Well, one such example would be the oil-for-food program. Russia was by far the greatest abuser, but not the only one by any means. France is on that list as expected:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil-for-Food_Programme#Beneficiaries

Who wouldn't want to be detained for hours, have their car towed, be handcuffed on the side of the road, and stuffed into the back of a cop car, all in the name of getting a blood test? That's assuming you don't get the shit kicked out of you by a cop having a bad day who will claim you were "resisting arrest". Extremely reasoned and well thought out retort to the problem stated above.

Indeed, probably should've listed the citation, thanks.

Great rant, except that over 75% of the Linux code contributed is contributed by paid corporate employees that are simply doing their job. They aren't contributing because they love the code and doing it of their own free will and volition. They're doing it to put food on the table just like MS employees are. They may or may not love coding and love their job just like MS employees. Working on open source doesn't mean you love open source or that you love coding. Correlation != causation.

Ya... coax penetration is nothing even remotely close to universal in the US. It's virtually non-existant in rural America.

They also believe that corporations wouldn't pollute the water supply because it's bad for everyone to have polluted water, so we don't need the EPA. Or that companies won't create things like the mortgage bubble because bad investments are bad for the entire market - a la Alan Greenspan, so we don't need banking oversite.

Reality has shown their beliefs are absolute trash when put into practice. Greedy assholes will always be greedy assholes and they tend not to care what happens to anyone that isn't them, right at this moment.

$12 billion up front is a HELL of a lot cheaper than the cost to taxpayers should we end up with even less competition in the wireless market than we currently have. Just look at Frontier communications for an example of what happens when a company is allowed to own a market (rural "broadband" in their case).

There's enough money in continuing support contracts. I'm not sure why they need to sell a net-new product instead of just building update coding costs into the support contract they presumably sell with the software. If they aren't selling any support whatsoever, I'd argue their business model is flawed.

Which shows a complete lack of understanding in how UAC and other new features were implemented. XP was a tangled mess of shit. That's why it was so hard for them to secure it, and that's why they didn't just continue on with that effort. Did you forget that changing a graphics drive in XP required a reboot? Sound card locks up? BSOD. Etc. etc. etc. To say that XP was complete sounds like someone who knows just enough about computers to think they have a clue without actually bothering to research what changes went into vista and 7. Here's a hint: it wasn't just pretty graphics.

http://www.osnews.com/story/19793/No_New_Kernel_Builds_on_Vista

Yes. They have. Israel has been receiving money and food since the Eisenhower administration. Good story though.

They very easily could say that externally while internally screaming. Given the amount of funding of their country that comes from the US government, they don't have to tell the public anything at all to get an increase in funding. They've had a blank check from the US for over 50 years.

Is this even a real question? Of course they should. The Chinese government is openly attacking both corporate and government interests throughout the US. Why give them yet another avenue to attacks?

Oracle literally would collapse tomorrow if Java were to go away overnight. Oracle absolutely had to acquire Sun for the Java IP, no matter the cost. Had it gotten into the hands of IBM and had IBM pulled the shit Oracle just tried to do to HP + Itanium, Oracle would be fucked. The *ONLY* reason that Oracle is so screwed right now is because of Larry Ellison and his personal relationships. The original plan was for HP to acquire all of the hardware business, and Oracle to take the software. Then Mark Hurd got caught banging an assistant, and the rest is history. Ellison hired Hurd, they both tried to screw HP by ending Oracle support on Itanium (and subsequently had that decision overturned in court as well), and now Larry is stuck bleeding cash because he doesn't know how to sell a product that you can't lock a customer into. It turns out if your servers suck, people just walk away. They aren't tied into it by the balls like they are with his database. His solution is "engineered systems" - read proprietary software that they won't sell you to run on just any old x86 hardware (for those saying you can run it on any hardware, let me know how you manage to get hybrid columnar compression working on something other than exadata). Fortunately most of the industry is bright enough to see through the lock-in and continue to run Oracle software on standard hardware.

Best method I've seen is generating a license file which has the users name and email address in it. That will at least make them think twice before throwing it up on TPB, assuming you've got a manual check to make sure people aren't putting in blatantly bogus information. It also makes it easy to blacklist a serial when a new version is released, and you can refuse to sell to that person if they come back again. Obviously there are ways around this, but at some point it's a mutual respect between developer and end-user. The most draconian I would get would be to have it phone-home when a license is applied. Apply the license whether they're online or not, but just have it keep retrying until it finds a connection.

I'm not sure why you'd trust Apple anymore than Google or eBay/Paypal.