How Much More Proof that Microsoft Is Evil Do You Need?

Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing points us to a research report indicating that, thanks to the cycle of software obselecence, users of computers running Windows upgrade their machines twice as often as those who run Linux.

The report stresses the impact of downversion computers on the waste stream and landfill. There is another important factor, however: the resources used to make the new machines, and the human toll that acquiring those resources takes.

Yesterday, Chris Clarke at Pandagon highlighted the connection between the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the mining of tantalum there.

Tantalum is a relatively scarce element that is a key component of the dielectric material in the capacitors used in the manufacture of just about every piece of electronic equipment made. The world's largest known reserves of tantalum ore are in the DRC, and with the personal electronics industry boomed in the late 1990s, the price of tantalum ore skyrocketed. Tantalum is mined in the DRC, smuggled out through Rwanda and Uganda, and sold to the world electronic manufacturing markets from there.

Millions of people have died in the bloody war, known as the African World War from the number of nations involved. The prize is the Congolese mineral resources, including gold and diamonds, yes, but the real treasure is tantalum ore.

The demand for electronics drives the price of tantalum ore, and as that price rises and falls, so does the level of violence in the Congo, the wholesale rapes of area women committed by the various militias and armies, the number of area residents impressed into service in the militias, the number of slaves working in the mines at gunpoint, the number of women forced into sexual slavery to service the miners and the soldiers, the overall human misery.

So anything that cuts into the number of new computers manufactured reduces the intensity of the agony of the Congo. To use Microsoft Windows and committing oneself to an hardware upgrade every time the software is rendered obsolete is to increase the toll exacted of human misery.

So does getting a new iPod, or mobile phone, or PDA, or GPS receiver, or just about any of the gadgets we take for granted in the privileged segments of Western society.