That merely establishes that the character Neo is "a hacker" His hacking is not a relevant piece of the plot
Neo is found by Morpheus not the other way around, Neo's hacking skills in the Matrix keep his computer simulated self fed, and busy until he can join the plot, nothing else.
God forbid a hacker be portrayed as somebody with outside hobbies *Shock* *Shock* *Horror* *horror*
Finish this sentence: I can't think of a greater crime against hacker-kind than portraying them as
1) a group of which some are pysically attractive
2) People who do SOME things ON OCCASION other than hack
3) A group of which some are interested in the common welfare of mankind and some are interested in personal gain at any cost (and some aren't part of either of those groups)
As far as I can tell, these 3 "mis"representations are the only ones present in hackers -about-hackers- there are some techincal weirdnesses (or at least, technology I haven't seen... Daddy, can I have a "mainframe" like Penn Gillette got to use?) and other random stuff, continued use of the wore "elite" as actually connoting some positive status, though, this was less mis-representative in the '95 than it is now, but all in all, it didn't really put hackers into any small boxes that they didn't belong in...
More importantly... The Matrix is "about hackers" in that, the main characters were described as "hackers"
In how many points are their computer skills used? Umm, 1.5
one full point for reading the matrix code off of those screens, probably took some tech savvy, (Cipher says "I can't even see the code, all I see is...")
one half point for paying Neo's bills... selling "stuff" on zip-disk out of the hollowed out copies of "Simulations and Simulacra"
So then what do we have... pretty much that people are called 'hackers' and Trinity has a big hack in her history (which she blows off as history)
Meta-movie wise, we have people who are more efficient within a computer system than the unenlightened (term is my own), and one who actually can re-write the system on the fly. So I guess those are "hackerish" qualities, but not quite in the "we see them doing hackerish things" sense.
Of course, they were portayed as confident and competant (and, err, super-human) in the computer world, and downtrodden and scraping-by in the real world more "meta-movie" interpretation of them as hackerish.
Anyway, despite all that, I still don't think about it as a movie about hackers in the sense of hackers hacking... *shrug*
Just for clarity... in case somebody isn't aware a "Compulsory License" cannot be summed up correctly as "pay for rights to listen". That quoted aside was a specific case of a compulsory license.
Compulsory licenses are those which the owner of some IP must grant regardless of who wishes to license their material. For instance, if there were a compulsory license on NFL Football, any TV station that wished to broadcast a game could pony up a statutory amount of money and the NFL has no right to say "No, I don't want to do business with your" (nor do they have the right to say, "Okay, but you can't broadcast any game that any other station is already broadcasting, here's the list... and by the way, if you accept any advertising dollars from the XFL, you'll never get another NFL game as long as you live." (This is a purely hypothetical example, and has nothing to do with real extant circumstances)
Compulsory licenses are the "opposite" of voluntary licenses, in which the IP owner makes all and only the deals that they individually negotiate with the licensee
ASCAP and BMI (the people who collect royalties for radio performance) have voluntarily made their operations work -like- compulsory licenses, where anybody who ponies up a certain amount of money can play a certain amount of music (different rant about how ASCAP and BMI don't pay the people who's music is ACTUALLY played by the people who pay the fees... but they pay the people who are POPULAR *sigh*).
If most/all IP were under compulsory licenses... well, you wouldn't have to worry about AOL-Time Warner withholding all of their programming from other cable networks, and you wouldn't worry about Pfizer withholding all of their medicines from knock-off producers. Sounds great doesn't it? But like all things that foster competition in the delivery of IP, it reduces the strength of the Innovator's half of the copyright/patent bargain... and any time you WEAKEN that half, you WEAKEN the encouragement to innovate.
I don't know enough about markets to say whether the lost innovation would be made up for by the increased social welfare of a competitive market, but I wouldn't want to trust legislators with that decision either.
The Story of WotC and D&D is now legendary among me and my gamer-friends. D&D's new shape, rules, and print-run are so far superior to the 2nd edition that D&D is having a massive revival in a group that has rolled our collective eyes skyward, and sighed heavily when a non-gamer would say, "Oh, is that like D&D?" when confronted with our hobby (to which we always answered "yes" because they didn't really want to hear our opinions of that game anyway)
Anyway, now with FASA dying and selling ShadowRun (a game I still love, despite the dull financial grind of buying the same material in 2 different covers "for different editions"). Me and my friends cross our fingers, and hope that in 2 years time, WizKids (who is purchasing the IP for ShadowRun) will show what care and love can do to a rapidly tiring game system. . . Just like WotC did.
(As a second aside, from somebody who played magic for a while, and got sick of it, and spent several months amazed at the disposable income, and swore at WotC for their brilliant scheme... it's weird to be lauding WotC for anything, much less reviving D&D)
The answer to your question is "Public Choice Theory"
It's an economic theory whereby a small but motivated group is more likely to be "heard" in public decisions than a large, less motivated group.
Corporations with profit motives are often VERY motivated, and therfore weigh in heavily in a system vulnerable to Public Choice Theory (I don't think I phrased that correctly) as US Representative Democracy is. Unfortunately I don't have any links to models and explanations of PCT, but, I'm under the impression that they're out there...
Britain certainly isn't implying otherwise. However, it should be difficult to patent them in making your "no prior art" case, but search differentiation, classes of Schroedinger's equations are all patentable
IMHO, they shold be too. Let people who innovate in software patent good algorithms, not the final effects.
The part that is au contraire US is the fact that business methods may not be patented. Like one click shopping. Now that is a good thing.
One click shopping isn't a business plan. It was patented _as_ a technological innovation. Wow look at the complex innovation in (*gasp*) storing credit card/billing information in a user account.
their thoughts were -not- Look at the miraculously different way of making my company flourish, letting people buy stuff... One click shopping may or may not be an innovative invetion but it is absolutely not a business model
Sure it make take me years to improve my skills, but the chances of me ever getting paid $20,000,000 USD for one song/program are next to zero, while no-talent boy-bands (that's right N-Sync, Backdoor boys, I'm talking about your dumb asses) rake in the dough because the cartels control the distribution of nearly all music. Do you like the fact that your industry is more akin to a lottery than to art?
3 basic (rhetorical) errors 1) The reason they're so rich is that they have fans, admittedly fans that were appropriated by careful engineering of their "owners" Demographers, trend setters, trend watchers, and an odd musician or two created a magic bullet 2) Laissez Faire economics models are the ONLY way I have to gauge the value of a product, service or performance (much less a combination of all 3) and a system -relatively- close to that produced all of the profits that the boy bands, the girl bands, and everybody else you hate, accumulated. 3) The record companies CANNOT force consumers to purchase a product, they can promote something enough that anybody who is interested in a product knows about it, and has access to it, they don't just put a mark on the board that makes N'Sync rich. These groups you say are over-paid are enormously popular and readily engage with the group of people most likely to purchase actual and related materials for their icons. If fans didn't like the Backstreet Boys, they wouldn't make money. period.
and some rambling I'm personally interested in a relatively low-profit corner of the music industry, and I'd personally LIKE to see those groups snapped up by major labels, so they can stop doing their day jobs (if they wish) and may become professional musicians, and make more music which I like. if, at any point you rip off the industry through the IP of a musician you are robbing that musician of their ability to cut deals with a (currently) indispensable industry. Some widely known and popular musicians (Prince) have attempted to distribute their music w/o the industry, and they have overwhelmingly failed. If at some point in the future it's possible to succesfully distribute yourself more profitably without the industry than with it, then the musicians will do so. The reason artists cut deals with industry is because they believe it's in their financial interests to do so (Suge Knight's Death Row excluded, where it was in their saftey interests (that's a joke)).
in case I buried my (second, rambly) point too deeply in garbage, if the record companies can't make money from an artist (because he's widely pirated, or what-not) then they will not agree to distribute that artist, and that artist's chances of being supported purely by their artisit endeavors slim to barely existant.
While humans, pigs, and whatever else -do- exhale carbon, they do not exhale it all. You may have noticed that there is a significant amount of carbon in the average human.
Additionally, perhaps more-importantly:
Your argument seems to be that locking the carbon underground in COAL is somehow a superior state of affairs to locking it underground in BACTERIA, a claim that confuses me, but perhaps there is some justification I don't know (Cue response)
The problem with CO2 isn't how to get it out of the air. The problem is where to put it (especially the carbon, since we'd like to keep the oxygen around) once it IS out of the air.
This is a non-problem, of all the worries human society on this planet has, "what to do with cyanobacteria or cyanoalgae" is not one of them. Use it for pig-slop, or sell it as a special additive to smooties from Jamba Juice, or scatter it onto tundra, or use it as a fertilizer component, or whatever. My point is, that the bacteria/algae are not a pollutant, at worst they are a non-toxic waste-product, at best it's a marketable product. Digging Carbon out of the ground isn't problematic for the atmosphere unless you pulverize and oxidize it. as far as re-release of their carbon goes, that would mean that the sugars in the bacteria had been consumed by some animal (or, technically, the bacteria itself) and I don't think of that as a "bad thing". I don't think the world is suffering from an excess of food products...
The section about the trend, and it's interface w/ Nanotech is EASILY the most interesting part of an interesting article...
I'm basically a supporter of a copy-right holders rights to control the distribution of their work in the fashion they choose. I basically think in the Adam Smith terms that if you work something, you gain rights to it. However, I personally prefer to obtain content from people who allow me normal purchaser rights (transcription, backup, use as toilet paper, resale, whatever).
But he's right about what people are trying to do, and that's impoverish society for the benefit of the original owners. Something which is "bad" for society as a whole, I agree with that. However, I also beleive that the original owners SHOULD have the right to impoverish society, at least for now. Right now food, clothing, housing, transportation, fuel, electronics, paper, shoes, facial tissue, etc are all scarce (economically, not connotatively) products which many, if not all content owners would wish to own. The fact that what they own is not economically scarce (save for copyright protections) would make their lives difficult to lead (save for copyright protections!).
The bottom line is that until I can feed myself without TRADING AWAY a scarce commodity, I'm going to have to spend a significant amount of my time producing one. And I personally believe that it's a better idea to live in a psychological limbo where non-scarce products are legally burdened with scarcity, than to make artists "waste" their time producing something else that -is- scarce.
I think I'm starting to ramble now, but I do want to state that I'm not in support of the DMCA, I think that where copyrights are violated people should be incarcerated, but where the desire to protect copyright (meta-copyright?) is circumvented, copyright holders should shrug and move on with their lives. If they want to arms race in tech, they can do that, but if they want to take one tech step and stop, they should be forced to rely on their protected right to control copy... not whine about their lack of right to control people's interface with their copy.
Now I'm definitely rambling, but the DMCA is a gun-control law for technology, by outlawing technology you're going to have the technological equivalent of 3-5X as many knife-fights, and street brawls (London v. LA)
The important distinguishing feature is picking on a start-up for orneriness, and picking on a start-up because you compete with them.
"Fighting" in the corporate world is vicious, and that's probably the way it will stay, but people, even people you dislike, will tend to expend their energy fighting with people that hold resources (market share?) that they (the aggressor) want
Re:light stopped? Or destroyed and re-emitted...
on
Stop, Light.
·
· Score: 1
Pardon the almost assuredly redundant nature of this comment... (In "too much" of a rush to read down to 1, but feel it's important enough to say)
When light passes through glass, it is almost always absorbed and re-emitted, in other words, the original photon is converted into excited electrons, and then the excited electron('s energy) is converted into a photon that is ludicrously similar to the original. I never understood why this re-emission was at the same angle, but that's partially because I never really studied optics...
the point is, that transmission through -any- transparent surface is the destruction and recreation of light What this break-through seems to imply is that they can hold light (relatively unchanged) for a significant period of time. I don't know the precise nature of the phenomenom, but at least it shows the theoretical possibility of optical transistors, which could quite possibly contain more information than on or off (depending on how precisely identical the new and old light are).
though, as is typical with big science news, they sorta tag on "it's for quantum computers" with positively no explanation... I don't know enough about QComputing to interpret this result as significant... *shrug*
Most of the time, non-compete clauses are -ignored- by the company that secured them. They know as well as anybody does, that one year out of the marketplace is like never having been there in the first place
however, in this case MS decided to pursue their contracted rights with these people... why? Is it because Crossgain actually produces something that MS fears? No, because Crossgain doesn't do anything audible yet.
my vague guess is it's because Crossgain is so quiet about what they do, they were actually hoping to get Crossgain to stand up in court and say "we're not competing... look what we do is XYZ what they do is LMN, there's no overlap, let our people go." Unless of course MS got some inside information about what they DO do, and know that it is serious competition, then it's more old bag...
I don't appreciate predatory corporate practice, but I also don't think that a company the size of MS has the -time- and -energy- to pick on start-ups for sheer orneriness. I guess the 3rd option is that one of these employees parted with MS on REALLY bad terms and somebody wanted to stick it to that person... *shrug*
Slashdot Mirror
That merely establishes that the character Neo is "a hacker"
His hacking is not a relevant piece of the plot
Neo is found by Morpheus not the other way around, Neo's hacking skills in the Matrix keep his computer simulated self fed, and busy until he can join the plot, nothing else.
*Gasp*
God forbid a hacker be portrayed as somebody with outside hobbies *Shock* *Shock* *Horror* *horror*
Finish this sentence: I can't think of a greater crime against hacker-kind than portraying them as
1) a group of which some are pysically attractive
2) People who do SOME things ON OCCASION other than hack
3) A group of which some are interested in the common welfare of mankind and some are interested in personal gain at any cost (and some aren't part of either of those groups)
As far as I can tell, these 3 "mis"representations are the only ones present in hackers -about-hackers- there are some techincal weirdnesses (or at least, technology I haven't seen... Daddy, can I have a "mainframe" like Penn Gillette got to use?) and other random stuff, continued use of the wore "elite" as actually connoting some positive status, though, this was less mis-representative in the '95 than it is now, but all in all, it didn't really put hackers into any small boxes that they didn't belong in...
In how many points are their computer skills used? Umm, 1.5
So then what do we have... pretty much that people are called 'hackers' and Trinity has a big hack in her history (which she blows off as history)
Meta-movie wise, we have people who are more efficient within a computer system than the unenlightened (term is my own), and one who actually can re-write the system on the fly. So I guess those are "hackerish" qualities, but not quite in the "we see them doing hackerish things" sense.
Of course, they were portayed as confident and competant (and, err, super-human) in the computer world, and downtrodden and scraping-by in the real world more "meta-movie" interpretation of them as hackerish.
Anyway, despite all that, I still don't think about it as a movie about hackers in the sense of hackers hacking... *shrug*
Just for clarity... in case somebody isn't aware a "Compulsory License" cannot be summed up correctly as "pay for rights to listen". That quoted aside was a specific case of a compulsory license.
Compulsory licenses are those which the owner of some IP must grant regardless of who wishes to license their material.
For instance, if there were a compulsory license on NFL Football, any TV station that wished to broadcast a game could pony up a statutory amount of money and the NFL has no right to say "No, I don't want to do business with your" (nor do they have the right to say, "Okay, but you can't broadcast any game that any other station is already broadcasting, here's the list... and by the way, if you accept any advertising dollars from the XFL, you'll never get another NFL game as long as you live." (This is a purely hypothetical example, and has nothing to do with real extant circumstances)
Compulsory licenses are the "opposite" of voluntary licenses, in which the IP owner makes all and only the deals that they individually negotiate with the licensee
ASCAP and BMI (the people who collect royalties for radio performance) have voluntarily made their operations work -like- compulsory licenses, where anybody who ponies up a certain amount of money can play a certain amount of music (different rant about how ASCAP and BMI don't pay the people who's music is ACTUALLY played by the people who pay the fees... but they pay the people who are POPULAR *sigh*).
If most/all IP were under compulsory licenses... well, you wouldn't have to worry about AOL-Time Warner withholding all of their programming from other cable networks, and you wouldn't worry about Pfizer withholding all of their medicines from knock-off producers. Sounds great doesn't it? But like all things that foster competition in the delivery of IP, it reduces the strength of the Innovator's half of the copyright/patent bargain... and any time you WEAKEN that half, you WEAKEN the encouragement to innovate.
I don't know enough about markets to say whether the lost innovation would be made up for by the increased social welfare of a competitive market, but I wouldn't want to trust legislators with that decision either.
Slightly offtopic but:
The Story of WotC and D&D is now legendary among me and my gamer-friends. D&D's new shape, rules, and print-run are so far superior to the 2nd edition that D&D is having a massive revival in a group that has rolled our collective eyes skyward, and sighed heavily when a non-gamer would say, "Oh, is that like D&D?" when confronted with our hobby (to which we always answered "yes" because they didn't really want to hear our opinions of that game anyway)
Anyway, now with FASA dying and selling ShadowRun (a game I still love, despite the dull financial grind of buying the same material in 2 different covers "for different editions"). Me and my friends cross our fingers, and hope that in 2 years time, WizKids (who is purchasing the IP for ShadowRun) will show what care and love can do to a rapidly tiring game system. . . Just like WotC did.
(As a second aside, from somebody who played magic for a while, and got sick of it, and spent several months amazed at the disposable income, and swore at WotC for their brilliant scheme... it's weird to be lauding WotC for anything, much less reviving D&D)
The answer to your question is "Public Choice Theory"
It's an economic theory whereby a small but motivated group is more likely to be "heard" in public decisions than a large, less motivated group.
Corporations with profit motives are often VERY motivated, and therfore weigh in heavily in a system vulnerable to Public Choice Theory (I don't think I phrased that correctly) as US Representative Democracy is. Unfortunately I don't have any links to models and explanations of PCT, but, I'm under the impression that they're out there...
Algorithms are 100% patentable.
Britain certainly isn't implying otherwise.
However, it should be difficult to patent them in making your "no prior art" case, but search differentiation, classes of Schroedinger's equations are all patentable
IMHO, they shold be too. Let people who innovate in software patent good algorithms, not the final effects.
The part that is au contraire US is the fact that business methods may not be patented. Like one click shopping. Now that is a good thing.
One click shopping isn't a business plan.
It was patented _as_ a technological innovation. Wow look at the complex innovation in (*gasp*) storing credit card/billing information in a user account.
their thoughts were -not- Look at the miraculously different way of making my company flourish, letting people buy stuff... One click shopping may or may not be an innovative invetion but it is absolutely not a business model
Sure it make take me years to improve my skills, but the chances of me ever getting paid $20,000,000 USD for one song/program are next to zero, while no-talent boy-bands (that's right N-Sync, Backdoor boys, I'm talking about your dumb asses) rake in the dough because the cartels control the distribution of nearly all music. Do you like the fact that your industry is more akin to a lottery than to art?
3 basic (rhetorical) errors
1) The reason they're so rich is that they have fans, admittedly fans that were appropriated by careful engineering of their "owners" Demographers, trend setters, trend watchers, and an odd musician or two created a magic bullet
2) Laissez Faire economics models are the ONLY way I have to gauge the value of a product, service or performance (much less a combination of all 3) and a system -relatively- close to that produced all of the profits that the boy bands, the girl bands, and everybody else you hate, accumulated.
3) The record companies CANNOT force consumers to purchase a product, they can promote something enough that anybody who is interested in a product knows about it, and has access to it, they don't just put a mark on the board that makes N'Sync rich. These groups you say are over-paid are enormously popular and readily engage with the group of people most likely to purchase actual and related materials for their icons. If fans didn't like the Backstreet Boys, they wouldn't make money. period.
and some rambling
I'm personally interested in a relatively low-profit corner of the music industry, and I'd personally LIKE to see those groups snapped up by major labels, so they can stop doing their day jobs (if they wish) and may become professional musicians, and make more music which I like.
if, at any point you rip off the industry through the IP of a musician you are robbing that musician of their ability to cut deals with a (currently) indispensable industry. Some widely known and popular musicians (Prince) have attempted to distribute their music w/o the industry, and they have overwhelmingly failed. If at some point in the future it's possible to succesfully distribute yourself more profitably without the industry than with it, then the musicians will do so. The reason artists cut deals with industry is because they believe it's in their financial interests to do so (Suge Knight's Death Row excluded, where it was in their saftey interests (that's a joke)).
in case I buried my (second, rambly) point too deeply in garbage, if the record companies can't make money from an artist (because he's widely pirated, or what-not) then they will not agree to distribute that artist, and that artist's chances of being supported purely by their artisit endeavors slim to barely existant.
good luck out there YMMV
Untrue.
While humans, pigs, and whatever else -do- exhale carbon, they do not exhale it all. You may have noticed that there is a significant amount of carbon in the average human.
Additionally, perhaps more-importantly:
Your argument seems to be that locking the carbon underground in COAL is somehow a superior state of affairs to locking it underground in BACTERIA, a claim that confuses me, but perhaps there is some justification I don't know
(Cue response)
The problem with CO2 isn't how to get it out of the air. The problem is where to put it (especially the carbon, since we'd like to keep the oxygen around) once it IS out of the air.
This is a non-problem, of all the worries human society on this planet has, "what to do with cyanobacteria or cyanoalgae" is not one of them. Use it for pig-slop, or sell it as a special additive to smooties from Jamba Juice, or scatter it onto tundra, or use it as a fertilizer component, or whatever.
My point is, that the bacteria/algae are not a pollutant, at worst they are a non-toxic waste-product, at best it's a marketable product. Digging Carbon out of the ground isn't problematic for the atmosphere unless you pulverize and oxidize it.
as far as re-release of their carbon goes, that would mean that the sugars in the bacteria had been consumed by some animal (or, technically, the bacteria itself) and I don't think of that as a "bad thing". I don't think the world is suffering from an excess of food products...
The section about the trend, and it's interface w/ Nanotech is EASILY the most interesting part of an interesting article...
I'm basically a supporter of a copy-right holders rights to control the distribution of their work in the fashion they choose. I basically think in the Adam Smith terms that if you work something, you gain rights to it. However, I personally prefer to obtain content from people who allow me normal purchaser rights (transcription, backup, use as toilet paper, resale, whatever).
But he's right about what people are trying to do, and that's impoverish society for the benefit of the original owners. Something which is "bad" for society as a whole, I agree with that. However, I also beleive that the original owners SHOULD have the right to impoverish society, at least for now.
Right now food, clothing, housing, transportation, fuel, electronics, paper, shoes, facial tissue, etc are all scarce (economically, not connotatively) products which many, if not all content owners would wish to own. The fact that what they own is not economically scarce (save for copyright protections) would make their lives difficult to lead (save for copyright protections!).
The bottom line is that until I can feed myself without TRADING AWAY a scarce commodity, I'm going to have to spend a significant amount of my time producing one. And I personally believe that it's a better idea to live in a psychological limbo where non-scarce products are legally burdened with scarcity, than to make artists "waste" their time producing something else that -is- scarce.
I think I'm starting to ramble now, but I do want to state that I'm not in support of the DMCA, I think that where copyrights are violated people should be incarcerated, but where the desire to protect copyright (meta-copyright?) is circumvented, copyright holders should shrug and move on with their lives. If they want to arms race in tech, they can do that, but if they want to take one tech step and stop, they should be forced to rely on their protected right to control copy... not whine about their lack of right to control people's interface with their copy.
Now I'm definitely rambling, but the DMCA is a gun-control law for technology, by outlawing technology you're going to have the technological equivalent of 3-5X as many knife-fights, and street brawls (London v. LA)
The important distinguishing feature is picking on a start-up for orneriness, and picking on a start-up because you compete with them.
"Fighting" in the corporate world is vicious, and that's probably the way it will stay, but people, even people you dislike, will tend to expend their energy fighting with people that hold resources (market share?) that they (the aggressor) want
Pardon the almost assuredly redundant nature of this comment... (In "too much" of a rush to read down to 1, but feel it's important enough to say)
When light passes through glass, it is almost always absorbed and re-emitted, in other words, the original photon is converted into excited electrons, and then the excited electron('s energy) is converted into a photon that is ludicrously similar to the original. I never understood why this re-emission was at the same angle, but that's partially because I never really studied optics...
the point is, that transmission through -any- transparent surface is the destruction and recreation of light
What this break-through seems to imply is that they can hold light (relatively unchanged) for a significant period of time. I don't know the precise nature of the phenomenom, but at least it shows the theoretical possibility of optical transistors, which could quite possibly contain more information than on or off (depending on how precisely identical the new and old light are).
though, as is typical with big science news, they sorta tag on "it's for quantum computers" with positively no explanation... I don't know enough about QComputing to interpret this result as significant... *shrug*
Most of the time, non-compete clauses are -ignored- by the company that secured them. They know as well as anybody does, that one year out of the marketplace is like never having been there in the first place
however, in this case MS decided to pursue their contracted rights with these people... why? Is it because Crossgain actually produces something that MS fears? No, because Crossgain doesn't do anything audible yet.
my vague guess is it's because Crossgain is so quiet about what they do, they were actually hoping to get Crossgain to stand up in court and say "we're not competing... look what we do is XYZ what they do is LMN, there's no overlap, let our people go." Unless of course MS got some inside information about what they DO do, and know that it is serious competition, then it's more old bag...
I don't appreciate predatory corporate practice, but I also don't think that a company the size of MS has the -time- and -energy- to pick on start-ups for sheer orneriness. I guess the 3rd option is that one of these employees parted with MS on REALLY bad terms and somebody wanted to stick it to that person... *shrug*
Tell me this isn't a Troll and I'll tell you that I don't believe you...
*sigh*