The FCC didn't give a shit three years ago, when the car-warranty scammers were robo-calling every phone number, including cell phones. How many thousand complaints did they get over that one? No, the FCC didn't do jack until the robo-callers called a US senator. That got them shut down.

Or look at the recent SOPA/PIPA debate, and the ensuing MegaUpload takedown. No SOPA/PIPA? No matter!

Why should I believe these new "rules" have any real meaning, for either the FCC or the miscreants?

"So hackers could not exploit the bug in the meantime." Only the hackers (crackers?) that don't already know about it, and have no way of learning from their black-hat friends.

The GLib layer contains those abstractions in the GTK+/GNOME stack.

"Carriers don't have access to the contents of the [SMS] messages." Then how the hell do they get them to my phone in a human-readable format?

True, but the lessons learned tend to be much more memorable.

You're proving your own point.

Any video from Barney Frank or Maxine Waters. They were basically screaming Bolsheviks for years, and now they're aligned with Obama, so calling them "Obama's screaming Bolsheviks" isn't a stretch at all.

Right, because all of Slashdot knows the anti-Christ will be a white Republican.

I agree in part (at least with the sentiment, if perhaps not the expression), but don't think the EU or its remnants won't move to block such a MicroNokia merger. The EU already hates Microsoft, and is not afraid to put M$ on a short leash, unlike the US DoJ kid-gloves approach to M$'s criminal behavior.

As if people needed yet another reason to avoid using Perl...