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-- A company like Microsoft hires programmers who create software that is then sold to customers. Think business. Think profits.

-- Open source computing involves a loosely knit group of programmers creating software that is given away free. Think commune. Think losses.

Aquilino says that new copy-protected CDs will still play in all the normal places - car stereos, home and portable players - but when inserted into a CD-ROM, attempts at ripping software to copy the files or access the directories on the disc will fail.

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Here's some examples of what I'm talking about:
http://199.97.97.16/contWriter/yhdweek/2001/03/19/ medic/2607-0105-pat_nytimes.html
http://www.motorists.com/issues/cellphones/policy. html

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Computer Game Could Hold Key To Internet Security: The key to solving one of the most vexing and profound problems of modern mathematics could lie in a most unusual place: Minesweeper, a simple computer game on millions of computers that rivals solitaire as an office time-waster.
The math problem, called the ``P versus NP conjecture,'' asks why some questions are so difficult to answer with computers. It is considered so important that in May the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge offered a $1 million prize for a solution. Proving the conjecture false would mean that modern encryption technology, the foundation of electronic commerce, would be open to easy attack. Here's the link.

The necessary post full of other links....

Salon article
"End of the tech world" piece from AnchorDesk
a "So What?" peice from E-Commerce Times
Forbes says sell the stock...
...but StarTribune say keep it
MS and hardware
And last, but certainly not least, Ballmer says if they're broken up, prices will rise.

Sometimes, it really baffles me that people get paid to write some of this stuff.