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U.S. Faults Microsoft Licensing Compliance
An anonymous reader writes "In a written report card on how well Microsoft is complying with its 2001 antitrust deal with state and federal prosecutors, Justice Department lawyers said they might need the court to force Microsoft to act more quickly." The DOJ's court filing is online if you want to wade through it.
Their answer as seen from the settlement, and the lack of compliance is "Not very much."
Translation:
Microsoft's substantial contributions to George W. Bush's 2000 campaign fund were very helpful in getting him into the White House. Bush returned the favor by allowing Microsoft to escape unscathed from the big antitrust suit.
Now, Mr. Bush has begun the process of raising funds for his 2004 campaign, and it's time for Microsoft to pay up again.
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The time has come, repent all you sinners, for the shiny saucers of the sex goddess are coming to deliver us!
This, as everybody knows, has been predicted in the Holy Scriptures of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs! Convert before it is too late, heathens!
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Remeber, having a monopoly is not illegal, having a monopoly and abusing your influence, such as the case of Microsoft, is illegal. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised for the courts to find that Microsoft has "pierced the corporate shield" with all of the tactics and tricks hey use.
Then again, the republicans are in power ... ;/
--LordKaT
Section III.A. prohibits Microsoft from retaliating or threatening to retaliate against an OEM because of an OEM's decision to distribute or otherwise to promote any software that competes with Microsoft Platform Software. Unlike Section III.B., which can be (and has been) implemented programmatically, compliance with Section III.A. can be achieved only through training and ongoing oversight of relevant Microsoft employees. Microsoft has conducted extensive mandatory training for its OEM Sales group personnel concerning Microsoft's obligations under the Final Judgments, with particular emphasis on Section III.A. and other OEM-related provisions. Since December 2001, Microsoft has trained its domestic OEM Sales personnel at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and has trained its international OEM Sales personnel at regional training sessions held in Germany, Switzerland, Mexico and Japan. Training will continue to be an ongoing process, both via live training by Microsoft lawyers and senior OEM Sales group personnel and via online training tools that Microsoft has developed for this purpose. Microsoft's licensing and antitrust lawyers work directly with OEM Division personnel to address and resolve any ongoing questions.
People would nolonger aspire to become as rich and successful as possible? Is being greedy a crime?
Guess what? Not everyone wants to have so much money that they could never spend it within their lifetime. I have no idea how someone could ever use 40 million dollars in their lifetime, let alone 40 billion. Personally, all I need is food, clothing, shelter, and something to do with my time that I enjoy. I don't need a fast/expensive sports car, an automated do-everything house, or my own aircraft.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Not only is Microsoft not complying, they are in fact way in excess of the monopoly position that they were in when they started.
They have been busy leveraging their monopoly into new markets (cell phones and games consoles to name but two) and reverse-leveraging their new market share in these industries back into the PC market for greater lock in (Outlook integration that is closer than 3rd parties can obtain for example).
They have been investigating hardware lock in techniques (palladium style) and trialling them on consumers (Xbox) to prepare for the next wave of monoplising efforts. They are busy fundng other companies attacking their competators (SCO). They are proping up Bush econmic policy (share dividend at an advantageous moment) in return for special consideration (legal proglems decrease).
Lets hope to God this triggers another investigation - there is such a huge increase in their deliberatly destructive antics now that even a half blind judge would break them up.
Except that they will prbably buy him off too.
Beep beep.
The judges in these cases have been impartial, but the DOJ seriously backed off when the administration changed.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Antitrust law is a good thing, but if it's not used quickly enough, a monopoly can get so big, rich, and powerful, that laws no longer apply to it. It can afford to buy its way out of any problems it may face. Microsoft is just such a monopoly. It should have been broken up around the time of Windows 3.1. But it was left alone for years after that, and now it can fart in the faces of the justice department and there's not a single thing they can do about it (other than whine to the press).
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Except the English police will wack you senseless with their extendable batons if you don't do what they say...
Ethics is what you say you do. Morals is what you actually do.
A day when we celebrate victory in a civil war that began as a protest about taxation without representation.
Say, how much representation do your taxes buy you? Wouldn't it be neat if we could all choose to pay "campaign contributions" to buy laws and fat federal contracts, instead of paying taxes to whoever we decided was probably the least bad of two candidates?
I'm in agreement with George W that the only way to deal with oppressive unelected regimes is to replace them forcibly. I just think we should clean house at home before building any more aircraft carriers.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
On the other hand, on my XP laptop - even after having used "set program access and defaults" - the only way I could get bsplayer to view .avis was to each and every time select "open with". No matter the settings for filetypes - XP would _always_ launch windows media player.
I had to use "set program.." to specifically say NEVER to use windows media player to get it to work - and yet the icons are still wrong.
I'm quite sure it's not a bug - it's a Microsoft feature.
it's in my head
I invite you to (any time you like) get on the wrong side of a "bobby".
:-) I think I heard of someone being shot earlier in the year around where I live (NE London). The shooter was shot dead by the police ARU. There was some criticism over the fact that he was hit by more than five bullets, which seemed overkill...
Their job is only to stop/catch unarmed (or at least, without ranged-weapons) criminals anyway. A policeman with one of the standard-issue batons is significantly better armed than joe crook with a knife...
Any time there is a gun-toting idiot (briefly) around, the police just call in the armed-response unit (ARU). Much better-trained snipers who don't seem to care where they hit, so long as the bad-guy gets it. Similar to SWAT teams, I suppose.
Gun crime isn't much of an issue in the UK anyway. There's a pretty-persistent rumour of a shoot-to-kill policy amongst the armed police. Perhaps that's a contributory factor
[Note that I'm not at all opposed to the bad-guy being shot. If you play the game, you play by ALL the rules...]
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
If you look it up yourself, Microsoft's contributions doesn't rank anywhere near the top compared to other donors. In fact, they contribute fairly evenly to both parties.
More mindless drivel on slashdot.
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
You call this a capitalist society?
No, I call it a corporatist society. In corporatism, the government is charged with the maintenance of power of the major corporations.
What happened to laissez faire ideals, free market and all that.
In a laissez faire system, there is no concept of intellectual property law. Laissez faire is based on the natural laws of scarcity. Microsoft's monopoly is based on artificial scarcity established by our corporatist government through intellectual property laws.
Whether corporatism is the best course for our nation I will leave to other threads. I only intend herein to correct your misuse of the terms "capitalism" and "laissez faire."
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Microsoft is mostly following through with its settlement with the federal government.
So I guess that means Microsoft won't mind if I MOSTLY comply with thier EULA for Windows XP.
"You don't need a weatherman/ To know which way the wind blows" -Bob Dylan: Subterranean Homesick Blues
I have no idea why Microsoft did this, but it effectively makes it so that certain programs seem to cease operating when you upgrade to XP. For the AVI files you mentioned, the value to delete would be HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AVIFile\shell\open\LegacyDisable
This really pissed me off the first time I used XP, and tried to reassociate the files with mplayer2.exe instead of wmplayer.exe, and the associations just wouldn't take. Didn't matter if I did it manually, or used mplayer2.exe to do it, it just didn't work, until I found that value hiding in those types...
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.