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I live in Brazil and sometimes I walk to the market.
Some upper end markets here give you a paper bag with handles, like this one:
http://blogs.estadao.com.br/curiocidade/files/2012/03/sacola_papel_SantaLuzia-682x1024.jpg
I prefer those to plastic ones. They easily handle 10kg(about 25 lbs, for americans), where the plastic ones barely get 2kg(5 lbs) without punctures. Also they are very sturdy, and survive minor rain.
With two of those paper bags I can take the equivalent of ten or more plastic bags, and they don't hurt my fingers like the plastic ones do.

I live in brasil, never heard anything about cracker being responsible for the blackouts in espirito santo in 2007. to tell the truth, the first time i heard about it was on the web a few days ago, reading blog posts about the 60min report.

the minister of energy and the national system operator (the office that controls our power grid) already denied the "information" from the 60min show.

IMHO, it's just another piece of typical american fear-mongering, probably aimed at selling some incredibly expensive, over-complicated and completelly unecessary "technology" to the government.

more here (in portuguese).

disclaimer: estadão is a reliable, reasonably unbiased brasilian news agency.

Linux is already sold pre-installed on cheap hardware in Brazil. They sit right next to Vista boxen, with a pathetic resource-hungry KDE desktop, full of little click-on menus (mail, browser). Here's a photo: http://www.link.estadao.com.br/index.cfm?id_conteudo=12583

The first thing users do is remove Linux and install a pirate XP.

The type of user who buys this is someone who needs a computer but doesn't want to pay the more expensive MS product. He knows shit about Linux and would like to install MS Office (pirate) on it. His 10 year-old is all excited, thinking he now is gonna be able to play awsome video games and outcool the kids in the hood that have PS2. Heh. The cruely of it all.

There's absolutely nothing securing more future Microsoft mindshare than the Linux boxen being sold in Brazil.

Yeah, there are people being taken down in Brazillian Customs. If you read news regarding this story in portuguese, you'll get the following relevant information (not available in TFA):

- Customs employees at Salvador Airport are being investigated as collaborators to the act
- The five "American Corporates" are actually Brazilians working in ghost export companies in the US
    (So probably the US police is going to cooperate with this)
- Cisco Brazil ex-president and the current president were already arrested (so not just janitors)
- Investigations have been going for 2 years already
- Besides cisco, there is a number of import/export "ghost" companies ("laranjas") being investigated.
- It is not just "office equipment", like some comments here say - the imported products were being re-sold
    for lower-than-possible-prices in Brazil.

Relevant article (in portuguese)
http://g1.globo.com/Noticias/SaoPaulo/0,,MUL151436-5605,00-PRESIDENTE+E+EXPRESIDENTE+DA+CISCO+DO+BRASIL+SCAO+PRESOS+POR+SONEGACAO.html
http://www.estadao.com.br/economia/not_eco65806,0.htm

I talked to a store clerk for a small business that sell used books, games, and stuff like that here in Virginia. He told that a friend of his went to Thailand and brought back with him around 300 DVD's of recent movies that be bought for less than quarter each over there.

It is not so in Brazil. There was a recent article on the Estado de Sao Paulo newspaper that read "Brazil leaves the list made by the US about the top most countries with problem on piracy". It is an interesting read. It tells that local companies together with the Brazilian Federal Police made several raids in places where piracy was running amok. This has been going on for over 2 years now.

The situation with the Drug patents have nothing to do with it, and I doubt it will put Brazil back in the US's watch list.

In the article, it says there was an announcement in the United States last Monday in which it was said that Brazil was removed from the top most part of the list of countries that ignore piracy and violate intellectual property.

Funny thing in the article is to read that they found out that Brazil didn't manufacture the products that were confiscated by authorities, but they were manufacture in China and crossed the border into Brazil via Paraguay.

I think the button is hidden somewhere...

http://today.reuters.com/stocks/QuoteCompanyNewsAr ticle.aspx?view=CN&storyID=2006-06-27T214849Z_01_N 27216845_RTRIDST_0_TECH-DELL-LAPTOP.XML&rpc=66

http://www.estadao.com.br/tecnologia/informatica/n oticias/2006/jun/28/321.htm

Some numbers:

- Budget on Federal IT spending: R$1,9bi (~US$ 720 mi)

- Budget to spend on hunger and income rdistribuition iniciatives : R$1,1bi(~US$415mi)

- Brazil's GNP in 2003: R$1,5trillion(~US$565bi)

- National Debt/GNP ratio: 58%.

- Money saved from not acquiring licenses: R$28mi(~US$10.5mi)

Some ranting:

- There is way too much hype about this technological policy in Brazil. The largest part of public spending in IT has never been on acquiring office licenses or MS-Windows stations. The largest piece of the pie has always gone to enterprise-wide systems. Unysis and Oracle are everywhere in government servers, and they get the big bucks. 28 million compared to a billionaire budget is pocket change. If they wanted to actually reduce costs, they would have to go after these guys.

- This stupid leftist (real left, not the Democrat Party kinda thing) government decided they should go after Microsoft because they are part of the Evil Empire. As an example, Lula refused to meet Bill Gates at Davos, just to show that they don't need MS anymore. He might get huge support from the open source crowd, but still think it was moronic attitude, politically speaking.

- Famine or hunger has hardly been a real problem in Brazil. Poverty and terrible distribution of wealth certainly are a bigger cause of concern. And the budget shows that: 0,1% of the budget spending hardly makes a "War on Hunger", as our beloved president wanted.

- As someone said above: Brazil is not Sudan. It has a huge, diverse economy, and is not by dictating one particular policy that they are going to solve our bigger issues.

Here in Brazil, were we have had last year the largest elections using proprietary-software-equiped-polls, it seens that there have been more than a
couple of frauds last year.

The latest news are these ones (In Portuguese. Use
the fish to read in English).

There have surfaced accuatins of votings being sold at R$10,00 (~U$3.30) each one, and of a candidate that had more than 1000 votes while they were being counted ending up with zero votes.

I just hope they get to the only one true: these eletronic polls, as they are, are nothing but election-buying machinnes.

Sorry replying to myself but I had formatting problems.

As someone who is a software engineer for the Brazillian government in São Paulo, I feel compelled to reply.

Open source is widely used and discussed as an option in almost every reguard. Yet virtually all server-based apps are run on solaris. In most cases you can choose to run linux on the desktop - some even choose bsd. Eclipse is fastly becomming universal. Yet virtually all development is being done in Java - pretty open for a closed standard but not exactly open source. Simple decrees will be hard to change that culture.

Still, the media I've read is not showing direct quotes from high level officials. The IT minister is quoted as speaking in the name of (chief of staff) ministro José Dirceu, and even that President Lula has stated software livre is "polÃtica pÃblica de governo". Pretty loftly claims from a lower level official - hope they are true but still as yet are unconfiremed in higher places recently.

It is my belief that the increasing amount of developers believing software livre is kool will have more impact than any law. I don't believe that software livre is really going to save much money as claimed because of wide piracy. Saying Public governments should use publicly available tools makes more sense to me. But seeing those numbers explains how the Secretaria de Fazenda do Rio (Rio IRS) created those swiss bank accounts.

iksrazal

> Oh and if you're interested in the Christian Science Monitor. (As in why should I read a "Christian" newspaper.... go here before you complain about this news source.

Well, first I would explain your quotes on Christian by remembering all readers that Christian Science is not Christian nor Science, but a mistaken self-assigned name for a gnostic heresy.

Second, why would I trust a publication by a religious organization based on bad philosophy over publications by corrupt corporations? I mean, what's the difference? Even idealistic publications have problems to get things right.