My S&P400 company gives us all both MsOffice and Google docs. Free to use whatever we want. I see Google docs being preferred over MsOffice for almost all the documents. Some fancy presentations with animations is the only time people fire up MsOffice. Send a link to all, and they get the most updated version of the document, don't have to bother working through comments and change history and emailing docs back and forth. Almost all the corporate back office forms are google spreadsheets now. All team leads directly post their budget proposals for the next year and it all gets consolidated and gets reported to admin.

Did slashdot just die and silently come back up? I was getting 503's and "offline mode", logged in and out for ages, then suddenly its just working again. Anybody else experience anything like that?

Seriously, insightful?? Sarcastic, funny maybe, but I was definitely not being insightful! Next I'll be accused of having sock puppets!

Really. You could have proposed Britain and Iceland. Lack of true free speech rights combined with an alarming lack of respect for the 1% = balance.

Russia could overfly Vanuatu once, problem solved.
At least you didn't defend the UN...

You need to move all of those tables and chairs, I am trying to land...

To really get the natural order you're suggesting, you'd have to nuke his mum in the past - requiring faster-than-light-travel - so your troll-biting comment isn't as off-topic as the resulting moderation would imply!

... Smothsonian channel will spend two episodes to cover it in Mighty Ships series. Wonder who watches that thing. It keeps showing up in the listings, but do people really watch them?

He is not losing that many votes. These Cuban Americans are captive to GOP. High time Democrats stop pursuing the vote they are never going to get. Might as well play to the base and show America what happens if both parties start appeasing their base.

I really, really hope apk will come on and tell me how "manly" I'm looking these days!

Well, almost all the software we pay for has boilerplate EULA that says, "We promise you lots of stuff. But if the software you bought for does not do it, well, tough luck buddy, suck it. Cant sue us". In fact some software actually said, "this software is not fit to do anything. not nuclear reactors definitely".

It's inevitable that the copyright holders will expect IP addresses or ranges to be blocked or simply deleted from routing tables.

And then innocent bystanders will become caught up in this.

That's how this escalates. And how it is dangerous to let them do even the little thing.

For other types of distribution, what remedies at law exist?

For instance, if I start mailing pirated Blu-Ray disc all over the world, do they instruct the various shipping agents, postal agencies, and so forth to refuse to accept anything from me, and also to refuse to deliver to me? Can they do this without informing me? Do I have recourse if this also denies me lawful services?

If I merely pack and ship these discs for someone else, is there a fix in law to also deny me access to shipping methods?

Do they put me/us in jail? Do they have the right to go wherever I am in the world, arrest me, and imprison me for this? Would I be denied even the mail from the court informing me of this?

This seems to be another example of technology being used to accomplish what could not be otherwise done. Removing a domain from DNS sure does eliminate their ability to distribute illegally-derived content, but doing so surreptitiously seems to be nasty business.

Is this an expansion of enforcement actions that may not itself be legal?

I don't prefer to ignore this. I instead am thankful.

You don't want the UN involved. And you'll have to recommend a better nation or group of nations to oversee DNS. Or another corporation.

This arrangement has worked very well for a long time. There is nothing to fix, and everything to defend.

Everyone knew as long as MS-Office franchise is delivering money to Microsoft in fire hoses, there is no way anyone can compete with it in *any* sphere. It will sustain losses year after year to deny revenue to the competition. Once the competition folds it has the market for itself. Look how long it was able to sustain losses to gain dominance with XBox franchise. Everyone knew that. Many people had ideas to attack it, but lacked the resources. People with resources, I am looking at you Sun microsystems, lacked the competence to pull it off.

Google went about it strategically. First it peeled of the low hanging fruit, people who don't need all the bells and whistles of a full suite with Google docs/apps. Then it leveraged the central server doing the edits, to create a collaborative edit features that were well ahead of MsOffice when it was introduced. Priced it cheap, pitched it to the enterprises. When it was forcing Microsoft to scramble to offer collaboration tools, Apple helped in the upgrade tread mill battle. In an earlier era, the top exec gets the latest and greatest laptop every six months with latest Office pre-installed and starts belting out documents in the latest format. IT will upgrade rest of the corp. But Apple took all the top execs with its iPad, and now PC is not the latest toy these top honchos were getting. Side effect: The corporate upgrade treadmill slowed down significantly.

Now it is going for the last section that really needs all the bells and whistles of a full fledged office suite. Instead of spending the money to reinvent the wheel inside google docs, it is just using the well established code base of OpenOffice and the ODF. Even though Microsoft lost the mind share and the market share in percentage terms, its cash cows were producing milk at the same old prodigal rate. Cutting off a significant portion of the MsOffice revenue stream is important for Google's business ops in other spheres. Else Microsoft will under cut it. It even tried to pay people to use Bing.

Google does not really want to make much money off its google docs franchise. It uses it just to crimp the revenue stream of Microsoft. It is making money elsewhere.

What, so in your own words, Mars shows no signs of life, except for farting, and Venus is very stormy and no-one can touch (land on) her? Sounds about right!