If you think that's creepy, checkout:
http://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/elections-quebec-2012/carte-du-financement-politique-au-quebec/

Since 2011, any amount over 200$ was made public by the organisation overseeing elections. Since 2012 all amounts are public. This is (in part) to counter corporate fraud. Companies are not allowed to donate directly to political parties, so they ask their employees to do so.

Here are two PCB sellers in HK who ship overseas:
http://www.onepcbsolution.com/
http://www.hkmingdi.com/enindex.asp

I found them off the forum of this site:
http://www.deadharddrive.com/

I wrote a short post about it in French, you can probably run it in google-translate. It took me a bit of time to figure out the PCB number on my Seagate drive, which is on the PCB, but on the side facing the disk, so I had to unscrew it to obtain it. (both HK sites were helpful and responded to my e-mails in good English).
http://www.bidon.ca/fr/random/2011-04-12-disque-dur-ressuscite

As the GP, I once had a burnt component on a PCB of a hard disk. I changed it using the *exact* model of the disk, and it worked. The disk was 100$ for a 500GB off eBay, which is a bit expensive, but afterwards I had a brand new disk to keep (I put the PCB back on the new disk once I finished retrieving the data). The seller on eBay provided the complete serial number in order to make it easy to find the correct replacement disk.

There are also companies in Hong Kong that specialize in selling replacement PCBs. It's much cheaper, but bigger delays.

I guess I shouldn't feed the trollls.. but :

I could survive with a phone running Windows, or even Vax VMS. I just wouldn't use it as much and would be far less amusing, secure and providing less freedom. Anyway, it's just a gadget, and one in decline, I'd argue.

(I, for one, would welcome a VMS smart phone. If Microsoft did it, why not VMS?)

I don't know for the OP, but many of us still cling to our aging Nokia N900 running Maemo. Easy to hack/play, free as in freedom, based on Debian.

That doesn't seem to me like a particularly good example. The reporter is being a dick and in most other languages this sort of behavior would have been classified as "undefined".

Last week I was in a in a small village 2h north of San Francisco. The hotel had broken ipv4/NAT (using 200.200.200.1/32 for the internal network), but perfectly functionnal IPv6 (using Comcast).

Most ISPs already have an IPv6 deployment plan. Most north american ISPs already ship wifi/dsl routers to their customers, so they will just switch the router at some point. No big deal really.

(my home/office networks/ISPs/websites are already ipv6)

Agreed. Private cord banks are pure scam, abusing of vulnerable parents who do not want to take any risks ("a small price to pay for peace of mind").

Public cord banks, on the other hand, save lives. Stem cells can be taken from a donor, not just from umbelical cords. Hema Quebec is a good example of an efficient public bank, imho.

Not to mention that it is unlikely that a single umbelical cord would be enough to save a life. A person under 50kg may require up to the equivalent of 3 or 4 umbelical cords. (ref, in french)

Your examples are a bit odd. RedHat seems to be doing fine, and more CentOS users means a bigger potential market for RedHat. There are a lot of success stories of free software communities that seem to be doing fine.

Although MySQL is in a weird spot now, the way it evolved is impressive. Also note that MySQL folks use to explain the dual-license as: "if you make money, then so do I". i.e. if your program is proprietary, no problem, you can link with MySQL, but then pay a licence fee. It was a good model for MySQL, imho.

I'm a developer and contribute/adapt/deploy fundraising and member management solutions that are completely GPL (CiviCRM and Drupal). Any patch I do for my clients, I publish it online, or put in more billable time to get the patch into the original program. My clients understand that they now have a choice of consultants and find it wonderful that we are a ton of people who understand this code. They are more autonomous, can do more stuff, and usually at less cost.

Anyway, the quote from Monthy seems really out of context. Afaik, Stallman finds proprietary software immoral, not profit. The argument is usually made that making money from proprietary software, while it may feed your family, causes harm to others. I don't see how making profit from free software would be an issue.

This said, imho, everyone has to do some compromises in order to survive, but more people succeed than you think.

I agree on the common ground aspect.

I'd add that when the story summary on slashdot is incomplete, someone usually reads the article and posts a better summary, gets modded up, and discussion moves on from there.

Most big media outlets will not let you criticise their summary. They usually post short-term rubbish to attract clicks and do advertising revenue. They often use misleading headlines and poor context. Not much of a surprise that the discussion afterwards goes nowhere.

Ideally, I do secretly wish that online discussions could be more similar to a real roundtable. It's very difficult to summarise a slashdot discussion. After 24-48h, it just kind of slows down and we move to something new and shiny. In a roundtable, a moderator usually tries to re-state the divergences of opinion to get a good understanding of the various positions. Otherwise it's just the same people repeating the same thing with different words. "Slashbacks" (something like that?), a while ago, kind of tried to do that, I guess, but they were done by slashdot editors.

I use e-mail a lot, but I also have a hard time keeping track of it. Group discussions over e-mail can be a mess.

For internal communication, most companies fail to use an issue tracker (to keep track of internal task dispatching between teams and announcements). I find that for small-medium sized companies, tools such as Redmine are a great way to reduce the quantity of e-mail. (and yes, even in non-development shops)

It's also nice to have a person create a weekly/monthly digest so that no one misses anything important -- but only one e-mail per week, and only with links to what is in the tracker.

Anyway, I'm sure there are tons of books/articles already on the topic, but I was surprised not to see much talk about issue trackers in this thread.

Well, exploits are used by viruses to spread. You have intent and escalation, the rest is just how you deliver the payload.

But no argument from me on the rest of your post. I haven't used MIcrosoft software in 12 years, including at work. :)

To be fair.. under Linux you do have userspace exploits that allow you to gain root, and from there install a rootkit. They tend to be really obscur and get patched quickly, but they still exist.

So an attacker usually needs to combine, for example, a Firefox/Libreoffice/PDF/Mail/PHP exploit, userspace exploit, then rootkit. And there are tons and tons of servers out there with old versions of PHP and Linux kernel. Most of the time people discover it only because they are exploited by spammers.

You can re-enable nautilus using the gnome-tweak-tool.

I have to admit that I always disliked nautilus in gnome2 (visual clutter), so I was happy to see it disabled by default. I only re-enabled it on my HTPC so that my 4 year old kid can find her stuff easily.