Microsoft's War Promotion And Censorship

1. promotes war through MSNBC and through Bing premier placement and censorship
Expand on that. Havnt got a clue what you are going on about

2. Puts 4 blocking steps between Indymedia.org and its readers
No it doesn't

3. Microsoft seems to be slowing down Firefox loading
Seems? No it doesnt. Maybe your computer is fooked.

4. Microsoft has a monopoly at many libraries, both in their search engine and computer courses taught
Thats a choice of the libraries. The library dictates what browser is on their computer.... because they own it not microsoft or you. Its the libraries.

5. Microsoft's Internet Explorer pirates people's flash drive data
No it doesn't

6. Microsoft is shutting down antiwar activist computers in some areas
No they arnt

7. Microsoft's Bing has much less data in its search engine than some others.
How the hell do you answer that?! Maybe they are behind or havnt put enough resources into it. The point is, its their property, they can do with it what they want. It isnt yours to have a say into how it is run. Don't like it? Then buy it - then you can do what you want with it.

8. Microsoft has little employee support for public questions.
Why should they. They are a private company, not a public service paid for by taxpayers.

9. Microsoft erased millions of MSN Group individual websites.
Free sites. They can do what they want with the servers because they own them and no contract was signed guaranteeing a service.

10. Microsoft cancels people's hotmail accounts if they are on vacation, sick or otherwise unable
to access their accounts for 3 months.
Thats because lots of people sign up and then dont use it. Its free - so it would lose microsoft money to keep them all open. Dont like it? Then pay to use the service. Its not a human right, its a service from a private company that isnt funded by tax payers money.

11. Microsoft fights against the open source movement of India, Brazil etc.
They are in competition. It isnt against the law. You could argue that the open source movement fights against microsoft.

12. Microsoft's billionaires (Gates, Ballmer and others) have made their money by pricegouging.
They've made their money by selling products and services that people have paid for.

13. Bill Gates funds inflicting pain on animals at Duke, in African vivisection programs
bullshit

I'm curious about point 2: "Puts 4 blocking steps between Indymedia.org and its readers".

I never use Bing (use Google instead which is in some ways worse) but I just tried it and it seemed to search for Indymedia fine - what is the problem? Do you really mean indymedia.org or indymedia.org.uk?

Maybe it is because you are loading a https URL instead of a http one and your browser is complaining about an self-signed certificate? That would be your browser, not Bing, and it could be argued this behaviour is desirable. If this isn't what you mean, maybe you could elaborate.

I just tried using Bing to search for indymedia and had no problems - got straight to the site.

I've seem some browsers configured to authenticate but that to do with the local machine not microsoft.

I'm a bit dubious about a lot of these accusations. Its easy not to like microsoft because they are big but at the end of the day they have also done sterling work. For instance, they are the ones who had the vision of getting computers from a geeky lab equipment to a useful device in everyone's home. If it wasnt for microsoft, computers wouldn't be what they are today.