the apparent superluminal expansion is explained neatly away by the fact that the jet of the quasars are pointed right at us.
One would immediately have to ask how come so very many of them turn out to be aimed right at us, given 360x360 degrees for them to "choose" from? <python>Are these quasars all French, to fart in our general direction like that?</python> However, it turns out that even if this grossly unlikely coincidence is true, we face yet other problems. Some of these quasars are so bright (if the deduced brightness is correct and I bet it ain't) that there's not enough room around the quasar to squeeze out anything like that many photons, to say nothing of any putative mechanism for producing so much light. Here is another attempt at explanation to chew on. There are a few serious alternatives around, hinting that a real problem exists. Don't confuse "unorthodox" with "wrong". You can't use orthodox authority to defend orthodox dogma, that's a tautology! (-:
(quoting article)
Arp drew attention to quasars interlinking with galaxies.
You may not like what Arp has to say, but Arp only drew attention to this phenomenon, he didn't invent it, and he's not been alone. It is one of several sticks in the spokes of cosmological orthodoxy, and as long as we resolutely hold to only building on that orthodoxy, never daring to step outside its holy tenets, for just so long we'll be scientifically stalled. Arp has some wild and untamed theories, and I don't think they're going to turn out to be anything like as correct as he evidently hopes, but several of his observations are valuable pointers away from some of our current dead ends.
The UN is the only body which has the authority to bless a new 'democratic' iraq.
Ignoring the observation that the vast majority of the UN's authority is simply assumed, we still have to get past the obvious problem that the UN is blatantly Communist in its choices (it was founded to be so), has supported - even if by "blessing with faint curse" in some cases - many dictators, and in general is about as friendly toward real democracy as an alligator is toward chickens. The enthusiasm is definitely there, and in the UN's case so is the lip-service, but the best you can expect IRL is a sick charade. The other problem is that many of the Iraqis are calling for Islamic self-government, and democratic it ain't.
I think you're missing many of the UNsubtle nuances here.
But don't go thinking that France (or the EU, or for that matter the UN) is representative of the voice of the world, either.
France doesn't, but the UN clearly should
Should it? Have a careful look at the people who founded the UN, and their views (here's an interesting perspective on an odd piece of NU and US combined subversion), and you might form a different opinion. Likewise the EU; many of the movers and shakers are committed to rebuilding Charlemagne'sempire, quite a different picture from the one held by the rest of the world and a good chunk of the EU's own constituents besides. Some are "more equal than others."
Nevertheless, the UN, regardless of its roots and covert original aim, should be representative of the world's people. It's a pity that they represent nothing like it, if any such single view actually exists.
[quoting Patrick Henry] For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth
Well, it's not by browsing CNN we are going to get that.
Oh, no. What a shocking surprise. My faith in the impartiality of the world's media is irretrievably shaken. </sarcasm weight=leaden>
No, the posting I'm responding to there is distinctly labelled `by Anonymous Coward on 22:54 Sunday 04 May 2003 (#5874327) '
France only wanted Bush to understand that problems are not solved by bombs.
True, some of them require missiles and small-arms fire as well. (-:
Seriously, I don't think America's response was anything like the best one, but it does seem to have ended the abuse of Iraqi citizens by a dictator, albeit briefly. Sadly, the Iraqis seem to be setting about abusing themselves, almost as if being subject to abuse is a habit too well entrenched to break. I think America's military response could have been much more tightly focussed; they should have given the Brits and Aussies a big budget and told them to go for it, the violence would have been over in less than half the time and a tenth the damage.
But the big problem is that a political power with the military coult of the USA simply should not be throwing its weight around at all. It would be far too easy to go from rescuer (of the Iraqi hoi polloi) to persectuer (of anyone they consider dangerous or subversive).
Not to mention the lame idea that America can replace the voice of the world.
They can't. But don't go thinking that France (or the EU, or for that matter the UN) is representative of the voice of the world, either.
they are only against the Bush administration.
I don't like them either; God is (ITESHO) on their side, and that bloody dangerous attitude is what led to the Dark Ages. On the other political hand, the Gore shadow administration sucks too. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. One has to wonder how the political situation in the USA got so sucky, and I think the answer is that the relatively clear ideals of a couple of centuries ago are now all muddled and dilute. Freedom of expression is confused with freedom to be an asshole to the detriment of others (compare that with "The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make a nuisance of himself to other people") and the common good is confused with the welfare of the State itself (does a State feel pain? can it irreversably be killed? can it have children?, compare "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" with legislation like the DMCA or the shiny new Home Security previsions; does it matter whether you are enslaved by Americans or by someone else, so long as you are enslaved?). This will not come to a good end. Both France and America are wrong. (Says he, sitting safely ten thousand kilometers from the front lines).
Have a chunk of Patrick Henry to consider, it may enlighten both Frank and Yank alike:
Mr. President, it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and, having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it.
Gravity is only tested to solar system scales, and in an indirect way, galactic cluster lensing effects.
Agree. And we make an awful lot of assumptions about the continuity of physics even at galactic scales.
The bottom line is that we start by assuming that because a theory fits some observed properties of the universe -and- we have not yet thought of a better (or at least more appealing to us) theory, the one we have is true. "If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."
This is especially true of the really grand assumptions like "the universe has no centre and no edge" and "the en-bloc redshifting of distant objects is evidence of recession caused only by the stretching of space"; the problems these assumptions cause conventional science run deep, yet so well embedded in orthodox scientific dogma are they that the vast majority of scientists would rather reject the growing collection of conflicting data than the dogma. (see here for discussion of something even weirder).
Does that mean that the question is no longer "What is 8 times 6?"
It never was. Try "What do you get when you multiply six by nine?" And the answer is 42 iff you do the arithmetic in base 13 and read out the answer in base 10:
bc 1.06
Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. For details type `warranty'. ibase=13 6*9 42 ^D
As I understand it, Douglas didn't plan it that way. The universe is always odder then it seems.
Prove that a cellphone outputs 200W of "power" - ever.
Rest your digital 'phone under your CRT and see what happens when it next rings. That doesn't happen with milliwatts, o ye of the stripey and cross intelligence, not to an electron beam being pushed by maybe 40-60kV inside a lightly shielded vacuum.
The phone's official power rating is an average (as in mean, not mode or median), but the peak power is considerably higher. If your phone's average power output were 200 watts, at typical RF amplifier efficiencies you would need to feed it at least 300W, which would exhaust your batteries in an eyeblink, and burn your hand (or whatever else the device was in contact with). With a peak power ratio of 200 watts and a duty cycle of 1%, the 'phone gets to output an average of 2 watts during a recalibration cycle and yet still bounce the stuffing out of your CRT's electron beam. That's how Orion gets to use uncontrolled nukes for propulsion without smearing the crew. But there are no shock-absorbers between the 'phone antenna and your head.
therefore one should give the rich more tax breaks...?
No, therefore tax breaks for the rich are close to pointless - and hiking their taxes wouldn't achieve as much as you would hope either. You'd only hurt the honest ones, the ones you really least want to hurt.
It's along the same lines as "if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns": gun control laws - beyond a sensible minimum - only disarm those who are best placed to use those weapons sensibly. The people you really want to control will buy their weapons on the black market (thus en passant enriching another class of society that you don't want to encourage), hide them and lie about them. In effect, you're encouraging dishonesty by either trying to ban guns (as I said, beyond the sensible minimum - needed to keep them out of the hands of obvious incompetents or psychopaths, just like driver's licences), or by overtaxing "the rich".
Here in Oz, we have the ridiculous circumstance of people on the Dole paying income tax: evidently, "the rich" extends down to people on welfare, so we must truly be the "lucky country". IRL, what it means is that the income tax system (set up in 1939 as an emergency measure to fund Australia's contribution to WW2 and not scaled for inflation since) is badly broken.
a doctor is only qualified to treat a gunshot would if he fired the pistol.
If a police force refused to arrest a rapist/mugger (the song "Maxwell's silver hammer" runs through my brain at this point, followed by "Excitable Boy", both about the sort of psychopathy France turned their back on), and the army subsequently arrest said rapist, why should the police force then have any say in how the rapist is sentenced?
Re:Unintentionally, hmm...
on
SCO DOS'ed
·
· Score: 1
SCO is up a creek.
The brown one. Always happens when someone allows greed to make their decisions for them.
I shouldn't respond to a coward, but I'm sure this short-sighted approach is taken by many others, so here goes...
If this war was about invading a country to take control of its resources then France has no reason to expect to have a say, the invadors have control. If on the other hand, that war was really fought for the reasons Bush gave, then he has what he asked for: an alleged threath to the lives of US citizens eradicated. At this point, only the UN should decide what to do now with this country.
No. France - and largely because of France the UN - refused to deal with the problem. Having arrived at a solution (not the best solution, IMESHO, but nevertheless a solution), France now wants to step in and say "OK, we'll take it from here, boys". Not a chance.
BTW, will it help your peace of mind at all to know that I'm not American? Quite aside from the many "own goals" the Yanks kicked during this war, it was approached in a dangerously simplistic fashion and they're not going to deal at all well with the social backlash that's coming. All of that is very bad but doesn't impact the question of France having resigned their right to speak to any solution.
Once you reach a certain level of income, you basically don't pay tax anyway. You pay accountants to make your tax go away.
guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people
Very few people die from gunshot wounds, even in time of war. More people are killed and mained by eating junk, smoking, or being hit by drunk drivers. In times of peace, more people are killed by mis-prescription and other iatrogenesis.
Take smoking, for example. We're dead sure that it sickens and kills millions of people every year, yet the amount of complaining that happens is muffled by the Bush (Clinton, Reagan, etc back to "the year dot") government's need to appease tobacco farmers. Given that repairing dying smokers typically costs around three times as much as the sum total of all of the cigarettes they ever bought, it would be much cheaper for the USA to simply buy every tobacco farm in the world, plow them under and declare tobacco farming/import/export illegal wherever they could. That's just straight economics, it makes no account for pain, suffering and loss.
It scares people to account like this, but it works. One of the small African countries had an enormous drink-driving problem, so they changed their laws. If you were caught driving drunk, they wrote your name down on a list and drove you home. That was all. If your name was already on the list, they shot you. No trial, no appeal, carried out on the spot. OTToMH, they shot something like 58 people in their first year, which was much less than 10% of their previous fatality level (ie, they saved more than 600 lives nett that year, and the ones who died were the offenders), and by that time the problem had essentially gone away. Yet try to enact capital punishment for second-offense drink drivers in any Western country and see what happens!
I think that might be hard...
on
SCO DOS'ed
·
· Score: 1
...if IBM decides to bite back. I'm sure they'll have no trouble finding enough of their own IP that SCO's trodden on to so arrange that the likely settlement value of the resulting lawsuit(s) significantly exceeds SCO's current nett worth. That kind of lawsuit is not something SCO can duck by selling their own overblown IP. And yes, it will be circular saw time for their office carpet within minutes of IBM's action becoming public knowledge. (-:
Things have never been quite the same since the Revolution. Fair enough, kick the Roman Church out 'coz it'd been vandalising their economy for centuries, at least (and France would've been a long way from the first to do it - in fact, the RCC have even been kicked out of Italy before, and the Jesuits out of the Vatican (or near equivalent), several times) - but the rest of it was more than a bit over the top, and France has never quite recovered from that, either economically or socially.
Witness France refusing to allow the US (and allies) to rampage around in Iraq, and then subsequently demanding a hand in choosing how the resulting gummint is organised. Chutzpah plus ultra (not that the USA is short of that either).
Punch a hole in the carpet, yes...
on
SCO DOS'ed
·
· Score: 1
I imagine that would have rather... extensive effects on things like their share-market value.
You mean it will go from zero to negative?
As I understand it, their nett worth is currently of the order of $20M, chicken feed against some of the big players. We have many local (Western Australian) one-shop manufacturing industries worth many times that. One counter-suit from IBM, and I expect their share value to implode like a balloon in a freezer.
They'll need to punch a hole in the carpet to continue the graph on their wall.
Time to replace the bearings?
on
SCO DOS'ed
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
the fact that they are still distributing [sco.com] it might have some bearing on that.
Unquestionably.
I think the GPL penny really hasn't dropped at all for so many important companies. Only a few people within SUn seem to really `get it', for example, and on the other side of the coin there are countless PHBs convinced that if they let a GPLed program in the door, every shred of their own software immediately becomes public.
Oh, very reasonable. (-:
on
SCO DOS'ed
·
· Score: 1
Therefore they should be dDosed
I can't advocate DDoSing, but they do deserve a little something as a reward for being greedy, destructive dickheads.
Unintentionally, hmm...
on
SCO DOS'ed
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
They intentionally released (and continue to intentionally release) Linux distributions including GPLed kernel code containing the putative code that they're whining about. AFAICT, that's what counts in court. Whether they unintentionally shot themselves in the foot (or head) at the same time appears to be immaterial.
I can't see a way of propagating that far enough back to force UnixWare open - but I'd be laughing for days if it did happen, it'd be near as funny as Microsoft GPLing the Windows 2003 source code.
...at least not legally. Go read the EULA on the keys. Distributing the binary under the GPL requires shipping source, fine, but "mere aggregation" of the key does not force it under the GPL or grant Joe the right to redistribute the key.
This gets interesting for the GPL, since the key is not required to run the software on Microsoft-based phones (dial the emergency number, get a blue screen?...or get a request for your serial number, can you remember all 20 digits?), there is no GPL requirement that Bob distribute the key. If the key was necessary, Bob could not distribute his signed app under the GPL (he would have to sual-licence it), since the key would otherwise form part of the source.
The bottom line is that Joe has to sign his own copy of app.
Sadly, this world contains enough dickheads that sooner or later, a Joe will appear on the scene. However, if we shut down the universe for fear of dickheads misusing their rights, the dickheads win (a pyrric victory, it's true, but probably a win in their eyes anyway).
One passenger airliner did go down because the power-drain for the seat-mounted game consoles overloaded wiring and caused a fire. Not passenger electronics, but at least the passengers weren't bored. Was it worth the price?
I can't wait for the first thread blaming the Challenger firework on an astronaut using a cell phone.
Slashdot Mirror
Top marks, that Euro!
One would immediately have to ask how come so very many of them turn out to be aimed right at us, given 360x360 degrees for them to "choose" from? <python>Are these quasars all French, to fart in our general direction like that?</python> However, it turns out that even if this grossly unlikely coincidence is true, we face yet other problems. Some of these quasars are so bright (if the deduced brightness is correct and I bet it ain't) that there's not enough room around the quasar to squeeze out anything like that many photons, to say nothing of any putative mechanism for producing so much light. Here is another attempt at explanation to chew on. There are a few serious alternatives around, hinting that a real problem exists. Don't confuse "unorthodox" with "wrong". You can't use orthodox authority to defend orthodox dogma, that's a tautology! (-:
You may not like what Arp has to say, but Arp only drew attention to this phenomenon, he didn't invent it, and he's not been alone. It is one of several sticks in the spokes of cosmological orthodoxy, and as long as we resolutely hold to only building on that orthodoxy, never daring to step outside its holy tenets, for just so long we'll be scientifically stalled. Arp has some wild and untamed theories, and I don't think they're going to turn out to be anything like as correct as he evidently hopes, but several of his observations are valuable pointers away from some of our current dead ends.
Ignoring the observation that the vast majority of the UN's authority is simply assumed, we still have to get past the obvious problem that the UN is blatantly Communist in its choices (it was founded to be so), has supported - even if by "blessing with faint curse" in some cases - many dictators, and in general is about as friendly toward real democracy as an alligator is toward chickens. The enthusiasm is definitely there, and in the UN's case so is the lip-service, but the best you can expect IRL is a sick charade. The other problem is that many of the Iraqis are calling for Islamic self-government, and democratic it ain't.
I think you're missing many of the UNsubtle nuances here.
Should it? Have a careful look at the people who founded the UN, and their views (here's an interesting perspective on an odd piece of NU and US combined subversion), and you might form a different opinion. Likewise the EU; many of the movers and shakers are committed to rebuilding Charlemagne's empire, quite a different picture from the one held by the rest of the world and a good chunk of the EU's own constituents besides. Some are "more equal than others."
Nevertheless, the UN, regardless of its roots and covert original aim, should be representative of the world's people. It's a pity that they represent nothing like it, if any such single view actually exists.
Oh, no. What a shocking surprise.
My faith in the impartiality of the world's media is irretrievably shaken. </sarcasm weight=leaden>
No worries, I see where you're coming from, mate. (-:
No, the posting I'm responding to there is distinctly labelled `by Anonymous Coward on 22:54 Sunday 04 May 2003 (#5874327) '
True, some of them require missiles and small-arms fire as well. (-:
Seriously, I don't think America's response was anything like the best one, but it does seem to have ended the abuse of Iraqi citizens by a dictator, albeit briefly. Sadly, the Iraqis seem to be setting about abusing themselves, almost as if being subject to abuse is a habit too well entrenched to break. I think America's military response could have been much more tightly focussed; they should have given the Brits and Aussies a big budget and told them to go for it, the violence would have been over in less than half the time and a tenth the damage.
But the big problem is that a political power with the military coult of the USA simply should not be throwing its weight around at all. It would be far too easy to go from rescuer (of the Iraqi hoi polloi) to persectuer (of anyone they consider dangerous or subversive).
They can't. But don't go thinking that France (or the EU, or for that matter the UN) is representative of the voice of the world, either.
I don't like them either; God is (ITESHO) on their side, and that bloody dangerous attitude is what led to the Dark Ages. On the other political hand, the Gore shadow administration sucks too. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. One has to wonder how the political situation in the USA got so sucky, and I think the answer is that the relatively clear ideals of a couple of centuries ago are now all muddled and dilute. Freedom of expression is confused with freedom to be an asshole to the detriment of others (compare that with "The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make a nuisance of himself to other people") and the common good is confused with the welfare of the State itself (does a State feel pain? can it irreversably be killed? can it have children?, compare "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" with legislation like the DMCA or the shiny new Home Security previsions; does it matter whether you are enslaved by Americans or by someone else, so long as you are enslaved?). This will not come to a good end. Both France and America are wrong. (Says he, sitting safely ten thousand kilometers from the front lines).
Have a chunk of Patrick Henry to consider, it may enlighten both Frank and Yank alike:
precession
Not very different, those words, but don't go astrogating without the correct one. (-:
Agree. And we make an awful lot of assumptions about the continuity of physics even at galactic scales.
The bottom line is that we start by assuming that because a theory fits some observed properties of the universe -and- we have not yet thought of a better (or at least more appealing to us) theory, the one we have is true. "If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."
This is especially true of the really grand assumptions like "the universe has no centre and no edge" and "the en-bloc redshifting of distant objects is evidence of recession caused only by the stretching of space"; the problems these assumptions cause conventional science run deep, yet so well embedded in orthodox scientific dogma are they that the vast majority of scientists would rather reject the growing collection of conflicting data than the dogma. (see here for discussion of something even weirder).
It never was. Try "What do you get when you multiply six by nine?" And the answer is 42 iff you do the arithmetic in base 13 and read out the answer in base 10:
As I understand it, Douglas didn't plan it that way. The universe is always odder then it seems.
Rest your digital 'phone under your CRT and see what happens when it next rings. That doesn't happen with milliwatts, o ye of the stripey and cross intelligence, not to an electron beam being pushed by maybe 40-60kV inside a lightly shielded vacuum.
The phone's official power rating is an average (as in mean, not mode or median), but the peak power is considerably higher. If your phone's average power output were 200 watts, at typical RF amplifier efficiencies you would need to feed it at least 300W, which would exhaust your batteries in an eyeblink, and burn your hand (or whatever else the device was in contact with). With a peak power ratio of 200 watts and a duty cycle of 1%, the 'phone gets to output an average of 2 watts during a recalibration cycle and yet still bounce the stuffing out of your CRT's electron beam. That's how Orion gets to use uncontrolled nukes for propulsion without smearing the crew. But there are no shock-absorbers between the 'phone antenna and your head.
Now go get a life.
No, therefore tax breaks for the rich are close to pointless - and hiking their taxes wouldn't achieve as much as you would hope either. You'd only hurt the honest ones, the ones you really least want to hurt.
It's along the same lines as "if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns": gun control laws - beyond a sensible minimum - only disarm those who are best placed to use those weapons sensibly. The people you really want to control will buy their weapons on the black market (thus en passant enriching another class of society that you don't want to encourage), hide them and lie about them. In effect, you're encouraging dishonesty by either trying to ban guns (as I said, beyond the sensible minimum - needed to keep them out of the hands of obvious incompetents or psychopaths, just like driver's licences), or by overtaxing "the rich".
Here in Oz, we have the ridiculous circumstance of people on the Dole paying income tax: evidently, "the rich" extends down to people on welfare, so we must truly be the "lucky country". IRL, what it means is that the income tax system (set up in 1939 as an emergency measure to fund Australia's contribution to WW2 and not scaled for inflation since) is badly broken.
What can I say? QED.
If a police force refused to arrest a rapist/mugger (the song "Maxwell's silver hammer" runs through my brain at this point, followed by "Excitable Boy", both about the sort of psychopathy France turned their back on), and the army subsequently arrest said rapist, why should the police force then have any say in how the rapist is sentenced?
The brown one. Always happens when someone allows greed to make their decisions for them.
No. France - and largely because of France the UN - refused to deal with the problem. Having arrived at a solution (not the best solution, IMESHO, but nevertheless a solution), France now wants to step in and say "OK, we'll take it from here, boys". Not a chance.
BTW, will it help your peace of mind at all to know that I'm not American? Quite aside from the many "own goals" the Yanks kicked during this war, it was approached in a dangerously simplistic fashion and they're not going to deal at all well with the social backlash that's coming. All of that is very bad but doesn't impact the question of France having resigned their right to speak to any solution.
Once you reach a certain level of income, you basically don't pay tax anyway. You pay accountants to make your tax go away.
Very few people die from gunshot wounds, even in time of war. More people are killed and mained by eating junk, smoking, or being hit by drunk drivers. In times of peace, more people are killed by mis-prescription and other iatrogenesis.
Take smoking, for example. We're dead sure that it sickens and kills millions of people every year, yet the amount of complaining that happens is muffled by the Bush (Clinton, Reagan, etc back to "the year dot") government's need to appease tobacco farmers. Given that repairing dying smokers typically costs around three times as much as the sum total of all of the cigarettes they ever bought, it would be much cheaper for the USA to simply buy every tobacco farm in the world, plow them under and declare tobacco farming/import/export illegal wherever they could. That's just straight economics, it makes no account for pain, suffering and loss.
It scares people to account like this, but it works. One of the small African countries had an enormous drink-driving problem, so they changed their laws. If you were caught driving drunk, they wrote your name down on a list and drove you home. That was all. If your name was already on the list, they shot you. No trial, no appeal, carried out on the spot. OTToMH, they shot something like 58 people in their first year, which was much less than 10% of their previous fatality level (ie, they saved more than 600 lives nett that year, and the ones who died were the offenders), and by that time the problem had essentially gone away. Yet try to enact capital punishment for second-offense drink drivers in any Western country and see what happens!
...if IBM decides to bite back. I'm sure they'll have no trouble finding enough of their own IP that SCO's trodden on to so arrange that the likely settlement value of the resulting lawsuit(s) significantly exceeds SCO's current nett worth. That kind of lawsuit is not something SCO can duck by selling their own overblown IP. And yes, it will be circular saw time for their office carpet within minutes of IBM's action becoming public knowledge. (-:
Things have never been quite the same since the Revolution. Fair enough, kick the Roman Church out 'coz it'd been vandalising their economy for centuries, at least (and France would've been a long way from the first to do it - in fact, the RCC have even been kicked out of Italy before, and the Jesuits out of the Vatican (or near equivalent), several times) - but the rest of it was more than a bit over the top, and France has never quite recovered from that, either economically or socially.
Witness France refusing to allow the US (and allies) to rampage around in Iraq, and then subsequently demanding a hand in choosing how the resulting gummint is organised. Chutzpah plus ultra (not that the USA is short of that either).
Gnu/Gnu/Gnu/Gnu/Gnu/Gnu ... Gnu/Gnu/SegmentViolation-StackOverflow
As I understand it, their nett worth is currently of the order of $20M, chicken feed against some of the big players. We have many local (Western Australian) one-shop manufacturing industries worth many times that. One counter-suit from IBM, and I expect their share value to implode like a balloon in a freezer.
They'll need to punch a hole in the carpet to continue the graph on their wall.
Unquestionably.
I think the GPL penny really hasn't dropped at all for so many important companies. Only a few people within SUn seem to really `get it', for example, and on the other side of the coin there are countless PHBs convinced that if they let a GPLed program in the door, every shred of their own software immediately becomes public.
I can't advocate DDoSing, but they do deserve a little something as a reward for being greedy, destructive dickheads.
They intentionally released (and continue to intentionally release) Linux distributions including GPLed kernel code containing the putative code that they're whining about. AFAICT, that's what counts in court. Whether they unintentionally shot themselves in the foot (or head) at the same time appears to be immaterial.
I can't see a way of propagating that far enough back to force UnixWare open - but I'd be laughing for days if it did happen, it'd be near as funny as Microsoft GPLing the Windows 2003 source code.
...at least not legally. Go read the EULA on the keys. Distributing the binary under the GPL requires shipping source, fine, but "mere aggregation" of the key does not force it under the GPL or grant Joe the right to redistribute the key.
...or get a request for your serial number, can you remember all 20 digits?), there is no GPL requirement that Bob distribute the key. If the key was necessary, Bob could not distribute his signed app under the GPL (he would have to sual-licence it), since the key would otherwise form part of the source.
This gets interesting for the GPL, since the key is not required to run the software on Microsoft-based phones (dial the emergency number, get a blue screen?
The bottom line is that Joe has to sign his own copy of app.
Sadly, this world contains enough dickheads that sooner or later, a Joe will appear on the scene. However, if we shut down the universe for fear of dickheads misusing their rights, the dickheads win (a pyrric victory, it's true, but probably a win in their eyes anyway).
One passenger airliner did go down because the power-drain for the seat-mounted game consoles overloaded wiring and caused a fire. Not passenger electronics, but at least the passengers weren't bored. Was it worth the price?
I can't wait for the first thread blaming the Challenger firework on an astronaut using a cell phone.