We have plans on how to invade and conquer Canada.
Not sure if the US still does have such a contingency plan on file, but they certainly did in the early 20th century. It was called War Plan Red, a scenario for global war between the United States and the British Empire.
Hitler justified what he was doing in the name of "fighting communist terrorism" that he claimed was headquartered in Poland.
Did he? Poland wasn't even nominally a Communist state at the time, AFAIK. He justified his invasion because a good deal of Poland was land that had been taken from Germany at the end of the First World War.
IIRC, Hitler's Communist terrorist was Matthias van der Lubbe, a Dutchman, who burned down the Reichstag. Conspiracy theories that it was Goering aside, Hitler did rapidly leap on the destruction of a major national landmark in order to whip up mass fear of terrorism, of the Bolshevism for which the terrorists stood, and to provide a pretext for the massive violations of civil rights that quickly followed.
Not that anyone would behave that way these days, of course.
Our men and women in Iraq will be able to maintain and win the war for at least several more years
Does anyone else think this strange? You win a war once, then you stop. Is it meaningful to say that you continue winning the war for several years? Surely if a war drags on for years, then for most of that time you weren't winning, in the usual sense of the word...
Forty-seven percent of those polled responded they they did not support 'wiretapping in order to reduce the threat of terrorism'."
Notice that the question isn't about 'wiretapping whomever the president decides he doesn't like' or even about 'wiretapping without appropriate judicial oversight'. It's 'wiretapping in order to reduce the threat of terrorism'.
So, even with a question that implicitly assumes that the president is telling the truth and that there is no malign intent here, and that actually raises the Terrorist Bogeyman in its wording, STILL nearly half of respondents didn't support it.
I'm actually feeling quite positive here. Not only are people waking up to the bullshit that's being done in their name, they're seeing through the trick poll questions too...
For the ultra paranoid there's Autoclave which has sadly been EOL'd by it's creator. This and similar utilities allow you to do numerous passes writing all sorts of random and non-random data
Who needs fancy tools? We have dd,/dev/random and/dev/zero, and/dev/hda. Anyone who's managed to find their way to/. ought to be able to piece these together to adequately scramble the contents of a hard drive...
Build a space elevator and fire nuclear waste at the sun. Easier said than done I guess though.
Energetically speaking, it's actually easier to fire the nuclear waste out of the solar system altogether. To hit the Sun, you need to cancel out the orbital velocity of the Earth completely and then drop straight down; that's a big velocity shift.
Try Jupiter. It's still plenty big enough to swallow all our radioactives without trace, and it's a lot easier to reach.
It's funny you mentioned that. I was just thinking of the military uses of a hand powered laptop. No need to recharde batteries, no need for generators, etc... Perfect for the War Lord on the Go (R).
Warlord? Pah. I'll take on a Warlord any day of the week and pwnz! I play on King, and only lay off Emperor 'cos the cheating AI pisses me right off.
* pulls out four 1993-vintage double-density floppies, grabs a Third World Kiddie laptop and fires up Civ 1 *
This can be seen with evolution. Evolution explains one thing and one thing ONLY - how one organism may beat out another organism, and thus survive and proliferate. It does NOT, however, explain how things are first formed.
For example, if 2 organisms are born, and one is taller than the other, the taller one may outlive the shorter one because it has easier access to food, etc. This is what evolution explains.
What evolution does NOT explain is how, for example, an organ such as the eyeball was formed. No form of evolution can explain this, and trying to is just as bad as a ID or creationism believer.
You've had a scenario for the evolution of the eye linked elsewhere in this thread, so I won't repeat the argument. It's been shown that by means of plausibly small mutations and Darwinian selection it is possible for a fully functioning eye to form entirely without conscious design or intervention of any kind.
Your objection seems to be that we can't prove that scenario actually is how it happened. Well, no. Eyes don't fossilise terribly well. But then, in the scenario you give, of evolution favouring the taller, you don't ask the question 'why is this animal taller than the other', you simply accept that it is, and that if in the circumstances in which they live this is advantageous, then the taller animal will prosper and pass on its genes.
Similarly, let us say there are two creatures with light-sensitive patches on their bodies. Not eyes, as we'd know them. The patch on one of them is a little more concave than the patch on the other. This gives it an advantage, as it has a better sense of the direction of a light source. Maybe it can now follow the sun better? Or know when a large predator is approaching? Just the same thing as with your taller and shorter animals, but it's the first step on the road to an eye.
The overall point is that evolution doesn't tell us for certain how the eye was formed - indeed, looking at the animals in the world, it looks likely that the eye evolved separately, several times, in different ways - but given that eyes did form, evolution can provide a plausible scenario for their formation not involving any violation of known physics.
Think of it like a murder investigation. Without a time machine, you can't be certain, but by examining the details of the crime scene you can narrow down the possible scenarios until you have a plausible story that fits with all the evidence - and then you can finger your suspect. What no detective in such investigations ever does is say 'Well, I can't work out this bit; he must have used magic.'
So let's see if I have this straight. You are agreeing that Britain IS a secular country and that the ties of the PM in this case to whatever church he chooses don't really matter. Of, except that one of the regions of said secular country will "explode" if he does.
Pretty much. On the mainland, most people would identify themselves if asked as Church of England, with large minorities of Catholics and Nones, and then small groups of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jedi, Sikhs and Jews (in IIRC descending order). Hardly anyone actually goes to church. Hardly anyone gives a damn what religion their neighbour practices as long as it isn't terribly noisy. This is the famously secular Britain you've heard about; religion is generally a private affair and it's considered rather bad form to make too much fuss about it in public.
In Northern Ireland, OTOH, damn near everyone is either Protestant or Catholic and is very loud about it. Ian Paisley in particular makes Jack Chick look like a liberal; as for some of the troublemakers on the Catholic side, well, the less said the better about their behaviour. In recent years, they've finally been persuaded to stop killing each other, but the peace is still rather fragile, so it behooves the Prime Minister not to do anything needlessly inflammatory like openly choosing one side over the other.
What, you expected British politics not to run into bizarre paradox? Come on...
... it's obviously that the snails got there by way of a lost continent which formed a land bridge! This sunken land I am convinced we will find if we look hard enough, and I call it Snailuria!
"None of my close friends give any credit to creationism or ID, but we're all well educated athiests so I guess that's to be expected."
Wow, never thought I'd see a comment like that get posted in an article summarry on the front page. Thank you, Slashdot, for giving me a dose of religious bashing with my morning cup of coffee.
Look, it's quite simple.
If one is neither well educated, nor an atheist, one could quite easily believe anything.
If one is well educated, but not an atheist, one might believe in creationism, if it were of the 'God planted fake evidence' variety.
If one is not well educated, but an atheist, one might believe in intelligent design, if it were of the 'monolith on the Moon' variety.
However, since the submitter and his friends are both well educated and atheists, none of them believe in either intelligent design or creationism.
2. He is constrained by the laws of the universe (i.e. physics, mathematics, etc) and cannot contravene them
It could be argued that a god who, metaphorically speaking, has to hit BREAK and hack the source code from time to time on a live system is an incompetent god. If you'll pardon the phrase, an intelligent designer would come up with a universe he wouldn't have to violate in that way. He'd set it up to be self-maintaining to the greatest extent possible, and include fudge factors he could use to operate within the usual laws of physics.
A god who could break the laws of physics, but who set up the system so that he would never need to, is far more impressive than a god who comes in with superpowers every few years to patch up the consequences of his last cack-handed intervention.
I seem to recall a similar story about a turtle and some birds from Aesop's Fables. Life imitating art?
I recall the story of the death of Aeschylus, and the uncannily similar death of the False Prophet Vorbis...
I also recall this being one hypothesis for how the seed of the coconut tree managed to spread itself. Unfortunately, the theory ran into difficulties regarding the practical lifting power of the available avians.
Great theory. Now, if they could only come up with a rigorous definition of "species", we could really get somewhere.
I always thought 'two animals are of the same species if they can mate to produce fertile offspring' was pretty good.
Granted, it wouldn't satisfy a mathematician or a computer programmer (what about the whole gender issue? what if one happens to be infertile through age or injury?) but it works well enough for biology.
Thus, the alsatian and the golden retriever are still the same species, 'dog', but they're physically quite different. They could still breed, though, and produce healthy fertile offspring. The St. Bernard and the Chihuahua are on the edge; with considerable luck and probably surgical assistance, they could breed together and produce possibly healthy and maybe even fertile offspring, but it'd be a chancy business. They are just too different physically for a hybrid to work. Release all the world's dogs back into the wild, and the genes of the Chihuaha and the St Bernard will never practically mix. They'll be different species by any standard.
Given a few more generations of separate evolution, 'dog' might no longer mean a single species, but a group of species like 'ape' or 'cat'.
An interesting outcome from this: there are ring species in the world. I think some Arctic birds have been shown to be like this; a Scottish bird could breed with a Norwegian which could breed with a Siberian which could breed with an Alaskan, but the Scot and the Alaskan would be mutually infertile.
Who owns/controls the BBC and who owns/controls the organization that performed the poll.
If there was a bias here, it's likely to have been in the opposite direction. Reading more details about the programme this poll was taken for, it seems to be a documentary about the recent business with ID in the USA, done as part of a series of fairly serious science documentaries. Hence if the poll was to be biased, it would be biased towards a 'We're not like those stupid Americans, are we chaps?' conclusion.
That it came out like this is, therefore, pretty damned alarming. Can't write this one off as Religious Right interests in the media, I'm afraid...
If not, then explain how a (presumably) mutant new example of an "evolved" chimpanzee with 22 pairs of chromosomes can find another exactly evolved 22-paired mutant -- at the same time -- in the same place -- recognize him or her -- and develop a brand new and unique mating ritual that works.
I can understand why you'd think that you'd need to have the same number of chromosomes, but where the hell did you get that bit about making up an all-new mating ritual?
Ah well... it's not as if you're even right about the chromosome number, anyway...
And where you can't be head of state unless you're a member of the established church.
Remember, in the UK the Queen is head of state, not the Prime Minister. The religion restriction isn't such a big deal. I could be C of E, Catholic, Buddhist or Zoroastrian as I please, I won't be head of state because Charles and William have that sewn up for the foreseeable future.
The PM can in theory be of whatever religion he pleases. The current incumbent is officially CoE, but there is speculation that he may convert to his wife's Catholicism in the future. I suspect he's deliberately playing the ambiguity, so that he can seem impartial to the Northern Irish. If he were to officially convert, the mainland British would have no problem, but Belfast would probably explode...
I'd like to see the questions they asked for the survey. It's all too easy to get the results you want with carefully worded questions.
I'd guess it'll be covered in the programme tonight.
There's more detail on the content here; it looks like it's largely about the recent shenanigans in the US. The UK poll they ran was probably incidental, to provide a baseline for comparison. According to that page, in the US over 50% believe we arrived in the world just as described in the Bible... ugh!
But that doesn't mean I think Intelligent Design is science, either. But neither is a whole lot that goes on with Evolution and other supporting theories that are based on something other than experimentation. Fact is, there has never been an experiment with macro-evolution - until there is, Macro-Evolution is simply a theory and, IMO, a weak one at that.
You're right there. Same with Plate Tectonics. I mean, sure, we've found the mid-Atlantic ridge and measured how it's spreading a tiny amount each year, I don't disagree with Micro-Continental-Drift. It's only Macro-Continental-Drift I disagree with. Pangaea? Rubbish. And all the magnetic reversal patterns and matching rock formations on separate continents that the scientists come up with are IMO really weak.
And don't get me started on Macro-Addition. I mean, we know 1+1=2, we can test that by counting things, but AFAIK nobody in the world has ever seen more than a few million of anything at one time. And yet these scientists tell us about billions of this and trillions of that, and then they even make up a new way of writing numbers that doesn't even use names! Exponential notation is only a theory, and IMO, a weak one at that.
If taught correctly, creationism does not necessarily imply one religion. It implies intelligent design meaning God, gods or advanced aliens.
None of which is science, except conceivably the aliens - who would presumably have to have evolved themselves.
Shall we also teach the 'Aliens have placed giant rocket engines on the backs of all the planets to make them move round the Sun' theory in addition to the theories of Kepler and Newton?
it's Ookami, not okami. i guess they feel having the extra O would confuse people and make their heads explode?
Anyone not an otaku will read 'ookami' as something like 'ukami'. 'oo' is generally read as in 'spoon'.
It might be best to spell the name of the game 'ôkami' - I believe this was done with Shôgun Total War - which would not cause hilarious mispronunciation among average English-speakers, but simultaneously satisfy the pedantry of.jp geeks.
If you suspect that the artist would not want you distributing their stuff, or helping yourself to a copy without paying it, then DON'T. Why? The golden rule. You would not want the artist to ignore your wishes.
Very well, now let's apply the Golden Rule to sharing of toys as per Sesame Street:
Cool Toy Co. would very much prefer it if every kid who wanted to play with Cool Toy bought their own. Therefore you shouldn't share your Cool Toy; only you are licensed to play with it, and your friends should buy their own. You would not want Cool Toy Co. to ignore your wishes, would you?
... That's a damn fine troll you got there. I imagine the anti-slash crowd will add it to the list pretty quick. To my mind, it's very nearly as good as the Christian Record Store Owner troll, so if it's not a cut'n'paste job I'm certain it soon will be...
(I only mod down _bad_ trolls. Or ones that copy trolls I've seen before. Trolling, when done well, is a valid artform, and a core part of geek culture, and is to be encouraged:)
If they publish XP but not Vista the usefulness will be limited.
Ever been annoyed at having to keep a FAT32 neutral-zone on your dual boot system because nobody's yet worked out how to write to NTFS without wrecking everything?
That's the kind of thing this will hopefully lead to. It's all about interoperability. Unfortunately, knowing MS, the terms and conditions will be fricking deadly, and no open-source coder will so much as look at MS code for fear of contaminating themselves legally, so we shouldn't get too optimistic...
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure if the US still does have such a contingency plan on file, but they certainly did in the early 20th century. It was called War Plan Red, a scenario for global war between the United States and the British Empire.
Did he? Poland wasn't even nominally a Communist state at the time, AFAIK. He justified his invasion because a good deal of Poland was land that had been taken from Germany at the end of the First World War.
IIRC, Hitler's Communist terrorist was Matthias van der Lubbe, a Dutchman, who burned down the Reichstag. Conspiracy theories that it was Goering aside, Hitler did rapidly leap on the destruction of a major national landmark in order to whip up mass fear of terrorism, of the Bolshevism for which the terrorists stood, and to provide a pretext for the massive violations of civil rights that quickly followed.
Not that anyone would behave that way these days, of course.
Does anyone else think this strange? You win a war once, then you stop. Is it meaningful to say that you continue winning the war for several years? Surely if a war drags on for years, then for most of that time you weren't winning, in the usual sense of the word...
Notice that the question isn't about 'wiretapping whomever the president decides he doesn't like' or even about 'wiretapping without appropriate judicial oversight'. It's 'wiretapping in order to reduce the threat of terrorism'.
So, even with a question that implicitly assumes that the president is telling the truth and that there is no malign intent here, and that actually raises the Terrorist Bogeyman in its wording, STILL nearly half of respondents didn't support it.
I'm actually feeling quite positive here. Not only are people waking up to the bullshit that's being done in their name, they're seeing through the trick poll questions too...
Who needs fancy tools? We have dd, /dev/random and /dev/zero, and /dev/hda. Anyone who's managed to find their way to /. ought to be able to piece these together to adequately scramble the contents of a hard drive...
Energetically speaking, it's actually easier to fire the nuclear waste out of the solar system altogether. To hit the Sun, you need to cancel out the orbital velocity of the Earth completely and then drop straight down; that's a big velocity shift.
Try Jupiter. It's still plenty big enough to swallow all our radioactives without trace, and it's a lot easier to reach.
Warlord? Pah. I'll take on a Warlord any day of the week and pwnz! I play on King, and only lay off Emperor 'cos the cheating AI pisses me right off.
* pulls out four 1993-vintage double-density floppies, grabs a Third World Kiddie laptop and fires up Civ 1 *
My words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS, dammit!
For example, if 2 organisms are born, and one is taller than the other, the taller one may outlive the shorter one because it has easier access to food, etc. This is what evolution explains.
What evolution does NOT explain is how, for example, an organ such as the eyeball was formed. No form of evolution can explain this, and trying to is just as bad as a ID or creationism believer.
You've had a scenario for the evolution of the eye linked elsewhere in this thread, so I won't repeat the argument. It's been shown that by means of plausibly small mutations and Darwinian selection it is possible for a fully functioning eye to form entirely without conscious design or intervention of any kind.
Your objection seems to be that we can't prove that scenario actually is how it happened. Well, no. Eyes don't fossilise terribly well. But then, in the scenario you give, of evolution favouring the taller, you don't ask the question 'why is this animal taller than the other', you simply accept that it is, and that if in the circumstances in which they live this is advantageous, then the taller animal will prosper and pass on its genes.
Similarly, let us say there are two creatures with light-sensitive patches on their bodies. Not eyes, as we'd know them. The patch on one of them is a little more concave than the patch on the other. This gives it an advantage, as it has a better sense of the direction of a light source. Maybe it can now follow the sun better? Or know when a large predator is approaching? Just the same thing as with your taller and shorter animals, but it's the first step on the road to an eye.
The overall point is that evolution doesn't tell us for certain how the eye was formed - indeed, looking at the animals in the world, it looks likely that the eye evolved separately, several times, in different ways - but given that eyes did form, evolution can provide a plausible scenario for their formation not involving any violation of known physics.
Think of it like a murder investigation. Without a time machine, you can't be certain, but by examining the details of the crime scene you can narrow down the possible scenarios until you have a plausible story that fits with all the evidence - and then you can finger your suspect. What no detective in such investigations ever does is say 'Well, I can't work out this bit; he must have used magic.'
Pretty much. On the mainland, most people would identify themselves if asked as Church of England, with large minorities of Catholics and Nones, and then small groups of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jedi, Sikhs and Jews (in IIRC descending order). Hardly anyone actually goes to church. Hardly anyone gives a damn what religion their neighbour practices as long as it isn't terribly noisy. This is the famously secular Britain you've heard about; religion is generally a private affair and it's considered rather bad form to make too much fuss about it in public.
In Northern Ireland, OTOH, damn near everyone is either Protestant or Catholic and is very loud about it. Ian Paisley in particular makes Jack Chick look like a liberal; as for some of the troublemakers on the Catholic side, well, the less said the better about their behaviour. In recent years, they've finally been persuaded to stop killing each other, but the peace is still rather fragile, so it behooves the Prime Minister not to do anything needlessly inflammatory like openly choosing one side over the other.
What, you expected British politics not to run into bizarre paradox? Come on...
... it's obviously that the snails got there by way of a lost continent which formed a land bridge! This sunken land I am convinced we will find if we look hard enough, and I call it Snailuria!
Wow, never thought I'd see a comment like that get posted in an article summarry on the front page. Thank you, Slashdot, for giving me a dose of religious bashing with my morning cup of coffee.
Look, it's quite simple.
If one is neither well educated, nor an atheist, one could quite easily believe anything.
If one is well educated, but not an atheist, one might believe in creationism, if it were of the 'God planted fake evidence' variety.
If one is not well educated, but an atheist, one might believe in intelligent design, if it were of the 'monolith on the Moon' variety.
However, since the submitter and his friends are both well educated and atheists, none of them believe in either intelligent design or creationism.
Clear enough for you?
It could be argued that a god who, metaphorically speaking, has to hit BREAK and hack the source code from time to time on a live system is an incompetent god. If you'll pardon the phrase, an intelligent designer would come up with a universe he wouldn't have to violate in that way. He'd set it up to be self-maintaining to the greatest extent possible, and include fudge factors he could use to operate within the usual laws of physics.
A god who could break the laws of physics, but who set up the system so that he would never need to, is far more impressive than a god who comes in with superpowers every few years to patch up the consequences of his last cack-handed intervention.
I recall the story of the death of Aeschylus, and the uncannily similar death of the False Prophet Vorbis...
I also recall this being one hypothesis for how the seed of the coconut tree managed to spread itself. Unfortunately, the theory ran into difficulties regarding the practical lifting power of the available avians.
I always thought 'two animals are of the same species if they can mate to produce fertile offspring' was pretty good.
Granted, it wouldn't satisfy a mathematician or a computer programmer (what about the whole gender issue? what if one happens to be infertile through age or injury?) but it works well enough for biology.
Thus, the alsatian and the golden retriever are still the same species, 'dog', but they're physically quite different. They could still breed, though, and produce healthy fertile offspring. The St. Bernard and the Chihuahua are on the edge; with considerable luck and probably surgical assistance, they could breed together and produce possibly healthy and maybe even fertile offspring, but it'd be a chancy business. They are just too different physically for a hybrid to work. Release all the world's dogs back into the wild, and the genes of the Chihuaha and the St Bernard will never practically mix. They'll be different species by any standard.
Given a few more generations of separate evolution, 'dog' might no longer mean a single species, but a group of species like 'ape' or 'cat'.
An interesting outcome from this: there are ring species in the world. I think some Arctic birds have been shown to be like this; a Scottish bird could breed with a Norwegian which could breed with a Siberian which could breed with an Alaskan, but the Scot and the Alaskan would be mutually infertile.
If there was a bias here, it's likely to have been in the opposite direction. Reading more details about the programme this poll was taken for, it seems to be a documentary about the recent business with ID in the USA, done as part of a series of fairly serious science documentaries. Hence if the poll was to be biased, it would be biased towards a 'We're not like those stupid Americans, are we chaps?' conclusion.
That it came out like this is, therefore, pretty damned alarming. Can't write this one off as Religious Right interests in the media, I'm afraid...
I can understand why you'd think that you'd need to have the same number of chromosomes, but where the hell did you get that bit about making up an all-new mating ritual?
Ah well... it's not as if you're even right about the chromosome number, anyway...
Remember, in the UK the Queen is head of state, not the Prime Minister. The religion restriction isn't such a big deal. I could be C of E, Catholic, Buddhist or Zoroastrian as I please, I won't be head of state because Charles and William have that sewn up for the foreseeable future.
The PM can in theory be of whatever religion he pleases. The current incumbent is officially CoE, but there is speculation that he may convert to his wife's Catholicism in the future. I suspect he's deliberately playing the ambiguity, so that he can seem impartial to the Northern Irish. If he were to officially convert, the mainland British would have no problem, but Belfast would probably explode...
I'd guess it'll be covered in the programme tonight.
There's more detail on the content here; it looks like it's largely about the recent shenanigans in the US. The UK poll they ran was probably incidental, to provide a baseline for comparison. According to that page, in the US over 50% believe we arrived in the world just as described in the Bible... ugh!
You're right there. Same with Plate Tectonics. I mean, sure, we've found the mid-Atlantic ridge and measured how it's spreading a tiny amount each year, I don't disagree with Micro-Continental-Drift. It's only Macro-Continental-Drift I disagree with. Pangaea? Rubbish. And all the magnetic reversal patterns and matching rock formations on separate continents that the scientists come up with are IMO really weak.
And don't get me started on Macro-Addition. I mean, we know 1+1=2, we can test that by counting things, but AFAIK nobody in the world has ever seen more than a few million of anything at one time. And yet these scientists tell us about billions of this and trillions of that, and then they even make up a new way of writing numbers that doesn't even use names! Exponential notation is only a theory, and IMO, a weak one at that.
None of which is science, except conceivably the aliens - who would presumably have to have evolved themselves.
Shall we also teach the 'Aliens have placed giant rocket engines on the backs of all the planets to make them move round the Sun' theory in addition to the theories of Kepler and Newton?
Anyone not an otaku will read 'ookami' as something like 'ukami'. 'oo' is generally read as in 'spoon'.
It might be best to spell the name of the game 'ôkami' - I believe this was done with Shôgun Total War - which would not cause hilarious mispronunciation among average English-speakers, but simultaneously satisfy the pedantry of .jp geeks.
Very well, now let's apply the Golden Rule to sharing of toys as per Sesame Street:
Cool Toy Co. would very much prefer it if every kid who wanted to play with Cool Toy bought their own. Therefore you shouldn't share your Cool Toy; only you are licensed to play with it, and your friends should buy their own. You would not want Cool Toy Co. to ignore your wishes, would you?
(I only mod down _bad_ trolls. Or ones that copy trolls I've seen before. Trolling, when done well, is a valid artform, and a core part of geek culture, and is to be encouraged :)
You're new here, aren't you?
It's Because. We're. Geeks.
Seriously, you've managed to find your way to Slashdot, you must at least have some understanding of the mindset that drives this kind of thing?
Ever been annoyed at having to keep a FAT32 neutral-zone on your dual boot system because nobody's yet worked out how to write to NTFS without wrecking everything?
That's the kind of thing this will hopefully lead to. It's all about interoperability. Unfortunately, knowing MS, the terms and conditions will be fricking deadly, and no open-source coder will so much as look at MS code for fear of contaminating themselves legally, so we shouldn't get too optimistic...