He willingly accepted the job, and is free to take another one. If he wants to demand overtime, fine. But it's incredibly sleazy to wait til you quit and then use the force of law to extort hundreds of dollars from one's employer. I don't care what the law says. If you agree to work 50 hours a week for a flat wage, who is the government to prohibit it?
All labor laws do is restrict the range of agreements that an employer and an employee can make. If employees start demanding overtime, do you think employers are just going to open their checkbooks and write out thousands of dollars in pay raises? They're going to either restrict you to 40 hours, or cut your pay rate to make up for it. Money doesn't grow on trees.
If I want to work more than 40 hours and accept a flat rate, what business does the government have to stop me. If I want more money, I can ask for it. And if they turn me down, I can leave. Emplouees are not helpless children. The government needs to stop coddling them.
This is stored on a hard drive, not a magnetic tape, so you can skip the commercials with the click of a button: just hit the "30-second skip" button and it skips it. Now the networks can start shuffling the *lengths* of commercials, but that messes up their neat little scheduling system, as they have to start keeping track of how long each commercial is and make sure that everything fits in ok. And even if they do that, I can skip ahead 2 minutes, and if my show has started skip back one minute, then go forward 30 second, then back 15 seconds. So even if I don't know how long the commercial is going to be I can still skip the commercials pretty quickly.
The real question is whether people will adopt this technology. Frankly, $500 is a bit much to charge for the ability to avoid watching commercials. And it sounds like this is not yet as simple as a VCR, so many people may still find it confusing. I predict that most people will be too lazy to use this thing to its full advantage, and so it will bruise the networks but not destroy them.
You reveal a great deal of passion and not a lot of thought. Think of the worst possible scenario. In the case of Microsoft, this is them taking complete control over the OS market and producing lousy products. This is the *worst* that can *possibly* happen. You will always be free to go to previous products, run a free OS, etc.
Now consider the government. Imagine for example if the government wins its case and sets up a "software review board" to make sure that MS lives up to its obligations. This board restricts the content of MS's OS. After a while, MS complains that its competitors have an unfair advantage, and so the board is expanded to regulate all OS's. Now you have a *permanent* stagnation of the OS industry. You tell me: which is scarier.
The fundamental difference between a government and a corporation, is that a corporation can never force you to do anything. If you simply refuse to accept its products, it can't do a thing to you. Only government can be described as "Orwellian" because only government can act like Big Brother. Corporations can make lousy software, and might even make it more difficult for you to get a competing product. But there are *always* alternatives.
Thus I am willing to accept a great deal of "monopoly" from MS before I sanction government action. I have a Mac, and Microsoft can't keep me from using it or keep Apple from making new hardware or software. The government conceivable could. Therefore the government is the only entity whose actions can properly be called "Orwellian."
I'm not sure that the rights of MS competitors are exactly the issue here. It's more a question of ensuring a level playing field for competition and encouraging a free market, rather than deciding exactly who has a right to do something.
A "field for competition" would seem to be a right held by MS competitors. And a free market is a market without gov't interference.
No one has a special right to write a browser for Windows, but everyone should have an equal opportunity in the market to distribute their browser and let the market pick the best one.
How has this been violated? Anyone who wants to is free to download Netscape and install it. It is true that Microsoft has given its browser a lot of publicity and support, but so what? Netscape has a right to write and distribute their browser. They have not been prevented from doing so.
If Apple is acting illegally to create a monopoly, then it should indeed be prosecuted. I'm not sure exactly what you are referring to, so I'm afraid I can't come up with an example here.
Well, Apple has a monopoly on the Macintosh market, and has "bundled" MSIE with Mac OS as the default browser. Is this monopolistic? I see no principled difference, excpept that Microsoft is bigger, so it is ok to beat up on them. Furthermore, its subsidiaries create a word processor, (Claris) a database program (FM) etc. Are these illegal?
I would argue that under antitrust law they are, but that the DOJ is not prosecuting them because Microsoft gives them more publicity. The fact is, that if you combine all the justifications that have won antitrust cases in the past, you could convict literally any major corporation. It is bad law.
Of course we don't want a law to "punish people who do bad things." That is an over generalization of what I said. Throughout U.S. history the courts have interpreted the laws (as is their function under the Constitution) and they will continue to do so.
But the difference between "people who do bad things" and "combinations in restraint of trade" is only a matter of degree. They are not specific actions, but class of actions, and no clear test is provided to tell which actions fall into that class. So a clever lawyer can find actions by pretty much any successful company that can be twisted into a "combination in restraint of trade," just as you can arrest pretty much any individual that "does bad things."
This history of case law and decisions sets a precedent, and the precedent is taken into account in future cases and as new laws are written.In some cases there are arbitrary laws, but they are refined over time by the precedents set by trials such as this one and as new laws are enacted as a result of those trials.
This is a bad thing, because it is simply Congress shirking its responsibility to define what is and is not illegal. Courts enforce the law, they should not have to write it. Obviously, courts should interpret minor points that were accidentally left unclear, but major points should be laid down ahead of time to make it clear. Courts usually follow precedents, but they also sometimes break precedents and decide that a whole new class of actions is illegal. When that happens, a bunch of businesses will suddenly find themselves criminals, despite the fact that what they did was legal when they did it. This is what antitrust advocates like to call "flexible" law--law that can change to fit the circumstances. What that means it that it gives the courts the power to convict companies for things that were not previously crimes.
So *any* law that must go through the process you describe is bad law. It is the job of Congress to clearly spell out what is and is not illegal, and if they don't they are creating an opportunity for oppression.
Charge OEMs for your product even if they don't ship it
Deliberately include incompatibilities in your product so that it fails to work with your competition, and then blame it on them
Create products in one market that only work correctly if used with your products from a different market
Contract with OEMs to give them a much better deal on your product only if they don't include a competitor's product as well.
I don't see how any of these actions violate the rights of their competitors. no one has a right to write Windows apps, and no one has a write to make OS's for any particualr computer. So I would argue all these should be legal.
This made sense when the laws were drafted, because markets can change rapidly and we don't want to rewrite large laws like this every year to take into account market changes and entirely new markets.
OK, how about this: let's write a law that reads: the government shall have the power to punish people who do bad things. Then we never have to write any laws again. Our all-knowing DOJ will simply decide who does bad things, and punish them.
This is the heart of the problem: even if I accept that the above practices should be illegal, there was no way for Microsoft to know they are illegal. Apple does many of the same things, yet no one is going after them. It is arbitrary, which means that it gives the DOJ nearly unlimited power to harrass successful companies for things that were not previously considered crimes.
Like many other laws, the question is ultimately the intent of Microsoft, and I don't think anyone at this point can argue that Microsoft's intent was only to have a good, clean competition and provide the best products for their customers.
The intention of microsoft is irrelevant. If they did something wrong, whether they did it for "good reasons" or "bad reasons" is irrelevant. When's the last time you saw a murder defendent argue he meant to perform "good, clean" murder? Law should limit actions, not intentions.
"Libertarian socialism" is a contradiction in terms. If you want to preach your anarcho-syndicalist theory, go right ahead. But the term "libertarian" has already been claimed by the movement you call "libertarian capitalism." "Libertarian socialism" bears *no* relationship to actual libertarianism--which is a philosophy of limited government, individual liberty, and capitalism. So please--get your own name. Don't drag the good name of Libertarianism through the mud with your socialistic nonsense.
This is a trial in which Microsoft has had every opportunity to prove that they were not breaking the law.
Except that the law is excessively vague and over-reaching. The best evidence for this is that Microsoft is not arguing that they did not do the things that they are accused of doing. They are arguing that what they does not fall under the bounds of the law. In other words, they are not asked to prove their innocence. They are asked to prove that the judge should interpret the law in their favor. This kind of "flexible" law is a recipe for tyranny.
The Sherman Act is full of phrases like "combinations in restraint of trade" and "attempts to monoplize." This is Orwellian doublespeak: government lawyers can twist this to apply to pretty much anything. The interpretations change with every judge and every prosecutor, because there is no rational basis for deciding what is and is not a crime. Basically, it boils down to prosecuting any company with a large market share who does unpopular (not necessarily unethical or otherwise illegal) things.
So "proving" that Microsoft did not break the law is impossible, because strictly speaking, every large corporation breaks antitrust law simply by trying to maintain their market share. Companies are punished not for specific acts deemed illegal, but for being large and unpopular. It's a blank check for the DOJ to harass pretty much whoever they want.
You're the intergalactic bounty hunter who caught Han Solo. The guy with the kick-ass helmet and about 3 lines of dialog, you get thrown into Jabba's pit in the final Jabba fight.
I'm not sure this is a big deal. It's not like you are doing anything important on your screen during startup. And if enough people don't like it, some company will give you the option of a non-ad BIOS.
I would be more worried about how the content is delivered. Is it hard-wired into some kind of flash ROM? Is it stored on the hard drive? If it is going to be delivered over the 'net, that means that either the BIOS has to do built in TCP-IP, which I doubt, or that you have to run a client-side app to download the new images. If the latter is true, it should be easy to disable.
In any event, this is yet another reason to get a Mac. The "Mac OS" startup screen is a whole lot more attractive than a stupid flying window anyway:)
Doesn't the "per seat" imply that it is not open source? If it was, then you could make your own binaries and run as many copies as you please, couldn't you?
But as I wrote in another comment, I am still wondering about how you can control all these initial steps. How to tell thousands of nanotrains moving on the same surface to deliver their load in the right place?
I think this may be a general problem with the whole nanotech concept. Even if we can build an assembler, you still can't do anything interesting on the macroscale without communication lines, energy, raw materials, and coordination between the assemblers. The assembler might be able to build a copy of itself in a very controlled environment, but when you try to make something much bigger, you run into a whole host of problems. Agriculture and macro-scale processes will probably always be the most efficient way of building things like furniture, buildings, vehicles, etc. There's really no reason we need to build couches one molecule at a time. Cutting down a tree and making cloth works just fine. Even something as small as a computer chip would require thousands of constructors working for hours to build. The logistics of coordinating, feeding, transporting and supplying all those assemblers will be a nightmare to say the least. Certainly, it wouldn't be possible to do any kind of top-down, real-time control of each of those thousands of assemblers. Just the communication lines would be prohibitively complex.
Ultimately, the only way I can see it ever working is if the machines themselves communicated among themselves and made decisions without much outside intervention. You would need a large number of different types of robots--messangers, transporters, assemblers, computers, etc--each in several varieties for different environments and tasks. Each of these components will take years to develop and perfect. And the AI framework necessary for such a system still is in a preliminary stage. So even if an assembler is developed, we'd still be decades from the sort of world Drexler envisions, in which we have diamond airplanes, microscopic spaceships, and nano-generated food.
It's not clear to me how this could possibly match the 60k increase in performance this article claims. Certainly, you can't execute a single stream of instructions at anywhere close to that speed, no matter how fast you can modify the gates. If this is supposed to be a massively parallel system, then you're only going to see this kind of speed up on tasks that can be extensively parallelized. So without even seeing the details, I don't buy it. Yeah, you might approach this level for something like prime number factoring, but I'll bet money they aren't going to achieve anywhere near this speed on everyday computing tasks
Corporations have no rights, only priviledges. By the good grace of the American people shareholders are given the gift of limited liability, which protects them from criminal charges when the corporation does something illegal. So, when corporations start to screw around with consumers, the government has every right to do something about it.
Corporations do not have rights, but individuals do. Specifically, when I say that something is owned by a given corporation, what that means is that it is owned by the shareholders of that corporation. I don't see what limited liablitity has to do with this at all. Are you saying that there would be nothing wrong with the government confiscating all of AT&T's assets? After all, AT&T is just a corporation... It can't own anything.
While the trial goes on, MS cannot try their usual arm-twisting. Even after the trial, even if MS wins, they won't be able to go back to the way things were a year ago without triggering major outrage and probable legal problems.
As much as this might please most/.ers, I don't think that this situation is a good thing. Law should be objective and clearly defined. If Microsoft has done something immoral, it should be prosecuted. If there is no law under which to prosecute them, then we should consider writing one. But "public outrage" and "possible legal action" should have no bearing in a court. Doing things that are legal but look bad should not trigger another trial.
Doing so gives the DOJ nearly unlimited power. When Microsoft is prosecuted not for specific actions that are considered illegal, but for patterns of behavior and general meanness, that is a bad thing. And as far as I'm concerned, antitrust law is so vague as to be meaningless. What Microsoft is alleged to have done under the Sherman Act is engaged in "combinations in restraint of trade" and "monopolistic practices." The DOJ can (and does) reinterpret that standard based upon their current target, and can harass pretty much anyone with a majority market share in pretty much any industry.
If a company's prices are "too high" that's gouging. If they are "too low" that is predatory pricing. If they are the same as everyone else, then that's collusion. If they sell to many products together, then that is "bundling." They are not allowed to set certain types of conditions in their OEM liscences. Some of these practices perhaps should be illegal. But if so, they should be made illegal explicitly and directly. Companies should not have to wait until after the fact to discover which practices are illegal under antitrust law.
As I have said before, if Microsoft is guilty of specific crimes--fraud, breach of contract, theft of intellectual property, or whatever--they should be prosecuted for those crimes. But they should not be prosecuted for competing too successfully by means that would otherwise be legal. They should not be forced to play by a whole new set of rules simply because their market share is above 80%.
If in fact the outcome of the trial of is irrelevant, I would argue that proves that Microsoft is being unjustly prosecuted. They should have just as much right to prove their innocence as anyone else. And if they are forced to change their behavior even if they win the case then that tells me that they are being prosecuted not for specific lawbreaking, but simply because their actions are unpopular.
While the trial goes on, MS cannot try their usual arm-twisting. Even after the trial, even if MS wins, they won't be able to go back to the way things were a year ago without triggering major outrage and probable legal problems.
As much as this might please most/.ers, I don't think that this situation is a good thing. Law should be objective and clearly defined. If Microsoft has done something immoral, it should be prosecuted. If there is no law under which to prosecute them, then we should consider writing one. But "public outrage" and "possible legal action" should have no bearing in a court. Doing things that are legal but look bad should not trigger another trial.
Doing so gives the DOJ nearly unlimited power. When Microsoft is prosecuted not for specific actions that are considered illegal, but for patterns of behavior and general meanness, that is a bad thing. And as far as I'm concerned, antitrust law is so vague as to be meaningless. What Microsoft is alleged to have done under the Sherman Act is engaged in "combinations in restraint of trade" and "monopolistic practices." The DOJ can (and does) reinterpret that standard based upon their current target, and can harass pretty much anyone with a majority market share in pretty much any industry.
If a company's prices are "too high" that's gouging. If they are "too low" that is predatory pricing. If they are the same as everyone else, then that's collusion. If they sell to many products together, then that is "bundling." They are not allowed to set certain types of conditions in their OEM liscences. Some of these practices perhaps should be illegal. But if so, they should be made illegal explicitly and directly. Companies should not have to wait until after the fact to discover which practices are illegal under antitrust law.
As I have said before, if Microsoft is guilty of specific crimes--fraud, breach of contract, theft of intellectual property, or whatever--they should be prosecuted for those crimes. But they should not be prosecuted for competing too successfully by means that would otherwise be legal. They should not be forced to play by a whole new set of rules simply because their market share is above 80%.
America has been through this before: the robber-baron era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when maniacs crushed hard working middle class folks. People like Rockefeller, Pew, Duke, Hearst used their money to stifle competition and extract monopoly rents.
I don't think this is in fact correct. Rockefeller got his market share by continually imporving his production methods and lowering his prices. This sucked for his competitors, but only because they simply could not keep up. The consumers benefitted enourmously from this. Remember also that the oil industry in the late 19th century was still young, and it was both much smaller and much more rapidly changing than today. So Rockefeller's "monopoly" (he never quite achieved a monopoly) likely would not have lasted once the industry matured and people started figuring out how things worked.
In any event, the important point is that Rockefeller became wealthy by producing oil more efficiently than his competitors. He was punished not because he was evil, but because he was productive. And yes, this is an "Ayn Rand" vision of the world.:)
The moderators don't decide which stories to post. They simply change the scores on the message boards. The stories are chosen by Rob and a few others on the/. staff, not the moderators.
Although I think you are a moron, I do agree with you on one score: there is nothing special about the software industry. Just as the software industry should not be regulated, neither should any other. The free market combined with fraud and liability laws can keep product quality up in any industry, be it software, medicines, airplanes, etc. The reason that computers are not as stable as they could be is that consumers are demanding new features. That's what people want. If you need to back things up, get a real backup system, like tape. Not stupid zip disks.
And no, this is not a "pseudo-libertarian" argument. It is a Libertarian one.
Think about it: I buy a software package, install it on my computer, and then return it. I say I don't like it, but I keep it anyway. There's practically no way to prevent this short of raiding peoples' computers, so what else can they do?
There are other ways to tell if a software package is good or not--reviews, demos, talkiing with friends, etc. And this policy prevents a LOT of potential piracy.
Nobody is forced into making software. They do it through choice. They do it because they want to. And they're making it for us. So when we talk of an official body to regulate the industry, we have to look at it from our own selfish angle - will it make things better for us? If it will then that's all that counts. If it makes things more difficult for developers or publishers then that's unfortunate, but it's not our problem. If they behaved properly then nobody would be suggesting regulation in the first place.
In other words: if I'm not happy, I'm going to screw you over, and your rights/needs are irrelevant. This article displays an incredible level of arrogance, and an incredible lack of understanding of the way regulation works. For example:
The industry's regulator could look at the situation and decide that from the time the game was released, until the time it should have been released, was a total of eleven weeks. So they calculate how much profit was made during that time and that's the fine they impose. In other words, they completely nullify any benefit for software being rushed out the door.
As anyone who's ever worked on a software project knows, there are always more bugs. You can nail the big ones, but if you try to nail every single bug before releasing a piece of software, it literally will never get released, unless you drastically limit your feature set. Nor is it clear what constitutes a "bug."
So this guy is talking about giving some beaurocrat the power to decide when a piece of software "should" be released. I'll bet money this beaurocrat isn't gonna be a software engineer. So the chances of hiim making good decisions is close to zero.
Beyond that, it's not even clear that waiting is a good thing. In some cases, consumers benefit from recieving buggy software six months early. If it is a game, for example, and the rendering engine doesn't look quite right, who cares? If we force companies to add several months to their debugging cycle, you simply lengthen the wait for new products. This hardly denefits consumers.
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He willingly accepted the job, and is free to take another one. If he wants to demand overtime, fine. But it's incredibly sleazy to wait til you quit and then use the force of law to extort hundreds of dollars from one's employer. I don't care what the law says. If you agree to work 50 hours a week for a flat wage, who is the government to prohibit it?
All labor laws do is restrict the range of agreements that an employer and an employee can make. If employees start demanding overtime, do you think employers are just going to open their checkbooks and write out thousands of dollars in pay raises? They're going to either restrict you to 40 hours, or cut your pay rate to make up for it. Money doesn't grow on trees.
If I want to work more than 40 hours and accept a flat rate, what business does the government have to stop me. If I want more money, I can ask for it. And if they turn me down, I can leave. Emplouees are not helpless children. The government needs to stop coddling them.
This is stored on a hard drive, not a magnetic tape, so you can skip the commercials with the click of a button: just hit the "30-second skip" button and it skips it. Now the networks can start shuffling the *lengths* of commercials, but that messes up their neat little scheduling system, as they have to start keeping track of how long each commercial is and make sure that everything fits in ok. And even if they do that, I can skip ahead 2 minutes, and if my show has started skip back one minute, then go forward 30 second, then back 15 seconds. So even if I don't know how long the commercial is going to be I can still skip the commercials pretty quickly.
The real question is whether people will adopt this technology. Frankly, $500 is a bit much to charge for the ability to avoid watching commercials. And it sounds like this is not yet as simple as a VCR, so many people may still find it confusing. I predict that most people will be too lazy to use this thing to its full advantage, and so it will bruise the networks but not destroy them.
You reveal a great deal of passion and not a lot of thought. Think of the worst possible scenario. In the case of Microsoft, this is them taking complete control over the OS market and producing lousy products. This is the *worst* that can *possibly* happen. You will always be free to go to previous products, run a free OS, etc.
Now consider the government. Imagine for example if the government wins its case and sets up a "software review board" to make sure that MS lives up to its obligations. This board restricts the content of MS's OS. After a while, MS complains that its competitors have an unfair advantage, and so the board is expanded to regulate all OS's. Now you have a *permanent* stagnation of the OS industry. You tell me: which is scarier.
The fundamental difference between a government and a corporation, is that a corporation can never force you to do anything. If you simply refuse to accept its products, it can't do a thing to you. Only government can be described as "Orwellian" because only government can act like Big Brother. Corporations can make lousy software, and might even make it more difficult for you to get a competing product. But there are *always* alternatives.
Thus I am willing to accept a great deal of "monopoly" from MS before I sanction government action. I have a Mac, and Microsoft can't keep me from using it or keep Apple from making new hardware or software. The government conceivable could. Therefore the government is the only entity whose actions can properly be called "Orwellian."
I'm not sure that the rights of MS competitors are exactly the issue here. It's more a question of ensuring a level playing field for competition and encouraging a free market, rather than deciding exactly who has a right to do something.
A "field for competition" would seem to be a right held by MS competitors. And a free market is a market without gov't interference.
No one has a special right to write a browser for Windows, but everyone should have an equal opportunity in the market to distribute their browser and let the market pick the best one.
How has this been violated? Anyone who wants to is free to download Netscape and install it. It is true that Microsoft has given its browser a lot of publicity and support, but so what? Netscape has a right to write and distribute their browser. They have not been prevented from doing so.
If Apple is acting illegally to create a monopoly, then it should indeed be prosecuted. I'm not sure exactly what you are referring to, so I'm afraid I can't come up with an example here.
Well, Apple has a monopoly on the Macintosh market, and has "bundled" MSIE with Mac OS as the default browser. Is this monopolistic? I see no principled difference, excpept that Microsoft is bigger, so it is ok to beat up on them. Furthermore, its subsidiaries create a word processor, (Claris) a database program (FM) etc. Are these illegal?
I would argue that under antitrust law they are, but that the DOJ is not prosecuting them because Microsoft gives them more publicity. The fact is, that if you combine all the justifications that have won antitrust cases in the past, you could convict literally any major corporation. It is bad law.
Of course we don't want a law to "punish people who do bad things." That is an over generalization of what I said. Throughout U.S. history the courts have interpreted the laws (as is their function under the Constitution) and they will continue to do so.
But the difference between "people who do bad things" and "combinations in restraint of trade" is only a matter of degree. They are not specific actions, but class of actions, and no clear test is provided to tell which actions fall into that class. So a clever lawyer can find actions by pretty much any successful company that can be twisted into a "combination in restraint of trade," just as you can arrest pretty much any individual that "does bad things."
This history of case law and decisions sets a precedent, and the precedent is taken into account in future cases and as new laws are written.In some cases there are arbitrary laws, but they are refined over time by the precedents set by trials such as this one and as new laws are enacted as a result of those trials.
This is a bad thing, because it is simply Congress shirking its responsibility to define what is and is not illegal. Courts enforce the law, they should not have to write it. Obviously, courts should interpret minor points that were accidentally left unclear, but major points should be laid down ahead of time to make it clear. Courts usually follow precedents, but they also sometimes break precedents and decide that a whole new class of actions is illegal. When that happens, a bunch of businesses will suddenly find themselves criminals, despite the fact that what they did was legal when they did it. This is what antitrust advocates like to call "flexible" law--law that can change to fit the circumstances. What that means it that it gives the courts the power to convict companies for things that were not previously crimes.
So *any* law that must go through the process you describe is bad law. It is the job of Congress to clearly spell out what is and is not illegal, and if they don't they are creating an opportunity for oppression.
I don't see how any of these actions violate the rights of their competitors. no one has a right to write Windows apps, and no one has a write to make OS's for any particualr computer. So I would argue all these should be legal.
This made sense when the laws were drafted, because markets can change rapidly and we don't want to rewrite large laws like this every year to take into account market changes and entirely new markets.
OK, how about this: let's write a law that reads: the government shall have the power to punish people who do bad things. Then we never have to write any laws again. Our all-knowing DOJ will simply decide who does bad things, and punish them.
This is the heart of the problem: even if I accept that the above practices should be illegal, there was no way for Microsoft to know they are illegal. Apple does many of the same things, yet no one is going after them. It is arbitrary, which means that it gives the DOJ nearly unlimited power to harrass successful companies for things that were not previously considered crimes.
Like many other laws, the question is ultimately the intent of Microsoft, and I don't think anyone at this point can argue that Microsoft's intent was only to have a good, clean competition and provide the best products for their customers.
The intention of microsoft is irrelevant. If they did something wrong, whether they did it for "good reasons" or "bad reasons" is irrelevant. When's the last time you saw a murder defendent argue he meant to perform "good, clean" murder? Law should limit actions, not intentions.
"Libertarian socialism" is a contradiction in terms. If you want to preach your anarcho-syndicalist theory, go right ahead. But the term "libertarian" has already been claimed by the movement you call "libertarian capitalism." "Libertarian socialism" bears *no* relationship to actual libertarianism--which is a philosophy of limited government, individual liberty, and capitalism. So please--get your own name. Don't drag the good name of Libertarianism through the mud with your socialistic nonsense.
Woohoo! Another MS flamewar!
This is a trial in which Microsoft has had every opportunity to prove that they were not breaking the law.
Except that the law is excessively vague and over-reaching. The best evidence for this is that Microsoft is not arguing that they did not do the things that they are accused of doing. They are arguing that what they does not fall under the bounds of the law. In other words, they are not asked to prove their innocence. They are asked to prove that the judge should interpret the law in their favor. This kind of "flexible" law is a recipe for tyranny.
The Sherman Act is full of phrases like "combinations in restraint of trade" and "attempts to monoplize." This is Orwellian doublespeak: government lawyers can twist this to apply to pretty much anything. The interpretations change with every judge and every prosecutor, because there is no rational basis for deciding what is and is not a crime. Basically, it boils down to prosecuting any company with a large market share who does unpopular (not necessarily unethical or otherwise illegal) things.
So "proving" that Microsoft did not break the law is impossible, because strictly speaking, every large corporation breaks antitrust law simply by trying to maintain their market share. Companies are punished not for specific acts deemed illegal, but for being large and unpopular. It's a blank check for the DOJ to harass pretty much whoever they want.
From the javascript:
var ptypes = new Array ("Darth Vader", "C-3PO", "Han Solo", "Luke Skywalker", "Boba Fett", "Obi-Wan Kenobi", "Chewbacca", "Princess Leia");
Looks like each question increments your rating to be one or more of the characters, and which every character get the most points is you!
You're the intergalactic bounty hunter who caught Han Solo. The guy with the kick-ass helmet and about 3 lines of dialog, you get thrown into Jabba's pit in the final Jabba fight.
I'm not sure this is a big deal. It's not like you are doing anything important on your screen during startup. And if enough people don't like it, some company will give you the option of a non-ad BIOS.
:)
I would be more worried about how the content is delivered. Is it hard-wired into some kind of flash ROM? Is it stored on the hard drive? If it is going to be delivered over the 'net, that means that either the BIOS has to do built in TCP-IP, which I doubt, or that you have to run a client-side app to download the new images. If the latter is true, it should be easy to disable.
In any event, this is yet another reason to get a Mac. The "Mac OS" startup screen is a whole lot more attractive than a stupid flying window anyway
Doesn't the "per seat" imply that it is not open source? If it was, then you could make your own binaries and run as many copies as you please, couldn't you?
I've heard it both ways. Anyone know for sure how one pronouces "Jobs"?
But as I wrote in another comment, I am still wondering about how you can control all these initial steps. How to tell thousands of nanotrains moving on the same surface to deliver their load in the right place?
I think this may be a general problem with the whole nanotech concept. Even if we can build an assembler, you still can't do anything interesting on the macroscale without communication lines, energy, raw materials, and coordination between the assemblers. The assembler might be able to build a copy of itself in a very controlled environment, but when you try to make something much bigger, you run into a whole host of problems. Agriculture and macro-scale processes will probably always be the most efficient way of building things like furniture, buildings, vehicles, etc. There's really no reason we need to build couches one molecule at a time. Cutting down a tree and making cloth works just fine. Even something as small as a computer chip would require thousands of constructors working for hours to build. The logistics of coordinating, feeding, transporting and supplying all those assemblers will be a nightmare to say the least. Certainly, it wouldn't be possible to do any kind of top-down, real-time control of each of those thousands of assemblers. Just the communication lines would be prohibitively complex.
Ultimately, the only way I can see it ever working is if the machines themselves communicated among themselves and made decisions without much outside intervention. You would need a large number of different types of robots--messangers, transporters, assemblers, computers, etc--each in several varieties for different environments and tasks. Each of these components will take years to develop and perfect. And the AI framework necessary for such a system still is in a preliminary stage. So even if an assembler is developed, we'd still be decades from the sort of world Drexler envisions, in which we have diamond airplanes, microscopic spaceships, and nano-generated food.
It's not clear to me how this could possibly match the 60k increase in performance this article claims. Certainly, you can't execute a single stream of instructions at anywhere close to that speed, no matter how fast you can modify the gates. If this is supposed to be a massively parallel system, then you're only going to see this kind of speed up on tasks that can be extensively parallelized. So without even seeing the details, I don't buy it. Yeah, you might approach this level for something like prime number factoring, but I'll bet money they aren't going to achieve anywhere near this speed on everyday computing tasks
Am I missing something?
Corporations have no rights, only priviledges. By the good grace of the American people shareholders are given the gift of limited liability, which protects them from criminal charges when the corporation does something illegal. So, when corporations start to screw around with consumers, the government has every right to do something about it.
Corporations do not have rights, but individuals do. Specifically, when I say that something is owned by a given corporation, what that means is that it is owned by the shareholders of that corporation. I don't see what limited liablitity has to do with this at all. Are you saying that there would be nothing wrong with the government confiscating all of AT&T's assets? After all, AT&T is just a corporation... It can't own anything.
Think about it.
Um... OS X server has been out since early March.
While the trial goes on, MS cannot try their usual arm-twisting. Even after the trial, even if MS wins, they won't be able to go back to the way things were a year ago without triggering major outrage and probable legal problems.
/.ers, I don't think that this situation is a good thing. Law should be objective and clearly defined. If Microsoft has done something immoral, it should be prosecuted. If there is no law under which to prosecute them, then we should consider writing one. But "public outrage" and "possible legal action" should have no bearing in a court. Doing things that are legal but look bad should not trigger another trial.
As much as this might please most
Doing so gives the DOJ nearly unlimited power. When Microsoft is prosecuted not for specific actions that are considered illegal, but for patterns of behavior and general meanness, that is a bad thing. And as far as I'm concerned, antitrust law is so vague as to be meaningless. What Microsoft is alleged to have done under the Sherman Act is engaged in "combinations in restraint of trade" and "monopolistic practices." The DOJ can (and does) reinterpret that standard based upon their current target, and can harass pretty much anyone with a majority market share in pretty much any industry.
If a company's prices are "too high" that's gouging. If they are "too low" that is predatory pricing. If they are the same as everyone else, then that's collusion. If they sell to many products together, then that is "bundling." They are not allowed to set certain types of conditions in their OEM liscences. Some of these practices perhaps should be illegal. But if so, they should be made illegal explicitly and directly. Companies should not have to wait until after the fact to discover which practices are illegal under antitrust law.
As I have said before, if Microsoft is guilty of specific crimes--fraud, breach of contract, theft of intellectual property, or whatever--they should be prosecuted for those crimes. But they should not be prosecuted for competing too successfully by means that would otherwise be legal. They should not be forced to play by a whole new set of rules simply because their market share is above 80%.
If in fact the outcome of the trial of is irrelevant, I would argue that proves that Microsoft is being unjustly prosecuted. They should have just as much right to prove their innocence as anyone else. And if they are forced to change their behavior even if they win the case then that tells me that they are being prosecuted not for specific lawbreaking, but simply because their actions are unpopular.
While the trial goes on, MS cannot try their usual arm-twisting. Even after the trial, even if MS wins, they won't be able to go back to the way things were a year ago without triggering major outrage and probable legal problems.
/.ers, I don't think that this situation is a good thing. Law should be objective and clearly defined. If Microsoft has done something immoral, it should be prosecuted. If there is no law under which to prosecute them, then we should consider writing one. But "public outrage" and "possible legal action" should have no bearing in a court. Doing things that are legal but look bad should not trigger another trial.
As much as this might please most
Doing so gives the DOJ nearly unlimited power. When Microsoft is prosecuted not for specific actions that are considered illegal, but for patterns of behavior and general meanness, that is a bad thing. And as far as I'm concerned, antitrust law is so vague as to be meaningless. What Microsoft is alleged to have done under the Sherman Act is engaged in "combinations in restraint of trade" and "monopolistic practices." The DOJ can (and does) reinterpret that standard based upon their current target, and can harass pretty much anyone with a majority market share in pretty much any industry.
If a company's prices are "too high" that's gouging. If they are "too low" that is predatory pricing. If they are the same as everyone else, then that's collusion. If they sell to many products together, then that is "bundling." They are not allowed to set certain types of conditions in their OEM liscences. Some of these practices perhaps should be illegal. But if so, they should be made illegal explicitly and directly. Companies should not have to wait until after the fact to discover which practices are illegal under antitrust law.
As I have said before, if Microsoft is guilty of specific crimes--fraud, breach of contract, theft of intellectual property, or whatever--they should be prosecuted for those crimes. But they should not be prosecuted for competing too successfully by means that would otherwise be legal. They should not be forced to play by a whole new set of rules simply because their market share is above 80%.
America has been through this before: the robber-baron era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when maniacs crushed hard working middle class folks. People like Rockefeller, Pew, Duke, Hearst used their money to stifle competition and extract monopoly rents.
:)
I don't think this is in fact correct. Rockefeller got his market share by continually imporving his production methods and lowering his prices. This sucked for his competitors, but only because they simply could not keep up. The consumers benefitted enourmously from this. Remember also that the oil industry in the late 19th century was still young, and it was both much smaller and much more rapidly changing than today. So Rockefeller's "monopoly" (he never quite achieved a monopoly) likely would not have lasted once the industry matured and people started figuring out how things worked.
In any event, the important point is that Rockefeller became wealthy by producing oil more efficiently than his competitors. He was punished not because he was evil, but because he was productive. And yes, this is an "Ayn Rand" vision of the world.
The moderators don't decide which stories to post. They simply change the scores on the message boards. The stories are chosen by Rob and a few others on the /. staff, not the moderators.
Although I think you are a moron, I do agree with you on one score: there is nothing special about the software industry. Just as the software industry should not be regulated, neither should any other. The free market combined with fraud and liability laws can keep product quality up in any industry, be it software, medicines, airplanes, etc. The reason that computers are not as stable as they could be is that consumers are demanding new features. That's what people want. If you need to back things up, get a real backup system, like tape. Not stupid zip disks.
And no, this is not a "pseudo-libertarian" argument. It is a Libertarian one.
Think about it: I buy a software package, install it on my computer, and then return it. I say I don't like it, but I keep it anyway. There's practically no way to prevent this short of raiding peoples' computers, so what else can they do?
There are other ways to tell if a software package is good or not--reviews, demos, talkiing with friends, etc. And this policy prevents a LOT of potential piracy.
Nobody is forced into making software. They do it through choice. They do it because they want to. And they're making it for us. So when we talk of an official body to regulate the industry, we have to look at it from our own selfish angle - will it make things better for us? If it will then that's all that counts. If it makes things more difficult for developers or publishers then that's unfortunate, but it's not our problem. If they behaved properly then nobody would be suggesting regulation in the first place.
In other words: if I'm not happy, I'm going to screw you over, and your rights/needs are irrelevant. This article displays an incredible level of arrogance, and an incredible lack of understanding of the way regulation works. For example:
The industry's regulator could look at the situation and decide that from the time the game was released, until the time it should have been released, was a total of eleven weeks. So they calculate how much profit was made during that time and that's the fine they impose. In other words, they completely nullify any benefit for software being rushed out the door.
As anyone who's ever worked on a software project knows, there are always more bugs. You can nail the big ones, but if you try to nail every single bug before releasing a piece of software, it literally will never get released, unless you drastically limit your feature set. Nor is it clear what constitutes a "bug."
So this guy is talking about giving some beaurocrat the power to decide when a piece of software "should" be released. I'll bet money this beaurocrat isn't gonna be a software engineer. So the chances of hiim making good decisions is close to zero.
Beyond that, it's not even clear that waiting is a good thing. In some cases, consumers benefit from recieving buggy software six months early. If it is a game, for example, and the rendering engine doesn't look quite right, who cares? If we force companies to add several months to their debugging cycle, you simply lengthen the wait for new products. This hardly denefits consumers.