The 4th amendment (search and seizure) has been under attack for YEARS (because primarily of the draconian "war against drugs") and with one amendment down, it will be easier for this one to go as well (actually they will probably continue what they have been doing for a long time anyway, writing loopholes to the amendment such as ability to search on "suspicion of guilt").
How about the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act (already passed by the Senate), which violates both the First and the Fourth Amendments in one swoop?
It would give police the authority to search your home in your absence and copy your computer files without EVER notifying you or producing a search warrant. It also creates a felony called 'illegal distribution of information', which makes it a crime to publish or link to certain drug-related information.
The War on Drugs is failing miserably, and costing us our freedoms in the process. How can anyone argue that this bill is not totalitarian?
You see, libertarianism, much like its almost direct opposite philosophy, communism, is basically just political masturbation. It looks really good in theory, and both of them promise to make things great for people--the difference being that libertarianism makes things great for the really smart and communism makes things great for the really dumb--but the results aren't quite what you expect, and it ends up being virtually impracticable.
As much as I enjoy masturbation, I try not to mix it with my politics:P
I disagree vehemently with your statement that libertarianism is impracticable. The United States was and is the single most libertarian nation in history, the formation of the U.S. was the single biggest libertarian event ever, and the Constitution is the single most important libertarian document ever. Modern libertarianism is very much rooted in the thinking of our Founding Fathers.
America certainly has its problems, but it has flourished and in a mere 200 years (a blip in time, historically) this libertarian nation has been the most free and prosperous one on earth. In light of this, how can you possibly say that libertarianism is 'impracticable'? I say that it's more than practicable - it's proven.
Look at the more-libertarian-than-now industrial American economy of the mid-to-late 1800s and early 1900s. Free market as far as the eye can see. But everybody ended up getting screwed except for either the really smart, clever, ruthless people, the really rich people, or the really rich, smart, clever, and ruthless people.
I must disagree with you on this as well. Everyone did not 'end up getting screwed'. Not the rich, not the middle class, and not the poor. Our nation flourished under a free market, and the standard of living went up for everyone, even the poorest of the poor. The Industrial Revolution pulled *millions of people* out of poverty and gave them the means to own a home, and have a retirement plan with benefits - the 'American Dream'.
Eventually people (i.e., the non-plutocrats) got fed up with it and formed labor unions to prevent just these types of abuses. Congress, after a fashion, finally woke up and started passing laws to enable this to a certain extent.
I agree that corporations often need a swift kick in the ass, and I support the peoples' right to free association - to apply collective bargaining as a means for achieving better pay and working conditions. I do not think that Congress should play a role in that at all, and I do not think that any company should be forced to accept unions if they choose not to.
So you see, we had our experiments with libertarianism. We ended up not liking it. We told the Government to get involved. And you're a fool if you think that the government's going to cease its involvement based on the nagging of what (societally) amounts to a political splinter group that most people don't even know exists.
The libertarian movement is thriving and in fact slowly and steadily growing. Through organizations like the CATO Institue and the Future of Freedom Foundation, we already have a large impact on public policy - far greater than that of a 'splinter group'. We are most definitely here to stay. The Libertarian Party is also growing, and actually getting some candidates elected at the state and local level, but it remains to be seen whether it will succeed at the federal level. Incidentally the LP natl convention is taking place today and tomorrow, and will be televised on CSPAN, if you're interested in watching.
With all that said, I do not beleive that libertarianism holds a 100% monopoly on the truth. I obviously believe strongly that it contains a tremendous amount of wisdom, but I think that there are aspects of other ideologies that merit careful consideration as well. I hope that someday humankind will figure out the keys to living together in peace, prosperity and freedom.
For you to even suggest what we are "moving towards" is a "command economy" from what we've seen here is a pretty sad little knee-jerk. Have you've studied much history, let alone economics? Would you know what a command economy sounds like if you were getting spanked by one? Have you any idea the details of what Microsoft had to do to get themselves in the position they're in?
Why yes, I've studied just a wee bit of history (mostly U.S.) and economics;)
My feeling that we're headed in the direction of a fully state-controlled economy comes from my observations over the last 12 years, the historical record of the U.S. before and after the 1930's (the period when statist economic policies exploded) the recent resurgence of antitrust enforcement, and from listening to C-Span every day on the car radio.
Most of all, this irks me because monopoly law is so basic. The fact of the matter is, capitalism screws up. It's logical for it to be screwed up. It follows easily that consolidation of wealth and mergers across interests will progress until they become self-sustaining. The more consolidated a marketplace, the less incentive there is to compete, and the easier it becomes to fix prices, with or without explicit collaboration. In many situations it's possible to end up with a single dominant entity controlling an entire market, with barriers to entry which are too forbidding for anyone to challenge. In these cases, the only thing between you and economic, technical, and social stagnation is a well-organized democratic government. The state where competition benefits "consumers" is, in many industries, a transitory accident.
This is a misconception about capitalism that was first propagated by Karl Marx, and has become very popular in the U.S. during the last 75 years.
Consider that consolidation is not always bad. Sometimes it brings with it economies of scale, which can lower price and increase quality for consumers.
Alan Greenspan wrote once in a piece called 'Antitrust' that if entry into a given field of production is not impeded by government regulations, franchises, or subsidies, "the ultimate regulator of competition in a free economy is the capital market. So long as capital is free to flow, it will tend to seek those areas which offer the maximum rate of return." Investors are constantly seeking the most profitable uses of their capital. If, therefore, some field of production is seen to be highly profitable (particularly due to high prices rather than to low costs), businessmen and investors necessarily will be attracted to that field; and as the supply of the product in question is increased relative to the demand for it, prices fall accordingly.
In other words, when capital is allowed to flow freely, even a large conglomerate that has 99.9% market share cannot raise prices with impunity, or VCs and potential competitors will start eyeing that market as a profitable one and will move in to take a chunk of it.
Captialism is not a panacea. Nothing is, besides collective intelligence. Reactionary belief in capitalism as somehow stronger or more productive a force than democracy shows a failure to understand what makes trouble for democracy in the first place.
What greater manifestation of collective intelligence is there than the trillions of economic decisions made every day in the marketplace?
That is the exact point of capitalism (aka free-market economics) - that the collection of economic choices made by billions of free individuals drive efficiency and productivity far better than some committee of suits in Washington could ever dream of.
The worst part is that you're sitting there on your Windows computer writing this. Hard-core, Reagan-era capitalism didn't give you a very good operating system, did it?
Actually I'm writing this on my Linux-Mandrake 7.0 computer. Occasionally X or Netscape will flake out, but the OS itself never crashes:)
Here are some links you may find useful in learning more about the free-market point of view:
Forgot to mention... another reason Windows would probably cost more is that MS doesn't make a whole lot on Windows itself. Rather, they sell Windows comparatively cheaply, and make the lion's share of their money when people buy Office to go along with it. Sort of like giving away razors and making your money selling razorblades.
Without Office around, the Windows half of the company will have only meager profits unless they raise the price of Windows or come up with some revenue stream to replace Office.
The short answer is that there are now a lot of departments that serve the whole company that would have to be duplicated: HR, R&D, marketing, executive management, distribution, building maintenance, information systems, accounting, legal, and so on.
On your last point, I think a standard published API *would* allow for better, more interoperable 3rd party software, and that anyone who says otherwise is just blowing smoke. I don't think that MS should be forced to publish their private intellectual property though.
I personally have a great distaste for closed and manipulated standards, so I vote with my dollars by not using MS products.
They simply had no incentive to try. Monopoly, after all.
If Microsoft, as a monopoly, had zero competition they would not have had any reason whatsoever to release new versions of the Windows OS. They could have stopped at 3.1, or 95, and just kept selling that until the end of time. The fact that they do update their OS from time to time proves that they have competition. Why else would they spend the R&D money to develop new versions instead of simply coasting forever?
Now I would say its true that they had little incentive to try, but thats because no other company stepped with an operating system that even came close to sucking less than Windows. OS/2 started making great progress, but IBM didn't market it very well. Someone here said that was because they weren't allowed to because of behavioral remedies from their own antitrust troubles. (can anyone from IBM confirm/deny this?) If this is true then I would say that the antitrust laws are pretty anti-competitive.
No company, not even Microsoft, can hold a dominant market position forever, even (especially) with obnoxious business tactics. Every successful company gets complacent and drops the ball at some point.
Capitalist fundamentalist libertarians (we all know what circle of hell reactionary political thinkers go to)
Dammit DaveWood, I'm a capitalist libertarian, though I tend to think of myself as more practical than fundamentalist. I oppose antitrust laws because I don't want to live under a Soviet-style command economy, which is the direction the U.S. is heading. I don't understand what's so radical or reactionary about that.
I respect your right to disagree with me, but if you're going to do so, please do it without tossing around bullshit labels.
The end result? 90% of the world runs Windows. Extremely unfortunate. Don't kid yourself for a minute that it's because it's a "better product."
Can you name an operating system that is more suitable for Joe Six-Pack than Windows?
I suggest that there hasn't been one in the last five years, and that Microsoft's market dominance is due mostly to the fact that no competitor had their shit together enough to correctly produce and market one. In other words, being in the right place at the right time with the closest product for the majority of the people.
Don't get me wrong - I pretty much despise Microsoft, and I want to see them fall from power, but I want to see them beaten in the marketplace, not in the courtroom. Many Slashdotters seem to think they are unbeatable, but I see them as being extremely vulnerable in the market right now, mostly to free software, ASPs and AOL/Netscape/Time-Warner. All of us here know how fast Internet time goes by - new paradigms and business models could reduce MS to a shadow of itself in a matter of days. I think that is likely to happen.
So instead of visiting some government office, filling out 12 forms in triplicate, and then being told you filled out the wrong forms, we'll now get to do that all online.
With a few exceptions, government web sites are as byzantine and difficult to navigate as a voicemail maze. Most of them look to be built with Front Page, many have 500K image files, and the forms are only slightly easier to deal with than the paper ones.
So while it will be less time-consuming to deal with govt stuff online, it will probably still be just as frustrating relative to dealing with the private sector online.
I have had to put a great deal of research into this because I'm doing a project for a client right now that requires converting.DOC files to HTML and inserting them into a MySQL db. So far I've found plenty of worthy solutions for converting the text, but none of them will handle the linked TIFF graphics in the documents.
Here are a few of my bookmarks:
WVWare - GPL library for reading.doc files, used by AbiWord, currently incomplete
Filtrix - Good commercial, closed-source converter, now available for Linux, great price, but doesn't handle linked TIFF files:P
InfoAccess - Makers of HTML Transit, the Cadillac of closed-source commercial document converters, also exorbitantly expensive ($5000+) and AFAIK not avail for Linux
So, is anyone aware of any open-source MS-Word filter projects that I don't know about? Especially one that recognizes/converts linked graphics contained in the document?
Fuck it, let's just take antitrust a logical step further and nationalize the Internet so we don't have these nasty peering issues and pesky corporations. I sure would feel much better that way.
The KDE project is building browsing capabilities into the core of its desktop environment via Konqueror, which will be the interface for navigating the filesystem as well as external network resources. The KDE team apparently felt there were technical and user-interface advantages to this. I'm pretty sure GNOME has an integrated HTML-rendering component also.
It should be pretty obvious to everyone here that a desktop operating system in this day and age needs to be Internet-centric to the core. There is no marketplace for separate browsers. Browsers are beyond commodity, they're free, readily available, and everyone with a computer needs one. I don't understand why on earth one shouldn't be integrated with the OS, regardless of the vendor's marketshare.
Besides, Netscape 4 sucks my ass on all platforms. IE5 is bulky, but is faster, more reliable, more feature-filled and contrary to the Slashdotter party line, has *better standards support*. Hopefully Mozilla will fix all that. The daily builds are getting really good.
Feel free to flame, I don't really care at this point.
Sure, Judge PJ didn't have much patience with the MSBS, but did he actually skimp on procedure?
After he found them guilty, he skipped the hearing on the proposed remedies. The government submitted its breakup proposal, then MS was allowed to file a response, then he went straight to issuing his judgement without allowing either side to call witnesses for or against the various components of the breakup plan.
I don't understand the full implications (did I mention IANAL?) but several news sources said that the appeals court may frown upon this as infringing on MS's right to due process, and it may count in MS's favor.
One Senator spoke out pretty vociferously about that, saying that it was wrong to rush something as weighty as tearing apart a however-many-billion-dollar successful company.
There's a lot of talk here about how corporations are growing in control, but I think we are ignoring the other side of the coin - the consumers that are making it possible for them.
It seems to me that consumerism is out of hand, and that is what is driving this whole thing.
I'm talking about the modern 'American Dream' lifestyle, which I see as whitebread, suburban, all living in identical houses (with fake shutters) in identical neighborhoods, driving 1 or more minivans, with 1 or more soccer moms playing the Mrs. Cleaver role, the entire family watching 4+ hours of TV daily and being programmed to all buy the same brands, and buy more, more, more.
I have never understood while all these people feel the need to look exactly the same. It scares the hell out of me.
Can someone please explain this to me?
Does anyone else see rampant consumerism as a problem?
BeOS is damned innovative in comparison to Win/Mac/Linux. Be should GPL it, and make their money by selling T-shirts.
What about Atheos, which was featured on Slashdot a few weeks ago? It's written by some BeOS hax0rs so it shares a lot of commonalities. I'm really impressed by it.
Whatever happened to the Harmony project to create a GPL QT clone?
As I recall it got pretty much abandoned when Trolltech (hehe, funny name) loosened the license on QT to bring it into OSS compliance.
Obviously though, QT licensing is still causing a problem. Would it really be that difficult to finish Harmony? Or to create a new, similar, GPL GUI toolkit? And since when has 'difficult' ever stopped the free software community from accomplishing big things?
Damn, man. Yours is possibly the most intelligent comment I've read today. I wish I could moderate right now.
How would the free market economy make decisions about natural resources and environmental harm without falling into the "tragedy of the commons" trap (I prefer the "prisoner's dilemma" analogy myself) that makes life worse for everyone?
A free market doesn't have to mean a lack of parameters and a government to enforce them. In fact, the right to life and property is the cornerstone of capitalism, and *requires* a central government to enforce that. (although a handful would argue that) In other words, your freedom to throw a punch ends where my nose begins.
In this scenario, if a corporation is spewing shit into the air (which is undeniably and indisputably shared) and causing me noticeable health problems, it's infringing upon my right to life, and as such it is proper for the government to give it an ass-whooping.
In an anarcho-capitalist scenario I don't see the invisible hand of capitalism protecting the environment well in the short term.
In the long run, I believe that societal attitudes play a big role in forcing enterprises to change their ways. I think this could keep extreme abuses in check. Many mainstream consumers would be willing to boycott a company if it was doing something obviously atrocious. Also consider that the younger generation is much more concerned about the environment and is less likely to tolerate spewage. Freedom of speech is key here. A free economy depends on a free press (or Internet).
Also consider that the most blatant waste and lack of progress occurs in areas which have abundant resources. As resources become scarce, it becomes economically advantageous to make more efficient use of those resources, and to explore renewable closed-loop sources.
So in the long run the free market might indeed take care of things, although I doubt we'll ever have an anarcho-capitalist society to test that out in. Unless we move to SeaLand:)
Maybe, maybe not. If we place real value on the planet's ecology, and we figure out how to enforce that value through governmental regulation, it may be possible to alter the risk/reward curve to make it favorable to save the planet rather than to use it up as if it were an endless resource to be exploited.
Economic systems that place little or no value on the environment tend to abuse the environment more. The perfect example of this is communist countries, where the government and society placed no value on anything--and thus destroyed the environment and broke people down at fantastic speed.
I support the use of government force to prevent the pollution of our air and water. If you dump PCBs upstream from me, you are infringing upon my right to life, and I believe it is proper for the courts to restrain you from doing so and to make you shoulder the cleanup costs.
This is incorrect, and here's why. In an infinite market with infinite resources and infinite competition, your statement would be correct. That's because no matter how large any individual player gets, they cannot dominate the market and thus change the rules as to how the competition are played.
However, markets, resources and people are not infinite: they're finite. This means that when you have a player become larger and larger, they tend to control more and more of the finite market and resources that are out there.
Certainly in any given industry segment there are going to be enterprises which rise to the top from time to time, but it is impossible for them to sustain their position forever. To sustain a dominant position indefinitely, you have to a) never, ever make a mistake or b) bribe government officials for special treatment.
a) just won't happen, because enterprises are made of humans who as we know don't always make the right choices, and there is just too much activity in the marketplace for any company to even dream of tracking all the variables. b) happens every day, esp. in China and other centrally controlled totalitarian-type places.
Allow me to mention something I think is related... Abundance of resources (natural or unnatural) breeds enormous waste, where shortages breed innovation and more efficient use of those resources.
Consider the 70's oil crisis, which is when gas prices shot up, fuel-efficient cars started replacing the gas guzzlers, and alternative energy sources started to receive mainstream attention. I remember my neighbor having a solar panel which heated all his hot water and saved him beaucoup bucks on his electrical bill.
Also consider bandwidth. Back in the Good Old Days, compression schemes like LHARC, ARJ, PKZIP, and V.42 could squeeze every possible bit through your 2400 baud modem. If bandwidth had been plentiful, would those utilities have been necessary? I doubt it.
It's popular to assume that only a totally and absolutely untouched market is somehow "free", but in fact, we expect all sorts of limitations. Laws against killing people for money restrict the free market too, but it turns out no one minds them.
While I do not choose to align myself completely with the Libertarian Party, their Statement of Principles is an excellent manifesto for a free society, and sums up my beliefs pretty well:
The Libertarian Party's Statement of Principles
We, the members of the Libertarian Party, challenge the cult of the omnipotent state and defend the rights of the individual.
We hold that all individuals have the right to exercise sole dominion over their own lives, and have the right to live in whatever manner they choose, so long as they do not forcibly interfere with the equal right of others to live in whatever manner they choose.
Governments throughout history have regularly operated on the opposite principle, that the State has the right to dispose of the lives of individuals and the fruits of their labor. Even within the United States, all political parties other than our own grant to government the right to regulate the lives of individuals and seize the fruits of their labor without their consent.
We, on the contrary, deny the right of any government to do these things, and hold that where governments exist, they must not violate the rights of any individual: namely, (1) the right to life -- accordingly we support the prohibition of the initiation of physical force against others; (2) the right to liberty of speech and action -- accordingly we oppose all attempts by government to abridge the freedom of speech and press, as well as government censorship in any form; and (3) the right to property -- accordingly we oppose all government interference with private property, such as confiscation, nationalization, and eminent domain, and support the prohibition of robbery, trespass, fraud, and misrepresentation.
Since governments, when instituted, must not violate individual rights, we oppose all interference by government in the areas of voluntary and contractual relations among individuals. People should not be forced to sacrifice their lives and property for the benefit of others. They should be left free by government to deal with one another as free traders; and the resultant economic system, the only one compatible with the protection of individual rights, is the free market.
---------------- I posted that to illustrate that freedom and societal order are not mutually exclusive, and that IMO, libertarianism offers a practical way to determine when it is proper for government to be involved and when it is not. It's a pretty basic formula.
First, market participants learn that in a truly free market their profits are severely limited by competition. As a result, bad apples often try to subvert the system and establish monopolies or cartels.
I might add these bad apples usually use the government (aka the System) to legally subvert their competitors using stuff such as lobbyists, lawsuits and antitrust, at our expense.
That's why if left o it's own devices, lassie faire capitalism will consume every square inch of the planet--because the people who created the theory thought the planet was infinite, and so the issue of consuming every square inch just never came up in the rush to greed.
a) we're probably going to use up every square inch of the planet regardless of what economic theories are popular. i imagine we'll eventually spill over onto other planets, and slowly expand into space.
b) I am very weary of hearing people associate laissez-faire capitalism with greed. Greed, like overpopulation, is going to exist just as much no matter what the economic system. The difference is that a free-market economy (which is far from what we have in the U.S.) places natural checks and balances on greed, and does a great job of keeping it from getting out of hand.
Adam Smith (the Father of Capitalism) once said that profit is evil because it indicates inefficiencies in the marketplace. Any time you have free-market conditions, you will see razor-thin profit margins and companies that are responsive to their customers' needs. Conversely, when profits or high that is a sign that something is stifling competition, holding back market information or making that industry a difficult one to enter; generally that's government regulation, censorship, corruption, tariffs, etc.
IBM didn't 'choose' not to market OS/2. It was one of the conditions of their run-in with the US DOJ and Antitrust laws. They weren't allowed to market effectively.
If this is correct, I would say that this is a prime example of antitrust enforcement hindering competition instead of helping it.
Plus, MS refused to grant them a license to Win32. That alone would have changed the face of OS'es today.
Well, I guess I can understand why MS wouldn't want to license that to them.
It would have been interesting to see more of a battle between OS/2 and Windows. We might today have entirely different OS choices.
Slashdot Mirror
The 4th amendment (search and seizure) has been under attack for YEARS (because primarily of the draconian "war against drugs") and with one amendment down, it will be easier for this one to go as well (actually they will probably continue what they have been doing for a long time anyway, writing loopholes to the amendment such as ability to search on "suspicion of guilt").
How about the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act (already passed by the Senate), which violates both the First and the Fourth Amendments in one swoop?
It would give police the authority to search your home in your absence and copy your computer files without EVER notifying you or producing a search warrant. It also creates a felony called 'illegal distribution of information', which makes it a crime to publish or link to certain drug-related information.
The War on Drugs is failing miserably, and costing us our freedoms in the process. How can anyone argue that this bill is not totalitarian?
More information is available here.
You see, libertarianism, much like its almost direct opposite philosophy, communism, is basically just political masturbation. It looks really good in theory, and both of them promise to make things great for people--the difference being that libertarianism makes things great for the really smart and communism makes things great for the really dumb--but the results aren't quite what you expect, and it ends up being virtually impracticable.
As much as I enjoy masturbation, I try not to mix it with my politics :P
I disagree vehemently with your statement that libertarianism is impracticable. The United States was and is the single most libertarian nation in history, the formation of the U.S. was the single biggest libertarian event ever, and the Constitution is the single most important libertarian document ever. Modern libertarianism is very much rooted in the thinking of our Founding Fathers.
America certainly has its problems, but it has flourished and in a mere 200 years (a blip in time, historically) this libertarian nation has been the most free and prosperous one on earth. In light of this, how can you possibly say that libertarianism is 'impracticable'? I say that it's more than practicable - it's proven.
Look at the more-libertarian-than-now industrial American economy of the mid-to-late 1800s and early 1900s. Free market as far as the eye can see. But everybody ended up getting screwed except for either the really smart, clever, ruthless people, the really rich people, or the really rich, smart, clever, and ruthless people.
I must disagree with you on this as well. Everyone did not 'end up getting screwed'. Not the rich, not the middle class, and not the poor. Our nation flourished under a free market, and the standard of living went up for everyone, even the poorest of the poor. The Industrial Revolution pulled *millions of people* out of poverty and gave them the means to own a home, and have a retirement plan with benefits - the 'American Dream'.
Eventually people (i.e., the non-plutocrats) got fed up with it and formed labor unions to prevent just these types of abuses. Congress, after a fashion, finally woke up and started passing laws to enable this to a certain extent.
I agree that corporations often need a swift kick in the ass, and I support the peoples' right to free association - to apply collective bargaining as a means for achieving better pay and working conditions. I do not think that Congress should play a role in that at all, and I do not think that any company should be forced to accept unions if they choose not to.
So you see, we had our experiments with libertarianism. We ended up not liking it. We told the Government to get involved. And you're a fool if you think that the government's going to cease its involvement based on the nagging of what (societally) amounts to a political splinter group that most people don't even know exists.
The libertarian movement is thriving and in fact slowly and steadily growing. Through organizations like the CATO Institue and the Future of Freedom Foundation, we already have a large impact on public policy - far greater than that of a 'splinter group'. We are most definitely here to stay. The Libertarian Party is also growing, and actually getting some candidates elected at the state and local level, but it remains to be seen whether it will succeed at the federal level. Incidentally the LP natl convention is taking place today and tomorrow, and will be televised on CSPAN, if you're interested in watching.
With all that said, I do not beleive that libertarianism holds a 100% monopoly on the truth. I obviously believe strongly that it contains a tremendous amount of wisdom, but I think that there are aspects of other ideologies that merit careful consideration as well. I hope that someday humankind will figure out the keys to living together in peace, prosperity and freedom.
For you to even suggest what we are "moving towards" is a "command economy" from what we've seen here is a pretty sad little knee-jerk. Have you've studied much history, let alone economics? Would you know what a command economy sounds like if you were getting spanked by one? Have you any idea the details of what Microsoft had to do to get themselves in the position they're in?
Why yes, I've studied just a wee bit of history (mostly U.S.) and economics ;)
My feeling that we're headed in the direction of a fully state-controlled economy comes from my observations over the last 12 years, the historical record of the U.S. before and after the 1930's (the period when statist economic policies exploded) the recent resurgence of antitrust enforcement, and from listening to C-Span every day on the car radio.
Most of all, this irks me because monopoly law is so basic. The fact of the matter is, capitalism screws up. It's logical for it to be screwed up. It follows easily that consolidation of wealth and mergers across interests will progress until they become self-sustaining. The more consolidated a marketplace, the less incentive there is to compete, and the easier it becomes to fix prices, with or without explicit collaboration. In many situations it's possible to end up with a single dominant entity controlling an entire market, with barriers to entry which are too forbidding for anyone to challenge. In these cases, the only thing between you and economic, technical, and social stagnation is a well-organized democratic government. The state where competition benefits "consumers" is, in many industries, a transitory accident.
This is a misconception about capitalism that was first propagated by Karl Marx, and has become very popular in the U.S. during the last 75 years.
Consider that consolidation is not always bad. Sometimes it brings with it economies of scale, which can lower price and increase quality for consumers.
Alan Greenspan wrote once in a piece called 'Antitrust' that if entry into a given field of production is not impeded by government regulations, franchises, or subsidies, "the ultimate regulator of competition in a free economy is the capital market. So long as capital is free to flow, it will tend to seek those areas which offer the maximum rate of return." Investors are constantly seeking the most profitable uses of their capital. If, therefore, some field of production is seen to be highly profitable (particularly due to high prices rather than to low costs), businessmen and investors necessarily will be attracted to that field; and as the supply of the product in question is increased relative to the demand for it, prices fall accordingly.
In other words, when capital is allowed to flow freely, even a large conglomerate that has 99.9% market share cannot raise prices with impunity, or VCs and potential competitors will start eyeing that market as a profitable one and will move in to take a chunk of it.
Captialism is not a panacea. Nothing is, besides collective intelligence. Reactionary belief in capitalism as somehow stronger or more productive a force than democracy shows a failure to understand what makes trouble for democracy in the first place.
What greater manifestation of collective intelligence is there than the trillions of economic decisions made every day in the marketplace?
That is the exact point of capitalism (aka free-market economics) - that the collection of economic choices made by billions of free individuals drive efficiency and productivity far better than some committee of suits in Washington could ever dream of.
The worst part is that you're sitting there on your Windows computer writing this. Hard-core, Reagan-era capitalism didn't give you a very good operating system, did it?
Actually I'm writing this on my Linux-Mandrake 7.0 computer. Occasionally X or Netscape will flake out, but the OS itself never crashes :)
Here are some links you may find useful in learning more about the free-market point of view:
http://www.laissezfaire.org/ (Laissez-Faire books)
http://www.free-market.net/
http://www.mises.org/ (Von Mises Institute)
CATO Institute
Forgot to mention... another reason Windows would probably cost more is that MS doesn't make a whole lot on Windows itself. Rather, they sell Windows comparatively cheaply, and make the lion's share of their money when people buy Office to go along with it. Sort of like giving away razors and making your money selling razorblades.
Without Office around, the Windows half of the company will have only meager profits unless they raise the price of Windows or come up with some revenue stream to replace Office.
The short answer is that there are now a lot of departments that serve the whole company that would have to be duplicated: HR, R&D, marketing, executive management, distribution, building maintenance, information systems, accounting, legal, and so on.
On your last point, I think a standard published API *would* allow for better, more interoperable 3rd party software, and that anyone who says otherwise is just blowing smoke. I don't think that MS should be forced to publish their private intellectual property though.
I personally have a great distaste for closed and manipulated standards, so I vote with my dollars by not using MS products.
They simply had no incentive to try. Monopoly, after all.
If Microsoft, as a monopoly, had zero competition they would not have had any reason whatsoever to release new versions of the Windows OS. They could have stopped at 3.1, or 95, and just kept selling that until the end of time. The fact that they do update their OS from time to time proves that they have competition. Why else would they spend the R&D money to develop new versions instead of simply coasting forever?
Now I would say its true that they had little incentive to try, but thats because no other company stepped with an operating system that even came close to sucking less than Windows. OS/2 started making great progress, but IBM didn't market it very well. Someone here said that was because they weren't allowed to because of behavioral remedies from their own antitrust troubles. (can anyone from IBM confirm/deny this?) If this is true then I would say that the antitrust laws are pretty anti-competitive.
No company, not even Microsoft, can hold a dominant market position forever, even (especially) with obnoxious business tactics. Every successful company gets complacent and drops the ball at some point.
Three kinds of people oppose this breakup:
[snip]
Capitalist fundamentalist libertarians (we all know what circle of hell reactionary political thinkers go to)
Dammit DaveWood, I'm a capitalist libertarian, though I tend to think of myself as more practical than fundamentalist. I oppose antitrust laws because I don't want to live under a Soviet-style command economy, which is the direction the U.S. is heading. I don't understand what's so radical or reactionary about that.
I respect your right to disagree with me, but if you're going to do so, please do it without tossing around bullshit labels.
The end result? 90% of the world runs Windows. Extremely unfortunate. Don't kid yourself for a minute that it's because it's a "better product."
Can you name an operating system that is more suitable for Joe Six-Pack than Windows?
I suggest that there hasn't been one in the last five years, and that Microsoft's market dominance is due mostly to the fact that no competitor had their shit together enough to correctly produce and market one. In other words, being in the right place at the right time with the closest product for the majority of the people.
Don't get me wrong - I pretty much despise Microsoft, and I want to see them fall from power, but I want to see them beaten in the marketplace, not in the courtroom. Many Slashdotters seem to think they are unbeatable, but I see them as being extremely vulnerable in the market right now, mostly to free software, ASPs and AOL/Netscape/Time-Warner. All of us here know how fast Internet time goes by - new paradigms and business models could reduce MS to a shadow of itself in a matter of days. I think that is likely to happen.
So instead of visiting some government office, filling out 12 forms in triplicate, and then being told you filled out the wrong forms, we'll now get to do that all online.
With a few exceptions, government web sites are as byzantine and difficult to navigate as a voicemail maze. Most of them look to be built with Front Page, many have 500K image files, and the forms are only slightly easier to deal with than the paper ones.
So while it will be less time-consuming to deal with govt stuff online, it will probably still be just as frustrating relative to dealing with the private sector online.
Click here for the answer to your question.
(I actually would not have known this if I hadn't seen it on memepool yesterday.)
I have had to put a great deal of research into this because I'm doing a project for a client right now that requires converting .DOC files to HTML and inserting them into a MySQL db. So far I've found plenty of worthy solutions for converting the text, but none of them will handle the linked TIFF graphics in the documents.
Here are a few of my bookmarks:
WVWare - GPL library for reading .doc files, used by AbiWord, currently incomplete
W3C's list of converters
HyperNews' list of converters - really old
Filtrix - Good commercial, closed-source converter, now available for Linux, great price, but doesn't handle linked TIFF files :P
InfoAccess - Makers of HTML Transit, the Cadillac of closed-source commercial document converters, also exorbitantly expensive ($5000+) and AFAIK not avail for Linux
KOffice (KDE2) filters page - not much here, but AFAIK they intend to ship with MS-Word import capabilities
So, is anyone aware of any open-source MS-Word filter projects that I don't know about? Especially one that recognizes/converts linked graphics contained in the document?
- phutureboy
Oh for God's sake. Quickly, call in Janet Reno!
Regulate early, Regulate often.(tm)
Fuck it, let's just take antitrust a logical step further and nationalize the Internet so we don't have these nasty peering issues and pesky corporations. I sure would feel much better that way.
Usenet didn't contain thousands of porn pictures, BBS systems were alive and well.
Usenet has had thousands of porn pictures for many, many years.
Er, um, at least so I've been told...
The KDE project is building browsing capabilities into the core of its desktop environment via Konqueror, which will be the interface for navigating the filesystem as well as external network resources. The KDE team apparently felt there were technical and user-interface advantages to this. I'm pretty sure GNOME has an integrated HTML-rendering component also.
It should be pretty obvious to everyone here that a desktop operating system in this day and age needs to be Internet-centric to the core. There is no marketplace for separate browsers. Browsers are beyond commodity, they're free, readily available, and everyone with a computer needs one. I don't understand why on earth one shouldn't be integrated with the OS, regardless of the vendor's marketshare.
Besides, Netscape 4 sucks my ass on all platforms. IE5 is bulky, but is faster, more reliable, more feature-filled and contrary to the Slashdotter party line, has *better standards support*. Hopefully Mozilla will fix all that. The daily builds are getting really good.
Feel free to flame, I don't really care at this point.
Sure, Judge PJ didn't have much patience with the MSBS, but did he actually skimp on procedure?
After he found them guilty, he skipped the hearing on the proposed remedies. The government submitted its breakup proposal, then MS was allowed to file a response, then he went straight to issuing his judgement without allowing either side to call witnesses for or against the various components of the breakup plan.
I don't understand the full implications (did I mention IANAL?) but several news sources said that the appeals court may frown upon this as infringing on MS's right to due process, and it may count in MS's favor.
One Senator spoke out pretty vociferously about that, saying that it was wrong to rush something as weighty as tearing apart a however-many-billion-dollar successful company.
There's a lot of talk here about how corporations are growing in control, but I think we are ignoring the other side of the coin - the consumers that are making it possible for them.
It seems to me that consumerism is out of hand, and that is what is driving this whole thing.
I'm talking about the modern 'American Dream' lifestyle, which I see as whitebread, suburban, all living in identical houses (with fake shutters) in identical neighborhoods, driving 1 or more minivans, with 1 or more soccer moms playing the Mrs. Cleaver role, the entire family watching 4+ hours of TV daily and being programmed to all buy the same brands, and buy more, more, more.
I have never understood while all these people feel the need to look exactly the same. It scares the hell out of me.
Can someone please explain this to me?
Does anyone else see rampant consumerism as a problem?
BeOS is damned innovative in comparison to Win/Mac/Linux. Be should GPL it, and make their money by selling T-shirts.
What about Atheos, which was featured on Slashdot a few weeks ago? It's written by some BeOS hax0rs so it shares a lot of commonalities. I'm really impressed by it.
NT was architected by the same cat who architected VMS. I forget his name... Dave something I think.
I really don't see the similarities between them, except that I don't enjoy using either. They simply feel too rigid and over-engineered.
Whatever happened to the Harmony project to create a GPL QT clone?
As I recall it got pretty much abandoned when Trolltech (hehe, funny name) loosened the license on QT to bring it into OSS compliance.
Obviously though, QT licensing is still causing a problem. Would it really be that difficult to finish Harmony? Or to create a new, similar, GPL GUI toolkit? And since when has 'difficult' ever stopped the free software community from accomplishing big things?
Is Harmony still around?
Damn, man. Yours is possibly the most intelligent comment I've read today. I wish I could moderate right now.
How would the free market economy make decisions about natural resources and environmental harm without falling into the "tragedy of the commons" trap (I prefer the "prisoner's dilemma" analogy myself) that makes life worse for everyone?
A free market doesn't have to mean a lack of parameters and a government to enforce them. In fact, the right to life and property is the cornerstone of capitalism, and *requires* a central government to enforce that. (although a handful would argue that) In other words, your freedom to throw a punch ends where my nose begins.
In this scenario, if a corporation is spewing shit into the air (which is undeniably and indisputably shared) and causing me noticeable health problems, it's infringing upon my right to life, and as such it is proper for the government to give it an ass-whooping.
In an anarcho-capitalist scenario I don't see the invisible hand of capitalism protecting the environment well in the short term.
In the long run, I believe that societal attitudes play a big role in forcing enterprises to change their ways. I think this could keep extreme abuses in check. Many mainstream consumers would be willing to boycott a company if it was doing something obviously atrocious. Also consider that the younger generation is much more concerned about the environment and is less likely to tolerate spewage. Freedom of speech is key here. A free economy depends on a free press (or Internet).
Also consider that the most blatant waste and lack of progress occurs in areas which have abundant resources. As resources become scarce, it becomes economically advantageous to make more efficient use of those resources, and to explore renewable closed-loop sources.
So in the long run the free market might indeed take care of things, although I doubt we'll ever have an anarcho-capitalist society to test that out in. Unless we move to SeaLand :)
Anyway, good post!
Maybe, maybe not. If we place real value on the planet's ecology, and we figure out how to enforce that value through governmental regulation, it may be possible to alter the risk/reward curve to make it favorable to save the planet rather than to use it up as if it were an endless resource to be exploited.
Economic systems that place little or no value on the environment tend to abuse the environment more. The perfect example of this is communist countries, where the government and society placed no value on anything--and thus destroyed the environment and broke people down at fantastic speed.
I support the use of government force to prevent the pollution of our air and water. If you dump PCBs upstream from me, you are infringing upon my right to life, and I believe it is proper for the courts to restrain you from doing so and to make you shoulder the cleanup costs.
This is incorrect, and here's why. In an infinite market with infinite resources and infinite competition, your statement would be correct. That's because no matter how large any individual player gets, they cannot dominate the market and thus change the rules as to how the competition are played.
However, markets, resources and people are not infinite: they're finite. This means that when you have a player become larger and larger, they tend to control more and more of the finite market and resources that are out there.
Certainly in any given industry segment there are going to be enterprises which rise to the top from time to time, but it is impossible for them to sustain their position forever. To sustain a dominant position indefinitely, you have to a) never, ever make a mistake or b) bribe government officials for special treatment.
a) just won't happen, because enterprises are made of humans who as we know don't always make the right choices, and there is just too much activity in the marketplace for any company to even dream of tracking all the variables. b) happens every day, esp. in China and other centrally controlled totalitarian-type places.
Allow me to mention something I think is related... Abundance of resources (natural or unnatural) breeds enormous waste, where shortages breed innovation and more efficient use of those resources.
Consider the 70's oil crisis, which is when gas prices shot up, fuel-efficient cars started replacing the gas guzzlers, and alternative energy sources started to receive mainstream attention. I remember my neighbor having a solar panel which heated all his hot water and saved him beaucoup bucks on his electrical bill.
Also consider bandwidth. Back in the Good Old Days, compression schemes like LHARC, ARJ, PKZIP, and V.42 could squeeze every possible bit through your 2400 baud modem. If bandwidth had been plentiful, would those utilities have been necessary? I doubt it.
It's popular to assume that only a totally and absolutely untouched market is somehow "free", but in fact, we expect all sorts of limitations. Laws against killing people for money restrict the free market too, but it turns out no one minds them.
While I do not choose to align myself completely with the Libertarian Party, their Statement of Principles is an excellent manifesto for a free society, and sums up my beliefs pretty well:
The Libertarian Party's Statement of Principles
We, the members of the Libertarian Party, challenge the cult of the omnipotent state and defend the rights of the individual.
We hold that all individuals have the right to exercise sole dominion over their own lives, and have the right to live in whatever manner they choose, so long as they do not forcibly interfere with the equal right of others to live in whatever manner they choose.
Governments throughout history have regularly operated on the opposite principle, that the State has the right to dispose of the lives of individuals and the fruits of their labor. Even within the United States, all political parties other than our own grant to government the right to regulate the lives of individuals and seize the fruits of their labor without their consent.
We, on the contrary, deny the right of any government to do these things, and hold that where governments exist, they must not violate the rights of any individual: namely, (1) the right to life -- accordingly we support the prohibition of the initiation of physical force against others; (2) the right to liberty of speech and action -- accordingly we oppose all attempts by government to abridge the freedom of speech and press, as well as government censorship in any form; and (3) the right to property -- accordingly we oppose all government interference with private property, such as confiscation, nationalization, and eminent domain, and support the prohibition of robbery, trespass, fraud, and misrepresentation.
Since governments, when instituted, must not violate individual rights, we oppose all interference by government in the areas of voluntary and contractual relations among individuals. People should not be forced to sacrifice their lives and property for the benefit of others. They should be left free by government to deal with one another as free traders; and the resultant economic system, the only one compatible with the protection of individual rights, is the free market.
----------------
I posted that to illustrate that freedom and societal order are not mutually exclusive, and that IMO, libertarianism offers a practical way to determine when it is proper for government to be involved and when it is not. It's a pretty basic formula.
First, market participants learn that in a truly free market their profits are severely limited by competition. As a result, bad apples often try to subvert the system and establish monopolies or cartels.
I might add these bad apples usually use the government (aka the System) to legally subvert their competitors using stuff such as lobbyists, lawsuits and antitrust, at our expense.
That's why if left o it's own devices, lassie faire capitalism will consume every square inch of the planet--because the people who created the theory thought the planet was infinite, and so the issue of consuming every square inch just never came up in the rush to greed.
a) we're probably going to use up every square inch of the planet regardless of what economic theories are popular. i imagine we'll eventually spill over onto other planets, and slowly expand into space.
b) I am very weary of hearing people associate laissez-faire capitalism with greed. Greed, like overpopulation, is going to exist just as much no matter what the economic system. The difference is that a free-market economy (which is far from what we have in the U.S.) places natural checks and balances on greed, and does a great job of keeping it from getting out of hand.
Adam Smith (the Father of Capitalism) once said that profit is evil because it indicates inefficiencies in the marketplace. Any time you have free-market conditions, you will see razor-thin profit margins and companies that are responsive to their customers' needs. Conversely, when profits or high that is a sign that something is stifling competition, holding back market information or making that industry a difficult one to enter; generally that's government regulation, censorship, corruption, tariffs, etc.
Just my two cents.
It's still confusing. Perhaps the codec group could rename as Divex or something...
IBM didn't 'choose' not to market OS/2. It was one of the conditions of their run-in with the US DOJ and Antitrust laws. They weren't allowed to market effectively.
If this is correct, I would say that this is a prime example of antitrust enforcement hindering competition instead of helping it.
Plus, MS refused to grant them a license to Win32. That alone would have changed the face of OS'es today.
Well, I guess I can understand why MS wouldn't want to license that to them.
It would have been interesting to see more of a battle between OS/2 and Windows. We might today have entirely different OS choices.