Linux, Anyone?

That's a rhetorical question for me. I fired Bill Gates years ago for selling me shoddy, unreliable merchandise and annoying, deficient "crippleware" I could ill-afford to "upgrade" when I was in grad school. I almost exclusively use Linux these days and can say that it is close to being able to replace Microsoft for most ordinary users, even with the various incompatibilities Microsoft deliberately incorporates in its software to discourage migration.

But perhaps it is becoming a not-so-rhetorical question for some now that the brutality of Red China has been documented on film so shortly after reports that the Colossus of Redmond opted to "embrace and extend" -- but, curiously this time, not "extinguish" -- China's internet censorship efforts.

Hired hands move in with shovels
Bill "Armand Hammer" Gates used to merely annoy me when I thought he was just a gun-grabber who insisted on making it nearly impossible to get that silly, politically-correct recycle bin off my desktop. But apparently, he's also so eager to do business with China that he'll stoop to censorship. I guess he has decided to "upgrade" himself from "annoying control freak" to "abettor of tyranny."

From the Sky News account from which the above footage was obtained:

Shocking footage of crowd control 'Chinese-style' has been obtained by Sky News.

The film shows dozens of hired thugs running amok in a village just 60 miles from the capital Beijing.

Villagers are shown being beaten with long canes while gunfire can be heard in the background.

Six villagers are reported to have died while 50 were injured.

It is the worst footage of violence to emerge from the secretive country since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.

One wonders how soon Gates will be announcing a new research initiative into image filtering software on behalf of the Chinese government so that such images don't "overwhelm [the] information workers," as he might put it, who are in charge of keeping the proles blissfully ignorant -- or, at least, ignorant of the general lack of bliss on the part of their countrymen.

-- CAV

PS: For more on the protests themselves, go here.
PPS: Via Instapundit is this op-test of the Microsoft blogging portal.

Updates

6-17-05: Added PPS.