Warp wrote:

Oh, by "boycott" I thought you meant "stop selling", not "apply automatic 
updates that break it."  (I think "boycott" has a pretty specific meaning in 
English, just so ya know. I never heard it used in any way other than 
consumers avoiding a particular company because they don't like that 
company's behavior (rather than just disliking the products).)

>   However, there's probably no precedent for this, so I don't know if it
> would cause any consequences to MS.

Well, you know, I think if you argued MS isn't allowed to make XP perform 
more poorly with an automatic update, you'd be stepping on the toes of a lot 
of DRM stuff too. If a DRM scheme is cracked and MS sends out an update to 
fix that crack, one could argue MS just made your computer intentionally 
perform worse. It would definitely be an interesting court case.

And yes, almost all monopoly court cases are very vague and open to 
argument, especially in the USA.  There really aren't too many fixed rules 
that would let you avoid most of the big cases you read about in the news. 
I'm sure there's regularly cases of price fixing and stuff like that, but 
most what you hear about is loud because there *isn't* a clear rule about it.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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