7/27/2005
Give your heart your to GOD . . because your ass computer belongs to Bill Gates and Microsoft!!
Bill Gates will be frisking you with a simple point and click.
The next time you visit the website of Microsoft Corp. to download some software, be prepared to let the world's biggest software company have a look inside your computer.
In a determined strike to quell the proliferation of counterfeit software, beginning today, Microsoft will require that all customers coming to its website for upgrades and other downloads submit their computers to an electronic frisking.
If you use one of the estimated hundred million PCs running pirated software, don't expect your upgrade. For Microsoft, the new policy is a stepped-up effort to combat the loss of billions of dollars worth of software sales every year to counterfeiters around the world. But in ramping up efforts to fight piracy, the Redmond, Wash.-based behemoth already finds itself fending off critics over privacy.
"It sets an extremely negative precedent," Pam Dixon, executive director of World Privacy Forum, a non-profit public-interest research centre in San Diego, said of the company's initiative. "Microsoft is saying, 'Before I let you do anything at all, you have to open your computer to us.' I really object to this."
The company will scan machines for a variety of information, including product keys or software authorization codes, operating-system version and details on the flow of data between the operating system and other hardware, such as printers.
It is access to this information that particularly upsets the privacy advocates. Ms. Dixon says the only information Microsoft needs to fight piracy is the product key and the operating-system version, and she says that Microsoft will be able to identify users uniquely based on some of the information the company collects.
"They are grabbing more information than they need to deter piracy," she said.
If Microsoft deems a PC to be carrying contraband code, it won't allow a user to download Microsoft programs, with the exception of security patches. But the software company — which says that more than one in five U.S. computers runs a counterfeit version of its Windows product — is not just waving a stick. It is also offering a big carrot.
Microsoft said it will give a free copy of its Windows XP to customers who unknowingly bought a counterfeit version of the operating system and who fill out a piracy report, provide proof of purchase and send Microsoft the counterfeit CDs.
Customers who cannot provide proof of purchase but file a piracy report will receive a substantial discount on a legitimate version of the operating system, said Tim Prime, a product manager in the Windows client group at Microsoft Canada Co., a subsidiary of the U.S. company.
http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/bio.asp
In 1999, Gates wrote Business @ the Speed of Thought,
a book that shows how computer technology can solve business problems in fundamentally new ways. The book was published in 25 languages and is available in more than 60 countries.
Business @ the Speed of Thought has received wide critical acclaim, and was listed on the best-seller lists of the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and Amazon.com.
Gates' previous book, The Road Ahead, published in 1995, held the No. 1 spot on the New York Times' bestseller list for seven weeks.
Gates has donated the proceeds of both books to non-profit organizations that support the use of technology in education and skills development.
'i am proud to be an american',
says OPIE http://sometimes-i-do.blogspot.com/
but Uncle Sam hates the guy, he is weird
# posted by Opie Outlaw @ 7/27/2005 <
