I don’t have much ‘purchased’ software – not because I have loads of pirate stuff – I don’t; it’s just I don’t really use much in the way of software other than to compress photos or create diagrams. So I am particularly miffed that that 2 CDs of software I’ve purchased in the past 2 years or so DON’T WORK with Vista. It took me some time to work this out, and only be searching through various discussion forums on t’interweb have I discovered zillions of people with the same problems. 

One of the issues that I hadn’t noticed before is that Microsoft can never be wrong. If something doesn’t work on Vista – then that’s because that company hasn’t worked hard enough to keep up to speed with the glories of M$ technical development. 

This same self-righteous ‘we-can-never-be-wrong’ tone is exactly that adopted by all the representatives of the Israeli government that I’ve seen on the news this week. Bomb a school? No; clearly it was full of hamas fighters; even as the bodies of kids are being removed from the rubble, no one says ‘oh no, terrible mistake’; they just look smug and nasty. Again, what’s pathetic about the TV news is the way that no one makes the statement that a great deal of what is happening is to strike abject terror into the vast majority of Palestinian people. That there is a deliberate use of violence to terrify people.

When Blair, the loathsome toad, was interviewed the first thing he said was ‘ we have to stop the weapons being smuggled into Gaza through the tunnels’. Nothing about stopping the flow of weapons into Israel then?

Where were we…oh yes, the crap-ness of Vista; the ‘we-are-never-wrong-tone’. It’s no coincidence that governments and corporations feel that they are never wrong and are effectively about the law; they both have the same interests and intertwining of connections and personal. 

This is partly why open source is seen as a radical departure; there is a feeling that it is collaborative and not controlled by government and corporations. And why is this attractive? Because all right minded people don’t actually trust governments and corporations much, and a cursory glance at the television news or a quick tour of the internet will demonstrate why.