Don't write your congressman:Because this is a uniform set of proposed state laws, your congressional rep in DC can't do much about it. Instead, contact your representatives in your state legislatures.
The software manufacturers want the best of both worlds:There has been a debate in recent years about whether software constitutes a product or a service. In broad terms, vendors selling a product are more accountable to consumers than those selling a service. UCITA sounds like an attempt by corporate giants to treat their software as a product, while still maintaining the lower liability thresholds associated with a service. It really sucks.
Here's an idea...Let's get UCITA ammended. Software makers could have a choice: either (a) open source your software under GPL and enjoy the limited liability associated with a service, or (b) put out a closed source product and be held accountable. That might just cause some vendors to make better software...
Nader and Buchannan have better name recognition than, say, Harry Browne. Media pick up on name recognition and use it to their advantage. I guarantee that a headline like "Nader sues debate commission" will attract more attention than "Browne says Micro$oft shouldn't be persecuted".
Money: The Green and Reform parties have more cash than the Libertarian, Natural Law, and other third parties. They consequently have better PR machines. The media is fundamentally lazy and unethical; they tend to simply regurgitate whatever the PR meisters feed them. I imagine that the Nader and Buchannan campaigns have way better PR machines than other 3rd party candidates.
So, I guess you're OK with the inevitable assault on our civil liberties that will result from either a Bush or Gore administration? I'm old enough to remember the PMRC. As a dedicated civil libertarian, I can't in good conscience vote for Gore.
Also, your diamond analogy is wrong. In terms of wealth, the real incomes of the middle class have actually been declining for 25 years or so. In terms of political power, one need only look at the amount of money it takes to influence a legislator or executive these days to realize that power is still proportional to the size of one's pocketbook (or campaign contribution).
The politicians are in the midst of and end-run around democracy; slowly erode the right to dissent (through PMRC-type culture wars and censorship in the name of protecting children), scare them into submission (the drug war and hysteria over crime), and they won't be able to do a damn thing when society turns right back into a pyramid...
Mr. Gore -
Your campaign has attempted to portray you as a moderate candidate who will protect our freedoms and our prosperity. Yet through your affiliation with the PMRC, you have shown yourself to be alarmingly receptive to the imposition of censorship on artists and musicians. As the internet surpasses print, recorded, and broadcast media as the primary form of communication in our society, we face a new onslaught of assaults on our liberty by both government and non-government entities (Communications Decency Act, DMCA, RIAA vs. Napster, DeCSS, censorware requirements, and CPHack to name just a few). The constitution applies only to laws passed by congress, but the president sets the overall tone for behavior in the country. As president, what would you do to protect and preserve our basic first amendment right to freedom of speech and expression as the internet becomes the ubiquitous form of communication in our lives?
The biggest problem I've experienced with outsourcing code is one of incentives: people who aren't part of your organization invariably have less of an interest in doing things correctly than those who are part of it. Every time we've used contractors/consultants, we've gotten kludge after kludge, without much documentation and thought toward architecture.
I'm not saying that all outsiders are like this, just all the ones I've had to deal with.
There's also an issue with expertise: many contractors/outsourcees have a preferred way of coding and architecting things, and will invariably push you to go with their way. Sometimes you can get away with that, but usually you run into problems.
I once worked for an investment bank that had originally outsourced a big portion of their development to consultants who insisted on using Sybase PowerDynamo with IIS and Sybase SQL Server, all running on NT. That's what they knew, so that's what was chosen. Everything was hunky-dory until they took a certain Linux-related company (which shall remain nameless) public and had to scale to meet a greatly increased server load. We ended up having to switch architecture 3 weeks before launch and basically re-writing the code the consultants had written. Ultimately, we ditched the hokey Sybase architecture in favor of Java servlets.
One problem with this type of taxation scheme is that the tax (and subsequent royalties) are not proportional to actual usage of IP. If someone were to buy a CDR solely for the purpose of distributing his/her own software/music/etc, why should that royalty be paid? On the other hand, if someone buys a CDR expressly for the purpose of pirating copyrighted music, he/she may be paying too little. This creates an undesirable situation (from an Economics perspective anyway) where the "good guys" are subsidizing the activities of the "bad guys". Unfortunately, I doubt Germans will see it as anything more than yet another tax levied on them.
There's also the question of how much of that "royalty" actually gets to the artist, and how that is apportioned. Do artists with more sales get more subsidy, or should it be inversely proportional to sales? And how much of that money will be skimmed by the royalty firms? It just smells of a cash cow for corporate interests, with no overhead to boot!
Truth be told, if this weren't such a blatant opportunity for corporate welfare, these companies might just wake up and realize that the web can be a source of new income, and not a drain on it.
I guess one would be technically correct in pointing out that the first OS was the human brain of whoever played with the first abacus several hundred (thousand) years ago...
If you have only a dozen or so computers, just keep a list of "inappropriate" hosts and update the computers' HOSTS files every so often by hand or via a script. Point them to a special web server that displays a message like "THIS SITE IS INAPROPRIATE. YOU CANNOT VIEW IT HERE" for all requests. Update the file with offending hosts as you catch kids looking at them.
After this becomes too much of a hassle, go to management and tell them how much of a burden being a censor is on the tech staff and that there really is no software solution that will prevent kids from getting pr0n AND allow access to legitimate sites at the same time. It's not your job to be a parent. Who in their right mind would want a corporation parenting their kids anyway?
Hmm...maybe this isn't so off-topic after all. The staffer was targeted for using a cell phone...that's YRO related. Plus, almost amy story about the election bears relevance...GW Bush is for censoring the internet. Al Gore was for censoring music (remember the PMRC?), but now tries to come off as a liberal. This presidential election has real implications for geeks; will DCMA be expanded? will pr0n be completely banned? will the justice department continue its case against Micro$oft on appeal, or will an AG under GW Bush quietly drop (or intentionally lose) the case? what type of people will each candidate appoint to our already conservative supreme court?
Sure, CmdrTaco admitted to abusing/. but I think this story has at least some relevance...
So, was this a story about video game violence, or being a vegan? Why do vegans always have to evangelize? I think a simple point about the hypocrisy of a society that tortures animals and yet bans video games about violence would have sufficed. I'm a vegetarian, and one who has no problem with people who eat meat, but I think that was way off topic.
I think the *real* reason they want to censor violent video games is clear; the politicos don't want people to wake up to the fact that we are indeed a violent society, and that they are mostly to blame. Think about it; who starts the wars, funds the abusive cops, and generally encourages the redneck/mullethead mentality? The damn politicians, that's who.
Hmm...so you say this country was built on capitalism? Not quite...capitalism implies that competition exists and markets actually work. If that were true, then no company (e.g. Micro$oft, AT&T, etc) would gain monopoly power and engage in anticompetitive behavior.
I think the point here is that software is moving from a product model to a services model. I'd like to see people make money off of implementations and customization rather than some closed-source buggy piece of software (see: WINDOW$). When software is free, the implementers and system integrators can't gouge their customers. It's analogous to the standards issue; it's way better for a standard to be owned and maintained by a relatively open & democratic standards body than for one monolithic company (see: IBM, MICRO$OFT) to own that standard.
I can't wait for the inevitable campchaos cartoon about this one...the first 3 were hillarious....beer GOOD!
On a serious note, I hope they talk to people other than artists, record execs, and software makers about this. It would lend a great deal of credibility if your average mullet-head Joe Schmoe came up to the mic and testified that he ended up buying the entire Selloutica collection (well, up until the black album anyway)after hearing Sanitarium.mp3 from some random site. But then, given congress' inclination toward corporate welfare, don't expect a balanced & representative set of speakers.
I think the real issues here are twofold;
Distribution channels:Record execs fear Napster, the internet and the MP3 format because it offers aspiring young artists a way to bypass the traditional music distribution & promotion channels. As such, musicians will have an alternative to selling their souls & signing all their rights away just to get recorded, promoted, and distributed. They will no longer be able to dictate what we should and shouldn't like. Just imagine; no more Britney Spears/Christina Aguilera/Backstreet Boys drivel being showered upon us by money-grubbing record execs. Maybe talent and creativity will actually count for something again!
The recording industry isn't giving consumers what they want:Who the hell wants to spend $20 or more on a CD they've never heard before, which might contain songs that suck? I know, I know, artists often craft an album as a statement or single unit. And indeed, some of the best music I've ever heard (Rush, Queensryche, Ice Cube) fit into this model. But then, why does the record industry promote one song at a time? I think consumers would love to be able to (a) sample an entire album before buying the album and (b) buy only those songs he/she likes. Think about it; this would be a music marketer's wet dream! They would know exactly what soungs consumers like without having to pump all those marketing dollars into promotion.
Some bands are starting to get this, and have (thankfully) put pressure on their management to adapt. It's not like we're going to be able to ban the MP3 format, eradicate Napster & Gnutella and their derivatives, or prosecute/sue everyone who does pirate a song. It's simply a change in the market that the record companies are going to have to deal with.
Cable is well and good until either (A)everyone in the neigborhood gets it and nukes the bandwidth or (B) you want to run a web/name/other server and the company forbids it.
I tend to agree here...these GUIs are definitely hard-wired into our brains. The average user isn't exactly tuned in to the idea of abstraction, so they don't think in terms of *what* they are doing, but more in terms of the steps needed to get where they want to go. It's almost as if they have the black box paradigm down, but just don't think of it in the correct terms.
This is very similar to a concept Economists call path dependency. The QWERTY keyboard layout, for example, has been shown to be far inferior to the DVORAK layout, but it persists as the de-facto standard (and indeed never caught on when computers came along) because so much time & effort has been invested in the QWERTY layout.
We human beings are creatures of habit, and we generally don't like change. That's why we keep electing the corporate whores to public office...... =[;-)]
OK, we at/. all know how to edit our HOSTS files to take care of this. But what about John Q. User, who would be hard pressed to save a file in a text editor? What we need here is a piece of software similar to, dare I say it, CyberPatrol, that maintains a list of privacy-encroaching hosts and edits the HOSTS file(s) for you. Hell, there could be a central repository of host names that routinely track peoples' habits online, and the software could run periodic updates. Of course, there would have to be some way to allow the user to disable certain hosts, but I don't think this would be too tough to write.
I guess there are a couple of things we need to point/figure out:
While this new product may just add up to an admission by Micro$oft that the Java model (garbage collection, runtime vs. native, platform independence) is important, they have answered in a typically anti-competitive way; build something that might be a better mousetrap, but find underhanded ways to tie it to your flagship product.
What becomes of J++? There were rumors (untrue, as it turns out) a while back on./ that they were going to sell it to Rational. Well, since that fell through, my guess would be that they kill it entirely, now that they have created a competing product. That's too bad; with a few improvements (servlet support, JDK compliance, cross-platform IDE, etc), J++ could easily be the best IDE out there. I love the Intellisense...having an API reference at your fingertips is a good thing.
Price Point: Java is still mostly free, while C# will probably be somewhat expensive. Will this slow adoption? Who knows; I think the features and reliability of the language are more important.
Available Libraries: Will there be a wide array of well-written, cross-platform, thoughtfully-arranged libraries for C#? This is one of the factors that has driven adoption of Java over the years. Because Java's libraries are quite mature in comparison, I think this will limit adoption.
Overall, I think C# will have to find a niche to be successful, and I certainly don't think that niche will be scalable, web-centric systems. Java's greatest weakness is it's performance on the client side. Maybe there's room for another cross-platform language there, but then AWT and Swing are fairly entrenched.
BTW - Anybody notice how the article lied about the Sun lawsuit? Check it out:
Microsoft is mired in a lawsuit with Sun over Java and has been prevented from updating its Java products.
Now that's BS if ever I heard it. Microsoft could easily update its Java products at any time, so long as they honor their contract with Sun and make them JDK compliant! But instead, they decide to kill what could have been a great product and put something else out instead.
If you put a racing saddle on a jackass, it's still a jackass...
So, you're saying that coding in C is preferable to an OO language? I beg to differ; the APIs available to Java are much more standardized and consistent than the myriad C and C++ libraries that don't seem to work on every platform. Java's mantra should be write once, compile anywhere. Plus, servlets tend to be way faster than CGI.
So, I assume that JServ & JRun will run on BSD/Apache now? Anybody ready to try a port? That's when I'll get excited; give me a stable VM and I can change the world.
Funny...I was just talking to a Sun rep at JavaOne about this today. He mentioned something about it, but he seemed to think it was Blackdown doing the port. No matter; good news is good news.
Now we just need the native compilers (TowerJ, etc) to port, and FreeBSD will be unstoppable.
As much as Joel Klein likes to parrot the idea that the Antitrust division of the DOJ is non-partisan and independent of politics, the fact is that the upcoming presidential election will have an effect on this case. If George Dubya wins, Micro$oft isn't likely to be broken up for 2 reasons:
Internal pressure:Let's face it - DOJ officials like Joel Klein serve at the pleasure of the attorney general, who in turn serves at the pleasure of the president. Think of the types George Dubya would appoint; neoconservative corporate-welfare lovers with contempt for antitrust law and consumer rights & market efficiency (imagine Ed Meese getting another shot as AG...ugh!). I can just see George Dubya's DOJ settling for a piddling little remedy that doesn't hinder Micro$oft's monopoly power one bit.
Appeals:Of course, Micro$oft will appeal any unfavorable remedy all the way to the supreme court. It's already an extremely conservative body with contempt for antitrust law, and the next president will get 3 or more appointments.
As much as I shudder at the thought of Tipper Gore running another PMRC witch hunt as first lady, one has to admit that at least the Micro$oft issue would be pursued with some concern for fairness & competition in mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Just a couple of thought here:
Don't write your congressman:Because this is a uniform set of proposed state laws, your congressional rep in DC can't do much about it. Instead, contact your representatives in your state legislatures.
The software manufacturers want the best of both worlds:There has been a debate in recent years about whether software constitutes a product or a service. In broad terms, vendors selling a product are more accountable to consumers than those selling a service. UCITA sounds like an attempt by corporate giants to treat their software as a product, while still maintaining the lower liability thresholds associated with a service. It really sucks.
Here's an idea...Let's get UCITA ammended. Software makers could have a choice: either (a) open source your software under GPL and enjoy the limited liability associated with a service, or (b) put out a closed source product and be held accountable. That might just cause some vendors to make better software...
I suspect the reasons are twofold:
Nader and Buchannan have better name recognition than, say, Harry Browne. Media pick up on name recognition and use it to their advantage. I guarantee that a headline like "Nader sues debate commission" will attract more attention than "Browne says Micro$oft shouldn't be persecuted".
Money: The Green and Reform parties have more cash than the Libertarian, Natural Law, and other third parties. They consequently have better PR machines. The media is fundamentally lazy and unethical; they tend to simply regurgitate whatever the PR meisters feed them. I imagine that the Nader and Buchannan campaigns have way better PR machines than other 3rd party candidates.
I'm not saying this is right. Just my $0.02...
So, I guess you're OK with the inevitable assault on our civil liberties that will result from either a Bush or Gore administration? I'm old enough to remember the PMRC. As a dedicated civil libertarian, I can't in good conscience vote for Gore.
Also, your diamond analogy is wrong. In terms of wealth, the real incomes of the middle class have actually been declining for 25 years or so. In terms of political power, one need only look at the amount of money it takes to influence a legislator or executive these days to realize that power is still proportional to the size of one's pocketbook (or campaign contribution).
The politicians are in the midst of and end-run around democracy; slowly erode the right to dissent (through PMRC-type culture wars and censorship in the name of protecting children), scare them into submission (the drug war and hysteria over crime), and they won't be able to do a damn thing when society turns right back into a pyramid...
Mr. Gore - Your campaign has attempted to portray you as a moderate candidate who will protect our freedoms and our prosperity. Yet through your affiliation with the PMRC, you have shown yourself to be alarmingly receptive to the imposition of censorship on artists and musicians. As the internet surpasses print, recorded, and broadcast media as the primary form of communication in our society, we face a new onslaught of assaults on our liberty by both government and non-government entities (Communications Decency Act, DMCA, RIAA vs. Napster, DeCSS, censorware requirements, and CPHack to name just a few). The constitution applies only to laws passed by congress, but the president sets the overall tone for behavior in the country. As president, what would you do to protect and preserve our basic first amendment right to freedom of speech and expression as the internet becomes the ubiquitous form of communication in our lives?
The biggest problem I've experienced with outsourcing code is one of incentives: people who aren't part of your organization invariably have less of an interest in doing things correctly than those who are part of it. Every time we've used contractors/consultants, we've gotten kludge after kludge, without much documentation and thought toward architecture.
I'm not saying that all outsiders are like this, just all the ones I've had to deal with.
There's also an issue with expertise: many contractors/outsourcees have a preferred way of coding and architecting things, and will invariably push you to go with their way. Sometimes you can get away with that, but usually you run into problems.
I once worked for an investment bank that had originally outsourced a big portion of their development to consultants who insisted on using Sybase PowerDynamo with IIS and Sybase SQL Server, all running on NT. That's what they knew, so that's what was chosen. Everything was hunky-dory until they took a certain Linux-related company (which shall remain nameless) public and had to scale to meet a greatly increased server load. We ended up having to switch architecture 3 weeks before launch and basically re-writing the code the consultants had written. Ultimately, we ditched the hokey Sybase architecture in favor of Java servlets.
One problem with this type of taxation scheme is that the tax (and subsequent royalties) are not proportional to actual usage of IP. If someone were to buy a CDR solely for the purpose of distributing his/her own software/music/etc, why should that royalty be paid? On the other hand, if someone buys a CDR expressly for the purpose of pirating copyrighted music, he/she may be paying too little. This creates an undesirable situation (from an Economics perspective anyway) where the "good guys" are subsidizing the activities of the "bad guys". Unfortunately, I doubt Germans will see it as anything more than yet another tax levied on them.
There's also the question of how much of that "royalty" actually gets to the artist, and how that is apportioned. Do artists with more sales get more subsidy, or should it be inversely proportional to sales? And how much of that money will be skimmed by the royalty firms? It just smells of a cash cow for corporate interests, with no overhead to boot!
Truth be told, if this weren't such a blatant opportunity for corporate welfare, these companies might just wake up and realize that the web can be a source of new income, and not a drain on it.
I guess one would be technically correct in pointing out that the first OS was the human brain of whoever played with the first abacus several hundred (thousand) years ago...
If you have only a dozen or so computers, just keep a list of "inappropriate" hosts and update the computers' HOSTS files every so often by hand or via a script. Point them to a special web server that displays a message like "THIS SITE IS INAPROPRIATE. YOU CANNOT VIEW IT HERE" for all requests. Update the file with offending hosts as you catch kids looking at them.
After this becomes too much of a hassle, go to management and tell them how much of a burden being a censor is on the tech staff and that there really is no software solution that will prevent kids from getting pr0n AND allow access to legitimate sites at the same time. It's not your job to be a parent. Who in their right mind would want a corporation parenting their kids anyway?
Hmm...maybe this isn't so off-topic after all. The staffer was targeted for using a cell phone...that's YRO related. Plus, almost amy story about the election bears relevance...GW Bush is for censoring the internet. Al Gore was for censoring music (remember the PMRC?), but now tries to come off as a liberal. This presidential election has real implications for geeks; will DCMA be expanded? will pr0n be completely banned? will the justice department continue its case against Micro$oft on appeal, or will an AG under GW Bush quietly drop (or intentionally lose) the case? what type of people will each candidate appoint to our already conservative supreme court?
Sure, CmdrTaco admitted to abusing /. but I think this story has at least some relevance...
As with all things M$, it's about marketing instead of using the right tool for the job...
So, was this a story about video game violence, or being a vegan? Why do vegans always have to evangelize? I think a simple point about the hypocrisy of a society that tortures animals and yet bans video games about violence would have sufficed. I'm a vegetarian, and one who has no problem with people who eat meat, but I think that was way off topic.
I think the *real* reason they want to censor violent video games is clear; the politicos don't want people to wake up to the fact that we are indeed a violent society, and that they are mostly to blame. Think about it; who starts the wars, funds the abusive cops, and generally encourages the redneck/mullethead mentality? The damn politicians, that's who.
So, whatever happened to Ralph Nader's proposal for .union, .sucks, etc? Were those ever submitted?
Personally, I'd like to see .whupass, .hillbilly, and .bugware.
Amen....
Tig-Ass-Bitties! Uncle Jessie be damned!
Hmm...so you say this country was built on capitalism? Not quite...capitalism implies that competition exists and markets actually work. If that were true, then no company (e.g. Micro$oft, AT&T, etc) would gain monopoly power and engage in anticompetitive behavior.
I think the point here is that software is moving from a product model to a services model. I'd like to see people make money off of implementations and customization rather than some closed-source buggy piece of software (see: WINDOW$). When software is free, the implementers and system integrators can't gouge their customers. It's analogous to the standards issue; it's way better for a standard to be owned and maintained by a relatively open & democratic standards body than for one monolithic company (see: IBM, MICRO$OFT) to own that standard.
So, how off topic could you be? Somebody moderate this asshole down, please...
it's gonna be dope! fp?
I can't wait for the inevitable campchaos cartoon about this one...the first 3 were hillarious....beer GOOD!
On a serious note, I hope they talk to people other than artists, record execs, and software makers about this. It would lend a great deal of credibility if your average mullet-head Joe Schmoe came up to the mic and testified that he ended up buying the entire Selloutica collection (well, up until the black album anyway)after hearing Sanitarium.mp3 from some random site. But then, given congress' inclination toward corporate welfare, don't expect a balanced & representative set of speakers.
I think the real issues here are twofold;
Some bands are starting to get this, and have (thankfully) put pressure on their management to adapt. It's not like we're going to be able to ban the MP3 format, eradicate Napster & Gnutella and their derivatives, or prosecute/sue everyone who does pirate a song. It's simply a change in the market that the record companies are going to have to deal with.
Cable is well and good until either (A) everyone in the neigborhood gets it and nukes the bandwidth or (B) you want to run a web/name/other server and the company forbids it.
I tend to agree here...these GUIs are definitely hard-wired into our brains. The average user isn't exactly tuned in to the idea of abstraction, so they don't think in terms of *what* they are doing, but more in terms of the steps needed to get where they want to go. It's almost as if they have the black box paradigm down, but just don't think of it in the correct terms.
This is very similar to a concept Economists call path dependency. The QWERTY keyboard layout, for example, has been shown to be far inferior to the DVORAK layout, but it persists as the de-facto standard (and indeed never caught on when computers came along) because so much time & effort has been invested in the QWERTY layout.
We human beings are creatures of habit, and we generally don't like change. That's why we keep electing the corporate whores to public office...... =[;-)]
OK, we at /. all know how to edit our HOSTS files to take care of this. But what about John Q. User, who would be hard pressed to save a file in a text editor? What we need here is a piece of software similar to, dare I say it, CyberPatrol, that maintains a list of privacy-encroaching hosts and edits the HOSTS file(s) for you. Hell, there could be a central repository of host names that routinely track peoples' habits online, and the software could run periodic updates. Of course, there would have to be some way to allow the user to disable certain hosts, but I don't think this would be too tough to write.
...like the potential to slice a penguin with a Gnu...
Overall, I think C# will have to find a niche to be successful, and I certainly don't think that niche will be scalable, web-centric systems. Java's greatest weakness is it's performance on the client side. Maybe there's room for another cross-platform language there, but then AWT and Swing are fairly entrenched.
BTW - Anybody notice how the article lied about the Sun lawsuit? Check it out:Now that's BS if ever I heard it. Microsoft could easily update its Java products at any time, so long as they honor their contract with Sun and make them JDK compliant! But instead, they decide to kill what could have been a great product and put something else out instead.
If you put a racing saddle on a jackass, it's still a jackass...
So, you're saying that coding in C is preferable to an OO language? I beg to differ; the APIs available to Java are much more standardized and consistent than the myriad C and C++ libraries that don't seem to work on every platform. Java's mantra should be write once, compile anywhere. Plus, servlets tend to be way faster than CGI.
So, I assume that JServ & JRun will run on BSD/Apache now? Anybody ready to try a port? That's when I'll get excited; give me a stable VM and I can change the world.
Funny...I was just talking to a Sun rep at JavaOne about this today. He mentioned something about it, but he seemed to think it was Blackdown doing the port. No matter; good news is good news.
Now we just need the native compilers (TowerJ, etc) to port, and FreeBSD will be unstoppable.
- Internal pressure:Let's face it - DOJ officials like Joel Klein serve at the pleasure of the attorney general, who in turn serves at the pleasure of the president. Think of the types George Dubya would appoint; neoconservative corporate-welfare lovers with contempt for antitrust law and consumer rights & market efficiency (imagine Ed Meese getting another shot as AG...ugh!). I can just see George Dubya's DOJ settling for a piddling little remedy that doesn't hinder Micro$oft's monopoly power one bit.
- Appeals:Of course, Micro$oft will appeal any unfavorable remedy all the way to the supreme court. It's already an extremely conservative body with contempt for antitrust law, and the next president will get 3 or more appointments.
As much as I shudder at the thought of Tipper Gore running another PMRC witch hunt as first lady, one has to admit that at least the Micro$oft issue would be pursued with some concern for fairness & competition in mind.