Science and Religion are different bodies of knowledge, but not mutually exclusive
That's a politically correct lie used to avoid alienating religious folk (maybe even to avoid the cognitive dissonance of alientating yourself if you're a religious pseudo-scientist!).
The fact is that science and religion really are, in at least one very core area, mutually exclusive.
This just is not true at all. Many claims made by many specific religions are completely at odds with the likely truth determined by the scientific method whers others are in line. Other claims made by religions deal with topics that are subjective and which science has no way of addressing.
For example, according to ancient Assyrians when I die my consciousness will go to place that is a cave and be ripped apart by demons forever. This is a falsifiable hypothesis. To test it, I can just die and see if it happens. There's science and religion together right there. Now the belief that this will happen before having tested it is unscientific, but said religion does not require belief as a tenet.
...it's not compatible with belief in a god that has any power in any domain covered by a scientific theory.
First, that belief does not equate to religion by a long shot. Second, if you study religion you'll quickly come across the concept of god as a controller or a creator. A god might set in motion all the events necessary for what he wants to come into being and thus have no need to interfere and micromanage. A god (by definition superior to us) might control events subtly enough that we cannot perceive it. Could you not control the life of a colony of ants and, being smarter and more powerful, control their lives reshaping their ant farm without revealing your presence to them? What makes you think a more powerful being than us, one that can fundamentally alter the physics of the universe could not do the same?
Science is limited by those implementing it and while an amazing tool is not all powerful. Note, I'm not trying to promote religion here. I generally find it to be detrimental as a whole and a dangerous social construct at best. I'm just pointing out that it is not incompatible with religion, whereas it may be in conflict with a given belief promoted by a specific religion.
Nope. Darwin's Theory of the Evolution of Species was a theory. It has since been refined into a more accurate and complete theory of evolution of species. Darwinism, is an ill defined term generally used by unscientific people to refer to a broad range of theories or general belief in said theories.
Also, when many people say Creationism they are assuming Judeo/Christian/Islamic Creationism, while there are many other Creationist theories.
Nope. When people say "creationism" they refer to the belief in supernatural creation of the world and/or life. They are not assuming any theory, because as far as I know there has never even been a proper hypothesis, let alone one that was tested and which did not falsify that hypothesis.
Now, here's the logic puzzle I'm talking about. Maybe we can look at it this way... If, back when, Dave Hyatt or Blake Ross and were asking you, "How do we get market share? Should we try to bundle?", how would you answer?
You mean bundle Netscape or Firefox? How could they? What are they going to bundle it with? You're not making sense to me at all.
Then the lords of Opera come to you, seeking council. "We need your advice. We must have more market share. Bundling is the way to get market share, is it not?"
I'd reply, "Umm, sure it is one way, but if you're bundling with a monopoly, it is illegal. What are you planning on bundling it with?"
If they replied they were going to bundle it with a non-monopolized product, I'd advise them it might or might not get them some market share, but making their product the best for users is the way to go.
If MS were to have asked me back in the day I'd say, umm I'm pretty sure that is illegal, lets go talk to the lawyers and then obey the law in that regard. If this were any other industry or the average company they'd talk to the lawyers then offer their browser as a stand alone product, going out of their way to make sure the people marketing it to OEMs was a different sales guy in a separate branch of the company.
The difference between MS and other companies is, MS did have a ton of lawyers at the time and certainly knew their actions were illegal. They bet they could break the law and the courts would be ineffective. By the time anything was done, it would be too late and they could just pay off lawsuits and fines. They bet they could make donations to politicians and have any antitrust case against them squashed. It was illegal and unethical and bad for everyone but MS... and in the USA they were 100% right. Their business model of breaking the law has worked wonderfully. (At least up till now, maybe the EU will finally make them obey the law and make reparations.)
You'll start hearing about "Newtonism" and "Einsteinism" the moment that some conservative (most likely religious) constituency realizes that modern physics challenges their worldview every bit as much as evolutionary biology.
You're being too optimistic. They don't attack evolutionary theory because it is any more opposed to their religious world view, but because it is a good topic to start a controversy and get people mad enough to do what they want. If a preacher tells his audience E=MC^2 is a lie and the bible "proves" it, no one argues because the average person has no understanding of what that means. They can repeat that Einstein was wrong to people everywhere and most of them won't have an opinion so no one fights them strongly and nobody gets mad. Preachers used to attack heliocentrism and the round earth, but those are ideas too simple to understand. Most everyone can understand it fully and see the proof themselves so it is hard to get anyone other than a tiny number of fringe people to fight them, thus giving the preachers less angry people willing to give them money to spread the word and fight the ungodly. Evolution is under attack so much because it is confusing enough that many people don't understand it, but still well supported enough that many people do understand it. This gives rabble rousers a great way to split the country in half and profit and gain power by exploiting that division. This is the same reason preachers attack homosexuality as being opposed to the bible instead of shaving the sides of your beard. If it gets people mad and scared exploitive preachers love it, regardless of whether it is one of the thousands of things where one can find biblical support for fighting reality or societal freedom.
Example; if someone said a watermelon is blue on the inside, but turns red when you cut it open, how could you prove them wrong? How could they prove they're right?
You couldn't and they can't. There is no method available to confirm or disprove what was said about the watermelon.
Sure I can. I'd smash it open instead of cutting it open. If it was blue, your hypothesis just became a theory. Otherwise, you need to go back to the drawing board and create a new hypothesis. Of course your hypothesis already fails in that it contradicts well supported theories of color, such as the requirement for light to be emitted (created transmitted or reflected) from an object and reaching an sensor, such as an eye, for it to have a color.
Honestly enough, I've never really understood any but the most literal creationist's objections to evolution. I mean, why aren't they protesting dinosaurs? Isn't the Earth supposed to be too young for them to have existed?
First, many of them do protest dinosaurs. They are split into camps that claim they are a hoax and camps that claim they existed at the same time as man, within the last few thousand years. Young earth creationists, however, are a fairly small group. Old earth creationists are a much larger group. They accept that the earth has been around a long time and when dinosaurs existed. They accept heliocentrism. Both of those theories are simple and understandable to them and if a preacher tries to convince them the scientists are attacking them by teaching those theories, they stop listening to the preacher.
Evolution is a more complex idea. Most of them don't understand it and it is easy for an exploitive preacher or politician to confuse the issue and conflate evolution with the big bang theory and abiogenesis. By lumping all these theories together and calling it "darwinism" or "evo-athiesm" (two terms used a lot by preachers and not really at all by scientists or anyone else) they create further confusion and at the same time try to imply that all these theories are dependent upon one another and part of a scientific attack on religion.
Most christians and organized religions in general recognize evolution as describing what is happening in the world and can reconcile that with their religious beliefs. Some can reconcile other scientific theories as well. By lumping them, preachers can gain a wider audience and are more likely to strike a belief where the listener has no understanding. This is why only the lunatic fringe can successfully attack the existence or timeframe for dinosaurs, whereas evolution is still a useful topic for them.
Just to clarify. The real quote is, "correlation does not imply any specific causation". While correlations can be coincidental, usually they do imply (not equal) that some causation is at work. It does not specify what that causation is. Probably half of all science is noticing correlations, devising a hypothesis, and testing for a specific causation that is causing the correlation.
Netscape was a fucking AWFUL browser compared to IE. Pinning its downfall on MS's bundling of IE with Windows is a bit far-fetched.
I don't know. I used both back in the day. Anyway, this question is irrelevant for the same reason it will never be answered. Netscape was not given the opportunity to compete in a free market to determine which was better or motivate both to become better. That's was the problem then and it is the problem now. You can theorize all you like, but it does not change that fact, which is the one that really matters.
If bundling is what leads to market share, how did Firefox get 20%?
By being so much better than IE that some people went significantly out of their way and outside their normal behavior to get it instead of IE.
bundling necessarily leads to market share: False. IE is bundled, yet its share has been dropping.
But IE does have significant, some would say overwhelming, market share despite being inferior to pretty every other competitor on the market. Just because they have lost some of it, does not mean they have huge amounts of it due to bundling.
Here's a question for you. Antitrust laws specifically banned bundling of this sort. If you read either law or economics books, bundling of this sort is the first example of antitrust abuse you'll read. If you don't think this type of bundling undermines the market and leads to increased market share for inferior products, why do you suppose it was made illegal in the first place? If you agree with the laws in theory and have seen all the historical examples that made these laws necessary, why do you think MS's bundling is an exception and in what way is it different?
Have you actually used IE8? It's brilliant for standards compliance - I can write a standard XHTML/CSS2 page...
It is certainly an improvement, but I'd say "brilliant" is an overstatement. It still lags others on CSS2.1 (a bit) and CSS 3 (a lot). It is still missing XHTML+XML which everyone else has down. It still lacks usable SVG, XForms, DOM3, etc.
Microsoft is doing very well with IE 8 if you're comparing it to older versions of IE. If you're comparing it to any other major browser including those with shoestring budgets being created by companies with 1/10th the resources MS has, it's still far behind the pack. They deserve praise for improvements, but it is still not nearly enough for their dominant position and antitrust abuse to not be the main thing holding back advancement of Web technologies. Make them compete on even footing with other browsers and watch one of two things happen, their market share tank or a huge increase in development rate. Either one is good for Web users.
Law yes. Market no. The market has no preferences toward stability or growth in any long-term situation or biases towards any greater good. The market is an unthinking non-entity that is invoked to gloss over ideas and trends which economists don't fully understand.
The market isn't used to gloss over anything and it is not as ill defined as you suppose. The press and pundits do occasionally reference "the free market" in general to refer to the economy, but that's not what is going on here. A market is simply a category of product or service as defined by the customers and what options they have when trying to make a purchase or otherwise acquire a good. By law, once a market is dominated by one company or cartel, they cannot use that dominance to undermine competition for goods in other, preexisting markets.
There are two really common categories of abuses used to do this: price fixing and tying. The most common form of tying is bundling. Where most people seem to go wrong is thinking that tying in general or having a monopoly is illegal. Neither is the case. It is illegal to tie/bundle one product from a dominated market to another product in a separate, pre-existing market.
For example, suppose Firefox did gain monopoly influence on the Web browser market. What would that mean to them? Could they still tie Firefox to Google search by making it the default search option? Sure, since Google search is not their own product. Could they still provide Seamonkey which ties Firefox and Thunderbird? Sure, since they also offer Firefox as a stand alone browser. Could they still develop new features? Yes, but they do need to be careful about it. If they're creating features where there is a preexisting market for that function via a plug-in, Firefox developers would have to create it as a plug-in as well and offer it on even footing with other plug-ins. Further, they could not stop offering Firefox as a stand alone application and instead offer only the Seamonkey suite.
Markets aren't some black magic hocus-pocus. They are just who is buying what and what alternatives they have to pick from. Likewise antitrust laws are not too hard to understand. They just mean if you have a monopoly on something (overwhelming influence in a market) you can't use that influence to undermine competition in another market. Anything you do in those other markets has to be fair and anything your competitors can't do because they don't have a monopoly on something else, you can't do either.
In a way antitrust law is a victim of its own success. It does such a good job of motivating most companies to avoid undermining markets, most users simply assume the free market is operating in all markets and don't even understand the difference between a competitive free market and a market undermined by a trust.
I don't get how moving the bundling down to the OEM is a better solution. Sounds like a guaranteed waste of bandwidth, man-hours, and electricity, to me.
Competition works to drive innovation because individuals are motivated to choose the best product for themselves out of self interest. Sellers are motivated to produce and sell what consumers want out of greed. Right now the market is very broken. MS doesn't lose significant money if IE sucks or is broken and, in fact, can gain money in their other businesses by keeping it broken. Additionally, they can gain money by introducing anti-features which redirect users to inferior products and services they profit from.
Theoretically, moving the choice of which browser to bundle to the OEM will result in OEMs making choices they think will make them the most money by giving them the lowest support costs and making their customers the happiest. They, theoretically, have no motivation to pick an inferior browser or one with anti-features.
Realistically, with the market in its current state, putting the choice of the browser in the hands of the OEMs is only a partial solution. This is because MS has a lot of power over them and can pressure them (secretly and illegally) to install only IE using differential pricing schemes. Normally, governments would not take precautions against this, but MS has shown they will and do break antitrust law whenever it suits them. After the third or fourth repeat offense even the most lax judge starts to look for a way to prevent repetition of the crime. Further, at this point the Web itself, including MS provided services and pages from other vendors are broken in such a way that OEMs are motivated to stick with the status quo. Simply moving the choice of the browser to the OEMs will have little or no effect unless developers are motivated to fix compliance and interoperability issues MS intentionally caused. One remedy that might be effective is to give OEMs the choice of browser, but force MS into compliance with all open Web standards that have working implementations by at least two other major Web browser developers and appoint someone to watch for compliance and effective punishments for noncompliance. These two remedies together could have significant impact, but either alone is unlikely to be sufficient and the latter is very hard to implement effectively.
So now the users have to spend extra time removing the files the government feels should be in there. Including the registry files, and who knows what other hidden files.
If that is the EU's chosen remedy, yes. Don't like it, start a class action against MS for the time it is wasting you and you'll probably win since it is the foreseeable result of a criminal action on their part.
Yes these criminals, preventing FireFox from getting 20% market share on their own.
No, those criminals preventing Firefox from getting whatever market share they would have in a free market, almost certainly a much larger percentage.
A broken website is not costing Opera money.
They spend millions reverse engineering IE's brokenness and implementing a compatibility mode for those bugs. How is that not costing them money.
If a site is not open compliance and doesn't work well with other browsers then you may want to blame the programmer of the site.
Instead of the company who broke the law to create those sites and who the courts have discovered did so intentionally as a way to hurt other browser makers? Coding for what was 90% of the market and ignoring 10% may have been a bas choice, but it is an understandable one. Breaking the market such that developers had to make that choice, however, was criminal.
If MS wants it's own sites to only work with MS products that is their choice, and it is your choice to boycott MS.
And is it Dell's choice, or does MS have so much influence in the desktop computer space that they can dictate to Dell what they do in the browser space? Antitrust law isn't about MS forcing me to do something, it's about them illegally undermining the market so in my own best interests I end up making choices that benefit MS and hurt everyone else.
Apparantly FireFox doesn't have the issue Opera does.
Certainly they do, although one executive there claims otherwise.
As for the laws, you really shouldn't comment about what I do or don't know. Makes you seem moronic...
Ahh, personal assaults, how persuasive and logical. You demonstrated significant ignorance of the laws already. My pointing out your ignorance is important to the point.
1) A gov't's ability to create/enforce law doesn't make it the right thing to do. So using that as part of your argument, especially on this forum, is ridiculous
Nope. Nor does the fact that pretty much every country around the world has similar antitrust laws. But neither does either fact make the laws wrong. Do explain, why antitrust laws are no longer needed and how the market will magically recover itself despite all historical and economic evidence and theory demonstrating the opposite. I'm all ears on this one.
2) The market is not broken due to MS.
I see all the courts that have convicted them were wrong. What part of the rulings do you disagree with? Does MS not have monopoly influence? Did they not ties it to another market? Are the economic models and historical evidence that this undermines the markets wrong? Has the Web technologies market been as innovative as we would expect a computer technology to be over a decade?
If you don't like it buy another OS.
I do actually, but that doesn't mean I don't suffer financially from their antitrust abuse anyway. Whether or not I buy Windows has nothing to do with whether or not I suffer because of MS's undermining the Web browser market.
First you are saying the gov't should regulate and in the other way you are saying if you don't like it get something else.
I'm saying both of those things, yes. They are not contradictory. They are separate markets.
Um, if the bundled app does the task, why is it lazy of the user not to download something else?
Because it does the task "well enough" not better than the competition. If the market does not give customers and equal choice among options, the best product does not win.
So let's say Microsoft throws in the towel and bundle firefox with windows...and have its home page set to msn.com. It would really be a win/win for Microsoft... Microsoft might actually be better off to bundle Firefox and control the home page.
Microsoft has two important tasks for the browser. It is their first line of defense of their Windows monopoly. People can't switch to other OS's if Web pages and applications are locked into proprietary technologies and broken versions of standard technologies. People can't switch OS's if their applications are to cross platform in general so keeping Web technologies crippled or tied to Windows is of huge importance to them for stopping Web apps as a route to OS independence.
MS's second big goal for IE is promoting their own Web services and proprietary Web applications. So far, this has been a lesser goal for them, but they're pushing hard for an 'application as a service' business model. Controlling the start page is important for that goal, but not nearly as important as making sure users of heir new services are locked in and can't migrate away. To some degree the services themselves facilitate this, but IE and closed protocols only implemented by MS is currently important to that strategy.
As for your suggestion about a distribution with all settings in a database. It's called the Windows Registry, and we all know how well _that_ works.
If you're going to discount using any technology MS has a terrible implementation of we'll have to stop using everything, including OS's in general. Not that I think a database of configuration settings is necessarily a good idea, I just don't accept your logic against it.
It was more than just bundling. If all they did was bundle, it wouldn't have been a problem.
Who mods this "informative"? Just bundling a monopolized product with a product from a separate market is plenty of a problem. It undermines the free market forces and is illegal. I suppose one could argue that is not "just" bundling but a specific type of bundling. That said, all the other actions MS took to break interoperability and prevent uninstallation were extras on top of the crime. Even without them, MS would be guilty in the courts and the free market would be prevented from effective operation.
If the Eu wants to force MS to bundle additional software into their OS, then fine, the EU should also be paying for the extra space that software takes on my HD.
Yeah, and they should pay for the gas it takes for transporting all those safety features in your car too. Or you could, you know, delete the browsers you don't want.
For all those who complain about big-gov't and their hand in the cookie-jar - this is it.
Blah blah blah.
This is the government stopping corporate criminals instead of being easily bribed like the US government was. I wish US politicians has as much integrity.
This is a company, Opera, crying to the gov't because Opera failed at their product. How did they fail?
Opera makes its money with Opera Mobile. They're doing well. They're also spending millions needlessly in order to work around slews of broken Web pages that investigations have shown MS intentionally created as a way to break interoperability. This is Opera reporting a crime that is costing them money and expecting the government to enforce the laws on the books that everyone else has to obey.
The only difference between this and a pizza joint calling the cops when the mob burns down one of their restaurants is that you understand arson laws while you have no understanding of antitrust laws... either what they say or why they exist.
I use FireFox, I love FireFox - but if I didn't why should I have my HD congested with their install because the gov't said so?
Actually, no government has said so or even proposed it as a possibility. It is just speculation from people about possible remedies. If the EU were to require Firefox and other browsers to be bundled in order to help undo the damage that MS has done, they are well within their rights. The market is broken and MS will hopefully be required to do whatever is needed to correct it. If you don't like it, buy a different OS or buy a version of the OS repackaged by an OEM or other non-monopolist to have those items you don't like stripped out. There is no reason every Web browser company and every Web user should suffer reduced innovation and interoperability just because you would have to delete a few files. Sorry if it is inconvenient, MS should have thought of that before they broke the law in the first place. If you want to be mad about the inconvenience, maybe you should look at the criminal instead of the victim.
Sure, you and I could work around it by burning a disc on another computer. What about mom?
If your mom is technical enough that she has installed an OS, then she is probably technical enough to know she will have to burn a browser to disk before installing a new OS. Normal people, like my mom, just buy a computer with the OS and browser pre-installed and if they need to re-install they find a local computer geek or take it to BestBuy.
How to you quantify "better?" I know you can say FF is faster, or more standards complaint or whatever.. but I supsect the average user doesn't case about these things. If both FF and IE display the webpages they want, and the user don't care about anything else... in what way is FF "better?"
Ever met a user who used tabbed browser windows then voluntarily gave them up? They were an enormous UI improvement for the vast majority of users. Firefox implemented them for five years before IE added them. That's just one example, but for almost any area you look at IE has been lagging the competition significantly.
I'd also mention that there is one area where IE is ahead and that is in its ability to read broken pages written specifically for IE. I'd also note this area of being "better" is an artificial feature caused by their intentional, illegal abuse of their monopoly position.
They wouldn't be attacked by the EU if they would allow the user to remove the stuff they install. Ever tried removing IE7? That's why the EU is going after MS.
This is factually incorrect. Simply bundling the software in the first place undermines the market and breaks the law.
The second part, I'm not as sure of. Even though you only want to watch most things once, portability is still of value - because you may want to watch something on a laptop, or portable device (like an iPhone or other small media player).
I agree you may want to watch it on such a device, but generally just one device. Usually, it is a device you are also using to purchase said content. So I may want to watch a movie on my laptop, but I'm also buying it from my laptop and so DRM restrictions usually never come into play. I may want to watch it on a smartphone or the like, but I generally buy it using that device too. In some cases you currently buy video via your laptop to watch on your network unaware device, but that use case is probably dying as networking becomes more prevalent.
The remaining use case where DRM is a problem is if you start watching it on your home game console, and would like to finish watching it on your laptop on the train ride to work... but I think that is a less common scenario and will not be a major impediment to uptake.
So I don't know where all that will go, but I guess in the end it does not matter to nearly as many people as music being opened up does.
And that, I think, is the crux of the matter and why DRM for video is less likely to go away by the actions of those in the industry, or to go away at all really.
I bet the antivirus companies didn't have it right away because they get their earliest warnings from honeypot machines and this one uses an offline vector.
Well, they also monitor network traffic looking for network usage signatures that are likely to be worms or viruses and do not match known malware. I suspect the limited range of this malware causes little traffic, since it is only machines from a tiny number of people who obtained a flyer. It is likely just not big enough to have shown up yet.
I disagree. The industry would ahve seen the light sooner or later, even if it was out of desperation.
Actually, by the time the industry saw the light it would have been too late. They would have blindly walked into MS proprietary DRM and would be positioned against another abusive trust, but one with a history of abusing their way into new markets with alacrity.
Right now the RIAA has to walk away from DRM or the iPod listening market or capitulate to Apple on some matters. Without Apple, they'd be looking at walking away from users of all portable players and computers and the Xbox or capitulate to MS and MS is a lot more likely and in a better position to split or undermine their trust.
I'm not even sure they have the same drive to try and get rid of the DRM they did with music. I don't know if that industry can be saved as easily.
There is a significant difference between the use cases and hence usability of DRM in the two industries. With music, almost everyone wants to keep it forever and listen to it many times over many years. Getting people to agree to rent music would require huge discount prices, likely just minimal advertising with free songs.
With video, most people only want to watch it once, or maybe once and then a second time years later (with some exceptions). DRM that prevents it from playing on different devices over time or making it hard to move, does not create as significant of a usability problem or bother most users. It is less of an issue for companies like Apple so they have less incentive to fight it.
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Science and Religion are different bodies of knowledge, but not mutually exclusive
That's a politically correct lie used to avoid alienating religious folk (maybe even to avoid the cognitive dissonance of alientating yourself if you're a religious pseudo-scientist!). The fact is that science and religion really are, in at least one very core area, mutually exclusive.
This just is not true at all. Many claims made by many specific religions are completely at odds with the likely truth determined by the scientific method whers others are in line. Other claims made by religions deal with topics that are subjective and which science has no way of addressing.
For example, according to ancient Assyrians when I die my consciousness will go to place that is a cave and be ripped apart by demons forever. This is a falsifiable hypothesis. To test it, I can just die and see if it happens. There's science and religion together right there. Now the belief that this will happen before having tested it is unscientific, but said religion does not require belief as a tenet.
...it's not compatible with belief in a god that has any power in any domain covered by a scientific theory.
First, that belief does not equate to religion by a long shot. Second, if you study religion you'll quickly come across the concept of god as a controller or a creator. A god might set in motion all the events necessary for what he wants to come into being and thus have no need to interfere and micromanage. A god (by definition superior to us) might control events subtly enough that we cannot perceive it. Could you not control the life of a colony of ants and, being smarter and more powerful, control their lives reshaping their ant farm without revealing your presence to them? What makes you think a more powerful being than us, one that can fundamentally alter the physics of the universe could not do the same?
Science is limited by those implementing it and while an amazing tool is not all powerful. Note, I'm not trying to promote religion here. I generally find it to be detrimental as a whole and a dangerous social construct at best. I'm just pointing out that it is not incompatible with religion, whereas it may be in conflict with a given belief promoted by a specific religion.
.. that's because Darwinism IS a theory.
Nope. Darwin's Theory of the Evolution of Species was a theory. It has since been refined into a more accurate and complete theory of evolution of species. Darwinism, is an ill defined term generally used by unscientific people to refer to a broad range of theories or general belief in said theories.
Also, when many people say Creationism they are assuming Judeo/Christian/Islamic Creationism, while there are many other Creationist theories.
Nope. When people say "creationism" they refer to the belief in supernatural creation of the world and/or life. They are not assuming any theory, because as far as I know there has never even been a proper hypothesis, let alone one that was tested and which did not falsify that hypothesis.
Now, here's the logic puzzle I'm talking about. Maybe we can look at it this way... If, back when, Dave Hyatt or Blake Ross and were asking you, "How do we get market share? Should we try to bundle?", how would you answer?
You mean bundle Netscape or Firefox? How could they? What are they going to bundle it with? You're not making sense to me at all.
Then the lords of Opera come to you, seeking council. "We need your advice. We must have more market share. Bundling is the way to get market share, is it not?"
I'd reply, "Umm, sure it is one way, but if you're bundling with a monopoly, it is illegal. What are you planning on bundling it with?"
If they replied they were going to bundle it with a non-monopolized product, I'd advise them it might or might not get them some market share, but making their product the best for users is the way to go.
If MS were to have asked me back in the day I'd say, umm I'm pretty sure that is illegal, lets go talk to the lawyers and then obey the law in that regard. If this were any other industry or the average company they'd talk to the lawyers then offer their browser as a stand alone product, going out of their way to make sure the people marketing it to OEMs was a different sales guy in a separate branch of the company.
The difference between MS and other companies is, MS did have a ton of lawyers at the time and certainly knew their actions were illegal. They bet they could break the law and the courts would be ineffective. By the time anything was done, it would be too late and they could just pay off lawsuits and fines. They bet they could make donations to politicians and have any antitrust case against them squashed. It was illegal and unethical and bad for everyone but MS... and in the USA they were 100% right. Their business model of breaking the law has worked wonderfully. (At least up till now, maybe the EU will finally make them obey the law and make reparations.)
You'll start hearing about "Newtonism" and "Einsteinism" the moment that some conservative (most likely religious) constituency realizes that modern physics challenges their worldview every bit as much as evolutionary biology.
You're being too optimistic. They don't attack evolutionary theory because it is any more opposed to their religious world view, but because it is a good topic to start a controversy and get people mad enough to do what they want. If a preacher tells his audience E=MC^2 is a lie and the bible "proves" it, no one argues because the average person has no understanding of what that means. They can repeat that Einstein was wrong to people everywhere and most of them won't have an opinion so no one fights them strongly and nobody gets mad. Preachers used to attack heliocentrism and the round earth, but those are ideas too simple to understand. Most everyone can understand it fully and see the proof themselves so it is hard to get anyone other than a tiny number of fringe people to fight them, thus giving the preachers less angry people willing to give them money to spread the word and fight the ungodly. Evolution is under attack so much because it is confusing enough that many people don't understand it, but still well supported enough that many people do understand it. This gives rabble rousers a great way to split the country in half and profit and gain power by exploiting that division. This is the same reason preachers attack homosexuality as being opposed to the bible instead of shaving the sides of your beard. If it gets people mad and scared exploitive preachers love it, regardless of whether it is one of the thousands of things where one can find biblical support for fighting reality or societal freedom.
I used to think the brain was the most amazing organ in the body... and then I realized what was telling me that. -Emo Philips
Example; if someone said a watermelon is blue on the inside, but turns red when you cut it open, how could you prove them wrong? How could they prove they're right? You couldn't and they can't. There is no method available to confirm or disprove what was said about the watermelon.
Sure I can. I'd smash it open instead of cutting it open. If it was blue, your hypothesis just became a theory. Otherwise, you need to go back to the drawing board and create a new hypothesis. Of course your hypothesis already fails in that it contradicts well supported theories of color, such as the requirement for light to be emitted (created transmitted or reflected) from an object and reaching an sensor, such as an eye, for it to have a color.
Honestly enough, I've never really understood any but the most literal creationist's objections to evolution. I mean, why aren't they protesting dinosaurs? Isn't the Earth supposed to be too young for them to have existed?
First, many of them do protest dinosaurs. They are split into camps that claim they are a hoax and camps that claim they existed at the same time as man, within the last few thousand years. Young earth creationists, however, are a fairly small group. Old earth creationists are a much larger group. They accept that the earth has been around a long time and when dinosaurs existed. They accept heliocentrism. Both of those theories are simple and understandable to them and if a preacher tries to convince them the scientists are attacking them by teaching those theories, they stop listening to the preacher.
Evolution is a more complex idea. Most of them don't understand it and it is easy for an exploitive preacher or politician to confuse the issue and conflate evolution with the big bang theory and abiogenesis. By lumping all these theories together and calling it "darwinism" or "evo-athiesm" (two terms used a lot by preachers and not really at all by scientists or anyone else) they create further confusion and at the same time try to imply that all these theories are dependent upon one another and part of a scientific attack on religion.
Most christians and organized religions in general recognize evolution as describing what is happening in the world and can reconcile that with their religious beliefs. Some can reconcile other scientific theories as well. By lumping them, preachers can gain a wider audience and are more likely to strike a belief where the listener has no understanding. This is why only the lunatic fringe can successfully attack the existence or timeframe for dinosaurs, whereas evolution is still a useful topic for them.
Uh-oh... correlation does not equal causation :)
Just to clarify. The real quote is, "correlation does not imply any specific causation". While correlations can be coincidental, usually they do imply (not equal) that some causation is at work. It does not specify what that causation is. Probably half of all science is noticing correlations, devising a hypothesis, and testing for a specific causation that is causing the correlation.
Netscape was a fucking AWFUL browser compared to IE. Pinning its downfall on MS's bundling of IE with Windows is a bit far-fetched.
I don't know. I used both back in the day. Anyway, this question is irrelevant for the same reason it will never be answered. Netscape was not given the opportunity to compete in a free market to determine which was better or motivate both to become better. That's was the problem then and it is the problem now. You can theorize all you like, but it does not change that fact, which is the one that really matters.
If bundling is what leads to market share, how did Firefox get 20%?
By being so much better than IE that some people went significantly out of their way and outside their normal behavior to get it instead of IE.
bundling necessarily leads to market share: False. IE is bundled, yet its share has been dropping.
But IE does have significant, some would say overwhelming, market share despite being inferior to pretty every other competitor on the market. Just because they have lost some of it, does not mean they have huge amounts of it due to bundling.
Here's a question for you. Antitrust laws specifically banned bundling of this sort. If you read either law or economics books, bundling of this sort is the first example of antitrust abuse you'll read. If you don't think this type of bundling undermines the market and leads to increased market share for inferior products, why do you suppose it was made illegal in the first place? If you agree with the laws in theory and have seen all the historical examples that made these laws necessary, why do you think MS's bundling is an exception and in what way is it different?
Have you actually used IE8? It's brilliant for standards compliance - I can write a standard XHTML/CSS2 page...
It is certainly an improvement, but I'd say "brilliant" is an overstatement. It still lags others on CSS2.1 (a bit) and CSS 3 (a lot). It is still missing XHTML+XML which everyone else has down. It still lacks usable SVG, XForms, DOM3, etc.
Microsoft is doing very well with IE 8 if you're comparing it to older versions of IE. If you're comparing it to any other major browser including those with shoestring budgets being created by companies with 1/10th the resources MS has, it's still far behind the pack. They deserve praise for improvements, but it is still not nearly enough for their dominant position and antitrust abuse to not be the main thing holding back advancement of Web technologies. Make them compete on even footing with other browsers and watch one of two things happen, their market share tank or a huge increase in development rate. Either one is good for Web users.
Law yes. Market no. The market has no preferences toward stability or growth in any long-term situation or biases towards any greater good. The market is an unthinking non-entity that is invoked to gloss over ideas and trends which economists don't fully understand.
The market isn't used to gloss over anything and it is not as ill defined as you suppose. The press and pundits do occasionally reference "the free market" in general to refer to the economy, but that's not what is going on here. A market is simply a category of product or service as defined by the customers and what options they have when trying to make a purchase or otherwise acquire a good. By law, once a market is dominated by one company or cartel, they cannot use that dominance to undermine competition for goods in other, preexisting markets.
There are two really common categories of abuses used to do this: price fixing and tying. The most common form of tying is bundling. Where most people seem to go wrong is thinking that tying in general or having a monopoly is illegal. Neither is the case. It is illegal to tie/bundle one product from a dominated market to another product in a separate, pre-existing market.
For example, suppose Firefox did gain monopoly influence on the Web browser market. What would that mean to them? Could they still tie Firefox to Google search by making it the default search option? Sure, since Google search is not their own product. Could they still provide Seamonkey which ties Firefox and Thunderbird? Sure, since they also offer Firefox as a stand alone browser. Could they still develop new features? Yes, but they do need to be careful about it. If they're creating features where there is a preexisting market for that function via a plug-in, Firefox developers would have to create it as a plug-in as well and offer it on even footing with other plug-ins. Further, they could not stop offering Firefox as a stand alone application and instead offer only the Seamonkey suite.
Markets aren't some black magic hocus-pocus. They are just who is buying what and what alternatives they have to pick from. Likewise antitrust laws are not too hard to understand. They just mean if you have a monopoly on something (overwhelming influence in a market) you can't use that influence to undermine competition in another market. Anything you do in those other markets has to be fair and anything your competitors can't do because they don't have a monopoly on something else, you can't do either.
In a way antitrust law is a victim of its own success. It does such a good job of motivating most companies to avoid undermining markets, most users simply assume the free market is operating in all markets and don't even understand the difference between a competitive free market and a market undermined by a trust.
I don't get how moving the bundling down to the OEM is a better solution. Sounds like a guaranteed waste of bandwidth, man-hours, and electricity, to me.
Competition works to drive innovation because individuals are motivated to choose the best product for themselves out of self interest. Sellers are motivated to produce and sell what consumers want out of greed. Right now the market is very broken. MS doesn't lose significant money if IE sucks or is broken and, in fact, can gain money in their other businesses by keeping it broken. Additionally, they can gain money by introducing anti-features which redirect users to inferior products and services they profit from.
Theoretically, moving the choice of which browser to bundle to the OEM will result in OEMs making choices they think will make them the most money by giving them the lowest support costs and making their customers the happiest. They, theoretically, have no motivation to pick an inferior browser or one with anti-features.
Realistically, with the market in its current state, putting the choice of the browser in the hands of the OEMs is only a partial solution. This is because MS has a lot of power over them and can pressure them (secretly and illegally) to install only IE using differential pricing schemes. Normally, governments would not take precautions against this, but MS has shown they will and do break antitrust law whenever it suits them. After the third or fourth repeat offense even the most lax judge starts to look for a way to prevent repetition of the crime. Further, at this point the Web itself, including MS provided services and pages from other vendors are broken in such a way that OEMs are motivated to stick with the status quo. Simply moving the choice of the browser to the OEMs will have little or no effect unless developers are motivated to fix compliance and interoperability issues MS intentionally caused. One remedy that might be effective is to give OEMs the choice of browser, but force MS into compliance with all open Web standards that have working implementations by at least two other major Web browser developers and appoint someone to watch for compliance and effective punishments for noncompliance. These two remedies together could have significant impact, but either alone is unlikely to be sufficient and the latter is very hard to implement effectively.
So now the users have to spend extra time removing the files the government feels should be in there. Including the registry files, and who knows what other hidden files.
If that is the EU's chosen remedy, yes. Don't like it, start a class action against MS for the time it is wasting you and you'll probably win since it is the foreseeable result of a criminal action on their part.
Yes these criminals, preventing FireFox from getting 20% market share on their own.
No, those criminals preventing Firefox from getting whatever market share they would have in a free market, almost certainly a much larger percentage.
A broken website is not costing Opera money.
They spend millions reverse engineering IE's brokenness and implementing a compatibility mode for those bugs. How is that not costing them money.
If a site is not open compliance and doesn't work well with other browsers then you may want to blame the programmer of the site.
Instead of the company who broke the law to create those sites and who the courts have discovered did so intentionally as a way to hurt other browser makers? Coding for what was 90% of the market and ignoring 10% may have been a bas choice, but it is an understandable one. Breaking the market such that developers had to make that choice, however, was criminal.
If MS wants it's own sites to only work with MS products that is their choice, and it is your choice to boycott MS.
And is it Dell's choice, or does MS have so much influence in the desktop computer space that they can dictate to Dell what they do in the browser space? Antitrust law isn't about MS forcing me to do something, it's about them illegally undermining the market so in my own best interests I end up making choices that benefit MS and hurt everyone else.
Apparantly FireFox doesn't have the issue Opera does.
Certainly they do, although one executive there claims otherwise.
As for the laws, you really shouldn't comment about what I do or don't know. Makes you seem moronic...
Ahh, personal assaults, how persuasive and logical. You demonstrated significant ignorance of the laws already. My pointing out your ignorance is important to the point.
1) A gov't's ability to create/enforce law doesn't make it the right thing to do. So using that as part of your argument, especially on this forum, is ridiculous
Nope. Nor does the fact that pretty much every country around the world has similar antitrust laws. But neither does either fact make the laws wrong. Do explain, why antitrust laws are no longer needed and how the market will magically recover itself despite all historical and economic evidence and theory demonstrating the opposite. I'm all ears on this one.
2) The market is not broken due to MS.
I see all the courts that have convicted them were wrong. What part of the rulings do you disagree with? Does MS not have monopoly influence? Did they not ties it to another market? Are the economic models and historical evidence that this undermines the markets wrong? Has the Web technologies market been as innovative as we would expect a computer technology to be over a decade?
If you don't like it buy another OS.
I do actually, but that doesn't mean I don't suffer financially from their antitrust abuse anyway. Whether or not I buy Windows has nothing to do with whether or not I suffer because of MS's undermining the Web browser market.
First you are saying the gov't should regulate and in the other way you are saying if you don't like it get something else.
I'm saying both of those things, yes. They are not contradictory. They are separate markets.
t is your opinion that IE is reduced in
Um, if the bundled app does the task, why is it lazy of the user not to download something else?
Because it does the task "well enough" not better than the competition. If the market does not give customers and equal choice among options, the best product does not win.
So let's say Microsoft throws in the towel and bundle firefox with windows...and have its home page set to msn.com. It would really be a win/win for Microsoft... Microsoft might actually be better off to bundle Firefox and control the home page.
Microsoft has two important tasks for the browser. It is their first line of defense of their Windows monopoly. People can't switch to other OS's if Web pages and applications are locked into proprietary technologies and broken versions of standard technologies. People can't switch OS's if their applications are to cross platform in general so keeping Web technologies crippled or tied to Windows is of huge importance to them for stopping Web apps as a route to OS independence.
MS's second big goal for IE is promoting their own Web services and proprietary Web applications. So far, this has been a lesser goal for them, but they're pushing hard for an 'application as a service' business model. Controlling the start page is important for that goal, but not nearly as important as making sure users of heir new services are locked in and can't migrate away. To some degree the services themselves facilitate this, but IE and closed protocols only implemented by MS is currently important to that strategy.
As for your suggestion about a distribution with all settings in a database. It's called the Windows Registry, and we all know how well _that_ works.
If you're going to discount using any technology MS has a terrible implementation of we'll have to stop using everything, including OS's in general. Not that I think a database of configuration settings is necessarily a good idea, I just don't accept your logic against it.
It was more than just bundling. If all they did was bundle, it wouldn't have been a problem.
Who mods this "informative"? Just bundling a monopolized product with a product from a separate market is plenty of a problem. It undermines the free market forces and is illegal. I suppose one could argue that is not "just" bundling but a specific type of bundling. That said, all the other actions MS took to break interoperability and prevent uninstallation were extras on top of the crime. Even without them, MS would be guilty in the courts and the free market would be prevented from effective operation.
If the Eu wants to force MS to bundle additional software into their OS, then fine, the EU should also be paying for the extra space that software takes on my HD.
Yeah, and they should pay for the gas it takes for transporting all those safety features in your car too. Or you could, you know, delete the browsers you don't want.
For all those who complain about big-gov't and their hand in the cookie-jar - this is it.
Blah blah blah.
This is the government stopping corporate criminals instead of being easily bribed like the US government was. I wish US politicians has as much integrity.
This is a company, Opera, crying to the gov't because Opera failed at their product. How did they fail?
Opera makes its money with Opera Mobile. They're doing well. They're also spending millions needlessly in order to work around slews of broken Web pages that investigations have shown MS intentionally created as a way to break interoperability. This is Opera reporting a crime that is costing them money and expecting the government to enforce the laws on the books that everyone else has to obey.
The only difference between this and a pizza joint calling the cops when the mob burns down one of their restaurants is that you understand arson laws while you have no understanding of antitrust laws... either what they say or why they exist.
I use FireFox, I love FireFox - but if I didn't why should I have my HD congested with their install because the gov't said so?
Actually, no government has said so or even proposed it as a possibility. It is just speculation from people about possible remedies. If the EU were to require Firefox and other browsers to be bundled in order to help undo the damage that MS has done, they are well within their rights. The market is broken and MS will hopefully be required to do whatever is needed to correct it. If you don't like it, buy a different OS or buy a version of the OS repackaged by an OEM or other non-monopolist to have those items you don't like stripped out. There is no reason every Web browser company and every Web user should suffer reduced innovation and interoperability just because you would have to delete a few files. Sorry if it is inconvenient, MS should have thought of that before they broke the law in the first place. If you want to be mad about the inconvenience, maybe you should look at the criminal instead of the victim.
Sure, you and I could work around it by burning a disc on another computer. What about mom?
If your mom is technical enough that she has installed an OS, then she is probably technical enough to know she will have to burn a browser to disk before installing a new OS. Normal people, like my mom, just buy a computer with the OS and browser pre-installed and if they need to re-install they find a local computer geek or take it to BestBuy.
If being better
How to you quantify "better?" I know you can say FF is faster, or more standards complaint or whatever.. but I supsect the average user doesn't case about these things. If both FF and IE display the webpages they want, and the user don't care about anything else... in what way is FF "better?"
Ever met a user who used tabbed browser windows then voluntarily gave them up? They were an enormous UI improvement for the vast majority of users. Firefox implemented them for five years before IE added them. That's just one example, but for almost any area you look at IE has been lagging the competition significantly.
I'd also mention that there is one area where IE is ahead and that is in its ability to read broken pages written specifically for IE. I'd also note this area of being "better" is an artificial feature caused by their intentional, illegal abuse of their monopoly position.
They wouldn't be attacked by the EU if they would allow the user to remove the stuff they install. Ever tried removing IE7? That's why the EU is going after MS.
This is factually incorrect. Simply bundling the software in the first place undermines the market and breaks the law.
The second part, I'm not as sure of. Even though you only want to watch most things once, portability is still of value - because you may want to watch something on a laptop, or portable device (like an iPhone or other small media player).
I agree you may want to watch it on such a device, but generally just one device. Usually, it is a device you are also using to purchase said content. So I may want to watch a movie on my laptop, but I'm also buying it from my laptop and so DRM restrictions usually never come into play. I may want to watch it on a smartphone or the like, but I generally buy it using that device too. In some cases you currently buy video via your laptop to watch on your network unaware device, but that use case is probably dying as networking becomes more prevalent.
The remaining use case where DRM is a problem is if you start watching it on your home game console, and would like to finish watching it on your laptop on the train ride to work... but I think that is a less common scenario and will not be a major impediment to uptake.
So I don't know where all that will go, but I guess in the end it does not matter to nearly as many people as music being opened up does.
And that, I think, is the crux of the matter and why DRM for video is less likely to go away by the actions of those in the industry, or to go away at all really.
I bet the antivirus companies didn't have it right away because they get their earliest warnings from honeypot machines and this one uses an offline vector.
Well, they also monitor network traffic looking for network usage signatures that are likely to be worms or viruses and do not match known malware. I suspect the limited range of this malware causes little traffic, since it is only machines from a tiny number of people who obtained a flyer. It is likely just not big enough to have shown up yet.
I disagree. The industry would ahve seen the light sooner or later, even if it was out of desperation.
Actually, by the time the industry saw the light it would have been too late. They would have blindly walked into MS proprietary DRM and would be positioned against another abusive trust, but one with a history of abusing their way into new markets with alacrity.
Right now the RIAA has to walk away from DRM or the iPod listening market or capitulate to Apple on some matters. Without Apple, they'd be looking at walking away from users of all portable players and computers and the Xbox or capitulate to MS and MS is a lot more likely and in a better position to split or undermine their trust.
I'm not even sure they have the same drive to try and get rid of the DRM they did with music. I don't know if that industry can be saved as easily.
There is a significant difference between the use cases and hence usability of DRM in the two industries. With music, almost everyone wants to keep it forever and listen to it many times over many years. Getting people to agree to rent music would require huge discount prices, likely just minimal advertising with free songs.
With video, most people only want to watch it once, or maybe once and then a second time years later (with some exceptions). DRM that prevents it from playing on different devices over time or making it hard to move, does not create as significant of a usability problem or bother most users. It is less of an issue for companies like Apple so they have less incentive to fight it.