Choose your weapons!

To be honest I didn't even know they provided "contractual support" for OpenSolaris, but surely the fact that they won't support you in using it doesn't nesessarily imply that it's being canned. Maybe it'll just be an unsupported "unstable" version that you can play with before getting "real" Solaris.

share the 3G HSPA connection with various Wi-Fi clients as an instant access point

Great... I can has cheap 3G data access now? Don't know what it's like in the US, but this side of the pond I'm looking at at least £1 per Mb.

the exact money figure is mostly a distraction from the issue. If he's done something *actually wrong*, then the fact that he can't pay the fine shouldn't mean that he gets off scot free.

No it should mean that the punishment reflects both the harm done and his ability to pay, unless you're saying that what he did really does merit the punishment of lifetime bankruptcy. It should cut the other way too: if he'd been rich he should have been fined more.

Microsoft may offer tools for volume license customers that prevent the Ballot Screen update from being installed on all computers covered by the license.

I'm still waiting for some confirmation on this. I do not want this thing appearing on my carefully locked down staff and lab desktops, which incidentally all use Firefox anyway in case you're thinking I'm an IE astroturfer.

Not that I ever used it to generate a completely new SID, but what I did find it invaluable for was to set a machine's SID back to its old value after a re-install. This did away with the need to change the ownership on all of the user's files still on the hard drive and meant that most of the time their user profile would just keep on working as if nothing had changed.

This only happens on new installs

Well, according to what I read here:

The browser ballot screen is a web page that will be shown to any European Windows user who has Internet Explorer set as their default browser. It will appear:

• following a new installation of Windows 7 during the first automatic update
• during a future automatic update of Vista and XP, and
• whenever the user chooses to return to the web page.

...how and to what extent this "ballot screen" is going to be forced on people. I manage a lot of Windows computers at work and the last thing I want is an automatic update suddenly presenting my users with the invitation to choose a new browser, which they won't be able to take up anyway because they lack the administrative privileges to install one.

Here's hoping there's a quick and easy way to disable this with group policy or registry tweaks. What makes sense for Joe Sixpack or Granny Crabapple is not necessarily wanted in a corporate/managed environment.

So does that mean that if I break a web site's terms of service then my access is still 'authorized'? Authorized by whom?

Who gets to decide which browsers are included in this "ballot screen"? Based on what criteria?

If it's simply going to be the top 5 or whatever based on current market share then this is simply cementing the status quo rather than helping competition and innovation, and if any any every browser gets a look in then what's to stop SuperSpywareBrowser2009 from appearing in the choices?

What the fuck are you talking about? Solaris IS GPL.

Nope, OpenSolaris is released under the CDDL, a license similar to the Mozilla Public License and widely believed to have been deliberately selected for its incompatibility with the GPL.

Rogers, one of Canada's big ISPs, also chimed in and explained that new regulations might limit its ability to throttle P2P uploads

No. Net Neutrality ensures no discrimination based on traffic source or destination. This has nothing to do with Quality of Service filtering, which is discrimination based on traffic type. They can still throttle my P2P all they like, they just can't throttle my access to YouTube because YouTube didn't pony up some "high traffic site fee".

Which was done with Vista.

No it doesn't. If you install Vista with all the defaults then you are a member of the Administrators group. You still have to go out of your way if you want to start out with a plain old unprivileged user.

Anyway, Administrator accounts are the default and therefore what 99% of users are going to be using.

And only when Microsoft change this will Windows be half way towards being secure.