If some people don't wanna walk through the machine, that's fine - they can take their strip-search the old-fashioned way.
Why should they have to be strip-searched at all? Does merely wanting to travel from A to B now require me to consent to a gross invasion of my privacy? Unless there are genuine grounds to suspect someone is doing something sufficiently dangerous that such a procedure is reasonably justified, why does anyone working in an airport have any authority to do it to anyone else at all, ever?
I personally happen to agree with your priorities. I just wanted to make the point that while something the authorities want to do might not bother you personally very much, the fact that it bothers a significant number of other people should be reason enough for us all to oppose it until/unless someone can make a stronger case for why we shouldn't.
You must have things pretty good in the US (I assume you're talking US dollars). Here in the UK, you'd be lucky to get a decent system for twice the prices you're quoting there. I know the dollar is worth about twopence halfpenny these days, but still...
With PC games there's nearly infinite hardware combinations which means that inevitably no matter how much QA you do, there will be bugs at release and so I think there's more of a tendency to assume that there will be bugs and that it's okay.
Yes and no. A lot of the bugs with PC games aren't really anything to do with "poor driver support" or whatever other excuse is shoved out the gaming company PR channels. Take a look at the working conditions and management attitude at some of the big name game companies (ea_spouse comes to mind), remember that developing games software is not special and works just like pretty much any other software project in almost any other field, and you'll soon see why bug-ridden **** gets sent to market in time for whatever big trade show or holiday season is coming up because management push it. As long as people are willing to buy bug-ridden ****, this is inevitable, but for the most part that's the only reason it is.
I believe you have the gaming companies' priorities confused. They really don't give a **** what platform Microsoft is pushing. They only care where the money-paying market is, and as far as PCs go that is — overwhelmingly — Windows XP.
The only major gamer advantage in Vista is DirectX 10. However, DX10 is dubious in terms of exclusivity: see the Halo II comments about the reality of "Vista only" games. DX10 is dubious in terms of technical advantages: I run Crysis just fine on my new super-rig, which deliberately has XP rather than Vista installed and is therefore limited to DX9, and frankly I'm not sure I prefer the DX 10 "improved" version anyway judging from the numerous screenshots in reviews. And finally, DX10 is dubious in terms of hardware, because even many serious gamers don't have fully DX10-capable cards and decent drivers to match yet, and the occasional gaming masses won't have for some years.
I predict, quite confidently, that Vista will never be the major games platform that XP has become, simply because it is in direct competition with its predecessor and will be for years, and worse, it is in competition with consoles for a lot of the custom, and consoles already have by far the largest share of the gaming market. Given that, I expect consoles to overcome their limitations with input devices for some gaming genres a lot faster than Vista will overcome everything from bad PR via relatively tiny market share among gamers to the numerous technical problems it seems to have, and in the meantime XP is dominant outside of console world anyway.
Well, if there's no problem with health risks, privacy risks and/or cost of using these devices routinely, it won't be a problem to stick one in the chamber where the security officers are, along with a normal camera if they get one too, and show everyone passing through the scanner the video feed, will it?
That you can avoid all the insane inconveniences of airports and aeroplanes by travelling on a train.
Unless you're going on a train that stops at an airport, such as the Paddington to Heathrow service, where similar digital strip-search scanners were already trialled two years ago.
If it doesn't bother you that someone sees you that way, that's OK, it's your choice. Then again, sad as I personally think it is, it obviously doesn't bother a significant number of people if they're tagged and monitored in everything they do, as long as they get 2% off at the till and to share photos with their friends on Facebook.
I believe the important thing is that these are personal choices. Why does it matter if they have machines that effectively strip search anyone walking through them? Because some people walking through them won't like it, and that's reason enough to prohibit the use of such machines by default.
If losing your job is going to cost you that much, you really need to be taking steps already, starting with finding a wife who wants more than your wealth and making more realistic credit arrangements. A whole load of people are going to lose their jobs through no fault of their own over the next few years as the economic downturn bites, and unless you're in a very few essential industries or hold a very privileged position, you could be unlucky just like the rest of us.
Of course, it could be that not travelling to certain places in this way wouldn't really cost you your job, your house, your car and your wife, and that you're just exaggerating to try and gain sympathy for your point. In any case, most people do not have to travel for their jobs, so even if you genuinely do, your argument does not mean the millions who don't should give in. As others have said, it doesn't even take that much for airlines and such to get the message and stop co-operating with police state schemes like this. If those who care enough got themselves organised and even 5–10% of customers refused to take a leisure flight to a foreign destination this year, perhaps going by ship or train instead or holidaying in their own country, it would make a substantial dent in several major airlines' bottom lines. If even 10% of those 5–10% bothered to write to the airlines saying that they would have liked to go but refused to submit to offensive security measures, the point would be made more than clearly enough.
The problem is just that right now, we're still in the bending over phase of society's development. The real impact of measures like this is, for the most part, confined to a relatively small number of people who have been seriously damaged. But a few thousand more "terrorist suspects" with Islamic-sounding names getting arrested here, a few thousand more people getting hassled by overpowered policemen there, a few thousand more wondering why they have to give up their soda to get on a plane when they can buy another much more expensive bottle of the same soda right past the security checkpoint over there... In five years time, this will have become a big election issue in most of these countries, people in general will be more aware of the dangers and the scope for abuse as they or those they care about have been personally affected, and I rather suspect that several governments will have fallen as a consequence.
Well, I'm afraid I disagree with you about the complete lack of damage of any on-line activity. Have you never heard the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword"? Have you never seen the results of identity theft? Heard of a career being ruined by defamation? Thought about how many hours of people's lives are lost to spammers and the like every day? The fact that you personally may have been lucky enough to avoid any damage does not mean everyone else is so lucky, particularly when by your own admission you avoid services many people use all the time.
In any case, as I acknowledged previously, there is always a question of who watches the watchers in any legal system. There must be checks and safeguards on any authority delegated to governments. No-one should be able to look up this information arbitrarily without demonstrating that there is a genuine need for it to uphold the law, and no information so obtained should be kept once it has served that purpose. But neither unauthorised interception nor over-greedy databases are a problem unique to the Internet, and they must be fought through proper constitutional safeguards, independent oversight, and harsh penalties for abuse wherever they occur.
Regarding your point about anonymous communications channels, I would draw to your attention another post I made regarding the difference between anonymity and privacy/confidentiality. If you are transmitting confidential information privately, I don't see why your identity need be public; it need only be known to the other party. This is sufficient to safeguard, for example, whistle-blowing to a legitimate source in the media, or private debate about government policies and people's reactions to them. However, it is not sufficient to safeguard attacks on banking web sites, public defamation, or someone caught supplying state secrets to an intelligence officer. Personally, I have no ethical problem with any of that.
The ballot box is an unfortunate example, because it leads to confusing anonymity with confidentiality.
I have no problem with someone knowing that I have voted, and indeed a record of this fact is kept to ensure that I can't vote twice. I am thus not an anonymous voter, and I hope we'd agree that allowing arbitrary anonymous votes is not likely to meet with democratic success.
Who I voted for is a different question. That is private/confidential information. Since the information is not publicly available, I don't believe it is necessary for me to put my name to that information.
As it happens, there is also no crime that can be committed by voting in a certain way as long as I am casting my vote(s) according to the rules of the election, and no-one else's rights can be infringed by my doing so. Thus there would be no legitimate need to break confidentiality anyway. I think this is a separate issue to the anonymity question, though.
I don't believe in freedom of speech as an absolute. It too often conflicts with other fundamental rights and freedoms, and sometimes I consider the others to be more important.
We are already working on a second "Internet" its called "Freenet" and it aims to eliminate many of the current problems with the Internet such as censorship and accountability.
Why is accountability for your own actions ever a problem?
Anonymity can be used for good, typically for the protection of people who would otherwise be unwilling to take action in the interests of justice. Most of the time there are other ways to protect people where this is true, and in cases where anonymity really is justified because of dangers to the person concerned, it seems unlikely that they'll be plastering their views all over the Internet.
Anonymity can also be used as a shield to hide behind if you break the law. The Internet is not a licence to break normal laws by committing acts like fraud, harassment and defamation with impunity. However, the Internet combined with anonymity is as good as such a licence, because if you can't identify the person doing the damage, you can't bring them to justice.
There will always be questions of "who watches the watchers" in any legal system, and the Internet raises complex ethical questions about dealing with the differences in laws and authorities between different countries. These are legitimate concerns, and society will have to find a way to deal with them. However, I would wager that most use of anonymity on the Internet is of the CYA kind, and I would argue that any system that allows people to avoid accountability in this way must be broken to some extent.
Most browsers render HTML, what's your point if you can't even come up with an real example?
There are several major discrepancies between IE and other browsers: ActiveX support, centralised management facilities for corporate IT... Did you think we were just talking about how the width of a block is worked out on old web pages?
How do you think you can support the things I mentioned above in "EVERY browser in a cross platform way"?
In fact most web developers would agree with me that you have to spend even MORE time getting things to be cross platform in IE.
Right. So by your argument, since IE is the established standard and has most of the market share, why are competing browsers that come with Linux distros not all required to provide a compatibility mode that renders pages as IE does, supports ActiveX, etc?
Perhaps I'll reply in more detail, but for now: you seem to have missed the fundamental point that if you apply your proposed legal standards of required interoperability/compatibility to Microsoft, you must apply the same legal standards to all software vendors. By doing so, you would basically force Big Software to leave Europe, and probably close down a lot of Little Software businesses altogether.
Oh, and if you laugh off the idea that those companies' offerings are, for the most part, significantly better than the freebie alternatives that cherish interoperability and standards so much, then I suggest that you're just being unrealistic. This sort of claim is made roughly every ten minutes on Slashdot. The defence is always to quote the same handful of relatively popular OSS titles, almost none of which are at all relevant in a business context, and then to apply some wishful thinking about the relative merits of a few more popular OSS titles. In this case, we can add to that ignoring the fact that many OSS products don't interact cleanly either, and with a small number of exceptions, arbitrary file formats are pretty much the norm there as well.
What crap, I should be able to uninstall Internet explorer (as in GONE) on windows and all Microsoft's products should be able to load links up in whatever browser is my default.
Why? What if you choose to use another browser that doesn't work the same way as IE? What if it doesn't even provide the functionality required by the application spawning it? Do you think that Microsoft should only be able to provide functionality in their product that is universally present in any replacement that you might choose to use and over which they have no control whatsoever? Do you think they should be required to test the functionality of all their applications with every possible browser you might drop in to replace IE, including those that don't even exist yet, to make sure they don't cause security flaws, crashes or similar?
Why is that unreasonable?! Why do they force me to use Internet Explorer?
Why is your demand reasonable? No-one is forcing you to use their software at all, if you don't like the way it behaves.
And my ethical equivalent is many things, but crap is not one of them. What you are, in this very post, demanding of Microsoft is exactly analogous to me demanding that every Linux distro should provide a mechanism for me to remove whatever the default browser is and expect some replacement that functions like IE to drop in and work instead. It's just that in that case, you don't seem to mind because it doesn't personally affect you, while in the Windows case you seem to object because it does. This is known in dictionaries as "hypocrisy".
It might make your day that day. However, it would really spoil your day for a long time afterwards. It would cause a huge amount of damage to European business and government, starting with the security implications of the big software companies no longer providing updates, and continuing with the handover and retraining costs as businesses and public organisations tried to migrate and the loss of productivity from being forced to use inferior software or write something better in several key areas. In the meantime, stock markets that are already struggling would be undermined, governments would be raising taxes to cover the vast expenses they were incurring in dealing with their self-made problem, unemployment would rise...
You just can't make sweeping changes like that to an entire market overnight. A sensible legal and economic framework will incentivise changes in behaviour in the public interest, and you might argue (though I would disagree) that requiring software interoperability is always in the public interest. Even then, you need to do things at a manageable pace. Biting the hand that feeds you is a bad idea, and when you have huge investment in several major existing pieces of software, legislating their developers out of your world is a dumb move.
The discussions I was thinking about were pretty neutral, in the sense that they dealt substantially with objective data about what could and couldn't be done in the products. Obviously a lot of those points were being made by people with their own biases, and some of the usability issues are inherently subjective. Anyway, if you want honest answers, you can find several of the discussions by sticking my user name and keywords like "OpenOffice" into a search engine, specifying slashdot.org as the site. Don't just read the long/highly moderated comments I made, though; if you scan the discussions filtering at +3 or above, you'll find a lot of good comments by many contributors on both sides of the debate.
I rather doubt that was a sincere question given your generally cynical tone, but if it was, there have been several extensive and fairly detailed discussions on the subject in past Slashdot discussions that you might like to read.
Well the thing is that is the EU that determines what your rights are in the EU, so if they believe you have to make you software compatible to make business in the EU, either you obey or you make business somewhere else.
Let's hope the politicians responsible are still around to punish for the horrible consequences of such a naive decision.
A think the EU requires ALL operating system manufacturers to stop bundling different products into their OS. - Oh, wait... WHAT other operating system manufacturers are we talking about? There is only Microsoft on the scene. Looks like monopoly to me...
I know it's fun to bash Microsoft, but consider that the ethical equivalent of what is being expected of Microsoft here would be compelling Linux vendors to ship only the kernel by default, and provide extensible mechanisms for anyone (including closed source, commercial vendors) to supply their own software to be used with such systems on the same basis as any preferences the vendor may have. The only difference is that at present, Microsoft is deemed to have a monopoly in the OS market.
Frankly, I think some of the cases against Microsoft have gone way too far, to the point that MS are being compelled to ship worse products (from their consumers' perspective) than they otherwise would. The point of these competition laws is to prevent monopoly status in one market distorting another, separate market to the detriment of consumers. But can you name me any other modern desktop OS that doesn't come with a web browser or a media player? These things are now a standard part of products in that market, and that's just too bad for anyone who wants to compete independently. Hitting Microsoft for supplying them is like hitting them for improving security in their OS because it's damaging to anti-virus and firewall vendors, or forcing them to unbundle graphics drivers because the OS core could survive just fine with a text console. It's not at all the same as if they, for example, use their power in the OS market to promote sales of Office or 360s, because the latter are independent markets.
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If some people don't wanna walk through the machine, that's fine - they can take their strip-search the old-fashioned way.
Why should they have to be strip-searched at all? Does merely wanting to travel from A to B now require me to consent to a gross invasion of my privacy? Unless there are genuine grounds to suspect someone is doing something sufficiently dangerous that such a procedure is reasonably justified, why does anyone working in an airport have any authority to do it to anyone else at all, ever?
I personally happen to agree with your priorities. I just wanted to make the point that while something the authorities want to do might not bother you personally very much, the fact that it bothers a significant number of other people should be reason enough for us all to oppose it until/unless someone can make a stronger case for why we shouldn't.
You must have things pretty good in the US (I assume you're talking US dollars). Here in the UK, you'd be lucky to get a decent system for twice the prices you're quoting there. I know the dollar is worth about twopence halfpenny these days, but still...
With PC games there's nearly infinite hardware combinations which means that inevitably no matter how much QA you do, there will be bugs at release and so I think there's more of a tendency to assume that there will be bugs and that it's okay.
Yes and no. A lot of the bugs with PC games aren't really anything to do with "poor driver support" or whatever other excuse is shoved out the gaming company PR channels. Take a look at the working conditions and management attitude at some of the big name game companies (ea_spouse comes to mind), remember that developing games software is not special and works just like pretty much any other software project in almost any other field, and you'll soon see why bug-ridden **** gets sent to market in time for whatever big trade show or holiday season is coming up because management push it. As long as people are willing to buy bug-ridden ****, this is inevitable, but for the most part that's the only reason it is.
I believe you have the gaming companies' priorities confused. They really don't give a **** what platform Microsoft is pushing. They only care where the money-paying market is, and as far as PCs go that is — overwhelmingly — Windows XP.
The only major gamer advantage in Vista is DirectX 10. However, DX10 is dubious in terms of exclusivity: see the Halo II comments about the reality of "Vista only" games. DX10 is dubious in terms of technical advantages: I run Crysis just fine on my new super-rig, which deliberately has XP rather than Vista installed and is therefore limited to DX9, and frankly I'm not sure I prefer the DX 10 "improved" version anyway judging from the numerous screenshots in reviews. And finally, DX10 is dubious in terms of hardware, because even many serious gamers don't have fully DX10-capable cards and decent drivers to match yet, and the occasional gaming masses won't have for some years.
I predict, quite confidently, that Vista will never be the major games platform that XP has become, simply because it is in direct competition with its predecessor and will be for years, and worse, it is in competition with consoles for a lot of the custom, and consoles already have by far the largest share of the gaming market. Given that, I expect consoles to overcome their limitations with input devices for some gaming genres a lot faster than Vista will overcome everything from bad PR via relatively tiny market share among gamers to the numerous technical problems it seems to have, and in the meantime XP is dominant outside of console world anyway.
Well, if there's no problem with health risks, privacy risks and/or cost of using these devices routinely, it won't be a problem to stick one in the chamber where the security officers are, along with a normal camera if they get one too, and show everyone passing through the scanner the video feed, will it?
That you can avoid all the insane inconveniences of airports and aeroplanes by travelling on a train.
Unless you're going on a train that stops at an airport, such as the Paddington to Heathrow service, where similar digital strip-search scanners were already trialled two years ago.
If it doesn't bother you that someone sees you that way, that's OK, it's your choice. Then again, sad as I personally think it is, it obviously doesn't bother a significant number of people if they're tagged and monitored in everything they do, as long as they get 2% off at the till and to share photos with their friends on Facebook.
I believe the important thing is that these are personal choices. Why does it matter if they have machines that effectively strip search anyone walking through them? Because some people walking through them won't like it, and that's reason enough to prohibit the use of such machines by default.
That's because even the stuff that those groups do publicly is enough to convince most of us that they're evil. ;-)
If losing your job is going to cost you that much, you really need to be taking steps already, starting with finding a wife who wants more than your wealth and making more realistic credit arrangements. A whole load of people are going to lose their jobs through no fault of their own over the next few years as the economic downturn bites, and unless you're in a very few essential industries or hold a very privileged position, you could be unlucky just like the rest of us.
Of course, it could be that not travelling to certain places in this way wouldn't really cost you your job, your house, your car and your wife, and that you're just exaggerating to try and gain sympathy for your point. In any case, most people do not have to travel for their jobs, so even if you genuinely do, your argument does not mean the millions who don't should give in. As others have said, it doesn't even take that much for airlines and such to get the message and stop co-operating with police state schemes like this. If those who care enough got themselves organised and even 5–10% of customers refused to take a leisure flight to a foreign destination this year, perhaps going by ship or train instead or holidaying in their own country, it would make a substantial dent in several major airlines' bottom lines. If even 10% of those 5–10% bothered to write to the airlines saying that they would have liked to go but refused to submit to offensive security measures, the point would be made more than clearly enough.
The problem is just that right now, we're still in the bending over phase of society's development. The real impact of measures like this is, for the most part, confined to a relatively small number of people who have been seriously damaged. But a few thousand more "terrorist suspects" with Islamic-sounding names getting arrested here, a few thousand more people getting hassled by overpowered policemen there, a few thousand more wondering why they have to give up their soda to get on a plane when they can buy another much more expensive bottle of the same soda right past the security checkpoint over there... In five years time, this will have become a big election issue in most of these countries, people in general will be more aware of the dangers and the scope for abuse as they or those they care about have been personally affected, and I rather suspect that several governments will have fallen as a consequence.
I thought of it way before even them, I just couldn't fit it in the margin of my log book!
Well, I'm afraid I disagree with you about the complete lack of damage of any on-line activity. Have you never heard the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword"? Have you never seen the results of identity theft? Heard of a career being ruined by defamation? Thought about how many hours of people's lives are lost to spammers and the like every day? The fact that you personally may have been lucky enough to avoid any damage does not mean everyone else is so lucky, particularly when by your own admission you avoid services many people use all the time.
In any case, as I acknowledged previously, there is always a question of who watches the watchers in any legal system. There must be checks and safeguards on any authority delegated to governments. No-one should be able to look up this information arbitrarily without demonstrating that there is a genuine need for it to uphold the law, and no information so obtained should be kept once it has served that purpose. But neither unauthorised interception nor over-greedy databases are a problem unique to the Internet, and they must be fought through proper constitutional safeguards, independent oversight, and harsh penalties for abuse wherever they occur.
Regarding your point about anonymous communications channels, I would draw to your attention another post I made regarding the difference between anonymity and privacy/confidentiality. If you are transmitting confidential information privately, I don't see why your identity need be public; it need only be known to the other party. This is sufficient to safeguard, for example, whistle-blowing to a legitimate source in the media, or private debate about government policies and people's reactions to them. However, it is not sufficient to safeguard attacks on banking web sites, public defamation, or someone caught supplying state secrets to an intelligence officer. Personally, I have no ethical problem with any of that.
The ballot box is an unfortunate example, because it leads to confusing anonymity with confidentiality.
I have no problem with someone knowing that I have voted, and indeed a record of this fact is kept to ensure that I can't vote twice. I am thus not an anonymous voter, and I hope we'd agree that allowing arbitrary anonymous votes is not likely to meet with democratic success.
Who I voted for is a different question. That is private/confidential information. Since the information is not publicly available, I don't believe it is necessary for me to put my name to that information.
As it happens, there is also no crime that can be committed by voting in a certain way as long as I am casting my vote(s) according to the rules of the election, and no-one else's rights can be infringed by my doing so. Thus there would be no legitimate need to break confidentiality anyway. I think this is a separate issue to the anonymity question, though.
I don't believe in freedom of speech as an absolute. It too often conflicts with other fundamental rights and freedoms, and sometimes I consider the others to be more important.
We are already working on a second "Internet" its called "Freenet" and it aims to eliminate many of the current problems with the Internet such as censorship and accountability.
Why is accountability for your own actions ever a problem?
Anonymity can be used for good, typically for the protection of people who would otherwise be unwilling to take action in the interests of justice. Most of the time there are other ways to protect people where this is true, and in cases where anonymity really is justified because of dangers to the person concerned, it seems unlikely that they'll be plastering their views all over the Internet.
Anonymity can also be used as a shield to hide behind if you break the law. The Internet is not a licence to break normal laws by committing acts like fraud, harassment and defamation with impunity. However, the Internet combined with anonymity is as good as such a licence, because if you can't identify the person doing the damage, you can't bring them to justice.
There will always be questions of "who watches the watchers" in any legal system, and the Internet raises complex ethical questions about dealing with the differences in laws and authorities between different countries. These are legitimate concerns, and society will have to find a way to deal with them. However, I would wager that most use of anonymity on the Internet is of the CYA kind, and I would argue that any system that allows people to avoid accountability in this way must be broken to some extent.
Hey, I'm juggling Perl, C++, Java, Fortran, and a few other languages for a living. How could that NOT be fun? ;-)
You could spend more time with Perl, C++, Java and Fortran, and less with the other languages? ;-)
Most browsers render HTML, what's your point if you can't even come up with an real example?
There are several major discrepancies between IE and other browsers: ActiveX support, centralised management facilities for corporate IT... Did you think we were just talking about how the width of a block is worked out on old web pages?
How do you think you can support the things I mentioned above in "EVERY browser in a cross platform way"?
In fact most web developers would agree with me that you have to spend even MORE time getting things to be cross platform in IE.
Right. So by your argument, since IE is the established standard and has most of the market share, why are competing browsers that come with Linux distros not all required to provide a compatibility mode that renders pages as IE does, supports ActiveX, etc?
Perhaps I'll reply in more detail, but for now: you seem to have missed the fundamental point that if you apply your proposed legal standards of required interoperability/compatibility to Microsoft, you must apply the same legal standards to all software vendors. By doing so, you would basically force Big Software to leave Europe, and probably close down a lot of Little Software businesses altogether.
Oh, and if you laugh off the idea that those companies' offerings are, for the most part, significantly better than the freebie alternatives that cherish interoperability and standards so much, then I suggest that you're just being unrealistic. This sort of claim is made roughly every ten minutes on Slashdot. The defence is always to quote the same handful of relatively popular OSS titles, almost none of which are at all relevant in a business context, and then to apply some wishful thinking about the relative merits of a few more popular OSS titles. In this case, we can add to that ignoring the fact that many OSS products don't interact cleanly either, and with a small number of exceptions, arbitrary file formats are pretty much the norm there as well.
What crap, I should be able to uninstall Internet explorer (as in GONE) on windows and all Microsoft's products should be able to load links up in whatever browser is my default.
Why? What if you choose to use another browser that doesn't work the same way as IE? What if it doesn't even provide the functionality required by the application spawning it? Do you think that Microsoft should only be able to provide functionality in their product that is universally present in any replacement that you might choose to use and over which they have no control whatsoever? Do you think they should be required to test the functionality of all their applications with every possible browser you might drop in to replace IE, including those that don't even exist yet, to make sure they don't cause security flaws, crashes or similar?
Why is that unreasonable?! Why do they force me to use Internet Explorer?
Why is your demand reasonable? No-one is forcing you to use their software at all, if you don't like the way it behaves.
And my ethical equivalent is many things, but crap is not one of them. What you are, in this very post, demanding of Microsoft is exactly analogous to me demanding that every Linux distro should provide a mechanism for me to remove whatever the default browser is and expect some replacement that functions like IE to drop in and work instead. It's just that in that case, you don't seem to mind because it doesn't personally affect you, while in the Windows case you seem to object because it does. This is known in dictionaries as "hypocrisy".
It might make your day that day. However, it would really spoil your day for a long time afterwards. It would cause a huge amount of damage to European business and government, starting with the security implications of the big software companies no longer providing updates, and continuing with the handover and retraining costs as businesses and public organisations tried to migrate and the loss of productivity from being forced to use inferior software or write something better in several key areas. In the meantime, stock markets that are already struggling would be undermined, governments would be raising taxes to cover the vast expenses they were incurring in dealing with their self-made problem, unemployment would rise...
You just can't make sweeping changes like that to an entire market overnight. A sensible legal and economic framework will incentivise changes in behaviour in the public interest, and you might argue (though I would disagree) that requiring software interoperability is always in the public interest. Even then, you need to do things at a manageable pace. Biting the hand that feeds you is a bad idea, and when you have huge investment in several major existing pieces of software, legislating their developers out of your world is a dumb move.
The discussions I was thinking about were pretty neutral, in the sense that they dealt substantially with objective data about what could and couldn't be done in the products. Obviously a lot of those points were being made by people with their own biases, and some of the usability issues are inherently subjective. Anyway, if you want honest answers, you can find several of the discussions by sticking my user name and keywords like "OpenOffice" into a search engine, specifying slashdot.org as the site. Don't just read the long/highly moderated comments I made, though; if you scan the discussions filtering at +3 or above, you'll find a lot of good comments by many contributors on both sides of the debate.
Office puts things to shame? How so?
I rather doubt that was a sincere question given your generally cynical tone, but if it was, there have been several extensive and fairly detailed discussions on the subject in past Slashdot discussions that you might like to read.
Well the thing is that is the EU that determines what your rights are in the EU, so if they believe you have to make you software compatible to make business in the EU, either you obey or you make business somewhere else.
Let's hope the politicians responsible are still around to punish for the horrible consequences of such a naive decision.
A think the EU requires ALL operating system manufacturers to stop bundling different products into their OS. - Oh, wait ... WHAT other operating system manufacturers are we talking about? There is only Microsoft on the scene. Looks like monopoly to me...
I know it's fun to bash Microsoft, but consider that the ethical equivalent of what is being expected of Microsoft here would be compelling Linux vendors to ship only the kernel by default, and provide extensible mechanisms for anyone (including closed source, commercial vendors) to supply their own software to be used with such systems on the same basis as any preferences the vendor may have. The only difference is that at present, Microsoft is deemed to have a monopoly in the OS market.
Frankly, I think some of the cases against Microsoft have gone way too far, to the point that MS are being compelled to ship worse products (from their consumers' perspective) than they otherwise would. The point of these competition laws is to prevent monopoly status in one market distorting another, separate market to the detriment of consumers. But can you name me any other modern desktop OS that doesn't come with a web browser or a media player? These things are now a standard part of products in that market, and that's just too bad for anyone who wants to compete independently. Hitting Microsoft for supplying them is like hitting them for improving security in their OS because it's damaging to anti-virus and firewall vendors, or forcing them to unbundle graphics drivers because the OS core could survive just fine with a text console. It's not at all the same as if they, for example, use their power in the OS market to promote sales of Office or 360s, because the latter are independent markets.
Some of us have been trying to get rid of the influence of Brussels on our country for years, but with a regrettable lack of success so far. :-(