Microsoft to Issue Fewer Stock Options, Gates Says [Bloomberg.com]

Coming up next: Ambushed on “Donahue”!
More dangerous than Grand Theft Auto 3 — a defender of video games is given the trash talk-show treatment. Here’s what he really wanted to say. [salon]

Switcher’s remorse. An Episcopal priest goes from Windows to Mac but then has second thoughts. Is her computing soul at risk? [Salon.com]

Bush’s Mideast Sand Trap. The Bush policy today is to punish its enemies with the threat of democracy and reward its friends with silence on democratization. By Thomas L. Friedman. [New York Times: Opinion]

test?

Office XP vs. bugs, round two. Microsoft plans to release its second “comprehensive” collection of bug fixes, or service pack, on Wednesday. [CNET News.com]

I remember once reading about the mirror way of thinking. The basic idea of the miror is that many complaints or rationlizing from one party to another should be examined in the other direction. I’ve read many things that critize payfor software for borrowing things in the public domain without giving back, and then today I realized that the thing I dislike the most about the GPL is that so much of it is copying from the public domain (and payfor domain) without giving anything back. I once wrote a little app for beos. I released it with the GPL because I had used a header of id3 genre name to id mappings from a GPL’d piece of source code, had I not done that I would have released it into the public domain. So what if some company picked up my source and made a better product with it? Software would have improved, and my life as a user would have improved.

Yahoo! News – Going Up? Private Group Begins Work on Space Elevator [lnk.to]

The Real Thing
And as my colleague Frank Rich points out, to offset the revenue losses from his tax cut, Mr. Bush would have to veto a $5 billion spending proposal every working day for the next year. Mr. Bush can no longer pretend, as he did during the 2000 campaign, that there is enough money for everything [lnk.to]

RealNetworks Launches New Player. RealNetworks began offering a new digital media player on Tuesday that plays back music and video in all formats, including those of its main competitor, Microsoft Corp. By Reuters. [New York Times: Technology]