Not a dime more than $31 (USD) per share Gates says to Yahoo!.  Of course, that's according to Yahoo!'s own news service.  ;)  Indeed, it's interesting to watch this clip and note all the things that aren't said; either because my work this past week on the documentation system for Commerce Server 2007 SP2 occupies too much time for the various news services to reach me trough the deluge that is my personal email service and keep me updated or because Yahoo! (for some reason) isn't saying all the things the other news services like CNet's News.com service are (or some combination thereof).

The Associated Press (AP) clip was likely edited for brevity, but was the only video segment tonight on Yahoo! Canada's news site that I could find.  There's no mention of the upcoming shareholders' meeting where Microsoft intends to let candidates selected by its own management stand for election.  And no mention of recent punditry citing the fact that several companies Microsoft is closely partnered with already sit on Yahoo's board (albeit not enough to form a majority), nor is there mention of the share holdings of those partners which also are significant.

Of course, there is a real danger here that if another suitor comes along offering more than $31, any deal between Microsoft and Yahoo! will be done.  And Yahoo's definitely pulling out all the stops to fight off the takeover - this past week, Yahoo started laying off staff (totalling 1,000 so far) to help bolster its share price and prevent Redmond from moving in.

The Yahoo story cited a falling share price, but one has to wonder whether that dynamic had anything to do with the Yahoo takeover talk, or whether it will continue with Yahoo starting to look desperate in its efforts to partner with Google and News Corp., denying the software industry's "evil empire" a foothold in the business of online advertising.  Taken in concert with failed earlier attempts to win the attention of Time Warner & AOL - it's not looking like Yahoo will end up with an alliance that will beat $31.

To top off everything, a small group of Yahoo's shareholders has launched a lawsuit in the United States against Yahoo, claiming the board is trying to stonewall the Microsoft offer, which is  - to them at least - extremely attractive.  I suppose one can't be too surprised that this wasn't in the coverage offered by Yahoo's news service, although what was contained therein made it seem (to me) that the Microsoft offer was in some real danger.

We could know for certain as early as next week.  Stay tuned...

•  CNET News.com Special Coverage: Microsoft's Big Bid for Yahoo
  As developments warrant, return here to read the insight of one developer on this remarkable and evolving story!

I know I sound to a lot of people who know me as being "down on Ottawa".  But my interactions with police, rare as they are, haven't been as positive since my departure from Winnipeg. Is that because I've become intolerant and behave with greater disdain for authorities as I've grown older?  I don't think we can say that; indeed, I think the degree to which I respect front-line police and understand their on-the-job challenges has improved, if anything.  Yet that understanding and respect has done little to win me any big favours from officers who've pulled me over on the four or five occasions I've been ticketed, and certainly not on the one occasion where I was actually arrested (and later cleared of the charge).  Nor did it spare me being treated with extreme suspicion by a detective I called in a more recent involvement while simply inquiring why I'd missed a policeman at my door.  He'd been carrying a subpoena for testimony from me concerning an incident a week earlier where I helped an older man who was being assaulted by a street thug near my apartment.  Suffice it to say that with these experiences, I haven't been terribly surprised at hearing about a number of incidents over the past year (or two) where pepper spray, batons and, most recently, tasers have been employed with a dubious level of provocation by those whom the media affectionately names "suspects".

But as we see in this report from Associated Press (courtesy of Yahoo!), questions are starting to be asked about police methods and practices from even relatively police-friendly media.  Practices that likely date back to the dawn of policing.  Technology, increasingly, is now frequently plays a key role in catching police in the act of being abusive with their powers.  Many police advocates are reacting with some disdain to this, seeing anything that makes the beat cop's job harder as just another impediment to "getting the bad guys".  But on the other side of the equation, such critics forget that there really are innocent people - like me (and therefore you, eventually) - getting their rights and liberties trampled upon.  That we're seeing justice undone all the time by those who've sworn to uphold it; and that these aren't isolated incidents best characterized as "far and few in between".  And that none of this behaviour is contributing to making our streets or property safer.  Certainly, it's not helping get or even hinder the bad guys.

Not even just a little bit.

Behind the pepper spray, holding that baton or taser, under that navy blue hat with the shield emblazoned upon it is a human being.  A human being that is oh so capable of making mistakes.  No matter how wonderfully discriminating the recruitment process is, despite the fact most cops are great people doing a difficult job, there are going to be people brought onto the force who are going to get into situations they sometimes wont' be able to entirely control.  And they'll screw up.  In the Associated Press (AP) article cited above, the reporters are very un-journalistically falling all over themselves to point out for the viewer what the video might not be showing us.  And yet, the officer's actions really speak for themselves - and even the policeman's would-be apologists have to acknowledge that police are and need to be held to a much higher standard than the average person in a similar situation.  A big reason for this is because of all those extra powers the officer has; powers that can really screw up an innocent person's life, if abused.  To boot, the courts will almost always take the testimony of a police officer over that of any other individual - including the accused - on the assumption that the officer will act professionally in the interests of justice rather than veer toward vigilantism.  In many ways, when a cop gets into a conflict with an ordinary person, the odds are stacked very heavily against that person getting anything more than token due process no matter what the cop did wrong.  This system has worked fine up until now; but with the ability of every individual on the street to take footage of police all the time - one of two things needs to happen: either public expectations about the police change, or the police need to adjust traditional behaviour to  conform with the law, no matter how badly their day went.  Or some combination of both.

Some systemic processes in the courtroom can't be changed easily - taking the cop's word over contradictory testimony by an accused without corroborating evidence, for example.  But we need to not put our heads in the sand and hold evidence collected by cell phone video or other such means suspect before the behaviour of police.  The cell phone camera isn't lying; that you can be sure of.  So if the officer presents a version of events that differs with that presented by technology - we need to accept it.  In the AP story, the journalists are leading the viewers' opinions by raising doubts about what happened before the video was taken, or after.  That's not something they do when covering other kinds of stories - and in almost any other context, a journalist would be criticized heavily by his/her peers for injecting editorial or conjecture like that.  What about the teacher who's accused of "touching" a student inappropriately?  Does he get that kind of preamble?  What about the soldier accused of shooting an unarmed demonstrator?  If we see video captures of such events, we tend to accept the evidence at face value (and perhaps we shouldn't).  But there's a special consideration being given police on this issue - and it's partly the desire to protect the institution of policing from the kind of criticism that might harm confidence in it and law and order along with it.  But unless we all toss our mobile phones in the garbage, that strategy is doomed to fail.

Questions like whether should the officer be fired (as the boy's mom in the AP  piece suggested) deserve an answer too.  "Probably not" is mine.  Although the boy's mother points out she'd be fired from her job (presumably not in policing) were she to act that way, we can and should afford a degree of tolerance for police needing to think on their feet quickly and not always get it right.  Police aren't merchants and the public aren't customers, so they don't really need to behave the same way as those whose relationships with the public are primarily commercial. Being human, we need to hold police to a higher standard in many resects, but mistakes of that sort probably shouldn't cost an officer his livelihood either.  Somewhere between the new reality cultivated by technology which catches a cop having a bad day and a dogmatic assumption that a person in-uniform is presumed to flawlessly walk that thin blue line is a happy medium where justice is done, the law is upheld and a lot fewer innocent people end up with fines, embarrassment, arrest, jail time or even worse - like accidental death from a taser in an airport for the crime of not speaking English.

Change won't come easy to policing, I don't think.  I used to be a security guard at a core area mall in my home city during my 1st year of university.  It was challenging, and rewarding in some respects - but really didn't pay well.  In the end, programming was far closer to 'my thing', but I had to work with police and got some great insight into how they work.  There were even a few mistakes I made where they backed me up, probably not all unlike a street gang looks after its own.  And there's a whole mentality borne of circumstance behind that.  It's flawed, certainly.  It's human too.  Sometimes, it's even necessary.  And that's why whatever change happens needs to be thought through carefully with the realization that there's a difference between the way things look on paper and how they are in practice.  But if police don't adapt willingly, the consequences will be a lot more distrust between the force and those whom they serve and protect.  Careers will be needlessly ruined and reputations forever tarnished.  Hopefully, eyes are opened to the change that is already here and we'll see fewer and fewer stories like this one as time goes on.

I've despised Facebook for a long time now.  While the popular social networking service has managed to re-unite me with a number of long-lost friends, schoolmates, etc. (more thanks to its own bloated popularity than anything innovative or wonderful it was doing), being periodically harassed and then spam-attacked by people I didn't want to talk to for whatever reason caused the bad to far outweigh the good where I was concerned.  Much to my delight, renowned Internet-based journalist and author Cory Doctorow shares my view that the site is ultimately doomed; and largely on the reasons why.

Hear why here.

The other big race that us geeks are following these days is the choice for who will take on the mantle of the world's leading Internet advertising provider.  And boy did it take next to no time for consolidation of this market!  The Internet is barely 10 years old, and if Yahoo bails, selling out either to the world's largest software company - Microsoft - or the world's largest Internet search engine - Google - there'll only be two companies left to virtually monopolize online advertising.  And who's it gonna be?

It seems likely that Yahoo will ultimately take the Microsoft deal, although the bid may have to go up marginally to clinch the deal.  The prevailing view in the street is that there just aren't any other bidders with the kind of capital necessary to top the Microsoft offer, and if Google were to try it would likely face being slapped with an antitrust action.  Additionally, Microsoft seems determined, having upped its bid from a similar one about a year ago.  Back then, Yahoo was in no hurry to take the offer, but time's have changed radically.  There's a lot less competition in the market now and Yahoo shareholders might find that the price per share will go down on subsequent offers from Microsoft or other suitors if it spurns the software giant this time.

Strategically, Microsoft needs the deal or another like it to stay in the game with Google.  It's at risk of losing the ability to compete with Google at all in the Internet advertising space and Google continues to threaten to enter into service areas traditionally held exclusively by Microsoft.  These include the operating system and even office productivity spaces, although Google's lone offering of online versions of office productivity software have yet to pose any serious threat to Microsoft's Office product line.  But Google hasn't slowed down development of new products and is rumoured to be continuing development of applications with a deliberate aim at taking users off the desktop and putting them on the Web in order to turn software from packaged merchandise to for-fee service.  What would a Google OS look like and how would it compete with Microsoft's Windows?  Although hard to predict outright, there is considerable research being spent on creating a product that could revolutionize the operating system; something that would be a departure from the approach Microsoft has taken with the traditional OS - by just adding more "stuff" into what's already been there for years.  Even Slate magazine, owned and operated by Microsoft, acknowledges this threat from "the cloud OS".

Whatever else you may read - and wherever you may read it - there will be a diversity of opinion (far too often religiously based more than in any fact or rational analyses) as to who will ultimately prevail in this contest for Internet dominance.  For some reason(s), Microsoft has perpetually held the image as the 'bad guy' of the net.  Somehow, conjecture about how it ended up being sued in one antitrust litigation after another at a time when its competitors, unable to prevail in the marketplace, decided to take a stab at winning in court only stained the company's image with many on the Net.  Although one has to admit that, for the most part, industry professionals have nothing but respect and even admiration for the company's performance over the years.  Even so, the views of those who track and write about the tech industry and Microsoft, in particular, tend to be as polarized as the readership.  But the objective onlooker must concede there's just no way to know.

Microsoft's biggest challenge will be its own success - it's size and largely decentralized organization can make it difficult to harness the talent at its disposal efficiently, and this means it's relatively slow to respond to changes and trends in the market (although make no mistake, it watches the market very closely).  Google, on the other hand, is younger, but suffers from organizational challenges of its own related to it growing 'too big, too fast'.  On balance, Google is probably weaker methodologically and while great ideas certainly get turned into innovative products, its dual focus as both a marketing services company and a software company could mean there's a split focus internally.  Although it has undertaken many new initiatives, the phenomenon of "big names at Google" as there are at Microsoft has yet to occur.  Does Google even have divisions?

The final chapter has yet to be written, but there's drama to come, I'm sure.  And as one whose career is tightly linked to the success of one of the two companies discussed in this article, you can be sure I'll be watching and, sometimes, even blogging about it.