Your problem here is clear - you don't know the difference between innovation and invention.

Really?

Read the other posts. The Streisand effect mention would be insightful. The Kaupthing effect mention is humor through the (intentional) appearance of ignorance.

See my sig. You are on your own. Stop expecting benevolence from you rulers.

If all other things are pretty much equal, I would consider these two things:

1) If you aren't already including it in "how happy you are with either job", consider how much you have to put up with other peoples crap. Since you say that you enjoy management, do you really already understand how much more other people's ignorance and attitudes you will have to DEAL with (as opposed to just LIVING with it as non-management)?

2) Where are you more needed? Often times management has more underqualified individuals in it. Or just people who are otherwise qualified but just lack the management skills. Or are you that good at the techie stuff that you are the one that really makes stuff happen most of the time? How many others are there that easily could fill your spot in either position, should you not take it? I don't mean this in a "for the good of the business sense" way, but rather in the sense that making a bigger difference in either role could add additional "happiness" to the basic aspects of the jobs themselves.

The point is that what you quoted is not the purpose of the law, it is the method by which the purpose is to be achieved. Once the method BECOMES the purpose, then the law is no longer constitutional (as the stated purpose is the only one that Congress has the authority to legislate this issue by).

I never said that the law didn't originally do that, I said that it wasn't the purpose of it. Thus, what I said WAS entirely correct.

And that is ignoring the ignorance behind calling it "stealing". :p

You are wrong, what I said IS entirely true.

Article One, Section 8 of the United States Constitution lists the "enumerated powers", one of those being "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;".

If a copyright or patent law is not designed for that purpose, then it is unconstitutional. (I.e. our intellectual property laws have been expanded unconstitutionally.)

Perhaps the idea should be to take patents back to the original purpose of them - to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, and NOT to protect the inventor from other people stealing their ideas.

Fixed that for you.

"The rest of us" meaning people who are trying to talk about monopolies in a reasonable sense (like Microsoft) without people getting ignorantly technical about it (you) and needing to have the basics of communication explained to them on the side (by me).

So you succeed at definitions but fail at reading comprehension. By your argument, everyone has a monopoly on everything since it is possible to arbitrarily define any product market narrow enough to make it so. When you are able to understand the context of the rest of the discussion, then you can come back and join the discussion the rest of us are having instead of misapplying semantics.

So you are one of those people who thinks satellite radio doesn't compete with over-the-air radio? [/sarcasm] I understand the necessity of properly defining the market to determine whether or not one has a monopoly, but that is no reason to start throwing around intentionally (I hope) obtuse examples like the two you threw out there. Apple does not have a monopoly with OS X.

See, you yourself say that IE is "primarily just a shell". So how is removing that IE shell not removing IE? Those shared libraries left behind are most definitely not IE.

But lock-in doesn't equate to monopoly, which is my point here.

So by your logic, if two programs share any libraries then the two programs are actually the same?

"Everything having solely to do with IE" is what IE is. IE is to Explorer like an extension is to Firefox. If you remove the extension, it's gone. That fact that what it was built on top of remains does not change the fact that it is gone.

Are you suggesting Apple is monopolistic? I don't think that word means what you think it means...