I'm all for electric and energy efficient vehicles. But the Corbin just didn't make sense to me: it was too expensive, too small, felt unsafe, and didn't have much range.
I'm much more sorry to see something like the Ford Think car go--while it had problems similar to the Corbin, it seemed much closer to being practical (all it needed was a little more range--probably doable with current battery technologies).
OTOH, there is a right way and a wrong way of approaching this. In the example of DBC, MS would do good by providing an Eiffel implementation for their CLR
We have excellent compilers, both free and commercial, for Eiffel that compile to native code and to the JVM, and Eiffel hasn't taken the world by storm. Why would a CLR back-end make any difference?
In the example of F#, MS would be more correct to introduce Scheme and LISP dialects rather than invent their own.
"More correct"? In what way? What does a statically typed batch-compiled functional language have to do with dynamically typed imperative languages?
I dont want to park the stylus when I want to write something, and then have to pick it out again to access menues or other programs.
That's a problem with the Clie/Palm software, not keyboards: the OS and apps just have lousy keyboard support. Get OKEY and you will never have to take out the stylus.
Why have lots and lots of PDA:s moved away from the graffit or similar type-in methods and moved onto the keyboard the size of two stamps overlapping?
Because many people don't want to bother learning Graffiti.
(Substitute your actual device for eth1.) That's all you need. Afterwards, use whatever you use to configure a wired Ethernet card (pump, dhclient, ifconfig).
All the rest (configuration files, etc.) is just distribution-related fluff.
If you make it only possible to use your products on Windows, it isn't surprising that 95% of your market is on Windows.
If your "95%" figure is supposed to refer to the fraction of desktop users using Windows within the population, your number unsubstantiated and probably erroneous. Microsoft's market share is usually overestimated because many desktop uses of other operating systems aren't counted towards those other operating systems, many non-desktop uses of Windows are counted as Windows users, and many non-Windows users are counted as Windows users because they have a Windows license that they don't, or don't want to, use.
The problem with 802.11x support under Linux is that the specs are being kept under wraps.
That's true for a lot of hardware. Reverse engineering is part of writing a Linux driver. That's why it takes a while.
The card manufacturers say the reason is that their cards could be reprogrammed to transmit on reserved frequencies (military, air traffic control, etc.).
Yeah, that's just one of the many excuses and reasons.
As for Linux Centrino support, Linux is not particularly important in the mobile market
Linux is a lot more important than people think. I'd say between a third and half of the presentations I see (in a CS research unrelated to open source software or Linux) are given from Linux machines, with Macintosh being a very, very distant third. Granted, this is not your PowerPoint-toting business users, but it strongly suggests that Linux is widely used in some significant populations.
And, frankly, many of the people who are running Windows are only doing so because Linux support for power management, wireless cards, and graphics cards ("how do I enable the external monitor?") is still too cumbersome. With better drivers, Linux might easily become the predominant mobile platform for CS researchers, instead of being "just" very big.
Linux drivers don't come from the Driver Fairy, they usually get written by volunteers. That takes a while: getting the specs, implementing the drivers, testing them, etc. And it usually only happens after the hardware is starting to sell. So, it may well take a year or two for Linux drivers to appear for a piece of hardware. If you want it to happen faster, volunteer yourself.
Of course, a few manufacturers do ship their own Linux drivers. That's nice, but it isn't all that common yet. And many of the drivers that do ship from manufacturers are based on proprietary, commercial driver toolkits and have to be closed source.
Centrino is a special case. Centrino is largely a marketing construct, not a technology, and the marketing group that pushed Centrino inside Intel apparently wants to make Microsoft happy and doesn't like Linux. I doubt this is going to last: Linux is too important for Intel to maintain this position.
is this an April's fools joke?
on
Hijacking .NET
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· Score: 1
"Private" declarations in most languages are effectively advisory. They alert you to the fact that something is not part of the official API. They are there to help you. Of course, you can circumvent them. You can circument them in C++ and in Java as well. But you ignore them at your own peril--Microsoft doesn't care. Ignoring "private" declarations really is pretty close to shooting yourself in the foot--deliberately.
The keyboard support in PalmOS applications is awful. For example, you can't easily do the simplest thing you might want to do: navigate to the 3pm slot in the day view and enter an appointment, you have to take out the pen and tap, then use they keyboard to enter the data. This is a problem both with the T|C and the TG-50. Palm and Sony seem to have slapped on the keyboards as an afterthought.
The solution? Get OKEY. It lets you navigate the fields on a form by using the rocker/navigation wheel.
Also, be aware that the TG-50 is big, almost as big as the Sony Clie clamshells (NX-60, etc.).
I suggest searching for "spam" on the USPTO site under current patents. It is depressing. Every conceivable 10 line Perl or awk hack that people have been using for filtering spam has more or less recently been patented.
For example, patent no 6,167,435, applied for in 1998, patents E-mail verification for mailing list subscriptions. I couldn't find the Mailblocks, which would at least have to reference 6,167,435 as prior art, which leads me to believe that it hasn't been published yet. Patent attorneys may be stupid or brazen enough to ignore decades of actual practice, but they wouldn't ignore another patent.
Mailblocks itself is an anachronism--a bubble-era startup with no realistic business proposition, financed, in this case, by the winnings from the founder's previous dotcom. Most likely, Microsoft will buy them out to own the technology for Hotmail. If not, they will keep suing people until somebody does buy them.
Mailblocks, Inc. is a new class of Web-based email service for consumers founded in July 2002 by Phil Goldman, a former Microsoft vice president and a founder of WebTV.
That "technology" is a couple of decades old--people used to use awk scripts to do that kind of mail processing. Well, what can you expect from a former Microsoft VP.
Let's hope Earthlink does their background research rather than rolling over for such a ridiculous patent.
The technology needed to put people on the moon, for instance, was there in the late sixties, or has everyone forgotten that?
We can put people in permanent bases in orbit. We can put people in permanent bases on the moon. We can probably put people in permanent bases on Mars if we redirect our output from producing sneakers and overpriced fighter jets to producing rockets.
But those are not self-sufficient colonies and they don't achieve what people claim they want to achieve: backup against disaster on earth.
working toward self-sufficiency then we could have the dream of a large human presence in space by the middle of this century. And that, my friends, is a pessimistic timeframe. [...] It's a matter of political will and if US (and all the other western nations, for that matter) were to spend half of the budgets they allot for military adventures then the future of humanity would be secure.
So, let's say we have a permanent settlement on Mars, Titan, and the moon. Now, something really bad happens and earth is thrown back into the stone age. Where are those settlements going to get their Pentiums and RAM from? Their medicines? Their circuit boards? Their software developers? Their silicone hoses and seals? Their fabrics? Where are they even going to get their food from? Their fertilizer? The entire US is capable of autonomy and is highly dependent on the rest of the world for most of its high-tech products.
And where is the food going to come from? Even if all those hotshot astronauts and frontiermen became vegan, they'd still need around 0.1 hectare of arable land (10x100 yards) per person on earth to produce enough food for them; all that needs to be enclosed and heated in space. With a regular American diet, you need more like 100x100 yards per person.
I seriously doubt you'd even get enough volunteers for such a venture because while the thought of living in a tiny tin can on a planet that kills you almost instantly if you go outside under a government that controls the air you breathe may appeal to you, I strongly suspect it doesn't appeal to most people if they thought about it.
This is pretty simple to do by modifying a bootable Linux rescue CD. The rescue CD will have all the tools; all you need to do is create a startup script that goes through the half dozen or so steps to do this.
If you want to keep it really simple, set up a machine with Mac OS with a single partition of size smaller than any of your disks (say, 5G) and do an install on that. The startup script would do something like:
Why does anybody care what processor is in their box anymore? There is fairly little assembly language programming going on (and most of that is redundant), and beyond that, it's just cost/performance ratios that count, right? Now, however I look at it, a $570 motherboard with a 600MHz G3 just doesn't cut it for me in terms of cost/performance.
And if this is about principle and you don't want to support the Intel "monopoly", you can buy AMD, VIA, or any of a number of other processor and motherboard manufacturers.
Where would Europe be without the USA pumping BILLIONS in foreign aid into Europe? [...] We'll just go and call all of our loans to European nations as "Due and Immediately Payable" - your economy would crumble to nothing in a single day.
What planet are you from? The US is $2.7 trillion in debt to the rest of the world, much of it to Europe and Japan. The entire US economy is built on foreign debt and foreign investments.
And the US is one of the stingiest nations when it comes to foreign aid, to the point that it really is offensive. And the notion that Europeans receive "foreign aid" from the US is absolutely laughable.
You want to be on your own and without the support of the USA? Fine - when the next border skirmish or "ethnic cleansing" spat happens, you can fscking be on your own..Go figure it out yourself...and go fight your own wars.
I think that's actually what the Europeans are asking for.
Space exploration is a great thing, and we have the technology for extensive exploration of our solar system. I think that's a great thing to do.
Space colonization is something completely different, and much harder, however, and creating a self-sustaining colony on another body is even more out of reach.
What's far more dangerous than "space escapism" is "we-can-fix-it-ism" because that distracts us from making progress during the small window we have available (between technological ability and environmental meltdown).
I am pretty pessimistic about being able to fix it. But I'm even more pessimistic about space travel.
The only way to achieve the mandatory objectives you have detailed (controlling population growth, military spending, and pollution) is a global totalitarian government forever.
No, that's not "the only way". Many of our pollution problems could be taken care of with recycling laws, energy conservation laws, and similar laws. Free markets and free societies then come up with efficient ways to service those needs. And we have a really powerful marketing and PR machinery that can get people to kill themselves with unhealthy food and cigarettes and spend far more than they can afford; affecting reproductive choices would be an easy task in comparison.
Democracies, market economies, and capitalism can be stable, environmentally friendly, and sustainable. What will kill us, however, is leaving setting the goals and regulations under which democracies, market economies, and capitalism operate to chance.
Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
That platitude can be used to justify anything from mass murder to perpetual motion machines
Is the colonization of space apparently unreasonable?
Well, I'm all for research in new propulsion systems, basic physics, and many other aspects of science relevant to space travel. What I'm against is wasting money on futile projects like the space station or manned exploration of the planets. We can fly around the solar system for the next thousand years with current technology and we would still be unable to achieve colonization. Unless and until we achieve fundamental breakthroughs, space colonization is a pipe dream, and those breakthroughs depend on science to be done here on earth.
The breadth of our ecological destruction has created ripples that will ebb and flow for centuries to come.
What we have done to the ecology of the planet has been immoral and destructive, but it doesn't yet threaten our existence. If we stopped our destructive behaviors tomorrow, the planet would soon stabilize and then start to recover. What does threaten our existence is that we keep doing what we have been doing, on an ever expanding scale.
but many (scientists too) feel that we are already too far gone to save this planet or at least save it as we know it
Many people feel that way. It's the "oh, I have already had the greasy hamburger, I might as well have the unhealthy desert" kind of attitude. It's common and it has no basis in fact as far as I can tell, either when it comes to pollution or when it comes to unhealthy food.
Why run any Ethernet at all? Most people who want wireless want overlapping coverage anyway, and in that case, the APs can forward packets among themselves.
People like Rees better get used to the fact that we aren't going to get off this planet in significant numbers any time soon and that colonization of space is a pipe dream for now.
So far, there is not a shred of evidence that we can travel faster than light or even get close? But, more importantly, if we can't control population growth and pollution on earth, how is that going to work in space, where just going a little bit over the limits can mean death for everybody? Even Antarctica is very forgiving compared to space--at least you can breathe there and dig into the snow.
Eventually, we may be able to transform asteroids into habitats, but even that is far off, and it will probably not give rise to societies that are self-sustaining.
Rees's kind of "space escapism" is dangerous because it distracts us from the fact that we do have a choice: we can control population growth, we can control military spending, we can control pollution. For the next couple of centuries, we either make it work here, or we become extinct.
Perhaps the "masses" don't quite get it yet, but Microsoft's misdeeds have been widely reported in the IT press and I think it has already made a difference with corporate IT managers. They used to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt, but I think many of them have come to realize that that is a mistake, and they are bargaining harder and looking for alternatives.
Just to be clear, this isn't just an accidental effect, it seems almost certainly planned to me. Microsoft loves the SCO lawsuit because it validates their own unfounded rantings against Linux. But if they just handed money to SCO to go sue IBM and badmouth Linux, it wouldn't be very effective. Saying "we licensed SCO UNIX because we respect intellectual property" lets them both appear respectful of intellectual property and give money to SCO to act as their attack dog.
However, I don't see anything that anti-trust regulators can do about that.
What the open source community can try to do is deflect the PR impact back on Microsoft by making it crystal clear what a sleazy deal this really is. Than, rather than appearing law-abiding and respecting IP, Microsoft will come across as underhanded and deceitful.
Of course, if anybody could leak the memo from inside Microsoft where this deal was discussed, that would help even more... any volunteers?
The OSI position paper is excellent and answers a lot of questions.
SCO's case is so ludicrous (they don't even own the "UNIX" trademark) that one really does have to wonder what the motives of Microsoft are in paying them anything.
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I'm all for electric and energy efficient vehicles. But the Corbin just didn't make sense to me: it was too expensive, too small, felt unsafe, and didn't have much range.
I'm much more sorry to see something like the Ford Think car go--while it had problems similar to the Corbin, it seemed much closer to being practical (all it needed was a little more range--probably doable with current battery technologies).
The idea that the Sun has a companion star has been around for a number of years in the scientific community. The name "Nemesis" was proposed in 1984.
:-)
Of course, it's a complete coincidence that Asimov's 1989 story used the same name
OTOH, there is a right way and a wrong way of approaching this. In the example of DBC, MS would do good by providing an Eiffel implementation for their CLR
We have excellent compilers, both free and commercial, for Eiffel that compile to native code and to the JVM, and Eiffel hasn't taken the world by storm. Why would a CLR back-end make any difference?
In the example of F#, MS would be more correct to introduce Scheme and LISP dialects rather than invent their own.
"More correct"? In what way? What does a statically typed batch-compiled functional language have to do with dynamically typed imperative languages?
I dont want to park the stylus when I want to write something, and then have to pick it out again to access menues or other programs.
That's a problem with the Clie/Palm software, not keyboards: the OS and apps just have lousy keyboard support. Get OKEY and you will never have to take out the stylus.
Why have lots and lots of PDA:s moved away from the graffit or similar type-in methods and moved onto the keyboard the size of two stamps overlapping?
Because many people don't want to bother learning Graffiti.
All the rest (configuration files, etc.) is just distribution-related fluff.
If you make it only possible to use your products on Windows, it isn't surprising that 95% of your market is on Windows.
If your "95%" figure is supposed to refer to the fraction of desktop users using Windows within the population, your number unsubstantiated and probably erroneous. Microsoft's market share is usually overestimated because many desktop uses of other operating systems aren't counted towards those other operating systems, many non-desktop uses of Windows are counted as Windows users, and many non-Windows users are counted as Windows users because they have a Windows license that they don't, or don't want to, use.
The problem with 802.11x support under Linux is that the specs are being kept under wraps.
That's true for a lot of hardware. Reverse engineering is part of writing a Linux driver. That's why it takes a while.
The card manufacturers say the reason is that their cards could be reprogrammed to transmit on reserved frequencies (military, air traffic control, etc.).
Yeah, that's just one of the many excuses and reasons.
As for Linux Centrino support, Linux is not particularly important in the mobile market
Linux is a lot more important than people think. I'd say between a third and half of the presentations I see (in a CS research unrelated to open source software or Linux) are given from Linux machines, with Macintosh being a very, very distant third. Granted, this is not your PowerPoint-toting business users, but it strongly suggests that Linux is widely used in some significant populations.
And, frankly, many of the people who are running Windows are only doing so because Linux support for power management, wireless cards, and graphics cards ("how do I enable the external monitor?") is still too cumbersome. With better drivers, Linux might easily become the predominant mobile platform for CS researchers, instead of being "just" very big.
Linux drivers don't come from the Driver Fairy, they usually get written by volunteers. That takes a while: getting the specs, implementing the drivers, testing them, etc. And it usually only happens after the hardware is starting to sell. So, it may well take a year or two for Linux drivers to appear for a piece of hardware. If you want it to happen faster, volunteer yourself.
Of course, a few manufacturers do ship their own Linux drivers. That's nice, but it isn't all that common yet. And many of the drivers that do ship from manufacturers are based on proprietary, commercial driver toolkits and have to be closed source.
Centrino is a special case. Centrino is largely a marketing construct, not a technology, and the marketing group that pushed Centrino inside Intel apparently wants to make Microsoft happy and doesn't like Linux. I doubt this is going to last: Linux is too important for Intel to maintain this position.
"Private" declarations in most languages are effectively advisory. They alert you to the fact that something is not part of the official API. They are there to help you. Of course, you can circumvent them. You can circument them in C++ and in Java as well. But you ignore them at your own peril--Microsoft doesn't care. Ignoring "private" declarations really is pretty close to shooting yourself in the foot--deliberately.
The keyboard support in PalmOS applications is awful. For example, you can't easily do the simplest thing you might want to do: navigate to the 3pm slot in the day view and enter an appointment, you have to take out the pen and tap, then use they keyboard to enter the data. This is a problem both with the T|C and the TG-50. Palm and Sony seem to have slapped on the keyboards as an afterthought.
The solution? Get OKEY. It lets you navigate the fields on a form by using the rocker/navigation wheel.
Also, be aware that the TG-50 is big, almost as big as the Sony Clie clamshells (NX-60, etc.).
I suggest searching for "spam" on the USPTO site under current patents. It is depressing. Every conceivable 10 line Perl or awk hack that people have been using for filtering spam has more or less recently been patented.
For example, patent no 6,167,435, applied for in 1998, patents E-mail verification for mailing list subscriptions. I couldn't find the Mailblocks, which would at least have to reference 6,167,435 as prior art, which leads me to believe that it hasn't been published yet. Patent attorneys may be stupid or brazen enough to ignore decades of actual practice, but they wouldn't ignore another patent.
Mailblocks itself is an anachronism--a bubble-era startup with no realistic business proposition, financed, in this case, by the winnings from the founder's previous dotcom. Most likely, Microsoft will buy them out to own the technology for Hotmail. If not, they will keep suing people until somebody does buy them.
Mailblocks, Inc. is a new class of Web-based email service for consumers founded in July 2002 by Phil Goldman, a former Microsoft vice president and a founder of WebTV.
That "technology" is a couple of decades old--people used to use awk scripts to do that kind of mail processing. Well, what can you expect from a former Microsoft VP.
Let's hope Earthlink does their background research rather than rolling over for such a ridiculous patent.
The technology needed to put people on the moon, for instance, was there in the late sixties, or has everyone forgotten that?
We can put people in permanent bases in orbit. We can put people in permanent bases on the moon. We can probably put people in permanent bases on Mars if we redirect our output from producing sneakers and overpriced fighter jets to producing rockets.
But those are not self-sufficient colonies and they don't achieve what people claim they want to achieve: backup against disaster on earth.
working toward self-sufficiency then we could have the dream of a large human presence in space by the middle of this century. And that, my friends, is a pessimistic timeframe. [...] It's a matter of political will and if US (and all the other western nations, for that matter) were to spend half of the budgets they allot for military adventures then the future of humanity would be secure.
So, let's say we have a permanent settlement on Mars, Titan, and the moon. Now, something really bad happens and earth is thrown back into the stone age. Where are those settlements going to get their Pentiums and RAM from? Their medicines? Their circuit boards? Their software developers? Their silicone hoses and seals? Their fabrics? Where are they even going to get their food from? Their fertilizer? The entire US is capable of autonomy and is highly dependent on the rest of the world for most of its high-tech products.
And where is the food going to come from? Even if all those hotshot astronauts and frontiermen became vegan, they'd still need around 0.1 hectare of arable land (10x100 yards) per person on earth to produce enough food for them; all that needs to be enclosed and heated in space. With a regular American diet, you need more like 100x100 yards per person.
I seriously doubt you'd even get enough volunteers for such a venture because while the thought of living in a tiny tin can on a planet that kills you almost instantly if you go outside under a government that controls the air you breathe may appeal to you, I strongly suspect it doesn't appeal to most people if they thought about it.
If you want to keep it really simple, set up a machine with Mac OS with a single partition of size smaller than any of your disks (say, 5G) and do an install on that. The startup script would do something like:This copies the partition table, the boot stuff, the 5G partition, and then some extra blocks that don't matter.
Afterwards, your script should create an additional partition so that people can use the remaining disk space on their machines.
Alternatively, you can create the partitions dynamically in a script and then copy the file system contentsThat's a lot more work to set up and debug, however.
Why does anybody care what processor is in their box anymore? There is fairly little assembly language programming going on (and most of that is redundant), and beyond that, it's just cost/performance ratios that count, right? Now, however I look at it, a $570 motherboard with a 600MHz G3 just doesn't cut it for me in terms of cost/performance.
And if this is about principle and you don't want to support the Intel "monopoly", you can buy AMD, VIA, or any of a number of other processor and motherboard manufacturers.
Where would Europe be without the USA pumping BILLIONS in foreign aid into Europe? [...] We'll just go and call all of our loans to European nations as "Due and Immediately Payable" - your economy would crumble to nothing in a single day.
What planet are you from? The US is $2.7 trillion in debt to the rest of the world, much of it to Europe and Japan. The entire US economy is built on foreign debt and foreign investments.
And the US is one of the stingiest nations when it comes to foreign aid, to the point that it really is offensive. And the notion that Europeans receive "foreign aid" from the US is absolutely laughable.
You want to be on your own and without the support of the USA? Fine - when the next border skirmish or "ethnic cleansing" spat happens, you can fscking be on your own..Go figure it out yourself...and go fight your own wars.
I think that's actually what the Europeans are asking for.
Space exploration is a great thing, and we have the technology for extensive exploration of our solar system. I think that's a great thing to do.
Space colonization is something completely different, and much harder, however, and creating a self-sustaining colony on another body is even more out of reach.
What's far more dangerous than "space escapism" is "we-can-fix-it-ism" because that distracts us from making progress during the small window we have available (between technological ability and environmental meltdown).
I am pretty pessimistic about being able to fix it. But I'm even more pessimistic about space travel.
The only way to achieve the mandatory objectives you have detailed (controlling population growth, military spending, and pollution) is a global totalitarian government forever.
No, that's not "the only way". Many of our pollution problems could be taken care of with recycling laws, energy conservation laws, and similar laws. Free markets and free societies then come up with efficient ways to service those needs. And we have a really powerful marketing and PR machinery that can get people to kill themselves with unhealthy food and cigarettes and spend far more than they can afford; affecting reproductive choices would be an easy task in comparison.
Democracies, market economies, and capitalism can be stable, environmentally friendly, and sustainable. What will kill us, however, is leaving setting the goals and regulations under which democracies, market economies, and capitalism operate to chance.
Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
That platitude can be used to justify anything from mass murder to perpetual motion machines
Is the colonization of space apparently unreasonable?
Well, I'm all for research in new propulsion systems, basic physics, and many other aspects of science relevant to space travel. What I'm against is wasting money on futile projects like the space station or manned exploration of the planets. We can fly around the solar system for the next thousand years with current technology and we would still be unable to achieve colonization. Unless and until we achieve fundamental breakthroughs, space colonization is a pipe dream, and those breakthroughs depend on science to be done here on earth.
The breadth of our ecological destruction has created ripples that will ebb and flow for centuries to come.
What we have done to the ecology of the planet has been immoral and destructive, but it doesn't yet threaten our existence. If we stopped our destructive behaviors tomorrow, the planet would soon stabilize and then start to recover. What does threaten our existence is that we keep doing what we have been doing, on an ever expanding scale.
but many (scientists too) feel that we are already too far gone to save this planet or at least save it as we know it
Many people feel that way. It's the "oh, I have already had the greasy hamburger, I might as well have the unhealthy desert" kind of attitude. It's common and it has no basis in fact as far as I can tell, either when it comes to pollution or when it comes to unhealthy food.
Why run any Ethernet at all? Most people who want wireless want overlapping coverage anyway, and in that case, the APs can forward packets among themselves.
"it is silly to ignore the clear signs of environmental and social degradation simply because we've been fine up until now."
Quite silly, indeed. And the solution to that is to fix the social and environmental problems, not to have unrealistic dreams of escaping into space.
People like Rees better get used to the fact that we aren't going to get off this planet in significant numbers any time soon and that colonization of space is a pipe dream for now.
So far, there is not a shred of evidence that we can travel faster than light or even get close? But, more importantly, if we can't control population growth and pollution on earth, how is that going to work in space, where just going a little bit over the limits can mean death for everybody? Even Antarctica is very forgiving compared to space--at least you can breathe there and dig into the snow.
Eventually, we may be able to transform asteroids into habitats, but even that is far off, and it will probably not give rise to societies that are self-sustaining.
Rees's kind of "space escapism" is dangerous because it distracts us from the fact that we do have a choice: we can control population growth, we can control military spending, we can control pollution. For the next couple of centuries, we either make it work here, or we become extinct.
Perhaps the "masses" don't quite get it yet, but Microsoft's misdeeds have been widely reported in the IT press and I think it has already made a difference with corporate IT managers. They used to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt, but I think many of them have come to realize that that is a mistake, and they are bargaining harder and looking for alternatives.
Just to be clear, this isn't just an accidental effect, it seems almost certainly planned to me. Microsoft loves the SCO lawsuit because it validates their own unfounded rantings against Linux. But if they just handed money to SCO to go sue IBM and badmouth Linux, it wouldn't be very effective. Saying "we licensed SCO UNIX because we respect intellectual property" lets them both appear respectful of intellectual property and give money to SCO to act as their attack dog.
However, I don't see anything that anti-trust regulators can do about that.
What the open source community can try to do is deflect the PR impact back on Microsoft by making it crystal clear what a sleazy deal this really is. Than, rather than appearing law-abiding and respecting IP, Microsoft will come across as underhanded and deceitful.
Of course, if anybody could leak the memo from inside Microsoft where this deal was discussed, that would help even more... any volunteers?
The OSI position paper is excellent and answers a lot of questions.
SCO's case is so ludicrous (they don't even own the "UNIX" trademark) that one really does have to wonder what the motives of Microsoft are in paying them anything.