Tempus

No way. They'll milk it for what it's worth first.

What happened to France can and will happen to other countries.

Google is an ad-based company, I can't imagine them changing their business model and getting into direct competition with Apple, among others.

MS already has a search engine and wants Yahoo (for many reasons). AOL is dead and simply not in a position to acquire anyone. And with Google having shown just how much you can profit from a good search engine, I doubt anyone will offer enough just now. It's wait-and-see on both sides.

Apple is too careful for this stuff. They will introduce multi-touch gradually, not with a big step that can backfire.

Wikipedia is hot, but breaking at the seams. It has failed to gain the acceptance of the academic society, and that's where high-quality content for many topics would have to come from. Right now, Wikipedia is quickly becoming a collection of mundane and street-level knowledge, not an encyclopedia. By my guess, there's more articles on movies and rock bands than there is about entire fields of science. Two years from now, half of those movies and rock bands will be barely worth mentioning.

Wikipedia is also quickly losing it's "new and shiny" factor. Lots of people are disappointed with it by now, for a variety of reasons, and its administrative structure seems bogged down in in-fighting.

Since Knol is the only serious competitor right now (i.e. the only one with the required publicity), people will very likely jump there.

Yes, given a few years. Google looks invisible, but that's exactly it's problem - it isn't as dynamic anymore. It can't change without millions of people crying foul.

There is one benefit and one harm that I see. Everything else is hogwash or not substantiated reliably (like links between rape and porn - you will find studies both ways).

Benefit: Free expression. Porn has more than once spearheaded the Free Speech movement and done a lot of good in this area, and porn is a big enough industry to pay for this fight, contrary to Free Speech idealists.

Harm: Porn depicts sex in a way that is not like we experience in the real world. Teens watching too much porn too early will form a wrong impression of what sex should be like. Our sex lives are already modified by porn (how many girls shave? compare that to 10 years ago).

All in all, I'm not sure about the overall effect. Like most things, it's difficult to say "good" or "bad", unless you have black-white world-view to guide you.

I don't even have a TV anymore. There's nothing on it, anyways.

Where's the "no, I already have one" option?

I'm not lining up, but I don't agree with the "this is crazy" notion.

I think it's a fad that will fade soon. Like most new toys, it's cool while new, then gets abandoned. More importantly, I think that most of the people with the necessary cash on hand would think the same, and would watch it for a while longer before any acquisitions are made.

However (that's why I predicted 40:60) it might be that its founders also realize they are sitting on a "hip for now" product, and would seek to sell it, even cheaply, to some sucker.

Too little, too late.

This stuff is more complicated in the real world than in the lab, and takes a good while. They will probably announce it soon, but MS is pretty bad at meeting its own deadlines.

0:1 for Spain was the final result.

Where's the "I am already taking public transport" option? Poll pre-supposes that everyone is driving.

Why not? It would frighten MS into making some sweet deals, and a penalty or two would bring in money. In addition, I'm fairly sure China doesn't want any foreign entity, be it a government or a corporation, to control too much of its vital infrastructure.

Mozilla says they broke it, but they are still waiting for official confirmation from the Guiness people, which might take a few days.

The fight has become way too public for a takeover of that kind. It's obvious that Icahn has picked his fight, and it's in the media, not the market.

Politicians routinely make claims with no evidence whatsoever. I don't think this case will be any different.

There wasn't really a "one more thing..." this time, but since the entire keynote was devoted to the iPhone, that's the closest result.