Microsoft's monopolistic powers reach far beyond the setting that we sit in in a government class. They reach even more powerfully to a country that is less wealthy than ours, because they have to work with the giant that is microsoft.
I feel that the decision of the Department of Justice to keep microsoft in one piece is a VERY bad idea, and i think that the idea is more politically based then antitrust based. I am hoping that the EU brings charges and forces a seperation. Which is something that the US is seemingly too weak to todo.
Today watching the news became an all day event. I started at just 9 am when I was made aware of the situation that was unfolding at the world trade center. It became even more shocking when live my second period class, tv studio, watched the second plane crash into the wtc buildings. I had watched movies and seen stuff like that, but never something real.
Then we watched as the news of the Pentagon being hit. That threw us into a frenzy. The second period TV class had been doing announcements 3rd at the time, and we had no idea what we were to do with the announcements. Making it worse, Mrs. Ratchford was not in that day. So I had to get someone to do the bulletin board, and then get Maria to go check with Dr. Pasi about what he wanted done with the announcements.
By the time I was in 3rd period, I had figured our the easist way to get information was to use IRC. IRC(Internet Relay Chat) has a low bandwidth, bandwidth being amount of data per second transferred, usage which meant that I could use it and know it would be around... I am still more intrested in getting information than processing my thoughts and feelings right now, Maybe later this week.
I have been reading through slashdot lately, and I have been seeing a large quantity of articles about the new regulations that the government has been looking at.
Most Notorius of them is the Law requiring backdoors in security measures. The problems are that they wont use the encryption schemes and that the backdoors would be exploitable. If some cracker got access to the backdoor then he could read all of the work / purchases online and steal trade secrets.
The Bush administration has told us to get back to our normal lives, but they continue to close the major routes through are city and the major money making device for Arlington. We always have to succumb to the whims of the federal government, because of their proximity to us. Even when the state/local governments object they still do things to the county. A good, however old, example is National Airport; the now closed national airport was renamed to a famous republican president in the highest concentration of democrats in the state.
They also closed E street / pennsylvania avenue in front of the White House. The Capital Police have been looking at closeing both independance and constitution at the capitol. That would block hte route of about 45000 cars a day.