"Now" Red Hat?

Red Hat, and by now all other Linux distros have had work contributed by NSA for ages now - it's called SELinux. Lookie here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selinux#Overview

But it's all open source, so rather hard to hide back doors. Any security-related bug could possibly be considered a deliberate attempt to allow circumvention.

@AC "Hrm" and @Chris Miller

AC: 'So the main problem is the bundling of IE in Windows, so MS removes IE from Windows and therefore removes the bundling component, and still the EU are not happy?'

Well, duh, how would anyone be able to install a browser if there wasn't one (or more) available to be installed from the media? It's a catch-22 - if you don't provide a browser, you can't install a browser. Unless you think most people should get by with the text mode FTP client.

Also @Chris Miller:

CM: 'I bet if Dell announced tomorrow that they will offer all their systems pre-installed with Fedora, the blogs would be full of Ubuntu enthusiasts wailing "it's not fair"!'

Uh, Dell sells systems pre-installed with Ubuntu:

http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/topics/topic.aspx/emea/segments/gen/client/en/ubuntu_landing?c=uk&l=en&s=dhs

and before that for quite a few years they could pre-install Red Hat Enterprise Linux (like commercial Fedora). So there's an existence proof that you're wrong.

@@Cambridge public transport sucks

I think the most you can say is that it does indeed depend where you live and work, but for *most* people, they suck. If your service is that frequent and cheap, you probably have the luxury of a council-subsidised service. I have a 15 minute walk to my nearest bus stop, which runs every half hour and takes a further half an hour to meander into the city centre. I'm all of 6 miles from Cambridge city.

And this for a mere £4.50 return. Stagecoach are a bunch of w*nkers.

But hooray for you - you have a brilliant bus service, probably largely subsidised by my council tax. Yeah, that's fair.

Beeb keeps the bar high (and @Sean B)

From TFA: "Indeed, a lot of the BBC's content is damn good - something it suggests it couldn't achieve in the market. Given that point, it's odd that most of its best content sells well globally and also tends to dominate DVD sales charts in the UK."

Well yes, but clearly that's a drop in the ocean otherwise there would already be no need for the licence fee, silly! The price of innovation is frequent failure, and for every roaring success there's a dozen "Meh"s.

Sean Baggaley writes: "By all means sell off the distribution side if you absolutely must have your pound of flesh-- a TV channel is just one medium amongst many now"

But there's no point having production if you can't guarantee distribution. What channels would buy innovative content unless there was a good chance of it being a good earner? You'll get what some suit thinks is low-risk solid TV that advertisers will like, and bingo, you've just invented American TV.

As far as I'm concerned, the beeb does a good job, not just for its own decent content, but because it makes ITV/CH4/5 work harder to compete. If the Beeb went commercialised (whether privatised or whatever), and its quality dropped, you could expect ITV/CH4/5 to get even worse than they already are.

Anyone who has seen the free market in action in the form of TV in the USA will know that we need the BBC, and for it not to be commercialised.