The model is flawed, but there are ways of having some privacy ; for example, hosting your own email on your own server, using encrypted partitions and encrypted swap over https, imaps, and if needed, pop3s, and giving emails addresses to friends and people you wanna have communication with. Having a drill press near the harddrive for when cops show up is optionnal. Basically the dead letter model will still work. I assumed this is why so many businesses have domain name email hosted on a single server.

I can't believe so few geeks made the choice of living of communal houses with a bunch of broke ass musicians were no one wants to pay to heat the unused parts of the house... Long live space heaters !

... a 1-2% user base hosting install parties in so many different cities when new versions are launched and maintaining user groups isn't qualitatively the same as a 92% user base that are mostly apathetical. It doesn't seem like Microsoft will ever put a break on software piracy, because that's who's their tech enthusiast user basis is. Wine is getting better and better though. Obviously, north american and west european governments can sorta afford to get Windows this or that, but even then, for political reasons (read realpolitik), its way better to have software built locally, or at least that you can review locally.

It would be nice if you remembered that in the same wave of protests the Free Trade Area of Americas got abandoned, and the role of the WTO got totally toned down. Obviously the government doesn't recognize that, because the rule #1 is to "never surrender to violence", and they pretended that the reorientation of the WTO priorities was in the air, somehow.

If you read actual documents on the riots that happened in Gothenborg and Prague around those time, the governement feels definitely threatened by widespread resistance to itself, and even more by the black blocs tactics that are considered by governement as decentralized cell-based potentially terrorist organizations. How do you think the cops got 1,2 billion dollar Canadian to protect Toronto in June ?

Also remember that north-american countries are directly relying on cheap labour in most of the "third-world" countries to keep on top of the imperialist food chain. Challenging such systems of oppression, when your benefiting from it, is surprising form altruism.

Overall I'd like if you would acknowledge the role of the government in decentralizing jobs to the southern hemisphere instead of eating their racist bullshit of: "immigrants are stealing our jobs".

As told in a lot of reports. But the government can't do much when suddenly it's stormed from everywhere, and after days and days of riots, some cop say: "hey I saw a blog that calls for this demonstration that was more like an angry mob !" I even think they didn't manage to close one of those blog. Also the election of 2004 in Spain, which happened three days after the Madrid train bombing, was won by the socialists, even though national TV was continually broadcasting that the ETA made those bombing (the ETA is a left wing basque nationalist group). Manuel Castells, a Spanish sociologist claim that everybody in the country was just SMSing all day for those three days, since it was clear for anyone left wing that it wasn't the ETA: the ETA usually claim their attacks, and do not usually target civilian.

That is the only reason why they do it: generic medecine spread through africa and south america, and they want to get their market back. This operation is a desperate attempt to make more profit, as they are a corporation, which mean they want to make the most for the shareholders.

Real compassion would be to drop the patents on aids medecine to help africa, just as the WHO propose (http://www.aegis.com/NEWS/AFP/2001/AF0103B8.html).

It means:
- You're really far away from home
- You're either going or in a place you really want to be since you're ready to sleep on the floor to go there