I'm talking Transformers, GI Joe, Voltron, Looney Tunes, Spiderman and His Amazing Friends, etc.? I try to watch saturday morning cartoons these days (yes, I'm 26), but they lack the magic of yore.
Boomerang runs cartoons from 1958 to 1976, 24 hours a day.
The judge's job is to maximize the value of Worldcom
Technically speaking, this is not accurate. It's the job of the debtors (Worldcom, et al) to maximize the value of Worldcom, so as to satisfy their creditors. IANAL.
The judge's job is to make sure that Worldcom files a reorganization plan under Title 11, Ch 11 of the US Code, whose purpose is to regain financial stability, and that the plan is acceptable (within some limits) to all creditors. According to the article, one creditor (SBC) objected to the plan, but the judge had the authority to overrule the objection under 1129(a)(7)(A)(ii), as long as SBC
will receive or retain under the plan on account of such claim or interest property of a value, as of the effective date of the plan, that is not less than the amount that such holder would so receive or retain if the debtor were liquidated under chapter 7 of this title on such date,
and assuming subparagraph (B) doesn't apply. Which it might if SBC holds any liens on property in which Worldcom has an interest. This information would be contained in the 521(1) report, but it hasn't even been filed yet, because Worldcom's financials are too damn complicated. (See here for more details. Click the folders for "WorldCom Bankruptcy Case", then "WorldCom, Inc.", and look up docket #1663. Basically, Worldcom have until Jan 31, 2003 to file their 521, unless they want another extension.)
I've learned recently that Anime rather annoys me. It's all too cliched these days, what with seeing it every which way you look in some way shape or form.
What, too much sex and violence in Anime for ya, and not enough plot? Too many cliches, poor stereotyped characters, and bad music? Do you realize you just explained why I don't go see most American movies any more? Anime is just the medium, like cellulose. It's what you do with it that counts. If you think there aren't any original ideas or artists any more, that's fine, but don't blame the messenger.
And then you have the people who know the names of every character from every series and can link every relationship in every way shape or form. And... yeah, that's migrane-inducing after about 10 minutes.
Sounds like your typical Star Trek / Star Wars / Babylon 5 / X-Files..... fanboy syndrome to me. What has Anime got to do with that?
This section clearly limits the authority of the bill. It does not grant any additional powers that weren't already available. Consider the case if this section had been left out. Now the bill would have had additional authority (to interfere with law enforcement and public morality), and people probably wouldn't even have noticed enough to complain. This "loophole" is a red herring.
Fact is, all security is obscurity. Security rests on the notion of a shared secret. Some key that both you and the other guy know.
Sorry, Mr. Troll. Confusing security with encryption proves you don't know a damn about security. You'll please excuse me while I ignore your impenetrable shared secret, break into your house, and steal your computer. For my next trick, I'll be going after your civil liberties, which are sitting out here on the lawn without so much as a bike lock.
The software companies attitude could be bad, and mainly oriented towards profit and monopoly. But do even such companies deserve such a death blow? At one stroke, their entire product goes down the drain.
This observation is inevitable. Let's do some basic business logic:
[Assume] Businesses need recurring revenue (i.e. you can only burn VC $ for so long)
[Assume] As long as your hardware doesn't crap out, software lifetime is infinite
[Assume] You have a finite customer base
[Assume] If you keep improving your software, eventually it will do everything your customers want
[Therefore] You can only sell so many copies of software to your customers before they don't need you any more
[Therefore] Software as a product is only good for a limited amount of money, and that isn't recurring
[Conclusion] Software as a product is not a viable business model in the long-run
Microsoft is having this problem right now with their operating systems. See, Windows 95 is good enough for most people. It runs AOL/MSN, Word, Outlook Express, Solitaire, and their printer. What more do they need? The MS solution has been to release a new OS every 2 years and hype the hell out of it, as well as purposely not provide patches for their older versions to support newer hardware, thus forcing software upgrades when old boxes die (since the older hardware isn't sold any more). The problem is, people are catching on, and new OS sales are fewer and fewer these days. The same could probably be said for purchases of Office. Who needs more Excel or Powerpoint templates? Anyone?
The product business is fine if the product has a finite lifetime. Take housing, for instance. People will always need to repair and build houses, because they weather. Software doesn't, which means the only money to be made long-term on software is in support. The same argument applies to patents and other 'intellectual property'. Dolby has the right idea: come up with an idea, and license it until the end of time.
Companies that sell a product that doesn't break have already signed up for their death blow. Distributing the software online only speeds it up.
While I know your heart is in the right place, I have to correct a few things with your post.
This is probably the most fair thing the RIAA has done. As has been said many times already, if you want to share music, look at porn, or run you own business, buy your own high speed connection. The connection is not all that expensive. By attacking the RIAA on this, we are allowing ourselves to be distracted from the larger fight.
Amen, brother. Preach on! Everything except for sharing music, I'll get to that in a minute.
Why is it wrong for an executive to borrow a plane to take his family on a trip and right for an employee to use the broadband connection to share music.
The short answer: they're both wrong, but they're wrong to varying degrees. The cost of borrowing an airplane is worth X amount of hours of, shall we say 'misappropriated', bandwidth. I believe the common feeling is that X is very very high, so the first wrong is much much worse than the second. Note that this is not an excuse: as I said, both activities are wrong.
Music and porn sharing is also raises liability issue of a safe workplace.
If you're talking about all that 'PC' brainwashing crap, then yes. Personally, I think jackhammers and liquid metal at 800 degrees raise much more "safety" issues.
And, though downloading music on your personal account may not be stealing, downloading music on an account primarily used for profit is much more likely to be stealing.
If you mean, downloading music without the author's permission, then they're both stealing, and they're both equally wrong. Just because you're paying to break copyright doesn't make it right.
Again, if you want to share music, buy the connection.
IANAL, but this sounds like advice to commit a felony. Um, no thanks. If you want to share music, get the author's permission first. If the opportunity doesn't present itself, then don't share music. Jeez, you'd think this was a difficult concept.
It seems we have much more power when we pit the financial interests of the telcos, who want to sell us broadband, against the financial interests of the music pushers, who want us sell up plastic disks. Both know on which side their bread is buttered.
Well said. If we have to fight fire with fire, let's make sure we've got lots of firepower on our side. We need more people thinking this way.
Most excellent reference to The Hudsucker Proxy. Interesting comparison, and two points for the good guys. If we can't beat 'em with dollars, let's beat 'em with brains.
I hate seeing useless claims like this propagated. Anyone who's taken an intro course on provability in computation knows that it's a Turing tarpit. Yeah, I wrote a program that I proved calculated the GCD of two numbers, using propositional calculus. The construction of the program and the proof took an hour. I seriously doubt you could even put together a mathematically formal specification of what a program like TinyDNS does, much less prove that any program does exactly what you want it to do on any kind of real hardware.
The South tried this once already gang. Didn't work. The Imperialists will come after you with guns and say "stop that" just like they did back then.
Let them. At least then the rest of the country and the man on the street will see that they're a bunch of tyrannical Fascists. This goal is precisely the aim of civil disobedience, to affect change in public opinion through the demonstration of injustice. I'm just worried that the masses are too comfortable being lazy and ignorant to do anything about it.
About the issue with professional saturation: you're assuming that only professionals will sign up. I assure you, it won't be hard convincing the ditch diggers that there are great advantages to living in a society with hardly any rules and no taxes. This may start as an intellectual movement, but it's one that's very easy to sell.
Sue a corporation if you get genetic cancer? I'm sorry, I don't buy into the 'everyone is presumed a victim until proven otherwise' mentality. What the hell did they do to give you the cancer? Figure out what causes it? Pretend you were born 50 years earlier, before this company existed, and make the same argument with a straight face.
This couldn't happen if some congressional pockets weren't being lined in the first place.
On this point I agree. Here's some food for thought: bribes don't affect the Justices of the US Supreme Court, because the office holds a lifetime appointment. They shouldn't affect the President or the Legislature in the ideal, but they do since these are elected offices. In other words, expect Congress and the President to screw up. At least we've got a (theoretically) unimpeachable backup in place to control the damage.
A company spent the money and time to make it available, and now they want a return on their investment.
Good for them! They figured something out, let them charge a price, and see how many people pay it. This process is called 'capitalism', you may have heard of it. But let someone else try to figure it out too, and if they can do it for cheaper, even better for them. This process is called 'competitive innovation', you may have heard of it as well. It's just as powerful an incentive as getting a government subsidy.
If they were making a product, fine, I'd accept the patent portion of the IP social contract. But they aren't, they're trying to patent a gene, so as far as I'm concerned their argument holds no weight. Heck, they didn't even create the gene, they just figured out how to find it. Some poor schmuck from Hoboken or wherever 'created' it in his bloodstream.
This is the kind of issue that cries for a flamatory public debate.
On one side, the right to cure and get cured at a reasonable cost or, even, any expense.
On the other, right right to maintain a certain cash flow from products who carry a usually very expensive R&D cycle.
I propose a socially and economically Darwinist anti-debate.
On one side, the belief that not everyone has a right to be treated for health care, but rather that said treatment goes to those most able to adapt to society, as reflected by how much money they can make.
On the other, the belief that not every company has the right to profit just because they spent a lot of money on R&D and manufacturing, but instead said profit is determined by how useful the rest of society (and not the Legislature's IP laws) find the product, as reflected by the number of people that buy it.
Mod me down if you will, but at least consider all arguments. I now return you to your regularly scheduled brainwashing.
Quoth kevlar: Who is going to develop new tests for hereditary diseases if the entire world can legitimately test for it without royalties?
You're missing the point, kevlar. Everyone repeat after me:
Technology is
enabling.
Legislation is curtailing.
Technology gives us power.
Legislation takes it away.
Those who seek power for the good of Mankind will pursue science and technology.
Those who seek power for the good of themselves will pursue rules, regulations, and domination.
More quotes from kevlar: If anyone could test for these genes without paying royalties, then the guy who made the discovery will not have ANY incentive to do the same in the future!
Is this guy doing research for the sake of his own back pocket, or is he doing it to help others? If the former, he should be denied the patent on moral grounds. If the latter, your argument doesn't hold any weight, since supposedly helping others is the incentive.
Now on another note, the Canadian health system has much worse problems than this patent issue. If my mother/father died of cancer and I knew this test would determine my risk, I'd fork over the $3500.
That is, of course, your choice. Just please don't force it on the rest of us, OK?
"I don't think there's a single movie that can survive on box office gross alone; it just doesn't exist anymore," says McCallum. "A theatrical gross can't hack it anymore, and the business is barely surviving right now."
Um, LOTR:FOTR seemed to do OK at the box office. Why? Because the script wasn't churned out by a 16 year old wannabe working in some seedy Hollywood basement for $6/hr. GIGO.
I just saw Beverly Hills Cop the other day on cable for the bazillionth time. Laughed my ass off, like I do every time. Why? Because it was well written, and well acted, IMO. Compare it to, say, a recent Adam Sandler 'comedy', or that gawd-awful Dana Carvey flick. Which would you rather watch?
Wake up, Hollywood! People don't go to the same movie twice because your movies suck. Heck, I don't even go to movies once, and the only reason I can figure that other people go at all is because they're too lazy to figure out something else to do on Saturday night.
The alternative is just to leave more and more people with no insurance at all, which will quickly drop the US life expectancy down to third world levels.
I love logic like this. Getting sick doesn't kill you, apparently, but lack of insurance will reduce your lifespan. Man, you need a good cup of coffee or something, and I need to breathe before I laugh myself to death. Oh wait, I can't die, I have insurance.
Actually, what I think you meant to say was, "Americans are idiots when it comes to money, and are too stupid to realize that you come out ahead if you just put your insurance premiums under the mattress instead of writing a check every month". If they ended up paying you more than you paid them, they wouldn't be in business, now would they?
Is it just me or is the idea of centralising security bad?
Sigh. Here we go again.
Security is a process, not a product. It cannot, by definition, be centralized. Every agent in a secure network, including and especially the bozo behind the keyboard, must be involved in the process. Passport claims to be an end-all be-all security product, that you install and that magically keeps your online transactions safe. Does anyone see the problem here?
Here's a list of things that Passport will not protect:
People forgetting their login data
Parents writing down their passwords and their kids logging in and ordering pr0n
Your computer crashing, denying you access to the Passport network (on Dec 24)
Any of a million other things that can go wrong that have nothing to do with encryption or trust
The phrase "centralized security" irks me to no end. Please use "centralized trust system" to describe Passport, because that's what it is. Whether or not centralizing your trust is a good idea is another issue, about which I'm too tired to lecture.
Those companies, which include Linux firms, use a special "free software" license called the General Public License that bars any payment.
This statement is flat wrong. There is nothing in the GPL which prohibits charging for GPL'ed software. The point of the GPL is that source must be made available for at-cost prices (postage, etc), and that source for any derivative product must be made similarly available. It only says that source must be made available at cost if the buyer asks for it. A lot of times, they don't ask. And a lot of times, they're willing to pay big $$ for a nice, installable binary distribution on CD. The GPL also says explicitly that "you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee". This is exactly what Red Hat does.
In summary, GPL is hardly the same as 'gratis'. It is, OTOH, a good try for 'libre'. Someone please beat these media guys with a cluestick.
Is it really possible for AOL to go out of business? Sure, they suck, and they've been losing a great deal of their consumer base, but they are still the single largest commercial ISP in the US. Time-Warner, if anything, would sooner split up AOL into smaller regional ISP's than bankrupt it, I would believe.
Is it really possible for UUnet to go out of business? Sure, they suck, and they've been losing a great deal of their consumer base, but they are still the single largest commercial ISP in Europe. Worldcom, if anything, would sooner split up UUnet into smaller regional ISP's than bankrupt it, I would believe.
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Damn you! I know what show that is, even thru the bad subbing! Thanks for reminding me how I need to get a life.
Boomerang runs cartoons from 1958 to 1976, 24 hours a day.
Technically speaking, this is not accurate. It's the job of the debtors (Worldcom, et al) to maximize the value of Worldcom, so as to satisfy their creditors. IANAL.
The judge's job is to make sure that Worldcom files a reorganization plan under Title 11, Ch 11 of the US Code, whose purpose is to regain financial stability, and that the plan is acceptable (within some limits) to all creditors. According to the article, one creditor (SBC) objected to the plan, but the judge had the authority to overrule the objection under 1129(a)(7)(A)(ii), as long as SBC
and assuming subparagraph (B) doesn't apply. Which it might if SBC holds any liens on property in which Worldcom has an interest. This information would be contained in the 521(1) report, but it hasn't even been filed yet, because Worldcom's financials are too damn complicated. (See here for more details. Click the folders for "WorldCom Bankruptcy Case", then "WorldCom, Inc.", and look up docket #1663. Basically, Worldcom have until Jan 31, 2003 to file their 521, unless they want another extension.)What, too much sex and violence in Anime for ya, and not enough plot? Too many cliches, poor stereotyped characters, and bad music? Do you realize you just explained why I don't go see most American movies any more? Anime is just the medium, like cellulose. It's what you do with it that counts. If you think there aren't any original ideas or artists any more, that's fine, but don't blame the messenger.
And then you have the people who know the names of every character from every series and can link every relationship in every way shape or form. And... yeah, that's migrane-inducing after about 10 minutes.
Sounds like your typical Star Trek / Star Wars / Babylon 5 / X-Files..... fanboy syndrome to me. What has Anime got to do with that?
This section clearly limits the authority of the bill. It does not grant any additional powers that weren't already available. Consider the case if this section had been left out. Now the bill would have had additional authority (to interfere with law enforcement and public morality), and people probably wouldn't even have noticed enough to complain. This "loophole" is a red herring.
Sorry, Mr. Troll. Confusing security with encryption proves you don't know a damn about security. You'll please excuse me while I ignore your impenetrable shared secret, break into your house, and steal your computer. For my next trick, I'll be going after your civil liberties, which are sitting out here on the lawn without so much as a bike lock.
This observation is inevitable. Let's do some basic business logic:
- [Assume] Businesses need recurring revenue (i.e. you can only burn VC $ for so long)
- [Assume] As long as your hardware doesn't crap out, software lifetime is infinite
- [Assume] You have a finite customer base
- [Assume] If you keep improving your software, eventually it will do everything your customers want
- [Therefore] You can only sell so many copies of software to your customers before they don't need you any more
- [Therefore] Software as a product is only good for a limited amount of money, and that isn't recurring
- [Conclusion] Software as a product is not a viable business model in the long-run
Microsoft is having this problem right now with their operating systems. See, Windows 95 is good enough for most people. It runs AOL/MSN, Word, Outlook Express, Solitaire, and their printer. What more do they need? The MS solution has been to release a new OS every 2 years and hype the hell out of it, as well as purposely not provide patches for their older versions to support newer hardware, thus forcing software upgrades when old boxes die (since the older hardware isn't sold any more). The problem is, people are catching on, and new OS sales are fewer and fewer these days. The same could probably be said for purchases of Office. Who needs more Excel or Powerpoint templates? Anyone?The product business is fine if the product has a finite lifetime. Take housing, for instance. People will always need to repair and build houses, because they weather. Software doesn't, which means the only money to be made long-term on software is in support. The same argument applies to patents and other 'intellectual property'. Dolby has the right idea: come up with an idea, and license it until the end of time.
Companies that sell a product that doesn't break have already signed up for their death blow. Distributing the software online only speeds it up.
This is probably the most fair thing the RIAA has done. As has been said many times already, if you want to share music, look at porn, or run you own business, buy your own high speed connection. The connection is not all that expensive. By attacking the RIAA on this, we are allowing ourselves to be distracted from the larger fight.
Amen, brother. Preach on! Everything except for sharing music, I'll get to that in a minute.
Why is it wrong for an executive to borrow a plane to take his family on a trip and right for an employee to use the broadband connection to share music.
The short answer: they're both wrong, but they're wrong to varying degrees. The cost of borrowing an airplane is worth X amount of hours of, shall we say 'misappropriated', bandwidth. I believe the common feeling is that X is very very high, so the first wrong is much much worse than the second. Note that this is not an excuse: as I said, both activities are wrong.
Music and porn sharing is also raises liability issue of a safe workplace.
If you're talking about all that 'PC' brainwashing crap, then yes. Personally, I think jackhammers and liquid metal at 800 degrees raise much more "safety" issues.
And, though downloading music on your personal account may not be stealing, downloading music on an account primarily used for profit is much more likely to be stealing.
If you mean, downloading music without the author's permission, then they're both stealing, and they're both equally wrong. Just because you're paying to break copyright doesn't make it right.
Again, if you want to share music, buy the connection.
IANAL, but this sounds like advice to commit a felony. Um, no thanks. If you want to share music, get the author's permission first. If the opportunity doesn't present itself, then don't share music. Jeez, you'd think this was a difficult concept.
It seems we have much more power when we pit the financial interests of the telcos, who want to sell us broadband, against the financial interests of the music pushers, who want us sell up plastic disks. Both know on which side their bread is buttered.
Well said. If we have to fight fire with fire, let's make sure we've got lots of firepower on our side. We need more people thinking this way.
For even more information, check out here, here, here, and here.
Don't laugh, they're coming. *fear*
Most excellent reference to The Hudsucker Proxy. Interesting comparison, and two points for the good guys. If we can't beat 'em with dollars, let's beat 'em with brains.
Three cheers for our brave charity! I love to hear how big corps are fighting global health.
Really? OK, lemme see the proof.
I hate seeing useless claims like this propagated. Anyone who's taken an intro course on provability in computation knows that it's a Turing tarpit. Yeah, I wrote a program that I proved calculated the GCD of two numbers, using propositional calculus. The construction of the program and the proof took an hour. I seriously doubt you could even put together a mathematically formal specification of what a program like TinyDNS does, much less prove that any program does exactly what you want it to do on any kind of real hardware.
Let them. At least then the rest of the country and the man on the street will see that they're a bunch of tyrannical Fascists. This goal is precisely the aim of civil disobedience, to affect change in public opinion through the demonstration of injustice. I'm just worried that the masses are too comfortable being lazy and ignorant to do anything about it.
About the issue with professional saturation: you're assuming that only professionals will sign up. I assure you, it won't be hard convincing the ditch diggers that there are great advantages to living in a society with hardly any rules and no taxes. This may start as an intellectual movement, but it's one that's very easy to sell.
This couldn't happen if some congressional pockets weren't being lined in the first place.
On this point I agree. Here's some food for thought: bribes don't affect the Justices of the US Supreme Court, because the office holds a lifetime appointment. They shouldn't affect the President or the Legislature in the ideal, but they do since these are elected offices. In other words, expect Congress and the President to screw up. At least we've got a (theoretically) unimpeachable backup in place to control the damage.
Good for them! They figured something out, let them charge a price, and see how many people pay it. This process is called 'capitalism', you may have heard of it. But let someone else try to figure it out too, and if they can do it for cheaper, even better for them. This process is called 'competitive innovation', you may have heard of it as well. It's just as powerful an incentive as getting a government subsidy.
If they were making a product, fine, I'd accept the patent portion of the IP social contract. But they aren't, they're trying to patent a gene, so as far as I'm concerned their argument holds no weight. Heck, they didn't even create the gene, they just figured out how to find it. Some poor schmuck from Hoboken or wherever 'created' it in his bloodstream.
On one side, the belief that not everyone has a right to be treated for health care, but rather that said treatment goes to those most able to adapt to society, as reflected by how much money they can make.
On the other, the belief that not every company has the right to profit just because they spent a lot of money on R&D and manufacturing, but instead said profit is determined by how useful the rest of society (and not the Legislature's IP laws) find the product, as reflected by the number of people that buy it.
Mod me down if you will, but at least consider all arguments. I now return you to your regularly scheduled brainwashing.
You're missing the point, kevlar. Everyone repeat after me:
More quotes from kevlar: If anyone could test for these genes without paying royalties, then the guy who made the discovery will not have ANY incentive to do the same in the future!Is this guy doing research for the sake of his own back pocket, or is he doing it to help others? If the former, he should be denied the patent on moral grounds. If the latter, your argument doesn't hold any weight, since supposedly helping others is the incentive.
Now on another note, the Canadian health system has much worse problems than this patent issue. If my mother/father died of cancer and I knew this test would determine my risk, I'd fork over the $3500.
That is, of course, your choice. Just please don't force it on the rest of us, OK?
Um, LOTR:FOTR seemed to do OK at the box office. Why? Because the script wasn't churned out by a 16 year old wannabe working in some seedy Hollywood basement for $6/hr. GIGO.
I just saw Beverly Hills Cop the other day on cable for the bazillionth time. Laughed my ass off, like I do every time. Why? Because it was well written, and well acted, IMO. Compare it to, say, a recent Adam Sandler 'comedy', or that gawd-awful Dana Carvey flick. Which would you rather watch?
Wake up, Hollywood! People don't go to the same movie twice because your movies suck. Heck, I don't even go to movies once, and the only reason I can figure that other people go at all is because they're too lazy to figure out something else to do on Saturday night.
I love logic like this. Getting sick doesn't kill you, apparently, but lack of insurance will reduce your lifespan. Man, you need a good cup of coffee or something, and I need to breathe before I laugh myself to death. Oh wait, I can't die, I have insurance.
Actually, what I think you meant to say was, "Americans are idiots when it comes to money, and are too stupid to realize that you come out ahead if you just put your insurance premiums under the mattress instead of writing a check every month". If they ended up paying you more than you paid them, they wouldn't be in business, now would they?
Sigh. Here we go again.
Security is a process, not a product. It cannot, by definition, be centralized. Every agent in a secure network, including and especially the bozo behind the keyboard, must be involved in the process. Passport claims to be an end-all be-all security product, that you install and that magically keeps your online transactions safe. Does anyone see the problem here?
Here's a list of things that Passport will not protect:
- People forgetting their login data
- Parents writing down their passwords and their kids logging in and ordering pr0n
- Your computer crashing, denying you access to the Passport network (on Dec 24)
- Any of a million other things that can go wrong that have nothing to do with encryption or trust
The phrase "centralized security" irks me to no end. Please use "centralized trust system" to describe Passport, because that's what it is. Whether or not centralizing your trust is a good idea is another issue, about which I'm too tired to lecture.This statement is flat wrong. There is nothing in the GPL which prohibits charging for GPL'ed software. The point of the GPL is that source must be made available for at-cost prices (postage, etc), and that source for any derivative product must be made similarly available. It only says that source must be made available at cost if the buyer asks for it. A lot of times, they don't ask. And a lot of times, they're willing to pay big $$ for a nice, installable binary distribution on CD. The GPL also says explicitly that "you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee". This is exactly what Red Hat does.
In summary, GPL is hardly the same as 'gratis'. It is, OTOH, a good try for 'libre'. Someone please beat these media guys with a cluestick.
Is it really possible for UUnet to go out of business? Sure, they suck, and they've been losing a great deal of their consumer base, but they are still the single largest commercial ISP in Europe. Worldcom, if anything, would sooner split up UUnet into smaller regional ISP's than bankrupt it, I would believe.
This episode has been sponsored by the letters s and g and the forward-slash.
Install Windows, boot your computer, and wait.