The press is technically private in that it's not government, but it's not really private the way say a regular corporation(or even the newspapers parent company) is private. It's more like churches are, it's not government, but it's not private. There's a reason they refer to it as the 4th estate, it's because it is considered separate than the other three(government, church, private as I recall).
You don't need a name to send a warning to other staff and you don't need to say why someone was fired to say they're gone(or tell 1500 people that someone is going for any reason whatsoever if that person isn't a seriously senior manager).
The point is even an absolute defense doesn't give you carte blanche.
If someone attacks you with deadly force, you are allowed to respond with deadly force. It doesn't entitle you to tie up the person you attacked and slowly torture them to death.
Just so, truth is a defense against libel, but it shouldn't necessarily give you the right to destroy someone's reputation without good reason. There is no public interest in his former coworkers know why he lost his job, at least not one which overrides his right not to have it spread. It also appears that the law in question never allowed truth as an absolute defense of libel anyway.
The truth has never been an absolute defense against libel, even in the US. Nothing on erth is an absolute defense against anything.
Add to that the fact that I can't think of anything in the constitution prohibiting the states from abridging libel, the fact that proof of malice is actually a fairly reasonable legal test, the entity, if any , whose free speech is being abridged is a corporation, and that the law is actually a reasonably fair one (it abridges an individual/companies right to be an asshole, not their right to speak the truth).
Personally, unless the state law is unconstitutional(and I don't think it is or that the supreme court would bother with this one), he'll probably win. The company had no compelling reason to send that e-mail, most companies and/or individuals would not have sent it, and it harmed this individuals reputation and future prospects. Sounds a lot like malice to me.
The kernel and other big projects definitely prove that complex projects are possible, they don't however prove complex game development is possible.
Good games are about more than good programmers(which the open source movement has plenty of), they're about good artists, good writers, good testers, good designers, a whole raft of people with different talents and skills. They also don't generally get designed well by committee.
They also have to run on systems people actually have(which includes windows), provide them with what they want(as opposed to what the developers want), have really good user interfaces, be relatively innovative, and a whole bunch of other things FOSS has yet to prove to be good at.
So generally speaking, the answer to your question is that Open Source gaming is going to remain where it is now, a few very clever text based games, engines the big game houses have open sourced after they've extracted what money they're worth, and mediocre crap.
And what exactly do you think a 6 year government SOE project is? They may save money in the long run, but it's going to be the long run. A migration on that scale is a huge amount of cost and work.
True, but a laptop is an even less appropriate place to not commit data for 2.5 seconds because it's much more likely to have an unexpected power fault.
That application developers don't always get to choose what filesystem their application is being run on would be my guess.
Disk caching is a good thing(well at the moment, if/when SSD's become large enough and cheap enough to replace regular old spinning disks for speed dependent applications, then it probably won't be all that useful), it makes everything faster and more efficient. That said, 2.5 seconds is an absolutely huge amount of time in computer terms, even on a really slow PC these days that's thousands of operatings being executed before any attempt is even made to write the data to disk. It's a huge, and unecessary risk. Average latency on normal hard drives now is easily below 5 ms, queueing up for 30 times that to try and make things more efficient is just stupid.
The reason why it isn't an issue is that the math(at least as far as I've seen) indicates that, presuming reasonably random writes(which can be handled by the drive, and has nothing at all to do with what you're writing), if you write the volume of the disk a day it will last for about 30 years.
That increases and decreases as your writing decreases and increases, but realistically, but given that most regular hard drives only last 3-4 years you would have to be writing more than a terabyte a day to have the 120 GB flash last less time than a regular physical drive.
This is true, but generally speaking, when you have an armed gunman in one of the endpoints of a high security communication, you have bigger problems than cryptography.
I'm not really 100% sure of how I feel about this new law.
On the one hand, they still require reasonable cause and still have to go before a judge, the only real difference is they don't have to tell the person they're searching.
On the other hand, I don't really see what benefit the police can really derive from this. It's only really useful if you're planning on repeat searches of the same target, but aside from the fact that repeatedly searching people you have no evidence against is somewhat dodgy, I don't see it as being terribly likely that the kind of people they're looking for won't know they were there.
It's not like a police search is a tremendously subtle thing generally speaking.
However, basing your hiring decisions on the result may or may not be legal(depending on what result you get and where you live). Not hiring someone because of their race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation is illegal even in the US.
AFAIK there is limited case law on whether not hiring someone based on legal behaviour outside working hours which does not impact their ability to work(such as drinking or promiscuity). It's certainly not a case which would be dismissed out of hand.
The thing to remember is you can find out whatever information you want, but basing your decision on certain kinds of information already is or someday may be, illegal. If you don't know the information no one can claim you broke the law when you made your decision.
In other words, mind you own business or it may come back to bite you.
I think it comes down to, it comes down to the fact that regardless of what it means in theory, Libertarianism in practice tends to boil down to "I'm not paying you a cent and everyone else can go hang".
That's not to say that that's what Libertarianism actually means. Libertarianism is in essence a philosopy which centers around personal freedom and individual rights, which is a good and noble thing. Most arguments around libertarianism(from me at least) centre around what things constitute rights, and what the appropriate response is when rights conflict with each other.
The most vocal supporters of Libertarianism tend to have very narrow definitions of rights which largely consist of them having a lot of rights and very few responsibilities. These vocal supporters(or as I tend to think of them, self centred jerks) tend to give the whole thing a rather anarchist flavour and give people an idea that supporters might be against copyright.
More importantly of course, the argument that people have a right to share that information would have to come from a view of personal liberties and would likely be inherently libertarian.
Well to begin with, Joe needs to have a signed agreement with his financier regarding his invention in any event.
From there, the primary reason patents are expensive and difficult in the US is because the US is not a first to file system.
An incredible amount of money and time has to go into researching, verifying, and defending claims of prior art. The process is convoluted, arcane, and expensive.
In a first to file system, it doesn't have to be that way. Joe Blow should only need to fill out the required paperwork and ensure that his patent meets required criteria. Add a bit of a grace period for a limited number of re-files if it gets knocked back, and you're looking at maybe a couple of hours time with a halfway decent lawyer. Not pocket change, but certainly affordable without a massive loan.
It's not so much the Patent Pending label that's important it's actually having the pending patent.
There's no reason we can't have provisional approval for products that don't exist quite yet. The problem is patent protection for products which don't exist and which the patent holder never intends to actually create, or which are actually impossible to build beyond theory.
Essentially the basic question comes down to whether patents are designed to protect and promote ideas or whether they're designed to protect and promote implementation.
If you put stringent requirements on actual implementation of patents, you have the potential to shaft the little guy. You'd have to ensure a number of additional protections such as ensuring that large companies can't just refuse to fund new ideas and then develop them after the patent has expired due to lack of implementation. That's certainly possible to do though.
The flip side of that argument is that patents which aren't turned into products stifle innovation because they stop anyone else from developing said product, and harms society as a whole.
All that aside, patents which are overly generic, vague, or which even given full funding the "inventor" couldn't actually create, should not under any circumstances be granted, and should be culled where they have already been granted. To use an example that's been mentioned earlier. If you can build a tiny anti-gravity machine, but it's prohibitively expensive to build a full scale one without some other development, you should probably get a patent. If your full scale one cannot function without some additional development, then you haven't actually invented anything and you shouldn't.
NULL doesn't exactly represent your lack of an apple, your lack of an apple is actually quite easy to explain. If you ask someone, "Do you have an apple?", and they don't have an apple, they just say no.
What NULL is for is when someone asks you what kind of fruit you have and you don't have any fruit at all.
The only feasible answers to "What kind of fruit do you have?" when you have no fruit are to either answer nothing at all, or to say "none". Not answering is a rather useless thing to do, and "none" is essentially NULL. NULL (in databases) metaphorically is a special way of saying I exist, but I have no fruit.
Of course, this doesn't always apply to the non database concept. In a lot of older programming languages(C particularly), null(as opposed to NULL) is an unfinished bridge. You've started to build the bridge, but it doesn't actually go anywhere at all. So if you cross it you fall into the void and all sorts of bad things happen. What you really need(and a number of newer languages have this) is an actual NULL which represents a bridge to a brick wall. If you go racing across it, bad things still happen, but they happen in a sensible explicable way.
Well, assuming that the GP is correct, having google sell out of print works and pay royalties is certainly in the fiduciary interest of authors. Royalties on something are certainly better than royalties on nothing.
They may or may not be in the interest of publishers, but publishers can always make the book commercially available again if there is sufficient demand.
This is actually one of the biggest questions of copyright. If the holder of the copyright and/or the distribution rights doesn't want to distribute the work, does someone else have the right to distribute it, and at what level of compensation to the rights holder(s).
Books are actually a pretty good place to start since the royalty agreements for authors are reasonably well codified as far as I'm aware and copyright is almost never transferred to the publisher under these circumstances.
Realistically, a settlement on this issue is probably in the best interest of publishers because a court case actually determining whether distributions rights apply when you refused to disrtibute might not swing their way.
And if they're royalty fees for e-books aren't high enough because an e-book has a higher value than they thought, that's fine, they're free to try to renegotiate that if it's in their best interest(more sales == more royalties in the end).
What they shouldn't get is an additional royalty fee because an e-book "might" be used in a TTS system, and that that TTS feature "might" cause someone who would otherwise have bought an audio book to not buy one.
This isn't an audio book, it isn't two sales, it's one sale, based on whatever royalties agreements they have on e-books. An e-book could always have been used in a TTS system so this isn't a new possibility. A lot of things have to change in business models to deal with the new way of things. Instead of doing that, a lot of people, this guy included, want to use the old rules in ways which don't apply. This is not a separate sale, and so there should only be one payment, what that payment is what might be is where the question lies.
Well, even presuming that an audio book and this were the same thing(which they aren't, by a long shot, there's a reason they pay people good money to read those books, it's skilled performance). Why should an author get paid twice for exactly the same thing. This isn't like an audio book where the author gets paid because the company doing the recording is making a profit off their work, it's an individual who has bought a legal copy of the book, format shifting that book into audio format.
There may be something not quite right about the way that Amazon is handling/advertising this and there's plenty of things that are not quite right about amazon. It's also possible that the royalties that authors are getting on e-books aren't what they ought to be. But charging twice just because someone "could" convert the document to audio book for their own personal use, is just BS.
Of course authors generally don't make "soooo much money". Like the practitioners of pretty much every field that doesn't have a seriously rigid certifying body, the vast majority of them aren't any good.
If you write books that people want to read(or at least that people want to buy) then you make money. If you don't, you don't. Most authors aren't particulary good and/or don't write things people want to read.
Writing is actually a lot fairer than most industries in this fashion as, as far as I can tell, a hell of a lot more people get a chance for someone to publish their book than get to be actors or recording artists or whatever they're called now.
Yes, but it's not an audio book, it's a computer program that can read e-books. They're selling you the "person" reading the book, not the reading itself.
No, I can't read a book and sell it. However I can ask someone to read it to me. In fact I have read numerous books to my younger siblings and plan on reading an awful lot of books to my kids.
I really don't think authors have a leg to stand on here because to the best of my understanding of the law(IANAL) reading a story to someone is perfectly legal and fair use. So long as you don't distribute the audio recording, sell it, or perform it, you're pretty much golden.
You could argue that Amazon are profiting by the performance of a work when they don't have a performance license, but that's a pretty gray legal area when it comes to books. Bookstores and libraries hire people to read books to kids quite frequently, and to the best of my knowledge no one has challenged the legality of that.
The problem with this argument is that the reasons why audio books are more expensive than regular books is that they're more expensive to make. You have to pay someone to read them and that someone has to actually be reasonably good at what they're doing. I don't believe the portion going to the author is any different, so this isn't an argument about how much they are paid. That said, if you buy the audio book, and the dead tree version, then the author gets paid twice.
This is basically a load of hogwash as reading it, or getting someone else to read it to you(even a mechanical device) should be covered under fair use, and the copyright on specific audio books only covers that particular recording, not all recordings.
There were no standards, Netscape did exactly the same undocumented non standard stuff. God I hate having to defend Microsoft, I don't like them either, but the ignorant pig headed vitriole on this site gives me no other choice.
Name one technology that Microsoft destroyed. One single technology they destroyed. Not techologies they tried to destroy, or technologies that failed because they didn't work or were too complicated(like applets), a technology that they actually destroyed.
FFS people, Microsoft is just another company, they've done some moderately unethical things, but so have all their competitors, and, unless you're one of those folks who thinks computers and technology should only be for folks like us, they've done a lot more good than bad. No the IT world doesn't look quite like a lot of us would like it to, but it includes a lot of people who would not otherwise be included. Technical perfection is a pipe dream, and probably not even one that would be good to have.
Slashdot Mirror
The press is technically private in that it's not government, but it's not really private the way say a regular corporation(or even the newspapers parent company) is private. It's more like churches are, it's not government, but it's not private. There's a reason they refer to it as the 4th estate, it's because it is considered separate than the other three(government, church, private as I recall).
You don't need a name to send a warning to other staff and you don't need to say why someone was fired to say they're gone(or tell 1500 people that someone is going for any reason whatsoever if that person isn't a seriously senior manager).
The point is even an absolute defense doesn't give you carte blanche.
If someone attacks you with deadly force, you are allowed to respond with deadly force. It doesn't entitle you to tie up the person you attacked and slowly torture them to death.
Just so, truth is a defense against libel, but it shouldn't necessarily give you the right to destroy someone's reputation without good reason. There is no public interest in his former coworkers know why he lost his job, at least not one which overrides his right not to have it spread. It also appears that the law in question never allowed truth as an absolute defense of libel anyway.
The truth has never been an absolute defense against libel, even in the US. Nothing on erth is an absolute defense against anything.
Add to that the fact that I can't think of anything in the constitution prohibiting the states from abridging libel, the fact that proof of malice is actually a fairly reasonable legal test, the entity, if any , whose free speech is being abridged is a corporation, and that the law is actually a reasonably fair one (it abridges an individual/companies right to be an asshole, not their right to speak the truth).
Personally, unless the state law is unconstitutional(and I don't think it is or that the supreme court would bother with this one), he'll probably win. The company had no compelling reason to send that e-mail, most companies and/or individuals would not have sent it, and it harmed this individuals reputation and future prospects. Sounds a lot like malice to me.
The kernel and other big projects definitely prove that complex projects are possible, they don't however prove complex game development is possible.
Good games are about more than good programmers(which the open source movement has plenty of), they're about good artists, good writers, good testers, good designers, a whole raft of people with different talents and skills. They also don't generally get designed well by committee.
They also have to run on systems people actually have(which includes windows), provide them with what they want(as opposed to what the developers want), have really good user interfaces, be relatively innovative, and a whole bunch of other things FOSS has yet to prove to be good at.
So generally speaking, the answer to your question is that Open Source gaming is going to remain where it is now, a few very clever text based games, engines the big game houses have open sourced after they've extracted what money they're worth, and mediocre crap.
And what exactly do you think a 6 year government SOE project is? They may save money in the long run, but it's going to be the long run. A migration on that scale is a huge amount of cost and work.
True, but a laptop is an even less appropriate place to not commit data for 2.5 seconds because it's much more likely to have an unexpected power fault.
Just because you can do something, doesn't mean it's not stupid.
That application developers don't always get to choose what filesystem their application is being run on would be my guess.
Disk caching is a good thing(well at the moment, if/when SSD's become large enough and cheap enough to replace regular old spinning disks for speed dependent applications, then it probably won't be all that useful), it makes everything faster and more efficient. That said, 2.5 seconds is an absolutely huge amount of time in computer terms, even on a really slow PC these days that's thousands of operatings being executed before any attempt is even made to write the data to disk. It's a huge, and unecessary risk. Average latency on normal hard drives now is easily below 5 ms, queueing up for 30 times that to try and make things more efficient is just stupid.
The reason why it isn't an issue is that the math(at least as far as I've seen) indicates that, presuming reasonably random writes(which can be handled by the drive, and has nothing at all to do with what you're writing), if you write the volume of the disk a day it will last for about 30 years.
That increases and decreases as your writing decreases and increases, but realistically, but given that most regular hard drives only last 3-4 years you would have to be writing more than a terabyte a day to have the 120 GB flash last less time than a regular physical drive.
This is true, but generally speaking, when you have an armed gunman in one of the endpoints of a high security communication, you have bigger problems than cryptography.
I'm not really 100% sure of how I feel about this new law.
On the one hand, they still require reasonable cause and still have to go before a judge, the only real difference is they don't have to tell the person they're searching.
On the other hand, I don't really see what benefit the police can really derive from this. It's only really useful if you're planning on repeat searches of the same target, but aside from the fact that repeatedly searching people you have no evidence against is somewhat dodgy, I don't see it as being terribly likely that the kind of people they're looking for won't know they were there.
It's not like a police search is a tremendously subtle thing generally speaking.
This is true.
However, basing your hiring decisions on the result may or may not be legal(depending on what result you get and where you live). Not hiring someone because of their race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation is illegal even in the US.
AFAIK there is limited case law on whether not hiring someone based on legal behaviour outside working hours which does not impact their ability to work(such as drinking or promiscuity). It's certainly not a case which would be dismissed out of hand.
The thing to remember is you can find out whatever information you want, but basing your decision on certain kinds of information already is or someday may be, illegal. If you don't know the information no one can claim you broke the law when you made your decision.
In other words, mind you own business or it may come back to bite you.
I think it comes down to, it comes down to the fact that regardless of what it means in theory, Libertarianism in practice tends to boil down to "I'm not paying you a cent and everyone else can go hang".
That's not to say that that's what Libertarianism actually means. Libertarianism is in essence a philosopy which centers around personal freedom and individual rights, which is a good and noble thing. Most arguments around libertarianism(from me at least) centre around what things constitute rights, and what the appropriate response is when rights conflict with each other.
The most vocal supporters of Libertarianism tend to have very narrow definitions of rights which largely consist of them having a lot of rights and very few responsibilities. These vocal supporters(or as I tend to think of them, self centred jerks) tend to give the whole thing a rather anarchist flavour and give people an idea that supporters might be against copyright.
More importantly of course, the argument that people have a right to share that information would have to come from a view of personal liberties and would likely be inherently libertarian.
Well to begin with, Joe needs to have a signed agreement with his financier regarding his invention in any event.
From there, the primary reason patents are expensive and difficult in the US is because the US is not a first to file system.
An incredible amount of money and time has to go into researching, verifying, and defending claims of prior art. The process is convoluted, arcane, and expensive.
In a first to file system, it doesn't have to be that way. Joe Blow should only need to fill out the required paperwork and ensure that his patent meets required criteria. Add a bit of a grace period for a limited number of re-files if it gets knocked back, and you're looking at maybe a couple of hours time with a halfway decent lawyer. Not pocket change, but certainly affordable without a massive loan.
It's not so much the Patent Pending label that's important it's actually having the pending patent.
There's no reason we can't have provisional approval for products that don't exist quite yet. The problem is patent protection for products which don't exist and which the patent holder never intends to actually create, or which are actually impossible to build beyond theory.
Essentially the basic question comes down to whether patents are designed to protect and promote ideas or whether they're designed to protect and promote implementation.
If you put stringent requirements on actual implementation of patents, you have the potential to shaft the little guy. You'd have to ensure a number of additional protections such as ensuring that large companies can't just refuse to fund new ideas and then develop them after the patent has expired due to lack of implementation. That's certainly possible to do though.
The flip side of that argument is that patents which aren't turned into products stifle innovation because they stop anyone else from developing said product, and harms society as a whole.
All that aside, patents which are overly generic, vague, or which even given full funding the "inventor" couldn't actually create, should not under any circumstances be granted, and should be culled where they have already been granted. To use an example that's been mentioned earlier. If you can build a tiny anti-gravity machine, but it's prohibitively expensive to build a full scale one without some other development, you should probably get a patent. If your full scale one cannot function without some additional development, then you haven't actually invented anything and you shouldn't.
Bad analogy.
NULL doesn't exactly represent your lack of an apple, your lack of an apple is actually quite easy to explain. If you ask someone, "Do you have an apple?", and they don't have an apple, they just say no.
What NULL is for is when someone asks you what kind of fruit you have and you don't have any fruit at all.
The only feasible answers to "What kind of fruit do you have?" when you have no fruit are to either answer nothing at all, or to say "none". Not answering is a rather useless thing to do, and "none" is essentially NULL. NULL (in databases) metaphorically is a special way of saying I exist, but I have no fruit.
Of course, this doesn't always apply to the non database concept. In a lot of older programming languages(C particularly), null(as opposed to NULL) is an unfinished bridge. You've started to build the bridge, but it doesn't actually go anywhere at all. So if you cross it you fall into the void and all sorts of bad things happen. What you really need(and a number of newer languages have this) is an actual NULL which represents a bridge to a brick wall. If you go racing across it, bad things still happen, but they happen in a sensible explicable way.
Well, assuming that the GP is correct, having google sell out of print works and pay royalties is certainly in the fiduciary interest of authors. Royalties on something are certainly better than royalties on nothing.
They may or may not be in the interest of publishers, but publishers can always make the book commercially available again if there is sufficient demand.
This is actually one of the biggest questions of copyright. If the holder of the copyright and/or the distribution rights doesn't want to distribute the work, does someone else have the right to distribute it, and at what level of compensation to the rights holder(s).
Books are actually a pretty good place to start since the royalty agreements for authors are reasonably well codified as far as I'm aware and copyright is almost never transferred to the publisher under these circumstances.
Realistically, a settlement on this issue is probably in the best interest of publishers because a court case actually determining whether distributions rights apply when you refused to disrtibute might not swing their way.
And if they're royalty fees for e-books aren't high enough because an e-book has a higher value than they thought, that's fine, they're free to try to renegotiate that if it's in their best interest(more sales == more royalties in the end).
What they shouldn't get is an additional royalty fee because an e-book "might" be used in a TTS system, and that that TTS feature "might" cause someone who would otherwise have bought an audio book to not buy one.
This isn't an audio book, it isn't two sales, it's one sale, based on whatever royalties agreements they have on e-books. An e-book could always have been used in a TTS system so this isn't a new possibility. A lot of things have to change in business models to deal with the new way of things. Instead of doing that, a lot of people, this guy included, want to use the old rules in ways which don't apply. This is not a separate sale, and so there should only be one payment, what that payment is what might be is where the question lies.
Well, even presuming that an audio book and this were the same thing(which they aren't, by a long shot, there's a reason they pay people good money to read those books, it's skilled performance). Why should an author get paid twice for exactly the same thing. This isn't like an audio book where the author gets paid because the company doing the recording is making a profit off their work, it's an individual who has bought a legal copy of the book, format shifting that book into audio format.
There may be something not quite right about the way that Amazon is handling/advertising this and there's plenty of things that are not quite right about amazon. It's also possible that the royalties that authors are getting on e-books aren't what they ought to be. But charging twice just because someone "could" convert the document to audio book for their own personal use, is just BS.
Of course authors generally don't make "soooo much money". Like the practitioners of pretty much every field that doesn't have a seriously rigid certifying body, the vast majority of them aren't any good.
If you write books that people want to read(or at least that people want to buy) then you make money. If you don't, you don't. Most authors aren't particulary good and/or don't write things people want to read.
Writing is actually a lot fairer than most industries in this fashion as, as far as I can tell, a hell of a lot more people get a chance for someone to publish their book than get to be actors or recording artists or whatever they're called now.
Yes, but it's not an audio book, it's a computer program that can read e-books. They're selling you the "person" reading the book, not the reading itself.
No, I can't read a book and sell it. However I can ask someone to read it to me. In fact I have read numerous books to my younger siblings and plan on reading an awful lot of books to my kids.
I really don't think authors have a leg to stand on here because to the best of my understanding of the law(IANAL) reading a story to someone is perfectly legal and fair use. So long as you don't distribute the audio recording, sell it, or perform it, you're pretty much golden.
You could argue that Amazon are profiting by the performance of a work when they don't have a performance license, but that's a pretty gray legal area when it comes to books. Bookstores and libraries hire people to read books to kids quite frequently, and to the best of my knowledge no one has challenged the legality of that.
Well sort of.
The problem with this argument is that the reasons why audio books are more expensive than regular books is that they're more expensive to make. You have to pay someone to read them and that someone has to actually be reasonably good at what they're doing. I don't believe the portion going to the author is any different, so this isn't an argument about how much they are paid. That said, if you buy the audio book, and the dead tree version, then the author gets paid twice.
This is basically a load of hogwash as reading it, or getting someone else to read it to you(even a mechanical device) should be covered under fair use, and the copyright on specific audio books only covers that particular recording, not all recordings.
There were no standards, Netscape did exactly the same undocumented non standard stuff. God I hate having to defend Microsoft, I don't like them either, but the ignorant pig headed vitriole on this site gives me no other choice.
Name one technology that Microsoft destroyed. One single technology they destroyed. Not techologies they tried to destroy, or technologies that failed because they didn't work or were too complicated(like applets), a technology that they actually destroyed.
FFS people, Microsoft is just another company, they've done some moderately unethical things, but so have all their competitors, and, unless you're one of those folks who thinks computers and technology should only be for folks like us, they've done a lot more good than bad. No the IT world doesn't look quite like a lot of us would like it to, but it includes a lot of people who would not otherwise be included. Technical perfection is a pipe dream, and probably not even one that would be good to have.