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I really shouldn't go on with you except you are pretty smart, and I appreciate that.

Likewise.

My "bitch" with MS is that they wasted four or five years of my life before I uncoverred how to wipe out the hidden disk partition they installed to "control" the system, and figured out how to "neuter" the "phone home" gizmos like ping.exe, pingnam.bat, pingnum.bat,tshoot.*, and so on.

I don't see how you can blame MS for preventing you from implementing knowledge that you didn't have.

If I had realized they wanted to monitor "inside" my machine, I would never have bought the first GUI version from them.(3.1)

I understand your reservation; however, I don't see any egregious examples where your trust is being totally abused.

Now I am stuck with a million applications that run under MS and hate the OS!

Try Linux. Or Mac OSX. They are good alternatives. There's no reason to get angry.

Even though I made a pretty good effort to block them from any further "access" to my PC, I still get probes that attemtpt to write static allocated routines on my disk surface, and change the partition table to try and hide a 2 million byte partition they can create if you let them do it. They have a simple business philosophy: "Your PC is our PC."

It's an operating system. It isn't news that an OS takes over disk partitions and writes information. Linux does the same.

I am "done" with MS.

It's good to have choices, wouldn't you agree?

As far as your point re: "options", I must fundamentally disagree. If they have any value to the employee who recieves them, then they have value, and constitute an expense of the company. I'll let the accountants sort the details.

Yes, they have value; however, my point is that, at the point of awarding those options, investors have no possible way of assessing their value. Because to do so would require a crystal ball. They could have a value of zero or $1M. You don't know. The only way to expense options is after the fact -- and that's too late for investors.

One possible way for the Congress to deal with this issue is to require companies to report how many options they have outstanding and at what share price. For example, they could require companies to disclose that they have 200,000 shares obligated at an option price of, say, $85. But I think you're barking up the wrong tree. As I've said previously, most of MS's options are underwater. That means that employees will never see any profit from them and, therefore, there will never be any expense to investors.

Another thing that I wouldn't mind seeing done is to prevent CEOs and higher management insiders from exercising stock options until at least 120 days (or longer) after they have left a particular company. That would prevent many of the fraudulent shenanigans that we are seeing.

The real game here is that Democrats want to get Republicans on record for opposing expensing stock options; in that way, they can paint Republicans as the "Party of the Rich". As a result, I would caution you to beware of who you side with on this debate.