CDR: Re: Jim Bell arrested, documents online

[Ray Dillinger]

On Wed, 22 Nov 2000, Eric Cordian wrote:

>The implications are that in a society where the government has not made
>personal privacy and private communication illegal, you can't be an
>asshole to countless millions of people without winding up with a price on
>your head.

The thing about money is, there's no property of it that says it takes 
a lot of people to have a lot of money.  

Think about the very early days of Linux, for example.  It would 
have been worth several million to Bill Gates if Linus Torvalds 
had just suddenly "disappeared".  Not because Linus was acting 
like an asshole to countless millions of people, but just because 
Linus was acting like an asshole to one person who had billions 
of dollars. And given the anonymity of the proposed assassination 
market, nobody would have known exactly whom to take revenge on
when Linus got whacked.

This is what free markets do; they reward people who use them 
efficiently with financial power on a scale that millions of 
ordinary people can't match even if they all work together.  
Now Bill G. has used every market he's ever dealt with efficiently, 
to increase Microsoft's Market share and shut out all alternatives.  
Why do you think he (or people like him) would be any less 
competent in the use of an assassination market? 

>Disputes with employees, and displeasure over Windows needing frequent
>rebooting, really don't rise to this level of visceral discontent.

"displeasure over windows rebooting" has gotten pretty visceral 
for me at times -- Two years ago, I spent a whole day poking 
hex codes into a BIOS to try to get back the contents of a 
crashed windows disk which contained all contacts and records 
for our company's first round of venture capitalization and 
our company's first major client.  The stakes were well over 
a million and a half dollars.  And yes, it was bad information 
management on our business developer's part, but we were only 
four guys at the time and didn't have corporate information 
policy going yet.

You wanna bet, if fifty or eighty people a year find themselves 
in that position, and fail to get their info back, that at least 
twenty or thirty of them wouldn't put a grand or more on Bill's 
head?  I got my files back, so I didn't have to deal with that. 
But these days I use Linux at home...  I won't even *steal* 
windows software any more, running it is too much of a risk.

				Bear