Did MS "borrow" from Linux Distros?

[BruisedQuasar]

Am I the only person who suspects Microsoft "borrowed" a lot from Linux Projects such as
Ubuntu, Debian, LinuxMint, PuppyLinux?

--Bruised

[Tasurinchi]

Since many Linux distros are better than MS in many aspects, I think MS did not "borrow" enough - yet

[BruisedQuasar]

Since many Linux distros are better than MS in many aspects, I think MS did not "borrow" enough - yet

I agree. Open Source projects must keep an eye on MS. Gates never had any tech talents and going by his many embarassing failures in Comdex demonstrations, he has limited tech skills.
He is a master at stealing & copyrighting the innovations of others & using the Microsoft cartel power to smash competitors. When we had more honorable & patriotic people in DC, Microsoft would have been broken into smaller companies for being the innovation stiffling price fixer it is.

You know something is very wrong when a lower MS senior executive could early retire from MS and have so much cash that he owns the world's three largest mega yachts, so big that they are larger than the biggest naval ship of most countries! One has an onboard ten passenger sub, a 32 foot speed boat and two military size helicopters. He was lower than a Vice President and he retired 10 years ago! People think Bernie Maddow is the super thief. Bill Gates and his MS buddies make Madow look like small change and they get away with it, gratis the billion dollar a year MS legal department. MS no longer has the top computer sci graduates but they certainly have the top corporate attorneys, expert in how to steal code from small startups and in workarounds of anti-trust and anti-price rigging and anti-MONOPOLY law.

Not to forgot Gate's 400 million dollar a year "donations" to both the Republican and Democratic National Parties.

[ThinkRob]

Not to forgot Gate's 400 million dollar a year "donations" to both the Republican and Democratic National Parties.

Nor his $33.5 billion foundation, providing assistance across the world in the areas of education, health and sanitation, and agricultural development.

[fasteez]

Gates way of doing business aside, I really don't think MS has took anything from the distros you mentioned. In the early days Linux was simply null for the consumers, it changed since a few years; and to me the linux desktop environments has often been too much aiming at being windows-like (not includings WM like ion, awesome, xmonad).
At a superficial level for the average user, Ubuntu = free Windows, and the good stuff like package management, customisation etc .. is still near non existant on the Windows side.

If you have examples of things that MS really did took from the Linux world go on.

[pianowizard]

Bruised, are there rich people that you don't hate?

[BruisedQuasar]

Bruised, are there rich people that you don't hate?

I "hate" neither Gates nor the so-called "rich". I have in fact been a lone critic of those who use the term "Rich People" loosely and in a way that should cause serious pause among rational, logical, & rigorous minded people. "Rich people" is a term used so sloppy that its as loose and sloppy as the words "Race" & "Racist" are today, they are drawfed by the rampant misuse of the term "Rich People". In fact, the only competitors for the ambiguous, proported omnipotent and ominpresent "Rich People" are the terms "Red Neck", "HillBilly" & "The Free Market". "Government" is a close competitor as well. And then there is the all knowing, perfectly rational, & omniscient "THEY" and "THEM" of the conspiracy theorist.

I just happen to know a few dozen wealthy individuals through the wealthy husband of my eldest cousin (and a Levy I met in graduate school). He is a Bough, the male heir to the Cleveland, Ohio Bough fortune. I know "members" of what I consider a type of wealthy people. I refer to them as productive rich, as opposed to parasite rich and celebrity first generation rich. These productive rich people I happen to know are second or third generation rich. People used to know them as blue blood wealthy. They are educated, patriotic, cultured, and LOW Profile. Such people as the Levys, Fishers, Fords, Boughs, etc. They could but do not pursue lives of idle leisure, social arrogance, extravagance, or vulgar consumption. They actually work long hours in activities that generate jobs and taxes. Thus, 'the productive rich". The ones I know, disapprove as much as I hold suspect the idle, flashy, extravagant, ever greedy, loud & forever preachy wealthy. People like Feinstein, Boxer, Harry Reid, the Clintons, the jailed Maddow, the Kennedys, Gates, Trump, Soros, who base their lives on ever increasing wealth and power. I observed long ago that anyone who bases their life on money, things, & status never have enough of any of them. Bernie Maddow, Martha Stewart, Soros, & Helmsley, Donald Trump are examples of this specie of wealthy people.

The productive rich, contrary to popular imagination and divide & conquer politico propaganda, generally do not approve of the carrying on, extravagance and arrogance of most celebrity rich, who are largely pretensious and often hedonistic people, who in one breath brag about how little they read and how poorly they did in school and in the next breath try to tell other Americans how they should think, vote, and live. Babara Streisand, Mrs Hines-Kerry, Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn, Jane Fonda, & Rush Limbaugh come to mind here (Limbaugh was the black sheep of a well-to-do family).

I have solid reason to disapprove of Bill Gates and his band of two dozen con-men. I was into computing before Microsoft existed and I know the technological and powerful innovating engine that was the early American Personal Computing field. I bought and assembled the first personal computer which appeared on the cover of Popular Mechanics. I had a Clive Sinclair Pocket Computer, the Z-88, Commodore Pet, C-64 & C-128D. I followed the exciting top five computer magazines and I witnessed what happened after Gates launched Microsoft and quickly became a huge monster in a once exciting arena of brilliant innovation. Gates still boasts in his biography about failing to complete his first & only semester of college.

I was online before Internet existed and in some powerful ways, the global free amateur home owned BBS (Bulletin Board Service) was superior to the Internet. There was no charge to log on and the BBS community was a firestorm of innovation. Then comes a greedy fellow like Gates and next a Giant AOL appears. In a few short years AOL kills off the World Wide Web of BBS systems. We sysops (BBS owners and operators) invented email and discussion groups. The first email system was named FidoNet (after the dog communication system in "The 101 dalmatians"). A second email system called Echonet was also created. ARAPANET copied a simple form of email from Fidonet. The truth is Internet borrowed more from BBS than from ARAPANET and the BBS
world provided the public its first access to Internet. We connected people to it by way of email. AOL borrowed from Apple's GUI desktops (for the Mac) and applied GUI technology to Internet access. SYSOPS had to be cost and byte efficient so our pipeline to Internet was command line only. It's a good thing IBM dominated early in the PC market. Otherwise, Apple prices would rule the field! Steve Jobs insists on dominating computing from the smallest hardware to the Operating System and the software --all at high prices. No blame goes to the only technical mind in the business, Steve Wozniac, the one who actually designed and built the first Apple PCs & choose a Unix variant for the MAC O/S. He could not tolerate the extremely crude way his friend and partner Steve Jobs openly trashed everyone who worked at Apple, so he cashed out of Apple in the early years, deciding $400 was enough for any one. The senior executives couldn't tolerate Jobs either. They figured out how to eliminate the founder and top stock holder. They fired Jobs.
He was brought back later when Apple was bankrupt. Extremely emotionally impaired rejected children like Jobs can be very charming to strangers. He is a super BS artist at promoting Apple products. He also. like Gates, is a master at stealing other people's ideas and intellectual property. He stole the GUI - icons, applets and all- and the mouse from an ignored Xerox research team.

We had rules. We strictly forbid time wasting "Flaming" and serial "Flamers" from participating in our global BBS discussion groups. There were no how-to books or literature for personal computing, no online browsers, GUIs or even menus. So, our time in discussion groups was serious and productive. We helped each other install cards, get phone modems up & running. Computing questions did not go unanswered or ignored like so many do today. Present a question or problem and dozens of people around the world either provided an intelligent answer or solution or worked on it with you until it was resolved.

What we had were really communities not just discussion groups.

Giant Robber Barons like Jobs, Gates & Case, reminiscent of the 1800s destructive railroad, coal & oil tycoons & greedy city-based ranchers took over the field that was populated by small innovative startups and brilliantly creative people. Small shops that assembled quality PCs for people were in every city.

FDR & his Regulators are certainly open to sharp criticism on many levels but self and socially destructive bankers, Wall Street, Airline tycoons and other corporate giants too big for folks to stand up to had to be regulated. Their wild conduct wasn't good for the country. You cannot let driven business innovators run totally unregulated any more than look the other way when brilliant actors, singers, athletes get cowboy wild. Do that and soon we will beg for a modern Wyatt Earp.

Reagan proved that with the huge mess we have today, a chaos I feared when he launched simple headed across the board budget cuts and across the board deregulation. HE deregulated banks, airlines, railroads, public transportation, the airways. On a positive note, Reagan stopped Labor fat cats from raping the public treasury by enfocing laws against public servants strong arm union machinations against the people. All these activities were regulated for good reason. I hoped we would learn now, at last, that certain things must be regulated, not nationalized, just restrained from hurting the little guy and from destroying each other. If we don't need that, then we don't need government at all.

Unfortunately, we face, today, the too familiar drum beat of extreme reaction to extreme action.
I pray we do not visit upon millions of average people the iron fist of do nothing government and the greedy rich guys claim that the only sane market is an extremely free market. Claiming that is really demanding we must let the wealthy and powerful do whatever they wish, despite what that may mean for the other 97% of us. Strange how folks who laugh at Big Government types for being tree huggers want you to believe that the best government is one that lets nature (in the name of extreme free market) redefine most people as losers and failures and throws them under the bus in the name of 'its righteous because natural.' Well, it's natural to die, natural to get sick and natural to grow feeble with age. Why bother with insurance- whether life, auto, or health insurance? Why bother with medical treatment? Why bother with fire and police forces? Why not just let 'nature rule'?

We have far more than two choices, extreme government control, extreme forced "social justice", & perfect forced "fairness" OR extreme government cut backs and extreme government do nothingness. The same people enjoy the top tier and the same people end up under the bus under either extreme. Ever notice who benefits either way? Do we want government that runs a strange race like the one run by the Mad Hatter in "Alice in Wonderland"?

Lumping together every one who happens to possess a certain amount of wealth, as if they are an actual club or race is no less ignorant, no less puts us on our knees before a mediocre arrogant elite, than does the opposite extreme of let the market decide, let the market do it for us. There are winners & losers in the market place and the losers vastly outnumber the winners.

That is why we must pay attention to people like Bill Gates who cuts the same huge check each year for the Democratic National Party and for the Republican National Party. It doesn't matter to him which one rules. He wants to be in with both. By the way, he learned this from the founder of another monopoly, Steven Case of Intel. He's not as rich, so his checks are only 124million each.

By the way, the Gates donated 500 million, not 500 billion. No wealthy person on the planet has yet managed to obtain anywhere near 500 billion. Ever wonder why Gates simply hands over such large sums to Prussian and Hindu model forced public schooling? Gates never donated to a charity or political candidate until .the Clinton Administration filed a huge anti-monopoly case against him. He got rid of the action by creating his education charity & by writing checks to both Parties. He only began this after Steven Case did it and his monopoly case was dropped. Keep in mind that Gate's charity seeks no education reform. It just funds the current failed systems.

Are you aware that BEFORE the authoritarian American laws forcing parents to send their children to public schools, Americans were the most literate, most educated people on earth? Their mothers taught them to read, write, spell, & calculate at home. People then went on to teach themselves. Benjamin Franklin, one of the most educated Americans who ever lived, was not schooled and he was not uncommon. His high literacy & lack of schooling was the norm. Gates supports public schools asthey are. From the perspective of people like him our schools do a fine job at a discount price. They program Americans to obey orders, be quiet when working, be on time, remain at their work station, respect work site rules & authoritarian management and to do hours of busy work. 12 years of American public schooling is spirit taming and mind numbing. Universities continue the mind numbing & they consume student life with pointless busy work.

In the past, our schools were 6 to 8 year long boot camps for factories. Today, they encourage memorization and discourage real thinking and train Americans for work boring service jobs at Walmart, Burger World, Kmart & other service industries, and to serve as mindless government (or corporate) pencil pushers, or for dangerous military assignments that often make no sense except to a few hundred professional politicians.

Read what major "educators" from John Dewey on (after he spent a year with Stalin and two years with Mao) wrote and preached about education. To the man, these swells talk about reigning in your imaginations, discouraging heavy readers and tinkering, and occupying children by filling their time with busy work. Unless you are focused on money and power, you want our children to do less school, not more class time as people like Bill Gates preach. Schools already fill up 12 years with less learning than the six years of 60 years ago. Then, youth are told they need another 5 years or more of school (at great expense) to get a decent job! 17 years to be the new person at work who doesn't know how to do anything?

No sir, you guessed way wrong. I am not lefty. I am not righty either. I am the ruling elite's worst nightmare, I am Aristotelian. I collect all known analyses and arguments and throw them against each other to determine which one makes the most sense and I hold all conclusions as subject to correction and revision. There are Truths but mere mortal man seems only able to figure out a few of them. I am certain of two things. Groups of people who surrender their mind to a single theory or ideology (examples, Progressivism, Communism, socialism, Free Market, Nazism, Green, One World Government, anarchism, Fabianism, Maoism, Reaganism, Fordism, Libertarianism, Global Warming, etc) given power over others are dangerous to the well being of the average person. ...And "Experts" do not know nearly as much as they assume they do.

...and yet, about this too I could be proven wrong...

--Bruised

"The more I learn, the less I think I KNOW"

[dr_st]

Slandering Microsoft is a popular thing across the webs. Although, thank God, not as popular as used to be, it seems.

When putting personal rants aside (so hard to do for some), and looking at the merits, one will be able to see that when comparing the world of Windows to the world of Linux, one will see that some things the open source community does better than Microsoft, and some things Microsoft does better than the open source community. This is point 1.

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that the only reason any of those Linux distros became even remotely popular with home users is because they went and "borrowed" Microsoft's concept of graphical user interface (or maybe it's fairer to say, Apple's concept, since they came up with it before). Without this, Linux would be, as fasteez put it, "simply null for the consumers".

That is not to say that the Linux community has not improved on those concepts and changed them in ways that they are sometimes better than Windows, but that just brings me back to point 1.

But of course, if one's fundamental principle is hatred towards Microsoft and/or Bill Gates personally, he won't care about the merits so much. And in fact may compare Microsoft's business model with a person who knowingly and willingly stole from his clients. Hearing this makes it very hard to take any other comments by such a person seriously.

The capitalist system is far from perfect. It allows some people to get rich beyond imagination while millions remain way below the poverty line. And it feeds itself, allowing the rich to get even richer. May seem unfair if you are not one of the "lucky few" (not that you really have to be filthy rich to live comfortably), and maybe it actually is unfair. But I don't understand the inclination to direct all of one's dislike of the system towards Microsoft, whose business model, as far as I can see, was perhaps ruthless, but far less immoral than that of some other.

Starbucks' model is (or at least used to be) to open a branch near a known good mom-n-pop coffee shop, offer good coffee for low prices, drive the competitors out of business, gouge the prices up and bring the coffee quality down.

The most famous example I remember of Microsoft being hit with anti-monopoly laws is when they started bundling IE free with Windows, and Netscape screamed that they are driving them out of the business. Putting aside the key question whether Microsoft should or should not have the right to give something they control for free to whomever they wish (that's up to the interpreters of the anti-trust /anti-monopoly laws to decide), Microsoft in the end succeeded. IE is everywhere, Netscape Navigator is dead. Did we as consumers suffer from that? Maybe indirectly, with IE being so ubiquitous that websites were tailored to support it specifically, and often would not display properly in other browsers because of that. But did Microsoft suddenly start taking advantage of the customers and charging for IE? No. Did it prevent from other good browsers (Firefox, Opera, Chrome) to appear and gain more and more market share? No. And guess what, even website designers now understand that the world does not end on IE, and the number of sites that appear broken outside of IE is diminished every year.

There was a company called Visio Corporation, making a product called Visio, for drawing diagrams, which could be incorporated into documents created by MS Office and other Windows applications using the OLE technology. The product was good. Microsoft bought the company, and now the product is called Microsoft Visio. Did it become a worse product for that? No. In fact, it's better has far more options, and the integration with Office is even more seamless.

And did the console gaming world suffer because of Microsoft's Xbox? I don't think so.

What I'm trying to say is that while Microsoft does have a history of taking over, expanding, butting in, marketing aggressively, they have never used these techniques as an alternative to making good products. I don't see how the PC world would necessarily be better off without Microsoft.

If one wants to make a statement against capitalistic greed, there are bigger trees to bark at. I will be happy to provide a couple off the top of my head.

[dsvochak]

"borrowed" Microsoft's concept of graphical user interface (or maybe it's fairer to say, Apple's concept, since they came up with it before)

Or perhaps a concept developed at PARC or by Douglas Engelbart

We sysops (BBS owners and operators) invented email and discussion groups.

Arpanet?

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers."--Proverbs for Paranoids #3, Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

[ThinkRob]

It's also worth pointing out that Apple actually licensed a good chunk of the Mac UI to Microsoft, albeit inadvertently.

[Temetka]

Microsoft did what no other company in the history of computing has managed to do. They brought computing to the masses. The tactics used don't matter as it is merely a footnote in the annals of history.

What matters is this. Computing is global. You think a mish mash of GUI's and front-ends could have reached over a billion homes? I don't. I seriously doubt that if Microsoft were removed from the equation that Apple or *NIX would be a viable replacement. Apple is far too expensive and *NIX is still far to hard to learn for Joe the consumer.

Go ahead walk into Sears, or Best Buy or whatever and buy a VAIO with Linux. Oh wait, you can't. I am not a Microsoft fanboy by any stretch of the means. I've been computing since I was old enough to read. I ran my own BBS back in the late 80's through the mid 90's. I was part of CheeseNet and FioNet. I know the history. I can still tell you what speed and compression a modem is using just by hearing it handshake.

People love to hate Microsoft for the one thing they did do right. They were very, very successful at selling their product. Sure they squeezed the little guy now and then or "borrowed" a technology or 3 to get the job done, but the end result cannot be argued. Computers are everywhere. Even in third world countries there are computers. Schools, companies, governments, homes, railways, coffee houses. You cant spit without seeing one.

Jobs was not altruistic enough nor did he have the vision to accomplish this. Linus? He didn't want to pay for a UNIX license and he didn't want to run Windows. So he rolled his own. Awesome? Yes. Was his vision to unite the world? No. He was cheap.

Bill on the other hand took this thing and made it easy to use (for the most part), cheap, and in many cases simply gave the [censored] thing away to get it spread.

Do I hate Microsoft for their success? Far from it. I admire them. They did what no one else has managed to do. They are on top and people hate them for it. Not me. I may not be happy with some of the decisions they have made, particularly in the Enterprise market, but someone had to make the decision. Let's not forget that IBM didn't even conceive of the possibility of home users with a computer. It just didn't make sense to them. Computers were a business tool, for doing big serious business-like things. They did not belong in the home.

You can rant and rave about Bill Gates being rich. The man deserves every penny. He built his company by hand, put in ridiculous amounts of hours. I'm sure he's had more than one visit to the doctor because of work related stress. Don't you ever tell me that man did not bust his [censored]. You build a multi-billion dollar global company and tell me you aren't burning the candle at both ends. Yeah, I thought so.

I am thankful to Microsoft for bringing home computing out of the purview of the garage tinkerer. Sure the home brew club was awesome and great and they made a lot of advancement with their tinkering. However tinkering does not build a global communications network. Money and standardization does.

I could go on and on, but frankly to besmear the company that has united the globe with something everyone can recognize and use is, well, shortsighted. It was and will remain a near impossible undertaking. One that is constantly in flux as the human race evolves into more intellectual beings backed by their high technology and the ability to share information across the globe in a manner of seconds.

[fasteez]

@dr_st

Even if I said that Linux has been trying to surf the wintel ride, I think it's not a good thing.
Being a unix child and trying to be windowsy doesn't fit. One is pluggable , scattered , organic ( yes hard to follow to an extent ) the other is centralised*, strict and many times poor in what it offers.. When I use bash or emacs I feel amazed every day (think legos), when I use the most popular D.E. I lose this feeling (think zapping in front of the TV)

* something that I hated but I know appreciate a lot more about windows, they try to synchronize a lots of stuff.. pros : less waste of energy for them and for the users, cons : lack of variability , unix has variability... but it's often random , fragile and hard to integrate. ( coming from an saavy noob )

My point is, unix had arguments for itself, but tied to legacy and dialectism that made it impossible for unsaavy people to get any use of it. The MS world try to make it usable but without the essence of it .. they just wave their hand in front of your shiny ignorant eyes looking at what you think is great ( of course it's from MS, they must know better - you dont , and it's pricey hence must have a value - again you dont know nothing right ? ) simple economics, return on investment ..
But that creates a fake reference for the mind where if something is not in windows, it's not possible.. until the next release (if you shout loud enough in numbers). You end up dependant.. Unix doesnt limit, it doesnt help you a lot either... but you get more than you've been told. Indepedancy. Which one do you prefer ?

If Unix wanted to succeed they would just hire ergonomy guys; linguist and a type designer ( i'm tempted to say "solidify interfaces" but I'm not knowlegable about that ) the point being to make it more "human" ( think about emacs/lisp way of doing things, almost no acronysm, fully out of order , you can't fall off the cliff since the system suggest the possible answers when you need them ) and stable while still retaining all the customisation / control there was.

I think Rob Pike and his friends tried hard with plan9; which was quite streamlined, consistent and "easy" but that failed too.

@temetka

I too admire gates / MS on the business side of things, driving such a gigantic entity must have been a hell ride , they used to crush competition badly but that's business; they succeeded there. Beside that I don't think they really wanted to give easy to use tech for you to communiate with the world.. to my eyes they were just nerdy and willing to make money.

--

to generalize the GUI invention war, I tend to think that anything mainstream was invented long ago and sitting in a lab. :p

[ThinkRob]

The thing that I think a lot of people miss (or ignore) is that the *nix world -- with a few exceptions of course -- never really wanted to "win" against Windows. Most of the long-time *nix folks that I know have no desire to make UNIX and UNIX-like OSs into consumer desktop OSs, just as most of the Windows fans that I know will happily concede that Microsoft's energies are better spent on the desktop than the server market.

It's amusing (to me) to see that, as time goes on, Microsoft ends up incorporating more and more of the *nix way of doing things, particularly when it comes to security. I don't think they'll ever implement the exact same sort of "least privileged" model -- at least not as long as they keep supporting old Win16/Win32 software -- but at least they get closer with every release. I'm also pleased to see that their server OSs no longer need to start up a full GUI environment. Looks like we won some battles after all...

[Temetka]

@dr_st
@temetka

I too admire gates / MS on the business side of things, driving such a gigantic entity must have been a hell ride , they used to crush competition badly but that's business; they succeeded there. Beside that I don't think they really wanted to give easy to use tech for you to communiate with the world.. to my eyes they were just nerdy and willing to make money.

--

to generalize the GUI invention war, I tend to think that anything mainstream was invented long ago and sitting in a lab. :p

Yeah, if they wanted to make money it would be easier to design and mass market something the average person could use and it will sell like hotcakes.

Oh wait, they did do that.

[ajkula66]

Temetka wrote:

Jobs was not altruistic enough nor did he have the vision to accomplish this.

Honestly, I don't see altruism being present anywhere in this game...which doesn't make its players ( as in Gates and Jobs) any less important...

And let's just say that I'm amongst the ones who believe that the readily available Internet was a way to monitor/control the masses better and dumb them down even more...but that's a whole another bowl of wax. After all, it wan't Gates or Jobs who invented the Internet, but Al Gore so he's the main culprit here...

[Temetka]

Honestly, I don't see altruism being present anywhere in this game...which doesn't make its players ( as in Gates and Jobs) any less important...

And let's just say that I'm amongst the ones who believe that the readily available Internet was a way to monitor/control the masses better and dumb them down even more...but that's a whole another bowl of wax. After all, it wan't Gates or Jobs who invented the Internet, but Al Gore so he's the main culprit here...

Ok, maybe altruistic was the wrong word to use. It is my opinion though that Jobs lacked the proper scope of vision and / or motivation to play with the Big Boys. He couldn't see from the top down. The big picture. He did want money though, which he got.

Moving on to your second point. Although the original ArpaNet was designed as an experiment and later used for research amongst a predominantly scientific base to swap messages back and forth. Later on small BBS's began to link up though various networks such as FidoNet and CheeseNet. Then the ISP's came, and finally big business began to make their presence known.

While I do not think that Internet was conceived as a tool of Big Brother, it is hard to argue the fact that it is indeed what it has become now. As we see more and more pervasive use of mobile internet devices, coupled with sites such as My Space, Facebook, and so on; we also see just how dumb the average person is. Now I'm sorry if what I am about to say offends some people, but in my experience it is true. I have come to find that 90% of the people in our society today just aren't clued in to what is going on. Ask them about politics, or world affairs, or economic trends, foreign policy, monsanto and so on. They will stare at you with that "deer in the headlights" look. No on is home. No lights are on. This has made me somewhat cynical in my views of the average humans intelligence and to also come to the conclusion that for most of them they can't be helped. Genetically, they are flawed. For whatever reason, the little DNA sequences never lined up quite right. So what we end up with is someone capable of thinking and experiencing emotions, even socialization. But true higher order intelligence? A facsimile at best.

There is a song which contains the following little nugget of wisdom:

Been around the world and found
That only stupid people are breeding
The cretins cloning and feeding
And I don't even own a tv

So if we couple a paranoid central government with the Internet along with the average persons willingness to post every single little detail of their lives on the web, we end up in an environment where it becomes a ridiculously easy matter to watch them. Throw in some street camera's, google street view, some GPS, and BAM! we arrive at a spook's wet dream.

A society based upon surveillance and the ever watchful eye of Big Brother. Oh some people think it can't happen here. This is the USA. The land of the free, the home of the brave. The key thought in that though is "some people can't think." Here's a nice Wikipedia article on the subject as well as a good article from our friends over at Wired.com.

Let's just say that Big Brother is a subject that is near and dear to me. One of the many influential factors which led me to getting my B.S. in Information Security.

EDIT: As long as we are on the subject, this youtube video sums up some of views quite succinctly.

[rs79]

Just to clear up a few historical inaccuracies. Xerox did the hardware (for the Star) systems at PARC, but the GUI/software was done at Xerox El Sugundo in Los Angeles.

BBS's absolutely did not invent mail and discussion groups. BBS's didn't exist until consumer modems were around, early to mid 80s. Long before that Unix had had email in the seventies at Bell Labs while at the time the arpanet weenies were actually FTP'ing files to each other as a method of communication. Email predates even unix however.

The first networked discussion group was Usenet which was invented in 1974 and rode on top of the Unix uucp transport layer that also shuttled mail around. These are known today as "Google groups" to some poeple, but it's still usenet.

This is pretty well documented in "Where wizards stay up late" at least on the ARPA-net TCP/IP side of things. I've been messing with unix since the 70s and that history isn't as so popularized, but keep in mind the uucp network was larger than the tcp/ip internet until 1996.