Somebody come to their senses and post some phone numbers to call! I would spend all day on the phone if only someone would actually tell me who to call and how!
Please, in the future, don't leave out or gloss details like this!
Oh no. This is great. You don't understand what fucked up is, eh? Then I'll take it you did not serve in any of the involved armed forces in Iraq a few years ago? Wait a minute, hmm... Isn't Desert Storm rather the tip of the iceberg over there in the mid-east? In fact, according to the CIA, that is the single most likely place for a nuke to go off right now. And it could; there are quite a few running around over there.
Are you getting it yet? Not to mention the stupid stuff will be gone in under 100 years. Which means fucking world war in 80 at the rate we're going.
1) Science will be fine without you. 2) Millions of jobs will not be lost due to changes in engine and fuel details. In the final analysis, it will probably create jobs, but it is the mark of an ignorant thinker to measure the health or success of a policy based on "jobs". 3) Please, let's not insult each other's intelligence with this one. Obviously it doesn't have to happen tomorrow - I would settle for sometime before the real oil shortages start. By which time, if we have even sent another single human being to the moon, I will eat my cynical bastard hat.. And don't think I won't cry any tears over it, either.
Leeches were, until quite recently, in regular use to aid in the bleedings commonly undertaken in western medicine for many thousands of years. George Washington died as a result of being bled to death as a treatment for a resperatory ailment. Murdered by his doctors, in other words. Leeches, like albumen before plastic, were a hot commodity. Admittedly comparing apples and oranges, the end of leech cultivation represented a major hardship for a significant number of hardworking americans.
I think you do get it, though. It's too much to ask me to believe that you can't fathom gradual phase-ins and incremental adjustments that, on the balance, would probably seem like an opportunity rather than a hardship. Cry me a river.
But again, underlying this argument is the baser fallacy that jobs are what is important. You can shove your jobs, and your economy, because we are risking global war, not to mention surpressing science, to sustain an energy plutocracy with an extremely short lifespan.
I do wish you had been there to champion the cause of farmers, factory workers and the merchant marine over the past 50 years, though. They could have really used your help. But perhaps that's not a significant enough portion of the 50-year-ago American economy to trouble you yet? (sigh)
You are quite right about relative efficiencies of current automotive combustion engines versus commercial power plants. Hence the gas/electric hybrid payoff. The gas half of the engine can run at its most efficient parameters and it actually is so much better than before that even accounting for double conversion and storage loss, you still do twice as good as the current IC state of the art. Locomotives have worked this way for years; it was really asking quite a bit to keep this approach out of the limelight as long as it was, so... perhaps, especially if this "shortage" holds long enough, we will see more. I saw my first G/E hybrid car parked on an upper west side street last Saturday.
Of course, there is clean energy in use today. Unfortunately, almost all commercial energy is dirty right now, some of it very dirty. Of course, someday, we may discover a way to produce clean energy cheaply and plentifully. I do not, however, think shipping hydrogen-3 from the moon will be part of the plan. Just a hunch, though.
Your points are very good and well taken. Thank you.
Meantime, I believe the benefits of actually having any happily functioning humans on this planet in 100 years outweigh this "oh what will happen to all the poor gas station attendants" bullshit. You know, we've had a lot of bullshit jobs in this country over the years, from horse buggy mechanic to medical leech collector to asbestos installer. And do you know what? They went and fucking found other work. Lucky for you. Do you have any idea how fucked up our energy situation is right now?
It could all be different. But no - some fucking people just never learn.
I am well aware of the electrolysis solution and so were the researchers doing the alternative hydrogen production research. It's a question of efficiency.
You are right, except for one thing. The electric car is actually the worst of all known alternative energy vehicles.
Claims of its "efficiency" or "eco-friendliness" are the most base slight of hand.
With regular cars, you burn gas to create energy, and your car moves, right? But the gas is messy, dirty and dangerous (not to mention being about to run out in less than 100 yrs or so). Meanwhile, electric cars run on nice, clean electricity, right? No exhaust, no mess.
Unfortunately, that's bullshit. The electricity that powers your cute little golf cart was created by burning gas somewhere else. See those big smokestacks? That's you. But it gets worse. Because producing the electricity, distributing it, and storing it in your cars batteries are all extremely inefficient processes. Far more gas is used, and far more polution produced (fossil and/or radioactive) by electric cars than their counterparts powered by turning combustion directly into motion. Oops.
Meanwhile, there are a number of other known, tested clean, renewable alternatives now. Fuel made from corn being the most obvious. Some are even in use in other parts of the world, where "energy" is expensive and the powers that be are more distant. Why is it that out of all the alternatives, electric is the only one being "seriously" pursued? Because electric cars are actually a bullshit propaganda scheme in the first place.
Notice I haven't mentioned gas/electric hybrids, which aren't necessarily a bad thing; at least you get 60-80mpg or so. Honda is actually selling one right now, which I believe you can order...
Now all we have to do is invent a workable fusion reactor, and we can start blasting our way through another non-renewable resource.
Let me guess: we're reading this sad little story because some scientists were tapped last weekend to think about energy sources due to the oil "shortage," right?
In the meantime, we could already power our nations automobiles with fuel made from corn instead of fossil fuels, and we don't.
We could already be spending real $$$'s on solar energy research... but, uh, not since the last oil crisis, eh?
And then there's hydrogen. Cleanest fuel known to man. There was some very promising research a while ago about producing hydrogen with engineered single-celled organisms. Gee... I wonder if those guys are getting enough funding? Duh.
Bottom line: energy research is a fucked business. Or is that energy research funding?
"Why yes, I've studied just a wee bit of history (mostly U.S.) and economics;)
My feeling that we're headed in the direction of a fully state-controlled economy comes from my observations over the last 12 years, the historical record of the U.S. before and after the 1930's (the period when statist economic policies exploded) the recent resurgence of antitrust enforcement, and from listening to C-Span every day on the car radio."
Sue your teachers.
"This is a misconception about capitalism that was first propagated by Karl Marx, and has become very popular in the U.S. during the last 75 years.
Consider that consolidation is not always bad. Sometimes it brings with it economies of scale, which can lower price and increase quality for consumers."
Sometimes it does. Often it does not.
As for capital flowing freely, you will have to give me your opinion about how freely it has been flowing in the past 25 years. Regardless, capital is not the only barrier to entry into a market, as has been amply demonstrated in our industry. You would do well to read through the specific details of what constituted Microsoft's loss in their case. The judge didn't find every single instance of anti-competitive behavior, but the coverage overall was adequate.
"What greater manifestation of collective intelligence is there than the trillions of economic decisions made every day in the marketplace?
That is the exact point of capitalism (aka free-market economics) - that the collection of economic choices made by billions of free individuals drive efficiency and productivity far better than some committee of suits in Washington could ever dream of."
Simply put, the "trillions of economic decisions" can be supplimented nicely with thorough and intelligent application existing antitrust laws. That legislation did not get written on a lark. You would also do well to study the circumstances under which it was written, and to examine its applications in the intervening years.
On their own, those "trillions of economic decisions" will naturally create an environment, towards which each step has been based on sound economic thinking, where competition has been throttled, or in many cases eliminated.
Consolidation does indeed create "economies of scale" - but it does a lot more than that. Markets are interconnected, and diversification can have network effects (what many economists call "collateral gains"). It is the net effect of these collateral gains that put individuals in the easy position of performing an "anti-competitive act" - denying rival carriers fairly priced access to your network infrastructure, rival online services access to your operating system's desktop, or, finally, spending your ample ill-gotten gains to simply crush the competition, through acquisition or manipulation of entire markets (i.e. flooding).
It is this subtle point that the libertarian party line is unable to acknowledge or answer. But it means that capitalism alone is not a substitute for democracy. Worse, blind praise for the notion of "voting with dollars" is the equivalent of admitting an unhealthy attraction for an aristocratic state.
But to stay on the main point, what you are misunderstanding (in your condemnation of "suits in Washington") is that the same forces which threaten democracy threaten capitalism as well. Human nature is pervasive. Dispensing with the notion of a democratic government does not dispense with the general malaise that makes it unpleasant today. And the "alternatives" you are describing are nothing new. We have seen them before here in this country, and can see them today elsewhere. Libertarians are ultimately, either through ignorance or deliberate and malicious self-interest, describing nothing more than governence by plutocrats. Are you really so ignorant to the consequences of collective "governance" accountable to nothing but an individual's monetary success? Rest assured, we have gotten to the place where we are today through hard and frequent experience.
You didn't happen to be there to see it, and apparently lack a sufficient understanding of history to appreciate it after the fact, but I assure you, the golden years of unfettered capitalism in this country were not an era you would have liked to live in. Unless, of course, you were lucky enough to have been born into the (considerably smaller than it is today) upper class. The day of the unfettered capitalist is over, because it led to injustice profound enough, to foster public outcry so powerful, that even your "suits in Washington" were unable to ignore it and keep their jobs. Imagine that.
But in all seriousness, you really have to stop talking about command economies. There are a few really poor policies related to certain commodities in the US, but rest assured, you have never seen a real command economy. Anti-trust law and command economies have nothing in common, in spirit or practice.
"Actually I'm writing this on my Linux-Mandrake 7.0 computer. Occasionally X or Netscape will flake out, but the OS itself never crashes:)"
I'm very pleased for you. (However, your non-proletarian tendencies make you an enemy of the state. You and your family will now be sent to a reeducation camp. A cadre of trained state economists will be reformatting your hard drive shortly. Muahahaha.)
I appreciate the links. You may be surprised to learn that I am well acquainted with all of them, and have in fact studied the Libertarian party extensively. I agree with their views on many issues. Unfortunately, dogma is still dogma. Most people accept a party line because they are not sufficiently qualified to have their own. To your credit, I find few card-carrying libertarians willing to engage in a free-thinking debate on the merits of the issues. Unfortunately, I remain unconvinced that Microsoft represents good capitalism at work, or that the larger issues of laissez faire capitalism currently spoken of contain anything to distinguish them from historical and current failures.
I respect your respect, phutureboy, and pardon me for making light of your beliefs, but you've never been to the Soviet Union, and worse, I think you actually buy into the whole communist/anti-communist polemic, when the truth is far more subtle.
Unfortunately, now you've got me started.
For you to even suggest what we are "moving towards" is a "command economy" from what we've seen here is a pretty sad little knee-jerk. Have you've studied much history, let alone economics? Would you know what a command economy sounds like if you were getting spanked by one? Have you any idea the details of what Microsoft had to do to get themselves in the position they're in?
Most of all, this irks me because monopoly law is so basic. The fact of the matter is, capitalism screws up. It's logical for it to be screwed up. It follows easily that consolidation of wealth and mergers across interests will progress until they become self-sustaining. The more consolidated a marketplace, the less incentive there is to compete, and the easier it becomes to fix prices, with or without explicit collaboration. In many situations it's possible to end up with a single dominant entity controlling an entire market, with barriers to entry which are too forbidding for anyone to challenge. In these cases, the only thing between you and economic, technical, and social stagnation is a well-organized democratic government. The state where competition benefits "consumers" is, in many industries, a transitory accident.
Captialism is not a panacea. Nothing is, besides collective intelligence. Reactionary belief in capitalism as somehow stronger or more productive a force than democracy shows a failure to understand what makes trouble for democracy in the first place.
The worst part is that you're sitting there on your Windows computer writing this. Hard-core, Reagan-era capitalism didn't give you a very good operating system, did it?
What do I mean? Well, you go ahead and consider that question every time you crash and reboot. ("Oh, but I didn't crash all week!" Sigh...) No, really, think about it for a minute. Because since the late 1980's there has been no good reason for your computer to ever have crashed. Yes, it's really true. Ask around.
For reference, BTW, it is now 2000. And if you want to know why it is we are now moving up on two decades of unnecessary crashing... I'll give you a hint... it's in one of my earlier messages...
This is not complicated. Atrocious is extending copyright expiry every time a major media company is about to lose a franchise. Atrocious is outlawing non-criminal acts such as reverse-engineering, benchmarking, defeating copy-protection: this is a subtle legal point, and I'll forgive you if you don't understand it, but only committing a crime actually makes you a criminal. There is a delicate balance to be struck when refining the protections of authors, and making it illegal for me to reverse-engineer is too much protection.
Truthfully, many of us would be working in pizza hut if we hadn't warezed our first compiler at 13. Truthfully, many of us would be pretty bad at what we do if we were always afraid of looking under the hood at how things work. But that's been outlawed now, and god forbid it should take - because that is the culture that gave us what we have today, and if we keep piling on favors for record, movie and software companies, it will be gone tomorrow.
You may never know it, of course. Many important things pass unheeded, their absence known only through the diffuse, general malaise of what was, and what could have been.
MacOS doesn't live up to the hype, but it's still better than windows, as primitive as it is. I can agree there are few credible threats on the consumer desktop. A few have come and gone. The issue that I made a point of highlighting is that good works in the space weren't even undertaken, or if they were, didn't reach a level of recognition necessary for their continued development - because they had no expectation of success against the monopoly.
As for what Microsoft could have or should have done, allow me to suggest a commonly used architectural feature which allows the isolation of legacy code from a more modern core - the boxed-emulation strategy. Consider Wine as the outer limits of such an approach, and VMWare as the other extreme.
In other words, take a good OS, support the legacy with an emulation layer, add Moore's law, and stir. If you do it properly, and there are plenty of examples one can point to of that being done, you win on both fronts. Microsoft could have done this three different ways by now. This is not rocket science. They simply had no incentive to try. Monopoly, after all.
Capitalism is not without its fanatical devotees, most of which would quake with fear at the realities of a truly capitalist state. Nonetheless, I do not want to make the impression that I am presenting an attack on capitalism here. Only that, as the quote suggests, we need better protections (or perhaps the right way to think about it is enhancements or catalysts) for the democratic process, in order to prevent the coopting of lawmakers by the interests of a relatively small group of wealthy individuals. As long as there are elected officials, there will be people who find it easier to lobby for unjust laws than to enrich themselves justly - and this is what has left us in the unfortunate state we are now in - one with most definitely unbalanced intellectual property legislation.
The missing piece in many of the uber-IP enthusiasts arguments is often where they got their own ideas from. Taken to its logical conclusion, what they currently propose is atrocious, and will ultimately have a chilling effect on learning, competition, and commerical and cultural development. Beyond that, I think what already we have now is seriously flawed. Coming up with better answers will be tricky, but that does not reduce the imperative. Creating massive "criminal classes" are not a particularly good way to run a society.
You're correct in many of your points. But it is important to keep in mind the wisdom of the original copyright laws as they applied to the world for which they were written. Come to think of it, going back to what we started with would be a good start (undoing the most blatant corporate tinkering at least). And then we can think about what we can do to (successfully) re-interpret the old ideas in the world we happen to live in.
Microsoft did not choose to compete by releasing superior products. There is little excuse for this as far as I can see; they had for all intents and purposes virtually unlimited resources.
They did however, actively and willfully, attempt to ruin competitors with better alternatives to their own products, through a variety of "strategic acquisitions," lawsuits, deals with OEMs, chipmakers, and distributors, "feature copy jobs" released for free to bottom out markets, selectively concealed APIs, "embrace and extend" nonsense, and need I really go on? The trial is public record. So are their emails.
The end result? 90% of the world runs Windows. Extremely unfortunate. Don't kid yourself for a minute that it's because it's a "better product." Anyone with any technical sense (let alone sufficient experience with the product) laughs bitterly when they hear this. Everyone knows it's a mess in there./.'ers are (generally) technically savvy people and understand this easily. The public at large may not be so fortunate. Sadly, for a variety of reasons both legal, illegal, and unfortunate, they have not been exposed to any of the better alternatives that exist, to speak nothing of the ones which never existed, because of the way the "marketplace" has developed.
Three kinds of people oppose this breakup:
Microsoft employees and stockholders (stupid, it will probably benefit them in the end)
Capitalist fundamentalist libertarians (we all know what circle of hell reactionary political thinkers go to)
And the lowliest of all, Microsoft propaganda victims (did I peg you with this one or what?)
Americans are stupid, that's why they use Microsoft. But stupidity isn't illegal, and no law will make people smarter. It's just none of Uncle Sam's business.
Spoken like someone who knows none of the issues, facts, or law.
X agrees with Y who disagrees with Z. Whatever. Argue the points on their merits or get lost.
I will debate you until you hemorrage llamas from your ass that Microsoft has been, and continues to be a pernicious monopoly. They may have single-handedly set the industry back 10 years. Now, whether or not others will simply step up to continue to cause trouble, well, that's Murphy for you. But if the ruling comes down right, it will at least set a better tone for the future.
What I question is why, and how, the Appellate court has repeatedly come down so heavily for the interests of Microsoft? Their track record on dealing with these issues is abyssmal, and from my layman's perspective, circumventing them seemed the only productive course the case could stay on.
Jackson's opinions have, as I suspect for many people, reaffirmed my own faith in the intelligence, circumspectness, and wisdom of the judiciary. But of course that's not a universal condition.
But does anyone know what the connection is? Why does the Appellate in this circumstance seem so firmly in MSFT's pocket?
Slashdot Mirror
Please, in the future, don't leave out or gloss details like this!
And how do you CHARGE the battery, eh, sparky?
Are you getting it yet? Not to mention the stupid stuff will be gone in under 100 years. Which means fucking world war in 80 at the rate we're going.
1) Science will be fine without you.
2) Millions of jobs will not be lost due to changes in engine and fuel details. In the final analysis, it will probably create jobs, but it is the mark of an ignorant thinker to measure the health or success of a policy based on "jobs".
3) Please, let's not insult each other's intelligence with this one. Obviously it doesn't have to happen tomorrow - I would settle for sometime before the real oil shortages start. By which time, if we have even sent another single human being to the moon, I will eat my cynical bastard hat. . And don't think I won't cry any tears over it, either.
Leeches were, until quite recently, in regular use to aid in the bleedings commonly undertaken in western medicine for many thousands of years. George Washington died as a result of being bled to death as a treatment for a resperatory ailment. Murdered by his doctors, in other words. Leeches, like albumen before plastic, were a hot commodity. Admittedly comparing apples and oranges, the end of leech cultivation represented a major hardship for a significant number of hardworking americans.
I think you do get it, though. It's too much to ask me to believe that you can't fathom gradual phase-ins and incremental adjustments that, on the balance, would probably seem like an opportunity rather than a hardship. Cry me a river.
But again, underlying this argument is the baser fallacy that jobs are what is important. You can shove your jobs, and your economy, because we are risking global war, not to mention surpressing science, to sustain an energy plutocracy with an extremely short lifespan.
I do wish you had been there to champion the cause of farmers, factory workers and the merchant marine over the past 50 years, though. They could have really used your help. But perhaps that's not a significant enough portion of the 50-year-ago American economy to trouble you yet? (sigh)
You are exactly right, but gas/electric hybrids are better. Distribution can have up to a 70% loss. That's right, I said 70%.
Just don't miss.
Of course, there is clean energy in use today. Unfortunately, almost all commercial energy is dirty right now, some of it very dirty. Of course, someday, we may discover a way to produce clean energy cheaply and plentifully. I do not, however, think shipping hydrogen-3 from the moon will be part of the plan. Just a hunch, though.
Your points are very good and well taken. Thank you.
You are clearly in space already. Lucky for you I live to be trolled by amateurs. You are actually ignorant enough to even mention electric cars. Please read this to be enlightened on the notion of electric cars.
Meantime, I believe the benefits of actually having any happily functioning humans on this planet in 100 years outweigh this "oh what will happen to all the poor gas station attendants" bullshit. You know, we've had a lot of bullshit jobs in this country over the years, from horse buggy mechanic to medical leech collector to asbestos installer. And do you know what? They went and fucking found other work. Lucky for you. Do you have any idea how fucked up our energy situation is right now?
It could all be different. But no - some fucking people just never learn.
I am well aware of the electrolysis solution and so were the researchers doing the alternative hydrogen production research. It's a question of efficiency.
Claims of its "efficiency" or "eco-friendliness" are the most base slight of hand.
With regular cars, you burn gas to create energy, and your car moves, right? But the gas is messy, dirty and dangerous (not to mention being about to run out in less than 100 yrs or so). Meanwhile, electric cars run on nice, clean electricity, right? No exhaust, no mess.
Unfortunately, that's bullshit. The electricity that powers your cute little golf cart was created by burning gas somewhere else. See those big smokestacks? That's you. But it gets worse. Because producing the electricity, distributing it, and storing it in your cars batteries are all extremely inefficient processes. Far more gas is used, and far more polution produced (fossil and/or radioactive) by electric cars than their counterparts powered by turning combustion directly into motion. Oops.
Meanwhile, there are a number of other known, tested clean, renewable alternatives now. Fuel made from corn being the most obvious. Some are even in use in other parts of the world, where "energy" is expensive and the powers that be are more distant. Why is it that out of all the alternatives, electric is the only one being "seriously" pursued? Because electric cars are actually a bullshit propaganda scheme in the first place.
Notice I haven't mentioned gas/electric hybrids, which aren't necessarily a bad thing; at least you get 60-80mpg or so. Honda is actually selling one right now, which I believe you can order...
Let me guess: we're reading this sad little story because some scientists were tapped last weekend to think about energy sources due to the oil "shortage," right?
In the meantime, we could already power our nations automobiles with fuel made from corn instead of fossil fuels, and we don't.
We could already be spending real $$$'s on solar energy research... but, uh, not since the last oil crisis, eh?
And then there's hydrogen. Cleanest fuel known to man. There was some very promising research a while ago about producing hydrogen with engineered single-celled organisms. Gee... I wonder if those guys are getting enough funding? Duh.
Bottom line: energy research is a fucked business. Or is that energy research funding?
Yeah. Right.
My feeling that we're headed in the direction of a fully state-controlled economy comes from my observations over the last 12 years, the historical record of the U.S. before and after the 1930's (the period when statist economic policies exploded) the recent resurgence of antitrust enforcement, and from listening to C-Span every day on the car radio."
Sue your teachers.
"This is a misconception about capitalism that was first propagated by Karl Marx, and has become very popular in the U.S. during the last 75 years.
Consider that consolidation is not always bad. Sometimes it brings with it economies of scale, which can lower price and increase quality for consumers."
Sometimes it does. Often it does not.
As for capital flowing freely, you will have to give me your opinion about how freely it has been flowing in the past 25 years. Regardless, capital is not the only barrier to entry into a market, as has been amply demonstrated in our industry. You would do well to read through the specific details of what constituted Microsoft's loss in their case. The judge didn't find every single instance of anti-competitive behavior, but the coverage overall was adequate.
"What greater manifestation of collective intelligence is there than the trillions of economic decisions made every day in the marketplace?
That is the exact point of capitalism (aka free-market economics) - that the collection of economic choices made by billions of free individuals drive efficiency and productivity far better than some committee of suits in Washington could ever dream of."
Simply put, the "trillions of economic decisions" can be supplimented nicely with thorough and intelligent application existing antitrust laws. That legislation did not get written on a lark. You would also do well to study the circumstances under which it was written, and to examine its applications in the intervening years.
On their own, those "trillions of economic decisions" will naturally create an environment, towards which each step has been based on sound economic thinking, where competition has been throttled, or in many cases eliminated.
Consolidation does indeed create "economies of scale" - but it does a lot more than that. Markets are interconnected, and diversification can have network effects (what many economists call "collateral gains"). It is the net effect of these collateral gains that put individuals in the easy position of performing an "anti-competitive act" - denying rival carriers fairly priced access to your network infrastructure, rival online services access to your operating system's desktop, or, finally, spending your ample ill-gotten gains to simply crush the competition, through acquisition or manipulation of entire markets (i.e. flooding).
It is this subtle point that the libertarian party line is unable to acknowledge or answer. But it means that capitalism alone is not a substitute for democracy. Worse, blind praise for the notion of "voting with dollars" is the equivalent of admitting an unhealthy attraction for an aristocratic state.
But to stay on the main point, what you are misunderstanding (in your condemnation of "suits in Washington") is that the same forces which threaten democracy threaten capitalism as well. Human nature is pervasive. Dispensing with the notion of a democratic government does not dispense with the general malaise that makes it unpleasant today. And the "alternatives" you are describing are nothing new. We have seen them before here in this country, and can see them today elsewhere. Libertarians are ultimately, either through ignorance or deliberate and malicious self-interest, describing nothing more than governence by plutocrats. Are you really so ignorant to the consequences of collective "governance" accountable to nothing but an individual's monetary success? Rest assured, we have gotten to the place where we are today through hard and frequent experience.
You didn't happen to be there to see it, and apparently lack a sufficient understanding of history to appreciate it after the fact, but I assure you, the golden years of unfettered capitalism in this country were not an era you would have liked to live in. Unless, of course, you were lucky enough to have been born into the (considerably smaller than it is today) upper class. The day of the unfettered capitalist is over, because it led to injustice profound enough, to foster public outcry so powerful, that even your "suits in Washington" were unable to ignore it and keep their jobs. Imagine that.
But in all seriousness, you really have to stop talking about command economies. There are a few really poor policies related to certain commodities in the US, but rest assured, you have never seen a real command economy. Anti-trust law and command economies have nothing in common, in spirit or practice.
"Actually I'm writing this on my Linux-Mandrake 7.0 computer. Occasionally X or Netscape will flake out, but the OS itself never crashes :)"
I'm very pleased for you. (However, your non-proletarian tendencies make you an enemy of the state. You and your family will now be sent to a reeducation camp. A cadre of trained state economists will be reformatting your hard drive shortly. Muahahaha.)
I appreciate the links. You may be surprised to learn that I am well acquainted with all of them, and have in fact studied the Libertarian party extensively. I agree with their views on many issues. Unfortunately, dogma is still dogma. Most people accept a party line because they are not sufficiently qualified to have their own. To your credit, I find few card-carrying libertarians willing to engage in a free-thinking debate on the merits of the issues. Unfortunately, I remain unconvinced that Microsoft represents good capitalism at work, or that the larger issues of laissez faire capitalism currently spoken of contain anything to distinguish them from historical and current failures.
Thank you. I couldn't have said it better myself.
Unfortunately, now you've got me started.
For you to even suggest what we are "moving towards" is a "command economy" from what we've seen here is a pretty sad little knee-jerk. Have you've studied much history, let alone economics? Would you know what a command economy sounds like if you were getting spanked by one? Have you any idea the details of what Microsoft had to do to get themselves in the position they're in?
Most of all, this irks me because monopoly law is so basic. The fact of the matter is, capitalism screws up. It's logical for it to be screwed up. It follows easily that consolidation of wealth and mergers across interests will progress until they become self-sustaining. The more consolidated a marketplace, the less incentive there is to compete, and the easier it becomes to fix prices, with or without explicit collaboration. In many situations it's possible to end up with a single dominant entity controlling an entire market, with barriers to entry which are too forbidding for anyone to challenge. In these cases, the only thing between you and economic, technical, and social stagnation is a well-organized democratic government. The state where competition benefits "consumers" is, in many industries, a transitory accident.
Captialism is not a panacea. Nothing is, besides collective intelligence. Reactionary belief in capitalism as somehow stronger or more productive a force than democracy shows a failure to understand what makes trouble for democracy in the first place.
The worst part is that you're sitting there on your Windows computer writing this. Hard-core, Reagan-era capitalism didn't give you a very good operating system, did it?
What do I mean? Well, you go ahead and consider that question every time you crash and reboot. ("Oh, but I didn't crash all week!" Sigh...) No, really, think about it for a minute. Because since the late 1980's there has been no good reason for your computer to ever have crashed. Yes, it's really true. Ask around.
For reference, BTW, it is now 2000. And if you want to know why it is we are now moving up on two decades of unnecessary crashing... I'll give you a hint... it's in one of my earlier messages...
Truthfully, many of us would be working in pizza hut if we hadn't warezed our first compiler at 13. Truthfully, many of us would be pretty bad at what we do if we were always afraid of looking under the hood at how things work. But that's been outlawed now, and god forbid it should take - because that is the culture that gave us what we have today, and if we keep piling on favors for record, movie and software companies, it will be gone tomorrow.
You may never know it, of course. Many important things pass unheeded, their absence known only through the diffuse, general malaise of what was, and what could have been.
Heh. That's too bad. Now we'll never hear from him again. :)
As for what Microsoft could have or should have done, allow me to suggest a commonly used architectural feature which allows the isolation of legacy code from a more modern core - the boxed-emulation strategy. Consider Wine as the outer limits of such an approach, and VMWare as the other extreme.
In other words, take a good OS, support the legacy with an emulation layer, add Moore's law, and stir. If you do it properly, and there are plenty of examples one can point to of that being done, you win on both fronts. Microsoft could have done this three different ways by now. This is not rocket science. They simply had no incentive to try. Monopoly, after all.
The missing piece in many of the uber-IP enthusiasts arguments is often where they got their own ideas from. Taken to its logical conclusion, what they currently propose is atrocious, and will ultimately have a chilling effect on learning, competition, and commerical and cultural development. Beyond that, I think what already we have now is seriously flawed. Coming up with better answers will be tricky, but that does not reduce the imperative. Creating massive "criminal classes" are not a particularly good way to run a society.
Read my other posts.
You're correct in many of your points. But it is important to keep in mind the wisdom of the original copyright laws as they applied to the world for which they were written. Come to think of it, going back to what we started with would be a good start (undoing the most blatant corporate tinkering at least). And then we can think about what we can do to (successfully) re-interpret the old ideas in the world we happen to live in.
They did however, actively and willfully, attempt to ruin competitors with better alternatives to their own products, through a variety of "strategic acquisitions," lawsuits, deals with OEMs, chipmakers, and distributors, "feature copy jobs" released for free to bottom out markets, selectively concealed APIs, "embrace and extend" nonsense, and need I really go on? The trial is public record. So are their emails.
The end result? 90% of the world runs Windows. Extremely unfortunate. Don't kid yourself for a minute that it's because it's a "better product." Anyone with any technical sense (let alone sufficient experience with the product) laughs bitterly when they hear this. Everyone knows it's a mess in there. /.'ers are (generally) technically savvy people and understand this easily. The public at large may not be so fortunate. Sadly, for a variety of reasons both legal, illegal, and unfortunate, they have not been exposed to any of the better alternatives that exist, to speak nothing of the ones which never existed, because of the way the "marketplace" has developed.
Three kinds of people oppose this breakup:
Spoken like someone who knows none of the issues, facts, or law.
I realize my own impression of the Appellate in that circuit is very vague. I'm glad there are /.'ers who understand it better than myself.
I will debate you until you hemorrage llamas from your ass that Microsoft has been, and continues to be a pernicious monopoly. They may have single-handedly set the industry back 10 years. Now, whether or not others will simply step up to continue to cause trouble, well, that's Murphy for you. But if the ruling comes down right, it will at least set a better tone for the future.
Jackson's opinions have, as I suspect for many people, reaffirmed my own faith in the intelligence, circumspectness, and wisdom of the judiciary. But of course that's not a universal condition.
But does anyone know what the connection is? Why does the Appellate in this circumstance seem so firmly in MSFT's pocket?