Paranoid or prophet?

Bob Cringely, speaking from The Pulpit, on Microsoft's latest rendition of "embrace and extend":

This is diabolical. If Microsoft is successful, Palladium will give Bill Gates a piece of every transaction of any type while at the same time marginalizing the work of any competitor who doesn't choose to be Palladium-compliant. So much for Linux and Open Source, but it goes even further than that. So much for Apple and the Macintosh. It's a militarized network architecture only Dick Cheney could love.

It's times like these that I miss my Atari 800 and a simple 300-baud modem for dialing into EBBS's.