(1) Windows 1.x (2) Windows 2.x (3) Windows 3.x (4) Windows 9x (95, 98, Millenium--all just iterations of the same OS) (5) Windows XP (6) Windows Vista (7) Windows 7
..is that Democrats have thought about the issue much less so than Republicans. Democrats advocate "fairness" in everything (wealth distribution, access to heathcare, etc.), but don't think about the perils of government-enforced fairness in a completely open medium like the Internet. If you turned the question on its head, and asked about government regulation of "objectionable" content on the Internet, I suspect the numbers would flip the other way, with Republicans not thinking how some of their own ideas might get caught up in the "objectionable" net.
The exclusion of capital cities seems more reasonable than handicapping some of the character races. The former could be added in via expansion packs (free via download or otherwise). To start off without "tanks" for some of the races is just silly, though. Were I them I'd split the difference and make sure the game is balanced in a smaller scale world, then expand that world.
According to your incorrect interpretation, a vast majority of internaly held code that has been written the world over is illegal. Lets take one simple example, Google. Do you honestly think that all of Googles code is released into the open?
Actually, that may well be coming in the next version of the GPL. For now, it's a separate license, but I suspect future versions of the GPL will be such that if you write any application based on GPL'd code which provides a service to anyone but yourself, you must provide the users of your service with the source code for that service. This particularly hits Google, with its web services, but I suspect it will be expanded to include any service (e.g., a mail server).
Perhaps more interesting will be when the FSF guys start to address the "content loophole." I.e., if you create content with GPL'd software (or with software derived from GPL'd code), you must provide the source code for the software when you distribute the created content. If I put on my "freedom" hat, that seems like a perfectly rational thing. (If, for example, I wrote a GPL'd 3-D modeling program and some game company modifies it and uses it to help create their next blockbuster, I'd at least like to get the source code for their improvements, even if I don't get a cut of the revenue from the game.) If I put on any other hat (or no hat at all), it seems bonkers, though.
When one starts work in the financial services industry as a "registered person" (e.g., a trader, broker, etc.) one is fingerprinted. Every time I've moved from one firm to another, I've been fingerprinted again. I'm pretty sure these are checked against criminal databases each time.
This is one of the most overwrought comments I've read in a long time. How exactly is the inability to get iPhone features in other products really impinging on the "collective good of society?" We're not talking about an overpriced patented drug here. We're talking about a frickin' phone! If Apple wants (and is allowed) to keep features to themselves, none of us who choose not to buy an iPhone are going to die or suffer great harm because of it.
In terms of "background tasks," I think at least part of Apple's goal is to maintain a quality user experience. People have different expectations from a device like a phone than they do from a computer. Most people expect their computers to occasionally freeze (whether Windows, OSX, Linux or otherwise) due to some background process kicking off and monopolizing resources for a few seconds. When it happens, hit Control-Alt-Delete, run "top", or whatever, and figure out what's taking the CPU. People expect their phones to respond instantly all the time, and I don't think many want to bring up a process manager and click "kill process" while they're walking down the street trying to make a call.
Given the amount of sketchy, useless junk that one sees "freely downloadable" on most PCs and Macs, I don't think that Apple should necessarily want to export that same environment to the iPhone right away. The first application that everyone installs and which secretly launches a DoS attack on the mobile phone network at some predetermined time in the future is going to be a PR disaster for Apple. And that's a scenario way beyond some junk application that just locks up or slows down people's iPhones.
In the end, Apple should probably have a "power user" mode on their phones, the activation of which forces you to sign a disclaimer or non-indemnifation agreement that protects them if you screw your iPhone up installing unverified apps, run up your bill because some background process was doing data access thoughout the day while you were in Europe, etc. Many of those things could be "protected" against of course, if Apple put safeguards in their software (e.g., block any automatic data access when on a roaming network where data access might be charged), but I don't expect Apple to have thought of every possible bad outcome yet, but I do expect people to complain/sue like crazy if one of those bad outcomes occurs.
Either way, though, regulators are not the solution here. Any government (Democratic or Republican) is just going to screw things up even more, because they'll have their own set of interests--namely self-perpetuation--at heart.
First off, I acknowledge that my automobile manufacturer analogy is an imperfect one. However, it is correct in one regard: I can guarantee you that users of these Variable Forward Contracts pay a premium over a "regular" investor--so they are getting something "better" by paying more.
Second, it is true that JP Morgan has more than one client. However, is it really unethical to offer one client a perfectly legal vehicle that may offer them an advantage over another client? I have another (perhaps better) analogy here: Given that the US government runs a deficit, any tax deduction a particular individual takes necessarily increases the burden on his/her fellow taxpayers, by reducing government revenue and increasing the debt load, reducing the money available for services, etc. If an accountant finds a significant deduction for a high-income client, that deduction will burden that accountant's other clients, for whom the deduction was not available. Even if the deduction is an "abuse" of the letter of the law in terms of the tax code, I don't think the accountant should be faulted for doing the best for each client as the law allows. The solution is to make the law more fair and close loopholes that allow abuse, not to blame parties for taking advantage of the law.
Most importantly, though, the thing to remember is that it is the insiders who abuse this plan who are acting unethically. Offering a product that is legal but which can be abused is not necessarily unethical. I would still argue that a financial service provider has the obligation to offer the most aggressive products that a client's situation will allow. In this circumstance, the law/regulation favors the insider, so JP Morgan must as well.
The SEC is aware of the problem. It doesn't take much link-following from the original post to find this speech by Linda Chatman Thomsen of the SEC.
Putting that aside, the fact is that regulations rarely have their full, intended effect, especially on the first go. If you read the aforementioned speech, it's pretty obvious that the SEC is trying to do the right thing: Allow executives (particularly founders and other holders of large percentages of stock) the ability to sell those shares on a pre-determined schedule, unencumbered by any insider information they have at a given time during the execution of that plan and unconcerned about the way the market would view the sale, since it had been planned and announced far in advance. For someone with a large percentage of stock, the ability to trade out of that position smoothly over time is critical, since any large sale would be disruptive to the market, and frequent small sales would likely be difficult due to the fact that they might coincide with the common circumstance of having insider information.
The problem, of course, is while the executive is not supposed to initiate the sales plan based on insider information, that same executive may cancel a sale or withdraw from the plan entirely based on non-public, material information. In doing so, they create a bias in that their sales that were initiated would be expected to perform "better than average", since any sales that would have performed "worse than average" are more likely to have been canceled. Such a bias is precisely what academics found and is referenced in Thomsen's speech. The SEC can then amend/interpret the rule so as to close any loophole. Such a process may go through multiple iterations before all the holes are patched.
In terms of the Wikileaks article itself, there are a few problems: First, it is not just "small investors" who are hurt by this. Any investor, small or large, who is not an "insider" would be disadvantaged by such activity. There's no need to be a populist to see the potential for abuse here. The second problem is that it is JP Morgan's fiduciary duty to offer the best product available to its clients, including taking advantage of the specifics of SEC regulations, if necessary. Of course, this particular opportunity is available only certain, very wealthy insiders, but that's the circumstance that the SEC created, not JP Morgan. This situation is no more unethical than Mercedes or Volvo building a "safer" automobile that is only available to those wealthy enough to afford it--and it carries the same hazard for others, actually, since a "protected" driver may be more reckless and endanger other drivers.
In short, there's no need to get bent out of shape when a necessarily imperfect law or regulation is exploited to someone's advantage. This is just what people will do in any system. The only solution is to keep in mind unintended consequences and improve the framework that one has for the future.
Re:My heterogeneous experience with Cell processor
on
Panic in Multicore Land
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I agree. While a proper library/framework can help abstract the difficulties associated with a heterogeneous/asymetric architecture away, it's just easier to program for a homogeneous environment. This same principle applies all the way down to having general-purpose registers in a RISC chip as opposed to special-purpose registers in a CISC chip--the latter may let you do a few specialized things better, but the former is more accomodating for a wide range of tasks.
And while the Cell architecture is a fairly stationary target because it was incorporated into a commercial gaming console, if these types of architectures were to find their way into general purpose computing, it would be a real nightmare, since every year or so a new variant of the architecture would come out that would introduce a faster interconnect here, more cache memory there, etc., so that one might have to reorganize the division of labor in one's application to take advantage (again a properly parameterized library/framework can handle this sometimes, but only post facto--after the variation in features is known, not before the new features have even been introduced).
So the Chinese government is not PROTECTING its people from the DANGERS of porn? And EU officials are not OPPRESSING those who have views they find DETESTABLE? Of course, MAYBE you were just being SARCASTIC. Either way, why are we typing like THIS?
Finally, a reasonable opinion on this. Not only did the guy have a personal blog where he discussed the news business, using inside information from his employment at CNN, as well as taking potshots at others in the news business, he was also blogging on The Huffington Post, which is a competitor to CNN's own website. It doesn't matter whether or not he got paid for the work--he was helping a competitor generate advertising revenue by providing content. I wonder whether a Firefox developer doing something to help the Microsoft Internet Explorer team along would ellicit the same defense from the Slashdot crowd. Or if a Barack Obama staffer (administrative--not involved in policy or strategy) was found to write a column on NewsMax saying why he or she felt Mike Huckabee should be the Republican nominee...
And even putting all of that aside, just as an employee can chose to quit a company because they disagree with the opinions of the company, its founders or its other officers, can an employer not fire an employee because they find his widely-expressed opinions distasteful? Does Ken Chenault have to respect "free speech rights" if he finds out an American Express employee has a column on Stormfront or enjoys marching in a KKK parades? The right of free speech is primarily a protection from the government, not from an employer. People may wish it were the latter as well, but that doesn't make it so.
I think I should patent the business process of establishing patents based on clear prior art and then suing companies for the use of my intellectual "property." Of course, my application would probably get rejected as prior art, but at least I could enjoy the irony.
Actually, both of your analogies are poor. The problem with "choice overload" in the software context is that with so many platforms to choose from, no one platform builds the critical mass to be useful for a broad range of problems, and developers are almost certain to build systems and components that do not interoperate because they are built in separate frameworks. In software, there's a benefit to having everyone chose the same platform to build on.
On the other hand, I don't know about the benefit of everyone chosing the same girl or the same restaurant, though--unless you like gang-bangs, long lines, etc.
You obviously haven't read Ted Rall or The Nation's articles on Yahoo. They practically worship at Mao's grave. So, there's plenty of far-left lunacy out there, too. The issue is that Google isn't an actual publishing "news" agency--they're a intermediate distributor of information. For them to make a political judgement about what information is worthy of distribution versus what is not is very concerning given their position in the market. It's perfectly within their rights, of course, but it doesn't set a good precedent.
With regard to repealing Glass-Steagall, the ability to provide integrated financial services including commercial banking, investment banking, and trading is important to the growth and competitiveness of the financial services industry. Why should one have to do banking at one institution, insurance at another, and brokerage at yet another? While there is more robustness in diversity of providers, there are also efficiencies of scale in having a range of services provided by the same institution, particularly when it comes to comprehensive planning.
As far as conflicts of interest go, they exist in any industry. The solution is not laws attempting to prevent conflicts of interest--the solution is vigilant monitoring and harsh punishment for those who fail to live up to their fiduciary responsibilities. Strong civil penalties also help. However, hamstringing an entire industry because someone might do something irresponsible is not the way to go.
Mindless indictments of Microsoft by hateboys is no better than mindless props by fanboys. Microsoft's "monopoly" is not an unassailable position created purely by anti-competitive tactics, etc. The incompetence of their competition contributed to that as much as anything. Let's review:
1) IBM outsourced OS development for the PC platform to Microsoft, effectively giving them control of the desktop once the PC platform became ubiquitous.
2) Lotus had the dominant position in spreadsheets with 1-2-3, but lost out to Excel by being slow in transitioning to a GUI, slow to add features, etc.
3) Wordperfect had the word processing market locked up, but fell behind for reasons similar to Lotus.
4) Novell dominated the PC networking scene but was based on proprietary protocols, was too obscure and command-line oriented, etc.
5) Netscape had the superior browser and majority share but became a slow, buggy piece of bloatware.
6) Apple had the superior UI (and still does in many ways) but allowed the gap to close considerably prior to OS X.
7) Symantec had a lock on tools with superior Norton products which have devolved into buggy bloatware (not that Microsoft yet competes against this, but it gives them a reason to develop their own equivalents).
There are other examples. If you look though at products, whether proprietary or open-source, where the competition has focused on their product over the long-haul, without letting it rot from lack of attention or bloat/wander from poor planning, Microsoft is clearly beatable:
1) Google has beaten them in search and taken the lead in web-based e-mail, too. (The latter at least in mindshare if not marketshare.)
2) Apache continues to dominate web servers.
3) Oracle and others continue to have the lead in database servers.
4) Specialty applications like Photoshop continue to trounce Microsoft's half-hearted offerings.
In short, Microsoft is no Standard Oil. They enjoy nothing approaching the same scale and are not in absolute control of a scarce resource. Simply put, there are alternatives. If you hate Microsoft, buy a Mac or run Linux, but quit moaning and groaning. And don't be so credulous about the EU "doing the right thing". Europe is just looking out for itself. If you think they would be pursuing this if Microsoft were a European company, you're very naive.
Slashdot Mirror
For the OS version, I think it's like this:
(1) Windows 1.x
(2) Windows 2.x
(3) Windows 3.x
(4) Windows 9x (95, 98, Millenium--all just iterations of the same OS)
(5) Windows XP
(6) Windows Vista
(7) Windows 7
Kernel 6.1 is the NT numbering.
but their spokesperson sure knows what bullshit means.
They used flourinert.
..is that Democrats have thought about the issue much less so than Republicans. Democrats advocate "fairness" in everything (wealth distribution, access to heathcare, etc.), but don't think about the perils of government-enforced fairness in a completely open medium like the Internet. If you turned the question on its head, and asked about government regulation of "objectionable" content on the Internet, I suspect the numbers would flip the other way, with Republicans not thinking how some of their own ideas might get caught up in the "objectionable" net.
The exclusion of capital cities seems more reasonable than handicapping some of the character races. The former could be added in via expansion packs (free via download or otherwise). To start off without "tanks" for some of the races is just silly, though. Were I them I'd split the difference and make sure the game is balanced in a smaller scale world, then expand that world.
Actually, that may well be coming in the next version of the GPL. For now, it's a separate license, but I suspect future versions of the GPL will be such that if you write any application based on GPL'd code which provides a service to anyone but yourself, you must provide the users of your service with the source code for that service. This particularly hits Google, with its web services, but I suspect it will be expanded to include any service (e.g., a mail server).
Perhaps more interesting will be when the FSF guys start to address the "content loophole." I.e., if you create content with GPL'd software (or with software derived from GPL'd code), you must provide the source code for the software when you distribute the created content. If I put on my "freedom" hat, that seems like a perfectly rational thing. (If, for example, I wrote a GPL'd 3-D modeling program and some game company modifies it and uses it to help create their next blockbuster, I'd at least like to get the source code for their improvements, even if I don't get a cut of the revenue from the game.) If I put on any other hat (or no hat at all), it seems bonkers, though.
When one starts work in the financial services industry as a "registered person" (e.g., a trader, broker, etc.) one is fingerprinted. Every time I've moved from one firm to another, I've been fingerprinted again. I'm pretty sure these are checked against criminal databases each time.
In terms of "background tasks," I think at least part of Apple's goal is to maintain a quality user experience. People have different expectations from a device like a phone than they do from a computer. Most people expect their computers to occasionally freeze (whether Windows, OSX, Linux or otherwise) due to some background process kicking off and monopolizing resources for a few seconds. When it happens, hit Control-Alt-Delete, run "top", or whatever, and figure out what's taking the CPU. People expect their phones to respond instantly all the time, and I don't think many want to bring up a process manager and click "kill process" while they're walking down the street trying to make a call.
Given the amount of sketchy, useless junk that one sees "freely downloadable" on most PCs and Macs, I don't think that Apple should necessarily want to export that same environment to the iPhone right away. The first application that everyone installs and which secretly launches a DoS attack on the mobile phone network at some predetermined time in the future is going to be a PR disaster for Apple. And that's a scenario way beyond some junk application that just locks up or slows down people's iPhones.
In the end, Apple should probably have a "power user" mode on their phones, the activation of which forces you to sign a disclaimer or non-indemnifation agreement that protects them if you screw your iPhone up installing unverified apps, run up your bill because some background process was doing data access thoughout the day while you were in Europe, etc. Many of those things could be "protected" against of course, if Apple put safeguards in their software (e.g., block any automatic data access when on a roaming network where data access might be charged), but I don't expect Apple to have thought of every possible bad outcome yet, but I do expect people to complain/sue like crazy if one of those bad outcomes occurs.
Either way, though, regulators are not the solution here. Any government (Democratic or Republican) is just going to screw things up even more, because they'll have their own set of interests--namely self-perpetuation--at heart.
Second, it is true that JP Morgan has more than one client. However, is it really unethical to offer one client a perfectly legal vehicle that may offer them an advantage over another client? I have another (perhaps better) analogy here: Given that the US government runs a deficit, any tax deduction a particular individual takes necessarily increases the burden on his/her fellow taxpayers, by reducing government revenue and increasing the debt load, reducing the money available for services, etc. If an accountant finds a significant deduction for a high-income client, that deduction will burden that accountant's other clients, for whom the deduction was not available. Even if the deduction is an "abuse" of the letter of the law in terms of the tax code, I don't think the accountant should be faulted for doing the best for each client as the law allows. The solution is to make the law more fair and close loopholes that allow abuse, not to blame parties for taking advantage of the law.
Most importantly, though, the thing to remember is that it is the insiders who abuse this plan who are acting unethically. Offering a product that is legal but which can be abused is not necessarily unethical. I would still argue that a financial service provider has the obligation to offer the most aggressive products that a client's situation will allow. In this circumstance, the law/regulation favors the insider, so JP Morgan must as well.
Putting that aside, the fact is that regulations rarely have their full, intended effect, especially on the first go. If you read the aforementioned speech, it's pretty obvious that the SEC is trying to do the right thing: Allow executives (particularly founders and other holders of large percentages of stock) the ability to sell those shares on a pre-determined schedule, unencumbered by any insider information they have at a given time during the execution of that plan and unconcerned about the way the market would view the sale, since it had been planned and announced far in advance. For someone with a large percentage of stock, the ability to trade out of that position smoothly over time is critical, since any large sale would be disruptive to the market, and frequent small sales would likely be difficult due to the fact that they might coincide with the common circumstance of having insider information.
The problem, of course, is while the executive is not supposed to initiate the sales plan based on insider information, that same executive may cancel a sale or withdraw from the plan entirely based on non-public, material information. In doing so, they create a bias in that their sales that were initiated would be expected to perform "better than average", since any sales that would have performed "worse than average" are more likely to have been canceled. Such a bias is precisely what academics found and is referenced in Thomsen's speech. The SEC can then amend/interpret the rule so as to close any loophole. Such a process may go through multiple iterations before all the holes are patched.
In terms of the Wikileaks article itself, there are a few problems: First, it is not just "small investors" who are hurt by this. Any investor, small or large, who is not an "insider" would be disadvantaged by such activity. There's no need to be a populist to see the potential for abuse here. The second problem is that it is JP Morgan's fiduciary duty to offer the best product available to its clients, including taking advantage of the specifics of SEC regulations, if necessary. Of course, this particular opportunity is available only certain, very wealthy insiders, but that's the circumstance that the SEC created, not JP Morgan. This situation is no more unethical than Mercedes or Volvo building a "safer" automobile that is only available to those wealthy enough to afford it--and it carries the same hazard for others, actually, since a "protected" driver may be more reckless and endanger other drivers.
In short, there's no need to get bent out of shape when a necessarily imperfect law or regulation is exploited to someone's advantage. This is just what people will do in any system. The only solution is to keep in mind unintended consequences and improve the framework that one has for the future.
And while the Cell architecture is a fairly stationary target because it was incorporated into a commercial gaming console, if these types of architectures were to find their way into general purpose computing, it would be a real nightmare, since every year or so a new variant of the architecture would come out that would introduce a faster interconnect here, more cache memory there, etc., so that one might have to reorganize the division of labor in one's application to take advantage (again a properly parameterized library/framework can handle this sometimes, but only post facto--after the variation in features is known, not before the new features have even been introduced).
So the Chinese government is not PROTECTING its people from the DANGERS of porn? And EU officials are not OPPRESSING those who have views they find DETESTABLE? Of course, MAYBE you were just being SARCASTIC. Either way, why are we typing like THIS?
Finally, a reasonable opinion on this. Not only did the guy have a personal blog where he discussed the news business, using inside information from his employment at CNN, as well as taking potshots at others in the news business, he was also blogging on The Huffington Post, which is a competitor to CNN's own website. It doesn't matter whether or not he got paid for the work--he was helping a competitor generate advertising revenue by providing content. I wonder whether a Firefox developer doing something to help the Microsoft Internet Explorer team along would ellicit the same defense from the Slashdot crowd. Or if a Barack Obama staffer (administrative--not involved in policy or strategy) was found to write a column on NewsMax saying why he or she felt Mike Huckabee should be the Republican nominee...
And even putting all of that aside, just as an employee can chose to quit a company because they disagree with the opinions of the company, its founders or its other officers, can an employer not fire an employee because they find his widely-expressed opinions distasteful? Does Ken Chenault have to respect "free speech rights" if he finds out an American Express employee has a column on Stormfront or enjoys marching in a KKK parades? The right of free speech is primarily a protection from the government, not from an employer. People may wish it were the latter as well, but that doesn't make it so.
I think I should patent the business process of establishing patents based on clear prior art and then suing companies for the use of my intellectual "property." Of course, my application would probably get rejected as prior art, but at least I could enjoy the irony.
Duke Nukem Forever team announces that they are reimplementing everything in Perl 6.
Actually, both of your analogies are poor. The problem with "choice overload" in the software context is that with so many platforms to choose from, no one platform builds the critical mass to be useful for a broad range of problems, and developers are almost certain to build systems and components that do not interoperate because they are built in separate frameworks. In software, there's a benefit to having everyone chose the same platform to build on.
On the other hand, I don't know about the benefit of everyone chosing the same girl or the same restaurant, though--unless you like gang-bangs, long lines, etc.
You obviously haven't read Ted Rall or The Nation's articles on Yahoo. They practically worship at Mao's grave. So, there's plenty of far-left lunacy out there, too. The issue is that Google isn't an actual publishing "news" agency--they're a intermediate distributor of information. For them to make a political judgement about what information is worthy of distribution versus what is not is very concerning given their position in the market. It's perfectly within their rights, of course, but it doesn't set a good precedent.
With regard to repealing Glass-Steagall, the ability to provide integrated financial services including commercial banking, investment banking, and trading is important to the growth and competitiveness of the financial services industry. Why should one have to do banking at one institution, insurance at another, and brokerage at yet another? While there is more robustness in diversity of providers, there are also efficiencies of scale in having a range of services provided by the same institution, particularly when it comes to comprehensive planning.
As far as conflicts of interest go, they exist in any industry. The solution is not laws attempting to prevent conflicts of interest--the solution is vigilant monitoring and harsh punishment for those who fail to live up to their fiduciary responsibilities. Strong civil penalties also help. However, hamstringing an entire industry because someone might do something irresponsible is not the way to go.
Brain hurts from too much reading. Must click graphics...
OS X's Automator lets you do much of the same thing with apps like Photoshop.
You're just trying to get a date... :-)
1) IBM outsourced OS development for the PC platform to Microsoft, effectively giving them control of the desktop once the PC platform became ubiquitous.
2) Lotus had the dominant position in spreadsheets with 1-2-3, but lost out to Excel by being slow in transitioning to a GUI, slow to add features, etc.
3) Wordperfect had the word processing market locked up, but fell behind for reasons similar to Lotus.
4) Novell dominated the PC networking scene but was based on proprietary protocols, was too obscure and command-line oriented, etc.
5) Netscape had the superior browser and majority share but became a slow, buggy piece of bloatware.
6) Apple had the superior UI (and still does in many ways) but allowed the gap to close considerably prior to OS X.
7) Symantec had a lock on tools with superior Norton products which have devolved into buggy bloatware (not that Microsoft yet competes against this, but it gives them a reason to develop their own equivalents).
There are other examples. If you look though at products, whether proprietary or open-source, where the competition has focused on their product over the long-haul, without letting it rot from lack of attention or bloat/wander from poor planning, Microsoft is clearly beatable:
1) Google has beaten them in search and taken the lead in web-based e-mail, too. (The latter at least in mindshare if not marketshare.)
2) Apache continues to dominate web servers.
3) Oracle and others continue to have the lead in database servers.
4) Specialty applications like Photoshop continue to trounce Microsoft's half-hearted offerings.
In short, Microsoft is no Standard Oil. They enjoy nothing approaching the same scale and are not in absolute control of a scarce resource. Simply put, there are alternatives. If you hate Microsoft, buy a Mac or run Linux, but quit moaning and groaning. And don't be so credulous about the EU "doing the right thing". Europe is just looking out for itself. If you think they would be pursuing this if Microsoft were a European company, you're very naive.
Where are moderator points when you need them?
...because Steve Ballmer obviously understands the meaning of "truthiness".
I have a feeling that "didn't google already" is going to become the default response to everything soon.