But honestly, with the US so far behind other industrialized nations in broadband quality and penetration, shouldn't this be promoted by Japan or South Korea? Who cares about the super duper better intertubes if you're still stuck at the 1.2mbps downstream dictated by the local suckage cable mini-monopoly?

I'm all for this type of thing, I really am. But fix the basement before you go adding a new chimney.

I was born in Argentina, but I grew up in Chile. My whole family (on my dad's side) lives there (except my sister who lives in San Francisco).

We've been friends with the Piñera Morel family since forever. I went to school with two of their kids.

The thing that is really important here is that Piñera is already filthy rich. He's not going to take bribes or engage in cronyism to improve his situation. He doesn't need it.

As the business climate over there begins to get better after a long drought of socialist administrations (things under the previous president, Michelle Bachelet, was pretty bad) I'm starting to think I want to go back. Almost 20 years! I was down there over the holidays and spent some time talking to friends and cousins about business opportunities. I don't want to end up working for my grandfather's Evil Conglomerate but I think I can do something on my own with the capital I have. We'll see. In the meantime, I'm just happy for Chile.

Doesn't matter. We'll just render you to Slovakia or something :)

by Uranium-238

[...] national database [...] lord [...] genetic code. [...] terrorists [...] bio weapons [...] DNA

This is the NSA. Please put down the donut and remain at your desk until the nice officers arrive.

Google won't follow suit? The difference here is that Bing is a loss leader for Microsoft. People want more privacy? No problem sez Microsoft, whatever. It's not like they live off the data they mine from their search engine users (which last I heard was something like 4% of the total in the US).

For Google, government-mandated privacy regulations can really hurt the bottom line. That data and how long they can hold on to it is essentially their business model.

I actually wouldn't be surprised to see Microsoft become a champion of consumer privacy on the Internet later on... you know, for the children.

And that is running Windows Update

Welcome to 2004, where we run WU as a standalone service that does not require IE at all.

What other unnecessary things do you do with IE? We stopped bathing the cat with it as well. In 2002, if I recall.

(actually the only thing I use it for these days is OWA, but OWA is so nice that I don't mind at all)

Oh wait, I see we're still friends. We're good.

Now if ya'll will excuse me, I need to get back to the party. Yay!

That's what they said in 1999, isn't it? We have Facebook and Twitter and x10000000000 web pages and lolcats, but everything else is the same.

Bruce, what is your intention here? I'm sorry if I couldn't figure it out from your article. Are you trying to get the SLFC to drop the suit, include you on it, recognize your copyright over the code, or what?

Um, did you just "tweet" on Slashdot? That's !lame.