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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.
Fly the flag with pride comrades!
boingboing.net/images/copyleftcommie.gif
Never show up at an event hosted by a comedian.
Using Windows.
I always knew Gates was a robot. Now they installed SP2 on him, and LOOK WHAT HAPPENS! Increased security, my foot!
I am scientifically inaccurate.
I wish they'd stop developing new, useless BS out at Microsoft and get to work on bug fixes.
I'm going to accuse them of being modern day capitalists.
Sounds just as bad to me.
It sounds like Bill Gates may be infested with SpyWare, a typical memetic programming that took place in the 1950's in which everyone who was not a right-wing-christian-gun-loving-American was a communist. It sounds like it's causing his PR ability to crash. Should we help him out and format him and put linux on him? (Wait.. Put linux on him, linux is Tux, the mental image that is coming to mind is... DISTURBING!!!! ACK REBOOT REBOOT!)
It would *REALLY* be nice to see someone in the media finally get this right.
SB:
Is it me or does Gates seem to be very out of touch with what is going on in the real world and mostly seems to be getting his current information from his "Human Search Engines". Not to mention the fact he is constantly doing little more then plugging Micro$oft products.
Just remember: If you don't buy from Micro$oft you are a Communist!
When I read that he nose-dived, I was hoping for a video of him tripping and flying off a stage or something. I am sorely disappointed!
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Gen. Jack D. Ripper: I can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
free ipods
Use his influence with the federal government to tie the open source effort with terrorism. Terrorism is the new communism. Cloak anything you don't like in terrorism and it gets done. Couple that with this administration's ability to be bought off by corporate interests and he can get what he wants. OK, mod me down now.......
From the interview, on the topic of search engines:
Oh, sure, everybody is working on those things, but just take the idea of finding your local pizza place and doing that right; search doesn't do that well today.
Sounds like someone needs to clue Bill in to using Sherlock under OS X -- that's exactly what I used it for yesterday.
--saint
Worlds largest blue screen of death here
Cruise TT
I, for one, welcome our new copyleft communist masters (and logo).
[rant]
Seriously, Bill Gate and Co. continue to try and paint anyone who doesn't agree with their stance on IP as un-American. Who died and made him J. Edgar Hoover, Jr.?
America was NOT founded on the principles of IP but on freedom of choice (religious and otherwise) and the idea that everyone is supposed to contribute to the public good. The recent push to IP, patent, and copyright every little "innovation" (think one-click)is what is hurting our ability to produce something new and better without having to wade through a morass of legalities.
I will continue to support copyleft, OSS, and any other program that contributes to the dissemination of knowledge and ideas.
[/rant]
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
If the video still works, Conan O'Brian does some hilarious stand-up badmouthing Gates at minute 7. Skip the garbage before that.
he described anyone who doesn't support ever-increasing intellectual property laws as "communists".
But... doesn't sharing mean caring? At least that's what my parents always said.
In all seriousness, there's nothing wrong with a communial society, it's just really really hard to pull off because of human nature.
Sometimes, all it takes is one comment. If Bush comes out on public television and makes one strong line of pure and clear racial charged comment against minority groups. Do you think everyone will say, well, using one comment against him is just propaganda?
.segmond
a) Calling free culture advocates commies shows a... slight misunderstanding of the two ideologies. At its best, Communism was never particularly concerned with the individual (possibly why it is so successful in the Confucian environment of China).
b) Arguing that "Communist" is not a pejorative is likely to go down like a lead balloon in much of America. The McCarthy witchhunts were ludicrous but they happened for a reason. Communists *were* the enemy - defending them carries the same overtones as defending Naziism to the French.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
Now to me, this doesn't sound like propoganda, but rather, who he actually is.
Fast forward to the interesting portion of this riveting presentation.
I can't think of a single anarchist government that's killed millions of people.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
For those interested, the crash for this year's CES happens at about 26 minutes in.
To the barricades!
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
We'd be supporting the idea of the government owning all intellectual property.
However, not to defend Mr. Gates (and surely to piss off a lot of the OSS community), but there is some small degree of validity to his statement, though he used the wrong word.
Many people who completely reject the idea of intellectual property (not all) aren't really communists as Mr. Gates would propose, but in fact, radical left-wing anarchists. They despise authority in any form that it comes in; that is why such things as IP and copyrights are hated so much. The idea of God introduces a supreme authority, so they hate him even more.
They wear the "communist" label with pride, not understanding who they really are, or what communism really is and what it has done to nearly every single society that has been foolish enough to try it.
They are the modern day hippy, when it comes right down to it. They stand for and oppose the same things and the same principles.
But God demonstrates his love for us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us - (Romans 5:8)
He has to say this sort of thing since he's bet the MS farm on DRM and the like. When you hear people making these kind of references though, you know they are concerned. That tells me the DRM plan isn't going as well as they thought it would.
Have you seen Ironstayn vs Supergovernment yet?
and was surprised, at first, to find that many people there actually believed that.
Best Slashdot Co
>Using one comment against him his just propoganda.
This is not one comment. This is him openly claiming:
1. The current IP system is what makes America great. Yes, that's what he's saying.
2. The current IP system doesn't need reform, except perhaps making better patent systems. Note Microsoft has been dealing with Eolas and others regarding patents so Bill is only seeing the light only when it serves his company.
3. He calls those who call for IP reform "new communists." That's just an insult and trivializes the real concerns many have with using the law (think DMCA and others) to maintain monopoly status and crack down on how one can use one's machine and software.
He spoke like a perfect monopolist. He knows IP laws help him and help maintain the status quo, thus creating a nice and healthy (for him) barrier to entry. He only diverged from the party-line when it came to patents and it should be obvious why.
Of course, he may be right about patent reform, but its soley in his interest and in the interest in his monopoly, comrade.
I will give MS credit, they are the perfect monopolists. Perfect. No wonder he uses such outdated and misused terms like "communism." MS has shown that ruthlessness pays off and Bill might be seeing himself as Ayn Rand, say versus Karl Marx, when he's just an old fashioned monopolist. Monopolies are of course, a symptom of a market failure or corruption. This is called irony.
I find this rhetoric to be common amongst the wealthy business class and conservatives in general. Such as: Commies! X makes America great! Sure there will always be a debate on Y, but lets not jump to conclusions! etc
There is communism (insane totalitarianism found in USSR and an earlier China) but they never achieved that Marx wrote about. No "government" ever has (In the '60's and '70's people had communes, but they always broke apart on the shoals of human nature). The people who started "communist" revolutions never completed the process. I don't call those insane assholes "communists", they are insane oligarchs, just like the Czarist regime before them.
There was a time when the new government in this continent did something that had not been done before or since: They *gave up power*, placing that power in the hands of people. Since then, the concept has fallen on hard times. Today, we have oligarchs like Mr. Gates trying to restore Traditional Values: Own and control access to *fucking everything*. And they have enough financial resources to buy off what passes for government these days. And the only people doing anything about it (in information technology, they are FOSS advocates) eschew government and political process. Too busy writing actual reliable code, I suppose...
I don't like arbitrary authority, so I don't like big centralized government. On the other hand, I cannot think of another way to slow down the assholes who want to charge me for the privilege of working (using "their" "intellectual" "property"). It's a dilemma that I don't know how to resolve.
Note that capitalism is not about monopolies. In fact, capitalism relies on free market, and you can't have free market if one of the players controls a majority of it.
The basic ideas of capitalism work just insanely effective. When we had communism in Poland, most shops had empty shelves -- and within just months after the communism's fall any shortages were just gone, as if by a wave of a magic wand.
On the other hand, communism is based on monopoly. It's supposed to be a monopoly of the "working class", but in reality in all cases it turned out to be a monopoly of the Party. And then, if you can buy the Party's blessing -- you can have a monopoly in your sector, too!
Whatever you say, you can't ignore the fact that all real-life implementations of communism were based on the control the Party had on the citizens. In fact, it's the control what the communism is about.
So... we have a company who tries to gain the sole control of a sector of industry -- and it's them who dare to call their enemies communists.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
where he described anyone who doesn't support ever-increasing intellectual property laws as "communists".
Does this make Bill Gates a communist? Xerox and Apple had windows before Microsoft. TCP was borrowed from Digital. Sun for RPCs and J#. Supercalc and other had spead sheets before Microsoft. Does work perect or others get roaylties rom Word for the word processor?
In fact, Linux uses X for it's windows which predates Microsoft. Maybe Microsoft should pay royalties to commercial UNIX and Linux for the RTU of Windows.
And look at Microsoft's legal track record.
This was obviously a hypocritical comment on Bill's part. A typical reaction to a monoplistic looser.
"Fly the [boing!boing! USSR/Copyleft] flag with pride comrades!"
NONONONONO!!! I know you're trying to be funny, but I'm not laughing... The last thing free software proponents need is to associate themselves with a failed economic ideology that has resulted in tens of millions of unnecessary deaths worldwide. Free Software has nothing to do with statist communism and everything to do with individual freedom of association and collaboration. When Bill Gates frames the debate between the capitalists on his side and communists on the other, the last thing to do is embrace the presuppositions of his frame! Down that road evokes an ideological wasteland of failure! Do copyleft supporters want to associate themnselves with that? --M
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.
Havn't Steve Jobs been going on and on about the digital hub for the last several years? Nice to see that Microsoft is using their good old R&D-lab called Apple again.
I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Ok, so I'm going to go a little bit off topic here, but gates implies that if you support free software, then you are a communist, the thing of it is, I'm not sure how exactly this is a bad thing.
Capitalism and Communism are each at opposite ends of a scale of scarcity- that is to say, Capitalism works great when there is a limited amount of stuff to go around, relative to the population size. It encourages effeciency and results in a population as a whole getting the most of what it wants from a limited pool of resources. Communism on the other hand is ideal for a world where, relative to the population size, resources are unlimited, or at least nearly unlimited. In the perfect theoreticaly communist society, the only limit to how much of something that can be made is the number of people available to make it.
Socialism is basically just the name given to the middle ground.
Now, capitalism is great for a lot of things, because as a society/country/planet today in many areas our resources are still finite. For many aspects of our world, capitalism is still the best thing we've come up with to deal with the limited resources we have, relative to the world population.
In the world of software however, we have a situation which is more closely related to the communist ideal world. Once a program is written it can be copied over and over again essentially for free. In this case, the only limit to the software that can be developed is the amount of skilled people who are able to work on it.
Looking at it like that, what I see when gates says people who support free software are communists is really his admission that we are using a superior philosophy for our little section of reality.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
The irony of Bill Gates' anti-communist rhetoric in the wake of his recent crash and burn presentation on Windows Media Center is that Microsoft itself resembles a creaky Soviet-era state-run monopoly much more than a lean, mean emblem of free-trade capitalism.
In my opinion Microsoft is essentially a state-sponsored monopoly and, as such, represents, little more than a tweaked version of the classic communist state entity.
The rational for this position is the simple fact that although Microsoft has been found guilty of being a monopolistic barrier to free-trade in the software industry it was given tacit state sanction to operate as such when the courts and the DOJ failed to press for meaningful controls on their business practices.
From an objective perspective this is no more than a refined version of the classic communist state monopoly. Like Soviet era monopolies Microsoft must compete in the international market as a representative of the State economy while at home it is given tacit control of the market in exchange for loyalty to the political leadership. Also like Soviet era monopolies, state pressure for reform of business practices amounted to little reform but a large increase in the amount of money passed on to corrupt politicians. Take a look at Microsoft's political contributions post-trial and I think you'll see this pattern is quite obvious.
What's worse is that this "tweaked" form of state control can be conducted legally through Political Action Committees with little need to resort to passing money under the table as occurred in the old Soviet Union.
That's right folks, Microsoft's brand of communism is conducted right under your noses while real innovation and competition in the software industry is systematically squashed through monopolistic trade practices tacitly sanctioned by the state. It's high time that all you Democrats and Republicans out there swallow the blue pill and see things as they are, not how you want them to be. Either we believe in free trade or not and no matter how you dice it monopolies are antithetical to free trade. Those who acquire them will always attempt to redefine competition so that the rules don't apply to them. Ooogedy boogedy people! Look-out! International competition means we have to stick together and support our local monopoly. Oh no! Look over there people, those communist are trying to wreck our good capitalist monopoly. It's total nonsense if you just step back and take a look at it for what it really is.
Communists? Come on, Bill, you can do better than that! Who cares about Communists anymore? Just look at all the business we're doing with Communist China these days. The word "Communism" has definitely lost its cache.
Here's some advice for your public relations folks: We're not communists, we're "software terrorists", Bill, and we're out to kill little babies and children in the name of FOSS. We hate freedom and the American way of life and we're out to destroy it.
Now, if you can get that message across and paint that picture to the American public, you'd kill FOSS forever. Hell, you could probably get the FBI to start raiding the homes of Linux users.
Good luck in your future endeavors, you Capitalist Pig.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
But I'll just add one more comment, trying to deconstruct what Gates says about communism and IP:
It really is rediculous all around. Bill neglects to carefully consider that the GPL and other open source licenses are simply gifts of intellectual property to the community at large. In no way does the GPL or BSD licenses "disrespect" commercial licenses, they just offer a better value than the commercial licenses, ie., our software is our gift to you.
Seriously, a fair bit of what he says really sits uncomfortably. For one thing what he says about IE and Firefox is, although perfectly true, not quite as clear-cut as he seems to be making it sound.
That's not exactly by choice in all cases. I am confident that were IE trivially uninstallable from a Windows setup then that point would be less valid.
I don't necessarily think that every FF user would uninstall IE if it were easily doable but I do think that in many of the cases where "IE is also on those systems" it's only because there's no simple way of remiving it.
As for his stance on IP rights then I think he hasn't got a clue.
However what I will say is that I'm no businessman and he runs a very successful business. So I freely admit that as much as I disagree with his points of view they obviously work in business. In fact I'd be pretty surprised if he didn't have views like that - many businesses seem to share the "IP Rights are Good" mentality.
Having said that I do think that what's good for business isn't always good for innovation and incentive. And that's why I personally think that the concept of "Intellectual Property" needs a major overhaul. Patents and non-terminating copyrights simply have too many drawbacks.
Like the main incentive for Patents that companies seem to have is that if they have a great idea then not only should they benefit from selling it but they shoudl benefit from anyone improving on it - as they'll have to pay to license it. Great from a business perspective but from a technical perspective this is dreadful because if someone's got great dieas to extend something but no money or Patents to bargain with then the new idea will be lost.
Obviously I find it a bit odd when Bill Gates (or anyone Microsoft spokeperson) talks about things "working together". Unless they're having a complete turnaround in their policies he probably means that when "devices work together" they will always be working via Windows.
Obviously this makes a great quote as he goes down as saying that interoperability is important - or something like that - but it just falls flat as more often than not he isn't tlaking about devices talking with non-Microsoft devices.
Tiggs
"120 chars should be enough for everyone..."
We're not having the Red Scare anymore. Why didn't he label them terrorists? That's today's thing.
hey!
On the whole, religion has killed more people than all forms of revolution and all wars over money, gold or resources.
Learn something new.
... proof that the Microsoft PR department astroturfs /.
Ok, ok before the guy with the very large user id blows a gasket, I'm only joking, really.
What *is* interesting is the so-called "world's greatest software company" has a demo crash on their most public figure, and that he resorts to anachronistic political labels for buttressing his argument.
About 33 minutes in and just after the second crash, Conan provides some filler and gives my favorite quote in the presentation:
... I got so drunk, I woke up with a hooker. Bill got so drunk, he woke up with an Apple computer."
"Last night
People should not fear what they do not understand; people should fear because they do not understand.
I saw a funny thing on my way to vegas recently - not quite as big a BSOD, but the same one on dozens of machines in US customs. I tried to take a picture and nearly had my camera confiscated...
First off: retaliation is not defense, no matter how many times national leaders claim it is. When it happens on a small scale people recognize this, I don't get why peoples brains stop working when we talk about religions and nations. There also was more than one, so stop talking about it in the singular.
Second: Where did you learn about the Inquistion? Torquemada's Revision of The Truth School for Retards? The mandate of the Inquisition was the exposure and punishment of heresy. Confession by torture was common place. There's been more than one (and in fact the order of the Inquisition still exists today) and it's not always been about blood and torture and burning but it absolutely DID happen and it WAS under the mandate of the Church and trying to claim that it was about creating fair trials for heretics is so ridiculous it makes my brain hurt. The fact that Church was very heavily involved in secular governments at the time does mean you can always claim it "wasn't about religion", but it's pedantic and silly nitpicking at best, dishonest at worst - you can just define any behavior you don't approve as not about religion, even when religiously motivated and done at the behest of religions authority. The Church was a major secular power in the Middle Ages, something that's hard for people to comprehend now - it had it's own armies, it's own banks, and it essentially ruled huge swaths of land even larger numbers of people. It had it's own courts (yes, of Inquisition) and would try and condemn people purely on it's own authority as well as that of the local rulers. Some rulers didn't allow the Inquisition into thier lands, those rulers faced excommunication. To claim that all this was done in the "name" of religion rather than "for" religion is missing the point.
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.
Come on, the deaths caused by Communism were a result of Religious Fervor.
I'm really short on time so I can't fully reply to all of these messages, or even to you. But I'm really not debating the underlying ideologies of communism, capitalism, or even religious expression. I'm talking about a cultural taboo against communism which continues in western cultures today. Look at the success of the Swift Boat Vets red baiting the Kerry campaign as a prime example; McCarthyism continues fifteen years after the fall of the Soviet Union and fifty years after McCarthy's downfall.
If the Free Software movement willingly accepts Gate's frame as being inspired by communist utopian idealism, the debate is over. Gate's will have won by default. If any of those EFFers or Project GNU folks are listening here (right - *cough*) I would recommend framing project GNU and BSD ideals by referencing simple down-to-earth small town values like church bake sales, community volunteer firefighting, and the Salvation Army. These are examples of community cooperation everyone can understand. And when Gates (or his surrogates) compares writing free software to communist destruction of capitalist intellectual property rights, argue back that his argument is like destroying the church bake sale for the profit-rights of local restaurants. That is an frame which skewer his debate talking points.
This is not about communist or capitalist ideology, this is about manipulating public opinion in order to promote - long term - a specific political agenda in Washington. Realize that and all this ideological bullshit smoke disappears like evenscent fog clearing on a sunny day.
Cheers,
--Maynard
There is a torrent available of the entire video at this blog.
Props to Conan for his good improv skills and ability to work a crowd, but doesn't it say something weird about our age that Microsoft itself can't keep its own product from going down at a major technology trade show, and that the crowd finds this acceptable, even funny? Remember, Microsoft's product is on warships these days. Would the crowd have also been yucking like a bunch of doped-up Amsterdam tourists if this had been wargames off the coast of England, and HMS Windows had given them a GPF when they tried to launch a missile? Please, boys: don't believe your own hype, and for God's sake, don't let anybody with a pulse take Ballmer seriously for a nanosecond.