Dominating market share is not enough to be a monopoly. Possibly under Federal law it is, but that's irrelevant to the economic definition.
You have to be able to CONTROL the market - and the only way that can be done INDEFINITELY is by use of state laws or actual force or fraud. Otherwise competitors arise, attracted by the monopoly profit, and eventually the monopoly falls.
This is basic economics. Having major - even dominating - market share does NOT make you a monopoly.
I fail to see the distinction between the short quote and the long quote.
Hillary says we gave back your own money to you, but since we don't want to do that any more for our own political agenda, we're going to keep taking it away from you.
What part of this don't you comprehend? (I'm assuming here that your quote of the long version was intended to offset the implication of the short version - which as I demonstrate it doesn't.)
This sentence: They aren't forcing you to do business with them, they are dictating how you do business with them if you do.
This is why I refer to Microsoft as a "quasi-monopoly", not an actual monopoly.
Using restrictive contracts is a monopolistic practice (because you are in some sense using the law to coerce other people to do something - i.e., contract law) - BUT you have to have some other clout to make people sign those contracts. And if that clout is purely the success of your product - and that success is based on either technical superiority OR customer stupidity (the latter is the case with Microsoft), then you can't really claim MS is a monopoly.
Not that they wouldn't be a monopoly using force or fraud if they could. Gates certainly would. But technically it doesn't fit the Austrian economic school definition.
A "monopoly" is someone who has a huge share of the market by virtue of the fact that nobody else has 1) entered the market yet, and/or 2) produced an equivalent product yet. Said "monopoly" is in quotes because it usually doesn't last long due to market pressures. By definition, a monopoly makes monopoly profit - thus attracting competition.
A real monopoly is one that uses coercion (ie., state laws or actual violence or fraud) to control its market. For example, uhm, uhm, let's see, who can I use? Microsoft?
Well, actually, Microsoft is not really a great example, either. Yes, it does use restrictive contracts, but the idiots who sign those contracts are just as guilty as Microsoft of making Microsoft a monopoly. There may be other US Federal law which makes Microsoft actions a monopoly but from an economic viewpoint, Microsoft is mostly guilty of being an asshole company - not actually using state laws or force to get people to buy its products. I tend to refer to Microsoft as a "quasi-monopoly".
And it's getting more "quasi" the more Linux eats into MS's market share.
Nonetheless, until ARM is accused of stealing proprietary information, or forcing other companies by contract to buy its products and not buy from competitors, I find it hard to refer to it as a monopoly for real.
If anyone has information that it does do those things, fine. I have no info one way or the other.
"Quit your bullshit lying about Cutler stealing VMS - he wrote the fucking thing you stupid ass."
Uh, moron, that was not the point. The point was that he brought the whole thing (and even the EMPLOYEES) over to Microsoft who used it to write NT. Thus prompting lawsuits from DEC because he presumably violated his contract in doing so.
Where in the OP do you see the OP saying Cutler "stole" VMS? The OP explicitly says he wrote it.
While dumpster-diving for source code might be legitimately considered "standing on the shoulders" (or dumpsters) of others, I find it hard to see how Einstein - who did original work BASED on the previous efforts of others - can be compared with Gates nearly fraudulent purchase of QDOS.
Only a Microsoft troll could accept this comparison.
Stealing is using force (or fraud) to take something that someone has and therefore cannot have anymore because you took it.
Copying a codec is and cannot be stealing - unless you break into the developer's computer and copy it. If obtained without force or fraud, the subsequent copying and distribution is not stealing. It may be illegal, but laws are not correct behavior or economically correct - they are merely laws.
I can't find a reference to any Linux edition of PowerDVD on their Web site.
Must be a version available only through TurboLinux.
One can hope this is not by contract, however, and that Cylink will make it available for other distros.
Also, the price for PowerDVD is only $39.95 for the Standard edition (until end of July, then it's the usual $49.95) and the Deluxe Edition is $62.95 until end of July, then $69.95. This doesn't exactly make it "more expensive" than DVD players just because one can buy a cheap DVD player on sale someplace.
Unfortunately the fact of the matter is that the movie is quite VIEWABLE and that's what's important if you don't want to spend $9 seeing it at your local theater.
The camcorder technigue may be poor compared to others, but this is not a collector's item, it's a way of viewing the movie without wasting money on a mediocre effort. I recently saw a camcorder video of a Corrs concert in Jakarta - now THAT was BAD. Compared to that, this camcorder effort deserves an Academy Award. The video was quite clear enough, the sound was quite good enough, and only the fact that some of the subtitles were cut off was at all a problem and not much of one.
I downloaded it merely because I wanted to see how badly Moore did his job. While I agree with most of the points made in the movie, the fact of the matter is the movie offers little documentation that wasn't obvious to anyone following the Iraq situation over the last year - especially if you visited the www.iraqwar.ru site or www.antiwar.com or www.counterpunch.com.
To anyone who has followed the Iraq war, this is NOT a "scorcher" of a movie.
But if you're a typical ignorant US drone "citizen", it probably is an "eye-opener".
1. Download Fahrenheit.911.CAM-POT(1).torrent from here on your desktop.
2. Open it with your favorite BitTorrent client.
3. Start the download and wait X hours for it to finish. My DSL line downloaded the 1.03GB file in around two hours plus.
4. Unpack the file "pot.911a.rar" in the CD1 directory as well as the "pot.911b.rar" in the CD2 directory with your favorite RAR extraction program. Opening the RAR file will automatically identify all the segments and put them together. This will create "pot.911a" and "pot.911b" directories which each contain a.bin and a.cue file.
7. Download the VideoLAN Client media player found here and install it.
8. Use VLC to open "CD1.cue" from the "pot.911a" file.
9. When that part of the movie finishes, open the "CD2.cue" file in the other directory.
The quality is quite good for a camcorder effort. Only some of the subtitles are cut off at the bottom of the screen.
There are no "average people" as far as the FBI is concerned.
The FBI views YOU as a threat to national security. Anybody who is not FBI (and even some who ARE FBI - remember that last guy?) is a threat to national security.
Penguins are a threat to national security, according to some idiots - and the FBI takes that seriously too.
The FBI are fucking major paranoid career-motivated power-seeking assholes from the day Hoover started the agency. Read "Silence of the Lambs" and forget Jodie Foster - Harris made Clarice a major career-hungry bitch in the first book for a reason (and why do you think Hannibal is the main character in three books? And why do you think he paired them in the third book?)
There's no such thing as "we can't find anybody who is qualified".
Either nobody wants to work for you - for good reasons - or you just aren't looking in the right places - or you just have no clue what is "qualified" (i.e., you're far too strict on what is necessary or not necessary to be "qualified".)
Employment technigues in most companies are a joke.
You need to ask three questions of a prospective employee (after thoroughly explaining the details of the position and what you want done in the foreseeable future in that position):
1) Do you want to do this job? 2) Can you do this job? 3) Can you give me a reason why you feel you can do this job?
If they can give you a *truthful* reasonable answer to those three questions, hire them and get on with the job and stop looking for "Mr(s). Right".
Oh, yes, you do have to tell them that since they got hired fast, they can also get fired fast if any of those answers were *not* truthful.
I don't misunderstand anything about the concept of CRM.
I am quite aware of the principle of customer focus. As I have said, I've read TONS of IT articles on the subject in the last ten years. I know what it is SUPPOSED to do.
I'm also quite aware that most management have no fucking clue what "customer focus" means - or how to do it without being clueless assholes about it.
That was the point of my post.
The concept is a joke because of the people trying to implement it - not because the concept is necessarily bad.
There have been articles recently citing the 60-80% figure. You can Google as well as I - do it. Some of these articles may even have been on/. Here's one I found on Google in ten seconds.
I'm not arguing FOR the stats, I'm arguing against the notion that you tried to present that 40% of spam is coming from Linux hosts.
That's fucking nonsense, as Linux has barely 3% of the desktop/home market. How the hell does 40% of spam come from Linux in that situation? You said that 40% of spam hitting the honeypot came from Linux hosts. Your implication was 40% of ALL spam comes from Linux hosts.
Now you're claiming it's all from UNIX mail relays. Well, it might be, I wouldn't know. But if any significant percentage - whether it's thirty or sixty - is coming from zombie home PCs, then how is it that the rest is coming from UNIX servers when UNIX and Linux combined have only around fifty percent of the server market?
Or are you saying Windows has no market presence in email transmission - and that it's all UNIX? I didn't think so.
I don't expect an objective discussion about Linux from Windows trolls, either.
I said the MANAGEMENT who used the technology. I also pointed out that the technology was misused to acquire irrelevant customer information such as kids' birthdates - actions which were intrusive on the customers' privacy. It is irrelevant how it was done technology-wise - the issue is the CONCEPT of CRM as a management tool, not the technology of CRM. And even the concept would be okay, if it wasn't misconstrued by idiot management.
Read ANY IT piece on this subject. They ALL talk about massively increasing their focus on the customer in order to increase their knowledge of the customer in order to raise profits by being the sort of wet, gooey company everybody can't stand.
As I mention in another post, some of these characters wanted to find out your kids' birth dates so they could send them birthday cards.
The little piece of CRM you're talking about is just to make the customer contact seamless across the corporations which have multiple divisions. That is where much of the CRM SOFTWARE was involved, but CRM goes much further than that.
I've read enough of this stuff over the last five years, I know what it was about. And I know it was a joke from the beginning as there was never any real motivation to be truly useful to people. The only motivation was to foist more crap on the customer.
It was SUPPOSED to be about customer service leading directly to higher profits. The way you DID this was to track customer data - the more invasive the better, you're right about that.
Read any of the IT stuff published in the last five years on this topic. Every single one of them advocated this position.
Companies were trying to find out their customers' kids' birth dates so they could send them cards. Who the hell wants some company sending your kid a birthday card?
Slashdot Mirror
Dominating market share is not enough to be a monopoly. Possibly under Federal law it is, but that's irrelevant to the economic definition.
You have to be able to CONTROL the market - and the only way that can be done INDEFINITELY is by use of state laws or actual force or fraud. Otherwise competitors arise, attracted by the monopoly profit, and eventually the monopoly falls.
This is basic economics. Having major - even dominating - market share does NOT make you a monopoly.
I fail to see the distinction between the short quote and the long quote.
Hillary says we gave back your own money to you, but since we don't want to do that any more for our own political agenda, we're going to keep taking it away from you.
What part of this don't you comprehend? (I'm assuming here that your quote of the long version was intended to offset the implication of the short version - which as I demonstrate it doesn't.)
This sentence:
They aren't forcing you to do business with them, they are dictating how you do business with them if you do.
This is why I refer to Microsoft as a "quasi-monopoly", not an actual monopoly.
Using restrictive contracts is a monopolistic practice (because you are in some sense using the law to coerce other people to do something - i.e., contract law) - BUT you have to have some other clout to make people sign those contracts. And if that clout is purely the success of your product - and that success is based on either technical superiority OR customer stupidity (the latter is the case with Microsoft), then you can't really claim MS is a monopoly.
Not that they wouldn't be a monopoly using force or fraud if they could. Gates certainly would. But technically it doesn't fit the Austrian economic school definition.
A "monopoly" is someone who has a huge share of the market by virtue of the fact that nobody else has 1) entered the market yet, and/or 2) produced an equivalent product yet. Said "monopoly" is in quotes because it usually doesn't last long due to market pressures. By definition, a monopoly makes monopoly profit - thus attracting competition.
A real monopoly is one that uses coercion (ie., state laws or actual violence or fraud) to control its market. For example, uhm, uhm, let's see, who can I use? Microsoft?
Well, actually, Microsoft is not really a great example, either. Yes, it does use restrictive contracts, but the idiots who sign those contracts are just as guilty as Microsoft of making Microsoft a monopoly. There may be other US Federal law which makes Microsoft actions a monopoly but from an economic viewpoint, Microsoft is mostly guilty of being an asshole company - not actually using state laws or force to get people to buy its products. I tend to refer to Microsoft as a "quasi-monopoly".
And it's getting more "quasi" the more Linux eats into MS's market share.
Nonetheless, until ARM is accused of stealing proprietary information, or forcing other companies by contract to buy its products and not buy from competitors, I find it hard to refer to it as a monopoly for real.
If anyone has information that it does do those things, fine. I have no info one way or the other.
"Unless he had a Get Out Of Jail Free card up his sleeve..."
You mean like Bill Gates and Ken Lay have George Bush? (And no, Lay has not been convicted yet.)
"Quit your bullshit lying about Cutler stealing VMS - he wrote the fucking thing you stupid ass."
Uh, moron, that was not the point. The point was that he brought the whole thing (and even the EMPLOYEES) over to Microsoft who used it to write NT. Thus prompting lawsuits from DEC because he presumably violated his contract in doing so.
Where in the OP do you see the OP saying Cutler "stole" VMS? The OP explicitly says he wrote it.
Moron.
While dumpster-diving for source code might be legitimately considered "standing on the shoulders" (or dumpsters) of others, I find it hard to see how Einstein - who did original work BASED on the previous efforts of others - can be compared with Gates nearly fraudulent purchase of QDOS.
Only a Microsoft troll could accept this comparison.
In other words, you're a fucking moron.
Bullshit.
Stealing is using force (or fraud) to take something that someone has and therefore cannot have anymore because you took it.
Copying a codec is and cannot be stealing - unless you break into the developer's computer and copy it. If obtained without force or fraud, the subsequent copying and distribution is not stealing. It may be illegal, but laws are not correct behavior or economically correct - they are merely laws.
Stuff your lame "morals" up your ass.
I can't find a reference to any Linux edition of PowerDVD on their Web site.
Must be a version available only through TurboLinux.
One can hope this is not by contract, however, and that Cylink will make it available for other distros.
Also, the price for PowerDVD is only $39.95 for the Standard edition (until end of July, then it's the usual $49.95) and the Deluxe Edition is $62.95 until end of July, then $69.95. This doesn't exactly make it "more expensive" than DVD players just because one can buy a cheap DVD player on sale someplace.
Unfortunately the fact of the matter is that the movie is quite VIEWABLE and that's what's important if you don't want to spend $9 seeing it at your local theater.
The camcorder technigue may be poor compared to others, but this is not a collector's item, it's a way of viewing the movie without wasting money on a mediocre effort. I recently saw a camcorder video of a Corrs concert in Jakarta - now THAT was BAD. Compared to that, this camcorder effort deserves an Academy Award. The video was quite clear enough, the sound was quite good enough, and only the fact that some of the subtitles were cut off was at all a problem and not much of one.
I downloaded it merely because I wanted to see how badly Moore did his job. While I agree with most of the points made in the movie, the fact of the matter is the movie offers little documentation that wasn't obvious to anyone following the Iraq situation over the last year - especially if you visited the www.iraqwar.ru site or www.antiwar.com or www.counterpunch.com.
To anyone who has followed the Iraq war, this is NOT a "scorcher" of a movie.
But if you're a typical ignorant US drone "citizen", it probably is an "eye-opener".
1. Download Fahrenheit.911.CAM-POT(1).torrent from here on your desktop.
.bin and a .cue file.
2. Open it with your favorite BitTorrent client.
3. Start the download and wait X hours for it to finish. My DSL line downloaded the 1.03GB file in around two hours plus.
4. Unpack the file "pot.911a.rar" in the CD1 directory as well as the "pot.911b.rar" in the CD2 directory with your favorite RAR extraction program. Opening the RAR file will automatically identify all the segments and put them together. This will create "pot.911a" and "pot.911b" directories which each contain a
7. Download the VideoLAN Client media player found here and install it.
8. Use VLC to open "CD1.cue" from the "pot.911a" file.
9. When that part of the movie finishes, open the "CD2.cue" file in the other directory.
The quality is quite good for a camcorder effort. Only some of the subtitles are cut off at the bottom of the screen.
"Making them, in this respect, indistinguishable from the general population."
I assume you were referring to the drooling morons.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
(Yeah, yeah, I know what you really meant, don't bother replying.)
Conservatives are smeared by being called homosexual because they are against homosexuals - and are thus hypocrites when exposed as being one.
Liberal gays can't be hypocritical about homosexuality because liberals generally support homosexual rights.
So your argument makes no sense.
There are no "average people" as far as the FBI is concerned.
The FBI views YOU as a threat to national security. Anybody who is not FBI (and even some who ARE FBI - remember that last guy?) is a threat to national security.
Penguins are a threat to national security, according to some idiots - and the FBI takes that seriously too.
The FBI are fucking major paranoid career-motivated power-seeking assholes from the day Hoover started the agency. Read "Silence of the Lambs" and forget Jodie Foster - Harris made Clarice a major career-hungry bitch in the first book for a reason (and why do you think Hannibal is the main character in three books? And why do you think he paired them in the third book?)
Yes - frequently mentioned on the old Art Bell show.
is me with a controllable Ebola.
(I don't mean *I* have Ebola, morons.)
Bring it on!
And "script kiddies with smallpox" will just wipe themselves out. No great loss.
This is just more future tech scare-mongering a la Bill Joy.
Therefore, there should be no government regulation of it.
/.'s who support this crap are morons.
The fact that the medium is broadcast versus subscribed to is irrelevant.
Supreme Court decisions are worthless posturing.
And
Have a nice day.
Howard Stern for FCC Commissioner!
"The country is not run on principle it is run on pragmatism, and that is the way it should be."
Oh, that's a nice line.
I'll remember that the next time I decide to rob a bank.
Moron.
There's no such thing as "we can't find anybody who is qualified".
Either nobody wants to work for you - for good reasons - or you just aren't looking in the right places - or you just have no clue what is "qualified" (i.e., you're far too strict on what is necessary or not necessary to be "qualified".)
Employment technigues in most companies are a joke.
You need to ask three questions of a prospective employee (after thoroughly explaining the details of the position and what you want done in the foreseeable future in that position):
1) Do you want to do this job?
2) Can you do this job?
3) Can you give me a reason why you feel you can do this job?
If they can give you a *truthful* reasonable answer to those three questions, hire them and get on with the job and stop looking for "Mr(s). Right".
Oh, yes, you do have to tell them that since they got hired fast, they can also get fired fast if any of those answers were *not* truthful.
I don't misunderstand anything about the concept of CRM.
I am quite aware of the principle of customer focus. As I have said, I've read TONS of IT articles on the subject in the last ten years. I know what it is SUPPOSED to do.
I'm also quite aware that most management have no fucking clue what "customer focus" means - or how to do it without being clueless assholes about it.
That was the point of my post.
The concept is a joke because of the people trying to implement it - not because the concept is necessarily bad.
There have been articles recently citing the 60-80% figure. You can Google as well as I - do it. Some of these articles may even have been on /. Here's one I found on Google in ten seconds.
I'm not arguing FOR the stats, I'm arguing against the notion that you tried to present that 40% of spam is coming from Linux hosts.
That's fucking nonsense, as Linux has barely 3% of the desktop/home market. How the hell does 40% of spam come from Linux in that situation? You said that 40% of spam hitting the honeypot came from Linux hosts. Your implication was 40% of ALL spam comes from Linux hosts.
Now you're claiming it's all from UNIX mail relays. Well, it might be, I wouldn't know. But if any significant percentage - whether it's thirty or sixty - is coming from zombie home PCs, then how is it that the rest is coming from UNIX servers when UNIX and Linux combined have only around fifty percent of the server market?
Or are you saying Windows has no market presence in email transmission - and that it's all UNIX? I didn't think so.
I don't expect an objective discussion about Linux from Windows trolls, either.
Who said anything about blaming the technology?
I said the MANAGEMENT who used the technology. I also pointed out that the technology was misused to acquire irrelevant customer information such as kids' birthdates - actions which were intrusive on the customers' privacy. It is irrelevant how it was done technology-wise - the issue is the CONCEPT of CRM as a management tool, not the technology of CRM. And even the concept would be okay, if it wasn't misconstrued by idiot management.
Read my posts.
Wrong.
That's only a component of CRM.
Read ANY IT piece on this subject. They ALL talk about massively increasing their focus on the customer in order to increase their knowledge of the customer in order to raise profits by being the sort of wet, gooey company everybody can't stand.
As I mention in another post, some of these characters wanted to find out your kids' birth dates so they could send them birthday cards.
The little piece of CRM you're talking about is just to make the customer contact seamless across the corporations which have multiple divisions. That is where much of the CRM SOFTWARE was involved, but CRM goes much further than that.
I've read enough of this stuff over the last five years, I know what it was about. And I know it was a joke from the beginning as there was never any real motivation to be truly useful to people. The only motivation was to foist more crap on the customer.
It was SUPPOSED to be about customer service leading directly to higher profits. The way you DID this was to track customer data - the more invasive the better, you're right about that.
Read any of the IT stuff published in the last five years on this topic. Every single one of them advocated this position.
Companies were trying to find out their customers' kids' birth dates so they could send them cards. Who the hell wants some company sending your kid a birthday card?
40% of spam is coming from Linux?
Oh, really?
The OTHER stat I'VE heard is that 60-80% of spam comes via compromised home machines.
Are you saying 40% of the home market is running Linux?
I didn't think so.
That's a crap statistic and your conclusion is nonsense.