Much ink has been spilled and audio/video bits and bytes used over the actions of some anti-Olympics protesters who smashed store windows in Vancouver.
While I support the anti-Olympics movement, the actions of this particular group of protesters was just plain stupid in my opinion. When the mainstream media is filled with Winter Olympics hype and looking for any excuse to discredit dissent, why give them exactly what they're looking for?
I've got a much better idea.
The best way to deal with all of the corporate hucksters trying to cash in on the Olympics by being the "official Olympics toilet paper" or whatever is to hit them in the pocket books.
For instance, NBC has the exclusive rights to broadcast the Olympics in the world's largest market...the USA. According to Wikipedia, MSNBC, a major NBC TV channel is 18% owned by monopoly software conglomerate Microsoft.
That's a corporation that's really easy to hit in the pocket books.
How?
Have an Olympic sized GNU/Linux install fest!
Invite geeks and freaks from all over the world to rid computers of Microsoft's operating system and install the free (as in freedom) GNU/Linux system instead.
It would be environmentally friendly!
Millions of computers annually are dumped into land fills sites. Why? Sometimes it's just because they're loaded with viruses and spyware. Other times it's just because the machine is too old to run Microsoft's latest and greatest resource hogging operating system.
Tons of computers could be brought back to life and made useful again!
It would have tremendous community value. The computers could be donated to poor and marginalized folks, under resourced community centres, schools, you name it!
Or, folks who are constantly "fixing" their computers could have machines that actually work.
You could award a gold medal to the person who gets the most GNU/Linux installs done in a 24 hour period. There could be bonus points for getting it to run on especially old or particularly flakey hardware.
All kinds of folks would discover that it isn't necessary to pay the "Microsoft Windows tax" on computing.
And most importantly, it would make Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer cry.
So don't smash windows. Smash Window$
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment