Does anyone know how the donation would affect the tax?

If he owes 25% (or whatever the real rate is) in tax, and he donates 33%, does that count as a write off on the tax and therefore he wouldn't have to pay anything?

This would make the donation not totally altruistic.

From what I've seen happen many times, a company does not need to use Oracle's products. Those multi-tenanted, cluster databases with editions, ...etc. Nice fun tech. But will the companies use it all? Nope. Only a fraction, and it could be run on other alternatives far cheaper.

What I have seen happen is the Oracle sales person makes the person taking the decision to feel important and powerful. "Look how much money I am spending on this project. I must be a big player." The sales person takes them out to lunch a few times, the employee feels special. Job done.

Ego. Play on peoples ego, and you'll go a long way.

Well, if we're going old school....

First Piss!

(more appropriate in this context than post) ...Naked and petrified...

Hey, at least we plebs know where we stand. So crimes, in descending order or importance are:

- Making a politician look stupid
- Preventing a corporation from maximising their profits
- Ridicule of any government organisation
- crimes against rich people
- ...
- ...
- property crimes ( rich people only)
- murder (poor people only)
- rape (poor people only)
(sorry, property crimes again poor people don't count at all)

It's good to know ones place in society.

They could have don't something creative, like give a tip to someone they don't like that their stock is going to plunge. Wait until the person has shorted the stock, then make some announcement (We're going into Chapter 11, etc).

Once the stock tanks, and your enemy has made some money, report them to the SEC for fraud, and tell the police that your enemy has hacked the account.

Sit back and watch them try to explain it.

I had some time in hospital, so I bought the first 4 seasons of The Walking dead and watched them through.

I watched the first season in real time, that was ok. For the second season, things just went too slowly, so I watched it on 2x.

After that, I watched all of the remaining series in 2x. Far better pacing. I know that the show likes to set the atmosphere and be slow, but it was too slow for me. At 2x speed, it was perfect.

Occasionally, I had to go back and watch a scene in normal speed again, but that wasn't too often.

That's a valid concern. The Eurovision song contest is a culturally significant European event, only open to truly integrated European countries, .... like Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_in_the_Eurovision_Song_Contest/

How do you reconcile this with the fact that 27% of 18-24 year old voted to leave, and 73% voted for the status quo?

See: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36616028/

Also, of the 65+ age group, 60% voted to leave.

If appears that reality has some disagreements with what you think. Now, unless you're Steve Jobs, you can't distort reality.

So, it's either -

  Woosh!

Or I have been trolled.

It's hard to tell these days.

No, that's sort of only right. There were physical constraints they had to deal with, with some extra security, but not the main bag checking security.

They blew up the check in area as that is where you drop off large bags, and they had large bombs in suitcases, not hand luggage size bags.

There are two exits from where they were towards the gates. The international gates has the passport control. You could physically take large bags through there, but you would get stopped by the police. The other exit is for European destinations, and there are large metal bollards made to stop the bag trolleys. It would have been very noticeable if they had tried to squeeze their bags past.

Only after both of these exit points, nearer to the walkways to the gates (and of course, past the shops) are the hand luggage scanners and the extra security. They could have never made it that far with their large suitcases.

The bombers set off their bombs at the best place they could, just like a car bomb could only be set off outside, and not inside a terminal building.

The bombers of the airport in Brussels exploded their bombs in the check-in area (before the passport control and even further from the baggage scanners). When the airport reopened, they had pushed the security as far back as they could.

There are now military+police checkpoints for cars before you get near the airport, just off the highway exits. It would be difficult to get a car bomb past. You have to get dropped off in a specific car park and walk up to 2 km to get to the security queue to get into the temporary airport buildings.

The queue for the next security check, where they check bags is about 500m long. Everyone is in a very long, thin queue. If there were bombs in the bags to be checked in, the best they could do is explode in the queue outside of the building, which would cause little damage, except to the few within 10m or so.

The end result is a nightmare of an airport, with people avoiding it and not flying. Passenger numbers are way down. A friend who flew recently took 4 hours to get through the security lines and to his flight. He just made it, even though it was a morning flight, and he arrived 4 hours in advance, at around 6am. I would hate to see the queue at 10am or later.

It hasn't crippled the economy, but has really screwed the operators of the airport and all of the airlines using it.

He's an economist.

He'll be using imaginary numbers.

It the way how how economists get their imaginary results.

So, you're saying that there is some sort of trade federation, backed by a shadowy figure trying to control everything.... ..... I have a bad feeling about this .....

So, you're saying that he has all of the qualifications to become president, or maybe a house/senate majority leader?

You may laugh, but it is true. Oracle were never going to turn itself into an Open Source company, and give away it's database for free.

Back in 1997, Oracle didn't have any official open source policy. It was not possible to officially run Oracle on Linux. There was a SCO release, and it was possible to grab a couple of SCO libraries and get Oracle running. There was no official project inside Oracle to get the database running on Linux.

Any open source work that was going on at the time was non-official, by individual employees, with no official support by Oracle management. Now, Oracle are paying people to work on the Linux kernel, along with a number of other Linux related open source add-ons.

Wim was an important player in getting Oracle to have an open source policy, and getting an official Linux version of the database, even if they did rip-off Redhat.

For a car analogy, Oracle have delivered an open source sub-compact, and if you were expecting them to deliver a fleet of 18 wheelers, then you're going to be sorely disappointed - but you can't say that they didn't deliver something, which is more than nothing.

It's really difficult to turn around an organization like Oracle, and the amount of open source support, no matter how small, is still more than I would have expected back in 1996.