Infineon To Pay $160 Million For Fixing RAM Prices

Jerrod K writes "Infineon Technologies pleaded guilty to charges of price fixing in an international conspiracy. The Justice Department said this is the third largest antitrust settlement ever. Other memory chip makers involved include Hynix, Samsung, and Micron Technology." Reader phalse phace adds a link to CNET's coverage.

Comments

Sweet.

[rincebrain]

Does that mean I can upgrade my RAM for less than the cost of a new processor now?

I mean, seriously. The prices were ludicrous for high-end manufacturers, and the low-end can sometimes die, and you have no recourse.

Huzzah!

Re:Sweet.

[Jason1729]

Compare the transisitor count in a 256 meg DIMM to a CPU. That's 2 gigabits and a minimum of 1 transistor per bit, so at least 2 billion transistors. Intel and AMD barely have over 100 million in their newest CPUs, so the memory has 20 times the transistor count.

A lot more engineering goes into a CPU, but the price of memory compared to a CPU isn't really that surprising.

A lot of the microcontrollers I work with are basically a tiny sliver of processor on the edge of a large field of memory.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Re:Sweet.

[Kogase]

But aren't the transistors on a CPU considerably smaller? And don't CPU production facilities cost consiberably more than those for RAM chips? Notice the "don't" and the question marks.

Re:Sweet.

[rincebrain]

I recognize that the RAM is, if not the, then one of the most intricate and cost-intensive parts to produce and to purchase.

I was simply pointing out that it's bloody expensive, too.

Re:Sweet.

[Jason1729]

I don't know, but comparing the die size of the CPU to the area taken up by the chips on the memory module, it 'looks' like the memory is at least as dense as the CPU.

I'm pretty sure (but not certain) that a memory fab plant costs more to produce than a CPU plant, but the memory plant will produce far more chips over its lifetime.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Re:Sweet.

[ZorinLynx]

I've always wondered why they can't manufacture DRAM chips with spare memory cells, the same way that hard drives get spare sectors. Then rather than tossing out chips for as little as one bad bit, they can remap the bad bits to the spare cells and still use the chip.

Yields would go up, prices would go down.

I can't be the only person to have thought of this; why isn't it done?

-Z

Re:Sweet.

[Jason1729]

My guess is you'd need some non-volitile storage to keep track of the bad bits and the mappings. A little non-volitile memory will more than double the cost of the chip and the remapping will slow the memory down to much.

Re:Sweet.

[LionMage]

I recognize that the RAM is, if not the, then one of the most intricate and cost-intensive parts to produce and to purchase.

Well, I can't speak to the cost-intensive part of your assertion, since I am not privy to some details about the economics of chip production. But intricate? Not hardly. DRAM and SRAM chips are laid out mostly in a grid, with very little real-estate set aside for control logic. The only complexity is the control logic; the rest of the chip is just a matrix of transistors (and, in the case of DRAM, one capacitor per transistor to actually store the bit).

RAM chips are pretty easy to design and lay out because of the inherent regularity in their structure.

Re:Sweet.

[mobby_6kl]

I'm not sure if they currently do this, but they (and the CPU guys) do something similar for speed: if this module can't do stable 533, rate it at 400, if it can't do 400, rate it at 333 but just sell it.

Re:Sweet.

[LionMage]

I know that this is already done with some flash memory chips on the market -- there are spare cells which become active as other cells become unreliable or unusable. Flash memory has a finite number of write cycles, so this practice is a cheap way to extend the life of a flash chip.

Of course, flash memory relies on a file system to do a lot of the heavy lifting...

As for DRAM... well, the logic to map out bad bits would have to reside on the chip, thus increasing real-estate consumption. So the chips would have to grow bigger to accommodate the logic to do this, and that would lower yields. This might negate any gains from having the logic there in the first place!

Re:Sweet.

[Anonymous Coward]

DRAM has capacitors, not transistors (why would a transistor need to be refreshed?). SRAM has transistors, and it's a whole lot more expensive than DRAM.

Re:Sweet.

[ackthpt]

I mean, seriously. The prices were ludicrous for high-end manufacturers, and the low-end can sometimes die, and you have no recourse.

Meanwhile the price of petroleum continues to drop, yet we're still shelling for $2/gal. (yeah, I know it's cheaper than in Europe, but you pay more taxes on it than we do.) Heck, with all the oil execs in Washington DC, in the government, it's small wonder nobody investigates price fixing of that commodity, heck, how could they run a re-election campaign if they found what pretty much everyone should know - they are a cartel and they run the government. Infineon's error was not getting their own people into high office.

Re:Sweet.

[Hatta]

Does that mean I can upgrade my RAM for less than the cost of a new processor now?

Nope, the fines are so big they'll have to increase prices just to remain solvent.

Re:Sweet.

[ranolen]

Does that mean I can upgrade my RAM for less than the cost of a new processor now?

Nope, now infinion will have to make their money back that they have just lost, so expect a sharp rise in the price.

Re:Sweet.

[Anonymous Coward]

DRAM has both capacitors and transistors - the bit storage cell is a capacitor, the logic required for cell access are transistors. The reason SRAM is more expensive is because using transistor latches to store bits takes up considerably more real estate than a capacitor.

Re:Sweet.

[Euler]

exactly. There is a matrix of capacitors with only drive cicuits (transistors) at the end of the rows and columns. That is basically why computer designs always go with the relatively slow DRAM for mass memory due to its compact and economical nature. If you are designing a system that needs speed (like a cache or video device) you will always go with SRAM. But exect to pay _hundreds_ of times more per MB, and expect to have a way more physical address lines to contend with.

Also, answering some of the other posts above, DRAM with bad cells will get downgraded by chopping off rows containing bad cells. So you might take a 32Mx32 chip and make it 32Mx16. Depending on the nature of the defects, the chip might be downgraded for non-critical use in things like digital answering machines which can tolerate a few bad bits in the data stream. I dont think downgrading the speed helps much though as far as bad individual bits.

Re:Sweet.

[drinkypoo]

All PCs used to test their memory a little bit at boot. It might be a better idea to start testing memory at boot and use any spare cycles to keep testing it until it's all been tested. Then you could keep the mappings in volatile ram.

Re:Sweet.

[captaincucumber]

They're not any smaller. Also, it's not just a transistor per bit, it's a transistor and a capacitor.

Re:Sweet.

[corngrower]

While the digital logic is straightforward and easy, the actual design of a RAM chip is not. The engineers are effectively dealing with analog circuitry when designing these chips. The design of each memory cell is critical, as they need to be as small as possible. It takes a lot of experimentation and knowledge of semiconductor physics to design these things. These guys are definitely not slackers, they're the cream of the crop. The company's future depends critically on their knowledge and intelligence. If they can't devise ways of making the cells smaller, the chip becomes larger, the yields fall, forcing the company to charge higher prices for the memory. The company may quickly loose a competitive advantage and a downward spiral begins for the company. Engineers that design digital logic are much easier to find than those that understand the semiconductor physics and manufacturing processes well enough to design the circuit layouts of ram chip.

Re:Sweet.

[Glonoinha]

Price fixing? I didn't know RAM prices were broken.
I mean $400 for two gigabytes of memory? Damn!

Once upon a time I remember reading that Netware 4.1 could accomodate two gigs of memory on a single machine and thinking how crazy that sounded - at $50 a meg you were looking at $100,000 dollars just for the memory.

The way I look at it, memory could be a little cheaper when you look at it historically with a little reality sprinkled on top ... but the down-side of the price curve is only going to go so low. Historically speaking about the up-side of RAM pricing and quite a few of us remember $80 or more per meg (compared to the .15 to .20 range it is right now) and quite frankly I'm real happy with my $200 per gig. It could go down a little - but it could also go up A LOT.

Re:Sweet.

[ocelotbob]

IIRC, they already do. It makes it a lot cheaper that way. Also, if a significant amount of say a 256Mb chip is bad, they can always knock down the price a bit, sell it as a 128Mb.

Re:Sweet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Memory is easy to design if you never plan to sell it. If you want to be competitve in the market, it is insanely difficult.

Memory makers must violate silicon design rules to increase density and remain competitive. This type of process tuning is on-going, and stabilizes just barely before the fab is obsolete.

CPU design is a bunch of hdl that you can get 10 trained monkeys to write. Process tweaking is black magic(k).

Re:Sweet.

[zangdesign]

it's small wonder nobody investigates price fixing of that commodity

Really? Look who's sitting in our current administration - two former oilmen who consulted those selfsame oil companies when creating their "energy policy'.

Re:Sweet.

[LionMage]

While everything you say may be true, my objection was to the use of the term "intricate" to describe RAM chip design. The layout isn't intricate at all. It is a highly regular structure. Not convoluted. Not intricate.

To bolster my point, let's look at the definition of the word intricate: "1. Having many complexly arranged elements; elaborate. 2. Solvable or comprehensible only with painstaking effort. Complex."

The physical structure does not satisfy the definition of "intricate." The complexity of RAM development stems from the inherent problems of solid-state physics that must be gotten around to pack the bits ever more densely. The economic drive to be competitive forces innovations in increasing bit density, but once the design work is done and the production process has been tweaked... that's it. The end result might be a marvel of engineering, but it's not intricate as the word is defined, sorry. Maybe the engineering process could be described as intricate (though I would consider this a stretch), but not the end result.

Re:Sweet.

[LionMage]

Memory is easy to design if you never plan to sell it. If you want to be competitve in the market, it is insanely difficult.

I never said the design process was easy. I just said I wouldn't characterize the end-product as intricate. And really, the engineering effort, as I understand it, goes into packing the bits tighter -- how to make each cell as small as possible. Once you have figured out the tricks, laying out a grid of cells isn't rocket science. Scaling your grid larger works up to a point, until the chip gets too big to be profitable.

I also think your assertion that CPU design is "a bunch of hdl that you can get 10 trained monkeys to write" is a gross exaggeration and an insult to CPU designers. I'll agree, though, that process refinement is tricky business.

But none of this speaks to my point that I wouldn't use "intricate" to describe RAM design. (See my other reply in another subthread of this discussion.)

Re:Sweet.

[ColaMan]

They already do - you generally have a (small) percentage of readdressable memory on-chip, and when they test the chip, they 'blow' the address circuitry for any bad memory (in a similar fashion to PROMS) and then map the address lines for the backup memory cells to the bad memory location.

Or something like that, anyway. But it's all done in hardware, so there's no on-the-fly remapping done - it's all hard-wired address circuits.

I like the memory exclusion patches to linux - they take the output from memtest86 and at boot the kernel immediately allocates that memory permanently. This allow you to use your bad ram chips, minus the bad ram of course.

So, everyone, send me your bad 512MB sticks... i'll find a home for them :-)

Re:Sweet.

[Maserati]

You're damn right they do this. And some systems (Macs) are *very* finicky about their RAM. An 'underclocked' DIMM may technically meet the electrical specifications for what they're selling it as, but still not meet the system's standards.

I've only found one manufacturer to never sell me an underclocked chip: Kensington. Of course, I suspect they sell their underclocked chips to other vendors as an OEM, but I can still trust the Kingston label. Others may be as good, but I haven't tried 'em all and Kingston has been reliable for 5 years.

Re:Sweet.

[t35t0r]

FYI DDR uses capacitors SRAM uses transistors.

Re:Sweet.

[mkldev]

I've used a lot of generic RAM in Macs---a bunch of 61/71/8100 machines, a 7600, a beige G3, a Pismo, a white iBook, a G4/450, and a DP G5 2GHz. In all that time, I've only had one single failure and that was because the chip turned out to be non-compliant with the JEDEC specifications. (It was at a higher density than the specification allowed. It didn't work in my Athlon machine, either, yet the vendor tested it and claimed that it worked.)

That's not saying that your mileage won't vary, but generally if a RAM vendor says "check compatibility", it's non-compliant garbage and should not be put into any machine at any cost. Anything else should generally work in just about any hardware you might use.

Just MHO.

Re:Sweet.

[Arcanix]

it's small wonder nobody investigates price fixing of that commodity

There's no need to investigate the price fixing since that is the stated purpose of OPEC, to fix oil prices. Some have tried unsuccesfully to sue them in the past but they don't fall under US jurisdiction under current antitrust laws.

Re:Sweet.

[sirsex]

Sure they use spares for the word and row lines. Almost always have. Usually use links whcih can be cut with a laser to change the connections. Some programmable styles like EPROM and E^2PROM can program the fix into special registors (assuming they themselves are working). Memory cells can be sorted into about five bins:

Good: self explanitory
Bad Row/Word line: laser a fix, retest
Bad Address decoder: Some rows either read and/or write simulatiously or not at all. Mostly it works, but not all bits can be used. Might be able to laser a fix.
Random bad bits: Well, random

With bad decoders or too many bad rows, disable the bad part and only use 1/2 or 1/4 of the memory.

Chips with random failure have a huge market: Digital voice recorders and cheap music player. Scramble the addresses going in, so the bad bits are mixed up. It doesn't really matter if a few bits are bad in you answering machine or cheap MP3 player!

Re:Sweet.

[regem]

>I've always wondered why they can't manufacture
>DRAM chips with spare memory cells, the same way
>that hard drives get spare sectors. Then rather
>than tossing out chips for as little as one bad
>bit, they can remap the bad bits to the spare cells
>and still use the chip.

They actually do put on more transistors than needed. If there are flaws in one portion of memory, they can "blow fuses" to remove that portion of DRAM from what is used. This is part of the reason that DRAM is cheaper than processors; in processors it is more difficult to just discard a large portion of silicon.

Re:Sweet.

[corngrower]

I was addressing your 'easy to design' statement, not your 'intricate' statement.

Re:Sweet.

[Anonymous Coward]

One can use the badram patch in Linux which allocates the bad memory in the kernel and holds onto it so that it never gets used.

I would post more details but I'm lazy and you have enough to google for now.

Re:Sweet.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I never said the design process was easy."

From your earlier post: "RAM chips are pretty easy to design"

(Technically, you may not have said it, but you certainly wrote it.)

Re:Sweet.

[sulimma]

They do. There is both row and column redundancy in moder DRAMs.

But the production failures are proportional to p to the power of 1 billion (p^1000000000) which is a problem even for very small values of p.

Re:Sweet.

[ColdGrits]

"I've always wondered why they can't manufacture DRAM chips with spare memory cells, the same way that hard drives get spare sectors"

They already do!

This technique is used to ensure a higher yield by allowing faulty cells to be replaced by working cells.

It's been around for a lot longer than you'd think.

Re:Sweet.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Once you have figured out the tricks, laying out a grid of cells isn't rocket science."

once you have "figured out the tricks", building a rocket isn't rocket science either. Just what the hell is your point?

Re:Sweet.

[LionMage]

OK, smart-ass. How about "Conceptually, RAM chips are pretty easy to design." Is that better? As for the "I never said the design process was easy" statement, the key word here is process. The thread devolved into a discussion of the competitive pressures placed on RAM manufacturers and the tweaking they have to do to the process in order to squeeze more bit density into a chip. But you'd know that from reading the thread...

Everyone else knew what I meant.

Re:Sweet.

[Heywood Jablonski]

That's 2 gigabits and a minimum of 1 transistor per bit

This would be true if DRAM were made of transistors, but it's not. It's made (mostly) of capacitors.

Re:Sweet.

[phillstac3]

Maybe the logic could reside in motherboards? At boot, and possibly while the system is idle, the mobo could map the memory, and use the backup bits where necessary.

Re:Sweet.

[Ed Avis]

Why bother? Why not just mark the few bad addresses and stop using them? It doesn't matter if your one gibibit memory chip is actually 0.9999997 Gib because a few 4k pages have to be mapped out by the OS. See BadRAM.

Re:Sweet.

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't done because it's not actually cost effective. There are a few things about memory processes that are a little peculiar compared with normal semiconductor processes:

- Not very complex (less than half the number of metal layers, (much) larger transistors than the typical "current Intel CPU" etc

- Not very large (memory chips are pretty tiny: 256mbit and 512mbit devices dominate the market today and the latter is basically 1/4 the size of a Pentium 4, even though the P4 is on a 90nm process!)

- Very, very high volume (so processes can be refined more easily - you get lots and _lots_ of data)

Right. So what's the impact? Well, the first point means that you're less likely to have manufacturing defects since you're not making things on the "bleeding edge" of fabrication capability. The second point means that when you do have a defect, you write off a relatively tiny piece of material: RAM is tested _before_ it is packaged, and given that you get around 500 256Mbit RAMs to a (smaller, 200mm) wafer, the few defects you do get mean you're only throwing away a dollar or two worth of materials and manufacturing time, all things considered.
Finally, the last point simply means that when you do make defects, it's easy (and quick) to change the details of some fabrication step slightly, and see what effect this has. The Intels and AMDs of this world need to wait a couple of weeks for a new production run to "come through" for comparison with previous runs. The DRAM guys need only wait a couple of days. So, they can eliminate the majority of their defects due to process imperfections very early on, usually before mass-production even begins.

Your whole "spare memory cells" thing hsa an overhead: not the overhead of the spare memory cells (which may be only 0.1%) but of the circuitry needed to actually do the mapping without affecting the latency of the device which would have a higher overhead (I wouldn't be surprised at a figure of 1% or more)

It's just not worth taking that 1% hit every time, when 99.9% of your devices come through perfect anyway (yes, perfect wafers are routine in a DRAM fab).

The $160 million dollar tax question...

[garcia]

The real question is do they get to give away a bunch of 256k chips to schools as a tax credit?

Re:The $160 million dollar tax question...

[Nos.]

Hopefully not, even though another company was allowed to do something similar
Since sending out a cheque to every buyer affected would be next to impossible, they should have to sell their chips below (or at) cost until the fine is made up. That way, those who were harmed would have a chance to recoup some loss.

Re:The $160 million dollar tax question...

[cmstremi]

But those that were harmed already have the memory they needed. All the discount RAM in the world isn't going to be a remedy to everyone - only those who need more memory.

Re:The $160 million dollar tax question...

[Martin Blank]

It's a fine, not a settlement. They're expected to cut a check for the amount to the government, not reimburse consumers.

Re:The $160 million dollar tax question...

[Casca]

Oh yeah, that would be a great idea, let them dump to gain market share. Too bad for their competitors.

Re:The $160 million dollar tax question...

[Hatta]

But those that were harmed already have the memory they needed. All the discount RAM in the world isn't going to be a remedy to everyone - only those who need more memory.

As if there's anyone who doesn't need more memory.

Re:The $160 million dollar tax question...

[xsupergr0verx]

As if there's anyone who doesn't need more memory.

Of course they don't. 640k should be enough for anybody.

Re:The $160 million dollar tax question...

[skooba]

the article mentioned that infineon was in the process of reaching settlements with the injured parties, i.e., dell. i am sure that these types of settlements will be in lieu of civil trials, and that they will remain private.

Re:The $160 million dollar tax question...

[illumin8]

It's a fine, not a settlement. They're expected to cut a check for the amount to the government, not reimburse consumers.

Do you realize how messed up our anti-trust system is? So, Infineon engaged in price-fixing, and gouged the consumers for more money. Now, the government says "pay up", and Infineon just has to raise prices in order to cover this $160 million loss. In both cases the consumer got shafted. Once by the company, and the second time by the government. These settlements should go directly to the people that bought systems during the time period that price fixing was occurring.

Re:The $160 million dollar tax question...

[Martin Blank]

The government also requires changes in business practices, and this usually means also submitting to accounting actions that determine that the company is not just passing along the costs and merrily doing things as before. The money (theoretically) comes out of the profits of the company. Fines can also pave the way to class-action lawsuits, as this establishes the existence of the practice in one court, making it far easier to bring into another court.

Odd Concept

[Timber_Z]

I recall that things got pretty bad for awhile, but I still have a hard time with the concept of price fixing, when I clearly remember paying $150 for 8MB of ram, and how good of a deal that was.

Re:Odd Concept

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if they hadn't have been price fixing, the ram prices would have gone down 99.9% instead of just 99.7%.

Re:Odd Concept

[HBI]

I remember paying $450 for an entire XT compatible with 640mb of RAM. The price without RAM was $200.

It was well over $1000 a meg at one point. The price of RAM has been dropping over the years though. In the early days (70's) you could spend that much on 64k of Static RAM.

Re:Odd Concept

[arose]

640 milibits?

Re:Odd Concept

[HBI]

kb, sorry. Out of practice with that, certainly.

Re:Odd Concept

[spoonyfork]

I recall that things got pretty bad for awhile, but I still have a hard time with the concept of price fixing, when I clearly remember paying $150 for 8MB of ram, and how good of a deal that was.

ME TOO. Sorry to get all AOL up on yo ass but you totally sparked my noodle. I remember saving for months to get $300 for two 8mb chips for my Pentium 100mhz Micron. At 32mb I was the shiznite!

Re:Odd Concept

[arose]

kilobits? :-D

Re:Odd Concept

[Anonymous Coward]

kB; b = bit, B = byte, m = milli, M = mega
kB; b = bit, B = byte, m = milli, M = mega
kB; b = bit, B = byte, m = milli, M = mega
Repeat a hundred times. Get that needed practice.

Re:Odd Concept

[Anonymous Coward]

Irony: goofing on someone for improper capitalization, but making a spelling error in your own post.

Re:Odd Concept

[arose]

Grammar nazi: someone who thinks that the spelling of milli is more important than a 1 000 000 000 x difference.

Re:Odd Concept

[Pope]

I recall paying C$200 for 4MB of SIPPs for my 386. That filled all 4 slots, but I could add 4MB more if I bought loose chips and filled those banks. Made a hell of a difference in WIN3.1 though!

What does this mean for me?

[Zed2K]

Does this mean I get a coupon or something now?

Re:What does this mean for me?

[Randy Wang]

It means you get cheaper RAM, methinks.

And a hug. Everyone likes hugs!

And just how do I benefit?

[Nom du Keyboard]

And just how do I benefit?

It's not like I expect them to send me a check in the mail. And if they did, it would cost me more in time and effort to collect it than it's value.

The lawyers should have to be paid just like everyone else that sees any part of this settlement.

Re:And just how do I benefit?

[xsupergr0verx]

Maybe it's like the RIAA settlement.

Each lawyer gets a new yacht, and we get a check for $4 in the mail.

Re:And just how do I benefit?

[gl4ss]

there's added incintive for the companies to NOT DO THIS SORT OF THING now, the society as a whole benefits and that is how you get the benefit.

that's the whole point of those fines, you make the RISK of running such price fixing schemes too high that they don't want to take it.

like the fairly recent cartel busts in metal and paper industries(northern+mid europe)... you don't directly get anything but by punishing with hefty fines (also in the 100m+ range)they send a message that "don't fucking do this".

Re:And just how do I benefit?

[strictfoo]

there's added incintive for the companies to NOT DO THIS SORT OF THING now, the society as a whole benefits and that is how you get the benefit.

Yes, these wonderful lawyers who are doing this for the little people like you and me. The fact that they're making millions of dollars is inconsequential to them.

I mean, look at the music industry! They've definitely changed their ways now that 20 different lawyer firms have made millions off of them and we've all gotten $2.85 checks in the mail.

Re:And just how do I benefit?

[geeklawyer]

Each lawyer gets a new yacht, and we get a check for $4 in the mail.

I must be missing the joke. Why is it bad I get a yacht?

Re:And just how do I benefit?

[Billy the Mountain]

Yes, these wonderful lawyers who are doing this for the little people like you and me.

Actually, yes. Imagine that, a lawyer can right a social wrong AND get paid well at the same time. Sounds like a noble profession.

Disclaimer: IANAL

BTM

Re:And just how do I benefit?

[strictfoo]

Great, so, they're creating another "social" wrong - receiving tons of money by having a skill set (and lack of morals) that allows them to abuse a corrupt and broken system. I really wouldn't call price fixing RAM as being a "social" wrong either.

You realize who ends up paying these lawyers, right?

Here's a hint: It's not the companies. It's not the insurance companies. It's not the government.

Here's the answer: It's the consumers (that's you and me).

Re:And just how do I benefit?

[Skater]

ROFL - thanks, I needed that!

--RJ

Re:And just how do I benefit?

[Hatta]

The yacht contains potassium benzoate?

Re:And just how do I benefit?

[Anonymous Coward]

(That's bad)

Re:And just how do I benefit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I go now?

Re:And just how do I benefit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh... where's MY $2.85??!?!?!?!?

I have hundreds of CDs. Does that mean I get $285 * NUM_HUNDREDS ?

Re:And just how do I benefit?

[xphread]

Unfair!! - This guy probably gets a yacht AND $4!!!

Re:And just how do I benefit?

[mdfst13]

"Yes, these wonderful lawyers who are doing this for the little people like you and me. The fact that they're making millions of dollars is inconsequential to them."

Government lawyers are well paid (compared to other professions), but not at the same level as those in private practice. Further, they don't work on commission; at best, they might get a raise for successfully prosecuting the case. The millions go to their employer (the government), not to them.

Re:And just how do I benefit?

[glitch23]

You got a check?

Re:And just how do I benefit?

[mdfst13]

Consumers would only pay if all the companies have to pay the settlement. Since only one company does, the company itself will have to pay the settlement. If it tried to pass the cost on to consumers, it would lose market share. Otoh, the fine will be paid to the government, which will benefit all consumers.

The RIAA settlement was different. It was a class action suit run by private lawyers and prosecuted against an entire industry. Your criticism would be much more accurate against it.

Re:And just how do I benefit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Otoh, the fine will be paid to the government, which will benefit all consumers.

That is close to the most amusing thing I have ever read here.

Now thats fair.

[DAldredge]

A local family man is facing 20+ years in prision for walking into the vault at the back where he worked and taking 100,000 USD.

Why do large corps get away with crap like this, hell the goverment doesn't even go after those whitecollar criminals that skip bail...

But, normal crimes they come down hard on.

Re:Now thats fair.

[slashjames]

It all comes down to keeping control of the country/society. There is more "common" crime than "white collar" crime; therefore you punish the common criminals more severly to keep the commoners in line, and make a show out of punishing the white collar criminals. Always bear in mind there are a LOT more people who make $100k.

Re:Now thats fair.

[lothar97]

What's even more aggrevating is that these companies, once they pay for the mistakes in some manner (such as a fine), they are free to function as if nothing went wrong.

A perfect example is MCI/Worldcom. After imploding under massive amounts of fraud, screwing tons of people out of investments, employment, 401ks, etc, the company gets to "re-organize," pay a fine, then get government contracts. I bet if I'm punished for fraud, I would be shunned for life in any type of business setting.

This corporate crime problem will continue as long as it can be solved by fines, admitting no wrongdoing, and the limited minor punishments for those involved. I imagine if we held these people personally liable for all damage, put the company under 5-10 years probation, and made sure large jail sentances were required, we'd see a lot less of this trickery.

Then again, we don't want to hurt the innocent employess, and we don't want excessive government regulation.

Re:Now thats fair.

[raygundan]

I agree with you. If they managed to find enough evidence to prove there was collusion, then surely they have enough information to point out the names of at least some of the people involved in the price fixing. These people should all be punished under normal theft laws for taking the money.

Your pick:

1. One huge count of stealing millions as if it were from a federal bank.

2. Hundreds of thousands of smaller counts of stealing from the individuals and companies who paid higher prices for their RAM.

The punishment should include immediate repayment of the amount they gained through price-fixing, and whatever additional jailtime and fines are associated with theft of that magnitude (or quantity). Only when the *people* who run corporations are subject to the penalties for their illegal actions will this crap stop.

It strikes me as an odd side effect of "corporate personhood" that the crime belongs to the company, and the individuals are not punished-- yet we have no comparable punishments for a company. We can't put a corp in jail for 20 years, and we can't give it the death penalty for awful crimes. So everything is just a fine... and companies treat it as "cost of doing business," just like you and I paying speeding tickets.

Re:Now thats fair.

[Daniel]

My dictionary (written circa 1911) says:

CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

Does that answer the question?

Daniel

Re:Now thats fair.

[dhakk]

Well, they do punish white collar crime in China!

http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000080& sid=aMZ0siUWgs8k&refer=asia

I saw this somewhere else that had a really good quote as well... I'll try and find it.

Re:Now thats fair.

[Psyrg]

Well, looks like the best way to commit crimes these days is to start a company, float it somehow and set yourself up as the CEO. Rip some people off, and then procede to cash out and disapear.

Perhaps something like the Nuremburg Trials for corperate types. Even though these people don't commit the crimes directly, the still ordered them.

Re:Now thats fair.

[Mad_Rain]

I think that's because law enforcement or government agencies can explain to most people (99.999%, with a 4% margin of error ;) ) what is wrong with robbing a bank. It's a visible, tactile, removing of money from a secure place into the hands of someone who has a difficult time explaining ownership.

On the other hand, they'd be pretty lucky if they could explain several white-collar crimes to more than 60% of the population. Most people can't "touch" the concepts of white-collar crime, and in some cases, only pretty sharp accountants can even see it happen.

So later on, when people ask the law enforcement groups or government agencies "What have you done for me lately?" they want to be able to point to things that they've done, that others can really understand. Of course, this doesn't mean that white collar crime isn't important, or that it doesn't effect everyone, it's just a guess at a reason why it doesn't get as many eyeballs looking at it than a bank heist.

Re:Now thats fair.

[Marxist Hacker 42]

We can't put a corp in jail for 20 years, and we can't give it the death penalty for awful crimes.

Actually we could- we just don't because we don't have any politicians left to write the laws to do so, just corporate puppets.

How to put a corporation in jail for 20 years: take away it's bank accounts for 20 years and give the interest to the victims.

How to give a corporation the death penalty: Let the government confiscate it and start competing with other businesses in that industry.

Bet if you had those two punishments instead of the fines, the corporations would shape right up.

Re:Now thats fair.

[chancycat]

Or for that matter, execute convicted perpetrators of fraud, as China does and did recently for four cases of bank faud. Note I do not support capital punishment, and China's examples put the topic into a perspective I've never encountered before: "a 'kill fewer, kill carefully' policy for nonviolent crimes."

Re:Now thats fair.

[JInterest]

Then again, we don't want to hurt the innocent employess, and we don't want excessive government regulation.

The government should leave the Mafia alone then, I suppose. Why there are a hard-core of murderers associated with organized crime (residents of Bhopal might say that doesn't make the Mafia different from Union Carbide), many of those who worked with the crime syndicates did jobs not greatly different from employees of other large businesses.

When a business entity is used to do evil, we shouldn't let them use the innocent as a shield against punishment. The people who buy the pieces after the company is dissolved can take care of the good employees, and would probably want them anyway to keep their part running. Let's start jailing the bad buys at GreedyBastards Inc. just like we would John Gotti.

Re:Now thats fair.

[AuMatar]

I'm not sure that there is, especially when you consider dollar amount. One company doing this is equal to the life's work of theft for entire cities. The real reason we don't see the white collar crooks being nabbed is that it hurts politician's campaign contributions to fund those efforts.

Re:Now thats fair.

[AuMatar]

Hear hear!

The CEO of Infineon obviously knew they were price fixing. There's no reason that he should be allowed to get away with it. There ought to be a chunk of that fine coming from HIS pocket, and a nice long stay in club fed afterwards. As it is now, there's no incentives for the CEOs not to break the law- if they don't get caught, they make tons of money, if they do, the corporation pays the fine and they've STILL made money.

Re:Now thats fair.

[Hao Wu]

Then again, we don't want to hurt the innocent employess, and we don't want excessive government regulation.

I do not agree. Severe punishment may cause neighbor to ask politely that his or her friend please behave. Heavy shame from family association with Criminal Act may bring peace and order to a large society. Anything less is always chaos.

Re:Now thats fair.

[killjoe]

"Then again, we don't want to hurt the innocent employess, and we don't want excessive government regulation."

Punishing the guilty should not be seen as excessive govt regulation. The solution is simple. Dissolve the corporation and confiscate all the assets.

It's imperitive that the shareholders get screwed in the worse possible way possible. It was their job to make sure their company was run responsibly and it's their fault that the company committed crimes.

Once the assets get liquidated the money should be given as severence pay to all the employees starting at the bottom and working your way to the top until the money runs out.

Re:Now thats fair.

[Anonymous Coward]

All the RAM manufacturers were price fixing. If they were all dissolved, we wouldn't have any RAM. Their assests consist of RAM manufacturing plants, if there are no companies with the ability to run them, no one will buy them, i.e. the assests are worthless and the workers get nothing.

No need to dissolve the company, just fire (and possibly convict) the management, and bar them from future managerial positions.

Re:Now thats fair.

[Anonymous Coward]

Skienna's Algorithm Design Manual http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~skiena/ shows the punishment increases logarithmically with the amount involved. So stealing 10M twice gets two times the sentence for stealing 20M etc.

Re:Now thats fair.

[DAldredge]

Yes, the devils dictionary, I love it.

http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict3&Database=d evils

Re:Now thats fair.

[DAldredge]

MCI/Worldcom came out in a BETTER position as they where about to right of large portions of their debt during the bankrupcy. Now they have much less debt than most of the companies they compete with.

IOW, cheating pays.

Re:Now thats fair.

[Fjandr]

I'm all for dissolution for corporate crimes. Corporations owe their existence to the state they are incorporated in. If they violate their charter, they should be dissolved.

Re:Now thats fair.

[Fjandr]

How to give a corporation the death penalty: Let the government confiscate it and start competing with other businesses in that industry.

Considering the track record of Congressional officials, this would be a death penalty. They'd run it into the ground.

Then again, it'd be as likely that they'd use the legislative process to run competitors out of business, and enact regulations to raise the barrier of entry to limit further competition.

Re:Now thats fair.

[Fjandr]

Well, racketeering is only illegal if you don't give to the major political parties. All these companies give lots of money to both parties, so they're untouchable.

Kinda like the meth dealers/sheriff's department here...

Re:Now thats fair.

[syukton]

Dictionary.com offers:

corporation, n. A body that is granted a charter recognizing it as a separate legal entity having its own rights, privileges, and liabilities distinct from those of its members.

Which is essentially what your dictionary says but with more words.

Re:Now thats fair.

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I'm more likely to believe the first- and that innovation will take care of the second.

Re:Now thats fair.

[fyngyrz]

this is a placeholder for a litany, quite long, of all the crimes committed by the US government

<sarcasm> Punishing the guilty should not be seen as excessive regulation. The solution is simple. Dissolve the government and confiscate all the assets.

It's imperitive that the citizens get screwed in the worse possible way possible. It was their job to make sure their government was run responsibly and it's their fault that the government committed crimes.

Once the assets get liquidated the money should be given as severence pay to all the lawyers starting at the bottom and working your way to the top until the money runs out. </sarcasm>

Punishing the innocent has a long tradition. I'm delighted to see you carry it on.

Oh well

[JLSigman]

Guess we won't be getting our $13.50 checks. :-p

So that's the reason...

[ircubic]

..that DRAM has been so expensive for our Dell computers at home
Shame on you! [/Old Mother]

Correct the %^&$# summary!

[silicon not in the v]

None of the other manufacturers were involved in, or even named in this settlement. It was just Infineon. The summary isn't outright false, but it's sure misleading.

Re:Correct the %^&$# summary!

[Anonymous Coward]

"None of the other manufacturers were involved in, or even named in this settlement. It was just Infineon."

Hey, it's Slashdot. You should at least be happy the other manufacturer's names were spelled correctly. ;)

Re:Correct the %^&$# summary!

[corngrower]

It looked like Samsung and Micron were also involved in this little scheme. The feds must have quite substantial evidence against them, otherwise the companies normally just agree to compensation without admitting any guilt. I recall noticing during those years that dram prices were abnormally high, as they hadn't been falling like they normally would be.

Re:Correct the %^&$# summary!

[nuclear305]

If you were to actually pay closer attention to TFA, You'd have noticed the related articles linked at the bottom. More specifically this

"The case centres on allegations that between the end of 2001 and mid-2002, Samsung, Hynix, Micron, Infineon and others covertly agreed to up prices. The alleged jump in prices followed a two-year slump in demand that drove most memory production lines into operating at a loss."

They may not have been named in the settlement, but they certainly have been named at one point or another.

Re:Correct the %^&$# summary!

[antifoidulus]

Um, not only did you not RTFA, but you don't seem to realize what the term, "price fixing" means. In a non-monopoly environment(like memory), if one company raises it's prices, it's not price fixing, it's capatilism. If the market doesn't like the higher memory prices, then nobody buys their stuff and either the prices drop or they do.
In this case though, it was a bunch of memory manufacturers who make up a very large chunk of the market colluding to keep prices high. This is kind of like a "Monopoly Voltron"->together they combine forces to become a virtual monopoly, even though they are seperate parts.

Re:Correct the %^&$# summary!

[hobdes]

That explains the huge drop in value I saw in late 2001. But why has the value not rebounded since then?

Re:Correct the %^&$# summary!

[silicon not in the v]

If you were to actually pay closer attention to TFA, You'd have noticed the related articles linked at the bottom. More specifically this

I read ALL TFAs about this. It was already known that all the manufacturers are being investigated by the DOJ. That is what the Register article is referring to. I was clarifying that in this Infineon settlement, none of the other companies are named or involved in the settlement.

Re:Correct the %^&$# summary!

[silicon not in the v]

Um, not only did you not RTFA, but you don't seem to realize what the term, "price fixing" means.

You don't seem to understand how price fixing can work. If you have 6 companies in the same business, and two or three of the major ones collude to agree to raise their prices, that doesn't mean all of the 6 companies are involved. When those prices get raised, the others not involved will raise prices too because that's what "the market" is doing. Infineon's settlement indicates they were meeting with someone, but no indication yet of who.

Geesh, I'm in the business of fixing things...

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess I won't be fixing things that are broken anymore. My mum has a broken dishwasher that I was going to fix this weekend, but if I can be fined millions for fixing things, I don't want to accept that risk.
I guess my mum will have to do the dishes manually. Oh well.

Re:Geesh, I'm in the business of fixing things...

[kidlinux]

Hah.. if you don't fix the dishwasher, I don't think your mom will be the one washin' 'em manually!

Free market isn't perfect

[revscat]

Cases like this remind me why I don't think the libertarian philosophy towards free markets is all that realistic. Many libertarians believe that things such as this should be left to the marketplace to settle, and that government "interference" like this ultimately harms the market. I emphatically disagree. There are inherent flaws with the free market that the justice system can and should remedy so that the overall market is healthier thereby. Collusion does no one -- consumers, industries, or the economy as a whole -- any favors, and I fail to see how letting the market handle it would do anything but unfairly fatten the pockets of those who benefit.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[Jahf]

You're right in the "many libertarians" statement, but that doesn't mean it is a clear majority. Unfortunately for Libs (like me) there are really 2 Lib groups within the party. Right/Conservative and Left/Liberal.

The Liberal side would be more in favor of government taking care of business like this but trying for the most part to stay out of other places like social laws (most especially privacy). The Conservative side is more set on seeing government stay out of business entirely as well as the social aspects.

I'm primarily a Libertarian Left because I'm more moderate on business than a Democrat, but far more liberal on social issues than a Republican, and I think both parties have sold out when it comes to privacy. However in this case I think the matter was solved properly.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[srwalter]

I wonder how much this court battle cost the tax-payers? Will the benefit outweigh the cost?

Further consider that: 1) you don't have to buy something no matter what the cost. If they want to charge you $100 for 16MB of RAM, you can either do that, or go without RAM. Or 2) you can always enter the business yourself. If they are colluding to lower prices, it would be in your (and other businesses) self-interest to undercut them and make an even heftier profit (an economical fact if the market price is above equilibrium). The colluders would then have no choice but to do likewise.

Look at Intel vs. AMD. Intel was the only name in the business for years and years, but AMD decided they could make a comparable product (arguably better) and undercut them. And they have made significant inroads doing so.

There's no reason the above scenario couldn't happen if, instead of Intel by itself, it was 2 large corporations colluding to sell processors.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[doc modulo]

In the age of the industrial revolution, it was free market all the way. It turned out to be a reall hell for the employees. Near-slavery situations.

In the end, the manufacturers failed as well, because they gave so little money to their employees and other population groups, that no one could affort their products anymore.

People have to abide by rules, and so do companies/corporations. corporations try to be an "individual" anyway, so they should accept the responsibilities that come with it.

Limitations on what powerful entities can do to the rest of the population is good for the population. In the end it's also good for the powerful because rules make sure that no one can leech the population dry with cartels and monopolies and people will be able to afford the products and services.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[Brandybuck]

Who did the price fixing harm? A few OEM's. What would the OEM's options have been under a free society? Sue Infineon for fraudulant negotiation. Would Infineon and friends have been able to maintain a cartel without the benefit of government copyright and patent laws? No, because there would be no barrier to entry.

Sorry, but I don't see the problem. The economy isn't a zero-sum game. Even if some RAM manufacturers managed to unfairly fatten their pockets, so what? A free market will not let any cartel keep their prices artificially high for any length of time.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[corngrower]

Correct, with the Libertarian philosophy, we'ld have situations like what was happening in the coal mines early last century. On average over 2000 coal miners died each year here in the U.S. in mining fires and explosions. That was the toll in the years from 1900 - 1910, before the government stepped in with safety regulations. Oh, and by the way the companies would hire thugs to kill picketers and union organizers.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, as one who studies (but does not practice) libertarianism I would say this is a situation that would not be sustainable or the situation would not even arise if we were in a complete libertarian (e.g. laissez-faire or the like) environment.

Things like tariffs, government subsidies, government nepotism, meddling, etc. have made these kinds of situations possible in the first place.

Antitrust laws are a necessary by-product of the problem, not a solution.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[maxpublic]

Oh, and by the way the companies would hire thugs to kill picketers and union organizers.

And now they have government thugs to do it for them. That is, if the government doesn't decide to make it illegal for the workers to strike at all "in the national interest".

You also failed to mention that the regulations in question forced THOUSANDS of small family-owned and operated coal mining businesses to fold. Not a single major corporation suffered in any conceivable way, nearly all of the small businesses went under in less than a decade.

Yeah, that was a real win for "the people". With your natural ability to selectively present the facts that you happen to agree with, you should consider running for office.

Max

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[revscat]

1) you don't have to buy something no matter what the cost. If they want to charge you $100 for 16MB of RAM, you can either do that, or go without RAM

I sure as hell DO have to buy it if my business is selling computers.

2) you can always enter the business yourself. If they are colluding to lower prices, it would be in your (and other businesses) self-interest to undercut them and make an even heftier profit (an economical fact if the market price is above equilibrium).

Unreasonable, inefficient, and untrue in any case. Justice delayed is justice denied; if companies are colluding they should be punished sooner rather than later. Further, this ignores the fact that companies frequently collude to keep competitors out of the market, and succeed in doing so.

Your idealism is touching, but falls on its face in the face of the way the market actually works.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[mwood]

Point to something that is perfect.

The free market does alright. Its weakness is that it requires lots of information to work well. The *necessary* function of government in such cases is that it has the power to compel the disgorgement of hidden information and to come in and sift through everything until it is found.

We all assume that, having discovered something wrong, "the government" should go on and make it right, but it doesn't have to be that way. Given enough information, the market can simply shun bad boys out of business, and if we expected to have to do that to make the system work, it would get done. If we knew that the FTC (e.g.) would simply dig out the information and post it on a page somewhere, and that we have to do the enforcement, we could do it and we could tailor our enforcement to our own (or our employers') ideas of what sort of punishment fits the crime.

Imagine that you pulled some shady deal, and now wherever you go, buyers are saying, "waitaminute, you have Sparkle Farkel on your board -- wasn't she in charge of Scamco when they cheated all those people? no thanks, I'll buy from someone else." Imagine that *billions* of potential customers are doing this because they know that (a) you did it, but (b) nobody else is going to punish you on their behalf.

It's complicated and unwieldy but it could work if enough people cared. That's a mighty big "if", though. And you still need the power to pry out the information.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[corngrower]

AMD has been selling '86 clones since the 8086. They didn't just happen on the scene, they've been around for nearly the same time as Intel.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[maxpublic]

In the age of the industrial revolution, it was free market all the way. It turned out to be a reall hell for the employees. Near-slavery situations.

Not true in America. Corporations operating within the free market only made up a tiny fraction of the American economy right up to 1900, no matter what you learned in your school textbooks. More than 90% of the entire economic output of the U.S. was in the hands of small businesses, most of these family-operated.

In those businesses working conditions were better than anywhere else in the Western world. But since this doesn't make for great pro-government copy, the only thing history books focus on is the abuse workers took at the hands of corporations.

And, of course, no one talks about how all that great, wonderful, "for the people" legislation killed hundreds of thousands of small businesses, leaving corporations free to pick up the pieces, expand their markets, and levy their influence on a government eager to sell out. Nope, you won't find that in a high school or college text. It's anti-government and anti-corporation, and therefore anti-American!

Max

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[wynler]

Could you provide me some reference material on this?

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[Telastyn]

Unfortunately, most libertarians seem to be anarchists rather than libertarians. The libertarian view of government should not be one of no-government, but one of government focused on protecting the life and liberty of its citizens.

Anti-competative practices directly effect the ability of citizens' freedom to choose.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[maxpublic]

Yes, indeed. I don't have the direct links right in front of me, but there's an entire chunk of John Taylor Gatto's book "The Underground History of American Education" devoted to this very subject, complete with relevant source materials. You can find Gatto's book online here, and from there you can find the sources that you need to confirm what I said.

This was big news in the late 1800's and early 1900's when even common people had a pretty good idea that something fishy was going on, but since then we've been convinced that "government regulation is always good, mmmkay" and swallow this horseshit without a second thought.

Max

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[Colazar]

Given enough information, the market can simply shun bad boys out of business, and if we expected to have to do that to make the system work, it would get done. If we knew that the FTC (e.g.) would simply dig out the information and post it on a page somewhere, and that we have to do the enforcement, we could do it and we could tailor our enforcement to our own (or our employers') ideas of what sort of punishment fits the crime.

Imagine that you pulled some shady deal, and now wherever you go, buyers are saying, "waitaminute, you have Sparkle Farkel on your board -- wasn't she in charge of Scamco when they cheated all those people? no thanks, I'll buy from someone else."

That might work if you had a choice of buying from EvilCo and GoodCorp, but what happens when your choices are between buying from a company that profits from foreign child labor, a company that is actively destroying the rain forest, and a company that hires a con artist as its CEO? Once the choice comes down to a lesser of evils or to a cause of the month, public sentiment doesn't have any power. Plus there is the problem of information overload. Individuals would have a hard time keeping track of who they should be "punishing" with each purchase. If you've hung around with people who take boycotts seriously, you know what I mean.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[Marxist Hacker 42]

small businesses, most of these family-operated.

In those businesses working conditions were better than anywhere else in the Western world.

Do you have any proof of this? The family owned/operated businesses that I've seen have a tendency to treat all the workers as family- and in so doing, the "boss" becomes the "parent", and an autocratic one at that.

And, of course, no one talks about how all that great, wonderful, "for the people" legislation killed hundreds of thousands of small businesses, leaving corporations free to pick up the pieces, expand their markets, and levy their influence on a government eager to sell out. Nope, you won't find that in a high school or college text. It's anti-government and anti-corporation, and therefore anti-American!

Now that part I fully agree with. I also happen to think that changing from mere fines for everything to Jail Time (assets confiscated and placed in bank accounts for a time with the interest going to the victims) and Death Penalty (confiscation of your corporation or company by the Federal or better yet, the State Government) for corporate crimes is a darn good idea. Fines alone squeeze out the small business person- but other than fines methods squeeze the corporations harder.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[bit01]

You are ignoring the fact that by colluding the companies now have the financial resources to swat any startup that would dare to interfere.

Those that have the gold, even if ill-gotten, make the rules.

---

It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporations operating within the free market only made up a tiny fraction of the American economy right up to 1900, no matter what you learned in your school textbooks. More than 90% of the entire economic output of the U.S. was in the hands of small businesses, most of these family-operated.

Yes. They are commonly called farms.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[Colazar]

but since then we've been convinced that "government regulation is always good, mmmkay" and swallow this horseshit without a second thought.

I thought the current political meme was "government regulation is always bad."

Which is also untrue. Good regulations are good, and bad regulations are bad. The only problem is telling the two apart before they are enacted.

I volunteer to be the Supreme Neutral Arbiter of All Regulations. And remember, it'll be easier for me to be "fair" if you tell me who's paying me *before* I start ruling on these regulations.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[Anonymous Coward]

libertarian is about freedom.

Not saying: You running a business so your behavior is controlled by the government, but this poor fuck here can do whatever he wants because he sits at home and complains on the internet.

It's about freedom and completely open economy. The good and the bad.

IE: Microsoft's monopoly would be legal, but they wouldn't be able to use patents to protect their monopoly.

You saying that your "left" libertarian because you support a socialist agenda towards big business, isn't libertarian, it's just the same old socialist "liberal" (actually not REALY liberal in the real sense of the word, but liberal in the sense of Democrates) BS that's been around for the last 60 years.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[wynler]

Thanks!

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[Wordsmith]

"I sure as hell DO have to buy it if my business is selling computers."

First of all, your business doesn't have to be selling computers. IF you enter or choose to stay into the business knowing the costs involved and accepting them, that's your perogative. If you look at prices like those and say it's not worth it, that's you're perogative too.

If you can't make a buck in your biz paying their prices, then you'll go out of business. And the memory company will lose a buyer. If that happens enough, it has an incentive to lower its prices.

No one NEEDS memory - the world kept turning just fine 50 years ago when no one had personal computers. Whether it's CONVENIENT to live without it is another question. But you're under no absolute obligation to buy thie memory company's product. If it's worth $100 per meg to you, pay them the $100 per meg. If the harm you'll do yourself by being a technological backward hick is less than the harm you'll suffer by shelling out the dough, abstain from the purchase. It's your choice.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[AuMatar]

No, the price fixing hurt everyone who manufactures or bought a computer (or other device with DRAM). Thats a very large group.

No barriers to entry? Thats either ridiculously naive, or lacking any understanding of economics. Even ignoring patents (which, by the way, most libertarians do not believein doing away with), the barriers are huge. Starting a fab plant costs millions. Infineon's larger economies of scale would make your costs higher. Infineon's tech advantage and existing designs would give it at least a year's time to market on you. And lets face it- even if the OEMs are being screwed, the risk of going with a no name manufacturer that they can't trust to bring in the quality or quantity demanded would be way too high.

Welcome to the real world- while on paper you could jump into the market yourself, in reality competing in a market takes years of work and large wads of cash, and even then competing versus an established vendor is tough to pull off. By the time you do, the consumers have been screwed over for years IF you succeed. The free market fails in this respect, as it does in many.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[AuMatar]

Thats one weakness among many. Another is time- a free market may theoreticly work, but there's no promises that it will work in a reasonable time frame. If someone is getting harmed now its no help to him to know that in a mere 150 years the free market will reverse the situation.

Yet another is goals. The goal of a free market is to maximize profits. The problem is that there's other goals of society that outweigh profit that aren't factor in. How much is a human life worth, if a manufactuing process kills 20 peopel a year? How much is it worth if it causes cancer and shaves a dozen years off a worker's life? What is the value of an acre of rain forest? Corporations will never consider these, and the market is not able to force them to. Even government regulation attempts are weak- they attempt to equate these variables with a dollar amount, but can you really put an accurate amount on human life?

Markets do one thing and one thing only well- they allocate resources without human intervention. Requiring human intervention is a nightmare- its not possible to do so efficiently. Markets do manage to do so, the outcome isn't optimal, but its better than humans deciding. At anything else they pretty much suck. They don't act in timely manners, they can't provide justice or fairness, and they work only when all considerations have a hard money value.

The solution then is regulation. Use the free market to allocate resources as we do, and regulate buisnesses and business practices to ensure that other considerations are acted upon as society demands. Buisnesses are encouraged to make a profit, but only while following the goals of society, not at the expense of society.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[St. Arbirix]

I think I fall into the same category as you, but I'd like to add something...

I think the problem is that people expect a capitalist marketplace with socialist penalties. The looseness provided by a libertarian ideal with regards to business regulations would have to come hand in hand with far stiffer penalties for hurting people.

We realize that corporations can do evil things. We are much more capable of punishing big business without destroying our economy than we used to be. Why are we so afraid of punishing then? We're like parents who keep their children out of trouble by not letting them out of eyesight rather than parents who let their play how they will because the child knows how mean the punishments can be if they do something wrong.

I'm sorry, I just realized that that's probably a personality type thing. I guess it makes sense to see the government regulating the heck out of business. The SEC's sole purpose was to make the comman people feel sure that they wouldn't be cheated on the stock market. But doesn't that just move the abuse from the business end to the government end? Who punishes the government?

I like to think that we can do better with less government oversight and more strict penalties, for all things. Unfortunately, that requires more jailers and headsmen though-- more people willing to punish the faulty.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[AuMatar]

First off- there were few to no small business coal mines. Coal mining requires a lot of expensive land and many workers, it was always either corporate or privately owned large buisness.

There were many small businesses- mainly farms, and a lot of skilled positions (tailor, potter, blacksmith, etc). The thing that killed those buisnesses wasn't regulations- it was automation. With automation, people who owned factories (which cost a lto of money to build) could produce many times the output in a shorter time and cheaper. THis produces economies of scale. An economy of scale means the more somone produces, the cheaper he can produce it for (and thus more profit). With their massive economies of scale, the corporations could undercut the small shops and push them out of buisness. The death of those small businesses had nothing to do with regulation, it had all to do with the industrial revolution tiself. If you look at the numbers, and stated ALL the facts, not just the ones you wanted to, the trend of dying small businesses started in the 1880s, LONG before the unions and regulation got started.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see how anyone could cite The Underground History of American Education as a source. It's as bad as citing Fahrenheit 911. He starts chapter one with a favorite conservative belief that there's a conspiracy against Phonics. I hated many teachers as a kid too, but as an adult I understand they aren't evil people trying to warp young minds. Grow up.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[Inebrius]

"Even if some RAM manufacturers managed to unfairly fatten their pockets, so what? A free market will not let any cartel keep their prices artificially high for any length of time."

The so what is that companies can use their market power to kill any competition and keep their prices high. By not doing anything to deter this practice, you are actually encouraging it since it is so efficient when you unfairly control the market.

Unregulated monopolies can be self sustaining at the cost of the consumers. It doesn't make it right if they unfairly take even a small amount of undue profit, when they do it to over millions of transactions.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[revscat]

First of all, your business doesn't have to be selling computers. IF you enter or choose to stay into the business knowing the costs involved and accepting them, that's your perogative. If you look at prices like those and say it's not worth it, that's you're perogative too.

And if prices were raised via collusion after I got into that market? What then? Screw it, change businesses? Meanwhile, I have a family to feed and a mortage to pay. Should I suffer financial pains because of the collusion of suppliers?

This is the problem that I have with libertarianism. It cares ONLY about liberty, but cares squat for justice or democracy. Justice requires that those companies be punished. And it's dependant upon this utopian ideal of a world without government involvement in the market, a world that has never existed in history nor is there any indication that it ever shall.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[revscat]

Who punishes the government?

The voters. If the voters don't like the way a policy maker implements policy, they vote them out. If they fail to be able to influence the government through the ballot box, they can revolt and set up a new government that will listen to them.

I like to think that we can do better with less government oversight and more strict penalties, for all things.

That's what most people wish for. The devil is in the details.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[maxpublic]

I'm not citing Gatto's book itself as the source, but as the place to get the sources you need to confirm the information. As I said, I don't have the direct links in front of me, but those links are in Gatto's book and can be used for independent confirmation of the material in question.

The rest of Gatto's book, including Gatto's conclusions concerning the school system, are immaterial to the discussion. So I'd suggest that it's you who needs to "grow up", perhaps starting with the mastery of 'reading comprehension'.

Max

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[maxpublic]

I thought the current political meme was "government regulation is always bad."

Don't tell that to the Republicans. Despite having a Republican congress we have more laws and more regulation on the books than ever before. Republicans seem to be just as enamored of legislation as Democrats and, in fact, I don't see any real policy difference between the two when it comes to who they favor (i.e., whoever happens to be paying them off, which is always special interest groups or big businesses).

Max

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[Brandybuck]

No barriers to entry?

There are always barriers to entry. Even the lemonade stand business has barriers to entry. What I meant to say in my imprecise text was that there would be no artificial obstacles created by government or the cartel. They couldn't stop you from competing. The more they try to screw the market with a cartel they more they create their own competition.

I myself as a single solitary guy would have a major obstacle in front of me if I wanted to get into that business, but there are planted of firms large enough to to do it. When they discover that the cartel is overpricing their goods, they could come in and knock the foundation out from under the cartel.

Even ignoring patents (which, by the way, most libertarians do not believein doing away with)

Patents are pure-government coercion, and any libertarian worth his salt will oppose them.

The free market fails in this respect, as it does in many.

And so does government antitrust. This isn't a story of the DOJ stopping price-fixing before it happened, but one of the DOJ coming in at the tail end of a problem. The purpose of antitrust isn't to prevent monopolies, cartels and trusts, but to punish selected transgressors after the fact.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[Brandybuck]

It doesn't make it right if they unfairly take even a small amount of undue profit

Unfairly? Small amount? Undue profit? It sounds like we're getting into a very subjective area here. I'm sorry but I like my law a bit more objective than that. It sounds to me like you're buying [sic] into the medieval notion of a just price. While you do have some economic ground to stand on while arguing against cartels and collusion, you have none if you're arguing about unjust pricing.

Infineon may have charged Kingston too much. I don't know because that's between Infineon and Kingston. All I know is that I was happy with my price from Kingston. Kingston charged what the market would bear, and I was very happy to bear it.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[lightknight]

It cares ONLY about liberty, but cares squat for justice or democracy.

Justice? I do not believe there is any law or right whereby a supplier is required to sell something to you, at any price.

And if prices were raised via collusion after I got into that market? What then? Screw it, change businesses?

Yeah, it happens. Even in our society. Deal. Alternatively, you could expand your business so that it encompasses RAM production. Or you could wait for someone else, not affiliated with the cartel, to jump in (high profit margins/limited demand tend to have that effect).

Should I suffer financial pains because of the collusion of suppliers?

No, you should suffer financial pains if you are unable to overcome challenges that are thrown at you, like any business owner. If you fail, you fail. Deal, like everyone else.

Now, someone will eventually cite IP as a problem. Whine, whine, bluster, but they have IP and I can't make those chips. Well, if they are unwilling to license their IP, fight back. File for some offensive patents: pidgeon hole them. Make it so that they cannot advance their tech, or even sell it, without working out a deal with you.

You sound like a union worker: you've blocked yourself inside a box, and are unwilling to consider the alternatives. "I make computers, that's all I want to do, and if someone won't sell me their components, I can't do anything to help my poor self, but whine about social justice and ?democracy?".

The marketplace is about transactions, and capitalism is built on the principles of dystopia, yet it can create a veritable utopia, by having everyone appeal to their own self-interest (short of theft (of property) or physical harm (of your body)). Greed ensures that people like money, much more than they care for racism, sexism, or personal vendettas. If they can ship a couple more units, making more money in the process, they quickly set aside whatever personal problems they have with you.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[lightknight]

Should read:

(high profit margins/limited supply tend to have that effect).

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[AuMatar]

Patents are pure-government coercion, and any libertarian worth his salt will oppose them.

But most don't. Including your presidential candidate, IIRC. It seems to be a split issue in the party.

And so does government antitrust. This isn't a story of the DOJ stopping price-fixing before it happened, but one of the DOJ coming in at the tail end of a problem. The purpose of antitrust isn't to prevent monopolies, cartels and trusts, but to punish selected transgressors after the fact.

Well, ideallly itisn't selected. But you're right, the idea is to punnish people who break the law, so hopefully people think its not worth the risk. Laws against murder and theft work the same way, want to get rid of them too?

Yup, antitrust isn't perfect. But its better to have them and try to stop such behavior than it is not to have them and let it run rampant. Getting rid of them won't end the problem either, it'll just make it more of a problem.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[Anonymous Coward]

The classic libertarian perspective (as suggested by Robert Nozick) is for the role of the state to only provide protection from force, fraud, or theft.

A libertarian could not ban anti-competetive pratices because at heart they would not fall into any of the above catagories, since it is just a group of people freely meeting and making a deal as to what prices to sell at.

The plus side would be that anyone could enter the market and make new chips to break this groups deal since chip design is just a thought (abstract universal) and one can't "steal" an idea.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[mabhatter654]

I'm not libertarian, but I don't see what they did as necessaraly bad. After all, they HAD to raise prices or somebody would go bankrupt...who was protecting them from the likes of Dell threatening to "make or break" them? They ALL had to flinch...so they choose to move prices/production at once. Technically that's not anticompetitive because the buyer was free to go to anybody else and sign a contract.

Remember, there's only a handful of Dram makers...you could put all the key sales people in a room...they probably all know eachother. They know when Dell starts calling around "ball busting" for low price...call up the boss and he says "no way". Rumors travel fast in an "small" industry like that. I worked in Extruded aluminum for a while and in my area we all knew who eachother's customers were and when the "customers" were trying to "play" us. It's no different here. It's the classic case of "Walmart Syndrome" the big "super customers" run around beating everybody up, normally that would only leave a few players...or in this case the collectively resound "NO" and raise prices to spite you...

Note the principle plaintiff was the TEXAS company DELL!!!! Gee...that wouldn't be a little political interest there, huh!!! You note that Dell wouldn't make a peep about MS in the anti-trust trial did they...and MS is squeezing them much harder than the Dram manufactures.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[Anonymous Coward]

thank you for that link Max, what is really funny to me is that so many people are up in arms about being "ripped off" by a group that just essentially made a deal with some other groups, and yet they prob. make little to no fuss about the real rip off...paying outrageous taxes to a bloated bureaucracy that uses our money to stop voluntary transactions!

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[Anonymous Coward]

What you are missing is the fact that there is nothing in a free market left unregulated that would prevent buyers from forming cartels as well. Just as sellers can band together and say they will all set a certain price they won't go below, buyers can band together and hold back buisness saying they won't pay more than what they determine. On a similar note, this is also the reason free markets developed labor unions - suppliers (aka employers) said what they would pay for a service, and consumers (employees) band together to say this is what we require. Between the two, the free market works as it should.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[lightknight]

That might work if you had a choice of buying from EvilCo and GoodCorp, but what happens when your choices are between buying from a company that profits from foreign child labor, a company that is actively destroying the rain forest, and a company that hires a con artist as its CEO?

Start your own company, if you do not agree with their policies.

Once the choice comes down to a lesser of evils or to a cause of the month, public sentiment doesn't have any power.

Or maybe, people really do not care. I mean, having $35 shoes is more important to them than the perceived evils of foreign child labor.

Plus there is the problem of information overload.

Of course, and the solution is shifting or screening for 'relevant' data. Knowing that the CEO just bought a BMW 760li is useless. Knowing that the CEO just outsourced production to China is not.

Individuals would have a hard time keeping track of who they should be "punishing" with each purchase.

The problem with boycotts is that, like unions, in order for them to be effective, you need a lot of people doing it. Something to impact the bottomline.

The most effective way to 'fix' a company is to point out how changing in your direction is beneficial to them. Self-interest, works everytime.

For burning down the rainforest, point out how cattle exposed to the contagions therein can and will open them up to lawsuits, that their competitors beef tastes better (on proper land), and that they can actually save money by using the people and land at home.

+1 for employing people in your own country.

+1 for saving money this way (land use more efficent).

+1 for avoiding lawsuits.

Etc..

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[Stephen Ma]

What you are missing is the fact that there is nothing in a free market left unregulated that would prevent buyers from forming cartels as well.

Yep, it happened before against the cartels of Great Britain, in particular the East India Company. The revolt against the cartels was called the American Revolution.

Why do you suppose the giant cartels of your libertarian paradise would be any less reluctant to shoot people than the East India Company was? Do you really want death squads to reappear in the U.S.?

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[revscat]

The libertarian view of government should not be one of no-government, but one of government focused on protecting the life and liberty of its citizens.

Yes, and you point out the problem I have with libertarianism (besides its inherent utopianism.) I believe a good, functioning society values three things in its government: liberty, justice, and democracy. Libertarians care only for the first, and none at all for the latter two.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[Fjandr]

I wouldn't say that collusion that does not involve fraud "harms" anyone. Even if a price is high, if someone is willing to pay it then the item is obviously worth more to them than whatever amount of money they parted with.

As far as essentials go, I have a hard time buying the what-if of price fixing regarding those markets. Trying to prevent entry into an essentials market would be like trying to prevent the Amazon from flooding.

I agree that collusion does nobody any favors. Due to the nature of changing markets, it would be hard to maintain any drastic level of collusion for long.

However, I also believe that human ingenuity thrives at its best through adversity. When circumstances occur that provide adversity, there will be individuals who will adapt new or old technologies or processes to overcome whatever barrier lies before a goal. This is the basis for progress.

Current events have made it clear that the hurdles faced today are most easily crossed through the use of a corporate shield. Those with fewer scruples will always find a way to profit at the expense of others.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[Fjandr]

I'm not going to comment much on the justice part other than to say it can be arbitrary, capricious, and depends solely on the subjective opinion of each individual. It is an ideal, something to strive for but something that will rarely (if ever) be realized.

As for democracy, it is the cornerstone liberty is founded on. However, I may not be using the term democracy as you define it. I use the classical definition: all power derives solely from the people. Democracy has no further definition than that in my view. I don't want a classical democracy, where no rights exist except the right to vote, where all else is privilege subject to the public jury to decide between right and wrong.

The United States' Constitutional Republic is a 3rd tier extension of the the concept of democracy. The "republic" is a type of democracy where legislative power is delegated by the people to a certain body of individuals. After all, in a democracy it's hard to be at every public trial to make sure your voice is heard. The Constitution then narrowed the concept of republican government by implementing a set of rules that could only very rarely be changed, and then only with the overwhelming consent of the seperate legislative bodies of the Republic.

So, your all-encompassing statement that libertarians only believe in the first (of your three values) is both overly broad (for a very diverse group) and completely incorrect. I, and all the libertarians I know, believe in fighting for all three concepts. If you could explain how you came to the conclusion that libertarians don't believe in democracy, I would be interested to hear it.

All that said, which "democracy" is it that you believe should exist here? :)

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[mwood]

If all of the choices are unpleasant, then there's room for a less-offensive new competitor. The new guys will have an awful time at first, but if they accept that this is so and prepare for it, they can survive and they'll quickly win the loyalty of lots of the people who care about such things. Sometimes the bad guys take over a market, but they can't keep it forever.

But my point was not that "let the market handle its own evil players" is the *best* way to run an economy, only that it *can* be made to work. I don't think we'll actually see things done this way. As you point out, some centralization and specialization is a more effective use of our collective brainpower.

BTW, public sentiment has no power at *any* time, never had it and never will. Public *choices* are the power center of the masses. Wave signs and chant all you want, and the fat cats will just go on counting their money. But let the count come up less than last month, and suddenly you get noticed.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[mwood]

Take another look. A free market not only involves human intervention, it is composed solely and completely of human intervention. It's an emergent property of billions of individual human decisions; there is nothing else involved.

Consider also that the goal of a free market is to maximize *everybody's* profit. That includes yours. And it's a narrow view which says that profit is measured only in money. If your expectation of an early death from continued operation of Corporation X is worth more to you than the money you save because Corporation X offers the lowest price, continuing to do business with Corporation X would be irrational. If the difference is big enough, it becomes rational to make your own stuff and sell your excess capacity to like-minded people, cutting further into X' sales and reducing their impact on the world.

OTOH I do believe in intelligent regulation to add a few necessary constraints to the optimization problem and approach optimal solutions more quickly and cheaply.

Of course, then we have to keep an eye on the regulators too. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[AuMatar]

A free market not only involves human intervention, it is composed solely and completely of human intervention

Perhaps I should restate- the free market requires no centralized human intervention. There's no small group of people making all the decisions. In a complex economy, it isn't possible to do so efficiently. By distributing the process as markets do, the problems lessen.

A free market not only involves human intervention, it is composed solely and completely of human intervention

Wrong. Its to maximize your own profit. Which turns it into the world's biggest prisoner's dillema. Society as a whole would be better off with option A, but someone profits short term by goign B instead, so society gets screwed. An everyday occurence.

And it's a narrow view which says that profit is measured only in money

Thats the only thing it does mean. The problem is that you have a main goal (profit) and other goals that are not easily turned into money. How much is a human life worth? A million bucks? If I give you $1000001 will you kill someone for me then? How much is human suffering worth? These questions do NOT have monetary answers, and thus cannot be factored into a system who's ONLY purpose is to make money.

If your expectation of an early death from continued operation of Corporation X is worth more to you than the money you save because Corporation X offers the lowest price, continuing to do business with Corporation X would be irrational. If the difference is big enough, it becomes rational to make your own stuff and sell your excess capacity to like-minded people, cutting further into X' sales and reducing their impact on the world.

In a utopia maybe. In the real world it doesn't work like that. First off, the chance that you know about the issue is low, X will be hiding the information. Secodnly, it assumes you have a choice. If all the corporations are doing something, you have none. If X is a monopoly you have none. If all the competitors do Y which is just as bad, you have none.

Start a competitor yourself? Assuming you have the ability to do so (millions of dollars burning a hole in your pocket and a lot of domain knowledge, which in a complex economy like ours is HIGHLY unlikely), chances are you'll still fail- barriers to entry. I believe Monsatto is pure evil, but it would take a decade to retrain in the fields needed to compete with them, at least 50 million to do so, and even then I could hope to compete on 1-2 product lines. And I'd need to do this against every company I think is bad? Not likely. Make a million of me and its still not likely.

Like I said- these are places where markets fail. You need to use markets to distribute the decision making of the economy, but without major oversight markets prove to be a cure thats worse than the disease. Oversight in the US is nowhere near as good as it should be.

Of course, then we have to keep an eye on the regulators too.

True enough. Not much of a way around that though- wherever power is concentrated you need to be warry.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[mwood]

"Wrong. Its to maximize your own profit."

For *every* value of "you". You are looking at it from your perspective; I'm looking at it from society's perspective.

Re:Free market isn't perfect

[AuMatar]

Yes, but that doesn't make it any better. First off, as the prisoner's dillema shows, maximizing your personal profit does NOT maximize society's profits. In fact, everyone working to their own best benefit is frequently the most pessimal solution to a problem. Monopolies maximize their own profits, but society suffers from it (yes, the total value of society drrops due to it- lookup deadweight loss).

Secondly, the system is rigged. Money is ower, the more money you have the greater effect you have to change the system for your own benefit. The best way to get money is if you sacrifice all other goals for it. You get a nice positive ffeedback loop there. Those who are willing to fuck over society benefit, causing them to get money, giving them even greater leverage to continue.

Re:Does this mean memory prices will fall?

[The Clockwork Troll]

No, in fact now the high prices are legitimized because they all need to pay restitution and legal bills.

And who benefits from this?

[what_the_frell]

You can bet your cash-starved wallet it'll be the corporations DELL that will receive the compensation/benefit, and keep the RAM pricing the same for the consumers so they can continue to recoup their losses .

Re:And who benefits from this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dell never HAD any losses... they all got handed down to the consumer! Do you think Dell could be a $40 million dollar company by taknig a hit on memory prices?

Re:And who benefits from this?

[rainman_bc]

That would be true if it wasn't for the little low-margin computer shops that put downward pressure on the hardware prices.

They'll come down. The computer industry is the best indication of how capitalism can benefit the consumer. We pay stupidly low margins at computer stores.

My Head Just Exploded

[mattgarnsey]

From the article (condensed for brevity):

Infineon Technologies announced today that it has plead guilty to a single and limited charge related to the violation of US antitrust laws in connection with the pricing in its Dynamic Random Access Memory.

Infineon strongly condemns any attempt to fix or stabilize prices. Infineon is committed to vigorous and fair competition based solely on superior products and services.

It really shocks other libertarians when....

[ShatteredDream]

People like myself, who are more classical liberals than libertarians, apply Lord Acton's famous expression "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" to economics. The more wealth that is centralized in faceless organizations, the more power they have. Yet, the wealth is not to be measured in just how much cash they have, but by the position they enjoy which can be worth more than their bank accounts.

Anti-trust laws are nothing more than a way to provide a check on corporate power. They exist to keep companies, especially big corporations, from becoming in Locke's words "a law unto themselves."

Anyone who calls themself a libertarian, opposes antitrust laws and has a sympathetic view of the south in the civil war would do well to read some of the founders of the CSA's opinions on monied corporations. The short summary is that they considered them to be a plague on basic liberties and the free market and were fighting more against the corporations who saught the tariff which taxed the southern economy terribly and used the money to line the pockets of corporations, than it was for "states' rights." The major state's right was to "be free from being sucked dry by monied corporations."

I will say this about monopolies. The government creates many of these headaches that it has to later solve by having expansive IP laws which allow patent holders to rape and pillage innovators. Would someone please tell me why we can patent online shopping carts and file formats? How about business processes in general? What about things we have never even fully or at all implemented ourselves?

If the government were to be reconstituted on classical liberal values, most of these monopolies would die like vampires in the morning sunlight.

Re:It really shocks other libertarians when....

[Bequita]

Actually, Lord Acton wrote "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." It's quite commonly misquoted, the misquote is even in some books of quotations.

Just for the personal edification of /.ers everywhere :-)

Re:It really shocks other libertarians when....

[Brandybuck]

Anyone who calls themself a libertarian, opposes antitrust laws and has a sympathetic view of the south in the civil war would do well to read some of the founders of the CSA's opinions on monied corporations.

Now go look at what the CSA was complaining about. You yourself say they were seeking tariffs. The problem with the monied corporations at that time was that they were receiving *government* privilege!

Would someone please tell me why we can patent online shopping carts and file formats? How about business processes in general?

Because there are *governmnet* laws allowing this. Did you think copyrights and patents sprung magically out of Lady Liberty's forehead?

Please don't complain about freedom while pointing at government coercion.

Re:It really shocks other libertarians when....

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Thank you for this- I just revised my estimation of when corporations started to become a problem downward a few decades- and I just lost a lot of what little respect I had left for the Republican Party and President Lincoln.

Re:It really shocks other libertarians when....

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Please don't complain about freedom while pointing at government coercion.

And the problem today is that the corporations have become the real government- the politicians are largely just the puppets of the corporations. *All* government regulation is vetted by the coprorate interests first. To the detriment of the small business person and the workers.

I'd be fine with a near laisez faire system- as long as you gave every citizen a mighty big stick to whack the corporation with when they did wrong. Say, the standard punishment in court not being a money settlement, but a stock settlement instead. For 51% share taken from all current stockholders.

Re:It really shocks other libertarians when....

[killjoe]

"Would someone please tell me why we can patent online shopping carts and file formats? "

Because corporations bribed the politicians to make it so.

Re:It really shocks other libertarians when....

[Brandybuck]

I'd be fine with a near laisez faire system- as long as you gave every citizen a mighty big stick to whack the corporation with when they did wrong.

You have one already. It's called the market place. If the company pisses off the public it loses a crapload of money. Even a monopoly. It's not a perfect system (nothing is) because not everyone is going to have your particular sense of right and wrong, but it does work. When e.coli was found in some Odwalla juice, it hit Odwalla very bad. It took them a long time to get back to where they were before the incident.

For 51% share taken from all current stockholders.

Under a true laissez-faire system, there would be no corporate liability shield for the stockholders. That's purely a govenrment granted privilege. Under laissez-faire the stockholders are responsible for the actions of their company. When Exxon dumped crude oil on the Alaskan coast, one ship pilot got fired. BFD. Under a laissez faire system every stockholder would have been liable for damages and cleanup costs. Collectively it might not amount to much for each stockholder (like your grandma with one share in your pension fund), but collectively those same stockholders are going to do a heck of a lot more to keep the company on a moral even keel, simply because they're responsible for it. It's one thing to demand stock growth at any cost when you're not accountable, but it's another when you ARE accountable.

Re:It really shocks other libertarians when....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I'm sure those corporations really were there bribing those politicians when the fucking constitution was written.

Re:It really shocks other libertarians when....

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yes I remember in the constitution where it said IP should be patentable.

Re:It really shocks other libertarians when....

[Anonymous Coward]

Article I section 8.

Re:It really shocks other libertarians when....

[Fjandr]

It's funny (and due to big-government-sponsored education) that anyone has a good opinion of Lincoln at all. Lincoln was about preserving the Union at any cost. Lincoln would have butchered his own mother and sold her for stew meat if it meant keeping the Union together. The Emancipation Proclamation didn't free the slaves. It freed Southern slaves, and only so long as they fought for the North. All anyone has to do is actually RTFP (read the fucking proclamation :) to know that.

The hypocrisy of calling Lincoln an abolitionist is engraved into history so deeply it can only be hidden by complete ignorance and apathy!

It amazes me how few people realize that the Civil War was more about tariffs than slavery. It's like saying we invaded Iraq to free the Iraqi people. It's post-war spin. Putting a positive face on otherwise completely ulterior motives.

I'm not saying that there were not positive results from either action, but I also like to point out blatant propaganda when I see it.

Re:It really shocks other libertarians when....

[Marxist Hacker 42]

You have one already. It's called the market place. If the company pisses off the public it loses a crapload of money. Even a monopoly. It's not a perfect system (nothing is) because not everyone is going to have your particular sense of right and wrong, but it does work. When e.coli was found in some Odwalla juice, it hit Odwalla very bad. It took them a long time to get back to where they were before the incident.

Losing money isn't enough- a good businessman simply sets his price high enough to cover such blips. The stockholders need to be hit, and hit hard, when businesses do bad things.

Under a true laissez-faire system, there would be no corporate liability shield for the stockholders. That's purely a govenrment granted privilege. Under laissez-faire the stockholders are responsible for the actions of their company. When Exxon dumped crude oil on the Alaskan coast, one ship pilot got fired. BFD. Under a laissez faire system every stockholder would have been liable for damages and cleanup costs. Collectively it might not amount to much for each stockholder (like your grandma with one share in your pension fund), but collectively those same stockholders are going to do a heck of a lot more to keep the company on a moral even keel, simply because they're responsible for it. It's one thing to demand stock growth at any cost when you're not accountable, but it's another when you ARE accountable.

And that's where I like laissez-faire, because THIS is a big enough stick.

FINALLY!

[Silverlancer]

For the past 2-3 years, RAM prices haven't dropped--they've gone up. The RAM that I bought with my current computer costs MORE now than it did when I bought it a year ago, and not only that--its crap quality too! Its supposedly PC3700, but won't hit PC3700 speeds on stock timings even with extra voltage!

This is one of the few great examples where we get to love the American legal system ;)

Re:FINALLY!

[tukkayoot]

I doubt you'll see any change, as the article mentions that the price fixing was limited to certain OEMs between 1999 to 2002.

Re:FINALLY!

[Zed2K]

PC3700 isn't a standard speed. The only way to get that speed is via overclocking which voids your warrenty. So basically you are saying that you can't get your PC to use memory that it isn't rated for but you blame the memory maker?

Re:FINALLY!

[Silverlancer]

By selling RAM as PC3700, they guarantee that it can be overclocked to that level. Its part of the warranty. Overclocking to that level does not void the warranty. Read their warranty ;).

Re:FINALLY!

[Zed2K]

Actually the ram is not what is causing the problem, its the motherboard, chipset and processor. To run at PC3700 (non standard by the way) speeds means that everything else has to be tweaked as well. There are no guarantees that PC3700 memory will work on certain motherboards and chipsets. The memory maybe rated to that level but thats the only thing that is.

Re:FINALLY!

[Silverlancer]

No, I set the RAM to a 4:5 ratio so that the processor/mobo wouldn't be a limiting factor. Still failed before PC3700.

Re:FINALLY!

[Stevyn]

But the effects can last longer than the act itself. The in the oil crisis in the 70's the drought didn't last two long, but the high prices lasted years. Some economists believe we're still feeling the effects.

Re:FINALLY!

[NeoSkandranon]

If the warranty isn't voided, why not RMA it and try again?

Re:FINALLY!

[Silverlancer]

Too lazy. My mobo is shit anyway and won't let me change the voltages on my CPU, so it won't help much to get better RAM when my system can't overclock for shit. Just might as well wait for a new A64 system...

Dell referred to the memory makers as a cartel....

[ARRRLovin]

.....no wonder their memory upgrades are so expensive. They should have just bought DRAM from Crucial. ;)

Still.

[ShizCakes]

This fine may be huge, but will we see a benefit from it? Probably not.

Re:Still.

[Anonymous Cowpat]

Benefit?
What are you smoking?

They now have $160million less to sink into R&D or charging less for their RAM. Either that or the innocent geeks who work for them take a wage cut. Yay!

Conflict of Interest

[jmulvey]

"Infineon has agreed to pay a $160m fine to the US government"

Once again, the companies profit and the US government gets cash... and joe six-pack gets screwed. I mean, with the government receiving all these settlements from Microsoft and the tobacco companies... why aren't our taxes going down?

The US government has more than a bit of conflict of interest in its role as protector of the public from price-fixing and monopolies, yet recipient of huge settlements when they are allowed to grow and blossom.

I'm sure Infineon, a company that has annual GROSS PROFITS of over $2 BILLION USD a year made a hell of a lot more that $160m. So Infineon makes out, and the government makes out.

But where's my money? You remember me, the guy that got ripped off?

Re:Conflict of Interest

[srwalter]

why aren't our taxes going down?

They are. Remember that big tax cut that Bush and the Republican Congress gave you? I guess you don't.

Re:Conflict of Interest

[Zed2K]

"why aren't our taxes going down?"

Mine did. Tax tables changed, I took more money home. I bought a house, deductable interest, even lower taxes. Don't know what you problem is.

Re:Conflict of Interest

[pavon]

...why aren't our taxes going down?

Uhm, they have gone down. Of course that is completely unrealated, and the real answer to your question is that these settlements are a drop in the bucket compared to the budget of the federal government.

But where's my money? You remember me, the guy that got ripped off?

So how do you propose effectively redistributing that money to thousands of people? Challenges: You don't know who they are or how to contact them. The amount that each person was overchared is fairly inconcequential (what $20 per stick of RAM), and the settlement was for far less than that. Unless the amount owed to each person is in the hundreds or thousands, administrating the claim procedure would end up costing more than the settlement itself.

The US government has more than a bit of conflict of interest in its role as protector of the public from price-fixing and monopolies, yet recipient of huge settlements when they are allowed to grow and blossom.

This I agree with. It is my opinion that the best thing to do with this money is to simply have it cease to exist. Stay with me here :) The government already regulates the total supply of money by how much it prints, and how much banks borrow from it (depending on FED interest rates). So there is no reason that we can't simply have this money disappear, and if it is an amount that will have any influence at all on the total economy (unlikely) then the FED can simply adjust to account for that.

But yeah, the government should not be allowed to keep money from fines, nor should taxes be used to modify the behavior of companies - fines should.

Re:Conflict of Interest

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Sometimes the little guy wins.

Ever get one of those class action settlements where you get a nice $5 or so "windfall"? Almost everyone has.

The little guy wins - notice I didn't say the little guy wins a fair amount.

Re:Conflict of Interest

[jsebrech]

Remember that big tax cut that Bush and the Republican Congress gave you?

The people that got most of that taxcut have better things to do than read slashdot, like having that orgy with those supermodels on their private yacht.

Re:Conflict of Interest

[srwalter]

Yeah, because they pay disproportionately more taxes than you do.

But I'm sure to you it makes perfect sense for people who paid less in to the government to get more back.

Re:Conflict of Interest

[Marxist Hacker 42]

When I figured it out in comparison to how much my county & city & state had to raise local taxes to keep the schools open through unfunded federal mandates, that "big tax cut" became a "big tax raise". Story is pretty much the same in any county/state/city that isn't borrowing from the future instead- and you'll have to pay for that borrowing too in the long run, plus interest.

Re:Conflict of Interest

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Tell me- do you pay property taxes for schools on that house? If you do, what is your tax bill now compared with historically? Mine went up so much that it more than swallowed the extra take home pay.

Re:Conflict of Interest

[jsebrech]

But I'm sure to you it makes perfect sense for people who paid less in to the government to get more back.

It does make sense to me. The reason it makes sense is the US's record income inequality, which when graphed details how over the last few decades the rich have gotten richer at the expense of the poor. Being rich is not a character flaw, but when 40 million people don't have affordable healthcare you have to ask yourself where the real priorities of a country lie: to the rich, or to human rights. Progressive taxation exists for a reason, to make sure the lowest rungs of society get access to their human rights, like healthcare, like education, like justice, and so on. If you do away with progressive taxation, you might as well do away with government entirely, because there is no purpose to government without income redistribution (everything else can be privatized, justice included).

Re:Conflict of Interest

[srwalter]

You faultily assume that healthcare and education are human rights.

Further, how can you say the rich get richer "at the expense" of the poor?

Further, the rich still pay for the majority of taxes even without progressive taxation. Under a flat tax, the rich, though paying an equal /percentage/ of their income, pay more real cash. Everyone should share the burden equally.

Mind you, I'm all for exempting the first 20-30k of income under a flat tax (which makes it act kinda like a progressive tax, but not really).

Re:Conflict of Interest

[sexylicious]

They are. Remember that big tax cut that Bush and the Republican Congress gave you? I guess you don't.

Nope. I don't remember any tax cut. I made 50K at my last job and had to pay 9310 in federal income tax.

I started a new job last March and will make about the same. My taxes are still going to be about 9310. Where was that tax break again?

You know what? I think my dad got a tax break from the previous year. It was $125. And he has made just a little under 50K for a while.

Instead of Bush writing out changes to give tax breaks to small businesses and upper income folks, he should put something down that eliminates taxes for folks that are at or below the poverty line for income. Then again, I suppose if you can tax 40 million people that are making less than 10,000 per year a dollar each, you've just acquired 40 million dollars. *snicker*

You know, before about 1930 the US taxed only the rich. Many people had small businesses, people were generally happy (minus the occasional labor riot), and the government ran itself just fine. I can understand that WWII changed a lot of things, such as changed congress' mind about the middle class, but the system could be better if it were more fair. Taxing only the rich doesn't make sense, because it could drive the rich away. Taxing the poor doesn't make sense for obvious reasons. Taxing the mostly the middle class puts the burden on the majority of the people, but it also creates some unrest.

The best thing to do would be to push for a tax schedule that scales with what you earn, instead of stopping at 35% for people that make more than a couple a hundred thousand a year. Or make everyone pay 25% or 30% in taxes that earn over the poverty line for your area (scaled up as you move away from the poverty level, of course).

Cutting federal taxes, which sucks money promised away from local and state communities or federal programs, hurts the people still. Those people are paying higher property, income, or sales taxes to make up for the shortfall.

Re:Conflict of Interest

[elpapacito]

healthcare and education may not be part of human rights on the paper, but they should be as they are in reality services you can't really do without.

Healthcare..tell me how are you supposed to work while you're being cured ? What if you worked your ass off but you still don't have money to pay for your healthcare because there was a price hike ? What if you didn't smoke or drink or have a reckless behavior and got sick nonetheless ? What if the insurance scams you and you don't have money to pay the lawyer to fight em ?

Education..you wanna remain a brute ? Look at the situation in any piss poor country with poor education..they're practically slaves of anybody who knows more then them. Also, lack of education makes them easier targets for religious zealots, you want to have more terrorists ?

And I won't ever bother comment about what you think you know about taxation. Everyone should share the burned equally, but they're not to be equallty educated or they health shouldn't equally be taken care of. I see, some people is more equal then others....

Re:Conflict of Interest

[jale37]

The fines all go into a fund that goes to all victim's of crime. Contrary to popular belief, the DOJ does not collect any of the funds. Under the Victim's of Crime Act of 1984, here's where the money goes:

• Crisis intervention.
• Emergency shelter.
• Emergency transportation.
• Counseling.
• Criminal justice advocacy.

Victim's of Crime Act of 1984
Title 42 USC Section 10601 establishes the Crime Victim's Fund

"There shall be deposited in the fund ALL fines collected from the person's convicted of offenses against the state"

This applies to cases that are settled as well. As you can see, we all benefit indirectly.

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/ovc/publications/factshts /vocacvf/fs_vocacvf.html

Re:Conflict of Interest

[Inebrius]

I used to think like that...

They rich pay the exact same proportion on their taxes that I do and sometimes less (for equal amounts earned). For the first 10k earned, we pay the same amount. For the next 20k earned, we also pay the same amount. This is true for all levels of income.

So for someone that makes 50k vs someone that makes 350k, both pay the same tax for the first 50k earned. Percentage wise, the wealthier person may contribute a higher percentage due to the progressive nature, but they are also keeping a much greater amount overall.

Often, the wealthy pay less since they have access to more tax deductions and writeoffs (much like the poor), and the ones that get screwed are the middle class.

I support the tax cuts, that effect the first 100k in income. The wealthy would get the same tax break that everybody gets due to the progressive nature of taxes, but would not get breaks that most of us never earn enough to see.

Re:Conflict of Interest

[Anonymous Coward]

why aren't our taxes going down?

Because $160m is about 50 cents per American citizen.

Re:Conflict of Interest

[srwalter]

Well, when Bush was running, he proposed exactly that--that everyone below the poverty line be dropped from the tax rolls. Why Congress' budget didn't contain that provision is the result of some political reasoning or other.

I agree with you, though, that a flat tax above the poverty line would be a great restructuring of the federal tax system.

Re:Conflict of Interest

[srwalter]

I agree that the government /should/ educate the populace, as it is something that benefits the nation at large, and does come with some "free-rider" economical effects that can be alleviated through government funding.

I still maintain that it is not a "right" in the same way that freedom of speech and the right to bears arms is.

As for healthcare, it isn't the government's job to oversee healthcare. It simply cannot be done in an efficient way. I won't defend our current healthcare system, as it is a mockery of free-markets, but Nationalizing it is only going to push it further in the wrong direction.

And don't say that Canada and Europe have great healthcare systems. They are no better than the US's, and are less efficient.

Re:Conflict of Interest

[Max Coffee]

My taxes went way down since my job got outsourced!

Re:Conflict of Interest

[Anonymous Coward]

So what's your problem, Marxist Hacker 42? You're not supposed to have any disposable income, Marxist Hacker 42. You're supposed to be provided by the Dictatorship of The Proletariat (the State), because they^W we know better than you, Marxist Hacker 42, what to do with your^W our money.
Property taxes? What property? Proletarians cannot have property.

Re:Conflict of Interest

[Heywood Jablonski]

"Infineon has agreed to pay a $160m fine to the US government"

... why aren't our taxes going down?

Because $160m pays for less than one day of the war in Iraq.

Re:Does this mean memory prices will fall?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you fail it ;( boo

Re:Does this mean memory prices will fall?

[mr_spatula]

Sure. Just like CD prices fell after the CD price fixing settlemet... oh, wait...

Then I guess this will be like my rates with progressive going lower after they had the class action law suit over adjusting rates based on credit... oh, wait... that didn't happen either.

The only peopel to benefit from this will be the lawyers and the major companies - the rest of us will be lucky to get a coupon for a dollar off.

Sounds to me like Crucialcould do this cheaper

[IronChefMorimoto]

They paid over $150 million for fixing RAM prices? [wink wink]

Damn. I would've thought a Crucial.com web programmer or database technician could've done that pretty easily by having each stick of RAM on the website subtract, say, $20 - $30.

That's what? $22.50 for the hour spent making the change? Hell -- even cheaper if Crucial.com outsources its website/database operations to Bangalore.

IronChefMorimoto

No, That's Impossible

[srwalter]

Every good slashdotter should realize that this is impossible. Theregister must just be trying to pull one over on us. I mean, clearly the Bush Administration is in the pocket of Corporations, and would never allow this to happen to big business. Obviously, the story is a farce.

Re:No, That's Impossible

[HarveyBirdman]

I know you are kidding, but it's a view held seriously by many over-politicized geeks. I had one at work last month whine about how all the "Enron guys got off scot-free". I pointed him to a web page detailing the indictments and convictions already handed down, along with exactly how complex the case was (hence the delay as cases were prepared), and a little mention of "innocent until proven guilty".

You should have seen the retarded idiot go through multiple waves of ideological panic in trying to fit the facts into his monochromatic world view. Truly a scary sight. He kept trying to filter and twist the information. A world where Bush was President and Enron executives got punished simply could not exist in his tiny, broken mind.

I used to think ideology was a mental illness, but these days I think it's just the may most people's brains are wired. It's going to take another 9 million years to evolve away. So, 9 million more years of total and complete fuckheadedness from the bulk of humanity, day in and day out.

C'moooon asteroid!

Re:No, That's Impossible

[DF5JT]

"Every good slashdotter should realize that this is impossible. Theregister must just be trying to pull one over on us. I mean, clearly the Bush Administration is in the pocket of Corporations, and would never allow this to happen to big business. Obviously, the story is a farce."

None of these companies involved in the price fixing is American, they only have subsidies in the US. Any profit after taxes will not be to the benefit of the Bushites, which makes them a perfect target.

Infineon is a German company and the government will be happy to take an additional 160 Mio. from any foreign company that it thinks misbehaves.

Re:No, That's Impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

Robert Bryce: By my count, the Bush campaign used Enron's jets at least a dozen times during the campaign. However, the critical use came during the Florida Recount. According to the campaign's IRS filings, Enron's jets were used 4 different times during the period that covers the recount. That period was crucial because time was of the essence.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3 65 18-2004Jul8.html

Thats why.

Re:No, That's Impossible

[corngrower]

Micron Technology was mentioned. It is an American company based in Boise, Idaho.

Re:No, That's Impossible

[drinkypoo]

That guy was a wanker. Everyone knows if you want credibility you have to complain about Halliburton. :)

Re:No, That's Impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

you got it all backwards, those companies fell behind on their "protection" services from the bush admin, Now kiss Don Cheney's ring and get out!

Re:No, That's Impossible

[Stephen Ma]

I mean, clearly the Bush Administration is in the pocket of Corporations, and would never allow this to happen to big business.

You're right, Bush wouldn't let it happen -- except when a business even bigger than Infineon or Micron starts complaining. Then Bush sides with the bigger one (Dell).

Re:No, That's Impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

Infineon is partely owned by Siemens, a German concern.

Infineon Financial Stuff / Payments

[webword]

Interestingly, there is a press release on this topic on the Infineon web site. Please note a discrepancy between what the Register says and what their press release says...

Register: "Infineon has agreed to pay a $160m fine to the US government for fixing the price of computer memory from 1999 to 2002, one of the biggest ever penalties imposed by the DoJ's Antitrust division."

Infineon: "The wrongdoing charged by the DoJ was limited to certain OEM customers. Infineon is already been in contact with these customers and has achieved or is in the process of achieving settlements with all of these OEM customers."

So, is the government getting the money or the OEMs. Note that either way, the trickle down to regular folks (i.e., you!) will take a long time.

p.s. I love this quote from the Infineon press release: "Infineon strongly condemns any attempt to fix or stabilize prices. Infineon is committed to vigorous and fair competition based solely on superior products and services."

Infineon 0, U.S. Department of Justice 1.

Re:Infineon Financial Stuff / Payments

[mahart]

http://www.eetimes.com/semi/news/showArticle.jhtml ;?articleId=47208507

"In July, Infineon indicated it would set aside $250 million to settle potential legal liabilities from the investigation."

They still have $90M in change left over from what they thought they might have to pay... it sounds like its possible they may be ahead even after the fine...

And there's still Rambus to deal with

[optimus2861]

The latest info I can find dates from around May, but Infineon is one of the DRAM makers facing a patent-infringement lawsuit from Rambus, and if that doesn't go well for them (Rambus had an initial setback but has been getting favourable rulings since; anyone who wants to cry "submarine patent!" better read up on the history, it's nowhere near that cut-and-dry) they could very well go under. I think they will lose it, and get hit with willful infringment for triple damages, which will easily run the damages into the billions. I doubt Infineon could absorb that.

Re:And there's still Rambus to deal with

[Bender_]

The gist of that trial is that rambus patentend parts of a public JEDEC spec before they were published. And it seems very likely that the Rambus people knew of the Jedec specs. In fact Rambus has the entire memory industry against them, very unlikely they win.

hope we get ram. some type of certificate

[beefcake101]

How do I benefit? hope we get ram instead of like a $5 check . i could always use more ram . hope something like bring this in to get your free 256 stick or 512 stick

Word dectives saw this case coming...

[LostCluster]

They just broke down the company name to Infineon...

Big cartel, this one? Pffft.

[SenorCitizen]

If you want a *big* international anti-trust case, just try sueing OPEC.

How are they any different?

Re:Big cartel, this one? Pffft.

[james_moriarty]

>If you want a *big* international anti-trust >case, just try sueing OPEC.
>How are they any different?

Um, plenty. They control the world's supply of oil (which is finite) by setting oil-pumping quotas. If they didn't, the situation would quickly become a "race-to-the-bottom": the faster they pump oil, the lower market values and the sooner they'd run out.

On the other hand, Infineon is guilty of more traditional forms of price fixing.

As a side note, I'd like to point out the US has (basically) run out domestic oil. I don't know the full history behind it, but I suspect OPEC is taking notes.

Of course, if we drove smaller cars and built more effecient homes our energy uses would be lower.. but I'm not in charge of the world (yet). The point is I don't have much sympathy for the anti-OPEC crowd.

-g

Re:Big cartel, this one? Pffft.

[Cecil]

Because they're a group of countries, not a business, and countries aren't subject to any sort of anti-trust law. They're free to do whatever they want with the their own resources, including gouging other countries. It's one of the wonderful rights you get by being a soverign country.

I realize that globalization is busy blurring the line between the two sets of entities, but at the moment businesses don't have militaries.

That's the real difference.

Re:Big cartel, this one? Pffft.

[drinkypoo]

I realize that globalization is busy blurring the line between the two sets of entities, but at the moment businesses don't have militaries.

It's a good thing, too. However, that day is probably coming. I believe this much of the "dark future" scenarios that we find in the much-maligned (usually deservingly so) "cyberpunk" genre: Some governments are going to collapse. Some corporations are going to become sovereign powers. And it's going to go very, very badly. Hopefully it will only be a fad...

Re:Big cartel, this one? Pffft.

[Deliveranc3]

Um Opec can charge whatever they want because they are countries countries don't really have rules because there is no one to enforce them.

Contrary to what some states would have you belive they have no moral right to question any other state.

Re:Big cartel, this one? Pffft.

[Cecil]

Well, being "out" of oil never really happens since current recovery technology only allows us to get about 20% (on average) of the existing oil out of the ground, but as far as oil production, yes, most of the domestic U.S. oil fields are either unviable fields (there's a break even point where it costs more to produce a barrel of oil than you get for selling it) or very mature (fields that have produced most of their recoverable oil, have therefore lost most of their pressure, and are only pumping a tiny fraction of what they were at their peak)

A lot of this is because the first oil well was drilled in the U.S. and the U.S. quickly became a leader in the process. It took about 40 years after that before oil was discovered in most of the middle east.

But yeah. I work in the oil and gas industry (aka Pure Evil Incorporated), and I don't have much sympathy for the anti-OPEC crowd either, because I think they're actually surprisingly reasonable. Sure, they're artificially keeping the price high (albeit still reasonable enough for people to buy it, apparently), but like you said, the alternative is much worse for them and for everyone. s/oil/(some endangered but useful-to-hunt animal)/ and the reason they act the way they do becomes more clear.

Besides, I know that if I was in their position, I'd be much less reasonable than they are about pricing and market demands, heh. ;)

Re:Big cartel, this one? Pffft.

[Cecil]

Yeah, thinking back on the rise of the military-industrial complex in the U.S. it certainly had the potential to turn that way. Companies like Lockheed-Martin, Northrop-Grumman, Rockwell, and others *did* basically have a military. Fortunately they just considered it inventory for them to sell, and not something more sinister.

Thankfully, the way it turned out it just provides reinforcement for my idea that any sufficiently sneaky conspiracy is impossible, because the government, and companies, are too stupid to think that far ahead.

Re:Big cartel, this one? Pffft.

[cr0sh]

However, that day is probably coming.

Actually, that day has already been there, done that - look into the East India Company, circa 17th century. Basically a large "multinational" corporation with its own Navy and Army. More or less ruled India in the day, and controlled major trading routes (shipping). Its rule lasted for 200 years, until the British finally stepped up to the plate and dissolved the company.

History - learn it or repeat it. It happenned then, it could easily happen today (some might say it *is* happenning). Also, witness the rise of corporate military training and weapons systems suppliers, along with corporate mercenary squads (DeBeers, anyone?)...

Re:Big cartel, this one? Pffft.

[Entropy2016]

"As a side note, I'd like to point out the US has (basically) run out domestic oil.
I don't know the full history behind it, but I suspect OPEC is taking notes."

You're right about one part.
You don't know the full story behind it. We [in the United States] have not "basically" run out of domestic oil.
(A better word could have been "effectively")

We probably import about 60% from the middle east, and as for the remaining 40%, most of that probably comes from deep-sea oil-platforms that drill at the bottom of the oceans. (Those numbers are my very rough guesses, so don't cite them). Deep-sea oil is preferable in many ways since it's extremely difficult for terrorists to attack the platforms, oil-lines, or oil-tankers. Also, politics is less of an obstacle when you're in international waters.

Also, oil-reservoirs are not quite as finite as some think. I've heard a story from reservoir-engineer about a well that was sucked dry and abandoned. Several years later, they tried to take a core-sample of rock from the well to study something nearby and they shockingly discovered its oil AND pressure had returned to normal. They never understood how.

America does have oil-reserves that we could tap into if need be (but they're not big enough in the long-run). The reason we don't use them is because they're supposed to be kept in case we're forced to go cold-turkey off of middle-eastern oil.

Imagine that the Saudi King decides he wants to completely stop selling oil to America (not to juice us up for when he sells again, but rather to ruin us). We would then drill into up our "off-limits" oil reserves in a desperate, but unsustainable effort to compensate. Even if we were to start manufacturing viable hydrogen-fuel cells & cars the day Saudi Arabia abandons us, we probably wouldn't survive.

One of these domestic oil reserves is in the famous/infamous arctic-wildlife-refuge. Sadly, Cheney/Bush want to drill in the arctic-wildlife refuge (and similar places). This isn't sad just because of environmental issues, but mostly because Cheney/Bush are willing to risk our country's long-term survival just so that oil prices will drop, and people will be happy in time for re-election day.
Remember that the next time they claim they're tougher on national-security.

Re:Big cartel, this one? Pffft.

[globalar]

Many oil companies are nationalized, that is state-owned. There is no law, to my knowledge, which has scaled to that many countries with any type of practical results (at arguably impractical costs). In any kind of proceding, we might throw more than a few oil-exporting countries into civil war, not to mention oil-importing countries. We could push some countries to military action. The war in Iraq might be academic compared to the complexity of this kind of international action.

The WTO has no real mechanism or precendent against such a massive operation and international law isn't solid. Some countries critical to oil and OPEC, like Saudi Arabia, are only observer members. Therefore, no organization has real oversight, experience, the framework, or legitimacy to talk down to OPEC.

Also, the oil market is fairly inelastic - demand is not suddenly going to fall simply because price rises. OPEC obviously knows this intimately. There is room for OPEC to broker with the world and come out winning (financially).

Realistically, it's in the best interest of the world in whole to go after OPEC, but it is not in the interest of individual countries or even a group of countries, not even the U.S. to push it. Self-interest will keep coalitions from forming, and as long as oil is finite yet priced to sell, OPEC can simply bargain it's relations.

In a way, it is different, though we can still apply the same principles, we may not have the ability to realize them. And right now we don't.

Re:Big cartel, this one? Pffft.

[Lord_Dweomer]

Businesses don't have militaries?

Lets not forget about BlackwaterUSA which IS a business military, currently hired by our government.

Re:Big cartel, this one? Pffft.

[james_moriarty]

>You're right about one part.
>You don't know the full story behind it.

Well I'm in good company, apparently ;)

>We probably import about 60% from the middle east, and as for the remaining 40%, most of that

I'd be interested in seeing the actual numbers. I know the US is still producing some oil, and I know we [Canada] produce more oil than we consume.. the balance of which is exported to the US. (That's not completely true: I believe most of it is exported and oil for consumption is re-important. I still can't believe this happens.

Anyways, my point was the US oil production has passed its peak--something that was unthinkable 50 years ago. (Wasn't there a story on /. about the guy who predicted it and was laughed down?)

-g

Re:Big cartel, this one? Pffft.

[g-doo]

I think that OPEC is different in that they don't charge a ridiculously higher price than the expected price. My guess is that RAM prices were inflated by a much larger percent than oil prices.

Re:Big cartel, this one? Pffft.

[Barto]

They have guns, missiles and bombs.

That's how OPEC are different.

Antitrust!

[Exmet Paff Daxx]

Now let me state the present rules,"
The lawyer then went on,
"These very simple guidelines,
You can rely upon:
Your gouging on your prices if
You charge more than the rest.
But it's unfair competition if
You think you can charge less!
"A second point that we would make
To help avoid confusion...
Don't try to charge the same amount,
That would be Collusion!
You must compete. But not too much,
For if you do you see,
Then the market would be yours -
And that's Monopoly!

- The Incredible Bread Machine

There are no rules, save "Don't Succeed". Gotta love America - they love capitalism, and someday they intend to give it a go.

Re:Antitrust!

[drinkypoo]

A slow and steady rate of progress shared by all is good for everyone. I frankly don't see anything wrong with that. Of course, it's kind of socialist, but then again, we've seen the results when one corporation is allowed to run amuck and it's never been pretty.

Re:First post

[Anonymous Coward]

You posted a huge 2 mins (minimum 62 secs) after the first one. How fucking slow do you type!

OPEC?

[Foo2rama]

Call me dumb, but how is this different then what OPEC does? A small group of people set prices on what everyone pays for a commidity. After which they make a huge amount of money.

Re:OPEC?

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference, my child, is that OPEC is an international entity with no "place of business" in the United States. As such, they have no need to obey U.S. Anti-trust laws in exactly the way the average U.S. citizen has no need of obeying the laws of the United Arab Emirates.

--AC

This is good for rambus..

[MasterDater]

Too bad they've already been pushed out of the PC ram business. Hey, shit happens, right?

Re:This is good for rambus..

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, it sounds like your knowledge of the memory industry is as lame as your nickname is.....

Rambus never manufactured anything, they are an IP company and licensed their memory to technologies to other companies to manufacture.

Infineon even manufactured Rambus RIMM's

http://www.infineon.com/cmc_upload/documents/040 /1 65/HYR16xx49G.pdf

Re:This is good for rambus..

[deaddeng]

Actual, he's not far off. Remember how SDRAM prices dropped like a rock beginning in 1999, as Intel released the i820 chipset, and kept dropping well below production costs as the i850 (first and for a year only P-4 chipset) was introducted. Didn't it seem odd that while Samsung made handsome profits on RDRAM--as the only volume producer--the rest of the industry lost its collective ass? Yet none of them (excepting Elpida, which was spun off from Toshiba and Hitachi) ever made RDRAM, even though all of them had licenses?

Finally, in 2002, Intel introduced the first non-RDRAM chipsets for the P-4, and memory prices immediately spiked. That's when Mikey Dell went to the DoJ. Funny how he didn't complain in the previous 2-3 years when Dell was buying memory for peanuts as a result of the same collusion.

The conspiracy to fix and control DRAM prices was the same conspiracy to exclude Rambus and ensure the failue of RDRAM. Same people, working through the same mechanism (JEDEC, the SLDRAM consortium, AMI, etc). They depressed DRAM prices to drive competitors out of business and prevent RDRAM from ramping, then inflated SDRAM and DDR-SDRAM prices as soon as RDRAM was eliminated as a competitor. Wasn't it odd that DDR-SDRAM was introduced in 2001-2002 at the same price-per-density as SDRAM? Normally, new memory technologies sell at a premium.

Infineon is just the first to plead guilty of an illegal conspiracy. Just remember that the conspiracy ran for years, and its first target was Rambus. With the DoJ victory in pocket, Rambus is greatly strengthened in it's own antitrust suit against the same companies--which is totally independent of the infringment trials against Infineon, Micron, and Hynix. Rambus could lose on patent infringment and still win on antitrust with all of the DoJ investigation results part of the public record. Most of this came to light in the FTC trial, which like the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, supported Rambus' contentions of an illegal conspiracy.

Re:Dell referred to the memory makers as a cartel.

[mwood]

Um, isn't Crucial a Micron label? :-/

China executes its white collar criminals...

[dhakk]

There is the other side of the coin of course, as I found the article I had first read on the execution of four bankers:

http://money.cnn.com/2004/09/14/news/international /china_banks.reut/?cnn=yes

Best line in it is: 'Legal experts have proposed what they call a "kill fewer, kill carefully" policy for nonviolent crimes.'

Gives me the warm fuzzies all over.

Re:China executes its white collar criminals...

[DAldredge]

In China they only kill those that have fallen out of favor with those in power or those that brag about it too much.

Just look at the billions in wages that companies in china haven't paid the people in the poorer areas of the country. Just google for it.

Re:China executes its white collar criminals...

[dhakk]

Absolutely agree with you. The true cause is a different (political as opposed to a sense of justice). I'm just saying be careful what you wish for...

and more importantly that punishment should suit the crime (as long as not cruel). Namely in these cases perhaps a suitable non-cruel crime would be personal responsibility to the CEO/Decision maker/Board members involved in the fixation as opposed to fining the company.

Something like - forfiture of all asset increases since the price fixation began... or perhaps more harsh -- forcing them to work as a volunteer for 15 years or something. I'm not sure Jail-time means anything to these people, whereas financial consequences might.

Re:China executes its white collar criminals...

[orim]

I fully support this. All these execs/bankers/etc who are stealing money...

1) they are stealing from somebody, everybody

2) people usually work for their money. while some of us are lucky to to enjoy our jobs, we still *have to* work to be able to eat. we spend a good portion of our life working.

3) somebody steals our money, they've just stolen our time, which in sufficient quantities could equal working our entire lifetime.

4) when they've just stolen enough money to equal the national average salary * national average working lifespan, they've stolen a life. That's when we execute the bastards.
(in 2002, that was $33,252.09 * 40years = works out to about $1.3 million)
I'd propose making them work it off, but keeping people in prison costs us money vs. making us money.

I think we should have more than a few executions for this shit in the US. It's about time.

So how do you vote?

[2nd Post!]

Do you act with all your power to reduce your own taxes?

Government's primary purpose is to further itself. Any entity's primary purpose has to be, else said entity would cease.

It's secondary purpose, then, is to govern, ie regulate and control it's people.
It's third perpose would be to a side effect of the second, and that is benefit those goverened.

Re:So how do you vote?

[Elithris]

Governments PRIMARY purpose is to serve the people. You're talking about a corporation. The government is suppose to be run by the people to benefit the people, not just to exist. Where did you learn YOUR American values?

Re:So how do you vote?

[2nd Post!]

The primary reason they EXIST is to serve the people.

But in purely abstract terms, any entity that does not see to it's own existence first and foremost is going to stop existing pretty soon.

Replace the term 'entity' with government, church, corporation, committee, cooperative, etc.

Oftentimes the best method to ensure continued existence is to offer a service people want. Corporations receive money for their services, so even by your own logic, a corporation's PRIMARY purpose is to serve the people. The more people served, the more money earned. The more people satisfied, the higher they can charge for their services.

There is no exclusion here.

Re:Does this mean memory prices will fall?

[Lord Kano]

Sure. Just like CD prices fell after the CD price fixing settlemet... oh, wait...

You can get new releases at Best Buy and Circuit City for like $13. It wasn't like that 5 years ago.

LK

The reason for this

[IGnatius T Foobar]

The real reason for this: Windows Longhorn is going to require an obscene amount of memory, so Microsoft's new bought-and-paid-for friends in the DOJ are making sure RAM chips are inexpensive.

Reasonable prices now?

[Guspaz]

Does this mean that companies like Dell (Any big computer company really) will stop charging five times more than retail for memory upgrades?

I tried to price it on Dell's site for notebooks. In retail, 2x256 is the same price as 1x512, more or less. (All prices that follow are Canadian)

Dell charges 200$ for the DIFFERENCE between them.

To upgrade from 2x256 to 2x512, they charge 600$. They should be charging about 150$. When I purchased a DDR333 512MB SODIMM, I paid 144$.

Now, even when using ultra-premium ram (Which they don't), there's a big difference between 144$ and 600$.

Why do we fine coporations and jail humans?

[nlinecomputers]

If I personally break the law I will probably be incarcerated for my crimes. Yet a corporation who's only job is to make more money then it spends simply pays a fine. If I am in jail I can't earn any money or perform any deeds outside of a very limited set of rules. Corporations shouldn't be fined. They should be forced to shutdown or even be disbanded.

Re:Why do we fine coporations and jail humans?

[Wylfing]

If I personally break the law I will probably be incarcerated for my crimes. Yet a corporation who's only job is to make more money then it spends simply pays a fine.

I will probably get bombed into karma hell for disagreeing with this easy-to-buy-into opinion. However, if corporations were held to the same standard of liability as individual citizens then businesses would be extremely hesitant to engage in any new ventures. It's easy to demonstrate that the resultant loss of investment spending would tank the economy rather quickly.

Now I do agree with the spirit of the comment, which if I may boldly rephrase is: executives should be liable in equal measure for willful acts of breaking or flouting the law with corporations that they helm. The sad part is that this is already true, but our Attorneys General do not generally go after such infractions, preferring to bust MP3 traders instead.

Re:Why do we fine coporations and jail humans?

[Anonymous Coward]

When you are jailed, only your household suffers since you won't be able to provide for your family when you serve your sentence. If a corporation were to be disbanded it would affect many households (e.g. employees laid off, loss of service provided by company, etc.). If the corporation was large enough, it could cause major damage to the country's economy. This outcome wouldn't be beneficial to society...

Re:Why do we fine coporations and jail humans?

[BCW2]

If you look at whats happening to the leaders of Tyco, Enron, Worldcom, and others, the leaders of fraudulent corporations ARE going to jail. I will not pretend to know where the DOJ draws the line between fines and jail, but there is one. Maybe severity of the crime or actual damage? Enron destroyed their employees retirement funds and crippled many investors. Memmory makers have not done that level of damage.

Re:Why do we fine coporations and jail humans?

[donutello]

There is a difference between a civil offense and a criminal offense.

When you commit a civil offense, you are asked to pay a fine and can be sued for restitution by the victims. The same thing applies to corporations. You are not jailed for a civil offense unless you are unable to pay the fine, in which case that becomes a criminal offense.

Corporations cannot commit criminal offenses. When someone acting on behalf of a corporation commits a criminal offense, it is that person who is held guilty of that offense and can be incarcerated.

Re:Why do we fine coporations and jail humans?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bingo! You nailed it. And this is exactly the reason CEO's salaries keep going up--you gotta make up for that risk (of imprisonment) with higher pay. The risk is caused by the government, which can decree an act as "antitrust" for ANY reason whatsoever. Seriously.

Re:Why do we fine coporations and jail humans?

[Anonymous Coward]

Answer: Double standards...

Fine line between "dumping" and fixing

[EmbeddedJanitor]

So if you get together with the other RAM vendors to stabilise the market to keep it sustainable (like OPEC and many others do) then that's illegal price fixing.

If you sell at too low a prices then you're "dumping" and that's illegal too.

One law is there to protect the consumer and the other is there to protect other suppliers.

Unless companies can sustainably make profit from their silicon sales we're doomed to boom and bust cycles where we oscillate between RAM surpluses and RAM shortages. In the long run, we all lose if these companies cant stabilise and make reasonable profits.

Re:Fine line between "dumping" and fixing

[SpecBear]

I don't see how it's a fine line between dumping and fixing. They seem to be polar opposites. As I understand it:

Fixing: I get together with my competitors and we all agree to sell products at a certain price. Since we're no longer competing against each other, we can negate the downward pressure on prices (and thus profits) that usually results from a competitive market.

Dumping: If I happen to have a bunch of money, instead of cooperating with my competitors, I try to kill them off. I price my products below the cost to make them, ensuring that nobody can run a sustainable business in the market. Since I have a bunch of money, I can last longer than my competitors. Once they die off or move on, I have a monopoly and can jack up prices far above what a competitive market would support.

We all lose if these companies can't stabilize, but we all win if the companies that can't manage their freaking inventory die off and make room for companies that actually read their history and learn from it. Collusion won't end the boom/bust cycle. It'll just ensure that the consumer gets screwed on prices regardless of whether there's a shortage or a surplus.

Re:Fine line between "dumping" and fixing

[Anonymous Coward]

"stabilise" - I really hope that you're from England. This annoys the crap out of me when Americans start trying to internationalize their English.

Re:Fine line between "dumping" and fixing

[johndoesovich]

Don't you mean *internationalise*

Re:Fine line between "dumping" and fixing

[Anonymous Coward]

no

Re:Fine line between "dumping" and fixing

[johndoesovich]

Excuse me, forgot the ?

Re:Fine line between "dumping" and fixing

[Anonymous Coward]

I really hope that you're from England.

Or, more correctly, from anywhere in the world except the USA.

The Queen's English is what we damn foreigners are taught, not some awkward dialect from the transatlantic colonies.

Re:Fine line between "dumping" and fixing

[bwd234]

"Dumping: If I happen to have a bunch of money, instead of cooperating with my competitors, I try to kill them off. I price my products below the cost to make them, ensuring that nobody can run a sustainable business in the market. Since I have a bunch of money, I can last longer than my competitors. Once they die off or move on, I have a monopoly and can jack up prices far above what a competitive market would support."

Um, isn't that exactly how WalMart works and I don't see them being fined or otherwise in trouble with the government.

Re:Fine line between "dumping" and fixing

[Anonymous Coward]

That should be:

Excuse me, forgot the "?".

Re:Fine line between "dumping" and fixing

[Anonymous Coward]

When you own politicians outright you can wrap yourself in the red white and blue while locking illegal aliens in your stores at night to violate not only immigration and labor laws, but the local fire code as well.

When you buy a tv from walmart, you're sending money to the chinese army. They might not have invented star spangled bullshit, but they definately elevated it from an art to a science.

Re:Fine line between "dumping" and fixing

[mmmmbeer]

Both laws are there to protect consumers. In either case, the ultimate outcome is that the consumers are paying a (likely greatly) inflated price for something they can't do without - otherwise it (i.e. the dumping or fixing) wouldn't work anyway. The result (or, to put it another way, the goal) is abuse of monopoly power. In the long run, this can lead to stagnation in the market, as well as a decrease in consumer spending (especially in other markets), thereby dragging down the whole economy. While it is unlikely that the RAM market is significant enough to cause noticeable effects on the overall economy, it is that possibility that antitrust laws are intended to prevent. There are always losers in business; we don't make laws to prevent that, as long as the winners are not using "unfair" practices that we have seen to hurt our society on the whole.

As for the viability of RAM companies, it is perfectly acceptable, and even expected, that some of these companies fail. Those who last the longest will be those who handle the challenges of the industry the best. These "boom and bust cycles" are simply one of the challenges. Which, incidentally, are beneficial to savvy consumers. Once some of the players have dropped out of the market (for acceptable reasons), the remaining companies will be able to remain viable, because they will each have a larger market share.

Re:Dell referred to the memory makers as a cartel.

[ARRRLovin]

I was referring more to Crucial's e-commerce site ,which has lower pricing on RAM upgrades when compared to Dell.

"Infineon To Pay $160 Million For Fixing RAM Price

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

I didn't know they were broke...

Re:First post

[Anonymous Coward]

You posted a huge 2 mins (minimum 62 secs) after the first one. How fucking slow do you type!

Second post!

This Puts a Smile on my Face

[Laebshade]

No for those poor people who got screwed on RAM prices, but that I bought Mushkin memory instead of Micron, Infineon, or any others. Damn good memory. Their Blue Line memory really has one of the best bang for the buck. About 4 months ago the price for 2 x 256 MB PC3200 Blue Line Mushkin memory cost about $112 on Newegg. Sadly, the price has risen about $30, but the price of a 1 x 512 MB DIMM is at $108.

Re:This Puts a Smile on my Face

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

Last time I looked, Mushkin didn't have a fab.

Seriously, there are only about 4 or 5 SDRAM producing companies in the world and Mushkin isn't one of them. You can bet that Mushkin bought from one of the biggies.

Re:This Puts a Smile on my Face

[Bender_]

Funny.. because as far as I know Infineon is producing the memory for Mushkin. But don't worry, it is of exceptional quality.

Why not?

[phorm]

The parent is modded to funny, but I could easily see this happening. HP settled a class action recently by giving me a discount coupon for new HP printers. The lawsuit was due to a known defect with their page seperators that included a printer model I own.

yay, capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

where your motivation is not common good, but personal benefit

and this means more work for everyone to fight everyone else

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

They could shut America down by halting supply... Or at least demolish the economy. (FYI, canada supplies most of our oil, Saudi are 2nd place)

Re:"Infineon To Pay $160 Million For Fixing RAM Pr

[freakmn]

You mean broken. Broken=needs fixing. Broke=Infineon-$160 Million.

Re:"Infineon To Pay $160 Million For Fixing RAM Pr

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

Common usage around here would be "broke" 'course that might be 'cause I'm only one generation removed from white trash. Or maybe that's White Trash.

Rambus is going to use this to help its case

[Anonymous Coward]

Or at least that's the company's general counsel says in this ExtremeTech story. It also looks like Infineon feels that this is going to be but the first of many such admissions by other DRAM makers...

people

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to be an optimist...back before I entered the working world.

As unpopular a notion as it may be, the fact (proven time and time again) is that people will attempt exactly as much evil as they think they can accomplish without being caught.

There may be a handful of individual persons who don't fit this generalization, but such persons never become politicians or board members.

Big Antitrust Setlements

[PingXao]

The Justice Department said this is the third largest antitrust settlement ever.

Only because they rolled over on the Microsoft case.

Re:Big Antitrust Setlements

[MasterDater]

"If the law disagrees with me, it's rolling over, if it agrees, it's justice", right?

Re:Does this mean memory prices will fall?

[mr_spatula]

I don't know how it was where you live, but I remember getting CD's back in '98 for about $13 at Circuit City, so I'll have to disagree with you there.

Circuit complexity.

[uberdave]

It's not so much the die size, but the circuit complexity. A memory chip is basically the same circuit duplicated several million times. A CPU has registers, ALUs, pipelines, control circuitry, and who knows what else. Memory chips are cheaper to design, and sell in greater quantities.

Re:Circuit complexity.

[mkldev]

Not only cheaper to design, but much cheaper to fab. The technology for CPUs is currently at 90nm. RAM, by contrast, is moving from a 130nm to 110nm process this year, and there are talks of plans to move to 90nm next year. That means that by the time the DRAM vendors switch to a smaller process, the industry as a whole typically has had a whole year to work out the kinks for them.

Re:Circuit complexity.

[Bender_]

No, its at 110nm. One vendor already moved to 90nm and more are likely to follow during the next month.

You can not compare modern dram to cpus. The problem with dram is often not the transistors, but the capacitors. The capacitors require extremely high aspect ratios which are very difficult to manufacture. Another problem is leakage in transistors. While relatively leaky transistors can be used in CPUs, additional effort needs to be spent in drams to avoid leakage.

Re:Circuit complexity.

[cofaboy]

Most CPU manufacturers who also produce memory chips bed the next cpu tech level on memory chips first. This gives them experience of production on a slightly easier to produce product. I think you may find that INTEL already produce 90nm memory chips. Intel 90nm memory

What part of anticompetitive don't you understand?

[mynameis (mother ...]

One law is there to protect the consumer and the other is there to protect other suppliers.

Yes and no. They're both there to protect both.

With some special-case exceptions, any price but the 'competative' one is 'bad.' Without getting into big economics words, there is a net-sum-loss. ie The producers make 'less more' than the consumers 'lose,' or vice-versa.

The point is that both dumping and fixing hurt the economy as a whole, and in the long run they even hurt the BadCompanies(tm).

Unless companies can sustainably make profit from their silicon sales we're doomed to boom and bust cycles where we oscillate between RAM surpluses and RAM shortages. In the long run, we all lose if these companies cant stabilise and make reasonable profits.

Firstly, if you can solve the whole boom-bust cycle thing, by all means do it and collect your bazillions of dollars and 'Nobel'... But slightly more seriously...
'Surpluses' and 'Shortages' are caused, precisely and specifically, by market prices that differ from the competative [equilibrium] price. The industries inability to properly manage its output isn't something you should reward them for!

Secondly, once a [competative] industry 'stabilizes' it makes 0 'economic profit.'
IOW nobody makes more in any market/industry than any other market/industry once risk is accounted for and things 'stabilize.' If you think 'accounting profit' matters in the long-run, lets talk about some investment opportunities I have to offer you ;)

We all lose more if they 'stabilize' as a non-competitive industry.
Besides I'd rather they innovate to keep making profit, wouldn't you?

Definitions

[Anonymous Coward]

Collusion: Your price is the same as the market price.

Dumping: Lowering your price.

Price fixing: Raising your price.

(At this point it should obvious that anything a business does is subject to "antitrust" laws. And somehow people are shocked that corporations would rather headquarter themselves not in America.)

Re:Definitions

[Hockney Twang]

Collusion: You and everyone else agree to charge the same price, eliminating that pesky "competition."

Dumping: You sell at a loss, driving competitors who cannot afford that kind of loss out of business, then you jack up your price and recoup when you're the only shop in town.

Price fixing: See collusion, except that everyone has agreed to keep raising their price.

And it's not like these corporations are "starving artists" or anything. They're making big bucks in this horribly hostile market, where antitrust laws obviously make it impossible to do business. Right?

That's fine

[Sycraft-fu]

The idea isn't really to get money back to the consumers, the idea to to punish them so they don't try it agian. Civil suits are for getting money directly, criminal fines are just a mathod of punishing a company. The idea is that Infenon won't like loosing $160million and so will not fix prices in the future for fear of it happening again.

While it would be nice to directly get money, I'm just satisfied that they are being called to carpet for this.

They made billions, fined a few million.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure they learned their lesson: keep doing it.

Re:They made billions, fined a few million.

[Anonymous Coward]

..but next time, don't get caught!

ba-dum bish.

The real benefit

[mynameis (mother ...]

Is to lower the 'expected value' of price fixing.

Every time an industry 'gets away' with it, more are encouraged to do it. IMHO the corporations should be accountable to 3x total revenue on colluded-sales. Hell, RICO isn't just for getting the DOJ a new Gulfstream...

Just realize that this type of price-fixing hurts everyone.

PS To the person who said '$160mm less R&D,' all I can point out is that this behaviour is done so companies can avoid doing R&D.

That's why "price fixing" cases are bullshit.

[CaptRespect]

"To upgrade from 2x256 to 2x512, they charge 600$. They should be charging about 150$. When I purchased a DDR333 512MB SODIMM, I paid 144$."

Unless it's a true monopoly utillity company, you shouldn't be able to make a case for price fixing. It's all bullshit. The market does take care of these things. Like the parent said, Dell charged 200 dollars over retail for extra memory. This guy instead of buying the stupid Dell memory, he bought it from somewhere else. So what if some companies get together to charge more for thier ram, the smart company that doesn't do this makes out big time by selling a shit load of ram for a lot less.

Just like the CD's crap. When the CD companies charged too much for the cd's, you could have just not bought them. Know one was forcing you to get that Brittney Spears album for 24.95. You bought it cause it was worth buying.(at least in your view). Other people who didn't think it was worth it didn't buy it, maybe they bought something else.

You won't die if you don't get cheap ram. You won't die if you can't afford the latest music. Bottom line is that there is no way companies should get in trouble for raising prices on non-necessities. Especially when there are alternatives.

The old sinclair spectrum

[blackest_k]

just for historys sake the spectrum was designed with 32 k ram chips which were actually failed 64k ram chips I think a jumper decided if the top half was good or the lower. in later times the spectrum got working 64k ram chips still for use as 32k.

RAM prices are fluctuating wildly

[Cryogenes]

and there are at least a dozen competing vendors. When they charge low, they get hit for dumping, when they charge high they get hit for fixing.

Or is it the US extorting money from foreign companies because they can? Does it also happen the other way round? (And don't give MS vs. EU as an example, MS hasn't paid a penny yet and probably never will).

Maybe It's Just Me...

[Tito]

But shouldn't Infineon be paying the 160 million to people who actually bought RAM? The government already has enough money that it can't spend responsibly. GIVE IT TO THE USERS!

well, there's one fix for the problem

[zogger]

the dang box makers need to ship new computers with the ram maxed out. Bogus that you have to pay 'extra" to have the dang slots filled. A motherboard, sure, I can see it selling like they do now, empty, or levels up to full, but a complete PC? Nope, they should max it out right from the git-go. I've got several nice old boxes here would run linux great if the ram was maxed, but after market pricing it, it's NUTZ. And whomever of the big guys could use that as an advertisement, MAXIMUM RAM INSTALLED for your computing pleasure. Slap it on stickers all over. they want something for the marketing weasels, there ya go. I know I would look more than once at xyz company when I was new box shopping if the price included max ram, ie, it didn't come without max ram, it just "was". Consumers are hip enough now to know "more RAM= gooder". CPU speeds are fast enough now, just need dat ole memory. And ther big vendors can certainly get it cheaper than joe sixpack searching on the web to buy asnother stick or two. I know what the naysaysers are thinking "but their competition will sell more boxes cuz they can be CHEAPER. Bingo! CHEAPER is not better sometimes.

rant grumble foam rant.... grumble....

heh %^)

that felt good!

too bad there's not some adapter gizmo you could put a cable end into a ram slot and then remotely have another board that would take all your old random ram sticks and still work. Or a daughter board or something. I bet every dude here has a box of old useless ram that is still functional, all dressed up, no where to go.....

Hey, cool, you just invented....

[zogger]

WALMART

Re:Does this mean memory prices will fall?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're a bit cheaper in the UK now too, probably due to being in competition with Kazaa.

They used to be a cheaper still, but then they stopped the grey imports :(

I only have one question...

[ZeroOne42]

Where does the US$160 million go? Who gets it? Do the people around the world who bought overpriced RAM get a cut out of it?

no shit sherlock.

[Anonymous Coward]

this article is a crock of shit, and the doj has taken a bribe.

the articles say that price fixin only occured from 99 to 02? look at the scoreboard budda. ram has ALWAYS been very expensive. it's made out of fuckin sand! there is no real cost with a low yeild...you just make more of it.
then there was the mysterious ram factory fire that got hushed up early reports indicated that there was no equipment found after the fire. what could that imply.

on top of this, infineon set aside 300 million for the fines, and was only fined half? could they be more obvious.

lets be realistic here. the doj only reacted because tons of people knew they were being ripped off--kinda like with M$. antitrust exists in nearly all walks of american consumerism. doj should read deparment of jokes. oil is a huge scam, electricity is screamin me too! remember when power was oing to be too cheap to meter? but the biggest scam has to be the auto industry. after almost a century of assembly lines the price of automobiles still continue to rise faster than inflation.
americans should wake up and smell the coffee... no wait, they just had a huge worldwide price hike too. its no small news that dairy, wheat board/cartels were invented in the us. what the american people should do is sue, and imprison the entire department of justice for not doing anything at the very least, and more likely, taking bribes and allowing this kind of thing to take over corporate america.

Problem is production methods...

[mabhatter654]

Like some others of you mentioned, they are trying to prevent a boom-bust cycle because they tie up a hell of a lot of money in fab to go bankrupt every 2 years...

A more real analysis lies in the nature of the industry though. Chip fabs don't produce all types of chips all the time. Typically semiconductor manufacures generate huge lots of 1 type [say DDR]and run for a month or so...then move on to the next type [say SDRAM] They have to guess the production 3-6 months in advance...that's where the trouble lies.

I'm sure they try to "spread the wealth" but also to keep up supply...but let's face it, what supplier DOESN'T want to make any extra dollar on a product. They're not really screwing the "customer" The manufactures only deal with other large megacorps...each trying to leverage their buying power for lower prices... in the end what many people miss is that 90% of their product is sold under contract...so they can't really "spike" the cost. Where you and I get screwed is the "spot market" where "mere mortals" have to go to buy chips. The middlemen are really the ones to blame for the wild spikes, not the chip makers. Blaming the chipmakers is like blaming Ty for not making enough beanie babies! A chip maker might make an extra dollar a chip for early or late season shipments.. it's the middlemen that double the cost of their chips in stock due to a "shortage", not the chip fabs themselves. Note too, it's a VERY common thing in the electronics industry to have wild fluxuations in price because most electronic components follow the "lot" model...I'm surprised they managed to loose the case!

Re:Problem is production methods...

[grainofsand]

But why hasn't the futures market been able to smooth these fluctuations as it has for almost every other conceivable product on earth?

Re:Problem is production methods...

[HyperCash]

I'm not an economist and I don't know for sure, but...One reason might be that in the memory market the product is always changing. While I might have wanted SDRAM 133 DIMMS at one point as a buyer I'm now going to want something like DDR 400 RAM. I suspect that this rapid rate of change makes it difficult for a futures market to smooth out fluctuations in prices as well as it is able to in other markets.

Re:Problem is production methods...

[grainofsand]

I'm not an economist either, but it sounds like you are right on the money. Gold is gold is gold. Winter barley is winter barley and pork bellies are ....

But RAM does change and I am sure that it is one of the reasons the RAM-based futures products don't work well as smoothers.

Re:Problem is production methods...

[Fjandr]

Umm, I hope you're not trying to imply that commodities are stable and not prone to massive little-to-no-notice fluctuations. If so, please don't post to tell me that. I'd really rather not die laughing. :)

Re:Problem is production methods...

[Andy_R]

Because it's not a commodity, it's a series of similar commodities with different enough specs to be non-interchangeable.

The supply and demand for the whole industry is nice and smooth already, but the demand curve for any specific product is very short, and the point at which it becomes obsolete and the price plummets is unpredicatable.

Re:Problem is production methods...

[mabhatter654]

in a sense it DOSES smooth out like you say...sort of. When the companies make a production change, say from DDR 400 to DDR2 500, the middlemen swoop in and the price skyrockets to slow down demand rather than just running out. The catch is that ALL the companies have to make the changes at roughly the same time due to other market conditions...i.e. intel/AMD releasing a super-duper new chip. With out some other player's time table that creates the market in the first place they have NOTHING...that's why there can never be a "futures" market...because while the DRAM may be an oligopoly it's entirely dependant on another oligopoly[CPUs/chipsets] to drive it's market demand timetable. Because it's more corperate marketing than "market conditions" the only "futures" trading that can happen is in company stocks...like say Rambus...and that's also a lesson in why such trading would never work.

Re:Problem is production methods...

[grainofsand]

But we do have a number of markets trading RAM futures - hence the reasons for my original question.

http://www.semiconx.com/Exchange01/SilverStream/Ob jectstore/General/FAQFutures.html

Re:Free market isn't perfect...once the government

[Anonymous Coward]

lightknight, I think you are on the right track, and I can give an example to back it up. I had my own ebay business in which I sold 1 inch pins of bands and movies on ebay, the going price used to be 1.00 an item. Some people got together and determined they could make more money by charging .50 a unit and undercut the others. Did I go whining to the government (ebay in this case) and complain that I had a nice deal going and that I now had to make adjustments in order to compete? No, I lowered my prices like the rest and now deal in more volume and I am doing fine.

I am not sure why this computer guy HAS to make/work with computers, he may have alot of time/skills tied up in that field but that is his problem for not diversifying his skills. On then topic of diversifying skills another way our ebay pin business diversified itself was to start selling shirts, belts, and other clothing.

As I understand it, one of the main criteria of a free market is that seller be permitted to freely enter and leave. If these people are angry at anyone it should be the government for enforcing IP laws that would prevent more people from entering into the chip market.

In the end, it is just RAM, you do not need it to live...save the outrage for when Mr. Burns trys to steal the sun.

One more thing the United States is a constitutional republic, not a democracy, so it's only true function SHOULD be to protect personal liberty. Call me crazy but I don't remember reading anything about Rawls in the constitution...

neverending monopoly

[Doc Ruby]

Infineon is paying the fine to the US government, despite their "international conspiracy". That would be just, if the US government spent the money on enforcing laws preventing international monopolies, but instad it will just be a drop in the bucket (0.8%) of the money we're spending on, say, keeping Iraq safe for international oil monopolies, like the Saudi-led OPEC.

Who gets the 160 Million?

[rspress]

How about the people who ponied up the dollars to buy it! I bought RAM from crucial.com a division of Micron. Shouldn't I get some dollars back?

Re:Who gets the 160 Million?

[Zemplar]

If you purchased this item for the price you paid, you obviously had good reason, and resources, to do so. So then, how is that not a fair price? No one held a gun to your head. You willfully agreed to purchase their product at and established price, again, willfully.

Re:"Infineon To Pay $160 Million For Fixing RAM Pr

[freakmn]

I've also seen it in common usage, but I think that it is just slang or something. I'm not an english major or anything, nor am I trying to be a jerk, but I honestly didn't get the joke at first, so I clarified it. But a joke isn't that funny when you have to clarify it, so I made a (failed) attempt at humor by saying that Infineon would be broke after losing $160 million. But just looking at that now, with formatting as it is, the minus sign is hardly visible, so my joke will be difficult to get as well. Unfortunately a bad day for humor. I apologize for any inconvienience, wasted time, or mental illness that may come about from reading this (or my previous) post.

Re:This isn't right...

[symbolic]

I was made privy to a similar type of case, where a class action suit was filed against AMEX with respect to their shoddy practices involving their travel insurance. The proposed settlement? ONE cardholder gets about $10K, one gets about $4K, the law firm gets $4 million, and everyone else that got screwed, got nothing. I don't know how this ultimately turned out, but this is absurd. The vast majority of any award should go to the parties that are injured, NOT THE DAMN LAWYERS!

Re: what about the investors?

[symbolic]

Aren't they as much to blame? If I decide that MCI/Worldcomm is a scumbag corporation, but I also knew that if I bought x number of shares today, with a high prospect of being worth considerably more in the future, and buy these shares based on that assumption, haven't I just helped to perpetuate this kind of behavior?

It's not only the greed of corporate executives, it's our own greed as well. We all want to make money, and few of us are willing to sacrifice profit for punitive action. Many "investors" these days are institutions (like various funds), thus making the whole process somewhat removed from any kind of moral judgement- it certainly doesn't help.

Parent is Smoking Crack on Death Penalty

[DoubleReed]

The government isn't and should never be in the business of making money, competing with private industry. To kill a company is simple happens all the time: for example, when they can't make payroll.

Re:Parent is Smoking Crack on Death Penalty

[Marxist Hacker 42]

The government isn't and should never be in the business of making money, competing with private industry.

And yet, we do it already in the area of package delivery- in the United States the USPO is the low cost leader in the industry, and still makes enough of a profit that they haven't required tax money in the last century. There is NO reason why the government shouldn't be competing in any national security industry. They can get workers easily among those that private industry has thrown away, and could produce cheap enough goods to effectively remove survival from being able to find work.

To kill a company is simple happens all the time: for example, when they can't make payroll.

That only hurts the workers, not the stockholders.

As opposed to the LCD guys

[pommiekiwifruit]

Who just define up to 8 bad pixels as "not being defective".

Re:As opposed to the LCD guys

[SenorCitizen]

No, there are performance classes for LCD's as well. A class-A (ie. guaranteed not to have defective pixels) will just cost you a pretty premium.

Re:Isn't this a crime?

[kylector]

That is the beauty (for them) of working behind a corporate veil. They can't attack the person that authorized it, only the corporation. It's rare that they can really nail someone in the corporation because the whole purpose of being a corporation is to protect the employees from lawsuits. Only the corporation can be sued and drained dry, not the individuals. I think it was originally meant to protect them from being sued over stupid stuff, but obviously it's "handy" for other uses as well.

Flogging a dead horse...

[LionMage]

once you have "figured out the tricks", building a rocket isn't rocket science either. Just what the hell is your point?

Funny how you seem to lack the courage or conviction to attack someone without hiding behind AC.

This is really very simple. By "tricks," I was referring to the process tweaks which, apparently (if earlier posts in this thread are to be believed), violate semiconductor design rules. These tweaks allow for increases in cell density; however, once you've established what tricks seem to work, how hard is it to create a grid of these cells? Not very. It should have been obvious to anyone who followed this discussion thread what I meant.

I shouldn't have to quote every single parent in a thread to establish the context in which I'm saying something; if you're too lazy to follow the thread, kindly don't comment. Of course, I suspect your goal wasn't to further the discussion but to get in a personal attack, hence your post as Anonymous Coward. It's easy to make smarmy comments when you take someone's written word entirely out of context, choosing to focus instead on a single sentence for the sole purpose of trying to make someone else look bad.

OK, so you want my point? You petulantly demand that I give you my point and make it plain, since you apparently don't have the capacity to figure it out on your own. Here it is: My contention is, and has been, that RAM isn't that frigging complicated, and despite the complexities inherent in the (design/refinement/whatever)process, RAM itself is conceptually and topologically simple. That's it. People have understood grids for thousands of years. So there's some fancy solid-state physics involved in squeezing higher bit densities onto memory chips? Great. That doesn't change the fact that it's a frigging matrix of cells, if we're talking about DRAM, each cell has one transistor and one capacitor. That's it, end of story. The complexities are all driven by economics.

Re:Flogging a dead horse...

[anytime]

The only thing funny here is your inability to back off from a ridiculous assertion that is not only uninformed, but arrogant. Your characterization of RAM as nothing more complicated than a simple grid of switch-capacitor cells is only part of the story: while it is true that the bit storage device is a transistor-capacitor pair, and that these are arranged in rows and columns to create a memory array, the logic and power management circuitry required to operate the memory device is far more
complex than you are guessing, and innovation in RAM design is most certainly not limited to array densities. I think it is quite obvious from your statements that memory devices are "topologically simple" that you are in more than a bit over your head, but rather than admit such when corrected, you've opted for the low road and mounted an attack on my character, accusing me of laziness and petulance, once again demonstrating your willingness to rant about things about which you haven't the slightest understanding.

Further, I fail to see how registering with this website and posting under an alias in any way is more courageous than posting anonymously, but since it seems so very important to you, I have done so. I suppose in your world hiding behind an alias or username is somehow considered more honorable.

Re:Flogging a dead horse...

[LionMage]

I suppose in your world hiding behind an alias or username is somehow considered more honorable.

Who's attacking whose character now?

Anyway, thank you for taking the time to register; now we can differentiate your posts from everyone else who posts as Anonymous Coward. (It has nothing to do with hiding behind an alias, and everything to do with making it easier to track who is making what assertions in a discussion thread.)

I'm sorry you felt that I attacked your character, but only a little bit. After all, since you've stooped to the same tactics that you accuse me of, you've basically proven yourself to be a hypocrite. If you want to say that I have no clue, then fine. Designing RAM chips isn't a job I want to do; I have more interesting things to spend my time on, and to me, storage (long or short term) is just storage. So there you go -- you win. Feel better now?

By the way... AFAICT, I never accused you of laziness. Petulance, yes. I will, however, accuse you of being a pedantic ass. I will also say that I am underwhelmed by the current state of the art in RAM technology, so you'll just have to forgive me for not caring about some of the fine points that you apparently care so much about. As I see it, everything is still just a grid of cells, with abysmal performance characteristics. All the fancy support logic and power management circuitry won't change that fundamental fact. When I see an order of magnitude boost in performance (speed) and/or storage densities, then I'll be impressed. I don't necessarily even care how we get there. But I strongly suspect that relying on the same tired DRAM technology (transistors and capacitors, for crying out loud) won't be the right path.

Fixing RAM prices

[Anonymous Coward]

Let this be a lesson: If it ain't broke don't fix it!