GOOD! DVD was a closed, proprietary encryption method. Nobody has any right to publish it.
Lessee... Maybe it was copyrighted? No, likely not, there is "fair use" doctrine, and all that. Maybe it was patented? No, because that would mean it was already published. So it must have been a trade secret, and that basically means that the company relies on its own security to keep it secret. Coca-Cola's recipe is neither copyrighted, nor patented. If you found it out (without breaking any laws) and published it on the Web, there is not much that Coca-Cola can do.
In any case, as far as I understand, this has nothing to do with the encryption method. Basically, there is a fixed list of passwords (around 400, I believe) any of which will unlock the DVD movie. All the guys did was to crack some of these passwords. And I don't think that publishing, say, some idiot's root password on the net is illegal...
We need make our displeasure known using peaceful and legal means
To make our displeasure known is not enough. We need to know and remember who did what. We need, basically, a database that knows that on such-and-such date such-and-such firm threatened/sued/shut down a programmer/group/site because of this-and-that. In this way people in position to pressure the offending organization will know if it needs pressuring (and, for example, has a history of hostility towards, say, MP3s).
Of course, there will have to be a significant threshold to cross before some action gets into such database. We don't want script kiddie complaints that their ISP shut them off for trying random 'spoits to end up in there.
And yes, I understand that it is likely to end up being known as "The Slashdot Black List".
First, I don't think that all that much attention should be paid to the ease of installation. Generally, a person who is not able to install software on a machine will not be able to use it properly. Besides, you install once an OS once, and then use it for years. Ease of use (as in updating, tweaking, etc.) counts for much more in my book than polished and chrome-laden install scripts.
Second, Debian was my first Linux (and, generally, the first Unix) that I installed and I didn't meet any insurmountable difficulties. As far as I can recall, the only problem I had was in configuring X (X-based tool got confused, but a terminal-based config program worked perfectly well). I have no clue why Debian is considered to be "for-geeks only" distribution.
It [the First Amendment] is *not* supposed to guarantee that privately-held companies should be forced to allow anyone to post anything using their systems.
You misunderstand the issue. There is no problem with the fact that Yahoo can do anything it wants to the posts on its computer systems. The problem is in the consequences of doing this. See my post above, but basically if Yahoo starts to remove objectionable posts from its boards, implicitly all the other posts become acceptable to Yahoo and so Yahoo turns from a common carrier into a publisher who can and will be sued for what some asshole posted on its board.
Let's see its their computers, they should be able to delete whatever they want for whatever reason they want. What's the big deal?
Well, the big deal is that people who provide message boards, chat rooms, etc. generally do not like to be held responsible for whatever gets posted to the message board or said in a chat room. I think that's a very reasonable wish.
Now, it so happens that under US law (IANAL and I am hugely simplifying) you can be either a publisher or a "common carrier". A publisher exercises editorial control over what he publishes and, consequentially, is responsible for content. Examples: newspapers, magazines, etc. A common carrier just provides the medium for somebody else's words, exercises no editorial control and is *not* responsible for content. Example: a phone company.
Cleary, Yahoo wants to be considered a common carrier and not a publisher for material on its boards and chat rooms. On the other hand, it cannot control content and at the same time claim it is a common carrier.
From my point of view, Yahoo should let everybody say anything on its boards. Trying to selectively delete 'objectionable' (to whom?) material is likely to get it into quite hot legal water.
Libel is NOT a criminal offence therefore it is absolutely false to say that UK libel laws 'ban' free speech
Oh, nobody said that UK libel laws 'ban' free speech. It's just that in the US you can get away by saying far more outrageous things (especially about public figures) than in the UK, and the first amendment is at least partly responsible for this.
To give you an example, the Kitty Kelly's book about the Royal Family was published in the US, but not in the UK for precisely these reasons. Here is a quote about it (from a law professor, no less):
"US law is far more generous to libellers than UK law, so the chances are the Royal Family would fail in a US case. So, by avoiding selling in the UK, where the laws are much stricter, the US publisher is massively reducing the chances of suffering legal action - and that's exactly why they've decided not to publish in the UK! "
So, I do stick to my point that the situation in the US and UK with regard to libel is significantly different.
I see a lot of comments like "Australia isn't a bass-ackward country because there is full frontal nudity on TV, so how come you think it's less free than the US where "Eyes Wide Shut" was censored".
Well, freedom (as in speech, not beer) comes in many parts and countries can (and do) selectively pick parts to tighten and to loosen. For example, the US has a very stong tradition of free speech. Speech that would be banned in, say, UK (because of libel laws) or in Germany (as hate speech) is perfectly legal in the US. So as regards speech, the US is one of the most free countries in the world.
Unfortunately, the US also has a weird hangup about sex (I am not going to go into reasons why). A lot of sex-related stuff that is perfectly OK in countries like Australia, or the same Germany is prohibited in the US -- either outright, or by coercion. "Eyes Wide Shut" is a good example: there is no government censorship involved, but a film with NC-17 rating cannot be a commercial success or seen widely (many movie theaters just do not show any NC-17 films).
Stealing $100=Stealing from 1 person roughly a weeks worth of living expenses is much different than stealing $10,000,000,000 roughly 1,923,076 YEARS worth of food. Those are not the same.
Oh, the consequences are not the same, no argument about it. Whether the moral character of the act changes depending on the sum of money in question is a much more dubious assumption.
I don't believe in the purity of the U.S. legal system. If you believe it is infallible, then we have a different argument.
I don't see what the "purity" or "infallibility" of the US legal system has to do with all this. Let me try to re-express my point of view.
The US (and most of the world) lives in a socioeconomic system called capitalism. This system is based on the fact that many things, including the non-material and intangible ones, can be owned by people and various entities. There is nothing special about software that exempts it from ownership. Given that the chances of the US declaring ownership of software illegal are substantially less than the chances of a large meteorite hitting the Earth in the next few years, I think we can all safely assume that the Microsoft's ownership of its software will continue to exist for some time.
Microsoft is a corporation, which is committed to increasing the wealth of its shareholders. It has to operate within the current legal framework in the US. It has to use all legal means to increase the shareholder value, and it does so.
You may believe that software needs to be free (as in beer, in the context of this argument). That's fine. Unfortunately, the US legal system does not share this view, and moreover, shows no signs of changing its mind about it. Given that, I find the distinctions between "natural" and "legal" means quite meaningless, and I don't think that the foundation under the Microsoft's assets is shaky.
So it's legal and ethical to report that you earned 2.5 billion when the actually value of the company decreased by the same amount in 3 months?
It's legal, for sure. Do you think DoJ would have missed that obvious a thing? And value of the company is one thing we are arguing about, are we not? "Value" is a very vague term and people can and do play all kind of games around it.
Lying about having $100 is a lot different than lying about $10 billion
Maybe to you, not to me.
The source code has value to Microsoft only because they can control its distrubution.
I don't understand. That the whole idea of intellectual property -- that you have some control over distribution, no?
They use legal, not logical or natural means to do so.
What, pray tell, are "logical" or "natural" means? Besides, what's wrong with legal means?
Do only physical things have real value to you?
Personal attacks in logical discussions are flames, and are ignored.
Heh. That wasn't a personal attack. If it were, you would be in no doubt about it. I was just commenting on your strange observation that Microsoft has to valuable assets. It is still a very strange observation to me.
Your argument is not strengthened by 'bookending' it with these baseless suppositions that the author has a personal agenda for his statements. In fact, it is greatly weakened by such tactics. This is referred to 'addressing the argument to the man' and is one of a number of common logical fallacies used in arguments that attempt to discredit the person whom you disagree with or credit yourself with higher authority. By trying to suggest that the author is motivated by something other than the truth, you attempt to lend more credence to your own, supposedly objective, determinations and cast doubt on his claims.
Hey, man, lighten up a bit, willya? Go smoke some good grass, or get laid, or do whatever makes you more relaxed. You may have not noticed, but the point of posting to Slashdot is entertainment, not dry and scholarly discussions of matters of great importance. If I were writing an academic paper, I would use different language and different arguments, but this is Slashdot. What's a post without a bit of flamage (that's ad hominem attacks to you)! And I think I was very polite -- I didn't call Bill Parish an asshole, a kook, a raving lunatic, a nazi and all other cute things that are the base of the Usenet and Slashdot lexicon. So, like, chill it, man.
I disagree, mainly for the large amounts of cash involved.
Interesting. You seem to be saying that the amount of cash involved is relevant to whether the action is legal/ethical/misleading. I don't think so, but everyone has a right to his point of view, of course...
M$ had basically lied, saying they are making 30-50% profit margins when they are not.
Er.. No. Microsoft has followed and is following legal, acceptable and very widespread accounting practices. You may question whether these accounting practices are helpful to make reasonable investment decisions, but it is a complaint targeted at FASB, not Microsoft. And I am yet to see anything that Microsoft does with regards to stock options that Intel, Cisco, Amazon, eBay, etc. etc. do not.
Everybody here knows that the only value that M$ has in on paper.... snip... They have "nothing" of real value.
Funny, you seem to believe that information (such as source code, for example) has no value. Do only physical things have real value to you? A brick is large and heavy, it has value, while some source code, or, say, a good relationship with a supplier, is ephemeral and not valuable at all -- right?
By the way, if you belive all you wrote, go and short Microsoft stock. If you are correct, you will make a lot of money.
When all people have access to all information then all people will be equal.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but no. People are different. There are and will always be short people (who won't be good basketball players), dumb people (who won't be good programmers), ugly people (who will be discriminated against in the mating game), people with no ear for music (who won't be able to play the piano well), etc. etc.
I'm rather tired of the "rich get richer and the poor get poorer" mandate of capitalism.
I'm also rather tired of the "cut everybody down to the lowest common denominator" mandate of the socialism/communism.
Our world is dying from pollution, from overpopulation, and consumption.
I haven't noticed our world dying. The pollution got significantly better in the last 10-15 years, overpopulation is becoming less and less of a problem as the developing countries grow economically, and why consumption is killing the world I don't understand. These are all slogans from the mid-70s -- wake up, they've been proven wrong.
If we gave power back to the people to recognize this, to act together to stop it, the tidal forces of change would rip through this country the likes of which haven't been seen since the Civil War.
YACFS (Yet Another Content-Free Sentence)
Information should be free. It's the ultimate personal freedom, it's a country's most valuable commodity, and the wind in the sails of progress.
I doubt very much that information is the "ultimate personal freedom". If anything, I would say that the ultimate freedom is the freedom to make choices and act on them. Granted, information is very important to making choices, but just knowing something is not enough.
And please notice that information as you describe it cannot be a commodity, since it cannot be bought or sold...
You and some other people in this discussion miss one point: it's not enough to find that person which knows the answer to your question. You also have to convince this person to spend his time and effort to provide this answer to you, and this is far from trivial. Linus is the ultimate authority on the Linux kernel: do you think he'll answer all the kernel questions that people come up with?
Existing Common stockholders have the right to maintain their proportianate ownership of the outstanding stock when new shares are issued. This is known as preemptive right.
Sometimes yes, and sometimes no. It depends on how the corporation's charter and by-laws are written. Some corporations offer such rights (also known as the right of first refusal) to their shareholders, and some do not.
Stocks are screwy anyway. According to economic theory, a stock's price = present value(future dividends)
Well, there are plenty of economic theories and the one you mention (stock price is the value of future cash flows discounted to the present) is one of the simplest and least satisfying ones. I think it's fair to say that it doesn't work, at least on the level of this simple statement.
People buy stocks not because they expect to get payments (mostly dividends) for 50 years from now. They buy stocks because they believe that at some point in the future they'll be able to sell this stock for more than they bought it for. Economists don't like this kind of assertions because they are very hard to analyze, but they correspond to real life much more.
And yet, people still think that stock markets are a great way for society to decide how to invest it's time and resources.
They have worked much better than any alternative system that I know of... Or are you claiming that the government allocation of resources works better?
It's not democratic, and it's very obviously not even pragmatic.
It was never supposed to be democratic (in the one person -- one vote sense). You don't decide where the society will invest its capital -- all you do is buy pieces of companies that you like. The rest works out by itself. Read Adam Smith -- he understood how this works a while ago.
As to being pragmatic -- I take it that you know better than everybody what is pragmatic and what is not, right?
A casino in which the more money you have, the more likely you are to win.
A casino, maybe. If you buy and sell stocks randomly, it is mostly luck that determines what you'll get at the end. I don't see, though, why the more money you have the more likely you are to win. Let's say that I buy 1 share of Microsoft. The odds of the Microsoft stock going up are exactly the same for me and for Bill Gates.
But what he basically claims is that in Microsoft accounting (and specifically, in stating the earnings) the overhang of the existing stock options is not being considered. That's true. However, that's true for every company in the US that has issued stock options. This issue has been discussed by FASB (accounting standards setting body) several times and after quite animated debate, the existing situation -- that the companies are not obliged to put the outstanding stock options into their profit-and-loss statement -- was left to stand as it is now.
Basically, the situation is like this. Company X issues a stock option to employee Y at, say, $10/share. Let's say a year passed and the stock of company X is now trading at $100. You *can* say that the company sustained a $90 unrealized loss (I am ignoring the time value of money for simplicity) and that's exactly what Parish is saying. However, in the real world if the option gets cashed in, the company will not go onto the open market, buy a share for $100 and give it to the employee in exchange for $10. The company will just issue more stock.
Of course, this is not a painless procedure. The more stock is issued, the more the value of the existing shares is diluted (or "watered down"). If the company has 100 shares outstanding, each share was worth 1% of the company. If 100 more shares are issued, all shares will now be worth only 0.5% of the company, so the previous share owners clearly become worse off.
And that's exactly why the earning figures released generally show two numbers: one for outstanding shares (those that have been issued and are not treasury stock), and one on a fully diluted basis, which assumes that all stock options are turned into shares. It is quite misleading to say that this is a big scam that nobody knows about. Any investment professional understands what "fully diluted" means and that Microsoft does have a huge number of stock options outstanding. That hasn't stopped them from buying Microsoft shares in huge amounts.
Maybe the guy has a point in that the gullible public should be made more aware of the problem (and I freely concede that this *is* a problem: only not limited to Microsoft, not having such huge importance, and not likely to lead to the financial meltdown of the free world). But financial professionals know the situation quite well. And the measures that he proposes against Microsoft are quite ridiculous.
I suspect that Bill Parish at some point in the past shorted Microsoft stock (or didn't buy it, buying instead something else) and is now very very bitter about it...
Careful reading of the NYTimes article suggests that the Mosaic 2000 program is used to vet whether individuals who make threats have potential for violence. Nothing suggests that this tool will be used for random evaluation (like random drug testing) or targeted evaluation of individuals perceived to be weird, odd, or different.
OK. Scenario. A school principal (or counselor, etc.) sits in his office thinking about a kid in his school. The kid is disrespectful to teachers, wears strange clothes, talks abour strange things, and is in generally weird. True, he hasn't threatened anybody (yet), but there is that useful program on the computer that was installed last month. Now, it's just evaluation, right? Evaluation never hurt anybody...
Willing to evaluate the percentage of principals who will say to themself: "That's not right. The program is only for those who made threats. I am not going to do this"? Something approaching zero will be my guess.
Good point, but this is still slasdot.org which means the site cannot be used for profit.
And, pray tell, why not? I have not seen any legislation that limits the.org sites to officially registered non-profit organizations. AFAIK, to give an example, Microsoft can set up any number of.org sites and make money off all of them.
I'll probably find myself in the minority here, but I can't see anything wrong with cybersquatting.
Let's see. Internet by now is part of the "real world". The real world mostly plays by the rules called capitalism. In particular, this means that valuable things (assets) should be freely bought and sold with their value being determined by the marketplace.
Now, Internet names are, by now, certainly assets -- they have value and it is possible to buy and sell them. Given that, I don't see anything wrong with people or companies accumulating these assets and then selling them to the highest bidder. After all, that's the way market works.
There is already quite sufficient protection for the copyrighted items and trademarks. This new law applies the doctrine of "use it or lose it" to domain names and I don't see any economic necessity for it. What this law does is give another heavy blunt weapon to large entities (mostly corporations) with which to beat over the head smaller entities (mostly individuals and small organizations). Lawyers should be happy.
People dislike cybersquatting because it would be unacceptable behavior in academic/research setting, and because there is perception of unfairness: these guys paid $70 for the domain name and want to sell it for $10,000! Unfair!
The first objection is no longer valid -- Internet, to repeat myself, now firmly belongs to the "real world" where a lot of stuff that would be ethically unacceptable in a university is legal and happens all the time. As to the second point -- life is unfair, deal with it. Do you think the Saudis deserved in any way those huge pools of oil underneath their sands? Besides, those cybersquatters demonstrated quickness of thinking and action, plus entrepreneurial instincts -- what's wrong with this?
I think two kinds of groups complain about cybersquatting. The first one is people who pine for the good old days when the Internet was basically a research network, unknown and not accessible to the unwashed masses, and domain names could be had for asking. The second one is large corporations which want to take what they want and if they happened to step on somebody in the meantime, so what. I am fairly sure who pushed for this law to be adopted.
Yes, high tution fees are a fact of life, and anyone thinking you can go to school in the US no matter your parents' income is deluding himself.
I don't think so.
At the time when my, my wife's and all of our parents' income was effectively zero, we were perfectly able to go to school. Since I and my wife wanted to go to school in the same city, we ended up with a choice between Columbia and Univ. of Pennsylvania and picked UPenn. Each of us got a package of loans and grants that fully paid for tuition and provided for living expenses. Yes, we ended up with a huge pile of loans, but I consider this fair.
And for people who argue for free/cheap tuition -- and pray, tell, who do you want to pay for education? Government? All this will mean is that your taxes will go up and the standard of education will go down.
The first problem is the classic one: key management. Tons has been written about it, but it usually boils down to either (1) central "approved" authority (== govt), or (2) a web of trust (a la PGP). Both approaches have serious problems, IMHO, and key management continues to be a big mess.
The second problem is also the classic one: poor passphrases. Again, well-known, and again, hard to do something about.
Plus the third problem, which just popped into my mind: Let's say Alice gives me a digitally signed note saying "Dear bank, please give to the bearer $10". Fine. I go to the bank and get $10. Rinse, repeat as desired. In other words, what to do about multiple copies of a signed document?
I'll volunteer that I certainly found it to be a fairly difficult read. And I read a lot.
Well, it all depends on *what* you read. Just reading tons of trash is not going to be particularly enrichening.
Mostly, what made it difficult for me is that I read very quickly (though I don't "speed read"), and Gibson has a rather interesting habit of having massive action happen in one line, sandwiched without fanfare between description that is relatively unimportant to the story.
Well, to my understanding, Gibson is not an action writer and is not very interested in what's happening (as in Alice shoots Bob, Bob falls down). Gibson is a stylist and is great at evoking the atmosphere of a place/person/happening/etc. For me, the "descriptions unimportant to the story" are what makes Gibson's book worth reading.
There are books that are perfectly OK to read quickly because they are mostly about story and action. Gibson's books are not them.
Slashdot Mirror
GOOD! DVD was a closed, proprietary encryption method. Nobody has any right to publish it.
Lessee... Maybe it was copyrighted? No, likely not, there is "fair use" doctrine, and all that. Maybe it was patented? No, because that would mean it was already published. So it must have been a trade secret, and that basically means that the company relies on its own security to keep it secret. Coca-Cola's recipe is neither copyrighted, nor patented. If you found it out (without breaking any laws) and published it on the Web, there is not much that Coca-Cola can do.
In any case, as far as I understand, this has nothing to do with the encryption method. Basically, there is a fixed list of passwords (around 400, I believe) any of which will unlock the DVD movie. All the guys did was to crack some of these passwords. And I don't think that publishing, say, some idiot's root password on the net is illegal...
Kaa
We need make our displeasure known using peaceful and legal means
To make our displeasure known is not enough. We need to know and remember who did what. We need, basically, a database that knows that on such-and-such date such-and-such firm threatened/sued/shut down a programmer/group/site because of this-and-that. In this way people in position to pressure the offending organization will know if it needs pressuring (and, for example, has a history of hostility towards, say, MP3s).
Of course, there will have to be a significant threshold to cross before some action gets into such database. We don't want script kiddie complaints that their ISP shut them off for trying random 'spoits to end up in there.
And yes, I understand that it is likely to end up being known as "The Slashdot Black List".
Kaa
First, I don't think that all that much attention should be paid to the ease of installation. Generally, a person who is not able to install software on a machine will not be able to use it properly. Besides, you install once an OS once, and then use it for years. Ease of use (as in updating, tweaking, etc.) counts for much more in my book than polished and chrome-laden install scripts.
Second, Debian was my first Linux (and, generally, the first Unix) that I installed and I didn't meet any insurmountable difficulties. As far as I can recall, the only problem I had was in configuring X (X-based tool got confused, but a terminal-based config program worked perfectly well). I have no clue why Debian is considered to be "for-geeks only" distribution.
Kaa
It [the First Amendment] is *not* supposed to guarantee that privately-held companies should be forced to allow anyone to post anything using their systems.
You misunderstand the issue. There is no problem with the fact that Yahoo can do anything it wants to the posts on its computer systems. The problem is in the consequences of doing this. See my post above, but basically if Yahoo starts to remove objectionable posts from its boards, implicitly all the other posts become acceptable to Yahoo and so Yahoo turns from a common carrier into a publisher who can and will be sued for what some asshole posted on its board.
Kaa
Let's see its their computers, they should be able to delete whatever they want for whatever reason they want. What's the big deal?
Well, the big deal is that people who provide message boards, chat rooms, etc. generally do not like to be held responsible for whatever gets posted to the message board or said in a chat room. I think that's a very reasonable wish.
Now, it so happens that under US law (IANAL and I am hugely simplifying) you can be either a publisher or a "common carrier". A publisher exercises editorial control over what he publishes and, consequentially, is responsible for content. Examples: newspapers, magazines, etc. A common carrier just provides the medium for somebody else's words, exercises no editorial control and is *not* responsible for content. Example: a phone company.
Cleary, Yahoo wants to be considered a common carrier and not a publisher for material on its boards and chat rooms. On the other hand, it cannot control content and at the same time claim it is a common carrier.
From my point of view, Yahoo should let everybody say anything on its boards. Trying to selectively delete 'objectionable' (to whom?) material is likely to get it into quite hot legal water.
Kaa
Libel is NOT a criminal offence therefore it is absolutely false to say that UK libel laws 'ban' free speech
Oh, nobody said that UK libel laws 'ban' free speech. It's just that in the US you can get away by saying far more outrageous things (especially about public figures) than in the UK, and the first amendment is at least partly responsible for this.
To give you an example, the Kitty Kelly's book about the Royal Family was published in the US, but not in the UK for precisely these reasons. Here is a quote about it (from a law professor, no less):
"US law is far more generous to libellers than UK law, so the chances are the Royal Family would fail in a US case. So, by avoiding selling in the UK, where the laws are much stricter, the US publisher is massively reducing the chances of suffering legal action - and that's exactly why they've decided not to publish in the UK! "
So, I do stick to my point that the situation in the US and UK with regard to libel is significantly different.
Kaa
I see a lot of comments like "Australia isn't a bass-ackward country because there is full frontal nudity on TV, so how come you think it's less free than the US where "Eyes Wide Shut" was censored".
Well, freedom (as in speech, not beer) comes in many parts and countries can (and do) selectively pick parts to tighten and to loosen. For example, the US has a very stong tradition of free speech. Speech that would be banned in, say, UK (because of libel laws) or in Germany (as hate speech) is perfectly legal in the US. So as regards speech, the US is one of the most free countries in the world.
Unfortunately, the US also has a weird hangup about sex (I am not going to go into reasons why). A lot of sex-related stuff that is perfectly OK in countries like Australia, or the same Germany is prohibited in the US -- either outright, or by coercion. "Eyes Wide Shut" is a good example: there is no government censorship involved, but a film with NC-17 rating cannot be a commercial success or seen widely (many movie theaters just do not show any NC-17 films).
Kaa
Stealing $100=Stealing from 1 person roughly a weeks worth of living expenses is much different than stealing $10,000,000,000 roughly 1,923,076 YEARS worth of food. Those are not the same.
Oh, the consequences are not the same, no argument about it. Whether the moral character of the act changes depending on the sum of money in question is a much more dubious assumption.
I don't believe in the purity of the U.S. legal system. If you believe it is infallible, then we have a different argument.
I don't see what the "purity" or "infallibility" of the US legal system has to do with all this. Let me try to re-express my point of view.
The US (and most of the world) lives in a socioeconomic system called capitalism. This system is based on the fact that many things, including the non-material and intangible ones, can be owned by people and various entities. There is nothing special about software that exempts it from ownership. Given that the chances of the US declaring ownership of software illegal are substantially less than the chances of a large meteorite hitting the Earth in the next few years, I think we can all safely assume that the Microsoft's ownership of its software will continue to exist for some time.
Microsoft is a corporation, which is committed to increasing the wealth of its shareholders. It has to operate within the current legal framework in the US. It has to use all legal means to increase the shareholder value, and it does so.
You may believe that software needs to be free (as in beer, in the context of this argument). That's fine. Unfortunately, the US legal system does not share this view, and moreover, shows no signs of changing its mind about it. Given that, I find the distinctions between "natural" and "legal" means quite meaningless, and I don't think that the foundation under the Microsoft's assets is shaky.
Kaa
So it's legal and ethical to report that you earned 2.5 billion when the actually value of the company decreased by the same amount in 3 months?
It's legal, for sure. Do you think DoJ would have missed that obvious a thing? And value of the company is one thing we are arguing about, are we not? "Value" is a very vague term and people can and do play all kind of games around it.
Lying about having $100 is a lot different than lying about $10 billion
Maybe to you, not to me.
The source code has value to Microsoft only because they can control its distrubution.
I don't understand. That the whole idea of intellectual property -- that you have some control over distribution, no?
They use legal, not logical or natural means to do so.
What, pray tell, are "logical" or "natural" means? Besides, what's wrong with legal means?
Do only physical things have real value to you?
Personal attacks in logical discussions are flames, and are ignored.
Heh. That wasn't a personal attack. If it were, you would be in no doubt about it. I was just commenting on your strange observation that Microsoft has to valuable assets. It is still a very strange observation to me.
Kaa
Your argument is not strengthened by 'bookending' it with these baseless suppositions that the author has a personal agenda for his statements. In fact, it is greatly weakened by such tactics. This is referred to 'addressing the argument to the man' and is one of a number of common logical fallacies used in arguments that attempt to discredit the person whom you disagree with or credit yourself with higher authority. By trying to suggest that the author is motivated by something other than the truth, you attempt to lend more credence to your own, supposedly objective, determinations and cast doubt on his claims.
Hey, man, lighten up a bit, willya? Go smoke some good grass, or get laid, or do whatever makes you more relaxed. You may have not noticed, but the point of posting to Slashdot is entertainment, not dry and scholarly discussions of matters of great importance. If I were writing an academic paper, I would use different language and different arguments, but this is Slashdot. What's a post without a bit of flamage (that's ad hominem attacks to you)! And I think I was very polite -- I didn't call Bill Parish an asshole, a kook, a raving lunatic, a nazi and all other cute things that are the base of the Usenet and Slashdot lexicon. So, like, chill it, man.
Kaa
I disagree, mainly for the large amounts of cash involved.
... snip ... They have "nothing" of real value.
Interesting. You seem to be saying that the amount of cash involved is relevant to whether the action is legal/ethical/misleading. I don't think so, but everyone has a right to his point of view, of course...
M$ had basically lied, saying they are making 30-50% profit margins when they are not.
Er.. No. Microsoft has followed and is following legal, acceptable and very widespread accounting practices. You may question whether these accounting practices are helpful to make reasonable investment decisions, but it is a complaint targeted at FASB, not Microsoft. And I am yet to see anything that Microsoft does with regards to stock options that Intel, Cisco, Amazon, eBay, etc. etc. do not.
Everybody here knows that the only value that M$ has in on paper.
Funny, you seem to believe that information (such as source code, for example) has no value. Do only physical things have real value to you? A brick is large and heavy, it has value, while some source code, or, say, a good relationship with a supplier, is ephemeral and not valuable at all -- right?
By the way, if you belive all you wrote, go and short Microsoft stock. If you are correct, you will make a lot of money.
Kaa
When all people have access to all information then all people will be equal.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but no. People are different. There are and will always be short people (who won't be good basketball players), dumb people (who won't be good programmers), ugly people (who will be discriminated against in the mating game), people with no ear for music (who won't be able to play the piano well), etc. etc.
I'm rather tired of the "rich get richer and the poor get poorer" mandate of capitalism.
I'm also rather tired of the "cut everybody down to the lowest common denominator" mandate of the socialism/communism.
Our world is dying from pollution, from overpopulation, and consumption.
I haven't noticed our world dying. The pollution got significantly better in the last 10-15 years, overpopulation is becoming less and less of a problem as the developing countries grow economically, and why consumption is killing the world I don't understand. These are all slogans from the mid-70s -- wake up, they've been proven wrong.
If we gave power back to the people to recognize this, to act together to stop it, the tidal forces of change would rip through this country the likes of which haven't been seen since the Civil War.
YACFS (Yet Another Content-Free Sentence)
Information should be free. It's the ultimate personal freedom, it's a country's most valuable commodity, and the wind in the sails of progress.
I doubt very much that information is the "ultimate personal freedom". If anything, I would say that the ultimate freedom is the freedom to make choices and act on them. Granted, information is very important to making choices, but just knowing something is not enough.
And please notice that information as you describe it cannot be a commodity, since it cannot be bought or sold...
You and some other people in this discussion miss one point: it's not enough to find that person which knows the answer to your question. You also have to convince this person to spend his time and effort to provide this answer to you, and this is far from trivial. Linus is the ultimate authority on the Linux kernel: do you think he'll answer all the kernel questions that people come up with?
Kaa
Existing Common stockholders have the right to maintain their proportianate ownership of the outstanding stock when new shares are issued. This is known as preemptive right.
Sometimes yes, and sometimes no. It depends on how the corporation's charter and by-laws are written. Some corporations offer such rights (also known as the right of first refusal) to their shareholders, and some do not.
Kaa
Stocks are screwy anyway. According to economic theory, a stock's price = present value(future dividends)
Well, there are plenty of economic theories and the one you mention (stock price is the value of future cash flows discounted to the present) is one of the simplest and least satisfying ones. I think it's fair to say that it doesn't work, at least on the level of this simple statement.
People buy stocks not because they expect to get payments (mostly dividends) for 50 years from now. They buy stocks because they believe that at some point in the future they'll be able to sell this stock for more than they bought it for. Economists don't like this kind of assertions because they are very hard to analyze, but they correspond to real life much more.
Kaa
And yet, people still think that stock markets are a great way for society to decide how to invest it's time and resources.
They have worked much better than any alternative system that I know of... Or are you claiming that the government allocation of resources works better?
It's not democratic, and it's very obviously not even pragmatic.
It was never supposed to be democratic (in the one person -- one vote sense). You don't decide where the society will invest its capital -- all you do is buy pieces of companies that you like. The rest works out by itself. Read Adam Smith -- he understood how this works a while ago.
As to being pragmatic -- I take it that you know better than everybody what is pragmatic and what is not, right?
A casino in which the more money you have, the more likely you are to win.
A casino, maybe. If you buy and sell stocks randomly, it is mostly luck that determines what you'll get at the end. I don't see, though, why the more money you have the more likely you are to win. Let's say that I buy 1 share of Microsoft. The odds of the Microsoft stock going up are exactly the same for me and for Bill Gates.
Kaa
This guy seems to really hate Microsoft...
But what he basically claims is that in Microsoft accounting (and specifically, in stating the earnings) the overhang of the existing stock options is not being considered. That's true. However, that's true for every company in the US that has issued stock options. This issue has been discussed by FASB (accounting standards setting body) several times and after quite animated debate, the existing situation -- that the companies are not obliged to put the outstanding stock options into their profit-and-loss statement -- was left to stand as it is now.
Basically, the situation is like this. Company X issues a stock option to employee Y at, say, $10/share. Let's say a year passed and the stock of company X is now trading at $100. You *can* say that the company sustained a $90 unrealized loss (I am ignoring the time value of money for simplicity) and that's exactly what Parish is saying. However, in the real world if the option gets cashed in, the company will not go onto the open market, buy a share for $100 and give it to the employee in exchange for $10. The company will just issue more stock.
Of course, this is not a painless procedure. The more stock is issued, the more the value of the existing shares is diluted (or "watered down"). If the company has 100 shares outstanding, each share was worth 1% of the company. If 100 more shares are issued, all shares will now be worth only 0.5% of the company, so the previous share owners clearly become worse off.
And that's exactly why the earning figures released generally show two numbers: one for outstanding shares (those that have been issued and are not treasury stock), and one on a fully diluted basis, which assumes that all stock options are turned into shares. It is quite misleading to say that this is a big scam that nobody knows about. Any investment professional understands what "fully diluted" means and that Microsoft does have a huge number of stock options outstanding. That hasn't stopped them from buying Microsoft shares in huge amounts.
Maybe the guy has a point in that the gullible public should be made more aware of the problem (and I freely concede that this *is* a problem: only not limited to Microsoft, not having such huge importance, and not likely to lead to the financial meltdown of the free world). But financial professionals know the situation quite well. And the measures that he proposes against Microsoft are quite ridiculous.
I suspect that Bill Parish at some point in the past shorted Microsoft stock (or didn't buy it, buying instead something else) and is now very very bitter about it...
Kaa
To requote your original post:
the site cannot be used for profit.
My point was that there is a big difference between "cannot" and ".org domains were not intended to".
Kaa
Careful reading of the NYTimes article suggests that the Mosaic 2000 program is used to vet whether individuals who make threats have potential for violence. Nothing suggests that this tool will be used for random evaluation (like random drug testing) or targeted evaluation of individuals perceived to be weird, odd, or different.
OK. Scenario. A school principal (or counselor, etc.) sits in his office thinking about a kid in his school. The kid is disrespectful to teachers, wears strange clothes, talks abour strange things, and is in generally weird. True, he hasn't threatened anybody (yet), but there is that useful program on the computer that was installed last month. Now, it's just evaluation, right? Evaluation never hurt anybody...
Willing to evaluate the percentage of principals who will say to themself: "That's not right. The program is only for those who made threats. I am not going to do this"? Something approaching zero will be my guess.
Kaa
Good point, but this is still slasdot.org which means the site cannot be used for profit.
.org sites to officially registered non-profit organizations. AFAIK, to give an example, Microsoft can set up any number of .org sites and make money off all of them.
And, pray tell, why not? I have not seen any legislation that limits the
Kaa
I'll probably find myself in the minority here, but I can't see anything wrong with cybersquatting.
Let's see. Internet by now is part of the "real world". The real world mostly plays by the rules called capitalism. In particular, this means that valuable things (assets) should be freely bought and sold with their value being determined by the marketplace.
Now, Internet names are, by now, certainly assets -- they have value and it is possible to buy and sell them. Given that, I don't see anything wrong with people or companies accumulating these assets and then selling them to the highest bidder. After all, that's the way market works.
There is already quite sufficient protection for the copyrighted items and trademarks. This new law applies the doctrine of "use it or lose it" to domain names and I don't see any economic necessity for it. What this law does is give another heavy blunt weapon to large entities (mostly corporations) with which to beat over the head smaller entities (mostly individuals and small organizations). Lawyers should be happy.
People dislike cybersquatting because it would be unacceptable behavior in academic/research setting, and because there is perception of unfairness: these guys paid $70 for the domain name and want to sell it for $10,000! Unfair!
The first objection is no longer valid -- Internet, to repeat myself, now firmly belongs to the "real world" where a lot of stuff that would be ethically unacceptable in a university is legal and happens all the time. As to the second point -- life is unfair, deal with it. Do you think the Saudis deserved in any way those huge pools of oil underneath their sands? Besides, those cybersquatters demonstrated quickness of thinking and action, plus entrepreneurial instincts -- what's wrong with this?
I think two kinds of groups complain about cybersquatting. The first one is people who pine for the good old days when the Internet was basically a research network, unknown and not accessible to the unwashed masses, and domain names could be had for asking. The second one is large corporations which want to take what they want and if they happened to step on somebody in the meantime, so what. I am fairly sure who pushed for this law to be adopted.
Kaa
Even thinking about a private company studying human DNA gives me the willies!
Ah, I see. You want the government to study your DNA, right?
Kaa
Yes, high tution fees are a fact of life, and anyone thinking you can go to school in the US no matter your parents' income is deluding himself.
I don't think so.
At the time when my, my wife's and all of our parents' income was effectively zero, we were perfectly able to go to school. Since I and my wife wanted to go to school in the same city, we ended up with a choice between Columbia and Univ. of Pennsylvania and picked UPenn. Each of us got a package of loans and grants that fully paid for tuition and provided for living expenses. Yes, we ended up with a huge pile of loans, but I consider this fair.
And for people who argue for free/cheap tuition -- and pray, tell, who do you want to pay for education? Government? All this will mean is that your taxes will go up and the standard of education will go down.
Kaa
I still think problems.
The first problem is the classic one: key management. Tons has been written about it, but it usually boils down to either (1) central "approved" authority (== govt), or (2) a web of trust (a la PGP). Both approaches have serious problems, IMHO, and key management continues to be a big mess.
The second problem is also the classic one: poor passphrases. Again, well-known, and again, hard to do something about.
Plus the third problem, which just popped into my mind: Let's say Alice gives me a digitally signed note saying "Dear bank, please give to the bearer $10". Fine. I go to the bank and get $10. Rinse, repeat as desired. In other words, what to do about multiple copies of a signed document?
Kaa
I don't see why can't palm IX use gameboy color's screen, and it cost 69 bucks.
(1) Gameboy's color screen sucks.
(2) Gameboys are subsidized by game cartridges. I am pretty sure the cost of a color Gameboy is more than $69.
(3) All the above nonwithstanding, I think that PalmPilots are all ridiculously overpriced. That's why I don't own one.
Kaa
I'll volunteer that I certainly found it to be a fairly difficult read. And I read a lot.
Well, it all depends on *what* you read. Just reading tons of trash is not going to be particularly enrichening.
Mostly, what made it difficult for me is that I read very quickly (though I don't "speed read"), and Gibson has a rather interesting habit of having massive action happen in one line, sandwiched without fanfare between description that is relatively unimportant to the story.
Well, to my understanding, Gibson is not an action writer and is not very interested in what's happening (as in Alice shoots Bob, Bob falls down). Gibson is a stylist and is great at evoking the atmosphere of a place/person/happening/etc. For me, the "descriptions unimportant to the story" are what makes Gibson's book worth reading.
There are books that are perfectly OK to read quickly because they are mostly about story and action. Gibson's books are not them.
Kaa