years of observation have allowed me to make the following generalizaton:
when the waves fade, and the uncountable hordes of pasty tourists arrive, that's summer.
when the pasty hordes disappear, and the waves return, that's winter.
reportedy, the rest of the US has two transition seasons, while we simply note the two holidays at either end

it's the BBC, surely you can't expect them to report in proper English.

The plot can usually be summarized as:
...
It seems to me that a lot of science fiction has an anti-science bent.

You could just as well say that all non SciFi has the same problem... Govenrment wants to do something stupid and only the maverick politician can save the day; Spouse does something stupid and only two hours of dramatic avoiding-the-real-problem can reunite the couple; Boy wants girl but it takes 90 minutes of wacky adventures and two near-death experiences before he gets the courage to ask her out.

The "best" SciFi doesn't make science out as the villain or the hero - Instead, it shows us the (possible) realities of everyday situations in a setting that extracts those problems from the limitations of "modern" science... ie, The boy will still take 90 minutes and nearly die before he gets up the courage to ask the girl out, whether he lives today, or in a dirt hovel 300 years ago, or on a colony station orbiting Jupiter in the year 3517.

I think your real complaint applies to most forced-plot movies in general... You need some artificially-induced source of tension, followed by stalling and CGI to make the story last more than five minutes, followed by a completely predictable but somehow "unexpected" resolution to the original problem. Faux-science just happens to make for some good villians without needing to really justify their motivations. Why does the god-like AI want to enslave humanity? Because, um, er, humans look weak and inefficient (and what about dogs, trees, ants, and every other lower life form on the planet that A, humans don't see a need to enslave/exterminate, and B, we must look barely better than them to this god-like AI?).

So blame Hollywood, not SciFi in general. :)

The problem I have with it is that the Sun shareholders own something of value - namely the brands, technology, and organizational structure (that is, they don't own the employees of course, but the do 'own' existing business relationships with those employees which could be transferred, and those relationships have value). Even if the company is not worth what it once was, shouldn't the shareholders have the freedom to sell off the assets of value which they own to an interested buyer?

Capitalism is, first and foremost, about freedom - that people should have the freedom to do business without undo interference by the government. The great economic tragedy of the current political climate is that all the people who are hating on capitalism right now forget that the *reason* the USA has traditionally chosen a mostly capitalist economy (I say mostly because, it definitely hasn't been a 'pure' capitalist business system in a long time) is because that is the most Free system of business.

There must be a very compelling reason, indeed, to impinge on the freedom of others. Sun shareholders should have the right to sell what is left of the company to a willing buyer.

Because I only owe a little over 50K on my house. With the housing prices in Vancouver Canada, for what I pay for my 3 bedroom house, I could not get more than a one bedroom apartment in town. I have fruit trees in my back yard, I have a back yard, I have enough space for all my toys, and that is why I put up with such insanity.

You're talking about the SlapChop, right?

Since we're talking about free speech, you left out being caged in a "free speech zone" if you weren't on Bush's side during his campaign.

Also, IBM has been a good friend to the open source community now for many years, just like Sun. They may have valid corporate-profit driven motives, but heck, who cares? They've been great for a lot of projects. They contribute their patents to the pool to defend open-source, rather than trying to kill Linux, like Microsoft.

Anyway, IBM is right. Software patents have been huge for open source. Open source projects only come about when the authors can't make any money selling the things. Software patents have made it far harder to actually sell a viable software product, resulting a huge boom on open source.

It isn't AIX from IBM that's burying Solaris, it's Linux.

At the fortune 100 companies I've worked with, AIX was legacy and stagnant, and being retired as quickly as possible. Solaris was losing servers to Linux starting with the web/application servers and moving into the Database space (replacing Oracle and DB2, in some cases with Mysql for smaller databases). Applications that could be run on virtualization were the next big thing to move to Linux. If they could replace large sun boxes (and expensive sun hardware/software service contracts) with a bunch of 1Us or Blades connected to a SAN, it was done.

At one financial institution it was even mandated that Linux be tested before any other Unix because of the cost savings.

I sometimes wonder if TV producer Bellisarius got the name "Quantum Leap" from Quantum Link. They certainly have the same "tone" to them.

As for charges, I was able to avoid them for the most post. There were plenty of free forums to chat with other people, and since it was nationwide the quality of the conversations was better than the local BBSes. The other stuff like games/newspapers didn't interest me, but it made sense you would have to pay for that content, just like we pay for it today (via advertisements).

BTW you can try Quantum Link yourself, and "feel" what it was like in the late 1980s, by going to this link. It takes maybe 15 minutes to setup the required software, and then you can start chatting with other people:

http://www.quantumlink.tk/
http://web.archive.org/web/20071206123549/http://quantumlink.tk/index.html