I know Slashdot hive mind thinks M$ is evil (i think it too), but even Microsoft knows it's not about the OS, it's about developer tools (developers, developers, developers).

Unix API is nice. Sockets? include sys/socket.h plus a couple of other headers and you are fine. Graphics? include opengl/gl*.h. But how about other things? Playing sound? Choose between OSS, ALSA, JACK or dozens of sound servers. KDE x GNOME war? Both lost.

I love linux, but it's truly is a PITA using and programming for it's desktop environment.

A Linux from Scratch installation is far from a usable system on the long run, but is a great experience for learning.

Maybe someone thinks the standards must be expensive so a thrid party that didn't work on the process must pay too.

Apple has a lot of patents on audio/video compression. Have they licensed those for free for this implementation? How about another implementation or fork? Will those have the same license?

I'm Brazilian. Orkut is still very popular here, but lost some space to facebook. A reason is that orkut is FULL of low-brow content. "Orkutization" is used as a verb to define the rise of low-brow content in a given service.

There's no way in hell Google is going to migrate all this.

I can't imagine how this can work. Computers without internet aren't 1% as useful. If you think about making a Wikipedia mirror, you don't plan to cut back on computer time anyway.
Just take the slowest connection you can find, or share with a neighbor, or use a cellphone for tethering.

I got a surname@gmail.com address and EVERYDAY i receive at least one e-mail by mistake. People type xyz.surname@gmail.com as xyz,surname@gmail.com and there you go...

I tried filter, warn people, flag as spam, but there's no sure way to catch it all. I at least try to have fun. So far i've got:
- Pics from a married man to his male lover.
- US$370 transfer from Paypal (i didn't take the money, by the way).
- Dozens of resumes.
- E-mail from a girl to his teacher who would do ANYTHING to don't fail his course.
- Got my e-mail banned from Facebook because someone signed up with my email and messed up (Solved later).
- Deleted 100+ e-mail accounts that used my email as secondary email for password recovery.

Change your e-mail or live with it.

IAAB (I am a Brazilian). Sure, anonimous posting is forbidden by Constitution. So is interest rates greater than 12%/year. It's more complicated than that. I think judges have a problem understanding how internet works and are trying to not lose power (like when a judge tried to block all of youtube because Cicarelli's sex video: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2007/06/youtube-wins-privacy-case-against-brazilian-supermodel.ars ). I feel sorry for Google.

Paper ballot is far from perfect. I think we are better this way. People will not hack a voting machine to win, just buy votes. It's easier. Brazil is a very big country and counting votes was always problematic. Now we have a official result in the same day. Elections for legislative branch was a problem too. People wrote the name or a nickname of a candidate, or just swear. A monkey (or another animal from a zoo, can't remember) was elected years ago as a prostest. Buying votes is harder too. They just took people who cant read and gave a paper already marked.

More important than that: DO NOT post this file(s) as a .doc, .jpg, .pdf, etc. AS IS. Those formats have metadata that can be used to trace to our source.

In economics and finance, arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of a price differential between two or more markets: striking a combination of matching deals that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrage