My client is trying to protect his family from scammers and other unsavory types, and isn't savvy in this matter, so i'm doing it for him.
Then you're doing it wrong.
Quite frankly, extreme monitoring and filtering isn't going to work. Scammers will hide their words to avoid filters, so active filtering doesn't work. The exchanges are managed quickly, so scams (especially phishing scams) get your data instantly, so delayed review of activity isn't going to protect anyone, either, though it might make detection a bit faster. There is simple no hardware approach that will work.
If, as others have pointed out, your client is an overly controlling patriarch, he needs professional psychiatric help. If he's just paranoid and scared, he needs professional technical help, and that's where you should focus your efforts.
Educate him and his family on scammers' techniques and tactics, and security practices. Explain how the teenage daughter will be victimized and harassed, because that's just the nature of the assholes on the Internet. From a network perspective, make sure they have updated antivirus software, and maybe an active monitoring firewall to scan HTTP traffic for viruses. A basic scanner for the known threats, and education for the unknown threats, and the client will be far better off in the long run.
As a former Catholic, I'm sort of glad that "thou shalt not play Diablo III for 12 hours on Sunday while occasionally watching free pornography" is no longer applied to me. Hard to shake the guilt that I'm enjoying so much while others deliberately stunt themselves though...
That's something I like about my church... Not only can I play games for 12 hours on Sunday, but one of our ministers will join in!
I've also been on the Internet since the early 90s, and I have been forced to a few places that would set off religious filters. One particularly nasty example was when giving a presentation with website references, I was asked a question about one of those references... so I went to the website (a reasonably-respected newspaper), and was greeted by a full-screen ad for Victoria's Secret, projected onto an 8-foot-tall screen behind me.
Then, of course, there's the times I wished others had a filter. I volunteer at a church, and from my seat in the choir loft, I've seen churchgoers watch porn on tablets in the back row, during the service.
That's a rather impossible question, actually, because there are many different metrics. A large number of people really only care what something can be sold for, so they'll see a company with a low stock price (like, for example, Apple in the late 1990's) as being worth very little. Someone who cares about having control of the company would value that low-priced stock more, because it's easier to gain more control for a lower cost. Someone with a sentimental attachment to the company or an interest in receiving the shareholder updates (which often include first announcements of future plans) could consider the stock worth quite a lot, regardless of the market price.
Perhaps the most common means for establishing the value of the particular portion of a company is its ability to be used as a tool for trade. This depends heavily on the preferences of others who want to have the portion, establishing demand, and those who do not want their portions any more, establishing supply. The demands of other investors can also be used as a factor in evaluating the trade abilities of a particular share of the company, so there's a complex feedback cycle to be considered.
The disparity between market price and actual estimated monetary value is of interest to investors and economists. If a company's market price is significantly higher than what's realistically expected to be returned from the company (if the company were to end its collective endeavor, pay off its debts, sell its assets, and distribute cash to shareholders), that's a sign that the company is part of a bubble, because the shares are being demanded more as tools for trade than other purposes. On the other hand, a lower-than-expected market price can indicate that the company's a good long-term investment, because it may pay out more (through dividends, mostly) in the long run.
In that model, the sole value of the stock is in the potential to convince another person to part with more money - if you're the last guy in the chain, all you have is a worthless piece of paper.
If you're the last guy in the chain, you have a portion of interest in the company, which is worth exactly what that portion of the company is worth.
The supposition that a stock is just a piece of paper is as preposterous as the oft-repeated notion that all money is just a piece of paper (or the more modern variant, numbers in a computer). Every company is a group of individuals who have invested their money and/or time into a collective endeavor to meet a common goal. Being publicly traded just means that during the offering, anyone can put their own money into the company and have a proportional amount of control over the collective endeavor. That's it. There is no magic or virtual wealth in the stock market. It's just a big market for trading goods.
It should be noted that all of these profit mechanisms can (and often are) applied to any traded goods. Stock is just very common. If you trade in commodities, you're actually buying and selling commodities. If you trade in stock, you're actually buying and selling your portion of a company.
He's not right. There are lots of ways to profit from investing, besides just selling it off on the market for a higher price. The first method that comes to my mind is shorting, where an investor sells stocks borrowed from someone else with the promise of buying them back later to return them. If, at any time during the loan, the price drops below what the borrower sold the stock for, the borrower can buy back the necessary stocks to return the loan, and have made a hefty profit. Of course, the lender is now left with shares that are worth less, but that's always a risk of investing.
Apart from the straightforward sale of stock, there are other ways to make money. There are of course dividends, which Facebook may offer later as a means to increase its stock's demand. There are also repurchases, where the company could buy back its own stock, for whatever price the company values it at (which is separate from the market price). Then, of course, there are benefits to simply owning interest in a company, like the ability to vote on certain decisions and to meet influential people in the company.
No, they're not trusted in academic circles, but for daily use and rudimentary research, they are. Personally, I trust Wikipedia exactly as much as I would an expert in the field. The expert can be mistaken or pushing a particular agenda, but is generally informative and mostly accurate.
I currently work at a financial company, and I agree. One of our algorithms for "buy or sell" currently relies on a few hundred data points for a few hundred securities. The algorithm boils down to "did this particular statistic recently rise or fall more than a certain amount based on its history?". Sure, the code is a little hairy in places, but not too bad with adequate commenting. There is nothing I'd consider AI, as the program doesn't attempt to learn. When the investment folks see something that should change, they tell me.
At the end of the article, they say they don't do any joins in their MySQL DB (not joking). So, I'm guessing they still match the "should probably be using a NoSQL DB" but aren't camp. I'm not sure what to make of this.
Without knowing much about their application or architecture, I'd assume that they're gathering a lot of data that doesn't have many relationships to other data. There's lots of models that fall easily into a list structure, which can of course be put in a single table without needing joins.
This is a perfect example of the attitude I'm referring to. You dismiss NoSQL out of hand as being immature, then propose a solution that doesn't actually provide the same functionality. Yes, on the surface most NoSQL solutions are key/value stores, and Berkeley DB is a key/value store, but the similarities end there. BDB is not clustered, not networked, and not designed for distributed computation. Yes, with great effort you can use the replication to emulate a cluster... but then you're again dealing with an immature codebase managing your data.
Berkeley DB is great for what it does, but it doesn't do the same job as those immature, pandering, mantra-inspiring NoSQL solutions.
While I'll agree that "NoSQL" is a term that should die, the technologies it refers to shouldn't. I'd prefer a better name like "flexible-structured clustered eventual-consistency data stores", but that makes conversation difficult.
The title alone indicates to me that it's a liberal studies course, intended to heighten awareness of how trusted sources can be deceived. Getting an 'A' in a class with such a provocative title opens the door to interviews, where the student can demonstrate that they know and understand more than just the minimum qualifications for their degree.
people using RDBMS solutions are "stuck in old ways". It seems like they are saying that NoSQL is effectively always best.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and hell no.
I'm referring somewhat-sarcastically to the RDBMS proponents who reject NoSQL out of hand. The ones who see "database" and think it must have a rigid structure, where all connections are made with JOINs. The ones who don't accept that NoSQL databases are inherently different and must be designed differently. If a programmer is actually stuck thinking in terms of an RDBMS, they should not be working in a NoSQL database. If the programmer is flexible enough to do both, good for them! They're hired!
It's all about having the right tool for the job, and hiring someone who knows how to use the tool in question. The process for soldering pipes together is very different from soldering electrical components, but that does not prevent someone from being able to do both.
For the record, a major part of my NoSQL experience was building a web application for medical research. We pulled data into a Hadoop/HBase store (for speed and cheap parallelism), ran processing on it, and put results into MySQL (for rigid structure and maturity). The web app ran entirely off the MySQL instance. It was the right tool for the job.
If your application fits well with the methodologies of a traditional RDBMS, use a traditional RDBMS, and hire people who are trained and experienced in using those methodologies to their full potential.
If you're dealing with the latest Big Data paradigms and designs, where you can sacrifice some of the rigidity of a RDBMS to gain some flexibility and cheaper scalability, use a NoSQL database, and hire people who aren't stuck in their old RDBMS ways.
True. Personally, I'm inclined to believe that monopolies are always damaging... eventually. To have a non-damaging monopoly requires a leader who's brilliantly smart, philanthropic to the point of self-sacrifice, and immune to the corruption of power. Those sort of people do exist, but they're rare. One could certainly lead a company to being a benevolent monopoly, but he'll eventually retire, and the odds are good that his successor won't share these traits.
Offhand, I can't think of any company that actually fits this right now. Google's coming close, but they don't quite have the "self-sacrifice" part figured out yet.
That's exactly what I get from this, too. Microsoft's stock price - while fairly high - has remained constant for ten years, while many of its competitors have seen enormous growth (even excluding Apple). Ten years ago, Apple was struggling, and Microsoft had the cash reserves and market share to sell any quality product they wanted. That would have been an ideal time to dump money into meaningful R&D (more meaningful than a fancy coffee table) and produce the next product that would end up in every home - but Microsoft, under Ballmer's guidance, didn't. Microsoft hasn't really moved forward at all, releasing only newer versions of the same old products, and only making half-hearted attempts to establish new markets.
That risk is important. Apple risked everything on the iPod, and risked a major stake on the iPhone. As the entire company's future was on the line, the entire company was committed to making the risk work. The software team made good software, and the hardware team made good hardware. At Microsoft, there is so much internal conflict that only minimal progress can get the support of the whole company. As I've heard, project managers will actively attack other projects, so they all look equally bad. That's not the kind of environment that fosters innovation, and when you're already at the top, innovation is the only way to grow.
Right... no car companies have ever had their own proprietary headlight connections, or custom electrical component cases, or just-slightly-longer-than-common belts. There haven't been any big scary warnings saying "Using non-$BRAND parts may damage your vehicle", and of course they'd never require hard-to-find tools to pop open certain panels, or charge high prices for service manuals.
It's not as obvious as a lock on the hood, but car companies do try to make aftermarket modifications difficult, and charge high prices for their "perfect fit" parts. There are still viable competitors making such custom parts, but they also charge high prices because they have such a small market. The auto companies leave them alone for the most part, because they don't cut into the maker's business (much), and attempting to shut them down would be obviously anti-competitive.
Short version of the tie-in sales provision: If you use off-brand parts, and something else breaks, the warranty still applies to the branded parts.
Note that I never mentioned anything about a warranty, because it's irrelevant to the analogy. Hell, maybe the car doesn't come with any warranty, or the one it does come with allows aftermarket modifications. You could still be allowed to put in a different oil, but the manufacturer doesn't have to make it easy to do so.
To run the analogy the other way, a clear hardware defect in a new iPod would be covered under warranty, regardless of whether you used a non-Apple charger, unless the issue was actually the charger's fault.
The federal minimum standards for full warranties are waived if the warrantor can show that the problem associated with a warranted consumer product was caused by damage while in the possession of the consumer, or by unreasonable use, including a failure to provide reasonable and necessary maintenance.
Or, in other words, problems the manufacturer didn't put in still aren't covered, but they can't void the whole warranty. Your aftermarket oil that contained iron filings earns you a pile of scrap metal, not a new engine - but that pile's turn signals are still under warranty.
Yes, they can, and I expect them to try... just like they tried with the Zune. Thing is, building a brand involves shaping consumers' perception of your product. Apple's (been) great at that, and Microsoft isn't. Their first foray into a locked-down world for this new brand is something they got in trouble for in the desktop market? That's great marketing sense, right there...
Intent is a major part of any legal issue. Do they intend to cut others out of the market, or do they intend to prevent others from mucking around with the user experience? If both, in what proportions? Did they take any actions to hurt competitors (like buying and closing) over promoting themselves?
Prior history goes a long way toward establishing a case for intent.
The devil's in the details... If your car was sold to you under a big banner that says "every part is certified by $BRAND to be right for the car" and the $BRAND reputation is built on parts all working together perfectly, that's not anti-competitive. That's just plain old lock-in. Still bad in my opinion, but not illegal, and certainly not running afoul of antitrust laws. Anyone buying a $BRAND-brand car likely knows that they're locked down, and is paying a premium for that near-perfect operation. The lock is a part of the car's quality-control design.
On the other hand, if your car's reputation is based on being a generic vehicle and the brand has been built on support for aftermarket parts, a sudden addition of a locked hood, while requiring the expensive oil and limited service locations, would be seen as anti-competitive.
Law is not a computer program. It's based on human judges interpreting guidelines to maintain a society. They can look at history and reputation in their decisions, to judge the likelyhood of an entity, corporate or individual, breaking the spirit of the law. Apple's just not that likely to screw over other mobile device makers like Microsoft is.
The point of antitrust laws is not to block monopolies. The point is to block anticompetitive behavior (which often, but not always, follows monopolies). Microsoft has a long history of aggressively anticompetitive tactics, where Apple has comparatively little.
Apple has also publicly stated the reason for the ban on other engines (coherent UI bahavior), which is perfectly in line with (and necessary for) their business model of producing devices that look and feel the same. Microsoft, on the other hand, has provided no reason (to my knowledge), and does not have any history of using such restrictions to actually improve the end product.
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My client is trying to protect his family from scammers and other unsavory types, and isn't savvy in this matter, so i'm doing it for him.
Then you're doing it wrong.
Quite frankly, extreme monitoring and filtering isn't going to work. Scammers will hide their words to avoid filters, so active filtering doesn't work. The exchanges are managed quickly, so scams (especially phishing scams) get your data instantly, so delayed review of activity isn't going to protect anyone, either, though it might make detection a bit faster. There is simple no hardware approach that will work.
If, as others have pointed out, your client is an overly controlling patriarch, he needs professional psychiatric help. If he's just paranoid and scared, he needs professional technical help, and that's where you should focus your efforts.
Educate him and his family on scammers' techniques and tactics, and security practices. Explain how the teenage daughter will be victimized and harassed, because that's just the nature of the assholes on the Internet. From a network perspective, make sure they have updated antivirus software, and maybe an active monitoring firewall to scan HTTP traffic for viruses. A basic scanner for the known threats, and education for the unknown threats, and the client will be far better off in the long run.
As a former Catholic, I'm sort of glad that "thou shalt not play Diablo III for 12 hours on Sunday while occasionally watching free pornography" is no longer applied to me. Hard to shake the guilt that I'm enjoying so much while others deliberately stunt themselves though ...
That's something I like about my church... Not only can I play games for 12 hours on Sunday, but one of our ministers will join in!
Absolutely! How dare these people act differently from those other people, when they're all different from this person!
I've also been on the Internet since the early 90s, and I have been forced to a few places that would set off religious filters. One particularly nasty example was when giving a presentation with website references, I was asked a question about one of those references... so I went to the website (a reasonably-respected newspaper), and was greeted by a full-screen ad for Victoria's Secret, projected onto an 8-foot-tall screen behind me.
Then, of course, there's the times I wished others had a filter. I volunteer at a church, and from my seat in the choir loft, I've seen churchgoers watch porn on tablets in the back row, during the service.
There are some good places for filters.
That's a rather impossible question, actually, because there are many different metrics. A large number of people really only care what something can be sold for, so they'll see a company with a low stock price (like, for example, Apple in the late 1990's) as being worth very little. Someone who cares about having control of the company would value that low-priced stock more, because it's easier to gain more control for a lower cost. Someone with a sentimental attachment to the company or an interest in receiving the shareholder updates (which often include first announcements of future plans) could consider the stock worth quite a lot, regardless of the market price.
Perhaps the most common means for establishing the value of the particular portion of a company is its ability to be used as a tool for trade. This depends heavily on the preferences of others who want to have the portion, establishing demand, and those who do not want their portions any more, establishing supply. The demands of other investors can also be used as a factor in evaluating the trade abilities of a particular share of the company, so there's a complex feedback cycle to be considered.
The disparity between market price and actual estimated monetary value is of interest to investors and economists. If a company's market price is significantly higher than what's realistically expected to be returned from the company (if the company were to end its collective endeavor, pay off its debts, sell its assets, and distribute cash to shareholders), that's a sign that the company is part of a bubble, because the shares are being demanded more as tools for trade than other purposes. On the other hand, a lower-than-expected market price can indicate that the company's a good long-term investment, because it may pay out more (through dividends, mostly) in the long run.
In that model, the sole value of the stock is in the potential to convince another person to part with more money - if you're the last guy in the chain, all you have is a worthless piece of paper.
If you're the last guy in the chain, you have a portion of interest in the company, which is worth exactly what that portion of the company is worth.
The supposition that a stock is just a piece of paper is as preposterous as the oft-repeated notion that all money is just a piece of paper (or the more modern variant, numbers in a computer). Every company is a group of individuals who have invested their money and/or time into a collective endeavor to meet a common goal. Being publicly traded just means that during the offering, anyone can put their own money into the company and have a proportional amount of control over the collective endeavor. That's it. There is no magic or virtual wealth in the stock market. It's just a big market for trading goods.
It should be noted that all of these profit mechanisms can (and often are) applied to any traded goods. Stock is just very common. If you trade in commodities, you're actually buying and selling commodities. If you trade in stock, you're actually buying and selling your portion of a company.
Once upon a time, a large portion of web sites had Geocities buttons on them, and forums listed AIM names.
He's not right. There are lots of ways to profit from investing, besides just selling it off on the market for a higher price. The first method that comes to my mind is shorting, where an investor sells stocks borrowed from someone else with the promise of buying them back later to return them. If, at any time during the loan, the price drops below what the borrower sold the stock for, the borrower can buy back the necessary stocks to return the loan, and have made a hefty profit. Of course, the lender is now left with shares that are worth less, but that's always a risk of investing.
Apart from the straightforward sale of stock, there are other ways to make money. There are of course dividends, which Facebook may offer later as a means to increase its stock's demand. There are also repurchases, where the company could buy back its own stock, for whatever price the company values it at (which is separate from the market price). Then, of course, there are benefits to simply owning interest in a company, like the ability to vote on certain decisions and to meet influential people in the company.
No, they're not trusted in academic circles, but for daily use and rudimentary research, they are. Personally, I trust Wikipedia exactly as much as I would an expert in the field. The expert can be mistaken or pushing a particular agenda, but is generally informative and mostly accurate.
I currently work at a financial company, and I agree. One of our algorithms for "buy or sell" currently relies on a few hundred data points for a few hundred securities. The algorithm boils down to "did this particular statistic recently rise or fall more than a certain amount based on its history?". Sure, the code is a little hairy in places, but not too bad with adequate commenting. There is nothing I'd consider AI, as the program doesn't attempt to learn. When the investment folks see something that should change, they tell me.
At the end of the article, they say they don't do any joins in their MySQL DB (not joking). So, I'm guessing they still match the "should probably be using a NoSQL DB" but aren't camp. I'm not sure what to make of this.
Without knowing much about their application or architecture, I'd assume that they're gathering a lot of data that doesn't have many relationships to other data. There's lots of models that fall easily into a list structure, which can of course be put in a single table without needing joins.
This is a perfect example of the attitude I'm referring to. You dismiss NoSQL out of hand as being immature, then propose a solution that doesn't actually provide the same functionality. Yes, on the surface most NoSQL solutions are key/value stores, and Berkeley DB is a key/value store, but the similarities end there. BDB is not clustered, not networked, and not designed for distributed computation. Yes, with great effort you can use the replication to emulate a cluster... but then you're again dealing with an immature codebase managing your data.
Berkeley DB is great for what it does, but it doesn't do the same job as those immature, pandering, mantra-inspiring NoSQL solutions.
While I'll agree that "NoSQL" is a term that should die, the technologies it refers to shouldn't. I'd prefer a better name like "flexible-structured clustered eventual-consistency data stores", but that makes conversation difficult.
How much flux? How much heat? How much solder? What tool do you use to apply the heat?
The title alone indicates to me that it's a liberal studies course, intended to heighten awareness of how trusted sources can be deceived. Getting an 'A' in a class with such a provocative title opens the door to interviews, where the student can demonstrate that they know and understand more than just the minimum qualifications for their degree.
people using RDBMS solutions are "stuck in old ways". It seems like they are saying that NoSQL is effectively always best.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and hell no.
I'm referring somewhat-sarcastically to the RDBMS proponents who reject NoSQL out of hand. The ones who see "database" and think it must have a rigid structure, where all connections are made with JOINs. The ones who don't accept that NoSQL databases are inherently different and must be designed differently. If a programmer is actually stuck thinking in terms of an RDBMS, they should not be working in a NoSQL database. If the programmer is flexible enough to do both, good for them! They're hired!
It's all about having the right tool for the job, and hiring someone who knows how to use the tool in question. The process for soldering pipes together is very different from soldering electrical components, but that does not prevent someone from being able to do both.
For the record, a major part of my NoSQL experience was building a web application for medical research. We pulled data into a Hadoop/HBase store (for speed and cheap parallelism), ran processing on it, and put results into MySQL (for rigid structure and maturity). The web app ran entirely off the MySQL instance. It was the right tool for the job.
That's actually a rather insightful point...
If your application fits well with the methodologies of a traditional RDBMS, use a traditional RDBMS, and hire people who are trained and experienced in using those methodologies to their full potential.
If you're dealing with the latest Big Data paradigms and designs, where you can sacrifice some of the rigidity of a RDBMS to gain some flexibility and cheaper scalability, use a NoSQL database, and hire people who aren't stuck in their old RDBMS ways.
True. Personally, I'm inclined to believe that monopolies are always damaging... eventually. To have a non-damaging monopoly requires a leader who's brilliantly smart, philanthropic to the point of self-sacrifice, and immune to the corruption of power. Those sort of people do exist, but they're rare. One could certainly lead a company to being a benevolent monopoly, but he'll eventually retire, and the odds are good that his successor won't share these traits.
Offhand, I can't think of any company that actually fits this right now. Google's coming close, but they don't quite have the "self-sacrifice" part figured out yet.
That's exactly what I get from this, too. Microsoft's stock price - while fairly high - has remained constant for ten years, while many of its competitors have seen enormous growth (even excluding Apple). Ten years ago, Apple was struggling, and Microsoft had the cash reserves and market share to sell any quality product they wanted. That would have been an ideal time to dump money into meaningful R&D (more meaningful than a fancy coffee table) and produce the next product that would end up in every home - but Microsoft, under Ballmer's guidance, didn't. Microsoft hasn't really moved forward at all, releasing only newer versions of the same old products, and only making half-hearted attempts to establish new markets.
That risk is important. Apple risked everything on the iPod, and risked a major stake on the iPhone. As the entire company's future was on the line, the entire company was committed to making the risk work. The software team made good software, and the hardware team made good hardware. At Microsoft, there is so much internal conflict that only minimal progress can get the support of the whole company. As I've heard, project managers will actively attack other projects, so they all look equally bad. That's not the kind of environment that fosters innovation, and when you're already at the top, innovation is the only way to grow.
Right... no car companies have ever had their own proprietary headlight connections, or custom electrical component cases, or just-slightly-longer-than-common belts. There haven't been any big scary warnings saying "Using non-$BRAND parts may damage your vehicle", and of course they'd never require hard-to-find tools to pop open certain panels, or charge high prices for service manuals.
It's not as obvious as a lock on the hood, but car companies do try to make aftermarket modifications difficult, and charge high prices for their "perfect fit" parts. There are still viable competitors making such custom parts, but they also charge high prices because they have such a small market. The auto companies leave them alone for the most part, because they don't cut into the maker's business (much), and attempting to shut them down would be obviously anti-competitive.
Short version of the tie-in sales provision: If you use off-brand parts, and something else breaks, the warranty still applies to the branded parts.
Note that I never mentioned anything about a warranty, because it's irrelevant to the analogy. Hell, maybe the car doesn't come with any warranty, or the one it does come with allows aftermarket modifications. You could still be allowed to put in a different oil, but the manufacturer doesn't have to make it easy to do so.
To run the analogy the other way, a clear hardware defect in a new iPod would be covered under warranty, regardless of whether you used a non-Apple charger, unless the issue was actually the charger's fault.
The federal minimum standards for full warranties are waived if the warrantor can show that the problem associated with a warranted consumer product was caused by damage while in the possession of the consumer, or by unreasonable use, including a failure to provide reasonable and necessary maintenance.
Or, in other words, problems the manufacturer didn't put in still aren't covered, but they can't void the whole warranty. Your aftermarket oil that contained iron filings earns you a pile of scrap metal, not a new engine - but that pile's turn signals are still under warranty.
MS can claim that Windows RT is a new brand
Yes, they can, and I expect them to try... just like they tried with the Zune. Thing is, building a brand involves shaping consumers' perception of your product. Apple's (been) great at that, and Microsoft isn't. Their first foray into a locked-down world for this new brand is something they got in trouble for in the desktop market? That's great marketing sense, right there...
Intent is a major part of any legal issue. Do they intend to cut others out of the market, or do they intend to prevent others from mucking around with the user experience? If both, in what proportions? Did they take any actions to hurt competitors (like buying and closing) over promoting themselves?
Prior history goes a long way toward establishing a case for intent.
The devil's in the details... If your car was sold to you under a big banner that says "every part is certified by $BRAND to be right for the car" and the $BRAND reputation is built on parts all working together perfectly, that's not anti-competitive. That's just plain old lock-in. Still bad in my opinion, but not illegal, and certainly not running afoul of antitrust laws. Anyone buying a $BRAND-brand car likely knows that they're locked down, and is paying a premium for that near-perfect operation. The lock is a part of the car's quality-control design.
On the other hand, if your car's reputation is based on being a generic vehicle and the brand has been built on support for aftermarket parts, a sudden addition of a locked hood, while requiring the expensive oil and limited service locations, would be seen as anti-competitive.
Law is not a computer program. It's based on human judges interpreting guidelines to maintain a society. They can look at history and reputation in their decisions, to judge the likelyhood of an entity, corporate or individual, breaking the spirit of the law. Apple's just not that likely to screw over other mobile device makers like Microsoft is.
The point of antitrust laws is not to block monopolies. The point is to block anticompetitive behavior (which often, but not always, follows monopolies). Microsoft has a long history of aggressively anticompetitive tactics, where Apple has comparatively little.
Apple has also publicly stated the reason for the ban on other engines (coherent UI bahavior), which is perfectly in line with (and necessary for) their business model of producing devices that look and feel the same. Microsoft, on the other hand, has provided no reason (to my knowledge), and does not have any history of using such restrictions to actually improve the end product.
I took the ends of magnets and actually adhered them to the back of the iPod
He has magnets in his skin, and other magnets on the iPod.