You know... I like your general take on this, Impy.

My personal belief is that the natural order is for media to be politically biased because people are politically biased. The idea of neutral content providers or neutral platforms is a fantasy. Look back to the newspapers of colonial America and the early United States and they were all politically focused and nobody seemed to have a problem with this. This 20th century fantasy of unbiased media companies is hilarious... as if such a thing ever existed, even in the 20th century. I was there for the last fifth of it, my parents were around for over half of it. I guarantee you there never was an unbiased media company.

However, I want to point out that I think you've drawn a false equivalence here. Democrats want Facebook to do what Democrats want, whether or not it's in Facebook's interest, and whether or not it's in anyone's interest but Democrats.

Republicans had been asking Facebook politely to stop censoring political speech, including pleas from Democratic Senator Wyden who helped write Section 230. Only after quite a lot of time passed did Senator Cruz lob a mildly threatening volley. The spirit of Section 230 was to protect online distributors of content from nuisance suits that might have a chilling effect on free speech and yet these providers themselves are having a chilling effect on free speech. So how about just removing that protection?

I think that may very well be a "cut off your nose to spite your face" move, so I'm inclined to disagree with it, but I can understand the political motivation behind it. It's a "soft" threat intended to open a political dialog about possible realistic alternatives and the underlying motivation is one of fairness.

Possibly. Or maybe it's completely legit and now that Dyson is unable to capitalize on it himself he's willing to let the technology go to Musk. What we're witnessing is the sales pitch.

Contractually, as per employee handbook, I'm legally required to do so. Common for large corporation. Even small ones should do this. It avoids one foul-mouthed employee to say things that could otherwise be construed as being a corporate direction.

I dont think this has anything to do with recession planning.

Been in that company nearly 22 years and I've gone through (/survived) *many* restructuring operation (more than 10). It's never been about "surviving the next quarter". It's usually about optimisation of teams or product direction.

I know people in the Montreal group that have been affected. Don't ask numbers, I dont have em. But I do know other people in that group that didn't get axed. One VP there has had his manager teams' constituents affected. Dont know where—we're spread out globally. (I work in a different group and my teams mates spread from California to London plus a couple more in India.)

I'm not sure if there's a better way to handle things. I'm not even sure how they handled it in this case. But when our startup was acquired, they did the "everyone in this room still has a job" thing.

THAT, was by far, the worse I have witnessed. And it was before the acquisition so it's not on Oracle.

Obligatory "this is my opinion" thing and "I dont speak for Oracle".

You trying to tell me the onslaught of anonymous trolls on here makes for a better social experience?

I'm better off with my friends. Close or less close.

As an insider, from my chair, I can tell you Oracle is usually not into boasting it's survival / existence based on one high profile client.

We sometime see customers lists in internal memos but these generally dont end up as high-profile web site / PR announcements. Rather, key points get floated about during quarter numbers filing. I'm suspecting many of our higher-profile clients dont need (/want) their infrastructure details out in the open, or that any divulgation remains vague.

In my division, we see governments, pharma, entertainment and aerospace big names as well as smaller clients and collabs with 3rd party. It's the defence clients you usually never hear about.

So, I'd say, Oracle doesn't _need_ to make anything free to any one big client just to please them. It's also not a PR benefit. We already have plenty free or otherwise open offerings (our cloud products are both hosted or On Premise, support federated SSO, have plug-in or SDKs to be extended).

The "Oracle is evil" arguments is kinda funny when, from the inside, you see nothing inherently evil about what we do. How it's perceived by some customers, though, I can understand and it probably the result of bureaucracy, business processes or internal competition that leads to certain views about the company. I suppose this explains why I hate MicroSoft with a passion, yet, rare hear MS employees ever go out in masses, irate about a company they "should" hate, from our point of view.

The ultimate Darwin filter.

Someone can sum up the article please?

Dumping excess workforce is a precursor to a buyout.

Jerking off.

Did you just frickin assume my preferred language?

Starting with anonymous comments.