Similarly, a homeless guy earning his homeless is not often because 'he threw it all away' but more often connected to the kind of people and life lessons he was subject to since birth.
It's nice how this fictional guy's situation is not his fault at all. People make chioces. People (should) have to live with choices they make. Some people start out poor, and become wealthy, others start out wealthy and become poor.
Just because someone starts out with certain advantages, they shouldn't be punished. This isn't a race in which everyone has to start out the same. Anyone who "fronted" Bush capital, did so because they knew he was capable of managing it in a way that would make it grow. On that principle, he did earn it. Clinton started out about as average as it gets. He'll never be poor, not because of anything he was born into, but because of his own abilites (and I am NOT a supporter of him in any way, shape or form) and (more importantly) choices.
"I really dont believe people 'earn' their status in life - I think you have a top and a bottom you can reach, givin your situation from birth.
A little too fatalist for my taste, but to each his own. Meanwhile, you will never find real life to demonstrate the truth of your statement. All different types of people end up in all different types of ways. Sure, people who grow up wealthy are more likely to be wealthy, not because of some abstract affect that environment had on them, but because they were fortunate to be in an environment to learn about money and how it works. Myself on the otherhand, I wasn't so fortunate to learn that as a child, so now I'm learning. Will I ever be really wealthy? I hope so, either way if I end up homeless and poor, that could only be placed on my shoulders.
I believe in helping people who are helpless. A government system of welfare (I'm not referring specifically the the program titleds Welfare, but government handouts in general) is a way for the (lazy) general population to feel charitable. Charity should discriminate, government programs don't. How many people who have all there fingers and toes (are not helpless), currently get some check from the government as a reward for bad decisions made through life? A bunch. My wife has been a paramedic for about 5 years. In all that time, I can't think of one story in which they picked someone up, at the cost of the taxpayers, who was truly helpless. Not once. I'm not saying it's never happened, but I can't think of any. In five years of asking my wife what she did today, that's pretty incredible.
Sure, people scam the system, but I'm willing to take that loss in order to help those who genuinely deserve it.
Fine, then you give your money away randomly, but I shouldn't be forced into your inefficient system of deciding who "deserves" what. And by the way, the more truthful statement is if you would have said "I'm willing for other people to bare the burdon of that cost in order to help those who genuinly deserve it". Meanwhile, because people like you are too lazy to actually help people, and just want to throw a bunch of other peoples' money at some not-very-well-defined problem, a lot of real charity will never be done. People who might otherwise get involved with actual effective charity, won't, since they have already "donated" a quarter (or more) of their salary to the fscked up system we have now. So next time you find someone who is actually helpless, and isn't receiving any (or enough) help, you can thank yourself and your brethren for that.
Most people use the term "Greed" to apply only to a desire of money...and that may be accurate. However, if that is the only definition of the word, then that is not what drives our economy.
What drives our economy is peoples desire to maximize benefit to themselves. This may be greed if we are talking about money, but fulfilling yourself with money vs. career goals is a personal choice. You personally (I'm just pointing to you as an example) may have very little interest in having lots of money, but may have a great interest in doing "doctory things". I on the other hand, may have no interest in doing "doctory things", but would much prefer to spend my time lounging around. Either choice should be allowed. Let each person make his or her own choices. Let not government, or majority, apply ethical/moral values to peoples individual choices. If you can find a way to be an Unemplyed Jaggoff, and still drive a Farrari and party in the Hamptons, go for it. If on the other hand, being an Unemployed Jaggoff means you may not eat on consecutive days, more power to you there as well.
If the "private sector bohemoths" are the puppeteers, then the government owns the stage, and allows them to perform for free.
The government is not some helpless entity abused by wealthy individuals or corporations. The government is a body of individuals, who in each of their own interests, have created a playing field that is not free, and is in favor of certain people. In some cases, these individuals buy votes by taking money from a small group of people, and handing it out to a larger group of people. In other cases, these individuals earn financial compensation from the wealthy, by passing laws that will make the wealthy even more wealthy.
I don't have a problem with people being rich. If you earn it, then you deserve it. There is no reason to distrust someone just because they are rich. I also don't have a problem with people being poor. If you earn that, you deserve that also. I do have a problem with government making laws that are harmful to the general public, because they have made people believe it's a good law and it will win votes (keep them in their job). I also have a problem with government passing laws that make being electively poor an affordable option.
Robin Hood was a thief. It so happens, that he stole from individuals that stole from others. Neither is ok.
I think they create a false sense of security more than they help anything.
As an example, shortly after the Enron/AA fiasco hit the airwaves, there was a show on the same topic on some news magazine (20/20, Dateline or something like that). The story was about a private company (a hospital) that was looking for investors. The auditor/accounting firm for the company was none other than Arthur Anderson. Apparently, there was some book cooking going on over there, and several people (about 7 investors were interviewed) lost a lot of money. Of course, these were all sob stories about how these helpless people lost all their money, and there was nothing they could do about it.
At any rate, they also interviewed an accountant. This accountant had been hired by a would-be investor to investigate the company. She found some discrepencies (it was all public information she looked at) and notified Arthur Anderson, thinking they may have made an honest mistake in their accounting. AA essentially brushed her off, and it became apparent that there was intentional diception.
The point of the whole story was basically just this news show bringing to light another bit of dishonest accounting that AA participated in.
Now, don't get me wrong, I don't support that kind of behavior. I don't know the specifics of what happened in that case (beyond what the show reported, which is what I've conveyed here), but if they really did something wrong, that is bad. If I were in business, I would never initiate or support dishonesty towards investors, even if it were legal.
However, one point of the whole story that the news program never really talked about, was that this one investor with the account didn't lose a dime. All the other people who lost money, blindly trusted that the numbers must have all been right...since there are "laws against that sort of thing." Seems reasonable I guess. My question is, what exactly are these laws helping? People are given a false sense of security. Fraud and misrepresentation happens anyway (as we are seeing in this WorldCom case and others). People may go to jail, but probably won't. So how do all the laws and restrictions help the individual investors exactly?
"Who do you suggest investigate the companies, Anderson consulting?"
If they are working for me...that would be fine. The problem is (or part of it), that the government basically tells the general public "We've got lots of regulations, so you should blindly trust auditing/accounting firms and stock analysts that are working for a corporation."
When people start actually investigating a corporation before investing in that corporation, the amount people lose in these types of situations would decrease dramatically.
but my main point is that the forced nature of many public-welfare-type projects seems to necessarily lead to resentment and division.
And inefficiencies.
it seems possible that these projects may come much closer to the spirit and the ideal of communism.
The whole point of communism is that it is an established, enforced, system. Given free-market/libertarian type thought in regard to markets, there is nothing that precludes charity. In fact, it is expected that there is at least some charitable nature in humanity, and that that level of charity would more than support need, and do it more efficiently.
Bottom line, there is no reason this type of behavious is excluded from a capitalist/free-market economy. It's part of human nature. I wouldn't say that "barn-raising efforts" are "communism at it's best", but rather human nature and free will at it's best.
"But doing something, ANYTHING, to try to prevent those deaths up front is not a useless endevor."
Even if that "ANYTHING" is a lack of action (or in this case, NOT approving a drug) which kills even more people than the mistake?
This is a typical Libertarian posing. And for being the "geek" party they show an enormous lack of thought and practical reality with these sorts of "platforms".
And your implication that because the government is doing it, it must be ok is typical of apathetic, non-thinking Americans. People should be involved and not rely on mother-government to tell them everything. Find drug companies that consistently put out good drugs, and only buy from those. There is no logical reason to believe a market driven drug economy would be less efficient than what we currently have.
"The claim assumed unimpeachable status when it appeared in a report published by America's Department of Commerce in April 1998."
This begs the question....How many other reports have they published but done zero research for?
A company can claim anything, and they usually do. People frequently are skeptical of corporate claims, until the government "affirms" it. Phin Fin (or however it is spelled) was "approved" by the FDA. Perhaps the FDA should have removed their collective head from their ass before approving it, and likewise, maybe the DoC should actually so some research before making great claims that people believe.
I'm not sure how it happened, but the goverment gained a reputation such that anything that comes from DC must be the gospel.
"Such an argument proves nothing because it is incapable of refutation"
I don't think the poster's intent was to claim that an Orwellian world was definately going to happen.
The point (as I took it anyway), was to counter the proposition by the original article that Orwell was, and forever will be, wrong that a "1984/Big Brother" type situation could ever occur.
While it's true that Orwell's predictions (if that's what they were) didn't come true by the year 1984, it is perfectly reasonable, and probably a good excercise, to always consider the possibility of the devolopment of a repressive government.
Furthermore, the more advanced technology gets, the more technically possible it would be for a government to pull off such Orwellian things. For example, on Slashdot just the other day was the story about robot warriors. Imagine a government (run by a relatively few individuals) capable of weilding the same military power as the US government weilds today, with only a small fraction of actual people (with consciences) needed to "do the dirty work".
So, back to the poster's point that just because such things haven't happened yet, one cannot extrapolate that those types of things could never happen.
Give him a computer and he will be able to afford the food, shelter, and medicine he needs in the future.
Huh? How exactly is that going to happen? The biggest thing people in third world countries need (generally speaking) is freedom. If they could get that, education, food, and even computers would follow suit.
OMB is asked to consider if it should place a cap of the market share for any one vendor of PC client software
store clerk: "Sorry sir, you can't buy that until someone buys a competing product, that company has reached it's market share cap."
Me: "But all the other competing products suck..."
store clerk: "Next."
I'm constantly amazed at the new levels of stupidity reached almost daily in politics.
who wants to see the exact same movies re-released anyway? Just rent the tapes....
Re:A libertarian perspective...
on
Fair IP Laws?
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· Score: 1
"why do you differentiate between intellectual property and say either physical property or financial property? "
Scarcity.
Basically, if you have a shirt, and I take it, I have robbed you of your shirt not becuase I'm wearing, but becuase you now can't wear it. If you invent a new way of making widgets, and I use your method to make my own widget, you are not deprived of also continuing to make widgets in this fashion.
Scarcity scarcity scarcity...that's the main point. We have to have laws governing property rights for real physical property, lest we have conflict of who gets to use the shirt. However, non-scarce objects (thoughts, songs, stories, etc.) don't suffer from the same problem.
A libertarian perspective...
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 1
...because there will be no incentive to create anything for mass market sale except out of goodwill, or for leveraging other revenue (aka Linux).
Sure there would, you just wouldn't have mother government working for you as your own personal enforcer.
This is a topic I have been seriously interested in, and have done a lot of reading about in the last year or so. Having studied economics under a very strict Libertarian, I have been influenced by that line of thought. Companies should be responsible for guarding their own secrets (wether through security or contracts between companies and consumers). It is not the job of government to subsidize corporations by providing "trade secret security".
I could go on and on...but I won't. Instead, I will defer to those who have thought a lot more about this, and who are much better at articulating relavent ideas than me...
Then Sun has an OS monopoly for Sun machines, Apple has a monopoly for the market of Apple machines...
My basic problem is defining the market so narrowly (as only OS's that can run on x86 architecture). The logic was that switching from an x86/Windows machine to a Mac was "cost prohibitive" as compared to what it "would cost" to switch from Windows to some other as of yet non existant competitor (I don't recall why Linux or any of the other free OS's didn't count as an alternative...). Anyway, who's to say exactly what dollar amount is prohibitive? It's an absurd logic.
hand me a monopoly and i can look pretty savvy as well. especially if the "gubment" doesn't have the balls to shut me down.
I doubt that. It's easy to say you could run a multi-billion dollar corporation, but very few people really can...which is why CEO's and the like get paid so damn much money.
Second, noone "handed" Bill a monopoly, he built it himself.
Third, I personally don't believe the courts' opinions that MS has a monopoly. Have you ever read the ruling that determined MS has a monopoly in the OS market? I have, and the logic is pretty shaky. They basically ruled that all the other OS's that exist "don't count", therefore MS must have a monopoly in the OS market, pretty lame. Of course, this is relevant in response to your implication that MS has a monopoly, and that is the only reason for their success.
ms owes it's existence to a) ibm's stupidity + hubris and b) extremely unethical + underhanded + illegal use of monopolistic power (starting w/ DOS).
a) So you mean MS/Bill Gates made better business decisions?
b) See my thoughts above.
what's amazing about all of this is that none of these facts are in contention.
Among the majority of the slashdot community?...Sure.
What's really funny, is that I'm not really an MS fan, but all this "sides taking" bugs me. How can someone have so much feeling for or against a company? Personally, I don't believe in being "for" or "against" a company. I buy what I want, and I don't buy what I don't want. Period.
Bill Gates built that company. He gets credit for any good decisions made, because ultimately, he hired the people who are making those decisions.
Part of being a good leader is having the humility to know that you don't know everything.
I know what the article was about (having read it and all...) but my post was in response to a thread of posts... Had you read the two posts above mine, you (mabye) would have been able to derive how my post was relevant to that thread...
Frankly, Bill Gates is (probably) far more successful in business than either the writer of the article or any poster on this forum.
That being said, who would you believe knows what is a "good way" to do business? Someone who has proven himself (BG) or a writer who obviously hates Microsoft?
I think the console controller for a FPS is a lot more intuitive (maybe that's a result of having the Nintendo before the mouse...), although I can use either (PC or console).
However, I won't argue with you about playing an RTS without a mouse...
"IP and MP (material property) are similar in that they don't really exist."
Actually, the whole point (necessity even) of private property laws, is to accomodate the scarcity; that is, the fact that real property (what you are calling MP) not only exists, but is scarce. "Scarce" meaning that the use of a thing by one person excludes the use of that thing by another person (e.g. we can't both be wearing the shirt I have on).
IP on the other hand, is not scarce. If I use an idea you originally came up with, it does not exclude you from also using that same idea in your own way.
Yet again, the USPTO is used as a weapon in the free market.
Erm...this is anything but a free market. You will find VERY few libertarian economists (people who know what a free market really is) who support intellectual property rights.
Of course, most people in society want laws that subsidize themselves...on the left are people who want "welfare" type laws, so they can continue to do whatever they do, and on the right are those who want "corporate welfare" and other protectionist laws (such as intellectual property laws) to allow them to do what they do.
Very, very few people support a truly free market.
Slashdot Mirror
Psychology is a junk science.
Similarly, a homeless guy earning his homeless is not often because 'he threw it all away' but more often connected to the kind of people and life lessons he was subject to since birth.
It's nice how this fictional guy's situation is not his fault at all. People make chioces. People (should) have to live with choices they make. Some people start out poor, and become wealthy, others start out wealthy and become poor.
Just because someone starts out with certain advantages, they shouldn't be punished. This isn't a race in which everyone has to start out the same. Anyone who "fronted" Bush capital, did so because they knew he was capable of managing it in a way that would make it grow. On that principle, he did earn it. Clinton started out about as average as it gets. He'll never be poor, not because of anything he was born into, but because of his own abilites (and I am NOT a supporter of him in any way, shape or form) and (more importantly) choices.
"I really dont believe people 'earn' their status in life - I think you have a top and a bottom you can reach, givin your situation from birth.
A little too fatalist for my taste, but to each his own. Meanwhile, you will never find real life to demonstrate the truth of your statement. All different types of people end up in all different types of ways. Sure, people who grow up wealthy are more likely to be wealthy, not because of some abstract affect that environment had on them, but because they were fortunate to be in an environment to learn about money and how it works. Myself on the otherhand, I wasn't so fortunate to learn that as a child, so now I'm learning. Will I ever be really wealthy? I hope so, either way if I end up homeless and poor, that could only be placed on my shoulders.
I believe in helping people who are helpless. A government system of welfare (I'm not referring specifically the the program titleds Welfare, but government handouts in general) is a way for the (lazy) general population to feel charitable. Charity should discriminate, government programs don't. How many people who have all there fingers and toes (are not helpless), currently get some check from the government as a reward for bad decisions made through life? A bunch. My wife has been a paramedic for about 5 years. In all that time, I can't think of one story in which they picked someone up, at the cost of the taxpayers, who was truly helpless. Not once. I'm not saying it's never happened, but I can't think of any. In five years of asking my wife what she did today, that's pretty incredible.
Sure, people scam the system, but I'm willing to take that loss in order to help those who genuinely deserve it.
Fine, then you give your money away randomly, but I shouldn't be forced into your inefficient system of deciding who "deserves" what. And by the way, the more truthful statement is if you would have said "I'm willing for other people to bare the burdon of that cost in order to help those who genuinly deserve it". Meanwhile, because people like you are too lazy to actually help people, and just want to throw a bunch of other peoples' money at some not-very-well-defined problem, a lot of real charity will never be done. People who might otherwise get involved with actual effective charity, won't, since they have already "donated" a quarter (or more) of their salary to the fscked up system we have now. So next time you find someone who is actually helpless, and isn't receiving any (or enough) help, you can thank yourself and your brethren for that.
Most people use the term "Greed" to apply only to a desire of money...and that may be accurate. However, if that is the only definition of the word, then that is not what drives our economy.
What drives our economy is peoples desire to maximize benefit to themselves. This may be greed if we are talking about money, but fulfilling yourself with money vs. career goals is a personal choice. You personally (I'm just pointing to you as an example) may have very little interest in having lots of money, but may have a great interest in doing "doctory things". I on the other hand, may have no interest in doing "doctory things", but would much prefer to spend my time lounging around. Either choice should be allowed. Let each person make his or her own choices. Let not government, or majority, apply ethical/moral values to peoples individual choices. If you can find a way to be an Unemplyed Jaggoff, and still drive a Farrari and party in the Hamptons, go for it. If on the other hand, being an Unemployed Jaggoff means you may not eat on consecutive days, more power to you there as well.
If the "private sector bohemoths" are the puppeteers, then the government owns the stage, and allows them to perform for free.
The government is not some helpless entity abused by wealthy individuals or corporations. The government is a body of individuals, who in each of their own interests, have created a playing field that is not free, and is in favor of certain people. In some cases, these individuals buy votes by taking money from a small group of people, and handing it out to a larger group of people. In other cases, these individuals earn financial compensation from the wealthy, by passing laws that will make the wealthy even more wealthy.
I don't have a problem with people being rich. If you earn it, then you deserve it. There is no reason to distrust someone just because they are rich. I also don't have a problem with people being poor. If you earn that, you deserve that also. I do have a problem with government making laws that are harmful to the general public, because they have made people believe it's a good law and it will win votes (keep them in their job). I also have a problem with government passing laws that make being electively poor an affordable option.
Robin Hood was a thief. It so happens, that he stole from individuals that stole from others. Neither is ok.
I think they create a false sense of security more than they help anything. As an example, shortly after the Enron/AA fiasco hit the airwaves, there was a show on the same topic on some news magazine (20/20, Dateline or something like that). The story was about a private company (a hospital) that was looking for investors. The auditor/accounting firm for the company was none other than Arthur Anderson. Apparently, there was some book cooking going on over there, and several people (about 7 investors were interviewed) lost a lot of money. Of course, these were all sob stories about how these helpless people lost all their money, and there was nothing they could do about it.
At any rate, they also interviewed an accountant. This accountant had been hired by a would-be investor to investigate the company. She found some discrepencies (it was all public information she looked at) and notified Arthur Anderson, thinking they may have made an honest mistake in their accounting. AA essentially brushed her off, and it became apparent that there was intentional diception.
The point of the whole story was basically just this news show bringing to light another bit of dishonest accounting that AA participated in.
Now, don't get me wrong, I don't support that kind of behavior. I don't know the specifics of what happened in that case (beyond what the show reported, which is what I've conveyed here), but if they really did something wrong, that is bad. If I were in business, I would never initiate or support dishonesty towards investors, even if it were legal.
However, one point of the whole story that the news program never really talked about, was that this one investor with the account didn't lose a dime. All the other people who lost money, blindly trusted that the numbers must have all been right...since there are "laws against that sort of thing." Seems reasonable I guess. My question is, what exactly are these laws helping? People are given a false sense of security. Fraud and misrepresentation happens anyway (as we are seeing in this WorldCom case and others). People may go to jail, but probably won't. So how do all the laws and restrictions help the individual investors exactly?
"Who do you suggest investigate the companies, Anderson consulting?"
If they are working for me...that would be fine. The problem is (or part of it), that the government basically tells the general public "We've got lots of regulations, so you should blindly trust auditing/accounting firms and stock analysts that are working for a corporation."
When people start actually investigating a corporation before investing in that corporation, the amount people lose in these types of situations would decrease dramatically.
And I love how you socialists/facists can call one of the most heavily regulated/controlled markets in the country(the stock market) "free".
but my main point is that the forced nature of many public-welfare-type projects seems to necessarily lead to resentment and division.
And inefficiencies.
it seems possible that these projects may come much closer to the spirit and the ideal of communism.
The whole point of communism is that it is an established, enforced, system. Given free-market/libertarian type thought in regard to markets, there is nothing that precludes charity. In fact, it is expected that there is at least some charitable nature in humanity, and that that level of charity would more than support need, and do it more efficiently.
Bottom line, there is no reason this type of behavious is excluded from a capitalist/free-market economy. It's part of human nature. I wouldn't say that "barn-raising efforts" are "communism at it's best", but rather human nature and free will at it's best.
"But doing something, ANYTHING, to try to prevent those deaths up front is not a useless endevor."
Even if that "ANYTHING" is a lack of action (or in this case, NOT approving a drug) which kills even more people than the mistake?
This is a typical Libertarian posing. And for being the "geek" party they show an enormous lack of thought and practical reality with these sorts of "platforms".
And your implication that because the government is doing it, it must be ok is typical of apathetic, non-thinking Americans. People should be involved and not rely on mother-government to tell them everything. Find drug companies that consistently put out good drugs, and only buy from those. There is no logical reason to believe a market driven drug economy would be less efficient than what we currently have.
"The claim assumed unimpeachable status when it appeared in a report published by America's Department of Commerce in April 1998."
This begs the question....How many other reports have they published but done zero research for?
A company can claim anything, and they usually do. People frequently are skeptical of corporate claims, until the government "affirms" it. Phin Fin (or however it is spelled) was "approved" by the FDA. Perhaps the FDA should have removed their collective head from their ass before approving it, and likewise, maybe the DoC should actually so some research before making great claims that people believe.
I'm not sure how it happened, but the goverment gained a reputation such that anything that comes from DC must be the gospel.
"Such an argument proves nothing because it is incapable of refutation"
I don't think the poster's intent was to claim that an Orwellian world was definately going to happen. The point (as I took it anyway), was to counter the proposition by the original article that Orwell was, and forever will be, wrong that a "1984/Big Brother" type situation could ever occur. While it's true that Orwell's predictions (if that's what they were) didn't come true by the year 1984, it is perfectly reasonable, and probably a good excercise, to always consider the possibility of the devolopment of a repressive government.
Furthermore, the more advanced technology gets, the more technically possible it would be for a government to pull off such Orwellian things. For example, on Slashdot just the other day was the story about robot warriors. Imagine a government (run by a relatively few individuals) capable of weilding the same military power as the US government weilds today, with only a small fraction of actual people (with consciences) needed to "do the dirty work".
So, back to the poster's point that just because such things haven't happened yet, one cannot extrapolate that those types of things could never happen.
Give him a computer and he will be able to afford the food, shelter, and medicine he needs in the future.
Huh? How exactly is that going to happen? The biggest thing people in third world countries need (generally speaking) is freedom. If they could get that, education, food, and even computers would follow suit.
OMB is asked to consider if it should place a cap of the market share for any one vendor of PC client software store clerk: "Sorry sir, you can't buy that until someone buys a competing product, that company has reached it's market share cap."
Me: "But all the other competing products suck..."
store clerk: "Next."
I'm constantly amazed at the new levels of stupidity reached almost daily in politics.
Can we now expect buildings/businesses that sell copying tools (e.g. CD_RW) to start blowing up?
who wants to see the exact same movies re-released anyway? Just rent the tapes....
"why do you differentiate between intellectual property and say either physical property or financial property? "
Scarcity.
Basically, if you have a shirt, and I take it, I have robbed you of your shirt not becuase I'm wearing, but becuase you now can't wear it. If you invent a new way of making widgets, and I use your method to make my own widget, you are not deprived of also continuing to make widgets in this fashion.
Scarcity scarcity scarcity...that's the main point. We have to have laws governing property rights for real physical property, lest we have conflict of who gets to use the shirt. However, non-scarce objects (thoughts, songs, stories, etc.) don't suffer from the same problem.
...because there will be no incentive to create anything for mass market sale except out of goodwill, or for leveraging other revenue (aka Linux).
Sure there would, you just wouldn't have mother government working for you as your own personal enforcer.
This is a topic I have been seriously interested in, and have done a lot of reading about in the last year or so. Having studied economics under a very strict Libertarian, I have been influenced by that line of thought. Companies should be responsible for guarding their own secrets (wether through security or contracts between companies and consumers). It is not the job of government to subsidize corporations by providing "trade secret security".
I could go on and on...but I won't. Instead, I will defer to those who have thought a lot more about this, and who are much better at articulating relavent ideas than me...
Stephan Kinsella
Ilana Mercer
Then Sun has an OS monopoly for Sun machines, Apple has a monopoly for the market of Apple machines...
My basic problem is defining the market so narrowly (as only OS's that can run on x86 architecture). The logic was that switching from an x86/Windows machine to a Mac was "cost prohibitive" as compared to what it "would cost" to switch from Windows to some other as of yet non existant competitor (I don't recall why Linux or any of the other free OS's didn't count as an alternative...). Anyway, who's to say exactly what dollar amount is prohibitive? It's an absurd logic.
hand me a monopoly and i can look pretty savvy as well. especially if the "gubment" doesn't have the balls to shut me down. I doubt that. It's easy to say you could run a multi-billion dollar corporation, but very few people really can...which is why CEO's and the like get paid so damn much money.
Second, noone "handed" Bill a monopoly, he built it himself.
Third, I personally don't believe the courts' opinions that MS has a monopoly. Have you ever read the ruling that determined MS has a monopoly in the OS market? I have, and the logic is pretty shaky. They basically ruled that all the other OS's that exist "don't count", therefore MS must have a monopoly in the OS market, pretty lame. Of course, this is relevant in response to your implication that MS has a monopoly, and that is the only reason for their success.
ms owes it's existence to a) ibm's stupidity + hubris and b) extremely unethical + underhanded + illegal use of monopolistic power (starting w/ DOS). a) So you mean MS/Bill Gates made better business decisions? b) See my thoughts above.
what's amazing about all of this is that none of these facts are in contention.
Among the majority of the slashdot community?...Sure.
What's really funny, is that I'm not really an MS fan, but all this "sides taking" bugs me. How can someone have so much feeling for or against a company? Personally, I don't believe in being "for" or "against" a company. I buy what I want, and I don't buy what I don't want. Period.
Bill Gates built that company. He gets credit for any good decisions made, because ultimately, he hired the people who are making those decisions.
Part of being a good leader is having the humility to know that you don't know everything.
I know what the article was about (having read it and all...) but my post was in response to a thread of posts... Had you read the two posts above mine, you (mabye) would have been able to derive how my post was relevant to that thread...
Frankly, Bill Gates is (probably) far more successful in business than either the writer of the article or any poster on this forum.
That being said, who would you believe knows what is a "good way" to do business? Someone who has proven himself (BG) or a writer who obviously hates Microsoft?
Aren't they basically in trouble for giving away IE? It doesn't get much cheaper than that.
I think the console controller for a FPS is a lot more intuitive (maybe that's a result of having the Nintendo before the mouse...), although I can use either (PC or console).
However, I won't argue with you about playing an RTS without a mouse...
Maybe not the best resolution but the 53" screen makes up for it...
"IP and MP (material property) are similar in that they don't really exist."
Actually, the whole point (necessity even) of private property laws, is to accomodate the scarcity; that is, the fact that real property (what you are calling MP) not only exists, but is scarce. "Scarce" meaning that the use of a thing by one person excludes the use of that thing by another person (e.g. we can't both be wearing the shirt I have on).
IP on the other hand, is not scarce. If I use an idea you originally came up with, it does not exclude you from also using that same idea in your own way.
Yet again, the USPTO is used as a weapon in the free market.
Erm...this is anything but a free market. You will find VERY few libertarian economists (people who know what a free market really is) who support intellectual property rights.
Of course, most people in society want laws that subsidize themselves...on the left are people who want "welfare" type laws, so they can continue to do whatever they do, and on the right are those who want "corporate welfare" and other protectionist laws (such as intellectual property laws) to allow them to do what they do.
Very, very few people support a truly free market.