My ISP, xs4all blocks my connection automatically when trojans or other malware starts to make outbound connections.
I know this as I am responsible for several people on this connection, one of them connected a laptop which triggered this.

When this happens all my ports are closed at the ISP and I get a notice to connect to their proxyserver so that I can download protective means.
When I solve the issue I get a checkup and after that all goes well, the ports are reconnected.

When they say: "We're comitted to..... blah blah...."

Hey, chear up, it's the American way...

Gum 19 — star-forming region with variable star V391 Velorum

And then people say that we in the west are decadent...

Didn't the UK have 58 million people?

So 2 million is 0.03 percent of the population.

So most people don't care. like the grandparent says.

It is already known that human brains make up what they miss in presented info.

With people you only have to withhold info to get them to make bad decisions

Yeah, let us all hide in our ghettos again, very good for the world.

While very noble, all this native translation stuff and UTF-8, what I see is that more and more people stop trying to reach out and stay in their own culture/circle.
The internet 10 years ago was much more international oriented than it is nowadays.

Wrong, the US has a winner takes all system, the people do not vote directly if they are allowed to vote at all.
There will be no coalition, ever...

Read this and be amazed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_the_United_States

Don't be mad at the oportunist, be mad at those that gave this oportunist leeway.

Patents and Copyrights have always been political power instruments and are used to censor, stiffle progress and to provide landgrab in the broadest sense to accomplices.
Stiffle progress is a special one, politicians are people with contol freak mindsets, they hate any sense of not being in control.
Science in perticular is constantly providing legal fronteer situations which enable others than the political class and their accomplices to be oportune.

Besides that, it is also strategic, when Google hurts Nokia it will kill Microsoft its (only?) platform and chances to enter that market.

PCLinux is an old fork, probably it is too far from the codebase of Mandriva.

Texstar (PCLinux' maintainer) used to be a packager for Mandriva years ago, he rpm'd a lot of applications in those days, and the packages were of exceptional quality.

But depending on if PC's can be built with electronics from pads and mobiles, prices may rise again to XT and AT prices from the mid 80's.
These machines did not come cheap.

I hope that more projects like rapsberry pi will enable us serious PC users to continue while keeping cost at acceptable levels.

Mageia is a fork of the rock solid Mandriva 2010 codebase, Mandriva crashed with their experimental 2011 codebase and threw out the main builders of the product, these builders united in september 2010 to start Mageia.

They used the Mandriva 2010 to build the servers that make the distribution (puppet based) and made the Mageia 1 distro with the servers in june 2011.
At this moment Mageia 2 is out there but it is not as stable, the product is in the middle of changing from startup scripts to systemd and has dbus and policy kit problems, half of my system does not startup in systemd mode so I am using startup scripts as I always have done.

The Mandriva they want to use for the desktop is less stable than the Mageia 2 they want to use for servers.
I use Mandrake since ancient times and stayed with Mandriva and now with Mageia, I am used to it and it mostly works out of the box.

Only that French company, it has always been and probably stay a disaster.

It's the cold water that contains the food, not the warm water, so from that perspective this is not odd at all