Re: Bill Gates and Tsunamis

royls_at_telus.net
Date: 01/02/05 

Date: Sun, 02 Jan 2005 23:06:28 GMT

On Sun, 02 Jan 2005 00:14:57 GMT, "Randall D. Kelton"
<rkelton@earthlink.net> wrote:

>I bought my first computer before Windows.

So did I.

>When I turned it on, I got a
>cursor. It just sat there, and I sat there. I hit lots of keys and
>sometimes it would do something but I had no idea what was going on so I
>turned it off, went to the book store bought a book on Wordstar, Dbase, and
>a few others. I spent untold hours trying to work out how to get that
>thing to do what I needed it to do. The problem was, I would spend hours,
>sometime days trying to find a single keystroke that would get me out of a
>problem. It was very crazy making.

Yes, well, DOS was Mr. Gates's product, too, you know...

>Then that sob Bill Gates came along
>with Window. I looked at it and said, "Hell, I am faster with DOS. I will
>never use that crap. Then I looked closer and though, "You ***, why the
>hell didn't you come up with this before I wasted all this time learning DOS
>and all those annoying programs?

That's easy: because he was so busy trying to stop people from using
Macs instead of DOS in order to increase the economic rents he could
extract from computer users that he didn't have time to produce a
usable Mac-like OS before that.

>All the money I spent and the time I
>wasted could have been put to more productive use.

That's another good reason people hate Gates: if not for him, we'd all
be using Macs.

>I bought Windows and it was of great value to me. When Bill Gates spent a
>small fortune developing Windows, he didn't know if it would pay off or not.

Nonsense. It was virtually guaranteed that if he didn't spend that
money, people were going to stop paying him for DOS.

>He took an incredible risk and you think he should just give it all to you.

He can do as he pleases with it. And while he may have the law on his
side, so does the salt monopolist. But Gates has no valid _right_ to
stop the public from using and copying the information he has released
to the public. It is a government-granted privilege, and nothing
more.

>If the world followed your way of thinking, we would still be banging rocks
>together.

Nonsense. It wasn't until after the Renaissance was nearly over that
the world's _very_first_ intellectual property law was passed. And
even if it is the case that there should be some provision to reward
creative work more than was done before IP law (wasn't Leonardo da
Vinci creative enough for you?), that doesn't mean government-granted
artificial monopoly privileges are the best way to do it.

-- Roy L