Re:Huge, Huge, Huge Problem for Microsoft
on
Ford To Move To Linux
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Right, their current money-maker is Office. Unfortunately, that's not going to help them on Linux, since people who are leaving Windows are doing so for reasons which apply equally to Office and Office doesn't even run on Linux presently.
MS has also not decided that their OS is going to die; they've decided that their OS is complete (at least while they rethink the entire OS metaphor for Longhorn). They're betting on people sticking with Windows XP for the forseeable future, not ditching Windows entirely. If people switch to Linux, MS doesn't have software to sell them, which is a problem for more than the OS division.
If Linux takes over a significant portion of the corporate desktop, MS will have to port to Linux, change their stance on the GPL, and lose a lot of monopoly power.
Perl scripts? UNIX has been around for 17 years, and we've never needed any of...
But seriously, UNIX has always had databases; it's just that they are represented on disk with ascii text files, so that you can manipulate them with a variety of tools. Unifying the databases under a standard format and exporting them over the network via a standard protocol is very much in the UNIX spirit (although unfortunately not much in the UNIX implementation, traditionally). LDAP didn't start with MicroSoft (although MicroSoft did come up with a good schema for corporate services).
Of course, there hasn't really been a properly UNIX-philosophy UNIX solution which covers the complete range of corporate directory services, because it has been done instead first by people who didn't recognize the unity of corporate services, then by the commercial UNIXes who were trying to differentiate themselves by making mistakes, and now by people who draw too much on MicroSoft and not enough on the UNIX philosophy (ending up with something that is neither a well-known kludge nor an elegant solution).
The parts do exist, but nobody has gotten things to the point where you can put a hostname in ldapc.conf and then start mounting filesystems and printing to printers (at least, not that I've seen).
however, you are most definitely harming the artist/label by downloading the new album put out by your favorite band that you would buy if it were not for your ability to download said album.
Assuming that you don't then buy the album. Given the efficiency and speed of P2P, you may be able to download the music before you can buy the CD. You might also want MP3s of the songs to put in playlists, and it might be faster and easier to download them than rip them, even if you have the CD.
It hurts the artists if you don't go to their live shows.
It hurts the sound techs if you don't buy an album you like, regardless of whether you just listen to the radio, download the songs, play somebody else's copy of the CD, or even just live without the music. (It's the sound techs and production staff who do work on albums and get paid for it, as opposed to the artists who do work on the album and don't get paid for it, or the higher-ups who don't do work on the album (but may be responsible for you knowing about it) and get paid for it). If you enjoy a professional recording of a song more than a bootleg of a live show, the salaries of the people responsible come from the purchase of the CD.
Re:Let's make this a press release!
on
Back To SCO
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· Score: 4, Insightful
ESR and Perens can be considered, for the purposes of this particular statement, well-known, since they're referred to by name in SCO's press release.
I'd personally like to see ESR and Perens sue McBride personally, since the slanderous letter seems to be from him, rather than officially from SCO. Furthermore, McBride, unlike SCO, will probably not be bankrupt before a slander lawsuit could complete.
Sure, it's illegal, but does it cause monetary damages of any particular amount? If I pick your front door lock but don't do anything else, it doesn't cost you anything (unless I damage the lock or the door in the process). It may be illegal, but it's breaking and entering, not causing property damage. It doesn't seem like any of the charges are legitimately due to merely accessing the system illegally.
Perhaps he turned himself in when he found out that all of the charges against him were ones he could fight.
Agreed; I only wish the "opt-out" page let you specify that you don't want your $5, but that you also don't think that register.com did anything wrong. The implication of opting out seems to be that you're not agreeing to the settlement, not that you're not agreeing to the case in the first place.
If anything, I'd like to get a couple of extra days of service to replace the days before the DNS was pointed where I wanted it. Who cares what they do with a new domain between when you ask for it and when you actually control it? It's not like it makes any sense for anyone to look at such a URL during that period.
Perhaps I'll just start renewing early to make up for underpaying them in the next cycle. That is, take my $5 in extra service after I stop renewing my domain, which won't actually happen.
Note that that page is talking about highways (somewhat implicitly), and is only considering car crashes. Things get much more complicated when you have pedestrians, bicycles, etc., which are harder for drivers to judge safety around. There are also cases where the road is misleading, and people tend to drive faster than they ought.
It seems to me that MA does enforcement right; there's very little on highways, and more on local roads (this could, of course, be due to what police department need the income). There's been a lot of enforcement in the new Big Dig tunnels, but that's in response to a series of bad accidents which suggest that the tunnel confuses drivers about speed (not surprising, since it's a really confusing road in general).
I'd personally really like to see a system like the Autobahn has, where the speed limit is set in realtime to reflect the road conditions and to smooth out traffic. Or, as a start, a system which posted the speed 85% of the drivers have not been exceeding.
From the signature, it looks like this is a letter from Darl, rather than a letter from SCO. This could be the chance to stop this foolishness. Assuming that the point of this exercise is to get Darl (et al) money, and they're planning to suck as much out of the company and the stock market as possible and then leave the bankrupt company to deflect all the liability, it should be possible to stop them with lawsuits against the individual executives. This seems to be the first action taken by a SCO executive personally (as opposed to as a representative of SCO), and a great chance for ESR and Perens to sue someone who will have the money to cover legal bills at the end.
There's also the possibility that the people paying for the study also interact with the subjects; if MicroSoft is paying to have the costs of Windows development studied, they could easily reduce those costs in the sample group (or make sure to generate the subjects for the study to find).
You can trust studies paid for by people with agendas to show some things, but cost less so, since money is both the compensation and the measurement.
Oddly, when I read your comment, I scratched my temple. Perhaps smacking my forehead instead would have made more sense, but it didn't quite seem right after that particular correction. Maybe I just wanted to engage my Wernicke's area.
I don't have the actual references off the top of my head (and it's temporal lobe, as someone else pointed out), but the LSD experiment was Pahnke's "Good Friday experiment", which should be sufficient information to find the actual study and related ones. I'm not sure of the source for the epilepsy results, but I'd guess Oliver Sacks (and you can't really go wrong reading a bunch of Oliver Sacks, even if you don't find what you're looking for); it might be common clinical psychology knowledge these days, since it comes up reasonably frequently in such patients.
I can't remember if I had anything in mind in particular with respect to the fMRI; I may have just been guessing (or remembering someone who was guessing) that fMRI would work, given that there's a particular epileptic syndrome associated with it.
This ruling doesn't really bear on whether clicking "Yes" on a EULA necessarily means that you really agree. It just means that U-Haul can't say you don't. If some users sued WhenU over this behaviour, the result might be very different. WhenU hasn't hacked U-Haul's site, but they could still be judges to have hacked the user's machine.
If the growth of technology is exponential (i.e., our rate of technological advance is proportional to our level of technology), humanity passes through an age where it takes more than a generation to advance significantly, through an age where technology advances each generation, to an age where technology advances constantly. Only in the middle of these ages does thinking about the future make sense. Before, you think about what could change in the present, because you won't live to see the future. After, you think about what you can change, because when you have thought of it, the future is here.
In fifty years, people won't make predictions about the next fifty years, because anything they predict will either be a bad idea and therefore never done, or will be a good idea, and done in less than fifty years.
This means that the equivalent of SF in the future is very different from the SF of the 20th century. I expect it will be largely counterfactual (like Babel-17; stories based on a discreditted scientific theory which ask what it would be like if it were true) or shade quickly into fiction, where anything they mention that's not an obvious fantasy is available as a tie-in product.
As for space, there's less to it than SF authors once thought. For that matter, some SF authors realized this. If you look critically at Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, you'll see an insightful work of SF set on Mars. But there's nothing important in the series actually about Mars or space. It is a story about scientists working in isolation from the rest of humanity, about social structures which could be created, about foreseeable technologies, about the range of human nature, about teasing apart different potential goals of environmentalism, about possible polical structures, and about change overtaking the ability of humans to guide it. Oh, and there's a little bit about Mars. Someday, we'll go to Mars, to the rest of the solar system, to other stars. And we'll find that it's largely more of the same; we might as well have gone to New Mexico or Antarctica.
The only frontier which we will never domesticate is human social interaction, which will forever remain untame due to being disrupted by the very research which seeks to tame it. This frontier can be explored in the isolation of space (or New Mexico), or in New York City, or even in the countryside, wastelands, and battlefields of New Zealand.
Perhaps, but they're not going to get anything passed which conflicts with their own use of copyrighted material (e.g., song lyrics, which at least one record company has been found liable over). They're not so stupid that they'd actually push through something that could be applied to either the record companies or to other businesses they own.
The whole "religious experience" thing is kind of interesting. There is a particular system in the brain responsible for it that can be seen with fMRI. It normally responds to a very personal set of stimuli, if anything. On the other hand, there are things that tend to trigger it, including frontal lobe epilepsy and LSD. It wouldn't be too surprising if low frequency sound did, as well.
Of course, not all religious experiences are due to any of the automatic factors, but they could help significantly with getting a whole group of people to have religious feelings together. (There has, in fact, been a study of this using LSD, and it worked well). There's actually a lot of fascinating research on the subject, with very interesting philosophical implications.
I prefer vendors who use GPL code and release the source when prompted. Whether they're doing it out of an understanding of the advantages or not, products with source available are just more useful (as this story demonstrates).
If everyone released source happily, the GPL wouldn't be necessary in the first place. The point of the GPL is, in fact, to compel unwilling participants who recognize the value of the available GPL code to participate in Free Software. The instances where the difference between the GPL and the BSD license matter are the ones where it is necessary (and, due to the GPL, possible) to prod a vendor into releasing source. Fortunately, it's not all that hard to catch a vendor red handed. (c.f., "security by obscurity is fine, but things you sell to the public are not obscure")
Of course, I've found LinkSys hardware unreliable in the past, so I'm not that excited about them.
Not quite true; with a challenge/response system instead of a fixed password, malware may take advantage of the authentication you performed through it, but does not get information which could be used to reproduce the authentication later.
Using a device with computation power and storage can increase the security, because it can perform computations which a person either couldn't perform or couldn't remember the information for. Of course, a human could use a challenge/response system (challenge: page, paragraph, line, word; response: the word at that position from a book the two ends both have; used to be popular), and a device could use a password, in which case the device would be weaker against malware.
The thing that makes the RIAA and Microsoft troubling and SCO not troubling is that there is no legal basis for SCO's claims and SCO has insufficient funds to create one. SCO doesn't have the revenue to survive long enough to bring a case to trial, and they don't have any foreseeable future income, having stopped selling products and lacking a process for receiving licensing fees. There's really nothing to SCO except PR (legal means? They're almost certain to lose all of their suits against others and the suits by others against them. They're not even writing threatening letters).
SCO is merely a distraction from the real issues. SCO isn't respected in the business community, and certainly not in comparison to IBM. The only thing to SCO is stock manipulation.
I somewhat doubt that anything like this, if it would apply to AIM, would have any chance of passing, because AOL/Time/Warner has a bit of influence. Actually, I'd be quite happy if the RIAA did something to really piss off the media. "Buying CDs Funds Attacks on America" would make a great Time cover story...
What are the requirements for the environment that can be used to access this? A wireless network which will assign it an address on which it can receive connections (that is, it doesn't need to be on the inside of any firewalls protecting the PCs from devices on the wireless net), and a computer with a web browser. The install base is, in fact, well off the ground.
PCs which will support a given non-server device from your list are somewhat rarer, if only because there are a bunch of different types of those devices. The personal server idea is clever because it only needs what modern PCs and networks already support for other reasons.
Microsoft is, in fact, right that this isn't fair. But I don't recall Japan, China, and Korea particularly being interested in a free market economy. Trying to compete as a foriegn corporation in a moderated market with some national governments is not, in fact, going to be fair. But neither is there any reason it should be. The idea that fair competition in the market will give the best results is not universal; nor is it right, particularly when competitors aren't arising.
Re:Building them like they used to
on
Goodbye, Galileo
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· Score: 4, Informative
Cheaper or more expensive comes down to the funding NASA gets. NASA spends the money it gets allocated. Half of "cheaper = better" is making the most of the stuff that's been built; Galileo is a prime example of this. What makes it such a great achievement is that NASA kept getting more information out of it, rather than building another expensive probe to send out there. As for reliability of new stuff, NASA recently debugged a system deadlock on Mars from Earth.
Of course, recent NASA projects haven't been particularly ambitious, because of a lack of sufficient funding for that. However, with a replacement for the shuttle fleet on Congress's minds, and shows of interest in space from Russia and especially China, NASA will hopefully get more funding to do interesting stuff (and to develop the necessary technologies, which are the really interesting results).
I think that the power grid is actually a plausible terrorist target. It's pretty clear that Al Queda (or others) won't try a blowing-stuff-up attack on American soil any time soon. Not because it would be difficult, but because they tried it and the response was not at all something they wanted (more US troops in the middle east, cutting off their funding, overthrowing the puppet government, etc). On the other hand, a massive blackout makes the US worry about its infrastructure, increases demand for oil, and hurts the US economy. It doesn't make the US angry; it makes the US worry. And that's the point of terrorism.
Er, actually, the government will step in and ensure changes are made after we have a massive blackout. And, for my next trick, I'd predict yesterday's stock market...
There are recordings from the control rooms where the technicians were saying they had no clue what was going on with the grid around them, because their computers were messed up. The control systems weren't affected by the network problems, but the systems provided the necessary information to the operators about what was going on weren't telling them anything. Obviously, the operators aren't going to do very well totally blind, and they ended up overloading some things.
The system was probably designed by someone who thought the system collecting and displaying information wasn't vital, because it didn't interact directly with any control systems, missing the problem that it is connected to the control systems through some very confused technicians.
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Right, their current money-maker is Office. Unfortunately, that's not going to help them on Linux, since people who are leaving Windows are doing so for reasons which apply equally to Office and Office doesn't even run on Linux presently.
MS has also not decided that their OS is going to die; they've decided that their OS is complete (at least while they rethink the entire OS metaphor for Longhorn). They're betting on people sticking with Windows XP for the forseeable future, not ditching Windows entirely. If people switch to Linux, MS doesn't have software to sell them, which is a problem for more than the OS division.
If Linux takes over a significant portion of the corporate desktop, MS will have to port to Linux, change their stance on the GPL, and lose a lot of monopoly power.
Perl scripts? UNIX has been around for 17 years, and we've never needed any of...
But seriously, UNIX has always had databases; it's just that they are represented on disk with ascii text files, so that you can manipulate them with a variety of tools. Unifying the databases under a standard format and exporting them over the network via a standard protocol is very much in the UNIX spirit (although unfortunately not much in the UNIX implementation, traditionally). LDAP didn't start with MicroSoft (although MicroSoft did come up with a good schema for corporate services).
Of course, there hasn't really been a properly UNIX-philosophy UNIX solution which covers the complete range of corporate directory services, because it has been done instead first by people who didn't recognize the unity of corporate services, then by the commercial UNIXes who were trying to differentiate themselves by making mistakes, and now by people who draw too much on MicroSoft and not enough on the UNIX philosophy (ending up with something that is neither a well-known kludge nor an elegant solution).
The parts do exist, but nobody has gotten things to the point where you can put a hostname in ldapc.conf and then start mounting filesystems and printing to printers (at least, not that I've seen).
however, you are most definitely harming the artist/label by downloading the new album put out by your favorite band that you would buy if it were not for your ability to download said album.
Assuming that you don't then buy the album. Given the efficiency and speed of P2P, you may be able to download the music before you can buy the CD. You might also want MP3s of the songs to put in playlists, and it might be faster and easier to download them than rip them, even if you have the CD.
It hurts the artists if you don't go to their live shows.
It hurts the sound techs if you don't buy an album you like, regardless of whether you just listen to the radio, download the songs, play somebody else's copy of the CD, or even just live without the music. (It's the sound techs and production staff who do work on albums and get paid for it, as opposed to the artists who do work on the album and don't get paid for it, or the higher-ups who don't do work on the album (but may be responsible for you knowing about it) and get paid for it). If you enjoy a professional recording of a song more than a bootleg of a live show, the salaries of the people responsible come from the purchase of the CD.
ESR and Perens can be considered, for the purposes of this particular statement, well-known, since they're referred to by name in SCO's press release.
I'd personally like to see ESR and Perens sue McBride personally, since the slanderous letter seems to be from him, rather than officially from SCO. Furthermore, McBride, unlike SCO, will probably not be bankrupt before a slander lawsuit could complete.
Sure, it's illegal, but does it cause monetary damages of any particular amount? If I pick your front door lock but don't do anything else, it doesn't cost you anything (unless I damage the lock or the door in the process). It may be illegal, but it's breaking and entering, not causing property damage. It doesn't seem like any of the charges are legitimately due to merely accessing the system illegally.
Perhaps he turned himself in when he found out that all of the charges against him were ones he could fight.
Agreed; I only wish the "opt-out" page let you specify that you don't want your $5, but that you also don't think that register.com did anything wrong. The implication of opting out seems to be that you're not agreeing to the settlement, not that you're not agreeing to the case in the first place.
If anything, I'd like to get a couple of extra days of service to replace the days before the DNS was pointed where I wanted it. Who cares what they do with a new domain between when you ask for it and when you actually control it? It's not like it makes any sense for anyone to look at such a URL during that period.
Perhaps I'll just start renewing early to make up for underpaying them in the next cycle. That is, take my $5 in extra service after I stop renewing my domain, which won't actually happen.
Note that that page is talking about highways (somewhat implicitly), and is only considering car crashes. Things get much more complicated when you have pedestrians, bicycles, etc., which are harder for drivers to judge safety around. There are also cases where the road is misleading, and people tend to drive faster than they ought.
It seems to me that MA does enforcement right; there's very little on highways, and more on local roads (this could, of course, be due to what police department need the income). There's been a lot of enforcement in the new Big Dig tunnels, but that's in response to a series of bad accidents which suggest that the tunnel confuses drivers about speed (not surprising, since it's a really confusing road in general).
I'd personally really like to see a system like the Autobahn has, where the speed limit is set in realtime to reflect the road conditions and to smooth out traffic. Or, as a start, a system which posted the speed 85% of the drivers have not been exceeding.
From the signature, it looks like this is a letter from Darl, rather than a letter from SCO. This could be the chance to stop this foolishness. Assuming that the point of this exercise is to get Darl (et al) money, and they're planning to suck as much out of the company and the stock market as possible and then leave the bankrupt company to deflect all the liability, it should be possible to stop them with lawsuits against the individual executives. This seems to be the first action taken by a SCO executive personally (as opposed to as a representative of SCO), and a great chance for ESR and Perens to sue someone who will have the money to cover legal bills at the end.
There's also the possibility that the people paying for the study also interact with the subjects; if MicroSoft is paying to have the costs of Windows development studied, they could easily reduce those costs in the sample group (or make sure to generate the subjects for the study to find).
You can trust studies paid for by people with agendas to show some things, but cost less so, since money is both the compensation and the measurement.
Ah, of course.
Oddly, when I read your comment, I scratched my temple. Perhaps smacking my forehead instead would have made more sense, but it didn't quite seem right after that particular correction. Maybe I just wanted to engage my Wernicke's area.
I don't have the actual references off the top of my head (and it's temporal lobe, as someone else pointed out), but the LSD experiment was Pahnke's "Good Friday experiment", which should be sufficient information to find the actual study and related ones. I'm not sure of the source for the epilepsy results, but I'd guess Oliver Sacks (and you can't really go wrong reading a bunch of Oliver Sacks, even if you don't find what you're looking for); it might be common clinical psychology knowledge these days, since it comes up reasonably frequently in such patients.
I can't remember if I had anything in mind in particular with respect to the fMRI; I may have just been guessing (or remembering someone who was guessing) that fMRI would work, given that there's a particular epileptic syndrome associated with it.
This ruling doesn't really bear on whether clicking "Yes" on a EULA necessarily means that you really agree. It just means that U-Haul can't say you don't. If some users sued WhenU over this behaviour, the result might be very different. WhenU hasn't hacked U-Haul's site, but they could still be judges to have hacked the user's machine.
If the growth of technology is exponential (i.e., our rate of technological advance is proportional to our level of technology), humanity passes through an age where it takes more than a generation to advance significantly, through an age where technology advances each generation, to an age where technology advances constantly. Only in the middle of these ages does thinking about the future make sense. Before, you think about what could change in the present, because you won't live to see the future. After, you think about what you can change, because when you have thought of it, the future is here.
In fifty years, people won't make predictions about the next fifty years, because anything they predict will either be a bad idea and therefore never done, or will be a good idea, and done in less than fifty years.
This means that the equivalent of SF in the future is very different from the SF of the 20th century. I expect it will be largely counterfactual (like Babel-17; stories based on a discreditted scientific theory which ask what it would be like if it were true) or shade quickly into fiction, where anything they mention that's not an obvious fantasy is available as a tie-in product.
As for space, there's less to it than SF authors once thought. For that matter, some SF authors realized this. If you look critically at Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, you'll see an insightful work of SF set on Mars. But there's nothing important in the series actually about Mars or space. It is a story about scientists working in isolation from the rest of humanity, about social structures which could be created, about foreseeable technologies, about the range of human nature, about teasing apart different potential goals of environmentalism, about possible polical structures, and about change overtaking the ability of humans to guide it. Oh, and there's a little bit about Mars. Someday, we'll go to Mars, to the rest of the solar system, to other stars. And we'll find that it's largely more of the same; we might as well have gone to New Mexico or Antarctica.
The only frontier which we will never domesticate is human social interaction, which will forever remain untame due to being disrupted by the very research which seeks to tame it. This frontier can be explored in the isolation of space (or New Mexico), or in New York City, or even in the countryside, wastelands, and battlefields of New Zealand.
Perhaps, but they're not going to get anything passed which conflicts with their own use of copyrighted material (e.g., song lyrics, which at least one record company has been found liable over). They're not so stupid that they'd actually push through something that could be applied to either the record companies or to other businesses they own.
The whole "religious experience" thing is kind of interesting. There is a particular system in the brain responsible for it that can be seen with fMRI. It normally responds to a very personal set of stimuli, if anything. On the other hand, there are things that tend to trigger it, including frontal lobe epilepsy and LSD. It wouldn't be too surprising if low frequency sound did, as well.
Of course, not all religious experiences are due to any of the automatic factors, but they could help significantly with getting a whole group of people to have religious feelings together. (There has, in fact, been a study of this using LSD, and it worked well). There's actually a lot of fascinating research on the subject, with very interesting philosophical implications.
I prefer vendors who use GPL code and release the source when prompted. Whether they're doing it out of an understanding of the advantages or not, products with source available are just more useful (as this story demonstrates).
If everyone released source happily, the GPL wouldn't be necessary in the first place. The point of the GPL is, in fact, to compel unwilling participants who recognize the value of the available GPL code to participate in Free Software. The instances where the difference between the GPL and the BSD license matter are the ones where it is necessary (and, due to the GPL, possible) to prod a vendor into releasing source. Fortunately, it's not all that hard to catch a vendor red handed. (c.f., "security by obscurity is fine, but things you sell to the public are not obscure")
Of course, I've found LinkSys hardware unreliable in the past, so I'm not that excited about them.
Not quite true; with a challenge/response system instead of a fixed password, malware may take advantage of the authentication you performed through it, but does not get information which could be used to reproduce the authentication later.
Using a device with computation power and storage can increase the security, because it can perform computations which a person either couldn't perform or couldn't remember the information for. Of course, a human could use a challenge/response system (challenge: page, paragraph, line, word; response: the word at that position from a book the two ends both have; used to be popular), and a device could use a password, in which case the device would be weaker against malware.
The thing that makes the RIAA and Microsoft troubling and SCO not troubling is that there is no legal basis for SCO's claims and SCO has insufficient funds to create one. SCO doesn't have the revenue to survive long enough to bring a case to trial, and they don't have any foreseeable future income, having stopped selling products and lacking a process for receiving licensing fees. There's really nothing to SCO except PR (legal means? They're almost certain to lose all of their suits against others and the suits by others against them. They're not even writing threatening letters).
SCO is merely a distraction from the real issues. SCO isn't respected in the business community, and certainly not in comparison to IBM. The only thing to SCO is stock manipulation.
I somewhat doubt that anything like this, if it would apply to AIM, would have any chance of passing, because AOL/Time/Warner has a bit of influence. Actually, I'd be quite happy if the RIAA did something to really piss off the media. "Buying CDs Funds Attacks on America" would make a great Time cover story...
What are the requirements for the environment that can be used to access this? A wireless network which will assign it an address on which it can receive connections (that is, it doesn't need to be on the inside of any firewalls protecting the PCs from devices on the wireless net), and a computer with a web browser. The install base is, in fact, well off the ground.
PCs which will support a given non-server device from your list are somewhat rarer, if only because there are a bunch of different types of those devices. The personal server idea is clever because it only needs what modern PCs and networks already support for other reasons.
Microsoft is, in fact, right that this isn't fair. But I don't recall Japan, China, and Korea particularly being interested in a free market economy. Trying to compete as a foriegn corporation in a moderated market with some national governments is not, in fact, going to be fair. But neither is there any reason it should be. The idea that fair competition in the market will give the best results is not universal; nor is it right, particularly when competitors aren't arising.
Cheaper or more expensive comes down to the funding NASA gets. NASA spends the money it gets allocated. Half of "cheaper = better" is making the most of the stuff that's been built; Galileo is a prime example of this. What makes it such a great achievement is that NASA kept getting more information out of it, rather than building another expensive probe to send out there. As for reliability of new stuff, NASA recently debugged a system deadlock on Mars from Earth.
Of course, recent NASA projects haven't been particularly ambitious, because of a lack of sufficient funding for that. However, with a replacement for the shuttle fleet on Congress's minds, and shows of interest in space from Russia and especially China, NASA will hopefully get more funding to do interesting stuff (and to develop the necessary technologies, which are the really interesting results).
I think that the power grid is actually a plausible terrorist target. It's pretty clear that Al Queda (or others) won't try a blowing-stuff-up attack on American soil any time soon. Not because it would be difficult, but because they tried it and the response was not at all something they wanted (more US troops in the middle east, cutting off their funding, overthrowing the puppet government, etc). On the other hand, a massive blackout makes the US worry about its infrastructure, increases demand for oil, and hurts the US economy. It doesn't make the US angry; it makes the US worry. And that's the point of terrorism.
Er, actually, the government will step in and ensure changes are made after we have a massive blackout. And, for my next trick, I'd predict yesterday's stock market...
There are recordings from the control rooms where the technicians were saying they had no clue what was going on with the grid around them, because their computers were messed up. The control systems weren't affected by the network problems, but the systems provided the necessary information to the operators about what was going on weren't telling them anything. Obviously, the operators aren't going to do very well totally blind, and they ended up overloading some things.
The system was probably designed by someone who thought the system collecting and displaying information wasn't vital, because it didn't interact directly with any control systems, missing the problem that it is connected to the control systems through some very confused technicians.