The report says Robbins turned in his laptop with a broken screen and was issued a loaner on Oct. 20, but school officials quickly moved to retrieve it due to outstanding insurance fees. So the tracking program was activated from Oct. 20 to Nov. 4 and captured 210 webcam photographs and 218 screen shots, the report said.

So they knew who had the laptop (not missing). They gave it to him (not stolen). They didn't attempt to recover the laptop by using reasonable measures (asking him for it back, calling the parents). But some how, spying on him for 15 days, off campus, is reasonable for not paying a $50 fee?

This is one of three possibilities. The other two being, they started using the code from open sourced modules and thus are still bound by that license or they contracted the work out and the copyright was reassigned to the whitehouse, in which case they can license it.

Drupal considers modules derivative works, so modules must be licensed under the GPL. Drupal Licensing FAQ. Not sure if it'd hold up in court, but thats what the Drupal community understands as their obligations.

Disabling the root password means now they only need to hijack a normal local user account, not root. You're effectively running as root, with all the security implications.

A local user in sudoers. This has been argued to death in many forums, and I don't think either side is going to back down anytime soon. No matter what, at least we're more secure than Windows, right?

And other handy things, like = and % are REALLY hidden on the BB. BTW, one of the keys on the Nokia brings up a character map.

The Curve is no different. SYM key brings up a character map, then Y or P for those symbols, respectively.

One would think that issues like keeping government IT systems up to date would transcend party politics.

I think you have far too much faith in politicians (however little faith you already have). There is not a single issue that politicians wouldn't use to score cheap political points.

Students DID notice the little green lights turning on. Many, many times. When they reported this to the district, the district said it was a "glitch."

What I'd be interested in is the frequency that the software was taking pictures. From the linked blog in TFS it sounds like this "glitch" was more common than some 40 students laptops that was reported. I wonder if it happens to all of the laptops at some interval (while outside the schools network, as the blog says), and then their server retains the images and that feature was only accessed the 40 some times. If this is how it works... I could see the school being royally boned.

Similarly, getting even connected to a network wasn't straightforward or as easy as XP. Linux would have died.

I don't know about you, but the first *nix (FreeBSD 4 or 5) system I used, network setup was much easier than Windows. Hell, I still have to download drivers for the nic on every clean Windows install. Now getting XFree86 working right back then on my shitty hardware, thats another story (and now, using Ubuntu, I've never had graphics not work out of the box--although that can't be said of everyone in every situation).

If Microsoft was forced to release the source code to XP in 2001/2002, things would not be better, the only thing that would have happened is we would have little to no technological advancement past 2002.

I don't think forcing them to open their code would have been a good solution, but surely Microsoft wouldn't have just folded? It's not like they haven't done any development on Windows since.

Excellent! If it's competitive, what does it matter if we were to add one more taxpayer funded competitor? Think of it like having the BBC available on TV. You sound a little worried ?

Because there are already enough good choices. Theres any number of ways that money could be used in a more productive way.

Those are irrelevant options. In the age of the internet, a public search engine should be paid for through taxes, in the same way that we already pay for the courts, we pay for the police, we pay for the military, etc. If it's a service that's for everyone and that everyone needs to use, it shouldn't be private. Think NASA or the military, but for information technology.

Ok, usually I'm pretty liberal and think that the government can (and should) provide some services where it makes sense that only one entity (can) provide the services. I say this only because, unlike many of the libertarians around here, I do not believe the free market is the best system for every problem.

But...

ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS?

The search market is competitive, if you really don't trust Google's search algorithm there's plenty of other ones to choose from. It's a fast moving field where each provider has to constantly update and tweak their algorithms to provide the most relevant results. Google has been constantly adding features which (to me, at least) displays more relevant information about each result. Keeping up with this pace is not something that the government is good at.

Now if you meant that to be sarcastic.... then WOOSH .