And I'll go one step farther:

Make it a felony for any legislator to pass legislation that impacts anyone who wasn't eligible to vote for them. There's an idea....

I wasn't aware that normalizing risk is now a legitimate function of government. Perhaps I was absent for that debate?

Schools are for children, I was under the impression government was for adults.

Funny, I was always taught that programs and computers should be designed to make things easier for the user, not harder.

This is why Windows 7 will come with a handy "delete everything and reinstall from scratch" button.

This time, the grammarian's are with you's.

Javac does essentially no optimization, while the dynamic compiler in the VM does a hell of a lot. Besides, the overhead of a method call is almost nothing compared to the overhead of constructing the StringBuffer, appending contents, building a String, and actually doing the IO. Why would you waste your time with a pre-processor?

Oh my god, help me, I forgot how to write utility methods!

Why then would you want to risk $800M in the first place when you can let your competitor spend the $800M, pay them a paltry $400M for the one thing that succeeded and then split the much larger profit to be made? Extra points if your marketing department is much better and you take a much larger fraction of the resulting market.

They had evidence from emails that these secret deals were occurring...

Oh noes! Not secret deals! I have news for you, most deals between businesses are "secret" by this standard.

As to illegality, It was clear to me at least that the GP was clearly questioning the validity of the anti-trust laws. One way to challenge a law is by deliberately breaking it. I am not claiming that Intel was making a political statement, but what if they were?

Cough and thought are the same, sorry.

Makes my off by one errors seem so quaint. Add 12 zeros and soon you're talking about real money.

I am noting your continual use of ad hominem attacks. They don't make your original statement any more precise or accurate.

Now onto that "choosing your words carefully" topic.

Define "take over".

And another reason that it's difficult to have a serious discussion on slashdot is ad hominem attacks. I read real GOOD, thanks.

Why do I get that impression?

Because "take over" typically doesn't mean "compete with", "build a more efficient replacement", or "drive out of business", or a host of other alternate meanings. Further you refer to the "means of production" as if it were some large singular entity (presumably with the magical ability of producing), when using this phrase. And suppose these mythical controllers of this mythical entity don't give their consent to your plan--do you intend to use force, or the government (but that's redundant isn't it)?

Sorry, the aging process of wine is far more complicated than you state and continues even after bottling.