Laptops will be cheaper than textbooks soon enough. So, if you believe in public education and getting the value for your money you will buy laptops instead of textbooks. If you want a free society, you will use free software.

Labs are typically a failure. Even when you have as many as one computer per 4 students, students end up with less than an hour a week on them. Laptops work better because they go everywhere with the student. Free laptops are cheaper too. That's all in the Indiana story, go check it out if you don't trust some random Slashdot user.

The goal should be to give one computer to each and every student and have a free network full of free information. China is not an excuse to avoid that. The economics of the result will be tremendous and dwarf the pety costs involved. It will create greater cultural wealth for everyone, greater oportunities and greater ability to exploit those oportunities.

Such goals can only be achieved in freedom. Indiana shows that free software is cheaper and a free network is also required for knowledge to really flow. Napster showed that we can have any piece of culture available for the trivial cost of allowing people to share. Wikipedia and the internet archive show that people are ready, willing and able to create works and share them without the "protection" of copyright.

Other M$ people claim that OOXML has a purpose, ActiveX is better than java, C# is "cross platform" and so on and so forth . How many times do you have to have the wool pulled over your eyes before you realize M$'s efforts at standardization are one lie after another?

... accumulated comments included the fact many Unix greybeards have never used Windows before ... they are busy people, like everyone else, and the time investment was too big for the relatively small win of closing one or two bugs on Windows.

Do you think that people will fix bugs for a platform they have successfully avoided for decades? And not just one but multiple versions of bug fixing too? It takes time and effort to avoid Windows and Windows only hardware and most people end up resenting the exercise. Does anyone really think that Windows will be a "first class citizen" even if all of Perl was perfect on it? I understand M$ wants to have WAMP, but I don't know why anyone will waste their time fixing things for a non free OS that takes so long to set up in the first place. What single advantage does Windows have to offer anyone that would justify development effort?

You like RFID better than tatoos? I don't, let's not criminalize people with diseases with either.

Even such a private tatoo would be seen by the people you work with when you go to the bathroom.

It's all the crap they load. Anti-virus, M$ Word preloads and all that other crap Windoze people think they need and the malware they don't know about. I've seen W2K take 5 to 10 minutes and can believe that Vista is much worse. I know, it's hard to imagine when you run an OS that does not have to be booted for months, but that's life in the cubicle. Stupid and ugly.

Adobe's sins complement those of M$, not wash them away. You can run Gnash 64 bit today, but the real action is in video and HTML 5 has support for theora. Between that and SVG support, the old Flash pdf game is over. Why jump to non free shit like Silverblight when you can move to freedom with the rest of the world?

As for non free platform "cooperation", ask a Mac user how much good M$'s efforts to vend Office and IE to them did. Non free stuff isn't made to make money in a fair way, it's made to extort money by jerking around customers. M$ is playing the same old game they always have but their revenue model long gone. You are not just defending immoral behavior, you are defending immoral behavior that no longer pays.

I'm sure twitter would answer for himself but can't. It's not easy to answer questions when you can only post once or twice a day.