They got a slap on the wrist and a stern warning not to do it again. They didn't do anything to change their practices, and continued with business as usual.
A few million in legal fees is chump change for Microsoft, and they have no reason to believe any future administration will attempt to crack down on them again. Even if someone did try to crack down on them, a new administration would likely be in office long before the case came to a conclusion.
Even the last anti trust scandal took years to wind it's way into court, and there's no sign of the public pressure necessary to make such a thing happen again.
Microsoft is simply too big and powerful for anyone to do more than shake some legal sabers at them and say "boo!"
Move along folks. There's nothing to see here. The user deliberately terminated their post for humor value. No government, private or foreign agency was involved in the truncation of the parent post, or for the poster's completely voluntary relocation to Syria.
Go back to your homes, watch some football and have a nice fast food meal, secure in the knowledge that whatever the government does, it's for the purpose of protecting your rights and ensuring your safety from TERRORIST!!!!!!!
Since we're talking about former SONY engineers, the new laptops will also be riddled with even MORE DRM and a few rootkits thrown in for good measure.
I won't argue UI with you. My issue with the Palm is it's lack of stability. I've seen the bastards fail on a hotsync when the thing has had a hard reset and is syncing with a clean install of Windows with a clean install of the Palm desktop.
I had so many failed syncs that I took to keeping a few 3x5 index cards in the case with my Palm so I could jot down the changes I needed to make. I'd lost all faith in the Palm Pilot's ability to sync without losing data.
Whatever you think of the UI, the OS is unreliable and unstable. It's one of the few pieces of technology that I'm willing to fight tooth and nail to avoid. Working with that data scrambling OS is not worth the hike my blood pressure would get.
It's a crying same they never DID anything with the IP they got from buying BE.
I used to work in "Distance Learning" for the Securities and Insurance industries. The company sold continuing education and licensing study courseware that you took online.
I knew of a number of different URLS and web sites the company used to sell the exact same product. Prices varied wildly between sites. One of the sites had a name chosen to confuse people into thinking they were dealing with the people who administered the SAT.
At a lot of firms, the company would pay for their reps' courseware, while at others the reps were required to pay for it themselves. What astounded me was how many insurance and securities firms would turn this into a profit center. All the reps would be required to get their C. E. through the company branded site. The kicker, was that the prices they paid were 10% to 50% higher than what an individual would pay using one of the other web sites.
Why would Monolith Insurance (Not a real customer name) have their reps pay so much more? Simple, Monolith Insurance would be pocketing the extra fees.
In house, the sales reps referred to it as the "Profit center financial university."
One day, one of the sales reps showed me a competitor's online exams. I noticed that the competitor was conducting exams illegally. They were selling to New York Insurance reps, but breaking New York's rules for Insurance Continuing Education exams.
When I told the sales rep that I was going to report the competitor to appropriate authorities, I got chewed a new one. Seems the sales rep worked for both companies.
So, I dutifully listened to the lecture, and waited a full three days before filing an anonymous complaint. I'm a loyal employee, until some asshat asks me to break the law or "forget" to report a violation of the law.
I've always felt the goal of technology was to become as unintrusive as possible. Making things that "just work" without fiddling or even minimal setup is one way to make technology invisible.
The Boston MBTA already has a site that does this here.
Since both mapquest and maps.google.com are incapable of providing decent driving maps of the Boston Metro area, this is the best site for trip planning. It will even give you two or more options with each trip, and takes into account things like the time of day and day of week, thus integrating with the actual bus schedules.
You don't see many MAC users complaining, because there aren't that many tech savvy MAC users who are familiar enough with the innards of the computer to know the difference.
I once took over a position where the previous admin, having seen all the extensions "vanish" from her Wordperfect documents upon upgrading to Windows 95, renamed them all so they would have the extension again.
Problem was, the company sold distance learning courses, which were written in those documents. Years later I was still finding files with names like "Series 65 Study Course Chapter 5.wpg.wpg"
Slashdot Mirror
They got a slap on the wrist and a stern warning not to do it again. They didn't do anything to change their practices, and continued with business as usual.
A few million in legal fees is chump change for Microsoft, and they have no reason to believe any future administration will attempt to crack down on them again. Even if someone did try to crack down on them, a new administration would likely be in office long before the case came to a conclusion.
Even the last anti trust scandal took years to wind it's way into court, and there's no sign of the public pressure necessary to make such a thing happen again.
Microsoft is simply too big and powerful for anyone to do more than shake some legal sabers at them and say "boo!"
Just add that code to the default and I'd consider the issue resolved.
Unless the web designer can override the setting...
It's not unpatriotic, it's realistic.
Where there's power, humans will abuse it, plain and simple. It's human nature.
Pardon the cliché, but someone needs to be watching the watchers.
Dougway?
Where's that?
Got a link to some photos / Google Maps???
Move along folks. There's nothing to see here. The user deliberately terminated their post for humor value. No government, private or foreign agency was involved in the truncation of the parent post, or for the poster's completely voluntary relocation to Syria.
Go back to your homes, watch some football and have a nice fast food meal, secure in the knowledge that whatever the government does, it's for the purpose of protecting your rights and ensuring your safety from TERRORIST!!!!!!!
9/11, 9/11, You all must remember 9/11.
Since we're talking about former SONY engineers, the new laptops will also be riddled with even MORE DRM and a few rootkits thrown in for good measure.
There are kits for building payloads for this exploit all over the Net.
There's a third party patch that tries to block the exploit.
Any Gray Hats out there interested in creating a variant that patches the vulnerability????
No, you misunderstood.
As of version 8, Netscape uses the IE engine as well as the Mozilla engine.
Netscape is now just another IE skin.
Everyone who actually believes they didn't land on the moon will probably be dead in a decade or two and then we can just forget about it.
They used to say the same thing about the flat-earthers. They're still around.
She has stated a number of times that Electricity is Mass Hypnosis.
Wait, what does this mean for the Bible?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?!?
ARRRRRRRRG!
I won't argue UI with you. My issue with the Palm is it's lack of stability. I've seen the bastards fail on a hotsync when the thing has had a hard reset and is syncing with a clean install of Windows with a clean install of the Palm desktop.
I had so many failed syncs that I took to keeping a few 3x5 index cards in the case with my Palm so I could jot down the changes I needed to make. I'd lost all faith in the Palm Pilot's ability to sync without losing data.
Whatever you think of the UI, the OS is unreliable and unstable. It's one of the few pieces of technology that I'm willing to fight tooth and nail to avoid. Working with that data scrambling OS is not worth the hike my blood pressure would get.
It's a crying same they never DID anything with the IP they got from buying BE.
I may be a Linux fan, but I kinda like WinCE.
And it IS better than Palm. Hell, Palm is so messed up, they never managed to port Nethack to it.
Nethack doesn't run on it. That's like hardware that can't run BSD.
Whatever the hardware, the Palm OS is still a sad, unstable, pathetic joke.
Hell, my experiences with Palm were so bad, I went back to a pen and paper day planner, and haven't looked back!
How on Earth did you get Linux to run on a platform designed for such a joke of an almost OS????
I used to work in "Distance Learning" for the Securities and Insurance industries. The company sold continuing education and licensing study courseware that you took online.
I knew of a number of different URLS and web sites the company used to sell the exact same product. Prices varied wildly between sites. One of the sites had a name chosen to confuse people into thinking they were dealing with the people who administered the SAT.
At a lot of firms, the company would pay for their reps' courseware, while at others the reps were required to pay for it themselves. What astounded me was how many insurance and securities firms would turn this into a profit center. All the reps would be required to get their C. E. through the company branded site. The kicker, was that the prices they paid were 10% to 50% higher than what an individual would pay using one of the other web sites.
Why would Monolith Insurance (Not a real customer name) have their reps pay so much more? Simple, Monolith Insurance would be pocketing the extra fees.
In house, the sales reps referred to it as the "Profit center financial university."
One day, one of the sales reps showed me a competitor's online exams. I noticed that the competitor was conducting exams illegally. They were selling to New York Insurance reps, but breaking New York's rules for Insurance Continuing Education exams.
When I told the sales rep that I was going to report the competitor to appropriate authorities, I got chewed a new one. Seems the sales rep worked for both companies.
So, I dutifully listened to the lecture, and waited a full three days before filing an anonymous complaint. I'm a loyal employee, until some asshat asks me to break the law or "forget" to report a violation of the law.
I've always felt the goal of technology was to become as unintrusive as possible. Making things that "just work" without fiddling or even minimal setup is one way to make technology invisible.
MAC users, bleh
Well, at long last I have a reason to subscribe to the White House RSS feed...
The Boston MBTA already has a site that does this here.
Since both mapquest and maps.google.com are incapable of providing decent driving maps of the Boston Metro area, this is the best site for trip planning. It will even give you two or more options with each trip, and takes into account things like the time of day and day of week, thus integrating with the actual bus schedules.
Don't you mean "Bloatus Goats?"
You don't see many MAC users complaining, because there aren't that many tech savvy MAC users who are familiar enough with the innards of the computer to know the difference.
I once took over a position where the previous admin, having seen all the extensions "vanish" from her Wordperfect documents upon upgrading to Windows 95, renamed them all so they would have the extension again.
Problem was, the company sold distance learning courses, which were written in those documents. Years later I was still finding files with names like "Series 65 Study Course Chapter 5.wpg.wpg"
Freebies?
What do you think people have been getting from P2P for ages????
Sheesh.
It's not a dupe, we just see so many of these kinds of stories that it SEEMS like a dupe.
Probably Ford
I recommend reading "The Lemon Aid Guide to Used Cars" The things it teaches you about Ford and it's recall policy is very disturbing.