Build Date: Tue Jun 23 19:10:08 2026 UTC
If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a hard time coming up with a better tool than Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give them a culture in which alpha status requires months of focus and resource-consumptive preparation, provide them with metric tons of psychotropic confusicants, and then... ignore them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be out registering voters, or doing anything that might actually threaten electoral change, when they have an art car to build.
-- John Perry Barlow
Bill Gates explains
2000-06-08 18:21:11
The internet celebrates the DOJ's decision against Microsoft -- by re-reading Bill Gates' 1998 testimony!
At least, that's what I did! Perfect hindsight now shows us Gates appears to saying to the government, "Please spank me, I've been very bad." At one point, the DOJ's lawyer, who was reported to be one of the toughest cross-examiners in the country, referred the Microsoft executive to an executive's memo to Gates urging Microsoft to continue its jihad against one of its competitors. You know you're in trouble when the prosecutor asks you coyly, "Do you know what he means by 'jihad'?"
Gates answered gamely "I think he is referring to our vigorous efforts to make a superior product and to market that product."
But the judge didn't really start laughing until Gates was grilled on Microsoft's plans to begin "pissing on" Java.
Gates: "I don't know if he's referring to pissing on JFC, or pissing on JDK 1.2! [Er,] nor do I know what he specifically means by 'pissing on'."
Ziff-Davis reported that Gates was then asked (facetiously) if he thought the phrase was a Microsoft code-word used for saying kind words about one's competitors...
Commemorate the day geeks have waited for for years. They always knew Microsoft was anti-competitive. But could they get a U.S. judge to side with them?
Thanks to Bill Gates' testimony, the answer was yes!
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