Look at Planet of the Apes. The second movie there ended with Charlton Heston nuking the whole planet. Yet they managed to have three sequels to that... OK, the sequels did suck, but still, compared with nuking an entire planet, this is nothing:)
In 1979, I think it was, the average CEO of a US company made 30 times as much as the average worker. Nowadays, it is about 240 times. And workers' wages have stagnated in this 20 year period; they have not even kept up with inflation. Are we to conclude that CEOs are now 8 times as productive as they were in 1979, while workers are less productive?
The short answer is in some cases absolutely. As companies get bigger and markets become more competitive, good leadership becomes increasingly important. If the janitor screws up, the company has dirty floors. If the CEO screws up, the company could very well go out of business. Thus shareholders are willing to pay a lot of money to attract the very best people available.
A good example would be Steve Jobs. Since taking over at Apple, their stock price has more than quadrupled, creating hundreds of millions in new wealth. Now obviously Steve isn't responsible for all of that, but if I were an Apple shareholder you can bet I'd be in favor of giving Steve a healthy raise if he were offered a position elsewhere. Like him or not, he has been good for Apple's share price. Apple's always had smart engineers, but without good leadership and marketing, they couldn't make money.
I also question the idea that the poor are not keeping pace with inflation. Check out this page for example. Also, the laws of statistics dictate that there will always be a lowest 20% of the workforce, but what is often ignored is who makes up that workforce. Many of those people are college students, immigrants, and recent high school graduates, who start out in low-paying jobs and move up the economic ladder. Unlike some countries, the US doesn't have a class system. People can and do change economic classes.
Aren't you talking about oppressive, corrupt, bloated governments diplomatically , economically and militarily supported by first-world governmental and private interests?
Absolutely. Our government has been screwing around with other nations all the time. I agree that they should not be. And certainly if the US stopped propping up dictators and sticking its nose into every global conflict other nations would be better off. But I find it hard to believe that we are single-handedly responsible for poverty around the world. There are certainly some countries where we propped up corrupt regimes, but there are other nations where we haven't done anything particularly viscious and those nations are still poor.
The US (and England, and every industrial first world country) achieved its current prosperity by means of protectionist policies and economic colonialism. This is very well documented in US history; throughout the 19th century, the government would pass tariffs on goods that were produced outside the US cheaper, in order to protect the development of local production. Precisely this is one of the things the IMF denies third world countries which seek its assistance, BTW.
Nonsense. It is true that the US had high tarriffs. But I don't see how this lead to prosperity. Simple economics will tell you that free trade is a benefit to both countries involved. And one of the things that allowed the US to be successful is that within its borders was one of the largest free trade zones in the world.
I don't know what "economic colonialism" is. Certainly Britain engaged in military colonialism, and the US did a little bit. But in the US the industrial revolution was well underway before we even started meddling in other nations. Aside from minor meddling in Cuba and Central America, the US was essentially isolationist until WWI, and even after WWI it was not particularly imperialistic until WWII.
Actually, most of the wealth produced in third world countries is siphoned away by multinational corporations, not by the local governments.
How do they do that?
I can not keep a straight face at you calling enthusiastic US government and corporate support of third world death squads "helping the poor".
Please reread my sentence. I said "attempts" at helping the poor. I didn't say they actually helped, nor am I endorsing such.
For recent examples, take Guatemala, or El Salvador, or Nicaragua, where the US supported death squads in the 80s.
My impression was that the excuse for this sort of thing was "fighting communism," but it doesn't really matter. I agree with you that the US support of these regimes is attrocious. But this was not the point of the original article. The article was suggesting that the internet was siphoning off talent from other purposes, and that capitalism and "greed" were major contributers to the plight of the third world. My point is that corrupt and bloated government (possibly supported by our government or our corporations) are responsible.
The best and the brightest are going into business, because Western "Civilization" values a person based on the size of their paycheck.
The size of your paycheck is a reflection of your productivity as a worker, which is, after all, the purpose of going to work: to produce new values. Capitalism is geared toward maximization of profits, which means the maximization of production.
You may scoff at this as "materialistic," but materialism is exactly what those in the third world need. They need food, shelter, clean water, etc. These things do not appear by magic. They must be produced. And that production is best accomplished by setting up society to reward producers.
The problem of poverty in the third world has little to do with Western greed. The primary problem in these countries is oppressive, corrupt, and bloated governments. The US achieved its current prosperity during a period of real free-market capitalism in the last century. Most third world countries have corrupt dictatorships, socialist economies, or massive welfare states. Economic growth is stifled in these nations because people do not have the freedom to take economic risks, and if they do succeed, that income is confiscated for the benefit of the rulers or the "people."
Most people are poor through no fault of their own. They are poor because of the destructive policies of thier governments. Without secure property rights and the freedom from taxes and regulations, they are condemned to stagnation and poverty. So I for one do not believe that the poor are poor "because they deserve it." But neither do I think we should feel guilty about their poverty. Attempts by our government to help the poor in other countries have resulted in the money going to the government of those countries, and often propping up the corrupt regimes that caused the problem in the first place.
The US serves as a model for what the people of other countries can achieve if given a chance. We have blazed a path that will be easier for others to follow. Concerns about "Linux versus Windows" may seem trivial in the grand scheme of things, but the wealth we now enjoy is the result of decades of Americans dealing with seemingly small problems, and gradually acquiring new knowledge and producing new wealth.
The other thing we can do to help the poor is to let them come here. Immigrants tend to be very hard workers, and second or third generation immigrants are often members of the middle or upper class. We can't change the economic conditions in other nations, but we can certainly allow as many people as possible to benefit from the economic opportunities available here. If we are seriously worried about the plight of the poor, our first step should be to open our borders to allow those who wish to work to take jobs here in the US.
It is good for people to have a means to keep their transactions private from prying eyes. Combine this with encryption, and hopefully we'll soon have a financial system in which it's impossible for the Feds to keep track of our money no matter what they do. This has great implications for the future of the tax burden: the Federal government will simply run out of money and be forced to cut back. Most of the times, "money laundering" means hiding the proceeds of drug deals. Drugs should be legal anyway, so I don't have a problem with drug dealers using this method to hide their transactions. There are some crimes that legitimately should be stopped (swuch as hiring a hit man, but there are other means of catching those criminals, and I don't think it's worth endangering our financial security for the small number of cases wheretighter controls would catch criminals.
This is a silly article, but it points to an important issue: property rights in outer space.
Contrary to the handwringing of most slashdotters, property rights in outer space is a good thing. People are not goingto invest the time and effort to get out there and build something useful on extraterrestrial bodies unless they think they can be sure they will reap the benefits.
Property rights are not a threat to space exploration. They are of utmost importance if mankind is to develop beyond the Earth. As nice as "sharing" sounds, it's not what drives progress. Mankind is driven forward by the expectation of material gain, and by the assurance that they will be free to dispose of the fruits of their labor.
Therefore, international treaties making outer space into a glorified national park should be repealed. As long as they are enforced, space exploration will be harmed.
True, smoking does effect other people. But the question is whether it affects people in big enough ways to justify prohibiting it. The problems you cite with smokers can happen just as much with other activities. There are lots of reasons that people take frequent breaks, call in sick, etc. That doesn't mean that you should regulate all of those things.
The sick issue you bring up is something to be worked out between you and your employer. If the employer wants to pay nonsmokers for the sick days they don't use, or only hire nonsmokers, or do any of a number of things, that's just fine with me.
The same is true of the smokers and tech support. If I were their employer, I would probably ask them to stagger their smoking breaks to keep up with demand. This isn't an issue of smoking: it's an issue of personal responsibility. Smoking doesn't force people to take regular breaks all at once. The solution is not to stop smoking. The solution is for people to do their jobs.
As for restaurant and airplanes, I see that as a simply property issue. Businesses should be free to allow or disallow smoking on their premises. Customers can seek to patronize establishments that prohibit smoking if that is what they prefer. As the number of smokers decreases, the number of nonsmoking establishments decreases as well.
The point is that in all of these cases, the people being inconvenienced have a choice in the matter. If you don't like having smoking employees, don't hire them. If you don't like being in restaurants with smokers, go to a different restaurant.
The alternative of banning smoking, on the other hand, takes away choice from the smokers. I see no reason why a group of smokers should not be free to get together and have a smoke if they so desire. And I see no reason why they should not invite nonsmoking customers to patronize the same extablishment. As long as market forces are at work, you will see a mix of policies, and customers will patronize those establishments with the best policies from their perspective.
Yes, industry/corporate America is responsible for most of the legal difficulties of our U.S. system.
For example...?
I gotta say your distinction between rational & irrational legal systems seems fairly vague and ill-defined.
By a rational legal system, I mean one with clearly established rights and a legal process that upholds those rights. For example, it was always assumed previously that people had a right to buy and sell any product they chose. (as long as they don't do so fraudulantly) And it was assumed that the buying party took responsibility for his actions with said product, even if that product was dangerous.
An irrational legal system ignores the fact that the consumer freely chose to purchase and use a product that he knew was dangerous. Instead, they blame the company that sold the product, even though they weren't the ones who fired the gun or smoked the cigarette.
In a nutshell, a rational legal system punishes people for violating clearly-defined rights, while an irrational one punishes people when other people are unhappy with them and they have lots of money.
As for antitrust law, it has been on the books for a century, and it is still a bad law. This issue comes up on the weekly MS flamewar, so suffice it to say at this point that it is so vague and overreaching that it can apply to almost any successful company. The result is that it gets reinterpreted every few years to fit current legal fads, and companies get screwed over for doing something that the previous administration's antitrust division had not considered a crime.
Abrogation (itihysi) of corporate responsibility is generally the rule and not the other way around.
For example...
If cigs kill people (they do), shouldn't the cig companies STOP selling them?
No, they shouldn't. There are millions of people who enjoy smoking and wish to continue doing so. Every one of them sees a warning on the pack of every cigarrette they smoke, and most of them are probably reminded regularly by others that smoking is dangerous. They choose to do it anyway. What right do you have to stop them?
If you think an individual can make up their mind on their own, then how come cig manufactures spend billions each year on advertising?
To sell their product. Car companies spend a lot more. Are people manipulated into buying those? All companies advetise. That's how they get people to use their product instead of their competition's. But people are not the mindless drones you seem to think they are. They don't blindly consume whatever the ads tell them to.
That's certainly part of it. But I think there are things that could be done to mitigate the problems. For example, repealing harrassment and discrimination law, the ADA and various other laws that contribute a large number of lawsuits. Also, I'd be in favor of a liability cap on some of these things. For example, I believe the Texas legislature has blocked cities from suing gun makers to recover the costs of violent crime. I'd like to see that happen eslewhere.
But you're right, the ultimate cure is a citizenry that is willing to take responsibility for its own actions and hold others responsible for theirs.
Because I wind up paying for your respiratory illnesses via insurance premiums and taxes for public health spending, making up your work while you're out sick or on a "smoke break," inhaling fumes off your clothes when you come back inside...
This is one of the many reasons why the government shouldn't be paying for health care. It's a strangely backwards argument: we're going to force other people to pay for your illnesses, and then we're using that as an excuse to keep you from smoking. What should be done is that the government should simply refuse to pay for smoking related illnesses. If smokers choose to smoke anyway, that's their choice.
In a libertarian society, you *would* only be effecting yourself.
Basically, the problem is paranoia, driven by hypercapitalism. American companies are so driven by the need to profit that they will notice and conscientiously avoid anything that even remotely might cause them to lose money to the legal process directly (i.e. through a successful lawsuit against them) or indirectly (i.e. through resources consumed during an unsuccessful lawsuit against them).
Let me get this straight. The sqeamishness of American companies to do things that will get them sued is a bad thing, and it is their fault that the legal system is screwed up? Huh?
It was my impression that the purpose of the civil legal system was to provide incentive for people to not harm one another. If you break my window, I sue you to recover the cost, and add a punative damage to make sure you don't do it again. It would seem, then, that in a rational legal system, we would want people to try to minimize lawsuits, since this means that they are not stepping on the toes of other people.
In an irrational legal system, on the other hand, people are punished for things over which they have no control(employee-on-employee sexual harrassment), are punished for things that were not considered crimes when they were done (Antitrust law), punished for selling products that were known by both sides to be dangerous at the point of sale (guns and cigarrettes), and for having products that are unpopular but and later proven perfectly safe. (breast implants)
My question for you is this: what do you expect companies to do? They get sued over an unbelievable array of transgressions, and if they can get run out of business by just a few such lawsuits. How can you blame businesses for the sorry state of our legal system? What do you want from them?
The problem with the legal system is not capitalism or large corporations but an abrogation of individual responsibility. When smokers sue tobacco companies, juries should realize that there have been warning labels on cagarettes for 20 years and acquit. When women sue breast implant manufacturers with bogus scientific evidence, jurors should have realized that the evidence was lacking and acquit. When employers get sued for employee on employee sexual harrassment, the jurors should realize that this is not something that employers can possibly control.
Instead of holding people responsible for their actions, jurors see someone who was hurt, assume that the fault lies with whoever has the most money, and award enourmous damages against that defendent, regardless of whether they did anything wrong. Every few years lawyers come up with yet another novel theory to fleece yet another corporation with yet another trumped up charge. It is no wonder companies are scared to take risks. Those that have in the past have been driven out of business.
Actually, the basis of Capitalism is the accumulation of capital.
All industrial societies accumulate capital. That's what causes economic growth.
Given that there's really only a certain amount of capital at any given time, that means that you're going to miss out on your capital while someone else gets it instead.
No there isn't. Yes, there is a certain amount of capital at any one time, but wealth is not a static quantity, and it doesn't grow on trees. The reason we have capital is that people work to produce it. The people who produce it should keep it.
Capitalism is directly responsible for the ridiculous divide between the rich and the poor, and the major unemployment problem the USA has.
Hmmm... Seems to me that the unemployment levels in the US are among the lowest in the world. We have had unemployment levels below 5% for most of the last five years. Many European countries (with less capitalist economies) have had consistent unemployment in the double digits. I'm not sure what unemployment problem you are referring to.
But in any event, the unemployment problem we do have is due primarily to minimum wage laws, liscencing restrictions, high taxes, frivolous lawsuits, and other government measures that make it increasingly expensive (or in some cases illegal) to hire unskilled workers. Many workers simply don't have the skills to justify paying them minimum wages, and even if some employer is willing to hire him, they have to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes.
Also, the welfare system doesn't do any good. It's not suprising that when you subsidize unemployment, you get more unemployed people. Subsidies cause more of everything else in an economy, so it should be obvious that paying people not to work will cause them not to work. Welfare reform helped, but there are still many states with extremely generous welfare benefits.
As for the "divide between the rich and the poor," I find it amazing that people focus so much on the relative prosperity of different groups rather than the overall stadard of living in those groups. It may be that the rich are getting richer, but the poor are getting richer as well. I don't think it's all that terrible that the rich are getting richer faster. Life is not a race for money. The standard of living today is drastically better for everyone today than it was for people in any social class a hundred years ago, and even the lower rungs of the economic ladder are doing as well today as the wealthy were in decades past. The rising tide has lifted all boats.
And the amazing thing is that the USA thinks that this is a GoodThing(TM)
OK, you might be right that 190 is excessively hot. But I don't think it changes the point all that much. If you are right that drinking the coffee in the first few minutes would give you third degree burns, then one of two things must be true:
1- Customers are going to get pissed and start buying coffee elsewhere, or
2- Most McDonalds's don't keep thier coffee that hot and so this was a fluke.
In the former case, the market will take care of this on its own, since McDonalds will realize that they are losing customers and lower the temperature. If you're right about the dangers of that amount of heat, I'd say its unlikely that all restaurants make it that hot. In the latter case, it's the fault of a single stupid manager, and McDonalds is hardly responsible. I can certainly sympathize with the woman, but I still don't see that it is the fault of McDonalds as a company. A handfull of people out of 1 billion cups sold *is* statistically insignificant. And obviously most of those people didn't mind the high temperature.
I had heard most of these details, and I still think the lawsuit is ridiculous. It's not like it's a suprise that coffee is hot. I strongly suspect that if you did a study of the average coffee burns per cup served for other restaurant chains and for home coffee makers, you would find that McDonalds is in line with other sources of coffee, and that most fast-food coffee is . Coffee is hot, and it would seem to be common sense that you should not spill it on yourself. And I hardly think that printing a warning on the cup saying "warning: contents are hot. Do not spill on self" would make much difference. The reason this sort of thing happens is because people are careless. They are not going to be less careless because the cup says they shouldn't be.
What happened was a simple accident. It is neither the woman's fault nor McDonalds's. The result of making simple accidents the target of lawsuits, (and when you sell a billion of *anything,* you're going to have some complaints) is to make corporations the all-purpose scapegoat for peoples' woes. There was nothing particularly dangerous about that cup of coffee. The customer knew exactly what was in it, and she willingly took that risk.
The result of this lawsuit is likely that McDonalds reduced the temperature of its coffee. Despite your scornful remark, I suspect that most customers *do* "like it hot." Coffee isn't very good when it is cold, and often coffee sits in the cup for several minutes on the trip into work or whereever it gets consumed. The lawsuit made it much more difficult to get coffee at the temperature they like it. One woman's carelessness led to the inconveniencing of 999,999,9999 other customers.
So the McDonalds case is not an example of corporate hype. The lawsuit was in fact ridiculous. Regardless of what the results to the woman were, making McDonalds responsible for accidents that happen with its product is an abdication of individual responsibility. Corporations should be liable when they directly cause harm to their customers, not when they sell an ordinary product that everyone knows can do damage if used carelessly.
Are these MS ads I hear on the radio urging employees to turn in their employers to "protect" them from piracy. They make a stupid analogy to unliscenced drivers, and scare people with warnings about viruses.
I don't necessarily object to MS protecting its intellectual property, but for them to do it in such a blatantly misleading manner makes my skin crawl. Reporting piracy is not in the employer's self-interest, and can likely land them with fines and jail time. To claim that it is in their interest is a lie.
I blame the CC company for settling. And not it specifically, but corporations in general. If you wonder why everyone and their brother is suing, the answer is simple -- because it works. As long as court will cost the corporation more than you are asking they'll settle. Principle is not a word in their vocabulary without a bottom line to back it up.
Settling looks like a bad move until you look at the stupid people that sit on American juries. The same people who gave us judgements against breast implants, tobacco companys and McDonalds' famous coffee incident are quite likely to let the woman off the hook and set a dangerous precedent in the process. The problem is not that companies settle. The problem is that if they don't settle, they will get screwed. In that atmosphere, then principle or not, they have to settle because fighting does no good if you lose.
The basis of capitalism is the protection of individual rights. In a capitalist system, the woman would be required to pay her debt. When mobsters go around killing people, that not Capitalism. It's called gang rule. Notice that in less capitalist nations like Russia, there is a lot more mob violence.
The anti-trust laws that you seem to hate so much are the reason you can call the other side of the planet without taking out a morgage. The baby-Bells are huge *now*, how big would Bell have been if it hadn't been broken up? Would you be paying the rates you are now?
AT&T was a government-enforced monopoly. It was illegal (and still is) to start a competing phone service. That has nothing to do with the free market.
Unix has been around forever and hasn't really changed. MacOS has been around forever without really changing.
I hope you're joking. What kind of change are you expecting? OS design has been steadily advancing, and modern Unices have a number of improvements over previous versions. Mac OS has undergone even more dramatic improvements, going from a single-user, feature starved system to a reasonably stable, multitasking, and full-feartured OS. In particular, in the last 10 years we have seen the following changes to the Mac platform.
Color Quickdraw, Quicktime, Quicktime VR, Quickdraw 3D, and OpenGL.
TrueType, Colorsync, and Applescript, text-to-speech, speech recognition.
Steadily improving GUI, including updated "look and feel," elimination of most modal dialog boxes, superior color support even at low pixel depths, contextual menus, kick-ass theme support, improved Finder, etc.
Modern, Open Transport-based networking, AppleShare (soon to be TCP/IP native), Applescript over the internet, vastly improved PPP tools.
Support for USB, 10/100 BT ethernet, firewire, wireless networking, etc.
I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot of stuff. In addition to that, Apple will within 6 months be releasing OS X, which will feature a new graphics model, modern, Unix-derived OS internals, improved UI features, a better, object oriented set of API's, and loads of other goodies.
I don't know what you're expecting OS's to do. Today's OS's are light-years ahead of what anyone had 10 years ago, and they show no sign of slowing down. The amount of innovation we've seen in OS's in the last 10 years would take 30 years in the automotive industry.
Suppose Microsoft were to simply refuse to sell Microsoft products to anyone that sold non-Microsoft software? Where is the government intervention in that? Do you argue that with a desktop share of over 90 percent that such an action would quickly result in a closed entry market? Do you think anything but the threat of anti-trust is keeping Microsoft from doing that?
No, anyone is free to run an alternative OS (Mac OS, Linux, FreeBSD, Be, NeXT) and run whatever software they like on it. The reason Microsoft doesn't do that is that in non-Microsoft shops, such a policy would prevent them from gaining market share, since it would require extra effort to make other software interoperate with MS software. And such a policy would serve as an impetus to have people switch to those other OS's in protest of MS actions (as happened recently. Both the Mac OS and Linux are gaining market share.)
So no, closing Windows to outside firms would not be coercive, and moreover it would not be good business. OS makers badly need developers, as Apple has been discovering. no company can do everything itself.
Does no one remember that Netscape and Sun pulled exactly the same kind of stunts to get this whole thing started? Netscape has been pushing for antitrust action against Microsoft for years. How is that OK, but when Microsoft fights back it's suddenly corruption? Does having more money than anyone else subject them to a different set of rules?
Note how general this is -- he doesn't specifically state he wants DoJ off Microsoft's back; the timing simply happens to be coincidental, I guess. Yeah, right. This Rep Dan Miller smells pretty corrupt.
Excuse me? He takes a position on an issue you disagree with, and now he's "corrupt?" Where does that come from?
If he really believes what he is saying, he should introduce legislation to repeal antitrust laws.
I wish he would. But I don't think there's enough support for that to pass. And government schools have had too many years to drill the antitrust rationale into our heads in "history" class for the voters to be easily persuaded. A poorly enforced law is worse than no law, but a well-enforced bad law is even worse.
Having laws without enforcement is a very bad thing, because they'll just get selectively enforced and used as a tool to suppress whoever doesn't play ball.
Exactly. I don't think it's a coincidence that the strongest Senate supporters for the antitrust action are from the home state of some of Microsoft's competitors. Antitrust law is so vague and overreaching that literally anything a successful company does is a crime. The DoJ only prosecutes what it sees as the worst "abuses," but the legal and political fads change with each new administration, so companies never really know when they'll be the next target.
Why do you think it's hard as hell to get a brand-name computer without M$/Windows?
I have several of them, all made by a company called "Apple." You can also get machines from Sun, and there are a few vendors that will sell you PC's with Linux preinstalled. At one point there were also machines from NeXT, Be, and several others.
And why do you think it's as hard to get Athlon mobos or why companies like Dell will never sell machines based on the Athlon when it's the fastest (Wintel-class) processor around?
Partly because it's not as fast as it was hyped up to be. Partly because AMD can't produce in the volume and with the reliability that Intel does, and partly because they have pre-existing contracts with Intel. But if AMD continues to do well, they *will* gain market share. Why do you think they're doing it?
Or why isn't FireWire ubiquitous and replacing EIDE as a storage/everything else interface??? (I'd kill to see a mobo using USB for input and FW for mass storage. Our lives would be much more simpler, IMO.)
Again, get a Mac. They still use IDE, but they also have first-class firewire support, and they use USB for input. The main reason people still use IDE is that it's dirt-cheap. As Firewire matures, we may see more people using it.
This is why governemental (sp?) action is required, to reel in those two techno-bullies, to give a chance to the competition. If nothing is done ASAP, we'll soon be stuck using only M$ applications and utilities on top of a M$ OS running on top of an Intel-powered machine using Intel chipsets and God knows what else to browse the M$-Internet to see M$-approved contents. You'll never see another rukus like what Tom Pabst (sp???) made when he found out that Intel was/still is pressuring OEM mobo makers not to make Athlon mobos. Or you'll never see a web site like www.billwatch.net to see Bill G.'s latest antics. And you'll have to pay Bill G. a tax on anything you do on the 'net (buying, viewing, etc.). It can't get more Orwellian than that.
This is complete nonsense. Even if the DoJ drops the case and promises to never bother Microsoft again, Microsoft could not maintain their dominance of the market. Linux and Solaris are eating away at NT's market share. Apple's doing well. Many power users are switching to Linux on their home PC's, Be and OS/2 are available. In short, Microsoft does not have a monopoly. The same is true on the hardware side. Not only do you have two major x86 choices (Intel and AMD) but you have other chip lineages to choose from (Alpha, PPC, SPARC's, ARM, etc.)
Now you might say that Microsoft has a near-monopoly on the home Intel market, but that's a pretty silly market definition. Of course if you define "market" narrowly enough you can prove that anyone has a monopoly on anything. But if you look at the actual choices available today, there are a *lot* of them. I haven't touched a Microsoft product in a week, and I use computers on a daily basis. They simply don't have a monopoly.
The real shame is not that M$ and Intel have accumulated that much power, it's that they've done it in front of everyone else and no one did anything before it was too late. Oh, well.
Too late for what? Is the government going to break into my house and confiscate my Mac? Is it going to shut down Linux-only PC vendors? Is it going to drive Sun or SGI out of business? What is this great catastrophe that you are dreading if the government doesn't do something?
..of a worthy cause that would get strangled by a lobbying ban. The tobacco lawsuits were nothing short of a looting by trial lawyers and politicians of tobacco companies and their customers. The idea that tobacco companies "covered up" the dangers of smoking is ludicrous. Even if they lied about it, no one was fooled. After all, every pack of cigarrettes has a warning on it, and has for 20 years. Smokers are not victims of the big bad tobacco companies.
And even if smokers were the victims, I fail to see what these lawsuits helped. The billions of dollars that went to politicians and lawyers are just going to come from higher cigarrette costs, and so are coming from the same people who are ostensibly being "protected." Smokers are getting screwed enough as it is, these lawsuits just make cigarrettes even more expensive.
So I wish the tobacco industry had stuck to its guns and fought it out. I think these lootings were a great injustice, and they only benefitted a handful of politicians and lawyers. Heck, I might have donated to a pro-tabacco lobbying group had one existed that would have taken a principled stand on this issue.
One person's "special interest group" is another man's activist. Yes, there are blatant examples of companies simply seeking handouts or destruction of competitors (say, Netscape and Sun whining about Microsoft) but there are also companies and individuals who lobby to protect their rights, and I think they would get hurt more by lobbying restrictions.
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Look at Planet of the Apes. The second movie there ended with Charlton Heston nuking the whole planet. Yet they managed to have three sequels to that... OK, the sequels did suck, but still, compared with nuking an entire planet, this is nothing :)
In 1979, I think it was, the average CEO of a US company made 30 times as much as the average worker. Nowadays, it is about 240 times. And workers' wages have stagnated in this 20 year period; they have not even kept up with inflation. Are we to conclude that CEOs are now 8 times as productive as they were in 1979, while workers are less productive?
The short answer is in some cases absolutely. As companies get bigger and markets become more competitive, good leadership becomes increasingly important. If the janitor screws up, the company has dirty floors. If the CEO screws up, the company could very well go out of business. Thus shareholders are willing to pay a lot of money to attract the very best people available.
A good example would be Steve Jobs. Since taking over at Apple, their stock price has more than quadrupled, creating hundreds of millions in new wealth. Now obviously Steve isn't responsible for all of that, but if I were an Apple shareholder you can bet I'd be in favor of giving Steve a healthy raise if he were offered a position elsewhere. Like him or not, he has been good for Apple's share price. Apple's always had smart engineers, but without good leadership and marketing, they couldn't make money.
I also question the idea that the poor are not keeping pace with inflation. Check out this page for example. Also, the laws of statistics dictate that there will always be a lowest 20% of the workforce, but what is often ignored is who makes up that workforce. Many of those people are college students, immigrants, and recent high school graduates, who start out in low-paying jobs and move up the economic ladder. Unlike some countries, the US doesn't have a class system. People can and do change economic classes.
Aren't you talking about oppressive, corrupt, bloated governments diplomatically , economically and militarily supported by first-world governmental and private interests?
Absolutely. Our government has been screwing around with other nations all the time. I agree that they should not be. And certainly if the US stopped propping up dictators and sticking its nose into every global conflict other nations would be better off. But I find it hard to believe that we are single-handedly responsible for poverty around the world. There are certainly some countries where we propped up corrupt regimes, but there are other nations where we haven't done anything particularly viscious and those nations are still poor.
The US (and England, and every industrial first world country) achieved its current prosperity by means of protectionist policies and economic colonialism. This is very well documented in US history; throughout the 19th century, the government would pass tariffs on goods that were produced outside the US cheaper, in order to protect the development of local production. Precisely this is one of the things the IMF denies third world countries which seek its assistance, BTW.
Nonsense. It is true that the US had high tarriffs. But I don't see how this lead to prosperity. Simple economics will tell you that free trade is a benefit to both countries involved. And one of the things that allowed the US to be successful is that within its borders was one of the largest free trade zones in the world.
I don't know what "economic colonialism" is. Certainly Britain engaged in military colonialism, and the US did a little bit. But in the US the industrial revolution was well underway before we even started meddling in other nations. Aside from minor meddling in Cuba and Central America, the US was essentially isolationist until WWI, and even after WWI it was not particularly imperialistic until WWII.
Actually, most of the wealth produced in third world countries is siphoned away by multinational corporations, not by the local governments.
How do they do that?
I can not keep a straight face at you calling enthusiastic US government and corporate support of third world death squads "helping the poor".
Please reread my sentence. I said "attempts" at helping the poor. I didn't say they actually helped, nor am I endorsing such.
For recent examples, take Guatemala, or El Salvador, or Nicaragua, where the US supported death squads in the 80s.
My impression was that the excuse for this sort of thing was "fighting communism," but it doesn't really matter. I agree with you that the US support of these regimes is attrocious. But this was not the point of the original article. The article was suggesting that the internet was siphoning off talent from other purposes, and that capitalism and "greed" were major contributers to the plight of the third world. My point is that corrupt and bloated government (possibly supported by our government or our corporations) are responsible.
The best and the brightest are going into business, because Western "Civilization" values a person based on the size of their paycheck.
The size of your paycheck is a reflection of your productivity as a worker, which is, after all, the purpose of going to work: to produce new values. Capitalism is geared toward maximization of profits, which means the maximization of production.
You may scoff at this as "materialistic," but materialism is exactly what those in the third world need. They need food, shelter, clean water, etc. These things do not appear by magic. They must be produced. And that production is best accomplished by setting up society to reward producers.
The problem of poverty in the third world has little to do with Western greed. The primary problem in these countries is oppressive, corrupt, and bloated governments. The US achieved its current prosperity during a period of real free-market capitalism in the last century. Most third world countries have corrupt dictatorships, socialist economies, or massive welfare states. Economic growth is stifled in these nations because people do not have the freedom to take economic risks, and if they do succeed, that income is confiscated for the benefit of the rulers or the "people."
Most people are poor through no fault of their own. They are poor because of the destructive policies of thier governments. Without secure property rights and the freedom from taxes and regulations, they are condemned to stagnation and poverty. So I for one do not believe that the poor are poor "because they deserve it." But neither do I think we should feel guilty about their poverty. Attempts by our government to help the poor in other countries have resulted in the money going to the government of those countries, and often propping up the corrupt regimes that caused the problem in the first place.
The US serves as a model for what the people of other countries can achieve if given a chance. We have blazed a path that will be easier for others to follow. Concerns about "Linux versus Windows" may seem trivial in the grand scheme of things, but the wealth we now enjoy is the result of decades of Americans dealing with seemingly small problems, and gradually acquiring new knowledge and producing new wealth.
The other thing we can do to help the poor is to let them come here. Immigrants tend to be very hard workers, and second or third generation immigrants are often members of the middle or upper class. We can't change the economic conditions in other nations, but we can certainly allow as many people as possible to benefit from the economic opportunities available here. If we are seriously worried about the plight of the poor, our first step should be to open our borders to allow those who wish to work to take jobs here in the US.
It is good for people to have a means to keep their transactions private from prying eyes. Combine this with encryption, and hopefully we'll soon have a financial system in which it's impossible for the Feds to keep track of our money no matter what they do. This has great implications for the future of the tax burden: the Federal government will simply run out of money and be forced to cut back. Most of the times, "money laundering" means hiding the proceeds of drug deals. Drugs should be legal anyway, so I don't have a problem with drug dealers using this method to hide their transactions. There are some crimes that legitimately should be stopped (swuch as hiring a hit man, but there are other means of catching those criminals, and I don't think it's worth endangering our financial security for the small number of cases wheretighter controls would catch criminals.
This is a silly article, but it points to an important issue: property rights in outer space.
Contrary to the handwringing of most slashdotters, property rights in outer space is a good thing. People are not goingto invest the time and effort to get out there and build something useful on extraterrestrial bodies unless they think they can be sure they will reap the benefits.
Property rights are not a threat to space exploration. They are of utmost importance if mankind is to develop beyond the Earth. As nice as "sharing" sounds, it's not what drives progress. Mankind is driven forward by the expectation of material gain, and by the assurance that they will be free to dispose of the fruits of their labor.
Therefore, international treaties making outer space into a glorified national park should be repealed. As long as they are enforced, space exploration will be harmed.
True, smoking does effect other people. But the question is whether it affects people in big enough ways to justify prohibiting it. The problems you cite with smokers can happen just as much with other activities. There are lots of reasons that people take frequent breaks, call in sick, etc. That doesn't mean that you should regulate all of those things.
The sick issue you bring up is something to be worked out between you and your employer. If the employer wants to pay nonsmokers for the sick days they don't use, or only hire nonsmokers, or do any of a number of things, that's just fine with me.
The same is true of the smokers and tech support. If I were their employer, I would probably ask them to stagger their smoking breaks to keep up with demand. This isn't an issue of smoking: it's an issue of personal responsibility. Smoking doesn't force people to take regular breaks all at once. The solution is not to stop smoking. The solution is for people to do their jobs.
As for restaurant and airplanes, I see that as a simply property issue. Businesses should be free to allow or disallow smoking on their premises. Customers can seek to patronize establishments that prohibit smoking if that is what they prefer. As the number of smokers decreases, the number of nonsmoking establishments decreases as well.
The point is that in all of these cases, the people being inconvenienced have a choice in the matter. If you don't like having smoking employees, don't hire them. If you don't like being in restaurants with smokers, go to a different restaurant.
The alternative of banning smoking, on the other hand, takes away choice from the smokers. I see no reason why a group of smokers should not be free to get together and have a smoke if they so desire. And I see no reason why they should not invite nonsmoking customers to patronize the same extablishment. As long as market forces are at work, you will see a mix of policies, and customers will patronize those establishments with the best policies from their perspective.
Yes, industry/corporate America is responsible for most of the legal difficulties of our U.S. system.
For example...?
I gotta say your distinction between rational & irrational legal systems seems fairly vague and ill-defined.
By a rational legal system, I mean one with clearly established rights and a legal process that upholds those rights. For example, it was always assumed previously that people had a right to buy and sell any product they chose. (as long as they don't do so fraudulantly) And it was assumed that the buying party took responsibility for his actions with said product, even if that product was dangerous.
An irrational legal system ignores the fact that the consumer freely chose to purchase and use a product that he knew was dangerous. Instead, they blame the company that sold the product, even though they weren't the ones who fired the gun or smoked the cigarette.
In a nutshell, a rational legal system punishes people for violating clearly-defined rights, while an irrational one punishes people when other people are unhappy with them and they have lots of money.
As for antitrust law, it has been on the books for a century, and it is still a bad law. This issue comes up on the weekly MS flamewar, so suffice it to say at this point that it is so vague and overreaching that it can apply to almost any successful company. The result is that it gets reinterpreted every few years to fit current legal fads, and companies get screwed over for doing something that the previous administration's antitrust division had not considered a crime.
Abrogation (itihysi) of corporate responsibility is generally the rule and not the other way around.
For example...
If cigs kill people (they do), shouldn't the cig companies STOP selling them?
No, they shouldn't. There are millions of people who enjoy smoking and wish to continue doing so. Every one of them sees a warning on the pack of every cigarrette they smoke, and most of them are probably reminded regularly by others that smoking is dangerous. They choose to do it anyway. What right do you have to stop them?
If you think an individual can make up their mind on their own, then how come cig manufactures spend billions each year on advertising?
To sell their product. Car companies spend a lot more. Are people manipulated into buying those? All companies advetise. That's how they get people to use their product instead of their competition's. But people are not the mindless drones you seem to think they are. They don't blindly consume whatever the ads tell them to.
That's certainly part of it. But I think there are things that could be done to mitigate the problems. For example, repealing harrassment and discrimination law, the ADA and various other laws that contribute a large number of lawsuits. Also, I'd be in favor of a liability cap on some of these things. For example, I believe the Texas legislature has blocked cities from suing gun makers to recover the costs of violent crime. I'd like to see that happen eslewhere.
But you're right, the ultimate cure is a citizenry that is willing to take responsibility for its own actions and hold others responsible for theirs.
Because I wind up paying for your respiratory illnesses via insurance premiums and taxes for public health spending, making up your work while you're out sick or on a "smoke break," inhaling fumes off your clothes when you come back inside...
This is one of the many reasons why the government shouldn't be paying for health care. It's a strangely backwards argument: we're going to force other people to pay for your illnesses, and then we're using that as an excuse to keep you from smoking. What should be done is that the government should simply refuse to pay for smoking related illnesses. If smokers choose to smoke anyway, that's their choice.
In a libertarian society, you *would* only be effecting yourself.
Basically, the problem is paranoia, driven by hypercapitalism. American companies are so driven by the need to profit that they will notice and conscientiously avoid anything that even remotely might cause them to lose money to the legal process directly (i.e. through a successful lawsuit against them) or indirectly (i.e. through resources consumed during an unsuccessful lawsuit against them).
Let me get this straight. The sqeamishness of American companies to do things that will get them sued is a bad thing, and it is their fault that the legal system is screwed up? Huh?
It was my impression that the purpose of the civil legal system was to provide incentive for people to not harm one another. If you break my window, I sue you to recover the cost, and add a punative damage to make sure you don't do it again. It would seem, then, that in a rational legal system, we would want people to try to minimize lawsuits, since this means that they are not stepping on the toes of other people.
In an irrational legal system, on the other hand, people are punished for things over which they have no control(employee-on-employee sexual harrassment), are punished for things that were not considered crimes when they were done (Antitrust law), punished for selling products that were known by both sides to be dangerous at the point of sale (guns and cigarrettes), and for having products that are unpopular but and later proven perfectly safe. (breast implants)
My question for you is this: what do you expect companies to do? They get sued over an unbelievable array of transgressions, and if they can get run out of business by just a few such lawsuits. How can you blame businesses for the sorry state of our legal system? What do you want from them?
The problem with the legal system is not capitalism or large corporations but an abrogation of individual responsibility. When smokers sue tobacco companies, juries should realize that there have been warning labels on cagarettes for 20 years and acquit. When women sue breast implant manufacturers with bogus scientific evidence, jurors should have realized that the evidence was lacking and acquit. When employers get sued for employee on employee sexual harrassment, the jurors should realize that this is not something that employers can possibly control.
Instead of holding people responsible for their actions, jurors see someone who was hurt, assume that the fault lies with whoever has the most money, and award enourmous damages against that defendent, regardless of whether they did anything wrong. Every few years lawyers come up with yet another novel theory to fleece yet another corporation with yet another trumped up charge. It is no wonder companies are scared to take risks. Those that have in the past have been driven out of business.
Actually, the basis of Capitalism is the accumulation of capital.
All industrial societies accumulate capital. That's what causes economic growth.
Given that there's really only a certain amount of capital at any given time, that means that you're going to miss out on your capital while someone else gets it instead.
No there isn't. Yes, there is a certain amount of capital at any one time, but wealth is not a static quantity, and it doesn't grow on trees. The reason we have capital is that people work to produce it. The people who produce it should keep it.
Capitalism is directly responsible for the ridiculous divide between the rich and the poor, and the major unemployment problem the USA has.
Hmmm... Seems to me that the unemployment levels in the US are among the lowest in the world. We have had unemployment levels below 5% for most of the last five years. Many European countries (with less capitalist economies) have had consistent unemployment in the double digits. I'm not sure what unemployment problem you are referring to.
But in any event, the unemployment problem we do have is due primarily to minimum wage laws, liscencing restrictions, high taxes, frivolous lawsuits, and other government measures that make it increasingly expensive (or in some cases illegal) to hire unskilled workers. Many workers simply don't have the skills to justify paying them minimum wages, and even if some employer is willing to hire him, they have to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes.
Also, the welfare system doesn't do any good. It's not suprising that when you subsidize unemployment, you get more unemployed people. Subsidies cause more of everything else in an economy, so it should be obvious that paying people not to work will cause them not to work. Welfare reform helped, but there are still many states with extremely generous welfare benefits.
As for the "divide between the rich and the poor," I find it amazing that people focus so much on the relative prosperity of different groups rather than the overall stadard of living in those groups. It may be that the rich are getting richer, but the poor are getting richer as well. I don't think it's all that terrible that the rich are getting richer faster. Life is not a race for money. The standard of living today is drastically better for everyone today than it was for people in any social class a hundred years ago, and even the lower rungs of the economic ladder are doing as well today as the wealthy were in decades past.
The rising tide has lifted all boats.
And the amazing thing is that the USA thinks that this is a GoodThing(TM)
Yes, freedom and prosperity are good things.
OK, you might be right that 190 is excessively hot. But I don't think it changes the point all that much. If you are right that drinking the coffee in the first few minutes would give you third degree burns, then one of two things must be true:
1- Customers are going to get pissed and start buying coffee elsewhere, or
2- Most McDonalds's don't keep thier coffee that hot and so this was a fluke.
In the former case, the market will take care of this on its own, since McDonalds will realize that they are losing customers and lower the temperature. If you're right about the dangers of that amount of heat, I'd say its unlikely that all restaurants make it that hot. In the latter case, it's the fault of a single stupid manager, and McDonalds is hardly responsible. I can certainly sympathize with the woman, but I still don't see that it is the fault of McDonalds as a company. A handfull of people out of 1 billion cups sold *is* statistically insignificant. And obviously most of those people didn't mind the high temperature.
I had heard most of these details, and I still think the lawsuit is ridiculous. It's not like it's a suprise that coffee is hot. I strongly suspect that if you did a study of the average coffee burns per cup served for other restaurant chains and for home coffee makers, you would find that McDonalds is in line with other sources of coffee, and that most fast-food coffee is . Coffee is hot, and it would seem to be common sense that you should not spill it on yourself. And I hardly think that printing a warning on the cup saying "warning: contents are hot. Do not spill on self" would make much difference. The reason this sort of thing happens is because people are careless. They are not going to be less careless because the cup says they shouldn't be.
What happened was a simple accident. It is neither the woman's fault nor McDonalds's. The result of making simple accidents the target of lawsuits, (and when you sell a billion of *anything,* you're going to have some complaints) is to make corporations the all-purpose scapegoat for peoples' woes. There was nothing particularly dangerous about that cup of coffee. The customer knew exactly what was in it, and she willingly took that risk.
The result of this lawsuit is likely that McDonalds reduced the temperature of its coffee. Despite your scornful remark, I suspect that most customers *do* "like it hot." Coffee isn't very good when it is cold, and often coffee sits in the cup for several minutes on the trip into work or whereever it gets consumed. The lawsuit made it much more difficult to get coffee at the temperature they like it. One woman's carelessness led to the inconveniencing of 999,999,9999 other customers.
So the McDonalds case is not an example of corporate hype. The lawsuit was in fact ridiculous. Regardless of what the results to the woman were, making McDonalds responsible for accidents that happen with its product is an abdication of individual responsibility. Corporations should be liable when they directly cause harm to their customers, not when they sell an ordinary product that everyone knows can do damage if used carelessly.
Are these MS ads I hear on the radio urging employees to turn in their employers to "protect" them from piracy. They make a stupid analogy to unliscenced drivers, and scare people with warnings about viruses.
I don't necessarily object to MS protecting its intellectual property, but for them to do it in such a blatantly misleading manner makes my skin crawl. Reporting piracy is not in the employer's self-interest, and can likely land them with fines and jail time. To claim that it is in their interest is a lie.
I blame the CC company for settling. And not it specifically, but corporations in general. If you wonder why everyone and their brother is suing, the answer is simple -- because it works. As long as court will cost the corporation more than you are asking they'll settle. Principle is not a word in their vocabulary without a bottom line to back it up.
Settling looks like a bad move until you look at the stupid people that sit on American juries. The same people who gave us judgements against breast implants, tobacco companys and McDonalds' famous coffee incident are quite likely to let the woman off the hook and set a dangerous precedent in the process. The problem is not that companies settle. The problem is that if they don't settle, they will get screwed. In that atmosphere, then principle or not, they have to settle because fighting does no good if you lose.
The basis of capitalism is the protection of individual rights. In a capitalist system, the woman would be required to pay her debt. When mobsters go around killing people, that not Capitalism. It's called gang rule. Notice that in less capitalist nations like Russia, there is a lot more mob violence.
The anti-trust laws that you seem to hate so much are the reason you can call the other side of the planet without taking out a morgage. The baby-Bells are huge *now*, how big would Bell have been if it hadn't been broken up? Would you be paying the rates you are now?
AT&T was a government-enforced monopoly. It was illegal (and still is) to start a competing phone service. That has nothing to do with the free market.
I hope you're joking. What kind of change are you expecting? OS design has been steadily advancing, and modern Unices have a number of improvements over previous versions. Mac OS has undergone even more dramatic improvements, going from a single-user, feature starved system to a reasonably stable, multitasking, and full-feartured OS. In particular, in the last 10 years we have seen the following changes to the Mac platform.
Color Quickdraw, Quicktime, Quicktime VR, Quickdraw 3D, and OpenGL.
TrueType, Colorsync, and Applescript, text-to-speech, speech recognition.
Steadily improving GUI, including updated "look and feel," elimination of most modal dialog boxes, superior color support even at low pixel depths, contextual menus, kick-ass theme support, improved Finder, etc.
Modern, Open Transport-based networking, AppleShare (soon to be TCP/IP native), Applescript over the internet, vastly improved PPP tools.
Support for USB, 10/100 BT ethernet, firewire, wireless networking, etc.
I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot of stuff. In addition to that, Apple will within 6 months be releasing OS X, which will feature a new graphics model, modern, Unix-derived OS internals, improved UI features, a better, object oriented set of API's, and loads of other goodies.
I don't know what you're expecting OS's to do. Today's OS's are light-years ahead of what anyone had 10 years ago, and they show no sign of slowing down. The amount of innovation we've seen in OS's in the last 10 years would take 30 years in the automotive industry.
Suppose Microsoft were to simply refuse to sell Microsoft products to anyone that sold non-Microsoft software? Where is the government intervention in that? Do you argue that with a desktop share of over 90 percent that such an action would quickly result in a closed entry market? Do you think anything but the threat of anti-trust is keeping Microsoft from doing that?
No, anyone is free to run an alternative OS (Mac OS, Linux, FreeBSD, Be, NeXT) and run whatever software they like on it. The reason Microsoft doesn't do that is that in non-Microsoft shops, such a policy would prevent them from gaining market share, since it would require extra effort to make other software interoperate with MS software. And such a policy would serve as an impetus to have people switch to those other OS's in protest of MS actions (as happened recently. Both the Mac OS and Linux are gaining market share.)
So no, closing Windows to outside firms would not be coercive, and moreover it would not be good business. OS makers badly need developers, as Apple has been discovering. no company can do everything itself.
Does no one remember that Netscape and Sun pulled exactly the same kind of stunts to get this whole thing started? Netscape has been pushing for antitrust action against Microsoft for years. How is that OK, but when Microsoft fights back it's suddenly corruption? Does having more money than anyone else subject them to a different set of rules?
Note how general this is -- he doesn't specifically state he wants DoJ off Microsoft's back; the timing simply happens to be coincidental, I guess. Yeah, right. This Rep Dan Miller smells pretty corrupt.
Excuse me? He takes a position on an issue you disagree with, and now he's "corrupt?" Where does that come from?
If he really believes what he is saying, he should introduce legislation to repeal antitrust laws.
I wish he would. But I don't think there's enough support for that to pass. And government schools have had too many years to drill the antitrust rationale into our heads in "history" class for the voters to be easily persuaded. A poorly enforced law is worse than no law, but a well-enforced bad law is even worse.
Having laws without enforcement is a very bad thing, because they'll just get selectively enforced and used as a tool to suppress whoever doesn't play ball.
Exactly. I don't think it's a coincidence that the strongest Senate supporters for the antitrust action are from the home state of some of Microsoft's competitors. Antitrust law is so vague and overreaching that literally anything a successful company does is a crime. The DoJ only prosecutes what it sees as the worst "abuses," but the legal and political fads change with each new administration, so companies never really know when they'll be the next target.
And anti-MS zealots have it in spades :)
What does China have to do with anything? For the record, China is not anywhere close to a free market. That's one of the reasons they are so poor.
Why do you think it's hard as hell to get a brand-name computer without M$/Windows?
I have several of them, all made by a company called "Apple." You can also get machines from Sun, and there are a few vendors that will sell you PC's with Linux preinstalled. At one point there were also machines from NeXT, Be, and several others.
And why do you think it's as hard to get Athlon mobos or why companies like Dell will never sell machines based on the Athlon when it's the fastest (Wintel-class) processor around?
Partly because it's not as fast as it was hyped up to be. Partly because AMD can't produce in the volume and with the reliability that Intel does, and partly because they have pre-existing contracts with Intel. But if AMD continues to do well, they *will* gain market share. Why do you think they're doing it?
Or why isn't FireWire ubiquitous and replacing EIDE as a storage/everything else interface??? (I'd kill to see a mobo using USB for input and FW for mass storage. Our lives would be much more simpler, IMO.)
Again, get a Mac. They still use IDE, but they also have first-class firewire support, and they use USB for input. The main reason people still use IDE is that it's dirt-cheap. As Firewire matures, we may see more people using it.
This is why governemental (sp?) action is required, to reel in those two techno-bullies, to give a chance to the competition. If nothing is done ASAP, we'll soon be stuck using only M$ applications and utilities on top of a M$ OS running on top of an Intel-powered machine using Intel chipsets and God knows what else to browse the M$-Internet to see M$-approved contents. You'll never see another rukus like what Tom Pabst (sp???) made when he found out that Intel was/still is pressuring OEM mobo makers not to make Athlon mobos. Or you'll never see a web site like www.billwatch.net to see Bill G.'s latest antics. And you'll have to pay Bill G. a tax on anything you do on the 'net (buying, viewing, etc.). It can't get more Orwellian than that.
This is complete nonsense. Even if the DoJ drops the case and promises to never bother Microsoft again, Microsoft could not maintain their dominance of the market. Linux and Solaris are eating away at NT's market share. Apple's doing well. Many power users are switching to Linux on their home PC's, Be and OS/2 are available. In short, Microsoft does not have a monopoly. The same is true on the hardware side. Not only do you have two major x86 choices (Intel and AMD) but you have other chip lineages to choose from (Alpha, PPC, SPARC's, ARM, etc.)
Now you might say that Microsoft has a near-monopoly on the home Intel market, but that's a pretty silly market definition. Of course if you define "market" narrowly enough you can prove that anyone has a monopoly on anything. But if you look at the actual choices available today, there are a *lot* of them. I haven't touched a Microsoft product in a week, and I use computers on a daily basis. They simply don't have a monopoly.
The real shame is not that M$ and Intel have accumulated that much power, it's that they've done it in front of everyone else and no one did anything before it was too late. Oh, well.
Too late for what? Is the government going to break into my house and confiscate my Mac? Is it going to shut down Linux-only PC vendors? Is it going to drive Sun or SGI out of business? What is this great catastrophe that you are dreading if the government doesn't do something?
..of a worthy cause that would get strangled by a lobbying ban. The tobacco lawsuits were nothing short of a looting by trial lawyers and politicians of tobacco companies and their customers. The idea that tobacco companies "covered up" the dangers of smoking is ludicrous. Even if they lied about it, no one was fooled. After all, every pack of cigarrettes has a warning on it, and has for 20 years. Smokers are not victims of the big bad tobacco companies.
And even if smokers were the victims, I fail to see what these lawsuits helped. The billions of dollars that went to politicians and lawyers are just going to come from higher cigarrette costs, and so are coming from the same people who are ostensibly being "protected." Smokers are getting screwed enough as it is, these lawsuits just make cigarrettes even more expensive.
So I wish the tobacco industry had stuck to its guns and fought it out. I think these lootings were a great injustice, and they only benefitted a handful of politicians and lawyers. Heck, I might have donated to a pro-tabacco lobbying group had one existed that would have taken a principled stand on this issue.
One person's "special interest group" is another man's activist. Yes, there are blatant examples of companies simply seeking handouts or destruction of competitors (say, Netscape and Sun whining about Microsoft) but there are also companies and individuals who lobby to protect their rights, and I think they would get hurt more by lobbying restrictions.