Most of that increase is from Radon, which is an inert gas that is produced by the breakdown of Thorium or Uranium. It's much heavier than mormal air and so tends to linger in basements, and as a gas, of course it goes right into a person's lungs.
Then there's Granite. Some granites produce 500 to 800 mr/year or so exposure. 'The' UN building in NY, NY is sheathed with a moderately hot granite cladding, resulting in, if I recall correctly, employee exposures of 200-250 mR/year at full time, and some buildings are much worse.
Not directly - i.e. Notarizing something is free to 3$ or so vrs. the 30$ for registration, but if the case goes to court, all copyright cases are federal, so if the judge has a strong preference for a legal paperwork trail that is established entirely within federal organizations, ANY other alternative could be more expensive, because the judge just might refuse to take it as evidence.
A document signed by multiple witnesses, or 'sealed' by an notary public, attesting that the work exists in finished form on a certain date, would probably be enough. Cost is free (except for your time), to a few dollars if you want to tip the notary. I am not a lawyer, but I have had the legal instruction and been granted the legal power to administer a binding oath and attest to its performance in the past, and I suspect that could be done is such a way as to cover it too.
None of these are common practice at this time. While any or all of them might be a way to protect a claim to have originated a creative work, existing law re. copyrights may make any of them unadvisable. Whether a US Federal Judge will accept any procedure involving records kept at a county courthouse, for example, varies widely.
"Suppose I die? What am I supposed to do, update my copyright records? Or are my heirs expected to be thinking about that at my funeral?"
Why is it wrong to require your heirs to update information? In the early versions of copyright law, your copyright could expire before you died. The new laws give you life +70, ergo, every copyright the public awards you will last well past your death. The public is giving you more than they used to, on an average, 4 or 5 times more, why don't you owe them a simple codicil to your will, dictating what you want done to support that extra right you and your heirs have been given?
Remember what giving you all that time costs the public. Any legal cases involving your work may have to be decided based on 80 year old records or worse. The chance that important contracts have decayed to illegibilty, been consumed by fire, or involve claims where nobody that signed the document is alive to question in court has gone way, way up. And now, you want the public to incur those extra costs in the event of litigation, and not to constrain you and your benficiaries in any way to keep better records?
Of course, the chance your works will survive until they reach the public domain has gone way down, as well, for just the same reasons, so you are giving back less in exchange for getting more. We should probably not just require your heirs to update what is now their contact information if they want to gain the benefits you are trying to leave them, but you should be required to leave a will, or lose all upon your death. You should be required to include a codicil, specifying that your heirs must make at least a good faith effort to preserve a manuscript copy of each and every work, and to actually notify the public or some designated representitive of the expiration and to actively facilitate the release of what was once your work to the public domain, or again, they should be deemed to have forfitted all rights.
Now as to whether they should have to think about that at the funeral, I suppose a reasonable waiting period, of say two weeks or so, might be in order. But guess what, I just buried a close relative less than a week ago, and I had to address several business related issues on that very same day, or several employees would have not been paid, and her primary heirs would have lost substantially from the disarray of what was about to be their business. I spent a 14 hour day after another death on such fun tasks as making sure a disabled car didn't become an abandoned and unsalvageable one before one of my minor nieces could inherit it. Why should your being an author protect your heirs from the same sort of consequences? Unless you want a law that applies to the owner of a small business as well as it does an author, what you are asking for there is called special priveledge.
Right - Like there have been a large number of craters and other non-terrestrial terrain features, asteroids, and such named for deceased SF authors in the recent past, but not a lot named for romance or mystery authors, or "Literary" authors. It's not because the naming bodys all want to be Lit critics, or a blanket assertion that Isaac Asimov was a better writer than James Joyce, it's a tribute to someone who encouraged the ongoing process of discovery.
"However, as someone else has observed, Earth doesn't really have a moon. Luna is more accurately described as orbiting the sun in the same orbit as Earth."
I bet you don't want to count Cruthne either, (probably for roughly similar reasons). Some people are just picky: Near-Earth Asteroid 3753 Cruithne
http://www.astro.queensu.ca/~wiegert/3753/3753.h tm l
and you get:
Quake 2 with nekid Stroggs galore.
Wolfenstein with a nude Adolph Hitler
GTA 2 with realistic squeeky vinyl bucket seat sounds.
Silent Hill's "playdead" of the month.
Warcraft 3 expansion - Frozen Cajones
and Frodo still says "I am naked before the wheel of fire" in LotR, but he's grinning.
I've been picking up some nice spare change just doing this on weekends. Now that I actually have a name for it, that ought to add 25% or so, even though I'm closer to the 30$ an hour end of the spectrum.
Given the seven layer model, what layer could become a hardware secured version? Is there a part of the process that could be converted or redesigned so it was done only by a box that would keep vital program code in EPROM, for example, and have to be approached physically to be reprogrammed? Given what they are describing in the article, I keep envisioning them trying a partially hardware based mode, but I can't for the life of me figure out a layer, or combination of parts of two adjacent layers, that couldn't be emulated on a virtual machine. For anyone who is really deeply familiar with the existing 7 layer model, what layers could this DARPA proposal be aimed at changing, _IF_ we assume new hardware is a part of the new design?
That Microsoft code that got leaked recently was full of comments where the coders used terms such as "kludge", "King of Kludges", and occasionally "Oh Ghod, stop me before I kludge again!" about their own work. You know what that proves...
These guys can code. Real hackworkers are the ones who never feel that their code is less than perfect, so they never document any shortcut. Pros are the guys that fix a problem by an elegant method, then feel bad because getting the accounting department to restate the requirement would have been even crisper. Often, the leaked code suggests Microsoft has some very good programmers.
With that said, there's specific areas of "code bloat" that do come to mind. Why did several versions of Homestyle Windows (3.1, 95, 98, 98 SE at least) install drivers for streaming tape backup devices by default on many systems that didn't have a tape drive? Why did some of those drivers add 30 seconds to a minute each to boot up times on a P-500? That's either bloated code, or a kludge (where some slow systems by 1993 standards needed a two second delay loop, and some coder added that plus a few thousand percent extra, and never thought to take it out on revisions, check processor speed and memory before implmenting it across the board, or document the archaic hardware bug that was likely actually to blame for the occasional boot failure).
Phrases such as "Code Bloat" started because of situations like that one. People would accuse MS of having written a bad load routine and MS would answer (if they answered at all) that the Streaming Tape drivers were often needed for other (unspecified) devices and so were larger and more omnipresent than might be immediately obvious, then people would interpret that to mean that they just might be large enough to actually need 67 seconds to read from a hard drive. A little checking might show that the same 67 second delay showed up if you ran the system with an old RLE drive, or with only 16 meg of RAM, or even installing on a P-75, but really, Microsoft's own statements were often what started the code bloat speculations, and even where the speculation was wrong, it was often reasonable.
"And indeed, several filesystems for Unix exist that do just this. Probably not as many as the number of GUI applications that DON'T provide clean undo capabilities (...) so neither side is perfect here."
There's a freeware graphics tool for windows 9x series called "STile99". By default, it can back up through the last 18 filters and tweaks you've applied (that's not exactly what clean undo capabilities means, but it's pretty close - a really clean system would always be able to go back at least to the start of the current session, and would let you undo one step without having to undo the others applied after it - but by that standard, there are really few programs that qualify).
Just offhand, there are at least half a dozen other freeware graphic programs that allow 8 or 10 or more undos in a row. Why does the default Microsoft 'free' application (Paintbrush) only allow 3 sequential undos?
As you put it, neither side is perfect here. But, why are some of the Microsoft Applets so especially far from perfect? Is MS Paintbrush illustrative of some limit of GUI based designs, or is it that way for some completely different reason?
I don't know the answer. I know that some pretty expensive commercial graphics programs have bragged about undo depth as one of their superior features. It would be speculating to claim that MS has deliberately crippled Paintbrush to encourage semi-pro graphic artist types to pay bigger bucks for trading up to a semi-pro or better package such as MS's own, or Photoshop or the full version of Adobe illustrator. It seems equally speculative to claim that the humble Paintbrush interface is simply limited by the nature of GUIs. Unless someone here is an industry insider who knows for sure why MS shipped the versions of Paintbrush they did, you may well be making a very good point, but I don't see how you can really, rigorously prove it.
Of course if Windows was open source...
It's still a bump in the learning curve. Sure, not every user needs to grep anything, but one who does is likely to learn to use the command solo before they ever pipe anything else through grep. Normally, I hesitate to use words like "everyone", "all", and such, but this is almost that universal - out of thousands of people learning to use Unix commands at a gien time, there may be a very small percentage that would learn them in such a way that the reason grep doesn't generate a negative output would quickly make sense, but it's darned near zero.
If I was training someone, and I caught them trying to pipe other command output through a command without really understanding what those commands did alone, I'd probably tell them not to try to walk before they have learned to crawl. If one of those commands is grep, that common sense homily is useless. Behavior that makes sense in the more complex uses but makes none in the simplest case is always very hard to understand, and the people who are trying to provide work arounds and solutions are doing a good thing.
If we make scarcity scarcer, then someday there won't be enough to go around, and only the wealthy will be able to afford scarcity anymore. At this point, War and Pestilence are having a tough time generating scarcity without motivating some people to reduce scarcity at the same time, and even Famine and Death seem to be on the brink of faltering in what was once an unbroken string of successes. Is this the future you want for your children? (Because it's certainly what I want for mine).
Can you drag lawyers before a court of technical experts for practicing software engineering without a liscence? Is there anyone serving time for impersonating a networking consultant? Until the answer to those questions is yes, IANAL, and if the esteemed Mr. Cochran wants to claim that he knows more Linux than Linus, about all we can do is cry BS.
Right. The court seems to have decided that AOL made enough mistakes that certain protections that would normaly apply weren't available to them, so Mr. Ellison's complaint isn't automatically shot down, but that doesn't mean he will automatically win it either. The decision still means that a company which kept up an incoming e-mail address that was clearly needed for legal messages would get a measure of protection from maintaining that address properly.
It also helps define negligence, intentional malice, willffulness, and other such terms found in the DMCA and other related laws, as it should count as a relevant precident to the whole area.
Even a pretty substantial period when AOL apparently didn't keep their ducks in a row is being considered as a simple act of negligence. This suggests it would take a company having ignored such complaints even after being served with a subpoena, or corporate internal e-mail where a VP effectively said "Screw him, who cares if people are pirating his work, and if the court doesn't like it, screw them too.", or a similarly weighty piece of evidence to make triple damages justified.
The DMCA allows a damage cap that is equal to 5 times damages, for the simple test of the action being willful. (It doesn't call this 5X damage, instead it resets the per incident cap at 150,000$ instead of 30,000$. Personally, I think 150 _is_ 5 times 30, but the courts haven't actually ruled that this is equal to saying 5x damages yet, and may not want to rule on this, as it opens the door to a challenge at the supreme court level under the "cruel and unusual" clause).
While this court decision may not help in getting the law to recognize that 150 is 5 x 30, it may at least mean that individuals have to do more than what AOL did to have it count as "willful", so this precident may someday matter to those fighting the DMCA.
This is a very good point. What I find disturbing are the comments about how the system is so broken that SCO may get away with their 'evil scheme'. When the rule of law colapses, force is what's left, not random luck or something, and the idea that SCO has more force available than even AutoZone is simply silly.
Most slashdotter's have a home page set in one of the larger browsers, and typically that home page has stock market coverage somewhere on it. If you're following all these SCO stories, try this: SCO's stock is listed under SCOX. IBM's is just IBM. Redhat is RHAT. Autozone's is AZO. (While you're at it Pixar and Disney are PIXR and DIS.).
If you want to see some background, on what stocks in general do, you can just watch the DOW aggregates and such , but often you'll get a better picture if you can add some of the really large companies out there, like: International Paper (IP), AT&T (T), General Electric (GE), Morgan Stanley Dean Whitter (MWD), Ford Motor (F), ConAgra (CAG), MetLIfe (MET), or Exxon-Mobil (XOM).
Once you set this up, you can click a link and see how big the stock actually is, get charts of trends, and so on. SCO is currently playing a David & Goliath game. There are now three Goliaths in the arena. All of them remembered to bring their helmets.
What would be better is if IBM could agree to leave enough of SCO intact for Autozone to get its legal fees out of before the carcass completly rots, but SCO will tank hard and fast before the IBM case even gets to court, and there simply won't be enough left to be worth counter-suits.
It's a sad day for the American legal system when there's no point in sueing, because all the other people ahead of you will clean them out first.
I played Pong for 30 hours or so without sleep, and for the next 30 hours or so, every sound that was anywhere close to that damned noise Pong made sounded exactly like thst "bip".
Slashdot Mirror
Most of that increase is from Radon, which is an inert gas that is produced by the breakdown of Thorium or Uranium. It's much heavier than mormal air and so tends to linger in basements, and as a gas, of course it goes right into a person's lungs.
Then there's Granite. Some granites produce 500 to 800 mr/year or so exposure. 'The' UN building in NY, NY is sheathed with a moderately hot granite cladding, resulting in, if I recall correctly, employee exposures of 200-250 mR/year at full time, and some buildings are much worse.
Not directly - i.e. Notarizing something is free to 3$ or so vrs. the 30$ for registration, but if the case goes to court, all copyright cases are federal, so if the judge has a strong preference for a legal paperwork trail that is established entirely within federal organizations, ANY other alternative could be more expensive, because the judge just might refuse to take it as evidence.
A document signed by multiple witnesses, or 'sealed' by an notary public, attesting that the work exists in finished form on a certain date, would probably be enough. Cost is free (except for your time), to a few dollars if you want to tip the notary. I am not a lawyer, but I have had the legal instruction and been granted the legal power to administer a binding oath and attest to its performance in the past, and I suspect that could be done is such a way as to cover it too.
None of these are common practice at this time. While any or all of them might be a way to protect a claim to have originated a creative work, existing law re. copyrights may make any of them unadvisable. Whether a US Federal Judge will accept any procedure involving records kept at a county courthouse, for example, varies widely.
"Suppose I die? What am I supposed to do, update my copyright records? Or are my heirs expected to be thinking about that at my funeral?"
Why is it wrong to require your heirs to update information? In the early versions of copyright law, your copyright could expire before you died. The new laws give you life +70, ergo, every copyright the public awards you will last well past your death. The public is giving you more than they used to, on an average, 4 or 5 times more, why don't you owe them a simple codicil to your will, dictating what you want done to support that extra right you and your heirs have been given?
Remember what giving you all that time costs the public. Any legal cases involving your work may have to be decided based on 80 year old records or worse. The chance that important contracts have decayed to illegibilty, been consumed by fire, or involve claims where nobody that signed the document is alive to question in court has gone way, way up. And now, you want the public to incur those extra costs in the event of litigation, and not to constrain you and your benficiaries in any way to keep better records?
Of course, the chance your works will survive until they reach the public domain has gone way down, as well, for just the same reasons, so you are giving back less in exchange for getting more. We should probably not just require your heirs to update what is now their contact information if they want to gain the benefits you are trying to leave them, but you should be required to leave a will, or lose all upon your death. You should be required to include a codicil, specifying that your heirs must make at least a good faith effort to preserve a manuscript copy of each and every work, and to actually notify the public or some designated representitive of the expiration and to actively facilitate the release of what was once your work to the public domain, or again, they should be deemed to have forfitted all rights.
Now as to whether they should have to think about that at the funeral, I suppose a reasonable waiting period, of say two weeks or so, might be in order. But guess what, I just buried a close relative less than a week ago, and I had to address several business related issues on that very same day, or several employees would have not been paid, and her primary heirs would have lost substantially from the disarray of what was about to be their business. I spent a 14 hour day after another death on such fun tasks as making sure a disabled car didn't become an abandoned and unsalvageable one before one of my minor nieces could inherit it. Why should your being an author protect your heirs from the same sort of consequences? Unless you want a law that applies to the owner of a small business as well as it does an author, what you are asking for there is called special priveledge.
As Stephen Wright said, "On a scale of 1 to 10, with 6 being the highest, am I weird?".
...three mile high "title" wave.
If the asteroid doesn't get us, maybe the opening credits will?
Right - Like there have been a large number of craters and other non-terrestrial terrain features, asteroids, and such named for deceased SF authors in the recent past, but not a lot named for romance or mystery authors, or "Literary" authors. It's not because the naming bodys all want to be Lit critics, or a blanket assertion that Isaac Asimov was a better writer than James Joyce, it's a tribute to someone who encouraged the ongoing process of discovery.
Is that 15th counting from the left or right?
"However, as someone else has observed, Earth doesn't really have a moon. Luna is more accurately described as orbiting the sun in the same orbit as Earth."
h tm l
I bet you don't want to count Cruthne either, (probably for roughly similar reasons). Some people are just picky:
Near-Earth Asteroid 3753 Cruithne
http://www.astro.queensu.ca/~wiegert/3753/3753.
and you get:
Quake 2 with nekid Stroggs galore.
Wolfenstein with a nude Adolph Hitler
GTA 2 with realistic squeeky vinyl bucket seat sounds.
Silent Hill's "playdead" of the month.
Warcraft 3 expansion - Frozen Cajones
and Frodo still says "I am naked before the wheel of fire" in LotR, but he's grinning.
I've been picking up some nice spare change just doing this on weekends. Now that I actually have a name for it, that ought to add 25% or so, even though I'm closer to the 30$ an hour end of the spectrum.
Given the seven layer model, what layer could become a hardware secured version? Is there a part of the process that could be converted or redesigned so it was done only by a box that would keep vital program code in EPROM, for example, and have to be approached physically to be reprogrammed?
Given what they are describing in the article, I keep envisioning them trying a partially hardware based mode, but I can't for the life of me figure out a layer, or combination of parts of two adjacent layers, that couldn't be emulated on a virtual machine. For anyone who is really deeply familiar with the existing 7 layer model, what layers could this DARPA proposal be aimed at changing, _IF_ we assume new hardware is a part of the new design?
That Microsoft code that got leaked recently was full of comments where the coders used terms such as "kludge", "King of Kludges", and occasionally "Oh Ghod, stop me before I kludge again!" about their own work. You know what that proves...
These guys can code. Real hackworkers are the ones who never feel that their code is less than perfect, so they never document any shortcut. Pros are the guys that fix a problem by an elegant method, then feel bad because getting the accounting department to restate the requirement would have been even crisper. Often, the leaked code suggests Microsoft has some very good programmers.
With that said, there's specific areas of "code bloat" that do come to mind. Why did several versions of Homestyle Windows (3.1, 95, 98, 98 SE at least) install drivers for streaming tape backup devices by default on many systems that didn't have a tape drive? Why did some of those drivers add 30 seconds to a minute each to boot up times on a P-500? That's either bloated code, or a kludge (where some slow systems by 1993 standards needed a two second delay loop, and some coder added that plus a few thousand percent extra, and never thought to take it out on revisions, check processor speed and memory before implmenting it across the board, or document the archaic hardware bug that was likely actually to blame for the occasional boot failure).
Phrases such as "Code Bloat" started because of situations like that one. People would accuse MS of having written a bad load routine and MS would answer (if they answered at all) that the Streaming Tape drivers were often needed for other (unspecified) devices and so were larger and more omnipresent than might be immediately obvious, then people would interpret that to mean that they just might be large enough to actually need 67 seconds to read from a hard drive. A little checking might show that the same 67 second delay showed up if you ran the system with an old RLE drive, or with only 16 meg of RAM, or even installing on a P-75, but really, Microsoft's own statements were often what started the code bloat speculations, and even where the speculation was wrong, it was often reasonable.
Are you argueing against punitive damages, period, or are you argueing that punitive damages should exist but go to the state?
"And indeed, several filesystems for Unix exist that do just this. Probably not as many as the number of GUI applications that DON'T provide clean undo capabilities (...) so neither side is perfect here."
There's a freeware graphics tool for windows 9x series called "STile99". By default, it can back up through the last 18 filters and tweaks you've applied (that's not exactly what clean undo capabilities means, but it's pretty close - a really clean system would always be able to go back at least to the start of the current session, and would let you undo one step without having to undo the others applied after it - but by that standard, there are really few programs that qualify).
Just offhand, there are at least half a dozen other freeware graphic programs that allow 8 or 10 or more undos in a row. Why does the default Microsoft 'free' application (Paintbrush) only allow 3 sequential undos?
As you put it, neither side is perfect here. But, why are some of the Microsoft Applets so especially far from perfect? Is MS Paintbrush illustrative of some limit of GUI based designs, or is it that way for some completely different reason?
I don't know the answer. I know that some pretty expensive commercial graphics programs have bragged about undo depth as one of their superior features. It would be speculating to claim that MS has deliberately crippled Paintbrush to encourage semi-pro graphic artist types to pay bigger bucks for trading up to a semi-pro or better package such as MS's own, or Photoshop or the full version of Adobe illustrator. It seems equally speculative to claim that the humble Paintbrush interface is simply limited by the nature of GUIs. Unless someone here is an industry insider who knows for sure why MS shipped the versions of Paintbrush they did, you may well be making a very good point, but I don't see how you can really, rigorously prove it.
Of course if Windows was open source...
It's still a bump in the learning curve. Sure, not every user needs to grep anything, but one who does is likely to learn to use the command solo before they ever pipe anything else through grep. Normally, I hesitate to use words like "everyone", "all", and such, but this is almost that universal - out of thousands of people learning to use Unix commands at a gien time, there may be a very small percentage that would learn them in such a way that the reason grep doesn't generate a negative output would quickly make sense, but it's darned near zero.
If I was training someone, and I caught them trying to pipe other command output through a command without really understanding what those commands did alone, I'd probably tell them not to try to walk before they have learned to crawl. If one of those commands is grep, that common sense homily is useless. Behavior that makes sense in the more complex uses but makes none in the simplest case is always very hard to understand, and the people who are trying to provide work arounds and solutions are doing a good thing.
If we make scarcity scarcer, then someday there won't be enough to go around, and only the wealthy will be able to afford scarcity anymore. At this point, War and Pestilence are having a tough time generating scarcity without motivating some people to reduce scarcity at the same time, and even Famine and Death seem to be on the brink of faltering in what was once an unbroken string of successes. Is this the future you want for your children? (Because it's certainly what I want for mine).
Oh! Well carry on then.
That's wgah'nagl, not w'gahnagl, you insensitive clod.
Can you drag lawyers before a court of technical experts for practicing software engineering without a liscence? Is there anyone serving time for impersonating a networking consultant? Until the answer to those questions is yes, IANAL, and if the esteemed Mr. Cochran wants to claim that he knows more Linux than Linus, about all we can do is cry BS.
Right. The court seems to have decided that AOL made enough mistakes that certain protections that would normaly apply weren't available to them, so Mr. Ellison's complaint isn't automatically shot down, but that doesn't mean he will automatically win it either. The decision still means that a company which kept up an incoming e-mail address that was clearly needed for legal messages would get a measure of protection from maintaining that address properly.
It also helps define negligence, intentional malice, willffulness, and other such terms found in the DMCA and other related laws, as it should count as a relevant precident to the whole area.
Even a pretty substantial period when AOL apparently didn't keep their ducks in a row is being considered as a simple act of negligence. This suggests it would take a company having ignored such complaints even after being served with a subpoena, or corporate internal e-mail where a VP effectively said "Screw him, who cares if people are pirating his work, and if the court doesn't like it, screw them too.", or a similarly weighty piece of evidence to make triple damages justified.
The DMCA allows a damage cap that is equal to 5 times damages, for the simple test of the action being willful. (It doesn't call this 5X damage, instead it resets the per incident cap at 150,000$ instead of 30,000$. Personally, I think 150 _is_ 5 times 30, but the courts haven't actually ruled that this is equal to saying 5x damages yet, and may not want to rule on this, as it opens the door to a challenge at the supreme court level under the "cruel and unusual" clause).
While this court decision may not help in getting the law to recognize that 150 is 5 x 30, it may at least mean that individuals have to do more than what AOL did to have it count as "willful", so this precident may someday matter to those fighting the DMCA.
This is a very good point.
What I find disturbing are the comments about how the system is so broken that SCO may get away with their 'evil scheme'. When the rule of law colapses, force is what's left, not random luck or something, and the idea that SCO has more force available than even AutoZone is simply silly.
Most slashdotter's have a home page set in one of the larger browsers, and typically that home page has stock market coverage somewhere on it. If you're following all these SCO stories, try this: SCO's stock is listed under SCOX. IBM's is just IBM. Redhat is RHAT. Autozone's is AZO. (While you're at it Pixar and Disney are PIXR and DIS.).
If you want to see some background, on what stocks in general do, you can just watch the DOW aggregates and such , but often you'll get a better picture if you can add some of the really large companies out there, like: International Paper (IP), AT&T (T), General Electric (GE), Morgan Stanley Dean Whitter (MWD), Ford Motor (F), ConAgra (CAG), MetLIfe (MET), or Exxon-Mobil (XOM).
Once you set this up, you can click a link and see how big the stock actually is, get charts of trends, and so on. SCO is currently playing a David & Goliath game. There are now three Goliaths in the arena. All of them remembered to bring their helmets.
What would be better is if IBM could agree to leave enough of SCO intact for Autozone to get its legal fees out of before the carcass completly rots, but SCO will tank hard and fast before the IBM case even gets to court, and there simply won't be enough left to be worth counter-suits.
It's a sad day for the American legal system when there's no point in sueing, because all the other people ahead of you will clean them out first.
I played Pong for 30 hours or so without sleep, and for the next 30 hours or so, every sound that was anywhere close to that damned noise Pong made sounded exactly like thst "bip".