OK, I may be a clueless bastard that believes fairy tales and does not comprehend the dangers and law of unintended stuffs and so on, but...
1) Storage costs for ISPs. GIVE ME A BREAK! Lets say a record is 100 bytes per event (and it won't be more than that since they are only asking about DHCP records), lets say an ISP has a million users and they all get new IPs twice a day (lets pretend no cable modem is ON 24/7 for months and same IP is not reassigned to the same MAC at reconnects). Such ISP would end up with horrid 73G file a year. It would likely compress to 10% of that size with zip but lets say we keep it uncompressed. Puhlease, ISP that can't handle THAT doesn't deserve to live.
2) Public AP. Same math- different budget or providers but I can guarantee that simple firmware update for the router and retention policy "download once a week, burn on a 30c CD and put it into a safe" or something like that can be easily implemented.
3) Home users... Plain stupidity, don't even want to go there but router developers should start taking better care about securing this stuff by default, like forcing first password change and defaulting to WPA2.

There were few other points floated: text files are editable, MACs are spoofable, etc. All valid, but nobody said that logs alone are supposed to carry burden of proof. Making part of evidence chain might be enough.

Finally, privacy concerns. First, bull about "ISP would have to store mount of PII" is just that, bull, unless bill says "and will not issue such IP before driver's license or alternate form of ID is provided". Just MACIP mapping. If whoever asks for these logs can find machine with that MAC- they have something. ISPs can also (and IMO should) include customer ID number or something. Now, there is (IMO) a very legit worry about censorship and about authorities using this to inquire "how went to this Arabic newspaper site" or "who googled 'how to make a nuke from household materials'". I think this is a HUGE concern and we might want to concentrate on that and how it will play with Patriot act and such. But rest is noise (again, IMO, please correct me)

Please don't confuse person asking the question with the question itself. Even though question was asked by Dell it wasn't phrased around PC hardware supply, it was centered around science and technology sector and this is a very interesting question with several sides:
1) Is Russia technologically or scientifically weak today? Hell no, I don't like Putin for a second but he is right, Russia does have very strong technological sector.
2) Will science survive long in Russia? Not without significant foreign interest. Science is a government venture there and government fails to finance it. Technology boom is there only because of cheap quality work force. With rising salaries in CS sector and economy crisis everywhere else technology will likely start suffering soon. So, unless there is a door opened for foreigners to invest in science and unless there is a new wave of outsourcing/investing in technology both sectors will suffer dearly and soon.
3) Does this mean that Russia needs help with this? Again, as much as I hate it I agree with mr. Putin. Russia is not in a position to beg (at least not yet). Russia would benefit from foreign investors and needs them but so would those investors. Russia needs entrepreneurs, not elves.

Excellent way to globalize without any substance, I see Putin isn't the only one that's insecure. I can attest that I have seen much more good programmers in Russia than in US. There are simple reasons- mathematics and logic is taught much better in school (it's virtually nonexistent here), almost any software was free (VSS=Maya=3dMax=Office=whatever else you want=$1.50) and people took full advantage of it. US students are starting to get similar opportunities with OSS and with free versions of most major development software).
Sun, Intel, Microsoft and maaaaany other companies opened development houses in Russia and it now has a few very strong game dev comapnies.

Yes, science in Russia needs financial investment but not as help but as a very viable ROI prospect not as "help". A problem with that is that science is still mostly government venture in Russia and it's kinda hard to invest in government :-\

"I've been cooking pastry- now I would like to do main dishes- what ingredients should I use?"

What exactly do you mean by "developing for Linux"? Writing drivers? Expanding kernel? Writing desktop apps? Web sites? Command line tools? Distributed programming on Linux cluster? Other, whatever that might be?
Until you answer this question you will get answers all over the map.
Desktop applications- you'll likely use C++ (with some C where APIs isn't properly wrapped by a miriad of OO wrappers for Gnome, KDE or cross-toolkit), however there are great apps in Python and other scripting languages. For lighter weight web site (not necessarily in size, but in functionality) you'll likely use PHP or Ruby. For something more substantive on the Web you'll use Java (and don't be afraid, performance-wise it got quite decent, probably at least ~80% of good C++ app speed).
Ultimately, your choice is limited if you are planning to work in the guts of the system (C with some elements of C++) but beyond that you can use whatever, so you better rephrase the question.