The gov needs to step in and force these companies to allow "used" digital copies of content.
The government needs to require that all "copy protection" systems and copy management systems that the DRM protects must have a physical object or token permanently assigned uniquely to exactly that one copy, and that re-sale / transfer of the copy of a copyrighted work must be allowed, if the token is included in the sale, for DRM protecting the work to be legally protected.
They have a fix for that... it's called new edition every year, which obsoletes all the used books.
The day you buy that brand new text book, the next edition is probably already on its way to the presses, with all sorts of "errors corrected", minor changes, renumbering homework exercises, and tweaking the problems to make sure the answers will be different, and you'll be screwed if you have the old edition, etc.
Otherwise, the logical thing to do would be to list all your used books on Amazon or eBay with a 25% markdown; so you sell it for 75% of its value instead of 50%, and the buyer gets it for 75% of its new value, instead of 90%.
So, a 600 page calculus tome is going to cost me $60 to photocopy or $80 new... may as well buy it.
Nowadays, the per-page cost of scanning essentially $0 if you own a scanner, so books should have tens of thousands of pages now, not infinitely many pages -- because the student's time is worth something, and there is some minute amount of wear and tear on the equipment probably about $0.007 or so per page.
If anybody gets into my Linux box, they're black hats.
This might be true of your Linux box.
A lot of people don't review the source code to their system, and they turn on automatic updates.
These people (the ones who turn on auto-updates) would be particularly susceptible to their distro maker releasing an update that deletes a software package.
For example, to deprecate a package used in a previous version, E.g. delete 'Vi' since it's a deprecated text editor in favor of the new Emacs or Pico package.
They might not ever use the technical ability, and if it actually happened it would most likely be some sort of bug or accident, but they have the technical means to do so, just like Amazon.
So think about that... the only difference between Amazon and auto-updates on a Linux system, is Amazon actually used their ability once, for a 'selfish' reason (to mitigate their legal costs), whereas Linux distros never used it.
As for a court order being able to force Amazon to remove an eBook, well, they brought it on themselves (and their customers) sort-of by including the capability explicitly in the system.
It should be noted, a court could order Redhat to release an update to force package X to be removed from systems that auto-update,
or a court could order Microsoft to deploy a 'windows update' that would disable third party software program X or provide an authority access to someone's computer.
In practice, the reason they probably won't, is there aren't likely to be any packages in a stock distro a court would order removed -- and
lawyers generally aren't so sophisticated in their understanding of the technology to successfully contrive the order that would be necessary to force them to, without imposing so great a burden the recipient can easily fight the order.
I'm very much opposed to buying a device where the manufacturer can alter my library at will. It's mine, dammit.
I think it would be naive to have an online device you don't have source code to that regularly interacts with an online store, and ever have any confidence the manufacturer can't do anything they like, at will... once they authenticate the message with the proper debug or backdoor codes.
Just because their competition hasn't informed you of their ability to modify downloaded content, does not mean they lack the ability.
It doesn't effect me at all unless they actually use those codes, however.
Amazon DID abuse the capability they have, which they apologized for, the deletion violated even their own ToS, it was against their own rules, and illegal. They got sued over this.
Amazon promised to change their systems so that they do not do this.
In Amazon's settlement, they Promised never to do it again, unless ordered by a court or regulatory body, if doing so is necessary to protect consumers from malicious code, if the consumer agrees for any reason to have the e-book removed, or if the consumer fails to pay.
So at least Amazon is legally bound by specific conditions regarding when they can do this.
Their (few) competitors have made no such promises and very likely do have the capability.
For example, for iPhone-based readers for one... we know that Apple is capable of killing the entire eBook reading app, and we know Google has similar control over devices using the Android app store.
"Mozilla has succeeded in improving the browser world, and its rivals have outstripped it in terms of features
1. Show me the 'rival' that has a large collection of available plugins, and many features that can be added using addons.
2. Show me the rival that can achieve challenge (1) and is open source and has a large developer community.
3. Show me the rival that can achieve challenge (2) and is stable
4. Show me the rival that can achieve challenge (3) and is multiplatform.
5. Show me the rival that meets challenge (4) and complies with web standards can achieve the same or better ACID, ACID2, ACID3 test score and achieves at least the same level of compliance as Firefox.
6. Show me the rival that meets challenge (5) and has a robust private browsing mode.
7. Show me the rival that meets challenge (6) and supports AES256 and higher encryption, and provides ability to disable/enable weak SSL ciphers, and provides detailed security controls.
8. Show me the rival that meets challenge (7) and supports integrated saving of passwords, and encrypting that data with a master password
9. Show me the rival that meets challenge (8) and has tabbed browsing, supports autocompleting the location bar with bookmarks, supporting tags, and customizable quick keywords for both bookmarks and search tools.
10. Show me the rival that meets challenge (9) and allows detailed controls of what options are available to javascript programs on a site.
For example: disable/enable the ability to raise/lower or focus windows.. disable/enable the ability of a script to open new windows, replace right click/context menus, etc.
11. Show me the rival that meets challenge (10) and has robust equivalents to No Referrer/User Agent Switcher, Popup blocker, AdBlock Plus, NoScript, FlashBlocker, Cookie Whitelist, With buttons, JSView, Prefswitch, BeefTaco, QuickJava, LinkTargetDisplay, Greasemonkey, FoxyProxy/AutoProxy/QuickProxy, Long URL Please, Permitcookies, Form History Control, Lazarus/Form Recover, Perspectives/SSL Guard/Certificate Patrol/Remember Mismatched Domains, Safecache, History Deleter, Firefox Sync, Redirect Remover, Image blocker, Web of Trust/LinkExtend, BetterPrivacy, Site Preferences
So, just to follow up on something a lot of people complained about when it happened, you're totally cool with Amazon having the ability to delete a book off your device without your explicit authorization?
Service provider control of their device is a totally different matter.
Just about any eBook maker that provides an online store would be capable of doing this -- providing a hook in their software to allow the store to perform a content delete. If not in the current version, they could easily roll the ability in a mandatory upgrade version if they wanted.
Similarly, Microsoft could delete any program off your computer, or tamper with your Firefox config in a windows update, if they wanted.
I am totally cool with them having the technical ability as long as they don't actually use the ability, except in a case where it can only benefit me.
For example, I would be happy to have a feature to delete all my books remotely and move them to a new device, if, for example, someone stole my portable ebook reader.
re: publishers have to opt-in to the lending feature, not all titles will be "lendable"
Translation: this is NOT a feature for users, this is a marketing tool for product placement.
If lending doesn't fit into the strategy needed to get the product sold, it won't be enabled.
If the book's sales are lousy, they might turn on lending... once a book has a chance of becoming popular, or being a bestseller, and lending is more of a liability, they turn lending off.......
There's a little part of me that likes this. I can't tell you how many times I've lent stuff to people only to have it never come back - even after asking for it back.
In this case, though, the restriction is too tight.
There ought to be no specific time limit.
The person who lent the book should have a 'return' button to push once they're done with it.
They should be required to connect to the network every 7 days to verify the book is still lent out to them.
When the person who lent the book selects the book they should have a 'request it back' button.
Once it's requested back, the person who lent it out will get a text message sent by the person who lent it to them. They'll have 14 days to hit the 'return' button. 14 days after it's requested returned, the return is forced.
The person who lent it should also have an ability to set a 'due back by date' when lending the title.
Restriction against lending something again are absurd.
demonstrated how to turn the popular JailbreakMe Tool for iPhones and iPads into stealthy rootkit-style malware
The authors of JailBreakMe should be scorning this act and sending legal threats (if possible) to the people contorting their Jailbreak software into a malware infection tool.
Apple is going to finally stand up, take notice, and kill the jailbreaking software, to public applause, if malware starts taking advantage of it, it will be more than a theoretical matter of security.
That is, things like this are going to justify adding additional security hardware to the iPhone to even further lock it down and roll out measures to automatically brick jailbroken devices.
When I can get a decent 300gb, 500gb, or 1TB SSD for less than $100,
with better performance and longevity characteristics than my less-than-$100 mechanical drive, then there are good reasons to consider using only SSD.
Until then, low-capacity SSDs running only as cache for the applications that really need them for IOPs are the way to go.
Most desktop PC users are not heavily disk I/O bound, the increase in performance/reduction in power usage is not necessarily worth the massively increased price of an SSD to replace mechanical storage GB for GB with SSD.
Capacity is what users run out of on the desktop.
Of course there are exceptions to the rule; people who do high-end video editing may run into disk throughput I/O bottlenecks, in regards to HD video capture rates, but actually, in that case SSDs don't really help.
Still... some desktop app might benefit from high random IOPs capabilities of SSDs; maybe some day i'll hear of or come across one.....
There are a bunch of audio books you can still get on cassette tape, the library also seems to have a whole lot of this. It will be mostly old content.
To listen to new music, you may have to implement the 1990s version of "sync your iPod". Buy CDs, and use a cassette recorder to record the music to blank cassette tapes which are still available
Sounds like a pain... iPod sync is a lot faster and more convenient than copying to cassette.
Although there is a minor advantage, that once copied to tape, you can switch between tapes almost instantly, this is more than made up for by how much music an iPod can hold at a time, however.
You probably still have a chance, since they just announced they are discontinuing it... I doubt this will increase demand.
You may have troubles finding a store that still carries them new, however, chances are you could find an old one on eBay if you looked hard.. they were that popular that there are probably many old ones whose owners don't want them anymore, and hope to sell to collectors/hoarders of odds and ends.
For its part, Facebook 'downplayed the study, saying that the site does not pass any personally identifiable information back to an advertiser.'"
If Facebook allows advertisers to target their ads to be seen by people whose personal information has certain values, then
by definition, they have passed that information to anyone who clicks on that particular ad.
The advertiser can then bind that info to their IP, and if they click on other target Ads later, there is a possibility for a single advertiser to gradually discover more and more personal 'facts' about the user.
Is that billions of Monopoly game dollars, or is it billions of real dollars from the 2 people who buy it (after hyperinflation depreciates the dollar to 10^(-8) of its current worth ?
You can't invest in an "environmentally friendly" company and sue them
Yes you can, if their board isn't living up to their fiduciary responsibilities.
The laws don't change, just because a company has a marketing message they sent to someone that claims they are environmentally friendly.
The board still has the same loyalty, good faith, and duty of care requirements to maximize profit as the board of any
for-profit corporation.
It should be noted the board has the power to remove the corp's "environmentally friendly" message if it is in the company's financial interests to do so.
If the company is unprofitable, then buy up a majority of the stock and run it how you want - or sell your own stock and go do something else.
No one is forcing investors to own this company.
But they do own this company, they have already invested in it, in the expectation of a return, they have already incurred costs.
If they were to "sell", this could result in a loss, an immediate loss (selling for less than the stake was purchased at), and an opportunity cost.
Buyout may not be an option, it may require too much capital, or the investor may be unwilling to take that risk;
the other 'investors', the CEO especially might be unwilling to release their shares.
If the management of the company is not acting appropriately, in attempting to maximize profit for the shareholders, then the board must remove them.
If the board do not exercise the required good faith, honesty, loyalty, and duty of care in making decisions they are doing what is referred to as being negligent and/or failing in their fiduciary duties,
in violation of the law.
The management really does not have the discretion to fail to take up business opportunities they are made aware of, when they are in line with the corporate charter, and a duty of care has not been exercised, to find that the opportunities are excluded in favor of other at least equally financially beneficial actions (returning cash to shareholders, for example).
It is not surprising that this could lead to a shareholder's lawsuit.
The board either acted in bad faith, for example, they took actions specifically designed to sabotage the company's financies. If a board member could be found to have stated they did not want the company to succeed, that could be evidence of bad faith.
or... the board acted recklesslly, did not properly act with the duty of care required of them by law. For example, if it could be shown that they hastily rejected or failed to consider something brought before them, without even the appearance of attempting to reach a financially beneficial situation for the company.
or... there was a disloyalty or conflict of interest; for example, if some board members helds another role or position for another company, that would benefit if theirs did poorly financially.
Or if a board member has expressed a personal opinion or belief, in conflict with their fiduciary role.
For example: if a board member were offered a choice between two CEOs, and voted against removing them because they were a close friend or family member, that board member was disloyal to the company.
Conflict of interest may be their best bet for suing. If they can prove board members held personal believes that they made known, that they can show influenced their decisions, and were not in the company's best interests, then they would have found illegal wrongdoing by the board.
Don't get me wrong, you could do it, depending on what you need, but it is very persnickety about hardware, and the extra expense probably only makes sense to do if running ESX is the primary objective, for example, for purposes of training/learning about that particular system. You have to be extremely careful about hardware.. you cannot plug just any common cheap-o NIC or storage device in and expect it to work, most notably on-board RTL NICs won't work,
but Intel PRO 1000s work fine.
On board SATA has some caveats, and you may find yourself having to go buy a RAID controller or SCSI HBA from a very small list of brands + chipset combinations that work.
Just because the driver required is the same as a card that works, doesn't mean you are OK either, unless you feel comfortable hacking to add an unknown device's PCI IDs to certain files.
It is not like Linux, it won't "just work", and it is not like Windows either -- you probably won't find 3rd-party rivers for anything, cannot simply compile your own Linux drivers either without modifications, check your hardware thoroughly against community known-to-work lists.
I would say Vmware Workstation, Virtualbox are easiest to get up and running fast.
If you want a bare metal hypervisor, look to XenServer.
That's no problem, hot air balloons don't fly, they float.
-guided fishing trips along the amazon
So have a guided boating trip along the amazon, where Fishing is not planned.
Bring along things to catch aquatic animals, however, in case you want to keep or eat some,
just don't "fish" for them.
-eating hot dogs
That's nasty... if you insist, force them into the freezer and close the door.
When the dog stops barking, it's ready to eat.
Slashdot Mirror
The gov needs to step in and force these companies to allow "used" digital copies of content.
The government needs to require that all "copy protection" systems and copy management systems that the DRM protects must have a physical object or token permanently assigned uniquely to exactly that one copy, and that re-sale / transfer of the copy of a copyrighted work must be allowed, if the token is included in the sale, for DRM protecting the work to be legally protected.
Cut out the middle-man and both sides are happy.
They have a fix for that... it's called new edition every year, which obsoletes all the used books.
The day you buy that brand new text book, the next edition is probably already on its way to the presses, with all sorts of "errors corrected", minor changes, renumbering homework exercises, and tweaking the problems to make sure the answers will be different, and you'll be screwed if you have the old edition, etc.
Otherwise, the logical thing to do would be to list all your used books on Amazon or eBay with a 25% markdown; so you sell it for 75% of its value instead of 50%, and the buyer gets it for 75% of its new value, instead of 90%.
So, a 600 page calculus tome is going to cost me $60 to photocopy or $80 new... may as well buy it.
Nowadays, the per-page cost of scanning essentially $0 if you own a scanner, so books should have tens of thousands of pages now, not infinitely many pages -- because the student's time is worth something, and there is some minute amount of wear and tear on the equipment probably about $0.007 or so per page.
If anybody gets into my Linux box, they're black hats.
This might be true of your Linux box.
A lot of people don't review the source code to their system, and they turn on automatic updates.
These people (the ones who turn on auto-updates) would be particularly susceptible to their distro maker releasing an update that deletes a software package.
For example, to deprecate a package used in a previous version, E.g. delete 'Vi' since it's a deprecated text editor in favor of the new Emacs or Pico package.
They might not ever use the technical ability, and if it actually happened it would most likely be some sort of bug or accident, but they have the technical means to do so, just like Amazon.
So think about that... the only difference between Amazon and auto-updates on a Linux system, is Amazon actually used their ability once, for a 'selfish' reason (to mitigate their legal costs), whereas Linux distros never used it.
As for a court order being able to force Amazon to remove an eBook, well, they brought it on themselves (and their customers) sort-of by including the capability explicitly in the system.
It should be noted, a court could order Redhat to release an update to force package X to be removed from systems that auto-update, or a court could order Microsoft to deploy a 'windows update' that would disable third party software program X or provide an authority access to someone's computer.
In practice, the reason they probably won't, is there aren't likely to be any packages in a stock distro a court would order removed -- and lawyers generally aren't so sophisticated in their understanding of the technology to successfully contrive the order that would be necessary to force them to, without imposing so great a burden the recipient can easily fight the order.
I'm very much opposed to buying a device where the manufacturer can alter my library at will. It's mine, dammit.
I think it would be naive to have an online device you don't have source code to that regularly interacts with an online store, and ever have any confidence the manufacturer can't do anything they like, at will... once they authenticate the message with the proper debug or backdoor codes.
Just because their competition hasn't informed you of their ability to modify downloaded content, does not mean they lack the ability.
It doesn't effect me at all unless they actually use those codes, however.
Amazon DID abuse the capability they have, which they apologized for, the deletion violated even their own ToS, it was against their own rules, and illegal. They got sued over this. Amazon promised to change their systems so that they do not do this.
In Amazon's settlement, they Promised never to do it again, unless ordered by a court or regulatory body, if doing so is necessary to protect consumers from malicious code, if the consumer agrees for any reason to have the e-book removed, or if the consumer fails to pay.
So at least Amazon is legally bound by specific conditions regarding when they can do this.
Their (few) competitors have made no such promises and very likely do have the capability.
For example, for iPhone-based readers for one... we know that Apple is capable of killing the entire eBook reading app, and we know Google has similar control over devices using the Android app store.
"Mozilla has succeeded in improving the browser world, and its rivals have outstripped it in terms of features
1. Show me the 'rival' that has a large collection of available plugins, and many features that can be added using addons.
2. Show me the rival that can achieve challenge (1) and is open source and has a large developer community.
3. Show me the rival that can achieve challenge (2) and is stable
4. Show me the rival that can achieve challenge (3) and is multiplatform.
5. Show me the rival that meets challenge (4) and complies with web standards can achieve the same or better ACID, ACID2, ACID3 test score and achieves at least the same level of compliance as Firefox.
6. Show me the rival that meets challenge (5) and has a robust private browsing mode.
7. Show me the rival that meets challenge (6) and supports AES256 and higher encryption, and provides ability to disable/enable weak SSL ciphers, and provides detailed security controls.
8. Show me the rival that meets challenge (7) and supports integrated saving of passwords, and encrypting that data with a master password
9. Show me the rival that meets challenge (8) and has tabbed browsing, supports autocompleting the location bar with bookmarks, supporting tags, and customizable quick keywords for both bookmarks and search tools.
10. Show me the rival that meets challenge (9) and allows detailed controls of what options are available to javascript programs on a site. For example: disable/enable the ability to raise/lower or focus windows.. disable/enable the ability of a script to open new windows, replace right click/context menus, etc.
11. Show me the rival that meets challenge (10) and has robust equivalents to No Referrer/User Agent Switcher, Popup blocker, AdBlock Plus, NoScript, FlashBlocker, Cookie Whitelist, With buttons, JSView, Prefswitch, BeefTaco, QuickJava, LinkTargetDisplay, Greasemonkey, FoxyProxy/AutoProxy/QuickProxy, Long URL Please, Permitcookies, Form History Control, Lazarus/Form Recover, Perspectives/SSL Guard/Certificate Patrol/Remember Mismatched Domains, Safecache, History Deleter, Firefox Sync, Redirect Remover, Image blocker, Web of Trust/LinkExtend, BetterPrivacy, Site Preferences
So, just to follow up on something a lot of people complained about when it happened, you're totally cool with Amazon having the ability to delete a book off your device without your explicit authorization?
Service provider control of their device is a totally different matter.
Just about any eBook maker that provides an online store would be capable of doing this -- providing a hook in their software to allow the store to perform a content delete. If not in the current version, they could easily roll the ability in a mandatory upgrade version if they wanted.
Similarly, Microsoft could delete any program off your computer, or tamper with your Firefox config in a windows update, if they wanted.
I am totally cool with them having the technical ability as long as they don't actually use the ability, except in a case where it can only benefit me.
For example, I would be happy to have a feature to delete all my books remotely and move them to a new device, if, for example, someone stole my portable ebook reader.
re: publishers have to opt-in to the lending feature, not all titles will be "lendable"
Translation: this is NOT a feature for users, this is a marketing tool for product placement.
If lending doesn't fit into the strategy needed to get the product sold, it won't be enabled.
If the book's sales are lousy, they might turn on lending... once a book has a chance of becoming popular, or being a bestseller, and lending is more of a liability, they turn lending off.......
eventually there will be more copies than there are interested readers at any given time, and no one will have to buy the book.
In other words.... Netflix for eBooks?
There's a little part of me that likes this. I can't tell you how many times I've lent stuff to people only to have it never come back - even after asking for it back.
In this case, though, the restriction is too tight. There ought to be no specific time limit.
The person who lent the book should have a 'return' button to push once they're done with it. They should be required to connect to the network every 7 days to verify the book is still lent out to them.
When the person who lent the book selects the book they should have a 'request it back' button.
Once it's requested back, the person who lent it out will get a text message sent by the person who lent it to them. They'll have 14 days to hit the 'return' button. 14 days after it's requested returned, the return is forced.
The person who lent it should also have an ability to set a 'due back by date' when lending the title.
Restriction against lending something again are absurd.
demonstrated how to turn the popular JailbreakMe Tool for iPhones and iPads into stealthy rootkit-style malware
The authors of JailBreakMe should be scorning this act and sending legal threats (if possible) to the people contorting their Jailbreak software into a malware infection tool.
Apple is going to finally stand up, take notice, and kill the jailbreaking software, to public applause, if malware starts taking advantage of it, it will be more than a theoretical matter of security.
That is, things like this are going to justify adding additional security hardware to the iPhone to even further lock it down and roll out measures to automatically brick jailbroken devices.
When I can get a decent 300gb, 500gb, or 1TB SSD for less than $100, with better performance and longevity characteristics than my less-than-$100 mechanical drive, then there are good reasons to consider using only SSD.
Until then, low-capacity SSDs running only as cache for the applications that really need them for IOPs are the way to go.
Most desktop PC users are not heavily disk I/O bound, the increase in performance/reduction in power usage is not necessarily worth the massively increased price of an SSD to replace mechanical storage GB for GB with SSD.
Capacity is what users run out of on the desktop.
Of course there are exceptions to the rule; people who do high-end video editing may run into disk throughput I/O bottlenecks, in regards to HD video capture rates, but actually, in that case SSDs don't really help. Still... some desktop app might benefit from high random IOPs capabilities of SSDs; maybe some day i'll hear of or come across one.....
Translation: this is mainly something for paid DreamWeaver users. For all the other web devs, it's basically an ad for dreamweaver.
There are a bunch of audio books you can still get on cassette tape, the library also seems to have a whole lot of this. It will be mostly old content.
To listen to new music, you may have to implement the 1990s version of "sync your iPod". Buy CDs, and use a cassette recorder to record the music to blank cassette tapes which are still available
Sounds like a pain... iPod sync is a lot faster and more convenient than copying to cassette.
Although there is a minor advantage, that once copied to tape, you can switch between tapes almost instantly, this is more than made up for by how much music an iPod can hold at a time, however.
You probably still have a chance, since they just announced they are discontinuing it... I doubt this will increase demand. You may have troubles finding a store that still carries them new, however, chances are you could find an old one on eBay if you looked hard.. they were that popular that there are probably many old ones whose owners don't want them anymore, and hope to sell to collectors/hoarders of odds and ends.
For its part, Facebook 'downplayed the study, saying that the site does not pass any personally identifiable information back to an advertiser.'"
If Facebook allows advertisers to target their ads to be seen by people whose personal information has certain values, then by definition, they have passed that information to anyone who clicks on that particular ad.
The advertiser can then bind that info to their IP, and if they click on other target Ads later, there is a possibility for a single advertiser to gradually discover more and more personal 'facts' about the user.
Is that billions of Monopoly game dollars, or is it billions of real dollars from the 2 people who buy it (after hyperinflation depreciates the dollar to 10^(-8) of its current worth ?
https://encrypted.google.com/, Gmail over SSL, AND Google Cache, FTW.
You can't invest in an "environmentally friendly" company and sue them
Yes you can, if their board isn't living up to their fiduciary responsibilities. The laws don't change, just because a company has a marketing message they sent to someone that claims they are environmentally friendly. The board still has the same loyalty, good faith, and duty of care requirements to maximize profit as the board of any for-profit corporation.
It should be noted the board has the power to remove the corp's "environmentally friendly" message if it is in the company's financial interests to do so.
If the company is unprofitable, then buy up a majority of the stock and run it how you want - or sell your own stock and go do something else.
No one is forcing investors to own this company.
But they do own this company, they have already invested in it, in the expectation of a return, they have already incurred costs. If they were to "sell", this could result in a loss, an immediate loss (selling for less than the stake was purchased at), and an opportunity cost. Buyout may not be an option, it may require too much capital, or the investor may be unwilling to take that risk; the other 'investors', the CEO especially might be unwilling to release their shares.
If the management of the company is not acting appropriately, in attempting to maximize profit for the shareholders, then the board must remove them. If the board do not exercise the required good faith, honesty, loyalty, and duty of care in making decisions they are doing what is referred to as being negligent and/or failing in their fiduciary duties, in violation of the law.
The management really does not have the discretion to fail to take up business opportunities they are made aware of, when they are in line with the corporate charter, and a duty of care has not been exercised, to find that the opportunities are excluded in favor of other at least equally financially beneficial actions (returning cash to shareholders, for example).
It is not surprising that this could lead to a shareholder's lawsuit.
However, the plaintiffs have a tough case to prove due to the Business judgement rule.
They must prove EITHER
For example: if a board member were offered a choice between two CEOs, and voted against removing them because they were a close friend or family member, that board member was disloyal to the company.
Conflict of interest may be their best bet for suing. If they can prove board members held personal believes that they made known, that they can show influenced their decisions, and were not in the company's best interests, then they would have found illegal wrongdoing by the board.
I have done something similar. Some points. 1. First pay attention to what CPU you get. Some Intel CPU's do not support VT extensions.
If you run VMware workstation or Virtualbox, you won't need VT unless you are attempting to emulate a 64-bit OS.
Don't get me wrong, you could do it, depending on what you need, but it is very persnickety about hardware, and the extra expense probably only makes sense to do if running ESX is the primary objective, for example, for purposes of training/learning about that particular system. You have to be extremely careful about hardware.. you cannot plug just any common cheap-o NIC or storage device in and expect it to work, most notably on-board RTL NICs won't work, but Intel PRO 1000s work fine.
On board SATA has some caveats, and you may find yourself having to go buy a RAID controller or SCSI HBA from a very small list of brands + chipset combinations that work. Just because the driver required is the same as a card that works, doesn't mean you are OK either, unless you feel comfortable hacking to add an unknown device's PCI IDs to certain files.
It is not like Linux, it won't "just work", and it is not like Windows either -- you probably won't find 3rd-party rivers for anything, cannot simply compile your own Linux drivers either without modifications, check your hardware thoroughly against community known-to-work lists.
I would say Vmware Workstation, Virtualbox are easiest to get up and running fast.
If you want a bare metal hypervisor, look to XenServer.
Or you could try Hyper-V.
you need something which costs around $1 million per kg for the whole operation to be paid for easily.
In other words.... rare earth metals which go @ rates like $600,000 per Kg, before China cuts off the supply.
But not until the more cheaply available supplies on earth are exchausted.
-flying in a hot air ballon
That's no problem, hot air balloons don't fly, they float.
-guided fishing trips along the amazon
So have a guided boating trip along the amazon, where Fishing is not planned. Bring along things to catch aquatic animals, however, in case you want to keep or eat some, just don't "fish" for them.
-eating hot dogs
That's nasty... if you insist, force them into the freezer and close the door. When the dog stops barking, it's ready to eat.