Yes, CNN is great at covering War. Let's not forget how they defamed the Special Operations community in their appallingly inaccurate reporting on Operation Tailwind, of which they knew before hand that the story was false, and they ran it anyway. Ted Turner is to the military what Bill Gates is to the Open Source community.
The producers, to this day, stand by their story; they're the ones who actually did the reporting and investigating -- I trust their judgment a hell of a lot more than I trust Tom Johnson's or Uncle Ted's. The suits at CNN (and the now-fired Peter "CYA" Arnett) were the ones who caved in to State and the Pentagon. If anyone's a "Bill Gates", you might want to look at Washington, not Atlanta, since CNN and the other major media are in thrall to us.gov (and the access to power that it rations out) -- they've been embraced and extended.
If you think the US military can do no wrong, and that the "Special Operations community" was "defamed" by the report, I question your honesty, albeit ten days too late.
I have few fond memories of the ST (mine was an ST520 with the memory bumped up to a whopping 1 MB). It was good for MIDI sequencing, but for now-commonplace stuff like sample editing (I used Sound Designer II), the results were often goofily hit-and-miss, as SDII just wore the hell out of that 68K CPU -- plus you could go take a cigarette or coffee break while it did the processing on "large" files, and still have to wait a little longer. Good riddance to that!
The main blame goes to the ones who did the killing, but as I watched President Clinton do his usual touchy-feely public statements (and said something about how we need to resolve our disputes without resorting to violence), I had to wonder: could we also attribute these killings to a nation that uses cruise missiles and Lite Nukes as instruments of diplomacy? Hmmm?
I agree that MP3 just shuffles the deck chairs, and as such is only a bogus revolution, but...
While I agree that certain companies like MS and ADM are scary, they're subject to the same laws that you and I are. The corporation is manned by human beings -- not androids and what have you. Do you honestly believe that these humans are that evil? That they can keep this conspiracy intact and secret?
Corporations are subject to a different set of laws than you or me. On top of that, they can use their money to decide or even write the laws under which they operate. Congress has passed cable bills and broadcasting bills that have had a great deal of input from the corporations that would be governed by the legislation. There were stories in 1995 of lobbyists writing various pieces of legislation in various House committees, though the stories vanished from the media shortly thereafter. Conspiracy is a way of life in politics; we can't all be flies on the wall, especially when hearings, cocktail parties, fundraiser-gatherings, and 18 holes at Congressional are closed to the voting public.
These aren't androids; they are very real human beings acting in their own self-interests, whether it be senators acting to please their big-money donors, CEOs acting to do whatever it takes to make their companies more profitable, and so forth. They're human beings, not saints or angels, and often the interests of the country at large (and the world) don't fit into their equations.
Of course the TV remote is one of technology's most political and significant creations.
Right along side the printing press and the telephone and the various forms of physical travel.
The zapper, and the mentality it represents, is crucially important. It has led to short attention-spans becoming the inexorable norm, which, in turn, has led to a culture in which not only has style triumphed over substance, but flash, trash, and shock has triumphed over style. When you consider how much of US politics and culture is virally transmitted via the airwaves, a further dumbing-down of the transmission content (to appease the Zapper Mentality) is a serious issue. An issue on the "decline-and-fall" level, something we'll see in a postmortem or two, should we live that long.
This essay is not unlike the kind of rhetoric we had in the psychedelic revolution of 1960s. The internet has a lot of similarities with the whole drug culture of the sixites, and Jon Katz is just another Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, and William Burroughs all rolled into one.
He's a journalist. A more accurate analogy would be that he's trying to be like one of the countless 60's writers who used the drug culture as subject matter, like Tom Wolfe or a pre-gonzo Hunter Thompson.
And, aside from the items that I could nit-pick, it was a darn good essay (again); Maynard and Amphigory's top-level comments pre-empted any need for me to really add anything other than a slightly-tempered thumbs-up.
Q: What about the Microsoft trial - should they shut down Mr. Bill, or let him play his game?
Chuck: When someone comes along and dominates an industry, of course you get a whole bunch of losers screaming, hoping somehow they can beat 'em down. Show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser. Bill Gates is Michael Jordan.
The interview is here. Gee, maybe he was referring to ex-Westinghouse CEO Michael Jordan; I dunno. The PE Enemy Board is here, FWIW.
Is this where I'm supposed to say "Don't believe the hype" again? We put pop stars on pedestals and expect them to put as much thought into everything as they put into their money-making endeavors. You people think he has a Debian box or something? The PE site runs on NT, methinks.
The April 17 announcement is here, if the link works. It and previous announcements can be found by searching for "public enemy" News Stories. There will be downloads available next month, but no mention of the format (I assume MP3s will be available, and other formats). Here's some relevant quotes...
"I have been accustomed to making revolutionary moves in a revolutionary genre which has always run parallel with technology," Chuck D said.
Atomic Pop said its pact with Public Enemy was a prototype of the unique relationship it offers artists.
"Chuck D has been a music visionary and will now prove to be a music business visionary as well. He deeply understands the profound impact Internet technology will have on bringing an artist's music directly to its fans as well as the enormous empowerment the web provides artists to that end," said Atomic Pop's founder, Al Teller.
Santa Monica, Calif.-based Atomic Pop, was founded by Teller, former head of MCA Music Entertainment Group and president of CBS Records.
Atomic Pop is Yet Another Portal, this one with a record company attached to it. It's as "revolutionary" as Netcenter or Yahoo. The relevant TLA for Teller isn't "MP3"; it's "IPO". But the PE CD will be cool, in whatever form you wish to hear it. But don't believe the hype.
You can preorder the CD; you can, it says, "check the Atomic Poop^H^Hp trailer for the new CD" via RealAudio, though all I got was an "Error 23". http://public-enemy.com/poison/. Someone has already mentioned the Atomic Poop^H^Hp website. Meet the new wannabe-boss, folks.
Wrong! artists can now make more money than ever off of live performances, television broadcasts, merchandising, advertising tie-ins.
Only 0.01% of artists can make more than chump change this way.
The only revenue stream that is affected is records sales, of which 90% of profit goes to record company anyway.
Not all record companies are crooks; not all companies are parts of giant conglomerates. What about the thousands of indies out there? Either way, that revenue stream is shared with the artist, some times quite fairly as well. If artists and companies feel they have to take steps to defend that revenue stream, I respect that, even if I don't always agree.
Furthermore, for lesser-know bands, CD sales are increased, not decreased, by widely available "try it for free" music from those artists. The only thing MP3 kills is the monopoly the big record companies and radio media conglomerates have enjoyed in deciding who will and will not be successful.
In an ideal world, this would be true; the infrastructure isn't quite there yet. The corporations still rule, for the most part. It may work for some early-adopters now, but I've yet to see some huge Net-only success story; of course, I haven't been looking all that hard.
Remember, these are the same people that gave us the Spice Girls!
And traditionally, the giant profits that a Spice Girls recording generates will embolden a corporation to use some of the money to subsidize recordings that are orders of magnitude more cool and daring than the Spices. If you own a major-label CD by some cool band that hasn't sold eleventy-jillion (or even 50,000) CDs, chances are that their portion of the catalog has been subsidized (in part) by the profits derived from selling chart-topping crap.
Excuse me, but what kind of moron buys something they already own? If I own the CD, I can legally make recordings in any audio format I damn well please, why the hell would I PAY for somebody else to compress the audio, when I can do it myself for free?
A legitmate technical shift will get listeners to buy what they already own. People have replaced old vinyl recordings with the same music (often with bonus tracks) on CD; people will, in the future, do the same when a better-than-CD medium comes along. But the MiniDisc, MP3, and all the other current file formats are not the killer-app sort of technical shift that will induce us to buy something we already own. Sony, Real, and MS are -- to some extent -- Fighting The Last War here; I'm not sure whether or not this is all a bit overhyped. Just a turf war, nothing to see here...
Yes Microsoft is a monopoly. But it isn't illegal to be a monopoly. It is illegal to use monopolistic powers to hurt consumers.
The focus of the trial is to determine whether Microsoft's actions have hurt consumers.
On just that merit I'm not sure if this case is sound.
Is it just consumers, or are competitors (past, present, and future) included in the equation as well? If MS can be proven to have taken deliberate steps to use it's legally-adjudicated monopoly (to use Howard Cosell's pet phrase) to screw its competitors, or to screw the possibility of competition in general, then they're as guilty as if they directly screwed consumers one by one.
IANAL, of course, so I may have gotten this all wrong.
All the politics now surrounding this case have mad the whole point totally obscure.
What politics?/. politics? Bill Neukom? Bruce Francis? Politics of some sort surrounds every square inch of life itself. Fortunately, in this particular case, there is a courtroom, a judge, lawyers, and quite a few journalists involved. Stick to that, and you'll do OK.
In the end the format I uses will be my choice. If no one else make the same choices as me that is fine. It is nice when people agree with you but it isn't necessary.
Many of your choices are limited to what people put on their server. In the radio realm, a Toronto station just switched from RA5.0 to WMP (still serving an RA stream, I think, but un-Linux-able now); I wrote them two or three days ago, and this little irony was mentioned. They haven't replied, nor do I think they will. Yes, I was extremely polite.
For just ripping-and-archiving your CDs, the file format is up to you, but if sites (large and small) end up signing on to MS-only (and maybe Mac as well) solutions, I'm locked out when it comes to listening to other peoples' music (or talk shows, or news broadcasts, or football matches, etc). What about the openness and platform-agnosticism of the Net?
Should M$ be proven monopolistic, steps will be required to take away it's unfair advantage, nothing more.
The spectrum of M$ competition ranges from Linux/GNU and BeOS to IBM, AOL and Apple, all employing different business practices. A level playing field is not possible without limiting all competitors to the lowest (least restrictive/competitive) common denominator. We're talking the economic version of Harrison Bergeron here - bad idea.
For Stallman's suggestions to work, and be morally right rather than anti-M$, they would have to be applied to the software industry as a whole. No way in hell will that ever work.
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Regulations and restrictions must be industry-wide, not just levied against the most successful of contenders.
If MS, which is a monopoly, I remind you, loses its case, then would you admit that the absence of a level playing field can be attributed (to a fair degree) on MS's practices? We're not talking about "success" here; if this is "success", then Charles Keating and Willie Sutton were successes as well, and to have them do time as convicted felons was an unfair punishment. A solution or remedy that is MS-specific is just as valid as an industry-wide remedy, provided it's judged to be a fair one. I'd say an MS-specific solution would be better and less of a hassle to us all, but YMMV.
They are not above the law by virtue of being a corporation, "successful" or otherwise. And a law that protects us from the excesses of a Microsoft (or anyone else) is valid, no matter what the anti-government folks say; MS have done their bit to limit freedom as well as competition.
All we have here is a competing streaming format; if over-the-web radio takes off, it will be via some future version of RealAudio, MSAudio, or both (and I'm really pissed that Real and MS seem to be lying through their teeth about Unix clients coming RSN). I downloaded an MSAudio'd Kristin Hersh song and was impressed by its half-of-MP3 file size ("is it MPEG-4?", I thought), but then noticed it was 64 kbps -- i.e. there's no difference in size compared to a 64 kbps MP3. Plus the sound quality was no improvement.
The future lies in better-than-CD (24 bit, 96 kHz, for example) audio, not some deft simulation of "CD-quality". RealAudio, MSAudio, and MP3 are good promotional tools for now, that's all. And as long as the only flavors of downloads tend to be Vanilla, French Vanilla, Super Vanilla, and Vanilla 2000, the revolution will not be streamed or downloaded. I wouldn't pay a dime for a scoop of this.
All I'm considering is whether someone has a right to spend your money. Money taken out of your paycheck by a company forcing you to contribute or by a union does affect you. Money spent by a corporation you patronize does not cost you anything, since their prices wouldn't be any lower if they didn't do the lobbying.
People have the right to spend my money. My tax dollars get spent on depleted-uranium weapons; I find that to be horrid, but that's the price of admission in this country.
The cost of doing business includes campaign contributions. It is passed on to us, but maybe due to the immense size of these entities (compared to unions), we don't notice it. But this nonsense started out essentially with a troll -- some conservative group wanted to stick it to labor unions, and found a conservative union member (IIRC) to launch the suit; it's a hatchet job. If the practice of supporting political parties (and one in particular, despite its utter lameness these days) were really egregious and unpopular, there'd be a groundswell for support to remove the union leadership -- there wouldn't have been a need for any lawsuits. My very conservative father probably didn't like it when his public-sector union gave to Democrats, but he was mature enough to know that the party looked after issues that were important to him and his employees, at least in those days.
The reason I went ballistic was because of the framing of your original post. I've already mentioned what I think of it vis-à-vis unions. I voted for Clinton twice. I also knew he was an SOB long before I voted for him. But you make him look like the epicenter of corruption in this matter. I don't much like defending him, but he was only doing what he learned from his predecessors -- if you don't like a piece of legislation, starve it to death or kill it by fiat. This is what was done by Reagan and Bush with the EPA, OSHA, and EEOC; you can't enforce regulations all that effectively if you don't have the budget or will to do it.
We won't begin to root out political corruption until we all realize that it's a bipartisan phenomenon, and that politicians aren't the only people in the equation.
Unions, corrupt or not, have as much clout with politicians as a Little League team (of course, there's many regional exceptions). Meanwhile, corporations give far more money and usually get their money's worth -- we've now had over fifty years of legislation and inaction designed to erode the political and economic viability of unions and their members. Slade Gorton rants on behalf of Bill Gates not because he loves his dual-Xeon NT box, but because Bill paid good money for him to rant; unions rarely have that perk these days. They can't get legislators to care about anti-scab bills; they can't exhort them to have the cojones to come up with a decent minimum wage hike. To pick on unions like you did is like kicking a three-legged puppy.
I'm sipping my caffeinated, carbonated beverage knowing full well that the high-fructose corn syrup is paying for the phone bill at Liddy Dole's Watergate offices.
...compared to Milton Hershey, who gave away his entire fortune. No strings were attached, the orphans were not required to buy Hershey's chocolate or name any building or wing after the guy. When BillG sells all his MS stock and builds some sort of mega-orphanage or something, let me know. Until then, he's just a cheep self-servin' bastid.
The DoL has employers post posters listing most of their rights. Except one. The Beck decision established that a union member can get refunds for that portion of union dues used for campaign contributions to candidates and parties, and not for collective bargaining. Since Clinton depends on union allies, one of his first acts when he came into office was to prevent any posters or other means of notifying workers of their Beck rights to go out. In addition, his DoL has acted in a politically motivated manner repeatedly. Complaints about corrupt unions have not gone forward at all. Companies which donated to his campaign have not been investigated.
Gee, more potshots at unions. What a surprise. Why don't I get a refund from ADM for its contributions to the Dole campaigns (past and present)? Some free Harvest Burgers would be nice. Will I get a refund from my bank for their contributions? How about Microsoft? Can I get some beer-style free software from the other SPA members? NewsCorp (maybe some free newspapers or a free month of Fox Sports World)? Will I get a cable-bill refund from Time Warner? Will my lawyer give me a discount based on their campaign contributions? Believe me, I've only scratched the surface; I can type until my fingers bleed and still only scratch the surface.
Corporations give tons and tons more money to politicians than labor unions do. And it shows, doesn't it? Doesn't it? Or have you not been paying attention?
All the Beck decision shows me is how politicized and tainted the judicial branch can sometimes be. It also shows how biased people like you are.
Schools, churches, charities, etc., have lots of volunteers. Often these volunteers receive some sort of non-monetary compensation.
US Presidents have encouraged volunteerism (remember Bush's thousand points of light).
Even if a stupid judge (or jury) ruled that "volunteers" must be paid, this would be quickly overruled by Congress.
"Volunteer" is this case is a misnomer. AOL isn't some non-profit organization; these "volunteers" weren't performing some "thousand points of light" community service. Considering the amount of compensation they were getting in the pre-flat rate days, this was a second job, using barter instead of cash as the currency. With the advent of the flat rate, these employees' compensation probably dropped faster and sharper than an overhand curve. I don't know the legal merits of that part of the complaint, but it's a mistake to equate these disgruntled folks with people helping out at a church bake sale.
All this tells me is: every search engine worth its salt has sold out. They're all tainted. I still use AltaVista. I use heavy boolean searches to weed out the taint; AltaVista finds me the two pages I'm searching for -- will some free search engine find me that fan page devoted to some obscure Latvian composer any better? Somehow I doubt it.
Indonesia's budget is 4.5% of GDP, which is a wet dream to Americans like you. So I guess this would not be "Big Government". Why isn't Indonesia thriving then? And who caused the rampant poverty, since we can't blame Big Government? Could it be because government and corporations conspire to piss on Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
Mexico, as I understand it, is practically socialist. They may not have environmental or labor laws, but they have an enourmous wellfare state, and a corrupt one-party-rule government.
Indonesia is run by a corrupt dictatorship, has an extremely unstable currency, and also has an extensive welfare state.
Both governments are much larger and more intrusive than ours.
I know less about the Dominican Republic, but I suspect it is the same.
If people are working for 20-60/hr, what does that tell you about the size and scope of their "welfare state"?
I write this from the US. Where are you? What is this place whose government is dwarfed by the "large" and "intrusive" governments of Mexico and Indonesia? This year's US defense budget is bigger than Indonesia's total (defense and non-defense) budgets for the last five years combined. Indonesia is a nation of about 220 million people, not some tiny, sparsely populated island. For transnational corporations, it (along with Mexico and the Dominican) is free market heaven.
If you're waiting for everyone to be free in order to pronounce something "free market", don't bother; your great-grandchildren will rot in the grave before that happens. The free market is as here as it's going to be, and it takes the unfreedom of millions to make it work. Or so our politicians seem to think.
I realize that many./ians are all for government contributions to OSS, but I highly doubt we're in favor of an Internet bringing about social destratification (socialism, for those at home) -- whether that's monetary equality or intellectual equality.
It's simplistic to reduce "socialism" to "social destratification". The United States, from, say, 1935 to 1980, experienced a lot of social destratification: it meant that people had things like indoor plumbing and telephones for the first time, and hourly-wage workers could buy houses and cars and "keep up with the Joneses" when previously this would have been less likely. There are many reasons why this happened, including "socialist" policies begun (or inspired) by FDR, as well as advances in technology. Nowadays, we tend to ignore the great untapped market that's right under our noses -- "restratified" Americans in the lower half of the economic totem pole. We ignore them at our peril.
I don't think so. There are many countries that have some elements of free markets, but a real free market requires minimal taxation and regulation. This does not exist anywhere today.
Mexico? Indonesia? The Dominican Republic? How minimal does it have to be before it counts? Western corps flock to these places because of minimal payrolls, minimal payroll taxes, lower corporate taxes (I presume), minimal environmental regulation, minimal safety regulation, and minimal labor laws. Now they have, in many cases, minimal or lower tariffs -- or even none at all. If this isn't minimal enough, then what is? What the fsck do you want? What the fsck do you want? You're either trolling or completely ignorant. Please forgive me for going ballistic, but the farther we stray from core geek topix, the more smug stupidity I seem to see here. Governments have been quite happy to sacrifice the freedom of its citizens in order to accomodate the demands of corporations. I'm not just speaking of far-away Third World governments.
I look at the monies spent on welfare, and I see people on welfare who could be working but are not. Why?
It might be because they can't afford to pay for child care, or it might simply be because the price isn't right. Everyone has their price, you know. I don't see why some people aren't allowed to live that truth/truism, while we often insist on it applying to ourselves. I also don't see why people on welfare are stereotyped worse than [fill in the blank with your own favorite stereotype -- suits for instance, or PHBs, or politicians, or "Winblows lusers"]. It would be really cool if they could peruse/. and speak for themselves rather than have idiots trash them all the time. I'd love to see those kind of flamewars, it would be a change from the somewhat predictable ones we've had of late.
If you give some people the means to live off the work of others, they will. You deserve what you work for.
Did you pay for the sun? Did you pay for the oxygen in the air? Did you work for it? Shouldn't we deny you access to these things? Do you live off the work of those who wrote Linux and GNU and GTK and Qt? Does Bill Gates deserve his money if it can be proven that he cheated by his business and accounting practices?
I get really, really tired of the selective morality of Americans, people who think it's really great to invade small defenseless countries or live off the labor of slaves, foreign and domestic. Americans are a bunch of greedy, selfish, whining, hypocritical, stupid bastards.
Slashdot Mirror
The producers, to this day, stand by their story; they're the ones who actually did the reporting and investigating -- I trust their judgment a hell of a lot more than I trust Tom Johnson's or Uncle Ted's. The suits at CNN (and the now-fired Peter "CYA" Arnett) were the ones who caved in to State and the Pentagon. If anyone's a "Bill Gates", you might want to look at Washington, not Atlanta, since CNN and the other major media are in thrall to us.gov (and the access to power that it rations out) -- they've been embraced and extended.
If you think the US military can do no wrong, and that the "Special Operations community" was "defamed" by the report, I question your honesty, albeit ten days too late.
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While I agree that certain companies like MS and ADM are scary, they're subject to the same laws that you and I are. The corporation is manned by human beings -- not androids and what have you. Do you honestly believe that these humans are that evil? That they can keep this conspiracy intact and secret?
Corporations are subject to a different set of laws than you or me. On top of that, they can use their money to decide or even write the laws under which they operate. Congress has passed cable bills and broadcasting bills that have had a great deal of input from the corporations that would be governed by the legislation. There were stories in 1995 of lobbyists writing various pieces of legislation in various House committees, though the stories vanished from the media shortly thereafter. Conspiracy is a way of life in politics; we can't all be flies on the wall, especially when hearings, cocktail parties, fundraiser-gatherings, and 18 holes at Congressional are closed to the voting public.
These aren't androids; they are very real human beings acting in their own self-interests, whether it be senators acting to please their big-money donors, CEOs acting to do whatever it takes to make their companies more profitable, and so forth. They're human beings, not saints or angels, and often the interests of the country at large (and the world) don't fit into their equations.
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Right along side the printing press and the telephone and the various forms of physical travel.
The zapper, and the mentality it represents, is crucially important. It has led to short attention-spans becoming the inexorable norm, which, in turn, has led to a culture in which not only has style triumphed over substance, but flash, trash, and shock has triumphed over style. When you consider how much of US politics and culture is virally transmitted via the airwaves, a further dumbing-down of the transmission content (to appease the Zapper Mentality) is a serious issue. An issue on the "decline-and-fall" level, something we'll see in a postmortem or two, should we live that long.
Stone Cold said so...
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He's a journalist. A more accurate analogy would be that he's trying to be like one of the countless 60's writers who used the drug culture as subject matter, like Tom Wolfe or a pre-gonzo Hunter Thompson.
And, aside from the items that I could nit-pick, it was a darn good essay (again); Maynard and Amphigory's top-level comments pre-empted any need for me to really add anything other than a slightly-tempered thumbs-up.
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Is this where I'm supposed to say "Don't believe the hype" again? We put pop stars on pedestals and expect them to put as much thought into everything as they put into their money-making endeavors. You people think he has a Debian box or something? The PE site runs on NT, methinks.
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Only 0.01% of artists can make more than chump change this way.
The only revenue stream that is affected is records sales, of which 90% of profit goes to record company anyway.
Not all record companies are crooks; not all companies are parts of giant conglomerates. What about the thousands of indies out there? Either way, that revenue stream is shared with the artist, some times quite fairly as well. If artists and companies feel they have to take steps to defend that revenue stream, I respect that, even if I don't always agree.
Furthermore, for lesser-know bands, CD sales are increased, not decreased, by widely available "try it for free" music from those artists. The only thing MP3 kills is the monopoly the big record companies and radio media conglomerates have enjoyed in deciding who will and will not be successful.
In an ideal world, this would be true; the infrastructure isn't quite there yet. The corporations still rule, for the most part. It may work for some early-adopters now, but I've yet to see some huge Net-only success story; of course, I haven't been looking all that hard.
Remember, these are the same people that gave us the Spice Girls!
And traditionally, the giant profits that a Spice Girls recording generates will embolden a corporation to use some of the money to subsidize recordings that are orders of magnitude more cool and daring than the Spices. If you own a major-label CD by some cool band that hasn't sold eleventy-jillion (or even 50,000) CDs, chances are that their portion of the catalog has been subsidized (in part) by the profits derived from selling chart-topping crap.
Excuse me, but what kind of moron buys something they already own? If I own the CD, I can legally make recordings in any audio format I damn well please, why the hell would I PAY for somebody else to compress the audio, when I can do it myself for free?
A legitmate technical shift will get listeners to buy what they already own. People have replaced old vinyl recordings with the same music (often with bonus tracks) on CD; people will, in the future, do the same when a better-than-CD medium comes along. But the MiniDisc, MP3, and all the other current file formats are not the killer-app sort of technical shift that will induce us to buy something we already own. Sony, Real, and MS are -- to some extent -- Fighting The Last War here; I'm not sure whether or not this is all a bit overhyped. Just a turf war, nothing to see here...
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The focus of the trial is to determine whether Microsoft's actions have hurt consumers.
On just that merit I'm not sure if this case is sound.
Is it just consumers, or are competitors (past, present, and future) included in the equation as well? If MS can be proven to have taken deliberate steps to use it's legally-adjudicated monopoly (to use Howard Cosell's pet phrase) to screw its competitors, or to screw the possibility of competition in general, then they're as guilty as if they directly screwed consumers one by one.
IANAL, of course, so I may have gotten this all wrong.
All the politics now surrounding this case have mad the whole point totally obscure.
What politics? /. politics? Bill Neukom? Bruce Francis? Politics of some sort surrounds every square inch of life itself. Fortunately, in this particular case, there is a courtroom, a judge, lawyers, and quite a few journalists involved. Stick to that, and you'll do OK.
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Many of your choices are limited to what people put on their server. In the radio realm, a Toronto station just switched from RA5.0 to WMP (still serving an RA stream, I think, but un-Linux-able now); I wrote them two or three days ago, and this little irony was mentioned. They haven't replied, nor do I think they will. Yes, I was extremely polite.
For just ripping-and-archiving your CDs, the file format is up to you, but if sites (large and small) end up signing on to MS-only (and maybe Mac as well) solutions, I'm locked out when it comes to listening to other peoples' music (or talk shows, or news broadcasts, or football matches, etc). What about the openness and platform-agnosticism of the Net?
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The spectrum of M$ competition ranges from Linux/GNU and BeOS to IBM, AOL and Apple, all employing different business practices. A level playing field is not possible without limiting all competitors to the lowest (least restrictive/competitive) common denominator. We're talking the economic version of Harrison Bergeron here - bad idea.
For Stallman's suggestions to work, and be morally right rather than anti-M$, they would have to be applied to the software industry as a whole. No way in hell will that ever work.
Regulations and restrictions must be industry-wide, not just levied against the most successful of contenders.
If MS, which is a monopoly, I remind you, loses its case, then would you admit that the absence of a level playing field can be attributed (to a fair degree) on MS's practices? We're not talking about "success" here; if this is "success", then Charles Keating and Willie Sutton were successes as well, and to have them do time as convicted felons was an unfair punishment. A solution or remedy that is MS-specific is just as valid as an industry-wide remedy, provided it's judged to be a fair one. I'd say an MS-specific solution would be better and less of a hassle to us all, but YMMV.
They are not above the law by virtue of being a corporation, "successful" or otherwise. And a law that protects us from the excesses of a Microsoft (or anyone else) is valid, no matter what the anti-government folks say; MS have done their bit to limit freedom as well as competition.
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The future lies in better-than-CD (24 bit, 96 kHz, for example) audio, not some deft simulation of "CD-quality". RealAudio, MSAudio, and MP3 are good promotional tools for now, that's all. And as long as the only flavors of downloads tend to be Vanilla, French Vanilla, Super Vanilla, and Vanilla 2000, the revolution will not be streamed or downloaded. I wouldn't pay a dime for a scoop of this.
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People have the right to spend my money. My tax dollars get spent on depleted-uranium weapons; I find that to be horrid, but that's the price of admission in this country.
The cost of doing business includes campaign contributions. It is passed on to us, but maybe due to the immense size of these entities (compared to unions), we don't notice it. But this nonsense started out essentially with a troll -- some conservative group wanted to stick it to labor unions, and found a conservative union member (IIRC) to launch the suit; it's a hatchet job. If the practice of supporting political parties (and one in particular, despite its utter lameness these days) were really egregious and unpopular, there'd be a groundswell for support to remove the union leadership -- there wouldn't have been a need for any lawsuits. My very conservative father probably didn't like it when his public-sector union gave to Democrats, but he was mature enough to know that the party looked after issues that were important to him and his employees, at least in those days.
The reason I went ballistic was because of the framing of your original post. I've already mentioned what I think of it vis-à-vis unions. I voted for Clinton twice. I also knew he was an SOB long before I voted for him. But you make him look like the epicenter of corruption in this matter. I don't much like defending him, but he was only doing what he learned from his predecessors -- if you don't like a piece of legislation, starve it to death or kill it by fiat. This is what was done by Reagan and Bush with the EPA, OSHA, and EEOC; you can't enforce regulations all that effectively if you don't have the budget or will to do it.
We won't begin to root out political corruption until we all realize that it's a bipartisan phenomenon, and that politicians aren't the only people in the equation.
Unions, corrupt or not, have as much clout with politicians as a Little League team (of course, there's many regional exceptions). Meanwhile, corporations give far more money and usually get their money's worth -- we've now had over fifty years of legislation and inaction designed to erode the political and economic viability of unions and their members. Slade Gorton rants on behalf of Bill Gates not because he loves his dual-Xeon NT box, but because Bill paid good money for him to rant; unions rarely have that perk these days. They can't get legislators to care about anti-scab bills; they can't exhort them to have the cojones to come up with a decent minimum wage hike. To pick on unions like you did is like kicking a three-legged puppy.
I'm sipping my caffeinated, carbonated beverage knowing full well that the high-fructose corn syrup is paying for the phone bill at Liddy Dole's Watergate offices.
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I'll have a minus-one, please!
Thanks! :)
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Gee, more potshots at unions. What a surprise. Why don't I get a refund from ADM for its contributions to the Dole campaigns (past and present)? Some free Harvest Burgers would be nice. Will I get a refund from my bank for their contributions? How about Microsoft? Can I get some beer-style free software from the other SPA members? NewsCorp (maybe some free newspapers or a free month of Fox Sports World)? Will I get a cable-bill refund from Time Warner? Will my lawyer give me a discount based on their campaign contributions? Believe me, I've only scratched the surface; I can type until my fingers bleed and still only scratch the surface.
Corporations give tons and tons more money to politicians than labor unions do. And it shows, doesn't it? Doesn't it? Or have you not been paying attention?
All the Beck decision shows me is how politicized and tainted the judicial branch can sometimes be. It also shows how biased people like you are.
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Schools, churches, charities, etc., have lots of volunteers. Often these volunteers receive some sort of non-monetary compensation.
US Presidents have encouraged volunteerism (remember Bush's thousand points of light).
Even if a stupid judge (or jury) ruled that "volunteers" must be paid, this would be quickly overruled by Congress.
"Volunteer" is this case is a misnomer. AOL isn't some non-profit organization; these "volunteers" weren't performing some "thousand points of light" community service. Considering the amount of compensation they were getting in the pre-flat rate days, this was a second job, using barter instead of cash as the currency. With the advent of the flat rate, these employees' compensation probably dropped faster and sharper than an overhand curve. I don't know the legal merits of that part of the complaint, but it's a mistake to equate these disgruntled folks with people helping out at a church bake sale.
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Indonesia is run by a corrupt dictatorship, has an extremely unstable currency, and also has an extensive welfare state.
Both governments are much larger and more intrusive than ours.
I know less about the Dominican Republic, but I suspect it is the same.
If people are working for 20-60/hr, what does that tell you about the size and scope of their "welfare state"?
I write this from the US. Where are you? What is this place whose government is dwarfed by the "large" and "intrusive" governments of Mexico and Indonesia? This year's US defense budget is bigger than Indonesia's total (defense and non-defense) budgets for the last five years combined. Indonesia is a nation of about 220 million people, not some tiny, sparsely populated island. For transnational corporations, it (along with Mexico and the Dominican) is free market heaven.
If you're waiting for everyone to be free in order to pronounce something "free market", don't bother; your great-grandchildren will rot in the grave before that happens. The free market is as here as it's going to be, and it takes the unfreedom of millions to make it work. Or so our politicians seem to think.
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It's simplistic to reduce "socialism" to "social destratification". The United States, from, say, 1935 to 1980, experienced a lot of social destratification: it meant that people had things like indoor plumbing and telephones for the first time, and hourly-wage workers could buy houses and cars and "keep up with the Joneses" when previously this would have been less likely. There are many reasons why this happened, including "socialist" policies begun (or inspired) by FDR, as well as advances in technology. Nowadays, we tend to ignore the great untapped market that's right under our noses -- "restratified" Americans in the lower half of the economic totem pole. We ignore them at our peril.
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Mexico? Indonesia? The Dominican Republic? How minimal does it have to be before it counts? Western corps flock to these places because of minimal payrolls, minimal payroll taxes, lower corporate taxes (I presume), minimal environmental regulation, minimal safety regulation, and minimal labor laws. Now they have, in many cases, minimal or lower tariffs -- or even none at all. If this isn't minimal enough, then what is? What the fsck do you want? What the fsck do you want? You're either trolling or completely ignorant. Please forgive me for going ballistic, but the farther we stray from core geek topix, the more smug stupidity I seem to see here. Governments have been quite happy to sacrifice the freedom of its citizens in order to accomodate the demands of corporations. I'm not just speaking of far-away Third World governments.
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It might be because they can't afford to pay for child care, or it might simply be because the price isn't right. Everyone has their price, you know. I don't see why some people aren't allowed to live that truth/truism, while we often insist on it applying to ourselves. I also don't see why people on welfare are stereotyped worse than [fill in the blank with your own favorite stereotype -- suits for instance, or PHBs, or politicians, or "Winblows lusers"]. It would be really cool if they could peruse /. and speak for themselves rather than have idiots trash them all the time. I'd love to see those kind of flamewars, it would be a change from the somewhat predictable ones we've had of late.
If you give some people the means to live off the work of others, they will. You deserve what you work for.
Did you pay for the sun? Did you pay for the oxygen in the air? Did you work for it? Shouldn't we deny you access to these things? Do you live off the work of those who wrote Linux and GNU and GTK and Qt? Does Bill Gates deserve his money if it can be proven that he cheated by his business and accounting practices?
I get really, really tired of the selective morality of Americans, people who think it's really great to invade small defenseless countries or live off the labor of slaves, foreign and domestic. Americans are a bunch of greedy, selfish, whining, hypocritical, stupid bastards.
(Matt 7:3-5)
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