What does it mean to "incur" tens of millions of dollars? Microsoft isn't putting any trade secrets into Windows that are worth millions of dollars; they publi

What does it mean to "incur" tens of millions of dollars? Microsoft isn't putting any trade secrets into Windows that are worth millions of dollars; they publish the object code to 500 million PCs, each one of which can decompile it all. A few hardware manufacturers may have contracts demanding M'soft protect their trade secrets -- the secret usually being all the patents they infringe -- by keeping driver BLOBs obscure, but I doubt that's at issue here. I don't think there will be tens of millions in fines, either. Maybe thousands and a few months in jail. Tens of millions (billions, really) may be all the salaries of employees that make M'soft a big name company that can call up the FBI and USA to get attention. But that's what I said before. It's a matter of social priorities. Also, congrats that your local police cared and had the resources to look out for your neighbor. Most departments don't have that level of resources. We had to work for months to get ours to pay that much attention to a convenience store that had some armed robberies in a residential neighborhood. Incidentally, I tried to make a fuss over a stolen teevee and nice camera once. Didn't help.