The idea of punishing a company for trying to make the most money they can is adsurd.
Things you may not know but should:
Money is not a moral good.
Fame is not a moral good.
Americana is not a moral good.
The PC market does not and never has depended on Microsoft
Without Microsoft we'd most likely be in the exact same place as we are today, except without Microsoft.
Without Microsoft, the people who work there would be employed elsewhere, possibly putting their talents to better use and thus there is good chance we would be better off.
Mediocre software does not excuse illegal and immoral business practices.
My opinion is that all this makes a strong case for reducing the power that politicians have over the economy. If they don't have the ability to hand out favors that give one industry an advantage over another, there won't be companies and industry groups lining up at the feeding trough.
In your opinion everything "makes a strong case for reducing the power that politiicans have".
On the other hand this just leads me to believe me that advertising has corrupted the capitalist system. Think about it for a moment, capitalism assumes perfect knowledge, but because perfect knowledge doesn't exist, the easiest way to abuse capitalism is to spread lies that support you. Why worry about competition when you can deliberately distort the knowledge of the marketplace to support your position.
Big Tobacco, Microsoft, and McDonalds all thrive on intentional deception. It's doubtful that there are any corporations that haven't embraced lies and tricks to bring them money. And once you have embraced intentional deception as way of life, you have begun down a slippery slope towards evil.
What's more, the media is dependent on advertising for their livelyhood, so they have placed themselves in a position of conflict of interest and thus have doomed themselves to complicity with the same evils they were supposed to guard against. How many times can you go against your own best interests and keep your job or business? Whatever the answer, it's inevitable that the companies that "play nice" with their corrupt corporate sponsors will force the companies that don't out of the marketplace.
Corporations are people, just like governments are people and both are equally predisposed to evil. To choose one over the other is to choose evil. It is only by a careful balance between the evils of the tyrant and the swindler can capitalism serve the people.
compares Williams' lawsuit to "a smoker suing a tobacco company."
People aren't suing tobacco companies because they're addicted to cigarettes or spent lots of money on cigarettes, but rather because the companies deliberately lied about making cigarettes more addictive and lied about the health hazards of cigarettes for decades after they knew cigarettes caused all kinds of health problems.
There's just a slight difference between a product that is harmful if abused, and one that is plain harmful.
except she never did figure out how to run the games that were installed. (I don't know what was so hard about "stepping on the foot" and selecting "Games", but she's never managed it.)
Isn't that a selling point for IT managers? Less time wasted non-productively than the equivalent MS-OS?
I think the problem with Mozilla is that they implemented an 'ideal' architecture in terms of extensibility and cross-platform-ness, and made the decision that certain other things (conformity with the host interface, sparing use of resources, etc.) weren't important.
I think the problem with Mozilla is that it is version 0.8. As for the originator of this thread, who says the you can't get acclaim for fixing noticeable bugs? I mean adding a new feature is kewl, but so is finding a good way to speed up the app, or fixing some annoying bug. YMMV.
Despite the declaration, ?The proof is right here, in our genes?, he offers none! Where is the indisputable evidence that the human genome PROVES evolution?
This is a newspaper article it's aimed at people with low reading comprehension. Providing a complete proof would be a waste of time and space, and probably lower the likely that anyone would finish reading it.
Neither retinal patterns nor fingerprints are provably unique. It is conventional wisdom that they are effectively unique. For most intents and purposes fingerprints and retina patterns are "unique enough". Just don't get silly on me. There is a limited area for the pattern to develop and thus there is a big but finite domain space for retinal(and fingerprint) patterns. Therefore, they must repeat eventually.
You should try Civilization (Board Game) or Ancient Civilization (Computer Game). These games were the inspiration for Civilization (Computer Gamer). They are still zero-sum (I think) because you play the games for a limited length of time, but no one player can control the entire board. I've never seen a player completely eliminated.
It's a good game, although it takes about 8 hours to play the board game version with 6-8 players.
And don't forget because of the gross negligence of the American Government that 24% profit is tax-free. Microsoft doesn't pay any tax on it's profits because the government allows them to use "profit-sharing schemes" whereby they sell stock to their employees and write it off as an expense. Thus, on paper, Microsoft screws the government out of taxes, shifts that money that would have been paid in taxes directly into it's assets as investment in the company, and dilutes the share price for their shareholders all at the same time.
Talk about screwing everybody at once!
How could anyone compete with a company that has billions of dollars of monopoly rents to invest in predatory pricing schemes, legal assaults, and FUD?
That's simply wrong. How can a labour of love be sloppy, amateurish and broken? It seems to me if these sites are labours of love, the author would at least learn to close his table tags.
Furthermore, you do realize that MS didn't create the web right? That the arriving of IE and MS largely coincided with the commercialization of the internet? That the spirit of what the web used to be is what the web used to be before MS-IE?
It seems the evidence is 100% against what you are saying.
AOL will start using Netscape if MS ever removes them from the online services offered by Windows. It's a careful balancing act that Microsoft is doing, using it's operating system, yet again, to make other companies do what they want.
Of course, the flip side is that if AOL ever jumps ship on MS, they have enough users to turn the browser war back into a shooting war.
Hmmm. What if you filed for a patent for the process of recording or transmitting data about yourself? You could then sue any company transmitting data about yourself for patent infringement?
Maybe you could make all your personal information a Trade Secret, and mark "This information is confidential" on all forms. Then if they tell it to anyone else you can sue them for corporate espionage.
Lastly you could try and Trade Mark yourself, but that would just stop them from using your name on stuff...
The big uproar was caused by a sore looser that thought he might be able to steal an election by changing the rules AFTER the election.
Correction, the big uproar was caused by the leaders of two bitterly divided and shortsighted parties who are nearly indistinguishable to the American public, because of their complete lack of backbone to actually take different stands. It was caused by an opportunistic grab for power that succeeded. Everyone outside the U.S. knows that A) Gore very nearly won, except for legitimate voting problems, and B) Gore got more votes than Bush, and that C) The reason he lost is because Gore and Bush are almost indistinguishable in every way shape and form. As my favorite political commentators said: "Gore is the one who sells out to a slightly less scary crowd of special interest groups".
In other words the furour was caused by a corrupt, degenerate, poorly organized and badly implemented system of democracry.
I'm partially fluent in Legalese, it seems to say (Really, really simplified):
Credit Suisse manipulated the stock price of VA Linux and make themselves several tons of cash.
The lawsuit was prompted by the results of a Federal Investigation of Credit Suisse and a number of suspicious circumstances surrounding the high-tech IPO's they've underwritten.
Sue them. It appears in the U.S. the only way to get anything done is to sick lawyers on negligent companies. And in this case the company was clearly negligent and as Katz pointed out above, they broke the law in more than one place. The answer seems to be to sue them. There seem to be plenty of sleazy American lawyers willing to take cases on contingency, give them another target other than doctors and bad drivers. If enough people start filling lawsuits against these CRA's then maybe they'll find out it's cheaper to do things right than to take the bad publicitly and constant lawsuits.
I don't know it, but it appears that they may have concerns over the possible embelishment, oversimplification, and ridicule that might be heaped on them by a media that knows little more than how to ridicule, oversimplify, and embelish.
Not that I think this will solve the problem, but it looks like they are worried that popular opinion will go negative and their budget will be cut again.
I don't think Microsoft has used strong-arm tactics against Linux or MacOS, maybe Netscape and Java, and Java sucks anyway, so I don't really care.
Open up your eyes:
Microsoft admitted in court that up until 95 it had licenses that had every vendor which sold machines with windows on it, paying for windows on every machine regardless of whether it was actually given to the customer.
Microsoft has made an empire on anti-competive practices, on betrayals and lies.
Microsoft gave IE away for free only so they could undercut Netscape and drive them out of business.
Microsoft is a monopoly by the legal definition
Whether or not anyone likes their applications has nothing to do with whether or not they were collecting monopoly rents.
Capitalism is not about being able to sell something anyway you want and at any price it is about using the worlds resources to maximum effect. It's put your money where you mouth is, if you want it bad enough, you'll pay for it, and someone will give it you.
Anybody want to start a religion that believes the universe began on August 25th, 1991?
We could then file for a patent on the entire human genome and claim our God's patent rights both predate all current genetic patents and that they haven't expired yet...;)
Deferring the release of results is not censorship.
You seem to have missed the point. Results are released at different times in different parts of the country for the benefit of the people.
Now in the interst of allowing everyone to receive the results simultaneously across the country, there are essentially two choices:
Newfoundland polls close at 9:00 PM local time and BC polls close at 9:00 PM local time, and Nefoundland gets the results at 1:30 AM, and BC gets the results at 9:00 PM.
Newfoundland polls close at 9:00 PM local time and BC polls close at 4:30 PM local time, and results are immediately released.
Either of these situations is simply less desirable than gagging the media for a few hours. Only an absolutist would think that the benefit of releasing local results to Newfoundland before 1:30 AM, and the befenit of allowing the BC polls to close after working hours so everyone has the opportunity to vote is less desireable than gagging the reporting of results until after polls close.
But then again, Americans are all about putting their own self-interest first and foremost. Sometimes rights conflict, such as your right to free speech, and my right to fair democractic election. Or the rights of the Newfoundlanders to see the results of their local elections and the importance of keeping the election results unbiased by foreknowledge of the results.
This law can easily be broken or circumvented, but it's main goal to to prevent widespread corruption of the political process without sacrificing timely results to the east coast. With the exception of a few people who can't stop and think before they do something, most people think it's entirely reasonable. After all if it is consistent violated, the end result will simply be the gagging of all results until after the polls are closed, thus everybody looses.
Does anyone else find it funny, that the proposed solution to Elections Canada's censorship is more censorship?
I mean, they publish the results in Eastern Canada so the people living there can see the local results before they go to bed.
Elections Canada could prevent that publication, but instead they trust Canadians not to spread the information. For shame, that our government might trust the people, and punish those who break that trust.
It's sad that so many people think that because there is a pot, they *have* to piss in it.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea of punishing a company for trying to make the most money they can is adsurd.
Things you may not know but should:
My opinion is that all this makes a strong case for reducing the power that politicians have over the economy. If they don't have the ability to hand out favors that give one industry an advantage over another, there won't be companies and industry groups lining up at the feeding trough.
In your opinion everything "makes a strong case for reducing the power that politiicans have".
On the other hand this just leads me to believe me that advertising has corrupted the capitalist system. Think about it for a moment, capitalism assumes perfect knowledge, but because perfect knowledge doesn't exist, the easiest way to abuse capitalism is to spread lies that support you. Why worry about competition when you can deliberately distort the knowledge of the marketplace to support your position.
Big Tobacco, Microsoft, and McDonalds all thrive on intentional deception. It's doubtful that there are any corporations that haven't embraced lies and tricks to bring them money. And once you have embraced intentional deception as way of life, you have begun down a slippery slope towards evil.
What's more, the media is dependent on advertising for their livelyhood, so they have placed themselves in a position of conflict of interest and thus have doomed themselves to complicity with the same evils they were supposed to guard against. How many times can you go against your own best interests and keep your job or business? Whatever the answer, it's inevitable that the companies that "play nice" with their corrupt corporate sponsors will force the companies that don't out of the marketplace.
Corporations are people, just like governments are people and both are equally predisposed to evil. To choose one over the other is to choose evil. It is only by a careful balance between the evils of the tyrant and the swindler can capitalism serve the people.
compares Williams' lawsuit to "a smoker suing a tobacco company."
People aren't suing tobacco companies because they're addicted to cigarettes or spent lots of money on cigarettes, but rather because the companies deliberately lied about making cigarettes more addictive and lied about the health hazards of cigarettes for decades after they knew cigarettes caused all kinds of health problems.
There's just a slight difference between a product that is harmful if abused, and one that is plain harmful.
except she never did figure out how to run the games that were installed. (I don't know what was so hard about "stepping on the foot" and selecting "Games", but she's never managed it.)
Isn't that a selling point for IT managers? Less time wasted non-productively than the equivalent MS-OS?
MS is all wrong about that lower TCO stuff...
I think the problem with Mozilla is that they implemented an 'ideal' architecture in terms of extensibility and cross-platform-ness, and made the decision that certain other things (conformity with the host interface, sparing use of resources, etc.) weren't important.
I think the problem with Mozilla is that it is version 0.8. As for the originator of this thread, who says the you can't get acclaim for fixing noticeable bugs? I mean adding a new feature is kewl, but so is finding a good way to speed up the app, or fixing some annoying bug. YMMV.
Despite the declaration, ?The proof is right here, in our genes?, he offers none! Where is the indisputable evidence that the human genome PROVES evolution?
This is a newspaper article it's aimed at people with low reading comprehension. Providing a complete proof would be a waste of time and space, and probably lower the likely that anyone would finish reading it.
Neither retinal patterns nor fingerprints are provably unique. It is conventional wisdom that they are effectively unique. For most intents and purposes fingerprints and retina patterns are "unique enough". Just don't get silly on me. There is a limited area for the pattern to develop and thus there is a big but finite domain space for retinal(and fingerprint) patterns. Therefore, they must repeat eventually.
You should try Civilization (Board Game) or Ancient Civilization (Computer Game). These games were the inspiration for Civilization (Computer Gamer). They are still zero-sum (I think) because you play the games for a limited length of time, but no one player can control the entire board. I've never seen a player completely eliminated.
It's a good game, although it takes about 8 hours to play the board game version with 6-8 players.
Let's also patent this one:
Abstract:
Process of applying for time-limited monopoly rights on an process or device that the applicant describes as novel and/or original.
Combine the two and we get to sue everyone involved in these debacles...
Silly player, you'll play them both. Why? Stars! Supernova Genesis comes out this year, MOO3 comes out in a year or two.
By the time MOO3 comes out you'll be looking for the next biggest thing after Stars! Supernova Genesis.
They both look like great games...
As a dmoz editor, I think I should qualify that Google's "recently-added directory" is actually dmoz.
And don't forget because of the gross negligence of the American Government that 24% profit is tax-free. Microsoft doesn't pay any tax on it's profits because the government allows them to use "profit-sharing schemes" whereby they sell stock to their employees and write it off as an expense. Thus, on paper, Microsoft screws the government out of taxes, shifts that money that would have been paid in taxes directly into it's assets as investment in the company, and dilutes the share price for their shareholders all at the same time.
Talk about screwing everybody at once!
How could anyone compete with a company that has billions of dollars of monopoly rents to invest in predatory pricing schemes, legal assaults, and FUD?
That's simply wrong. How can a labour of love be sloppy, amateurish and broken? It seems to me if these sites are labours of love, the author would at least learn to close his table tags.
Furthermore, you do realize that MS didn't create the web right? That the arriving of IE and MS largely coincided with the commercialization of the internet? That the spirit of what the web used to be is what the web used to be before MS-IE?
It seems the evidence is 100% against what you are saying.
AOL will start using Netscape if MS ever removes them from the online services offered by Windows. It's a careful balancing act that Microsoft is doing, using it's operating system, yet again, to make other companies do what they want.
Of course, the flip side is that if AOL ever jumps ship on MS, they have enough users to turn the browser war back into a shooting war.
Hmmm. What if you filed for a patent for the process of recording or transmitting data about yourself? You could then sue any company transmitting data about yourself for patent infringement?
Maybe you could make all your personal information a Trade Secret, and mark "This information is confidential" on all forms. Then if they tell it to anyone else you can sue them for corporate espionage.
Lastly you could try and Trade Mark yourself, but that would just stop them from using your name on stuff...
Just some musings on the alternatives...
The big uproar was caused by a sore looser that thought he might be able to steal an election by changing the rules AFTER the election.
Correction, the big uproar was caused by the leaders of two bitterly divided and shortsighted parties who are nearly indistinguishable to the American public, because of their complete lack of backbone to actually take different stands. It was caused by an opportunistic grab for power that succeeded. Everyone outside the U.S. knows that A) Gore very nearly won, except for legitimate voting problems, and B) Gore got more votes than Bush, and that C) The reason he lost is because Gore and Bush are almost indistinguishable in every way shape and form. As my favorite political commentators said: "Gore is the one who sells out to a slightly less scary crowd of special interest groups".
In other words the furour was caused by a corrupt, degenerate, poorly organized and badly implemented system of democracry.
If Microsoft bought slashdot they'd certainly stick a few dozen developers on the system to help fix it up.
Of course, the first noticeable result would be the disappearance of all the pro-Linux and Anti-MS... ;)
I'm partially fluent in Legalese, it seems to say (Really, really simplified):
Credit Suisse manipulated the stock price of VA Linux and make themselves several tons of cash.
The lawsuit was prompted by the results of a Federal Investigation of Credit Suisse and a number of suspicious circumstances surrounding the high-tech IPO's they've underwritten.
Sue them. It appears in the U.S. the only way to get anything done is to sick lawyers on negligent companies. And in this case the company was clearly negligent and as Katz pointed out above, they broke the law in more than one place. The answer seems to be to sue them. There seem to be plenty of sleazy American lawyers willing to take cases on contingency, give them another target other than doctors and bad drivers. If enough people start filling lawsuits against these CRA's then maybe they'll find out it's cheaper to do things right than to take the bad publicitly and constant lawsuits.
I don't know it, but it appears that they may have concerns over the possible embelishment, oversimplification, and ridicule that might be heaped on them by a media that knows little more than how to ridicule, oversimplify, and embelish.
Not that I think this will solve the problem, but it looks like they are worried that popular opinion will go negative and their budget will be cut again.
does this change anything?
I don't think so. It just continues the current decay of the MS empire. Each desperate move like this further degrades their public good will.
I don't think Microsoft has used strong-arm tactics against Linux or MacOS, maybe Netscape and Java, and Java sucks anyway, so I don't really care.
Open up your eyes:
Don't confuse Capitalism with Anarchy, Ok?
Anybody want to start a religion that believes the universe began on August 25th, 1991?
We could then file for a patent on the entire human genome and claim our God's patent rights both predate all current genetic patents and that they haven't expired yet... ;)
Deferring the release of results is not censorship.
You seem to have missed the point. Results are released at different times in different parts of the country for the benefit of the people.
Now in the interst of allowing everyone to receive the results simultaneously across the country, there are essentially two choices:
Either of these situations is simply less desirable than gagging the media for a few hours. Only an absolutist would think that the benefit of releasing local results to Newfoundland before 1:30 AM, and the befenit of allowing the BC polls to close after working hours so everyone has the opportunity to vote is less desireable than gagging the reporting of results until after polls close.
But then again, Americans are all about putting their own self-interest first and foremost. Sometimes rights conflict, such as your right to free speech, and my right to fair democractic election. Or the rights of the Newfoundlanders to see the results of their local elections and the importance of keeping the election results unbiased by foreknowledge of the results.
This law can easily be broken or circumvented, but it's main goal to to prevent widespread corruption of the political process without sacrificing timely results to the east coast. With the exception of a few people who can't stop and think before they do something, most people think it's entirely reasonable. After all if it is consistent violated, the end result will simply be the gagging of all results until after the polls are closed, thus everybody looses.
If you can't see that, then you're blind.
Does anyone else find it funny, that the proposed solution to Elections Canada's censorship is more censorship?
I mean, they publish the results in Eastern Canada so the people living there can see the local results before they go to bed.
Elections Canada could prevent that publication, but instead they trust Canadians not to spread the information. For shame, that our government might trust the people, and punish those who break that trust.
It's sad that so many people think that because there is a pot, they *have* to piss in it.