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Re: [News] ALL Russian Schools Will Move to Linux!!!!

In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Mark Kent
<mark.kent@xxxxxxxxxxx>
 wrote
on Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:50:31 +0100
<7eaas4-339.ln1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> [H]omer <spam@xxxxxxx> espoused:
>> Verily I say unto thee, that Roy Schestowitz spake thusly:
>> 
>> [some creative restructuring]
>> 
>> Cause:
>> 
>>> Russian schools abandon Windows after piracy scare
>> 
>> Effect:
>> 
>>> Russian Linux (ALTLinux) to be installed in every school in Russia
>> 
>>> Chairs will break in Redmond now.
>> 
>> Oops.
>> 
>> The harder Microsoft push people, the harder those people push back.
>> Bullying tactics just don't work, as Apple also recently discovered.
>> 
>
> Nor should they.  Microsoft rely on being able to bribe governments into
> bullying people to do what they want, but the exposure of this practice
> has been so great now that it's becoming much harder to get away with.
> Except in the UK, of course, where the BBC with Mr Highfield and company
> continue the same corrupt approach.
>
> There are good previous examples, though, like the levy on blank tapes
> and CDs in France and Canada, the money going to the recording
> companies.  The government, in those cases, is taxing directly on behalf
> of mostly foreign businesses.
>
> It's hard to believe that such laws could ever have made it to the
> statute books.
>

Not that hard.  Corruption is rife in parts of Africa, for
example, and was well documented in parts of America during
the gangster era.  Remember also Tom DeLay, corrupting the
election system in Texas -- I'd have to study precisely
what he did and who paid whom, but it involved some
creative redistricting, and counts as corruption of the
process.  To be fair, there's also William Jefferson; how
does he get $90K in his freezer?  Either he got paid off
and then caught, or someone planted it to discredit him;
either one points to a problem somewhere, though I suspect
(unfortunately) the first to be more likely.

There's a fair amount of legalese that is intended to be
highly specific to one benficiary, but the law has to be
written to make it as specific as necessary without naming
that beneficiary.  At least, such is my understanding.

And then there's Microsoft.  Time was when there was a
thriving market of innovation with machines that were
very crude compared to today's desktops (they might have
reached 2 MHz at most, and 64K RAM) in the late 70's or so,
but which had a lot of nice features we don't have today --
"instant on" being the most obvious one.  Then IBM stepped
in, and chased most of them out (no, I don't blame IBM,
really, though they did let the genie out by distributing
their specs).  Between IBM and Microsoft, almost everyone
has an x86 now on their desktop, except for the 5% or so
Apple die hards, though IBM is trying to make amends (and
more money) by jumping on the Linux bandwagon -- in part,
perhaps, because Microsoft stiffed them.  (Not sure whether
IBM is jealous, has a long memory, or is simply being
opportunistic/competitive.  I suspect a mix of all three.
It's all human.)

The next realm may be the legal one, a la the Standard
Oil mess in the early part of the 20th century -- an
outcome that was driven in part by corruption of the oil
market, and the subsequent creation of the "robber barons",
coining a phrase that we still have today in the American
English lexicon.

No, it's not hard at all to believe.  I wish it were.

-- 
#191, ewill3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of
elderberries!" - Monty Python and the Holy Grail

-- 
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