What I'm most concerned is that this could have a cumulative effect on the culture of governmental employees to equate online radio and other forms of internet commerce for music in a bad light. I think this is bad for the industry and that the government is doing a disservice to internet commercialization of music.

According to this, Pandora and radio streams are.. STEALING!

It's still downloading music.

This is all very interesting considering it was just ruled that Yahoo online internet radio should be royalty-free and only have to pay normal radio licensing fees: http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/19017.cfm

Also company/government bandwidth... However, that's not the way it was presented to the employees.

This will end up just wasting man hours for legitimate companies who provide web site owners ways to monetize their content by showing ads, and cost websites money for legitimate use (because they can't record "impressions"). People who do illegitimate things will just find a way around it.

Microsoft needs to remove this useless junk and stick to things that actually help people instead of marketing hype.

Of course they did.

The two lead engineers have been working paid full-time on this for years, where do you think those resources are coming from? The mozilla build team has pushed releases, Thunderbird has had its place on mozilla.com along side Firefox etc.

Basically, the issue now is - how is Thunderbird going to survive without all this support? I'm not saying it all is going away, but Thunderbird WILL have to do more on its own. As I understand it, Mozilla Foundation/Corporation (not sure which) might still help out somewhat financially, but I am not sure of the status on that situation.

However, I think there's no reason to believe "it's all over". There are plenty of other organizations/companies doing top-notch Mozilla work without being a physical part of Mozilla Corporation. See Joost, Songbird, and others. Also, it will be interesting to see what high-level decisions are taken by the Thunderbird team now that they will be more independent. I think there's a chance they will have to think more radically about Thunderbird's place in the world than what has been the case up until now.

Xmas of 2002, right? My last year there before moving to DC...

Bill Gates is laughing maniacly right now. Think about it. XP for 1 CPU license? $199

Guess SCO doesn't believe in linux for the desktop...

Are you kidding? SCO is showing a tremendous belief in Linux for the desktop, evaluating it as worth over three times as much as Windows!