I'm guessing they probably ask if you're renting adult material. If the mother was outed by the movies she rented, she was probably renting adult material.
Good, now we're actually getting somewhere in this discussion (though, for the record, the fact you don't understand why something is unclear to me is irrelevant for the discourse).
I did (and do) understand that giving away IE for free was not what they were being charged with (or whatever the proper term is). However you make an excellent point that "Giving something away for free does not preclude you from behaving properly in the marketplace". I was not thinking along those lines, but you are absolutely right.
Out of curiosity, are there paid browsers with any semblance of a real market share? I understand that's also not the point, I'm just curious, all the browsers I've ever seen are free (as in beer).
It is a protest, what do you not understand about this? It is the same when you get people complaining about traffic by driving slow. Or cylists complaining about cars by driving in a huge pack in peak hour.
First of all, protesting traffic by driving slowly is also stupid, but for different reasons. Second, cyclists riding in a pack is not at all the same as this AT&T protest. They're trying to be disruptive to demonstrate, yes, but in that case they aren't protesting the idea that cyclists clog up traffic. With the AT&T protest, they're out to demonstrate exactly the point they're trying to protest. It's pointless.
How do you suggest the protest, by building extra infrastructure to improve ATT network, so they get better calls? Or maybe not using their phones, so they miss out on business and personal calls? Genius, bloody genius.
Don't straw man me, those are your ideas, not mine.
When you protest you have a limited number of things you can do. DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT COMPLICATED CONCEPT??
That's small minded. When you protest, there are an infinite number of things you can do. How do I suggest they protest? I suggest they stop being such little dinks and have a real protest. Picket the AT&T offices; have a real flash mob; challenge AT&T to some public discourse, make them prove that smart phones are really responsible. They could do it Abbie Hoffman style with dramatic street theater to disrupt and inform. They could do it ELF style and physically attack the network which would be at least as disruptive as the proposed tactic without proving the point that smart phones are the problem. Or, gee, I don't know, they might also consider the fact that any given communications network can only handle so much information at a time, and that maybe, just maybe mind you, excessive smart phone use really is causing the problems.
Yes, thank you for summarizing: that was quite well established in the original post. I was not asking the reason these actions are being taken, just calling into question the legitimacy of them.
Its mentality like yours that allowed the DoJ to let MS off with a warning instead of sundering the company.
That's a thought terminating cliche and an appeal to ridicule; both are logical fallacies meaning you've failed to actually address my point. In fact, even as an appeal to ridicule it fails because that ridicule is requisite upon the fact that the DoJ should not have let them off with a warning, which is an extension of the very point under contention. So congratulations, that was epic.
This was obviously a pretty big over reaction to what was apparently just a thoughtless casual comment. But frankly, I say give her (the student) a night in jail as punishment for being so stupid. How do people not get this by now: you can't say shit like that anymore. Whether it's reasonable or not, it's reality; people are scared, people are paranoid, people overreact. Facebook is, for all intents and purposes, a public forum without any benefit of audible tone or social context. If it can be misconstrued, it will be. I think people need to get in the habit of reading themselves the Miranda warning before they post to the web: "You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say or do can and will be used against you in a court of law"
I hate IE as much as the next guy, and have no love for MS in general, but I don't see what the big deal is?
Then go read an article on antitrust law so you understand what the big deal is. I mean is your ignorance supposed to be some sort of badge of honor or something here?
No is your "Anonymous Coward"? You seem to be struggling with my colloquialism, so let me explain what I meant when I said "I don't see what the big deal is". This is a somewhat polite way of saying that I don't think it's a big deal, while still leaving the door open for someone to change my mind.
You don't understand how the capitalist free market motivates innovation? You don't understand how monopoly abuse undermines that motivation? Have you considered educating yourself?
I think I understand quite well how competition can motivate innovation. I understand that capitalist theory claims that a free market will produce lots of competition, and I understand how monopolies necessarily undermine competition. One thing I don't understand is how one might reconcile this sort of government intervention with the free market. I mean don't half-ass it, if you're going to be a free-market advocate, you really need to just accept whatever the invisible hand deals out, monopolies and all (Adam Smith, be damned).
But I digress, because that's not actually what I was referring to. I understand why a monopoly is a big deal and (not being a free market advocate, I feel comfortable saying this) I encourage a certain amount of government regulation against them. What I was actually referring to was this specific issue of internet explorer being bundled with Windows. That specifically is what (to be clear) I don't think is a big deal (at least not at the time of my first posting, I've since been somewhat swayed by the likes of flabordec and AntiDragon, below).
Why wouldn't they integrate their own browser with their own operating system?
Because it undermines capitalism and the free market and leads to retardation of innovation. In short, monopoly abuse is bad for society.
See above.
They don't even charge for IE, so how can it be a monopoly issue?
And I didn't steal the guy's wallet so how can it be assault? Seriously, you need to know what you're talking about before espousing your opinions.
Terrible metaphor. Here, I fixed it for you: "There was no money in his wallet, so how is it theft?" Ah! Now I get it, good point! You're right, the fact that there was no money directly involved is irrelevant to the monopoly charges. Thanks for pointing that out.
I must be missing something. Are they going to have include the option of installing crimson editor instead of notepad?
That would be of great benefit, yes. Sadly no one has taken them to court over that yet, so we're stuck with a broken text editor that can't properly handle unicode and the rest of the text editors in the world have to have extra code to work around broken documents from notepad.
Are you joking with me at this point, I can't tell? Are you seriously advocating that an anti-trust court should force them to include text-editor alternatives as well? You just RAA'd yourself: where does it stop? Do they have to include alternatives to every piece of software packaged with their OS? Alternatives to the OS itself?
They don't stop you from installing other browsers, so who cares?
People who make a living writing Web browsers for one. Secondly, anyone who cares about innovation and the state of the art on the Web moving forward at the pace normally promoted by free market competition.
Grandma's stuck with IE because she doesn't know how to install Firefox herself. Then
Sorry for giving you a headache...but thank you for the explanation (likewise to flabordec).
I definitely understand the significance of Internet Explorer's massive market share, having done a bit of web development myself over the years, and I can certainly see how it's a self-reinforcing cycle of users beget developers, beget more users...
At face value, it still seems odd to me, per my original car metaphor. In the context of a "monopoly on the...direction of the web", the decision makes much more sense.
I really want to reiterate the point of your first case, because I haven't heard enough people catching on to this: AT&T is blaming network issues on what they consider to be the high bandwidth that smart phones use. To protest this, smart phone users are going to try to bring down the network by hogging as much bandwidth as possible. With their smart phones.
Just wanted to make sure everyone understood exactly what's going on here...
Interesting point, but FF is open source, and Mozilla is non-profit. It seems to me that most of IE's issues are profit based, in particular as a result of Microsoft's infamous EEE strategy. I think we stand a good chance of not facing these same issues from firefox for the above given reasons. (Of course, it may have it's own laundry list of outstanding issues).
I hate IE as much as the next guy, and have no love for MS in general, but I don't see what the big deal is? Why wouldn't they integrate their own browser with their own operating system? They don't even charge for IE, so how can it be a monopoly issue? I must be missing something. Are they going to have include the option of installing crimson editor instead of notepad? How about BB4Win instead of explorer.exe? They don't stop you from installing other browsers, so who cares? Grandma's stuck with IE because she doesn't know how to install Firefox herself. Then she probably wouldn't notice the difference either.
Thanks, Nate! I couldn't for the life of me figure out how my car made it to work every morning, let alone what those ugly round bits were.
Seriously though, thanks for clarifying. I kept hearing about propulsion without mass-loss like it was some kind of yet-to-be-achieved holy grail; I didn't make the connection that it was specifically in the context of a non friction-based system that this was such a big deal. It's clear now.
Thanks for the thorough information. How does this throwing off mass thing relate to electric cars? Do electric cars accelerate without loosing mass? If not, they must be loosing mass as the battery discharges, right? So how would this vacuum mobile be any different?
I have a feeling it's rooted largely in parents' insecurity over not being able to monitor them as closely on the computer as in real life, partially because they're less tech savvy (gross generalization, but the ones that it applies to are the ones I'm referring to), and partially just by the nature of computers and the Internet (how many of us are reading/posting at work right now, alt-tabbing away when someone walks by?). A paranoid parent can always go through their kids' closets and drawers and whatever, looking for drugs, guns, porn, &c., but how many parents know how to read their kids email or IM logs, access their Facebook account, read their files, or see where they've been online?
Note that I don't condone any of this behavior, but we all know there are parents who would do all of these things if they knew how. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this population of parents has heavy overlap with the population most interested/concerned with this report.
Personally, I don't think the "adult content" is the biggest problem. Immersion in a virtual world can be damaging to your sense of reality, parents (and children to whatever extent that's possible) need to be aware of it. Frankly, I'd be more worried that my kid wants to spend all his free time and all his money in a virtual world, then I would if he wanted to get off watching virtual sex.
Wouldn't changing the code at this point still be a violation of the GPL? They released a certain version containing GPLd code, they need to make/that/ version available, right?
Obviously there are plenty of other reasons it's likely to take a week to do anything at a megacompany like Microsoft.
I understand your sentiment: social web services like Facebook are about sharing information, if that's not what you want to do, don't use them. On the other hand, less tech-savvy folks are not always so keenly aware of the implications of such privacy issues.
There's something wrong here. You're the one paying attention to the
details in his post, so either you're the bullshitter, or you meant to
say that "not paying attention to detail is the first sign of a
bullshitter," in which case you weren't paying attention to your own
post and are once again...the bullshitter.
True enough. I hadn't considered a spiral, I assumed the hypothesis was based on the rocket spinning like a pinwheel, rather than like a football. Thanks for pointing that out.
Definitely the weirdest damn thing I've ever seen. Maybe I just haven't spent enough time around rockets...could that really be cause by one? The spiral looks too perfect for an out of control rocket.
The problem isn't bad hardware, it's bad software. The Chrome authors may be the best, brightest, leanest coders in the world, but if someone submits an extension that happens to scarf down your resources doing god knows what, even the best browser on the best hardware will come to crawl. The problem is only escalated when you have multiple extensions running. 5% of my memory may not be a big deal, but if each of 5 extensions eats that much, I'm down by a quarter! Not what I want from a browser.
But obviously, that's not the browser itself, it's the extensions, which each user decides for themselves whether or not to load. I just think it's kind of ignorant to think that extensions only affect performance if you have crappy hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing they probably ask if you're renting adult material. If the mother was outed by the movies she rented, she was probably renting adult material.
Good, now we're actually getting somewhere in this discussion (though, for the record, the fact you don't understand why something is unclear to me is irrelevant for the discourse).
I did (and do) understand that giving away IE for free was not what they were being charged with (or whatever the proper term is). However you make an excellent point that "Giving something away for free does not preclude you from behaving properly in the marketplace". I was not thinking along those lines, but you are absolutely right.
Out of curiosity, are there paid browsers with any semblance of a real market share? I understand that's also not the point, I'm just curious, all the browsers I've ever seen are free (as in beer).
Dad? Is that you?
It is a protest, what do you not understand about this? It is the same when you get people complaining about traffic by driving slow. Or cylists complaining about cars by driving in a huge pack in peak hour.
First of all, protesting traffic by driving slowly is also stupid, but for different reasons. Second, cyclists riding in a pack is not at all the same as this AT&T protest. They're trying to be disruptive to demonstrate, yes, but in that case they aren't protesting the idea that cyclists clog up traffic. With the AT&T protest, they're out to demonstrate exactly the point they're trying to protest. It's pointless.
How do you suggest the protest, by building extra infrastructure to improve ATT network, so they get better calls? Or maybe not using their phones, so they miss out on business and personal calls? Genius, bloody genius.
Don't straw man me, those are your ideas, not mine.
When you protest you have a limited number of things you can do. DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT COMPLICATED CONCEPT??
That's small minded. When you protest, there are an infinite number of things you can do. How do I suggest they protest? I suggest they stop being such little dinks and have a real protest. Picket the AT&T offices; have a real flash mob; challenge AT&T to some public discourse, make them prove that smart phones are really responsible. They could do it Abbie Hoffman style with dramatic street theater to disrupt and inform. They could do it ELF style and physically attack the network which would be at least as disruptive as the proposed tactic without proving the point that smart phones are the problem. Or, gee, I don't know, they might also consider the fact that any given communications network can only handle so much information at a time, and that maybe, just maybe mind you, excessive smart phone use really is causing the problems.
This is punishment for monopolistic practices.
Yes, thank you for summarizing: that was quite well established in the original post. I was not asking the reason these actions are being taken, just calling into question the legitimacy of them.
Its mentality like yours that allowed the DoJ to let MS off with a warning instead of sundering the company.
That's a thought terminating cliche and an appeal to ridicule; both are logical fallacies meaning you've failed to actually address my point. In fact, even as an appeal to ridicule it fails because that ridicule is requisite upon the fact that the DoJ should not have let them off with a warning, which is an extension of the very point under contention. So congratulations, that was epic.
This was obviously a pretty big over reaction to what was apparently just a thoughtless casual comment. But frankly, I say give her (the student) a night in jail as punishment for being so stupid. How do people not get this by now: you can't say shit like that anymore. Whether it's reasonable or not, it's reality; people are scared, people are paranoid, people overreact. Facebook is, for all intents and purposes, a public forum without any benefit of audible tone or social context. If it can be misconstrued, it will be. I think people need to get in the habit of reading themselves the Miranda warning before they post to the web: "You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say or do can and will be used against you in a court of law"
I hate IE as much as the next guy, and have no love for MS in general, but I don't see what the big deal is?
Then go read an article on antitrust law so you understand what the big deal is. I mean is your ignorance supposed to be some sort of badge of honor or something here?
No is your "Anonymous Coward"? You seem to be struggling with my colloquialism, so let me explain what I meant when I said "I don't see what the big deal is". This is a somewhat polite way of saying that I don't think it's a big deal, while still leaving the door open for someone to change my mind.
You don't understand how the capitalist free market motivates innovation? You don't understand how monopoly abuse undermines that motivation? Have you considered educating yourself?
I think I understand quite well how competition can motivate innovation. I understand that capitalist theory claims that a free market will produce lots of competition, and I understand how monopolies necessarily undermine competition. One thing I don't understand is how one might reconcile this sort of government intervention with the free market. I mean don't half-ass it, if you're going to be a free-market advocate, you really need to just accept whatever the invisible hand deals out, monopolies and all (Adam Smith, be damned).
But I digress, because that's not actually what I was referring to. I understand why a monopoly is a big deal and (not being a free market advocate, I feel comfortable saying this) I encourage a certain amount of government regulation against them. What I was actually referring to was this specific issue of internet explorer being bundled with Windows. That specifically is what (to be clear) I don't think is a big deal (at least not at the time of my first posting, I've since been somewhat swayed by the likes of flabordec and AntiDragon, below).
Why wouldn't they integrate their own browser with their own operating system?
Because it undermines capitalism and the free market and leads to retardation of innovation. In short, monopoly abuse is bad for society.
See above.
They don't even charge for IE, so how can it be a monopoly issue?
And I didn't steal the guy's wallet so how can it be assault? Seriously, you need to know what you're talking about before espousing your opinions.
Terrible metaphor. Here, I fixed it for you: "There was no money in his wallet, so how is it theft?" Ah! Now I get it, good point! You're right, the fact that there was no money directly involved is irrelevant to the monopoly charges. Thanks for pointing that out.
I must be missing something. Are they going to have include the option of installing crimson editor instead of notepad?
That would be of great benefit, yes. Sadly no one has taken them to court over that yet, so we're stuck with a broken text editor that can't properly handle unicode and the rest of the text editors in the world have to have extra code to work around broken documents from notepad.
Are you joking with me at this point, I can't tell? Are you seriously advocating that an anti-trust court should force them to include text-editor alternatives as well? You just RAA'd yourself: where does it stop? Do they have to include alternatives to every piece of software packaged with their OS? Alternatives to the OS itself?
They don't stop you from installing other browsers, so who cares?
People who make a living writing Web browsers for one. Secondly, anyone who cares about innovation and the state of the art on the Web moving forward at the pace normally promoted by free market competition.
Grandma's stuck with IE because she doesn't know how to install Firefox herself. Then
Sorry for giving you a headache...but thank you for the explanation (likewise to flabordec).
I definitely understand the significance of Internet Explorer's massive market share, having done a bit of web development myself over the years, and I can certainly see how it's a self-reinforcing cycle of users beget developers, beget more users...
At face value, it still seems odd to me, per my original car metaphor. In the context of a "monopoly on the...direction of the web", the decision makes much more sense.
I really want to reiterate the point of your first case, because I haven't heard enough people catching on to this: AT&T is blaming network issues on what they consider to be the high bandwidth that smart phones use. To protest this, smart phone users are going to try to bring down the network by hogging as much bandwidth as possible. With their smart phones.
Just wanted to make sure everyone understood exactly what's going on here...
This is great! Now all the users that really wanted a different browser finally will be able to get one!
Sarcasm? Why would a user who really wants a different browser not be able to have one before now?
Interesting point, but FF is open source, and Mozilla is non-profit. It seems to me that most of IE's issues are profit based, in particular as a result of Microsoft's infamous EEE strategy. I think we stand a good chance of not facing these same issues from firefox for the above given reasons. (Of course, it may have it's own laundry list of outstanding issues).
Sorry, I don't follow.
I hate IE as much as the next guy, and have no love for MS in general, but I don't see what the big deal is? Why wouldn't they integrate their own browser with their own operating system? They don't even charge for IE, so how can it be a monopoly issue? I must be missing something. Are they going to have include the option of installing crimson editor instead of notepad? How about BB4Win instead of explorer.exe? They don't stop you from installing other browsers, so who cares? Grandma's stuck with IE because she doesn't know how to install Firefox herself. Then she probably wouldn't notice the difference either.
Thanks, Nate! I couldn't for the life of me figure out how my car made it to work every morning, let alone what those ugly round bits were.
Seriously though, thanks for clarifying. I kept hearing about propulsion without mass-loss like it was some kind of yet-to-be-achieved holy grail; I didn't make the connection that it was specifically in the context of a non friction-based system that this was such a big deal. It's clear now.
Thanks for the thorough information. How does this throwing off mass thing relate to electric cars? Do electric cars accelerate without loosing mass? If not, they must be loosing mass as the battery discharges, right? So how would this vacuum mobile be any different?
I have a feeling it's rooted largely in parents' insecurity over not being able to monitor them as closely on the computer as in real life, partially because they're less tech savvy (gross generalization, but the ones that it applies to are the ones I'm referring to), and partially just by the nature of computers and the Internet (how many of us are reading/posting at work right now, alt-tabbing away when someone walks by?). A paranoid parent can always go through their kids' closets and drawers and whatever, looking for drugs, guns, porn, &c., but how many parents know how to read their kids email or IM logs, access their Facebook account, read their files, or see where they've been online?
Note that I don't condone any of this behavior, but we all know there are parents who would do all of these things if they knew how. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this population of parents has heavy overlap with the population most interested/concerned with this report.
Personally, I don't think the "adult content" is the biggest problem. Immersion in a virtual world can be damaging to your sense of reality, parents (and children to whatever extent that's possible) need to be aware of it. Frankly, I'd be more worried that my kid wants to spend all his free time and all his money in a virtual world, then I would if he wanted to get off watching virtual sex.
Wouldn't changing the code at this point still be a violation of the GPL? They released a certain version containing GPLd code, they need to make /that/ version available, right?
Obviously there are plenty of other reasons it's likely to take a week to do anything at a megacompany like Microsoft.
I understand your sentiment: social web services like Facebook are about sharing information, if that's not what you want to do, don't use them. On the other hand, less tech-savvy folks are not always so keenly aware of the implications of such privacy issues.
Digg? Sorry, I'm not really into Pokemon.
I blame Mrs. Roberts.
There's something wrong here. You're the one paying attention to the details in his post, so either you're the bullshitter, or you meant to say that "not paying attention to detail is the first sign of a bullshitter," in which case you weren't paying attention to your own post and are once again...the bullshitter.
True enough. I hadn't considered a spiral, I assumed the hypothesis was based on the rocket spinning like a pinwheel, rather than like a football. Thanks for pointing that out.
Definitely the weirdest damn thing I've ever seen. Maybe I just haven't spent enough time around rockets...could that really be cause by one? The spiral looks too perfect for an out of control rocket.
The problem isn't bad hardware, it's bad software. The Chrome authors may be the best, brightest, leanest coders in the world, but if someone submits an extension that happens to scarf down your resources doing god knows what, even the best browser on the best hardware will come to crawl. The problem is only escalated when you have multiple extensions running. 5% of my memory may not be a big deal, but if each of 5 extensions eats that much, I'm down by a quarter! Not what I want from a browser.
But obviously, that's not the browser itself, it's the extensions, which each user decides for themselves whether or not to load. I just think it's kind of ignorant to think that extensions only affect performance if you have crappy hardware.