Tattoos were traditionally a indication of some insecurity in the past (financial, physical, emotional, geographical, family, chemical, etc, etc). I know, as my tattoos date from the 80's & I did a survey once of everyone I knew that had tattoos & they all suffered from insecurity in the past (broken homes, abuse, jail, the insecurity of drug dependence, the need to be in a gang, the ongoing insecurities of a criminal lifestyle, etc, etc).
These days tattoos seem to be the fashion. Just look at all the trendy women living in trendy innercity suburbs/neihbourhoods & trendy beachside ares that have lower back tattoos. & the trendy blokes who obviouly spend a fortune on fresh streetwise hairstyles 'n clothing, that make a commitment to regularly workout & be tanned, that have profeshionally done tats that look like streetwise tatts. It's like the way trendies ride Harleys now.
I winder how these people will react when the fashions end up changing, as they always do. Such people habitually dump fine clothing on a whim, simply because it's no longer hip, but what will they do when their tatts are no longer hip?
I bet tattoo removal will be a boom industry in about a decade.
Meanwhile blokes like me who got their tatts 20 years ago will still be content wearing flannalette shirts, basic jeans & Blundie work boots as they were 20 years ago & will still be driving things like old slant-6 or Hemi-6 Valients, HR Holdens & weird stuff like Austin 1800s.....well if there are any left.
If their investors don't like it they can sell their shares to other investors, with the Windows & OS cash cows churning a total of billion a month in profit combined, there will always be someone willing to buy MS shares no matter how they fall.
Just as no matter how the price of some mint postage stamp goes up 'n down as philatelists buy & sell it, it's totally irrilivent to it's economic productivity/potential, IE it's ability to transport a letter a certain distance, well it's the same with Stock investors. The productive output of a company is determined by it's output, in regards Ford that's the cars & trucks running off it's lines, & the value of it's stock is as irrilivent here as the value our philatelists put on our mint postage stamp.
Really once money is raised via a prospectus & a company is floated on a exchange the value of it's shares become meaningless to a company. Each time the shares are then bought & sold is just a exchange of part ownership with no net investment gain or loss to the company. IOW investors don't matter, all that matters are potential investors if a company plans to raise more funds by a future share issue.
So please tell me why investor confidence matters to MS? With their Windows & Office cash cows they never need to ever think about raising new funds with another issue, & if MS investors don't like the way things are going they can sell their shares, it makes no difference to MS. Ontop of which MS's CEO could hypothetically divest all it's non liquid assets in a free lottery & there would still be billions for the major shareholders to retire on & live off the interest.
Why MS keeps wasting billions doing things like buying up companies 'n software & developing new products for no net return is beyond me. You know spending a obcene amount of money on things like the Xbox as the've done over the years. Each new field or product being a billion dollar gamble in the hope of striking lucky the way they did with Windows & Office (like the way Hitler kept gambling on new campiaigns after the winter of 41 in the hope of emulating the successes of the Spring of 1940 & the summer of 41). Especially when they can just rake in a billion a month on just their Windows & Office markets & simply invest the profits in property, the banking, arms & pharmacuetical industries (all can be very profitable relative to the average earnings/asset ratio in business) for the inivitable day when there isn't enough of a market for Windows & Office to be worth while sustaining. Whether that happens in a year or a decade it makes no differance to MS sustainability in regards filthy profits.
Gez instead of wasting a fortune on the numerous things over the years like the XBox 'n Underdog & buying up other companies 'n IP, they could simple burn a million or 2 a year & the net result would be the same - the losses totally eclipsed by the Profits from Windows & Office.
Corporations should consider themselves lucky if they fluke one cash cow, but MS fluked 2 cash cows, meaning the odds are a million to one that they'd ever fluke 3 times lucky. Better to just invest in the companies/sectors/industries with the top earning to asset ratios. That will set them up much better for the inivitable day whenever when the Windows & Office cashcows splutter down.
It's about time Ballmer got smart & divested MS of everything but their Windows & Office cash cows & turned itself into a merchant bank with the cash.
Look at the way they avoided such masterpieces as Sergi Eisenstein's 'Battleship Potemkin' 'n '10 Days that shook the World' & Leni Riefenstahl's 'Triumph of the Will'. Together with Citizen Kane, those 3 films always get included in such lists. For example m father was an award winning Cinematographer who was a mentor & teacher to 3 Oscar winning DOPs & those 4 films always make his top 20 best film lists.
Personally I think 'Carry on up the Kyber' was a better film than many that made it on this list of Time's.
The US is full of hidden local & state taxes that can really addd up, that of course never get counted because they're not universal nation wide. Do any sort of transaction in the US & it always worked out higher than the agreed price because all of a sudden these state 'n county fees, surcharges & taxes pop up from nowhere. Even things like a county road surcharge & a state emissions surcharged added to cab fares in some places. Then there's the local land taxes to fund local public schools (that can vary by a huge degree between even 2 neihbouring satalite towns with similar socio-economic mixes), where as in the rest of the world public schools are mostly simply funded directly from consilidated revenue of the national treasury.
Ontop of which employers in the US have to pay for the employees healthcare insurance, in a country with the highest health costs in the world, both per capita & as a percentage of GDP, both by a significant margin than anywhere else too. Where as in much of Europe employees healthcare is covered again by consilidated revenue of the national treasury.
Ask yourself which is a better place to live in Central America if you arn't wealthy, & I mean wealthy by Central American standards (which rules even those on the dole in the west).
Yep lets compare Cuba with Mexico, Post Sandinista Nicaragua, Columbia, Panama & Haiti, etc.
The simple fact that Cuba is a 3rd World Country yet has tertiary education levels & life expectancies that match the US (all while facing a cripling embargo for 2 generations), makes it a Utopian workers paradise by 3rd world standards, no matter how much of a stinking sewer some arrogant 'Sepo' thinks the place is.
What you do is next time you come across a EULA while installing a program, is simply to make sure not to read any of it & instead get you flatmate to come over it & ask him to click the checkbox & tick ok.
By doing that you are under no obligation to corform to the EULA as you never agreed to comply with it in the 1st place.
Meaning I assume there's nothing stopping anyone from distributing (by a download or a CD) a static install complete with all the popular extensions pre-loaded.
I would say the vast majority of national govts have purchasing rules stating that they must buy locally produced goods unless there's no option but to buy foreign.
I know all the NSW govt depts & statuary authorities I've worked at had tendering & purchasing regulations giving preferance to locally made products & suppliers over foreign ones.
Americans are prosecuted everyday for crimes overseas.
BTW there's nothing stopping foreign countries themselves prosecuting American soldiers for warcrimes in their countries. Contrary to popular belief, most countries in the world have not signed armed services treaties with the US signing away their right to prosecute US servicemen in their country if they commit a crime there.
Here in Oz I can name a couple of incidents when US servicemen were arrested & prosecuted for indictable crimes & the relivent state govt rejected US appeals to let the US military prosecute & punish the servicemen themselves. Mind you often what happens is that the US military pulls stunts to make sure the servicemen in question arn't accesable to local low enforcement bodies, so the juristiction concerned has little choice but to accept US military offers to prosecute & punish the soldiers internally, whether the offer is genuine or not.
From my understand Semprons are the same as the older Athlons (maybe manufactured on a smaller process) but with different CPUIDs as Semprons, for the budget market.
So maybe the Windows Starter Edition accepts Duron & Sempron IDs.
You just have the base editions in each country locked to that countries language.
So the MS India editon only has Indian language options, say the top half dozen.
Sure English only software could be loaded & English documents viewed, but things like the OS (& it's utilities)in some foreign language & programs that self adjust to the OS's default language will piss off English speaking cheapskates no end.
I remember when on some bloody computer every Nvdia driver I downloaded would have it's installer automatically reset the dialogues & buttons into bloody Cyrilic Russian for some reason. Really pissed me off, & the computer has it's region settings as Australia with just US keyboard defaults & nothing else... Eventually I worked out that some setting for non-unicode languages had somehow ended up set to Russian in the past.
With Patents it's up to the patent holders to sue those that infringe their patent or break license agreements, & doing such things are consided totally irrilivent by law enforcement bodies & the criminal courts, because infringing patents is not a crime.
Instead one's just infringing on another's exclusive commercial rights. Afterall that's what a patent is - the government rewarding the innovative for being creative by giving them exclusive commercial rights to their own work for X amount of years.
Well copyrights were traditionally pretty similar - the government rewarding the artistic for being creative by giving them them exclusive commercial rights to their own work for X amount of years.
Now WTF should infringing on copyrights be a crime but not but patents is beyond me.
I see absolutelly no public interest slash pragmatic imperitive for government law enforcement of the commerical exclusivity of copyrights but not patents.
From my understanding traditionally copyrights & patents were enforced in similar ways (by the holders themselves at their expence via legal threats & the civil law courts) but over time lobbying in the US has meant that the type of criminal provisions relating to trademarks have creaped into copyright law. Theses criminal provisions in relation to trademarks originally came out to protect the consumers from fraudelent suppliers, like fake Made in USA Hamilton Railroad watches from Switzerland (Oh how things have changed, today now all Hamiltons are made in Switzerland & one can buy fake Rolexes with genuine Swiss ETA movts, virtually the same as in real Rolex Tudors). Over time the US thrust criminal enforcement of copyrights on the rest of the world via the multilateral treaties & bodies like the WTO & bilateral treaties (like the way a DMCA style bill is being offloaded onto us Aussies as a consequence of the US/Australian FTA).
Even though it's been largely proved incorrect, it was generally treated as a matter of fact by most sources of intelligence that Saddam had and / or was trying to get WMD's
From my understanding to every piece of intelligence suggesting WMD, western intelligence services had much more intelligence saying the opposite.
It's just that our governments were cherry picking the intelligence to find the bits that suited their plans. All while the leaders of our intelligence services wanted to stay on side with their governing administrations by only passing on the iffy intelligence that kept to the partyline(like claims by defectors paid with retainors by neocon think-tank offshoots to say what the powers that be wanted to hear), all while excluding & shelving away the much more reliable & extensive intelligence that Iraq was thouroughly contained & not even a threat to it's immediate neihbours, let alone the US.
Note that there were top level intelligence analysts/experts on Iraq in the US, UK & Australia that resigned in protest (I'm talking plural wise in regards each of those countries) over the exagerations, hyperbol & descredited sources that those govts used to back their claims in total contradiction to what they really knew on Iraq on the ground, that has since been confirmed by even Bush's own Iraq Survey Group.
Remember when the war-mongers ravaged Scott Ritter for saying things like 'Iraq is more than 90% disarmed', well guess what I wasn't the least bit surprised when he was proved right. Really the only reason this wasn't the official position of the UN inspectors' leadership & the intelligence services of the more nuetral nations (in regard Iraq), was just to cover their arses in of the million to 1 chance that Saddam had managed to stash reliably operative WMD away in deployable quanties, totally contrary to everything they knew. (the odd battle field & artillery range chemical shell left over from the Iran-Iraq war does not equal WMD). Plus they wanted to protect their own cashcows, as in generous tax-free UN salaries with the numerous hardship allowances 'n perks, that in total probability dwarfted their base saleries.
If their investors don't like it they can sell their shares to other investors, with the Windows & OS cash cows churning a total of billion a month in profit combined, there will always be someone willing to buy MS shares no matter how they fall.
Just as no matter how the price of some mint postage stamp goes up 'n down as philatelists buy & sell it, it's totally irrilivent to it's economic productivity/potential, IE it's ability to transport a letter a certain distance, well it's the same with Stock investors. The productive output of a company is determined by it's output, in regards Ford that's the cars & trucks running off it's lines, & the value of it's stock is as irrilivent here as the value our philatelists put on our mint postage stamp.
Really once money is raised via a prospectus & a company is floated on a exchange the value of it's shares become meaningless to a company. Each time the shares are then bought & sold is just a exchange of part ownership with no net investment gain or loss to the company. IOW investors don't matter, all that matters are potential investors if a company plans to raise more funds by a future share issue.
So please tell me why investor confidence matters to MS? With their Windows & Office cash cows they never need to ever think about raising new funds with another issue, & if MS investors don't like the way things are going they can sell their shares, it makes no difference to MS. Ontop of which MS's CEO could hypothetically divest all it's non liquid assets in a free lottery & there would still be billions for the major shareholders to retire on & live off the interest.
Why MS keeps wasting billions doing things like buying up companies & software & developing new products for no net return is beyond me. You know spending a obcene amount of money on things like the Xbox as the've done over the years. Each new field or product being a billion dollar gamble in the hope of striking lucky the way they did with Windows & Office (like the way Hitler kept gambling on new campiaigns after the winter of 41 in the hope of emulating the successes of the Spring of 1940 & the summer of 41). Especially when they can just rake in a billion a month on just their Windows & Office markets & simply invest the profits in property, the banking, arms & pharmacuetical industries (all can be very profitable relative to the average earnings/asset ratio in business) for the inivitable day when there isn't enough of a market for Windows & Office to be worth while sustaining. Whether that happens in a year or a decade it makes no differance to MS sustainability in regards filthy profits.
Gez instead of wasting a fortune on the numerous things over the years like the XBox 'n Underdog & buying up other companies 'n IP, they could simple burn a million or 2 a year & the net result would be the same - the losses totally eclipsed by the Profits from Windows & Office.
Corporations should consider themselves lucky if they fluke one cash cow, but MS fluked 2 cash cows, meaning the odds are a million to one that they'd ever fluke 3 times lucky. Better to just invest in the companies/sectors/industries with the top earning to asset ratios. That will set them up much better for the inivitable day whenever when the Windows & Office cashcows splutter down.
Slashdot Mirror
You might not get so many people wanting to moderate you as a fool.
Either that or next time you want to reply to someone, check their parent post to see the angle they're coming from
One can exploit them better
Tattoos were traditionally a indication of some insecurity in the past (financial, physical, emotional, geographical, family, chemical, etc, etc). I know, as my tattoos date from the 80's & I did a survey once of everyone I knew that had tattoos & they all suffered from insecurity in the past (broken homes, abuse, jail, the insecurity of drug dependence, the need to be in a gang, the ongoing insecurities of a criminal lifestyle, etc, etc).
These days tattoos seem to be the fashion. Just look at all the trendy women living in trendy innercity suburbs/neihbourhoods & trendy beachside ares that have lower back tattoos. & the trendy blokes who obviouly spend a fortune on fresh streetwise hairstyles 'n clothing, that make a commitment to regularly workout & be tanned, that have profeshionally done tats that look like streetwise tatts. It's like the way trendies ride Harleys now.
I winder how these people will react when the fashions end up changing, as they always do. Such people habitually dump fine clothing on a whim, simply because it's no longer hip, but what will they do when their tatts are no longer hip?
I bet tattoo removal will be a boom industry in about a decade.
Meanwhile blokes like me who got their tatts 20 years ago will still be content wearing flannalette shirts, basic jeans & Blundie work boots as they were 20 years ago & will still be driving things like old slant-6 or Hemi-6 Valients, HR Holdens & weird stuff like Austin 1800s.....well if there are any left.
That's what's being ethical is all about.
BTW having a bias doesn't mean one can't be objective. The thing to do is to disclose one's bias so the reader can take that into account.
If their investors don't like it they can sell their shares to other investors, with the Windows & OS cash cows churning a total of billion a month in profit combined, there will always be someone willing to buy MS shares no matter how they fall.
Just as no matter how the price of some mint postage stamp goes up 'n down as philatelists buy & sell it, it's totally irrilivent to it's economic productivity/potential, IE it's ability to transport a letter a certain distance, well it's the same with Stock investors. The productive output of a company is determined by it's output, in regards Ford that's the cars & trucks running off it's lines, & the value of it's stock is as irrilivent here as the value our philatelists put on our mint postage stamp.
Really once money is raised via a prospectus & a company is floated on a exchange the value of it's shares become meaningless to a company. Each time the shares are then bought & sold is just a exchange of part ownership with no net investment gain or loss to the company. IOW investors don't matter, all that matters are potential investors if a company plans to raise more funds by a future share issue.
So please tell me why investor confidence matters to MS? With their Windows & Office cash cows they never need to ever think about raising new funds with another issue, & if MS investors don't like the way things are going they can sell their shares, it makes no difference to MS. Ontop of which MS's CEO could hypothetically divest all it's non liquid assets in a free lottery & there would still be billions for the major shareholders to retire on & live off the interest.
Why MS keeps wasting billions doing things like buying up companies 'n software & developing new products for no net return is beyond me. You know spending a obcene amount of money on things like the Xbox as the've done over the years. Each new field or product being a billion dollar gamble in the hope of striking lucky the way they did with Windows & Office (like the way Hitler kept gambling on new campiaigns after the winter of 41 in the hope of emulating the successes of the Spring of 1940 & the summer of 41). Especially when they can just rake in a billion a month on just their Windows & Office markets & simply invest the profits in property, the banking, arms & pharmacuetical industries (all can be very profitable relative to the average earnings/asset ratio in business) for the inivitable day when there isn't enough of a market for Windows & Office to be worth while sustaining. Whether that happens in a year or a decade it makes no differance to MS sustainability in regards filthy profits.
Gez instead of wasting a fortune on the numerous things over the years like the XBox 'n Underdog & buying up other companies 'n IP, they could simple burn a million or 2 a year & the net result would be the same - the losses totally eclipsed by the Profits from Windows & Office.
Corporations should consider themselves lucky if they fluke one cash cow, but MS fluked 2 cash cows, meaning the odds are a million to one that they'd ever fluke 3 times lucky. Better to just invest in the companies/sectors/industries with the top earning to asset ratios. That will set them up much better for the inivitable day whenever when the Windows & Office cashcows splutter down.
It's about time Ballmer got smart & divested MS of everything but their Windows & Office cash cows & turned itself into a merchant bank with the cash.
Israel's been pumping trojans on the world's computer networks since the late 70's, all with a wink from the US.
Out there in the suburbs where I fix computers Win 98SE is still the most common OS, then comes XP & W2K comes 3rd.
Look at the way they avoided such masterpieces as Sergi Eisenstein's 'Battleship Potemkin' 'n '10 Days that shook the World' & Leni Riefenstahl's 'Triumph of the Will'. Together with Citizen Kane, those 3 films always get included in such lists. For example m father was an award winning Cinematographer who was a mentor & teacher to 3 Oscar winning DOPs & those 4 films always make his top 20 best film lists.
Personally I think 'Carry on up the Kyber' was a better film than many that made it on this list of Time's.
plus mandatory services charges, etc.
In Oz there isn't even tipping, meaning the quoted price is the price paid.
The US is full of hidden local & state taxes that can really addd up, that of course never get counted because they're not universal nation wide. Do any sort of transaction in the US & it always worked out higher than the agreed price because all of a sudden these state 'n county fees, surcharges & taxes pop up from nowhere. Even things like a county road surcharge & a state emissions surcharged added to cab fares in some places. Then there's the local land taxes to fund local public schools (that can vary by a huge degree between even 2 neihbouring satalite towns with similar socio-economic mixes), where as in the rest of the world public schools are mostly simply funded directly from consilidated revenue of the national treasury.
Ontop of which employers in the US have to pay for the employees healthcare insurance, in a country with the highest health costs in the world, both per capita & as a percentage of GDP, both by a significant margin than anywhere else too. Where as in much of Europe employees healthcare is covered again by consilidated revenue of the national treasury.
I assume the minimum requirements for XP Embedded ie32 are less than for Windows XP for the PC
With a couple of add ons & a new skin, that's my guess.
Ask yourself which is a better place to live in Central America if you arn't wealthy, & I mean wealthy by Central American standards (which rules even those on the dole in the west).
Yep lets compare Cuba with Mexico, Post Sandinista Nicaragua, Columbia, Panama & Haiti, etc.
The simple fact that Cuba is a 3rd World Country yet has tertiary education levels & life expectancies that match the US (all while facing a cripling embargo for 2 generations), makes it a Utopian workers paradise by 3rd world standards, no matter how much of a stinking sewer some arrogant 'Sepo' thinks the place is.
What you do is next time you come across a EULA while installing a program, is simply to make sure not to read any of it & instead get you flatmate to come over it & ask him to click the checkbox & tick ok.
By doing that you are under no obligation to corform to the EULA as you never agreed to comply with it in the 1st place.
Meaning I assume there's nothing stopping anyone from distributing (by a download or a CD) a static install complete with all the popular extensions pre-loaded.
I would say the vast majority of national govts have purchasing rules stating that they must buy locally produced goods unless there's no option but to buy foreign.
I know all the NSW govt depts & statuary authorities I've worked at had tendering & purchasing regulations giving preferance to locally made products & suppliers over foreign ones.
Or maybe thay're just supporting past sales contracts guaranteeing avaliabilty for so many years?
Americans are prosecuted everyday for crimes overseas.
BTW there's nothing stopping foreign countries themselves prosecuting American soldiers for warcrimes in their countries. Contrary to popular belief, most countries in the world have not signed armed services treaties with the US signing away their right to prosecute US servicemen in their country if they commit a crime there.
Here in Oz I can name a couple of incidents when US servicemen were arrested & prosecuted for indictable crimes & the relivent state govt rejected US appeals to let the US military prosecute & punish the servicemen themselves. Mind you often what happens is that the US military pulls stunts to make sure the servicemen in question arn't accesable to local low enforcement bodies, so the juristiction concerned has little choice but to accept US military offers to prosecute & punish the soldiers internally, whether the offer is genuine or not.
From my understand Semprons are the same as the older Athlons (maybe manufactured on a smaller process) but with different CPUIDs as Semprons, for the budget market.
So maybe the Windows Starter Edition accepts Duron & Sempron IDs.
You just have the base editions in each country locked to that countries language.
So the MS India editon only has Indian language options, say the top half dozen.
Sure English only software could be loaded & English documents viewed, but things like the OS (& it's utilities)in some foreign language & programs that self adjust to the OS's default language will piss off English speaking cheapskates no end.
I remember when on some bloody computer every Nvdia driver I downloaded would have it's installer automatically reset the dialogues & buttons into bloody Cyrilic Russian for some reason. Really pissed me off, & the computer has it's region settings as Australia with just US keyboard defaults & nothing else... Eventually I worked out that some setting for non-unicode languages had somehow ended up set to Russian in the past.
Like Patents.
With Patents it's up to the patent holders to sue those that infringe their patent or break license agreements, & doing such things are consided totally irrilivent by law enforcement bodies & the criminal courts, because infringing patents is not a crime.
Instead one's just infringing on another's exclusive commercial rights. Afterall that's what a patent is - the government rewarding the innovative for being creative by giving them exclusive commercial rights to their own work for X amount of years.
Well copyrights were traditionally pretty similar - the government rewarding the artistic for being creative by giving them them exclusive commercial rights to their own work for X amount of years.
Now WTF should infringing on copyrights be a crime but not but patents is beyond me.
I see absolutelly no public interest slash pragmatic imperitive for government law enforcement of the commerical exclusivity of copyrights but not patents.
From my understanding traditionally copyrights & patents were enforced in similar ways (by the holders themselves at their expence via legal threats & the civil law courts) but over time lobbying in the US has meant that the type of criminal provisions relating to trademarks have creaped into copyright law. Theses criminal provisions in relation to trademarks originally came out to protect the consumers from fraudelent suppliers, like fake Made in USA Hamilton Railroad watches from Switzerland (Oh how things have changed, today now all Hamiltons are made in Switzerland & one can buy fake Rolexes with genuine Swiss ETA movts, virtually the same as in real Rolex Tudors). Over time the US thrust criminal enforcement of copyrights on the rest of the world via the multilateral treaties & bodies like the WTO & bilateral treaties (like the way a DMCA style bill is being offloaded onto us Aussies as a consequence of the US/Australian FTA).
As far as I've noticed, no one uses AMD except local operator owned PC outlets & people like me who build boxes for myself & others that twist my arm.
All the brandname PCs still virtually always have Intel inside, mores the pity.
Just stick "file://localhost/" in Opera's address bar & one ends up with a rudimentary equilivent of Window Explorer's 'My Computer'
I assume one could do similar with Firefox too.
From my understanding to every piece of intelligence suggesting WMD, western intelligence services had much more intelligence saying the opposite.
It's just that our governments were cherry picking the intelligence to find the bits that suited their plans. All while the leaders of our intelligence services wanted to stay on side with their governing administrations by only passing on the iffy intelligence that kept to the partyline(like claims by defectors paid with retainors by neocon think-tank offshoots to say what the powers that be wanted to hear), all while excluding & shelving away the much more reliable & extensive intelligence that Iraq was thouroughly contained & not even a threat to it's immediate neihbours, let alone the US.
Note that there were top level intelligence analysts/experts on Iraq in the US, UK & Australia that resigned in protest (I'm talking plural wise in regards each of those countries) over the exagerations, hyperbol & descredited sources that those govts used to back their claims in total contradiction to what they really knew on Iraq on the ground, that has since been confirmed by even Bush's own Iraq Survey Group.
Remember when the war-mongers ravaged Scott Ritter for saying things like 'Iraq is more than 90% disarmed', well guess what I wasn't the least bit surprised when he was proved right. Really the only reason this wasn't the official position of the UN inspectors' leadership & the intelligence services of the more nuetral nations (in regard Iraq), was just to cover their arses in of the million to 1 chance that Saddam had managed to stash reliably operative WMD away in deployable quanties, totally contrary to everything they knew. (the odd battle field & artillery range chemical shell left over from the Iran-Iraq war does not equal WMD). Plus they wanted to protect their own cashcows, as in generous tax-free UN salaries with the numerous hardship allowances 'n perks, that in total probability dwarfted their base saleries.
If their investors don't like it they can sell their shares to other investors, with the Windows & OS cash cows churning a total of billion a month in profit combined, there will always be someone willing to buy MS shares no matter how they fall.
Just as no matter how the price of some mint postage stamp goes up 'n down as philatelists buy & sell it, it's totally irrilivent to it's economic productivity/potential, IE it's ability to transport a letter a certain distance, well it's the same with Stock investors. The productive output of a company is determined by it's output, in regards Ford that's the cars & trucks running off it's lines, & the value of it's stock is as irrilivent here as the value our philatelists put on our mint postage stamp.
Really once money is raised via a prospectus & a company is floated on a exchange the value of it's shares become meaningless to a company. Each time the shares are then bought & sold is just a exchange of part ownership with no net investment gain or loss to the company. IOW investors don't matter, all that matters are potential investors if a company plans to raise more funds by a future share issue.
So please tell me why investor confidence matters to MS? With their Windows & Office cash cows they never need to ever think about raising new funds with another issue, & if MS investors don't like the way things are going they can sell their shares, it makes no difference to MS. Ontop of which MS's CEO could hypothetically divest all it's non liquid assets in a free lottery & there would still be billions for the major shareholders to retire on & live off the interest.
Why MS keeps wasting billions doing things like buying up companies & software & developing new products for no net return is beyond me. You know spending a obcene amount of money on things like the Xbox as the've done over the years. Each new field or product being a billion dollar gamble in the hope of striking lucky the way they did with Windows & Office (like the way Hitler kept gambling on new campiaigns after the winter of 41 in the hope of emulating the successes of the Spring of 1940 & the summer of 41). Especially when they can just rake in a billion a month on just their Windows & Office markets & simply invest the profits in property, the banking, arms & pharmacuetical industries (all can be very profitable relative to the average earnings/asset ratio in business) for the inivitable day when there isn't enough of a market for Windows & Office to be worth while sustaining. Whether that happens in a year or a decade it makes no differance to MS sustainability in regards filthy profits.
Gez instead of wasting a fortune on the numerous things over the years like the XBox 'n Underdog & buying up other companies 'n IP, they could simple burn a million or 2 a year & the net result would be the same - the losses totally eclipsed by the Profits from Windows & Office.
Corporations should consider themselves lucky if they fluke one cash cow, but MS fluked 2 cash cows, meaning the odds are a million to one that they'd ever fluke 3 times lucky. Better to just invest in the companies/sectors/industries with the top earning to asset ratios. That will set them up much better for the inivitable day whenever when the Windows & Office cashcows splutter down.