Oh, I'm sorry, I thought your own examples would suffice once you recognized there was a difference between marketing and advertising. For example, Bill Gates convincing IBM to allow them to write the DOS for them is pure marketing whereby Bill Gates created his entire software empire by creating a market out of software sales that would have been developed in-house and given away by IBM if he had not done so. In the case of Netscape and Wordperfect, Microsoft made it easy for users of MS alternatives to read competitors' files while only creating content in their own standards which many here call "embrace, extend and extinguish." This is a pure marketing ploy to make your product the only one in the market which reads everything while making it difficult for your competitors to read your output. This makes using MS products the path of least resistance for those reading documents while forcing everyone else to also buy MS products to read the documents produced. This was not an engineering decision but a carefully considered marketing decision.

But these are just your examples. Microsoft has exhibited marketing excellence throughout its existence from choosing to offer discounts to computer manufacturers who do not sell systems with alternative OSes to MCSEs and Microsoft Solution providers who are provided with primarily marketing resources rather than technical resources. Apparently, much of what you think is just "business" is the particular subset of business known as marketing.

You're confusing marketing with advertising. There's much more to marketing than advertising and Microsoft is exceedingly good at the former despite being poor at the latter.

You can't tell what sites I've been to if it's Slashdotted!

Let me see if I've got this straight. The government is concerned that people are being scammed out of their money by online poker playing so they take the player's money instead. How's this better? And, wouldn't the fact that the money they are seizing is actually payouts from the poker companies prove that at least people are actually winning at least $33 million?

And, WOW, aren't those beads shiny! Let me have them.

There's nothing wrong with more discrete searches but I've found that the vast majority of users are not nearly as good at defining a discrete search as I am. The point is, if you search for "sex discrimination" with a location of India you get blocked because the term "sex" is blocked and the GGP stated that if a user used the term "sex" in their search they were only seeking sexually explicit results.

Sure, it's impossible that someone might be trying to read laws about sex discrimination or how to determine the sex of a snake or something.

I know. I hope they crack down on all these pirates so we can have a successful automobile industry again.

It seems to me that the RIAA is just doing a lot of "make busy" work to make the case as expensive as possible for her pro bono counsel.

However, if 10,000 people each give you a $1 gift you won't owe taxes. This seems to be more analogous to peer-to-peer file-sharing. In fact, most gifts from the users are less than a full file since you would get only small pieces of files from each person.

The problem is that there s no such thing as the "best" standard. Different circumstances and applications favor one standard over another. What companies like Apple and Microsoft do when they set their standards is definitively choose one standard over another despite the fact that it will not perform in well in some circumstances. But open source developers want to have the best for any given set of circumstances and hence create multiple competing standards. This multiplicity of standards makes the development environment all the more fragmented and make a less unified whole for the user. This is a serious problem with open source development. Even individual applications often get bogged down with let's-add-another-button-itis until the user interface is a cacophony of controls and difficult for users to learn. In a company like Apple, for instance, great battles are fought over almost every pixel of the display. The interface people fight with the developers and in the end pare down the feature set and the number of options in the interface. Since Apple pays everyone's paycheck, there is an incentive for them to reach some fort of resolution and Apple can set the priorities within these disputes.

Sadly, I don't see this improving in the open source community. For there to be a consistent Linux desktop interface, the developers would need to bow to a body of interface specialists and comply with the interface standards set by them. Every developer who's written a difficult bit of code is proud of their accomplishment and would like a button to run it in the middle of the interface. If someone were to suggest that the button does not belong or, indeed, that the entire functionality (and its configuration) should never be seen by the user then the developer and others who think like him will fork the code and add yet another confusing option to the mix. This is compounded by the fact that most open source developers think of interfaces as "pretty printing" and believe that it is far beneath their talents and that those who concern themselves with the interface are inferior programmers. So it's unlikely that this situation will improve.

Basically, they're launching a retail store on Monday and don't know what configurations and prices will be for offer.

Not to mention it's a country that's easy to embargo since they have nothing we need. Rest assured, if they strike oil there we'll find every reason under the sun to be the best of allies.

That's funny. Even in your own statement, you change from "I would have paid" to "if I have to pay, I might." You simply cannot say someone would have bought something until they actually do so. Personally, I don't listen to much music but I do enjoy movies and television shows. I have purchased thousands of DVDs (HD-DVD's and Blu-rays, too) because I enjoy them. Currently, there are hundreds of others that I would buy but I haven't and may never actually purchase them. I'll only spend within my alloted budget so many things I would buy will never actually be purchased.

As far as your belief that low prices trump everything else, there are many successful luxury brands that prove this is not true. The iPhone and iPod are not the cheapest devices of their class but they seem to sell well. Many people pay to see movies on an IMAX screen when they could pay less and watch on a smaller screen.

One of the things I always find missing in these discussions, though, is the actual cost of piracy to those who participate in it. Setting issues of morality aside, I'd like to say that file sharing is rife with problems: downloads that never finish, bad quality files, files that aren't what they claim to be, etc. If you place any value on your time and available bandwidth, the cost of copying the file is often as high as simply buying it in the first place. The only reason people are willing to expend so much of their time in this endeavor is because they lack the funds to purchase the item in the first place. So it's unlikely that the studios are losing much money in any case. But then, maybe I place a higher value on inconvenience than most people, after all, I purchased a couple of Apple TVs and ripped all my DVDs to iTunes so that I wouldn't need to go look for the disc or be forced to watch those FBI warnings that purchasers of DVDs are not allowed to skip but those pirating movies are blissfully spared from watching.

I like the convenience of buying DVDs, so I do. However, I would like to mention that Netflix is providing a service almost identical to to what the file-sharers do: allowing you to watch any number of movies without paying money to the studios for the rights to do so. But it's perfectly legal for them to do so. In addition, my local library lets people borrow movies for free and it's perfectly legal, too. Maybe those who watched movies from those services would have bought the movie if the service wasn't available. Seriously, what's the difference?

I thought they meant Tipper Gore had started trying to get game ratings again.