"Freedom isn't free"

This aphorism is proudly shouted out by those in the USA who believe  the 2nd amendment is the most important in the US Constitution. Eternal vigilance, they say, preferably armed and ready is the price of freedom.

"Freedom isn't free"

The USA has just endured yet another mass shooting, this time at a grocery store where ten people were murdered while freely shopping for dinner simply because a well armed individual decided to shoot them. Fans of the second amendment lay the blame squarely on the shooter. "Guns don't kill people", they say, "people kill people". As if the shooter could have just as easily ended ten lives with a kitchen knife.

Freedom isn't freedom

Americans actually argue over the definition of "mass shooting" and "school shooting" as if such sophistry matters to the victims. American kindergarten children are subjected to active shooter drills as part of their introduction to school. These drills are repeated at each grade level until they graduate or die in yet another mass school shooting. The list of American activities which could end with a bullet in your body now includes: Attending school, Attending a concert, Partying at a bar, Shopping, Going to work, Staying home, Driving. Nowhere is safe. Fans of the 2nd amendment think the answer to this is more guns and more active shooter training. They seem to prefer the "freedom" of the old American wild west where, as they imagine it, every real man had a gun and would travel. Such "freedom" is neither freedom nor free. There is no freedom in active shooter drills, hardened spaces and arming for the next threat. No state of existence can be free while its cost is a body count.

The Democrats control the White House, the House of Representatives and have a thin edge in the Senate. However tenuously, they hold the power to do something about America's mass murder problem. If they do not, they will have to accept blame for every subsequent mass shooting, just as much as the person who pulls the trigger.     

How to be successful? Of course, all you need to do is get up earlier, purr more often and carry more weight. However, there are people who decide to take a different path - that of fraud. Today I will tell a short story about how Microsoft finished off its competitor, Digital Research.

CP / M

I think that each of you has heard about MS-DOS, which is commonly called DOS. However, as much as this system was popular in Poland, it was not the only system from this family. We also had PC-DOS (which was actually MS-DOS, but developed by IBM) or the above-mentioned DR-DOS (FreeDOS appeared later, but it's also in this family of systems).

DR-DOS is an operating system created by Digital Research. It was created as a successor to another system - CP / M. IBM could not get along with DR, so they signed a contract to supply software from Microsoft. Microsoft decided to buy another operating system - 86-DOS and develop it for IBM's hardware. The similarities of MS and IBM's system to CP/M were so huge that DR wanted to sue these companies for copying their product. As compensation, IBM allowed Digital Research to sell the system alongside PC-DOS (IBM had the right not to use the MS-DOS name). However, IBM's and Microsoft's operating system was much cheaper than its counterpart which meant that CP/M began to be squeezed out of the market.

Digital Research's product was not fully compatible with IBM's, an initial plus began to turn into a minus as PC-DOS began to rule the personal computer market. Even later attempts to improve CP/M could not tip the balance. Simply put, DR systems were too expensive and IBM and Microsoft began to set the trends.

DR-DOS

However, DR rolled up their sleeves and went into battle. The first thing they did, besides achieving compatibility with Microsoft's product, was to significantly lower the price and start introducing newer and newer features to the system - such as HMA support, allowing the system to handle more RAM than 640KB, and file compression. From now on, it was up to Microsoft to make newer and newer changes to keep up with DR-DOS, and they had to cut prices. Customers (and especially computer makers) were so interested in DR's product that they started offering DR's products widely.

If you're going to kill someone there isn't much reason to get all worked up about it and angry. Any discussions beforehand are a waste of time. We need to smile at Novell while we pull the trigger.

When a user ran Windows 3.1 Beta on his computer using DR-DOS he was horrified when the system informed him of a "non-fatal error". Every run of Windows or certain programs reported the problem.

This is a feature added at the request of Bill Gates. The message you see here is not a "real" error. Code was added in various parts of the operating system that detected what system it was running on and displayed the message. Of course, DR-DOS handled these programs without a problem and everything worked perfectly despite the error message. However, users of the system seeing such messages, according to the vice president of Microsoft - "(...) to do is feel uncomfortable, and when he has bugs, suspect that the problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS".

In the final version of Windows 3.1, the code was disabled, but you could easily enable it by changing 1 byte, and rumours of DR-DOS malfunctioning spread around the world. Not even a patch to pass the "sieve" of AARD

Caldera

DR-DOS was sold to Novell and eventually went to Calder. The first thing the company did when it bought DR-DOS (later Novell DOS) was to file a monopoly case against Microsoft for, among other things, AARD code and "bundling" Windows 95 with MS-DOS (Win95 was a DOS overlay, but installed Microsoft DOS by default, even though DR-DOS could very well have acted as a "shim"). We know from leaks in 2009 that Microsoft paid Caldera $280 million for his practices.

Sources:
- CP/M image Wikipedia, from Digital Research website under PD license.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M#/media/File:CPM-86.png

- Photo Novell DOS, Wikipedia, Ghettoblaster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DeviceLogics_DR-DOS_8.0_720x400.png

- Photo of AARD from Wikipedia, from Betawiki under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Windows_3.10.068_setup_AARD_code.png

- History of MS-DOS (Coleslav) [PL]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq5qKRAMpLw

- Windows' Hidden Self Destruct Code (Nostalgia Nerd)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIfNIWn2Ad4

I have started this group due a a recent "debate" I've had over fishing rights. I realized during the course of that exchange that the person arguing with me had no real experience or understanding of the purpose of arguing. Sadly, very few of us do. Arguing is the less formal version of debating. Though less formal, arguing is still a good way to fully understand an opposing viewpoint. This goal is most likely realized if all parties understand the purpose of a good argument.

So lets start with some rules:

1) There is more than enough discussion about BITCOIN on this site so no arguments about BITCOIN are allowed in this group.

2) Participants are considered to be seeking a greater understanding about some topic.

3) While an argument might start with some egregiously offensive statement, the poster is not assumed to be locked into the idea expressed therein. In other words the originator and all other participants are expected to be open to other viewpoints and to listen to each other.

4) Repetition of a point is not tolerated as a tactic to win an argument. This is a written medium, if a participant feels they have been misunderstood, asking a question to seek out the misunderstanding is better than merely repeating a point.

5) Gainsaying is NOT an argument.

6) Insulting a participant will result in the offender losing the argument. The insulted party has the option to allow continued participation.

I don't want to make this more complicated than need be so this seems like enough rules.

Let the arguments begin! Keep it civilized. I'll give a few days for someone else to post some contentious idea and see what happens.

And the season is open! This is the planetary record - so far!

Do you know what censorship is?

In Poland, on 31 Jan during the weather forecast, a weather presenter on public television put a sticker promoting a charity which buys equipment for children's treatment.

Unfortunately, this charity is not supported by the government (Because the creator supported women's protest, supporting the abortion of seriously ill babies).

The presenter was fired and the material was removed from the website.

poznan.tvp.pl/1780092/pogoda

Interesting discussion between Elon and Vlad (RobinHood CEO)

Post 45's tempestuous administration, the Grand Old Party's members are engaging in a wary game of sniffing each other's arses as they sort out who is and is not really a Trumpista and how much power said cult still retains within the party. While the Republican/Royal party sorts that out the rest of us can get a sense of what is really happening by watching a few select people over the next few months. 

The first to keep an eye on is Marjorie Taylor Greene. You may be forgiven for not knowing this newly elected Republican congresswoman from Georgia. But you will hear about her eventually and probably quite soon. MTG is either one of the craziest people ever to sit in Congress or the most craven opportunist. She has denounced the massacre at Sandy Hook School as a "false flag" operation. Her Facebook account is replete with calls to murder various Democrat opponents with whom she now shares the floor of the people's house. She is an enthusiastic cheerleader for QAnon and the erstwhile occupant of the Oval Office. She is so far off the scale that within a month of her swearing in a motion has been tabled to have her expelled from Congress. That requires a 2/3 majority. She will only be tossed if a significant number of Republicans agree with the expected unanimous vote of the Democrats. Whether or not that happens will be heavily influenced by what price GOP representatives think they will pay for purging what has to be one of the least consequential performers in the Trump circus.

Next is Sara Huckabee-Sanders. The daughter of a former Republican Governor of Arkansas and the erstwhile Trump Liar-in-Chief at the White House Briefing Room is hoping to lever her name and loyalty to the Orange Outrage into her own stint in Arkansas' gubernatorial mansion. Naturally there are a few others who are also interested but SHS is considered the front runner due to her high level of sycophancy to the dearly departed aspiring monarch. How well she does in the primaries will be a major test of the endurance of DJT's hold on voters and the spines of Royalists throughout the GOP.

Finally there is Liz Cheney. The Third highest ranked member of the House GOP has openly defied the loser of the 2020 Presidential race and even voted to impeach him on the matter of inciting insurrection. This has drawn fire from small hands and some of the remaining flying monkeys that still orbit his mass. There are threats of a primary challenge in 2022 and maneuvers to curtail her power. For now she portrays an aura of no-concern about the threats. She is probably right that over time she will be the hero in this drama. The question is: How much time must pass?

If MTG and SHS go down in flames while LC sails on, the GOP has a chance to redeem itself as a real Republican Party of Ideas.

If MTG is not purged, SHS becomes the Republican Gubernatorial candidate for Arkansas and LC is banished, the Republican Party will have betrayed itself and become a party in search of a monarch. but they will undoubtedly continue to call themselves Republicans. None of them will see anything wrong with that.