Since he was trained at MIT, he recognizes the value of being exposed to scientific ideas. Seems pretty consistent to me.
And good for him for telling those afro-american professors to cut the crap and get back to work. He deserved praise for those actions, not condemnation (which is what much of the press has done).
Two requirements of a patent are the existance of an 'inventive step' and another is 'novelty'.
Patenting a gene itself (if that's what's done) is nothing more than patenting a transcription of an already-existing structure. It won't hold up - there is no novelty, and no invention - you're just writing down what already exists.
However, an inventive, novel step could be the application of the knowledge contained in the gene for specific therapies which were developed. These can and are patented, and I don't see anything wrong with this.
I think there's a common misconception that these companies are patenting genes themselves-I think that with few exception, this isn't the case - they're patenting applications of the knowledge to new therapies, much like someone who has studied the physiology of the body can patent a drug to treat an illness. You're not patenting the mechanism of the body, you're patenting a tool based on that knowledge.
"Profit" in the loosest sense of the word
on
Amazon Makes a Profit
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I'm not impressed at all by a company that has had to spend several billion dollars to make a profit of $5 million. First of all, $5 million is peanuts, and the stated profit takes none of the infrastructure expenses they've been making for the last several years.
If I spend $10 billion on a factory one year, and make $5 million the next year after operating expenses, am I profitable? No way. Not until the $10 billion factory is paid for.
There was also few details given about the expense exclusions that have likely been included in the calculation. Let's see what the SEC filings have to say (they're not out yet).
And even still, a $5 million profit on a $10 billion+ investment is a pretty lousy return (rate = 0.05%).
I think the most likely cause of the shrinking market for domain names is simply the internet bubble bursting - it's been clearly shown that such trivialities as domain names (among other things internet-related) are of dubious real value.
And as for Google searching, while I'm happily using it as my primary search engine, it's by no means perfect, and the author claiming that Google is an example of "search tools that unerringly bring you to the page you want" is total nonsense. I suppose your odds might be better than typing in a domain name blindly, but I'm not so sure.
If I'm looking for a company, I always try the domain name directly *first*, and only after (and if) that fails do I use Google. Seems to work most of the time.
It is a nice hack, but the technology really has very little applicibiltiy to real medical ultrasound uses. Properly trained professionals have absolutely no trouble identifying the location and structures seen on the ultrasonic monitor. Anyone who is NOT a trained professional shouldn't be playing with ultrasonic equipment, regardless.
While it might be nice for 'dad' to see the fetus properly located in the womb, there will be absolutely zero impact on the quality of patient care due to this device. In fact, because of the inherent inferiority of the ultrasonic image projected in this manner, I would bet that quality of care would diminish.
Cool hack, but any claims that this is something that hospitals will widely adopt is utter nonsense.
I got several of these emails this morning, and obviously thought it was a virus, but my McAfee software didn't identify it as such. It passed, no problem.
So, thinking I needed an update, this afternoon, I downloaded the most recent version of their.dat file (dated 11/28). Still, the virus passed, with no problems.
I'm pretty disappointed with McAfee for this. An update should have been made immediately available as in, this morning. I imagine a lot of people were stung because the virus definitions weren't updated quickly enough.
Thankfully, I never use Outlook, so no damage was done.
Well, Cisco is certainly losing plenty of money. If their earnings profile is correct, they lost $2.7 BILLION dollars a few months ago.
Doesn't seem like a very strong company to me. Perhaps, your sarcasm aside, they won't do so well in the long term. Cheap knockoff routers can unseat Cisco easily.
Sumbit a phony story to slashdot, making up some bogus story about a stolen domain name, set up a porn ad on the domain, and wait for the hits to roll in.
Pretty smart. I bet these folks made a bunch of money from the posting of this article.
I think it's time to deflate the hype surrounding these things a bit.
They basically use an inflatable structure (not unlike a beachball) as a loudspeaker enclosure, and attach a flat-panel loudspeaker to the front. Voila.
Performance of these will be questionable, at best, and they will certainly not have the performance they're claiming. Utter nonsense. They've provided absolutely nothing to support their claims.
Loudspeaker enclosured are designed to be rigid for a reason - they're essentially used as baffles and resonant structures, that, when properly designed, will provide a reliable, efficient, output of sound. An inflatable loudspeaker will not have any rigidity, thereby eliminating its use as a baffle, and severely diminishing low frequency performance. Second, the fact that the air will be expected to leak over time will change the resonant structure significantly, eliminating any possibility of consistent performance, if it even could be attained in the first place.
Now, an inflatable loudspeaker might be a nice gimmick, but it will absolutely not be a performance product. Not even close.
This is all hype, folks, nothing to see here - move along.
Oh, they're apparently VC funded? Go figure with the outlandish claims!
Distortion down to 'unheard of low levels'? Hype city. There is absolutely no plausible mechanism to support this claim. As for transdcuer shapes, such as tetrahedral, it's almost completely irrelevant as far as sound quality goes.
Loudspeakers don't have a limited lifetime because of corrosion. It's usually fatigue of the constituent materials, of which an inflatable plastic would certainly be about the worst.
These might be a good gimmick, but nothing more. I think their egos need a bit of deflating.
They're apparently using NXT flat panel techniques. No wonder this is so full of mindless hype.
They must be running out of money again. Last time they just shot John Glenn into orbit as a PR stunt, now they realize they need something else..
And imagine this: Learning and adopting capitalist methods from Russia?! Amazing!!! And I thought the US was capitalist...
Perhaps, if it's done well enough, it could be an enterprise similar to other semi-public industries, such as transportation (Amtrak, etc.), where governmental 'aid' is subsidized by paying customers.
There's plenty of value to be had:
- Performing research missions sponsored by industry, or by entertainment outlets (such as the Discovery channel). They already do this with satellite launches.
- Bringing back souvenirs (how much would you have to sell moon rock for to make it profitable?)
- Space tourism, of course.
However, NASA's culture is really not well suited for this - they're far too used to getting handouts from the government. It will, perhaps, have to fall on a private company to do properly. And I'm all for that.
Enough of wasting my tax money on NASA. Let 'em pay their own way like everyone else.
Quantum entanglement involves creating a system in which the state (polarization, spin, etc.) of two or more particles are 'dependent on' each other. Measuring the state of one particle defines the state of the other, 'magically', over some distance.
HOWEVER make no mistake, nothing in quantum mechanics or entanglement theory allows anything resembling faster-than-light information traveling, nor teleportation as we understand it. This is pure fantasy that many physicists subtly or not-so-subtly use to solicit grants, or at least popular press. (There's plenty of this nonsense in sci-tech magazines.) It certainly worked here.
Here's another example of macroscopic 'quantum entanglement'. I have a bag with two billiard balls, one black, one white. I close my eyes, pull one out and put it in a second bag. Then, I hand you the first bag, and walk across the room with the second bag, and open it. Once I look at the color of the billiard ball in my bag, the color of the ball in your bag 'magically' changes color and assumes a defined state. These billiard balls are entangled, very much like subatomic particles are.
Can you ever transport information faster than light using this method? NO. Can matter be teleported? NO. I really wish these pop-sci articles would put an end to these misconceptions once and for all...
I couldn't have said it better. Restricting the operations of a company in this manner can be increadibly destructive to both the company and the economy. An employer has to have the right to hire and fire people, as they see fit. Period. Inhibiting this is interfering with their ability to effectively run THEIR company.
I think he's right. That doesn't make him a troll
on
Pirates!
·
· Score: 2, Offtopic
It does sound pretty lame. Nothing wrong at all with saying so. The moderators shouldn't be so quick to jump the gun on a 'troll' moderation, just because it's negative.
(Or offtopic, for those who dare to continue to discuss it.)
This is a re-post of a fine piece by nightlight3 some months ago. I'd simply post the link, but slashdot archives aren't working. (I retrieved this from google cache).
This isn't flamebait - it's definitely a subject worthy of discussion. I, for one, have great reservations about whether this is a viable technology. This is especially important since so much money and attention is being poured into research, perhaps often without a real understanding of the basic principles. I happen to know people in Gershenfeld's lab, and know full well their tendencies to let the hype get out of hand.
Perhpas HP is spending the money as a marketing/PR effort, rather than them intending to get real work done. That would explain the press release.
So here it is; I hope nightlight3 will chime in.
- - - - -
"If one existed, a quantum computer would be extremely powerful; building one, however, is extremely challenging,"
Extremely challenging, like in "it can't work and it won't ever work, but I hope the government and the industry sponsors won't find that out, at least until I retire, preferably after I am dead."
The whole field of Quantum Computing is a mathematical abstraction (fine, as any pure math is, as long as you don't try to claim that's how the real world works). Its vital connection with the real world is based on a highly dubious (even outright absurd, according to some physicists, including Einstein) conjecture about entangled quantum states (roughly, a special kind of "mystical" non-local correlation among events) which was actually never confirmed experimentally. And without that quantum entanglement the whole field is an excercise in pure abstract math with no bearing on reality.
While there were number of claims of an "almost" confirmation of this kind of quantum correlations (the so-called Bell inequality tests), there is always a disclaimer (explicit or, in recent years, between the lines as the swindle got harder to sell), such as "provided the combined setup and detection efficiency in this situation can be made above 82%" (even though it is typically well below 1% overall in the actual experiment; the most famous of its kind, Aspect experiment from early 1980s had only 0.2% combined efficiency, while 82% is needed for actual, "loophole free" proof) or provided we assume that the undetected events follow such and such statistics, etc. The alternative explanations of those experiments (requiring no belief in mystical instant action-at-a-distance), which naturally violate those wishfull assumptions, are ignored, or ridiculed as unimportant loopholes when forced to debate the opposition, by the "mystical" faction. After all, without believing their conjecture all the magic of quantum computing, quantum cryptography, quantum teleportation, along with funding, would vanish.
For those interested in the other side of these kinds of claims, why it doesn't work and why it will never work, check the site by a reputable British physicist Trevor Marshall, who has been fighting, along with a small group of allies, the "quantum magic" school for years:
Unfortunately, the vast bulk of the research funding in this area goes to the mystical faction. As long as there are fools with money, there will always be swindlers who will part the two.
For a more popular account, accessible to non-physicists, of the opposing view, you can check a site by a practical statistician (and general sceptic) Caroline Thompson:
This recent Slashdot article has links to the technical details. (Inexplicably, that article didn't appear on the Slashdot's front page and awareness of this problem has lagged.) The hardware and resource requirements for this new attack are trivial: pretty much anyone with a wireless Ethernet card can compromise WEP.
Hmm, gaining a few leads from k5, huh Michael? Should have gotten it on the front page correctly the first time.
The examples you cite are a vanishingly small pecentage of music downloads, to say nothing of those done via Napster. In fact, in the case of your Dave Matthews example, rather than using Napster, you could just put them on your web page!
We've heard these arguments before, and they're thinly veiled attempts to justify and rationalize the widespread copyright infringement software like Napster enabled.
If you're going to copy music, then do it. Don't pretend, however, that you're doing anything moral, any more than the wareZZ kids do. Copying music via Napster is the same thing as downloading from a wareZ BBS. Sure, maybe there's a few shareware files in there, but to pretend that these are somehow important compared to commercial copies is entirely self-deceptive.
This is why I'm not really all that impressed with chess-playing computers. These computers do little more than brute-force search, because the game is simple enough to allow that strategy to be successful.
But games that actually require intelligence rather than horsepower (such as Go) are a much better gague of our success at producing an 'intelligent' machine... and our 'success' is thereby extremely limited.
It's about as silly as wasting cycles brute-force hacking RC5 or whatnot. Near-zero intelligence or creativity is required, just raw horsepower and $$$ to buy it. Big whoop.
Excellent point. Those items are most certainly real, as they required time and effort to earn. Losing them arbitrarily due to a poorly supported system will justifiably cause a lot of frustration in its users, and this is something Blizzard is absolutely responsible for.
Let's see... according to Yahoo, AOL posted a net loss of $2.10 BILLION for the last six months (up 8%), and Amazon posted a loss of $392 million. Between them, they've got about enough cash for another year or so.
Perhaps AOL was concerned that they weren't losing money fast enough, and needed some help from the world's #1 dot-bomber: Jeff Bezos.
"complimenting each other very well", indeed.
I fail to be impressed by either company - it really doesn't take much hard work, or brainpower, to lose this much money, although it does take a certain... panache to convince the masses to fork it over. For all of those anxiously fearing the worldwide domination of AOL, don't you fret - just wait a year or two, and watch the demise.
"But there's potential!" people say. Um, didn't we hear all about this a year or so ago? Look what happened...
(nope, I'm not a bitter investor, just an old-fashioned engineer who thinks wealth should be created, and earned. I've never owned a stock in my life, just for the record.)
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I had some mod points to throw at you, but this'll do.
Sorry, he's done some great things in the past, but what the hell does Steve Wozniak know about computer security?
Since he was trained at MIT, he recognizes the value of being exposed to scientific ideas. Seems pretty consistent to me.
And good for him for telling those afro-american professors to cut the crap and get back to work. He deserved praise for those actions, not condemnation (which is what much of the press has done).
Two requirements of a patent are the existance of an 'inventive step' and another is 'novelty'.
Patenting a gene itself (if that's what's done) is nothing more than patenting a transcription of an already-existing structure. It won't hold up - there is no novelty, and no invention - you're just writing down what already exists.
However, an inventive, novel step could be the application of the knowledge contained in the gene for specific therapies which were developed. These can and are patented, and I don't see anything wrong with this.
I think there's a common misconception that these companies are patenting genes themselves-I think that with few exception, this isn't the case - they're patenting applications of the knowledge to new therapies, much like someone who has studied the physiology of the body can patent a drug to treat an illness. You're not patenting the mechanism of the body, you're patenting a tool based on that knowledge.
I'm not impressed at all by a company that has had to spend several billion dollars to make a profit of $5 million. First of all, $5 million is peanuts, and the stated profit takes none of the infrastructure expenses they've been making for the last several years.
If I spend $10 billion on a factory one year, and make $5 million the next year after operating expenses, am I profitable? No way. Not until the $10 billion factory is paid for.
There was also few details given about the expense exclusions that have likely been included in the calculation. Let's see what the SEC filings have to say (they're not out yet).
And even still, a $5 million profit on a $10 billion+ investment is a pretty lousy return (rate = 0.05%).
I mean, "the Google effect"?
I think the most likely cause of the shrinking market for domain names is simply the internet bubble bursting - it's been clearly shown that such trivialities as domain names (among other things internet-related) are of dubious real value.
And as for Google searching, while I'm happily using it as my primary search engine, it's by no means perfect, and the author claiming that Google is an example of "search tools that unerringly bring you to the page you want" is total nonsense. I suppose your odds might be better than typing in a domain name blindly, but I'm not so sure.
If I'm looking for a company, I always try the domain name directly *first*, and only after (and if) that fails do I use Google. Seems to work most of the time.
It is a nice hack, but the technology really has very little applicibiltiy to real medical ultrasound uses. Properly trained professionals have absolutely no trouble identifying the location and structures seen on the ultrasonic monitor. Anyone who is NOT a trained professional shouldn't be playing with ultrasonic equipment, regardless.
While it might be nice for 'dad' to see the fetus properly located in the womb, there will be absolutely zero impact on the quality of patient care due to this device. In fact, because of the inherent inferiority of the ultrasonic image projected in this manner, I would bet that quality of care would diminish.
Cool hack, but any claims that this is something that hospitals will widely adopt is utter nonsense.
I got several of these emails this morning, and obviously thought it was a virus, but my McAfee software didn't identify it as such. It passed, no problem.
.dat file (dated 11/28). Still, the virus passed, with no problems.
So, thinking I needed an update, this afternoon, I downloaded the most recent version of their
I'm pretty disappointed with McAfee for this. An update should have been made immediately available as in, this morning. I imagine a lot of people were stung because the virus definitions weren't updated quickly enough.
Thankfully, I never use Outlook, so no damage was done.
Well, Cisco is certainly losing plenty of money. If their earnings profile is correct, they lost $2.7 BILLION dollars a few months ago.
Doesn't seem like a very strong company to me. Perhaps, your sarcasm aside, they won't do so well in the long term. Cheap knockoff routers can unseat Cisco easily.
If it is, it's one of the more ingenious.
Sumbit a phony story to slashdot, making up some bogus story about a stolen domain name, set up a porn ad on the domain, and wait for the hits to roll in.
Pretty smart. I bet these folks made a bunch of money from the posting of this article.
I think it's time to deflate the hype surrounding these things a bit.
They basically use an inflatable structure (not unlike a beachball) as a loudspeaker enclosure, and attach a flat-panel loudspeaker to the front. Voila.
Performance of these will be questionable, at best, and they will certainly not have the performance they're claiming. Utter nonsense. They've provided absolutely nothing to support their claims.
Loudspeaker enclosured are designed to be rigid for a reason - they're essentially used as baffles and resonant structures, that, when properly designed, will provide a reliable, efficient, output of sound. An inflatable loudspeaker will not have any rigidity, thereby eliminating its use as a baffle, and severely diminishing low frequency performance. Second, the fact that the air will be expected to leak over time will change the resonant structure significantly, eliminating any possibility of consistent performance, if it even could be attained in the first place.
Now, an inflatable loudspeaker might be a nice gimmick, but it will absolutely not be a performance product. Not even close.
This is all hype, folks, nothing to see here - move along.
Oh, they're apparently VC funded? Go figure with the outlandish claims!
I don't believe it for a minute.
Distortion down to 'unheard of low levels'? Hype city. There is absolutely no plausible mechanism to support this claim. As for transdcuer shapes, such as tetrahedral, it's almost completely irrelevant as far as sound quality goes.
Loudspeakers don't have a limited lifetime because of corrosion. It's usually fatigue of the constituent materials, of which an inflatable plastic would certainly be about the worst.
These might be a good gimmick, but nothing more. I think their egos need a bit of deflating.
They're apparently using NXT flat panel techniques. No wonder this is so full of mindless hype.
They must be running out of money again. Last time they just shot John Glenn into orbit as a PR stunt, now they realize they need something else..
And imagine this: Learning and adopting capitalist methods from Russia?! Amazing!!! And I thought the US was capitalist...
Perhaps, if it's done well enough, it could be an enterprise similar to other semi-public industries, such as transportation (Amtrak, etc.), where governmental 'aid' is subsidized by paying customers.
There's plenty of value to be had:
- Performing research missions sponsored by industry, or by entertainment outlets (such as the Discovery channel). They already do this with satellite launches.
- Bringing back souvenirs (how much would you have to sell moon rock for to make it profitable?)
- Space tourism, of course.
However, NASA's culture is really not well suited for this - they're far too used to getting handouts from the government. It will, perhaps, have to fall on a private company to do properly. And I'm all for that.
Enough of wasting my tax money on NASA. Let 'em pay their own way like everyone else.
Clarification:
Quantum entanglement involves creating a system in which the state (polarization, spin, etc.) of two or more particles are 'dependent on' each other. Measuring the state of one particle defines the state of the other, 'magically', over some distance.
HOWEVER make no mistake, nothing in quantum mechanics or entanglement theory allows anything resembling faster-than-light information traveling, nor teleportation as we understand it. This is pure fantasy that many physicists subtly or not-so-subtly use to solicit grants, or at least popular press. (There's plenty of this nonsense in sci-tech magazines.) It certainly worked here.
Here's another example of macroscopic 'quantum entanglement'. I have a bag with two billiard balls, one black, one white. I close my eyes, pull one out and put it in a second bag. Then, I hand you the first bag, and walk across the room with the second bag, and open it. Once I look at the color of the billiard ball in my bag, the color of the ball in your bag 'magically' changes color and assumes a defined state. These billiard balls are entangled, very much like subatomic particles are.
Can you ever transport information faster than light using this method? NO. Can matter be teleported? NO. I really wish these pop-sci articles would put an end to these misconceptions once and for all...
I couldn't have said it better. Restricting the operations of a company in this manner can be increadibly destructive to both the company and the economy. An employer has to have the right to hire and fire people, as they see fit. Period. Inhibiting this is interfering with their ability to effectively run THEIR company.
It does sound pretty lame. Nothing wrong at all with saying so. The moderators shouldn't be so quick to jump the gun on a 'troll' moderation, just because it's negative.
(Or offtopic, for those who dare to continue to discuss it.)
Emotional pulls make for poor arguments ("Won't someone please think of the children?!")
Resorting to thievery and lawlessness, whatever the cause, is morally repugnant. Especailly if done by a government.
The clear argument is, that it is wrong to steal, even if it saves someone's life. Period.
The Brazilians are crooks for doing this, plain and simple.
This is a re-post of a fine piece by nightlight3 some months ago. I'd simply post the link, but slashdot archives aren't working. (I retrieved this from google cache).
This isn't flamebait - it's definitely a subject worthy of discussion. I, for one, have great reservations about whether this is a viable technology. This is especially important since so much money and attention is being poured into research, perhaps often without a real understanding of the basic principles. I happen to know people in Gershenfeld's lab, and know full well their tendencies to let the hype get out of hand.
Perhpas HP is spending the money as a marketing/PR effort, rather than them intending to get real work done. That would explain the press release.
So here it is; I hope nightlight3 will chime in.
- - - - -
"If one existed, a quantum computer would be extremely powerful; building one, however, is extremely challenging,"
Extremely challenging, like in "it can't work and it won't ever work, but I hope the government and the industry sponsors won't find that out, at least until I retire, preferably after I am dead."
The whole field of Quantum Computing is a mathematical abstraction (fine, as any pure math is, as long as you don't try to claim that's how the real world works). Its vital connection with the real world is based on a highly dubious (even outright absurd, according to some physicists, including Einstein) conjecture about entangled quantum states (roughly, a special kind of "mystical" non-local correlation among events) which was actually never confirmed experimentally. And without that quantum entanglement the whole field is an excercise in pure abstract math with no bearing on reality.
While there were number of claims of an "almost" confirmation of this kind of quantum correlations (the so-called Bell inequality tests), there is always a disclaimer (explicit or, in recent years, between the lines as the swindle got harder to sell), such as "provided the combined setup and detection efficiency in this situation can be made above 82%" (even though it is typically well below 1% overall in the actual experiment; the most famous of its kind, Aspect experiment from early 1980s had only 0.2% combined efficiency, while 82% is needed for actual, "loophole free" proof) or provided we assume that the undetected events follow such and such statistics, etc. The alternative explanations of those experiments (requiring no belief in mystical instant action-at-a-distance), which naturally violate those wishfull assumptions, are ignored, or ridiculed as unimportant loopholes when forced to debate the opposition, by the "mystical" faction. After all, without believing their conjecture all the magic of quantum computing, quantum cryptography, quantum teleportation, along with funding, would vanish.
For those interested in the other side of these kinds of claims, why it doesn't work and why it will never work, check the site by a reputable British physicist Trevor Marshall, who has been fighting, along with a small group of allies, the "quantum magic" school for years:
Quantum Mechanics is not a Science
Unfortunately, the vast bulk of the research funding in this area goes to the mystical faction. As long as there are fools with money, there will always be swindlers who will part the two.
For a more popular account, accessible to non-physicists, of the opposing view, you can check a site by a practical statistician (and general sceptic) Caroline Thompson:
Caroline Thompson's Physics
Some track record he has. I spend most of my days online, and I've never heard of him or any of his brands.
Batteries.com? Whoopee.
I think his book is about a year too late.
They beat slashdot to the punch, even though slashdot appears to have attempted to cover this before:
Yesterday's article from Kuro5hin quoted below:
This recent Slashdot article has links to the technical details. (Inexplicably, that article didn't appear on the Slashdot's front page and awareness of this problem has lagged.) The hardware and resource requirements for this new attack are trivial: pretty much anyone with a wireless Ethernet card can compromise WEP.
Hmm, gaining a few leads from k5, huh Michael? Should have gotten it on the front page correctly the first time.
The examples you cite are a vanishingly small pecentage of music downloads, to say nothing of those done via Napster. In fact, in the case of your Dave Matthews example, rather than using Napster, you could just put them on your web page!
We've heard these arguments before, and they're thinly veiled attempts to justify and rationalize the widespread copyright infringement software like Napster enabled.
If you're going to copy music, then do it. Don't pretend, however, that you're doing anything moral, any more than the wareZZ kids do. Copying music via Napster is the same thing as downloading from a wareZ BBS. Sure, maybe there's a few shareware files in there, but to pretend that these are somehow important compared to commercial copies is entirely self-deceptive.
This is why I'm not really all that impressed with chess-playing computers. These computers do little more than brute-force search, because the game is simple enough to allow that strategy to be successful.
:)
But games that actually require intelligence rather than horsepower (such as Go) are a much better gague of our success at producing an 'intelligent' machine... and our 'success' is thereby extremely limited.
It's about as silly as wasting cycles brute-force hacking RC5 or whatnot. Near-zero intelligence or creativity is required, just raw horsepower and $$$ to buy it. Big whoop.
Chess if for wimps!
Excellent point. Those items are most certainly real, as they required time and effort to earn. Losing them arbitrarily due to a poorly supported system will justifiably cause a lot of frustration in its users, and this is something Blizzard is absolutely responsible for.
Michael - it is just you.
Let's see... according to Yahoo, AOL posted a net loss of $2.10 BILLION for the last six months (up 8%), and Amazon posted a loss of $392 million. Between them, they've got about enough cash for another year or so.
Perhaps AOL was concerned that they weren't losing money fast enough, and needed some help from the world's #1 dot-bomber: Jeff Bezos.
"complimenting each other very well", indeed.
I fail to be impressed by either company - it really doesn't take much hard work, or brainpower, to lose this much money, although it does take a certain... panache to convince the masses to fork it over. For all of those anxiously fearing the worldwide domination of AOL, don't you fret - just wait a year or two, and watch the demise.
"But there's potential!" people say. Um, didn't we hear all about this a year or so ago? Look what happened...
(nope, I'm not a bitter investor, just an old-fashioned engineer who thinks wealth should be created, and earned. I've never owned a stock in my life, just for the record.)