Check, Please: It's mind-boggling when you think about Microsoft and the $60 billion in cash reserves it has to pay off legal settlements and other expenses. Recently, Microsoft has been running through a lot of printer ink to settle patent infringement cases. Microsoft reached a $440 million legal settlement and licensing deal with InterTrust this April, which came less than two weeks after the company agreed to pay Sun $1.6 billion to drop an antitrust suit against Microsoft and clear up patent disputes between the two companies. While it may be true that "if you build it, they will come", it is also apparent that "if you pay them, they will go away."

Ironically, Microsoft's generous check policy apparently doesn't extend to 19-year-olds that discover security holes in the Jet Database Engine - which if exploited would have let hackers take control of a user's PC and spread nasty viruses.