I should mention that "filer pays" should only apply when the defendant meets certain financial conditions.
The costs would also have to be split exactly 50/50, and the defendant could of course opt-out and choose to pay his own legal bills... and pay whatever he wants.
The whole point is that a rich plaintiff should not be able to browbeat a poor defendant in to settling just becuase the defendant can't afford the legal costs of continuing the case.
Office has never been part of Windows. Microsoft had to remove Internet Explorer from Windows in some part of the world.
It's still here in the US, though. It's the browser I use to install Chrome.
Actually, I do tend to agree with Microsoft's logic on one point: providing a browser with the OS allows software developers to more easily provide a text visualization layer that doesn't need a lot of coding. If I'm going to distribute text and graphics as part of a program, I know that there's an easy way to show it to the user.
This used to be done by the Help system. Help files used to be something very much like HTML, as a matter of fact... but in recent years, more and more programs are simply linking to web pages or HTML documents for user documentation, and an HTML doc is much easier to build than a help file.
But you still need some sort of baseline presentation layer for that... which means the OS really does need some sort of HTML viewer, or what we call a web browser.
if the product you're using was given to you for free, you're not the customer, you're the product.
Except that most of the free software I use isn't ad-driven. Certainly, Open Office, Paint.Net, and Inkscape aren't adware.
And then there's all the free developer tools out there. Eclipse, SharpDevelop, the list goes on.
My thinking is that the real reason Android is free is because its developers wanted to use Linux as a base. That pretty much forced them to continue under the GPL.
And quite frankly, I'm glad they did. There's been a lot of stuff that free Android has made possible that would have been a lot more difficult, if not impossible without it: stuff that has nothing to do with Google or even mobile phones.
Really? I have multiple Windows licences just sitting here unused, and I couldn't figure out how to get an OS-free machine when I bought my last laptop.
Personally, I see nothing wrong with running Microsoft Word on an Apple computer while using GMail to communicate with my friends. I've always seen the Google/Apple/MS triad as complementary: Apple sells hardware. MS sells software. Google sells web advertising.
The world made sense when this separation existed, but as Microsoft is pushing in to the content space with Bing, and as Google pushes in to the OS space with Chrome OS and Android, I can see how this would create a natural conflict.
There seems to be this natural inclination for businesses to always need to grow, when perhaps the smart thing to do is stop trying to grow in to other business's markets and start looking for ways to go in to "maintenance mode" and simply serve your core market.
Yes, Microsoft was doing that for a while - forcing manufacturers to sell Windows, even when the end user didn't want a new copy.
(I got nailed by that when I bought a PC back in 1998. I had to take the OS, even though I had already bought a retail copy of Windows, and I was going to put Linux on my old PC.)
But that practice has long since been discontinued... even though it's still difficult for the average consumer to actually buy a pre-built PC without Windows on it.
The idea that giving away some software for free is somehow anti-competitive is just laughable.
Actually, I kind of see the point. Microsoft, Blackberry, Apple, and Google have all spent millions of dollars to develop their mobile operating systems. Aside from Google, all of the other platform developers have opted to profit from this by making the consumer pay for the software - either as part of the device (in the case of iOS and Blackberry) or through license fees, like MS does with Windows Phone.
The thing is, so-called "loss leaders" are a common tactic: bringing in customers with good deals, then hooking them in with contracts or more expensive products can be abusive. A lot of retail stores, for example, have been accused of moving in to a town, setting low initial prices on products, then raising their price once competition has dried up.
I think you could make a case that giving something away for free can be used to hook people in to something that they would not otherwise have purchased. Internet Explorer is perhaps a perfect example of this; IE started out as payware, but it quickly became free. Netscape, the first browser I had experience with, also started as payware - but IE killed Netscape's market share, even though Netscape was a much better product at the time.
That's the real issue here: free software isn't always or even usually as good as the paid-for alternatives, yet people use free stuff because it's good enough.
In the case of IE, this definitely harmed the industry by creating a conflicting set of "standards" for CSS and web design. You have to basically write web sites twice, now: once for IE and once for everything else.
However, in the mobile phone industry, I think we're facing a situation where the free product is actually better than its competition in many ways: I didn't choose Android based on price; I chose it because it's more like a real computer than the other mobile OS's I've used.
The fact is that for the consumer, all of these OS's are free. The OS comes with the device, and that's all there is to it. We've already also discovered that Android actually costs manufacturers money in terms of patent licenses: rumor has it that Microsoft makes more from its patents in Android device than from Windows Phone devices.
So while I do agree that this really isn't anti-competitive in this instance, I also cannot agree with the assertion that free software can't be anti-competitive. I think that free software, when it's used as a way to lock people in to products or services that are more costly in the long run, can and definitely have been harmful to the industry.
I am using adblock, but ONLY because some of the blogs I visit tend to display ads that my work firewall blocks. Rather than continually generate "this guy is viewing blocked content!" alerts with my security folks, I started blocking ads.
I really *don't* want to do that, and I don't use ad blocks on my tablet or my home PC.
Their own argument creates an inverse relationship between advertising and listeners. They said fewer ads=more listeners, so that must mean more ads=fewer listeners.
So their "solution" would put Pandora out of business.
"Pandora is choosing to ... keeping advertising low and attracting customers to its free service tier."
This statement implies that fewer advertisements attract customers. The inverse of this argument is that more advertising drives customers away.
So their solution is "sell more advertising, " which, based on their own argument, will drive customers away.
So their own argument says that Pandora isn't going to make more money by advertising more. They'll simply lose customers, therefore not making any more money for royalty licensing.
FWIW: I think ALL forms of radio should pay exactly the same amount: online, satellite, and terrestrial. I discover (and buy) a lot more music these days online than I do on FM, yet FM is the one that doesn't have to pay jack for royalties.
The “its for the kids” idiocy is getting so bad that its hard to recommend kids to kids oriented or content filtered sites. Its always wrong to provide a slanted/kilted/skewed/censored world view. Its damaging to a young persons psych to the extent it seems permanent. Or at leas requiring some life watershed event putting most into deeper shock. As long as a kid is old enough to understand that Santa is not what was originally presented then... Its the real world or nothing.
I'm trying to figure out what you're saying here.
Are you saying that parents should not bother trying to keep their children from seeing profanity, nudity, sex, and violence, or that trying to filter this is futile?
Personally, I hate the fact that YouTube doesn't have any sort of content filters for the most part. My kid loves to watch Minecraft let's play videos and pardy music videos, but some of the posters are real potty mouths... so I am close to the point of simply banning my kid from YouTube and all the good stuff that's there, simply because there's so much trash.
ironically, they don't censor for language or adult content that doesn't involve nudity.... so I have to pretty much watch over my kid's shoulder when she's browsing YouTube.
Having full time people responding to a bunch of those folks would probably be a huge waste of time
I disagree. I think that they YouTube has an obligation to support their customers. Without people posting their videos, YouTube wouldn't have the content that they use to make money. The content creators are YouTube's true customers, and if YouTube doesn't support them - I'm sure Vimeo or someone else will.
What I love is when the line just *beeps* with no explanation or reason. I remember the first time I encountered that, the beep was very loud and annoying.
I finally asked the rep, "What is that beeping noise?"
She answered, "You are being recorded."
I replied, "I don't want you to record me."
She gave me this spiel about how it's for my protection, blah blah blah. I finally told her that she could call me back when there's not a machine beeping in my ear every 30 seconds and hung up.
The funny part is that I didn't care about being recorded. I just hated that annoying beep. It was distracting and kept throwing off my concentration.
On the post: Wikipedia Editor Threatened With Lawsuit For Participating In Discussion Leading To Deletion Of Entry
Re: Re: There's such a thing as too open
WP is going to have to make some fundamental changes, or it will soon become untenable as a research and information tool.
On the post: Startups Realizing That Patent Trolls Are An Existential Threat
Re: Re: Re: Why so expensive?
The costs would also have to be split exactly 50/50, and the defendant could of course opt-out and choose to pay his own legal bills... and pay whatever he wants.
The whole point is that a rich plaintiff should not be able to browbeat a poor defendant in to settling just becuase the defendant can't afford the legal costs of continuing the case.
On the post: Startups Realizing That Patent Trolls Are An Existential Threat
Re: Re: Re: Why so expensive?
If I was sued for patent infringement, I literally would not be able to afford to take it to court... and that's where the average person is screwed.
On the post: Time Warner Cable: We Can Record You, But You Can't Record Us
Re: Re: Harassement FTW
I'm also pretty sure they're voice actors recording those bits in a studio... but that's just my general skepticism. =)
On the post: Google Competitors File Ridiculous EU Complaint Arguing That 'Free' Android Is Anti-Competitive
Re:
On the post: Google Competitors File Ridiculous EU Complaint Arguing That 'Free' Android Is Anti-Competitive
Re:
It's still here in the US, though. It's the browser I use to install Chrome.
Actually, I do tend to agree with Microsoft's logic on one point: providing a browser with the OS allows software developers to more easily provide a text visualization layer that doesn't need a lot of coding. If I'm going to distribute text and graphics as part of a program, I know that there's an easy way to show it to the user.
This used to be done by the Help system. Help files used to be something very much like HTML, as a matter of fact... but in recent years, more and more programs are simply linking to web pages or HTML documents for user documentation, and an HTML doc is much easier to build than a help file.
But you still need some sort of baseline presentation layer for that... which means the OS really does need some sort of HTML viewer, or what we call a web browser.
On the post: Google Competitors File Ridiculous EU Complaint Arguing That 'Free' Android Is Anti-Competitive
Re: Re:
Except that most of the free software I use isn't ad-driven. Certainly, Open Office, Paint.Net, and Inkscape aren't adware.
And then there's all the free developer tools out there. Eclipse, SharpDevelop, the list goes on.
My thinking is that the real reason Android is free is because its developers wanted to use Linux as a base. That pretty much forced them to continue under the GPL.
And quite frankly, I'm glad they did. There's been a lot of stuff that free Android has made possible that would have been a lot more difficult, if not impossible without it: stuff that has nothing to do with Google or even mobile phones.
On the post: Google Competitors File Ridiculous EU Complaint Arguing That 'Free' Android Is Anti-Competitive
Re: Re: Re: Re: Let's clear something up
On the post: Google Competitors File Ridiculous EU Complaint Arguing That 'Free' Android Is Anti-Competitive
Re:
The world made sense when this separation existed, but as Microsoft is pushing in to the content space with Bing, and as Google pushes in to the OS space with Chrome OS and Android, I can see how this would create a natural conflict.
There seems to be this natural inclination for businesses to always need to grow, when perhaps the smart thing to do is stop trying to grow in to other business's markets and start looking for ways to go in to "maintenance mode" and simply serve your core market.
On the post: Google Competitors File Ridiculous EU Complaint Arguing That 'Free' Android Is Anti-Competitive
Re: Re: Let's clear something up
(I got nailed by that when I bought a PC back in 1998. I had to take the OS, even though I had already bought a retail copy of Windows, and I was going to put Linux on my old PC.)
But that practice has long since been discontinued... even though it's still difficult for the average consumer to actually buy a pre-built PC without Windows on it.
On the post: Google Competitors File Ridiculous EU Complaint Arguing That 'Free' Android Is Anti-Competitive
Actually, I kind of see the point. Microsoft, Blackberry, Apple, and Google have all spent millions of dollars to develop their mobile operating systems. Aside from Google, all of the other platform developers have opted to profit from this by making the consumer pay for the software - either as part of the device (in the case of iOS and Blackberry) or through license fees, like MS does with Windows Phone.
The thing is, so-called "loss leaders" are a common tactic: bringing in customers with good deals, then hooking them in with contracts or more expensive products can be abusive. A lot of retail stores, for example, have been accused of moving in to a town, setting low initial prices on products, then raising their price once competition has dried up.
I think you could make a case that giving something away for free can be used to hook people in to something that they would not otherwise have purchased. Internet Explorer is perhaps a perfect example of this; IE started out as payware, but it quickly became free. Netscape, the first browser I had experience with, also started as payware - but IE killed Netscape's market share, even though Netscape was a much better product at the time.
That's the real issue here: free software isn't always or even usually as good as the paid-for alternatives, yet people use free stuff because it's good enough.
In the case of IE, this definitely harmed the industry by creating a conflicting set of "standards" for CSS and web design. You have to basically write web sites twice, now: once for IE and once for everything else.
However, in the mobile phone industry, I think we're facing a situation where the free product is actually better than its competition in many ways: I didn't choose Android based on price; I chose it because it's more like a real computer than the other mobile OS's I've used.
The fact is that for the consumer, all of these OS's are free. The OS comes with the device, and that's all there is to it. We've already also discovered that Android actually costs manufacturers money in terms of patent licenses: rumor has it that Microsoft makes more from its patents in Android device than from Windows Phone devices.
So while I do agree that this really isn't anti-competitive in this instance, I also cannot agree with the assertion that free software can't be anti-competitive. I think that free software, when it's used as a way to lock people in to products or services that are more costly in the long run, can and definitely have been harmful to the industry.
On the post: Recording Industry Lobbyists Accuse Pandora Of Deliberately Not Selling Ads To Plead Poverty To Congress
Re:
I really *don't* want to do that, and I don't use ad blocks on my tablet or my home PC.
On the post: Recording Industry Lobbyists Accuse Pandora Of Deliberately Not Selling Ads To Plead Poverty To Congress
Re:
So their "solution" would put Pandora out of business.
On the post: Recording Industry Lobbyists Accuse Pandora Of Deliberately Not Selling Ads To Plead Poverty To Congress
The argument contradicts itself
"Pandora is choosing to ... keeping advertising low and attracting customers to its free service tier."
This statement implies that fewer advertisements attract customers. The inverse of this argument is that more advertising drives customers away.
So their solution is "sell more advertising, " which, based on their own argument, will drive customers away.
So their own argument says that Pandora isn't going to make more money by advertising more. They'll simply lose customers, therefore not making any more money for royalty licensing.
FWIW: I think ALL forms of radio should pay exactly the same amount: online, satellite, and terrestrial. I discover (and buy) a lot more music these days online than I do on FM, yet FM is the one that doesn't have to pay jack for royalties.
On the post: YouTube Takes Down Music Video For 'Terms Of Service' Violation; Refuses To Explain Or Put Back
Re:
I'm trying to figure out what you're saying here.
Are you saying that parents should not bother trying to keep their children from seeing profanity, nudity, sex, and violence, or that trying to filter this is futile?
Personally, I hate the fact that YouTube doesn't have any sort of content filters for the most part. My kid loves to watch Minecraft let's play videos and pardy music videos, but some of the posters are real potty mouths... so I am close to the point of simply banning my kid from YouTube and all the good stuff that's there, simply because there's so much trash.
On the post: YouTube Takes Down Music Video For 'Terms Of Service' Violation; Refuses To Explain Or Put Back
Re:
On the post: YouTube Takes Down Music Video For 'Terms Of Service' Violation; Refuses To Explain Or Put Back
I disagree. I think that they YouTube has an obligation to support their customers. Without people posting their videos, YouTube wouldn't have the content that they use to make money. The content creators are YouTube's true customers, and if YouTube doesn't support them - I'm sure Vimeo or someone else will.
On the post: DJs' 'Dihydrogen Monoxide' April Fool's Prank Results In Suspension And Possible Felony Charges
Re: Re: How the water company should've handle this
Err. Life-challenged Americans.
On the post: DJs' 'Dihydrogen Monoxide' April Fool's Prank Results In Suspension And Possible Felony Charges
Re: Re:
Please sign my petition to have Ferrous metals banned from all public places and all commercial products.
http://youso.stupid
On the post: Time Warner Cable: We Can Record You, But You Can't Record Us
Re: it's more simple than that, no?
I finally asked the rep, "What is that beeping noise?"
She answered, "You are being recorded."
I replied, "I don't want you to record me."
She gave me this spiel about how it's for my protection, blah blah blah. I finally told her that she could call me back when there's not a machine beeping in my ear every 30 seconds and hung up.
The funny part is that I didn't care about being recorded. I just hated that annoying beep. It was distracting and kept throwing off my concentration.
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