I never really understood the part about monopolistically competitive markets. I was rather thinking about the behaviour of firms engaging in monopolistic competition. From this part:
A monopolistically competitive firm acts like a monopolist in that the firm is able to influence the market price of its product by altering the rate of production of the product. Unlike in perfect competition, monopolistically competitive firms produce products that are not perfect substitutes. As such, brand X's product, which is different (or at least perceived to be different) from all other brands' products, is available from only a single producer. In the short-run, the monopolistically competitive firm can exploit the heterogeneity of its brand so as to reap positive economic profit (i.e. a rate of return greater than the rate required to compensate debt and equity holders for the risk of investing in the firm).
Another notable quote:
Unlike in perfect competition, the monopolistically competitive firm does not produce at the lowest attainable average total cost. Instead, the firm produces at an inefficient output level, reaping more in additional revenue than it incurs in additional cost versus the efficient output level.
They don't like us defending ourselves though because it means their fuel costs go up
Do you really believe that? Europe use comparatively fuel-efficient cars, lots of electrified railroads, and a lot of nuclear power. It's you who have the coal- and oil-fired power stations and the gas-guzzling cars.
Really? Is that why I can buy star office and download open office for free? How does this constitute a monopoly?
This has already been been answered over and over again. A monopoly does not necessarily require only one vendor in a given parket. A vendor is a monopoly if it can engage in monopolistic competition. Note that Standard Oil was determined to be a monopoly by the US court system, and it "only" had 64% market share, and had a hundred competitors. Compare with Microsoft that has approximately 95% market share in the PC operating system market.
It's only noon-ish, and already I've spotted quite a few lies today. One was in a blog article I just read. Another in the paper. Yet another on "Meet the Press" on the TV.
Reminds me of an "in-depth article" about open source on the Swedish national television website, provided as "see also" information about the latest Microsoft fine in the EU. It listed a few companies whose products are open source, and to my surprise, Skype were among them.
I sent them an email, pointing out their error, and they removed it the next day.
You obviously never made a telnet (or SSH, etc) connection to a router. That's quite useful when you e.g. need to change something in its configuration.
Ahh, I see. I always recommend people that want to install Fedora Core to take a look at Stanton Finley's excellent installation guide, where all these topics are covered.
While you look forward to choosing specific hardware for Linux, modifying you system code to get it working, and calling people ignorant for not knowing what you know, I look forward to not buying all new hardware (thousands of dollars and a gamble to boot) just to get a functional system.
Even though I'm not the GP, I'll reply. I did not buy any special Linux-compatible hardware, and I did not have to modify any system code to get my systems working, including graphics drivers. I use Fedora Core 5 for my desktop system and Fedora Core 4 for my work laptop. My desktop has a recent nVidia card and my laptop has an ATI Radeon card, and both are using the proprietary drivers from their respective vendors. The only thing I had to do after system installation was to add the third-party RPM repository Livna, which provides packages that don't conform to the Fedora Core package inclusion rules (such as proprietary software or packages that are potentially patent-infringing in the US). After adding the Livna repository, I could install the nVidia and ATI drivers, NTFS driver, multimedia software and codecs, etc, directly from the package manager. And there wasn't any code modification involved. And it all works just fine.
Oh? I have an ATI card on my work laptop, and it works just fine in Linux, using the proprietary ATI driver. I did not use the ATI installer though, since the unofficial FC5 repository Livna provides this driver in RPM format.
does anyone actually find that unaccelerated desktop windows are slowing them down?
Are you sure that the driver is unaccelerated? I thought that the open source drivers (both ATI and nVidia) were 2D-accelerated, but lacked 3D acceleration. I haven't had slow performance on the (2D) desktop for ages.
I've never tried getting an ATI card to work because I've never heard anything other than it was sheer agony to use an ATI card under Linux.
I have an ATI Radeon Mobility X600 in my Dell laptop, I use the ATI proprietary driver and it works just fine. I run Fedora Core 4 on it, and installed the driver from the Livna third-party RPM repository.
To me, it seems reasonably appropriate for the G8 to look at it.
But what can they use to put pressure on the Russians? Mr Putin has threatened to turn off the gas before, and he might do it again if he don't like being pushed around by the MAFIAA.
Skype should have patented its technology, but it's not like the Chinese respect IP anyway.
First, patents are issued on a country-by-country basis. Even if patented in the United States, such a patent have no validity in other countries, where they can be freely ignored. And even if they tried to patent it everywhere, this would probably amount to a software or business method patent, which are not available in many countries, effectively making it impossible to reach global patent coverage. And without global patent coverage, people in those countries where they had no patent would be free to use the technology.
This is different from e.g. copyrights. Swedish citizens are required to respect American copyrights, but we aren't required to respect American patents. We are only (at the moment) required to respect Swedish patents.
And bearing in mind that the current administration has declared that treaties it has willfully signed are not binding upon it, as that violates American legal sovereignity.
This is interesting, especially since the Bush administration recently pressured the Swedish government to close down The Pirate Bay, referring to American copyrights. According to the Swedish national television, the US threatened with WTO sanctions if we do not adhere to signed treaties. Looks like hypocrisy to me.
Not that I care about The Pirate Bay (apart from their legal page), I do care about hypocrisy in politics though.
Over a billion dollars spent from the Gates Foundation on AIDS efforts, child mortality and poverty in developing nations is well worth the annoying bugs in Windows and IE. It's not even comparable.
What about those many billions of dollars spent cleaning up after various virus epidemics and other malware infestations caused by those bugs? Without those costs, other people could spend more than Bill Gates on the same charities.
I look forward to when the US is a Democratic Socialist country like Norway or Sweden. The government should always take the least expensive route that achieves the same results, in this case, open source.
Are you sure? Sweden is in many cases far behind in the open source adoption curve. An explanation could be that citizens are used to only have one supplier for many goods and services, like alcohol, gambling and (previously) telephone services. Microsoft appears to be just another single source of goods, in this case computer programs, and this is accepted as fact by most people.
The only way out of this is to restart Firefox (which can take 15-30 minutes due to the long shutdown and session restore times). The long shutdown times are due to heap fragmentation and poor Linux paging strategies.
Are you serious? Shutting down Firefox (1.5.0.4) on my machine (running Fedora Core 5) takes about one second (even after running for an entire day), and starting Firefox takes 2-3 seconds.
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I never really understood the part about monopolistically competitive markets. I was rather thinking about the behaviour of firms engaging in monopolistic competition. From this part:
Another notable quote:
If you think this is Microsoft, I wonder what metric you used.
Do you really believe that? Europe use comparatively fuel-efficient cars, lots of electrified railroads, and a lot of nuclear power. It's you who have the coal- and oil-fired power stations and the gas-guzzling cars.
This has already been been answered over and over again. A monopoly does not necessarily require only one vendor in a given parket. A vendor is a monopoly if it can engage in monopolistic competition. Note that Standard Oil was determined to be a monopoly by the US court system, and it "only" had 64% market share, and had a hundred competitors. Compare with Microsoft that has approximately 95% market share in the PC operating system market.
Yes they can. It's called a law.
Reminds me of an "in-depth article" about open source on the Swedish national television website, provided as "see also" information about the latest Microsoft fine in the EU. It listed a few companies whose products are open source, and to my surprise, Skype were among them.
I sent them an email, pointing out their error, and they removed it the next day.
You obviously never made a telnet (or SSH, etc) connection to a router. That's quite useful when you e.g. need to change something in its configuration.
Ahh, I see. I always recommend people that want to install Fedora Core to take a look at Stanton Finley's excellent installation guide, where all these topics are covered.
Even though I'm not the GP, I'll reply. I did not buy any special Linux-compatible hardware, and I did not have to modify any system code to get my systems working, including graphics drivers. I use Fedora Core 5 for my desktop system and Fedora Core 4 for my work laptop. My desktop has a recent nVidia card and my laptop has an ATI Radeon card, and both are using the proprietary drivers from their respective vendors. The only thing I had to do after system installation was to add the third-party RPM repository Livna, which provides packages that don't conform to the Fedora Core package inclusion rules (such as proprietary software or packages that are potentially patent-infringing in the US). After adding the Livna repository, I could install the nVidia and ATI drivers, NTFS driver, multimedia software and codecs, etc, directly from the package manager. And there wasn't any code modification involved. And it all works just fine.
Oh? I have an ATI card on my work laptop, and it works just fine in Linux, using the proprietary ATI driver. I did not use the ATI installer though, since the unofficial FC5 repository Livna provides this driver in RPM format.
And I use my laptop all day at work.
Are you claiming that nVidia drivers are available from any official repository? I have to use Livna to get both nVidia and ATI proprietary drivers.
Are you sure that the driver is unaccelerated? I thought that the open source drivers (both ATI and nVidia) were 2D-accelerated, but lacked 3D acceleration. I haven't had slow performance on the (2D) desktop for ages.
I have an ATI Radeon Mobility X600 in my Dell laptop, I use the ATI proprietary driver and it works just fine. I run Fedora Core 4 on it, and installed the driver from the Livna third-party RPM repository.
I think the name MAFIAA is even clearer. :)
Oh, that's easy to counter. Mr Putin just has to threaten to turn off the gas, or double the prices. He did it before and can do it again.
But what can they use to put pressure on the Russians? Mr Putin has threatened to turn off the gas before, and he might do it again if he don't like being pushed around by the MAFIAA.
This could work for IFPI too, the International Federation of the Pornographic Industry.
I think you meant "enable copyright infringement". Otherwise DRM would be illegal. :)
First, patents are issued on a country-by-country basis. Even if patented in the United States, such a patent have no validity in other countries, where they can be freely ignored. And even if they tried to patent it everywhere, this would probably amount to a software or business method patent, which are not available in many countries, effectively making it impossible to reach global patent coverage. And without global patent coverage, people in those countries where they had no patent would be free to use the technology.
This is different from e.g. copyrights. Swedish citizens are required to respect American copyrights, but we aren't required to respect American patents. We are only (at the moment) required to respect Swedish patents.
This is interesting, especially since the Bush administration recently pressured the Swedish government to close down The Pirate Bay, referring to American copyrights. According to the Swedish national television, the US threatened with WTO sanctions if we do not adhere to signed treaties. Looks like hypocrisy to me.
Not that I care about The Pirate Bay (apart from their legal page), I do care about hypocrisy in politics though.
What about those many billions of dollars spent cleaning up after various virus epidemics and other malware infestations caused by those bugs? Without those costs, other people could spend more than Bill Gates on the same charities.
Are you sure? Sweden is in many cases far behind in the open source adoption curve. An explanation could be that citizens are used to only have one supplier for many goods and services, like alcohol, gambling and (previously) telephone services. Microsoft appears to be just another single source of goods, in this case computer programs, and this is accepted as fact by most people.
Oh, do you know something nobody else knows? E.g. that Microsoft found a way to make perfectly secure applications? I'll believe that when I see it.
And to remember it, think L = Location.
Are you serious? Shutting down Firefox (1.5.0.4) on my machine (running Fedora Core 5) takes about one second (even after running for an entire day), and starting Firefox takes 2-3 seconds.