There is http://www.linux-laptop.net/ as one source if info, but I'm curious too.
Everyone knows that Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers colaborate on BIOS hooks and drivers, does anyone know if any laptop makers have made an effort to be so friendly to the Linux kernel and utilities?
I saw a wonderful laptop here in Tokyo a couple months ago, DVD, CD-RW, 1280x1024x32, 1Ghz Athalon, 20GB... but I realized that it's totally designed around Windows, and I'm not going to spend that kind of money on something I cannot utilize in its entirety.
Because the passengers and crew were disarmed, and instructed to "just go along" with the hyjackers by central planners who all assumed that all hyjackers want something in return for NOT killing the passengers (look at the FAA regulations), the hyjackers were successful even when outnumbered 5 to 1 at worst.
The continued projection of so-called "American" military force was the repeatedly stated reason for the first attack on the WTC, which failed, and the second attack, which succeeded.
The resultant call for yet more control of peoples lives, and restrictions on their liberty, are merely a sad reminder that those who seek control of others will always seek control, at every opportunity. Especially if they caused it. Reichstaag Fire? Kristalnacht? Those are words every American should know and understand.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, write a sonnet, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, solve equations, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. -- Robert Heinlein
A bitter disagreement in one area, complete agreement in another.
By Cromm, I do love multidiciplinary discussion forums.
I've worked in a few different shops, doing lots of things. I'm not a programmer by "trade", I'm a network engineer. To get here I've done CompOps, NetOps, Helpdesk, security system installation, pumped gas, sold crap at Target and RadioShack, etc.
I have found that leadership, rather than management, works best. This allows people not to be restricted in their actions by job titles as such, there is more cross-training and sharing of ideas, and far more working together than saying things like "That's not in my job description" or "Hey, you can't do that, that's mine."
There is one absolutely critical function: Leadership. The buck has to stop somewhere.
By that I mean that unpleasent or uninteresting jobs must be assigned from time to time to specific individuals. There must be accountability for tasks done badly or not done at all.
I'm not in the Japanese style "Your work reflects on all the members of your team" credit/blame sharing. Not officially. I have seen, however, that when something says "These people, the Operations Staff, have gone beyond our needs and done wonderfully" etc etc, there certainly is a good feeling to being part of that team.
Treat people as valuable individuals, respect their talents and skills, and listen to them as individuals. Fire them as individuals if they are not performing, also. I hate open door policies. If I go to talk to the boss, there are times I want that door SHUT and no record kept. Honesty should never be punished.
Also challange the team. There should always be a view or goal that everyone is working towards at once, as well as the individual tasks. This makes getting there a personal as well as team success.
Liability is an individual thing. Liability is based on making statements that are not true, or the deliberate cause of harm.
The supposed $2B in "damages" are a liability on those who wrote and launched the worms, directly.
By connecting to the net, just like stepping outside your door, you are assuming risk.
That said, Microsoft should be liable if they represent their product as "safe" and it isn't. I believe their representation of XP as the "Most Secure Windows Ever" does open the company to prosecution for misleading advertizing, but who has the resources to prosecute it?
There is a great deal of difficulty with trying to assign liability to those who are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Someone who gets wet because they weren't wearing a long coat when a truck splashed them doesn't expect to sue the truck driver, do they?
The systems owners who were "damaged" by the worms are indeed guilty of not securing their systems. Who will prosecute them? And for what?
Liability is based on two things: Intent and negligence. False advertizing and misrepresentation are the former, the success of virii is the latter.
Personally, I think a few false-advertizing claims against Microsoft would be great, and from a theoretical standpoint they certainly are misrepresenting their products when they call them "secure" or "safe". Who's got a million or two for the legal fees when we lose?
First you say "most roads" without supporting it, were toll roads. They you say that roads are "public goods." Which is it?
By your logic, a private road is a public good. I agree. However, then you mention street lights, which I would gladly see ripped out. My tax money is being used to polute the night sky with so much light people cannot see the stars any more. Such abuse is criminal, but since it's the government doing it they cannot be punished.
The next step in your reasoning is to realize that you're absolutely correct about everything, and it's time for you to do something about it.
That means, you build the fscknig system and become a multi-billionare from its success.
To force people at gun point to support you is a pathetic excuse for not wanting to do the work yourself. You're taking the easy way out like every blood-sucking bureaucratic vampire in history.
Produce something good, and people will support it without your using force. Have the courage of your convictions and put yourself on the line, rather than using force and coersion to do it.
People might respect you. And you might fail. But this way, they won't hate you.
I said it's bad if the school tries to censor the private activity of the students.
How does that lead you to conclude that I support private censorship?
I will take my business elsewhere, that's all. Without coersion, that is a choice I'm allowed to make. I, personally, abhore censorship and will gladly pay more to avoid it, until the ISP's realize it's bad business.
Supply meets demand, always. Supply only depends on what you're willing to pay for.
If you want OC-192 to your home, you can get it. Anywhere. The "price" includes the time it will take to run the fiber to your home, and ship in the optical hardware.
Or did you really mean that the demand for *cheap* things always exceeds supply? Then you're comparing three variables, not two.
Price is the point at which demand and supply meet. That's all. You pay less for something because you do the work yourself? Your labor is part of the price you pay. For you, your labor is worth less than the money you saved.
That is why supply always meets demand, because there is always a crossing point. Everything has its price. That is why there is no shortage of drugs in the US, regardless of legality.
If you want to say that I cannot buy antimatter at any price, that is merely a technological issue where the "price" includes development costs.
If you want to talk politics, there is never enough supply of "free" services to meet demand. Thus the cost to supply welfare is always more than the costs of comparable private efforts.
The same site, http://www.mises.org/ also has seminal works by such luminaries as Fredric Hayak and Murry Rothbard, for anyone curious about the actual workings of "free markets" and the market forces which make Microsoft's efforts to promote their products no surprise at all.
Even, expected.
Bob-
Same thing in Tokyo. Wouldn't last 10 minutes.
on
ULTra Robo-Taxi
·
· Score: 2
Every once in a while I see piles of boxes of products, early in the morning, waiting outside on the sidewalk for the shop workers to open the shop and bring the new inventory in.
My imediate reaction is, This Is Not New York!
Oh, and the taxis here are clean, smell good, and run on propane.
But just like New York, they don't speak much English.
Bob-
As long as it's privately built, who cares?
on
ULTra Robo-Taxi
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Go ahead and build it, but build it privately. That way, if it fails to provide the service people want, it will simply go away.
The article says it costs "only half as much as Light Rail", but so what? One Light Rail sytem of my acquaintence, San Jose CA, costs 8 times more to operate than it brings in through ticket sales.
The taxpayers are stuck with this bloated wart-hog of a white elephant, a political monstrosity that cannot be allowed to go away.
So maybe this ULTra really is the next GreatThing(tm, us pat off). If so it will pay for itself, and investors will be happy to build it in order to profit from it.
At least that way no one is forced to pay for something they don't want.
The question is what you want. Examine what a "Hosting Service" provides:
Is your DSL service static IP, Always?
Can you afford the downtime of a residential-grade circuit?
Can you afford the downtime of power failures, or the cost of a UPS?
Maintain your own hardware?
Maintain your own backup hardware and schedule?
Don't get me wrong, I've hosted a web site from a home over 56K frame relay and later ADSL for years, without a problem.
I prefer to host it myself because it gives me the control over my system that I prefer. I also make no money from the site, so there is no real risk to me if it goes down for a while for whatever reason.
Five-Nines guranteed reliability is not cheap. If that is important to you, keep the hosting service. However, unless you earn your living with that web site, I cannot imagine it is worth the cost.
Since WinNT is closed source, the only place to get service and support is from Microsoft.
Since Microsoft will not be supporting NT4 past 2003, they are wisely getting their house in order before they run out of time.
Everything has to change anyway, so they are entertaining the idea of building something better. Unfortunately, the argument that they don't have to replace the hardware at all wasn't good enough.
So rather than spend the money on consultants to use existing hardware, and free software, to rebuild their network, they are going to spend the money on consultants, new hardware and new software to retain the same functionality they have now.
And in a few years, when Microsoft stops supporting XP, they're right back where they are now.
"Guess what: I was forced to buy their product with any fscking available option, safe(sic) for assembling it myself."
You demonstrate the point exactly. You could have assembled the machine yourself, but the cost of Win98, to you, was not worth the effort. You made a deliberate decision, based on your personal relative value, to do something you feel you were "forced" to do.
And the consequences if you had chosen to assemble the machine yourself? Some time, some effort, no blood. No prison. Some would do so just to have a machine built to their perfect specifications. Another choice, another value judgement.
This is the free market in action.
And as far as the courts go, fsck-em. Entrenched bureaucrats who only watch out for their own asses. When Microsoft started buying politicians, they settled really fast, didn't they?
You're absolutely right, most people will go along with the herd rather than stick to a moral point. I couldn't agree more.
I also agree that Microsofts negotiating placed them in a very profitable position, for a short time.
But something you'll learn, as you grow older Gnovos, is that the market is a cold and heartless bitch. Nothing Microsoft could do prevented their main product from being made obsolete. Nothing they could do was able to force anyone to buy their product, if the individual chose not to do so.
I use Win2K at work, and happily used Win95 for 6 years before moving entirely to Linux. Does that surprise you? How does my employers (bad, but so what?) decision to use Microsofts products make my decision not to use Microsoft products any less a successful moral one?
Yes, some companies and people, in fact a vast majority, chose or accepted Microsoft as their default. It doesn't change the fact that none of them were forced to use it.
It's the schools server, it's their email address, if they want to filter go right ahead.
Just like complaining about censorship in China, look at the property ownership. Since all "utilities" in China are owned by the government, they get to filter all they want.
The abuse is if you are not allowed to choose an alternative. If the school attempted to censor what the kids do/see when not on the schools dime, for instance.
...or the fact that private ISP service is "illegal" in China.
Yep. Government grants limited liability powers to a "corporation", allowing the so-called "officers" of that company to do things that "normal" people could and would be prosecuted for by that same government.
The "corporations" pay off the government with some special taxes, and the politicians with campaign fund contributions. "Reform" has no effect.
Since the "corporations" are the experts in their fields, officially, new regulations are written by and for those same "corporations". Any abuses are covered by "Hey, we're following the law", and "Lets pass a new law!"
Oversight committees, when the abuses are just too massive to sweep under the rug any more (citizens noticed!), are made up of more experts, often the same ones who drafted the abused laws in the first place. See: Interstate Railroad Commission for a case in point.
Recall your lessons in Mercantilism. Want real reform? Abolish limited liability corporations, repeal government regulations, and let ideas stand or fall on their own merit. A "monopoly" cannot move fast enough to keep up with real competition and remain abusive. Abuse destroys good will. See: Microsoft.
That's why the Big American automakers are not building electric cars people want, the laws they wrote to mandate them have not come into effect yet. When they do, the upstart electric vehical companies will be regulated out of business, and the Big auto companies will buy up the remaining good ideas.
The statement "they were forced to buy Windows in order to stay afloat" is no better than saying that Enron did no wrong, because they were "forced to cook the books in order to stay afloat."
Those businesses made the choice to "stay afloat" by OEMing Windows on Microsofts terms, just as I make the choice to pay taxes to stay out of jail and for no other reason.
Microsoft has no jail, no guns, no ability to use actual force, other than market leverage. If market leverage is so awful to you that you equate it with force, I would suggest some lessons in economics.
The "fact" is that by being so greedy, Microsoft signed their own death warrant. Microsoft has lost the "good will" factor, people use it only because of inertia. Now that better products are being produced, Microsoft is being abandoned. The turning point was the Microsoft Win95 rebate drive. Now that the sole source contracts are expiring, they're not being renewed. The market at work. Check out WalMart.
By the time the lawsuits came along, it was already too late. So go ahead and beat the dead horse, have your jolly anti-trust suit. Crow how you're fighting the good fight while such efforts do nothing but reenforce Microsofts own failing position and give it lots of free publicity, and the lawyers and politicians cash in.
Or better yet, just don't use their products. No one is forcing you.
How many times must we all "speak up" about the issue?
The first couple dozen articles on the Microsoft settlement got lots of statements of support/disagreement.
Just re-read those, they're still valid.
Personally, I think Microsoft should not have been prosecuted for negotiating contracts in their favor. Who cares? As long as no one is forced to buy their product.
And no one was forced. Ever. Just because the lowest price machines came with Win pre-installed did not mean you had to buy it. White-box machines have always been available. And Linux was around for years prior to Win95.
"Public Trust"! Gee, here we go again, another disaster created by government.
Yes, indeed, by granting this "public trust" monopoly on the deployment of copper, there are vast areas with one (1) established phone company who owns all the infrastructure.
And what to do when the mistake is noticed? Retract the protections on the monopoly? De-regulate? Allow the people who own the copper to use it as they wish? Oh no, cannot do that. That would be "anti-competitive". As if the original monopoly grant wasn't.
So go crying Chicken Little for Government to "fix" the problem they caused in the first place. Prolong the crisis until the whole house of cards comes tumbling down, instead of letting it fail as quickly and painlessly as possible.
Here I thought Enron might wake people up to the abuses that government grants produce.
Slashdot Mirror
There is http://www.linux-laptop.net/ as one source if info, but I'm curious too.
Everyone knows that Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers colaborate on BIOS hooks and drivers, does anyone know if any laptop makers have made an effort to be so friendly to the Linux kernel and utilities?
I saw a wonderful laptop here in Tokyo a couple months ago, DVD, CD-RW, 1280x1024x32, 1Ghz Athalon, 20GB... but I realized that it's totally designed around Windows, and I'm not going to spend that kind of money on something I cannot utilize in its entirety.
Bob-
Because the passengers and crew were disarmed, and instructed to "just go along" with the hyjackers by central planners who all assumed that all hyjackers want something in return for NOT killing the passengers (look at the FAA regulations), the hyjackers were successful even when outnumbered 5 to 1 at worst.
The continued projection of so-called "American" military force was the repeatedly stated reason for the first attack on the WTC, which failed, and the second attack, which succeeded.
The resultant call for yet more control of peoples lives, and restrictions on their liberty, are merely a sad reminder that those who seek control of others will always seek control, at every opportunity. Especially if they caused it. Reichstaag Fire? Kristalnacht? Those are words every American should know and understand.
Bob-
A human being should be able to change a diaper,
plan an invasion,
butcher a hog,
design a building,
write a sonnet,
set a bone,
comfort the dying,
take orders,
give orders,
solve equations,
pitch manure,
program a computer,
cook a tasty meal,
fight efficiently,
die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects.
-- Robert Heinlein
A bitter disagreement in one area, complete agreement in another.
By Cromm, I do love multidiciplinary discussion forums.
Bob-
I've worked in a few different shops, doing lots of things. I'm not a programmer by "trade", I'm a network engineer. To get here I've done CompOps, NetOps, Helpdesk, security system installation, pumped gas, sold crap at Target and RadioShack, etc.
I have found that leadership, rather than management, works best. This allows people not to be restricted in their actions by job titles as such, there is more cross-training and sharing of ideas, and far more working together than saying things like "That's not in my job description" or "Hey, you can't do that, that's mine."
There is one absolutely critical function: Leadership. The buck has to stop somewhere.
By that I mean that unpleasent or uninteresting jobs must be assigned from time to time to specific individuals. There must be accountability for tasks done badly or not done at all.
I'm not in the Japanese style "Your work reflects on all the members of your team" credit/blame sharing. Not officially. I have seen, however, that when something says "These people, the Operations Staff, have gone beyond our needs and done wonderfully" etc etc, there certainly is a good feeling to being part of that team.
Treat people as valuable individuals, respect their talents and skills, and listen to them as individuals. Fire them as individuals if they are not performing, also. I hate open door policies. If I go to talk to the boss, there are times I want that door SHUT and no record kept. Honesty should never be punished.
Also challange the team. There should always be a view or goal that everyone is working towards at once, as well as the individual tasks. This makes getting there a personal as well as team success.
Bob-
Liability is an individual thing. Liability is based on making statements that are not true, or the deliberate cause of harm.
The supposed $2B in "damages" are a liability on those who wrote and launched the worms, directly.
By connecting to the net, just like stepping outside your door, you are assuming risk.
That said, Microsoft should be liable if they represent their product as "safe" and it isn't. I believe their representation of XP as the "Most Secure Windows Ever" does open the company to prosecution for misleading advertizing, but who has the resources to prosecute it?
There is a great deal of difficulty with trying to assign liability to those who are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Someone who gets wet because they weren't wearing a long coat when a truck splashed them doesn't expect to sue the truck driver, do they?
The systems owners who were "damaged" by the worms are indeed guilty of not securing their systems. Who will prosecute them? And for what?
Liability is based on two things: Intent and negligence. False advertizing and misrepresentation are the former, the success of virii is the latter.
Personally, I think a few false-advertizing claims against Microsoft would be great, and from a theoretical standpoint they certainly are misrepresenting their products when they call them "secure" or "safe". Who's got a million or two for the legal fees when we lose?
Bob-
The foisting of one version of right and wrong on children is one of the best reasons for a complete separation of school and state.
Bob-
First you say "most roads" without supporting it, were toll roads. They you say that roads are "public goods." Which is it?
By your logic, a private road is a public good. I agree. However, then you mention street lights, which I would gladly see ripped out. My tax money is being used to polute the night sky with so much light people cannot see the stars any more. Such abuse is criminal, but since it's the government doing it they cannot be punished.
And you might like this site:
http://www.mises.org/
Bob-
The next step in your reasoning is to realize that you're absolutely correct about everything, and it's time for you to do something about it.
That means, you build the fscknig system and become a multi-billionare from its success.
To force people at gun point to support you is a pathetic excuse for not wanting to do the work yourself. You're taking the easy way out like every blood-sucking bureaucratic vampire in history.
Produce something good, and people will support it without your using force. Have the courage of your convictions and put yourself on the line, rather than using force and coersion to do it.
People might respect you. And you might fail. But this way, they won't hate you.
Bob-
You and the "Global warming" set always make dire predictions, but you never back it up.
So prosecute poluters. Invest in a for-profit parking garage. Design and sell telecommuting consultant services.
Chicken Little blind assertions may win elections, but they're useless in an argument.
Bob-
"there would be NO light rail. There would also be no buses, BART, or AMTRACK either.."
And this is bad.....how? I notice that you don't include taxi's in your list.
Before you knee-jerk, think about it: if you had all that tax money that is otherwise removed from your paycheck, what would you do with it?
Might you invest in a local transport project? Might you use it to facilitate your working from home, so you don't have to commute?
Just some considerations to think about before declaring that demand for taxpayer funded transportation would not otherwise be met.
Bob-
Good Subtle, I wish more people would open their minds as you have and reconsider these "one size fits all" tax funded horrors.
At least back before government took over building roads, the only people who paid for them were the ones that used them.
At least it's still legal to home school, even though they won't give you back the taxes they already extracted for that schooling.
Bob-
I said it's bad if the school tries to censor the private activity of the students.
How does that lead you to conclude that I support private censorship?
I will take my business elsewhere, that's all. Without coersion, that is a choice I'm allowed to make. I, personally, abhore censorship and will gladly pay more to avoid it, until the ISP's realize it's bad business.
Will you?
Bob-
Supply meets demand, always. Supply only depends on what you're willing to pay for.
If you want OC-192 to your home, you can get it. Anywhere. The "price" includes the time it will take to run the fiber to your home, and ship in the optical hardware.
Or did you really mean that the demand for *cheap* things always exceeds supply? Then you're comparing three variables, not two.
Price is the point at which demand and supply meet. That's all. You pay less for something because you do the work yourself? Your labor is part of the price you pay. For you, your labor is worth less than the money you saved.
That is why supply always meets demand, because there is always a crossing point. Everything has its price. That is why there is no shortage of drugs in the US, regardless of legality.
If you want to say that I cannot buy antimatter at any price, that is merely a technological issue where the "price" includes development costs.
If you want to talk politics, there is never enough supply of "free" services to meet demand. Thus the cost to supply welfare is always more than the costs of comparable private efforts.
I suggest Ludiwg von Mises' book "Human Action", available online, for a discussion of supply and demand.
The same site, http://www.mises.org/ also has seminal works by such luminaries as Fredric Hayak and Murry Rothbard, for anyone curious about the actual workings of "free markets" and the market forces which make Microsoft's efforts to promote their products no surprise at all.
Even, expected.
Bob-
Every once in a while I see piles of boxes of products, early in the morning, waiting outside on the sidewalk for the shop workers to open the shop and bring the new inventory in.
My imediate reaction is, This Is Not New York!
Oh, and the taxis here are clean, smell good, and run on propane.
But just like New York, they don't speak much English.
Bob-
Go ahead and build it, but build it privately. That way, if it fails to provide the service people want, it will simply go away.
The article says it costs "only half as much as Light Rail", but so what? One Light Rail sytem of my acquaintence, San Jose CA, costs 8 times more to operate than it brings in through ticket sales.
The taxpayers are stuck with this bloated wart-hog of a white elephant, a political monstrosity that cannot be allowed to go away.
So maybe this ULTra really is the next GreatThing(tm, us pat off). If so it will pay for itself, and investors will be happy to build it in order to profit from it.
At least that way no one is forced to pay for something they don't want.
Bob-
I recompiled PGP back in 1994, after looking through the source code and finding a variable called (I kid you not) "MAX_KEY_LENGTH=1024".
I changed it to 8080 or some such strange number, and it ran just fine.
On a 386-33 it was *slow* to generate the keys, and of course no one was compatable, but it was trivially easy to do.
I wonder why the keysize limits on GPG still demand only 2048 or smaller. Why bother?
Bob-
The question is what you want. Examine what a "Hosting Service" provides:
Is your DSL service static IP, Always?
Can you afford the downtime of a residential-grade circuit?
Can you afford the downtime of power failures, or the cost of a UPS?
Maintain your own hardware?
Maintain your own backup hardware and schedule?
Don't get me wrong, I've hosted a web site from a home over 56K frame relay and later ADSL for years, without a problem.
I prefer to host it myself because it gives me the control over my system that I prefer. I also make no money from the site, so there is no real risk to me if it goes down for a while for whatever reason.
Five-Nines guranteed reliability is not cheap. If that is important to you, keep the hosting service. However, unless you earn your living with that web site, I cannot imagine it is worth the cost.
Bob-
Since WinNT is closed source, the only place to get service and support is from Microsoft.
Since Microsoft will not be supporting NT4 past 2003, they are wisely getting their house in order before they run out of time.
Everything has to change anyway, so they are entertaining the idea of building something better. Unfortunately, the argument that they don't have to replace the hardware at all wasn't good enough.
So rather than spend the money on consultants to use existing hardware, and free software, to rebuild their network, they are going to spend the money on consultants, new hardware and new software to retain the same functionality they have now.
And in a few years, when Microsoft stops supporting XP, they're right back where they are now.
That's why it's called an "Upgrade Cycle".
Bob-
"Guess what: I was forced to buy their product with any fscking available option, safe(sic) for assembling it myself."
You demonstrate the point exactly. You could have assembled the machine yourself, but the cost of Win98, to you, was not worth the effort. You made a deliberate decision, based on your personal relative value, to do something you feel you were "forced" to do.
And the consequences if you had chosen to assemble the machine yourself? Some time, some effort, no blood. No prison. Some would do so just to have a machine built to their perfect specifications. Another choice, another value judgement.
This is the free market in action.
And as far as the courts go, fsck-em. Entrenched bureaucrats who only watch out for their own asses. When Microsoft started buying politicians, they settled really fast, didn't they?
Bob-
You're absolutely right, most people will go along with the herd rather than stick to a moral point. I couldn't agree more.
I also agree that Microsofts negotiating placed them in a very profitable position, for a short time.
But something you'll learn, as you grow older Gnovos, is that the market is a cold and heartless bitch. Nothing Microsoft could do prevented their main product from being made obsolete. Nothing they could do was able to force anyone to buy their product, if the individual chose not to do so.
I use Win2K at work, and happily used Win95 for 6 years before moving entirely to Linux. Does that surprise you? How does my employers (bad, but so what?) decision to use Microsofts products make my decision not to use Microsoft products any less a successful moral one?
Yes, some companies and people, in fact a vast majority, chose or accepted Microsoft as their default. It doesn't change the fact that none of them were forced to use it.
Bob-
It's the schools server, it's their email address, if they want to filter go right ahead.
Just like complaining about censorship in China, look at the property ownership. Since all "utilities" in China are owned by the government, they get to filter all they want.
The abuse is if you are not allowed to choose an alternative. If the school attempted to censor what the kids do/see when not on the schools dime, for instance.
...or the fact that private ISP service is "illegal" in China.
Bob-
Yep. Government grants limited liability powers to a "corporation", allowing the so-called "officers" of that company to do things that "normal" people could and would be prosecuted for by that same government.
The "corporations" pay off the government with some special taxes, and the politicians with campaign fund contributions. "Reform" has no effect.
Since the "corporations" are the experts in their fields, officially, new regulations are written by and for those same "corporations". Any abuses are covered by "Hey, we're following the law", and "Lets pass a new law!"
Oversight committees, when the abuses are just too massive to sweep under the rug any more (citizens noticed!), are made up of more experts, often the same ones who drafted the abused laws in the first place. See: Interstate Railroad Commission for a case in point.
Recall your lessons in Mercantilism. Want real reform? Abolish limited liability corporations, repeal government regulations, and let ideas stand or fall on their own merit. A "monopoly" cannot move fast enough to keep up with real competition and remain abusive. Abuse destroys good will. See: Microsoft.
That's why the Big American automakers are not building electric cars people want, the laws they wrote to mandate them have not come into effect yet. When they do, the upstart electric vehical companies will be regulated out of business, and the Big auto companies will buy up the remaining good ideas.
Bob-
The statement "they were forced to buy Windows in order to stay afloat" is no better than saying that Enron did no wrong, because they were "forced to cook the books in order to stay afloat."
Those businesses made the choice to "stay afloat" by OEMing Windows on Microsofts terms, just as I make the choice to pay taxes to stay out of jail and for no other reason.
Microsoft has no jail, no guns, no ability to use actual force, other than market leverage. If market leverage is so awful to you that you equate it with force, I would suggest some lessons in economics.
The "fact" is that by being so greedy, Microsoft signed their own death warrant. Microsoft has lost the "good will" factor, people use it only because of inertia. Now that better products are being produced, Microsoft is being abandoned. The turning point was the Microsoft Win95 rebate drive. Now that the sole source contracts are expiring, they're not being renewed. The market at work. Check out WalMart.
By the time the lawsuits came along, it was already too late. So go ahead and beat the dead horse, have your jolly anti-trust suit. Crow how you're fighting the good fight while such efforts do nothing but reenforce Microsofts own failing position and give it lots of free publicity, and the lawyers and politicians cash in.
Or better yet, just don't use their products. No one is forcing you.
Bob-
How many times must we all "speak up" about the issue?
The first couple dozen articles on the Microsoft settlement got lots of statements of support/disagreement.
Just re-read those, they're still valid.
Personally, I think Microsoft should not have been prosecuted for negotiating contracts in their favor. Who cares? As long as no one is forced to buy their product.
And no one was forced. Ever. Just because the lowest price machines came with Win pre-installed did not mean you had to buy it. White-box machines have always been available. And Linux was around for years prior to Win95.
Bob-
"Public Trust"! Gee, here we go again, another disaster created by government.
Yes, indeed, by granting this "public trust" monopoly on the deployment of copper, there are vast areas with one (1) established phone company who owns all the infrastructure.
And what to do when the mistake is noticed? Retract the protections on the monopoly? De-regulate? Allow the people who own the copper to use it as they wish? Oh no, cannot do that. That would be "anti-competitive". As if the original monopoly grant wasn't.
So go crying Chicken Little for Government to "fix" the problem they caused in the first place. Prolong the crisis until the whole house of cards comes tumbling down, instead of letting it fail as quickly and painlessly as possible.
Here I thought Enron might wake people up to the abuses that government grants produce.
Bob-