No, his argument was related to region-coding requirements for DVD players. He was basically saying that the makers of DVDs (i.e., the studios) are effectively tying sales of DVDs to sales of region-limited DVD players because licensing the DVD decryption scheme by DVD player manufacturers requires that those DVD players be region locked. His point hand nothing to do with VHS recorders.
It's an interesting argument, but one that doesn't really square with antitrust precedent.
First off, I can't think of any case where this kind of roundabout tying found to be an antitrust violation; every case I've ever read involved tying by the same firm (example: a shoe machinery company tied sales of the machine to long term service contracts).
Secondly, this isn't really "tying" as traditionally understood; this is really just an ordinary licensing restriction. If merely putting conditions on the use of a license constitutes "tying," then that would impact an awful lot of licensing agreements.
Actually, you are seriously wrong about lawyers (I am one). Getting a teaching gig at a law school is an extremely prestigious position, at the better schools only going to those who graduated at the tops of their law school classes and who clerked for judges, often at the appellate or even Supreme Court level. Granted, for most law profs actual classroom teaching generally comes second to publishing influential law review articles, but to be a teacher of the the law is in fact a huge indicator of competence.
Tying is not per se illegal, and it certainly isn't illegal under racketeering laws. It may be illegal under the antitrust laws, but only by a firm that is using tying to either attain or solidify monopoly power.
Furthermore, the firms that make DVDs do not, for the most part, make DVD players, so the use of the term "tying" is somewhat inappropriate.
Jesus, that could get expensive. Y'know how an irritating, crappy but nonetheless eerily catchy tune will stay in your head ALL FUCKING DAY? Now imagine paying for it every time it plays.:-)
If you'll go back to the ultimate parent of this thread, the specific issue at hand was the "impeachment circus," which of course was confined to those items in the Starr Report; the other issues to which you refer simply were not part of that proceeding.
The mere fact that there were already ongoing independent counsel investigations is largely irrelevant to the issue of the Clinton impeachment. Furthermore, each such investigation was approved by a three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit of Appeals and were based on credible evidence of possible wrongdoing. Whitewater, to name one such investigation, landed former Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker in prison, as well as many other Clinton associates. That hardly sounds like a fishing trip to me.
You claim that the independent counsel investigations of Clinton amount to evidence that Republicans use "smear tactics." Well, if the mere presence of an independent counsel purusing a political figure is a "smear tactic," then Democrats are just as guilty; consider IC Lawrence Walsh indicting Caspar Weinberger three days before the 1992 presidential election for an example of what I'm talking about.
But all of this is neither here nor there. The specific point I was making was that the impeachment inquiry was a valid one based on the law of perjury. Again, the paper at my web site lays out this case in substantial detail. By ignoring a credible allegation of felony wrongdoing, you are the one being disingenuous.
You accuse me of avoiding the issue. But unless you only consider a "response" to be parroting your opinion of "yessir, those Republicans sure are a nasty bunch," your accusation is patently false. I have defended the legal substance of the impeachment charge, and that, at the end of the day, is what is crucial.
Oh, and as to your final point -- do you really expect me to call my own profession "evil"? Such a blanket statement would assuredly be false. Lawyers are like every other profession; it has its good and bad apples. I like to think I fall in the former category.
You made specific reference to the killers of abortionists, with the implication that all conservatives approve of those actions...something that is clearly untrue.
Further, I'd argue that the bulk of the smearing over the past 8 years has indeed been coming from the left. Even if we accept as a given that the impeachment move was a "smear" (it wasn't, it was a justifiable response to perjury), there are a bevy of folks in the Blumenthal-Carville-Flynt wing of the Democratic party that sought to tear down a number of conservatives. I doubt you'll find similar numbers on the conservative side.
So the only way to prevent perjury is to go on open-ended, multi-million-dollar fishing expeditions to dig up dirt on political opponents, years before there's any chance that they might testify anywhere about anything? So the whole thing was a pre-emptive strike against a crime that Clinton (and all the others they went after) may or may not have eventually committed?
Clinton's testimony was given in a deposition under oath. Deposition testimony is just as subject to the perjury statute as testimony in open court. In fact, in my paper I dealt with this specific issue; see footnotes 12-15 and related text. (Again, it is available on my web site under "Law School Outlines.")
So, far from being "hallucinatory," my view is based on the facts and the law, something you clearly haven't bothered to investigate.
Actually, the poster did not make a mistake. A gauntlet can, in fact, go inside a glove (albeit a very large glove). He was clearly referring to a draconian policy (the "iron gauntlet") wrapped in a feel-good, doesn't-look-harmful justification (the "velvet glove).
So, you're saying that the Clinton impeachment circus wasn't a GOP attempt at character assasination?
I can't speak for the poster, but I'll say that it wasn't an attempt at character assasination. It was an attempt to preserve the integrity of our court system. In a system where testimony under oath is the principal mechanism for resolving legal disputes, perjury is a very serious offense.
I won't revisit the whole spectacle again except to say that when I was in law school (yes, IAAL) I wrote a paper on the topic. It's on my web page if you're interested.
Where have YOU been the last 8 years?.. Jeez man.. talk about blind to the facts.. you scare me.. kill any abortion doctors lately?
Grouping conservatives (or even right-to-lifers generally) to those who bomb abortion clinics is tantamount to grouping Greenpeace with Ted Kaczynski. There are nutjobs in every movement; just because a cause has some idiots that support it doesn't per se invalidate that cause.
Think about it. You can coast thru life with no problem. Land a series of low paying jobs, live somewhere like Nebraska or Iowa or Detroit (or Palmdale) where rents are low, there's McDonalds on every block, and a Wal-Mart in every mall. You can save up enough to buy a car, or at least lease one and chain yourself to 3 years of debt. You can have kids in or out of wedlock, get a dog and a cat, ride a harley. You can shop at the Gap or Banana republic and you can wear Oakley sunglasses and Nike shoes and Calvin Klein underoos and you can look and act and think and be just like everyone else. But you still won't be satisfied.
It is a conceit of a wealthy nation that these things are deemed negative. I wonder what a homeless Calcuttan would give to "coast through life" in an area where "rents are low, there's McDonalds on every block, and a Wal-Mart in every mall." I wonder what a starving African would give to "save up enough to buy a car, or at least lease one and chain [himself] to 3 years of debt." I wonder what a Serbian facing ethnic cleansing would think of the chance to "shop at the Gap or Banana republic and [...] wear Oakley sunglasses and Nike shoes and Calvin Klein underoos."
When our biggest problem is that it's too easy to put a roof over our heads, feed ourselves and our families, and put clothes on our backs, when our most serious complaint is that a few wealthy people have it even more luxurious than we do, then we've reached the heights of depravity.
For most of human history, life was "nasty, brutish, and short." Now, in the industrialized world at least, we've made that kind of existence the exception rather than the rule. Whenever I hear this kind of rant about the spiritual emptiness of it all, I just want to scream. I'm sure the average poor person from the developing world would happily trade a little spiritual impoverishment in exchange for freedom from actual impoverishment.
Guess you'd have to leave your Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears tees at home, eh?
Re:Use the power of the state government over scho
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Sean In The Middle
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Oh, yes, greater centralized power. That's just a great idea. That way, abuses can occur statewide rather than being confined to a local area.
Re:We definately need some education reform
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Sean In The Middle
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As far as Colimbine goes, the ones that made the shooters feel like outcasts were just as responsible for the deaths as the shooters themselves.
I categorically reject that statement.
Yes, schools should stop bullying, and most schools do a pretty poor job of preventing the tormenting of "outcast" kids, but this is moral equivalence of the worst kind. Bullying kids are not "just as responsible" as those who pulled the trigger.
There are millions of bullied teens who manage to get through high school without massacring their classmates. Anyone who places less than 100% of the responsibility for Columbine on Klebold and Harris is just plain wrong.
UU not revolutionary? What are you smoking? UU had true 3D (IIRC) well before Wolfenstein 3D gave us 2.5-D.
You know, I always wondered what the Looking Glass guys thought when Descent and Quake came out touting their true-3D (e.g., not 2.5-D) environments. "Been there, done that" springs to mind.
As I noted, there are legitimate reasons to dislike Microsoft. To the extent that they prevented OEM's from including Netscape, they are rightly condemned.
But simply including IE as a part of the OS isn't a terrible thing; indeed, it is to be applauded. It provides the consumer with greater value for his OS dollar, and it does not prevent a consumer who is so inclined from grabbing Netscape if the consumer thinks he would prefer that browser to the one provided by Microsoft.
If you're going to condemn Microsoft simply for making a browser part of the OS, then you also have to condemn them for providing memory management, disk defragmentation, and screen savers with the OS, since all of these once had to be purchased separately.
"Law and Order" is pretty serious about using real NYC locations, so I'm pretty sure you're hearing "Lenox Ave." Besides, why would the network that is partnered with Microsoft be subliminally inserting open-source references?
Whooptie-freakin'-doo. Many cars come with basic stereo systems standard, and that doesn't seem to hurt third party stereo manufacturers.
Most "non-techies" will keep their current browsers if it meets their needs, much like folks like my Mom will keep Wordpad in lieu of MS Word or StarOffice or whatever if Wordpad is sufficient to meet their needs.
What you really want is to prevent consumers from getting a good deal. Look, back in the dark old days of DOS I had to buy separately from the OS a memory manager, basic disk utilities, and screen saver software. Now it's all bundled in the OS. Are you really going to claim this is a bad deal for consumers? Do you really want them to shell out $50 for EMM386, $50 for Norton, and $50 for After Dark?
Look, there is one way and one way only that Netscape could continue to charge for its browser, and that is if that browser provided significantly more functionality than IE. It didn't, so they couldn't, so here we are. If your product is good enough, people will pay for it even in the face of a free (but inferior) alternative. If that wasn't true, we'd all be using Wordpad.
There are plenty of good reasons to dislike Microsoft, but this just isn't one of them.
It turns out that users ARE stupid. Otherwise they would be called programmers or sysadmins.
I know you probably didn't mean it this way, but most users are NOT stupid; they just don't deal with computers well. Case in point: I'm an attorney, and I guarantee that most of my colleagues would have fits if we were to use Linux on the desktop. Sure, I like to fiddle with computers in my spare time, but most of my colleagues don't. Yet I would never in a million years characterize my colleagues as "stupid." We shepard billion dollar transactions and handle incredibly large lawsuits here, none of which could be handled by "stupid" people. We just have a different skill set, that's all.
Whenever I hear this kind of chatter, I always think what the/. crowd would think of a composer who considered non-musicians "stupid", or a doctor who considered his patients "stupid" because they kept asking him all these really obvious (to him) medical questions, or a lawyer who considered his clients "stupid" because they needed help with difficult legal problems.
Programmers and sysadmins aren't the only smart people in the world, and I really wish that the/. crowd would quit using computer skills as a proxy for intelligence.
Slashdot Mirror
It's an interesting argument, but one that doesn't really square with antitrust precedent.
First off, I can't think of any case where this kind of roundabout tying found to be an antitrust violation; every case I've ever read involved tying by the same firm (example: a shoe machinery company tied sales of the machine to long term service contracts).
Secondly, this isn't really "tying" as traditionally understood; this is really just an ordinary licensing restriction. If merely putting conditions on the use of a license constitutes "tying," then that would impact an awful lot of licensing agreements.
Actually, you are seriously wrong about lawyers (I am one). Getting a teaching gig at a law school is an extremely prestigious position, at the better schools only going to those who graduated at the tops of their law school classes and who clerked for judges, often at the appellate or even Supreme Court level. Granted, for most law profs actual classroom teaching generally comes second to publishing influential law review articles, but to be a teacher of the the law is in fact a huge indicator of competence.
Hate to reply to my own post, but I just got an email back from cryptome -- they have corrected the transcript. "Umeki" is no more.
Blue pickles must have been an early Nazi experiment...
I think Umeki is related to Xenu somehow... :-)
Furthermore, the firms that make DVDs do not, for the most part, make DVD players, so the use of the term "tying" is somewhat inappropriate.
Actually, I do hope that Inga and Vanessa go to court...it'd be better than Cinemax...
Jesus, that could get expensive. Y'know how an irritating, crappy but nonetheless eerily catchy tune will stay in your head ALL FUCKING DAY? Now imagine paying for it every time it plays. :-)
The mere fact that there were already ongoing independent counsel investigations is largely irrelevant to the issue of the Clinton impeachment. Furthermore, each such investigation was approved by a three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit of Appeals and were based on credible evidence of possible wrongdoing. Whitewater, to name one such investigation, landed former Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker in prison, as well as many other Clinton associates. That hardly sounds like a fishing trip to me.
You claim that the independent counsel investigations of Clinton amount to evidence that Republicans use "smear tactics." Well, if the mere presence of an independent counsel purusing a political figure is a "smear tactic," then Democrats are just as guilty; consider IC Lawrence Walsh indicting Caspar Weinberger three days before the 1992 presidential election for an example of what I'm talking about.
But all of this is neither here nor there. The specific point I was making was that the impeachment inquiry was a valid one based on the law of perjury. Again, the paper at my web site lays out this case in substantial detail. By ignoring a credible allegation of felony wrongdoing, you are the one being disingenuous.
You accuse me of avoiding the issue. But unless you only consider a "response" to be parroting your opinion of "yessir, those Republicans sure are a nasty bunch," your accusation is patently false. I have defended the legal substance of the impeachment charge, and that, at the end of the day, is what is crucial.
Oh, and as to your final point -- do you really expect me to call my own profession "evil"? Such a blanket statement would assuredly be false. Lawyers are like every other profession; it has its good and bad apples. I like to think I fall in the former category.
Further, I'd argue that the bulk of the smearing over the past 8 years has indeed been coming from the left. Even if we accept as a given that the impeachment move was a "smear" (it wasn't, it was a justifiable response to perjury), there are a bevy of folks in the Blumenthal-Carville-Flynt wing of the Democratic party that sought to tear down a number of conservatives. I doubt you'll find similar numbers on the conservative side.
Clinton's testimony was given in a deposition under oath. Deposition testimony is just as subject to the perjury statute as testimony in open court. In fact, in my paper I dealt with this specific issue; see footnotes 12-15 and related text. (Again, it is available on my web site under "Law School Outlines.")
So, far from being "hallucinatory," my view is based on the facts and the law, something you clearly haven't bothered to investigate.
Actually, the poster did not make a mistake. A gauntlet can, in fact, go inside a glove (albeit a very large glove). He was clearly referring to a draconian policy (the "iron gauntlet") wrapped in a feel-good, doesn't-look-harmful justification (the "velvet glove).
I can't speak for the poster, but I'll say that it wasn't an attempt at character assasination. It was an attempt to preserve the integrity of our court system. In a system where testimony under oath is the principal mechanism for resolving legal disputes, perjury is a very serious offense.
I won't revisit the whole spectacle again except to say that when I was in law school (yes, IAAL) I wrote a paper on the topic. It's on my web page if you're interested.
Grouping conservatives (or even right-to-lifers generally) to those who bomb abortion clinics is tantamount to grouping Greenpeace with Ted Kaczynski. There are nutjobs in every movement; just because a cause has some idiots that support it doesn't per se invalidate that cause.
It is a conceit of a wealthy nation that these things are deemed negative. I wonder what a homeless Calcuttan would give to "coast through life" in an area where "rents are low, there's McDonalds on every block, and a Wal-Mart in every mall." I wonder what a starving African would give to "save up enough to buy a car, or at least lease one and chain [himself] to 3 years of debt." I wonder what a Serbian facing ethnic cleansing would think of the chance to "shop at the Gap or Banana republic and [...] wear Oakley sunglasses and Nike shoes and Calvin Klein underoos."
When our biggest problem is that it's too easy to put a roof over our heads, feed ourselves and our families, and put clothes on our backs, when our most serious complaint is that a few wealthy people have it even more luxurious than we do, then we've reached the heights of depravity.
For most of human history, life was "nasty, brutish, and short." Now, in the industrialized world at least, we've made that kind of existence the exception rather than the rule. Whenever I hear this kind of rant about the spiritual emptiness of it all, I just want to scream. I'm sure the average poor person from the developing world would happily trade a little spiritual impoverishment in exchange for freedom from actual impoverishment.
Guess you'd have to leave your Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears tees at home, eh?
I categorically reject that statement.
Yes, schools should stop bullying, and most schools do a pretty poor job of preventing the tormenting of "outcast" kids, but this is moral equivalence of the worst kind. Bullying kids are not "just as responsible" as those who pulled the trigger.
There are millions of bullied teens who manage to get through high school without massacring their classmates. Anyone who places less than 100% of the responsibility for Columbine on Klebold and Harris is just plain wrong.
You know, I always wondered what the Looking Glass guys thought when Descent and Quake came out touting their true-3D (e.g., not 2.5-D) environments. "Been there, done that" springs to mind.
As I noted, there are legitimate reasons to dislike Microsoft. To the extent that they prevented OEM's from including Netscape, they are rightly condemned.
But simply including IE as a part of the OS isn't a terrible thing; indeed, it is to be applauded. It provides the consumer with greater value for his OS dollar, and it does not prevent a consumer who is so inclined from grabbing Netscape if the consumer thinks he would prefer that browser to the one provided by Microsoft.
If you're going to condemn Microsoft simply for making a browser part of the OS, then you also have to condemn them for providing memory management, disk defragmentation, and screen savers with the OS, since all of these once had to be purchased separately.
"Law and Order" is pretty serious about using real NYC locations, so I'm pretty sure you're hearing "Lenox Ave." Besides, why would the network that is partnered with Microsoft be subliminally inserting open-source references?
Most "non-techies" will keep their current browsers if it meets their needs, much like folks like my Mom will keep Wordpad in lieu of MS Word or StarOffice or whatever if Wordpad is sufficient to meet their needs.
What you really want is to prevent consumers from getting a good deal. Look, back in the dark old days of DOS I had to buy separately from the OS a memory manager, basic disk utilities, and screen saver software. Now it's all bundled in the OS. Are you really going to claim this is a bad deal for consumers? Do you really want them to shell out $50 for EMM386, $50 for Norton, and $50 for After Dark?
Look, there is one way and one way only that Netscape could continue to charge for its browser, and that is if that browser provided significantly more functionality than IE. It didn't, so they couldn't, so here we are. If your product is good enough, people will pay for it even in the face of a free (but inferior) alternative. If that wasn't true, we'd all be using Wordpad.
There are plenty of good reasons to dislike Microsoft, but this just isn't one of them.
Funny, I don't remember Tony Soprano showing up with my PC and "suggesting" I stick with IE...
I know you probably didn't mean it this way, but most users are NOT stupid; they just don't deal with computers well. Case in point: I'm an attorney, and I guarantee that most of my colleagues would have fits if we were to use Linux on the desktop. Sure, I like to fiddle with computers in my spare time, but most of my colleagues don't. Yet I would never in a million years characterize my colleagues as "stupid." We shepard billion dollar transactions and handle incredibly large lawsuits here, none of which could be handled by "stupid" people. We just have a different skill set, that's all.
Whenever I hear this kind of chatter, I always think what the /. crowd would think of a composer who considered non-musicians "stupid", or a doctor who considered his patients "stupid" because they kept asking him all these really obvious (to him) medical questions, or a lawyer who considered his clients "stupid" because they needed help with difficult legal problems.
Programmers and sysadmins aren't the only smart people in the world, and I really wish that the /. crowd would quit using computer skills as a proxy for intelligence.
Actually, no. In fact, ASCAP (a payment clearinghouse for the record industry) was once sued under the antitrust laws.