NSA 03.19.2004 - Regarding Ashcroft response to Clinton Attorney General;

I searched my drive for "swieee" because this is what I devised to call my Pareto-reinvented-wheel concept before I discovered Sweden's "ISO." "Swieee" was not in the text of the message as ASCIII, and I was long in discovering it as the filename. I can now search UNICODE, and EBSDIC is not an XP affliction. See humor at end.

5/9/2004
For The NSA
Office Of Public Affairs
Washington, DC, 20505

Robert B Johnson
4030 Valley View Lane #137
Dallas, Tx [sic should be TX] 75244

To Each Concerned Party:

Early in the month of April, I wrote a letter to the Dept Of Justice, asking The Attorney General’s Office to educate me about issues concerning Microsoft and its status as a monopoly. In contemplating that issue, I began to wonder what would be the effect on our economy, were Microsoft to be broken up. Clearly the reason the Bush Administration would prefer not to break them up, is that they are critical to our economy. As such, I wondered if we could put the question in perspective as follows: If Microsoft were militarily attacked, would the effect on our economy be such that we stalled out? By contrast, if they are actually not so critical as we might believe by default, could we then re-evaluate the possibility of [sic] bring anti-trust legislation to bear on them again?

The reasons that this is a worthwhile exercise, is that at Microsoft, there are no doubt foreign nationals employed. At some point, we should ask ourselves, are we prepared to say with confidence that they have not written in Easter eggs as part of the system. An example of one would be to go to a win98 machine, and set the screen saver to “volcano.” It is clearly a harmless one, but establishes proof by exception that it is a possibility. As such, the un-anticipated problems of outsourcing to foreign soil might already be with us.

The solution that I would devise would not necessarily be easy. However, the kernel should be very attractive on its own merits. When IBM built its early PCs, they set standards that eventually became the IEEE. If we were to have an open standards Organization, such as SWIEEE, any [sic] programer or company could write to those standards, without any fear of Microsoft changing the standard to build in obsolescence. Microsoft would benefit from this by modularizing, by cutting out much bureaucracy, and the playing field would leveled for all competitors.

Along these lines, we can observe that much phone support has moved overseas to India. As such, they have become peace hostages, and this is not bad. However, we have inherited alliance with Pakistan, and if they engage India in conflict, we cannot come to Pakistan’s aid, with losing critical Tech Support functions. It would seem more sensible for the US to have her Phone Support in Pakistan, and for India and Pakistan to exchange peace hostages of their own.

I am very interested in any reply you might have,

Yours [sic] Sincerley,

Rob Johnson.

If all the other states start a township in a Texas desert, they can have a corporate headquarters, an answering machine and a PO Box there; then the 5ts would be FORCED to acknowledge them as independent entities - the 5ts would be reduced to peer participation, and the joke would be over :-(