Why should Microsoft do that? Because the EU isn't afraid to collect 1 mio. Euros per day in fines if they don't. Like, you know, that other large western country where they prefer having criminals in office to prosecuting them.
Unbundling it would mean the OS doesn't have a functioning browser The horror! The horror! They'd have to put extra CDs with IE on it into the shops. Only, you know, that's an option the competition can also make use of, at which point we have a market, and market mechanics can sort things out, as in the better offering wins. Right now, we don't have a market, we have a monopoly.
I dislike MS's monopolistic practices as much as anyone. But really, there's not much harm in bundling an OS with a browser IF they don't prevent OEMs from including other browsers or from removing the IE icon from the desktop. It's not about dislike, it's about illegal. MS is a convicted monopolist and the rules are different for them. They are leveraging their OS monopoly to dominate the browser market, and they are using their dominance in the browser market to damage competitors. Without the lever, the intentional incompatabilities of IE would make it 3rd choice or drive it into extinction. With the lever, web designers are forced to adapt to the "quirks" instead, producing webpages that work well on IE but not so on other (standards-complient) browsers, which in turn drives more people to IE, creating a lock-in effect.
And somewhere along that route, a dozen or so laws have been broken and the only reason MS hasn't been drawn and quartered in the courts is that they move faster than the court system and will probably be bancrupt long before the final, crushing verdict is rendered.
This is just stupid. This is not 1990. A browser is an integral part of an operating system in 2007. It's a standardized document display application. The operating system depends on it being there. The rules change for monopoly corporations.
Like the tax laws, you don't have to like it, but that's the law of the land.
destroy, damage or disable targets with little to no collateral damage They've been claiming that for pretty much every new, modern weapons system. Somehow, the reality of the battlefield is different.
There are no weapons that don't kill innocents. It's as simple as that, come to grips with it already. You want to play war, you're gonna kill people.
wouldn't the US government be the perfect entity to write encyclopedia article given that they are the primary source in the scope of their job? Wikipedia doesn't want primary sources. In fact, there are several policies against it, such as the "no original research" one. Wikipedia is interested in secondary sources.
(Not to say that a file sharing program is proof of anything, in and of itself...) But that, obviously, is the next step.
This is a real-life example: Germany has a not-quite-a-tax system to fund the public television and radio channels. The system says that if you own a TV or radio, you have to pay a few Euros a month.
Thing is, you have to pay for having the device, not for actually watching those channels. Even if you never do, even if all you ever do is watch DVDs on your TV, you still have to pay. Makes sense from one POV (they can't control what you do), but doesn't make sense from the other POV (as someone put it eloquently: If he has to pay this just for "having the device", then he wants child support money as well - he doesn't have any children, but he "has the device").
I really wonder how long it'll be before the RIAA employs the same argument. "Due to encryption and all those evil hacker countermeasures, we can not gather evidence of file sharing anymore, but defendant had a file sharing program on his machine and we must assume it was used, why else would he have it?"
I think the real problem here is not that privacy is being violated, but that people (1) kill, and (2) do so without being sure their victim is actually guilty of the things they kill them for. The reason for both is that people in fear don't act rational, and far too few of us have seen "The politics of fear" (google it, it's available for download from somewhere. If you haven't, it's the most important political documentary of the decade).
I mean, shouldn't the government designate an area childfree in each state that these guys can live? Can I go there even if I'm not a sex offender? Please?
Also, remember that we will also need a women-free area for the rapists, and a property-free area for the thieves. Also a brain-free area for the fuckwits to come up with these "protect the children by fucking up someone's life so he's sure to not re-integrate into society" ideas.
On some of my anti-social days, I wonder if, as a species, we are really doing ourselves a favour with our support of disabled, mentally and physically ill and others who would be dead in days in the wilderness. Now let's get one thing out of the way: It might be advantageous from a social, moral or any other number of points, I'm not discussing these.
I'm merely asking one question an evolutionary biologist who's not afraid of bad press can possibly answer: Are we breeding disabilities and mental illness this way, or are we not? Yes, not all mental or physical problems are genetically determined, but some are. Yes, I know I'm wandering dangerously close to Eugenics. Still, there's this nagging feeling that helping people with a heritable genetic defect to survive and create offspring might not be terribly nice towards their children.
Scenario: Judge agrees to the "ripped to mp3 and put into shared folder is illegal" part. The next step will be that the RIAA uses that judgement in another case, carefully omitting the second part of the sentence and claiming the judge decided that ripping to mp3 is illegal. After all, what does it matter which folder you store it in?
You're basically saying that the only business anyone does with the US is oil. No I am not. Please stop reading things I didn't write.
There is a general consensus that the dollar being "the oil currency" is important for it and the US money system. Just how important economists can't seem to agree upon, the range is from "it would hurt a little" to "it would destroy the entire US economy" if that would change. That's got nothing to do with sales to the US and everything to do with the fact that everyone else has to own dollars in order to buy oil.
the country with the largest GDP in the world According to both the IMF and the CIA, you're #2 with the EU being #1. Unless you insist on the literal meaning of "country". However, given your and their current growth rate, China will be taking over in about two years.
Yes, you are big and powerful. If you rest on that for just a while longer, it'll be gone. That was the whole point I made.
You're forgetting that prosperity is governed by people's productivity, Which if non-tangible goods don't count is fairly low for the US. That trade deficit is coming from somewhere, you know?
and it doesn't matter whether the wealth is denominated in dollars or Euros. I didn't say "wealth", I said "oil", and for a reason. There are legions of economics professors out there who agree that the dollar being "the oil currency" is a vital part of the US money system, and are predicting all kinds of bad (for you) effects if that ever changes, up to and including the total collapse of the US economy.
Obviously, your (coming out of the oil industry) government agrees, otherwise they wouldn't be spending trillions of dollars to keep a strong presence in the world oil center.
No industrialised nation will lose everything, the dramatic example of the fall of Rome notwithstanding. See russia. Sure they didn't lose everything, but for about 10 years, they essentially vanished from the map.
I'm sure you won't miss American exports. Verily, I doubt any part of your computer was designed, manufactured, or assembled in America. Actually, it was designed in California, or so it says. But I don't fear for that, I'm fairly sure all the important individuals and companies will leave the US when it breaks down, continuing operations from their respective european or asian homes and headquarters.
"This plan is not about Microsoft, it's about ensuring the perpetual availability of data without any obstacles." Which, we all know and MS knows but could never say publicly, is very much about MS.:-)
The usual capitalist-corporation strawman. Please, we've burnt that one a hundred times already. It's bullshit and a cheap excuse to "justify" any immoral and even illegal behaviour, as long as it yields a cent.
Is that your solution to life's problems? Run away from them? Well, shooting any of them is illegal and will get you a life sentence, so what else is there to do?;-)
Of course, since 7/9 of the Tier 1 networks are American companies So what? Go away, let the rest of us figure out how to solve that problem, you can be sure we will. Maybe there'll be a year where our local youtube equivalents don't stream fluently, but we lived without that before.
You're also forgetting that asia, for example, is quickly building up its own backbone.
You're not as important as you think you are. Once oil is paid for in Euros, not dollars, america will be a backwater country with an overblown military that is incredibly impressive, but falling apart because you can't finance it anymore. Pretty much like russia after its respective hegemony collapsed.
Book to read: "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers"
But we're talking about a company with proprietary operating system and total market control that spent man-years developing kernel-level DRM for practically all I/O instead of developing a sane security model. Mod parent up. That, really, is the point.
It's not that security is hard - it is, but it isn't as hard as the jokers who don't even have the easy parts try to make you believe. We have lots and lots and lots of security methods and systems that would put 99% of today's trojan and exploit writers out of business because they'd have to get a degree in CS first just to understand even the theoretical exploits. But that stuff is hard to implement, and even harder to implement right. MS is one of the few entities that have the resources to do it. And probably - unless the rumours of the exodus of the really smart people are true - the required level of know-how and brains.
But, instead of putting those resources into real security, they put them into DRM, half-assed stealing of Apple's latest ideas, and adding extra incompatability code to make sure some stuff only runs on Vista, even though it could run just as well on XP as some cracker group proved for the Shadowrun game, for example.
It's priorities, and MS has its priorities very seriously fucked up.
For the past five to ten years, lawmakers have passed an incredible number of laws that the courts had to sort out as unconstitutional. It's almost as if they abandoned sensible work for a "let's try everything and see what works" attitude.
Really, is it just my perception or has the number of stuff that was made a law only to be killed by the courts as unconstitutional skyrocketed? I really wonder, why that is.
And the US is a leader in the wind turbine tech and industry, According to who?
Just because, you know, this is the third country I've seen claiming that role in as many weeks (Germany and Denmark being the other two). Apparently the title is hotly contested.;-)
I don't know much about this, so I'll say that first, but......are you sure you aren't oversimplifying things? You know, the earth isn't a passive collector that doesn't know what to do with all the energy input. It's a massive system powered by said energy. Withdrawing parts of that energy changes the energy balance of the system.
Or, in other words, if we were to use 50% of the sunlight for solar cells, we'd pretty darn need it desperately to heat the damn planet that's not being heated by sunlight as much anymore.
Yes, I realize 22 of 150,000 is a tiny fraction. Still, the point should at least be properly debunked.
I should've snapped a picture the on friday, when I was in my local electronics store, and a good pile of Wii boxes were sitting right there, waiting for buyers.
In other words: Just because the media write about it doesn't mean it's true.
Or maybe it's because I'm in Europe and for some reason logistics and the supply chain work better here. I doubt that, though, given how much we've all become alike in those regards. Same companies running the same business using the same software to decide how much to ship where.
When you try to use Firefox, you're told that you need to "upgrade" to Internet Explorer. That's the damn word they use--"upgrade." I've been using that for years on my site (see below) - only the other way around. It works, I've got 70%+ Firefox users, many who switched because of my game and aren't looking back.
it is incorrect to say they unlocked normal 500-contract phones for free; I have a 399 unlocked iPhone here to prove it.:-)
They responded to the injunction in two ways, because it had two parts. Part one, the SIM-lock, response: Remove it if customer asks for it. Part two, the 2-year-exclusive-contract, response: Sell for 999 without a contract.
In my case, I bought for 399 with 2-year contract, asked for the SIM-lock to be removed, and a few days (and a phone call) later, I could use my E-Plus SIM card in addition to the T-Mobile card it came with.
If a firmware update would re-lock or brick those phones, Apple or T-Mobile would face a class-action lawsuit, and surely lose it. Two different things. My iPhone is unlocked, and yet I only paid 399 and have a T-Mobile contract.
You can (could) buy one for 999 without a contract. During the time the injunction was in place, T-Mobile also unlocked your phone (i.e. removed the SIM-Lock) for free if you bought one with a T-Mobile contract.
Why is that not just a technical difference? For me, it means for example that I can use the SIM card from my business phone for business calls without having to carry two mobile phones. Also, it means at the end of the 2 year contract I'm free to choose whatever I like without having to worry about a SIM lock.
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Without the lever, the intentional incompatabilities of IE would make it 3rd choice or drive it into extinction. With the lever, web designers are forced to adapt to the "quirks" instead, producing webpages that work well on IE but not so on other (standards-complient) browsers, which in turn drives more people to IE, creating a lock-in effect.
And somewhere along that route, a dozen or so laws have been broken and the only reason MS hasn't been drawn and quartered in the courts is that they move faster than the court system and will probably be bancrupt long before the final, crushing verdict is rendered.
Like the tax laws, you don't have to like it, but that's the law of the land.
From what it sounds like, they actually managed to make a fundamentally broken product even more broken!
Can we still nominate them for the Engineering Award of 2007? Making Vista any worse is not exactly a small feat.
There are no weapons that don't kill innocents. It's as simple as that, come to grips with it already. You want to play war, you're gonna kill people.
This is a real-life example: Germany has a not-quite-a-tax system to fund the public television and radio channels. The system says that if you own a TV or radio, you have to pay a few Euros a month.
Thing is, you have to pay for having the device, not for actually watching those channels. Even if you never do, even if all you ever do is watch DVDs on your TV, you still have to pay. Makes sense from one POV (they can't control what you do), but doesn't make sense from the other POV (as someone put it eloquently: If he has to pay this just for "having the device", then he wants child support money as well - he doesn't have any children, but he "has the device").
I really wonder how long it'll be before the RIAA employs the same argument. "Due to encryption and all those evil hacker countermeasures, we can not gather evidence of file sharing anymore, but defendant had a file sharing program on his machine and we must assume it was used, why else would he have it?"
Also, remember that we will also need a women-free area for the rapists, and a property-free area for the thieves. Also a brain-free area for the fuckwits to come up with these "protect the children by fucking up someone's life so he's sure to not re-integrate into society" ideas.
Absolutely excellent point.
On some of my anti-social days, I wonder if, as a species, we are really doing ourselves a favour with our support of disabled, mentally and physically ill and others who would be dead in days in the wilderness. Now let's get one thing out of the way: It might be advantageous from a social, moral or any other number of points, I'm not discussing these.
I'm merely asking one question an evolutionary biologist who's not afraid of bad press can possibly answer: Are we breeding disabilities and mental illness this way, or are we not? Yes, not all mental or physical problems are genetically determined, but some are. Yes, I know I'm wandering dangerously close to Eugenics. Still, there's this nagging feeling that helping people with a heritable genetic defect to survive and create offspring might not be terribly nice towards their children.
You are right, and we should still watch this.
Scenario: Judge agrees to the "ripped to mp3 and put into shared folder is illegal" part. The next step will be that the RIAA uses that judgement in another case, carefully omitting the second part of the sentence and claiming the judge decided that ripping to mp3 is illegal. After all, what does it matter which folder you store it in?
Yes, lawyers are getting paid to be like that.
There is a general consensus that the dollar being "the oil currency" is important for it and the US money system. Just how important economists can't seem to agree upon, the range is from "it would hurt a little" to "it would destroy the entire US economy" if that would change. That's got nothing to do with sales to the US and everything to do with the fact that everyone else has to own dollars in order to buy oil. the country with the largest GDP in the world According to both the IMF and the CIA, you're #2 with the EU being #1. Unless you insist on the literal meaning of "country". However, given your and their current growth rate, China will be taking over in about two years.
Yes, you are big and powerful. If you rest on that for just a while longer, it'll be gone. That was the whole point I made.
Obviously, your (coming out of the oil industry) government agrees, otherwise they wouldn't be spending trillions of dollars to keep a strong presence in the world oil center. No industrialised nation will lose everything, the dramatic example of the fall of Rome notwithstanding. See russia. Sure they didn't lose everything, but for about 10 years, they essentially vanished from the map. I'm sure you won't miss American exports. Verily, I doubt any part of your computer was designed, manufactured, or assembled in America. Actually, it was designed in California, or so it says. But I don't fear for that, I'm fairly sure all the important individuals and companies will leave the US when it breaks down, continuing operations from their respective european or asian homes and headquarters.
The usual capitalist-corporation strawman. Please, we've burnt that one a hundred times already. It's bullshit and a cheap excuse to "justify" any immoral and even illegal behaviour, as long as it yields a cent.
You're also forgetting that asia, for example, is quickly building up its own backbone.
You're not as important as you think you are. Once oil is paid for in Euros, not dollars, america will be a backwater country with an overblown military that is incredibly impressive, but falling apart because you can't finance it anymore. Pretty much like russia after its respective hegemony collapsed.
Book to read: "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers"
It's not that security is hard - it is, but it isn't as hard as the jokers who don't even have the easy parts try to make you believe.
We have lots and lots and lots of security methods and systems that would put 99% of today's trojan and exploit writers out of business because they'd have to get a degree in CS first just to understand even the theoretical exploits.
But that stuff is hard to implement, and even harder to implement right. MS is one of the few entities that have the resources to do it. And probably - unless the rumours of the exodus of the really smart people are true - the required level of know-how and brains.
But, instead of putting those resources into real security, they put them into DRM, half-assed stealing of Apple's latest ideas, and adding extra incompatability code to make sure some stuff only runs on Vista, even though it could run just as well on XP as some cracker group proved for the Shadowrun game, for example.
It's priorities, and MS has its priorities very seriously fucked up.
For the past five to ten years, lawmakers have passed an incredible number of laws that the courts had to sort out as unconstitutional. It's almost as if they abandoned sensible work for a "let's try everything and see what works" attitude.
Really, is it just my perception or has the number of stuff that was made a law only to be killed by the courts as unconstitutional skyrocketed? I really wonder, why that is.
Just because, you know, this is the third country I've seen claiming that role in as many weeks (Germany and Denmark being the other two). Apparently the title is hotly contested.
I don't know much about this, so I'll say that first, but... ...are you sure you aren't oversimplifying things? You know, the earth isn't a passive collector that doesn't know what to do with all the energy input. It's a massive system powered by said energy. Withdrawing parts of that energy changes the energy balance of the system.
Or, in other words, if we were to use 50% of the sunlight for solar cells, we'd pretty darn need it desperately to heat the damn planet that's not being heated by sunlight as much anymore.
Yes, I realize 22 of 150,000 is a tiny fraction. Still, the point should at least be properly debunked.
I should've snapped a picture the on friday, when I was in my local electronics store, and a good pile of Wii boxes were sitting right there, waiting for buyers.
In other words: Just because the media write about it doesn't mean it's true.
Or maybe it's because I'm in Europe and for some reason logistics and the supply chain work better here. I doubt that, though, given how much we've all become alike in those regards. Same companies running the same business using the same software to decide how much to ship where.
They responded to the injunction in two ways, because it had two parts. Part one, the SIM-lock, response: Remove it if customer asks for it. Part two, the 2-year-exclusive-contract, response: Sell for 999 without a contract.
In my case, I bought for 399 with 2-year contract, asked for the SIM-lock to be removed, and a few days (and a phone call) later, I could use my E-Plus SIM card in addition to the T-Mobile card it came with.
You can (could) buy one for 999 without a contract. During the time the injunction was in place, T-Mobile also unlocked your phone (i.e. removed the SIM-Lock) for free if you bought one with a T-Mobile contract.
Why is that not just a technical difference? For me, it means for example that I can use the SIM card from my business phone for business calls without having to carry two mobile phones. Also, it means at the end of the 2 year contract I'm free to choose whatever I like without having to worry about a SIM lock.