Easy the us constitution forbids states interfering with interstate commerce. Therefore the FCC has the right

If you set up a straw man, then it's very easy to kill it. The issue is not an OS providing something, it's that Microsoft, which had a near-monopoly in the desktop space, used the money from selling the OS to fund development in another market (browsers) and then bundled their version, undercutting the competition with cross subsidies. There was a thriving browser market before IE was introduced, but it's hard to compete when most of your customers are forced to pay to fund the development of your competitor.

I think I've seen this movie before. It doesn't end well.

150 km a day on a bike? How long does that take? According to my phone GPS, which isn't spectacularly accurate, I do about 18km/hour (though I'm far from the fastest cyclist), so even if you're twice as fast as me that sounds like it would involve a bit over 4 hours on a bike. That's a lot of time to spend commuting each day, it's adding over 50% to the normal work day!

The last 5 years is long after this was an issue. Windows 98 was the release that triggered the lawsuit and it had been EOL for a long time five years ago.

Really? Because that's exactly the set of values that I'd choose to indoctrinate my serfs with.

Or, to summaries: 'Hey oppressed people, don't think about following a leader from amongst yourself, that kind of thing always ends badly'.

Laplink also had a neat mode where it would install on the remote machine for you (which was useful for me, because it came on 3.5" floppies and one machine only had a 5.25" drive). The mechanism for this was quite interesting - you ran command.com on the remote machine machine, telling it to use com1 as the console device (something I hadn't been aware DOS could do). Then it would use the type command (similar to cat on UNIX systems) to write a stream of data from the standard input to a file and finally run that file.

This obviously raises the question of why, when you have a serial console with working flow control, do you need laplink at all? If you have a null modem cable and a lot of patience, then you can always extract files by writing them to standard output and reading them off with a serial program - just make sure that you've correctly configured the UART first. If you're a bit paranoid, then running something like par2 first (I think there are DOS binaries and they're pretty small, though they may take a while on a 386) and you'll be able to recover small data errors.

Copying 160MB over a serial connection won't be fast, but I'm assuming that this isn't urgent if it's been sitting on a 160MB disk for years without backups...

While this is technically true, it's also misleading. You could delete iexplore.exe, but don't expect a working system afterwards. Lots of other parts of Windows (and Office) invoked iexplore.exe directly, rather than providing a web view with MSHTML.dll or invoking the default browser via the URL opening APIs.

What is this, 1998? IE was never part of the kernel. The complaints were:

• MSHTML.dll (around which IE was a very thin wrapper) was installed by default and used by loads of things.
• Lots of things in Windows that should have used MSHTML.dll to embed a web view, or just invoked the default browser, used IE so that you couldn't uninstall IE without breaking Windows.
• MS bundled IE with Windows and used their near monopoly in the desktop OS market to gain a dominant position in the browser market and push Netscape (and a few other browser makers) out of business.

It was never part of the kernel and never ran with system-level privileges.

I've not been paying much attention to Windows for a few years, but does IE still have the same poor security reputation? I was under the impression that it did the multiprocess thing and sandboxed each instance, putting it in the same ballpark as Chrome and Safari and ahead of Firefox (which is finally going to start adding sandboxing support now). Did they manage to screw up the sandboxing and make something that's still trivially exploitable, or are you just repeating ten-year-old information?

Firefox was Mozillas spartan. Netscape code really bogged it down. Firefox was just better after the striping

Does it test implementation? Game pad support as one example was just now a proposal. IE doesn't support that therefore it is not compliant is not true as no standard implementation is agreed upon

IE 11 implements W3C standards better than any browser. Webkit might have more check offs from html5test but they are not implemented the same way as w3c.

Css 3 animations are a good example. Chrome does not do them right without hacks.

It is not IE 6 anymore and Sun and IBM subverted and changed proposed standards IE 6 used in development on purpose. It was not designed to break Web pages. Mozilla and Netscape were worse in 2001 believe it or not

Problem is they make finding apps more difficult and outlook 2013s lack of colors make it hard to spot marked events.

Skuemorphic design with gloss, shininess, gradients, are out dated according to the Art professors.

Look at ios 8? Buttons are gone as they represent real objects. Macosx? Yosemite is flat and high color scales and gradients gone. Andriod M? Same. Furniture? That too is now minimalist color and design.

This is the new thing.

Even chromes icon now no longer looks like 3d plastic circa 2011. It is flat and slightly frosted.

The old way is out of date now. You all whined Skuemorphism sucks!!! Look at the leather in macosx address book??? Well the art professors heard. You got it