On the other hand, it would enable a secure method of controlling who can have access to your identity.
And subsequently, the assumption that anyone said method is, in fact, legitimate.
Criminals rejoice - now instead of having to forge a dozen pieces of documentation to establish an unquestionable false identity, you only need to forge one !
MS does not support reading and writing to linux filesystems by choice to stifle interoperability.
Or maybe they just don't see any value in spending money developing a feature only 0.0001% of customers are interested in, something better handled by a third party.
Why does this need any application more complex than a text file sitting on a file share, somewhere, for people to review or make changes as needed? That's what I do, and it seems to work OK.
How many networks, sites and devices are in your environment ?
Windows Vista is becoming more and more "Windows XP warmed over".
If you just walk past the machine and look at the screen over someone's shoulder, that's probably true.
However, there are substantial - and much more interesting - changes in the internals than there are in the default GUI skin, if you bother to look. Memory management, scheduling, locking, driver architecture, display system, component modularity and dependencies. All these things are undergoing significant improvement, but you can't see that from a few screenshots.
Particularly if you only read about it on Slashdot, which is only interested in reporting on things that can then be the target of rhetoric, like default firewall configurability and unofficial hardware requirements.
Now, if they offered a scaled down version that contained only the most necessary of drivers and a simple user interface to access drives and programs (think 32-bit safe mode) that I could then build it up from there, I would jump on it in a heartbeat.
Microsoft are not interested in the type of customer this represents. Seems that something like Debian Linux or FreeBSD would be more in line with your requirements.
Imagine in 10-20 years, China becomes the biggest economy in the world, it ignores all the US patents, and just use those patents to roll out their own products.
You mean like the US did a couple of hundred years ago ?
Same thing that happened then - you end up with a new world power.
Many companies that have been responsible for human deaths are still running... pharmaceutical companies that knowingly release unsafe products to the public, chemical companies that dump toxic chemical into the environment. Oil companies that support corrupt/totalitarian regimes, or eliminate critics of those regimes.
In any case, a criminal charge requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. For a company that could save millions of dollars, it wouldn't be too hard to find someone behind the scenes to do the deed.
Yes there are, but they are not for rich people, only poor people and drug addicts.
So how is this broken legal system relevant to copyright again ? The best justification you can offer for extending copyright past the authors death is that it *might* add one more thing to an already infinite list of motivations for psychopaths to commit murder ?
Your argument is like saying extramarital sex should be illegal, because indulging in it might provide motivation for one person to kill another. It's ridiculous on its face and utterly without merit.
It appears that you don't understand what copyright means.
Yes, I do.
Would you like it if after a person dies, all of their property returns to the government/public domain?
Physical property and information are fundamentally different things. Any attempts to conflate them are inherently flawed (as copyright has made more and more obvious as information and the physical representations of it have become more divorced over time).
Taking physical property from one person against their wishes is theft. Copying information is *not* theft, nor anything like theft, no matter how much some people would like it to be.
In short, your analogy is simply wrong. Indeed, given that you then state that you don't support long copyright terms (thus implicitly stating you *do* support the principle of Public Domain), how could you have even conceived such an analogy - one requiring the conceptualising of material entering the Public Domain as "theft" - in the first place ?
I am not a fan of the insane copyright lengths that some countries (most notably the US) have been introducing.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Europe was the leader in this regard.
On the other hand, I don't understand why people think they are "entitled" to copyrighted work.
Funny, I've always wondered why some people think they're entitled to be exempted from market forces (not to mention nature and physics) and be given special treatment so they can sell the same thing over and over and over again, but only have to do the work to create it once.
These aren't patents, where a novel and inventive idea is shared with the world in exchange for a limited protection.
No, they're copyrights, where information is shared with the world in exchange for a limited (but ever increasing) exemption from natural and market forces.
(Making the copyright system a mirror of the patent system would, in itself, be an incredible improvement over the existing system.)
There are virtually infinite potential novels, songs, computer programs, paintings, poems, television programs (despite what it might appear in modern TV) etc.
I'm glad you realise this. So many are like Chicken Little and think reform (or abolition) of copyright would result in no new creative works being generated.
You also highlight how low the bar is with regards to copyrighted material, which makes one wonder even more how copyright length exceeding patent length could ever be rationally defended.
There is no restriction from you writing your own novels or songs or computer programs or poems etc.
Yes, there is. If someone's work looks or sounds too much like someone else's work - or reuses any part of it (even an insigificant part), then they will be found to have violated copyright.
Try telling a relative on the phone to buy a Pentium 672.. much easier to say "Get an Athlon 4000!".
Yeah, I know what you mean. I always tell people to get a "Sigglewatter 2468" because it's just so much easier to say over the phone than "Bagglerister 42".
company x wants to make a book based on novel by author Y. Y refuses, company X kills Y. Should company X be able to make a movie without any access rights issues? (This is not an unheard of situation)
Do you really think company x are still going to be in business after being found guilty of premeditated murder ?
Are there not already laws that deal with generating money from the proceeds of crime ?
What about Author z wishes to provide for Zs family, so writes a book on deathbed. should this book become public domain when Z dies? It would defeat the purpose of Zs actions (this is also not an unheard of situation)
Why should the situation for copyright holders be any different to the situation for anyone else ? Does an employer keep paying their employees wages to the family after their death ?
Companies and organizations can hold copyright. Generally this copyright is held for a fixed period of years (as companies do not have to "die"). Should companies' copyrights be protected more than humans (whose copyrights would expire when they die?
No, outside of extraordinary circumstances, copyright shouldn't last even close to the lifetime of a person in the first place.
How do you propose to measure success?
Given copyright is simply an economic tool, by return on investment.
Very few movies ever show a profit. This is not because they don't make money for the studio, but because it makes tax sense to calculate it that way.
This is a flaw in laws dealing with corporate accounting, and should be dealt with there.
Many of the wealthiest people in the world pay less income tax than a regular person earning $50,000. It isn't because they are not earning an income, but because they can pay very creative accountants. Income is a lot simpler to measure than "economic success".
Firstly, copyright must be changed to an opt-in system.
Secondly, when a work is lodged with the copyright office, one copy must be kept by them (for guaranteed availability on expiration of copyright) and a "cost of development" must be registered. This cost - along with any revenue generated from the work, either directly or indirectly - would become an integral part of legally required accounting and/or taxation reporting for the entity that registered it.
Punishments for defrauding the process would, by necessity, have to be harsh. If found to be fraudulently copyrighted, the work would immediately enter the public domain and a fine levied against the registered entity equal to the stated "cost of development", plus any reported revenue generated by the work. Additionally, any customers able to provide proof of purchase would be entitled to a full refund.
The enforcement for private individuals registering copyrights would be looser. Firstly, simply for practical reasons, secondly, to encourage such private works and finally, because private individuals have much less scope for abuse. They would generally be able to simply provide a "fair assessment of the value of their time", which could be challenged, if necessary by either the copyright office or the public. (I would expect in a relatively short period of time that legal precedent would establish an "accepted value" of $SOME_INDEXED_AMOUNT*$DEVELOPMENT_TIME.)
Finally, copyright would expire one taxation year[0] after the first accounting/taxation report shows that revenue generated from the work has exceeded the "cost of development".
The only thing I cannot decide on is whether or not copyrights should be transferrable from one entity to another, and if so how to deal with it. I can see some value in it, by allowing it would make the system more complex and hence, allow more scope for "creative accountants" and the like to abuse it.
[0] I see the main vulnerability of this system being here, where an actual, arbitrary time limit is specified - which can then obviously be increased to a higher arbitrary limite by appropriately
If that were the case I'd start looking over my shoulder if I came up with something really popular.
Fortunately, premediated murder is already (very) illegal.
Not to mention, what would be the point ? Killing the creator of a work would put their work into the public domain, severely restricting - indeed, nearly completely eliminating - any ability to generate profit from that work.
This is why copyrights need a solid HARD limit that aftera short X years of the death of the creator all of it goes into public domain and free tomatoes get passed out to the public to pelt the family that was whoring the creativity of the artist or person...
There is no justifiable reason whatsoever for copyright to last a second past the creator's death.
Copyright - if it must exist at all - is fundamentally an economic tool (it exists for no other reason than to artificially restrict information to increase its scarcity, and hence value) and as such should have its terms tied to the economic success (or lack thereof) of the protected work. Copyright terms need to be linked to "return on investment" for the system to work in the modern world.
Successful work -> copyright expires quickly -> creator has to generate more works to keep the money flowing -> higher net benefit to society.
Perhaps it is you that needs to educate yourself on relative international literacy rates and educational standards, freedoms of speech, press freedoms, religious freedoms and all the other key features of liberal, secular societies.
You may then wish to examine the correlations between these things and the world's sane societies compared to the world's insane societies.
Note that you may have trouble reconciling the obvious conclusions (the foremost being that poor, uneducated peasants with little access to inbiased information are easily misled) with your "everything wrong with the world is America's fault" viewpoint.
Watching Fox News does not count.
The country I live in doesn't *have* Fox News, and from everything I've heard about it's far-right slant (and, hey, if *Americans* think it's right wing, then it's got to be way out there) I doubt I'd find much of interest on it.
Why do you think that USA is so hated by the general population in the Middle-East?
Because they are largely uneducated peasants living in fundamentalist theocracies lacking even the most basic necessities for a balanced, rational society.
And it's not just the USA they hate, either, it's anyone who doesn't happen to believe in whatever piece of dogmatic fantasy they use to run their lives.
Everything is made up of smaller parts, and the line is drawn totally arbitrarily.
But the line isn't arbitrary (well, there are exceptions, as always). The problem seems to be that in English, a collective noun is treated as a plural, whereas in American English, it is not.
Most of the other words you've picked out as examples (town, Earth, ocean) are *not* collective nouns or plurals, even though they refer to things that could be viewed as groups of other things (or, at least, they aren't in English - presumably they are in American English, though, or you wouldn't have used them).
My parents are pretty average American people. My father bought our first VCR in 1984. To my knowledge I'm the only person that ever watched porn on it, and it was actually the first couple of porn movies I ever saw. A friend brought them over. My father has a computer. Sure, some porn, but that is not the driving force for having a computer and broadband.
The key phrase here is "to my knowledge".
Now, porn does have one special quality. Young males. Young males drive technology, because they are the ones that understand it first. Or at least they understand it more than other age groups.
Here's the problem with your hypothesis. Young males - because of the understanding of technology you talk about - are also the people most capable of finding *free* porn (many would react as I do, I'm sure - "people actually *pay* for porn !?")
Yet, pornography is a *massively* profitable industry. It's one of the few industries where some sort of success is pretty much a guarantee. You can pretty much guarantee the majority of those profits aren't being generated from the "young males" demographic.
Everyones using USB disks for backups now rather than tapes.
Maybe if by "everyone" you mean "hobbyists and SOHO users", then yes. But any serious backup system pretty much requires tapes. Not only for off-site convenience, but also for data retention (you want to trust a hard disk for seven years ? I feel lucky getting *two* our of my home server drives before they start failing).
A terabyte is a lot. It will be a lot 5 years later, and quite a lot even 10 years later.
Not really. I have over a TB of TV shows on my server and nearly that much again on DVDs. Another TB or so of movies also (and this is compressed/ripped, not raw). My personal fileserver has grown over the last ~5 years from ~120G of raw space to ~3T, and I plan on adding another 1.2T or 1.6T in the next couple of months (depending on which size drives are at the AU$200ish sweet spot) and I wouldn't expect to take more than 9 months to fill that. This being Slashdot, I imagine there's multiple users with a TB+ just of pornography.
The company I work for (A TB is not really a lot of data, if you're the type of person who doesn't already think a few dozen gigs is "lots of space".
I suspect you are talking from a technological point of view.
From any point of view. OS X is certainly a nice environment to use, but it is still marred by poor performance and faults ranging from niggling to substantial. IMHO, until Expose and Spotlight, its GUI wasn't even on par with MacOS 9.x in terms of usability, let alone better - and it is only these two feature, IMHO, that make it a better than Windows (and certainly not "stunningly" better).
How little is little ? Let's take a bit of a walk along the roadside of bad behaviour.
About the _worst_ thing Microsoft have ever done is put another company out of business - and most of those because that company screwed up.
Then there are corporations based around the principles of preying on people's weaknesses - fostering insecurities, encouraging addictive behaviours, pretending to do things they can't.
Then there are corporations using slave labour, destroying the environment and killing their customers.
Then there are undemocratic governments.
Then there are governments restricting free speech, waging wars and setting policies based on religion.
Then there are governments who torture, murder and oppress their own citizens.
Then we get into acts committed by individuals, not groups of people hiding behind masks of inertia or chains of command. That's a whole new world of "evil".
See, in the grand scheme of Things That Actually Matter, nothing Microsoft has ever done even registers above "slightly naughty" and, quite frankly, if you think otherwise then you need to get out into the real world and get some fucking perspective on what actually happens out there.
You have explained something you think NT cannot do, not how it is crippled.
The ability to have a cluster with *decades* of uptime is something that NT is not even close to technically.
Why ? Technical reasons.
Most of the features that made VMS great for certain types of applications, such as the clustering features, are not nearly as well developed in NT.
Probably due to their relevant target markets.
Which features ?
The tight integration that was possible between VMS systems is similarly not really possible in NT.
Why not ?
So yes, for building anything more than small departmental servers, NT is crippled.
Thousands of companies running large webserver farms, messaging systems, fileservers and directory services - to name a few - would disagree.
You seem to have some sort of disconnection from reality, insisting NT cannot do things that it is actually doing *right now* (or calling systems dealing with hundreds of thousands of users "small departments").
Slashdot Mirror
And subsequently, the assumption that anyone said method is, in fact, legitimate.
Criminals rejoice - now instead of having to forge a dozen pieces of documentation to establish an unquestionable false identity, you only need to forge one !
Or maybe they just don't see any value in spending money developing a feature only 0.0001% of customers are interested in, something better handled by a third party.
Close enough, then.
True. It's probably closer to 90%.
How many networks, sites and devices are in your environment ?
If you just walk past the machine and look at the screen over someone's shoulder, that's probably true.
However, there are substantial - and much more interesting - changes in the internals than there are in the default GUI skin, if you bother to look. Memory management, scheduling, locking, driver architecture, display system, component modularity and dependencies. All these things are undergoing significant improvement, but you can't see that from a few screenshots.
Particularly if you only read about it on Slashdot, which is only interested in reporting on things that can then be the target of rhetoric, like default firewall configurability and unofficial hardware requirements.
Now, if they offered a scaled down version that contained only the most necessary of drivers and a simple user interface to access drives and programs (think 32-bit safe mode) that I could then build it up from there, I would jump on it in a heartbeat.
Microsoft are not interested in the type of customer this represents. Seems that something like Debian Linux or FreeBSD would be more in line with your requirements.
I seem to recall him blowing up an entire planet just because he could. I'd have to say that falls into the "evil" category.
You mean like the US did a couple of hundred years ago ?
Same thing that happened then - you end up with a new world power.
In any case, a criminal charge requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. For a company that could save millions of dollars, it wouldn't be too hard to find someone behind the scenes to do the deed.
Yes there are, but they are not for rich people, only poor people and drug addicts.
So how is this broken legal system relevant to copyright again ? The best justification you can offer for extending copyright past the authors death is that it *might* add one more thing to an already infinite list of motivations for psychopaths to commit murder ?
Your argument is like saying extramarital sex should be illegal, because indulging in it might provide motivation for one person to kill another. It's ridiculous on its face and utterly without merit.
It appears that you don't understand what copyright means.
Yes, I do.
Would you like it if after a person dies, all of their property returns to the government/public domain?
Physical property and information are fundamentally different things. Any attempts to conflate them are inherently flawed (as copyright has made more and more obvious as information and the physical representations of it have become more divorced over time).
Taking physical property from one person against their wishes is theft. Copying information is *not* theft, nor anything like theft, no matter how much some people would like it to be.
In short, your analogy is simply wrong. Indeed, given that you then state that you don't support long copyright terms (thus implicitly stating you *do* support the principle of Public Domain), how could you have even conceived such an analogy - one requiring the conceptualising of material entering the Public Domain as "theft" - in the first place ?
I am not a fan of the insane copyright lengths that some countries (most notably the US) have been introducing.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Europe was the leader in this regard.
On the other hand, I don't understand why people think they are "entitled" to copyrighted work.
Funny, I've always wondered why some people think they're entitled to be exempted from market forces (not to mention nature and physics) and be given special treatment so they can sell the same thing over and over and over again, but only have to do the work to create it once.
These aren't patents, where a novel and inventive idea is shared with the world in exchange for a limited protection.
No, they're copyrights, where information is shared with the world in exchange for a limited (but ever increasing) exemption from natural and market forces.
(Making the copyright system a mirror of the patent system would, in itself, be an incredible improvement over the existing system.)
There are virtually infinite potential novels, songs, computer programs, paintings, poems, television programs (despite what it might appear in modern TV) etc.
I'm glad you realise this. So many are like Chicken Little and think reform (or abolition) of copyright would result in no new creative works being generated.
You also highlight how low the bar is with regards to copyrighted material, which makes one wonder even more how copyright length exceeding patent length could ever be rationally defended.
There is no restriction from you writing your own novels or songs or computer programs or poems etc.
Yes, there is. If someone's work looks or sounds too much like someone else's work - or reuses any part of it (even an insigificant part), then they will be found to have violated copyright.
For example, there are only a finite number
Bit of a pyrrhic victory when so many "employed" people need to have 3 jobs just so they can feed themselves, isn't it ?
Yeah, I know what you mean. I always tell people to get a "Sigglewatter 2468" because it's just so much easier to say over the phone than "Bagglerister 42".
Do you really think company x are still going to be in business after being found guilty of premeditated murder ?
Are there not already laws that deal with generating money from the proceeds of crime ?
What about Author z wishes to provide for Zs family, so writes a book on deathbed. should this book become public domain when Z dies? It would defeat the purpose of Zs actions (this is also not an unheard of situation)
Why should the situation for copyright holders be any different to the situation for anyone else ? Does an employer keep paying their employees wages to the family after their death ?
Companies and organizations can hold copyright. Generally this copyright is held for a fixed period of years (as companies do not have to "die"). Should companies' copyrights be protected more than humans (whose copyrights would expire when they die?
No, outside of extraordinary circumstances, copyright shouldn't last even close to the lifetime of a person in the first place.
How do you propose to measure success?
Given copyright is simply an economic tool, by return on investment.
Very few movies ever show a profit. This is not because they don't make money for the studio, but because it makes tax sense to calculate it that way.
This is a flaw in laws dealing with corporate accounting, and should be dealt with there.
Many of the wealthiest people in the world pay less income tax than a regular person earning $50,000. It isn't because they are not earning an income, but because they can pay very creative accountants. Income is a lot simpler to measure than "economic success".
Firstly, copyright must be changed to an opt-in system.
Secondly, when a work is lodged with the copyright office, one copy must be kept by them (for guaranteed availability on expiration of copyright) and a "cost of development" must be registered. This cost - along with any revenue generated from the work, either directly or indirectly - would become an integral part of legally required accounting and/or taxation reporting for the entity that registered it.
Punishments for defrauding the process would, by necessity, have to be harsh. If found to be fraudulently copyrighted, the work would immediately enter the public domain and a fine levied against the registered entity equal to the stated "cost of development", plus any reported revenue generated by the work. Additionally, any customers able to provide proof of purchase would be entitled to a full refund.
The enforcement for private individuals registering copyrights would be looser. Firstly, simply for practical reasons, secondly, to encourage such private works and finally, because private individuals have much less scope for abuse. They would generally be able to simply provide a "fair assessment of the value of their time", which could be challenged, if necessary by either the copyright office or the public. (I would expect in a relatively short period of time that legal precedent would establish an "accepted value" of $SOME_INDEXED_AMOUNT*$DEVELOPMENT_TIME.)
Finally, copyright would expire one taxation year[0] after the first accounting/taxation report shows that revenue generated from the work has exceeded the "cost of development".
The only thing I cannot decide on is whether or not copyrights should be transferrable from one entity to another, and if so how to deal with it. I can see some value in it, by allowing it would make the system more complex and hence, allow more scope for "creative accountants" and the like to abuse it.
[0] I see the main vulnerability of this system being here, where an actual, arbitrary time limit is specified - which can then obviously be increased to a higher arbitrary limite by appropriately
Fortunately, premediated murder is already (very) illegal.
Not to mention, what would be the point ? Killing the creator of a work would put their work into the public domain, severely restricting - indeed, nearly completely eliminating - any ability to generate profit from that work.
There is no justifiable reason whatsoever for copyright to last a second past the creator's death.
Copyright - if it must exist at all - is fundamentally an economic tool (it exists for no other reason than to artificially restrict information to increase its scarcity, and hence value) and as such should have its terms tied to the economic success (or lack thereof) of the protected work. Copyright terms need to be linked to "return on investment" for the system to work in the modern world.
Successful work -> copyright expires quickly -> creator has to generate more works to keep the money flowing -> higher net benefit to society.
Perhaps it is you that needs to educate yourself on relative international literacy rates and educational standards, freedoms of speech, press freedoms, religious freedoms and all the other key features of liberal, secular societies.
You may then wish to examine the correlations between these things and the world's sane societies compared to the world's insane societies.
Note that you may have trouble reconciling the obvious conclusions (the foremost being that poor, uneducated peasants with little access to inbiased information are easily misled) with your "everything wrong with the world is America's fault" viewpoint.
Watching Fox News does not count.
The country I live in doesn't *have* Fox News, and from everything I've heard about it's far-right slant (and, hey, if *Americans* think it's right wing, then it's got to be way out there) I doubt I'd find much of interest on it.
Because they are largely uneducated peasants living in fundamentalist theocracies lacking even the most basic necessities for a balanced, rational society.
And it's not just the USA they hate, either, it's anyone who doesn't happen to believe in whatever piece of dogmatic fantasy they use to run their lives.
It's now an online, searchable, cross-referenced, interlinked resource.
Books look nice on the shelf and are handy for helping get to sleep at night, but a good online help system is infinitely more functional.
But the line isn't arbitrary (well, there are exceptions, as always). The problem seems to be that in English, a collective noun is treated as a plural, whereas in American English, it is not.
Most of the other words you've picked out as examples (town, Earth, ocean) are *not* collective nouns or plurals, even though they refer to things that could be viewed as groups of other things (or, at least, they aren't in English - presumably they are in American English, though, or you wouldn't have used them).
The key phrase here is "to my knowledge".
Now, porn does have one special quality. Young males. Young males drive technology, because they are the ones that understand it first. Or at least they understand it more than other age groups.
Here's the problem with your hypothesis. Young males - because of the understanding of technology you talk about - are also the people most capable of finding *free* porn (many would react as I do, I'm sure - "people actually *pay* for porn !?")
Yet, pornography is a *massively* profitable industry. It's one of the few industries where some sort of success is pretty much a guarantee. You can pretty much guarantee the majority of those profits aren't being generated from the "young males" demographic.
A 1G drive would have been lucky to have 512k of cache.
Er, why ? That's the number that actually matters...
Maybe if by "everyone" you mean "hobbyists and SOHO users", then yes. But any serious backup system pretty much requires tapes. Not only for off-site convenience, but also for data retention (you want to trust a hard disk for seven years ? I feel lucky getting *two* our of my home server drives before they start failing).
A terabyte is a lot. It will be a lot 5 years later, and quite a lot even 10 years later.
Not really. I have over a TB of TV shows on my server and nearly that much again on DVDs. Another TB or so of movies also (and this is compressed/ripped, not raw). My personal fileserver has grown over the last ~5 years from ~120G of raw space to ~3T, and I plan on adding another 1.2T or 1.6T in the next couple of months (depending on which size drives are at the AU$200ish sweet spot) and I wouldn't expect to take more than 9 months to fill that. This being Slashdot, I imagine there's multiple users with a TB+ just of pornography.
The company I work for (A TB is not really a lot of data, if you're the type of person who doesn't already think a few dozen gigs is "lots of space".
From any point of view. OS X is certainly a nice environment to use, but it is still marred by poor performance and faults ranging from niggling to substantial. IMHO, until Expose and Spotlight, its GUI wasn't even on par with MacOS 9.x in terms of usability, let alone better - and it is only these two feature, IMHO, that make it a better than Windows (and certainly not "stunningly" better).
How little is little ? Let's take a bit of a walk along the roadside of bad behaviour.
About the _worst_ thing Microsoft have ever done is put another company out of business - and most of those because that company screwed up.
Then there are corporations based around the principles of preying on people's weaknesses - fostering insecurities, encouraging addictive behaviours, pretending to do things they can't.
Then there are corporations using slave labour, destroying the environment and killing their customers.
Then there are undemocratic governments.
Then there are governments restricting free speech, waging wars and setting policies based on religion.
Then there are governments who torture, murder and oppress their own citizens.
Then we get into acts committed by individuals, not groups of people hiding behind masks of inertia or chains of command. That's a whole new world of "evil".
See, in the grand scheme of Things That Actually Matter, nothing Microsoft has ever done even registers above "slightly naughty" and, quite frankly, if you think otherwise then you need to get out into the real world and get some fucking perspective on what actually happens out there.
You have explained something you think NT cannot do, not how it is crippled.
The ability to have a cluster with *decades* of uptime is something that NT is not even close to technically.
Why ? Technical reasons.
Most of the features that made VMS great for certain types of applications, such as the clustering features, are not nearly as well developed in NT.
Probably due to their relevant target markets.
Which features ?
The tight integration that was possible between VMS systems is similarly not really possible in NT.
Why not ?
So yes, for building anything more than small departmental servers, NT is crippled.
Thousands of companies running large webserver farms, messaging systems, fileservers and directory services - to name a few - would disagree.
You seem to have some sort of disconnection from reality, insisting NT cannot do things that it is actually doing *right now* (or calling systems dealing with hundreds of thousands of users "small departments").