[humorix] Man Charged With Crashing Windows

[James Baughn <jbaughn@ldd.net>]

Man Charged With Crashing Windows
March 9, 2000

MOUNTAIN HOME, AR -- Eric Turgent, a closet Linux advocate,
was arrested yesterday for intentionally crashing his
co-worker's Windows box at the offices of the "Roadkill
Roundup" newspaper.  Turgent disputes the charges, saying,
"If causing an operating system to crash is illegal, than
why isn't Bill Gates serving life without parole?"

Turgent's co-worker, Mr. Stu Poor, the clueless technology
pundit for the newspaper, is a heavy Microsoft supporter. 
He frequently brags in his weekly Tuesday Tech Talk column
that he "once had a conversation with Bill Gates." In
short, he is the local equivalent of Jesse Berst.  Last
week he published an editorial entitled, "Freaks in Linux
Houses Shouldn't Throw FUD", in which he wrote:

    As you all know, February 17th was the happy day that
    Microsoft officially released Windows 2000.  I went
    down to the local Paperclips computer store and asked
    if they had any copies in stock.
    
    One of the pimply-faced Linux longhairs explained that
    Paperclips didn't carry Win2K because it is not
    intended for consumers.  What FUD!  I can't believe the
    gall of those Linux Communists to spread such FUD
    (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) about Windows 2000,
    which is _the_ best, most stable operating system ever
    produced in the history of mankind!

It should come as no surprise that this editorial enraged
Turgent.  A heated argument broke out yesterday morning in
which the two insulted each other ("You're nothing but a
Linux hippie freak on the Red Hat payroll!" vs. "You make
Jesse Berst and Fred Moody look like [expletive]
geniuses!") for two hours.

Before the argument, Stu Poor had been composing a new
op-ed, "Java and Linux -- The Edsel and New Coke of the
21st Century", on his machine running Windows 98 SE
(Sixteenth Edition).  At the heat of the moment, Turgent
shoved Poor aside, fired up Internet Explorer, and typed in
"C:\CON\CON"[1].  The machine crashed and the pundit lost
all of his work (a real loss to humanity, to be sure).

When Stu Poor protested, Turgent taunted, "What are you
going to do? Call the cops? Ha ha!"  The pundit did just
that, and now Turgent is in jail awaiting trial for
violating the "Slash Crashes Act". This bill was enacted in
1999 after a Senator's gigabyte cache of pornography was
destroyed by a Windows crash.

The case is expected to go to trial next month.  One of his
lawyers said to Humorix off the record, "Turgent is not the
criminal. Windows is a con -- a C:\CON\CON, that is, and
the Microsoft Marketing Department is the con-artist. My
client is innocent."


[1] We're not making this up: a pathname such as C:\CON\CON will
actually crash
Windows 9x. See this security advisory:
http://securax.org/pers/scx-sa-01.txt

---

James S. Baughn
http://i-want-a-website.com/about-linux/

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