The other solution is to severely limit the ways out of Jury duty.
I'm living in Australia and I got called up last year. I could postpone it for up to 6 months, and there were the usual disqualifications for members of law enforcement and certain kinds of convicted criminals, but pretty much everyone else had no way out. Led to a lot smarter jury pool than I'd been led to expect.
And in this market, you really think Google could actually afford to do that? To have the next android update remove Davlik and break every non native app? To fragment their app market into "old devices" and "new devices"? Not to mention reducing their developer pool to people who can actually write native Linux binaries.
If it was as easy as "sadly setting aside" they'd have done it by now and saved themselves the cost of a lawsuit.
I've had people tell me that LCD's actually generate close to the same amount of heat, but when in University I worked in a computer lab which switched and it was noticeably cooler. This was however a state school with a shared heating system between multiple buildings which meant that they did some silly things like turning the heat on and off based on a calendar not the weather, so I can't attest scientifically that this was based entirely on the LCD switch over.
I don't know about socialism, but one could argue a lot of America's historic and current prosperity was brought about by things like the national highway system which allows for the transportation of goods, the telephone network, the internet built on top of that telephone network, the electricity grid, running water, etc all of which are and were paid for by public dollars. The public education system which allows a lot of its employees to gain their skills also helps them some. You might also argue that Apple has some sort of obligation to ensure that they pump at least a little money back into the US economy, if only so that their American customers can afford to keep buying their overpriced products, but that's for another day.
With very rare exceptions every US resident has benefited in at least some way from public infrastructure, including every single person using Slashdot.
The essence of the argument is that if millionaires had more money to spare they would use it to employ people regardless of the ROI for that employment. That if a corporation encounters another 50 grand extra cash it will hire someone with it. Never mind that money spent on starting up a new idea can already be deducted from your taxes and that Reagan dropping the highest tax rate from 70% to 35% didn't lead to any dramatic job creation. There's an argument to be made that certain activities which are currently not viable because they don't generate enough revenue to be worthwhile might cross the border into viability with a lower tax rate, but the number of those activities would be vanishingly small and would still have fairly crappy returns and high risk.
It's essentially an argument which ignores supply and demand. So called "job creators" act on the supply side of the equation, they produce goods or services which are consumed by others. As anyone with even basic economic knowledge knows, expanding supply without commensurate demand drives down prices. Now we can presume commensurate demand does not exist because if it did tax rates wouldn't be stopping companies from meeting that demand, so we can also assume that no one is going to increase supply regardless of how much money they might have.
There are a couple relatively obvious ways the federal government can create jobs in the private sector. The simplest is income redistribution, give money to poor people and they spend it increasing demand and creating Jobs(though not necessarily American jobs). In the US we don't like this because it's the wrong kind of socialism. It's perfectly ok to provide a moral hazard by socializing risk and privatizing gain if you're talking about rich people, but doing the same for the poor is unacceptable.
Another involves increasing workers rights by essentially eliminating "at will" employment. This doesn't as such directly increase demand, but it would make it easier for employees to say no to doing the work of multiple people, which would mean that the false efficiencies companies are currently enjoying would disappear. This is partly unpopular for all of the above reasons, but also because while there would be a net job gain, there would probably be job losses in some sectors.
Many other ways exist which would serve the same purpose, but they'd all be rejected in the current American political climate because in the US the wealthy have sold a bill of goods to the population convincing them either that they will one day be rich enough to be affected by the buffet rule and so should vote against it or that, and I honestly have no idea how this works, private enterprise would take care of them much better than the government does, how this meshes with the accusation that the US has become an oligarchy or the entirety of American history I do not understand. Libertarians seem to believe that the US has become a corporate dictatorship so as a solution they want to remove the middle man and go straight to a corporate dictatorship. Mind you, we are talking about the same voting population who 4 years after Wall Street caused the biggest global economic melt down in close to a century through pure greed and stupidity is objecting to the implementation of any kind of regulation of the baking and finance sector. The GFC should have thoroughly discredited neoconservatism since the ideology proved to be wrong in every respect, but 4 years later we're still having the same arguments.
This is the most ridiculous states rights argument I've ever heard. As if the state legislatures aren't even more corrupt and special interest influenced than the federal one.
I meant iTunes as the store, not the app, the app doesn't really matter at the moment.
In terms of Office being multiple things I meant, Office itself, Sharepoint, Exchange, Office 365, etc, not Excel, Word, etc.
Nor did I say Microsoft had a huge product range, merely that it wasn't the same as the old days when they had installed office and a couple versions of Windows.
A large percentage of Apple's success is due to the premium they can charge for the iPod/Phone/Pad and related equipment. The profit margins they make are ridiculous, and they get a lot of that profit off the back of poorly paid Chinese labor. Of course they deserve a lot of that credit, they saw what people wanted in mp3 players, and phones, and while I don't think the iPad is technically a tablet, they created the market for whatever it is. My point was that most of their innovation spawns from one or two great ideas the same as Microsoft, and for that matter most companies. There are also some major question marks hanging over the companies future now that Steve Jobs is dead, but we'll see how that turns out.
Folks are constantly seeing Microsoft as it was 10 years ago with the Office Suite and Windows as the only remotely successful things in their catalog propping up everything else. That's not been true for a while now anymore than Apple is just computers anymore.
That's true, but those product lines are bigger than you'd think, and Apple has fewer product lines than you think. Office is a gigantic ecosystem including cloud services, it's technically one product but it contains a huge number of sub products. Windows is again a whole bunch of different stuff, though it's probably a shrinking not growing portion of their product set. SQL server is also quite a money spinner these days. The days when Microsoft made all their money on sales of Office for the Desktop and Windows are long gone, even if those two centers are still most of their profit.
Contrasting with apple, if you look more closely, apple have, OSX which makes them no money and Macs which haven't had a significant market share increase in decades. Then you've essentially got the iPhone, the iPhone without the phone, and a bigger iPhone without a phone plus iTunes which feeds the previous three products. The vast majority of Apple's income comes from iTunes and three different variations of exactly the same device.
Of course both are better than Google which has an advertising business and products which operate at a loss to feed people into their advertising business. If a competitor managed to take a significant chunk of the advertising business Google would probably go under.
They don't cut it because it's more complicated than the Microsoft bashers let on.
Microsoft builds search for enterprise, a space where it is very successful, more popular, and a darned site cheaper than Google's offerings. Bing is Sharepoint search for the public, sure it isn't really taking any market share, but that doesn't really matter, because they're getting the kind of test volume which you can't do for in internal product. MSN messenger is the same deal. Microsoft makes no money off of it, but they make a crap tonne off Exchange and Lync which use the same technologies.
The whole purpose of Microsoft's on-line services division is to get people used to the Microsoft interface and get additional testing data for their enterprise products. Hell, Google search doesn't actually make Google any money either, it's a portal for their advertising business.
Folks on sharepoint will tell you that Bing sucks(it doesn't, though it's not as good as Google), and that since it's not taking market share from Google it must be a failure. They'll tell you that Microsoft jumped into the Search business because they feel they must because of Google, none of which is entirely accurate. No one makes any money on internet search, they make money on advertising associated with search and right now, Google has online advertising totally locked up. Making money on internet search is however, not the only reason for having a search product, or a messaging client, or anything else.
I don't know if they bought the judge, I believe probably not, but the point is that they've found a judge sympathetic to their cause.
As to whether they need a license, Oracle insist that they do and Oracle's license terms seem to back them up. The legal question is therefor, "Is Oracle Right". History seems to indicate that they are as Sun won exactly this same lawsuit against Microsoft a while back, Microsoft didn't call their implementation Java either, but they still lost. Google seems to believe that they aren't, or at least has backed themselves into a corner where it's their only viable choice.
My biggest concern with this case is that it was incredibly stupid on Google's part to get into this position in the first place. Sun and then Oracle's opinion on their licensing terms have been well known in the industry far longer than Android has been around, Google lawyers would have been perfectly aware of this. They almost certainly could have sorted something out that would cost them far less than what this is, and the same goes for Sun.
I was responding to a specific poster who is continuing to spread the idiocy that this lawsuit is about a license for the JVM vs using an open source alternative. According to Oracle's licensing, the only legal implementation of Java for mobile is the official JME, Blackdown, OpenJRE, etc, all legal for Desktop and Server, not for mobile.
The crux of this case is not whether Google needed a license, Google violated Sun's license terms by making Davlik, it is explicitly against said terms. The issue really comes down to whether Sun, and now Oracle's license terms are legally enforceable. Google seems to have drawn or bought a friendly judge, which is helping them a lot, but they've still got some issues to sort out.
Personally I quite like top posting, because it's more efficient for me.
Having the train of conversation is important and useful, but if I remember what the e-mail was about I just want to know what you've added. Bottom posting makes that more work, and interleaved posting is just abhorrent for any number of reasons.
There are no legally licensed mobile implementations of Java, never have been(at least according to Oracle).
You can implement Java however you like, wherever you like, but the license therefor requires that your implementation pass the TCK. The TCK is not open source, and is licensed for use only on desktops and servers, explicitly. This is stupid, but it's part of Sun's legacy of trying to actually make enough money to not get bought by Oracle, a plan they failed at.
The point of the e-mail is to show that Google were aware they needed a license and so the infringement was willful which increases the penalties. If he was wrong then it doesn't really matter what he said since willful won't matter.
In actuality they don't have the power to dictate how efficient your light bulbs or toilet are. You can have as inefficient a light bulb as you like.
The power they do have, which is granted them by the interstate commerce clause, is the right to dictate what kind of light bulb an interstate entity can sell you.
Now in theory, if you can find yourself a light bulb manufacturer which is located entirely in your home state, and your home state doesn't use its powers to implement the same ban, you could buy an old style light bulb, but that scenario doesn't exist.
On your other points. Fresh water is actually fairly rare on earth, and even most places you think don't have a shortage are developing one as the covering of land with asphalt prevents the refilling of aquifers, and lighting is actually a substantial portion of power usage, especially in an office environment.
Every single one of them is different(well I don't know about twins as I have no experience with twins). This is the bit which every single non parent fails to understand. A child, from a very young age, is a person with free will and their own personality. They can and do make their own decisions, from the age of 18 months or even younger. You can provide an example to your child, you can use you power over them to force them to do certain things, but that's really about it. You can no more force a two year old to think a certain way than you can a 30 year old, you can make him or her go to daycare, make them put on clothes, but you can do that because you have physical power over them. Sometimes good parents raise shitty kids. Sometimes shitty parents raise good kids. Sometimes a technique that for one kid helps them to achieve all their dreams stunts the growth of another.
Sure there are some general rules like not blowing smoke into your kids face, but for the most part parenting is a matter of patience and faith. You try to be the best role model you can be, you have the patience to love them even when they fail and you have faith, sometimes unrewarded, that they will turn out, at the very least, a little bit better than you did. All the rest of it is bullshit dreamed up by middle aged men who have never had kids or based on some parent's experiences that worked for their particular kid. No non parent ever understands this, they think that you have a kid, you perform actions A, B, and C for 20 years and then out comes a functional adult. Sorry, it doesn't work that way.
As for the whole orphans thing, there's reasonable evidence showing that pulling some kid out of their native country and raising them with no sense of their heritage or background can be damaging. Most foster kids are already so horrendously damaged that it takes more than most people have in them to try and turn that around.
It's legally incorrect because corporations are not people. The constitution doesn't make them people, nor does it grant them any kind of rights, the employees and owners of a corporation and they have rights to speech, but the corporation itself does not.
Personally I also believe that while campaign finance can be argued to be speech the constitution doesn't grant you any sort of guarantee that because you have more money to give you get to speak louder, any more than having a loud voice guarantees you the right to scream at midnight.
Aside from that, the current court has very little integrity and ignores the constitution or not on pretty much a whim. All indications are that the court will find the health care mandate unconstitutional, but when it came to medical marijuana the same court allowed the feds to use interstate commerce to override state laws. The Roberts court is partisan, it is more activist than any liberal court has ever been, and it inconsistently applies the constitution to support its political beliefs. The court has become a farce with no accountability to even the ethics rules they apply to other judges. I don't know what the fix is, but at present I'll not put their word to determine who is a tyrant.
If we had a supreme court which weren't a bunch of right wing nut jobs you might have a point, but I'd like my elected officials to go against the wishes of the douche bags who gave us the Citizens United decision.
Vista had issues because Microsoft was fighting the hardware vendors over who would blink. In this specific instance Microsoft was right as the new driver model was better. They put in DRM because it was a requirement for enabling blu-ray playback. They ditched that in Win 7 and so ditched the DRM. An unfortunate addition to Vista, but Microsoft as a US based publicly traded company has to play ball with the MPAA in a way Linux does not. I live on Australia and my Microsoft devices are the only hardware in my house that actually pays attention to region encoding in DVDs and the rest of it came that way off the shelf, most of it from Sony.
IE 6 was a crime, it's one Microsoft are paying for, and should continue to pay for. Leaving their browser alone for a decade has set everyone back years, including them they now seem to realize. Microsoft needs competition to survive, but its competition dies, at least in recent times, because Microsoft's offering is better, and this includes Netscape.
I don't know enough about the technical differences between OOXML and OD to judge this point.
Ogg Vorbis isn't used in the US because it is probably vulnerable to patent lawsuit(Ogg says it isn't, the MP3 patent holders say it is, a court hasn't decided), and it isn't used anywhere because the iPod doesn't support it and Apple has had a monopoly on the portable music player market for the last decade. Apple and patent law killed Vorbis.
I know you didn't claim the Oracle Microsoft thing, but the thread I was responding to did.
I'm aware of the copyright, I'm not sure that's going to wash. The fundamental issue in this case is that it never should have happened. Sun screwed up royally and Google had a fit of hubris and thought they'd test the agreement, now both sides are fairly desperate, Google seem to have found a sympathetic judge which has Oracle somewhat grasping at straws.
The net as a whole isn't going to win no matter who wins this lawsuit, but they weren't going to win if it hadn't been filed either.
The TCK has never been licensed for mobile, only ever for desktop and server. Not a great move on anyone's part, but it goes back to Sun, was continued by Oracle and has nothing to do with Microsoft.
The Java APIs are free to use so long as your implementation conforms to the TCK which as previously mentioned is not licensed for mobile platforms. Essentially by the terms of Sun's and now Oracle's licensing, there is no legal way to create a mobile version of Java. This is stupid and not in anyone's best interests, but the time to resolve that was before Davlik got created not after. As I've said before, an Oracle loss in this case spells the end of Java, and a loss for Google spells the end for android. There are serious consequences for both sides, and Sun should never have let it get this far, and nor should Google have been stupid enough to assume that Sun wouldn't have the money to sue them.
All that aside, Oracle is not acting on behalf of Microsoft, they're acting on behalf of Oracle, partially for sound economic reasons and probably not just a little bit because of spite and wounded pride. Microsoft is a threat to Oracle in every space they operate in, far far more than Google is Oracle is not going to do their bidding.
They bought it when they bought Sun, and then they sued Google for creating an incompatible version of Java (Davlik) and violating the terms under which they provided the Java patents free of charge. Pretty much exactly the same way that Sun sued Microsoft over J++, and entirely within Oracle's interests. There's plenty of argument over whether those patents should exist or apply in this case but I've never seen a claim by Google that they didn't do the above.
However, Google makes a phone and an OS(which no one uses) and so Microsoft must be behind it instead of perfectly rational Oracle self interest.
Microsoft takes other peoples freely available ideas and then extends and improves those ideas to the point where no one wants the original product anymore. Sucks for the original implementer, but it's not actually immoral. Unfair maybe, as the original implementer can't compete with Microsoft's cash, but still.
Slashdot Mirror
The other solution is to severely limit the ways out of Jury duty.
I'm living in Australia and I got called up last year. I could postpone it for up to 6 months, and there were the usual disqualifications for members of law enforcement and certain kinds of convicted criminals, but pretty much everyone else had no way out. Led to a lot smarter jury pool than I'd been led to expect.
And in this market, you really think Google could actually afford to do that? To have the next android update remove Davlik and break every non native app? To fragment their app market into "old devices" and "new devices"? Not to mention reducing their developer pool to people who can actually write native Linux binaries.
If it was as easy as "sadly setting aside" they'd have done it by now and saved themselves the cost of a lawsuit.
I've had people tell me that LCD's actually generate close to the same amount of heat, but when in University I worked in a computer lab which switched and it was noticeably cooler. This was however a state school with a shared heating system between multiple buildings which meant that they did some silly things like turning the heat on and off based on a calendar not the weather, so I can't attest scientifically that this was based entirely on the LCD switch over.
I don't know about socialism, but one could argue a lot of America's historic and current prosperity was brought about by things like the national highway system which allows for the transportation of goods, the telephone network, the internet built on top of that telephone network, the electricity grid, running water, etc all of which are and were paid for by public dollars. The public education system which allows a lot of its employees to gain their skills also helps them some. You might also argue that Apple has some sort of obligation to ensure that they pump at least a little money back into the US economy, if only so that their American customers can afford to keep buying their overpriced products, but that's for another day.
With very rare exceptions every US resident has benefited in at least some way from public infrastructure, including every single person using Slashdot.
You don't understand it because it's bullshit.
The essence of the argument is that if millionaires had more money to spare they would use it to employ people regardless of the ROI for that employment. That if a corporation encounters another 50 grand extra cash it will hire someone with it. Never mind that money spent on starting up a new idea can already be deducted from your taxes and that Reagan dropping the highest tax rate from 70% to 35% didn't lead to any dramatic job creation. There's an argument to be made that certain activities which are currently not viable because they don't generate enough revenue to be worthwhile might cross the border into viability with a lower tax rate, but the number of those activities would be vanishingly small and would still have fairly crappy returns and high risk.
It's essentially an argument which ignores supply and demand. So called "job creators" act on the supply side of the equation, they produce goods or services which are consumed by others. As anyone with even basic economic knowledge knows, expanding supply without commensurate demand drives down prices. Now we can presume commensurate demand does not exist because if it did tax rates wouldn't be stopping companies from meeting that demand, so we can also assume that no one is going to increase supply regardless of how much money they might have.
There are a couple relatively obvious ways the federal government can create jobs in the private sector. The simplest is income redistribution, give money to poor people and they spend it increasing demand and creating Jobs(though not necessarily American jobs). In the US we don't like this because it's the wrong kind of socialism. It's perfectly ok to provide a moral hazard by socializing risk and privatizing gain if you're talking about rich people, but doing the same for the poor is unacceptable.
Another involves increasing workers rights by essentially eliminating "at will" employment. This doesn't as such directly increase demand, but it would make it easier for employees to say no to doing the work of multiple people, which would mean that the false efficiencies companies are currently enjoying would disappear. This is partly unpopular for all of the above reasons, but also because while there would be a net job gain, there would probably be job losses in some sectors.
Many other ways exist which would serve the same purpose, but they'd all be rejected in the current American political climate because in the US the wealthy have sold a bill of goods to the population convincing them either that they will one day be rich enough to be affected by the buffet rule and so should vote against it or that, and I honestly have no idea how this works, private enterprise would take care of them much better than the government does, how this meshes with the accusation that the US has become an oligarchy or the entirety of American history I do not understand. Libertarians seem to believe that the US has become a corporate dictatorship so as a solution they want to remove the middle man and go straight to a corporate dictatorship. Mind you, we are talking about the same voting population who 4 years after Wall Street caused the biggest global economic melt down in close to a century through pure greed and stupidity is objecting to the implementation of any kind of regulation of the baking and finance sector. The GFC should have thoroughly discredited neoconservatism since the ideology proved to be wrong in every respect, but 4 years later we're still having the same arguments.
This is the most ridiculous states rights argument I've ever heard. As if the state legislatures aren't even more corrupt and special interest influenced than the federal one.
I meant iTunes as the store, not the app, the app doesn't really matter at the moment.
In terms of Office being multiple things I meant, Office itself, Sharepoint, Exchange, Office 365, etc, not Excel, Word, etc.
Nor did I say Microsoft had a huge product range, merely that it wasn't the same as the old days when they had installed office and a couple versions of Windows.
A large percentage of Apple's success is due to the premium they can charge for the iPod/Phone/Pad and related equipment. The profit margins they make are ridiculous, and they get a lot of that profit off the back of poorly paid Chinese labor. Of course they deserve a lot of that credit, they saw what people wanted in mp3 players, and phones, and while I don't think the iPad is technically a tablet, they created the market for whatever it is. My point was that most of their innovation spawns from one or two great ideas the same as Microsoft, and for that matter most companies. There are also some major question marks hanging over the companies future now that Steve Jobs is dead, but we'll see how that turns out.
Folks are constantly seeing Microsoft as it was 10 years ago with the Office Suite and Windows as the only remotely successful things in their catalog propping up everything else. That's not been true for a while now anymore than Apple is just computers anymore.
I mean that's what android is, an advertising supported OS.
That's true, but those product lines are bigger than you'd think, and Apple has fewer product lines than you think. Office is a gigantic ecosystem including cloud services, it's technically one product but it contains a huge number of sub products. Windows is again a whole bunch of different stuff, though it's probably a shrinking not growing portion of their product set. SQL server is also quite a money spinner these days. The days when Microsoft made all their money on sales of Office for the Desktop and Windows are long gone, even if those two centers are still most of their profit.
Contrasting with apple, if you look more closely, apple have, OSX which makes them no money and Macs which haven't had a significant market share increase in decades. Then you've essentially got the iPhone, the iPhone without the phone, and a bigger iPhone without a phone plus iTunes which feeds the previous three products. The vast majority of Apple's income comes from iTunes and three different variations of exactly the same device.
Of course both are better than Google which has an advertising business and products which operate at a loss to feed people into their advertising business. If a competitor managed to take a significant chunk of the advertising business Google would probably go under.
They don't cut it because it's more complicated than the Microsoft bashers let on.
Microsoft builds search for enterprise, a space where it is very successful, more popular, and a darned site cheaper than Google's offerings. Bing is Sharepoint search for the public, sure it isn't really taking any market share, but that doesn't really matter, because they're getting the kind of test volume which you can't do for in internal product. MSN messenger is the same deal. Microsoft makes no money off of it, but they make a crap tonne off Exchange and Lync which use the same technologies.
The whole purpose of Microsoft's on-line services division is to get people used to the Microsoft interface and get additional testing data for their enterprise products. Hell, Google search doesn't actually make Google any money either, it's a portal for their advertising business.
Folks on sharepoint will tell you that Bing sucks(it doesn't, though it's not as good as Google), and that since it's not taking market share from Google it must be a failure. They'll tell you that Microsoft jumped into the Search business because they feel they must because of Google, none of which is entirely accurate. No one makes any money on internet search, they make money on advertising associated with search and right now, Google has online advertising totally locked up. Making money on internet search is however, not the only reason for having a search product, or a messaging client, or anything else.
I don't know if they bought the judge, I believe probably not, but the point is that they've found a judge sympathetic to their cause.
As to whether they need a license, Oracle insist that they do and Oracle's license terms seem to back them up. The legal question is therefor, "Is Oracle Right". History seems to indicate that they are as Sun won exactly this same lawsuit against Microsoft a while back, Microsoft didn't call their implementation Java either, but they still lost. Google seems to believe that they aren't, or at least has backed themselves into a corner where it's their only viable choice.
My biggest concern with this case is that it was incredibly stupid on Google's part to get into this position in the first place. Sun and then Oracle's opinion on their licensing terms have been well known in the industry far longer than Android has been around, Google lawyers would have been perfectly aware of this. They almost certainly could have sorted something out that would cost them far less than what this is, and the same goes for Sun.
I was responding to a specific poster who is continuing to spread the idiocy that this lawsuit is about a license for the JVM vs using an open source alternative. According to Oracle's licensing, the only legal implementation of Java for mobile is the official JME, Blackdown, OpenJRE, etc, all legal for Desktop and Server, not for mobile.
The crux of this case is not whether Google needed a license, Google violated Sun's license terms by making Davlik, it is explicitly against said terms. The issue really comes down to whether Sun, and now Oracle's license terms are legally enforceable. Google seems to have drawn or bought a friendly judge, which is helping them a lot, but they've still got some issues to sort out.
Personally I quite like top posting, because it's more efficient for me.
Having the train of conversation is important and useful, but if I remember what the e-mail was about I just want to know what you've added. Bottom posting makes that more work, and interleaved posting is just abhorrent for any number of reasons.
There are no legally licensed mobile implementations of Java, never have been(at least according to Oracle).
You can implement Java however you like, wherever you like, but the license therefor requires that your implementation pass the TCK. The TCK is not open source, and is licensed for use only on desktops and servers, explicitly. This is stupid, but it's part of Sun's legacy of trying to actually make enough money to not get bought by Oracle, a plan they failed at.
Oracle are arguing that they needed a license.
The point of the e-mail is to show that Google were aware they needed a license and so the infringement was willful which increases the penalties. If he was wrong then it doesn't really matter what he said since willful won't matter.
In actuality they don't have the power to dictate how efficient your light bulbs or toilet are. You can have as inefficient a light bulb as you like.
The power they do have, which is granted them by the interstate commerce clause, is the right to dictate what kind of light bulb an interstate entity can sell you.
Now in theory, if you can find yourself a light bulb manufacturer which is located entirely in your home state, and your home state doesn't use its powers to implement the same ban, you could buy an old style light bulb, but that scenario doesn't exist.
On your other points. Fresh water is actually fairly rare on earth, and even most places you think don't have a shortage are developing one as the covering of land with asphalt prevents the refilling of aquifers, and lighting is actually a substantial portion of power usage, especially in an office environment.
Children are not machines, they are people.
Every single one of them is different(well I don't know about twins as I have no experience with twins). This is the bit which every single non parent fails to understand. A child, from a very young age, is a person with free will and their own personality. They can and do make their own decisions, from the age of 18 months or even younger. You can provide an example to your child, you can use you power over them to force them to do certain things, but that's really about it. You can no more force a two year old to think a certain way than you can a 30 year old, you can make him or her go to daycare, make them put on clothes, but you can do that because you have physical power over them. Sometimes good parents raise shitty kids. Sometimes shitty parents raise good kids. Sometimes a technique that for one kid helps them to achieve all their dreams stunts the growth of another.
Sure there are some general rules like not blowing smoke into your kids face, but for the most part parenting is a matter of patience and faith. You try to be the best role model you can be, you have the patience to love them even when they fail and you have faith, sometimes unrewarded, that they will turn out, at the very least, a little bit better than you did. All the rest of it is bullshit dreamed up by middle aged men who have never had kids or based on some parent's experiences that worked for their particular kid. No non parent ever understands this, they think that you have a kid, you perform actions A, B, and C for 20 years and then out comes a functional adult. Sorry, it doesn't work that way.
As for the whole orphans thing, there's reasonable evidence showing that pulling some kid out of their native country and raising them with no sense of their heritage or background can be damaging. Most foster kids are already so horrendously damaged that it takes more than most people have in them to try and turn that around.
In actuality we call this man "Newt Gingrich", Romney would still be where he is without Citizens United.
It's legally incorrect because corporations are not people. The constitution doesn't make them people, nor does it grant them any kind of rights, the employees and owners of a corporation and they have rights to speech, but the corporation itself does not.
Personally I also believe that while campaign finance can be argued to be speech the constitution doesn't grant you any sort of guarantee that because you have more money to give you get to speak louder, any more than having a loud voice guarantees you the right to scream at midnight.
Aside from that, the current court has very little integrity and ignores the constitution or not on pretty much a whim. All indications are that the court will find the health care mandate unconstitutional, but when it came to medical marijuana the same court allowed the feds to use interstate commerce to override state laws. The Roberts court is partisan, it is more activist than any liberal court has ever been, and it inconsistently applies the constitution to support its political beliefs. The court has become a farce with no accountability to even the ethics rules they apply to other judges. I don't know what the fix is, but at present I'll not put their word to determine who is a tyrant.
If we had a supreme court which weren't a bunch of right wing nut jobs you might have a point, but I'd like my elected officials to go against the wishes of the douche bags who gave us the Citizens United decision.
Vista had issues because Microsoft was fighting the hardware vendors over who would blink. In this specific instance Microsoft was right as the new driver model was better. They put in DRM because it was a requirement for enabling blu-ray playback. They ditched that in Win 7 and so ditched the DRM. An unfortunate addition to Vista, but Microsoft as a US based publicly traded company has to play ball with the MPAA in a way Linux does not. I live on Australia and my Microsoft devices are the only hardware in my house that actually pays attention to region encoding in DVDs and the rest of it came that way off the shelf, most of it from Sony.
IE 6 was a crime, it's one Microsoft are paying for, and should continue to pay for. Leaving their browser alone for a decade has set everyone back years, including them they now seem to realize. Microsoft needs competition to survive, but its competition dies, at least in recent times, because Microsoft's offering is better, and this includes Netscape.
I don't know enough about the technical differences between OOXML and OD to judge this point.
Ogg Vorbis isn't used in the US because it is probably vulnerable to patent lawsuit(Ogg says it isn't, the MP3 patent holders say it is, a court hasn't decided), and it isn't used anywhere because the iPod doesn't support it and Apple has had a monopoly on the portable music player market for the last decade. Apple and patent law killed Vorbis.
I know you didn't claim the Oracle Microsoft thing, but the thread I was responding to did.
I'm aware of the copyright, I'm not sure that's going to wash. The fundamental issue in this case is that it never should have happened. Sun screwed up royally and Google had a fit of hubris and thought they'd test the agreement, now both sides are fairly desperate, Google seem to have found a sympathetic judge which has Oracle somewhat grasping at straws.
The net as a whole isn't going to win no matter who wins this lawsuit, but they weren't going to win if it hadn't been filed either.
The TCK has never been licensed for mobile, only ever for desktop and server. Not a great move on anyone's part, but it goes back to Sun, was continued by Oracle and has nothing to do with Microsoft.
The Java APIs are free to use so long as your implementation conforms to the TCK which as previously mentioned is not licensed for mobile platforms. Essentially by the terms of Sun's and now Oracle's licensing, there is no legal way to create a mobile version of Java. This is stupid and not in anyone's best interests, but the time to resolve that was before Davlik got created not after. As I've said before, an Oracle loss in this case spells the end of Java, and a loss for Google spells the end for android. There are serious consequences for both sides, and Sun should never have let it get this far, and nor should Google have been stupid enough to assume that Sun wouldn't have the money to sue them.
All that aside, Oracle is not acting on behalf of Microsoft, they're acting on behalf of Oracle, partially for sound economic reasons and probably not just a little bit because of spite and wounded pride. Microsoft is a threat to Oracle in every space they operate in, far far more than Google is Oracle is not going to do their bidding.
They bought it when they bought Sun, and then they sued Google for creating an incompatible version of Java (Davlik) and violating the terms under which they provided the Java patents free of charge. Pretty much exactly the same way that Sun sued Microsoft over J++, and entirely within Oracle's interests. There's plenty of argument over whether those patents should exist or apply in this case but I've never seen a claim by Google that they didn't do the above.
However, Google makes a phone and an OS(which no one uses) and so Microsoft must be behind it instead of perfectly rational Oracle self interest.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Microsoft takes other peoples freely available ideas and then extends and improves those ideas to the point where no one wants the original product anymore. Sucks for the original implementer, but it's not actually immoral. Unfair maybe, as the original implementer can't compete with Microsoft's cash, but still.