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.

I don't know about everyone else but I pretty much just had the best decade ever. Warts and all.

I never had a problem installing Fedora (and desktop RH before it) on any hardware. Realistically I suppose this is luck to a certain extent, but I figured I'd give you a data point here :)

I've never used Ubuntu much beyond booting a LiveCD and looking around a bit. I still prefer yum over apt even though I've been using Debian as a server for a while. I guess I'm just used to all the little RH idiosyncrasies and quirks.

XFCE rocks. I've used it for years as my primary desktop manager. I find KDE to be idiotically annoying and a resource hog (especially the 4.x series), and too much like Windows. I never liked GNOME much either. It always reminded me of MacOS.

Happy holidays!

My sister's kids had some respiratory problems a few years back, which the doctors treated with this thing called a "nebulizer" (I think). Apparently it's some sort of miraculous device because it solved all their problems and she can't stop talking about how great it is.

Not sure if that would help you. By her descriptions I gather it's just a high-tech version of the breathe-VicksVapoRub-in-hot-water thing my parents used to afflict us with when we were kids, but there's some sort of actual medication involved.

Hope you get better.

What do you say to the inevitable flood of "advocates" who claim Microsoft is doing this sort of thing to subvert FOSS?

Bonus points: Do you see Microsoft headed in the same general direction as Google and IBM where the core products and IP are held close to the chest while some of the more peripheral stuff (not key to revenue) is released under open licenses? Recent news like the open sourcing of one of the versions of the .NET framework make it seem that way.

Double bonus points: Do you see Microsoft ever releasing the whole of .NET itself under a non-restrictive license? Do you think there would be some benefit to Microsoft in pulling something akin to Sun GPL'ing Java and still retaining control over its direction? I ask this because it would end a lot of problems (imagined and real) with Mono, for example. But that would imply a lot of work with things like WinForms, ASP.NET and parts of the data client stack, without which any .NET implementation cannot help but be seen as a interesting experiment rather than as a valid enterprise-ready alternative.

To be clear, I would love to see Codeplex lead the way in facilitating a truly cross-platform alternative to .NET on the Windows platform. If that's Mono, great. Perhaps within Microsoft something like this is seen as a threat, but you guys need to get past that mindset. How come I can robustly host PHP or Python apps on Server 2003 today but I can't do the same with .NET in BSD? The Mono team has already done most of the heavy lifting, all you guys need to do is clear up the air around it!

(sorry for the multiple questions, these are things I've been thinking about lately a lot)

They'll just pass a law requiring you to hand over the key. I believe those exist already in the US at least.

Either way, you're screwed.