That would have sounded more professional, and more accurate as well. However, it's common for companies and wealthy individuals to get the habit of only saying a law has definitely been broken when they are actually announcing either a civil suit or seeking criminal charges.
That's because there's the chance the other side knows something the aggrieved party doesn't, and will gladly skip over negotiations that could resolve the issue and say "Fine, let's go straight to court". It's seen as much better to call them names that may get them to reveal more of their strategy while keeping actual options open.
To put it more coloquially, Apple wants to know if Real has been borrowing SCO's crackpipe or not, before they commit to hauling them before a judge.
Apple's main concern appears to be that any mistakes made by Real (buggy software causing frequent I-Pod crashes, or customers who own older Realmedia format files and some upgrade somewhere breaks compatability) will cost Apple money. In one respect they are simply right - If Real gets its way, there will be customers calling Apple tech support to deal with problems Real has introduced, and Apple tech support will have to play the "It's a 3rd party software issue" card.
Apple would therefore definitely spend money addressing Real's consumer related issues. Also, Apple currently has a better than average rating for tech support, and the added load, and risk that tech support would use that "Blame a third party" card when it wasn't true have at least a fair chance of reducing Apple's rating, which also eventually translates to a financial hit.
The phrase they used is quite unfortunate at best. However, if they had said "cracker", haf the people reading it would have wondered what Georgia had to do with it, and if they had used a correct term for their analogy, such as "Computer Criminal", they would have been linguistically more correct but legally very foolish.
"First, they don't have to use the DMCA, it is a choice."
(IANAL)
If by they you mean Apple - As long as Apple is only considering civil options, yes they have the choice not to invoke certain laws. They can even do this for moral reasons, although they had better be able to win a civil suite or their shareholders may get a bit upset with them.
In this case, there are pragmatic reasons for Apple not to invoke the DMCA, in that they are primarily a hardware company who would be sueing a software only corporation, and any resulting precident, even a most favorable one, might become a problem for one division of Apple or another down the road.
However, current IP laws now all include possible criminal penalties, and the DMCA is specifically already ruled relevant to criminal proceedings. There is nothing technically to stop a civil judge from forwarding a transcript of an Apple v. Real tort case to a federal D.A. more concerned with criminal prosecution, even if Apple might prefer they didn't.
Sure, you can have your share of the eastern seaboard back, as soon as you pay the shipping and handleing fees. We'll just butt them all up against Ireland, O.K.? Glad we could work this out. If you see Spain you might suggest they dispute our claim to California. Trust me, with DC already gone, we'll fold.
The great heartland of the USA.
P.S. We already told the occifer that it was just oregan, that's how this mess started, remember?
The article points out some good reasons for not panicing. To explain them, it then mentions Giant Asteroid Impacts and Mutually Assured Distruction as for a massive nuclear war. These are not the best metaphors to choose in explaining why things are not really all that bad.
This subject usuually draws some "Well, pirating is still just plain wrong" responses. Your post points out the real problem with that. To the RIAA, you are a criminal, who is lieing about boycotting their stuff and is really pirating it instead. The guy who defends them by pointing out that pirating is just plain wrong, is a criminal, who is really pirating their stuff instead, and I am a criminal, who is really pirating their stuff instead.
To the RIAA, we are all criminals. Every time their sales dip, it is you, me, and everyone else who ever posted to this subject, plus a whole lot of other people, committing piracy that is the sole cause.
Stick up for the RIAA's rights, and they will take away yours to thank you for it. They need you to be thought a criminal whether you are one or not.
The Native American nations wish to collectively thank you, and to add that they have never hated America, at least as it was before all you new guys moved in. All hateful mass murderers among the NAN would like to point out that they were directing their "innate ethnic exuberance" against people who were not real Americans at all, mostly Europeans within a mere generation or three. They will however agree to leave, just so we send them back to their homeland.
Jeffery Dalmer would also like to say, (speaking "ex infernalis" of course), that he has never hated America, at least before he got caught, although there were a few parts of it he needed extra mayonaise for.
First, I agree with you, if you mean that it's better to hear the news from a typical vigilante that to only find out when your most sensitive information appears in the hands of a competitor or plastered all over the net. Second, that's part of a larger picture. If you get hacked by a script kiddee, and he only appears to get to your web server, the same questions apply. Are you lucky to get the wake up call from a mere website defacement insead of finding a trojan that's been sitting for months in accounts recievable? Possibly, but how do you know the intruder only got in as far as it first appears, and how do you know no one else better than him hasn't done more? I'ts all a spectrum, from a vigilante who really didn't screw up anything, to one who accidentally did some damage, to a web site defacement that's easy to fix and relatively harmless, to harvesting personnel information for head hunters, to harvesting customer information for spam lists, to the most serious crimes that can cost a company millions.
Anybody who falls victim to one of the less serious sorts can breathe a sigh of relief that it wasn't one of the worse ones, and for their blood pressure's sake they probably should, but they still need to think about what it implies about their chances the next time will be successful, and for worse consequences.
There have been several mountaineering injuries and quite possibly actual deaths related to people who have recently had lasix type surgery, then spent more of that 'excess' money on getting a pro to drag them up a big pile of rock (like Everest, or Denali) for the bragging rights. Laser surgery produces eyes that can warp greatly under quick changes in pressure, and leave a person with at least temporary 20/500 vision.
Before you decide that you are safe from this as you are not taking up mountain climbing, you might want to consider whether you plan on taking any high altitude airplane flights, as for example on a business trip to Denver CO.
While you are at it, you might want copies of Pink Floyd's Echos, and 2001 a space oddyssy. Start the music when the video shows the text "Jupiter and beyond...".
Darwin's theory makes predictions, and some of them have been very well documented and are among the most thoroughly tested predictions of science.
1. 70 years or so before Crick and Watson discovered the genetic code, Darwin claimed that natural selection would not work if heredity allowed unlimited blending, and so the theory predicted that whatever the mechanisms of heredity were, they would be discovered to be quantized, with each gene functioning only either full on or full off. While there are a few areas where that model turns out to be simplistic, 99% plus of genes work exactly that way.
2. Natural selection predicts that the mutation rate has to be low enough to result in gradual change, because the larger the single mutation, the greater the chance it will be lethal. (To see why, imagine a leopard suddenly evolving a major new feature. Most of the time, this would be an oddly formed lump, which would make it harder for the leopard to survive, but if by extreme chance, a leopard was suddenly born with fully functional gills, that would still make it harder for the leopard to survive, because gills in the middle of the African savanna don't give the leopard a survival advantage, they just make it harder for the leopard to conserve enough water. Since the leopard is already very well suited to its particular environment, only a slight tweak is likely to be an improvement).
This arguement has resulted in detailed calculations, about how likely a mutation should be to result in the observable survival rate for an average member of a species. Other numbers, such as the lifespan the fossil record shows for different species, how much variation members of a common species exibit, and other such factors all allow similar calculations. Those result in several independant estimates of how often DNA makes a copying error, and not only are all these different approaches ones that produce numbers within a few % of each other, but those estimates match laboratory measurements of the actual value that have just become possible within the last 10 years or so, which again counts as a confirmed prediction of the theory.
3. Natural selection predicts the fossil record, not just in general, but in detail. As just one example, when scientists had found two fossil types realted to modern whales, with the fossils in rock layers roughly 30 million years apart, they were able to describe what the expected appearance of intermediate forms were, not only in broad terms such as expected size or weight, but in very detailed aspects such as how many bones in the inner ear were fused, or how many teeth were expected in the jaw. Since those predictions were made, four more whale intermediates have been found, filling in most of that range, and every one of them comes from rock in the predicted age range to show the modifications expected.
A few states do apportion electoral votes, rather than practicing a winner take all method. People are reluctant to pressure their state to go to divvying up electoral votes, because it is percived that this will give the states that don't an advantage.
However, with more states also doing winner-take-all voting, there are increasing advantages to not doing it. (For example, a particular district can get lots of government programs even if the state it is a part of didn't go strongly for the winner, just so that district did.)
Guns are effectively the only subject of the 2nd amendment. Until and unless communications related electronics are seen as a subject of the 1st amendment, our rights are not going to see the same level of protection. Right now, the legal underpinning for all to many laws controlling such devices is widely seen, in political circles, as being derived only from customary law or just possibly restricted by the 9th amendment. Ultimately, this is about a struggle for the 1st.
Unfortunately, I just checked wit hthe intergaqlactic council, and Earth is zoned as part of a historic preservation area. We are out of compliance until we repaint the whole moon to match earth (G. Washington White and Federal Blue).
More than that, for most people, it has to be substantially better value. If it's only a 20% improvement, they are not going to be interested, the value has to look at least twice as good to draw most people's attention.
I'm all in favor of reducing poverty at home. I'm even in favor of helping people outside of our own country. But that doesn't make the space program the rational place to cut spending to get more money for such actions. At 0.7% of the federal budget, just how much impact would scrapping the entire space program have? You could produce a lot more good by scapping the least efficient social program and giving all its funding to the most efficient one.
For example, it's been suggested in several studies that we let a lot of non-violent felons out of prison early, then cut prison funding only proportionately (without making conditions less humane for the remaining convicts), and put that freed up funding into job related education, and this should create a feedback loop where we will see a continuing decrease in new criminals, AND a rise in general standard of living. Even people who think our education systems suck seldom disagree that we have even more inefficiency in the way we run the courts and prisons.
In ratio, It's like you're wanting a thousand dollars I preferred to spend on something else, and justifying it by saying we can build 30 homes for local poor people with all that money. If you were limiting yourself to saying that 1,000$ could be used to buy a few used washers and dryers for a few of them, or put a new roof on one little old lady's house with volunteer labor, or something like that, you'd have a point.
Then we could argue about the moral questions - whether society has that particular obligation, whether funding science is morally justified by its potential impact on our collective grandchildren, and things like that.
Instead, you make it sound like it's an either or issue - Either we fund NASA, or we eliminate poverty. In doing so, you have not begun to descibe the real facts of the matter. Sorry, but facing up to the truth is a moral act, as is careing about speeking it.
Your moral superiority is laughable in that you are feeling superior over your stand on an untrue hypothetical position instead of the real one. It's like getting a good feeling for advocating saving the endangered Naugas.
And if I find out you have been in the habit of dealing with everything quietly, and it still impacted me negatively, I will immediately assume you have not sufficently meant your promise to do it quickly, and have not had the professional ethics to treat me with equal respect to what you are expecting in turn.
At that point, I will believe you deliberately chose to screw me, your customer, over. I will then do my level best to see to it that you never run a business again, including making damned sure you are in the papers for your mistakes and that any bank that is thinking of giving you a recovery loan simply does not want to do business.
So, do you want to risk my not being understanding when you tell me the truth, or risk slipping over the line into a lie and get me pissed enough that I will happily work at getting you, and the wife and kids if necessary, added to the rolls of the homeless?
Now what was that about an ability to continue to do business? Lie to me, either explicitly _or by omission_ , and that's exactly what I want you to lose.
SCO stock's inside trading record shows five automatic sell orders and only two regular sells in recent History (Going back to Sept. of last year). No inside trades have been reported since April 7th. There are no buys or automatic buys (0).
Largest number of transactions (by far) and largest total value (by a smaller ratio) is Director Thomas P. Raimondi.
Gasparro, Larry (VP), Broughton, Reginald (SR VP), and Bench, Robert K. (CFO) all appear on the list. Bench owns (or owned by the most recent record) roughly 2.4 times as much stock as the next largest investor on the list.
Hunsaker, Jeff F. is the only person appearing on the list who is not shown with a position in the company described to explain why he is an insider, but other sources confirm he was a SR VP.
Interestingly, Darl's name does not appear at all on the inside trading list.
SCO hovered at about 5.00$ US for a few weeks. There is a 5.00$/share barrier for some types of puts and calls, notably ones related to shorting stocks, on the NYSE, so a number of short sellers picked that point just because it's as low as they were allowed to go. SCO's stock price couldn't drop much below that until all those transactions had been absorbed by the market, but the recent drop suggests they have now been cleared out.
Note how they didn't talk much for a while. I'd suspect they will stay vocal all the way to penny stockdom now.
NH3 Polar, well, yes, as you point out, but if you don't mind me qualifying it a bit, I'd say NH3 isn't usefully polar, in that it doesn't have the equivalent of Van der Walls forces between liquid molecules at a strength sufficient to much help stretch the range of liquidity (a tiny bit, but not much). The 2 Hydrogens in a water molecule don't line up on the opposite sides with the oxygen atom in the middle, but form a rather pronounced bend. By contrast the three hydrogens in Ammonia don't leave the Nitrogen sticking out by itself. They may not maintain perfect 120 degree angles in a flat plane around the N's "equator" under all conditions, but they are pretty close to it.
When you analyze this geometrically, we're talking about an inverse square law force (electromagnetism), and various sine or cosine based equations for the resulting angles in determining the resultant forces. Then you have some fairly small adjustments to factor in the different masses and orbital diameters of O and N, and so on.
What this all ends up meaning is the resulting 80 degrees F will be a bit broader than Methane's totally non polar 37 degrees F, but it's still less than half the 180 degrees F for liquid water, and not nearly 1.5/1.8 of it. (I assume your 212 F is a typo - you obviously know this stuff better than that).
It's really the more limited question of how NH3 molecules react solely with each other when we're talking about the freezing of an entire ocean of the stuff, not how NH3 and H2O (or some other interesting combinations) interact (many of which can be quite polar crystalization reactions).
Now as regards life forms, what applies to a relatively pure liquid is more than usually not something we can extrapolate too much to a mixture, so I wouldn't read too much into it. Our one example of liquid oceans is not exactly pure H2O, after all, and showing that there are some reasons life is less likely in close to pure Methane or Ammonia doesn't limit a lot of other possibilities.
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That would have sounded more professional, and more accurate as well. However, it's common for companies and wealthy individuals to get the habit of only saying a law has definitely been broken when they are actually announcing either a civil suit or seeking criminal charges.
That's because there's the chance the other side knows something the aggrieved party doesn't, and will gladly skip over negotiations that could resolve the issue and say "Fine, let's go straight to court". It's seen as much better to call them names that may get them to reveal more of their strategy while keeping actual options open.
To put it more coloquially, Apple wants to know if Real has been borrowing SCO's crackpipe or not, before they commit to hauling them before a judge.
Apple's main concern appears to be that any mistakes made by Real (buggy software causing frequent I-Pod crashes, or customers who own older Realmedia format files and some upgrade somewhere breaks compatability) will cost Apple money. In one respect they are simply right - If Real gets its way, there will be customers calling Apple tech support to deal with problems Real has introduced, and Apple tech support will have to play the "It's a 3rd party software issue" card.
Apple would therefore definitely spend money addressing Real's consumer related issues. Also, Apple currently has a better than average rating for tech support, and the added load, and risk that tech support would use that "Blame a third party" card when it wasn't true have at least a fair chance of reducing Apple's rating, which also eventually translates to a financial hit.
The phrase they used is quite unfortunate at best. However, if they had said "cracker", haf the people reading it would have wondered what Georgia had to do with it, and if they had used a correct term for their analogy, such as "Computer Criminal", they would have been linguistically more correct but legally very foolish.
"First, they don't have to use the DMCA, it is a choice."
(IANAL)
If by they you mean Apple - As long as Apple is only considering civil options, yes they have the choice not to invoke certain laws. They can even do this for moral reasons, although they had better be able to win a civil suite or their shareholders may get a bit upset with them.
In this case, there are pragmatic reasons for Apple not to invoke the DMCA, in that they are primarily a hardware company who would be sueing a software only corporation, and any resulting precident, even a most favorable one, might become a problem for one division of Apple or another down the road.
However, current IP laws now all include possible criminal penalties, and the DMCA is specifically already ruled relevant to criminal proceedings. There is nothing technically to stop a civil judge from forwarding a transcript of an Apple v. Real tort case to a federal D.A. more concerned with criminal prosecution, even if Apple might prefer they didn't.
Sure, you can have your share of the eastern seaboard back, as soon as you pay the shipping and handleing fees. We'll just butt them all up against Ireland, O.K.? Glad we could work this out. If you see Spain you might suggest they dispute our claim to California. Trust me, with DC already gone, we'll fold.
The great heartland of the USA.
P.S. We already told the occifer that it was just oregan, that's how this mess started, remember?
The article points out some good reasons for not panicing. To explain them, it then mentions Giant Asteroid Impacts and Mutually Assured Distruction as for a massive nuclear war. These are not the best metaphors to choose in explaining why things are not really all that bad.
This subject usuually draws some "Well, pirating is still just plain wrong" responses. Your post points out the real problem with that. To the RIAA, you are a criminal, who is lieing about boycotting their stuff and is really pirating it instead. The guy who defends them by pointing out that pirating is just plain wrong, is a criminal, who is really pirating their stuff instead, and I am a criminal, who is really pirating their stuff instead.
To the RIAA, we are all criminals. Every time their sales dip, it is you, me, and everyone else who ever posted to this subject, plus a whole lot of other people, committing piracy that is the sole cause.
Stick up for the RIAA's rights, and they will take away yours to thank you for it. They need you to be thought a criminal whether you are one or not.
And yet, most of us somehow manage to tolerate at least half the recent ex-virgins out there, despite their new idiosyncrasy.
The Native American nations wish to collectively thank you, and to add that they have never hated America, at least as it was before all you new guys moved in. All hateful mass murderers among the NAN would like to point out that they were directing their "innate ethnic exuberance" against people who were not real Americans at all, mostly Europeans within a mere generation or three. They will however agree to leave, just so we send them back to their homeland.
Jeffery Dalmer would also like to say, (speaking "ex infernalis" of course), that he has never hated America, at least before he got caught, although there were a few parts of it he needed extra mayonaise for.
First, I agree with you, if you mean that it's better to hear the news from a typical vigilante that to only find out when your most sensitive information appears in the hands of a competitor or plastered all over the net.
Second, that's part of a larger picture. If you get hacked by a script kiddee, and he only appears to get to your web server, the same questions apply. Are you lucky to get the wake up call from a mere website defacement insead of finding a trojan that's been sitting for months in accounts recievable? Possibly, but how do you know the intruder only got in as far as it first appears, and how do you know no one else better than him hasn't done more? I'ts all a spectrum, from a vigilante who really didn't screw up anything, to one who accidentally did some damage, to a web site defacement that's easy to fix and relatively harmless, to harvesting personnel information for head hunters, to harvesting customer information for spam lists, to the most serious crimes that can cost a company millions.
Anybody who falls victim to one of the less serious sorts can breathe a sigh of relief that it wasn't one of the worse ones, and for their blood pressure's sake they probably should, but they still need to think about what it implies about their chances the next time will be successful, and for worse consequences.
There have been several mountaineering injuries and quite possibly actual deaths related to people who have recently had lasix type surgery, then spent more of that 'excess' money on getting a pro to drag them up a big pile of rock (like Everest, or Denali) for the bragging rights. Laser surgery produces eyes that can warp greatly under quick changes in pressure, and leave a person with at least temporary 20/500 vision.
Before you decide that you are safe from this as you are not taking up mountain climbing, you might want to consider whether you plan on taking any high altitude airplane flights, as for example on a business trip to Denver CO.
While you are at it, you might want copies of Pink Floyd's Echos, and 2001 a space oddyssy. Start the music when the video shows the text "Jupiter and beyond...".
Darwin's theory makes predictions, and some of them have been very well documented and are among the most thoroughly tested predictions of science.
1. 70 years or so before Crick and Watson discovered the genetic code, Darwin claimed that natural selection would not work if heredity allowed unlimited blending, and so the theory predicted that whatever the mechanisms of heredity were, they would be discovered to be quantized, with each gene functioning only either full on or full off. While there are a few areas where that model turns out to be simplistic, 99% plus of genes work exactly that way.
2. Natural selection predicts that the mutation rate has to be low enough to result in gradual change, because the larger the single mutation, the greater the chance it will be lethal. (To see why, imagine a leopard suddenly evolving a major new feature. Most of the time, this would be an oddly formed lump, which would make it harder for the leopard to survive, but if by extreme chance, a leopard was suddenly born with fully functional gills, that would still make it harder for the leopard to survive, because gills in the middle of the African savanna don't give the leopard a survival advantage, they just make it harder for the leopard to conserve enough water. Since the leopard is already very well suited to its particular environment, only a slight tweak is likely to be an improvement).
This arguement has resulted in detailed calculations, about how likely a mutation should be to result in the observable survival rate for an average member of a species. Other numbers, such as the lifespan the fossil record shows for different species, how much variation members of a common species exibit, and other such factors all allow similar calculations. Those result in several independant estimates of how often DNA makes a copying error, and not only are all these different approaches ones that produce numbers within a few % of each other, but those estimates match laboratory measurements of the actual value that have just become possible within the last 10 years or so, which again counts as a confirmed prediction of the theory.
3. Natural selection predicts the fossil record, not just in general, but in detail. As just one example, when scientists had found two fossil types realted to modern whales, with the fossils in rock layers roughly 30 million years apart, they were able to describe what the expected appearance of intermediate forms were, not only in broad terms such as expected size or weight, but in very detailed aspects such as how many bones in the inner ear were fused, or how many teeth were expected in the jaw. Since those predictions were made, four more whale intermediates have been found, filling in most of that range, and every one of them comes from rock in the predicted age range to show the modifications expected.
A few states do apportion electoral votes, rather than practicing a winner take all method. People are reluctant to pressure their state to go to divvying up electoral votes, because it is percived that this will give the states that don't an advantage.
However, with more states also doing winner-take-all voting, there are increasing advantages to not doing it. (For example, a particular district can get lots of government programs even if the state it is a part of didn't go strongly for the winner, just so that district did.)
How'd you get past the leopard?
What's sad is, it's probably easier to wade through all the junk on usenet than the junk in the current programmimg schedule, or no one would bother.
Yeah, I bought a P-90 just cause Jack uses one.
Guns are effectively the only subject of the 2nd amendment. Until and unless communications related electronics are seen as a subject of the 1st amendment, our rights are not going to see the same level of protection. Right now, the legal underpinning for all to many laws controlling such devices is widely seen, in political circles, as being derived only from customary law or just possibly restricted by the 9th amendment. Ultimately, this is about a struggle for the 1st.
Unfortunately, I just checked wit hthe intergaqlactic council, and Earth is zoned as part of a historic preservation area. We are out of compliance until we repaint the whole moon to match earth (G. Washington White and Federal Blue).
More than that, for most people, it has to be substantially better value. If it's only a 20% improvement, they are not going to be interested, the value has to look at least twice as good to draw most people's attention.
I'm all in favor of reducing poverty at home. I'm even in favor of helping people outside of our own country. But that doesn't make the space program the rational place to cut spending to get more money for such actions. At 0.7% of the federal budget, just how much impact would scrapping the entire space program have? You could produce a lot more good by scapping the least efficient social program and giving all its funding to the most efficient one.
For example, it's been suggested in several studies that we let a lot of non-violent felons out of prison early, then cut prison funding only proportionately (without making conditions less humane for the remaining convicts), and put that freed up funding into job related education, and this should create a feedback loop where we will see a continuing decrease in new criminals, AND a rise in general standard of living. Even people who think our education systems suck seldom disagree that we have even more inefficiency in the way we run the courts and prisons.
In ratio, It's like you're wanting a thousand dollars I preferred to spend on something else, and justifying it by saying we can build 30 homes for local poor people with all that money. If you were limiting yourself to saying that 1,000$ could be used to buy a few used washers and dryers for a few of them, or put a new roof on one little old lady's house with volunteer labor, or something like that, you'd have a point.
Then we could argue about the moral questions - whether society has that particular obligation, whether funding science is morally justified by its potential impact on our collective grandchildren, and things like that.
Instead, you make it sound like it's an either or issue - Either we fund NASA, or we eliminate poverty. In doing so, you have not begun to descibe the real facts of the matter. Sorry, but facing up to the truth is a moral act, as is careing about speeking it.
Your moral superiority is laughable in that you are feeling superior over your stand on an untrue hypothetical position instead of the real one. It's like getting a good feeling for advocating saving the endangered Naugas.
And if I find out you have been in the habit of dealing with everything quietly, and it still impacted me negatively, I will immediately assume you have not sufficently meant your promise to do it quickly, and have not had the professional ethics to treat me with equal respect to what you are expecting in turn.
At that point, I will believe you deliberately chose to screw me, your customer, over. I will then do my level best to see to it that you never run a business again, including making damned sure you are in the papers for your mistakes and that any bank that is thinking of giving you a recovery loan simply does not want to do business.
So, do you want to risk my not being understanding when you tell me the truth, or risk slipping over the line into a lie and get me pissed enough that I will happily work at getting you, and the wife and kids if necessary, added to the rolls of the homeless?
Now what was that about an ability to continue to do business? Lie to me, either explicitly _or by omission_ , and that's exactly what I want you to lose.
I hate to respond to my own post, but I'm not sure but what that 5.00$ limit is only on the NASDAC, just in case.
SCO stock's inside trading record shows five automatic sell orders and only two regular sells in recent History (Going back to Sept. of last year). No inside trades have been reported since April 7th. There are no buys or automatic buys (0).
Largest number of transactions (by far) and largest total value (by a smaller ratio) is Director Thomas P. Raimondi.
Gasparro, Larry (VP), Broughton, Reginald (SR VP), and Bench, Robert K. (CFO) all appear on the list. Bench owns (or owned by the most recent record) roughly 2.4 times as much stock as the next largest investor on the list.
Hunsaker, Jeff F. is the only person appearing on the list who is not shown with a position in the company described to explain why he is an insider, but other sources confirm he was a SR VP.
Interestingly, Darl's name does not appear at all on the inside trading list.
SCO hovered at about 5.00$ US for a few weeks. There is a 5.00$/share barrier for some types of puts and calls, notably ones related to shorting stocks, on the NYSE, so a number of short sellers picked that point just because it's as low as they were allowed to go. SCO's stock price couldn't drop much below that until all those transactions had been absorbed by the market, but the recent drop suggests they have now been cleared out.
Note how they didn't talk much for a while. I'd suspect they will stay vocal all the way to penny stockdom now.
NH3 Polar, well, yes, as you point out, but if you don't mind me qualifying it a bit, I'd say NH3 isn't usefully polar, in that it doesn't have the equivalent of Van der Walls forces between liquid molecules at a strength sufficient to much help stretch the range of liquidity (a tiny bit, but not much). The 2 Hydrogens in a water molecule don't line up on the opposite sides with the oxygen atom in the middle, but form a rather pronounced bend. By contrast the three hydrogens in Ammonia don't leave the Nitrogen sticking out by itself. They may not maintain perfect 120 degree angles in a flat plane around the N's "equator" under all conditions, but they are pretty close to it.
When you analyze this geometrically, we're talking about an inverse square law force (electromagnetism), and various sine or cosine based equations for the resulting angles in determining the resultant forces. Then you have some fairly small adjustments to factor in the different masses and orbital diameters of O and N, and so on.
What this all ends up meaning is the resulting 80 degrees F will be a bit broader than Methane's totally non polar 37 degrees F, but it's still less than half the 180 degrees F for liquid water, and not nearly 1.5/1.8 of it. (I assume your 212 F is a typo - you obviously know this stuff better than that).
It's really the more limited question of how NH3 molecules react solely with each other when we're talking about the freezing of an entire ocean of the stuff, not how NH3 and H2O (or some other interesting combinations) interact (many of which can be quite polar crystalization reactions).
Now as regards life forms, what applies to a relatively pure liquid is more than usually not something we can extrapolate too much to a mixture, so I wouldn't read too much into it. Our one example of liquid oceans is not exactly pure H2O, after all, and showing that there are some reasons life is less likely in close to pure Methane or Ammonia doesn't limit a lot of other possibilities.