Yes they are. They sell hardware in competition with Dell and HP, which is important if you're considering if the desktop computer market is monopolized. They do not, however, compete, in the desktop OS market because they won't sell their product, only integrating it in their own machines, bypassing that market through vertical integration.
The market isn’t just “Dell”
I didn't say it was.
...and Apple doesn’t have to license OSX to Dell for Apple to be a competitor in the personal computing marketplace.
I used Dell as an example. We're not talking about the personal computer market because no one has ever been alleged to have monopoly influence in that market for the antitrust action we're discussing. The relevant markets are "web browsers" which is what was being influenced and "desktop operating systems" (as opposed to server which was ruled a separate market). If Apple is not willing to license their OS to a given OEM, then their OS is not relevant for purposes of defining the market and how much influence MS has over buyers (OEMs). When economists and lawmakers consider how much market share MS has, OS X's numbers are not even considered nor should they be.
Re:Difference between law enforcement and health c
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Health Care Reform
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The public has a compelling interest to unify and use force to prevent private individuals from arresting suspected criminals. Yet the job still needs to be done, so we have no choice but to form government and stick it with that responsibility.
We don't have to. We can have corporations form private police forces and hire them either individually or as communities. We just choose to hand that over to the government because people aren't stupid enough to trust for profit companies to do their job.
The public has no compelling interest to unify and use force to prevent people from obtaining health care on their own.
It has a great compelling interest to hand health insurance (sort of a twisted term these days) over to the government because like police work, our individual lives are on the line. We don't trust the funds to actually be there when this duty is performed by for profit companies, because realistically they often aren't and because the private companies are refusing to provide service to a lot of us.
If you're out there, working on your own with no oversight or due process, obtaining or failing to obtain health care, you pose no risk no any innocent third parties.
Companies that refuse to pay when their clients get sick are failing, but it is not an oversight it is a business plan. The same goes for people who cannot get insurance at all.
I think there are some good reasons for "reform." There are anecdotes out there about just plain fraud: someone pays for insurance and then their claims are denied.
We're not talking about anecdotes, we're talking about an endemic problem effecting a significant portion of our society and reflected in the numbers of uninsured and in the cost we pay and the relatively poor results compared to public systems.
But supporting public-funded health care finance because it's "like" public-funded law enforcement, is just absurd.
This is yet another strawman argument. No one suggested supporting it because it is "like" law enforcement. I made comparison between the two challenging why healthcare was fundamentally different from a legal perspective from law enforcement in response to comment claiming this was transforming our society into a non-free society like a feudal system, instead of just applying the same legal and ethical principals we already apply, but in a different area.
Look at the portion of my comment you quote. Does it say we should support healthcare because of my comparison or does it simply ask how one is freedom and the other is tyranny?
The two are nothing alike at all, when you look at it in terms of the people's relationship with government.
I disagree completely. Both are service based markets that can be provided by the private sector, but which many feel is too important to our very lives and should be handled as a public service by the government. You've provided no reason why private police forces regulated by the government are qualitatively different from private insurers regulated by the government.
Every week I see cool new features demonstrated [zurb.com]. But they're all tied to disclaimers such as Demo works best in Safari 4.x and pretty well in Firefox 3.5. and use css properties like "-webkit-text-stroke". That is the opposite of a standard.
The difference is those are features still being developed and in the process of being standardized. Your basic failure of understanding is motivation. A monopolist who can push their browser without working on its merits has little or no incentive to be interoperable with competitors. Every other company, however, has direct financial incentive to make their browser interoperable in order to gain market share. With no one party dominant, standards compliance becomes the lifeblood of every browser.
they refuse to license their OS to OEMs thus creating more competition (not enough to matter legally) in the desktop OS market
You lost me there.
Okay I'll simplify. A "market" is a group of sellers and buyers where the buyers choose among those sellers when looking to make a purchase. The sellers in this case are people supplying the desktop OS component for pre-installation on home computers. The buyers in this case are OEMs like Dell, HP, and Asus. They can't buy OS X to preinstall on their machines, so it is not part of the market when the courts examine how much power Microsoft has over them. If Apple were to license OS X to Dell to preinstall, there would be more choices in the market and MS's monopoly power would be lessened. Given Apple and MS's relative sales now, however, that would not seem to lessen MS's power over OEMs enough to make bundling laws not apply in this case.
You've never heard of the FBI? DEA? BATF? There are also a lot of federally employed firefighters and both police and firefighters are funded and regulated significantly by the federal government. Your argument is stillborn.
So Starbucks are being anti-competitive when they sell sandwiches ?
Nope. If, however, Starbucks doubled their market share and qualified as a monopoly and then gave away a free sandwich with each coffee (while rolling their costs into the price of coffee, usually called bundling) then they would be guilty of violating competition laws.
Somebody should tell Steve Jobs that Microsoft has a monopoly in the personal computer market.
Actually it's the desktop OS market. MS doesn't even sell a computer of their own. Steve Jobs, being a bright guy, already knows this fact and knows that his company bears some responsibility since they refuse to license their OS to OEMs thus creating more competition (not enough to matter legally) in the desktop OS market. Of course the fact that MS's monopoly power would make that a crazy business move probably figures in.
I'm not a fan of IE or anything but I still find it a little strange that Microsoft is being required to "promote the competition" in their own product.
I'm not a fan of strangling women or anything but I still find it a little strange that Gary Leon Ridgway is being required to "promote the safety of women" in his own housing choices, by living in a small cell away from society.
Perhaps Opera and every browser should be required to have a popup ballot that appears the first time you open the browser telling you about all of the other browsers you could be using.
Perhaps Anthony Hopkins and every man should be required to live in a cell.
Let's start the insanity...
I think your insanity is in assuming people convicted of a crime should not be punished and forced to make reparations to society because non-criminals are not punished. That's pretty fucking nuts dude.
Re:I don't have health insurance.
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Health Care Reform
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Umm, that linked article is an opinion piece that says it would "threaten people with jail time" but provides no citation. He doesn't even use the correct term since jail would be for a local offense and prison for a federal crime. You'll have to do a lot better than that, like a citation in the bill, perhaps. I searched the text of it and there were no matches for "prison," "imprisonment," or "jail". I can give you a hundred references and cite the portion of the bill where is says you can be fined up to $750 per uninsured adult in a household. I can't find anything about a prison sentence. I'm calling bullshit on this one, unless you can provide a real citation.
I Believe We Need Reform... I just can't help but think this bill isn't going to do it.
This is probably the most commonly expressed opinion about this bill. I ask you, is there anything in this bill you don't think should be there? After reading the bill or even a summary of the major points, the vast majority of people in the US say they support all the things there and want more reforms yet. And yet, the majority of people don't know what is in the bill and currently don't support it. I see this as a complete failure of our press to accurately inform the populace, which is another serious issue where reform is needed.
I have catastrophic insurance, so if I get cancer and my bills go over $20,000 then THEY will cover the cost. Like a safety net.
You mean like a safety net not everyone can afford, not available to everyone who can afford a reasonable price if they've had illness in the past, and a safety net which has huge holes in it because it's provided by a company whose best financial interest is it to fail. Getting catastrophic insurance to pay out is difficult. Trying to do it while very ill is more so. I've been through all this with the insurance company. Needless paperwork and delays and requirements and mistakes and hassles, all while you're very ill. In most cases, you end up paying yourself and then, if you survive, suing them.
But most of the time I pay CASH (about $200 a year), which means I deal *directly* with my doctor.
In places with universal single payer healthcare, you deal directly with your doctor as well. The difference being, your doctor is not motivated to cut costs, is motivated to provide preventative treatments, and is not profiting or working for people profiting the more the longer you are ill.
If this Pelosicare Bill forces me to abandon my system of paying cash for product (or else be fined by the government), then I will be very very angry.
You're probably going to be very angry then. But a lot of people will get to keep their homes and get their insulin and fresh needles for it, and fewer children will die needlessly and fewer people will go blind from preventable causes (the US is the worst in the first world on this now). So you'll forgive me if I don't value your stress levels all that highly. Oh, and as a side bonus, we'll finally be reducing the deficit so maybe, in the conceivable future, we could lower taxes overall, and not just for the ultra wealthy.
I will also be concerned what else "they" might force down my throat.
This is called the "slippery slope" logical fallacy.
This is not freedom. This is like a return to 1770 when Parliament dictated to citizens as if they were Serfs.
Why is it the people electing representatives who tax us and provide the service of health insurance is "not freedom" but people electing representatives who tax us and provide the service of arresting serial killers is? Both directly work to protect the lives of the citizenry. Sensationalist pseudo journalists like to spin healthcare reform in the US as though it were fundamentally a new concept, evil socialism or some such nonsense. It's no more socialist than the FBI and our socialist police force and it's just an extension of our current, partially socialist healthcare system that already provides socialized healthcare to the very poor, the elderly, military veterans, and members of congress. It's an incremental change. Of course these are the same sensationalist pseudo journalists that claim setting tax levels/disparity to the same as they were in the early eighties and significantly less than they were in the 50's-70's is some sort of radical measure, instead of what it actually is, a conservative move back towards our historical system and away from the current radically unbalanced level of taxation.
Re:I don't have health insurance.
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Health Care Reform
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Its worse, its not that they fine you, THEY CAN THROW YOU INTO JAIL FOR FIVE YEARS
[citation needed]
Re:Oh great, Sony
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I Want My GTV
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· Score: 2, Insightful
With Google's resources, Sony needs Google a lot more than Google needs Sony (Imagine how many hardware manufacturers would jump at an exclusive right to make hardware for a GTV style product)...
Well, a lot of them, but what you're missing is that very few of those hardware companies are also major content producers, holding title to thousands of movies and dozens of ongoing TV shows. Building a set top box that streams content over the internet is not trivial, except in comparison to the task of getting content providers to license their shows in an affordable and not completely useless and annoying way.
Unless it's changed significantly since I last saw it a little over a year ago, those graphs are not lifted straight from the web interface.
I haven't seen it in years, but they look exactly like what I recall. Maybe you're thinking of the enterprise product (Peakflow X) instead of the service provider product (Peakflow SP) which is mentioned?
It's not even interesting data. The graphs make the whole presentation worse. I felt like I was reading a grad student's thesis, and a really dry one at that.
The graphs were lifted straight from the Web interface of the Arbor Networks product mentioned. It would have been nice and more professional to export the data and make some high resolution graphics instead and to provide more illuminating labels.
The iPad is in fact nothing like the products that gave the Macs a reputation for technological elegance and user-friendliness. You didn't have to jailbreak a Mac to make it do the things you wanted it to do.
That's funny. I remember manually tweaking text files to change appearances and installing kernel extensions to modify UI components. It all depends upon what it is you want to do. Most people did not have to hack at their Macs t do what they wanted, but then most people don't hack at their iPhones either because they don't see any need to. The restrictions that bug you, may well not even enter the mind of the average user.
On top of that, Apple will be including DRM on some eBooks and other iPad content.
Wait what? You won't buy devices that companies can sell DRM'd content on? I can see not buying devices where the only content is DRM'd, but devices that support both free and DRM'd formats give me more choices, not fewer. I'm not buying an iPad because I don't fit the target market and it would be pretty useless for me, but your DRM reasoning baffles me.
You're right Apple doesn't use OS X to promote iTunes, but that's because they use their monopoly on the mp3 market instead.
First, Apple has never been ruled to have such a monopoly and in the EU it was investigated and rejected. Second, even if Apple did have such a monopoly, MS has twice the market share for media playing applications, which they achieved by bundling with Windows, which is a monopoly as determined by previous court rulings. To go after Apple after doing nothing to stp MS would be some pretty crazy application of the law.
From what I understand, the iPod requires iTunes to be of any use at all...
Your understanding is flawed. Songbird works fine for every iPod except the touch.
To me that's worse than simply bundling software with your product for which there are alternatives that the user can get easily.
You're being self-centered. You're not the victim in either case. The companies most damaged by MS's behavior are OEMs and other Web browser makers. The effect upon you and the rest of society is just the trickle down effect. There are serious negative effects for you such as slowing the progress of Web technologies. Whether you care about that or not depends upon you.
But didn't that start the other way around? Apple first used their near monopoly in the hardware music player business to push their iTunes music store...
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Apple has never been ruled to have monopoly influence in the music player market. The EU looked into it and decided they did not have that much influence, mostly because of media playing cell phones. So until they have enough influence they can legally bundle anything they like with it.
A monopoly is when one company / group is the ONLY one that allows access to a product or service.
Not legally speaking, no. Back in the day standard oil was a monopoly, but you could still buy whale blubber and use it instead. There was an alternative. Heck, the local electricity distribution monopoly in your area still has alternatives, you can just go charge up a truckload of car batteries. Clearly you don't understand that 1% fo the market is not enough to make a difference of the negative effect monopolies can have, which is why legal guidelines use 70% share as a general rule.
You whine that Dell / HP / Acer don't sell OS X - that is APPLE'S fault, not MS's, and even so, if you want OS X you can buy a goddamn Mac.
I don't whine at all, I inform. You're the one pissing and moaning about the law being enforced. How does Apple being at fault for MS's monopoly help HP or any of the others? Does that somehow make illegal acts less damaging to them? If I refuse to let you in my martial arts class does that mean anyone who beats the crap out of you can't be arrested for assault?
I get it, your preferred products aren't popular.
See here's the problem. You don't know jack or shit about this subject but you assume everyone else is as prejudiced on the issue as you are. Here's an idea. Go read the law and a little bit of history about why they were written. Then if you have an informed opinion, come back.
Windows is a monopoly in some jurisdictions and a market dominant in others, depending upon what they call it in their antitrust/competition law. IE is not a monopoly.
Yes, but there are alternatives (for those who really care, there's Linux), for everyone else there's Apple.
Linux has negligible share and Apple is not in the same market. MS's customers are Dell and HP and Acer and they cannot license OS X. You clearly did not bother learning anything about this issue before spouting off.
Unless you can prove that MS forces stores to sell Mac's for more money (they don't, Apple gladly artificially inflates their prices on their own), then you can't claim that Windows is a monopoly.
Unless you can prove bananas are purple you can't say Windows is not a monopoly. Seriously, just because make up some nonsense that has nothing to do with the legal definitions involved doesn't mean it has anything to do with reality.
IE is also not a monopoly since you can download a different browser any time you choose.
Since the EU never claimed it was, all your comment does is demonstrate you don't understand the law, the purpose for the law, or the particulars of this case. Why then, should anyone care about your ignorant opinions? Why would I bother reading yet another poster regurgitating the same ignorant nonsense because they're too lazy to read and find out what the hell they're talking about?
No Apple can't leverage an OS monopoly but they certainly are starting to get there in the media player space.
Umm, the Windows Media Player has more than double the share if iTunes. How exactly does that constitute a monopoly?
My problem is I like the iPod but have a strong aversion to iTunes. It continues to be a pain to manage devices with.
So use something else. Seriously WMP, Amarok, Banshee, Floola, gtkpod, MediaMonkey, Rhythmbox,SharePod, Songbird, Winamp,YamiPod all have support for iPod integration. Why are you using iTunes if you don't like it?
When the Flash 10 Player is officially released, mobile phone support shouldn't be an issue, except for Apple devices.
Except reviews of the beta show that it still sucks down CPU and battery when playing even H.264, the supported video it can supposedly offload to a coprocessor because the Flash application itself still requires so much. So realistically that means as a developer you can't target Apple mobile devices (a large and growing market chunk) and your application will suck down battery and CPU (compared to HTML 5 competitors) on other mobile devices.
It's not a finalized spec, and won't be for a few more YEARS.
It's up and running on multiple browsers today, for the relevant parts.
There are no IDE tools to support the animation components (though Adobe will be the first to release one).
Yes there are, since it uses SVG for vector graphics and there are existing solutions, including Adobe Illustrator support for creating the models/stills.
Finally, the Flash Player needs work, no doubt. Flash itself has been poorly used and written by many, no doubt (not Adobe/Flash's fault). So browsers which will now render all this stuff natively...won't be bloated, won't eat lots of RAM, won't be slow... Right?
Nope because it's already being used and because all the major browser makers sans MS have a vested interesting making javascript fast and secure for the latest generation of Web apps and they've been doing a very good job of it. You haven's seen how fast javascript is on Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera all using competing very fast new engines? The main difference is, they're competing for both speed and security with one another. The lack of single vendor lock-in makes all the difference.
What if I started a class action suit against Apple because Itunes is installed by default, and that is a "monopoly" on digital music storefronts?
You have your cart and horse backwards. First, iTunes the application is not a monopoly of any sort. OS X is not a monopoly of any sort. That leaves iTunes the service, which as a lot of market share in the US. That means Apple can't bundle OS X with that service, but they don't they bundle the application with the OS and tie the service to the application.
If Apple required OS X to use iTunes, you'd have a case. If Apple forced people to buy a copy of OS X to buy a song on iTunes, you'd have a case. In fact though, Apple is moving iTunes to a Web interface to remove the tie with the application as they approach monopoly levels of market share... Which is probably the best you could hope for from any lawsuit regarding it. Apple can't leverage OS X's monopoly influence to promote iTunes because OS has no monopoly influence. Apple isn't leveraging iTunes service monopoly to promote anything in particular.
What the fuck is society coming to.
It is now and always has been a clamoring crowd of ignorance. People who insist on expressing their uneducated opinions without bothering to understand the topic even superficially first.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple is an OEM.
Yes they are. They sell hardware in competition with Dell and HP, which is important if you're considering if the desktop computer market is monopolized. They do not, however, compete, in the desktop OS market because they won't sell their product, only integrating it in their own machines, bypassing that market through vertical integration.
The market isn’t just “Dell”
I didn't say it was.
...and Apple doesn’t have to license OSX to Dell for Apple to be a competitor in the personal computing marketplace.
I used Dell as an example. We're not talking about the personal computer market because no one has ever been alleged to have monopoly influence in that market for the antitrust action we're discussing. The relevant markets are "web browsers" which is what was being influenced and "desktop operating systems" (as opposed to server which was ruled a separate market). If Apple is not willing to license their OS to a given OEM, then their OS is not relevant for purposes of defining the market and how much influence MS has over buyers (OEMs). When economists and lawmakers consider how much market share MS has, OS X's numbers are not even considered nor should they be.
The public has a compelling interest to unify and use force to prevent private individuals from arresting suspected criminals. Yet the job still needs to be done, so we have no choice but to form government and stick it with that responsibility.
We don't have to. We can have corporations form private police forces and hire them either individually or as communities. We just choose to hand that over to the government because people aren't stupid enough to trust for profit companies to do their job.
The public has no compelling interest to unify and use force to prevent people from obtaining health care on their own.
It has a great compelling interest to hand health insurance (sort of a twisted term these days) over to the government because like police work, our individual lives are on the line. We don't trust the funds to actually be there when this duty is performed by for profit companies, because realistically they often aren't and because the private companies are refusing to provide service to a lot of us.
If you're out there, working on your own with no oversight or due process, obtaining or failing to obtain health care, you pose no risk no any innocent third parties.
Companies that refuse to pay when their clients get sick are failing, but it is not an oversight it is a business plan. The same goes for people who cannot get insurance at all.
I think there are some good reasons for "reform." There are anecdotes out there about just plain fraud: someone pays for insurance and then their claims are denied.
We're not talking about anecdotes, we're talking about an endemic problem effecting a significant portion of our society and reflected in the numbers of uninsured and in the cost we pay and the relatively poor results compared to public systems.
But supporting public-funded health care finance because it's "like" public-funded law enforcement, is just absurd.
This is yet another strawman argument. No one suggested supporting it because it is "like" law enforcement. I made comparison between the two challenging why healthcare was fundamentally different from a legal perspective from law enforcement in response to comment claiming this was transforming our society into a non-free society like a feudal system, instead of just applying the same legal and ethical principals we already apply, but in a different area.
Look at the portion of my comment you quote. Does it say we should support healthcare because of my comparison or does it simply ask how one is freedom and the other is tyranny?
The two are nothing alike at all, when you look at it in terms of the people's relationship with government.
I disagree completely. Both are service based markets that can be provided by the private sector, but which many feel is too important to our very lives and should be handled as a public service by the government. You've provided no reason why private police forces regulated by the government are qualitatively different from private insurers regulated by the government.
Every week I see cool new features demonstrated [zurb.com]. But they're all tied to disclaimers such as Demo works best in Safari 4.x and pretty well in Firefox 3.5. and use css properties like "-webkit-text-stroke". That is the opposite of a standard.
The difference is those are features still being developed and in the process of being standardized. Your basic failure of understanding is motivation. A monopolist who can push their browser without working on its merits has little or no incentive to be interoperable with competitors. Every other company, however, has direct financial incentive to make their browser interoperable in order to gain market share. With no one party dominant, standards compliance becomes the lifeblood of every browser.
they refuse to license their OS to OEMs thus creating more competition (not enough to matter legally) in the desktop OS market
You lost me there.
Okay I'll simplify. A "market" is a group of sellers and buyers where the buyers choose among those sellers when looking to make a purchase. The sellers in this case are people supplying the desktop OS component for pre-installation on home computers. The buyers in this case are OEMs like Dell, HP, and Asus. They can't buy OS X to preinstall on their machines, so it is not part of the market when the courts examine how much power Microsoft has over them. If Apple were to license OS X to Dell to preinstall, there would be more choices in the market and MS's monopoly power would be lessened. Given Apple and MS's relative sales now, however, that would not seem to lessen MS's power over OEMs enough to make bundling laws not apply in this case.
The police and fire departments are locally run.
You've never heard of the FBI? DEA? BATF? There are also a lot of federally employed firefighters and both police and firefighters are funded and regulated significantly by the federal government. Your argument is stillborn.
Nothing is as bad for the future of America as Fox says.
Except Fox. Fox is bad for America.
Just because Fox says the health care reform is bad doesn't mean that we should therefore support the reform.
Your argument is a strawman. No one said we should support health care reform because Fox does not. That was just something you made up to attack.
So Starbucks are being anti-competitive when they sell sandwiches ?
Nope. If, however, Starbucks doubled their market share and qualified as a monopoly and then gave away a free sandwich with each coffee (while rolling their costs into the price of coffee, usually called bundling) then they would be guilty of violating competition laws.
Somebody should tell Steve Jobs that Microsoft has a monopoly in the personal computer market.
Actually it's the desktop OS market. MS doesn't even sell a computer of their own. Steve Jobs, being a bright guy, already knows this fact and knows that his company bears some responsibility since they refuse to license their OS to OEMs thus creating more competition (not enough to matter legally) in the desktop OS market. Of course the fact that MS's monopoly power would make that a crazy business move probably figures in.
I'm not a fan of IE or anything but I still find it a little strange that Microsoft is being required to "promote the competition" in their own product.
I'm not a fan of strangling women or anything but I still find it a little strange that Gary Leon Ridgway is being required to "promote the safety of women" in his own housing choices, by living in a small cell away from society.
Perhaps Opera and every browser should be required to have a popup ballot that appears the first time you open the browser telling you about all of the other browsers you could be using.
Perhaps Anthony Hopkins and every man should be required to live in a cell.
Let's start the insanity...
I think your insanity is in assuming people convicted of a crime should not be punished and forced to make reparations to society because non-criminals are not punished. That's pretty fucking nuts dude.
Just one, I'm sure there are more: http://www.aolnews.com/opinion/article/opinion-obamas-health-care-myths-exposed/19402359 [aolnews.com]
Umm, that linked article is an opinion piece that says it would "threaten people with jail time" but provides no citation. He doesn't even use the correct term since jail would be for a local offense and prison for a federal crime. You'll have to do a lot better than that, like a citation in the bill, perhaps. I searched the text of it and there were no matches for "prison," "imprisonment," or "jail". I can give you a hundred references and cite the portion of the bill where is says you can be fined up to $750 per uninsured adult in a household. I can't find anything about a prison sentence. I'm calling bullshit on this one, unless you can provide a real citation.
I Believe We Need Reform... I just can't help but think this bill isn't going to do it.
This is probably the most commonly expressed opinion about this bill. I ask you, is there anything in this bill you don't think should be there? After reading the bill or even a summary of the major points, the vast majority of people in the US say they support all the things there and want more reforms yet. And yet, the majority of people don't know what is in the bill and currently don't support it. I see this as a complete failure of our press to accurately inform the populace, which is another serious issue where reform is needed.
I have catastrophic insurance, so if I get cancer and my bills go over $20,000 then THEY will cover the cost. Like a safety net.
You mean like a safety net not everyone can afford, not available to everyone who can afford a reasonable price if they've had illness in the past, and a safety net which has huge holes in it because it's provided by a company whose best financial interest is it to fail. Getting catastrophic insurance to pay out is difficult. Trying to do it while very ill is more so. I've been through all this with the insurance company. Needless paperwork and delays and requirements and mistakes and hassles, all while you're very ill. In most cases, you end up paying yourself and then, if you survive, suing them.
But most of the time I pay CASH (about $200 a year), which means I deal *directly* with my doctor.
In places with universal single payer healthcare, you deal directly with your doctor as well. The difference being, your doctor is not motivated to cut costs, is motivated to provide preventative treatments, and is not profiting or working for people profiting the more the longer you are ill.
If this Pelosicare Bill forces me to abandon my system of paying cash for product (or else be fined by the government), then I will be very very angry.
You're probably going to be very angry then. But a lot of people will get to keep their homes and get their insulin and fresh needles for it, and fewer children will die needlessly and fewer people will go blind from preventable causes (the US is the worst in the first world on this now). So you'll forgive me if I don't value your stress levels all that highly. Oh, and as a side bonus, we'll finally be reducing the deficit so maybe, in the conceivable future, we could lower taxes overall, and not just for the ultra wealthy.
I will also be concerned what else "they" might force down my throat.
This is called the "slippery slope" logical fallacy.
This is not freedom. This is like a return to 1770 when Parliament dictated to citizens as if they were Serfs.
Why is it the people electing representatives who tax us and provide the service of health insurance is "not freedom" but people electing representatives who tax us and provide the service of arresting serial killers is? Both directly work to protect the lives of the citizenry. Sensationalist pseudo journalists like to spin healthcare reform in the US as though it were fundamentally a new concept, evil socialism or some such nonsense. It's no more socialist than the FBI and our socialist police force and it's just an extension of our current, partially socialist healthcare system that already provides socialized healthcare to the very poor, the elderly, military veterans, and members of congress. It's an incremental change. Of course these are the same sensationalist pseudo journalists that claim setting tax levels/disparity to the same as they were in the early eighties and significantly less than they were in the 50's-70's is some sort of radical measure, instead of what it actually is, a conservative move back towards our historical system and away from the current radically unbalanced level of taxation.
Its worse, its not that they fine you, THEY CAN THROW YOU INTO JAIL FOR FIVE YEARS
[citation needed]
With Google's resources, Sony needs Google a lot more than Google needs Sony (Imagine how many hardware manufacturers would jump at an exclusive right to make hardware for a GTV style product)...
Well, a lot of them, but what you're missing is that very few of those hardware companies are also major content producers, holding title to thousands of movies and dozens of ongoing TV shows. Building a set top box that streams content over the internet is not trivial, except in comparison to the task of getting content providers to license their shows in an affordable and not completely useless and annoying way.
Unless it's changed significantly since I last saw it a little over a year ago, those graphs are not lifted straight from the web interface.
I haven't seen it in years, but they look exactly like what I recall. Maybe you're thinking of the enterprise product (Peakflow X) instead of the service provider product (Peakflow SP) which is mentioned?
It's not even interesting data. The graphs make the whole presentation worse. I felt like I was reading a grad student's thesis, and a really dry one at that.
The graphs were lifted straight from the Web interface of the Arbor Networks product mentioned. It would have been nice and more professional to export the data and make some high resolution graphics instead and to provide more illuminating labels.
The iPad is in fact nothing like the products that gave the Macs a reputation for technological elegance and user-friendliness. You didn't have to jailbreak a Mac to make it do the things you wanted it to do.
That's funny. I remember manually tweaking text files to change appearances and installing kernel extensions to modify UI components. It all depends upon what it is you want to do. Most people did not have to hack at their Macs t do what they wanted, but then most people don't hack at their iPhones either because they don't see any need to. The restrictions that bug you, may well not even enter the mind of the average user.
On top of that, Apple will be including DRM on some eBooks and other iPad content.
Wait what? You won't buy devices that companies can sell DRM'd content on? I can see not buying devices where the only content is DRM'd, but devices that support both free and DRM'd formats give me more choices, not fewer. I'm not buying an iPad because I don't fit the target market and it would be pretty useless for me, but your DRM reasoning baffles me.
You're right Apple doesn't use OS X to promote iTunes, but that's because they use their monopoly on the mp3 market instead.
First, Apple has never been ruled to have such a monopoly and in the EU it was investigated and rejected. Second, even if Apple did have such a monopoly, MS has twice the market share for media playing applications, which they achieved by bundling with Windows, which is a monopoly as determined by previous court rulings. To go after Apple after doing nothing to stp MS would be some pretty crazy application of the law.
From what I understand, the iPod requires iTunes to be of any use at all...
Your understanding is flawed. Songbird works fine for every iPod except the touch.
To me that's worse than simply bundling software with your product for which there are alternatives that the user can get easily.
You're being self-centered. You're not the victim in either case. The companies most damaged by MS's behavior are OEMs and other Web browser makers. The effect upon you and the rest of society is just the trickle down effect. There are serious negative effects for you such as slowing the progress of Web technologies. Whether you care about that or not depends upon you.
But didn't that start the other way around? Apple first used their near monopoly in the hardware music player business to push their iTunes music store... --
Apple has never been ruled to have monopoly influence in the music player market. The EU looked into it and decided they did not have that much influence, mostly because of media playing cell phones. So until they have enough influence they can legally bundle anything they like with it.
A monopoly is when one company / group is the ONLY one that allows access to a product or service.
Not legally speaking, no. Back in the day standard oil was a monopoly, but you could still buy whale blubber and use it instead. There was an alternative. Heck, the local electricity distribution monopoly in your area still has alternatives, you can just go charge up a truckload of car batteries. Clearly you don't understand that 1% fo the market is not enough to make a difference of the negative effect monopolies can have, which is why legal guidelines use 70% share as a general rule.
You whine that Dell / HP / Acer don't sell OS X - that is APPLE'S fault, not MS's, and even so, if you want OS X you can buy a goddamn Mac.
I don't whine at all, I inform. You're the one pissing and moaning about the law being enforced. How does Apple being at fault for MS's monopoly help HP or any of the others? Does that somehow make illegal acts less damaging to them? If I refuse to let you in my martial arts class does that mean anyone who beats the crap out of you can't be arrested for assault?
I get it, your preferred products aren't popular.
See here's the problem. You don't know jack or shit about this subject but you assume everyone else is as prejudiced on the issue as you are. Here's an idea. Go read the law and a little bit of history about why they were written. Then if you have an informed opinion, come back.
Except that Windows (and IE) are not a monopoly.
Windows is a monopoly in some jurisdictions and a market dominant in others, depending upon what they call it in their antitrust/competition law. IE is not a monopoly.
Yes, but there are alternatives (for those who really care, there's Linux), for everyone else there's Apple.
Linux has negligible share and Apple is not in the same market. MS's customers are Dell and HP and Acer and they cannot license OS X. You clearly did not bother learning anything about this issue before spouting off.
Unless you can prove that MS forces stores to sell Mac's for more money (they don't, Apple gladly artificially inflates their prices on their own), then you can't claim that Windows is a monopoly.
Unless you can prove bananas are purple you can't say Windows is not a monopoly. Seriously, just because make up some nonsense that has nothing to do with the legal definitions involved doesn't mean it has anything to do with reality.
IE is also not a monopoly since you can download a different browser any time you choose.
Since the EU never claimed it was, all your comment does is demonstrate you don't understand the law, the purpose for the law, or the particulars of this case. Why then, should anyone care about your ignorant opinions? Why would I bother reading yet another poster regurgitating the same ignorant nonsense because they're too lazy to read and find out what the hell they're talking about?
No Apple can't leverage an OS monopoly but they certainly are starting to get there in the media player space.
Umm, the Windows Media Player has more than double the share if iTunes. How exactly does that constitute a monopoly?
My problem is I like the iPod but have a strong aversion to iTunes. It continues to be a pain to manage devices with.
So use something else. Seriously WMP, Amarok, Banshee, Floola, gtkpod, MediaMonkey, Rhythmbox,SharePod, Songbird, Winamp,YamiPod all have support for iPod integration. Why are you using iTunes if you don't like it?
When the Flash 10 Player is officially released, mobile phone support shouldn't be an issue, except for Apple devices.
Except reviews of the beta show that it still sucks down CPU and battery when playing even H.264, the supported video it can supposedly offload to a coprocessor because the Flash application itself still requires so much. So realistically that means as a developer you can't target Apple mobile devices (a large and growing market chunk) and your application will suck down battery and CPU (compared to HTML 5 competitors) on other mobile devices.
It's not a finalized spec, and won't be for a few more YEARS.
It's up and running on multiple browsers today, for the relevant parts.
There are no IDE tools to support the animation components (though Adobe will be the first to release one).
Yes there are, since it uses SVG for vector graphics and there are existing solutions, including Adobe Illustrator support for creating the models/stills.
Finally, the Flash Player needs work, no doubt. Flash itself has been poorly used and written by many, no doubt (not Adobe/Flash's fault). So browsers which will now render all this stuff natively...won't be bloated, won't eat lots of RAM, won't be slow... Right?
Nope because it's already being used and because all the major browser makers sans MS have a vested interesting making javascript fast and secure for the latest generation of Web apps and they've been doing a very good job of it. You haven's seen how fast javascript is on Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera all using competing very fast new engines? The main difference is, they're competing for both speed and security with one another. The lack of single vendor lock-in makes all the difference.
What if I started a class action suit against Apple because Itunes is installed by default, and that is a "monopoly" on digital music storefronts?
You have your cart and horse backwards. First, iTunes the application is not a monopoly of any sort. OS X is not a monopoly of any sort. That leaves iTunes the service, which as a lot of market share in the US. That means Apple can't bundle OS X with that service, but they don't they bundle the application with the OS and tie the service to the application.
If Apple required OS X to use iTunes, you'd have a case. If Apple forced people to buy a copy of OS X to buy a song on iTunes, you'd have a case. In fact though, Apple is moving iTunes to a Web interface to remove the tie with the application as they approach monopoly levels of market share... Which is probably the best you could hope for from any lawsuit regarding it. Apple can't leverage OS X's monopoly influence to promote iTunes because OS has no monopoly influence. Apple isn't leveraging iTunes service monopoly to promote anything in particular.
What the fuck is society coming to.
It is now and always has been a clamoring crowd of ignorance. People who insist on expressing their uneducated opinions without bothering to understand the topic even superficially first.