Mod parent up.

No 9/11 truther conspiracies there, but an interesting history predating this incident of other boxes out there exactly like this.

I'm more interested in why it has 25 stripes.

They can claim the value of the pending legal action against IBM is $1 trillion dollars if they want to resist a buy-out. Unlike other people who replied here, I don't think SCO wants a buy-out, I don't think they're in this for the money. I mean, they're in it for the money, but they're in it for the massive cash M$ already paid them, and in exchange for that, they are providing FUD. If they let IBM buy them, they will have no FUD left to sell.

Incidentally, the rumor mill says this sort of thing has happened before - a supposedly infringing company that would rather just buy the company who's IP they're infringing, but can not afford to buy that company for the sole reason that the perceived value of the lawsuit against them makes the company unaffordable. A higher offer simply provides evidence that the lawsuit is worth that much more. Supposedly Steve Jobs tried to just buy Apple Corps, and offered more than anyone thought the perpetual rights to the Beatles catalog is worth, but that wasn't enough because they wanted the value of the Beatles catalog plus the value of the lawsuit against Apple... and the lawsuit against Apple was worth at least any offer Jobs would make for Apple Corps...

Does anyone know of a source that can back this claim from the article?

Specifically here, the claim that Monsanto has sued and then subsequently purchased any farm.

You have this exactly reversed, and the world would be a better place if you and more people in busnesses would recognize this. In economic theory, if consumers care how they are treated and whether businesses behave ethically, they punish corporations for doing the wrong thing, creating the economic incentive for corporations to behave ethically. The idea that corporations are mandated by capitalism to behave unethically in the pursuit of profits, even if behaving unethically is ultimately bad for profits, comes up all the time here on Slashdot and never makes any sense.

In this case this will be a public image nightmare for Sony. They spend millions and millions on advertising to try to improve their corporate image and make people think favorably of them, and this just cost them a ludicrous amount. They were already going to make a killing off Whitney Houston's death, with no downside. Now in an attempt to bump up short term cash-flow by some amount irrelevant to their bottom line, they are shooting themselves in the foot. They already have an image problem, but more people are going to understand this than a rootkit. If internal management is any goods, heads will roll over this decision, and if it isn't, it's one more sign Sony is doomed.

If you were a merciless investor, would seeing this news item make you think Sony stock has a bright future? If not, then it means it's bad for them and a mistake, that behaving unethically is moving them towards being a defunct corporation, not securing their economic future. That would be my bet.

I was at DFW at Christmas with my girlfriend and watching the security line ahead of me. They had a regular metal detector and the nudie scanner going and were directing some people to one and some to the other. And every single hot woman got sent to the nudie scanner, where only about a third of the total people were being sent there. I pointed this out to my girlfriend, who noticed it was the case.
I'm male and not good looking at all, but was flattered to be sent there myself.

Boll Weevil Monument

SKINNER
Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.

LISA
But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?

SKINNER
No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.

LISA
But aren't the snakes even worse?

SKINNER
Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.

LISA
But then we're stuck with gorillas!

SKINNER
No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.

People interested by that may also be interested to know the demise of the former oldest living thing in the world, the Prometheus Tree, which a graduate student cut down so he could count the rings.

Slashdotter: Timothy, we're all a little mystified by your claim that the new python film stars Graham Chapman.

Timothy: It does, yes.

Slashdotter: Who died over ten years ago?

Timothy: Uh, that's correct.

Slashdotter: Are you lying?

Timothy: No, no, it's just that he's very popular.

Slashdotter: Does he have a big part?

Timothy: He is the star of the film.

Slashdotter: And dead.

Timothy: Well, we dug him up and gave him a screen test, a mere formality in his case, and...

Slashdotter: Can he still act?

Timothy: Well...well, he still has this-this enormous, ah-ah, kinda indefinable, uh...no.

Slashdotter: Was decomposition a problem?

Timothy: We did have to put him in the fridge between takes.

Slashdotter: Ah, what sorts of things does he do in the film?

Timothy: Well, we had him lying on beds, lying on floors, falling out of cupboards, scaring the children, ahm...

Slashdotter: But surely Graham Chapman was cremated?

Timothy: Well, we had to use a standin for some of the more visible shots.

Slashdotter: Ah! Uh, another actress.

Timothy: Dead actress. But Chapman was in shot the whole time.

Slashdotter: How?

Timothy: Oh, in the ash tray, in the fire grate and vacuum cleaner...

Slashdotter: So Graham does not appear in the film?

Timothy: Not as such.

Yes, sporty... 0-60 5.4s.

See also Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution MR (4.8s) and Subaru WRX-STI (4.4s). The WRX-STI comes in a station wagon and is a 4.x second car factory standard. For anyone needing a practical family race car.

I bought Ethyl The Aardvark Goes Quantity Surveying, but I haven't read it yet because I can't read. I've been looking for a copy of Knickerless Nickleby and several other books, but haven't had any luck finding them.

I can't believe I didn't see a link in this thread to the mother of all absurd cable review threads.

That's a good narrative of how Microsoft screwed up the browser war, but there's another story to tell about why Microsoft screwed up the browser war. Back in the mig 90's at the advent of the web, there was endless talk about how the web and web browser were going to replace the OS. "The Network Is The Computer," that sort of thing.

This may not actually be wrong for the common user and majority of machines, it may just be about 20 years off. Chrome OS or similar thin, probably Linux based OS's booting into a browser-only environment may still be the future of $80 commodity netbooks sold at the checkout line at Walmart. Which may become ubiquitous, with only "power users" who need Creative Suite, CATIA, Maya, etc. using computers that run a real OS anymore.

Microsoft jumped on the "we need to control this thing before it eats Windows" idea and spent a lot of money on a product that they gave away for free in order to control market share to protect Windows.

But then two things happened. First of all, Anti-Trust made every market-dominant position they held a scary liability, and here they were taking 80% of the browser market giving away a free product. Second, the idea that Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox/Opera were some kind of immediate threat to Windows dominance was looking more and more ludicrous.

So did M$ totally screw their huge lead in browsers? Definitely. Were they trying not to? I'm not so sure about that.

It may be ironic if thin-client/fat-web-browser cheaper-than-dirt netbooks and tablets still come around to sweep the mass market PC free of the M$ tax, relying on the viability of alternative browsers.

It's not a popular idea around here, but among my hard-core geek tech industry friends, there are several who used to use Linux as their primary OS who then got a Mac. Many still run both Linux and Windows virtualized, but still tend to boot into OSX.

A lot of geeks just hated Microsoft and were not necessarily huge fans of Linux on the desktop. Once Apple went to Unix, and to Intel, and started making nice laptops, it was an appealing option. Other geeks like open source but also still find Linux frustrating with dependency hell or config file editing or lack of some piece of software functionality, and just want an out-of-the-box OS that they feel they can spend less time messing around with so they can spend more time messing around with their code. [Obviously a contentious topic around here, but in my limited experience I have spent relatively less time troubleshooting configuration on OSX than Linux. Yes, yes, OSX supports a limited set of hardware and Linux tries to support everything, but that doesn't change the time commitment to making your stuff work.]

There are also developer geeks who, until Lion (which allows virtualization), practically had to buy a Mac because they wanted to test their software under Windows, Linux, and OSX, on one machine. So it had to be a Mac virtualizing the other two.