I don't think you've actually been to Europe recently, have you? Don't believe everything you see on the news, or at least take it with a grain of salt.
Europe may be increasingly violent, yes, but it's still a far cry from the USA, so that's not exactly something you'd have to worry about. The riots in Paris are a bad thing, of course, but they're a pretty unique phenomenon - if I said I couldn't visit the USA because you had riots in L.A. after Rodney King was beaten up (by the police, no less!) a couple of years ago, wouldn't you say that, well, it doesn't really matter (as far as my safety is concerned)? As for London, it's not scarier than it's always been, unless you happen to be an Arab-looking guy running to catch a train. In that case, you just might get shot, but let's face it: the chances of it actually happening are pretty slim. It's much more likely that you'll die in a car accident on the highway tomorrow.
As for English being spoken... the only country that really does in Europe is the UK. Oh, you'll probably get along with English in many other countries as well, but it's not what people will ordinarily use - it's not even a language spoken by a minority anywhere that I know of.
And as for cultural differences... well, yes, there does seem to be a trend towards less differences, but it's mostly tied to a few specific things, like music (or what passes for music these days) and so on. If you turn off the TV and don't go to watch the dubbed version of latest Hollywood shit in a cinema anymore, you will find that there's lots of culture, and although the differences are subtle, they're there, and they're noticeable.:)
Really, the only person who could conclude that there are no differences anymore between Europe and the USA (or between any two parts of the world, for that matter, unless they're very close to each other both geographically *and* culturally) is one who hasn't explored the world yet.
If you want to visit the USA, you just may have to get a new one soon, anyway (considering that they implemented this in order to still be eligible for the visa waiver program) - either that, or apply for a visa, which isn't exactly a wark in the park, either.
Case in point: I have a friend who lives in Sweden who once needed a visa. Outside of having her photo taken by a photographer certified by the US embassy (a regular photo used for passports etc. wouldn't work), she also had to come to the embassy in Stockholm in person to be interviewed - a six-hour train drive, FWIW, and the fact that they gave her an appointment at 8:30 Monday morning meant that she had to arrive on Sunday already, too (so in addition to the train ride, she also had to pay for a hotel room for one night). The interview itself was pretty much straightforward, from what she told me, but relatively long - more than half an hour. And the security measures were rather tight, too; for example, she had brought a bottle of water, and she actually had to drink that before being allowed to enter. And not just some of it, in order to prove it wasn't poison or whatever they suspected it might be - all of it.
The whole thing, IMO, was/is extremely idiotic, but considering that she needed the visa, she had to put up with it.
I'm not sure, but if that's the price you have to pay in order to get a visa, even in a highly developed country like Sweden (or Germany, for that matter), then having an RFID passport almost sounds like the lesser evil - at least you can put that into a leaded box and leave it at home whenever you're not travelling. (When you are, to the USA at least, all bets are off, anyway; you'll be fingerprinted and photographed upon trying to enter, and I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years, they'd conduct random body cavity searches as well. The problem is that pretty much noone here actually cares - after all, it all just happens to foreigners, anyway.)
What *is* a good policy for dealing with your secret keys, then? You obviously have to keep them somewhere; and you most likely will want them nearby and in an accessible form so you can actually use them without going through lots of trouble (or at least inconvenience), so it's not unreasonable to assume that no matter where you keep them, the police will find them.
And while brute-forcing a 256-bit AES key (or, for that matter, a big RSA key with 2048 or 4096 bits) might not be realistic, an attempt to brute-force your passphrase might be much more feasible.
What's worse, while it's possible to just keep on increasing your key size to cope with increasing computer power available to the police/government/intelligence agencies/illuminati, you can't really increase the length and complexity of your passphrase arbitrarily - you still have to be able to memorise it, after all. Certain techniques might help (for example, learning a short paragraph from your favourite book and using the 3rd letter of each word for your passphrase, or something along those lines), but they're not gonna help forever.
It's kind of a problem, really. How do you encrypt sensitive data that you don't want the government to be able to read (and it's not just a problem that criminals are faced with; journalists, for example, probably wonder about the same thing) so that it actually *will* be safe, even when a considerable amount of time, energy, money and knowledge can be invested into breaking it and so that it will also still be accessible for *you* in a convenient way?
Triple-DES is 168-bit encryption, or at least if by "x-bit encryption" you mean that the keysize is x bits, which I think is pretty much standard. It's *effectively* 112-bit due to certain known weaknesses, but technically, it's still 168-bit.
Of course, that's really just a technical issue, especially compared to the rather glaring errors ITFA you're pointing out, but I think it's something worth mentioning.:)
It's hard to say where the limit would be, but 8 bucks simply is too much - I can go to a video rental place and get pretty much every movie I want for considerably less than that (the local one in the town where I live charges up to 4,50 per movie, depending on how recent it is; not sure what the big chains take).
Sure, it requires me to walk there first (I don't have to drive, considering that it's pretty much just across the street), and they might not have what I'm looking for; but on the upside, I get the movie within minutes instead of having to wait for a big download first.
So for me at least, an online place would have to be considerably cheaper than a real store in order to be attractive. And considering that a lot of the costs associated with having an actual walk-in store with real DVDs and real employees don't exist here, I'd say that they could still make a comparable amount of money even if they charged less than the offline stores do, too.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems that it's not really worth it. Consider the following task, for example:
Your task is to create a new product description for a product in the Amazon.com Automotive catalogue. The Product Description provides an additional opportunity to tell the customer about the product. This HIT will require some product research to complete. Approval depends on following the instructions and the quality of your submission, determined by a manual review.
Guess how much you get paid for that. 2 dollars? 3? That wouldn't be unreasonable, I think, considering that you're supposed to write an entire product description from scratch for which additional "research" is required. The actual amount paid is only 65 cents, though.
Maybe it's just me, but if I check to see how much I need to work in my regular job to make 65 cents, then it does not make any sense to invest more than a few minutes into a task like this, and it seems that it would take more than that to actually complete it. The fact that there's a review required afterwards doesn't exactly make things better, either - if what you did gets rejected, then you've essentially worked for nothing (I wonder if there's anything that keeps amazon from still using your description in this case, too...).
In other words, the whole thing seems like a good idea in theory, but it won't really take off until they're willing to actually pay you a reasonable amount.
Well, he does have a point. Technical things like this should probably be written by experts on the subject matter rather than being decided by everyone who just happens to have an opinion after they read about it on Slashdot; and for that matter, nobody's being forced to use the license for anything, anyway.
And if you don't like the new GPL... feel free to modify it to your liking. There's already a few pieces of software out there that use a modified GPL v2 (typically, these are projects that are GPL'ed but grant you special permission to link with this or that non-free library even though this would otherwise not be allowed by the GPL), so you could do the same thing here.
And to those who'll reply now and tell me that I can't modify the GPL because the license as such is itself copyrighted to the FSF... I insist that that's irrelevant, as a license is not a creative work but rather a technical description of the terms the author offers you the software under.
No, that's not true. Outside of the fact that many major brands are owned by Kraft Foods (Milka and Côte d'Or come to my mind right now), there's also lots of independent manufacturers. Sure, you might not be able to get a bar of Rausch or Leysieffer or so from the candy vending machine etc., but to say that they don't exist is pretty silly and/or naive.
Theobroma-Cacao has a good list of many chocolate brands world-wide (in German); you'll find lots in there that aren't owned by any big player.
As for getting chocolate in the USA, it's pretty easy actually - just order it online.:) Check Google, and you'll find lots of websites where you can order it.
A recipe as such cannot be copyrighted; only a specific version you write down can be. In other words, if you publish a recipe book and a competing publisher also creates one with the same recipes you gave, then you can only sue them if they copied them literally (and thus violated your copyright), but not if they took the *information* contained in the recipes and wrote that down themselves in their own words.
It's a good rule of thumb to keep in mind: pure information cannot be copyrighted. Specific expressions of information can.
Why would natural selection push male mice to develop this talent?
I think you're misunderstanding how natural selection works if you assume that everything that developers (whether it's a physical feature or a character trait or something) has to have a direct advantage. It doesn't - it's also possible that it just developed as the secondary effect of some underlying cause.
Case in point: the genitals of female spotted hyenas. (Look it up if you want details - suffice to say that it's not possible to visually distinguish the two genders without quite literally grabbing the animal by the balls and checking whether they are present or not). IANAB (I Am Not A Biologist), but people have wondered what purpose they might serve for a long time, and some clumsy theories based on the greeting rituals of spotted hyenas were constructed, but it took everyone a while to realise that they're not actually serving any purpose.
Quite the opposite, actually; they complicate birth quite a lot, for example, but still, they developed. The real reason is that female spotted hyenas have an extremely high level of testosterone, and the peculiar genitals are just a side effect of that, one the disadvantages of which do not outweigh the advantages of the high testosterone level itself (so natural selection still favoured the high testosterone levels even though they had rather visible side effects).
I'm not saying that this is something that can be applied to in the case of mice singing for prospective sexual partners, of course, but I wanted to point out that the idea that every feature and behaviour must be directly explainable in terms of why natural selection and evolution would favour it can be misleading.
Easy. Slashdot punishes you for moderating stuff down, and moderators know this, so pretty much everything that's even remotely interesting gets modded up.
Actually, the NetBSD manpage says "Some of the dl* functions first appeared in SunOS 4", which, according to the Unix history chart, came out in 1989. The manpage doesn't specify which functions appeared, but it seems reasonable to assume that dlopen was among them.
That'd be nine years before the patent was granted, then - so even if you assume it was filed a few years before being awarded, and even if you take into account the ~1 year that prior art actually has to come prior to the patent's filing to be considered "prior" (IANAL, but I think it's roughly that much), this should qualify as prior art, or at least a priori.
Or at least, indifference and a focus on profits rather than naivity.
I think Taco's recent "editorial" about how Blizzard made him change his name because it was in violation of the rules and he knew so is a perfect example of that - every reasonable person would've concluded that forcing someone to change their name when it clearly *is* a violation of the rules, when the person knew about the rules before they chose a name, and when the rules actually do make sense, too (as opposed to just being there "because we can") is a non-issue, and a non-story. On Slashdot, though, it gets a whiny editorial that generates literally thousands of comments.
So yes, you're definitely right - and anyone who still maintains that the Slashdot "editors" care about anything except ad revenue is naive.
I don't see a lot of people griping when their Closed-Source ATI linux driver keeps their video card running on their "open source" OS...
That's because in reality, there aren't actually many people like that. Sure, you'll find the occasional flameboy on Slashdot (although Slashdot's population in general is better than its reputation), and of course you'll also have zealots like Theo de Raadt (who, while probably a genius as far as the technical side of things is concerned, unfortunately still can be quite the flameboy), but for the most part, most developers *and* most users are pretty reasonable and will respect your choices and opinions even if they don't share them.
Maybe it has to do with the fact that the more reasonable developers are busy coding instead of making a fuss all the time, but I also think that people generally aren't given as much credit as they deserve. Every village has village idiots, even the global village, but you shouldn't judge the entire population based on them, and neither should you assume that the majority of the village's inhabitants are village idiots - because they aren't.
FYI, the cake is called "bee sting" (or "bee sting cake") in English as well. That being said, I think this is the first time I've ever heard anyone talk about *eating* water.:)
It's all about control - the publishers don't like the fact that Google didn't grovel at their feet and offer to pay for the priviledge of exercising its fair use rights.
Not as long as Microsoft is funding them. Think of it as "FUD dollars at work"...
The sad thing about this is that SCO as such, which actually used to be a respectable company (remember Caldera's OpenLinux?) is the only party involved on that side that doesn't get anything out of this - MS does, of course (FUD against Linux for a nominal fee), Darl and his buddies do (money), the lawyers do (money), but SCO (and its actual shareholders) don't: they're being exploited by a CEO who is actually just looking at his own monetary gain and willing to sacrifice the company for the money he gets.
Once you realise this, it also becomes clear why this is still going on: SCO (that is, its management) is not actually interested in closing the case. They know perfectly well they'll lose, and did so right from the start; for that matter, so does Microsoft, but they still push the case further, as it's still a good way to spread FUD against Linux, prevent adoption, and get more windows sales. It won't last forever, of course, but for the money they have to invest, it's probably a good return nevertheless.
And the FUD works because while people (even CEOs of companies who don't know a thing about computers really but still want to make all the decisions themselves, or at least the "important" ones) have learned not to trust Microsoft when it comes to evaluating Linux, they will still take into consideration a lawsuit brought by a company that's seemingly unrelated to Microsoft.
You can always sue. The real question is: will you win? And even though IANAL, I'd say you have a pretty good case here; if the EULA does not even *mention* any of this, then it probably constitutes an illegal act.
Of course you can make a movie with less than 30 people. Seen Klayworld, for example? More than 90 minutes, done by one person. Or how about Kaze, Ghost Warrior? OK, that's only 22 minutes, but it was also done by one single person, and the fact that it's entirely done in CG and has a quality that rivals Pixar's movies is highly impressive, I think.
You probably need more than one person if you want to make a life-action movie, but even then, I'm pretty sure that 30 aren't strictly needed - you'd also be able to do a movie with 29, or even 20, or 10, if you just tried.
Well, KOffice is 19 MB, for example (in source form). Binaries seem to be similar in size, depending on what exactly you do and don't need (debug info, for example), of course, as well as on your architecture, distro etc.
That's a quarter, and KOffice is not significantly less full-featured than OOo.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably a good idea. :P Just don't ever accept a job that might require you to travel to a conference or so...
I don't think you've actually been to Europe recently, have you? Don't believe everything you see on the news, or at least take it with a grain of salt.
:)
Europe may be increasingly violent, yes, but it's still a far cry from the USA, so that's not exactly something you'd have to worry about. The riots in Paris are a bad thing, of course, but they're a pretty unique phenomenon - if I said I couldn't visit the USA because you had riots in L.A. after Rodney King was beaten up (by the police, no less!) a couple of years ago, wouldn't you say that, well, it doesn't really matter (as far as my safety is concerned)? As for London, it's not scarier than it's always been, unless you happen to be an Arab-looking guy running to catch a train. In that case, you just might get shot, but let's face it: the chances of it actually happening are pretty slim. It's much more likely that you'll die in a car accident on the highway tomorrow.
As for English being spoken... the only country that really does in Europe is the UK. Oh, you'll probably get along with English in many other countries as well, but it's not what people will ordinarily use - it's not even a language spoken by a minority anywhere that I know of.
And as for cultural differences... well, yes, there does seem to be a trend towards less differences, but it's mostly tied to a few specific things, like music (or what passes for music these days) and so on. If you turn off the TV and don't go to watch the dubbed version of latest Hollywood shit in a cinema anymore, you will find that there's lots of culture, and although the differences are subtle, they're there, and they're noticeable.
Really, the only person who could conclude that there are no differences anymore between Europe and the USA (or between any two parts of the world, for that matter, unless they're very close to each other both geographically *and* culturally) is one who hasn't explored the world yet.
If you want to visit the USA, you just may have to get a new one soon, anyway (considering that they implemented this in order to still be eligible for the visa waiver program) - either that, or apply for a visa, which isn't exactly a wark in the park, either.
Case in point: I have a friend who lives in Sweden who once needed a visa. Outside of having her photo taken by a photographer certified by the US embassy (a regular photo used for passports etc. wouldn't work), she also had to come to the embassy in Stockholm in person to be interviewed - a six-hour train drive, FWIW, and the fact that they gave her an appointment at 8:30 Monday morning meant that she had to arrive on Sunday already, too (so in addition to the train ride, she also had to pay for a hotel room for one night). The interview itself was pretty much straightforward, from what she told me, but relatively long - more than half an hour. And the security measures were rather tight, too; for example, she had brought a bottle of water, and she actually had to drink that before being allowed to enter. And not just some of it, in order to prove it wasn't poison or whatever they suspected it might be - all of it.
The whole thing, IMO, was/is extremely idiotic, but considering that she needed the visa, she had to put up with it.
I'm not sure, but if that's the price you have to pay in order to get a visa, even in a highly developed country like Sweden (or Germany, for that matter), then having an RFID passport almost sounds like the lesser evil - at least you can put that into a leaded box and leave it at home whenever you're not travelling. (When you are, to the USA at least, all bets are off, anyway; you'll be fingerprinted and photographed upon trying to enter, and I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years, they'd conduct random body cavity searches as well. The problem is that pretty much noone here actually cares - after all, it all just happens to foreigners, anyway.)
Thanks, but I actually prefer my +5 Skyclad Armour. :)
What *is* a good policy for dealing with your secret keys, then? You obviously have to keep them somewhere; and you most likely will want them nearby and in an accessible form so you can actually use them without going through lots of trouble (or at least inconvenience), so it's not unreasonable to assume that no matter where you keep them, the police will find them.
And while brute-forcing a 256-bit AES key (or, for that matter, a big RSA key with 2048 or 4096 bits) might not be realistic, an attempt to brute-force your passphrase might be much more feasible.
What's worse, while it's possible to just keep on increasing your key size to cope with increasing computer power available to the police/government/intelligence agencies/illuminati, you can't really increase the length and complexity of your passphrase arbitrarily - you still have to be able to memorise it, after all. Certain techniques might help (for example, learning a short paragraph from your favourite book and using the 3rd letter of each word for your passphrase, or something along those lines), but they're not gonna help forever.
It's kind of a problem, really. How do you encrypt sensitive data that you don't want the government to be able to read (and it's not just a problem that criminals are faced with; journalists, for example, probably wonder about the same thing) so that it actually *will* be safe, even when a considerable amount of time, energy, money and knowledge can be invested into breaking it and so that it will also still be accessible for *you* in a convenient way?
Triple-DES is 168-bit encryption, or at least if by "x-bit encryption" you mean that the keysize is x bits, which I think is pretty much standard. It's *effectively* 112-bit due to certain known weaknesses, but technically, it's still 168-bit.
:)
Of course, that's really just a technical issue, especially compared to the rather glaring errors ITFA you're pointing out, but I think it's something worth mentioning.
It's hard to say where the limit would be, but 8 bucks simply is too much - I can go to a video rental place and get pretty much every movie I want for considerably less than that (the local one in the town where I live charges up to 4,50 per movie, depending on how recent it is; not sure what the big chains take).
Sure, it requires me to walk there first (I don't have to drive, considering that it's pretty much just across the street), and they might not have what I'm looking for; but on the upside, I get the movie within minutes instead of having to wait for a big download first.
So for me at least, an online place would have to be considerably cheaper than a real store in order to be attractive. And considering that a lot of the costs associated with having an actual walk-in store with real DVDs and real employees don't exist here, I'd say that they could still make a comparable amount of money even if they charged less than the offline stores do, too.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems that it's not really worth it. Consider the following task, for example:
Guess how much you get paid for that. 2 dollars? 3? That wouldn't be unreasonable, I think, considering that you're supposed to write an entire product description from scratch for which additional "research" is required. The actual amount paid is only 65 cents, though.
Maybe it's just me, but if I check to see how much I need to work in my regular job to make 65 cents, then it does not make any sense to invest more than a few minutes into a task like this, and it seems that it would take more than that to actually complete it. The fact that there's a review required afterwards doesn't exactly make things better, either - if what you did gets rejected, then you've essentially worked for nothing (I wonder if there's anything that keeps amazon from still using your description in this case, too...).
In other words, the whole thing seems like a good idea in theory, but it won't really take off until they're willing to actually pay you a reasonable amount.
They were talking about the EU, not Europe, so Russia is out as well.
Well, he does have a point. Technical things like this should probably be written by experts on the subject matter rather than being decided by everyone who just happens to have an opinion after they read about it on Slashdot; and for that matter, nobody's being forced to use the license for anything, anyway.
And if you don't like the new GPL... feel free to modify it to your liking. There's already a few pieces of software out there that use a modified GPL v2 (typically, these are projects that are GPL'ed but grant you special permission to link with this or that non-free library even though this would otherwise not be allowed by the GPL), so you could do the same thing here.
And to those who'll reply now and tell me that I can't modify the GPL because the license as such is itself copyrighted to the FSF... I insist that that's irrelevant, as a license is not a creative work but rather a technical description of the terms the author offers you the software under.
No, that's not true. Outside of the fact that many major brands are owned by Kraft Foods (Milka and Côte d'Or come to my mind right now), there's also lots of independent manufacturers. Sure, you might not be able to get a bar of Rausch or Leysieffer or so from the candy vending machine etc., but to say that they don't exist is pretty silly and/or naive.
:) Check Google, and you'll find lots of websites where you can order it.
Theobroma-Cacao has a good list of many chocolate brands world-wide (in German); you'll find lots in there that aren't owned by any big player.
As for getting chocolate in the USA, it's pretty easy actually - just order it online.
A recipe as such cannot be copyrighted; only a specific version you write down can be. In other words, if you publish a recipe book and a competing publisher also creates one with the same recipes you gave, then you can only sue them if they copied them literally (and thus violated your copyright), but not if they took the *information* contained in the recipes and wrote that down themselves in their own words.
It's a good rule of thumb to keep in mind: pure information cannot be copyrighted. Specific expressions of information can.
Of course, IANAL, but TGWOS.
I think you're misunderstanding how natural selection works if you assume that everything that developers (whether it's a physical feature or a character trait or something) has to have a direct advantage. It doesn't - it's also possible that it just developed as the secondary effect of some underlying cause.
Case in point: the genitals of female spotted hyenas. (Look it up if you want details - suffice to say that it's not possible to visually distinguish the two genders without quite literally grabbing the animal by the balls and checking whether they are present or not). IANAB (I Am Not A Biologist), but people have wondered what purpose they might serve for a long time, and some clumsy theories based on the greeting rituals of spotted hyenas were constructed, but it took everyone a while to realise that they're not actually serving any purpose.
Quite the opposite, actually; they complicate birth quite a lot, for example, but still, they developed. The real reason is that female spotted hyenas have an extremely high level of testosterone, and the peculiar genitals are just a side effect of that, one the disadvantages of which do not outweigh the advantages of the high testosterone level itself (so natural selection still favoured the high testosterone levels even though they had rather visible side effects).
I'm not saying that this is something that can be applied to in the case of mice singing for prospective sexual partners, of course, but I wanted to point out that the idea that every feature and behaviour must be directly explainable in terms of why natural selection and evolution would favour it can be misleading.
Hmm. Time to start ordering from amazon.co.uk or so instead of amazon.com, it seems (there's no amazon.se, right?)... thanks for the info.
Easy. Slashdot punishes you for moderating stuff down, and moderators know this, so pretty much everything that's even remotely interesting gets modded up.
Why am I reminded of this immortal dialogue...
Lahndon!
Essex!
Lahndon!
Essex!
Actually, the NetBSD manpage says "Some of the dl* functions first appeared in SunOS 4", which, according to the Unix history chart, came out in 1989. The manpage doesn't specify which functions appeared, but it seems reasonable to assume that dlopen was among them.
That'd be nine years before the patent was granted, then - so even if you assume it was filed a few years before being awarded, and even if you take into account the ~1 year that prior art actually has to come prior to the patent's filing to be considered "prior" (IANAL, but I think it's roughly that much), this should qualify as prior art, or at least a priori.
Or at least, indifference and a focus on profits rather than naivity.
I think Taco's recent "editorial" about how Blizzard made him change his name because it was in violation of the rules and he knew so is a perfect example of that - every reasonable person would've concluded that forcing someone to change their name when it clearly *is* a violation of the rules, when the person knew about the rules before they chose a name, and when the rules actually do make sense, too (as opposed to just being there "because we can") is a non-issue, and a non-story. On Slashdot, though, it gets a whiny editorial that generates literally thousands of comments.
So yes, you're definitely right - and anyone who still maintains that the Slashdot "editors" care about anything except ad revenue is naive.
That's because in reality, there aren't actually many people like that. Sure, you'll find the occasional flameboy on Slashdot (although Slashdot's population in general is better than its reputation), and of course you'll also have zealots like Theo de Raadt (who, while probably a genius as far as the technical side of things is concerned, unfortunately still can be quite the flameboy), but for the most part, most developers *and* most users are pretty reasonable and will respect your choices and opinions even if they don't share them.
Maybe it has to do with the fact that the more reasonable developers are busy coding instead of making a fuss all the time, but I also think that people generally aren't given as much credit as they deserve. Every village has village idiots, even the global village, but you shouldn't judge the entire population based on them, and neither should you assume that the majority of the village's inhabitants are village idiots - because they aren't.
FYI, the cake is called "bee sting" (or "bee sting cake") in English as well. That being said, I think this is the first time I've ever heard anyone talk about *eating* water. :)
It's all about control - the publishers don't like the fact that Google didn't grovel at their feet and offer to pay for the priviledge of exercising its fair use rights.
Not as long as Microsoft is funding them. Think of it as "FUD dollars at work"...
The sad thing about this is that SCO as such, which actually used to be a respectable company (remember Caldera's OpenLinux?) is the only party involved on that side that doesn't get anything out of this - MS does, of course (FUD against Linux for a nominal fee), Darl and his buddies do (money), the lawyers do (money), but SCO (and its actual shareholders) don't: they're being exploited by a CEO who is actually just looking at his own monetary gain and willing to sacrifice the company for the money he gets.
Once you realise this, it also becomes clear why this is still going on: SCO (that is, its management) is not actually interested in closing the case. They know perfectly well they'll lose, and did so right from the start; for that matter, so does Microsoft, but they still push the case further, as it's still a good way to spread FUD against Linux, prevent adoption, and get more windows sales. It won't last forever, of course, but for the money they have to invest, it's probably a good return nevertheless.
And the FUD works because while people (even CEOs of companies who don't know a thing about computers really but still want to make all the decisions themselves, or at least the "important" ones) have learned not to trust Microsoft when it comes to evaluating Linux, they will still take into consideration a lawsuit brought by a company that's seemingly unrelated to Microsoft.
You can always sue. The real question is: will you win? And even though IANAL, I'd say you have a pretty good case here; if the EULA does not even *mention* any of this, then it probably constitutes an illegal act.
Of course you can make a movie with less than 30 people. Seen Klayworld, for example? More than 90 minutes, done by one person. Or how about Kaze, Ghost Warrior? OK, that's only 22 minutes, but it was also done by one single person, and the fact that it's entirely done in CG and has a quality that rivals Pixar's movies is highly impressive, I think.
You probably need more than one person if you want to make a life-action movie, but even then, I'm pretty sure that 30 aren't strictly needed - you'd also be able to do a movie with 29, or even 20, or 10, if you just tried.
Well, KOffice is 19 MB, for example (in source form). Binaries seem to be similar in size, depending on what exactly you do and don't need (debug info, for example), of course, as well as on your architecture, distro etc. That's a quarter, and KOffice is not significantly less full-featured than OOo.