It's a little hard to manage,but MS has some incredible educational deals. We recently got for the local high school a collection of Win7, Visual Studio, Expression designer tools (like a scaled down version of Adobe CS5), SQL Server,Exchange,and Tech Support. This for 3-years -- including full updates of all the software, for $1k. Nobody feels like they were cheated in this deal. And frankly, everyone was really quite pleased.

When I first saw the phones I thought "loser". I was comparing it to the iPhone, Nexus One, WP7, etc...

But then it became more apparent that it's competing against the EnV and the Rage. What Verizon calls MultiMedia phones. It will likely be on the lower priced data plan (or maybe they'll make one between teh $10 and $30/month package). Given a choice between an EnV or a Kin, the Kin is an easy choice. If MS were to clean up the multimedia phone space at Verizon, I think you'll suddenly begin to see a new market emerge. Although it's a surprisingly tough market, because I think a lot of it hinges on the data center and carrier integration.
Watch how this plays out. I think it possibly flops, but could be iPhone like huge, but to a totally different market.

Actually, if that's the problem, then Apple is even more stupid, because their license agreement doesn't address that. Their license agreement allows me to write my iPhone game in C++ for the XBox and then port it to the iPhone. Porting is allowed by their license.

What's not allowed is that I can't use an in-house level editor for my designer to generate maps that then use codeten to native Objective-C code. All of which was built in-house, and all of which was meant to only target the iPhone. But since the level code was not originally written in ObjectiveC (or C, C++, etc...) this is not allowed. We need to tell our level designers to write in Objective C from now on.

This is just stupid. iPhone games just don't make us enough money to put up with Steve Jobs. I'm more than happy to focus on Android and WP7, along with other business. Even in Microsoft's darkest day did I feel so dirty using a platform. I'm glad I moved to Droid when I did. Otherwise I'd be moving now.

Actually, I disagree. I think that pulling out of China does far more harm to citizens of China than staying there. The same goes for Nike. I think our "enlightened" world view of what is good for other countries is naive and short-sighted.
And yes, I am serious. And I'm personally sick of the claim that MS abused its monopoly. MS's position IMO was still the right one. A web browser is an OS feature. I think the forced decoupling of the OS from the web browser has actually slowed innovation. With that said MS's behavior in court was horrible, but frankly I think the trial should have never happened.

I think the point is that MS is no less honorable than Google.

At the end of the day Google hasn't improved the lives or prospects of Chinese citizens (hence I think it destroys the "good deed even if for morally ambiguous reasons" argument). They've done a PR move with no real upside to anyone but Google. I see no honor in that.

I think lack of universal health care is a violation of human rights. How should we be punished in the US? (Note, even with this latest bill, we still don't have UHC).

That's not a great analogy either. A better one would be "Admiring Google for no longer censoring is like admiring the person who started beating their child because they said their child was a problem child and this would actually help them. After beating their child more than anyone else beats their child they later realized that their child could actually fight back a little and then they said that they'd no longer beat their child because it was bad -- forgetting the reason they said they'd originally spank their child. And then they condemn other people who are still spanking their children, because clearly the original reason for spanking children is no longer valid after they've stopped." Or something like that.

I think that's an orthogonal question, although not an uninteresting one. Although its fundamentally the same thing that Republicans say about elite universities, which is why they tend to discount theories that come out of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, etc as being liberal. I do think the study is more interesting than people give it credit for though. I do think there is this belief in (liberal?) society that with increased education a lot of ideological "problems" disappear. I think this study does push us further down the track that education may not be all that helpful. And coupled with what we spoke of above -- self selection for getting education, our current system may simply exacerbate the perceived gap.

It's too bad users here on Slashdot don't simply take the time to read MS code. Windows kernel code is available for researchers. You can see the code for the CLR largely in Rotor. And the .NET Fx source code has been released as well. It's not hard to see what they're code looks like. And for the most part the code is very reasonable looking. MS doesn't have the problem with code quality they get accused of. There real problem historically has been lack of vision. If you give them a target they can generally hit it -- see how they've done on things like security, IE (until IE6), Win7, Bing, etc... What they don't do is see what's over the hill, ala the iPhone. This is why I think WinMo7 will be a very solid OS as they have competitors to target, but I'm not sure they know what's after that.

First of all, what Schmidt says isn't wrong. If you don't want anyone to know what you're doing, it may be because you value your privacy, but it may also be because it's wrong, and you know it's wrong

The problem is that is not what Schmidt said. But regardless who is he to judge the morality of my searches/email? He should have said, "if you don't want anyone to know what you're doing, then don't use Google as we can not guarantee privacy. Period." He can make a statement that captures their lack of willingness to anonymize data without casting moral judgment on the desire of users to do so.
But for some reason Google has decided that their lack of willingness to anonymize data effectively puts your searches/data in the public sphere. And he is attempting to justify it by saying that this is OK, because only "evil" people would care that their data is public.
The other point to note is that Google gives you no option to anonymize your searches. It's actually relatively straightforward to give users the ability to opt-in for this. The technology to do so is there, but they essentially require you to use a 3rd party service to do this. Of course anonymizing email is harder, but they could encrypt the emails and require the client decrypt it (this way all their servers have is a blob with a public key). Admittedly, no one else does this either for email. But it is disappointing that Google has taken arguably the most "evil" route (moral judgment and justification) for a company that is supposed to do none of it (evil).