Internet catastrophe theorists are at it again, playing on all our insecurities, whipping up our neuroses.
Take, for example, Creative Commons founder and Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, who is terrifying us with horror stories about the government shutting the Internet down.
Late last month, at Fortune magazine’s illustrious Brainstorm: Tech conference in Silicon Valley, Lessig warned that the U.S. government is getting ready to impose its own Patriot-Act-style clampdown on Internet freedoms.
Sounding as paranoid as one of the adolescent authors of the 9/11 conspiracy movie Loose Change, Lessig contended that the Justice Department had already written up a Patriot Act look-alike for the Internet that would be imposed in the event of a major act of cyber-terrorism.
What is Lessig’s evidence for this crazy claim? Apparently, former federal counter-terrorism tsar Richard Clarke told him about this government plot to shut down the Internet.
Yes, that Richard Clarke -- the guy who has been an increasingly outspoken critic of the Bush administration. The same Richard Clarke who is now writing outlandish geo-political science fiction for a living.
So what’s really going on here? Substitute telephone and cable companies for the government -- and Lessig's real agenda may be the debate about Net neutrality.
This issue, in the way it is presented by Net neutrality advocates like Lessig, is all about keeping the Web safe from any attempt by broadband providers like AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T), Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK), and Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) to create a tiered Internet, which would charge businesses different rates to travel on their networks. "Leave the Internet alone -- it's ours!" is Lessig’s subliminal message. "They are out to get us," he’s whispering into your ear, Richard Clarke-style. "They want to shut down our Internet."
Some will say: By favoring legislation that will make it illegal to discriminate for or against certain kinds of online traffic, isn’t Lessig sticking up for the little guys, ordinary Internet users like you or me?
If that were the case, I would be much more sympathetic to his argument. Unfortunately, the companies that have the most at stake in the Net neutrality brouhaha are Internet leviathans like Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), and Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO). Rather than David versus Goliath, Net neutrality is really a fight among big backbone providers and the giants of Silicon Valley and Redmond over the core principles of the broadband Internet economy.
While it is fashionable to vilify the big broadband providers, I think they have every right to establish varied pricing on their networks. Take Verizon, for example, which has invested $23 billion in wiring America with next-generation fiber optic cable to the home (FTTH).
Why shouldn’t Verizon establish special rates for broadband hogs like YouTube Inc. to distribute their video content? That seems to me to be a basic law of the free market, and if YouTube doesn’t want to pay extra for carriage on Verizon’s high-speed network, then the Google-owned company is free to take its content elsewhere and distribute it on an alternative broadband network (or invest $23 billion in its own FTTH service).
The cold Net neutrality war is about to get very hot. Lessig may be crazy, but he isn’t stupid. He knows that Obama will probably win the election and that a Democratic president and Congress are much more likely to pass Net neutrality legislation.
So expect more stories from Lessig and his pro-Net-neutrality allies about government plots to close down the Internet. These catastrophe theorists want to scare us. They are ratcheting up the paranoia so that we’ll support legislation that will make it illegal for any broadband provider to set tiered pricing over its own network.
Think twice about the Net neutrality debate. The real horror story here could be that Lessig and his pro-Net Neutrality lobby are discouraging investment in broadband infrastructure. And it may be them, rather than the Justice Department or the big telephone or cable companies, who are the real threat to the long-term viability of our Internet.
— Andrew Keen, Silicon Valley author, broadcaster, and entrepreneur
Findings of Fact. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson. Friday, November 5, 1999
[...]
III. MICROSOFT’S POWER IN THE RELEVANT MARKET
33. Microsoft enjoys so
much power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems that
if it wished to exercise this power solely in terms of price, it could
charge a price for Windows substantially above that which could be
charged in a competitive market. Moreover, it could do so for a
significant period of time without losing an unacceptable amount of
business to competitors. In other words, Microsoft enjoys monopoly
power in the relevant market.
34. Viewed together,
three main facts indicate that Microsoft enjoys monopoly power. First,
Microsoft’s share of the market for Intel-compatible PC operating
systems is extremely large and stable. Second, Microsoft’s dominant
market share is protected by a high barrier to entry. Third, and
largely as a result of that barrier, Microsoft’s customers lack a
commercially viable alternative to Windows.
[...]
50. The experience of
the Linux operating system, a version of which runs on Intel-compatible
PCs, similarly fails to refute the existence of an applications barrier
to entry. Linux is an "open source" operating system that was created,
and is continuously updated, by a global network of software developers
who contribute their labor for free. Although Linux has between ten and
fifteen million users, the majority of them use the operating system to
run servers, not PCs. Several ISVs have announced their development of
(or plans to develop) Linux versions of their applications. To date,
though, legions of ISVs have not followed the lead of these first
movers. Similarly, consumers have by and large shown little inclination
to abandon Windows, with its reliable developer support, in favor of an
operating system whose future in the PC realm is unclear. By itself,
Linux’s open-source development model shows no signs of liberating that
operating system from the cycle of consumer preferences and developer
incentives that, when fueled by Windows’ enormous reservoir of
applications, prevents non-Microsoft operating systems from competing.
3. Open-Source Applications Development
51. Since application
developers working under an open-source model are not looking to recoup
their investment and make a profit by selling copies of their finished
products, they are free from the imperative that compels proprietary
developers to concentrate their efforts on Windows. In theory, then,
open-source developers are at least as likely to develop applications
for a non-Microsoft operating system as they are to write
Windows-compatible applications. In fact, they may be disposed
ideologically to focus their efforts on open-source platforms like
Linux. Fortunately for Microsoft, however, there are only so many
developers in the world willing to devote their talents to writing,
testing, and debugging software probonopublico.
A small corps may be willing to concentrate its efforts on popular
applications, such as browsers and office productivity applications,
that are of value to most users. It is unlikely, though, that a
sufficient number of open-source developers will commit to developing
and continually updating the large variety of applications that an
operating system would need to attract in order to present a
significant number of users with a viable alternative to Windows. In
practice, then, the open-source model of applications development may
increase the base of applications that run on non-Microsoft PC
operating systems, but it cannot dissolve the barrier that prevents
such operating systems from challenging Windows.
[...]
H. Microsoft’s Pricing Behavior
62. Microsoft’s actual
pricing behavior is consistent with the proposition that the firm
enjoys monopoly power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating
systems. The company’s decision not to consider the prices of other
vendors’ Intel-compatible PC operating systems when setting the price
of Windows 98, for example, is probative of monopoly power. One would
expect a firm in a competitive market to pay much closer attention to
the prices charged by other firms in the market. Another indication of
monopoly power is the fact that Microsoft raised the price that it
charged OEMs for Windows 95, with trivial exceptions, to the same level
as the price it charged for Windows 98 just prior to releasing the
newer product. In a competitive market, one would expect the price of
an older operating system to stay the same or decrease upon the release
of a newer, more attractive version. Microsoft, however, was only
concerned with inducing OEMs to ship Windows 98 in favor of the older
version. It is unlikely that Microsoft would have imposed this price
increase if it were genuinely concerned that OEMs might shift their
business to another vendor of operating systems or hasten the
development of viable alternatives to Windows.
63. Finally, it is
indicative of monopoly power that Microsoft felt that it had
substantial discretion in setting the price of its Windows 98 upgrade
product (the operating system product it sells to existing users of
Windows 95). A Microsoft study from November 1997 reveals that the
company could have charged $49 for an upgrade to Windows 98 — there is
no reason to believe that the $49 price would have been unprofitable —
but the study identifies $89 as the revenue-maximizing price. Microsoft
thus opted for the higher price.
64. An aspect of
Microsoft’s pricing behavior that, while not tending to prove monopoly
power, is consistent with it is the fact that the firm charges
different OEMs different prices for Windows, depending on the degree to
which the individual OEMs comply with Microsoft’s wishes. Among the
five largest OEMs, Gateway and IBM, which in various ways have resisted
Microsoft’s efforts to enlist them in its efforts to preserve the
applications barrier to entry, pay higher prices than Compaq, Dell, and
Hewlett-Packard, which have pursued less contentious relationships with
Microsoft.
Note that the Judge had it right in terms of what Open Source people would or could do for free. The Open Source community has not tried to write non-Windows versions of all the many applications on the market, just the most important ones. The landscape has changed since 1999, though. Writing software for Linux/Unix is just much easier than writing it for Windows, starting with that the APIs are all well-documented and nobody tries to "hide the better calls for money." I would also say that Ubuntu Linux is an example of a pretty-much-ready-for-primetime OS competitive with Windows. All we have to do is tell the third-party software vendors that we'll ONLY buy the Linux version (why run a good app on a garbage platform?) and those vendors will heed. Windows has no future (read: Museum piece) if Ubuntu takes hold. Yo: Ubuntu is FREE and all the software you had to buy for Windows to do common work is FREE and your machine will never be part of Bill's Bot-Net crowd despite your not having to pay McAfee or Symantec a dime. What are you waiting for?
If Bill had had to pay for the damages his crappy software causes, he could never have gotten rich. Remember the little "EULA" clause that says (a) we don't warrant that this crap even works and (b) we're not responsible one whit for the damage you encounter from using our software? So some 24-year-old in the Philippines becomes a national hero for writing the ILOVEYOU virus costing $11 BILLION in damages and Microsoft walks away from it unscathed, even though the damage was caused by an erroneous choice of default setting for one stupid variable somewhere - I remember, first Microsoft came out and said it would take months to fix, and then Microsoft (in three more days) produced the fix. What was the fix? To CHANGE THAT DEFAULT SETTING. Talk about negligence: MS uses its clients for QA (Quality Assurance = testing the crap before you let people suffer its use.) I don't think they know what it is otherwise.
The entire point of the antitrust suit was to show what illegal things Bill did to get rich in the first place. I am not impressed with his trying to salvage his reputation using money he stole from other people, besides which I'll bet cash that the one person responsible for his "philanthropy" is Belinda Gates - it is certainly not in Bill's genes. I think he finally realized that he would not be able to take over the computing world and decided to quit trying - good for us.
Your wonderful logic again: people are making money supporting Open Source products. The cute thing is that it needs far less support because it JUST WORKS, and without a 700-page book filled with screenshots showing what checkbox to click on - Microsoft has adopted IBM's "bloat" syndrome, where they just can't write a simple thing but instead have to write a 400-blade Swiss Army knife with an 800-page manual, with 750 pages devoted to "Microsoft extensions" that violate International Standards. Bill spends $millions trying to convince people to STAY AWAY from open source and no doubt threatens any business partner that thinks it'll stick its fingers into Linux with the loss of "access" to be able to write programs that will actually WORK on Windows.
What do you want to do? Run an email server that can support THOUSANDS of users? Run databases that can serve GIGABYTES of data? Run Java Server Pages for your website? Run a website? So far all those things can be done for FREE, whereas MS SQL costs THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS and is harder to maintain or use than MySQL or PostgreSQL, Exchange server the same and so forth. Open Source is based on WORLDWIDE STANDARDS. Microsoft HATES OPEN STANDARDS and does what it can to subvert them.
Microsoft, like any "good" capitalist, tries to separate you from something you can trivially do for nearly no cost, and resell it BACK to you with HUGE MARKUPS for a job only half-done and that poorly. Microsoft relies on people not wanting to have to learn anything new - even when you can show that working through one more abbreviated learning curve will save endless time, money and aggravation. Open Office is entirely interoperable with the MS Office suite and it's free. If you need to pay someone for help, you can get it easily, or you can find any number of How-To and Guts-Of books about any open-source thing you want to use. I haven't bought a piece of MS software since 1998 and I don't miss it. I have no intention of embarrassing Microsoft yet again by hobbling my 3.4GHz hyperthreading Xeon CPU with Vista; MS clearly has Peter-Principled itself into oblivion, it's just sad that it will take more years for people to realize that Microsoft's days are behind it a long time ago. I boycott MS to every possible extent and miss none of their software whatsoever. I am glad to not have to interact with their wretched garageware or to support it in any way. Let Bill answer the support calls - not me.
It doesn't bother me that Open Source emerged partially as a response to Darth Vader. Mozilla is an open-source project to "get back" at Microsoft for its murder of Netscape, and it's a wonderful standards-compliant browser - that Microsoft undertook to sabotage to the extent they could do so unobserved - but they have been observed. :)
We (the whole collection of computer users) will "mature" by discarding the MS-phase for the Open Source world. If Open-Source shrinks opportunities to extract excessive profits from unsuspecting users, so be it. Bill Gates is a has-been who thought he would extort every user of every PC to have to pay him royalties just for using their OWN computer, and we have, I do believe, seen the death of that instinct now. At least in Bill Gates. Since Steve Ballmer is just as much an idiot, I'm secure that Microsoft will ultimately die, and in not all that long from now.
I do not and will not use any Microsoft methodology. They are pathetic thieves, aren't they? Everything they rip off they make worse. "C#" is nothing more than "Java--", right? Why not use the REAL LANGUAGE they couldn't figure how to stop someone else from profiting from? Oh right - it's ALL they will LET you use, I forgot.
How many schools can we build if we quit using MSware? Berkeley spent $340000 on an EMAIL SYSTEM based on Exchange. I warned them they WOULD LOSE EMAIL and they sure have as time has passed. I told them they could have saved AT LEAST $290000 on that installation if they used Open Source software, and when I confronted the City IT Manager with the fact, he said "what's Open Source?" - that's the world Microsoft likes, with everyone ignorant of the (superior, vastly cheaper) alternatives.
Imagine never having to pay for OS or common application software ever again. How many schools could a community build with the money saved? And no need to grovel at the feet of a so-called "philanthropist", the same one who stole your money to begin with.
Try "The Microsoft File" by Wendy Rohm. I haven't read it, but its subtitle (The secret case against Bill Gates) suggests it rakes some muck on him.
Economy, foo. The people who tell us how things ought to work believe in their own fairy tales. Intelligent people can rework the rules of the economy to suit human needs. The purpose of life is not to "generate wealth", but to live a full and productive life - where we (humans) get to decide what is "productive", not the moneygrubbers who try to define our reality for us. Caring for a child is "productive" but not remunerated. Why? Because Capitalism is predicated upon the existence and validity of Slavery, whether its proponents admit that or not. If you can't get rich trying to control all PCs in the world, then I guess you'll have to find SOME OTHER JOB. Just like you would in any other case.
Making people use shit software that lets you be SPAMMED minute after minute is not a PRODUCTIVE or EFFECTIVE thing to do - it just makes Bill Gates Rich, and that is ALL he cares about. Not us. Not his users.
Yes, Ubuntu is available for 64-bit. I use CHEAPBYTES.COM. Get a CD or DVD for $4 to $14 or download the ISO for free.
Yes, Bill did have his day - and like most despots before him, he became what he had overthrown (IBM with totalitarian ambitions.) He long overstayed his usefulness. By the time he couldn't stop teenaged hackers messing with his stuff after several iterations, he should have acknowledged his incompetence and left the field, but we seem to think human nature doesn't permit people to follow a social conscience and that they must always follow any triumph with becoming yet another thing to have to get RID of. Mao did that: a hero for liberating and unifying China. And then he overstayed his usefulness and China suffered the Cultural Revolution. Why won't they ever learn? Do your great thing and then LEAVE.
So Bill Gates is indeed human, huh? And operating systems were put together by people and not an alien intervention? I look at the BIGGER PICTURE versus zero in on baby steps to fault.
QUICK NOTE:
The chipmaker/pc mfrs/OS providers may all have had a role in the lifecyle of pc in homes..I could delve that into a 'conspiracy' but the same approach can be taken to economic cycles, governements globalization etc.
So if one perspective is all evil, there is still some good in evil (as stated by Randy Pausch in the closing of his last lecture ) as well as a brighter perspective of accepting and trusting some things have to be a certain way for the greater good.
Open Source being free? Really. So every single application that is built under the open source ecosystem is Free? I just figured for some reason that the source code was free to build upon and improve..not that it would necessarily become a part of the core product..or that modified versions would be distributed at no cost..like at commodore 64 swap meets back in the mid 80's.
How cheap is open source support? We shall see how great linux os is for the consumer when I buy my lenovo (not taking anything away from Linxus). Open office is cool -
Open source is only as good as the development community in my opinion...I'll give open source props when it has enabled as much jobs as the proprietary Microsoft Windows.
I don't think open source Linux would be what it is today if Windows wasn't around. Linux still needed the bread and butter of boxes in homes.
How many highschools did Linux build..some costing $45 million..
I had some friends that were Cobol programmers for 20 years at CSC that had trouble grasping Java and OOP. What bad stuff do you have to say about vb.net, c# and the .net framework?
My only issue with many legacy/lineage - programmers with HISTORY is that often they were too egotistical to NOT reinvent the wheel.
I read one book relevant to Microsoft and its haters - "Fire in the Valley, making of the personal computer". and love "Business @ the Speed of Thought". I BLOGGED about Speed of Thought in 1993.
So Ubuntu is currently 64-bit? (I could have easily found out).
"You "don't care" about the verdict? When does a fact on the ground
become worth caring about to you? When you agree with it? Have you READ
THE JUDGEMENT? Thanks for having an opinion about the worthlessness of
something you have never ever seen.
Forgive me if I no longer take your positions seriously - they seem to
be informed by the seat of your pants and not much else."
As I mentioned, I look at the bigger picture. Action/reaction/probability.. for short-long and long run. Immediate results (what it seems) are often not what it is in the long run(what it is). Nope I didn't bother to read the case..I can tell you that I personally met the attorney/partner that was heavily involved with the Microsoft Anti-trust case. I didn't read into SCO's suit(hehe) against linux either.
I don't think Linux would have done nearly what Microsoft has done for the US Economy. And many linux folks should THANK Microsoft for ripening the market for penetration - on a consumer level.
What does the ability to make lots of money have to do with the ability to write good software? Nothing, and sorry you don't see that.
If Microsoft is "as good as it gets", we're obviously not yet a civilized, thinking society, but then you knew that. It's not anything near "as good as it gets", though: Unix is.
The "next big thing" emerged in 1993/4 with Linus Torvalds and the release of 4.4BSD into the public domain. Microsoft has been trying to kill "the next big thing" mercilessly, to the point of Bill Gates calling the Open Source people Communists, as I heard the story. The "next big thing" in computing is the Open Source revolution - providing excellent software to be used for FREE. Of course Gates hates it - they've already proven Gates is a dunce. Linus is the boy who said the Emperor has no clothes on - he did that by singlehandedly writing an operating system 1000 times more secure than Windows, basically as a toy for his own use that others asked him to release. Open Source works better than MSware in every sphere of application where there are products to compare, with few if any exceptions - and it's FREE. Gates is a sore loser and we should be glad to be rid of him at Microsoft.
Gates/MS delayed the advent of 32-bit computing on the desktop for years because they refused to license tools from Intel and didn't understand "protected mode" introduced with the 80286 chip. Their insistence on always looking BACKWARD doomed their software to pedestrianism. 99.999% of people familiar with the 80286/80386 chips had more imagination and insight than Bill Gates, apparently.
How many millions of dollars has MS put into basic security and why hasn't it made ANY difference? This is a company that STIFLES innovation, and BOOKS have been written about it that you can read. I say again: if you Have Not Used other software, then you are not in a position to defend MS against the other software - so stop defending MS until you've seen what you can get for FREE and what you can DO with what you can get for free. We run our ISP entirely with Open Source software - did not ever have to pay so much as ONE DIME for it, since we began in 1996. And I would REFUSE to systems-administer even just ONE windows machine because I do not want to have to sleep next to it waiting for it to crash.
We use FreeBSD for the Business and I am using both a FreeBSD and a Ubuntu Linux box at home for workstations.
There are very few alerts about Solaris or FreeBSD compared to Windows. In the FreeBSD base system I had to patch ONE component (the telnet server) in eight years. For Windows, you have to patch the sucker practically day after day. How useless.
So when the Internet bandits probe and poke our Unix servers, I don't care: I know they won't get in.
You "don't care" about the verdict? When does a fact on the ground become worth caring about to you? When you agree with it? Have you READ THE JUDGEMENT? Thanks for having an opinion about the worthlessness of something you have never even seen. Forgive me if I no longer take your positions seriously - they seem to be informed by the seat of your pants and not much else.
Programming language of choice. Hmm, probably C; I haven't lawyered up enough to remember what virtual friend can access what private object in C++, and Java reminds me of COBOL and was never interesting on the server side, which is where they mostly use it. You can thank MS for stopping Java Applets from being common and useful, too. Perl is neat for how much you can do with how little code, but its syntax irritates me for some odd reason and it's too easy to write code that takes many many minutes to comprehend. I love working with PHP because it is so clean and easy to use. Almost nobody uses Lisp or remembers what APL or SNOBOL are. I hated ALGOL and Pascal and PL/I. I also like assembler language, and therefore FORTRAN before C became commonplace. I would have rated myself in the top-ten of IBM 360/370 assembler language programmers in the world circa 1983-1985. The Intel x86 instruction set absolutely sucks compared to the IBM (mainframe), so the "thrill" of assembler is not there for Intel because it's so horrid and clumsy.
If you begin to realize that almost everything you hear in the "news" is propaganda, then it's easy to "read between the lines". it is a favorite tactic of the right to use a "cherished liberal tenet" to justify destroying the very thing being discussed, and so it is with the notion of "Fairness". Notice how the "fairness doctrine" was GUTTED BY REAGAN appointee Mark Fowler and how this shill McDowell is NOT SUGGESTING BRINGING THATBACK but is USING the concept to JUSTIFY doing even MORE damage to Democracy.
Yes, he EXACTLY knows what he's doing and who his masters are. I'm also sure he's looking at a cushy retirement after having done Master's bidding.
you said "I wrote better software while I was STILL AT SCHOOL - which Bill Gates never finished, by the way."
hehe, and what did not finishing at Harvard have to do with the Forbes 400? Or Steve Jobs not finishing intially at Reid College (and where is the ubiquity of your software...[probing question] )
Harvard is GREAT yes, however Mr. Gates worth at one point was about 5 times Harvard's endowment. I don't necessarily link academic achievements with aptitude..I ran into many Intelligent and wise folks on the street(near homeless), and conversed closely with senior execs that hold MBA's and Ph.Ds together that have idiot tendencies. What about Jim Clark?
about Galileo..we share a birthday..I agree with you on that one - I said something similar about 6 years ago...
Microsoft did provide numerous jobs..careers etc. HOWEVER. so they are not perfect..I say it's as good as it gets. If Beos and others were so good, then why aren't they ubiquitous?
INNOVATION COUPLED WITH ECONOMICS GOVERNS THE BARRIERS OF ENTRY FOR THE NEXT BIG THING!!
I'm not saying Microsoft is great just because I use it..I look at it from a 'half-full' perspective and will say all day how great of solutions are provided by Microsoft..turning business ideas into reality!! $5 billion a year in R&D SHOULD NOT BE OVERLOOKED - finding time travel might already have happened ;-)
ECSD, I assume regardless of how I tweak my machines with commercial protection software (which itself is buggy often..as you mentioned)..that my machines are 'open'. Regardless of what OS I'm using..I generally assume my data isn't secure..and that someone, somewhere has access to my digital travels/activities.
I don't care about the verdict on the anti-trust case. It's all hogwash to me. There will be 'haters' and also advocates. Most haters hate just because that's their nature. Jealousy, envy, greed, Ego...great ingredients for Man's downfall.
So what's your OS of choice? What's your 'programming' language of choice? <-- I'm really curious, as I'm trying to second guess who's behind the veil, with much respect.
"Is it me or does net neutrality negate telecom deregulation?
I think it's funny how the right wing pushes the concept of smaller governenment and then comes up with schemes like this."
Telecom "deregulation" negates Democracy. "Net Neutrality" tries to preserve Democracy. It's that simple.
You never need to take anything the "right wing" says at face value. They will never tell the truth about what motivates their positions: read "The Republican Noise Machine" by David Brock. If they were to admit their position it would read
(1) We will DO and SAY anything we need to do and say in order to get total, unaccountable power in this country. If the Geneva Conventions (1948) are 'quaint', imagine how we view the Constitution (1789.)
(2) We will have endless global wars for world domination and YOU get to foot the bill and pony up bodies for us to grind to hamburger with the "thanks of a Grateful Nation" quaking in its boots with each next PHONY THREAT we put in the news. For example, we have ZERO to be concerned with Iran for - in fact - but all you hear is how they'll be the next evil empire. You ALREADY LIVE IN A PROPAGANDA STATE. Not even Bill Moyers dares to use the word "FASCISM" to describe what the Bush people have been doing for eight years.
(3) In order to serve us properly, Believe what we Say but do not Watch what we Do.
(4) If you Watch what we Do and do not believe what we say, and especially if you try to communicate your concerns to your fellow citizens, you are a "liberal traitor to the State" and should "watch what you say." And we don't mind beating your head in at peace rallies and framing you if you try to video-capture officers beating people for nothing.
If you remember COINTELPRO, understand that (a) that has NEVER STOPPED and (b) the Bush administration has tried to LEGALIZE the crimes committed by the FBI at the time.
FIVE IMPEACHABLE OFFENSES - at least one or two rising to the level of TREASON, but NO attempt to hold Bush accountable. 50% of people in a poll wanted to see BUSH IMPEACHED but the corporate-controlled media has never let that 50% realize how large a bloc they are. Namely, the media pretends that Bush is a Good Man and will not allow people to discuss the alternate point of view - not once ever. So much for the People being Informed.
That's the landscape they want: you will listen to the leader and agree with him.
You will go to war for him for his reasons.
You have no right to challenge any part of this.
His "crimes" are not crimes.
Welcome to your new Democracy 2.0, complete with toxic paint and parts to choke on, available at Wal*Mart for $1.99 and worth every cent of that.
You are ALREADY BEING ILLEGALLY WIRETAPPED with no apologies from McCain (like he'd care) but no apologies from Obama Either - see how that works: Two choices for No Change in Policy Whatever. Choose A or B and still be illegally wiretapped - except, oh right, they'll make it legal to violate your privacy and retroactively too, to excuse all the "german lieutenants" who caved in to illegal wiretap orders. No defense of Democracy is worth losing one's job or blowing a whistle, it seems.
I think we watch reruns of WW-II movies to remember that America was (past-tense) a great nation and to try to remember - vaguely - what it meant "back then" to be a patriot. The few real leaders we have left, we do not recognize as such and rarely hear from.
So now we have FCC Commish Robert McDowell stirring up the talk-radio folks at the Heritage Foundation by linking the Network Neutrality debate to the old "Fairness Doctrine" of equal time on TV and Radio.
McDowell's comparison of Network Neutrality is the dumbest thing I've heard all week.
The Fairness Doctrine, if applied on the Internet, would violate Network
Neutrality principles! The network has never cared about the political
positions of the senders of packets before deciding how to foward them, and if it were even possible, it would violate the neutral
behavior of the network if it had to start caring.
Today's free
marketplace provided by the Internet ensures that no voices get blocked
and that access to all voices are ensured to anyone who wants to
listen. The fairness doctrine provided for "equal time" on a radio
station, regardless if anyone was listening to it.
That's not a free
market, and McDowell definitely knows the difference.
I said "most" municipal water is better - not all. Sorry you have to boil Your water.
If I didn't make it clear in what I wrote here, Microsoft can't write software worth a damn. If you believe they are "best" at anything, I would say they are the best at forcing people to pay good money for crap software and with no accountability for their part in the worldwide SPAM and bot-net/DDOS/network-attack problems. I "hate" people and institutions that deserve to be hated. Every time you see Bill Gates' smiling face, remember that he specifically can have the worldwide SPAM problem (93% of all email traffic is SPAM) pegged on HIS LAPEL. You might even call him the "author of Bot-Nets" since it is his inferior system that bot-nets are made from. Since he calls himself the "master architect" as if he knows the first thing about Operating System Design, then he gladly accepts responsibility for never having made his engineers fix what makes Windows so WORTHLESS once connected to the Internet. Linux/Unix suffer the same problems at a rate of THREE TO FIVE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE LESS OFTEN.
Confusing "market share" for "worth" is exactly where they want you. By the same logic, all we have to do is "vote" that Galileo was wrong since 98% of people were "using" the geocentric system - therefore it must be good, right?
Before you're so sure how great Microsoft "must be", try reading the verdict in their antitrust case - see what the Judge had to say about "Microsoft the Great". The Judge said that MS is ripping people off blind - among another 150 complaints. So even you have been ripped off by Microsoft.
If you have not used an alternative to MS software, you have little room to speak authoritatively about a COMPARISON between MS and non-MS software.
You're sitting back 'complaining' about a complaint - which you seem not to have investigated. I'm sorry you're willing to defend Microsoft just because you use it. Too bad you haven't used anything better to understand the complaints.
Try posting your publicly accessible IP address and running your machine without an add-on program from McAfee or Symantec. Your PC will be invaded probably within 24 hours to start doing work for CRIMINALS. And your PC will be invaded ANYWAY, somewhere down the line, as the antivirus people always play catch-up with the virus authors. Another CERT alert was released just Yesterday - and every quarter, MS software is tagged similarly:
Technical Cyber Security Alert TA08-225A
Microsoft Updates for Multiple Vulnerabilities
Original release date: August 12, 2008
Systems Affected
* Microsoft Windows
* Microsoft Internet Explorer
* Microsoft Office including Access, Excel, and Word
Overview
[...]
I. Description
[...]The most severe vulnerabilities could allow a remote, unauthenticated
attacker to execute arbitrary code.
Read the last sentence: it means HACKER OWNS YOUR BOX.
These ALERTS are posted EVERY SINGLE QUARTER WITHOUT LETUP.
MICROSOFT SOFTWARE WILL NEVER BE SECURE.
===
Great, my eye. I wrote better software while I was STILL AT SCHOOL - which Bill Gates never finished, by the way.
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