I'm open for any suggestions you happen to have on running out the poor, criminal riff-raff, while leaving the poor, hard working population in place.

Prop 13 serves a useful purpose for non-commercial properties.

How about "Think of the filthy, crime ridden ghetto children!"?

No, we detune our gasoline.

If we didn't detune our gasoline, the infinitesimal percentage of cars that were manufactured before 1981 so they don't have oxygen sensors would pollute a tiny amount more than they already do.

Also, Chevron wouldn't have a monopoly on reformulated gasoline which complies with California law, and you'd be able to import it from out of state refineries instead, without paying the "Chevron Tax".

Either of these outcomes would be "disastrous".

And Ford Probe'ing them?

General "Thunderbolt" Ross would be investigating it, since he's brought in any time The Hulk might be involved...

Sure. And if we were talking about forward binary compatibility, which would require accurate predicting the future, that would be a valid argument.

We're not, we're talking about intentionally breaking binary backward compatibility, so that when you force someone to buy a new OS when they want to buy a computer, you force them to also re-buy application software, which they already own, to run on that OS.

This isn't any different than any other form of tying, where you leverage a monopoly in desktop OS's to force, for example, use of a particular browser. The money spent on Office 2000 is a sunk cost, and you're forcing them to re-spend.

Please name another software vendor with a monopoly in desktop operating systems, and I'll be happy to describe how they provide binary backward compatibility to avoid leveraging their monopoly position to force re-purchase of existing software by not tying that software to a particular platform.

32 bit Office 2000 doesn't work on Windows 7.

You lost me at "unmanned". Enough said.

Actually, no. The reason they are willing to continue to provide the updates to some entities is because of the purchase and support contracts they entered into as part of a bulk purchase agreement. So they offer it not because they want more $$$, but because they are contractually obligated to do so. They'd just as soon give all these companies free updates to Windows 7 (or whatever) to get released from these contracts, which is the reason they are unwilling to extend support, for any amount of $$$, to other people caught in the same situation, but without benefit of contracts adding additional clauses on top of the clauses present in the public licenses themselves.

That's not true. Microsoft will happily sell you Windows to run on anything capable of running it, and Apple went out of their way to support ACPI and SMP tables that are acceptable to Microsoft OS's, even though it required adding some substantial EFI modules, as well as providing driver support for Windows for Apple proprietary hardware.

Apple will certainly not provide Mac OS X for non-Apple hardware; however, this has been upheld multiple times in court cases as being acceptable because Apple does not wield monopolistic power in the desktop computer marketplace. Courts have led exactly the opposite in findings of fact when it comes to Microsoft.

In this instance, we define "market" as "market for desktop computer operating systems".

Agreed; however, the IRS amortization schedule on computer hardware is 5 years - and unlike Windows on PC hardware, Apple desktop computers consist of both the hardware and the software, not just the software running on white-box/grey-box machines. You could make the argument on the basis of hardware only for hardware sold with Windows installed, if it was considered part of the hardware. But again, we have court precedent forcing companies such as Dell and HP to offer white-box/grey-box hardware without the so-called "Windows tax", This means that the software is not subject to the same accelerated depreciation.

Specifically, IRS Publication 544, Chapter 2, under "depreciable business assets".

This is very much a red herring; while Open Source OS vendors and advocates, such as FreeBSD and Linux would dearly love for this to be the case, the problem is actually not with the platform, but with the capitol investment as a lump sum business asset, in software components, such as Microsoft Office and other components which can be assembled together with glue code to implement vertical market solutions.

Microsoft explicitly does not support Visual Basic, Visual Studio, Microsoft Access, or other software on non-Windows Platforms for the use model of implementing vertical market solutions (i.e. neither Linux nor FreeBSD nor Mac OS X have such support).

Further, the software packages of this type from Microsoft are tied to a specific version of the Windows Operating system; that is, you can not take a version of Office intended for use on Windows XP, and run it on Windows 7 or later versions of the Microsoft OS platform. This explicit and intentional tying is monopolistic in nature. Further, the glue code for the vertical market systems previously mentions, *also* will not run on non-XP platforms.

Effectively, this means that Microsoft is leveraging their monopoly position in operating systems - specifically, with regard to the discontinuation of support for XP - into additional sales of non-OS Microsoft products, and to sales of middleware components and development tools. As a necessary side effect, they create a market for third parties to port code they've already written to the new middleware and applications components running on the new platform, without actually providing additional value for the intentional binary incompatibility of the user space code.

So there's more or is a good argument, in terms of what the paper is suggestion, for a third party market for the equivalent of "Autozone" replacement parts/repairs being made to Windows XP systems.

Forced "upgrades" which aren't actually "upgrades", since they don't provide fixes without damaging binary compatibility, are almost always a bad idea.

Not that Apple is completely innocent of this tactic with regard to new iOS versions; they've recently disabled the ability to turn off sync and update downloads happening over the cellular data connection, even though there are usage caps and extra costs to the user if this is left on, and they consistently pop up complaint dialogs when they can't fit the update into the storage on a 16G iPhone, and suggest you delete stuff to make room.

I fully expect for them to get a ration of shit in the courts for this at some point in the near future, particularly on things like older iPhone 4G's, where the over the cell network syncs and downloads have to occur before the phone lets you do anything else - like answer a phone call.

Maybe the new fashion designer VP they hired will do the right thing, and throw some phones against the wall, like Steve would have, until the issue is fixed.

In any case, the Windows XP end of life has been handled very, very badly, and the papers author has some great points, from a legal perspective, given the findings of fact on the monopolistic power by the courts in the Netscape case.

I might agree, if the versions of IE eligible for that treatment also included greater than or equal to 10...

A potentially more interesting example is replacement auto parts, which automobile manufacturers are required by law to stock for 10 years after the last date of manufacture so that owners of the vehicles can repair them or have them repaired by a third party. Since the last ship date for Windows XP was the last contractual date that Microsoft allowed vendors to bundle it with new computers, that would give them about an 8 year support requirement for "replacement parts". Note that the automobile example would apply to the GM ignition switch, which had an engineering change to correct a design defect - and any security flaw is technically a design defect.

I think that the more companies attempt to treat intellectual property as real property, the more that the negative aspects of real property law should be applied to their products.

E.g. if I use your patent, and you don't stop me using it, then I've engaged in adverse possession, and have "established an interest" in the intellectual property which you must therefore allow me to continue to use, just as if my driveway had been over the property line for 10 years, and you didn't do anything about it, or if I'd been parking my car at your curb, and it didn't bother you until I started parking my RV there and blocking your view.

The paper's argument seems to be along similar lines of thinking.

The paper (if you read it) claims that the requirement should be enforced based on the Microsoft having monopolistic power in the marketplace. Apple doesn't wield monopolistic power in the marketplace for desktop operating systems.

If only it were possible to do challenge/response! Using a pre-arranged CERT, so that the drone sends a challenge for each command that has to be encrypted with the shared secret before the drone would accept it!

Oh... wait... it's completely possible.