I would put my money on Cisco. They have been trying to reinvent themselves as a cloud company and clearly their financials show declining margins on hardware as the market shifts to cloud. Their intercloud announcement is interesting but not real yet and I think a Rackspace acquisition would give them a serious boost just as the SoftLayer acquisition by IBM has really accellerated IBM's move into cloud services.
The other possible buyer could be EMC -- for similar reasons -- but I would definitely think Cisco would be more likely.
Freedom of press and freedom of speech are complete red herrings here.
DO is a private company and they are free to agree to whatever they want in their contracts. They don't owe anyone any obligation other than to adhere to the agreements they form with their customers.
All DO are asking the blog author to do is to just honour the Terms of Service that he himself agreed to. I don't see any controversy here; it is all very simple.
Maybe, the blog author is attention-seeking and trying to manufacture outrage by trying to cast himself as a "victim". The real victim, if there is one, is the Googler who has had his conversations in a closed forum relayed to the world and editorialised by someone who obviously didn't explain his true intents. Anyway, if the blog author disagrees and doesn't feel that he wants to honour his contract then he can just move his blog or, as DO suggest, launch legal action and get an injunction. I suspect though he will just skulk off and look for some other controversy to rant about.
If the NY Times signed an agreement with AWS that stated that they couldn't do X against anyone and, at a later date, they did X against Jeff Bezos then AWS would be well within their rights to demand that either NYT adhere to their agreement or leave.
I note that you use the example of two related entities (AWS and Jeff Bezos). Are you implying that there is a relationship between DO and the Googler equivalent to that between Jeff and AWS?
No one is suggesting DO shouldn't enforce their ToS. Rather, it's their ToS that is at issue. The use of AWS and NYTimes was too look at it another way. Everything the NYTimes prints would fall afoul of the ruling from DO.
More importantly, NYTimes wouldn't agree to such a stipulation from their provider precisely because of an issue like this. That should be a warning sign.
As for the use of Jeff Bezos, it was because I had mentioned AWS. Replace Bezos with anyone. It was merely the first name that popped into my head.
Here, I'll make it easy: AWS is the hosting provider, NYTimes is the site, and a member of the NSA is mentioned in the article.
A lot of the Roman impatience with early Christians was due to their energetic ... disagreements ... about your statement that "the trinity is nothing if not an expression of polytheism".
Right, however the Pauline creed places Jesus as divine alongside God. This is polytheistic as it has assigned divinity to something/someone other than God alone. And predates the period you describe. Of course, Christianity has become more and more polytheistic over time and now resembles, particularly in the third world where saint worship and veneration of bones is common practice, a belief system that is only marginally more monotheistic than Hinduism.
Nowadays, the only two major religions that one can say are even remotely monotheistic are Judaism and Islam. The Islamic notion of "tawheed" (unity of God) being a good example of a belief system that is genuinely monotheistic.
The actual question of whether Jesus is "alongside" God or whether he is God (and whether God is one being with three aspects or three independent aspects that combine like a divine Voltron) is literally the root of most of the nasty bustups of the first few centuries of Christianity. Those early bongpipe debate clubs really got out of hand.
In terms of veneration of saints etc; that's mostly because the early church deliberately went out of its way to absorb existing customs and beliefs. Many of the dates in the Christian calendar are pretty much stuff scribbled over the top of an existing pagan festival. Christmas pretty much replaces the Saturnalia, for instance.
>* This is polytheistic as it has assigned divinity to something/someone other than God alone.* //
It sounds like you're outside your comfort zone. Jesus is not other than God [the Father or God the Spirit] in orthodox [little-o] Christian belief. It's confusing for sure.
Catholicism includes the veneration of saints but they are categorically not gods, nor are relics gods, so how can the inclusion of such elements indicate polytheism.
Interesting that you mention Islam as one of the criticisms of Islam is that many supposed adherents appear to worship Mohammed as a god, certainly as much as Catholics "worship" the beatified. There is also the notion, warned against in the Quran IIRC, of worship of the djinn which could be considered analogous in some ways with veneration of the saints.
The orthodox belief you state that Jesus is the same as God is basically equivalent to the Hindu belief that their various gods are just different facets or aspects of God (with a capital G). If Christianity is monotheistic then, by this definition, so is Hinduism.
As for veneration of saints and relics, then anything that worshipped is a god and asking for blessings, intervention in worldly affairs, etc are all acts of worship. So when someone prays to a particular saint seeking something they are engaging a polytheistic act just as one who prays to an idol is engaging in polytheism.
I am not sure about Muslims worshipping Muhammad. Maybe in some polytheistic branches of Islam such as sufism and so forth which were themselves influenced by hindu/christian/etc ideas.
Some Hindu thought tends towards monotheism in considering the Brahman to be personal but that's certainly not true across the board. Personally I don't know enough hinduism, or hindus, to comment properly.
For those that don't consider the Brahman to be personal, and some that do, then within their philosophy [or practise] there are certainly distinct gods with distinct beings.
Not everything that is worshipped is a god. You can certainly worship something which is not divine - one of Jehovah's big beefs (!) with the early Hebrew tribes was their tendency to make things to worship.
When Catholics appeal to dead "Saints" (quite contradictory to NT use of saints to mean those who believe in Christ Jesus and so are saved) they ask for them to intercede before God for them. The thought is that the Saints are in heaven and so have the ear of God in a way that mortals do not - that is not deifying the Saints. It is not polytheism in practise or reality.
