unfortunately, they didn't provide enough quests to actually level all the way, so people are forced to kill random monsters to make up the difference.
Have you ever even played the game? There are more than enough quests to level you from 1-60 without having to level grind. If you run out of quests in your current locale, there are at least one or two other areas (possibly on another continent, mind you) where there are quests appropriate for your level. If you can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to travel to another continent to keep questing, that's your own fault, not Blizzard's.
As part of the settlement, Sony BMG will allow consumers to exchange CDs containing the concealed software purchased before December 31, 2006 for new CDs that are not content-protected, and will be required to reimburse consumers up to $150 to repair damage that resulted directly from consumers' attempts to remove the software installed without their consent. Sony BMG is required to publish notices on its Web site describing the exchange and repair reimbursement programs.
It's a reimbursement for costs incurred while trying to repair the damage done. I presume this means you would need a receipt from a vendor or service company that removed the rootkit for you. I doubt Sony will award the full $150 to you if you removed it yourself.
He was not a Senator, but he wasn't Speaker of the House either. He was House Minority Leader.
During the eight years (1965-1973) he served as Minority Leader, Ford won many friends in the House because of his fair leadership and inoffensive personality. from Wikipedia
In addition, he was indeed chosen by Nixon.
Because the Republicans did not attain a majority in the House, Ford was unable to reach his ultimate political goal--to be Speaker of the House.
When Spiro Agnew resigned the office of Vice President of the United States late in 1973, after pleading no contest to a charge of income tax evasion, President Nixon was empowered by the 25th Amendment to appoint a new vice president. from Gerald R. Ford Biography
Ah, but what happens when a wardriver breaks into your (secured, unsecured, whatever) wireless LAN and bittorrents up a storm. Or decides to try and hack into a secure government database? Should it be the account holder's responsibility if the actions were unknown to and/or unapproved by the account holder?
No, they very specifically state that this is NOT a recall. They're replacing all NEW straps with the new one, but if you are really concerned about it, you can call and get a replacement, new one. Where in my post did I say anything about a recall? I am well aware that all new wiimotes sold will use the new strap, which is why I used the phrase "updating the strap" and not "recall" or "replacement."
I'm also well aware that you are not supposed to let go of the wiimote during play, and that the strap is not designed with that in mind. That doesn't change the fact that it is a wise business decision for Nintendo to strengthen the strap to accommodate the people who wish to do so. Nobody ever went bankrupt by listening and incorporating user feedback into their product to make it better.
If there was nothing wrong with the first strap then why did they correct it. The fact that they started using a newer version of the strap does not imply the old one was defective. Perhaps the old strap was perfectly suitable for normal use, as instructed in the manual (I don't know, I don't own a Wii). If Nintendo found that a larger subset of their users than first expected like swinging their wiimote much more vigorously than instructed, then updating the strap to be a little stronger to accommodate those users is a smart business decision (fewer complaints from users about weak straps is good for the product's image among that demographic).
It's kind of a shame, from that point of view. The summary could read: 1)Business releases product. 2)Customers ask for improvement to product. 3)Business improves product. 4)Customers file class-action lawsuit against business, assuming that the improvement implies the original product was defective. 5)Profit! (for the lawyers, anyhow)
Well, it's something to consider (first amendment and such), but let's not lose sight of the big picture here.
For example, I don't care if Rick Santorum backs the ESRB or not, his voting record (and general asshattery) is more than enough to dissuade me from voting for him.
I mean seriously, the man is against gay marriage and gay rights, tried to slip Intelligent Design into the No Child Left Behind act, has said that he doesn't belive in privacy rights, and is anti-abortion. If you have an opinion on any of those issues, then his stance on the ESRB is probably irrelevant when you decide whether or not to vote for him.
He comes in at 53.33% (click on Alaska on the map), which while the lowest in Alaska is far from the lowest overall. In fact, it's above the senate average of 43.30%.
I'm not sure about other PhD programs, but ours doesn't require any courses outside our department. I know there are still schools around that require all PhD students to become fluent in another language, but that's been falling out of favor in the sciences over the past 10 years or so. So from my perspective, cheating in graduate school implies you're cheating in courses that directly relate to your degree.
I wouldn't consider teaching for a standardized test "cheating," but rather an unfortunate side effect of standardized tests. If a course is supposed to prepare you for a particular standardized test, then it's obviously in the instructor's best interest to gather as much information about the exam as possible and tailor the course to the material on the exam. That includes having the students work through lots of questions that are very similar to (or even taken directly from) exams from previous years.
Several people having the same conversion error doesn't automatically convict them of cheating. Especially in engineering, where professors often expect that students will work together on a homework set, it's common for a group of people that work together to come up with the same (flawed) answer.
The fact that it was line-by-line identical is a bit more damning, but not necessarily enough to be certain. I'm sure that out of all the homeworks that I've worked on with the same group of people, one or two of us must have had the exact same line-by-line solution to a problem, even though we never saw the other person's sheet of paper.
I'm in grad school now (in the Physical Sciences category), and I second your BS call on the accurracy of the statistics. 50% is much higher than I would have expected, and definitely higher than what I've observed in my department. We've had 2 cases of academic dishonesty in the last 5 years here, both of which were rapidly caught, one of which was severely punished (the student was kicked out of the graduate program). That's out of well over 150 students (masters and PhD) who have gone through the program. I suppose it's possible that my department is abnormal, but I doubt that's really the case.
I wonder what the study's definition of "cheating". FTFA:
The study, published in the September issue of the Academy of Management Learning and Education, defined cheating as including copying the work of other students, plagiarizing and bringing prohibited notes into exams.
It's relatively difficult to smuggle notes into an exam when the professor is watching you take it, and that criterion is not very ambiguous, so I doubt this makes up the bulk of the statistic.
Copying the work of other students is a little more vague. Is this limited to straight-out copying someone else's work, or did they include working with other students to solve problems? I know that at my school, we're encouraged to work with other people on most of the problem sets given out as homework, and I'd suspect this is the attitude at most universities. The homework sets that are supposed to be completed alone are far less common, and specifically designated as such by the professor. I can't imagine that the study would be stupid enough to count 'working together with other students' as 'copying work', but if it did, this would explain a lot of the disrepancy.
Probably the largest component in the study is plagiarism. This is pretty clear-cut, but I have to wonder -- how many opportunities are there for plagiarism in a graduate level Physical Science curriculum?? I think out of my entire coursework, I was required to write two or three papers at the most, none of them longer than a few pages. Most of our coursework was problem sets, which I suppose could be plagiarized in the sense of "copying someone else's work" as above. But even if this were the case, the percentages they give seem unreasonably high.
I wouldn't be surprised if the study used an unnaturally broad definition of "cheating" so that the statistics would come out this way, just for shock factor. After all, how likely would you be to read an article that claimed half of all graduate students are cheaters, compared to one claiming that less than 5 percent are?
It's a gamble nonetheless. What happens if the attachment rate drops to 2 or 1.5? The scariest part is that this can happen due to forces outside your control.
By the way, I think your math is incorrect. ($50+3*$25)*1.5 million = 187.5 million (-$50+3*$25)*2 million = 50 million They'd have to sell 7.5 million consoles (and 3 games for each) just to break even in your scenario.
I'm not sure that they'll go through the effort to sue. With file sharing via p2p, it's possible for one person to share with many other people, making the resultant copyright infringement "damages" much higher. Hence the ridiculous amounts quoted per song in RIAA lawsuits.
If you loan a video game to your buddy down the hall, Sony would be hard-pressed to claim that you deprived them of more than one extra sale. Perhaps if you organized a floor-wide or dorm-wide game swapping club, the liability would be higher. But with the damages on the order of hundreds of dollars, I doubt that it's worth Sony's lawyers' time to file suit.
The SBL database is updated 24/7 by a dedicated international Spamhaus team (US, UK, NL, IT, CA, JP, CN) and is broadcast by 32 SBL zone mirror servers based in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, South Africa, Sweden, UK and USA.
Google cannot ignore the laws of the land where their servers are based, if they want to operate in foreign countries they should follow local laws.
I wonder how exact this analogy is though, since Google is distinctly for-profit, and make money off of the work the servers do. I can't seem to find a reference on the Spamhaus website as to how Spamhaus supports itself.
They are preventing an illegal acting being commited in our country. Why should they give a shit?
Now let's pretend that the plaintiff in the case wasn't a spam company with a stupid name, but instead is a regular user who gets put on the list by mistake. From what I've read about Spamhaus, they tend to "not give a shit" in that sort of situation either, which is unfortunate. A good example why vigilante justice isn't always a good thing.
An even more interesting quandry: What if a large, well-recognized organization with deep pockets gets put on the list by mistake in the same fashion? Any bets as to how long it would take before they get removed?
Yes, I actually consulted the wikipedia entry before I posted, and noticed that there was nothing in it about backing up ones files. However, the phrase "fair use" has been thrown about in this context for years, whether it's the technically correct phrase to use or not. And while I'm not a lawyer, I was under the impression that there were legal cases where the decision stated that backing a work up fell under the umbrella of "fair use." I don't have citations for or against that though.
I don't think you need to give misinformation, but i can see where his frustration comes from. The question might have been slightly ambiguous, but the implication was pretty clearly that he ripped his legally purchased CD to mp3, and wants to know about the legality of the mp3s if the CD is stolen.
If the answer was "The law doesn't make any provisions for you having an mp3 of the CD in the first place," then you could have said as much. Pretending you don't know where the mp3's came from comes off as very rude, at least to my eyes.
Ok, so admittedly, IANAL, so maybe this is me being naive and optimistic, but in that situation couldn't the defendent cite the RIAA's oral argument in the MGM v. Grokster case in their defense? I would hope that if the RIAA stated specifically that making personal copies was ok in a legal proceeding, then they would be held to that, despite their apparent change of heart.
Not that I expect them to start suing people in this sort of situation anyway, but considering the direction the industry seems to be heading (locking everything down with DRM, effectively coercing the user into buying a seperate copy for each device) it may become relevant.
I agree, the answer to that question in particular seemed very condescending, and almost willfully ignorant. It was pretty clear that the question pertained to mp3's made from a CD that was purchased legally:
Q: Are the.mp3 files of that CD on my computer legal or do they now belong to the thief too?
A: I don't know what MP3 files you are talking about, how do you know you were entitled to make those copies legally?
(emphasis mine) It would have been more useful if he had answered the question that was asked, or at least elaborated more (ex: "Technically, you shouldn't even have ripped the CD in the first place" or whatever)
You shouldn't be trying to educate the younger generation about this stuff. The law is unsettled. Even lawyers don't know how it's all going to play out. Plus you seem to have a general misunderstanding about the basic principles of copyright law. When you buy a copy of something you have rights in the copy, that's it. No metaphysical rights to listen, reproduce additional copies, etc. I don't know what gives you this idea.
Wouldn't some of this fall under fair use? Specifically ripping a CD to mp3 for listening to on a computer, iPod, etc. Are you really saying that when I buy a CD, I don't have the right to convert the music on that CD to a format of my choosing for use on a device that I own?
Note that I said for my use only, obviously if i then share that music with others the water becomes murky.
Yes, it is. It's just that *you* didn't have a say in which modules were optional.
Isn't this the whole point? If "we" (or more accurately the EU) could say which modules should be included in a default install, this whole article wouldn't exist. If the EU says "we don't want (media player/antivirus/firewall/etc.) enabled by default," MS just makes sure that that module is disabled on default installs for machines being sold in the EU. Problem solved.
That's exactly what happens now.
If it gets installed by default, it's a core component and software developers can safely assume that it will be present on any Windows installation their software runs on. If it doesn't, it isn't, and they can't.
Yes, but right now "core component" includes a lot of things that wouldn't necessarily need to be there, and are causing the legal troubles the article is talking about. Hence the suggestion to trim down the part of the OS that's absolutely, positively required, to make it easier to comply in the future.
I still find it amazing, that *years* after everyone else (GNOME, KDE, OS X) went down the same path with a browser component as Microsoft did, people are still carrying on about it trying to pretend a web browser isn't an expected and critical feature of any consumer-oriented OS.
The compelling reason is that the vast majority of end users will *hate* having to run out and acquire additional software (even if it's download straight from Microsoft, at no extra cost) to reach levels of functionality that have been standard for a decade or more.
I think you mistook what I meant. Of course a browser is expected of a modern OS, and of course users hate having to spend time getting additional functionality that should be standard. I'm not suggesting that Microsoft do this at all; in my view most installations will default to installing all of the components, unless the user specifically asks otherwise. The important thing is that the option to remove major components (or disable their installation by default in certain geographic or political regions) would be feasible to comply with the type of anti-monopoly policy that the EU is asking for.
This is no longer the early 80s. Computers aren't just for 31337 geeks anymore and when people buy one today they expect to get more than a text screen with a flashing cursor and the opportunity to create their own experience. Microsoft are not pandering to the minscule proportion of people that wish it was, nor are they ever likely to. Get over it, install Linux (which *does* pander to your demographic) and move on with your life.
I think you're confused. This wouldn't be "pandering to a miniscule proportion of people," it would be "pandering" to the entire EU, which isn't a miniscule segment of their customer base. The fact that power users get the added ability to customize would a secondary benefit of the change, not the primary goal.
That's completely true of Windows XP. There's no reason it needs to be true of Vista.
The only reason it's true of XP is that XP is not modular. Thus, programs are coded with the expectation that the core system components include many of the things you've mentioned. This is why MS wouldn't go back and modularize XP -- it would certainly create the support nightmare that you predict.
However, what if Vista were modularized from the beginning, with this in mind? Development kits would emphasize which parts of the OS were core components (and thus guaranteed to exist) and which components were optional. Programs that were written that tried to require optional components would be subject to scrutiny; perhaps they would not be allowed to put the "Compatible with Vista" sticker on the box.
Or, at the very least, the programs themselves would look to see which optional components were installed on a user's machine, and tell the user if they needed to install these other components to use the software. Remember that this would be as simple as popping the Windows CD into the drive, or downloading the module from MS.
The point you bring up about the html rendering engine in IE is a good one, but it's not difficult to work around it. Simply make sure that the default windows install has a basic html rendering engine, but only barely enough to run help files. The "IE" module would then be a larger component that focused on a clean front-end designed to be a solid user interface for web browsing, with full support for RSS and the like that wouldn't be included in the basic install.
For video rendering, a more simple solution would just be to catch any program trying to render video and give the user a pop-up screen alerting them that they have no video software installed, with a friendly reminder that they can download and install the Microsoft one free of charge if they like. Depending on the design, the program could even do this itself if it wanted to suggest a different alternative.
So for your Gecko example, the program requiring it would check for the existance of that module, and if it didn't exist, give the user a dialog box saying, "Hey, we need this particular module to run properly, you should go to this website and download it, or press this button and we'll automatically direct you to the latest compatible version."
Clearly, this sort of thing would be unwieldly to do retroactively to XP (and even Vista, at this point, i'm sure). But I don't see a compelling reason that this couldn't be achieved, provided the decision to go this route is made early enough in the OS's development cycle.
This was brought up by someone in another discussion in a different context, but I think it applies equally well to Microsoft's current problems with the EU.
If they would simply modularize many of the components that come with Windows, they might wriggle out of a lot of legal troubles.
For example: I go to install Windows from scratch. On the installation screen, i get a list of components... [x] Windows OS (base system, required) [_] Internet Explorer [_] Windows Security Center [_] MS Firewall [_] MS Antivirus [_] MS Anti-Malware
etc.
I can check any of these things that i like, and they'll be included in the installation. For OEM installs, they could just include everything by default.
Most importantly, make them removable through Add/Remove Programs, so that if i decide at a later date that I no longer need a feature, i can uninstall it completely.
Suddenly a lot of the monopolistic legal troubles get much less worrisome for Redmond. EU worried about MS including Anti-Virus or Firewall? No problem, make them un-checked in the default install. Leave them on the disc, and make them freely available for download at the MS website to make it abundantly clear that they're a free service.
Not that I expect them to do any of this of course, but it would certainly help reduce the amount of resentment that many people feel towards them, even from their own users.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever even played the game? There are more than enough quests to level you from 1-60 without having to level grind. If you run out of quests in your current locale, there are at least one or two other areas (possibly on another continent, mind you) where there are quests appropriate for your level. If you can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to travel to another continent to keep questing, that's your own fault, not Blizzard's.
(1 woman + legion of male soldiers)*(17 lonely years)=?
If a woman was along with all those lost men, she would probably be too exhausted to ask for directions.
In addition, he was indeed chosen by Nixon. Because the Republicans did not attain a majority in the House, Ford was unable to reach his ultimate political goal--to be Speaker of the House. When Spiro Agnew resigned the office of Vice President of the United States late in 1973, after pleading no contest to a charge of income tax evasion, President Nixon was empowered by the 25th Amendment to appoint a new vice president. from Gerald R. Ford Biography
Ah, but what happens when a wardriver breaks into your (secured, unsecured, whatever) wireless LAN and bittorrents up a storm. Or decides to try and hack into a secure government database? Should it be the account holder's responsibility if the actions were unknown to and/or unapproved by the account holder?
I'm also well aware that you are not supposed to let go of the wiimote during play, and that the strap is not designed with that in mind. That doesn't change the fact that it is a wise business decision for Nintendo to strengthen the strap to accommodate the people who wish to do so. Nobody ever went bankrupt by listening and incorporating user feedback into their product to make it better.
It's kind of a shame, from that point of view. The summary could read:
1)Business releases product.
2)Customers ask for improvement to product.
3)Business improves product.
4)Customers file class-action lawsuit against business, assuming that the improvement implies the original product was defective.
5)Profit! (for the lawyers, anyhow)
Well, it's something to consider (first amendment and such), but let's not lose sight of the big picture here.
For example, I don't care if Rick Santorum backs the ESRB or not, his voting record (and general asshattery) is more than enough to dissuade me from voting for him.
I mean seriously, the man is against gay marriage and gay rights, tried to slip Intelligent Design into the No Child Left Behind act, has said that he doesn't belive in privacy rights, and is anti-abortion. If you have an opinion on any of those issues, then his stance on the ESRB is probably irrelevant when you decide whether or not to vote for him.
He comes in at 53.33% (click on Alaska on the map), which while the lowest in Alaska is far from the lowest overall. In fact, it's above the senate average of 43.30%.
I'm not sure about other PhD programs, but ours doesn't require any courses outside our department. I know there are still schools around that require all PhD students to become fluent in another language, but that's been falling out of favor in the sciences over the past 10 years or so. So from my perspective, cheating in graduate school implies you're cheating in courses that directly relate to your degree.
I wouldn't consider teaching for a standardized test "cheating," but rather an unfortunate side effect of standardized tests. If a course is supposed to prepare you for a particular standardized test, then it's obviously in the instructor's best interest to gather as much information about the exam as possible and tailor the course to the material on the exam. That includes having the students work through lots of questions that are very similar to (or even taken directly from) exams from previous years.
Several people having the same conversion error doesn't automatically convict them of cheating. Especially in engineering, where professors often expect that students will work together on a homework set, it's common for a group of people that work together to come up with the same (flawed) answer.
The fact that it was line-by-line identical is a bit more damning, but not necessarily enough to be certain. I'm sure that out of all the homeworks that I've worked on with the same group of people, one or two of us must have had the exact same line-by-line solution to a problem, even though we never saw the other person's sheet of paper.
I wonder what the study's definition of "cheating". FTFA:
It's relatively difficult to smuggle notes into an exam when the professor is watching you take it, and that criterion is not very ambiguous, so I doubt this makes up the bulk of the statistic.
Copying the work of other students is a little more vague. Is this limited to straight-out copying someone else's work, or did they include working with other students to solve problems? I know that at my school, we're encouraged to work with other people on most of the problem sets given out as homework, and I'd suspect this is the attitude at most universities. The homework sets that are supposed to be completed alone are far less common, and specifically designated as such by the professor. I can't imagine that the study would be stupid enough to count 'working together with other students' as 'copying work', but if it did, this would explain a lot of the disrepancy.
Probably the largest component in the study is plagiarism. This is pretty clear-cut, but I have to wonder -- how many opportunities are there for plagiarism in a graduate level Physical Science curriculum?? I think out of my entire coursework, I was required to write two or three papers at the most, none of them longer than a few pages. Most of our coursework was problem sets, which I suppose could be plagiarized in the sense of "copying someone else's work" as above. But even if this were the case, the percentages they give seem unreasonably high.
I wouldn't be surprised if the study used an unnaturally broad definition of "cheating" so that the statistics would come out this way, just for shock factor. After all, how likely would you be to read an article that claimed half of all graduate students are cheaters, compared to one claiming that less than 5 percent are?
It's a gamble nonetheless. What happens if the attachment rate drops to 2 or 1.5? The scariest part is that this can happen due to forces outside your control.
By the way, I think your math is incorrect.
($50+3*$25)*1.5 million = 187.5 million
(-$50+3*$25)*2 million = 50 million
They'd have to sell 7.5 million consoles (and 3 games for each) just to break even in your scenario.
I'm not sure that they'll go through the effort to sue. With file sharing via p2p, it's possible for one person to share with many other people, making the resultant copyright infringement "damages" much higher. Hence the ridiculous amounts quoted per song in RIAA lawsuits.
If you loan a video game to your buddy down the hall, Sony would be hard-pressed to claim that you deprived them of more than one extra sale. Perhaps if you organized a floor-wide or dorm-wide game swapping club, the liability would be higher. But with the damages on the order of hundreds of dollars, I doubt that it's worth Sony's lawyers' time to file suit.
I wonder how exact this analogy is though, since Google is distinctly for-profit, and make money off of the work the servers do. I can't seem to find a reference on the Spamhaus website as to how Spamhaus supports itself.
An even more interesting quandry: What if a large, well-recognized organization with deep pockets gets put on the list by mistake in the same fashion? Any bets as to how long it would take before they get removed?
It seems it's the latter.
Yes, I actually consulted the wikipedia entry before I posted, and noticed that there was nothing in it about backing up ones files. However, the phrase "fair use" has been thrown about in this context for years, whether it's the technically correct phrase to use or not. And while I'm not a lawyer, I was under the impression that there were legal cases where the decision stated that backing a work up fell under the umbrella of "fair use." I don't have citations for or against that though.
I don't think you need to give misinformation, but i can see where his frustration comes from. The question might have been slightly ambiguous, but the implication was pretty clearly that he ripped his legally purchased CD to mp3, and wants to know about the legality of the mp3s if the CD is stolen.
If the answer was "The law doesn't make any provisions for you having an mp3 of the CD in the first place," then you could have said as much. Pretending you don't know where the mp3's came from comes off as very rude, at least to my eyes.
Ok, so admittedly, IANAL, so maybe this is me being naive and optimistic, but in that situation couldn't the defendent cite the RIAA's oral argument in the MGM v. Grokster case in their defense? I would hope that if the RIAA stated specifically that making personal copies was ok in a legal proceeding, then they would be held to that, despite their apparent change of heart.
Not that I expect them to start suing people in this sort of situation anyway, but considering the direction the industry seems to be heading (locking everything down with DRM, effectively coercing the user into buying a seperate copy for each device) it may become relevant.
(emphasis mine)
It would have been more useful if he had answered the question that was asked, or at least elaborated more (ex: "Technically, you shouldn't even have ripped the CD in the first place" or whatever)
Wouldn't some of this fall under fair use? Specifically ripping a CD to mp3 for listening to on a computer, iPod, etc. Are you really saying that when I buy a CD, I don't have the right to convert the music on that CD to a format of my choosing for use on a device that I own?
Note that I said for my use only, obviously if i then share that music with others the water becomes murky.
Isn't this the whole point? If "we" (or more accurately the EU) could say which modules should be included in a default install, this whole article wouldn't exist. If the EU says "we don't want (media player/antivirus/firewall/etc.) enabled by default," MS just makes sure that that module is disabled on default installs for machines being sold in the EU. Problem solved.
Yes, but right now "core component" includes a lot of things that wouldn't necessarily need to be there, and are causing the legal troubles the article is talking about. Hence the suggestion to trim down the part of the OS that's absolutely, positively required, to make it easier to comply in the future.
I think you mistook what I meant. Of course a browser is expected of a modern OS, and of course users hate having to spend time getting additional functionality that should be standard. I'm not suggesting that Microsoft do this at all; in my view most installations will default to installing all of the components, unless the user specifically asks otherwise. The important thing is that the option to remove major components (or disable their installation by default in certain geographic or political regions) would be feasible to comply with the type of anti-monopoly policy that the EU is asking for.
I think you're confused. This wouldn't be "pandering to a miniscule proportion of people," it would be "pandering" to the entire EU, which isn't a miniscule segment of their customer base. The fact that power users get the added ability to customize would a secondary benefit of the change, not the primary goal.
That's completely true of Windows XP. There's no reason it needs to be true of Vista.
The only reason it's true of XP is that XP is not modular. Thus, programs are coded with the expectation that the core system components include many of the things you've mentioned. This is why MS wouldn't go back and modularize XP -- it would certainly create the support nightmare that you predict.
However, what if Vista were modularized from the beginning, with this in mind? Development kits would emphasize which parts of the OS were core components (and thus guaranteed to exist) and which components were optional. Programs that were written that tried to require optional components would be subject to scrutiny; perhaps they would not be allowed to put the "Compatible with Vista" sticker on the box.
Or, at the very least, the programs themselves would look to see which optional components were installed on a user's machine, and tell the user if they needed to install these other components to use the software. Remember that this would be as simple as popping the Windows CD into the drive, or downloading the module from MS.
The point you bring up about the html rendering engine in IE is a good one, but it's not difficult to work around it. Simply make sure that the default windows install has a basic html rendering engine, but only barely enough to run help files. The "IE" module would then be a larger component that focused on a clean front-end designed to be a solid user interface for web browsing, with full support for RSS and the like that wouldn't be included in the basic install.
For video rendering, a more simple solution would just be to catch any program trying to render video and give the user a pop-up screen alerting them that they have no video software installed, with a friendly reminder that they can download and install the Microsoft one free of charge if they like. Depending on the design, the program could even do this itself if it wanted to suggest a different alternative.
So for your Gecko example, the program requiring it would check for the existance of that module, and if it didn't exist, give the user a dialog box saying, "Hey, we need this particular module to run properly, you should go to this website and download it, or press this button and we'll automatically direct you to the latest compatible version."
Clearly, this sort of thing would be unwieldly to do retroactively to XP (and even Vista, at this point, i'm sure). But I don't see a compelling reason that this couldn't be achieved, provided the decision to go this route is made early enough in the OS's development cycle.
This was brought up by someone in another discussion in a different context, but I think it applies equally well to Microsoft's current problems with the EU.
If they would simply modularize many of the components that come with Windows, they might wriggle out of a lot of legal troubles.
For example: I go to install Windows from scratch. On the installation screen, i get a list of components...
[x] Windows OS (base system, required)
[_] Internet Explorer
[_] Windows Security Center
[_] MS Firewall
[_] MS Antivirus
[_] MS Anti-Malware
etc.
I can check any of these things that i like, and they'll be included in the installation. For OEM installs, they could just include everything by default.
Most importantly, make them removable through Add/Remove Programs, so that if i decide at a later date that I no longer need a feature, i can uninstall it completely.
Suddenly a lot of the monopolistic legal troubles get much less worrisome for Redmond. EU worried about MS including Anti-Virus or Firewall? No problem, make them un-checked in the default install. Leave them on the disc, and make them freely available for download at the MS website to make it abundantly clear that they're a free service.
Not that I expect them to do any of this of course, but it would certainly help reduce the amount of resentment that many people feel towards them, even from their own users.