Let's not get too carried away. Do you really think that child labor laws are an important reason why we don't have much child labor? Or OSHA laws the reason that we have relatively safe workplaces?
Would *you* let your son or daughter leave school to work at age 10? Perhaps so, but I notice that many people support their children, to some degree, all the way through college -- insulating them from the workpace way beyond what child labor laws require.
Would *you* be willing to work at a job where there is a 10% annual mortality rate? I think that you could find one or two workers out there who might think twice about taking even comparatively low-mortality jobs like working on oil rigs.
I usually wear a coat in cold weather. If there were a regulation requiring me to do so, would it be correct to assume that I was wearing it because of a regulation?
Obviously some regulations have some effect but the sky isn't going to fall if we get rid of a few, either. Usually, laws don't get passed if they run contrary to what most people want to do anyway.
The Union for Linguistic Propriety (ULP) has written to the Americal Mathematical Society to demand changes in socially-offensive mathematical terminology. "The term 'least upper bound' is clearly derogatory," according to the ULP memorandum. "A perfectly satisfactory alternative, 'supremum,' carries the same mathematical meaning without the adverse connotations." Similarly, ULP insists that "infimum" be abolished, to be replaced by "greatest lower bound," a term that "reflects the struggle to overcome the adversity associated with membership in a stigmatized group or set."
When asked whether ULP intends to abolish the use of the term "negative," an ULP representative said that "that issue is under active consideration."
If psycho-cultural explanations don't work, try greed.
What's so perplexing here? If you are CEO of SCO, what can you do to maximize your income? Assuming that you haven't got much of a product line, how about suing a bunch of companies to see whether (a) the courts will give you a big payout, or (b) the companies will settle to make you go away? Sure, it's a gamble. Is it the worst gamble ever made in business history? Probably not.
The greed explanation clears up quite a few other questions about motivation not easily explained by
appealing to personality disorders or cultural phenomena, such as: (a) why would a law firm elect to go with contingency payments, (b) why would someone finance a loan to this company, and (c) why would anyone buy shares of this company's stock? Are they all bipolar, schizo-whatever, or suffering from business culturitis?
Nah, I think it's just a roll of the dice, hoping to cash in. Personally, I think it's a lousy bet and there's no way I'd buy their stock, but hey, it takes a difference of opinion to make a horse race. Simple explanations are preferable to complex ones.
One further thought about discovery (IA *obviously* NAL):
If SCO doesn't identify the offending lines of code, can't IBM simply assert that each and every line is not offending? Doesn't this shift the burden of proof to SCO?
I suppose the issue is procedural: IBM wants to know what is the offending code in advance of trial. If the judge doesn't insist on discovery, the trial presumably gets mired in delays when SCO finally *does* say that "line 367 in file 42" is offending. Then IBM says, "Judge, this is the first we've heard of that; we need a delay to respond."
Aha, I see: this is the SCO strategy: attack, deny, and delay so as to maximize FUD. An expeditious court proceeding is probably the last thing that they want.
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Would *you* let your son or daughter leave school to work at age 10? Perhaps so, but I notice that many people support their children, to some degree, all the way through college -- insulating them from the workpace way beyond what child labor laws require.
Would *you* be willing to work at a job where there is a 10% annual mortality rate? I think that you could find one or two workers out there who might think twice about taking even comparatively low-mortality jobs like working on oil rigs.
I usually wear a coat in cold weather. If there were a regulation requiring me to do so, would it be correct to assume that I was wearing it because of a regulation?
Obviously some regulations have some effect but the sky isn't going to fall if we get rid of a few, either. Usually, laws don't get passed if they run contrary to what most people want to do anyway.
The Union for Linguistic Propriety (ULP) has written to the Americal Mathematical Society to demand changes in socially-offensive mathematical terminology. "The term 'least upper bound' is clearly derogatory," according to the ULP memorandum. "A perfectly satisfactory alternative, 'supremum,' carries the same mathematical meaning without the adverse connotations." Similarly, ULP insists that "infimum" be abolished, to be replaced by "greatest lower bound," a term that "reflects the struggle to overcome the adversity associated with membership in a stigmatized group or set." When asked whether ULP intends to abolish the use of the term "negative," an ULP representative said that "that issue is under active consideration."
What's so perplexing here? If you are CEO of SCO, what can you do to maximize your income? Assuming that you haven't got much of a product line, how about suing a bunch of companies to see whether (a) the courts will give you a big payout, or (b) the companies will settle to make you go away? Sure, it's a gamble. Is it the worst gamble ever made in business history? Probably not.
The greed explanation clears up quite a few other questions about motivation not easily explained by appealing to personality disorders or cultural phenomena, such as: (a) why would a law firm elect to go with contingency payments, (b) why would someone finance a loan to this company, and (c) why would anyone buy shares of this company's stock? Are they all bipolar, schizo-whatever, or suffering from business culturitis?
Nah, I think it's just a roll of the dice, hoping to cash in. Personally, I think it's a lousy bet and there's no way I'd buy their stock, but hey, it takes a difference of opinion to make a horse race. Simple explanations are preferable to complex ones.
If SCO doesn't identify the offending lines of code, can't IBM simply assert that each and every line is not offending? Doesn't this shift the burden of proof to SCO?
I suppose the issue is procedural: IBM wants to know what is the offending code in advance of trial. If the judge doesn't insist on discovery, the trial presumably gets mired in delays when SCO finally *does* say that "line 367 in file 42" is offending. Then IBM says, "Judge, this is the first we've heard of that; we need a delay to respond."
Aha, I see: this is the SCO strategy: attack, deny, and delay so as to maximize FUD. An expeditious court proceeding is probably the last thing that they want.