Monkeys now hired to fix TV sets!!!
June 01, 2000
by Ben Charny
Federal prosecutors know the law. But do they know what an Internet browser is?
Microsoft (MSFT) doesn't think so, a claim that could haunt the upcoming months, or even years, of expected legal wrangling to come in the Microsoft breakup case.
While both sides wait for Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's expected bust-up Microsoft ruling, now slated for late next week, Microsoft attorneys are hammering away at the government's supposed computer illiteracy.
"Although it contains 31 defined terms, the government's revised proposed final judgment (filed last week) fails to define the software that lies at the center of this case, namely, what the government refers to as 'Internet browser,'" Microsoft attorneys wrote in the company's final appeal to Jackson.
One government expert defines the browser as "that software which allows the user to browse the Web."
...
The questions raised by Microsoft, buried in footnotes in its 36-page filing, haven't been lost on analysts trying to make sense of the case.
"What we have here is monkeys looking at a TV set and trying to interpret it," says Joseph Farley of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. "Has the government lost what's left of its mind? I struggle with this."
Found in Justice shytheads's dictionary: "Computer is TV that computes!" |
