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Journalism of Courage
Breaking up Microsoft might seem to be overkill a dramatic remedy for antitrust violation. But the inconvenient truth is that less drastic remedies are apt to be less effective and might involve government or court officials taking a permanent oversight role in the American software industry, hampering its evolution.
Microsoft is the latest target of antitrust laws designed to prohibit companies from conspiring by way of mergers, contracts or other forms of cooperation to reduce consumer choice. Though the laws do not outlaw monopolies, they do prohibit a single company from deliberately creating or maintaining a monopoly through anti-competitive practices rather than simply by selling a product that is better or cheaper than someone else8217;s8230; A proposal to split Microsoft in two raises profound questions about the government8217;s role in the new economy. Can, and should, laws designed to manage the emergence of industrial and natural-resource monopolies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries be applied to the technology and intellectual-property giants of the 21st century?
8212; Excerpted from an editorial in The New York Times
Germaine Greer on knickers
Lingerie is a fancy French name for underwear. Underwear is any garment that is not meant to be seen in public; the category includes, from the skin out, pants, singlets, brassieres, corsets, girdles, suspender-belts, vests, slips and petticoats. Under each of these headings could be marshalled dozens of variations; pants, for example, include briefs, Y-fronts, jockey shorts, boxer shorts, knickers, cami-knickers, drawers, bloomers, panties, pantettes, panty-girdles, panty-shorts, pant-slips, scanties, bikini briefs and thongs. Who wears all this stuff? And why is our culture increasingly obsessed by it? British people spent 1.6 billion pounds on lingerie last year, 25 per cent more than in 1991, influenced no doubt by the images that proliferate everywhere. Underwear is used to sell anything from Citroen cars to Vogue website. There is even an exhibition of underwear, Inside Out, organised by the British Council, opening in London next month.
When I was growing up, certain kinds of women8217;s underwear were called foundation garments8217;. If your clothes were to look good you had to underprop them with foundation garments, so at 14 or so you were packed off to be fitted8217; with your first bra and and girdle. The bra fitter was usually a deep voiced, whiskery female of what seemed horrifyingly advanced years and she measured your budding breast by horribly spreading her hand over it. The girdle was and still is a garment so repellent that you had to dash to take it off in the toilet and stuff it down behind the cistern before foreplay reached the revelation point. Nowadays, firmness of the rear end is supposed to be achieved by working out, and no more covering needed than a thong. But thongs can be repellent on certain bodies. My hairdresser confided to me the other day that, though his wife is a beautiful woman he finds the sight of her buttocks surrounding a thong deeply off-putting. The very thought of Cherie Blair8217;s mythical thong ismind-boggling.
8212; Excerpted from Knickers who needs them?8217;, by Germaine Greer, The Observer, May 7
