yelamdenu

There’s something remarkable going on in the (operating system) software world. This has, actually, been going on for quite a few years. A lot of users tired of proprietary (’closed’) software and the licenses that go with it, and of course the flaws that many people perceive are in Microsoft Windows, now turn to something called Linux. Many of them get so enthusiastic that they start to actively convert Windows users to Linux.

It would be dishonest of me to claim that I haven’t tried this occasionally; the thing is that Linux and free software is actually often very good. But I did learn: don’t disturb the happy Windows user. They may use all kinds of illegally installed anti-virus software, they may have an unknown number of unnecessary services (or spyware programs) running on their pc’s; they may have all kinds of hidden frustrations, as long as they don’t complain, don’t try to linuxify them if they’re not really open to it.

Installing the Mozilla Firefox browser on Windows would be a good idea, though.

Al Gore has been getting a lot of attention lately, and so does the "Live Earth" thing. I have little against that, but it’s really irrelevant. When the oil runs out, we’ll have no choice but to consume way less energy than we ever have anyway. The fact that the war for the scarce oil is already underway (Iraq for the oil and the strategic position at the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan for a strategic position, near China’s and Russia’s gas and oil pipelines) is something few people seem to realise, too. Publicly, that is.

Recently, I got in an online discussion on nine eleven again. Not only do these discussions virtually never result in one person convincing the other, but they also take way too much time. Often the other person refuses to even consider the remote possibility that not everything that (s)he’s been told in the press, on tv, on the radio, regarding the attacks is gospel. It’s a great exercise of patience. More important, it’s the mainstream press, not random people you meet, that lives in a parallel universe and refuses to cover this. That gets on your nerves a lot more.

On the other hand, maybe the western part of the world really needs this myth. Maybe our societies would collapse without the masses having been brainwashed. And maybe the politicians have no other way to thrive than to act as fearmongerers, making people suspicious of one another, of other ethnic or religious groups.