The fact that you use "macro" to describe evolution is a very strong indicator that you do not understand evolution. The fact this ignorant post has been upgraded to "insightful" bodes ill for the knowledge of evolution for the slashdot crowd as a whole.
... I thought it important to add a bit of reason into the mix...
The irony of this is so thick you should be embarrassed. There is no reason or logic in ID. None. ID is nothing but a religious wish to brainwash more children into believing that a god actually, maybe, exists. It has absolutely no other purpse. ID cuts everything off at the knees and says "god did it". Within the view of ID, biological science comes to a stand still.
I'm sick of this nonsense. I'm going to call it as it is. Anyone that supports ID is an absolute moron.
Why WoW is better than anything else I've played
on
Review: World of Warcraft
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I've played EQ for four years, played StarWars Galaxies for a year and a half, and played EQ2 beta.
WoW has a major advantage over all of the above games because of one thing. Blizzard understands math and statistics. Blizzard has mastered the RTS genre which requires a very high compentency of math. You cannot balance 3+ diverse teams in a RTS game without a solid understanding of statistics, non-transitive statistics, and stong skills in mathematics.
In WoW, every aspect of character ablities and spells have the Blizzard touch. They just feel right. They don't feel overpowered or underpowered. The enemies that you face are perfectly balanced for their level. Unlike EQ or SWG where you could easily run into a lower level enemy that would completely wipe the floor with you.
Other game makers seem to play darts with their games. Try something random, see if it works and tweak it if needed. Blizzard obviously has a very strong mathematical foundation for their game. There's nothing complex. The formulas just work and the game just feels right.
This alone is why I think WoW has a very bright future.
Why do you feel that people have a right to reproduce when they are physically incapable? It's like someone claiming they have a right to inexpensive plastic surgury because they don't like the way they look.
Your health or your spouse's health does not depend on having a child. It is a case of pure desire on your part to have a child that is genetically your offspring. I'm sorry that you and your spouse are/were unable to conceive, but sometimes life dishes out things that aren't desirable. Nobody owes you anything.
Just for the record, I also work professionally with computers. I make shrink-wrapped software for a living.
This is not about politics. This is about ensuring that tax payer money is used as efficiently as possible by requiring that all options have been evaluated. Legislation like this does not force a particular choice. It merely forces that all options have been considered before making a decision.
Commercial software has marketing, sales teams, and slews of paid people backing it up. Open source software has none of this (outside of your local OSS zealot). Open source is often very viable for many situations, but it goes unnoticed because it has no marketing or sales teams. In my mind, legislation like this levels the playing field. It at least gives open source a chance of being noticed.
I don't agree that software costs are "in the noise". This is definitely not the case for public schools. A school district can easily have 1000+ computers. If one piece of software costs $50 per seat, thats nearly two teacher salaries just for that single piece of software. Imagine the cost savings between a full installation of MS Office vs OpenOffice for a school system.
I fully support legislation like this. I don't want my tax money going to a commercial software company just because their sales boy is charismatic. As a tax payer I want the most for my money.
Quicktime does not ship with WinXP. I just had to install it. However, Flash does ship with Windows. Last I heard, the Flash player had been downloaded a billion times (yes with a 'B')and was getting downloaded at the rate of somewhere around 30,000 a day. These numbers do not count the copies of Flash shipped with Windows.
This is absolutely true. Have you gone into Best Buy, Circuit City, or other consumer electronics stores? The Sony marketing department has made sure that Spider-Man film loops are prominantly displayed on all Sony TV's, especially the high-end flat plasma displays. Its even worse at the Sony Metreon. All the Sony computers had Spider-Man themes, all the TV's were showing Spider-Man film loops, Spider-Man "the making of", etc., etc.
When I think of Spider-Man, I now think of $10,000 Sony Plasma displays, not Marvel Comics. Given this, I can certainly understand why Marvel is pissed off.
DRM is not possible, period!
on
Open Source DRM
·
· Score: 1
God, this sickens me to no end. I thought the OSS culture was smarter than this. It's not that I hate DRM, its the fact that DRM is a logcial fallacy. Spending time on DRM is like spending time trying to prove 2+2=5. You'll never succeed. Never!
If I can read it, see it, or hear it. I can make a copy. End of story, end of discussion. It doesn't matter how much you encrypt something, eventually it will need to be unencrypted for a human to read/see/hear it. At that point, it can be copied. Maybe it won't be a copy of the exact bits, but it will be a copy. For example, I could buy an e-book with heavy DRM. I load that e-book into my DRM e-book reader so I can read it. I then begin to transcribe the book into my word processor. Sure its tedious, but it only takes one person to do this and all the DRM in the world can't stop it.
When will people learn that DRM is a complete and utter waste of time?!
This is extactly what they want. Go after a company that has no chance of defending themselves in court and set a precedent that it is illegal to transfer software licenses in a business aquisition. Once they have this precedent, they can litigate larger business mergers or aquisitions. Thus requiring them to purchase all new licenses.
Imagine the revenue MS would have recieved if they forced the HP/Compaq merger to purchase all new licenses because they can't be transfered.
MS has 96% market penetration in desktop OS. There is no room to grow that business, unless they can force a legal requirement on businesses to buy more licenses in certain situations. They are obviously trying to "grow" their business.
...are opposed to people stealing their content...
@#$%&^!!! It is not stealing, it is copyright infringement. The media industry wants us to believe it is stealing so they can criminalize it as such. We need to keep people informed that it is copyright infringement. It's still wrong according to the law, but it is not stealing. Stealing is when I walk into a store and take a DVD off the shelf, stuff it into my coat, and walk out without paying for it.
Think of copyrights as patents. If one company uses a process or idea covered by another company's patent, did they steal it? No, they infringed on the patent. Same with copyright.
This is the beauty of copy protected content. It only needs to be converted into a non-protected format *once*. Once it is in the non-protected format, everybody can access it. If somebody wanted to make copies of this, they surely wouldn't make copies of the.lit file. They would save the content as some other format and pass that around. In the end, you wouldn't even have to worry about reading the.lit file.
If I remember correctly, Battle.net is a completely free service. It's not like bnetd was taking revenue away from some online service Blizzard has. However, Battle.net does serial number verification. You cannot create a battle.net account without a unique serial number which is only obtained by buying a legit copy of the game.
I don't know enough about bnetd, but I would bet that bnetd doesn't do serial number verification. This basically allows everybody to use the same warez copy of a particular game and enjoy the benefits of Battle.net. I'm sure this is the largest reason why Blizzard wants to shut them down. Blizzard doesn't make any money off its free Battle.net service, but it does enforce that people actually buy the game.
We have all seen that the only people/corporations that can successfully dodge litigation are those with enough money to throw enough laywers at the problem. A law like this would basically guarantee Microsoft a future with little to no competition. Small companies that do not have the financial resources to defend themselves against lawsuits that this new law would allow would die. Microsoft would be able to defend themselves just because they have the money to do so, not because their software is better.
Let the market decide! Let the people choose the software that is most secure! A law like this will not help consumers. It will only kill off the small companies and individuals who are innovating and trying to give people choices!
The problem about the idea of "copy protection" for media (music, video, books, photographs, etc) is that it overlooks the basic principle of data: *** If you can read it, you can copy it. ***
People that are intent on preventing people from copying should forget DRM and focus on adding value to the original. In case of a CD, make it come with a coupon for 50% a ticket to see that artist in concert, or a signed photo of the artist, or anything else that would make the consumer want to buy it.
The most DRM will ever do is potentially make it more difficult for people to get "good" copies of the data. I've seen several people in this forum talk about encrypting the data and having all kinds of hardware support so that it is unencrypted at the last possible stage before a human needs to interpret it (hear the music, etc). This is all interesting, but this is easily circumvented by running the "speaker out" lines to your stereo, or another computer and recording the analog output. Then you can re-encode the recording into MP3. Most of the time (and I have done this), the result is excellent.
*All* DRM techniques for media can be circumvented in similar ways. I saw a webpage (wish I could find the URL now) where a guy took one of the e-book readers that stored the text encrypted and proceeded to place the reader on his scanner and scan the book page by page. Then he ran the scanned pages through a program that converts faxes/images into raw text by image recognition of the characters. It took him a few days to do it, but he was able to make an exact copy of the book. I thought it was hilarious. I'm sure the people who engineered the e-book reader's security never thought of that. I mean, if someone was patient and determined enough, they could just copy the book by hand just by typing it in.
DRM is a bit different for computer programs or things that are dynamic and have user interaction as they can require interaction with a remote server for verification. Thats why CD keys with online games work, or the "dongle" that some high-end applications use to verify a user. However, these things are not perfect, there are ways around them too (intercepting network data, cracking the binary, etc). Its just a bit more technical than running the speaker out to your stereo to record your favorite song.
DRM will never solve the problem. It will always fail just due to the fact that "if you can read it, you can copy it". The most it will do is annoy people and cause unending frustration for the people trying to support DRM. Give up now and focus on added-value to the real product... something that seems to have been forgotten.
Not to defend Microsoft here, but their numbers could be correct. How? I used to work for a fairly large software company. The product that I worked on had a Windows version and a Mac version. On top of that we supported 5 different languages. Then on top of that, we had 4 different packages that included different sets of 3rd party software. Then we had 2 different bundles that it went in with other software from my company. So, when it came down to it, we had:
1 product * 2 platforms * 5 languages * 4 distrobutions * 2 bundles = 80 different shippable CD and box sets. All from one single application.
From an engineering perspective, each of these shippables was considered to be a separate product due to the testing we needed to do to make sure everything worked as intended.
I can imagine that Microsoft has hundreds of applications that they sell, then all the languages that they support, plus bundles, plus patches, etc, would lead to an extremely large number of shippables.
Now I could imagine that your average marketing person could take those numbers of shippables and massage them into some kind of data saying Microsoft has 70,000 applications. Which is not correct. They may have 70,000 shippables, but not applications.
Um, ever hear of a privately owned company? Not every company in existence is publicly traded, or heading in that direction.
Umm... yes. Shares are shares. If you own them, you own a part of a company. I have many friends that work for private companies. The companies have a form of profit sharing where each employee gets a percentage of the company profits based on how many shares they own.
Just because a company is not public doesn't mean owning a piece of that company is worthless. There would be a lot of poor CEOs out there if private companies did not did not pay dividends or such.
My bottom line is, don't work for any company unless they give you stock options.
From the way the question was worded, it sounds to me like you don't know exactly what stock options are, and you don't understand the processes involved with granting of stock options. You may want to search around and find some articles on what stock options really are. I found this (it seems to describe options well without getting too complicated):
Zero. They are not yours until they vest. Well, when do they vest? Each company is different (ie you need to find out from your company). The company that I used to work for had a 4 year vesting period, where you would get 25% each year. For example, if I was granted 1000 options, I would get 25% (250 shares) after the first year, another 25% after the second year and so on until I had all 1000 shares vested. Once the options are vested, you are free to sell them or purchase them whenever you want (under the assumption that the company has gone public by that time)
2. What was the increase (or decrease) in value?
For me, $74 increase. Note that this company had already been public for several years before I joined. It was not a startup.
3. Do you think its a good idea?
I cannot stress this enough. Do NOT NOT NOT work for any company that does not offer stock options (or some other form of profit sharing) to its technical employees. If they do not, there is something wrong. The tech industry is booming. Working without the possibilty of sharing the success of the business is pure lunacy.
4. What are the "gotchas"?
At worst, you get nothing. The business is unsuccessful and your options are worth zero. At best, you are a millionare. You have abosolutely nothing to lose.
You mentioned that the company is offering a trade of salary for options. Take the options!! Just make sure that the percentage of total shares that you are given justifies the lower salary. (ie don't take a $10K cut in salary to get 100 shares out of a total of 100,000,000 shares).
I don't think super moderators would be the most efficient solution since I could easily create multiple posts faster than you could probably moderate them (all I have to do is figure out the CGI parameters that the server is expecting for a post and keep sending it). Something like this could be easily handled by preventing multiple posts in a short period of time from the same IP address.
If/. made it such that you can't post more than one comment every 90 seconds, this kind of abuse would be time consuming for the abuser, but would not affect most people that contribute to the discussions.
I remember several years ago some companies going after "offensive" phone services that had 1-800 numbers that were very close to the phone numbers of the "legitimate" companies.
The complaint was that these "offensive" companies were tarnishing the reputation of the "legitimate" companies because their customers were mis-dialing. (I personally think this is a load of crap. A company no matter what their business should not depend on the stupidity of other individuals)
Does anyone remember the outcome of these cases? I would assume that any rulings in these cases could be easily applied to the etoy/etoys case.
John Dvorak (in PC Magazine) brought up an interesting perspective on this whole "refund" issue. Many small time PC makers complain that Microsoft sells Windows licenses to the big companies (Dell, Gateway, etc) at a discount, while the smaller companies pay a higher price.
Microsoft claims that everyone pays the same price. However, if the big guys actually do pay less, the refund could be higer than what MS actually sold the license for. Maybe this is why they don't want to give any refunds.
If its true that big companies pay less for the Windows licenses, they have two reasons not to give refunds. 1) They could lose money in the process (instead of just breaking even). 2) They could be caught lying about the "everyone pays the same price" idea. Which could hurt their legal position even more in the DOJ suit.
Linux was/is built around the internet. If Linux lacks a modern browser, Linux is dead. Yes, getting a good gaming base would help, but it certainly didn't help the Amiga. Linux needs good quality end user applications. A modern browser is the most important one.
The future of computers is the network. If Linux lacks the features to interact with the rest of the world (no matter what platform the other side is), it will die.
One of the goals of the Linux community is to get Linux on the desktop. Mortal desktop users do not care about 64bit file systems, IPv6, and they especially do not care about parallel processing.
Just look at Dave's wife. She is the one of the types we are trying to convince to use Linux. She didn't care that Linux had stable multiprocessing or process control. She just wanted to have the same experience as her friends.
That's the idea of the internet: COMMUNITY. Without it, Linux is dead. Read Judge Jackson's FOF about Microsoft. He concluded that one of the main reasons that people buy Windows is because "everyone else" has it too. People buy it because they think there is a community out there.
If Linux bends over for the lowest common denominator, I'm going FreeBSD, and so will all the people developing for Linux
This is the mentality that will kill the Linux movement. Just because the next step in technology was not developed open source does not make it inferior. Technology will advance. If we choose not to keep up because we think that we are "too good", we have only proven ourselves to be stupid and arrogant.
The modern human is no longer evolving. We care for our sick and less than suitable members so that they can grow up and reproduce (I know it sounds harsh, but if we were like other creatures on this planet, there definitely would not be 6 billion of us). The weak are surviving and passing on their less than desirable genes. We are all a product of this. We have no survival of the fittest anymore. Everyone survives.
I see the possibility of new genetic enhancement as the new way that we, the human race, can evolve. We have reached the stage where we are no longer evolving "naturually", so we might as well find some other way.
As for ethics, if it isn't hurting anybody, what's wrong with it?
Slashdot Mirror
The irony of this is so thick you should be embarrassed. There is no reason or logic in ID. None. ID is nothing but a religious wish to brainwash more children into believing that a god actually, maybe, exists. It has absolutely no other purpse. ID cuts everything off at the knees and says "god did it". Within the view of ID, biological science comes to a stand still.
I'm sick of this nonsense. I'm going to call it as it is. Anyone that supports ID is an absolute moron.
I've played EQ for four years, played StarWars Galaxies for a year and a half, and played EQ2 beta.
WoW has a major advantage over all of the above games because of one thing. Blizzard understands math and statistics. Blizzard has mastered the RTS genre which requires a very high compentency of math. You cannot balance 3+ diverse teams in a RTS game without a solid understanding of statistics, non-transitive statistics, and stong skills in mathematics.
In WoW, every aspect of character ablities and spells have the Blizzard touch. They just feel right. They don't feel overpowered or underpowered. The enemies that you face are perfectly balanced for their level. Unlike EQ or SWG where you could easily run into a lower level enemy that would completely wipe the floor with you.
Other game makers seem to play darts with their games. Try something random, see if it works and tweak it if needed. Blizzard obviously has a very strong mathematical foundation for their game. There's nothing complex. The formulas just work and the game just feels right.
This alone is why I think WoW has a very bright future.
IVF is a luxury.
Why do you feel that people have a right to reproduce when they are physically incapable? It's like someone claiming they have a right to inexpensive plastic surgury because they don't like the way they look.
Your health or your spouse's health does not depend on having a child. It is a case of pure desire on your part to have a child that is genetically your offspring. I'm sorry that you and your spouse are/were unable to conceive, but sometimes life dishes out things that aren't desirable. Nobody owes you anything.
The most comfortable pen I have ever used by far is the Penagain:
http://www.penagain.com/
It works right or left handed. It's a dream to use. I highly recommend this pen.
Just for the record, I also work professionally with computers. I make shrink-wrapped software for a living.
This is not about politics. This is about ensuring that tax payer money is used as efficiently as possible by requiring that all options have been evaluated. Legislation like this does not force a particular choice. It merely forces that all options have been considered before making a decision.
Commercial software has marketing, sales teams, and slews of paid people backing it up. Open source software has none of this (outside of your local OSS zealot). Open source is often very viable for many situations, but it goes unnoticed because it has no marketing or sales teams. In my mind, legislation like this levels the playing field. It at least gives open source a chance of being noticed.
I don't agree that software costs are "in the noise". This is definitely not the case for public schools. A school district can easily have 1000+ computers. If one piece of software costs $50 per seat, thats nearly two teacher salaries just for that single piece of software. Imagine the cost savings between a full installation of MS Office vs OpenOffice for a school system.
I fully support legislation like this. I don't want my tax money going to a commercial software company just because their sales boy is charismatic. As a tax payer I want the most for my money.
Quicktime does not ship with WinXP. I just had to install it. However, Flash does ship with Windows. Last I heard, the Flash player had been downloaded a billion times (yes with a 'B')and was getting downloaded at the rate of somewhere around 30,000 a day. These numbers do not count the copies of Flash shipped with Windows.
This is absolutely true. Have you gone into Best Buy, Circuit City, or other consumer electronics stores? The Sony marketing department has made sure that Spider-Man film loops are prominantly displayed on all Sony TV's, especially the high-end flat plasma displays. Its even worse at the Sony Metreon. All the Sony computers had Spider-Man themes, all the TV's were showing Spider-Man film loops, Spider-Man "the making of", etc., etc.
When I think of Spider-Man, I now think of $10,000 Sony Plasma displays, not Marvel Comics. Given this, I can certainly understand why Marvel is pissed off.
God, this sickens me to no end. I thought the OSS culture was smarter than this. It's not that I hate DRM, its the fact that DRM is a logcial fallacy. Spending time on DRM is like spending time trying to prove 2+2=5. You'll never succeed. Never!
If I can read it, see it, or hear it. I can make a copy. End of story, end of discussion. It doesn't matter how much you encrypt something, eventually it will need to be unencrypted for a human to read/see/hear it. At that point, it can be copied. Maybe it won't be a copy of the exact bits, but it will be a copy. For example, I could buy an e-book with heavy DRM. I load that e-book into my DRM e-book reader so I can read it. I then begin to transcribe the book into my word processor. Sure its tedious, but it only takes one person to do this and all the DRM in the world can't stop it.
When will people learn that DRM is a complete and utter waste of time?!
Sheesh.
This is extactly what they want. Go after a company that has no chance of defending themselves in court and set a precedent that it is illegal to transfer software licenses in a business aquisition. Once they have this precedent, they can litigate larger business mergers or aquisitions. Thus requiring them to purchase all new licenses.
Imagine the revenue MS would have recieved if they forced the HP/Compaq merger to purchase all new licenses because they can't be transfered.
MS has 96% market penetration in desktop OS. There is no room to grow that business, unless they can force a legal requirement on businesses to buy more licenses in certain situations. They are obviously trying to "grow" their business.
Think of copyrights as patents. If one company uses a process or idea covered by another company's patent, did they steal it? No, they infringed on the patent. Same with copyright.
Copyright infringement != stealing
This is the beauty of copy protected content. It only needs to be converted into a non-protected format *once*. Once it is in the non-protected format, everybody can access it. If somebody wanted to make copies of this, they surely wouldn't make copies of the .lit file. They would save the content as some other format and pass that around. In the end, you wouldn't even have to worry about reading the .lit file.
Somebody mod this up. This is priceless.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c107:S.2048. IS:
The one given above is a temporary search link. This one will always work.
If I remember correctly, Battle.net is a completely free service. It's not like bnetd was taking revenue away from some online service Blizzard has. However, Battle.net does serial number verification. You cannot create a battle.net account without a unique serial number which is only obtained by buying a legit copy of the game.
I don't know enough about bnetd, but I would bet that bnetd doesn't do serial number verification. This basically allows everybody to use the same warez copy of a particular game and enjoy the benefits of Battle.net. I'm sure this is the largest reason why Blizzard wants to shut them down. Blizzard doesn't make any money off its free Battle.net service, but it does enforce that people actually buy the game.
- d
We have all seen that the only people/corporations that can successfully dodge litigation are those with enough money to throw enough laywers at the problem. A law like this would basically guarantee Microsoft a future with little to no competition. Small companies that do not have the financial resources to defend themselves against lawsuits that this new law would allow would die. Microsoft would be able to defend themselves just because they have the money to do so, not because their software is better.
Let the market decide! Let the people choose the software that is most secure! A law like this will not help consumers. It will only kill off the small companies and individuals who are innovating and trying to give people choices!
The problem about the idea of "copy protection" for media (music, video, books, photographs, etc) is that it overlooks the basic principle of data: *** If you can read it, you can copy it. ***
People that are intent on preventing people from copying should forget DRM and focus on adding value to the original. In case of a CD, make it come with a coupon for 50% a ticket to see that artist in concert, or a signed photo of the artist, or anything else that would make the consumer want to buy it.
The most DRM will ever do is potentially make it more difficult for people to get "good" copies of the data. I've seen several people in this forum talk about encrypting the data and having all kinds of hardware support so that it is unencrypted at the last possible stage before a human needs to interpret it (hear the music, etc). This is all interesting, but this is easily circumvented by running the "speaker out" lines to your stereo, or another computer and recording the analog output. Then you can re-encode the recording into MP3. Most of the time (and I have done this), the result is excellent.
*All* DRM techniques for media can be circumvented in similar ways. I saw a webpage (wish I could find the URL now) where a guy took one of the e-book readers that stored the text encrypted and proceeded to place the reader on his scanner and scan the book page by page. Then he ran the scanned pages through a program that converts faxes/images into raw text by image recognition of the characters. It took him a few days to do it, but he was able to make an exact copy of the book. I thought it was hilarious. I'm sure the people who engineered the e-book reader's security never thought of that. I mean, if someone was patient and determined enough, they could just copy the book by hand just by typing it in.
DRM is a bit different for computer programs or things that are dynamic and have user interaction as they can require interaction with a remote server for verification. Thats why CD keys with online games work, or the "dongle" that some high-end applications use to verify a user. However, these things are not perfect, there are ways around them too (intercepting network data, cracking the binary, etc). Its just a bit more technical than running the speaker out to your stereo to record your favorite song.
DRM will never solve the problem. It will always fail just due to the fact that "if you can read it, you can copy it". The most it will do is annoy people and cause unending frustration for the people trying to support DRM. Give up now and focus on added-value to the real product... something that seems to have been forgotten.
Not flamebait!
Not to defend Microsoft here, but their numbers could be correct. How? I used to work for a fairly large software company. The product that I worked on had a Windows version and a Mac version. On top of that we supported 5 different languages. Then on top of that, we had 4 different packages that included different sets of 3rd party software. Then we had 2 different bundles that it went in with other software from my company. So, when it came down to it, we had:
1 product * 2 platforms * 5 languages * 4 distrobutions * 2 bundles = 80 different shippable CD and box sets. All from one single application.
From an engineering perspective, each of these shippables was considered to be a separate product due to the testing we needed to do to make sure everything worked as intended.
I can imagine that Microsoft has hundreds of applications that they sell, then all the languages that they support, plus bundles, plus patches, etc, would lead to an extremely large number of shippables.
Now I could imagine that your average marketing person could take those numbers of shippables and massage them into some kind of data saying Microsoft has 70,000 applications. Which is not correct. They may have 70,000 shippables, but not applications.
Um, ever hear of a privately owned company? Not every company in existence is publicly traded, or heading in that direction.
Umm... yes. Shares are shares. If you own them, you own a part of a company. I have many friends that work for private companies. The companies have a form of profit sharing where each employee gets a percentage of the company profits based on how many shares they own.
Just because a company is not public doesn't mean owning a piece of that company is worthless. There would be a lot of poor CEOs out there if private companies did not did not pay dividends or such.
My bottom line is, don't work for any company unless they give you stock options.
c ayton.html
From the way the question was worded, it sounds to me like you don't know exactly what stock options are, and you don't understand the processes involved with granting of stock options. You may want to search around and find some articles on what stock options really are. I found this (it seems to describe options well without getting too complicated):
http://www.hmbreview.com/opinion/stories/981119
1. How long do you have to keep them?
Zero. They are not yours until they vest. Well, when do they vest? Each company is different (ie you need to find out from your company). The company that I used to work for had a 4 year vesting period, where you would get 25% each year. For example, if I was granted 1000 options, I would get 25% (250 shares) after the first year, another 25% after the second year and so on until I had all 1000 shares vested. Once the options are vested, you are free to sell them or purchase them whenever you want (under the assumption that the company has gone public by that time)
2. What was the increase (or decrease) in value?
For me, $74 increase. Note that this company had already been public for several years before I joined. It was not a startup.
3. Do you think its a good idea?
I cannot stress this enough. Do NOT NOT NOT work for any company that does not offer stock options (or some other form of profit sharing) to its technical employees. If they do not, there is something wrong. The tech industry is booming. Working without the possibilty of sharing the success of the business is pure lunacy.
4. What are the "gotchas"?
At worst, you get nothing. The business is unsuccessful and your options are worth zero. At best, you are a millionare. You have abosolutely nothing to lose.
You mentioned that the company is offering a trade of salary for options. Take the options!! Just make sure that the percentage of total shares that you are given justifies the lower salary. (ie don't take a $10K cut in salary to get 100 shares out of a total of 100,000,000 shares).
I don't think super moderators would be the most efficient solution since I could easily create multiple posts faster than you could probably moderate them (all I have to do is figure out the CGI parameters that the server is expecting for a post and keep sending it). Something like this could be easily handled by preventing multiple posts in a short period of time from the same IP address.
/. made it such that you can't post more than one comment every 90 seconds, this kind of abuse would be time consuming for the abuser, but would not affect most people that contribute to the discussions.
If
I remember several years ago some companies going after "offensive" phone services that had 1-800 numbers that were very close to the phone numbers of the "legitimate" companies.
The complaint was that these "offensive" companies were tarnishing the reputation of the "legitimate" companies because their customers were mis-dialing. (I personally think this is a load of crap. A company no matter what their business should not depend on the stupidity of other individuals)
Does anyone remember the outcome of these cases? I would assume that any rulings in these cases could be easily applied to the etoy/etoys case.
John Dvorak (in PC Magazine) brought up an interesting perspective on this whole "refund" issue. Many small time PC makers complain that Microsoft sells Windows licenses to the big companies (Dell, Gateway, etc) at a discount, while the smaller companies pay a higher price.
Microsoft claims that everyone pays the same price. However, if the big guys actually do pay less, the refund could be higer than what MS actually sold the license for. Maybe this is why they don't want to give any refunds.
If its true that big companies pay less for the Windows licenses, they have two reasons not to give refunds. 1) They could lose money in the process (instead of just breaking even). 2) They could be caught lying about the "everyone pays the same price" idea. Which could hurt their legal position even more in the DOJ suit.
See Fla mebait
Linux was/is built around the internet. If Linux lacks a modern browser, Linux is dead. Yes, getting a good gaming base would help, but it certainly didn't help the Amiga. Linux needs good quality end user applications. A modern browser is the most important one.
The future of computers is the network. If Linux lacks the features to interact with the rest of the world (no matter what platform the other side is), it will die.
One of the goals of the Linux community is to get Linux on the desktop. Mortal desktop users do not care about 64bit file systems, IPv6, and they especially do not care about parallel processing.
Just look at Dave's wife. She is the one of the types we are trying to convince to use Linux. She didn't care that Linux had stable multiprocessing or process control. She just wanted to have the same experience as her friends.
That's the idea of the internet: COMMUNITY. Without it, Linux is dead. Read Judge Jackson's FOF about Microsoft. He concluded that one of the main reasons that people buy Windows is because "everyone else" has it too. People buy it because they think there is a community out there.
If Linux bends over for the lowest common denominator, I'm going FreeBSD, and so will all the people developing for Linux
This is the mentality that will kill the Linux movement. Just because the next step in technology was not developed open source does not make it inferior. Technology will advance. If we choose not to keep up because we think that we are "too good", we have only proven ourselves to be stupid and arrogant.
We need a good browser.
The modern human is no longer evolving. We care for our sick and less than suitable members so that they can grow up and reproduce (I know it sounds harsh, but if we were like other creatures on this planet, there definitely would not be 6 billion of us). The weak are surviving and passing on their less than desirable genes. We are all a product of this. We have no survival of the fittest anymore. Everyone survives.
I see the possibility of new genetic enhancement as the new way that we, the human race, can evolve. We have reached the stage where we are no longer evolving "naturually", so we might as well find some other way.
As for ethics, if it isn't hurting anybody, what's wrong with it?