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Microsoft Critic Received $9.75m After Settlement
An anonymous reader writes "Just this month, Microsoft paid almost $20 million to the Computer and Communications Industry Association to make an anti-trust lawsuit go away.
FT.com has just revealed that *half* of that payment was pocketed by Ed Black, the president of CCIA and one of MS's fiercest opponents over antitrust issues. His payment was approved by the CCIA board, which includes Sun Microsystems, Yahoo and Oracle. And here's a quote from this article at Groklaw: Could this be why Nokia quit the CCIA right after the settlement was announced, saying matters were not handled "in the proper way"?"
Or is anyone else coming to the conclusion that any organisation named *IA or *AA is, in fact, corrupt and evil?
I'm shocked, shocked!, to discover that an out-of-court settlements that consists of paying off your antagonists. Next you'll be telling me that Michael Jackson's settlements were somehow related to the $20 million that he forked out, rather than plaintiffs reaching mutual understanding.
Next week Slashdot will discuss : "The Pope : could he be a Catholic?"
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Since when is silencing one person's allegations worth 9 million dollars? Couldn't they just have arranged an "accident" for him?
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... and you gotta admit that he got a fairly good price!
i wonder if he's getting it in cash or a couple of SQL Server licences...
Your comment reminds me of a joke. A man walks up to a beautiful young woman and says, "will you sleep with me for a million dollars."
She says, "sure."
Next, he says, "will you sleep with me for a dollar?"
She slaps him in the face and says, "what kind of woman do you think I am?"
He replies, "We have already established that, we are just dickering over price!"
And OSDL and RedHat. Was the submitter trying to imply complicity between Sun and Microsoft by omitting those other members from that list?
Interestingly, Nokia is a Scandinavian country
That's a common misconception. Nokia is not a country, it's the capital of Finland! Gee, stupid Americans.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Nokia is not a Scandinavian country. Nokia is a Finnish company. Finland is not part of Scandinavia, Scandinavia is Norway, Sweden and Denmark. It is a common misinterpretation to consider Scandinavia the same as the "Nordic countries" which include Finland and Iceland. The term "Scandinavian" was created prior to Finland's independence from the Soviet Union.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Nokia's a Finnish company, and I'd like to think it reflects on their corporate culture. Finland's known for the relative lack of gravy. Transparency.org seems to think so anyway.
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I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
Cases which use our justice system, using up taxes, should not merely be settled without a fee. If they're not going to produce a precedent, they should compensate the government at least a fraction of their costs as part of the settlement price. There's no reason why taxpayers like me should be subsidizing their competition without getting a piece of the action.
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make install -not war
Oh, so you're from Glasgow?
Flash is the Herpes of the Internet.
your.opinion >
And here's another:
A boy comes home from school, and tells his dad: "Today we learned the
difference between 'theoretically' and 'practically', but I'm not sure
I got it. Could you explain it to me?" The father thinks for a
minute and then replies "Son, your mom is in the other room, go and
ask her if she would be willing to have sex with a stranger for a
million dollars." The boy returns after a short minute and says: "She
said she would." "OK," says the father, "now go upstairs and ask your
older sister the same question." Again the boy returns after a short
while, and again he says "She said she would." "So, you see son," the
father says, "theoretically we have two million dollars in our house,
but practically we have two whores."