The new theory on regulation (since approximately the 80s) is that it's bad, and thanks in large part to an economist and a Federal judge (both named Posner) the new theory is that there is no such thing as monopoly abuse -- so there's no need to regulate monopolies, because a monopoly that abuses its position will always have a competitor spring up and underprice them.

When was there ever competition? In the vast majority of service areas, cable (like telephone) is a monopoly with exclusive access to end-users granted by the local governmental authorities.

Years back, the locals kept the worst of the monopoly abuses under a lid by regulating the cable outfits. When cable started serving up networking, the FCC took over and essentially deregulated the business, which is why the old ISP business is dead -- it's telco or cable today, or do without.

Well, to begin with both cable and phone companies would (much) rather you paid them for video service separately.

Then there's the fact that P2P takes them out of the position of selling access to you while removing their regulatory fig leaf of citing (inflated) numbers for adding bandwidth.

And that's just the first two.

Ah, yes. Issue number 3959. Originally filed April 10, 2002. More than twelve years ago. In that time it has remained in the top-voted issue list year-in and year-out. Others come and go, but 3959 keeps on pissing off users. At last look, there are about ten duplicates requests on file.

Every few years some developer wanders by and tells the people following it that nobody needs outline view, or that there are tools available to do it, or whatever. Often, they close the issue. In effect, "I don't use outline mode so obviously it's not important." The mailing list heats up for a while, the developer either mumbles something about maybe the team should look into it and vanishes or else just vanishes, but the issue is either reopened or left open. I've seen at least four of those cycles so far. We're probably due for another one.

At this point, I suspect that 3959 will outlive (Open|Libre|Star)Office for the classic open-source software reason: if it doesn't scratch a developer's itch, it ain't happening. And apparently, developers don't outline, edit, or otherwise structure their writing or much care about the people who do.

dealing with bug/enhancement issues that have been pending for more than twelve years. Issue #3959 (notice the position in the queue?) has been either ignored or brushed off as unimportant since April of 2002, despite seniority and votes in the issues list.

Classic case of writers telling programmers "this is a must-have function" and programmers responding with "I don't use it so neither do you."

I haven't seen the application yet, but I'd be quite surprised if it contains enough information to actually detect cameras -- given, after all, that a camera doesn't necessarily look like anything in particular, nor emit a signal declaring "I am a camera."

More likely, Gates et al are doing the old trick of patenting the idea of detecting a camera and then planning to fill in the blanks as the technology improves. Jerry Lemelson was the grand master of this trick and made billions (yes, with a "B") with it. On numerous occasions he actually sued, and prevailed, against the people who actually invented the technology that he incorporated in revised patent applications because his application predated their invention.

... arrive in queue behind them.