Is the government prepared to compensate Microsoft's shareholders for the devaluation?
No, why the hell should it? As the Metallica fans are always saying, they broke the law. Why should shareholders be rewarded for paying money to fund a lawbreaking corporation? If Michael Milken goes to jail, do his investors get compensated for losing money by investing in crime?
Without patent protection all of that work will go to waste if competitors get there first.
Good! Maybe greed-motivated monster multinational corporations SHOULDN'T be encouraged to go out playing God when they haven't even shown they're responsible with plain old chemicals.
I don't particularly see the POINT of encouraging Mafia-like thugocrats like the Monsanto corporation to pollute the genetic environment with potentially dangerous and untested genetic technologies when they've already poisoned the world with poisonous chemicals like PCBs. They blithely ignored warnings about those, just like they do about the potential hazards of the crap they're unleashing now. They have deliberately gone out of their way even to prevent customers from knowing whether they are eating their products. If they are so wonderful, then why do they hide and lie like that?
What's next, a genetically-engineered human-based slave class whose children are taken away and killed because they reproduced without a license?
Well it is Monsanto who has developed the strong breeds of crops in the first place. Nobody has the right to reproduce Monsanto's intellectual property (which their genetically altered crops are).
Another mindless corporate shill. The plants already have the potential to cross-pollinate. What are you gonna fucking do, sue God?
Lots of people can't get weed to plant the next crop, there's a big famine in most of the world(3rd world, should I say, they always get all the hits), and that means LOTS of people die, revolutions(not that they are bad, but...), etc, more people die. Sure it is a fast solution to the demographic problems on earth.
I imagine worse than that. Much worse. Never mind that Monsanto is the same company that brought the gift of PCBs to the world, ignoring the evidence of how hazardous they are, and also brought us saccharin and even brag about that on their webpage, that they censor opposing views, and generally act like the genetic Mafia, suing farmers left and right.
Giving this vicious, dishonest, fascist corporation a monopoly on natural phenomena and then encouraging them to spread crops with zero genetic diversity across the world invites terrorism. Imagine this: Monsanto succeeds in their vision of global domination of the food market. Then Iraq releases a phage specifically targeting Monsanto products, resulting in global crop failures. Due to all the crops being the same, or having been cross-pollinated by the offensive plants, world starvation, global riots, a world war, you get the picture.
Even worse, I wouldn't put it past Monsanto to release such a phage themselves. Is there a single damn thing this company has ever made that isn't toxic, carcinogenic, or otherwise vile?
Even if none of the worst-case scenarios happen, they abandon the "Terminator" seeds, and they *merely* get a monopoly on the food market, and create a slave-class of Third World farmers who work as serfs to pay for seeds each year, because they aren't allowed to save seeds--after all, by the insane logic of "intellectual" property law the natural growth of plants is now "patent infringement"--isn't that bad enough?
This company is pure fucking evil and they need to be stopped.
Considering that China simultaneously wants to make inroads into the Internet, while also wanting complete control over it, it is inevitable that eventually Internet anarchy, cryptography, and technology-facilitated free speech will collide with the attempt of the Chinese government to maintain a monopoly on information.
This is not just inevitable but a good thing. It is easy to have troops open fire on a peaceful group of protesters in Tianeman Square, but much more difficult to control a distributed network of protest.
1. Richard Stallman is reported in an anecdote to have been rude at dinner, and someone has called him a communist.
2. Linus Torvalds has an ego the size of 2 1/2 Dom Deluises.
3. Eric Raymond has ranted about guns.
Therefore:
The whole idea of free software is stupid, and communist, and furthermore Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman by association with free software are guilty of supporting school shootings, bad manners, and farting in elevators.
What logic!
I'm abandoning all free software and buying a thousand copies of Windows 2000 today! I've been such a FOOL!
Yes, it is possible. The IS department at our office (a large "e-business solutions provider" company) has set up filters to do exactly that, for exactly that reason.
What an idiotic "solution"! As if the NEXT virus is going to contain "FW" in the subject. Filtering ".vbs" is also similarly idiotic, as the NEXT virus could just as easily be javascript or an.exe or a.com or any other common executable format, or even some kind of malicious html--which Outlook is also capable of reading.
I sigh at the "solutions" proffered by the pointy-haired imbeciles. I say they eradicate virii by pulling the Internet plug on all these companies and government agencies as they're obviously too fucking dumb to be on the net.
I hate to sound like the protector of corporate interests, but I guess I will have to.
I am so sick of idiots who always hate to do something they tell you they hate to do, then they go and do it. If you hate it so much quit doing it and then complaining about how much you hate it. Anyway, if corporate interests have you as their protector they're in worse shape than I thought.
Instead, they stole it. Simple. Plain.
Yes, you are pretty simple. And it's plain to see you're an idiot. They infringed, possibly.
The use of the photograph was possibly fair use by this definition, despite including the entirety of the photo. Another case that would relate would be
What these viruses need to do is examine the context of all of the messages in the user's Inbox that come from the individual who it is being sent to and generate a context-sensitive reply to that individual.
That, or find the most prolific person in the person's email, gather the non-quoted text, and use something like Mark V. Chaney to generate an email similar in style to that person, including a request to click the attachment for a "joke."
Even better, these virii should look for NT servers and then dump the.SAM files to alt.anonymous.messages through a remailer, along with a network map of the site.
The problem with these virus writers is they have no imagination.
It is true. Joe Baptista is a frothing lunatic and a troll, at best. I'd bet that like his other wild threats, he won't go through with this, though it would be amusing to watch. Another link on this loon is here.
It is illegal to use copyrights to create rights which otherwise do not exist. Such misuse bars the copyright holder from successfully pursuing a copyright infringement claim. Here is an article detailing the "copyright misuse" defense, which may come up in this slashdot case, should Microsoft pursue legal action.
Under the DMCA, a company need only notify the carrier in writing (an e-mail is sufficient) that a copyrighted document is on their site. If the carrier does not remove it, they can be held as liable as the original poster.
Not entirely true. The DMCA creates no new liabilities, and the carrier could be held liable by a theory of contributory or vicarious liability. However, this was possible before the DMCA. RTC v. Netcom
Well, you are technically correct, but enforcement of legal copyright only allows damages, which would be rated at exactly zero dollars, so go home and think about all the publicity we will be able to pump out of this while you think about suing us for zero dollars and wasting the courts time (judges really like that, you know).
Statutory damages for copyright infringement, regardless of damages, range from $500 per infringement to $100,000.
The best line about lawyers comes from "A Civil Action"
"A lawyer that fells the pain of his clients is doing them a disservice, he is too wrapped up in his client to be of any use. He is just as bad as a doctor that cringes at the sight of blood."
It's not amazing that that movie starred a Scientologist.
I'd disagree, and say that the best lawyers are exactly the opposite of this cold-blooded stereotype. Clarence Darrow, perhaps the best lawyer of the century if not all time, argued all his cases with passionate intensity. I'll note that he also didn't cringe at the sight of blood.
I would argue that it is hard to comment or report upon something without actually viewing what it is that is to be commented on. So even those posters who merely posted the entire document could be said to be furthering disscussion on the document.
At least one 9th Circuit judge disagrees with you. Judge Ronald M. Whyte, who is also the judge in the Sun v. Microsoft case, ruled against H. Keith Henson for doing precisely this--posting the entirety of a short document on a Usenet newsgroup to discuss its ramifications. A Wired article discusses this. It was Henson's contention that the document, NOTS 34, demonstrated illegal practice of medicine by the Scientology cult.
Judge Whyte was roundly criticized in a Wall Street Journal article for "Pecksniffian literalness" and for having "turned copyright law on its head."
The document, NOTS 34, is discussed, along with many other such documents, at Dave Touretzky's NOTS Scholars Page, and a description of the earlier parts of the trial is at Ron Newman's old page while the jury trial for damages is transcribed at Sten-Arne Zerpe's page. Incidentally, Judge Whyte dismissed trade secret claims in this litigation based on Internet distribution, as well as similar claims in other cases.
I've been reading/. for a LONG time, and it's chock full of MS hating people.
That's true. Microsoft does hate people.
MS had to send the letter... if they didn't, they show the world that they don't care about their copyrights and would probably lose a court battle later. Completely untrue. You don't lose the ability to prosecute copyright violations no matter how many times you have neglected to do so. You are thinking of trademarks or trade secrets. (Distributing something over the web does not constitute adequate security precautions for trade secrets, whatever their EULA says, and I note they don't even attempt any trade secret bullshit in their threat letter.)
Is it just me or does this sound damned hard to work out details for?
Simple. You turn in the ears and tail for the bounty. They'll be able to tell it's from a spammer because the ears will be made from a pink, vaguely ham-like substance and be covered in a slimy gel.
Alternately, you could turn in their thumbs as well, that would slow them down. I don't even care what happens with this, I just would love to see spammers hunted across the face of the earth, fleeing gangs of money-hungry geeks.
Over the past few years, I've grown increasingly sick of the spate of what have come to be called "dotcoms." For some reason ending in.com is supposed to mean something is a good idea.
Gee, whiz! They're selling Spam on a Stick [TM] and they're doing it online! Let's buy into the IPO! And idiotic ideas like this would rack up millions overnight despite being completely worthless.
Even now the tech-heavy NASDAQ is overpriced, even after the Justice Department's actions against Microsoft have depressed its stock and other NASDAQ stocks--for the wrong reason. Ultimately those stocks, after they split, will again be solid values regardless of the skittishness of the market.
If the ecommerce bubble bursts, good. The gold rush mentality prevailing in the market lemmings will do nothing but cause more harm in the long run if it isn't checked soon. Growing to rely on a bubble economy is dangerous, as witness Asia.
It's getting to the point that virtually anything, even completely harmless parodies that don't deprive copyright owners of the use of their work or profit from it, will immediately get swamped by cocksucking legal whores out to make a buck by running google and then filing "point-and-sue" lawsuits against everything imaginable.
This is just ridiculous. Is Bank of America somehow harmed by people reading its website in "Swedish chef" talk? I am almost of the opinion that copyright law is getting so ridiculous it ought to be just defiantly ignored, and fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.
I think this idea of nuking the moon is brilliant! That'd show those lunar bastards. Every night since I've looked up, I've seen the Man in the Moon giving me this bug-eyed nasty look. I think we should show that guy, and a nice nuking should do nicely. We should charge Bill Gates for the nukes and let him nuke the Microsoft logo onto the moon. I think that would impress people nicely.
I am a Microsoft employee, and more than that, I am a shareholder in said corporation. I stongly support the actions that the corporation has taken to protect our intellectual property.
More than that, you're a brain-damaged idiot. More than that, the kind of mentally deficient claptrap you are posting is part of the reason Microsoft is seen as the Borg.
You, and Emmett, and that rest of the creeps here, are acting like a bunch of spoiled and petulant children. There is no issue of free speech here; there is merely an issue of gross theft and corporate malfeasance.
Big words from a little mind. Only one of the articles targeted by your monopolistic mafia of a corporation is a direct infringement; the rest are debatable hyperlinks and comments that one can avoid the clickthrough, and thus the NDA, by opening the file with winzip. If you honestly think that commenting that the file can be opened by winzip is "gross theft" then you are a fucking moron with your head so far up your ass you can lick your own gallbladder.
It is not a first amendment issue. You are not being censored.
Did you ever notice that when some legalese-spewing human pinworm says "This is not a first amendment issue" it always is? Why is that?
Go look at what Martin Luther King did and faced. Hell -- have crosses burned on your own front yard, as I HAVE, and then come back and tell me about how you're being "censored".
This is a new one--argument by persecution dicksizing. The "logic" here appears to be "I've been persecuted elsewhere about something else therefore I'm now right about everything." It doesn't fly. Cross-burning sucks, but precisely how your dicksizing comments relate logically in any way to the issue at hand is difficult to see.
The right to steal other people's work, whether Microsoft does it or you do it -- that's not worth fighting for. That's worth spitting on.
Well, I'll agree there. Microsoft's hijacking of an open standard like Kerberos and its pathetic attempts to declare them a "trade secret" by making minimal changes is downright repulsive. And I'm sure/. readers will continue commenting on this within fair use, regardless of the whinings and threats of the thuglike jackboot squads and punk-ass fools of Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
Is the government prepared to compensate Microsoft's shareholders for the devaluation?
No, why the hell should it? As the Metallica fans are always saying, they broke the law. Why should shareholders be rewarded for paying money to fund a lawbreaking corporation? If Michael Milken goes to jail, do his investors get compensated for losing money by investing in crime?
Without patent protection all of that work will go to waste if competitors get there first.
Good! Maybe greed-motivated monster multinational corporations SHOULDN'T be encouraged to go out playing God when they haven't even shown they're responsible with plain old chemicals.
I don't particularly see the POINT of encouraging Mafia-like thugocrats like the Monsanto corporation to pollute the genetic environment with potentially dangerous and untested genetic technologies when they've already poisoned the world with poisonous chemicals like PCBs. They blithely ignored warnings about those, just like they do about the potential hazards of the crap they're unleashing now. They have deliberately gone out of their way even to prevent customers from knowing whether they are eating their products. If they are so wonderful, then why do they hide and lie like that?
What's next, a genetically-engineered human-based slave class whose children are taken away and killed because they reproduced without a license?
Well it is Monsanto who has developed the strong breeds of crops in the first place. Nobody has the right to reproduce Monsanto's intellectual property (which their genetically altered crops are).
Another mindless corporate shill. The plants already have the potential to cross-pollinate. What are you gonna fucking do, sue God?
Moron.
Lots of people can't get weed to plant the next crop, there's a big famine in most of the world(3rd world, should I say, they always get all the hits), and that means LOTS of people die, revolutions(not that they are bad, but...), etc, more people die. Sure it is a fast solution to the demographic problems on earth.
I imagine worse than that. Much worse. Never mind that Monsanto is the same company that brought the gift of PCBs to the world, ignoring the evidence of how hazardous they are, and also brought us saccharin and even brag about that on their webpage, that they censor opposing views, and generally act like the genetic Mafia, suing farmers left and right.
Giving this vicious, dishonest, fascist corporation a monopoly on natural phenomena and then encouraging them to spread crops with zero genetic diversity across the world invites terrorism. Imagine this: Monsanto succeeds in their vision of global domination of the food market. Then Iraq releases a phage specifically targeting Monsanto products, resulting in global crop failures. Due to all the crops being the same, or having been cross-pollinated by the offensive plants, world starvation, global riots, a world war, you get the picture.
Even worse, I wouldn't put it past Monsanto to release such a phage themselves. Is there a single damn thing this company has ever made that isn't toxic, carcinogenic, or otherwise vile?
Even if none of the worst-case scenarios happen, they abandon the "Terminator" seeds, and they *merely* get a monopoly on the food market, and create a slave-class of Third World farmers who work as serfs to pay for seeds each year, because they aren't allowed to save seeds--after all, by the insane logic of "intellectual" property law the natural growth of plants is now "patent infringement"--isn't that bad enough?
This company is pure fucking evil and they need to be stopped.
Considering that China simultaneously wants to make inroads into the Internet, while also wanting complete control over it, it is inevitable that eventually Internet anarchy, cryptography, and technology-facilitated free speech will collide with the attempt of the Chinese government to maintain a monopoly on information.
This is not just inevitable but a good thing. It is easy to have troops open fire on a peaceful group of protesters in Tianeman Square, but much more difficult to control a distributed network of protest.
The more we find out about IO the more I'm sure that some primitive life exists there.
I'd say Europa is more likely, as it is the only other body in the solar system known to have liquid oceans.
Or actually, it's possible Callisto does, too.
1. Richard Stallman is reported in an anecdote to have been rude at dinner, and someone has called him a communist.
2. Linus Torvalds has an ego the size of 2 1/2 Dom Deluises.
3. Eric Raymond has ranted about guns.
Therefore:
The whole idea of free software is stupid, and communist, and furthermore Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman by association with free software are guilty of supporting school shootings, bad manners, and farting in elevators.
What logic!
I'm abandoning all free software and buying a thousand copies of Windows 2000 today! I've been such a FOOL!
What about Ask Jesus?
Now THIS would be a scary-ass lawsuit!
(Re filtering all messages with "FW" in Subj)
Yes, it is possible. The IS department at our office (a large "e-business solutions provider" company) has set up filters to do exactly that, for exactly that reason.
What an idiotic "solution"! As if the NEXT virus is going to contain "FW" in the subject. Filtering ".vbs" is also similarly idiotic, as the NEXT virus could just as easily be javascript or an .exe or a .com or any other common executable format, or even some kind of malicious html--which Outlook is also capable of reading.
I sigh at the "solutions" proffered by the pointy-haired imbeciles. I say they eradicate virii by pulling the Internet plug on all these companies and government agencies as they're obviously too fucking dumb to be on the net.
I hate to sound like the protector of corporate interests, but I guess I will have to.
I am so sick of idiots who always hate to do something they tell you they hate to do, then they go and do it. If you hate it so much quit doing it and then complaining about how much you hate it. Anyway, if corporate interests have you as their protector they're in worse shape than I thought.
Instead, they stole it. Simple. Plain.
Yes, you are pretty simple. And it's plain to see you're an idiot. They infringed, possibly.
The law is the law, in this case.
How about in this case? Or maybe this one ?
The parody broke the law. Hence the lawsuit.
Did you even READ the article? There IS no lawsuit!
Theft is theft.
And brain damage is brain damage. And fair use is fair use. Deal with it, fanboy.
Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 114 S. Ct. 1164 (1994)
The use of the photograph was possibly fair use by this definition, despite including the entirety of the photo. Another case that would relate would be
Leibovitz v. Paramount Pictures Corp., 137 F.3d 109, 113 (2d Cir. 1998)
What these viruses need to do is examine the context of all of the messages in the user's Inbox that come from the individual who it is being sent to and generate a context-sensitive reply to that individual.
That, or find the most prolific person in the person's email, gather the non-quoted text, and use something like Mark V. Chaney to generate an email similar in style to that person, including a request to click the attachment for a "joke."
Even better, these virii should look for NT servers and then dump the .SAM files to alt.anonymous.messages through a remailer, along with a network map of the site.
The problem with these virus writers is they have no imagination.
It is true. Joe Baptista is a frothing lunatic and a troll, at best. I'd bet that like his other wild threats, he won't go through with this, though it would be amusing to watch. Another link on this loon is here.
A SURVEY OF THE LAW OF COPYRIGHT MISUSE AND FRAUD ON THE COPYRIGHT OFFICE: LEGITIMATE RESTRAINTS ON COPYRIGHT OWNERS OR ESCAPE ROUTES FOR COPYRIGHT INFRINGERS? by Stephen J. Davidson and Nicole A. Engisch of LEONARD, STREET AND DEINARD Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Under the DMCA, a company need only notify the carrier in writing (an e-mail is sufficient) that a copyrighted document is on their site. If the carrier does not remove it, they can be held as liable as the original poster.
Not entirely true. The DMCA creates no new liabilities, and the carrier could be held liable by a theory of contributory or vicarious liability. However, this was possible before the DMCA. RTC v. Netcom
Well, you are technically correct, but enforcement of legal copyright only allows damages, which would be rated at exactly zero dollars, so go home and think about all the publicity we will be able to pump out of this while you think about suing us for zero dollars and wasting the courts time (judges really like that, you know).
Statutory damages for copyright infringement, regardless of damages, range from $500 per infringement to $100,000.
The best line about lawyers comes from "A Civil Action"
"A lawyer that fells the pain of his clients is doing them a disservice, he is too wrapped up in his client to be of any use. He is just as bad as a doctor that cringes at the sight of blood."
It's not amazing that that movie starred a Scientologist.
I'd disagree, and say that the best lawyers are exactly the opposite of this cold-blooded stereotype. Clarence Darrow, perhaps the best lawyer of the century if not all time, argued all his cases with passionate intensity. I'll note that he also didn't cringe at the sight of blood.
I would argue that it is hard to comment or report upon something without actually viewing what it is that is to be commented on. So even those posters who merely posted the entire document could be said to be furthering disscussion on the document.
At least one 9th Circuit judge disagrees with you. Judge Ronald M. Whyte, who is also the judge in the Sun v. Microsoft case, ruled against H. Keith Henson for doing precisely this--posting the entirety of a short document on a Usenet newsgroup to discuss its ramifications. A Wired article discusses this. It was Henson's contention that the document, NOTS 34, demonstrated illegal practice of medicine by the Scientology cult.
Judge Whyte was roundly criticized in a Wall Street Journal article for "Pecksniffian literalness" and for having "turned copyright law on its head."
The document, NOTS 34, is discussed, along with many other such documents, at Dave Touretzky's NOTS Scholars Page, and a description of the earlier parts of the trial is at Ron Newman's old page while the jury trial for damages is transcribed at Sten-Arne Zerpe's page. Incidentally, Judge Whyte dismissed trade secret claims in this litigation based on Internet distribution, as well as similar claims in other cases.
I've been reading /. for a LONG time, and it's chock full of MS hating people.
That's true. Microsoft does hate people.
MS had to send the letter... if they didn't, they show the world that they don't care about their copyrights and would probably lose a court battle later. Completely untrue. You don't lose the ability to prosecute copyright violations no matter how many times you have neglected to do so. You are thinking of trademarks or trade secrets. (Distributing something over the web does not constitute adequate security precautions for trade secrets, whatever their EULA says, and I note they don't even attempt any trade secret bullshit in their threat letter.)
Is it just me or does this sound damned hard to work out details for?
Simple. You turn in the ears and tail for the bounty. They'll be able to tell it's from a spammer because the ears will be made from a pink, vaguely ham-like substance and be covered in a slimy gel.
Alternately, you could turn in their thumbs as well, that would slow them down. I don't even care what happens with this, I just would love to see spammers hunted across the face of the earth, fleeing gangs of money-hungry geeks.
Over the past few years, I've grown increasingly sick of the spate of what have come to be called "dotcoms." For some reason ending in .com is supposed to mean something is a good idea.
Gee, whiz! They're selling Spam on a Stick [TM] and they're doing it online! Let's buy into the IPO! And idiotic ideas like this would rack up millions overnight despite being completely worthless.
Even now the tech-heavy NASDAQ is overpriced, even after the Justice Department's actions against Microsoft have depressed its stock and other NASDAQ stocks--for the wrong reason. Ultimately those stocks, after they split, will again be solid values regardless of the skittishness of the market.
If the ecommerce bubble bursts, good. The gold rush mentality prevailing in the market lemmings will do nothing but cause more harm in the long run if it isn't checked soon. Growing to rely on a bubble economy is dangerous, as witness Asia.
IANASB.
It's getting to the point that virtually anything, even completely harmless parodies that don't deprive copyright owners of the use of their work or profit from it, will immediately get swamped by cocksucking legal whores out to make a buck by running google and then filing "point-and-sue" lawsuits against everything imaginable.
This is just ridiculous. Is Bank of America somehow harmed by people reading its website in "Swedish chef" talk? I am almost of the opinion that copyright law is getting so ridiculous it ought to be just defiantly ignored, and fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.
I think this idea of nuking the moon is brilliant! That'd show those lunar bastards. Every night since I've looked up, I've seen the Man in the Moon giving me this bug-eyed nasty look. I think we should show that guy, and a nice nuking should do nicely. We should charge Bill Gates for the nukes and let him nuke the Microsoft logo onto the moon. I think that would impress people nicely.
This ugly bastard. What's with these teeth? Ballmer's teeth suck.
I am a Microsoft employee, and more than that, I am a shareholder in said corporation. I stongly support the actions that the corporation has taken to protect our intellectual property.
More than that, you're a brain-damaged idiot. More than that, the kind of mentally deficient claptrap you are posting is part of the reason Microsoft is seen as the Borg.
You, and Emmett, and that rest of the creeps here, are acting like a bunch of spoiled and petulant children. There is no issue of free speech here; there is merely an issue of gross theft and corporate malfeasance.
Big words from a little mind. Only one of the articles targeted by your monopolistic mafia of a corporation is a direct infringement; the rest are debatable hyperlinks and comments that one can avoid the clickthrough, and thus the NDA, by opening the file with winzip. If you honestly think that commenting that the file can be opened by winzip is "gross theft" then you are a fucking moron with your head so far up your ass you can lick your own gallbladder.
It is not a first amendment issue. You are not being censored.
Did you ever notice that when some legalese-spewing human pinworm says "This is not a first amendment issue" it always is? Why is that?
Go look at what Martin Luther King did and faced. Hell -- have crosses burned on your own front yard, as I HAVE, and then come back and tell me about how you're being "censored".
This is a new one--argument by persecution dicksizing. The "logic" here appears to be "I've been persecuted elsewhere about something else therefore I'm now right about everything." It doesn't fly. Cross-burning sucks, but precisely how your dicksizing comments relate logically in any way to the issue at hand is difficult to see.
The right to steal other people's work, whether Microsoft does it or you do it -- that's not worth fighting for. That's worth spitting on.
Well, I'll agree there. Microsoft's hijacking of an open standard like Kerberos and its pathetic attempts to declare them a "trade secret" by making minimal changes is downright repulsive. And I'm sure /. readers will continue commenting on this within fair use, regardless of the whinings and threats of the thuglike jackboot squads and punk-ass fools of Microsoft.