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December 31, 2007

Vista - America's secret weapon?

My oldest daughter is one of those computer help-line techies that you call when you can't figure out how to make your computer work. And it just so happens that she does contract tech-help for a Windows Vista licensee. So I've heard more than my share of the usual horror stories about the notoriously problematic Vista platform.

So, you can imagine the belly laugh that resulted from seeing the following typo (apparently missed by his semi-official wire service) on Oregon Senate candidate Steve Novick's website article on the Darfur mess:

Secretary-General Ban is asking for just 24 helicopters from the international community to make peacekeeping in Darfur a success. Yet when asked last month about whether the U.S. would lend its support, Secretary of Defense Bill Gates responded that "no such request has come to us," and added, "Our helicopter resources are pretty – are pretty pushed between Iraq and Afghanistan."

Bill Gates, of course, is the founder of Vista creator, Microsoft. Whereas Robert Gates is the Secretary of Defense. But just imagine what a wacky world this would be if Bill Gates were the Secretary of Defense!

* Well for one thing the DOT, FAA and NIST agencies would probably have been forced to use Vista. Although I'm sure that a major crash or two would have let the FAA off the hook.

* Nobody would blame DHS or particularly the DOD for failing routine audits.

* And of course bloggers would have much less reason to worry about computerized data sweeps by the Feds.

* Chinese hackers would find hacking into government computers a cakewalk. Wait... that's not funny!

* McCain's myspace page getting hacked wouldn't be an isolated problem.

* Of course on the bright side, Novick's semi-official wire service could just hack in and correct any future typos. Oh... wait... they wouldn't need to hack in, would they?

Posted by Kevin at December 31, 2007 03:41 PM