This is bunk. As a long term investor, I pay attention to the ethics of the companies I invest in. Poor business ethics are a large part of the reason for the mess we're in. Eventually, ethical slip ups like this come home to roost. People wise up and learn not to trust frequent offenders.

I checked the second link as well. You can go ahead and download the software, but it does NOT include a license! I've spent some years in the Microsoft System Builder program and have some familiarity with the program requirements and what is required to stay legal. There are some gray areas, and some really strange licensing requirements that put SMBs in a bit of a difficult spot. MS Office Home and Student is available from Newegg for about the price shown in your link and it can be installed on 3 computers! It says right in the license that commercial use is a violation of the terms. No doubt, a small business that has no disgruntled employees can go cheap and stay under the radar. As a business grows, this is more difficult and the licensing requirements and associated costs must be considered. It is obvious that you are not taking them fully into account, or perhaps are unfamiliar with the terms/requirements. I do advise folks to consider standardizing on OO unless their requirements suggest this will not do. Have any of the folks you've advised been through a BSA audit? We did a trial audit using a form/checklist that guided us through the process. It was a real eye-opener that didn't make us rush out and buy the site licenses. We simply moved to Open Office for all the users/computers that did not require MS Office.

Look in the Windows folder of a computer running XP. Me thinks you will see a folder "/prefetch" and that it is used just as the name suggests.

You do realize that your first link was to an academic version. This is not legal to use for commercial purposes. You might as well pirate it as pay $109 and use it in a SMB. You're NOT legal either way!

I've seen that your posts repeatedly fail to see the most important feature of free software, that being its "free as in speach" nature, more so than its being "free as in beer". Google these for more discussion.

Being able to examine and alter code is what attracts the volunteer developers AND the large companies who see the value of drawing from the well, pooling their efforts with other companies and often adding back to same well.

The founding fathers were certainly interested in free speach, and THAT is what the FSF and the free software movement are fundamentally about, even though many in this forum are apparently ignorant about that fact. For this reason, I miss the early Slashdot period.

Regarding the low rate of Linux adoption, I don't get what you mean. It is used everywhere, and the world would literally grind to a halt if a small percentage of devices running GNU/Linux were shut down.

Largemouth Bass will eat ducklings. http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/snapshots/fish/largemouthbass.html

There are plenty of senior citizens living on fixed incomes in rural areas who cannot afford satellite or cable (if it were available). They are using free TV. They've been watching free TV for 50 years. Your attitude sucks.

When the informatin is "loosed", where does it run off to? Should we have some mechanism in place to catch it before it gets in the wrong hands?

No, that is not what I meant. When the constitutional protections are fully in place, you can't invade my home or listen to my phone conversations without a warrant. What is a warrant, if not a limited sacrifice of the right to privacy? Constitutional protections (ideally) still apply, but the state and its law abiding citizens have an interest in convicting the guilty and mitigating the danger posed to society. I am certainly not favoring warrantless wiretapping or searches of homes. I agree that the threat of terrorism in the homeland is overblown. Nevertheless, probable cause has a legal definition that properly applied allows for some balance between rights of accused parties and the state's/citizen's mutual interest in pursuit of the guilty.

You and the parent poster have both gone off the deep end, just at opposite ends. If you are certain that someone is "doing wrong", i.e. you have probable cause, they are forfeiting certain of their rights. The duty to protect them stops when they are a threat to other, innocent parties. You betray your absolutistism when you say, "The government has always been a more clear and present danger to the people than any real-world terrorist threat." Really? Always?

Then the parent poster has the audacity to say, "Wether they found any substantiating evidence of this or not doesn't matter. What matters is they were following a lead and they had to react quickly." When and where does this approach stop? There are no safeguards, no civil liberties at all if the government merely suspects something.