begin Curtis Rey's quote: | With a 90+% share of the desktop market and a substantial amount of | the NASDAQ riding on M$ stock, at least to a measurable amount, | what is the implications of M$ stock taking a major dive? | Especialy in the current market. I find it funny that a tacit turn | around regarding what action to take against M$ happened after 9/11 | and the precipitous drop in the markets. Wall Street may turn to | Linux and Open Source to run their systems but the rely on M$ to | run the tech sector, at least to a fair degree. actually, the judge in ordering the two sides to settle, an order she made on, i believe, september 29, 2001, did in fact cite national security, which had everybody scratching their heads because "microsoft" and "security" are not commonly used in the same sentence. i wrote about it at the time: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/opinions/3952/1/ [quote] At the end of September, Judge Kollar-Kotelly ordered the government and Microsoft to arrive at a settlement in this, the penalty phase of the litigation. She implied that doing so would somehow make it easier to defeat the Al Qaeda terrorists, or words to that effect. Microsoft's negotiators and people from the Department of Justice, who bore the title of "negotiator" even if their actions scarcely reflected it, sat in a room where, apparently, the DoJ people were kept busy acceding to everything Microsoft's negotiators asked for; the reason it took a few days, one might suppose, was so Microsoft's people could phone Redmond to get them to think up additional demands to which the government would instantly agree. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Microsoft cowed the DoJ into going along with all this by freely profaning the phrase "in the national interest," saying that Microsoft's demands met that specification. The result is the proposed settlement, which would grant Microsoft its operating system monopoly -- indeed, contains wording such that it would no longer be illegal for Microsoft to maintain that monopoly -- while saying that if Microsoft wants to, it can make it easier for people to write Windows applications, but it's by no means required to do so. In short, the settlement is a travesty, an ill-advised embarrassment that flings down and dances upon the law and upon all but the most twisted notion of justice. [end of quote] -- dep http://www.linuxandmain.com -- outside the box, barely within the envelope, and no animated paperclip anywhere.