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I don't think Bill Gates is really responsible for the problems with Windows. In fact, I think it's probably one reason why he left when he did. The company just got too big for him to manage day-to-day - he wasn't the one making relatively minor decisions like where Windows Movie Maker sits on the Microsoft web site or how to install it, somebody else was making those decisions. And little decisions like that, all added up together, are 95% of what makes Windows as maddening to use as it is. And he was as annoyed by that stuff as everybody else.

Don't we wish. The fact about Windows is that MS OS' have always been bad. And it's not because knows no better - he's used Unix and other 'real' OS' plenty in his life. No, I'll leave you with a choice between "doesn't care because he's puts lots of successful effort into not having to" and "likes it that way." Clearly Ballmer DOOES like it that, because his watch shows aBD-style security system.

Life even as an Evil Imperial CEO does get old. You have all the power, which is great stuff, especially if you're like Gates, but it's also tons of work and especially stress. The stress gets too much for everybody, in fact, especially if you're in the same CEO slot long.

So, if you want to effectively vandalize somebody, file a lawsuit. It'll likely cost them more than just bashing up their car or shorting out their wiring, and it's legal. Sure, it's an abuse of the legal system, but that doesn't seem to matter all that much. As a wise person once said on Slashdot (ignoring the oxymoron potential in the first phrase), I can't just require you to write or commission a device driver for me, and take your house if I find a significant bug.

All so true - the court REGULARLY requires you to spend money on your lawyer doing device-driver-like long, technical labor, and for you or companies to be enslaved answering questions and helping that lawyer, whether you like it or can afford it or not.

And, as I explain at length in the article, with examples including the SCO case and Berkeley's Professor Ousterhout, IMHO that that's come to be as corrupt as the original slavery.

If discovery or deposition is required for a case you're in, be sure to ask for the cost recovery request that somehow few lawyers remember to tell you

There's an often-missed angle on public transit: total transit time. has to go up with public transit, including trains, That means you're asking everybody taking them to spend possibly alot more time to go anywhere

Absolutely not true. Yes the minimum total transit time is higher for public transport (rail/bus/etc) compared to private transport (car/truck/etc), but the average and more importantly the peak transit times are much lower with public transport.

When the roads are at >80% capacity you will spend a considerable amount of time stationary or traveling at single digit speeds. When public transport is at >80% capacity you get people standing and the total transit time rises by the extra time to get people on and off, which will be a small or zero increase compared to the total transit time (zero increase when keeping to the timetable requires waiting to leave the stopping point).

There's an often-missed angle on public transit: total transit time. has to go up with public transit, including trains, That means you're asking everybody taking them to spend possibly alot more time to go anywhere. My wife doesn't mind, but I do.

Money quote: "In NYC, it seems to take roughly 50 minutes to get anywhere by public transit, more like an hour by car, and the car costs more. Thus, in NYC, it makes sense to take transit. In the medium-size city where I live, it takes 20-30 minutes to drive places. Even if we had NYC-level transit, it'd take a lot longer to go that way."

I'm all in favor of public transit - I figured this stuff out by, well, taking alot of every kind of public transit, and it served me well within its limits. I just want to get one of those limits out in public a bit.

Like Paladin, that's made me also feel like transit rail has some realistic low-end density requirements to be of much help.

While I'm at it, notice that having 15-minute busses is alot cheaper than rail, because you already have lanes in place. And it'd prolly be easier to adapt Detroit to changing to. But you still need reasonable density or you just get lots of empty busses.

lawyers don't sue people, people sue people.

Yeah, but it looks to me like most of the money goes to corruption in the civil trials where patent trials are tried. Most money goes to discovery and deposition.

Litigants are usually required by to court must spend large amounts of produce large amounts of evidence in response to discovery and deposition orders. At no time is any evidence of malfeasance required for these orders to be issued, and these phases are allowed to last years and years.

Isn't it slavery to require unpaid labor from litigants who haven't been found guilty? Almost as bad, because there's no time limit, civil trials often last well until after products are obolete (e.g., the Microsoft case). There is no constraint to keep big companies from milking cases to drive small, innovative companies out of business. In short, it's as corrupt as the original slavery.

I've read a defense that deposition and discovery can bring out facts of bad behavior we otherwise wouldn't see. But I'm at a loss to see how that's good when the trial ends a decade later. None of this helped Netscape. And it certainly does bring slavery and corruption.

Why do judges and lawyers let this happen? This would seem to be major moral failing of theirs. Certainly, they do make vastly more money.

Maybe what you're trying to do is to set up a centrist blog.

There is no such thing as nonpartisan polical discussion, but there are a surprising number of centrist blogs, running normal blog software, that succeed in perpetuating a culture of thoughtful comments, rather than paranoia or personal attack.

Spam's more of a real problem than trolls.

It was started by a couple of people of centrist inclination getting together and recruiting a initial core. That's since changed drastically, but it's still going strong.

I post at one called Centerfield. It also includes a blogroll of other centrist blogs.

It's just a few monopoly carriers trying to blow smoke to cover their attempted change of the ruleset that has allowed the Internet to grow, not a wide set of ISPs saying this.

I wrote a long post that explains network neutrality issues in detail. The truth is that ISPs are already charging for and being paid for the network they're providing. If they need to raise fees on broadband users to support higher bandwidth consumption, they can and do.

It's important, though, that they not be allowed to change the rules to try and also collect from content providers. These monopolies are being foolish, of course, because if the rules changed, there'd almost certainly be less of an Internet economy to collect bandwidth fees from.

More at http://www.centristcoalition.com/blog/archives/003 270.html

Looks like deliberate strategery to me. Be warned, Schwarts: heavy-handed FUD has a way of backfiring.

ObOldMovieRef: The Schwartz is NOT with you.

This is happening because of panic. Pretty much anything can happen when policians panic. And it's not something the GOP did, either. We Democrats did it to ourselves and the nation as a whole.

Democratic politicians and media were paniced after the 2000 election, and were looking for somebody to blame. They chose the election machines. Do you remember all the news articles and politicians opining that everything would be better when upgraded to digital?

Do you remember any computer scientists being asked about it? No, of course not. Since it was about panic, nobody wanted to learn the facts.

Although, "we" computer scientists do bear partial guilt. An early feasibility study was run, and they botched it. They did mention problems and risks, but not in the summary or first paragraph.

I've written a blog posting on how current evote reform efforts aren't going far enough.

You know, that article doesn't go nearly far enough ... they don't mention that by the end of this election season, somebody has quite possibly been elected by a bug.