Iplayer actually could have helped: by actually using Bittorrent instead of their own invented Bittorrent-like protocol, and spreading the load, it could have cut the piracy bandwidth load of people downloading BBC television shows. But their business choices completely ruined the possibility.
1: They chose Windows Media Player to provide their desired DRM, which meant they had to go and stream it anyway for Linux and Mac users. 2: Their interface sucks so badly no one in the UK wants to use it. (At least not the sys-admin there I've discussed it with.) No one cares whether the episode of a child's program you want to see showed at which timeslot, you shouldn't have to scroll through all the times to pick the 6:30 AM or the 10:25 AM or the 2:30 re-run, just name the show and let people grab it. 3: Even when turned off, Iplayer quietly sucks your bandwidth for its Bittorrent like protocol without telling you. So it interferes with your other usage, and companies have to tell their own staff not to run it on their laptops or VPN connected machines, etc.
Absolutely. It was done as an illegal campaign to silence speech. Their scale and means were as awful as any federal censorship of which I'm aware.
The purpose of such lawsuits is not necessarily to win, but to silence opposition.
And the US export encryption laws, described at http://www.bis.doc.gov/encryption/default.htm. It would also interfere with the Patriot Act warrant and supervision free phone tapping, and whatever the NSA has put in lately to tap the major fiber optic backbones without warrant or any appeal to inappropriate monitoring available, as they've previously done to AT&T.
On good days, yes. On bad days, we have a history of 100 years of legal slavery, Herbert Hoover's use of the FBI for political abuse, the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during World War II for the simple act of having Japanese ancestors, the McCarthy era witch-hunt for communists, illegal tapping of the fiber-optic backbone of AT&T by the National Security Agency with the granting of retroactive immunity from prosecution for the criminals involved, and Guantanamo Bay.
The Constition provides useful guidelines, but there are far too many cases where it has been ignored wholesale by individuals or entire departments of the federal government. Much of it has been discarded over the last decade in the name of the "war on terrorism", just as it was ignored by previous presidents for the "war on drugs" and other oddness.
Vote, campaign, commit civil disobedience if necessary: we're fortunate that our system allows dissent, but should not be complacent.
The last 9/11 attack failed because the old "leave the hijacker alone and everyone will probably be safe" no longer applied, and the passengers found out it no longer applied. Don't expect that kind of attack to work again anywhere.
Even before the word of the crashes got out, there was at least one former member of the Israeli Defense Forces on one of the earlier 9/11 flights, Danny Lewin. I assume he tried something, unsuccessfully, because the FAA reports that he was stabbed by Satam al Suqami , the terrorist who had apparently been seated right behind Danny.
Remember, folks, in the real world, crackers won't abide by your user agreements. They will look under your secretary's keyboard for the password list, check your logs for mistyped passwords instead of login names, read your Subversion stored plain text passwords from your backup tapes, and read your Wiki for shared passwords.
The Scientologists hated Cult Awareness Network with good reason: CAN had good documentation and support to help families with people who'd been sucked into it, and put them in contact with former members who could explain how things really worked.
The Scientologists filed literally hundreds of lawsuits to drive CAN into bankruptcy and destroy them, eventually succeed with a lawsuit where the plaintiff (not a scientologist) was represented by a Scientology senior lawyer and former leading member of the Guardian's Office, Kendrick Moxon. Look him up as well, and the case, it's fascinating material.
This wasn't direct censorship, come to think about it. It _was_ SLAPP, Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, to stop CAN from their legal and justified activities. And in the end the cult managed to buy the trademarks and phone numbers of CAN. So when you call CAN now, your call is answered by a scientologist.
Guess who they now steer you towards? Apologists for the very cults they used to help people avoid.
Actually, I think that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would be _thrilled_ if it became a popular picnic spot, with kids climbing over it and tourists pinching moon rocks. Because that would mean that humans have in fact settled there and made it a fact of life, rather than the expensive military publicity stunt their original visit was.
I think they'd settle happily for making the square kilometor a Lunar equivalent of a national monument, and having the tourist booth with the commemorative flags and the funny hats and the "authentic" souvenirs just outside it, though.
I know quie a lot about LDAP, Kerberos, DNS, DHCP, and database back ends. I find Active Directory's pitfalls to be quite painful. (Its refusal to assign a hostname for broadcast or netmask addresses is just plain stupid.) And as you say, custom applications are difficult. (Try deploying djbdns for mail filtering of the dnsbl blacklist with Active Directory in place. Oh, dear, that was painful!!)
But _everyone has clients that will work with it_, And if you need a bit of your own services, such as a local DNS zone or a better secured and scriptable DHCP setup, that can be deployed alongside itl. The big problem is whether you can actually secure it in a corporate environment: the fear of installing security patches, and unwillingness to deploy them in proper failover configuraiton or with the ability to test new setups, has made them a single point of failure in many environments. So deploy them cautiouslyl
Unfortunately, I can imagine it, although not as a federal political action. Take a good look at what happened to Cult Awareness Network for a stunning example of political censorship.
Did you tell him "welcome to Guantanamo"? While the Chinese have historically been awful about quelling even polite and peaceful protest, they're hardly the only ones to use violence against untried, possibly innocent people for political reasons.
And even an idiot can have a good year in the lawsuit world. Like the stock world, you print the statistics that make you look best to encourage more investors, and you don't want to admit that if you role a fair dice 3 times, for 12.5 % of the people who do it it will win every time, and for 12.5% it will lose every time. You, as the salesmen for the investment services, make your money from the transaction fees (and the bribes and kickbacks ans shwag), not from the investors winning or losing.
Admittedly, my claims are anecdote, for you. For me, they're direct experience, including the three machines belonging to visiting consultants I had to clean up before the big presentation last month. This sort of installer nonsense has been going on for years. When I click on a 'setup.exe', I don't know nor do I have a choice which installer it is using. I don't have the tools, nor do most users, to review what it actually does or where it put it. And the abuses of the system, the outside-the-installer configuration manipulations which the better installlers cannot even _hope_ to reverse or track, remain standard operating procedure. And yes, DLL hell still happens, although it's slowly gotten better. And yes, one of those machines was a Vista box. (Cleaning up that was an education: that stupid "allow or deny" dialogue box has trained everyone like Pavlov's dogs to drool and hit the "allow" box, which is great for protecting Microsoft for admitting their historically rotten security is their fault but has proven absolutely useless.)
I _do not care_ whether it's because the developers chose to ignore the better installer practices you describe, and which in principle I agree seem wise. Whether better class of Microsoft installers _can_ be used properly, far too frequently, they are not. And the result is conflicts and debris. Whether it's "outdated" with the latest releases, and it's gotten better (which I'll agree it has), it remains true of plenty of commercial software and supported Windows operating systems.
Go ahead: clean up after a failed PeachTree accounting software installation, of an old version needed to access old data properly. (I clocked my wasted time "just fixing" his machine instead of handing him a fresh machine and a disk image of his old one, and warned the consultant: when it hit 8 hours, we wouldn't pay him for the day. I had to do it, not our IT people because of the NDA material involved, although I did consult our IT people. He didn't get paid for that day, and we swapped machines.)
Creating a proper installer may be "trivial", but so is installing security patches. It still doesn't happen anywhere nearly enough, and is often against policy because the installers _choose_ to interfere with other software or with the removal process.
The amount of uninstallable debris that builds up on a Windows computer over time is amazing. DLL Hell didn't go away because a few programmers have learned to use it: it's a function of default practices of using 8.3 namespaces, a fascinating set of locations to look for libraries, programmer laziness causing them to stuff all their DLL's in the same place, and a desire to replace standard system DLL's with third party ones to force their use instead of that provided by the other vendor. That's not something an installer can automatically fix, becuse it's rooted in bad programming practice. And it makes cleaning up after such installers rather awkward.
And you've seriously waved a magic wand at, and this ignored, the other changes done by the _software creator's_ installation process. Adding a cartload of registry keys and configuration oddnesses that a tool like Windows Installer does not reverse is completely standard practice: look at the handling of registration keys for licensed software for examples. And the installers you're applauding are way, way, way too often used to install multiple packages simultaneously about which the installers do not inform you, and which are _deliberately_ written to be difficult to remove. Welcome to the world of adware and vaguely legal "monitoring your experience" spyware.
Whether this is the fault of the developers for adding their own installation oddnesses to Microsoft's installers is pretty much irrelevant. It's far too common of a practice to ignore, and a well-written installation wrapper can't prevent it, anymore than a well-written RPM or.deb system can prevent idiots like NVidia from replacing your system librarys with symlinks to their proprietary debris and then failing to clean up after themselves.
These sorts of mess can certainly happen under Linux, but the debris left behind tends to be much, much smaller. And because the installers are better documented and more transparent, it's usually much simpler to clean up.
And "mock" (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Projects/Mock), which I use to build software for one platform on another OS. The chroot cages it builds automatically are quite useful for getting clean, new compilation environments without the pain of allocating hardware, configuring device drivers, setting up networks, etc., etc.
Transactional my eye. It records a transaction list, but that list is extremely poorly managed and often involves files, particularly configuration files and DLL's, that wind up overwriting each other and are extremely unwieldy to uninstall. They're also amazingly bad about cleaning out the Registry debris and installation time configuration changes that can, and do, interfere with other software.
Oh, my. No. Most Linux releases have a single primary package management system, such as Debian's.deb system, or RedHat's RPM system. But people consistently install packages by other means, for both good and bad reasons. This includes SuSE's YaST, CPAN, Python's pear utilities, and NVidia's binary installer.
I agree with your desire, but have personally cleaned up far too often from the mix of software installers and their conflicts.
Without the crudity, I have to agree. I ran the OS for about six months because I wanted to play some Win9x games I owned, and the hardware vendors would not sell Win98 in the hardware configuration I wanted. Oh, my, it was bad.
Their existence as a "church" is a tax dodge, and an attempt to avoid the FDA. They presented themselves as a "science of the mind" for many years until the FDA finally stepped and ruled that their claims were fraudulent, and _boom_. They campaigned, long and hard and illegally, to get declared as a "501c3", the US tax classification of religions.
The secret agreement between the IRS and the cult, eventually published by the Wall Street Journal, is here (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Cowen/essays/agreemnt.html). It's fascinating reading if you're a bit cynical and realize why a government agency, exhausted with wasting their time on such a group that always screamed bloody murder and had been caught in criminal activity to harass and discredit anyone who bothered them enough, would wash their hands of the matter and settle for this.
And their members can, in fact, edit Wikipedia from other locations. But this wasn't "members" editing. This was the cult's own staff doing a planned campaign to distort and eliminate the postings of others.
Remember, few "members" are permitted to deal with skeptical outsiders. That's a task reserved for the "Office of Special Affairs", their group that took on dealing with reporters and former members, after the "Guardian's Office" had its leadership convicted of planting bomb threats to discredit the author Susan Meister and convicted of a large array of other crimes. Look it up: this is _precisely_ the material that these astro-turfing censors wanted to eliminate from Wikipedia. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Affairs, it's fascinating what this cult has done historically to harass writers and former members.
Oh, my. Sir or madam, you apparently didn't notice or pay attention to the warfare with Netscape when Microsoft first released Internet Explorer. It used to be quite possible, though the steps kept changing as Microsoft deliberately altered the procedures, to uninstall Internet Explorer. The old, easy links to the procedures are now flooded with too many links of removing only the most recent versions, I certainly remember the old Netscape lawsuits about this. But Wikipedia is my friend for such research: check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft for some details of the shenanigans Microsoft pulled in court.
It was a matter of _policy_, not technology, to refuse to include the hooks to yank out many of the previous versions of Internet Explorer as a classic 'Add/Remove Programs' option. The fact that Microsoft agreed to provide Internet Explorer for Apple's operating systems certainly shows that they, at lteast, thought it was modular enough to do. Judges have, in fact, ordered Microsoft to make it optional, and been given demonstrations that it was feasible, at least in 2000. (See that link above.)
Third party rendering applications? Please name two that use that unstable mess of internal over-customization, deliberately undocumented features and violation of API's known as Internet Explorer. Any two. You've actually made me curious about this.
Oh, like many experts, they have whatever principles you are willing to fund.
More seriously, they are the champions in the "battle of chapions" that is a US courtroom. So many, as individuals, have excellent principles which they try to support by the clients they accept. And they can lose their license for not doing their courthouse best for their clients, even if their violation of legal "canons" helps keep a child rapist or Dick Cheney from hurting society as a whole.
Ohh, gold has significant intrinsic worth: its use for industry and effectiveness as a very malleable, highly conductive noble metal that can be handled in nearly monomolecular layers make it very effective for all sorts of industrial uses. But yes, its use and manipulations for decoration and economic market uses are quite out of scale with its industrial use.
This wasn't always the case: The invention of steel, the assembly line, and the invention of bank notes all distorted the value of easily worked, stable metals. And gold was very useful as a verifiable form of portable wealth, less reliant on the trust in a remote agency than banknotes or on a particular government.
Battles have been won and lost, but the browser wars continue. Or haven't you monitored the entry of Google and their "Chrome" browser into this space? And have you looked at the oddness happening to browsers on cell phones and PDA's?
The XP thing is to get you hooked, then upgrade you to Vista later when they drop support for XP.
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Iplayer actually could have helped: by actually using Bittorrent instead of their own invented Bittorrent-like protocol, and spreading the load, it could have cut the piracy bandwidth load of people downloading BBC television shows. But their business choices completely ruined the possibility.
1: They chose Windows Media Player to provide their desired DRM, which meant they had to go and stream it anyway for Linux and Mac users.
2: Their interface sucks so badly no one in the UK wants to use it. (At least not the sys-admin there I've discussed it with.) No one cares whether the episode of a child's program you want to see showed at which timeslot, you shouldn't have to scroll through all the times to pick the 6:30 AM or the 10:25 AM or the 2:30 re-run, just name the show and let people grab it.
3: Even when turned off, Iplayer quietly sucks your bandwidth for its Bittorrent like protocol without telling you. So it interferes with your other usage, and companies have to tell their own staff not to run it on their laptops or VPN connected machines, etc.
Absolutely. It was done as an illegal campaign to silence speech. Their scale and means were as awful as any federal censorship of which I'm aware. The purpose of such lawsuits is not necessarily to win, but to silence opposition.
And the US export encryption laws, described at http://www.bis.doc.gov/encryption/default.htm. It would also interfere with the Patriot Act warrant and supervision free phone tapping, and whatever the NSA has put in lately to tap the major fiber optic backbones without warrant or any appeal to inappropriate monitoring available, as they've previously done to AT&T.
On good days, yes. On bad days, we have a history of 100 years of legal slavery, Herbert Hoover's use of the FBI for political abuse, the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during World War II for the simple act of having Japanese ancestors, the McCarthy era witch-hunt for communists, illegal tapping of the fiber-optic backbone of AT&T by the National Security Agency with the granting of retroactive immunity from prosecution for the criminals involved, and Guantanamo Bay. The Constition provides useful guidelines, but there are far too many cases where it has been ignored wholesale by individuals or entire departments of the federal government. Much of it has been discarded over the last decade in the name of the "war on terrorism", just as it was ignored by previous presidents for the "war on drugs" and other oddness. Vote, campaign, commit civil disobedience if necessary: we're fortunate that our system allows dissent, but should not be complacent.
The last 9/11 attack failed because the old "leave the hijacker alone and everyone will probably be safe" no longer applied, and the passengers found out it no longer applied. Don't expect that kind of attack to work again anywhere. Even before the word of the crashes got out, there was at least one former member of the Israeli Defense Forces on one of the earlier 9/11 flights, Danny Lewin. I assume he tried something, unsuccessfully, because the FAA reports that he was stabbed by Satam al Suqami , the terrorist who had apparently been seated right behind Danny.
Won't they have to pull their heads out, first?
Remember, folks, in the real world, crackers won't abide by your user agreements. They will look under your secretary's keyboard for the password list, check your logs for mistyped passwords instead of login names, read your Subversion stored plain text passwords from your backup tapes, and read your Wiki for shared passwords.
The Scientologists hated Cult Awareness Network with good reason: CAN had good documentation and support to help families with people who'd been sucked into it, and put them in contact with former members who could explain how things really worked. The Scientologists filed literally hundreds of lawsuits to drive CAN into bankruptcy and destroy them, eventually succeed with a lawsuit where the plaintiff (not a scientologist) was represented by a Scientology senior lawyer and former leading member of the Guardian's Office, Kendrick Moxon. Look him up as well, and the case, it's fascinating material. This wasn't direct censorship, come to think about it. It _was_ SLAPP, Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, to stop CAN from their legal and justified activities. And in the end the cult managed to buy the trademarks and phone numbers of CAN. So when you call CAN now, your call is answered by a scientologist. Guess who they now steer you towards? Apologists for the very cults they used to help people avoid.
Most of us have suffered quite enough from "innovation" in web browsers, thank you very much.
Actually, I think that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would be _thrilled_ if it became a popular picnic spot, with kids climbing over it and tourists pinching moon rocks. Because that would mean that humans have in fact settled there and made it a fact of life, rather than the expensive military publicity stunt their original visit was.
I think they'd settle happily for making the square kilometor a Lunar equivalent of a national monument, and having the tourist booth with the commemorative flags and the funny hats and the "authentic" souvenirs just outside it, though.
I know quie a lot about LDAP, Kerberos, DNS, DHCP, and database back ends. I find Active Directory's pitfalls to be quite painful. (Its refusal to assign a hostname for broadcast or netmask addresses is just plain stupid.) And as you say, custom applications are difficult. (Try deploying djbdns for mail filtering of the dnsbl blacklist with Active Directory in place. Oh, dear, that was painful!!) But _everyone has clients that will work with it_, And if you need a bit of your own services, such as a local DNS zone or a better secured and scriptable DHCP setup, that can be deployed alongside itl. The big problem is whether you can actually secure it in a corporate environment: the fear of installing security patches, and unwillingness to deploy them in proper failover configuraiton or with the ability to test new setups, has made them a single point of failure in many environments. So deploy them cautiouslyl
Unfortunately, I can imagine it, although not as a federal political action. Take a good look at what happened to Cult Awareness Network for a stunning example of political censorship.
Did you tell him "welcome to Guantanamo"? While the Chinese have historically been awful about quelling even polite and peaceful protest, they're hardly the only ones to use violence against untried, possibly innocent people for political reasons.
And even an idiot can have a good year in the lawsuit world. Like the stock world, you print the statistics that make you look best to encourage more investors, and you don't want to admit that if you role a fair dice 3 times, for 12.5 % of the people who do it it will win every time, and for 12.5% it will lose every time. You, as the salesmen for the investment services, make your money from the transaction fees (and the bribes and kickbacks ans shwag), not from the investors winning or losing.
Admittedly, my claims are anecdote, for you. For me, they're direct experience, including the three machines belonging to visiting consultants I had to clean up before the big presentation last month. This sort of installer nonsense has been going on for years. When I click on a 'setup.exe', I don't know nor do I have a choice which installer it is using. I don't have the tools, nor do most users, to review what it actually does or where it put it. And the abuses of the system, the outside-the-installer configuration manipulations which the better installlers cannot even _hope_ to reverse or track, remain standard operating procedure. And yes, DLL hell still happens, although it's slowly gotten better. And yes, one of those machines was a Vista box. (Cleaning up that was an education: that stupid "allow or deny" dialogue box has trained everyone like Pavlov's dogs to drool and hit the "allow" box, which is great for protecting Microsoft for admitting their historically rotten security is their fault but has proven absolutely useless.)
I _do not care_ whether it's because the developers chose to ignore the better installer practices you describe, and which in principle I agree seem wise. Whether better class of Microsoft installers _can_ be used properly, far too frequently, they are not. And the result is conflicts and debris. Whether it's "outdated" with the latest releases, and it's gotten better (which I'll agree it has), it remains true of plenty of commercial software and supported Windows operating systems.
Go ahead: clean up after a failed PeachTree accounting software installation, of an old version needed to access old data properly. (I clocked my wasted time "just fixing" his machine instead of handing him a fresh machine and a disk image of his old one, and warned the consultant: when it hit 8 hours, we wouldn't pay him for the day. I had to do it, not our IT people because of the NDA material involved, although I did consult our IT people. He didn't get paid for that day, and we swapped machines.)
Creating a proper installer may be "trivial", but so is installing security patches. It still doesn't happen anywhere nearly enough, and is often against policy because the installers _choose_ to interfere with other software or with the removal process.
Oh, dear. You are an optimist, aren't you?
The amount of uninstallable debris that builds up on a Windows computer over time is amazing. DLL Hell didn't go away because a few programmers have learned to use it: it's a function of default practices of using 8.3 namespaces, a fascinating set of locations to look for libraries, programmer laziness causing them to stuff all their DLL's in the same place, and a desire to replace standard system DLL's with third party ones to force their use instead of that provided by the other vendor. That's not something an installer can automatically fix, becuse it's rooted in bad programming practice. And it makes cleaning up after such installers rather awkward.
And you've seriously waved a magic wand at, and this ignored, the other changes done by the _software creator's_ installation process. Adding a cartload of registry keys and configuration oddnesses that a tool like Windows Installer does not reverse is completely standard practice: look at the handling of registration keys for licensed software for examples. And the installers you're applauding are way, way, way too often used to install multiple packages simultaneously about which the installers do not inform you, and which are _deliberately_ written to be difficult to remove. Welcome to the world of adware and vaguely legal "monitoring your experience" spyware.
Whether this is the fault of the developers for adding their own installation oddnesses to Microsoft's installers is pretty much irrelevant. It's far too common of a practice to ignore, and a well-written installation wrapper can't prevent it, anymore than a well-written RPM or .deb system can prevent idiots like NVidia from replacing your system librarys with symlinks to their proprietary debris and then failing to clean up after themselves.
These sorts of mess can certainly happen under Linux, but the debris left behind tends to be much, much smaller. And because the installers are better documented and more transparent, it's usually much simpler to clean up.
And "mock" (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Projects/Mock), which I use to build software for one platform on another OS. The chroot cages it builds automatically are quite useful for getting clean, new compilation environments without the pain of allocating hardware, configuring device drivers, setting up networks, etc., etc.
Transactional my eye. It records a transaction list, but that list is extremely poorly managed and often involves files, particularly configuration files and DLL's, that wind up overwriting each other and are extremely unwieldy to uninstall. They're also amazingly bad about cleaning out the Registry debris and installation time configuration changes that can, and do, interfere with other software.
Oh, my. No. Most Linux releases have a single primary package management system, such as Debian's .deb system, or RedHat's RPM system. But people consistently install packages by other means, for both good and bad reasons. This includes SuSE's YaST, CPAN, Python's pear utilities, and NVidia's binary installer.
I agree with your desire, but have personally cleaned up far too often from the mix of software installers and their conflicts.
Without the crudity, I have to agree. I ran the OS for about six months because I wanted to play some Win9x games I owned, and the hardware vendors would not sell Win98 in the hardware configuration I wanted. Oh, my, it was bad.
Their existence as a "church" is a tax dodge, and an attempt to avoid the FDA. They presented themselves as a "science of the mind" for many years until the FDA finally stepped and ruled that their claims were fraudulent, and _boom_. They campaigned, long and hard and illegally, to get declared as a "501c3", the US tax classification of religions.
The secret agreement between the IRS and the cult, eventually published by the Wall Street Journal, is here (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Cowen/essays/agreemnt.html). It's fascinating reading if you're a bit cynical and realize why a government agency, exhausted with wasting their time on such a group that always screamed bloody murder and had been caught in criminal activity to harass and discredit anyone who bothered them enough, would wash their hands of the matter and settle for this.
And their members can, in fact, edit Wikipedia from other locations. But this wasn't "members" editing. This was the cult's own staff doing a planned campaign to distort and eliminate the postings of others.
Remember, few "members" are permitted to deal with skeptical outsiders. That's a task reserved for the "Office of Special Affairs", their group that took on dealing with reporters and former members, after the "Guardian's Office" had its leadership convicted of planting bomb threats to discredit the author Susan Meister and convicted of a large array of other crimes. Look it up: this is _precisely_ the material that these astro-turfing censors wanted to eliminate from Wikipedia. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Affairs, it's fascinating what this cult has done historically to harass writers and former members.
Oh, my. Sir or madam, you apparently didn't notice or pay attention to the warfare with Netscape when Microsoft first released Internet Explorer. It used to be quite possible, though the steps kept changing as Microsoft deliberately altered the procedures, to uninstall Internet Explorer. The old, easy links to the procedures are now flooded with too many links of removing only the most recent versions, I certainly remember the old Netscape lawsuits about this. But Wikipedia is my friend for such research: check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft for some details of the shenanigans Microsoft pulled in court.
It was a matter of _policy_, not technology, to refuse to include the hooks to yank out many of the previous versions of Internet Explorer as a classic 'Add/Remove Programs' option. The fact that Microsoft agreed to provide Internet Explorer for Apple's operating systems certainly shows that they, at lteast, thought it was modular enough to do. Judges have, in fact, ordered Microsoft to make it optional, and been given demonstrations that it was feasible, at least in 2000. (See that link above.)
Third party rendering applications? Please name two that use that unstable mess of internal over-customization, deliberately undocumented features and violation of API's known as Internet Explorer. Any two. You've actually made me curious about this.
Oh, like many experts, they have whatever principles you are willing to fund.
More seriously, they are the champions in the "battle of chapions" that is a US courtroom. So many, as individuals, have excellent principles which they try to support by the clients they accept. And they can lose their license for not doing their courthouse best for their clients, even if their violation of legal "canons" helps keep a child rapist or Dick Cheney from hurting society as a whole.
Ohh, gold has significant intrinsic worth: its use for industry and effectiveness as a very malleable, highly conductive noble metal that can be handled in nearly monomolecular layers make it very effective for all sorts of industrial uses. But yes, its use and manipulations for decoration and economic market uses are quite out of scale with its industrial use.
This wasn't always the case: The invention of steel, the assembly line, and the invention of bank notes all distorted the value of easily worked, stable metals. And gold was very useful as a verifiable form of portable wealth, less reliant on the trust in a remote agency than banknotes or on a particular government.
Battles have been won and lost, but the browser wars continue. Or haven't you monitored the entry of Google and their "Chrome" browser into this space? And have you looked at the oddness happening to browsers on cell phones and PDA's?
The XP thing is to get you hooked, then upgrade you to Vista later when they drop support for XP.