Monsanto has gone through a very confusing corporate history.

This is quite simplified;

Monsanto used to be a large chemical company with several agricultural divisions. Products like PCB and DDT were made by the Monsanto chemical company.

At some point in the company history, they decided to spin off the agricultural products. The new spin-off got to keep the "Monsanto" name, while the chemical company renamed itself Solutia. Solutia continues to exist today and is the historical descendant of the original Monsanto chemical business.

This ignores the Pharmacia spin-off, the Pfizer acquisition, and several other twists and turns, but it makes the general point clear - the agricultural company known today as "Monsanto" is not the linear descendant of the old chemical company with the same name.

The terminator gene has never been used in a commercial product.

Regarding the rest of your argument, you are either severely overestimating the amount of diversity found in non-GM commercial seed, or severely underestimating the amount of diversity found in GM commercial seed. When you read a fact like "95 percent of crop X planted this year use Monsanto's glyphosate resistance trait", that does not mean that 95% of crop X are clones of the same seed. Monsanto licenses many of it's genes to third-party seed producers, who them introduce those genes into their own seed products.

The major risk here isn't that 95% of the plantings of a crop contain a specific gene, which you falsely hypothesize leads to increased mortality. The major risk is that we've already concentrated the bulk of our food production into only a handful of crops. For most diseases and pests, wheat is wheat, whether it is GM or not. If a pandemic begin spreading among the US wheat crop, it would likely affect most varieties of wheat.

The terminator gene has never been used in a commercial product. Your argument is a red herring.

I'm not going to correct all the errors in your post, but the key error is falling into the "we need permits" trap that the Burning Man organizers have set up for you.

Anybody can camp on BLM land. No permit required. In the early years, we all used the "spontaneous gathering" excuse (the same as rainbow gatherings still use today). If a group has no leader, there is nobody for the government to demand a permit from. If 20,000 people spontaneously all decide to individually camp at the same place at the same time, no permits are required because the gathering is not organizing.

By setting themselves up as the "leaders", Larry Harvey and company were able to exert further control over an event that was originally all about spontaneity and lack of control.

You went in 1999 and 2000? Too bad you got there after it sucked. I went 1991 through 1995 (when it became clear how badly they were going to destroy BM in order to monetize it), and then went to a private alternative event (same desert, same weekend) for the next six years.

Larry Harvey has destroyed everything Burning Man originally stood for. Don't believe me, google "John Law" (another Burning Man cofounder) and learn.

The words all make sense by themselves, but collectively it is like he is trying to redefine every word he uses.

> "Consumers face potential identity theft, system failures and unrecoverable data loss,"

That isn't a consequence of piracy. It may be the consequence of malware, spyware, worms, or viruses, but you can't blame piracy for any of that.

> "Customers want to know that they are using the genuine high-quality Microsoft product they paid for, and they want to know that their systems are more secure and that their software does not contain malicious code"

What about customers who want to use Microsoft products without paying for them at all. Not to defend them, but that is what we are talking about when we discuss piracy. If someone takes a "genuine" copy of Windows and disables your license validation code, what does that have to do with making their system more or less secure and what does it have to do with malicious code. If anything, a hacked copy of Windows may be more secure and less malicious because it isn't "phoning home" to Microsoft.

> "We see many cases of customers who wanted to buy genuine software and believed they did, only to find out later that they were victims of software piracy."

Wow. This one just made my head hurt. They are completely trying to redefine victim here. That's like calling a bank robber the victim of his crime because he stubbed his toe running out of the bank.

I guess I'm supposed to read all the above and think that Microsoft is acting benevolently to make sure no malicious code has been inserted into the operating system at install time. If that was really some sort of crisis that needed to be solved, they could simply ship install CDs with known signatures and provide a mechanism for checking those signature. Problem solved with no need for checking hardware configurations, issuing serial numbers, tracking activations, etc.

What a bunch of asshats.

> ...asking whether the Internet is so broken it needs to be replaced.

Yeah, I agree. Anonymity on the internet is completely broken. It is trivial for law enforcement to get a subpoena to force websites to reveal the IP addresses of users, and also trival for law enforcement to get a subpoena to force ISPs to reveal who had that IP address at a given moment in time. Granted, there are ways to make sure that the IP address you are using can't be traced to you, but those methods are kind of a pain in the ass.

> ...where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety

WTF? Any rearchitecting of the internet needs to have subpoena-proof absolute anonymity built in from the beginning. This "proposal" is like suggesting we rearchitect transportation to make sure that vehicle occupants receive no shelter from the weather.

Nice, but no friggin way a PC built in one of these is going to meet FCC class A or class B limits.

Of course, that isn't Antec's problem - the system integrator is the one responsible for meeting spec.