Your point is well-taken. Assets do include intangibles, which for a technology company like Apple is not insignificant. The art of investing - as opposed to the strict (and necessary) technical analysis of cashflows payable to investors - is to assess just how valuable intangible assets will remain and for how long in an industry that is synonymous with innovation and change. Apple is exclusively priced on the basis of being a growth stock into the indefinite future. On that basis, investors are betting (I use that word deliberately) that the product/service innovation will continue to roll on.

They have every right to poke their noses in if they own the company. Don't be hypocritical - you would do so yourself if you owned your own company. Count your blessings that somebody thinks you're worth paying a salary.

You just pointed out one of the attributes of a non-rational sharemarket buyer. Theoretically the share price should be at max - sans cashflow from dividends - the value of it's net assets only. On the other hand, if reinvestment of corporate cashflows that would otherwise go to paying dividends earns a greater return than individual shareholders can achieve then it makes sense for Apple investors to let the company continue investing on their behalf rather than pay dividends. It all goes pear-shaped if growth companies can't maintain their internal rate of return I think I just agreed and disagreed simultaneously...

Will they stick him in the same freezer as Walt?

The comments within the article were more informative than the article itself. A number of commentators pointed out the context in which the Stuxnet developers were working and presumed tradeoffs in complexity behind covering their tracks versus achieving their objective. (Which by most accounts appears to have been successful at covering their tracks long enough to permanently damage the uranium centrifuges. Sounds like a solid achievement to me and not whatif conjecture on how good it could have been.) As usual the self-appointed /. experts assume that their "hive" hindsight knowledge could conquer the day. More likely you'd just flame one another over irrelevant technical details, and boast whose toolkit was bigger and more colourful.

Haha, if I had a dollar every time some techhead know-it-all on slashdot thinks he understands how markets and businesses evolve or can second-guess every management decision with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, then I wouldn't need to work as an engineering manager. I don't think you'd get many arguments against the technical features behind NeXT's version of computer, but I think you are overstating the value that people placed on those features at the time. (Or even now. What consumer values resolution independence - are you really serious?) It's the curse of being way ahead of the curve. Not every vision has a happy ending. However your argument about "MBA bean counters" and criticizing Sculley for having experience in a soft drink company is weak. I guess Lou Gerstner's success at IBM shouldn't have happened. He has an MBA; worked with cookies at RJR and sold credit services at AMEX. Apple's market cap exceeds IBM's market cap by a large percentage, but I'd much rather be in IBM's business than Apple's. The consumer is a fickle beast and I suspect that Job's egomania has prevented decent succession planning at Apple. Like other companies dominated by visionary leaders, Apple may not survive the idiosyncrasies of its founder. Last word - Jobs hired Sculley. What was he thinking?

Open platform does not imply automatic forward compatibility in OS'. If Samsung wants to restrict OS upgradeability on current releases in favour of future product releases, then that is their product decision to make - Android is one component of their product. (Of course if sufficient numbers of Samsung consumers are pissed off by that particular decision then one can say it is a bad one.) This situation has nothing to do with walled gardens, jailbreaks or Steve Job's bowel movements.

You are correct in stating that the vaccine can also lead to shingles. However based on current studies your assertion that the vaccine can "just as easily" cause shingles is incorrect. Again it appears that the net benefit of receiving a chickenpox vaccine is positive. Check the excerpt from Science Daily (can be googled): ScienceDaily (Dec. 5, 2009) — Herpes zoster, also known as shingles, is very rare among children who have been vaccinated against chicken pox, according to a Kaiser Permanente study in the December issue of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Journal. The study, the largest of its kind, used electronic health records to identify more than 170,000 children vaccinated with the varicella (chicken pox) vaccine from 2002 to 2008 in Kaiser Permanente's Southern California region, then followed children for an average of two and a half years to identify the occurrence of herpes zoster. Researchers found only 122 cases of herpes zoster among the 172,163 vaccinated children, for an estimated incidence of 1 case per 3,700 vaccinated children per year. This is a lower rate compared to what one would expect in the unvaccinated children based on previous experiences.

Whoa dude, you need to lighten up a little yourself. I think you overdid the bile and bitterness. There have been whistleblowers before JA/Wikileaks. And there will be yet more whistleblowers after they are gone. JA's part in the Great Struggle for Truth and Justice Against Tyrannical Government is overblown. p.s. He doesn't possess a spine - just some hacking skills, a paranoid ego and over-inflated sense of self-worth. His mother should have hugged him more as a child.

You are ignoring the issue of shingles occurring in latter years due to chicken pox infection. By first-hand accounts from friends and collegaues who suffer from it, it is very painful. (I don't actually know what percentage of people who get chicken pox will then go on to develop shingles.) Seems there is another cost-benefit trade-off to the vaccination...

Ouch. Do you suffer an irony deficiency also?

This has to be one of the stupidest posts in recent /. history. The writer poses an obvious question of why can't "they" make satellite phones work and then proceeds to explain it to us, i.e. no ordinary consumer will purchase a highly-priced handset (priced to recoup some of those massive sunk satellite costs) that can phone hom from the Sahara when the average GSM/UMTS mobile phone will do just fine. It's one of the worst business cases of recent times...

My mistake. I should have written "out of your depth" or "beyond your ken".

Why, are you owed some special favours from Slashdot readers?

Is it the writing style, the plotting or the concepts or all the above that's confusing?