<quote><p>How can this be legal and not an abuse of their monopoly power?</p><p>Aside from the fact you can turn it off ( for now ) it still sounds like a clear case of abuse to me and someone should be talking to an attorney about this.</p></quote>

The simple fact that it can be turned off defeats your argument. Plus, are you so naive to believe that no one, i.e. Microsoft, Symantec/Verisign, Red Hat, etcetera have not properly vetted this with legal counsel?

In any case, vendors who make the hardware are the only ones who could be sued. Microsoft can make any software they want. If the vendors don't make adjustments to their hardware to facilitate its operation, then that is the end of it. Second, vendors can make any hardware they want. They are under no legal obligation to make any specific hardware that suits any specific environment. Failure to do so may well cost them money; however, they are legally allowed to do so.

This is just another example of the FOSS being a day late and a dollar short again. This entire scenario was announced nearly 18 months ago. What did the FOSS do? As usually, nothing. Procrastination is its own punishment.

<quote><p>Wrong. At the most, you could accuse OO/LO of attempting to match the look and feel of MS Office circa 2003. They haven't bothered to copy that stupid new "ribbon" interface, and seem to be happy with the UI they presently have.</p></quote>

Seriously, that is what you are going with? That "ribbon" bullshit argument ended years ago. It was only started by FOSS users in a vain attempt to conceal their "sour grapes" attitude towards MS Office and the pathetic offerings being made available to the FOSS community.

By the way, when was the last time you attempted to do any serious OLE with LibreOffice? Or how about some conditional "mail merge" work? It is not pretty and certainly not as robust as that available in MS Office. Think about it. You give away a product that they charge $100 +/- for the home version (sans Outlook) yet they control 90% of the market. You can make up any excuse you want; the bottom line is no body is buying what you are selling.

<quote>Yeah, if you're going to mimic the UI of a better product, you may as well just use the better product.</quote>

That has always been one of my arguments against OpenOffice and now LibreOffice. They continue to attempt to match the look, feel and usefulness and robustness of MS Office, yet have barely managed to equal Office-97. Considering that they have a fully functioning example of what they are trying to improve on, yet cannot even manage to create something vague equal to is really scary.

<quote><p> The amount of voodoo required to get it to work the way you want it, and the ease with which someone can destroy all your work, are staggering.</p></quote>

For a moment there I thought you were describing a FreeBSD system with any modern hardware. Then I remembered that FreeBSD doesn't support the latest Intel Video cards or most high end "wireless N" cards either.

Could it be that Apple knows something about IPv6 that it wants to keep secret from its competitors?

Imagine if those frigging a-holes had simple listened to Gen. George S. Patton and continued the war into the USSR and destroyed them out at the end of the war. We had the A-bomb, so that was certainly not a problem. No "cold war" would have ever existed. Rule #1: When you have an advantage, exploit or or you will pay dearly in the end.

I cannot believe that Google would ever do anything a nefarious as this. Only Microsoft is capable of this treachery.. Why next thing you know, they will be insinuating that there are security bugs in Firefox.

DNA samples should be required of all children born in the USA, period. It would help in the identification of accident victims as well as aid in the catching of criminals. The only possible privacy issue would be the one where a criminal could avoid identification. The hell with those assholes. If you are not committing a crime, you have nothing to fear.

<quote><p>Google is an expert at this. Convincing people that their open apis are the same as open source. They have and will never opensource their revenue generating products. They themselves don't believe in the open source economic model.</p></quote>

I have no idea what "They have and will never opensource their revenue generating products" is suppose to infer. In any case, "open source" aka "open sore" software is by definition unable to generate any substantial revenue. That is why it is the software of choice for devout socialist/fascist users throughout the software industry.