Please provide me a list of alternatives then. There's nothing that even comes close to what Skype does, not even any opensource ones. In the mean time, I can always find anyone I need to talk to on Skype.

Yes, and the American revolutionaries should have brought their concerns to the King instead of breaking the law and killing all those poor red coats. I'm sure the King would have been understanding by chopping off their heads for bringing it up.

He violated the law for reporting on a government that's breaking its own laws? You would make an excellent legal adviser in Iran.

They were spying on everyone, including US citizens. The whole system was designed to spy on everything and everyone. By your definition, any whistleblower in this case would be called a "Traitor" because there's no way around it.

And that website still gets the tax rates wrong. It lists my area with 8% tax when it's 7.75%.

Right, and that really doesn't matter because as a whole product, Skype is complete, UI and network. Unless some opensource alternative can do the same thing, they'll never really be an alternative.

And the pitfalls of opensource software is lacking innovation and the will to be better than Skype. We still have nothing that comes close to Skype in the opensource world. All the opensource alternatives are difficult to use for the average joe, especially dealing with video and audio issues. I have no problem setting up my own sip service or my own teamspeak server, but trying to explain to my mother how to connect to that is difficult when I can just say, "Find my username on Skype" and in 5 minutes I'm talking to her.

Ekiga is a freaking mess compared to Skype. I don't understand why they don't simplify it and make it nice to use. It's one of those Opensource programs who refuse to be better, like Gimp. In the meantime, the only good alternative to Skype I found viable is Google.

I've never heard of them. You can go onto their forums and their community is pretty much nill compared to the other sites. All I see is a bunch of spam posts. I don't know why this is newsworthy. It sounds more like a troll and theguardian bought into it without actually researching the entire story.

"Mark Radcliffe, an IP expert and senior partner at DLA Piper who specializes in open source licensing issues, has analyzed the case—and argued that it underscores the need for companies to implement internal GPL compliance processes. 'Fantec is a reminder that companies should adopt a formal FOSS use policy which should be integrated into the software development process,'"

Yeah, because that's gonna work!
No, what's actually going to happen at businesses, they're going to implement a policy of "NO GPL" in their policy. Why? Because it's easier. This is why it's hard for businesses to accept GPL based code. When it now requires I hire a lawyer and consultant to actually figure out if I'm in "compliance", because I may obviously not have all the legal knowledge to figure it all out myself, I'm just not going to bother. Basically this has made the situation even worse and businesses are just going to look at GPL based code as a time bomb waiting to go off on them and refuse to deal with it. I'd rather hire another programmer to rewrite the piece of software I need, as it will be cheaper for me in the long run.

I agree, but some things are extremely annoying. I wouldn't mind metro so much if I didn't have to really aim for the precise position on multi-monitor setups to get to it from the Desktop. However, with this in mind, I learned about the quick keys to access the same stuff, however, I would want to disable the onscreen menus if I'm going to use the hotkeys because I inadvertently trigger these menus when I don't want them at the time.

I just realized you can disable the taskbar on multiple monitors, there's an option to do it.

I actually like the taskbar going across multiple monitors. However, I agree, they need an option to turn it off. What's especially annoying with multi-monitor support is the side option screen that shows up when you least expect it and when you want to access it, it's hard to access it. I hope Microsoft patches some of these annoyances for plain desktop use. Why add a "DESKTOP" option that functions like a broken Windows 7 Desktop?

Because wikileaks is bullshit: http://cryptome.org/0002/wikileaks-unlike.htm I don't need to say more. John Young has more credibility than Assange or his wikileak group will ever have.

Only 7% running ICS because the majority of people don't want to purchase a new phone ever since google screwed us over with updates. Considering we can't run ICS on the majority of Android phones on sale right now, why bother upgrading? Forcing us to buy some new battery hungry phone isn't gonna do it.