When you have a democracy and your government failed, you failed.

shit damn fuck

I, for one, would much rather support a call-girl fund for my corrupt, obscenely profiteering government officials than a call-girl fund for my corrupt, obscenely profiteering insurance industry executives.

Just because you think it should be an inalienable right does not make it so.

Might makes right.

Open Source software can have software patents.

A conversation I had at an organic food shop:

Me: Do you have any pure mint extract?
Employee: Yeah man, we've got some right over here.
Me: This is the cosmetics aisle. It says "Not for human consumption." right on the bottle.
Employee: Oh. But its organic man, its okay.
Me: So are rhubarb leaves.
Employee: Oh. Man. I dunno man.

IBM would have to do a lot more than support Oracle's SQL. They would have to support PL/SQL and all the hooks into very Oracle specific things like RMAN.

Due to significant differences between the ways Oracle and DB2 work, applications written to be fast on Oracle are probably not going to perform nearly as well on DB2, even if the application could be altered without much work to be faster on DB2.

It does not make it obscure, it makes it unpredictable.

You may figure out the location of something once, but it will be somewhere else on a different computer, or even on the same computer after a reboot.