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[MikeCindi]

...they have a brazilian lawyers ...

I suspect that is a reference to the slang combination of billion and zillion (is zillion really proper nomenclature or just slang itself?) vs. a reference to the nationality of the lawyers at Microsoft. 

[rbistolfi]

LOL, brazilian lawyers must be great. They hypnotize you with samba and then BANG, you just give them your house. Argentinian lawyers are the worst, you can smell the sulfur from miles.

[nubcnubdo]

There's a movie about a house sold to US couple Tom Hanks and Shelley Long by Brazilian lawyers/realtors/hustlers, called The Money Pit.
the scaffold scene:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PochL9uL-Y

[tomh38]

nubcnubdo:  That's one of my favorite movies of all time!

mikecindi:  Correct ... I got it from people at Fark.com (a site I sometimes visit but don't really recommend) where "a brazilian" is goofy slang for any really large number, as opposed to "a Brazilian," which would, I suppose, be a person.

rbistolfi:  I get the joke about about the Brazilian lawyers and the samba, but I think there's a joke about the Argentinian lawyers and sulfur which I don't understand.

[rbistolfi]

A tradition says Astharot, Lucifer, Azmodel, Beelzebub, Mephistopheles, Satan, well... the Devil smell like sulfur (or it is sulphur?, bah, S in that chemistry thing).
Damn I didn't go so far with the devil's name, I used to know lot of them.
I take the chance to salute Caim, my Brazilian friend. Damn, pentacampeao my a**, you will see!!

[tomh38]

Thanks, rbistolfi, I should have understood the reference to sulfur and Hell.  I think that all European-derived cultures have the same association between the smell of sulfur and the Devil.

What I was imagining was sulfur dioxide or hydrogen sulfide or whichever one of those sulfur compounds that causes the bad smell of, um, intestinal gas.

I don't know why I would associate this with lawyers.

[sledgehammer]

Well, now that lawyers are mentioned, I have a comment.

The problem is not Microsoft, the problem is that government has not broken up Microsoft into separate companies, one owning the highway, another the cars that run on the highway. Until it does, the cars made by Microsoft will run well on the highway and cars made by others won't.   

Monopoly is and always has been the cancer of capitalism.  Without government action to cut out that cancer, being Microsoft in the current context, or weaken it, monopoly results.  We all know that monopolists have absolute power, or effectively so, and that absolute power corrupts.  So Microsoft continues to do whatever it can to destroy its rivals, and will continue to do so until (and unless) government stops it, until, that is, we get an administration with the courage to enforce our anti-trust laws.  Those who think Microsoft, or any company, will stifle itself, don't understand capitalism.  Under Clinton, the government was doing its duty....it was breaking up Microsoft.  Then Bush came along and stopped all that.  Bush isn't smart enough to understand that for capitalism to flourish, the biggest (and sometimes the best) have to go under the knife.

As an aside, Bush's failure to comprehend that it is competition that brings the benefits of capitalism to the people also caused him to empty the federal treasury to his friends via no-bid contracts, and Bush's friends are the only ones who, in today's economy, have any cash.  Thankfully, term limits will likely solve many of these problems, probably explaining Microsoft's attempt to gobble up Yahoo now, before the election.

John

[rbistolfi]

Surely is a task of the government to put limits in the free enterprise activity to protect the community. The debate is international and it is not limited at the US government. In the last 20 years we assisted to a "liberalization" of the economies of the world. Now that process is under question,  since many countries are having several problems and the underpowered State is perhaps the origin of many of them. The role of the FMI and similar organizations which promoted free enterprise around the globe are now in a heavy crisis. The neo-liberal tendency shows it own limitation, because more close to its realization, the social problems it generates produces a heavy impact on the economy, the productive system and the stability in a long term. We suffered this kind of problems at s. America the last 10 years. The capitalism without social justice is just impossible, and is all the way dangerous for the Freedom it pretends to promote. I am not in favor of the super giant State machinery, but I do believe in the reason -this is the law- putting limits over the social forces of the economy and its actors.
In this scenario, I think Open Source is not only a way of develop and distribute software, it is also an example of a new point of view about property, about the role of the community and an alternative between the Big Bureaucratic Organization and the pure individualism of free enterprise. Community (common property) and Freedom are finally interacting.