FYI, AMD is a licencee of an enormous amount of Intel IP, including the IA32 instruction set. Every AMD chip sold lines Intel's pockets a bit.
So what were they supposed to do? Make a chip with a totally new instruction set that they invented and then hope that Microsoft and the software vendors would port their products to it? Get a clue! Of course the license the IA32 instruction set.
In the early days their chips were virtually identical to Intel's. They have made many good improvements to Intel's designs since then, but to even call them 'cloners' (in the Compaq sense) is an overstatement.
That shows how little you know about history, CPU design, and basic terminology (like "clone"). A "clone" CPU is not something with radically better performance at the same clock speed. Right now, the AMD 1.4ghz CPU is a good match for the Pentium 2.0ghz CPU and even outdistances it on floating point. That's not how clones work.
You clearly are all of about 18. I was a computer professional when IBM released the PC. While the markup now might be tiny, it was anything but when IBM entered the fray. They enjoyed a tremendous profit from them and that was why they had their entire Boca Raton campus. At one point in time, PC clones were all that Compaq made, so how could they have been unimportant to Compaq? What do you think Compaq is making all of its money on if not PCs? Toaster ovens? This morning, I told a Compaq rep what you wrote and he just laughed!
You are simply wrong and you need to read some history books before you start spouting off your unsubstantiated stuff. Give me some facts to support your wild claims. Tell me what percentage of IBM's gross profit or revenue was accounted for by PC sales. Don't get on Slashdot and try to rewrite history.
But what have they done in terms of innovation? They're cloners! That's it!
AMD has been in business since 1969 and has introduced many CPUs, including proprietary ones like the AM29300 family. If they were "cloners", their chips would perform identically to the Intel chips that you claimed that they cloned. Instead, the current generation of AMD CPUs significantly outperforms the Intel CPUs at the same clock rate. They have more efficient floating point units (FPUs). They use a completely different electrical interface and pinout. They have additional instructions not present in the Intel chips:
21 original 3DNow! instructions
19 additional instructions for improved integer math for speech and video encoding
5 DSP instructions to improve soft modem, soft ADSL, and MP3 applications.
Sure, they support the basic x86 instruction set, but that does not make them "cloners." They would be hard-pressed to sell chips into the PC market that could not run normal PC software and operating systems.
OK, AMD has had some pretty huge reliability problems in the early to mid nineties, so your wrong on your last point.
So what were they? What chips did AMD have to recall and for what reason? I'm not aware of any "huge reliability problems."
IBM never really made much of an effort in the PC market, since their core business has always been in big iron, a much more profitable market (ask compaq), than PCs.
Huh? By 1986, IBM estimates put their total PC sales at 7 million! IBM's Boca Raton PC division was a 565 acre campus housing nearly 10,000 IBM employees. For electricity, IBM arranged with Florida Power & Light to have a twin-unit substation built on the edge of the property, with ''double redundancy'' so that each unit would have to fail twice before there was a cut-off in electricity. IBM was not a company that dismissed PC sales as unimportant. For quite a few years, it was their bread and butter. The fact is that IBM fought as hard as they could to dominate the market and they failed, becoming a company that is a non-entity in the PC sales arena.
Once again, the company with the most resources, experience, and capital has secured their lead. Did you really think AMD was capable of competing?
Like IBM? They really dominate the entire personal computer market now, don't they? They were "the company with the most resources, experience, and capital" and had "secured the lead." I remember 15 or so years ago when trolls like you were proclaiming Compaq to have no chance of ever selling more PCs than IBM. I want an answer to that point! If the largest, richest, oldest company always wins, explain IBM's position in the PC industry today.
AMD already has a very large portion of the market share and their share is growing. They are not some no-name start-up company like Transmeta.
They're big enough to coast, and take a break sometimes. AMD needs every minute of developer time they can get just to keep up! Sooner or later, AMD just exhausts it's resources and slips back into the low-end slot, where it belongs. Also remember, intel can weather a lot more damage to their markets than AMD. AMD doesn't have much of a war chest.
What you are not realizing is that Intel has a lot more overhead than does AMD. Because of that, Intel has to sell their chips for more even if the chips cost the same to produce. AMD loves price wars. They can make a profit at a price point that's killing Intel.
As far as AMD's technical prowess, they have had far fewer failures than has Intel. You have not heard about AMD having to recall CPUs for floating point bugs, motherboard support chips for timing problems, and CPUs because they fail at their rated clock speed. Intel has had all of the aforementioned recalls in recent years. Add to that the Rambus fiasco that has driven up the price of P4 systems and Intel is not exactly a paragon of engineering talent.
It's called a hobby. Look into it. Hobbies are harmless and fun and in no way make a person a "loser."
I know what hobbies are and have lots of them including woodworking, computers, SCUBA, motorcycling, boating, fishing, and lots more. I agree that a hobby does not make a person a loser, but there are certain hobbies that tend to attract people who are losers. Case modding and lowrider cars are two very good examples.
Spewing RF through Plexiglass windows and interfering with television is not harmless. All we need is some case modder interfering with the TV of some member of Congress and we may see legislation requiring that computers only be sold as FCC-approved, pre-built units. Do not be too quick to write this off as paranoid delusion. There are a lot of major U.S. corporations that would benefit tremendously if we all had to buy complete computers, rather than new motherboards and CPUs, each time we wanted to upgrade. Compaq, Dell, and Gateway, would love such legislation. So would Microsoft since each new big-name computer sold goes out with another copy of Windows. Once the ball was in play, the corporate PC giants would have "experts" testifying before Congress and making claims that home-built PC cause everything from cancer to aircraft navigation system failures.
Then the case modders would not be the losers. We all would.
Whether you like him or not, Jon Katz is a person who has never, to the best of my knowledge, uttered an unkind work to or about you. For you to publically insult him speaks ill of your upbringing.
If you feel that something on Slashdot is not working, submit a bug report. Don't post public messages that are abusive and insulting about some person who is not responsible for the bug.
I am guessing that you will respond with a rude posting to/about me, but why don't you try surprising us all and just admit that you were out of line. It might even earn you some Karma points.
Complete, absolute, losers, case modders, every one.
Since I have 50 Karma points to burn...
I agree with you 100%. It's one thing to improve the cooling of a case, but fancy paint, clear windows, lights on the inside, etc. is just idiotic and tacky. Case modders are like the lowrider crowd -- they spend a lot of time and/or money to make their machines look stupid and perform worse than stock (many modded cases spew RF, have inadequate cooling, have dangerous high voltages for neon lights, and have component access problems - like hinged doors disguised as 5.25" floppy drives). These people need to get lives -- or at least a little good taste.
Get a life. Jon Katz wrote a movie review that you clicked on and chose to read! He is an insightful, talented author with many book reviews to prove it. The fact that you cannot appreciate his writing does not mean that you need to attack the man personally every time he posts something on Slashdot. You remind me of the stupid troll that keeps posting the "*BSD is dying" crap every time an article about BSD appears. If you don't want to read stuff by Jon Katz, then don't read it. But don't subject Jon Katz and his readers to your childish insults and whining.
But for how long? Trends have been going back up at a high rate in the incidence of unprotected sex in the gay community, which for lack of a better phrase was scared 'straight' there for while.
That's one danger with drugs that control the disease in so many victims. More often than not, people with AIDS now look perfectly healthy. There are now young adults that were in grade school when the AIDS epidemic was really hitting hard. They didn't see close friends get horribly sick and die. They know that AIDS is still out there, but they don't really see it as a real threat to them. Some even view it as an inconvenience that can be controlled with drugs -- like herpes.
Part of the problem is the lack of sex education in schools. It's time to stop pandering to the religious right and start teaching kids things that they need to know in order to avoid becoming victims of STDs, regardless of whether they engage in vaginal, oral, or anal sex. The importance of condom use should be taught and to hell with the Catholic church. There are people dying.
The author attributed this to complete stonewalling from gay organization which are busy fighting any attempt by link AIDS with gay lifestyle.
The unfortunate fact is that AIDS does not get enough research dollars and public awareness if it is viewed as a "gay problem." If mom and dad think that their precious, (assumed) straight son or daughter might become infected then they will start demanding that something be done. That's why groups representing the gay population are fighting so hard to prevent AIDS from being closely linked with a gay lifestyle.
I am also sure that straight AIDS victims have no desire to have their coworkers, friends, and family to assume that they must have contracted the disease through gay sex. Basically, it doesn't serve anyone's best interests to have the disease be seen as a problem only for the gay community.
No, it is a choice of having unprotected sex with great number of partners which gays are famous for.
Wilt Chamberlain, Magic Johnson, and many other straight people have boasted of their sexual conquests, most of which involved uprotected sex. It's not just gay people that do that.
You paint with an overly broad brush. Most gay men no longer have unprotected sex. Many gay men who contracted AIDS when the epidemic started had no idea of how the disease was spread, from whom they got it, etc. It was a complete mystery to epidemiologists as well as to the gay community. Prior to AIDS, there was little reason for gay men to need "protection" when they had sex. It was not like either person would end up pregnant. Even now, condoms, while helpful, are not 100% effective in stopping the spread of AIDS. Sometimes they tear. Sometimes the come off.
You need to chill out on the gay bashing. There are adults here and we don't feel threatened by someone else's sexuality.
Einstein had several children; A girl named Liserl (supposedly retarded and put up for adoption), and two sons, Hans Albert and Eduard (the latter also being mentally unstable and institutionalized).
Thank you. I never knew that, though it certainly shoots down the troll's "good genes" theory, doesn't it?
Choice? You think that each gay person simply decided that they wanted to be sexually aroused by members of the same sex, that they wanted to be the victims of hate crimes, gay bashing, and prejudice?
I could not simply wake up one morning and think to myself "I think I'll be gay from now on." Could you really just flip a switch inside your head and change which gender was sexually attractive to you? No offense intended, but that's really weird that you can do that. Most people are "hard-wired", as to whether they are straight or gay.
Humans are animals. We live as a species to bump other species out of existance and rule the planet and eventually the universe.
So you feel that overpopulation is the key to the survival of the human race. That will work real well -- at least until we run out of food.
Maybe your feeble little mind doesn't grasp the idea
"Feeble little mind"? That can't be the explanation -- and I have the IQ tests to prove it. So I'll go back to my original premise: You are just a troll. Happy trolling.
Well, gays contributed AIDS as it was first recorded among them.
And please do not bullshit here about lack of relation between gay lifestiles and much greater rates of AIDS among them.
I did not say that there was no relationship, but gays are not the only people that ever got AIDS. Blaming gay people for AIDS is like blaming black people for sickle cell anemia. They are the victims, just as have been a tremendous number of hemophiliacs, IV drug users, and even people like Magic Johnson.
You're mostly right, but I do judge people's worth on their sexual prefrence. Gay people not propegate the human species. Therefore they are as useless as Microsoft Bob.
Do you really believe that the only thing that anyone, including you, can contribute to humanity is more people? Albert Einstein never had kids. Mother Theresa never had children. Does that mean that their lives were complete wastes and that they were "as useless as Microsoft Bob"? Do you also feel that infertile couples have nothing to contribute? Does that mean that welfare mothers with 14 kids are making a wonderful contribution to society?
Here's a clue: We don't need any more people. We have more than enough already. The best thing that could happen to insure the survival of the human species is fewer people polluting the planet and using up its resources.
If you are going to troll, at least don't be so obvious about it. Don't post something that is so clearly concocted to enrage. No one is really going to believe that you are so ignorant that:
you judge people's worth based on their sexual preference.
you believe that only gay people get AIDS.
You need to try subtlety. Claim that the stockholders of the drug company are being cheated or that we should stop trading with any country that violates a U.S. patent. You are dealing with a sharper bunch on here than you realize and no one here is going to believe that you are that stupid, bigoted, and narrow-minded. Try again.
"The Road Runner system has been designed to offer access to all the high speed services mentioned above, even assuming continuous, maximal usage by every Road Runner user in a neighborhood simultaneously.
Since Road Runner is supposedly designed to be impossible to saturate, then they should refund money to those who had unusable connections -- especially since the vast majority of the Code Red traffic came from within their network. Of course, this is just another example of marketing hyperbole as many Road Runner franchises (including mine) are horrendously overloaded and subject to packet loss and high latency at peak usage times.
The real point is that many networks were not taken down or even substantially slowed by Code Red. That makes it pretty clear that Code Red was not some all-powerful force capable of bringing the Internet to its knees. The networks that were rendered useless by it were the ones that had inadequate capapacity.
These companies constantly bully, threaten, and devastate individuals and smaller businesses by means of legal technicalities, unethical and immoral behavior, and outright lies. Anything that CAN be done to undermine any one standing in the way of profit IS done by the corporate entities. And yes, I include mass murder, or have you already forgotten Bohpal?
So you are saying that this justifies cybersquatting -- that because some firms behave unthically, that we should hold no one accountable for their actions?
New rule: No individual or company can own more than 10 domains. It's absurd that some cybersquatters have each grabbed thousands of domains that they neither want nor plan to develop.
Somebody scraps up a domain name which some corporation later wants. Result: The corporation has to get a different domain name.
So, in my hypothetical example, the buying public types www.compaq.com, find's a "this domain for sale" sign, and then types www.gateway.com or www.dell.com. Compaq would lose far more money than Bob's vacation home in Florida was ever worth. If it's a dot-com rather than Compaq, being stuck with a crappy domain name could cost them their business, their investors would lose their investments, and their employees would lose their jobs.
By the way, plywood protects windows, not people's lives. People who board up their houses normally have enough sense to evacuate them before the storm hits.
So do you also look down upon real estate speculation, where someone buys land out in the middle of nowhere, does nothing with it for several years until the land is worth something?
Yes, I do. I respect people who take something and make it valuable, not people that try to get rich without contributing anything to society or the economy.
Yeah, sometimes people do get screwed to some degree when someone buys a domain name. But to compare it to the people who extort money after a hurricane blows through is a bit excessive.
How? What's your neighbor's house worth? Now how much damage is done to a business that can't have a recognizable domain? How much would it cost Compaq if some cybersquatter had www.compaq.com, for example?
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So what were they supposed to do? Make a chip with a totally new instruction set that they invented and then hope that Microsoft and the software vendors would port their products to it? Get a clue! Of course the license the IA32 instruction set.
In the early days their chips were virtually identical to Intel's. They have made many good improvements to Intel's designs since then, but to even call them 'cloners' (in the Compaq sense) is an overstatement.
That shows how little you know about history, CPU design, and basic terminology (like "clone"). A "clone" CPU is not something with radically better performance at the same clock speed. Right now, the AMD 1.4ghz CPU is a good match for the Pentium 2.0ghz CPU and even outdistances it on floating point. That's not how clones work.
You are simply wrong and you need to read some history books before you start spouting off your unsubstantiated stuff. Give me some facts to support your wild claims. Tell me what percentage of IBM's gross profit or revenue was accounted for by PC sales. Don't get on Slashdot and try to rewrite history.
AMD has been in business since 1969 and has introduced many CPUs, including proprietary ones like the AM29300 family. If they were "cloners", their chips would perform identically to the Intel chips that you claimed that they cloned. Instead, the current generation of AMD CPUs significantly outperforms the Intel CPUs at the same clock rate. They have more efficient floating point units (FPUs). They use a completely different electrical interface and pinout. They have additional instructions not present in the Intel chips:
21 original 3DNow! instructions
19 additional instructions for improved integer math for speech and video encoding
5 DSP instructions to improve soft modem, soft ADSL, and MP3 applications.
Sure, they support the basic x86 instruction set, but that does not make them "cloners." They would be hard-pressed to sell chips into the PC market that could not run normal PC software and operating systems.
So what were they? What chips did AMD have to recall and for what reason? I'm not aware of any "huge reliability problems."
IBM never really made much of an effort in the PC market, since their core business has always been in big iron, a much more profitable market (ask compaq), than PCs.
Huh? By 1986, IBM estimates put their total PC sales at 7 million! IBM's Boca Raton PC division was a 565 acre campus housing nearly 10,000 IBM employees. For electricity, IBM arranged with Florida Power & Light to have a twin-unit substation built on the edge of the property, with ''double redundancy'' so that each unit would have to fail twice before there was a cut-off in electricity. IBM was not a company that dismissed PC sales as unimportant. For quite a few years, it was their bread and butter. The fact is that IBM fought as hard as they could to dominate the market and they failed, becoming a company that is a non-entity in the PC sales arena.
Ding! So just report it as a bug. Thank you.
Like IBM? They really dominate the entire personal computer market now, don't they? They were "the company with the most resources, experience, and capital" and had "secured the lead." I remember 15 or so years ago when trolls like you were proclaiming Compaq to have no chance of ever selling more PCs than IBM. I want an answer to that point! If the largest, richest, oldest company always wins, explain IBM's position in the PC industry today.
AMD already has a very large portion of the market share and their share is growing. They are not some no-name start-up company like Transmeta.
They're big enough to coast, and take a break sometimes. AMD needs every minute of developer time they can get just to keep up! Sooner or later, AMD just exhausts it's resources and slips back into the low-end slot, where it belongs. Also remember, intel can weather a lot more damage to their markets than AMD. AMD doesn't have much of a war chest.
What you are not realizing is that Intel has a lot more overhead than does AMD. Because of that, Intel has to sell their chips for more even if the chips cost the same to produce. AMD loves price wars. They can make a profit at a price point that's killing Intel.
As far as AMD's technical prowess, they have had far fewer failures than has Intel. You have not heard about AMD having to recall CPUs for floating point bugs, motherboard support chips for timing problems, and CPUs because they fail at their rated clock speed. Intel has had all of the aforementioned recalls in recent years. Add to that the Rambus fiasco that has driven up the price of P4 systems and Intel is not exactly a paragon of engineering talent.
I know what hobbies are and have lots of them including woodworking, computers, SCUBA, motorcycling, boating, fishing, and lots more. I agree that a hobby does not make a person a loser, but there are certain hobbies that tend to attract people who are losers. Case modding and lowrider cars are two very good examples.
Spewing RF through Plexiglass windows and interfering with television is not harmless. All we need is some case modder interfering with the TV of some member of Congress and we may see legislation requiring that computers only be sold as FCC-approved, pre-built units. Do not be too quick to write this off as paranoid delusion. There are a lot of major U.S. corporations that would benefit tremendously if we all had to buy complete computers, rather than new motherboards and CPUs, each time we wanted to upgrade. Compaq, Dell, and Gateway, would love such legislation. So would Microsoft since each new big-name computer sold goes out with another copy of Windows. Once the ball was in play, the corporate PC giants would have "experts" testifying before Congress and making claims that home-built PC cause everything from cancer to aircraft navigation system failures.
Then the case modders would not be the losers. We all would.
If you feel that something on Slashdot is not working, submit a bug report. Don't post public messages that are abusive and insulting about some person who is not responsible for the bug.
I am guessing that you will respond with a rude posting to/about me, but why don't you try surprising us all and just admit that you were out of line. It might even earn you some Karma points.
Since I have 50 Karma points to burn...
I agree with you 100%. It's one thing to improve the cooling of a case, but fancy paint, clear windows, lights on the inside, etc. is just idiotic and tacky. Case modders are like the lowrider crowd -- they spend a lot of time and/or money to make their machines look stupid and perform worse than stock (many modded cases spew RF, have inadequate cooling, have dangerous high voltages for neon lights, and have component access problems - like hinged doors disguised as 5.25" floppy drives). These people need to get lives -- or at least a little good taste.
Get a life. Jon Katz wrote a movie review that you clicked on and chose to read! He is an insightful, talented author with many book reviews to prove it. The fact that you cannot appreciate his writing does not mean that you need to attack the man personally every time he posts something on Slashdot. You remind me of the stupid troll that keeps posting the "*BSD is dying" crap every time an article about BSD appears. If you don't want to read stuff by Jon Katz, then don't read it. But don't subject Jon Katz and his readers to your childish insults and whining.
That's one danger with drugs that control the disease in so many victims. More often than not, people with AIDS now look perfectly healthy. There are now young adults that were in grade school when the AIDS epidemic was really hitting hard. They didn't see close friends get horribly sick and die. They know that AIDS is still out there, but they don't really see it as a real threat to them. Some even view it as an inconvenience that can be controlled with drugs -- like herpes.
Part of the problem is the lack of sex education in schools. It's time to stop pandering to the religious right and start teaching kids things that they need to know in order to avoid becoming victims of STDs, regardless of whether they engage in vaginal, oral, or anal sex. The importance of condom use should be taught and to hell with the Catholic church. There are people dying.
The unfortunate fact is that AIDS does not get enough research dollars and public awareness if it is viewed as a "gay problem." If mom and dad think that their precious, (assumed) straight son or daughter might become infected then they will start demanding that something be done. That's why groups representing the gay population are fighting so hard to prevent AIDS from being closely linked with a gay lifestyle.
I am also sure that straight AIDS victims have no desire to have their coworkers, friends, and family to assume that they must have contracted the disease through gay sex. Basically, it doesn't serve anyone's best interests to have the disease be seen as a problem only for the gay community.
Wilt Chamberlain, Magic Johnson, and many other straight people have boasted of their sexual conquests, most of which involved uprotected sex. It's not just gay people that do that.
You paint with an overly broad brush. Most gay men no longer have unprotected sex. Many gay men who contracted AIDS when the epidemic started had no idea of how the disease was spread, from whom they got it, etc. It was a complete mystery to epidemiologists as well as to the gay community. Prior to AIDS, there was little reason for gay men to need "protection" when they had sex. It was not like either person would end up pregnant. Even now, condoms, while helpful, are not 100% effective in stopping the spread of AIDS. Sometimes they tear. Sometimes the come off.
You need to chill out on the gay bashing. There are adults here and we don't feel threatened by someone else's sexuality.
Thank you. I never knew that, though it certainly shoots down the troll's "good genes" theory, doesn't it?
Choice? You think that each gay person simply decided that they wanted to be sexually aroused by members of the same sex, that they wanted to be the victims of hate crimes, gay bashing, and prejudice?
I could not simply wake up one morning and think to myself "I think I'll be gay from now on." Could you really just flip a switch inside your head and change which gender was sexually attractive to you? No offense intended, but that's really weird that you can do that. Most people are "hard-wired", as to whether they are straight or gay.
So you feel that overpopulation is the key to the survival of the human race. That will work real well -- at least until we run out of food.
Maybe your feeble little mind doesn't grasp the idea
"Feeble little mind"? That can't be the explanation -- and I have the IQ tests to prove it. So I'll go back to my original premise: You are just a troll. Happy trolling.
And please do not bullshit here about lack of relation between gay lifestiles and much greater rates of AIDS among them.
I did not say that there was no relationship, but gays are not the only people that ever got AIDS. Blaming gay people for AIDS is like blaming black people for sickle cell anemia. They are the victims, just as have been a tremendous number of hemophiliacs, IV drug users, and even people like Magic Johnson.
Do you really believe that the only thing that anyone, including you, can contribute to humanity is more people? Albert Einstein never had kids. Mother Theresa never had children. Does that mean that their lives were complete wastes and that they were "as useless as Microsoft Bob"? Do you also feel that infertile couples have nothing to contribute? Does that mean that welfare mothers with 14 kids are making a wonderful contribution to society?
Here's a clue: We don't need any more people. We have more than enough already. The best thing that could happen to insure the survival of the human species is fewer people polluting the planet and using up its resources.
you judge people's worth based on their sexual preference.
you believe that only gay people get AIDS.
You need to try subtlety. Claim that the stockholders of the drug company are being cheated or that we should stop trading with any country that violates a U.S. patent. You are dealing with a sharper bunch on here than you realize and no one here is going to believe that you are that stupid, bigoted, and narrow-minded. Try again.
"The Road Runner system has been designed to offer access to all the high speed services mentioned above, even assuming continuous, maximal usage by every Road Runner user in a neighborhood simultaneously.
Since Road Runner is supposedly designed to be impossible to saturate, then they should refund money to those who had unusable connections -- especially since the vast majority of the Code Red traffic came from within their network. Of course, this is just another example of marketing hyperbole as many Road Runner franchises (including mine) are horrendously overloaded and subject to packet loss and high latency at peak usage times.
The real point is that many networks were not taken down or even substantially slowed by Code Red. That makes it pretty clear that Code Red was not some all-powerful force capable of bringing the Internet to its knees. The networks that were rendered useless by it were the ones that had inadequate capapacity.
So you are saying that this justifies cybersquatting -- that because some firms behave unthically, that we should hold no one accountable for their actions?
New rule: No individual or company can own more than 10 domains. It's absurd that some cybersquatters have each grabbed thousands of domains that they neither want nor plan to develop.
AOL: You've got mail!
Hotmail: You've got someone else's mail!
So, in my hypothetical example, the buying public types www.compaq.com, find's a "this domain for sale" sign, and then types www.gateway.com or www.dell.com. Compaq would lose far more money than Bob's vacation home in Florida was ever worth. If it's a dot-com rather than Compaq, being stuck with a crappy domain name could cost them their business, their investors would lose their investments, and their employees would lose their jobs.
By the way, plywood protects windows, not people's lives. People who board up their houses normally have enough sense to evacuate them before the storm hits.
But, unlike cybersquatting, it's illegal.
Yes, I do. I respect people who take something and make it valuable, not people that try to get rich without contributing anything to society or the economy.
Yeah, sometimes people do get screwed to some degree when someone buys a domain name. But to compare it to the people who extort money after a hurricane blows through is a bit excessive.
How? What's your neighbor's house worth? Now how much damage is done to a business that can't have a recognizable domain? How much would it cost Compaq if some cybersquatter had www.compaq.com, for example?