Re:I think you jumped the gun a little.
on
Watchmen Watched
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I went to see the midnight release in IMax and thought it was amazing. I was worried about the changed ending, but after seeing it, it works very well. The cinematography and choice of music was spot on and even though a lot of people bitched about the slow-mo fighting I thought it looked cool. Had one person with us who hadn't read the books and she thought the movie was "good" and she enjoyed it. I wouldn't call myself a huge fan by any stretch (the first time I read the comic was only a few months ago), but I did enjoy the comic and I think they did a good job on the movie. Oh, and yes I did go to work today, I'm just a bit tired now is all.
Nope sorry, it's still balanced, you just forgot to factor in the momentum of the moon. Once all the forces are factored in properly it still amounts to a net 0 (more or less, the moon is slowly de-orbiting, but it's going to take a very long time).
Nope, still not possible. By the very nature of it it would take more energy to move the plate out of the way than would ever be generated by it moving in the first place. Essentially all the Casimiar force is is the quantum version of a pressure differential. It's a very interesting phenomenon and has some possible uses in the design of nano scale generators and parts, but it will never be a energy source on its own. To be clear what I mean is that the effective could be incorporated into the design of a generator for extra gains on efficiency or as part of a large principle, but the force itself is not enough to build a generator around and it will never be a primary motive force.
And before anyone makes a big deal out of it, feel free to replace any occurrence of Microsoft in the previous statement with any other entity of their choosing.
Someone else already gave a pretty good explanation of why this wouldn't work, but I'll see if I can give a slightly better explanation. Consider this, anytime you have unequal forces objects move, and we can in most cases convert that movement (which is simply excess energy) into power. When however forces are balanced no movement occurs, and no excess energy is released that can be harnessed. As a related example things are constantly attracted to the Earth via gravity, which is a force (rather well understood and easily quantified at that), however there is an opposing force in the collision of two solid masses, that is the force of gravity attracting an object towards the center of the Earth is opposed by the force of the ground pushing back at the object and preventing it from moving closer to the center of the Earth. In the example you give even though there is a force attempting to bring the plates together it is being canceled out by your supposed "something", thus resulting in a net zero for the forces involved, and therefore no way to harvest any energy out of the configuration. You could of course attach those "somethings" to some kind of generator that generates electricity when they move and allow the Casimir force to bring the plates together thereby harvesting that energy (a very very tiny amount of energy), but in order to generate more energy from that effect you would need to separate the plates again which would take as much or more energy than was harvested from the effect in the first place.
Time an again it has been shown there is no free energy no matter how you slice it. We had our peak during the big bang, and its all been going down hill since then. The most we can hope for is to harness as much of the already existing energy as we can.
They should use something like GIT and assign each congress critter a login (and make the revision history available to the public). Not only could we follow the larger modifications of a bill at the central level as it moves through congress, but we could look at the branches each congress critter checks in and see what kinds of modifications occur in their own office. What would be really neat is if someone then took that data and did a bit of correlation between changes made at particular times and recent visits of lobbyists. Imagine the questions that might be raised if a congress critter has a recent visit by say a Microsoft lobbyist, and then a few days later amends a seemingly unrelated bill in a way that turns out to be beneficial to MS.
Actually if they would just price it around ~$900 give or take $100 I might consider it. I put together a very similar system on newegg for ~$960 including shipping, but that also included a beefier GPU, and a 1TB Raid-0 array, but no Blu-Ray, and a case that isn't quite as nice but provided better active cooling.
Perhaps they need a warning on a vaccines that says: WARNING: vaccine may contain vaccine.
If I'm paying for it, it damn well better contain vaccine.
Seriously though, a warning that a small percentage of the population has dangerous allergic reactions to vaccines (same as any other substance you might come into contact with) would probably go a long way towards fending off these "OMG BAN VACCINES!" morons. The simple fact is, anything you come into contact with poses a risk of allergic reaction, whether it peanuts, penicillin, or titanium (that one surprised me as I thought it was inert, but friend of mine is allergic to it).
Do we really want courts deciding scientific fact?
Why not? The media industry decides on the law.
OK, if I'm following this that means:
Media -> Law -> Courts -> Science
So the Media now defines science?... of course now that I think about it, that's probably not to far from the truth for a distressingly large portion of the population.
This was one of my initial thoughts as well so I looked at the text of the Americans with Disabilities Act to see if anything would apply in this case and I don't think it would. Someone might still try to file a discrimination suit, but I'm not sure it would get anywhere (they are however on stronger ground than the Authors Guild appears to be). Ultimately whether the ADA suit would win or not isn't the point as you note, it's a case of bad publicity. I do wonder however if that wouldn't have the opposite effect of what the Authors Guild wants and force other ebook manufacturers to include text-to-speech software in their ebooks in order not to prevent future bad press or ADA suits.
Well, there are some interesting questions here, but ultimately I still think it boils down to nothing (and before I forgot, IANAL still). First of all even though space shifting is illegal in some parts of the world, it's legal under fair use in the US. Since the one bringing the suit is an US organization, and Amazon (so far as I know) is an US company, I would assume the suit would be tried in the USA and hence fall under US law. It might (depending on the contract) violate Amazons contract to distribute audio recordings of the ebooks, but they very clearly do have a contract for the ebooks. In order to fall afoul of contributory or vicarious infringement I believe (once again IANAL) they would have to show they helped someone else violate copyright. Now, it would violate copyright if Amazon did the space shifting, but the end user has that right under fair use (as per US law). So, the question is, is it contributory or vicarious infringement to contribute to someone else doing something legal that would be illegal if you yourself did it. I think, the answer to that question is no, but once again IANAL.
IANAL but I was once told by a lawyer that you can bring a civil suit against someone for anything you want, whether you have a case or not. It's just that doing so most likely won't get you anywhere except maybe in trouble for wasting the courts time, or for the lawyer involved possible disbarment.
IANAL. "I think you are an asshole!" is not actionable as it clearly states an opinion. "Todd Knarr has sex with farm animals!" is actionable (unless you can show it to be true!) as you make a clear statement of fact. IANAL.
Having had a similar discussion with someone in the past I'll share what I learned with you. On the topic of the second statement it's still actionable in some parts of the world (the UK notably) where truth is not considered a defense to libel. IANAL yada yada yada.
Fist, since someone made a smart ass remark about it, IANAL, this is not legal advice, if you make legal decisions based on what you read on the internet you are officially a moron, ask a lawyer, yada yada yada.
You are missing the point that Amazon is selling the works as both text and audio when they have a contract to only sell text. That Amazon is touting the Kindles ability to translate text to audio as a reason to buy the Kindle demonstrates that Amazon thinks they are selling you something in addition to text.
But they aren't selling the works as audio. At no point do you receive an audio copy from Amazon. What you receive is a text copy which is what they have the contract to sell. It's the end consumer, the one with the kindle who is converting that text version into a audio version (on the fly I believe, so no fixed form, and therefore not covered by copyright law) not Amazon. Amazon is not responsible for what the consumer does with the product after it's sold, and unless you can figure out some way to argue that text-to-speech software is illegal or that its primary purpose is copyright violation (putting it in violation of the DMCA) there's nothing illegal about the kindle. Amazon is selling two products (for the purposes of this discussion), the first is a ebook reader that has build in text-to-speech support, and the second is ebooks. Amazon has contracts to sell the ebooks, and therefore can do so legally. The kindle so far as I know, is also perfectly legal (and if it isn't, there's probably a whole bunch more hardware and/or software that's also illegal). Furthermore, the user has the right to space shift the ebook they purchase (at least in the US, apparently in the UK they don't) so that's fine to. So, unless Amazon is actually allowing users to download mp3s or wavs or whatever of the ebooks they purchase I don't see anyway in which you could argue they're violating copyright.
That doesn't answer a crucial question, which is whether Amazon, the maker and seller of Kindle and the works that can be used in it, has the right to "space-shift" the works that it sells specifically for use in its device. You can bet that this is the angle the Author's Guild is going to push, in order to pressure Amazon to agree to license audiobook rights for the e-books they sell for Kindle.
But they aren't distributing (or selling) an audio copy of the book (the work), rather they distribute a regular ebook copy, it's just that the reader they also sell has text-to-speech support and can do the space shifting on the final distributed work. It's like arguing that Apple is selling CDs because they sell MP3s (or whatever the specific format is) and iTunes has the ability to convert those into CDs. Ultimately it's the user that's doing the space shifting, not Amazon. If you buy the book from Amazon and download it on your kindle, it's perfectly possible to read that book without ever using the text-to-speech capability of the device. Likewise if you purchased the exact same ebook and downloaded it onto some other device that didn't have text-to-speech capability you wouldn't be able to do the conversion without further hardware/software being involved. You might as well say your local grocery store needs a license to distribute ebook versions of the tabloids it sells since someone could go home and use OCR software to convert them into ebooks.
You can't space-shift a DRM laiden product, because that requires breaking the encryption, which is against the DMCA.
Maybe, maybe not. That portion of the DMCA is, shall we say of questionable legality and enforceability, much like the EULA (IANAL BTW, not legal advice, ask a lawyer, yada yada yada). We're rather quickly approaching the point at which a serious legal challenge is going to come up against some of the more brain dead provisions of things like the DMCA and I really don't know which way things are going to fall. I rather hope fair use and the rights of the consumer triumph (not to mention common sense), but I can easily see things going the opposite direction as well.
Nah, it's the same general issue of space shifting as has already been addressed time and again (and either upheld or not in various cases). They'll lose this one, as if you already have it on the kindle you bought it (in theory) and therefore have the right to space shift that copyrighted work into whatever form you want. It's really no different than ripping a CD to a mp3 and then loading it on your MP3 player. Think of it this way, both audio recording, and printed text are just different encoded forms of the same underlying concepts. There is some argument against performing a piece, but in having a personal ebook device read you its contents that's clearly designed for personal use not performance to a large audience, and therefore covered under fair use.
You are seriously underestimating the complexity of the task. In any case, essentially everything has been thought of before. Your bringing up lint is simply stupid: you are either saying that everything that's been done (by MS and others) in the area of static analysis is a knock off lint, which is simply an ignorant thing to say, or you are saying that the work done by Microsoft is *really* a knock-off from lint, which is false.
I wasn't comparing lint to anything, I mentioned lint as an example of static analysis that's been around for a very long time. The work done by Microsoft on Static Driver Verifier isn't new, and it isn't innovative, rather it's a implementation of a static analysis utility specifically geared towards verifying Microsofts driver model. There's nothing there that needs research or development, it's purely an implementation problem. I never said it was an easy thing to implement, but that doesn't mean it's innovative, complexity is not the same thing as innovation.
Nothing in.NET is new so I don't really see how much research would have been necessary to produce it. I'll give partial credit for F# as even though functional languages aren't new (no matter how you slice it) a modern implementation build on top of a pseudo VM like CLR is at least semi-novel.
Under what criteria is Songsmith successful? And if people are actually using Songsmith seriously why are they being allowed to breed?
This is the first I've heard of Kodu, and it does look interesting, although having never used it myself and not having ever heard of it before I can't really say how innovative or successful it actually is.
The fact that you're able to point out F# and Kodu shows that maybe MSR is actually starting to do some real R&D work and we'll start to see something actually innovative at some level come out of MS, but both of those items are relatively new which raises the question of what exactly the R&D department has been doing before now. Re-implementing other established technologies inside of MS products doesn't really count as research in my book, anymore than adding a "proc" filesystem to Windows 7 would count as R&D. Just because Microsoft has never done it, doesn't mean that it's new and innovative.
The Static Driver Verifier. Okay, so it's given away free with the DDK, but it indirectly helps them since driver quality is now by far the main stability problem Windows has.
It's also not new, as static analysis has existed in various forms for quite a while (lint is a form of static analysis). I'm not saying it isn't a good product, it just isn't something that counts as R&D seeing as the research has already been done so all they needed to do was actually implement a version for their driver model (they also could have done one better and implemented a generic version). My statement still stands, the MS R&D department doesn't really produce anything useful that isn't simply a re-implementation of something someone else has already done. To date the most innovative things I've seen them do anything at all on are MS surface (which isn't really new, although the way it's implemented is certainly one of the cleaner approaches) and that god awful abortion of technology that should have never been Songsmith.
I don't really think MS is better not having R&D, but I feel like what passes for R&D at MS currently falls well short of the mark to the point that that money probably would have been better spent buying a company that actually is doing some real R&D.
C# and.NET rose from the ashes of J++. I'll give them credit, they're not too shabby now, but they had to go through some pretty long and nasty teething phases to get where they are now. MS has always been more about the D in R&D than they have the R, relying on others to do the research which MS then "borrows" and re-implements. To my knowledge MS has never done anything new or innovative (business practices aside) that didn't completely bomb in the marketplace. What they have done is come up with some very shrewd business decisions, bought certain key companies/technologies, and re-implemented or otherwise produced some very successful (and a few very unsuccessful) knockoffs of other good pieces of software/products.
In some ways they may have a genuine concern. Microsoft has never really done much of anything with their R&D department. I mean, can you seriously name one product that's come out of MS R&D that counts as a success (discount anything that's a blatant knockoff of a pre-existing product, embrace and extend/extinguish is not R&D)? A better use for that money would probably be the traditional way in which Microsoft "innovates" which is buying out other companies that create interesting products.
The issue is that you can't uninstall IE. You can uninstall notepad and Windows will still boot and run just fine. Try deleting IE and the whole thing grinds to a halt. And before you say that IE gets used all over the place (like the help system), that can be fixed by just including the necessary DLLs while still allowing the browser itself to be uninstalled. Really IE shouldn't be embedded in everything the way it is, and I could think of about a dozen ways of fixing that particular problem, but that's a different situation entirely (which is only reinforced by the guarantee that there's nothing the user can do to remove IE so developers can count on it being available instead of bundling a rendering engine or providing the user the option of selecting one like they should do).
Slashdot Mirror
I went to see the midnight release in IMax and thought it was amazing. I was worried about the changed ending, but after seeing it, it works very well. The cinematography and choice of music was spot on and even though a lot of people bitched about the slow-mo fighting I thought it looked cool. Had one person with us who hadn't read the books and she thought the movie was "good" and she enjoyed it. I wouldn't call myself a huge fan by any stretch (the first time I read the comic was only a few months ago), but I did enjoy the comic and I think they did a good job on the movie. Oh, and yes I did go to work today, I'm just a bit tired now is all.
Nope sorry, it's still balanced, you just forgot to factor in the momentum of the moon. Once all the forces are factored in properly it still amounts to a net 0 (more or less, the moon is slowly de-orbiting, but it's going to take a very long time).
Nope, still not possible. By the very nature of it it would take more energy to move the plate out of the way than would ever be generated by it moving in the first place. Essentially all the Casimiar force is is the quantum version of a pressure differential. It's a very interesting phenomenon and has some possible uses in the design of nano scale generators and parts, but it will never be a energy source on its own. To be clear what I mean is that the effective could be incorporated into the design of a generator for extra gains on efficiency or as part of a large principle, but the force itself is not enough to build a generator around and it will never be a primary motive force.
And before anyone makes a big deal out of it, feel free to replace any occurrence of Microsoft in the previous statement with any other entity of their choosing.
Someone else already gave a pretty good explanation of why this wouldn't work, but I'll see if I can give a slightly better explanation. Consider this, anytime you have unequal forces objects move, and we can in most cases convert that movement (which is simply excess energy) into power. When however forces are balanced no movement occurs, and no excess energy is released that can be harnessed. As a related example things are constantly attracted to the Earth via gravity, which is a force (rather well understood and easily quantified at that), however there is an opposing force in the collision of two solid masses, that is the force of gravity attracting an object towards the center of the Earth is opposed by the force of the ground pushing back at the object and preventing it from moving closer to the center of the Earth. In the example you give even though there is a force attempting to bring the plates together it is being canceled out by your supposed "something", thus resulting in a net zero for the forces involved, and therefore no way to harvest any energy out of the configuration. You could of course attach those "somethings" to some kind of generator that generates electricity when they move and allow the Casimir force to bring the plates together thereby harvesting that energy (a very very tiny amount of energy), but in order to generate more energy from that effect you would need to separate the plates again which would take as much or more energy than was harvested from the effect in the first place.
Time an again it has been shown there is no free energy no matter how you slice it. We had our peak during the big bang, and its all been going down hill since then. The most we can hope for is to harness as much of the already existing energy as we can.
They should use something like GIT and assign each congress critter a login (and make the revision history available to the public). Not only could we follow the larger modifications of a bill at the central level as it moves through congress, but we could look at the branches each congress critter checks in and see what kinds of modifications occur in their own office. What would be really neat is if someone then took that data and did a bit of correlation between changes made at particular times and recent visits of lobbyists. Imagine the questions that might be raised if a congress critter has a recent visit by say a Microsoft lobbyist, and then a few days later amends a seemingly unrelated bill in a way that turns out to be beneficial to MS.
Actually if they would just price it around ~$900 give or take $100 I might consider it. I put together a very similar system on newegg for ~$960 including shipping, but that also included a beefier GPU, and a 1TB Raid-0 array, but no Blu-Ray, and a case that isn't quite as nice but provided better active cooling.
My god - high voltage resistant rats
You sir win 2 internets and owe me a new monitor and keyboard.
Perhaps they need a warning on a vaccines that says: WARNING: vaccine may contain vaccine.
If I'm paying for it, it damn well better contain vaccine.
Seriously though, a warning that a small percentage of the population has dangerous allergic reactions to vaccines (same as any other substance you might come into contact with) would probably go a long way towards fending off these "OMG BAN VACCINES!" morons. The simple fact is, anything you come into contact with poses a risk of allergic reaction, whether it peanuts, penicillin, or titanium (that one surprised me as I thought it was inert, but friend of mine is allergic to it).
Do we really want courts deciding scientific fact?
Why not? The media industry decides on the law.
OK, if I'm following this that means:
Media -> Law -> Courts -> Science
So the Media now defines science?... of course now that I think about it, that's probably not to far from the truth for a distressingly large portion of the population.
This was one of my initial thoughts as well so I looked at the text of the Americans with Disabilities Act to see if anything would apply in this case and I don't think it would. Someone might still try to file a discrimination suit, but I'm not sure it would get anywhere (they are however on stronger ground than the Authors Guild appears to be). Ultimately whether the ADA suit would win or not isn't the point as you note, it's a case of bad publicity. I do wonder however if that wouldn't have the opposite effect of what the Authors Guild wants and force other ebook manufacturers to include text-to-speech software in their ebooks in order not to prevent future bad press or ADA suits.
Well, there are some interesting questions here, but ultimately I still think it boils down to nothing (and before I forgot, IANAL still). First of all even though space shifting is illegal in some parts of the world, it's legal under fair use in the US. Since the one bringing the suit is an US organization, and Amazon (so far as I know) is an US company, I would assume the suit would be tried in the USA and hence fall under US law. It might (depending on the contract) violate Amazons contract to distribute audio recordings of the ebooks, but they very clearly do have a contract for the ebooks. In order to fall afoul of contributory or vicarious infringement I believe (once again IANAL) they would have to show they helped someone else violate copyright. Now, it would violate copyright if Amazon did the space shifting, but the end user has that right under fair use (as per US law). So, the question is, is it contributory or vicarious infringement to contribute to someone else doing something legal that would be illegal if you yourself did it. I think, the answer to that question is no, but once again IANAL.
IANAL but I was once told by a lawyer that you can bring a civil suit against someone for anything you want, whether you have a case or not. It's just that doing so most likely won't get you anywhere except maybe in trouble for wasting the courts time, or for the lawyer involved possible disbarment.
Prior to this I'd never heard of Topix before... and after reading everything on here I'm going to pretend I still haven't heard of it.
IANAL. "I think you are an asshole!" is not actionable as it clearly states an opinion. "Todd Knarr has sex with farm animals!" is actionable (unless you can show it to be true!) as you make a clear statement of fact. IANAL.
Having had a similar discussion with someone in the past I'll share what I learned with you. On the topic of the second statement it's still actionable in some parts of the world (the UK notably) where truth is not considered a defense to libel. IANAL yada yada yada.
You are missing the point that Amazon is selling the works as both text and audio when they have a contract to only sell text. That Amazon is touting the Kindles ability to translate text to audio as a reason to buy the Kindle demonstrates that Amazon thinks they are selling you something in addition to text.
But they aren't selling the works as audio. At no point do you receive an audio copy from Amazon. What you receive is a text copy which is what they have the contract to sell. It's the end consumer, the one with the kindle who is converting that text version into a audio version (on the fly I believe, so no fixed form, and therefore not covered by copyright law) not Amazon. Amazon is not responsible for what the consumer does with the product after it's sold, and unless you can figure out some way to argue that text-to-speech software is illegal or that its primary purpose is copyright violation (putting it in violation of the DMCA) there's nothing illegal about the kindle. Amazon is selling two products (for the purposes of this discussion), the first is a ebook reader that has build in text-to-speech support, and the second is ebooks. Amazon has contracts to sell the ebooks, and therefore can do so legally. The kindle so far as I know, is also perfectly legal (and if it isn't, there's probably a whole bunch more hardware and/or software that's also illegal). Furthermore, the user has the right to space shift the ebook they purchase (at least in the US, apparently in the UK they don't) so that's fine to. So, unless Amazon is actually allowing users to download mp3s or wavs or whatever of the ebooks they purchase I don't see anyway in which you could argue they're violating copyright.
That doesn't answer a crucial question, which is whether Amazon, the maker and seller of Kindle and the works that can be used in it, has the right to "space-shift" the works that it sells specifically for use in its device. You can bet that this is the angle the Author's Guild is going to push, in order to pressure Amazon to agree to license audiobook rights for the e-books they sell for Kindle.
But they aren't distributing (or selling) an audio copy of the book (the work), rather they distribute a regular ebook copy, it's just that the reader they also sell has text-to-speech support and can do the space shifting on the final distributed work. It's like arguing that Apple is selling CDs because they sell MP3s (or whatever the specific format is) and iTunes has the ability to convert those into CDs. Ultimately it's the user that's doing the space shifting, not Amazon. If you buy the book from Amazon and download it on your kindle, it's perfectly possible to read that book without ever using the text-to-speech capability of the device. Likewise if you purchased the exact same ebook and downloaded it onto some other device that didn't have text-to-speech capability you wouldn't be able to do the conversion without further hardware/software being involved. You might as well say your local grocery store needs a license to distribute ebook versions of the tabloids it sells since someone could go home and use OCR software to convert them into ebooks.
You can't space-shift a DRM laiden product, because that requires breaking the encryption, which is against the DMCA.
Maybe, maybe not. That portion of the DMCA is, shall we say of questionable legality and enforceability, much like the EULA (IANAL BTW, not legal advice, ask a lawyer, yada yada yada). We're rather quickly approaching the point at which a serious legal challenge is going to come up against some of the more brain dead provisions of things like the DMCA and I really don't know which way things are going to fall. I rather hope fair use and the rights of the consumer triumph (not to mention common sense), but I can easily see things going the opposite direction as well.
Nah, it's the same general issue of space shifting as has already been addressed time and again (and either upheld or not in various cases). They'll lose this one, as if you already have it on the kindle you bought it (in theory) and therefore have the right to space shift that copyrighted work into whatever form you want. It's really no different than ripping a CD to a mp3 and then loading it on your MP3 player. Think of it this way, both audio recording, and printed text are just different encoded forms of the same underlying concepts. There is some argument against performing a piece, but in having a personal ebook device read you its contents that's clearly designed for personal use not performance to a large audience, and therefore covered under fair use.
You are seriously underestimating the complexity of the task. In any case, essentially everything has been thought of before. Your bringing up lint is simply stupid: you are either saying that everything that's been done (by MS and others) in the area of static analysis is a knock off lint, which is simply an ignorant thing to say, or you are saying that the work done by Microsoft is *really* a knock-off from lint, which is false.
I wasn't comparing lint to anything, I mentioned lint as an example of static analysis that's been around for a very long time. The work done by Microsoft on Static Driver Verifier isn't new, and it isn't innovative, rather it's a implementation of a static analysis utility specifically geared towards verifying Microsofts driver model. There's nothing there that needs research or development, it's purely an implementation problem. I never said it was an easy thing to implement, but that doesn't mean it's innovative, complexity is not the same thing as innovation.
Nothing in .NET is new so I don't really see how much research would have been necessary to produce it. I'll give partial credit for F# as even though functional languages aren't new (no matter how you slice it) a modern implementation build on top of a pseudo VM like CLR is at least semi-novel.
Under what criteria is Songsmith successful? And if people are actually using Songsmith seriously why are they being allowed to breed?
This is the first I've heard of Kodu, and it does look interesting, although having never used it myself and not having ever heard of it before I can't really say how innovative or successful it actually is.
The fact that you're able to point out F# and Kodu shows that maybe MSR is actually starting to do some real R&D work and we'll start to see something actually innovative at some level come out of MS, but both of those items are relatively new which raises the question of what exactly the R&D department has been doing before now. Re-implementing other established technologies inside of MS products doesn't really count as research in my book, anymore than adding a "proc" filesystem to Windows 7 would count as R&D. Just because Microsoft has never done it, doesn't mean that it's new and innovative.
The Static Driver Verifier. Okay, so it's given away free with the DDK, but it indirectly helps them since driver quality is now by far the main stability problem Windows has.
It's also not new, as static analysis has existed in various forms for quite a while (lint is a form of static analysis). I'm not saying it isn't a good product, it just isn't something that counts as R&D seeing as the research has already been done so all they needed to do was actually implement a version for their driver model (they also could have done one better and implemented a generic version). My statement still stands, the MS R&D department doesn't really produce anything useful that isn't simply a re-implementation of something someone else has already done. To date the most innovative things I've seen them do anything at all on are MS surface (which isn't really new, although the way it's implemented is certainly one of the cleaner approaches) and that god awful abortion of technology that should have never been Songsmith.
I don't really think MS is better not having R&D, but I feel like what passes for R&D at MS currently falls well short of the mark to the point that that money probably would have been better spent buying a company that actually is doing some real R&D.
C# and .NET rose from the ashes of J++. I'll give them credit, they're not too shabby now, but they had to go through some pretty long and nasty teething phases to get where they are now. MS has always been more about the D in R&D than they have the R, relying on others to do the research which MS then "borrows" and re-implements. To my knowledge MS has never done anything new or innovative (business practices aside) that didn't completely bomb in the marketplace. What they have done is come up with some very shrewd business decisions, bought certain key companies/technologies, and re-implemented or otherwise produced some very successful (and a few very unsuccessful) knockoffs of other good pieces of software/products.
In some ways they may have a genuine concern. Microsoft has never really done much of anything with their R&D department. I mean, can you seriously name one product that's come out of MS R&D that counts as a success (discount anything that's a blatant knockoff of a pre-existing product, embrace and extend/extinguish is not R&D)? A better use for that money would probably be the traditional way in which Microsoft "innovates" which is buying out other companies that create interesting products.
The issue is that you can't uninstall IE. You can uninstall notepad and Windows will still boot and run just fine. Try deleting IE and the whole thing grinds to a halt. And before you say that IE gets used all over the place (like the help system), that can be fixed by just including the necessary DLLs while still allowing the browser itself to be uninstalled. Really IE shouldn't be embedded in everything the way it is, and I could think of about a dozen ways of fixing that particular problem, but that's a different situation entirely (which is only reinforced by the guarantee that there's nothing the user can do to remove IE so developers can count on it being available instead of bundling a rendering engine or providing the user the option of selecting one like they should do).