This is a patent for the Nintendo 64 Disk Drive. I repeat: This is a patent for the Nintendo 64 Disk Drive. This is not a patent on online gaming. This is a patent on one specific product, one component of which happens to be online gaming. That product was a peripheral for the Nintendo 64.
Here is a link I got off the Penny Arcade message boards wherein Nintendo confirms this:
Nintendo reps contacted by GameSpot confirmed the patent was indeed for the 64DD and not for a new console.
Of course, it's too late; the slashdot blurb has done its damage and this story will likely be filled with nothing but alternating "OMFG THE REVOLUTION" and "they patented the internet!" comments. But, if you were curious, this is what is actually happening here.
Why the hell would you go into a country based on a total lie? That doesn't do anything at all to help him.
Looking at how Bush's approval ratings have reacted to the war, it appears to have helped him immensely.
[In order to think Bush lied about Iraq] You'd have to beleive (which i'm under the impression that a lot of liberals do these days) that bush has the intelligence of a four-year old and about as much morality as Adolf Hitler.
This is a straw man.
Your post would have been much stronger without the paragraph where you chose to switch gears from (legitimately) attacking those who trash Bush without a valid basis to (illegitimately) taking a very, very valid reason to criticize Bush's administration (he brazenly decieved the public in order to start a wholly avoidable war to which we have lost billions of dollars, our federal financial, international diplomatic, and military flexibility, and a thousand American servicemen, all with no apparent benefit to Americans) and suddenly trying to paint it as insignificant or equivilent to calling him a monkey.
If you wish to complain about the maturity of intellectual discourse in this country, that is fine and good. However trying to publically confuse political discourse which you happen to disagree with with political discourse which is immature in practically the same breath you complain about rabid and unfair political debate tactics is rather disingenous.
You didn't watch the DNC, did you? I think something like 43% of the American population had spoken at it by the time it was over. It's probably just a coincidence.
Isn't 100% easier and more smooth to interact with POP3 and your favorite email software?
I think the idea is your favorite email software isn't available everywhere. If you're ever using a computer other than your home desktop, and you want to read your email, you don't have the option of launching up whatever email client you like-- because the computer won't have it. Probably there will just be just Outlook Express, and you'll have to set up a user and configure your servers or whatnot. Not fun. It's much easier to have the option of just going to a website and checking your email, and once you start using this option you'll tend to want to use this website even when you get home-- even though at home you are actually free to run whatever your favorite email program-- because it's pleasant to have a single consistent interface every single time that you check your email, whereever in the world you are.
Of course, I don't use GMail, but the above logic is why even at home on my mac, I pretty much always check my email by sshing into a remote shell and using this command line mail program I sort of like. Ssh is pretty much available everywhere, and unlike webpages all ssh clients are actually compliant with one another...
What I find increasingly interesting is how Microsoft's competitors-- now that it's been made clear that united states antitrust law is not going to be enforced-- are trying to get around the Microsoft OS monopoly with what amounts to shareware. Microsoft has the power to create the default configuration for the vast majority of PCs, and since traditionally few users have stepped away from the default configuration this means Microsoft has the ability to dictate many things, from what formats will gain popularity to what web standards succeed or fail. If Microsoft desires, it can install a piece of software on every new copy of Windows in the world. Those companies that are not Microsoft do not have this luxury. Some of them now appear to be circumventing this by just trying to create random pieces of "must-have" software for free and bundling the service or format that they are actually making their money from with it.
For example, iTunes. Apple needs people to have support for Quicktime; however, they have no way of making Windows users want to install Quicktime. Webpages that require Quicktime will, of course, force you to download it, but such pages would seem likely to become scarce as webmasters realize that every computer has WMP already and using WMP instead of Quicktime will not require their users to download a plugin. Apple's solution is to create a music player program for Windows that is considered by many to be the best there is, which everybody then wants to download and try out. As a process of doing this, these people inadvertently wind up installing Quicktime. End result: every computer has Quicktime already.
Google here is just another example. Google appears to be anticipating that at some point Microsoft will start using its space within the desktop to promote some engine of its own and dissuade the use of Google. Google is reacting to this by trying to get a toehold into the desktop of their own, using things such as the Google Toolbar and now, the GMail notifier. Both of these things will be installed by users for purposes largely irrelivant to Google's search-- the former for popup blocking, the latter for mail-- yet doing this means that Google builds up inertia with everyone who "just has" to download their Google tools after every system upgrade. This means that when the system update comes where Microsoft decides that every time you accidentally control-click on a word displayed on the screen it will open up Internet Explorer and search for it in MSN Search, Google can use their toehold in the desktop to undo this change and replace it with something (1) useful and (2) involving google search.
This approach hits Microsoft hard where it hurts; Microsoft is excellent at creating software. However, historically they have by and large failed at creating good software. Microsoft's strategy of destroying competitors by bundling their own special brand of mediocre with roughly equivilent functionality for "free" with the OS doesn't work anymore once people start to wind up downloading the software of Microsoft's competitors free just because it's better.
Practically every news article I saw on the subject of this whole dutch auction thing mentioned that Google was reserving the right to fiddle with the exact number of shares sold if they didn't like how the price was turning out. And I saw quite a few articles. So it isn't like nobody saw this coming.
The news article I saw said held the opinion Google lowered the number of shares in the offering in order to increase the initial offering price-- since the "dutch auction" system had the direct effect that the fewer shares involved in the auction, the higher the final price of the auction would be set. This made a bit more sense to me than this "limiting supply" theory.
I think about the only thing to take away here is "no one fucking understands the stock market, and anyone who claims otherwise is selling something".
You can go out-- *now*-- and buy music from the Warp Records Music Store, and download it right onto your iPod, and it will work. And Apple doesn't mind. Ever notice that?
You know why that is? It's because when you buy from the Warp Music Store you get ordinary mp3s.
Meanwhile, what this Harmony thing is has nothing to do with Real "figuring out how to play.rm files on the iPod". We all know how to play music files on the iPod: You put them on the hard drive. What Real did was figure out how to hijack Apple's DRM restriction system so that Real could put DRM-restricted files on the iPod and they would be DRM-restricted, just like the files you get from the iTunes Music Store. In other words, even without Harmony Real can already put their music on your iPod, but that's not what they want, what they want to be able to put their music on your iPod but still limit what you do with it.
This is the problem I have with what Real's doing. It's disingenous. Real isn't fighting to make the iPod more "open". What Real is doing is fighting for the right to limit your consumer choice on a device that Apple attempted to design in such a way that only Apple could limit your consumer choice on it. This isn't consumer advocacy, it's two wolves arguing over whether or not the first wolf has to share the sheep he's about to eat with the second one.
I don't get what you're trying to say. I'm saying that if you look not at the individual stock share prices, but at the overall valuation of the company created by the total amount of Google stock that will exist post-IPO, you get an overall value about comparable to the overall value of Yahoo. Since Yahoo provides similar services to Google, has similar potential growth paths, and is probably Google's nearest direct competitor, then it would not be unreasonable to suspect the market would find it acceptable for Google to have an overall value as a company comparable to that of Yahoo.
If Google were selling one share for $1,000,000, would you think it's a great deal?
Uh, if you could buy a 100% share in Google for $1,000,000? Um, yes that would be a great deal!
From what I was told, Google was founded on cash from some venture capitalists. Those venture capitalists expect an IPO at some point so that they can have a return on their investments.
By IPOing, Google frees themselves from this investment. Meanwhile, they don't seem to be exactly jumping in to this stock market thing, kind of more like timidly putting one foot in or something.
I think we are going to be getting to a point where the majority of the desktop users will stop going to a website to search. They will choose to use integrated solutions in the future.
Not so sure the desktop users will bite. Mac users have had an excellent meta-search utility built into the desktop since... I think since about 1998 or so. Most of us don't use it. We mostly just use google now. In fact in the end Apple just put a "search google" field in its web browser's button bar.
If I go to Google, it's because I'm looking for webpages. If I am looking at webpages I want to do it in my web browser. It makes more sense to just keep the entire process within the browser than it does to add the unnecessary mental context switch of dropping into my file browser application. And that goes even if your operating system for some reason decides to reuse individual windows between the web browser and file browser so that it can pretend they're the same thing.
but really look at their business model and tell me that it's worth tens of billions in market capitalization
The initial market capitalization at that $100+ stock price (I.E. price of stock * stock in circulation) was about a billion dollars less than Yahoo's current capitalization.
Put that way, it doesn't sound quite so unreasonable.
Of course it was also about three times as much as Apple's current capitalization...
- If they stop distributing the source, they lose GPL rights. This could be a BIG cost.
Tough crap for them. The entire premise of the GPL is that you don't have to pay money or arrange licensing for the use of the GPLed code, and in exchange you extend the same courtesy to those persons who receive the same GPLed work from you. If you don't accept this then you have no right to continue distributing GPLed works.
If what you're saying is that SCO was distributing source to fulfill a prior obligation created by distributing a binary, then no, that's different, I agree, and I don't think that would constitute placing their embedded IP under the GPL. But putting the GPLed materials up for public download-- for anyone, including NEW persons who never recieved a binary from SCO or Caldera-- cannot really be said to be there for the purpose of fulfilling that obligation. This is a new act of distribution.
Also, did SCO continue to update the kernel mirror on their website once the lawsuits were launched? Or did they just leave the one they had in place? That would change a lot if they did.
But nevertheless, if you're interpreting the GPL in such a way that you can get a situation where SCO's distributing Linux from their website, but for you to download and redistribute Linux would be a violation of SCO's IP, then the GPL might as well not exist.
You can only have three apps concurrently? Fine, let one of them be Cygwin's X server. You can run as much crap as you want in that.
Actually, come to think of it, wouldn't that make this restriction kind of useless? How do they limit the number of apps you can run? What if one of the three apps you ran was just a file browser that you could point at your other apps, and it would exec() them as child processes or however Windows thinks of it, thus allowing you to launch as many apps as you wanted? It seems like however they implemented it, this restriction would be very easy to circumvent.
Getting back your support for "file and print sharing and local area networks" wouldn't be so easy though... unless you did the Cygwin thing and ran samba ^_^
I dunno what an ancestor of Kirk would entail, though that would definitely be interesting. But what about an ancestor of Picard? Aren't the Picards supposed to be this really famous family who were present at all of these historic space-exploration moments? Wouldn't it make sense for one of the Picards to show up in Enterprise somewhere? Has this already happened while I wasn't watching?
So what's Google's market capitalization? Well, um, I checked google...
For example, should Google really be worth $36.2 billion? Well, if the search engine giant, which unveiled pricing details and its ticker symbol (GOOG) Monday morning, begins trading at the upper end of its range, then that would be its market value.
That's comparable to Yahoo!, which currently has a market capitalization of about $37.8 billion.
So is that reasonable? I guess it is, I have no idea. The stock market still seems to me to pick these values out of thin air. If Google's market capitalization is less than Yahoo's, then I guess that couldn't be that unreasonable. Still, I find it amusing that that will be three times Apple's current market value.
So the article here seems to be saying that traditional IPOs invariably choose a structure that purposefully causes the IPO price to be undervalued; and Wall Street is pissy about Google's IPO because they chose a structure that does not purposefully cause undervaluation, and Wall Street benefits from undervaluation. However, what the article neglects is the possibility that Google's IPO structure has accidentally overcompensated and overvalued the IPO price.
So I've been trying to figure out: What happens to the Google stock price after the IPO?
Because $120 seems pretty clearly to be a silly price, at least compared to other stocks. I don't really think many people are going to want to buy at that price.
But, the thing is this. People know this ahead of time. No one is expecting the price to skyrocket immediately after stock launch. This means that, as this guy notes, if someone is buying Google stock at IPO they're probably buying it as a long term investment. At the very least, if you had just spent however much ridiculous amount of money that you have to spend to be one of the initial buyers in the IPO, and it immediately after IPO sinks $20, are you going to respond by going "oh shit, i'd better sell it now!"? No! That would be stupid! You sell at stock peaks, not valleys-- doing otherwise would limit your participation in the IPO to just throwing away the $20 per share you bought.
So the thing is this: demand for the Google stock at IPO time will likely be very low. But supply is also likely going to be very low-- because likely, and especially likely if the stock price sinks immediately after the IPO happens, the people who bought into that IPO won't be interested in selling what they have. So what does this all really mean for the stock price? Will the overvaluation be cancelled out by the fact that the IPO will attract the sort of people who won't want to sell what they just bought for a long time?
Meanwhile someone in the thread I just linked claimed that some people will be signing on to this IPO for the purpose of sabotaging it-- I.E., we'll see a fall in prices immediately after IPO launch because the big investment houses will be manipulating the stock down in order to discredit the dutch auction method. But if this is the case, once this manipulation-based fall is finished-- and it can't go on forever-- won't we immediately see a really large bounce in the other direction? If people are now widely expecting a drop in Google's price to occur immediately after the IPO launches, then doesn't this mean that anyone who wants the stock, but isn't in the IPO, will be operating on the strategy of: Hold off on buying at IPO launch, then wait for the inevitable post-IPO stock price correction to happen, then as soon as the price seems to have stabilized at its lower, corrected price, then buy. In other words, when the minima of Google's stock's first big dip occurs, it seems likely that a small flood of new interested buyers will come into play, possibly even triggering a rally.
Beyond this: the whole "options" thing. How does this work out? As far as I know the way this works is that a bunch of the people who work for Google, as well as Google's original VCs, have the right to buy the IPO stock at a price well below the actual IPO cost. Is this right? If so, then these people will likely be wanting to clear out as much of this stock as possible as soon as possible, right? Does this cancel out my "there won't be many sellers at IPO launch because of long-term investors" theory above, because the investors won't be providing supply for the stock at IPO launch, but the optionholders will be providing lots of supply? How significant of a proportion of shares will the optionholders hold within the greater block of google stock available?
One last thing: Does Google even care what happens to the
Who are you responding to? Neither the article, nor CmdrTaco's summary at all say anything about the "little guy".
The complaint here isn't that the current IPO system screws the "little guy".
The complaint being lodged here is that the current IPO system screws the company, while disproportionately helping those who are well-connected. In other words the complaint is that the current IPO system represents a way for the company board, as well as persons with connections to investment firms, to embezzle gobs of money from the company going IPO itself by lowering the amount of money that the company receives from the IPO sale in order to cause their bought-before-the-public-gets-a-chance shares to become fabulously valuable.
So we were initially worried CAN-SPAM would fail because we feared it was so weak it might actually protect certain "marketers" who bothered to follow its provisions to the letter. Now it turns out that it's going to fail because even it its weakened form, it isn't being enforced...
I think CAN-SPAM could be a good thing if they did enforce it. Even if some spammers were able to still "legally" operate under it, it would at least rise the cost of spamming, shoving many spammers out of business. It would also shut down the worst spammers-- the ones who are [i]already[/i] using illegal methods to push their spam, such as mail server hijacking. We'd have a culling of the herds, as it were.
Of course, this gets to something I never figured out. If Company A in the united states hires Spammer B in Burma to spam U.S. citizens, and Spammer B violates the CAN-SPAM act in doing so, can Company A be prosecuted under CAN-SPAM?
Slashdot Mirror
Here is a link I got off the Penny Arcade message boards wherein Nintendo confirms this:Of course, it's too late; the slashdot blurb has done its damage and this story will likely be filled with nothing but alternating "OMFG THE REVOLUTION" and "they patented the internet!" comments. But, if you were curious, this is what is actually happening here.
Search for "java ssh" on google. There are actually some very good java ssh clients now.
Why the hell would you go into a country based on a total lie? That doesn't do anything at all to help him.
Looking at how Bush's approval ratings have reacted to the war, it appears to have helped him immensely.
[In order to think Bush lied about Iraq] You'd have to beleive (which i'm under the impression that a lot of liberals do these days) that bush has the intelligence of a four-year old and about as much morality as Adolf Hitler.
This is a straw man.
Your post would have been much stronger without the paragraph where you chose to switch gears from (legitimately) attacking those who trash Bush without a valid basis to (illegitimately) taking a very, very valid reason to criticize Bush's administration (he brazenly decieved the public in order to start a wholly avoidable war to which we have lost billions of dollars, our federal financial, international diplomatic, and military flexibility, and a thousand American servicemen, all with no apparent benefit to Americans) and suddenly trying to paint it as insignificant or equivilent to calling him a monkey.
If you wish to complain about the maturity of intellectual discourse in this country, that is fine and good. However trying to publically confuse political discourse which you happen to disagree with with political discourse which is immature in practically the same breath you complain about rabid and unfair political debate tactics is rather disingenous.
If you are incompetent, you lack the fundamental qualities necessary to lead and do the job.
One could make a compelling and evidence-backed argument that, with George W. Bush, this is the case.
You didn't watch the DNC, did you? I think something like 43% of the American population had spoken at it by the time it was over. It's probably just a coincidence.
Isn't 100% easier and more smooth to interact with POP3 and your favorite email software?
I think the idea is your favorite email software isn't available everywhere. If you're ever using a computer other than your home desktop, and you want to read your email, you don't have the option of launching up whatever email client you like-- because the computer won't have it. Probably there will just be just Outlook Express, and you'll have to set up a user and configure your servers or whatnot. Not fun. It's much easier to have the option of just going to a website and checking your email, and once you start using this option you'll tend to want to use this website even when you get home-- even though at home you are actually free to run whatever your favorite email program-- because it's pleasant to have a single consistent interface every single time that you check your email, whereever in the world you are.
Of course, I don't use GMail, but the above logic is why even at home on my mac, I pretty much always check my email by sshing into a remote shell and using this command line mail program I sort of like. Ssh is pretty much available everywhere, and unlike webpages all ssh clients are actually compliant with one another...
What I find increasingly interesting is how Microsoft's competitors-- now that it's been made clear that united states antitrust law is not going to be enforced-- are trying to get around the Microsoft OS monopoly with what amounts to shareware. Microsoft has the power to create the default configuration for the vast majority of PCs, and since traditionally few users have stepped away from the default configuration this means Microsoft has the ability to dictate many things, from what formats will gain popularity to what web standards succeed or fail. If Microsoft desires, it can install a piece of software on every new copy of Windows in the world. Those companies that are not Microsoft do not have this luxury. Some of them now appear to be circumventing this by just trying to create random pieces of "must-have" software for free and bundling the service or format that they are actually making their money from with it.
For example, iTunes. Apple needs people to have support for Quicktime; however, they have no way of making Windows users want to install Quicktime. Webpages that require Quicktime will, of course, force you to download it, but such pages would seem likely to become scarce as webmasters realize that every computer has WMP already and using WMP instead of Quicktime will not require their users to download a plugin. Apple's solution is to create a music player program for Windows that is considered by many to be the best there is, which everybody then wants to download and try out. As a process of doing this, these people inadvertently wind up installing Quicktime. End result: every computer has Quicktime already.
Google here is just another example. Google appears to be anticipating that at some point Microsoft will start using its space within the desktop to promote some engine of its own and dissuade the use of Google. Google is reacting to this by trying to get a toehold into the desktop of their own, using things such as the Google Toolbar and now, the GMail notifier. Both of these things will be installed by users for purposes largely irrelivant to Google's search-- the former for popup blocking, the latter for mail-- yet doing this means that Google builds up inertia with everyone who "just has" to download their Google tools after every system upgrade. This means that when the system update comes where Microsoft decides that every time you accidentally control-click on a word displayed on the screen it will open up Internet Explorer and search for it in MSN Search, Google can use their toehold in the desktop to undo this change and replace it with something (1) useful and (2) involving google search.
This approach hits Microsoft hard where it hurts; Microsoft is excellent at creating software. However, historically they have by and large failed at creating good software. Microsoft's strategy of destroying competitors by bundling their own special brand of mediocre with roughly equivilent functionality for "free" with the OS doesn't work anymore once people start to wind up downloading the software of Microsoft's competitors free just because it's better.
Practically every news article I saw on the subject of this whole dutch auction thing mentioned that Google was reserving the right to fiddle with the exact number of shares sold if they didn't like how the price was turning out. And I saw quite a few articles. So it isn't like nobody saw this coming.
I have met the dangerous 208-year old uncle of Dr. Octagon, Mr. Gerbik!!!
The news article I saw said held the opinion Google lowered the number of shares in the offering in order to increase the initial offering price-- since the "dutch auction" system had the direct effect that the fewer shares involved in the auction, the higher the final price of the auction would be set. This made a bit more sense to me than this "limiting supply" theory.
I think about the only thing to take away here is "no one fucking understands the stock market, and anyone who claims otherwise is selling something".
You can go out-- *now*-- and buy music from the Warp Records Music Store, and download it right onto your iPod, and it will work. And Apple doesn't mind. Ever notice that?
.rm files on the iPod". We all know how to play music files on the iPod: You put them on the hard drive. What Real did was figure out how to hijack Apple's DRM restriction system so that Real could put DRM-restricted files on the iPod and they would be DRM-restricted, just like the files you get from the iTunes Music Store. In other words, even without Harmony Real can already put their music on your iPod, but that's not what they want, what they want to be able to put their music on your iPod but still limit what you do with it.
You know why that is? It's because when you buy from the Warp Music Store you get ordinary mp3s.
Meanwhile, what this Harmony thing is has nothing to do with Real "figuring out how to play
This is the problem I have with what Real's doing. It's disingenous. Real isn't fighting to make the iPod more "open". What Real is doing is fighting for the right to limit your consumer choice on a device that Apple attempted to design in such a way that only Apple could limit your consumer choice on it. This isn't consumer advocacy, it's two wolves arguing over whether or not the first wolf has to share the sheep he's about to eat with the second one.
I don't get what you're trying to say. I'm saying that if you look not at the individual stock share prices, but at the overall valuation of the company created by the total amount of Google stock that will exist post-IPO, you get an overall value about comparable to the overall value of Yahoo. Since Yahoo provides similar services to Google, has similar potential growth paths, and is probably Google's nearest direct competitor, then it would not be unreasonable to suspect the market would find it acceptable for Google to have an overall value as a company comparable to that of Yahoo.
If Google were selling one share for $1,000,000, would you think it's a great deal?
Uh, if you could buy a 100% share in Google for $1,000,000? Um, yes that would be a great deal!
From what I was told, Google was founded on cash from some venture capitalists. Those venture capitalists expect an IPO at some point so that they can have a return on their investments.
By IPOing, Google frees themselves from this investment. Meanwhile, they don't seem to be exactly jumping in to this stock market thing, kind of more like timidly putting one foot in or something.
I think we are going to be getting to a point where the majority of the desktop users will stop going to a website to search. They will choose to use integrated solutions in the future.
Not so sure the desktop users will bite. Mac users have had an excellent meta-search utility built into the desktop since... I think since about 1998 or so. Most of us don't use it. We mostly just use google now. In fact in the end Apple just put a "search google" field in its web browser's button bar.
If I go to Google, it's because I'm looking for webpages. If I am looking at webpages I want to do it in my web browser. It makes more sense to just keep the entire process within the browser than it does to add the unnecessary mental context switch of dropping into my file browser application. And that goes even if your operating system for some reason decides to reuse individual windows between the web browser and file browser so that it can pretend they're the same thing.
but really look at their business model and tell me that it's worth tens of billions in market capitalization
The initial market capitalization at that $100+ stock price (I.E. price of stock * stock in circulation) was about a billion dollars less than Yahoo's current capitalization.
Put that way, it doesn't sound quite so unreasonable.
Of course it was also about three times as much as Apple's current capitalization...
- If they stop distributing the source, they lose GPL rights. This could be a BIG cost.
Tough crap for them. The entire premise of the GPL is that you don't have to pay money or arrange licensing for the use of the GPLed code, and in exchange you extend the same courtesy to those persons who receive the same GPLed work from you. If you don't accept this then you have no right to continue distributing GPLed works.
If what you're saying is that SCO was distributing source to fulfill a prior obligation created by distributing a binary, then no, that's different, I agree, and I don't think that would constitute placing their embedded IP under the GPL. But putting the GPLed materials up for public download-- for anyone, including NEW persons who never recieved a binary from SCO or Caldera-- cannot really be said to be there for the purpose of fulfilling that obligation. This is a new act of distribution.
Also, did SCO continue to update the kernel mirror on their website once the lawsuits were launched? Or did they just leave the one they had in place? That would change a lot if they did.
But nevertheless, if you're interpreting the GPL in such a way that you can get a situation where SCO's distributing Linux from their website, but for you to download and redistribute Linux would be a violation of SCO's IP, then the GPL might as well not exist.
You can only have three apps concurrently? Fine, let one of them be Cygwin's X server. You can run as much crap as you want in that.
Actually, come to think of it, wouldn't that make this restriction kind of useless? How do they limit the number of apps you can run? What if one of the three apps you ran was just a file browser that you could point at your other apps, and it would exec() them as child processes or however Windows thinks of it, thus allowing you to launch as many apps as you wanted? It seems like however they implemented it, this restriction would be very easy to circumvent.
Getting back your support for "file and print sharing and local area networks" wouldn't be so easy though... unless you did the Cygwin thing and ran samba ^_^
I couldn't help but wonder how much of the movie was changed after Kubrick died.
They toned the nudity in the orgy scene WAY down.
However I think the more appropriate question to be asking here is "how much of the movie was FINISHED before Kubrick died"?
I dunno what an ancestor of Kirk would entail, though that would definitely be interesting. But what about an ancestor of Picard? Aren't the Picards supposed to be this really famous family who were present at all of these historic space-exploration moments? Wouldn't it make sense for one of the Picards to show up in Enterprise somewhere? Has this already happened while I wasn't watching?
Okay, I see.
So what's Google's market capitalization? Well, um, I checked google...
For example, should Google really be worth $36.2 billion? Well, if the search engine giant, which unveiled pricing details and its ticker symbol (GOOG) Monday morning, begins trading at the upper end of its range, then that would be its market value.
That's comparable to Yahoo!, which currently has a market capitalization of about $37.8 billion.
So is that reasonable? I guess it is, I have no idea. The stock market still seems to me to pick these values out of thin air. If Google's market capitalization is less than Yahoo's, then I guess that couldn't be that unreasonable. Still, I find it amusing that that will be three times Apple's current market value.
The question I was attempting to pose was, who is DP responding to, since otherwise he appears to be the one bringing the "little guy" into this?
So the article here seems to be saying that traditional IPOs invariably choose a structure that purposefully causes the IPO price to be undervalued; and Wall Street is pissy about Google's IPO because they chose a structure that does not purposefully cause undervaluation, and Wall Street benefits from undervaluation. However, what the article neglects is the possibility that Google's IPO structure has accidentally overcompensated and overvalued the IPO price.
So I've been trying to figure out: What happens to the Google stock price after the IPO?
Because $120 seems pretty clearly to be a silly price, at least compared to other stocks. I don't really think many people are going to want to buy at that price.
But, the thing is this. People know this ahead of time. No one is expecting the price to skyrocket immediately after stock launch. This means that, as this guy notes, if someone is buying Google stock at IPO they're probably buying it as a long term investment. At the very least, if you had just spent however much ridiculous amount of money that you have to spend to be one of the initial buyers in the IPO, and it immediately after IPO sinks $20, are you going to respond by going "oh shit, i'd better sell it now!"? No! That would be stupid! You sell at stock peaks, not valleys-- doing otherwise would limit your participation in the IPO to just throwing away the $20 per share you bought.
So the thing is this: demand for the Google stock at IPO time will likely be very low. But supply is also likely going to be very low-- because likely, and especially likely if the stock price sinks immediately after the IPO happens, the people who bought into that IPO won't be interested in selling what they have. So what does this all really mean for the stock price? Will the overvaluation be cancelled out by the fact that the IPO will attract the sort of people who won't want to sell what they just bought for a long time?
Meanwhile someone in the thread I just linked claimed that some people will be signing on to this IPO for the purpose of sabotaging it-- I.E., we'll see a fall in prices immediately after IPO launch because the big investment houses will be manipulating the stock down in order to discredit the dutch auction method. But if this is the case, once this manipulation-based fall is finished-- and it can't go on forever-- won't we immediately see a really large bounce in the other direction? If people are now widely expecting a drop in Google's price to occur immediately after the IPO launches, then doesn't this mean that anyone who wants the stock, but isn't in the IPO, will be operating on the strategy of: Hold off on buying at IPO launch, then wait for the inevitable post-IPO stock price correction to happen, then as soon as the price seems to have stabilized at its lower, corrected price, then buy. In other words, when the minima of Google's stock's first big dip occurs, it seems likely that a small flood of new interested buyers will come into play, possibly even triggering a rally.
Beyond this: the whole "options" thing. How does this work out? As far as I know the way this works is that a bunch of the people who work for Google, as well as Google's original VCs, have the right to buy the IPO stock at a price well below the actual IPO cost. Is this right? If so, then these people will likely be wanting to clear out as much of this stock as possible as soon as possible, right? Does this cancel out my "there won't be many sellers at IPO launch because of long-term investors" theory above, because the investors won't be providing supply for the stock at IPO launch, but the optionholders will be providing lots of supply? How significant of a proportion of shares will the optionholders hold within the greater block of google stock available?
One last thing: Does Google even care what happens to the
Who are you responding to? Neither the article, nor CmdrTaco's summary at all say anything about the "little guy".
The complaint here isn't that the current IPO system screws the "little guy".
The complaint being lodged here is that the current IPO system screws the company, while disproportionately helping those who are well-connected. In other words the complaint is that the current IPO system represents a way for the company board, as well as persons with connections to investment firms, to embezzle gobs of money from the company going IPO itself by lowering the amount of money that the company receives from the IPO sale in order to cause their bought-before-the-public-gets-a-chance shares to become fabulously valuable.
You're slipping, Taco
So I take it you haven't been reading slashdot very long.
BA-DUM CHING
So we were initially worried CAN-SPAM would fail because we feared it was so weak it might actually protect certain "marketers" who bothered to follow its provisions to the letter. Now it turns out that it's going to fail because even it its weakened form, it isn't being enforced...
I think CAN-SPAM could be a good thing if they did enforce it. Even if some spammers were able to still "legally" operate under it, it would at least rise the cost of spamming, shoving many spammers out of business. It would also shut down the worst spammers-- the ones who are [i]already[/i] using illegal methods to push their spam, such as mail server hijacking. We'd have a culling of the herds, as it were.
Of course, this gets to something I never figured out. If Company A in the united states hires Spammer B in Burma to spam U.S. citizens, and Spammer B violates the CAN-SPAM act in doing so, can Company A be prosecuted under CAN-SPAM?