nknight

The capsules holding astronauts obviously have to land intact at some point, unless you thought we sent all astronauts prior to the Shuttle up to their deaths. The Shuttle's uncontrollable SRBs have been jettisoned and recovered after every flight.

Reusability is of no ground-safety consequence. By basic physical law, these devices will be very nearly empty of fuel by the time they reach the ground -- in fact almost all fuel will have been expended within minutes of liftoff.

The first stage of a Falcon 9 has a dry mass less than a 14-seat Gulfstream V business jet, the Dragon capsule is less than 1/3rd that.

If you trust thousands of planes to fly through the air over and into major cities every day without killing thousands of people on the ground, you should trust spacecraft far, far more.

> Up until now, space operations have always been nonpartisan, co-operative, and peaceful.

Oh please. Space operations grew directly out of unbridled Cold War militarism, and have been pure political football at least since the approval of the absolutely insane space shuttle program.

I want high taxes, I want big government, I want single-payer health care, I want a welfare and social security system that makes Scandinavia look like a libertarian wasteland. I want ten times the corporate regulation we have now.

But there is no reason for the government to be the primary driver or provider of routine space launch services, especially when it's done such a piss-poor job of it since Apollo.

Private companies like SpaceX have ample incentive to advance the state of the art in launch services and are demonstrably doing so for less than the government has ever managed before. NASA can and should take advantage of that.

Where exactly have you lived that you've avoided knowledge of Vostok, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Soyuz, the Space Shuttle, Skylab, Salyut, Mir, the International Space Station, and the thousands of observation, spy, communications, and scientific satellites that have been launched since Sputnik in 1957?

WTF?!

I'd call that more like three orders of magnitude, and the world has been launching rockets and landing capsules since 1961. Nothing even remotely like what you are speaking of has ever come remotely close to happening.

No one launches rockets over populated areas, nobody aims capsules for populated areas, the CIA spent the 1960s recovering CORONA satellite film canisters with such precision they captured them with planes in mid-air.

Stop fear-mongering.

No, in many cases these are actual, realized losses, as in "we bought at this price and sold at this much lower price". They have no money, and no stock. Recovery of the stock is irrelevant to them.

The problem I have with this attitude is that transparency only helps if people are paying attention.

Americans aren't paying attention.

This seemed extremely bizarre to me until I read the filing itself[1].

The RSUs in question are unvested. Apparently a change was just made by the board that means unvested RSUs will collect dividends which will be paid out upon vesting. Cook is declining those.

I can kind of understand that it would look strange to make a change like this to already-granted RSUs, but if it were that big of a concern, it seems odd that only Cook would decline the dividends, or that the board would have made the change retroactive in the first place, so I still don't entirely understand declining them.

[1] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/00011814311203...

He's actually wrong. Starcraft introduced usernames/passwords and unique names to Battle.net in early 1998. The support was then patched into Diablo 1.05. Diablo I's Battle.net functionality did not originally include usernames/passwords at all.

It was quite a strange little architecture, initially. Your displayed name was whatever you'd named your character, with the distinguishing feature being an "account number" that could be re-generated by deleting a file in your Diablo directory (the corollary being if you didn't back the file up, your account number would change upon a reformat or migration to a new computer).

I decline to engage in a debate with someone who has decided he can divine my worldview from a single comment about privately-owned search engines.

Hint: I'm a socialist.

I'd be fine with that. In fact, it'd probably be an objective improvement with regard to my search results.

Not all of us believe search engines have some magical obligation to be complete or impartial. If you don't like the results you get from one, try another.

I said "theoretically", did I not?

And there was nothing particularly special about the module aside from the extreme concentration. Every piece of Java I've ever written or even looked at has this same problem on a reduced scale.

My point is to show how utterly broken and worthless the concept is. Either there's a ton of exception-"handling" boilerplate that does nothing useful, or there's "throws Exception" everywhere, itself useless boilerplate that exists only to tell the compiler to buzz off.

> I reckon every few function calls you make could potentially trigger an exception.

One Java module I had the misfortune of writing theoretically had to deal with checked exceptions on the majority of its calls, and the only possible response to virtually all of them was to crash, because in that context, it could only have meant someone had either ripped the DRAM off the board, or placed the board in a particle accelerator.

What percentage of people actually get angry at this sort of thing? It's insane for luxury items -- either you value an item at the price it's listed for or you don't. If you don't, why are you buying it in the first place?

Frankly, I didn't have much confidence in this jury. It was stacked to avoid techies, its findings on other copyright issues (e.g. rangecheck) didn't instill much confidence in me, and some of the questions that were emerging made me question their ability to understand complex issues and distinguish between basically being ordered to find infringement, and being asked to determine if it was really infringement.

If you'd asked me what the count was likely to be, I probably would have told you something like 10-2 for Oracle.

I guess my only direct source is that every time she's spoken of working as a paralegal, it's been in the past tense. e.g. her H-Online interview:

http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Groklaw-The-blog-that-...

It would certainly have been impractical for long stretches of Groklaw's history for PJ to have a day job.

Why do you think she's employed by any law firm? She's a former paralegal, not a current paralegal.

By "suspiciously silent" you mean "Groklaw covered it", right?

http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20090926131450...

Since you've attempted to deflect instead of disclose, I now assume you are a hypocrite in Oracle's employ.

Why, exactly is it OK for you to make up a pseudonym and libel Ms. Jones?

I demand disclosure. Your full name, your address, your phone, bank, and tax records for the past year, social security statement, and a sworn affidavit that you have never been paid by, had any financial interest in, or were related to anyone with an interest in, IBM, SCO, Oracle, Google, Novell, and any media outlet that has ever given critical or favorable coverage to any of these companies.

If you don't comply within 24 hours, I'll assume you're simply a troll and paid shill.

Edit: Downvoters may want to consult "cooldeal"'s other comments on this very page for context. I'm simply demanding of him what he demands of others.

What disclosure do you want, exactly? Bank records? Travel history? Phone records?

Florian's hand was ultimately forced because it is impractical to keep consulting for multiple large companies a secret.

So far, no one has ever found any evidence that PJ is anything other than what she says she is -- a Linux user and former paralegal. Even when Maureen O'Gara thought it'd be a good idea to stalk her and publish everything to the world, no evidence of any kind came to light.

You are proposing a criminal (yes, criminal, perjury is a crime, and sworn statements as to PJ's lack of involvement with IBM were filed in the SCO case) conspiracy spanning at least multiple large public companies, a well-known law professor, and several prominent tech journalists.

"Wow" is right. There's also this interesting gem right after: https://twitter.com/FedcourtJunkie/status/205371711233851392

> Juror said it was his opinion that more tech savvy jurors were less likely to go for limits on openness. Ie they were pro google

This really says it all. Ultimately Oracle can only win if the jury is borderline luddite.

> Its definitely far from an objective news source.

Let me know when you find one.

Perhaps you should know exactly who you're accusing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Webbink

Unless they stipulated to something I missed, there's actually another very important issue on the table: Fair use.

The jury decided Google "infringed", but couldn't agree whether the fair use defense applied.

If Alsup rules APIs are not copyrightable, the fair use defense is moot and we're done (barring appeal, which will surely happen), but if he were to go the other way, fair use may have to be re-litigated in front of a new jury.

That would generally be some variety of fraud. You can sue for damages, and there are tax laws and regulations dealing with losses due to bad acts like that.

It's not unprecedented for tax liabilities to be waived in extreme circumstances, but just not understanding what was going on isn't an extreme circumstance.

A lot of people got screwed badly by this during the dot-com boom/bust, and it did lead to changes in how startups grant ordinary employees equity.

If you're ever in the situation of being given stock or options and you're not 100% sure of the implications, TALK TO AN ACCOUNTANT IMMEDIATELY.

> It seems like the successful(popular) "NoSQL" engines will eventually reinvent many RDBMS wheels.

The wheels in question aren't RDBMS wheels, they're just generic database wheels. The backlash against RDBMSs wasn't because of implementation details like this, it was because of the baggage of relational structures in general, and SQL in particular.

The "reinvention" of these wheels is occurring now because non-relational databases are maturing now.

There is an exception as mentioned there. If you pay an amount equal to 100% of the previous year's liability (110% if your AGI is over $150k), it doesn't matter how much more you owe in April.

(I personally ended up with a 2011 tax liability that was something like 160% of my 2010 liability, but I'd paid estimated taxes equal to my 2010 liabilities. So I had to cut the IRS a pretty big check in April, but had no penalties.)

You speak of "going public" as if it's somehow turning over power to the general public. It's not. It's a colloquial term for a series of regulatory steps required to permit non-accredited investors to invest in a business. These steps are primarily designed not to exercise control over the operations of the company or its ownership and power structures, but to ensure a certain level of disclosure to investors whose resources and influence are limited.

There is nothing about going public that implies a general relinquishment of control of the company, nor is there anything about going public that mandates a particular ownership or power structure. Companies have "gone public" by selling only a few percent of their stock. Split voting rights are very common. None of this is even remotely illegal or unethical so long as it is disclosed, as it has been here.

If you do not like a company's control structure, you do not have to invest in it, whether the company is "public" or "private". As a shareholder, your relationship to the company is the same whether it's public or private.

They're diluted, or his are inflated, however you want to look at it. Yes, it's similar to the Google structure, but Google isn't the prototype. Lots of companies over the years have had special shares with extra voting power, families often retain voting control of a company long after they've sold off most of the equity.

I'm always divided on this as a shareholder, but more often than not I do trust the founders more than the open market, yes. They have an emotional stake in the company that goes beyond short-term economic interests, and I've seen enough companies flounder after the market jettisons the people who built it, and enough recoveries when the founders return, to question the wisdom of shareholder power.