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We are moving away from free market capitalism to monopoly capitalism. We could take take radical measures to fix this, but at the moment the trend is towards mercantilism and, and away from Adam Smith style free markets and even Washington consensus neo-liberalism.

Nokia have failed to persuade people to buy Meego based products, so they are trying to solve the problem installing another OS that no one is buying. Very smart.

At the same time, they are going to keep investing in Meego (and making Symbian phones), and dividing responsibilities for each OS over multiple divisions. My take: Nokia's strategy seems to be “divide our forces, and keep dividing them”.

The other article is about government regulation to reduce restrictions on internet access, not to impose them.

Given that governments have been censoring the internet successfully for some time, why is this a surprise to anyone?

He does have a point on the importance of how the questions are asked. It is very easy to frame questions that, for example, force someone to choose between God as creator and evolution, without being able to answer both (the orthodox Christian view).

Some previous surveys have been badly framed that way, see my comments on the PEW survey

I would define a free market to mean that prices are set by supply and demand in a competitive market place. Therefore the existence of a monopolist or cartel would mean that the market is not free.

You could argue, but I notice that people who advocate "free markets" in the sense of "no regulation" are those who think that monopolies and cartels cannot successfully exclude competition.

To put it another way, I define free market to mean the sort of market that Adam Smith advocated, rather than what neo-mercantilism advocates.

In fact terrorists do not usually seem to be competent engineers.

My favourite example of this are the absurd attempts at car bombs aimed at London and Glasgow.

My theory: Terrorists are motivated by the belief that they can change the world for the better through acts of terrorism. Only someone fairly stupid is likely to believe this. Therefore terrorists are usually stupid. Not always because an otherwise intelligent person can believe something stupid, and because terrorism might achieve an aim the terrorists believes to be good as part of a larger campaign (e.g. by demoralising the other side in a war, diverting forces from the front line to homeland defence, etc.)

Exactly. Its a meaningless concession that will work to the disadvantage of Murdoch and - although I think some sites will gain from it.

Slashdot is so slow that by the time I see anything here I have read it, blogged about it, and twittered about it hours ago.

It beginning to discourage me from commenting here (especially as I use twitter more).

A vertical monopoly is still a monopoly.

It is not

Can you explain how KDE have (or even could) exploited this monopoly you claim they have to distort the market for web browsers?

MS are being treated in exactly the same way as other monopolists who bundle in both the US and the EU. For example, 3M with regard to both sticky tape and post-it notes for example. It is one of a range of ways if exploiting a monopoly, most of which MS has used, none of any of the others are in a position to use in the browser market.

I have a simple test that can show that a company is paying bribes. If they get government contracts in the red areas of this map, or do business with any regularity in the dark red areas, then they must pay bribes.

Some day, somebody is going to have to explain to me just what being gay has to do with not supporting software.

More seriously, it is simply the evolution of the English language, and the meaning of the word "gay" is changing again.

Pfff you are one sad sucker! Why don't you start reading more than just the British tabloid press?

My main general news sources are those in my RSS reader: BBC, Spiegel (International English edition), People's Daily, Christain Science Monitor, The Guardian, Scientific American, New Scientist.

I also read several economics blogs (my blog has a partial list), some IT news sources (/., The Register, Inquirer, Techmeme), and a few political blogs(Jonathan Calder and Craig Murray are the political bloggers I read most freqently).

The members of the EU council of ministers are elected in their respective countries of origin and (their parties) will have to explain their actions in their home parliaments.

I think it was perfectly clear to other posters who replied that I was talking about direct vs indirect election, because direct election is only a minor pre-qualification for the important job - and, given that ministers do not have to be in the House of Commons, it is not essential that they are elected at all.

How often are British ministers called to account for how they voted in the Council of Ministers? What can parliament do to reverse they decisions? How much debate is there compared to that over bills that pass through the the British legislative process?

I did not want to post these links because I posted them on Slashdot before, but they explain my objections better than I will in a quick Slashdot comment.:

http://pietersz.co.uk/2007/02/patents-inefficient
http://pietersz.co.uk/2007/01/pharmaceutical-incen tives-development

I did not want to post these links because I posted them on Slashdot before, but they explain my objections better than I will in a quick Slashdot comment.:

http://pietersz.co.uk/2007/02/patents-inefficient
http://pietersz.co.uk/2007/01/pharmaceutical-incen tives-development

P.S. Links are to my blog. I do know the subject - if you want my background go to the about page on the site in my sig.

P.S. Links are to my blog. I do know the subject - if you want my background go to the about page on the site in my sig.

Incidentally, why is this supposed to be news - I thought that any one who knew anything about open source knew this, and that only stupid journalists get it wrong

we the minority are putting the christian majority down

I have never lived in a Christian majority country, and both the countries I have lived it to some extent a disadvantage to be a Christian.

Non-religious people never have to take crap from overly religious fundamentalists

This is irrelevant UNLESS you are equating religious with fundamentalist - which would prove my point. As a matter of fact, the rest of your post assumes that Christians as all fundamentalists - in other words you are a bigot.

I simply find bigots obnoxious, as I do fundamentalists of ANY religion (or even none). Thanks for proving my point.

I'm not an atheist, though I am agnostic.

Good, I think God intends most people to be agnostics (at least in this life), and that it is the most reasonable position for most people.

I don't give a damn about your religion

You are an agnostic, and therefore open to the possibility that there is a God - but you do not care about the beliefs of the religious - even though you think they may turn out to be right.

But when you start trying to force your beliefs down my throat

Actually more of it goes into marketing patented drugs than into research.

Terrorism gets media attention far out of proportion to its real impact - the number of people terrorist kill is far fewer than cars kill.

The best thing to do is to ignore terrorism.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25161

The Inquirer is a fairly busy site and widely enough read to be a reasonable sampling of tech-savvy readers.

Few visitors to my main sites (UK oriented, investment related, mostly read during working hours) using Firefox. I think it is fairly obvious why.

On the other hand only 14 of the last 70 visitors to my blog used IE: about equal to Safari + Konqueror! Most of them are looking for my Wordpress plugins, both of which are of niche interest.