You pretty much got it - the core of Microsoft's argument was 100% vindicated by history. It's one of the little quirks of nature:

1. Bundling DOES help the consumer. Apple is the proving point. The users crave a unified bundled approach. Even to the level MS never envisioned, hardware, service and software.

2. An upstart competition could arrive at anytime and take MS's market share, because unlike natural monopolies on resources, the human capital needed to fight MS was readily available to competitors. Google, Apple, Blackberry, all came from nowhere to drink MS's milkshake.

3. The browser is a natural part of the operating system and it's unfair to force MS to accommodate competitors who someday would be more profitable or powerful than MS.

4. MS doesn't have the ability to set prices which is a critical part of the monopoly power. This is so obviously true. MS exerts almost no price pressure on the market these days.

Your politics are backwards. Nationally, the car dealers are associated strongly with the conservatives in the GOP. Many, many, many car dealers are owned by Republicans.

Nate Silver correlated the data nicely back when the major makers were on the verge of bankruptcy.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com...

It's better than 8-to-1 correlation (i.e., a fairly strong correlation).

The problem is that, adjusting for inflation, it should be dramatically less. That's the trend. The major outlier is for raw materials which are more costly to extract and process for use.

In the 1950's a decent Westinghouse consolve TV cost about $1000. Inflation adjusted to today, that's about $9000. You'd be hard pressed to spend $9000 on a TV today unless it was a big theater setup or was quite exotic. That's because technology has replaced the need for many expensive raw materials, improved production (including moving it overseas), and driven out the excess.

Auto manufacturers have a problem, and they are the ones driving cost inflation, trying to convince Americans to spend more and more of their income each year on automobiles. For the last two generations this has been through fictionalization of automobiles - you are buying a payment, not a product. That has started to lessen, but record low interest rates have prevented a major crash in sales, and actually led to some good years against a trend of decline.

There is a large untapped market for a car marker who builds the same model of car, with no changes other than manufacturing refinements, for 7-15 years, direct to consumers. From a manufacturing theory perspective, there are something like 7,000-10,000 drivers in an auto production line. 10 years is about what you could expect to optimize the supply chain for each driver, maybe half that if you are very good at managing supply chain. This type of company is stymied by three things:

a. cheap credit money which makes it cheaper to buy a new car than to maintain and run older cars,
b. regulatory creep which increases requirements continually and
c. consumers willing to spend a large slice of their income on flashy cars and status symbols.

And in the end, car dealerships do deserve to undergo a radical change in their structure. They are inherently bad for customers.

For one - they make money in ways that customers are not aware of. The most insidious being "point spread". You walk in, buy a car, and they make money selling the car (fair), future service either under warranty or direct to the consumer (fair), and more importantly, on the financing. You might qualify for a certain rate, but they get a big chunk of the difference between your best qualifying rate and what they convince you to pay. So you qualify for a 3.5% rate, but they get you sign on the line for 9.9%, and they get roughly 50% of the point spread between 3.5% and 9.9%, which on many financing arrangements, is far more than the profit involved in selling the car to begin with.

Second, they do an only okay job with service. They do not typically do as a good job as independent shops, and for warranty work, face little competitive price pressure.

Finally, they are effective local monopolies and do not always respond to market pressure. Because of brand monopolies, there is not as much competition as they would have you believe. The car market is deeply segmented, and so there are not as many brand choices in a price/demographic band as you might think. On paper there are 15 manufacturers selling through dealerships in a market. But for a single random consumer, there are likely 3 or 4 options that meet the basic criteria of type and price range.

In many small towns or areas, the local car dealer is the wealthiest person in town. There is a lot of profit standing between the car maker and the consumer. And in the end, this excess is needs to be wrung out of the system. Manufacturer's should not be able to prevent car dealers from selling and servicing cars, but long-term, the concept of a franchised car dealership needs to be scaled back. Channel conflict is inevitable.

No idea why the parent is flagged interesting, as it is entirely misleading. The typo redirection can be easily disabled under the opendns control panel.

$ nslookup slashdot.og 208.67.222.222
Server: 208.67.222.222
Address: 208.67.222.222#53

** server can't find slashdot.og: NXDOMAIN

If they're transparently grabbing your DNS traffic, shift it to another port. Opendns will accept queries on port 5353.

As John Gilmore (I think) said, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

Ya know, you're assuming all water used in ag is pumped out of the ground. True in some areas, not in others. And that it's not replenished fast enough -- true in some areas, not in others.

I find it rather telling that the most resistance to building dams to store the winter melt comes from areas with the most hue and cry against ag water use. (Did you know that some parts of the Sierra Nevada can achieve a snowpack in excess of 50 FEET?? Where do you think all the water goes in the spring?)

There are parts of Calif that are now desert, but were not before Los Angeles siphoned off all the surface water. Think on that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

And you are right, grass evolved to be grazed (and it doesn't really matter if it's bison or cattle). If it's not grazed, eventually it's overtaken by invasive weeds.

Initially the 'family farm' size was restricted to 40ac (btw not so much restricted, as what you could homestead) but that quickly proved nonviable, hence the expansion. In a great deal of the American West during the time of expansion, even 160 acres wouldn't feed your family, let alone produce enough surplus to sell a crop.

And see my post above on why many CA farmers (especially in marginal water areas) now grow alfalfa in preference to other crops. It was either that, or go out of business entirely. (Which many did as well.) I watched the change while I lived there. You'd be shocked at how much formerly-productive Calif cropland is now a wasteland of invasive weeds. (Tho where sheep are still pastured, the native grass has recovered.)

And also to protect some river-spawning salmon -- which to my understanding, isn't native in the first place, but rather is an invasive species.

Indeed, the standard rotation for farms around here is one year of potatoes, two years of wheat, and three years of alfalfa.

At what it costs to pump water nowadays (what with the high price of diesel and electric in CA), you can't make money with row crops anymore. Where I used to live in SoCal was once all onions and carrots and occasionally other vegetable crops. As the cost of water went up, those crops gradually went away (the last onion crop near my place, ca. 2005, was left to rot in the field because the cost of diesel to harvest it exceeded the value of the crop).

That land either went either to weeds or to alfalfa, because alfalfa is the last crop you can make money on. You don't have to plow or plant it every year, you don't need to hire a labor gang to harvest it, and you get multiple crops per year (some fields in SoCal are cut every couple of months year-round), and it doesn't need as much water per ton of product as most row crops do.

As of 2011, alfalfa in SoCal retailed for up to $450/ton (vs. as low as $75/ton for midwestern hay), and since CA restricts hay imports, and since there's little other hay grown in CA, alfalfa had a captive market and growers could sell every bale they could cut.

So, after this water falls elsewhere in the world, does that mean there will be no more evaporation off the Pacific? Because it sounds like you're assuming California will get no more rain in the future.

What most people here are not aware of is that much of the northern CA Central Valley was swampland before it was drained for ag use. (Some of it still is, which is why there's a levee system.)

And there is an easy, very easy, defense http://xkcd.com/936/

If she had done that, there would be no need to e-mail passwords to herself.

Don't you love the logic here? Any water used is gone forever, since obviously there is no evaporation and no subsequent rainfall. California water is used up and magically fails to be replenished by water/rain that evaporated off the Pacific.

If any of what they claim was true, agriculture would have ground to a dusty halt after the first season, rather than having continued for thousands of years. Even if one takes it forward to just include modern agriculture... explain to me how it continues to operate from one year to the next if their theory s true.

Most of these concepts start life as animal rights propaganda, which has no problem with delegating facts to the dustbin if that furthers their cause.

California's problem isn't agriculture. It's that too much of what used to be local water now gets shipped off to the cities for domestic use. Did you know the Owens Valley wasn't a desert til after Los Angeles took most of its water?