Author: VD

“The U.S. Government’s assertion that Microsoft has a monopoly in the OS market might be the most patently absurd claim ever advanced by the legal mind. Linux, a technically superior operating system, is being given away for free, and BeOS is available at a nominal price. This is simply a fact, which has to be accepted whether or not you like Microsoft…. this is not the sort of power that fits any normal definition of the word “monopoly,” and it’s not amenable to a legal fix. The courts may order Microsoft to do things differently. They might even split the company up. But they can’t really do anything about a mindshare monopoly, short of taking every man, woman, and child in the developed world and subjecting them to a lengthy brainwashing procedure.”

Mr. Stephenson, a devotee of Debian Linux, is not a fan of Microsoft. I am in the midst of what can only be described as a purge, methodically eliminating Microsoft applications and operating systems from every machine in the house. But, as I have said before, Microsoft is not a monopoly.

I realize the federal government has pronounced otherwise. They have also taken the position that ketchup is a vegetable and that the United States is still facing a national emergency due to “the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security” posed by the Burmese government.

“Linux stands on the verge of ousting Apple in the OS stakes…. As Linux continues its apparently unstoppable march over the server and desktop market, more and more people are writing to PC Plus asking why we don’t try hardware out on Linux for compatibility checks. Questions like these make sense after all, with so many users weighing the pros and cons of ditching Windows in favour of Linux, they want to know how good Linux hardware support is, and particularly for cutting-edge kit.”

PC Plus provides some reasonable answers as to why they will not be providing the same sort of coverage to Linux-compatible hardware that they do to Microsoft and Apple hardware, but it is certainly interesting that they even feel they need to address the issue at all. It’s also interesting to hear that the writer believes that Apple – “so fragile, and yet so vicious” – is on the verge of being pushed off to the side, although we’ve heard that death knell before, and I, for one, imagine that they’ll be around for a while, if only to market hardware to those who believe that style, sophistication and moral superiority can be purchased from a computer manufacturer.

I was more intrigued by the following paragraph:

“…it’s a sad fact that some manufacturers have no wish to be associated with Linux. Over on my day job at Linux Format, we recently ran a ‘Linux on laptops’ feature, for which one particularly big name suddenly refused to send us a review unit when we mentioned we’d be installing Linux on it. “We don’t support Linux, and don’t want our customers thinking we support Linux,” they explained, despite the fact that the same company had previously made a big deal over its new line of dedicated Linux systems.”

I’ve been working on a column delving into the strange quasi-capitalist, quasi-socialist corporation-centered economy in which we currently live, and I found it very curious that a laptop maker would: a) not support the fastest-growing operating system, and b) not want their customers who are interested in that operating system to know that they could run that OS on their products. Far from being the champions of the free market, it seems that corporations are increasingly focused on supporting centralization, government regulation and standardization even if this means they must sacrifice customers in the short term.

There are some real doubts about whether modern corporations and the corporatist system are truly compatible with human liberty, capitalism and the free market. I think that the next stage of the thirty-year OS saga may prove to shed some interesting light on whether corporatism finally sheds its capitalist facade in the 21st century and reveals itself as the true Third Way or if capitalism again throws off another challenger to its throne as the optimal means of secular human progress.

If you or your potential wife-to-be are non-Christians, that is. I’m serious about this. Only a woman who believes that her commitment is before God has a reason to take her commitment seriously once the initial romantic high wears off. Women choose to end 75 percent of marriages and now, contrary to what one would assume, are apparently committing nearly half of the adultery as well.

This is not to say that a Christian wife won’t leave you when she gets bored or fail to decline an affair with a good-looking tennis instructor if you happen to be spending too much time out with the guys. But at least she has a solid reason not to do so, whereas if her only reason to remain faithful is because she’s in love with you and thinks you’re super spiffy, what do you think is likely to happen if she decides she isn’t in love with you anymore and starts to believe that you are the one responsible for her being miserable?

I know there are plenty of faithless (in the religious sense) couples who are happily married. I know a few and I have great respect for them. And there’s certainly no shortage of Christians who fail to live up to their ideals. But, as the study is apparently an English one, it demonstrates how a lack of faith is likely to correspond with a lack of long-term committment. Since the legal deck is heavily stacked against men, the only real solution for young men is to avoid matrimony like the black plague. This is the strategy that Scandinavian men have pursued, according to a Danish friend of mine, and with some degree of success as 54 percent of the children in Sweden and 46 percent in Denmark are now born illegitimate. As my friend concludes, you’re going to lose custody anyhow, so you might as well make sure that you’ll be able to preserve your bank account if the relationship falls apart.

The cost to society will be terrible, of course. Which is exactly what many Christians argued, to no avail, when the Godless Leap Forward was made two generations ago. But I can’t, in good conscience, tell a young man that it makes any sense whatsoever for him to marry a woman whose only commitment is emotional and legal, instead of spiritual and eternal.

I have been a supporter of US Women’s Soccer and the WUSA for five years, but no more. I’ll have no part in supporting anything for which the feminasties are waving the pink flag. Julie Foudy, the loud-mouthed former national team player and Reichsfuhrer of the Women’s Sports Foundation, has repeatedly revealed herself as a sexist opportunist who will brook no criticism of Title IX, however valid, as BYU swimming coach Tim Powers points out:

Cynthia Cooper, the WNBA player who co-chaired the commission, tried in vain to raise these very points. “The law of Title IX stays as is,” she explained during a recent hearing. “We are talking about the three-part test. Are you attending a university to play sports? If not, then why should you be counted for proportionality?” Cooper was quickly rebuked by Julie Foudy, president of the Women’s Sports Foundation, who argued “If 3 percent of airline pilots are Black, does that means that Blacks are afraid of flying?” Foudy went on to call Cooper’s ideas “crazy” and “dangerous” — exactly the kind of invective that greets anyone who dares to challenge proportionality.

Nice logic, Foudy, and tasteful too, considering that Cynthia Cooper is black. Right, it’s crazy and dangerous to suggest that it is possible – possible – that on some college campuses, there are more men than women who wish to play sports. And if there are, Foudy wants them to sit down and forget about it. What a joke. If women want to turn sports into a zero-sum game, then so be it. Perhaps men should boycott the WNBA. Oh, never mind, what’s the point? It’s not like anyone watches it anyhow.

I can only conclude that Microsoft is toast. After the Digital Ghetto’s favorite blonde finished poking her nose around Evolution – she likes to read the email and often has a few choice comments for the haters – she decided that Linux wasn’t necessarily a complete freakfest. It didn’t hurt that she envied Opera’s ability to block pop-ups, so she was already flirting with MS-infidelity. And then, she has a thing for penguins too, so I suppose I shouldn’t have been too surprised when, after having her Outlook Express start acting up again this morning, she expressed some interest in making the grand migration. Say no more!

I think we’ll stick with Redhat, since I already know what I’m doing there and don’t have to worry about any hardware incompatibilities with her wireless card. Girl without Internet access = Very Bad Thing, especially when my defenseless machine is sitting there burbling away in the great digital chorus.

From whence the name Space Bunny? It’s not really that hard to figure out. Except the real-world version has a laser on her Glock.

A Minnesota pediatrician writes that public preschool is expensive, doesn’t work and has a historically proven tendency to eliminate liberty and the free market. Which, naturally, is why the Federal Reserve is pushing for it in their Economic Development Initiatives. My dream is that one day, Americans will again remember that turning power, money and children over to the government is ALWAYS a bad idea.

Freedom = Responsibility. Give up the latter, and you will lose the former.

A reader writes in to tell me that based on my description, it is almost certain that my motherboard is dying – post warranty, of course. This is the second Dell laptop in a row in which the motherboard has croaked. The other one, fortunately, was still under warranty when it passed away. The good news is that I can start thinking about my next machine, which will certainly NOT be a Dell. Of all the things there were to be learned from the object lesson of the American auto manufacturers, why is it that planned obsolescence should be the one that they latched onto.

“Muslims Against Defamation is calling for the immediated removal of known Islamophobe Rod Dreher from the staff of The Dallas Morning News. Rod Dreher is responsible for several articles painting the entire Muslim community as suspicious, a threat and anti-Semites. Rod Dreher is a direct threat to the safety of our community…. Your Muslim child’s safety is at stake!”

Somehow, I find it a little difficult to picture the mild-mannered former National Review editor kitting himself out like Duke Nukem and mowing down rows of burkha-clad women and children clutching trading cards of Yasser Arafat, Osama bin Laden and Sheihk Yassin.

Islam does not mean “peace”. It means “submission“. As in yours.

Jay Nordlinger declares that this letter from Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, a physician imprisoned by Fidel Castro, “deserves some kind of fame — or at least a modicum of attention.” I agree, even if I am myself no supporter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which subsumes all human rights to the United Nations. (Dr. Biscet is serving 25 years for defending the declaration, though his real crime is opposing the socialist Cuban dictator.)

Cubans deserve freedom too. Let everyone who thinks that relations with the socialist dictatorship should be normalized read this first.

Free Biscet.

The points Rumsfeld made include these: The US has no way to measure whether it is winning or losing the global war on terror; we have not made truly “bold moves” to fight terrorists and we are in for “a long, hard slog” in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pointing to Iraq’s al Qaeda-linked Ansar al Islam, Rumsfeld asked: “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the clerics are recruiting, training and deploying?” Later, in a briefing to Washington Times staff, he called for a new agency to help fight “a war of ideas” against international terrorism. He suggested a “21st –century information agency in the government” to help in the international battle of ideas, to limit the teaching of terrorism and extremism and to provide better education.” However, in his memo, he said private organizations could counter Islamist “radical madrassas.”

Clearly, the defense secretary is convinced that the war on terror cannot be won by military victories alone and wants more emphasis on the struggle for hearts and minds. Fighters and defense officials, says Rumsfeld, must start asking themselves: “Are there things we aren’t doing that we might be doing?”

I don’t always agree with the Defense Secretary, but he’s certainly got a mind of some magnitude and his thinking is always worthy of due respect. As usual, the press is focusing on irrelevant trivialities from the leaked memo, but there are some interesting points revealed here. First, it’s pretty clear that the whole “war on terror” and “Islam means peace” line is simply pacification cover for the idiot press and public. You aren’t concerned about madrassas – Islamic academies – and memes if you don’t view the war as a long-term clash between civilizations, or as the Islamists put it, the inevitable conflict between the Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-Harb. Also, his mention of the need for private organizations rightly recognizes that government can only accomplish so much in terms of winning a war of ideas and implicitly recognizes – I suspect – that Christian missionaries and aid societies can accomplish more in Iraq at this point than the USMC. Finally, it’s both true and intriguing that Rumsfeld does not consider successfully invading Afghanistan and Iraq to be bold moves…. though perhaps ending the Saudi, Palestinian and Iranian threats would be.

I dislike that our government is still hiding the true nature of this revival of war between Islam and the West, I reject the notion that a new propaganda agency will solve anything and I very much distrust the government’s ability to resist the temptation to further assault American liberties while using the war as an excuse. But until our Islamic enemies are willing to declare a real peace with their Christian, atheist and Hindu foes, it’s still somewhat of a relief to know that those running the show aren’t quite as clueless as they are somehow determined to make themselves appear to be.