“The European Commission has fined seven international groups of companies a total of EUR 1,470,515,000 for participating in either one or both of two distinct cartels in the sector of cathode ray tubes. For almost ten years, between 1996 and 2006, these companies fixed prices, shared markets, allocated customers between themselves and restricted their output. One cartel concerned colour picture tubes used for televisions and the other one colour display tubes used in computer monitors. The cartels operated worldwide. The infringements found by the Commission therefore cover the entire European Economic Area. Chunghwa, LG Electronics, Philips and Samsung SDI participated in both cartels, while Panasonic, Toshiba, MTPD (currently a Panasonic subsidiary) and Technicolor (formerly Thomson) participated only in the cartel for television tubes.” The EU can do good things.
“The EU can do good things.”
10 years too late. Where’s my rebate?
Just imagine how we’re being ripped off nowadays.
Your rebate? Whenever a company has to pay fines, they usually let their customers (i. e., you and me) pay the bill, and maybe adding them as “tax deductible” in their declaration. All kinds of “extra costs” are handed down through trading chains until they finally reach the consumer who cannot avoid paying them. In the end, some clever manager gets a bonus of “having successfully dealt with it”.
I wonder if it’s even the same people who are fined as those who made the cartel in the first place. Those responsible are probably going free.
1996 was 16 years ago.
Easy money!
Now they need to do something about UEFI!
Like having it renamed to “Microsoft UEFI”?
Can’t you FOSSers just leave the Anti_Microsoft Bigotry behind. Its getting sickening.
I mean really its getting old.
(/mock type=”of some other commentor that usually says this and shall be left un-named”)
You know what’s horrible? For about a minute, I missed the mock tag and considered this to be a serious comment.
Says something about the current state of UEFI discussions on OSAlert, if “discussions” is still the proper term
Edited 2012-12-08 07:16 UTC
Oh hell, I missed it too my first read and voted him down for it. Sarcastic comments are hard to detect when others say the same thing without sarcasm.
Maybe “unnamed” is just taking sarcasm to the literal extreme.
See Sarcastaball: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlv6BrrxD_4