Apple failed to intimidate Microsoft, but they broke Atari whose GEM O/S had a far better user interface as well as multi-tasking.
Bullshit.
Read http://www.seasip.demon.co.uk/Gem/History/gem1.htm l. It outlines why Apple sued Atari over GEM/1. Basically, they just copied many interface features from the original Mac: disks on the desktop, trash on the desktop, even down to how icons and the toolbar were shaded. Apple didn't "break" Atari; they demanded Atari change these blatant interface rip-offs, and Atari did. After all of this was settled, there were GEM/2, GEM/3, GEM/4, GEM/5 and later versions under different names. Hardly sounds like "broken" to me.
I like MacOS X, but I figure Apple's going to be out of business within 5 years, and I need an exit strategy.
Put up or shut up.
I'll wager good money ($1,000 sound good? How about $10,000?) that Apple will not be out of business within 5 years. We can define "out of business" as "having declared Chapter 7 Bankruptcy and in the process of selling off remaining assets."
If Apple is purchased by another company and still making Macs/Mac OS X/etc., that doesn't count as "out of business" in my book.
Why do you think England and France almost supported the Confederacy in our civil war, despite their abhorance of slavery?
Economics.
One of the root causes of the Civil War was high tarrifs on cotton. The North (which had factories for processing cotton) wanted to keep tarrifs high on goods made from Cotton. The South (which produced the cotton on the backs of slaves) wanted tarrifs low, so it could sell to Europe (which paid better than the North). And the Europeans wanted cheap raw materials from the South and no competition from factories in the North.
England and France were voting with their wallets, not their consciences.
If I was hit by a stray bomb, I wouldn't probably feel much of anything; I'd be dead.
And if I found out that a neighbor was a terrorist, and a family member was killed trying get the guy, I'd pitch in and try to find the motherfucking terrorist. See, I don't blame the victim like you do. I blame the source.
There is a world of difference between intentionally targeting civilians for mass murder and accidently killing civilians in a war zone because the enemy WHO ATTACKED YOU FIRST is using civilians as human shields. If the Taliban Afghans and Al Qeada Arabs you love so much cared about the Afghani people, why are they using them as cover for bombs? Why not turn themselves in and save the lives of their fellow Muslims, or at least carry the battle away from civilians. But they'd rather let them die. And idiots like you think these bastards are the good guys.
I am sure because there is no evidence they have occured.
You are making the extraordinary claim: that unbeknownst to everyone else on the planet, the government is engaging in secret tribunals and executions. Prove it. Or shut the fuck up.
1. NO TRIBUNALS HAVE OCCURED. Until you prove otherwise, you're a liar when you claim they have.
2.NO EVIDENCE HAS BEEN PRESENTED OF AN INNOCENT PERSON BEING EXECUTED SINCE THE DEATH PENALTY WAS REINSTATED IN 1976. Now, I don't always agree with how the death penalty is implented in places like Texas. But I have yet to see conclusive evidence that any innocents have been executed recently. This doesn't mean the system doesn't have problems, though. In any event, it has NOTHING to do with whether or not "innocent" Afghans will be executed. If you're captured pointing a gun at US troops, you don't have much of a case.
3. LEARN SOME FUCKING HISTORY. The Taliban was created by Pakistani intelligence (the ISI) in the mid-90's. The US didn't support them in the 70's and 80's; they didn't exist. The US supported the Muhenjidin, the Afghani and Arab guerrilla fighters trying to evict the Soviets from Afghanistan. There are overlap between the groups (Mullah Omar lost an eye fighting the Soviets), but they were not the same group of people and they had different goals.
4. WE HAVE NO IDEA HOW MANY AFGHANI CIVILIANS HAVE BEEN KILLED. We can't even get exact numbers on the number of people killed at the Twin Towers, and we're picking through rubble and doing DNA tests. Do you really think that these reporters (most of whom are anti-American in their slant) are getting accurate numbers? And do you think there would be nearly as many civilian casualties if the Taliban and Al Qeida weren't using civilians as cover? When the US bombed those Red Cross warehouses, it was because the Taliban was using them to hide.
It's time you figure out who the good guys are here, you shithead.
With on the spot convictions/death penalty, god knows how many innocent people will be sentenced by these kill happy folks.
Are you stupid? According to the US government, no tribunals have occured yet, and the rules for them have not been finalized. And if they have been happening in secret, how do YOU know about them? And how do you know they were innocent people? You must be God.
As for innocent, tell me how many innocent fuckers were in the Taliban and Al Qeida armies.
It must be nice to hate America. You don't need evidence or any such thing to prove your point. Just a feeling that "kill-happy" folks are going to do something. If the US is so evil and kill-happy, why didn't we just nuke Afghanistan?
Who the F cares if US citizens aren't subject to them. This is a total invasion of the human rights of the Afghanees.
It is no such thing. Let me try to explain this to someone as terminally stupid as yourself. Military tribunals are intended to try prisoners of war, captured overseas. Same as the Nuremberg trials, same as the trial faced by Tojo and other Japanese leaders at the end of WW II.
This is a war. The US is bending over backwards to be nice to captured enemy troops, even though these troops are fighting in violation of the Third Geneva Convention (they target civilians, they don't wear uniforms to mark themselves as combatants, and they don't reveal their chain of command). Under international law, the US is well within its rights to shoot these fuckers with no trial at all.
Human rights, by the way, are a fiction created by western societies. If you don't respect them (as the Taliban and Al Qeida certainly don't), they don't exist. Pissing and moaning that the US isn't respecting rights that the the people captured don't even believe exist is an amazing exercise in self-indulgence.
You know these tribunals are exactly what the Soviet Union used during the Cold War. Read up on it. Americans haven't been exposed to this sort of thing, so they're not as sensetive to it.
Oh don't be absurd. This is nothing like the show trials in the USSR. Please site an example (with references) that show any similarities. You're just another America-hater who would love to cast the US as the Evil Empire, since the country you loved (the USSR) proved to be so completely rotten.
Other that major drawback, though, I love the tool because of all the benefits that come with the image model, such as the constantly-built source tree and the problem browser (I know, I know, if I were a real developer, I'd never have problems;-) ).
Take a look at IDEA. It manages to do far more nifty things than VisualAge (refactoring!), and still works with text files alone. Sure, it eats up RAM, but that's cheap;-)
These are explicitly for non-US citizens caught abroad, trying to attack the US. US citizens aren't subject to them (they've got constitutional rights). Residents of the US aren't subject to them (the Supreme Court says that non-citizens who are residents of the US have constitutional rights). Stop being an idiot.
email/keyboard sniffing
This case was explicitly about a mafioso, so how is the terrorist excuse working here? Besides, WIRETAPS ARE LEGAL WITH A JUDGE'S PERMISSION. This is just the 21st century version of the wiretap. Stop being an idiot.
, hundreds of detnetions,
And every single detainee is either someone who has violated the law (overstaying their visas, for example) or who is a material witness who is likely to flee. Unless you know better, oh stupid one? This is the exact same thing that liberal icon Bobby Kennedy did when he started taking on the mob; if a reputed mafioso spit on the sidewalk, he would be arrested for violating public spitting laws (which exist to prevent the spread of disease). Was it OK for Bobby Kennedy to do? Did civilization collapse?
racial profiling
Note to moron: you would have to be willfully stupid to not wonder about a muslim booking a one-way ticket on a jumbo jet, taking no baggage. Idiots don't pay attention to patterns just because it's not politically correct. Oh, and the majority of American Blacks are in favor of racial profiling to prevent terror attacks, so you can assuage your white, upper-middle class guilt.
under this "terrorism" excuse.
Excuse? If you think this is a fucking excuse, please tell me where the Twin Towers went. Do you think they're on holiday in Paris?
Russia says the Chechyns are "terrorists."
The Chechens are terrorists. They blew up several apartment buildings in Russia two or three years ago. That's what prompted the renewal of the Chechen war. There had been a cease-fire for about a year until they started blowing up civilians in Russia. Sorry to let actual facts get in the way of your mindless diatribe.
China's calling Taiwan "terrorist,"
China is run by a group of evil people. They've been calling the Taiwanese whatever name seems to strike a nerve in the West. It's like Saddam calling the US/British no-fly zones "terrorist" or "criminal." When the evil ones call you names, you're doing well.
when it becomes a challenge of who can keep it in court longer (as it always does [guerrillanews.com]) the corporation almost always wins...
One example does not a pattern make. And it's not even a good example. According to this article, Coke is being accused of letting its copyright (sounds more like a trademark than a copyright to me, but I'm not an IP lawyer) on the classic bottle design lapse, and then defending itself against some guy who now claims to own the copyright on the bottle image because he used the bottle design in some internal pitch that may or may not have been stolen by an ad agency (and not by Coke). A pox on both their houses. IMHO, this guy is abusing the copyright system just as badly as Coke is.
If it was something along the lines of this guy being sued out of existence by Coke because he had proof that Coca-Cola causes brain tumors, that's one thing. I'd say you had a point. But Coke trying to squash a suit over an image that's been theirs for a long time? Give me a break.
It's obviously not bulk buying that drives mom and pop companies out of buisness (as much as Wal-Mart wants to say it is). It's having enough cash reserves to sell your products at a loss longer than the mom and pop companies can sell at a loss.
Question: how did Wal-Mart get to be the size it is today? Secret government contracts? Murdering its competitors? Or brilliant management? There is NOTHING, I repeat NOTHING that Wal-Mart did that any of a billion other mom-and-pop operations couldn't have done. The Walstons just figured it out first.
Furthermore, if the modern mom-and-pops want to form their own MegaCorp, they can. They'll end up doing VERY similar things to what Wal-Mart does, because it's the only way to turn a profit on their margins. Retail is a sucky, sucky industry to be in.
Now, I agree that monopolies are bad things. But there are no monopolies on selling Tide or crappy clothes made by child labor. No one has ever presented evidence that Wal-Mart jacks up prices after it drives all of it competitors out of business. If they did, K*Mart would then move in and eat Wal-Mart's lunch. See, not a monopoly.
I agree that smaller companies usually provide better services. But you have to pay for those extra services, and most people are unwilling to do so. That's why Wal-Mart wins.
Before you think that I'm a loony "corporations are always right" Objectivist, I think that Microsoft's illegal tie-ins and restrictions on bundled software are in a totally different category. In that case, MS has clearly violated US anti-trust regulations that prevent a company that has monopoly power in one area from using that power to obtain a monopoly in another area. And, to my non-lawyer mind, intentionally presenting false evidence and lying during an affidavit is perjury. But no one is charging Gates or Balmer with that, so we should just forget about it.
-jon
Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?
on
Adcritic Shuts Down
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· Score: 3, Insightful
p a company from creating fake hits (using a script) to drive the bandwith costs of a small publisher through the roof? If I were to start an anti-phillip morris page (as a random example), what's to stop them from using a script to create so many hits to my page that there is no possible way I can pay it.. they can obviously afford more bandwith than me (so the bandwith they use to create the hits wont affect them).
Well, there are two ways this could be handled. First, if they use enough of your bandwidth, you could probably charge them with doing a DOS attack on your site; that's a serious crime in the US now.
Second, many states have laws against SLAPP suits (nuicence suits brought by large corporations against grass-roots organizations). It's not a lawsuit, but if you're being harassed by a large corporation, it's actionable. There are about a billion lawyers who would love to sue a big company and get the "David vs. Goliath" publicity.
So, yeah, the system works.
In other stupid things you said:
So you're arguing that it's good for small buisnesses to go under? It's certainly not good for the consumer when that happens.. and it's not good for the small buisness owner.. In fact the only people that it seems to be good for is their competition (which is increasingly mega-corporations).
Yeah, it's good for the consumer when inefficient businesses go under and places that can sell the same item for less money move in.
If being a mega-corporation is the only way to make a deal to get decent prices, why don't mom-and-pops set up an organziation to bulk-buy goods (a couple of mom-and-pops in each town, with a few thousand towns)? I've heard of this new Internet thingie that lets people communicate over long distances...
Today's lesson: if the only way to win is to be big, get big!
-jon
Remember the Y2K bug fixing frenzy?
on
al Qaeda Hacks XP?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Now I don't know if XP was targeted by Al Qaeda, but a good chunk of Y2K work was outsourced to places like India, where this self-proclaimed terrorist was picked up.
Given the long-term planning that Al Queda is known for, and their penchant for using the tools of the West against the West, I would be unsurprised if they planted people into companies doing Y2K patchwork for major financial institutions or other mission-critical systems. Most of that code was NOT code reviewed due to time constraints, and the work was done overseas by the lowest bidders. This is a recipe for disaster and was predicted as such years ago. Now that we know exactly how crazy these motherfuckers are, the warnings seem a lot more important.
I can't tell if this is anti-Apple FUD, anti-Sun FUD, or anti-Java FUD.
The fact is that Sun had no problems with MS making it easier to tie Java apps to Windows via J/Direct.
What they objected to was MS leaving out bits of functionality by obeying the letter of the spec and not the spirit (RMI support, for example, required accessing an FTP server at MS that would change from time to time).
Apple has been providing ways to bridge Mac OS calls and Java for about 4 years. Sun has never objected, because Apple also implements the Java spec to aching accuracy. They just add extra stuff on top of it.
There were other CLI tools for the Mac besides MPW; it was just the officially sanctioned one (even way back when; I don't know if it was around in 1984, but it's pretty old).
I was just pointing out that there was no inherent anti-CLI bias among Mac cognicenti, such as programmers. If Mac fan-boys feel a certain way, well, they're fan-boys.
If you wanted a command line for a pre OS X Mac, you should have grabbed MPW (Macintosh Programmer Workshop). It provided a UNIX-y command line and programming environment. It was payware for a long time, but Apple started giving it away about 5 years ago.
I bought the SMC 4-port wireless router for my home network (an iMac, an iBook, and an ancient PowerBook 1400 with an Orinoco Silver card) recently. It's excellent.
Configuration is done via a built-in web server. NAT, firewall that you can punch holes in as needed, DMZ, MAC filtering, 128-bit WEP, 3 10/100 downlink, one 10/100 uplink, printer server, and a port to plug in a modem (I don't know what protocols it supports over the modem, though). It can route AppleTalk, and you can install firmware upgrades from any computer (you just upload a file via your web browser).
It cost $199, about $100 less than the Airport Base Station. The new base station has some excellent features (AOL, better network config stuff), but I'm not regreting my choice at all.
No, you're wrong. The problem is how does the CD-ROM's device drivers respond to the errors put on the disc by the "copy protection." Mac and Linux device drivers seem to handle these errors without a problem. Windows drivers don't.
there is no end condition that we can call victory.
Right after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, a US General said, "When this war is over, the only place they'll speak Japanese is Hell."
If only someone would utter the same sentence, replacing the word "Japanese" with "Arabic". Then we'll know when the war against terrorism will be won.
For a less glib answer check with (once again) the Italians and the Germans. Both suffered through communist terrorist attacks in the 70s and 80s. Both had severe restrictions on civil rights (compared to pre-9/11 US standards). (At one point, the entire city of Rome was surrounded by police and every home was searched.) And, most importantly, both won the war on communist terrorism and civil rights were restored.
So, except for you having nothing but paraniod conjecture which flies in the face of history, you're completely right.
Slashdot Mirror
-jon
-jon
Bullshit.
Read http://www.seasip.demon.co.uk/Gem/History/gem1.htm l. It outlines why Apple sued Atari over GEM/1. Basically, they just copied many interface features from the original Mac: disks on the desktop, trash on the desktop, even down to how icons and the toolbar were shaded. Apple didn't "break" Atari; they demanded Atari change these blatant interface rip-offs, and Atari did. After all of this was settled, there were GEM/2, GEM/3, GEM/4, GEM/5 and later versions under different names. Hardly sounds like "broken" to me.
-jon
Put up or shut up.
I'll wager good money ($1,000 sound good? How about $10,000?) that Apple will not be out of business within 5 years. We can define "out of business" as "having declared Chapter 7 Bankruptcy and in the process of selling off remaining assets."
If Apple is purchased by another company and still making Macs/Mac OS X/etc., that doesn't count as "out of business" in my book.
So, you willing to bet?
-jon
Economics.
One of the root causes of the Civil War was high tarrifs on cotton. The North (which had factories for processing cotton) wanted to keep tarrifs high on goods made from Cotton. The South (which produced the cotton on the backs of slaves) wanted tarrifs low, so it could sell to Europe (which paid better than the North). And the Europeans wanted cheap raw materials from the South and no competition from factories in the North.
England and France were voting with their wallets, not their consciences.
-jon
And if I found out that a neighbor was a terrorist, and a family member was killed trying get the guy, I'd pitch in and try to find the motherfucking terrorist. See, I don't blame the victim like you do. I blame the source.
-jon
Apparently, you are too stupid to know what proof of something is. Proof is not what someone else did 30 years ago. Proof is what you are doing now.
-jon
There is a world of difference between intentionally targeting civilians for mass murder and accidently killing civilians in a war zone because the enemy WHO ATTACKED YOU FIRST is using civilians as human shields. If the Taliban Afghans and Al Qeada Arabs you love so much cared about the Afghani people, why are they using them as cover for bombs? Why not turn themselves in and save the lives of their fellow Muslims, or at least carry the battle away from civilians. But they'd rather let them die. And idiots like you think these bastards are the good guys.
It's amazing how twisted you are.
-jon
You are making the extraordinary claim: that unbeknownst to everyone else on the planet, the government is engaging in secret tribunals and executions. Prove it. Or shut the fuck up.
-jon
1. NO TRIBUNALS HAVE OCCURED. Until you prove otherwise, you're a liar when you claim they have.
2.NO EVIDENCE HAS BEEN PRESENTED OF AN INNOCENT PERSON BEING EXECUTED SINCE THE DEATH PENALTY WAS REINSTATED IN 1976. Now, I don't always agree with how the death penalty is implented in places like Texas. But I have yet to see conclusive evidence that any innocents have been executed recently. This doesn't mean the system doesn't have problems, though. In any event, it has NOTHING to do with whether or not "innocent" Afghans will be executed. If you're captured pointing a gun at US troops, you don't have much of a case.
3. LEARN SOME FUCKING HISTORY. The Taliban was created by Pakistani intelligence (the ISI) in the mid-90's. The US didn't support them in the 70's and 80's; they didn't exist. The US supported the Muhenjidin, the Afghani and Arab guerrilla fighters trying to evict the Soviets from Afghanistan. There are overlap between the groups (Mullah Omar lost an eye fighting the Soviets), but they were not the same group of people and they had different goals.
4. WE HAVE NO IDEA HOW MANY AFGHANI CIVILIANS HAVE BEEN KILLED. We can't even get exact numbers on the number of people killed at the Twin Towers, and we're picking through rubble and doing DNA tests. Do you really think that these reporters (most of whom are anti-American in their slant) are getting accurate numbers? And do you think there would be nearly as many civilian casualties if the Taliban and Al Qeida weren't using civilians as cover? When the US bombed those Red Cross warehouses, it was because the Taliban was using them to hide.
It's time you figure out who the good guys are here, you shithead.
-jon
Are you stupid? According to the US government, no tribunals have occured yet, and the rules for them have not been finalized. And if they have been happening in secret, how do YOU know about them? And how do you know they were innocent people? You must be God.
As for innocent, tell me how many innocent fuckers were in the Taliban and Al Qeida armies.
It must be nice to hate America. You don't need evidence or any such thing to prove your point. Just a feeling that "kill-happy" folks are going to do something. If the US is so evil and kill-happy, why didn't we just nuke Afghanistan?
-jon
Who the F cares if US citizens aren't subject to them. This is a total invasion of the human rights of the Afghanees.
It is no such thing. Let me try to explain this to someone as terminally stupid as yourself. Military tribunals are intended to try prisoners of war, captured overseas. Same as the Nuremberg trials, same as the trial faced by Tojo and other Japanese leaders at the end of WW II.
This is a war. The US is bending over backwards to be nice to captured enemy troops, even though these troops are fighting in violation of the Third Geneva Convention (they target civilians, they don't wear uniforms to mark themselves as combatants, and they don't reveal their chain of command). Under international law, the US is well within its rights to shoot these fuckers with no trial at all.
Human rights, by the way, are a fiction created by western societies. If you don't respect them (as the Taliban and Al Qeida certainly don't), they don't exist. Pissing and moaning that the US isn't respecting rights that the the people captured don't even believe exist is an amazing exercise in self-indulgence.
You know these tribunals are exactly what the Soviet Union used during the Cold War. Read up on it. Americans haven't been exposed to this sort of thing, so they're not as sensetive to it.
Oh don't be absurd. This is nothing like the show trials in the USSR. Please site an example (with references) that show any similarities. You're just another America-hater who would love to cast the US as the Evil Empire, since the country you loved (the USSR) proved to be so completely rotten.
-jon
Take a look at IDEA. It manages to do far more nifty things than VisualAge (refactoring!), and still works with text files alone. Sure, it eats up RAM, but that's cheap ;-)
-jon
They've set up military tribunals,
These are explicitly for non-US citizens caught abroad, trying to attack the US. US citizens aren't subject to them (they've got constitutional rights). Residents of the US aren't subject to them (the Supreme Court says that non-citizens who are residents of the US have constitutional rights). Stop being an idiot.
email/keyboard sniffing
This case was explicitly about a mafioso, so how is the terrorist excuse working here? Besides, WIRETAPS ARE LEGAL WITH A JUDGE'S PERMISSION. This is just the 21st century version of the wiretap. Stop being an idiot.
, hundreds of detnetions,
And every single detainee is either someone who has violated the law (overstaying their visas, for example) or who is a material witness who is likely to flee. Unless you know better, oh stupid one? This is the exact same thing that liberal icon Bobby Kennedy did when he started taking on the mob; if a reputed mafioso spit on the sidewalk, he would be arrested for violating public spitting laws (which exist to prevent the spread of disease). Was it OK for Bobby Kennedy to do? Did civilization collapse?
racial profiling
Note to moron: you would have to be willfully stupid to not wonder about a muslim booking a one-way ticket on a jumbo jet, taking no baggage. Idiots don't pay attention to patterns just because it's not politically correct. Oh, and the majority of American Blacks are in favor of racial profiling to prevent terror attacks, so you can assuage your white, upper-middle class guilt.
under this "terrorism" excuse.
Excuse? If you think this is a fucking excuse, please tell me where the Twin Towers went. Do you think they're on holiday in Paris?
Russia says the Chechyns are "terrorists."
The Chechens are terrorists. They blew up several apartment buildings in Russia two or three years ago. That's what prompted the renewal of the Chechen war. There had been a cease-fire for about a year until they started blowing up civilians in Russia. Sorry to let actual facts get in the way of your mindless diatribe.
China's calling Taiwan "terrorist,"
China is run by a group of evil people. They've been calling the Taiwanese whatever name seems to strike a nerve in the West. It's like Saddam calling the US/British no-fly zones "terrorist" or "criminal." When the evil ones call you names, you're doing well.
-jon
-jon
One example does not a pattern make. And it's not even a good example. According to this article, Coke is being accused of letting its copyright (sounds more like a trademark than a copyright to me, but I'm not an IP lawyer) on the classic bottle design lapse, and then defending itself against some guy who now claims to own the copyright on the bottle image because he used the bottle design in some internal pitch that may or may not have been stolen by an ad agency (and not by Coke). A pox on both their houses. IMHO, this guy is abusing the copyright system just as badly as Coke is.
If it was something along the lines of this guy being sued out of existence by Coke because he had proof that Coca-Cola causes brain tumors, that's one thing. I'd say you had a point. But Coke trying to squash a suit over an image that's been theirs for a long time? Give me a break.
It's obviously not bulk buying that drives mom and pop companies out of buisness (as much as Wal-Mart wants to say it is). It's having enough cash reserves to sell your products at a loss longer than the mom and pop companies can sell at a loss.
Question: how did Wal-Mart get to be the size it is today? Secret government contracts? Murdering its competitors? Or brilliant management? There is NOTHING, I repeat NOTHING that Wal-Mart did that any of a billion other mom-and-pop operations couldn't have done. The Walstons just figured it out first.
Furthermore, if the modern mom-and-pops want to form their own MegaCorp, they can. They'll end up doing VERY similar things to what Wal-Mart does, because it's the only way to turn a profit on their margins. Retail is a sucky, sucky industry to be in.
Now, I agree that monopolies are bad things. But there are no monopolies on selling Tide or crappy clothes made by child labor. No one has ever presented evidence that Wal-Mart jacks up prices after it drives all of it competitors out of business. If they did, K*Mart would then move in and eat Wal-Mart's lunch. See, not a monopoly.
I agree that smaller companies usually provide better services. But you have to pay for those extra services, and most people are unwilling to do so. That's why Wal-Mart wins.
Before you think that I'm a loony "corporations are always right" Objectivist, I think that Microsoft's illegal tie-ins and restrictions on bundled software are in a totally different category. In that case, MS has clearly violated US anti-trust regulations that prevent a company that has monopoly power in one area from using that power to obtain a monopoly in another area. And, to my non-lawyer mind, intentionally presenting false evidence and lying during an affidavit is perjury. But no one is charging Gates or Balmer with that, so we should just forget about it.
-jon
Well, there are two ways this could be handled. First, if they use enough of your bandwidth, you could probably charge them with doing a DOS attack on your site; that's a serious crime in the US now.
Second, many states have laws against SLAPP suits (nuicence suits brought by large corporations against grass-roots organizations). It's not a lawsuit, but if you're being harassed by a large corporation, it's actionable. There are about a billion lawyers who would love to sue a big company and get the "David vs. Goliath" publicity.
So, yeah, the system works.
In other stupid things you said:
So you're arguing that it's good for small buisnesses to go under? It's certainly not good for the consumer when that happens.. and it's not good for the small buisness owner.. In fact the only people that it seems to be good for is their competition (which is increasingly mega-corporations).
Yeah, it's good for the consumer when inefficient businesses go under and places that can sell the same item for less money move in.
If being a mega-corporation is the only way to make a deal to get decent prices, why don't mom-and-pops set up an organziation to bulk-buy goods (a couple of mom-and-pops in each town, with a few thousand towns)? I've heard of this new Internet thingie that lets people communicate over long distances...
Today's lesson: if the only way to win is to be big, get big!
-jon
Given the long-term planning that Al Queda is known for, and their penchant for using the tools of the West against the West, I would be unsurprised if they planted people into companies doing Y2K patchwork for major financial institutions or other mission-critical systems. Most of that code was NOT code reviewed due to time constraints, and the work was done overseas by the lowest bidders. This is a recipe for disaster and was predicted as such years ago. Now that we know exactly how crazy these motherfuckers are, the warnings seem a lot more important.
Just my paranoid guess.
-jon
I guess we better read those End User Licence Agreements a lot more carefully from now on ;-)
-jon
The fact is that Sun had no problems with MS making it easier to tie Java apps to Windows via J/Direct.
What they objected to was MS leaving out bits of functionality by obeying the letter of the spec and not the spirit (RMI support, for example, required accessing an FTP server at MS that would change from time to time).
Apple has been providing ways to bridge Mac OS calls and Java for about 4 years. Sun has never objected, because Apple also implements the Java spec to aching accuracy. They just add extra stuff on top of it.
-jon
I was just pointing out that there was no inherent anti-CLI bias among Mac cognicenti, such as programmers. If Mac fan-boys feel a certain way, well, they're fan-boys.
-jon
-jon
Configuration is done via a built-in web server. NAT, firewall that you can punch holes in as needed, DMZ, MAC filtering, 128-bit WEP, 3 10/100 downlink, one 10/100 uplink, printer server, and a port to plug in a modem (I don't know what protocols it supports over the modem, though). It can route AppleTalk, and you can install firmware upgrades from any computer (you just upload a file via your web browser).
It cost $199, about $100 less than the Airport Base Station. The new base station has some excellent features (AOL, better network config stuff), but I'm not regreting my choice at all.
-jon
-jon
Right after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, a US General said, "When this war is over, the only place they'll speak Japanese is Hell."
If only someone would utter the same sentence, replacing the word "Japanese" with "Arabic". Then we'll know when the war against terrorism will be won.
For a less glib answer check with (once again) the Italians and the Germans. Both suffered through communist terrorist attacks in the 70s and 80s. Both had severe restrictions on civil rights (compared to pre-9/11 US standards). (At one point, the entire city of Rome was surrounded by police and every home was searched.) And, most importantly, both won the war on communist terrorism and civil rights were restored.
So, except for you having nothing but paraniod conjecture which flies in the face of history, you're completely right.
-jon