What you are supporting is basically a return to the European Dark Ages, where the leaders operated in the dark without the people's knowledge, and the citizens were just pawns in their leader's games.

This.
Wikileaks is there only to serve you and me. It is a leak, not a discovery.
The way I see it, the leaks are not meant to embarrass the governments or bureaucracy. They already know this. Wikileaks works for us. You and me. We see the real stuff what our governments are doing, and if we have a chance, vote for or against the government. If Saudi Arabia was not a kingdom, the ruler would be given the boot. Pakistan now knows what it's government is doing. You guys know what US is trying to do.

Don't play strawman with me.
Gandhi, Mandela, Martin Luther King are honest and simple people. I prefer them. Maybe you would like to be ruled by extremely intellgent and motivated people behind the credit crisis, I want honest and simple people to do the job. Learn some history and come back to play strawman with me, I can play better than you.
What you imply in your post is that simple==dumb. This is not true.
The dumb guy at top was a joke. The criminals getting elected is continuing the joke.

I always wondered why automated twitter like systems are not used to solve this kind of problem.
Here is what I would like: Have a device which measures the traffic at one point installed all across the highways (Simple IR device looking at the number of passing vehicles per second should do). These devices act as social beings, sharing their data to a server to give out to everyone. They should come cheap, especially while buying in bulk (Make them solar powered, if you want to). Let them transmit the data to the nearest cell phone tower or to a server on the internet. The connectivity should be cheap, it is sending bytes of information. Have the GPS in your car (or your $20 cellphone) receive the 'feed'(or SMS) from the server based on the input route.
I dont think you need an algorithm to predict the travel time, you can just calculate it (Can be done server side too).
The costs in implementing this should be lesser.

I am not an American, but aren't simple and honest folks more trustworthy than a highly educated and dishonest people? I consider myself a part of the latter group, and I want to be led by a guy with a simple and honest plan, frankly. Never trust a guy who is more intelligent than you. Of course, I want the more intelligent guy to work UNDER me, which is better for both of us. Put the dumbest person at the top, and lets steer towards progress.
This is also why I feel more people with criminal records get elected in my country. They were dumb enough to get caught, they will be dumb enough to give me what I want.

Excellent. What you have shown to the slashdot crowd is the difficulties in manufacturing in a way no one has ever done before.
That said, you need to remember that the decision to do so has been made by the company itself. They wanted to take on the risk of manufacturing in China for more profits (or to stay with competition). There is a risk there, make no mistake.
Even when you sell a 'Made in America' laptop for $899, there is a risk that you are taking. The risk is associated with the manufactuing process itself. Dell did nothing to plan against that risk. When the problem appeared, they lied. They cannot be excused.
Summary: They are supposed to do all that AND sell me a laptop at $10, which is my reservation price for any electronic device.

Actually we have a lot of faith in our corruption. Look, its not that I just know that somebody is corrupt, it is also that I know how to use it.
In a previous attempt, this same exercise created many dupes and gave birth to many non existing people. I am talking about iris scanners here, and the officials themselves, top civil servants can be trusted. It is not a bad database design too, remember, we create most of the designs for your systems. It was later found out that a political party created these, and the method was by bribing some of the data collectors.

Every system is corrupt, even this one. If your authorities want to screw you, trust me, they don't need this. This is only for the better.

JFGI. He is Asok from IIT Madras.

It is not that India is not on board with the problem. It does not think the proposed solutions would work. I agree that the government interventions in other states are a good way to solve the problem, but it might not work in India (We still have gas subsidized).
India is much like EU with a central government, but poor. Too many ill thought out solutions presented by too many countries, India now does not trust the west much, especially considering the threat that it brings to global power balance.

Who uses watches for the time now? All the technology that has enabled top quality mechanical watches has come to a grinding halt. What would the watch companies do? Do you pity them as well? Find a way to use the technology and do something better, in fact earn more profits. Even the simplest mechanical watch can now be (and are being) labeled as luxury and sold to gullible buyers. Technology made a commodity useless. Good thinking made the useless commodity a luxury. Things can be changed here too, and note this, sire, they will in a free market. You are either up to the challenge or somebody more enterprising than you is.

Any MBA should know the opportunity cost of time: If he can ditch this and earn something doing some other work, he is doing a loss. Open source development is a challenge, and challenging tasks need to offer rewards.
I know, most developers wouldn't understand this, but it is no more "I will do stuff because I can". For MBAs, it is (ofcourse I am being generic) "What am I going to get in return for this".
Have an incentive structure in place, attract people who are either devoted to the cause or are interested in things other than money and a few MBAs might actually go work with open source projects.
If I need to explain why an MBA is needed at all, here is what you do: Take a proprietary software (market leader or otherwise), calculate its revenue from the particular product. If you had a decent MBA, you would be in that position and the social impact you could have caused is the revenue, which is saved by customers by not buying the proprietary product.

I am a management student, so have to deal with office products a lot. Where MSOffice win hands down and OO.o loses out is that OO.o is plain ugly. If I have to show my boss a sales plan, I need to highlight a few rows. The colours that are by default provided on it are simply plain ugly. Anybody using those colours to distinguish estimated vs actual sales is going to get a dirty look from the boss.
The defaults in Writer (size, margins,headings, fonts, colours), the ease of accessing formulas in calc, the ease of making a ppt which will win us a contract, these are the things missing from OO.o. I don't care if it is open-source or costs $0, if I can't make a good presentation out of it, bye bye.
Why don't OO.o do a market survey on what are the default colours and themes and fonts people like? What are the functions, menu items that their target segment use? I think with this sort of data, UI changes make more sense, not on simple random ideas by nerds. True, this is a great forum for generating a few ideas, and thats where this post comes in too, but I would be more than happy to see some USEFUL features incorporated as UI changes.