The European Commission has set an example by fining Intel 1.45B. No US court was likely to award much more than that. AMD can make much better use of the cash now, rather than a few years down the line. And Intel can do without being continuously accused of cheating. Rest assured that the agreement has included quite a few provisions regarding dirty play in the future, but don't expect those to be made public.

Just to remember one thing, when Microsoft pushed their Windows clusters (yes, there is such a thing) Cornell was the only university which bought such clusters and forced their students to use them. This time I am sure they did not sign up to the "project" ...

Back in '92 the school received a bunch of 386 machines. The school principal (or "director"), computer illiterate and scared of such dubious machines, decided that allowing the students to use them will have only one outcome: the students will damage the machines. Therefore, to prevent such damage, he locked them away in a warehouse, and I am sure that they are still there, in the same warehouse, in the same state as in '92. Not a trace of damage, of course.

Is anyone surprised ? Check out this year's Physics Nobel prize. Disgusting publicity stunt for LHC, so that it will continue to get funding despite the setbacks and the fact that it will most probably find nothing at all. When the most powerful machine was able to reach only about 40GeV, all the theoretical models were showing irefutable evidence that the top quark had a mass of about 45GeV. The 2004 Nobel Prize (Physics again) ? The idea belonged to Sidney Coleman who was honest enough not to put his name on a paper where all the work was done by his student (Politzer), but David Gross had no problem stealing the idea and adding his name to the paper written by his student (Wilczek). Not to say that Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered the pulsars, but it was her advisor Antony Hewish who got the Nobel Prize even though he was incapable to recognize the value of her work and just discarded her data as just plain wrong. There are other examples, bu these are the most obvious ones I know about. Is anyone surprised about the bribery probe ? I certainly am surprised that this was not kept under the wraps and was made public.

The entire debacle would not have happened if the rating agencies had done their jobs an not put an "AAA" rating on securities backed by the crappy mortgages, securities that should have been graded a lot lower. So much revolves around this "credit rating" that financial institutions just take the ratings without thinking and move on from there. Somehow, nobody points the finger at the rating agencies, now it's the quants who are to blame.