Better call Obi-Wan Kenobi then: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjCyZ2P9bCA :)

Please read Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine" before continuing your praise of the US championing 'economic development and cooperation.'

One might add that some people are capable of acting morally without a god-like character telling them what to do, but rather by long-term survival strategy - it really pays off to be nice to others!

By lowering taxes for corporations or by keeping the loop holes open, yes. But how about enforcing tax rules to make the corporations pay their contribution like they should? That way you could in fact weaken corporations and strengthen the state, spend the extra money on better health care, infra structure or w/e you would otherwise complain about not working well enough in the public sector. I don't see how taxes in themselves help corporations...

When you take the idea to extremes there, it sounds to me like advocating "security through deterring for seconds or minutes" -- which I would consider even worse than "security through obscurity".

Check out the Organic Groups module.

I think such a requirement is quite outrageous. But it does make me think of yet another application of the "project a tag cloud onto the person in front of you" feature seen in Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry demo SixthSense (at around 7:00).

Say, a convicted embezzler, having served his time, applying for a job with no amounts of cash whatsoever, but in spite of his otherwise fine qualifications not getting the job because he's cried out as a criminal in some public source?

In a case like the above, and even in a case like the in the original post, I think getting over it and moving on -- after actually having served the penalty decided by the judicial system based on the laws passed by the parliament elected by the people -- is actually quite alright.

Apparently it's not as interesting as it's informative ;)

2.20.10-0ubuntu1 can, and is the one still used in Ubuntu (even in 9.04).

The newest version of gdm available in Ubuntu, version 2.25.2-0ubuntu0.1 in the try-out gdm-new package, really cannot auto-login, nor can it do timed login or allow you to theme it much more than changing the background picture.

It's in the plans to make 2.25 (or a newer version) the login manager in Ubuntu Karmic (see the blueprint here), and they have (had) discussions about gdm at some gnome mailing list (I don't have the link presently).

About those issues:
- FOSS is by licence and definition not restricted to being government-lead.
- If $17 bn is available, I'm sure you could find an FOSS-type service company who would make the design effort for a tenth of that amount.

Unless your login name is "nobody", GP actually has a point. I for one like to keep my home dir safely chmod'ed to 0700.

Expecting that their distro will automagically take care of running any p2p app as "nobody" for them is another discussion - but I expect some p2p daemons actually run this way?

Onion peeling analogy fail. ;) Or parent never finishes cooking a meal with onions in it.

In many European countries (at least Denmark and Sweden, I know this for sure), there is an optional (opt-out) 'Church tax' (I don't recall its name which is less linked to Christianity) through which you can contribute to any officially acknowledged religious society you wish. This way you can support your preferred religious society, or the one you would be most likely to attend if you were a believer, or none at all.