It never ceases to amaze me how many seemingly intelligent
people can fall for such an obviously absurd urban legend
like this. (1) Microsoft gets investigated by the FTC for
doing such terrible things as freely negotiating a contract
with Compaq for its use of Windows, or for the audacity to
give away their browser. They get castigated in the press
for making a Java that's a little bit different from Sun's.
If they were caught doing something as truly underhanded as
this, it would be front page headline news, and people would
be screaming for jail terms (I mean people one would normally
take seriously, not the kind of people already screaming for
Bill's head). (2) If they did have code that did this, all
that would be necessary to prove it is a filename and byte
offset, and anyone could go disassemble the code and see for
themselves. This is such a trivial thing to prove, the
complete lack of such proof in any of these stories makes it
obvious that they are just fabrication.
No doubt we'll see stories next week that Bill is running
a black-market stolen kidney syndicate, or has purchased the
Dewar holding Walt Disney, or maybe that he was the one who
shot down TWA 800.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC