Kip Crosby wrote: Yeah, but there's lots of them in the enthusiastic "up and coming" category trying to build reps at taxpayer expense. Remember that though MS has shitloads of money, the government can steal boatloads DC has nuclear weapons. And remember that most elected officials started out as lawyers -- even the guys with MS won't want to screw up their career path. The whole situation is bullshit anyway. I'm posting from a Linux system with nobody holding a gun to my head to switch from Netscape to Internet Exploiter. If someone does try that, they may find out why I'm a supporter of the Second Amendment living in a state that strongly opposes that right. The government is (as usual) wrong in this lawsuit despite my own feelings about MS garbage. Manufacturers are perfectly free to sell equipment with no MS stuff in the package, but unfortunately the ignorant mass of customers want the stuff and that means the manufacturers cave in to MS contract conditions or pay full retail for the product they ship. Honestly there are few legal and almost as few ethical conundra involved. I made _my_ choice and mostly run Linux. My wife has two systems with '95 preinstalled and therefore poorly configured -- my one '95 system was installed from media bought retail (I may not like it, but it's a professional necessity that I know it) works better, despite being a 486/66 competing with a Pentium 133 -- preinstalls are not optimized. (Of course, my 386/33 running Warp beats my hand-optimized 486/66 running '95 -- and my Linux boxes beat everything). -- Ward Griffiths They say that politics makes strange bedfellows. Of course, the main reason they cuddle up is to screw somebody else. Michael Flynn, _Rogue Star_