i never understood why BROADCAST radio regulated by the FCC was not considered 'public performance' by the FCC as the stations already pay per listener. Isn't it double-dipping to charge players of public radio? More than that the radio station buys the rights to air songs to the public already. It's expected that they can sell their performance to gain advertising dollars for broadcasting, last I checked I don't have any kind of FCC license to listen to the public radio (and in the UK don't they already pay radio tax) and wouldn't suing people for listing to the radio performance be some kind of "slander of title" against the rights to broadcast and royalties paid by commercial radio stations?
In the USA, it's ASCAP/BMI you have to worry about.. the songwriters guild, they already do exactly this same thing. Because they started out on the lawsuit train much sooner they beat the recording publishers to the easy money. That's why in the USA the royalties radio pays are to ASCAP/BMI. The recent Soundforge was created under law to server the RIAA and they are trying to get recording royalties established starting with Web radio.
Women are better at killing than men, just not as well trained yet. Of course once technology reaches a certain point (bullets don't cut thru armor, missiles can't lock, explosives powerful enough to damage the machines kill too many civilians, remote control "toys" don't work and your left beating each other with glorified "sticks" again, in really big suits of armor.
You miss the theme of most "giant robot" stories is that you can have the power to squish masses of people all day, but it still won't solve the real problems unless you stop squishing people and talk about them.
You really don't understand just how far behind the USA is in manufacturing technology. Sure we have the brightest people, but we lack govt, corporate, and personal discipline to get results. We allow the "free market" to determine our fate and allow crazy ass backwards things in our business society. What companies like GM are touting as "great advances" in the last 15 years are all things Japanese were learning and doing 40 years ago. It's not the ACT of making things, it's the discipline of LEARNING to make things that they excel at. The US still thinks business is "cowboys and indians", Japan thinks of business as "ants marching".. China is a cloud of locust.... Japanese and German companies outsource to the USA because WE are the "unwashed" cheap labor. Japan and Germany dominate the market of making the machines that MAKE the machines we use every day. The USA lost that crown about 5 years ago, we buy more advanced tooling than we sell now. The USA has lost the ability to DELIVER on innovation, the Japanese are hitting their peak but nobody talks about it over here.
Exactly what I was getting at. Finally. The issue is that Japan is very good at implementing technology if they put their govt leverage behind it. They're designing for public problems 20-50 years out and what Japan would look like then. They do it with pubic support and corporate backing and enthusiasm that the USA just doesn't get.
Unlike US defense contractors, the Japanese companies that would be tapped for military contracts have track records for excellent execution of their products... there's no reason to think that wouldn't extend to military production as well. People forget that the Japanese production methods are universal, and ingrained in nearly all their management of anything. It's only in the USA that we have some backwards idea that military products are hard to make. We just allow crappy management to spend vast sums of money and not deliver the product on time and on budget. That's not the case over there, the corporate and pubic ethos is much different bad business is not tolerated like it is here.
You force Japan's hand and you could have "gundam" level hardware in 10 years. It's not that hard, cars are built with robots faster and more accurate than you need to fight with, Asimo is only missing time resources, not tech, it's a matter of not being a necessity to put the pieces together in that fashion. All of the best CNC/robotics is built in Germany or Japan... ironically both countries that can't produce actual weapons so their companies find other things to make money.
the short leash is that if the US doesn't sell tactical planes to Japan they have no way to seriously fight back should the Chinese launch short range missiles against them. Things are heating up and Japan has been a very good kid for the last 60 years. There's no reason NOT to trust them as an ally except to keep them dependent for political leverage in the region.
Historically though, it's the Japanese that are more cruel and kill more people. Prior to WW2 Japan had probably killed more people in Southeast Asia than Germany came close to... and not on some "grand plan" like Germany, but just routine raping and pillaging. While Japan is our Ally and seems to be flying straight, China has a lot of bad history with them to get "payback" for. Chinese antagonism against Japan would be there even if China was 100% democratic and capitalist tomorrow.
but the songs are tied to iPods so unless you're thinking of buying one you might consider to shop elsewhere. Look at it this way, after filling up your windows PC with iTunes songs how likely are you to buy an iPod, Apple TV, mac, etc? If Apple removed the strings attached to all your stuff then you might not be so likely to buy Apple stuff. Note that even free or independent stuff has to be m4p it's only recently they opened it up for EMI.
Russians like making thigs "backwards" they tend to find quick and dirty ways to defeat really high technology. I'm sure they've already pulled some form of satillite or IR sensor to watch for stealth aircraft. Also, you'd have to guard the planes so that if they get shot down you can blow them in to smaller pieces.. great way to trust you pilots!
but theirs will tranform a la Robotech or Gundam!! They'll mix some ASIMO tech in there for good measure... it that respect they are two decades a head of the US. Building high tech planes is easy compared to microprocessors or advanced electronics or robots which they're way ahead of us at doing.
unless you happen to be a small country the USA wants to attack and they shoot at YOUR planes with missles from 100 miles away before your pilots can even see the other planes. Once both sides have stealth, it's back to man-vs-man... like it should be.
sounds like it has similar stealthiness to an F22... and this is just the MODEL. The kicker is that if they really wanted air superiority, they could stop selling the USA the high tech sensor arrays used to detect stealth aircraft in the first place. most of that stuff is made in Taiwan or Japan now.
is that if you want to keep Japan "on a leash" you have to sell them the technological arms. They already are already 5-10 year ahead of the USA in electronics, processors, and 20 years ahead in manufacturing. The last thing we need is for them to feel the need to build their own weapons at this level. They're capable of buying 1 F-22 and exactly cloning it in under a year... I'd hate to see them try to "fix" the designs a la Honda or Toyota manufacturing methods. Chinese engineers don't have all tech yet so even if they get the plans they aren't quite capable of building aircraft and making them reliable.... Imagine a military aircraft built to Toyota or Honda levels of reilabiltiy and efficency... US military equipment only has field life of hundred of hours... I'd bet the Japaneese could hit that 10x without trying.
Of course with Japan's fetish for robots, I'd expect them to already be ahead of the US in unmaned flight as well. The combination of the two would put Japan as the leader in tech in 5 years for all of Asia. with China becomming increasingly hostile Japan probably feels the need to load up with high tech weapons fast so they can beat China down.
actually now is the time to buy up the first run players with poor DRM implementations. Then it weighs the format down with baggage so the "cool" features to the execs don't work and can't be relied on in the future. The formats are pretty stable if you don't give them quarter to turn up the DRM without upsetting customers.
Personally I think Sony is throttling Blu-ray for just that reason. Microsoft is pushing the cheapest possible HD-DVD everywhere which means build up of features that don't work as well as missing features from customer machines will slow it down. Blu-ray is almost always full-featured burners being sold. They cost more, but they're out there and getting more reasonable by the day. Also for content providers, the slower adoption will let Sony "fix" the DRM.. because how many people are really going to get bit by this.
It also keeps the cheap Chinese manufacturers away by introducing bugs they don't have channel to fix. Sony can easily afford to roll out 5 million patches as they have high capacity servers runnign all the time... what Chinese "sweatshop" company can do that? Being as there's almost no HDVDVD burners out there, adding HDDVD read-only to blu-ray writers is really cheap...and the playback software is the same. HD writers are outlandishly expensive and probably discouraged for "piracy" concerns.
Re:Draw your own conclusions...
on
ZOMG New Zunes
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· Score: 3, Informative
can't buy tracks from the largest online sellers that support windows OS.. napster, walmart, itms.... doesn't work on my mac.... no web surfing or 3rd party software hacks.
it's been mentioned here before that the DRM benifits Apple as much as music companies. After all Apple runs iTunes to sell iPods, if you aren't buying iPods then they don't want you wasting their bits. The labels don't like being "used" to help Apple get bigger selling iPods while being reduced to "value added" extras.
I'd like bug fixes and the product to be "refreshed" at least as long as the 1 year warranty...when I get the product within 1 month of being new... that's not too much to expect. In the case of the 20GB photo iPod it was a "midseason" refresh and only marketed for 3 months!! At least the 2nd gen nano I got made it almost 1 full year. I purchased it with in the week it was released, and it was still obsolete before the warranty was expired!!!
Particularly with iPhone (and Apple TV), they've already "bragged" the accounting was extended for up to 2 years. Does that mean we'd get updates the whole time? That was Apple's excuse for the $5 update to add wireless features. Or was it just marketing spin? My issue is that mac stuff is supposed to cost more because it lasts longer.. and for the most part it does.. but if Apple's not going to back up products in the WARRANTY period that's a little scarry.
they're doing something to check for "tampered" phones, but still running the update anyway. There's a bunch of things Apple could have done differently, from simply not running the update to requesting that the user put the correct data in then load the new improved lock software. Like you said, the phone is not "bricked" but they deliberately leave an error they refuse to correct at the shop.
In my opinion that is "malicious prosecution" of the contract terms. Because the phone still physically works it is obvious that the phone COULD be fixed, Apple is refusing. Also, the update does not stop if it will fail.. To use a car analogy, this would be like having an unwarranted mod, nox, stereo equipment on your ride. When you take the car in for a routine oil change they say you're out of warranty.. and cut the offending parts off your car with a chainsaw rendering it undriveable.. when you drove it into the shop just fine. Then telling you that it's "your problem" it's not under warranty.
Apple is clearly self destructing at an alarming rate. Products with half-implemented features, then locked down to ridiculous levels (with out any features) releasing new versions without looking after current customers (I had the 20G photo they stopped updating after 3 months when 30GB video came out... very poor service after the purchase) The iPhone and Touch seem to be the top though. The pricing, and service locks, lack of development platform even after it was cracked... the $200 price drop at 60 days, dud screens on Touch, now disabling the devices. Somebody is getting high off those fumes from the freshly printed money they're raking in. Not to mention they sacrificed their core OS Leopard to make this "innovation" happen? I like Tiger better than Win XP but Leopard is way late... should have been out in the spring and it's holding up development for the core group of Apple fanbois that just want to do cool stuff.
but in reality, justifying precision more than 4 significant places is really difficult using proper scientific/engineering methods. For instance 4 decimal places in surveying takes you to an inch range even over a mile of distance with hand tools. Average slide rules can do 2-3 fancy ones can hit that last place.
everybody LIKES new and shiny. It's fun to get new computers. On the other hand, Vista has taken a lot of work to get working for the IT staff that use it as more of a toy. We can't give it to regular users in that condition so we've got to wipe it and put the XP site-license on to get real work done.
note, I'm not the windows fan... I showed them my new macbook once... and I think they'll hurt it if they see it again.
copyright is a legal monopoly. The author of a GPL program is bound by no contratual terms to the user or re-user of the code, but they are always 100% protected. That's what I meet about not being able to refuse the terms. A copyright license can't be refused by the user or re-user... it's terms are already set as one-sided by the goverment. The author may grant you some extra things but it's exactly that Extra, they didn't have to let you do ANYTHING with the copy. If you don't agree with the license your only course is not to reproduce the copyrighted material. That's the only recourse in copyright law.
Else where I pointed out this is about trying to make GPL a "contract"... the other shoe to the story is that once the courts treat it as contract it removes the wammy card of stopping distribution. Then they argue in the contract suit that the work was not distributed for money so no harm was done... It's a separate suit, so the original case doesn't apply to the new one for "fairness". That would effectively gut Open Source to being pseudo-public-domain.
I've said before, to seriously hurt windows market share, the real price of windows needs to be made apparent. Now Microsoft is allowed to hide the real cost OEMs pay AND keep OEMS from seeing what each other are paying for the same thing. Being as large OEMs are partially complicit in the monopoly situation, the most fair thing for everybody would be to fix the price of Windows at the first published, RAND price available... the RETAIL price would work as no OEM agreements are required. As Microsoft is a monopoly, everybody can pay THAT price and get full retail rights of first sale, moving to different computers, virtualizing, etc. Lots of things get really simple. Microsoft can't complain as they will make boatloads of money with the new higher price, they wouldn't be pricing it too low with unfair restrictions now would they:P
The whole point of this would of course to increase competition by not allowing Microsoft to hide it's pricing nor to retaliate against OEMs that choose to explore options. Having 100% published, non-contractual pricing is the first step. As Microsoft is already a monopoly it's the easiest and most fair step.
planesdragon is right, in the 1700's North America was a far away as Mars is now. But King George still tried to keep an army here debating pennies on tea leaves and return on investments instead of understanding the colonies would grow up and the world would get much smaller. Of course it took Austrailla, Canada, and even in the 1900's India and Argentina to succeed before England "got it". Space is the same way. It will take a governments resources to get there, and private monopolies to exploit it, but ultimately Thomas Jefferson was right that All men have the right to live in their own way. Where you live and make your home you cannot be "managed"... that is ALWAYS the flaw in the plan. At the point you are forced to make your own way and fend for yourself thru force of will in treking on your own, or thru accident of chance, you are your own "people" by the natural order of nature.
To mix Sci-fi and History what was explored in the Gundam series of space colonies Vs. earth is much the same as the North American colonies Vs. England in the 1700s. That story is a pretty good approxamation of what will happen. Although I'd add more of an Aliens twist with one or two companies controlling everything you own or do. The employer, IP owner, Landlord and Bank.
no, the govt will just declare "national security" and take the technology. then those who are good at sucking up and filing paper work will get the technology and the profits. I'd be like if you got a boat and discovered a new country... what's to stop other countries from following later and simply shooting you to take what you've found. The first 300 years of US history from 1492 to 1792 is all about nations in europe requiring "permits" and thousands of people being killed over their petty paperwork disagreements.
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you were meaning to say that some of out lawyers in the USA got out.. not what we meet to export... sorry about that.
i never understood why BROADCAST radio regulated by the FCC was not considered 'public performance' by the FCC as the stations already pay per listener. Isn't it double-dipping to charge players of public radio? More than that the radio station buys the rights to air songs to the public already. It's expected that they can sell their performance to gain advertising dollars for broadcasting, last I checked I don't have any kind of FCC license to listen to the public radio (and in the UK don't they already pay radio tax) and wouldn't suing people for listing to the radio performance be some kind of "slander of title" against the rights to broadcast and royalties paid by commercial radio stations?
In the USA, it's ASCAP/BMI you have to worry about.. the songwriters guild, they already do exactly this same thing. Because they started out on the lawsuit train much sooner they beat the recording publishers to the easy money. That's why in the USA the royalties radio pays are to ASCAP/BMI. The recent Soundforge was created under law to server the RIAA and they are trying to get recording royalties established starting with Web radio.
Women are better at killing than men, just not as well trained yet. Of course once technology reaches a certain point (bullets don't cut thru armor, missiles can't lock, explosives powerful enough to damage the machines kill too many civilians, remote control "toys" don't work and your left beating each other with glorified "sticks" again, in really big suits of armor.
You miss the theme of most "giant robot" stories is that you can have the power to squish masses of people all day, but it still won't solve the real problems unless you stop squishing people and talk about them.
You really don't understand just how far behind the USA is in manufacturing technology. Sure we have the brightest people, but we lack govt, corporate, and personal discipline to get results. We allow the "free market" to determine our fate and allow crazy ass backwards things in our business society. What companies like GM are touting as "great advances" in the last 15 years are all things Japanese were learning and doing 40 years ago. It's not the ACT of making things, it's the discipline of LEARNING to make things that they excel at. The US still thinks business is "cowboys and indians", Japan thinks of business as "ants marching".. China is a cloud of locust.... Japanese and German companies outsource to the USA because WE are the "unwashed" cheap labor. Japan and Germany dominate the market of making the machines that MAKE the machines we use every day. The USA lost that crown about 5 years ago, we buy more advanced tooling than we sell now. The USA has lost the ability to DELIVER on innovation, the Japanese are hitting their peak but nobody talks about it over here.
Exactly what I was getting at. Finally. The issue is that Japan is very good at implementing technology if they put their govt leverage behind it. They're designing for public problems 20-50 years out and what Japan would look like then. They do it with pubic support and corporate backing and enthusiasm that the USA just doesn't get.
Unlike US defense contractors, the Japanese companies that would be tapped for military contracts have track records for excellent execution of their products... there's no reason to think that wouldn't extend to military production as well. People forget that the Japanese production methods are universal, and ingrained in nearly all their management of anything. It's only in the USA that we have some backwards idea that military products are hard to make. We just allow crappy management to spend vast sums of money and not deliver the product on time and on budget. That's not the case over there, the corporate and pubic ethos is much different bad business is not tolerated like it is here.
You force Japan's hand and you could have "gundam" level hardware in 10 years. It's not that hard, cars are built with robots faster and more accurate than you need to fight with, Asimo is only missing time resources, not tech, it's a matter of not being a necessity to put the pieces together in that fashion. All of the best CNC/robotics is built in Germany or Japan... ironically both countries that can't produce actual weapons so their companies find other things to make money.the short leash is that if the US doesn't sell tactical planes to Japan they have no way to seriously fight back should the Chinese launch short range missiles against them. Things are heating up and Japan has been a very good kid for the last 60 years. There's no reason NOT to trust them as an ally except to keep them dependent for political leverage in the region.
Historically though, it's the Japanese that are more cruel and kill more people. Prior to WW2 Japan had probably killed more people in Southeast Asia than Germany came close to... and not on some "grand plan" like Germany, but just routine raping and pillaging. While Japan is our Ally and seems to be flying straight, China has a lot of bad history with them to get "payback" for. Chinese antagonism against Japan would be there even if China was 100% democratic and capitalist tomorrow.
but the songs are tied to iPods so unless you're thinking of buying one you might consider to shop elsewhere. Look at it this way, after filling up your windows PC with iTunes songs how likely are you to buy an iPod, Apple TV, mac, etc? If Apple removed the strings attached to all your stuff then you might not be so likely to buy Apple stuff. Note that even free or independent stuff has to be m4p it's only recently they opened it up for EMI.
Russians like making thigs "backwards" they tend to find quick and dirty ways to defeat really high technology. I'm sure they've already pulled some form of satillite or IR sensor to watch for stealth aircraft. Also, you'd have to guard the planes so that if they get shot down you can blow them in to smaller pieces.. great way to trust you pilots!
but theirs will tranform a la Robotech or Gundam!! They'll mix some ASIMO tech in there for good measure... it that respect they are two decades a head of the US. Building high tech planes is easy compared to microprocessors or advanced electronics or robots which they're way ahead of us at doing.
unless you happen to be a small country the USA wants to attack and they shoot at YOUR planes with missles from 100 miles away before your pilots can even see the other planes. Once both sides have stealth, it's back to man-vs-man... like it should be.
sounds like it has similar stealthiness to an F22... and this is just the MODEL. The kicker is that if they really wanted air superiority, they could stop selling the USA the high tech sensor arrays used to detect stealth aircraft in the first place. most of that stuff is made in Taiwan or Japan now.
is that if you want to keep Japan "on a leash" you have to sell them the technological arms. They already are already 5-10 year ahead of the USA in electronics, processors, and 20 years ahead in manufacturing. The last thing we need is for them to feel the need to build their own weapons at this level. They're capable of buying 1 F-22 and exactly cloning it in under a year... I'd hate to see them try to "fix" the designs a la Honda or Toyota manufacturing methods. Chinese engineers don't have all tech yet so even if they get the plans they aren't quite capable of building aircraft and making them reliable.... Imagine a military aircraft built to Toyota or Honda levels of reilabiltiy and efficency... US military equipment only has field life of hundred of hours... I'd bet the Japaneese could hit that 10x without trying.
Of course with Japan's fetish for robots, I'd expect them to already be ahead of the US in unmaned flight as well. The combination of the two would put Japan as the leader in tech in 5 years for all of Asia. with China becomming increasingly hostile Japan probably feels the need to load up with high tech weapons fast so they can beat China down.
actually now is the time to buy up the first run players with poor DRM implementations. Then it weighs the format down with baggage so the "cool" features to the execs don't work and can't be relied on in the future. The formats are pretty stable if you don't give them quarter to turn up the DRM without upsetting customers.
Personally I think Sony is throttling Blu-ray for just that reason. Microsoft is pushing the cheapest possible HD-DVD everywhere which means build up of features that don't work as well as missing features from customer machines will slow it down. Blu-ray is almost always full-featured burners being sold. They cost more, but they're out there and getting more reasonable by the day. Also for content providers, the slower adoption will let Sony "fix" the DRM.. because how many people are really going to get bit by this.
It also keeps the cheap Chinese manufacturers away by introducing bugs they don't have channel to fix. Sony can easily afford to roll out 5 million patches as they have high capacity servers runnign all the time... what Chinese "sweatshop" company can do that? Being as there's almost no HDVDVD burners out there, adding HDDVD read-only to blu-ray writers is really cheap...and the playback software is the same. HD writers are outlandishly expensive and probably discouraged for "piracy" concerns.
can't buy tracks from the largest online sellers that support windows OS.. napster, walmart, itms.... doesn't work on my mac.... no web surfing or 3rd party software hacks.
it's been mentioned here before that the DRM benifits Apple as much as music companies. After all Apple runs iTunes to sell iPods, if you aren't buying iPods then they don't want you wasting their bits. The labels don't like being "used" to help Apple get bigger selling iPods while being reduced to "value added" extras.
I'd like bug fixes and the product to be "refreshed" at least as long as the 1 year warranty...when I get the product within 1 month of being new... that's not too much to expect. In the case of the 20GB photo iPod it was a "midseason" refresh and only marketed for 3 months!! At least the 2nd gen nano I got made it almost 1 full year. I purchased it with in the week it was released, and it was still obsolete before the warranty was expired!!! Particularly with iPhone (and Apple TV), they've already "bragged" the accounting was extended for up to 2 years. Does that mean we'd get updates the whole time? That was Apple's excuse for the $5 update to add wireless features. Or was it just marketing spin? My issue is that mac stuff is supposed to cost more because it lasts longer.. and for the most part it does.. but if Apple's not going to back up products in the WARRANTY period that's a little scarry.
they're doing something to check for "tampered" phones, but still running the update anyway. There's a bunch of things Apple could have done differently, from simply not running the update to requesting that the user put the correct data in then load the new improved lock software. Like you said, the phone is not "bricked" but they deliberately leave an error they refuse to correct at the shop.
In my opinion that is "malicious prosecution" of the contract terms. Because the phone still physically works it is obvious that the phone COULD be fixed, Apple is refusing. Also, the update does not stop if it will fail.. To use a car analogy, this would be like having an unwarranted mod, nox, stereo equipment on your ride. When you take the car in for a routine oil change they say you're out of warranty.. and cut the offending parts off your car with a chainsaw rendering it undriveable.. when you drove it into the shop just fine. Then telling you that it's "your problem" it's not under warranty.
Apple is clearly self destructing at an alarming rate. Products with half-implemented features, then locked down to ridiculous levels (with out any features) releasing new versions without looking after current customers (I had the 20G photo they stopped updating after 3 months when 30GB video came out... very poor service after the purchase) The iPhone and Touch seem to be the top though. The pricing, and service locks, lack of development platform even after it was cracked... the $200 price drop at 60 days, dud screens on Touch, now disabling the devices. Somebody is getting high off those fumes from the freshly printed money they're raking in. Not to mention they sacrificed their core OS Leopard to make this "innovation" happen? I like Tiger better than Win XP but Leopard is way late... should have been out in the spring and it's holding up development for the core group of Apple fanbois that just want to do cool stuff.
but in reality, justifying precision more than 4 significant places is really difficult using proper scientific/engineering methods. For instance 4 decimal places in surveying takes you to an inch range even over a mile of distance with hand tools. Average slide rules can do 2-3 fancy ones can hit that last place.
everybody LIKES new and shiny. It's fun to get new computers. On the other hand, Vista has taken a lot of work to get working for the IT staff that use it as more of a toy. We can't give it to regular users in that condition so we've got to wipe it and put the XP site-license on to get real work done.
note, I'm not the windows fan... I showed them my new macbook once... and I think they'll hurt it if they see it again.
copyright is a legal monopoly. The author of a GPL program is bound by no contratual terms to the user or re-user of the code, but they are always 100% protected. That's what I meet about not being able to refuse the terms. A copyright license can't be refused by the user or re-user... it's terms are already set as one-sided by the goverment. The author may grant you some extra things but it's exactly that Extra, they didn't have to let you do ANYTHING with the copy. If you don't agree with the license your only course is not to reproduce the copyrighted material. That's the only recourse in copyright law. ... the other shoe to the story is that once the courts treat it as contract it removes the wammy card of stopping distribution. Then they argue in the contract suit that the work was not distributed for money so no harm was done... It's a separate suit, so the original case doesn't apply to the new one for "fairness". That would effectively gut Open Source to being pseudo-public-domain.
Else where I pointed out this is about trying to make GPL a "contract"
I've said before, to seriously hurt windows market share, the real price of windows needs to be made apparent. Now Microsoft is allowed to hide the real cost OEMs pay AND keep OEMS from seeing what each other are paying for the same thing. Being as large OEMs are partially complicit in the monopoly situation, the most fair thing for everybody would be to fix the price of Windows at the first published, RAND price available... the RETAIL price would work as no OEM agreements are required. As Microsoft is a monopoly, everybody can pay THAT price and get full retail rights of first sale, moving to different computers, virtualizing, etc. Lots of things get really simple. Microsoft can't complain as they will make boatloads of money with the new higher price, they wouldn't be pricing it too low with unfair restrictions now would they:P
The whole point of this would of course to increase competition by not allowing Microsoft to hide it's pricing nor to retaliate against OEMs that choose to explore options. Having 100% published, non-contractual pricing is the first step. As Microsoft is already a monopoly it's the easiest and most fair step.
planesdragon is right, in the 1700's North America was a far away as Mars is now. But King George still tried to keep an army here debating pennies on tea leaves and return on investments instead of understanding the colonies would grow up and the world would get much smaller. Of course it took Austrailla, Canada, and even in the 1900's India and Argentina to succeed before England "got it". Space is the same way. It will take a governments resources to get there, and private monopolies to exploit it, but ultimately Thomas Jefferson was right that All men have the right to live in their own way. Where you live and make your home you cannot be "managed"... that is ALWAYS the flaw in the plan. At the point you are forced to make your own way and fend for yourself thru force of will in treking on your own, or thru accident of chance, you are your own "people" by the natural order of nature.
To mix Sci-fi and History what was explored in the Gundam series of space colonies Vs. earth is much the same as the North American colonies Vs. England in the 1700s. That story is a pretty good approxamation of what will happen. Although I'd add more of an Aliens twist with one or two companies controlling everything you own or do. The employer, IP owner, Landlord and Bank.
no, the govt will just declare "national security" and take the technology. then those who are good at sucking up and filing paper work will get the technology and the profits. I'd be like if you got a boat and discovered a new country... what's to stop other countries from following later and simply shooting you to take what you've found. The first 300 years of US history from 1492 to 1792 is all about nations in europe requiring "permits" and thousands of people being killed over their petty paperwork disagreements.