Let's see.. the plutocratic corporations scream that government should be kept out of their business at all costs.
Then when a competitor wants to test MORE than the requirement, they demand the government prevent them so that THEY don't have to absorb any extra cost.
Well, if the competitor can do it, then THEY can do it.
If it ultimately IS too expensive, then the competitor will stop or go out of business.
Isn't this the "capitalism" that these hypocritical scumbags pretend to worship (when they aren't pretending to worship Jesus that is - as if he would approve of their greed).
Anyone else remember 2004, when the Diebold CEO said he would "deliver" Ohio to the GOP?
He sure did. According to the exit polls (which had been rigorously redone after the questions around them in 2000), Ohio should have gone to Gore by several points.
Instead, in a situation that can only be called MAGIC (or theft), it went to Bush.
They are just setting the stage to do it again. Mark my words.
The RIAA and MPAA bought themselves some of our representatives and they have added some Peer to Peer technology restrictions to the requirements that publicly funded colleges will have to abide by in order to get their money. This memo discusses it, but basically they will have to:
Disclose annually to students that file sharing is bad and illegal Certify to the Secretary of Education the school will "effectively combat" copyrighted file sharing Offer alternatives to "illegal filesharing"
They both DESERVED the death penalty for their actions. However, if AA hadn't been an auditing firm, they might well have lived to lie another day. As it is, they still aren't "dead", just almost dead. The company still exists, even if it is vilified and hardly used.
Same deal with Enron... The dead just get rolled into something else or the name changed and all too often the same batch of MBA crooks move on to the next company.
Not sure what it is about MBAs and the way they seem to make decent people into slimeballs, but I've rarely met someone who was an MBA and wasn't a complete a**hole who was willing to shove his own grandma into a hole to make an extra nickel off of her.
Let's be honest, they overturned the verdict because of the over-broad instructions of the judge, not because AA was innocent.
They knew exactly what they were doing and they knew it was wrong and they did it anyway, just like pretty much every other corporation who thinks they are untouchable.
And once again, the fact that corporations routinely and constantly suffer punishments FAR below those handed out to individuals will mean that even more corporations will do even more immoral and illegal things and mostly not be prosecuted for it.
I think you should do a little more looking at the evidence before calling everyone who thinks the government had a significant hand in 9/11 to be pathological.
Combined with all the interviews with firefighters and people who were at Ground Zero, as well as the engineering analyses of the building collapses, etc., etc, etc., leads to a preponderance of evidence that the government was deeply involved.
Add to that things like The Project for the New American Century, and the papers written around that by people who are now in the Bush administration regarding the need for a "Pearl Harbor-like" event, and you start to get REAL suspicious.
I'm a materials engineer with a lot of experience in materials failures. I even took a course on the effects of explosives on materials.
The way the WTC buildings failed did not progress in a way that makes much if any sense from a materials engineering perspective unless they were demo'd.
However, continue to believe that no government could ever subject you to the Big Lie. Isn't that the point of the Big Lie?
Heck, you probably believe Flight 800 actually DID fail from a centerline fuel tank explosion due to faulty wiring. Something no aerospace engineer I've ever spoken to whose looked at the data has EVER agreed with.
Accept the fact that the US Government is NOT benevolent. Accept the fact that the US Government HAS DONE FALSE FLAG OPS before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
Accept the fact that the US Government lies... A LOT. All of these are facts proven over and over and OVER again by the US Government's ACTIONS, not their words.
It will make your ability to look at data and make rational decisions a lot easier.
Well, let's hope that no one is ever stupid enough to hire anyone from SCO's management team again. They should instead be employed where their talents clearly lie, in human waste management (no offense to those in that profession now intended).
Deciding that you should change your company's primary product from something that is useful (software) to something that is a leech on others (lawsuits) is moronic. Then suing not only your competitors, but your customers is even MORE moronic. Doing all of this while having no case is even more so. Realizing your stupidity halfway through but then continuing to fight in every way possible just throws stubbornness after stupidity. I only wish there was a way to put the SCO team into prison for their actions, because the malice they showed clearly deserves it...
Let's hope this cautionary tale prevents any other company from being so imbecilic in the future.
Ok, good points, and so was the poster who mentioned laptops, but still, I'd use PCMCIA rather than USB.
USB 2.0 is theoretically 480Mps, but USB1.1 is only 12Mbs. Hopefully yours is USB2.. but I still don't think I've ever really gotten 480Mbs out of a USB2.0 device. Given this, I'd prefer a PCI solution, but that's just me. And there is better Linux support for PCI cards...
As for the rest, let's put it this way, on all the desktops (maybe 8) I've tried in the last 2 years, Ubuntu "just works".
For me, that is equivalent or better than Windoze, so I consider them at least equal in usability.
Sorry it didn't work for you out of the box, but unlike pretty much all earlier Linux distros, Ubuntu sure works out of the box for a lot more people.
I know that most think it extremely unlikely, but I for one would like some advance notice of when they are going to crank this thing up for real so that I can at least make sure I live the few days before that to the fullest.
Ever wondered what it would be like if they generated a large, non-disappearing black hole?
What they will do is if they find something, they will sick FBI or CIA agents on you and use traditional law enforcement powers to find out again what they already know, but this time legally. They basically had no probable cause, but used illegal means to find one.
If someone asks why they focused on you, they can always say they got an "anonymous" tip.
Basically, you're screwed.
Say good bye to our little Republic experiment... Ben never thought it would last this long anyway...
I agree that it's sad, but much of what results from the legal system is sad.
However, that is why engineers are good. We route around damage and inefficiency and the legal system is exactly that, damage and inefficiency.
There is a reason that most people consider lawyers about as honorable as a bad used car salesman.
Civil lawyers are mostly parasites on the economic body. They exist to try to suck money from people doing actual work. This mostly means doctors, engineers and entrepreneurs. Our entire culture could be made up of productive people working to better society, (i.e. no lawyers) and go on just fine. An entire culture made up of lawyers would starve to death immediately.
Lawyers are a necessary nuisance, but like government, we should have the least number of them we can get away with.
That's why you have IN PERSON MEETINGS! And no minutes other than tasks and attendees. I guess you can have decisions in the minutes as well... Face it, if this stuff doesn't get written down, it doesn't get subpoena'd.
I'd start by initiating a renewable energy Manhattan Project. Dedicate more than the amount of the GDP (say 1.5X) that is currently going to that idiotic, undeclared war in Iraq and use it to make us self sufficient when it comes to energy.
With that amount of money being spent, there would undoubtedly be a lot of serendipitous benefits and we would be likely be energy self sufficient within a decade. Heck, I'd use JFK's speech about Apollo project to kick off mine!
Then I'd implement a "fair tax" of some sort so that we don't need $50 computer programs to figure out our taxes.
I could go on, but you've probably heard it before... You know, all the stuff that everyone agrees should be done, but for some reason the current batch of status quo slimebuckets can't do (mostly because they are paid off to keep it this way)...
Frankly I think it is a "truck" thing. The Japanese don't know how to make large pickup trucks because they aren't really needed in Japan... I go there frequently, and the only "pickups" you see are status symbols in Tokyo or Nagoya or some SR5 type thing on farms.
But as for cars, the Japanese can make them much better than GM... I mean I had a 1999 Oldmobile Alero. Way overpowered and got relatively crappy gas mileage but fun to drive. The DRIVER'S SEAT just came apart one day. Literally the mechanism holding the seat back up just stopped working. And not because I am fat... I weigh 185.. It just stopped working, so the seat would dump you into the back of the car! While you were driving if you weren't careful. Ever tried to drive 50 miles sitting in a car seat when you can't lean back at all? Talk about an abdominal workout. But to me, that's exactly what GM and American cars are... Crap that comes apart when you least expect it in the dumbest way possible.
I could mention the coolant pump on my relatively new Lynx FALLING OFF in mid drive as well, but that would be redundant...
Suffice to say, such things don't happen on Japanese cars... at least not that I've heard of or seen.
Having dealt a lot with the Japanese I think I understand why. Their level of self discipline is something we just mostly don't match here... "Good enough" is good enough for us... But the Japanese demand the BEST in quality and they are willing to pay for it... and so they GET it... And when it comes to a $30k car that I will have to risk my life in and take care of daily, I'm willing to pay for quality too... Not sure when GM and Ford and Chrysler will "get" this...
No, GM's REAL problem is that they either make crap cars or used to make crap cars and American's have gotten tired of crap quality.
American car companies still average ~1.5-2x as many defects per vehicle than the Japanese do and Americans are tired of it. If you owned an American car in the 1990s( and I owned 2), then you probably got pieces of junk like I did.
Whereas every Japanese car I have ever owned has run till it died with minimum problems.
GM needs to spend some of their "research" budget on QUALITY and RELIABILITY (as well as a way to make their UGLY cars prettier), and then maybe they will sell some cars.
Until then, why would I buy an ugly car, with poor gas mileage and worse quality? Just so I can say I "buy American"? No way. Especially since the Japanese cars are more likely to actually be made in the USA while the GM cars are likely partially built in Mexico...
FWIW, I like the idea of cars driving themselves... maybe we could get rid of the traffic jams and stop DUIs with this tech... but if GM doesn't figure out how to sell more cars, they won't be around in 2018...
Fine, I'll admit that in some ways Vista now approaches the reliability of Linux... too bad it took 14 years and an OS chock full o'DRM (for the movie companies) to do it.
Sorry, but I have large philosophical issues with having my operating system doing constant handshakes with all peripherals just to make sure I'm not (gasp) watching a copyrighted work without "permission".
I have even BIGGER issues when said handshaking dramatically reduces the speed of the OS (which it absolutely does in Vista).
M$ should have realized their "customers" are not the MPAA, and then I'd have more respect for Vista. As it is, they screwed their real customers over.
Well, my Gentoo based 1.5TB file server also runs myth and records and streams HD and dual standard def and it stays up at LEAST as long as 30 days... so don't try to pretend that Linux only stays up rock solid when it is doing nothing..
We no longer have a government by the people and for the people (if indeed we ever did), we now have a corporate republic, where the only citizens that matter are corporations. The rest of us are unimportant at best and serfs at worst...
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Let's see.. the plutocratic corporations scream that government should be kept out of their business at all costs.
Then when a competitor wants to test MORE than the requirement, they demand the government prevent them so that THEY don't have to absorb any extra cost.
Well, if the competitor can do it, then THEY can do it.
If it ultimately IS too expensive, then the competitor will stop or go out of business.
Isn't this the "capitalism" that these hypocritical scumbags pretend to worship (when they aren't pretending to worship Jesus that is - as if he would approve of their greed).
Pathetic.
Anyone else remember 2004, when the Diebold CEO said he would "deliver" Ohio to the GOP?
He sure did. According to the exit polls (which had been rigorously redone after the questions around them in 2000), Ohio should have gone to Gore by several points.
Instead, in a situation that can only be called MAGIC (or theft), it went to Bush.
They are just setting the stage to do it again. Mark my words.
All of this is now relatively irrelevant.
The RIAA and MPAA bought themselves some of our representatives and they have added some Peer to Peer technology restrictions to the requirements that publicly funded colleges will have to abide by in order to get their money. This memo discusses it, but basically they will have to:
Disclose annually to students that file sharing is bad and illegal
Certify to the Secretary of Education the school will "effectively combat" copyrighted file sharing
Offer alternatives to "illegal filesharing"
Once again our representatives have sold out.
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/epo0815.pdf
They both DESERVED the death penalty for their actions. However, if AA hadn't been an auditing firm, they might well have lived to lie another day. As it is, they still aren't "dead", just almost dead. The company still exists, even if it is vilified and hardly used.
Same deal with Enron... The dead just get rolled into something else or the name changed and all too often the same batch of MBA crooks move on to the next company.
Not sure what it is about MBAs and the way they seem to make decent people into slimeballs, but I've rarely met someone who was an MBA and wasn't a complete a**hole who was willing to shove his own grandma into a hole to make an extra nickel off of her.
Let's be honest, they overturned the verdict because of the over-broad instructions of the judge, not because AA was innocent.
They knew exactly what they were doing and they knew it was wrong and they did it anyway, just like pretty much every other corporation who thinks they are untouchable.
And once again, the fact that corporations routinely and constantly suffer punishments FAR below those handed out to individuals will mean that even more corporations will do even more immoral and illegal things and mostly not be prosecuted for it.
I think you should do a little more looking at the evidence before calling everyone who thinks the government had a significant hand in 9/11 to be pathological.
Things like this:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/01/anthrax/index.html
Combined with all the interviews with firefighters and people who were at Ground Zero, as well as the engineering analyses of the building collapses, etc., etc, etc., leads to a preponderance of evidence that the government was deeply involved.
Add to that things like The Project for the New American Century, and the papers written around that by people who are now in the Bush administration regarding the need for a "Pearl Harbor-like" event, and you start to get REAL suspicious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century
I'm a materials engineer with a lot of experience in materials failures. I even took a course on the effects of explosives on materials.
The way the WTC buildings failed did not progress in a way that makes much if any sense from a materials engineering perspective unless they were demo'd.
However, continue to believe that no government could ever subject you to the Big Lie. Isn't that the point of the Big Lie?
The rest of us realize that 9/11 was a False Flag op.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag
Heck, you probably believe Flight 800 actually DID fail from a centerline fuel tank explosion due to faulty wiring. Something no aerospace engineer I've ever spoken to whose looked at the data has EVER agreed with.
Accept the fact that the US Government is NOT benevolent. Accept the fact that the US Government HAS DONE FALSE FLAG OPS before.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
Accept the fact that the US Government lies... A LOT. All of these are facts proven over and over and OVER again by the US Government's ACTIONS, not their words.
It will make your ability to look at data and make rational decisions a lot easier.
Well, let's hope that no one is ever stupid enough to hire anyone from SCO's management team again. They should instead be employed where their talents clearly lie, in human waste management (no offense to those in that profession now intended).
Deciding that you should change your company's primary product from something that is useful (software) to something that is a leech on others (lawsuits) is moronic. Then suing not only your competitors, but your customers is even MORE moronic. Doing all of this while having no case is even more so. Realizing your stupidity halfway through but then continuing to fight in every way possible just throws stubbornness after stupidity. I only wish there was a way to put the SCO team into prison for their actions, because the malice they showed clearly deserves it...
Let's hope this cautionary tale prevents any other company from being so imbecilic in the future.
You realize of course that the sole holdout (Qwest) against this had their CEO indicted immediately afterwards. Coincidence? I think not.
You can guarantee that the NSA and CIA and FBI threatened the CEOs of these companies if they didn't play ball.
So yes, they broke the law. Yes, they KNEW they were breaking the law when they did it. But yes, they probably didn't have much choice....
Ok, good points, and so was the poster who mentioned laptops, but still, I'd use PCMCIA rather than USB.
USB 2.0 is theoretically 480Mps, but USB1.1 is only 12Mbs. Hopefully yours is USB2.. but I still don't think I've ever really gotten 480Mbs out of a USB2.0 device. Given this, I'd prefer a PCI solution, but that's just me. And there is better Linux support for PCI cards...
As for the rest, let's put it this way, on all the desktops (maybe 8) I've tried in the last 2 years, Ubuntu "just works".
For me, that is equivalent or better than Windoze, so I consider them at least equal in usability.
Sorry it didn't work for you out of the box, but unlike pretty much all earlier Linux distros, Ubuntu sure works out of the box for a lot more people.
Why the heck would you use a wireless USB network adapter? Do you like crazy slow interfaces?
Use a PCI one. Ubuntu will work with it.
I know that most think it extremely unlikely, but I for one would like some advance notice of when they are going to crank this thing up for real so that I can at least make sure I live the few days before that to the fullest.
Ever wondered what it would be like if they generated a large, non-disappearing black hole?
Would the world die?
Is he still employed at SCO, or is this latest brilliance the result of someone ELSE at SCO?
Another question might be... does SCO have no shame? Apparently not...
At this point the corpse of SCO has to be worth less than the continuing legal wrangling... so who is paying for all this?
What they will do is if they find something, they will sick FBI or CIA agents on you and use traditional law enforcement powers to find out again what they already know, but this time legally. They basically had no probable cause, but used illegal means to find one.
If someone asks why they focused on you, they can always say they got an "anonymous" tip.
Basically, you're screwed.
Say good bye to our little Republic experiment... Ben never thought it would last this long anyway...
I agree that it's sad, but much of what results from the legal system is sad.
However, that is why engineers are good. We route around damage and inefficiency and the legal system is exactly that, damage and inefficiency.
There is a reason that most people consider lawyers about as honorable as a bad used car salesman.
Civil lawyers are mostly parasites on the economic body. They exist to try to suck money from people doing actual work. This mostly means doctors, engineers and entrepreneurs. Our entire culture could be made up of productive people working to better society, (i.e. no lawyers) and go on just fine. An entire culture made up of lawyers would starve to death immediately.
Lawyers are a necessary nuisance, but like government, we should have the least number of them we can get away with.
Thanks! We met on eHarmony amazingly enough. That thing works...
That's why you have IN PERSON MEETINGS! And no minutes other than tasks and attendees. I guess you can have decisions in the minutes as well... Face it, if this stuff doesn't get written down, it doesn't get subpoena'd.
They were in Las Vegas too... Drove by this on the way out of town... maybe 30 people out...
Since I don't care for Scientology (or any other religion), I honked.
Had a great time in Vegas though, I got married!
Mod parent up! Good points..
I'd start by initiating a renewable energy Manhattan Project. Dedicate more than the amount of the GDP (say 1.5X) that is currently going to that idiotic, undeclared war in Iraq and use it to make us self sufficient when it comes to energy.
With that amount of money being spent, there would undoubtedly be a lot of serendipitous benefits and we would be likely be energy self sufficient within a decade. Heck, I'd use JFK's speech about Apollo project to kick off mine!
Then I'd implement a "fair tax" of some sort so that we don't need $50 computer programs to figure out our taxes.
I could go on, but you've probably heard it before... You know, all the stuff that everyone agrees should be done, but for some reason the current batch of status quo slimebuckets can't do (mostly because they are paid off to keep it this way)...
Frankly I think it is a "truck" thing. The Japanese don't know how to make large pickup trucks because they aren't really needed in Japan... I go there frequently, and the only "pickups" you see are status symbols in Tokyo or Nagoya or some SR5 type thing on farms.
But as for cars, the Japanese can make them much better than GM... I mean I had a 1999 Oldmobile Alero. Way overpowered and got relatively crappy gas mileage but fun to drive. The DRIVER'S SEAT just came apart one day. Literally the mechanism holding the seat back up just stopped working. And not because I am fat... I weigh 185.. It just stopped working, so the seat would dump you into the back of the car! While you were driving if you weren't careful. Ever tried to drive 50 miles sitting in a car seat when you can't lean back at all? Talk about an abdominal workout. But to me, that's exactly what GM and American cars are... Crap that comes apart when you least expect it in the dumbest way possible.
I could mention the coolant pump on my relatively new Lynx FALLING OFF in mid drive as well, but that would be redundant...
Suffice to say, such things don't happen on Japanese cars... at least not that I've heard of or seen.
Having dealt a lot with the Japanese I think I understand why. Their level of self discipline is something we just mostly don't match here... "Good enough" is good enough for us... But the Japanese demand the BEST in quality and they are willing to pay for it... and so they GET it... And when it comes to a $30k car that I will have to risk my life in and take care of daily, I'm willing to pay for quality too... Not sure when GM and Ford and Chrysler will "get" this...
No, GM's REAL problem is that they either make crap cars or used to make crap cars and American's have gotten tired of crap quality.
American car companies still average ~1.5-2x as many defects per vehicle than the Japanese do and Americans are tired of it. If you owned an American car in the 1990s( and I owned 2), then you probably got pieces of junk like I did.
Whereas every Japanese car I have ever owned has run till it died with minimum problems.
GM needs to spend some of their "research" budget on QUALITY and RELIABILITY (as well as a way to make their UGLY cars prettier), and then maybe they will sell some cars.
Until then, why would I buy an ugly car, with poor gas mileage and worse quality? Just so I can say I "buy American"? No way. Especially since the Japanese cars are more likely to actually be made in the USA while the GM cars are likely partially built in Mexico...
FWIW, I like the idea of cars driving themselves... maybe we could get rid of the traffic jams and stop DUIs with this tech... but if GM doesn't figure out how to sell more cars, they won't be around in 2018...
Umm... no... It does exactly that when playing DRM'd media among other things... check into protected video path and similar crap that is in Vista.
Vista was a total cop out to the MPAA and Microsoft deserves to have it go down in flames. I for one will be in the background cheering when it does.
Fine, I'll admit that in some ways Vista now approaches the reliability of Linux... too bad it took 14 years and an OS chock full o'DRM (for the movie companies) to do it.
Sorry, but I have large philosophical issues with having my operating system doing constant handshakes with all peripherals just to make sure I'm not (gasp) watching a copyrighted work without "permission".
I have even BIGGER issues when said handshaking dramatically reduces the speed of the OS (which it absolutely does in Vista).
M$ should have realized their "customers" are not the MPAA, and then I'd have more respect for Vista. As it is, they screwed their real customers over.
Well, my Gentoo based 1.5TB file server also runs myth and records and streams HD and dual standard def and it stays up at LEAST as long as 30 days... so don't try to pretend that Linux only stays up rock solid when it is doing nothing..
Given this: http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Exit_Polls_2004_Edison-Mitofsky.pdf, I am not sure you should really blame your neighbors... It's pretty clear that we did NOT vote Bush back into power. Diebold did...
We no longer have a government by the people and for the people (if indeed we ever did), we now have a corporate republic, where the only citizens that matter are corporations. The rest of us are unimportant at best and serfs at worst...