The ruling is from March 2004, but they had until December 2005 to comply. They didn't. So they'll be fined. Retroactively. OOps (what's the sound of half a billion going "poof"?)
assuming MS actually pays (seems kind of unlikely)
Why do you think that? Fighting tooth and nail in a court is standard business practice. But not paying a court-ordered fine ranks highly on the "most idiotic things imaginable" for any serious business. Because, you know, the court are the guys who tell the other guys, the ones with the guns, to please go and enforce that ruling if they don't terribly mind.
If MS doesn't pay up, the EU will simply confiscate their european holdings, and liquidate them until the fine is paid. They do have that kind of power, much like they can put you in a cell if you slaughter your neighbour.
You confuse worth with money. Gates net worth is mostly in stock (not only MS, but stock nevertheless). And I very much doubt that the EU will accept payment in that form.
Same with MS the company - sure it's a tiny fraction of their net worth, but most of their net worth is tied up somewhere - as investment, real estate or property. Half a billion is something that MS will feel, at the very least because as a publicly traded company it'll mess up their budget for the year for good and drive the next quarterly down.
It's all a questions of respect. The US government barked, but when it came to biting, they didn't. As a result, MS does not and will probably not ever again have respect for them.
Apparently, someone in the EU has some soft skills and knows that at this stage it isn't about being right or wrong or fair or blablabla. If the EU doesn't bite after making so much noise about it, they'll have a hard time ever getting MS to comply with anything.
The thing is: To advance the species, we need both. We already have $30b doing the here-and-now stuff. Why not put the other $30b to the "next-decade-or-century" things?
Because, you know, there's one thing everyone seems to be forgetting about Africa: Every child you save means one more life spent in poverty, misery and starvation, and five or so more childs to save 15 years down the road.
I say fix up the place first before you bring in more people to inhabit it. But maybe that's because I'm a European and uncomfortably close to what might blow up very soon. We already have mass migrations from northern Africa to southern Spain. Some perspective beyond "saving everyone we can today, fuck tommorow" is certainly asked for.
Thanks for that comment. I was looking everywhere for someone not posting the usual whining or "look, Bill ain't evil" trolling, but some background on the foundation.
Because no matter what, anything with almost $70 billion to spend is a force. $70 billion can make or break almost anything, maybe except the US$ currency market.
He's done some evil things, but it came out all right in the end because he's donating practically all his winnings to charity,
Excuse me? You can't possibly mean that. In essence, you are saying that the end can justify the means, and that's a long philosophical debate that we won't even copy, much less resolve, in a/. comment section.
However, it always reminds me of a proverb in Germany: "After all, Hitler built the Autobahn". Did you shudder when you heard that? I hope so. Same with me when I read "but it cam out all right in the end".
I can just see the same specimens under some crude picnic/fishing/bus/whatever shelter, screaming into the phone, "YES, I'M IN THE WOODS! CAN YOU HEAR ME? IN THE WOODS! WHAT WAS THAT? THERE'S A THUNDERSTORM HERE! CAN YOU HEAR ME? THUNDERSTORM!"
What's so bad about that? I can imagine the lightning might miss the guy, but then we aren't any worse than before, so whatever happens it'll either improve the situation or make no difference.
(Does anyone else just love that some cases are too important for proper legal procedure? They should have gotten warrants in the first place...)
Oh yes! I have the same problem in my job, where it's been my mantra for a while now that if something is really important, then it can be done right, including the necessary paperwork. It's astonishing how often the importance of stuff drops through the floor once you make people work for it even a tiny little bit.
No offense intended toward you Tom, but if we keep loosening our standards of what is acceptable and not acceptable we may come to the point where we will see other classes of people as expendable.
You mean like the tens of thousands of Iraqis who die and aren't newsworthy?
We never had any standards of the kind you claim. Two hundred years ago, we killed people for what's considered minor crimes today. Five hundred years ago, we burned them alive due to superstition. Two thousand years ago, we let people kill each other for entertainment.
I don't mind loosening those standards. And that includes the modern world, where I'm always surprised that everyone but me apparently considers it normal to read a front-page article about how prominent person X was rescued from the Tsunami area and oh yes a hundred thousand or so locals were killed.
How far is this de-valuation really from considering people expendable? How far is "I don't care if they die" from "if there's profit, why not make them die"? In fact, there are quite a few allegations that US companies are using that very philosophy while operating abroad. Bopal comes to mind...
It seems like a lot of Slashdot posters think that the best thing human beings could do is just junk whatever moral notions they have about the dignity of the human person, and just do a lot of crazy whizbang scientific experiments just because they are there.
Without such an attitude, we'd still consider leeches as the pinnacle of modern medicine. The human body was once considered holy and untouchable, and cutting it open was not something a doctor could even consider without risking to be burned alive.
In a couple years, we'll have the same attitude towards embryos. After all, you can just make a new one, it isn't very complicated and it happens to be a lot of fun, too.
I'm still uncertain about what happens when we depend upon this for recall, though.
Nobody knows for sure. However, we do know for sure that repetition aids memory, especially if information is repeated in the proper context so it can be stored there. Almost all "remember names" tricks work that way, by making you associate names with faces in better ways, by repetition and association between name (data) and face (context) so the next time you are in that context (see that face) the associated data (the name of the person) appears. So having more information about someone presented to you whenever you meet him or her could possibly improve memory, rather than weaken it.
we're forgetting that it IS possible to know dozens of people's phone numbers with resorting to a cell phone address book.
True. But why should I? Human brains were not designed to remember phone numbers. There were no phone numbers to remember when homo sapiens evolved. The brain is much better at pattern matching (e.g. recognizing faces) than it is at storing digital data.
What happens when we depend on augmented reality to remind us who it is sitting across from us at the coffee shop?
That ain't the focus. For the time to come, my brain will tell me faster and in more detail about people I know well. Reading it off a display, even a HUD where eye movement is minimal, takes way longer than memory recall.
But what about the 500 people I do not know so well? The guy I met at a conference last year and had an interesting talk at lunch with? If I meet him today, I'll dimly remember I know him, but it'll be a while before even basic details such as name, company and last conversation topic pop up. This is where a computer system would help, because it is better at storing random stuff.
This is a really cool device, I've been looking forward to this for so long that I've contemplated building it myself.
Remember that augmented reality is what virtual reality isn't: Useful for everyday life. Imagine a device like this linked with a wearable computer. Imagine it puts everyone whose face you look at for more than a second into a face-recognition search to find out whether you know that person, and if so it shows you some details (full name, birthday, any important details you entered into your contacts database to make sure you never forget about this person) via some unobstrusive HUD.
Or imagine shopping with a wearable computer with online connection which can tell you that the gadget you're about to buy sells at $0.50 more next door, but they have 1 year guarantee instead of 6 months and a much better score on customer reviews.
Or, to simplify it again, just imagine having a device with you that records everything you see in a round-robin storage of just a minute or two - suddenly you can store all those moments that happened two seconds before you remembered to grab your digicam.
Augmented reality is a way cool research subject. If I were in university again, this is where I'd be heading.
There is a monopoly, but it does not arise from unfair manipulation Several courts of law, chambers of commerce, anti-trust offices and other experts, both in the US and in Europe, beg to differ. MS was not convicted for being a monopoly, it was convicted for unfair manipulation (i.e. levering their monopoly into other markets).
The people are not opressed, users are free to use what they like Tell that to the 80% or so who bought "a computer" - which, of course, came with windos. I've met people who believed that Linux must be a windos program, because they couldn't contemplate the concept of an "Operating System". Windos is what runs on computers, isn't it? Every computer runs windos, doesn't it? Check with the real world, then come back and you'll laugh at your sentence as hard as I did.
nor does Microsoft brainwash them. Aside from convincing people that windos is computing, using every trick in the book to contain them to their own small world (MSN comes to mind, a huge failure in the market that would certainly be dead if IE wouldn't force you there every chance it gets), aside from the fact that before (win)dos, a computer crash was a serious problem that required attention and an immediate bug fix, aside from the fact that MS stalemated HCI for years by forcing some arbitrary and obnoxious interface on everyone, and aside from their constant attempts to embed their own products as "the product" (IE is still called "Internet" on the default desktop, isn't it? Outlook was called "Mail". Word has become a synonym for word processing through aggressive marketing, etc.) No, absolutely no brainwashing going on. Why would a marketing driven company ever want to do something like manipulating its customers?
Fighting Microsoft gains nothing. They have nothing we want to take. They have about $50 billion, much of it gained illegally as monopoly rent. If you don't want your share, I'll gladly take it.
Must agree with parent. None of my sites has IE anywhere even near 90%+ and hasn't for a year, maybe two. In addition to that, there is a very clear trend of about 0.5 to 1% moving from IE to Firefox every month. This trend has held more or less for at least a year as well.
And especially Opera is much stronger than these studies make it. Maybe it's because it identifies as IE by default, maybe the studies are off in other ways, but Opera scores between 2% and 8% on the sites I run.
I predict there'll be a new mandatory button on most community sites soon:
"I acknowledge that I am old enough to not wear diapers anymore and that I can take responsibility for my own actions and stupidity. [Agree / Enter] - [No / Leave]"
Google is helping an authoritarian government control its citizens
But do they? They certainly are not helping to break censorship in China, but pray, tell, which additional control of its citizens does Google offer to China, which control the chinese government would not have if Google would not be there?
Slashdot Mirror
The ruling is from March 2004, but they had until December 2005 to comply. They didn't. So they'll be fined. Retroactively. OOps (what's the sound of half a billion going "poof"?)
assuming MS actually pays (seems kind of unlikely)
Why do you think that? Fighting tooth and nail in a court is standard business practice. But not paying a court-ordered fine ranks highly on the "most idiotic things imaginable" for any serious business. Because, you know, the court are the guys who tell the other guys, the ones with the guns, to please go and enforce that ruling if they don't terribly mind.
If MS doesn't pay up, the EU will simply confiscate their european holdings, and liquidate them until the fine is paid. They do have that kind of power, much like they can put you in a cell if you slaughter your neighbour.
You confuse worth with money. Gates net worth is mostly in stock (not only MS, but stock nevertheless). And I very much doubt that the EU will accept payment in that form.
Same with MS the company - sure it's a tiny fraction of their net worth, but most of their net worth is tied up somewhere - as investment, real estate or property. Half a billion is something that MS will feel, at the very least because as a publicly traded company it'll mess up their budget for the year for good and drive the next quarterly down.
It's all a questions of respect. The US government barked, but when it came to biting, they didn't. As a result, MS does not and will probably not ever again have respect for them.
Apparently, someone in the EU has some soft skills and knows that at this stage it isn't about being right or wrong or fair or blablabla. If the EU doesn't bite after making so much noise about it, they'll have a hard time ever getting MS to comply with anything.
The thing is: To advance the species, we need both. We already have $30b doing the here-and-now stuff. Why not put the other $30b to the "next-decade-or-century" things?
Because, you know, there's one thing everyone seems to be forgetting about Africa: Every child you save means one more life spent in poverty, misery and starvation, and five or so more childs to save 15 years down the road.
I say fix up the place first before you bring in more people to inhabit it. But maybe that's because I'm a European and uncomfortably close to what might blow up very soon. We already have mass migrations from northern Africa to southern Spain. Some perspective beyond "saving everyone we can today, fuck tommorow" is certainly asked for.
Thanks for that comment. I was looking everywhere for someone not posting the usual whining or "look, Bill ain't evil" trolling, but some background on the foundation.
Because no matter what, anything with almost $70 billion to spend is a force. $70 billion can make or break almost anything, maybe except the US$ currency market.
He's done some evil things, but it came out all right in the end because he's donating practically all his winnings to charity,
/. comment section.
Excuse me? You can't possibly mean that. In essence, you are saying that the end can justify the means, and that's a long philosophical debate that we won't even copy, much less resolve, in a
However, it always reminds me of a proverb in Germany: "After all, Hitler built the Autobahn". Did you shudder when you heard that? I hope so. Same with me when I read "but it cam out all right in the end".
I can just see the same specimens under some crude picnic/fishing/bus/whatever shelter, screaming into the phone, "YES, I'M IN THE WOODS! CAN YOU HEAR ME? IN THE WOODS! WHAT WAS THAT? THERE'S A THUNDERSTORM HERE! CAN YOU HEAR ME? THUNDERSTORM!"
What's so bad about that? I can imagine the lightning might miss the guy, but then we aren't any worse than before, so whatever happens it'll either improve the situation or make no difference.
(Does anyone else just love that some cases are too important for proper legal procedure? They should have gotten warrants in the first place...)
Oh yes! I have the same problem in my job, where it's been my mantra for a while now that if something is really important, then it can be done right, including the necessary paperwork. It's astonishing how often the importance of stuff drops through the floor once you make people work for it even a tiny little bit.
No offense intended toward you Tom, but if we keep loosening our standards of what is acceptable and not acceptable we may come to the point where we will see other classes of people as expendable.
You mean like the tens of thousands of Iraqis who die and aren't newsworthy?
We never had any standards of the kind you claim. Two hundred years ago, we killed people for what's considered minor crimes today. Five hundred years ago, we burned them alive due to superstition. Two thousand years ago, we let people kill each other for entertainment.
I don't mind loosening those standards. And that includes the modern world, where I'm always surprised that everyone but me apparently considers it normal to read a front-page article about how prominent person X was rescued from the Tsunami area and oh yes a hundred thousand or so locals were killed.
How far is this de-valuation really from considering people expendable? How far is "I don't care if they die" from "if there's profit, why not make them die"? In fact, there are quite a few allegations that US companies are using that very philosophy while operating abroad. Bopal comes to mind...
It seems like a lot of Slashdot posters think that the best thing human beings could do is just junk whatever moral notions they have about the dignity of the human person, and just do a lot of crazy whizbang scientific experiments just because they are there.
Without such an attitude, we'd still consider leeches as the pinnacle of modern medicine. The human body was once considered holy and untouchable, and cutting it open was not something a doctor could even consider without risking to be burned alive.
In a couple years, we'll have the same attitude towards embryos. After all, you can just make a new one, it isn't very complicated and it happens to be a lot of fun, too.
Thanks for those links. Very interesting stuff. As soon as they sell things, I want one.
I'm still uncertain about what happens when we depend upon this for recall, though.
Nobody knows for sure. However, we do know for sure that repetition aids memory, especially if information is repeated in the proper context so it can be stored there. Almost all "remember names" tricks work that way, by making you associate names with faces in better ways, by repetition and association between name (data) and face (context) so the next time you are in that context (see that face) the associated data (the name of the person) appears.
So having more information about someone presented to you whenever you meet him or her could possibly improve memory, rather than weaken it.
we're forgetting that it IS possible to know dozens of people's phone numbers with resorting to a cell phone address book.
True. But why should I? Human brains were not designed to remember phone numbers. There were no phone numbers to remember when homo sapiens evolved. The brain is much better at pattern matching (e.g. recognizing faces) than it is at storing digital data.
What happens when we depend on augmented reality to remind us who it is sitting across from us at the coffee shop?
That ain't the focus. For the time to come, my brain will tell me faster and in more detail about people I know well. Reading it off a display, even a HUD where eye movement is minimal, takes way longer than memory recall.
But what about the 500 people I do not know so well? The guy I met at a conference last year and had an interesting talk at lunch with? If I meet him today, I'll dimly remember I know him, but it'll be a while before even basic details such as name, company and last conversation topic pop up. This is where a computer system would help, because it is better at storing random stuff.
This is a really cool device, I've been looking forward to this for so long that I've contemplated building it myself.
Remember that augmented reality is what virtual reality isn't: Useful for everyday life. Imagine a device like this linked with a wearable computer. Imagine it puts everyone whose face you look at for more than a second into a face-recognition search to find out whether you know that person, and if so it shows you some details (full name, birthday, any important details you entered into your contacts database to make sure you never forget about this person) via some unobstrusive HUD.
Or imagine shopping with a wearable computer with online connection which can tell you that the gadget you're about to buy sells at $0.50 more next door, but they have 1 year guarantee instead of 6 months and a much better score on customer reviews.
Or, to simplify it again, just imagine having a device with you that records everything you see in a round-robin storage of just a minute or two - suddenly you can store all those moments that happened two seconds before you remembered to grab your digicam.
Augmented reality is a way cool research subject. If I were in university again, this is where I'd be heading.
Mod parent up "+1 Good Satire".
Oh, wait...
There is a monopoly, but it does not arise from unfair manipulation
Several courts of law, chambers of commerce, anti-trust offices and other experts, both in the US and in Europe, beg to differ. MS was not convicted for being a monopoly, it was convicted for unfair manipulation (i.e. levering their monopoly into other markets).
The people are not opressed, users are free to use what they like
Tell that to the 80% or so who bought "a computer" - which, of course, came with windos. I've met people who believed that Linux must be a windos program, because they couldn't contemplate the concept of an "Operating System". Windos is what runs on computers, isn't it? Every computer runs windos, doesn't it?
Check with the real world, then come back and you'll laugh at your sentence as hard as I did.
nor does Microsoft brainwash them.
Aside from convincing people that windos is computing, using every trick in the book to contain them to their own small world (MSN comes to mind, a huge failure in the market that would certainly be dead if IE wouldn't force you there every chance it gets), aside from the fact that before (win)dos, a computer crash was a serious problem that required attention and an immediate bug fix, aside from the fact that MS stalemated HCI for years by forcing some arbitrary and obnoxious interface on everyone, and aside from their constant attempts to embed their own products as "the product" (IE is still called "Internet" on the default desktop, isn't it? Outlook was called "Mail". Word has become a synonym for word processing through aggressive marketing, etc.)
No, absolutely no brainwashing going on. Why would a marketing driven company ever want to do something like manipulating its customers?
Fighting Microsoft gains nothing. They have nothing we want to take.
They have about $50 billion, much of it gained illegally as monopoly rent. If you don't want your share, I'll gladly take it.
The problem is that there's no real, new, revolutionary development in browsers.
Good! Excellent!
Nobody wants browsers to do revolutions. How about correctly implementing current standards like XHTML and CSS first?
Must agree with parent. None of my sites has IE anywhere even near 90%+ and hasn't for a year, maybe two. In addition to that, there is a very clear trend of about 0.5 to 1% moving from IE to Firefox every month. This trend has held more or less for at least a year as well.
And especially Opera is much stronger than these studies make it. Maybe it's because it identifies as IE by default, maybe the studies are off in other ways, but Opera scores between 2% and 8% on the sites I run.
He cited estimates predicting that consumer robotics alone will grow into a multibillion-dollar industry in five to 10 years.
But which ones did he cite? The ones from the 60s or the ones from the 70s?
Robotics has been in the "we'll all have tons of robots around ten years from now" stage on and off for about 40 years. I'll believe it when I see it.
Not a great system from any point of view.
But is it so much worse than the "there are two ways into Harvard: Being a genius or being rich" system?
the obvious question would be, why don't they just open more schools?
The obvious answer would be, that they value quality over quantity.
Actually, I was tempted to tell the spoiled brat "fuck you", but I fear she'd sue me for sexual harassment if I did.
I predict there'll be a new mandatory button on most community sites soon:
"I acknowledge that I am old enough to not wear diapers anymore and that I can take responsibility for my own actions and stupidity. [Agree / Enter] - [No / Leave]"
You want either a Mac Mini, or an USB drive.
Google is helping an authoritarian government control its citizens
But do they? They certainly are not helping to break censorship in China, but pray, tell, which additional control of its citizens does Google offer to China, which control the chinese government would not have if Google would not be there?