Feds to Publish Public Comments on MS Settlement

Silas writes: "This AP Article notes that the government is going to be releasing the comments submitted by the public on the Microsoft anti-trust case. Highlight: 'Overall, the department said it received about 7,500 comments from people in favor of the settlement reached by the federal government and nine states, while 15,000 opposed it. Another 7,000 comments were dismissed as opinion, like "I hate Microsoft."' Apparently they have to publish and respond to each one." CNN is carrying the AP wire story as well.

Comments

Numbers could be misleading...

[trcooper]

I wonder how many of the comments that were against the settlement were looking for a harsher settlement as opposed to the number of those thinking no action or less action should be taken. At first glance the numbers seem to indicate that twice as many people think there should have been harsher punishment, but the actual content of those comments could be different.

Be interesting to verify the 7500

[A Commentor]

Seeing how MS has already admitted to sending letters to congress with other people's names, doubtful they would be stupid enough to do it again with this, but the people/names should at least be verified.

Most likely that those 7500 people are just shareholders of MS.

Re:That's it?

[Flower]

With all the /. stories I expected to see a higher number of porn^H^H^H^Hgoatse.cx messages. But that's just me.

It's a sad state of affairs when even the trolls don't live up to their potential.

On a more serious note, what do you expect? /. can't even organize a boycott of DVDs. Hell, we even get frontpage stories about the latest anime DVDs to come out. You have a majority here that when you take an activist stand, like say voting for Nader, tell you you wasted your vote even when said critic admits to not voting at all.

Most of the /. crowd and even me to a shameful degree don't have an activist bone in their body. We're opinionated but not motivated and definately not inconvenienced enough to "get religion." The fact is we're too diverse of group to all congregate on any real issue. Having an interest in technology is simply not encompassing enough to organize this group.

Washington Post Article

[craw]

Here are some snippets of the comments from some of the "big guns" who responded. This article was published last week.

15,000 that were not trolls, etc

[Alien54]

Well there were the form letters.

Then there were the "me too"s

So you actually had a decnt chance of being included in the comment base if you took the time to actually write an intelligent thoughtful comment. Form letters were tossed as obvious attempts to flood the channel.

It probably winds up being similar to the number of comments in any number of Slash articles, and reading everything above 0.

!5,000 submittals that were not trolls, flamebait, etc, and which actually had some content is probably not that bad.

Heck, you could go for months here at slash before you hit that many.

Just taker a look at alterslash