I agree that what Iran is doing is wrong, however, I do not think companies should be the ones to dictate foreign policies towards other countries not even evil dictatorships. The ones that should react more strongly are the governments of the world. The Finnish and German governments should impose these export restrictions just as the US does butuntil they do, I do not think Nokia/Siemens should avoid exporting to Iran.

There is an other example of western tech ending up in Iran's missile research program in the news today. AMD Opteron processors power their numbercrunchersupercomputer ( http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=knowledge_center&articleId=340338&taxonomyId=1&intsrc=kc_top ). My point is, this technology will end up being used by these countries no matter what we do. They can steal it, they can buy it in a neighboring country and illegally export it to Iran. Only nation sanctioned/enforced embargos can have any kind of effect on an other nation and in some cases not even these embargos work.

That MS Office 2007 upgrade that the budget just could not handle just became a must have since it supports "open standards" and MS Office 2003/XP does not :) Woohoo! One win for "open standards" in the books.

I've found several articles about the Extremadura LinEx project but I have been unable to find any information about exactly which schools were migrated.
One article (http://lwn.net/Articles/41738/) from 2003 states one computer for every two children were installed so I would say a substantial amount of all schools were running LinEx by June 2003.
An other article (http://www.osnews.com/story/12611) from November 2005 states that 66000 computers in schools and education centers and an additional 14000 in public administration buildings.
According to a third article (posted August 2006) on debian.org, all schools were migrated to Linux during 2004 ((Article in Swedish) http://www.debian.org/News/2006/20060803.sv.html)

Please read more than the first paragraph, especially if you link to a source yourself :) Goverment migration in Extramadura started in 2006/2007 however in 2002 they migrated 70000-80000 (the figures differ from source to source) desktops for their schools and they set up 33 public computer centers.

80000+ desktops + 33 datacenters in Spain in 2003 ? Qualifies :) ?

In goverment...
* 1000+ in French parliament : http://blogs.computerworld.com/node/4060
* 11000 at German Foreign ministry.
* 14000 in Munich.
* 13000 at The Federal Employment Office of Germany
* 80000+ in Spain 2003: http://lwn.net/Articles/41738/
* 90000 at France's national police force in 2007

In education...
* "Germany has announced that 560,000 students in 33 universities will migrate to Linux."
* "Russia announced in October 2007 that all its school computers will run on Linux."
* "9,000 computers to be converted to Linux and OpenOffice.org in school district Geneva, Switzerland by September 2008"

In business...
* "Peugeot, the European car maker, announced plans to deploy up to 20,000 copies of Novell's Linux desktop."

Read more about adoption of Linux at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_adoption

Oh thank you god! Finally someone who actually agrees with me on what the purpose of education is. Teaching should be about stimulating the kids to want to learn, to want to find out the whys and hows!...and give them the tools to do so. Off course it is an other matter in higher education, but that is besides the point here as people seems to be talking about creating mindless drones belonging to one camp or the other.

Thanks for pointing out how it gets it's time.

You could modify an isolated gateway (Linux/*BSD with custom IP-forwarding code/hacked IPTables/FW ?) to send back spoofed responses that meet the criteria no matter which IP is used in the request.

The point is not HOW it gets it's time but that it is not so terribly hard to fake the date and that would allow the researchers to investigate what will happen on April 1st?

The options to check time are limited...
* Local machine time
* NTP server time
* Specialized time server set up by creators

1st option can easily be fooled so it is unlikely.

2nd option...the researchers can intercept the NTP request on an isolated network and pretend to be the contacted time server.

3rd option...the call in itself could be intercepted and lead the researchers to a site(s) previously hacked by the creators of this worm and might give them valuable information about where to look next or how to detect other similarly hacked/infected machines.

Alternative 3 would also be unlikely since that would limit the effectiveness of the worm to have one or a few "single-point-of-failures" in that those machines could be taken off-line if found through experimenting.

The experiments could be ran again and again and...with the identical environment if the machine(s) infected were running in a VM so the "HDs" could be restored quickly to original status.

Not all subjects are so controversial/disputed that they need this Edit-Approval system IMHO. Certain subjects could be flagged, like political and religious content, the rest could be "peer-reviewed" as it is today. That might cut the possible backlog a bit.

I'm sure the significance of this can not be missed by anyone, however just like boys will be boys...Slashdoters will be Slashdoters and make comedy about the most serious topics. Re: "I wonder if, further down the line..." Check out Kevin Warwick's (Reading University, UK) work @ http://www.kevinwarwick.com/ He and his wife apparently was able to transfer sensory information from one person to the other in his Cyborg 2.0 experiment.