I remember reading here (correct me if I'm wrong) that M.S. has an injunction placed on their XP release of Windows.
There is currently no injunction on the XP release. Certain senators and state attorneys want one but it isn't there yet.
Suddenly, they seem willing to settle out of court or at least want to hurry the process. Looks like they are getting to know what it feels like when you get dragged through court. I'm just wondering if all this effort to end this case on M.S.'s end is because they are afraid they won't be able to release XP as it is or when they want.
Huhh?? Maybe you're in a different world from the rest of us. Microsoft is actually the one who wanted this to be revisited and not fast-tracked. They want this to go on as long as possible. It's the government on the other hand that wanted this case to be fast-tracked.
I started reading Miguel de Icaza's article about Passport but had to stop halfway through. I'm sorry but I don't have the patience for clueless opinions.
Every one of the links he points to in his section on "The problems of Passport" fails to support his argument!
First he talks about a single point of failure and says "Such a failure was predicted, and we recently witnessed got a lot of people worried." While a single point of failure is a problem with Passport, the link he points to is a problem with MSN Messenger and NOT with Hailstorm or Passport which had no problems during the period.
Next he talks about trust and how "This is not unheard of, as the Microsoft Internet Server had a trojan horse built into that allowed anyone that knew about this to control any server running IIS." Of course as anyone who has been following stories knows that there was no trojan horse involved there - just a comment digging at Netscape and some bad test cases.
Finally he talks about Security and points out "Hackers have already broken into Microsoft in the past. And the company was unable to figure out for how long their systems had been hacked. " However, anyone with any clue should realize that an internal corporate network is a completely different thing from an external service. Getting into one doesn't get you into the other, for starters and both are used by very different users for very different purposes.
Next, they ruled that the boyscouts could discriminate against gays, because they are a private organization. (gays are second class citizens in the US now).
Homosexual people are NOT second-class citizens in this country. Yes, there are some morons who think homosexuality is somehow wrong but they are a fast-shrinking minority.
That issue aside, just as it is important that the state protect ones right to practice ones sexual orientation, it is just as important to me that a private organization has the freedom to make and enact its own rules.
I don't want to live in a society where the majority is able to cram its opinion down everyones throats. The down side to this is that the lunatic fringe is able to practice what it wants to but the up side is that if there is a small minority that is right about something, they are not automatically silenced because of being considered the lunatic fringe.
This freedom is very important to me and I'm willing to pay whatever price it takes.
They penalized manufacturers who did not put Windows on the PCs they sold... AOL is striking deals where they would pay the manufacturers
Bzzzzt!! Wrong!
There is no difference between Microsoft's "penalties" and what AOL is doing here. The price for the OS was always $89. For OEMs that played along with MS, MS offered a huge discount to that price. OEMs that didn't do this didn't get the discount and were hence "penalized". What AOL is doing is the same here. They're offering money and OEMs that don't take it are "penalized" because their computers cost more compared to their competitors who do.
Did you come up with that idea all by yourself or did you have help? No single person could possibly have come up with something so stupid!
As an application developer, I prefer coding to a standards, not moving targets where my test matrix blows up because every OEMs version of the Operating System has its own personal quirks which throw my app in a tizzy.
As a user, I prefer a standardized operating system where I don't have to relearn everything every time I want to do something just because some OEM thought it would be cool to remap the function keys.
Here's a clue: Most users use their computers to get something ELSE done. People don't normally use computers for the thrill of it but in order to get their job done. They don't care about the specifics of how as long as it is relatively easy to learn and doesn't change every time. MS won't have much to worry about until the competition begins to realize this.
Microsoft never threatened to withhold the OS or to raise prices on it. There was a set price per license and a date on which you could get your hands on copies. What it did do, though was offer incentives - not unlike what AOL is doing here. If a manufacturer was willing to do things their way, MS offered them discounted licenses (similar to AOLs $35 rebate) as well as a chance to get their hands on the Gold CDs early.
It's a basic fact of human psychology that people hate people who they see as more fortunate as them and love making excuses for it. So, if you're rich, no one will like you. If you're rich, everyone will assume you got there by lying, stealing, being dishonest, etc. (that rationalizes why they, themselves are not rich).
That's also the reason why every loser on Slashdot hates all "evil corporations". Most people - especially the incompetent - simply cannot accept the success of others as being a result of their competency.
So you go ahead and defend your theft by pretending the music companies are dishonest and greedy while they'll go ahead and try to stop themselves from being robbed.
And they're removing Java, meaning that anyone distributing a Java app needs to distribute instructions on how to waste half an hour downloading the latest VM.
FYI, if you try to download a web page which uses a Java applet you get a pop-up telling you you need Java and you can click on a button to automatically download the VM.
I hate to feed the obvious troll, but MICROSOFTS CONSUMERS DON'T CARE!
Yup, that's right. The vast majority of Microsoft's consumers don't care whether IE is bundled into the OS or not. It's only the folks at Netscape that cared. So yes, Microsoft does listen to its consumers, just not to the government and their competitors.
That's some of the dumbest logic I've ever heard. "I can't do blah with product A. Why should I expect to do so with product B?"
They're two entirely different products and, trust me, if it was possible for people to repair their Maytag washers over the phone and Maytag had thought of it, we'd have Maytag phone support already. The simple reason for this is the fact that phone support is so much cheaper than bringing the washer in or sending in a repair person. The other big difference is that a poorly repaired washing machine can KILL and cause serious damage while the damage from someone clicking on the wrong icon is never nearly that serious.
It's so obvious that the poster has no idea what Smart Tags are or how they work. I wonder how this post got modded up to +5.
Smart Tags are a great idea and I, for one, want them. I want my browser to be smart about what I see and automatically provide me the ability to navigate from and gain more information about the words that I see in my window.
I wish that instead of pulling the feature entirely, they had simply shipped the technology with the Smart Tag recognizers that point to their own stuff being a downloadable add-in (or disabled). That way no one would be able to cry foul about what they shipped because Joe Yahoo! can write his own Smart Tag recognizer to work with the technology, maybe making the links to Yahoo! instead of MSN.
And for the sake of completeness, the above example assumes, wrongly, that Smart Tags would be installed on your computer without authorization by the user. I have no problem with a pop-up dialog coming up when I visit a porn site that asks me if I want to add a smart-tag recognizer from that site onto my computer.
Ice ages are regular events. There's another one coming RSN in geological terms. Sure, maybe it won't be for thousands of years. But maybe it will be this year. (cue scoffing laugher)
Will that be before or after everyone stops whining about global warming?
Yes, but consider the source of that information - it can be slanted any way Microsoft wishes. No other power on earth has ever had that kind of editorial control.
Did you fail reading in grade school? As I said, anyone can write their own smart-tag recognizer that plugs into the system. Microsoft has no more editorial control than it has over the pages on its own website. If you don't like those pages, just visit a different website - if you don't like the smart-tag recognizers they provide, use someone elses. You don't think web-browsers are evil, do you?
Anybody with half a brain ought to be terrified at the prospect.
Sheesh. Get over it, kids. I know you hate Microsoft but I really don't see a problem here. Smart-tags are progress. Quit getting in the way of it.
For one, it appears from most of the comments that most people have no clue what smart-tag technology is. Smart-tags provide the ability to automatically recognize certain strings and generate hyperlinks based on that text.
You can write your own smart-tag recognizers! There's a smart-tags SDK which content providers can use to create smart-tag recognizers and a database of hyperlinks to generate. Of course, the ones that Microsoft ships point to MS properties, but anyone can create and ship their own recognizers pointing to their own stuff.
The closest analogy I can see to all this whining is if you were whining about someone shipping a web-browser with the OS because you hadn't written a web-page and felt that put you at a disadvantage.
As for the spam argument, that's ridiculous. All a user sees is a dotted underline on a piece of text which allows the user to get more information. Users who don't like seeing those lines can disable smart-tags or not install IE6. Users currently have the exact same functionality if they cut-and-paste the text out of the page and into a search bar. Smart-tags just make it easier.
However, it was a good company in its effects. It brought taxation and simple democracy to India. It breathed the first light of the west's wisdom on those dark and primitive lands.
That is an as arrogant, narrow-minded and xenophobic statement as I have ever heard.
Taxation is not a self-evident benefit, as another poster pointed out.
Democracy was a relatively nascent concept (not in terms of time, but in terms of its adoption) at the time at which the East India company subjucated the peoples of India. To say that democracy wouldn't have made it there without their help is ridiculous at best. What we do know, though, is that after the East India company took over, there was no real democracy in the country until 1947 when the British finally left.
The statement I find most incendiary, though, is where you say the East India Company "breathed the light of the west's wisdom on India". You can lookup the scientific and mathematical advances that pre-modern India had made yourself. It won't be hard to read up on. Indian culture also had a relatively egalitarian system of education and local economies that were dismantled by the British to set up their own hierarchy where bureaucrats that worked for the British achieved a higher status.
The only area in which the British were distinguishably superior to the indigenous population was in terms of the technology of warfare.
I'm reminded of an anecdote I read which was written by a British author whose name I forget. He described an incident when he was sitting down with a French friend and he made the statement that England had never lost a battle (which was what he had been taught in history). His French counterpart rattled off a list of battles which England had indeed lost. The moral here is to not go just by what history texts teach you because they are almost guaranteed to be biased towards the authors point of view.
I think they keyword there was him mentioning that it happened in the pre-e-everything days. Until a few years ago, if your credit card was stolen you had a maximum liability of $50. A couple of years ago, Visa decided to waive that liability and all the other major credit card providers decided to follow suit.
I agree. I think a simple, polite email or phone call was warranted before Corley pointed that domain name to Ford's website. It could very well have averted the whole situation.
Did Corley call Ford motors and ask if they would mind terribly if he pointed fuckgeneralmotors.com at them? No. I see no reason why Ford shouldn't return the favor.
You go ahead and act like a dumbass and you get treated like one.
The vast majority of the people are landless and disenfranchised (emphasis mine)
India is a stable democracy and has been that way for the past 54 years - no coups, nothing. Yes, democracy is implemented haphazardly in India, but to suggest that anyone in India is disenfranchised is ridiculous. Maybe you don't know what the word disenfranchised means.
The land must be redistributed
The commies are coming, the commies are coming...
and social (marriage) laws enacted so as to link the wealth of the land to population increases. There should not be more people than the resources of the country can support comfortably.
I have no idea what you mean by that but if you're thinking of forcibly sterilizing people or disallowing them from getting married or having children, I'm very, very afraid of you.
Yes, the Mumbai police has a website and I applaud them for that inspite of the fact that is a very shoddy site but that doesn't imply that the police force as a whole is tech-savvy.
Yes, there is mobile banking available in Mumbai. I'm not sure I'd conclude anything about their police from that.
The universal keyboard announcement was for the Tamil language. Tamil is not spoken (at least it's not significant as a language) in Mumbai.
The biotech park link was dead but I'll assume that has nothing to do with Mumbai either.
Just thought I'd make some facts clear. Regardless of how clueful the police is, it says nothing about whether the idea of removing anonymity is a good one or not.
I hate commenting on moderation but I have to agree that the original post in this thread made no sense whatsoever.
My take on this (Maybe I'm biased because I grew up in Bombay - before they renamed it to Mumbai): The only significant piece of this is the fact that they are requiring identification for internet access and are requiring the cafes to tie any access to a specific individual. How they do it - i.e. what technology: ID cards, snoop cams, etc. - is irrelevant.
Personally, I'd hesistate to hit the panic button. It seems like they are only requiring that that information be collected - there is no implication that they will have free access to it. For example, a record of every phone call made from your home is collected right now -but the police can't access that unless they have a warrant. I'll assume access to this information will be on a similar basis.
About pornography: From reading the article, I have no idea whether what they want to target people who access porn or who send "porn mail" (I assume that means unsolicited porn via email).
(OT: PS: Wtf?? I tried posting this and it says I need to slow down because it's been 30 seconds since I last posted -- but I haven't!)
I guess after stock values have stopped climbing so consistently that it takes some extra carrots to get bright programmers willing to surgically operate on spaghetti:)
Or maybe they weren't fundamentalist idiots about operating systems - like the average slashdotter is - in the first place? Just a thought.
Thanks for proving your own point wrong. Here's the bottomline: It's not illegal to build an operating system, office suite, etc. just like Microsoft's. The only IP laws protecting Microsoft right now are copyright laws, not patent laws. (Yes, they own some patents but I've never heard them go after anyone for patent infringement). And these copyright laws are with respect to actually copying the software instead of buying it, not with regards to the source being open - the source is not and would not be open regardless of what laws you made. (Short of a communist regime, of course)
So, inspite of all the opportunity to do so, none of the other companies have yet come up with an OS or Office Suite (among others) that really competes with Microsofts offering.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember reading here (correct me if I'm wrong) that M.S. has an injunction placed on their XP release of Windows.
There is currently no injunction on the XP release. Certain senators and state attorneys want one but it isn't there yet.
Suddenly, they seem willing to settle out of court or at least want to hurry the process. Looks like they are getting to know what it feels like when you get dragged through court. I'm just wondering if all this effort to end this case on M.S.'s end is because they are afraid they won't be able to release XP as it is or when they want.
Huhh?? Maybe you're in a different world from the rest of us. Microsoft is actually the one who wanted this to be revisited and not fast-tracked. They want this to go on as long as possible. It's the government on the other hand that wanted this case to be fast-tracked.
"Insightful"? How about "Totally Wrong"
I started reading Miguel de Icaza's article about Passport but had to stop halfway through. I'm sorry but I don't have the patience for clueless opinions.
Every one of the links he points to in his section on "The problems of Passport" fails to support his argument!
First he talks about a single point of failure and says "Such a failure was predicted, and we recently witnessed got a lot of people worried." While a single point of failure is a problem with Passport, the link he points to is a problem with MSN Messenger and NOT with Hailstorm or Passport which had no problems during the period.
Next he talks about trust and how "This is not unheard of, as the Microsoft Internet Server had a trojan horse built into that allowed anyone that knew about this to control any server running IIS." Of course as anyone who has been following stories knows that there was no trojan horse involved there - just a comment digging at Netscape and some bad test cases.
Finally he talks about Security and points out "Hackers have already broken into Microsoft in the past. And the company was unable to figure out for how long their systems had been hacked. " However, anyone with any clue should realize that an internal corporate network is a completely different thing from an external service. Getting into one doesn't get you into the other, for starters and both are used by very different users for very different purposes.
I couldn't get any further than that. Sheesh!
Next, they ruled that the boyscouts could discriminate against gays, because they are a private organization. (gays are second class citizens in the US now).
Homosexual people are NOT second-class citizens in this country. Yes, there are some morons who think homosexuality is somehow wrong but they are a fast-shrinking minority.
That issue aside, just as it is important that the state protect ones right to practice ones sexual orientation, it is just as important to me that a private organization has the freedom to make and enact its own rules.
I don't want to live in a society where the majority is able to cram its opinion down everyones throats. The down side to this is that the lunatic fringe is able to practice what it wants to but the up side is that if there is a small minority that is right about something, they are not automatically silenced because of being considered the lunatic fringe.
This freedom is very important to me and I'm willing to pay whatever price it takes.
They penalized manufacturers who did not put Windows on the PCs they sold ... AOL is striking deals where they would pay the manufacturers
Bzzzzt!! Wrong!
There is no difference between Microsoft's "penalties" and what AOL is doing here. The price for the OS was always $89. For OEMs that played along with MS, MS offered a huge discount to that price. OEMs that didn't do this didn't get the discount and were hence "penalized". What AOL is doing is the same here. They're offering money and OEMs that don't take it are "penalized" because their computers cost more compared to their competitors who do.
Did you come up with that idea all by yourself or did you have help? No single person could possibly have come up with something so stupid!
As an application developer, I prefer coding to a standards, not moving targets where my test matrix blows up because every OEMs version of the Operating System has its own personal quirks which throw my app in a tizzy.
As a user, I prefer a standardized operating system where I don't have to relearn everything every time I want to do something just because some OEM thought it would be cool to remap the function keys.
Here's a clue: Most users use their computers to get something ELSE done. People don't normally use computers for the thrill of it but in order to get their job done. They don't care about the specifics of how as long as it is relatively easy to learn and doesn't change every time. MS won't have much to worry about until the competition begins to realize this.
to to this by threatening to withhold the OS;
No, you're wrong.
Microsoft never threatened to withhold the OS or to raise prices on it. There was a set price per license and a date on which you could get your hands on copies. What it did do, though was offer incentives - not unlike what AOL is doing here. If a manufacturer was willing to do things their way, MS offered them discounted licenses (similar to AOLs $35 rebate) as well as a chance to get their hands on the Gold CDs early.
Not that much different after all.
How does this crap get modded up as insightful?
It's a basic fact of human psychology that people hate people who they see as more fortunate as them and love making excuses for it. So, if you're rich, no one will like you. If you're rich, everyone will assume you got there by lying, stealing, being dishonest, etc. (that rationalizes why they, themselves are not rich).
That's also the reason why every loser on Slashdot hates all "evil corporations". Most people - especially the incompetent - simply cannot accept the success of others as being a result of their competency.
So you go ahead and defend your theft by pretending the music companies are dishonest and greedy while they'll go ahead and try to stop themselves from being robbed.
And they're removing Java, meaning that anyone distributing a Java app needs to distribute instructions on how to waste half an hour downloading the latest VM.
FYI, if you try to download a web page which uses a Java applet you get a pop-up telling you you need Java and you can click on a button to automatically download the VM.
I hate to feed the obvious troll, but MICROSOFTS CONSUMERS DON'T CARE!
Yup, that's right. The vast majority of Microsoft's consumers don't care whether IE is bundled into the OS or not. It's only the folks at Netscape that cared. So yes, Microsoft does listen to its consumers, just not to the government and their competitors.
That's some of the dumbest logic I've ever heard. "I can't do blah with product A. Why should I expect to do so with product B?"
They're two entirely different products and, trust me, if it was possible for people to repair their Maytag washers over the phone and Maytag had thought of it, we'd have Maytag phone support already. The simple reason for this is the fact that phone support is so much cheaper than bringing the washer in or sending in a repair person. The other big difference is that a poorly repaired washing machine can KILL and cause serious damage while the damage from someone clicking on the wrong icon is never nearly that serious.
It's so obvious that the poster has no idea what Smart Tags are or how they work. I wonder how this post got modded up to +5.
Smart Tags are a great idea and I, for one, want them. I want my browser to be smart about what I see and automatically provide me the ability to navigate from and gain more information about the words that I see in my window.
I wish that instead of pulling the feature entirely, they had simply shipped the technology with the Smart Tag recognizers that point to their own stuff being a downloadable add-in (or disabled). That way no one would be able to cry foul about what they shipped because Joe Yahoo! can write his own Smart Tag recognizer to work with the technology, maybe making the links to Yahoo! instead of MSN.
And for the sake of completeness, the above example assumes, wrongly, that Smart Tags would be installed on your computer without authorization by the user. I have no problem with a pop-up dialog coming up when I visit a porn site that asks me if I want to add a smart-tag recognizer from that site onto my computer.
Ice ages are regular events. There's another one coming RSN in geological terms. Sure, maybe it won't be for thousands of years. But maybe it will be this year. (cue scoffing laugher)
Will that be before or after everyone stops whining about global warming?
Yes, but consider the source of that information - it can be slanted any way Microsoft wishes. No other power on earth has ever had that kind of editorial control.
Did you fail reading in grade school? As I said, anyone can write their own smart-tag recognizer that plugs into the system. Microsoft has no more editorial control than it has over the pages on its own website. If you don't like those pages, just visit a different website - if you don't like the smart-tag recognizers they provide, use someone elses. You don't think web-browsers are evil, do you?
Anybody with half a brain ought to be terrified at the prospect.
You certainly seem like you fit the bill.
Sheesh. Get over it, kids. I know you hate Microsoft but I really don't see a problem here. Smart-tags are progress. Quit getting in the way of it.
For one, it appears from most of the comments that most people have no clue what smart-tag technology is. Smart-tags provide the ability to automatically recognize certain strings and generate hyperlinks based on that text.
You can write your own smart-tag recognizers! There's a smart-tags SDK which content providers can use to create smart-tag recognizers and a database of hyperlinks to generate. Of course, the ones that Microsoft ships point to MS properties, but anyone can create and ship their own recognizers pointing to their own stuff.
The closest analogy I can see to all this whining is if you were whining about someone shipping a web-browser with the OS because you hadn't written a web-page and felt that put you at a disadvantage.
As for the spam argument, that's ridiculous. All a user sees is a dotted underline on a piece of text which allows the user to get more information. Users who don't like seeing those lines can disable smart-tags or not install IE6. Users currently have the exact same functionality if they cut-and-paste the text out of the page and into a search bar. Smart-tags just make it easier.
Post or moderate? The classic dilemma.
However, it was a good company in its effects. It brought taxation and simple democracy to India. It breathed the first light of the west's wisdom on those dark and primitive lands.
That is an as arrogant, narrow-minded and xenophobic statement as I have ever heard.
Taxation is not a self-evident benefit, as another poster pointed out.
Democracy was a relatively nascent concept (not in terms of time, but in terms of its adoption) at the time at which the East India company subjucated the peoples of India. To say that democracy wouldn't have made it there without their help is ridiculous at best. What we do know, though, is that after the East India company took over, there was no real democracy in the country until 1947 when the British finally left.
The statement I find most incendiary, though, is where you say the East India Company "breathed the light of the west's wisdom on India". You can lookup the scientific and mathematical advances that pre-modern India had made yourself. It won't be hard to read up on. Indian culture also had a relatively egalitarian system of education and local economies that were dismantled by the British to set up their own hierarchy where bureaucrats that worked for the British achieved a higher status.
The only area in which the British were distinguishably superior to the indigenous population was in terms of the technology of warfare.
I'm reminded of an anecdote I read which was written by a British author whose name I forget. He described an incident when he was sitting down with a French friend and he made the statement that England had never lost a battle (which was what he had been taught in history). His French counterpart rattled off a list of battles which England had indeed lost. The moral here is to not go just by what history texts teach you because they are almost guaranteed to be biased towards the authors point of view.
What kind of a geek are you? You should be working harder at your editing job. Oh, wait, you have a geek friend who works at square. It's ok then.
I hate to defend Slashdot editors but it's a very valid figure of speech the way it was said. You should try reading some good books sometimes.
I think they keyword there was him mentioning that it happened in the pre-e-everything days. Until a few years ago, if your credit card was stolen you had a maximum liability of $50. A couple of years ago, Visa decided to waive that liability and all the other major credit card providers decided to follow suit.
I bought a Logitech Cordless TrackMan FX the other day ... that's about as useful as a cordless telephone pole ...
And you bought it because you're really into cordless telephone poles?
I agree. I think a simple, polite email or phone call was warranted before Corley pointed that domain name to Ford's website. It could very well have averted the whole situation.
Did Corley call Ford motors and ask if they would mind terribly if he pointed fuckgeneralmotors.com at them? No. I see no reason why Ford shouldn't return the favor.
You go ahead and act like a dumbass and you get treated like one.
The vast majority of the people are landless and disenfranchised (emphasis mine)
India is a stable democracy and has been that way for the past 54 years - no coups, nothing. Yes, democracy is implemented haphazardly in India, but to suggest that anyone in India is disenfranchised is ridiculous. Maybe you don't know what the word disenfranchised means.
The land must be redistributed
The commies are coming, the commies are coming...
and social (marriage) laws enacted so as to link the wealth of the land to population increases. There should not be more people than the resources of the country can support comfortably.
I have no idea what you mean by that but if you're thinking of forcibly sterilizing people or disallowing them from getting married or having children, I'm very, very afraid of you.
India is a country. Mumbai is a city in India.
Yes, the Mumbai police has a website and I applaud them for that inspite of the fact that is a very shoddy site but that doesn't imply that the police force as a whole is tech-savvy.
Yes, there is mobile banking available in Mumbai. I'm not sure I'd conclude anything about their police from that.
The universal keyboard announcement was for the Tamil language. Tamil is not spoken (at least it's not significant as a language) in Mumbai.
The biotech park link was dead but I'll assume that has nothing to do with Mumbai either.
Just thought I'd make some facts clear. Regardless of how clueful the police is, it says nothing about whether the idea of removing anonymity is a good one or not.
I hate commenting on moderation but I have to agree that the original post in this thread made no sense whatsoever.
My take on this (Maybe I'm biased because I grew up in Bombay - before they renamed it to Mumbai): The only significant piece of this is the fact that they are requiring identification for internet access and are requiring the cafes to tie any access to a specific individual. How they do it - i.e. what technology: ID cards, snoop cams, etc. - is irrelevant.
Personally, I'd hesistate to hit the panic button. It seems like they are only requiring that that information be collected - there is no implication that they will have free access to it. For example, a record of every phone call made from your home is collected right now -but the police can't access that unless they have a warrant. I'll assume access to this information will be on a similar basis.
About pornography: From reading the article, I have no idea whether what they want to target people who access porn or who send "porn mail" (I assume that means unsolicited porn via email).
(OT: PS: Wtf?? I tried posting this and it says I need to slow down because it's been 30 seconds since I last posted -- but I haven't!)
I guess after stock values have stopped climbing so consistently that it takes some extra carrots to get bright programmers willing to surgically operate on spaghetti:)
Or maybe they weren't fundamentalist idiots about operating systems - like the average slashdotter is - in the first place? Just a thought.
Thanks for proving your own point wrong. Here's the bottomline: It's not illegal to build an operating system, office suite, etc. just like Microsoft's. The only IP laws protecting Microsoft right now are copyright laws, not patent laws. (Yes, they own some patents but I've never heard them go after anyone for patent infringement). And these copyright laws are with respect to actually copying the software instead of buying it, not with regards to the source being open - the source is not and would not be open regardless of what laws you made. (Short of a communist regime, of course)
So, inspite of all the opportunity to do so, none of the other companies have yet come up with an OS or Office Suite (among others) that really competes with Microsofts offering.