Luzhkov implemented a lot of crazy and unpopular projects. I'm glad he couldn't ruin our winter.

I can not believe how many hypocrites there are on slashdot. He was wasting agency money and time, I don't argue with that. Is porn worse that facebook or twitter? Hell no.

Will it work on bed bugs? On mosquitoes? Houseflies?

...and demand that the principle "ignorance of law is not an excuse for breaking it" must be abolished.

That is an issue between good programs and poor programs. Take Firefox and OpenOffice, they win on every occasion, because they are good. And they are open source. Some other programs appear to be bad, so they lose. Period. The seeming significance of "openness" of the source comes just from your preference. You like open source so it's interesting for you to see how OS products fare. If you take some firm CrappySoft Inc, and take the survey of their products you will probably see that their bad products get dumped in favor of better competing products and vise versa.

I don't get it. I can type very fast on a QWERTY keyboard (although I didn't learn touchtyping), and I can type almost as fast on Russian JCUKEN keyboard, and there was time I had to use russian YAWERTY keyboard and I was typing faster than average (and I am not a genius, either). Given that, I am sure I can master Dvorak too and add it to my arsenal. No need to XOR it is a good old OR, guys.

I don't get it. Why anybody would want it? I mean, ok, I tweet that I'm having a party, so my friends would know. But why would I want my friends to know if my washing machine has finished doing my laundry? I mean, yes, it's useful to make me know that, but that can be done much much easier and without twitter.

They managed to break some basic functionality in the release. For example, <a ... target="_blank"> doesn't work as expected and opens the link in the same window. The funny thing is that was okay in the betas. Oh, and they dare speak about some acid test or html5? Ridiculous.

So, you don't like the black guy changed to a white. Why don't you complain about the site being in polish rather than english?
That reminds me... some stupid american reporter who took several shots at some celebrations in Moscow and then complained that the crowd was almost 100% white and no blacks was present. (just before someone gets smart: yes I know that Moscow is in Russia not in Poland) Has it occured to you that there are just no blacks in Poland in significant quantities? And that asian guy is in the background on both pictures so that is probably racist too.

Not funny, really. My mobile which I stuck with needs three key presses to get to the contact list... Well, it dials manually alright, but contact list is important too, isn't it? And all the single key presses are bound to stupid internet access, camera and even mp3 player. They cannot be remapped. Phone is by samsung.

The problem here is that open source tries to imitate proprietary software in order to be "no worse than". Many geeks even see it as an advantage: "I changed my mum's text processor from Word to Open Office and she didn't notice a thing!" So, following this paradigm OpenOffice should replicate Clippy soon as well.

I may sound like a heretic here, but I think cheating is OK and should be allowed. I don't see any use in (stupidly) memorizing all that stuff they teach at school. As internet made access to information very easy people don't need that much memorizing, you can always look up needed facts in relevant databases. On the other hand, students should be taught what the machines can't accomplish: to be creative. There should be less option tests and more essay tests. Less memorizing, more creating. If you want to really teach students something you should make sure they understand what they learn. So we can kill two birds with one stone: make it harder to cheat and improve the quality of education. Hell, I remember my days at school. We were allowed to use the textbooks on exams. It didn't help much, though, as the teachers didn't ask for memorized facts. They asked trick questions so you should be creative and come up with your own answers.

I remember M$ was that greedy too and claimed ownership over the content uploaded on their hosting. It was very easy to right their wrong: someone just posted some illegal images and MS was screwed. Do the same to wolfram, they deserved it.

It's funny you brought up the topic, but yes, most, if not all, today Russian officials and "politicians" are former members of the Communist Party. I don't think they changed much. Hell, Putin himself is a former KGB officer!

While what you write is right (no pun intended) it is not the case here. Russian officials, to put it simply, are too stupid to know about some internet technologies. It's all about money here, really.

Fun fact: here in Russia we have to BUY licenses for Linux to present it to police raiding our datacenters. Thank God they cost almost nothing but anyway...