or advance positions against the interests of their clients. Had the firm continued to employ this person without any sort of reprimand, they would would not be zealously representing the clients.
I have my doubts whether this person could now be admitted to the NY Bar.
I'm not talking about things like XML support. I'm talking about things like views, triggers, stored procedures, a PL/SQL or T-SQL like language (I know that these objections changed recently/are changing). These are huge issues for lots of clients. I'm not saying that you are not going to find MySQL at big enterprises, but that MySQL is often a niche player running a certain bit of infrastructure, backing a corporate website, behind DNS or LDAP, things like that. MySQL is only now getting features that Oracle/Sybase/DB2 were offering 10 or 15 years ago.
The fact that you compare MySQL to fox and access is telling. MySQL is, of course, light years ahead of those products. But the releases of DB2 and Oracle in production (which are roughly two years old now) are a similar distance ahead of MySQL. MySQL is closing the gap, however, and I expect it to be roughly on the same level as MS SqlServer in by 2008, and a potential threat to Oracle and DB2 at that time forward.
First of all, the commercial database offerings are far more feature rich than MySQL, though MySQL is getting better all the time. MySQL is fabulous for the hobbyist and small business crowd, but won't be found as a core technology of a major investment bank or backing an SAP installation at a large manufacturer anytime soon.
So the benefit of these free commercial products is that developers can build systems based on these technologies, then scale them easily to both small businesses and large enterprises. No one will start running their self-hosted blog on DB2, but it is easy to build a software product which may target businesses of several different sizes, and using a consistent database engine for small business and large enterprises is useful.
I've seen this before too. It seems that there is a fairly large component of non-crackpot scientists who believe that Pons-Fleischman found something interesting. The experiments have been duplicated, sometimes with positive and sometime with negative results, by others. This indicates to me that the scientific community does not have sufficient understanding of the process that Pons-Fleishman observed to identify and control the variables.
Pons-Fleishman were guilty of performing "bad science" because they announced - in a press conference - results that could not be reliably duplicated, not because their work was valueless. They jumped to conclusions that they could not defend, and sidestepped peer review.
It has nothing to do with merit, but it has to do with what kind of outstanding questions are involved with the case.
The American civil law system divides the questions that come up during a litigation into two categories: fact and law. Judges are responsible for deciding questions of law. Juries are responsible for deciding questions of fact.
If the facts of the case are not in dispute, and the case solely hinges on the interpretation of law, the judge will rule on the case directly. On the other hand, if the facts of the case are in dispute, the judge will instruct the jury to decide the facts and the judge will apply the law to the jury's finding of facts.
The fact that the case hasn't been dismissed is because the judge is not satisfied that there are no relevent facts in dispute.