The claims about unicorns and leprechauns are far easier to test and negate than claims about god, and there lies the problem with your examples.
How does one test for the (non-)existence of Unicorns or Leprechauns? They're magical. If they don't want you to see them, they won't appear to you. Likewise, it is impossible to prove that they don't exist.
I am just saying that an Atheist's claim is as untestable and as much of an article of faith as as those of a believer's.
What is an Atheist's claim, exactly? I am an Atheist. I am not claiming anything untestable. I am simply asserting that the logical position with regard to the potential existence of something for which zero evidence has been found is to assume that it does not exist.
You keep asserting that my disbelief is based in faith. I do not have faith that there is no God; I simply do not have faith that there is a God. Furthermore, the question of whether or not there is a God is irrelevant to my daily decision-making process. Perhaps God does exist, somehow, in an unobservable state. I have seen no evidence for the existence of God, however, and you seem to concur. In the absence of observable evidence of God, then is it not logical to assume that for all practical purposes, there is no God?
Try substituting Leprechauns for God in the above paragraph, and see whether or not it becomes any more palatable to you. If you are truly agnostic and unable to assume, for all practical purposes, that God does not exist, then your feelings should not change at all when you consider the potential existence of Leprechauns. In other words, a true Agnostic would claim that it is unknowable whether or not Leprechauns exist, and accept either position. I suspect that if you're honest with yourself, you don't really believe that you need to see proof of the nonexistence of Leprechauns to assume that they don't exist.
I think that Athiesim is just as shaky as religion's claims. How is that personal honesty? Either side's claims rely on faith.
I'll keep an open mind until I see proof provided by one side or the other.
No, not really. This is a tiresome strawman argument against Atheism. Are you keeping an open mind about the possible existence of Unicorns? Leprechauns? The end of the world in 2012 as predicted by the Mayan calendar?
As an Atheist, I am simply living my life without belief in the Divine. I don't know with certainty because it is impossible to prove the nonexistence of something unobservable. In the absence of any tangible evidence of the Divine, however, I can confidently assume that at best, it is almost certain there is no Divine, and at worst, it is irrelevant to my daily life.
What does keeping an open mind about the potential existence of God mean to you? Are you hoping to hedge your bets somehow? Are you hoping that when you get to the pearly gates, if they exist, that you can tell St. Pete that you weren't an Atheist, so you should still be OK? Or are you just uncomfortable with the idea that rejection of belief in the supernatural puts you in the minority and on the wrong side of a whole lot of potentially scary people with a shared delusion?
But then your position is not rational, but merely convenient.
So, are you saying that my lack of belief in leprechauns or brownies or unicorns is not rational, but merely convenient?
I am an Atheist. A- (without) theism (belief in the divine). I don't believe in the Divine. Do I pretend to have proof of the non-existence of God? No, I do not. I don't need it, any more than I need to prove that any number of mythological creatures do not exist.
It's really quite simple. I simply do not believe in that which can not conceivably ever be observed empirically. Making up supernatural explanations for that which we have not yet come to understand through science is convenient, and lazy.
I don't think you know either. So I call on you, stop pretending you're omniscient: admit you're not atheist, but rather agnostic.
Strictly speaking, I think you will be hard-pressed to find very many so-called atheists who truly believe (i.e. have faith) that there is no God (in the judeo-christian sense or otherwise) or gods. Throwing this out as an argument against calling oneself Atheist is an exercise in pedantry.
I am an Atheist. Do I pretend to have iron-clad proof of the non-existence of God or gods? No. I do live my life as though it is true, however. Practically speaking, it might as well be true. It does not trouble me to assume that there is no God any more than it does to assume that there is no invisible pink unicorn standing behind me, judging my soul as I type this. It is illogical to assume otherwise! Once one opens the door to the possibility of one supernatural being, the only logical progression is that ALL beliefs based on the supernatural must potentially be true. And that's an express train to crazytown.
I used to share your discomfort with the concept of atheism vs. agnosticism... As I grew older, though, I began to see that agnosticism was a much less useful state of being. If one is truly agnostic, then one ought to feel compelled to give equal weight to all systems of knowing. I believe that accepting a personal state of functional atheism requires more up-front intellectual honesty, but in the long run produces much less cognitive dissonance.
WTF is up with the commenting system lately? All my paragraphs are smushed together, even though each is correctly bracketed within <p>tags</p>...
RAAARGH! . Legally, there is no reason in the world that you (or I, or my dog) can not port ZFS to Linux and run it ourselves. The licensing issues only come into effect when you want to DISTRIBUTE your work as binaries. The idea that the FSF would sue someone for linking ZFS and Linux together in their basement is so fundamentally misguided that I would be shocked if this weren't a/. discussion. . Let me underscore this point: GPL ONLY COVERS BINARY DISTRIBUTION! The goal is to prevent someone from taking GPL-covered code, compiling it to binary, and then redistributing it without accompanying source. The CDDL and GPL are fundamentally incompatible in such a way that it is quite difficult if not impossible to distribute binaries derived from mixed CDDL/GPL code without violating some clause of one or the other license. I won't claim to have an expert-level understanding of the details, but I work with several people who do. . Now, as for why "someone" doesn't distribute some magical patchset which will allow you to build a ZFS-enabled Linux kernel... It's because "someone" doesn't feel like keeping up with the massive amount of work required to maintain said patchset against ZFS and Linux kernel changes. The work would not get nearly the amount of exposure and testing necessary to make it a first-class filesystem option, and so would languish as a hobby/experiment with not much payout. . Much better to just focus on btrfs. Or wait and see what happens after the acquisition completes.
Well, living in the Boston area, I can say that locally I am better than 80% of the drivers - due to the fact that, at the very least, I use my signal when turning/changing lanes. That's gotta count for something...
. Turn signals give away too much. By showing your hand, you lose the element of surprise, and the other drivers accelerate to ensure that you won't get ahead of them. Especially if you have out-of-state plates. Boston drivers HATE out-of-staters... Always driving too slowly, wildly looking around in vain for street signs to figure out where they are, desperately trying to avoid going around in a circle for a third time because they just can't figure out the precise combination of one-way streets to get them where they're going... . Ah, good times. Boston's motto ought to be something like, "Boston: Our streets were designed by cows!" . (incidentally, wtf is up with the commenting system? whenever i reply to comments, the preview shows my reply all jumbled up with the quoted part, with no linebreaks. doesn't matter if i use plain old text or html-formatted, with or without <p> and/or <br>)
And if awe doesn't lead you to seek knowledge, but instead leads you to constantly reproduce the experience in church or meditation, then you're no different than a crack addict, masturbating your brain with endorphins.
I am in awe of the succinctness with which you have described the futility of religious experience. I'm going to be chuckling about this one all day.
One can also argue sexual activities within a marriage bears a cost and therefore compensation is exchanged.
Those leave-it-to-beaver days are over. The stay-at-home wifey who takes care of the kids, makes the house spotless, and meets her hard-working breadwinner at the door with a martini and blowjob are long gone (did they ever really exist?).
Most modern marriages/marriage-like-arrangements are more like business partnerships. There is a merger of resources and skills, with the goal being procreation, education of offspring, and (hopefully) a retirement consisting of at minimum parallel play, or even better, a retirement with a close friend/lover.
At least, this is how it works for me and most of the people I know.
Would it be that hard for a WYSIWYG editor to implement a usable plain-text based editor to act as a fail-safe for users who actually know what's going on?
Kids these days... What you are describing is WordPerfect's
Reveal Codes functionality. My 10th grade word processing class used WP, on Winderz 3.0. Even before that, I vaguely recall some C=64 editing software that had something like this functionality.
They will attack with their bill and with the front edge of their wings. The front edge of the wings being powered by the huge muscles they use to fly. Imagine getting punched in the arm by Mike Tyson if he wasn't wearing gloves.
Dude, let it go. This is ridiculous. Are you seriously trying to convince me that a 30lb goose is able to generate the equivalent amount of force, with the leading edge of its wing, as a professional boxer's fist?
Again, I implore you to consider basic physics here. Broken down very simply, kinetic energy is mass * velocity, right? Which impact has a higher kinetic energy level, a motor scooter hitting a building at 40mph, or a fully-loaded tractor-trailer hitting a building at 40mph?
Given equivalent velocities, increased mass results in proportionately more kinetic energy. This is because the kinetic energy is equivalent to the amount of energy required to accelerate the mass from rest to the given velocity. Big trucks have much larger engines than mopeds because it requires a lot more work to get 40,000lbs going at 40mph than it does 200lbs. Does this make sense?
So, I'm no avian expert, but having personally disassembled many turkeys and chickens, I am reasonably confident that the kinetic energy of even the biggest, angriest goose wing strike is nowhere near the kinetic energy of a professional boxer's punch (or from my 60lb daughter, for that matter). Why? Because geese fly, and their bones are hollow, which means less mass, which means less kinetic energy.
I am totally willing to believe that an angry goose can be quite intimidating. I believe that they bite, and possibly scratch/gouge with the claws on their feet. But break an adult human arm with a wing strike? That's silly. Maybe if the human were so startled and frightened that they fell backward and landed weird they might break a wrist or something...
Be nice. You think a 20 pound goose can't break your arm? Do you think I could break your arm with twenty ounces of steel?
OK, but we're still talking about basic physics, here. A claw hammer masses less than the whole goose, true. However, there is much more concentrated mass in the steel hammer head than in the wing of even the biggest goose.
Not only that, but I'm sure that the velocity of a good hammer swing is higher than the whack of even the angriest goose.
Sheesh. I hope you were joking, but I just couldn't let that go unanswered.
That last idea isn't the greatest, because if I recall my (was it 6th grade?) text book from several years ago, geese are strong enough to break your arm if they decide to hit you with their wing. They also bite.
Wha? Canadian geese range from 5-14lb (3.2-5.5kg) in weight. The largest goose is supposedly around 20lb. How's that supposed to work? Do you understand the concepts of mass, velocity, and energy?
I can see how one might break your arm if... shot out of a cannon.
If I have nothing to say about Java, I should STFU?
I don't work on Java. Java isn't on my radar. I could not care less about Java.
I wanted IBM to buy Sun because I felt that IBM would be more likely to retain the parts of the company I care about. Oracle doesn't care about supercomputing. I do. So I'm unhappy about this acquistion.
There, did I break it down into nice little digestable brain-bites for you?
I don't mean this in a snarky way, but given that the population of the entire country of Finland is ~5.2M folks, I can't imagine that even a "major" Finnish ISP has a huge userbase.
I used to work for a medium-sized regional ISP. We were one of several similar-sized ISPs serving a multi-metro area of maybe 3M people. At our peak, we had 30k accounts, if I recall correctly. This was back in the dialup days, btw.
Anyhow, my point is that when you're talking about the scale of the behemoth ISPs here in the States, expecting proactive approaches to zombie fighting is unrealistic. Support is an expensive cost center, which is why it's been farmed off to India. Getting experienced people who know how to do more than reboot the computer or reinstall ethernet/modem drivers is pretty experienced.
It's the financial aspects of the problem which make me pessimistic that ISPs will do anything to fix it.
If they start doing that, then botnet writers will have an incentive to have their rootkits start deleting emails (when a common email program loads up). I don't think they'll be that choosy about what they delete either.
Sending warning emails to users is a pointless exercise. Assuming that they read/understand the email in the first place (BIG assumption), I guarantee that the majority of them will just delete it. Why should they care if their computer's a zombie? It still works well enough to do whatever it is they're online to do.
No, I think the solution is for zombied computers to be quarantined. Use DNS and routing tricks to redirect any attempts to go anywhere "on the internets" (i.e. a web browser) to a site which explains that they're quarantined, and what they have to do to get out.
Unfortunately, that would raise call volumes to the ISP support lines, and require commitment on the ISPs' part to train their support monkeys. If ISPs started facing financial penalties for zombied users, then maybe the economics would balance out.
I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of this, though, so I'm probably missing something.
You don't make it clear exactly why you hate this outcome, but it sounds like your interest begins and ends with the future of Java.
I don't give a flying fig about Java. No, my interest in IBM as a buyer was because IBM plays in the HPC space. Oracle? Umm, not so much.
I'm having trouble staying awake just typing Orac... *zzzn* Wha? Oh, right. Boring.
The internal announcement
on
Oracle Buys Sun
·
· Score: 5, Informative
For anyone with morbid curiosity:
From: Jonathan I. Schwartz To: allsun@sun.com Subject: Today's Sun/Oracle Announcement Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 04:34:16 -0700 (07:34 EDT)
Today's Sun/Oracle Announcement
This is one of the toughest emails I've ever had to write.
It's also one of the most hopeful about Sun's future in the industry.
For 27 years, Sun has stood for courage, innovation, a willingness to blaze trails, to envision and engineer the future. No matter our ups and downs, we've remained committed to those ideals, and to the R&D that's allowed us to differentiate. We've committed to decade long pursuits, from the evolution of one of the world's most powerful datacenter operating systems, to one of the world's most advanced multi-core microelectronics. We've never walked away from the wholesale reinvention of business models, the redefinition of technology boundaries or the pursuit of new routes to market.
Because of the unparalleled talent at Sun, we've also fueled entire industries with our people and technologies, and fostered extraordinary companies and market successes. Our products and services have driven the discovery of new drugs, transformed social media, and created a better understanding of the world and marketplace around us. All, while we've undergone a near constant transformation in the face of a rapidly changing marketplace and global economy. We've never walked away from a challenge - or an opportunity.
So today we take another step forward in our journey, but along a different path - by announcing that this weekend, our board of directors and I approved the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by the Oracle Corporation for $9.50/share in cash. All members of the board present at the meeting to review the transaction voted for it with enthusiasm, and the transaction stands to utterly transform the marketplace - bringing together two companies with a long history of working together to create a newly unified vision of the future.
Oracle's interest in Sun is very clear - they aspire to help customers simplify the development, deployment and operation of high value business systems, from applications all the way to datacenters. By acquiring Sun, Oracle will be well positioned to help customers solve the most complex technology problems related to running a business.
To me, this proposed acquisition totally redefines the industry, resetting the competitive landscape by creating a company with great reach, expertise and innovation. A combined Oracle/Sun will be capable of cultivating one of the world's most vibrant and far reaching developer communities, accelerating the convergence of storage, networking and computing, and delivering one of the world's most powerful and complete portfolios of business and technical software.
I do not consider the announcement to be the end of the road, not by any stretch of the imagination. I believe this is the first step down a different path, one that takes us and our innovations to an even broader market, one that ensures the ubiquitous role we play in the world around us. The deal was announced today, and, after regulatory review and shareholder approval, will take some months to close - until that close occurs, however, we are a separate company, operating independently. No matter how long it takes, the world changed starting today.
But it's important to note it's not the acquisition that's changing the world - it's the people that fuel both companies. Having spent a considerable amount of time talking to Oracle, let me assure you they are single minded in their focus on the one asset that doesn't appear in our financial statements: our people. That's their highest priority - creating an inviting and compelling environment in which our brightest minds can continue to invent and deliver the future.
Thank you for everything you've done over the years, and for everything you will do in the future to carry the business forward. I'm incredibly proud of this company and what we've accomplished together.
Details will be forthcoming as we work together on the integration planning process.
Slashdot Mirror
The claims about unicorns and leprechauns are far easier to test and negate than claims about god, and there lies the problem with your examples.
How does one test for the (non-)existence of Unicorns or Leprechauns? They're magical. If they don't want you to see them, they won't appear to you. Likewise, it is impossible to prove that they don't exist.
I am just saying that an Atheist's claim is as untestable and as much of an article of faith as as those of a believer's.
What is an Atheist's claim, exactly? I am an Atheist. I am not claiming anything untestable. I am simply asserting that the logical position with regard to the potential existence of something for which zero evidence has been found is to assume that it does not exist.
You keep asserting that my disbelief is based in faith. I do not have faith that there is no God; I simply do not have faith that there is a God. Furthermore, the question of whether or not there is a God is irrelevant to my daily decision-making process. Perhaps God does exist, somehow, in an unobservable state. I have seen no evidence for the existence of God, however, and you seem to concur. In the absence of observable evidence of God, then is it not logical to assume that for all practical purposes, there is no God?
Try substituting Leprechauns for God in the above paragraph, and see whether or not it becomes any more palatable to you. If you are truly agnostic and unable to assume, for all practical purposes, that God does not exist, then your feelings should not change at all when you consider the potential existence of Leprechauns. In other words, a true Agnostic would claim that it is unknowable whether or not Leprechauns exist, and accept either position. I suspect that if you're honest with yourself, you don't really believe that you need to see proof of the nonexistence of Leprechauns to assume that they don't exist.
I think that Athiesim is just as shaky as religion's claims. How is that personal honesty? Either side's claims rely on faith.
I'll keep an open mind until I see proof provided by one side or the other.
No, not really. This is a tiresome strawman argument against Atheism. Are you keeping an open mind about the possible existence of Unicorns? Leprechauns? The end of the world in 2012 as predicted by the Mayan calendar?
As an Atheist, I am simply living my life without belief in the Divine. I don't know with certainty because it is impossible to prove the nonexistence of something unobservable. In the absence of any tangible evidence of the Divine, however, I can confidently assume that at best, it is almost certain there is no Divine, and at worst, it is irrelevant to my daily life.
What does keeping an open mind about the potential existence of God mean to you? Are you hoping to hedge your bets somehow? Are you hoping that when you get to the pearly gates, if they exist, that you can tell St. Pete that you weren't an Atheist, so you should still be OK? Or are you just uncomfortable with the idea that rejection of belief in the supernatural puts you in the minority and on the wrong side of a whole lot of potentially scary people with a shared delusion?
But then your position is not rational, but merely convenient.
So, are you saying that my lack of belief in leprechauns or brownies or unicorns is not rational, but merely convenient?
I am an Atheist. A- (without) theism (belief in the divine). I don't believe in the Divine. Do I pretend to have proof of the non-existence of God? No, I do not. I don't need it, any more than I need to prove that any number of mythological creatures do not exist.
It's really quite simple. I simply do not believe in that which can not conceivably ever be observed empirically. Making up supernatural explanations for that which we have not yet come to understand through science is convenient, and lazy.
Atheism has as much to do with faith as not collecting stamps has to do with stamp-collecting.
Wow, man... That is .sig-quality. I won't steal it, but I will remember it. Thanks! :)
I don't think you know either. So I call on you, stop pretending you're omniscient: admit you're not atheist, but rather agnostic.
Strictly speaking, I think you will be hard-pressed to find very many so-called atheists who truly believe (i.e. have faith) that there is no God (in the judeo-christian sense or otherwise) or gods. Throwing this out as an argument against calling oneself Atheist is an exercise in pedantry.
I am an Atheist. Do I pretend to have iron-clad proof of the non-existence of God or gods? No. I do live my life as though it is true, however. Practically speaking, it might as well be true. It does not trouble me to assume that there is no God any more than it does to assume that there is no invisible pink unicorn standing behind me, judging my soul as I type this. It is illogical to assume otherwise! Once one opens the door to the possibility of one supernatural being, the only logical progression is that ALL beliefs based on the supernatural must potentially be true. And that's an express train to crazytown.
I used to share your discomfort with the concept of atheism vs. agnosticism... As I grew older, though, I began to see that agnosticism was a much less useful state of being. If one is truly agnostic, then one ought to feel compelled to give equal weight to all systems of knowing. I believe that accepting a personal state of functional atheism requires more up-front intellectual honesty, but in the long run produces much less cognitive dissonance.
WTF is up with the commenting system lately? All my paragraphs are smushed together, even though each is correctly bracketed within <p>tags</p>...
RAAARGH! /. discussion.
.
Legally, there is no reason in the world that you (or I, or my dog) can not port ZFS to Linux and run it ourselves. The licensing issues only come into effect when you want to DISTRIBUTE your work as binaries. The idea that the FSF would sue someone for linking ZFS and Linux together in their basement is so fundamentally misguided that I would be shocked if this weren't a
.
Let me underscore this point: GPL ONLY COVERS BINARY DISTRIBUTION! The goal is to prevent someone from taking GPL-covered code, compiling it to binary, and then redistributing it without accompanying source. The CDDL and GPL are fundamentally incompatible in such a way that it is quite difficult if not impossible to distribute binaries derived from mixed CDDL/GPL code without violating some clause of one or the other license. I won't claim to have an expert-level understanding of the details, but I work with several people who do.
.
Now, as for why "someone" doesn't distribute some magical patchset which will allow you to build a ZFS-enabled Linux kernel... It's because "someone" doesn't feel like keeping up with the massive amount of work required to maintain said patchset against ZFS and Linux kernel changes. The work would not get nearly the amount of exposure and testing necessary to make it a first-class filesystem option, and so would languish as a hobby/experiment with not much payout.
.
Much better to just focus on btrfs. Or wait and see what happens after the acquisition completes.
Haw! I say haw, son. Now that's funny! Humor, y'see?
Thanks for the belly laugh. Brought back memories of the game more than the movie. That freakin' shooting range was awesome!
Well, living in the Boston area, I can say that locally I am better than 80% of the drivers - due to the fact that, at the very least, I use my signal when turning/changing lanes. That's gotta count for something...
.
Turn signals give away too much. By showing your hand, you lose the element of surprise, and the other drivers accelerate to ensure that you won't get ahead of them. Especially if you have out-of-state plates. Boston drivers HATE out-of-staters... Always driving too slowly, wildly looking around in vain for street signs to figure out where they are, desperately trying to avoid going around in a circle for a third time because they just can't figure out the precise combination of one-way streets to get them where they're going...
.
Ah, good times. Boston's motto ought to be something like, "Boston: Our streets were designed by cows!"
.
(incidentally, wtf is up with the commenting system? whenever i reply to comments, the preview shows my reply all jumbled up with the quoted part, with no linebreaks. doesn't matter if i use plain old text or html-formatted, with or without <p> and/or <br>)
Awe is an emotion, it is not knowledge.
And if awe doesn't lead you to seek knowledge, but instead leads you to constantly reproduce the experience in church or meditation, then you're no different than a crack addict, masturbating your brain with endorphins.
I am in awe of the succinctness with which you have described the futility of religious experience. I'm going to be chuckling about this one all day.
One can also argue sexual activities within a marriage bears a cost and therefore compensation is exchanged.
Those leave-it-to-beaver days are over. The stay-at-home wifey who takes care of the kids, makes the house spotless, and meets her hard-working breadwinner at the door with a martini and blowjob are long gone (did they ever really exist?).
Most modern marriages/marriage-like-arrangements are more like business partnerships. There is a merger of resources and skills, with the goal being procreation, education of offspring, and (hopefully) a retirement consisting of at minimum parallel play, or even better, a retirement with a close friend/lover.
At least, this is how it works for me and most of the people I know.
Would it be that hard for a WYSIWYG editor to implement a usable plain-text based editor to act as a fail-safe for users who actually know what's going on?
Kids these days... What you are describing is WordPerfect's Reveal Codes functionality. My 10th grade word processing class used WP, on Winderz 3.0. Even before that, I vaguely recall some C=64 editing software that had something like this functionality.
a one-legged chinese hooker.
... named Irene?
I might as well duct tape the cat to my face then jump in the cold shower.
Make sure you post that to youtube, please.
They will attack with their bill and with the front edge of their wings. The front edge of the wings being powered by the huge muscles they use to fly. Imagine getting punched in the arm by Mike Tyson if he wasn't wearing gloves.
Dude, let it go. This is ridiculous. Are you seriously trying to convince me that a 30lb goose is able to generate the equivalent amount of force, with the leading edge of its wing, as a professional boxer's fist?
Again, I implore you to consider basic physics here. Broken down very simply, kinetic energy is mass * velocity, right? Which impact has a higher kinetic energy level, a motor scooter hitting a building at 40mph, or a fully-loaded tractor-trailer hitting a building at 40mph?
Given equivalent velocities, increased mass results in proportionately more kinetic energy. This is because the kinetic energy is equivalent to the amount of energy required to accelerate the mass from rest to the given velocity. Big trucks have much larger engines than mopeds because it requires a lot more work to get 40,000lbs going at 40mph than it does 200lbs. Does this make sense?
So, I'm no avian expert, but having personally disassembled many turkeys and chickens, I am reasonably confident that the kinetic energy of even the biggest, angriest goose wing strike is nowhere near the kinetic energy of a professional boxer's punch (or from my 60lb daughter, for that matter). Why? Because geese fly, and their bones are hollow, which means less mass, which means less kinetic energy.
I am totally willing to believe that an angry goose can be quite intimidating. I believe that they bite, and possibly scratch/gouge with the claws on their feet. But break an adult human arm with a wing strike? That's silly. Maybe if the human were so startled and frightened that they fell backward and landed weird they might break a wrist or something...
Be nice. You think a 20 pound goose can't break your arm? Do you think I could break your arm with twenty ounces of steel?
OK, but we're still talking about basic physics, here. A claw hammer masses less than the whole goose, true. However, there is much more concentrated mass in the steel hammer head than in the wing of even the biggest goose.
Not only that, but I'm sure that the velocity of a good hammer swing is higher than the whack of even the angriest goose.
Sheesh. I hope you were joking, but I just couldn't let that go unanswered.
Random comment:
That last idea isn't the greatest, because if I recall my (was it 6th grade?) text book from several years ago, geese are strong enough to break your arm if they decide to hit you with their wing. They also bite.
Wha? Canadian geese range from 5-14lb (3.2-5.5kg) in weight. The largest goose is supposedly around 20lb. How's that supposed to work? Do you understand the concepts of mass, velocity, and energy?
I can see how one might break your arm if ... shot out of a cannon.
Um, what?
If I have nothing to say about Java, I should STFU?
I don't work on Java. Java isn't on my radar. I could not care less about Java.
I wanted IBM to buy Sun because I felt that IBM would be more likely to retain the parts of the company I care about. Oracle doesn't care about supercomputing. I do. So I'm unhappy about this acquistion.
There, did I break it down into nice little digestable brain-bites for you?
I don't mean this in a snarky way, but given that the population of the entire country of Finland is ~5.2M folks, I can't imagine that even a "major" Finnish ISP has a huge userbase.
I used to work for a medium-sized regional ISP. We were one of several similar-sized ISPs serving a multi-metro area of maybe 3M people. At our peak, we had 30k accounts, if I recall correctly. This was back in the dialup days, btw.
Anyhow, my point is that when you're talking about the scale of the behemoth ISPs here in the States, expecting proactive approaches to zombie fighting is unrealistic. Support is an expensive cost center, which is why it's been farmed off to India. Getting experienced people who know how to do more than reboot the computer or reinstall ethernet/modem drivers is pretty experienced.
It's the financial aspects of the problem which make me pessimistic that ISPs will do anything to fix it.
If they start doing that, then botnet writers will have an incentive to have their rootkits start deleting emails (when a common email program loads up). I don't think they'll be that choosy about what they delete either.
Sending warning emails to users is a pointless exercise. Assuming that they read/understand the email in the first place (BIG assumption), I guarantee that the majority of them will just delete it. Why should they care if their computer's a zombie? It still works well enough to do whatever it is they're online to do.
No, I think the solution is for zombied computers to be quarantined. Use DNS and routing tricks to redirect any attempts to go anywhere "on the internets" (i.e. a web browser) to a site which explains that they're quarantined, and what they have to do to get out.
Unfortunately, that would raise call volumes to the ISP support lines, and require commitment on the ISPs' part to train their support monkeys. If ISPs started facing financial penalties for zombied users, then maybe the economics would balance out.
I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of this, though, so I'm probably missing something.
I LOLed, anyhow.
You don't make it clear exactly why you hate this outcome, but it sounds like your interest begins and ends with the future of Java.
I don't give a flying fig about Java. No, my interest in IBM as a buyer was because IBM plays in the HPC space. Oracle? Umm, not so much.
I'm having trouble staying awake just typing Orac... *zzzn* Wha? Oh, right. Boring.
For anyone with morbid curiosity:
From: Jonathan I. Schwartz
To: allsun@sun.com
Subject: Today's Sun/Oracle Announcement
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 04:34:16 -0700 (07:34 EDT)
Today's Sun/Oracle Announcement
This is one of the toughest emails I've ever had to write.
It's also one of the most hopeful about Sun's future in the industry.
For 27 years, Sun has stood for courage, innovation, a willingness to blaze trails, to envision and engineer the future. No matter our ups and downs, we've remained committed to those ideals, and to the R&D that's allowed us to differentiate. We've committed to decade long pursuits, from the evolution of one of the world's most powerful datacenter operating systems, to one of the world's most advanced multi-core microelectronics. We've never walked away from the wholesale reinvention of business models, the redefinition of technology boundaries or the pursuit of new routes to market.
Because of the unparalleled talent at Sun, we've also fueled entire industries with our people and technologies, and fostered extraordinary companies and market successes. Our products and services have driven the discovery of new drugs, transformed social media, and created a better understanding of the world and marketplace around us. All, while we've undergone a near constant transformation in the face of a rapidly changing marketplace and global economy. We've never walked away from a challenge - or an opportunity.
So today we take another step forward in our journey, but along a different path - by announcing that this weekend, our board of directors and I approved the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by the Oracle Corporation for $9.50/share in cash. All members of the board present at the meeting to review the transaction voted for it with enthusiasm, and the transaction stands to utterly transform the marketplace - bringing together two companies with a long history of working together to create a newly unified vision of the future.
Oracle's interest in Sun is very clear - they aspire to help customers simplify the development, deployment and operation of high value business systems, from applications all the way to datacenters. By acquiring Sun, Oracle will be well positioned to help customers solve the most complex technology problems related to running a business.
To me, this proposed acquisition totally redefines the industry, resetting the competitive landscape by creating a company with great reach, expertise and innovation. A combined Oracle/Sun will be capable of cultivating one of the world's most vibrant and far reaching developer communities, accelerating the convergence of storage, networking and computing, and delivering one of the world's most powerful and complete portfolios of business and technical software.
I do not consider the announcement to be the end of the road, not by any stretch of the imagination. I believe this is the first step down a different path, one that takes us and our innovations to an even broader market, one that ensures the ubiquitous role we play in the world around us. The deal was announced today, and, after regulatory review and shareholder approval, will take some months to close - until that close occurs, however, we are a separate company, operating independently. No matter how long it takes, the world changed starting today.
But it's important to note it's not the acquisition that's changing the world - it's the people that fuel both companies. Having spent a considerable amount of time talking to Oracle, let me assure you they are single minded in their focus on the one asset that doesn't appear in our financial statements: our people. That's their highest priority - creating an inviting and compelling environment in which our brightest minds can continue to invent and deliver the future.
Thank you for everything you've done over the years, and for everything you will do in the future to carry the business forward. I'm incredibly proud of this company and what we've accomplished together.
Details will be forthcoming as we work together on the integration planning process.
Jonathan
Is 8am too early to start drinking?
I am deeply disappointed by this turn of events.
IBM would have been a much better buyer, if the deal had to be done.
Oracle? Bleah!
Well, I'll bet the suits at IBM are kicking themselves hard, now that Oracle has control of Java.
First bleah!