Great post...

And again, yours sound like an ideological position, rather than a pragmatic approach.

There's nothing sacred in the "free market", a purity that should be protected from any intervention. The free market from the point of view of the general interest that a government is supposed to care about is a tool to provide practical, positive effects. When it doesn't seem to work in that way, it must be kicked into working.

The rest of your post again is about believing. In particular that consumers will always drive the market towards the optimal direction for them. That fails to recognize the reality of things like exploitation of monopolistic positions, the power of marketing, illicit business practices. All of which decouple the quality of an offer the market made to the customer from the chance the customer will accept that offer.

okay, what about iPod and iTunes?

I second. Long live capitalism!

What about it? I'm sorry but I'm ignorant about the state of their interaction and the way they treat DRM.

I tangentially know that most music programs used under Linux - including the one I'm most familiar with - can sync with iPods, and that other pieces of hardware can work with iTunes.

Sorry, and where does the Government come from in the United States? It's a democracy... isn't it?

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The free market is flawed in principle, anyway. The idea of the free market is to try and achieve allocative efficiency of resources through the use of the price mechanism - and the price mechanism is where the free market fails. Price is usually costs to firm + profit, and it settles down at a reasonable level depending on the level of supply and demand of a good, but it doesn't factor in outside costs that the firm doesn't have to pay.

These outside costs are called negative externalities, and these could be, for example, the emission of carbon dioxide from production - firms don't pay for these emissions, and so they aren't factored in the cost of production, and so the good is being sold at a price lower than what it should be - meaning that allocative efficiency hasn't been reached, so the free market fails.

What the free market needs, and is starting to get, is Government intervention - through things like pollution permits and extra taxation, firms are starting to have to pay for these negative externalities, and that is resulting in the markets getting ever closer to allocative efficiency.

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Also, the free market would be much more effective in pre-14th amendment conditions, which granted corporations too much power. Before the 14th Amendment corporations were very limited in what they could do, they couldn't buy out other corporations, they could only do what their charter allowed them to do (say, making baskets), and corporations weren't around indefinitely - they were usually closed after they had served their function (corporation to build a bridge, or something). The 14th amendment, as most should know, was designed to give people (notably black ex-slaves) more rights, ans corporations managed to bring in that they were indeed, legal persons, and as such, they were able to dramatically increase their rights.

So, instead of Windows with built-in IE, will Microsoft sell Windows with built-in IE distributive/downloader? Huge difference, lol :D

I think Microsoft should be able to do anything it wants with its OS.

I'd like to know what every one's last IE use was... Some of your statements show that some of you haven't used IE since 6.1... and someone linking an article from 2004? We have already seen that it is unnecessary to force this issue when someone forces Microsoft back with ingenuity they gain market share without having to rely on government intervention

Were it not for Firefox, I'd be using Internet Explorer.  

It's the only browser with plugins that come close to adequately matching Firefox's No Script/Ad Block capability and it's even better than Firefox in memory handling (particularly with flash elements).  Internet Explorer 6 is junk, but 7 and up are pretty spiffy.