If you manage a company for stockholders, you have a fiduciary duty to maximize profit. The article says that the company's founders claim they have a "sacred purpose", but if that's the case, they should have sought out donations, not investments.
It might be open source, or it might not be, but eventually, someone will come along with a "better Facebook than Facebook", and it will slowly die.
That's just creative destruction at work. It ALWAYS happens.
Facebook was a better MySpace than MySpace.
MySpace was a better Friendster than Friendster.
Friendster was a better Classmates.com than Classmates.com.
Google was a better Altavista than Altavista.
AOL Instant Messenger was a better ICQ than ICQ.
USENET was a better BBS than old-school dialup bulletin board.
Books were better scrolls than scrolls.
Something newer and better is going to come along. People talk about Facebook and the network effect "locking in" people, but creative destruction is even more powerful than the network effect.
Seriously, guys. You already f'ed up DNS beyond recognition, now you want to break http, too? Someone at Juniper needs to kick the marketers out of the engineering department.
Googling "Cherrypal fraud" may prove instructive, if you happen to find the time. Wasn't there a front-page story on these guys taking money for computers and never delivering them? Why more attention to these scam artists?
I stand corrected, excellent explanation. The joke is still good, though, right?
--Fortunato_NC
What you were supposed to say was:
I feel a great disturbance in the force, as if the Overton Window cried out after being shoved to the right very, very hard.
Congratulations on your inquisitive nature, but your personal habit of recreational reading is quite frankly irrelevant in this discussion. The vast majority of schoolchildren accept what is presented to them in the classroom as the gospel truth (pun intended). Should the conservative wing of the Texas school board get its way, many innocent students will be put hopelessly behind their competition in other countries - the ones that aren't slowly turning into theocracies.
My condolences.
Actually, that isn't necessarily true. Look up "regression to the mean" if you don't believe me.
Hey Multics, I'm really happy for ya, and imma let you finish, but UNIX is the best multiuser operating system of ALL TIME. OF. ALL. TIME.
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To bring this more on-topic: if I were a JotP, I would refuse to perform marriages for gay couples. I don't believe the State need recognize any rights for a union that cannot create a biological family, even in theory. (I know that not all heterosexual couples can or even want to have children, but the law is not about individual cases.)
So I would assume that you are also against marriages involving post-menopausal women? How about men who have had vasectomies?
I can see the bumperstickers now:
MARRIAGE = 1 (UNSNIPPED) MAN + 1 (FERTILE) WOMAN
Freedom of speech means that you have the right to express your beliefs secure in the knowledge that the government will not persecute you for your opinions.
It does not mean that you will be protected from being ostracized by the rest of society, however. Decisions have consequences, and if you decide that your beliefs require you to endorse state-sanctioned bigotry, then when that endorsement is made public, AS IT SHOULD BE, then you are going to have to face the consequences of your decision. If that means you lose business, or that your workplace becomes less welcoming, or that your picture shows up on a website, then maybe you should consider keeping your bigoted opinions to yourself.
No matter what your pastor says, gay rights ARE civil rights. Period.
Software production is assumed to be a line function, but it is run like a staff function. -- Paul Licker
