Oh, certainly, stupidity is rife. The trouble is, it's not susceptible to analysis; if the other side is acting irrationally (or from motives you don't understand), you know you can't analyze their actions. So, any analysis has to assume they're being rational. Which is especially important in cases where "crazy" is an unusually common description of a side -- it leaves too much room for suprises that make sense only in retrospect.
That isn't to say that assuming rationality will result in conclusions that are correct; merely that it's useful as long as you don't mistake the conclusions for Truth.
Being a nuclear power almost guarantees that your country won't get invaded.
Having a defense guarantee from an allied nuclear power is considered to be similarly protective, as is having the capital of your nearest hostile neighbor under your guns.
That is, North Korea doesn't need a deterrent against the U.S., because it has a defense guarantee from China and artillery in place plenty capable of pulverizing Seoul, able to inflict tens to hundreds of thousands of casualties. If North Korea is being rational, and is doing this to have deterrent to invasion, the country they're trying to deter from invading is China.
On the other hand, they may not be trying to deter a Chinese invasion. They might be trying to deter, say, a U.S. defense of South Korea in case of a North Korean invasion. One way to do that is to say, to Japan, "You interfere, and we'll nuke Tokyo". That could quite well get the Japanese to deny the U.S. use of Okinawa, which would logistically cripple any U.S. military response. While NK might not have the ability to hit the U.S. with a nuke at this time, they certainly could hit Japan with one (if the missile doesn't blow up in flight).
North Korea already had plutonium-producing reactors in 1994, which it claimed were for the purpose of making power. The deal was to sell them light-water reactors as replacements, because light-water reactors are not suitable for plutonium production without heavy modification, and have NK shut down and seal its plutonium reactors.
So what NK then did was start refining uranium to weapons-grade in centrifuges. In 2003, the U.S. officially asked them if they were doing this, and they announced they were. So the U.S. cancelled the shipment of the light-water reactors, because North Korea was building nukes anyway. That's right, the ABB reactors never made it to the DPRK.
Then, North Korea responded to this by breaching the seals on the plutonium-producing reactors, and started refining the plutonium.
So, to take your gun analogy and make it actually reflect the facts, let's assume a lunatic already has a fully-automatic AK-47, which they say they need to shoot crows that are eating their crops. The police come by, nod and smile, and convinces the lunatic to lock up the AK-47, and in exchange the police will give him a SuperSoaker to drive off the crows. The lunatic then starts making pipe bombs. A few days later, the former CEO of SuperSoaker has joined the police, and he comes by and asks the nut if he's making pipe bombs. The nut say yes, so the new officer tells him to stop it or he won't be given the SuperSoaker. In response, the nut unlocks his AK-47 and shoots off a few rounds.
You then come along, and accuse the owner/police officer of being responsible for the gunfire because he was CEO of the SuperSoaker manufacturer.
I guess when you have moral integrity, the only important facts are the ones that don't get in the way of your indignation.
Erase Enterprise from the continuity. Entirely, completely, totally.
Set this series 2155, shortly after a Romulan force destroyed an Earth exploration vessel that they believed was an invasion force, igniting the Earth-Romulan War. The series runs 26 episodes a year -- 13 set on the United Earth Space Probe Agency ship Intrepid, 13 are set on the Imperial Romulan Warbird Indomitable. Time passes one year per season, with a peace treaty establishing the Neutral Zone occuring in the sixth season after the fifth-season-ending Battle of Charon.
The Intrepid is all-human in crew; the Federation does not yet exist, and no nonhumans are trusted to serve in the military. And this is a military ship, part of the new Star Fleet formed to defend Earth. In the show's sixth and seventh seasons, the crew moves from patrolling the Romulan border to new, science-and-diplomacy tasks culminating in the formation of the Federation at the end of season seven.
The Indomitable is a mix of Romulans and Remans. The Remans are full and equal members of the crew, and the head of the Empire is indeed an Empress, though a semiconstitutional monarch, for the first five seasons. The evolution of the Empire to being Praetor-headed and Reman-supressing happens in the wake of the Romulan defeat at the Battle of Cheron, as a military coup places a Reman-blaming admiral in charge, power being consolidated in the hands of this dictator at the end of season seven.
The two crews, of course, never meet face to face, because it's established in TOS that no one in the Federation knows what a Romulan looks like. There is still room, of course, for humans to wind up meeting the Romulans and never getting the opportunity to report back to Earth . . . and the two ships, of course, will clash in several encounters during the series.
No current version of string theory, within the limits of our current technological ability to engage in tests, makes a testable prediction that differs from those made by the Standard Model and/or General Relativity.
For efficiency, CPUs are heading below 3.3v, and RAM too.
That's actually why single-voltage PSUs make sense. Your CPU, GPU, and RAM don't care if the PSU is providing 12V, -12V, 5V, or 3.3V, or any combination of them, as long as its VRM steps it down to the 1.7V or whatever it needs. So why have the power supply provide so many different types of power, instead of just one of them? It's all going to be converted by a local VRM anyway.
And a single-voltage power supply is about 85% energy-efficient at converting AC power, compared with about 65% for four-voltage (12, -12, 5, and 3.3) supplies, due to various redundancies. Switiching to all 12V means you've made the power supply less complicated, more efficient, and less expensive, at the cost of a few extra VRMs on any 5v and 3.3v components that are put in the machine.
For one, keep in mind that it's not a laptop, it's a notebook.
So it's roughly 8.5" x 11" (A4 for the metric world)? Because, you see, the term "notebook" was specifically inaugurated for the subclass of laptops the approximate size of -- get this -- a notebook. With the ones even smalled than that being "subnotebooks".
Laptop is an unfortunate consumer-ism
No, it's a manufacturer-coined name for the class of machine small enought to fit on the lap and powered by batteries, going back to the advertising for the Gavilan SC.
Chamberlain left office after declaring war on Germany for its invasion of Poland, after refusing to fold on Hitler's demand for Danzig.
Did he screw up royally on Czechoslovakia? Did he totally misestimate Hitler in 1938? Yes, of course he did. And he knew he did, which is why he stepped down so somebody credible could take over the war effort. But Chamberlain did stand up to Hitler in the end.
The Red Air Force doesn't exist anymore. The F/A-18F (Super Hornet, which is really a different plane than the F/A-18 Hornet despite the name) is quite adequate against any opponent the U.S. is even remotely likely to fight, cheaper and easier to maintain than the F-14, is quite flexible in combat roles, and is better suited for the sorts of combat missions flown in Panama, the Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Well, yes. The plane was designed for air superiority combat against a capable contemporary air force (read, the Red Air Force). Since we thankfully never fought a full war with the Soviet Union, we never had a chance to use the Tomcat for its intended purpose (in the Gulf War, Iraq refused to face our Tomcats, knowing its air force would be slaughtered). Similarly, we never used our arsenal of nuclear missiles, our subs, or any of other huge classes of weapons for their designed purpose, either.
Now, it's possible that if we'd never built these weapons of war to fight the Soviet Union, people like Brezhnev wouldn't have taken the opportunity to conquer Western Europe or at least extort from it money to prop up the Soviet Union, and accordingly the only reason we built them was to fund a military-industrial complex. It's similarly possible that, had Danzig been handed over to Hitler when he demanded it, World War II would have been averted, and the only reason Chamberlain stood up to Hitler in 1939 was to please Britsh armaments manufacturers.
Actually the linux kernel could be forked from the existing code base licenced as GPLV2 with ongoing contributions to the new kernel licenced as GPLV3.
Actually, no.
The Linux kernel is specifically licensed under GPL v2 only. Due to the deliberate design of the copyleft in the version 2 GPL, it would be illegal to distribute that code in a kernel where portions of the kernel could not be redistributed under the terms of the GPL v2. The inability of GPL v2 code to be put under a more restrictive license without permission of the copyright holder is a deliberate, designed-in feature, and no FSF backdoor exists.
That means, all the "GPL v3" code in your "forked" kernel would either have to include specific permission to be used under the GPL v2, or none of it could be the current GPL v2 Linux kernel code. In the first case, then, anybody could grab any of the code from your "fork" and distribute it under the v2 only, defeating the whole point of forking a project to add v3 DRM restrictions. In the second, you wouldn't be forking Linux, you'd just be writing a new kernel.
You want a GPL v3 GNU kernel? You can start with HURD, or with one of the nonproprietary BSDs (4.4 Lite, Free, Net, Open), or a few more obscure things. But you can't start with Linux if Linus says no, because the FSF set up the GPL v2 that way.
Wow, nobody yet mentioned this thing?
on
Outré USB Gadgets
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I mean, sure, there was a reference to the fictional iBrator, but this is real.
The law (statute and case) establishes certain protected classes, and limits how and why they can be discriminated against. If your nightclub qualifies as a place of "public accomodation", and your bouncers consistently discriminate against black people, you can get in legal trouble -- though you can (at least in most places) throw out people who refuse to conform to the dress code all you like. If you're planning on running a business where you'll refuse certain kinds of customers, consult a qualified attorney about the applicable Federal, state, and municipal laws and regulations.
Now, prior to 1964, you could pretty much serve whomever you liked as far as Federal law was concerned. It was your property, your business, your rules. On the other hand, the state governments even then would require otherwise. The railroads, for example, resisted discriminating against blacks until a number of states passed laws requiring segregation in the late 19th Century. In fact, specifically because those state laws had entrenched such segregation into local customs was why the Civil Rights Act of 1964 dictated nondiscrimination for private businesses that counted as places of "public accomodation".
They don't HAVE to sell their products to blind people if they don't want to...
Actually, in the United States, they do have to even if they don't want to, because Congress and the first President Bush enacted a law to that effect.
Um, no. It isn't a judge's job to advocate legislation. It's a judge's job to apply existing law to specific cases. It's exactly the judge's job to interpret 'service' and 'accessible', and to then explain how he reached those conculsions in his opinion (thus "case law" and "precedent"). That's how the Anglo-American system of law has worked for several centuries now.
Dank and dismal. From the river Styx, which Charon ferries people across to the realm of Hades (Pluto to the Romans), a dank and diamal realm of the dead very similar to the Jewish Sheol, both of which are often conflated with Hell in Christian cosmology . . .
I'd counter that the market seems to love vendor lock-in.
Lock-in, historically, is the inability to change hardware vendor. And it's always been hated by the market.
You might have been locked in to MVS, but you had your choice of IBM and Amdahl mainframes. You might have been locked in to Unix, but you had your choice of Sun, Apollo, and many, many other (usually 68k) Unix workstation vendors -- and the imperfect compatibily between them (the Unix Wars) were the opening wedge for Windows NT. And you might have been locked into Microsoft on the PC platform, but you had your choice of clone maker.
OSX lock-in means hardware lock-in. It only comes on Apples. Your business is now at the whims of the fashion of Steve Jobs -- if he decides to kill XServes, you can't get them anymore. If in five years you need a 16-way SMP system, and Apple isn't making one, you can't get one. So with Apple, you'd have to avoid all binary software and all software that uses OSX-only APIs to avoid Apple hardware lock-in. And if you're avoiding all that, why are you bothering with Apple in the first place?
Windows? You have OS lock-in, just like OSX (if using any features other than bog-standard Unix). But if Dell disappeared from the face of the Earth tomorrow, Gateway and Lenovo and HP and everybody else can sell you a Windows box.
And then there's Linux. Hardware lock-in? You've got hundreds of hardware vendors toi choose from. OS lock-in? You not only have dozens of distro vendors, you can run unmodified binaries on Solaris, SCO Openserver, FreeBSD, and others. People are going to favor being at the mercy of Steve Jobs's big idea of the year to that?
The thing that bothers me is that if Pluto hasn't cleared Neptune out of it's orbit, then neither has Neptune cleared Pluto
I'm assuming for the moment that it was misreported. The real problem with Pluto is the thirteen other known Plutinos -- objects not gravitationally related to Pluto, but also in highly elliptical Neptune-cossing orbits with a 3:2 resonance to the Neptunian orbit.
Now, there are a bunch of objects which have stable solar orbits with a period the same as Mars. But in the case of Mars, they all either orbit Mars itself, Sol-Mars L4, or Sol-Mars L5. Same can be said for Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune (and Earth, except the "bunch", since Earth only really has the Moon).
Instead, Pluto is like Ceres, which has a number of objects in the same orbit which are all more-or-less doing their own thing. Demoting Pluto now that we know about the Plutinos is like the demotion of Ceres after the discovery of a bunch of other asteroids in the same orbit.
Yeah, this is total speculation, but what better way for Apple Corp to say "fuck you" to Apple Computer than to make the release of the Beatles' music in electronic format in WMA, on the 88-cent-a-track Wal-Mart music store, as part of the Zune player launch?
And how much do you think Microsoft would pay Apple Corp to be able to say that Zune plays the Beatles, but iPod doesn't?
1) New services are cheap for Google (the reason given in this article). 2) New services get publicity, serving as advertisement for Google as a brand. 3) New services might become hits, so why not launch and see?
Combined, the result is that Google is spending little money (#1) doing something that needs to be done anyway (#2) and which might make big returns (#3). You think McDonalds or Wal-Mart wouldn't jump at the chance to get their advertising dollars to double as pseudo-venture capital?
Hmm. It's a case of a specific dog (the one in which this originated as a cancer) having mutated/evolved into a unicellular eukaryotic parasite that's hosted by canines, which as a symptom of initial infection forms an almost-benign, short-lived tumor (the immune response in most dogs causes the tumors to go into spontaneous remission, apparently).
One of the Darl McBride interviews along the line included something to the effect that he didn't understand why IBM didn't just buy SCO to make the trouble go away. And the agreement by which it hired its lawfirm, IIRC, includes a specific clause where the firm gets a significant chunk of any buyout of SCO. So there's evidence (well, for you, there's my hearsay) that the lawsuit may have been brought in the first place specifically to get SCO bought by IBM.
IBM hasn't said anything about it, but I assume they want to send the clear message that if you try to extort IBM into buying your failing company by filing a lawsuit, IBM will instead stomp you flat.
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Oh, certainly, stupidity is rife. The trouble is, it's not susceptible to analysis; if the other side is acting irrationally (or from motives you don't understand), you know you can't analyze their actions. So, any analysis has to assume they're being rational. Which is especially important in cases where "crazy" is an unusually common description of a side -- it leaves too much room for suprises that make sense only in retrospect.
That isn't to say that assuming rationality will result in conclusions that are correct; merely that it's useful as long as you don't mistake the conclusions for Truth.
Being a nuclear power almost guarantees that your country won't get invaded.
Having a defense guarantee from an allied nuclear power is considered to be similarly protective, as is having the capital of your nearest hostile neighbor under your guns.
That is, North Korea doesn't need a deterrent against the U.S., because it has a defense guarantee from China and artillery in place plenty capable of pulverizing Seoul, able to inflict tens to hundreds of thousands of casualties. If North Korea is being rational, and is doing this to have deterrent to invasion, the country they're trying to deter from invading is China.
On the other hand, they may not be trying to deter a Chinese invasion. They might be trying to deter, say, a U.S. defense of South Korea in case of a North Korean invasion. One way to do that is to say, to Japan, "You interfere, and we'll nuke Tokyo". That could quite well get the Japanese to deny the U.S. use of Okinawa, which would logistically cripple any U.S. military response. While NK might not have the ability to hit the U.S. with a nuke at this time, they certainly could hit Japan with one (if the missile doesn't blow up in flight).
North Korea already had plutonium-producing reactors in 1994, which it claimed were for the purpose of making power. The deal was to sell them light-water reactors as replacements, because light-water reactors are not suitable for plutonium production without heavy modification, and have NK shut down and seal its plutonium reactors.
So what NK then did was start refining uranium to weapons-grade in centrifuges. In 2003, the U.S. officially asked them if they were doing this, and they announced they were. So the U.S. cancelled the shipment of the light-water reactors, because North Korea was building nukes anyway. That's right, the ABB reactors never made it to the DPRK.
Then, North Korea responded to this by breaching the seals on the plutonium-producing reactors, and started refining the plutonium.
So, to take your gun analogy and make it actually reflect the facts, let's assume a lunatic already has a fully-automatic AK-47, which they say they need to shoot crows that are eating their crops. The police come by, nod and smile, and convinces the lunatic to lock up the AK-47, and in exchange the police will give him a SuperSoaker to drive off the crows. The lunatic then starts making pipe bombs. A few days later, the former CEO of SuperSoaker has joined the police, and he comes by and asks the nut if he's making pipe bombs. The nut say yes, so the new officer tells him to stop it or he won't be given the SuperSoaker. In response, the nut unlocks his AK-47 and shoots off a few rounds.
You then come along, and accuse the owner/police officer of being responsible for the gunfire because he was CEO of the SuperSoaker manufacturer.
I guess when you have moral integrity, the only important facts are the ones that don't get in the way of your indignation.
Erase Enterprise from the continuity. Entirely, completely, totally.
Set this series 2155, shortly after a Romulan force destroyed an Earth exploration vessel that they believed was an invasion force, igniting the Earth-Romulan War. The series runs 26 episodes a year -- 13 set on the United Earth Space Probe Agency ship Intrepid, 13 are set on the Imperial Romulan Warbird Indomitable. Time passes one year per season, with a peace treaty establishing the Neutral Zone occuring in the sixth season after the fifth-season-ending Battle of Charon.
The Intrepid is all-human in crew; the Federation does not yet exist, and no nonhumans are trusted to serve in the military. And this is a military ship, part of the new Star Fleet formed to defend Earth. In the show's sixth and seventh seasons, the crew moves from patrolling the Romulan border to new, science-and-diplomacy tasks culminating in the formation of the Federation at the end of season seven.
The Indomitable is a mix of Romulans and Remans. The Remans are full and equal members of the crew, and the head of the Empire is indeed an Empress, though a semiconstitutional monarch, for the first five seasons. The evolution of the Empire to being Praetor-headed and Reman-supressing happens in the wake of the Romulan defeat at the Battle of Cheron, as a military coup places a Reman-blaming admiral in charge, power being consolidated in the hands of this dictator at the end of season seven.
The two crews, of course, never meet face to face, because it's established in TOS that no one in the Federation knows what a Romulan looks like. There is still room, of course, for humans to wind up meeting the Romulans and never getting the opportunity to report back to Earth . . . and the two ships, of course, will clash in several encounters during the series.
No current version of string theory, within the limits of our current technological ability to engage in tests, makes a testable prediction that differs from those made by the Standard Model and/or General Relativity.
For efficiency, CPUs are heading below 3.3v, and RAM too.
That's actually why single-voltage PSUs make sense. Your CPU, GPU, and RAM don't care if the PSU is providing 12V, -12V, 5V, or 3.3V, or any combination of them, as long as its VRM steps it down to the 1.7V or whatever it needs. So why have the power supply provide so many different types of power, instead of just one of them? It's all going to be converted by a local VRM anyway.
And a single-voltage power supply is about 85% energy-efficient at converting AC power, compared with about 65% for four-voltage (12, -12, 5, and 3.3) supplies, due to various redundancies. Switiching to all 12V means you've made the power supply less complicated, more efficient, and less expensive, at the cost of a few extra VRMs on any 5v and 3.3v components that are put in the machine.
For one, keep in mind that it's not a laptop, it's a notebook.
So it's roughly 8.5" x 11" (A4 for the metric world)? Because, you see, the term "notebook" was specifically inaugurated for the subclass of laptops the approximate size of -- get this -- a notebook. With the ones even smalled than that being "subnotebooks".
Laptop is an unfortunate consumer-ism
No, it's a manufacturer-coined name for the class of machine small enought to fit on the lap and powered by batteries, going back to the advertising for the Gavilan SC.
Chamberlain left office after declaring war on Germany for its invasion of Poland, after refusing to fold on Hitler's demand for Danzig.
Did he screw up royally on Czechoslovakia? Did he totally misestimate Hitler in 1938? Yes, of course he did. And he knew he did, which is why he stepped down so somebody credible could take over the war effort. But Chamberlain did stand up to Hitler in the end.
The Red Air Force doesn't exist anymore. The F/A-18F (Super Hornet, which is really a different plane than the F/A-18 Hornet despite the name) is quite adequate against any opponent the U.S. is even remotely likely to fight, cheaper and easier to maintain than the F-14, is quite flexible in combat roles, and is better suited for the sorts of combat missions flown in Panama, the Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Well, yes. The plane was designed for air superiority combat against a capable contemporary air force (read, the Red Air Force). Since we thankfully never fought a full war with the Soviet Union, we never had a chance to use the Tomcat for its intended purpose (in the Gulf War, Iraq refused to face our Tomcats, knowing its air force would be slaughtered). Similarly, we never used our arsenal of nuclear missiles, our subs, or any of other huge classes of weapons for their designed purpose, either.
Now, it's possible that if we'd never built these weapons of war to fight the Soviet Union, people like Brezhnev wouldn't have taken the opportunity to conquer Western Europe or at least extort from it money to prop up the Soviet Union, and accordingly the only reason we built them was to fund a military-industrial complex. It's similarly possible that, had Danzig been handed over to Hitler when he demanded it, World War II would have been averted, and the only reason Chamberlain stood up to Hitler in 1939 was to please Britsh armaments manufacturers.
Merry Christmas to you, too!
(The First No L . . . )
Sails ships are fairly slow in crossing the Atlantic. Maybe this will be a faster way[.]
Not reading the article is one thing, but not reading the summary?
"This boat will achieve its 7,000-mile trip at a speed of 5-6 knots, about the speed of a sailing yacht[.]"
Actually the linux kernel could be forked from the existing code base licenced as GPLV2 with ongoing contributions to the new kernel licenced as GPLV3.
Actually, no.
The Linux kernel is specifically licensed under GPL v2 only. Due to the deliberate design of the copyleft in the version 2 GPL, it would be illegal to distribute that code in a kernel where portions of the kernel could not be redistributed under the terms of the GPL v2. The inability of GPL v2 code to be put under a more restrictive license without permission of the copyright holder is a deliberate, designed-in feature, and no FSF backdoor exists.
That means, all the "GPL v3" code in your "forked" kernel would either have to include specific permission to be used under the GPL v2, or none of it could be the current GPL v2 Linux kernel code. In the first case, then, anybody could grab any of the code from your "fork" and distribute it under the v2 only, defeating the whole point of forking a project to add v3 DRM restrictions. In the second, you wouldn't be forking Linux, you'd just be writing a new kernel.
You want a GPL v3 GNU kernel? You can start with HURD, or with one of the nonproprietary BSDs (4.4 Lite, Free, Net, Open), or a few more obscure things. But you can't start with Linux if Linus says no, because the FSF set up the GPL v2 that way.
I mean, sure, there was a reference to the fictional iBrator, but this is real.
.
Actually, he's apparently writing something like twenty hours of new content at this moment, for the full first season of a Star Wars TV Series.
The law (statute and case) establishes certain protected classes, and limits how and why they can be discriminated against. If your nightclub qualifies as a place of "public accomodation", and your bouncers consistently discriminate against black people, you can get in legal trouble -- though you can (at least in most places) throw out people who refuse to conform to the dress code all you like. If you're planning on running a business where you'll refuse certain kinds of customers, consult a qualified attorney about the applicable Federal, state, and municipal laws and regulations.
Now, prior to 1964, you could pretty much serve whomever you liked as far as Federal law was concerned. It was your property, your business, your rules. On the other hand, the state governments even then would require otherwise. The railroads, for example, resisted discriminating against blacks until a number of states passed laws requiring segregation in the late 19th Century. In fact, specifically because those state laws had entrenched such segregation into local customs was why the Civil Rights Act of 1964 dictated nondiscrimination for private businesses that counted as places of "public accomodation".
They don't HAVE to sell their products to blind people if they don't want to...
Actually, in the United States, they do have to even if they don't want to, because Congress and the first President Bush enacted a law to that effect.
Um, no. It isn't a judge's job to advocate legislation. It's a judge's job to apply existing law to specific cases. It's exactly the judge's job to interpret 'service' and 'accessible', and to then explain how he reached those conculsions in his opinion (thus "case law" and "precedent"). That's how the Anglo-American system of law has worked for several centuries now.
Dank and dismal. From the river Styx, which Charon ferries people across to the realm of Hades (Pluto to the Romans), a dank and diamal realm of the dead very similar to the Jewish Sheol, both of which are often conflated with Hell in Christian cosmology . . .
I'd counter that the market seems to love vendor lock-in.
Lock-in, historically, is the inability to change hardware vendor. And it's always been hated by the market.
You might have been locked in to MVS, but you had your choice of IBM and Amdahl mainframes. You might have been locked in to Unix, but you had your choice of Sun, Apollo, and many, many other (usually 68k) Unix workstation vendors -- and the imperfect compatibily between them (the Unix Wars) were the opening wedge for Windows NT. And you might have been locked into Microsoft on the PC platform, but you had your choice of clone maker.
OSX lock-in means hardware lock-in. It only comes on Apples. Your business is now at the whims of the fashion of Steve Jobs -- if he decides to kill XServes, you can't get them anymore. If in five years you need a 16-way SMP system, and Apple isn't making one, you can't get one. So with Apple, you'd have to avoid all binary software and all software that uses OSX-only APIs to avoid Apple hardware lock-in. And if you're avoiding all that, why are you bothering with Apple in the first place?
Windows? You have OS lock-in, just like OSX (if using any features other than bog-standard Unix). But if Dell disappeared from the face of the Earth tomorrow, Gateway and Lenovo and HP and everybody else can sell you a Windows box.
And then there's Linux. Hardware lock-in? You've got hundreds of hardware vendors toi choose from. OS lock-in? You not only have dozens of distro vendors, you can run unmodified binaries on Solaris, SCO Openserver, FreeBSD, and others. People are going to favor being at the mercy of Steve Jobs's big idea of the year to that?
The thing that bothers me is that if Pluto hasn't cleared Neptune out of it's orbit, then neither has Neptune cleared Pluto
I'm assuming for the moment that it was misreported. The real problem with Pluto is the thirteen other known Plutinos -- objects not gravitationally related to Pluto, but also in highly elliptical Neptune-cossing orbits with a 3:2 resonance to the Neptunian orbit.
Now, there are a bunch of objects which have stable solar orbits with a period the same as Mars. But in the case of Mars, they all either orbit Mars itself, Sol-Mars L4, or Sol-Mars L5. Same can be said for Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune (and Earth, except the "bunch", since Earth only really has the Moon).
Instead, Pluto is like Ceres, which has a number of objects in the same orbit which are all more-or-less doing their own thing. Demoting Pluto now that we know about the Plutinos is like the demotion of Ceres after the discovery of a bunch of other asteroids in the same orbit.
Yeah, this is total speculation, but what better way for Apple Corp to say "fuck you" to Apple Computer than to make the release of the Beatles' music in electronic format in WMA, on the 88-cent-a-track Wal-Mart music store, as part of the Zune player launch?
And how much do you think Microsoft would pay Apple Corp to be able to say that Zune plays the Beatles, but iPod doesn't?
1) New services are cheap for Google (the reason given in this article).
2) New services get publicity, serving as advertisement for Google as a brand.
3) New services might become hits, so why not launch and see?
Combined, the result is that Google is spending little money (#1) doing something that needs to be done anyway (#2) and which might make big returns (#3). You think McDonalds or Wal-Mart wouldn't jump at the chance to get their advertising dollars to double as pseudo-venture capital?
Hmm. It's a case of a specific dog (the one in which this originated as a cancer) having mutated/evolved into a unicellular eukaryotic parasite that's hosted by canines, which as a symptom of initial infection forms an almost-benign, short-lived tumor (the immune response in most dogs causes the tumors to go into spontaneous remission, apparently).
One of the Darl McBride interviews along the line included something to the effect that he didn't understand why IBM didn't just buy SCO to make the trouble go away. And the agreement by which it hired its lawfirm, IIRC, includes a specific clause where the firm gets a significant chunk of any buyout of SCO. So there's evidence (well, for you, there's my hearsay) that the lawsuit may have been brought in the first place specifically to get SCO bought by IBM.
IBM hasn't said anything about it, but I assume they want to send the clear message that if you try to extort IBM into buying your failing company by filing a lawsuit, IBM will instead stomp you flat.