Slashdot Mirror

>> Well, you sure are pleasant.

Aren't you just so cute and clever? People must swoon at your wit and charisma. Jackass.

No one ever said the truth was pleasant. On the contrary, in a nation populated by 300 million raving psychotics, the one sure way to offend everyone is to tell the truth to everyone you meet. You most likely would not like to hear that you are obviously the scum of the earth, a bat shit, seriously sick psychotic who has absolutely no clue what is going on in the world, but that doesn't make it any less true. You also would most likely not like to hear that all of the evil in the world is brought about by cock-sucking cowards like yourself, but there it is.

>> I was referring to the exact same thing as you. While I don't support raids without warrants, I also don't support blocking of roads to make a deranged point.

Who is talking about roads? Who decides what is deranged? What is the point of contention here? I think that you have yet to realize that the very concept of 'public property' is indicative of mental illness (e.g. schizophrenia). Public property is an oxymoron. The State owns the roads. They stole them fair and square.

>> You think I've been brainwashed by the statist media, and I think you've been brainwashed by crazy people on the internet.

Not really sure how you could come to that conclusion since everything I said was completely factual, obvious (to anyone who is sane), and documented. Besides, I've never been to the web sites of either the Democratic or the Republican parties, cnn.com, whitehouse.gov, or any other fascist organization, so it seems difficult to believe that THEY (the internet crazies @ barackobama.com) could brainwash me over the web.

More government agents operating in Denver:

http://www.infowars.com/?p=4306

But I am sure you will believe whatever you want, rant and spout some asinine opinion in direct contradiction to the facts. After all, that's what makes you an American: complete and total incoherent psychosis.

Of course, the obvious goal is to label all dissent as terrorism and lock people away for decades even though they haven't committed a single crime:

http://www.infowars.com/?p=4344
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/09/rnc-protesters.html

But why should that concern anyone on slashdot? Only decent human beings have a reason to be afraid of the government. You and all the other delusional douche bags here will obviously be just fine. May you get exactly what you deserve.

Top speed on AMTRAK's rails is 180 KM/hr and only on some routes.

Not that it matters. Top speed when you run out of gas is zero anyway.

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-protest28-2008aug28,0,2351344.story Sorry, no FUD here.

You claim that wrongful convictions are "extreme exceptions". Do you have evidence for this? Data on wrongful convictions is difficult to obtain for obvious reasons.

I did manage to find this article which indicates that the wrongful conviction rate is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1-5%, depending on what data you listen to. That strikes me as enormously high, particularly given the huge US prison population.

Your chances of being paroled if you are a "to life" convicted murderer in California are extremely low. Reiser will probably stay in prison for the rest of his life.

From a story in the LA Times:

"The parole board grants release dates to a relative few. Schwarzenegger vetoes most releases approved by the parole board, as did his predecessor, Gov. Gray Davis. Since taking office, Schwarzenegger has allowed 191 lifers to leave prison -- about 1% of more than 16,000 who had parole hearings."

Not all of us live in a state that has sales/use taxes.

My state gets a healthy chunk of business by allowing out of state residents to come here, set up a shell corporation, and buy RVs under that corporation. It saves most people $15k-$30k in taxes and fees on their new motor home. California hates us for it :)

http://articles.latimes.com/2006/sep/25/local/me-taxdodge25

Good idea in theory, but apparently kids don't play outside anymore...

Here we see Hollywood studios regularly rob, cheat and steal from the people that work for them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2001/aug/31/artsfeatures

Here companies like News Limited trick the public into surrendering their copyright, giving them massive royalty-free photo libraries, all for the "chance of winning an iPod".
http://blogs.smh.com.au/photographers/archives/2008/07/read_the_fine_print.html

Orson Scott Card wrote this good piece on the hipocracy of the RIAA:
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2003-09-07-1.html
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2003-09-14-1.html

And for years, we the public have had our rights progressively eroded. Well-monied rights holders throw money at congress who turn around and keep extending their copyright. This reached an artform in the "Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act", otherwise known as the "Mickey Mouse Copyright Act". Yet Disney has quite happily argued against this when it suits them.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,17327,00.html

Well, eat this Disney: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-mickey22-2008aug22,0,3228580,full.story

And then there was that DRM debacle... What's worst is countries like Australia spinelessly accepted the DRM laws as their own (and US patents being enforcable in Australia) all for a political photo opportunity with George W. Bush. In this way, these execessive new laws are spreading all over the world. And here we have Universities teaching one side of the Great Copyright Rights Grab. Why aren't they educating their students about both sides, instead of brainfeeding them RIAA propaganda?

Bottom line is: Congress doesn't work for you. It works for these guys. I don't see Congress ever saying no to MPAA slush funds, and treating IP the way the Constitution intended it too. So to hell with Congress and the MPAAFIA: Stupid Laws are made to be broken. I say torrent freely and torrent often. It's our very own digital tea party.

They were cutting off bits of peoples flesh before this technology was introduced, so people having nothing to lose.

But given the mood in Mexico, any corrupt police officers may just end up having a life-span slightly less than an airline hijacker armed with a box-cutter.

The LA Times ran an artice on Why Mexican business directors, doctors, and other professionals

Under pressure from the federal crackdown, some gangs appear to be ratcheting up kidnapping and extortion to make up for shrinking drug profits.

There is no question that kidnappings in Mexico are soaring, particularly in trafficking hot spots along the U.S. border, where criminals have found easy targets among business owners, doctors and other professionals who have prospered in the region.

Last year, 438 Mexicans were reportedly abducted, according to official government statistics. That's a 34% increase over 2006. But it's believed to be just a fraction of the true number.

MEXICO CITY -- When their 14-year-old son was snatched off the street by armed men in early June, the Marti family reportedly did what many wealthy Mexicans do in such a crisis.

It was not to be. Fernando Marti's decomposed, bullet-riddled body was found Friday in the trunk of a stolen Chevy that had been abandoned in a working-class Mexico City neighborhood. For many, Monday's news was equally bad: Authorities said they had arrested at least one city police commander in connection with the crime, and that other cops might be involved.

Again, your side of this discussion isn't clear at all. I never said that anyone other than the retired general (and people like him) could ignore the no-fly list. I said that his privilege of showing his military ID gets him past the list, despite his matching the list (by name, which is all the list gives its enforcers). That is an arbitrary privilege, not part of the "security" system. Because he's a (retired) part of the police state, so he gets "trusted" in a way that other people don't.

It's clear from what many high-profile people (like Al Gore) have had to do to get past the no-fly list that the list itself doesn't contain identities, it contains names. And it's also clear that one's actual security risk to the planes is not at all the selection criteria to get one's name on the list. There's something like a million names on that list, and there aren't a million names of people who are actual security threats.

The Federal government acts with respect to Constitutional protections of our rights only so long as people use the Federal government to force that respect. A decade or more of people electing majorities in Congress which have actively disrespected those rights, and reelecting a president with nothing but public scorn for those rights, as a matter of public policy, has of course given those people the freedom to abuse our rights. This story is about one way we can force respect for some of our rights, "public petition for redress of grievances", to get more of them back. But we have to work at it. Fortunately, people like the guy now with standing to sue are working to fix rights protections for all of us. If fewer people will elect fewer rights abusers, the balance might reverse, and we may see our rights more protected than abused by our government.

Cable talking heads accuse broadcast networks of liberal bias -- but a think tank finds that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Barack Obama than on John McCain in recent weeks.

[...] when network news people ventured opinions in recent weeks, 28% of the statements were positive for Obama and 72% negative.

Network reporting also tilted against McCain, but far less dramatically, with 43% of the statements positive and 57% negative...

Boo-hoo, Obama gets much more air time being bashed than McCain.

When have you seen a 24 year old female gymnast, much less a 40 year old one?

How about this 33-year old who won a silver? Yeah, it doesn't happen often, but no less often than the 40 year old female swimmer you mention.

And the Mindstorms version only works with Silverlight, probably.

This article has sheds some insight about the visitors that were left out.

Wow how *interesting* and *original*.

Or not. Where do you guys think Barack Obama's money is coming from? People like me, who are donating tiny amounts.

Actually, both the McCain campaign and the RNC have gotten itself in hot water several times for using copyrighted music or video clips without permission during this cycle.

A few examples:

McCain was served with a cease and desist letter from Fox News after he used their broadcast footage in a commercial without buying it...

McCain was sued by Mike Myers after he used a clip from a skit from SNL without purchasing it or getting permission from Myers himself (Myers isn't the copyright owner, but that's irrelevant).

McCain got yelled at by copyright owners for using the "Rocky" theme song in an ad without permission.

One of McCain's YouTube videos have been hit with a copyright infringement claim by Warner Music Group after the campaign used a song by Frankie Valli without permission.

Of course, all of this is not to mention McCain's little plagiarism issue with Wikipedia...

A few of the reality shows have managed to do some good (e.g. Extreme Makeover occasionally helped people out who really were in need), but they often botched just as many attempts to help as they succeeded. Which arguably is not helpful in the long run.

Teach a man to fish or give a man a fish: Foreclosed.

I should point out that a great deal of the maintenance of our road system is funded through gas taxes; in the current system, people who drive the most help pay for the roads the most. While I dislike gov't meddling for the most part, I do enjoy using our roads and highways. If EVs take off in a big way, you can expect to pay for the lost gas tax revenue in some other way.

Yeah that has been working for us so far. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-bridge1-2008aug01,0,4924543.story

In California, they prescribe it for pretty much anything, including anxiety:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-stein9-2008may09,0,1639734.column

He got to spend time with the US Women's Beach Volleyball team on the sand. How 'bout you?

Not so fast on that 1 in 10 billion number.

I saw an article in an admittedly unscientific publication, the LA Times recently:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-dna20-2008jul20,0,5133446.story

which is a long but interesting look at how DNA evidence can work, but also how it might be misleading (and I'm not talking about sloppy work and fraud). It's pause for thought.

The Irish and Italians were not legal immigrants. We just didn't have our internal passport system perfected yet, so once they jumped the border they were able to disappear into the local population... as they are indeed still doing, but with less success because of our new fangled, and disgusting to anyone who loves liberty, internal passport system.

Who are we to say that the app is useless? People buy things to remind themselves of their status all the time. According to another report (in the same newspaper):

'...Heinrich said there seemed to be a market for the program. "I am sure a lot more people would like to buy it -- but currently can't do so," Heinrich said. "The App is a work of Art and included a 'secret mantra' -- that's all."'

The US Defense budget is somewhere around $600 billion a year. Divide that by the 7.5 billion barrels of oil we use every year and that averages to $80 a barrel. How much of that $600B is to keep the world safe for oil? Oil has gotten a free ride with massive subsidies.
It's true the retailer makes a very slim profit margin, but that's because gasoline retailing has very little value added. Most of the profit has been extracted by the time it's sold wholesale. Even more so with Zone Pricing. The little guy, in this case the small businessperson who owns the gas station, gets the shaft.

The original article has since been updated with a picture, a map, and even a video. But the 800 degree temperature still lacks a -°-F designation IMO. Here was my original submission:

Ground temperatures exceeding 800 degrees (C? F? HOT!) are being recorded at the Los Padres Forest in Ventura County, California. Geologists are uncertain why, but a popular theory is that hydrocarbons in some form (petroleum, gas, coal) are being exposed to air through cracks formed in dry ground. (Fuel + Oxygen + Heat = Fire Triangle) The last thing California needs are forest fires from below, after so recently fighting off forest fires from lightning above, so fire fighters are closely monitoring the area.

Los Angeles Unified is in payroll hell themselves after spending over $100 million to overhaul their payroll system.

Any Californians remember when Tandem Computers tried to replace just one part of the antiquated DMV? Total failure, IIRC.

Now perhaps it is just a bureaucrat waving a huge BS flag. Or it might just be a really complicated proposition to temporarily alter wages and then put them back with back pay.

I get that all the time where the product manager comes to me with a feature he needs and says "it's just a minor or simple change." In his eyes it is simple. But sometimes the evolution of a 12 year old piece of software (in my case) with about 100 developer's hands, past and present, creates a difficult situation for that simple change.

...the good governator is probably payed by that system too and you know HIS pay ain't going down.

In fact, you would be wrong:

"Elected officials and their appointees have had their salaries withheld since July 1."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-arnold1-2008aug01,0,1783186.story?page=2

"Law enforcement experts say that homemade subs are becoming ever more sophisticated..." http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico17-2008jul17,0,9344.story

Cool Photos and Everything! http://www.oobject.com/category/drug-smuggling-submarines/

...its a decision to be taken by the individual airlines based on feedback from their customers, not something they should be bound to enforce.

Remember when no one cared about smoking bans? Yeah, that was just the tip of the iceburg.
It gets worse from here on out. Pretty soon you won't be able to grab some in-and-out before your flight, either. Ohshi~

The fallacy is the perception that there can anonymity on the Internet. Earlier this year, a woman was accused of violating Federal law by using a fake MySpace name. If you make false and injurious comments, it really does not matter if you try to hide behind a fake user name.

I think it is a scandal that China ever came to host the Olympics.

I hate Government oppression as anyone but I've got to call you out here. I think the Olympic Committee was hoping that the Chinese government would clean up it's act for it's people as a direct result of planning The Games.

In some respects this is true, there has been great infrastructure and environmental improvements in China recently. In terms of infrastructure, you might like to consult this interesting article, PART 1, PART 2 comparing the difference between credit crunch enlaboured American cities and shining new developments in China.

In terms of environmetal issues, Greenpeace have applauded many of the Chinese Governemnt's efforts. Efforts include a focus on reducing emmisions and river pollution, switching to renewable energy sources such as hydro and geo-thermal, expanding public transportation and air quality improvements. In America, the government is actively trying to prevent any improvements relating to global warming.

In terms of censorship, also recall that employees at the American Environment Protection Authority have been prevented from talking to journalists. How's that for "extreme censorship"? Also, don't forget about warrentless wire tapping and the subsequent bill to protect the government and telcos from any repercussions.

Chinese doping is as organized as in the former East Germany

Remember that testing for doping is overseen by the Olympic Committee, not the Chinese government. You should also be aware that America is involved with doping too and stripped of medals.

Admittedly, the improvements aren't as good as they could have been, but if you ask the average Chinese on the street, I'm sure he's very satisfied with the changes and his governments ability to effect them. I'm not trying to imply that America is worse than China or even close, just that it has it's problems too and they are pretty much the same ones. It's time to get off your high horse and realise that he who is without guilt should cast the first stone. Not you.

Here is another interesting story I read the other day about media bias from the L.A. times. It states that while Obama is indeed receiving more media coverage than McCain, the coverage is by a large degree more negative than the coverage for McCain.

Would you be able to make an arguable case in court on the premise that the state in which you reside said it is ok to violate the federal law?

In a word, no. A number of people licensed to grow or sell medical marijuana by their local cities have been sent to federal prison, and I believe they couldn't mention their local-government blessing in federal court.

There's a good article in today's LA Times. A guy who ran a dispensary is up on Federal charges, and at the top of the article is a photo of him cutting the ribbon with the whole city council standing with him. Boing Boing has some related coverage about the high school student with advanced cancer who Lynch was supplying with pot to help with pain and appetite loss. The feds are using that to push for a bigger sentence. Lynch probably won't even be able to use the term "medical marijuana" in court.

Lol! Really, that's all I got, you really can't distinguish between micro and macro.

You know, this actually (frustratingly) reminds me of debating creationism. Yes, I understand the difference between micro and macro, but you don't seem to. "Micro" and "Macro" are not quantities. The difference between them is relative, which is the point I was trying to make with using the term "high level".

Some differences between males and females are great, and some are subtle, but there is no denying that there are very fundamental differences. And subtle differences can be very significant. And yes, there are STRUCTURAL, PHYSICAL differences between men and women's brains. Here is but one article on the subject, from a woman researcher, no less. I quote:

"What is astonishing to me," Witelson said, "is that it is so obvious that there are sex differences in the brain and these are likely to be translated into some cognitive differences, because the brain helps us think and feel and move and act.

"Yet there is a large segment of the population that wants to pretend this is not true."

Now I'm done with this subject. Sheesh.

We already only fire at guys who fire back at us*. Guys who don't fire at us, we have no reason to shoot at all, be it lethally or non-lethally.

* "We" = guys following the rules. Jackasses who kick in doors in search of revenge who then gun down an unarmed family, they're shitheads who need to break rocks at Leavenworth for the rest of their lives.

There is no noticeable "resistance movement" in China.

Explosions this morning in the southern Chinese city of Kunming killed at least three people and injured 13 in what appears to have been a coordinated terrorist attack.

The article that sparked this Slashdot post is by some know-nothing Ivory tower far leftist. Full of 10 dollar words, long on speculation and short on facts.

Thank you! We have, of course, uranium and other naturally radioactive minerals in the earth right now. And yet we've mostly avoided exposure (except by early scientists who worked with them.) This author could have just summed his article into one sentence: I hate nuclear power.

If we end up back in the stone age it will be BECAUSE of people like Ulrich Beck who jump up and down about climate change, but then complain that no solution is good enough. THOSE are the people who would have us living back in time with no electric, no cars and eating berries and twigs because cows pass too much methane!

Mr. Beck might be interested to know there is ALREADY a universal warning sign denoting radioactivity.

Perhaps if we add a "Mr. Yuck" symbol....

If the Dems piss me off one more time though, all bets are off.

How many times has it been already, uhm?

In the 1990ies Clinton's campaign wore the patience of some supporters with talking about "Change" too much... "Clinton/Gore. For people, for a change." . He took office promising more change, only to strongly disappoint its most vociferous supporters immediately after.

And today's Democratic candidates? One's very motto is "The change we can believe in"... And the other selling herself as "an agent of change". And you keep falling for it...

And, oh, look — the boy-wonder from Chicago, whose first profession was "community organizer" (whatever the heck that means) — is all but nominated by your party. With "change" — the emptiest promise — being his "inspiring" slogan. Eeww...

Even ancient historians describing earlier events have noticed, that plebs leans to change for the sake of change — however useless or outright dangerous the proposed change may be... "One more time," — you said? Yeah, right...

Qwest's legal problems predate the NSA's circulating access requests to the telcos in the Fall of 2001.

The insider case that Nacchio, Qwest's CEO, claims he's being punished for, goes back to the dot-com bust when Qwest execs realized they weren't going to hit revenue projections. They started dumping stock and fraudulently shifting revenue to cover up the shortfall. Again, this all happened prior to the NSA asking for data.

The company has a history of engaging in illegal activity. In 2001, they paid an additional $350,000 fine on top of the June, 2000 $1.5 million fine they paid the FCC for slamming users. The slamming complaints started in the 90's.

Nacchio's blowing smoke by playing the role of NSA's victim.

The Wired article is in fact poorly researched. Obama's website was overhauled this weekend to remove any and all traces of his criticism of the surge and calling Iraq a civil war. Not only did he not support the surge he insisted it would make things worse. Clearly his judgement, which lacking any real experience is what he has run on, was off. Now he's rewritting history to make it sound like "well of course it worked I never said it wouldn't" which is pathetic.

The LA Times has a slightly better take on the issue. The reason it's a political issue is he is doing this months after everyone with half a brain has admitted the surge worked (and in fact the surge is officially over now, as all the surge troops are leaving.)

Proportionately speaking, the 9th Circuit is about average for the chances of any individual case being overturned.

Incorrect, I smelled poo when you didn't back up your assertion with incontrovertible internet links. ;)

From the LA Times:

In other words, although the 9th Circuit decided only one-third more appeals on the merits than the 5th Circuit, it was reversed nearly five times more often.

http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jul/11/opinion/oe-fitzpatrick11

Too bad the author of this article didn't bother to cite where HIS statistics comes from either, but he's a "journalist" so I guess I'll defer to him. ;)

Inidividuals have rights and there can be dire consequences for abridging those rights.

Sadly that is where you are wrong, the consequences would be dire if they happened to a private individual or small business, but a few million dollars punitive damages is just a business expense to the like of Viacom. From an artcle in 2007:Viacom, parent of cable TV's MTV Networks and the Paramount Pictures movie studio, reported quarterly net income of $641.6 million....Reflecting last year's acquisition of the DreamWorks SKG studio, Viacom's filmed entertainment division logged an operating profit of $71.7 million. So if some independent producer wins $10 or $20 million, it would hurt Viacom, but would hardly break them. By contrast if an individual must pay $100K in damages to Viacom, that pretty much breaks that person. They lose their house and car and hope for a decent life. That's why big corporations can fuck with individuals, but not vice versa. The only way individuals can take on a large corporation is to unionize, so if people want to protect privacy in their YouTube usage then there needs to be a YouTube Contributors Union, because a strike that involved every private contributor taking down their postings would break YouTube in less than a month.

When that printing press is capable of making near-perfect reproductions of currency, and easily accessible information on how to defeat or mimic many of the security features is found on the Internet, then yes, it is too much to leave around.

That argument doesn't hold water as a defense of the watermarking technology that I was talking to. My complaint is with the practice of forcing printers to leave a serial number behind that law enforcement can track.

That "technique" does not survive a rational examination. That watermarking technology might catch the dumbass teenager that tries to pass a photoshopped $20 bill off on one of the drones at Wally World. But it's not going to catch professional counterfeiters. You really think that they are going to buy printers in such a way that can be traced back to them? The last time I checked it wasn't illegal to buy things with cash in this country and even if it were there are all sorts of ways to obtain things through "unofficial" channels (buying people off at Xerox comes to mind).

Given that, I don't really see how you can defend this practice. It doesn't do much of anything to deter counterfeiting. Yet it makes it that much easier for the Government to trace political communications that it might not agree with. Don't think it's happened before? Think again.

And if you look at Cogresses approval numbers, which are in the single digits, it's obvious that's it's not just republicans or conservatives that are unhappy.

We, the American people. The public. People whole follow the news, who watch C-SPAN or even The Daily Show, who look things up rather than just letting them slide by.

Oh look, a little lie of our own!!! "We, the American people", is a total fabrication. In fact, the vast majority of the American people care about one thing in this election - the price of gasoline. If all Americans were as involved, as you said, you wouldn't have a bunch of liberal blogs taking donations and ad revenue to, "get the message out".. ..

Oh get over yourself. By exactly that same reasoning you could argue that the Constitution was "a lie" because it starts with exactly the same formula. Of course, no reasonable person uses English that way. If I say "I ate grapes for lunch" no one expects the world grape supply to have vanished. If I say that "Americans like to play baseball" no one thinks that I mean that all, or even most, Americans play baseball. And no one expects that the statement that information was made public, learned by the public, in the public domain, known to the public, etc. means that all, or even most, of the people who have access to the information are even aware of it.

Ah, but then if you try to paint the report as an independent source of factual information to which you are simply responding (rather than a contrived source of spin that you engineered to justify your actions) you are....wait for it...lying!.

But that's not what they were doing.

That is exactly what they were doing.

What they were doing is working to ensure that the reports being issued by those agencies followed a "Fairness Doctrine" and received proper information to help guide their analysis! You can't rely on a report made by one guy in a vacuum, you need to have somebody who is experienced, on the ball coordinating information across multiple agencies, bringing their own vast experience to the table... you really need someone like Dick Cheney!

It isn't even remotely related to the Fairness Doctrine as I presume you know.

I would agree that you need someone like Dick Cheney to orchestrate a fiasco like this. But I don't think I'd call repeatedly forcing discredited claims into the channel to "guide their analysis" being "on the ball" (unless you're making a play on his code name, and mean it in a derogatory sense).

--MarkusQ

So basically, he being outed as a Charity basher because he is citing the LA times article that the foundation only spends 10% of its money on actual helping the poor. He doesn't say the organization shouldn't exist... He's pointing out that they aren't doing their best job of giving to the poor because they are investing for a return.

Read the LA Times article and decide for yourself though.

Sounds like the way a foundation that wants to stick around doing good for longer than a year or two should operate.

In fact that is the normal operating procedure of a private non-profit foundation. Where is the controversy?

Yes, many will not concur with Richard, but the truth is that the foundation IS Bill Gates PR arm. I give you the example of Mexico's enciclomedia project (which was an absolute failure): with the simplest menace of the country's strategy of including linux as a base platform for millions of computers for elementary schools, the B&MG foundation (after a lightning trip of ballmer and gates to personally talk to President Fox) donated 40 million dollars worth of boxes with a simple, little string attached: it HAS to run Microsoft Windows.

also :
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gatesx07jan07,0,4205044,full.story
Also, as an earlier poster mentioned :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_and_Melinda_Gates_Foundation#Criticisms
also this :
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4103.htm

Yes, many will not concur with Richard, but the truth is that the foundation IS Bill Gates PR arm. I give you the example of Mexico's enciclomedia project (which was an absolute failure): with the simplest menace of the country's strategy of including linux as a base platform for millions of computers for elementary schools, the B&MG foundation (after a lightning trip of ballmer and gates to personally talk to President Fox) donated 40 million dollars worth of boxes with a simple, little string attached: it HAS to run Microsoft Windows.

also :
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gatesx07jan07,0,4205044,full.story
Also, as an earlier poster mentioned :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_and_Melinda_Gates_Foundation#Criticisms
also this :
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4103.htm

Yes, many will not concur with Richard, but the truth is that the foundation IS Bill Gates PR arm. I give you the example of Mexico's enciclomedia project (which was an absolute failure): with the simplest menace of the country's strategy of including linux as a base platform for millions of computers for elementary schools, the B&MG foundation (after a lightning trip of ballmer and gates to personally talk to President Fox) donated 40 million dollars worth of boxes with a simple, little string attached: it HAS to run Microsoft Windows.

also :
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gatesx07jan07,0,4205044,full.story

Also, as an earlier poster mentioned :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_and_Melinda_Gates_Foundation#Criticisms