Right there is the problem. Everyone HERE should know that by now. Not everyone out THERE knows about it though.
It's good job it doesn't affect everyone then. Really, very few XBox360 are affected. Some people just look for things to sue. Fuck'em, I'm sure MS aren't loosing sleep over it.
Yeah, I did think of that, which is why I said more than you quoted. I agree that in the modern environment redistribution of wealth must be handled differently or preceded by re-education. However, the argument that Microsoft or any of these corporations have earned their vast wealth and resources (and, by extension, that they are therefore entitled to keep it) is totally false. I don't know about anyone else here, but you should be smart enough to realize that the concencentration of wealth and power among just a tiny number of inbred groups who have unbelievably wide reach, which in such a zero-sum game means an almost total lack of power in the rest of the world, negates all such arguments. With the system of international business laws which have in no small part been written by these corporations and their minions with no resort to ethical standards and with the complete control of the media (not just the news media, but all media) by wealth and the simultaneous influence of those media on a dumbed down world population, there can be no speaking of "earned." It is only and nothing more than a grand and complicated theft. There is no defense for it. And there are no rights for the thieves. People who defend the rights of corporations to their wealth and power must be either among the theives themselves or at least they think they are or hope that they will be soon (40% of the American population believes they are in the top 5% of earners and another 40% think they will be within 10 years) or else they have been taken in by the incredibly low-level propaganda the thieves broadcast through our society. ...word is bondage...
Regardless of how they look now, the fact remains that Microsoft started years and years ago as 'the little guy' and has worked their way to the top with decades of producing successful product. You can look at it from any socio-political standpoint you want (and make thinly veiled allusions to the lack of intelligence and disposition towards theivery of anyone who disagrees with you in the process) but unless I'm missing out on their whole Mongolian Sex-Slave operations, Microsoft has earned the vast majority of their wealth by creating software that people buy. When you think of how many computers - just in the US - run Windows, Office, Visual Studio, etc. etc., it's not hard to imagine that yeah, the corporate earnings are legit. I mean, we're talking MICROSOFT here, not the freaking Rockefellers or anything like that. It's the corporation started by nerdy little Bill Gates back when he'd mug for photo shoots, sprawling in a poor imitation of sexy across a desk next to a Paleolithic IBM running some version of MS Office from the stone tablets in the disk drive!
Sweater Fish Deluxe has made this argument into a soci-political argument. But I have a feeling that he is aware of the reasons why the "little guy" got very big. Microsoft built it empire through lawsuits and court cases. In my opinion some theft occured in the early years (this can be disputed) But make no mistake of it microsoft established many patents and rights that extend to this day becuase bill gates was an advanced thinker who sued and went to court for the rights of things that were not considered so important in the 80's. They didn't earn any of the money you have given them credit for, but I am not saying that I hate bill gates because his scam worked and made him who he is today.
I'm not going to get too much in to this whole argument, but if it wasn't for Bill Gates, I might still be using GEM Desktop on my old 8086. We upgraded from our main computer when Windows 95 came out, and 90% of the reason was for the operating system. Of course, on the other hand, if Bill Gates had never started Microsoft, maybe Amiga would still be around and we would have upgraded from our old Amiga 500 instead. Ahhh the lovely days of Workbench...
This is capitalism, there are winners and losers. There are laws in which you can bend to a certain and extent but it is not the same as breaking the law. Yeh people get screwed, that has been happening ever since man was walking on two legs. Stealing is when you take something, without permission, from someone else, without a proper trade. If you sell some item to someone at a certain price and that buyer turns around and sells it, and in turn makes 1000% profit from it, of course you are going to get mad, but calling it a theft is utterly stupid. But anyway, if the guy does win, he'll get counter-sued by MS for libel and lose the money he made and more than that.
Uh, if he wins the defect lawsuit, he would win de facto for any potential libel lawsuit since it would be found that there was a defect. Now, if he loses on the other hand...
Microsoft is a fictional entity (literally, that is its legal status, it's legal status of any business), it's not the case one group of people and ideas has moved from where it was in the 1970s to where it is today. Bill Gates and a couple other people made a lot of money and they are often used as figureheads and poster boys for the American and greater capitalist myth, but the fact is Microsoft is a TOTALLY different company today and as it grew than it was when it was founded. First of all, it is a publically traded company, which doesn't mean that it is owned by the public, but that it is owned by the minority of extremely wealthy stockholders and investors who have no connection with the wonderful idealist Microsoft you envision. Microsoft is also composed of a huge fleet of lawyers and businessmen who likewise have no connection with Microsoft's past. What these investors and upper-echelon employees do have connections to are all the organisms of power and control that I talked about in my first post. Appeals to Microsoft's past as justifcations for its present ar invalid. This would be the case with any so-called rags to riches corporate story. And my comments regarding people who support the corporate system were not meant to be thinly veiled. Those who know what it is they support are indeed theives and I have no respect for them. For the rest, who are fooled, I don't want to mack them, they are tangled in a system that goes way beyond what a human being should be expected to cope with, let alone have power over. It says nothing about their intelligence that they have been fooled, the system wouldn't be as huge or powerful as say it is if only stupid people could be trapped by it. The people who are at least partially extricated from it (for myself, I think I am only very very marginally free of it) only had a lucky set of environmental influences in their youth in their favor and have to work incredibly hard in the present to hold onto their vision.
That's what I meant to say, if he loses he'll be counter-sued. A publicly traded company is controlled by the company. I can buy a couple of MS stock and be invited to their shareholder meetings and take part of their committee voting. You can own just one stock and have a say in what the company does. Grant it, the way its set up, the more stock you own, the more control you have. Keep in mind though that the option of ousting a CEO you don't deem fit to run the company is still there so as long as you own stock. Then there is the SEC. With them you can file a complaint with the company and they will investigate them, have the IRS audit their papers. You just have to have support from others and not make yourself look stupid. I'm kicking myself for not buying Google stock when they first came out. I could've had made enough money to buy a decent car and help a lot with my college education.
Did you have the time, money and knowledge to fullfill that statement? Guessing that the price will go up is just the first of many steps. Don't kick yourself over the notion of buying google IPO, it may not have been as easy to do as you think about it in hindsight. I say this because when I was a teenager in the early 90's I predicted that Nikes stock would split and the value would double. I told my parents friends and teachers (the econ teacher who gave the assignment). I was very proactive about it and nobody really believed me. My Step father who was a CPA saw it on the news not too long after I predicted it and told him about it months before. You know what he said to me? "Why didn't you tell me I would have given you a couple thousand dolars to invest, it would have been a good experience for you" Yeah, right. My mom on the other hand remembered the events exactly as they had occured and told me not to feel bad as there was little I could have done about since I was just a kid. Can you beleive that guy, I even asked him for some advice when I got the assigment, he knew about the whole thing nearly from start to finish. I guess that big poster board chart I made with the graphs was just to decorate my room. If you take this perspective it easy to see the mishap of my situation, afterall I really got burned. Googles IPO was $85 a share and required a few more steps than just buying any old stock on sites like etrade etc. All my dad had to do in the 90's was call his broker and buy a few $50 shares and then wait for the money to roll in.
I wasn't that serious with that statement. At first I thought the google stock would flop, but it has proved me wrong, for now...
If the theft you are talking about is from Apple then there is more to that story and Apple is just as guilty.
