For instance, how would one explain the "Autism/Vaccination" fiasco? Talking of blind trust, here we have literally hundreds of thousands of people, who willingly and knowingly ignore multiple large-scale peer-reviewed studies, only to put their faith into something that can only be described as an internet fad, started by some really sad an unfortunate parents, looking to place the blame for the tragic condition that befell their child. This really has nothing to do with the internet. Severe illness drives desperation. People who suffer from serious illnesses can be easily duped into accepting "alternative" treatments and causes, especially when conventional medicine doesn't have an attractive solution. And there's always someone willing to SELL you that "alternative", whether it works or not.
The autism/vaccination fiasco (like the autism/facilitated communication fiasco) was pushed by "snake oil" salesmen because the wanted to scam people to make money. It's been this way for, literally, thousands of years. Sure, it much have STARTED because of a few distressed parents, but it spread because snake oil salesmen found products to push.
The liability of the cardholder is about 50 Euro, until he reports his card as stolen/lost - then it's zero. I've had 600 Euro fraudulently charged to my credit card (probably my CC info got "lost" during a 1.5 year stay in the US, because that was the only time when I regularly used it), and got it charged back without having to pay a thing. This is very similar to the US rules. As I said, apparently this has changed since last I looked into it, which admittedly was almost 10 years ago.
Well, there are more reasons for credit cards being not as common over here. One is that checking accounts usually come with a line of credit (if you have a regular income, with conditions comparable to that of a CC except for the grace period), so you don't need credit cards for "consumer" credit. You can get lines of credit like this is the USA, I have one. But the terms are often unfavorable compared to credit cards.
Others might be that direct deposit, direct debit (very convenient since it also allows chargeback within 6 weeks) and paying with your ATM card are more common, pretty much negating the need for a CC for most things. This is different from the US model. Chargebacks aren't allowed on debit/ATM transactions. This is a bit screwy because most Americans have ATM cards that are Visa/MasterCard Check Cards. If they are USED as credit cards you can do chargebacks (and the merchant is charged the CC transaction fee). Direct deposit is heavily used here as well, but I really think that doesn't havea major impact on credit cards.
However, I've written lots of software for BSD, including on embedded devices, and lots of software for Linux, including on phones; and I can verify that BSD on embedded devices is just the same as BSD on the desktop, and that Linux on phones is the same - the codebase with the same libraries and many of the same applications - on phones as it is on the desktop. Are you seriously going to argue that the distribution of Linux on any common phone (which one did you work on?) is similar to Ubuntu or any other major desktop distribution? It's not. You'll find that the phone is missing tons of "standard" libraries, tools, and applications.
I'd agree with you that Linux embedded development is generally WAY easier than Windows embedded development because of the similarity of the command line environment. You can easily write code that requires nothing more than a recompile to run on different architectures. I'd argue that BSD is at least as good as Linux in this regard. MacOS is not BSD. MacOS X has an extremely heavy GUI. It's difficult to believe that significant changes weren't made to the GUI and it's interfaces to accommodate the smaller screens and slower processors of phones (hint: the same is true of Linux!).
And, again, having written software for it: Windows CE is not - not even remotely - the same as either Windows95/98/Me or Windows NT/XP/Vista. It's completely different. This is just BS. Windows Mobile uses similar or identical APIs and interfaces as desktop Windows. I ported a VB app to Windows Mobile by changing ONE LINE, and I'm not much of a software developer. Having said that, interacting with the hardware can be quite a bit different. Porting a simple game is a lot easier than trying to port an IM app (needs the network) or GPS app.
Vista's failure is down to poor engineering and poor management. Vista could have been brought out on time with all its features as promised by half a dozen of the companies out there - but not by Microsoft. Since you don't seem to know much about the development of Vista, I question this assertion. Do you, for example, approximately how many engineers worked on Vista full time? What were the major teams? What were the names of the heads of those teams and how much experience did they have?
Vista is a failure not because of any sort of code maintenance problem, but rather that Microsoft aimed far too high with Vista, taking far too many risks for a big, big change.
Like many such highly speculative (the whole WinFS initiative), large-scale projects, it failed spectacularly, and the result was a backtrack and then a polishing of XP to pretend it was something new. The failure of WinFS alone, which was to be a major foundation of a lot of the features of the new OS, was a massive failure for the project. Please mod the parent up.
Anyone who is familiar with the Vista development process would agree with this analysis. Vista's problems stem from trying to do too much, not from doing too little. Vista is not Windows Me.
unlike in Europe where the CONSUMER has all the liability.
Bunch of BS. As far as I'm aware in the UK, France, and Germany the consumer has the liability for domestic credit card fraud, not the merchant. I'm not familiar with all the laws in all of Europe. If you're saying the EU has changed their laws to conform to something like what we see in the USA then YAY!
Credit cards are less common over here because people are being taught in school that consuming on credit is bad fiscal behavior. They have the same classes in the USA you know. I had such a class and I attended high school many years ago. I apparently think better of Europeans than you do because I believe they saw unfavorable terms and then rejected them.
Sorry, I meant the client would mangle the messages when retrieving them. Most of the serious bugs in NMS were with IMAP, it mostly worked fine if you stuck to POP3. Since I've seen this pattern repeated with a number of mail servers, and I've heard an ARMY of developers complain about the spec (I don't understand it, but I don't claim to be an expert), the additional instability I've seen overrides the superior features of IMAP over POP3 as far as I'm concerned. And with Exchange I have a mail server with MORE features than IMAP that is (IME) much more robust, so I've been disinclined to experiment with IMAP further.
My understanding is that there were major revisions to the spec back in 2003 and those revisions may have fixed many of the problems I've experienced. I've just been burned in the past.
Maybe I'm just a curmudgeon. I won't use Macs either because of my horrible experiences with MacOS 9.
PayPal has helped ME reclaim money from sellers who scammed me, several times. About 1 in 3 purchases I make on eBay are fraudulent somehow (I buy a lot of used electronics. This is an heavy area for fraud on eBay) and PayPal has helped me reclaim money almost every time. The last time I was scammed (on a pair of bluetooth headphones) PayPal didn't help much, but that's mainly because I waited too longer than 30 days to file my complaint. In the past when I've quickly filed my complaints I quickly got my money back.
As a seller, PayPal HAS frozen my account once because of a buyer complaint. They quickly unlocked it (3 days) and I didn't lose any money. I also think their fees are excessive for sellers, but I understand WHY the fees are so high (massive seller fraud).
EVERY seller I have seen in recent years that refuses to accept PayPal is a scammer. Back in the day when SquareTrade did auction payments I ran into some legitimate sellers that used SquareTrade instead of PayPal. SquareTrade's buyer protection was awesome, but they soaked up too much liability and stopped doing it. What does that tell you?
Given the MASSIVE fraud I see from sellers on eBay I think this move is long overdue.
Chargeback is basically fraud protection - if someone's credit card is stolen they can recover any lost money. But where do you think this money comes from ? From the credit card issuing company ? From PayPal ? Nope - the fraudulent transactions are reversed, so the person who originally received payment ends up footing the loss. That's right, in the USA (thankfully) MERCHANTS carry most of the burden for credit card fraud, unlike in Europe where the CONSUMER has all the liability. The only way around this is to insist on cash/money order. And I would refuse to do business with ANY eBay seller that only accepted cash because of the lack of fraud protection for ME means they are almost certainly trying to scam ME.
The US payment systems (again, thankfully) tend to heavily favor the consumer over the merchant. eBay is simply falling in line with general US practice. This is very good for the consumer, and what's good for the consumer is good for merchants in the long run. Why do you think credit cards are so widely used in the USA? It's almost SOLELY because of the favorable fraud protection. Americans face only $50 of fraud liability while Europeans face liability up to the credit limit of the card! Credit cards are less common in Europe for exactly this reason. They also generally have much lower limits in Europe (again, for the same reason).
In the real world of credit card fraud, ACTUAL cardholders scamming merchants is a small problem because the cards are quickly canceled and doing so voids cardholders' liability protection so merchants can try to reclaim losses against the (easily identifiable and poor) cardholders.
This also applies to eBay. According to the eBay security staff I've spoken too 90% of their fraud incidents are sellers scamming buyers with faulty, counterfeit, or nonexistent products. Sellers might make more noise about fraud, especially the PowerSellers, but THEY are the source of almost all the fraud on eBay which is why eBay has moved in this direction. I'm sorry if you're an honest eBay PowerSeller, but if you know anything about eBay you'll know that "honest" PowerSellers are about as common as "honest" lawyers.
The only real alternative is bonding for the sellers. Would you rather pay a $5000 security deposit to sell on eBay? That's what most credit card processors require for a merchant account.
Nonsense. There are plenty of other online webstore providers, like Amazon Marketplace and Yahoo! Stores. Most of them force you to use a single payment processor a well.
As someone who occasionally sells on eBay (in the USA), I'm fine with this if it's brought to the USA. Too many sellers use third-party payment systems which eBay can't monitor to screw buyers. If is costs sellers a few more pennies I could care less.
As far as I'm concerned, "PowerSellers" shouldn't exist. eBay was SUPPOSED to be a "national swap meet" with no "professional" sellers at all. And my experience has been that the "PowerSellers" are the big problem since they seem to be running all the scams. eBay is NOT meant for small retailers, that's what Yahoo! Shopping is for.
Basically if you buy an item from a seller, and it's wrong, defective, etc, paypal will give you a refund but only if you ship it to the seller's "registered" address, using a shipping service with online tracking. Because of this, sellers can register an address in a foreign country, sell low value goods, ship you garbage, and then it becomes uneconomical to send it back so the seller keeps your money. Except that you can SEE the seller's Registered Address when making your payment. If the seller says he's in the US but has a Registered Address in a foreign country you can refuse to pay for the item. In fact, this is against eBay/PayPal's rules and sellers can get tossed for doing this.
You're unique as far as I know. Communigate, Netscape Messaging Server (which I personally worked on), and UW-IMAP have all lost mail or mangled mailboxes with different clients in my experience. By "lost mail" I mean the server rejected messages sent from specific clients or using IMAP4rev1-specific headers. I can't think of an incident where any of these servers arbitrarily bounced mail sent from a POP3 client. I worked at Netscape where we used Netscape Messaging Server, I worked ON NMS, and it was buggy as shit. It sort of worked with Communicator (this was back in the Netscape 4 days) and had nasty bugs with every other client. Bugs like: If you put a binary attachment in the message the server would reject it as malformed.
IAAL and I'm getting more than a little fed up with ignorant people who can't even recognise their own ignorance. And I get pissed off at lawyers who claim obscure case law makes any random tort claim "common law". According to case law playing basketball in your own driveway is "assault". I suspect you can find case law that supports virtually any insane claim you wish to make because judges make bad decisions all the time. If it were up to idiots like you, virtually everything would be "illegal".
When most people talk about "trespass" they're talking about "criminal trespass", not obscure tort claims. And most judges in most jurisdictions would agree with ME that driving onto someone's driveway is NOT "criminal trespass" and the plaintiff would NOT have a valid tort. I know that in other posts you've clarified your position that you're not talking about "criminal trespass", but that wasn't clear to me.
As I said, if you can present me with a written statute that supports your position I'll concede I'm wrong. Otherwise all you've got is an ARGUMENT that driving on someone's driveway is "trespass". You argue in another post that a salesman ringing a doorbell also counts as "trespass", though I seriously doubt you could cite case law to support that. And even if you did, I'd revert to my previous statement that given an exhaustive enough search you can find obscure case law to support virtually any ridiculous claim.
Let's get real for a moment. Who is "right" in court has far less to do with what "the law" is and far more to do with how much money each side can afford to spend fighting. Google is going to decide how this case is resolved because they have more money.
In case it isn't clear, I have a lot of contempt for ambulance-chasing lawyers such as yourself.
Name the IMAP server that doesn't randomly lose email. I'm familiar with almost every popular IMAP mail server out there and every one I'm familiar with loses messages. Dan Bernstien, Roland Schnieder, Sam, and others who worked on RFC 2060 say that the RFC is completely broken and impossible to implement. I have heard this from every single developer I have spoken to that worked on an IMAP mailserver. EVERY IMAP server is broken because the SPEC is broken. Because the SPEC is broken every IMAP server and client handles messages (and critically) HEADERS differently.
This means that ANY particular combination of IMAP server and IMAP client (say, UW-IMAP and ThunderBird) will have nasty bugs. This is true even of Exchange and Domino which have their own clients.
I don't give a fuck what "common law" says. In California, merely walking on private property is not trespassing. You cannot shoot a Jehova's Witness for knocking on your door, nor will the police arrest him, nor do you have ANY civil case against him. It is only trespassing if you ask him to leave and he refuses. If no property owner or tenant is present he can theoretically remain on the property indefinitely.
If you can present case law that supports your position I'll concede I'm wrong.
The short answer is that Legg Mason is just angling for more money.
Senior management at Yahoo! obviously doesn't like or want the Microsoft buyout because they know that most of them will be fired by MS due to their poor financial management of the company. They're supposedly trying to fight the deal. In reality, they've already given up and are trying to stall long enough to gut the company by pissing away money and offering absurdly generous severance packages to employees (2 years pay with benefits and no non-compete agreements). I suspect that a number of them have already secretly accepted offers at other companies (like Google) and are trying to steal talent away before they're fired.
This is why Microsoft is going for the proxy fight. They KNOW the management at Yahoo! isn't negotiating in good faith and the want to get rid of them as quickly as possible.
It doesn't just "resemble" Unix; it conforms to Unix. What the fuck does that mean? Windows is POSIX complaint. You can choose from several Unix, Linux, and POSIX-compliant subsystems for Windows. etc. Is Windows Unix? Fuck no! No reasonable person would conclude this.
MacOS has a BSD-based subsystem. The command line closely resembles BSD. You've got some standard Unix commands. That's about it. Most of what takes place in "userspace" (the GUI, desktop applications, etc.) is proprietary to Apple and very NON-Unixy.
The problem is unions and government regulations. Try firing someone. You have a union to deal with. Unions are simply NOT the problem. The percentage of workers in the USA that are members of unions has been steadily falling since the 1970s. Unions, especially in the private sector, are rapidly going away.
Try building something really innovative, say a nice new nuclear power plant. Blame the oil industry. Who do you think funds anti-nuclear groups? Who funded "The China Syndrome"?.
China kills US manufacturing because it has less regulation than the US plants. Chinese manufacturing is also enormously harmful to the Chinese environment and public health. Literally millions of Chinese have died due to environmental destruction, poisoning, etc. Since China is a vicious dictatorship that treats it's people like slaves, this is hardly supprising. I do not wish to join China in a race to the bottom.
1. Protective tariffs: historically a bad idea (recall the Civil War). Tell this to the Europeans who have been enjoying a higher standard of living than us for decades, largely due to protectionism and trade tariffs.
"Pro" soundcards use breakout boxes (boxes outside of the PC) containing the ADAC for exactly this reason. This arraignment is more expensive, which is why these cards generally cost around $1000 USD.
Comcast is doing this because they're slowly transitioning to a pure IPTV system which directly competes with IPTV systems that use P2P to reduce costs like Hulu and Bittorrent. They know if they can force all their competitors to stream all content they can totally screw them on performance (since Comcast will have a lot more bandwidth to play with) and pricing. They make a lot of money off Pay-Per-View and they don't want any competition.
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The autism/vaccination fiasco (like the autism/facilitated communication fiasco) was pushed by "snake oil" salesmen because the wanted to scam people to make money. It's been this way for, literally, thousands of years. Sure, it much have STARTED because of a few distressed parents, but it spread because snake oil salesmen found products to push.
I'd agree with you that Linux embedded development is generally WAY easier than Windows embedded development because of the similarity of the command line environment. You can easily write code that requires nothing more than a recompile to run on different architectures. I'd argue that BSD is at least as good as Linux in this regard. MacOS is not BSD. MacOS X has an extremely heavy GUI. It's difficult to believe that significant changes weren't made to the GUI and it's interfaces to accommodate the smaller screens and slower processors of phones (hint: the same is true of Linux!). And, again, having written software for it: Windows CE is not - not even remotely - the same as either Windows95/98/Me or Windows NT/XP/Vista. It's completely different. This is just BS. Windows Mobile uses similar or identical APIs and interfaces as desktop Windows. I ported a VB app to Windows Mobile by changing ONE LINE, and I'm not much of a software developer. Having said that, interacting with the hardware can be quite a bit different. Porting a simple game is a lot easier than trying to port an IM app (needs the network) or GPS app. Vista's failure is down to poor engineering and poor management. Vista could have been brought out on time with all its features as promised by half a dozen of the companies out there - but not by Microsoft. Since you don't seem to know much about the development of Vista, I question this assertion. Do you, for example, approximately how many engineers worked on Vista full time? What were the major teams? What were the names of the heads of those teams and how much experience did they have?
You just don't like MS. I get that.
Like many such highly speculative (the whole WinFS initiative), large-scale projects, it failed spectacularly, and the result was a backtrack and then a polishing of XP to pretend it was something new. The failure of WinFS alone, which was to be a major foundation of a lot of the features of the new OS, was a massive failure for the project. Please mod the parent up.
Anyone who is familiar with the Vista development process would agree with this analysis. Vista's problems stem from trying to do too much, not from doing too little. Vista is not Windows Me.
Bunch of BS. As far as I'm aware in the UK, France, and Germany the consumer has the liability for domestic credit card fraud, not the merchant. I'm not familiar with all the laws in all of Europe. If you're saying the EU has changed their laws to conform to something like what we see in the USA then YAY! Credit cards are less common over here because people are being taught in school that consuming on credit is bad fiscal behavior. They have the same classes in the USA you know. I had such a class and I attended high school many years ago. I apparently think better of Europeans than you do because I believe they saw unfavorable terms and then rejected them.
Sorry, I meant the client would mangle the messages when retrieving them. Most of the serious bugs in NMS were with IMAP, it mostly worked fine if you stuck to POP3. Since I've seen this pattern repeated with a number of mail servers, and I've heard an ARMY of developers complain about the spec (I don't understand it, but I don't claim to be an expert), the additional instability I've seen overrides the superior features of IMAP over POP3 as far as I'm concerned. And with Exchange I have a mail server with MORE features than IMAP that is (IME) much more robust, so I've been disinclined to experiment with IMAP further.
My understanding is that there were major revisions to the spec back in 2003 and those revisions may have fixed many of the problems I've experienced. I've just been burned in the past.
Maybe I'm just a curmudgeon. I won't use Macs either because of my horrible experiences with MacOS 9.
PayPal has helped ME reclaim money from sellers who scammed me, several times. About 1 in 3 purchases I make on eBay are fraudulent somehow (I buy a lot of used electronics. This is an heavy area for fraud on eBay) and PayPal has helped me reclaim money almost every time. The last time I was scammed (on a pair of bluetooth headphones) PayPal didn't help much, but that's mainly because I waited too longer than 30 days to file my complaint. In the past when I've quickly filed my complaints I quickly got my money back.
As a seller, PayPal HAS frozen my account once because of a buyer complaint. They quickly unlocked it (3 days) and I didn't lose any money. I also think their fees are excessive for sellers, but I understand WHY the fees are so high (massive seller fraud).
EVERY seller I have seen in recent years that refuses to accept PayPal is a scammer. Back in the day when SquareTrade did auction payments I ran into some legitimate sellers that used SquareTrade instead of PayPal. SquareTrade's buyer protection was awesome, but they soaked up too much liability and stopped doing it. What does that tell you?
Given the MASSIVE fraud I see from sellers on eBay I think this move is long overdue.
The US payment systems (again, thankfully) tend to heavily favor the consumer over the merchant. eBay is simply falling in line with general US practice. This is very good for the consumer, and what's good for the consumer is good for merchants in the long run. Why do you think credit cards are so widely used in the USA? It's almost SOLELY because of the favorable fraud protection. Americans face only $50 of fraud liability while Europeans face liability up to the credit limit of the card! Credit cards are less common in Europe for exactly this reason. They also generally have much lower limits in Europe (again, for the same reason).
In the real world of credit card fraud, ACTUAL cardholders scamming merchants is a small problem because the cards are quickly canceled and doing so voids cardholders' liability protection so merchants can try to reclaim losses against the (easily identifiable and poor) cardholders.
This also applies to eBay. According to the eBay security staff I've spoken too 90% of their fraud incidents are sellers scamming buyers with faulty, counterfeit, or nonexistent products. Sellers might make more noise about fraud, especially the PowerSellers, but THEY are the source of almost all the fraud on eBay which is why eBay has moved in this direction. I'm sorry if you're an honest eBay PowerSeller, but if you know anything about eBay you'll know that "honest" PowerSellers are about as common as "honest" lawyers.
The only real alternative is bonding for the sellers. Would you rather pay a $5000 security deposit to sell on eBay? That's what most credit card processors require for a merchant account.
Nonsense. There are plenty of other online webstore providers, like Amazon Marketplace and Yahoo! Stores. Most of them force you to use a single payment processor a well.
As someone who occasionally sells on eBay (in the USA), I'm fine with this if it's brought to the USA. Too many sellers use third-party payment systems which eBay can't monitor to screw buyers. If is costs sellers a few more pennies I could care less.
As far as I'm concerned, "PowerSellers" shouldn't exist. eBay was SUPPOSED to be a "national swap meet" with no "professional" sellers at all. And my experience has been that the "PowerSellers" are the big problem since they seem to be running all the scams. eBay is NOT meant for small retailers, that's what Yahoo! Shopping is for.
You're unique as far as I know. Communigate, Netscape Messaging Server (which I personally worked on), and UW-IMAP have all lost mail or mangled mailboxes with different clients in my experience. By "lost mail" I mean the server rejected messages sent from specific clients or using IMAP4rev1-specific headers. I can't think of an incident where any of these servers arbitrarily bounced mail sent from a POP3 client. I worked at Netscape where we used Netscape Messaging Server, I worked ON NMS, and it was buggy as shit. It sort of worked with Communicator (this was back in the Netscape 4 days) and had nasty bugs with every other client. Bugs like: If you put a binary attachment in the message the server would reject it as malformed.
I think anyone who believes salesmen selling vacuum cleaners are "trespassing" is pretty deluded.
When most people talk about "trespass" they're talking about "criminal trespass", not obscure tort claims. And most judges in most jurisdictions would agree with ME that driving onto someone's driveway is NOT "criminal trespass" and the plaintiff would NOT have a valid tort. I know that in other posts you've clarified your position that you're not talking about "criminal trespass", but that wasn't clear to me.
As I said, if you can present me with a written statute that supports your position I'll concede I'm wrong. Otherwise all you've got is an ARGUMENT that driving on someone's driveway is "trespass". You argue in another post that a salesman ringing a doorbell also counts as "trespass", though I seriously doubt you could cite case law to support that. And even if you did, I'd revert to my previous statement that given an exhaustive enough search you can find obscure case law to support virtually any ridiculous claim.
Let's get real for a moment. Who is "right" in court has far less to do with what "the law" is and far more to do with how much money each side can afford to spend fighting. Google is going to decide how this case is resolved because they have more money.
In case it isn't clear, I have a lot of contempt for ambulance-chasing lawyers such as yourself.
BTW, How does Apple know what state you're in?
Name the IMAP server that doesn't randomly lose email. I'm familiar with almost every popular IMAP mail server out there and every one I'm familiar with loses messages. Dan Bernstien, Roland Schnieder, Sam, and others who worked on RFC 2060 say that the RFC is completely broken and impossible to implement. I have heard this from every single developer I have spoken to that worked on an IMAP mailserver. EVERY IMAP server is broken because the SPEC is broken. Because the SPEC is broken every IMAP server and client handles messages (and critically) HEADERS differently.
This means that ANY particular combination of IMAP server and IMAP client (say, UW-IMAP and ThunderBird) will have nasty bugs. This is true even of Exchange and Domino which have their own clients.
I don't give a fuck what "common law" says. In California, merely walking on private property is not trespassing. You cannot shoot a Jehova's Witness for knocking on your door, nor will the police arrest him, nor do you have ANY civil case against him. It is only trespassing if you ask him to leave and he refuses. If no property owner or tenant is present he can theoretically remain on the property indefinitely.
If you can present case law that supports your position I'll concede I'm wrong.
I didn't know that. That's not typical for online vendors. I know Amazon doesn't collect sales tax for music downloads.
The short answer is that Legg Mason is just angling for more money.
Senior management at Yahoo! obviously doesn't like or want the Microsoft buyout because they know that most of them will be fired by MS due to their poor financial management of the company. They're supposedly trying to fight the deal. In reality, they've already given up and are trying to stall long enough to gut the company by pissing away money and offering absurdly generous severance packages to employees (2 years pay with benefits and no non-compete agreements). I suspect that a number of them have already secretly accepted offers at other companies (like Google) and are trying to steal talent away before they're fired.
This is why Microsoft is going for the proxy fight. They KNOW the management at Yahoo! isn't negotiating in good faith and the want to get rid of them as quickly as possible.
MacOS has a BSD-based subsystem. The command line closely resembles BSD. You've got some standard Unix commands. That's about it. Most of what takes place in "userspace" (the GUI, desktop applications, etc.) is proprietary to Apple and very NON-Unixy.
It's also a bit insulting to MAPI because MAPI/Exchange actually works. If you like your mailbox randomly losing mail, use IMAP.
"Pro" soundcards use breakout boxes (boxes outside of the PC) containing the ADAC for exactly this reason. This arraignment is more expensive, which is why these cards generally cost around $1000 USD.
Comcast is doing this because they're slowly transitioning to a pure IPTV system which directly competes with IPTV systems that use P2P to reduce costs like Hulu and Bittorrent. They know if they can force all their competitors to stream all content they can totally screw them on performance (since Comcast will have a lot more bandwidth to play with) and pricing. They make a lot of money off Pay-Per-View and they don't want any competition.
Those are use taxes, like the sales taxes you're supposed to pay on purchases from Amazon.com that you don't pay.