• Watergate jailbird sees God in Windows XP
  By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
  Posted: 12/11/2001 at 17:31 GMT

  A fascinating meditation on the divine origins of Microsoft's Windows XP reaches us from the former Watergate jailbird turned fundamentalist Christian, Chuck Colson.

  Colson was Richard M Nixon's Special Counsel, and in 1974 served seven months for obstruction of justice in the Watergate scandal. Since then, he's rehabilitated himself as a moderate lay preacher, and founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

  It's the appearance of Windows XP that has got Chuck musing. But about what, exactly, we're not quite sure.

  "Can you imagine anyone reverse engineering the new Microsoft software," he asks. And before we you can say "Ximian... Miguel de Icaza!", Colson continues "....and concluding that natural processes put it together?"

  Colson then weaves together the existence of Windows XP, DNA, to the tentative conclusion that perhaps we shouldn't dismiss creationism out of hand.

  "Does Windows XP somehow prove that Bill Gates or his engineers don't exist?" asks Chuck, incomprehensibly.

  "I don't think so," he concludes.

  The mere existence of the new version Windows should have us all pondering where we came from, advises Colson:

  "The recent release of Windows XP illustrates the concept of intelligent design. If Windows XP points to Bill Gates, how much more do the marvelous complexities of DNA point directly to God, the great Intelligent Designer?"

  Well, as the Good Book almost, but not quite, says: it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than get WPA* to work after changing your motherboard. ®

  Related Link
  Colson on Windows XP
  

* WPA is Windows Product Activation, which nobody who knows computers much likes at all and is an integral part of Windows XP and Office XP which makes you get a product number from Microsoft when you first install the operating system, and anytime that it thinks you have changed computers. ie: you move the hard drive to another computer and try to run Windows it will complain and ask you to call Microsoft to get a new product number since you're obviously using your copy of Windows on a different computer than last time. For those of you who may be thinging of upgrading to Windows XP do not let this stop you, as you will most likely never encounter it anyway and thus it's just one more gripe the technology industry can have with Microsoft.