You know it’s crap, I know it’s crap, but they don’t know, nor do they care. but it gives them the illusion of simplicity, and that’s where the problem is with it.

Mandrake! Get over here and feed me this belt of ammo!

I think that what you said is true about 3rd world and linux. But not about MS products and newbs using them. There are just as many cluster fuck apps written on linux or mac. Access is a piece of shit, FP is a joke. But VB, although I dislike using it, is powerful enough to write probably 95% of everything you need on windows. If you do it wrong, well that’s your dumb ass fault. But it’s that sense of ease that get’s people into trouble.

This was actually a big concern what, 5 years ago? They actually let the chinese gov’t see their source code to prove they weren’t misbehaving- or parts of it at least.

Now, true or untrue, it’s still a concern. suppose, from their point of view, they go to war with the US and MS really HAS put some sort of auto-locking kill switch in there. Imagine if their infrastructure was locked in the middle of a war? Bad news for the guy who gets it run on their machines. Now, if say this country was to find out about the switch, and use it against the US? would the US know it’s there? some branch somewhere would, but as we’ve seen in the past, the US gov’t isn’t exactly good at communicating with itself. Then we get pwned with our own software.

But that’s a very slim possibility. I thought I was going somewhere with this.

Ah, yes. lets not forget about winXP activation. it would suck to be at war and not be able to re-activate your software when you decide to upgrade.

*continues to mumble*

This scares Microsoft because they like to be the only game in town, and it is hard to sell bulk licensing when the software itself does not have an incremental cost.