From the Gates article: The front line of defense against such sophisticated viruses is a continually evolving computer-operating system that attracts the efforts of eager software developers, Gates said.
That relationship would suffer because the Justice Department's proposal for breaking up the company would result in fewer innovations of Windows programs, he said.
The breakup order also would end improvements to the Internet software in Windows and cripple company efforts to develop a write-on tablet that allows notes to be transferred seamlessly to a personal computer, Gates said.
"The benefits of developing operating systems and applications software under the same roof will increase as new intelligent devices emerge over the next few years," he said.
Having read that, I understand Microsoft a lot more. It is hard for a company to consistently spout the same lies and ignore reality as consistently as they have--unless they don't think they're lying.
Microsoft doesn't see themselves as megalomaniacs trying to take over the world. They are here to help us.
Microsoft believes that the single worst thing in software today is chaos and incompatibility. They are trying their best to save us from it, and these damned Government nincompoops are getting in the way!
My honest belief is that Microsoft truly believes that the way to provide the best user experience is for one company to provide a unified suite of products, untainted by those of other vendors. They, of course, are in the position to do just that, providing that the government get off their backs and pesky competitors such as Linux, Netscape, and Java stop polluting the computing environment.
They believe the Devo quote: "Freedom of choice is what you've got. Freedom from choice is what you want."
To Microsoft, this isn't about billions of dollars. This isn't about market share, though market share is the best measure of how they are doing. This is completely altruistic, and is about giving the end user the best possible computing experience.
This sounds patently ludicrous to the open source/free software crowd that hangs around Slashdot. Here, the general belief is that open standards is all you need, and that competing implementations of these standards will provide better software. Unity of software is less important than technical excellence among Slashdotters.
The above may explain Microsoft's near-religious bullheadedness, and why Bill simply can't understand why so many people think that he is the Antichrist. We're starting from absolutely different base assumptions, and have completely different goals, and we both think that we are doing what is best for computing as a whole.
Personally, I think that he is reaching for quite laudable goals with entirely the wrong tools.
All joking aside, there are a lot of messy environments where you can stick the monitor in an enclosure and leave a keyboard out that you can hose down at the end of the day.
Ever see those terminals where you get your oil changed? If those things resist 10W30, they're worth the money. Manufacturing, auto service, and maritime uses abound.
A lot of people have given a lot of technical reasons for not choosing Ada. However, I think that there is one, larger reason for this. Ada has been considered beneath contempt by most geeks since before most geeks were coding. It's one of those things that we are supposed to hate as a matter of culture. I've read a bunch of stuff about how it is built by committee with all the problems thereof, but I've never actually seen it, and I can count on one hand the number of people I know who have used it.
If you don't hate Ada and COBOL, you get shunned by hackerdom. You are allowed to code in either, but must swear loudly while doing so. People who actually choose to generally get discounted as idiots.
I'm not saying that the above is right, but only that the above is so.
Microsoft, as far as I know, never sues anyone. (excluding matters of piracy, of course.) Oh, they wage bloody and violent wars in the marketplace, but never have I seen them go to the courts and say, "Stop ABC Widgetsoft from doing that!"
Stac vs. Microsoft, and then the countersuit Microsoft vs. Stac.
Stac figured out a way to compress and decompress a FAT filesystem on-the-fly. Thus, you could effectively double your hard drive capacity. They sold this as a DOS utility called Stacker.
Microsoft put this technology into DOS 6. Unfortunately, they didn't bother to ask Stac permission first. They just stole Stacker and used it. The Stac Vs. Microsoft suit caused them to pull it back out (they eventually built their own disc-compression logic and put that back in).
Microsoft then proceeded to sue Stac for using "undocumented DOS calls". Never mind that these APIs were documented by third parties and you could go down to your bookstore and get it, and never mind that these were the same calls that make any useful program possible in DOS; Microsoft realized that their legal budget exceeded Stac's grosses and sued their asses for deigning to complain about Microsoft stealing their code.
I don't trust Microsoft with a plastic spoon, much less a patent. Now you know why.
These are defensive patents. Because, believe it or not, there are companies worse than Microsoft. There are companies who have produced nothing, yet patent the most mundane obvious thing and sue like hell.
Maybe they are defensive patents. Maybe they are offensive patents. Only time will tell. Patents are like guns; they can be used to defend or destroy.
Given Microsoft's track record in general, I think at least some skepticism and even preparation is in order. When a bank robber picks up a handgun, it may just be defensive. But I'm going to run for the nearest cover, and a good cop will level his own piece at the man and tell him to drop it.
Microsoft doesn't try to win by being the fastest runner. It tries to win by being the last man standing. When it picks up a patent, any patent, I don't expect that it is going to play nice with it.
I've used a couple of flavors of SCO Unix. Frankly, I was less than impressed. However, they have a well-oiled business machine and a lot of channels to sell this stuff. The geeks laugh, and the suits buy.
So far, SCO has been scared to death of Linux. I've been to a VAR conference in the mid '90's where the quote was "Linux? Linux? Linux is for people who want their tech support from Finland!". A year or so back, one of their officers railed against Red Hat's fraudulent business model ("they're selling you an OS that they don't own!").
They don't have to be scared anymore. They can ride this train all the way to the bank, and unseat Red Hat besides.
Here's the plan. Start by making SCO Unix Linux-compatible. That is, put a patch into SCO to allow it to run Linux x86 binaries, and then release a copylefted patch to allow Linux boxen to run SCO binaries. Then, start merging their source with that of their favorite distro, with the goal of making a true SCO Linux/Unix (they own the Unix trademark, no?). The SCO distro, with a lot of basis in SCO code, will have been built from the ground up to be server use, not home use. SCO Linux will be industrial-strength Linux.
SCO takes on the business plan of any distro. But (and this is the biggie), they have more employee-centuries experience selling it, employee-centuries building it, and a bigger intercorporate distribution network than any two Linux distributions put together. Finally, they have corporate trust. From the suit perspective: why buy a support contract from those hippie-dudes at your average Linux distro when you can deal with the suits at SCO Linux?
SCO makes money increasing their market share (though losing in licensing fees), they free up their development army to do support (since most of the fixes come from the outside when you're a Linux distro), the suits sleep easy with the SCO reputation behind their purchase, and the geeks get a platform with all the advantages of Linux plus SCO's own extras regarding industrial strength use. Everybody goes home happy.
You're right; it isn't legal. But people think it's legal. And the relevant laws can be made to sound mumble-jumble enough that it only takes several million dollars worth of legal talent to convince a dozen of our peers that it is legal.
Einsteinean physics don't really become visible until you get around 90% of the speed of light (0.9 C). If you accelerate at 1G for the better part of a year (acceleration at 1G is quite useful, if you have huge amounts of fuel and reaction mass but no artificial gravity) to get to 0.9C.
Basically, the speed of light is around 300,000,000 meters per second. The acceleration of one gee of gravity is 9.8 meters per second squared (call it 10). So to get up to 0.9 C, accelerate at 10 M/sec^2 until you get to 270,000,000 M/sec.
Do the math, and this takes 27,000,000 seconds, which is 312.5 days.
Now, assuming that you are running this on Windows, your universe will CRASH before you get relativistic effects;^>
All corporations have a will, which reads roughly: we pay off our creditors first, then sell off all our assets and distribute that to our shareholders.
This would be straightforward with other corporations, but a bit tricky with Microsoft. Microsoft's biggest assets are the copyrights to Windows * and Office *, and it's those assets that we're scared of. If J. Random Software House bought these copyrights at auction, would they become the next Microsoft?
Axial movements progress down a rod at the speed of sound in that rod. Effectively, you have a little sonic shockwave going down the rod: the particles where you push bump into particles down the line, bump into others, etc. While a really stiff rod may have a speed of sound much higher than the 7?? MPH of sound in air, you can't get matter stiff enough to have a superluminal speed of sound.
There are a few discussions here suggesting that, were MS to be broken up, the pieces would merely ally with themselves. This, of course, would be patently illegal itself as part of the ruling. The problem is: that hasn't stopped them before, why should it now? Remember, this trial is about a contempt of court proceeding; Microsoft is guilty of disobeying a court order. There is no reason to believe that another court order, of any sort (even a breakup) will resolve the issues.
The real question to me is: what do you do with a rogue corporation? Microsoft's monopoly doesn't scare me half as much as their total disrespect for the law. The government can fine you and I, and throw our collective butts in jail, for committing crimes. They can't fine Microsoft enough to make them feel the pain, and they can't really incarcerate them.
I don't believe in the death penalty for people, but I do believe in it for corporations--less bloodshed. The courts need the rights to do real damage to a company, possibly pulling their papers of incorporation or simply denying them access to stock markets such as the NASDAQ. Remember, these are govenrment-granted priveleges, not inherent rights (corporations have no inherent rights; no matter what the Supreme Court says, they are not people).
I don't suggest that the courts try to do either to Microsoft...yet. However, I do believe that the courts need this sort of power, to be used only in the most extreme of circumstances, in order to give their rulings teeth.
I am not a fan of giving a lot of power to a government. However, I do believe that the government must have the power to trump a corporation. Otherwise, the Bill of Rights may one day become a EULA.
Legally, telemarketing and spamvertising are two seperate issues. The issue is one of payment.
In telemarketing, the advertiser contacts you over the telephone. They, not you, pay for the call. While there are regulations against this, part of the control mechanism for this sort of thing is that the advertiser has to pay for it.
Spam, however, is a neat little thing. Email costs more for the recipient than for the sender, because it's on the hard drive of the recipient (or their ISP) for longer than on the drive of the sender. Basically, they're advertising to you on your dime. Even if you don't pay per MB or per email (who does, today?), the costs of spam are incurred by your ISP. One way or another, you are going to pay for the service of having an average of fifteen MAKE MONEY FAST WITH FREE PR0N messages in your mail queue at any given time.
This is why people started equating email with, of all things, fax machines. There are Federal restrictions on unsolicited fax transmissions, again on the principle of "you don't advertise on the customer's dime". While the long-distance charge on such a call is small (they are short calls), the recipient is paying for paper and ink. Amusingly, the legal definition of a fax machine fit the PC pretty well. So much for the fine print.
One of the big problems with Max Headroom was Max Headroom. That is, the show was killed by the character.
The reason that the show is tied to the character is that the two-hour pilot was written in order to create an origin for the character of Max Headroom. Other than that, the show could have avoided Max, been retitled "Edison Carter, Twenty Minutes Into the Future", and marketed as a real cyberpunk show.
Instead, the first thing you know is that it's a show with Max Headroom in it, and this implies a lighthearted, silly sort of show. While there was certainly a lot of humor in the show, it was really cyberpunk: dark and brooding. Its target audience was probably seventeen year old males.
But, since it was a "Max Headroom" show, its actual audience was nine year old kids. They couldn't appreciated it, and many of us who could appreciate it were turned off by the title character.
I'm suggesting that the FSF, while still a non-profit, could enter the same business model as some of the for-profit (profitable?) companies out there. While they wouldn't be allowed to show a profit, they could easily handle that by plowing such profits into more development, or throwing money at outfits to do same ("Here's some money...can you get Gnome to do this neat little thing?").
I do understand that you can avoid the heavy distribution charges. My point is that an organization that relies on donations and escapable fees is likely to be forever cash-strapped. I assume that neither RMS nor the FSF are opposed to money per se, only the use of software licenses.
My suggestion, and IANA businessman, is that FSF consultancy might be a way to get more money into the FSF, which would in turn allow them to produce more free software faster. Why ask for money when you can sell stuff (consultant services) without compromising your morals?
Currently, free software can be effectively turned into proprietary software by ASPs. (Or is this not true? If so, I'm pretty sure a lot of people misunderstand the GPL, and could use some clarification.)
My take:
An ASP can take free software, host it on their machine, and charge you to run it on their system. They aren't charging a license fee, they are giving a service charge, literally charging you for CPU-seconds. ASPs don't distribute code any more than taxi companies distribute cars.
If they make changes, they can distribute it (under the GPL), but they don't have to. Remember that you can do all sorts of mean nasty secret things to the code in your hands; you only have to worry about GPL restrictions when you distribute it.
What's happening is superheating. Water can be heated beyond 100 Centigrade without boiling if it is still enough that there is no specific "hot spot". Under normal heating, this doesn't happen because the flame or element creates hot spots. Microwave ovens heat so evenly that hot spots rarely occur. Once there is an irregularity in the water (like something breaking surface tension), it starts boiling. If the water is too overheated, it starts boiling dangerously.
It's a case of unstable equilibrium. Imagine a ball on the top of a hill. It is ready to roll, but has no direction to roll in. The slightest disturbance, however, will get it rolling.
Moral to the story: use less time on your microwave--you don't want the water to be superheated!
The success of such ventures as Red Hat and Cygnus imply that there is a valid business model in providing support for free software. The FSF, however, still charges heavily for software distributions (not licenses, obviously) and asks for donations.
Why not go into the business of funding GNU development with GNU consulting fees? While you probably wouldn't want to become a full for-profit center (imagine all the back taxes!), I'm certain that any excess revenue could be plowed into something useful.
Okay, so they argue that Open Source Software isn't perfectly secure. Very little is. I see no argument that Closed Source Software is any more secure. And this implies...?
Often, a "service entrance" is needed, a way to access your software when you lose your primary access credentials (like, say, you forget the root password). The term "back door" implies a service entrance accessed by knowing a secret that is common across all machines. If we run the same type of system, we have the same back door. This spells doom for truly secure systems, since such secrets get leaked often.
Secrets get leaked at a rate proportional to both the number of people who know it and the value of the secret. In the MS case, the secret is potentially known by several thousand MS employees with source code access, and the value of the secret is incredible, since it allows access to thousands if not millions of Web servers. In contrast, passwords rarely leak because they are known by only one person and can only be used to attack one site.
To handle the case of getting locked out of your own system, you use a well-documented, well-protected service entrance. A perfect example is the OS itself, be it NT, Unix, or whatever.
If you lock yourself out of your OS (lost the root password or something), the service entrance is to boot from CD or floppy, which gives you superuser priveleges and allows you to change the superuser password(s). The security of the service entrance is due to teh fact that said devices are physically connected to the machine. That is, you need physical control of the machine, the ability to touch the case, before you can exploit this. And if such a machine needs to be secure, the competent admin will put it under lock and key. We can't protect you against incompetent admins.
If the system you are locked out of is an application rather than an OS, you can build a service entrance that requires superuser priveleges. Since you can always gain superuser priveleges with physical access (see above), no back door is needed.
Maybe outcasts is the wrong word, but that depends on which dictionary you read. There are many historical examples of a small minority oppressing a majority in such a way that it's only considered worth it to be in the minority group: effectively, the majority are outcasts.
Three examples that come right to mind are whites/blacks during Apartheid, nobles/commoners through medieval Europe, and old-timers/AOL users in the mid '90's.
Slashdot Mirror
That relationship would suffer because the Justice Department's proposal for breaking up the company would result in fewer innovations of Windows programs, he said.
The breakup order also would end improvements to the Internet software in Windows and cripple company efforts to develop a write-on tablet that allows notes to be transferred seamlessly to a personal computer, Gates said.
"The benefits of developing operating systems and applications software under the same roof will increase as new intelligent devices emerge over the next few years," he said.
Having read that, I understand Microsoft a lot more. It is hard for a company to consistently spout the same lies and ignore reality as consistently as they have--unless they don't think they're lying.
Microsoft doesn't see themselves as megalomaniacs trying to take over the world. They are here to help us.
Microsoft believes that the single worst thing in software today is chaos and incompatibility. They are trying their best to save us from it, and these damned Government nincompoops are getting in the way!
My honest belief is that Microsoft truly believes that the way to provide the best user experience is for one company to provide a unified suite of products, untainted by those of other vendors. They, of course, are in the position to do just that, providing that the government get off their backs and pesky competitors such as Linux, Netscape, and Java stop polluting the computing environment.
They believe the Devo quote: "Freedom of choice is what you've got. Freedom from choice is what you want."
To Microsoft, this isn't about billions of dollars. This isn't about market share, though market share is the best measure of how they are doing. This is completely altruistic, and is about giving the end user the best possible computing experience.
This sounds patently ludicrous to the open source/free software crowd that hangs around Slashdot. Here, the general belief is that open standards is all you need, and that competing implementations of these standards will provide better software. Unity of software is less important than technical excellence among Slashdotters.
The above may explain Microsoft's near-religious bullheadedness, and why Bill simply can't understand why so many people think that he is the Antichrist. We're starting from absolutely different base assumptions, and have completely different goals, and we both think that we are doing what is best for computing as a whole.
Personally, I think that he is reaching for quite laudable goals with entirely the wrong tools.
If RSI has a god, it must be one of the Great Old Ones. __ (oO) (It's the Great Old Ones, Charlie Brown!) /||\
Ever see those terminals where you get your oil changed? If those things resist 10W30, they're worth the money. Manufacturing, auto service, and maritime uses abound.
If you don't hate Ada and COBOL, you get shunned by hackerdom. You are allowed to code in either, but must swear loudly while doing so. People who actually choose to generally get discounted as idiots.
I'm not saying that the above is right, but only that the above is so.
Stac vs. Microsoft, and then the countersuit Microsoft vs. Stac.
Stac figured out a way to compress and decompress a FAT filesystem on-the-fly. Thus, you could effectively double your hard drive capacity. They sold this as a DOS utility called Stacker.
Microsoft put this technology into DOS 6. Unfortunately, they didn't bother to ask Stac permission first. They just stole Stacker and used it. The Stac Vs. Microsoft suit caused them to pull it back out (they eventually built their own disc-compression logic and put that back in).
Microsoft then proceeded to sue Stac for using "undocumented DOS calls". Never mind that these APIs were documented by third parties and you could go down to your bookstore and get it, and never mind that these were the same calls that make any useful program possible in DOS; Microsoft realized that their legal budget exceeded Stac's grosses and sued their asses for deigning to complain about Microsoft stealing their code.
I don't trust Microsoft with a plastic spoon, much less a patent. Now you know why.
Maybe they are defensive patents. Maybe they are offensive patents. Only time will tell. Patents are like guns; they can be used to defend or destroy.
Given Microsoft's track record in general, I think at least some skepticism and even preparation is in order. When a bank robber picks up a handgun, it may just be defensive. But I'm going to run for the nearest cover, and a good cop will level his own piece at the man and tell him to drop it.
Microsoft doesn't try to win by being the fastest runner. It tries to win by being the last man standing. When it picks up a patent, any patent, I don't expect that it is going to play nice with it.
So far, SCO has been scared to death of Linux. I've been to a VAR conference in the mid '90's where the quote was "Linux? Linux? Linux is for people who want their tech support from Finland!". A year or so back, one of their officers railed against Red Hat's fraudulent business model ("they're selling you an OS that they don't own!").
They don't have to be scared anymore. They can ride this train all the way to the bank, and unseat Red Hat besides.
Here's the plan. Start by making SCO Unix Linux-compatible. That is, put a patch into SCO to allow it to run Linux x86 binaries, and then release a copylefted patch to allow Linux boxen to run SCO binaries. Then, start merging their source with that of their favorite distro, with the goal of making a true SCO Linux/Unix (they own the Unix trademark, no?). The SCO distro, with a lot of basis in SCO code, will have been built from the ground up to be server use, not home use. SCO Linux will be industrial-strength Linux.
SCO takes on the business plan of any distro. But (and this is the biggie), they have more employee-centuries experience selling it, employee-centuries building it, and a bigger intercorporate distribution network than any two Linux distributions put together. Finally, they have corporate trust. From the suit perspective: why buy a support contract from those hippie-dudes at your average Linux distro when you can deal with the suits at SCO Linux?
SCO makes money increasing their market share (though losing in licensing fees), they free up their development army to do support (since most of the fixes come from the outside when you're a Linux distro), the suits sleep easy with the SCO reputation behind their purchase, and the geeks get a platform with all the advantages of Linux plus SCO's own extras regarding industrial strength use. Everybody goes home happy.
Hey...I wonder how hard MS is getting hit with this? Or are they smart enough not to deploy Outlook over there corporate net?
You're right; it isn't legal. But people think it's legal. And the relevant laws can be made to sound mumble-jumble enough that it only takes several million dollars worth of legal talent to convince a dozen of our peers that it is legal.
Basically, the speed of light is around 300,000,000 meters per second. The acceleration of one gee of gravity is 9.8 meters per second squared (call it 10). So to get up to 0.9 C, accelerate at 10 M/sec^2 until you get to 270,000,000 M/sec.
Do the math, and this takes 27,000,000 seconds, which is 312.5 days.
Now, assuming that you are running this on Windows, your universe will CRASH before you get relativistic effects ;^>
The fact that this was moderated up as "funny" makes sense. The fact that this was moderated down as "flamebait" makes sense, but less so.
The fact that the idea of killing al lthe idiots has two upticks for "insightful" scares me a hell of a lot more than Microsoft does...
All corporations have a will, which reads roughly: we pay off our creditors first, then sell off all our assets and distribute that to our shareholders.
This would be straightforward with other corporations, but a bit tricky with Microsoft. Microsoft's biggest assets are the copyrights to Windows * and Office *, and it's those assets that we're scared of. If J. Random Software House bought these copyrights at auction, would they become the next Microsoft?
Axial movements progress down a rod at the speed of sound in that rod. Effectively, you have a little sonic shockwave going down the rod: the particles where you push bump into particles down the line, bump into others, etc. While a really stiff rod may have a speed of sound much higher than the 7?? MPH of sound in air, you can't get matter stiff enough to have a superluminal speed of sound.
The real question to me is: what do you do with a rogue corporation? Microsoft's monopoly doesn't scare me half as much as their total disrespect for the law. The government can fine you and I, and throw our collective butts in jail, for committing crimes. They can't fine Microsoft enough to make them feel the pain, and they can't really incarcerate them.
I don't believe in the death penalty for people, but I do believe in it for corporations--less bloodshed. The courts need the rights to do real damage to a company, possibly pulling their papers of incorporation or simply denying them access to stock markets such as the NASDAQ. Remember, these are govenrment-granted priveleges, not inherent rights (corporations have no inherent rights; no matter what the Supreme Court says, they are not people).
I don't suggest that the courts try to do either to Microsoft...yet. However, I do believe that the courts need this sort of power, to be used only in the most extreme of circumstances, in order to give their rulings teeth.
I am not a fan of giving a lot of power to a government. However, I do believe that the government must have the power to trump a corporation. Otherwise, the Bill of Rights may one day become a EULA.
In telemarketing, the advertiser contacts you over the telephone. They, not you, pay for the call. While there are regulations against this, part of the control mechanism for this sort of thing is that the advertiser has to pay for it.
Spam, however, is a neat little thing. Email costs more for the recipient than for the sender, because it's on the hard drive of the recipient (or their ISP) for longer than on the drive of the sender. Basically, they're advertising to you on your dime. Even if you don't pay per MB or per email (who does, today?), the costs of spam are incurred by your ISP. One way or another, you are going to pay for the service of having an average of fifteen MAKE MONEY FAST WITH FREE PR0N messages in your mail queue at any given time.
This is why people started equating email with, of all things, fax machines. There are Federal restrictions on unsolicited fax transmissions, again on the principle of "you don't advertise on the customer's dime". While the long-distance charge on such a call is small (they are short calls), the recipient is paying for paper and ink. Amusingly, the legal definition of a fax machine fit the PC pretty well. So much for the fine print.
If you can't trust the state to do it, what makes you think you can trust the Fed to do it?
The reason that the show is tied to the character is that the two-hour pilot was written in order to create an origin for the character of Max Headroom. Other than that, the show could have avoided Max, been retitled "Edison Carter, Twenty Minutes Into the Future", and marketed as a real cyberpunk show.
Instead, the first thing you know is that it's a show with Max Headroom in it, and this implies a lighthearted, silly sort of show. While there was certainly a lot of humor in the show, it was really cyberpunk: dark and brooding. Its target audience was probably seventeen year old males.
But, since it was a "Max Headroom" show, its actual audience was nine year old kids. They couldn't appreciated it, and many of us who could appreciate it were turned off by the title character.
I do understand that you can avoid the heavy distribution charges. My point is that an organization that relies on donations and escapable fees is likely to be forever cash-strapped. I assume that neither RMS nor the FSF are opposed to money per se, only the use of software licenses.
My suggestion, and IANA businessman, is that FSF consultancy might be a way to get more money into the FSF, which would in turn allow them to produce more free software faster. Why ask for money when you can sell stuff (consultant services) without compromising your morals?
My take:
An ASP can take free software, host it on their machine, and charge you to run it on their system. They aren't charging a license fee, they are giving a service charge, literally charging you for CPU-seconds. ASPs don't distribute code any more than taxi companies distribute cars.
If they make changes, they can distribute it (under the GPL), but they don't have to. Remember that you can do all sorts of mean nasty secret things to the code in your hands; you only have to worry about GPL restrictions when you distribute it.
It's a case of unstable equilibrium. Imagine a ball on the top of a hill. It is ready to roll, but has no direction to roll in. The slightest disturbance, however, will get it rolling.
Moral to the story: use less time on your microwave--you don't want the water to be superheated!
Why not go into the business of funding GNU development with GNU consulting fees? While you probably wouldn't want to become a full for-profit center (imagine all the back taxes!), I'm certain that any excess revenue could be plowed into something useful.
Okay, so they argue that Open Source Software isn't perfectly secure. Very little is. I see no argument that Closed Source Software is any more secure. And this implies...?
Secrets get leaked at a rate proportional to both the number of people who know it and the value of the secret. In the MS case, the secret is potentially known by several thousand MS employees with source code access, and the value of the secret is incredible, since it allows access to thousands if not millions of Web servers. In contrast, passwords rarely leak because they are known by only one person and can only be used to attack one site.
To handle the case of getting locked out of your own system, you use a well-documented, well-protected service entrance. A perfect example is the OS itself, be it NT, Unix, or whatever.
If you lock yourself out of your OS (lost the root password or something), the service entrance is to boot from CD or floppy, which gives you superuser priveleges and allows you to change the superuser password(s). The security of the service entrance is due to teh fact that said devices are physically connected to the machine. That is, you need physical control of the machine, the ability to touch the case, before you can exploit this. And if such a machine needs to be secure, the competent admin will put it under lock and key. We can't protect you against incompetent admins.
If the system you are locked out of is an application rather than an OS, you can build a service entrance that requires superuser priveleges. Since you can always gain superuser priveleges with physical access (see above), no back door is needed.
Three examples that come right to mind are whites/blacks during Apartheid, nobles/commoners through medieval Europe, and old-timers/AOL users in the mid '90's.
Do I have to smiley-caption these things? I was following up on a joke!
Anyone who seriously compares Microsoft to God needs their head and/or stock options examined.