What is it then, if you decide to acquire it anyway, and deprive me of due compensation?
In the case of illegal copying, what is it you need compensation for? You still have your copy. It didn't stop working just because someone copied it, so exactly what is it you are being compensated for? I know perfectly well what it was, by the way. I'm just trying to get you to admit it: If the thing in question was something you were going to make money from, you want compensation for the money you (and this is the key part) WOULD HAVE made had the work not been copied. I leave it as an excercise for the reader to note how taking an item that is definately worth something today is a different thing entirely from short-circuiting someone's potential to make money in the future from a hypothetical sale that might have happened. I'm not apologising for software piracy. I'm just saying prosecuting it as if it was theft is like prosecuting an assult and battery case as if it was a full blown murder.
I'm sorry to say, but keeping a jacket after engaging in a good faith effort to find its rightful owner has nothing to do with the willful acquisition of copyrighted material with no intent to seek permission or provide compensation in accordance with the owner's offer.
I agree fully. Which is why your definition of theft is faulty. I was pointing out that under YOUR definition the jacket example would have been theft. I was trying to point out why your definition doesn't match what people are really thinking when they say the word "theft". People don't think of the jacket example as theft. Your definition does, even if you didn't realise this when you wrote it.
To reiterate: I advertise something of value at a given price. If you decide you want it, you pay for it. If you reject my offer but TAKE my goods anyway (medium notwithstanding), how is that NOT theft?
"TAKE" != "COPY". I shouldn't have to explain any further than that.
If someone leaves a jacket behind on a bench, and there is no way of finding out who's it is, and I try for several days to find the owner before giving up and taking the jacket myself, have I "stolen" it? Is this theft? Common sense would say no. Your definition would say yes because I never succeeded in contacting the owner to arrange terms of payment or to obtain permission to have it for free.
As I said, the definition is behind the times because it was only recently in the history of the language that it became easy to obtain something of worth by making a quick copy instead of taking the thing away from it's owner. The only reason the definition doesn't mention the distinction is that there WAS NO SUCH DISTINCTION until recently. One always assumed the other.
Historically, radio was the means by which you could hear most of the songs on a new album before buying it. Recently, only one or two songs off each album end up getting radio airplay and the rest are a blind crap-shoot as to what you're going to get. That's what changed.
It's closer to "You're not going to the store?" as an observation, presented as a question to invite disagreement.
Sure, but normally if I make a tentative statement and await disagreement or agreement, "yes" means agreement, and "no" means disagreement, so if someone says "I say X is not true, what do you say?" then "yes" would mean "I also think X is not true." At least it would if the language was logical.
"You're not going to the store. discuss."
"Yes, I concur. I am not going."
But prices still are not copyrightable, period. Secret or not-secret, they're facts.
Yes, but things like "E-books are encrypted using the following technique...blah blah blah" are also facts. At least in the English language they are - I realize that lawyers often redefine English terms to be much more narrow in scope, and this might be such a case. But if the meaning of "fact" you were looking for was the general English one, then every secret copyrighted document is just a written down bunch of facts, and the distinction isn't very obvious to me.
A better analogy would be buying a second hand car from someone and finding that I'm getting pulled over by the police all the time because the car is in police records a having once been used in a hit-and-run. Then I talk to the police to get things resolved, show them the proof that I bought it at a time after the hit-and-run occurred, and yet they refuse to remove the ABP out on my car and I cannot legally use it on the roads. You're damn straight I'm going to be mad at the police for this, and rightfully so, in ADDITION to being mad at the guy who sold me the car without disclosing this problem.
C02 is a poison to the human body if you have it in high concentrations. (That's the big air problem they had on Apollo 13. They had enough O2, but not enough filtering capacity to get rid of the CO2.) How quickly it would kill you depends on how diluted it is with other gasses in the air. the small percentage of it in the earth's atmopshere isn't enough to kill you, obviously. But being in a room full of it is NOT a good idea.
And CO2 has the very very nasty side effect of tricking your body into thinking it's choking and needs another breath whether it really does or not. (Which was another problen on Apollo 13 - the high level of CO2 was causing the crew to breathe way too fast.) Your body is unable to detect oxygen in the lungs. It only detects CO2. CO2 triggers your automatic involuntary breathing, and it triggers your panic feeling when you think you're asphixiating. Get excess CO2 in your lungs and you will be filled with an almost overwhelming urge to take another breath, which if you are in a room with lots of CO2, will make you have even more CO2 in your lungs and make you have even more physcal desire to take another breath, and so on. This is the worst thing to do because you are getting rid of what little oxygen is left in your lungs and replacing it with oxygen-less air.
When you can't get oxygen from the surrounding air, the worst thing in the world to do is take a breath. You will survive much longer by fighting the urge to take a breath, and instead just hold the air already in your lungs in place until you can get out. You don't convert all the oxygen in your lungs into carbon dioxide with each breath - far from it. You just convert a portion of it, so the air you expell just has a smaller percentage of oxygen than the air you breathe in. But there's still quite a bit there that never got converted. (That's why mouth-to-mouth breathing can help someone - the air you breathe out still has enough oxygen in it to be a lot better than no air at all.)
But if you breathe that air out and breathe oxygen-less air in, you will pass out very fast. Most people have the misconception that you can do without oxygen for a minute or two before dying. That's not true - your body needs to consume fresh oxygen at a continuing rate just to function at all, it's just that your lungs can HOLD a small supply of oxygen to supply this need for a minute or two. Get rid of that oxygen by breathing it out and replacing it with oxygenless air, and you're going to pass out in just a few seconds, and be dead shortly thereafter.
And the worst part is you won't FEEL like anything is wrong. Your body is unable to measure the level of oxygen in your lungs. Instead your body senses the level of carbon dioxide in your lungs. As the by-product of normal breathing, when carbon dioxide has built up enough, that indicates you've converted a lot of oxygen and it's time for another breath. This is what triggers the automatic involuntary breathing that takes over when you stop thinking about it. This is also what triggers the panic feeling that you get when you know you need air. Your lymph nodes detect too much carbon dioxide and start sending the panic signal to your mind. What this all means is that if your body isn't exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide, your body doesn't even realize it's asphixiating. If there's no oxygen in your lungs to start with, then there won't be any carbon dioxide building up in the lungs, and you will feel no sensation of needing a breath at all. You'll feel just fine for a few seconds and then *poof* you're gone as the blood going to your brain runs out of oxygen and your brain activity just plain stops.
So if you're ever in a halon gas system when it goes off - DO NOT BREATHE. Just hold whatever breath happens to already in your lungs and get out. The instinct is to hold your breath by first inhaling your lungs full and THEN holding it, but that's the worst thing you could do, as explained above. The tricky part is remembering to override that instinct.
ONE person viewing the movie ONE time
A big screen, with big sound to boot.
A home copy (DVD *or* VHS) buys you:
As many people as you want to invite over,
viewing the movie, on multiple occasions if
you wish.
That factor alone makes the price difference make sense. Then you tack on that the DVD typically lets you pick subtitle options (very handy for foreign films where you want to hear the real actors' voices and not some out of work low paid actor in a sound stage dubbing badly. (The dubbed version of Run Lola Run is very painful to watch, because the voiceover for Franka Potente sounds like some valley girl floozy.).)
BOTH the RIAA and the MPAA piss me off with their raping of the copyright laws, but at least the MPAA isn't doing it to prop up an unrealistcly overpriced product like the RIAA is. (Both annoy me, but I feel the RIAA's motives are more evil.)
Movies pay off their costs at theaters. False. Most movies don't even break even, they rely on rental and sales to break even or profit.
Not true. They rely on BOTH to break even. It's just that the two forms of revenue come in in distinct phases such that the theatre revenue all occurs first and the rental revenue all occurs second. So even if, say, 70% of the money came from the theatre run and only 30% from rental, as long as the profit margin is less than 30% it will still look as if the rental is solely responsible for the profit if you bookkeep week by week and don't look at the whole movie run in summary.
(I'm just objecting to the use of the phrase "rely on" - yes I know the break even point doesn't happen until after the theatre run, but that doesn't automatically mean rental sales are more of a contributor to the total profit than the theatre sales. It's more a question of WHEN the money comes in, not how much of it each contribues.)
Exactly. Just because I sample something doesn't mean I would have bought it otherwise. For me it's just the online equivilent of the "listen before you buy" booth at the music store. If record execs insist that the only legal way to buy music is to buy albums blindly at random without knowing how they sound first, I'm not going to end up buying very many albums. The stuff played on the radio is usually not a very good indicator of what the rest of the album sounds like.
Theft also carries the implication that you DEPRIVE the original owner of the item or service in question. Piracy doesn't do that. It is not the same thing as, say, stealing someone's car stareo. The reason the definition isn't clear on the distinction is that until the digital age it wasn't possible to make a perfect copy of something with ease, and so there was never a need to distinguish specificly what it was about an act that made it theft - was it the obtaining of goods without permission or payment, or was it the depreivation of those goods from the current owner? Originally, one always implied the other. Not true anymore today - but the English language hasn't caught up to reality yet, and if the media campaign to label piracy as theft succeeds, it never will.
The key difference is that the word "theft" carries with it TWO different reasons why it's bad. If you steal a radio from a car, you are essentially screwing over two different people at the same time. Not only are you taking the radio away from the car owner and thereby depriving that owner of the use of it, you are also getting the use of the radio without paying the radio manufacturer for it.
Piracy only has the second kind of screwing someone over, not the first. And that's why it's NOT theft. Theft is when you deprive the owner of the item. Making a copy does not do that.
Does that make piracy right? No. But it does make it something DIFFERENT from theft, and it should not be treated under the law as the same thing. The software companies call it theft in the media because they like the false association the public makes between piracy and things like someone stealing their car radio.
For those who don't know, BOGO = Buy One Get One, as in by one, get one free.
According to `cat/proc/cpuinfo`. my old computer has 799.54 By One, Get One deals on Mips. Twice the instructions per second for the same price. Sweet.
The number on the barcode in a retail store isn't a price - it's just an ID number indicating the type of item it is. The barcode doesn't say, "This item costs $3.75". The barcode says, "This is item number 105919541 in your database". When the cash register scans it, it looks up in the store's database and discovers that item number 105919541 is "6-pack of 20 fluid Oz bottles of Cherry Coke", and that the price for this item in this particular store is $3.75.
Altering the barcode would only confuse the cash register into thinking it was a different item, not into charging a different price for the same item. That could still work if the checkout line person isn't really paying attention - you might be able to check out a 24-pack of soda as if it was a small pack of chewing gum. But if the person watches the screen at all, you could get caught easily.
The prices that were leaked were *future* prices not yet in effect - so No, you couldn't find out about them by just walking into the store and looking. What the companies suing are concerned about is consumers finding out what the deals will be before the companies wanted them to. If you know the new computer you wanted will be 15% cheaper in a couple of weeks, you'll probably delay your purchase until then.
They think that not having the prices public will help them stay out of price wars or other competitive practices, but it's not like this would stop secret shoppers or anything.
I think it's more likely that they are worried about consumers knowing how the prices are about to change. Would you buy a product today if you knew it was going to be 15% cheaper a week from today as part of some promotional deal? They don't want consumers to be able to plan ahead to catch when the deals are on, because if they can do that then nobody will ever need to purchase anything at full price.
If you don't KNOW whether or not the item will be on sale next week, you'll be more likely to buy it right now.
Yes, I know what it means. The problem is that connotation is in direct opposition to the literal meaning, and that bothers me because I have the sense that the literal *should* always trump the connotative. It's a good thing when adding the connotative interpetation to a statement adds additional meaning to it. It's bad, though, when adding the connotative interpetation INVERTS the meaning of the statement in addition to adding more information.
"You are going to the store, are you not?" is the same question phrased opposite ways. When asked the same question opposite ways, I always answer with a full sentence, not just "yes" or "no". I view such questions as the sort that "yes" and "no" are not useful answers for. It's the same as being asked an "or" question and answering "yes". It's technically valid, but often not particularly helpful:
"Are you going to walk to the store or drive your car?" "Yes".
"Are you going to the store or staying home?" "Yes".
"You are going to the store, aren't you?" "Yes".
I view the above three examples as having the same identical kind of ambiguity to them.
In this case the exploit was published explicitly because the vendor WAS notified earlier and said they didn't consider it important. Publishing the exploit was the way to slap them and say, "Okay you liars, let's see if you still consider it to be unimportant after the word gets out to everybody about how dangerous it is. NOW let's see if you keep sticking your head in the sand when this allegedly unimporant exploit is destroying your userbase's data."
In the long run, it was in the users best interest, because this was the only way to get the vendor to do something about it.
As one of the people who wants to see IE lose, let me explain my reason:
If IE non-standard "standards" take over, then people can't use the web under Unix, which seems a shame given that that's where the fsking thing was invented and developed while the idiots in the PC world (the few who'd heard of the web) were poo-pooing the idea and promoting incompatable private networks like AOL and Compuserve.
To that end I am very happy whenever IE has a problem. If IE wasn't invented for the express purpose of stopping us perverted weirdos who want to use something other than Microsoft, then I wouldn't care who used it or why.
Slashdot Mirror
In the case of illegal copying, what is it you need compensation for? You still have your copy. It didn't stop working just because someone copied it, so exactly what is it you are being compensated for? I know perfectly well what it was, by the way. I'm just trying to get you to admit it: If the thing in question was something you were going to make money from, you want compensation for the money you (and this is the key part) WOULD HAVE made had the work not been copied. I leave it as an excercise for the reader to note how taking an item that is definately worth something today is a different thing entirely from short-circuiting someone's potential to make money in the future from a hypothetical sale that might have happened. I'm not apologising for software piracy. I'm just saying prosecuting it as if it was theft is like prosecuting an assult and battery case as if it was a full blown murder.
I agree fully. Which is why your definition of theft is faulty. I was pointing out that under YOUR definition the jacket example would have been theft. I was trying to point out why your definition doesn't match what people are really thinking when they say the word "theft". People don't think of the jacket example as theft. Your definition does, even if you didn't realise this when you wrote it.
"TAKE" != "COPY". I shouldn't have to explain any further than that.
If someone leaves a jacket behind on a bench, and there is no way of finding out who's it is, and I try for several days to find the owner before giving up and taking the jacket myself, have I "stolen" it?
Is this theft? Common sense would say no. Your definition would say yes because I never succeeded in contacting the owner to arrange terms of payment or to obtain permission to have it for free.
As I said, the definition is behind the times because it was only recently in the history of the language that it became easy to obtain something of worth by making a quick copy instead of taking the thing away from it's owner. The only reason the definition doesn't mention the distinction is that there WAS NO SUCH DISTINCTION until recently. One always assumed the other.
Historically, radio was the means by which you could hear most of the songs on a new album before buying it. Recently, only one or two songs off each album end up getting radio airplay and the rest are a blind crap-shoot as to what you're going to get. That's what changed.
"You're not going to the store. discuss."
"Yes, I concur. I am not going."
Yes, but things like "E-books are encrypted using the following technique...blah blah blah" are also facts. At least in the English language they are - I realize that lawyers often redefine English terms to be much more narrow in scope, and this might be such a case. But if the meaning of "fact" you were looking for was the general English one, then every secret copyrighted document is just a written down bunch of facts, and the distinction isn't very obvious to me.
A better analogy would be buying a second hand car from someone and finding that I'm getting pulled over by the police all the time because the car is in police records a having once been used in a hit-and-run. Then I talk to the police to get things resolved, show them the proof that I bought it at a time after the hit-and-run occurred, and yet they refuse to remove the ABP out on my car and I cannot legally use it on the roads. You're damn straight I'm going to be mad at the police for this, and rightfully so, in ADDITION to being mad at the guy who sold me the car without disclosing this problem.
C02 is a poison to the human body if you have it in high concentrations. (That's the big air problem they had on Apollo 13. They had enough O2, but not enough filtering capacity to get rid of the CO2.) How quickly it would kill you depends on how diluted it is with other gasses in the air. the small percentage of it in the earth's atmopshere isn't enough to kill you, obviously. But being in a room full of it is NOT a good idea.
And CO2 has the very very nasty side effect of tricking your body into thinking it's choking and needs another breath whether it really does or not. (Which was another problen on Apollo 13 - the high level of CO2 was causing the crew to breathe way too fast.) Your body is unable to detect oxygen in the lungs. It only detects CO2. CO2 triggers your automatic involuntary breathing, and it triggers your panic feeling when you think you're asphixiating. Get excess CO2 in your lungs and you will be filled with an almost overwhelming urge to take another breath, which if you are in a room with lots of CO2, will make you have even more CO2 in your lungs and make you have even more physcal desire to take another breath, and so on. This is the worst thing to do because you are getting rid of what little oxygen is left in your lungs and replacing it with oxygen-less air.
When you can't get oxygen from the surrounding air, the worst thing in the world to do is take a breath. You will survive much longer by fighting the urge to take a breath, and instead just hold the air already in your lungs in place until you can get out. You don't convert all the oxygen in your lungs into carbon dioxide with each breath - far from it. You just convert a portion of it, so the air you expell just has a smaller percentage of oxygen than the air you breathe in. But there's still quite a bit there that never got converted. (That's why mouth-to-mouth breathing can help someone - the air you breathe out still has enough oxygen in it to be a lot better than no air at all.)
But if you breathe that air out and breathe oxygen-less air in, you will pass out very fast. Most people have the misconception that you can do without oxygen for a minute or two before dying. That's not true - your body needs to consume fresh oxygen at a continuing rate just to function at all, it's just that your lungs can HOLD a small supply of oxygen to supply this need for a minute or two. Get rid of that oxygen by breathing it out and replacing it with oxygenless air, and you're going to pass out in just a few seconds, and be dead shortly thereafter.
And the worst part is you won't FEEL like anything is wrong. Your body is unable to measure the level of oxygen in your lungs. Instead your body senses the level of carbon dioxide in your lungs. As the by-product of normal breathing, when carbon dioxide has built up enough, that indicates you've converted a lot of oxygen and it's time for another breath. This is what triggers the automatic involuntary breathing that takes over when you stop thinking about it. This is also what triggers the panic feeling that you get when you know you need air. Your lymph nodes detect too much carbon dioxide and start sending the panic signal to your mind. What this all means is that if your body isn't exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide, your body doesn't even realize it's asphixiating. If there's no oxygen in your lungs to start with, then there won't be any carbon dioxide building up in the lungs, and you will feel no sensation of needing a breath at all. You'll feel just fine for a few seconds and then *poof* you're gone as the blood going to your brain runs out of oxygen and your brain activity just plain stops.
So if you're ever in a halon gas system when it goes off - DO NOT BREATHE. Just hold whatever breath happens to already in your lungs and get out. The instinct is to hold your breath by first inhaling your lungs full and THEN holding it, but that's the worst thing you could do, as explained above. The tricky part is remembering to override that instinct.
And apparently, not a thief is still a thief, too, if you call piracy theft.
A theatre ticket buys you:
ONE person viewing the movie ONE time
A big screen, with big sound to boot.
A home copy (DVD *or* VHS) buys you:
As many people as you want to invite over,
viewing the movie, on multiple occasions if
you wish.
That factor alone makes the price difference make sense. Then you tack on that the DVD typically lets you pick subtitle options (very handy for foreign films where you want to hear the real actors' voices and not some out of work low paid actor in a sound stage dubbing badly. (The dubbed version of Run Lola Run is very painful to watch, because the voiceover for Franka Potente sounds like some valley girl floozy.).)
BOTH the RIAA and the MPAA piss me off with their raping of the copyright laws, but at least the MPAA isn't doing it to prop up an unrealistcly overpriced product like the RIAA is. (Both annoy me, but I feel the RIAA's motives are more evil.)
Not true. They rely on BOTH to break even. It's just that the two forms of revenue come in in distinct phases such that the theatre revenue all occurs first and the rental revenue all occurs second. So even if, say, 70% of the money came from the theatre run and only 30% from rental, as long as the profit margin is less than 30% it will still look as if the rental is solely responsible for the profit if you bookkeep week by week and don't look at the whole movie run in summary.
(I'm just objecting to the use of the phrase "rely on" - yes I know the break even point doesn't happen until after the theatre run, but that doesn't automatically mean rental sales are more of a contributor to the total profit than the theatre sales. It's more a question of WHEN the money comes in, not how much of it each contribues.)
Exactly. Just because I sample something doesn't mean I would have bought it otherwise. For me it's just the online equivilent of the "listen before you buy" booth at the music store. If record execs insist that the only legal way to buy music is to buy albums blindly at random without knowing how they sound first, I'm not going to end up buying very many albums. The stuff played on the radio is usually not a very good indicator of what the rest of the album sounds like.
Getting a haircut without paying is theft of someone's TIME. It takes none of your time for me to copy a program from you.
Theft also carries the implication that you DEPRIVE the original owner of the item or service in question. Piracy doesn't do that. It is not the same thing as, say, stealing someone's car stareo.
The reason the definition isn't clear on the distinction is that until the digital age it wasn't possible to make a perfect copy of something with ease, and so there was never a need to distinguish specificly what it was about an act that made it theft - was it the obtaining of goods without permission or payment, or was it the depreivation of those goods from the current owner? Originally, one always implied the other. Not true anymore today - but the English language hasn't caught up to reality yet, and if the media campaign to label piracy as theft succeeds, it never will.
The key difference is that the word "theft" carries with it TWO different reasons why it's bad. If you steal a radio from a car, you are essentially screwing over two different people at the same time. Not only are you taking the radio away from the car owner and thereby depriving that owner of the use of it, you are also getting the use of the radio without paying the radio manufacturer for it.
Piracy only has the second kind of screwing someone over, not the first. And that's why it's NOT theft. Theft is when you deprive the owner of the item. Making a copy does not do that.
Does that make piracy right? No. But it does make it something DIFFERENT from theft, and it should not be treated under the law as the same thing. The software companies call it theft in the media because they like the false association the public makes between piracy and things like someone stealing their car radio.
According to `cat
Sweet.
The number on the barcode in a retail store isn't a price - it's just an ID number indicating the type of item it is. The barcode doesn't say, "This item costs $3.75". The barcode says, "This is item number 105919541 in your database". When the cash register scans it, it looks up in the store's database and discovers that item number 105919541 is "6-pack of 20 fluid Oz bottles of Cherry Coke", and that the price for this item in this particular store is $3.75.
Altering the barcode would only confuse the cash register into thinking it was a different item, not into charging a different price for the same item.
That could still work if the checkout line person isn't really paying attention - you might be able to check out a 24-pack of soda as if it was a small pack of chewing gum. But if the person watches the screen at all, you could get caught easily.
The prices that were leaked were *future* prices not yet in effect - so No, you couldn't find out about them by just walking into the store and looking.
What the companies suing are concerned about is consumers finding out what the deals will be before the companies wanted them to. If you know the new computer you wanted will be 15% cheaper in a couple of weeks, you'll probably delay your purchase until then.
I think it's more likely that they are worried about consumers knowing how the prices are about to change. Would you buy a product today if you knew it was going to be 15% cheaper a week from today as part of some promotional deal? They don't want consumers to be able to plan ahead to catch when the deals are on, because if they can do that then nobody will ever need to purchase anything at full price.
If you don't KNOW whether or not the item will be on sale next week, you'll be more likely to buy it right now.
Clue for the hard of thinking: The McDonalds tie came into existence AFTER the game was out.
Yes, I know what it means. The problem is that connotation is in direct opposition to the literal meaning, and that bothers me because I have the sense that the literal *should* always trump the connotative. It's a good thing when adding the connotative interpetation to a statement adds additional meaning to it. It's bad, though, when adding the connotative interpetation INVERTS the meaning of the statement in addition to adding more information.
"You are going to the store, are you not?" is the same question phrased opposite ways. When asked the same question opposite ways, I always answer with a full sentence, not just "yes" or "no". I view such questions as the sort that "yes" and "no" are not useful answers for. It's the same as being asked an "or" question and answering "yes". It's technically valid, but often not particularly helpful:
"Are you going to walk to the store or drive your car?"
"Yes".
"Are you going to the store or staying home?"
"Yes".
"You are going to the store, aren't you?"
"Yes".
I view the above three examples as having the same identical kind of ambiguity to them.
In this case the exploit was published explicitly because the vendor WAS notified earlier and said they didn't consider it important. Publishing the exploit was the way to slap them and say, "Okay you liars, let's see if you still consider it to be unimportant after the word gets out to everybody about how dangerous it is. NOW let's see if you keep sticking your head in the sand when this allegedly unimporant exploit is destroying your userbase's data."
In the long run, it was in the users best interest, because this was the only way to get the vendor to do something about it.
As one of the people who wants to see IE lose, let me explain my reason:
If IE non-standard "standards" take over, then people can't use the web under Unix, which seems a shame given that that's where the fsking thing was invented and developed while the idiots in the PC world (the few who'd heard of the web) were poo-pooing the idea and promoting incompatable private networks like AOL and Compuserve.
To that end I am very happy whenever IE has a problem. If IE wasn't invented for the express purpose of stopping us perverted weirdos who want to use something other than Microsoft, then I wouldn't care who used it or why.
It's a fight MS started, not us.