Gates Nose-Dives at CES

Lots of submissions this morning about Bill Gates' performance at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show. His Media Center PC presentation crashed. (The presentation is online.) He also gave an interview to CNET, where he described anyone who doesn't support ever-increasing intellectual property laws as "communists". Boingboing has some commentary on that interview as well.

Where is that video

someone provide a link to the video where Windows 98 crashed on Gates and former MS employee at Comdex in Chicago circa 1998.

Re:Where is that video

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9804/20/gates.co mdex/ [cnn.com]

Re:Time of crash

Actually four. The digicam thing crashed twice in about three minutes, then the game gave the BSOD, then Conan's game was lagging A WHOLE LOT. He was getting 2fps, while Gate$ was gettign the full 60fps.

And the audience was eating it up?

Props to Conan for his good improv skills and ability to work a crowd, but doesn't it say something weird about our age that Microsoft itself can't keep its own product from going down at a major technology trade show, and that the crowd finds this acceptable, even funny? Remember, Microsoft's product is on warships [theregister.co.uk] these days. Would the crowd have also been yucking like a bunch of doped-up Amsterdam tourists if this had been wargames off the coast of England, and HMS Windows had given them a GPF when they tried to launch a missile? Please, boys: don't believe your own hype, and for God's sake, don't let anybody with a pulse take Ballmer seriously for a nanosecond.

Re:And the audience was eating it up?

Of course they find it funny. Have you ever given a demonstration and something goes wrong...we deal with that with humor. They are trying to show off new technology, which is always a risk. Windows XP has never crashed on me, ever. But I don't do anything crazy with it...just play games and general computing use. Yet here at work, I can't even insmod a damn module for 10 Gb Ethernet in my SuSE distro. It crashes the whole system and forces me to walk to the lab and reboot it. Does Linux suck? Hell no...and neither does XP. Would people be laughing if ANY OS screwed up and fired a missile when it shouldn't? Of course not, your example is retarded and pointless. Did people die when my linux server crashed 7 times today? No. Did the people in my depeartment shake their head and laugh when I told them about my problems? Yeah, because we all know how hard it is to deal with technology and software...particularly when you are on the bleeding edge. So to you people who have no perspective and objectivity when it comes to this stuff...I say shove it. An OS is a tool, and each has advanatages over the other. If you can't admit it, you are fool with an agenda. Let go of it...it is so much easier to appreciate that we have these fantastic OSs at all and to use each one to its full benefit. Object to MS's business practices, criticize security models, but before you place your finger squarely at MS, realize that all OSs have a long way to go before they just work (like as simple as turning on your TV).

I spy a new meme

Fly the flag with pride comrades!
boingboing.net/images/copyleftcommie.gif [boingboing.net]

Re:I spy a new meme

In Soviet, erm...

I'm sure there's a joke here somewhere, but I can't for the life of me remember what it is. ;-)

Re:I spy a new meme

Actually, isn't a government granted monopoly (copyright) and "incentives" more communist than capitalist? Do we really need to pour millions of dollars into the pockets of the recording industry and artists? I mean, I accept the premise that entertainment is worth money, but when one organization controls the distribution channels, content, and advertisement, where's the competition?

Re:I spy a new meme

Communism is a method of government, what we're talking about here is socialism, the economic theory. So with that out of the way, lets go on: Copyright is a violation of "pure" economic principles, because it's a market control to create an artificial scarcity. However, nobody with any brains actually wants a market totally free of any controls, even so-called free-marketers. There's some other considerations, like that copyright creates a market where there otherwise wouldn't be one.

However, anti-copyright is not socialist, because socialism is ENFORCED public sharing/ownership. The absence of copyright means that there's no legal protection for works, not that you're required to share them. (As an aside: patents as well as registered copyrights require disclosure["sharing"] as a requirement).

The RIAA is an industry organization made up of record labels. It doesn't directly interact with artists in any way, but people (at least on Slashdot) will refer to "the RIAA" when they mean "record labels and/or the music industry as a whole", as well as the RIAA per se. Any artist with any signifigant amount of distribution (ie, outside their home county) will have to sign with an RIAA member, because record labels control access to all the major means of distribution - you won't get your album into stores and you won't get radio play without a record deal with a major label. One more note: despite there being a whole shit-ton of record labels, they're mostly subsidaries or imprints of each other. There's a fairly small set of people who control the music industry and while they compete with each other to a degree, they mostly collude.

In summary: Grandparent is wrong to call copyrights communist (or socialist), but your rebuttal is equally wrong pretty much everywhere.

Re:I spy a new meme

"Communism is a method of government"

Actually Communism is a way of living. It derives from living in a commune. You might note it has the same root as a word us Linux people use a lot, community. Bill Gates is in fact right, sharing MP3's and open source software development IS communism. The catch is thanks the word was hijacked by a bunch of socialist dictators, specially Stalin. Its been turned in to a dirty word and thats why Bill Gates and Co. try to lay it on file swappers and Linux. Americans in particular freak at the word and start warming up the jets on the deck of the aircraft carriers everytime the get a wiff of it in the air. That is exactly what Bill is trying to do here, mobilize the American people and government in to a reactionary frenzy in which they wipe out file sharing and Linux. Oh, and in the process he just happens to get "Trusted Computing" and he locks Linux off of the Internet and out of personal computing because it can't be "Trusted". In the process he further secures his monopoly because all computers have to be trusted and Microsoft will seek to control the implementation of that trust(in all hardware and all software). It is classic Marxism, the community versus an ever expending capitalist monpolist.

At its ideal Communism is a group of people living together sharing their resources and labor, working together for the common good. They are not dividing the world up in to personal property which at its worst usually means one percent of the people own everything, including all the land and everyone else is dirt poor and share cropping or working in outright servitude. Thats what Russia was like prior to 1917 which is why there was a revolution. Its also classic Marxism that when you have capital you have a huge advantage in making more capital over people who have no capital. And of course there is a near inevitable concentration of wealth in a few hands and ever larger monpolies because large corporations can dominate smaller ones and huge monopolies are extremely good at making money, and destroying or gobbling up their competitors. Unless government restrains it through antitrust law, which is ... gasp ... socialism it is a nearly inevitable evolution of Capitalism that eventually you end up with one company that owns everything, and in the computer age it would most likely be Microsoft unless they screw the pooch at some point.

Re:I spy a new meme

You sure are throwing that "liar" word around a lot without any actual justification.

"you are lying when you say Bill Gates is calling open source developer or Linux developers communists"

This is exactly what he said:

"No, I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist."

He obviously didn't say LINUX in bold letters but who exactly do you think he is talking about when he is refering to "software makers" here? The "incentive" here is that software makers should hold all their software under proprietary license and get paid for it, an arguement he's been making since his famous letter in 1976.

OK if that didn't clarify who the liar is here lets hop in the wayback machine and remember when Steve Ballmer, Bill's partner called [theregister.co.uk] Linux "communist" outright. He said:

"Yet Linux sort of springs organically from the earth. And it had, you know, the characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it."

"what you are doing is essentially changing that into an attack on open source."

I am doing no such thing. I'm merely pointing out that Linux IS communist in the classic sense of the word. It is a community working for the common good, and renouncing private ownership of the fruit of their labors for that good. There is nothing resembling an "attack" in that. It is an entirely positive thing. I'm pointing out than when Gates and Ballmer use this word it comes across as an attack because the true meaning of the word "communist" has been so distorted in today's world especially in the U.S. that it is a pejorative and they are trying to associate Linux with all the badness that was and is the U.S.S.R and China which weren't even remotely communist in reality, the were and are oppressive socialist dictatorships.

All in all you strike me as a classic anonymous coward chickenshit slinging terms like "big liar", without supporting it, while you cower under complete anonymity. If you believe what you are saying and aren't a chickenshit at least post it under your login.

Re:I spy a new meme

But whose choice is that to make? Your choice (or the peoples)? What gives you the right to decide how much Brittney Spears and her organizations want to charge for their own creation? Or should we let the gov't choose the price?
With available tech people steal the material. If people are legally allowed to steal the material (now it is not stealing, it is just taking for free) - they will do so. In all honesty - how many people are going to pay for something, when they can get it for free legally? Hell how many people out there pay for something when they can take it illegally with little risk of capture?
It is not our property - we did not make it, we have ZERO say. It is like if I knit a sweater. I can charge nothing for it(give it away), I can charge 5 bucks or I can charge 5,000 bucks. My choice. Your choice is to pay or not pay for it. If i see that people are not buying my sweaters I can either reduce the price or leave it as is. Again I have a choice to sell at the price that I want to sell, you have the choice to buy it or not. I can't see why this concept is so hard to grasp?

Please note I am not trying to incite you to anger, I am just trying to figure out why people have a problem with someone setting a price that they want on their property.

Re:I spy a new meme

It is not our property - we did not make it, we have ZERO say. [snip] I can't see why this concept is so hard to grasp? [snip] I am just trying to figure out why people have a problem with someone setting a price that they want on their property.

Because some people have figured out that intellectual property is not property. It is non-rivalrous, can be reproduced at negligible cost, and it cannot be stolen (ie. you cannot be criminally convicted for theft of IP). In other words it has none of the characteristics of real property.

IP is a legal monopoly on ideas, which is enforced through contracts and civil law (ie. license agreements). Only businessmen attempting to invent a market by means of a false scarcity call it "property".

See here [dklevine.com] if you're really trying to figure this out.

Re:I spy a new meme

I think it is more that some people are trying to make IP not property.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means, what you think it means.

"Intellectual Property" is a bit of an oxymoron, isn't it? Property means something that one possesses, and it is very difficult to possess something that only exists in someone's head, in my opinion.

Historically, (as far as I can tell) people have not wrangled so much over the ownership of ideas. It only, as you say, since people have started investing so much money into ideas, to be later confronted with better copying techniques, that this has been a problem. Patrons of the art, for instance, have always existed, but generally have not expected a return on their investments. Nowadays, the patrons are all record producers and software companies and the like.

Did it ever occur to you that it is insane to invest millions of dollars into an intangible work? Probably not, because the industry has us trained to believe that that is normal. You are probably worried that without the current industry there would not be new games and books and recordings. But remember that artists have always worked for thousands of years, and that this industry structure is less than a hundred years old.

Re:I spy a new meme

A rose by any other name is still a rose. I think then the argument is over the name... People hate assigning the word property to non-tangeable products. But why can't property be applied to non-tangeable products.
According to dictionary.com
Something tangible or intangible to which its owner has legal title: properties such as copyrights and trademarks.

IP is not physical property, but it is as real as money. Why is it so hard to apply the same thought process we do about money to copyrightable material? That hundred dollar bill is a piece of paper worth less then a penny, but we assign it a great value. You say that because something is not tangeable it is not property? I have some money in the bank - not tangeable at the moment...is that not my property?

Why can't criminal law on theft of tangible property be applied to non-tangible? Because we say so? Because the old laws do not support it? Since when do people in the tech industry, one of the fastest changing industries if not the fastest, resist change to old ideas?

Re:I spy a new meme

I am saying that it should be the IP's owners decision, not anyone elses decision, to set the price.

I believe the creator of the content should have the decision to set the price for their work. And they do.

But, the reality of copying and recording technology means that they really only have the right to set the price for the very first copy of their work.

This is much like centuries ago when, after a great composer allowed their work to be performed, it was possible for musicians with good ears and memory to copy down a transcription of a great piece of music.

That it was possible to do this was regarded as reality.

If laws that distort the market by granting exclusive rights to sell duplicated information are reformed, then we might well have artists that would be paid by enough fans getting money together for induce them to perform a First Performance, since that is the only service for which they inherently ought to have the right to charge for. They are permitted to set the price for this First Performance as they wish, they can refuse to play unless the price is to their liking, and they can refuse to perform in the presence of recording equipment. All of those choices are the right of the content creator and I believe those rights should be preserved.

But, when I copy one file of bits to another on my computer and email it to a friend and RIAA demands payment, it's an artificial distortion of the market. Next thing you know, the authors of child-rearing advice books will want cameras in my home to help them charge me in case I actually use on their copyrighted techniques for child-rearing.

Eh?

Shows you what you know. Flags are for fat old aparachnik fogies. All the cool revolutionaries know you wave bloody shirts.

To the barricades!

Re:I spy a new meme

That should be a patent-unencumbered PNG! Where is your sense of decency, comrade? :)

Run screaming from this!!!

"Fly the [boing!boing! USSR/Copyleft] flag with pride comrades!"

NONONONONO!!! I know you're trying to be funny, but I'm not laughing... The last thing free software proponents need is to associate themselves with a failed economic ideology that has resulted in tens of millions of unnecessary deaths worldwide. Free Software has nothing to do with statist communism and everything to do with individual freedom of association and collaboration. When Bill Gates frames the debate between the capitalists on his side and communists on the other, the last thing to do is embrace the presuppositions of his frame! Down that road evokes an ideological wasteland of failure! Do copyleft supporters want to associate themnselves with that? --M

Re:Run screaming from this!!!

Free Software has nothing to do with statist communism and everything to do with individual freedom of association and collaboration.

And statist 'communism' as practiced in places like the USSR and China has very little to do with real communist/socialist theory.

Re:Run screaming from this!!!

Ah, yes, this is a old chestnut: "Communism is a good system run by bad people."

The problem with communism/socialism is not the people who are running it, it's people. We just don't work that way in groups larger than a high school study group, and that's why it fails every time.

Religion is exactly the ideological retort to use

Come on, the deaths caused by Communism were a result of Religious Fervor.

I'm really short on time so I can't fully reply to all of these messages, or even to you. But I'm really not debating the underlying ideologies of communism, capitalism, or even religious expression. I'm talking about a cultural taboo against communism which continues in western cultures today. Look at the success of the Swift Boat Vets red baiting the Kerry campaign as a prime example; McCarthyism continues fifteen years after the fall of the Soviet Union and fifty years after McCarthy's downfall.

If the Free Software movement willingly accepts Gate's frame as being inspired by communist utopian idealism, the debate is over. Gate's will have won by default. If any of those EFFers or Project GNU folks are listening here (right - *cough*) I would recommend framing project GNU and BSD ideals by referencing simple down-to-earth small town values like church bake sales, community volunteer firefighting, and the Salvation Army. These are examples of community cooperation everyone can understand. And when Gates (or his surrogates) compares writing free software to communist destruction of capitalist intellectual property rights, argue back that his argument is like destroying the church bake sale for the profit-rights of local restaurants. That is an frame which skewer his debate talking points.

This is not about communist or capitalist ideology, this is about manipulating public opinion in order to promote - long term - a specific political agenda in Washington. Realize that and all this ideological bullshit smoke disappears like evenscent fog clearing on a sunny day.

Cheers,
--Maynard

Re:I spy a new meme

A better picture [umtstrial.co.uk].

Re:I spy a new meme

I find it offensive to associate the GPL with a form of government that's responsible for killing many millions of people.

Are you aware of a major form of government that is NOT responsible for killing millions of people?

Finkployd

Anarchist, dammit

I can't think of a single anarchist government that's killed millions of people.

Re:Anarchist, dammit

"Anarchist government" is an oxymoron. True anarchy arises from lack of order spontaneously, and a lot of scores get settled with blood. Everyone: the US killed over 300,000 Filipinos alone in the Spanish-American war. We've killed 12,000-100,000 in Iraq; the exact number is classified. "Communism" didn't kill anyone any more than our "democracy" has. Nothing about the theories demand you murder people. The ideologies don't kill. People kill. Stalin and Lenin killed millions for political and economic advantage, and we are killing for the same reasons now. And the Russians thought they were defending their motherland and freedom as well. And were as deluded as we are now, for the exact same reasons.

Re:Anarchist, dammit

Whilst making a valid point in your post, this statement is highly misleading:

"Communism" didn't kill anyone any more than our "democracy" has.

You should really read this article about Democide in the Soviet Union [freedomsnest.com] before you make such a statement. I really hate to bring death tolls into such discussions, but in this case there is a completely different dimension in numbers *and* course of action.

Re:Anarchist, dammit

That's very true, and I'd mod you up if I werent responding to your comment.

BUT, you have to acknowledge that Soviet-style Communism isn't really Communism, it's totalitarianism. USA-style democracy isn't really democracy, either, but that's another matter...

Re:Hate to break it to you...

And I don't know about you, but my copy of the communist manifesto doesn't say much giving people a choice; it just makes an assumption that communism is a historical inevitability, and that you'd better learn to live with it.

The manifesto is like a pamphlet to describe the general idea of Communism. Throughout much of Marx and Engel's more detailed writings, they not only allude to, but directly state that the Communist economic system must be hand-in-hand with some sort of popular government, a democracy, a republic, etc. In fact, Marx and Engels frequently state throughout their work that the adoption of a Communist economic system must be brought about by the will of the people.

Just like every other communist country is a dictatorship.

The fact that they are Communist is not the reason that they were dictatorships. They were dictatorships because they were modeled after the original Soviet system. It was originally envisioned by Lenin (who grossly modified Marx and Engels work) and later modified by Stalin. When Stalin came to power, Soviet hegemony throughout Asia and Eastern Europe spread, and with it, the Soviet system of government, a dictatorship.

Don't be fooled by people. The Communist Manifesto is not the no-all, end-all of communism, just a simple leaflet compared to what is really out there.

Check out this link for Marx and Engel's real work.

Marx and Engel's Selected Works [marxists.org]

I especially recommend that you read "The Principles of Communism".

Re:I spy a new meme

To paraphrase the NRA member logic: Governments don't kill people, people kill people. The communist form of government had little to do with killing people. It ultimately fell victim to a human trait called greed. The people in power in the former soviet states felt that they were more equal than others. If you ask me, I will tell you that our capitalist republic is failing in the same exact way. The only difference is that with capitalism, the PR machine has better beads and trinkets. Now before anyone jumps on me to tell me that capitalism is an economic model and communism is a political model, don't forget that in communism, the economic model is defined by the political model. Here in the U.S. the economic model is also defined by the political model, but the balance is different. Here the economic model has more power than the political model. And those people who would have been high ranking politicos in the U.S.S.R. are instead CEOs in our corporations. Very effective way of attempting to take over the world without letting things like politics and ethics get in the way.

Re:I spy a new meme

One key difference between Communism and Capitalism is the existence of a middle class in Capitalism.

Let's keep it that way. The middle class is currently shrinking in a dramatic way. The upper class is not growing appreciably, but they are making more money. The poor class, on the other hand, is growing. This suggests a shift of power away from the middle class to the upper class. This is not a good thing. As the powerful amass more power, they will abuse it to the detriment of everybody else. That is why power should reside in the largest segment of the population as possible -- to help ensure that as few people as possible face abuse from the rest of society.

Lesson for Gates

Never show up at an event hosted by a comedian.
Using Windows.

You see, this just proves it.

I always knew Gates was a robot. Now they installed SP2 on him, and LOOK WHAT HAPPENS! Increased security, my foot!

That's pretty funny...

I wish they'd stop developing new, useless BS out at Microsoft and get to work on bug fixes.

Re:That's pretty funny...

Agreed - the last paragraph of that sfgate piece really sez it all:

"While Microsoft's goal is to turn the PC into a superhub that does everything -- plays music, works as a cell phone, stores your photos -- they're running up against the fact that most people buy discreet components that do particular things."

Personally, I kinda like having seams of one sort or another. They are boundries around systems that restrict their awareness and let me take control of them again when I need to.

Re:That's pretty funny...

That, and your data/life doesnt get held hostage when something goes wrong with it!

Re:That's pretty funny...

To heck with taking control of them, I just want the devices discreet and seperate so that, god forbid, my DVD player take a dump on me, I can still watch TV, watch a VHS tape, play a game on a console, or look up my email on my computer. The 'One Box Does It All' mentality may simplify what you have to carry or buy, but it also represents a single point of failure for a large number of services. Getting it repaired, especially if it's out of warrenty, can be a major pain in the ass.

(Only one device I've ever really had repaired was my Minidisc player, twice, and that was under CircuitCity's own extended warrenty. Took weeks to get it back, though thankfully it did come back fixed, or at least with an explaination as to a point of failure like the power adaptor. TV, Microwave, my Clie.. it's almost cheaper to just buy a new one since it is generally designed to just barely outlive it's warrenty)

What's wrong with communism?

I'm going to accuse them of being modern day capitalists.
Sounds just as bad to me.

I see your point but...

a) Calling free culture advocates commies shows a... slight misunderstanding of the two ideologies. At its best, Communism was never particularly concerned with the individual (possibly why it is so successful in the Confucian environment of China).

b) Arguing that "Communist" is not a pejorative is likely to go down like a lead balloon in much of America. The McCarthy witchhunts were ludicrous but they happened for a reason. Communists *were* the enemy - defending them carries the same overtones as defending Naziism to the French.

Re:I see**2 your point but...

There is communism (insane totalitarianism found in USSR and an earlier China) but they never achieved that Marx wrote about. No "government" ever has (In the '60's and '70's people had communes, but they always broke apart on the shoals of human nature). The people who started "communist" revolutions never completed the process. I don't call those insane assholes "communists", they are insane oligarchs, just like the Czarist regime before them.

There was a time when the new government in this continent did something that had not been done before or since: They *gave up power*, placing that power in the hands of people. Since then, the concept has fallen on hard times. Today, we have oligarchs like Mr. Gates trying to restore Traditional Values: Own and control access to *fucking everything*. And they have enough financial resources to buy off what passes for government these days. And the only people doing anything about it (in information technology, they are FOSS advocates) eschew government and political process. Too busy writing actual reliable code, I suppose...

I don't like arbitrary authority, so I don't like big centralized government. On the other hand, I cannot think of another way to slow down the assholes who want to charge me for the privilege of working (using "their" "intellectual" "property"). It's a dilemma that I don't know how to resolve.

Re:What's wrong with communism?

I'm not going to defend capitalism (granted I think it's much better than communism), but communism itself is pretty bad.

I myself have fairly left-wing views (I'm from Canada and completely agree with universal healthcare, etc), but communism doesn't seem to take one thing into consideration: Humans are greedy, and this includes the ones controlling the government of a communist country. Much like the very purpose of an incorporation (Check out this movie [thecorporation.tv]), there's an underlyting wrongness about communism that doesn't have enough checks and balances (at least not in my country of origin).

Anyway, Bill should grow up and know better than to call people commies. It's unprofessional.

Is this a metaphor?

It sounds like Bill Gates may be infested with SpyWare, a typical memetic programming that took place in the 1950's in which everyone who was not a right-wing-christian-gun-loving-American was a communist. It sounds like it's causing his PR ability to crash. Should we help him out and format him and put linux on him? (Wait.. Put linux on him, linux is Tux, the mental image that is coming to mind is... DISTURBING!!!! ACK REBOOT REBOOT!)

Bzzt

But while promoting what he calls the "digital lifestyle," Gates showed how vulnerable all consumers -- even the world's richest man -- are to hardware and software bugs.

It would *REALLY* be nice to see someone in the media finally get this right.

SB: ... showed how vulnerable all *WINDOWS USERS* - even the founder and ex-CEO of the very company that makes Windows -- are to ... (the fact that Windows is a buggy piece of shit)

Re:Bzzt

Okay, so (1) how is a video game able to tear down the entire operating system? and (2) how does this blame-shifting actually help the users?

Sure, a few game buyers might return their game, but they'll still have an operating system with lurking landmine bugs that will crash in exactly the same way for some other product next week.

Re:I Don't Get It...

... proof that the Microsoft PR department astroturfs /.

Ok, ok before the guy with the very large user id blows a gasket, I'm only joking, really.

Re:I Don't Get It...

I don't know what you guys are doing to fuck your Windows boxes up so much, but I have no problem keeping mine up and running.

What do I do to fuck up my Windows box? Connect it to the net and tried to read email, that's what. I know a lot of people who run Windows at home. Out of all those people, I can't name a single one that hasn't had a problem *IN THE PAST 2 MONTHS* with some sort of virus, spyware, random flakiness, or other bullshit. Right now, on a freshly installed XP system from the factory (with nothing else on it) Windows Update is stuck trying to install some sort of fix, but can't for some reason, with the end result being that I can't get SP2 for it. Fuck it up? Yeah, it's fucked up. But it wasn't me - it was fucked as designed.

Rebooting once a week to "keep it running smoothly." Ha. The fact that you need to do this points to something wrong with your system.

Out of touch....

Is it me or does Gates seem to be very out of touch with what is going on in the real world and mostly seems to be getting his current information from his "Human Search Engines". Not to mention the fact he is constantly doing little more then plugging Micro$oft products.

Just remember: If you don't buy from Micro$oft you are a Communist!

-5: Self-redundant

How many times are you going to submit the same post [slashdot.org]? How many times will the mods mark it up all the way?

also...

When I read that he nose-dived, I was hoping for a video of him tripping and flying off a stage or something. I am sorely disappointed!

Obligatory Dr. Strangelove Quote

Gen. Jack D. Ripper: I can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

I lived in Utah for ten years

and was surprised, at first, to find that many people there actually believed that.

How Bill can succeed...

Use his influence with the federal government to tie the open source effort with terrorism. Terrorism is the new communism. Cloak anything you don't like in terrorism and it gets done. Couple that with this administration's ability to be bought off by corporate interests and he can get what he wants. OK, mod me down now.......

Search.

From the interview, on the topic of search engines:

Oh, sure, everybody is working on those things, but just take the idea of finding your local pizza place and doing that right; search doesn't do that well today.

Sounds like someone needs to clue Bill in to using Sherlock under OS X -- that's exactly what I used it for yesterday.

--saint

Re:Search.

Hey Bill, here are your local pizza joints [google.com].

Re:Search.

hell, fucking google does that for me good enough, in fact it finds a page with reviews too in top 5.

and i'm in a smallish 20k person suburb, in finland...

but i guess what bill meant was that the he wants an engine that the pizzeria owner needs to pay for to be in and the user needs to pay for use..

Anything like this

Worlds largest blue screen of death here [infoworld.com]

top secret BSOD

I saw a funny thing on my way to vegas recently - not quite as big a BSOD, but the same one on dozens of machines in US customs. I tried to take a picture and nearly had my camera confiscated...

Welcome to the revolution!

I, for one, welcome our new copyleft communist masters (and logo).

[rant]
Seriously, Bill Gate and Co. continue to try and paint anyone who doesn't agree with their stance on IP as un-American. Who died and made him J. Edgar Hoover, Jr.?

America was NOT founded on the principles of IP but on freedom of choice (religious and otherwise) and the idea that everyone is supposed to contribute to the public good. The recent push to IP, patent, and copyright every little "innovation" (think one-click)is what is hurting our ability to produce something new and better without having to wade through a morass of legalities.

I will continue to support copyleft, OSS, and any other program that contributes to the dissemination of knowledge and ideas.
[/rant]

Re:Welcome to the revolution!

"Rather, America was founded on the idea that each person could retain control over what they had created/built/earned/believed without someone "more deserving" taking that control away from them.

People chose to contribute to the common effort because they believed in it, not because they had to."

Very well said.

One of the things that constantly bugs me are the extremists. I'm an author - intellectual rights are very important to me, as a large part of my living right now depends on how they are used in regards to my work. Quite frankly, if I spend a year and a half writing a book, that book is mine, to do with as I please. That's the letter and spirit of the law.

But then you have the extremists on both sides, who abuse the spirit and/or letter of intellectual property law. Companies like Microsoft use it as a weapon to stifle others from innovating, essentially by trying to take their ideas away from them and claim them as their own. The extremists on the other side react by wanting to strip away intellectual property rights entirely, and make any new creation into part of the public domain.

When you think about it, both are theft. To use the chair example, the first group of extremists come to you after you've made a chair and demand that you give it to them and not make any more because they made it first. The second group of extremists come to you after you've made a chair and demand that you give it to them so that it can be contributed to the public good. Neither is terribly respectful to the person who made the chair in the first place, and who should be allowed to sell it if they want, give it away if they want, or just sit in it if they want.

Unusual

I find it pretty unusual that both cases caused the machine to stop responding completely. That hasn't happened to me since Windows 98/Me. 2000 and XP have generally been pretty stable theirselves. Individual programs still crash, but they don't usually take the system down with them. I wonder if there was some bad ram or other hardware failure as part of the cause. Still funny and I'm sure embarrassing all the same. :)

Minute 7

If the video still works, Conan O'Brian does some hilarious stand-up badmouthing Gates at minute 7. Skip the garbage before that.

Your parents told you...

he described anyone who doesn't support ever-increasing intellectual property laws as "communists".

But... doesn't sharing mean caring? At least that's what my parents always said.

In all seriousness, there's nothing wrong with a communial society, it's just really really hard to pull off because of human nature.

Re:Your parents told you...

Communal societies work if they're voluntary. But you can't force someone to participate. It's the difference bewteen someone giving something away and someone forcefully taking something away.

And the lesson is ...

So, his media player presentation crashed, and the link to this is ... a .asx.

Kinda ironic don't you think ?

Dennis Miller called it years ago ...

"Bill Gates is a Persian cat and a monocle away from being a villain in a James Bond movie."

-- Dennis Miller

You may laugh...

he described anyone who doesn't support ever-increasing intellectual property laws as "communists".

While this is generally laughed at by the slashdot community we still need to consider that Joe Sixpack pretty much sees it the same way. Not that he minds downloading free music and pr0n but ultimatly he does see it as theft.

And this could really bite at the community in the future. While most people here laugh at Joe Sixpack he's the one who helped Gates build an empire.

Marketing

I wonder if the fathers of capitalism ever imagined the levels of marketing we would have today. I believe it really skews the whole idea of competition...

It didn't hurt Windows 98 sales after Gates got a blue screen [methodshop.com] during a demo, Ashlee Simpson is still selling albums even though we found out that she really, really, can't sing (SNL [msn.com] + Orange Bowl [msn.com]), and G. W. Bush got the presidency despite being a below average public speaker.

The american public really doesn't hold public figures to a very high standard anymore.

There are music geeks who hate Ashlee for taking away a spot at a record company that some talented band might have had, political geeks who know every single word GW has said wrong, and normular computer geeks who know the design flaws in Windows.

Still, the public doesn't seem to care, and prefer to be sheep following celebrity shepards rather than thinking humans supporting the most qualified public figures.

You have to be a really dedicated researcher if you want to get beyond the multi-million dollar marketing hype surrounding most products and people these days.

Microsoft in a nutshell...

Although he accepted guffaws from audience members in the theater, the technical hiccups didn't prompt Gates to engage in a hard-hitting analysis of computer reliability and security.

Doesn't that just sum up everything that's wrong with Microsoft?

Hmm

Throwing words like comunist is very imature and unprofessional on Bills behalf IMHO.

Trouble starts at 26 minutes 50 seconds (or so)

Fast forward to the interesting portion of this riveting presentation.

re: Communists

You know I was ready to call B.S. as I was reading the article because I got to here and read "There are fewer communists in the world today than there were". I thought man, saying that Bill called everyone communists was a bit of stretch but then I read a little further, "There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises."

Yep, he pretty much just said that if you don't support IP then your a Communist. What a douchebag. That statement is going to haunt him for a long time and rightly so. The world's richest man and still as greedy as ever. Again, what a douchebag. Oh btw for the 12 year olds among you who can't think like adults yet, yes you can still be a douchebag and be philanthropic at the same time.

Re: Communists

I was ready to call B.S. until I started reading the Slashdot thread full of people explaining how Communism isn't so bad. I'll let them explain this to my girlfriend, who grew up in part of the former USSR (now Latvia). Funny thing - since we got together I've met many people who used to live in the Eastern Bloc - 100% of them (the ones I've met) think that Communism is about the worst thing to ever infect the planet. The scariest thing (at least to some of the posters in this thread) is that most of them now vote Republican.

What kills me is that the left-wingers who advocate communism (to call them Liberals would be an insult to, well, Liberals) so blindly ignore the fact that it has caused some of the worst environmental and human rights abuses in history. We go around villifying Hitler, and rightly so, but he was strictly junior-varsity when compared to Stalin. The most evil corporate polluters (and yes, I think that a few companies are actually evil in this regard) have nothing on Moscow's old five-year plans.

My suggestion to these wanna-be Commies is that they go live in an actual Communist country for awhile. Enjoy life in these workers' paradises full of happy people. Oh, what, these people have either thrown the Communists out, or would do so if they didn't have guns to their heads?

Yes, I know there are a few people screaming about why they can't mod this post -50 flamebait (feel free, I have karma to burn). I'm not saying everyone that supports Open Source, Creative Commons, etc. is a Communist. Far from it: I doubt that more than a tiny, tiny percentage of them actually are. I am, however, shocked at how many crawl out from under their rocks when a subject like this pops up.

If we were really communists....

We'd be supporting the idea of the government owning all intellectual property.

However, not to defend Mr. Gates (and surely to piss off a lot of the OSS community), but there is some small degree of validity to his statement, though he used the wrong word.

Many people who completely reject the idea of intellectual property (not all) aren't really communists as Mr. Gates would propose, but in fact, radical left-wing anarchists. They despise authority in any form that it comes in; that is why such things as IP and copyrights are hated so much. The idea of God introduces a supreme authority, so they hate him even more.

They wear the "communist" label with pride, not understanding who they really are, or what communism really is and what it has done to nearly every single society that has been foolish enough to try it.

They are the modern day hippy, when it comes right down to it. They stand for and oppose the same things and the same principles.

Bill bet the farm

He has to say this sort of thing since he's bet the MS farm on DRM and the like. When you hear people making these kind of references though, you know they are concerned. That tells me the DRM plan isn't going as well as they thought it would.

Of course Gates would claim communisim...

...reforming the IP laws to be fair to all people would hurt his pocketbook. The real problem as I see it is that the laws need to be reformed enough so that OPEN/FREE software can do anything that Closed/Commercial can. Right now some of the IP laws prevent this from happening, and some of the coming ones will tighten that even more. All I presonally want is a level playing field, and so long as we have "Trade secrets", Broadcast flags, CSS, etc that can never happen because IT locks out Open/Free which requires that those secrets begiven to everyone using the software and nothing be hidden. Thankfully we won the battle with the W3C and they dropped that whole RAND thing for web standards. A step in the right direction, but not the whole road.

It's MS who's communist here, not us

Note that capitalism is not about monopolies. In fact, capitalism relies on free market, and you can't have free market if one of the players controls a majority of it.

The basic ideas of capitalism work just insanely effective. When we had communism in Poland, most shops had empty shelves -- and within just months after the communism's fall any shortages were just gone, as if by a wave of a magic wand.

On the other hand, communism is based on monopoly. It's supposed to be a monopoly of the "working class", but in reality in all cases it turned out to be a monopoly of the Party. And then, if you can buy the Party's blessing -- you can have a monopoly in your sector, too!
Whatever you say, you can't ignore the fact that all real-life implementations of communism were based on the control the Party had on the citizens. In fact, it's the control what the communism is about.
So... we have a company who tries to gain the sole control of a sector of industry -- and it's them who dare to call their enemies communists.

Hypocritical at best

where he described anyone who doesn't support ever-increasing intellectual property laws as "communists".

Does this make Bill Gates a communist? Xerox and Apple had windows before Microsoft. TCP was borrowed from Digital. Sun for RPCs and J#. Supercalc and other had spead sheets before Microsoft. Does work perect or others get roaylties rom Word for the word processor?

In fact, Linux uses X for it's windows which predates Microsoft. Maybe Microsoft should pay royalties to commercial UNIX and Linux for the RTU of Windows.

And look at Microsoft's legal track record.

This was obviously a hypocritical comment on Bill's part. A typical reaction to a monoplistic looser.

Minute mark

Just so you don't have to watch the entire video (2 hours), the crash happens when they are trying to modify a car at around the 01:13:30 mark.

Wait a minute here.

Havn't Steve Jobs been going on and on about the digital hub for the last several years? Nice to see that Microsoft is using their good old R&D-lab called Apple again.

Software Communism Good?

Ok, so I'm going to go a little bit off topic here, but gates implies that if you support free software, then you are a communist, the thing of it is, I'm not sure how exactly this is a bad thing.
Capitalism and Communism are each at opposite ends of a scale of scarcity- that is to say, Capitalism works great when there is a limited amount of stuff to go around, relative to the population size. It encourages effeciency and results in a population as a whole getting the most of what it wants from a limited pool of resources. Communism on the other hand is ideal for a world where, relative to the population size, resources are unlimited, or at least nearly unlimited. In the perfect theoreticaly communist society, the only limit to how much of something that can be made is the number of people available to make it.
Socialism is basically just the name given to the middle ground.
Now, capitalism is great for a lot of things, because as a society/country/planet today in many areas our resources are still finite. For many aspects of our world, capitalism is still the best thing we've come up with to deal with the limited resources we have, relative to the world population.
In the world of software however, we have a situation which is more closely related to the communist ideal world. Once a program is written it can be copied over and over again essentially for free. In this case, the only limit to the software that can be developed is the amount of skilled people who are able to work on it.
Looking at it like that, what I see when gates says people who support free software are communists is really his admission that we are using a superior philosophy for our little section of reality.

Microsoft is a State-Sponsored Monopoly

The irony of Bill Gates' anti-communist rhetoric in the wake of his recent crash and burn presentation on Windows Media Center is that Microsoft itself resembles a creaky Soviet-era state-run monopoly much more than a lean, mean emblem of free-trade capitalism.

In my opinion Microsoft is essentially a state-sponsored monopoly and, as such, represents, little more than a tweaked version of the classic communist state entity.

The rational for this position is the simple fact that although Microsoft has been found guilty of being a monopolistic barrier to free-trade in the software industry it was given tacit state sanction to operate as such when the courts and the DOJ failed to press for meaningful controls on their business practices.

From an objective perspective this is no more than a refined version of the classic communist state monopoly. Like Soviet era monopolies Microsoft must compete in the international market as a representative of the State economy while at home it is given tacit control of the market in exchange for loyalty to the political leadership. Also like Soviet era monopolies, state pressure for reform of business practices amounted to little reform but a large increase in the amount of money passed on to corrupt politicians. Take a look at Microsoft's political contributions post-trial and I think you'll see this pattern is quite obvious.

What's worse is that this "tweaked" form of state control can be conducted legally through Political Action Committees with little need to resort to passing money under the table as occurred in the old Soviet Union.

That's right folks, Microsoft's brand of communism is conducted right under your noses while real innovation and competition in the software industry is systematically squashed through monopolistic trade practices tacitly sanctioned by the state. It's high time that all you Democrats and Republicans out there swallow the blue pill and see things as they are, not how you want them to be. Either we believe in free trade or not and no matter how you dice it monopolies are antithetical to free trade. Those who acquire them will always attempt to redefine competition so that the rules don't apply to them. Ooogedy boogedy people! Look-out! International competition means we have to stick together and support our local monopoly. Oh no! Look over there people, those communist are trying to wreck our good capitalist monopoly. It's total nonsense if you just step back and take a look at it for what it really is.

Blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda

Article summary: Microsoft is a huge company with massive, crippling market share. We've got all sorts of different things going, but we can't really describe them specifically so that you can understand what we're doing. We intend to lock you in and control every aspect of your life, from the content on your hard drive to the content you see, hear, and use for entertainment to the content you send back and forth with friends and family. Don't worry, though, because we're huge and lots of other huge companies are partnering with us, so whatever we're doing must be good.

So no big problem; it's not that people have stopped using IE, it's just we've got lots of good ideas that can match and move ahead.

Translation: Microsoft no longer innovates. We have massive, crippling market share, so we don't have to innovate. We wait to see what cool things other people come up with, then we steal them and tell everyone we thought of them first. The general public is stupid and doesn't know any better, so they believe us.

In terms of our agility to do things on the browser, people who underestimated us there in the past lived to regret that.

Translation: Microsoft has massive, crippling market share. Competing with us is an exercise in futility, because we will crush you. Ask Netscape if you don't believe us.

All in all, 100% image and 0% substance in that interview. I have to ask: does Bill actually DO anything any more? Or is he just a gloating talking head?

We're "software terrorists", Bill

Communists? Come on, Bill, you can do better than that! Who cares about Communists anymore? Just look at all the business we're doing with Communist China these days. The word "Communism" has definitely lost its cache.

Here's some advice for your public relations folks: We're not communists, we're "software terrorists", Bill, and we're out to kill little babies and children in the name of FOSS. We hate freedom and the American way of life and we're out to destroy it.

Now, if you can get that message across and paint that picture to the American public, you'd kill FOSS forever. Hell, you could probably get the FBI to start raiding the homes of Linux users.

Good luck in your future endeavors, you Capitalist Pig.

I find what he says rather worrying

Seriously, a fair bit of what he says really sits uncomfortably. For one thing what he says about IE and Firefox is, although perfectly true, not quite as clear-cut as he seems to be making it sound.

So when people say Firefox is being downloaded onto people's systems, that's true, but IE is also on those systems.

That's not exactly by choice in all cases. I am confident that were IE trivially uninstallable from a Windows setup then that point would be less valid.
I don't necessarily think that every FF user would uninstall IE if it were easily doable but I do think that in many of the cases where "IE is also on those systems" it's only because there's no simple way of remiving it.

As for his stance on IP rights then I think he hasn't got a clue.
However what I will say is that I'm no businessman and he runs a very successful business. So I freely admit that as much as I disagree with his points of view they obviously work in business. In fact I'd be pretty surprised if he didn't have views like that - many businesses seem to share the "IP Rights are Good" mentality.

Having said that I do think that what's good for business isn't always good for innovation and incentive. And that's why I personally think that the concept of "Intellectual Property" needs a major overhaul. Patents and non-terminating copyrights simply have too many drawbacks.
Like the main incentive for Patents that companies seem to have is that if they have a great idea then not only should they benefit from selling it but they shoudl benefit from anyone improving on it - as they'll have to pay to license it. Great from a business perspective but from a technical perspective this is dreadful because if someone's got great dieas to extend something but no money or Patents to bargain with then the new idea will be lost.

From a BBC News article [bbc.co.uk] about the speech:

Mr Gates said the PC, like Microsoft's Media Centre, had a central role to play in how people would be making the most out of audio, video and images but it would not be the only device.

"It is the way all these devices work together which will make the difference," he said.

Obviously I find it a bit odd when Bill Gates (or anyone Microsoft spokeperson) talks about things "working together". Unless they're having a complete turnaround in their policies he probably means that when "devices work together" they will always be working via Windows.
Obviously this makes a great quote as he goes down as saying that interoperability is important - or something like that - but it just falls flat as more often than not he isn't tlaking about devices talking with non-Microsoft devices.

Not the red scare

We're not having the Red Scare anymore. Why didn't he label them terrorists? That's today's thing.

Favorite quote

About 33 minutes in and just after the second crash, Conan provides some filler and gives my favorite quote in the presentation:

"Last night ... I got so drunk, I woke up with a hooker. Bill got so drunk, he woke up with an Apple computer."

Close-up screenshot from Video

I could take a snapshot [uticaod.com] from the video of Gates amazed at the technical difficulties. Couldn't fix the colors, sorry if it looks a bit yellow.

RMS answered the "communist" slur in 1992

RMS answered the "communist" accusation in 1992's

Why Software Should be Free [gnu.org], the section "Why don't you move to Russia?".

Founded by Programmers...

From the last paragraph:

"Microsoft was founded by programmers and is still run by programmers, and the bias of programmers is that software can do anything"

From Donkey [folklore.org]:

"We thought the concept of the game was as bad the crude graphics that it used. Since the game was written in BASIC, you could list it out and see how it was written. We were surprised to see that the comments at the top of the game proudly proclaimed the authors: Bill Gates and Neil Konzen ... we were amazed that such a thoroughly bad game could be co-authored by Microsoft's co-founder, and that he would actually want to take credit for it in the comments."

The problem isn't that Microsoft was founded by programmers. The problem is that it was founded by bad programmers.

Torrent

There is a torrent available of the entire video at this blog [nordstrom.fi].

re: communists

>where he described anyone who doesn't support >ever-increasing intellectual property laws as >"communists"

Lawrence Lessig on The Tyranny of Copyright

"We are invoking ideas that should be central to the American tradition, such as that a free society is richer than a control society," he says. "But in the cultural sphere, big media wants to build a new Soviet empire where you need permission from the central party to do anything." He complains that Americans have been reduced to "an Oliver Twist-like position," in which they have to ask, "Please, sir, may I?" every time we want to use something under copyright -- and then only if we are fortunate enough to have the assistance of a high-priced lawyer."

NY Times Jan, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/magazine/2 5COPYR IGHT.html

I bought one of these Media Center PCs

My brother just got one and it seemed pretty like a pretty neat computer. Since I was also on the lookout for a new PC, I bought one days after he did.

AMD-64 3400
1.8G FSB
512M RAM
200G Hard Drive
128Meg AGP Video Card (Quoted on the documentation)

Now for the fun part.
First, the video board is really a PCI card (not to be confused with PCI-Express). I've yet to resolve this issue as I didn't realize this until just the other day.

Now for the Operating System: Windows XP - Media Center Edition. Windows ME's big brother.

Applications suddenly terminate - not all the time, but enough.

Premiere 6.0 is a nightmare on this system - crashes repetedly on the same project within seconds after starting up. If I place a video on a timeline and resize the edit window the app crashes. No other OS (WinXP, Win2K or Win98) crashes.

Windows Messenger - Where to start. First-off, you can not uninstall Windows Messenger (at least without uninstalling The Media Center)!

Running the media center to listen to the radio (which is a cool idea) causes Windows Messenger to run. That particular PC is not connected to the Internet therefore I don't have to worry about it nor can I report it's behaviour after the Windows Messenger comes up. Maybe someone can fill in those details.

On the subject of the Windows Firewall and Anti-virus detection schemes: Oi! (Remember, now, that this system is NOT connected to the internet.) I uninstalled the pre-packaged Norton AV and Norton Internet Security because of it's constant whining about connecting to the net to get updates. It just would not stop prompting me - so I uninstalled it. That's when SP2's problem reared it's very ugly head.

I thought, "OK, I'll just 'change the way Security Center alerts me.'"

I checked the requesite check-boxes in the security center (4 check-boxes total (two under 'Change the way Security Center alerts me and one each under the firewall and AV recommedation buttons). After two restarts, the checkboxes miracouslty (-2 sp) un-check themselves and the Security Center continues to nag me to death. ( I imagine there is some other procedure to effectively (permenently) turn off this mis-feature; but, I haven't found it, yet.)

Anyway, I give 4 'drives down' on WinXP-MC.

Re:Propoganda

Sometimes, all it takes is one comment. If Bush comes out on public television and makes one strong line of pure and clear racial charged comment against minority groups. Do you think everyone will say, well, using one comment against him is just propaganda?

.segmond

Re:Propoganda

Propoganda? In the late 70's/early 80's he wrote a letter to Stallman stating that he should be banned from all computer events because he supports free software...

Now to me, this doesn't sound like propoganda, but rather, who he actually is.

One comment?

>Using one comment against him his just propoganda.

This is not one comment. This is him openly claiming:

1. The current IP system is what makes America great. Yes, that's what he's saying.

2. The current IP system doesn't need reform, except perhaps making better patent systems. Note Microsoft has been dealing with Eolas and others regarding patents so Bill is only seeing the light only when it serves his company.

3. He calls those who call for IP reform "new communists." That's just an insult and trivializes the real concerns many have with using the law (think DMCA and others) to maintain monopoly status and crack down on how one can use one's machine and software.

He spoke like a perfect monopolist. He knows IP laws help him and help maintain the status quo, thus creating a nice and healthy (for him) barrier to entry. He only diverged from the party-line when it came to patents and it should be obvious why.

Of course, he may be right about patent reform, but its soley in his interest and in the interest in his monopoly, comrade.

I will give MS credit, they are the perfect monopolists. Perfect. No wonder he uses such outdated and misused terms like "communism." MS has shown that ruthlessness pays off and Bill might be seeing himself as Ayn Rand, say versus Karl Marx, when he's just an old fashioned monopolist. Monopolies are of course, a symptom of a market failure or corruption. This is called irony.

I find this rhetoric to be common amongst the wealthy business class and conservatives in general. Such as: Commies! X makes America great! Sure there will always be a debate on Y, but lets not jump to conclusions! etc

Pointing out logical fallacies may be useless...

But I'll just add one more comment, trying to deconstruct what Gates says about communism and IP:

1. Communism is generally considered to be a negative adjective in the US, no matter how you slice it. Also, I would argue that most communist governments have done quite a bit of damage by being communist (note that we're talking about communism not socialism, which is something different altogether.
2. He is also, largely, fighting a straw man: very few people (that I know of, anyway) are actually in favor of abolishing all intellectual property. Rather, most seem to advocate more moderate limits.
3. He maintains that the purpose of IP laws are to provide an incentives for those who create content. I agree that this was the original intent of the laws - whether that is still their function is debatable. However, I have a hard time imagining a musician (or any other content creator) sitting down to write a song (or any other content for that matter) but deciding not to because it would only remain protected until 75 years after their death (the current laws protect it for 95 years, I believe). I understand wanting to leave something to one's heirs, but 95 years is several generations - is this really a factor in whether people create new content?

Re:fp

It really is rediculous all around. Bill neglects to carefully consider that the GPL and other open source licenses are simply gifts of intellectual property to the community at large. In no way does the GPL or BSD licenses "disrespect" commercial licenses, they just offer a better value than the commercial licenses, ie., our software is our gift to you.

Re:Another example of fantastic journalism from /.

News Flash: Slashdot is not unbiased towards Microsoft. This seems to shock you. And the thing is, they (we!) understand that MS is pure crapola and borderline-to-outright evil, and so for /. to do what you suggest they would have to approach the situation dishonestly, pretending that MS's history of security problems, bad software, and monopolistic characteristics just don't exist. Gates making vapid proclamations about the future direction of MS is neither newsworthy nor interesting; that happens every single year, and they usually turn out to be almost completely wrong.

What *is* interesting is the so-called "world's greatest software company" has a demo crash on their most public figure, and that he resorts to anachronistic political labels for buttressing his argument.