As it often happens the summary is rather sensationalist, as I would not dare accuse anyone of actually RTFA, here's Shuttleworth's full response (with which I could not agree more):

Mark Shuttleworth wrote on 2010-03-17: Re: [Bug 532633] Re: [light-theme] please revert the order of the window controls back to "menu:minimize, maximize, close" #167

On 15/03/10 23:42, Pablo Quirós wrote:
> It'd have been nice if this comment had been made some time ago,
> together with a deep reasoning on the concrete changes that are in mind.
>
> We are supposed to be a community, we all use Ubuntu and contribute to
> it, and we deserve some respect regarding these kind of decisions. We
> all make Ubuntu together, or is it a big lie?

We all make Ubuntu, but we do not all make all of it. In other words, we
delegate well. We have a kernel team, and they make kernel decisions.
You don't get to make kernel decisions unless you're in that kernel
team. You can file bugs and comment, and engage, but you don't get to
second-guess their decisions. We have a security team. They get to make
decisions about security. You don't get to see a lot of what they see
unless you're on that team. We have processes to help make sure we're
doing a good job of delegation, but being an open community is not the
same as saying everybody has a say in everything.

This is a difference between Ubuntu and several other community
distributions. It may feel less democratic, but it's more meritocratic,
and most importantly it means (a) we should have the best people making
any given decision, and (b) it's worth investing your time to become the
best person to make certain decisions, because you should have that
competence recognised and rewarded with the freedom to make hard
decisions and not get second-guessed all the time.

It's fair comment that this was a big change, and landed without
warning. There aren't any good reasons for that, but it's also true that
no amount of warning would produce consensus about a decision like this.

> If you want to tell us
> that we are all part of it, we want information, and we want our opinion
> to be decisive.
>

No. This is not a democracy. Good feedback, good data, are welcome. But
we are not voting on design decisions.

Mark

Call me when he finds a way to determine the email after gravatar starts adding a pinch of salf to the hashed emails...

is preferred, but whatever I do - there is always going to be someone that needs something done ASAP.
So I plan for 4, but the 5 working days are always full, with at most a daily delay in delivering stuff.

If anyone is actually interested:
http://ev.kde.org/reports/ev-quarterly-2009Q1.pdf
http://foundation.gnome.org/reports/gnome-report-2009-Q2.pdf

to ask the source:

https://developer.apple.com/safari/library/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/CreatingVideoforSafarioniPhone/chapter_9_section_1.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40006514-SW1

requires a login, etc but if your going to develop for an iphone you might as well save yourself some headbashing and sign up.

Last i checked the Nigerian scams, hackers accounts for pushing spam, scammers, and V1agra sellers are all using bank accounts.

AFAIK, its usually small African banks that don't have agreements with other banks worldwide (visa anyone ?) preventing fraudulent and illegal transactions...

Transfer your money there, ask some idiot to pick it up - or better yet, get an actual nigerian setup for someone to help get the money out of the country.
I hear Western union isn't easily trackable either when you have a network of people working to earn their 10k out (compared to your cool 1mil).

while i understand the premise behind this move (its always about money, aint it ? ;) ), it will have serious consequences:
less users from countries that do not get the service for free.
this leads to less of an incentive for bands from those countries to sign up, publish their music for free (or for money - doesn't really matter).
and that means that the sole reason for which i love last.fm - the amazing variety of music from every corner of the globe available on it - will be gone.
it will become just like any bog standard radio station, pushing britney spears, pussycat dolls and just5 (no disrespect - the mentioned are just not my thing ;) ).
im sure that others will agree that the amazing variety of music in the system is an enormous advantage of last.fm, and loosing it will lead to a slow decay of the service.

having said that - im in the UK, and will be receiving the service for free.
and having said _THAT_ i wouldn't mind at all if the service became a globally paid service, and everyone was required to pitch in to keep/raise the quality - i would pay for it myself.

so shouldnt they be cutt off from the global network, but still have a working 'web' of their own ?
They must have their own servers, anything going into that cable is just a 'foreign' request.

Those are important - sure, but i would gather they dont make up more then 40% of all requests.

But only some of the routes should be down, and they still should have a very large lan, with dns, www, email and anything else they have on the spot, and im willing to bet that the ISP's there have stuff like that.
IIRC the web wasnt just designed to be foolproof, it was also designed to be autonomus once disconected from other networks.
Or am i missing something here, and all that they have is cables, no other infrastructure ?