Affluence = population control. Note how Europe and the US are experiencing all of their population growth now due to immigration? It doesn't require mandatory birth control measures (or enforced abortion laws, etc) to keep the population down.
All you really have to do is provide the masses with a better form of retirement plan than: 'have a shitload of kids so that at least some will live long enough to care for you when you get old'.
Yes we can, and are actively working towards them even as I type this.
The workarounds include higher efficiency devices (e.g. iPad/Mac Mini/laptop instead of a massive gaming desktop), lowered consumption (when gasoline hits $5/gal in the US, odds are excellent that we'll all be driving less), and a different way of providing the goods (locally-sourced and produced foods instead of container-ship shipped, etc).
Long-term, this also includes starting colonies off-Earth, or at least having commercial space mining and production (which in turn expands the resource pool for a lot of things, from energy to minerals, to living space when we start looking centuries ahead). We're doing space tourism now (well, not-quite-LEO), and with commercial space industry warming up, it is not impossible (or even improbable) to consider viable commercial space entities making regular trips up and back by 2030. Consider that the first airplane flight happened in 1903, and we had commercial passenger flight by 1930.
This has nothing to do with "left" or "right", and using such designations will only muddy the water (and degenerate the debate). Please refrain from doing so.
I see what you did there. Neat fallacy, but let's make things honest (and more in line with GP's point):
* There are 23 million XBox gamers with XBox Live subscriptions
* meanwhile, there are roughly 1.5 - 2 billion human beings who could be reasonably considered as "consumers" out there.
But, you were busily counting one phone's potential pool, versus the paid result of the other. See the problem?
Now, to be perfectly fair, out of the 23m XBox gamers, you're going to have to remove the under-18 demographic, and a reasonable percentage of folks who can afford an XBox, but not an ongoing smartphone plan. The leftover folks may or may not consider a console-phone semi-link to be a factor, let alone a deciding one.
I don't think they're shooting as much for marketshare, as they are to enforce licensing on everyone who is not Apple (and Apple while they're at it). IF they can't sell phones, they'll still make money off of the mobile industry (see also their wee lawsuit).
I think we're seeing something different here. Company A gets sued by Company B, because B wants a revenue stream from a stupid patent (especially since it's rather obvious that B is struggling in the mobile market pretty badly). Company A, also struggling, doesn't want to have to pay for the eventual licensing out of its own funds, so it sues Company C to get a revenue stream that it will in turn use to pay B with (and maybe get a bit of extra besides). Eventually everyone is suing everyone else to, well, pay everyone else.
It all looks good on paper, though, and it'll confuse the hell out of shareholders enough to make them look profitable.
To be fair, the history of China involves not necessarily refusing to care, but instead involves individuals being more interested in not sharing the same fate. Once you read up on its history (esp. the 20th century), you may come to realize that it's not a question of stupidity, but of survival instinct.
Here in the US, we're made up of mostly loud, boisterous, and contentious people... the kind of folks who got killed off rather quickly in China. It's pretty easy for someone here to shout "stand up for yourselves!", but damned hard to realize that their target audience saw grandparents incarcerated or worse for doing just that.Throw in the culture, and shouting it will just get you a puzzled look.
We've had well over two centuries here of shouting (and even shooting once) our political views - our ancestors' circumstances pretty much made that a given. China isn't like that. Sometimes, you just have to take that into account.
Just out of spite go to the corp's direct competitor(s), and let them know exactly who said what. Then offer to help said competitor(s) get a jump on things.
Hell - I'd do it just out of spite; the original corp gets bitch-slapped, competitor(s) get a Nobel Prize-winning scientist's name in their press releases, and while you still have to stupid patent issues, at least the evil is more diffuse (among competitors), and therefore less of a threat at large.
I've been running it happily on a HP Elitebook 8440p, when no other Linux distro would even contemplate running on the thing (at least not w/o HP's proprietary drivers for SuSE - wish to frig one could download those). I was hella surprised to see how frickin' smooth everything was - Broadcom Wireless, Intel Graphics chip, etc etc - name it, and it all was up and ready to run by default.
This is honestly the first distro/rev that I've not had to configure anything for, hardware-wise... and I've been mucking about in Linux since ~1996.
The apps have come along enough that I can confidently recommend the whole damned bundle to even the most tech-illiterate members of the family. The artwork is smoother than a prom queen's thighs, and is readily alterable to taste. Hell, even Evolution, with one clicky-install plugin (evolution-mapi) connected to Exchange 2007 servers with only a minimum of effort - calendar, mail, contacts, you name it (though to be honest, it has its moments...)
The one and only thing keeping me from flushing the XP install off of this thing is the VMWare VI Client (which reminds me: Dear VMWare - WTF guys? Would it kill you to make a *nix-based client!?). That said, RDP to a little VM I keep stashed for such tools works pretty much for me.
Out of curiosity - why the hell would you use BitTorrent on a phone? AT&T has bandwidth charges that would make most torrents pretty expensive, you'd fill up your phone in extremely short order, and the transfer rates are atrociously slow at best.
I understand the whole 'free to do what you like with it' concept, but seriously, downloading torrents on a phone is, well, kind of stupid.
Dunno about Canada, but a bit of sniffing around turned up this: US Federal law says that they can only take up to 25% of your paycheck, or exempts up to 30x the federal minimum wage per week, whichever is bigger (though according to that site, child support, alimony and such can be taken in bigger amounts). They could come after a goodly chunk of what you own, though again, with a healthy dose of exemptions.
Basically, I figure that they'd leave you with enough stuff to live simply, and not much else.
OTOH, not so sure ab't wanting to get locked up in PMTIA prison just to avoid paying it or to make some sort of point... it would be hella easier on one's anus to just move to Mexico or Central/South America, no?
I couldn't agree more which is why it's really cool that the Exchange GUI tools will show you the exact PowerShell commands they are running if you want to learn how to use the CLI (and in fact that are still things that can only be done in the CLI, though the list is greatly reduced in EX 2010 vs 2007).
Crap. I was hoping they would've encouraged more CLI and less GUI... (using Exch2k7 here - haven't had time to dink with 2010 yet). I'm guessing the typical MCSE types (comprising the majority, not the whole) have decided that command-line stuff must be too hard to learn.
A systematic error in their billing system - the kind of thing I have no problem believing would slip past a corporate QA department - could easily rack up $90M across the book of business before being noticed.
In most cases, okay, I can totally grok the 'never attribute to malice' line. But Verizon? Sorry... they're the type where this sort of thing is designed, not accidental. Also, that $90m is likely only a portion of the money they've taken in over the years.
The vast majority of those features can be summed up in one sentence from the user POV: "They moved stuff around".
To be fair, from a technical standpoint, yeah, they overhauled it pretty good. On the other hand, the typical user isn't going to care - all they know is that it has eye-candy, some nice widgets, and, well... they moved stuff around.
With Windows 95, 98, and 2000, and even XP, users saw substantial changes (and saw them to be useful). With Vista and 7, users aren't going to see a whole lot that has changed 'under-the-hood' in a way that's apparent and useful to them.
In fact, they're going to see some things that are wrong in their eyes - mostly having to do with application compatibility - users still want to use their old stuff. For instance, try and play Quake III on Windows 7... not going to happen very well (depending on hardware). Being told "Use XP Mode" isn't going to help - they'll likely say 'screw it' and just use the real thing... Windows XP.
Now IMHO, props to Microsoft for at least partially cutting the cord and all WRT legacy apps, but the user isn't going to see it that way.
A $40k per year Linux admin is unheard of. The average is almost $90k, $10k more than the average Windows admin. That's great if you're a Linux guy, not so much if you're a business trying to save money.
You missed something: A business only needs 2/3 to half as many *nix admins in most cases - a competent admin can automate the vast majority of what is normally required (or expensive via third-party toolsets) in a Windows-only environment (for instance, compare SCCM vs. an in-house YUM server.)
Factor in the costs of re-training all your staff...
More FUD, and for two reasons:
re-training is a fact of life anyway. Ask any Exchange Admin trying to turn his/her Exch2k3 server farm into an Exch2k7 or Exch2k10 one. You'll be spending the money on training whether you like it or not. (and in Exchange's case, you have to train these folks to use a CLI anyway - like it or not)
Any sysadmin who isn't at least passingly adept at Linux by now is likely incompetent and/or ROAD ("retired on active duty" - i.e. lazy beyond belief). Either condition is useless to a company, and detrimental to the admin's own career.
Funny, but the only thing I pay RedHat for per-server? Seems to be just for access to patches and updates. I've honestly never had to call their support line in the 4+ years that I've been using RHEL professionally.
Microsoft OTOH had been a near-constant companion last year during the install of the travesties that are SCOM and SCCM - and most professional MCSE types I know of have had to do the same. Even called 'em up a couple of times back when Exchange 2007 first came out.
So, at least in my own experience, Microsoft has been a pricier support and maintenance proposition (on the enterprise level, anyhoo) than Linux has been.
It'll eventually (in a few million years) end up being some really bad-assed coal?
It does bring up a point, though - for a movement that utterly detests genetically-modifying things like food, I wonder how the overly-eco crowd will react to genetically modified trees... 'course, I'm thinking they'll just turn around and complain that humanity should instead modify its own behavior.
I wouldn't be surprised to see some congresscritter use this as an example to introduce legislation that makes all of our lives just a little bit worse, by regulating the unholy shit out of the Internet.
Pranks, yeah. Making their lives miserable through perfectly legal means, yeah, I can smile at it (e.g. when Mr. Ralsky got a taste of his own spammy medicine a few years back... those were good times).
OTOH, breaking the law is only good for those willing to challenge an unjust law. Notice that the US Civil Rights Movement didn't resort to breaking other laws to make a point - they only broke the unjust ones. Most importantly, they were willing to take the punishment for it, in order to point out to the world at large just how unjust those laws were. That's the whole point of civil disobedience.
While, yeah, I have zero love for a law firm that engages in the RIAA/MPAA's tactics, the best way to make one's point is to do so w/o breaking other, more important laws.
What this would accomplish (at least if done large-scale or over time) is to provide fodder to make existing laws even more draconian, and to allow government(s) to step in and regulate the Internet even more, which none of us want.
Taking something to the US Supreme Court is a big-assed wager.
Sometimes, you get what you want - say, software patents being invalidated (or at least weakened to the point of near-uselessness). This would be a very good thing.
However - any outcome other than what you desired will either make it im-fucking-possible to change later. For instance, a bad outcome would be for software patents to not only get validated, but strengthened to the point where any patent holder (no matter how specious the patent), can promptly send any company they want straight into fiscal hell. Like today, only 10x as worse.
Of course, like the roulette players who only bet on red or black, but the ball lands on "00"? Sometimes, the result is something totally unexpected, confusing as hell, angers both sides, and only ends up making things more complex and ugly all at once.
Seriously? I'd like to see software patents die and all, but there had better be one HELL of a strong case, aligned just right in circumstance, before anyone starts shoving for a USSC hearing on the matter. Thsi case, in which both parties have every interest towards seeing software patents stay alive and healthy? This case damned sure ain't it. The EFF would've been better served leaving Microsoft to choke on its own blood.
Apple sued HTC over hardware patents, IIRC. Microsoft merely included their (and Oracle's) name to legitimize what they were up to in the eyes of their audience. Not sure I'd want the association with Oracle, though - that particular one smells/tastes like Ellison trying to generate some revenue off of his recent purchase of Java, not (as portrayed) as some aggrieved party sick of getting ripped off (remember, Oracle just bought the thing).
Long-term, sure, Google will likely be vying w/ Apple for the #1 slot. OTOH, I don't think Apple cares if they ever quite reach #1 in the smartphone market, or any market. If they cared about market position, Verizon would be selling iPhones by now, and Dell and HP would be selling computers with OSX preloaded on them. OTOH, Apple has its own, not-so-obvious goals, mostly having to do with holding more money than the US Treasury and China combined, methinks.
Finally, one last nitpick... I sincerely doubt that Microsoft was/is cozy at all with the iPhone coming out of nowhere and basically tearing it a new arse in the US smartphone markets (and I bet that Palm hated the whole episode even worse). Globally, Microsoft was drowned out by Nokia anyway.:)
It's interesting that you'd advocate for a quick and easy surrender, when in fact Microsoft may not even have a case (or even valid patents). Smells like FUD, circa 2003.
If Google came out swinging, no sweat - the devs (like everyone else) will figure that it'll settle anyway, and barring injunctions (unlikely), business will continue as usual.
You know? If IBM took the attitude that you're advocating, we'd all be paying some jackass in Utah $700/seat for Linux.
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Affluence = population control. Note how Europe and the US are experiencing all of their population growth now due to immigration? It doesn't require mandatory birth control measures (or enforced abortion laws, etc) to keep the population down.
All you really have to do is provide the masses with a better form of retirement plan than: 'have a shitload of kids so that at least some will live long enough to care for you when you get old'.
With the Earth, don't expect any such workaround.
Yes we can, and are actively working towards them even as I type this.
The workarounds include higher efficiency devices (e.g. iPad/Mac Mini/laptop instead of a massive gaming desktop), lowered consumption (when gasoline hits $5/gal in the US, odds are excellent that we'll all be driving less), and a different way of providing the goods (locally-sourced and produced foods instead of container-ship shipped, etc).
Long-term, this also includes starting colonies off-Earth, or at least having commercial space mining and production (which in turn expands the resource pool for a lot of things, from energy to minerals, to living space when we start looking centuries ahead). We're doing space tourism now (well, not-quite-LEO), and with commercial space industry warming up, it is not impossible (or even improbable) to consider viable commercial space entities making regular trips up and back by 2030. Consider that the first airplane flight happened in 1903, and we had commercial passenger flight by 1930.
This has nothing to do with "left" or "right", and using such designations will only muddy the water (and degenerate the debate). Please refrain from doing so.
I see what you did there. Neat fallacy, but let's make things honest (and more in line with GP's point):
* There are 23 million XBox gamers with XBox Live subscriptions
* meanwhile, there are roughly 1.5 - 2 billion human beings who could be reasonably considered as "consumers" out there.
But, you were busily counting one phone's potential pool, versus the paid result of the other. See the problem?
Now, to be perfectly fair, out of the 23m XBox gamers, you're going to have to remove the under-18 demographic, and a reasonable percentage of folks who can afford an XBox, but not an ongoing smartphone plan. The leftover folks may or may not consider a console-phone semi-link to be a factor, let alone a deciding one.
I don't think they're shooting as much for marketshare, as they are to enforce licensing on everyone who is not Apple (and Apple while they're at it). IF they can't sell phones, they'll still make money off of the mobile industry (see also their wee lawsuit).
So, err, the eventual survivors will be Marilyn Vos Savant, and Stephen Hawking?
We're fucked.
I think we're seeing something different here. Company A gets sued by Company B, because B wants a revenue stream from a stupid patent (especially since it's rather obvious that B is struggling in the mobile market pretty badly). Company A, also struggling, doesn't want to have to pay for the eventual licensing out of its own funds, so it sues Company C to get a revenue stream that it will in turn use to pay B with (and maybe get a bit of extra besides). Eventually everyone is suing everyone else to, well, pay everyone else.
It all looks good on paper, though, and it'll confuse the hell out of shareholders enough to make them look profitable.
The Nobel Peace Prize has always been politically charged. Even the committee admitted as much when folks kept asking them why Al Gore got one.
To be fair, the history of China involves not necessarily refusing to care, but instead involves individuals being more interested in not sharing the same fate. Once you read up on its history (esp. the 20th century), you may come to realize that it's not a question of stupidity, but of survival instinct.
Here in the US, we're made up of mostly loud, boisterous, and contentious people... the kind of folks who got killed off rather quickly in China. It's pretty easy for someone here to shout "stand up for yourselves!", but damned hard to realize that their target audience saw grandparents incarcerated or worse for doing just that.Throw in the culture, and shouting it will just get you a puzzled look.
We've had well over two centuries here of shouting (and even shooting once) our political views - our ancestors' circumstances pretty much made that a given. China isn't like that. Sometimes, you just have to take that into account.
Just out of spite go to the corp's direct competitor(s), and let them know exactly who said what. Then offer to help said competitor(s) get a jump on things.
Hell - I'd do it just out of spite; the original corp gets bitch-slapped, competitor(s) get a Nobel Prize-winning scientist's name in their press releases, and while you still have to stupid patent issues, at least the evil is more diffuse (among competitors), and therefore less of a threat at large.
I've been running it happily on a HP Elitebook 8440p, when no other Linux distro would even contemplate running on the thing (at least not w/o HP's proprietary drivers for SuSE - wish to frig one could download those). I was hella surprised to see how frickin' smooth everything was - Broadcom Wireless, Intel Graphics chip, etc etc - name it, and it all was up and ready to run by default.
This is honestly the first distro/rev that I've not had to configure anything for, hardware-wise... and I've been mucking about in Linux since ~1996.
The apps have come along enough that I can confidently recommend the whole damned bundle to even the most tech-illiterate members of the family. The artwork is smoother than a prom queen's thighs, and is readily alterable to taste. Hell, even Evolution, with one clicky-install plugin (evolution-mapi) connected to Exchange 2007 servers with only a minimum of effort - calendar, mail, contacts, you name it (though to be honest, it has its moments...)
The one and only thing keeping me from flushing the XP install off of this thing is the VMWare VI Client (which reminds me: Dear VMWare - WTF guys? Would it kill you to make a *nix-based client!?). That said, RDP to a little VM I keep stashed for such tools works pretty much for me.
I wonder how long it will be until "intellectual property" lawyers start complaining about their cases being outsourced?
Out of curiosity - why the hell would you use BitTorrent on a phone? AT&T has bandwidth charges that would make most torrents pretty expensive, you'd fill up your phone in extremely short order, and the transfer rates are atrociously slow at best.
I understand the whole 'free to do what you like with it' concept, but seriously, downloading torrents on a phone is, well, kind of stupid.
Dunno about Canada, but a bit of sniffing around turned up this: US Federal law says that they can only take up to 25% of your paycheck, or exempts up to 30x the federal minimum wage per week, whichever is bigger (though according to that site, child support, alimony and such can be taken in bigger amounts). They could come after a goodly chunk of what you own, though again, with a healthy dose of exemptions.
Basically, I figure that they'd leave you with enough stuff to live simply, and not much else.
OTOH, not so sure ab't wanting to get locked up in PMTIA prison just to avoid paying it or to make some sort of point... it would be hella easier on one's anus to just move to Mexico or Central/South America, no?
I couldn't agree more which is why it's really cool that the Exchange GUI tools will show you the exact PowerShell commands they are running if you want to learn how to use the CLI (and in fact that are still things that can only be done in the CLI, though the list is greatly reduced in EX 2010 vs 2007).
Crap. I was hoping they would've encouraged more CLI and less GUI... (using Exch2k7 here - haven't had time to dink with 2010 yet). I'm guessing the typical MCSE types (comprising the majority, not the whole) have decided that command-line stuff must be too hard to learn.
A systematic error in their billing system - the kind of thing I have no problem believing would slip past a corporate QA department - could easily rack up $90M across the book of business before being noticed.
So why would it take an FCC inquiry (and a large number of consumer complaints, endless websites/news stories about Verizon's bad data-charging habits, "Verizon Math", and even firing employees who offer service blocks to customers)?
In most cases, okay, I can totally grok the 'never attribute to malice' line. But Verizon? Sorry... they're the type where this sort of thing is designed, not accidental. Also, that $90m is likely only a portion of the money they've taken in over the years.
The vast majority of those features can be summed up in one sentence from the user POV: "They moved stuff around".
To be fair, from a technical standpoint, yeah, they overhauled it pretty good. On the other hand, the typical user isn't going to care - all they know is that it has eye-candy, some nice widgets, and, well... they moved stuff around.
With Windows 95, 98, and 2000, and even XP, users saw substantial changes (and saw them to be useful). With Vista and 7, users aren't going to see a whole lot that has changed 'under-the-hood' in a way that's apparent and useful to them.
In fact, they're going to see some things that are wrong in their eyes - mostly having to do with application compatibility - users still want to use their old stuff. For instance, try and play Quake III on Windows 7... not going to happen very well (depending on hardware). Being told "Use XP Mode" isn't going to help - they'll likely say 'screw it' and just use the real thing... Windows XP.
Now IMHO, props to Microsoft for at least partially cutting the cord and all WRT legacy apps, but the user isn't going to see it that way.
A $40k per year Linux admin is unheard of. The average is almost $90k, $10k more than the average Windows admin. That's great if you're a Linux guy, not so much if you're a business trying to save money.
You missed something: A business only needs 2/3 to half as many *nix admins in most cases - a competent admin can automate the vast majority of what is normally required (or expensive via third-party toolsets) in a Windows-only environment (for instance, compare SCCM vs. an in-house YUM server.)
Factor in the costs of re-training all your staff...
More FUD, and for two reasons:
Funny, but the only thing I pay RedHat for per-server? Seems to be just for access to patches and updates. I've honestly never had to call their support line in the 4+ years that I've been using RHEL professionally.
Microsoft OTOH had been a near-constant companion last year during the install of the travesties that are SCOM and SCCM - and most professional MCSE types I know of have had to do the same. Even called 'em up a couple of times back when Exchange 2007 first came out.
So, at least in my own experience, Microsoft has been a pricier support and maintenance proposition (on the enterprise level, anyhoo) than Linux has been.
It'll eventually (in a few million years) end up being some really bad-assed coal?
It does bring up a point, though - for a movement that utterly detests genetically-modifying things like food, I wonder how the overly-eco crowd will react to genetically modified trees... 'course, I'm thinking they'll just turn around and complain that humanity should instead modify its own behavior.
I wouldn't be surprised to see some congresscritter use this as an example to introduce legislation that makes all of our lives just a little bit worse, by regulating the unholy shit out of the Internet.
Nuh-uh.
Pranks, yeah. Making their lives miserable through perfectly legal means, yeah, I can smile at it (e.g. when Mr. Ralsky got a taste of his own spammy medicine a few years back... those were good times).
OTOH, breaking the law is only good for those willing to challenge an unjust law. Notice that the US Civil Rights Movement didn't resort to breaking other laws to make a point - they only broke the unjust ones. Most importantly, they were willing to take the punishment for it, in order to point out to the world at large just how unjust those laws were. That's the whole point of civil disobedience.
While, yeah, I have zero love for a law firm that engages in the RIAA/MPAA's tactics, the best way to make one's point is to do so w/o breaking other, more important laws.
What this would accomplish (at least if done large-scale or over time) is to provide fodder to make existing laws even more draconian, and to allow government(s) to step in and regulate the Internet even more, which none of us want.
I think Microsoft and the rest of the software companies have realized that patent-trolls do more harm than good.
I call bullshit.
Taking something to the US Supreme Court is a big-assed wager.
Sometimes, you get what you want - say, software patents being invalidated (or at least weakened to the point of near-uselessness). This would be a very good thing.
However - any outcome other than what you desired will either make it im-fucking-possible to change later. For instance, a bad outcome would be for software patents to not only get validated, but strengthened to the point where any patent holder (no matter how specious the patent), can promptly send any company they want straight into fiscal hell. Like today, only 10x as worse.
Of course, like the roulette players who only bet on red or black, but the ball lands on "00"? Sometimes, the result is something totally unexpected, confusing as hell, angers both sides, and only ends up making things more complex and ugly all at once.
Seriously? I'd like to see software patents die and all, but there had better be one HELL of a strong case, aligned just right in circumstance, before anyone starts shoving for a USSC hearing on the matter. Thsi case, in which both parties have every interest towards seeing software patents stay alive and healthy? This case damned sure ain't it. The EFF would've been better served leaving Microsoft to choke on its own blood.
Some picking apart may be in order here...
Apple sued HTC over hardware patents, IIRC. Microsoft merely included their (and Oracle's) name to legitimize what they were up to in the eyes of their audience. Not sure I'd want the association with Oracle, though - that particular one smells/tastes like Ellison trying to generate some revenue off of his recent purchase of Java, not (as portrayed) as some aggrieved party sick of getting ripped off (remember, Oracle just bought the thing).
Long-term, sure, Google will likely be vying w/ Apple for the #1 slot. OTOH, I don't think Apple cares if they ever quite reach #1 in the smartphone market, or any market. If they cared about market position, Verizon would be selling iPhones by now, and Dell and HP would be selling computers with OSX preloaded on them. OTOH, Apple has its own, not-so-obvious goals, mostly having to do with holding more money than the US Treasury and China combined, methinks.
Finally, one last nitpick... I sincerely doubt that Microsoft was/is cozy at all with the iPhone coming out of nowhere and basically tearing it a new arse in the US smartphone markets (and I bet that Palm hated the whole episode even worse). Globally, Microsoft was drowned out by Nokia anyway. :)
It's interesting that you'd advocate for a quick and easy surrender, when in fact Microsoft may not even have a case (or even valid patents). Smells like FUD, circa 2003.
If Google came out swinging, no sweat - the devs (like everyone else) will figure that it'll settle anyway, and barring injunctions (unlikely), business will continue as usual.
You know? If IBM took the attitude that you're advocating, we'd all be paying some jackass in Utah $700/seat for Linux.