You're quite correct about the gas-price issue, tho the flow of population migration is still overwhelmingly toward metro areas -- because that's where the big money is. Of course, the city is also where the cost of living is high, and you'll probably have to commute to work 50 miles each way (if you're lucky -- there are people around L.A. who drive over 200 miles a day, because that's how far away they were from work before they found housing they could afford).
At the end of the day, what counts is your net income, and how far it goes beyond the bare necessities. If you make $40/hr but had to work an hour just to cover your commute costs, and 6 more hours to cover that day's mortgage, taxes, and insurance, you've only got one hour worth of real income. If you make $10/hr but walked to work, and it only takes 4 hours of work to cover your cost of living, you've got 4 hours worth of real income. Yeah, it's still the same $40 at the end of the day, but that $40 buys a whole lot more in a small town than it will in the big city.
The problem comes with "disposable-income purchases" that have a fairly high cost to produce no matter where you make them -- you won't sell them in rural America, unless you're willing to take a loss. There's little demand and you can't make a living at it. In terms Slashdotters can grok, you ain't gonna sell your services as a middleware programmer to a shopkeeper in Sand Hills, Nebraska, because he has no need for your product at ANY price. So either you find a way to telecommute, or you live in the city. This issue became more prevalent as we turned from a nation of farmers, basics, and small businesses, into a nation of CEOs, specialists, and gadgets (bringing with it a "need" for heavy-handed regulations).
The number of people going the other way (toward rural areas) is relatively minimal, and only looks as large as it does because the total population is increasing (note the runaway urban sprawl around major metro areas). But farm towns are still dying all over the midwest. And as I griped in some other post, one big problem is that as these city folk move to the country, especially in areas outlying from major metros, they bring their city ways with them, ultimately destroying the rural lifestyle they supposedly want to get back to. I've seen this over and over, everywhere that people move out to the country in clumps.
Anyway, the root point remains -- someone who hasn't actually lived in a true rural environment (not just urban-to-rural sprawl like we have in SoCal) has no idea what they're talking about -- or what they're missing.
I grew up in rural America, but in 1984 [!] moved to SoCal for business reasons. In 2001 I got a place out in the desert, miles from anything, and for a couple years it was stars and crickets again, like I hadn't seen or heard in years.
Now development is coming my way, the stars are no longer visible, and the rural midwest is starting to sound pretty good, even tho it means I'll have to give up my primary business (no market).
So I know exactly what you're talking about... but I've met city folk who find the dark and the quiet too frightening. (Hey, then stay in the bright and noisy city, and stop moving out to the country in hordes, ruining it for rural folk!)
Heh, I know where that is, tho I've never been there.
Not too different from where I used to live (Belgrade, MT) tho since then the yuppies have invaded and taken over, and it's no longer a small town environment.
In my observation, the turning point that signifies runaway growth is when a mall comes in. It changes attitudes, and the old downtown dies and the sense of community with it.
I know it's worse in some areas, such as the old south, but the poverty level in midwestern rural and smalltown America is not starved and shoeless, either, nor is there so much contrast between poor and middle-class. And there typically is not a welfare class.
As to the parent poster's comment about food and culture -- it's not that it's lacking, rather than you don't get so much of it that comes from outside mainstream American heritage. In fact, quite the reverse applies to American-style food -- what you can get in rural America is of much better quality and variety than what's seen in metro areas. But yeah, there won't be restaurants dedicated to Thai and Greek and Korean food, nor will there be an opera house (tho you do get stuff like Shakespeare in the Parks).
1) Comparatively speaking crime is lower. However the town I lived did have quite a bit more crime then you might expect. Murder, drugs, sexual misconduct, vandalism.
2) More than you'd expect, but less than an urban setting. I guess whether that works for you or not is subjective.
Crime is everywhere. The real difference is that in a small town or rural area, everyone knows who has a nasty temper or is lightfingered or whatever. You don't have to worry much about being robbed or killed by random strangers, because, well, there aren't that many of 'em, and you get to know who is trouble on the hoof.
Not only that, but people are more likely to solve their own problems rather than running to the law. And if you do wind up having to defend yourself, the attitude is likely to be "yep, it's about time Joe Trouble got hisself shot," not the big city's "do you have a gun permit? And here's your wrongful-death suit."
And yes, I've lived in both environments, so I do know of what I speak.
[blink] Interesting. United is a dreadful airline for anything to do with on-time. Frex, back when for any other airline you just showed up at the airport and shipped your freight, United required freight reservations two days in advance, and then they'd never get back to you with your cargo number; you had to go chase THEM down, and half the time it never did get finished. Their service for live freight was so bad that one of the watchdog agencies made a whole new category of rotten, just for United.
Anyway, I'm led to wonder if United imposing their will might be part of Chicago's problems -- horrible airport to go thru if you're shipping live freight, cuz everything takes forever and even with a four hour transfer window, there's still some chance you'll miss your flight -- at least if it was with United!!
I've been thru there a few times (when I lived in Montana, I used to do the eastern Wash. dog show circuit, so I'm passing-familiar with the whole area). I'm considering relocation out of SoCal, and the swath between Moses Lake and Yakima is one of my potential targets, for exactly those reasons.
The main reason it beats out North Dakota (where I lived as a kid) is because winters are less extreme, and there are fewer twin-engine mosquitoes in summer.:)
Um... Federal Express? millions of packages in every weird shape, and most of 'em manage to survive the sorting warehouse and get to their correct loading dock. What would be wrong with an airport using an effectively identical system?? after all, it's the same general type of operation -- packages/baggage comes in from all over, gets sorted, and sent somewhere else.
I don't know about any conspiracy theories; what I do know is that the Denver Airport, in all its several manifestations, has been one giant fuckup from my first acquaintance with it back in 1968.
I don't recall the order or details of the various fuckups, but as I vaguely recall some general problems:
The old airport was just plain old, neglected, and overloaded. Baggage and passenger areas were a day's hike apart, with no delivery system at all.
So they built a new airport. Years over schedule, it finally... never opened. I don't remember why.
So they built another one, and somehow managed to put it where it maximized the problems with planes icing up in bad weather. Anyone familiar with the local climate patterns could have told them this would happen (and probably did so), but they put it there anyway.
[I might have those two events out of chron order, but you get the idea.]
Last I heard, they were going to build yet another airport. I have no idea if it ever happened or not.
But from having many times shipped animals by air cargo, where you have to be aware of timing tolerances among connecting flights -- I can tell you that a change of planes takes 20 minutes in Salt Lake City or Minneapolis, but 2 or more hours in Denver, and it's always been that way. Yeah, Denver is a regional hub, but so is Minneapolis, so that's no excuse.
(Google: "Results 1 - 10 of about 2,220,000 for Denver International Airport".... methinks the conspiracy is to share the slashdotting;)
The problem with DUN being overwritten by AOL's version happened mainly with AOL v5.x, and some of the forced updates to same that evidently had compatibility issues. It was even more fun when they'd forcefeed a v5 update to a machine running v3 or 4 (it didn't always check whether it was on Win3.1x or Win32, either), and the whole bloody AOL app would stop working. That happened to one of my clients, who went ballistic to the Sales phone number and got his account cancelled RIGHT NOW. See, there's the trick (and it works with a lot of companies): don't call Support with any complaints; call Sales instead.
Otherwise, I've not seen it be a problem that way, and I've uninstalled AOL from a lot of random machines. The uninstaller doesn't even leave much registry crap (sometimes none at all).
As to their other stuff -- when AOL's coders had their way, they produced some nifty tools, such as their modem/system-diagnostic utilities. You can find the current version on most AOL CDs, I think under \TOOLS. And I've always liked AIM; it works well and doesn't eat much.
As I read your post, I found myself making this translation:
Today companies don't give a crap about anybody's rights, because the people who are running them today don't care about anything but power and control. And they can get away with it, too, because they control all the money of any consequence (the pathetic businesses the customers are allowed to have are no match for the real money controlled by the CEO).
Apparently the real message is that our gov't is no longer run by public servants (in the pure sense of the term), but rather by... managers: People who have no experience in building a country/company, and therefore only see it as a means to whatever end pleases/enriches themselves.
It's symptomatic of an era in which no one now living remembers how anything was built from scratch, including a truly free country.
An AC too far under to ever be seen says with some insight, "The shareholders are the company. They collectively own the company. The best interest of the shareholders is the best interest of the company and vice versa because the entire purpose of any company is to serve the shareholders. The problem comes when the shareholders are interested in selling the stock at a higher price rather than investing in a company that serves a purpose."
It'd be more accurate to say that shareholders are people that the company is effectively mortgaged to. If their interests are paramount, well, that's like making an addition on your house *as cheaply as possible* solely to make the bank happy, rather than for the purpose of increasing your house's utility over the long haul. If the addition falls down two days later, oh well!!
There is no rule that a company HAS to be publicly held, nor do companies start out that way. And if the sole purpose of a company is to serve the shareholders -- well, where does that leave the company's customers? I'll tell you: roofless, after the cheaply-made addition falls down.
Likewise, I had to wonder about the people here who don't consider Chairman Mao a psychopath. I guess it doesn't count when you merely expunged everyone in your society who doesn't fit your Cultural Revolution's vision of the future.
"In the business world, it's even fuzzier, because it's harder to differentiate between someone who lays off 1000 people because they're mean from someone who lays them off so the company can stay profitable and keep jobs for everyone else."
Nah, that's easy. Just listen for the words "stock price" or "shareholder". If those are their first concerns, they are NOT interested in the welfare of the company itself, its employees, or its customers.
Don't recall what the study you mention concluded, but personally I've observed a very high coincidence of genius with some degree of paranoid schizophrenia.
Right on, brother. And the reason humans aren't 'natural' is that we were brought here by aliens. Or aliens crash-landed and humans are their descendants. For that matter, maybe all the other surviving species came on the same interstellar ark. I say kill 'em all off and bring back the age of dinosaurs!
No, wait, didn't those come on the previous ark? Crap, looks like we gotta go all the way back to the primordial soup, cuz everything else is unnatural.
Side note: If I were running the library, I'd consider switching to a browser that keeps no personal data (cache, cookies, history) in the first place.
The "Off-by-One" browser http://www.offbyone.com/ keeps no on-disk cache, and perhaps the author could be motivated to make the rest transient too.
I had the same thought -- that library computers should automagically purge all user data whenever a session is closed (and there should probably be a shortcut so the user can manually purge their own data, if they feel the need). If the browser can't do it, then there are surely utilities that can be scripted to accomplish it.
My other thought was that if this is how it is with library-based internet access, perhaps the solution is to simply remove all such access, as being a hazard to the library *patrons* -- since it is now expected that librarians will control your behaviour, and tattle on you when you "misbehave".
It sounds so noble when it only applies to kiddie porn and a convicted sex offender, but what about when it's someone researching the constitutional rights that are being eroded by this sort of shit?
Or just take a light plane up and, from a suitably innocuous distance, view the place with a telescope. (For bonus points, use a hot air balloon and arrange to be "blown off course.") It's not like there's a charm of +18 Invisible hanging over the site!!
The other day I happened across a "math teaching game". It quickly became apparent to me that what is taught by the game is "how to make the game provide the desired response" rather than anything about math.
It occurs to me that feedback gadgetry falls into the same barrel: the object is not to provide feedback, but to learn how to effectively operate the feedback device.
You also make good points that if these devices are personalized, or used for graded responses, there is grave potential for abuse -- whether they're secure or not.
I use Corel Photopaint every day. I have Photoshop, PSP, etc. but they don't get used unless I need a specific feature that Photopaint lacks (and most Photoshop filters work with Photopaint). Photopaint is way easier to use, and much faster on the same hardware. (Tho I much prefer v8.0 to later versions, which are starting to pick up some of Photoshop's user-hostile traits.)
Insurance companies don't make such decisions on a whim, either. They make them based on the bottom line for various risk factors, which in turn are derived from actual events -- not merely accidents caused by intoxication, but also the likelihood of lawsuits generated by said accidents.
If your insurance company gives you better rates when you drug-test employees, it's because they've learned that they are less likely to have to *pay a claim* when there are no drug users in the workplace.
Insurance companies truly don't give a shit about drug use one way or the other; they care about their own profit margin, which goes to hell when they have to pay too many claims.
Like you said -- it boils down to cost/benefit analysis.
On looking at the poll questions, it occurred to me that it *could* instead have been Red Hat's poll, as an attempt to learn how their customers would take an admission of "ooops, patent nonsense". The tone of the questions sounds too defensive for M$, even tho exploring such issues thru a poll does sound more like the sort of thing they'd do.
Note: I've also taken some IT polls that were clearly sponsored by M$, and they were much more neutral in tone. (Ditto polls obviously sponsored by AOL.)
Slashdot Mirror
You're quite correct about the gas-price issue, tho the flow of population migration is still overwhelmingly toward metro areas -- because that's where the big money is. Of course, the city is also where the cost of living is high, and you'll probably have to commute to work 50 miles each way (if you're lucky -- there are people around L.A. who drive over 200 miles a day, because that's how far away they were from work before they found housing they could afford).
At the end of the day, what counts is your net income, and how far it goes beyond the bare necessities. If you make $40/hr but had to work an hour just to cover your commute costs, and 6 more hours to cover that day's mortgage, taxes, and insurance, you've only got one hour worth of real income. If you make $10/hr but walked to work, and it only takes 4 hours of work to cover your cost of living, you've got 4 hours worth of real income. Yeah, it's still the same $40 at the end of the day, but that $40 buys a whole lot more in a small town than it will in the big city.
The problem comes with "disposable-income purchases" that have a fairly high cost to produce no matter where you make them -- you won't sell them in rural America, unless you're willing to take a loss. There's little demand and you can't make a living at it. In terms Slashdotters can grok, you ain't gonna sell your services as a middleware programmer to a shopkeeper in Sand Hills, Nebraska, because he has no need for your product at ANY price. So either you find a way to telecommute, or you live in the city. This issue became more prevalent as we turned from a nation of farmers, basics, and small businesses, into a nation of CEOs, specialists, and gadgets (bringing with it a "need" for heavy-handed regulations).
The number of people going the other way (toward rural areas) is relatively minimal, and only looks as large as it does because the total population is increasing (note the runaway urban sprawl around major metro areas). But farm towns are still dying all over the midwest. And as I griped in some other post, one big problem is that as these city folk move to the country, especially in areas outlying from major metros, they bring their city ways with them, ultimately destroying the rural lifestyle they supposedly want to get back to. I've seen this over and over, everywhere that people move out to the country in clumps.
Anyway, the root point remains -- someone who hasn't actually lived in a true rural environment (not just urban-to-rural sprawl like we have in SoCal) has no idea what they're talking about -- or what they're missing.
I grew up in rural America, but in 1984 [!] moved to SoCal for business reasons. In 2001 I got a place out in the desert, miles from anything, and for a couple years it was stars and crickets again, like I hadn't seen or heard in years.
Now development is coming my way, the stars are no longer visible, and the rural midwest is starting to sound pretty good, even tho it means I'll have to give up my primary business (no market).
So I know exactly what you're talking about... but I've met city folk who find the dark and the quiet too frightening. (Hey, then stay in the bright and noisy city, and stop moving out to the country in hordes, ruining it for rural folk!)
Heh, I know where that is, tho I've never been there.
Not too different from where I used to live (Belgrade, MT) tho since then the yuppies have invaded and taken over, and it's no longer a small town environment.
In my observation, the turning point that signifies runaway growth is when a mall comes in. It changes attitudes, and the old downtown dies and the sense of community with it.
Just curious, where are you, exactly?
...you're right!! :)
(I already ranted somewhere above, about how
I know it's worse in some areas, such as the old south, but the poverty level in midwestern rural and smalltown America is not starved and shoeless, either, nor is there so much contrast between poor and middle-class. And there typically is not a welfare class.
As to the parent poster's comment about food and culture -- it's not that it's lacking, rather than you don't get so much of it that comes from outside mainstream American heritage. In fact, quite the reverse applies to American-style food -- what you can get in rural America is of much better quality and variety than what's seen in metro areas. But yeah, there won't be restaurants dedicated to Thai and Greek and Korean food, nor will there be an opera house (tho you do get stuff like Shakespeare in the Parks).
Two folks argue,
1) Comparatively speaking crime is lower. However the town I lived did have quite a bit more crime then you might expect. Murder, drugs, sexual misconduct, vandalism.
2) More than you'd expect, but less than an urban setting. I guess whether that works for you or not is subjective.
Crime is everywhere. The real difference is that in a small town or rural area, everyone knows who has a nasty temper or is lightfingered or whatever. You don't have to worry much about being robbed or killed by random strangers, because, well, there aren't that many of 'em, and you get to know who is trouble on the hoof.
Not only that, but people are more likely to solve their own problems rather than running to the law. And if you do wind up having to defend yourself, the attitude is likely to be "yep, it's about time Joe Trouble got hisself shot," not the big city's "do you have a gun permit? And here's your wrongful-death suit."
And yes, I've lived in both environments, so I do know of what I speak.
[blink] Interesting. United is a dreadful airline for anything to do with on-time. Frex, back when for any other airline you just showed up at the airport and shipped your freight, United required freight reservations two days in advance, and then they'd never get back to you with your cargo number; you had to go chase THEM down, and half the time it never did get finished. Their service for live freight was so bad that one of the watchdog agencies made a whole new category of rotten, just for United.
Anyway, I'm led to wonder if United imposing their will might be part of Chicago's problems -- horrible airport to go thru if you're shipping live freight, cuz everything takes forever and even with a four hour transfer window, there's still some chance you'll miss your flight -- at least if it was with United!!
I've been thru there a few times (when I lived in Montana, I used to do the eastern Wash. dog show circuit, so I'm passing-familiar with the whole area). I'm considering relocation out of SoCal, and the swath between Moses Lake and Yakima is one of my potential targets, for exactly those reasons.
:)
The main reason it beats out North Dakota (where I lived as a kid) is because winters are less extreme, and there are fewer twin-engine mosquitoes in summer.
Um... Federal Express? millions of packages in every weird shape, and most of 'em manage to survive the sorting warehouse and get to their correct loading dock. What would be wrong with an airport using an effectively identical system?? after all, it's the same general type of operation -- packages/baggage comes in from all over, gets sorted, and sent somewhere else.
I don't know about any conspiracy theories; what I do know is that the Denver Airport, in all its several manifestations, has been one giant fuckup from my first acquaintance with it back in 1968.
... never opened. I don't remember why.
.... methinks the conspiracy is to share the slashdotting ;)
I don't recall the order or details of the various fuckups, but as I vaguely recall some general problems:
The old airport was just plain old, neglected, and overloaded. Baggage and passenger areas were a day's hike apart, with no delivery system at all.
So they built a new airport. Years over schedule, it finally
So they built another one, and somehow managed to put it where it maximized the problems with planes icing up in bad weather. Anyone familiar with the local climate patterns could have told them this would happen (and probably did so), but they put it there anyway.
[I might have those two events out of chron order, but you get the idea.]
Last I heard, they were going to build yet another airport. I have no idea if it ever happened or not.
But from having many times shipped animals by air cargo, where you have to be aware of timing tolerances among connecting flights -- I can tell you that a change of planes takes 20 minutes in Salt Lake City or Minneapolis, but 2 or more hours in Denver, and it's always been that way. Yeah, Denver is a regional hub, but so is Minneapolis, so that's no excuse.
(Google: "Results 1 - 10 of about 2,220,000 for Denver International Airport"
The problem with DUN being overwritten by AOL's version happened mainly with AOL v5.x, and some of the forced updates to same that evidently had compatibility issues. It was even more fun when they'd forcefeed a v5 update to a machine running v3 or 4 (it didn't always check whether it was on Win3.1x or Win32, either), and the whole bloody AOL app would stop working. That happened to one of my clients, who went ballistic to the Sales phone number and got his account cancelled RIGHT NOW. See, there's the trick (and it works with a lot of companies): don't call Support with any complaints; call Sales instead.
Otherwise, I've not seen it be a problem that way, and I've uninstalled AOL from a lot of random machines. The uninstaller doesn't even leave much registry crap (sometimes none at all).
As to their other stuff -- when AOL's coders had their way, they produced some nifty tools, such as their modem/system-diagnostic utilities. You can find the current version on most AOL CDs, I think under \TOOLS. And I've always liked AIM; it works well and doesn't eat much.
As I read your post, I found myself making this translation:
... managers: People who have no experience in building a country/company, and therefore only see it as a means to whatever end pleases/enriches themselves.
Today companies don't give a crap about anybody's rights, because the people who are running them today don't care about anything but power and control. And they can get away with it, too, because they control all the money of any consequence (the pathetic businesses the customers are allowed to have are no match for the real money controlled by the CEO).
Apparently the real message is that our gov't is no longer run by public servants (in the pure sense of the term), but rather by
It's symptomatic of an era in which no one now living remembers how anything was built from scratch, including a truly free country.
An AC too far under to ever be seen says with some insight, "The shareholders are the company. They collectively own the company. The best interest of the shareholders is the best interest of the company and vice versa because the entire purpose of any company is to serve the shareholders. The problem comes when the shareholders are interested in selling the stock at a higher price rather than investing in a company that serves a purpose."
It'd be more accurate to say that shareholders are people that the company is effectively mortgaged to. If their interests are paramount, well, that's like making an addition on your house *as cheaply as possible* solely to make the bank happy, rather than for the purpose of increasing your house's utility over the long haul. If the addition falls down two days later, oh well!!
There is no rule that a company HAS to be publicly held, nor do companies start out that way. And if the sole purpose of a company is to serve the shareholders -- well, where does that leave the company's customers? I'll tell you: roofless, after the cheaply-made addition falls down.
Likewise, I had to wonder about the people here who don't consider Chairman Mao a psychopath. I guess it doesn't count when you merely expunged everyone in your society who doesn't fit your Cultural Revolution's vision of the future.
"In the business world, it's even fuzzier, because it's harder to differentiate between someone who lays off 1000 people because they're mean from someone who lays them off so the company can stay profitable and keep jobs for everyone else."
Nah, that's easy. Just listen for the words "stock price" or "shareholder". If those are their first concerns, they are NOT interested in the welfare of the company itself, its employees, or its customers.
Don't recall what the study you mention concluded, but personally I've observed a very high coincidence of genius with some degree of paranoid schizophrenia.
Right on, brother. And the reason humans aren't 'natural' is that we were brought here by aliens. Or aliens crash-landed and humans are their descendants. For that matter, maybe all the other surviving species came on the same interstellar ark. I say kill 'em all off and bring back the age of dinosaurs!
No, wait, didn't those come on the previous ark? Crap, looks like we gotta go all the way back to the primordial soup, cuz everything else is unnatural.
Get your hands off me, you damned dirty ape!! ;)
Side note: If I were running the library, I'd consider switching to a browser that keeps no personal data (cache, cookies, history) in the first place.
The "Off-by-One" browser http://www.offbyone.com/ keeps no on-disk cache, and perhaps the author could be motivated to make the rest transient too.
I had the same thought -- that library computers should automagically purge all user data whenever a session is closed (and there should probably be a shortcut so the user can manually purge their own data, if they feel the need). If the browser can't do it, then there are surely utilities that can be scripted to accomplish it.
My other thought was that if this is how it is with library-based internet access, perhaps the solution is to simply remove all such access, as being a hazard to the library *patrons* -- since it is now expected that librarians will control your behaviour, and tattle on you when you "misbehave".
It sounds so noble when it only applies to kiddie porn and a convicted sex offender, but what about when it's someone researching the constitutional rights that are being eroded by this sort of shit?
Or just take a light plane up and, from a suitably innocuous distance, view the place with a telescope. (For bonus points, use a hot air balloon and arrange to be "blown off course.") It's not like there's a charm of +18 Invisible hanging over the site!!
The other day I happened across a "math teaching game". It quickly became apparent to me that what is taught by the game is "how to make the game provide the desired response" rather than anything about math.
It occurs to me that feedback gadgetry falls into the same barrel: the object is not to provide feedback, but to learn how to effectively operate the feedback device.
You also make good points that if these devices are personalized, or used for graded responses, there is grave potential for abuse -- whether they're secure or not.
I use Corel Photopaint every day. I have Photoshop, PSP, etc. but they don't get used unless I need a specific feature that Photopaint lacks (and most Photoshop filters work with Photopaint). Photopaint is way easier to use, and much faster on the same hardware. (Tho I much prefer v8.0 to later versions, which are starting to pick up some of Photoshop's user-hostile traits.)
Insurance companies don't make such decisions on a whim, either. They make them based on the bottom line for various risk factors, which in turn are derived from actual events -- not merely accidents caused by intoxication, but also the likelihood of lawsuits generated by said accidents.
If your insurance company gives you better rates when you drug-test employees, it's because they've learned that they are less likely to have to *pay a claim* when there are no drug users in the workplace.
Insurance companies truly don't give a shit about drug use one way or the other; they care about their own profit margin, which goes to hell when they have to pay too many claims.
Like you said -- it boils down to cost/benefit analysis.
On looking at the poll questions, it occurred to me that it *could* instead have been Red Hat's poll, as an attempt to learn how their customers would take an admission of "ooops, patent nonsense". The tone of the questions sounds too defensive for M$, even tho exploring such issues thru a poll does sound more like the sort of thing they'd do.
Note: I've also taken some IT polls that were clearly sponsored by M$, and they were much more neutral in tone. (Ditto polls obviously sponsored by AOL.)