Puerto Rican Blog Congress sells itself to Microsoft

    Today and tomorrow, February 8 and 9, the First Puerto Rican Congress of Educational Blogs is being held in Mayagüez. In its website, these allege that  the conference can "be seen live" as it occurs, from the web-page of the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez (RUM).  In fact, if one uses Apple computers--rivals of Microsoft--one cannot see the video web-stream of the conference.  These distort the truth to the general public in two ways.  The first is is that they claim that with only downloading the latest version of Microsoft Media Player, one can see the video--something patently false.  The second is that there is no reason whatsoever to only diffuse the content only in this format or only in a single format.  They could have video streamed the conference in all formats: flash, quicktime, and media player.  The most common method used today is the "Flash" format (Macromedia), used in 95% of all computers and (better yet) visible to ALL.  (It is in fact ironic that Microsoft used FLASH and to its own .wmv for its own web-page. With the incident, we see the troubling tendency of using false technical justifications to subvert the common interest and democracy--such as routinely happens in China.  ¿Is there a difference between the establishment of private fences (Ocean Park) towards the public beach and the use of private electronic gates to prevent access to a publicly-funded event?  None whatsoever.