I thought this article was going to explore how children are being prepared for duty in next-generation wars via realistic first-person shooters running on X-box 360s.
Although you've played to the conspiracy theorists who'd love to believe the myth that the high paid professional athletes really are a bunch of overpaid floaters who couldn't care less about the olympics, the truth is USA's tie with Latvia early on in olympic rounds was more or less predictable and quite common under such circumstances.
The only two teams who are made up of 100% NHL players are Canada and Team USA. These two teams played for the gold 4 years ago in Nagano after handily beating all other strong hockey playing countries, which include Sweden, Finland, Russia and the Czech Republic. If you'll go back and look at the early rounds of each of the past several olympic games, the NHL-based clubs tend to do poorly early on and from time to time get beaten by teams made up of amateurs. Why is this?
1. The players are often travelling to the other side of the world 24-48 hours before they are supposed to step on the ice and play. That's hardly enough time to compensate for jet lag. (Obviously, this was not an excuse at Salt Lake in '02...)
2. NHL seasons are in full swing up to about 3 days before the first game at the olympics, meaning that the olympic teams made up of NHL players have little more than a single practice together in 4 months leading up to the games. That's not enough time to gel together as a cohesive team unit.
3. Teams that win Stanley cups aren't made up solely of a group of all-star players. On championship teams, each player has spent a good deal of time learning to fill a particular role on the squad so that the team plays better as a whole than would be expected based on the individual talent of each player alone. These NHL "dream team" squads often lack an appropriate mix of key role players.
4. Early games at the olympics are mostly meaningless. Given the circumstances (first competitive game together as a team) any professional coach will tell you it's more productive to spend time getting to understand each other's playing style rather than focusing on annihilating the competition as if it was the gold medal game.
5. "...on any given Sunday". Hockey, basketball and baseball are sports in which a few random lucky bounces can dramatically change the outcome of a single game. It's quite common (maybe 15-20% of the time?) that a team is outplayed, yet wins a game because a ref call goes one way or the other, or the ball/puck takes a lucky bounce. To compensate for this randomness, MLB, NBA and the NHL have instituted best-of-5 and best-of-7 series to reduce (but never quite eliminate) the chances that the weaker team will advance. The Olympics is single-game elimination in the semi-final rounds and beyond, meaning even a significantly weaker team has a decent chance of advancing past a strong competitor.
6. Hot goalies. More than any player on the ice, goalies have a huge impact on a team's overall results. A hot goalie can almost single-handedly win a game for a team that is otherwise badly outplayed. Witness the Czech Republic's beating of Canada at the 1998 Olympics for evidence of this. Stanley Cup champions almost without exception have very strong goaltending. It's not uncommon for a really hot goalie to turn aside 40-50 shots a game when his team fails him against a stronger opponent. These games can have surprisingly positive outcomes for otherwise badly outplayed teams if the goalie plays really well.
GIMP will never have more than a marginal user base because they don't understand their users.
...and furthermore, GIMP developers aren't incented enough to care. That's why in a company driven by profits, you hire Product Managers whose primary job is to ensure that user needs are addressed. If the GIMP had a company with a real vested interest in creating a viable Photoshop alternative -- say, like Red Hat is to Linux -- then you might see some positive developments.
Well, efficient market theory (sure, I know it's controversial) would contend that if Lynch had published such sage advice, then any investor can use it (including those on Wall Street) and so no one can gain an unfair advantage with it going forward. The problem is no matter how well you think you know a company and how long you pore over the numbers and read up on the management team, you can't predict the future -- you can't predict all the random wacky things that combine to drive a stock one way or the other. Regardless of the fundamentals, the behavior of the market can be out-of-whack for a LONG time. Your "merits" stuff would have crushed you in the 1990s as investor sentiment and momentum, not merits were the driving force behind stock gains.
On average, even if your strategy beats the market, you'll probably underperform the market over the long-term due to some combination of inadequate diversification, transaction fees, high turnover rates, management fees and taxes (though few ever go to the trouble of calculating such factors into their portfolio, so they live with the belief that they beat it even though they didn't). Then again, even a chimp has nearly a 50% chance of beating the market throwing darts at a stock page, so even if your strategy is a craps shoot, you could just luck out, even over the long-run.
Or... You can listen to the likes of John Bogle, Burton Malkiel and William Bernstein.
They each advocate that you TOTALLY IGNORE what the market is doing because it is impossible to predict. Buy entire asset classes because buying and selling on the supposed MERITS of invidual stocks will probably result in a below average return over the long-term -- unless you think you can out-fox the box.
Most of the security establishment is focused on patching holes *after* they're discovered. This goes for application/product vendors as well as the security companies that are tasked with protecting those assets. The reasoning goes something along the lines that the sooner you patch your systems, the sooner you are safe from the "bad guys".
The problem is that many of the vulnerabilities have been sitting there for YEARS before they're discovered by the establishment. Take Blaster for example... how long was that vulnerability present in shipping product before it was disclosed by Microsoft? Try nearly 7 years. Of course, only a few short weeks after this disclosure, the worm propagated. So, how long were blackhats exploiting the vuln before the disclosure? We'll probably never know. How many other "undiscovered" vulnerabilities have been exploited prior to the vendor acknowledging the vulnerability? Dunno, but I suspect it ain't just a handful. How about yesterday's IE proof of concept remote root exploit that works just as well against a fully patched Windows XP SP2 as it does against Windows 2000? You think any signature or "behavior"-based IDS/IPS can even detect this sort of thing 0-day? I'm willing to bet money on the fact that they can't.
So long as vendors remain profit motivated and focused on short-term competitiveness, they will never adequately address the software quality issue. Unexposed vulnerabilities are ripe picking for blackhats, while vendors and the security establishment continue to address the reactive post-vulnerability disclosure space.
so suddenly there are no ethical measurements for a human actions when they are in a company ?
No. Humans can and should be held to ethical standards, but profit driven organizations (regardless of the fact that humans are in them) only understand money. If, as CEO of a company, I choose to use slaves to manufacture goods, I have questionable morals and should be prosecuted criminally. Thinking of my company as good or evil by extension is mostly useless since it's not an entity that can be held to such standards. Boycotting their products (or some other way of affecting the bottom line) is really the only way you can convince this company to make moral labor decisions. If you were to hold it to human standards, it would probably be labeled psychotic, bipolar and/or schizophrenic based on its seeming lack of compassion, constantly changing outlook and contradictory decisions.
As you've stated, clearly there are situations in which programmers can be treated in a condescending manner, but in my experience, many programmers prefer the informal atmosphere where they can blow off steam by playing video games in the break room, wear whatever they feel like at work and come in at noon and leave whenever. Clearly, most work long hard hours, but at the same time they scoff at the idea that they should even look presentable, and so it's probably interpretted by the decision makers that keeping engineers content does not generally involve offering them plush offices.
Microsoft is simply making decisions that are intended to increase profit. There are one of two outcomes to such decisions: the intended increase in profit materializes or an unintended drop in profit occurs. So long as Microsoft can successfully bully around competitors, lock in customers to proprietary technology and gain from it (i.e. get away with it), it will do that. When market dynamics change such that Microsoft needs to do something that would seem out of character under previous circumstances (i.e. fully support rival web browsing software), be sure that it's TO MAINTAIN PROFIT IN THE LONG RUN. Don't be too surprised if Microsoft out-does Google at "doing no evil" so long as it benefits the company. As hard as it may seem at times, it's easier to understand these decisions when we stop personifying companies and recognizing them for what they are -- profit driven organizations.
Theoretically, this is correct. But you've forgotten that most (if not all) the 6-bit displays actually use a special circuit that simulates the extra two bits by wavering between two neighboring colors very quickly. I'm not saying it is quite as good as a true 8-bit display, but you don't see any of the obvious banding as you might expect. That's how some monitor manufacturers (like Hitachi) who use the 6-bit AU Optronics panel in their 19" monitor can claim 16M colors from a 6-bit display.
Pound every key in your password at the same tempo with your thumb, randomly adding junk characters followed by appropriate backspaces. Also, throw some ASCII 3 digit equivalents in there for even more secure password fun. Cackle at the screen in sheer glee and scoff at anyone who dares question your sanity.
If you can ascertain that your network-based application are secured (via code-review)...
Evidently, you've perused through hundreds of thousands of lines of Windows/Linux source code, because if you haven't, one might take your claim to be some kind of naive joke.
in the grand scheme of humanity. If America handcuffs itself to the point that innovation is practically impossible, then a culture which embraces freer movement of information will take its place as dominant hegemon.
I happen to believe it won't come to that, but the idea that it could happen doesn't keep me up at night.
drive straight to your destination, get out and the car will route/drive itself to a holding area or pickup.
...at which point some would be car thief will jump out in front of the empty vehicle, smash the window with a small tool and reroute its onboard computer to drive directly to the chop shop.
In my opinion, what Microsoft seems to suffer from is getting things to market as fast as possible to remain (or at least appear to remain) competitive. The problem is, that once a product is in the wild, a lot of bugs and security flaws turn up which results in patching the software for the remainder of the time you own it.
Of all the software running on the typical Internet connected computer how many lines of code were written by Microsoft? Well let's see, there's the operating system, web browser, multimedia player, dozens of listening services and numerous client interfaces.
Now, how about Google? Hmmm... Google Toolbar -- a browser plug-in; Google Desktop -- a local search facility; Picasa -- an image searching interface; Google Earth... maybe? The rest of their products and services are delivered over the web, and so at worst usually run within an existing browser process locally.
Granted, Google's got some pretty neat little tools, but why do they automatically get a pass card for security and stability when the nature of what they're doing is so much less core to the security and stability of the host in the first place?
A remotely exploitable vulnerability existed in several widely deployed operating systems for exactly 5 years, 4 months and 9 days before a patch was offered. Since we all know that everyone patches their systems the very day a patch is released, there is no need to worry about silly propagating exploits!
Furthermore, if you are a network admin who's deployed ISS protection agents (ISS initially discovered the bug), you would have been protected since March 2005, meaning the vulnerability would have been exposed in your network for only 5 years!
And people are worrying about so-called 'blackhats' exploiting so-called 'unknown' vulnerabilities? Hah, this really *is* funny!
Corporate power is anathema to small business formation as the overaccumulation of capital in the hands of a small group of people who are more likely to hoard assets than invest them, makes it really hard for anyone who is not born with a silver spoon in their mouth to create a new business.
Have you heard of venture captialists? How about Angel investors? They give money to people who have good ideas. You don't need a silver spoon to start a business.
...laws like Sarbanes-Oxley which are ironically intended to curb corporate corruption, only enhance its power at the expense of small and medium sized businesses.
Huh? I work for a small startup business. Sarbanes-Oxley hasn't affected us in any severe way. We have a rent-a-CFO who consults a few hours a week and we chose to go with a smaller consulting firm to help us deal with accounting regulations. I think Sarbox is a bigger pain for large corporations than it is for us, since our accounting is pretty simple and straight forward comparatively. Incidentally, the feeling among experts is that Sarbox will be tweaked and toned down in the coming years as the whole Enron/Worldcom, etc. scandals come into perspective.
...things are going to get worse and worse for the worker as they will be stuck in a state of inertia slaving away in some cubicle at a super-massive corporation with no option of finding another job because no new jobs will be created due to small businesses getting the shaft
Some would argue that as large companies merge and become even bigger, they react to customer needs slower and become bogged down by their own weight. This leads to opportunity for smaller businesses to pick up the slack. Obviously when you're talking about things that require large infrastructure like phone companies or natural gas distribution, it is difficult for small companies to make inroads, but there is still plenty of opportunity for small companies to serve different needs.
I mean seriously, when will the American public get the drift that corporate mergers are not some special unification to be joyous about as if corporate mergers should be treated as some kind of state wedding.
I don't sense that the American public is joyous over mergers any more than they're joyous over the war in Iraq. They're apathetic to both.
Well since you've already performed a detailed investigation ahead of the FBI, why don't you enlighten us as to the details of what Lynn did and didn't do with respect to the laws of the United States?
Sheesh, how many people have to say "investigation is the FBI's role when someone complains of a crime" for you to get it? It is called the Federal Bureau of *Investigation* for g-d's sake. What would you have them do?
The debate whether Pluto is a planet is likely to get rekindled by this discovery."
Yawn. The term "planet" is just an arbitrary label attached to rocks of a certain size that orbit the sun. You humans are so caught up with lumping everything into buckets, you forget what really matters. Get over yourselves, the rest of the universe has already moved on.
In the USA, it is extremely rare for unregistered versions of Windows to be used in Offices.
Perhaps, but in other places in the world, such as China, large, sophisticated pirate manufacturing operations are common, and Microsoft is looking for ways to stop them from redirecting its profits.
But Microsoft should lighten up about this policy. They are already the richest software company. Their chairman is the richest man in the world and possibly the richest man that every lived. They don't really do anything with the money that they already have.
You are forgetting a basic premise of Capitalism: A public company is owned by its shareholders -- shareholders who demand growth of their investments so they can retire in Florida and purchase gas guzzling luxobarges that barely fit into parking spaces -- but I digress. Microsoft shareholders (which probably includes you, if you own any index or mutual funds) would pull their money out if M$ were to decide that it's ok to just sit on their piles of cash and stop trying to make any more. Enough is never enough.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought this article was going to explore how children are being prepared for duty in next-generation wars via realistic first-person shooters running on X-box 360s.
Oh well, back to playing America's Army I go...
Although you've played to the conspiracy theorists who'd love to believe the myth that the high paid professional athletes really are a bunch of overpaid floaters who couldn't care less about the olympics, the truth is USA's tie with Latvia early on in olympic rounds was more or less predictable and quite common under such circumstances.
The only two teams who are made up of 100% NHL players are Canada and Team USA. These two teams played for the gold 4 years ago in Nagano after handily beating all other strong hockey playing countries, which include Sweden, Finland, Russia and the Czech Republic. If you'll go back and look at the early rounds of each of the past several olympic games, the NHL-based clubs tend to do poorly early on and from time to time get beaten by teams made up of amateurs. Why is this?
1. The players are often travelling to the other side of the world 24-48 hours before they are supposed to step on the ice and play. That's hardly enough time to compensate for jet lag. (Obviously, this was not an excuse at Salt Lake in '02...)
2. NHL seasons are in full swing up to about 3 days before the first game at the olympics, meaning that the olympic teams made up of NHL players have little more than a single practice together in 4 months leading up to the games. That's not enough time to gel together as a cohesive team unit.
3. Teams that win Stanley cups aren't made up solely of a group of all-star players. On championship teams, each player has spent a good deal of time learning to fill a particular role on the squad so that the team plays better as a whole than would be expected based on the individual talent of each player alone. These NHL "dream team" squads often lack an appropriate mix of key role players.
4. Early games at the olympics are mostly meaningless. Given the circumstances (first competitive game together as a team) any professional coach will tell you it's more productive to spend time getting to understand each other's playing style rather than focusing on annihilating the competition as if it was the gold medal game.
5. "...on any given Sunday". Hockey, basketball and baseball are sports in which a few random lucky bounces can dramatically change the outcome of a single game. It's quite common (maybe 15-20% of the time?) that a team is outplayed, yet wins a game because a ref call goes one way or the other, or the ball/puck takes a lucky bounce. To compensate for this randomness, MLB, NBA and the NHL have instituted best-of-5 and best-of-7 series to reduce (but never quite eliminate) the chances that the weaker team will advance. The Olympics is single-game elimination in the semi-final rounds and beyond, meaning even a significantly weaker team has a decent chance of advancing past a strong competitor.
6. Hot goalies. More than any player on the ice, goalies have a huge impact on a team's overall results. A hot goalie can almost single-handedly win a game for a team that is otherwise badly outplayed. Witness the Czech Republic's beating of Canada at the 1998 Olympics for evidence of this. Stanley Cup champions almost without exception have very strong goaltending. It's not uncommon for a really hot goalie to turn aside 40-50 shots a game when his team fails him against a stronger opponent. These games can have surprisingly positive outcomes for otherwise badly outplayed teams if the goalie plays really well.
With that said, go Canada!
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/gribble/papers/ spycrawler.pdf
Well, efficient market theory (sure, I know it's controversial) would contend that if Lynch had published such sage advice, then any investor can use it (including those on Wall Street) and so no one can gain an unfair advantage with it going forward. The problem is no matter how well you think you know a company and how long you pore over the numbers and read up on the management team, you can't predict the future -- you can't predict all the random wacky things that combine to drive a stock one way or the other. Regardless of the fundamentals, the behavior of the market can be out-of-whack for a LONG time. Your "merits" stuff would have crushed you in the 1990s as investor sentiment and momentum, not merits were the driving force behind stock gains.
On average, even if your strategy beats the market, you'll probably underperform the market over the long-term due to some combination of inadequate diversification, transaction fees, high turnover rates, management fees and taxes (though few ever go to the trouble of calculating such factors into their portfolio, so they live with the belief that they beat it even though they didn't). Then again, even a chimp has nearly a 50% chance of beating the market throwing darts at a stock page, so even if your strategy is a craps shoot, you could just luck out, even over the long-run.
Or... You can listen to the likes of John Bogle, Burton Malkiel and William Bernstein.
They each advocate that you TOTALLY IGNORE what the market is doing because it is impossible to predict. Buy entire asset classes because buying and selling on the supposed MERITS of invidual stocks will probably result in a below average return over the long-term -- unless you think you can out-fox the box.
"Kids, you tried and failed miserably. The lesson is: never try."
--Homer Simpson
It is also used to detect illiterates. They're particularly fast and accurate at naming the colors, for obvious reasons.
Most of the security establishment is focused on patching holes *after* they're discovered. This goes for application/product vendors as well as the security companies that are tasked with protecting those assets. The reasoning goes something along the lines that the sooner you patch your systems, the sooner you are safe from the "bad guys".
- 11-2005
The problem is that many of the vulnerabilities have been sitting there for YEARS before they're discovered by the establishment. Take Blaster for example... how long was that vulnerability present in shipping product before it was disclosed by Microsoft? Try nearly 7 years. Of course, only a few short weeks after this disclosure, the worm propagated. So, how long were blackhats exploiting the vuln before the disclosure? We'll probably never know. How many other "undiscovered" vulnerabilities have been exploited prior to the vendor acknowledging the vulnerability? Dunno, but I suspect it ain't just a handful. How about yesterday's IE proof of concept remote root exploit that works just as well against a fully patched Windows XP SP2 as it does against Windows 2000? You think any signature or "behavior"-based IDS/IPS can even detect this sort of thing 0-day? I'm willing to bet money on the fact that they can't.
See here for a fun new way to run Calc.exe on your Windows box:
http://www.computerterrorism.com/research/ie/ct21
So long as vendors remain profit motivated and focused on short-term competitiveness, they will never adequately address the software quality issue. Unexposed vulnerabilities are ripe picking for blackhats, while vendors and the security establishment continue to address the reactive post-vulnerability disclosure space.
so suddenly there are no ethical measurements for a human actions when they are in a company ?
No. Humans can and should be held to ethical standards, but profit driven organizations (regardless of the fact that humans are in them) only understand money. If, as CEO of a company, I choose to use slaves to manufacture goods, I have questionable morals and should be prosecuted criminally. Thinking of my company as good or evil by extension is mostly useless since it's not an entity that can be held to such standards. Boycotting their products (or some other way of affecting the bottom line) is really the only way you can convince this company to make moral labor decisions. If you were to hold it to human standards, it would probably be labeled psychotic, bipolar and/or schizophrenic based on its seeming lack of compassion, constantly changing outlook and contradictory decisions.
As you've stated, clearly there are situations in which programmers can be treated in a condescending manner, but in my experience, many programmers prefer the informal atmosphere where they can blow off steam by playing video games in the break room, wear whatever they feel like at work and come in at noon and leave whenever. Clearly, most work long hard hours, but at the same time they scoff at the idea that they should even look presentable, and so it's probably interpretted by the decision makers that keeping engineers content does not generally involve offering them plush offices.
Microsoft is simply making decisions that are intended to increase profit. There are one of two outcomes to such decisions: the intended increase in profit materializes or an unintended drop in profit occurs. So long as Microsoft can successfully bully around competitors, lock in customers to proprietary technology and gain from it (i.e. get away with it), it will do that. When market dynamics change such that Microsoft needs to do something that would seem out of character under previous circumstances (i.e. fully support rival web browsing software), be sure that it's TO MAINTAIN PROFIT IN THE LONG RUN. Don't be too surprised if Microsoft out-does Google at "doing no evil" so long as it benefits the company. As hard as it may seem at times, it's easier to understand these decisions when we stop personifying companies and recognizing them for what they are -- profit driven organizations.
Theoretically, this is correct. But you've forgotten that most (if not all) the 6-bit displays actually use a special circuit that simulates the extra two bits by wavering between two neighboring colors very quickly. I'm not saying it is quite as good as a true 8-bit display, but you don't see any of the obvious banding as you might expect. That's how some monitor manufacturers (like Hitachi) who use the 6-bit AU Optronics panel in their 19" monitor can claim 16M colors from a 6-bit display.
I second the TrueCrypt recommendation. It really is as good as it gets for encrypting files and file systems.
Pound every key in your password at the same tempo with your thumb, randomly adding junk characters followed by appropriate backspaces. Also, throw some ASCII 3 digit equivalents in there for even more secure password fun. Cackle at the screen in sheer glee and scoff at anyone who dares question your sanity.
If you can ascertain that your network-based application are secured (via code-review)...
Evidently, you've perused through hundreds of thousands of lines of Windows/Linux source code, because if you haven't, one might take your claim to be some kind of naive joke.
in the grand scheme of humanity. If America handcuffs itself to the point that innovation is practically impossible, then a culture which embraces freer movement of information will take its place as dominant hegemon.
I happen to believe it won't come to that, but the idea that it could happen doesn't keep me up at night.
In my opinion, what Microsoft seems to suffer from is getting things to market as fast as possible to remain (or at least appear to remain) competitive. The problem is, that once a product is in the wild, a lot of bugs and security flaws turn up which results in patching the software for the remainder of the time you own it.
Of all the software running on the typical Internet connected computer how many lines of code were written by Microsoft? Well let's see, there's the operating system, web browser, multimedia player, dozens of listening services and numerous client interfaces.
Now, how about Google? Hmmm... Google Toolbar -- a browser plug-in; Google Desktop -- a local search facility; Picasa -- an image searching interface; Google Earth... maybe? The rest of their products and services are delivered over the web, and so at worst usually run within an existing browser process locally.
Granted, Google's got some pretty neat little tools, but why do they automatically get a pass card for security and stability when the nature of what they're doing is so much less core to the security and stability of the host in the first place?
Haven't these companies learned from previous virus events?
Does anyone care about the difference between worms and viruses anymore?
Anyone?
Ah, forget it.
A remotely exploitable vulnerability existed in several widely deployed operating systems for exactly 5 years, 4 months and 9 days before a patch was offered. Since we all know that everyone patches their systems the very day a patch is released, there is no need to worry about silly propagating exploits!
Furthermore, if you are a network admin who's deployed ISS protection agents (ISS initially discovered the bug), you would have been protected since March 2005, meaning the vulnerability would have been exposed in your network for only 5 years!
And people are worrying about so-called 'blackhats' exploiting so-called 'unknown' vulnerabilities? Hah, this really *is* funny!
Have you heard of venture captialists? How about Angel investors? They give money to people who have good ideas. You don't need a silver spoon to start a business.
Huh? I work for a small startup business. Sarbanes-Oxley hasn't affected us in any severe way. We have a rent-a-CFO who consults a few hours a week and we chose to go with a smaller consulting firm to help us deal with accounting regulations. I think Sarbox is a bigger pain for large corporations than it is for us, since our accounting is pretty simple and straight forward comparatively. Incidentally, the feeling among experts is that Sarbox will be tweaked and toned down in the coming years as the whole Enron/Worldcom, etc. scandals come into perspective.
Some would argue that as large companies merge and become even bigger, they react to customer needs slower and become bogged down by their own weight. This leads to opportunity for smaller businesses to pick up the slack. Obviously when you're talking about things that require large infrastructure like phone companies or natural gas distribution, it is difficult for small companies to make inroads, but there is still plenty of opportunity for small companies to serve different needs.
I mean seriously, when will the American public get the drift that corporate mergers are not some special unification to be joyous about as if corporate mergers should be treated as some kind of state wedding.
I don't sense that the American public is joyous over mergers any more than they're joyous over the war in Iraq. They're apathetic to both.
Well since you've already performed a detailed investigation ahead of the FBI, why don't you enlighten us as to the details of what Lynn did and didn't do with respect to the laws of the United States?
Sheesh, how many people have to say "investigation is the FBI's role when someone complains of a crime" for you to get it? It is called the Federal Bureau of *Investigation* for g-d's sake. What would you have them do?
The debate whether Pluto is a planet is likely to get rekindled by this discovery."
Yawn. The term "planet" is just an arbitrary label attached to rocks of a certain size that orbit the sun. You humans are so caught up with lumping everything into buckets, you forget what really matters. Get over yourselves, the rest of the universe has already moved on.
Medeep, medeep.
In the USA, it is extremely rare for unregistered versions of Windows to be used in Offices.
Perhaps, but in other places in the world, such as China, large, sophisticated pirate manufacturing operations are common, and Microsoft is looking for ways to stop them from redirecting its profits.
But Microsoft should lighten up about this policy. They are already the richest software company. Their chairman is the richest man in the world and possibly the richest man that every lived. They don't really do anything with the money that they already have.
You are forgetting a basic premise of Capitalism: A public company is owned by its shareholders -- shareholders who demand growth of their investments so they can retire in Florida and purchase gas guzzling luxobarges that barely fit into parking spaces -- but I digress. Microsoft shareholders (which probably includes you, if you own any index or mutual funds) would pull their money out if M$ were to decide that it's ok to just sit on their piles of cash and stop trying to make any more. Enough is never enough.