Such speech does not suborn violence or other illegal acts, nor does it infringe anyone's rights, yet becomes "illegal" under hate speech doctrine, which *is* an unjustifiable infringement of free speech.
Actually, it is highly unclear if that speech would or would not be illegal under the proposed legislation, which is just as bad in my opinion. Somewhere there is a line where inciting people to hate others is likely to lead them to violence towards those others, and that is a pretty blurry line making this sort of legislation very difficult to create. One might argue that your example does not incite violence but, "Jews deserve to die" might, because it falls in between actually calling for people to commit murder, and calling for an otherworldly punishment for them. It advocates death for them, which is a lot closer to appealing to people to specifically kill them.
I also understand the state of affairs that is pushing such legislation. The number of different cultures with a history of violent, irrational beliefs with regard to one another, all living in close proximity is creating a lot of crime and suffering, which is increased by people who use religious and political forums to feed those same beliefs. Personally I'd rather that logic and reasoning were brought back as the cornerstones of both education, and qualification for immigration, but I do understand the difficulty of the problem.
The whole notion of "hate speech" is bullshit anyway. True freedom of speech means I can write/say "Linux users are monkey butts" or "Microsoft users are hamster butts" with legal impunity. It is my *opinion* and none of the government's damned business.
I don't think either of your examples would qualify as hate speech under the law being proposed. Freedom of speech is an important human right, but like all rights it is limited in that when it conflicts with other rights, that conflict must be resolved by law. In the US, for example, yelling "fire" in a crowded theater may very well get you thrown in jail because your right to free speech does not trump all the other theater patrons rights to not be trampled upon. Like wise, you can't go on your TV station the night before the election and report that one of the candidates was just found raping corpses without going to jail for slander. You can't make a television advertisement that says your product will make people live twice as long when you know that isn't true because of false advertising laws.
So considering free speech in those terms, what "hate speech" may or may not qualify. In the US, this mostly is calls for illegal and violent action such as "jews are the minions of satan and I want you to all go down to their evil temple and kill every man woman and child you find." To me, that seems like free speech versus freedom to live (another important right). The EU law calls out this same behavior, but they also call out some more vague terms, such as speech that incites hate. For me, the vagueness of this terminology seems inappropriate to me and subject to abuse. That is why right now I'm inclined to oppose the proposed legislation.
And later this day a story comes out that puts MySQL revenue at $50 million. I'm sure some of that money comes from companies who buy the product under a commercial license because they can't use GPL.
This doesn't have a lot to do with my statement. If they could have sold copies of their database to even half the people who use it for free they'd be making a whole lot more than that. Providing it as open source, however, allows them to undercut Oracle and MS and other OSS projects, which is where those people would probably be going if MySQL did not offer it as GPL. I think you may misconstrued my statement. MySQL makes more money by licensing it as GPL as well, but not because the license benefits them directly, but because it benefits customers who would otherwise not have paid them at all. Think of it like a feature. Adding a new feature to MySQL costs money and effort and does not directly benefit the company, but it does benefit their customers, thus motivating more sales, which benefits the company.
What you are missing is that lots of companies will pay to get a non-GPL version of the code, while at the same time the developer gets open-source marketing and support for free. The only limitation is the threat of fork and that they can only take code submissions where the copyright is assigned to them.
That threat is exactly why it is not long-term sustainable business model in a mature market. It works for emerging markets, but eventually it will fail.
Then there's Red Hat, who manages to sell GPL'd code they don't own
I think RedHat is going to be in serious trouble if Linux ever takes off because support is not really a sustainable business model either because it does make development opposed to the interests of users, which will eventually result in them moving elsewhere.
Mozilla/Firefox, who makes $50 million a year from Google, but I digress.
Mozilla has a sustainable business plan. They do work on contract and make funds from ancillary sources like advertising via Google. That is exactly the kind of low-margin business method that cannot only succeed, but also undercut any commercial competitor using traditional methods.
You make bombastic claims, that you don't back up with any references. You also use incorrect terms:
You know if you're going to claim someone is misusing terms is it sort of conventional to actually specify which term you feel is misused and why.
Where? How?
Amazing! You claim I'm making unverified and unbacked claims by griping about the huge government subsidies for internet infrastructure? Let me guess, you did zero research and don't work in the industry, but somehow you assumed there weren't any so you're now emotionally attached to that idea? The Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 alone provided 2 billion dollars for subsidizing low interest loans for rural broadband connections and that isn't even counting all the fiber the government themselves laid and then sold for orders of magnitude less than it cost them. Take a look at Kushnick's new book, "$200 Billion Broadband Scandal" where he details exactly the approximately $2000 per household in the US that has been spent subsidizing US ISPs, largely based upon promises of infrastructure improvements they never delivered. Or if you're not much os a reader, you could always try Google.
Violations of peering agreements are to be enforced in courts with contract law, not government regulations.
Peers are financially motivated to overlook that aspect said peering agreements since each of them will be violating them for a profit somewhere. No, common carrier laws need to establish that said carriers actually act like common carriers and treat traffic without discrimination based upon source or destination if they want special protections from prosecution.
Again, if that sabotage you are alleging is in violation of the terms of any agreement, the injured payer has the courts as the recourse.
Please the law and the free market is no efficient enough to act through so many intermediary agreements without a common law. Think of it this way. You start running a service and contract with LocalISP who peers with AT&T who peers with Sprint who peers with Telus who peers with OtherLocalISP who provides a cable modem to a customer of yours. You have a contract with LocalISP and no one else. Telus calls you up and says they want you to send them a check for $10,000 every month, or they're going to slow down traffic with your source to the point that your service is unusable and people switch to you competitors. LocalISP is doing nothing. They could, on your behalf complain to AT&T, but AT&T isn't doing anything either. AT&T could in turn complain to Sprint who could complain to Telus, but the chances are absolutely nothing would happen. LocalISP is not breaking their contract with you and you don't have a contract with Telus so you can't take someone to court over a contract violation. Switching to another provider does nothing since they will almost certainly still transit Telus's backbone to reach that given customer.
Are you honestly telling me you think the courts will do anything about this if there is no law in place? The FCC used to regulate this sort of thing, but changed their policies in 2004 opening the way for companies to take advantage of this. I should know since I sell the ISPs tools that let them easily throttle that traffic (among many other tasks).
The benefit is obvious -- to allow them to exist. If they were to be charged with censoring content, they would fail and nobody would win.
That's the problem. They are censoring the internet, for their own profit, instead of out of some moral belief. What about when the CEO of one of these big ISPs decided to start degrading all traffic that crosses his backbone that is from the Democratic party. Do you think that should be legal? The point is, if we forbid them from censoring then they are performing a public good in exchange for their protections, otherwise they are simply running a completely for profit
Ubuntu (Dapper and Edgy, haven't tested Feisty yet)
Strange, it is in my stock kubuntu install, although it is by no means cutting edge.
And while gcc is very easy to install on just about any distro, telling a non-geek Linux user they need to install a compiler to use some desktop applications (WTF is a compiler? they ask...) will leave some of them baffled.
This is a usability issue rather than an inherent flaw. Personally I'd like to see package management move towards integration of an installer and build instructions, rather than towards more pre-compiled binaries. In my ideal OS, double clicking an icon would run the appropriate included binary and schedule the included source to be built into a custom binary for my system when my machine is next idle... all transparently to the average user.
While compiling once for every distro in the top 10 might be possible for some, it requires a lot of logistics for commercial software. Plus, we distribute 3 binaries on 1 CD, one for Windows, one for OSX, and one for Linux. Putting 10 binaries for Linux would require multiple CDs, or a DVD, or maybe even multiple DVDs.
This sounds like an issue with package management. The bulk of most binaries are reusable data, especially if you're getting to something that required a DVD to fit it on. Just another reason I wish major Linux distros would adopt and extend the OpenStep package format for use with their package manager. Then you could be back down to two packages with everything else reusing most of the same data.
Recompiling on 10 distros is a piece of cake compared to the trouble of distributing those 10 binaries and dealing with the end user.
Yeah, it is a serious limitation of most Linux package managers that they are not accommodating to binaries from commercial enterprises, resulting in the need for stand alone installers outside the normal package management system. I suppose you could always distribute an open source program in the major package repositories that queried the distro version and then downloaded and installed the proper binary itself, but that certainly is a huge pain.
The sad thing is all of these are solvable problems that could actually lead to a much better and easier user experience, if only there were motivation and backing due to competition combined with plain old american greed.
But I noticed something peculiar in this article, there were no examples of students being encouraged to drop or avoid math as the title of both the Slashdot summary and the BBC's article state. What I did see was that there were observations of Universities having to implement remedial math. Ok, and also that students were choosing not to take hard courses so their GPA remained high.
Perhaps your understanding of the usage of the word "encouraged" is the issue here. It is perfectly normal to say something like, "the entrance requirements for UK universities (which take into account only GPA and not which classes are taken) are encouraging students to drop math classes so they can go to a better school.
I faced the same choices in the American public education system and I chose the hardest courses I could. The result was that a student who took primarily shop courses graduated with highest honors & I graduated with a 3.0 or something. But I already had 11 credits through advanced placement courses.
My story is very similar. I obtained a 3.8 or something while being the only student in my class to take every AP course offered. The high honors went to other students who took easier courses and they probably had a better choice of schools and scholarships as a result. The one really big difference is that in my state some schools had begun correcting for this issue by crediting AP classes higher than regular classes. Taking the same classes and getting the same scores in a nearby city I would have had a GPA of 4.7 (which I only learned after seeing another person's entrance info listing a higher than 4.0 GPA and trying to figure out what was going on).
Root problem we're really discussing is bureaucracy versus an accurate depiction of a student's abilities. One could argue that the ability to properly manipulate the bureaucracy to have the highest scores is an indication, if that is the kind of intelligence a student is supposed to be demonstrating. The sad truth is, in the world of academia being good on paper is usually a lot more important than being intelligent or competent and both students and parents realize that and make choices that reflect that reality, to the detriment or real learning.
No design can protect people from their own stupidity and willingness to follow malicious instructions they don't understand.
I'm afraid I don't have time to address you post in its entirety, but I would like to address this common theme you seem to harp on, as well as half of the so called security industry. Users follow instructions they don't understand and click OK to weird technobabble, and run software they don't know they can trust, because that is what they have to do with the current shitty OS designs to perform common tasks. OS's in general and Windows in particular are not designed to let users do what they want securely.
Security is not about finding someone to blame or finding a way you can blame the user when they are compromised. Rotating passwords a user needs to change every day result in users who write them on post it notes. This is a flaw in the security in that it failed to take the human element into account and blaming the users does not make it any more secure. MS has outrageously poor security in this regard because they never consider the human element and apparently think shifting the blame to the user constitutes security. Please stop buying into the false premise that the user is at fault when the OS gives them a bunch of bad and incomprehensible choices and they make the wrong one.
That is only true if you want to publish the source, and let the user do the compiling.
Not really. You just compile it and package it in one or two formats (a very small amount of work compared to writing code in the first place) and post the binaries. It tends to work pretty well.
Many modern distro, when installed as a "Workstation", does not even install a compiler by default.
Really? Which ones? More importantly for those that have a desktop option instead of workstation, do they include a compiler?
And if you don't want to provide the sources (and there are valid reasons for that), binary compatibility across distros is hard to achieve.
This has not been my experience, but even if it is true in the general case, that does not make it all that hard to simply recompile for the top 10 or whatever and distribute binaries for them. No the real problem with getting applications to work cross platform on various Linux distros or between Windows and OS X and Linux and the like is that there is no market for it because of MS's monopolization of the desktop OS market. If one Linux distro had 15% of the market and another had 20% and Windows had 30% and OS X had 30% and the remain 5% was miscellaneous you'd see serious resources put into cross platform toolsets and distribution methods. Almost all programs would work on all platforms whether you had to download a specific binary or something like the JVM became standard. The problem you cite is not an inherent weakness of anything but a monoculture, but a problem resulting from a monoculture.
I'm not sure full on net neutrality is necessary though. Fair pricing regulation that required networks to charge all customers the same price for a given bandwidth class(volume and QOS level) may be enough...
As far as I'm aware, every proposed network neutrality bill has done just this. The only people who have brought up stopping network operators from discriminating on any criteria other than source/destination/person are the networks operators themselves trying to spread FUD. When anyone says "network neutrality" from a legal perspective that means exactly what you are proposing.
But that has it's own share of problems... Namely make sure the software sucks so that there is a market for improvements, customizations, services and support.
No, that is the problem with relying upon support as your main revenue stream, not with any of the business methods I listed.
You can make money developing an OSS database by:
offering to code improvements, bug fixes, and interfaces for anyone willing to pay for them
selling any product or service that relies upon a database and using the OSS database as a tool for that purpose (while not paying to license a commercial one and getting free improvements form others)
building custom solutions for a given company's workflow based around the tool, e.g. a database for tracking the shipments of shoes through customs agencies
None of those provide any motivation for trying to hold back the functionality of the product, nor to do shoddy work in the hopes that you can get paid again for fixing your own problems, because it is a competitive market and someone else can always do better work and drive you out of business.
I think the main thing about OSS licensing that people coming from a closed source sales model mistake is that OSS is not a way to get more money from software you develop. It is a feature of the product that benefits end users and allows you to undercut commercial and closed source offerings with flexibility and price. The people who came up with OSS licensing were both users and developers and the license was designed to benefit them as users. It is not a good business move to open source your code instead of selling it as closed source, unless the cash you get from selling it is not worth the trouble or using the software is more important to you than selling it or if you need a way to make your product better than a competitor and are willing to change to a less profitable model to do it.
This illustrates a problem with commercial OSS At least with the GPL, anyway.
I think this illustrates a problem with trying to sell OSS as if it were closed source software, instead of relying upon contract work for improvements, customizations, services, and other closed source add ons or using that OSS as a tool yourself for some other market.
They were not dangling parts of the security model prior to their introduction. They are not necessary parts to a working multiuser security model.
They are a necessary part of a functional security model, given the current malware environment.
Surely you can come up with more examples to the claim that "most of it is not implemented at all in any version of Windows" (emphasis mine).
I already gave you several examples, but you don't seem to understand the difference between, it is possible to configure a system to use this feature, and this feature is in use by default, encouraged and brought to the end user in a way that makes sense and solves the problem. UAC, for example, theoretically addresses user level access controls for applications, but realistically is presented by a UI that completely ignores what is needed to make it functional. As a result, it has little real benefit.
For that matter, most ISVs and users still don't care.
Users care about results, even when they don't understand the mechanisms. Windows users want better security and protection from malware and the results on their computers. They are not, however, experts to be demanding some feature they don't understand. It is MS's job to provide them with something that will work, except it doesn't make MS enough money so they aren't going to do so.
Still, I'm not aware of anything, aside from momentum in bad practices by ISVs, that makes writing software that correctly follows the standards of LUA and multiple users any harder on Windows than any other platform.
Existing toolsets and off the shelf components (installers and registration software for example) often are a hurdle. Mostly though, it is just that people develop for the defaults and MS provided the wrong ones.
Windows also has a LOT more crappy software, which drags the average down.
How much of that crappy software is developed with tools from MS that could encourage or discourage the proper methodology?
If the user is, as I said before, giving the malware full consent, he will have no compunction sudoing the malware to root with a password prompt dialog.
Actually this is a hurdle as it provides users with information to determine the difference between data and executables, which is often confused by Windows users. It also provides specific information on the type of access requested, which at least provides some info for more clueful users. There are also differences in teh scope of what can be done from these graphical "su" type prompts. Don't get me wrong, however, OS X security is insufficient to deal with the level of malware currently attacking Windows. It is, however, appropriate for the level of malware attacking OS X and there is every indication that it will stay that way regardless of the level of malware attacking OS X, because Apple has direct, financial motivation to keep it that way. MS's security problems are rooted in their monopoly, which provides them with no motivation to respond to customer problems like security.
Ok, what's the one right now then? There have been some in the past, but not more than other desktop OSes AFAIK. . Certainly not a state of constant publicly known vulnerability.
You go to Google and type in "Vista unpatched escalation" among the top 10 results is sure enough CVE-2007-0843 an unpatched local escalation. As I said, I don't think this method for finding an unpatched local escalation in Windows has ever failed me. Most people don't even pay attention to these because if they are in security they know it and if they're not MS rates these as unimportant security vulnerabilities. While these same types of holes occasionally get news for other platforms, the news would have to report them every week to keep up with Windows, so it becomes a non-story. Until the advent of Vista, everyone was administrators
Then users demanding "Linux" applications are demanding something that will never happen since you can not write an application to a kernel!
The truth of the matter is, you can easily write a "Linux" application that runs on pretty much all major Linux distributions.
I'm not trolling, I'm no shill and I definitely do not work for Microsoft.. but I just really believe that "too" much choice sucks.
I disagree. The real problems we have with many choices are all because we have a monoculture. Because there is one dominant OS and that OS is intentionally incompatible with other things, fragmentation is an issue. If we had four OS's sharing 75% of the market and another 10 OS's sharing the rest we'd have significant investment in all the major ones and in technologies that allow for good cross-platform development and portable applications so it did not matter which OS you are running as much, since it would preclude your using a given application.
I would have a much easier time choosing between 2-3 carpet types and 10-20 colors than the amazing number of styles/options out there (visit the carpet section next time you're at home depot and you'll know what I'm talking about).
I picked out some carpet a month ago. Like any other decision, I had criteria. It needed to go with two different wall colors and needed to have a pattern to hide the stuff tracked in from outside and the garage. If there were only 10-20 colors, I would have had a carpet that was less suited to my needs than what I did get, since I doubt one of these 20 colors would have been a combination of colors complementary to my walls along with a dark and a neutral to help hide dirt and the like. If you don't like having choices, then just pick from a limited selection from one company or collection. I don't see why this is hard. Variety and competition breed innovation and improvement and allow for a better fit to a given task. It is only when we have a monoculture that the problems appear and one vendor can intentionally make sure you have no choices by making sure floors are either compatible with their carpet or are weird and non-standard ones that do not work with anything other than one specialty floor.
The choice is even worse for software companies that put money or even the whole company on the line when they make a platform choice.
So it is better for a company to have only one or two choices, than many choices to find the best fit for their needs? I'm not sure I understand that argument at all.
If you happen to know something about carpet, or where I can get more/good information please post it. No pets, one year old and an average budget. Thanks in advance:)
I don't know a lot about carpet, but I recently did some research and consulted someone who knew a whole lot. I'm happy with the result. Consider what it will look like in two years given the type of traffic you have. Consider changing trends and what will quickly look dated. Spend the extra money for thick, high quality padding underneath the carpet as that makes a whole lot more difference for the price differential than the cost difference between the carpets themselves.
Unless the ownership is secure, there will not be much investment -- that's so obvious, it is a truism. Yet these people expect companies to invest in infrastructure, while, at the same time, trying to reduce the companies' control of same:
I think its a little late for the ISPs to be complaining about socialism, seeing as the taxpayers have subsidized their infrastructure they now own to the tune of billions of dollars. In any case, all investment has risks, the ISPs are simply looking for a way to make money by investing in politicians instead of hardware. "You know, if not for these common carrier provisions the FCC requires, we could extort a lot more money without actually providing any more benefit, lets buy us some congresscritters!"
Oh, you built a new pipe? Great! No, we are not going to let you charge a premium for using it, no sir, net-neutrality and all... Don't be greedy, we want to trade our warez and to hold high-res video-conferences over it.
Do you even know what you're talking about? Net neutrality does not say that an ISP can't charge a premium for a faster pipe or even for running a given type of traffic faster. Net neutrality does not ban QoS, that is FUD they have been spreading that has always been shown to be false. Net neutrality is about insuring all traffic of the same type is treated the same, regardless of the source and destination. If the ISPs want to charge their customers a premium for use of some new pipe, they are free to do so. What net neutrality stops is them from charging people who are not their customers a fee for not waylaying any transit traffic from them that happens to cross their network (in violation of their peering agreements). They can charge 10 times as much for video conference traffic as they do for Web traffic and use QoS to ensure the video conference runs fast enough. What net neutrality stops them from doing is looking at traffic they are paid by peers to have cross their network, and intentionally slowing down traffic from say, Google, so that Google searches are extra slow, because either Google (who is not their direct customer) did not pay extortion, or because MS paid more than Google.
ISPs are given immunity to certain laws under the assumption that they are common carriers. They can transport child pornography without going to jail because they just carry all traffic impartially. They can carry slanderous remarks without fear of lawsuit because they just impartially carry traffic. If they decide not to impartially carry traffic, but instead to discriminate among different people sending and receiving, what benefit to society does it bring to continue providing them with special immunity to the laws?
Next you'll see some creeps argue, that the free market is failing, and that the government thus needs to take over the Internet service provision, much like it currently is responsible for highways (is not that a roaring success)...
There is not now and never has been a "free market" for internet. The government highly subsidized the infrastructure from day one, provided special legal protections to ISPs, and allowed only two in most geographical areas to run lines in the public right of ways creating government enforced monopolies. Because of those public right of ways and the geographic realities, internet service lends itself to being a natural monopoly, which never obeys free market rules anyway. Claiming then, that one given act of government interference is the cause of all problems is absurd.
I build tools for ISPs and I can tell you the ones outside the US are a lot less fucked up and are investing a lot more in improved infrastructure and bringing real value to customers as a way to make money. In a lot of Europe and even in some of south america you can buy internet pipes that allow you to filter our DDoS attacks at your ISPs peering border, not once it has hosed your network completely. People pay a premium for those pipes, but in the
I think you misunderstand the nature of my post. We were speaking about whether or not it would be acceptable for the EU to fine MS or another business that breaks the law so much that it becomes bankrupt, not whether or not the EU was going to take that action or even if it is a good idea. I did not write that the EU is going to bankrupt MS, I wrote that if they had no other options driving them out of business is better than allowing them to continue breaking the law.
MS does have a legitimate business model, they don't tend to use it very often because it involves less profit than the ones they prefer to use but it is there.
MS has legitimate sources of income although they are entangled with illegitimate ones at this point. That is not the same thing as having a legitimate business model. A business model is generally the overall plan for operating a business and MS's current model is built upon constant growth to keep shareholders happy, constant growth created by illegally leveraging their monopoly into new markets. Half the feature set of Vista is bundling or tying into a new market and that is not an accident. Without that strategy MS could change and create a viable business plan that is not illegal and which had slow and steady growth, but that is not their current model.
Bankrupting them is not going to happen...
Of course not. The EU would have to change its laws in order to do that anyway as the fines they can enact are limited.
What is far more likely is that through ever increasing fines they will make not complying less profitable than complying until microsoft capitulates - its probably going to be a lengthy process.
I'm not sure the EU will have the patience for that. The point of this article is that the EU commissioners are faced with something new, a company that is in open defiance of their laws and is more poorly behaved than any other anti-competative company that they've had to deal with before. Even while these proceedings are going on, MS has released Vista which introduces another handful of blatantly illegal attempts to leverage their monopoly into new markets and the EU is not ignoring that fact. It is probably clear to them by now that the courts are too slow and their fines are too low to change MS's actions.
What we have now are some comments that amount to saber rattling. The commission has a second option for dealing with antitrust abuse, one they have never used yet. They can order the company to be restructured, and break up MS into multiple, competing companies to fix the market from a top down approach. Realistically, that is the only way MS will change its behaviors. They narrowly avoided this fate in the US by making huge contributions to politicians just before the elections. This complicates things for the EU. By rights, the US should have solved the problem and MS is a US company.
The EU ordering MS broken up may be an empty threat or it may be a last option. All this is highly complicated by the politics. Wo is in charge in the US and how will they react? How much anti-american sentiment is there in the EU and will a breakup score them enough political currency. If the next US presidential election goes to a republican will MS be broken up because of the EU's outrage over the current regime's actions? If the election goes to a democrat will that make the US less likely to object to such a break up, or even make US politicians support the action? I doubt many outsiders could answer these questions, but escalating fines and structural changes are both possibilities for how the EU will deal with this. Or, maybe they will do nothing effective at all.
What "criminal activity"? Microsoft has never been charged with a "crime". "Civil" violations are not "crimes". The "civil" code is not the same as the "criminal" code.
Antitrust violations in the US are criminal code violations under the sherman and clayton acts. You're probably confused because they are commonly precipitated by civil suits. The Department of Justice does not file civil suits, they prosecute criminals. I'm about 90% sure that antitrust violation is a criminal offense in the EU as well, but I don't have good references on EU law as opposed to country specific laws, so I'm relying upon the opinions presented to me by EU residents. If you have some evidence to the contrary, please present it.
Also, I've read that the EU "case" consists of mandates and decrees issued by the EC, not a court.
The EC is equivalent to the executive branch of the US government (you know like the Department of Justice). They are charged with enforcement of treaties and competition issues. They are enforcing the laws enacted by the parliament and Council which are sort of equivalent to the US houses of congress. MS has appealed to the courts several times now and had their case rejected as without merit.
Seize the rights to what? You mean the software that is protected by copyright? Assuming the EU ignored this minor fact, you'd see Vista era stuff in 2020.
Intellectual property rights include trademarks, copyrights, and patents. If the EU "confiscated" those rights because of criminal acts on the part of MS, then they could either give those rights to a newly formed competitor to MS, or make them public domain. MS certainly would not be able enforce their copyrights to stop free copying and use of Windows, since as criminals on the run they would have no standing. Many other countries might, in fact, agree with the EU that the rights had been legally transferred to the EU, thus providing the same result in those other countries (many of whom are less than please with both the US and MS to start with) and making software from the American MS the copyright violator.
On what grounds? It is not illegal to pull your products from a region that isn't profitable.
Actually, that would be a criminal act of antitrust abuse. That is, of course, ignoring the fact that they would be violating legal contracts with literally thousands of international corporations who would file suit in the US and elsewhere suing MS into oblivion.
I'm just trying to point out the logical flaw in your position. It is entirely proper for the government to be involved when a transaction is illegal, such as soliciting murder or antitrust bundling. Arguing that they absolutely should not on principal is what exposes you to demonstrations of how absurd that position can be.
And do you seriously expect a foreigner to be well versed in such issues as some trial against an American company?
I would expect anyone who feels the need to argue about antitrust issues in a public forum to be educated enough on the topic to at least have heard of some of the major antitrust cases of the last 100 years and Bell Telephone and Standard Oil are the two most common and well known examples I've seen everywhere, even if they do happen to both be based in the US.
Sure, there were other companies that did it earlier and some even better, but Windows brought a gui to the masses.
I don't even know what point you're trying to make. MS did not invent something, but did popularize it many years ago so we should let them break the law now?
And I certainly hope that this is not your first language if you really are above average intelligence. First, anyone that wants to announce their increased intelligence to the world probably has some issues, so maybe you're not so much familiar with "modesty".
Actually this is my first language and I am fluent enough in it to take note of, but not call attention to your numerous grammatical errors. This is, after all, a rather informal forum for writing. As for your statement about, "announce their increased intelligence" I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to convey. I mentioned that people on Slashdot tend to be above average in intelligence, not that my intelligence is increased by... well, whatever it is you think I was saying.
Second, what the hell is decidedness supposed to mean in your post?
That is a typo that was meant to read "decides."
If you plan to label someone as a moron you should first do a spell check.
A spell check should not catch "decidedness" since it is a proper, if little used word.
I still insist that bundling is not a big deal.
Bundling is not a big deal. Bundling with a monopolized product is a big deal. The fact that you still can't seem to understand the significance that those are different things, speaks to your ignorance. If you bothered to read anything about antitrust law you would note that only the latter is illegal. That might be your first clue to try to figure out why it is illegal.
How many people do you know that actually use the build in CD burning functionality in XP? None? Because it sucks. What about Media player? Probably a lot more because it's not a bad product.
Actually, those are both the most popular applications in their respective categories, used more than any other. Just because you don't seem to know a lot of people who use them, does not make them less popular.
I'm not saying it's great, but it is usable without much fuss.
So imagine you're in business as say, a baker. Now suppose you make really good baked goods at an affordable price and are doing well, but then the electric company starts bundling baked goods with people's electrical service. They raise the cost of electricity a bit, but there still aren't any other good options, so now everyone already has baked goods and don't need yours. Now the baked goods from the electric company aren't great, but they are eatable without much fuss. So you go out of business and consumers end up eating inferior baked goods that cost them more money, even if they can't tell exactly how much.
You honestly don't see a problem with that? What about when they start adding more and more products to said bundle and driving more and more people out of business? Still no problem? What about when all innovation or advancement in those markets slows to a crawl since there are no competitors left for people to move to? Why invest when it doesn't get you any more money? You really can't comprehend how monopolistic bundling can be a bad thing for the economy and people in general?
I get the analogy but I'm saying its flawed. Firstly where have MS hiked the same product price by 10000%
The problem with the analogy is not in comparing MS to the electric company as both are monopolies and the same rules do apply similarly. The problem is with the nature of the abuse. MS is not being punished for raising prices on their monopolized product. They are being punished for tying their monopolized product to another product in a different market and then charging others to remove that tie.
At the end of the day if you want to insulate yourself from a 3rd party vendor price changes don't go with a 3rd party vendor and develop it all yourself, or go with something from OpenSource. These are other options.
And you can bypass the electric company with solar panels or a generator, but it is not cost effective or most people at this time.
Allow me to try to extend the analogy presented to fit with what MS has done. Imagine if the electric company decided to get into the television business and somehow changed the nature of the electricity coming into your house to be a proprietary pattern. This pattern would cause normal televisions to not function, but televisions from the electric company would still work because they could predict the spikes or whatever. Now assume the law caught up with them and told them they had to publish the specs as to when these spikes would occur so other television manufacturers could compete again (after the electric company went from a few percent of the market to more like 50%). So the electric company after years of going through the courts and being fined for not complying says they will publish the pattern, but they want to charge money for it, since it took them a lot of time to come up with. At this point they're haggling over how much they are going to charge other TV makers to get around the problems they intentionally created in order to break the law in the first place.
Now there are obvious practical issues with the analogy above, but it at least presents the spirit of what is happening in the MS antitrust case here. They're haggling over charging for the details of the interface between MS's monopoly(desktop OS) and another product(server OS), not MS's monopoly product itself.
this kind of thing is like telling somebody that has committed multiple felonies that he must abide by certain "extra" rules (can't live near "secured areas" can't own firearms can't go to certain locations...)
Not really. It is more like telling someone convicted of multiple felonies and who is still in the act of committing that same felony and has never stopped that no, putting the knife away that they've been using to stab people isn't good enough, you actually have to stop repeatedly kicking them as well and yes could you please stop throwing bricks. That's what a lot of people here don't seem to be getting. This isn't an "extra" punishment. It is criminal to tie an existing monopoly to a product in a new market and nonstandard protocols between your monopolized product and the other product that in any way disadvantage competitors are illegal. The EU bends over backwards here and still you have people claiming that they are being anti-american. I'm about convinced at this point that about 1 in 100 people here understand what a monopoly is, what tying is, and what constitutes that tying in this case.
What I think is funny (in a sad and pathetic way) is that so many people, American or not, have such a rabid hatred of Microsoft.
People, in general, do not. Most don't even know who MS is, and of those who do some think of them as the people who may the xbox and a few know they make Windows or Word. People on Slashdot tend to have a lot of anger towards MS, but we're computer people and above average in intelligence. To most people "monopoly abuse that stifles innovation in the OS market" is a bunch of gibberish. To us it means one company has held back the future and kept our cool toys from us and made us work around their shitty intentionally broken designs.
Does this all go back to Microsoft "bundling" a bunch of additional features in the OS? That's anti-competitive? When I purchased my car it came with a sound system that was "bundled" with the purchase.
Sigh. Every single article about this contains your post or one like it; you know, the moron who decidedness to make an analogy about monopoly abuse and does not include any monopolies in the example. Can't you go back to MySpace or wherever it is you people come from?
Why is it acceptable for someone to toss out perfectly good parts of a vehicle in favor of something that they want more, but when an OS comes with some perfectly good features it's some kind of big deal to just install and use something else?
Because MS has a monopoly on OS's and no one has a monopoly on cars. Try your example again, including a monopoly, like electrical distribution.
We're arguing that these rules (if they actually give the EU the power it is claiming) seem to have some serious issues. Just because something is a law does not automatically make it right.
These laws are actually almost identical to the ones in the US, and do not differ significantly from most of the rest of the world. What MS is doing is a crime in countries around the globe. If you want to argue that antitrust laws like these are not needed, well that is fine, but it should be backed up with something other than "because." Monopoly abuse undermines capitalism. It breaks the system is such a way that the best, cheapest product no longer is rewarded with money, while a more expensive and inferior product is, simply because of that company's position in a different market. You could go into business and make a product that is both better and cheaper than your competitor and they could still easily drive you out of business and then collect money in that market forever, despite never innovating or improving the state of the art or finding a way to lower prices.
We have plenty of historical examples as to why we have these laws. If you want to go back to renting a wired telephone handset for tens of thousands of dollars over the course of your life, well then you have some really odd preferences. If you want to watch market after market consolidate under the roofs of a a few monopolies until very few are born into all the wealth and we're a feudalist system again, well then I think you're an idiot or a wealthy jerk. We tried it your way and it was unstable as all hell and bad for almost everyone. Why should we go back to it, just because you do not understand the mechanisms or did not bother to read your history lessons?
I have no idea what went on between the US gov't and this MaBell you speak of, but I would have opposed it if it involved regulating a private company.
If you're so ignorant of the history of monopolies that you don't know about Bell Telephone versus the DOJ, why would I value you opinion about antitrust regulation and the need for it? Why don't you answer my other question. If MS offered someone else money to kill you, do you think the government should get involved in regulating that transaction, or since it is between MS and the hired killer should they ignore it?
Well, fine grained ACLs like the one they apply to IE, come to mind. A well defined userspace is easily supported by the kernel, for another, but is still iffy as their current implementation in Vista.
Windows NT 3.1, released in 1993, had full separation of user privileges.
Yeah, that's great, but because it was not the default setup for a normal user account to be created, they were rarely used and thus lots of things did not work when they did. Theoretically, several current Linux distros ship with SELinux, but that does not protect them from having their user data hosed by a trojan because it is not yet applied by default to applications.
Microsoft can't force ISVs to write software that works properly with the security system, but Microsoft has been urging them to do so since the beginning. Microsoft's own software has been pretty good about following those requirements (except for the games department.)
Your opinion on this differs a lot form mine. If MS has been pushing it, why have so many of MS's own applications failed as a single user? You mention games, but there are several functions of MSOffice 2003 (mostly VB) that do not work unless you're an admin, and that is MS's fault. They did far too little and it was obvious they were not serious about it.
Since Windows 2000, the only supported method of installation is the Windows Installer, which indeed supports installation as a limited user for programs that support it (not many, I'm afraid).
Yeah it supports it, but it is practically not easy to do and not something MS encourages through their default user account settings.
Is that because there is precious little malware developed specifically for OSX? If an administrative user were to give consent to installing a piece of malware on OSX, what technical barriers would prevent it from having free reign on the machine that don't exist on Windows?
There are a lot fewer malware programs in circulation and there are some technical hurdles it needs to get through that would not present if a user was logged in a root (which is not even something a normal user could probably figure out how to accomplish since the account is locked out by default. More importantly, however, every OS that is not Windows has something in common. They have to give users what they want. If malware starts compromising machines, they have to adapt their OS to stop it or they lose money. MS is the only company this does not apply to and hence they will probably have serious malware problems for the foreseeable future. There are OS's with less security than Windows and OS's with a lot more security that Windows but all of them have an appropriate level of security to keep their users happy, except Windows.
On Windows, I can try installing anything I want without admin access and not worry about infecting the machine or other user accounts.
Umm, you might want to rethink that assumption. I don't think I've ever known a time when there was not at least one public, unpatched local escalation in Windows. MS has never taken these seriously. I'm hoping when enough Vista users appear that will change, but I don't have a lot of hope.
I don't think you understand the concept of ACLs. A discretionary access control list (which controls who has what access rights to an object) is part of a security descriptor, which controls the access a process has to an object. They're traditionally organized by user and object, not application.
You're the one who seems confused. DACLs are not the only kind of ACL. I was referring to MACLs (Mandatory Access Control Lists). They are widely implemented in security minded *NIX OS's.
Microsoft cannot force developers to follow those requirements-- if they did, people would really scream bloody murder.
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Actually, it is highly unclear if that speech would or would not be illegal under the proposed legislation, which is just as bad in my opinion. Somewhere there is a line where inciting people to hate others is likely to lead them to violence towards those others, and that is a pretty blurry line making this sort of legislation very difficult to create. One might argue that your example does not incite violence but, "Jews deserve to die" might, because it falls in between actually calling for people to commit murder, and calling for an otherworldly punishment for them. It advocates death for them, which is a lot closer to appealing to people to specifically kill them.
I also understand the state of affairs that is pushing such legislation. The number of different cultures with a history of violent, irrational beliefs with regard to one another, all living in close proximity is creating a lot of crime and suffering, which is increased by people who use religious and political forums to feed those same beliefs. Personally I'd rather that logic and reasoning were brought back as the cornerstones of both education, and qualification for immigration, but I do understand the difficulty of the problem.
I don't think either of your examples would qualify as hate speech under the law being proposed. Freedom of speech is an important human right, but like all rights it is limited in that when it conflicts with other rights, that conflict must be resolved by law. In the US, for example, yelling "fire" in a crowded theater may very well get you thrown in jail because your right to free speech does not trump all the other theater patrons rights to not be trampled upon. Like wise, you can't go on your TV station the night before the election and report that one of the candidates was just found raping corpses without going to jail for slander. You can't make a television advertisement that says your product will make people live twice as long when you know that isn't true because of false advertising laws.
So considering free speech in those terms, what "hate speech" may or may not qualify. In the US, this mostly is calls for illegal and violent action such as "jews are the minions of satan and I want you to all go down to their evil temple and kill every man woman and child you find." To me, that seems like free speech versus freedom to live (another important right). The EU law calls out this same behavior, but they also call out some more vague terms, such as speech that incites hate. For me, the vagueness of this terminology seems inappropriate to me and subject to abuse. That is why right now I'm inclined to oppose the proposed legislation.
This doesn't have a lot to do with my statement. If they could have sold copies of their database to even half the people who use it for free they'd be making a whole lot more than that. Providing it as open source, however, allows them to undercut Oracle and MS and other OSS projects, which is where those people would probably be going if MySQL did not offer it as GPL. I think you may misconstrued my statement. MySQL makes more money by licensing it as GPL as well, but not because the license benefits them directly, but because it benefits customers who would otherwise not have paid them at all. Think of it like a feature. Adding a new feature to MySQL costs money and effort and does not directly benefit the company, but it does benefit their customers, thus motivating more sales, which benefits the company.
What you are missing is that lots of companies will pay to get a non-GPL version of the code, while at the same time the developer gets open-source marketing and support for free. The only limitation is the threat of fork and that they can only take code submissions where the copyright is assigned to them.That threat is exactly why it is not long-term sustainable business model in a mature market. It works for emerging markets, but eventually it will fail.
Then there's Red Hat, who manages to sell GPL'd code they don't ownI think RedHat is going to be in serious trouble if Linux ever takes off because support is not really a sustainable business model either because it does make development opposed to the interests of users, which will eventually result in them moving elsewhere.
Mozilla/Firefox, who makes $50 million a year from Google, but I digress.Mozilla has a sustainable business plan. They do work on contract and make funds from ancillary sources like advertising via Google. That is exactly the kind of low-margin business method that cannot only succeed, but also undercut any commercial competitor using traditional methods.
You make bombastic claims, that you don't back up with any references. You also use incorrect terms:
You know if you're going to claim someone is misusing terms is it sort of conventional to actually specify which term you feel is misused and why.
Where? How?
Amazing! You claim I'm making unverified and unbacked claims by griping about the huge government subsidies for internet infrastructure? Let me guess, you did zero research and don't work in the industry, but somehow you assumed there weren't any so you're now emotionally attached to that idea? The Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 alone provided 2 billion dollars for subsidizing low interest loans for rural broadband connections and that isn't even counting all the fiber the government themselves laid and then sold for orders of magnitude less than it cost them. Take a look at Kushnick's new book, "$200 Billion Broadband Scandal" where he details exactly the approximately $2000 per household in the US that has been spent subsidizing US ISPs, largely based upon promises of infrastructure improvements they never delivered. Or if you're not much os a reader, you could always try Google.
Violations of peering agreements are to be enforced in courts with contract law, not government regulations.
Peers are financially motivated to overlook that aspect said peering agreements since each of them will be violating them for a profit somewhere. No, common carrier laws need to establish that said carriers actually act like common carriers and treat traffic without discrimination based upon source or destination if they want special protections from prosecution.
Again, if that sabotage you are alleging is in violation of the terms of any agreement, the injured payer has the courts as the recourse.
Please the law and the free market is no efficient enough to act through so many intermediary agreements without a common law. Think of it this way. You start running a service and contract with LocalISP who peers with AT&T who peers with Sprint who peers with Telus who peers with OtherLocalISP who provides a cable modem to a customer of yours. You have a contract with LocalISP and no one else. Telus calls you up and says they want you to send them a check for $10,000 every month, or they're going to slow down traffic with your source to the point that your service is unusable and people switch to you competitors. LocalISP is doing nothing. They could, on your behalf complain to AT&T, but AT&T isn't doing anything either. AT&T could in turn complain to Sprint who could complain to Telus, but the chances are absolutely nothing would happen. LocalISP is not breaking their contract with you and you don't have a contract with Telus so you can't take someone to court over a contract violation. Switching to another provider does nothing since they will almost certainly still transit Telus's backbone to reach that given customer.
Are you honestly telling me you think the courts will do anything about this if there is no law in place? The FCC used to regulate this sort of thing, but changed their policies in 2004 opening the way for companies to take advantage of this. I should know since I sell the ISPs tools that let them easily throttle that traffic (among many other tasks).
The benefit is obvious -- to allow them to exist. If they were to be charged with censoring content, they would fail and nobody would win.
That's the problem. They are censoring the internet, for their own profit, instead of out of some moral belief. What about when the CEO of one of these big ISPs decided to start degrading all traffic that crosses his backbone that is from the Democratic party. Do you think that should be legal? The point is, if we forbid them from censoring then they are performing a public good in exchange for their protections, otherwise they are simply running a completely for profit
Strange, it is in my stock kubuntu install, although it is by no means cutting edge.
And while gcc is very easy to install on just about any distro, telling a non-geek Linux user they need to install a compiler to use some desktop applications (WTF is a compiler? they ask...) will leave some of them baffled.This is a usability issue rather than an inherent flaw. Personally I'd like to see package management move towards integration of an installer and build instructions, rather than towards more pre-compiled binaries. In my ideal OS, double clicking an icon would run the appropriate included binary and schedule the included source to be built into a custom binary for my system when my machine is next idle... all transparently to the average user.
While compiling once for every distro in the top 10 might be possible for some, it requires a lot of logistics for commercial software. Plus, we distribute 3 binaries on 1 CD, one for Windows, one for OSX, and one for Linux. Putting 10 binaries for Linux would require multiple CDs, or a DVD, or maybe even multiple DVDs.This sounds like an issue with package management. The bulk of most binaries are reusable data, especially if you're getting to something that required a DVD to fit it on. Just another reason I wish major Linux distros would adopt and extend the OpenStep package format for use with their package manager. Then you could be back down to two packages with everything else reusing most of the same data.
Recompiling on 10 distros is a piece of cake compared to the trouble of distributing those 10 binaries and dealing with the end user.Yeah, it is a serious limitation of most Linux package managers that they are not accommodating to binaries from commercial enterprises, resulting in the need for stand alone installers outside the normal package management system. I suppose you could always distribute an open source program in the major package repositories that queried the distro version and then downloaded and installed the proper binary itself, but that certainly is a huge pain.
The sad thing is all of these are solvable problems that could actually lead to a much better and easier user experience, if only there were motivation and backing due to competition combined with plain old american greed.
Perhaps your understanding of the usage of the word "encouraged" is the issue here. It is perfectly normal to say something like, "the entrance requirements for UK universities (which take into account only GPA and not which classes are taken) are encouraging students to drop math classes so they can go to a better school.
I faced the same choices in the American public education system and I chose the hardest courses I could. The result was that a student who took primarily shop courses graduated with highest honors & I graduated with a 3.0 or something. But I already had 11 credits through advanced placement courses.My story is very similar. I obtained a 3.8 or something while being the only student in my class to take every AP course offered. The high honors went to other students who took easier courses and they probably had a better choice of schools and scholarships as a result. The one really big difference is that in my state some schools had begun correcting for this issue by crediting AP classes higher than regular classes. Taking the same classes and getting the same scores in a nearby city I would have had a GPA of 4.7 (which I only learned after seeing another person's entrance info listing a higher than 4.0 GPA and trying to figure out what was going on).
Root problem we're really discussing is bureaucracy versus an accurate depiction of a student's abilities. One could argue that the ability to properly manipulate the bureaucracy to have the highest scores is an indication, if that is the kind of intelligence a student is supposed to be demonstrating. The sad truth is, in the world of academia being good on paper is usually a lot more important than being intelligent or competent and both students and parents realize that and make choices that reflect that reality, to the detriment or real learning.
I'm afraid I don't have time to address you post in its entirety, but I would like to address this common theme you seem to harp on, as well as half of the so called security industry. Users follow instructions they don't understand and click OK to weird technobabble, and run software they don't know they can trust, because that is what they have to do with the current shitty OS designs to perform common tasks. OS's in general and Windows in particular are not designed to let users do what they want securely.
Security is not about finding someone to blame or finding a way you can blame the user when they are compromised. Rotating passwords a user needs to change every day result in users who write them on post it notes. This is a flaw in the security in that it failed to take the human element into account and blaming the users does not make it any more secure. MS has outrageously poor security in this regard because they never consider the human element and apparently think shifting the blame to the user constitutes security. Please stop buying into the false premise that the user is at fault when the OS gives them a bunch of bad and incomprehensible choices and they make the wrong one.
Not really. You just compile it and package it in one or two formats (a very small amount of work compared to writing code in the first place) and post the binaries. It tends to work pretty well.
Many modern distro, when installed as a "Workstation", does not even install a compiler by default.Really? Which ones? More importantly for those that have a desktop option instead of workstation, do they include a compiler?
And if you don't want to provide the sources (and there are valid reasons for that), binary compatibility across distros is hard to achieve.This has not been my experience, but even if it is true in the general case, that does not make it all that hard to simply recompile for the top 10 or whatever and distribute binaries for them. No the real problem with getting applications to work cross platform on various Linux distros or between Windows and OS X and Linux and the like is that there is no market for it because of MS's monopolization of the desktop OS market. If one Linux distro had 15% of the market and another had 20% and Windows had 30% and OS X had 30% and the remain 5% was miscellaneous you'd see serious resources put into cross platform toolsets and distribution methods. Almost all programs would work on all platforms whether you had to download a specific binary or something like the JVM became standard. The problem you cite is not an inherent weakness of anything but a monoculture, but a problem resulting from a monoculture.
As far as I'm aware, every proposed network neutrality bill has done just this. The only people who have brought up stopping network operators from discriminating on any criteria other than source/destination/person are the networks operators themselves trying to spread FUD. When anyone says "network neutrality" from a legal perspective that means exactly what you are proposing.
No, that is the problem with relying upon support as your main revenue stream, not with any of the business methods I listed.
You can make money developing an OSS database by:
None of those provide any motivation for trying to hold back the functionality of the product, nor to do shoddy work in the hopes that you can get paid again for fixing your own problems, because it is a competitive market and someone else can always do better work and drive you out of business.
I think the main thing about OSS licensing that people coming from a closed source sales model mistake is that OSS is not a way to get more money from software you develop. It is a feature of the product that benefits end users and allows you to undercut commercial and closed source offerings with flexibility and price. The people who came up with OSS licensing were both users and developers and the license was designed to benefit them as users. It is not a good business move to open source your code instead of selling it as closed source, unless the cash you get from selling it is not worth the trouble or using the software is more important to you than selling it or if you need a way to make your product better than a competitor and are willing to change to a less profitable model to do it.
I think this illustrates a problem with trying to sell OSS as if it were closed source software, instead of relying upon contract work for improvements, customizations, services, and other closed source add ons or using that OSS as a tool yourself for some other market.
They were not dangling parts of the security model prior to their introduction. They are not necessary parts to a working multiuser security model.
They are a necessary part of a functional security model, given the current malware environment.
Surely you can come up with more examples to the claim that "most of it is not implemented at all in any version of Windows" (emphasis mine).
I already gave you several examples, but you don't seem to understand the difference between, it is possible to configure a system to use this feature, and this feature is in use by default, encouraged and brought to the end user in a way that makes sense and solves the problem. UAC, for example, theoretically addresses user level access controls for applications, but realistically is presented by a UI that completely ignores what is needed to make it functional. As a result, it has little real benefit.
For that matter, most ISVs and users still don't care.
Users care about results, even when they don't understand the mechanisms. Windows users want better security and protection from malware and the results on their computers. They are not, however, experts to be demanding some feature they don't understand. It is MS's job to provide them with something that will work, except it doesn't make MS enough money so they aren't going to do so.
Still, I'm not aware of anything, aside from momentum in bad practices by ISVs, that makes writing software that correctly follows the standards of LUA and multiple users any harder on Windows than any other platform.
Existing toolsets and off the shelf components (installers and registration software for example) often are a hurdle. Mostly though, it is just that people develop for the defaults and MS provided the wrong ones.
Windows also has a LOT more crappy software, which drags the average down.
How much of that crappy software is developed with tools from MS that could encourage or discourage the proper methodology?
If the user is, as I said before, giving the malware full consent, he will have no compunction sudoing the malware to root with a password prompt dialog.
Actually this is a hurdle as it provides users with information to determine the difference between data and executables, which is often confused by Windows users. It also provides specific information on the type of access requested, which at least provides some info for more clueful users. There are also differences in teh scope of what can be done from these graphical "su" type prompts. Don't get me wrong, however, OS X security is insufficient to deal with the level of malware currently attacking Windows. It is, however, appropriate for the level of malware attacking OS X and there is every indication that it will stay that way regardless of the level of malware attacking OS X, because Apple has direct, financial motivation to keep it that way. MS's security problems are rooted in their monopoly, which provides them with no motivation to respond to customer problems like security.
Ok, what's the one right now then? There have been some in the past, but not more than other desktop OSes AFAIK. . Certainly not a state of constant publicly known vulnerability.
You go to Google and type in "Vista unpatched escalation" among the top 10 results is sure enough CVE-2007-0843 an unpatched local escalation. As I said, I don't think this method for finding an unpatched local escalation in Windows has ever failed me. Most people don't even pay attention to these because if they are in security they know it and if they're not MS rates these as unimportant security vulnerabilities. While these same types of holes occasionally get news for other platforms, the news would have to report them every week to keep up with Windows, so it becomes a non-story. Until the advent of Vista, everyone was administrators
The truth of the matter is, you can easily write a "Linux" application that runs on pretty much all major Linux distributions.
I'm not trolling, I'm no shill and I definitely do not work for Microsoft.. but I just really believe that "too" much choice sucks.I disagree. The real problems we have with many choices are all because we have a monoculture. Because there is one dominant OS and that OS is intentionally incompatible with other things, fragmentation is an issue. If we had four OS's sharing 75% of the market and another 10 OS's sharing the rest we'd have significant investment in all the major ones and in technologies that allow for good cross-platform development and portable applications so it did not matter which OS you are running as much, since it would preclude your using a given application.
I would have a much easier time choosing between 2-3 carpet types and 10-20 colors than the amazing number of styles/options out there (visit the carpet section next time you're at home depot and you'll know what I'm talking about).I picked out some carpet a month ago. Like any other decision, I had criteria. It needed to go with two different wall colors and needed to have a pattern to hide the stuff tracked in from outside and the garage. If there were only 10-20 colors, I would have had a carpet that was less suited to my needs than what I did get, since I doubt one of these 20 colors would have been a combination of colors complementary to my walls along with a dark and a neutral to help hide dirt and the like. If you don't like having choices, then just pick from a limited selection from one company or collection. I don't see why this is hard. Variety and competition breed innovation and improvement and allow for a better fit to a given task. It is only when we have a monoculture that the problems appear and one vendor can intentionally make sure you have no choices by making sure floors are either compatible with their carpet or are weird and non-standard ones that do not work with anything other than one specialty floor.
The choice is even worse for software companies that put money or even the whole company on the line when they make a platform choice.So it is better for a company to have only one or two choices, than many choices to find the best fit for their needs? I'm not sure I understand that argument at all.
If you happen to know something about carpet, or where I can get more/good information please post it. No pets, one year old and an average budget. Thanks in advanceI don't know a lot about carpet, but I recently did some research and consulted someone who knew a whole lot. I'm happy with the result. Consider what it will look like in two years given the type of traffic you have. Consider changing trends and what will quickly look dated. Spend the extra money for thick, high quality padding underneath the carpet as that makes a whole lot more difference for the price differential than the cost difference between the carpets themselves.
Unless the ownership is secure, there will not be much investment -- that's so obvious, it is a truism. Yet these people expect companies to invest in infrastructure, while, at the same time, trying to reduce the companies' control of same:
I think its a little late for the ISPs to be complaining about socialism, seeing as the taxpayers have subsidized their infrastructure they now own to the tune of billions of dollars. In any case, all investment has risks, the ISPs are simply looking for a way to make money by investing in politicians instead of hardware. "You know, if not for these common carrier provisions the FCC requires, we could extort a lot more money without actually providing any more benefit, lets buy us some congresscritters!"
Oh, you built a new pipe? Great! No, we are not going to let you charge a premium for using it, no sir, net-neutrality and all... Don't be greedy, we want to trade our warez and to hold high-res video-conferences over it.
Do you even know what you're talking about? Net neutrality does not say that an ISP can't charge a premium for a faster pipe or even for running a given type of traffic faster. Net neutrality does not ban QoS, that is FUD they have been spreading that has always been shown to be false. Net neutrality is about insuring all traffic of the same type is treated the same, regardless of the source and destination. If the ISPs want to charge their customers a premium for use of some new pipe, they are free to do so. What net neutrality stops is them from charging people who are not their customers a fee for not waylaying any transit traffic from them that happens to cross their network (in violation of their peering agreements). They can charge 10 times as much for video conference traffic as they do for Web traffic and use QoS to ensure the video conference runs fast enough. What net neutrality stops them from doing is looking at traffic they are paid by peers to have cross their network, and intentionally slowing down traffic from say, Google, so that Google searches are extra slow, because either Google (who is not their direct customer) did not pay extortion, or because MS paid more than Google.
ISPs are given immunity to certain laws under the assumption that they are common carriers. They can transport child pornography without going to jail because they just carry all traffic impartially. They can carry slanderous remarks without fear of lawsuit because they just impartially carry traffic. If they decide not to impartially carry traffic, but instead to discriminate among different people sending and receiving, what benefit to society does it bring to continue providing them with special immunity to the laws?
Next you'll see some creeps argue, that the free market is failing, and that the government thus needs to take over the Internet service provision, much like it currently is responsible for highways (is not that a roaring success)...
There is not now and never has been a "free market" for internet. The government highly subsidized the infrastructure from day one, provided special legal protections to ISPs, and allowed only two in most geographical areas to run lines in the public right of ways creating government enforced monopolies. Because of those public right of ways and the geographic realities, internet service lends itself to being a natural monopoly, which never obeys free market rules anyway. Claiming then, that one given act of government interference is the cause of all problems is absurd.
I build tools for ISPs and I can tell you the ones outside the US are a lot less fucked up and are investing a lot more in improved infrastructure and bringing real value to customers as a way to make money. In a lot of Europe and even in some of south america you can buy internet pipes that allow you to filter our DDoS attacks at your ISPs peering border, not once it has hosed your network completely. People pay a premium for those pipes, but in the
I think you misunderstand the nature of my post. We were speaking about whether or not it would be acceptable for the EU to fine MS or another business that breaks the law so much that it becomes bankrupt, not whether or not the EU was going to take that action or even if it is a good idea. I did not write that the EU is going to bankrupt MS, I wrote that if they had no other options driving them out of business is better than allowing them to continue breaking the law.
MS does have a legitimate business model, they don't tend to use it very often because it involves less profit than the ones they prefer to use but it is there.MS has legitimate sources of income although they are entangled with illegitimate ones at this point. That is not the same thing as having a legitimate business model. A business model is generally the overall plan for operating a business and MS's current model is built upon constant growth to keep shareholders happy, constant growth created by illegally leveraging their monopoly into new markets. Half the feature set of Vista is bundling or tying into a new market and that is not an accident. Without that strategy MS could change and create a viable business plan that is not illegal and which had slow and steady growth, but that is not their current model.
Bankrupting them is not going to happen...Of course not. The EU would have to change its laws in order to do that anyway as the fines they can enact are limited.
What is far more likely is that through ever increasing fines they will make not complying less profitable than complying until microsoft capitulates - its probably going to be a lengthy process.I'm not sure the EU will have the patience for that. The point of this article is that the EU commissioners are faced with something new, a company that is in open defiance of their laws and is more poorly behaved than any other anti-competative company that they've had to deal with before. Even while these proceedings are going on, MS has released Vista which introduces another handful of blatantly illegal attempts to leverage their monopoly into new markets and the EU is not ignoring that fact. It is probably clear to them by now that the courts are too slow and their fines are too low to change MS's actions.
What we have now are some comments that amount to saber rattling. The commission has a second option for dealing with antitrust abuse, one they have never used yet. They can order the company to be restructured, and break up MS into multiple, competing companies to fix the market from a top down approach. Realistically, that is the only way MS will change its behaviors. They narrowly avoided this fate in the US by making huge contributions to politicians just before the elections. This complicates things for the EU. By rights, the US should have solved the problem and MS is a US company.
The EU ordering MS broken up may be an empty threat or it may be a last option. All this is highly complicated by the politics. Wo is in charge in the US and how will they react? How much anti-american sentiment is there in the EU and will a breakup score them enough political currency. If the next US presidential election goes to a republican will MS be broken up because of the EU's outrage over the current regime's actions? If the election goes to a democrat will that make the US less likely to object to such a break up, or even make US politicians support the action? I doubt many outsiders could answer these questions, but escalating fines and structural changes are both possibilities for how the EU will deal with this. Or, maybe they will do nothing effective at all.
Antitrust violations in the US are criminal code violations under the sherman and clayton acts. You're probably confused because they are commonly precipitated by civil suits. The Department of Justice does not file civil suits, they prosecute criminals. I'm about 90% sure that antitrust violation is a criminal offense in the EU as well, but I don't have good references on EU law as opposed to country specific laws, so I'm relying upon the opinions presented to me by EU residents. If you have some evidence to the contrary, please present it.
Also, I've read that the EU "case" consists of mandates and decrees issued by the EC, not a court.The EC is equivalent to the executive branch of the US government (you know like the Department of Justice). They are charged with enforcement of treaties and competition issues. They are enforcing the laws enacted by the parliament and Council which are sort of equivalent to the US houses of congress. MS has appealed to the courts several times now and had their case rejected as without merit.
Intellectual property rights include trademarks, copyrights, and patents. If the EU "confiscated" those rights because of criminal acts on the part of MS, then they could either give those rights to a newly formed competitor to MS, or make them public domain. MS certainly would not be able enforce their copyrights to stop free copying and use of Windows, since as criminals on the run they would have no standing. Many other countries might, in fact, agree with the EU that the rights had been legally transferred to the EU, thus providing the same result in those other countries (many of whom are less than please with both the US and MS to start with) and making software from the American MS the copyright violator.
On what grounds? It is not illegal to pull your products from a region that isn't profitable.Actually, that would be a criminal act of antitrust abuse. That is, of course, ignoring the fact that they would be violating legal contracts with literally thousands of international corporations who would file suit in the US and elsewhere suing MS into oblivion.
I'm just trying to point out the logical flaw in your position. It is entirely proper for the government to be involved when a transaction is illegal, such as soliciting murder or antitrust bundling. Arguing that they absolutely should not on principal is what exposes you to demonstrations of how absurd that position can be.
And do you seriously expect a foreigner to be well versed in such issues as some trial against an American company?I would expect anyone who feels the need to argue about antitrust issues in a public forum to be educated enough on the topic to at least have heard of some of the major antitrust cases of the last 100 years and Bell Telephone and Standard Oil are the two most common and well known examples I've seen everywhere, even if they do happen to both be based in the US.
I don't even know what point you're trying to make. MS did not invent something, but did popularize it many years ago so we should let them break the law now?
And I certainly hope that this is not your first language if you really are above average intelligence. First, anyone that wants to announce their increased intelligence to the world probably has some issues, so maybe you're not so much familiar with "modesty".Actually this is my first language and I am fluent enough in it to take note of, but not call attention to your numerous grammatical errors. This is, after all, a rather informal forum for writing. As for your statement about, "announce their increased intelligence" I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to convey. I mentioned that people on Slashdot tend to be above average in intelligence, not that my intelligence is increased by... well, whatever it is you think I was saying.
Second, what the hell is decidedness supposed to mean in your post?That is a typo that was meant to read "decides."
If you plan to label someone as a moron you should first do a spell check.A spell check should not catch "decidedness" since it is a proper, if little used word.
I still insist that bundling is not a big deal.Bundling is not a big deal. Bundling with a monopolized product is a big deal. The fact that you still can't seem to understand the significance that those are different things, speaks to your ignorance. If you bothered to read anything about antitrust law you would note that only the latter is illegal. That might be your first clue to try to figure out why it is illegal.
How many people do you know that actually use the build in CD burning functionality in XP? None? Because it sucks. What about Media player? Probably a lot more because it's not a bad product.Actually, those are both the most popular applications in their respective categories, used more than any other. Just because you don't seem to know a lot of people who use them, does not make them less popular.
I'm not saying it's great, but it is usable without much fuss.So imagine you're in business as say, a baker. Now suppose you make really good baked goods at an affordable price and are doing well, but then the electric company starts bundling baked goods with people's electrical service. They raise the cost of electricity a bit, but there still aren't any other good options, so now everyone already has baked goods and don't need yours. Now the baked goods from the electric company aren't great, but they are eatable without much fuss. So you go out of business and consumers end up eating inferior baked goods that cost them more money, even if they can't tell exactly how much.
You honestly don't see a problem with that? What about when they start adding more and more products to said bundle and driving more and more people out of business? Still no problem? What about when all innovation or advancement in those markets slows to a crawl since there are no competitors left for people to move to? Why invest when it doesn't get you any more money? You really can't comprehend how monopolistic bundling can be a bad thing for the economy and people in general?
The problem with the analogy is not in comparing MS to the electric company as both are monopolies and the same rules do apply similarly. The problem is with the nature of the abuse. MS is not being punished for raising prices on their monopolized product. They are being punished for tying their monopolized product to another product in a different market and then charging others to remove that tie.
At the end of the day if you want to insulate yourself from a 3rd party vendor price changes don't go with a 3rd party vendor and develop it all yourself, or go with something from OpenSource. These are other options.And you can bypass the electric company with solar panels or a generator, but it is not cost effective or most people at this time.
Allow me to try to extend the analogy presented to fit with what MS has done. Imagine if the electric company decided to get into the television business and somehow changed the nature of the electricity coming into your house to be a proprietary pattern. This pattern would cause normal televisions to not function, but televisions from the electric company would still work because they could predict the spikes or whatever. Now assume the law caught up with them and told them they had to publish the specs as to when these spikes would occur so other television manufacturers could compete again (after the electric company went from a few percent of the market to more like 50%). So the electric company after years of going through the courts and being fined for not complying says they will publish the pattern, but they want to charge money for it, since it took them a lot of time to come up with. At this point they're haggling over how much they are going to charge other TV makers to get around the problems they intentionally created in order to break the law in the first place.
Now there are obvious practical issues with the analogy above, but it at least presents the spirit of what is happening in the MS antitrust case here. They're haggling over charging for the details of the interface between MS's monopoly(desktop OS) and another product(server OS), not MS's monopoly product itself.
Not really. It is more like telling someone convicted of multiple felonies and who is still in the act of committing that same felony and has never stopped that no, putting the knife away that they've been using to stab people isn't good enough, you actually have to stop repeatedly kicking them as well and yes could you please stop throwing bricks. That's what a lot of people here don't seem to be getting. This isn't an "extra" punishment. It is criminal to tie an existing monopoly to a product in a new market and nonstandard protocols between your monopolized product and the other product that in any way disadvantage competitors are illegal. The EU bends over backwards here and still you have people claiming that they are being anti-american. I'm about convinced at this point that about 1 in 100 people here understand what a monopoly is, what tying is, and what constitutes that tying in this case.
People, in general, do not. Most don't even know who MS is, and of those who do some think of them as the people who may the xbox and a few know they make Windows or Word. People on Slashdot tend to have a lot of anger towards MS, but we're computer people and above average in intelligence. To most people "monopoly abuse that stifles innovation in the OS market" is a bunch of gibberish. To us it means one company has held back the future and kept our cool toys from us and made us work around their shitty intentionally broken designs.
Does this all go back to Microsoft "bundling" a bunch of additional features in the OS? That's anti-competitive? When I purchased my car it came with a sound system that was "bundled" with the purchase.Sigh. Every single article about this contains your post or one like it; you know, the moron who decidedness to make an analogy about monopoly abuse and does not include any monopolies in the example. Can't you go back to MySpace or wherever it is you people come from?
Why is it acceptable for someone to toss out perfectly good parts of a vehicle in favor of something that they want more, but when an OS comes with some perfectly good features it's some kind of big deal to just install and use something else?Because MS has a monopoly on OS's and no one has a monopoly on cars. Try your example again, including a monopoly, like electrical distribution.
These laws are actually almost identical to the ones in the US, and do not differ significantly from most of the rest of the world. What MS is doing is a crime in countries around the globe. If you want to argue that antitrust laws like these are not needed, well that is fine, but it should be backed up with something other than "because." Monopoly abuse undermines capitalism. It breaks the system is such a way that the best, cheapest product no longer is rewarded with money, while a more expensive and inferior product is, simply because of that company's position in a different market. You could go into business and make a product that is both better and cheaper than your competitor and they could still easily drive you out of business and then collect money in that market forever, despite never innovating or improving the state of the art or finding a way to lower prices.
We have plenty of historical examples as to why we have these laws. If you want to go back to renting a wired telephone handset for tens of thousands of dollars over the course of your life, well then you have some really odd preferences. If you want to watch market after market consolidate under the roofs of a a few monopolies until very few are born into all the wealth and we're a feudalist system again, well then I think you're an idiot or a wealthy jerk. We tried it your way and it was unstable as all hell and bad for almost everyone. Why should we go back to it, just because you do not understand the mechanisms or did not bother to read your history lessons?
If you're so ignorant of the history of monopolies that you don't know about Bell Telephone versus the DOJ, why would I value you opinion about antitrust regulation and the need for it? Why don't you answer my other question. If MS offered someone else money to kill you, do you think the government should get involved in regulating that transaction, or since it is between MS and the hired killer should they ignore it?
What's not implemented, specifically?
Well, fine grained ACLs like the one they apply to IE, come to mind. A well defined userspace is easily supported by the kernel, for another, but is still iffy as their current implementation in Vista.
Windows NT 3.1, released in 1993, had full separation of user privileges.
Yeah, that's great, but because it was not the default setup for a normal user account to be created, they were rarely used and thus lots of things did not work when they did. Theoretically, several current Linux distros ship with SELinux, but that does not protect them from having their user data hosed by a trojan because it is not yet applied by default to applications.
Microsoft can't force ISVs to write software that works properly with the security system, but Microsoft has been urging them to do so since the beginning. Microsoft's own software has been pretty good about following those requirements (except for the games department.)
Your opinion on this differs a lot form mine. If MS has been pushing it, why have so many of MS's own applications failed as a single user? You mention games, but there are several functions of MSOffice 2003 (mostly VB) that do not work unless you're an admin, and that is MS's fault. They did far too little and it was obvious they were not serious about it.
Since Windows 2000, the only supported method of installation is the Windows Installer, which indeed supports installation as a limited user for programs that support it (not many, I'm afraid).
Yeah it supports it, but it is practically not easy to do and not something MS encourages through their default user account settings.
Is that because there is precious little malware developed specifically for OSX? If an administrative user were to give consent to installing a piece of malware on OSX, what technical barriers would prevent it from having free reign on the machine that don't exist on Windows?
There are a lot fewer malware programs in circulation and there are some technical hurdles it needs to get through that would not present if a user was logged in a root (which is not even something a normal user could probably figure out how to accomplish since the account is locked out by default. More importantly, however, every OS that is not Windows has something in common. They have to give users what they want. If malware starts compromising machines, they have to adapt their OS to stop it or they lose money. MS is the only company this does not apply to and hence they will probably have serious malware problems for the foreseeable future. There are OS's with less security than Windows and OS's with a lot more security that Windows but all of them have an appropriate level of security to keep their users happy, except Windows.
On Windows, I can try installing anything I want without admin access and not worry about infecting the machine or other user accounts.
Umm, you might want to rethink that assumption. I don't think I've ever known a time when there was not at least one public, unpatched local escalation in Windows. MS has never taken these seriously. I'm hoping when enough Vista users appear that will change, but I don't have a lot of hope.
I don't think you understand the concept of ACLs. A discretionary access control list (which controls who has what access rights to an object) is part of a security descriptor, which controls the access a process has to an object. They're traditionally organized by user and object, not application.
You're the one who seems confused. DACLs are not the only kind of ACL. I was referring to MACLs (Mandatory Access Control Lists). They are widely implemented in security minded *NIX OS's.
Microsoft cannot force developers to follow those requirements-- if they did, people would really scream bloody murder.
MS