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To: space cadet who wrote (19574)	5/21/1998 4:10:00 AM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

<snip various points about the goverentment being facist and responsible for all monopolies, suffused with rather awkward buttering up remarks to me> You have it backwards. The businesses pay bribes to various officials to allow them to create or hold a monopoly. This is known as corrupting the government. The the legislature passes laws, the paid-off beaurocrats hand down rulings, and so on. This has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with the power of money. <<< The one case you cite that does not involve government suppression is IBM. I'll admit I don't know the details of this case till I followed the pc market in the early '80's. From that time forward I can vouch that the government played no constructive role in the pc market. >>> True. The Reagan and Bush administrations conducted practically no anti-merger or anti-trust actions. (Also, no environmental actions except the ones their EPA head went to jail for, no safety actions, no airline safety, etc. Not their style, antitrust.) They started up in 1981, of course, which as you note, when you first became aware of such issues. Thus the 90's are your first chance to see any of this in action. <<< I suspect you are also wrong about the early history of IBM, though I really don't know the facts. >>> I couldn't demolish your point any better than you did. <<< Your wild talk of msft owning the internet really needs to be toned down- you are too smart for that sort of thing. >>> Now I'm feeling all warm and fuzzy. <<< Incidentally, you mentioned about being sprayed with insecticide on flights. Could you explain about this?>>> Sure, although I'm surprised you didn't read all about it when it was on all the news shows and in all the papers last year. A couple of the Asian countries are paranoid about Americans and other foreigners being dirty. They think our vegetables are filled with pesticides, our meat is filled with hormones, we don't wash products like chicken properly... Hmmm, maybe they have a point. Anyway, they also think we have things like head lice, that our bags lay around anywhere on the ground or airport floor and never get washed, that we are just generally nasty. So they have passed laws that we need to be fumigated. If you ever wondered what that pesticide-like chemical smell is when you fly into Narita, that's it. Basically, they put a little fly spray in the air coming out those nozzles, to oversimplify it a bit. This is quite a dangerous practice that can cause birth defects, organ failure in children, allergic reactions and so on. Now when this became news not so long ago there was a minor storm of protest about it, and some US congressmen said they would have it stopped. But I don't know that they ever did. The airlines, of course, operating as they do dependent on the governments are far too chickenshit to try to do anything about it. They just cover up the practice.

To: space cadet who wrote (19574)	5/21/1998 9:34:00 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Respond to of 24154

Space cadet indeed. Your wild talk of msft owning the internet really needs to be toned down- you are too smart for that sort of thing. You'll have to take that one up with Reggie. "Microsoft has already succeeded in highjacking the internet". That was in a different context, of course. Hahaha. Me, I'll go back to an old metaphor I went into detail on long ago. The internet is the new phone system, and the browser is the telephone. Microsoft very much wants Windows to be the only consumer telephone worth bothering with. Badly enough to put a bullet through MSN's head, as Bill so poetically put it. You don't see a problem with that, ok, but I'd say that's sort of like Bill telling the cable guys "Don't be paranoid / Wince will be just like Windows." No contradiction there, eh? Me, I tend more toward Andy Grove's sage advice. John Malone too, I hear. Cheers, Dan.