Well, it isn't a fault with the program if people don't adhere to it. That's something for psychologists.
I'm a big proponent of life-extension...but 1000 years is quite aggressive, and something that may very well take 1000 years to accomplish. In caveman days, the average lifespan was -- what -- 30 years old? Or maybe that was the maximum, being generous. I forget. Now, the average lifespan is 78 years old, lets say 80. So over tens of thousands of years, technological progress has increased lifespan by 2.7 times.
Given that the most promising research to-date on life-extension (resveratrol and caloric restriction) can produce about a 40% increase in maximum lifespan at best, how do you estimate that we can achieve a lifespan of 1,000 years (about a 10-fold increase in current maximum lifespans)?
Well, keep in mind that the size/safety argument is relative. How safe would that 3000 lb vehicle be if it was hit by a tank?;-)
Granted, I get the point; most cars in the US are a certain size. Cars significantly smaller than that are in danger of being flung around like a hockey puck if hit by those bigger cars.
However, the flip-side is that a small car like this is likely to be more maneuverable, and more able to squeeze into tight space; hence, easier to avoid being hit in the first place...right?
Because "picking berries" isn't homesteading or transforming in a significant way; it treating that thing as a condition of nature, rather than as something that the person can control and bend to his will. Unless you do something to the berry-bush to actively encourage it to grow more berries, you haven't homesteaded by bush simply by picking berries; all you've homesteaded is the berries you picked.
And there's nothing wrong with "parasitic speculators", provided they actually homestead property in some way for possible future use, or buy it from previous homesteaders (of course, simply declaring it their's isn't legitimate). Speculators take on risk that the property may turn out to be worthless. They, in fact, do a lot of good. Consider if speculators think there will be a famine; what would they do? They would stock up on various dry foods that can be preserved before the famine, bidding up the price of food before the famine (hence, encouraging people to economize on it). If they end up being right, and there is a famine, they then sell it at significant profit, but their selling of it acts to increase the supply of such, and actually lower prices (yes, they sell it for a profit, but the price of said food would be even higher during famine without speculators who forecasted the famine). Hence, they act to inter-temporally smooth out supply of goods. If they forecast wisely, they are rewarded; if poorly, they incur losses.
Again, you are thinking in socialist terms. The issue is that for any given individual, when there is no private property in something, they reap no benefit from restraint; because they realize that everyone else is thinking the same thing, that if they hold back, others will raid it.
Not to mention, it is total bullshit to say that there is "no change" that is unequivocally an improvement. A person transforming land is obviously transforming it for the better, for their purposes...and most likely the purposes of anyone else too. And to say that the improvements aren't a significant proportion of the value of the underlying land is non-sense. Prior to farming, for example, land can't produce nearly as much food.
It doesn't matter that you didn't "create" the underlying land; you're the first one to homestead it, hence legitimate claim to it. You also didn't "create" your body (your parents did); of course that doesn't mean you don't own yourself, or that your parents own you.
If we never homesteaded any land and exercised property rights in it, we would not have civilization as we now know it; we would have various tribes, nomads roaming across vast swaths of land to find enough food to sustain themselves.
The Spanish "Anarchists" tried your bullshit idea...they executed all of the rulers, and chased those greedy evil capitalist pigs out of Spain. And ya know what happened after they got rid of all the evil capitalist overlords? People wanted to own property, their own property, and land too. Imagine that. So they had to force "anarchist" socialism or syndicalism on them. Go figure.
Absent coercion, in a society that eliminates centralized forms of aggression and theft (e.g., the State), people naturally want to own property, including land. See Ancient Iceland and Ireland.
The tragedy of the commons IS the result of logical rational behavior. When an individual is faced only with the reward of reaping the current value of a piece of land, and doesn't face the cost, because he can't make use of the capital value of that land, it is rational for him to expropriate without thought of the future.
The problem isn't "rich pricks". Don't be a commie. The problem is that the government just declares they own a bunch of crap, with no objective connection to it -- I mean, anyone can do that -- and then sells it to favored denizens. This doesn't establish legitimate ownership.
What establishes legitimate ownership is actually homesteading and transforming land.
Prior to appropriation (homesteading) of property, it wasn't "owned" by the community at large, unless they had actually worked the land. Walking over it and maybe picking berries once in a while doesn't count. At most, if some group of people have been walking a path, they have an easement right, but not a property rights in it.
But when some smart individual decides to stop living off of what nature gives him, and grow his own food, he clears an area, plants crop, tends to it, grows it. And that plot of land, along with all its produce, is rightfully his property. So what if it was available to all before? They didn't homestead it.
It is only by swallowing the biggest load of a socialist bullshit-sandwich, that you can claim that someone who homesteads land, a "thief".
Such arrogance. If someone goes up to the moon, or where-ever, and homesteads a plot of land by transforming it, then they own it. Period. This is the only legitimate way that unowned things can come to be owned. Not by legislative decree. I can make a lot of decrees too, so what.
Damage to your property. Violation of your property rights.
What do you mean, "would would you sue for"? What would the family of Nicole Brown sue OJ Simpson for?
All crimes against individuals can be properly conceived of as torts against them, for which they are owed restitution by the aggressor. This is actually the preferable way to deal with crimes -- victim-focused, providing compensation to the victims first -- rather than "punishment first" (whereby the victims pay taxes to feed and house their aggressor).
Yea, I'm sure their lawyer is just full of BS, right?
And in any event, you are apparently completely unware of the difference between natural law, which I was talking about, and positive law (i.e., fiat law, legislation, or declarations made by men in the State).
And there is absolutely no just reason why the burden falls on me to erect a "barrier" to entrance of my private property to keep others off of it. All I need do is inform them in some way that I don't want them there. A sign would do, or even a piece of tape between two metal posts. In other words, all I ought to have to do is make it clear that the property is private to keep others out. Now, a driveway may be reasonably perceived of as an invitation to enter for limited purposes. Then again, the sign "private road" arguably implies that they don't want anyone coming down it (after all, most people don't post a sign saying "private property" on their yard, and those signs do typically accompany "no trespassing signs").
Your argument essentially is an "opt out" that puts an unjust burden on the private property owner. An analogy to your argument would be as follows:
"A woman lying naked on a beach is an invitation to enter. To legally bar access to any dick walking byt, she as to erect barriers to entry and/or clearly post 'no f-ing me' signs."
No, the correct way to look at it is that if she's lying on a beach naked, the default presumption -- which places no unjust positive obligation on her -- is that she doesn't want any dick that comes along to be inside of her. If she writes "f-me please" on her body, then that's an invitation to any passerby.
I am talking about natural law, not positive (fiat) law by whim. The State doesn't get to legislate away natural rights, anymore than I do. It simply has the power to violate them, and write crap on pieces of paper saying that it's going to.
An example: The Jews in concentration camps at WWII still had a right to life, because of natural law. It's just that the Nazi' were violating that right. They were hence criminals (and not because the "international community" decided to put them on trial afterwards). Even though they wrote a bunch of stuff on paper (fiat decrees) to say they could and would do that.
That case was hence a confusing and unfortunate byproduct of the fact that we have the oxymoron called "public property". None-the-less, it is still based on physical enclosure, and of course the fact that we pay taxes for public property. In other words, it is a reasonable countermeasure to the unwarranted and unjust power that the State wields. But if you're in my house, using my telephone to make a phone call, you don't have a right to "privacy" from me.
I was going to respond that this suit is BS, since no-one has a right to "privacy" per se, just to private property. But since it is a private road that they had to drive down, it's really more like a long drive-way with "sub-driveways" off the sides. Hence, Google had no right to be there to take the photographs in the first place.
On the other hand, that assumes they didn't go somewhere on the other side, and use a telephoto lens. This should be easily discernable from the photograph (depending on how much of the background is in focus and the perspective).
They did say their problem was that Google had to trespass to have taken the photos as they appeared. However, they unfortunately phrase it in terms of "privacy violation". There is no such thing as the "right to privacy", per se. It is merely a right derived from private property, or self-ownership in some cases (e.g., for someone wearing clothes, no-one would have the right to come by and rip them off to "get a picture of what's underneath"; but this isn't because of privacy "rights", it is because of their right to their body and property).
Thus, the proper way to phrase it is that their private property rights were violated -- Google trespassed. As a result, their reasonable expectation to a certain measure of privacy, due to their property configuration, was not fulfilled. Hence, the damages they are asking for.
LOL, great post & analogy. Yea, if only we didn't wear out.
Thanks for the more detailed analysis of how MTBF is calculated (and how burn-in failures are ignored -- shouldn't that also be something that they report?). So it seems like this calc is just enough to get beyond burn-in duds or DOA, and into maybe the "mid-life" of the HD, but not into the burn-out phase. Although with 3 or 5 years being burn-out, that would be impractical to calculate. Albeit, they could provide an estimate based on reported burnouts (StorageReview.com) of their similar HDs manufactured with similar processes.
The best metric is probably going to be the length of warranty the manufacturer offers. They have financial incentive to find out the REAL mean time until failure in calculating the warranty. They do provide "real" MTBF numbers. It's just MTBF isn't for what you think it's for. See my post explaining this.
I think that a lot of people are mis-understanding MTBF. A HD might have a MTBF of 100 years. This doesn't mean that the company expects the vast majority of consumers to have that HD running for 100 years without problems.
MTBF numbers are generated by running say thousands of hard-drives of the same model and batch/lot, and seeing how long it takes before 1 fails. This may be a day or so. You then figure out how many total HD running hours it took before failure. If you have 1,000 HD's running, and it takes 40 hours before one fails, that's a 40,000 hr MTBF. But this number isn't generated by running say 10 hard-drives, waiting for all of them to fail, and averaging that number.
Thus, because of the way MTBF numbers are generated, they may or may not reflect hard-drive reliability beyond a few weeks. It depends on our assumptions about hard-drive stress and usage beyond the length of time before the 1st HD of the 1,000 or so they were testing failed. Most likely, it says less and less about hard-drive reliability beyond that initial point of failure (which is on the order of tens or hundreds of hours, not hundreds of thousands of hours or millions of hours!).
To be sure, all-else equal, a higher MTBF is better than a lower one. But as far as I'm concerned, those numbers are more useful for predicting DOA, duds, or quick-failure; and are more useful to professionals who might be employing large arrays of HD's. They are not particularly useful for getting a good idea of how long your HD will actually last.
HD manufacturers also publish an expected life-cycle of their HD. But I usually put the most stock in the length of the warranty. That's what they're willing to put their money behind. Albeit, it's possible their strategy is just to warranty less than how long they expect 90% of HD's to last, so they can then sell them cheaper. But if you've had a HD and you've had it for longer than what the manufacturer publishes as the expected-life, what they're saying by that is you've basically got a good value, and will probably want to have something else on hand, and be backed up.
In other words, people are rank stinking hypocrites and childish. Let me explain. It appears that those complaining want 3 things:
1. Millions of free (as in gratis) web-pages and free services like Google.
2. If they have to deal with advertisements at all, they want ones that are relatively unobtrusive and aren't irrelevant to them.
3. They don't want anyone gathering anonymous information on their viewing habits.
Hmm...well, basically all of those 3 things together are impossible, unless people throw a tantrum and childishly expect *everyone* to give them stuff for free, at their expense, with no way to make money from it. It is hypocritical to ask for contradictory things, and to ask things of others that you yourself wouldn't do. You don't see these whiners going to their job and working there for free, do you? Furthermore, I bet if Google offered an "ad-free" version of their website for paying users, there would be very very few people who would be willing to pay even 1 extra cent for that. Although they would switch to an identical non-profit equivalent to Google that didn't have ads (if such a thing existed or could exist, which it doesn't and can't).
And if it really bothered them, they'd get add-blockers. Most of them do have popup blockers. And as far as I can tell, popup blockers work pretty well. I haven't had many problems with popups in Firefox and Safari.
In any event, I really can't get over how this sounds like childish whining. How else do they expect the companies that provide various online services for free to make money, if not from effective advertising, which requires some information-gathering on the target-audience. Guess what, there is no such thing as the "right to privacy"; that's just sometimes something that you have by default in certain circumstances, as a derivation from your other rights (like property). But if you tell someone some embarrassing secret about yourself, they're free to go and spread it to the world. Likewise, people can and do walk around collecting data on random people walking down the street.
No, you're wrong! Apple invented everything good and pure in the OS world. They invented the GUI, not Xerox. And they invented computer cases with front vents to provide for better cooling, not companies in the server market, or even (gasp!) Gateway in 2001 with their old computers. Apple also invented hot-swapping -- err, no, it's called slide-in storage. Apple invented memory riser cards. Apple invented columnar file-browsing. And Apple invented the dock. It's all about Apple, Apple, Apple.;-)
To move from (a) the fact that OOXML is not a standard, or if you want to call it one, a crappy standard that only a person who is biased, malevolent, or moronic could recommend; to (b) that MS should be broken up; is a non-sequitar.
We don't have the right to good standards. Yes, we want good standards, just like we want good things in everything we have. But we don't have the right to good standards regarding document formats. This is because we don't have the right to have documents, word-processors, or computers to begin with. We obtain those things through mutually beneficial trades, using our money. If we don't think what is being offered for our money (e.g., MS Office) is worth it, we can walk away from the proposed deal. But we have no right to force Microsoft to change their offer to be more appealing to us.
If you want to create a world with better software and better standards, you have several justifiable options: (a) Educate consumers; (b) Oppose patent laws, the DMCA, and other laws relating to such that result in artificial government-created monopolies over various things. If you're response to the fact that there are numerous laws in existence which give unjustified advantages to say Microsoft over it's competitors, by using the threat of aggression to prevent competition (e.g., patent laws), is to argue for more artificial government laws to deal with the problem created by those laws to begin with, then you'll never get anywhere. As Ludwig von Mises said, interventionism leads to more interventionism.
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Well, it isn't a fault with the program if people don't adhere to it. That's something for psychologists.
I'm a big proponent of life-extension...but 1000 years is quite aggressive, and something that may very well take 1000 years to accomplish. In caveman days, the average lifespan was -- what -- 30 years old? Or maybe that was the maximum, being generous. I forget. Now, the average lifespan is 78 years old, lets say 80. So over tens of thousands of years, technological progress has increased lifespan by 2.7 times.
Given that the most promising research to-date on life-extension (resveratrol and caloric restriction) can produce about a 40% increase in maximum lifespan at best, how do you estimate that we can achieve a lifespan of 1,000 years (about a 10-fold increase in current maximum lifespans)?
Well, keep in mind that the size/safety argument is relative. How safe would that 3000 lb vehicle be if it was hit by a tank? ;-)
Granted, I get the point; most cars in the US are a certain size. Cars significantly smaller than that are in danger of being flung around like a hockey puck if hit by those bigger cars.
However, the flip-side is that a small car like this is likely to be more maneuverable, and more able to squeeze into tight space; hence, easier to avoid being hit in the first place...right?
Because "picking berries" isn't homesteading or transforming in a significant way; it treating that thing as a condition of nature, rather than as something that the person can control and bend to his will. Unless you do something to the berry-bush to actively encourage it to grow more berries, you haven't homesteaded by bush simply by picking berries; all you've homesteaded is the berries you picked.
And there's nothing wrong with "parasitic speculators", provided they actually homestead property in some way for possible future use, or buy it from previous homesteaders (of course, simply declaring it their's isn't legitimate). Speculators take on risk that the property may turn out to be worthless. They, in fact, do a lot of good. Consider if speculators think there will be a famine; what would they do? They would stock up on various dry foods that can be preserved before the famine, bidding up the price of food before the famine (hence, encouraging people to economize on it). If they end up being right, and there is a famine, they then sell it at significant profit, but their selling of it acts to increase the supply of such, and actually lower prices (yes, they sell it for a profit, but the price of said food would be even higher during famine without speculators who forecasted the famine). Hence, they act to inter-temporally smooth out supply of goods. If they forecast wisely, they are rewarded; if poorly, they incur losses.
Again, you are thinking in socialist terms. The issue is that for any given individual, when there is no private property in something, they reap no benefit from restraint; because they realize that everyone else is thinking the same thing, that if they hold back, others will raid it.
The only solution is privatization.
Not to mention, it is total bullshit to say that there is "no change" that is unequivocally an improvement. A person transforming land is obviously transforming it for the better, for their purposes...and most likely the purposes of anyone else too. And to say that the improvements aren't a significant proportion of the value of the underlying land is non-sense. Prior to farming, for example, land can't produce nearly as much food.
It doesn't matter that you didn't "create" the underlying land; you're the first one to homestead it, hence legitimate claim to it. You also didn't "create" your body (your parents did); of course that doesn't mean you don't own yourself, or that your parents own you.
If we never homesteaded any land and exercised property rights in it, we would not have civilization as we now know it; we would have various tribes, nomads roaming across vast swaths of land to find enough food to sustain themselves.
The Spanish "Anarchists" tried your bullshit idea...they executed all of the rulers, and chased those greedy evil capitalist pigs out of Spain. And ya know what happened after they got rid of all the evil capitalist overlords? People wanted to own property, their own property, and land too. Imagine that. So they had to force "anarchist" socialism or syndicalism on them. Go figure.
Absent coercion, in a society that eliminates centralized forms of aggression and theft (e.g., the State), people naturally want to own property, including land. See Ancient Iceland and Ireland.
The tragedy of the commons IS the result of logical rational behavior. When an individual is faced only with the reward of reaping the current value of a piece of land, and doesn't face the cost, because he can't make use of the capital value of that land, it is rational for him to expropriate without thought of the future.
The problem isn't "rich pricks". Don't be a commie. The problem is that the government just declares they own a bunch of crap, with no objective connection to it -- I mean, anyone can do that -- and then sells it to favored denizens. This doesn't establish legitimate ownership.
What establishes legitimate ownership is actually homesteading and transforming land.
This is just socialist crap.
Prior to appropriation (homesteading) of property, it wasn't "owned" by the community at large, unless they had actually worked the land. Walking over it and maybe picking berries once in a while doesn't count. At most, if some group of people have been walking a path, they have an easement right, but not a property rights in it.
But when some smart individual decides to stop living off of what nature gives him, and grow his own food, he clears an area, plants crop, tends to it, grows it. And that plot of land, along with all its produce, is rightfully his property. So what if it was available to all before? They didn't homestead it.
It is only by swallowing the biggest load of a socialist bullshit-sandwich, that you can claim that someone who homesteads land, a "thief".
Such arrogance. If someone goes up to the moon, or where-ever, and homesteads a plot of land by transforming it, then they own it. Period. This is the only legitimate way that unowned things can come to be owned. Not by legislative decree. I can make a lot of decrees too, so what.
Damage to your property. Violation of your property rights.
What do you mean, "would would you sue for"? What would the family of Nicole Brown sue OJ Simpson for?
All crimes against individuals can be properly conceived of as torts against them, for which they are owed restitution by the aggressor. This is actually the preferable way to deal with crimes -- victim-focused, providing compensation to the victims first -- rather than "punishment first" (whereby the victims pay taxes to feed and house their aggressor).
Yea, I'm sure their lawyer is just full of BS, right?
And in any event, you are apparently completely unware of the difference between natural law, which I was talking about, and positive law (i.e., fiat law, legislation, or declarations made by men in the State).
And there is absolutely no just reason why the burden falls on me to erect a "barrier" to entrance of my private property to keep others off of it. All I need do is inform them in some way that I don't want them there. A sign would do, or even a piece of tape between two metal posts. In other words, all I ought to have to do is make it clear that the property is private to keep others out. Now, a driveway may be reasonably perceived of as an invitation to enter for limited purposes. Then again, the sign "private road" arguably implies that they don't want anyone coming down it (after all, most people don't post a sign saying "private property" on their yard, and those signs do typically accompany "no trespassing signs").
Your argument essentially is an "opt out" that puts an unjust burden on the private property owner. An analogy to your argument would be as follows:
"A woman lying naked on a beach is an invitation to enter. To legally bar access to any dick walking byt, she as to erect barriers to entry and/or clearly post 'no f-ing me' signs."
No, the correct way to look at it is that if she's lying on a beach naked, the default presumption -- which places no unjust positive obligation on her -- is that she doesn't want any dick that comes along to be inside of her. If she writes "f-me please" on her body, then that's an invitation to any passerby.
I am talking about natural law, not positive (fiat) law by whim. The State doesn't get to legislate away natural rights, anymore than I do. It simply has the power to violate them, and write crap on pieces of paper saying that it's going to.
An example: The Jews in concentration camps at WWII still had a right to life, because of natural law. It's just that the Nazi' were violating that right. They were hence criminals (and not because the "international community" decided to put them on trial afterwards). Even though they wrote a bunch of stuff on paper (fiat decrees) to say they could and would do that.
That case was hence a confusing and unfortunate byproduct of the fact that we have the oxymoron called "public property". None-the-less, it is still based on physical enclosure, and of course the fact that we pay taxes for public property. In other words, it is a reasonable countermeasure to the unwarranted and unjust power that the State wields. But if you're in my house, using my telephone to make a phone call, you don't have a right to "privacy" from me.
Wrong, you can still use logically correct descriptions of these things in suing.
I was going to respond that this suit is BS, since no-one has a right to "privacy" per se, just to private property. But since it is a private road that they had to drive down, it's really more like a long drive-way with "sub-driveways" off the sides. Hence, Google had no right to be there to take the photographs in the first place.
On the other hand, that assumes they didn't go somewhere on the other side, and use a telephoto lens. This should be easily discernable from the photograph (depending on how much of the background is in focus and the perspective).
They did say their problem was that Google had to trespass to have taken the photos as they appeared. However, they unfortunately phrase it in terms of "privacy violation". There is no such thing as the "right to privacy", per se. It is merely a right derived from private property, or self-ownership in some cases (e.g., for someone wearing clothes, no-one would have the right to come by and rip them off to "get a picture of what's underneath"; but this isn't because of privacy "rights", it is because of their right to their body and property).
Thus, the proper way to phrase it is that their private property rights were violated -- Google trespassed. As a result, their reasonable expectation to a certain measure of privacy, due to their property configuration, was not fulfilled. Hence, the damages they are asking for.
LOL, great post & analogy. Yea, if only we didn't wear out.
Thanks for the more detailed analysis of how MTBF is calculated (and how burn-in failures are ignored -- shouldn't that also be something that they report?). So it seems like this calc is just enough to get beyond burn-in duds or DOA, and into maybe the "mid-life" of the HD, but not into the burn-out phase. Although with 3 or 5 years being burn-out, that would be impractical to calculate. Albeit, they could provide an estimate based on reported burnouts (StorageReview.com) of their similar HDs manufactured with similar processes.
That's a good point. It should be called drive-hours.
Thanks. Looks like I was just misunderstanding what you meant by "real MTBF".
I think the MTBF numbers as published are more useful for, say, enterprises setting up large arrays of hard-drives for redundancy.
Good post, I think we were on the same wavelength, as I posted something very similar to that below.
I think that a lot of people are mis-understanding MTBF. A HD might have a MTBF of 100 years. This doesn't mean that the company expects the vast majority of consumers to have that HD running for 100 years without problems.
MTBF numbers are generated by running say thousands of hard-drives of the same model and batch/lot, and seeing how long it takes before 1 fails. This may be a day or so. You then figure out how many total HD running hours it took before failure. If you have 1,000 HD's running, and it takes 40 hours before one fails, that's a 40,000 hr MTBF. But this number isn't generated by running say 10 hard-drives, waiting for all of them to fail, and averaging that number.
Thus, because of the way MTBF numbers are generated, they may or may not reflect hard-drive reliability beyond a few weeks. It depends on our assumptions about hard-drive stress and usage beyond the length of time before the 1st HD of the 1,000 or so they were testing failed. Most likely, it says less and less about hard-drive reliability beyond that initial point of failure (which is on the order of tens or hundreds of hours, not hundreds of thousands of hours or millions of hours!).
To be sure, all-else equal, a higher MTBF is better than a lower one. But as far as I'm concerned, those numbers are more useful for predicting DOA, duds, or quick-failure; and are more useful to professionals who might be employing large arrays of HD's. They are not particularly useful for getting a good idea of how long your HD will actually last.
HD manufacturers also publish an expected life-cycle of their HD. But I usually put the most stock in the length of the warranty. That's what they're willing to put their money behind. Albeit, it's possible their strategy is just to warranty less than how long they expect 90% of HD's to last, so they can then sell them cheaper. But if you've had a HD and you've had it for longer than what the manufacturer publishes as the expected-life, what they're saying by that is you've basically got a good value, and will probably want to have something else on hand, and be backed up.
In other words, people are rank stinking hypocrites and childish. Let me explain. It appears that those complaining want 3 things:
1. Millions of free (as in gratis) web-pages and free services like Google.
2. If they have to deal with advertisements at all, they want ones that are relatively unobtrusive and aren't irrelevant to them.
3. They don't want anyone gathering anonymous information on their viewing habits.
Hmm...well, basically all of those 3 things together are impossible, unless people throw a tantrum and childishly expect *everyone* to give them stuff for free, at their expense, with no way to make money from it. It is hypocritical to ask for contradictory things, and to ask things of others that you yourself wouldn't do. You don't see these whiners going to their job and working there for free, do you? Furthermore, I bet if Google offered an "ad-free" version of their website for paying users, there would be very very few people who would be willing to pay even 1 extra cent for that. Although they would switch to an identical non-profit equivalent to Google that didn't have ads (if such a thing existed or could exist, which it doesn't and can't).
And if it really bothered them, they'd get add-blockers. Most of them do have popup blockers. And as far as I can tell, popup blockers work pretty well. I haven't had many problems with popups in Firefox and Safari.
In any event, I really can't get over how this sounds like childish whining. How else do they expect the companies that provide various online services for free to make money, if not from effective advertising, which requires some information-gathering on the target-audience. Guess what, there is no such thing as the "right to privacy"; that's just sometimes something that you have by default in certain circumstances, as a derivation from your other rights (like property). But if you tell someone some embarrassing secret about yourself, they're free to go and spread it to the world. Likewise, people can and do walk around collecting data on random people walking down the street.
Thanks for the correction, I was thinking I might be a little off on that one.
No, you're wrong! Apple invented everything good and pure in the OS world. They invented the GUI, not Xerox. And they invented computer cases with front vents to provide for better cooling, not companies in the server market, or even (gasp!) Gateway in 2001 with their old computers. Apple also invented hot-swapping -- err, no, it's called slide-in storage. Apple invented memory riser cards. Apple invented columnar file-browsing. And Apple invented the dock. It's all about Apple, Apple, Apple. ;-)
To move from (a) the fact that OOXML is not a standard, or if you want to call it one, a crappy standard that only a person who is biased, malevolent, or moronic could recommend; to (b) that MS should be broken up; is a non-sequitar.
We don't have the right to good standards. Yes, we want good standards, just like we want good things in everything we have. But we don't have the right to good standards regarding document formats. This is because we don't have the right to have documents, word-processors, or computers to begin with. We obtain those things through mutually beneficial trades, using our money. If we don't think what is being offered for our money (e.g., MS Office) is worth it, we can walk away from the proposed deal. But we have no right to force Microsoft to change their offer to be more appealing to us.
If you want to create a world with better software and better standards, you have several justifiable options: (a) Educate consumers; (b) Oppose patent laws, the DMCA, and other laws relating to such that result in artificial government-created monopolies over various things. If you're response to the fact that there are numerous laws in existence which give unjustified advantages to say Microsoft over it's competitors, by using the threat of aggression to prevent competition (e.g., patent laws), is to argue for more artificial government laws to deal with the problem created by those laws to begin with, then you'll never get anywhere. As Ludwig von Mises said, interventionism leads to more interventionism.