According to the Slashdot article below, "A couple of weeks ago you had a chance to ask Canonical Ltd. and the Ubuntu Foundation founder, Mark Shuttleworth, anything about software and vacationing in space."

What bad luck you're asking it now.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/12/09/1828238/mark-shuttleworth-answers-your-questions?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

I think it's the second uglyest yatch in the whole world. I've never seen or known of any yatch uglyer than this, but the world is big, you know, so this one must be the second.

I think actually it would take an effort greater than what they gave to XBox. I don't know if Microsoft would be rewarded for it. Right now Windows 8 feels completely alien, but Microsoft is unifying the interface for the computer, videogame and phone. Nearly absent from the phone market, they have a natural tendency to grow. I would bet they expect to grow in all markets because of the interface, but they can as well shrink because of that.

Ants are separated by caste in Queen, male, worker, soldier. Next evolutionary step: the lawyer caste, that sue other colonies foodless.

Netbooks are not commonly known to have good hardware integration. It probably just has lots of BIOS bugs (doesn't follow specifications), and needs a specific firmware or driver to run graphics.

I got two netbooks back home, both runs Ubuntu very well, thank you, I bought them last year. Video acceleration runs great, no hacks during boot needed.

On the other partition, there is a Windows 7 installation refusing to update the graphics driver because I "accidentaly" uninstalled the shitty upgrade software from the vendor (along with lots of other pre-installed crapware). I tried the reference drivers but it refuses to install (really, it says I should use the vendor's shitty upgrade software).

Probably in a few years, your wife's netbook could run only Linux, or other Free Software, as the drivers developers and vendor won't be supporting it anymore. No crazy hacks would get anything else to run on that machine.

No sir, we don't have assault rifles here, try the TV Department.

Brazil was a dictatorship.

Brazil Constitution was a reaction to that period in which it was ruled by the military, appointed by the state (themselves), and most civil liberties were suspended. It was written from scratch by a Constituent Assembly elected in 1986 (wikipedia), many different parties represented there. I agree that constitution itself is not a representation of how freedom really is. Anonimity itself gives only a perception of safeness, and you can always act anonymously regardless of what the constitution says.

I agree that the constitution should have granted, to the individual, the right to be anonymous. Brazil constitution says, translation is mine (IANAL):

IV - It is granted the freedom to expression of thought, being denied anonymity.

Reasoning in Brazil's Constitution is you can't be anonymous as you publish diffamatory content or hate speech, or else it can be taken down judicially. And you can be prosecuted by publishing diffamatory content if identified. It is a controversy if this clause applies to other areas besides freedom of expression of thought.

On the other hand, my perception is that veiled persecution is stronger through major companies than by any other means, and that this is as anywhere else. Most major companies acting in Brazil are originally from other countries, maybe it is common practice.

What a troll! Interesting? I hope not.

Being myself a brazilian I say this troll's views on brazilian government are somewhat wrong. I don't deny the existence of corruption in Brazil, but it's not as bad as in the other part of the world (Brazil is ranked #73 in the 192 countries participating in Corruption Perceptions Index).

In reality, there are some very successful brazilian business. The "bribe hell" he talks about is probably the fate of businesses that would not want to pay due taxes (counts as corruption). Problems in law are constantly being reviewed, public opinion has usually been taken in consideration.

Also, corrupt politicians in Brazil do not have the power to take down anything, and the brazilian law that forbids anonimity, in the same paragraph ensures the freedom of expression of thought.

The "reasons we buy" argument is completely fallacious.

"It is the greatest good to the greatest number of people which is the measure of right and wrong." (Jeremy Bentham)

<quote> And to be brutally honest, how is it really fair to ask them to? If they paid for the R&amp;D, why should someone else be entitled to it without paying a cent? Is it some first-world tech company's fault that your country is poor, that your government is too corrupt to invest in its infrastructure instead of padding El-Presidente's pockets, that your education system is a joke? </quote>

To be brutally honest: yes it is. Corruption works both ways, and both are equally guilty, the one being corrupted *and* the one who corrupts. Companies do not only pay for R&D, they pay for monopoly, they pay to get others out of competition, they pay to keep entire countries in misery and poverty. So, honestly, blame the system or whatever, they take part on keeping it the way it is, it is their fault.

The problem is, it is destroying the environment. People will have to be living in bubbles if nobody takes action, and companies do not care if they have to commit suicide to make money. Environmental concerns are calculated, into their revenues, to maximizes profit.

Would it be the mild violence and crude humor of crashing your plane on others?

That is not news, at least in Brazil. I have been to at least five speeches about the same topic in the last 6 years. By November 2007, five years in development inVesailus software became Free Software, using the CC-GPL license (a non official GPL translation license used in Brazil).

From the Wikipedia article (in portuguese):
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/pt/wiki/InVesalius
"By 2010, the software was already used to build more than 1500 prototype models..."

A 2008 article (in portuguese), showing a prototype picture:
http://cienciaecultura.bvs.br/scielo.php?pid=S0009-67252008000100004&script=sci_arttext

SVN site (in english):
http://svn.softwarepublico.gov.br/trac/invesalius

Yesterday I read Steve Jobs was dead. Today, as I read that Dive into Python was gone offline, I thought: "No! Not Mark Pilgrim!"
Thank God he's alive. Hope he ressurects Dive into Python soon. You can only make so much impact on people this once, like Jobs did.

Yes! It was like finding a needle in a needlestack.

I was quoting The Big Bang Theory.

I agree, at this cost you wouldn't customize this costume.

What do you mean? It's not a costume.