Not safe for work, boys. Be ready with the quick alt-Tab.

BWA-hahahahahaha! "People of Feather," he said! BWA-hahahahaha!

Links aren't working, so I'll just cut-n-paste it. From Brothers Judd Blog: A tourist walked into a curio shop in San Francisco. Looking around at the exotic, he noticed a very lifelike, life-sized bronze statue of a rat. It had no price tag but was so striking he decided he must have it.

He took it up to the owner, "How much for the bronze rat?"

"Twelve dollars for the rat. One hundred dollars for the story," said the owner.

The tourist gave the man twelve dollars. "I'll just take the rat. You can keep the story."

As he walked down the street carrying his bronze rat, he noticed that a few real rats had crawled out of the alleys and sewers and began following him down the street. This was disconcerting; he began walking faster. But within a couple blocks, the herd of rats behind him had grown to hundreds, and they began squealing.

He began to trot toward the bay, looking around to see that the rats now numbered in the MILLIONS, and were squealing and coming toward him fast. Scared, he ran to the edge of the bay and threw the bronze rat as far out into the bay as he could. Amazingly, the millions of rats all jumped into the bay after it, and drowned.

The man walked back to the curio shop.

"Aha," said the owner, "you have come back for the story?"

"No," said the man. "I came back to see if you have a bronze Democrat."

The U.S. Military Academy (a.k.a. West Point) has published a collection of maps of military conflicts. Very interesting stuff, assuming you like studying maps and military history (guilty on both counts, by the way).

Austin Bay writes, for StrategyPage.com, a lovely article about the Predator UAV and the War On Terror. "Have some," I say.

Cool optical illusions, as found by The Volokh Conspiracy.

Once again, one of Eric S. Raymond's fans leaks an internal Microsoft memo about open source software. Hee hee hee.

Let me see if I can get this straight: the voting machine clearly displays an error (in that the word "Democratic" appears when it shouldn't), but we should just accept your unsubstantiated word that everything is just peachy, and there isn't the slightest chance of miscounting, or anything? And we shouldn't be even slightly worried that there isn't any physical possibility of an independent audit of the votes? I hope Maryland voters feel much more enfranchised now.

Professor Reynolds finds an incident of truly staggering foolishness on the part of our own home-grown Federal Bureau of Intrusiveness: go read his except and commentary. Thank you, boys ... no amount of average citizens' complaints about the necessity of oversight will ever carry as much weight as self-important armed thugs demanding people give up their Constitutional rights on teevee will.

A two-fer! Ars Technica has published two bits on wireless security:

• Wireless Security Blackpaper is an overview of wireless and security practices
• Wireless security howto concentrates on securing a SOHO net.

Boo-yah! Hooray for the CIA for striking down military combatants without any allied casualties. I hope all the opposing forces are now asking themselves "I wonder what else is up there that I can't see."

The Yale Law Journal is publishing a paper about the tension between copyright and the 1st Amendment. From the abstract:

Measured in light of the freedom of imagination, copyright's central prohibition of piracy is fully constitutional, but its prohibition of unauthorized derivative works is not.

What do you imagine that says about fair use and the DMCA? "Nothing good" is the correct answer.

Hee hee hee! I can just imagine the reactions of opposing infantry after this is working. The poor schlubs will be sitting there, minding their own military business, and the hand of <diety/> just swats them down. Outstanding!

And now for something not Microsoft-related .. National Ammo Day is November 19th. Go buy some ammo to show your support for your individual 2nd Amendment right.

How can the living embodiment of all that is good (and quantifiable) arrive at the conclusion that nothing should be done about Microsoft? I am crushed.

• Consumers like Wintel

Jane says "Consumers like Wintel", I assume because the overwhelming majority of them buy computers with Intel chips running the Windows OS. How come they don't buy machines with Linux, or BeOS, or really anything else on them? I assume (from later comments) that Jane's answer would be "network effect" (which I'll come back to). How about that Microsoft would cut off the air supply to any vendor who dared to sell such a thing? It is unreasonable to claim that this threat, and the consequent unavailability of machines without Windows on them, had no effect on the market. Consumers can't buy what isn't available for sale.

Microsoft should disclose their licensing agreements with OEMs, and they should be subject to governmental oversight, since they have demonstrated rather conclusively that they won't play well with others without adult supervision.




• Innovation will stall

Jane also says "Innovation will stall". Before I hurt myself laughing, please suggest which innovations we're talking about. Pay-per-incident support? UCITA? HIPAA-incompatible license agreements? DR-DOS detection and spurious error message generation? Palladium and <scare-quote>trusted</scare-quote> computing? I will opine that Bill Gates' and Microsoft's primary contribution to the computing field is to establish that (a) software is a product and people should expect to pay for it, and (b) computers are unreliable and should be expected to fail early and often. He also helps establish that (c) corporations are evil and rapacious in exactly their capacity to inflict evil and rapine.

I'm all in favor of (a) what with me being a professional software developer, but (b) causes me no end of teeth-gnashing. I've had to reboot my stereo exactly once, and I don't believe I've ever had to reboot my cell phone. I guess my car doesn't count since I can't tell when it reboots, but I've never had to manually start the reboot process to clear up some flaky behavior. If that's the innovation we're talking about, I'd just as soon not have any.

As an aside, has anybody ever actually called Microsoft tech support and gotten any useful information from them? Show of hands please. Note that this doesn't include getting support for Windows from your computer hardware vendor. You must have called Microsoft themselves and gotten satisfaction. I opine that "support from Microsoft" is a useful fiction in the same category as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

I don't think (c) ever actually goes away, but damn me if I can think of an alternative. Transaction costs, after all, are real real real.

I propose no remedy here, since there isn't any objection. Claiming "innovation" is just an appeal to apple pie and Mom-hood. Yes, we all think all the children should have shoes, and as soon as Microsoft comes up with an innovation that people voluntarily purchase, then they should get to sell all they can make of it subject to all the other rules that bind the rest of us.




• Network Effects save companies money

Yes, network effects are real. The network effects would be just as real if there were interoperable products as they are now with the ubiquitous computing monoculture. Unfortunately, Microsoft isn't actually interested in interoperability. Primarily, they are interested in Microsoft-only versions of things, as evidenced by their conduct vis-a-vis Java and Visual J++ and their refusal to abide by licensing agreements that they find inconvenient (ibid). If you really believe that network effects provide a benefit to consumers (which I do, by the bye), then yes, a ubiquitous platform is very desirable but that doens't mean that it must come from a single vendor.

Microsoft should publish their file formats and APIs, and those interfaces should be the only communication between Microsoft OSs and applications, which, coincidentally, is the same rule that the rest of us have to follow if we want to play in the pool.




• Microsoft has a lot of shareholders

I opine that neither the government nor the people of the U.S. have an obligation to re-arrange the game to insure that a company that previously was profitable continues to be so if circumstances change. The investors have already been offered their reward in the form of increased stock prices. I feel strongly that we are not obligated to continue to force their stock price up. After all, Sun has stockholders too, as does (or did, anyway) Enron. Would we also be obligated to keep their stock prices up? I could insert a slippery-slope argument here, but I assume everyone can see what sort of shape it would have. Discuss amongst yourselves, if you wish.

Microsoft's shareholders should have no special standing before the court, or at least no more special than that of us consumers.




• Risk is not good for the economy

First, I'm not entirely sure that risk isn't good for the economy. It seems to me that accepting risk and attempting to mitigate it is the essence of starting a new business; if everybody is fat and sassy then they're unlikely to select you as a vendor. If there's no chance that anything will ever fail to be perfectly wonderful, then you're probably not going to be interesting in buying any new anything.

Second, Microsoft is apparently not shy about letting their customers swing. We've already establish that everybody is their customer, including (unfortunately), the U.S. Navy. What exactly is the risk of having our armed forces left stranded because their increasingly-wired equipment BSODs? What are the risks to the rest of us from having truly astonishing vulnerability to every s|<ript |<iddy who finds the source to a distributed denial of service 'bot? What is the risk to us of current and future variants of Melissa, BugBear, Anna Kournikova, Code Red, etc etc ad nauseam?

Recognize that there are real risks to inaction as well, and that the status quo contains harmful elements.

In short ("too late" I hear you say), Microsoft is not a poster child for the free market. They have acted contrary to their customer's interests on quite a number of occasions. (As I recall, Adam Smith claimed that the invisible hand worked because the vendor, working in his own selfish interest, would improve the position of his customers as well; that doesn't seem to be working here, damn it all) Far too many people are willing to give them a pass for what is truly unconscionable behaviour just because their logo is stamped onto damn near everybody's desk. They have commited harm, and if we wish them to stop harming us then they must suffer some penalty. One of my personal quirks is I refuse to accomodate people doing crap that I don't approve of. If you want to screw me, I will not be assisting you in doing so, and I will do what I reasonably can to make it painful for you. We, as consumers, should be making it painful for Microsoft to work against our interests, and so far the DOJ isn't doing such a fine job of that.

BWA-hahahahahaha! I don't know if this is for real, but it's damned funny even if it's not. Ho ho ho!

Ummmm ... <conspiracy-theory mode="on">He wouldn't do that, would he? I mean, he's a huge proponent of international law. And that would clearly be a violation of same, wouldn't it? Obviously it's a fabrication of the Great Right-Wing Conspiracy. After all, our own governments take great delight in lying to us about everything. Just think about the 100 mpg carburetor and all those crashed flying saucers interred at Groom Lake.</conspiracy-theory>

Woo-hoo! There was really only one thing about the original Star Trek series that I still like, and that's the green-skinned girlies!!!!

Hooray for Qatar! What say we remember this too, for when the appropriate time comes. Sorry bastards. I understand geopolitik demands that the Saudis not see the gun barrels just yet, but damn me if I like it.

Mindles H. Dreck post a short-ish essay on wealth redistribution in which he argues (quickly) that wealth redistribution, even though we might collectively agree that a certain amount is desirable, is actually problematic on its face. I know this makes me weird(er), but I actually enjoy reading economics. Once I get to be stupid idle rich, I intend to run right off and get an MBA and just wallow in it all.