I think that a lot of what Microsoft would be buying would be the perception that Google no longer has the best stuff. They would be trying to use strategic payments and lots of buzz to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. This could never work under the table. As you note, most people wouldn't even notice.

But yeah, I don't think it would actually be workable: as you say, $1m is probably far too little. Microsoft couldn't even pay for Amazon to switch, I suspect. Others would refuse the move on principle, like slashdot or the IRS.

I didn't say it was *my* principle, just the principle Cuban seems to be assuming.

I wouldn't focus too much on the number involved -- the principle is that everyone has their price.
Also, in theory those top websites stand to gain that much money from whichever search engine dominates. If Bing dominated the market as a result of this move, they would not lose much money, and the bribe could well make up the difference.

More to the point: what on earth is wrong with copying good interface ideas? As a Microsoft stockholder I'd be far more upset if they *didn't* look at Mac OS when designing Windows!

"Won't mind"? That's probably the point -- they can then use this as a bargaining chip to get access to anything they happen to be short on, or political concessions. They're betting, probably correctly, that while there are substitutes for cloth, wood, petrochemicals, and lots of other raw materials, nothing short of transmutation will give us yttrium in quantity.

Me, I hate watching someone else program, it's like watching your dog take a shit. But it's a good experience for one term -- some people will find that they hate it, but some will find that they can live with it, and some will find that it works very well for them. Education works well when it bumps you out of your comfort zone from time to time.

Dude, no! Now you need it more than ever, because they're not afraid of accidentally irradiating your brain while they read your thoughts!

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.