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Disagree strongly on several points. 1. New money doesn't mean it is clean. Zuck might be the first honest billionaire, but I highly doubt it. Highly. And, ev

Disagree strongly on several points. 1. New money doesn't mean it is clean. Zuck might be the first honest billionaire, but I highly doubt it. Highly. And, even if he was above board on every business dealing, partner agreement or equity stake (we know this not to be the case already), there is still the little matter of Facebook privacy issues, which are well known. Again, not clean money. 2. Facebook today, doing what they are doing with the money the have, is great. But we don't know what the twins would have done with the money and facebook of today and it is silly to speculate (it only shows biases). Personally, I think nearly everyone involved in this fiasco is dirty to some degree. I don't wholesale reject the notion that ideas aren't worth that much (your earlier post), but I do reject that they have no value. What Zuck has reported to have done would qualify as intellectual property theft in any industry, why not ours? I don't care what the intentions of the twins were, zuck didn't need to do that (string them along..etc etc) if he was some quality human being. To your point that the twins wanted to ride on the back of Zuck while making a buck....I'm not sure your argument is as compelling as you think it is. Every corporation has an unjust equity structure at the core. Founder share vs VC share vs first engineer share etc etc. Typical first engineer/non-founder share would be .5%-1.5%. Did Zuck get this deal with the Twins? Is this even fair? Valid questions, but either way it is still valid that Zuck basically aligned himself with the twins and then bolted leaving them with nothing. Do I agree with them coming back for more money? I haven't thought about it too much nor do I think I will b/c frankly this whole thing bores me. Lastly, I barely use facebook. I do respect what they've become as a technology organization, but I do not like their semi-shady business practices. I think of Facebook like I do Oracle: I would trust them as far as I could throw them. Both may be the top in their industry, but neither are clean.

strlen 16y ago
> What Zuck has reported to have done would qualify as intellectual property theft in any industry, why not ours? First, let me preface this that I am not a big believer in IP to start with: I'm especially opposed to software and business method patents. When I worked at an EDA company as a contractor (doing random C++ hacking just to make things work, without really understanding them) I heard many interesting ideas on computational physics, computational geometry, graph theory and the like. I floated some of my own, just out of curiosity and idle thinking. However, as I don't have the qualifications to implement any of them (I may know Boost and STL, but my physics knowledge has been swapped out of the page cache), making those ideas worthless to me -- just as the idea of a social network is worthless to the Winklevoss twins as they can't code. If accidentally, someone else at the company went and implemented those ideas, I'd have no right to sue: I blindly spouted ideas that I had no insights into (in regards to feasibility and work involved) and if I'm right about them being viable, it's by accident. In other words, suppose you work at Intel: your boss says, "it'd be nice if we had a more power efficient chip" without giving any idea as to how. You leave and implement such a chip. I doubt there'd be case for IP theft. If, on the other hand, you took the actual layouts for the chip, it's a different matter.

strlen 16y ago

> What Zuck has reported to have done would qualify as intellectual property theft in any industry, why not ours? First, let me preface this that I am not a big believer in IP to start with: I'm especially opposed to software and business method patents. When I worked at an EDA company as a contractor (doing random C++ hacking just to make things work, without really understanding them) I heard many interesting ideas on computational physics, computational geometry, graph theory and the like. I floated some of my own, just out of curiosity and idle thinking. However, as I don't have the qualifications to implement any of them (I may know Boost and STL, but my physics knowledge has been swapped out of the page cache), making those ideas worthless to me -- just as the idea of a social network is worthless to the Winklevoss twins as they can't code. If accidentally, someone else at the company went and implemented those ideas, I'd have no right to sue: I blindly spouted ideas that I had no insights into (in regards to feasibility and work involved) and if I'm right about them being viable, it's by accident. In other words, suppose you work at Intel: your boss says, "it'd be nice if we had a more power efficient chip" without giving any idea as to how. You leave and implement such a chip. I doubt there'd be case for IP theft. If, on the other hand, you took the actual layouts for the chip, it's a different matter.