A judge has to decide if a lawsuit settlement can be dropped in a bankruptcy. Typically, they are not as far as I understand, so bankruptcy is not really a viable alternative.

Just register a similar typo-squatting type domain in the name of the 3rd party service and bring that to your employer's attention.

Or they renew on Carousel.

I'm fairly certain they did this to allow more Office interoperability, since Office still uses quite a bit of COM crap. As for it being a Windows bias, I don't really think that has any meaning since COM doesn't exist on the other platforms (not that I'm aware of, anyway). Besides, COM Interop is a nightmare to work with and I've only ever seen developers use it when they had no other choice (i.e. the PHB has to have his automated data dump of a 4-column table in a perfectly formatted Excel 2003 file rather than a .csv)

I agree that it is a bad patent just because it is an obvious thing to do. However, I think comparing it to sudo is a bit of a stretch. Maybe I'm running the wrong version of Linux, but I've never had sudo pop up and tell me that I don't have permission to do something and would I please provide the password to an account that does have said permission. Is "Permission denied" a sudo prompt that I have been hitherto unaware?

I really don't think you could pull that off in a car without power steering. Unless maybe you've got really muscular legs and are wearing really sticky kneepads...

The judge agreed with you. Looks like CW ran an old story, or they are talking about an appeal and forgot to mention it. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/court-smacks-autodesk-affirms-right-to-sell-used-software.ars

The screenshot in TFA would seem to indicate that what they are calling a "ribbon" is simply the same interface that Chrome and Safari are already using.

This may be true, but Les Paul actually created multi-track recordings with records in the 30's. Go check out "Lover" from 1938. Sure, it wasn't on tape, but it was still multi-track in the sense that he created a single recording with himself playing all the parts.

I have kids and I DO want a simplified tax code. In fact, I would prefer a sales-tax only model. And since I'm wishing, I would like to see the federal government abandon all activities that don't involve national or inter-state relations.