Health insurance should not be a point of contention between employee and employer
Exactly, it should be like wages. The employer says here's what you're getting and the employee should accept it, wages or bogus no-pay health plan, gratefully with a deferential tug of his forelock.
You have a right to live without 24 hour surveillance of your movements and transactions whether or not you're guilty of anything - and if you don't have that in this country anymore then it is time for a revolution.
You are supposed to be presumed innocent until proven guilty of a crime. Whatever else that may mean, it doesn't mean that law enforcement has a blank check to gather and sift for information on people before they know a crime is committed in anticipation of that event. It should preclude that. Presumption of innocence means that your rights are to be held intact and without modification until you are indicted or convicted. If you are under no indictment, your right to privacy may not be infringed upon.( Police and prosecutors should have that rule tattooed on their foreheads instead of getting shiny badges to identify themselves as law enforcement). But we see that the police do invade the privacy of individuals routinely while investigating no specific reported crime. This is the presumption of guilt and they apply it indiscriminately to batches of people at a time so they may claim they violated no one person's rights. In fact they just violated the rights of all.
This is not a relationship of a free people to their own law enforcement, and I think it's something that should be fought, even though it must be admitted that only favored classes of citizens really enjoyed protection from invasive hostile law enforcement in the past. The point is we should all expect that protection as our right as citizens, and expand it to cover all, rather than accept the erosion of privacy for all to better enable enforcing laws, which is what is happening now.
If they are not investigating A SPECIFIC CRIME, then I want the cops back in the precinct house watching TV and eating donuts. If they say they cannot enforce all the laws of this country without taking "pro-active" measures, then you may know by that sign that THERE ARE TOO MANY LAWS. The laws exist to sustain and improve the lives of the citizens, not the other way around.
An ancient assumption of our legal system was that "better 99 guilty men go free than one innocent man lose his life or freedom", which I think was a quotation from Blackstone. Another assumption I'll add to that which I think was so implicit it never got said was that the laws existed to protect average people from extraordinary bad actors. Well, with the changing of times and the multiplication of laws, it seems to me that an average person is probably guilty of something nowadays. A misdemeanor offense, for most of us, but still a threat of prosecution for misdemeanor offences can easily be used by police to extort information on 3rd parties' criminal acts (real or made up). Police may gripe about how hard it is for them to enforce all the laws, but they can hardly deny that they love the leverage they get from being able to nick almost anybody for something. Through that mechanism we are becoming a nation of informants, a good deal of that information is fiction concocted between Inquisitors and the informants they put on the rack, and we are crazy if we think this can continue long without bad effects on our national character and political life.
Yeah but Nova airs shows about global temperature enhancement. They are critical shows. Uncomplementary shows with naysayers saying nay and professors professing their theories and models.
Don't you see that education is at the root of the rot? PBS must die. Nova and Frontline are where the daggers must run in. Bleeding Barney white is just a bonus.
I almost agree. Public Broadcasting Service in the United States is a joke. It has as you allude, been made into a joke by the savage gelding strokes of American Mullahs, and also through the more lapidarian trimmings of corporate curators of acceptable public opinion, and the patronage of the Phillip-Morrisonian Bonsai Gardeners of Kulture.
Sometimes I am resigned to the idea that it could be better (all things considered) if the fascists had prevailed and eliminated PBS altogether.
They have done a pretty thorough job already of subverting its journalistic freedom and they have completely annihilated it as a cultural actor. Leaving PBS in place but censored and powerless as it is only serves to mask the presently totalitarian nature of the American media landscape.
Better perhaps that people should be faced with the unambiguous truth that they cannot further deny by saying "Oh but I have an alternative -public broadcasting". Because in truth as an American, you have no alternative. As a consumer of media and culture, you cannot buy an alternative, not even with a million fucking dollars. (If you have billions on the other hand, you are at liberty to present whatever you think is advantageous to you but then that's just more of the sewage and brainwashing we already have, not an alternative).
You are completely naked and alone with your disbelief and outrage:
They own both major political parties - one of which proudly bills itself as the party of Corporate Cocksuckers without a trace of shame.
They own all the media outlets, which are in business it seems to tell you what to think, and more importantly, what not to think about, ever; not to discover what questions to ask.
They went on a buying spree and now own all the think-tanks, and have owned most of them for 10-15 years.
(Ergo, if you were a non-corporate cocksucker with an outlet through the media --highly unlikely, I know, I know, but let's pretend-- you would be hard pressed to host a pundit or book an expert for your show who was not a proficient cocksucker[1} even before their first media appearance.
How bad is it? Well consider that at this point in time even Christopher Hitchens now dangles from the teat of Richard Mellon Scaife. That my friends is 100% total, safe, and reliable capture of visible media dissent.)
No place left.
No place left but the streets. And it takes alot to get fatassed Americans into the streets but I confidently predict we will see it in the next 4-5 years. Fat American asses in the streets by the million. The Happy Meal is over.
[1] No offence intended to those for whom fellatio is an expression of love, or sexual attraction and affection, or just a tasty kinetic substitute for casual salutations like, "Good Morning", or "Nice Pants". No actual cocksuckers were harmed in the fabrication of this post.
And that is the way PBS started in the United States, too. National Public Radio's All Things Considered show debuted in the midst of Vietnam War protests in D.C., the Pentagon Papers Case, and soon thereafter the Watergate investigation and hearings. Skepticism of government official li[n]es was naturally a characteristic of NPR editorial policy which, just like a birthmark, would be slow to fade. Predictably, conservatives could not endure it, and as PBS journalism rose in popularity (as a widespread reaction to the hollowing-out of mainstream broadcast news) they made it a campaign contribution rallying cry to destroy and defund public broadcasting altogether.
The government has long since regulated the content of Public Broadcasting's offerings, particularly anything new and not already established, simply by casting the shadow of the Republican Swastika ((looks like this -> $ <- rotated at 45 degrees and repeated)) at intervals over the Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding, and dragging PBS officials before the Mullah's Inquests on Capitiol Hill.
On aggregate PBS, has if anything a slightly rightward bias. I mean bias in the true sense of the word, not the make believe sense used and endorsed by American "conservatives". Bias in the context of a network's programming means overrepresenting a given point of view. For around 15 years or so PBS has been consistently overweighting conservative viewpoint programming to defend itself against the attacks of right wing extremists. For decades PBS gave Bill Buckley, publisher of National Review, a free forum nationwide. Now, added to that for around ten years or so, John McLaughlin has had his show (or show trial as some would say). Where is the equal time for the people who are as left as those two ghouls are right of center? Where? Washington Week in Review ? Please.
National Public Radio may be said to have a liberal character but in general I don't think you could fairly claim "bias", as there as no commercial news broadcast that begins to come close to NPRs approach to presenting multiple sides to a given issue or story. (Remember I said we would not use the make-believe sense of the term in which anyone with an education or an idea different from the RNC is considered clearly biased).
Certainly not overtly biased fascist-party media organs like the Faux News Network. They don't come close to balance and are frankly proud of their ability to avoid it.
Certainly not General Electric owned CNBS.
Some USians may think Jim Lehrer, of the once-great McNeil Lehrer News Hour, is liberal. But in that case I'll have to assure them he is not, and that they do not have the first clue about what a real liberal is.
(Don't worry, by the time you have it figured out it will be too late).
Don't you think the average person is already resentful of the large monthly transfers they have to make to various other monopolies like the cable co or what have you?
I see.NET as typical rent-to-own (nothing) bullshit. (Slow credit ? No credit ? Not to worry! Microsoft will get your financing approved!) I would guess that the average consumer will not dig it very much either. They may not immediately understand and seize their alternatives but that doesn't mean they'll all line up and drop trou' for Microsoft's plan to "share" their income stream in perpetuity either.
As others have noted, despite Intel's best efforts, it's not like CPU or RAM are expensive nowadays.
Bottomline:.NET solves.NO problem for the consumer. It just creates extra problems that didn't exist before, while trying to stick a IV tap in Joe Users' wallet.
A monthly fee is something Joe actually notices if only because he have to be comfortably dead to overlook it -that invisible hand at Microsoft may be about to get chopped off at the elbow.
Whether businesses want to convert to internal.NET servers for their office non-productivity is another question. But again, for different reasons I think they'd be crazy to do that.
I hate to mention this since you're already alarmed, but thanks in part to Mmmm MMmmm uh some company whose name begins with a letter in the mmmiddle of the alphabet there's a buttload of ISP/hosting servers in the world running on a very similar, very simple kill/reboot switch.
Some people like APC for this purpose, others favor the good folks at Western Telematic.
Western Telematic RPS switches can be chained for 1100 feet worth of rj-11, all nodes rebootable/killable individually or en masse at the flick of your Tk-perl control panel.
Huge telecoms have these devices strewn throughout their operations. Scary isn't it?
Yeah, just advertise it and all problems are solved!
advertising does away with the applications problem.
the file format compatibility problem.
the hardware support problem. -Poof!-all gone.
"Proper Advertising" can bankrupt a company like Be in 2 shakes.
Likewise developing many core applications for your OS or desktop environment is a tricky thing. Don't do any, and people will claim your platform is "underdeveloped and immature".
Do a lot and you're rapidly shoveling money into a furnace, while simultaneously chasing away people who might have entertained the idea of selling such apps themselves on your platform.
Be was setup to be bought as the next generation OS for Apple. For better or worse Apple committed to taking the Mach muKerel route to provide bass'wards compatibilty - 5 years ago! Be has been lost company in search of a market ever since.
RIP, Be.
You're all the same brainlesss scum to me.
PS: I can tell you're a lib-RA-tarian from the foaming mouthed vitriol in your posts, so you don't need to declare it. I'm guessing most other people find libertarian<-> sociopath connection fairly obvious by now, as well.
I am very happy for the Daily Show - I don't watch much TV but when I go through phases of watching, the Daily Show is a fixture that other programming slots revolve around.
Still, let's not confuse the Daily Show with information. They don't have the format for that. The best they have done, (mind: I do consider the sight of Beth Littleford masturbating a stud-boar through a hole in the wall very informative in it's way) is to scoff and make obscene gestures at the corporate approved reporting of the networks. While that is a crucial humanitarian service it is not a substitute for "news".
Who here misses Beth Littleford, i mean aside from the masturbating pig thing? She was the greatest smart-ass of them all. I cried the day she left for CBS or whatever sordid hole in the wall she's at now.
I think the problem is that you can make a profit turning news into propaganda for your parent company's world-view, and you can attract a devoted audience of people who want to see that kind of journalistic prostitution pilloried and ripped to shreds, the way the Daily Show has, but you can't seem to make a big profit actually telling people what's going on in the world.
Mister, are you sayin that cowpies and tumbleweeds ain't got a right to representation?
We count 'em extra (almost double) in the electrical collage because they are more important than the cityfolk on the coasts. The Founding Fathers considered this the most sacred right: the right to more than equal representation and to receive more federal dollars than you send to Washington in taxation.
Here's the problem with Linux and corporate foot soldiers: they use laptops. Linux just hasn't focussed on fully supporting the hinquie laptop hardware and all functions of ACPI and PCMIA devices need special love and care. Windows gets these without having to try because the manufactuerers write the drivers themselves.
It's all very well to talk about setting the vealpen employees up with locked down Linux installs and even Xterminals, but the people who make the decisions about all this use muy expensivo laptops because they actually do need them. (And it's also a major status thing to have the swankiest laptop models)
Now if Linux isn't seen on laptops and these people need to exchange documents with underlings who are on Linux desktops, then Windows everywhere is their kneejerk response to solving their communications problems - instead of demanding cross platform compatible file formats.
WHen you talk about sales and marketing weasels you are talking about a) people who do their computing on laptops because they travel and b) the people within the organization who are the "squeaky wheels", they were hired to their positions because they are constitutionally squeaky wheel type personalities. It is not surprising, then, that their preferences hold disproportionate sway over the IT character of the rest of the organization. They squeak and feel like the have a right to squeak first, and generally speaking, alot of upper management will come from with this squeaky corner of the overall business (sales weasels with MBAs).
Show them that Linux works to run the status-symbol laptop hardware and the "mission critical" presentation software, then maybe you can persuade them of the value of GNU/Linux elsewhere in the workforce.
Because with MS the problems just get worse over time, and will continue to worsen as they need more and more of your businesses cashflow diverted to their bottom line. Without increasing profits, real or imaginary, MSFT the pyramid scheme will implode. Got it now?
None of those 'practices' would be illegal, IF THEY WERE NOT A MONOPOLY.
And I'd add: many of these 'practices' are not even possible, unless they company attempting them is a powerful monopoly - no one else has the leverage to try.
And not all monopolies are powerful. Using marketshare as a metric, Netscape was as close to a "monopoly" in webbrowsers as you could be, one might say, having well over 75% of the market at one time; but could they keep ISPs from distributing IE ? No, they couldn't. I don't know they even tried to - what would be the source of their coercive power? better deals on Netscape server? They simply had not enough "horizontality" or "verticality" to their monopoly product lineup to abuse their status as the market leader. Anyway, if you're arguing sense to JonKatz or any MS apologist you may as well argue with a wall. In the face of shelfulls of evidence that this company Microsoft exerts and abuses monopoly power over a very wide and broadening range of business, not just software, this guy is getting hung up on whether the Judge conceived a dislike for people who strutted into his courtroom and persistently denied the wrongdoing manifest in their own words before, during, and after their illegal acts - and brought in fabricated evidence not once but twice.
What kind of pussyfaced shitbird motherfucker would do that? One that is a soulless shameless Microshill apologist - for sure, but that's not Katz. OTOH, Maybe one that is trolling for controversy to justify his lame-assed non-existence as a non-celebrated author. Hmmm, now we maybe getting warm...
they still deserve a fair and open trial with an unbiased judge.
And they got one. And they lost. What's your damage?
Any judge is going to be "biased" against Microsoft when they walk into court and lie, fabricate evidence and flip the judge off, and laugh at the laws of this country.
MS had every chance to make a competent, earnest defense of their actions in District Court instead they acted like gangsters and told the judge to fuck himself through their refusal to answer questions about their own correspondence and policies.
If this group of "legitimate businessmen" were famous Hispanics or blacks accused of trafficking dope instead of Microsoft, most of you shitheads who support without question would be screaming for the judge to throw them under a bus for their insolence in court.
This country is going to hell and will reach a point of explosion - if support for this criminal organization truly reaches all the way to Federal Appeals Courts and the Supreme Court.
A properly designed social system is designed to take this into account, and ensure that all players have a reasonable chance...
A social system that is so designed...
I think I may be able to assist you on a grammatic level: if you are willing to speak of "design" in regards society, and of "level playing fields" as a social value and a proper object of government, then you are (or may be) a civil libertarian, but definitely not a Libertarian -which is another phylum entirely. I can tell you know that there's a difference - be careful about throwing the L word around though.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and so well you wish it didnt't.
Yup, England ...and Britain, too.
Exactly, it should be like wages. The employer says here's what you're getting and the employee should accept it, wages or bogus no-pay health plan, gratefully with a deferential tug of his forelock.
I think you got (t)rolled.
You are supposed to be presumed innocent until proven guilty of a crime. Whatever else that may mean, it doesn't mean that law enforcement has a blank check to gather and sift for information on people before they know a crime is committed in anticipation of that event. It should preclude that. Presumption of innocence means that your rights are to be held intact and without modification until you are indicted or convicted. If you are under no indictment, your right to privacy may not be infringed upon.( Police and prosecutors should have that rule tattooed on their foreheads instead of getting shiny badges to identify themselves as law enforcement). But we see that the police do invade the privacy of individuals routinely while investigating no specific reported crime. This is the presumption of guilt and they apply it indiscriminately to batches of people at a time so they may claim they violated no one person's rights. In fact they just violated the rights of all.
This is not a relationship of a free people to their own law enforcement, and I think it's something that should be fought, even though it must be admitted that only favored classes of citizens really enjoyed protection from invasive hostile law enforcement in the past. The point is we should all expect that protection as our right as citizens, and expand it to cover all, rather than accept the erosion of privacy for all to better enable enforcing laws, which is what is happening now.
If they are not investigating A SPECIFIC CRIME, then I want the cops back in the precinct house watching TV and eating donuts. If they say they cannot enforce all the laws of this country without taking "pro-active" measures, then you may know by that sign that THERE ARE TOO MANY LAWS. The laws exist to sustain and improve the lives of the citizens, not the other way around.
An ancient assumption of our legal system was that "better 99 guilty men go free than one innocent man lose his life or freedom", which I think was a quotation from Blackstone. Another assumption I'll add to that which I think was so implicit it never got said was that the laws existed to protect average people from extraordinary bad actors. Well, with the changing of times and the multiplication of laws, it seems to me that an average person is probably guilty of something nowadays. A misdemeanor offense, for most of us, but still a threat of prosecution for misdemeanor offences can easily be used by police to extort information on 3rd parties' criminal acts (real or made up). Police may gripe about how hard it is for them to enforce all the laws, but they can hardly deny that they love the leverage they get from being able to nick almost anybody for something. Through that mechanism we are becoming a nation of informants, a good deal of that information is fiction concocted between Inquisitors and the informants they put on the rack, and we are crazy if we think this can continue long without bad effects on our national character and political life.
Don't you see that education is at the root of the rot? PBS must die. Nova and Frontline are where the daggers must run in. Bleeding Barney white is just a bonus.
It has as you allude, been made into a joke by the savage gelding strokes of American Mullahs, and also through the more lapidarian trimmings of corporate curators of acceptable public opinion, and the patronage of the Phillip-Morrisonian Bonsai Gardeners of Kulture.
Sometimes I am resigned to the idea that it could be better (all things considered) if the fascists had prevailed and eliminated PBS altogether. They have done a pretty thorough job already of subverting its journalistic freedom and they have completely annihilated it as a cultural actor. Leaving PBS in place but censored and powerless as it is only serves to mask the presently totalitarian nature of the American media landscape.
Better perhaps that people should be faced with the unambiguous truth that they cannot further deny by saying "Oh but I have an alternative -public broadcasting". Because in truth as an American, you have no alternative. As a consumer of media and culture, you cannot buy an alternative, not even with a million fucking dollars. (If you have billions on the other hand, you are at liberty to present whatever you think is advantageous to you but then that's just more of the sewage and brainwashing we already have, not an alternative).
You are completely naked and alone with your disbelief and outrage:
They own both major political parties - one of which proudly bills itself as the party of Corporate Cocksuckers without a trace of shame.
They own all the media outlets, which are in business it seems to tell you what to think, and more importantly, what not to think about, ever; not to discover what questions to ask.
They went on a buying spree and now own all the think-tanks, and have owned most of them for 10-15 years.
(Ergo, if you were a non-corporate cocksucker with an outlet through the media --highly unlikely, I know, I know, but let's pretend-- you would be hard pressed to host a pundit or book an expert for your show who was not a proficient cocksucker[1} even before their first media appearance.
How bad is it? Well consider that at this point in time even Christopher Hitchens now dangles from the teat of Richard Mellon Scaife. That my friends is 100% total, safe, and reliable capture of visible media dissent.)
No place left.
No place left but the streets. And it takes alot to get fatassed Americans into the streets but I confidently predict we will see it in the next 4-5 years. Fat American asses in the streets by the million. The Happy Meal is over.
[1] No offence intended to those for whom fellatio is an expression of love, or sexual attraction and affection, or just a tasty kinetic substitute for casual salutations like, "Good Morning", or "Nice Pants". No actual cocksuckers were harmed in the fabrication of this post.
The government has long since regulated the content of Public Broadcasting's offerings, particularly anything new and not already established, simply by casting the shadow of the Republican Swastika ((looks like this -> $ <- rotated at 45 degrees and repeated)) at intervals over the Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding, and dragging PBS officials before the Mullah's Inquests on Capitiol Hill.
National Public Radio may be said to have a liberal character but in general I don't think you could fairly claim "bias", as there as no commercial news broadcast that begins to come close to NPRs approach to presenting multiple sides to a given issue or story. (Remember I said we would not use the make-believe sense of the term in which anyone with an education or an idea different from the RNC is considered clearly biased).
Certainly not overtly biased fascist-party media organs like the Faux News Network. They don't come close to balance and are frankly proud of their ability to avoid it.
Certainly not General Electric owned CNBS.
Some USians may think Jim Lehrer, of the once-great McNeil Lehrer News Hour, is liberal. But in that case I'll have to assure them he is not, and that they do not have the first clue about what a real liberal is. (Don't worry, by the time you have it figured out it will be too late).
Not likely. That's the first place police the world over want to look.
I see .NET as typical rent-to-own (nothing) bullshit. (Slow credit ? No credit ? Not to worry! Microsoft will get your financing approved!)
I would guess that the average consumer will not dig it very much either. They may not immediately understand and seize their alternatives but that doesn't mean they'll all line up and drop trou' for Microsoft's plan to "share" their income stream in perpetuity either.
As others have noted, despite Intel's best efforts, it's not like CPU or RAM are expensive nowadays.
Bottomline: .NET solves .NO problem for the consumer. It just creates extra problems that didn't exist before, while trying to stick a IV tap in Joe Users' wallet.
A monthly fee is something Joe actually notices if only because he have to be comfortably dead to overlook it -that invisible hand at Microsoft may be about to get chopped off at the elbow.
Whether businesses want to convert to internal .NET servers for their office non-productivity is another question. But again, for different reasons I think they'd be crazy to do that.
Some people like APC for this purpose, others favor the good folks at Western Telematic.
Western Telematic RPS switches can be chained for 1100 feet worth of rj-11, all nodes rebootable/killable individually or en masse at the flick of your Tk-perl control panel.
Huge telecoms have these devices strewn throughout their operations. Scary isn't it?
is every other link at that site broken?
advertising does away with the applications problem.
the file format compatibility problem.
the hardware support problem. -Poof!-all gone.
"Proper Advertising" can bankrupt a company like Be in 2 shakes.
Likewise developing many core applications for your OS or desktop environment is a tricky thing. Don't do any, and people will claim your platform is "underdeveloped and immature".
Do a lot and you're rapidly shoveling money into a furnace, while simultaneously chasing away people who might have entertained the idea of selling such apps themselves on your platform.
Be was setup to be bought as the next generation OS for Apple. For better or worse Apple committed to taking the Mach muKerel route to provide bass'wards compatibilty - 5 years ago! Be has been lost company in search of a market ever since.
RIP, Be.
More like a one way ticket to Roswell.
You're all the same brainlesss scum to me.
PS: I can tell you're a lib-RA-tarian from the foaming mouthed vitriol in your posts, so you don't need to declare it. I'm guessing most other people find libertarian<-> sociopath connection fairly obvious by now, as well.
Still, let's not confuse the Daily Show with information. They don't have the format for that. The best they have done, (mind: I do consider the sight of Beth Littleford masturbating a stud-boar through a hole in the wall very informative in it's way) is to scoff and make obscene gestures at the corporate approved reporting of the networks. While that is a crucial humanitarian service it is not a substitute for "news".
Who here misses Beth Littleford, i mean aside from the masturbating pig thing? She was the greatest smart-ass of them all. I cried the day she left for CBS or whatever sordid hole in the wall she's at now.
I think the problem is that you can make a profit turning news into propaganda for your parent company's world-view, and you can attract a devoted audience of people who want to see that kind of journalistic prostitution pilloried and ripped to shreds, the way the Daily Show has, but you can't seem to make a big profit actually telling people what's going on in the world.
We count 'em extra (almost double) in the electrical collage because they are more important than the cityfolk on the coasts. The Founding Fathers considered this the most sacred right: the right to more than equal representation and to receive more federal dollars than you send to Washington in taxation.
The map don't lie.
It's all very well to talk about setting the vealpen employees up with locked down Linux installs and even Xterminals, but the people who make the decisions about all this use muy expensivo laptops because they actually do need them. (And it's also a major status thing to have the swankiest laptop models)
Now if Linux isn't seen on laptops and these people need to exchange documents with underlings who are on Linux desktops, then Windows everywhere is their kneejerk response to solving their communications problems - instead of demanding cross platform compatible file formats.
WHen you talk about sales and marketing weasels you are talking about a) people who do their computing on laptops because they travel and b) the people within the organization who are the "squeaky wheels", they were hired to their positions because they are constitutionally squeaky wheel type personalities. It is not surprising, then, that their preferences hold disproportionate sway over the IT character of the rest of the organization. They squeak and feel like the have a right to squeak first, and generally speaking, alot of upper management will come from with this squeaky corner of the overall business (sales weasels with MBAs).
Show them that Linux works to run the status-symbol laptop hardware and the "mission critical" presentation software, then maybe you can persuade them of the value of GNU/Linux elsewhere in the workforce.
Because with MS the problems just get worse over time, and will continue to worsen as they need more and more of your businesses cashflow diverted to their bottom line. Without increasing profits, real or imaginary, MSFT the pyramid scheme will implode. Got it now?
That's allright. I filter aol's mail so they don't have to: all senders from that domain are shown the way to /dev/null with a quickness.
Mod this up - greater insight has never been seen on SLashdot, and in so few words.
And I'd add: many of these 'practices' are not even possible, unless they company attempting them is a powerful monopoly - no one else has the leverage to try.
And not all monopolies are powerful. Using marketshare as a metric, Netscape was as close to a "monopoly" in webbrowsers as you could be, one might say, having well over 75% of the market at one time; but could they keep ISPs from distributing IE ? No, they couldn't. I don't know they even tried to - what would be the source of their coercive power? better deals on Netscape server? They simply had not enough "horizontality" or "verticality" to their monopoly product lineup to abuse their status as the market leader. Anyway, if you're arguing sense to JonKatz or any MS apologist you may as well argue with a wall. In the face of shelfulls of evidence that this company Microsoft exerts and abuses monopoly power over a very wide and broadening range of business, not just software, this guy is getting hung up on whether the Judge conceived a dislike for people who strutted into his courtroom and persistently denied the wrongdoing manifest in their own words before, during, and after their illegal acts - and brought in fabricated evidence not once but twice.
What kind of pussyfaced shitbird motherfucker would do that? One that is a soulless shameless Microshill apologist - for sure, but that's not Katz. OTOH, Maybe one that is trolling for controversy to justify his lame-assed non-existence as a non-celebrated author. Hmmm, now we maybe getting warm...
And they got one. And they lost. What's your damage?
Any judge is going to be "biased" against Microsoft when they walk into court and lie, fabricate evidence and flip the judge off, and laugh at the laws of this country.
MS had every chance to make a competent, earnest defense of their actions in District Court instead they acted like gangsters and told the judge to fuck himself through their refusal to answer questions about their own correspondence and policies.
If this group of "legitimate businessmen" were famous Hispanics or blacks accused of trafficking dope instead of Microsoft, most of you shitheads who support without question would be screaming for the judge to throw them under a bus for their insolence in court.
This country is going to hell and will reach a point of explosion - if support for this criminal organization truly reaches all the way to Federal Appeals Courts and the Supreme Court.
I think I may be able to assist you on a grammatic level: if you are willing to speak of "design" in regards society, and of "level playing fields" as a social value and a proper object of government, then you are (or may be) a civil libertarian, but definitely not a Libertarian -which is another phylum entirely. I can tell you know that there's a difference - be careful about throwing the L word around though.