Oh, politicians know full well who the real sexual predators are. They also know what will get them elected and what won't. Which do you suppose is going to go over better with the voters: "We're going to protect your children from you and your sicko borther in law. You know, the real predators." or: "We're going to protect your children from scary psychos ON THE INTARWEB. They're EVERYWHERE! My GOD, they're hiding in the TUBES!"
Hehe, a friend of mine had a wind-up key for his VW Bug. Mounted on the rear hood, driven by the alternator pulley, it actually turned as he drove. Hilarious. The Fiat, on the other hand, looks like it is driven by rubber bands or perhaps a hamster wheel.
I would never have known about them, but for Gran Turismo 4. I won a fairly tough race and I was all like "Yeah! I won! What did I win? I won a... wtf? What IS that thing?" It's even funnier than the Subaru 360.
I remember an AI project that created realistic daydreams based on story input. You typed in a situation and it created a "daydream" based on that. Many were realistic, many were not, but it was an interesting project.
I don't think you need to go beyond the "Hardy Boys/Tom Swift/Bobbsey Twins/Nancy Drew archetypal plot outlines" model though. We aren't talking about rendering them in english, that I agree would be fairly difficult. We are talking about a game generating in game characters, situations, and other plot elements based on a list of archetypal plots and Aristotelian analysis of dramatic tension. That would be hard, no doubt, but not impossible.
Anyways, if this is the same AC, thanks for replying with more constructive criticism this time. But I still don't agree it would be impossible.
I thought one attempt to replicate succeded. But I may have overstated their case. Further perusal of the wiki talk page shows that the one attempt to replicate was run by a PEAR staffer...
It does work for novels, at least on a commercial level, if not on an artistic one. Can't remember which publishing house it was, but one of the big romance novel publishers actually developed a "program" (more of a flow-chart, really. This was before computers) that outlined the various plot elements necessary to create a commercially successful romance novel. The publisher hired unkown authors who would basically fill in the blanks according to the formula.
See my comment below about filling in the details from a sim. The sim can provide a lot of detail for the story generator to use, and the story can impact the sim. We aren't talking about having a computer generate great art here, just a random story that still adheres to the rules of drama.
But thanks for your constructive criticism of my ideas, I'm always grateful when someone gives me a thoughtful critique delivered in a civil tone.
I think the key is to have some kind of a sim running in the background. Have the sim provide detail and structure to the story elements, have the story elements effect the outcome of the sim. You aren't going to get the requisite level of richness and detail from a simplistic fill-in-the-blanks, mad libs style story generator.
Not to belittle a man who's done far more with his life than me, but I don't think Chris is that brilliant of a game designer, and Storytron is (from what I understand) more a tool for creating multi-branching plotlines than actual completely dynamic stories.
Anyone who has GMed a RL RPG should know about the 36 plots, and anyone familiar with drama should know about Aristotle's Poetics, which outlines the science of drama: plot, tension, characterization, all the way down to things like color, shape, harmony, and rhythm. We understand all that is necessary to dynamically generate interesting story lines which raise and release dramatic tension. Done by a computer, this could be customized to create stories the individual player finds interesting. Brenda Laurel did some intersting work in this field with her game company, Purple Moon. Although it was a commercial flop, the time may now be right for her approach. She also wrote a great book on computer-human interaction, analyzing it throught the lens of Aristotalian Poetics.
PEAR is a very interesting lab at a very prestigious school that has been performing research into two areas of paranormal effects for over fifteen years. They have done numerous scientifically rigorous studies of human-machine interaction and remote perception. While remote perception experiments have been inconclusive, PEAR has pretty much proven that human thought has a slight but measurable impact on physical systms.
In the human-machine interaction experiments, a high quality source of randomness, either a radio-isotope hooked to a geiger counter, a pachinko-like machine which drops balls down a triangular array of pins into slot, or a radio tuned to static is measured and a baseline is determined for that source. Three trials take place, in which the subject is asked to skew the results higher, keep them the same, and skew them lower. Then the results are measured and compared to the baseline.
Their conclusions, as listed on the wiki page are as follows:
Human minds can affect random physical processes, to a minor but statistically detectable degree.
The effect seems to disappear when deterministic (pseudo-random) sources are substituted.
The effect is idiosyncratic (different individuals produce different results).
The effect is erratic, showing long-term fluctuations which can be partly (but only partly) explained by changes in the operator pool.
The scaling in response to simple physical variables is not obvious: for example, speeding up sampling by a factor of 10 produced no detectable difference in the effect size per bit, but speeding up sampling by a factor of 10,000 inverted the sign of the effect and reduced the per-bit effect size by a factor of 30.
This is Princeton we're talking about. From what I've read, they have done their experiments right. The effect is measurable. People's thoughts impact the world, through some unexplained mechanism. The really weird thing is, it doesn't matter how far away the subject is from the experiment, either in space or in time. Forwards or backwards. They have done experiments where the apparatus is in a locked room, the trial is run but the results not measured, and some time later the subject asked to skew the results. When measured, the results are the same as if the subject had been asked to change them before-hand.
So all you naysayers out there can go shove your skepticism where the sun don't shine. Paranormal phenomenon exist and have been scientifically demonstrated in the laboratory of one of the world's best universities. James Randi, Princeton is expecting your check for (pinkie to mouth) One Million Dollars! Mwahahaha!
This question always gets asked
on
Beginning GIMP
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This comes up in any discussion of GIMP, and has been answered many times. RAW isn't one image format, it is any proprietary unprocessed image data from a scanner or camera. Proprietary, that's the key word. GIMP, being free, can not afford to license the necessary file conversion software from the scanner and camera manufacturers, but every scanner and camera out there comes with software to convert its proprietary RAW format to TIFF or JPEG. Why would GIMP need to do this?
I'm sorry Uncle Kent; I lost my thesaurus
on
Virus Jumps to RFID
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Brockman: Big game fever is reaching a fever pitch as the
fevered rivalry between Springfield U. and
Springfield A&M spreads like wildfever. [looks
offstage] This is writing? Intern: I'm sorry Uncle Kent; I lost my thesaurus.
You're winning me over with your self-deprecating humor, despite my better judgement, so I might as well admit, yeah, I troll sometimes. But only targeted trolls against knee-jerk types who deserve it, IMHO. And if they don't bite and instead reply in a non knee-jerk fashion, I'll converse with them.
I really can't do more than call Coulter names, logic doesn't work with her or her fans. Point noted about dada, but I'll reserve judgement. I don't think he's a total loon just because I happen to disagree with some of his ideas. Though, you can practice dialectic with a loon, just as you can practice tennis by hitting a ball against a wall.
And yeah, conversations with you are like hitting tennis balls to a dog. The dog never gets tired of it.;) And now I've forgotten what the hell I was even talking about. Oh yeah, property is theft, down with the State, uhhh, Libertarians suck? Was that it? Dang, where's the nurse with my meds?
Whatever. Trolling is trying to incite an angry reply. What I do is called dialectic, testing ideas out to see how they work in conversation rather than always thinking I'm right. The Coultergeist comment is a fricken joke, as if you couldn't tell that from the fact that I used the name "Coultergeist." I'm not emulating her style by any means, that should be obvious. But I do believe the window of acceptable discourse has moved far, far to the right of what it once was, and if I say things that are slightly more left leaning than I otherwise would in order to shift it back towards the middle, is that a problem? You won't even put your own position out there, all you can do is bad mouth others. Stylish.
Anyways, I'm pretty sure you are the real troll here. You chose the name "Karma Farmer," which indicates a particularly trollish attitude towards the moderation system here. You jump in the middle of another conversation with ad-hominem attacks. You accuse others of trolling. You add nothing useful to the conversation and appeal to emotionalism. You have as many freaks as fans. All very trollish attributes. Yes, I think it is safe to say, IHBT, IHL. Unless you can contribute something usefull to the conversation, I've wasted enough time on you. Buh-bye.
I'm not dada, and my position is (mostly) what I write. I sometimes take a slightly more radical position than I really feel, for effect, for testing of my ideas, and for moving the window of discussion (hey, if the Coultergeist can do it, so can I) but if anything that puts me further from dada's position. As when I argue that property is theft. My real position is more nuanced than that (as was Proudhon's position, not that people remember him for saying "The absolute right of the State is in conflict with the absolute right of the property owner," or "Property is inherently anarchistic." "Property is Theft" is a much better catch-phrase.)
But dada's arguments make me think, so I'm disinclined to believe some guy calling himself "Karma Farmer" who jumps in the middle of a discussion with unsupported ad-hominems. The reasons I enjoy talking with people like dada, by which I mean thoughtful anarcho-capitalists, are twofold: one, they are a rare breed, with most of their ilk being Randroids or Libertarobots who just parrot back poorly understood arguments, two they hold a position similar to mine in some ways, but very different in others and so can provide a unique perspective on my own thoughts.
Anyways, thanks for sticking up for me, forrest, though anyone comparing my posting history to dada's should have little trouble telling us apart, and I've was here for years prior to him. Not that I care what the likes of "Karma Farmer" think. I'd much rather have a conversation with someone like dada who makes me think than someone like him who just tosses baseless accusations into the middle of someone else's conversation without adding anything of value.
What, me flamebait? Why I ne... Oh wait, yes, yes I do that all the time.:) Anyway, flamebait aside (And it WAS an aside, it's only at the very end. Rest of the posting indeed. One whole sentance of flamebait, eeeek! Run away!) I'm actually curious, do you just not agree with his arguments or do you think he doesn't put together a good argument?
If I were dada, I wouldn't astroturf myself unless there was some profit to be made, (Haha, only kidding, dada... Or am I?)
Anyways, it's not an unsupported claim. That is EXACTLY what I am guessing. I know, because I made the guess. See, there's that word, guess. Guess what it means? Bingo! You win the prize, yes it means, "I am thinking something unsupported by logical facts."
What's so wrong about not liking someone's philosophy that you feel like my even mentioning it is some kind of attack on you?
Here I go again, with the guessing and the flamebait: I'm guessing you couldn't come up with a good reply to my questions and tried to sidetrack the discussion with a red herring about my flamebait and unsupported claims.
Seriously, WTF? Do you think he doesn't make a good argument, and can you back that up with an example? Or do you just not like the arguments he makes? Just answer the question, no more sidetracks about my flaming insults, we both know I do it, and anyways, you were the one butting in on a nice conversation with insults towards one side. Did you think I'd support your insults towards dada just because I don't agree with him?
We use it here in the Child, Youth, and Family Development department in New Mexico. We have an IBM BladeCenter where the blades run VMware ESX with Virtual Center, and most VMs run SuSE Linux. We are transitioning from HPUX and AIX to an all Linux backend. We like that combo because it makes it easy to clone and move machines as need be. When a server becomes overloaded, we can buy another blade and move some VMs over onto it with ease.
"Good argument" isn't "Something I happen to believe in." It's also relative, and anyone who can present a cogent, reasoned argument on slashdot is something of a rarity. Not unique, certainly, or I wouldn't keep coming back, but rare enough. Am I convinced by his arguments? No, not really. Do his responses provide a fresh perspective towards my own thoughts? Yes, definitely. I like to engage in dialectic, where the goal is not for me to convince the other, nor them to convince me, but for us both to strengthen our mental map of the universe by seeing how that map stands up to an outside observer.
I'm guessing you just don't like his philosophy. In that regard, he's far more moderate and reasoned than a lot of self professed anarcho-capitalists out there. At least he has the good graces not to call himself a libertarian. You do that and you have to PROVE to me that you aren't an idiot afterwards.
So what is it? Is it "That guy can't string two connected thoughts together in a cogent fashion" or is it "I don't like the thoughts he's stringing together?" If it's the first, I disagree. If it's the second, well, buh-bye, and thanks for playing. Here's a copy of "Slashdot, the home game" you might enjoy.
You don't have the right to profit from the products of your mind. Without government protection, the first person you sold it to could sell it himself. Only the threat of government sanctioned violence keeps people from reproducing any intellectual property whatsoever.
Corporation is an abstract concept created by government. Your free market idealism applies to sole proprietorships only. Once you have more than one owner, you need a power structure and laws to keep things sane. Without corporate charter, you do not have limited liability and any shareholder can be sued for the entire amount of damages or debt a company has. So telling government to stay the hell out of corporate business is nonsensical. Without government, corporations as we know them wouldn't exist. We, the people, created them through the democtratic process and we can impose any kind of limitations we want.
We live in a cooperative society, and just as we have the right to say "we will imprison you for killing someone" we can also say what are legal and illegal ways of making money. You sound like a petulant child who wants all of the rights and privileges of living in a cooperative society with none of resonsiblities, and like petulant children everyhwere you project your own failings onto those who point them out to you. Socialists aren't the ones profiting off the work of others, capitalists are, and they demand the right to keep on profiting. A wage slave is a slave nonetheless, and capitalism is founded on the work of the wage slave.
Using monopoly powers unfairly is the same as fraud or extortion, it is against the law. This is economics 101, man. You can't have a free market without protection against monopoly. We, the people, get to decide what our laws should be. We have decided that monopolistic practices are against the law. Ergo, what MS did is against he law. If you don't like it, write your congresscritter or go found your own country and decide what your own laws will be. You may not like it, but that's the way it is, and trying to argue that what MS did is okay is pointless. They broke the law that we the people made, and they will be punished. End of story.
MS is owned by far more than just Americans, it is a global company. But MS would never shoot itself in the foot by failing to comply with any sovereign nation's judgements. Once the put itself above the law, no other country in the world would ever trust them with their computing resources again.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, politicians know full well who the real sexual predators are. They also know what will get them elected and what won't. Which do you suppose is going to go over better with the voters:
"We're going to protect your children from you and your sicko borther in law. You know, the real predators."
or:
"We're going to protect your children from scary psychos ON THE INTARWEB. They're EVERYWHERE! My GOD, they're hiding in the TUBES!"
Hehe, a friend of mine had a wind-up key for his VW Bug. Mounted on the rear hood, driven by the alternator pulley, it actually turned as he drove. Hilarious. The Fiat, on the other hand, looks like it is driven by rubber bands or perhaps a hamster wheel.
I would never have known about them, but for Gran Turismo 4. I won a fairly tough race and I was all like "Yeah! I won! What did I win? I won a... wtf? What IS that thing?" It's even funnier than the Subaru 360.
In case you have never seen one, this is a Fiat 500. Fear it.
That's the feeling that you will be reading the exact same article tomorrow.
What's another word for pirate treasure?
[voice= Twiki's Girlfriend]
Well I think it's Booty Booty Booty!
[/voice]
Because you can't manufacture and sell "common sense."
I can. If you lack common sense, please send me $14.95 for a two week supply. You'll wonder how you ever got along without it!
Silly me, I thought slashdot was "getting hit on the head lessons" No, no, like this: WAGH!
:)
P.S. This has been my sig for years
Just having a wife is paranormal.
I remember an AI project that created realistic daydreams based on story input. You typed in a situation and it created a "daydream" based on that. Many were realistic, many were not, but it was an interesting project.
I don't think you need to go beyond the "Hardy Boys/Tom Swift/Bobbsey Twins/Nancy Drew archetypal plot outlines" model though. We aren't talking about rendering them in english, that I agree would be fairly difficult. We are talking about a game generating in game characters, situations, and other plot elements based on a list of archetypal plots and Aristotelian analysis of dramatic tension. That would be hard, no doubt, but not impossible.
Anyways, if this is the same AC, thanks for replying with more constructive criticism this time. But I still don't agree it would be impossible.
I thought one attempt to replicate succeded. But I may have overstated their case. Further perusal of the wiki talk page shows that the one attempt to replicate was run by a PEAR staffer...
It does work for novels, at least on a commercial level, if not on an artistic one. Can't remember which publishing house it was, but one of the big romance novel publishers actually developed a "program" (more of a flow-chart, really. This was before computers) that outlined the various plot elements necessary to create a commercially successful romance novel. The publisher hired unkown authors who would basically fill in the blanks according to the formula.
See my comment below about filling in the details from a sim. The sim can provide a lot of detail for the story generator to use, and the story can impact the sim. We aren't talking about having a computer generate great art here, just a random story that still adheres to the rules of drama.
But thanks for your constructive criticism of my ideas, I'm always grateful when someone gives me a thoughtful critique delivered in a civil tone.
I think the key is to have some kind of a sim running in the background. Have the sim provide detail and structure to the story elements, have the story elements effect the outcome of the sim. You aren't going to get the requisite level of richness and detail from a simplistic fill-in-the-blanks, mad libs style story generator.
Not to belittle a man who's done far more with his life than me, but I don't think Chris is that brilliant of a game designer, and Storytron is (from what I understand) more a tool for creating multi-branching plotlines than actual completely dynamic stories.
Anyone who has GMed a RL RPG should know about the 36 plots, and anyone familiar with drama should know about Aristotle's Poetics , which outlines the science of drama: plot, tension, characterization, all the way down to things like color, shape, harmony, and rhythm. We understand all that is necessary to dynamically generate interesting story lines which raise and release dramatic tension. Done by a computer, this could be customized to create stories the individual player finds interesting. Brenda Laurel did some intersting work in this field with her game company, Purple Moon. Although it was a commercial flop, the time may now be right for her approach. She also wrote a great book on computer-human interaction, analyzing it throught the lens of Aristotalian Poetics.
In the human-machine interaction experiments, a high quality source of randomness, either a radio-isotope hooked to a geiger counter, a pachinko-like machine which drops balls down a triangular array of pins into slot, or a radio tuned to static is measured and a baseline is determined for that source. Three trials take place, in which the subject is asked to skew the results higher, keep them the same, and skew them lower. Then the results are measured and compared to the baseline.
Their conclusions, as listed on the wiki page are as follows:
This is Princeton we're talking about. From what I've read, they have done their experiments right. The effect is measurable. People's thoughts impact the world, through some unexplained mechanism. The really weird thing is, it doesn't matter how far away the subject is from the experiment, either in space or in time. Forwards or backwards. They have done experiments where the apparatus is in a locked room, the trial is run but the results not measured, and some time later the subject asked to skew the results. When measured, the results are the same as if the subject had been asked to change them before-hand.
So all you naysayers out there can go shove your skepticism where the sun don't shine. Paranormal phenomenon exist and have been scientifically demonstrated in the laboratory of one of the world's best universities. James Randi, Princeton is expecting your check for (pinkie to mouth) One Million Dollars! Mwahahaha!
This comes up in any discussion of GIMP, and has been answered many times. RAW isn't one image format, it is any proprietary unprocessed image data from a scanner or camera. Proprietary, that's the key word. GIMP, being free, can not afford to license the necessary file conversion software from the scanner and camera manufacturers, but every scanner and camera out there comes with software to convert its proprietary RAW format to TIFF or JPEG. Why would GIMP need to do this?
Brockman: Big game fever is reaching a fever pitch as the
fevered rivalry between Springfield U. and
Springfield A&M spreads like wildfever. [looks
offstage] This is writing?
Intern: I'm sorry Uncle Kent; I lost my thesaurus.
Hehe, and here I was thinking that mdash was just some very prolific poster to whom all the others were responding.
You're winning me over with your self-deprecating humor, despite my better judgement, so I might as well admit, yeah, I troll sometimes. But only targeted trolls against knee-jerk types who deserve it, IMHO. And if they don't bite and instead reply in a non knee-jerk fashion, I'll converse with them.
;) And now I've forgotten what the hell I was even talking about. Oh yeah, property is theft, down with the State, uhhh, Libertarians suck? Was that it? Dang, where's the nurse with my meds?
I really can't do more than call Coulter names, logic doesn't work with her or her fans. Point noted about dada, but I'll reserve judgement. I don't think he's a total loon just because I happen to disagree with some of his ideas. Though, you can practice dialectic with a loon, just as you can practice tennis by hitting a ball against a wall.
And yeah, conversations with you are like hitting tennis balls to a dog. The dog never gets tired of it.
Whatever. Trolling is trying to incite an angry reply. What I do is called dialectic, testing ideas out to see how they work in conversation rather than always thinking I'm right. The Coultergeist comment is a fricken joke, as if you couldn't tell that from the fact that I used the name "Coultergeist." I'm not emulating her style by any means, that should be obvious. But I do believe the window of acceptable discourse has moved far, far to the right of what it once was, and if I say things that are slightly more left leaning than I otherwise would in order to shift it back towards the middle, is that a problem? You won't even put your own position out there, all you can do is bad mouth others. Stylish.
Anyways, I'm pretty sure you are the real troll here. You chose the name "Karma Farmer," which indicates a particularly trollish attitude towards the moderation system here. You jump in the middle of another conversation with ad-hominem attacks. You accuse others of trolling. You add nothing useful to the conversation and appeal to emotionalism. You have as many freaks as fans. All very trollish attributes. Yes, I think it is safe to say, IHBT, IHL. Unless you can contribute something usefull to the conversation, I've wasted enough time on you. Buh-bye.
I'm not dada, and my position is (mostly) what I write. I sometimes take a slightly more radical position than I really feel, for effect, for testing of my ideas, and for moving the window of discussion (hey, if the Coultergeist can do it, so can I) but if anything that puts me further from dada's position. As when I argue that property is theft. My real position is more nuanced than that (as was Proudhon's position, not that people remember him for saying "The absolute right of the State is in conflict with the absolute right of the property owner," or "Property is inherently anarchistic." "Property is Theft" is a much better catch-phrase.)
But dada's arguments make me think, so I'm disinclined to believe some guy calling himself "Karma Farmer" who jumps in the middle of a discussion with unsupported ad-hominems. The reasons I enjoy talking with people like dada, by which I mean thoughtful anarcho-capitalists, are twofold: one, they are a rare breed, with most of their ilk being Randroids or Libertarobots who just parrot back poorly understood arguments, two they hold a position similar to mine in some ways, but very different in others and so can provide a unique perspective on my own thoughts.
Anyways, thanks for sticking up for me, forrest, though anyone comparing my posting history to dada's should have little trouble telling us apart, and I've was here for years prior to him. Not that I care what the likes of "Karma Farmer" think. I'd much rather have a conversation with someone like dada who makes me think than someone like him who just tosses baseless accusations into the middle of someone else's conversation without adding anything of value.
What, me flamebait? Why I ne... Oh wait, yes, yes I do that all the time. :) Anyway, flamebait aside (And it WAS an aside, it's only at the very end. Rest of the posting indeed. One whole sentance of flamebait, eeeek! Run away!) I'm actually curious, do you just not agree with his arguments or do you think he doesn't put together a good argument?
If I were dada, I wouldn't astroturf myself unless there was some profit to be made, (Haha, only kidding, dada... Or am I?)
Anyways, it's not an unsupported claim. That is EXACTLY what I am guessing. I know, because I made the guess. See, there's that word, guess. Guess what it means? Bingo! You win the prize, yes it means, "I am thinking something unsupported by logical facts."
What's so wrong about not liking someone's philosophy that you feel like my even mentioning it is some kind of attack on you?
Here I go again, with the guessing and the flamebait: I'm guessing you couldn't come up with a good reply to my questions and tried to sidetrack the discussion with a red herring about my flamebait and unsupported claims.
Seriously, WTF? Do you think he doesn't make a good argument, and can you back that up with an example? Or do you just not like the arguments he makes? Just answer the question, no more sidetracks about my flaming insults, we both know I do it, and anyways, you were the one butting in on a nice conversation with insults towards one side. Did you think I'd support your insults towards dada just because I don't agree with him?
We use it here in the Child, Youth, and Family Development department in New Mexico. We have an IBM BladeCenter where the blades run VMware ESX with Virtual Center, and most VMs run SuSE Linux. We are transitioning from HPUX and AIX to an all Linux backend. We like that combo because it makes it easy to clone and move machines as need be. When a server becomes overloaded, we can buy another blade and move some VMs over onto it with ease.
"Good argument" isn't "Something I happen to believe in." It's also relative, and anyone who can present a cogent, reasoned argument on slashdot is something of a rarity. Not unique, certainly, or I wouldn't keep coming back, but rare enough. Am I convinced by his arguments? No, not really. Do his responses provide a fresh perspective towards my own thoughts? Yes, definitely. I like to engage in dialectic, where the goal is not for me to convince the other, nor them to convince me, but for us both to strengthen our mental map of the universe by seeing how that map stands up to an outside observer.
I'm guessing you just don't like his philosophy. In that regard, he's far more moderate and reasoned than a lot of self professed anarcho-capitalists out there. At least he has the good graces not to call himself a libertarian. You do that and you have to PROVE to me that you aren't an idiot afterwards.
So what is it? Is it "That guy can't string two connected thoughts together in a cogent fashion" or is it "I don't like the thoughts he's stringing together?" If it's the first, I disagree. If it's the second, well, buh-bye, and thanks for playing. Here's a copy of "Slashdot, the home game" you might enjoy.
You don't have the right to profit from the products of your mind. Without government protection, the first person you sold it to could sell it himself. Only the threat of government sanctioned violence keeps people from reproducing any intellectual property whatsoever.
Corporation is an abstract concept created by government. Your free market idealism applies to sole proprietorships only. Once you have more than one owner, you need a power structure and laws to keep things sane. Without corporate charter, you do not have limited liability and any shareholder can be sued for the entire amount of damages or debt a company has. So telling government to stay the hell out of corporate business is nonsensical. Without government, corporations as we know them wouldn't exist. We, the people, created them through the democtratic process and we can impose any kind of limitations we want.
We live in a cooperative society, and just as we have the right to say "we will imprison you for killing someone" we can also say what are legal and illegal ways of making money. You sound like a petulant child who wants all of the rights and privileges of living in a cooperative society with none of resonsiblities, and like petulant children everyhwere you project your own failings onto those who point them out to you. Socialists aren't the ones profiting off the work of others, capitalists are, and they demand the right to keep on profiting. A wage slave is a slave nonetheless, and capitalism is founded on the work of the wage slave.
Using monopoly powers unfairly is the same as fraud or extortion, it is against the law. This is economics 101, man. You can't have a free market without protection against monopoly. We, the people, get to decide what our laws should be. We have decided that monopolistic practices are against the law. Ergo, what MS did is against he law. If you don't like it, write your congresscritter or go found your own country and decide what your own laws will be. You may not like it, but that's the way it is, and trying to argue that what MS did is okay is pointless. They broke the law that we the people made, and they will be punished. End of story.
MS is owned by far more than just Americans, it is a global company. But MS would never shoot itself in the foot by failing to comply with any sovereign nation's judgements. Once the put itself above the law, no other country in the world would ever trust them with their computing resources again.