On a good day in California, you can get enough power from your roof to heat some of your water, but not enough to run the house--at least with the solar cells in the forseeable future.
I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice. See an attorney in your jurisdiction if you need some.
>The FoF is a lot of high-sounding nonsense, which >shows little more than "Microsoft has a large and >stable market share, and works to aggressively >defend that market share from competitors."
Try reading the FofF . . .
It is rather detailed, and does show much more than this. Particularly, it shows ms incurring great costs for the sole purpose of impeding netscape and introductions of applications that would rely on netscape's API rather than windows.
>Despite Judge Jackson's contentions, I see >nothing immoral or illegal about that.
About what you describe, no. About what microsoft was found to do, and what microsoft's documents showed it to be doing, yes.
>He ignored several viable alternatives(most >notably Apple)
This just isn't true. Start at page 168 for the discussions dealing with IE and apple.
>and more importantly he completely failed to >demonstrate harm to consumers.
Again, read the document.
p. 32. , monopoly price of $89 rather than competitive level of $49. p.59, refusal to deal with IBM--limiting consumer choices. p.72, blocking distributiona of netscape as a choice. p.84, overriding consumer's choice of other browser and forcinguse of IE p. 98, revoking licenses of OEM's for accomodating the choicesdesired by consumers p. 103, increased support costs by banning shells (leads directly to higher prices).
And the list goes on.
>Yes the FoF is bad for them and they will >probably lose, but to admit their guilt >would be big mistake, both legally and morally, >since they are not guilty.
There is a list of things that monopolists are not allowed to do due to the harm to consumers. I can't think of any of them that weren't found to have happened--documented by ms's memos.
Yep, another chapter of the apple saga, in which they prove that if you buiild a better mousetrap, you can still beat the world away from your door.
It's not the net that's useful for connectivity, but the home. Let the computer cycle the lights when you're away. Turn on the coffee pot. Change the channel on the stereo. Turn off the light downstairs that you forgot about.
And why is this apple's screwup? Turn the clock back 11 years. Apple produces the Mac IIfx. Recall that every mac since day one was network capable. In the IIfx, the serial (network) ports were run by a special chip with a 6502, RAM, and ROM. Gee, one little chip, that apple could sell for about $20 to embed in everything . . . that could communicate around the house over the unused pair of wires in the phone lines (yes, appletalk ran on common phone wire). So how many did apple sell outside of the IIfx? [hint: it's the same number as North American coal exports in 1491 . ..]
IIAL, and you're correct. It's not that findings of fact can't be appealed, but that the standard of review is so high--essentially that no reasonable person could have reached that concusion from the evidence offered.
IAAL, but this is is not legal advice. etc. The market today has *nothing* to do with whether ms violated the law four years ago. zero. zilch. No matter how much ms's spin machine tries to suggest otherwise.
Today's market *does* matter in determining what remedies to be applied. But the underlying case was about harm in 1996, which doesn't go away just because they can't do it any more.
I thought a friend was crazy when he referred to a cell phone in his 16 year old daughter's car. Then he explained: emergency use *only*.
It made sense to me then. Now that I have four daughters of my own, it makes even more sense . . . [ok, not just a cell-phone, but something lethal, too:) ]
At least for large American cars, CO emmissions were pretty much eliminated about 10 years ago. The last time my 89 Crown Victoria went in for a smog test, its CO emmissions were below what the machine (in Nevada) could detect. Even before connecting it, the attendant told me it would probably blow 0.0 . . .
I had a client whose ex-husband-to-be tried suicide, with the old hose-from-the-exhaust-pipe trick. But he used an 89 Buick. Same problem. THough I suppose that if the garage was well enough sealed, the engine could have gone through most of the O2, causing him to pass out, leading him to starve to death if the fuel held out:)
While it can heat your water from the rooftop in some climates, solar isn't so friendly to the environment, either.
Commercially,you have two major choices
1) Acres and acres of panels. These raise the temperature beneath them by enough to change the ecosystem beneath them (yes, there is an ecosystem beneath the surface in the desert).
2) Solar Sattelites, beaming power down (MASER?). Just don't cross the beam . . .
It describes a market in which each firm has a monopoly in their own product, which is distinguished in some way from other products (Coke & Pepsi). Each firm has some market power, but must compete with other monopolists.
1) You can always file the initial appeal, which willl be heard. This is part of due process.
2) Findings of Fact *can* be appealed. However, the standard of review makes it improbable that they will be reversed. Conclusions of law can be altered by an appellate court easily; the appellate court just substitutes its own judgment. Factual findings, however, whether by a judge or jury, can only be overturned if the appellate court finds that no reasonable person could have come to that conclusion given the evidence before them. A *very* tough standard.
yes, you can read it that way. But when it comes time to write briefs for the appellate court, or discuss different portions of the paragraph,you will need to be able tof find the exact line.
>That appearance is more important than content is >only one of the things wrong with our legal >system.
How in the world did you get from "formatting is important" to "appearance is more important than content"???
The format means that we can all agree on what is on page 5, line 7, so that we can intelligently discuss the content. HTML does not have this feature, by design.
>This is correct. In other words he could say >"Internet Explorer was bundled unfairly."
That's a bit farther than he can go--he can get as faras "Internet Explorer was tied to Windows 95", but he can't get as far as "unfairly."
So far he is still only deciding what happened (fact). To get to legality (unfairly), he will need to decide if these facts violate the law. *that* will not be decided at this point; there will be at least one more round of briefs--and another encouragement to settle.
Yes, I know that you can attach a twiddler (?), but this gives you a big, bulky thing that isn't really one-handed. Use buttons or pressure switches so that while it's in your palm, your fingers land on them. *then* I'll rush out and buy one. But everything that I'd want to do with a hand-held means I need another hand to work with (drive, flipthough the booksi'm indexing, whatver)
I'm a lawyer, but this isn't legal advise. etc. read the rest of the disclaimer elsewhere in this thread.
A summary judgment motion is an attempt to win without a trial. It claims that the evidence being offered by the other side, even if believed (at least the portions that a reasonable person could believe), isn't enough for the other side to win, and that judgment should therefore be entered now.
Microsoft filed separate motions for each claim made by caldera, claiming that that particular act didn't violate anti-trust law, and that therefore that portion of caldera's claim should be dismissed. On many of these, microsoft would be right if the facts were viewed on their own. However, it is the combination of actions (the course of action) that was called illegal, and thus microsoft failed.
I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advise. See a lawyer licensed in your juisdiction if you need some.
>What did they mean by "tying", as in what MS did >to DOS and Windows 3.1?
U.S. antitrust law prohibits the "tying" of other goods to monopoly goods, even if the monopoly is legal. Tying is the refusal to by the monopoly good (DOS) unless the tied good (windows) is also purchased.
>Seriously, though, I wonder how many people >believe that this is just a money-grubbing ploy >that is just now being filed by spoil-sports >Caldera? I mean, to the man on the street, I'd >imagine that a lawsuit concerning competing >brands of DOS is pretty silly.
Only until you explain it. DR-DOS had 10% of the market, and growing. It worked better.
What are the damages for stealing this? Ten per cent of today's desktop OS market?
It's the remedies that really become interesting here. How do you put DR-DOS where it would have been? A full, royalty-free, license to all windows source code? An ownership interest in ms to reflect that share of the OS market--which would then be tripled (as an anti-trust verdict)? Or perhaps just 10% (before trippling) of microsoft's DOS revenue since then?
Then again, maybe microsoft shows the allegations aren't true and wins . . .
>But can Caldera demonstrate that they lost out >because of DR going bust?
yes, and it's trivial to do so.
>They probably picked up DR-DOS (from Novell, >IIRC) for a snip because of that!
And here you almost answer your own question. Part of the value of DR/DR-DOS was the claim against ms. This is reflected in the price paid by Novell, and then by caldera. DR didn't have the resources for the fight, and Novell didn't want a fight with ms and/or didn't think the chances of winning were good enough. Caldera disagreed, and bought the asset, claims & all. It's an x% chance of relief, with Caldera and Novell disagreeing about the value of x.
I don't think that this case will really have all that much technical evidence--it's really the conduct of microsoft that'sin question. That is, the jury doesn't have to know how the alleged code worked, but decide whether or not microsoft put it in there. Th DOJ trial, on the other hand, hade to adress issues such whether or not IE is really part of the OS.
And I can think of judges I've known who would be much inferior to a randomly selected jury . . .
Also, even though juries deciding certain cases might be scary, that's not as scary as a system without juries. The jury's most important role is as a check on the system, and as a limit on the potential for judicial corruption.
[replying to myself] See the very end of my post. This is the summary judgment motion. The basis of microsoft's motions were to claim, act by act, that the acts were insufficient to show abuse of monopoly power. The strategy was to eliminate each act from the case on its own.
The problem is that caldera wasn't suing for a bunch of different bad things, they were suing over the course of action consisting of *all* of the bad things *put together*. Once more, microsoft seems to have been represented by the law firm of Larry, Mo, and Curly . . .
I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advise. If you need some, see a lawyer in you own jurisdiction.
That a jury will be empaneled means two things 1) that one party ortheother demandeda jury, and 2) that there are "questions of fact" to be determined--i.e., someone needs to determinewhich sides' version of what happened is true.
In the DOJ case, the judge was also the trier of fact (2). In this case, my guess (someone can go to the courthouse and check the pleadings to make sure) is that Caldera demanded the jury, expecting sympathy for the little guy (if I represented ms, I would want a bench trial [judge instead of jury]).
Once the jury decides the facts, the judge will then decide how the law applies to the facts.
The way the judge's opinion would enter at this point is in a ruling for summary judgment. If the facts as alleged by caldera were insufficient for caldera to win, the case would be dismissed. This could also happen if the evidence produced during discovery showed that no reasonable jury could find in caldera's favor.
>As I understand it, the supposedly-so-great thing >about FORTRAN is that it allows you to ocntrol >floating-point precision better than C.
Matrices. Oh, my, the matrices:) Seven dimensions to comply with the standard, and most compilers offer far more. All sitting there, and ready to use, wiht nice intrinsics to manipulate them.
Slashdot Mirror
On a good day in California, you can get enough power from your roof to heat some of your water, but not enough to run the house--at least with the solar cells in the forseeable future.
I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice. See an attorney in your jurisdiction if you need some.
>The FoF is a lot of high-sounding nonsense, which
>shows little more than "Microsoft has a large and
>stable market share, and works to aggressively >defend that market share from competitors."
Try reading the FofF . . .
It is rather detailed, and does show much more than this. Particularly, it shows ms incurring great costs for the sole purpose of impeding netscape and introductions of applications that would rely on netscape's API rather than windows.
>Despite Judge Jackson's contentions, I see
>nothing immoral or illegal about that.
About what you describe, no. About what microsoft was found to do, and what microsoft's documents showed it to be doing, yes.
>He ignored several viable alternatives(most
>notably Apple)
This just isn't true. Start at page 168 for the discussions dealing with IE and apple.
>and more importantly he completely failed to
>demonstrate harm to consumers.
Again, read the document.
p. 32. , monopoly price of $89 rather than competitive level of $49.
p.59, refusal to deal with IBM--limiting consumer choices.
p.72, blocking distributiona of netscape as a choice.
p.84, overriding consumer's choice of other browser and forcinguse of IE
p. 98, revoking licenses of OEM's for accomodating the choicesdesired by consumers
p. 103, increased support costs by banning shells (leads directly to higher prices).
And the list goes on.
>Yes the FoF is bad for them and they will
>probably lose, but to admit their guilt
>would be big mistake, both legally and morally,
>since they are not guilty.
There is a list of things that monopolists are not allowed to do due to the harm to consumers. I can't think of any of them that weren't found to have happened--documented by ms's memos.
But then, I read the document.
hawk, esq.
Yep, another chapter of the apple saga, in which they prove that if you buiild a better mousetrap, you can still beat the world away from your door.
.]
It's not the net that's useful for connectivity, but the home. Let the computer cycle the lights when you're away. Turn on the coffee pot. Change the channel on the stereo. Turn off the light downstairs that you forgot about.
And why is this apple's screwup? Turn the clock back 11 years. Apple produces the Mac IIfx. Recall that every mac since day one was network capable. In the IIfx, the serial (network) ports were run by a special chip with a 6502, RAM, and ROM. Gee, one little chip, that apple could sell for about $20 to embed in everything . . . that could communicate around the house over the unused pair of wires in the phone lines (yes, appletalk ran on common phone wire). So how many did apple sell outside of the IIfx? [hint: it's the same number as North American coal exports in 1491 . .
IIAL, and you're correct. It's not that findings of fact can't be appealed, but that the standard of review is so high--essentially that no reasonable person could have reached that concusion from the evidence offered.
IAAL, but this is is not legal advice. etc.
The market today has *nothing* to do with whether ms violated the law four years ago. zero. zilch. No matter how much ms's spin machine tries to suggest otherwise.
Today's market *does* matter in determining what remedies to be applied. But the underlying case was about harm in 1996, which doesn't go away just because they can't do it any more.
hawk, esq.
>Either that, or require car-phone users to post
>their cell numbers on the outside of their cars.
Nah, not the regular number. A special one to kill the engine and engage the brakes . . .
I thought a friend was crazy when he referred to a cell phone in his 16 year old daughter's car. Then he explained: emergency use *only*.
:) ]
It made sense to me then. Now that I have four daughters of my own, it makes even more sense . . .
[ok, not just a cell-phone, but something lethal, too
At least for large American cars, CO emmissions were pretty much eliminated about 10 years ago. The last time my 89 Crown Victoria went in for a smog test, its CO emmissions were below what the machine (in Nevada) could detect. Even before connecting it, the attendant told me it would probably blow 0.0 . . .
:)
I had a client whose ex-husband-to-be tried suicide, with the old hose-from-the-exhaust-pipe trick. But he used an 89 Buick. Same problem. THough I suppose that if the garage was well enough sealed, the engine could have gone through most of the O2, causing him to pass out, leading him to starve to death if the fuel held out
While it can heat your water from the rooftop in some climates, solar isn't so friendly to the environment, either.
Commercially,you have two major choices
1) Acres and acres of panels. These raise the temperature beneath them by enough to change the ecosystem beneath them (yes, there is an ecosystem beneath the surface in the desert).
2) Solar Sattelites, beaming power down (MASER?). Just don't cross the beam . . .
> Caldera's case is kind of on shakey ground,
:) Part of DR-DOS when they bought it was the potential claim against ms.
>IMHO, because they didn't own DR-DOS during a
>time where it would have mattered.
Completely & utterly irrelevant
> They bought
>DR-DOS only after it was fairly clear that
>DR-DOS wasn't a viable product anymore. But
>#include
Yep. But they bought it wounds & all
hawk, esq. (but this isn't legal advice)
>"Monopolistically Competitive" is an oxymoron.
:)
Not if you have any idea what it means
It describes a market in which each firm has a monopoly in their own product, which is distinguished in some way from other products (Coke & Pepsi). Each firm has some market power, but must compete with other monopolists.
I am a lawyer, but this isn't advice. etc.
1) You can always file the initial appeal, which willl be heard. This is part of due process.
2) Findings of Fact *can* be appealed. However, the standard of review makes it improbable that they will be reversed. Conclusions of law can be altered by an appellate court easily; the appellate court just substitutes its own judgment. Factual findings, however, whether by a judge or jury, can only be overturned if the appellate court finds that no reasonable person could have come to that conclusion given the evidence before them. A *very* tough standard.
yes, you can read it that way. But when it comes time to write briefs for the appellate court, or discuss different portions of the paragraph,you will need to be able tof find the exact line.
Vertical integration is producing all of the parts; horizontal integration is the combining of manufacturors of the same product.
>If Microsoft gets split then all components
:) The DJ will continue to contain 30 stocks, meaning that at most one piece remains in the average.
>may be removed from the Dow, maybe just one,
>maybe neither, who knows? No one knows.
Yes we do
>The only person in the country (unless there's
>been a leak) who knows what will be in the
>finding of fact is the Judge.
And all his clerks, and his secretary, and maybe a special master (was there one in this case? I don't think so, but there could be)
hawk, esq.
>That appearance is more important than content is
>only one of the things wrong with our legal
>system.
How in the world did you get from "formatting is important" to "appearance is more important than content"???
The format means that we can all agree on what is on page 5, line 7, so that we can intelligently discuss the content. HTML does not have this feature, by design.
>I am a lawyer, this is not advise, etc.
>This is correct. In other words he could say
>"Internet Explorer was bundled unfairly."
That's a bit farther than he can go--he can get as faras "Internet Explorer was tied to Windows 95", but he can't get as far as "unfairly."
So far he is still only deciding what happened (fact). To get to legality (unfairly), he will need to decide if these facts violate the law. *that* will not be decided at this point; there will be at least one more round of briefs--and another encouragement to settle.
Yes, I know that you can attach a twiddler (?), but this gives you a big, bulky thing that isn't really one-handed. Use buttons or pressure switches so that while it's in your palm, your fingers land on them. *then* I'll rush out and buy one. But everything that I'd want to do with a hand-held means I need another hand to work with (drive, flipthough the booksi'm indexing, whatver)
I'm a lawyer, but this isn't legal advise. etc. read the rest of the disclaimer elsewhere in this thread.
A summary judgment motion is an attempt to win without a trial. It claims that the evidence being offered by the other side, even if believed (at least the portions that a reasonable person could believe), isn't enough for the other side to win, and that judgment should therefore be entered now.
Microsoft filed separate motions for each claim made by caldera, claiming that that particular act didn't violate anti-trust law, and that therefore that portion of caldera's claim should be dismissed. On many of these, microsoft would be right if the facts were viewed on their own. However, it is the combination of actions (the course of action) that was called illegal, and thus microsoft failed.
I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advise. See a lawyer licensed in your juisdiction if you need some.
>What did they mean by "tying", as in what MS did
>to DOS and Windows 3.1?
U.S. antitrust law prohibits the "tying" of other goods to monopoly goods, even if the monopoly is legal. Tying is the refusal to by the monopoly good (DOS) unless the tied good (windows) is also purchased.
>Seriously, though, I wonder how many people
>believe that this is just a money-grubbing ploy
>that is just now being filed by spoil-sports
>Caldera? I mean, to the man on the street, I'd
>imagine that a lawsuit concerning competing
>brands of DOS is pretty silly.
Only until you explain it. DR-DOS had 10% of the market, and growing. It worked better.
What are the damages for stealing this? Ten per cent of today's desktop OS market?
It's the remedies that really become interesting here. How do you put DR-DOS where it would have been? A full, royalty-free, license to all windows source code? An ownership interest in ms to reflect that share of the OS market--which would then be tripled (as an anti-trust verdict)? Or perhaps just 10% (before trippling) of microsoft's DOS revenue since then?
Then again, maybe microsoft shows the allegations aren't true and wins . . .
>But can Caldera demonstrate that they lost out >because of DR going bust?
yes, and it's trivial to do so.
>They probably picked up DR-DOS (from Novell,
>IIRC) for a snip because of that!
And here you almost answer your own question. Part of the value of DR/DR-DOS was the claim against ms. This is reflected in the price paid by Novell, and then by caldera. DR didn't have the resources for the fight, and Novell didn't want a fight with ms and/or didn't think the chances of winning were good enough. Caldera disagreed, and bought the asset, claims & all. It's an x% chance of relief, with Caldera and Novell disagreeing about the value of x.
Any case with a jury is a crap-shoot :)
I don't think that this case will really have all that much technical evidence--it's really the conduct of microsoft that'sin question. That is, the jury doesn't have to know how the alleged code worked, but decide whether or not microsoft put it in there. Th DOJ trial, on the other hand, hade to adress issues such whether or not IE is really part of the OS.
And I can think of judges I've known who would be much inferior to a randomly selected jury . . .
Also, even though juries deciding certain cases might be scary, that's not as scary as a system without juries. The jury's most important role is as a check on the system, and as a limit on the potential for judicial corruption.
[replying to myself] See the very end of my post. This is the summary judgment motion. The basis of microsoft's motions were to claim, act by act, that the acts were insufficient to show abuse of monopoly power. The strategy was to eliminate each act from the case on its own.
The problem is that caldera wasn't suing for a bunch of different bad things, they were suing over the course of action consisting of *all* of the bad things *put together*. Once more, microsoft seems to have been represented by the law firm of Larry, Mo, and Curly . . .
I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advise. If you need some, see a lawyer in you own jurisdiction.
That a jury will be empaneled means two things
1) that one party ortheother demandeda jury,
and
2) that there are "questions of fact" to be determined--i.e., someone needs to determinewhich sides' version of what happened is true.
In the DOJ case, the judge was also the trier of fact (2). In this case, my guess (someone can go to the courthouse and check the pleadings to make sure) is that Caldera demanded the jury, expecting sympathy for the little guy (if I represented ms, I would want a bench trial [judge instead of jury]).
Once the jury decides the facts, the judge will then decide how the law applies to the facts.
The way the judge's opinion would enter at this point is in a ruling for summary judgment. If the facts as alleged by caldera were insufficient for caldera to win, the case would be dismissed. This could also happen if the evidence produced during discovery showed that no reasonable jury could find in caldera's favor.
>As I understand it, the supposedly-so-great thing
:) Seven dimensions to comply with the standard, and most compilers offer far more. All sitting there, and ready to use, wiht nice intrinsics to manipulate them.
>about FORTRAN is that it allows you to ocntrol
>floating-point precision better than C.
Matrices. Oh, my, the matrices