Kip Crosby wrote:
>
> At 22:28 5/18/98 +0100, you wrote:
> >Do you think that there is any chance that Microsoft is now so big that
> >it can afford better lawyers that the Department of Justice?
>
> Has been able to for quite some time. Federal lawyers aren't all that well
> paid.
Yeah, but there's lots of them in the enthusiastic "up and coming"
category trying to build reps at taxpayer expense. Remember that
though MS has shitloads of money, the government can steal boatloads
from us taxpayers. MS only has obnoxious salesmanship, Washington
DC has nuclear weapons. And remember that most elected officials
started out as lawyers -- even the guys with MS won't want to screw
up their career path.
The whole situation is bullshit anyway. I'm posting from a Linux
system with nobody holding a gun to my head to switch from Netscape
to Internet Exploiter. If someone does try that, they may find out
why I'm a supporter of the Second Amendment living in a state that
strongly opposes that right. The government is (as usual) wrong in
this lawsuit despite my own feelings about MS garbage. Manufacturers
are perfectly free to sell equipment with no MS stuff in the package,
but unfortunately the ignorant mass of customers want the stuff and
that means the manufacturers cave in to MS contract conditions or pay
full retail for the product they ship. Honestly there are few legal
and almost as few ethical conundra involved. I made _my_ choice and
mostly run Linux. My wife has two systems with '95 preinstalled and
therefore poorly configured -- my one '95 system was installed from
media bought retail (I may not like it, but it's a professional
necessity that I know it) works better, despite being a 486/66
competing with a Pentium 133 -- preinstalls are not optimized. (Of
course, my 386/33 running Warp beats my hand-optimized 486/66 running
'95 -- and my Linux boxes beat everything).
--
Ward Griffiths
They say that politics makes strange bedfellows.
Of course, the main reason they cuddle up is to screw somebody else.
Michael Flynn, _Rogue Star_
Received on Thu May 21 1998 - 19:30:52 BST