And this is why it is a good idea to take a Numerical Analysis course or an Assembly course that lets you play with floating-point arithmetic as part of your CS electives. As much as I'd like to blame today's Java/.NET-oriented CS curricula (which seem to be fashionable now in many universities), it's been quite a while that many universities barely pay any attention (if any) to the details of floating point arithmetic.
I bought the original Razr when it just came into market. It was a great phone. Beautifully designed, sleek and stylish even by today's standards.
Too bad Motorola had monkeys design the user interface and idiots write the software. Completely fucked up a superbly designed piece of hardware.
Nope. Blame the carriers who had the saying on what the UI had to be like. Each one wanted its own customizable shit - that is hard to get right on software unless you develop a product line from the get-go.
I should expound this more: you need to be good at LaTeX so that you can quickly type your equations on LyX. Yes, you can enter your equations graphically, but for speed and efficiency, you better know your LaTeX. I'm rusty now, but I was good at it and even then, it was hard to recover from a mistake in the middle of a lecture, or worse, when the instructor makes a mistake and in mid-formula goes back to re-draw it while spouting some more important stuff that you sure as hell don't want to miss from the lecture. In other words, it's not as simple or efficient as using plain old pen and paper.
This sounds more like a solution looking for a problem to me. Paper+pencil = teh win!1
I foolishly tried once to that once, with LyX - pretty cool concept, but when you really need to write a whole bunch of equations in succession, then you end up putting more effort on getting it right on your computer than on actually paying attention to the lectures. Don't believe it? Try using LyX to jot down long-ass operational semantics formulas while trying to pay attention to what the instructor is saying.
Best thing is to jot them down on paper for later digitizing. Or use a Baboo Pen in conjunction to your laptop (I wish I had that kind of technology that cheap when I was in school.) Actually I might end up Xmas-present myself with one of those.
By the way, do you have an M.B.A. yourself, by chance?
B.S CompSci, all but the thesis for a M.S. Might consider an additional M.S. in Systems Engineering, but an M.B.A, never. Don't have what it takes to deal with management.
How many beans have you counted?
How many have you counted? Instead of answering my previous question with another one (strawmanning much?) answer whether you have any experience in bean counting and management with which to talk on the subject.
By the way, about those degrees, you do see a lot of them, actually. From '07 to '08 over 150,000 MBAs were awarded. About a quarter of all masters degrees for the year, more than at any other time before. (And it's been growing since the 70's.)
And because you see 150,000 in a year, they are simply easy, right, much less cheap? Have you consider that many of those degrees are "professional" MBA degrees, for which you can only enroll if you have had a certain amount of years of professional experience in management or engineering? So yeah,they come easy. Come again, your management experience is in what?
Frankly, I don't care if you're the son of a Somalian dirt farmer.
Of course you don't. You would care about that only if it were to support your point of view. At least I can talk from experience and can justly criticize what people have turned unions into.
I don't care if Smith and Wagoner and Lutz came from the same oh-so-deliciously-humble beginnings you claim to come from. They and their management people made bad decisions, constantly.
Nobody has argued that this is not true. Certainly not me. Red herring.
They wrecked the company.
In addition to UAW, and certainly in large part by UAW.
UAW didn't make things any better, but with better leadership (if you can even call what GM had 'leadership') the company would still be around.
Pure speculation. UAW was a cancer to GM. It is possible that better management would have kept GM up, but it simply would have delayed the inevitable. UAW made operational costs non-competitive comparing with other auto makers in Europe and Japan.
How about you quit waving your dick around and stop changing the subject
Didn't change the subject. I brought the context of my origins to counter your obviously conniving dick-waving comment about me against the poor proletariat.
so you can badmouth your union bogeymen more?
It is not bad mounting to call an overpaid manual worker with better benefits than a HS teacher an overpaid manual worker. If calling it for what it.
Yeah dude, since a B.A. and an M.B.A are
so hard to get.
Which is why you see so many of them!! Do you have one, M.B.A. in specific so that we know you talk from experience?
(Admittedly the student loans are a legitimate problem, but that goes for everyone.) You're talking six years of school at most, more realistically four. This isn't medical school, and you conflating business with medicine, law, and engineering really speaks to your lack of knowledge on the subject.
Roger Smith was a perfectly ordinary ladder climber. Rick Wagoner was educated, but he was a dumbass on the job anyway. Robert Lutz was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. I'm sorry, were you trying to make a point?
Take out your anger on the proles all you want. UAW deserves some blame, but GM's management was fucking terrible and you know it. You call I.T. guys glorified janitors, but executives and managerial types are just deified bean counters and salesmen. The overwhelming majority of them are nothing compared to people working in the hard-sciences, or in medicine, or in law
Tell me a bit about your professional experience as a bean counter. I wanna know if you are talking from experience or if this is pure ideologicotardic rhetorical nonsense.
, but their advantage is that they can convince people that they're worth more than they actually are and that's why they take home the big bucks. They're hucksters.
But you're so much better than those stupid auto workers,aren't you? Keep swinging that rhetorical bat. You might hit yourself.
Fuck yeah. Been working since I was 12, starting in a 3rd world country, not in the pampered reality of the 1st world version of *poverty* , doing all kinds of prole work, including human cargo mule. Fast forward later and I'm doing whatever I can to work here in the US, from flipping burgers to driving forklifts. But with all that, I tolled away until I finally got by degree.
And then we have an overpaid janitor demanding better benefits than me even though he'd never improved his skills and education despite being born and raised in this country with all the opportunities that are just there for the taking? Screw that!
I have no problem with manual workers, shit that's where I come from. But I do have problems with manual workers that expect to get paid as much if not more than those with a college education and expect to live like that under the umbrella of protectionism, even though they were born here and never got an itch to improve their skills and education not even by a bit, with all the opportunities a 1st world country provides.
Go and whip your me-for-the-peepl3 e-dick somewhere else dude. You have no clue what you are talking about, and from what I can tell, your position on the matter lacks any form of substance.
Sure, people selling little baggies of things will prosper and grow. But it ain't going to be cheerios.
Honestly, I'm an Indian IT guy who looks like this and is a straight edge vegetarian. But despite all that, twice in Portland, people have stopped me and asked me for some weed.
Now, there's a market which expands during a recession.
If six weeks vacation (not even two months) will drive a company into bankrupcy, maybe we need to rethink this whole capitalism thing.
Do you have a better, tried and true alternative? And what the hell does one do to deserve a six week vacation? Besides, take several thousand people without qualifications, getting paid more than what they contribute and on top of that getting six weeks of over paid salary, that increases operational costs for no purpose. That's not a fault of capitalism, but the fault of the misapplication and abuse of a socialist/humanist concept.
Syndicalism was to protect workers from abuse, not create overpaid janitors.
I don't see the problem with a docker making $80 an hour.
Only if a combination of his skills and job risk make him deserving of that salary.
Would it be better if everyone made minimum wage?
Nice strawman. Certainly not the minimum wage, but also certainly not above the salary of a fireman or a college-educated HS teacher.
I thought the whole point of economic growth was that everyone got richer.
How does overpaying a janitor with $80/hour make everyone richer? Do you see college-educated HS teachers getting paid $80/hour? Didn't think so.
The purpose of economic growth is that everyone got richer relative to their skill set. A janitor gets paid more than what he did before. A teacher gets paid more than what he did before. But still the relation of salaries to skills remain.
Justify me why a pampered bunch of janitors get paid much, much better than other, more educated, more vital sectors of society, or prove to me that they getting paid that much contributes to everyone getting richer, then you might have an argument worth discussing.
Until then, all you have are strawmen, and poorly built strawmen to boot.
But then I never bought into trickle-down economics.
It's not that you never bought it. It's that your understanding of economics, be it capitalist or otherwise, is superficial/ideological/googlish at best.
And what does the executive do that justifies his income?
For starters, this is completely irrelevant. Assuming an exec does not deserve his income, that does not necessitate that over-paid janitors get paid as... overpaid janitors either. GM bled a lot more from over-paid janitors than what you call *overpaid* executives.
Second, what they did to justify their income?
Same reason why doctors, MS in engineering, brain surgeons, lawyers and every other person who invested a decade of their life in school and collected several 10s of thousands of dollars in student loans:
They went to college, probably took shit, ate expired muffins and staled coffee for 6-10 years while going to school getting a post-grad. Took more shit as a grad student. Most likely took $20-$30K in student loans. Started from the bottom as a admin assistant (or at best as a mid-level manager taking shit from below and up). Worked and climbed the latter for an additional 10 years, eventually collecting an average of 2 decades in knowledge required to drive and manage companies.
I got that question asked once (by a computer repair guy), and I'm not even a manager, but fuck! If a person can't deserve to make an obscene amount of money after sacrificing a decade of his life in school, depriving himself of a lot of shit, accumulating a shit load of student loans, then what the hell does one makes the sacrifice for? And to top it off, to have some punk who doesn't even have a fraction of his qualifications, and who never make the job/scholastic sacrifice, asking why he deserve his salary? Screw that!.
That's something you can ask a GM stockholder too.
They know where the blame is - in missed opportunities by management second (ditching green possibilities, investing/insisting in gazz guzzlers), and a rotten, leeching mass of overpaid janitors demanding to get paid far more than competitive automaker workers are in Europe and Japan, demanding to get paid far more than what their skills entitled them for.
Unions are very good things people and sooner or later this country is going to figure out.
One name: General Motors.
Unions have been great in history as tools that protect workers from employer's abuse. But that's it. Protection =/= protectionism. At the end of the day, the world is a competitive one, and if you have to rely on protectionism to guarantee a certain salary, then you will eventually be subject to harsher consequences of open, competitive markets, not to mention that the value you get remunerated with is way over the value that you actually generate.
Compete with what you have, and get remunerated according to the value you are capable of creating.
Think of this way. My walls of my new place are bare and I need some art. So I go to the local museum with my bajilion-pixel camera, snap some photos, and print them "poster printing" (one photo spanning several pages) and put them on my wall.
For you to do so you will have to break the rules of the museum (which most likely forbids the usage of cameras for the purpose of reproduction in print). So that on itself makes your action an illegitimate one since you entered the museum with the purpose of breaking the rules which you implicitly agreed upon the moment you set foot inside it.
I now have great works of art at home. Years later I hear the originals are being auctioned and I buy them thinking "I had to take them then because I really needed (wanted) some art for my walls, it just took awhile to get the money".
The existence of a copy at your home does not decrease the value of the originals nor poses a risk, however insignificant, of lowering its value potential.
There is nothing intrinsic about these two analogies that makes them logically different if we are to follow the line of argument you are presenting here
Except for the fact that the acquisition of your copy originated from violating the access rules established by the museum, which are his to established, which are yours to obey whenever you agree to set foot inside it, and which no ones forces you to obey if you agree not to go inside the museum.
My argument follows from the nature of legitimate transactions, and possession and usage via legitimate means. Yours does not.
except now we're comparing digital copy with digital copy.
Except for the fact that the issue at hand is not about comparing apples to apples but the legitimacy by which who gets to possess what and under what legitimate conditions.
And don't say "Yeah but, you took a photo and printed it, that's not the same as pirating". Oh really? Am I not enjoying these paintings on my walls? How exactly is it different?
Still missing the point of legitimacy. You don't get to take the picture the way you just described. You want a copy of the art in question, then buy a poster from a legitimate manufacturer or purchase a hand-made copy made legitimately.
Furthermore, you are still missing the point of creating a loss on potential (and legitimate whether your like it or not) revenue. The creation of the copy in this example, does not create a loss of value on the original, unless you attempt to pass your copy as an original one (or using your copy to fake a copy for sale.)
The copy of digital software indeed creates a digital copy, of an intangible property, that belongs to someone else (not you), the action of which creates a potential loss of legitimate revenue for the author/owner of the aforementioned intangible copy (in this case, the software.)
Sure I can't sell my printouts but most pirates don't pirate to make $$$, they do it so they can enjoy and use something without paying for it. Am I not doing that with these paintings?
Not because the enjoyment of your legitimately obtained copy (illegitimate for the reasons previously stated) does not cause potential financial harm to the owner of the copied property in question.
Again, it is a matter of legitimacy not of simply copying stuff around for whatever purpose that fancies you.
If copying bits is never wrong, I suppose you won't mind copying the bits that spell out the url for your bank, your username and password and your credit cards to Slashdot.
If copying bits is never wrong, then company data leaks are no big deal.
If copying bits is never wrong, why don't you make a video of your neighbor masturbating and post it to you tube.
OBJECTION! (Cue Phoenix Wright pic)
You're confusing breach of privacy with software/media piracy. Very different things indeed.
Why? Simple. A game was meant to be enjoyed by people. Movies are made to be watched. Music is meant to be listened.
Where they meant to be enjoyed/watched/listened for free without ever reimbursing the costs to the authors. Did the authors say "have at it" or did they say "these are objects of my creation, you are entitled to enjoy/watch/listen under my conditions; you are free from refraining to enjoy/watch/listen them if you do not agree with my conditions."?
Next time Cirque Du Soleil come to my town, should I start planning a scheme to sneak in and avoid paying the entrace fee simply because the show was meant, artistically speaking, to be enjoyed and watched?
Private personal information is meant to be KEPT SECRET. And that includes a video of your neighbor masturbating, your hotmail userid/password, or your bank account password.
This is why people who tape things that shouldn't be taped often find themselves in trouble (insert your favorite celebrity sex video). The moment they're taping themselves, they're crossing the realm of "private matters" and moving to the public affairs zone. And that's the problem with your analogy.
Yes, there are bits that are more important that others. But you don't say in which way they're meant to be important, and fail to make the difference.
Just in case, I'll specify it for you:
Movies. Games. Software. They're MEANT TO BE DISTRIBUTED TO THE PUBLIC.
Passwords. NIPs. Private matters. Private software source code. They're MEANT TO BE KEPT SECRET.
Understand now? The only thing piracy does with bits is removing the economic factor in bits already meant for public distribution. Failing to tell the difference between the two is equating pirates with black hat hackers.
Everything else that you have built there is a red herring and a strawman; that there is a distinction between privacy concerns and the protection of intangible assets does not mean that the second one does not exist or does not deserve as much level of legal protection as the former.
EXACTLY. It doesn't exist. Who says it's property?
Or more to the point, who says a tangible property does not exist? You? People who think like you?
Prove to me that the concept of property is intrinsically imbued with physical attributes, prove to me that the concept of intangible property is a recently made invention and not something that has existed for centuries in different cultures in one form of another, then we talk.
People who claim to be losing money to piracy are forgetting one very important fact: Until it's in their bank accounts, it's NOT their money.
You need to take a couple of courses in economics before you start lecturing about the nature of income and profit.
I have a laundry business, and you, for X/Y reason disseminate news that we don't use appropriate cleaning agents in our clothes and my establishment is not hygienic. Founded accusations or not, that causes inevitable harm to my business, reducing the number of opportunities to create income.
I've lost money, not because someone took it from my bank account, but because legitimate opportunities to complete business transactions have been reduce/lost/robbed by possibly illegitimate means.
Similarly, when M$ engaged in FUD campaigns, to the point of altering programs to not run on Novel DOS, it robbed Novel of money - not necessarily money that was in its coffers, but money that could have reasonably generated had the economics under fair and free competition had ran their course.
And before you go in a hurry trying to build a strawman and claim that I'm comparing either example with the previous examples of piracy, think for a second these are legitimate and real counter-examples to the notion that the money is yours (or that it exists) only when it is firmly in your coffers.
Take some classes on economics/finance/business 101 before you go about lecturing about the nature of money.
You guys keep differentiating the scenarios simply by saying that one refers to a physical property. You keep neglecting the existence of intangible property.
EXACTLY. It doesn't exist. Who says it's property? The media cartels, the entertainment companies, the guys who cry "piracy! piracy!". Of course, they sell this idea to governments and schools, who end producing mass-marketed sheep like you who believes everything they see on TV.
Even bad hollywood productions still manage to get a profit. Do you know what profit means? It means that you earn more than you invested. And that of course, is AFTER you pay the salaries / agreed amount of money to the director, the actors, the extras, the special effects people, etc. etc. etc. The guys who invested in games / movies / music / etc. GAINED money.
If someone pirates their album, they should congratulate themselves and say "wow, our production is so good that it's the nth top pirated item!". But no, they cry "ah! thieves! My precious money!"
People who claim to be losing money to piracy are forgetting one very important fact: Until it's in their bank accounts, it's NOT their money.
Do yourself a favor and purchase/download the book "The Pirate's dilemma". Then you'd realize how piracy is an implicit market phenomenon instead of the crime you claim it to be.
So the concept of an intangible property is a recently created fallacy, not something that has existed for a long time in different cultures, and codified for centuries?
Half of my lawn died and need to be replaced with fresh sod. I need it before it deteriorates further causing damage to my property. But I can't afford that right now. Should I sneak out into a nursery and take the sod I need?
Of course not, you would be depriving the nursery of a physical item, and therefore be stealing.
Think of it this way. I car dealer gets me inside a car, to give it a try in the parking lot just to get a feel for it (try it before you buy it). But I take off with it. Weeks later you come back with the money saying "if you thought I was stealing it, that's bullshit. I had to take it then because I really needed it (wanted it). It just took a while to get the money."
Again, you completely fail to capture the issue with your flawed car analogy. Physical item, depriving owner, theft.
This is simply not the black-and-white issue you claim it is, no matter how long or loudly you rail against it. Now I'm not saying that piracy is 100% right - but copying bits is never in the same category of "wrong" as stealing a car.
Get a grip.
You guys keep differentiating the scenarios simply by saying that one refers to a physical property. You keep neglecting the existence of intangible property. Wishy-washing it out of existence just to make an argument does not make the argument a valid one (to borrow your own word), no matter how hard or loud you rally for it.
That there are problems with copyright law and with current software business models does not constitute a justification for neglecting the existence of intangible property and the right of such property to be respected and protected by society and the law.
This is like arguing that I have a right to defraud social services with new means simply because social services do not have a model that take into account unforeseen methods of benefits fraud.
Get a grip dude. Your entire reasoning is based on matters of convenience, not principle, logic or any legal interpretation in any legal system.
Half of my lawn died and need to be replaced with fresh sod. I need it before it deteriorates further causing damage to my property. But I can't afford that right now. Should I sneak out into a nursery and take the sod I need?
No, because that would be stealing. You should use a replicator and duplicate the sod (which you aren't going to pay for, anyway) from over the fence.
Intangible property is a reality. It's always been for centuries, millennia in almost every nation that has had a notion of property and trade secrets.
We don't get to wishy-wash it out of existence just prop a fallacious argument.
I'm not a fan of software piracy (and I am a software developer who enjoys earning money), but every time someone compares software piracy to physical theft, Zeus kills 10 kittens.
Neglecting the existence of intangible properties is just an argument of convenience, not principle or reason, regardless of how many kittens get killed by Zeus or Dr. Bimbu.
Half of my lawn died and need to be replaced with fresh sod. I need it before it deteriorates further causing damage to my property. But I can't afford that right now. Should I sneak out into a nursery and take the sod I need?
The problem with this analogy is that with pirate software you are not "taking" anything, you are copying.
And by copying you are "taking" an intangible property that provides revenue to the maker of the software. Property can either be tangible or intangible. The notion of intangible property is an ancient, time honored one.
In your example you deprive the nursery of some sod, but when copying software you don't deprive anyone of physical property.
Again, property does not be to be physical to be qualified as such.
At best they loose a potential sale.
And there is nothing wrong with that, right?
Imagine the recipe for Pepsi Cola was leaked on to the internet, and you decided to make your own instead of buying actual Pepsi. I'm sure Pepsi would argue that they have lost something of value to them but it would be hard to accuse someone of stealing Pepsi if they made their own.
But you are forgetting that to get the recipe, Pepsi invested millions in term of payroll, research, equipment, infrastructure and product development to create something that is unique and for which they built a customer base and generate revenue. That is, they created an intangible property.
Leakage of that over the internet would be a break in the law and it would cause potential harm to the company (and thus its shareholders, employees and 3rd party companies that have business deals with it.)
You taking that recipe and using it to make profit (or even just to use it for your own) is no different from me taking your car and use it (either to make profit as a delivery boy or for pleasure to drive me to disneyland or a strip club.)
Computers and the internet are good at copying stuff.
Photocopiers are good at copying stuff. I can copy a book using my copier or someone else and not pay what I should morally and legitimately should.
You need to build your business model around that.
Though this is true, this argument is no much different from me saying I'm a bank robber and banks need to invest in their security infrastructure to take bank robbery into account. It's like telling the insurance industry to develop their business model to take fraud into account (with me actively filling bogus claims.)
The old artificial scarcity thing is dying pretty rapidly, and not just in computer/internet related fields. The value of news has fallen dramatically due to it being available for free.
Non sequitur.
It's a shame that a lot of newspapers will close but it's also pointless trying to reverse the situation.
Maybe you just have to accept that in a store with 85,000+ apps, many of which are free, you just can't make a lot of money unless your app is really, really popular. I mean, if you can't do it in the App Store with a captive audience of millions of un-jailbroken iPhone users...
All of those points have no principle in them, they are simply a matter of convenience to satisfy a "I-want-it-so-I'm-entitled-for-it-no-matter-what" mentality.
I don't know about you but I neither pay $1.99 for a cup of coffee, nor do I buy *coffee* for personal entertainment, so no the comparison isn't valid.
The comparison is valid in the sense of how much it cost to do the right, financially responsible thing.
Or to rephrase it, when it comes to personal entertainment, it is valid, morally justifiable or even logical to
take someone's property with you without his permission,
without any binding obligation to pay for the property unless it is of your liking, a decision that is, for the most part, subjective and personal,
even though the cost of the property is just $1.99, a miserable $1.99, the price of a *good* cup of coffee (whether you like *good* coffee or not is irrelevant),
and that the only reasons that compels you to are purely of an entertaining nature, not of something intrinsic that forces you to (.ie. morally compelling or to satisfy one's fundamental physical needs)?
I don't know about you but I neither pay $1.99 for a cup of coffee, nor do I buy *coffee* for personal entertainment, so no the comparison isn't valid.
The comparison is valid in the sense of how much it cost to do the right, financially responsible thing.
I don't pirate to "try before you buy". I pirate because I can't afford the software, and I need it (want it?).
Half of my lawn died and need to be replaced with fresh sod. I need it before it deteriorates further causing damage to my property. But I can't afford that right now. Should I sneak out into a nursery and take the sod I need?
If I need something, I buy it. If I can't, then I suck it up and live with the consequences. That's how honesty works in the real world. In software, it should not be different. It cannot be. When I was in college, I use to pirate stuff with "me need, me haz no moolah!" lame explanation... not excuse, but explanation (that can't possibly be construed as a legitimate excuse at all.)
Somehow I grew up. Perhaps it was because, once out of college, I had a good job that allowed me to get the things I wanted, plus having to cope with other financial obligations that we don't get when living under our parent's basements got me a sense to respect other people's properties. Or perhaps it was that once I started working in software (not just playing or studying, but actually working on it), that's when I realized how difficult and how expensive it is to create software. Who knows.
But, I have purchased 3 rather high dollar 3D graphics programs that I pirated. I purchased them because I liked them, and when I managed to get the cash together, I wanted to make sure that the company that made them got some of my scratch.
Sure, I could have only stuck with what I could afford at the time,
Like, the way honest people in the real world do?
but then I would only be using Truespace, and the other 3 companies (Truespace was what turned me on to graphic art, me and my brother purchased it back in 96, the other three I pirated before I purchased) would not have gotten any money out of me.
They would have if you could afford them, and they would have if you could not. Welcome to life.
So to say it is total bullshit is not correct. Some of us really do purchase the software we pirate first. It just takes awhile.
Games of semantics dude. Doesn't matter if the statement is 100% accurate or not. The transgression has occurred, rendering any other apologetic red herrings moot.
Think of it this way. I car dealer gets me inside a car, to give it a try in the parking lot just to get a feel for it (try it before you buy it). But I take off with it. Weeks later you come back with the money saying "if you thought I was stealing it, that's bullshit. I had to take it then because I really needed it (wanted it). It just took a while to get the money."
There is nothing intrinsic about these two analogies that makes them logically different if we are to follow the line of argument you are presenting here.
It's not the EU that is causing these job losses, it's Sun's piss-poor management that caused them to need to be bought out in the first place.
Causation dude. Sun's piss-poor management caused them to be bought in the first place. EU's feet dragging is causing further financial harm on already screwed up company for no valid reason. Learn to separate your arguments dude.
Those jobs (and more) were already lost once they decided to sell.
Speculation. Could be true, could be false.
What we know is that EU is dragging its feet in letting an otherwise legitimate merger to occur. It is also a fact that Sun is bleeding as it's waiting for the merger to be approved.
Without knowing anything else, it is reasonable to assume that the continuous monetary bleeding caused by EU feet-dragging on an already economically hurt Sun is one of the main causes (if not the primary one) for jobs cut just announced.
You could argue that these jobs were already lost, and that might be true. Hell, it might be the simplest explanation. But simplest =/= correct or pausible. Considering the facts at hand at this moment, it provides a logically compelling picture of the financial harm that this situation is causing Sun.
If you don't like the laws of the land, take your business elsewhere. Sun and Oracle are more than welcome to leave.
And I'm sure every single European Sun/Oracle user who has invested millions in Sun/Oracle infrastructure will be more than happy to see them go (and sacrifice their investment) just to prove a rhetorical point of view.
In fact, this is not about not liking a law, but about having to face the consequences of a given interpretation and execution of a law where such interpretation and execution are of nature that is uneducated at best and ideologically malignant at worse.
I always thought that Europe would hold on to the enlightened principle of "innocent until proven guilty". Guess not.
I don't like monopolies either, but there is no logic or justification behind this particular case. Take ideology and sentiment out, observe the case (and the available evidence) objectively, and you will arrive to that conclusion... if you are a reasonable person capable of objective analysis.
Slashdot Mirror
And this is why it is a good idea to take a Numerical Analysis course or an Assembly course that lets you play with floating-point arithmetic as part of your CS electives. As much as I'd like to blame today's Java/.NET-oriented CS curricula (which seem to be fashionable now in many universities), it's been quite a while that many universities barely pay any attention (if any) to the details of floating point arithmetic.
I bought the original Razr when it just came into market. It was a great phone. Beautifully designed, sleek and stylish even by today's standards. Too bad Motorola had monkeys design the user interface and idiots write the software. Completely fucked up a superbly designed piece of hardware.
Nope. Blame the carriers who had the saying on what the UI had to be like. Each one wanted its own customizable shit - that is hard to get right on software unless you develop a product line from the get-go.
I should expound this more: you need to be good at LaTeX so that you can quickly type your equations on LyX. Yes, you can enter your equations graphically, but for speed and efficiency, you better know your LaTeX. I'm rusty now, but I was good at it and even then, it was hard to recover from a mistake in the middle of a lecture, or worse, when the instructor makes a mistake and in mid-formula goes back to re-draw it while spouting some more important stuff that you sure as hell don't want to miss from the lecture. In other words, it's not as simple or efficient as using plain old pen and paper.
I foolishly tried once to that once, with LyX - pretty cool concept, but when you really need to write a whole bunch of equations in succession, then you end up putting more effort on getting it right on your computer than on actually paying attention to the lectures. Don't believe it? Try using LyX to jot down long-ass operational semantics formulas while trying to pay attention to what the instructor is saying.
Best thing is to jot them down on paper for later digitizing. Or use a Baboo Pen in conjunction to your laptop (I wish I had that kind of technology that cheap when I was in school.) Actually I might end up Xmas-present myself with one of those.
you win!!(10+1)
"Yeah bro, rags to riches!"
What country did you come from, again?
Nicaragua.
This is fun, I love creative writing.
I bet you do.
By the way, do you have an M.B.A. yourself, by chance?
B.S CompSci, all but the thesis for a M.S. Might consider an additional M.S. in Systems Engineering, but an M.B.A, never. Don't have what it takes to deal with management.
How many beans have you counted?
How many have you counted? Instead of answering my previous question with another one (strawmanning much?) answer whether you have any experience in bean counting and management with which to talk on the subject.
By the way, about those degrees, you do see a lot of them, actually. From '07 to '08 over 150,000 MBAs were awarded. About a quarter of all masters degrees for the year, more than at any other time before. (And it's been growing since the 70's.)
And because you see 150,000 in a year, they are simply easy, right, much less cheap? Have you consider that many of those degrees are "professional" MBA degrees, for which you can only enroll if you have had a certain amount of years of professional experience in management or engineering? So yeah,they come easy. Come again, your management experience is in what?
Frankly, I don't care if you're the son of a Somalian dirt farmer.
Of course you don't. You would care about that only if it were to support your point of view. At least I can talk from experience and can justly criticize what people have turned unions into.
I don't care if Smith and Wagoner and Lutz came from the same oh-so-deliciously-humble beginnings you claim to come from. They and their management people made bad decisions, constantly.
Nobody has argued that this is not true. Certainly not me. Red herring.
They wrecked the company.
In addition to UAW, and certainly in large part by UAW.
UAW didn't make things any better, but with better leadership (if you can even call what GM had 'leadership') the company would still be around.
Pure speculation. UAW was a cancer to GM. It is possible that better management would have kept GM up, but it simply would have delayed the inevitable. UAW made operational costs non-competitive comparing with other auto makers in Europe and Japan.
How about you quit waving your dick around and stop changing the subject
Didn't change the subject. I brought the context of my origins to counter your obviously conniving dick-waving comment about me against the poor proletariat.
so you can badmouth your union bogeymen more?
It is not bad mounting to call an overpaid manual worker with better benefits than a HS teacher an overpaid manual worker. If calling it for what it.
> Waaah, waaah, they're so ENTITLED!
Yeah dude, since a B.A. and an M.B.A are so hard to get.
Which is why you see so many of them!! Do you have one, M.B.A. in specific so that we know you talk from experience?
(Admittedly the student loans are a legitimate problem, but that goes for everyone.) You're talking six years of school at most, more realistically four. This isn't medical school, and you conflating business with medicine, law, and engineering really speaks to your lack of knowledge on the subject.
Roger Smith was a perfectly ordinary ladder climber. Rick Wagoner was educated, but he was a dumbass on the job anyway. Robert Lutz was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. I'm sorry, were you trying to make a point?
Take out your anger on the proles all you want. UAW deserves some blame, but GM's management was fucking terrible and you know it. You call I.T. guys glorified janitors, but executives and managerial types are just deified bean counters and salesmen. The overwhelming majority of them are nothing compared to people working in the hard-sciences, or in medicine, or in law
Tell me a bit about your professional experience as a bean counter. I wanna know if you are talking from experience or if this is pure ideologicotardic rhetorical nonsense.
, but their advantage is that they can convince people that they're worth more than they actually are and that's why they take home the big bucks. They're hucksters.
But you're so much better than those stupid auto workers,aren't you? Keep swinging that rhetorical bat. You might hit yourself.
Fuck yeah. Been working since I was 12, starting in a 3rd world country, not in the pampered reality of the 1st world version of *poverty* , doing all kinds of prole work, including human cargo mule. Fast forward later and I'm doing whatever I can to work here in the US, from flipping burgers to driving forklifts. But with all that, I tolled away until I finally got by degree.
And then we have an overpaid janitor demanding better benefits than me even though he'd never improved his skills and education despite being born and raised in this country with all the opportunities that are just there for the taking? Screw that!
I have no problem with manual workers, shit that's where I come from. But I do have problems with manual workers that expect to get paid as much if not more than those with a college education and expect to live like that under the umbrella of protectionism, even though they were born here and never got an itch to improve their skills and education not even by a bit, with all the opportunities a 1st world country provides.
Go and whip your me-for-the-peepl3 e-dick somewhere else dude. You have no clue what you are talking about, and from what I can tell, your position on the matter lacks any form of substance.
Sure, people selling little baggies of things will prosper and grow. But it ain't going to be cheerios.
Honestly, I'm an Indian IT guy who looks like this and is a straight edge vegetarian. But despite all that, twice in Portland, people have stopped me and asked me for some weed.
Now, there's a market which expands during a recession.
You look like Kumar??? :) :) :)
If six weeks vacation (not even two months) will drive a company into bankrupcy, maybe we need to rethink this whole capitalism thing.
Do you have a better, tried and true alternative? And what the hell does one do to deserve a six week vacation? Besides, take several thousand people without qualifications, getting paid more than what they contribute and on top of that getting six weeks of over paid salary, that increases operational costs for no purpose. That's not a fault of capitalism, but the fault of the misapplication and abuse of a socialist/humanist concept.
Syndicalism was to protect workers from abuse, not create overpaid janitors.
I don't see the problem with a docker making $80 an hour.
Only if a combination of his skills and job risk make him deserving of that salary.
Would it be better if everyone made minimum wage?
Nice strawman. Certainly not the minimum wage, but also certainly not above the salary of a fireman or a college-educated HS teacher.
I thought the whole point of economic growth was that everyone got richer.
How does overpaying a janitor with $80/hour make everyone richer? Do you see college-educated HS teachers getting paid $80/hour? Didn't think so.
The purpose of economic growth is that everyone got richer relative to their skill set. A janitor gets paid more than what he did before. A teacher gets paid more than what he did before. But still the relation of salaries to skills remain.
Justify me why a pampered bunch of janitors get paid much, much better than other, more educated, more vital sectors of society, or prove to me that they getting paid that much contributes to everyone getting richer, then you might have an argument worth discussing.
Until then, all you have are strawmen, and poorly built strawmen to boot.
But then I never bought into trickle-down economics.
It's not that you never bought it. It's that your understanding of economics, be it capitalist or otherwise, is superficial/ideological/googlish at best.
And what does the executive do that justifies his income?
For starters, this is completely irrelevant. Assuming an exec does not deserve his income, that does not necessitate that over-paid janitors get paid as ... overpaid janitors either. GM bled a lot more from over-paid janitors than what you call *overpaid* executives.
Second, what they did to justify their income?
Same reason why doctors, MS in engineering, brain surgeons, lawyers and every other person who invested a decade of their life in school and collected several 10s of thousands of dollars in student loans:
They went to college, probably took shit, ate expired muffins and staled coffee for 6-10 years while going to school getting a post-grad. Took more shit as a grad student. Most likely took $20-$30K in student loans. Started from the bottom as a admin assistant (or at best as a mid-level manager taking shit from below and up). Worked and climbed the latter for an additional 10 years, eventually collecting an average of 2 decades in knowledge required to drive and manage companies.
I got that question asked once (by a computer repair guy), and I'm not even a manager, but fuck! If a person can't deserve to make an obscene amount of money after sacrificing a decade of his life in school, depriving himself of a lot of shit, accumulating a shit load of student loans, then what the hell does one makes the sacrifice for? And to top it off, to have some punk who doesn't even have a fraction of his qualifications, and who never make the job/scholastic sacrifice, asking why he deserve his salary? Screw that!.
That's something you can ask a GM stockholder too.
They know where the blame is - in missed opportunities by management second (ditching green possibilities, investing/insisting in gazz guzzlers), and a rotten, leeching mass of overpaid janitors demanding to get paid far more than competitive automaker workers are in Europe and Japan, demanding to get paid far more than what their skills entitled them for.
Hurr.
I bow to your amazing eloquence. You can
Unions are very good things people and sooner or later this country is going to figure out.
One name: General Motors.
Unions have been great in history as tools that protect workers from employer's abuse. But that's it. Protection =/= protectionism. At the end of the day, the world is a competitive one, and if you have to rely on protectionism to guarantee a certain salary, then you will eventually be subject to harsher consequences of open, competitive markets, not to mention that the value you get remunerated with is way over the value that you actually generate.
Compete with what you have, and get remunerated according to the value you are capable of creating.
Anyway, you based too much of your argumentation on the possibility of the museum of setting up rules prohibiting taking pictures
Just as many here base their arguments too much in the (fallacious btw) argument that a property must be physical to exist.
Think of this way. My walls of my new place are bare and I need some art. So I go to the local museum with my bajilion-pixel camera, snap some photos, and print them "poster printing" (one photo spanning several pages) and put them on my wall.
For you to do so you will have to break the rules of the museum (which most likely forbids the usage of cameras for the purpose of reproduction in print). So that on itself makes your action an illegitimate one since you entered the museum with the purpose of breaking the rules which you implicitly agreed upon the moment you set foot inside it.
I now have great works of art at home. Years later I hear the originals are being auctioned and I buy them thinking "I had to take them then because I really needed (wanted) some art for my walls, it just took awhile to get the money".
The existence of a copy at your home does not decrease the value of the originals nor poses a risk, however insignificant, of lowering its value potential.
There is nothing intrinsic about these two analogies that makes them logically different if we are to follow the line of argument you are presenting here
Except for the fact that the acquisition of your copy originated from violating the access rules established by the museum, which are his to established, which are yours to obey whenever you agree to set foot inside it, and which no ones forces you to obey if you agree not to go inside the museum.
My argument follows from the nature of legitimate transactions, and possession and usage via legitimate means. Yours does not.
except now we're comparing digital copy with digital copy.
Except for the fact that the issue at hand is not about comparing apples to apples but the legitimacy by which who gets to possess what and under what legitimate conditions.
And don't say "Yeah but, you took a photo and printed it, that's not the same as pirating". Oh really? Am I not enjoying these paintings on my walls? How exactly is it different?
Still missing the point of legitimacy. You don't get to take the picture the way you just described. You want a copy of the art in question, then buy a poster from a legitimate manufacturer or purchase a hand-made copy made legitimately.
Furthermore, you are still missing the point of creating a loss on potential (and legitimate whether your like it or not) revenue. The creation of the copy in this example, does not create a loss of value on the original, unless you attempt to pass your copy as an original one (or using your copy to fake a copy for sale.)
The copy of digital software indeed creates a digital copy, of an intangible property, that belongs to someone else (not you), the action of which creates a potential loss of legitimate revenue for the author/owner of the aforementioned intangible copy (in this case, the software.)
Sure I can't sell my printouts but most pirates don't pirate to make $$$, they do it so they can enjoy and use something without paying for it. Am I not doing that with these paintings?
Not because the enjoyment of your legitimately obtained copy (illegitimate for the reasons previously stated) does not cause potential financial harm to the owner of the copied property in question.
Again, it is a matter of legitimacy not of simply copying stuff around for whatever purpose that fancies you.
If copying bits is never wrong, I suppose you won't mind copying the bits that spell out the url for your bank, your username and password and your credit cards to Slashdot.
If copying bits is never wrong, then company data leaks are no big deal.
If copying bits is never wrong, why don't you make a video of your neighbor masturbating and post it to you tube.
OBJECTION! (Cue Phoenix Wright pic)
You're confusing breach of privacy with software/media piracy. Very different things indeed.
Why? Simple. A game was meant to be enjoyed by people. Movies are made to be watched. Music is meant to be listened.
Where they meant to be enjoyed/watched/listened for free without ever reimbursing the costs to the authors. Did the authors say "have at it" or did they say "these are objects of my creation, you are entitled to enjoy/watch/listen under my conditions; you are free from refraining to enjoy/watch/listen them if you do not agree with my conditions."?
Next time Cirque Du Soleil come to my town, should I start planning a scheme to sneak in and avoid paying the entrace fee simply because the show was meant, artistically speaking, to be enjoyed and watched?
Private personal information is meant to be KEPT SECRET. And that includes a video of your neighbor masturbating, your hotmail userid/password, or your bank account password.
This is why people who tape things that shouldn't be taped often find themselves in trouble (insert your favorite celebrity sex video). The moment they're taping themselves, they're crossing the realm of "private matters" and moving to the public affairs zone. And that's the problem with your analogy.
Yes, there are bits that are more important that others. But you don't say in which way they're meant to be important, and fail to make the difference.
Just in case, I'll specify it for you:
Movies. Games. Software. They're MEANT TO BE DISTRIBUTED TO THE PUBLIC. Passwords. NIPs. Private matters. Private software source code. They're MEANT TO BE KEPT SECRET.
Understand now? The only thing piracy does with bits is removing the economic factor in bits already meant for public distribution. Failing to tell the difference between the two is equating pirates with black hat hackers.
Everything else that you have built there is a red herring and a strawman; that there is a distinction between privacy concerns and the protection of intangible assets does not mean that the second one does not exist or does not deserve as much level of legal protection as the former.
EXACTLY. It doesn't exist. Who says it's property?
Or more to the point, who says a tangible property does not exist? You? People who think like you? Prove to me that the concept of property is intrinsically imbued with physical attributes, prove to me that the concept of intangible property is a recently made invention and not something that has existed for centuries in different cultures in one form of another, then we talk.
People who claim to be losing money to piracy are forgetting one very important fact: Until it's in their bank accounts, it's NOT their money.
You need to take a couple of courses in economics before you start lecturing about the nature of income and profit.
I have a laundry business, and you, for X/Y reason disseminate news that we don't use appropriate cleaning agents in our clothes and my establishment is not hygienic. Founded accusations or not, that causes inevitable harm to my business, reducing the number of opportunities to create income.
I've lost money, not because someone took it from my bank account, but because legitimate opportunities to complete business transactions have been reduce/lost/robbed by possibly illegitimate means.
Similarly, when M$ engaged in FUD campaigns, to the point of altering programs to not run on Novel DOS, it robbed Novel of money - not necessarily money that was in its coffers, but money that could have reasonably generated had the economics under fair and free competition had ran their course.
And before you go in a hurry trying to build a strawman and claim that I'm comparing either example with the previous examples of piracy, think for a second these are legitimate and real counter-examples to the notion that the money is yours (or that it exists) only when it is firmly in your coffers.
Take some classes on economics/finance/business 101 before you go about lecturing about the nature of money.
You guys keep differentiating the scenarios simply by saying that one refers to a physical property. You keep neglecting the existence of intangible property.
EXACTLY. It doesn't exist. Who says it's property? The media cartels, the entertainment companies, the guys who cry "piracy! piracy!". Of course, they sell this idea to governments and schools, who end producing mass-marketed sheep like you who believes everything they see on TV.
Even bad hollywood productions still manage to get a profit. Do you know what profit means? It means that you earn more than you invested. And that of course, is AFTER you pay the salaries / agreed amount of money to the director, the actors, the extras, the special effects people, etc. etc. etc. The guys who invested in games / movies / music / etc. GAINED money.
If someone pirates their album, they should congratulate themselves and say "wow, our production is so good that it's the nth top pirated item!". But no, they cry "ah! thieves! My precious money!"
People who claim to be losing money to piracy are forgetting one very important fact: Until it's in their bank accounts, it's NOT their money.
Do yourself a favor and purchase/download the book "The Pirate's dilemma". Then you'd realize how piracy is an implicit market phenomenon instead of the crime you claim it to be.
So the concept of an intangible property is a recently created fallacy, not something that has existed for a long time in different cultures, and codified for centuries?
Half of my lawn died and need to be replaced with fresh sod. I need it before it deteriorates further causing damage to my property. But I can't afford that right now. Should I sneak out into a nursery and take the sod I need?
Of course not, you would be depriving the nursery of a physical item, and therefore be stealing.
Think of it this way. I car dealer gets me inside a car, to give it a try in the parking lot just to get a feel for it (try it before you buy it). But I take off with it. Weeks later you come back with the money saying "if you thought I was stealing it, that's bullshit. I had to take it then because I really needed it (wanted it). It just took a while to get the money."
Again, you completely fail to capture the issue with your flawed car analogy. Physical item, depriving owner, theft.
This is simply not the black-and-white issue you claim it is, no matter how long or loudly you rail against it. Now I'm not saying that piracy is 100% right - but copying bits is never in the same category of "wrong" as stealing a car.
Get a grip.
You guys keep differentiating the scenarios simply by saying that one refers to a physical property. You keep neglecting the existence of intangible property. Wishy-washing it out of existence just to make an argument does not make the argument a valid one (to borrow your own word), no matter how hard or loud you rally for it.
That there are problems with copyright law and with current software business models does not constitute a justification for neglecting the existence of intangible property and the right of such property to be respected and protected by society and the law.
This is like arguing that I have a right to defraud social services with new means simply because social services do not have a model that take into account unforeseen methods of benefits fraud.
Get a grip dude. Your entire reasoning is based on matters of convenience, not principle, logic or any legal interpretation in any legal system.
Half of my lawn died and need to be replaced with fresh sod. I need it before it deteriorates further causing damage to my property. But I can't afford that right now. Should I sneak out into a nursery and take the sod I need?
No, because that would be stealing. You should use a replicator and duplicate the sod (which you aren't going to pay for, anyway) from over the fence.
Intangible property is a reality. It's always been for centuries, millennia in almost every nation that has had a notion of property and trade secrets.
We don't get to wishy-wash it out of existence just prop a fallacious argument.
I'm not a fan of software piracy (and I am a software developer who enjoys earning money), but every time someone compares software piracy to physical theft, Zeus kills 10 kittens.
Neglecting the existence of intangible properties is just an argument of convenience, not principle or reason, regardless of how many kittens get killed by Zeus or Dr. Bimbu.
The problem with this analogy is that with pirate software you are not "taking" anything, you are copying.
And by copying you are "taking" an intangible property that provides revenue to the maker of the software. Property can either be tangible or intangible. The notion of intangible property is an ancient, time honored one.
In your example you deprive the nursery of some sod, but when copying software you don't deprive anyone of physical property.
Again, property does not be to be physical to be qualified as such.
At best they loose a potential sale.
And there is nothing wrong with that, right?
Imagine the recipe for Pepsi Cola was leaked on to the internet, and you decided to make your own instead of buying actual Pepsi. I'm sure Pepsi would argue that they have lost something of value to them but it would be hard to accuse someone of stealing Pepsi if they made their own.
But you are forgetting that to get the recipe, Pepsi invested millions in term of payroll, research, equipment, infrastructure and product development to create something that is unique and for which they built a customer base and generate revenue. That is, they created an intangible property.
Leakage of that over the internet would be a break in the law and it would cause potential harm to the company (and thus its shareholders, employees and 3rd party companies that have business deals with it.)
You taking that recipe and using it to make profit (or even just to use it for your own) is no different from me taking your car and use it (either to make profit as a delivery boy or for pleasure to drive me to disneyland or a strip club.)
Computers and the internet are good at copying stuff.
Photocopiers are good at copying stuff. I can copy a book using my copier or someone else and not pay what I should morally and legitimately should.
You need to build your business model around that.
Though this is true, this argument is no much different from me saying I'm a bank robber and banks need to invest in their security infrastructure to take bank robbery into account. It's like telling the insurance industry to develop their business model to take fraud into account (with me actively filling bogus claims.)
The old artificial scarcity thing is dying pretty rapidly, and not just in computer/internet related fields. The value of news has fallen dramatically due to it being available for free.
Non sequitur.
It's a shame that a lot of newspapers will close but it's also pointless trying to reverse the situation.
Maybe you just have to accept that in a store with 85,000+ apps, many of which are free, you just can't make a lot of money unless your app is really, really popular. I mean, if you can't do it in the App Store with a captive audience of millions of un-jailbroken iPhone users...
All of those points have no principle in them, they are simply a matter of convenience to satisfy a "I-want-it-so-I'm-entitled-for-it-no-matter-what" mentality.
I don't know about you but I neither pay $1.99 for a cup of coffee, nor do I buy *coffee* for personal entertainment, so no the comparison isn't valid.
The comparison is valid in the sense of how much it cost to do the right, financially responsible thing.
Or to rephrase it, when it comes to personal entertainment, it is valid, morally justifiable or even logical to
I don't know about you but I neither pay $1.99 for a cup of coffee, nor do I buy *coffee* for personal entertainment, so no the comparison isn't valid.
The comparison is valid in the sense of how much it cost to do the right, financially responsible thing.
I don't pirate to "try before you buy". I pirate because I can't afford the software, and I need it (want it?).
Half of my lawn died and need to be replaced with fresh sod. I need it before it deteriorates further causing damage to my property. But I can't afford that right now. Should I sneak out into a nursery and take the sod I need?
If I need something, I buy it. If I can't, then I suck it up and live with the consequences. That's how honesty works in the real world. In software, it should not be different. It cannot be. When I was in college, I use to pirate stuff with "me need, me haz no moolah!" lame explanation... not excuse, but explanation (that can't possibly be construed as a legitimate excuse at all.)
Somehow I grew up. Perhaps it was because, once out of college, I had a good job that allowed me to get the things I wanted, plus having to cope with other financial obligations that we don't get when living under our parent's basements got me a sense to respect other people's properties. Or perhaps it was that once I started working in software (not just playing or studying, but actually working on it), that's when I realized how difficult and how expensive it is to create software. Who knows.
But, I have purchased 3 rather high dollar 3D graphics programs that I pirated. I purchased them because I liked them, and when I managed to get the cash together, I wanted to make sure that the company that made them got some of my scratch.
Sure, I could have only stuck with what I could afford at the time,
Like, the way honest people in the real world do?
but then I would only be using Truespace, and the other 3 companies (Truespace was what turned me on to graphic art, me and my brother purchased it back in 96, the other three I pirated before I purchased) would not have gotten any money out of me.
They would have if you could afford them, and they would have if you could not. Welcome to life.
So to say it is total bullshit is not correct. Some of us really do purchase the software we pirate first. It just takes awhile.
Games of semantics dude. Doesn't matter if the statement is 100% accurate or not. The transgression has occurred, rendering any other apologetic red herrings moot.
Think of it this way. I car dealer gets me inside a car, to give it a try in the parking lot just to get a feel for it (try it before you buy it). But I take off with it. Weeks later you come back with the money saying "if you thought I was stealing it, that's bullshit. I had to take it then because I really needed it (wanted it). It just took a while to get the money."
There is nothing intrinsic about these two analogies that makes them logically different if we are to follow the line of argument you are presenting here.
It's not the EU that is causing these job losses, it's Sun's piss-poor management that caused them to need to be bought out in the first place.
Causation dude. Sun's piss-poor management caused them to be bought in the first place. EU's feet dragging is causing further financial harm on already screwed up company for no valid reason. Learn to separate your arguments dude.
Those jobs (and more) were already lost once they decided to sell.
Speculation. Could be true, could be false.
What we know is that EU is dragging its feet in letting an otherwise legitimate merger to occur. It is also a fact that Sun is bleeding as it's waiting for the merger to be approved.
Without knowing anything else, it is reasonable to assume that the continuous monetary bleeding caused by EU feet-dragging on an already economically hurt Sun is one of the main causes (if not the primary one) for jobs cut just announced.
You could argue that these jobs were already lost, and that might be true. Hell, it might be the simplest explanation. But simplest =/= correct or pausible. Considering the facts at hand at this moment, it provides a logically compelling picture of the financial harm that this situation is causing Sun.
If you don't like the laws of the land, take your business elsewhere. Sun and Oracle are more than welcome to leave.
And I'm sure every single European Sun/Oracle user who has invested millions in Sun/Oracle infrastructure will be more than happy to see them go (and sacrifice their investment) just to prove a rhetorical point of view.
In fact, this is not about not liking a law, but about having to face the consequences of a given interpretation and execution of a law where such interpretation and execution are of nature that is uneducated at best and ideologically malignant at worse.
I always thought that Europe would hold on to the enlightened principle of "innocent until proven guilty". Guess not.
I don't like monopolies either, but there is no logic or justification behind this particular case. Take ideology and sentiment out, observe the case (and the available evidence) objectively, and you will arrive to that conclusion... if you are a reasonable person capable of objective analysis.