I'm in the middle of attempting to get an application filed for a college loan for my son Linguist. Unlike when I did the same for my other kids, I evidently don't have "approved" software installed on my computer, so our illustrious (s)elected officials aren't going to allow me to complete this application online.

It would be nice if those !@#$%$^*& would include information that such a requirement exists on their information pages prior to discovering the hard way that there is only "approved" software that they will allow to access their sites (YawnDoze, naturally. Oh - and Mac for the vocal Apple Corps!) and there is also "non-approved" software (everything else) whose users can go pound sand up their dorsal ports before the Bush administration will allow equal access. After all, "MegaHard has enormous influence over government in the U.S."

This leaves me with two choices. I can slime my computer with Redmond's Finest government-approved snoopware just so I can complete this project, or I can manually fill out a form and drag it over to the Post Office and hope that they can still read the postmark when it arrives at the Halliburton Department of Edjimikashun, since the filing deadline is tomorrow.

This is technological progress?

I begin to have much more sympathy for Russia (especially after YawnDoze blew up a gas pipeline of theirs!), Venezuela, Brazil, Norway, Cuba, and many other nations who all lately decided that they weren't interested in making US government eavesdropping on their sector of the Internet easy through the use of Bill and Steve's Majick VirusAgar. They decided instead to use of open source alternatives, something which many national victims of globalization have already chosen to use in order not to have to ship a pound of every user's flesh to MegaHard Headquarters every year. Other nations - like South Africa - are about to take the plunge and rend their technological conditioning, as Apple's famous 1984 Super Bowl commercial once suggested we all do. I'm sure that the notification that MegaHard would crash anyone's computer if found to be using pirated copies of WhizDuh helped this effort to shift large governmental systems to open source a great deal.