Tag: Al Gore

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Al Gore’s Initiative

Can we settle this for once and for all?

It’s damn infuriating to see smug conservatives continue to trot out this old canard whenever they get the chance: Mitt Romney has been going around claiming that Al Gore “took credit” for the Internet. Well, it’s all politics, but the next time Romney looks in the mirror I wonder if he sees the liar that I see when he pulls shit like that.

Al Gore did not claim he “invented” the internet. He said he “took the initiative” in the creation of the internet. Apparently, it seems to shock many people that anyone was “involved” in the creation of such a massively important and successful project.   Do people think it was always there? Do they think it was created by private companies?

Look it up. Even better, here it is, from Wikipedia:

First, the actual original quote from Gore, from a March 9, 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN:

I’ll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. And it will be comprehensive and sweeping. And I hope that it will be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be. But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I’ve traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.[105]

Yes, he could have phrased it better, but what he actually said– as opposed to the deliberate misquote making the rounds– was true:

Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn noted that, “as far back as the 1970s, Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship […] the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication.”[53]

So Al Gore was not just on the congressional committee that oversaw the creation of the internet: he played a leadership role on the issue.

Even Newt Gingrich acknowledged as much.

And let’s not forget that Gore served honorably in Viet Nam. Can you name a single Republican running in this election who did? Come on– try it.

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Canada vs U.S.

It appears that most of the opposition to proposals for national health care reform in the U.S. stem from the belief that government can not do anything right.

Let’s let corporations decide, instead, when I should see a doctor, and how much I should pay.

As a Canadian, let me extend my sympathy. You poor Americans. You are so proud of your flag and your nation and your constitution– but so embarrassed by the idiots you elect to office every two years that you can’t trust them to run an insurance program. You call yourself the greatest country in the world but the citizens of this country appear to be the dumbest voters on the planet.

You see, we Canadians are very lucky. We actually elect reasonably good governments and then give them the power to execute their policies and then we enjoy the benefits— like universal health care coverage. Oh, of course it’s not perfect. You can always find a few Canadians out there who envy you Americans your vastly over-priced system that treats you quickly and then bankrupts you.

But how good is the Canadian system? Not a single politician in Canada will run on a platform of dismantling it. How simple is that? If there were any number of Canadians who were dissatisfied and wanted to move to the U.S. model, surely we’d have a member of parliament or two who would dare to campaign on privatizing health care. But even our conservative parties pledge to leave health care alone, or even to improve it.

That’s not the only thing our government does that strikes most Canadians as reasonably good. Your Social Security is a mess because Republicans won’t cooperate with reforming it and Democrats are terrified of being accused of raising taxes. Our Canadian government simply adjusted the rates of contributions a few years ago. Most Canadians probably barely noticed. But the result is that the Canadian Pension Plan is actuarially sound and all Canadians can count on receiving full benefits when they retire.

Oh and our banks. Did you know that our banks were the only banks in the developed world that did not need a single penny of bail-out funds? Not one cent. Once again, we happened to choose a government (the Liberals) who decided that the credit default swaps, sub-prime mortgages, and derivatives, were too risky. Our banks pleaded to be allowed to make the big money, like their U.S. competitors. The Liberals, under Jean Chretien, said “no”. Our government also wouldn’t let the banks merge so they could take on the big U.S. banks. Crazy, eh?

Do you Americans ever get sick of your two year election cycles? It seemed to take Obama forever to finally get to the inauguration. Well, we might have an election this fall. If it is called soon, the campaigns will start almost immediately and end six weeks later. Yes, six weeks! Isn’t that a gas! Done. Over. And much cheaper too.

No doubt our government could do better. We haven’t done very well in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. We didn’t get sucked into Iraq, but we are stuck in Afghanistan. Our top executives, like yours, get paid too much. The taxpayers bought the Skydome for the Blue Jays but the perception is that no major league sports team will get a tax-payer funded stadium ever again. (That’s why the Expos are gone, probably, and why the NHL doesn’t want to see any U.S. teams moving to Canada. Probably.)

But it’s a nice country. You should come visit sometimes. Our Conservative party would be roughly comparable to your Democrats. Obama probably would have gotten about 75% of the votes up here. Our liberals would probably find Obama a tad too “moderate” for our tastes.

You guys did invent the Internet– good for you!  Yes, your government invented it. And yes, Al Gore took the initiative, in Congress, to fund the proposal.

I personally thank God regularly that we don’t have anything like the Republican Party up here.

Bring your can-do spirit, your generosity, and your exuberance. But don’t bring your guns.

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Global Warming

For the past few years, I have been playing a little game with myself on the issue of global warming. I would read whatever I could about it, from any source at all, and then try to find out if the writer was funded, in any way, directly or indirectly, by the oil industry.

This was an easy task, for the most part. Virtually every scientist who denied global warming was employed by Exxon, Mobil, or another oil or coal company, or a foundation or Institute funded by them.

Conservatives will tell you that the people who believe in global warming, like Al Gore, are funded by the “climate-change industry”. I leave it to you decide if a voluntary group of concerned citizens is more “self-interested” and more likely to lie about the subject than Exxon and Mobil and the coal companies. It’s a clever approach, though, I give you that. A little earlier in history, they might have tried to convince you that Mother Theresa was running an “industry” of vagrant nuns looking for a handout and that poverty in India doesn’t really exist. It’s all just a scam to provide for Mother Theresa’s lavish memorials.

For the past year or so, I thought the game was over. Seemed to me that a tight consensus had grown up in the field, that global warming was real, that it was caused by humans, and that it was going to cause some severe environmental problems. Not so. Or so. I don’t know. But one has to be amazed at the capacity for humans of all political and social stripes to delude themselves into believing that any particular piece of knowledge is a “slam-dunk”.

In an article in Discover Magazine, a scientist not employed by the oil industry, named John Christy, of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, asserts that all the scientists who say the globe is warming are wrong. I wish I could give you a number of how many exactly are wrong, and how many are for and how many are against, and how many don’t know but wish everyone else would make up their minds….

Wouldn’t it be nice if facts could be decided by a majority.

Anyway, they are wrong and he is right, because he looked at temperatures in a different way, and got data from different sources, and his data shows that, in fact, there is a bit of cooling going on– not warming. And the Arctic is actually freezing, so forget all those images you saw on TV and in National Geographic. It’s all the result of sun spots, and a Danish scientist named Henrik Svensmark has proven it.

Okay– that last part is my deductive conclusion based on Mr. Christy’s reasoning. If we are not warming, I’m not sure why the ice is melting. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it just a fluke, an inversion of some kind. Who knows?

We have always known that hot summers are not the result, directly, of global warming. Weather in any particular location on any particular day is not cut and dried and linear. We know there will be oddities and anomalies, so Christy should stop pretending that people noticed the hot weather and immediately jumped to the conclusion that the entire globe was heating up.

Christy thinks that Africa could be saved from dire poverty if only every hut had an electric light bulb and microwave. And there was a Walmart in the neighborhood. Okay– I’m making up the Walmart part. But surely Christy is making up the microwave part. He believes America is a grand force for good in the world– we export “freedom”, you see.

Not sure why the people in Darfur haven’t lined up to buy it yet.

Conservatives have been very clever at leveraging dissent:

If 1000 scientists say that global warming is real and 1 scientist says it’s not, they announce that there is no consensus and Public Television is now obliged to present “both sides” of the issue.

I believe this ratio could also be used to justify presenting “both sides” on the issue of witchcraft. After all, a fair number of people really believe in witches.

Please— please Mr. Christy, give us all one tiny little insignificant little break and don’t take a job with the coal or gas or oil companies. Be the only light, the soul beacon of potential unconflicted evidence on the subject of global warming– at least from the skeptic side.

(Sorry Mr. Christy: I don’t regard foundations that raise money from people concerned about climate change to be as “interested” as the oil industry, even as the oil industry keeps trying to convince us that those greedy environmentalists will stop at nothing to continue to have an excuse to protest….)

Christy, by the way, is a Baptist. So, just because he is not employed directly by the oil industry, does not mean he doesn’t belong to a group that has an axe to grind: Baptists in the Southern U.S. are overwhelming politically and socially conservative. Climate change is a liberal, European issue.

Christy’s social and religious background are not helpful in determining whether he is telling the truth or not. As a Christian, you might hope that he would tell what he believes to be the truth, but that he also might express some distaste for some of the character assassination and oil industry lobbying that is going on behind the scenes.

No such luck.  Did he say he was a Christian?

We do know that the Republicans– who hate the idea of reducing carbon emissions– have carefully cultivated the support of Evangelical Christians since the 1970’s.  Unfortunately, the fact that Christy is a Christian makes it more likely that he is more loyal to the Republican Party than he is to independent research.

It is more likely that he is just a partisan hack and a liar.

Does that seem crude and judgmental?  I don’t ask that Christy agree with 99% of the climate scientists that the earth warming and it is due to human activity and carbon emissions.  I just ask that he show that he has principles, and, if he has principles, that he disagrees with Exxon’s blatant advocacy of fake science in order to protect their fossil fuel business investments.

Details From Discover Magazine

Christy’s Testimony to Congress on the Impact of CO2 Emissions that might come from More Coal-fired Plants

Just in– apparently Christy now acknowledges that climate change is real. His earlier data was flawed. Okay. That is a bit of a shock. I thought I’d found that hold-out independent scientist…. but no. BUT…. Christy believes that global warming will be a good thing for the planet. You can’t keep a good man down! Tune in again in five years…

Christy further undermines his own credibility by attacking “extremists”. If Christy is acting like a scientist, he wants you to know that his information is accurate and unbiased. But Christy is not being asked for his emotional judgment of a dissenting movement in politics. He has no expertise on what “extremism” is. He should only have addressed any particular facts and figures presented by any group– including those who are tools of the oil industry.

Author Michael Crichton has chimed in with his own propaganda on behalf of the skeptics. He has also testified to congress and given several public speeches on the global warming “scam”. Once again, it is odd that a skeptic seems more interested in political attacks on the climate change lobby than on disputing the facts. Most of us feel a speaker or writer is most credible when he is the least emotionally involved, and when it is clear that he isn’t just out to try to humiliate or insult or marginalize people he just doesn’t seem to like very much. It would have done wonders for Crichton’s credibility if he would acknowledge that the science is being “corrupted” by oil companies as well as by scientists who crave peer approval and don’t think for themselves.

Think about it– if you have a fire department with 12 members and they are sitting in the fire hall waiting around and a garbled message suddenly came through on the telephone and half the men thought it said there was a fire at city hall and the other half said they heard no such thing. What would anyone with common sense do? They’d drive the fire truck out to city hall with a crew to find out for sure. But the climate change skeptics, including Crichton and Christie, are trying to take away the keys to prevent the other six firemen from going anywhere. When that fails, they slash the tires. They accuse the other six firemen of being in the pocket of the Fire Prevention Industry.

The only explanation that could account for this behavior? The six skeptics are allied with the people who have set fire to city hall.

Mr. Crichton and company would be far more believable if they would merely take the trouble to point out that the skeptic “industry” is far more lavishly funded and “interested” than Al Gore and the majority of climatologists. If they really believe that the fact that many people make a living advocating reductions in carbon emissions invalidates their “science”, they would be quick to admit that the “science” of the skeptics is even more compromised. (At least the believers have an overtly beneficial purpose: to save mankind from immense suffering and economic hardship.) Then they might get back to the point: what are the facts? How can we find out more about what is really going on?

Crichton talks about the “religion” of environmentalism. All fair and good– there’s some truth to that. But it is absolutely ridiculous of him to ignore the “religion” of economic growth and capitalism which, like environmentalism, bears an irrational, unscientific adherence to a set of values and assumptions that colour it’s “scientific” conclusions about a global warming. The motive of the skeptic “industry” is increased consumption, bigger profits for corporations, and more pollution.

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The Curious and Unfortunate Fate of Wen Ho Lee.

Without the big bad Russians to kick around any more, what is the U.S. military-industrial establishment to do? There must be somebody out there scary enough to drum up another $300 billion or so for preposterous defense schemes. Cuba? Pretty scary, you must admit, but with Castro getting a little long in the tooth and a population of only about 4 million of which 3.999 million are more interested in baseball and mariachi bands, there’s not much to muster there.

Well, hey, you don’t have to look too far. There’s the red devil himself, China, just sitting there with about two billion people, and a communist government.

Of course, China hasn’t even been able to scare Taiwan into submission yet, so first you’ve got to puff them up a little. What if they had nuclear bombs? Oh dear! Oh my! The Chinese with nuclear weapons! But how did they get nuclear weapons? They already had them? They must have stolen them from us! They must have been spying on us. They probably have spies everywhere. Just look around you. Just look at those scientists working at the Los Alamos Nuclear Research Laboratory. Hey… look at that guy....

This week, a U.S. District Judge, James Parker, apologized to Wen Ho Lee for the idiotic persecution of the 60-year-old Taiwan-born scientist for allegedly selling nuclear secrets to the Chinese. Attorney General Janet Reno– possibly the worst attorney general in the recent history of the United States– refused to say she was sorry. She said, in essence, that if only Mr. Lee had cooperated as he should have he never would have been in so much trouble. How nice to know that the chief law enforcement officer of the United States has officially pronounced that innocent citizens have no need to fear incarceration as long as they “cooperate”.

Not much is known any more about what really happened to start this mess, but it is clear that there was never any significant reason to believe that Lee had sold vital nuclear secrets to the Chinese. But prosecutors claimed that Lee had downloaded thousands of megabytes of information about nuclear weapons onto his laptop computer without permission. They figured he was ready to pack them all off to China.

Lee, and others who work in the field, immediately insisted that though downloading the files was technically against the rules at the Los Alamos Research Laboratory, “everybody did it”. Everybody did it, but not everybody looked Chinese.

Wen Ho Lee was the victim of a right-wing paranoid fantasy. Prosecutors and politicians chose Lee to bear the brunt of their irrational hysteria that somehow the Chinese were getting ready to take over the world. Chances are that many of the individuals involved in persecuting Mr. Lee actually thought he was born Chinese. After all, he had slanty eyes, didn’t he? I’d love to be able to lay this exclusively at the feet of the Republicans but the truth is that high officials at the Department of Energy and the Executive– eager to be more paranoid than thou when it came to military security– were at least equally responsible. Clinton, playing the centrist, did nothing to help Lee even though most sane observers were very quick to point out the absurdities in the prosecution’s case. Al Gore hasn’t said a single decent, respectable thing about the case. Bush would like to have you believe that he is so smart that all spies will be caught under his administration.

The Republicans, meanwhile, after encouraging the prosecution with their paranoid hysteria, are now trying to politicize the case by demanding an inquiry into the investigation!

Lee was held for 278 days in solitary confinement after being charged with 59 counts of espionage. The prosecution’s case fell apart when an FBI official named Robert Messemer admitted that he had distorted an interview he had with Lee. In other words, he lied— to a judge– about Lee’s responses to questions he had asked him before last December.

But even before Messemer’s confessions, reputable experts and analysts were insisting that none of the “secrets” Mr. Lee is alleged to have copied to his laptop computer were actually “secret”. In fact, virtually all of the information was already available in trade documents and on the internet.

As usual, grossly incompetent lawyers know how to protect themselves. They argue that Lee probably really is guilty, but they just can’t prove it. So while asserting, on the one hand, that he really did intend to sell “the crown jewels” of U.S. nuclear research to some other country– a capital offense– they admit that they have such a weak case that they will release him after time served already.

There is an ugly dynamic here. The prosecutors, possibly dimly aware of looking like idiots, are now desperate for any kind of vindication, no matter how meager. They got it with this perverse deal with Lee: he pleads guilty to a very minor charge, and they call off the hounds. This is called bullying, harassment, extortion, when it is performed by anyone but the police or the government or lawyers.

You can’t have it both ways. Either he’s guilty and you’re incompetent and you bungled the investigation, or he’s innocent and you are cold-blooded liars, as well as incompetent.

Clinton should do the right thing for a change. All the persons involved in persecuting Mr. Lee should be summarily dismissed. Mr. Lee’s good name should be cleared and he should be restored to his position at Los Alamos.

Last minute note: I just read that President Clinton did at least part of the right thing. He has chastised the Department of Justice for the way they handled the investigation and indicated that he believes Mr. Lee’s rights were violated. Meanwhile, Attorney-General Janet Reno continues to insist her department did nothing wrong. But then, Janet Reno’s initial claim to fame (and stepping stone into a political career) came from the dubious prosecution of a Satanic Ritual Abuse case in Florida in the 1980’s. And we all know what THAT was about….

More on Janet Reno’s colourful past.

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Gush Bore: The 2000 Election

The Difference Between Al Gore and George Bush Jr….

As everybody seems to know, this election is about purity, innocence, and fidelity. God knows, we could have 15% unemployment, a –4% growth in GDP, riots in the streets, and war in the Middle East, but what we really care about is whether the President loves his wife.

So Al Gore kisses Tipper passionately on stage at the Democratic National Convention. The steam hissed from both their ears as the astounded press corp dropped their pens and microphones and gasped.

Clever, don’t you think. Instead of saying, “I will never screw around with any interns, no matter how doe-eyed and lovely and naïve”, which sounds like, “No, I don’t still beat my wife”, Al Gore plants a passionate kiss on his wife. Message: hey, I don’t need to fool around. I’m passionate about my wife.

Well, the Republicans could not let that stand, by golly, no. They had to be equally subtle, equally insidious. So they leak this story about George Bush Jr. dealing with a flirtatious staff member during his father’s 1988 presidential campaign. It seems that the stalwart George Bush Jr. got sick and tired of all this flirtation so he just marched right up to this woman and told her off, right then and there. When another staff member remonstrated with him about treating a loyal staff member so harshly, George Junior barked out, “Good. I’m a married man!”

There. This proves that George Bush Jr. is just as honorable and faithful as Al Gore.

Maybe this is a good illustration of the difference between the two candidates. Gore believes that marriage is a good thing because you get to spend your whole life with a beautiful sexy person that you really care about. Bush believes that marriage is a good thing because the Bible darn well tells us that it is and you just better get that straight.

Now I understand.

Well, I thought I did. The trouble is… can you tell me which candidate supports which position on any of the following issues?

  • Military build up
  • Less regulation and government intervention
  • Lower taxes
  • Capital punishment
  • Spending billions on the war on drugs
  • Persuading Hollywood—with logic instead of laws—to tone down the sex and violence
  • Improving education
  • Campaign Finance Reform
  • Welfare “Reform” (read “slash welfare programs”)

You’re right. They both have pretty well the same positions. So what’s the difference?

Well, in all fairness, Gore probably won’t set out to break all records for executions the way George Bush Jr. did in Texas. Of course that is at least partly because the Federal Government in the U.S. has very little responsibility for capital punishment: that is a state issue. But I can see Gore saying something like, “by golly, we ought to make sure these guys are guilty before we execute them,” whereas George Jr. would probably say something like, “if they weren’t guilty, what the heck were they doing on death row?”

Gore is probably a little more environment-friendly than Bush, but probably not very much. Like Bush, he tends to give business interests, including the oil and forestry industries, pretty well everything they want.

Gore claims to be serious about campaign finance reform. We have not seen a leader yet, however, who is dumb—or smart—enough to cut off the very branch upon which he is sitting. Will Gore bring in serious campaign finance reform and cut off the very moneyed interests that have sponsored his campaign to an unimaginable degree? Not very likely.

Gush/Bore. Take your choice.

Chromehorse.net officially endorses Ralph Nader for President.

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Dumbing Down Computers

The dumbing down of Computers
You bring your garbage out to the road. You go back inside your house, take off your coat, your winter boots. You pick up a cup of coffee, sit down to read…. Suddenly, there is a knock at the door. It’s the garbage man. He’s standing there holding some lemon rinds and egg shells. “Are you sure you want to throw this out?” he says. You say, “yes, of course.” You go back to your table and your coffee and resume reading. There goes the doorbell again. It’s the garbage man again, and this time he’s holding a broken toaster. “Are you sure you want to throw this out?” You nod. A few minutes later, it’s an old magazine, a pair of leaky boots, a shriveled old sponge. Are you sure you want to throw them out?

Of course I am, you idiot. Why do you think I put them in the garbage?

Of course, in real life, the garbage man doesn’t do that. He doesn’t go through your garbage first to see if you might have made a mistake. Once his truck is in front of your house, your garbage is gone, and you’re never getting it back. Is this so unmanageable?

Obviously not. Yet, this is what Microsoft Windows does whenever you want to throw a file away. “Are you sure you want to throw that out?” Yes, yes, yes.

It tells you something about the world of computers nowadays that Microsoft, which is a very market-savvy company, keeps putting stuff like this in their operating system. Think about the “my documents” folder, and the fact that the dos prompt defaults to the Windows directory, the least useful place for a user to be. Think about Windows 98 and Windows 2000 which have added “my pictures” and “my music” as defaults, as if the user is so stupid, lazy, and trivial, that he will be keeping all of his precious files in these three locations, named, as if by a child, “my” stuff.

Think about the fact that when you go into Explorer and try to look at drive C:, Microsoft presents you with this nebulous thing called “desktop” and then “my computer”. What is “my computer”? I don’t know what Microsoft thinks it is. It wants you to think that your disk drive is attached to something that keeps everything together for you. What Microsoft has done is make the operating system king of your computer. If you want your data, you don’t go looking on Seagate’s 10 GIG hard drive anymore. You go looking in “my desktop” for “my computer” which has “internet explorer” on it as if it was something apart from the software provided by Microsoft, and “printers” as if they existed in the ether and could be invoked only by an application provided by—you guessed it—Microsoft. And there is your hard drive: a mere subsidiary of the true ruler of the universe: Windows! It looks like you could lose a hard drive or two and hardly miss it: you’ll still have “my desktop” and “my computer”—right?

In the old days of DOS, and the present day of Linux, you booted up to a hard drive, which had everything on it: your applications, operating system, software, and – most importantly—your data. You made a copy of your data because sometimes the hard drive—the thing that your data is actually, physically, on—could occasionally fail. But today, in Windows, your data is stored in some labyrinthine network of secret passages, hidden grottos, and camouflaged tunnels. Can you find it? Oh, you can probably find your letters to grandma in “my documents”. But if you think that is neat and you like Microsoft and think it’s great, let me ask you this: where is your e-mail? Do you know? Can you back it up? I thought so. When your hard drive fails, my friend, you will start over from scratch. But then again, a short memory seems to be a requisite of joining the on-line world nowadays.

When you use Windows Explorer to go look for your e-mail files, it doesn’t show the full names of the files, their size, or the dates they were last used. It shows you a stupid picture of what the file is supposed to be like. Windows no longer shows you the extensions of the files, because it supposed to be able to tell you what kind of file it is. In fact, if you rename a file’s extension, Windows doesn’t have a clue what it is.

Windows doesn’t show you “hidden” files: it wants you to leave them alone, and let Microsoft tell you what should or should not be on your computer. Double-click on a certain file, and suddenly Windows is trying to drag you onto the Internet. Haven’t signed up with an Internet Service Provider yet: Microsoft will take care of it. Just click here—or don’t click “no”—and you are hurtled onto MSN, but make sure you have your credit card ready.

With every new release of Windows, the nuts and bolts of your computer are becoming more and more invisible, and you are less and less able to control what is on your system and how it works. With every new release, your expensive hard drive is polluted with more and more hidden functions, routines, and settings designed to manipulate, cajole, and annoy you into doing something you didn’t think of yourself. With every new release, the idiotic short-comings of Windows become more and more embarrassing:

  • – it crashes frequently, even while running Microsoft games, like “Age of Empires” or applications like “Outlook”
  • – it can’t back up your data. It has no idea of where your data is. It has no means of backing up your documents, e-mails, bookmarks, or anything else, efficiently. As a result, most people don’t back up anything.
  • – It is SLOW, SLOW, SLOW, as molasses, as they say. Don’t believe me? Get out an old 486 computer running Windows 3.1 and play with it for a while. You’ll be astonished at how quick and responsive the computer is compared to Windows 98.
  • – It is getting more and more difficult to program for Windows—the operating system is becoming enmeshed with applications, making it extremely difficult to produce efficient, reliable applications.
  • – Microsoft deliberately creates file incompatibilities to drive everyone to upgrade. If one person in your office starts using Office 2000, before you know it, other users will be complaining because they can’t share files anymore. Access will not allow two different versions of the application to run on the same computer: the result is that applications have to be redeveloped for the new version.
  • – Windows is bloated beyond belief. Does Microsoft every throw anything away? I suspect that when the garbage man comes to Bill Gates’ door with a handful of rotting fruit, Gates says, “yes, actually, I did change my mind about throwing that out…”
  • – Windows is often just plain stupid. I installed a network card once, but Windows failed to find the correct drivers for it. Strike 1. No big deal. I installed the updated driver for the network card, but Windows wouldn’t install it because it couldn’t find the card. Strike 2. Annoying, perhaps. Then I decided to remove the card and try a different one. When I told Windows to delete it, it asked for a driver disk. After accepting the driver, it said, “do you wish to remove the card?” Yes, you moron.
  • – Does Microsoft think that people only use CD drives to install software? If I want to install software, I’ll tell it to install software. In the meantime, I’d like to be able to change disks without having the computer come grinding to a halt while it checks to see if something should install itself from drive d:.
  • – When you try to export a file from Outlook, it asks for the Office 2000 CD, but it checks drive a:. Does it think Office 2000 comes on a floppy disk now? When I tell it I want to browse to the files, it dumps me into “My documents”—good place to keep my copy of Office 2000, don’t you think?

In short, the computer is becoming like television. The Internet was a bold, amazing, astonishing innovation in communications technology that promised the world a new means of building networks of communities reflecting the rich diversity of cultures and intellects on this planet. Microsoft’s vision the internet: the “shop” button on your browser.

Now, you may have rightly observed that my opinion is not an isolated one and you may have asked yourself why, if Windows is so bad and so annoying, does everyone use it. The answer is really quite simple: like many other “power users”, I make a living trying to keep Windows systems running smoothly. People pay me, fairly good money, to solve the endless myriad of problems created by Microsoft’s sloppy programming, so I have to understand their products as well as I can. It is also true that there are some dazzling applications that run only on Windows—Adobe Premiere, Sound Forge, Audio Catalyst, Paint Shop Pro, etc. There is a growing number of good applications for Linux, but they can’t match some of these applications at the moment.

But power users are not like salesmen. To a salesman, millions of people buying defective products is nirvana. When the product breaks down, you simply sell them another one.

Computer technical support people see this as wasteful and stupid. They like things that work well, like hard drives, video cards, and RAM. They admire efficiency and durability. They hold reliability in high esteem. It’s part of their nature: that’s why they hack. To play with fascinating technologies that do cool things, like send music over the internet.

Why is Windows so popular if it’s so bad? I have explained that in detail in a previous rant, but, in a nutshell, to reiterate: Microsoft Windows was probably the worst graphical user interface ever developed, but it triumphed in the marketplace by leveraging it’s position when Microsoft’s version of DOS came pre-installed on every IBM computer. Only someone who has never read the news or any books on the history of the computer would really believe that Bill Gates is a technical genius. He is a marketing genius—I grant you that—though a lot of Microsoft’s success is also due to practices which, as the Department of Justice has observed, were blatantly illegal. The final factor in Microsoft’s success came as a result of the first two reasons: the network effect. Everyone wants compatible software. Everyone wants to be able to “borrow” their friends’ applications. IBM compatible computers were about 30% cheaper than the superior Apple McIntosh, and it was easy to copy software. That’s why Windows is on every desktop.

As wonderful and magical as computers are today, they could be twice as wonderful, three times as magical, and reliable to boot, if OS/2 or Geoworks, or the McIntosh, or the Amiga (a brilliant little machine way ahead of its time) or Linux had triumphed instead of Microsoft. The magic and wonder, my friend, comes from the hardware improvements, which have been astonishing. Sound cards, hard drives, video cards, monitors, CPU’s, RAM—all have improved at an astonishing rate. When you can record a ten-minute piece of music into a digital format onto a hard drive, edit it, and then compress it into an eight MB file—that’s impressive. And you know what—none of those functions related to this process were produced by Microsoft! Not one! The digital sound quality came from Turtle Beach (since adopted by Creative Labs). The compression codec came from a German company, Xing. The software came from Audio Forge and others (only dilettantes use the built-in Microsoft software for this). And the Internet, of course, came from the U.S. army.   And yes, Al Gore played a big role in creating it by promoting it to Congress because, yes, he was visionary and understood the potential of the idea.  The browser was invented by Tim Berners-Lee. Microsoft didn’t even see it coming until Netscape had 90% of the market.

When Microsoft does try to compete with real software companies, it generally does poorly. Of all the Microsoft products available that were developed in house, only Excel was superior to it’s competition (Lotus).

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McCaine Mutiny

There is a lot to be learned about the Republican Party from the failed candidacy of John McCain.

First of all, there is the bizarre logic of the primary process. The object of the primaries is to nominate a candidate who can represent the values of the Republican Party and win an election against the nominee from the Democrats. But you wouldn’t know it from this primary.

There is a certain percentage of the electorate who will vote upon party lines regardless of who the nominee is. But in order to win the election, you must appeal to more of the undecided, moderate voters than your opponent does. It was rather hysterical, in this context, to hear George Bush Jr. complain bitterly about John McCain appealing to Democrats and independents in order to win the Michigan primary. In other words, the outrageous John McCain actually positioned himself well to win the general election. Is that the kind of candidate you want??? Well… it is, sort of.

But the larger lesson is that the Republican Party really is, baldly and absolutely, the party of Big Money. Bush and McCain did not disagree on any major policy issue except what to do with the budget surplus (Bush wants to give it to the rich in the form of a tax break, while McCain wants to use it to pay down the debt and fortify Medicare) and campaign finance reform. McCain wants to eliminate the notorious “soft money” from election campaigns; Bush doesn’t.

The fundamental difference between the two men is that George Bush Jr. understands and likes the symbiotic relationship between the wealthy and Republican politics, and McCain does not. Bush understands that, in exchange for the millions of dollars in campaign financing he has received, he will enact certain policies and agendas that will generously benefit his rich sponsors, including, especially, his mammoth proposed tax break for the rich. McCain sees that relationship as something that essentially corrupts the political process. Instead of making decisions based on what is best for all Americans, Bush Jr. will be making decisions based on the best interests of his generous buddies.

The Republicans would have you believe that the Democrats do the same thing. But even the Republicans admit that the special interests that the Democrats are generally beholden to are groups, like the labor unions and the NAACP and teachers’ associations and so on. So at least the Democrats are beholden to large numbers of people, instead of a small minority of wealthy capitalists.

Gore has smartly positioned himself right behind McCain. He has offered to forego the use of all “soft” money if Bush Jr. also agrees.

Fat chance, and Gore knows it, and Bush knows it.

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We are Shocked: Clinton vs Nixon

Of course we’re all shocked. The President may have had sex with an attractive young intern. He was the President. He was twice her age. He was in a position of power and authority. He shouldn’t have done it.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a clear-headed look at what’s going on. The controversy started when a woman known to be hostile to Bill Clinton (she was a holdover from the Bush administration) secretly and apparently illegally taped conversations with Monica Lewinsky about the alleged affair. The Special Prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, accepted this evidence even though it was acquired illegally, but not before Ms. Tripp had given a copy of some of the tapes to her agent, who once spied on George McGovern’s presidential campaign on behalf of the Republicans and is also known as a Clinton-hater. The information on the tapes, like everything else from Kenneth Starr’s office, is leaked all over the place, but not to anybody with the guts, courage, or integrity to go “on-record”. For three days, we have had nothing but hysterical innuendo without any of the normal checks and balances required of professional journalism. For example, CNN reports that the President’s version of events contradicts Ms. Lewinsky’s. That’s a hoot: Ms. Lewinski has not made any official statement other than the one which insisted that there was no affair. The contradiction is with what the anonymous sources say Ms. Lewinsky said on tape to Ms. Tripp, who is the Benedict Arnold of this scandal.

Anyway, the details are already pretty tired. Most Americans, apparently, continue to approve of the Clinton administration (he lost 2 percentage points!).

What we have is one of the ugliest political scenes since the Profumo scandal in Britain in the 1960’s. And the ugliest aspect of it all is the lurid fascination of watching a nation throw itself into paroxysms of righteous indignation over a petty consensual relationship between the President and a young admirer. Even if it is proven that Clinton advised her to lie to the Special Prosecutor, the idea of impeaching the “leader of the free world” because of a sexual indiscretion is bizarre.

Don’t even mention comparisons to Watergate. Nixon conspired with his senior staff, including the Attorney-General, to cover-up numerous serious criminal acts, including misuse of the FBI and the IRS to harass and spy on political opponents. He maintained an illegal “slush” fund. He accepted illegal, under-the-table campaign contributions. He destroyed evidence and fired the Attorney General when the investigation drew too near to the Oval Office. The list of offenses was so long and detailed that the Democrats didn’t even bother to pursue the charge that he cheated on his income taxes. His staff committed real crimes, including burglary and bribery, and tried to obstruct the investigation of those crimes.

Clinton had an affair. He may be a jerk, but he is not a criminal. Whitewater, you say? The Republicans have tried desperately for five years to find evidence of any kind to indicate that Clinton committed a crime. In spite of all their efforts, no such evidence has surfaced.

The Republicans, in what appears to me to be a highly coordinated strategy, are laying low, hoping to downplay the suspicion that all of these charges are politically inspired. Having learned their lesson from the highly negative reaction to the government shut-down last year– a result of their stubborn determination to sabotage the Clinton administration–they are trying very hard to convey the impression that they are taking the “high road”. Don’t be fooled: they know exactly what they’re doing. When the time comes, if the public can be swayed against Clinton, they’ll demand their pound of flesh. It’s been more than 25 years, but they won’t think it’s too late to retaliate for Watergate.

The question any alert observer would have to ask is, do they really want to give Al Gore a two-year head start on the next election? Maybe, maybe not. It might be easier to fight an incumbent who can be blamed for just about anything that happens in the country, than a fresh-face with creditable experience and political savvy. I’m not sure of the read on this one, but I do know one thing: we’re not getting the whole story.

More and more citizens appear to be adopting the view that this is all politics as usual in Washington D.C. Generally, they feel Clinton is doing a good job– the economy is booming–and don’t want to see a change.

I’ll go out on a limb and make a forecast: a reaction will set in shortly. The media will do some self-analysis and conclude that they may have gotten carried away. Clinton will go on the attack. The American public will perceive this attack as being an indictment of the media that splashes stories about semen-stained dresses on the nightly news, and they will quietly approve. Gore will be president… in 2000.