How about we look at military history? Infantry, cavalry, artillery? Pikes, Muskets, Cavalry? And so on. There are many models we could use that provide interesting tactical arrangements without forcing groups to spend hours waiting for a healer.

-Jeff

If they pass a law requiring resale royalties, I doubt anyone would obey it. People will continue to buy and sell like they always have, and public media campaigns will have zero effect on it. The used book industry would go out of business overnight, and libraries would lose a significant source of new material, as well as the ability to sell books that they need to clear out (once you add several dollars to the price of a book of common logarithms, who will buy it?).

In the worst case scenario, when you need to get rid of books, you'll have to call the firemen.

If Monty wants it back I'm sure the 1Billion he got paid can be used to pay to redevelop the code.

Oracle has no incentive to kill the MySQL ecosystem, it's going to be their low end competitor against MS and SAP products. It has more value to them as a working system than a dead one. If that had been their intention to kill MySQL they could have done immense damage when they acquired INNODB, at least temporarily. Yet they continued to develop and improve INNODB just like they will with MySQL.

Oracle's bread and butter is support contracts, not license revenue. MySQL buys them another market to sell support into. Just speculating but they also will have the ability to make it possible for MySQL to use Oracle for it's engine, bringing some heavy advantages to high availability LAMP stacks where customers are already using Oracle on the backend and replicating into mysql for the LAMP application. Monty's big fear is he's built a company (MariaDB AB) doing the same thing with the MySQL code as he had with MySQL AB and he's worried that Oracle will shut him out or kill the ability of commercial forks and force everything GPL. As they have used the GPL as a marketing threat (they told all their customers using the GPL branch would force them to GPL their databases) and now he's scared he will have to operate in the GPL ecosystem knowing he has nothing to offer by reselling the same code anyone else can.

Monty is a liar, Groklaw caught him in the lie and he shouldn't be trusted. Let him use all that money he got paid to redevelop a closed source DB if he wants to have a proprietary product. He's abusing the EU approval process for personal gain.

Actually, it doesn't. LEGO is an adjective, there are no "legos" or "leggos", they're LEGO bricks:

Woosh.

There is no photoshopping either: http://www.adobe.com/misc/trade.html

leggos are any bricks that snap together. LEGO is a trademark for a subset of these connecting blocks that has lost true trademark status because people use the word in the generic. That the owner of the trademark asserts something different doesn't surprise me. Though they are still fighting it, which is why I used them and Adobe in my example.

I vote with my Mute button. It's really quite easy.

I don't think it's surprise so much as it's excitement: "We always thought they were there, and now we know they're there! Friggin' awesome!" I imagine scientists having this reaction, typically followed by chest-bumps.

"Most London streets have "look left" and "look right" painted on the road at the crossings."

Well yeah, but it's a foreign country so he might have trouble reading the signs.

"When you go to Dell and click through as a home user vs a small business, the prices are different for the same machine!"

Yeah, and my residential phone line costs $25.00/month while my business line costs $120.00/month. There is no discernible difference in service level between the two.

WTF Verizon?

in life, the world, the universe. In everything actually...

but we already know the answer is always 42.

Always.

... but there was another PKD story that portrayed the same tech first. Of course, that one was turned into a crappy movie starring Ben Aflac!

If only it had had Cuba Gooding Jr. in it - he's much better than Ben Affleck...

(did I say that out loud?)

"I fail to see how the cable companies are double dipping but this seems to be a very common misconception around here."

Sigh. I'm old enough to remember when cable TV was first rolled out. There were NO commercials. It was touted as a subscription-based alternative to over-the-air, advertising-supported programming.

Didn't take too long for greed to take over. Now, the only non-commercial channels are the premium ones, like HBO, Showtime, etc. - and they're all busy advertising themselves between shows.

I see the same thing eventually happening to satellite radio. The siren-song of advertising dollars is just too strong to resist.

My favorite button on the remote control is 'mute'.

While I prefer my coffee like I like my women... cold, and bitter.

Agreed - which is why I won't buy one at any price. If everyone votes with their dollars, the world can be changed. However, too many people rush to buy the latest & grea... oohhhh, loook -- shiny!!

perhaps an eBay killer, likely named gBay.

Hmmm... that would be a terrible name. But still better than bGay, I suppose...

*** rimshot ***