Let's skip over the hilarious hyperbole of comparing a business story to the prosecution of aggressive war (yes, managers love to *talk* about "crushing" opposition and evisceration and all that...all of which is hilarious hyperbole, too).

Taking it at face value - Japan had its whole regime torn down, warmongers mostly shot for war crimes, replaced with a whole different government and became a whole different culture that now votes heavily against any significant degree of aggressive militarization. If MS had *lost* that antitrust case and been broken up, managers scattered, their whole corporate culture changed, that would have been equivalent.

It wasn't just one thing - attempting to monopolize web browsers and make MS products the default choice for any web application was only a part of it. It was MS wanting to see all your product designs under non-disclosure before they'd offer to buy your company...and then the offer would be comically low and if you didn't take it, your general ideas would appear (badly) in a new Microsoft product that automatically took all your market share because...it was Microsoft.

Columnist "Robert X. Cringely" had a good term for it: "sharp trading" - always on the edge of illegal, but hard and expensive to prove as such. Nobody does business with the sharp trader twice....unless they're over a barrel.

Microsoft's *power* to do this has been reduced, but not their business model and inclinations. I have no choice but to use Office at work, and so I'm an enthused Excel VBA programmer, you make the best of what you've got. (And besides, writing a large critical application as a glorified spreadsheet macro is rare; it's just great for one-shot solutions.) But the very idea of basing a larger business system around SharePoint, their various Visual programming languages, their C# ripoff of Java, strikes me as comical; I'd go with platforms they don't control every time. MS has a long and continuing history of using their most-deeply-engaged customers the way shepherds use sheep - by which I mean "keep shearing them every year" of course. Honest.

Appropriate to what 1961 would have called a science-fiction crime, the punishment taken from Starship Troopers. I like it.

I can't help but notice all the comments so far are about technical prevention. If it is possible, well, that would be great. But for those who dodge all technical barriers and pull this off, maybe its time for some laws equivalent to those insanely high penalties for file-sharing. It's not like a 200Gbps attacks are inadvertent or accidental; they take some deliberate effort. Make it a criminal-record, no-passport, ruin-your-employability, year-in-jail kind of crime. I suppose the 15-year-old in Illinois will have his computer taken away; what if HE were taken away?

PDF at: http://www9.georgetown.edu/fac...

It wasn't about programming, specifically, but about all computer usage. I hate to summarize, but my take was that only through text can you get down to anything the tool (the computer) can do; with all interfaces, you're limited to what the designer of the interface thought you might do.

Never used MS databases; we're an Oracle shop. The Oracle driver supplies some extra goodness from OLE, the MS ODBC driver supplies adequate speed and all, though.

I've just started in on PostgreSQL connectivity, and that's fine too.

Please don't misunderstand me, guys, I H8 MS as much as the next FLOSS commie; but MS is my work environment and Excel gets stuff done for me.

When Krushchev said "we will bury you" at the UN, he *meant* "we will be around after you are gone" like "a son buries his father". It was a common Russian expression, and we had access to fine, nuanced Russian translators. Instead it became this famous threat of nuclear Armageddon, please pass the collection plate for more nukes of our own.

You can see similar rush-to-exaggerate in rhetoric that led up to WW1. I'm trying to think of a time when leaders in particular did NOT want to paint their side of a political dispute as heroism and the other side as villany. Coming up dry. Anybody? Is there a history major in the house who can point to us some long-lost "Age of Nuanced Political Dispute" ?

Sounds like you and the post you're replying to might have the answer to a question I've wanted to ask a real spreadsheet power user for some time. I'm a MS detractor in general but have fallen deeply for Excel in the last decade as I learned VBA, creating whole small applications with same, pivot tables, database access via ODBC and OLE - sometimes Excel is my whole work environment, hitting on huge databases, downloading chunks into pivot tables, using spreadsheet calcs to create masses of UPDATE statements that then change the same database.

Does ANY of that work in OOo ? I know it has some kind of database connection, but it seemed pretty lame by comparison; I know it has a macro language of its own, but unlike VBA there aren't six thick books on it and mega-lines of code to steal from the Net - so I'd anticipate a huge drop in capability if I switched.

This isn't about whether the (very) widespread claims that current evidence supports 'global warming', it's about whether Mann committed scientific fraud.

For instance, George Bush's commander really did think of Bush the way a fake letter (put forth by CBS as real) said he did; presumably the faker was frustrated by his inability to get that fact in the news, so he resorted to fraud, no doubt thinking that the real truth made it morally OK. But he still committed fraud, and the news that the secretary who would have typed the letter if it were real, said it was the commander's opinion, even as she debunked the letter was quite lost in the scandal over the fraud.

So global warming could be real, and Mann still a fraud, or it could be all a huge mistake by thousands of scientists, and Mann NOT a fraud, simply in possession of data that was mistaken or didn't mean what he thought.

Steyn is no doubt happy about the trial, because it will give him grounds to subpoena great heaps of Mann's work, looking for the same thing that the climategate E-mail thieves looked for: any kind of out-of-context quote they can find that they cam drum up into a "scandal" - a fraudulent one, of course...

And there's a punchline in the third sentence:

And the attorney general reiterated that the United States was not willing to offer clemency to Mr. Snowden

"Clemency", kind or merciful treatment of one who deserves harsh punishment, says the dictionary.

So the full offer is: "We'll talk if you come back, plead guilty and are punished to the fullest extent of the law."

It's like some kind of Woody Allen line, "My lawyer plea-bargained my sentence down to death".

In an environment with truly open competition, prices must be driven down to the costs of production, plus whatever profit pays for the seller's own work and risk. Anybody charging more is outpriced by somebody willing to accept that minimum.

Every service provision has capital and operating components. Connection to any network - water, gas, power, comms - has a fixed price whether you use it or not, and an incremental price proportional to usage. Keeping a network to a whole city running costs a good $25/month, flat - but then incremental water, power, whatever, are often pretty cheap. Blended rates per-unit only work where everybody consumes in the same order of magnitude at most. (Many get around this because the high consumers can be identified and "commercial rates" for water or whatever are lower per-unit.)

And we know the answer on gigabytes: Netflix pays something under a nickel each. Since bandwidth purchases differ by well over an order of magnitude, the bill will always screw somebody to benefit another unless it breaks out the costs: $35/month plus a dime a gigabyte, (or something similar)

Oh, lordy, Amen.

For a while, I found the registry stuff that switched caps-lock and CTRL, and of course on Linux it's just an xmodmap tweak - and I carried around files for both on a key so that I could swap 'em on any machine I was using. For an emacs user in particular, this is huge.

THEN came Windows 7, which I was compelled to use at work - and it won't let users reprogram keys at user-level; you have to do it with Admin access at the whole-system level and compel all users to do the same....not that my work lets me have Admin access. I was stumped, so I switched back.

The irony is that while I'm hating on MS for this, I have to admit that their MS Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 is the One True Faith for me. It has a bunch of idiot key along the top I ignore; the main thing is the spacing, size, and 3D curved shape that matches the hand better than any other. That's the funny thing about MS: a hate-worthy software* company that makes fine hardware...the MS Mouse was the best of its time, too, until it spawned a number of great imitators; but the Ergo 4000, no rivals - instead we get the gimmicky keyboards that this article rightfully complains about.

*with apologies to Excel, Pivot Tables, and VBA, which have saved my job more times than I can count. Credit where due.

>A portion of the government wants as many people on food stamps as possible, because as soon as you condition a person to free handouts you get power over them.

I've heard that before - indeed almost exactly the same words - but I don't understand. It's so vague.
1) Which portion of the government? Are you talking about some federal or state employees, or are you referring to politicians? After that, can you get even more specific and give examples of persons doing this conditioning and then exercising power?

2) What do these employees or politicians DO with this power over some poor people? Do the government employees make them come over to mow their lawn? It can't be politicians saying "You must vote for me or I'll cut off your food stamps" because we have a secret ballot. The most that could be done is "if you stop putting me in, the Republicans will probably cut off everybody's food stamps, including yours"...but that applies to every public-spending decision. "Vote Republican or those Democrats will raise your taxes" is exactly the same proposition, and seems to be pretty legitimate. You might as well say "if you condition people to tax cuts, that gives you power over them".

If that sounds sarcastic or something, sorry ... I'm not trying to pick a fight, it's just the whole statement doesn't compute for me. I'll take up the same position if you've got some specific examples or something.

Except that the public inquiry and publicity crushed their careers and lives in general. Ask anybody who was on the Hollywood blacklist for expressing their political views.

...I admit 1984 was even worse, they had a "Junior Anti-Sex League". Our anti-sex league is at least mostly beyond the age of burning desire themselves.

I love how this stuff exposes the "anti-abortion" forces as actually being "anti-sex". If you were only anti-abortion, you'd be strongly pro-contraceptive. But no, they don't want women's ancient disincentive to sex taken away: if you have sex, you should be punished by bearing children in pain and caring for them for two decades. Then you should mourn how your life was ruined by all the opportunities for education and earning lost to childcare, and mourn how your child started off life at a disadvantage. You should suffer for your sins, the sin of having sex. And you should think about all that before having sex outside of marriage, and Just Not Do It.

All that used to be quite openly stated, you can find grandparents around today who remember lectures with just that rhetoric. Now they cover themselves with victimhood, but they're only "victims" in having their power to dictate women's sex lives taken away by technological advances in medicine. It's particularly sidesplitting that they base their objection to the loss of this power with complaints about a large organization imposing fascist controls on individual behaviour.

Charlie admits that Judaism is still alive and MULTICS is not. He should have gone with Zoroastrianism, even older. (Actually, writer Paul William Roberts found a tiny community of Zoroastrians in Iran a few decades back.) But then a few of us still remember MULTICS with some affection and it still affects our designs. The University of Calgary was sucked into the belief that MULTICS was a great future back in the 70s and ran one of the largest-ever installations of it, in user-count at least. (They were also taken in by ADA and ran some courses and assignments in it for a while.)

MULTICS was the only system I ever used that had the very cool and effective accounts/login design of two-parts to your login: your personal ID and your project ID. Your personal ID stayed permanently, but might lack all resources for years; your compiler course would come with one project-ID that would give you enough resources for that course; your database course would be a different project ID. Your access levels to various files, etc might change with which project ID you used, but your home directory was always yours because of your personal ID. It was cool. There were a few babies tossed with the bathwater when MULTICS was simplified down to Unix...