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Gates Nose-Dives at CES
Lots of submissions this morning about Bill Gates' performance at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show. His Media Center PC presentation crashed. (The presentation is online.) He also gave an interview to CNET, where he described anyone who doesn't support ever-increasing intellectual property laws as "communists". Boingboing has some commentary on that interview as well.
someone provide a link to the video where Windows 98 crashed on Gates and former MS employee at Comdex in Chicago circa 1998.
If the video still works, Conan O'Brian does some hilarious stand-up badmouthing Gates at minute 7. Skip the garbage before that.
Fast forward to the interesting portion of this riveting presentation.
For those interested, the crash for this year's CES happens at about 26 minutes in.
Just so you don't have to watch the entire video (2 hours), the crash happens when they are trying to modify a car at around the 01:13:30 mark.
Hey Bill, here are your local pizza joints.
o/~ Join us now and share the software
And I don't know about you, but my copy of the communist manifesto doesn't say much giving people a choice; it just makes an assumption that communism is a historical inevitability, and that you'd better learn to live with it.
The manifesto is like a pamphlet to describe the general idea of Communism. Throughout much of Marx and Engel's more detailed writings, they not only allude to, but directly state that the Communist economic system must be hand-in-hand with some sort of popular government, a democracy, a republic, etc. In fact, Marx and Engels frequently state throughout their work that the adoption of a Communist economic system must be brought about by the will of the people.
Just like every other communist country is a dictatorship.
The fact that they are Communist is not the reason that they were dictatorships. They were dictatorships because they were modeled after the original Soviet system. It was originally envisioned by Lenin (who grossly modified Marx and Engels work) and later modified by Stalin. When Stalin came to power, Soviet hegemony throughout Asia and Eastern Europe spread, and with it, the Soviet system of government, a dictatorship.
Don't be fooled by people. The Communist Manifesto is not the no-all, end-all of communism, just a simple leaflet compared to what is really out there.
Check out this link for Marx and Engel's real work.
Marx and Engel's Selected Works
I especially recommend that you read "The Principles of Communism".
How many times are you going to submit the same post? How many times will the mods mark it up all the way?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I was ready to call B.S. until I started reading the Slashdot thread full of people explaining how Communism isn't so bad. I'll let them explain this to my girlfriend, who grew up in part of the former USSR (now Latvia). Funny thing - since we got together I've met many people who used to live in the Eastern Bloc - 100% of them (the ones I've met) think that Communism is about the worst thing to ever infect the planet. The scariest thing (at least to some of the posters in this thread) is that most of them now vote Republican.
What kills me is that the left-wingers who advocate communism (to call them Liberals would be an insult to, well, Liberals) so blindly ignore the fact that it has caused some of the worst environmental and human rights abuses in history. We go around villifying Hitler, and rightly so, but he was strictly junior-varsity when compared to Stalin. The most evil corporate polluters (and yes, I think that a few companies are actually evil in this regard) have nothing on Moscow's old five-year plans.
My suggestion to these wanna-be Commies is that they go live in an actual Communist country for awhile. Enjoy life in these workers' paradises full of happy people. Oh, what, these people have either thrown the Communists out, or would do so if they didn't have guns to their heads?
Yes, I know there are a few people screaming about why they can't mod this post -50 flamebait (feel free, I have karma to burn). I'm not saying everyone that supports Open Source, Creative Commons, etc. is a Communist. Far from it: I doubt that more than a tiny, tiny percentage of them actually are. I am, however, shocked at how many crawl out from under their rocks when a subject like this pops up.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
I don't know what you guys are doing to fuck your Windows boxes up so much, but I have no problem keeping mine up and running.
What do I do to fuck up my Windows box? Connect it to the net and tried to read email, that's what. I know a lot of people who run Windows at home. Out of all those people, I can't name a single one that hasn't had a problem *IN THE PAST 2 MONTHS* with some sort of virus, spyware, random flakiness, or other bullshit. Right now, on a freshly installed XP system from the factory (with nothing else on it) Windows Update is stuck trying to install some sort of fix, but can't for some reason, with the end result being that I can't get SP2 for it. Fuck it up? Yeah, it's fucked up. But it wasn't me - it was fucked as designed.
Rebooting once a week to "keep it running smoothly." Ha. The fact that you need to do this points to something wrong with your system.
There is a torrent available of the entire video at this blog.