But with vested interests.

E.g. High Fructose Corn Syrup.

obviously this person has never heard of Ebay

"Business Intelligence"

Reading between the lines, and with over 20 years experience of working with Oracle E-Business Suite, when you say 'managing' data, what you really mean is 'analysing' data. I agree Oracle E-Business Suite is primarily a 'repository' for the data, and typically the analysis is done with Business Intelligence tools built on either the EBS database directly, or on a dedicated data warehouse. The canonical product you would use is Oracle BI, but there are free tools probably just as good like Pentaho, Jaspersoft et al. Probably the only major benefit of using Oracle BI is that it comes with E-Business Suite specific queries and dashboards pre-built and configured.

I once wrote a COBOL code generator, in COBOL

one of these

http://www.swisstechtools.com/proddetail.aspx?pid=5

I have one - has made it through various security checkpoints and x-rays, including airports and courts - no-one has ever questioned me about it

Solitaire for grown-ups....

Yeah, like you can download RHEL without having to buy a subscription, and without having to register or anything, and its a full version, not some crappy evaluation version. Oh, wait.....

Oracle *database* is expensive. OEL is free.

And Linux Mint is just what a Fortune 500 company wants running their mission-critical systems.

https://oss.oracle.com/ol6/docs/RELEASE-NOTES-UEK2-en.html

which includes this little tid-bit

"The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel is available as binary RPM packages that can be installed from Oracle's public yum repository as well as the Unbreakable Linux Network. The kernel's source code is available via a public git source code repository from http://oss.oracle.com/git/?p=linux-uek-2.6.39.git"

http://www.oracle.com/us/media/calculator/linuxtco/index.html

No, it was because 'A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state'. They opposed the idea of having a standing army, because standing armies had been used against citizens in the revolutionary war and in other countries. The idea was that everyone would have a weapon so that in the event of the 'security of (the) free state' being threatened, 'a well regulated militia' could quickly form to remove the threat.

IIRC, the USA has a reasonably well-equipped defence force to deal with threats to the security of the USA (opposition to the idea of standing armies notwithstanding) so, yes, the 2nd amendment is past its use-by-date.

http://www.axpo-kompogas.ch/index.php?path=home&lang=en

http://tstbob.blogspot.com/2009/05/retro-goodness-vintage-sexist-adverts.html

I must have missed the part on the x-plane website that shows how it can 'allow pilots to experience real-world combat situations' and 'is also configurable, which allows the evaluation of "novel systems and concepts"'

And where does it say that the AUD 1.7M is on software?

"While the idea of universal free happy healthy health care sounds sugary sweet, there are some dire consequences of handing our individual health to governmental control"

as opposed to handing your individual health to an HMO whose goal is to maximize the return to its share holders, partly by minimizing costs by refusing to pay for treatments. Assuming you can afford to be with an HMO in the first place.