Governor George W Bush was a fighter pilot during the war in Vietnam - not in the US Air Force, where one could be seriously hurt or injured - but in the Texas air force, known as the Air Guard. Membership excused these weekend warriors from the draft. Young George W tested at 25 out of 100, one point above 'too dumb to fly' status, yet leapt ahead of hundreds of applicants to get in.
Baby Bush's good fortune 30 years ago is connected in a strange and edifying manner to the victory by GTech Corporation and its Camelot partners in beating Richard Branson for the new contract to operate the National Lottery, starting in 2002. (Show me more...)
It was computer Kristallnacht, the sound of Windows shattered by marauding government bureaucrats.
All good, responsible news outlets announced that Judge Penfield Jackson's judgment of Microsoft meant that Bill Gates' corporate corpus would be torn limb from limb. (Show me more...)
It's official. Microsoft is a monopoly. But those hoping to see the break-up of Bill Gates's empire are likely to be disappointed. The 207-page judgment delivered by US district court judge Thomas Penfield Jackson on Friday found in favour of the US Justice Department's anti-trust team, lead by Joel Klein. (Show me more...)
It's 2022 and my grandchildren ask, 'Grandpa, when did the communications counter-revolution begin?' As we huddle round the cyberfire, they guess it all went wrong in October 1999. That was when MCI WorldCom paid $115 billion for Sprint Corporation which, once it had merged with AT&T in 2002, gave the telephony behemoth 80 per cent of America's long-distance market. (Show me more...)
New Mexico's privately operated prisons are filled with America's impoverished, sometimes violent outcasts - and they are just the guards. That's the warning I took away from confidential documents and from guards who spoke nervously on condition of anonymity. (Show me more...)
Britain had to go to war to force China to buy opium. But the USA hasn't had to fire a single bullet to make the world surrender to our Disk Operating System. (Show me more...)
All British users of Windows software - and that's almost everyone with a PC - could be in for a payment from Microsoft as a result of the US government's case against it for monopolising the market for operating systems. (Show me more...)
At the far side of Alaska's Kenai Fjord glacier, a heavily armed
rock-and-roll band held lock-down control of the politics and treasury of
Nanwalek, a Chugach village, until four years ago. (Show me more...)
I am convinced the only person in Britain with a true understanding of the consequences of Freedom of Information is Jack Straw. The home secretary's critics claim his resistance to FoI is rooted in some pathological distrust of open democracy. That's quite unfair. His concerns are rational indeed. This government has some very specific information - records of meetings,phone calls, deals - it would hope to keep very un-free. (Show me more...)
At Wal-Mart's 1992 general meeting, founder Sam Walton asked shareholders to sing God Bless America. The 15,000 Wal-Martians responded to Sam's call - even though Walton had been dead for two months. (Show me more...)
