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Third world countries use skype.
Everybody else has an IPhone or Android that will let you voice chat or video chat anywhere in the world for nothing.

Skype is a household word as is Kleenex, and people want to get rid of both as soon as they have used it.

Skype is backdoored and nobody but love struck teenagers use it any more.

Does it matter?

There are backdoors in all these online services (the Skype one is now confirmed, btw), If you trust any personal data to them, expect it to be shared.

What about software? Windows? Skype? iOS? Can't even say that Ubuntu won't include it, or be forced by this kind of law to be included in a blob in the linux kernel. They won't do a different version, no backdoor included, for EU, after all, it could enable people to install the EU version in other places. Also, a lot of your information resides in servers, that will or have that backdoors, even if not hosted in US. And any measure to disable or get around it will be treated as a crime, of course.

How many more of these rip-off stories before the BSD license is modified (or replaced with the GPL) to prevent commercial exploitation?

Huh? Do you mean OpenSSL's use of the BSD license, or BSD in general. In the specific case of OpenSSL, the license specifically prohibits relicensing the software under the GPL. Actually not sure about the stuff done under the OpenSSL project, but everything that came from EAY had that restriction.

In the general case, if you are licensing works under the BSD license and don't understand that this license allows commercial use (including closed source forks), it could only be your own fault, since this is a well known property of the BSD license. Personally, as the author of code of BSD licensed code which does have closed source forks (see here), I don't mind at all. I thought about it, and in the end decided that it simply wasn't something that mattered to me.

You mean like this portland compiler

Actually I wouldn't say that gcc produces particularly bad code on all computers, it's sorta average, but not bad. Certainly the 3.3.x series are alot better than 2. Pretty good at number crunching and it is more standards compliant than most.

Use the Intel compilers, your code will be 50-300% faster.

50-300%? You're nuts. I've used both, and performance definitely varies...and if I had to choose one or the other as "generally producing faster code", I'd probably point at gcc.

Take a look at these benchmarks.

Gcc produces fastest code on 26 of the tests, icc on 9.

Furthermore, not all the optimization flags for gcc were being used (no idea why -fexpensive-optimizations wasn't used).

Basically the poster you responded to is right. ICC won on some things, GCC won on others. And, for the most part, KAI C++ kicked the hell out of both of them. The comparison was integer-heavy code with lots of tight loops on a 1.4 Ghz Thunderbird.

If you dont own (but want) a DVD player then you can probably justify the extra cost for a xbox or ps2.

Yeah, I suppose. However:

I (well, a housemate) has a DVD player, though she is moving out in May. But we're good until then.

and

I would rather buy the DVDized Gamecube than a PS2 or an Xbox, because the DVD playing Gamecube looks really cool to me <g>, and anyway, while there are certain games that I would like to play on PS2 and Xbox (GTA3, GT3, MGS2), the only games where I will think "WOW! I really want to buy this game right now! $#^#@^&#$% Me like!! @%^!%^&" are on the Gamecube, enough so that I would rather buy a regular GC and a DVD player if Panasonic doesn't produce the DVD playing GC in some reasonable timeframe.