I hope they have chosen to use NON union labor. Otherwise they are just trading one set of communists for another.

Betteridge's Law of Headlines is an adage that states, "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'".

And so it is with this article. Must be a slow news day, or perhaps the slashdot editors are desperate for a few extra clicks, and they knew all the paid Microsoft shills and OSX fanbois would dutifully come out and talk about how much teh Linux desktop sux0rs.

The Linux desktop is doing just fine, thank you. Innumerable satisfied users use it every day to get things done. So quit your whining.

From a quick read of this, it sounds like Canonical is basically trying to build a signed chain loader that will make a transition from a Microsoft-signed boot environment to a libre boot environment. Seems to me as if this will be useful not just for Ubuntu, but for pretty much anyone who wants to boot Linux on a Microsoft-encumbered computer.

If that's the case, we'll eventually start to see Debian, Mint, etc. distributions that make use of the Ubuntu boot loader to get the system up and running.

Clearly the decline of RIM is at the hands of Microsoft, whose Innovative(tm) Windows Phone brings consumers all of the Innovative(tm) features they've been looking for; once they had a taste of Innovative(tm) Windows Phone(tm) there was no further demand for Blackberry.

It is rumored that Apple and Google also have products in this space but they are irrelevant.

I'd buy it. The idea of my mobile phone being merely one more extension hanging off the Asterisk system I have installed at home is VERY appealing. Yes, I know, there are all sorts of edge cases (home phone is down, there's an emergency, blah blah blah) and Slashbots love to be stupidly pedantic about edge cases, but by and large this is the kind of thing a lot of people want -- an "extremely cordless phone" that is part of the voice plan (and phone number) they already have. Bring it on.

So the malware guys found a bunch of unpatched DSL modems with a vulnerability that allowed the resolver to be reconfigured remotely, and pointed it towards the "bad" DNS servers.

So why not just go to the "bad" DNS servers, which they now control, find out the IP addresses of the compromised modems, and use the same vulnerability to reconfigure the resolver to point back to "good" DNS servers?

Facebook is a mile wide but an inch deep. It's basically a whiny high school full of drama queens that happens to have half a billion people enrolled. As others have posted here already, Google+ actually delivers some substance. It's where smart people go.

The way I like to say it is: Google+ is where Facebook users go when they grow up.

No schizophrenia needed. That bit of information came directly from a Compaq rep.

"I see you're trying to do several things at once. Which jobs may I screw up for you?"

Exactly. Climate "science" (or what we hear about it in the news, anyway) isn't science at all; it's politics masquerading as science. And I have to say it's really a turn off when Slashdot suspends its "news for nerds" theme to take a hard line on a political issue.

Your argument is compelling and backed up by such detailed reasoning!

This could be a big win for open source. Are you concerned about your privacy? Then you'd better not be running proprietary mail or web software because the government backdoors are pre-installed (actually, they're probably there already today, but now you'll know for sure). Only if you're running open source will you be able to inspect the code yourself, verify that there are no government backdoors, or remove them if they are present. I'm sure the clever among us will even go as far as to send the FBI to a honeypot while directing private communications to the real servers.

Here is the thing.... in the next 18 months you won't see DVD players on most laptops.

Correction:

In the next 18 months Microsoft will strongarm OEM's into omitting the DVD drives on most laptops.

It'll be just like in the mid 1990's when Compaq switched the CD drives in their servers from SCSI models to IDE models because Microsoft told them to. And it'll be just like in the late 2000's when Microsoft started forcing netbook manufacturers to lard up the specs on the previously cheap devices because they needed just enough horsepower to run Windows XP.

Microsoft still has feet over the necks of all major OEM's. Until this problem is corrected, they will still call the shots.

Is everything Microsoft does wrong by definition?

Yes.

Microsoft's business practices over the years have earned them truckloads of bad karma. They've singlehandedly set the entire industry back by a decade or more. So yes, it will take more than getting something right once in a while for them to establish a reputation as a good citizen.

Oracle have shot themselves in the foot, and this is a good example of why. Even if the R-Pi runs Java, no one is going to trust Oracle not to sue them out of existence after the way they've abused Google over its use of Java on the Android platform.