Bill (Gates), Beer, Blogs (on Lay’s Escape) and School Bus Ads

Search "Microsoft EU fine" to find a story about the huge punishment against the tech giant and you might mistakenly click on a story from March 25, 2004 that “The European Union has found Microsoft guilty of abusing the 'near-monopoly' of its Windows PC operating system and fined it a record 497 million euros ($613 million).”

Of course, the current story this week reported that the European Union “levied a second massive fine — $357 million — on Microsoft and threatened greater penalties (3 million euros, or $3.82 million, per day beginning July 31) in the future unless the world’s largest software company obeys the 2004 antitrust order."

This speaks to the point in my July 3rd blog post that philanthropy is wonderful -- as in Gates' move to work full time on his foundation and Warren Buffett’s entrusting him with the historic $31 billion gift, but the world’s richest man should not leave his social responsibility at the door when he goes to work.

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On a lighter note, want to drink beer guilt-free? See “Sales of organic beers start to hop”

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Finding yourself disquieted over Ken Lay’s punishment-robbing death before his sentencing? Perhaps a scan of the blogsphere’s reaction (One quote: "I wanna see the body") will help.

In other Enron related news:

Merrill Lynch agreed to pay Enron $29.5 million to settle its portion of a lawsuit filed against 10 banks accused of failing to prevent the energy company's collapse.

Voting is still open in the Enron poll, although views may have been skewed be recent events.


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HAVE YOU HEARD? BusRadio, a Massachusetts company, is installing radios in school buses, which will naturally air advertisements along with music to a captive audience of impressionable children. The company says it will reach over 100,000 children in MA alone this fall, and has signed contracts with districts in CA, NY, PA and IL as well. Next year, it plans to reach over a million children, and to grow from there. The teen and tween kids will hear music, patter, and eight minutes of ads per hour to start. This follows on the American tradition of advertisements in classrooms in exchange for televisions and programming from the company Channel One, which now reaches 30 percent of teenagers in the U.S.

Evidently the folks that brought you BusRadio also have a company called Cover Concepts that distributes “free” book covers to schools that happen to have ads for McDonald’s, Nike, and other national brands that are used by 30 million kids in 43,000 U.S. public schools.

In response, the nonprofit Commercial Alert sent a letter to Massachusetts Governor -- and republican presidential hopeful, Mitt Romney, urging him to stop the initiative, which is set to include “children as young as five."

My memories of taking the bus include never ending fights over which music was played on the radio with the end result always turning it off to keep the peace.