Most Chinese believe that our civilisation today can be dated back to 4000-5000 years. Written character was invented and preserved since Shang Dynasty (about 2000BC). But, the historical records were a bit sketchy. Starting from Zhou Dynasty (1040 B.C), the records were much more concrete.
>>given the size of the landmass were likely to be linguistically, culturally >>and ethnically diverse.If you call that kind of entity a society contiguous >>with unified China, then you might as well call pre-historic Europe a society >>contiguous with the Roman In Zhou Dynasty, there was a single ruling family. The powerful states were supposed to be governed on behalf of the figurehead king. Actually, Confucianism and Taoism were developed in that period. Judging from the fact that the leading scholar of the time can travel around the different states to teach is a strong indication that they share the same language. In fact, educated people today can still read the same text. There was a consensus about who were the "barbarians" at that time. The people in those rivaling states were not classified as the barbarians. Because of these reasons, at least the Zhou dynasty should be marked as the start of the Chinese civilisation, as we see now. http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/prehistory/china/ancie nt_china/zhou.html
The unification in 221 BC by Qin Dynasty merely marked the established the first empire, which started to centralise the power back to a single ruler.
One more piece of trivia: the cover page woodcut animals featuring in front of the OReilly books are from the Dover Pictorial Archives. It is a collection of 18th to 19th century wood and copperplate engravings of animals, ie no copyright issue to care about... In fact, the students in my former research group get used to choose one from the archive as well as a decoration for their own thesis. Many university/art school libraries have that collection. Feel free to use them when need a drawing of some cute animal.
It sets dangerous example for blanketing patent. While this anti-gravity device breaks all the existing research finding and most likely be fake, the fact that you can patent something without doing much can the nasty blanketing strategy to work.
For example, nano-device nowadays are largely built up from carbon and silicon. I have no background in such area. But, I know that there are only finite number of elements. Then, I can create vague patent along the line of "manipulate the strong, weak, electromagnetic forces in between {arsenic, sulfur, indium, whateverium} to create small-scale device which improve the {mechanical, electrical, acoustic,....} property of..." In this way, the researchers who really know what they are doing will, sooner or later, discover they are trapped in my patent mine field. It can really kill innovation.
>>Think of the Long March, think of the Cultural Revolution, >>think of routine forced migration... It all resembles slavery much more Modern China is not at all perfect. But, the quoted historical facts are not really relevant "evidences", which may have little similarity between them.
First of all, the Long March is the retreat of early Communist in the 1930's after defeat by the ruling Nationalist party by the time. (c.f. I don't think you would describe the forced retreat French and British troop in WW2 through Dunkirk as an evidence that the Allies) Cultural Revolution is a period of civil unrest (ananchy) a bit similar to the chaos after the French Revolution. After stirred up by someone high up in the party (Gang of Four/ Chairman Mao), grass root supporters want to root out any remaining "counter revolutionary element". Many participants were teens (the Red Guards) and not necessary member of the communist party. Leading communist party officiers Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping and countless middle/local officers were targets of the attacks. The country had no structure in the middle by the time. It was nothing like a gang of evil communist party member went around the country to capture people as many outsiders tend to believe...
>>think of mass imprisonment into factories ummm.... it was really bad. How bad? As bad as the condition of most highly industrialised nations in their infancy. The workers can come and go, can take another job. No one forces you to work. You just simply have to accept the low wage and long hour to support your living. But, please tell me how different is that from the early industralisation history of say, Great Britain and United States? Again it is not good, but seems to be a bit off from the description of slavery...
The requirement for the cybercafe to register is pretty unrelated to censorship... Cybercafe in China also serves as a kind of night time youth entertainment center. Fire and physical security means that it has to be inspected and maintained to a standard comparable to say, cinema or restaurant. Many still remembers one of the big cybercafe fire that killed more than 20 young people in Beijing a few years ago, which triggered the audit for the condition of cybercafes... http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/2053 735.stm
However, the need to register the access with ID number is another matter...
Nothing in the internet is censored by Hong Kong government. What you can see/hear/watch in US/Europe/Japan across internet is available in Hong Kong. It is complete separated from the mainland China Great Firewall. There is really not much point to test whether a site is accessible from Hong Kong...
Monsanto always make me thing of the moneylender in the Merchant of Venice: The moneylender can take one pound of flesh without blood or hair, from the borrower. Similarly, Monsanto should be able to the protect its magic gene, but not anything more.
If they can enforce their IP just to that gene but not anything else go for it. They are overly greedy and ignore (or forget) the fact that 99.99999% of the plant is contributed by the mother nature and generations of farmers who adopt the selective breeding technique (keep only the seed from a good and strong plant). To me it is a bit like adding a proprietary extension to Linux and claim the whole lot belong to yours. So sad that God forgets to sign GPL with Man;)
>>PCs will work fine for quite a while even with >>metal filings and rat piss in them.
That's probably true. I got a summer job once upon a time in a backyard ceramics factory. The boss discovered a nest of ants living inside his PC... We had an extended tea break when the boss flea-bombed the machine... Apparantly, it still worked fine all the way thru.
Get a cheap PC, dump that to a 55 gallon drum, punch a few holes for the cables to come out, pour lubricant oil to the cover the PC and cross your finger...
It means to be a joke initially, but, other than the possiblity of eatting away the plastics, I suddenly think it may work.
The idea is not bad. But, giving out to "selected" tourists is problematic. First, it will upset some of the tourist... For example, backpackers are not all potential thieves. Neither do people with specific skin color/ race. But, we are fairly sure these are the factors when determining whether to lend the PDA to that particular traveller. Second, you will never know whehter the info containing inside is sufficient. If not so, you may consider, say buy an electronic map in advance. Third, when do you do the plaining of the trip.
So, why don't they just give out free software for download on the web. It can probably solve all the above problems.
One thing that amuses me is sites that include the MD5 checksum on the download page. Yes, because if someone got in and changed the tarball, they sure wouldn't even bother updating that MD5 string at the same time!;)
It is for another usage. I occasionally download big packages (knoppix iso, just released kernel etc) from bt. To verify I am in fact downloading something original, I go back to the main site to check the md5sum. The assumption is I trust the main site but not p2p.... Anyway, the main sites do get hit by cracker sometimes.... But, once some guys discover that the news will appear in slashdot...
Unauthorised software copying (I hate the term "pirating". We don't even call the scum robbing old lady in gunpoint a pirate...) also affects gaming industry... But, it is more like market differentiation.
As a forever student, ie. someone in grad school, you will have some interesting obseravtion. Most of the game freeloaders in fact buy legal game copies once they get a real job. The reason is they would rather pay a bit of money to avoid the hassle of searching/ virus scanning/ patching the dodgy copy on the web. In addition, they can get into the online service (e.g. gamezone etc) freely . They don't become saints, but just market force in action.
The movie bosses are really retarded in terms of pricing policy. They still have the 1960 mind set. At that time, movie was one of the main form of entertainment for city dwellers. Nowadays, going to the movie theater is an annoying experience for many. You fit your free time around the cinema but not the other way round...
>>In particular the majority of their CD players >>have long-term issues Good on you, pal... It is not too bad if the unit can last sufficiently long such that you can see the "long term issue". A guy that I know was not so lucky. He sells computers. At about 1998, when Samsung was still considered as an inferior company, some distributor told him that it was possible to supply him with Sony CD drives at the price just slightly highly higher than the Samsung ones. He accepted the deal, assembled a white-box machine featuring the use of "high quality" Sony CD-ROM, ran promotions on local newspaper , yada yada...
In the next few weeks, he encountered one of the most humilating moment in his career. The return rate of due to broken CDROM was close to 40%! He had to cut the promotion short, dealed with frustrated customers etc... Needless to say, he did not touch Sony CDROM anymore.
I guess the Sony DVD-Writers are now "better". Why? They are just Lite-On drives selling for 25+% more. For example, Sony DRU-710A is Lite-On SOHW-1633S, Lite-On now makes all the burners for Sony. No wonder... I got mine Lite-On SOHW-1653S (next version up) for NZD140, my friend got his Sony DRU-710A for NZD175, at the same shop at the same time...
Not really. Skip forward makes sense in many cases.
I am a regular listener of the RTHK radio archive (a Hong Kong government funded radio station). The subscription is free. The audio clip contains the news, government ad (like don't throw rubblish blahblah) and the radio show itself... Not one bothers to cut the junk out. In a typical 2-hr session, 20-25 mins are news and other junk... It is just odd and a waste of time sit still and listen to "news" several months or even years ago...
DOS sounds better than Linux to a lot of customer. I have heard something older folks refer Win95 as DOS7.0, and Win2k as Dos8.0... The shop assistant can probably use the same tactic.
Just like desktop machine bundled with OpenOffice... Many smaller shops prefer the following wording:
*FREE Office Productivity Suite -- OpenOffice 1.0 ... Now they can use
*Preload with MS compatible DOS operating system -- FreeDOS x.x
The reason is because US has now stepped outside the shadow of the Civil War. Separatist movement is not an immedidate concern for US either. Imagine what would happen if you were raising the confederate flag in one of the North states at Lincoln's time....
You may think the Chinese are crazy and the Chinese Government is over-reaction. Mind you, even until today, a lot of the territory claim are based on maps printed centuries ago. If you allow those printed materials to circulate under your jurisdiction, you give your rival credit for the claim.
The other example is the so called "Sea of Japan". In the 1919 meeting of the International Hydrographic Bureau, the Japan proposed the international body to change the name of the sea between Korea and Japan to "Sea of Japan". Formerly known as "Sea of Corea" or "East Sea". At that time, Korea was annexed by the imperialist Japanese army... Now, the Koreans (both North and South) want to change the name back and encountered resistance....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispute_over_the_na me _of_the_Sea_of_Japan
In New Zealand, it was a true story. A survey for the call centre managers highlights the written communication problem.
Many front line call centre operators are high school dropouts. English is their mother tongue. Conversational English is not at all a problem for them. However, written English is another story. Many operators are scared to reply emails exactly because of this reason....
In addition, a lot of the sites are overdone with the flash ads... I am on a Celeron 566. A bit old but today's standard, but hey.... A news site that I often visit suddenly become very very slow (100% CPU load)... I have 384 MB of RAM, running Linux... I don't think JVM will need that much of RAM, neither do the rest of the apps... I suspected my latest sync to Firefox went wrong...
But, at the end, I figure that may be the Flash Ads... Every single ad come with the new site runs Flash (for no good reasons)... They have included an especially bad one recently and keep my browser... Thanks for FlashBlock. I no longer need to see any of them... Running excessively too much Flash means none will be visualised by me anymore.
The cyberport is pretty meaningless to me. There may be a need of better connected building for IT companies... But, the value added is minimal.
In my opinion, the Hongkong Science Park is probably a smarter idea. I have friends working over there (IC design). Many firms are small start-up. Usually the access to top end equipments and chip design software are the main obstacle to them. The science park bought a bunch of tools and hire to them. In terms of software, the startups only need to drop a fiber cable to the main server room and billed by the hourly usage. The main difference is the boss... The chief of the Science Park was the local Motorola semiconductor director. Apparently, he knows what he is doing...
To promote Linux anywhere in the world, I feel the resistance from the parents is one of the big concern. Many will complain if they find their children are learning some useless subject, like, non-MS related computer course.
It is especially relevant for IBM. If they want to create future headache for MS, develop a good set of teaching resources, which can be delivered through Linux. It should be relatively easy to include typing tutor program (localised version), basic word processing (openoffice), internet browser, programming tools matched to the course to an iso... The teachers will love the idea.
It may not be that expensive to say, IBM. But, the schools can have a big company to lean on and the parents will feel much better.
The GM claim for car design theft sounds like FUD to me. The following is what I cut directly from the linked article. "But the Spark design, which GM obtained in its 2002 acquisition of South Korea's former Daewoo Motor Sales Corp., was never patented in China and thus isn't protected by China's intellectual property laws"... In addition, other than similar exterior look GM does not provide much evidence for copying. Most cars in the lower end of the market look similar anyway. It sounds like GM's FUD to me...
Remember the infamous GIF patent. Unisys has filed patent only in US, Japan, Canada, Germany, France, Britain and Italy. The above case was like Unisys boss cry foul for the use of unlicenced GIF tools by Scandinavian/ Australian/ New Zealander.
Yeah.... Ballmer has some ego problem... I guess the most spammed man number 2 in the world is George Bush or whoever be the US president at the time... Since Bill Gates is always Bill Gates, he accumulates all those crap through the years. The US president a/c probably gets a bit of rotation....
Slashdot Mirror
Most Chinese believe that our civilisation today can be dated back to 4000-5000 years. Written character was invented and preserved since Shang Dynasty (about 2000BC). But, the historical records were a bit sketchy. Starting from Zhou Dynasty (1040 B.C), the records were much more concrete.
e nt_china/zhou.html
>>given the size of the landmass were likely to be linguistically, culturally
>>and ethnically diverse.If you call that kind of entity a society contiguous >>with unified China, then you might as well call pre-historic Europe a society >>contiguous with the Roman
In Zhou Dynasty, there was a single ruling family. The powerful states were supposed to be governed on behalf of the figurehead king. Actually, Confucianism and Taoism were developed in that period. Judging from the fact that the leading scholar of the time can travel around the different states to teach is a strong indication that they share the same language. In fact, educated people today can still read the same text. There was a consensus about who were the "barbarians" at that time. The people in those rivaling states were not classified as the barbarians. Because of these reasons, at least the Zhou dynasty should be marked as the start of the Chinese civilisation, as we see now.
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/prehistory/china/anci
The unification in 221 BC by Qin Dynasty merely marked the established the first empire, which started to centralise the power back to a single ruler.
One more piece of trivia: the cover page woodcut animals featuring in front of the OReilly books are from the Dover Pictorial Archives. It is a collection of 18th to 19th century wood and copperplate engravings of animals, ie no copyright issue to care about... In fact, the students in my former research group get used to choose one from the archive as well as a decoration for their own thesis. Many university/art school libraries have that collection. Feel free to use them when need a drawing of some cute animal.
http://www.oreilly.com/news/lejeune_0400.html
It sets dangerous example for blanketing patent. While this anti-gravity device breaks all the existing research finding and most likely be fake, the fact that you can patent something without doing much can the nasty blanketing strategy to work.
....} property of..." In this way, the researchers who really know what they are doing will, sooner or later, discover they are trapped in my patent mine field. It can really kill innovation.
For example, nano-device nowadays are largely built up from carbon and silicon. I have no background in such area. But, I know that there are only finite number of elements. Then, I can create vague patent along the line of "manipulate the strong, weak, electromagnetic forces in between {arsenic, sulfur, indium, whateverium} to create small-scale device which improve the {mechanical, electrical, acoustic,
>>Think of the Long March, think of the Cultural Revolution,
>>think of routine forced migration... It all resembles slavery much more
Modern China is not at all perfect. But, the quoted historical facts are not really relevant "evidences", which may have little similarity between them.
First of all, the Long March is the retreat of early Communist in the 1930's after defeat by the ruling Nationalist party by the time. (c.f. I don't think you would describe the forced retreat French and British troop in WW2 through Dunkirk as an evidence that the Allies) Cultural Revolution is a period of civil unrest (ananchy) a bit similar to the chaos after the French Revolution. After stirred up by someone high up in the party (Gang of Four/ Chairman Mao), grass root supporters want to root out any remaining "counter revolutionary element". Many participants were teens (the Red Guards) and not necessary member of the communist party. Leading communist party officiers Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping and countless middle/local officers were targets of the attacks. The country had no structure in the middle by the time. It was nothing like a gang of evil communist party member went around the country to capture people as many outsiders tend to believe...
>>think of mass imprisonment into factories
ummm.... it was really bad. How bad? As bad as the condition of most highly industrialised nations in their infancy. The workers can come and go, can take another job. No one forces you to work. You just simply have to accept the low wage and long hour to support your living. But, please tell me how different is that from the early industralisation history of say, Great Britain and United States? Again it is not good, but seems to be a bit off from the description of slavery...
Owning an IP in a company is not at all a problem. Procedure:
....
:p
1. locate your sys admin
2. bribe him with beer/ whiskey/ chocolate fish
3. have your MAC address ready
4. your own static IP
5.
6. profit
Oh, we are talking about another type of IP here
Forget step 1,3,4,5,6 then.
The requirement for the cybercafe to register is pretty unrelated to censorship... Cybercafe in China also serves as a kind of night time youth entertainment center. Fire and physical security means that it has to be inspected and maintained to a standard comparable to say, cinema or restaurant. Many still remembers one of the big cybercafe fire that killed more than 20 young people in Beijing a few years ago, which triggered the audit for the condition of cybercafes...3 735.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/205
However, the need to register the access with ID number is another matter...
Another question: how do they stop the participants from trying to take advantage of wind, ie turn a solar car competition, to sail car competition?
Nothing in the internet is censored by Hong Kong government. What you can see/hear/watch in US/Europe/Japan across internet is available in Hong Kong. It is complete separated from the mainland China Great Firewall. There is really not much point to test whether a site is accessible from Hong Kong...
Monsanto always make me thing of the moneylender in the Merchant of Venice:
;)
The moneylender can take one pound of flesh without blood or hair, from the borrower.
Similarly, Monsanto should be able to the protect its magic gene, but not anything more.
If they can enforce their IP just to that gene but not anything else go for it. They are overly greedy and ignore (or forget) the fact that 99.99999% of the plant is contributed by the mother nature and generations of farmers who adopt the selective breeding technique (keep only the seed from a good and strong plant). To me it is a bit like adding a proprietary extension to Linux and claim the whole lot belong to yours. So sad that God forgets to sign GPL with Man
>>PCs will work fine for quite a while even with >>metal filings and rat piss in them.
That's probably true. I got a summer job once upon a time in a backyard ceramics factory. The boss discovered a nest of ants living inside his PC... We had an extended tea break when the boss flea-bombed the machine... Apparantly, it still worked fine all the way thru.
Get a cheap PC, dump that to a 55 gallon drum, punch a few holes for the cables to come out, pour lubricant oil to the cover the PC and cross your finger...
It means to be a joke initially, but, other than the possiblity of eatting away the plastics, I suddenly think it may work.
The idea is not bad. But, giving out to "selected" tourists is problematic. First, it will upset some of the tourist... For example, backpackers are not all potential thieves. Neither do people with specific skin color/ race. But, we are fairly sure these are the factors when determining whether to lend the PDA to that particular traveller. Second, you will never know whehter the info containing inside is sufficient. If not so, you may consider, say buy an electronic map in advance. Third, when do you do the plaining of the trip.
So, why don't they just give out free software for download on the web. It can probably solve all the above problems.
It is for another usage. I occasionally download big packages (knoppix iso, just released kernel etc) from bt. To verify I am in fact downloading something original, I go back to the main site to check the md5sum. The assumption is I trust the main site but not p2p.... Anyway, the main sites do get hit by cracker sometimes.... But, once some guys discover that the news will appear in slashdot
Unauthorised software copying (I hate the term "pirating". We don't even call the scum robbing old lady in gunpoint a pirate...) also affects gaming industry... But, it is more like market differentiation.
As a forever student, ie. someone in grad school, you will have some interesting obseravtion. Most of the game freeloaders in fact buy legal game copies once they get a real job. The reason is they would rather pay a bit of money to avoid the hassle of searching/ virus scanning/ patching the dodgy copy on the web. In addition, they can get into the online service (e.g. gamezone etc) freely . They don't become saints, but just market force in action.
The movie bosses are really retarded in terms of pricing policy. They still have the 1960 mind set. At that time, movie was one of the main form of entertainment for city dwellers. Nowadays, going to the movie theater is an annoying experience for many. You fit your free time around the cinema but not the other way round...
>>In particular the majority of their CD players >>have long-term issues
Good on you, pal... It is not too bad if the unit can last sufficiently long such that you can see the "long term issue". A guy that I know was not so lucky. He sells computers. At about 1998, when Samsung was still considered as an inferior company, some distributor told him that it was possible to supply him with Sony CD drives at the price just slightly highly higher than the Samsung ones. He accepted the deal, assembled a white-box machine featuring the use of "high quality" Sony CD-ROM, ran promotions on local newspaper , yada yada...
In the next few weeks, he encountered one of the most humilating moment in his career. The return rate of due to broken CDROM was close to 40%! He had to cut the promotion short, dealed with frustrated customers etc... Needless to say, he did not touch Sony CDROM anymore.
I guess the Sony DVD-Writers are now "better". Why? They are just Lite-On drives selling for 25+% more. For example, Sony DRU-710A is Lite-On SOHW-1633S, Lite-On now makes all the burners for Sony. No wonder... I got mine Lite-On SOHW-1653S (next version up) for NZD140, my friend got his Sony DRU-710A for NZD175, at the same shop at the same time...
Not really. Skip forward makes sense in many cases.
I am a regular listener of the RTHK radio archive (a Hong Kong government funded radio station). The subscription is free. The audio clip contains the news, government ad (like don't throw rubblish blahblah) and the radio show itself... Not one bothers to cut the junk out. In a typical 2-hr session, 20-25 mins are news and other junk... It is just odd and a waste of time sit still and listen to "news" several months or even years ago...
Just like desktop machine bundled with OpenOffice... Many smaller shops prefer the following wording:
*FREE Office Productivity Suite -- OpenOffice 1.0 ... Now they can use
*Preload with MS compatible DOS operating system -- FreeDOS x.x
The reason is because US has now stepped outside the shadow of the Civil War. Separatist movement is not an immedidate concern for US either.
Imagine what would happen if you were raising the confederate flag in one of the North states at Lincoln's time....
You may think the Chinese are crazy and the Chinese Government is over-reaction. Mind you, even until today, a lot of the territory claim are based on maps printed centuries ago. If you allow those printed materials to circulate under your jurisdiction, you give your rival credit for the claim.
The other example is the so called "Sea of Japan". In the 1919 meeting of the International Hydrographic Bureau, the Japan proposed the international body to change the name of the sea between Korea and Japan to "Sea of Japan". Formerly known as "Sea of Corea" or "East Sea". At that time, Korea was annexed by the imperialist Japanese army... Now, the Koreans (both North and South) want to change the name back and encountered resistance....
a me _of_the_Sea_of_Japan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispute_over_the_n
In New Zealand, it was a true story. A survey for the call centre managers highlights the written communication problem.
Many front line call centre operators are high school dropouts. English is their mother tongue. Conversational English is not at all a problem for them. However, written English is another story. Many operators are scared to reply emails exactly because of this reason....
In addition, a lot of the sites are overdone with the flash ads... I am on a Celeron 566. A bit old but today's standard, but hey.... A news site that I often visit suddenly become very very slow (100% CPU load)... I have 384 MB of RAM, running Linux... I don't think JVM will need that much of RAM, neither do the rest of the apps... I suspected my latest sync to Firefox went wrong...
But, at the end, I figure that may be the Flash Ads... Every single ad come with the new site runs Flash (for no good reasons)... They have included an especially bad one recently and keep my browser... Thanks for FlashBlock. I no longer need to see any of them... Running excessively too much Flash means none will be visualised by me anymore.
The cyberport is pretty meaningless to me. There may be a need of better connected building for IT companies... But, the value added is minimal.
In my opinion, the Hongkong Science Park is probably a smarter idea. I have friends working over there (IC design). Many firms are small start-up. Usually the access to top end equipments and chip design software are the main obstacle to them. The science park bought a bunch of tools and hire to them. In terms of software, the startups only need to drop a fiber cable to the main server room and billed by the hourly usage. The main difference is the boss... The chief of the Science Park was the local Motorola semiconductor director. Apparently, he knows what he is doing...
To promote Linux anywhere in the world, I feel the resistance from the parents is one of the big concern. Many will complain if they find their children are learning some useless subject, like, non-MS related computer course.
It is especially relevant for IBM. If they want to create future headache for MS, develop a good set of teaching resources, which can be delivered through Linux. It should be relatively easy to include typing tutor program (localised version), basic word processing (openoffice), internet browser, programming tools matched to the course to an iso... The teachers will love the idea.
It may not be that expensive to say, IBM. But, the schools can have a big company to lean on and the parents will feel much better.
The GM claim for car design theft sounds like FUD to me. The following is what I cut directly from the linked article. "But the Spark design, which GM obtained in its 2002 acquisition of South Korea's former Daewoo Motor Sales Corp., was never patented in China and thus isn't protected by China's intellectual property laws"... In addition, other than similar exterior look GM does not provide much evidence for copying. Most cars in the lower end of the market look similar anyway. It sounds like GM's FUD to me...
Remember the infamous GIF patent. Unisys has filed patent only in US, Japan, Canada, Germany, France, Britain and Italy. The above case was like Unisys boss cry foul for the use of unlicenced GIF tools by Scandinavian/ Australian/ New Zealander.
Yeah.... Ballmer has some ego problem... I guess the most spammed man number 2 in the world is George Bush or whoever be the US president at the time... Since Bill Gates is always Bill Gates, he accumulates all those crap through the years. The US president a/c probably gets a bit of rotation....