The week in your words: One ring to rule them all

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 17 Oct 2008 at 18:19

In a week that saw the Government ditch a big brother state for a Sauron state, Windows 7 get a startling new name, and Steve Jobs go street, we take a look back to see what our readers have made of it all.

Home Secretary puts her arm around Big Brother

We're beginning to worry about the Government. It's rubbish with money, incredibly unpopular and spends all its time following us about, recording what we do. In many ways it's like our slightly demented, ex-girlfriend - but without the perks.

This week it managed to infuriate our forums even further by pressing ahead with its great, big database of personal information it intends to lose within fifteen minutes of collating.

Marccarter baffled everybody by not immediately flying into a rage about it: "Why anyone thinks we should just be allowed to do whatever we like whenever we like is beyond me, we live in a modern complex society and people need to be kept safe, the vast majority have nothing to worry about, if it means we are all just a tiny bit safer is it not worth the risk?"

Oh yeah, that's going to popular. Off you go Talbot_Avenger.

"The erosion of basic freedoms isn't an overnight thing, it happens in small stages, and always for the 'best of reasons'. It's not like the Government has said, 'right, that's it, this far, no farther'. There'll be other initiatives, always with the terrorism bogeyman being used to justify them. This surveillance is cast as being about 'national security'; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent."

To be fair we at PC Pro are as docile as dead pandas most of the time, anyway, so the Government need not go to any trouble on our account. tonyfoster2, however, was feeling philosophical.

"These discussions always make me smile as I think that there is much confusion over what constitutes a 'free' country or 'liberty'. We do not, and have not for many centuries lived in true freedom.

"The laws of the land limit our freedoms at every turn and constrain our actions to a relatively narrow subset which are deemed acceptable, not by society at large but by the elite few who are tasked with defining these laws..."

Blimey, and we were just going to be rude about Gordon Brown.

Windows 7 to be called... Windows 7

Who says there's a brain drain at the world's largest technology companies? This week Microsoft's crack-team of naming baboons decided that calling the new Windows anything other than Windows 7 might suggest it was something more than a hastily pieced together service pack for Vista, and that would be bad.

"Genius!" Reckons Pocket73, though we suspect some sarcasm has crept in there. "The funny thing is that you know it has taken them hours, days and weeks of meetings, discussions and more meetings to come up with that."

Qpw3141 disagreed: "It would be nice to think that a delegation arrived at Steve Ballmer's office to get the okay for setting up a working group to consider names for the new OS version and he said: 'Fu*k off - we're calling it Windows 7'"

Shortly before he kicked a chair at them and threw the first person to blub out of the window. The superbly-monikered phantombudgie liked it, though.