It's not just video files, it's the annotations, commentary tracks, and a variety of links keyed in to particular timestamps. Someone put some significant time and energy into this project, it's not just posting ripped video to a website.

Look at it this way: assume for a moment that he wants to be altruistic. The technologies available to him to do this the way he wants are Silverlight and Flash. He's a Microsoft fan, he naturally chooses Silverlight - or more likely, the Microsoft lackey he gives the job to chooses it out of fear of being berated for choosing something "inferior".

So, looking from the outside, the altruistic explanation looks exactly the same as the conniving one.

Microsoft had tons of legal issues over crushing Netscape, but Netscape stayed crushed. Microsoft was wounded, but it would rather be fined and saddled with weakly-enforced consent decrees than risk real competition.

Besides, Microsoft could use its monopoly in lots of smaller ways to screw with Google. What would happen, for example, if IIS servers produced pages that messed with Google's indexer? Nothing major, just made it get things wrong, or miss keywords. Or if Internet Explorer could still access Google... but was really slow for some reason, and hard to use? Or if Windows Update started changing the default search to Bing on all different browsers?

And that's just the underhanded stuff. Microsoft loves wedging one product into another - how much you want to bet that an upcoming version of Office has convenient little hooks into Bing, to let you do searches from inside documents? Or they release a pared-down version of it with Bing-driven ads? Or buy the Encyclopedia Britannica, lump it in with Encarta with a Bing interface, and make an assault on Google + Wikipedia?

If it makes you feel better, it only reports on objects that have already entered the atmosphere and started glowing from the heat of entry.

No, but their UK servers were configured to willingly transmit copies of the work to a country where those works are not copyrighted. It is entirely within the realm of possibility to screen connections and send images to only countries where the works are under copyright, but they chose not to do so.

My former boss in the US runs an entire state university's Japanese program, and has done so for 20 years. Her title? "Lecturer." Why? No PhD, just a master's.

Did you happen to attend WVU, by any chance?

Of course they recycle their work - teaching a course over time is a process of continual refinement year after year. You find out what works and what doesn't. If you find a problem that does a good job of teaching a concept and is easy to grade, it's foolish to throw it out just because your students might be able to cheat.

That said, you're right that telling his student to take down his work shows ignorance, but you're right for the wrong reason. Students who want to cheat can cheat endlessly from thousands of sources, some more or less useful than others. It's just as ridiculous to yell at a former student for posting his homework as it is to yell at, say, Stack Overflow for having useful snippets of code that my students could steal. The fraternities here are well-known for keeping dozens of years' worth of old homeworks and exams. The school itself takes great care in maintaining a tremendous source of cheating material, in its libraries. Far too many professors seem to think that they are the only source of the knowledge they teach, and seem continually surprised by the existence of other sources of information.

"Internet users have become used to getting things when they want it and how they want it"

Not at all like rich CEOs, no.

Out of curiosity, as a WSJ reader, what do you think of their proposed use of the new Kindle? I can see it being interesting for Times and Globe readers, but it does seem that WSJ readers really want different things out of their paper.

Nobody will pay for content that used to be free.

Says who?

I agree - local papers are the ones most likely to benefit from this approach. Most peoples' hometown news just doesn't merit coverage by the BBC or Washington Post or whatever. The smallest towns might not make quite enough for this - I figure you'd need an electronic subscriber base around 10,000 at $50/year to make it really viable. As more people go online, that's a target easier to reach for more small towns.

The question is what the Wall Street Journal provides that people are paying for. Mr. Murdoch seems to think that people are paying for access to the general newspaper sections that are shared with other papers - global news, national news, op-eds. I strongly suspect that he is wrong, that subscribers are paying primarily for the financial news. If I am right, then this model cannot be easily expanded to other newspapers.

As Clay Shirky argued, the newspaper itself is somewhat misplaced in an era where it is nearly free to copy and distribute information. What's the point of arguing over whether your pig ought to be pink or brown - it still won't fly.

You could be right; I can't find a picture of Klingons from the animated series, and I do remember the ones in the movie being a big deal - I always assumed that it was because so many people didn't watch the animated series.

Yeah, most of the aliens got "facelifts" in the animated series, as I recall.