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14 April, 2000 3.55pm pst | Pita Edition
Dow, Nasdaq, Tumble: Blame MSFT?
MSFT CEO Steve Ballmer

BE DOPE NEWS (BDN) On a day that will be forever known as "Black Friday" until the next Black Friday comes along, the stock market took a serious tumble, with both the Dow and Nasdaq dropping a record number of points. Immediately, zealots of alternative operatings systems such as BeOS and Linux mobilized to figure out exactly how this is part of a Microsoft plot to control the world.

"I believe all this can be traced to [Microsoft Chairmain] Bill Gates' master plan," said one faction leader, known as M$FT$UX, via IRC.

This response is typical of those small but dedicated factions of people who follow their OS of choice as if it they were on a quest to reclaim the Holy Land during the Crusades," said Dr. Nora Roberts, director of psychiatric medicine at John Hopkins Medical Center.

"This website will prove how Gates and Ballmer engaged in unfair business practices, engineered the entire anti-trust trial, purposely put on a pathetic performance and timed the breakdown of settlement talks, pumped wealth into the system to create a higher-than-expected inflation rate, so that they could coincide fears of a interest rate hike with the worries about a runaway bull market, thereby collapsing the market and destroying dozens of tech startups that they eventually would have had to hunt down and destroy one by one (sure they hit some of their allies and even took a hit themselves, but by nuking the competition in one fell swoop they are saving billions and building quite a comfortable cushion of security around their fat, bloated ass)," read the microsoftwillburninhellandiwillbringthemarshmellows.com web site. According to the site, evidence of this theory was destroyed by "Redmond agents, but the author is hoping to restore documents from backup.

The majority of users who choose so-called alternate operating systems based on their technical merits are often annoyed by the overshadowing presence of the few who adopt them in their Pythonian quest to rid the world of Microsoft's presence.

"The literature is filled with case studies of ranting websites such as these and even humor websites dedicated to alternative technologies," explained Roberts. "It's quite pathetic really."

Microsft CEO Steve Ballmer denied any connections with today's stock market performance, although it was difficult to make out his statements exactly due to the sounds of several people yelling "BUY! BUY! BUY!" in the background. Well it was "buy" or "die" - hard to say for sure.

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