But the government could give out the criminals who the West asks from them. They don't cooperate with other nations. The EU has deadlines for new member states to get some things in order (corruption, law and even the macro economics) why can't a huge country like Russia to do the same. I think also that this is a problem of willingness not the nature and the size of the task.

Small (niche) content producers benefit from file sharing. Because more and more people encounter content that isn't advertised or played in the mass media. When there wasn't no Internet people had rely on the radio/tv/newspapers for bringing them the newest cultural content but now people can find suitable content for them self. Therefor I think that it's fair to share files. Look how much the big corps. earn and how much the musician/actor/director etc earn. The revenues are too large to complain.

How many months can one IT employer work for $30 000? Maybe 7-10 months. The crisis will last at least one Year. How the stimulus can offer 1M jobs?

Probably Apples MS Bob

And all the rumours about PC gaming will die out and now that...mmh.

Would be correct?!? Threading is a messy thing. You have 10 times more testing to do than in a single threaded application. And a multy-threaded application is slower than single threaded one when the CPU is powerful enough to run it in one core.

The problem is the OS. Windows isn't built for more than one core CPU. It only can put one application to one core and that's it. And sharing the cores isn't really that fast. Therefor isn't the multi-core CPU-s very useful for such big applications like today's games. But buying a multi-core GPU is more useful because the threading model should be built-in in the cards or drivers. Of course 32-bit XP can't handle more than 3G ram.

When they don't agree then Linux won't come any popular because the hassle with distributing software to Linux doesn't pay off. And when there isn't popular software in Linux then majority of users won't change to Linux. That's the reality.

In my mind Linux has one major problem - too many different subsystems for developers - KDE or GNOME, RPM or DEB etc. If there would be a major Desktop for example Ubuntu which has 80% of the Linux desktop market and decides on one of the subsystems then developers can port just one time not N times for every freaking distro. Ubuntu, Fedora etc are pretty user friendly (ok some work to do but not so much).

80% of people doesn't need Windows. When people acknowledge that then this year will be the year of Linux.