Most Austrian School devotees do not support patents, so they would not consider this a "market failure".

I don't recall Rand ever speaking about monopoly or cartels. AS does have antitrust laws, including one to prevent "vertical integration" such as the deal Rearden tries to make with his supplier after he's forced to divest that part of his business; but the gist I got from AS is not that such deals are good or bad, but that you can never rely upon your trading partner performing as he should in a deal like that.

The economic term rent-seeking was coined in the '60s, after AS was written, so I don't know of any Objectivist work that refers to it; and I'm not sure it applies here. Friedman wrote a good description of it.

loses a lot of transition info though - eg the animations, paragraph-by-paragraph, audios, videos...

If I had to create a PowerPoint in OpenOffice, I'd save it as a Word .doc, then import that into PP on a school computer. (My college has PCs that students can use for assignments.)

Yep...they created viruses so they could build an anti-virus business, firewalls and cleaners.

I can't believe the crap that ends up on my computer after a day of research. I clean it more than once a day.

Yea...we stopped trusting them a long time ago...

Apple is no better than MS when it comes to making good decisions about their OS. Even though Apple has UNIX underpinnings, they have been on the path of closing down access to it's OS to the point that is is getting difficult to use the systems as one might want to. The trend is moving toward smaller devices, less compute power and more cloud based applications. The personal computer as we know it today is going to be a thing of the past in a few years. Only developers and service providers will need the "Big Iron" to do all the back end processing. Care to guess where that will take us?

Most embedded systems today are already some form of Unix/Linux. This may be the best reason to dump MS and Apple and get on with Linux if you expect to have any control over your anonymity in the near future.

Even though both MS and Apple have $$$'s both are headed to the cloud and looking to be in control of the data. Apple is already basically gotten out of the PC market and is going after the cell and tablet crowd. MS is just now catching up to Apples level of User Interface but they are still stumbling around in the PC/Server world. Google and Oracle are the big players in the Cloud data space. Do you think Apple and MS can crowd them out of that space? My best guess is that Android and IOS are going to be the User Interface to the cloud and the cloud will be driven by Unix/Linux/Solaris. OS X and Windoze just won't cut it in the world of big data and Cloud Apps.

I dumped Windoze over 5 years ago for Linux and haven't looked back. I find the Linux crowd to be open and willing to get it right. Keeping an eye on the back doors and malicious hackers is all out in the open. With the code being available to anyone wanting to know what is happening in the system we have a built in alert system for when things go awry. So if you believe Open Source is a form of socialism think twice. It is the highest form of freedom because it is something we all have to protect in order to preserve our own freedom.

they impede company formation except for favoritism
like Solyndra and so forth. . there, they facilitate! -- j
.

Micro$oft has objected strenuously to open source in past years, to the point of calling it a 'cancer' which will 'infect' everyone's intellectual property and destroy their ownership.

Personally, I love open source since it reduces market friction and helps create a much more efficient economy

Thanks for posting that. I found link problematic, too.

It is. What a lot of people are missing is: how much of this does the government facilitate, directly or indirectly? That is, does the government make it any easier to form a true "company" than it was, in AS, for Midas Mulligan and Hugh Akston to form a "company" to grow tobacco, roll cigarettes, etc.?

Thank You! -- j

and, of course, they ask that I re-boot ...
which takes half an hour (mostly for reassembly
of the workstation which I use). . okay.
.

To get rid of the Win 10 dialogue box, go to updates installed under Control Panel, about June they sent out update KB3035583 - uninstall it. They will continue to try to include it in updates from time to time, but don't allow it. That is where they got access. Before I got rid of it, they tried 37 times to update my Win 7 to 10! Luckily, I do not allow auto install.

It is unfortunate, but you are right. What you say is reality and if reality offends than work to change it. Easier said than done. I have been retired for a while. It occurs to me that I am not aware of the difficulties in getting a start up company going. In 1969 when I started my first business, all I needed was a good location, an occupancy permit and a desire to work my ass off. There was lots of competition, but not the monopolistic kind, even though many tried. Those days are gone and the world of distorted Capitalism, or Crony Capitalism or whatever, is the mixed-up economic reality of today's America.

the monopolistic angle is paris1's concern, and the old
anti-trust or trustbuster stuff from the late 1800s and
early 1900s is the reference, don't you think? -- j
.

It is past time to say no to Microsoft! It is time for their CEO to be canned. This is not free enterprise, this is hostage tacking, and i am sick of it. They are not trading value for value, they are expecting us to update to crap.

on recommendation from my sister's husband who
built both of my twin machines here, I am using bitdefender
and hoping for the best. . it's a cruel digital world! -- j
.

If the developer made it open source, why should anyone object?

Jan

Unless you are using W10 there is no reason to even get that message. Do you really think that the windows updates are required ? They aren't. I never allow windows updates on my computers (except when I was installing windows XP on a new empty machine and I wanted SP3 update.) I have good virus software protection and there is little likelihood that anyone would be interested in attacking my machine in a way that defeats that software. It is possible but not very probable imo. (I do take care on what software I load and what links I click in email and on web sites.) Your situation may be different, of course. If you have a company full of networked machines then the "security" updates may be more valid.

"The more the Empire tightens its grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers."

There used to be a reason not to use Linux, compatibility and ease of use. Compatibility is almost a thing of the past, and so has ease of use.

I use Windows 7 and Macs at home, and Windows 8 at work. Macs work better, but Windows works. Unix was a preeminent invention. Thank you Mssrs Thompson and Ritchie!

Problem is that OpenOffice can't even save a working presentation in .ppt or .pptx which auto-plays audio on each new slide or transition. This was a requirement of my last undergraduate assignment, and it drove me nuts. I had to beg the lecturer to let me submit the presentation as a PDF with accompanying audio files. Definitely did NOT help my final grade. :(

The problem with creating a startup is the rapidly-rising entry barriers. Designing a machine that will perform to today's specs requires access to chips that are heavily patent encumbered, and that are increasingly being controlled by Microsoft.

Sorry if this offends any Austrian School devotees, but to me this is a classic example of market failure - a monopoly gaining such market power that competition is stifled by market friction, resulting in massive economic inefficiencies all round.

we have lifelock ultimate and still, I'm shaking in my
shoes when the w10 dialogue box appears. -- j
.

I am convinced that the danger to your privacy is greater using W10 than it is using unsupported W7.

this is sickening, as I continue to use w7. -- j
.