It's not just Oracle. Android-based vendors are lining up to pay Microsoft as much as $10 a unit as well.

And, by the way, since Amazon isn't paying Google, it's possible Oracle will go after Amazon as well.

Oracle uses anti-competitive licensing for RDBMS to promote their OS and hardware. They allow you to pay for per-vCPU licensing (assuming CPU-based licensing) if you're using their version of Xen under their "Unbreakable" Linux, but if you're using a different platform - RedHat/Xen, RedHat/KVM, VMware, SuSE/Xen, etc, you have to pay for each CPU core in the host, regardless of how many vcpus you've assigned to the VM. And they've made moves to try to force RedHat users to switch to "Unbreakable" - look at the mess around ASMlib support.

And it looks like they're moving to a model where users of IBM and HP's higher-end systems will pay more per CPU for Oracle than those running SOracle hardware (they're discounting 25% on SPARC).

As of last spring, Oracle's hardware shipments were down by a whopping 40% vs. the pre-sale Sun numbers. So they're attempting to use their dominant position - and let's not fool ourselves about how big a player they are - in the RDBMS market to "encourage" customers to use other Oracle products.

They're going to be owned by the Russians in no time.

Small-government in the US these days means privatizing the profit, but socializing the cost and risk.

We won't invest in teachers' training and pay, because educational material and educational technology companies lobby hard to get contracts. We won't invest in training TSA agents training and pay, because contractors would rather sell the government security technology that doesn't work. Investing in the people - which DOES work, isn't on the table. And privatization? The pre-9/11 privatized security worked SO well. And, hey, doesn't Edison Schools have a great terrific record?

Their cronies and paid politicians will prevent these companies from being held to account. After all, we wouldn't want to interfere with taxpayer-funded free enterprise.

And even the non-content producing cable-operating ISPs (Cablevision, Verizon, etc) have to worry about the networks and studios and what sort of terms are negotiated and fees are paid as contracts come up for renewal. And there's the looking threat of Congress passing additional regulations that could be more expensive to implement.

In case anyone can't see why, check out the headline from News International's British tabloid, The Sun, on Saturday.

http://fleetstreetblues.blogspot.com/2011/07/sun-blames-al-qaeda-for-norway.html

Yes, that's right, they actually use the phrase 'AL-QAEDA' MASSACRE above the headline NORWAY'S 9/11. Now that it's a right-wing extremist, he'll just be a lunatic instead of it being a plot.

Research-based methods don't lead to big profits for educational reform advocates (paid consulting gigs, speaking engagements), those who run private schools and publishers or scantily-researched educational materials. We've now got the educational equivalent of defense contractors selling weapons to the military that they don't want and that don't work.

Good luck in a lot of places finding a public library that's open when you'd need it to be. Public libraries are closing or cutting hours and services at an alarming rate.

One of the problems with educational reformers is that things that work on a small scale - only put in the best teachers, get parents involved, etc. can't always be replicated on a large scale. And they need to realize that. You can't have 100% excellent teachers. What's the current number - not even a third of the US population gets a 4-year college degree? Exactly how can we pay to have millions of brilliant teachers? Especially when teachers are under attack, there's pressure to drive pay down, etc. And a huge part of public school problems are actually societal problems. We've got drugs, crime, malnutrition, poverty, uninvolved/absent parents, lead poisoning, lousy school facilities and so forth. And the public schools can't cherry pick.

And at a time when standardized tests are being used to evaluate teachers and schools, the kids have no stake in the tests. And there's a ton of pressure (some of it based on the raft of IEPs given to students for all sorts of reasons - some legit, some ridiculous) to grade kids based on effort and not outcome. You want to make adjustments for kids with issues? Provide both absolute and adjusted grades.

And the cost to support students with learning or behavioral problems is high. It's not unheard of now to have a classroom with three or four kids with individual aides, plus there's an assistant teacher to deal with kids who have less-stringent IEPs, plus the lead teacher. Unless, of course, you teach art, music, industrial arts, etc. Then, the aides get that as a break period. So you've got 25 kids in the room - a bunch of whom get aides in other classes and some for behavioral reasons - with no help. And you received no training in how to deal with those students as part of your education.

Try getting a company like Google or Microsoft, when they're trying to sell you hosted services, to say anything other than "we comply with lawful requests for information from governments". Note that they don't just mean your government. They mean the government of any country, and if it's a country they do business in, they have to weigh your business against access to an entire market. Which do you think they'll choose? They may try to dodge by only hosting the information in some geographical locations, but that doesn't help much.

Roads don't pay their own way, even with fuel taxes. All you're doing is deciding one is a necessity, and one isn't.

And Target figures out the sales taxes quite easily. And they sell items that are taxable in some states (clothing for example), but not others.

Other web sites - Sears, Wal-Mart, etc.all manage to do this. It's got nothing to do with difficulty, it's Amazon not wanting to lose an advantage. By the way - Amazon could make money via their merchants program by making it more attractive to small internet retailers that don't want to handle computing tax themselves, or providing a paid SaaS service to compute sales tax for other sites.

Weren't a fair number of them WDEF-based viruses on floppies?

Larger protests - may be picking up steam?

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/02/13/a-bad-day-for-sultan.html