Demonstrating that another link in the evolutionary chain can happen without conscious intervention (spontaneously and mechanically) does not demonstrate the non-existence of an intelligent designer.
Are you familiar with the scientific process? This was yet another falsifiable test for the currently best supported version of the theory of abiogenesis. It was a test the theory passed, adding more support for said theory in that it made a useful prediction.
It, at best, removes a point that was previously used to defend ID.
ID is not logically defensible. It is not science. There is no hypothesis of intelligent design that I've ever been able to find.
But, logically, the inability to prove something does not constitute a disproof (that would be the fallacy of Argumentum ad Ignorantium).
The logical structure of the scientific method is well known. We even covered it in my intro to logic class and in numerous books I've read since. This research s deductive logic supporting an inductive conclusion. The more of the former, the stronger the premise supported by the latter.
You probably know all this, but we don't want to give the impression that the scientific method is not logically supported, nor its conclusions not logically supported by this particular experiment.
Your chronology is flawed. Before Apple created either the iPod or iTunes there were existing hardware and software players constituting separate markets. Apple came out with both iPods and iTunes afterwards. That's fine. They bundled iTunes with iPods. That's fine too. in very recent times, however, the iPod has come right to the edge of what constitutes monopoly influence in a market. At that point, they are legally obligated to make sure their bundling does not unfairly advantage them over competitors in other markets including the music jukebox software market and the music download market. Apple has chosen to wait and see if the courts complain... which is fine. Apple will absolutely not be surprised, however, if the courts were to rule that they needed to change their business practices and if they are given a small fine and remedies.
If anything, Apple leveraged their success to begin the end of DRM for downloadable music.
Apple leveraged their success to promote their music service and their music player software and their phone and their Macs and their video download service. Most of that is legal, but some of it is questionable. They did, indeed, use their influence to take down DRM, a move which allows them to sell more iPods, and that's a good thing. They're also competing in a market already compromised by antitrust abuse from Microsoft and from the RIAA (both convicted at different times). I'd say they've been an overall positive influence, but that doesn't make their actions legal. It would be idiotic to take action againt them while ignoring the other abusers, but that doesn't mean the courts won't.
The chronology completely refutes your position - which, BTW, you still haven't stated clearly at all.
It refutes the my position, but you don't know what my position is? You're very confused.
What did the iPod leverage?
Umm, iPods are devices. They don't leverage anything. Do you know what leveraging is, in terms of antitrust?
Apple leveraged share of the portable, digital music player market to gain in other, related but separate markets, including music jukebox software and music download services. This may or may not be illegal depending upon how great Apples influence in the portable, digital music player marekt was at the time of the action. Is that clear enough for you?
Why do you persist in believing that just because no one has matched Apple's iTunes/iPod/iTMS market success that that in and of itself is anticompetitive...
This is yet another strawman argument. I made no such claim. I explained clearly that the anticompetitive aspect hinges upon their market share with the iPod product and the fact that they tied that market to other markets. I don't know how much simpler I can make this.
Based on the fact that you've gotten the definition only slightly correct, defining it is a obviously an issue. Your claim that iTunes is a market, as legally defined, notwithstanding...
Let me head you off right there. You list a lot of aspects of the software, but you're looking at it from a technical, CS perspective. Antitrust laws are written based upon economic markets. No one writes a law that specifies Web browsers, they write laws that specify "competing products". The market for iTunes is the market for all the software people consider as replacements for it. That means Windows Media Player, WinAmp, Amarok, Songbird, etc. If people use it to play music or load songs onto their portable player or take over other functions of iTunes, it is the same market. Underlying technologies don't even come into it. This market has already been defined by the EU courts in previous antitrust legislation I might add.
So, no, just because it's convenient to define iTunes as a legal market...
You mistake my meaning. iTunes is a competitor in a market. The market is for iTunes and software such as I listed above. iTunes, however, is in a different market than the Amazon music store or the Zen. This is evidenced by the fact that Amazon sells music downloads without a bundled portable music player or software jukebox. It is evidenced by the fact that Creative sells a Zen but not a music download service.
Is your complaint with QuickTime or iTunes?
I don't have a complaint at all. Nor does antitrust apply to just one product in most cases. The potentially illegal action Apple is engaged in refers to the music jukebox software market, the portable digital music player market, and the music download services market and tying between them. When MS was convicted of violations for tying WMP to Windows, the separation between the application and underlying frameworks within the OS was not even an issue. It's about markets, not technologies.
Ok, either I'm right or you are on this one. IANAL. But to my knowledge, what you're insisting is illegal, simply isn't. Apple gained an advertising advantage over Amazon - not a technological one nor a functional one nor a pricing one.
Sigh. The law does not distinguish between and advertising advantage and a technical advantage. It was not even written in a time where technology was a big concern for trusts. It is illegal to leverage an existing monopoly to gain any advantage in a separate, pre-existing market. The test is basically if you have monopoly influence (not total monopoly mind you) and if a competitor, without the monopoly can take the same action to gain an advantage. If the answers are yes and no respectively, that's an antitrust abuse.
No one is on a level playing field with my DirecTV receiver - it only works with the DirecTV system. That's a more direct example, but isn't a crime and won't be - even if DirecTV becomes market dominant.
No one is on a level playing field with my AT&T phone - it only works with the AT&T phone system. That's a more direct example, but isn't a crime and won't be - even if AT&T becomes market dominant.
Except of course AT&T was convicted of exactly that. If anyone ever pushes it through the courts the cable companies will, in fact, lose an antitrust case with regard to their tying of DVRs and their service. They've tried to defuse that situation several times now by signing contracts with Tivo and the other hardware providers and pretending to implement cablecard while using lobbyists so the FCC keeps it crippled.
When you have a monopoly you can't leverage it into a separate, preexisting market.
Music services can serve an iPod owner quite easily - unless they want to muck about their own closed, DRM. Why Apple choose to not license FairPlay...
So Apple can sell music with DRM on the iPod and no o
Bundling is now working against them because businesses can't move to Vista while their webapps still target IE 6.0.
There past incompatibilities are a problem, but I'm not seeing how that is a problem from bundling. MS is still bundling IE and Windows and they can bundle IE wind several versions of Windows if they want. I don't see how that is causing the slow sales of Vista. The bundling still keeps users on Windows and not using competitor's OS's and browsers. That's a financial win.
Given that the iPod is strictly (by appearance) an iTunes extension, I don't think that that's reasonably possible.
I'm not sure what you mean by an iTunes extension. iPods and iTunes(the software) and the iTunes store are all separate markets as markets are legally defined.
Force Apple to bundle any and all iTunes competitors with the iPod (but let them bundle iTunes).
That's roughly impossible - either beginning with how to define iTunes...
I don't understand the problem. iTunes is a piece of software. It's not had to define. It connects to the iPod device and to the iTunes Music Store service.
...and stepping[sic?] with how large the shareware list alone is, and ending with those competitors wanting to be bundled and represented by Apple.
I don't see the problem. Anyone who made a request and qualified as a competitor in the eyes of the courts could ship Apple CDs or DVDs for inclusion with iPods.
For me, the idea that the iTMS matters is a non-starter.
"Matters" is an odd term. Legally it is products tied to the iPod that are potentially violating antitrust law. iTMS and iTunes are the two main candidates for antitrust violations with Apple's potentially dominant market.
No one is ragging Netflix for compatibility, for example...
Assuming Netflix has dominance in the "video rental by mail" market, what second market would Netflix have tied to this where people would be complaining? It is the leveraging of the market through tying or price fixing which is potentially illegal.
... and the iTMS/iTunes+iPod lock is a phantom - one can already use Amazon music for an example on-line music store...
I didn't say it was lock-in. It is tying. Because every iPod ships with a copy of iTunes, which connects to the iTMS, Apple gains an advantage against Amazon in selling music online. That in and of itself is illegal tying if Apple has monopoly influence on the iPod's relevant market. Unless Amazon can have iTunes connect to Amazon's online store or ship their own player with iPods which will connect to their service, they are at a disadvantage. That's only legal until Apple is ruled to have monopoly influence on the iPod market, then it is antitrust abuse.
That's an odd proposal to a non-problem.
Not really. Breaking up monopolies is a very common way of breaking their motivation for tying. It is unlikely for a first offender, but it is actually the most straightforward of remedies.
The iPod+iTMS isn't a monopoly and the European courts that tried to make this case rightfully failed.
The iPod (not the combination) was considered as a potential monopoly in Europe. It was likely decided not to be because cell phones were determined to be valid competitors at the time. Interestingly, because of the US's different cell phone market (tied to plans) the same case at the same time in the US would probably have ruled the other way. Now, it is still questionable, but getting less likely every day.
Note, the case in the EU was dropped because of the market definition for the market in which iPods compete. If they had been ruled to have influence in their market, then the tying to iTunes and the iTunes store were both slam dunk instances of tying.
Just because someone is market dominant doesn't make them a monopoly.
No, it doesn't but you're getting terms of US and EU law confused. Both the EU and US consider 70% or so to be a rule of thumb for "monopoly influence" or "market dominance". Either way, influence on the market is the real measure but if the relevant market for iPods had been 70%+ (which it would be if cell phone
The real issue - if it does exist or if it will be uncovered - is that Apple supports Windows OS w/ QT+iTunes, but not Linux. Insofar as Apple (and a great many of its users) see OS X as a flavor of *nix, then Linux is a *nix competitor to OS X. Note the subtle difference - not an OS competitor, but a *nix competitor.
Frankly, I don't think this figures into Apple's motivation at all. Apple isn't trying to use iTunes to get Linux users to switch to OS X, they haven't had any problem making that happen to a large portion of the Linux on the desktop crowd as it is. OS doesn't really figure into this from an antitrust perspective.
What Apple could be guilty of is leveraging the iPod to increase market share of iTunes and the iTunes store by making sure other jukebox software and music download stores do not work as well with iPods as iTunes+iTunes store. There are several possible effective remedies:
Break Apple's iPod business into a separate company not tied to Apple.
Ban Apple from bundling iTunes with the iPod.
Force Apple to bundle any and all iTunes competitors with the iPod (but let them bundle iTunes).
Force Apple to fully document the interfaces needed to make iTunes competitors work as well with the iPod as iTunes does.
Force Apple to fully document the interface to the iTunes Store so iTunes competitors can access it on par with iTunes.
Some combination of the above is most likely, if Apple were found guilty of antitrust abuse. You'll note that forcing Apple to release a Linux version of iTunes is not on the list. This is because there is little or no evidence that Apple is leveraging iPods (their monopoly) against Linux, simply by not releasing iTunes for Linux. The list of remedies is pretty close to the reverse order of likelihood a court would actually implement them.
Frankly, I think the chances of anything being done by the courts is remote. MS is guilty of very blatant abuses in the same market and the DOJ has not done anything about it. Every day that passes the convergence of phones and portable music players becomes more important and arguments that the iPod constitutes a dominating force in the market gets weaker. Three years ago you could have argued that people don't consider cell phones as an alternative when buying an iPod or other portable player. Thus, Apple had 70% or more of the market. These days so many cell phones double as music players and Apple themselves make a phone... well that makes Apple a small player in a larger market where they don't have anything close to approaching dominance. This appears to be the conclusion of the EU probe into the matter. Nowadays you have a better chance of Apple being declared dominant in the music download market and getting the interface to the iTunes store opened up than you do getting the iPod opened up to related markets.
Obama administration keen to make an example of an antitrust bully
It'd be nice to see them take on Apple and their bullshit use of the DMCA to shut down people trying to get iTunes to work on Linux.
The thing is, Apple's market dominance is a really close call. They may or may not have enough influence for antitrust law to apply, based upon how the courts define the relevant markets. Intel, like Microsoft, was clearly dominant in the relevant market at the time of the abuse. Further, the US courts have not addressed MS's obvious abuse leveraging into the very same market.
Now don't get me wrong. I think the US courts should look into Apple's leveraging of the iPod and it is quite possibly illegal. I just think they should hit the low hanging fruit first and they should absolutely not try to correct the markets Apple is involved in until they address MS's influence in the same market. Apple's potential abuses have been the only thing stopping MS's abuses from completely destroying those markets and have resulted in a lot of consumer benefits, like the death of DRM in the online music market. To go after Apple without going after MS would not only be unfair, it would be ignoring the obvious crime in favor of a possible crime while doing more harm than good.
I've seen plenty of browser articles on/. but have yet to learn what benefit companies derive by having a popular browser, and motivates them to put so much money and effort into their product. Anyone care to explain?
The Web browser market is key to several other, very profitable markets including desktop OS, Web services, applications, media delivery, and computer hardware. Companies devoting resources to the Web browser market are profiting from one or more of those other markets.
Here's an example. Google wants to provide a word processor via the Web (Google Docs). They profit by showing advertising and by selling support to corporations. Microsoft competes with Google by selling MS Word. Since Google's offering can only be accessed via a Web browser and MS controls the biggest Web browser, keeping IE unable to perform many of the functions Google wants in a timely manner prevents many customers from using Google Docs, which makes MS more money selling MS Word. So Google throws resources behind a browser that runs Web applications faster and better and has more functionality in the hopes that enough people will move away from IE so that MS can no longer use it as a tool to hurt their word processor business. MS tries to keep IE dominant so that they can hurt Google's business by carefully making IE better in some ways to keep people from taking the time to switch, while still keeping it crippled enough to hurt Google.
MS is even more motivated because in addition to a word processor, they also sell their own Web services, which they want to use IE to promote and they sell a desktop OS and if people move to Web applications, they have less motivation to buy another computer with Windows instead of a cheaper one with Linux or a cooler one with OS X.
Wow! That's quite the assertion. What makes you think MS's illegal bundling of IE and Windows is no longer gaining install share for IE? Do you really think if IE were no longer bundled with Windows it would not decrease the install share of IE?
MS may be losing Web browser market share, but that doesn't mean they will abandon their lock-in or that it is not still helping them. IE is a terrible browser propped up by bundling. MS is not motivated to make it a less terrible browser, just enough so that more people will use it but not enough so that it will enable people to bypass MS's Windows monopoly in an effective way. MS isn't even aiming at making IE better than other browsers, just "good enough" to maintain the largest share while propped up by bundling.
"Microsoft's loss of IE market power, in turn, could have serious consequences for the company's efforts to compete with Google on the Web."
Is it just me, or does this comment seem totally off the wall?
It's just you. MS is competing with Google for Web services. IE is MS's main method illegally leveraging their monopolies against the Web services market to gain market share without having the best Web services. (Noting, of course, that IE's install share is also illegally increased by leveraging Windows.) MS losing market dominance with IE means they can no longer leverage it to prop up inferior Web services, which means they actually have to spend money and compete or lose market share for Web services.
I like Firefox, I think IE sucks. But this whole "market share" thing is silly and fueled by nothing more than people obsessed with hating Microsoft. Guess what. If everyone dumps IE and switches to another browser, Microsoft's loss of revenue is exactly zero.
Their direct loss of revenue is zero, but their loss of revenue because of people no longer having artificial incentive to use Windows because of IE lock-ins is significant. Beyond that, IE has been the main factor holding back innovation in Web technologies for the last decade. The lack of real competition has resulted in the weak and crappy Web we use today, where companies strive to make ever more clever hacks for delivering new content using partially implemented versions of eight year old standards. No one has been able to move forward because developers can't implement technologies IE does not support and expect significant numbers of users and other browser makers know new technologies that IE does not have can't be used so they don't devote resources to implementing them in browsers. With IE at a low enough install share, that situation changes and we can move forwards again. Every time IE drops in share, MS has more incentive to start implementing newer standards and the Web moves forward.
Actually they can usually make a citizen's arrest if they see you physically take the property and commit the crime.
IANAL
It is, however, my understanding that no state in the US applies citizen's arrest powers to non-felonies. You can detain someone if they take something worth more than $1000 or if they cause damage or physical injury in the process. Be very careful about legality if you try to stop someone from committing what you think is a crime. My brother used to be a police officer and now works private security and I get tot hear all his amusing stories about this stuff. If someone grabs merchandise people in his company will follow them and talk to them and tell them to stay and wait for police. For legal reasons they will not try to physically detain a person, even one who is blatantly stealing.
They cannot detain you from leaving unless you've stolen their property (like Levis jeans) which is not the case here.
In most cases they can't even stop you then. They can follow you while talking to the cops on the phone, but they can't physically detain you unless you are posing an immediate physical threat and it is an attempt to stop that threat.
>>>Not many countries have a flat tax rate and you really don't want to live in any of them.
Some of the EU states have a flat tax
There are a few EU members with something close to a flat tax, notably Lithuania, Romania, and Estonia, but like I said, they aren't places most people want to live and have some of the worst standards of living in Europe. I'd credit their economic success more to EU membership than tax policy at this point.
A flat tax helps eliminate a lot of paperwork
Sure it does, but you miss the point. It also creates an unstable economy in that wealth continually consolidates until the system collapses. Flat taxes don't last because economies that rely upon them fail.
This is why some cross-platform projects that start on Linux generally end up being pretty weak on other platforms.
Depends what you're after, a consistent interface on the same platform for different applications or a consistent interface for the same application on different platforms. Choose your poison.
I can see the case for a consistent interface across multiple machines if you work on many, diverse terminals and the like. That's not me. I have a laptop. It runs OS X, WinXP, and Ubuntu. I pick the best application for my purpose that runs well in any of these OS's. I run each application in the OS where it works best. I don't care if I'm running OpenOffice in Windows or OS X or Ubuntu, just what I can do in the most functional one. When you have an application that runs on more than one, I often tend towards OS X simply because it does add on additional functionality (like decent spelling and grammar checking that are already trained from using other applications). Applications that are cross platform and pretty good, but which fail to allow those added features to work are frustrating in the extreme. Here's an app that will run natively on OS X, but you might as well run it in Linux in a VM since it has no more functionality either way.
Packages often replace OS provided functionality with they're own so it's easily possible for an application to have superior functionality to that provided by a particular OS.
The problem being when they don't give the user the choice to use the native functionality. Hey adding on an additional grammar checker is fine, but failing to let me use the default one on the platform sucks. Augmenting good. Replacing bad. In this case it is especially annoying because it doesn't just replace functionality, at the same time it uses nonstandard text handling to make all the add-on and cool customizable functions of OS X accessible only by copying and pasting into another program and back. I mean seriously, is this the early 90's? Shouldn't copying and pasting things into Word to spellcheck then back into your e-mail before sending be a long solved problem? I get my native functionality in a Web application like Google Docs, but not in a full fledged "native" port of OpenOffice. I have to say, I find that pretty weak.
It's called a "trackpad" and my fingers are already there.
For me, "a slow and tedious workflow" would involve taking my hands off the keyboard in the middle of typing.
For me slow and tedious is opening and closing a separate window to correct the one word I misspelled in an article, instead of simply clicking on it and selecting the word I want from the list. This used to work in OpenOffice.
Spell checking and other interruptions are best left to after I finish typing.
You must make a lot of spelling mistakes. I also like to use the thesaurus to replace words with more precise and varied ones while I'm writing and the context is still foremost in my mind, instead of trying to do so as a separate process at the end (a process which I've seen many people attempt with awkward results).
It doesn't seem to work anymore in my copy. Version 3.1 on OS X 10.5.6.
Open Office 3.1 also has a fully functional grammar checker that works extremely well on ALL major operating systems (linux/osx/windows).
Funny. I have the grammar checker enabled in OpenOffice. I type in the sentence "Your a loser." In my browser window my grammar checker immediately flags "your" as being incorrect and suggests "you're". In OpenOffice... nothing. If I select Tools: Spelling and Grammar, it says spellcheck complete and gives me an "OK" box to check. The same thing happens if I highlight the sentence. So either it is not working at all, or it sucks and the UI that should tell you it performed a grammar check is also flawed. On top of that, it insists on using its own grammar checker instead of the OS X one which I've spent years training and which I use in pretty much every other program: TextEdit, Photoshop, InDesign, Safari, Mail, Word, Pages, iChat, Tex, heck even Terminal.
Maybe your definition of "extremely well" and mine are slightly different. The really sad thing is, all OpenOffice has to do is use the default text handling APIs on OS X and they'll have a really nice working spelling and grammar checker and dictionary/thesaurus all of which integrates with my other applications. They'd also enable my other services like automatic bibliography entry formatting, language translation, statistical analysis of text, auto summarization, and a variety of scripts I use which work in all my other applications. This is why some cross-platform projects that start on Linux generally end up being pretty weak on other platforms. They limit themselves to whatever the least common denominator OS can handle.
Just checked that out, since I have a story open at the moment. The incorrect word is highlighted with a jagged red line underneath and you right click over the word for a list of suggestions and accesses to dictionaries and such. I use 2.4. You mean they turned that off?
In 2.4,regardless of whether or not you select the OS X spell checker in the preferences, you can right click on a word but it will never check it against the OS X spell checker, just the OpenOffice default one.
In OpenOffice 3.1 right clicking a highlighted word brings up the same context menu as right clicking any other text, which is to say just formatting options. But, when you use the spelling checker window, it uses the OS X dictionary including any words you added in other programs.
Neither version seems to support the dictionary/thesaurus or grammar checker or any other OS X services you might use.
That would just be murder, far as I know. How do you compare hiring mercenaries to shoot competitors to paying someone or offering discounts to not stock a product?
Both are breaking the law to undermine the free market. If murder is illegal and undermines the free market, how is antitrust abuse, which is also illegal not undermining the free market? In both cases they are simply a business protecting their markets against competition. Your implication that because the government is involved it is not a free market is thus disproved. If you want to assert antitrust laws hinder rather than protect the free market you need to support that assertion with a different premise.
Your claims of other countries having longer life expectancies due to socialist health care are bogus. They have longer life expectancies because they eat healthier and exercise more.
Why do they eat and exercise more? Do their physicians suggest they do so regularly as part of preventative medicine. Do they see their physician more regularly for this to happen?
As for WHY ours costs more? Because like it or not, we DO have better doctors...
Umm, sure we do. Any evidence to support that hypothesis?
...and our pharmaceutical companies are the ones doing most of the research to create new drugs.
So? They pass on the costs to their customers. Just because the research is done in the US does not mean US citizens are charged more per pill. In fact, drug companies tend to charge higher rates in Europe where people have higher incomes than the US. In canada drug prices are lower because they buy in bulk and because the companies don't add on the cost for advertising to individuals (which is illegal there).
So go ahead, tell that company working on a drug to cure disease XYZ that they can't make charge enough for it to make a profit and then that company will simply shut down and there goes the cure....
A strawman.
You have to think farther along than "I think someone else should pay for me to get medical treatment".
Another strawman.
You don't have much in the way of real support for your ideas do you?
The latest version of OpenOffice is the first one on OS X where the spell checker actually uses the default, built in spell checker on OS X which is used by all the other programs and already programmed with all the preferences and words from my other work. I applaud the addition of this functionality.
Sadly, the UI by which it is accessed is clunky and nonstandard. In every other program, highlighting a word and right clicking on it brings up the context menu that lets me directly select the corrected version of the word. In OpenOffice I have to run the spellchecker which opens a separate window to provide suggestions which I then have to close once I'm done and go back to working. The only usable way to do spellchecking becomes to ignore all spelling errors until I'm done then go through and correct spelling mistakes at the end, a slow and tedious workflow.
Further, In every other program, the context menu that comes up when right clicking on a word allows me to use the dictionary/thesaurus service and to correct grammar mistakes using the universal grammar checker. OpenOffice still ignores the standard APIs and thus still does not have these freebie functions even basic text editors on OS X have. When I have to copy and paste my text out of my full fledged word processor and into a basic text editor in order to check grammar or apply any other text services, well something is wrong. Some of the features OpenOffice does present in their context menus are useful, but really I want to select the correct spelling for a word flagged as misspelled a lot more often than I want to change the font size of a word. The options presented to not reflect my needs and I doubt they reflect the needs of the average user.
So basically my complaint with OpenOffice's user interface is that it does not conform to the standards of the OS on which it is running and instead dumbs down functionality to the level of the lowest common denominator OS.
Except that when the government runs the insurance company, they CAN decide "Well, you're 75 years old and this heart surgery is REALLY expensive......so we've decided it's not in the best interest of the country to pay that much money since you're already old.
As opposed to the private insurance company making that decision like they do now? This problem is actually better with government control because no politician wants to be the one saying it is not cost effective to treat the sick or elderly at some point so policies go into place that prevent just this thing from happening. Government healthcare is answerable to voters. Private insurance companies are answerable to shareholders who can afford to pay their outrageous medical bills out of pocket.
THAT, along with the blatant inefficiency (it's real easy to find the numbers about how long it takes to get treatment -- plenty of examples out there of things like 8 months to live with no treatment for cancer, but due to government run health systems you can't see a doctor for 10 months
Yeah, it is easy to find numbers. What you're talking about though are anecdotes. The numbers say other countries manage to have overall longer lifespans and overall better care while spending half as much as we do. Buying in bulk makes a difference. If we make healthcare in the US socialized and we spend the same amount and our government screws it up badly as we expect them to, we're still almost certain to have better overall care and longer lies than we have today... based upon the numbers from countries that have already done it.
Governments are inefficient bureaucracies, but so are current insurance companies and the government at least has motivation to make individuals happy as they aren't trying to profit. Healthcare, like police and fire departments and military are simply not suited to capitalism because when they are needed consumers don't have the luxury of comparison shopping because they go with the first offer or likely die.
I'm also not nuts about the 50% tax rate (average) in E.U. States. The U.S. tax rate of 40% is still outrageously high, but better.
Actually, too low of tax rates are a big part of what has destabilized the US economy. It's not quite that simple, of course. Not many countries have a flat tax rate and you really don't want to live in any of them. First world nations use progressive taxation coupled with socialism to balance out capitalism and keep it from collapsing under its own weight. In a pure capitalist system having money allows you to make more money more rapidly and all wealth consolidates into fewer and fewer hands until the whole shebang crumbles. In the past this has happened whenever economies have become too heavily capitalist, usually collapsing in a bloody peasant rebellion, but occasionally in a vast economic redistribution ala the New Deal.
To keep wealth from consolidating not based upon merit, but instead upon how much wealth has been accumulated (this is called wealth condensation by the way) we tax people with more wealth, more heavily than people with less wealth. This is called "progressiveness" of taxes. The idea is balance out wealth condensation with the tax rate of the wealthy then use that tax money on socialist programs (public schools and roads and welfare and police and healthcare and the the military, etc.) that benefit everyone. This effectively redistributes wealth from the top down to the bottom of society and prevents all the money from consolidating and the resulting instability.
In the US, the progressiveness of taxes has been slashed to absurd levels and the distribution of wealth has become alarmingly uneven. This is the same thing that happened during the great depression. Obama's very modest plan to return tax progressiveness to the levels they were in the 90's is viewed as radical, but in truth it is probably not even enough to stabilize things. We really need to get rid of the tax shelters and return to levels closer to what we had in the 70s or 80s.
Don't get me wrong, in general I'm in favor of lower overall taxes, but not until we've stabilized the economy, remedied the uneven wealth distribution to safe levels, paid off the national debt to sane levels, and replaced the progressiveness of taxes to sustainable rates. Then, I'm all in favor of cutting taxes, although that doesn't ever really happen. Democrats are focused on getting support via social programs, which need to be paid for, and Republicans as a party claim to be for lowered taxes but any of them that vote to lower government aid to their district is immediately deposed by their constituents and it is the Republican controlled states that are being disproportionately funded by the taxes in the more wealth Democrat controlled states.
The problem with going after Microsoft is that there are far too many deeds they need punished for that it'd tie up the courts system for decades to come, and waste a LOT of EU tax payers money on a show trial.
Well, the EU could make money with fines, so that isn't a big deal, but I do agree taking all of their illegal acts piecemeal as it has been so far is a lost cause. The EU either needs to be much more aggressive with pursuing individual violations and make the punishments really hurt, or they need to take a different tack. Personally, I think they need to coordinate with the US and take a concerted action and break MS up.
It's easier to just ban Microsoft from the EU altogether as an organized crime syndicate. Make their products and services illegal.
This breaks competition just as much as MS's actions do. I also don't think it is practical. It is better to have Windows and other MS products existing in a competitive market and getting better as a result than it is to have them removed from the market.
My solution would probably require the US, but Microsoft should be broken up. After the breakup, at least two new companies should exist, both with all the intellectual property rights to the Windows code base. Each company should have half the monetary and half the human resources. They should be explicitly forbidden from any non-public communications or exclusive partnerships.
Basically, imagine if next year, Dell could license Windows 7A from Company A or Windows 7B from company B. Imagine if Dell could ask them to bid on the contract and took the lowest bid. Imagine if Dell could ask for changes to be implemented and give the bid to whichever company was willing to make the improvements they wanted. Company A and Company B would both be motivated to lower prices on Windows and make improvements OEMs want... just like the free market is supposed to work. Windows would start to get better as the two companies compete and MS could no longer leverage their monopoly power by breaking compatibility because doing so would break compatibility with the other version of Windows, making their product lose significant sales. If they wanted to change some protocol to keep Linux from being able to be interoperable they would have to lose compatibility with the other Windows as well. If they wanted to keep compatibility with the other version of Windows going forward, they'd have to publish and license any changes allowing Linux and OS X to use them as well.
I know a lot of people are both angry with MS and supportive of Linux here, but the move that promotes Linux the most is not necessarily the most practical move or the move that is best for the market overall. Splitting up companies is a classic method for removing monopoly influence and with intellectual property like Windows, this does not have to be too different in principal. The main difficulty with these plan, of course, is the EU is not going to do it on their own for diplomatic reasons and we don't know if Obama's claims to be harder on monopolists is actually going to ever happen.
Every major ideology works just fine if it would be implemented and practiced properly. But none is, due to the "human factor", thus we have failed capitalism and failed socialism.
Umm, ignoring how humans act is kind of a non-starter for any ideology. We don't have failed capitalism or failed socialism. Every reasonably stable economy in the world operates with a mix of both. What fails is extremism. Trying to push an economy too forward towards either socialism or capitalism destabilizes it.
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Demonstrating that another link in the evolutionary chain can happen without conscious intervention (spontaneously and mechanically) does not demonstrate the non-existence of an intelligent designer.
Are you familiar with the scientific process? This was yet another falsifiable test for the currently best supported version of the theory of abiogenesis. It was a test the theory passed, adding more support for said theory in that it made a useful prediction.
It, at best, removes a point that was previously used to defend ID.
ID is not logically defensible. It is not science. There is no hypothesis of intelligent design that I've ever been able to find.
But, logically, the inability to prove something does not constitute a disproof (that would be the fallacy of Argumentum ad Ignorantium).
The logical structure of the scientific method is well known. We even covered it in my intro to logic class and in numerous books I've read since. This research s deductive logic supporting an inductive conclusion. The more of the former, the stronger the premise supported by the latter.
You probably know all this, but we don't want to give the impression that the scientific method is not logically supported, nor its conclusions not logically supported by this particular experiment.
Your chronology is flawed. Before Apple created either the iPod or iTunes there were existing hardware and software players constituting separate markets. Apple came out with both iPods and iTunes afterwards. That's fine. They bundled iTunes with iPods. That's fine too. in very recent times, however, the iPod has come right to the edge of what constitutes monopoly influence in a market. At that point, they are legally obligated to make sure their bundling does not unfairly advantage them over competitors in other markets including the music jukebox software market and the music download market. Apple has chosen to wait and see if the courts complain... which is fine. Apple will absolutely not be surprised, however, if the courts were to rule that they needed to change their business practices and if they are given a small fine and remedies.
If anything, Apple leveraged their success to begin the end of DRM for downloadable music.
Apple leveraged their success to promote their music service and their music player software and their phone and their Macs and their video download service. Most of that is legal, but some of it is questionable. They did, indeed, use their influence to take down DRM, a move which allows them to sell more iPods, and that's a good thing. They're also competing in a market already compromised by antitrust abuse from Microsoft and from the RIAA (both convicted at different times). I'd say they've been an overall positive influence, but that doesn't make their actions legal. It would be idiotic to take action againt them while ignoring the other abusers, but that doesn't mean the courts won't.
The chronology completely refutes your position - which, BTW, you still haven't stated clearly at all.
It refutes the my position, but you don't know what my position is? You're very confused.
What did the iPod leverage?
Umm, iPods are devices. They don't leverage anything. Do you know what leveraging is, in terms of antitrust?
Apple leveraged share of the portable, digital music player market to gain in other, related but separate markets, including music jukebox software and music download services. This may or may not be illegal depending upon how great Apples influence in the portable, digital music player marekt was at the time of the action. Is that clear enough for you?
Why do you persist in believing that just because no one has matched Apple's iTunes/iPod/iTMS market success that that in and of itself is anticompetitive...
This is yet another strawman argument. I made no such claim. I explained clearly that the anticompetitive aspect hinges upon their market share with the iPod product and the fact that they tied that market to other markets. I don't know how much simpler I can make this.
Based on the fact that you've gotten the definition only slightly correct, defining it is a obviously an issue. Your claim that iTunes is a market, as legally defined, notwithstanding...
Let me head you off right there. You list a lot of aspects of the software, but you're looking at it from a technical, CS perspective. Antitrust laws are written based upon economic markets. No one writes a law that specifies Web browsers, they write laws that specify "competing products". The market for iTunes is the market for all the software people consider as replacements for it. That means Windows Media Player, WinAmp, Amarok, Songbird, etc. If people use it to play music or load songs onto their portable player or take over other functions of iTunes, it is the same market. Underlying technologies don't even come into it. This market has already been defined by the EU courts in previous antitrust legislation I might add.
So, no, just because it's convenient to define iTunes as a legal market...
You mistake my meaning. iTunes is a competitor in a market. The market is for iTunes and software such as I listed above. iTunes, however, is in a different market than the Amazon music store or the Zen. This is evidenced by the fact that Amazon sells music downloads without a bundled portable music player or software jukebox. It is evidenced by the fact that Creative sells a Zen but not a music download service.
Is your complaint with QuickTime or iTunes?
I don't have a complaint at all. Nor does antitrust apply to just one product in most cases. The potentially illegal action Apple is engaged in refers to the music jukebox software market, the portable digital music player market, and the music download services market and tying between them. When MS was convicted of violations for tying WMP to Windows, the separation between the application and underlying frameworks within the OS was not even an issue. It's about markets, not technologies.
Ok, either I'm right or you are on this one. IANAL. But to my knowledge, what you're insisting is illegal, simply isn't. Apple gained an advertising advantage over Amazon - not a technological one nor a functional one nor a pricing one.
Sigh. The law does not distinguish between and advertising advantage and a technical advantage. It was not even written in a time where technology was a big concern for trusts. It is illegal to leverage an existing monopoly to gain any advantage in a separate, pre-existing market. The test is basically if you have monopoly influence (not total monopoly mind you) and if a competitor, without the monopoly can take the same action to gain an advantage. If the answers are yes and no respectively, that's an antitrust abuse.
No one is on a level playing field with my DirecTV receiver - it only works with the DirecTV system. That's a more direct example, but isn't a crime and won't be - even if DirecTV becomes market dominant.
No one is on a level playing field with my AT&T phone - it only works with the AT&T phone system. That's a more direct example, but isn't a crime and won't be - even if AT&T becomes market dominant.
Except of course AT&T was convicted of exactly that. If anyone ever pushes it through the courts the cable companies will, in fact, lose an antitrust case with regard to their tying of DVRs and their service. They've tried to defuse that situation several times now by signing contracts with Tivo and the other hardware providers and pretending to implement cablecard while using lobbyists so the FCC keeps it crippled.
When you have a monopoly you can't leverage it into a separate, preexisting market.
Music services can serve an iPod owner quite easily - unless they want to muck about their own closed, DRM. Why Apple choose to not license FairPlay...
So Apple can sell music with DRM on the iPod and no o
Bundling is now working against them because businesses can't move to Vista while their webapps still target IE 6.0.
There past incompatibilities are a problem, but I'm not seeing how that is a problem from bundling. MS is still bundling IE and Windows and they can bundle IE wind several versions of Windows if they want. I don't see how that is causing the slow sales of Vista. The bundling still keeps users on Windows and not using competitor's OS's and browsers. That's a financial win.
Ban Apple from bundling iTunes with the iPod.
Given that the iPod is strictly (by appearance) an iTunes extension, I don't think that that's reasonably possible.
I'm not sure what you mean by an iTunes extension. iPods and iTunes(the software) and the iTunes store are all separate markets as markets are legally defined.
Force Apple to bundle any and all iTunes competitors with the iPod (but let them bundle iTunes).
That's roughly impossible - either beginning with how to define iTunes...
I don't understand the problem. iTunes is a piece of software. It's not had to define. It connects to the iPod device and to the iTunes Music Store service.
...and stepping[sic?] with how large the shareware list alone is, and ending with those competitors wanting to be bundled and represented by Apple.
I don't see the problem. Anyone who made a request and qualified as a competitor in the eyes of the courts could ship Apple CDs or DVDs for inclusion with iPods.
For me, the idea that the iTMS matters is a non-starter.
"Matters" is an odd term. Legally it is products tied to the iPod that are potentially violating antitrust law. iTMS and iTunes are the two main candidates for antitrust violations with Apple's potentially dominant market.
No one is ragging Netflix for compatibility, for example...
Assuming Netflix has dominance in the "video rental by mail" market, what second market would Netflix have tied to this where people would be complaining? It is the leveraging of the market through tying or price fixing which is potentially illegal.
... and the iTMS/iTunes+iPod lock is a phantom - one can already use Amazon music for an example on-line music store...
I didn't say it was lock-in. It is tying. Because every iPod ships with a copy of iTunes, which connects to the iTMS, Apple gains an advantage against Amazon in selling music online. That in and of itself is illegal tying if Apple has monopoly influence on the iPod's relevant market. Unless Amazon can have iTunes connect to Amazon's online store or ship their own player with iPods which will connect to their service, they are at a disadvantage. That's only legal until Apple is ruled to have monopoly influence on the iPod market, then it is antitrust abuse.
That's an odd proposal to a non-problem.
Not really. Breaking up monopolies is a very common way of breaking their motivation for tying. It is unlikely for a first offender, but it is actually the most straightforward of remedies.
The iPod+iTMS isn't a monopoly and the European courts that tried to make this case rightfully failed.
The iPod (not the combination) was considered as a potential monopoly in Europe. It was likely decided not to be because cell phones were determined to be valid competitors at the time. Interestingly, because of the US's different cell phone market (tied to plans) the same case at the same time in the US would probably have ruled the other way. Now, it is still questionable, but getting less likely every day.
Note, the case in the EU was dropped because of the market definition for the market in which iPods compete. If they had been ruled to have influence in their market, then the tying to iTunes and the iTunes store were both slam dunk instances of tying.
Just because someone is market dominant doesn't make them a monopoly.
No, it doesn't but you're getting terms of US and EU law confused. Both the EU and US consider 70% or so to be a rule of thumb for "monopoly influence" or "market dominance". Either way, influence on the market is the real measure but if the relevant market for iPods had been 70%+ (which it would be if cell phone
The real issue - if it does exist or if it will be uncovered - is that Apple supports Windows OS w/ QT+iTunes, but not Linux. Insofar as Apple (and a great many of its users) see OS X as a flavor of *nix, then Linux is a *nix competitor to OS X. Note the subtle difference - not an OS competitor, but a *nix competitor.
Frankly, I don't think this figures into Apple's motivation at all. Apple isn't trying to use iTunes to get Linux users to switch to OS X, they haven't had any problem making that happen to a large portion of the Linux on the desktop crowd as it is. OS doesn't really figure into this from an antitrust perspective.
What Apple could be guilty of is leveraging the iPod to increase market share of iTunes and the iTunes store by making sure other jukebox software and music download stores do not work as well with iPods as iTunes+iTunes store. There are several possible effective remedies:
Some combination of the above is most likely, if Apple were found guilty of antitrust abuse. You'll note that forcing Apple to release a Linux version of iTunes is not on the list. This is because there is little or no evidence that Apple is leveraging iPods (their monopoly) against Linux, simply by not releasing iTunes for Linux. The list of remedies is pretty close to the reverse order of likelihood a court would actually implement them.
Frankly, I think the chances of anything being done by the courts is remote. MS is guilty of very blatant abuses in the same market and the DOJ has not done anything about it. Every day that passes the convergence of phones and portable music players becomes more important and arguments that the iPod constitutes a dominating force in the market gets weaker. Three years ago you could have argued that people don't consider cell phones as an alternative when buying an iPod or other portable player. Thus, Apple had 70% or more of the market. These days so many cell phones double as music players and Apple themselves make a phone... well that makes Apple a small player in a larger market where they don't have anything close to approaching dominance. This appears to be the conclusion of the EU probe into the matter. Nowadays you have a better chance of Apple being declared dominant in the music download market and getting the interface to the iTunes store opened up than you do getting the iPod opened up to related markets.
Obama administration keen to make an example of an antitrust bully
It'd be nice to see them take on Apple and their bullshit use of the DMCA to shut down people trying to get iTunes to work on Linux.
The thing is, Apple's market dominance is a really close call. They may or may not have enough influence for antitrust law to apply, based upon how the courts define the relevant markets. Intel, like Microsoft, was clearly dominant in the relevant market at the time of the abuse. Further, the US courts have not addressed MS's obvious abuse leveraging into the very same market.
Now don't get me wrong. I think the US courts should look into Apple's leveraging of the iPod and it is quite possibly illegal. I just think they should hit the low hanging fruit first and they should absolutely not try to correct the markets Apple is involved in until they address MS's influence in the same market. Apple's potential abuses have been the only thing stopping MS's abuses from completely destroying those markets and have resulted in a lot of consumer benefits, like the death of DRM in the online music market. To go after Apple without going after MS would not only be unfair, it would be ignoring the obvious crime in favor of a possible crime while doing more harm than good.
I've seen plenty of browser articles on /. but have yet to learn what benefit companies derive by having a popular browser, and motivates them to put so much money and effort into their product. Anyone care to explain?
The Web browser market is key to several other, very profitable markets including desktop OS, Web services, applications, media delivery, and computer hardware. Companies devoting resources to the Web browser market are profiting from one or more of those other markets.
Here's an example. Google wants to provide a word processor via the Web (Google Docs). They profit by showing advertising and by selling support to corporations. Microsoft competes with Google by selling MS Word. Since Google's offering can only be accessed via a Web browser and MS controls the biggest Web browser, keeping IE unable to perform many of the functions Google wants in a timely manner prevents many customers from using Google Docs, which makes MS more money selling MS Word. So Google throws resources behind a browser that runs Web applications faster and better and has more functionality in the hopes that enough people will move away from IE so that MS can no longer use it as a tool to hurt their word processor business. MS tries to keep IE dominant so that they can hurt Google's business by carefully making IE better in some ways to keep people from taking the time to switch, while still keeping it crippled enough to hurt Google.
MS is even more motivated because in addition to a word processor, they also sell their own Web services, which they want to use IE to promote and they sell a desktop OS and if people move to Web applications, they have less motivation to buy another computer with Windows instead of a cheaper one with Linux or a cooler one with OS X.
Bundling used to work in favor of IE. No longer.
Wow! That's quite the assertion. What makes you think MS's illegal bundling of IE and Windows is no longer gaining install share for IE? Do you really think if IE were no longer bundled with Windows it would not decrease the install share of IE?
MS may be losing Web browser market share, but that doesn't mean they will abandon their lock-in or that it is not still helping them. IE is a terrible browser propped up by bundling. MS is not motivated to make it a less terrible browser, just enough so that more people will use it but not enough so that it will enable people to bypass MS's Windows monopoly in an effective way. MS isn't even aiming at making IE better than other browsers, just "good enough" to maintain the largest share while propped up by bundling.
"Microsoft's loss of IE market power, in turn, could have serious consequences for the company's efforts to compete with Google on the Web."
Is it just me, or does this comment seem totally off the wall?
It's just you. MS is competing with Google for Web services. IE is MS's main method illegally leveraging their monopolies against the Web services market to gain market share without having the best Web services. (Noting, of course, that IE's install share is also illegally increased by leveraging Windows.) MS losing market dominance with IE means they can no longer leverage it to prop up inferior Web services, which means they actually have to spend money and compete or lose market share for Web services.
I like Firefox, I think IE sucks. But this whole "market share" thing is silly and fueled by nothing more than people obsessed with hating Microsoft. Guess what. If everyone dumps IE and switches to another browser, Microsoft's loss of revenue is exactly zero.
Their direct loss of revenue is zero, but their loss of revenue because of people no longer having artificial incentive to use Windows because of IE lock-ins is significant. Beyond that, IE has been the main factor holding back innovation in Web technologies for the last decade. The lack of real competition has resulted in the weak and crappy Web we use today, where companies strive to make ever more clever hacks for delivering new content using partially implemented versions of eight year old standards. No one has been able to move forward because developers can't implement technologies IE does not support and expect significant numbers of users and other browser makers know new technologies that IE does not have can't be used so they don't devote resources to implementing them in browsers. With IE at a low enough install share, that situation changes and we can move forwards again. Every time IE drops in share, MS has more incentive to start implementing newer standards and the Web moves forward.
Actually they can usually make a citizen's arrest if they see you physically take the property and commit the crime.
IANAL
It is, however, my understanding that no state in the US applies citizen's arrest powers to non-felonies. You can detain someone if they take something worth more than $1000 or if they cause damage or physical injury in the process. Be very careful about legality if you try to stop someone from committing what you think is a crime. My brother used to be a police officer and now works private security and I get tot hear all his amusing stories about this stuff. If someone grabs merchandise people in his company will follow them and talk to them and tell them to stay and wait for police. For legal reasons they will not try to physically detain a person, even one who is blatantly stealing.
They cannot detain you from leaving unless you've stolen their property (like Levis jeans) which is not the case here.
In most cases they can't even stop you then. They can follow you while talking to the cops on the phone, but they can't physically detain you unless you are posing an immediate physical threat and it is an attempt to stop that threat.
>>>Not many countries have a flat tax rate and you really don't want to live in any of them.
Some of the EU states have a flat tax
There are a few EU members with something close to a flat tax, notably Lithuania, Romania, and Estonia, but like I said, they aren't places most people want to live and have some of the worst standards of living in Europe. I'd credit their economic success more to EU membership than tax policy at this point.
A flat tax helps eliminate a lot of paperwork
Sure it does, but you miss the point. It also creates an unstable economy in that wealth continually consolidates until the system collapses. Flat taxes don't last because economies that rely upon them fail.
This is why some cross-platform projects that start on Linux generally end up being pretty weak on other platforms.
Depends what you're after, a consistent interface on the same platform for different applications or a consistent interface for the same application on different platforms. Choose your poison.
I can see the case for a consistent interface across multiple machines if you work on many, diverse terminals and the like. That's not me. I have a laptop. It runs OS X, WinXP, and Ubuntu. I pick the best application for my purpose that runs well in any of these OS's. I run each application in the OS where it works best. I don't care if I'm running OpenOffice in Windows or OS X or Ubuntu, just what I can do in the most functional one. When you have an application that runs on more than one, I often tend towards OS X simply because it does add on additional functionality (like decent spelling and grammar checking that are already trained from using other applications). Applications that are cross platform and pretty good, but which fail to allow those added features to work are frustrating in the extreme. Here's an app that will run natively on OS X, but you might as well run it in Linux in a VM since it has no more functionality either way.
Packages often replace OS provided functionality with they're own so it's easily possible for an application to have superior functionality to that provided by a particular OS.
The problem being when they don't give the user the choice to use the native functionality. Hey adding on an additional grammar checker is fine, but failing to let me use the default one on the platform sucks. Augmenting good. Replacing bad. In this case it is especially annoying because it doesn't just replace functionality, at the same time it uses nonstandard text handling to make all the add-on and cool customizable functions of OS X accessible only by copying and pasting into another program and back. I mean seriously, is this the early 90's? Shouldn't copying and pasting things into Word to spellcheck then back into your e-mail before sending be a long solved problem? I get my native functionality in a Web application like Google Docs, but not in a full fledged "native" port of OpenOffice. I have to say, I find that pretty weak.
How are you typing? With your mouse?
It's called a "trackpad" and my fingers are already there.
For me, "a slow and tedious workflow" would involve taking my hands off the keyboard in the middle of typing.
For me slow and tedious is opening and closing a separate window to correct the one word I misspelled in an article, instead of simply clicking on it and selecting the word I want from the list. This used to work in OpenOffice.
Spell checking and other interruptions are best left to after I finish typing.
You must make a lot of spelling mistakes. I also like to use the thesaurus to replace words with more precise and varied ones while I'm writing and the context is still foremost in my mind, instead of trying to do so as a separate process at the end (a process which I've seen many people attempt with awkward results).
No, they did not turn that feature off.
It doesn't seem to work anymore in my copy. Version 3.1 on OS X 10.5.6.
Open Office 3.1 also has a fully functional grammar checker that works extremely well on ALL major operating systems (linux/osx/windows).
Funny. I have the grammar checker enabled in OpenOffice. I type in the sentence "Your a loser." In my browser window my grammar checker immediately flags "your" as being incorrect and suggests "you're". In OpenOffice... nothing. If I select Tools: Spelling and Grammar, it says spellcheck complete and gives me an "OK" box to check. The same thing happens if I highlight the sentence. So either it is not working at all, or it sucks and the UI that should tell you it performed a grammar check is also flawed. On top of that, it insists on using its own grammar checker instead of the OS X one which I've spent years training and which I use in pretty much every other program: TextEdit, Photoshop, InDesign, Safari, Mail, Word, Pages, iChat, Tex, heck even Terminal.
Maybe your definition of "extremely well" and mine are slightly different. The really sad thing is, all OpenOffice has to do is use the default text handling APIs on OS X and they'll have a really nice working spelling and grammar checker and dictionary/thesaurus all of which integrates with my other applications. They'd also enable my other services like automatic bibliography entry formatting, language translation, statistical analysis of text, auto summarization, and a variety of scripts I use which work in all my other applications. This is why some cross-platform projects that start on Linux generally end up being pretty weak on other platforms. They limit themselves to whatever the least common denominator OS can handle.
Just checked that out, since I have a story open at the moment. The incorrect word is highlighted with a jagged red line underneath and you right click over the word for a list of suggestions and accesses to dictionaries and such. I use 2.4. You mean they turned that off?
In 2.4 ,regardless of whether or not you select the OS X spell checker in the preferences, you can right click on a word but it will never check it against the OS X spell checker, just the OpenOffice default one.
In OpenOffice 3.1 right clicking a highlighted word brings up the same context menu as right clicking any other text, which is to say just formatting options. But, when you use the spelling checker window, it uses the OS X dictionary including any words you added in other programs.
Neither version seems to support the dictionary/thesaurus or grammar checker or any other OS X services you might use.
That would just be murder, far as I know. How do you compare hiring mercenaries to shoot competitors to paying someone or offering discounts to not stock a product?
Both are breaking the law to undermine the free market. If murder is illegal and undermines the free market, how is antitrust abuse, which is also illegal not undermining the free market? In both cases they are simply a business protecting their markets against competition. Your implication that because the government is involved it is not a free market is thus disproved. If you want to assert antitrust laws hinder rather than protect the free market you need to support that assertion with a different premise.
Your claims of other countries having longer life expectancies due to socialist health care are bogus. They have longer life expectancies because they eat healthier and exercise more.
Why do they eat and exercise more? Do their physicians suggest they do so regularly as part of preventative medicine. Do they see their physician more regularly for this to happen?
As for WHY ours costs more? Because like it or not, we DO have better doctors...
Umm, sure we do. Any evidence to support that hypothesis?
...and our pharmaceutical companies are the ones doing most of the research to create new drugs.
So? They pass on the costs to their customers. Just because the research is done in the US does not mean US citizens are charged more per pill. In fact, drug companies tend to charge higher rates in Europe where people have higher incomes than the US. In canada drug prices are lower because they buy in bulk and because the companies don't add on the cost for advertising to individuals (which is illegal there).
So go ahead, tell that company working on a drug to cure disease XYZ that they can't make charge enough for it to make a profit and then that company will simply shut down and there goes the cure....
A strawman.
You have to think farther along than "I think someone else should pay for me to get medical treatment".
Another strawman.
You don't have much in the way of real support for your ideas do you?
The latest version of OpenOffice is the first one on OS X where the spell checker actually uses the default, built in spell checker on OS X which is used by all the other programs and already programmed with all the preferences and words from my other work. I applaud the addition of this functionality.
Sadly, the UI by which it is accessed is clunky and nonstandard. In every other program, highlighting a word and right clicking on it brings up the context menu that lets me directly select the corrected version of the word. In OpenOffice I have to run the spellchecker which opens a separate window to provide suggestions which I then have to close once I'm done and go back to working. The only usable way to do spellchecking becomes to ignore all spelling errors until I'm done then go through and correct spelling mistakes at the end, a slow and tedious workflow.
Further, In every other program, the context menu that comes up when right clicking on a word allows me to use the dictionary/thesaurus service and to correct grammar mistakes using the universal grammar checker. OpenOffice still ignores the standard APIs and thus still does not have these freebie functions even basic text editors on OS X have. When I have to copy and paste my text out of my full fledged word processor and into a basic text editor in order to check grammar or apply any other text services, well something is wrong. Some of the features OpenOffice does present in their context menus are useful, but really I want to select the correct spelling for a word flagged as misspelled a lot more often than I want to change the font size of a word. The options presented to not reflect my needs and I doubt they reflect the needs of the average user.
So basically my complaint with OpenOffice's user interface is that it does not conform to the standards of the OS on which it is running and instead dumbs down functionality to the level of the lowest common denominator OS.
Except that when the government runs the insurance company, they CAN decide "Well, you're 75 years old and this heart surgery is REALLY expensive......so we've decided it's not in the best interest of the country to pay that much money since you're already old.
As opposed to the private insurance company making that decision like they do now? This problem is actually better with government control because no politician wants to be the one saying it is not cost effective to treat the sick or elderly at some point so policies go into place that prevent just this thing from happening. Government healthcare is answerable to voters. Private insurance companies are answerable to shareholders who can afford to pay their outrageous medical bills out of pocket.
THAT, along with the blatant inefficiency (it's real easy to find the numbers about how long it takes to get treatment -- plenty of examples out there of things like 8 months to live with no treatment for cancer, but due to government run health systems you can't see a doctor for 10 months
Yeah, it is easy to find numbers. What you're talking about though are anecdotes. The numbers say other countries manage to have overall longer lifespans and overall better care while spending half as much as we do. Buying in bulk makes a difference. If we make healthcare in the US socialized and we spend the same amount and our government screws it up badly as we expect them to, we're still almost certain to have better overall care and longer lies than we have today... based upon the numbers from countries that have already done it.
Governments are inefficient bureaucracies, but so are current insurance companies and the government at least has motivation to make individuals happy as they aren't trying to profit. Healthcare, like police and fire departments and military are simply not suited to capitalism because when they are needed consumers don't have the luxury of comparison shopping because they go with the first offer or likely die.
I'm also not nuts about the 50% tax rate (average) in E.U. States. The U.S. tax rate of 40% is still outrageously high, but better.
Actually, too low of tax rates are a big part of what has destabilized the US economy. It's not quite that simple, of course. Not many countries have a flat tax rate and you really don't want to live in any of them. First world nations use progressive taxation coupled with socialism to balance out capitalism and keep it from collapsing under its own weight. In a pure capitalist system having money allows you to make more money more rapidly and all wealth consolidates into fewer and fewer hands until the whole shebang crumbles. In the past this has happened whenever economies have become too heavily capitalist, usually collapsing in a bloody peasant rebellion, but occasionally in a vast economic redistribution ala the New Deal.
To keep wealth from consolidating not based upon merit, but instead upon how much wealth has been accumulated (this is called wealth condensation by the way) we tax people with more wealth, more heavily than people with less wealth. This is called "progressiveness" of taxes. The idea is balance out wealth condensation with the tax rate of the wealthy then use that tax money on socialist programs (public schools and roads and welfare and police and healthcare and the the military, etc.) that benefit everyone. This effectively redistributes wealth from the top down to the bottom of society and prevents all the money from consolidating and the resulting instability.
In the US, the progressiveness of taxes has been slashed to absurd levels and the distribution of wealth has become alarmingly uneven. This is the same thing that happened during the great depression. Obama's very modest plan to return tax progressiveness to the levels they were in the 90's is viewed as radical, but in truth it is probably not even enough to stabilize things. We really need to get rid of the tax shelters and return to levels closer to what we had in the 70s or 80s.
Don't get me wrong, in general I'm in favor of lower overall taxes, but not until we've stabilized the economy, remedied the uneven wealth distribution to safe levels, paid off the national debt to sane levels, and replaced the progressiveness of taxes to sustainable rates. Then, I'm all in favor of cutting taxes, although that doesn't ever really happen. Democrats are focused on getting support via social programs, which need to be paid for, and Republicans as a party claim to be for lowered taxes but any of them that vote to lower government aid to their district is immediately deposed by their constituents and it is the Republican controlled states that are being disproportionately funded by the taxes in the more wealth Democrat controlled states.
The problem with going after Microsoft is that there are far too many deeds they need punished for that it'd tie up the courts system for decades to come, and waste a LOT of EU tax payers money on a show trial.
Well, the EU could make money with fines, so that isn't a big deal, but I do agree taking all of their illegal acts piecemeal as it has been so far is a lost cause. The EU either needs to be much more aggressive with pursuing individual violations and make the punishments really hurt, or they need to take a different tack. Personally, I think they need to coordinate with the US and take a concerted action and break MS up.
It's easier to just ban Microsoft from the EU altogether as an organized crime syndicate. Make their products and services illegal.
This breaks competition just as much as MS's actions do. I also don't think it is practical. It is better to have Windows and other MS products existing in a competitive market and getting better as a result than it is to have them removed from the market.
My solution would probably require the US, but Microsoft should be broken up. After the breakup, at least two new companies should exist, both with all the intellectual property rights to the Windows code base. Each company should have half the monetary and half the human resources. They should be explicitly forbidden from any non-public communications or exclusive partnerships.
Basically, imagine if next year, Dell could license Windows 7A from Company A or Windows 7B from company B. Imagine if Dell could ask them to bid on the contract and took the lowest bid. Imagine if Dell could ask for changes to be implemented and give the bid to whichever company was willing to make the improvements they wanted. Company A and Company B would both be motivated to lower prices on Windows and make improvements OEMs want... just like the free market is supposed to work. Windows would start to get better as the two companies compete and MS could no longer leverage their monopoly power by breaking compatibility because doing so would break compatibility with the other version of Windows, making their product lose significant sales. If they wanted to change some protocol to keep Linux from being able to be interoperable they would have to lose compatibility with the other Windows as well. If they wanted to keep compatibility with the other version of Windows going forward, they'd have to publish and license any changes allowing Linux and OS X to use them as well.
I know a lot of people are both angry with MS and supportive of Linux here, but the move that promotes Linux the most is not necessarily the most practical move or the move that is best for the market overall. Splitting up companies is a classic method for removing monopoly influence and with intellectual property like Windows, this does not have to be too different in principal. The main difficulty with these plan, of course, is the EU is not going to do it on their own for diplomatic reasons and we don't know if Obama's claims to be harder on monopolists is actually going to ever happen.
Every major ideology works just fine if it would be implemented and practiced properly. But none is, due to the "human factor", thus we have failed capitalism and failed socialism.
Umm, ignoring how humans act is kind of a non-starter for any ideology. We don't have failed capitalism or failed socialism. Every reasonably stable economy in the world operates with a mix of both. What fails is extremism. Trying to push an economy too forward towards either socialism or capitalism destabilizes it.