I don't see how the DMCA is even relevant when it sounds like what they're going after is people sharing movies (although it does appear on second thought to be related mostly in how it puts some teeth into sending a letter to the ISP, but that's not fundamental in my mind). It's one thing to have rules against things like DeCSS which is a tool, one that allows a user to act within both ethical and (previous) legal boundaries-- providing for the ability to use one's DVDs in a manner not provided for in existing hardware or software perhaps. But when has it ever been ethical or legal to share a complete copy of a movie?
And yes, I'm aware that there is a Fair Use clause, but it does not allow third parties to completely independently to provide me with a "backup copy" of something I own unless (maybe) they do it by acting on the original copy I do own. The situation on Gnutella is analogous to me setting a streetcorner stand with CD-writers and a large collection of CDs, then strangers can come by and make a copy of any CD they want, provided they bring a blank CD-R along. Whether they have their own copy of the CD is irrelevant to whether what I'm doing is legal or ethical.
On the other hand, if the entertainment industries seriously think Gnutella, DeCSS, or Napster are having any effect on their business, they really should guess again. In fact, it seems to be helping them. When I go looking for independent music, I rarely find it. Instead, I get in the habit of downloading their pop music (since it's free), but then I'm hooked so instead of saving my money for independent label CDs at a smaller record store, I just go plunk down my money at Sam Goody for some mainstream crud. I don't have the bandwidth to do movies, but I'm guessing it's the same with Gnutella and divx movies.
As soon as I started thinking about this and reading some of the other comments in this discussion I started thinking the same thing. It's enough work sorting out which buttons on button bars do what (especially if you have non-standard buttons-- and this only gets worse in Linux as opposed to Windows, where at least there seem to be some basic bars for the fundamentals like cut, paste, print, etc). Usually word-based menus are not too tough since they use language, which is highly expressive.
But to me the idea that I'm going to have to learn to right-button-left-drag, just to do the same thing as cmd-left-arrow or alt-left-arrow seems like a major waste of time. And is right-button-left-drag going to mean the same thing in Word, Excel, or Outlook? Can it even mean the same thing? If there is a page scroll gesture, will it be consistent? Do we really think the big software houses will accept the Opera standards across the board, thus making life easy for users?
Taco, maybe you could respond by giving Apple a lot less credit for a change. Just because they used some old Unix kernel as the basis for their new OS does not mean they are the good guys suddenly. First, they promised this OS for years, and have finally delivered a product that requires a person to upgrade for $100 to OS 9.something in order to run their "Classic" applications, then spend $100 on the new OS. Not to mention that the average Apple sold in the last few years is a DIMM or two short of the requisite 128mb of RAM. I priced upgrading my Rev. A iMac a week or two ago because of how everyone on Slashdot raves about OS X. I'm looking at probably $500 in software and memory just to make sure I don't lose a lot more than I gain. So apparently "Think Different" doesn't mean "Different" except in terms of "Make sure different people have the money in your wallet". For $500 I can buy a whole new Wintel box, and not have to worry which three peripherals have drivers, or install maintstream Linux if I want. Why should I help fund Apple's marketing department, let alone their legal team?
The posting that the CoS requested to have removed was in clear violation of of the (pre-DMCA) copyright law. The post was clearly a reproduction of the entire document without any attempt to comment on or otherwise discuss the piece.
If you'll recall, please, that Slashdot has actively participated in all kinds of progressive activity on this front without having "laid down like a sheep" (incidentally, do sheep even lay down, aren't they like cows and pretty much stand up all the time?).
Look at how Slashdot has handled DeCSS (I don't recall any links or even posts of code getting taken down where that is concerned) or the time Microsoft came after Slashdot for leaking MS trade secrets. Frankly, ad hominem style attacks such as yours are a bigger detriment to any "battle", since it wastes a lot of energy having people who are fundamentally on the same side fighting about who's more right than who. So take your own advice "do something or shut the hell up".
As a person who can see, I'm curious about this de vice. To my mind it looks completely inadequate... three little finger pad sized deals. I guess it's supposed to be an input-output device, but how about a similar device that is output only? That would be cool, imho-- especially if it were larger, like the size of a paperback book even.
Also, gotta love a technical company company that can't add. In the survey they have 15 "very goods" to 9 "goods" to get 24, but they say they got 25 good results.
Give up the anti-Nader nonsense will you? Here we have a country that out of millions of people can barely decide which of the royal families' sons they want to have as president. I mean the margin was what, 1%? The guy who got the most votes loses the election because a state like Florida has a margin of a few thousand votes for the other guy? The potential statistical error involved was greater than the difference in the votes!
Either this points up that America is a very conflicted country divided sharply into two very separate camps, or maybe its indicative that there are a few key issues which have been made into false dichotomies, when-- in fact-- most Americans are a little fuzzy on their stance, sitting on the fence, in the grey area, you know... centrist. They really don't know about the fundamental differences, because there aren't any.
We had a Democrat president for 8 years and he brought us Chinese spy scandals, sexual harrassment in the Oval Office, delivered on almost none of his promises to gays, racial profiling by police forces is the hot topic at the END of his term, pollution really hasn't changed, AIDS is on the rise again, the WTO, COPA, then CIPA, the DMCA, whose FTC allowed the AOL-Time merger, and I know we all got the sense that when his lawsuit situation wasn't looking so good he used a military action to divert our attention. Then his right-hand man runs for president and says nothing new. This guy who is married to one of the founders of the Parents' Music Resource Center, is a born-again Christian, chooses an extremely conservative Jew as a running mate, and mouths mostly the same platitudes as his opponent does. And you really want to pretend there's a difference?
With the exception of rescinding some overseas funding for abortions (a move a lot of Americans support) and maybe this Kyoto treaty thing (and recall it's not like we're breaking the treaty, the Democrat never agreed to it anyway) what has GW done that's so terribly conservative? How about appointing a halfway progressive gay man to head the AIDS office?
No, the two parties are not that different. They mostly say a whole lot of nothing and bow to public pressure (which is fairly unanimous... Americans, for all the diversity the culture could have, have basically settled for a land that is basically one big strip mall of the same ten stores) by finding fairly bland compromises on most divisive issues. So please, the reason Nader had to focus on swing states was precisely because that's where Gore went to try and sway people away from Nader. If Gore had focused his anti-Nader rhetoric in states where he had the election sewed up, then Nader probably wouldn't have been in places like FL asking for votes either. Instead Nader has to be there convincing people that they are not handing the election to Bush if they vote for Nader, he has to be there convincing them that two parties are not enough and that the sooner they stop voting for the lesser of two evils the sooner one of the evils will stop winning the election.
No. "Big Media" as you call it is not dictating what we can or cannot hear. They are simply refusing to speak to us over the internet because they have a contractual obligation to some union members which they don't feel is financially worthwhile. That is, the added expense is not equal to the marginal revenue from internet broadcasting. I have serious doubts that webcasts produce ANY revenues for regular broadcast stations. First they have to pay for some pretty good servers and bandwidth and software, then they have to find enough ears so that they can pitch this as a value to advertisers. Either they can make a revenues selling webcast-only ads targeted to the demographic of internet listeners (which I think would be a stretch, low quantity-- a problem exacerbated by the likely geographic displacement) or they can simply increase their usual ad rates saying that they are adding value by including webcast as part of the package (I'd say this is a hard sell and most advertisers would ask for some good analysis before they let this slide).
Now, as to what I can and cannot hear... "Big Media" has almost never given me something I wanted to hear, especially not over the radio. If this means I can't stream Britney Spears and Creedence Clearwater to my work-station at work, big deal. This is such a non-event. I mean, Clear Channel? I think we should be thankful they aren't polluting the net with their "music" anymore.
You honestly think a group of 1800 college IT departments is going to do something better than a single government agency? First, remember that a high percentage of this group will be state schools. Second, have you read some of the horror stories here in recent months about the Use Policies and the behavior of some of these instititutions? At least at the State schools the local state constitution has some bearing on their behavior but a private school...
Most porn companies bill through holding companies with halfway respectable sounding names, both offline and on. I have never been sure if this was because this helped them cook their books or because they honestly cared about how it looked on card statements. What I will say is that only the most brain-dead SO at this point (given all the free advertising, er, coverage Yahoo! has been getting on this) would NOT think of a $20 charge from Yahoo! as probably a smut purchase. I mean, other than dirty movies, I can't think of anything else they actually sell.
No one is "forced to protect its copyright". Copyright is inalienable during the term of the copyright. This, however, is a trademark, which does require protection if it is to maintain its legal status as a trademark-- which means nothing except that you can go around bashing people for using it to sell similar products. While there may be a Fair Use type of exception for trademarks, that would protect satire or parodies, it's really unnecessary. It's not like rec.humor.funny is selling credit cards with the MasterCard name on them, they are making jokes, which is not a competing commercial enterprise (unless you consider these cease & desist letters some sort of twisted joke, I guess).
I didn't mention Kent State or Ruby Ridge or Waco or even Seattle because they are not relevant to the notion that the Chinese government is not paying attention to the average Chinese citizen's concerns. I was simply responding to a single point in the parent post, not making some blanket pro-US statement.
It says as much in the story, but at 100 mpg that's not too shabby. I don't know what the average mpg is for a petrol-powered bike, but my old Honda Spree was very fuel efficient and only got 70 mph when I rode with the wind at my back.
What I don't understand is why there aren't more cars that run this, after all, the emissions sound like they'd be a lot cleaner than from petroleum fuel, and if the car is too noisy, well that might explain, but couldn't you muffle it?
Other interesting questions: could you run a power plant on stuff like this? Does it consume more energy to process the seeds into oils than the oils produce in an engine?
I guess what I find interesting is that Europe (while not a singular whole) does seem to have a much healthier attitude towards sex and sexual language and nudity, even in public. On the other hand, the German police are incredibly strict in enforcing anti-Nazi laws, they've even busted anti-Nazi punks whose propaganda wasn't clearly anit-Nazi enough for them (although I suspect this was a ruse to harrass punks, and not an actual instance of sensitivity on Germany's part). France, and several other countries have strict speech codes restricting pro-Nazi stuff. I'm completely anti-Nazi myself (it saddens me to see Americans getting into that shit), but I think as an important part of history, it should be considered legitimate to want to read books like "Mein Kampf" or to obtain or view relics and the like without restricting them to museums.
So when they say "Join the Linux revolution" and "free software movement", does this mean that all of the software on the machine is GPL or something similar, so that unlike Palm OS, when I want to change a built-in app I can (provided I have skillz)? I'm not finding a lot on their site that indicates one way or the other.
Add to this the fact that there was a lot of this stuff made before it was illegal to possess and you don't actually need any new children to be exploited for the internet to have a lot of it-- all you really need is some old photos and a scanner. And I have to wonder if there aren't some mighty large collections out there that were never found or destroyed. I mean, if they told you you had to erase DeCSS from your hard drive or toss out your copy of "Anarchist Cookbook" because they were illegal to even own, would you?
The music companies have just announced a joint venture to distribute tunes online. Doubt this hearing will result in much more than a hearing. Once the legal scribbling starts up on any type of "forced licensing" this sort of joint venture rules out the notion that the music companies are just being lazy.
Actually, compared to pre-X Mac OS (when it hasn't bombed), Windows is hard to use-- or maybe 12 years of steady Mac use can't be overcome in just four years of heavy Windows use. Just last week I read an excellent document that talked about usability in a GUI and most of the key points had been ignored in Windows. I know I often find it clunky. And unlike MS, Apple appears to have broken the mold and come out with another major advance in the interface environment. Working on Macs is very visually appealing and eye-to-hand intuitive. Working on Windows is not. imho.
Keeping in mind the early support for all major Adobe products on the Mac platform, I think there is still more behind the continued success of the Mac Graphical User Interface with the graphics crowd-- like the fact that it makes visual sense.
I love Linux and I am staunchly in favor of Free Software (unAmerican or not, I don't care, I'm an American and I'm in full favor of it, and I'm not about to let any zealot tell me what is "American" and what isn't). But if $100 can provide me that wonderful Mac OS on top of a real Unix backside, I'm sorely tempted. Especially since having the power of things like Perl and gcc give me the power to do all kinds of fun stuff as an individual, while relying on the group for the larger stuff.
As for Microsoft, they should pay attention to OS X and some of the things that Linux GUIs offer (for all the yammering about KDE and GNOME, I still like Enlightenment with gtk the best, and all E lacks is some support for cut & paste between applications-- oh and some applications). But MS applications are great, especially under Mac OS. I'd gladly run IE6.0 on Mac OS X. IE4.5 on Mac OS 8.6 is still my browser of choice if I'm in serious surf-mode.
Hmmm. That would be excellent actually. "Gee, boss, you could make sure you never get a disgruntled employee calling in to MS about your shady copying of proprietary software. It's easy. We'll install Linux."
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see how the DMCA is even relevant when it sounds like what they're going after is people sharing movies (although it does appear on second thought to be related mostly in how it puts some teeth into sending a letter to the ISP, but that's not fundamental in my mind). It's one thing to have rules against things like DeCSS which is a tool, one that allows a user to act within both ethical and (previous) legal boundaries-- providing for the ability to use one's DVDs in a manner not provided for in existing hardware or software perhaps. But when has it ever been ethical or legal to share a complete copy of a movie?
And yes, I'm aware that there is a Fair Use clause, but it does not allow third parties to completely independently to provide me with a "backup copy" of something I own unless (maybe) they do it by acting on the original copy I do own. The situation on Gnutella is analogous to me setting a streetcorner stand with CD-writers and a large collection of CDs, then strangers can come by and make a copy of any CD they want, provided they bring a blank CD-R along. Whether they have their own copy of the CD is irrelevant to whether what I'm doing is legal or ethical.
On the other hand, if the entertainment industries seriously think Gnutella, DeCSS, or Napster are having any effect on their business, they really should guess again. In fact, it seems to be helping them. When I go looking for independent music, I rarely find it. Instead, I get in the habit of downloading their pop music (since it's free), but then I'm hooked so instead of saving my money for independent label CDs at a smaller record store, I just go plunk down my money at Sam Goody for some mainstream crud. I don't have the bandwidth to do movies, but I'm guessing it's the same with Gnutella and divx movies.
As soon as I started thinking about this and reading some of the other comments in this discussion I started thinking the same thing. It's enough work sorting out which buttons on button bars do what (especially if you have non-standard buttons-- and this only gets worse in Linux as opposed to Windows, where at least there seem to be some basic bars for the fundamentals like cut, paste, print, etc). Usually word-based menus are not too tough since they use language, which is highly expressive.
But to me the idea that I'm going to have to learn to right-button-left-drag, just to do the same thing as cmd-left-arrow or alt-left-arrow seems like a major waste of time. And is right-button-left-drag going to mean the same thing in Word, Excel, or Outlook? Can it even mean the same thing? If there is a page scroll gesture, will it be consistent? Do we really think the big software houses will accept the Opera standards across the board, thus making life easy for users?
That was not clear to me at all. So at least there's $100 saved. Now tell me it will work passably with 96mb and I may just give up this rant. :)
Taco, maybe you could respond by giving Apple a lot less credit for a change. Just because they used some old Unix kernel as the basis for their new OS does not mean they are the good guys suddenly. First, they promised this OS for years, and have finally delivered a product that requires a person to upgrade for $100 to OS 9.something in order to run their "Classic" applications, then spend $100 on the new OS. Not to mention that the average Apple sold in the last few years is a DIMM or two short of the requisite 128mb of RAM. I priced upgrading my Rev. A iMac a week or two ago because of how everyone on Slashdot raves about OS X. I'm looking at probably $500 in software and memory just to make sure I don't lose a lot more than I gain. So apparently "Think Different" doesn't mean "Different" except in terms of "Make sure different people have the money in your wallet". For $500 I can buy a whole new Wintel box, and not have to worry which three peripherals have drivers, or install maintstream Linux if I want. Why should I help fund Apple's marketing department, let alone their legal team?
Grow up. I mean, really. Please.
The posting that the CoS requested to have removed was in clear violation of of the (pre-DMCA) copyright law. The post was clearly a reproduction of the entire document without any attempt to comment on or otherwise discuss the piece.
If you'll recall, please, that Slashdot has actively participated in all kinds of progressive activity on this front without having "laid down like a sheep" (incidentally, do sheep even lay down, aren't they like cows and pretty much stand up all the time?).
Look at how Slashdot has handled DeCSS (I don't recall any links or even posts of code getting taken down where that is concerned) or the time Microsoft came after Slashdot for leaking MS trade secrets. Frankly, ad hominem style attacks such as yours are a bigger detriment to any "battle", since it wastes a lot of energy having people who are fundamentally on the same side fighting about who's more right than who. So take your own advice "do something or shut the hell up".
Obviously this is a troll, but I can't help asking, "What about IBM's 'Peace, Love, and Linux' campaign?"
As a person who can see, I'm curious about this de vice. To my mind it looks completely inadequate... three little finger pad sized deals. I guess it's supposed to be an input-output device, but how about a similar device that is output only? That would be cool, imho-- especially if it were larger, like the size of a paperback book even.
Also, gotta love a technical company company that can't add. In the survey they have 15 "very goods" to 9 "goods" to get 24, but they say they got 25 good results.
No no no no. When he/she says "boycott" he/she means the FBI, not Amtrak! I mean, how many police forces does one nation need, anyway?
Give up the anti-Nader nonsense will you? Here we have a country that out of millions of people can barely decide which of the royal families' sons they want to have as president. I mean the margin was what, 1%? The guy who got the most votes loses the election because a state like Florida has a margin of a few thousand votes for the other guy? The potential statistical error involved was greater than the difference in the votes!
Either this points up that America is a very conflicted country divided sharply into two very separate camps, or maybe its indicative that there are a few key issues which have been made into false dichotomies, when-- in fact-- most Americans are a little fuzzy on their stance, sitting on the fence, in the grey area, you know... centrist. They really don't know about the fundamental differences, because there aren't any.
We had a Democrat president for 8 years and he brought us Chinese spy scandals, sexual harrassment in the Oval Office, delivered on almost none of his promises to gays, racial profiling by police forces is the hot topic at the END of his term, pollution really hasn't changed, AIDS is on the rise again, the WTO, COPA, then CIPA, the DMCA, whose FTC allowed the AOL-Time merger, and I know we all got the sense that when his lawsuit situation wasn't looking so good he used a military action to divert our attention. Then his right-hand man runs for president and says nothing new. This guy who is married to one of the founders of the Parents' Music Resource Center, is a born-again Christian, chooses an extremely conservative Jew as a running mate, and mouths mostly the same platitudes as his opponent does. And you really want to pretend there's a difference?
With the exception of rescinding some overseas funding for abortions (a move a lot of Americans support) and maybe this Kyoto treaty thing (and recall it's not like we're breaking the treaty, the Democrat never agreed to it anyway) what has GW done that's so terribly conservative? How about appointing a halfway progressive gay man to head the AIDS office?
No, the two parties are not that different. They mostly say a whole lot of nothing and bow to public pressure (which is fairly unanimous... Americans, for all the diversity the culture could have, have basically settled for a land that is basically one big strip mall of the same ten stores) by finding fairly bland compromises on most divisive issues. So please, the reason Nader had to focus on swing states was precisely because that's where Gore went to try and sway people away from Nader. If Gore had focused his anti-Nader rhetoric in states where he had the election sewed up, then Nader probably wouldn't have been in places like FL asking for votes either. Instead Nader has to be there convincing people that they are not handing the election to Bush if they vote for Nader, he has to be there convincing them that two parties are not enough and that the sooner they stop voting for the lesser of two evils the sooner one of the evils will stop winning the election.
Note: I didn't vote for Nader, Bush, or Gore.
No. "Big Media" as you call it is not dictating what we can or cannot hear. They are simply refusing to speak to us over the internet because they have a contractual obligation to some union members which they don't feel is financially worthwhile. That is, the added expense is not equal to the marginal revenue from internet broadcasting. I have serious doubts that webcasts produce ANY revenues for regular broadcast stations. First they have to pay for some pretty good servers and bandwidth and software, then they have to find enough ears so that they can pitch this as a value to advertisers. Either they can make a revenues selling webcast-only ads targeted to the demographic of internet listeners (which I think would be a stretch, low quantity-- a problem exacerbated by the likely geographic displacement) or they can simply increase their usual ad rates saying that they are adding value by including webcast as part of the package (I'd say this is a hard sell and most advertisers would ask for some good analysis before they let this slide).
Now, as to what I can and cannot hear... "Big Media" has almost never given me something I wanted to hear, especially not over the radio. If this means I can't stream Britney Spears and Creedence Clearwater to my work-station at work, big deal. This is such a non-event. I mean, Clear Channel? I think we should be thankful they aren't polluting the net with their "music" anymore.
You honestly think a group of 1800 college IT departments is going to do something better than a single government agency? First, remember that a high percentage of this group will be state schools. Second, have you read some of the horror stories here in recent months about the Use Policies and the behavior of some of these instititutions? At least at the State schools the local state constitution has some bearing on their behavior but a private school...
Looks to me like the new model is a module of some sort. So the answer is: both.
Most porn companies bill through holding companies with halfway respectable sounding names, both offline and on. I have never been sure if this was because this helped them cook their books or because they honestly cared about how it looked on card statements. What I will say is that only the most brain-dead SO at this point (given all the free advertising, er, coverage Yahoo! has been getting on this) would NOT think of a $20 charge from Yahoo! as probably a smut purchase. I mean, other than dirty movies, I can't think of anything else they actually sell.
#include
No one is "forced to protect its copyright". Copyright is inalienable during the term of the copyright. This, however, is a trademark, which does require protection if it is to maintain its legal status as a trademark-- which means nothing except that you can go around bashing people for using it to sell similar products. While there may be a Fair Use type of exception for trademarks, that would protect satire or parodies, it's really unnecessary. It's not like rec.humor.funny is selling credit cards with the MasterCard name on them, they are making jokes, which is not a competing commercial enterprise (unless you consider these cease & desist letters some sort of twisted joke, I guess).
I didn't mention Kent State or Ruby Ridge or Waco or even Seattle because they are not relevant to the notion that the Chinese government is not paying attention to the average Chinese citizen's concerns. I was simply responding to a single point in the parent post, not making some blanket pro-US statement.
Look at it from the average Chinese person's point of view
Would that be the view before or after the tank rolls over the top of you for participating in a pro-democracy rally?
It says as much in the story, but at 100 mpg that's not too shabby. I don't know what the average mpg is for a petrol-powered bike, but my old Honda Spree was very fuel efficient and only got 70 mph when I rode with the wind at my back.
What I don't understand is why there aren't more cars that run this, after all, the emissions sound like they'd be a lot cleaner than from petroleum fuel, and if the car is too noisy, well that might explain, but couldn't you muffle it?
Other interesting questions: could you run a power plant on stuff like this? Does it consume more energy to process the seeds into oils than the oils produce in an engine?
I guess what I find interesting is that Europe (while not a singular whole) does seem to have a much healthier attitude towards sex and sexual language and nudity, even in public. On the other hand, the German police are incredibly strict in enforcing anti-Nazi laws, they've even busted anti-Nazi punks whose propaganda wasn't clearly anit-Nazi enough for them (although I suspect this was a ruse to harrass punks, and not an actual instance of sensitivity on Germany's part). France, and several other countries have strict speech codes restricting pro-Nazi stuff. I'm completely anti-Nazi myself (it saddens me to see Americans getting into that shit), but I think as an important part of history, it should be considered legitimate to want to read books like "Mein Kampf" or to obtain or view relics and the like without restricting them to museums.
Awesome link. thanks.
So when they say "Join the Linux revolution" and "free software movement", does this mean that all of the software on the machine is GPL or something similar, so that unlike Palm OS, when I want to change a built-in app I can (provided I have skillz)? I'm not finding a lot on their site that indicates one way or the other.
Add to this the fact that there was a lot of this stuff made before it was illegal to possess and you don't actually need any new children to be exploited for the internet to have a lot of it-- all you really need is some old photos and a scanner. And I have to wonder if there aren't some mighty large collections out there that were never found or destroyed. I mean, if they told you you had to erase DeCSS from your hard drive or toss out your copy of "Anarchist Cookbook" because they were illegal to even own, would you?
The music companies have just announced a joint venture to distribute tunes online. Doubt this hearing will result in much more than a hearing. Once the legal scribbling starts up on any type of "forced licensing" this sort of joint venture rules out the notion that the music companies are just being lazy.
Actually, compared to pre-X Mac OS (when it hasn't bombed), Windows is hard to use-- or maybe 12 years of steady Mac use can't be overcome in just four years of heavy Windows use. Just last week I read an excellent document that talked about usability in a GUI and most of the key points had been ignored in Windows. I know I often find it clunky. And unlike MS, Apple appears to have broken the mold and come out with another major advance in the interface environment. Working on Macs is very visually appealing and eye-to-hand intuitive. Working on Windows is not. imho.
Keeping in mind the early support for all major Adobe products on the Mac platform, I think there is still more behind the continued success of the Mac Graphical User Interface with the graphics crowd-- like the fact that it makes visual sense.
I love Linux and I am staunchly in favor of Free Software (unAmerican or not, I don't care, I'm an American and I'm in full favor of it, and I'm not about to let any zealot tell me what is "American" and what isn't). But if $100 can provide me that wonderful Mac OS on top of a real Unix backside, I'm sorely tempted. Especially since having the power of things like Perl and gcc give me the power to do all kinds of fun stuff as an individual, while relying on the group for the larger stuff.
As for Microsoft, they should pay attention to OS X and some of the things that Linux GUIs offer (for all the yammering about KDE and GNOME, I still like Enlightenment with gtk the best, and all E lacks is some support for cut & paste between applications-- oh and some applications). But MS applications are great, especially under Mac OS. I'd gladly run IE6.0 on Mac OS X. IE4.5 on Mac OS 8.6 is still my browser of choice if I'm in serious surf-mode.
That's not exactly true... Here is more information at Snopes.
Hmmm. That would be excellent actually. "Gee, boss, you could make sure you never get a disgruntled employee calling in to MS about your shady copying of proprietary software. It's easy. We'll install Linux."