So the departments in poor neighbourhoods with lots of controvertial police interactions also have the cheap crappy cameras that fail all the time?

http://presentationzen.blogs.c...
Yawn.
Are you now going to say, "but that is 2005!"
Apple didn't have to force anything on anyone. That's not what antitrust laws are about. The fact is, they used their leverage of a monopoly in one market to harm players in another market.

Should have been written as *personal* media players, and yes, they did.
It is absolutely true that their product was good, but that is in no way relevant to antitrust discussions. Monopoly, whether by-merit, or not, is still subject to special rules with regard to penetration in other market places.

Not a single other point you made is even relevant.

Restored sanity to the universe for you.

I don't live in Germany, but my closest friend since about the age of 18 does, and I can say with absolute certainty, based upon the pictures she sends me of there, and her own personal vehicle, that my anecdote would not match yours.
My guess is that's more a function of affluence, which is in fact one of the few metrics we do win in.

Unless of course the function determining probability of Elk-Road encounter were a function of distance rather than time... My head hurts too much to try to figure it out, but it seems likely to me that it is.

You've illustrated the exact problem. The fact that their players worked with MP3s is not the problem. The fact that they were leveraging their monopoly in digital players to advance a format that stifled competition is. Anyone who purchased that material was harmed by those practices, illegal if you're a monopoly, at least allegedly so. The courts will decide, ultimately.

I think a better analogy would be for GM, in the US, to suddenly only produce cars that only operated with a specific type of Gas nozzle, not replaceable, and patented with refusal to license to other manufacturers. This would have major consequences to the fuel distribution market, even with GM lacking a monopoly. With a monopoly, it would be a death knell for Ford.

I'm of course talking about the leveraging of the iPod monopoly to abuse the market of digital audio distribution.

I think this is where our viewpoints diverge...
I believe it's precisely because of the iPod's market dominance that they could not do so. If the iPod did not have dominance, then it would be a very, very poor business decision by Apple to make it impossible to play their digitally distributed music only on Apple players.

Am I off-base?

Far more complicated than that. Lower gear ratios do not directly reduce fuel consumption, but rather indirectly through reduced compression and other rotational/time domain losses in the power delivery. That is, there are diminishing returns, and most modern cars will gain very little with a lower final gear ratio (assuming they're able to move at all, since torque is already effectively barely enough to accelerate most cars in final gear at higher speeds)

It's perfectly legal for anyone not abusing their Monopoly (or lack thereof in Microsoft's case with regard to the personal audio player market)
Same reason no one busted Apple's balls over tightly bundling Safari with OSX.
You can get away with all kinds of anti-competitive practices, right up until you effectively monopolize a market (fairly or not)

You're aware Microsoft didn't have a monopoly in the music-player market, right?
Now, if they bundled a Zune with every installation of Windows, they'd be in some deep shit.

I'm certain you understand that antitrust law imposes special restrictions upon monopolies, right?
That's why it was no problem that Apple bundled Safari with OSX.

Because there are rules that apply to you when you have a monopoly on a market (As Apple does on personal audio players)
You can't use your monopoly in one market to dominate in another. That's an anti-trust violation.
It's Internet Explorer bundled with Windows, only Apple is/was significantly more sinister in this particular regard. (Everyone's got an iPod, so everyone must use iTunes, which is strongly tied to the music store that is again only functional on the iPod)
Obviously, it's not nearly as bad anymore. Competition managed to arise, undoubtedly much to Jobs' angst, and so the monopoly was forced to make baby steps toward consumer satisfaction.

Chevy gas in your BMW would be a better analogy.
I don't think anyone is complaining because they can't replace the screen on their iPod with the screen from their Zune.