I understand that. My point was not to point out what most Christians generally believe. I was merely stating that, IIRC, the only thing that God did write were the Ten Commandments. Him, Himself, with His hand. He didn't write the books that became the Bible.
This is tangental, and it's been quite a while since I've done any significant religious reading, but IIRC it's good to note that God is not above revising his own writing. The current ten commandments are the second draft - Moses smashed up the first, and there were revisions made. (on a related note, someone once told me that the reason there are two tablets is b/c each is a copy of the other - it's a contract, though God's copy was also kept in the ark)
I'm just saying - as a Jew - that Chanukah is a fairly stupid holiday. Here in the states, about the only reason that I can see for it being popular is b/c it's so similar to Christmas. Personally, I think it's sad that there are Jews (and I know some) who are more prone to celebrate Chanukah than they are the High Holidays or Passover or anything that's more important.
Well, I like the constitution too, but personally I think that antitrust, at least in MS's case, falls pretty squarely into regulating interstate commerce. If it's an intrastate monopoly, it depends on the state in question having similar powers in its' constitution et al.
Why exactly do you think that antitrust law is not constitutional? And why do you think that it's a good idea for an entity that is incapable of voting (like MS, as opposed to Bill) should get to lobby the government at all? I'm rather offended that politicians try to get money from foreigners. Not to mention that they should have to get money at all... we need more politicians like Fred Tuttle;)
And as for the disagreement thing, well, the system broke so badly that we had to have a war to resolve things in 1776. Unless you want to change the entire government radically, torch the constitution and start over, you're pretty much restricted to working in the system. This means that in order to effect changes in the court's opinion you need to get a good case and appeal to them. If they'll hear you, you have a chance. If not, this means that none of the justices think that there's any chance at all that the opinion will change. Not the best way of doing things, but it seems to work safely enough.
Finally, wrt Waco, did anyone try to get a restraining order against the FBI and ATF? Particularly the Davidians themselves? Much as I don't care for those two esteemed groups, the Davidians were no prize either. I need to read through the details of the matter more thoroughly, but they probably were also breaking the law. They didn't deserve what they got, but I don't think they had clean hands either. Like I said, need more information.
Oh, come on. I'm Jewish, and you know as well as I do that the only reason anyone other than the most rabid zionist would celebrate Chanukah is b/c it falls so close to Christmas. The closest real equivalent I can think of for Christmas would probably be Purim.
Not once did they ever, *ever* claim that the laws that they were being charged with breaking (and have now been proven to have broken) were unconstitutional. They could have. It might have worked. But they didn't, probably because they think that antitrust regulation is perfectly fine when not applied to them.
So please save us your ranting on the constitutionality of antitrust law (which IIRC has pretty uniformly been upheld by the courts) as it is an issue to you and you alone. The DoJ disagrees with you. Microsoft disagrees with you. While IANAL, I think that the courts disagree with you.
Re: the GSA, I agree that it would have been cool for MS products to no longer be bought by the government. I'm frankly very disappointed that the old rules of competitive bidding seem to have been discarded, and that the government is incapable of hiring some good programmers to develop a good public domain OS.
However, while this appears to be a bug it is actually more of a miswart. The government is more or less deliberately designed to have an incredible amount of inertia. It's a good thing for two parts of the government to generally be at odds with each other and refusing to budge. This prevents it from turning on the populace. I'm really quite proud of the carefully designed inefficiency in the US government.
I don't care for Janet Reno, or Louis Freedh or most of the rest of the DoJ cronies, but they're capable of doing good things too, and I think that going after MS was a good thing.
Re:It's all how you look at it
on
Copyright!
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· Score: 1
Bzzt, wrong.
Corporations are not groups of people. I would be rather happy if they were. Instead, corporations are considered to be artificial, limited 'people' in and of themselves, ostensibly for the benefit of real people in general.
This warps a lot of stuff, because corporations have no inalienable or natural rights, only the rights explicitly granted to them. I am amazed that in the last hundred years or so such a large blind spot has developed with regard to limiting and regulating corporations as well as the dangers of granting corporate status willy-nilly.
I would much rather have the people in a corporation, save for extremely special cases, be directly accountable for what they do as a business. As it currently stands having a corporation is pretty useful for being able to break the law and get away with it.
I'm suddenly getting the feeling that he'll alter OEM (et al) licenses to permit bundling of any third party software and unbundling of any MS software. This would include any software he doesn't feel is part of the actual OS, and thus could include IE. OEMs are free to include notepad, but they can replace it with emacs if they want, nicely dodging the 'they-bundle-minesweeper-too' argument. This would also, as a side benefit, get rid of Office being pushed on people, though it would not address the file format problems that are the method of continuing Office sales.
On an slight tangent here,/. rejected my post about MS making Office into a web site. Doesn't this bother anyone? I don't especially want to only be able to access Excel files by: *paying a monthly access fee *only using IE *keeping it on MS's server, and not having local files
The last is the worst. How many documents do you think MS will snoop. It's a BAD time to compete with them. Word is about to only be useful to people undertaking a massive disinformation campaign against MS.
They proved otherwise. Now we're waiting for the conviction. Me, I hope that someday the limited liability for employees of corporations is revoked. IMHO it causes a great deal more damage than it does good.
What FDR was trying to do, btw, was 'pack' the Supreme Court with judges which would not keep ruling that New Deal legislation was unconstitutional (which had been happening a lot). But the specifics of the issue had to do with the fact that a lot of the justices were really old. FDR wanted legislation (not an amendment) that would allow him to add federal judges to 'ease the burden' on judges over 70. Then he'd have swung the balance of the Supreme Court in his favor, as well as a bunch of lesser federal courts.
Everyone saw very quickly that this was probably unconstitutional and definately a bad idea. But it didn't matter, except to FDR's pride, because the justices got the message and stopped automatically ruling against everything that came to them.
IIRC, CRT displays were first used on the USAF's Whirlwind computer, which was used for radar tracking or something. It also used light guns as part of the control system. The display was not really all that good though - I seem to remember that it could show 1px at a time;)
Additionally, some computers used to use CRTs as memory. There's a funny story about Ivan Sutherland hacking CRT memory.
Yeah that's what I've always heard. That and that Bill encourages Paul to invest (in anything - witness the ugly Jimi Hendrix museum going up in Seattle) so that no one else has a chance in hell of coming vaguely close to Bill's share in MS.
Oh? Bear in mind that until comparitively recently you couldn't go south of northern Florida and plan on both enjoying the region and surviving. (excepting the Keys, Dry Tortugas, etc.)
We've been Florida for quite some time, though I'll confess that where I am in Tallahssee is closer to Georgia than to the Gulf.
I'm not a Linux user. I'm a Mac user. I have no reason to claim that my computer is just as easy to use as Windows. That would be a big step backwards for me;)
(And this is not to say that I can't use Linux for some reason. I regularly ssh to a linux box, though I don't have my own copy. But Linux does not yet pass the Mom test, unless configured perfectly and used only for limited, predefined tasks. Which isn't bad, but isn't the best possible state of affairs either.)
I wasn't saying that it is illegal to attempt to kill a corporation. The poisioner example was intended to show that even if MS' competitors would have inevitably gone out of business even had MS acted legally (which they did not), MS did not act legally. It is not suddenly okay to break the law just because illegal actions would have the same end result as legal actions. It was that point which I attempted to illustrate.
I'm a steadfast Mac user. I don't have a shred of MS software on my system other than IE, and that's only because I am presently doing web design and need to be able to test pages.
I am not defining the market narrowly at all. All personal microcomputers (excluding handhelds, at least for now) is a pretty damn big scope.
Why does the MacOS require a large investment? It does not run on Intel hardware. The hardware it does use costs a substantial amount (~$1000 minimum for a low end iMac), and until _very_ recently tended to use peripherals that cost a lot due to either quality (e.g. SCSI vs. IDE) or quantity (e.g. ADB vs. PS2, technical merits aside). Since windows software doesn't generally run on the Mac, new software has to be gotten incurring an additional expense. Neither Windows nor the Mac are known for their extensive use of open source software you know. Additionally the thing about cost is not going from no computer to any computer, but leaving Windows b/c of MS' practices to go to an alternative.
I could survive quite nicely without Windows. I never touch it. But that's not true for most people, and that's the issue here. For everyone else Windows is the king. No matter how much I like the Mac, or Linux, or Be, or VMS... well I don't like VMS actually, but these are not the king. You're fooling yourself if you think they are.
Have you actually been to Orlando? The place is a hellhole. As a Floridian, I'd like nothing better than to drop everything south of Gainesville (wait a second - I'm from Tallahassee... must not save Gainesville;) into the sea, except for a few choice bits like the Keys, the Cape and Tampa/St. Pete.
Giant sinkholes (e.g. the one in Winter Park) could also work.
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This is tangental, and it's been quite a while since I've done any significant religious reading, but IIRC it's good to note that God is not above revising his own writing. The current ten commandments are the second draft - Moses smashed up the first, and there were revisions made. (on a related note, someone once told me that the reason there are two tablets is b/c each is a copy of the other - it's a contract, though God's copy was also kept in the ark)
Sorry, but L. Ron Hubbard has already basically had the same idea (though he had to invent a new religion to take advantage of it)
Will it involve both hypnosis and time travel?
Clearly, the Thunderdome is in order here.
;)
(two go in, one comes out
Don't forget that without the reverse-engineering of the IBM PC BIOS there would be no IBM clones. _that_ would change things.
Man, I wish WB would release their absolutely huge collection of shorts on DVD. What I wouldn't give to have a good copy of Duck Amuck or something.
Fair enough. I'm willing to drop the subject if you are (it's quite a diversion from the actual thread)
I'm just saying - as a Jew - that Chanukah is a fairly stupid holiday. Here in the states, about the only reason that I can see for it being popular is b/c it's so similar to Christmas. Personally, I think it's sad that there are Jews (and I know some) who are more prone to celebrate Chanukah than they are the High Holidays or Passover or anything that's more important.
Well, I like the constitution too, but personally I think that antitrust, at least in MS's case, falls pretty squarely into regulating interstate commerce. If it's an intrastate monopoly, it depends on the state in question having similar powers in its' constitution et al.
;)
Why exactly do you think that antitrust law is not constitutional? And why do you think that it's a good idea for an entity that is incapable of voting (like MS, as opposed to Bill) should get to lobby the government at all? I'm rather offended that politicians try to get money from foreigners. Not to mention that they should have to get money at all... we need more politicians like Fred Tuttle
And as for the disagreement thing, well, the system broke so badly that we had to have a war to resolve things in 1776. Unless you want to change the entire government radically, torch the constitution and start over, you're pretty much restricted to working in the system. This means that in order to effect changes in the court's opinion you need to get a good case and appeal to them. If they'll hear you, you have a chance. If not, this means that none of the justices think that there's any chance at all that the opinion will change. Not the best way of doing things, but it seems to work safely enough.
Finally, wrt Waco, did anyone try to get a restraining order against the FBI and ATF? Particularly the Davidians themselves? Much as I don't care for those two esteemed groups, the Davidians were no prize either. I need to read through the details of the matter more thoroughly, but they probably were also breaking the law. They didn't deserve what they got, but I don't think they had clean hands either. Like I said, need more information.
Oh, come on. I'm Jewish, and you know as well as I do that the only reason anyone other than the most rabid zionist would celebrate Chanukah is b/c it falls so close to Christmas. The closest real equivalent I can think of for Christmas would probably be Purim.
MS did break the law.
Not once did they ever, *ever* claim that the laws that they were being charged with breaking (and have now been proven to have broken) were unconstitutional. They could have. It might have worked. But they didn't, probably because they think that antitrust regulation is perfectly fine when not applied to them.
So please save us your ranting on the constitutionality of antitrust law (which IIRC has pretty uniformly been upheld by the courts) as it is an issue to you and you alone. The DoJ disagrees with you. Microsoft disagrees with you. While IANAL, I think that the courts disagree with you.
Re: the GSA, I agree that it would have been cool for MS products to no longer be bought by the government. I'm frankly very disappointed that the old rules of competitive bidding seem to have been discarded, and that the government is incapable of hiring some good programmers to develop a good public domain OS.
However, while this appears to be a bug it is actually more of a miswart. The government is more or less deliberately designed to have an incredible amount of inertia. It's a good thing for two parts of the government to generally be at odds with each other and refusing to budge. This prevents it from turning on the populace. I'm really quite proud of the carefully designed inefficiency in the US government.
I don't care for Janet Reno, or Louis Freedh or most of the rest of the DoJ cronies, but they're capable of doing good things too, and I think that going after MS was a good thing.
Bzzt, wrong.
Corporations are not groups of people. I would be rather happy if they were. Instead, corporations are considered to be artificial, limited 'people' in and of themselves, ostensibly for the benefit of real people in general.
This warps a lot of stuff, because corporations have no inalienable or natural rights, only the rights explicitly granted to them. I am amazed that in the last hundred years or so such a large blind spot has developed with regard to limiting and regulating corporations as well as the dangers of granting corporate status willy-nilly.
I would much rather have the people in a corporation, save for extremely special cases, be directly accountable for what they do as a business. As it currently stands having a corporation is pretty useful for being able to break the law and get away with it.
I'm suddenly getting the feeling that he'll alter OEM (et al) licenses to permit bundling of any third party software and unbundling of any MS software. This would include any software he doesn't feel is part of the actual OS, and thus could include IE. OEMs are free to include notepad, but they can replace it with emacs if they want, nicely dodging the 'they-bundle-minesweeper-too' argument. This would also, as a side benefit, get rid of Office being pushed on people, though it would not address the file format problems that are the method of continuing Office sales.
/. rejected my post about MS making Office into a web site. Doesn't this bother anyone? I don't especially want to only be able to access Excel files by:
On an slight tangent here,
*paying a monthly access fee
*only using IE
*keeping it on MS's server, and not having local files
The last is the worst. How many documents do you think MS will snoop. It's a BAD time to compete with them. Word is about to only be useful to people undertaking a massive disinformation campaign against MS.
They proved otherwise. Now we're waiting for the conviction. Me, I hope that someday the limited liability for employees of corporations is revoked. IMHO it causes a great deal more damage than it does good.
What FDR was trying to do, btw, was 'pack' the Supreme Court with judges which would not keep ruling that New Deal legislation was unconstitutional (which had been happening a lot). But the specifics of the issue had to do with the fact that a lot of the justices were really old. FDR wanted legislation (not an amendment) that would allow him to add federal judges to 'ease the burden' on judges over 70. Then he'd have swung the balance of the Supreme Court in his favor, as well as a bunch of lesser federal courts.
Everyone saw very quickly that this was probably unconstitutional and definately a bad idea. But it didn't matter, except to FDR's pride, because the justices got the message and stopped automatically ruling against everything that came to them.
IIRC, CRT displays were first used on the USAF's Whirlwind computer, which was used for radar tracking or something. It also used light guns as part of the control system. The display was not really all that good though - I seem to remember that it could show 1px at a time ;)
Additionally, some computers used to use CRTs as memory. There's a funny story about Ivan Sutherland hacking CRT memory.
No, a transliteration of '23' would be 'twenty three.' You mean a transposition. Fnord.
Well... you know how it is for soldiers in foreign countries (or planets as the case may be)
;)
-cpt, proudly supporting the Saucer Corps
Yeah that's what I've always heard. That and that Bill encourages Paul to invest (in anything - witness the ugly Jimi Hendrix museum going up in Seattle) so that no one else has a chance in hell of coming vaguely close to Bill's share in MS.
Oh? Bear in mind that until comparitively recently you couldn't go south of northern Florida and plan on both enjoying the region and surviving. (excepting the Keys, Dry Tortugas, etc.)
We've been Florida for quite some time, though I'll confess that where I am in Tallahssee is closer to Georgia than to the Gulf.
Actually I'd say RC Cola probably _is_ monarchist, given what 'RC' stands for ;)
I'm not a Linux user. I'm a Mac user. I have no reason to claim that my computer is just as easy to use as Windows. That would be a big step backwards for me ;)
(And this is not to say that I can't use Linux for some reason. I regularly ssh to a linux box, though I don't have my own copy. But Linux does not yet pass the Mom test, unless configured perfectly and used only for limited, predefined tasks. Which isn't bad, but isn't the best possible state of affairs either.)
I'm sorry, I may have chosen a poor example.
I wasn't saying that it is illegal to attempt to kill a corporation. The poisioner example was intended to show that even if MS' competitors would have inevitably gone out of business even had MS acted legally (which they did not), MS did not act legally. It is not suddenly okay to break the law just because illegal actions would have the same end result as legal actions. It was that point which I attempted to illustrate.
Ha!
I'm a steadfast Mac user. I don't have a shred of MS software on my system other than IE, and that's only because I am presently doing web design and need to be able to test pages.
I am not defining the market narrowly at all. All personal microcomputers (excluding handhelds, at least for now) is a pretty damn big scope.
Why does the MacOS require a large investment? It does not run on Intel hardware. The hardware it does use costs a substantial amount (~$1000 minimum for a low end iMac), and until _very_ recently tended to use peripherals that cost a lot due to either quality (e.g. SCSI vs. IDE) or quantity (e.g. ADB vs. PS2, technical merits aside). Since windows software doesn't generally run on the Mac, new software has to be gotten incurring an additional expense. Neither Windows nor the Mac are known for their extensive use of open source software you know. Additionally the thing about cost is not going from no computer to any computer, but leaving Windows b/c of MS' practices to go to an alternative.
I could survive quite nicely without Windows. I never touch it. But that's not true for most people, and that's the issue here. For everyone else Windows is the king. No matter how much I like the Mac, or Linux, or Be, or VMS... well I don't like VMS actually, but these are not the king. You're fooling yourself if you think they are.
Have you actually been to Orlando? The place is a hellhole. As a Floridian, I'd like nothing better than to drop everything south of Gainesville (wait a second - I'm from Tallahassee... must not save Gainesville ;) into the sea, except for a few choice bits like the Keys, the Cape and Tampa/St. Pete.
Giant sinkholes (e.g. the one in Winter Park) could also work.