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Story: Pricing scuppers Media Player-free XP

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Chris Rankin :" suppose the EU's legal requirement that MS provide a version of XP without Windows Media Player means that MS is blocked from welding Media Player into the OS. That might be considered a Good Thing in the long run, even if no-one buys XP-N. (And let's face it, who would?) "

# 1, this ruling applies only in the EU countries.
America does not and WILL NOT recognize this stupid ruling.
Neither does Japan, the second largest economy on the planet, nor China and India, the 2 biggest countries by population by far, nor does Australia or any other country outside the EU.
The EU make up less than 10% of the world'population.
Exactly how effective does that make the ruling?

# 2, Microsoft has already signed all kinds of agreements with Time Warner,Disney, Fox etc etc to distribute their movies and DVD's in the Microsoft Windows Media Player format.
Since practically all the most popular films are American, plus practically all major web news sites and portals like Yahoo, Msnbc, Fox news et al are using WMP exlusively, how exactly does the EU propose to stop WMP from dominating?

# 3, Even within the EU itself,very few consumers are going to go for this inferior version of Windows anyway.

The beauty of this is, it took the EU over one solid year of hard core negotiations, with the EU rejecting to the tune of TEN suggested names from Microsoft, before Microsoft finally threw up their hands in disgust and told the EU : Here, you come up with a name".

Question I gotta ask is, is this an futile, brain dead action by a governmental agency I have seen for a long time or what? Oh yeah.

You guys outta find some real work for the bureaucrats in Brussels to do.
They must be REALLY bored out there to be coming up with such nonsense.!!!

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