Of course what you failed to mention is that Microsoft only did this because the European Commission forced them to:

December 20th 2007. Today the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF), a non-profit organization created by the Software Freedom Law Center, signed an agreement with Microsoft to receive the protocol documentation needed to fully interoperate with the Microsoft Windows workgroup server products and to make them available to Free Software projects such as Samba. Microsoft was required to make this information available to competitors as part of the European Commission March 24th 2004 Decision in the antitrust lawsuit, after losing their appeal against that decision on September 17th 2007.

The 1984 ad wasn't a warning, it was a promise.

It certainly "worked", so well in fact that it was banned at my university because when we played doom we starved out all other network traffic. Didn't keep us from breaking into the comp sci labs at night to play it, though.

The parent comment needs to be moderated up. Many people are actually thanking the Conservatives for backtracking on what is, essentially, their stated policy. With the upcoming election, they are just hedging their bets that they will win another minority or even (God help us) a majority, and if that happens rest assured this policy change will go through (as well as the DMCA style copyright law waiting in the wings now).

"A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other 'open source' codecs now." - Steve Jobs

Apple and Microsoft, working together against open source. How delicious.

Non-American here, just wondering if this means foreign corporations can now open shell businesses in the US and spend billions of dollars to influence US elections to favour their own companies or countries? I guess in the past they would have had to convince actual US citizens (or pay lobbyists) to do the influencing for them, they can now do so pretty much directly without the middle man. Interesting.

Hello moderators?

Like the email that brought down global warming, this pager evidence is pretty damned convincing.

Slashdot in a nutshell.

I use a black Unicomp space saver 104 with the "Linux" layout model #UB40V46 with the control and escape keys placed where God intended them. I've tried a lot of other keyboards, and none of them have the heft or the solid feedback that the Model M style 'boards have. With this keyboard I can type faster and more accurately than with other keyboards. Also, there is simply nothing better than capping off a line of code than a nice, solid, CLUNK on the enter key. In this respect, the Unicomp's aren't quite as good as the true Model M's, but it's close enough for me.