I think you are getting mixed up between the program being referentially transparent and stateless and it being purely mathematical. The two are not the same. You can't be referentially transparent in the presence of I/O - true. But all the I/O you do still boils down to pushing a numerically encoded symbol onto the end of a list. This is eminently mathematical.
Maybe the best thing to do is remember what the turing machine was doing with that paper tape, and then consider if it is a mathematical construct or not;-)
I think you are getting mixed up between the program being referentially transparent and stateless and it being purely mathematical. The two are not the same. You can't be referentially transparent in the presence of I/O - true. But all the I/O you do still boils down to pushing a numerical symbol onto the end of a list. This is eminently mathematical. And think about it : it is evidently possible to emulate stateful machines with I/O within the confines of a stateless referentially transparent language. Referential transparency is important because it greatly helps reasoning : it makes it tractable. Without it, all the forms of reasoning are still possible, but maybe intractable.
I/O instructions are just another part of the instruction set of the machine. All the I/O that you do is still a bunch of symbols numerically represented at the end of the day. You can always transform I/O to either explicit state or to extra arguments you pass around that eventually contribute to the result of the computation. For intertwined I/O, this is only possible with an extension to a basic declarative model, such as dataflow concurrency.
Remember why monads actually help : they are effectively a cheeky way to thread extra arguments to all functions. You can do the same by adding a world argument on to every function you use, but this loses type safety. And even ghc gets grouchy if you use 50+ arguments to a function;-)
If you like this kind of stuff I strongly recommend Concepts Techniques and Models of Programming by Peter van Roy and Seif Haridi.
Actually, all of this is pretty wordy. Maybe the best thing to do is remember what the turing machine was doing with that paper tape, and then consider if it is a mathematical construct or not;-)
Yep, it is amazing how many people in the places I usually work ( big name investment banks) just randomly play around with & and * until they get something to compile. Then they assume it is all ok;-).
I think it is to do with the way things are taught : I strongly believe CS needs to be taught both top down and bottom up at the same time. All too often an approach known as "Java is all the world, and all the world is Java" is used in preference to showing people everything from AND gates to dependent type systems. Multiple passes through all these layers are needed too. But then unis would need to chuck out 75% of people in the first year...
"to get away from the 1s and 0s that are actually doing the calculations."
So you really do beleive that mathematics is just arithmetic. I think this is where the disconnect is: mathematics is by its very nature the process of abstraction that you use to get away from any other representation you already have. It is not just adding and dividing, or other simple operators you learned when you were two.
Look up some fields of more abstract maths: category theory, topography, etc. Are you going to advocate promoting a small field of discrete maths to being "not maths" merely because we can make machines to perform that maths easily? Or that some people who use the machines don't understand them? If so, then arithmetic is not maths, because a lot of people use calculators, and don't know how to divide numbers without one.
If I have the rules to the machine, abstract or physical, and I have the code, then I can laboriously perform the instructions. Are you seriously denying that this is the case? Can you imagine doing one instruction?
push 20h
Can you imagine doing the next one?
call 401010
Oh look, by induction, you can imagine performing the whole program. Big fucking surprise.
I never said it would be easy or fun, or that it would finish in a single lifetime. But clearly it can be performed as a mental process.
On to planes. Planes, and all other mechanical devices, work because they obey physical "laws". These laws are mathematical generalisations that we have tested against the world for a long time and failed to disprove. The maths does not generate the laws, it is merely a statement about them. That we can use the maths to design other physical items does not mean that these items are suddenly pure maths. They simply obey the same "constant conjunctions" that we have observed for everything else in the physical world. Read some Hume, ingrate.
Your logical fallacies are unbeatable. Keep it up.
Please would you post some of your mythical non-maths based code? I have a feeling you are beyond help.
A pure mental process that is based on consistent symbolic manipulation is extremely difficult to paint as anything but maths. What do you think it is ? Interpretive dance? Woodcraft?
I would love to know what you believe mathematics is. I'm guessing that you think it is arithmetic.
And as to your MS : the standards for getting a degree in this field are shockingly bad. I know people with even less clue than you who have degrees in CS. I have one too, but I don't think that it alone proves anything. Your statements show that you are very confused.
Do you think that all of maths is simple arithmetic? I hope you realise that apply is a mathematical operator : this is what you would refer to as "calling a method". Defining a function is an equation. Do I really have to spell it out for you? Everything in your programs is mathematical. Not necessarily arithmetical. Please learn the difference.
Practically all programming language semantic research is couched in the terms of category or set theory. That you don't know this doesn't mean it isn't so. Look it up if you have more than a passing interest in your career.
When a patent claims something like the "method of drag and drop", it is claiming that all possible symbolic forms that implement this method are infringing. These forms, like every program you have ever written, are mathematical. The big issue is that the form is not being claimed as in a copyrighted work or a physical patent: it is the very concept of solving the problem that is being claimed. Once you have spotted a problem, you immediately control all possible solutions.
"This isn't 1940 where computers are simply solving math problems."
This is possibly the most idiotic statement I have ever read. In what way is software not entirely a mathematical field? Have you the slightest inkling of what computer science is?
Software, in all its forms, from the highest level Haskell to the tightest x86 machine code, from the elegance of Scheme to the pure sickness of Befunge, is represented as regular groups of symbols encoded in a numerical form. The abstract machines that give meaning to these symbols can also be encoded in any of these forms . The presence of hardware is incidental : everything that has been done or can be done with software is performable by a purely mental process. How anyone can believe this does not qualify as a field of pure mathematics is beyond me.
In summary, you don't have a clue what you are talking about. I think a better statement might be:
"This isn't 3000BC where mathematics is simply solving mathematics problems."
This must have been modded up as interesting by a moonlighting psychologist. This kind of paranoia is hard to find when applied to questions like "Why does a free, fully functional web browser do better in the market than a closed, adware/payware, less functional and horrendously ugly competitor?"
Qt does exactly the same thing as VCL, OOs toolkit.
In fact, each version of MS Office comes with totally raped up controls that are not entirely native, and don't work in the same way as the native controls.
Tbh, I'd love to hear about your better ways of doing it. I'm guessing they are actually worse, and probably based on a fantastical notion of how usable SWT is. Hint: not very.
What exactly is the "Bollocks" directed at? Are you really suggesting that millions of people do *not* use public transport daily in the UK?
I find your hypothetical quite literally incredible. Do you seriously consider taking the bus all the time, only to be confounded by your own ignorance of the timetable? Why not pick up a copy of it?
I agree that the information on the web could be a lot better and more standardised. This doesn't mean that millions of people don't use public transport.
So rather than "practically unusable", you meant "It is not universally as good as I would like it to be". The fact remains, it is used, so it is patently not unusable. I agree that it is definitely not as good as it should be and the rail privatization has been an utter disaster, following decades of underinvestment.
I think your goal may be unrealistic, however. I would challenge you to find any state of appreciable size - ie not Singapore - where none of the workforce are dependent upon private vehicles. Public transport is only really ever going to be reliable for daily commuting in urban and suburban areas.
Given that the UK public transport system is, in all practical senses, unusable
This is quite a ridiculous statement. Millions upon millions of people use public transport in the UK every day. It is not perfect and definitely needs more investment. But to say it is "unusable" just boggles the mind....
I don't see the point in the ID cards - they would be able to do all the nefarious stuff with face recognition anyway - the ID card publicity is just to justify funding for a bound-to-fail effort at building a big database on everyone. Which, if the NHS, Inland Revenue, or National Insurance systems worked, would already exist....
The packaging system is still called Conary. The distro made by its creators is called rpath.
I usually make my judgement of software on something more than an ad-hominem... and to be honest, I think that being a bunch of guys who were a key part of making the most commercially successful distro isn't the damning indictment you want it to be.
Anyway, I don't really care about the particular implementation. Its the idea of transactional upgrades and easily derived distros that is interesting. These are features that could be added to apt, yum, or smartpm.
Erm, no, that is the point. You can't. I think you need to reevaluate what you think constitutes a legitimate argument. Do you understand the concept of a logical fallacy?
You are stating that:
Division of labour is good for everyone everywhere at any scale
OR
Division of labour is NOT good for everyone everywhere at any scale
SO
As division of labour is clearly good at some scales, the first statement must be true.
Clearly you have excluded the middle : that it can be good at one scale and bad at another, or good for some people and bad for others. Therefore your argument is fallacious. If your response is to attempt to reinvent or argue against logic itself rather than modify your premises, then there is no hope for you.
Take a look at this Conary system. It has some interesting ideas that could certainly help in this kind of situation : especially transactions for upgrades. If a bit fails, the whole upgrade rolls back, and you can even rollback completed transactions.
I like this idea better than choosing some arbitrary core of code to upgrade as a massive lump, and statically linking hundreds of copies of anything not in the core into the separate apps. As to your verifiability detecting script, I see no reason this can not be done for a packaging system. And before you go on about corrupt databases, please remind yourself what a filesystem is: thats right, a corruptable database.
I will agree with you on compatibility: people should stop breaking ABI. I'm looking at you, Freetype...
I myself am ambivalent on outsourcing. But your argument is fallacious : the fallacy is known as the excluded middle, or slippery slope. People can quite legitimately argue that at the level of the country, outsourcing does harm, whilst at the same agree that within the country division of labour is a good thing.
Interestingly, you hear this fallacy quite a lot on the other side too: Some jobs are going to China and India, therefore they all will.
And BTW, it is spelt 'ridiculous'. This is almost as annoying as people spelling 'than' as 'then'.
But it is possible QEMU could be ported, and Transitive almost certainly would be willing to work with sony on this.... their stuff has been used for PS2 games before along with Cedega. So wine could work using either of these options.
I agree, I would much prefer it if things were more isolated and versioned. Take a look at Gobolinux, it seems to be halfway there. Zero install and the ROX desktop are also interesting. However there is a massive cost in transitioning to a system like this : it is very hard to make a real case that the switch is worthwhile.
But... my real point was that OS X zealots often act as if everything that Apple do is perfect in concept and implementation, and that there is something holy and unique about Apple that means that a better solution is simply impossible. Because they are Designers (TM), or something.
I've had a far far worse time with OS X installers leaving crap around than with the debian package system. But I don't then claim.debs are perfect.
Your rosy eyed view of Mac OS X packaging is quite amusing. From someone who actually knows something about the issue, Mike Hearn of the autopackage project, in his own words:
Does the Mac fare any better? Unfortunately not. MacOS X has (in theory) totally eschewed installers in favour of App Folders, which are specially marked directories, the idea being that you simply drag and drop the app into the Applications directory. To uninstall, just drag it to the wastebasket. This is good UI, but bad everything else. By eliminating (un)install logic, it becomes extremely hard to check for dependancies, to provide system components, to clean up configuration changes, other application metadata and so on. Although technically apps can have dependancies via bundles, the lack of OS side install logic means that in practice it's not possible to install these bundles into the OS if required - the user must do it for the app. As such, apps can only rely on funtionality that was known to ship with the operating system. That suits Apples goal of selling more copies of OS X, but is rather limiting for the user. By trying to hide the problems dependancies pose all together, it creates bigger problems further down the line. As such, some Mac apps ship with install apps anyway which rather defeats the point. Note that my beef with appfolders are more to do with the way they have been implemented in NeXTStep - you can use autopackage to install apps into an appfolders style arrangement (for instance i test with/apps/packagename) and one day there may well be a VFS plugin that lets you view installed packages as folders/directories. I think it is highly unlikely that you'll ever be able to just drag app directories off a CD onto the system however.
And you will note that even Apple do not universally use the app folder method of installation.
It is utterly ridiculous to compare Brazil and India. I've been to both : Brazil is really very western in comparison to India. The quality of life is much better - so what point did you think you were proving with your travel diary?
Till you realize that overbroad software patents are what Slashdotters are upset about the most, you should listen to your own advice.
Then you take it one step further, and realise that the subject matter of any software patent that was not overbroad would already be well protected by copyright, and you have the complete argument for why software patents should not be allowed.
The purpose of the stream is to let people see talks from a conference on the web. They didn't have a conference just to make these streams available on the web.
"How can we get information on optimization to everyone on the internet? "
"Lets all fly to Germany and then stream videos of ourselves! "
Your idiocy and "I've never been outside the States"-ness is showing.
I know plenty of MS employees who work in the EU. The idea MS would pull out is just ludicrous. Sorry, its just not even half sane. Hopefully you can appreciate that much more than 5% of MS global revenue would be affected.
MS have broken the law, the law is being applied, and you are arguing that the law should be changed just for MS? I hope you realise that your incentive argument can be applied to any government collection of revenue : tax, fines, duty. If you are a libertarian, maybe you believe that, but realise that very few people in Europe agree with you. All of these things are the government taking economic output. Should Microsoft be uniquely exempt from all government revenue collection?
Slashdot Mirror
At last a vaguely sensible objection...
;-)
I think you are getting mixed up between the program being referentially transparent and stateless and it being purely mathematical.
The two are not the same.
You can't be referentially transparent in the presence of I/O - true.
But all the I/O you do still boils down to pushing a numerically encoded symbol onto the end of a list. This is eminently mathematical.
Maybe the best thing to do is remember what the turing machine was doing with that paper tape, and then consider if it is a mathematical construct or not
At last a vaguely sensible objection...
;-)
;-)
I think you are getting mixed up between the program being referentially transparent and stateless and it being purely mathematical.
The two are not the same.
You can't be referentially transparent in the presence of I/O - true.
But all the I/O you do still boils down to pushing a numerical symbol onto the end of a list. This is eminently mathematical. And think about it : it is evidently possible to emulate stateful machines with I/O within the confines of a stateless referentially transparent language. Referential transparency is important because it greatly helps reasoning : it makes it tractable. Without it, all the forms of reasoning are still possible, but maybe intractable.
I/O instructions are just another part of the instruction set of the machine. All the I/O that you do is still a bunch of symbols numerically represented at the end of the day. You can always transform I/O to either explicit state or to extra arguments you pass around that eventually contribute to the result of the computation. For intertwined I/O, this is only possible with an extension to a basic declarative model, such as dataflow concurrency.
Remember why monads actually help : they are effectively a cheeky way to thread extra arguments to all functions. You can do the same by adding a world argument on to every function you use, but this loses type safety. And even ghc gets grouchy if you use 50+ arguments to a function
If you like this kind of stuff I strongly recommend Concepts Techniques and Models of Programming by Peter van Roy and Seif Haridi.
Actually, all of this is pretty wordy. Maybe the best thing to do is remember what the turing machine was doing with that paper tape, and then consider if it is a mathematical construct or not
Yep, it is amazing how many people in the places I usually work ( big name investment banks) just randomly play around with & and * until they get something to compile. Then they assume it is all ok ;-).
I think it is to do with the way things are taught : I strongly believe CS needs to be taught both top down and bottom up at the same time. All too often an approach known as "Java is all the world, and all the world is Java" is used in preference to showing people everything from AND gates to dependent type systems. Multiple passes through all these layers are needed too. But then unis would need to chuck out 75% of people in the first year...
"to get away from the 1s and 0s that are actually doing the calculations."
So you really do beleive that mathematics is just arithmetic. I think this is where the disconnect is: mathematics is by its very nature the process of abstraction that you use to get away from any other representation you already have. It is not just adding and dividing, or other simple operators you learned when you were two.
Look up some fields of more abstract maths: category theory, topography, etc. Are you going to advocate promoting a small field of discrete maths to being "not maths" merely because we can make machines to perform that maths easily? Or that some people who use the machines don't understand them? If so, then arithmetic is not maths, because a lot of people use calculators, and don't know how to divide numbers without one.
You are a real nutcase.
If I have the rules to the machine, abstract or physical, and I have the code, then I can laboriously perform the instructions. Are you seriously denying that this is the case? Can you imagine doing one instruction?
push 20h
Can you imagine doing the next one?
call 401010
Oh look, by induction, you can imagine performing the whole program. Big fucking surprise.
I never said it would be easy or fun, or that it would finish in a single lifetime. But clearly it can be performed as a mental process.
On to planes. Planes, and all other mechanical devices, work because they obey physical "laws". These laws are mathematical generalisations that we have tested against the world for a long time and failed to disprove. The maths does not generate the laws, it is merely a statement about them. That we can use the maths to design other physical items does not mean that these items are suddenly pure maths. They simply obey the same "constant conjunctions" that we have observed for everything else in the physical world. Read some Hume, ingrate.
Your logical fallacies are unbeatable. Keep it up.
Please would you post some of your mythical non-maths based code? I have a feeling you are beyond help.
A pure mental process that is based on consistent symbolic manipulation is extremely difficult to paint as anything but maths. What do you think it is ? Interpretive dance? Woodcraft?
I would love to know what you believe mathematics is. I'm guessing that you think it is arithmetic.
And as to your MS : the standards for getting a degree in this field are shockingly bad. I know people with even less clue than you who have degrees in CS. I have one too, but I don't think that it alone proves anything. Your statements show that you are very confused.
You clearly have no idea what mathematics is.
Do you think that all of maths is simple arithmetic? I hope you realise that apply is a mathematical operator : this is what you would refer to as "calling a method". Defining a function is an equation. Do I really have to spell it out for you? Everything in your programs is mathematical. Not necessarily arithmetical. Please learn the difference.
Practically all programming language semantic research is couched in the terms of category or set theory. That you don't know this doesn't mean it isn't so. Look it up if you have more than a passing interest in your career.
When a patent claims something like the "method of drag and drop", it is claiming that all possible symbolic forms that implement this method are infringing. These forms, like every program you have ever written, are mathematical. The big issue is that the form is not being claimed as in a copyrighted work or a physical patent: it is the very concept of solving the problem that is being claimed. Once you have spotted a problem, you immediately control all possible solutions.
"This isn't 1940 where computers are simply solving math problems."
:
This is possibly the most idiotic statement I have ever read. In what way is software not entirely a mathematical field? Have you the slightest inkling of what computer science is?
Software, in all its forms, from the highest level Haskell to the tightest x86 machine code, from the elegance of Scheme to the pure sickness of Befunge, is represented as regular groups of symbols encoded in a numerical form. The abstract machines that give meaning to these symbols can also be encoded in any of these forms . The presence of hardware is incidental : everything that has been done or can be done with software is performable by a purely mental process. How anyone can believe this does not qualify as a field of pure mathematics is beyond me.
In summary, you don't have a clue what you are talking about. I think a better statement might be
"This isn't 3000BC where mathematics is simply solving mathematics problems."
This must have been modded up as interesting by a moonlighting psychologist. This kind of paranoia is hard to find when applied to questions like "Why does a free, fully functional web browser do better in the market than a closed, adware/payware, less functional and horrendously ugly competitor?"
Qt does exactly the same thing as VCL, OOs toolkit.
In fact, each version of MS Office comes with totally raped up controls that are not entirely native, and don't work in the same way as the native controls.
Tbh, I'd love to hear about your better ways of doing it. I'm guessing they are actually worse, and probably based on a fantastical notion of how usable SWT is. Hint: not very.
What exactly is the "Bollocks" directed at? Are you really suggesting that millions of people do *not* use public transport daily in the UK?
I find your hypothetical quite literally incredible. Do you seriously consider taking the bus all the time, only to be confounded by your own ignorance of the timetable? Why not pick up a copy of it?
I agree that the information on the web could be a lot better and more standardised. This doesn't mean that millions of people don't use public transport.
So rather than "practically unusable", you meant "It is not universally as good as I would like it to be". The fact remains, it is used, so it is patently not unusable. I agree that it is definitely not as good as it should be and the rail privatization has been an utter disaster, following decades of underinvestment.
I think your goal may be unrealistic, however.
I would challenge you to find any state of appreciable size - ie not Singapore - where none of the workforce are dependent upon private vehicles. Public transport is only really ever going to be reliable for daily commuting in urban and suburban areas.
Given that the UK public transport system is, in all practical senses, unusable
This is quite a ridiculous statement. Millions upon millions of people use public transport in the UK every day. It is not perfect and definitely needs more investment. But to say it is "unusable" just boggles the mind....
I don't see the point in the ID cards - they would be able to do all the nefarious stuff with face recognition anyway - the ID card publicity is just to justify funding for a bound-to-fail effort at building a big database on everyone. Which, if the NHS, Inland Revenue, or National Insurance systems worked, would already exist....
The packaging system is still called Conary. The distro made by its creators is called rpath.
... and to be honest, I think that being a bunch of guys who were a key part of making the most commercially successful distro isn't the damning indictment you want it to be.
I usually make my judgement of software on something more than an ad-hominem
Anyway, I don't really care about the particular implementation. Its the idea of transactional upgrades and easily derived distros that is interesting. These are features that could be added to apt, yum, or smartpm.
Erm, no, that is the point. You can't. I think you need to reevaluate what you think constitutes a legitimate argument. Do you understand the concept of a logical fallacy?
:
You are stating that
Division of labour is good for everyone everywhere at any scale
OR
Division of labour is NOT good for everyone everywhere at any scale
SO
As division of labour is clearly good at some scales, the first statement must be true.
Clearly you have excluded the middle : that it can be good at one scale and bad at another, or good for some people and bad for others. Therefore your argument is fallacious. If your response is to attempt to reinvent or argue against logic itself rather than modify your premises, then there is no hope for you.
You again ;-)
Take a look at this Conary system. It has some interesting ideas that could certainly help in this kind of situation : especially transactions for upgrades. If a bit fails, the whole upgrade rolls back, and you can even rollback completed transactions.
I like this idea better than choosing some arbitrary core of code to upgrade as a massive lump, and statically linking hundreds of copies of anything not in the core into the separate apps. As to your verifiability detecting script, I see no reason this can not be done for a packaging system. And before you go on about corrupt databases, please remind yourself what a filesystem is: thats right, a corruptable database.
I will agree with you on compatibility: people should stop breaking ABI. I'm looking at you, Freetype...
I myself am ambivalent on outsourcing. But your argument is fallacious : the fallacy is known as the excluded middle, or slippery slope. People can quite legitimately argue that at the level of the country, outsourcing does harm, whilst at the same agree that within the country division of labour is a good thing.
Interestingly, you hear this fallacy quite a lot on the other side too: Some jobs are going to China and India, therefore they all will.
And BTW, it is spelt 'ridiculous'. This is almost as annoying as people spelling 'than' as 'then'.
But it is possible QEMU could be ported, and Transitive almost certainly would be willing to work with sony on this.... their stuff has been used for PS2 games before along with Cedega.
So wine could work using either of these options.
I agree, I would much prefer it if things were more isolated and versioned. Take a look at Gobolinux, it seems to be halfway there. Zero install and the ROX desktop are also interesting. However there is a massive cost in transitioning to a system like this : it is very hard to make a real case that the switch is worthwhile.
.debs are perfect.
But... my real point was that OS X zealots often act as if everything that Apple do is perfect in concept and implementation, and that there is something holy and unique about Apple that means that a better solution is simply impossible. Because they are Designers (TM), or something.
I've had a far far worse time with OS X installers leaving crap around than with the debian package system. But I don't then claim
Your rosy eyed view of Mac OS X packaging is quite amusing. From someone who actually knows something about the issue, Mike Hearn of the autopackage project, in his own words:
/apps/packagename) and one day there may well be a VFS plugin that lets you view installed packages as folders/directories. I think it is highly unlikely that you'll ever be able to just drag app directories off a CD onto the system however.
Does the Mac fare any better? Unfortunately not. MacOS X has (in theory) totally eschewed installers in favour of App Folders, which are specially marked directories, the idea being that you simply drag and drop the app into the Applications directory. To uninstall, just drag it to the wastebasket. This is good UI, but bad everything else. By eliminating (un)install logic, it becomes extremely hard to check for dependancies, to provide system components, to clean up configuration changes, other application metadata and so on. Although technically apps can have dependancies via bundles, the lack of OS side install logic means that in practice it's not possible to install these bundles into the OS if required - the user must do it for the app. As such, apps can only rely on funtionality that was known to ship with the operating system. That suits Apples goal of selling more copies of OS X, but is rather limiting for the user. By trying to hide the problems dependancies pose all together, it creates bigger problems further down the line. As such, some Mac apps ship with install apps anyway which rather defeats the point. Note that my beef with appfolders are more to do with the way they have been implemented in NeXTStep - you can use autopackage to install apps into an appfolders style arrangement (for instance i test with
And you will note that even Apple do not universally use the app folder method of installation.
Microsoft may be a bit slow to get there, but they'll get there in the end.
I'm hoping you are talking about Chapter 11 here.
It is utterly ridiculous to compare Brazil and India. I've been to both : Brazil is really very western in comparison to India. The quality of life is much better - so what point did you think you were proving with your travel diary?
Till you realize that overbroad software patents are what Slashdotters are upset about the most, you should listen to your own advice.
Then you take it one step further, and realise that the subject matter of any software patent that was not overbroad would already be well protected by copyright, and you have the complete argument for why software patents should not be allowed.
"How can we get information on optimization to everyone on the internet? "
"Lets all fly to Germany and then stream videos of ourselves! "
Your dichotomy is idiotic.
I expect he'll stick the slides up soon anyway.
Your idiocy and "I've never been outside the States"-ness is showing.
I know plenty of MS employees who work in the EU. The idea MS would pull out is just ludicrous. Sorry, its just not even half sane. Hopefully you can appreciate that much more than 5% of MS global revenue would be affected.
MS have broken the law, the law is being applied, and you are arguing that the law should be changed just for MS? I hope you realise that your incentive argument can be applied to any government collection of revenue : tax, fines, duty. If you are a libertarian, maybe you believe that, but realise that very few people in Europe agree with you. All of these things are the government taking economic output. Should Microsoft be uniquely exempt from all government revenue collection?