I agree with most of your points, but Japanese Americans are Japanese AMERICANS. You might as well say that during war you should watch ALL your citizens closely because you never know who's going to sell you out. Just because one of your citizens has epicanthic folds doesn't make it any more likely that he's going to be the douchebag who does the deed.
And terrorism isn't monopolized by towel-headed religious fanatics. Terrorism is a weapon of FANATICS - period. Fanatics of all kinds, of all stripes. Just ask Timothy McVeigh who, prior to 9/11, held the record for body count within the United States. If you want to make a point here it isn't that Americans who happen to be Muslims should be watched, it's Americans who've been identified as fanatics - especially religious fanatics, *regardless of what religion they supposedly support*. And yes indeedy, that includes Christians.
That would imply that the entire nation of Japan was responsible for the "Rape of Nanking"
In general I'd say that's true. The government is the responsbility of its citizenry; if the government does something evil then the citizenry are also to blame, at least indirectly. This applies to both people who support that government and people who sit on the sidelines thinking that inaction somehow absolves them from blame (e.g, "a crime of omission is no crime at all").
Tom Cruise is a bit of a nutbar - no doubt about it - but he is a fascinating
Perhaps you to. To me, he's an annoying Scientology douchebag.
Bruce, on the other hand, hasn't really turned the world on it's ear since Army of Darkness.
On the other hand, Bruce ISN'T an annoying Scientology douchebag.
Good or bad, Tom Cruise pumps out the big Hollywood blockbusters like a tennis ball machine gone evil.
I don't think "blockbuster" is the term I'd use for a good chunk of the movies he's been involved in in the last five or six years. And I'm willing to bet the reason War of the Worlds isn't doing worse than it is is because Dakota Fanning is more of an actress at 10 years old than ol' Tom will ever be.
He has as much a right to speak about whatever he believes as much as anybody.
And we have the right to ignore him, or take a pass on his movies...because he's an annoying Scientology douchebag.
Bruce should maybe take his own advice and "shut-up and act", or at least stop being such a bloody hypocrite.
Tom Cruise has the right to speak about whatever he pleases, yet Bruce should shut his pie-hole? Classic slashdot reasoning in action.
Yet another socialist fighting to be able to tell the rest of us what to do and how to live our lives. And if we don't agree with the little twit, or think that perhaps the Constitution is more important than his own pet views on How The World Should Be(TM), we're stupid little slaves who don't understand the evils done to us by our corporate masters.
It's good to know that vastly superior intellects such as your own are looking out for our welfare. Snort.
Ownership doesn't give you the right to make up any rules you like, even on your property.
Perhaps, but I do have the right to tell you to get the fuck off my property if you won't obey my rules. And guess what? If I say "get the fuck off my property", *you have to get the fuck off my property whether you want to leave or not*. You don't get any other choice.
I do have a right to expect private corporations not to be able to set such invasive terms on my doing business.
Sure you do. You can also expect the rest of us to bow down before you and worship you as a superior human being. But it ain't ever going to happen.
There is no limit on expectations. Humans have all sorts of unrealistic and downright loony expectations.
This "you don't have a right... private property...you can't set the terms" bullshit is just a cop-out by apologists for corporate america.
And the argument against private property is a copout for little socialists to throw a tantrum over the fact that they don't get to tell those big, bad property owners what to do and how to conduct their business.
Fact: it's not that people decide to do business with these soulless corps despite the drawbacks as your kind wish us to believe, it's that the public is too stupid to realize what half of these companies are doing
Not only are you a socialist prick, you're an elitist, egomaniacal socialist prick who thinks he's smarter than just about everyone else in America.
Get over yourself, junior. You aren't that bright. And you certainly aren't unique.
you must not be a big believer in the Bill of Rights?
Yet another example of why people say the educational system in the U.S. has gone to shit.
The Bill of Rights defines citizen interaction with government, not citizen-citizen interaction. Your rights apply to government entities, not private ones - which is why, for example, you have no implied or actual right to privacy at your place of work, nor do you have the right to free speech on company time.
This is one of the things that bothered me as well (not to mention having to hunt down all the plugins I needed to properly customize it). Every open tab seemed to make the system more and more sluggish, while on Opera open tabs have no effect at all. I've had more than 60 open tabs in Opera while tracking site updates and nary a problem or a slowdown.
That, and the mouse gestures (which I've been using in Opera since they came out) seem to be 'sticky' in FireFox. Not sure how to explain it, or why it occurs, but it happened on all of our home machines (I tried it on all of them to see if there was a machine-specific conflict of some sort). The sticky mouse gestures made me absolutely batshit; it's one of those little annoyances that makes you crazy when you know that they work perfectly well in your regular browser.
This is about open vs closed source, free vs not free.
Perhaps in your virtual world, but not in mine. I use SuSE Linux for everything but gaming, for many reasons which I won't bother stating here. But one of them is because I'm a paranoid son of a bitch and I don't trust MS as far as I can throw them. For me, using a closed source OS is just begging to be butt-reamed by a company that's repeatedly proven itself to be an unscrupulous law-breaker.
But even though I insist on using an open-source OS, I do not insist on using open-source apps. I'll take whatever tool is best for the job, assuming the company producing it doesn't have a reputation for stealing information from the end user. An example of this is Opera, which I prefer over all other browsers. I don't care if FireFox is free, I don't like it and won't be using it just because some college kids and hippies point to it as a banner example for their own personal politics.
For Joe user, the free vs not-free argument falls along the lines of "big - fucking - deal". We want what works best for us, end of story. Fortunately IE is such a piece of crap, and causes so many inconveniences, that Joe User is starting to see FireFox and Opera as 'working better' than IE. But he still doesn't give a rats ass about the whole 'free vs not-free' thing, and never will.
The only way to win Joe User as a 'convert', if you're one of those folks on a religious crusade, is to make FireFox obviously better than IE. Nothing else matters.
The US used to have a government that was for its citizens.
Privacy in the Constitution applies to the relationship between citizen and government, not to the relationship between citizen and citizen. You can ensure privacy (or the punishment of it's violation) via contract, if you're concerned about the issue. Getting the government in on the act, other than to settle a contract dispute in the courts, is a very bad idea.
ownership doesn't give you the right to make up any rules you like.
Funny, that's how it works on my property. I tell my guests they can either follow my rules or leave - and they can leave any time they like. But there is no third option available to them.
In the land of the free I'm free to make the rules that govern my property, and you're free to leave (or not enter the property in the first place) if you don't like the rules. Freedom all around, for everyone concerned.
What if Disney required your home address and social security number to enter their park?
If you object then don't go to the park. It's that simple. You don't have a 'right' to visit the park, nor to set the terms by which you can enter their property. And if enough people think the same way you do the park will be forced to change their practices or go out of business.
But if you're in the minority you'll simply have to suck it up and deal with it. That's part and parcel of the whole concept of 'private property'.
Disneyland is a unique place, and as such there should be restrictions on what rights they can force you to give away to attend their unique attraction.
It's also private property. If they want to require a scan for you to enter their property you do indeed have to "like it or lump it". The decision *isn't up to you* and in a free society it'll *never be up to you*. Your role in this little melodrama is either to put up with it for entry into the park, or refuse your patronage and take the kids someplace else.
Just because there isn't another place quite like Disney World or Disney Land doesn't grant you any special rights, or impose any special restrictions upon the park. *There is no element of coercion here, regardless of what you may think*.
Criticism is a fundamental component of a free market.
In a free market, the best sort of criticism of all is to *not give your money to the company in the first place*.
What's interesting is how many people here have bitched about the policy...and then chosen to suffer through it to go the park anyway. I guess the concept of 'hypocrisy' is a bit too complex for them to comprehend.
I agree with you where Disney World is concerned. It's their property; they can set whatever requirements they like for entry. You, as a citizen of the United States, have the right to choose not to abide by those requirements and to forego entering the park.
As far as Microsoft goes, however, they *are* a monopoly, by the classical economic definition. You don't have to have 100% of the market to qualify as a monopoly, only enough of it to exert monopolistic influence. Which they clearly do.
You know what the great thing is about always having your karma maxed out? You can piss off the moderators who slam you into oblivion because you happen to be on their 'foes' list and they just got some mod points. By reposting this:
"He had his opinion, and then I expressed mine. So what precisely is your problem here?"
Which I originally left at '1' (now modded at 0) at '2'. After they've run out of those points.
The network executivies dont care that you watch more telelvision now than you ever did because your watching significantly less of their advertising.
Reading comprehension helps. We watch more TV, NOT more TV on BitTorrent. Does that help? Without the ability to get back episodes on torrent or to catch an episode we missed, we wouldn't be watching these shows - on TV - AT ALL.
If you stop and think it through, we're watching more advertising now than we have in years.
He even says in his blog that this is a terrible implementation of DRM.
And that's exactly where he should've stopped. If he were at all consistent he would've exercised his right to free speech on the matter but never have tried to crack the DRM.
Unfortunately this moron believes that HE gets to be the one who decides whether or not some subset of DRM is 'good', and if it doesn't meet HIS standards then it's okay to crack it. He's essentially said that his own personal beliefs supercede the law and are justification for breaking that law.
This makes him no different than any other 'pirate' out there, just a little slicker at convincing people that what he's doing is actually okay.
You could try not watching. Then the show wouldn't bother you so much. Trust me, no one's going to care if you spend your time watching something else.
Don't make me pick between galactica and CSI, that would kill me to have to chose only one or the other.
Good geeks know of this mystical device called "the VCR", which can record one show while you watch another. In fact, just about everyone knows about the mighty VCR, and owns one to boot!
But even better geeks know of "BitTorrent", for those times when you forget to set the VCR. Or for catching up on shows that you didn't clue in on until the second or third season. This is how my wife and I got up to speed on West Wing, Alias, and yes - even CSI! Without BitTorrent to provide the seasons we'd missed (not big TV fans) we'd never have watched the shows on regular TV. We hate jumping into shows mid-stream.
Of course, we didn't bother with BitTorrent until BSG aired in Britain. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for us. But once we took the leap...well, there's really no going back. We watch more TV now than we have in decades. If we happen to miss an episode, so what? We can always catch it with a download and be on track again before the next week's episode airs.
No doubt the network goons will soon be kicking in my door for these public admissions. It won't matter that we watch MORE TV now, only that we've used BitTorrent in acts of "piracy"....
This is about mostly young people feeling entitled to the professional work of other people, and simply taking it because they know they probably won't be caught.
Given that around 70% of all Americans "sometimes" indulge in piracy, I'd say your conclusion about the problem being restricted to "mostly young people" is dead wrong.
Economics 101: the greater the popularity of the black market, the more likely it is that the price of the item or service in question is seen as being too high. In a normal capitalistic market environment competitors would appear, pricing would drop, and the black market would return to the fringes; in a non-capitalistic market controlled in part through government action the consumers choices are limited to either a) paying what they perceive to be far too much for that product or service, b) not purchasing the product or service at all, or c) paying a 'fairer' price using the black market.
There will always be little college shits screaming "information wants to be free!" when in fact what they mean is "everything I want should be free!". But this activity is hardly limited to these little punks. If it were I'd happily tell you to round the fuckers up, put them against a wall, and shoot them before they can breed. As is, what the popular media calles piracy has become commonplace, and what that tells anyone with a decent grounding in economics is that something is SERIOUSLY wrong with the current market structure.
The perception of what appears to be a majority of infringers is that certain goods and services are overpriced, and they're overpriced because of coercive practices by businesses that strictly control those goods or services. Whether or not you agree with that perception is irrelevent; you do NOT get a huge demographic like the one above willfully engaging in black-market activities otherwise. It just doesn't happen, regardless of what the "all human beings are essentially evil shits" crowd spouts.
You're generalizing the attitudes of a tiny minority (stupid college fucks who don't respect anyone but themselves) to the population as a whole, and that couldn't be more wrong. Although I'm sure the RIAA/MPAA would be overjoyed to hear that you've done just that.
People in a year or so literally won't have a choice; if you want a new computer you'll be buying Longhorn.
That would explain why a nice big chunk of the users out there (businesses included) are still using Win95 and Win98. And why WinXP seems to have failed to capture a majority of the market share.
These people aren't upgrading due to a lack of funds to purchase new computers. They're buying the new computers but removing XP and replacing it with Win98 because XP won't run some favorite (or necessary) piece of software properly. Joe User hates the upgrade cycle even more than businesses do.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with most of your points, but Japanese Americans are Japanese AMERICANS. You might as well say that during war you should watch ALL your citizens closely because you never know who's going to sell you out. Just because one of your citizens has epicanthic folds doesn't make it any more likely that he's going to be the douchebag who does the deed.
And terrorism isn't monopolized by towel-headed religious fanatics. Terrorism is a weapon of FANATICS - period. Fanatics of all kinds, of all stripes. Just ask Timothy McVeigh who, prior to 9/11, held the record for body count within the United States. If you want to make a point here it isn't that Americans who happen to be Muslims should be watched, it's Americans who've been identified as fanatics - especially religious fanatics, *regardless of what religion they supposedly support*. And yes indeedy, that includes Christians.
Max
That would imply that the entire nation of Japan was responsible for the "Rape of Nanking"
In general I'd say that's true. The government is the responsbility of its citizenry; if the government does something evil then the citizenry are also to blame, at least indirectly. This applies to both people who support that government and people who sit on the sidelines thinking that inaction somehow absolves them from blame (e.g, "a crime of omission is no crime at all").
Max
Tom Cruise is a bit of a nutbar - no doubt about it - but he is a fascinating
Perhaps you to. To me, he's an annoying Scientology douchebag.
Bruce, on the other hand, hasn't really turned the world on it's ear since Army of Darkness.
On the other hand, Bruce ISN'T an annoying Scientology douchebag.
Good or bad, Tom Cruise pumps out the big Hollywood blockbusters like a tennis ball machine gone evil.
I don't think "blockbuster" is the term I'd use for a good chunk of the movies he's been involved in in the last five or six years. And I'm willing to bet the reason War of the Worlds isn't doing worse than it is is because Dakota Fanning is more of an actress at 10 years old than ol' Tom will ever be.
He has as much a right to speak about whatever he believes as much as anybody.
And we have the right to ignore him, or take a pass on his movies...because he's an annoying Scientology douchebag.
Bruce should maybe take his own advice and "shut-up and act", or at least stop being such a bloody hypocrite.
Tom Cruise has the right to speak about whatever he pleases, yet Bruce should shut his pie-hole? Classic slashdot reasoning in action.
Max
Yet another socialist fighting to be able to tell the rest of us what to do and how to live our lives. And if we don't agree with the little twit, or think that perhaps the Constitution is more important than his own pet views on How The World Should Be(TM), we're stupid little slaves who don't understand the evils done to us by our corporate masters.
It's good to know that vastly superior intellects such as your own are looking out for our welfare. Snort.
Max
Ownership doesn't give you the right to make up any rules you like, even on your property.
Perhaps, but I do have the right to tell you to get the fuck off my property if you won't obey my rules. And guess what? If I say "get the fuck off my property", *you have to get the fuck off my property whether you want to leave or not*. You don't get any other choice.
Max
I do have a right to expect private corporations not to be able to set such invasive terms on my doing business.
Sure you do. You can also expect the rest of us to bow down before you and worship you as a superior human being. But it ain't ever going to happen.
There is no limit on expectations. Humans have all sorts of unrealistic and downright loony expectations.
This "you don't have a right... private property...you can't set the terms" bullshit is just a cop-out by apologists for corporate america.
And the argument against private property is a copout for little socialists to throw a tantrum over the fact that they don't get to tell those big, bad property owners what to do and how to conduct their business.
Fact: it's not that people decide to do business with these soulless corps despite the drawbacks as your kind wish us to believe, it's that the public is too stupid to realize what half of these companies are doing
Not only are you a socialist prick, you're an elitist, egomaniacal socialist prick who thinks he's smarter than just about everyone else in America.
Get over yourself, junior. You aren't that bright. And you certainly aren't unique.
am I rite
Nor, it seems, can you spell.
Max
you must not be a big believer in the Bill of Rights?
Yet another example of why people say the educational system in the U.S. has gone to shit.
The Bill of Rights defines citizen interaction with government, not citizen-citizen interaction. Your rights apply to government entities, not private ones - which is why, for example, you have no implied or actual right to privacy at your place of work, nor do you have the right to free speech on company time.
Place of business =! government body.
Just how bloody hard is this for you to grasp?
Max
This is one of the things that bothered me as well (not to mention having to hunt down all the plugins I needed to properly customize it). Every open tab seemed to make the system more and more sluggish, while on Opera open tabs have no effect at all. I've had more than 60 open tabs in Opera while tracking site updates and nary a problem or a slowdown.
That, and the mouse gestures (which I've been using in Opera since they came out) seem to be 'sticky' in FireFox. Not sure how to explain it, or why it occurs, but it happened on all of our home machines (I tried it on all of them to see if there was a machine-specific conflict of some sort). The sticky mouse gestures made me absolutely batshit; it's one of those little annoyances that makes you crazy when you know that they work perfectly well in your regular browser.
Max
This is about open vs closed source, free vs not free.
Perhaps in your virtual world, but not in mine. I use SuSE Linux for everything but gaming, for many reasons which I won't bother stating here. But one of them is because I'm a paranoid son of a bitch and I don't trust MS as far as I can throw them. For me, using a closed source OS is just begging to be butt-reamed by a company that's repeatedly proven itself to be an unscrupulous law-breaker.
But even though I insist on using an open-source OS, I do not insist on using open-source apps. I'll take whatever tool is best for the job, assuming the company producing it doesn't have a reputation for stealing information from the end user. An example of this is Opera, which I prefer over all other browsers. I don't care if FireFox is free, I don't like it and won't be using it just because some college kids and hippies point to it as a banner example for their own personal politics.
For Joe user, the free vs not-free argument falls along the lines of "big - fucking - deal". We want what works best for us, end of story. Fortunately IE is such a piece of crap, and causes so many inconveniences, that Joe User is starting to see FireFox and Opera as 'working better' than IE. But he still doesn't give a rats ass about the whole 'free vs not-free' thing, and never will.
The only way to win Joe User as a 'convert', if you're one of those folks on a religious crusade, is to make FireFox obviously better than IE. Nothing else matters.
Max
The US used to have a government that was for its citizens.
Privacy in the Constitution applies to the relationship between citizen and government, not to the relationship between citizen and citizen. You can ensure privacy (or the punishment of it's violation) via contract, if you're concerned about the issue. Getting the government in on the act, other than to settle a contract dispute in the courts, is a very bad idea.
Max
ownership doesn't give you the right to make up any rules you like.
Funny, that's how it works on my property. I tell my guests they can either follow my rules or leave - and they can leave any time they like. But there is no third option available to them.
In the land of the free I'm free to make the rules that govern my property, and you're free to leave (or not enter the property in the first place) if you don't like the rules. Freedom all around, for everyone concerned.
Max
What if Disney required your home address and social security number to enter their park?
If you object then don't go to the park. It's that simple. You don't have a 'right' to visit the park, nor to set the terms by which you can enter their property. And if enough people think the same way you do the park will be forced to change their practices or go out of business.
But if you're in the minority you'll simply have to suck it up and deal with it. That's part and parcel of the whole concept of 'private property'.
Max
Disneyland is a unique place, and as such there should be restrictions on what rights they can force you to give away to attend their unique attraction.
It's also private property. If they want to require a scan for you to enter their property you do indeed have to "like it or lump it". The decision *isn't up to you* and in a free society it'll *never be up to you*. Your role in this little melodrama is either to put up with it for entry into the park, or refuse your patronage and take the kids someplace else.
Just because there isn't another place quite like Disney World or Disney Land doesn't grant you any special rights, or impose any special restrictions upon the park. *There is no element of coercion here, regardless of what you may think*.
Max
Criticism is a fundamental component of a free market.
In a free market, the best sort of criticism of all is to *not give your money to the company in the first place*.
What's interesting is how many people here have bitched about the policy...and then chosen to suffer through it to go the park anyway. I guess the concept of 'hypocrisy' is a bit too complex for them to comprehend.
Max
I agree with you where Disney World is concerned. It's their property; they can set whatever requirements they like for entry. You, as a citizen of the United States, have the right to choose not to abide by those requirements and to forego entering the park.
As far as Microsoft goes, however, they *are* a monopoly, by the classical economic definition. You don't have to have 100% of the market to qualify as a monopoly, only enough of it to exert monopolistic influence. Which they clearly do.
Max
You know what the great thing is about always having your karma maxed out? You can piss off the moderators who slam you into oblivion because you happen to be on their 'foes' list and they just got some mod points. By reposting this:
"He had his opinion, and then I expressed mine. So what precisely is your problem here?"
Which I originally left at '1' (now modded at 0) at '2'. After they've run out of those points.
Just to drive them crazy.
Max
The network executivies dont care that you watch more telelvision now than you ever did because your watching significantly less of their advertising.
Reading comprehension helps. We watch more TV, NOT more TV on BitTorrent. Does that help? Without the ability to get back episodes on torrent or to catch an episode we missed, we wouldn't be watching these shows - on TV - AT ALL.
If you stop and think it through, we're watching more advertising now than we have in years.
Max
He even says in his blog that this is a terrible implementation of DRM.
And that's exactly where he should've stopped. If he were at all consistent he would've exercised his right to free speech on the matter but never have tried to crack the DRM.
Unfortunately this moron believes that HE gets to be the one who decides whether or not some subset of DRM is 'good', and if it doesn't meet HIS standards then it's okay to crack it. He's essentially said that his own personal beliefs supercede the law and are justification for breaking that law.
This makes him no different than any other 'pirate' out there, just a little slicker at convincing people that what he's doing is actually okay.
Max
He had his opinion, and then I expressed mine. So what precisely is your problem here?
Max
A few hours after it airs here in America. After that you'll be able to get the torrent, just like us Americans did from the Brits.
Max
You could try not watching. Then the show wouldn't bother you so much. Trust me, no one's going to care if you spend your time watching something else.
Max
Kinda like what "Enterprise" was to "Star Trek".
The end of the franchise?
Max
Don't make me pick between galactica and CSI, that would kill me to have to chose only one or the other.
Good geeks know of this mystical device called "the VCR", which can record one show while you watch another. In fact, just about everyone knows about the mighty VCR, and owns one to boot!
But even better geeks know of "BitTorrent", for those times when you forget to set the VCR. Or for catching up on shows that you didn't clue in on until the second or third season. This is how my wife and I got up to speed on West Wing, Alias, and yes - even CSI! Without BitTorrent to provide the seasons we'd missed (not big TV fans) we'd never have watched the shows on regular TV. We hate jumping into shows mid-stream.
Of course, we didn't bother with BitTorrent until BSG aired in Britain. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for us. But once we took the leap...well, there's really no going back. We watch more TV now than we have in decades. If we happen to miss an episode, so what? We can always catch it with a download and be on track again before the next week's episode airs.
No doubt the network goons will soon be kicking in my door for these public admissions. It won't matter that we watch MORE TV now, only that we've used BitTorrent in acts of "piracy"....
Max
This is about mostly young people feeling entitled to the professional work of other people, and simply taking it because they know they probably won't be caught.
Given that around 70% of all Americans "sometimes" indulge in piracy, I'd say your conclusion about the problem being restricted to "mostly young people" is dead wrong.
Economics 101: the greater the popularity of the black market, the more likely it is that the price of the item or service in question is seen as being too high. In a normal capitalistic market environment competitors would appear, pricing would drop, and the black market would return to the fringes; in a non-capitalistic market controlled in part through government action the consumers choices are limited to either a) paying what they perceive to be far too much for that product or service, b) not purchasing the product or service at all, or c) paying a 'fairer' price using the black market.
There will always be little college shits screaming "information wants to be free!" when in fact what they mean is "everything I want should be free!". But this activity is hardly limited to these little punks. If it were I'd happily tell you to round the fuckers up, put them against a wall, and shoot them before they can breed. As is, what the popular media calles piracy has become commonplace, and what that tells anyone with a decent grounding in economics is that something is SERIOUSLY wrong with the current market structure.
The perception of what appears to be a majority of infringers is that certain goods and services are overpriced, and they're overpriced because of coercive practices by businesses that strictly control those goods or services. Whether or not you agree with that perception is irrelevent; you do NOT get a huge demographic like the one above willfully engaging in black-market activities otherwise. It just doesn't happen, regardless of what the "all human beings are essentially evil shits" crowd spouts.
You're generalizing the attitudes of a tiny minority (stupid college fucks who don't respect anyone but themselves) to the population as a whole, and that couldn't be more wrong. Although I'm sure the RIAA/MPAA would be overjoyed to hear that you've done just that.
Max
People in a year or so literally won't have a choice; if you want a new computer you'll be buying Longhorn.
That would explain why a nice big chunk of the users out there (businesses included) are still using Win95 and Win98. And why WinXP seems to have failed to capture a majority of the market share.
These people aren't upgrading due to a lack of funds to purchase new computers. They're buying the new computers but removing XP and replacing it with Win98 because XP won't run some favorite (or necessary) piece of software properly. Joe User hates the upgrade cycle even more than businesses do.
Max