The words Boycott Microsoft are simple enough, but sitting here I can think of a vast array of reaons why people would be angry w/ Microsoft.. some may even be people who LIKE windows.. but want Microsoft to obey the anti-trust laws.

If you have any ideas or thoughts on how we might utilize Care2 to put the effort into high gear.. day or night.. dont hesitate to post it here.. spelling doesnt count !!

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This isn't directly a boycott idea, but one of sneaking a foot in the door. 

For some years, using an old PC with Linux as a firewall and home or small business router has been popular with techies.  It seems to be less common these days for those who don't really need to implement more complex routing, as hardware boxes are now a lot cheaper than they were, and are simpler to plug in and configure for most needs.  Some of us have done that anyway, in part to preserve some penguin consciousness when other needs point to keeping a more hardware resource demanding EBG-ware bog. 

I saw an odd classified ad in a rural newspaper today.  It's selling a service to turn an old computer into such a Linux box.  I can't imagine that's a serious profit center, but it does offer an opportunity to get more people Linux aware, who aren't among the usual tech leaders.  That could be combined with the Ubuntu project, to hand out media hard backups, and the rest of the application suite, as a lead in to encourage more people to try it.  Rather than trashing EBG for all the deserving reasons, that could be a positive sales demo, to show the relative performance to resource comparison between systems. 

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John, yay for this thread...

This sounds silly, but maybe boycott their M$ new patent on smilies which even the patents are questioning. What they did here confuses me, but anyway, its sure seems a joke to patent smilies and I'm not even bothering to figure out why they have.

Something to do with transmissions of smilie data for use on MSN?

I saw the gist of this on a social forum and saw the links but still don't get what the M$ thinks its doing... pfft, weird.

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posted at VeggieBoards.com http://www.veggieboards.com/boards/showthread.php?p=976623#post976623

TITLE of forum thread by OP: "I suggest you guys get used to not having any smilies"....(or so it goes, not sure if that is meant literally, probably only as regards non-MS users).

1st link... http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220050156873%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20050156873&RS=DN/20050156873

[QUOTE]Another link

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/0,39020645,39210396,00.htm

Various organisations have criticised Microsoft for attempting to patent the creation of custom emoticons.

The patent, which was published by the US patent office on Thursday, covers selecting pixels to create an emoticon image, assigning a character sequence to these pixels and reconstructing the emoticon after transmission.[/QUOTE]

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@ John and SarahJane and everybody....

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