Dell keeps growing while other companies are missing the mark.
You do know this was Dell's slowest growth quarter in a long time and that HP made a lot of progress towards catching up, right? I think Dell is at 16.5% and HP at 15% right now, with the rest spread among many other players.
here is a case where the government has decided NOT to add additional regulation, and just hear the hue and cry!
That is an incredibly simplistic view. There are already hundreds of laws restricting this space and stopping it from being a free market. It does not operate as a free market now as evidenced by the pricing of products and is in fact a government enforced monopoly in most locations.
I think most people here would be in favor of removing all those laws and letting the free market operate, but since that isn't going to happen, we should at least have some guarantees that these government enforces monopolies will be using those monopolies to screw us more than once.
Ultimately, if I or you, or ABC Giant Corporation(tm) pays for the infrastructure and owns the equiptment, don't they have the right to charge as they see fit for access?
The problem is you and I did pay for much of the equipment which was then "sold" to the telco for pennies on the dollar. We've spent hundreds of billions of tax dollars laying lines to subsidize these companies. Worse yet, if I were to try to compete with AT&T or Comcast by running my own lines on the government owned, public right of ways, they would arrest me. I think when the situation is already this restricted and that is not going to change, it is ridiculous to try to apply libertarian ideals
If I run a dry-cleaner can't I charge more for same-day service? Isn't reasonable that I might charge a frequent customer less, or I might charge more to clean your sequined tube-top? (sissy).
Was your laundromat subsidized with my tax dollars? Does the government arrest anyone else who tries to build a laundromat in your area? Are you granted special immunity from breaking certain laws in exchange for your impartially cleaning anyone who asks clothing just the same?
More importantly, assuming all of the above are true, that still does not meet the requirements of this analogy. According to the provisions in COPE (as they would apply to an analogy) you still would have been able to do all of the above. What you wouldn't be able to do is look through the wedding announcements in the paper and figure out who actually needed their clothes done in the usual 2 weeks and then threaten to hold onto them for 6 weeks unless they paid double. Even that does not really fit. The ISPs aren't even charging their customers. This would be more like threatening to delay the cleaning of clothes at the only laundromat the government allows in town, unless the bride and groom paid up to have guests and caterers appropriately dressed.
... allow firms to use the regulatory system to hobble competitors.
Hobble competitors? For 90% of the US there are no competitors because it is forbidden by law. I think it is a little late to worry about that.
...it would encourage more FCC regulation of the Internet and broadband markets in general.
Do tell. How would it do that? They have limited manpower. If they are enforcing this, how does it encourage them to make more regulations to enforce?
Is it just me, or are a lot of people asking the government to regulate our businesses?
Its just you. A lot of us are asking the government to make sure their monopolies play fairly if they are going to enforce monopolies in the first place. It was a deal. Networks got money, free gear, immunity from prosecution for dozens of laws, and a government enforced monopoly in exchange for one thing, impartially carrying packets. They can discriminate between different types of packets and packets sent at different times, and packets from different locations. All they had to do was not discriminate based upon who was sending the packet. It was the one and only thing they promised in return and now the FCC has removed that and you don't think it is a good idea to force the FCC to hold them to their half of the deal. Gee, that's just brilliant.
I was hoping the FSF would finally be the one to force the DRM problem into the consciousness of "normal america" but it's clear that no, the FSF still has no idea how people's minds work. I guess we can write this protest campaign off as ineffectual from here on out, and the best we can hope for is that it will manage to avoid hurting the digital freedom cause.
I'm a bit torn on this issue. I think they did choose a good target for publicizing DRM. Everyone knows what an iPod is and anyone can understand "you can't move you music to a competing player." DVDs are more common, but most don't implement any of them and "you can't skip the commercials" is less likely to anger the masses. The problem is, unless they bring MS's WMD format into it hard and right away all they will do is drive people to the competing WMD format which is worse and is promoted by an exploitive monopoly with some really savvy marketers (see plays-for-sure). This campaign could blow up in their faces. People will think, "well MS doesn't even have a player so we'll go with that." By targeting Apple exclusively I think they are making a huge mistake.
I have the luxury of using an Intel centrino laptop and an AMD powered laptop side by side and I gotta say that If intel is doing so much better how come I don't see it.
There are dozens of good chip comparisons out there. I'd say it depends upon which two chips you have and what the other specifications are. Intel leapfrogged AMD at the beginning of the year when the released the core duo chips. Centrino is a marketing term for a pairing of chips, motherboards and other miscellany. If your laptop says "Centrino" instead of "Centrino Duo" then your laptop likely precedes the switch, or is one of the low end models OEMs are still trying to get rid of.
I am not a drone, I just won't be going back without some serious consideration.
You said you always went with Intel and then switched and made comments about how you'd never go back to Intel. That says to me, you aren't evaluating chips, you're just blindly going with a brand.
Intel could give the damned things away and I'll still buy AMD... I had been a faithful Intel drone for years and turned my brain off to everybody saying good things about AMD
So you used to be an Intel drone and now you're an AMD drone? Have you ever considered not turning your brain off or being any kind of drone? You could actually... you know... evaluate the choices and pick the best product for what you need to do at any given time?
Right now I see Intel winning for most of the laptop space. They are faster, using less power, per dollar than AMDs. For desktops, it is about even. You really need to find your price point and see what fits in it. For servers, AMD seems to be winning on price. Of course all of this changes every month as new products are released and prices change. For reliability, it is a draw as well.
I guess I just don't understand why people get so fanatic about supporting some particular company. If they make the best fit for what you want, use it. If they don't, don't.
I'm not questioning the legitimacy of Adobes possible lawsuit, but I'm saying that while Adobe is considering suing MS for having PDF support in Office 2007, they have a reason for not wanting to use Adobes PDF format and rather use their own...
Actually, you're still wrong. By implementing both PDF and XPS they can move people to their toolset and away from Adobe's before they have the format switch bump in the road. Adobe is making sure that bump is right away and thus making it harder for people to transition slowly.
I fail to see how MS allowing support for their own format in their software package is a violation of the law. By following your logic and interpritation[sic] of the law, basicly[sic] anybody could make a calculator for Windows, try to sell it and then file a lawsuit against MS for incorporating a calculator in Windows by default as a part of the price for the OS and thereby pushing their own software.
Have you ever purchased a calculator application, or downloaded one that was ad supported or while looking at ads on the page? If so, did it pre-date Windows inclusion of a calculator? If so, then yes that company can take MS to court and MS will probably lose.
The thing about antitrust law is markets not products. There is an existing market for PDF creation tools, thus if MS enters that market (either with PDF or XPS) they must not, in any way, gain an advantage from the fact that they have a monopoly on Windows. If they do, they are breaking the law. This includes a specific prohibition on tying products to one another (like with shared, proprietary file formats they both use but that others cannot freely use) and in particular they are prohibited from the form of tying called "bundling" where products are put in the same package and sold together for one price.
While I'm no expert in US law...
That is an understatement. I'm no expert either, but I've at least read the US antitrust laws and some expert summations of them. It is not all that complex. If I create a calculator program for Windows, but MS already has an existing one, they're not entering into the market, I'm trying to create one. That is not the case for portable document formats, for which there is an existing, healthy market. If you want to argue this stuff, at least educate yourself.
I'm not sure why it is and I doubt anyone else does either. Most of the research has been done for practical reasons. What color do restaurants want to paint? I remember orange, yellow, and red were all winners, while blue and to a lesser extend purple were not. Given the same food, with different, tasteless dyes people generally preferred to the taste of and to eat more food if it was orange and disliked blue. Ever notice that hospitals in the US tend to use a lot of green and hotels a lot of beige? Green hides blood almost as well as red, but does not cause raised blood pressure or stress. Beige tends to calm people, sometimes even making them sleepy.
If you're interested, there are numerous books on the psychology of color. Most of the research you'll find tends to be most applicable to America, with some surprisingly different results for the same sort of tests in Europe and Asia.
Seriously, aren't bright reds and oranges supposed to make you a little nuts if you're surrounded by them too much?
Not really. Colors have different effects depending upon the culture. For example, Americans tend to associate orange with hunger, but in the far East it is considered soothing. Some colors do have cross-cultural implications, like splatters of red increasing blood pressure and stress, but those are usually less prominent. Offering a variety of colors provides options for different regions.
I see two aspects to this report. First, GoDaddy moved a metric buttload of parked domains. Okay, who really cares. Second, even without this, IIS is gaining slight market share, despite the fact that their product is pretty badly overmatched and overpriced compared to Apache. Partly, this may be regular old marketing/sales stuff. Some people will pay ten times as much for a lesser product if the sales guys take them to strip clubs for a week, introduce them to hookers, and leave a pile of blow on the table. It's business. It happens. Some of it, though, I suspect is simply a matter of keeping the same tools in use everywhere. "We need Exchange for Windows clients so we have a Windows based server already so we might as well use IIS for our Web site. Then we can use the same management tools." And, "we already have a huge number of Windows workstations and they use ActiveX for a lot of crap, so we might as well use IIS to host in house Web apps."
These last two cases I attribute directly to MS abuse of their monopoly and the court's inability to deal with them. The US courts said, "yeah they failed to comply and other vendors still can't correctly implement Exchange etc., so we'll do nothing but extend how long we monitor them doing nothing. What do you expect, we're crooks and they gave us millions in campaign contributions?" The EU courts have held firm on the issue. They're fining them millions a day while they still fail to comply. Unfortunately, they're making millions a day on these server sales and the EU still hasn't collected a penny. Eventually, MS will get the money to the right people and suddenly all those problems will go away.
Governments today that are representative democracies, can't deal with large corporations. They have too much money and politicians go into the field because they want money and power. Maybe it is time we moved to a direct democracy. I don't know that it would be better, but it could hardly do worse. Or maybe, we need to motivate politicians. Strip them of all worldly possessions when they are elected and take a poll of how happy the people are. Return their possessions and funds to them when they leave office proportionally to how happy the people are when they are done. "Sorry Bob, but while you were a millionaire when you became president, the people are less happy now, so you're down to 20K and a 1 bedroom apartment. Good luck in the private sector." Also, we'd need to viciously enforce laws about kickbacks from industry that was not paid till after they left office, although that is a very difficult proposition. Still, it might be better than the mess of corruption we have now.
Not really...after all, these firms have absolutely no interest in eliminating the problem, but only in treating the symptoms.
So look who is motivated to fix the problem. MS isn't, they aren't losing market share and they've introduced their own anti-virus to milk the situation. So who is? Well alternate OS vendors are (as you mentioned), since they can use it as a differentiator, but most of them don't really have a malware problem so they haven't put much effort into a better solution. Big, enterprise businesses are and people who sell them solutions that do multiple tasks, like network management, where malware is a small piece of the puzzle. Some of the solutions to come out of that space are surprisingly effective. "Oh, gee another random worm outbreak. Well, lets just stop that from spreading or re-entering the network using our routers to filter it. Now I'll send this list of infected hosts to operations along with a virus signature and they can clean them when someone writes an AV signature and a tool to remove this one."
Who else is motivated? Big network operators are. Worms clog pipes and launch DDoS attacks. That is fine, since they can charge for the bandwidth, but customers complain about the network congestion and a lot of people are willing to pay extra for "cleaned" pipes. Some of the solutions in that space are likewise effective; the same thing on a larger scale. At least one of the tools ups the ante by letting operators swap signatures using a centralized database.
Who else is motivated? Open source projects, like Clam AV and the like. If corporations donated a quarter of what they spend on proprietary solutions to these guys, they'd save a fortune and end up with better solutions. They could emulate the techniques employed by the two examples above and apply them on a smaller scale.
It is a pity most corporate purchasing agents did not have a course on critical thinking in high school.
So my question is, do you get paid to astroturf, or do you just read other astroturf and parrot it, while never bothering to read any related articles?
After Adobe threatened MS with a lawsuit for wanting to allow PDF writing for free in Office 2007 i can see why they'd rather use their own format.
Did you even read the article whose inaccurate summary you're linking to? It starts out, "Microsoft Corp. said it expected Adobe Systems Inc. to file an antitrust suit..." Making either PDF or XPS built into Windows is a gross violation of the law. Including them in MS Office (which is tied to Windows) is a violation of the law. Even just providing all Windows documentation XPS and not PDF is a violation of the law. So MS announces they are blatantly going to break the law and expect to be sued.
Essentially, they weren't pushing their own format, they were going to provide PDF support as well as the XPS format...
So they were going to break the law twice instead of once, or maybe you're not understanding what part of this Adobe is objecting to. I'll give you a hint, it's the part that is illegal.
...but Adobe it seems will be suing because they're not charging for the ability to convert to PDF format.
No, they're suing because their competitor is illegally leveraging a monopoly to take over a market. Charging for PDF generation (instead of rolling the cost into Windows like they are illegally doing now) would be one way to mediate the effects on the market of MS breaking the law. You seem to think your choices are:
make PDFs for free with Windows.
Be charged for the tools to make PDFs in Windows
In reality your choices are:
Optionally, pay for the ability to make PDFs in Windows, if you want to do that, by purchasing a tool from Adobe, MS, or whoever you want.
Pay for the ability to make PDFs in Windows when you buy Windows, whether or not you want it and if you want a tool from Adobe or someone else pay again.
The same thing goes for XPS, except there is no guarantee in the future there will be any other tools available. I wonder why Adobe would choose to take them to court for their illegal behavior. Those jerks.
"...more secure alternatives like *nix and MacOS, which have a chance of actually fixing the underlying problem."
How so? When replying, please consider that I'm Joe Sixpack, armed with the root password, just enough smarts to install stuff and not enough smarts to not install bad stuff.
Well, both of those OS's have some architectural advantages, like not needing to run network services for local actions, that make automated compromises less common. They both tend to be more responsive to vulnerabilities thus further reducing risks. They are motivated to fix the problems as developers are also users and no one has a monopoly to ensure income.
Mostly, it is this last aspect. Right now there are security features on certain linux distributions that if properly integrated into the OS and UI would make both automated attacks and trojans a whole lot harder to manage. They have not been integrated into mainstream distributions because, there is no real demand. Linux does not really have a malware problem because of the architectural choices, people who make up the user base, and the size of the user base. If, however, that were to change, I have no doubt developers would respond and implement them. Microsoft has not, because they just don't really care that much and have no motivation to do so.
So, since you appear to be Microsoft's official spokesman, what does this new format do that PDF can't? Why would I want to choose it over PDF?
Choose it? Maybe you're not familiar with how MS does business. User choice is not something they can agree with. You'll pay for it, because it is bundled into Windows. Eventually you'll buy a computer and guess what, Windows will ship with it and XPS with Windows. The price will be all rolled together so you won't even notice you're paying for it. After that, who cares what it does? Well, I suppose it needs to do something to hurt MS's competitors. What it will do is do a "good enough" job at what PDF does, but without letting certain people in on the party. It will be standard "enough" that 95% of people will be able to view them, just so long as you aren't running Linux or OpenOffice and even then you'll probably be able to view them sort of via a reverse engineered viewer.
Chose it, heh, that is a good one. Monopolies who are above the law don't work that way though. What are you going to do about it... go the the Justice Department? MS bought them years ago. You'll pay for it whether you choose it or not.
HTML is open in this sense, but is also open in the sense that it is controlled by a standards body (the w3c) and anyone can propose additions to the spec...
I think I'd chalk that up to how "standard" it is rather than how open, but that is just semantics. Good point.
Oh, and.txt isn't a standard at all. It is a huge collection of standards.
Okay, I agree. Bad example. It's hard come up with a good example everyone will recognize.
The RADIUS and USB issues are not really a big deal for a beta release. This sort of thing should be expected at this stage. Unless these are in the final release, there is not a lot of point mentioning them, other than reporting them as bugs.
The Aero Glass interface isn't very responsive. Since Windows 95, the mouse pointer in Windows has never been afflicted by pauses when moving the pointer.
Umm, yes they have. One of the main reasons graphic artists tend to use the MacOS is that the mouse input and cursor display is prioritized above pretty much everything else. Using both Win2K and Windows XP I've experienced times, during heavy load, when the mouse cursor would disappear or the position would fail to update. If I'm painting a stroke on the screen, this is completely unacceptable and it certainly does happen.
Vista Beta 2 is a resource hog... I know any unused RAM is wasted RAM but when a basic Windows hogs that much, it shows that power users will easily have to push 4gigs of RAM if they intend to run Photoshop or a few instances of Office applications.
I'm not sure I agree. A better way to find this out is to actually run photoshop and Office and see how it performs. You can't judge this based upon how much RAM it is using while idle. The disk space, is a valid issue, although pretty minor given disk sizes even today, let alone going forward.
The other annoyance is the new non-admin user model. It is completely broken and illogical... The end result will either be people disabling the new protection scheme or learning to click without reading-both scenarios are disastrous and will render this protection useless.
From what I've seen, I agree. Sometimes it is better not to implement a feature or to provide an easy and slow transition than it is to implement something so broken that it causes customers to suffer, confusion, and creates a "common wisdom" that it should be disabled, which may persist long after the feature is working.
Your user privilege model is a bit complex for my taste. It also seem impractical for MS to implement, given their ponderously slow development. Rather, I think they should keep the model they have, but throw all "old" programs that are not designed for Vista into a VM, with a good set of default restrictions and warnings. This could provide even better security than the average Linux install as it could alert on programs accessing your personal files outside the VM, like your address book, IM buddies, etc. and thus detect a lot of common malware activity. Coupled with this, they should fix the UI regarding privileges to follow Apple's HIG, which would take care of 80% of their horrible and counterproductive UI. All of this is doable, just by shuffling around their existing technologies (the VM stuff they have for servers) and redesigning the UI and interaction. They won't, or course. The security people apparently don't believe UI is a real component and even their UI people seem to break basic rules of the profession. Still, it would be nice and is practical.
Technically though it's their website and they can put whatever lame duck format on their they want.
Not really. They are a monopoly. If they release a new product like a XPS generation tool, they are forbidden from leveraging their existing monopolies in order to promote it. That means no bundling, it can't be built in. It also means no tying. Requiring people to get your new PDF competitor in order to use Windows (the monopoly) and not providing the same benefit to someone using PDF is a form of tying and is illegal in and of itself.
The XPS format will either get opened up or nobody but MSFT websites will use it.
Bullshit. Various governments will enforce their antitrust laws and stop MS from bundling it or XPS will take over huge chunks of the market from Adobe, simply because it is bundled into Windows. That is the whole point of leveraging a monopoly. Just because your product is inferior because the license is not truly open and there is no guarantee it won't lock you in or even be readable in 10 years does not mean the market will not choose the inferior product. Competition is bypassed by bundling. It is already installed and the development paid for when you buy Windows. Even if you want to use PDF for everything, you had to buy Windows to interoperate with clients and when you did, you paid for the bundled XPS generation tools. Adobe can't compete with that.
What you should be questioning is why XPS exists at all.
There is no mystery. MS wants one more way to lock in users. They want to kill OpenOffice which is threatening MS Office. They want to lessen Adobe's influence. XPS will do all of these things. In 5 years, unless the governments intervene effectively, most people will be using XPS, OpenOffice will be using a similar, reverse engineered version that is not 100% compatible, OpenOffice will thus not have gained much of the market, and Adobe will be making less money and be more willing to do what MS wants, lest they illegally take over another of Adobe's markets.
That explains why Adobe doesn't fancy the idea of Microsoft including PDF exporting functionality into Office 12!
So Microsoft reported that they think Adobe might sue them for breaking an antitrust law and possibly a contract they signed, and you think this is proof as to whether or not PDF is an open format? Guess what, Microsoft has already been sue for bundling software that reads HTML. I take it you think HTML is no longer an open format either?
As for the openness of the XPS...
It is irrelevant to whether or not including it is a violation of anti-trust law. XPS has no released license only an outline of a plan for the license. Will this license be "open" like their OpenXML format, which is to say full of traps like the revocation of the license at any time, without warning, if MS releases a new format and calls it OpenXML? MS does not release open formats. They just have too many lawyers there. They can't get it done.They have proven time and time again they always have hidden traps. Why would we assume this one, with no information given, will be any different?
All of these organizations are pro-control anti-consumer and we all should realize that immediately. No government mandate on companies is ever good for consumers because it decreases the amount of competition in a market and it raises prices. You can't prove otherwise.
I see so you think consumer protection laws are all useless. For example, false advertising laws? For example, food safety regulations?
Or is it maybe that some do more good than harm and it is just a scale of where a particular law falls on that scale? There has been a long tradition of laws that prevent a consumer from signing away all their rights and these laws are especially important when a monopoly or emergency is involved. Without them, emergency rooms would force you to sign the next 10 years of your life away to work as a slave before treating you.
Higher prices with less competition usually mean lower quality products and even lower quality research for new products.
Sometimes consumer protection laws increase competition or lower prices, especially when a monopoly is involved. Often they enforce a minimum, safe, level of product quality. Innovative research is rarely driven primarily by money. Usually, people do new, cool things because they can and they then capitalize upon those that seem profitable.
If they had to follow these idiotic laws in the beginning, the consumer would be protected, surely: protected from ever seeing great devices like the iPod and whatever the next competitor will release.
Maybe, but the market does provide. If the government says no beef with more than 10% rat feces, some company will produce beef without as much rat feces, even if it costs more. Companies will produce software and take responsibility for what it does. Half of the provisions in Apple or any other software company's license are unenforceable, even in the US. They just put them in there to give their lawyers more ammo.
The only real question I have, is are the laws being applied equitably or is someone on a vendetta here. I mean have they read the license for Windows?
...can someone explain why Apple selling music that only works on their devices (unless of course you consider those crappy Motorola ROKR and SLVR phones) is bad, but Sony selling games that only play on the PlayStation or Microsoft selling software that only runs on Windows is OK.
This particular issue is about the terms of use for the software, not the DRM on the music. Basically, the legalese says they won't certify it won't break other things on your computer, which is a violation on the law there. As to why that law has not been applied to the thousands of other programs/software sold (like Windows), I suspect it is because no one was motivated to go after them.
As for the legal difference between DRM and a natural incompatibility, there are two factors. One, Apple intentionally prevents their content from running on other systems. Two, Apple is approaching monopoly status for portable music players, so antitrust law may come into play.
I don't give a shit about the "universe", the "universe" is not a living, thinking entity that monitors my actions.
This is relevant how?
All of the monetary and social systems we have are constructs that we have agreed (or maybe not) upon.
True, but it doesn't make them natural rights and doesn't imply that any given construct is a good or bad thing and is thus irrelevant to this discussion.
So, if you want to be ruled by natural law alone go live in a cave by yourself.
This is an example of the logical fallacy, "false dichotomy" and implies that these are the only two (extreme) options. The truth is, most of our constructs are built upon the concepts of natural rights. Free speech is a natural right. The right to freely exchange goods with others is a natural right. Both of these are limited by laws for a common good, but if those laws do more harm than good then there is no ethical justification for them. Anything else argues that a law is always good, and that is absurd and I'm sure you can think of an example to disprove it.
As for the "founding" fathers crap, I am not American so I don't care.
Ahh, but the founding fathers are not the only one to recognize natural human rights as different from imposed rules. Some countries do not recognize freedom of speech/expression (which copyright restricts) as a natural right. But since this is an ethical discussion, do you recognize freedom of speech/expression as a natural right?
Even if I was I highly doubt they would have been okay with a situation where an individual could not choose to control the fruits of their labour regardless of their being physical or something more abstract like a song.
Now picture of a world built upon these principals. Newton came up with most newtonian physics. Should his descendants now be living on royalties paid in perpetuity by everyone who applies newtonian physics? How about the Bible? Shall we pull it from the shelves and confiscate all copies until the descendants of the original authors can be found and compensated for each copy? Shall we remove the whole of the public domain and restrict each and every idea forever, granting it to the first person to write it down and get it stamped? And do you think this will help or hinder humanity as a whole?
I really don't believe they would have promoted the socialist/communist ideal of IP you are putting forth.
There is plenty of documentation about what they thought. They wrote copyright law with restriction on the duration and purpose specifically in an attempt to prevent duplicating the situation in much of Europe. That situation was, the great publishing houses had a cartel that controlled distribution and the creators of works were compensated very little if at all, while this cartel reaped all the profits and at the same time censored from widespread distribution any ideas they disagreed with. Does that sound at all familiar?
Whell[sic], when the RIAA slaps you with a megafine, please feel free to proceed to make this argument all the way to the SCOTUS.
Obviously you never bothered to read any of their copyright decisions. The supreme court says they are powerless to make any judgement as to the constitutionality of copyright law, since the constitutions is prescriptive on this matter. So long as Congress claims their intent is to promote science and useful arts, even when it can conclusively be shown that is not the result, the Supremes are helpless. It is not their place to judge that congress is being malicious instead of incompetent.
The proper check for this is the US populace but because most of them are ignorant and because the issue is slightly complicated and because the people have been hearing a lot of propaganda for years about copyright being a natural right, the laws stand. It is a failure of democracy in the US as pointed out by numerous constitutional scholars and judges. In fact it is also a good indicator of the state of the government. When the founding father's miss-phrase something what happens? Does the current administration fix it or exploit it as a weakness? I think we all know the answer and are just lucky our current crop of politicians did not write the constitution.
I've spent more time in that room listening to them and more time reading their decisions than you have.
And yet you're still completely ignorant about the topic and show not only an unwillingness to learn but an arrogant disrespect for someone who has bothered to do so. Here's an idea, you could do your research before you draw your conclusion. But concepts like logical reasoning and critical thinking seem a bit beyond you.
Besides, this discussion isn't about laws, it's about morality. You know, stealing is bad, etc.
Claiming some level of knowledge about constitutional law and then demonstrating your abject lack of understanding by confusing violating a natural right (stealing) with violating an artificial government granted right that is not serving its purpose and exists only because a loophole (copyright infringement) does nothing to back up the credibility of your opinions. Do you even know what basic human rights the US acknowledges? I'll give you a hint. Freedom of speech is one of them, which is restricted by copyright law for a specific purpose. If that law no longer serves to uphold that purpose and, in fact does the opposite, what "moral" justification is their for obeying it?
P.S. if you want to talk about constitutional law you better learn the difference between "moral" and "ethical." Only one applies.
So, to bring this all home, if Google launches a web-based OS and we define the market as "OSs" then MS no longer has a monopoloy on the OS market because no Google has a competing OS. It's a contradiction in terms to say that MS and Google both have monopolies in the same market.
I never claimed two companies could have a monopoly in the same market. What you seem to be missing, however, is that the main reason monopolies are regulated in the first place is because you can use a monopoly in one market to affect a second market where you do not have a monopoly. Thus, if Google and MS each have a monopoly in a market, they can both "compete" in the word processor space, by illegally leveraging their existing monopoly. Both of them bypassing the free market does not necessarily equate to giving the same advantages as a free market. It could be that a consumer is just forced to pay for two word processors they don't want, possibly on top of the cost of yet a third word processor they do want.
Now I don't believe Google has any monopoly right now, and even if they did, there is nothing to say they would abuse it... so we needn't worry about this for a while.
Final statement. Monopoly doesn't necessarily mean that there's just 1 company. There are several hundred linux distros, there's unix, there's the BSDs, and there's Mac (just to name the major players). But if MS is so disproprotionately large relative to these minor players you still have (again, this is arguable) a monopoly.
Even that is not the case. The relative proportion of a market dominated by one product is defined by the money changing hands in that market. Much of the development of Linux is paid for by companies that use it to sell other products. For example, IBM pays for a lot of Linux development which they pay for with hardware and services sales. Apple spends a lot of money developing OS X which they primarily pay for with hardware sales they bundle the OS with. Neither of those count as part of the market (except the direct OS sales from each company). I know this does not contradict your last statement, per se, but it did need clarification.
I kinda stopped reading right there. I was initially looking at the shape of the post and thinking, hmm, maybe this guy is interested in a serious discussion. Then I saw that line, chuckled, and stopped.
I take it you're clueless about the law and haven't bothered to read the supreme court rulings on copyright term extensions? Or is it just that you think the supreme court justices aren't qualified to make this determination? Or is it that you're an idiot and don't know what the constitution is, have no ability to actually address a logical argument, and instead decided to launch an ad hominem attack? Why do I even waste my time on you morons
When you look at the distribution of wealth (or knowledge, or access, or whatever), you find that since the internet these gaps have grown bigger...
For wealth this is certainly true in the US. I'm not sure that is the case for knowledge in general, or "access" or anything else.
...the truth is out of the billions of sites online, the top thousand sites get 99.99% of the traffic.
I don't believe you. Please provide support for this assertion. The numbers I've seen put the top 1000 sites as closer to 70% of HTTP and HTTPS traffic, with the rest distributed across many sites.
How's the democracy? How's that "power to the people"?
I'm not sure what you mean by these statements. If 99.999% of all people think eating babies is wrong. Does that mean democracy has failed in some way? I'd say it has failed when it a significant number of people are living in poor conditions or being denied their basic, human rights.
The internet should probably be considered a public utility in the future and as such all speech should be free on it and all people should be able to have a voice. That does not mean there is a problem if most of those voices are ignored out of indifference.
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Dell keeps growing while other companies are missing the mark.
You do know this was Dell's slowest growth quarter in a long time and that HP made a lot of progress towards catching up, right? I think Dell is at 16.5% and HP at 15% right now, with the rest spread among many other players.
here is a case where the government has decided NOT to add additional regulation, and just hear the hue and cry!
That is an incredibly simplistic view. There are already hundreds of laws restricting this space and stopping it from being a free market. It does not operate as a free market now as evidenced by the pricing of products and is in fact a government enforced monopoly in most locations.
I think most people here would be in favor of removing all those laws and letting the free market operate, but since that isn't going to happen, we should at least have some guarantees that these government enforces monopolies will be using those monopolies to screw us more than once.
Ultimately, if I or you, or ABC Giant Corporation(tm) pays for the infrastructure and owns the equiptment, don't they have the right to charge as they see fit for access?
The problem is you and I did pay for much of the equipment which was then "sold" to the telco for pennies on the dollar. We've spent hundreds of billions of tax dollars laying lines to subsidize these companies. Worse yet, if I were to try to compete with AT&T or Comcast by running my own lines on the government owned, public right of ways, they would arrest me. I think when the situation is already this restricted and that is not going to change, it is ridiculous to try to apply libertarian ideals
If I run a dry-cleaner can't I charge more for same-day service? Isn't reasonable that I might charge a frequent customer less, or I might charge more to clean your sequined tube-top? (sissy).
Was your laundromat subsidized with my tax dollars? Does the government arrest anyone else who tries to build a laundromat in your area? Are you granted special immunity from breaking certain laws in exchange for your impartially cleaning anyone who asks clothing just the same?
More importantly, assuming all of the above are true, that still does not meet the requirements of this analogy. According to the provisions in COPE (as they would apply to an analogy) you still would have been able to do all of the above. What you wouldn't be able to do is look through the wedding announcements in the paper and figure out who actually needed their clothes done in the usual 2 weeks and then threaten to hold onto them for 6 weeks unless they paid double. Even that does not really fit. The ISPs aren't even charging their customers. This would be more like threatening to delay the cleaning of clothes at the only laundromat the government allows in town, unless the bride and groom paid up to have guests and caterers appropriately dressed.
Hobble competitors? For 90% of the US there are no competitors because it is forbidden by law. I think it is a little late to worry about that.
Do tell. How would it do that? They have limited manpower. If they are enforcing this, how does it encourage them to make more regulations to enforce?
Is it just me, or are a lot of people asking the government to regulate our businesses?
Its just you. A lot of us are asking the government to make sure their monopolies play fairly if they are going to enforce monopolies in the first place. It was a deal. Networks got money, free gear, immunity from prosecution for dozens of laws, and a government enforced monopoly in exchange for one thing, impartially carrying packets. They can discriminate between different types of packets and packets sent at different times, and packets from different locations. All they had to do was not discriminate based upon who was sending the packet. It was the one and only thing they promised in return and now the FCC has removed that and you don't think it is a good idea to force the FCC to hold them to their half of the deal. Gee, that's just brilliant.
Do you
I was hoping the FSF would finally be the one to force the DRM problem into the consciousness of "normal america" but it's clear that no, the FSF still has no idea how people's minds work. I guess we can write this protest campaign off as ineffectual from here on out, and the best we can hope for is that it will manage to avoid hurting the digital freedom cause.
I'm a bit torn on this issue. I think they did choose a good target for publicizing DRM. Everyone knows what an iPod is and anyone can understand "you can't move you music to a competing player." DVDs are more common, but most don't implement any of them and "you can't skip the commercials" is less likely to anger the masses. The problem is, unless they bring MS's WMD format into it hard and right away all they will do is drive people to the competing WMD format which is worse and is promoted by an exploitive monopoly with some really savvy marketers (see plays-for-sure). This campaign could blow up in their faces. People will think, "well MS doesn't even have a player so we'll go with that." By targeting Apple exclusively I think they are making a huge mistake.
I have the luxury of using an Intel centrino laptop and an AMD powered laptop side by side and I gotta say that If intel is doing so much better how come I don't see it.
There are dozens of good chip comparisons out there. I'd say it depends upon which two chips you have and what the other specifications are. Intel leapfrogged AMD at the beginning of the year when the released the core duo chips. Centrino is a marketing term for a pairing of chips, motherboards and other miscellany. If your laptop says "Centrino" instead of "Centrino Duo" then your laptop likely precedes the switch, or is one of the low end models OEMs are still trying to get rid of.
I am not a drone, I just won't be going back without some serious consideration.
You said you always went with Intel and then switched and made comments about how you'd never go back to Intel. That says to me, you aren't evaluating chips, you're just blindly going with a brand.
Intel could give the damned things away and I'll still buy AMD... I had been a faithful Intel drone for years and turned my brain off to everybody saying good things about AMD
So you used to be an Intel drone and now you're an AMD drone? Have you ever considered not turning your brain off or being any kind of drone? You could actually... you know... evaluate the choices and pick the best product for what you need to do at any given time?
Right now I see Intel winning for most of the laptop space. They are faster, using less power, per dollar than AMDs. For desktops, it is about even. You really need to find your price point and see what fits in it. For servers, AMD seems to be winning on price. Of course all of this changes every month as new products are released and prices change. For reliability, it is a draw as well.
I guess I just don't understand why people get so fanatic about supporting some particular company. If they make the best fit for what you want, use it. If they don't, don't.
I'm not questioning the legitimacy of Adobes possible lawsuit, but I'm saying that while Adobe is considering suing MS for having PDF support in Office 2007, they have a reason for not wanting to use Adobes PDF format and rather use their own...
Actually, you're still wrong. By implementing both PDF and XPS they can move people to their toolset and away from Adobe's before they have the format switch bump in the road. Adobe is making sure that bump is right away and thus making it harder for people to transition slowly.
I fail to see how MS allowing support for their own format in their software package is a violation of the law. By following your logic and interpritation[sic] of the law, basicly[sic] anybody could make a calculator for Windows, try to sell it and then file a lawsuit against MS for incorporating a calculator in Windows by default as a part of the price for the OS and thereby pushing their own software.
Have you ever purchased a calculator application, or downloaded one that was ad supported or while looking at ads on the page? If so, did it pre-date Windows inclusion of a calculator? If so, then yes that company can take MS to court and MS will probably lose.
The thing about antitrust law is markets not products. There is an existing market for PDF creation tools, thus if MS enters that market (either with PDF or XPS) they must not, in any way, gain an advantage from the fact that they have a monopoly on Windows. If they do, they are breaking the law. This includes a specific prohibition on tying products to one another (like with shared, proprietary file formats they both use but that others cannot freely use) and in particular they are prohibited from the form of tying called "bundling" where products are put in the same package and sold together for one price.
While I'm no expert in US law...
That is an understatement. I'm no expert either, but I've at least read the US antitrust laws and some expert summations of them. It is not all that complex. If I create a calculator program for Windows, but MS already has an existing one, they're not entering into the market, I'm trying to create one. That is not the case for portable document formats, for which there is an existing, healthy market. If you want to argue this stuff, at least educate yourself.
I'm curious as to why. Care to explain?
I'm not sure why it is and I doubt anyone else does either. Most of the research has been done for practical reasons. What color do restaurants want to paint? I remember orange, yellow, and red were all winners, while blue and to a lesser extend purple were not. Given the same food, with different, tasteless dyes people generally preferred to the taste of and to eat more food if it was orange and disliked blue. Ever notice that hospitals in the US tend to use a lot of green and hotels a lot of beige? Green hides blood almost as well as red, but does not cause raised blood pressure or stress. Beige tends to calm people, sometimes even making them sleepy.
If you're interested, there are numerous books on the psychology of color. Most of the research you'll find tends to be most applicable to America, with some surprisingly different results for the same sort of tests in Europe and Asia.
Seriously, aren't bright reds and oranges supposed to make you a little nuts if you're surrounded by them too much?
Not really. Colors have different effects depending upon the culture. For example, Americans tend to associate orange with hunger, but in the far East it is considered soothing. Some colors do have cross-cultural implications, like splatters of red increasing blood pressure and stress, but those are usually less prominent. Offering a variety of colors provides options for different regions.
I see two aspects to this report. First, GoDaddy moved a metric buttload of parked domains. Okay, who really cares. Second, even without this, IIS is gaining slight market share, despite the fact that their product is pretty badly overmatched and overpriced compared to Apache. Partly, this may be regular old marketing/sales stuff. Some people will pay ten times as much for a lesser product if the sales guys take them to strip clubs for a week, introduce them to hookers, and leave a pile of blow on the table. It's business. It happens. Some of it, though, I suspect is simply a matter of keeping the same tools in use everywhere. "We need Exchange for Windows clients so we have a Windows based server already so we might as well use IIS for our Web site. Then we can use the same management tools." And, "we already have a huge number of Windows workstations and they use ActiveX for a lot of crap, so we might as well use IIS to host in house Web apps."
These last two cases I attribute directly to MS abuse of their monopoly and the court's inability to deal with them. The US courts said, "yeah they failed to comply and other vendors still can't correctly implement Exchange etc., so we'll do nothing but extend how long we monitor them doing nothing. What do you expect, we're crooks and they gave us millions in campaign contributions?" The EU courts have held firm on the issue. They're fining them millions a day while they still fail to comply. Unfortunately, they're making millions a day on these server sales and the EU still hasn't collected a penny. Eventually, MS will get the money to the right people and suddenly all those problems will go away.
Governments today that are representative democracies, can't deal with large corporations. They have too much money and politicians go into the field because they want money and power. Maybe it is time we moved to a direct democracy. I don't know that it would be better, but it could hardly do worse. Or maybe, we need to motivate politicians. Strip them of all worldly possessions when they are elected and take a poll of how happy the people are. Return their possessions and funds to them when they leave office proportionally to how happy the people are when they are done. "Sorry Bob, but while you were a millionaire when you became president, the people are less happy now, so you're down to 20K and a 1 bedroom apartment. Good luck in the private sector." Also, we'd need to viciously enforce laws about kickbacks from industry that was not paid till after they left office, although that is a very difficult proposition. Still, it might be better than the mess of corruption we have now.
Not really...after all, these firms have absolutely no interest in eliminating the problem, but only in treating the symptoms.
So look who is motivated to fix the problem. MS isn't, they aren't losing market share and they've introduced their own anti-virus to milk the situation. So who is? Well alternate OS vendors are (as you mentioned), since they can use it as a differentiator, but most of them don't really have a malware problem so they haven't put much effort into a better solution. Big, enterprise businesses are and people who sell them solutions that do multiple tasks, like network management, where malware is a small piece of the puzzle. Some of the solutions to come out of that space are surprisingly effective. "Oh, gee another random worm outbreak. Well, lets just stop that from spreading or re-entering the network using our routers to filter it. Now I'll send this list of infected hosts to operations along with a virus signature and they can clean them when someone writes an AV signature and a tool to remove this one."
Who else is motivated? Big network operators are. Worms clog pipes and launch DDoS attacks. That is fine, since they can charge for the bandwidth, but customers complain about the network congestion and a lot of people are willing to pay extra for "cleaned" pipes. Some of the solutions in that space are likewise effective; the same thing on a larger scale. At least one of the tools ups the ante by letting operators swap signatures using a centralized database.
Who else is motivated? Open source projects, like Clam AV and the like. If corporations donated a quarter of what they spend on proprietary solutions to these guys, they'd save a fortune and end up with better solutions. They could emulate the techniques employed by the two examples above and apply them on a smaller scale.
It is a pity most corporate purchasing agents did not have a course on critical thinking in high school.
So my question is, do you get paid to astroturf, or do you just read other astroturf and parrot it, while never bothering to read any related articles?
After Adobe threatened MS with a lawsuit for wanting to allow PDF writing for free in Office 2007 i can see why they'd rather use their own format.
Did you even read the article whose inaccurate summary you're linking to? It starts out, "Microsoft Corp. said it expected Adobe Systems Inc. to file an antitrust suit..." Making either PDF or XPS built into Windows is a gross violation of the law. Including them in MS Office (which is tied to Windows) is a violation of the law. Even just providing all Windows documentation XPS and not PDF is a violation of the law. So MS announces they are blatantly going to break the law and expect to be sued.
Essentially, they weren't pushing their own format, they were going to provide PDF support as well as the XPS format...
So they were going to break the law twice instead of once, or maybe you're not understanding what part of this Adobe is objecting to. I'll give you a hint, it's the part that is illegal.
No, they're suing because their competitor is illegally leveraging a monopoly to take over a market. Charging for PDF generation (instead of rolling the cost into Windows like they are illegally doing now) would be one way to mediate the effects on the market of MS breaking the law. You seem to think your choices are:
In reality your choices are:
The same thing goes for XPS, except there is no guarantee in the future there will be any other tools available. I wonder why Adobe would choose to take them to court for their illegal behavior. Those jerks.
"...more secure alternatives like *nix and MacOS, which have a chance of actually fixing the underlying problem." How so? When replying, please consider that I'm Joe Sixpack, armed with the root password, just enough smarts to install stuff and not enough smarts to not install bad stuff.
Well, both of those OS's have some architectural advantages, like not needing to run network services for local actions, that make automated compromises less common. They both tend to be more responsive to vulnerabilities thus further reducing risks. They are motivated to fix the problems as developers are also users and no one has a monopoly to ensure income.
Mostly, it is this last aspect. Right now there are security features on certain linux distributions that if properly integrated into the OS and UI would make both automated attacks and trojans a whole lot harder to manage. They have not been integrated into mainstream distributions because, there is no real demand. Linux does not really have a malware problem because of the architectural choices, people who make up the user base, and the size of the user base. If, however, that were to change, I have no doubt developers would respond and implement them. Microsoft has not, because they just don't really care that much and have no motivation to do so.
So, since you appear to be Microsoft's official spokesman, what does this new format do that PDF can't? Why would I want to choose it over PDF?
Choose it? Maybe you're not familiar with how MS does business. User choice is not something they can agree with. You'll pay for it, because it is bundled into Windows. Eventually you'll buy a computer and guess what, Windows will ship with it and XPS with Windows. The price will be all rolled together so you won't even notice you're paying for it. After that, who cares what it does? Well, I suppose it needs to do something to hurt MS's competitors. What it will do is do a "good enough" job at what PDF does, but without letting certain people in on the party. It will be standard "enough" that 95% of people will be able to view them, just so long as you aren't running Linux or OpenOffice and even then you'll probably be able to view them sort of via a reverse engineered viewer.
Chose it, heh, that is a good one. Monopolies who are above the law don't work that way though. What are you going to do about it... go the the Justice Department? MS bought them years ago. You'll pay for it whether you choose it or not.
HTML is open in this sense, but is also open in the sense that it is controlled by a standards body (the w3c) and anyone can propose additions to the spec...
I think I'd chalk that up to how "standard" it is rather than how open, but that is just semantics. Good point.
Oh, and .txt isn't a standard at all. It is a huge collection of standards.
Okay, I agree. Bad example. It's hard come up with a good example everyone will recognize.
The RADIUS and USB issues are not really a big deal for a beta release. This sort of thing should be expected at this stage. Unless these are in the final release, there is not a lot of point mentioning them, other than reporting them as bugs.
The Aero Glass interface isn't very responsive. Since Windows 95, the mouse pointer in Windows has never been afflicted by pauses when moving the pointer.
Umm, yes they have. One of the main reasons graphic artists tend to use the MacOS is that the mouse input and cursor display is prioritized above pretty much everything else. Using both Win2K and Windows XP I've experienced times, during heavy load, when the mouse cursor would disappear or the position would fail to update. If I'm painting a stroke on the screen, this is completely unacceptable and it certainly does happen.
Vista Beta 2 is a resource hog... I know any unused RAM is wasted RAM but when a basic Windows hogs that much, it shows that power users will easily have to push 4gigs of RAM if they intend to run Photoshop or a few instances of Office applications.
I'm not sure I agree. A better way to find this out is to actually run photoshop and Office and see how it performs. You can't judge this based upon how much RAM it is using while idle. The disk space, is a valid issue, although pretty minor given disk sizes even today, let alone going forward.
The other annoyance is the new non-admin user model. It is completely broken and illogical... The end result will either be people disabling the new protection scheme or learning to click without reading-both scenarios are disastrous and will render this protection useless.
From what I've seen, I agree. Sometimes it is better not to implement a feature or to provide an easy and slow transition than it is to implement something so broken that it causes customers to suffer, confusion, and creates a "common wisdom" that it should be disabled, which may persist long after the feature is working.
Your user privilege model is a bit complex for my taste. It also seem impractical for MS to implement, given their ponderously slow development. Rather, I think they should keep the model they have, but throw all "old" programs that are not designed for Vista into a VM, with a good set of default restrictions and warnings. This could provide even better security than the average Linux install as it could alert on programs accessing your personal files outside the VM, like your address book, IM buddies, etc. and thus detect a lot of common malware activity. Coupled with this, they should fix the UI regarding privileges to follow Apple's HIG, which would take care of 80% of their horrible and counterproductive UI. All of this is doable, just by shuffling around their existing technologies (the VM stuff they have for servers) and redesigning the UI and interaction. They won't, or course. The security people apparently don't believe UI is a real component and even their UI people seem to break basic rules of the profession. Still, it would be nice and is practical.
Technically though it's their website and they can put whatever lame duck format on their they want.
Not really. They are a monopoly. If they release a new product like a XPS generation tool, they are forbidden from leveraging their existing monopolies in order to promote it. That means no bundling, it can't be built in. It also means no tying. Requiring people to get your new PDF competitor in order to use Windows (the monopoly) and not providing the same benefit to someone using PDF is a form of tying and is illegal in and of itself.
The XPS format will either get opened up or nobody but MSFT websites will use it.
Bullshit. Various governments will enforce their antitrust laws and stop MS from bundling it or XPS will take over huge chunks of the market from Adobe, simply because it is bundled into Windows. That is the whole point of leveraging a monopoly. Just because your product is inferior because the license is not truly open and there is no guarantee it won't lock you in or even be readable in 10 years does not mean the market will not choose the inferior product. Competition is bypassed by bundling. It is already installed and the development paid for when you buy Windows. Even if you want to use PDF for everything, you had to buy Windows to interoperate with clients and when you did, you paid for the bundled XPS generation tools. Adobe can't compete with that.
What you should be questioning is why XPS exists at all.
There is no mystery. MS wants one more way to lock in users. They want to kill OpenOffice which is threatening MS Office. They want to lessen Adobe's influence. XPS will do all of these things. In 5 years, unless the governments intervene effectively, most people will be using XPS, OpenOffice will be using a similar, reverse engineered version that is not 100% compatible, OpenOffice will thus not have gained much of the market, and Adobe will be making less money and be more willing to do what MS wants, lest they illegally take over another of Adobe's markets.
PDF is an open format?
Yes it is, as much as HTML or .txt.
That explains why Adobe doesn't fancy the idea of Microsoft including PDF exporting functionality into Office 12!
So Microsoft reported that they think Adobe might sue them for breaking an antitrust law and possibly a contract they signed, and you think this is proof as to whether or not PDF is an open format? Guess what, Microsoft has already been sue for bundling software that reads HTML. I take it you think HTML is no longer an open format either?
As for the openness of the XPS...
It is irrelevant to whether or not including it is a violation of anti-trust law. XPS has no released license only an outline of a plan for the license. Will this license be "open" like their OpenXML format, which is to say full of traps like the revocation of the license at any time, without warning, if MS releases a new format and calls it OpenXML? MS does not release open formats. They just have too many lawyers there. They can't get it done.They have proven time and time again they always have hidden traps. Why would we assume this one, with no information given, will be any different?
All of these organizations are pro-control anti-consumer and we all should realize that immediately. No government mandate on companies is ever good for consumers because it decreases the amount of competition in a market and it raises prices. You can't prove otherwise.
I see so you think consumer protection laws are all useless. For example, false advertising laws? For example, food safety regulations?
Or is it maybe that some do more good than harm and it is just a scale of where a particular law falls on that scale? There has been a long tradition of laws that prevent a consumer from signing away all their rights and these laws are especially important when a monopoly or emergency is involved. Without them, emergency rooms would force you to sign the next 10 years of your life away to work as a slave before treating you.
Higher prices with less competition usually mean lower quality products and even lower quality research for new products.
Sometimes consumer protection laws increase competition or lower prices, especially when a monopoly is involved. Often they enforce a minimum, safe, level of product quality. Innovative research is rarely driven primarily by money. Usually, people do new, cool things because they can and they then capitalize upon those that seem profitable.
If they had to follow these idiotic laws in the beginning, the consumer would be protected, surely: protected from ever seeing great devices like the iPod and whatever the next competitor will release.
Maybe, but the market does provide. If the government says no beef with more than 10% rat feces, some company will produce beef without as much rat feces, even if it costs more. Companies will produce software and take responsibility for what it does. Half of the provisions in Apple or any other software company's license are unenforceable, even in the US. They just put them in there to give their lawyers more ammo.
The only real question I have, is are the laws being applied equitably or is someone on a vendetta here. I mean have they read the license for Windows?
This particular issue is about the terms of use for the software, not the DRM on the music. Basically, the legalese says they won't certify it won't break other things on your computer, which is a violation on the law there. As to why that law has not been applied to the thousands of other programs/software sold (like Windows), I suspect it is because no one was motivated to go after them.
As for the legal difference between DRM and a natural incompatibility, there are two factors. One, Apple intentionally prevents their content from running on other systems. Two, Apple is approaching monopoly status for portable music players, so antitrust law may come into play.
I don't give a shit about the "universe", the "universe" is not a living, thinking entity that monitors my actions.
This is relevant how?
All of the monetary and social systems we have are constructs that we have agreed (or maybe not) upon.
True, but it doesn't make them natural rights and doesn't imply that any given construct is a good or bad thing and is thus irrelevant to this discussion.
So, if you want to be ruled by natural law alone go live in a cave by yourself.
This is an example of the logical fallacy, "false dichotomy" and implies that these are the only two (extreme) options. The truth is, most of our constructs are built upon the concepts of natural rights. Free speech is a natural right. The right to freely exchange goods with others is a natural right. Both of these are limited by laws for a common good, but if those laws do more harm than good then there is no ethical justification for them. Anything else argues that a law is always good, and that is absurd and I'm sure you can think of an example to disprove it.
As for the "founding" fathers crap, I am not American so I don't care.
Ahh, but the founding fathers are not the only one to recognize natural human rights as different from imposed rules. Some countries do not recognize freedom of speech/expression (which copyright restricts) as a natural right. But since this is an ethical discussion, do you recognize freedom of speech/expression as a natural right?
Even if I was I highly doubt they would have been okay with a situation where an individual could not choose to control the fruits of their labour regardless of their being physical or something more abstract like a song.
Now picture of a world built upon these principals. Newton came up with most newtonian physics. Should his descendants now be living on royalties paid in perpetuity by everyone who applies newtonian physics? How about the Bible? Shall we pull it from the shelves and confiscate all copies until the descendants of the original authors can be found and compensated for each copy? Shall we remove the whole of the public domain and restrict each and every idea forever, granting it to the first person to write it down and get it stamped? And do you think this will help or hinder humanity as a whole?
I really don't believe they would have promoted the socialist/communist ideal of IP you are putting forth.
There is plenty of documentation about what they thought. They wrote copyright law with restriction on the duration and purpose specifically in an attempt to prevent duplicating the situation in much of Europe. That situation was, the great publishing houses had a cartel that controlled distribution and the creators of works were compensated very little if at all, while this cartel reaped all the profits and at the same time censored from widespread distribution any ideas they disagreed with. Does that sound at all familiar?
Whell[sic], when the RIAA slaps you with a megafine, please feel free to proceed to make this argument all the way to the SCOTUS.
Obviously you never bothered to read any of their copyright decisions. The supreme court says they are powerless to make any judgement as to the constitutionality of copyright law, since the constitutions is prescriptive on this matter. So long as Congress claims their intent is to promote science and useful arts, even when it can conclusively be shown that is not the result, the Supremes are helpless. It is not their place to judge that congress is being malicious instead of incompetent.
The proper check for this is the US populace but because most of them are ignorant and because the issue is slightly complicated and because the people have been hearing a lot of propaganda for years about copyright being a natural right, the laws stand. It is a failure of democracy in the US as pointed out by numerous constitutional scholars and judges. In fact it is also a good indicator of the state of the government. When the founding father's miss-phrase something what happens? Does the current administration fix it or exploit it as a weakness? I think we all know the answer and are just lucky our current crop of politicians did not write the constitution.
I've spent more time in that room listening to them and more time reading their decisions than you have.
And yet you're still completely ignorant about the topic and show not only an unwillingness to learn but an arrogant disrespect for someone who has bothered to do so. Here's an idea, you could do your research before you draw your conclusion. But concepts like logical reasoning and critical thinking seem a bit beyond you.
Besides, this discussion isn't about laws, it's about morality. You know, stealing is bad, etc.
Claiming some level of knowledge about constitutional law and then demonstrating your abject lack of understanding by confusing violating a natural right (stealing) with violating an artificial government granted right that is not serving its purpose and exists only because a loophole (copyright infringement) does nothing to back up the credibility of your opinions. Do you even know what basic human rights the US acknowledges? I'll give you a hint. Freedom of speech is one of them, which is restricted by copyright law for a specific purpose. If that law no longer serves to uphold that purpose and, in fact does the opposite, what "moral" justification is their for obeying it?
P.S. if you want to talk about constitutional law you better learn the difference between "moral" and "ethical." Only one applies.
So, to bring this all home, if Google launches a web-based OS and we define the market as "OSs" then MS no longer has a monopoloy on the OS market because no Google has a competing OS. It's a contradiction in terms to say that MS and Google both have monopolies in the same market.
I never claimed two companies could have a monopoly in the same market. What you seem to be missing, however, is that the main reason monopolies are regulated in the first place is because you can use a monopoly in one market to affect a second market where you do not have a monopoly. Thus, if Google and MS each have a monopoly in a market, they can both "compete" in the word processor space, by illegally leveraging their existing monopoly. Both of them bypassing the free market does not necessarily equate to giving the same advantages as a free market. It could be that a consumer is just forced to pay for two word processors they don't want, possibly on top of the cost of yet a third word processor they do want.
Now I don't believe Google has any monopoly right now, and even if they did, there is nothing to say they would abuse it... so we needn't worry about this for a while.
Final statement. Monopoly doesn't necessarily mean that there's just 1 company. There are several hundred linux distros, there's unix, there's the BSDs, and there's Mac (just to name the major players). But if MS is so disproprotionately large relative to these minor players you still have (again, this is arguable) a monopoly.
Even that is not the case. The relative proportion of a market dominated by one product is defined by the money changing hands in that market. Much of the development of Linux is paid for by companies that use it to sell other products. For example, IBM pays for a lot of Linux development which they pay for with hardware and services sales. Apple spends a lot of money developing OS X which they primarily pay for with hardware sales they bundle the OS with. Neither of those count as part of the market (except the direct OS sales from each company). I know this does not contradict your last statement, per se, but it did need clarification.
I kinda stopped reading right there. I was initially looking at the shape of the post and thinking, hmm, maybe this guy is interested in a serious discussion. Then I saw that line, chuckled, and stopped.
I take it you're clueless about the law and haven't bothered to read the supreme court rulings on copyright term extensions? Or is it just that you think the supreme court justices aren't qualified to make this determination? Or is it that you're an idiot and don't know what the constitution is, have no ability to actually address a logical argument, and instead decided to launch an ad hominem attack? Why do I even waste my time on you morons
When you look at the distribution of wealth (or knowledge, or access, or whatever), you find that since the internet these gaps have grown bigger...
For wealth this is certainly true in the US. I'm not sure that is the case for knowledge in general, or "access" or anything else.
I don't believe you. Please provide support for this assertion. The numbers I've seen put the top 1000 sites as closer to 70% of HTTP and HTTPS traffic, with the rest distributed across many sites.
How's the democracy? How's that "power to the people"?
I'm not sure what you mean by these statements. If 99.999% of all people think eating babies is wrong. Does that mean democracy has failed in some way? I'd say it has failed when it a significant number of people are living in poor conditions or being denied their basic, human rights.
The internet should probably be considered a public utility in the future and as such all speech should be free on it and all people should be able to have a voice. That does not mean there is a problem if most of those voices are ignored out of indifference.
What's the difference between a 'hybrid' drive and a drive with a really big cache?
Cache is volatile, flash memory in a hybrid drive isn't. Thus a hybrid drive could save time when you boot, while a large cache won't.