Slashdot Mirror
How To Hijack an EU Open Source Strategy Paper
Glyn Moody writes "Thanks to the indispensable Wikileaks, we have the opportunity to see how an organization close to Microsoft is attempting to re-write — and hijack — an important European Union open source strategy paper, currently being drawn up. Analyzing before and after versions visible in the document demonstrates how the Association for Competitive Technology, a lobbying group partially funded by Microsoft, is trying to widen the scope of open source to include 'mixed solutions blending open and proprietary code.'" And reader Elektroschock adds some detail on EU processes: "The European Commission lets ACT and CompTIA participate in all working groups of the European Open Source Strategy, which defines Europe's future open source approach. A blue editor questions the objectives: 'Regarding the "Europe Digital Independence" our [working] group thinks it is, in general, not an issue.' 'European digital independence' is a phrase coined by EU Commissioner V. Reding, that is what her European Software Strategy was supposed to be about. She didn't reveal that lobbyists or vendors with vested interests would write the strategy for the Commission."
Groklaw (www.groklaw.net) is down, due to coverage of Microsoft vs TomTom? Or, is it just a coincidence?
It should be obvious by now that proprietary, off-the-shelf, software is on its way out. Off-the-shelf software only amounts for around 10% of the total software production, and the bespoke market has always avoided proprietary solutions where possible, to avoid vendor lock-in. Microsoft, with its huge armies of developers and vast collections of existing tools could easily own a huge chunk of the bespoke market, so why are they fighting the transition so hard? Is there some kind of long-term plan, or are they just hoping to turn back the clock?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
How long will it be before we get a long, tedious series of posts from team "I'm not ideological, I just use what is best for the job"(never mind that short-term pragmatism is an ideology)?
If you protect your markets you destroy your exports. Exports are what drive our economy. Just like the Smoot-Holey Act in the 30's did your support of protectionism, if successful, will do far more damage to the economy than the banks have.
'Microsoft leaned on EC to spike open source report'
'One might ask, "Who are these lobbyists?", so let's take a closer look'
I would too support MS if it were from my country. My question is: would EU do the same thing to protect their market if were another 3 or 4 big OS American companies disputing the same market?
I was on a plane reading Slashdot on my iPhone... the first headline came up "How To Hijack ..." and the air marshal in the seat next to me karate-chopped my neck and now I'm in Gitmo.
Thanks a lot Slashdot.
oh, by the way...can someone call me a lawyer?
No because then there wouldn't be a monopoly and it never would have reached the EU's attention in the first place.
Great. So Microsoft gets the US and everywhere else gets Free Software? If it wasn't for free trade, MS would never have got to Europe in the first place.
More yet, if you protect your market, you make your people poorer (except for the owners of protected companies). But that is valid only for protectionism... If you protect your markets from Microsoft (or any other kind of fraud) you'll make our people richer and will increase the competitiveness of your exports (except for items that bundle with Windows).
Rethinking email
You mean, like with LGPL? I'm all for it.
This is like the EU deciding what oil individuals should use in all their cars.
The decision to use open source is not a governmental decision. If a government says to me "build a bridge from point A to point B," then I decide what piece of software is best for calculating the mass of the bridge. I can use an open source product, or a closed source product. But it would be absurd for my decision to be affected by what some guy in another country, who has no idea what software is, to make that decision for me.
The name "European Digital Independence" would seem to indicate that, yes. Which makes it especially dumb for them to accept input from Microsoft.
Because it's always good for the US to cut its own throat just because the Europeans are cutting theirs.
Not really.
Outside of Ireland the the UK, Microsoft is simply not as big in Europe as it is in the states. Time and again I have heard the same story. Linux shops and linux systems are simply more common in mainland Europe than Microsoft systems. Which is not to say that Microsoft systems are not there. They're just not there as much.
A lot of this is down to language and cultural barriers. A lot. It is very difficult for American companies to adapt to business on the continent. Going from an environment of 50 states with the same currency, culture and language, to 25 states with different languages, cultures, currencies (less now), and even legal systems is difficult. In North America, it's common for a franchise to expand across the entire continent at a rapid pace. I doubt there even is a franchise across the entire continent of Europe.
But, it's also true that European governments do balk at the idea of an American operating system controlling all of their computers. The English and Irish do not really see this as a problem, but I'm sure that the French view the situation as an anathema. The same goes for products like Oracle. But this is not a new development. These problems have existed for years.
May the Maths Be with you!
Money has no homeland.
Microsoft is a multinational, it has employees and shareholders all around the world. The shareholders don't give a fuck about the USA or any other country.
They should just call themselves "Association for Dealing with Competitive Technology."
oh, by the way...can someone call me a lawyer?
OK, you're a lawyer.
Free Martian Whores!
ACT is not Microsoft but a Microsoft proxy. I don't think Microsoft is a member of the committee.
Microsoft is one of 59 members of the Association for Competitive Technology
[1]. The only victim here is the readership of Slashdot. There is a concerted campaign here to slate Microsoft regardless of any basis in reality.
Wikileaks claims the president of the ACT has strong ties to Microsoft, but only provides the ironically named, unsourced open-access Wiki, SourceWatch[2], as evidence for this latest smear campaign.
This is not the work of Microsoft. This lobbying was perpetrated by the software industry in general. People round here fail to see, for reasons unbeknown to me, that Microsoft is not exceptionally evil as corporations go.
Ireland offers massive tax cuts, so MIOL licenses the EMEA software sales from Ireland. Other companies do the same. The Irish economic wonder is nothing but tax dumping for multinationals from the United States, at the expense of the US tax income of course and for the benefit of Ireland.
Interesting. How does open source and interoperability spending qualify as protectionism. It is more anti-dependency, deprotectionism.
you would change your mind if your local banks owned by foreign ones pumped the cash out of your country to save HQ's ass during the economic crisis.
Oh come on, you're blowing this way out of proportion.
Right now, the EU is highly dependent on proprietary software from the US. Is it really so strange that they don't like this? No country likes to be dependent on another country for essential goods. It's not much different from the US disliking their dependence on foreign oil.
And rather than demanding non-US software, the EU just wants guarantees in the form of less restrictive licensing (open source). Does this make it easier for other countries to compete? Yes, it does. Does it mean that the US is disadvantaged? No, it doesn't. As long as the US produces quality software for a reasonable price, the EU will keep buying.
Oh, and for the record: I'm an EU citizen who is employed by a major US software house.
I thought there were open source based companies in America too. I also thought there were plans to increase adoption of open source in public administrations in America too. Finally, I thought America already had a host of protectionist measures in place for several economic sectors.
Basically, what the hell are you talking about?
I am getting so sick of the Smoot-Harley comments whenever the topic of tariffs comes up. There are issues with protectionist tariffs, but the reason Smoot-Harley was such a disaster is that the tariffs were fixed in dollar per item rather than a percentage of price. During the deflationary spiral of the 1930's, this resulted in the tariff's being as high as 60% of the cost of a tariffed item. Personally, I think we need to have some tariffs so that imported goods carry the same load in our society as domestically produced goods to level the playing field. It does not make sense that domestically produced goods carry a significantly higher tax burden than those produced abroad.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
In the US, "Organic" used to mean untarnished by nasties. The Big Food lobby got "Organic" re-defined to mean mostly untarnished. Now "100% Organic" means totally untarnished. So maybe soon we'll have "100% Open Source" (as supported by Mr Stallman) vs the new "Open Source" with proprietary lock-ware in it.
People round here fail to see, for reasons unbeknown to me, that Microsoft is not exceptionally evil as corporations go.
Well, there's Union Carbide, who killed thousands of Indians and whose CEO is still on India's most wanted fugitive list.
There's Haliburton.
There's Sony and their XCP rootkit.
There's Purina, who was too cheap to put doors on an elevator and my grandfather went four stories down without an elevator car, carrying two 100 lb sacks of grain. I absolutely HATE them, as you might possibly understand (and it was 50 years ago this year).
There's that chicken company that burned up all those minimum wage workers because they chained the fire doors shut.
There's the peanut place that killed a few people and sickened thousands.
Then there's the oil industry.
There's the banks, giving million dollar bonuses to the people who are running them into the ground. All of these are more evil than Microsoft.
And the fact that few corporations pay any US Federal Income tax at all is pretty evil, too. Does MS pay Federal Income Tax?
But just because everyone else if evil doen't give you an escuse to be, too. Waht did your mother say about all your friends jumping off a bridge?
Free Martian Whores!
The U.S. economy was built on protectionist policies. It's funny how they would get there if protectionist actually was all that harmful. Or take England, as another example: previously protectionist. Is it possible that selective protectionism may be good for a developing economy and bad for a developed economy, as empirical evidence would suggest? And that free markets would be good for -- wait for it! -- the proponents of free markets, i.e. rich nations?
I believe the continuing Airbus / Boeing battles and accusations about protectionist strategies, public subsidies, unfair competition, etc. show that BOTH EU and US are more than happy to protect their home companies when it's useful.
And the fact that few corporations pay any US Federal Income tax at all ...
Huh? Where do you get your 'facts' from?
There's the banks, giving million dollar bonuses to the people who are running them into the ground.
And there's the US govt. that gives billions to those same banks.
Well McDonalds is across the whole of Europe (or at least the EU), and it makes more money in the EU than it did in America. So not only is that proof that franchises dont cross the whole EU, but that American ones can also be succesful
Of course the widespread prevalence of wrongdoing doesn't excuse Microsoft's transgressions - whatever they may be, but I'm willing to bet that most of those who cut their nose off to spite their face by foregoing the use of Microsoft tools on moral grounds, are happy using banks, cars, chemicals of all kinds and are perfectly content in consuming the products of multinational corporations. The criticism Microsoft receive in certain circles is grossly disproportionate.
The fact you have choices for which OS to install on your computer proves Microsoft is, in fact, *not* a monopoly. PsyStar vs. Apple is actually a great example for WHY Microsoft is not a monopoly. If you buy a PC from PsyStar you can choose OS X or Windows. The lawsuit shines light on the scenario greedy scumbags have thrust upon the consumers against their will, a scenario that obfuscates real issues with half-truths or complete fallacies about software licenses, end user agreements, and monopolistic practices. Because you have the freedom to choose Dell, HP, Apple, PsyStar or any other PC vendor, means you have the freedom to buy a PC with an OS other than from Microsoft.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
For starters, you must be a techie. For you to think that a monopoly is an absolute measurement shows that you think this way.
A monopoly is not a company that is exclusive in an industry. It's a company that has such an effective control over its industry that most people pretty much equate the company with the industry. And, as most people here point out, that's not illegal. When you use the control in one industry (OS) to project into another industry (Office), THAT is illegal. That you have competitors in the first industry is only significant if those competitors have significant mindshare and people treat the competitor as similar enough to weigh their options.
Apple's mindshare is rising enough to start to threaten the monopoly status of Microsoft. That doesn't mean that PsyStar has any bearing on it. Their mindshare is close enough to zero to make Linux on the Desktop look like a reality.
Remember: a healthy industry has two major competitors slugging each other out at about 40% marketshare each, a third competitor between 15 and 20% marketshare, largely ignored by the first two, and then a myriad of minor competitors making up the rest of the market, filling niche needs in that market. A dominated, but not monopolistic, industry has its number one company at about 60% marketshare, a number two at 30-40%, a number three company trying to get double digit percentages, and possibly a few others eeking out their living in niche markets. The desktop operating system market is not anywhere near these. Microsoft is sitting over 80%, Mac is somewhere around 5-10%, and others are filling niche roles. The server operating system market is not, from what I can tell, hugely different, though Mac and Linux might have their numbers reversed.
Because you have the freedom to choose Dell, HP, Apple, PsyStar or any other PC vendor, means you have the freedom to buy a PC with an OS other than from Microsoft.
Unless MS abuse their market influence by bullying vendors who show signs of offering other OSs in a significant number of cases by increasing their OEM price of Windows... or withdrawing the "discounts" that their competition gets.
You imply that just because other OSs are available there is no problem. Well, if the vast majority of vendors are being coerced by MS into only offering Windows, and if a very high percentage of software and apps is only available for Windows- because it's what everyone's running, because that's what everything runs on, because.... Then IMHO there *is* a problem.
Even if they got there because people preferred MS in the early days, it wouldn't justify the fact that for a *long* time now people have chosen Windows because it's dominant in the market, not because it's the best. People buy Windows as a means to run software.
Though even that's charitably hypothetical; in reality no-one chose MS's legally-dubious, uninnovative, bought-in CP/M clone in the early days because it was the best. It got big because it first appeared on IBM's unexceptional PCs (and hence was the platform for IBM compatible software), which in turn were successful in the business field because.... well, because IBM made them. In other words, MS-DOS rode to domination on the back of IBM's domination of the market and it was self-perpetuating after that.
Your invocation of the Mozilla vs. IE situation is lame bordering on trollish. IE only comes with Windows and never came out for Linux; giving it away free encouraged its domination in the market and discouraged support of other more standard and platform-neutral browsers, hence encouraging more people to run Windows.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
But just because everyone else if evil doen't give you an escuse to be, too. Waht did your mother say about all your friends jumping off a bridge?
Believe me, plenty of kids (and grown men) *are* that stupid and sheeplike.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
What Europe are you speaking of?? I live in Western Europe (in Belgium); people, businesses and organizations use *much* more Microsoft systems than Linux systems. If you go to the store and buy a PC, it comes with Windows preinstalled. At work, our file/database/mail server runs Linux, but all the desktops run Windows. I know that many small businesses are like that, and that there are also a lot that are 100% Microsoft. Many people still don't realize that the computing world is larger than Microsoft alone (that is starting to change now, but more because of Apple than because of Linux).
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
So what? Microsoft IS a monopoly because they own over 90% of Desktop computers alone. There's nothing wrong with being a monopoly until they use it illegally which they have done.
An example off the topic of my head is the bundling of DirectX10 into Vista forcing gamers to purchase a copy and then coming out with WARP10 afterwards which perfectly emulates the DX10 API in CPU.
If there were 2 competitors the same size as Microsoft then OpenGL would be the standard, wouldn't suck due to pressure to update it and this kind of situation wouldn't happen where an OS maker can dictate the direction of the games industry.
Heck - I don't even want to be dependent on a single vendor, much less a country.
Senseless: it doesnt work this way because america COULD if she WANTED be the biggest FOSS engine in the world and still kick into the european market.
You confuse microsoft with your country: What a shame.
NO SIG
The American legal definition of monopoly is based on the presence of either of the following:
Either of both makes a monopoly. The test is a functional one, not one base on having X% of the market.
Microsoft has been determined to have a monopoly by a US Court, and to have abused it.
If you protect your markets you destroy your exports.
Japan seems to be doing just fine with it. Compare who made your TV and their TVs. Your phone and their phones (yeah yeah, excluding iPhones).
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
no it is not about kicking out americans, just the MAFIA that ;Microsoft, Accenture and so many more conglomerates reporesent
People round here fail to see, for reasons unbeknown to me, that Microsoft is not exceptionally evil as corporations go.
That would be a catchy little quatrain if it weren't for the word Microsoft (somehow fitting).
People 'round here fail to see
for reasons unbeknownst to me,
that MS aren't especially
evil as corporations go.
For starters, you must be a techie. For you to think that a monopoly is an absolute measurement shows that you think this way.
Be careful. It's a Micro-Bot.
(SCNR)
The fact that a huge number of the big players in open source (Novell, Sun, Red Hat, Xandros, IBM, the Free Software Foundation, Google, Mozilla, et al) are American or America-based should be the first big sign that protectionism would be a daft name for it.
You could see it as a stimulus for Europe, seeing as many of the best proprietary companies are American or Japanese. But ultimately FOSS is completely anti-protectionist; if the intellectual property is impossible to control (thanks to the licensing), how can you use it to lock out foreign competitors?
Ultimately, it's just the EU not liking being at the mercy of a foreign monopoly. Makes just as much sense as the US trying to ween itself off of foreign oil.
Well it also gets down to what directly affects you and what you care personally about. If one is a FOSS developer or user than MS suing a manufacturer who uses LInux with a really crappy patent is going to provoke outrage. We toil in this particular vineyard so MS' transgressions are going to be particularly noticed.
The EU does what the US should have done: encourage competition and punnisch illegal actions taken by dominant companies. Period. Good riddance. I'd rather have a choice between a Windows and a Linux and a whatever PC than only to have the choice to buy "Made for Vista" crap.
Fsck DRM. Fsck DirectInput. Fsck Direct3D. Fsck closed formats and protocols. Fsck lock-in. Fsck backdoors. Fsck x86 dominance (where's my 200 dollar/euro 64 threads CPU with a 1000% performance increase, huh?). Etc...
Here be signatures
Remember: a healthy industry has two major competitors slugging each other out at about 40% marketshare each, a third competitor between 15 and 20% marketshare, largely ignored by the first two, and then a myriad of minor competitors making up the rest of the market, filling niche needs in that market. A dominated, but not monopolistic, industry has its number one company at about 60% marketshare, a number two at 30-40%, a number three company trying to get double digit percentages, and possibly a few others eeking out their living in niche markets. The desktop operating system market is not anywhere near these. Microsoft is sitting over 80%, Mac is somewhere around 5-10%, and others are filling niche roles.
From where do those percentages come?
So, somebody decides to use a free alternative that fulfills all of their needs instead of paying you for your product, and you call that "kicking Americans out?"
Sounds to me like they decided to start using their noggins to think. Maybe we here in America should do that too, and stop paying for nothing.
I don't see how this makes "free trade" a failure, though. OSS is a free alternative to overpriced proprietary code. "Free trade" is what enables them to decide to choose the better product; "free trade" doesn't mean that people have to pay you for your overpriced junk. It means they're free to make a choice.
Please don't support protectionist candidates. You'll make the outsourcing problem worse than it already is by voting for total boobs who want to jack up minimum wage and drive business out of the country with pseudo-communist anti-competitive policies.
Protectionism is not free trade, it's control. The EU deciding to use the better, cheaper product is not a free trade violation. It is an example of free trade doing what it is supposed to do -- improve the consumer's real income.
You confuse microsoft with your country: What a shame.
Well put. What an idiot.
One of the reasons. Not the only reason.
I wasn't aware that they did. Care to expain why and how they do?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Microsoft is a protectionist company that combats freedom of governments to promote open source, interoperability and a free market, it does so simply because its business strategy is protectionism and lockin.
Free software is about freedom, lock-in is about market protectionism.
Don't you know 98% of facts are made up, 50% of the time?
The only victim here is the readership of Slashdot. There is a concerted campaign here to slate Microsoft regardless of any basis in reality.
[1] [actonline.org]
That's disingenuous at best.
Microsoft may be one of 59, but most of the rest are Microsoft partners.
To pick only the headlined companies:
These smaller, entrepreneurial technology firms like Sax Software, ComponentSource and EnsuredMail have long been the driving force behind innovation and job growth in the industry.
See any pattern there?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
WikiLeaks could run out of money before they get their next funding in September. They're asking for money to keep running their essential service in the meantime:
--
make install -not war
Hahahahaha... what a pathetic joke!!
I agree with the general idea that the GP is talking nonsense (if there was any proof of Microsoft not being a monopoly in his post, it must have been really really well hidden). Some minor corrections though.
A monopoly is not a company that is exclusive in an industry. It's a company that has such an effective control over its industry that most people pretty much equate the company with the industry.
Actually, a monopoly is, technically, a company that can price its product(s) in such a way that it maximizes the operating profit (normally through underproduction) because there are no market forces that would compel it to lower prices. Meaning that the company, not the market, sets the volume and pricing for the product. Public perception is not directly relevant (although it affects things via enforcing or weakening the barriers of entry for potential competitors).
Remember: a healthy industry has two major competitors slugging each other out at about 40% marketshare each, a third competitor between 15 and 20% marketshare, largely ignored by the first two, and then a myriad of minor competitors making up the rest of the market, filling niche needs in that market. A dominated, but not monopolistic, industry has its number one company at about 60% marketshare, a number two at 30-40%, a number three company trying to get double digit percentages, and possibly a few others eeking out their living in niche markets.
Those are oligopoly examples - in the medium to long term those markets are not very healthy either, as companies will eventually engage in strategy games to maximize profit that will lessen the actual competition. Witness the collusion/price-fixing accusations against NVidia and ATi a while ago.
Anyway, a good proof of Microsoft's monopolistic power is not necessarily the fact that you have little choice in the OS you get with a computer; a much better case for it was the way Microsoft got away with the subscription change in their licensing model - customers hated it as they ended up paying more for less (for example, Microsoft promised an update interval that so far didn't quite happen; another example, many companies ended up buying licenses twice - once the company subscription and one the regular OS license for new computers with Windows preinstalled) and the company made the expected sales and profit anyway. The Linux negotiation weapon that some customers have started to bring up in recent years to force prices lower is another proof - indirect this time, as it shows the original price was set in the absence of any competitive pressure; OTOH, this also shows that Microsoft's price-setting power has finally started to decrease in some fields.
Domestically good producers have to pay their half of the worker's FICA taxes. Imported goods do not.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I'm not normally one to quibble about misspellings, but seeing two different ones in a row gets my goat.
Its Smoot-Hawley folks. Smoot-Hawley.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
If you protect your markets you destroy your exports
We don't have any exports relative to our imports.
Just like the Smoot-Holey Act in the 30's did your support of protectionism, if successful, will do far more damage to the economy than the banks have.
Even Milton Friedman argued that Smoot-Holey had nothing to do with the Great Depression. The GD was a monetary problem turned into an economic one. Indeed, if your argument were true, it would not explain how the United States went from an agrarian society to an economic manufacturing powerhouse in the 40 year span from the 1820s to the 1860s. Protectionism spawned the economic growth from farms to steel mills, won the civil war for the north, and then created the modern consumer society.
This is my sig.
Oh come on, you're blowing this way out of proportion.
sorry, I'm watching two more American companies on the verge of going belly up, all in the name of this so-called free trade. I've heard all of these promises of free trade for 30 years, believed in it, and now its failing. I'm sick of it. Trade ideas, not goods.
This is my sig.
dropped them a mail asking if they're ready for the usual DOS attack. i interpreted their answer as yes.
80/tcp open http AOLserver httpd 4.0.3
*grin*
You don't even really need to exclude iPhones - Japanese people primarily buy Japanese phones... see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/27/free_iphones/
The industrialized nations want free markets for consumer goods, services, and intellectual property, but protection for agricultural products.
" ...Thanks to you today I work for Halliburton, a company which is perfectly inline with my values. "
www.oilcareer.com
Well said!
And the UK's economic success was down to the offshore banking facilities it offered.
And while we're at it, the economic success of China was primarily the result of production in an economy where human rights were low on the agenda. All the cheap goods of the past thirty years or so came at a price, not the least of which was the shift of manufacturing - and the power which goes with that - away from the west, to the east.
The politicians responsible for the legislation which allowed all this to happen should be slung in jail.
In my mind, the difficulty is ensuring that code marked "free" (to modify, redistribute, sell, and so on) isn't polluted by code involving patents
Free software, like proprietary software, inadvertently violates patents; that's just a fact and it's unavoidable. But so what? The worst that seems to happen in practice is that a judge orders the patented invention to be removed and people add a workaround.
If by "pollution" you mean "deliberate introduction", that's even less of a problem: source code is usually tracked openly. If the patent holder or one of their minions introduces a patented invention, they automatically donate them to the project under open source licenses (thank you). Third parties usually have no motivation to introduce someone else's patented inventions into an open source project. If they do, it's no worse than an accidental introduction.
And for situations like Tom Tom, it really doesn't matter either: Microsoft would have tried to screw Tom Tom whether they use Linux or whether they use some proprietary embedded operating system, and they don't need Linux-related patents to do it. The only way for Tom Tom not to get sued by Microsoft would have been to sell their soul to Microsoft from the start, pay hefty licensing fees, and build their systems on Windows CE.
Please don't support protectionist candidates. You'll make the outsourcing problem worse than it already is by voting for total boobs who want to jack up minimum wage and drive business out of the country with pseudo-communist anti-competitive policies.
I'm supporting protectionist candidates and I might well become one. I am going to take the Republican Party and turn it into an anti-globalization, protectionist regime and let the world understand that the people who condemn conservatives as the luddites are the very bankers and governments that want to sweep away all local traditions and customs in favor of some UN Mandated, EU Commission like body of arrogant bureacrats whose only concern for the so-called working man is a disdainful accounting of how much he can be used as a political chip.
If the socialist revolution that drives the left wing can be worldwide, then so too can the Republican Revolution. When we argue that Americans should drive their own cars, we will also reach out and argue that French should too, and Germans, and British. We will argue for a world where if you want to be a Pennsylvanian you can be one, and we will probably get the French on our side, by saying, that France should be French.
No more RINO free traders!
This is my sig.
More yet, if you protect your market, you make your people poorer
Can you give me a historically accurate example of that? Let's see, Asia's markets are protected, and they are building skyscrapers like crazy. USA's are not, and we have what?
This is my sig.
Belgium's pretty typical of most of Western Europe in my experience. Windows dominates the desktop at home and in the workplace (around 90%) just about everywhere, with Linux mostly being found in server rooms and universities. Macs are growing their market share quickly, partly because of the iPod / iPhone "halo effect", but the fact that both iPod and iPhone penetration levels are much lower than in the US means that the halo effect is less pronounced, so Macs typically have around half their US share of typical Western European markets (about 5% to 6%).
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
I'm assuming that you are referring to Microsoft. If so your numbers are wrong. They just recently announced a layoff of 15,000, before that they had 90,000 leaving them currently at ~75,000.
Tell me how many people were victimized by Enron and how many people were in on the "scam"? Gangs frequently terrorize neighbourhoods containing far more people than the gang themselves. Seems to me that a large number of people are frequently vicitimzed by a smaller number.
Not quite true. When Microsoft created IE to counter Netscape they produced versions for other operating systems. Notably for the MacOS and for Unix. The Unix version of the time could be made to run on Linux. Once they had effectively destroyed Netscape they stopped development of the Unix and MacOS versions of IE.
This of course helped to slow adoption of other OS's as with each revision of IE on Windows the IE on non Microsoft OS's fell further behind. This situation was status quo for some time. The Mozilla browser then Firefox helped to repair the discrepancy in browser capabilities while Microsoft left IE 6 rotting in the field as they had no motive to develop it due to lack of competition. The sudden burst of Firefox popularity caused the current heavy work by Microsoft on browser development.
But, you could take Union Carbide, Halliburton, Microsoft, and every other supposedly corporation you could think of that is "evil", and that would not compare even remotely to one day's worth of government evil and incompetence at the Somme.
This is my sig.
Judge them by both words and deeds. Here are some of their words.
"Knife the Baby."
"Cut of their air supply."
"Whack Dell."
Your numbers are bullshit; a healthy industry, according to accepted measures (Concentration Ratio or HHI) has no firm at 40% marketshare, let alone two. Try closer to 15% as the maximum single-firm share.
The only thing mind-boggling here is the magnitude of tjstork's ignorance and back-water, inbred country-boy notions of patriotism.
No, I can't give you an accurate historical example of anything. To be fair, nobody will be able to give accurate examples against that prediction either. (Yours isn't that accurate, since you made no effort for discovering how rich those countries would be without the barriers.)
Despite that, the hypothesis that trade barriers make people poorer has as good empirical support as an economic theory goes (what is not that much, but there aren't better alternatives). Countries that raise trade barriers tend to grow slower than before, and the ones that lower those barriers tend to grow faster.
Rethinking email