Republican logic too, if you replace "company" by "country". :)

Fine, then my answer changes to "stay at home and donate the money for your plane ticket to charity".

Figure out if any open-source software is widely used in Africa, and contribute to it. A month should be easily enough time to implement a new feature or track down a few bugs.

I don't have any figures to back this up, but I'd be willing to bet that this was also true of Twitter, Gmail, video games, and the Internet itself in the beginning.

(1) That's an exaggeration. (2) The Beijing accent is not standard Mandarin.

René Barjavel's Ravage (Ashes, ashes in English) is pretty spot on, if not about specific customs and technologies, then about modes of life in the future. It's set in the 2050s, but the world has already evolved remarkably toward Barjavel's vision. I recommend it for everyone.

But the 'r' can only be found in a restricted set of syllables (at least in Mandarin, I have no idea about the other languages of China), so Chinese people still substitute 'l' for 'r' when speaking English. Perhaps less often than Japanese people do; I wouldn't know.

I wasn't talking about economic policies. I was talking specifically about telecommunications companies having the state in their pockets, which is a totally separate issue.

I'm certainly not a bright enough economist to pronounce myself one way or another on the content of your post.

I've lived in France for about a year, speak, read, and write French fluently, and keep up with French (and Western European in general) current affairs pretty closely. So I'm not an expert, but I hope I'm not presumptuous in claiming to know more about it than you do by reading Slashdot :)

Again, I maintain that Europe is moving in the wrong direction -- and rather quickly, at that -- but that it's still better off than the United States

The ONE day I don't have mod points....

Really? Ron Paul is the only candidate that is neither democrat nor republican? You must be out of your mind.

Not just you... I thought the exact same thing immediately upon reading the article.

Well, that sucks... I had hoped Canada was at least better off. Europe certainly is, although like most places it's moving in the wrong direction.

Nothing will change; the utilities will keep fucking us over every chance they get. I'm not sure why this still surprises anyone.

Our political system is so locked down by corporations that there is less of a chance of meaningful change here than in China or even North Korea. I'm not saying we're as bad as those places, but we're certainly headed that direction and there is literally no way to change that within the current system.

Nothing will change in the United States without a revolution, which would first require a huge sea change in the culture to even be remotely effective.

Again, chances are slim. May as well move to Europe or Canada as soon as possible.

I think he actually meant functional -- Javascript has a lot of features that would be called as such.