Some thoughts after watching Fail Safe on CBS. The scenario is a mistaken launch signal sent to a bomber group, which proceeds to bomb Moscow at the end of the story. To prevent a war, the President orders New York to be nuked to show that it was really an accident. It's based on a book, and there was a movie made which I saw, starring Henry Fonda and this version was much like the movie. This one was done live, and there were a few stutters, but like any play it went well.

It's a good story, and a good movie. Pretty tense as it slowly builds up to the climax, which ends by showing some scenes of happy New Yorkers, then a little girl running towards her mom, then the screen goes white. I should mention that it's set in the fifties, so the military technologies reflect that time. After the screen is white for a few seconds, it cuts to the first commercial, which is for State Farm Life Insurance. Quite an effective ad placement there.

Something else I want to comment on is Keen.com, whose commercials I've seen a few times. From what I can tell, all they're doing is having Operators with Internet terminals answer the phone and answer people's questions. Someone needs some information, the Operator will look it up on the web. I suppose if the caller wants the Operator to read out the whole page to him they'll do it, since it's a per minute service. Maybe it's just me but it sounds quite stupid.

Another commercial I've been seeing is Bill Gates talking about how Microsoft has been such an innovative company and has brought computing to the masses. Purely a commercial aimed at the Department of Justice, which hasn't ruled on what should be done about Microsoft's monopoly. Breaking up Microsoft a bit is not going to hurt it in the long run, and won't hurt the stockholders. Look at AT&T, which is a bigger company than when it controlled the local telephony marketplace. Or IBM, which is still the biggest computer maker in the world. Of course, Standard Oil is no longer around.

But the point is, a good company that got into a monopoly position can do it again, if they can't then breaking it up was a good thing. The whole point is to benefit the consumers by providing more competition, which is done by leveling the playing field again. If Microsoft can't recover from having portions of it set up as independent companies, then it really doesn't deserve to be around.

Companies strive to do well enough to become a monopoly, to so rule a market that they are the only supplier. Nothing wrong with that, and it promotes a healthy economy and is usually a good thing for consumers. When a company finally controls a market it rarely can continue to benefit the consumers. Few companies can continue to innovate and provide good service at a low price without competition, so it is at that point that the company has to be restrained somehow to re-establish that competition. That's the way our economy works.

I was getting a lot of junk mail. One thing is that I signed up to too many mailing lists for different companies. So I've been unsubscribing from them as I've gotten each message. That's easy, since those companies don't want to anger people by spamming them. The harder part was getting rid of the unwanted spam, which usually has forged header info so it's hard to track down. But after looking a bit at the messages I realized they were all coming from iname.com, which is the e-mail service that Altavista used to use for its free e-mail. It's also one of the few free e-mail accounts that allows you to forward mail to another account. Once I turned it off most of the spam stopped. Later I checked my altavista.net account and saw seven messages after less than a week. So I guess iname sold my e-mail address, the rat bastards.