This all comes about by Dell contracting out services and support to the lowest bidder, they got the worst possible results. For example contracting out telephone support and paying per call, means it is more profitable for the support company to hang up before the customer request is fulfilled and forcing the customer to make an additional call and repeat, they have been known to hang up when a set time limit is reached.
Contracting out service repairs means those repairs will be conducted as quickly and cheaply as possible by the most inexperienced cheapest staff they can get hold of, with faulty repairs being the result and of course another warranty repair that Dell foolishly has to pay for.
The reality is, it has always been, "sales, service and support", they are intertwined, and staff should be rotated through those functions so they become aware of customer needs pre and post sales and can work to implement the result of customer feedback. Contract out service and support and you will get results that are focused or making that service and support as profitable as possible regardless of the impact on sales.
Lets be nice and simply put in down to Paul Allen and Bill Gates vs Steve Ballmer. The break up of the earlier partnerships is also likely Ballmer's doing and his desire to be number 1 regardless of the self evident consequences for M$.
Vista is what you would expect with Ballmer at the helm and the current M$ marketing trend is all about hiding Ballmer's failures rather than accepting the mistakes, apologising to the investors and customers and introducing win2kpro 2008 edition (updated drivers).
Then again, I'm a penguinista, so Ballmer keep up the good 'sic' work;D, ahh, the world will, be a much pleasanter place with Linux as the default OS;).
However there is a fundamental flaw in the idea of attempting to prevent insurance companies from discriminating against people because of bad genes. Insurance companies can already discriminate against people who have existing conditions, that is quite legal, hence we a inflating your premiums because of your genes but because of your existing health conditions, that they discovered you health condition ad a result of analysing your genes is arbitrary.
Now lets look at even even more cynically, the cynicism based upon the greed of insurance companies and the current corrupt US administration. Hmm, based upon you genes you will be healthy for the next ten years at which time the genetic defect will manifest itself a a health condition and then your policy will no longer be renewed again not because of your genes but because of the then existing health condition.
So it all sound wonderful but it is B$, as all genetic defects can defined as health conditions and that information can be passed on and discriminated against ie not the inputs and the formulas just the results.
Now if you take that a bit further and say you just want a second PC that's very portable and low cost, something you could tolerate replacing at regular intervals due to user abuse, drops, dunkings and thefts. So you want a complete Linux install because not only is there going to be a reliable fully functioning reliable and secure OS there but also every other application your a likely to need for everyday use will also be there ie. for example an office suit (everybody forgets the office suit install).
Also if you futz thinks up a reinstall/repair disk will be also be in package.
So complete hardware without having to spend the same again in your own labour cost to get up and running or in the case of that other not to be named evil (P)OS double again to pay for the applications so you can actually do something with the computer ie. the software that you actually use that runs on top of the OS.
Hmm, hidden invasion of privacy. A lot of people would want to know if email coming to them or email being sent out is going far beyond the recipient. Thanks for that useful bit of information. I had no idea google was skulking about in the background hiding behind other domain name and turning private emails into what the googlites like to refer to as 'postcards'. Really makes you wonder how google would treat VOIP should they take that on board as well.
He should be sued as there is no way of protecting some ones identity. The whole term identity theft is very misleading, your a not stealing some ones identity, you are fraudulently misrepresenting yourself to another party in order to gain benefit from that party. That party then goes on to seek remunerated or other benefit from another innocent party.
So in reality the person whose identity was misused has a case for harm against the person who accepted the false identity and falsely brought action and harm against them. So two parties failed, the fraudulent individual who provided a false identity and the party that failed in ensuring due diligence and accepted that false identity, and further compounded their error by attacking an innocent party whose identity was abused.
Want to stop identity theft then start fining companies etc. that accept them and who then fraudulently seek reparation from innocent parties and if those innocent person suffer harm as a result allow them to seek compensation from the party that accepted the false indentity.
Quite simply to cut though the BS no contract, absolutely no contract can infringe upon statutory law. Lawyers are quite capable of utterly invalidating any contract that has just one clause that infringes upon statutory law, at which point all the conditions of contract revert to default general conditions of contract and any ambiguities will go against the party that wrote/supplied the contract.
So first sale doctrine under copyright law is a statutory law hence you can not write a civil condition of contract that will infringe that law, you can of course still do it but, when challenged in court that contract can then be voided.
When it comes to computer games it does make it very interesting fro a bunch of companies that only allow one of a registration of the game or a limited number of installation possible, as that does infringe upon a person right to sell the game when they no longer want it.
Currently the real problem is that government consumer protection authorities are completely failing in their duty of responsibility in ensuring a lot of this crap is nipped in the bud, in actively prosecuting companies that write criminally deficient contracts. Corrupt governments pandering to corporate interest have stripped away all power from consumer protections authorities, so that corporations can write criminal contracts and then force consumers who want to challenge them, to spend large amounts of money in court in order to do so.
Naturally, it is the spread of rampant capitalism, infrastructure to the lowest bidder, maintenance to the lowest bidder, profits today, cost are someone else's problem tomorrow, after the bonuses have been paid out.
Even real oddities can occur ie. when you charge for traffic across a network, DDOS attacks can prove very profitable to those selling bandwidth and it would actually cost them money without any financial return to stop them.
So it requires legislation to force privatised infrastructure providers to secure the network against hostile attacks, they will of course voluntarily spend inordinate amounts of money to prevent people stealing bandwidth but when it comes to securing their customers from attack they will only do so if they are forced.
Come on, can't you picture it, a bunch of marketdroids all sitting around a board room table telling each other how good they are, all waffling on about this whole new 'Live' marketing theme, it's alive, if you not using live your the undead, a living search service, it's like really really cool, cooler than google.
Of course all they were really doing is the the whole bullshit baffles brains thing and convincing management of why they are worth the bloated salaries. Now of course, you have to wonder which heads will role for the wasted live rebranding, as live has become 'the undead' search engine.
That the egg thrower was cheered on and allowed to leave peacefully of his own volition was pretty indicative of the majorities position and, ultimately even more humiliating for ballmer.
It really does demonstrate how unpopular M$ has become and why they have so much trouble with gaining market share utside of their existing eroding monopolies.
M$ was foolish enough to use it's management as part of it's marketing strategy, obviously more to do with the ego of it's management rather than being of any real benefit to M$ market share.
Now M$'s management has to pay the price of that marketing concept, either they leave or the company continues to suffer a deteriorating public image and growing shareholder discontent. Let the speculation start on who M$ will bring in to replace ballmer & co , to reinvigorate the company and rebuild it's public image.
It is fairly clear that the article is in fact pointing out far more sinister overtones "the City of London police came under fire two years ago when it emerged that more than 20 officers, ranging from constable to chief superintendent, had accepted gifts worth thousands of pounds from the Church of Scientology".
It would appear that an independent investigation by another regulatory authority needs to be carried out to investigate possibly corrupt links between the scientology cult and the London police force.
The cult has a history of being willing to traitorously infiltrate government legal authorities to serve it's own subversive and criminal purposes. Perhaps this flagrant abuse of the law will justly trigger that investigation. I am sure a lot of other countries will be taking a very close look at what happens in this case and whether the cult intends to or already has extended this pattern of behaviour into other countries.
The government is no more or less powerful than google they are both bound by the law. Og course the government writes those laws and corporations currently pay them to write laws that favour them, so who is the weaker or more powerful is anybodies guess, until of course the general public are sufficiently motivated to force change, then they are the most powerful, all you have to to is try to wake them from a decades long slumber.
Of course to take a more cynical view of google not censoring at the whim of a single politico in the US whilst they are quite willing to do so in other countries, one could say that the harm it would do to googles image to censor in the US forces some sort of moral behaviour ie. bad image low profits (they are a marketing company) versus other countries where if they fail to censor the ability to generate profits will be curbed by autocratic governments.
So in this case youtube's protection of free speech against the wishes of a US politician tends to highlight the morality of the US general public and their desire to protect free speech, rather than necessarily any morality on the part of googles management other than a marketing driven profit motivation.
The most damming indictment of M$, is they are incapable of effectively investing that 40 billion dollars into MSN and making it perform. Now they want to buy the search portion of Yahoo as that is all that they can afford.
Search is already losing the marketing edge that google was able to fabricate around it a marketing illusion, at the end of the day search is just an extension of a web portal and the rest of the portal is far more important in keeping the user on site.
The only real adjustment portal companies need to make is that they should be making far better uses of tab under firefox ie. when a search is initiated from their portal in should open in another tab so as to keep the portal page the home page alive on the users screen. That way once the search is over, some minutes latter and that tabbed screen closed the user returns to the portal screen ie. search is relegated to a basic utility an infrequent background activity.
So based upon that M$ buys what, I don't know, whose on first, perhaps it's an old comedy routine. As it is the old world media companies are all working hard at chewing into googles lead in search and of course more importantly are now trying to gain the mass market home page, portal advantage, that of course is far more important, hours per day as the users home page portal versus minutes per day for the search utility.
The whole idea of a myth TV box is you still have a full fledged PC. A media juke box, and dvd player, a web browser, multiple screens, rip, covert, view and record from different sources all at the same time, it can even add a file server, fire wall and email serving to it's functions (it a home situation these elements take up very little resources).
Simply if you have trouble doing the configuring, spend the money you save on software licence fees when you are use FOSS to pay someone to do it for you, a customised to you solution that you can have changed and that you control as you deem appropriate.
Personally I would see all the off topic comments and the titled moderation at the beginning of this thread as a typical googlite attempt to take away from yet another profit first humanity last act by google. So is actively flooding the first page of slashdot posting and then modding them up an act of evil, perhaps not but, certainly attempting to avoid and bury a public review for turning over a person knowing full well the repercussion of that act, especially when so many people would consider the act worthy of no punishment but also turning someone in to be evil.
So what is the difference between a googlite troll and an M$ micro trolls, apparently very little, yetch, marketdroids, humanity for sale to the highest bidder. We all know the answer to problems like these we just have to pay off these profit first corporations to protect ourselves from them, protection money, billions of dollars worth, either that or they will sell us out with out batting an eyelid and then lie to us about it.
Either way the whole idea is nucking futs. Why would your bother to try a run a more secure and stable OS on top of an unsecure and unstable 'Work In Progress' (P)OS. Now I can understand wanting to access the windows OS from Linux to play computer games because of the number of titles available and that way your work and internet connections are kept secure from the vagaries of what is basically a games console but why the hell would you try to conduct important work and financial activities as an extension to a windows PC game console. Talk about trying build multi storey structures upon foundations of jello;).
It is all about how the money will be spent. Expect a few corporations to stick their snouts into the trough to sell filtering software to the government which they will make it an option for parents. So think in terms of millions of prepaid unused licences for filtering software, it's called pork, sold by lobbyists and it is the worst kind of goatse tax pornography.
It will fill plenty of mass media news articles, with glorious advertising as news write ups, politicians will get re-elected, filtering and censoring corporations will sneak off with hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, child pornographers will get blamed for all the evil in the world (they are really pretty nasty people, thankfully there are all not that many of them in reality, but after enough PR=B$ they will be hiding under every child's bed) and then we will all move onto the next let's rip off the tax payer idea.
All this means is, the terrorist mass media political fear propaganda is becoming ho hum so it is back to the child abuse fear propaganda, I'm expecting they will eventually move onto alien invasion, a whole lot a B$ and I'm sure politicians and corporations could make billions from the whole, oh no 'we all gonna get probed by aliens' fear machine, in some ways I am surprised they have not already done it;D.
A lot of Vista so called sales are in reality M$=B$, due to the way they sell XP as downgrade option when you buy a PC, so it counts as a Vista sales even though XP is installed and used. So typical M$ the lie is simply presented to the investing public to try to preserve an image of management competence.
MSN at one stage competed equally with Yahoo and was way ahead of google. Search is not enough, it is basically a flash in the pan, a complete web portal and retaining users for an extended period of time. Google add words revenue is losing its market, it is just cheap low entry level spamwords, with a lot of hits but with very low user time on site.
So MSN screwed up it's own user baser losing massive chunks of market, so buying Yahoo with the same MSN management just gives them the opportunity to repeat the exercise.
Jump ship is easy, CBS just bought CNET, Disney/ABC are marking moves, Newscorp is moving ahead, AOL/Time Warner are rebuilding, oddly enough googles portal is the most luck luster compared to that group (hits do not count the same as time on site). So MSN buys Yahoo, Yahoo users start 'LOOKING' for alternates, finding something reasonable is easy there are plenty to choose from and shift to.
It is easy to lose market share on the net, just look at Alta Vista, Look Smart, Lycos (wired) etc., buying it in when you have failed at retaining and expanding upon it does not bode well for the future. Make no mistake, Yahoo and MSN, competitors want the buy to go ahead, M$ would have screwed up Yahoo and freed up a lot of market share to be snapped up by other portals.
In this case it would be hard to show criminal intent, although the US still does maintain the catch all conspiracy crime, for where no crime is actually committed but they still want to send you to prison.
Well logical extrapolation would indicate that based upon the existence of gravity that gravitons exist. There are three basic types of energy, particle energy (the energy bound up within existence of a particle), transitional energy (energy temporarily stored by particles) and, gravitational energy (the energy generated by gravitons).
Ya got gravity, ya got gravitons, can't git sumtin from nuttin. We really have to lose this whole self aggrandising, it we haven't discovered it it doesn't exist thing, history should have taught us by now there is a whole lot of stuff that exists that we haven't discovered yet or even figured out how it works.
It certainly is interesting that a Vatican priest express a opinion that would have been considered heretical not all that long ago. It does make one wonder, what has occurred or what has been discovered that would alter that viewpoint or their willingness to publicly express that viewpoint;).
Not only that but M$ will block the installation of OpenOffice.org on the windows OLPC boxes just as it does on all the low price ultra portables. So the lie that it will only add $3 to the cost is simply another marketing lie, as it will all add a repeating M$ office licence fee another licence fee to be spent again and again, at upgrades and as a result of hardware failures.
The OLPC project lost focus as the low price ultra portable open notebooks started eating into it's market identity. In order to retain significance it sidled up to M$. M$ jumped at the opportunity, not to promote OLPC, or even to sell it's software at a profit losing discount but to kill the OLPC.
M$ just like the other single minded greed is everything corporations wants to bleed the taxpayer dry, with endless licence fees, service and support fees, upgrade fees, server fees, content distribution fees etc. etc. etc. all dumped onto the cost of educating the children of the world not only in the third world but also the first and second world.
The OLPC is just as useful an educational tool in first world countries as it is in third world countries and, people don't really realise how threatening that was to the arse holes of greed, all those billions of dollars of profit gone wanting or in reality tax payer dollars spent more usefully than on bloating the profit margins a just a handful of companies.
Well at least the OLPC was not a failure, it launched a whole new line of notebooks and created a focus on achieving low cost educational computers using FOSS software, an effort that will only grow, and continue to expand well beyond the M$ lead demise of the OLPC.
That has always been the problem when you make the universe infinite, the only effective way of doing so is to define infinity as a dimensions and reality is just the expression of finite probabilities, even when any fraction of infinity is infinite in itself.
An interesting way of expressing this is with a coin toss. A finite probability of two possible results, heads or tails. However that coin toss can also be infinitely complex when you consider a far more complex reaction, like which calcium atoms would transfer from the surface of your thumb nail to the surface of the table during that same experiment, a result that would not only be governed by the orbital motions of the sub atomic particles making up the surface of the your nail, the coin and the table but also the larger motions of galaxy altering gravity, major electro magnetic fields and your only own personal reactions, a infinitely complex calculation far beyond our abilities to forecast.
The interesting point being that based upon significance, an 'in reality' infinitely complex reaction can be reduced to the simple finite result of heads or tails, hmm, the nature of our universe and, the importance of relativity and significance.
The M$ buy of Yahoo had nothing to do with making M$ a better company, it was all about Ballmer's survivability after his windows and office blunders as well as his bombastic boats about beating google. This was a look at the other hand buy, a whole lot of flash and noise about buying Yahoo to obscure the failures.
Simply put, in a few months the M$=B$ PR machine would rewrite history, add Yahoo market share and revenue to MSN's lack of market share and revenue and then claim all those gains for MSN as a result of Ballmer's skill, rather than simply buying those numbers in at a loss.
Hence you succinctly define the problem with the prosecutions case. Mo one has any way currently of accurately knowing what the results will be of this kind of psychological abuse of a minor. Whether it will result in suicidal tendencies, a need for revenge or just indifference. Unlike a physical assault where the result of the attack can be surmised, the person who commits this kind of psychological assault can not guess at the results other than causing pain.
The person who committed the attack is obviously seriously disturbed and perhaps as a result of a criminal prosecution should be subject to psychological evaluation and treatment, perhaps even committed to a suitable facility for a time. A extended prison term would hardly serve any purpose or even set a useful precedent. Clearly though, it does point out the problems of that adults and minors mixing in web social networks, unless those adults and properly trained and are only acting in a supervisory or instructional role.
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Contracting out service repairs means those repairs will be conducted as quickly and cheaply as possible by the most inexperienced cheapest staff they can get hold of, with faulty repairs being the result and of course another warranty repair that Dell foolishly has to pay for.
The reality is, it has always been, "sales, service and support", they are intertwined, and staff should be rotated through those functions so they become aware of customer needs pre and post sales and can work to implement the result of customer feedback. Contract out service and support and you will get results that are focused or making that service and support as profitable as possible regardless of the impact on sales.
Vista is what you would expect with Ballmer at the helm and the current M$ marketing trend is all about hiding Ballmer's failures rather than accepting the mistakes, apologising to the investors and customers and introducing win2kpro 2008 edition (updated drivers).
Then again, I'm a penguinista, so Ballmer keep up the good 'sic' work ;D, ahh, the world will, be a much pleasanter place with Linux as the default OS ;).
Now lets look at even even more cynically, the cynicism based upon the greed of insurance companies and the current corrupt US administration. Hmm, based upon you genes you will be healthy for the next ten years at which time the genetic defect will manifest itself a a health condition and then your policy will no longer be renewed again not because of your genes but because of the then existing health condition.
So it all sound wonderful but it is B$, as all genetic defects can defined as health conditions and that information can be passed on and discriminated against ie not the inputs and the formulas just the results.
Also if you futz thinks up a reinstall/repair disk will be also be in package.
So complete hardware without having to spend the same again in your own labour cost to get up and running or in the case of that other not to be named evil (P)OS double again to pay for the applications so you can actually do something with the computer ie. the software that you actually use that runs on top of the OS.
Hmm, hidden invasion of privacy. A lot of people would want to know if email coming to them or email being sent out is going far beyond the recipient. Thanks for that useful bit of information. I had no idea google was skulking about in the background hiding behind other domain name and turning private emails into what the googlites like to refer to as 'postcards'. Really makes you wonder how google would treat VOIP should they take that on board as well.
So in reality the person whose identity was misused has a case for harm against the person who accepted the false identity and falsely brought action and harm against them. So two parties failed, the fraudulent individual who provided a false identity and the party that failed in ensuring due diligence and accepted that false identity, and further compounded their error by attacking an innocent party whose identity was abused.
Want to stop identity theft then start fining companies etc. that accept them and who then fraudulently seek reparation from innocent parties and if those innocent person suffer harm as a result allow them to seek compensation from the party that accepted the false indentity.
So first sale doctrine under copyright law is a statutory law hence you can not write a civil condition of contract that will infringe that law, you can of course still do it but, when challenged in court that contract can then be voided.
When it comes to computer games it does make it very interesting fro a bunch of companies that only allow one of a registration of the game or a limited number of installation possible, as that does infringe upon a person right to sell the game when they no longer want it.
Currently the real problem is that government consumer protection authorities are completely failing in their duty of responsibility in ensuring a lot of this crap is nipped in the bud, in actively prosecuting companies that write criminally deficient contracts. Corrupt governments pandering to corporate interest have stripped away all power from consumer protections authorities, so that corporations can write criminal contracts and then force consumers who want to challenge them, to spend large amounts of money in court in order to do so.
Even real oddities can occur ie. when you charge for traffic across a network, DDOS attacks can prove very profitable to those selling bandwidth and it would actually cost them money without any financial return to stop them.
So it requires legislation to force privatised infrastructure providers to secure the network against hostile attacks, they will of course voluntarily spend inordinate amounts of money to prevent people stealing bandwidth but when it comes to securing their customers from attack they will only do so if they are forced.
Of course all they were really doing is the the whole bullshit baffles brains thing and convincing management of why they are worth the bloated salaries. Now of course, you have to wonder which heads will role for the wasted live rebranding, as live has become 'the undead' search engine.
It really does demonstrate how unpopular M$ has become and why they have so much trouble with gaining market share utside of their existing eroding monopolies.
M$ was foolish enough to use it's management as part of it's marketing strategy, obviously more to do with the ego of it's management rather than being of any real benefit to M$ market share.
Now M$'s management has to pay the price of that marketing concept, either they leave or the company continues to suffer a deteriorating public image and growing shareholder discontent. Let the speculation start on who M$ will bring in to replace ballmer & co , to reinvigorate the company and rebuild it's public image.
It would appear that an independent investigation by another regulatory authority needs to be carried out to investigate possibly corrupt links between the scientology cult and the London police force.
The cult has a history of being willing to traitorously infiltrate government legal authorities to serve it's own subversive and criminal purposes. Perhaps this flagrant abuse of the law will justly trigger that investigation. I am sure a lot of other countries will be taking a very close look at what happens in this case and whether the cult intends to or already has extended this pattern of behaviour into other countries.
Of course to take a more cynical view of google not censoring at the whim of a single politico in the US whilst they are quite willing to do so in other countries, one could say that the harm it would do to googles image to censor in the US forces some sort of moral behaviour ie. bad image low profits (they are a marketing company) versus other countries where if they fail to censor the ability to generate profits will be curbed by autocratic governments.
So in this case youtube's protection of free speech against the wishes of a US politician tends to highlight the morality of the US general public and their desire to protect free speech, rather than necessarily any morality on the part of googles management other than a marketing driven profit motivation.
Search is already losing the marketing edge that google was able to fabricate around it a marketing illusion, at the end of the day search is just an extension of a web portal and the rest of the portal is far more important in keeping the user on site.
The only real adjustment portal companies need to make is that they should be making far better uses of tab under firefox ie. when a search is initiated from their portal in should open in another tab so as to keep the portal page the home page alive on the users screen. That way once the search is over, some minutes latter and that tabbed screen closed the user returns to the portal screen ie. search is relegated to a basic utility an infrequent background activity.
So based upon that M$ buys what, I don't know, whose on first, perhaps it's an old comedy routine. As it is the old world media companies are all working hard at chewing into googles lead in search and of course more importantly are now trying to gain the mass market home page, portal advantage, that of course is far more important, hours per day as the users home page portal versus minutes per day for the search utility.
Simply if you have trouble doing the configuring, spend the money you save on software licence fees when you are use FOSS to pay someone to do it for you, a customised to you solution that you can have changed and that you control as you deem appropriate.
So what is the difference between a googlite troll and an M$ micro trolls, apparently very little, yetch, marketdroids, humanity for sale to the highest bidder. We all know the answer to problems like these we just have to pay off these profit first corporations to protect ourselves from them, protection money, billions of dollars worth, either that or they will sell us out with out batting an eyelid and then lie to us about it.
Either way the whole idea is nucking futs. Why would your bother to try a run a more secure and stable OS on top of an unsecure and unstable 'Work In Progress' (P)OS. Now I can understand wanting to access the windows OS from Linux to play computer games because of the number of titles available and that way your work and internet connections are kept secure from the vagaries of what is basically a games console but why the hell would you try to conduct important work and financial activities as an extension to a windows PC game console. Talk about trying build multi storey structures upon foundations of jello ;).
It will fill plenty of mass media news articles, with glorious advertising as news write ups, politicians will get re-elected, filtering and censoring corporations will sneak off with hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, child pornographers will get blamed for all the evil in the world (they are really pretty nasty people, thankfully there are all not that many of them in reality, but after enough PR=B$ they will be hiding under every child's bed) and then we will all move onto the next let's rip off the tax payer idea.
All this means is, the terrorist mass media political fear propaganda is becoming ho hum so it is back to the child abuse fear propaganda, I'm expecting they will eventually move onto alien invasion, a whole lot a B$ and I'm sure politicians and corporations could make billions from the whole, oh no 'we all gonna get probed by aliens' fear machine, in some ways I am surprised they have not already done it ;D.
A lot of Vista so called sales are in reality M$=B$, due to the way they sell XP as downgrade option when you buy a PC, so it counts as a Vista sales even though XP is installed and used. So typical M$ the lie is simply presented to the investing public to try to preserve an image of management competence.
So MSN screwed up it's own user baser losing massive chunks of market, so buying Yahoo with the same MSN management just gives them the opportunity to repeat the exercise.
Jump ship is easy, CBS just bought CNET, Disney/ABC are marking moves, Newscorp is moving ahead, AOL/Time Warner are rebuilding, oddly enough googles portal is the most luck luster compared to that group (hits do not count the same as time on site). So MSN buys Yahoo, Yahoo users start 'LOOKING' for alternates, finding something reasonable is easy there are plenty to choose from and shift to.
It is easy to lose market share on the net, just look at Alta Vista, Look Smart, Lycos (wired) etc., buying it in when you have failed at retaining and expanding upon it does not bode well for the future. Make no mistake, Yahoo and MSN, competitors want the buy to go ahead, M$ would have screwed up Yahoo and freed up a lot of market share to be snapped up by other portals.
In this case it would be hard to show criminal intent, although the US still does maintain the catch all conspiracy crime, for where no crime is actually committed but they still want to send you to prison.
Ya got gravity, ya got gravitons, can't git sumtin from nuttin. We really have to lose this whole self aggrandising, it we haven't discovered it it doesn't exist thing, history should have taught us by now there is a whole lot of stuff that exists that we haven't discovered yet or even figured out how it works.
It certainly is interesting that a Vatican priest express a opinion that would have been considered heretical not all that long ago. It does make one wonder, what has occurred or what has been discovered that would alter that viewpoint or their willingness to publicly express that viewpoint ;).
The OLPC project lost focus as the low price ultra portable open notebooks started eating into it's market identity. In order to retain significance it sidled up to M$. M$ jumped at the opportunity, not to promote OLPC, or even to sell it's software at a profit losing discount but to kill the OLPC.
M$ just like the other single minded greed is everything corporations wants to bleed the taxpayer dry, with endless licence fees, service and support fees, upgrade fees, server fees, content distribution fees etc. etc. etc. all dumped onto the cost of educating the children of the world not only in the third world but also the first and second world.
The OLPC is just as useful an educational tool in first world countries as it is in third world countries and, people don't really realise how threatening that was to the arse holes of greed, all those billions of dollars of profit gone wanting or in reality tax payer dollars spent more usefully than on bloating the profit margins a just a handful of companies.
Well at least the OLPC was not a failure, it launched a whole new line of notebooks and created a focus on achieving low cost educational computers using FOSS software, an effort that will only grow, and continue to expand well beyond the M$ lead demise of the OLPC.
An interesting way of expressing this is with a coin toss. A finite probability of two possible results, heads or tails. However that coin toss can also be infinitely complex when you consider a far more complex reaction, like which calcium atoms would transfer from the surface of your thumb nail to the surface of the table during that same experiment, a result that would not only be governed by the orbital motions of the sub atomic particles making up the surface of the your nail, the coin and the table but also the larger motions of galaxy altering gravity, major electro magnetic fields and your only own personal reactions, a infinitely complex calculation far beyond our abilities to forecast.
The interesting point being that based upon significance, an 'in reality' infinitely complex reaction can be reduced to the simple finite result of heads or tails, hmm, the nature of our universe and, the importance of relativity and significance.
Simply put, in a few months the M$=B$ PR machine would rewrite history, add Yahoo market share and revenue to MSN's lack of market share and revenue and then claim all those gains for MSN as a result of Ballmer's skill, rather than simply buying those numbers in at a loss.
The person who committed the attack is obviously seriously disturbed and perhaps as a result of a criminal prosecution should be subject to psychological evaluation and treatment, perhaps even committed to a suitable facility for a time. A extended prison term would hardly serve any purpose or even set a useful precedent. Clearly though, it does point out the problems of that adults and minors mixing in web social networks, unless those adults and properly trained and are only acting in a supervisory or instructional role.