What happens to microcephalic babies? Uthanasia? No, they go to law school.
And governments are staffed by lawyers who were failures at law so they went into politics and now make statute books you need fork lifts to shuffle around (and never, but never, make a law criticizing lawyers.)
A world where information, or at least data, is not free, in every sense of the word, is a world where people are not free, in the political sense of the word.
I am appalled that someone did not think through and committed this act of intellectual vandalism. Or worse, did think it through and has sacked the cathedral. It is an act of out standing and palpable idiocy to have perpetrated this piece of bigandcy, this act of perfidy.
But this is a great opportunity for the internet to promote, promulgate and perpetrate freedom of information, the freedom of the bazzar.
Scan the source material. Publish it on the net and cut this guy's legs out from under him and anyone stupid enough to invest in his foul scheme.
Proprietary rights to what you can put into your head will eventually be out-lawed because they are untenable,but we're going to have to deal with this dentist as harshly as he should be dealing with cavities.
This decay of our rights to information is moral turpitude. What's does he want to "protect" next? (It certainly isn't you.)
Has anyone read the page (http://www.mpaa.org/anti-piracy/index.htm) at the MPAA's site?
I have never read about such strong-arming tactics being used in the US before. Not ever in war time. Its appalling. Is absolutely Stalinist!
And this for the cause of what exactly? So some bozos can create scenarios that look like Wag the Dog?
Big Brother Studios brings you The execution! Starring YOU! (And your wallet of course.)
I'm only listening to live music from now on and reading books and surfing the 'Net... The RIAA and the MPAA can go suck vacuum. They can't make me pay to watch this drek. (TV hasn't been worth watching since McCluhan's day.)
My company's thinking of cutting their costs. Given what real-estate goes for in NYC, I whole heartedly support them. What they don't spend on rent, they can spend on me:-)
I also have a home office (ADSL connection, router/hub, a LAN full of pretty fast G3 Macs, printers, scanner, QuickCam, PC Anywhere and Lotus Notes clients, yadda, yadda, yadda,) where the dress code is nil, the coffee is not drowned ground dog sh*t, where I don't have to listen to other nerd's conversations (or encounter marketing rep.s) or get comments about my eclectic tastes in music or food,) and I believe that this is the way of the future.
Its not where you are but what you are.
The real revolution to come from the ubiquitousness of the internet will be the democratization of hegemony and the elimination of the tyranny of place.
As a native French speaker, I can tell you that while speaking French makes me a well rounded person, being an ex-architecture student and ex-musician helped me more.
Except for a visceral understanding that literal expressions all belong in an internationalizable dictionary and that my code should only contain symbolic links to entries in that dictionary.
Also that presentations (aka screens, windows, dialogs, maps, layouts etc.) should never be laid out with information carved into it. (Actually if you're laying out content instead of programming the rules and letting objects lay themselves out, you're doing it, uh, unscalably and creating maintenance headaches for later.)
The distinction must be made between symbiotes (like mitochondria,) and parasites (like the common cold or HIV.)
That's where the parallels fall on their collective mug.
You can't really draw comparisons like that because the facts are never black and white.
The RIAA, the MPAA and most big corporate content providers are up in arms because their hegemony is threatened.
Napster or something very much like it would have been welcome with open arms if it had been their idea and it spread their content (and collected their pound of flesh,) without it costing them a farthing.
You think its cheap to produce and package all those CDs for shipping to all those record stores all of which also want a piece of the sales price?
Well okay, it is, but the people, who are under investigation by the states for price collusion right now, don't want to share or play fair and if they can make more money slicing their pipeline's throat, they will.
Who cares what's on the CD? The companies all call the content "software" whether its music, movies, executable code or porn.
Get with it. They are greedy bastards and won't stop picking your pocket until they are run out of town on a rail.
If you want to get them to wise up, go for a month listening to radio or reading books from the library. When the revenue goes flat, so will the cardiograms of the greediest of them.
I'm for any technology that reduces the amount of invasive probing and testing that we're subjected to.
Most technology goes through the same cycles depending on the amount of revenue that it can generate. Bleeding-edge early adopters first, porn next if at all possible, and there are some real sickies out there, medical next, military if there are destructive applications. Eventually it filters down to industrial app and then security.
I don't think its scary at all.
The biometric applications are much more interesting. How would you like you computer to identify you just by your being near it? No more passwords on your machine and you're safe if a user smells fishy (unless you normally smell like rotting carp. Then it may just refuse to work with you on GP.:-)
Read Communications of the ACM Volume 43, #8 (August 2000)
Software is not a product, its a medium of expression
Knowledge is expressed in it as much as in oral tradition (very perishable and difficult to transmit,[like documentation by osmosis,]) or the via the written word which at least persists but is passive and inert, software is an interactive means of expression.
Furthermore it is about as patentable, and copy- rightable as anyother human language. I don't think, despite possible protestations of those much parodied and maligned "upper-class twits" who speak with proper received pronunciation" that it can even be considered to be owner, since much as it is the result of consensual aggregation of linguistic rules and recognizable algorithmic process.
Software is a medium. It is used to express knowledge in a form which is efficient, or at least self-sufficient, and beyond active (unlike the passivity of words on a page or audiences in a theatre,) it is interactive.
The industry consortia are not about rights. They are about control but control is a double edged sword.
Start a copyright infringement suit against them about using the English language without having obtained written prior consent (one might ask from who and in what language and that's the point!
)
Of course, they might very well try to control the use of the language next but I don't think that a suit could be expressed that did not itself violate the nature of the suit.
They are trying to control what you see, hear, think for their own profits.
Stop paying them for a few weks and catch a live show or a play, read a book, watch TV and let the wind of change blow through record stores and movie theatres. Give the next block-buster a pass. You can live with the alternatives and wait until is comes back in video.
It won't take long before they notice the deleterious effect of their own campain.
Only that the ndustry be pushed into sueing everybody for copyright infringment upon the release of every new movie, CD, CD-ROM with immediate requests to suppress and quash every poster, ad, t-shirt, cummerbund, toy or other source of revenue generating tie-in.
Sue the industry if it does not sue everybody for infringement and for their selective application.
The law is an ass and the law responds like one. It will haul anything for anybody with equal disregard for justice, truth or the American way.
I've always maintained that gamers were the greediest.:-)
First the CPUs are never fast enough. Quake]|[ ate PentiumIIs for breakfast. Alive! Even a G4 Mac is hard pressed to keep up. (Well okay, I really can't tell the difference past a 60Hz refresh rate...)
The RAM requirements, nay demands are apalling. They keep fabs working long into the night.
Now the downloads are going to kill the 'net. That great.:-)
Ouch! I'd rather be raked over the coals! Talk about getting f*cked over by the boss! (I can't claim to know BG's procilvities but it sounds like the expression "cutting someone a new *ss-hole" might be taken literally.)
M$ won't put out the details and has supported every piece of legislation which will make reverse engineering illegal (for everybody but them of course.)
Bill Gates is a bully. Get used to it and deal with him like one. You'll live better.
You know, if I had Gate's balls, I couldn't walk because I'd be nailed to the floor from the weight.
The company has done what it always has done: Use its dominant OS position (an accident of history if ever there was one,) to wedge itself into another market and eventually shove everyone else (including standards comittees that were in place before it even knew there was a market,) off the 'level playing field.'
If you drove as wrecklessly as M$ conducts business, you'd be in jail before you got a mile from the dealer showroom. M$ drives a steamroller through other people's parking lot and complains when people point at the wreckage.
This behavior is beyond outrageous, Bill. Its CRIMINAL. And you belong in jail along with the other bullies.
Well I think that its amazing how low/. has fallen, along with the rest of the industry if you're running flacid feces like this purported hunourous piece of jeujune chaff.
I guess its better than M$ baiting but not by much.
Of course if it all been generated that would be something else.
Things that are supposedly "done for our own good" are fundamentally fascist at heart.
Anyone who is hiding something from you is not hiding it for your benefit. They're doing it for their own benefit and the only limit on their own cupidity and greed is their own conscience, ( corporations have no more souls than governments and government "wanna-be"s.)
Who knows if the Mattel filter is keeping Coleco sites out of your browser? If I was a competitor and a retailer of competing products, I'd ask that the source code be opened up.
Mattel can't prove that they're not dealing underhandedly as long as the code is closed.
As any PR person can tell you, its not the answers that hurt you, its the very fact that people can ask questions.
If Mattel has any brains, they'll open up the code and the database and co-opt their competition into collaborating rather than trying to hide something and looking like they're trying to hide something.
Apple did the smart thing by opening up their own OS9 iReview and KidSafe site categorization services.
You don't have to worry about suddenly having your products banned because Apple doesn't like you. And you have recourse if someone claims that you belong in category "A" (which may be off limits to a certain audience,) when you feel you should be in category "B."
With Mattel, who knows? And that's hard to defend in court...
Given the sieve like consistency of M$ product security and the promiscuity with which the system bares it vulnerable Office innards to every script kiddie who can move a mouse, I suspect (and fervently hope,) that MIS managers of businesses big and small will give this idea the trouncing it deserves.
Think of it. We already don't have to pay for a good OS (Linux,) or can pay (Solaris and the upcoming OS X[BSD] or Amiga [Linux]) instead of shelling out to Redmond.
Now M$ wants to nickle and dime you to death for using the applications you were extorted into buying in the first place. WordPerfect Suite and StarOffice and a whole raft of free software looks better and better.
M$ is Gates is a thief and a bully. (That was the gist the finding of law!)
M$ would stay intact instead of metastizing and they could be tarrifed out of existence. (And don't think they wouldn't be. We're not talking about a few Amerinds smuggling cigarettes here.)
The couldn't be any sweet-heart deals with OEMs if the boxes have to come through cuctoms with prices listed on the boxfor every transaction (I don't see M$ putting Windows on the Web for free, though their vict..., uh, customers might!:-)
Problem is that M$ has already thought of this and knows that they'd be cutting their own throats so they're about as likely to blight the BC lanscape as the DOJ is to cut M$ some slack. Still don't underestimate the stupidity of the lawyers who seem to be running the joint now.
I've been running with a 17" a 15" and a 21" monitors hooked up to my Mac for years.
I look forward to installing OS X (and getting a real OS,) on my G3 but, while flat screens are neat 'cause they don't eat your desktop for breakfast and leave you balancing a tablet on your knees, multiple heads is old hat to anybody in the Visual arts.
I use Macs, I have a copy of Excel (I had both arms twisted to buy it.) I recently tried to read a rinky-dink little nothing Excel 97 spread sheet, (nothing special to it at all,) only to be told that NONE of the damn conversions I tried on the client's '97 NT machine worked when I get them back home to my Mac (and this with Excel for NT 4.x.)
M$ has a lot to answer for and I REFUSE to by another copy of their crappy products to try to get at something saved in a different crappy version. That's what should be against the law.
M$ Word is an even worse offender. Have you looked at the crap that's on a Word file. 90% of it is waste. WordPerfect was easy to parse. This stuff is absolute drivel.
Bill Gates can kiss my [expletive deleted] on his way to oblivion.
Separate layout from the content and layout your pages using fixed symbolic references.
Internationalization then becomes a two phase process. You can have your visitors select from a drop-down list of languages (that you're supporting) as to what language they want to see.
Then use JSP, ASP (boo-hiss) or ModPerl to fetch from a dictionary containing all of the symbolically described tags you have, a dictionary containing the language specific content.
The script can shove out the page containing the final page content. (You'll find StyleSheets to be extremely useful for controling positioning and typefaces.)
My father was even saying how unfortunate it is that MS is even involved in the anti-trust case at all. Lets face it, the general population really doesn't know what's going on... not that they have to, though. Windows is good enough for their means, and it's relatively easy to use. As long as this holds true, their opinion of MS is not going to change, no matter what happens.
Besides, they didn't have a choice anyway. Even the manufacturer didn't have a choice.
M$ advertising is a total wasted effort. I still have Win'95 dual booting with Linux (which I did go through the trouble of installing) because its what came with the box. (My other boxes are Macs, one of which dual boots with LinuxPPC.:-)
The only people who change versions are the MIS wage-slaves who's bosses told them to in their fruitless to get a version of Windows that actually delivers...
Let's just KEEP M$ on the x86 architecture (they ain't anywhere else,) until it dies and then we'll be rid of 'em.
Slashdot Mirror
Richard III that is.
"The first thing we do. Kill all the lawyers."
What happens to microcephalic babies? Uthanasia? No, they go to law school.
And governments are staffed by lawyers who were failures at law so they went into politics and now make statute books you need fork lifts to shuffle around (and never, but never, make a law criticizing lawyers.)
Lawyers are smegma.
Big Brother must be smiling...
A world where information, or at least data, is not free, in every sense of the word, is a world where people are not free, in the political sense of the word.
I am appalled that someone did not think through and committed this act of intellectual vandalism. Or worse, did think it through and has sacked the cathedral. It is an act of out standing and palpable idiocy to have perpetrated this piece of bigandcy, this act of perfidy.
But this is a great opportunity for the internet to promote, promulgate and perpetrate freedom of information, the freedom of the bazzar.
Scan the source material. Publish it on the net and cut this guy's legs out from under him and anyone stupid enough to invest in his foul scheme.
Proprietary rights to what you can put into your head will eventually be out-lawed because they are untenable,but we're going to have to deal with this dentist as harshly as he should be dealing with cavities.
This decay of our rights to information is moral turpitude. What's does he want to "protect" next? (It certainly isn't you.)
Has anyone read the page (http://www.mpaa.org/anti-piracy/index.htm) at the MPAA's site?
I have never read about such strong-arming tactics being used in the US before. Not ever in war time. Its appalling. Is absolutely Stalinist!
And this for the cause of what exactly? So some bozos can create scenarios that look like Wag the Dog?
Big Brother Studios brings you The execution! Starring YOU! (And your wallet of course.)
I'm only listening to live music from now on and reading books and surfing the 'Net... The RIAA and the MPAA can go suck vacuum. They can't make me pay to watch this drek. (TV hasn't been worth watching since McCluhan's day.)
My company's thinking of cutting their costs. Given what real-estate goes for in NYC, I whole heartedly support them. What they don't spend on rent, they can spend on me :-)
I also have a home office (ADSL connection, router/hub, a LAN full of pretty fast G3 Macs, printers, scanner, QuickCam, PC Anywhere and Lotus Notes clients, yadda, yadda, yadda,) where the dress code is nil, the coffee is not drowned ground dog sh*t, where I don't have to listen to other nerd's conversations (or encounter marketing rep.s) or get comments about my eclectic tastes in music or food,) and I believe that this is the way of the future.
Its not where you are but what you are.
The real revolution to come from the ubiquitousness of the internet will be the democratization of hegemony and the elimination of the tyranny of place.
As a native French speaker, I can tell you that while speaking French makes me a well rounded person, being an ex-architecture student and ex-musician helped me more.
Except for a visceral understanding that literal expressions all belong in an internationalizable dictionary and that my code should only contain symbolic links to entries in that dictionary.
Also that presentations (aka screens, windows, dialogs, maps, layouts etc.) should never be laid out with information carved into it. (Actually if you're laying out content instead of programming the rules and letting objects lay themselves out, you're doing it, uh, unscalably and creating maintenance headaches for later.)
The distinction must be made between symbiotes (like mitochondria,) and parasites (like the common cold or HIV.)
That's where the parallels fall on their collective mug.
You can't really draw comparisons like that because the facts are never black and white.
The RIAA, the MPAA and most big corporate content providers are up in arms because their hegemony is threatened.
Napster or something very much like it would have been welcome with open arms if it had been their idea and it spread their content (and collected their pound of flesh,) without it costing them a farthing.
You think its cheap to produce and package all those CDs for shipping to all those record stores all of which also want a piece of the sales price?
Well okay, it is, but the people, who are under investigation by the states for price collusion right now, don't want to share or play fair and if they can make more money slicing their pipeline's throat, they will.
Who cares what's on the CD? The companies all call the content "software" whether its music, movies, executable code or porn.
Get with it. They are greedy bastards and won't stop picking your pocket until they are run out of town on a rail.
If you want to get them to wise up, go for a month listening to radio or reading books from the library. When the revenue goes flat, so will the cardiograms of the greediest of them.
I'm for any technology that reduces the amount of invasive probing and testing that we're subjected to.
:-)
Most technology goes through the same cycles depending on the amount of revenue that it can generate. Bleeding-edge early adopters first, porn next if at all possible, and there are some real sickies out there, medical next, military if there are destructive applications. Eventually it filters down to industrial app and then security.
I don't think its scary at all.
The biometric applications are much more interesting. How would you like you computer to identify you just by your being near it? No more passwords on your machine and you're safe if a user smells fishy (unless you normally smell like rotting carp. Then it may just refuse to work with you on GP.
Nah. A butt plug. They they can shove it up their collective greedy little anal-retentive, control freak-ish ass.
Read Communications of the ACM Volume 43, #8 (August 2000)
Software is not a product, its a medium of expression
Knowledge is expressed in it as much as in oral tradition (very perishable and difficult to transmit,[like documentation by osmosis,]) or the via the written word which at least persists but is passive and inert, software is an interactive means of expression.
Furthermore it is about as patentable, and copy- rightable as anyother human language. I don't think, despite possible protestations of those much parodied and maligned "upper-class twits" who speak with proper received pronunciation" that it can even be considered to be owner, since much as it is the result of consensual aggregation of linguistic rules and recognizable algorithmic process.
Software is a medium. It is used to express knowledge in a form which is efficient, or at least self-sufficient, and beyond active (unlike the passivity of words on a page or audiences in a theatre,) it is interactive.
The industry consortia are not about rights. They are about control but control is a double edged sword.
Start a copyright infringement suit against them about using the English language without having obtained written prior consent (one might ask from who and in what language and that's the point!
)
Of course, they might very well try to control the use of the language next but I don't think that a suit could be expressed that did not itself violate the nature of the suit.
They are trying to control what you see, hear, think for their own profits.
Stop paying them for a few weks and catch a live show or a play, read a book, watch TV and let the wind of change blow through record stores and movie theatres. Give the next block-buster a pass. You can live with the alternatives and wait until is comes back in video.
It won't take long before they notice the deleterious effect of their own campain.
The object of the suit doesn't matter.
Only that the ndustry be pushed into sueing everybody for copyright infringment upon the release of every new movie, CD, CD-ROM with immediate requests to suppress and quash every poster, ad, t-shirt, cummerbund, toy or other source of revenue generating tie-in.
Sue the industry if it does not sue everybody for infringement and for their selective application.
The law is an ass and the law responds like one. It will haul anything for anybody with equal disregard for justice, truth or the American way.
Don't circumvent it. Use it...
Now those are some downloads!
:-)
I've always maintained that gamers were the greediest.:-)
First the CPUs are never fast enough. Quake]|[ ate PentiumIIs for breakfast. Alive! Even a G4 Mac is hard pressed to keep up. (Well okay, I really can't tell the difference past a 60Hz refresh rate...)
The RAM requirements, nay demands are apalling. They keep fabs working long into the night.
Now the downloads are going to kill the 'net. That great.
-Charles-A.
Ouch! I'd rather be raked over the coals! Talk about getting f*cked over by the boss! (I can't claim to know BG's procilvities but it sounds like the expression "cutting someone a new *ss-hole" might be taken literally.)
You can't DO that if you're M$ competition.
M$ won't put out the details and has supported every piece of legislation which will make reverse engineering illegal (for everybody but them of course.)
Bill Gates is a bully. Get used to it and deal with him like one. You'll live better.
You know, if I had Gate's balls, I couldn't walk because I'd be nailed to the floor from the weight.
The company has done what it always has done: Use its dominant OS position (an accident of history if ever there was one,) to wedge itself into another market and eventually shove everyone else (including standards comittees that were in place before it even knew there was a market,) off the 'level playing field.'
If you drove as wrecklessly as M$ conducts business, you'd be in jail before you got a mile from the dealer showroom. M$ drives a steamroller through other people's parking lot and complains when people point at the wreckage.
This behavior is beyond outrageous, Bill. Its CRIMINAL. And you belong in jail along with the other bullies.
Well I think that its amazing how low /. has fallen, along with the rest of the industry if you're running flacid feces like this purported hunourous piece of jeujune chaff.
I guess its better than M$ baiting but not by much.
Of course if it all been generated that would be something else.
Things that are supposedly "done for our own good" are fundamentally fascist at heart.
Anyone who is hiding something from you is not hiding it for your benefit. They're doing it for their own benefit and the only limit on their own cupidity and greed is their own conscience, ( corporations have no more souls than governments and government "wanna-be"s.)
Who knows if the Mattel filter is keeping Coleco sites out of your browser? If I was a competitor and a retailer of competing products, I'd ask that the source code be opened up.
Mattel can't prove that they're not dealing underhandedly as long as the code is closed.
As any PR person can tell you, its not the answers that hurt you, its the very fact that people can ask questions.
If Mattel has any brains, they'll open up the code and the database and co-opt their competition into collaborating rather than trying to hide something and looking like they're trying to hide something.
Apple did the smart thing by opening up their own OS9 iReview and KidSafe site categorization services.
You don't have to worry about suddenly having your products banned because Apple doesn't like you. And you have recourse if someone claims that you belong in category "A" (which may be off limits to a certain audience,) when you feel you should be in category "B."
With Mattel, who knows? And that's hard to defend in court...
Given the sieve like consistency of M$ product security and the promiscuity with which the system bares it vulnerable Office innards to every script kiddie who can move a mouse, I suspect (and fervently hope,) that MIS managers of businesses big and small will give this idea the trouncing it deserves.
Think of it. We already don't have to pay for a good OS (Linux,) or can pay (Solaris and the upcoming OS X[BSD] or Amiga [Linux]) instead of shelling out to Redmond.
Now M$ wants to nickle and dime you to death for using the applications you were extorted into buying in the first place. WordPerfect Suite and StarOffice and a whole raft of free software looks better and better.
M$ is Gates is a thief and a bully. (That was the gist the finding of law!)
I'd love it.
:-)
M$ would stay intact instead of metastizing and they could be tarrifed out of existence. (And don't think they wouldn't be. We're not talking about a few Amerinds smuggling cigarettes here.)
The couldn't be any sweet-heart deals with OEMs if the boxes have to come through cuctoms with prices listed on the boxfor every transaction (I don't see M$ putting Windows on the Web for free, though their vict..., uh, customers might!
Problem is that M$ has already thought of this and knows that they'd be cutting their own throats so they're about as likely to blight the BC lanscape as the DOJ is to cut M$ some slack. Still don't underestimate the stupidity of the lawyers who seem to be running the joint now.
Well...
Isn't this another fine example of M$s innovation. [ROF-LMAO] They didn't even change the [expletive deleted] name.
I swear that M$ is no longer a software company, its a law firm filled with feisty midgets who were pithed at graduation.
Only a moron would think we were that gullible and/or innorant. Or a lawyer...
I have never seen a more complete fabrication. (any other MSNBC story ever run to five sections?)
The media are usually pretty lame but this piece reads more like it came more from MS legal department than NBC.
Its a desperate attempt to do what shouldn't be done anyway.
The ONLY way to get rid of the problem is to concede the x86 platform to M$ and NAIL THEM THERE.
No M$ on Merced/Itanium, PPC, Alpha, nowhere else, ever.. No FUTURE. Then watch the smart investors go elsewhere...
I've been running with a 17" a 15" and a 21" monitors hooked up to my Mac for years.
:-)
I look forward to installing OS X (and getting a real OS,) on my G3 but, while flat screens are neat 'cause they don't eat your desktop for breakfast and leave you balancing a tablet on your knees, multiple heads is old hat to anybody in the Visual arts.
Get over it guys.
Next miracle, please
I use Macs, I have a copy of Excel (I had both arms twisted to buy it.) I recently tried to read a rinky-dink little nothing Excel 97 spread sheet, (nothing special to it at all,) only to be told that NONE of the damn conversions I tried on the client's '97 NT machine worked when I get them back home to my Mac (and this with Excel for NT 4.x.)
M$ has a lot to answer for and I REFUSE to by another copy of their crappy products to try to get at something saved in a different crappy version. That's what should be against the law.
M$ Word is an even worse offender. Have you looked at the crap that's on a Word file. 90% of it is waste. WordPerfect was easy to parse. This stuff is absolute drivel.
Bill Gates can kiss my [expletive deleted] on his way to oblivion.
Separate layout from the content and layout your pages using fixed symbolic references.
Internationalization then becomes a two phase process. You can have your visitors select from a drop-down list of languages (that you're supporting) as to what language they want to see.
Then use JSP, ASP (boo-hiss) or ModPerl to fetch from a dictionary containing all of the symbolically described tags you have, a dictionary containing the language specific content.
The script can shove out the page containing the final page content. (You'll find StyleSheets to be extremely useful for controling positioning and typefaces.)
Charles-A.
Corral M$ onto the x86 platform and let Windows die like CP/M.
Their apps can live or die on their own merits.
There's no need to spend a dime on this thing. No need for punitive damages. No complex verification procedures.
Nothing M$ can appeal. Its status quo. They're on nothing BUT the x86. Leave 'em there and corrall them.
Let the need for bigger, better, faster pass them by.
My father was even saying how unfortunate it is that MS is even involved in the anti-trust case at all. Lets face it, the general population really doesn't know what's going on... not that they have to, though. Windows is good enough for their means, and it's relatively easy to use. As long as this holds true, their opinion of MS is not going to change, no matter what happens.
:-)
Besides, they didn't have a choice anyway. Even the manufacturer didn't have a choice.
M$ advertising is a total wasted effort. I still have Win'95 dual booting with Linux (which I did go through the trouble of installing) because its what came with the box. (My other boxes are Macs, one of which dual boots with LinuxPPC.
The only people who change versions are the MIS wage-slaves who's bosses told them to in their fruitless to get a version of Windows that actually delivers...
Let's just KEEP M$ on the x86 architecture (they ain't anywhere else,) until it dies and then we'll be rid of 'em.