The Rational Mind

Microsoft has just announced that it is removing PDF features
from the next version of Microsoft Office because
Adobe
will sue it for antitrust violations if it does. The
key to the success of Adobe’s PDF format is that it
is free of any licensing restrictions, so anyone can
implement PDF readers/writers. Microsoft’s
competitors have – both operating system vendors
like Apple and Linux and competing office suites like
Star Office and OpenOffice.org. However Microsoft
isn’t allowed to – not because Adobe has any
legal right to prevent it, but because Adobe claims that
it won’t be able to compete with Microsoft if
Microsoft makes PDF features available for free like most
everyone else does. Adobe
charges $449 for Adobe Acrobat – something it can
only get away if Microsoft isn’t allowed to compete with
it. In effect, it is saying “anyone can use our format
and compete with our products… unless you actually
present a competitive challenge.” Microsoft expects Adobe
to sue anyway because it will offer its own portable document
format instead of selling Adobe’s products for them in its own
software. (Meanwhile, anti-Microsoft advocates continue
blasting it for rejecting “open standards.”) You
can bypass Adobe and get free PDF creation software
here.

This post comes via TIA Daily and the National Review:

Not since I peered over the Berlin Wall from West to East in 1987 has the contrast between capitalism and socialism been as stark as it was last week in Manhattan.

On the north side of Vesey Street, real-estate developer Larry Silverstein led the joyous, May 23 grand opening of 7 World Trade Center—a sleek, sparkling, 52-story high-rise that replaces its namesake predecessor. That building collapsed in flames at 5:20 P.M. on September 11, 2001.

On Vesey’s south side, Ground Zero remains a grim, gaping cavity where the Twin Towers proudly stood until al Qaeda agents demolished them with passenger-filled missiles.

Four years and eight months after Islamo-fascists disfigured this country, Silverstein, a private entrepreneur, delivered a skyscraper that elegantly says, “The barbarians crashed the gates, but we repelled them, with our beauty and prowess intact.”
Yards away, a tangle of politicians and bureaucrats—dizzyingly misdirected by New York’s blundering GOP governor, George Pataki—has stalled, squabbled, and spun in circles. The distinction is staggering: Above, a palace of commerce; below, a canyon of tears….

As Silverstein said March 15: “I am a builder. That is all I want to do. And when the Port Authority has not stood in the way, that is exactly what I have done—without any delay.”

Wired news is carrying a story on how an out-of-control Consumer Product Safety Commission has made chemistry sets illegal in an orgy of terrorist paranoia. This is a sad development indeed, as many of America’s great inventors got into technology experimenting with chemicals and home-made fireworks.

The chemophobia that’s put a damper on home science has also invaded America’s classrooms, where hands-on labs are being replaced by liability-proof teacher demonstrations with the explicit message Don’t try this at home. A guide for teachers of grades 7 through 12 issued by the American Chemical Society in 2001 makes the prospect of an hour in the lab seem fraught with peril: “Every chemical, without exception, is hazardous. Did you know that oxygen is poisonous if inhaled at a concentration a bit greater than its natural concentration in the air?” More than half of the suggested experiments in a multimedia package for schools called “You Be the Chemist,” created in 2004 by the Chemical Educational Foundation, are to be performed by the teacher alone, leaving students to blow up balloons (with safety goggles in place) or answer questions like “How many pretzels can you eat in a minute?”

The same political idiocy afflicts model rocketry.

Only the U.S. Navy can spend $20
million to sink one of its own ships:

The Navy spent more than three years
and $20 million preparing [the aircraft carrier] Oriskany
to become an artificial reef. The project was repeatedly
delayed to meet Environmental Protection Agency concerns
about removal of hazardous substances including oil, fuel,
asbestos and PCBs — polychlorinated biphenyls, which are
cancer-causing substances used throughout old ships in
electrical equipment. Even then, for a while, it seemed as
if the 56-year-old flattop might never go down. She was
towed between Pensacola and Texas three times before the
sinking was set.

Learning from failure is a hallmark of the technology business. Nick Baker, a 37-year-old system architect at Microsoft, knows that well. A British transplant at the software giant’s Silicon Valley campus, he went from failed project to failed project in his career. He worked on such dogs as Apple Computer’s defunct video card business, 3DO’s failed game consoles, a chip startup that screwed up a deal with Nintendo, the never successful WebTV and Microsoft’s canceled Ultimate TV satellite TV recorder.

But Baker finally has a hot seller with the Xbox 360, Microsoft’s video game console launched worldwide last holiday season…

In an industry where you have to take a 4 billion dollar loss just to break into the market, the deadlines are tight, the stakes are big, and a mistake can cost you everything…

We should ban violent video games that show our military hunting down terrorists because… terrorists use them to prove that our military wants to kill them. (God, sorry, Allah forbid!) Or at least that’s the unstated message of this Reuters article.

I love Google, but this is just pathetic:

Google has informally complained to U.S. and European antitrust regulators about what it says are biased settings on Microsoft’s latest Web browser, marking the latest spat between two companies whose business models are increasingly bumping up against one another.

Google’s charge, isn’t true, as you can see in my screenshot.  My IE7 is set to Google by default becuase IE6 was, and even if it wasn’t, the change is very easy to make.

However, even if it were true, it’s fully within Microsoft’s right, and in fact might be expected by their shareholders to favor their own search engine over Google.  By complaining to a regulatory agency, Google is basically claiming that Microsoft doesn’t have a right to pitch its own products before others.  And this is coming from the dominant search engine on the market!
Meanwhile, the Firefox browser is set to Google’s browser by default, and does not even have MSN Search as an option. In exchange the Mozilla corporation makes millions from Google searches.  MSN search is also notably absent from Google Desktop and other Google applications.

I took some photos from my bike last night and made some collages. What do you think?

(More here)

Advocates of eminent domain often argue that it is necessary to prevent holdouts from bidding up prices as part of a large land purchase. But real estate companies have developed many strategies to deal with this problem long before governments started confiscating land on their behalf. Even if you are a brand-name company trying to build a 50 acres campus in the hottest real estate market in the country.