Get real, the only damage done to the project was via corporate marketdroids. As soon as it was obvious that the OLPC was a threat to corporate profits in school computer sales and overt attack campaign was launched via web trolls.
The underlying reality is the OPLC had to get out there as soon as it good, so that it be refined, and continue to develop, a continuing process. Along the way, there will always be for profit corporations who see the OLPC as nothing more but a source of profits and seek to take shortcuts and cheat the concept in order to increase profits.
For many countries, the ideal school notebook should be locally manufactured, as part of the education and development process. This is also necessary to ensure reliable supply in the event of any disruptive issues be that natural or man made disasters. For every child to have a notebook consistent supply becomes very important and the OLPC project as an open development process does teach a lot of lessons.
Of course the attacks on OLPC by various parties, also teaches other lessons, that corporate greed knows no bounds and billionaires remain greedy no matter how much money they have.
Generally the application of communism has been nothing more than another version of totalitarianism, so no I never have been nor wish to be a communist. I am quite comfortable with being a social democrat, you know, you just might possibly have heard of it, a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
Why would wanting to ensure legal accountability for corporate executive officers be considered communism. Taking legal and moral responsibility for your actions might be considered a long way from corporate fascism but it is hardly at the opposite end of the political spectrum, it is generally considered to be the conservative middle ground. Yes, I know it does allow for legalised lying cheating and stealing but, you must understand and you should clearly see by now by the example set by the current US administration that it is inevitably destructive and more closely aligned with being a totalitarian traitor than a democratic patriot.
Generally I go with politely informing the miss-informed during those all to frequent 'free' service and support sessions, all done in a friendly manner to ensure word of mouth to spread in forums and social networks that I have no real desire to visit. Best to leave the trolling to the marketdroids.
It is always terribly sad and pathetic when people try to reach back into history to try to justify what is happening today. Are you really serious, in trying to compare what is happening in China today has any bearing on what happened in the US a century back. In the current generation attempting to disrupt abuses by the corrupt autocratic government in China and helping the Tibetan people to regain their freedom today, now, with some kind of misguided nonsense of the failure of the current generation to some how travel to the past and prevent the abuses of a century ago.
In fact the whole fake China protests stink of autocratically controlled media and, the whole foul, corrupt idea of launching protests against other countries, for what, failing to silence their own citizens in their own countries, for failing to curtail the ability of citizens to express their freedoms and liberties in their own countries, for failing to punish citizens of other countries when they don't agreed with the corrupt government in China, you just really don't get how offensive that idea really is.
You will note, that I never call it the Chinese government but always refer to it as the Government of China, as the majority of Chinese have absolutely no control over it and are just exploited by it, it is not the government of the Chinese people, it is simply a government of a greedy and self serving, corrupt minority and the greed and ego involved have nothing to do with race or even politics. Those same kind of deceitful arse holes can be found all over the world in every country and in every nationality, the only difference is how much they are excluded from controlling the countries they fester in and, obviously not enough is being done in China or Tibet to curtail those autocratic individuals.
A effort should really be made to kill the oft repeated lie that costs will be passed onto the consumer. What a line of utter bullshit, the price to the consumer reflects the highest price that a corporation can charge, an often grossly inflated price supported by B$ marketing and often nothing to do with the actual cost of products sold.
Strangely enough corporations scream louder and attempt to spread more outlandish lies, as the gap between cost and retail becomes greater, greed knows no bounds and the corrupt need to protect extreme profits leads to these kind of sick lies.
The most interesting part of consumer subscription for office is a M$ admission of ballmer's balls up and the disaster that office 2007 has been, the least upgraded version of M$ office and the need to shift to a subscription model in the consumer market to try and sustain income. Of course M$'s version of subscription will be actual service and support will cost extra and the fees only pays for minimal access to the software, abridged useless help files and no manuals (basically paying for bug fixes).
Of course with the subscription fee version of the software expect invasive monitoring services to ensure service stops after you stop paying, what, protection money. They have tied office to required (as a result of windows and office security failings) security software, stop paying and you system will be infected within days and your data destroyed. You think they would have baulked at the whole blatant public perception of a M$ protection racket tied to your documents, ballmer really does work hard at creating the imagine of being an arrogant, disconnected git.
Being a little politically pro-active might also be called for. So not just a boycott but, actually making those offensive practices illegal and, punishable by long term imprisonment.
The internet provides the means by which the majority can regain control over politics and laws. The internet redefines how the public mind scape is formed and shaped. The mass media, greed is every thing message is dying, along with celebrity worship and the mindless messages that celebrities sell.
So a campaign of re-regulation, a campaign of corporate executive culpability and liability, a campaign of not only protecting what we have but also taking back what has already by stolen via corporate corruption of the political system.
Speaking of Ubuntu, I think Redhat's withdrawal from the desktop market has more to do with it losing to much desktop mind share to Ubuntu/Kubuntu. In a business sense a way of not admitting defeat to the newer upstart Canonical, it doesn't look good for the investors.
For Redhat of course, which Linux desktop is being used matters little to service and support contracts, as long as there is a perception in the market that they are fully capable of supporting.
Having the same desktop distribution spread over several major Linux Service and Support companies will simplify proprietary application distribution and installation as well as of course computer games for Linux sales.
With the market becoming increasingly resistant to software upgrades , an OS cross grade becomes increasingly desirable to stimulate software sales and for the bulk of the market the less money spent on the OS and basic office suite, the more money that becomes available for other software, literally billions of dollars per annum.
Re:Isn't the whole idea of a standard
on
ISO Releases OOXML FAQ
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· Score: 2, Insightful
What is funny about the whole thing. They both won and lost at the same time. Everybody knows the OOXML standard is bull shit and best to be ignored. No government can possibly stand up and say that is acceptable to store those documents under that standard. Most of all M$ demonstrated to the world at large, to industry and to governments, exactly what kind of people their executive team really are.
So where are the limits. What becomes far to much advertising. I have no problem about being 'informed' about a product. I do have problems with product exaggerations, product deceit, psychological manipulation and invasive product marketing. There is a world of difference between informing people about product and creating full psychological profiles of them so that they buying choices can be more effectively manipulated.
Can we all say what industry self regulation is all about;
1) How to maximise profits.
2) Avoiding any and all legal responsibilities for corrupt practices.
3) Political manipulation to protect those practices.
It is about time that advertising was forced to be completely truthful and included full product disclosure. We as consumers should be entitled to know more about the products and the companies producing them and in turn those companies are entitled to know nothing about us as individuals beyond credit financing requirements and a delivery address for products ordered.
Well that does bring up a point. Should you have to include extra coding in your html to block google, or should google only be allowed to deep search sites that have extra coding that invites them in.
Google in a way is saying that if you fail to properly secure your site that they have a right to data mine it and generate profits from your data. Perhaps, mind you, just perhaps, that really, legally, is not appropriate and perhaps a legal investigation is required to clarify this before everyone starts doing it.
The nonsense of your statement when you compare it to the utter failure that is the windows registry. The well known reason for most of windows failures to boot up. A defunct stupid idea.
Now compare that to being able to edit a simple text file, that can be done will the system is running and often the service that ties to that configuration file can stopped and restarted with out rebooting the system.
Would you care to guess how many, 'known faults', in the windows (P)OS require you to edit the registry, tens of thousands of 'known faults'.
The reason why employers are entitled to read employees email sent from the employers email server with the employers email address is because the employer is legally liable for the contents of the email. The employee as far as any receiver of the email is concerned sent that email of behalf of employer and the contents of that email reflect the intents of the employer.
To avoid hassles, I simply opened up the email log file to all employees, so that any employee could peruse any other employees email, no secrets, it calmed down the contents of email significantly and saved me the disgusting chore of monitoring for legally dangerous content, and as I was in charge of the servers I had the initial legal liability for email contents until I could prove someone else was responsible.
In this case patience will be a virtue as mobile internet connections get cheaper and 2nd notebooks get even cheaper, simply send and receive personal emails on your own personal hardware and do not use company infrastructure for personal communications. Now if your company attempts to ban personal communications hardware, or attempts to intercept and monitor personal communications on your own hardware, than use the unions to rip in up the employers and work to ensure management can ponder the error of their ways from the confines of a prison cell.
What is does is teaches future business leaders that there are choice beyond closed source proprietary software. As a tech site sometimes it is worth remembering that for 99.99% of businesses software is just an overhead, and even worse it is an overhead with an enormous service and support cost.
So understanding open source software, being able to deploy it effectively and establishing service and support systems for it, is very important to ensure major savings are achieved in this overhead cost.
The changes in software are shrinking. Upgrades are being rejected by a much more resistant business market, for them the only way to escape from the high cost software upgrade market is to make the the cross grade shift to open source software, so understanding is fundamental to making that cross grade shift.
The catch is the couldn't charge substantially extra for multi user. The whole B$ differentiation to inflate the price of windows continues to this day, nothing but greed and marketing lies.
There is a really terrible mistake going on here. You really can't link vaccines to anything. There are many different kinds of vaccines produced by many companies. It is really very bad to lump them all together.
So would a company produce 'a' cheap unreliable vaccine of poor quality in order to maximise short profits, well the history of corporations would tend to indicate that it is likely to happen. Would a corrupt corporation attempt to hide this behaviour to attempt to hide it's bad vaccine behind all the other safe and good vaccines by claiming any attack on their own product is an attack on all vaccines, well history would also tend to show that kind of behaviour will happen.
No one should repeat or spread that error, not all vaccines are the same, you can not compare every vaccine ever made, to one product like DDT, the idea is stupid. So the only question to ask is, can a particular vaccines made by a particular company cause undesirable side affects.
If I were a medical product manufacturer I would take the easy way out and simply prove that junk additives in junk foods cause a whole lot of different and varied problems. Hence it would be virtually impossible to prove than any particular medication from the 20th century caused any particular problem because it would have been near impossible for anybody to avoid all the junk food additives added into the modern western diet.
People do not go to you tube searching for campaign videos they get to youtube via the campaigners web site. All that needs to happen is for congress to add video streaming to the library of congress so the videos can be hosted there. Side benefits, kept as a matter of public record, un-editable once put up and campaigners held legally liable for them.
WTF is all the nonsense about trying to make Youtube of any other commercial site suitable, and should the video then go on to also be hosted by commercial video streaming sites, who cares.
Considering M$'s QDos history (quick dirty operating system). The reality is more likely, that they just spewed out an operating system it the quickest cheapest fashion they could. After all win 95 came out after windows for workgroups win3.11 (networking, so no excuse) and after they had already decided to stab their then partner Novell in the back with NT. With NT also having a greatly inflated price structure which partly in turn can only be justified by ensuring that the home version, 95 specifically had none at all.
With win98 the created the typical M$=B$ marketing illusion of security with a logon for win98, of course you still had to pay much more for that logon to actually mean anything and get winNT.
Ahh, the corporate manoeuvrings of marketing bullshit, the seeking of maxmium profits and attempting to establish an OS monopoly (with a good measure PR rewriting of history).
M$ is talking but is Newscorp really listening. Why would News Corp burden itself with a known untrusted partner like M$. Look at what News Corp achieved with Myspace in a very short time.
So does News Corp see M$/MSN as a potential partner, or a competitor to be defeated (bearing in mind News Corp is a substantial content holder and M$ is bascially a content vacuum, having failed miserably in it's attempt to create content via MSN).
While M$ has substantial cash reserves, there is no real effective way for News Corp to mine those cash reserves.
These talks only serve to highlight 'Ballmers' desperation and pretty much publicly announce that he is willing to up the bid for Yahoo (not really a bright thing to do at this stage, pretty damn stupid in fact).
News Corp, typical corporate manoeuvring seeking an advantage against it's competitors MSN and Yahoo.
What makes the thought that Yahoo is dead even sillier, is where the hell does that leave MSN and all the money ballmer blew on creating the go no where 'Live' brand. The reality is Yahoo is the leading portal. Where you compare time spent at the site, Yahoo is ahead of google, who just wins on numbers of short visits admittedly you tube picks up some extra time for google but most of it is indirect while people are actually at other sites and often even at the Yahoo portal.
The AOl, Newscorp stuff, is just business as usual, a means by which to force up M$ bid, to bleed it of more cash, don't forget both AOl and Newscorp are likely to have some sort of investment in Yahoo, so forcing M$ to substantially increase it's bid is a double plus bonus.
Newscorp is shifting further into being a web portal and AOL is starting to recover, Yahoo is reality is ahead of Google in being a portal and the one being left behind, the one consistently losing money, the one the parent company sees as a dead loss, is MSN or is it 'Live' or should that be 'Dead'.
yYou really are confused, it is the yes men corporate flunkies who are the sock puppets, you know the bend over butt monkeys and face it already M$> is nearly a decade old, and I have no idea who twitter is, seeing as you are so focussed with them, perhaps you can inform me about twitter as well as why M$ is so obsessed by twitter.
Is the 'Twitter' some past foe of the billy goat. Is the 'Twitter' an ex-M$ employee. Is the 'Twitter' a google employee. Perhaps with the billy goat's latest angst against Yahoo, is the 'Twitter' a Yahoo employee.
Perhaps twitter is just a M$ delusion, you know, like where is waldo, so if they are real where and who is twitter and who is meant to be end the 'Twitters' group. If it is meant to be a insult, isn't it just more than a little be lame after being called a cancerous, terrorist member of organised crime as well a communist to boot. Well if it makes you feel good go for it;D.
It wont change until Ballmer is gone becuase that is all that he is capable of, taking over some elses work, Gates. Ballmer has turned windows into a failure via Vista and Office via banner tool bars (I still haven't seen it in operation, so I can't really comment on how gone or bad that idea is, now that in itself is something to consider a year after it has been out).
So the current executive team, the driving force behind the direction of M$ lacks the skills necessary to, well, change direction. To successfully launch new products, to tackle new markets, to diversify M$ and generate profits not losses. Bluff and bluster and a lot of PR=B$ really does not achieve all that much in the internet age.
So to correct you post, and why would it change, it worked for M$ (had to throw the M$ in, it really, really, really irritates them;D).
I think the word you are looking for is simulation, not games. Computer generated simulations can be used as cost effective teaching tools, where the students can work on doing research to understand how changes in the variables will alter the outcomes and the logic behind the change mechanisms.
So more worthwhile research topics for universities might be the creation of said simulations for various educational topics including the required associated research materials to support the simulation.
A good topic for simulation good be a social humanities subject, where students can gain a greater under standing of those things that will have affects upon the nature of their societies. Science topics do really well in simulation, cheaper chemistry and physics experiments.
This also ignores that after selling the yahoo stock to M$ you somehow have to dump the M$ stock in order to get your money, and it will mean billions of dollars of M$ stock on the market at the same time inevitably leading to a fall in the price and basically shrinking the effective buy price.
It might be said that after the M$ bid fails that the Yahoo stock will fall in price, but the reality is the fall might not be all the great because M$ have basically admitted they have lost to Yahoo on the web and also that Yahoo remains the only significant competitive threat to Google on the web, otherwise why would M$ try to buy it.
There is usually a range significant differences between not for profit and for profit web sites. Not profit web sites, are usually made up of people with a direct shared interest, they are also usually monitored and controlled by those people with a shared common interests, the shared common interest is the goal as well as the benefit to the members, not greed and profits.
It is a perverse and extreme lie when you try to lump not for profit sites with for profit sites, and the only reason to do so is to hide the greed based for profit web sites who do not really care about their members but only how much they can make from them behind not for profit web sites where the members sharing common interest is all the site is about.
You should really be ashamed of yourself for trying to propagate that deceit. It is the same a spreading the lie that charities and corporation are basically the same, because both charities and for profit corporations supply goods and service. By that logic charities should be banned because the provide goods and services below cost and as such breach competition laws because for profit corporations cannot compete against them. The same as not for profit web sites do not have the revenue to pay for the cost of monitoring and validated all the data that they store versus for profit sites that often have billions of dollars of revenue that they seek to put into there own pockets rather than spending upon 'due care' responsibilities. So basically screw 'em and sue 'em.
Slashdot Mirror
The underlying reality is the OPLC had to get out there as soon as it good, so that it be refined, and continue to develop, a continuing process. Along the way, there will always be for profit corporations who see the OLPC as nothing more but a source of profits and seek to take shortcuts and cheat the concept in order to increase profits.
For many countries, the ideal school notebook should be locally manufactured, as part of the education and development process. This is also necessary to ensure reliable supply in the event of any disruptive issues be that natural or man made disasters. For every child to have a notebook consistent supply becomes very important and the OLPC project as an open development process does teach a lot of lessons.
Of course the attacks on OLPC by various parties, also teaches other lessons, that corporate greed knows no bounds and billionaires remain greedy no matter how much money they have.
Why would wanting to ensure legal accountability for corporate executive officers be considered communism. Taking legal and moral responsibility for your actions might be considered a long way from corporate fascism but it is hardly at the opposite end of the political spectrum, it is generally considered to be the conservative middle ground. Yes, I know it does allow for legalised lying cheating and stealing but, you must understand and you should clearly see by now by the example set by the current US administration that it is inevitably destructive and more closely aligned with being a totalitarian traitor than a democratic patriot.
Generally I go with politely informing the miss-informed during those all to frequent 'free' service and support sessions, all done in a friendly manner to ensure word of mouth to spread in forums and social networks that I have no real desire to visit. Best to leave the trolling to the marketdroids.
In fact the whole fake China protests stink of autocratically controlled media and, the whole foul, corrupt idea of launching protests against other countries, for what, failing to silence their own citizens in their own countries, for failing to curtail the ability of citizens to express their freedoms and liberties in their own countries, for failing to punish citizens of other countries when they don't agreed with the corrupt government in China, you just really don't get how offensive that idea really is.
You will note, that I never call it the Chinese government but always refer to it as the Government of China, as the majority of Chinese have absolutely no control over it and are just exploited by it, it is not the government of the Chinese people, it is simply a government of a greedy and self serving, corrupt minority and the greed and ego involved have nothing to do with race or even politics. Those same kind of deceitful arse holes can be found all over the world in every country and in every nationality, the only difference is how much they are excluded from controlling the countries they fester in and, obviously not enough is being done in China or Tibet to curtail those autocratic individuals.
Strangely enough corporations scream louder and attempt to spread more outlandish lies, as the gap between cost and retail becomes greater, greed knows no bounds and the corrupt need to protect extreme profits leads to these kind of sick lies.
Of course with the subscription fee version of the software expect invasive monitoring services to ensure service stops after you stop paying, what, protection money. They have tied office to required (as a result of windows and office security failings) security software, stop paying and you system will be infected within days and your data destroyed. You think they would have baulked at the whole blatant public perception of a M$ protection racket tied to your documents, ballmer really does work hard at creating the imagine of being an arrogant, disconnected git.
The internet provides the means by which the majority can regain control over politics and laws. The internet redefines how the public mind scape is formed and shaped. The mass media, greed is every thing message is dying, along with celebrity worship and the mindless messages that celebrities sell.
So a campaign of re-regulation, a campaign of corporate executive culpability and liability, a campaign of not only protecting what we have but also taking back what has already by stolen via corporate corruption of the political system.
For Redhat of course, which Linux desktop is being used matters little to service and support contracts, as long as there is a perception in the market that they are fully capable of supporting.
Having the same desktop distribution spread over several major Linux Service and Support companies will simplify proprietary application distribution and installation as well as of course computer games for Linux sales.
With the market becoming increasingly resistant to software upgrades , an OS cross grade becomes increasingly desirable to stimulate software sales and for the bulk of the market the less money spent on the OS and basic office suite, the more money that becomes available for other software, literally billions of dollars per annum.
What is funny about the whole thing. They both won and lost at the same time. Everybody knows the OOXML standard is bull shit and best to be ignored. No government can possibly stand up and say that is acceptable to store those documents under that standard. Most of all M$ demonstrated to the world at large, to industry and to governments, exactly what kind of people their executive team really are.
Can we all say what industry self regulation is all about;
1) How to maximise profits.
2) Avoiding any and all legal responsibilities for corrupt practices.
3) Political manipulation to protect those practices.
It is about time that advertising was forced to be completely truthful and included full product disclosure. We as consumers should be entitled to know more about the products and the companies producing them and in turn those companies are entitled to know nothing about us as individuals beyond credit financing requirements and a delivery address for products ordered.
Google in a way is saying that if you fail to properly secure your site that they have a right to data mine it and generate profits from your data. Perhaps, mind you, just perhaps, that really, legally, is not appropriate and perhaps a legal investigation is required to clarify this before everyone starts doing it.
Now compare that to being able to edit a simple text file, that can be done will the system is running and often the service that ties to that configuration file can stopped and restarted with out rebooting the system.
Would you care to guess how many, 'known faults', in the windows (P)OS require you to edit the registry, tens of thousands of 'known faults'.
To avoid hassles, I simply opened up the email log file to all employees, so that any employee could peruse any other employees email, no secrets, it calmed down the contents of email significantly and saved me the disgusting chore of monitoring for legally dangerous content, and as I was in charge of the servers I had the initial legal liability for email contents until I could prove someone else was responsible.
In this case patience will be a virtue as mobile internet connections get cheaper and 2nd notebooks get even cheaper, simply send and receive personal emails on your own personal hardware and do not use company infrastructure for personal communications. Now if your company attempts to ban personal communications hardware, or attempts to intercept and monitor personal communications on your own hardware, than use the unions to rip in up the employers and work to ensure management can ponder the error of their ways from the confines of a prison cell.
So understanding open source software, being able to deploy it effectively and establishing service and support systems for it, is very important to ensure major savings are achieved in this overhead cost.
The changes in software are shrinking. Upgrades are being rejected by a much more resistant business market, for them the only way to escape from the high cost software upgrade market is to make the the cross grade shift to open source software, so understanding is fundamental to making that cross grade shift.
The catch is the couldn't charge substantially extra for multi user. The whole B$ differentiation to inflate the price of windows continues to this day, nothing but greed and marketing lies.
So would a company produce 'a' cheap unreliable vaccine of poor quality in order to maximise short profits, well the history of corporations would tend to indicate that it is likely to happen. Would a corrupt corporation attempt to hide this behaviour to attempt to hide it's bad vaccine behind all the other safe and good vaccines by claiming any attack on their own product is an attack on all vaccines, well history would also tend to show that kind of behaviour will happen.
No one should repeat or spread that error, not all vaccines are the same, you can not compare every vaccine ever made, to one product like DDT, the idea is stupid. So the only question to ask is, can a particular vaccines made by a particular company cause undesirable side affects.
If I were a medical product manufacturer I would take the easy way out and simply prove that junk additives in junk foods cause a whole lot of different and varied problems. Hence it would be virtually impossible to prove than any particular medication from the 20th century caused any particular problem because it would have been near impossible for anybody to avoid all the junk food additives added into the modern western diet.
WTF is all the nonsense about trying to make Youtube of any other commercial site suitable, and should the video then go on to also be hosted by commercial video streaming sites, who cares.
With win98 the created the typical M$=B$ marketing illusion of security with a logon for win98, of course you still had to pay much more for that logon to actually mean anything and get winNT.
Ahh, the corporate manoeuvrings of marketing bullshit, the seeking of maxmium profits and attempting to establish an OS monopoly (with a good measure PR rewriting of history).
So does News Corp see M$/MSN as a potential partner, or a competitor to be defeated (bearing in mind News Corp is a substantial content holder and M$ is bascially a content vacuum, having failed miserably in it's attempt to create content via MSN).
While M$ has substantial cash reserves, there is no real effective way for News Corp to mine those cash reserves.
These talks only serve to highlight 'Ballmers' desperation and pretty much publicly announce that he is willing to up the bid for Yahoo (not really a bright thing to do at this stage, pretty damn stupid in fact).
News Corp, typical corporate manoeuvring seeking an advantage against it's competitors MSN and Yahoo.
The AOl, Newscorp stuff, is just business as usual, a means by which to force up M$ bid, to bleed it of more cash, don't forget both AOl and Newscorp are likely to have some sort of investment in Yahoo, so forcing M$ to substantially increase it's bid is a double plus bonus.
Newscorp is shifting further into being a web portal and AOL is starting to recover, Yahoo is reality is ahead of Google in being a portal and the one being left behind, the one consistently losing money, the one the parent company sees as a dead loss, is MSN or is it 'Live' or should that be 'Dead'.
Is the 'Twitter' some past foe of the billy goat. Is the 'Twitter' an ex-M$ employee. Is the 'Twitter' a google employee. Perhaps with the billy goat's latest angst against Yahoo, is the 'Twitter' a Yahoo employee.
Perhaps twitter is just a M$ delusion, you know, like where is waldo, so if they are real where and who is twitter and who is meant to be end the 'Twitters' group. If it is meant to be a insult, isn't it just more than a little be lame after being called a cancerous, terrorist member of organised crime as well a communist to boot. Well if it makes you feel good go for it ;D.
So the current executive team, the driving force behind the direction of M$ lacks the skills necessary to, well, change direction. To successfully launch new products, to tackle new markets, to diversify M$ and generate profits not losses. Bluff and bluster and a lot of PR=B$ really does not achieve all that much in the internet age.
So to correct you post, and why would it change, it worked for M$ (had to throw the M$ in, it really, really, really irritates them ;D).
So more worthwhile research topics for universities might be the creation of said simulations for various educational topics including the required associated research materials to support the simulation.
A good topic for simulation good be a social humanities subject, where students can gain a greater under standing of those things that will have affects upon the nature of their societies. Science topics do really well in simulation, cheaper chemistry and physics experiments.
This also ignores that after selling the yahoo stock to M$ you somehow have to dump the M$ stock in order to get your money, and it will mean billions of dollars of M$ stock on the market at the same time inevitably leading to a fall in the price and basically shrinking the effective buy price.
It might be said that after the M$ bid fails that the Yahoo stock will fall in price, but the reality is the fall might not be all the great because M$ have basically admitted they have lost to Yahoo on the web and also that Yahoo remains the only significant competitive threat to Google on the web, otherwise why would M$ try to buy it.
It is a perverse and extreme lie when you try to lump not for profit sites with for profit sites, and the only reason to do so is to hide the greed based for profit web sites who do not really care about their members but only how much they can make from them behind not for profit web sites where the members sharing common interest is all the site is about.
You should really be ashamed of yourself for trying to propagate that deceit. It is the same a spreading the lie that charities and corporation are basically the same, because both charities and for profit corporations supply goods and service. By that logic charities should be banned because the provide goods and services below cost and as such breach competition laws because for profit corporations cannot compete against them. The same as not for profit web sites do not have the revenue to pay for the cost of monitoring and validated all the data that they store versus for profit sites that often have billions of dollars of revenue that they seek to put into there own pockets rather than spending upon 'due care' responsibilities. So basically screw 'em and sue 'em.