Microsoft has a long and interesting Linux/FOSS history.

I remember in the late 90s, Microsoft actually released a Front Page Server Extensions module for Apache on Linux, so people using FP could publish sites to Linux servers.

During the early 2000s, MS shipped a bunch of GPL'd stuff via the Interix/SFU product.

Currently, System Center (enterprise management tool) can also monitor and manage Linux machines along side windows (and Mac) machines.

As noted elsewhere, Microsoft has made Linux a 1st class scenario for Hyper-V on-premise and Azure hosted uses.

Microsoft has opened some its internal projects to the external community, with acceptable licenses, and Microsoft has also contributed to existing FOSS projects where it has made sense. Internally, "should we use existing FOSS" or "should we open source this?" are questions that are coming up now where in the past, they never did, and asking them would get you some funny looks.

In the future, you're going to see Microsoft doing a better job of meeting customers in mixed/heterogenous settings. We've got a new CEO that has provided this guidance to the entire company. The market changes have certainly become too large to ignore, but the bottom line is that we're adapting.

On the business side, getting some of a customer's business is better than getting none of their business.

As always, we partner with everybody and we compete against everybody. For example, I sit in a building where most of the developers here work on Microsoft's own ERP products, yet I worked on features that let Visual Studio talk to SAP.

How about political editorials?
Who will decide if "news" coverage is impartial or biased towards or against any candidate or party?

Sure it does. Let people say whatever they want to say and in the marketplace of ideas, the most compelling argument wins.

LK

Because CocaCola is not a citizen. Illegal aliens do not have the right to vote in November either. (We all know that many of them will anyway, but they have no right to do so.)

Yes it is. Being a "person" under the law doesn't require one to be a human being. There is still a class of human beings who are not "persons" under the laws of the USA. You need to understand the underlying premise here.

The Constitution refers to "Persons", "The People" and "Citizens". These are three distinct types of entity under the law. I am a Citizen and by virtue of that, I am a person and one of the people.

No, they are not "people". They are "persons". There is a legal distinction and an important one.

If a dog bites you, can you sue the dog? No. Why? Because the dog is not a person.
Can you sue a corporation? Yes. Why? Because it's a legal "person". "Incorporate" means to "bring together into one body".

LK

ALL candidates? Does that include candidates who have no chance to win? The American Nazi Party for example? Why in the fuck should they get as much money as the "established" parties or even the third parties that are on the fringes but still have the power to influence. Like the Libertarian, Green and Constitution Parties?

Your quick fixes lack foresight. I don't mean that as an insult It seems to me that you're genuinely concerned and motivated to fix the problem but when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you're supposed to do is stop digging. These "solutions" make the problem worse.

LK

If you pay a woman to have sex with you, in most places, that's illegal.

If you pay other people to tell this woman why she should have sex with you, that's not illegal.

Buying votes is illegal. Paying people to tell others to vote the way you want them to should not be illegal.

LK

Do you have a problem with Michael Bloomberg giving $50,000,000 to promote anti-gun politicians?

LK

Other people here have already pointed these issues out separately but I'd like to combine them.

I don't think that anyone can honestly deny how NBC's portrayal of Sarah Palin had a tremendous impact on how the 2008 campaign ended. To this day, a lot of people still confuse Tina Fey's awesome satire for actual Palin statements. Bill Maher, in addition to his million dollar donation to a PAC for Obama's benefit, has constantly given media exposure to politicians who represent his point of view.

Do you have a plan to limit the effect that non-advertising content has on elections?

LK

Bugs weren't missed in mainline openSSL. Bugs were logged, sat around for years, and didn't get fixed.

The project management and software engineering practices for openSSL were/are simply not acceptable.

The code is salvageable. The people and processes that allowed the code to get that way are not.

"This code under new management"

Your links are all to denialist web sites. Those are not "the scientists" at all. The actual scientists are the ones publishing actual science in actual scientific journals. And that research shows man-made warming.

No idea what you mean by "their own experiments have lower confidence." Seems like you're parroting something one of your non-scientists said.

Agreed that it's not in the summary, but as you correctly note, it's just a "summary". Anyone who reads the underlying blog post will read this among the facts on which the court based its opinion: "The public was allowed to search by keyword. The search results showed only the page numbers for the search term and the number of times it appeared; none of the text was visible."

So those readers who RTFA will be in the know.

The party you are referring to exists - it's called the libertarian party - and it is mostly (but not entirely) ex-Republicans who think responsible adults should be treated like responsible adults -- e.g. left alone until they hurt somebody.

There _should_ be more liberals and democrats joining the libertarian cause, because the LP is much better than the dems on key issues dems claim to care about: anti-war, pro-civil liberties, anti-racism in law enforcement (especially the drug war), anti-corporatism..

So, I cannot tell you why there aren't more democrats who break ranks and join the libertarians.

One reason for that, I suspect, is that I simply cannot relate to democrats or understand how they came to be democrats in the first place. There are plenty of intelligent people who are democrats, but I've never been able to figure out how any of them "tick".

In any case, there are principled libertarians -- and that's how they've traditionally billed themselves. Principled in the sense that they think government morally/ethically should not do certain things.

Then there are pragmatic libertarians -- folks who figure government is _ineffective_ or even malicious at doing certain things, and therefore shouldn't do them. An example would be Gary Johnson.

The bottom line is that, if America were actually incredibly hungry for a fiscally conservative, socially permissive party -- that party has existed for decades. It has been getting more popular lately, but it's still basically a rounding error in most elections.

That's a popular canard but it's not always true. Intensity beats extensity, every time.

This is an example of what I mean, Eric Cantor just lost his primary to a no-name Tea Partier that he outspent 27 to 1.

In local, state and national elections the ability to motivate people is what wins elections.

In 2008, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani out-fundraised McCain by 7 million and 4 million dollars respectively and they both lost.

The Democrats were even more interesting on this front. First when he beat the Clinton machine in the 2008 primary. His campaign employed analytics on a level that hadn't been seen before, especially for a political nobody who was barely on the national stage for 4 years. Hillary out-funraised Barack by over 11 million dollars and he soundly beat her.

Obama out-spent McCain by almost 400 million dollars and had it not been for his running mate, McCain would have faced an embarrassing loss in the general election. Beyond that money, Obama had the organization to win.

Obama out-spent Romney by 250 million dollars. Had the election taken place a year later, his victory wouldn't have been assured. Despite a quarter of a billion dollar advantage, the incumbent nearly lost.

The thread that unites all of these cases is that in every instance, the candidate with the most energetic following won. Money helps but it's only the losers who complain when the game that they chose to play doesn't turn out their way.

LK

OK. Fair enough.

Then, you're not really a Libertarian. Your association with any business is purely voluntary, absent any government coercion.

If the government didn't have so much power, there'd be no incentive for businesses to subvert it for their own goals.

LK

Technically, our current system is "voluntary" as well.

See what happens if you don't volunteer to pay.

LK