I don't really see the corporatism. I assume you're talking about the idea of requiring stations that use the airwaves to provide free time?
If so, it doesn't seem like a problem to me because they'll know about the requirements up-front and can bid for them with that in mind.
And no, rich politicians aren't inherently more trustworthy than the poor. But allowing them to buy publicity (which directly translate to votes - at least to a point) seems to violate the spirit of the system where people vote for the best representation.
In the last local election I barely heard about the Green Party candidate because they didn't have many yard signs, where three major parties had plastered the neighborhood with their signs. The simple issue of funding prevented one party from being as widely known which no-doubt cost them votes.
I saw the beta and pretty much dismissed the game based on that.
There's no use of terrain in the way that Total Annihilation did back in 98 or so. The game still seems balanced towards rushes, and the units are pretty dumb.
I liked how in TA you could tell your repair units to patrol an area and repair anything that needed it. Anything else makes unit repair/medics a micro-management nightmare.
Age of Empires 2 is a much more in-depth game, and TA is much more strategically advanced. W3 brings nothing to the table except funny unit sayings and exploding sheep. Star Craft at least pioneered the not-identical races concept.
Bleh. Blizzard has always been heavy-handed about trying to prevent certain tactics instead of actually trying to balance the game against them. For example, to try to limit rushes they put a limit on the number of units you can control at once. Boring. Part of the fun in TA was bringing a huge army towards your enemy and watching the 100+ unit dust-up. And the SC unit-limit didn't stop rushes, it just made them a bit more annoying to launch and defend against if your enemy did launch them.
The big thing that made rushes so effective in WC & SC was that there were no useful defenses as in AoE. That's a game where attacking a base is painful if they defend it well. It's also an example of how to encourage diverse armies because ideally you bring infantry for attack power, cavalry to destroy enemy catapults and trebuchets, plus your own trebuchets to destroy walls and towers, etc, etc. The lack of walls (supply depots in a row don't count) in SC meant that you could pretty well ignore everything except melee troops.
I think predicting ISNs also lets you hijack a connection...
You let Alice telnet into Bob's machine and do enough that she's had time to enter her password. You then DoS Alice into next week while sending telnet packets to Bob that will create some sort of hole for you to come through later.
Bob sends the responses to Alice but she doesn't see them because she's flooded off the net, and Bob doesn't bother resending them because you ACK the packets.
Now SSH does prevent this, because you can still forge TCP/IP headers and guess ISNs, but you can't fake the encryption without knowing the password (and if you knew that, you'd just log in normally.)
Configuring a machine to trust another based soley on the IP is actually rhosts, I think. I've never actually used it, but that sounds right. And yes, it's supposed to be quite insecure.
Why can't we order them to provide free services? We "auction" off the public airwaves at way below market value. I agree that cable companies are harder to control, but those using the airwaves can provide them.
Airtime on cable stations can be purchased with money from other sales of public resources.
I would agree that there isn't enough real debate between politicians, just sound-bites. That's why I don't like the idea of the rich (or well-backed) politicians buying a ton of airtime for these sound bites.
If you provided free airtime for them it could be with the stipulation that they debate other candidates at the appropriate level, etc. As is, the debates are really worthless, they pick their opponent and it's a big PR thing.
One of the conditions of purchasing access to the airwaves is providing government access. Just write it into all the new contracts that they get more. Not a biggy.
And the argument that anything government does costs more is tired libertarian bullshit. Something done seperately by every candidate is much less efficient that something run by a central authority.
And yes, not increasing the exposure of candidates you agree with is a feature. Let them compete without outside help.
The idea being that everyone who can get a basic number of signatures gets a certain level of support for round 1, for round 2, get more signatures, etc... Like 1000, 5000, 50k, 150k, etc.. Anyone who can get people to sign a petition supporting them (not even promising a vote, just supporting them as a candidate) gets the support.
Web browsing is interpreting of content. That should be in user space. Perhaps it should be a part of every OS install, but that's a lot different than the networking code which fetches the content.
The OS really shouldn't do much, it should just provide services to the other components.
Remember how everyone gave MS hell for Win95, saying it was still a DOS app? Well, people were somewhat wrong to do so. Win95 sucked in that it was limited by the same things a MS-DOS, but it shouldn't have been an OS. It should have just been an integrated desktop environment running on top of the real OS. Anything else is hideous to debug and very unsafe.
Go to Astalavista.box.sk and search for Quicktime, it'll come up with a list of keygens, take the one for 5.x (not preview release) and generate a key.
I don't use any of the Quicktime Pro features but I hate the stupid nag screens.
www.gamecopyworld.com has NoCD patches for games which are pretty handy.
(Especially Diablo 2, the last Blizzard game I'll ever buy, which wouldn't do a CD-check properly in my burner. Blizzard's response was "buy a new CD drive." Fuck em.)
Keygens, NoCD cracks, AdAware and Proximitron (with Mozilla) make a wonderful nag-free, CD-check free computing experience.
Serv-U FTP has bugs that allow DoS attacks and "root"-level access from outside. Is this MS's fault?
Then when is IRSSI the fault of Linux developers?
Look at how fast major server products (OpenSSH, Apache, etc) get patched after exploits are discovered. Then look at how long it takes MS. And how MS delays (UPnP) around critical sales times like christmas.
There's no way you can say with a straight face that MS has a decent security record compared to open source projects like Linux, Apache, etc. (Hell, they barely have a decent security record compared to Sun, etc.)
Install the latest Mandrake with enough aps to replicate the functionality of Win2k Server. Now tell me how often you have to patch it to avoid remote exploits. How often during the same time does Win2k Server have to get patched?
Of course, IRSSI doesn't count here, any more than you can count mIRC against Win2k.
I think the whole point of the lawsuit is that Gator barely informs the user and does it in a way as to intentional avoid doing so when possible.
If you hire someone to snip ads from a magazine, or automatically close pop-up windows, that's essentially as if you are doing it and as long as it's legal for you to do it, you can hire someone to do it.
Gator on the other hand is very unclear on what it does and doesn't really give people a chance to agree. It's like you going to the store to buy a magazine and when you get it home you find out that the magazine has been edited, without your consent or that of the publisher, to change the ads, rewrite the editorial content, etc.
And then the store claims that you agreed to this because when you bought a cup of coffee there was a contract printed on the bottom of the cups...
If Gator really was something people wanted to install, I don't think the suit would go anywhere. But Gator basically does all this without the consent of anyone.
Cops need money to better perform their duties. Haven't you ever seen them looking for more funding?
Of course, there's this expectation that the police will make due with the money they're given... Politicians don't seem capable of sticking to a budget.
Seek time is important too, which is a combination of head-travel speed and roational latency.
This will give them a reason to keep the RPMs up. If they drop them, for instance for 540, that'd that about 111ms for the disk to rotate to the right spot to be read. Not a killer, once, but when the data becomes fragmented it's unacceptable.
In the old days they had drives with multiple sets of read heads, spaced evenly around the drive. I figure we'll go back to this some day, when the heat from multiple heads is less than the heat from increasing the speed.
Adding a second head would let them have speed equivalent to a 7200rpm drive in a 3600rpm one. With four heads that would be equivalent to a 15k-rpm drive...
I'm sure there some of that. Some things are just too much for campaign contributions to twist, gun control, abortion, and other flamebait topic.
It seems a bit like bribery still though. Undue influence because of money.
If you pay a cop $20 to ignore your speeding, that's a bribe. If you pay a supervisor $20 to put a lazy cop on your route, that's still a bribe, even though it's indirect and not as guaranteed as a direct bribe.
We already say that some things are off-limits during elections (campaigning near polling stations, early release of results, etc) so why not go one step further and forbid giving politicians any money, directly or otherwise?
Sure. And giving money to the cop wouldn't be a problem if he didn't give you preferential treatment for it.
The problem is that it's almost impossible to tell what someone wants. Maybe I simply want him to go eat donuts for a while to let me break a law, maybe I want to be arrested for a minor crime to distract for a major crime, or maybe I want him to go stop speeders, paying special attention to a certain car I need delayed.
Because nobody can look at this and tell if the $20 I gave him is having the desired effect (ie, a bribe) they simply rule that the giving of the money is the crime and prevent that.
There are times you could give an officer money and not mean it as a bribe, but the thin line is so difficult to see that it was decided to avoid the whole issue.
I think we should have a system where all candidates are given campaign funds by the state based on the number of "signatures" collected by certain dates. There are drawbacks to the plan, but it lets us remove the undue influence of money.
As long as the client tests the MD5 sums of the chunks it downloads it can decide when to ignore a certain user.
Pick a version you think is likely good, request an overall MD5 sum and that of various parts. Now download from other people and test blocks at random.
You need to trust someone, either the P2P service, or a single user in a list, but considering you could block a user from showing up again (either in the download list, or from the automated download splitting) you could simply try another user, having weeded out a few cheaters.
While this definately would be a good start, it doesn't go far enough...
There need to be more limits to this "legal entity" thing. If a corporation breaks laws there are people behind it who ordered that these laws be broken. They need to be punished (jail time, fines that really punish - everything they made and then some) in such a way that will ensure they don't just form another of these legal entities and do it again.
As someone else in this thread noticed, exec always have golden parachutes, usually they come out smelling like roses even if personally linked to crimes dastardly enough to put a poor person in jail for a lifetime.
You can do a 5+0 RAID (I think, or is it 0+5?), which is a RAID 5, that is mirrored. Pop a set of drives in, mirror the RAID onto them, and pop them out. Move them off-site for storage.
It's more secure than CDs because the data is interleaved across all of them in such a way that losing any one to three disks won't actually lose any information. In a CD backup you'll actually lose information if a single disk fails, unless you stripe the data and parity info, but few systems support doing that unless you burn all the disks at once (which isn't likely).
I saw a dedicated raid controller that they used for this. It had eight drive bays, plus another eight. It could run off of either set, and would mirror the RAID 5 across from one set to another as soon as the drives were inserted. Trivial to operate.
Fining a monopoly doesn't mean higher prices for consumers unless you have a monopoly such that no other alternatives can exist (as in, your company controls all the raw materials required.) In the case of MS, they have a monopoly now but could easily lose it if they couldn't undercut all competitors. Fining them enough to raise their prices would benefit consumers.
As to the issue of perjury. Simply the fact that evidence was faked is evidence of intent. You can't pin it on the guy who displayed it, and finding the person who did doctor the tape (or order it) is likely to be hard, but this isn't verbal perjury where someone can say they were mistaken - this is the faking of evidence. How do you accidentaly fake a video? It's easily enough for conviction.
As for contempt, simply trying to pull something and getting caught is often enough. As you say, this isn't TV. On TV lawyers skirt the edges of the law all the time and keep almost getting in trouble for badgering witnesses, etc, etc. In real life they don't push in that way because they know they wouldn't be in the court room for long. Contempt charges are easy and judges know it, it's their stick with which to control people.
The fines could and should be huge. Company wrecking? Yeah, perhaps. Maybe it'd never happen, but for political reasons, not legal ones.
Haven't you ever seen how in smaller crimes (ones where people don't donate huge ammounts of campaign contributions) the punishments are set not at a multiple of the damages, but at a multiple of the expected profit. This is designed to remove motive.
Sure, it won't happen. We all knew from the beginning that nothing would. But that doesn't mean it couldn't, just that everyone has your attitude, it'd be too hard and cost a lot of money so they might as well get away with it...
There are choices. Let MS raise the fees for Windows, that lets other companies actually stand a chance. Nobody else can afford to nearly give their OS away if they write one, so they go out of business. (Witness BeOS) Microsoft isn't, what's the term, a natural monopoly? As in, where one company owns all the means of production and nobody else could ever compete (like if they owned the oil wells). They're a monopoly in that they exert unfair pressure in other markets by using their OS control. If they couldn't undercut competition in the OS market you might actually see some.
Also, nobody needs a new OS. If they raised the rates it'd slow sales and they'd actually have to support their current products instead of keeping people on the upgrade cycle. It really wouldn't hurt the economy all that much.
Hell, Apple has finally made a decent OS, it couldn't be too hard to make a PC version of it. If there was a viable market it'd be worth someone making a spiffy front-end for linux, or bsd, and actually market it.
And I have seen people tried for perjury. Maybe the US is different from Canada in that, but I think it'd be trivial to prove perjury in the case of the faked video, for instance. You can't accidentaly fake a video.
And rarely do CEOs get charged, but why is that? It's because they're rich and in many things, above the law. Contempt is easy to prove and many instances of perjury end up with contempt charges instead. Hell, even a week in jail would be a bit of a lesson.
As for how much to fine them... Don't look at the damage to Netscape, look at the benefit to MS. They now control the browser market. Get a few industry analysts to examine that issue and take the average estimate. After all, they did it to help themselves as much as to hurt the competition, so remove that incentive.
(It's like Rambus. If they tried to patent things JEDEC members were talking about they not only should lose their patents on that, but should also lose their patents on RDRAM which is what they really intended to profit from because of their illegal dealings.)
If it puts them out of business, tough. Sucks to be caught. It's this pansy-ass "we can't punish them, it'd be ineffective and a bit painful to us" mentality that encourages them to do it. Why will any company now ever bother following the law when they have proof that it'll be ignored?
It will hurt to properly punish them, but every dollar they don't make through OS sales, someone else will. There is a demand for PCs, it won't dry up overnight. MS doesn't control the creation of PCs so they'll still get made and still get bought...
Why not fine MS? Why not try individuals (and their bosses, etc) for perjury? These are things that would be done to any other company that broke the law blatantly and lied about it in court.
I'm sick of this shit about how MS can't be punished because so many people are financially dependent on them. Tough. You invested in it without regard for how it was being run, you deserve to take a bath.
And when it comes to setting conduct penalties... Why should this be hard to enforce? The minute there's a complaint, investigate. When it's clear they've broken that restriction, toss execs in jail for contempt. Just 90 days would do. And fine them all their profits related to the action, times three as is a common punative damage.
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I don't really see the corporatism. I assume you're talking about the idea of requiring stations that use the airwaves to provide free time?
If so, it doesn't seem like a problem to me because they'll know about the requirements up-front and can bid for them with that in mind.
And no, rich politicians aren't inherently more trustworthy than the poor. But allowing them to buy publicity (which directly translate to votes - at least to a point) seems to violate the spirit of the system where people vote for the best representation.
In the last local election I barely heard about the Green Party candidate because they didn't have many yard signs, where three major parties had plastered the neighborhood with their signs. The simple issue of funding prevented one party from being as widely known which no-doubt cost them votes.
I saw the beta and pretty much dismissed the game based on that.
There's no use of terrain in the way that Total Annihilation did back in 98 or so. The game still seems balanced towards rushes, and the units are pretty dumb.
I liked how in TA you could tell your repair units to patrol an area and repair anything that needed it. Anything else makes unit repair/medics a micro-management nightmare.
Age of Empires 2 is a much more in-depth game, and TA is much more strategically advanced. W3 brings nothing to the table except funny unit sayings and exploding sheep. Star Craft at least pioneered the not-identical races concept.
Bleh. Blizzard has always been heavy-handed about trying to prevent certain tactics instead of actually trying to balance the game against them. For example, to try to limit rushes they put a limit on the number of units you can control at once. Boring. Part of the fun in TA was bringing a huge army towards your enemy and watching the 100+ unit dust-up. And the SC unit-limit didn't stop rushes, it just made them a bit more annoying to launch and defend against if your enemy did launch them.
The big thing that made rushes so effective in WC & SC was that there were no useful defenses as in AoE. That's a game where attacking a base is painful if they defend it well. It's also an example of how to encourage diverse armies because ideally you bring infantry for attack power, cavalry to destroy enemy catapults and trebuchets, plus your own trebuchets to destroy walls and towers, etc, etc. The lack of walls (supply depots in a row don't count) in SC meant that you could pretty well ignore everything except melee troops.
I think predicting ISNs also lets you hijack a connection...
You let Alice telnet into Bob's machine and do enough that she's had time to enter her password. You then DoS Alice into next week while sending telnet packets to Bob that will create some sort of hole for you to come through later.
Bob sends the responses to Alice but she doesn't see them because she's flooded off the net, and Bob doesn't bother resending them because you ACK the packets.
Now SSH does prevent this, because you can still forge TCP/IP headers and guess ISNs, but you can't fake the encryption without knowing the password (and if you knew that, you'd just log in normally.)
Configuring a machine to trust another based soley on the IP is actually rhosts, I think. I've never actually used it, but that sounds right. And yes, it's supposed to be quite insecure.
Why can't we order them to provide free services? We "auction" off the public airwaves at way below market value. I agree that cable companies are harder to control, but those using the airwaves can provide them.
Airtime on cable stations can be purchased with money from other sales of public resources.
I would agree that there isn't enough real debate between politicians, just sound-bites. That's why I don't like the idea of the rich (or well-backed) politicians buying a ton of airtime for these sound bites.
If you provided free airtime for them it could be with the stipulation that they debate other candidates at the appropriate level, etc. As is, the debates are really worthless, they pick their opponent and it's a big PR thing.
I don't think cracks or keygens are illegal actually.
Especially if you own the software, like I did with Diablo 2, before I sold it.
With something you didn't pay for, Quicktime for instance, you're on shaky ground perhaps.
One of the conditions of purchasing access to the airwaves is providing government access. Just write it into all the new contracts that they get more. Not a biggy.
And the argument that anything government does costs more is tired libertarian bullshit. Something done seperately by every candidate is much less efficient that something run by a central authority.
And yes, not increasing the exposure of candidates you agree with is a feature. Let them compete without outside help.
The idea being that everyone who can get a basic number of signatures gets a certain level of support for round 1, for round 2, get more signatures, etc... Like 1000, 5000, 50k, 150k, etc.. Anyone who can get people to sign a petition supporting them (not even promising a vote, just supporting them as a candidate) gets the support.
Any idea where to get Snipes, and if it worked without Novell networking? Is IPX/SPX enough?
I really enjoyed that back when it was new and would like to show my Q3-addicted friends how us old-timers used to deathmatch.
Hell no.
Web browsing is interpreting of content. That should be in user space. Perhaps it should be a part of every OS install, but that's a lot different than the networking code which fetches the content.
The OS really shouldn't do much, it should just provide services to the other components.
Remember how everyone gave MS hell for Win95, saying it was still a DOS app? Well, people were somewhat wrong to do so. Win95 sucked in that it was limited by the same things a MS-DOS, but it shouldn't have been an OS. It should have just been an integrated desktop environment running on top of the real OS. Anything else is hideous to debug and very unsafe.
That's easy to fix.
Go to Astalavista.box.sk and search for Quicktime, it'll come up with a list of keygens, take the one for 5.x (not preview release) and generate a key.
I don't use any of the Quicktime Pro features but I hate the stupid nag screens.
www.gamecopyworld.com has NoCD patches for games which are pretty handy.
(Especially Diablo 2, the last Blizzard game I'll ever buy, which wouldn't do a CD-check properly in my burner. Blizzard's response was "buy a new CD drive." Fuck em.)
Keygens, NoCD cracks, AdAware and Proximitron (with Mozilla) make a wonderful nag-free, CD-check free computing experience.
Serv-U FTP has bugs that allow DoS attacks and "root"-level access from outside. Is this MS's fault?
Then when is IRSSI the fault of Linux developers?
Look at how fast major server products (OpenSSH, Apache, etc) get patched after exploits are discovered. Then look at how long it takes MS. And how MS delays (UPnP) around critical sales times like christmas.
There's no way you can say with a straight face that MS has a decent security record compared to open source projects like Linux, Apache, etc. (Hell, they barely have a decent security record compared to Sun, etc.)
Install the latest Mandrake with enough aps to replicate the functionality of Win2k Server. Now tell me how often you have to patch it to avoid remote exploits. How often during the same time does Win2k Server have to get patched?
Of course, IRSSI doesn't count here, any more than you can count mIRC against Win2k.
If all politicians were stuck with the same budget, why would any of them need more?
I think the whole point of the lawsuit is that Gator barely informs the user and does it in a way as to intentional avoid doing so when possible.
If you hire someone to snip ads from a magazine, or automatically close pop-up windows, that's essentially as if you are doing it and as long as it's legal for you to do it, you can hire someone to do it.
Gator on the other hand is very unclear on what it does and doesn't really give people a chance to agree. It's like you going to the store to buy a magazine and when you get it home you find out that the magazine has been edited, without your consent or that of the publisher, to change the ads, rewrite the editorial content, etc.
And then the store claims that you agreed to this because when you bought a cup of coffee there was a contract printed on the bottom of the cups...
If Gator really was something people wanted to install, I don't think the suit would go anywhere. But Gator basically does all this without the consent of anyone.
Money is only needed to get your name out if you don't have a system that supports everyone equally.
If we have a system that basically requires bribes to function, maybe we should change the system.
I am fundamentaly nervous with a system that has people paying the politicians in charge of making laws that affect the people...
Cops need money to better perform their duties. Haven't you ever seen them looking for more funding?
Of course, there's this expectation that the police will make due with the money they're given... Politicians don't seem capable of sticking to a budget.
Nope. Just proves how depressingly stupid most voters are. Willing to overlook anything he does because they need to show solidarity in wartime.
Ugh. He's a simp, but they're festering retards.
Seek time is important too, which is a combination of head-travel speed and roational latency.
This will give them a reason to keep the RPMs up. If they drop them, for instance for 540, that'd that about 111ms for the disk to rotate to the right spot to be read. Not a killer, once, but when the data becomes fragmented it's unacceptable.
In the old days they had drives with multiple sets of read heads, spaced evenly around the drive. I figure we'll go back to this some day, when the heat from multiple heads is less than the heat from increasing the speed.
Adding a second head would let them have speed equivalent to a 7200rpm drive in a 3600rpm one. With four heads that would be equivalent to a 15k-rpm drive...
I'm sure there some of that. Some things are just too much for campaign contributions to twist, gun control, abortion, and other flamebait topic.
It seems a bit like bribery still though. Undue influence because of money.
If you pay a cop $20 to ignore your speeding, that's a bribe. If you pay a supervisor $20 to put a lazy cop on your route, that's still a bribe, even though it's indirect and not as guaranteed as a direct bribe.
We already say that some things are off-limits during elections (campaigning near polling stations, early release of results, etc) so why not go one step further and forbid giving politicians any money, directly or otherwise?
Sure. And giving money to the cop wouldn't be a problem if he didn't give you preferential treatment for it.
The problem is that it's almost impossible to tell what someone wants. Maybe I simply want him to go eat donuts for a while to let me break a law, maybe I want to be arrested for a minor crime to distract for a major crime, or maybe I want him to go stop speeders, paying special attention to a certain car I need delayed.
Because nobody can look at this and tell if the $20 I gave him is having the desired effect (ie, a bribe) they simply rule that the giving of the money is the crime and prevent that.
There are times you could give an officer money and not mean it as a bribe, but the thin line is so difficult to see that it was decided to avoid the whole issue.
I think we should have a system where all candidates are given campaign funds by the state based on the number of "signatures" collected by certain dates. There are drawbacks to the plan, but it lets us remove the undue influence of money.
As long as the client tests the MD5 sums of the chunks it downloads it can decide when to ignore a certain user.
Pick a version you think is likely good, request an overall MD5 sum and that of various parts. Now download from other people and test blocks at random.
You need to trust someone, either the P2P service, or a single user in a list, but considering you could block a user from showing up again (either in the download list, or from the automated download splitting) you could simply try another user, having weeded out a few cheaters.
Suprising, no. Meaningful, yes.
Campaign contribution is the same as if you tried to hand a cop a twenty before breaking the law.
There are laws against bribery in some contexts, why do we allow it in more important contexts?
While this definately would be a good start, it doesn't go far enough...
There need to be more limits to this "legal entity" thing. If a corporation breaks laws there are people behind it who ordered that these laws be broken. They need to be punished (jail time, fines that really punish - everything they made and then some) in such a way that will ensure they don't just form another of these legal entities and do it again.
As someone else in this thread noticed, exec always have golden parachutes, usually they come out smelling like roses even if personally linked to crimes dastardly enough to put a poor person in jail for a lifetime.
You can do a 5+0 RAID (I think, or is it 0+5?), which is a RAID 5, that is mirrored. Pop a set of drives in, mirror the RAID onto them, and pop them out. Move them off-site for storage.
It's more secure than CDs because the data is interleaved across all of them in such a way that losing any one to three disks won't actually lose any information. In a CD backup you'll actually lose information if a single disk fails, unless you stripe the data and parity info, but few systems support doing that unless you burn all the disks at once (which isn't likely).
I saw a dedicated raid controller that they used for this. It had eight drive bays, plus another eight. It could run off of either set, and would mirror the RAID 5 across from one set to another as soon as the drives were inserted. Trivial to operate.
Fining a monopoly doesn't mean higher prices for consumers unless you have a monopoly such that no other alternatives can exist (as in, your company controls all the raw materials required.) In the case of MS, they have a monopoly now but could easily lose it if they couldn't undercut all competitors. Fining them enough to raise their prices would benefit consumers.
As to the issue of perjury. Simply the fact that evidence was faked is evidence of intent. You can't pin it on the guy who displayed it, and finding the person who did doctor the tape (or order it) is likely to be hard, but this isn't verbal perjury where someone can say they were mistaken - this is the faking of evidence. How do you accidentaly fake a video? It's easily enough for conviction.
As for contempt, simply trying to pull something and getting caught is often enough. As you say, this isn't TV. On TV lawyers skirt the edges of the law all the time and keep almost getting in trouble for badgering witnesses, etc, etc. In real life they don't push in that way because they know they wouldn't be in the court room for long. Contempt charges are easy and judges know it, it's their stick with which to control people.
The fines could and should be huge. Company wrecking? Yeah, perhaps. Maybe it'd never happen, but for political reasons, not legal ones.
Haven't you ever seen how in smaller crimes (ones where people don't donate huge ammounts of campaign contributions) the punishments are set not at a multiple of the damages, but at a multiple of the expected profit. This is designed to remove motive.
Sure, it won't happen. We all knew from the beginning that nothing would. But that doesn't mean it couldn't, just that everyone has your attitude, it'd be too hard and cost a lot of money so they might as well get away with it...
Same old story.
There are choices. Let MS raise the fees for Windows, that lets other companies actually stand a chance. Nobody else can afford to nearly give their OS away if they write one, so they go out of business. (Witness BeOS) Microsoft isn't, what's the term, a natural monopoly? As in, where one company owns all the means of production and nobody else could ever compete (like if they owned the oil wells). They're a monopoly in that they exert unfair pressure in other markets by using their OS control. If they couldn't undercut competition in the OS market you might actually see some.
Also, nobody needs a new OS. If they raised the rates it'd slow sales and they'd actually have to support their current products instead of keeping people on the upgrade cycle. It really wouldn't hurt the economy all that much.
Hell, Apple has finally made a decent OS, it couldn't be too hard to make a PC version of it. If there was a viable market it'd be worth someone making a spiffy front-end for linux, or bsd, and actually market it.
And I have seen people tried for perjury. Maybe the US is different from Canada in that, but I think it'd be trivial to prove perjury in the case of the faked video, for instance. You can't accidentaly fake a video.
And rarely do CEOs get charged, but why is that? It's because they're rich and in many things, above the law. Contempt is easy to prove and many instances of perjury end up with contempt charges instead. Hell, even a week in jail would be a bit of a lesson.
As for how much to fine them... Don't look at the damage to Netscape, look at the benefit to MS. They now control the browser market. Get a few industry analysts to examine that issue and take the average estimate. After all, they did it to help themselves as much as to hurt the competition, so remove that incentive.
(It's like Rambus. If they tried to patent things JEDEC members were talking about they not only should lose their patents on that, but should also lose their patents on RDRAM which is what they really intended to profit from because of their illegal dealings.)
If it puts them out of business, tough. Sucks to be caught. It's this pansy-ass "we can't punish them, it'd be ineffective and a bit painful to us" mentality that encourages them to do it. Why will any company now ever bother following the law when they have proof that it'll be ignored?
It will hurt to properly punish them, but every dollar they don't make through OS sales, someone else will. There is a demand for PCs, it won't dry up overnight. MS doesn't control the creation of PCs so they'll still get made and still get bought...
Why not fine MS? Why not try individuals (and their bosses, etc) for perjury? These are things that would be done to any other company that broke the law blatantly and lied about it in court.
I'm sick of this shit about how MS can't be punished because so many people are financially dependent on them. Tough. You invested in it without regard for how it was being run, you deserve to take a bath.
And when it comes to setting conduct penalties... Why should this be hard to enforce? The minute there's a complaint, investigate. When it's clear they've broken that restriction, toss execs in jail for contempt. Just 90 days would do. And fine them all their profits related to the action, times three as is a common punative damage.
What is really so hard about that?