I don't understand why people feel that of all the things that the government does this one should be a money maker. It is not a requirement of mine that government services break even or make money. That's why I pay taxes. That's not to say that they should not be more efficient of innovative but they provide a valuable service that I am willing to subsidize with my taxes.

I have never really understood the hatred for Mono here on /. Like any other language it has its advantages and disadvantages. Each person or company choosing to do development takes a risk in the language / platform they decide to use. As long as that person or company feels comfortable managing those risks it seems like that should be enough.

In my years on Slashdot I have not noticed the developers of Wine being vilified in even remotely the same way as de Icaza, despite the obvious parallels.

Mod spire up. I did this same setup and and the speed was so slow it was unusable. Time Machine would just crap out after a long long while.

I always find it surprising when I see a post like this on /. Of all the places to post comments I would think that /. would be one of the few places where people would welcome the attempt to keep technology and the user interaction with technology moving forward. You may disagree with Unity's approach their approach but at least they are making efforts to adapt to the differences in the way we work with computers (in this case the movement way from a 4:3 screen ratio). Instead you cling to a UI paradigm that that is at a minimum 16 years old. There are plenty of alternatives to Ubuntu that offer near duplicate functionality. Canonical is in no position to dictate any long term UI change if it is not as good as the other options. Ultimately if Unity is as bad as you say it is, it will go the way of the CueCat and something better will come a long.

Enjoy the variety, computer UI's are still so young as a technology and evolving rapidly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1_NhnXMCKw&feature=related

It seems to me that his claim that the US government has some kind of direct access to FB is totally unsubstantiated. Show me the evidence that this is the case and then I may be concerned.

If the Post Office had done this 10 years ago it might still have a chance of staying in business.

Looks like they forgot to add that to the end of the story.

This is probably a great percentage compared to the % of people that read the headlines of a newspaper at the newspaper stand never buy a paper.

This would be perfect for a reboot tv series:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081871/

it is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. I suspect that it was a calculated risk by Google to use the name they wanted.

I think I remember Jini being touted for this kind of stuff as well. Not much mention of it on the Wikipedia page though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jini
https://home-automation.dev.java.net/

I'm not sure why you think Miguel trusts Microsoft as a corporation anymore than anyone else here. Based on what I have read on his blog, it seems that he has met some people who work at Microsoft who support Free/Open Source software. He appears to be working with those people to make Microsoft more friendly to Free/Open Source software in the capacity that they can.

I would rather have someone trying to make Microsoft more friendly to Free/Open Source software than not. If no one tries to change their strategies then there is absolutely no hope that they will ever change. Will he succeed? Probably not, but I am glad that he is trying.