Iran was about British oil--specificaly, a company called "BP", as in "British Petroleum"--not US oil, period. To claim that US oil interests were the cause of US intervention in Iran is just ridiculous.

Really? You do seem to ignore the fact that Anglo-Iranian lost it's oil monopoly and was forced into a joint venture with amongst others Gulf Oil, Socony-Mobil, Esso, Standard Oil of California, and Texaco after the coup?

And "intervention" amounted to little more than organizing a protest; the Iranian government was on its last leg anyway.

Hardly. Mosaddegh was apparently viewed as a hero at the time. He would have easily won any new election.

Stop watching FOX.

I don't watch Fox. But you obviously should stop listening to European neo-Marxist propaganda.

Fact is, most of the trouble spots in the world are the result of European fascism, European colonialism and European socialism.

Really? You sure sound like someone that watches Fox a lot. Please explain which trouble spots are caused by European Socialism.

The US is trying its best to keep things running, but Americans and American tax payers are running out of patience. If Europe doesn't like the way it's going, Europe should pay for its own damned military

The EU has a combined military budget of appx. 300 billion USD. That is about the same amount as the combined budgets of China, Russia, Japan, Saudi Arabia, India and Brazil together. Europe can defend itself just fine. It takes a whiny and ignorant American to pretend otherwise.

You just described OSX.

Microsoft has an extremely long history of churning out mediocre software which people hailed as "fantastic". You seem to have forgotten the Outlook back when it tended to auto-execute email attachments. You know - back when retrieving a deleted mail from Exchange included a database restore. Back when Word seemed to lay out its documents differently from PC to PC. (It still does). Remember Vista which people loathed? People on this site now claim it was "great". *sigh*

It's not about dying at the moment of exposure, it's about how it affects your body as a whole. DDT has been linked to diabetes and is a neurotoxin, endocrine disruptor, and suspected carcinogen (just to name a few). These things kill people.

First, CITATION NEEDED because I'm calling bullshit. I need something from a real live science source, not Rachel Carson, Green Peace or the Sierra Club.

Citations can be found in the Wikipedia article: "However, for younger women—exposed earlier in life—the third who were exposed most to p,p'-DDT had a fivefold increase in breast cancer incidence over the least exposed third.."

And I need something more than simply "linked to". I want actual cases of real people developing these problems due to exposure to DDT and it must show more deaths than the hundreds of millions caused by the stuff that DDT prevented, like mosquito born illnesses.

Carcinogens usually don't leave smoking guns. That does not mean that carciogens are harmless. As for the "deaths of hundreds of millions caused by the stuff that DDT prevented", you should read up on DDT resistant mosquitos.

The VLC developer made the claim because Apple's TOS is incompatible with the GPL. Apple is 100% to blame for that incompatibility.

Actually, the VLC developer that made the claim was unaware that Apple had actually changed it's TOS to accomodate FOSS licenses. See discussion on the VideoLAN list around October / Novemer 2010. Also take a look at Jean-Baptiste Kempf's legal analysis in the latter link.

It turns out that the last stumbling block - as explained in a comment above - is that the GPL license specifically dictates you can’t block the user's ability to redistribute binaries himself. This is conflicts with the iOS security model of only allowing software that is signed by a special certificate (or other enterprise certificates).

Now consider if VLC changed their license to be consistent with the app store TOS. VLC would be allowed on the app store, but it would no longer be free software.

This is plainly wrong, as only GPL licensed software has trouble with this model. Fres software under e.g. Apache, Mozilla or BSD licenses are easily distributed through the App Store.

• - Electric cars have lower operating costs. Nissan estimates 5 year operating cost for the Leaf will be US$1,800 versus US$6,000 for a gas car.
• - Modern electric cars have the same passenger room as regular cars. Take a look at the Renault Fluence Z.E. or the Opel Ampera.
• - Modern electic cars can easily reach and exceed the speed limit. A Shelby Aero EV can reach 208mph (albeit for a short period).
• - Electric cars can have great range using e.g. a QuickDrop system to change to fresh batteries in appx. 3 minutes. Fast Charging is also an alternative, but is rumoured to actually wear out your battery faster.
• - An electric car has currently a higher sticker price and a higher TCO than a gas car. This is offset by a low center of gravity, extremely few moving parts making them a breeze to service and the warm fuzzy feeling you get from driving an BEV.

I test drove a Nissan Leaf this summer and it was actually a great drive.

This is not entirely correct. The "money written off" was actually supplies and war material from USA and Canada sent to Britain. Britain paid in kind by effectively handing over export rights to the commonwealth, reverse lend-lease transfers, giving away basing rights and let's not forget Roosevelts initial plan - carrying the battle against the Nazis so you wouldn't have to.

> Oh? How well does OTA contact and calendar sync work between iOS, Android, Palm, and Blackberry, and your FOSS server?

iOS supports LDAP/CardDAV for contact sync and CalDAV for calendar sync out of the box. Android apps will give you the same functionality. IMO iOS CalDAV support is actually better than it's ActiveSync support.

As for ActiveSync, you can get that through e.g. z-push. It even integrates with Zimbra open source edition.

I have managed mail-systems for several ISPs. Each with 7 digit numbers of users. Exchange isn't even on their radar, while Postfix/Exim with Horde/Dovecot most definetly is. Please don't delude yourself in thinking that an Exchange server will scale even remotely as well.
As for Zimbra, we currently serve several thousand concurrent users using a virtualized server. A similar Exchange installation in our experience consumes far more resources. Other independent actors also seems to think that Zimbra is a better choice.

Really? It seems with reports of shiite and suni violence from the official thugs in many middle east countries that Isreal would be the best country to support. Their record for religious freedom for Muslims beats that of their neighbors.

Lebanon, Syria and Egypt all have sizeable religious minorities and they all have had religious freedom for centuries. Also, do not underestimate the violence committed by jewish extremists.

Do you think the US wouldn't be allowed to talk to other countries or make deals?

Given that the International Telecommunication Union is a UN agency, I'd say you would at least have to turn up in person.

But in all my life I have never heard of a business choosing F/OSS software purely on the basis of price. There's always a degree of pragmatism involved - "cheap and adequate" is usually how it pans out. As soon as you have to interact with someone else who's using MS Office, there's a good chance it ceases to be adequate.

There are lots of world class open source projects out there that gets picked because they are simply better than their closed source equivalents - linux, apache, postgresql, spamassassin, varnish, ruby, python, gcc/llvm, webkit, postfix, dovecot etc.

I have used Word for years, but after having been forced to write a 50 page user manual in it, I stopped using it. I have never looked back.

Try to run your cherry-picked examples in a mixed OS (heterogenous) environment. Unlike PowerShell, Bash and its brethren are designed to be portable, support the Unix/Posix standards and be backwards compatible with sh.
If you want to look at a shell with a more powerfull syntax, try e.g. rush (which unfortunately seems to be an inactive project ).

The Samsung vs. Apple case is not about software patents but about Samsung ripping off Apple design:

http://peanutbuttereggdirt.com/e/2011/05/03/apple-vs-samsung-a-visual-guide-to-apples-ip-claims-hardware-icons-packaging/

The problem is sometimes companies get too diverse, and need to sell off units that they are distracting from their core business or perhaps may be hindering it mind share.

As an aside, Lenovo has moved into tablets, servers and financial services. Lenovo bladeservers, diskarrays and consultants are probably right around the corner.