That's an interesting way of looking at things, except historically there's never been a problem creating your own compiler or interpreter for an existing managed language. This is precisely why Microsoft's C# is an ISO/ECMA standard, because it means other people can create their own implementation for the standard language hence spreading it's use and adoption leading to net benefits for the company.
For example, in developing Android apps that connect to a web server someone may then go on to pay for and use Sun's enterprise products which makes sense as you're keeping the technology the same. They might even have gone on to use one of Oracle's database solutions too.
The irony now is that it seems Google would've actually been no less safe in creating a C# VM and having that as their development language. Although, from what I can tell of this case the issue is the VM itself rather than the language itself- this means that if Oracle wins this case then any other technology almost certainly including all Microsoft's.NET languages running on the CLR (in other words the CLR itself) are at risk of also infringing these patents.
This is bad all round, if Oracle isn't careful not only do they risk killing interest in Java, but also stifling all modern programming language development too and we'll all be worse off for that, whichever side of the fence we sit on. Look at the things covered in this post:
When I was at an airshow the other week I was speaking to some intelligence guys and discussing Afghanistan with them, they had a nice high resolution map on display of the regions where British troops are based and they answered all sorts of questions I asked about the region such as where the most dangerous areas were, whether the open areas were generally free of insurgents and whether it was just limited to areas around population centres and so forth, but one question they couldn't answer that I asked was along the lines of:
"Whereabouts are all the poppies and opium we here about grown? I get the impression it's a big deal over there but there doesn't seem much fertile land so does it grow out in the deserts or just near the main rivers?"
This is one question they couldn't answer, they simply said they had no idea because it's not something they've ever been focussed on, some staff pay attention to the poppy problem but it's not something that is the concern of most people who have been there and looking at intel there.
So perhaps this is why there may be a shortage of reports about poppies and heroin- for most troops it's not something they're focussed on, it's only a small set of the total troops over there who are focussed on dealing with the poppy problem, hence the chance of it being discussed is quite low when it's limited to those few who deal with that particular problem. It's well known that growing poppies is a way of life for most Afghans so for the combat troops on patrol it's best to leave them too it, and sure they may find a heroin stash every once in a while, but most are far more concerned with IEDs, insurgents, reconstruction, and that sort of thing.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree but one point I'll make- WL's release schedule is far from super-tight, they've been sat on these documents for months upon months
There's something quite ironic about America claiming Julian Assange is putting British troops in danger.
America has killed more British troops in the last decade through gung-ho incompetence resulting in friendly fire deaths and injuries than Wikileaks has, and likely ever will.
If the recent leak leads to America's forces being told to be a little more careful before pulling the trigger then I suspect Wikileaks is actually making the world a safer place not just for civilians in combat zones where Americans are deployed, but for British troops too.
If the Obama administration is unhappy about the leaks the most sensible thing to do is make sure that they act a little more competently in future so that next time data leaks there's nothing to make them look bad in the first place. The only people who can be blamed for things like Task Force 373 sounding more like Dad's Army with their antics than a special forces unit are the US authorities, no one else.
"The problem (as Amnesty sees it) is a short-term risk of widespread retribution as a side-effect of the release of the unredacted documents. This is a problem entirely of Assange's making and therefore attacking Amnesty for not stumping up the cash to mitigate it is misguided at best."
Absolutely it's a problem of Assange's making, but the point is Assange recognises that, his viewpoint seems to be that yes it's a problem, but it's not a problem worth blocking the release of the files, because if that decreases US civilian deaths, improves US security practices, and puts more pressure on Pakistan to stop their security services backing the Taliban then it's of net benefit.
The alternative for WL was to not leak the documents because they didn't have the resources to deal with the problem at all. It's also worth keeping in mind that a few months ago they put out a request for help from volunteers for exactly this sort of thing as well as other things such as assistance providing servers etc.- did Amnesty offer any help there? I very much doubt it.
They seem to have made the best of what they had available whilst achieving their aims, and Amnesty has had the opportunity to pitch in and help all along. Yes it's an issue of Wikileak's making, but it's not as if it's not at least counterbalanced by anything positive. It's not as if Amnesty doesn't have the opportunity to help rectify it, and I'd argue, it's not as if they haven't had the opportunity all along to get involved with Wikileaks. Will they now help ensure the remaining 15,000 reports have any names redacted? I guess we'll have to wait and see, but again, Wikileak's goal is improving transparency, Amnesty's goal is improving human rights, if Amnesty isn't willing to muck in and help with it's goal it can't expect others to do it for them and complain if they don't.
I think the problem smaller cars like the Micra face is also that many new and older drivers go for them because it's smaller and hence easier for them to maneuvre when it comes to parking and such which is the real reason many of them are also a little slow and not too great at controlling the vehicle.
When I drove a Peugeot 207 for a short while I noticed the difference in acceleration as you mention, it took a few days to get used to giving it more revs and lower gear than I was used to. Always thought it was quite a nice looking car though even if a little underpowered!
I wasn't really making a comment on the article per-se as should be clear by the fact I pointed that out in my post by mentioning I wasn't familiar with the case. I was just responding to someone making the suggestion that an online based admittance is enough to convict.
I'm not sure how it works elsewhere, but I do not believe in the UK that even that would pass a beyond reasonable doubt test if the problems with such evidence's accuracy were fully understood. Certainly in non technology related crimes people have been allowed to go free even when suspicion is extremely high on such circumstancial evidence.
You still can't prove beyond reasonable doubt even if there are posts on other forums with similar accounts that it's not part of some framing running over a longer period. I'm not saying convictions don't and wont happen, they do, but only because the jury is often not technical enough to know what reasonable is in this sorts of case. Mostly though for these sorts of cases the police just rely on strong arming with plea bargains and pushing for admittance of guilt directly, or alternatively have just involved people too technically inept to understand how they could argue their innocent, hence why someone denying all knowledge is largely untested still.
By confessing he's effectively acting a witness to his own online admittance of guilt. The police are effectively using the comment as a witness statement that someone has made, and he's confirming it's truth making the comment valid evidence in itself.
So the evidence is there, but only because he admitted guilt, if he had not admitted guilt they would not have had verified evidence, nor would they have had his admittance of guilt.
At least that means there's no precedent being set where the conviction is based only on the comment then which is good and really how things should be. As I say, the comments are fair enough reason to investigate, and if he then admitted guilt then it seems a reasonable conviction as it's the admittance of guilt that effectively got him convicted in the end so I don't think there's really any news here.
I'm not sure why that's posted on a spoof site, in my experience it's quite fucking true! BMWs seem pretty common and run of the mill in the UK now and I don't really encounter many that are driven badly above the norm for most cars, One series seem common as muck and I even saw one with one of those learner signs on the top of it the other day which made me chuckle.
Most Audi drivers on the other hand, there's generally two types, there's the middle England Daily Mail reading wife who drives one because her husband bought her it and she thinks it makes her cool but actually scares the living shit out of her to drive so she sticks to 30mph on safe 60mph roads, and then there's the dickhead, who drives 60mph on safe 30mph roads, overtaking on blind corners down country lanes because he thinks the national speed limit sign means "Drive as fast as you fucking can at a minimum of 60mph down every part of this road", when in reality it means something along the lines of "Drive whatever speed is safe for the section of the road you are on, upto 60mph on safe open straight parts with good visibility".
But then it's also no suprise that on the 25 mile commute each way a day I do, that the cars I see in bushes are also nearly always Audis, driven by both types of driver- the dickhead who lost control, and the middle England Daily Mail reading wife who did a 90 degree turn off the side of the road into a ditch because a tractor was coming the other way on the other side of the road towards her at 10mph and that made her panic.
Still, it could be worse, at least they're not the annoying Nissan Micra and Fiat 500 drivers that seem to exist solely to slow the flow of traffic down to something like 5mph on every stretch of road possible whilst still managing to drift across the other side of the road because turning the wheel to navigate a 2 mile long 10 degree turn is just too much for them!
The problem is there's no way to prove the physical connection between who typed that comment and posted the pictures and the person potentially breaking the law.
What if he had a falling out with his brother and his brother used the computer to try and frame him for example?
This is quite different to someone admitting in front of witnesses they have committed a crime, because there the witnesses have witnessed the perpetrator in question admitting the crime directly.
This is the fundamental problem with computer crimes, people are arrested and convicted on much lower standards of evidence than have come to be expected in real life. Say a computer is used for a crime online, and the police trace the IP back to the house, and they can somehow prove the IP has always been attached to that computer and only that computer and they search that computer and find evidence of the crime, then can they prove the owner of the computer committed it? Say they check for finger prints and DNA evidence on the keyboard even, can they prove someone didn't just plug in another keyboard for the purpose of carrying out the crime?
It's the fundamental disconnect between the system used to commit the crime and the person who used that system to commit it that is the problem, and short of someone making a mistake and incriminating themselves physically in real life or someone physically witnessing the crime being committed I'm not sure it's ever possible to conclusively prove people responsible for digital crimes, at best you can get a decent amount of evidence, but many cases of non-digital crimes upto and including the most serious have fallen flat on such low standards of evidence even where the person is guilty.
I'm not familiar with this case, but I hope he was convicted on the basis that he also admitted guilt in real life, in person, and not purely on an internet posting as that'd be a bad precedent, a green light for smart criminals to frame people for anything from this sort of crime through to child porn crimes to hacking crimes.
A crime being linked to an IP seems fair enough justification to investigate the system or systems behind that IP and their owners, but not enough in itself to fairly secure a conviction.
I don't really see how it's blackmail, he's simply making use of the old adage- if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. This is quite true, there's no point criticising if you're not willing to help solve the problem. He's given them the opportunity to be part of the solution, but if they don't agree to be part of that then why should he have to accept criticism of his organisation from them when they're no more willing to help solve the problem themselves, but instead simply whine about it?
Wikileaks exists to provide leaked information, if people want more done with that information then they can get in touch- this is what Amnesty has done, but it's done it publicly and critically, Assange has in turn given them the opportunity to help solve the problems that are at the core of their criticism, it's really as simply as that. The real question is did these human rights groups think to contact them privately first to try and rectify the situation amicably, or are they just all mouth in which case it's akin to simply using the situation for attention whoring. Judging by the fact Assange suggested they try and solve it with a conference call it sounds like these organisations didn't think to try and solve the problem privately first and just went the attention whore route from the outset.
If you approach someone aggressively rather than constructively, then don't be suprised if you get a similar response in turn. This is really exactly what has happened here- the likes of AI have gone for maximum publicity from the outset rather than simply trying to actually do the right thing, and help resolve the problem.
For what it's worth, in response to your last paragraph I don't see any evidence that Assange has tried to dodge his responsibilities, he's previously stated quite clearly that he fears that one day he may have blood on his hands, but that he believes it's still absolutely the right thing to do.
That's a rather short sighted view- Assange must be dangerous because this guy says so?
Not everyone in AI puts their money where their mouth is, the organisation does unfortunately contain a lot of people who are willing to mouth off about some injustice without being willing to do anything about it, or simply mouth off about something that isn't an injustice suggesting it is because they have a naive view of the world. Whilst Amnesty has these people in it's ranks it must also expect criticism over them- George Bush did wonders for aid in Africa, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't criticise the things he did very very wrong.
Assange has quite rightly given the folks at AI the chance to put their money where their mouth is, and if they aren't willing to do so he's simply saying he's willing to make that pretty clear. The sad thing is I suspect what'll happen is that AI will agree to help, but it'll be the hard working ones that do all the work whilst the opinionated lazy wastes of space who are there merely because they never grew out of some teenage anti-establishment mindset rather than because they actually agree with the things Amnesty stands for per-se.
Wikileaks has given an insight on how the war in Afghanistan is really going, rather than the propaganda-biased version. I fail to see how that's in any way a bad thing- the fact Afghan civilian casualties are higher than reported is now seen as fact rather than speculation or rumour can only help AI's cause as it means there's more pressure than ever on NATO to cut civilian casualties, and will be more support than ever amongst the general public for ensuring casualties are cut. If the fundamental principal of ensuring safety of civilians sits above all else then the net effect of the Wikileaks leak can only be a good thing.
I suspect that the people at Amnesty complaining are the ones who simply whine about everything, without being willing to act themselves, leaving it to others in the organisation. These are people you can't ever please no matter what you do, these are the ones who if you airdropped a million pounds of aid to a village after some natural disaster would complain that you'd littered their street with the packaging.
AI isn't a magical perfect organisation, it has as many wastes of space as any other organisation, and it's not suprising that these are often the bureaucrats who send out letters to the likes of Wikileaks in the first place, the ones who do the actual hard work have better things to do- like focussing on doing that good hard work than get involved in public PR dramas.
1) How proactive and forward thinking a business is in trying to improve itself 2) How good the member of staff asking for the rise is
Some businesses do not fulfil point 1, and would rather lose someone who makes them £500k more profit a year more than the average Joe, than pay that person an extra £10k leaving them £490k out of pocket than if they just hadn't been so fucking stubborn and. Some people do not fulfil point 2 in that they think they're worth more but they most certainly aren't, in this case the business has no reason to give them a rise as they're likely easily replaced for their current wage.
If however the business fulfils point 1, and you fulfil point 2, then they'll see value in giving you a rise if you ask for it and recognise that they're better off keeping you happy and paying you what you ask and getting higher profits, than they are losing you and not getting the boost in profits.
If the business is smart, and if you're damn good at what you do then wage is certainly very negotiable. There is one other factor that often arises though- if you do think you'd underpaid and ask for more money you have to be willing to stand by what you say- if you tell them you want more money or you're going to have to consider looking elsewhere then you have to be willing to look elsewhere if they don't meet your request otherwise they'll know you were full of shit and are too lazy to go anywhere and will just keep paying you lower wages indefinitely because they'll know they can get away with it. If however they reject your requests and you start taking time off to attend interviews and asking for references then if it hurts them to lose you they may well change their mind.
If however you just do the bare minimum, don't offer the company anything they couldn't get elsewhere for the same wage and say "I want a pay rise", then no, pay certainly isn't negotiable. You have to be worth not losing, and sometimes this can even be as little as being a fairly good employee even if not somekind of superstar employee and the cost of finding a replacement for you being more expensive than just giving you the raise you ask for.
I do generally agree with you on Microsoft, they could certainly be doing much better, although I think you're being a little kind to Apple- they have had product failures, their server ranges don't do terribly well, the Apple TV was rather a flop and the MacBook Air didn't do particularly well for example, although you might be right in that they still turn a profit at least which means I suppose even there they can be called a success however small, but certainly not something that really generates worthwhile revenue.
Fundamentally though I think Apple's problems will be in terms of expanding their market, the iPod isn't selling amazingly well anymore, largely because it's been replaced by the iPhone for many users. There's also some pretty solid signs that they're facing increased competition from Android and Nokia and Windows 7 phones aren't out the game yet- they could still come back and re-take a decent share of the smartphone market and the danger here for Apple is that with the new breed of phones any loss in phone sales wont see an increase again in iPods because people's new phones even if not Apple phones will do the trick more so than they used to. Further, Apple is somewhat restricted demographically too, it's largely limited to the West, the iPhone has effectively flopped in India, China and Africa, because Apple only has individual model of the iPhones and it's simply too expensive for these markets- this leaves Apple with a dilemma, does it just ignore those markets and hope to continue to simply out-compete the competition in existing markets, or does it consider changing it's business model and introduce a budget iPhone much like with the iPod Nano and Shuffle to compete in these markets?
The iPad has potential but how much is yet to be seen, and again whether the competition will continue to fail to out-compete it in said market will be yet to be seen. Mac sales are increasing, but not really at a rate fast enough to matter compared to the profits garnered from their other divisions which is where the profit really comes from.
I'm not sure how well iTunes and the App store are doing now, but only about 6 months ago Apple themselves stated these weren't core profit centres and were barely just breaking even.
There's also the Jobs question, he wont be there forever, and have Apple as a company learnt enough this time round to cope without him?
Apple certainly has a lot of strengths, but continued success as you can see is far from guaranteed, Apple has an awful lot of work cut out for it to maintain momentum over the next decade as they have over the last decade. Whether they do decide to start producing low end products, or do something drastic like sell Mac OS X for general PCs will be interesting as it'll let them ensure continued growth, but may also lead to them growing faster than they can reasonably handle (i.e. support issues for Mac OS X on generic hardware could become a problem in such a scenario). They've played the slowy but sure card so far, but as I say can it continue indefinitely in the face of increasing competition and rapidly shrinking room for growth in their target markets? At minimum they'll maintain their core fanbase and be able to keep selling the latest model to this fanbase each year meaning they're guaranteed to maintain their solid core of profits, but it's their method of continuing growth that'll be really interesting to watch.
The problem with share prices is that they can be terribly misleading- BP has taken a massive drop because of their oil spill for example, but that doesn't stop them being one of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world even with their asset sale and losses on the spill. As I say what really fundamentally matters in terms of the actual strength of a company above all is assets and equity followed by profits.
Of course, having a market cap as high as Apple is still a good sign, it shows a lot of confidence in a company, but it far from tells the whole story or the strength of a company. It's also worth keeping in mind how quickly market cap can change too on the slightest bit of bad news.
"And you should get a better understanding of hardware profits vs software profits. Because you don't really seem clued in at all on this."
I'm not sure what you're suggesting I don't understand? That software nets more profit? yes, as I said, I get this, which makes it a better business model for achieving profit. Reality doesn't give a discount to Apple and say "Oh well, okay, so you made less profit, that's okay, we understand the profit you did make was made on hardware so obviously we'll give you an extra star for this". The fact is, Apple makes far less profit.
"And look at the last quarter for MSFT (16.1B) vs AAPL (15.7B) in revenue. That's about the same in my book. And AAPL will be above MSFT next quarter."
So you can see the future can you? No really, you may turn out to be right, you have a good chance, but so what? Read what I said, they need to be $5bn ahead next quarter, and then maintain it for the whole year, and then convert a much larger portion of that from revenue to profit. They aint going to achieve that, no company in history has made such a big leap and Apple despite Steve Jobs' scattering of magic wont be able to achieve it either- it's a long slow process, they may overtake them eventually but it'll be years. You seem to go on about hardware vs. software profits, but again here's the point- Apple can't increase it's revenue to profit conversion when large amounts of it's profit are on hardware so they need a massive boost in software to catch up- that's nowhere in sight, Apple admitted themselves that iTunes and the app store isn't a good money spinner and barely breaks even.
"Also try looking at growth patterns. MSFT flat, AAPL up. Pick any time frame in the last 10 yrs or so."
You're good at making stuff up, I'll give you that. MS are increasing too, certainly not at the rate of Apple, but increasing and most definitely not flat- their last quarter was their record ever profit for example which you know, means an upwards trend.
But here's where you're going wrong, you're assuming Apple can continue increasing at the rate they are indefinitely, that's a hell of an assumption to make. Rapid growth from the underdog is difficult but possible and Apple proved it as did Google, but the saying it's tough on top is very true- as Apple get bigger, they'll start to find things harder and will plateau off themselves.
I do generally agree with you, but I don't think that's entirely Microsoft's business model. They do have some innovations that do really well for them, Sharepoint is a fine example of a new product that netted them a lot of additional income.
So the key for them is to basically use what you mention as their core business to keep them solid, and then try and branch out from there. The XBox is another example, and this is beginning to finally pay off- they have 25 million Gold subscribers at £40 a year (well slightly less as the UK cost is a little higher) but realistically that's most likely around $1 billion of pure profit, and Microsoft's last quarter results mentioned that for the first time content has overtaken subscription costs suggesting they're at least doubling that on XBox Live alone.
The next attempts at increasing profit are Kinect and Windows Mobile 7, Bing is another possibility as it's certainly gaining share, but who knows, I'm not expecting them to be stellar performers personally, but as I say this is really all Microsoft has to do- just keep trying and trying because it's position in the market as you acknowledge isn't going anywhere any time soon because they're sufficiently big to sustain that.
My underlying point really is that a lot of people think companies rise and fall much faster than they do here on Slashdot and I believe this stems from a profound misunderstanding of how much money Microsoft actually makes regardless of how shit it is. There seems to be this idea that because Slashdot hates Microsoft, Microsoft is a poor performing company, but as much as Slashdot might like that to be true, it's really not. We have to live with them for a while yet, and quite honestly, whilst I'd gladly see them fall normally, right now, I'm more scared that that would mean a rise of Apple who in recent years seem to have shown their true colours as being much more evil. Frankly I wish they'd both fuck off, but unfortunately wishful thinking wont achieve that, again, as much as Slashdot appears to think it does.
Although, after Dell screwed me over with horrendous support charade over my faulty laptop which took 9 months for them to finally repair I did wish that they'd fuck off and die, and well, I seem to have got my wish there at least as they really have been performing abysmally in recent years.
Hmm, maybe wishful thinking isn't such a bad option after all:)
Lots of companies have higher revenue but so what? Have you never heard the following saying?-
Revenue is vanity Profit is sanity Cash is king
If Microsoft is getting more profit from it's revenues then that means it has a better business model, and as Microsoft has both higher profits and more cash Apple's increase in revenue, like it's market cap, is largely meaningless. It'll only matter when Apple overtakes Microsoft in profit and equity and assets, until that point Microsoft is still the more solid business.
To illustrate the point, Dell has a revenue of $53bn but a profit of only $1.4bn. By your logic the fact Dell has a revenue around $10bn higher than Apple it's a stronger company, but the profits tell a completely different story. I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who believes Dell, despite it's high revenue is a better bet when it has such vastly lower profits and vastly lower assets and equity.
Besides, your assertion that Apple's revenues being about the same as Microsoft isn't even close to true anyway, there's about a $20bn gap with Microsoft at $62bn and Apple at around $42bn and Microsoft's latest results showed them with more revenue than Apple too meaning Microsoft are in fact widening the gap.
Even if Apple do close the revenue gap they still don't have the profits gap closed and still don't have the assets or equity of Microsoft.
So as for where I want to be, well, I'd still rather be where Microsoft is- higher revenue, higher profits, higher equity, greater assets, and not even losing ground in those metrics.
If I were you I'd get a little better understanding of what revenue actually is, what profit is, what equity and assets are and what they mean for a company. Further, you also seem to have a confused view of the importance of quarterly revenue, for example, you suggest that Apple might pass Microsoft in revenue next quarter, which is certainly a possibility, but by how much? maybe in the absolute best case by a couple of $bn but they've got a $20bn gap to close across the year so they'd need to jump at least $5bn ahead every quarter from their current position of being behind, and once they've done that they've got to go from turning $1 in 5 of revenue into profit, down to $1 in 3 into profit which is where Microsoft is, and then building equity and assets takes time. All this for them to even catch up with Microsoft, let alone overtake it.
I generally agree with you though, I'm not sure the conclusions are valid from what's given. It basically says 0.26% of black cars, the most stolen colour, get stolen, whilst 0.16% of red cars, the least stolen get stolen. Apparently there's something like 6.8 million vehicles in the Netherlands, but it's hard from the data to tell how many cars this actually translates to in practice, particularly as the graph given changes over time, and older cars will most likely be off the road. I'm sure you could figure it out by averaging the amount bought over the period and factor in an exponential decrease in those taken off the road, but it'd be more reasonable if the author had done this. The very fact he does seem to have basically left things half finished and come to a conclusion without providing better supporting evidence and clearer data does leave me a little skeptical I'll admit, the level of work done would be fine for a high school science class, but for a professor of economics? a bit of a poor show to be honest.
Personally, if I had a choice, I'd gladly take Microsoft's non-viable business model at $18bn profit in the last year more than I'd take any other technology company's as that's over double Apple's profits and nearly triple Google's profits.
Microsoft's got a perfectly viable business model, such that it's still consistently slaughtering the competition in the technology market in terms of profit they make year on year- I think IBM is the next closest at around $12bn and HP 3rd at about $9bn, although I could be wrong, I've not been paying attention to all of them.
The issue is simply that Microsoft is struggling to grow their market even more, not that they don't in fact make fuck loads of profit, and have a metric shit ton of assets and equity. The fact is it can do things like the Kin, the Zune, the XBox, and whether they flop or not is irrelevant when they're still pulling in more profit than any other technology company out there from the profits of their core business. If however one of their adventures does turn out to be a hit then great, they've widened the gap even more, if not, then, well, their lead in terms of profit is still pretty massive and even Apple and Google's resounding successes in comparison over the last decade haven't even come close to closing the gap. Unless Microsoft has a secret oil drilling operation that's going to explode due to poor maintenance in the gulf of Mexico soon then there's not too much that'll change that in the forseeable future. As a company, financially, they're still a behemoth, and are as solid as a rock.
Slashdot Mirror
That's an interesting way of looking at things, except historically there's never been a problem creating your own compiler or interpreter for an existing managed language. This is precisely why Microsoft's C# is an ISO/ECMA standard, because it means other people can create their own implementation for the standard language hence spreading it's use and adoption leading to net benefits for the company.
For example, in developing Android apps that connect to a web server someone may then go on to pay for and use Sun's enterprise products which makes sense as you're keeping the technology the same. They might even have gone on to use one of Oracle's database solutions too.
The irony now is that it seems Google would've actually been no less safe in creating a C# VM and having that as their development language. Although, from what I can tell of this case the issue is the VM itself rather than the language itself- this means that if Oracle wins this case then any other technology almost certainly including all Microsoft's .NET languages running on the CLR (in other words the CLR itself) are at risk of also infringing these patents.
This is bad all round, if Oracle isn't careful not only do they risk killing interest in Java, but also stifling all modern programming language development too and we'll all be worse off for that, whichever side of the fence we sit on. Look at the things covered in this post:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1752790&cid=33237368
Some of them are important advances in modern programming languages that make all code written using them better off.
When I was at an airshow the other week I was speaking to some intelligence guys and discussing Afghanistan with them, they had a nice high resolution map on display of the regions where British troops are based and they answered all sorts of questions I asked about the region such as where the most dangerous areas were, whether the open areas were generally free of insurgents and whether it was just limited to areas around population centres and so forth, but one question they couldn't answer that I asked was along the lines of:
"Whereabouts are all the poppies and opium we here about grown? I get the impression it's a big deal over there but there doesn't seem much fertile land so does it grow out in the deserts or just near the main rivers?"
This is one question they couldn't answer, they simply said they had no idea because it's not something they've ever been focussed on, some staff pay attention to the poppy problem but it's not something that is the concern of most people who have been there and looking at intel there.
So perhaps this is why there may be a shortage of reports about poppies and heroin- for most troops it's not something they're focussed on, it's only a small set of the total troops over there who are focussed on dealing with the poppy problem, hence the chance of it being discussed is quite low when it's limited to those few who deal with that particular problem. It's well known that growing poppies is a way of life for most Afghans so for the combat troops on patrol it's best to leave them too it, and sure they may find a heroin stash every once in a while, but most are far more concerned with IEDs, insurgents, reconstruction, and that sort of thing.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree but one point I'll make- WL's release schedule is far from super-tight, they've been sat on these documents for months upon months
Miles are still the standard measure of distance for motoring in England on every road sign, every map, and in every car.
There's something quite ironic about America claiming Julian Assange is putting British troops in danger.
America has killed more British troops in the last decade through gung-ho incompetence resulting in friendly fire deaths and injuries than Wikileaks has, and likely ever will.
If the recent leak leads to America's forces being told to be a little more careful before pulling the trigger then I suspect Wikileaks is actually making the world a safer place not just for civilians in combat zones where Americans are deployed, but for British troops too.
If the Obama administration is unhappy about the leaks the most sensible thing to do is make sure that they act a little more competently in future so that next time data leaks there's nothing to make them look bad in the first place. The only people who can be blamed for things like Task Force 373 sounding more like Dad's Army with their antics than a special forces unit are the US authorities, no one else.
The difference is I don't put people's lives at risk (or sometimes more than at risk and actually cause people to die) when I'm being an arsehole.
"The problem (as Amnesty sees it) is a short-term risk of widespread retribution as a side-effect of the release of the unredacted documents. This is a problem entirely of Assange's making and therefore attacking Amnesty for not stumping up the cash to mitigate it is misguided at best."
Absolutely it's a problem of Assange's making, but the point is Assange recognises that, his viewpoint seems to be that yes it's a problem, but it's not a problem worth blocking the release of the files, because if that decreases US civilian deaths, improves US security practices, and puts more pressure on Pakistan to stop their security services backing the Taliban then it's of net benefit.
The alternative for WL was to not leak the documents because they didn't have the resources to deal with the problem at all. It's also worth keeping in mind that a few months ago they put out a request for help from volunteers for exactly this sort of thing as well as other things such as assistance providing servers etc.- did Amnesty offer any help there? I very much doubt it.
They seem to have made the best of what they had available whilst achieving their aims, and Amnesty has had the opportunity to pitch in and help all along. Yes it's an issue of Wikileak's making, but it's not as if it's not at least counterbalanced by anything positive. It's not as if Amnesty doesn't have the opportunity to help rectify it, and I'd argue, it's not as if they haven't had the opportunity all along to get involved with Wikileaks. Will they now help ensure the remaining 15,000 reports have any names redacted? I guess we'll have to wait and see, but again, Wikileak's goal is improving transparency, Amnesty's goal is improving human rights, if Amnesty isn't willing to muck in and help with it's goal it can't expect others to do it for them and complain if they don't.
I think the problem smaller cars like the Micra face is also that many new and older drivers go for them because it's smaller and hence easier for them to maneuvre when it comes to parking and such which is the real reason many of them are also a little slow and not too great at controlling the vehicle.
When I drove a Peugeot 207 for a short while I noticed the difference in acceleration as you mention, it took a few days to get used to giving it more revs and lower gear than I was used to. Always thought it was quite a nice looking car though even if a little underpowered!
I wasn't really making a comment on the article per-se as should be clear by the fact I pointed that out in my post by mentioning I wasn't familiar with the case. I was just responding to someone making the suggestion that an online based admittance is enough to convict.
I'm not sure how it works elsewhere, but I do not believe in the UK that even that would pass a beyond reasonable doubt test if the problems with such evidence's accuracy were fully understood. Certainly in non technology related crimes people have been allowed to go free even when suspicion is extremely high on such circumstancial evidence.
You still can't prove beyond reasonable doubt even if there are posts on other forums with similar accounts that it's not part of some framing running over a longer period. I'm not saying convictions don't and wont happen, they do, but only because the jury is often not technical enough to know what reasonable is in this sorts of case. Mostly though for these sorts of cases the police just rely on strong arming with plea bargains and pushing for admittance of guilt directly, or alternatively have just involved people too technically inept to understand how they could argue their innocent, hence why someone denying all knowledge is largely untested still.
By confessing he's effectively acting a witness to his own online admittance of guilt. The police are effectively using the comment as a witness statement that someone has made, and he's confirming it's truth making the comment valid evidence in itself.
So the evidence is there, but only because he admitted guilt, if he had not admitted guilt they would not have had verified evidence, nor would they have had his admittance of guilt.
At least that means there's no precedent being set where the conviction is based only on the comment then which is good and really how things should be. As I say, the comments are fair enough reason to investigate, and if he then admitted guilt then it seems a reasonable conviction as it's the admittance of guilt that effectively got him convicted in the end so I don't think there's really any news here.
I'm not sure why that's posted on a spoof site, in my experience it's quite fucking true! BMWs seem pretty common and run of the mill in the UK now and I don't really encounter many that are driven badly above the norm for most cars, One series seem common as muck and I even saw one with one of those learner signs on the top of it the other day which made me chuckle.
Most Audi drivers on the other hand, there's generally two types, there's the middle England Daily Mail reading wife who drives one because her husband bought her it and she thinks it makes her cool but actually scares the living shit out of her to drive so she sticks to 30mph on safe 60mph roads, and then there's the dickhead, who drives 60mph on safe 30mph roads, overtaking on blind corners down country lanes because he thinks the national speed limit sign means "Drive as fast as you fucking can at a minimum of 60mph down every part of this road", when in reality it means something along the lines of "Drive whatever speed is safe for the section of the road you are on, upto 60mph on safe open straight parts with good visibility".
But then it's also no suprise that on the 25 mile commute each way a day I do, that the cars I see in bushes are also nearly always Audis, driven by both types of driver- the dickhead who lost control, and the middle England Daily Mail reading wife who did a 90 degree turn off the side of the road into a ditch because a tractor was coming the other way on the other side of the road towards her at 10mph and that made her panic.
Still, it could be worse, at least they're not the annoying Nissan Micra and Fiat 500 drivers that seem to exist solely to slow the flow of traffic down to something like 5mph on every stretch of road possible whilst still managing to drift across the other side of the road because turning the wheel to navigate a 2 mile long 10 degree turn is just too much for them!
The problem is there's no way to prove the physical connection between who typed that comment and posted the pictures and the person potentially breaking the law.
What if he had a falling out with his brother and his brother used the computer to try and frame him for example?
This is quite different to someone admitting in front of witnesses they have committed a crime, because there the witnesses have witnessed the perpetrator in question admitting the crime directly.
This is the fundamental problem with computer crimes, people are arrested and convicted on much lower standards of evidence than have come to be expected in real life. Say a computer is used for a crime online, and the police trace the IP back to the house, and they can somehow prove the IP has always been attached to that computer and only that computer and they search that computer and find evidence of the crime, then can they prove the owner of the computer committed it? Say they check for finger prints and DNA evidence on the keyboard even, can they prove someone didn't just plug in another keyboard for the purpose of carrying out the crime?
It's the fundamental disconnect between the system used to commit the crime and the person who used that system to commit it that is the problem, and short of someone making a mistake and incriminating themselves physically in real life or someone physically witnessing the crime being committed I'm not sure it's ever possible to conclusively prove people responsible for digital crimes, at best you can get a decent amount of evidence, but many cases of non-digital crimes upto and including the most serious have fallen flat on such low standards of evidence even where the person is guilty.
I'm not familiar with this case, but I hope he was convicted on the basis that he also admitted guilt in real life, in person, and not purely on an internet posting as that'd be a bad precedent, a green light for smart criminals to frame people for anything from this sort of crime through to child porn crimes to hacking crimes.
A crime being linked to an IP seems fair enough justification to investigate the system or systems behind that IP and their owners, but not enough in itself to fairly secure a conviction.
I don't really see how it's blackmail, he's simply making use of the old adage- if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. This is quite true, there's no point criticising if you're not willing to help solve the problem. He's given them the opportunity to be part of the solution, but if they don't agree to be part of that then why should he have to accept criticism of his organisation from them when they're no more willing to help solve the problem themselves, but instead simply whine about it?
Wikileaks exists to provide leaked information, if people want more done with that information then they can get in touch- this is what Amnesty has done, but it's done it publicly and critically, Assange has in turn given them the opportunity to help solve the problems that are at the core of their criticism, it's really as simply as that. The real question is did these human rights groups think to contact them privately first to try and rectify the situation amicably, or are they just all mouth in which case it's akin to simply using the situation for attention whoring. Judging by the fact Assange suggested they try and solve it with a conference call it sounds like these organisations didn't think to try and solve the problem privately first and just went the attention whore route from the outset.
If you approach someone aggressively rather than constructively, then don't be suprised if you get a similar response in turn. This is really exactly what has happened here- the likes of AI have gone for maximum publicity from the outset rather than simply trying to actually do the right thing, and help resolve the problem.
For what it's worth, in response to your last paragraph I don't see any evidence that Assange has tried to dodge his responsibilities, he's previously stated quite clearly that he fears that one day he may have blood on his hands, but that he believes it's still absolutely the right thing to do.
Test
That's a rather short sighted view- Assange must be dangerous because this guy says so?
Not everyone in AI puts their money where their mouth is, the organisation does unfortunately contain a lot of people who are willing to mouth off about some injustice without being willing to do anything about it, or simply mouth off about something that isn't an injustice suggesting it is because they have a naive view of the world. Whilst Amnesty has these people in it's ranks it must also expect criticism over them- George Bush did wonders for aid in Africa, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't criticise the things he did very very wrong.
Assange has quite rightly given the folks at AI the chance to put their money where their mouth is, and if they aren't willing to do so he's simply saying he's willing to make that pretty clear. The sad thing is I suspect what'll happen is that AI will agree to help, but it'll be the hard working ones that do all the work whilst the opinionated lazy wastes of space who are there merely because they never grew out of some teenage anti-establishment mindset rather than because they actually agree with the things Amnesty stands for per-se.
Wikileaks has given an insight on how the war in Afghanistan is really going, rather than the propaganda-biased version. I fail to see how that's in any way a bad thing- the fact Afghan civilian casualties are higher than reported is now seen as fact rather than speculation or rumour can only help AI's cause as it means there's more pressure than ever on NATO to cut civilian casualties, and will be more support than ever amongst the general public for ensuring casualties are cut. If the fundamental principal of ensuring safety of civilians sits above all else then the net effect of the Wikileaks leak can only be a good thing.
I suspect that the people at Amnesty complaining are the ones who simply whine about everything, without being willing to act themselves, leaving it to others in the organisation. These are people you can't ever please no matter what you do, these are the ones who if you airdropped a million pounds of aid to a village after some natural disaster would complain that you'd littered their street with the packaging.
AI isn't a magical perfect organisation, it has as many wastes of space as any other organisation, and it's not suprising that these are often the bureaucrats who send out letters to the likes of Wikileaks in the first place, the ones who do the actual hard work have better things to do- like focussing on doing that good hard work than get involved in public PR dramas.
In my experience it depends on two factors:
1) How proactive and forward thinking a business is in trying to improve itself
2) How good the member of staff asking for the rise is
Some businesses do not fulfil point 1, and would rather lose someone who makes them £500k more profit a year more than the average Joe, than pay that person an extra £10k leaving them £490k out of pocket than if they just hadn't been so fucking stubborn and. Some people do not fulfil point 2 in that they think they're worth more but they most certainly aren't, in this case the business has no reason to give them a rise as they're likely easily replaced for their current wage.
If however the business fulfils point 1, and you fulfil point 2, then they'll see value in giving you a rise if you ask for it and recognise that they're better off keeping you happy and paying you what you ask and getting higher profits, than they are losing you and not getting the boost in profits.
If the business is smart, and if you're damn good at what you do then wage is certainly very negotiable. There is one other factor that often arises though- if you do think you'd underpaid and ask for more money you have to be willing to stand by what you say- if you tell them you want more money or you're going to have to consider looking elsewhere then you have to be willing to look elsewhere if they don't meet your request otherwise they'll know you were full of shit and are too lazy to go anywhere and will just keep paying you lower wages indefinitely because they'll know they can get away with it. If however they reject your requests and you start taking time off to attend interviews and asking for references then if it hurts them to lose you they may well change their mind.
If however you just do the bare minimum, don't offer the company anything they couldn't get elsewhere for the same wage and say "I want a pay rise", then no, pay certainly isn't negotiable. You have to be worth not losing, and sometimes this can even be as little as being a fairly good employee even if not somekind of superstar employee and the cost of finding a replacement for you being more expensive than just giving you the raise you ask for.
I do generally agree with you on Microsoft, they could certainly be doing much better, although I think you're being a little kind to Apple- they have had product failures, their server ranges don't do terribly well, the Apple TV was rather a flop and the MacBook Air didn't do particularly well for example, although you might be right in that they still turn a profit at least which means I suppose even there they can be called a success however small, but certainly not something that really generates worthwhile revenue.
Fundamentally though I think Apple's problems will be in terms of expanding their market, the iPod isn't selling amazingly well anymore, largely because it's been replaced by the iPhone for many users. There's also some pretty solid signs that they're facing increased competition from Android and Nokia and Windows 7 phones aren't out the game yet- they could still come back and re-take a decent share of the smartphone market and the danger here for Apple is that with the new breed of phones any loss in phone sales wont see an increase again in iPods because people's new phones even if not Apple phones will do the trick more so than they used to. Further, Apple is somewhat restricted demographically too, it's largely limited to the West, the iPhone has effectively flopped in India, China and Africa, because Apple only has individual model of the iPhones and it's simply too expensive for these markets- this leaves Apple with a dilemma, does it just ignore those markets and hope to continue to simply out-compete the competition in existing markets, or does it consider changing it's business model and introduce a budget iPhone much like with the iPod Nano and Shuffle to compete in these markets?
The iPad has potential but how much is yet to be seen, and again whether the competition will continue to fail to out-compete it in said market will be yet to be seen. Mac sales are increasing, but not really at a rate fast enough to matter compared to the profits garnered from their other divisions which is where the profit really comes from.
I'm not sure how well iTunes and the App store are doing now, but only about 6 months ago Apple themselves stated these weren't core profit centres and were barely just breaking even.
There's also the Jobs question, he wont be there forever, and have Apple as a company learnt enough this time round to cope without him?
Apple certainly has a lot of strengths, but continued success as you can see is far from guaranteed, Apple has an awful lot of work cut out for it to maintain momentum over the next decade as they have over the last decade. Whether they do decide to start producing low end products, or do something drastic like sell Mac OS X for general PCs will be interesting as it'll let them ensure continued growth, but may also lead to them growing faster than they can reasonably handle (i.e. support issues for Mac OS X on generic hardware could become a problem in such a scenario). They've played the slowy but sure card so far, but as I say can it continue indefinitely in the face of increasing competition and rapidly shrinking room for growth in their target markets? At minimum they'll maintain their core fanbase and be able to keep selling the latest model to this fanbase each year meaning they're guaranteed to maintain their solid core of profits, but it's their method of continuing growth that'll be really interesting to watch.
I think that's market cap no?
The problem with share prices is that they can be terribly misleading- BP has taken a massive drop because of their oil spill for example, but that doesn't stop them being one of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world even with their asset sale and losses on the spill. As I say what really fundamentally matters in terms of the actual strength of a company above all is assets and equity followed by profits.
Of course, having a market cap as high as Apple is still a good sign, it shows a lot of confidence in a company, but it far from tells the whole story or the strength of a company. It's also worth keeping in mind how quickly market cap can change too on the slightest bit of bad news.
"And you should get a better understanding of hardware profits vs software profits. Because you don't really seem clued in at all on this."
I'm not sure what you're suggesting I don't understand? That software nets more profit? yes, as I said, I get this, which makes it a better business model for achieving profit. Reality doesn't give a discount to Apple and say "Oh well, okay, so you made less profit, that's okay, we understand the profit you did make was made on hardware so obviously we'll give you an extra star for this". The fact is, Apple makes far less profit.
"And look at the last quarter for MSFT (16.1B) vs AAPL (15.7B) in revenue. That's about the same in my book. And AAPL will be above MSFT next quarter."
So you can see the future can you? No really, you may turn out to be right, you have a good chance, but so what? Read what I said, they need to be $5bn ahead next quarter, and then maintain it for the whole year, and then convert a much larger portion of that from revenue to profit. They aint going to achieve that, no company in history has made such a big leap and Apple despite Steve Jobs' scattering of magic wont be able to achieve it either- it's a long slow process, they may overtake them eventually but it'll be years. You seem to go on about hardware vs. software profits, but again here's the point- Apple can't increase it's revenue to profit conversion when large amounts of it's profit are on hardware so they need a massive boost in software to catch up- that's nowhere in sight, Apple admitted themselves that iTunes and the app store isn't a good money spinner and barely breaks even.
"Also try looking at growth patterns. MSFT flat, AAPL up. Pick any time frame in the last 10 yrs or so."
You're good at making stuff up, I'll give you that. MS are increasing too, certainly not at the rate of Apple, but increasing and most definitely not flat- their last quarter was their record ever profit for example which you know, means an upwards trend.
But here's where you're going wrong, you're assuming Apple can continue increasing at the rate they are indefinitely, that's a hell of an assumption to make. Rapid growth from the underdog is difficult but possible and Apple proved it as did Google, but the saying it's tough on top is very true- as Apple get bigger, they'll start to find things harder and will plateau off themselves.
I do generally agree with you, but I don't think that's entirely Microsoft's business model. They do have some innovations that do really well for them, Sharepoint is a fine example of a new product that netted them a lot of additional income.
So the key for them is to basically use what you mention as their core business to keep them solid, and then try and branch out from there. The XBox is another example, and this is beginning to finally pay off- they have 25 million Gold subscribers at £40 a year (well slightly less as the UK cost is a little higher) but realistically that's most likely around $1 billion of pure profit, and Microsoft's last quarter results mentioned that for the first time content has overtaken subscription costs suggesting they're at least doubling that on XBox Live alone.
The next attempts at increasing profit are Kinect and Windows Mobile 7, Bing is another possibility as it's certainly gaining share, but who knows, I'm not expecting them to be stellar performers personally, but as I say this is really all Microsoft has to do- just keep trying and trying because it's position in the market as you acknowledge isn't going anywhere any time soon because they're sufficiently big to sustain that.
My underlying point really is that a lot of people think companies rise and fall much faster than they do here on Slashdot and I believe this stems from a profound misunderstanding of how much money Microsoft actually makes regardless of how shit it is. There seems to be this idea that because Slashdot hates Microsoft, Microsoft is a poor performing company, but as much as Slashdot might like that to be true, it's really not. We have to live with them for a while yet, and quite honestly, whilst I'd gladly see them fall normally, right now, I'm more scared that that would mean a rise of Apple who in recent years seem to have shown their true colours as being much more evil. Frankly I wish they'd both fuck off, but unfortunately wishful thinking wont achieve that, again, as much as Slashdot appears to think it does.
Although, after Dell screwed me over with horrendous support charade over my faulty laptop which took 9 months for them to finally repair I did wish that they'd fuck off and die, and well, I seem to have got my wish there at least as they really have been performing abysmally in recent years.
Hmm, maybe wishful thinking isn't such a bad option after all :)
Lots of companies have higher revenue but so what? Have you never heard the following saying?-
Revenue is vanity
Profit is sanity
Cash is king
If Microsoft is getting more profit from it's revenues then that means it has a better business model, and as Microsoft has both higher profits and more cash Apple's increase in revenue, like it's market cap, is largely meaningless. It'll only matter when Apple overtakes Microsoft in profit and equity and assets, until that point Microsoft is still the more solid business.
To illustrate the point, Dell has a revenue of $53bn but a profit of only $1.4bn. By your logic the fact Dell has a revenue around $10bn higher than Apple it's a stronger company, but the profits tell a completely different story. I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who believes Dell, despite it's high revenue is a better bet when it has such vastly lower profits and vastly lower assets and equity.
Besides, your assertion that Apple's revenues being about the same as Microsoft isn't even close to true anyway, there's about a $20bn gap with Microsoft at $62bn and Apple at around $42bn and Microsoft's latest results showed them with more revenue than Apple too meaning Microsoft are in fact widening the gap.
Even if Apple do close the revenue gap they still don't have the profits gap closed and still don't have the assets or equity of Microsoft.
So as for where I want to be, well, I'd still rather be where Microsoft is- higher revenue, higher profits, higher equity, greater assets, and not even losing ground in those metrics.
If I were you I'd get a little better understanding of what revenue actually is, what profit is, what equity and assets are and what they mean for a company. Further, you also seem to have a confused view of the importance of quarterly revenue, for example, you suggest that Apple might pass Microsoft in revenue next quarter, which is certainly a possibility, but by how much? maybe in the absolute best case by a couple of $bn but they've got a $20bn gap to close across the year so they'd need to jump at least $5bn ahead every quarter from their current position of being behind, and once they've done that they've got to go from turning $1 in 5 of revenue into profit, down to $1 in 3 into profit which is where Microsoft is, and then building equity and assets takes time. All this for them to even catch up with Microsoft, let alone overtake it.
Here:
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/5262
I generally agree with you though, I'm not sure the conclusions are valid from what's given. It basically says 0.26% of black cars, the most stolen colour, get stolen, whilst 0.16% of red cars, the least stolen get stolen. Apparently there's something like 6.8 million vehicles in the Netherlands, but it's hard from the data to tell how many cars this actually translates to in practice, particularly as the graph given changes over time, and older cars will most likely be off the road. I'm sure you could figure it out by averaging the amount bought over the period and factor in an exponential decrease in those taken off the road, but it'd be more reasonable if the author had done this. The very fact he does seem to have basically left things half finished and come to a conclusion without providing better supporting evidence and clearer data does leave me a little skeptical I'll admit, the level of work done would be fine for a high school science class, but for a professor of economics? a bit of a poor show to be honest.
Personally, if I had a choice, I'd gladly take Microsoft's non-viable business model at $18bn profit in the last year more than I'd take any other technology company's as that's over double Apple's profits and nearly triple Google's profits.
Microsoft's got a perfectly viable business model, such that it's still consistently slaughtering the competition in the technology market in terms of profit they make year on year- I think IBM is the next closest at around $12bn and HP 3rd at about $9bn, although I could be wrong, I've not been paying attention to all of them.
The issue is simply that Microsoft is struggling to grow their market even more, not that they don't in fact make fuck loads of profit, and have a metric shit ton of assets and equity. The fact is it can do things like the Kin, the Zune, the XBox, and whether they flop or not is irrelevant when they're still pulling in more profit than any other technology company out there from the profits of their core business. If however one of their adventures does turn out to be a hit then great, they've widened the gap even more, if not, then, well, their lead in terms of profit is still pretty massive and even Apple and Google's resounding successes in comparison over the last decade haven't even come close to closing the gap. Unless Microsoft has a secret oil drilling operation that's going to explode due to poor maintenance in the gulf of Mexico soon then there's not too much that'll change that in the forseeable future. As a company, financially, they're still a behemoth, and are as solid as a rock.