What would be nice would be to have lockers at airports. I live out in the Pacific and it would be convenient to have stuff sent to a locker at say Brisbane airport, where I pick it up for my last leg home.

How can you tell when you've had a Vietnamese burgle your house? Your VCR is gone, but your homework is done...

LibreOffice can't disrupt MS Office because if something is free then there must be something wrong with it (that's how they think out in the Pacific). If LibreOffice had a $400 price tag it would be way more popular than it is. (Stolen watermelon always tastes better). That's why people pirate Windows rather then use Linux - free? what's wrong with it? I'm not getting a 'professional' pirated experience if I don't use Windows.

Not just a piracy problem - even when offered open source software people in developing countries will go for pirated software because it is 'worth something' - if the software is free (as in you don't have to pay a license for it) then there must be something wrong with it. They would much rather use free stolen software than free free software. Also, due to lower connectivity rates, memory sticks get passed around (music, movies) - I'm not sure about now, but a few years ago here in the Solomon Islands I used to get 100% success rate on finding malware on memory sticks I tested. Another factor is the cost of bandwidth - Solomon Islands, 7 cents US per megabyte is costly for most locals, so memory stick malware passing is still rife.

Hey man, don't you know that using UNIX will lead to more hard core stuff like Linux????

I live in the Solomon Islands - Honiara to be exact (think Marines, think Guadalcanal). There are no traffic lights here, and the traffic cops are almost non-existent (except for carrying out road-side audits for licensing and registration). Anarchy more or less rules - there's lots of traffic, though most of the time it doesn't move very fast. At times, the traffic and pedestrians mix (next to the markets). There are very few accidents here. People learn to rely on their own skills and judgement, and NEVER trust the person in the other vehicle. Sort of like open source traffic management...

What, like that really bad Windows disease?

Best thing for the invasive Eucalypts is to cut them down and use them for firewood. In my experience they make the best firewood in the world, especially for outdoors dutch oven cooking and BBQs. The wood doesn't turn instantly into ash when burnt, instead they tend to form solid hot coals for a while and give an even heat. After moving to the Solomon Islands from Australia, one thing I miss is Eucalypt firewood.

I live in the Solomon Islands, and getting people to adopt Linux has one main problem. Unless the software is pre-loaded on a laptop, almost no-one pays for commercial software. The 'computer experts' in the Solomons get business by loading pirated software onto peoples' computers, thereby giving it to them 'for free' and 'saving them lots of money'. Too bad the machines flake out again in four to sixth months due to malware load and have to be reloaded by the 'the experts' again, for a fee of course, but they load the software again 'for free'. They find it impossible to see value in open source software - there must be something wrong with it if there is no cost involved. I've had a Solomons IT guy arguing against me installing a samba server as it would not make the government department appear 'professional', meanwhile he was running Windows 2000 desktop with a file share as the file server. Ubuntu should place a US$500 license fee on their products - it would be pirated like hotcakes...

This level of software piracy is standard in the Solomon Islands, and I assume much of the rest of the Pacific.