In reality this law will create just another bribery channel for government officials. In Russia, various government agencies, including fire department, fishing, environmental, whatever regulating/monitoring bodies can close businesses for the slightest violation of infinite borderline idiotic regulations. For example, _every_ vehicle was supposed to have first aid kit and functioning fire extinguisher. Not sure if it's the case anymore, but I would not be surprised if in addition to that you need 50 meters climbing rope and gas mask, just in case. This is just one more way to facilitate bribery across the wider spectra.

...and suddenly Putin decides he wants to deal in diamonds.

I cannot explain it, just feels that way.

Dear poster, ask yourself if you are really entitled to opinion in this argument. It sounds like your son has things figured out, and you don't.

I also second other posters who mention CMS. If he is so excited about C# he may try Visual Web Developer Express and poke around Microsoft web development ecosystem. They got some nice toys, like WebMatrix. I myself would stick to vi, gimp and browser built-in tools when I work with WordPress or some such CMS. I fancy Opera recently, but all major and free browsers have descent developer tool-kits. Everything else is redundant.

just wait for it. Win7 SP1 came out almost two years ago. When Windows devices with UEFI will hit the markets in Europe, in few years EU regulators will take an issue with that as well. It will be fun if Microsoft will call its UEFI lock a software bug as well =)

On the other hand, EU may want to let Microsoft make some money before they demand the fines again. I am all antitrust and libertarian, but what is in it for me when EU gets more money to bail out Greece and Spain? Will they put all these money to promote open standards and software? I doubt it.

Stanislaw Lem was writing about such super-connected army back in 60s. In one of the stories in Cyberiad he wrote how two inventors, Trurl and Klapauciu, were forced by two competing monarchs to build them ultimate armies. Inventors agreed. They connected soldiers of each army (since they were robots, it was plausible) into two hive-mind entities. The moment armies 'synced', instead of attacking each other, they all sat on the battlefield and went to enjoyed the sunny day making wreaths of flowers for each other. Lem postulates that once mind crosses certain threshold of intelligence, it becomes inherently nonviolent, even if intelligence gain comes from union of multiple, lesser minds. The man was genius.

What if we apply this very same idea backwards? What if all life on Earth is exactly a product of such colonization, all started from a spore or two? A spore programmed to erupt into entire biosphere through preprogrammed evolution/adaptation mechanisms? A spore sent into the space with countless others with no specific destination... and it took only one to hit the Earth. I understand that it is a bitten to death idea of extraterrestrial origin of life, but here what really strikes my fancy is not the idea of life as foreign contaminant or an accident, but life as a colonization that starts with minimal assembly unit and grows colonizers upon the arrival.