Wow, is that really the best the right-wing smearers can find on Gore?! Shows what a decent man Gore is compared to the current president if nothing else.
Poor choice of words? Maybe, but Wired misquoted (libel!) him and put the word "Invented" in his mouth.
Actually, it is said that Dick Armeymisquoted Gore. And strangely enough, our heavily biased liberal media did not correct the lies of Bush when he repeated the libel (would maybe have been an idea to stop the liar with his first "innocent" lie instead the lies to follow where people ended up dying or losing jobs). Anyway, you get what you vote for.
People get worked up about it because it was used during the 2000 election by right-wing pundits (yes, I mean *you*, Peggy Noonan) to "prove" that Al Gore was a serial liar who couldn't be trusted with the presidency.
The "funny" thing is that Bush has shown himself to be a serial liar, from Iraq to the real reason they want to "save" social security (and I can mention many more examples if anyone needs any help). Also ironic that under Bush's "leadership" the government will cut the funding of DARPA research which Gore as a younger politician played an important part to get started. Should make some of those nerds who laughed at the cheerleaders internet jokes think again.
I think that in far future all science will be done by AI, because knowledge will be too complicated and complex to understand for even most inteligent human on chemical boost/genetic engineered/stuffed with chips.
I think the empahsis has to be on far future, if science will ever be done by AI. AI can't even consistently beat chess master in a simple game like chess, even though it calculates more moves per second than Kasporov is able to think in a life time. If AI can't even handle something as simple as chess as well as one human (and there has been a fair amount of research into making effective algorithms in chess, and even Big Gene got help from human chess experts that tuned the code while playing Kasparov), then AI isn't even yet on the level of simple arithmetic, not to mention real maths.
The Abel Prize and Fields medal will be going to human researchers into the far future, that is for sure.
there once was a time when it was thought "obvious" that parallel lines could never meet
Actually, it was never thought to be obvious that parallel lines could never meet. Euclid tried to get rid of the postulate, and mathematicians for centuries after tried to show that the postulate was dependent on the others (the other postulates were never controversial in the same sense). In the qwest for a fundament for the parallel postulate, it was shown that the postulate is independent of the others. Then Gauss and others showed that very interesting new geometries could be created if you changed the parallel postulate with other postulates. And the story of the troublesome postulate in a way ends in the great breakthrough of Riemann geometry and the general relativity in physics it made possible. Penrose should know, he is an expert in general relativity.
, and it's still hard for many people to believe that there is no such thing as universal time.
Newton was challenged by among other Leibniz when Newton made time something that flows with a steady flow and that is just something physics has to accept similiarly to the existence of an unmovable space (Newton was making the concept undefinedable axioms of physics in a way). Leibniz did not like it and it lead to many philosphical debates, while physicist were usually happy to leave time as undefined since Newton's physics was so successful to explain things.
What was Fermats proof (if it existed)? It would surely have been far more elegant than the modern version.
That doesn't make the modern version wrong, just less pure, I feel.
Mathematicians think they know what Fermat thought was the "proof" that he could not fit in the margin, since Fermat used a similar strategy for another problem. Euler was the one who used Fermat's strategy on Fermat's last theorem explicitly, and showed that it did not give a full proof as Fermat had hoped. It might be that Fermat himself tried and then gave up, or that he was happy to have "solved it" and looked for other things to prove.
I think you (and most people) misunderstand the reason Fermat's last theorem has such a central place in math history. But first lets discuss the reason why the problem became so well known; it is because it is such an easy problem to state and to understand, still no one has been able to use "simple" math to prove it. Even Fermat himself thought the problem should be fairly straigth forward to solve, and it has made generations of people with curiosity for math look for proofs and even thinking they have found one. It is also a problem some of the greatest minds of math did not manage to solve. Fermat, Euler, Lagrange, Gauss, Abel, Riemann, etc have all had a try and did not solve it. Which math wanna-be wouldn't want to solve something this group of people did not manage?
Now, even though this has made Fermat's problem something that has created a lot of publicity, the number one reason Fermat's problem has been important, is because of all the beautiful maths that have been discovered by mathematicians trying to solve it. Fermat's theorem in itself is not interesting. It is not like the Riemann hypothesis, which if proven to be false, will make much of modern maths not true or at least force mathematicians to look for new proofs. This is because you can prove much interesting stuff if you assume the Riemann's hypothesis is true, problem is of course, this is not yet proven. If Fermat's theorem was been shown to be not true, that would have been suprising, but would not made large parts of maths collapse.
So, the modern proof of Fermat's theorem is the end of a long journey which has lead to some very deep mathematical knowledge, and in a way, Wiles' proof is much more interesting in its own right than that it also proofs that Fermat was right in his guess. A "simple" proof (watch out when mathematicians use the word simple or trivial) of Fermat's problem would give undeniable bragging rights, since you could say you solved a problem Gauss couldn't solve with the maths Gauss knew. But again, it probably would be more of a huge accomplishment for one person than a huge breakthrough in maths.
A last comment; the reason Wiles' proof is long is not because math is verbose, far from it . It is because Wiles is able to connect what would seem to be two unconnected branches of mathematics, showing that problems in one of the branches can be restated as problems in the other. This is not something you do in a few pages. And the importance of it becomse clear, if you consider that what can be an unsolveable problem in the one branch of maths might be reformulated as a solveable problem in the other. Math is always about trying to find ways to solve something as simply as possible. Not something computers is very good at, so no Abel prize to Big Blue for a while I think.
Getting funding for the breakthrough research that created among other things the internet, is exactly what Gore (somewhat clumsy) pointed out that he had done while in Congress. Funny ironi that the present government is now "lead" by the the guy who seemed to make his whole election campaign back in 2000 on misrepresenting Gore's remark, and that this government lacks the vision of Al Gore to continue to fund this important research.
Isn't helping getting funding for the breakthrough research that created among other things the internet, what Gore (somewhat clumsy) pointed out that he had done while in Congress? Funny ironi that the government is now "lead" by the the guy who seemed to make his whole election campaign on misrepresenting Gore's remark, and that this government lacks the vision of Gore to continue to fund this important research.
They had some missiles that might have a few miles longer reach than what was allowed under the UN resolution. And when Blix told them to destroy them, the Iraqies did even though they probably where allowed to have the missiles since it was under doubt that they actually would reach longer than what the resolutions stated.
Don't you feel stupid too be looking so desperatley for a reason that 1500 soldiers died in vain?
You can chit-chat as much as you want, but France stated clearly before the vote that the resolution did not give the right to invade the country. There would be needed a new resolution if Iraq did not let the weapon's inspectors do their job. This was stated clearly by Chirac and shouldn't be hard to understand even for a moron like Bush.
Hans Blix said he needed three more months to verify if Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or not. 1500 US soldiers paid with their lives because of the incompetence of your government. I can't see how you dare try to cover over the lies that they paid their lives for.
While George W. Bush action is to take away from the common good to give to those same filthy rich people that Hillary was talking to. It is of course your choic who you would want to be president.
One of the most important changes was the early stages, when the Internet started, when ICANN started in 1998. The purpose was to exclude governments (but that didn't work).
The way I read this, he says that the internet is not run independent of governments as some seems to think. I guess he is implying diplomaticly that he sees ICANN as basically a front to hide the control by the US government.
If there are any Internet governance structure changes in the future, I think government rules will be more important and more respected.
I guess he is implying that the Internet probably will need "governance struture changes" in the future since other government don't like the present situation with the US government having so much control over the Internet. As he states: "People say the Internet flourished because of the absence of government control. I do not agree with this view. " So he thinks the growth of the internet has come about because governments have agreed about how to control it, and that having the UN playing a role to coordinate this agreement between governments will be important for the continuing growth of the internet.
You can disagree with him, but it doesn't seem like he is saying anything dangerous or stating anything but practial considerations to make the Internet continue as a success story.
UN Security Council could have acted but they voted against the use of force against Iraq. That is why the US and Britain had to pull the resolution that Tony Bliar wanted to cover his ass when going to war. (Bliar is in trouble now in the UK because it seems like the government lawyer actually believed the UK would break international law by joining Bush on his failed invation). The Security Council did not buy the lies that they were served. (Not only France and Germany by the way, even Mexico did not buy it even when threatened or tried bribed).
If the UN was so impotent, why did Saddam not have any WMD? This is the question you need to answer.
I say we start by censoring this guys mouth, then he can tell us whatever he wants.
Flag wawing USians are as much for free speech as the communist party in China. It is only important with so-called "free speech" when people are WASPs that have the right faith. It is really sad.
I'm afraid it's the current USA administration that is making international law meaningless, not the UN.
I would say it is the other way around; the failure of the current USA administration to get its way and to achive its goals when trying to break international law that shows the relevance and power of international law.
There were binding security council resolutions not only allowing, but compelling, member nations to act to force Iraq into compliance, and scores of instances of verified, documented, UN-acknowledged material breach of its binding resolutions on the part of Iraq. And still, there was no meaningful action. Some UN member nations ended up having to act on their own. To say nothing of the massive corruption in the UN's management of the Oil for Food Programme that is *still* coming to light.
Bull. Iraq had no WMD because of UN-lead sanctions. Get over it, you were lied too. And no, France et al would not let Iraq of the hook if they were shown to have done some serious breach of UN resolutions. Again, you were lied too. Try not to be so gullible in the future when your government lies to you. It is dangerous.
None of the errors where significant for the result it seems. I don't know what you have proven actually, so it took 6 years to correct errors that was not significiant, and it was done because of critisism from MM who actually have done some losy science and want some publicity. And as expected, MM's results are not published in any significant journals.
Seems like science is working fine to me from this one example.
How else will we know if it works the way they say it works?
Because they are obliged to state clearly which assumptions they have made in their simulations and which nummerical, statistical, and mathematical methods they use to show their results. This is the science part. If they don't state these things clearly, there is no way they will be able to publish in respected journals (instead of the crap journals that the two guys who have published their code publish their results in).
The programming part can of course be poorly done, just like experiments can be poorly done even though the methods used are valid. But then other who use similar methods will get different results and will challenge the other scientist's results. This is the scientific method. The programs themselves are just one way to implement the general underlying method. No one asks people doing experiments to give away their experimental equipment after they have done the experiments so other can use the exact same equipment. Of course, it is easier to give away source code, but the analogy is good.
It can be time consuming and often boring for scientist to write computer code, but it has to be done sometimes to investigate the phenomena they want to study. Why should scientist be forced to give away this labour to their competitiors if they don't want to? The serious "bugs" are anyway in their published results, while the bugs in their program might make the programs less efficient, unstable or flaky, but still is the programmers problem as long as the results are correct. And if the results are not correct, well then the scientific method and competition will take care of it in due time.
Of course, any group can make false graphs and make up results, but all scientist know that their carreer is over if that their results are shown to be a hoax. It is possible for a very smart and respected scientist to manage a few years to trick their fellow scientist (there are some examples of this), but even a respected scientist will have a hard time to convince fellow scientist for a long time since scientist generally love to prove their fellow "competitors" wrong (isn't most human activity ego driven).
It is an interesting debate, if scientist should publish their source or not. But that two economist with little understanding of the climate has published some source code is not very interesting. I guess they want to sell more of their book which I guess goes in the politics and economy section and not in the science section.
I think there is no reason to demand that scientist should publish their source code, since scientist usually reuse their code and share their code with people they work with, but should not be obliged to help other scientist that they are competing for funding with to get their own simulation programs.
The demand on scientist are clear though, they should give enough information in their publications so anyone interested (or who want to refute their results) can reproduce what they have done. So any statistical or mathematical methods used should be mentioned. And if they use commercial packages (with closed source usually for all parties), mention which packages they use would be wise so that if there are found bugs in these programs, any influence on their results can be taken into consideration. If enough information is given, then any scientist who can program, can check out the literature how to implement the nummerical algorithms and write their own program. Often they can buy (fairly expensive) commercial packages or even find open source liberies that have already implemented these algorithms, and then reproduce the results.
If these two economist were able to reproduce the results of some major climate scientist, then these climate scientist have given enough information to their fellow scientist and the general public. So lets forget about these two guys, or buy their book if you want to believe they know better about climate changes than the general scientific community.
What Emporer Linux charges for their custom version of Linux is a matter for them and the customers they can attract. A more interesting question is if Sharp forces them to pay the Windows tax, or if Sharp lets them buy the laptop without Windows pre-installed. I don't mind paying extra for a nicely setup linux system that is tuned for the hardware I am using. But I do mind giving money to the anti-competitive company MS which tries to sabotage linux and other software I use. Especially since I have not used any software from MS the last 6 years or so.
That is why the EU ruling is so important; it has set a precedence. If MS tries the old tricks again, the EU commision or the EU high court will fast be able to impose new fines if any competitor complains to them. This is the one reason the EU commision took on MS in the first place, they were feed up with MS being able to do the same monopoly tricks for each new software marked or new technology (the case the EU commision looked at was of course Media players, while the US government had previously found MS guilty with web-browsers). When the US government under the corrupt leadership of Bush didn't want to stop the MS monopoly game, the EU had to step up to the plate.
I have a feeling they still have some wiggle room to increase them if MS decides to play the "pay and carry on as usual" game.
That is how the EU got Bush to back down from him illegal steel tariffs. The tariffs were supposed to start slowly with low tariffs but every month the tariffs would increase. It didn't take Bush long to figure out that he wasn't as tough as he thought.
I think the Abel Committee is obliged to also honour applied mathematicians, which is one reason Lax was chosen this year. The previous winners, Atiyah and Singer and Serre were all pure mathematicians (like Wiles is).
Andrew Wiles will probably get the prize, but since the prize is very new, there are many important mathematicians to chose from. And even though Wiles is maybe the best known living mathematician to the general public (because of his solution of Fermat's theorem), among mathematicians Wiles is not consider the most dominant mathematician alive today (Serre, for instant, was generally seen as the natural choice for the first prize). Some of the possible worthy winners are also old and will maybe for this reason get the prize before Wiles which is still young and healthy.
The Abel Prize is named after the brilliant Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel who died at the age of 26, after living his short life with little money and little support. It is quite amazing that at such young age Abel was able to produce results that put a lasting mark on modern mathematics. Another of the "young dead" in the history of mathematics is Galois, who died at the age of 21 and is remembered for results that expanded on earlier work of Abel. Because of these two and also many other mathematicians who did their best work at very young age, math has got the reputation of being the young man's science.
The Abel prize was introduced as a sort of "Nobel Prize of math" where people are rewarded for results and achievements that have shown themselves to be of lasting value in the field. Alfred Nobel did not want a Nobel Prize in math since he himself saw little scientific value of math! The most prestigious prize in math before the Abel came into being is the Fields medal, but this prize is only given to younger mathematicians (belove the age of 40) that has made break-through results and show promise for the future. The Fields medal is handed out every 4 years while the Abel is handed out every year (first prize was handed out in 2003).
It would have been ironic for Abel if he were to know that such a huge money prize is to be given out in his name, when his whole life he had to live in poverty and fight to get time and money to do his scientific work. The irony of Abel's life is also that Abel himself finally got a professorship in Berlin; but too late, the letter was sent to him two days after his death.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, is that really the best the right-wing smearers can find on Gore?! Shows what a decent man Gore is compared to the current president if nothing else.
Actually, it is said that Dick Armey misquoted Gore. And strangely enough, our heavily biased liberal media did not correct the lies of Bush when he repeated the libel (would maybe have been an idea to stop the liar with his first "innocent" lie instead the lies to follow where people ended up dying or losing jobs). Anyway, you get what you vote for.
The "funny" thing is that Bush has shown himself to be a serial liar, from Iraq to the real reason they want to "save" social security (and I can mention many more examples if anyone needs any help). Also ironic that under Bush's "leadership" the government will cut the funding of DARPA research which Gore as a younger politician played an important part to get started. Should make some of those nerds who laughed at the cheerleaders internet jokes think again.
I think the empahsis has to be on far future, if science will ever be done by AI. AI can't even consistently beat chess master in a simple game like chess, even though it calculates more moves per second than Kasporov is able to think in a life time. If AI can't even handle something as simple as chess as well as one human (and there has been a fair amount of research into making effective algorithms in chess, and even Big Gene got help from human chess experts that tuned the code while playing Kasparov), then AI isn't even yet on the level of simple arithmetic, not to mention real maths.
The Abel Prize and Fields medal will be going to human researchers into the far future, that is for sure.
Actually, it was never thought to be obvious that parallel lines could never meet. Euclid tried to get rid of the postulate, and mathematicians for centuries after tried to show that the postulate was dependent on the others (the other postulates were never controversial in the same sense). In the qwest for a fundament for the parallel postulate, it was shown that the postulate is independent of the others. Then Gauss and others showed that very interesting new geometries could be created if you changed the parallel postulate with other postulates. And the story of the troublesome postulate in a way ends in the great breakthrough of Riemann geometry and the general relativity in physics it made possible. Penrose should know, he is an expert in general relativity.
Newton was challenged by among other Leibniz when Newton made time something that flows with a steady flow and that is just something physics has to accept similiarly to the existence of an unmovable space (Newton was making the concept undefinedable axioms of physics in a way). Leibniz did not like it and it lead to many philosphical debates, while physicist were usually happy to leave time as undefined since Newton's physics was so successful to explain things.
Mathematicians think they know what Fermat thought was the "proof" that he could not fit in the margin, since Fermat used a similar strategy for another problem. Euler was the one who used Fermat's strategy on Fermat's last theorem explicitly, and showed that it did not give a full proof as Fermat had hoped. It might be that Fermat himself tried and then gave up, or that he was happy to have "solved it" and looked for other things to prove.
I think you (and most people) misunderstand the reason Fermat's last theorem has such a central place in math history. But first lets discuss the reason why the problem became so well known; it is because it is such an easy problem to state and to understand, still no one has been able to use "simple" math to prove it. Even Fermat himself thought the problem should be fairly straigth forward to solve, and it has made generations of people with curiosity for math look for proofs and even thinking they have found one. It is also a problem some of the greatest minds of math did not manage to solve. Fermat, Euler, Lagrange, Gauss, Abel, Riemann, etc have all had a try and did not solve it. Which math wanna-be wouldn't want to solve something this group of people did not manage?
Now, even though this has made Fermat's problem something that has created a lot of publicity, the number one reason Fermat's problem has been important, is because of all the beautiful maths that have been discovered by mathematicians trying to solve it. Fermat's theorem in itself is not interesting. It is not like the Riemann hypothesis, which if proven to be false, will make much of modern maths not true or at least force mathematicians to look for new proofs. This is because you can prove much interesting stuff if you assume the Riemann's hypothesis is true, problem is of course, this is not yet proven. If Fermat's theorem was been shown to be not true, that would have been suprising, but would not made large parts of maths collapse.
So, the modern proof of Fermat's theorem is the end of a long journey which has lead to some very deep mathematical knowledge, and in a way, Wiles' proof is much more interesting in its own right than that it also proofs that Fermat was right in his guess. A "simple" proof (watch out when mathematicians use the word simple or trivial) of Fermat's problem would give undeniable bragging rights, since you could say you solved a problem Gauss couldn't solve with the maths Gauss knew. But again, it probably would be more of a huge accomplishment for one person than a huge breakthrough in maths.
A last comment; the reason Wiles' proof is long is not because math is verbose, far from it . It is because Wiles is able to connect what would seem to be two unconnected branches of mathematics, showing that problems in one of the branches can be restated as problems in the other. This is not something you do in a few pages. And the importance of it becomse clear, if you consider that what can be an unsolveable problem in the one branch of maths might be reformulated as a solveable problem in the other. Math is always about trying to find ways to solve something as simply as possible. Not something computers is very good at, so no Abel prize to Big Blue for a while I think.
Getting funding for the breakthrough research that created among other things the internet, is exactly what Gore (somewhat clumsy) pointed out that he had done while in Congress. Funny ironi that the present government is now "lead" by the the guy who seemed to make his whole election campaign back in 2000 on misrepresenting Gore's remark, and that this government lacks the vision of Al Gore to continue to fund this important research.
Isn't helping getting funding for the breakthrough research that created among other things the internet, what Gore (somewhat clumsy) pointed out that he had done while in Congress? Funny ironi that the government is now "lead" by the the guy who seemed to make his whole election campaign on misrepresenting Gore's remark, and that this government lacks the vision of Gore to continue to fund this important research.
Don't you feel stupid too be looking so desperatley for a reason that 1500 soldiers died in vain?
Hans Blix said he needed three more months to verify if Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or not. 1500 US soldiers paid with their lives because of the incompetence of your government. I can't see how you dare try to cover over the lies that they paid their lives for.
While George W. Bush action is to take away from the common good to give to those same filthy rich people that Hillary was talking to. It is of course your choic who you would want to be president.
The way I read this, he says that the internet is not run independent of governments as some seems to think. I guess he is implying diplomaticly that he sees ICANN as basically a front to hide the control by the US government.
I guess he is implying that the Internet probably will need "governance struture changes" in the future since other government don't like the present situation with the US government having so much control over the Internet. As he states: "People say the Internet flourished because of the absence of government control. I do not agree with this view. " So he thinks the growth of the internet has come about because governments have agreed about how to control it, and that having the UN playing a role to coordinate this agreement between governments will be important for the continuing growth of the internet.
You can disagree with him, but it doesn't seem like he is saying anything dangerous or stating anything but practial considerations to make the Internet continue as a success story.
If the UN was so impotent, why did Saddam not have any WMD? This is the question you need to answer.
Are you talking about ICANN and the US government or the UN in that post?
Flag wawing USians are as much for free speech as the communist party in China. It is only important with so-called "free speech" when people are WASPs that have the right faith. It is really sad.
I would say it is the other way around; the failure of the current USA administration to get its way and to achive its goals when trying to break international law that shows the relevance and power of international law.
Bull. Iraq had no WMD because of UN-lead sanctions. Get over it, you were lied too. And no, France et al would not let Iraq of the hook if they were shown to have done some serious breach of UN resolutions. Again, you were lied too. Try not to be so gullible in the future when your government lies to you. It is dangerous.
Seems like science is working fine to me from this one example.
Because they are obliged to state clearly which assumptions they have made in their simulations and which nummerical, statistical, and mathematical methods they use to show their results. This is the science part. If they don't state these things clearly, there is no way they will be able to publish in respected journals (instead of the crap journals that the two guys who have published their code publish their results in).
The programming part can of course be poorly done, just like experiments can be poorly done even though the methods used are valid. But then other who use similar methods will get different results and will challenge the other scientist's results. This is the scientific method. The programs themselves are just one way to implement the general underlying method. No one asks people doing experiments to give away their experimental equipment after they have done the experiments so other can use the exact same equipment. Of course, it is easier to give away source code, but the analogy is good.
It can be time consuming and often boring for scientist to write computer code, but it has to be done sometimes to investigate the phenomena they want to study. Why should scientist be forced to give away this labour to their competitiors if they don't want to? The serious "bugs" are anyway in their published results, while the bugs in their program might make the programs less efficient, unstable or flaky, but still is the programmers problem as long as the results are correct. And if the results are not correct, well then the scientific method and competition will take care of it in due time.
Of course, any group can make false graphs and make up results, but all scientist know that their carreer is over if that their results are shown to be a hoax. It is possible for a very smart and respected scientist to manage a few years to trick their fellow scientist (there are some examples of this), but even a respected scientist will have a hard time to convince fellow scientist for a long time since scientist generally love to prove their fellow "competitors" wrong (isn't most human activity ego driven).
I think there is no reason to demand that scientist should publish their source code, since scientist usually reuse their code and share their code with people they work with, but should not be obliged to help other scientist that they are competing for funding with to get their own simulation programs.
The demand on scientist are clear though, they should give enough information in their publications so anyone interested (or who want to refute their results) can reproduce what they have done. So any statistical or mathematical methods used should be mentioned. And if they use commercial packages (with closed source usually for all parties), mention which packages they use would be wise so that if there are found bugs in these programs, any influence on their results can be taken into consideration. If enough information is given, then any scientist who can program, can check out the literature how to implement the nummerical algorithms and write their own program. Often they can buy (fairly expensive) commercial packages or even find open source liberies that have already implemented these algorithms, and then reproduce the results.
If these two economist were able to reproduce the results of some major climate scientist, then these climate scientist have given enough information to their fellow scientist and the general public. So lets forget about these two guys, or buy their book if you want to believe they know better about climate changes than the general scientific community.
What Emporer Linux charges for their custom version of Linux is a matter for them and the customers they can attract. A more interesting question is if Sharp forces them to pay the Windows tax, or if Sharp lets them buy the laptop without Windows pre-installed. I don't mind paying extra for a nicely setup linux system that is tuned for the hardware I am using. But I do mind giving money to the anti-competitive company MS which tries to sabotage linux and other software I use. Especially since I have not used any software from MS the last 6 years or so.
That is why the EU ruling is so important; it has set a precedence. If MS tries the old tricks again, the EU commision or the EU high court will fast be able to impose new fines if any competitor complains to them. This is the one reason the EU commision took on MS in the first place, they were feed up with MS being able to do the same monopoly tricks for each new software marked or new technology (the case the EU commision looked at was of course Media players, while the US government had previously found MS guilty with web-browsers). When the US government under the corrupt leadership of Bush didn't want to stop the MS monopoly game, the EU had to step up to the plate.
Andrew Wiles will probably get the prize, but since the prize is very new, there are many important mathematicians to chose from. And even though Wiles is maybe the best known living mathematician to the general public (because of his solution of Fermat's theorem), among mathematicians Wiles is not consider the most dominant mathematician alive today (Serre, for instant, was generally seen as the natural choice for the first prize). Some of the possible worthy winners are also old and will maybe for this reason get the prize before Wiles which is still young and healthy.
The Abel prize was introduced as a sort of "Nobel Prize of math" where people are rewarded for results and achievements that have shown themselves to be of lasting value in the field. Alfred Nobel did not want a Nobel Prize in math since he himself saw little scientific value of math! The most prestigious prize in math before the Abel came into being is the Fields medal, but this prize is only given to younger mathematicians (belove the age of 40) that has made break-through results and show promise for the future. The Fields medal is handed out every 4 years while the Abel is handed out every year (first prize was handed out in 2003).
It would have been ironic for Abel if he were to know that such a huge money prize is to be given out in his name, when his whole life he had to live in poverty and fight to get time and money to do his scientific work. The irony of Abel's life is also that Abel himself finally got a professorship in Berlin; but too late, the letter was sent to him two days after his death.