That or make the new recordable format unreadable in any stand alone players..

I have a feeling this is not about raking in more cash and creating onflicting standards, but about reducing Piracy. They probably want to make a format that has the capacity to hold a lot of data without being used to clone Blu-Ray discs. It stands to reason that if a normal Blu-Ray player cannot read this format, then it oculdn't play a bootlegged version of an ISO downloaded.

I thought Microsoft said they were not going to push Bing on IE Users. Unfortunately I don't find it surprising in the least. If I used IE6 I would be annoyed.

and wont this result in a bloody battle where no clear winner emerges victorious? What could hurt Microsoft the most, more than any GNU/Linux distribution is consumer apathy. People sticking to XP, even if it goes on to be unsupported is a real danger. Microsoft's biggest challenge is itself. Also, we don't need brave distributions or Linux companies forcing the issue, we need a brave company, that has lots of PC's, switching to Linux and forcing the issue. That's when we'll see Microsoft make it's move.