At the same time, the French and the Japanese -- with their outstanding understanding of basic science (as indicated by international comparisons of high-school students in France, Japan, and the USA) -- have generally supported nuclear power. It generates most of the electricity in France.
The reason France gets so much of its power from nuclear has nothing to do with the science education of its citizenry. It is because France has no other choice economically. Next to no fossil fuels, and solar has been more expensive than nuclear so far.
There was a decent article in Nat Geo sometime in the past year or two that went into some detail about this.
France has less resistance among the general population not due to science education, but because the French people don't want to pay high prices for imported fuels and/or energy. Plus the French government mounted a massive PR campaign to increase acceptance, because of the national security issues involved in energy independence, especially during the cold war.
Japan's reasons for nuclear are along the same lines. You can't point to the Japanese as accepting nuclear power because of science education -- they have an entire genre of movies based on the unforeseen consequences of nuclear power (Godzilla, etc).
Japan has adopted nuclear power for the same reason France has -- economics and national security.
Our whole society RUNS on those things you speak so poorly of: a strong workforce and structure. We're not at the point where we have this Utopia where people can go around pursuing pleasures of the mind because there's no crime and everything you need is provided for you at no cost.
Our society STAGNATES on those things I speak poorly of. While a strong workforce and structure are necessary, we also need to make sure we have the environment where those with potential to effect great positive change are capable of reaching their potential.
Read case studies of the creative geniuses who've changed our world. One of the most common themes is that their educational experience was not institutionalized.
Yes, we have to churn out productive drones that support our economy. But we should not, at the same time, limit the creative production of the people who could benefit society the most.
I'm not anti-establishment, BTW. I'm just against the idea of shoehorning bright people into a system that will limit their potential.
No, my point whizzed right over your head... They did live up to their potential - their actual potential, not what they thought their potential was.
so your point is that traditional schooling does not affect the potential of an individual? Or that it can only increase their potential? I think that public school indoctrination limits the potential of many individuals who are brightest. Students who are socially and institutionally dissuaded from excelling, for example (Don't study so hard, let someone else win some awards, etc). Students who are actively dissuaded from accelerating their pace of study (no reading ahead in the textbook, etc).
I fail to appreciate your point because I feel it does not have merit. I've explained why (previously, and at length in this post).
As I demonstrated in my original post, that's an assumption - and one shown to have significant flaws. As above, I didn't mistake your point, I demolished it and that fact whizzed right past your blinders and bias.
You did not demolish it, as I pointed out in my last post. Care to address the means by which I tore down your "proof"? Or are you still going to stand by a "proof" that does not meet the test of logic?
Society is best served by allowing the cream to force itself to the top - not by creating more special snowflakes who believe they deserve special treatment because they hold the belief that they have [subjectively measured] 'gifts'.
And my point is that tossing in extra barriers to the cream rising to the top is a stupid idea. You do not promote greatness by throwing up roadblocks -- that inhibits greatness. While we're at it, why don't we make everyone live in a hovel and have to perform subsistence farming? Surely THAT would force the cream to rise to the top, right?
Please, before you continue down your illogical track, consider one concept that has continued to escape you: Is it possible that an institutionalized culture could inhibit the ability of some individuals to achieve greatness? If your answer is yes, then your argument is void. If your answer is no, then you've got, in my opinion, a sad and twisted understanding of what drives creative intelligence and excellence.
This has nothing to do with whether some people believe themselves to have greater potential than they actually do, which is a point you continue to harp on without recognizing that there are indeed people with great potential who we limit via poor educational institutions.
Hm... you were first to claim some giant conspiracy (headed by the teachers union, I believe)... not sure you're thinking critically if you can't see that.
School vouchers ARE about competition and not one conservative recommendation says that you MUST choose a religious private school.
And yet the reason they are supported so much by the right is because they know that's how the card will fall.
As for all the media that you watch/listen to/read, I couldn't care less -- that has nothing to do with whether or not you buy into silly conspiracy theories.
My concern is that you fail to realize that you're a victim of a PR snowjob intended to drum up support for a strategically valuable political tool.
I'm not opposed to school vouchers, by the way. What I'm opposed to is them being used as a front for de-secularizing school systems, which is the intention of many on the right.
When I lived in a city, my wife and I had *zero* cars. This is common for dense urban areas; two cars per household is rare. When we needed a car (road trips, etc) we rented one.
I used my saddlebags and trailer for my bike when grocery shopping then, and I still do even though I'm out in the boonies now (and we have two cars).
I think the market that a product like this is geared to is not the two-cars-in-the-burbs market.
Citizen hunters could also become cybervigilantes and harm bystanders as they pursue criminals but Symantec is betting customers won't mind being disrupted if they can help snare the bad guys.
Hah. You think Joe and Judy are going to be concerned about the big picture when they are trying to order Suzie's birthday party invitations and can't? The big picture is nice and all, but to expect people to act reasonably is, in my experience, a recipe for disappointment.
"I'm convinced we can clean up the Internet in 10 years if we can peel away the dirt and show people the threats they're facing," says Trollope.'"
More of the same. "If we can scare people, we can sell more product, er, I mean, clean up the internet," says security vendor.
They don't want to clean up the internet. They want to continue to make money selling products to people who need them (or are scared).
I know you're not going to remove them anytime soon, but if you believe the Republicans are not as much a party to the effort to keep the general public ignorant and complacent as the Democrats, then I pity you.
School vouchers aren't about competition in educational systems for the purpose of better education (despite all the PR crap you might have read). They're about putting religion into education. It's the conservatives trying to expand their base by allowing kids to circumvent getting an education where they *might* learn to think for themselves.
Every conspiracy your poor addled mind sees on the left can be matched with an equally plausible conspiracy on the right. You choose to believe the conspiracy theory that bests suits your ideology.
There are several factors that I'd want to compare products on if I were in the market for a personal motorized transport device.
1. Size 2. Weight 3. Ergonomics -- sitting or standing? Comfort? 4. Range 5. Durability 6. Cargo capacity
For me, #6 would be a dealbreaker, the others are ones I could compromise on. What is the cargo capacity on a segway? How many saddlebags and how much weight can it handle? If I couldn't do my family's grocery shopping with it, I wouldn't consider it.
But I'm not in the market for one of these, since I have a bike with good cargo capacity (and a trailer for when I need it), and I live in a small town, not a city.
No, the purpose of the educational system in the U.S. is to create dumbed down people that will vote for Democrats that promise to "give them more stuff"!
Conversely, the purpose is to create automatons who will follow the "guidance" of their leaders in their Churches and in the Republican Party no matter how much it contradicts with their own personal interests.
Don't make this a partisan issue. A complacent public accustomed to monotony benefits all those with power, independent of political affiliation. It's about serving the wealthy.
Most kids won't really question their parents the way that Calvin, who is portrayed at every turn as an incorrigible, authority-bucking youth, does. It's good to teach your children to question authority and not trust everything they hear.
If you do it right, they'll question it. You've got to trigger their bullshit meter, then they'll pick it up. From a young age, this comes from stating a blatant untruth (and is a very common, I believe damn-near-instinctual form of play). "That ball is purple" "No, it's yellow, daddy!"
My problem is that I'm a pretty good bullshitter, so I've got to make an effort to make sure it's ridiculous enough that they catch on. And as a big plus, sometimes the kid will play along with the BS, which is a great opportunity to explore what-ifs (complex thinking on hypotheticals).
Of course, the Socratic method is useful as well, but I find that a mix of the two works best for me. My problem with the Socratic method is that it limits the ability of a person to build off the work of others -- the kid may develop a need to derive every solution himself (sometimes a waste of time), and also fails to train the bullshit detector.
Sure, the looked the part - but when it came time to stop talking and start doing, they fell apart. Which implies that they weren't as brilliant as you or they thought. If they lacked the drive in school to get off their butts and improve themselves - they weren't going to succeed among other (actually) brilliant people when they got out into the real world.
And here you lay out my point for me, without understanding the implications. Why do they lack the drive? Did the educational system contribute to their lack of drive? Could society benefit from a differing educational track for these individuals, whereby we all might benefit from their works, if their potential was realized?
Falsifiable by existence proof - the number of brilliant people who did excel after attending public school. From a societal standpoint - the educational system was a screaming success because it separated the poseurs from the real McCoy.
That's neither falsification nor a proof. The fact that some people have excelled after institutionalized education has nothing to do with whether others would have excelled but for our institutionalized education system.
Apparently, logic and reason is not your strong point.
No, there's nothing but selfishness and entitlement issues - it's not societies fault that they weren't actually the special snowflake they thought themselves to be.
That "special snowflake" label is useless in your context, you completely mistake the point. There are, in fact, some special individuals. The "special snowflake" issue is one of too many people believing they fit into that category, and believing there is entitlement because of it. The truth is, there *are* people who should (for society's sake) be educated differently because of their gifts. The problem is convincing the parents of the normals that their kids do not meet the criteria.
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
-Donald Rumsfeld
My concern with unschooling is that the set of unknown unknowns becomes too large.
I know many brilliant people who never lived up to their potential partly because, among other reasons, they were completely stifled in a public education system. They were never taught how to work hard to learn, how to challenge themselves.
Yes, there's some selfishness and entitlement issues with people feeling that their school system failed their brilliance.
But from a societal standpoint, that educational system failed society at large by not nurturing the potential of those people.
But of course, that's not the purpose of the educational system in the US. The purpose is to create a functional workforce that is conditioned to structured systems.
Ever been burned by hot water? If you were to sit in water over 110 for very long you would litterally boil yourself to death. When you put your feet in the tub and scream, that's your body's way of telling you not to boil yourself.
No. No, you would not literally boil yourself (unless you are at some ridiculously high elevation where the boiling point of water is under 100 F).
Instead, you would suffer tissue damage due to electrolyte imbalances and some protein denaturation.
Not only do you get the Calvin's Dad effect, but your children also lose out on learning to deal with structure.
FWIW, the "Calvin's Dad" effect is a huge positive. Even in the strip, BW pointed out the benefits:
1. Calvin learns to not always trust authority figures. 2. Calvin learns that he should look things up on his own, to find the truth himself, and not depend on others to slake his curiosity.
While I agree with you on kids needing to learn how to deal with structure (to a certain extent -- many of the happiest people I know operate outside of normal structure systems, like a formal workplace), I completely disagree on the Calvin's Dad effect... I believe one of the best things you can teach a kid is to think critically and do research for themselves.
A large company can potentially provide computing services to a client for less cost than if the client supplied their own needs.
If I need server capacity, or raw processing, at a high volume but only infrequently, it might cost a lot for me to buy the capacity myself, when not using it all the time. If I need data storage, I may have issues with scaling, and with laying out the cash quickly to purchase new drives.
Cloud services allow for small companies to take advantage of economies of scale. Sure, the provider gets a cut -- but it still may be a bargain for the small company.
Don't these idiots know that the suffering is where all the good flavor is?
What? Maybe for beef, I'm not sure...
But for pigs, it's really important that you kill them unexpectedly, or the meat gets an off flavor. I always used to drop mine off at the butchers, where he'd treat them nicely for a couple days for them to get content and acclimated, then he'd shoot them when they weren't expecting it.
This is why all the best butchers are ninjas and/or members of the Spanish Inquisition.
This is an issue of selection bias. We only remember the mergers that go poorly.
For very large companies, there are a lot more things that can go expensively wrong during mergers, so perhaps the incidence of failure goes up. But there are notable mergers that have succeeded, from a profit point-of-view.
At any rate, the risk of a flop is balanced against the payout. If you have near-bottomless pockets, as Oracle does, then wagering 5 billion on a potential flop may make sense... the expected payout might be 7 billion, even if the failure risk is 75% (the payout if successful would need to be 28 billion). The math here is overly simplified, but you get the point...
One other note... if a company holds onto a ton of cash, their shareholders can get angry. That cash is wasted if not invested (in the core business, or via acquisitions). So shareholders will demand that there is either a stock buyback (a la Microsoft), a dividend paid, or that the cash is used for an acquisition or for other investment in the business. Oracle's strategy has been primarily acquisition to "dispose" of excess cash.
I'm sorry, but I just do not see that it is anything less than a loss of sovereignty for the US, to expect that US business must get foreign approval for changes in ownership.
They don't need foreign approval to merge.
What they need to know is whether they'll be allowed to sell their products and services in that very large foreign market if they do merge.
The confusion, I think, is because it's a kind of mental shorthand to think of it as merger approval, when that is not actually what is under consideration right now.
I hope this clears it up a bit for you. There's no question of sovereignty here. There's only a question of money -- Oracle shareholders would not approve the merger if the EU would not allow merged company to conduct business there, since they'd lose billions.
as part of the automotive bailout, the UAW now owns a majority stake in Chrysler....does this count as effort?
Part-ownership is immaterial. The UAW has little control of Chrysler. The executives control Chrysler, and they are still coming from the same group as before. Giving the UAW part ownership was a PR move, so that handing Chrysler billions of dollars would be accepted by the supporters of the Democratic Party. It's whitewashing to help people swallow corporatism.
Tell me, what does the UAW's ownership share do for the members of the union? How does it affect the relationship between the union members and the UAW leadership?
Making the UAW part owners of Chrysler hamstrings the union to negotiate effectively for its workers... it puts the union at odds with itself.
But to equate the Democratic Party, the Socialist Party, and the Communist Party is patently ridiculous.
I'm not a huge fan of the Democratic Party, though I'm liberal. The Democratic Party is Corporatist, just like the Republican Party. It's nowhere near Socialist or Communist. Yes, there are *some* socialist aspects to the Democratic Party, but these are far outweighed by the corporatist (quasi-fascist) elements.
And Communism is about as far as you can get from the Democratic Party. When was the last time the Dems made any effort to put control of industry in the hands of the people working in the industry?
Wake up and smell the coffee.
The cash for buying houses? Handouts to the banks. The cash-for-clunkers program? Handouts to the car companies and the banks.
Socialized medicine? We don't even know *if* there will be a public option (which doesn't make it a socialized system anyway), and if there is, you can bet it will be like Medicare, which is a boon to practitioners, no matter how much some of them complain about it.
Oracle could have reassured them at any time, if they knew, and cared, which isn't a very realistic expectation for a small team in a big merger.
But anyone in that position knows that those assurances aren't worth the air breathed to utter them.
Given today's job market, if you're in an uncertain position, and you get a good offer elsewhere that seems more certain -- you take it.
What happens if the regulators deny the merger application? If you've stuck around, now you're in a lame-duck company and you can see your employer has lost a large portion of your customer base to IBM.
What happens if the merger is accepted? At least now you've got a chance of your employer taking advantage of Oracle's sales & marketing force, etc. That is, if you're not let go as a result of the merger.
In short, employees are leaving Sun because they don't like uncertainty. Never mind the customers leaving Sun for the same reason (amongst other reasons).
The length of time it's taking for the review process is definitely a factor.
That said, I think the review is important, and I hope it's taking so long because of thoroughness, not because of some stupid attempt to hamstring American companies.
I suppose that would fall under the category of collateral damage, and they're probably expecting everyone within sight of the target to be, well, "The Enemy(tm)."
And yet weapons intended to blind people are verboten.
Sure, we can claim that the intent was not to blind people, it was accidental and due only to the type of defense deployed by the enemy...
But even so, this kind of weapon is pushing the limits of the treaties the US has signed. The first time this weapon is deployed against personnel, instead of against vehicles or buildings, there would be a case to be made that we've committed a war crime.
The Fourth Council of Ristorante determined that there is no such thing as "slightly" al dente. It is al dente or not al dente; there is no in-between. The path to damnation is lined with compromise, and we'll have none of that here!
Slashdot Mirror
The reason France gets so much of its power from nuclear has nothing to do with the science education of its citizenry. It is because France has no other choice economically. Next to no fossil fuels, and solar has been more expensive than nuclear so far.
There was a decent article in Nat Geo sometime in the past year or two that went into some detail about this.
France has less resistance among the general population not due to science education, but because the French people don't want to pay high prices for imported fuels and/or energy. Plus the French government mounted a massive PR campaign to increase acceptance, because of the national security issues involved in energy independence, especially during the cold war.
Japan's reasons for nuclear are along the same lines. You can't point to the Japanese as accepting nuclear power because of science education -- they have an entire genre of movies based on the unforeseen consequences of nuclear power (Godzilla, etc).
Japan has adopted nuclear power for the same reason France has -- economics and national security.
Our society STAGNATES on those things I speak poorly of. While a strong workforce and structure are necessary, we also need to make sure we have the environment where those with potential to effect great positive change are capable of reaching their potential.
Read case studies of the creative geniuses who've changed our world. One of the most common themes is that their educational experience was not institutionalized.
Yes, we have to churn out productive drones that support our economy. But we should not, at the same time, limit the creative production of the people who could benefit society the most.
I'm not anti-establishment, BTW. I'm just against the idea of shoehorning bright people into a system that will limit their potential.
so your point is that traditional schooling does not affect the potential of an individual? Or that it can only increase their potential? I think that public school indoctrination limits the potential of many individuals who are brightest. Students who are socially and institutionally dissuaded from excelling, for example (Don't study so hard, let someone else win some awards, etc). Students who are actively dissuaded from accelerating their pace of study (no reading ahead in the textbook, etc).
I fail to appreciate your point because I feel it does not have merit. I've explained why (previously, and at length in this post).
You did not demolish it, as I pointed out in my last post. Care to address the means by which I tore down your "proof"? Or are you still going to stand by a "proof" that does not meet the test of logic?
And my point is that tossing in extra barriers to the cream rising to the top is a stupid idea. You do not promote greatness by throwing up roadblocks -- that inhibits greatness. While we're at it, why don't we make everyone live in a hovel and have to perform subsistence farming? Surely THAT would force the cream to rise to the top, right?
Please, before you continue down your illogical track, consider one concept that has continued to escape you: Is it possible that an institutionalized culture could inhibit the ability of some individuals to achieve greatness? If your answer is yes, then your argument is void. If your answer is no, then you've got, in my opinion, a sad and twisted understanding of what drives creative intelligence and excellence.
This has nothing to do with whether some people believe themselves to have greater potential than they actually do, which is a point you continue to harp on without recognizing that there are indeed people with great potential who we limit via poor educational institutions.
And yet the reason they are supported so much by the right is because they know that's how the card will fall.
As for all the media that you watch/listen to/read, I couldn't care less -- that has nothing to do with whether or not you buy into silly conspiracy theories.
My concern is that you fail to realize that you're a victim of a PR snowjob intended to drum up support for a strategically valuable political tool.
I'm not opposed to school vouchers, by the way. What I'm opposed to is them being used as a front for de-secularizing school systems, which is the intention of many on the right.
When I lived in a city, my wife and I had *zero* cars. This is common for dense urban areas; two cars per household is rare. When we needed a car (road trips, etc) we rented one.
I used my saddlebags and trailer for my bike when grocery shopping then, and I still do even though I'm out in the boonies now (and we have two cars).
I think the market that a product like this is geared to is not the two-cars-in-the-burbs market.
Hah. You think Joe and Judy are going to be concerned about the big picture when they are trying to order Suzie's birthday party invitations and can't? The big picture is nice and all, but to expect people to act reasonably is, in my experience, a recipe for disappointment.
More of the same. "If we can scare people, we can sell more product, er, I mean, clean up the internet," says security vendor.
They don't want to clean up the internet. They want to continue to make money selling products to people who need them (or are scared).
You have huge partisan blinders on.
I know you're not going to remove them anytime soon, but if you believe the Republicans are not as much a party to the effort to keep the general public ignorant and complacent as the Democrats, then I pity you.
School vouchers aren't about competition in educational systems for the purpose of better education (despite all the PR crap you might have read). They're about putting religion into education. It's the conservatives trying to expand their base by allowing kids to circumvent getting an education where they *might* learn to think for themselves.
Every conspiracy your poor addled mind sees on the left can be matched with an equally plausible conspiracy on the right. You choose to believe the conspiracy theory that bests suits your ideology.
There are several factors that I'd want to compare products on if I were in the market for a personal motorized transport device.
1. Size
2. Weight
3. Ergonomics -- sitting or standing? Comfort?
4. Range
5. Durability
6. Cargo capacity
For me, #6 would be a dealbreaker, the others are ones I could compromise on. What is the cargo capacity on a segway? How many saddlebags and how much weight can it handle? If I couldn't do my family's grocery shopping with it, I wouldn't consider it.
But I'm not in the market for one of these, since I have a bike with good cargo capacity (and a trailer for when I need it), and I live in a small town, not a city.
Conversely, the purpose is to create automatons who will follow the "guidance" of their leaders in their Churches and in the Republican Party no matter how much it contradicts with their own personal interests.
Don't make this a partisan issue. A complacent public accustomed to monotony benefits all those with power, independent of political affiliation. It's about serving the wealthy.
And here you lay out my point for me, without understanding the implications. Why do they lack the drive? Did the educational system contribute to their lack of drive? Could society benefit from a differing educational track for these individuals, whereby we all might benefit from their works, if their potential was realized?
That's neither falsification nor a proof. The fact that some people have excelled after institutionalized education has nothing to do with whether others would have excelled but for our institutionalized education system.
Apparently, logic and reason is not your strong point.
That "special snowflake" label is useless in your context, you completely mistake the point. There are, in fact, some special individuals. The "special snowflake" issue is one of too many people believing they fit into that category, and believing there is entitlement because of it. The truth is, there *are* people who should (for society's sake) be educated differently because of their gifts. The problem is convincing the parents of the normals that their kids do not meet the criteria.
-Donald Rumsfeld
My concern with unschooling is that the set of unknown unknowns becomes too large.
That's horsecrap.
I know many brilliant people who never lived up to their potential partly because, among other reasons, they were completely stifled in a public education system. They were never taught how to work hard to learn, how to challenge themselves.
Yes, there's some selfishness and entitlement issues with people feeling that their school system failed their brilliance.
But from a societal standpoint, that educational system failed society at large by not nurturing the potential of those people.
But of course, that's not the purpose of the educational system in the US. The purpose is to create a functional workforce that is conditioned to structured systems.
No. No, you would not literally boil yourself (unless you are at some ridiculously high elevation where the boiling point of water is under 100 F).
Instead, you would suffer tissue damage due to electrolyte imbalances and some protein denaturation.
FWIW, the "Calvin's Dad" effect is a huge positive. Even in the strip, BW pointed out the benefits:
1. Calvin learns to not always trust authority figures.
2. Calvin learns that he should look things up on his own, to find the truth himself, and not depend on others to slake his curiosity.
While I agree with you on kids needing to learn how to deal with structure (to a certain extent -- many of the happiest people I know operate outside of normal structure systems, like a formal workplace), I completely disagree on the Calvin's Dad effect... I believe one of the best things you can teach a kid is to think critically and do research for themselves.
This thread is a good illustration.
Heh, that shouldn't be modded flamebait.
If anything, it deserves elaboration.
A large company can potentially provide computing services to a client for less cost than if the client supplied their own needs.
If I need server capacity, or raw processing, at a high volume but only infrequently, it might cost a lot for me to buy the capacity myself, when not using it all the time. If I need data storage, I may have issues with scaling, and with laying out the cash quickly to purchase new drives.
Cloud services allow for small companies to take advantage of economies of scale. Sure, the provider gets a cut -- but it still may be a bargain for the small company.
What? Maybe for beef, I'm not sure...
But for pigs, it's really important that you kill them unexpectedly, or the meat gets an off flavor. I always used to drop mine off at the butchers, where he'd treat them nicely for a couple days for them to get content and acclimated, then he'd shoot them when they weren't expecting it.
This is why all the best butchers are ninjas and/or members of the Spanish Inquisition.
This is an issue of selection bias. We only remember the mergers that go poorly.
For very large companies, there are a lot more things that can go expensively wrong during mergers, so perhaps the incidence of failure goes up. But there are notable mergers that have succeeded, from a profit point-of-view.
At any rate, the risk of a flop is balanced against the payout. If you have near-bottomless pockets, as Oracle does, then wagering 5 billion on a potential flop may make sense... the expected payout might be 7 billion, even if the failure risk is 75% (the payout if successful would need to be 28 billion). The math here is overly simplified, but you get the point...
One other note... if a company holds onto a ton of cash, their shareholders can get angry. That cash is wasted if not invested (in the core business, or via acquisitions). So shareholders will demand that there is either a stock buyback (a la Microsoft), a dividend paid, or that the cash is used for an acquisition or for other investment in the business. Oracle's strategy has been primarily acquisition to "dispose" of excess cash.
They don't need foreign approval to merge.
What they need to know is whether they'll be allowed to sell their products and services in that very large foreign market if they do merge.
The confusion, I think, is because it's a kind of mental shorthand to think of it as merger approval, when that is not actually what is under consideration right now.
I hope this clears it up a bit for you. There's no question of sovereignty here. There's only a question of money -- Oracle shareholders would not approve the merger if the EU would not allow merged company to conduct business there, since they'd lose billions.
You discuss hardware and software.
Perhaps you are unaware that IBM is primarily a services company nowadays?
The hardware and software is a tool to sell services.
You know that's where Oracle is aiming for growth too, right?
For all the advantages you see for Solaris over its competition, IBM's service offering is miles ahead of Oracle right now...
Part-ownership is immaterial. The UAW has little control of Chrysler. The executives control Chrysler, and they are still coming from the same group as before. Giving the UAW part ownership was a PR move, so that handing Chrysler billions of dollars would be accepted by the supporters of the Democratic Party. It's whitewashing to help people swallow corporatism.
Tell me, what does the UAW's ownership share do for the members of the union? How does it affect the relationship between the union members and the UAW leadership?
Making the UAW part owners of Chrysler hamstrings the union to negotiate effectively for its workers... it puts the union at odds with itself.
WTF? That is marked insightful?
It's slightly humorous, yes.
But to equate the Democratic Party, the Socialist Party, and the Communist Party is patently ridiculous.
I'm not a huge fan of the Democratic Party, though I'm liberal. The Democratic Party is Corporatist, just like the Republican Party. It's nowhere near Socialist or Communist. Yes, there are *some* socialist aspects to the Democratic Party, but these are far outweighed by the corporatist (quasi-fascist) elements.
And Communism is about as far as you can get from the Democratic Party. When was the last time the Dems made any effort to put control of industry in the hands of the people working in the industry?
Wake up and smell the coffee.
The cash for buying houses? Handouts to the banks. The cash-for-clunkers program? Handouts to the car companies and the banks.
Socialized medicine? We don't even know *if* there will be a public option (which doesn't make it a socialized system anyway), and if there is, you can bet it will be like Medicare, which is a boon to practitioners, no matter how much some of them complain about it.
But anyone in that position knows that those assurances aren't worth the air breathed to utter them.
Given today's job market, if you're in an uncertain position, and you get a good offer elsewhere that seems more certain -- you take it.
What happens if the regulators deny the merger application? If you've stuck around, now you're in a lame-duck company and you can see your employer has lost a large portion of your customer base to IBM.
What happens if the merger is accepted? At least now you've got a chance of your employer taking advantage of Oracle's sales & marketing force, etc. That is, if you're not let go as a result of the merger.
In short, employees are leaving Sun because they don't like uncertainty. Never mind the customers leaving Sun for the same reason (amongst other reasons).
The length of time it's taking for the review process is definitely a factor.
That said, I think the review is important, and I hope it's taking so long because of thoroughness, not because of some stupid attempt to hamstring American companies.
And yet weapons intended to blind people are verboten.
Sure, we can claim that the intent was not to blind people, it was accidental and due only to the type of defense deployed by the enemy...
But even so, this kind of weapon is pushing the limits of the treaties the US has signed. The first time this weapon is deployed against personnel, instead of against vehicles or buildings, there would be a case to be made that we've committed a war crime.
Sacrilege!
The Fourth Council of Ristorante determined that there is no such thing as "slightly" al dente. It is al dente or not al dente; there is no in-between. The path to damnation is lined with compromise, and we'll have none of that here!
Glory to his name, Ramen.