Considering that most people had probably resigned themselves to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, a ridiculously expensive, minimally valuable moon race probably sounded pretty damned good as an alternative way to beat the Russkies.

The moon isn't going anywhere. There's plenty of time for us to put things right at home before going back there, and in the meantime if there's really any great profit to be had there, private enterprise will be all too happy to go claim it. Times have changed; our biggest problems today are internal and of our own making, not some external enemies. A mad dash from nothing to a useless lunar base makes very little sense right now, even if it were technically feasible.

Put another way, if you feel so strongly about it, go finance your own expedition. In all seriousness, I'm looking forward to seeing stuff like this happen. Once someone has a foothold away from Earth, we'll have a new frontier to expand, on which existing governments will be largely powerless. It will be a wonderful new opportunity for those of us who are highly dissatisfied with the way this planet is being governed to set out and try something different. Most human generations have had that opportunity; only in the last century or so has the entire planet been claimed by effective governments. Forget the 1960s and think instead about what might make sense in the future.

I don't think Capt. Powers is in a position to agree or disagree with much of anything. He's been dead for over 30 years.

If they "really, really, really need you" then you should make them "really, really, really pay you" for work done instead of a long-scheduled, already paid-for wedding and vacation. A reasonable offer is something like "Look, I've gone out of my way to schedule this in advance and make sure you were aware I'd need to be away. And I've already paid for everything and invited a lot of people. If you haven't found someone to cover for me, I can cancel, but if it's that important you will need to make me whole, too. I think it would be fair to add two more weeks to my vacation time, cover my expenses and my guests' for canceling and rescheduling, append a rider to my employment contract to the effect that my next vacation, once scheduled, is guaranteed for the agreed dates, and increase my salary by 10%. Considering how important my work must be to the company, that seems like the least you could do. And please, so that neither of us has to go through this again, make sure that there are people on staff who can cover for one another and let me know how I can help make that happen."

Then you'll find out just how important your work really is.

What we have in common with the cyanobacteria, however, is that we don't understand the consequences of the various choices we could make. The ability to reason should not be confused with sufficiently good understanding to predict those consequences. The best we can say is probably that if we "do less", in the sense of creating less delta relative to the world as it would be without us, conditions will probably be more like they've been in the past. Unfortunately, that's an exceedingly weak and almost useless statement, as "the past" includes an extremely wide range of conditions including many that would make our current existence completely impossible.

The questions before us in this area are whether we should attempt to "do less" in an attempt to avoid irreversibly bad outcomes (certainly no guarantee of a happy outcome anyway), and, if not, whether we should apply our profoundly imperfect understanding of our impact in one way or another to attempt to control our environment in unprecedented ways. The only thing I'm sure of is that anyone who pretends to have the "correct" answers to these questions is either intellectually dishonest or a self-serving piece of shit. The rest of this "debate" is a waste of time, money, and electrons. Give it up already. Everything goes to hell a billion years from now anyway.

Please don't truncate my sentences when you quote them. If you had preserved the whole thing, it would be obvious that I offered three positives about webOS, only one of which is that it is open source. And we are talking about niche products here, so having a couple of attributes each of which is interesting to a tiny slice of the possible customer universe is EXACTLY what matters. I never claimed that webOS would take over the mobile device world because it's open source. Perhaps I need to spell it out for you since you're probably accustomed to reading wild, unsubstantiated claims in unintelligible rants written by 14-year-olds: WebOS has a few attributes that may help it occupy one or two small niches in the mobile device space that iOS and Android cannot or will not fill effectively. That gives it a very limited future that may nevertheless constitute commercial viability for a few small players. ... Based on that landscape, I do not see Windows Phone being successful for Microsoft or its partners, including Nokia, since they need WinPho to be a major competitor and it does not even seem that it would be viable as a niche offering.

Does that help any or do I need to use shorter words?

Surely you jest. The jurors?! Those are commoners; they have no place anywhere near His Larryness. And they're unnecessary. Larry already plays golf with the judge every month, so he's already won the case. He'll make sure to pick up the tab in the clubhouse next time, but he's probably already doing that anyway. Don't you know anything about how Oracle operates?

No university offers a fixed-price guarantee of a better life. The cost of courses is almost never fixed, nor is the cost of books, lab fees, supplies, etc. that are specific to your course of study. And of course nothing about the results is guaranteed at all; you may or may not get a degree, depending on whether you choose to pursue one and how well you demonstrate mastery, and of course a degree is no guarantee of a better life in any tangible way. The university is offering to teach you something and provide a structure and environment in which you're more likely to learn it well. That's all. Your attempt to draw similarities here and tar both parties with the same brush is laughably weak. If you had a contract from a university that said for $60k we guarantee you will have a job that pays at least $X for at least Y% of your life between now and age 65, you would have a case. No one is that stupid.

Here, however, there was a contract in place that specified the requirements and expected results and the fixed price the university was willing to pay Oracle. Oracle signed the contract, then, apparently, failed to deliver on those specific performance expectations laid out in the contract. No one can say whether they'll win it, but they do have a case. Marketing and sales is what is *said*, a contract is what is *put in writing and signed*. It's not at all unusual for the two to be very different, and in general a company can't be held liable for the claims it makes in marketing materials and sales pitches unless they meet strict criteria for deceptiveness. The UK seems to have the broadest powers to police deceptive claims; it's rare in the US. But a contract, well, that's a different story. And it's the story here.

It's not at all surprising that Oracle overpromised, underdelivered, and then failed to disclose that more money would have to be spent to achieve the customer's goals. While many vendors engage in the occasional unscrupulous practice, Oracle is at the very bottom of the heap when it comes to sleaze. The company has repeatedly shown that it cares nothing for its customers, employees, or shareholders (except for Larry), and has complete disregard for the laws of the countries in which it operates. Its corporate culture is built entirely on backstabbing, deception, and ass-kissing. Montclair State's experience is far more typical than atypical when it comes to doing business with Oracle; a similar series of events involving the State of California received national publicity recently as well. But what is surprising here is that these cases are being litigated; Oracle's lawyers are numerous, effective, and almost completely in control of everything the company does. As an Oracle employee, you can't take a dump in the men's room shitter without getting approval from Legal and Rev Rec. It will be interesting to see how this plays out; Oracle will almost certainly come up with something they put in the contract that gives them an escape. It won't be something technical, because the people in charge over there don't know anything about technology, so it'll probably be some kind of loophole or exception clause. So while I have no doubt that the university was wronged, I expect that their lawyers will have been outlawyered by Oracle's legal army. It seems to be the way these cases go; that is after all Oracle's entire business model. The company could not exist on the merits of its products, the ability of its engineers, or the integrity with which it treats its customers. Why anyone does business with them is beyond me.

And this for me really highlights how Microsoft especially but also its partners have really dropped the ball. If you can't be the saturation player (Apple), and you can't directly challenge the saturation player (Google and its partners), then you have to offer a compelling niche product. That approach can succeed, especially for smaller companies for whom even a niche product produces meaningful revenue. But there are two big problems here: First, neither Nokia nor Microsoft is a small company; Nokia needs to be a major challenger for its business model to work, and Microsoft is investing a lot of money in mobile and needs more than just one or two partners with niche products to generate a return. Second, the Windows brand has plenty of value, but is a handicap to anyone trying this approach in developing a new niche product. Windows is hardly the brand people associate with innovative, hip new products or being off the beaten path; many if not most people interact with it every day and for them it is background noise, the default, the standard, something that is so bland and ordinary as not to even occasion comment. Is that really the brand that Nokia, or Microsoft for that matter, thinks will excite people who are tired of iOS or Android, or people looking for a less-common status symbol?

If Microsoft were smarter they would have recognised this and invested the time and energy into coming up with an alternative brand for their mobile products, perhaps leveraging the successful Xbox brand. But in a sense that would also have been an acknowledgement up front that their approach was unlikely to pay off big; a new brand might generate a niche following, but only the Windows brand is likely to be able to take on Apple and Google... most likely by eating RIM's lunch in the corporate space. In other words, either Microsoft has badly misjudged the cachet of Windows among ordinary individuals or its intent all along was to sell Windows Mobile into places where corporate IT makes the decisions rather than end users. That strategy looked decent a few years ago, but we have really seen a lot of changes recently in how employers handle supporting their employees' personal mobile devices. Recognising that it's cheaper to support their existing iOS and Android devices than to issue their own fleet of business-only devices, and that most people prefer to have at most only one phone and one tablet anyway, almost no one is still handing out a single device and refusing to support anything else. In the absence of products that are compelling on their own, RIM is finding that the decay of the corporate mobile device mandate is very bad for business. Microsoft, and therefore their partners as well, seem to be in the same spot.

It looks like the niche player, whatever it ends up being, will be built around WebOS. It has open source cachet, underdog cachet ("back from the dead"), and it's not a terrible technology. With two dominant players duking it out for the mass market and a potential family of niche alternatives brewing, where does this leave Microsoft? With a lacklustre brand, tiny market share, an apparently outdated strategy, and no compelling products on the market, it's hard to imagine Windows Mobile going anywhere. Too late to market to be where Android is today, and too stodgy a brand to be what Nokia wishes it were (not that a niche business is what Microsoft wants anyway), Windows Mobile looks like a dead end. If anyone knows the value of getting in early, it should be Microsoft; the entire company exists today solely because of its first mover advantage all those years ago. Nokia was happy to get a backer, but it appears to have picked the wrong one. They could be doomed as well.

But the $31,000 you spent 9 years ago was worth a lot more than $31,000 is today. Realistically, about twice as much. And of course utility rates have changed over time as well. So the amount you're saving each month needs to be recalculated and adjusted. Did your calculations take this into consideration? Then, of course, there's the fact that you externalised much of that initial cost by voting to have other people who do not benefit from it pay instead of you. The outcome is bound to look really good when you're investing someone else's money and keeping the returns for yourself.

It's time to recognise that the West is in another Cold War with China. The steps taken to keep industrial information out of Soviet hands crimped trade and imposed costly burdens on US business, but they were at least somewhat effective. Let's try to do better, but for fuck's sake let's do something! How about starting by dropping all packets from China at the border? If nothing else it ought to get their attention.