This is how the debate between sound science and "intelligent design" looks from the sidelines. Note here that we replace the theory that life was created by an intelligent designer {who logically must have been created by a more intelligent designer, and so forth, since any mechanism which would account for the spontaneous generation of an intelligent designer must be capable of spontaneously generating life} with the theory that all roses are red. This has little bearing on the quality of the debate.
IDist: All woses are wed.
Scientist: No they aren't. Look. Produces white rose A white rose.
IDist: That is obviouthly not a wose. All woses are wed. That flower is white. Therefore it cannot be a wose.
Scientist: It is a rose. A white rose. Performs some unspecified test which demonstrates that the white flower indeed belongs to the genus Rosa.
IDist: Well, OK then, I acthept that it may be a wose, but you still haven't dithpwoved my theowy. Even you must surely have to admit that it is sort of a bit wed-ish. No, it's not a white rose -- it's just a vewy pale wed wose. You still haven't dithpwoved my theowy. All woses are wed!
Scientist: Now you're just talking bollocks.
IDist: Waaaah! You used a naughty word! Well, that just pwoves it, doesn't it? All woses are wed. I win! Come on, mummy, buy me an ithe cweam!
Don't bother. I've had about four pieces of spam addressed to an address that was visible on Slashdot. I don't think the spam-harvesters look here. {I know Slashdot uses "armouring", but it's all a bit christian -- I've seen every one of the techniques it uses now. If I was cruel, I'd write some proof-of-concept code to convert Slashdot armoured e-mail addresses to real ones. Unless that's already patented..... }
So in the combined work, I can put these changes in there. (Note, this is allowed because I'm allowed to create a derivative work.
No, section 0 says "You are authorised to copy and distribute this program, and create Derivative Works based upon this program..... strictly in accordance with the terms of this licence and on the understanding that the same terms will be imposed upon the recipients" (emphasis mine). You lose the licence if you change the terms.
Or I can post merely the original code and not my changed version.
You wouldn't be in compliance. The licence requires you to distribute Source Code and Build Instructions for the actual code you distribute.
With the encrypted media, your license never said you had to be able to read it in cleartext.
The prosecution would simply claim that you had failed to supply the required materials altogether, and the "encryption" was merely a ruse to divert attention from your default. Since they constitute the only evidence for the defence, they will have to be revealed in court (unless you fancy a stretch).
When it comes to patents, if there is prior art younger than a year old from my filinf (in the US) then that does not constitute prior art unless you can PROVE it was my only source of inspiration. And even in that case, patents have been handed out for "using floating point numbers in 3D rendering".
But it's still an abstract mathematical concept and still can't be patented.
And where does the license say I cannot lease my combined, improved work? If the license says you may do what you want but not then anything NOT enumerated in is allowed..... You still haven't shown why the license doesn't forbid the elements I asked, and I'm not particularly evil nor legally trained.
You misunderstand. A licence gives you permission to do something that the Law of the Land would not normally allow. If the Licence doesn't explicitly mention a particular act, then the Law of the Land applies. Leasing your combined, improved work would breach the original copyright holder's copyright.
All the same, I think that in the next version I will add a clause authorising the use of reasonable force in obtaining the Source Code. Should be fun seeing what the courts determine is or isn't reasonable:)
when I give you the code on a device, on volatile memory (disk/flash/...) but tell you you cannot modify the program in any way.
The copyright holder already told me in section 0 that I could modify the program. What you say is irrelevant, because the licence does not originate from you: it originates from the copyright holder. If you distribute the program other than in accordance with the terms of the licence (which includes changing the terms), then you are infringing copyright.
What's to stop me from giving you the instructions and the source code on write-only media (e.g. encrypted).
Then you would have to prove in a court of law, on pain of copyright violation (because the only thing allowing you to give me a copy of the program is the licence), that you had given them to me.
How about if I take your program and patent something it does?
You can't. Even if the program itself did not constitute prior art, mere abstract mathematical processes are beyond the scope of patentability.
What if I give it to someone else and add "but you can ignore the license"?
Section 0 makes it clear that the recipient of the program receives the licence from the copyright holder, not the person who supplied them with the program. Unless you are the copyright holder yourself, you would be exceeding your authority by making such a statement; and, if the recipient goes on to infringe copyright by distributing the program other than in accordance with the licence, you could be guilty of aiding and abetting copyright infringement or conspiracy to commit copyright infringement.
Can I sell it?
Of course. Other people can still sell it cheaper or give it away for free, though, so don't count on gouging people that way. If you're selling the program for £1000 a time, then 1000 people could club together, pay £1 each, buy one copy, make another 999 copies for themselves and give away still more copies. If you had annoyed them sufficiently, they might even stand in the street outside your shop and give away copies of the program to your prospective customers.
What about if I improve it but "lease" the software to you, rather than sell a copy (distribute means I give a copy away, if I lease, I still own it, so no ownership changes).
That sounds like it might not be Fair Dealing / Fair Use, and it definitely isn't permitted by the licence. In other words, you're most probably guilty of infringing copyright.
I wrote my own licence for my own projects, which is reproduced below.
The GPL would have been nice, but it's a bit too politically-intensive. And the problem with BSD-style licences is that (unless you remove the second clause, to permit distribution only in Source Code form; which is actually fine for stuff written in interpreted languages) it doesn't guarantee to preserve Freedoms One and Three (I know I'm borrowing these terms from GNU; I happen to agree with their manifesto, I'm just not convinced that a notice of permission for acts above and beyond the Fair Dealing provisions of copyright law needs to reproduce a political manifesto) for posterity. I know that's just me being lazy -- I could always get off my backside and write my own Free competitor if some upstart tried to make a non-Free fork -- but I figured that said non-Free competitor would be just as guilty of "just being lazy" by using my hard work (which I intended to be for the benefit of all of humankind) for their non-Free project rather than writing their own from scratch.
I did at one stage have a section restricting translation of the program to other languages (the English text permitting translation was to be replaced with a section forbidding further translations when the program was translated; the intention being to preserve the integrity of the program and its documentation by guarding against multiple translations) but dropped this requirement as being unworkable and possibly non-DFSG.
COPYRIGHT 0. This program is copyright $DATE $AUTHOR. You are authorised to copy and distribute this program, and create Derivative Works based upon this program (in respect of which you will hold copyright on the portions you have modified), strictly in accordance with the terms of this licence and on the understanding that the same terms will be imposed upon the recipients. This licence originates from the copyright holders, not necessarily the person from whom you have obtained the program. Nothing in this licence is intended to be construed as prejudicing your Statutory Rights, which may include a limited right to make copies ("fair dealing" or "fair use") for certain purposes.
TERMS OF DISTRIBUTION 1. Any distribution in Source Code form (the preferred form for making modifications to the program) must include this licence and warranty disclaimer (or at your option, a warranty underwritten by you).
2. Any distribution in binary executable form must include the complete Source Code, the necessary instructions to render the Source Code into executable form ("Build Instructions"), and this licence and warranty disclaimer (or at your option, a warranty underwritten by you). If the program is made available for electronic download, the executable and Source Code + Build Instructions need not be included in the same archive file as long as both are available for download from the same place.
3. Any distribution pre-loaded into an appliance must include the complete Source Code and Build Instructions, the necessary instructions to replace the version of the program within the appliance with a modified version ("Modification Instructions"), any applicable warnings regarding cessation of warranty protection and/or regulatory approval as a consequence of modification, and this licence and warranty disclaimer (or at your option, a warranty underwritten by you).
DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY 4. We warrant that this program, when run unmodified on a computer which is operating properly, will do what the source code says it will do. NO OTHER WARRANTY IS MADE IN RESPECT OF THE PROGRAM, NOT EVEN OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. If you are in any doubt about the suitability of this program for a particular application, you are advised to consult with a programmer who is familiar with the language in which this program is written and whom you trust before proceeding.
As far as I can see, it guarantees to preserve Free
No, it was supremely difficult to land a person on the moon. There were technological limitations that had to be overcome in order to make it possible, is all.
Working Digital Restrictions Management is not just supremely difficult -- it's impossible. As in perpetual motion machines, faster-than-light travel, or constructing with ruler and compass a rectangle with area equal to a given circle. It can be shown mathematically that there is no way to do it. And there is nothing that anyone could ever invent that would make it possible: the impossibility of DRM is a limitation of the universe, not a limitation of technology.
For example, many places produce hamburgers in batches such that it costs them nothing at the margin to provide you with one -- after all, if you don't buy it, it'll just be thrown away.
Throwing away food is a sin, which properly ranks up there with the "biggies" like rape, murder and pollution.
I think you'll find that copying a CD is perceived by most people as being closer morally to baking your own loaf of bread -- using your own flour and yeast that you bought and paid for -- than to stealing a loaf of bread from a store. And I think that most people, if it came down to it, would have fewer qualms about stealing a loaf of bread from Tesco or Asda than from some little village baker's shop.
You don't get the bakery industry running around complaining that home bread machines are ruining their sales. (In fact, it actually works out more expensive to bake your own bread; at least if you buy flour by the ordinary 1k5 bag. I don't know where to get a 25kg. bag of strong white flour, nor where I'd store it if I had one. OTOH, store-bought bread tastes like shredded paper so you're paying for quality.)
No..... the answer is that there is no way for the DRM system to know for certain whether or not the unencrypted stream (which has to exist in some human-perceptible form) is being re-recorded in an unencrypted form.
I invented something like that when I was 8 years old. It consisted of unscrewing the shell of a cassette, mounting a small piece of ceramic magnet somewhere downstream of the sound head and replacing the screws. The tape could be listened exactly once; on its journey to the take-up spool, it rubbed against the magnet, which realigned the magnetic fields of the ferric oxide molecules uniformly. When rewound, it was all quiet.
Unfortunately, there was one tiny flaw in this plan. And I sincerely hope I do not have to point out to anyone here what that flaw was.
When my Linux distro is ready, it will come with a command line exercise book with some stuff for you to practise. In just ten quick and easy lessons, you will learn how to perform tasks such as: editing a configuration file, restarting a daemon, compiling a program from source, hacking source code and launching a program from a terminal. By the time you finish, you will not think there is anything wrong with the command line. Rather, you will see it as a feature in its own right; and if you ever have to use Windows again, you will miss the beauty and simplicity of typing in commands.
Possibly the fact that changing one bit in one byte is enough to turn a £30 graphics card into a £300 graphics card. Or maybe that they ripped someone else's code off.
Just because a particular gene sequence found in fish means something when spliced into tomato DNA isn't really saying anything. The word "fart" is perfectly respectable in Swedish. The word "mist" is not so respectable in German. It just so happens that a bit of the pattern that happens to make an improvement to a tomato, also occurs in fish.
DNA is basically a self-extracting compressed executable. It just happens that with the current state of the art (which is a bit like doing embroidery by firelight and wearing boxing gloves), messing with it whilst it's still compressed is easier than trying to expand the compressed form.
A living organism is dealt a hand of DNA and plays out that hand strictly according to predetermined rules. Either it scores enough points to play again, or it dies. Most of the possible DNA sequences don't do anything useful. Scientists might be able to stick bits of gene sequences together, but they can't alter the rules for how they play out; just the starting cards. Some random mutation could happen to produce the same sequence and there would be no way to tell which was created artificially and which was created naturally.
Terminator genes exist for one purpose and one purpose alone: artificially to raise revenue for biotechnology companies by ensuring that seeds from one year's crop cannot be planted next year. (In the past this was generally done by using F1 hybrids, whose offspring will not generally resemble the parents; but, as long as you have enough offspring, you can find the closest matches to the grandparent stock, re-cross these and recreate the F1. See Mendel's pea plant experiment.)
I am no Luddite. I don't have a problem with genetic engineering per se, but when it is so blatantly misused -- for example, to breed pesticide-resistant plants and so sell more pesticides rather than breed pest-resistant plants, to create plants which cannot self-seed, or otherwise to create any kind of artificial dependency -- or when any person or company tries to claim a living organism as "intellectual property", I think that is a bad thing.
OpenOffice.org v1.x was based on a piece of closed-source software, and once you saw the codebase it really shew. The original developers made a whole mountain of schoolboy errors that they just never really expected would see the light of day. Sun opened it up mainly in order to save themselves the effort of rewriting it from scratch in order to make it run on processors with a word length and/or addressing space of anything other than 32 bits (like, for example, a modern SPARC processor in 64-bit mode). Getting StarOffice running on 64-bit SPARC under Solaris meant more to them than preventing StarOffice from running on other architectures under other OSs.
The mess of different licences is unfortunate but necessary. Sun's original in-house-written licence (which allowed Sun to make closed forks of other contributors' code) proved about as popular as a hang-glider with diarrhoea, so they had to re-licence it under the LGPL in order to allow their own closed OpenOffice.org fork (which is also called StarOffice, though it bears little resemblance to the original) to exist. But you can't revoke a copyright licence except by relinquishing copyright in the work; so, as long as there is enough OO.o 1.x code in OO.o for it to be considered a derivative work rather than a new work in its own right which happens to make Fair Use of portions of another copyrighted work, then the SISSL remains in force. The permissions of the GPL are themselves a subset of the permissions of the LGPL, and it's OK to make a GPL fork of an LGPL project (which NeoOffice is).
If you don't like copy+paste in X, that is most probably because you are doing it wrong!
To copy text, highlight it by holding down the left mouse button and dragging over it.
To paste it, bring up the screen showing the destination application; hover the mouse pointer somewhere inside the window into which you wish to paste, and depress the scroll wheel without moving it either up or down. (AKA middle-clicking. Also try middle-clicking links in a web browser, if you don't know what it does.) If your mouse has no scroll wheel, then just depress both mouse buttons together and release them together.
Note that these actions are completely universal, as they are part of X itself and not the application (which just thinks the text was typed on the keyboard). If you're into highly advanced stuff, you can even copy and paste between X applications running on different machines. There is no need to disrupt your flow by touching the keyboard or selecting an item from a menu.
What about somebody writing a browser extension that performs bogus searches in the background, for no better reason than to frustrate "profiling" attempts? Is this feasible?
What about patenting it, but then dedicating the patent to the Public Domain? Then there is definitely published prior art, so nobody should be able to patent the same thing again. Anybody building one need only label it with the patent number you were originally allocated.
Depends how blocked. As long as there's enough of a reaction going to liberate enough energy to break some C-H bonds, you'll get a mess of carbon monoxide, soot and water vapour.
As for preheating, my experience has been the other way around; gas ovens need less preheating. You do have to get used to what cooks best on which shelf, but that's all part of the fun. Maybe there's even some innate tendency to prefer one cooking fuel over another. Maybe worth submitting a study proposal for a bit of Government funding?
Yes, obviously. If you knew which was cooked by gas and which was cooked by electricity, you'd be cheating. So get someone to take samples from each one for you. It's even better if the person cutting the samples and passing them to you doesn't know themself which was cooked on gas and which on electric.
I have Sky Plus (not HD, though; my eyesight is so poor I can barely see 625 lines, and that's already a bit Monet-esque; so what am I going to do with another 465?). I do generally skip the adverts. However, maybe about one advert per hour of programming will catch my eye and I will rewind it to watch in normal speed. Not that I'll actually go out and buy the product being advertised, though.
Other times, I'll simply let the advert break run through but without actually watching, because I'm taking a leak / feeding the cat / answering the phone / skinning up / whatever else I used to do in advert breaks before Sky Plus; but I don't have to be so careful to return in time for the start of the programme proper, because I can just rewind it.
I suspect this is what's actually happening: the recorder lets you not have to be there dead on the end of the break, because you can just rewind if you missed the start. Anyway, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter how many people see your advert. All that matters is how many people buy your product.
I'm guessing the extra moisture that gets released into the oven cavity from the combustion of the gas is what makes the difference. You'll get that even if the air supply is blocked, since hydrogen is "hornier" than carbon (which will make do with just one oxygen atom; or even none, if it comes to that). I've also noticed that methane produces slightly better tasting food than propane, which sort of bears out the moisture theory (C3H8 gives off less moisture for the same amount of heat).
Anyway, don't just take my word for it -- try it sometime. Cook the same recipe in two ovens and see for yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
This is how the debate between sound science and "intelligent design" looks from the sidelines. Note here that we replace the theory that life was created by an intelligent designer {who logically must have been created by a more intelligent designer, and so forth, since any mechanism which would account for the spontaneous generation of an intelligent designer must be capable of spontaneously generating life} with the theory that all roses are red. This has little bearing on the quality of the debate.
IDist: All woses are wed.
Scientist: No they aren't. Look. Produces white rose A white rose.
IDist: That is obviouthly not a wose. All woses are wed. That flower is white. Therefore it cannot be a wose.
Scientist: It is a rose. A white rose. Performs some unspecified test which demonstrates that the white flower indeed belongs to the genus Rosa.
IDist: Well, OK then, I acthept that it may be a wose, but you still haven't dithpwoved my theowy. Even you must surely have to admit that it is sort of a bit wed-ish. No, it's not a white rose -- it's just a vewy pale wed wose. You still haven't dithpwoved my theowy. All woses are wed!
Scientist: Now you're just talking bollocks.
IDist: Waaaah! You used a naughty word! Well, that just pwoves it, doesn't it? All woses are wed. I win! Come on, mummy, buy me an ithe cweam!
I'm not sure that the average malware author or spammer is likely to bother licencing the necessary patents .....
Don't bother. I've had about four pieces of spam addressed to an address that was visible on Slashdot. I don't think the spam-harvesters look here. {I know Slashdot uses "armouring", but it's all a bit christian -- I've seen every one of the techniques it uses now. If I was cruel, I'd write some proof-of-concept code to convert Slashdot armoured e-mail addresses to real ones. Unless that's already patented ..... }
All the same, I think that in the next version I will add a clause authorising the use of reasonable force in obtaining the Source Code. Should be fun seeing what the courts determine is or isn't reasonable
I wrote my own licence for my own projects, which is reproduced below.
The GPL would have been nice, but it's a bit too politically-intensive. And the problem with BSD-style licences is that (unless you remove the second clause, to permit distribution only in Source Code form; which is actually fine for stuff written in interpreted languages) it doesn't guarantee to preserve Freedoms One and Three (I know I'm borrowing these terms from GNU; I happen to agree with their manifesto, I'm just not convinced that a notice of permission for acts above and beyond the Fair Dealing provisions of copyright law needs to reproduce a political manifesto) for posterity. I know that's just me being lazy -- I could always get off my backside and write my own Free competitor if some upstart tried to make a non-Free fork -- but I figured that said non-Free competitor would be just as guilty of "just being lazy" by using my hard work (which I intended to be for the benefit of all of humankind) for their non-Free project rather than writing their own from scratch.
I did at one stage have a section restricting translation of the program to other languages (the English text permitting translation was to be replaced with a section forbidding further translations when the program was translated; the intention being to preserve the integrity of the program and its documentation by guarding against multiple translations) but dropped this requirement as being unworkable and possibly non-DFSG.
COPYRIGHT
0. This program is copyright $DATE $AUTHOR. You are authorised to copy and distribute this program, and create Derivative Works based upon this program (in respect of which you will hold copyright on the portions you have modified), strictly in accordance with the terms of this licence and on the understanding that the same terms will be imposed upon the recipients. This licence originates from the copyright holders, not necessarily the person from whom you have obtained the program. Nothing in this licence is intended to be construed as prejudicing your Statutory Rights, which may include a limited right to make copies ("fair dealing" or "fair use") for certain purposes.
TERMS OF DISTRIBUTION
1. Any distribution in Source Code form (the preferred form for making modifications to the program) must include this licence and warranty disclaimer (or at your option, a warranty underwritten by you).
2. Any distribution in binary executable form must include the complete Source Code, the necessary instructions to render the Source Code into executable form ("Build Instructions"), and this licence and warranty disclaimer (or at your option, a warranty underwritten by you). If the program is made available for electronic download, the executable and Source Code + Build Instructions need not be included in the same archive file as long as both are available for download from the same place.
3. Any distribution pre-loaded into an appliance must include the complete Source Code and Build Instructions, the necessary instructions to replace the version of the program within the appliance with a modified version ("Modification Instructions"), any applicable warnings regarding cessation of warranty protection and/or regulatory approval as a consequence of modification, and this licence and warranty disclaimer (or at your option, a warranty underwritten by you).
DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY
4. We warrant that this program, when run unmodified on a computer which is operating properly, will do what the source code says it will do. NO OTHER WARRANTY IS MADE IN RESPECT OF THE PROGRAM, NOT EVEN OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. If you are in any doubt about the suitability of this program for a particular application, you are advised to consult with a programmer who is familiar with the language in which this program is written and whom you trust before proceeding.
As far as I can see, it guarantees to preserve Free
No, it was supremely difficult to land a person on the moon. There were technological limitations that had to be overcome in order to make it possible, is all.
Working Digital Restrictions Management is not just supremely difficult -- it's impossible. As in perpetual motion machines, faster-than-light travel, or constructing with ruler and compass a rectangle with area equal to a given circle. It can be shown mathematically that there is no way to do it. And there is nothing that anyone could ever invent that would make it possible: the impossibility of DRM is a limitation of the universe, not a limitation of technology.
I think you'll find that copying a CD is perceived by most people as being closer morally to baking your own loaf of bread -- using your own flour and yeast that you bought and paid for -- than to stealing a loaf of bread from a store. And I think that most people, if it came down to it, would have fewer qualms about stealing a loaf of bread from Tesco or Asda than from some little village baker's shop.
You don't get the bakery industry running around complaining that home bread machines are ruining their sales. (In fact, it actually works out more expensive to bake your own bread; at least if you buy flour by the ordinary 1k5 bag. I don't know where to get a 25kg. bag of strong white flour, nor where I'd store it if I had one. OTOH, store-bought bread tastes like shredded paper so you're paying for quality.)
No ..... the answer is that there is no way for the DRM system to know for certain whether or not the unencrypted stream (which has to exist in some human-perceptible form) is being re-recorded in an unencrypted form.
I invented something like that when I was 8 years old. It consisted of unscrewing the shell of a cassette, mounting a small piece of ceramic magnet somewhere downstream of the sound head and replacing the screws. The tape could be listened exactly once; on its journey to the take-up spool, it rubbed against the magnet, which realigned the magnetic fields of the ferric oxide molecules uniformly. When rewound, it was all quiet.
Unfortunately, there was one tiny flaw in this plan. And I sincerely hope I do not have to point out to anyone here what that flaw was.
When my Linux distro is ready, it will come with a command line exercise book with some stuff for you to practise. In just ten quick and easy lessons, you will learn how to perform tasks such as: editing a configuration file, restarting a daemon, compiling a program from source, hacking source code and launching a program from a terminal. By the time you finish, you will not think there is anything wrong with the command line. Rather, you will see it as a feature in its own right; and if you ever have to use Windows again, you will miss the beauty and simplicity of typing in commands.
Possibly the fact that changing one bit in one byte is enough to turn a £30 graphics card into a £300 graphics card. Or maybe that they ripped someone else's code off.
Just because a particular gene sequence found in fish means something when spliced into tomato DNA isn't really saying anything. The word "fart" is perfectly respectable in Swedish. The word "mist" is not so respectable in German. It just so happens that a bit of the pattern that happens to make an improvement to a tomato, also occurs in fish.
DNA is basically a self-extracting compressed executable. It just happens that with the current state of the art (which is a bit like doing embroidery by firelight and wearing boxing gloves), messing with it whilst it's still compressed is easier than trying to expand the compressed form.
A living organism is dealt a hand of DNA and plays out that hand strictly according to predetermined rules. Either it scores enough points to play again, or it dies. Most of the possible DNA sequences don't do anything useful. Scientists might be able to stick bits of gene sequences together, but they can't alter the rules for how they play out; just the starting cards. Some random mutation could happen to produce the same sequence and there would be no way to tell which was created artificially and which was created naturally.
Terminator genes exist for one purpose and one purpose alone: artificially to raise revenue for biotechnology companies by ensuring that seeds from one year's crop cannot be planted next year. (In the past this was generally done by using F1 hybrids, whose offspring will not generally resemble the parents; but, as long as you have enough offspring, you can find the closest matches to the grandparent stock, re-cross these and recreate the F1. See Mendel's pea plant experiment.)
I am no Luddite. I don't have a problem with genetic engineering per se, but when it is so blatantly misused -- for example, to breed pesticide-resistant plants and so sell more pesticides rather than breed pest-resistant plants, to create plants which cannot self-seed, or otherwise to create any kind of artificial dependency -- or when any person or company tries to claim a living organism as "intellectual property", I think that is a bad thing.
OpenOffice.org v1.x was based on a piece of closed-source software, and once you saw the codebase it really shew. The original developers made a whole mountain of schoolboy errors that they just never really expected would see the light of day. Sun opened it up mainly in order to save themselves the effort of rewriting it from scratch in order to make it run on processors with a word length and/or addressing space of anything other than 32 bits (like, for example, a modern SPARC processor in 64-bit mode). Getting StarOffice running on 64-bit SPARC under Solaris meant more to them than preventing StarOffice from running on other architectures under other OSs.
The mess of different licences is unfortunate but necessary. Sun's original in-house-written licence (which allowed Sun to make closed forks of other contributors' code) proved about as popular as a hang-glider with diarrhoea, so they had to re-licence it under the LGPL in order to allow their own closed OpenOffice.org fork (which is also called StarOffice, though it bears little resemblance to the original) to exist. But you can't revoke a copyright licence except by relinquishing copyright in the work; so, as long as there is enough OO.o 1.x code in OO.o for it to be considered a derivative work rather than a new work in its own right which happens to make Fair Use of portions of another copyrighted work, then the SISSL remains in force. The permissions of the GPL are themselves a subset of the permissions of the LGPL, and it's OK to make a GPL fork of an LGPL project (which NeoOffice is).
If you don't like copy+paste in X, that is most probably because you are doing it wrong!
To copy text, highlight it by holding down the left mouse button and dragging over it.
To paste it, bring up the screen showing the destination application; hover the mouse pointer somewhere inside the window into which you wish to paste, and depress the scroll wheel without moving it either up or down. (AKA middle-clicking. Also try middle-clicking links in a web browser, if you don't know what it does.) If your mouse has no scroll wheel, then just depress both mouse buttons together and release them together.
Note that these actions are completely universal, as they are part of X itself and not the application (which just thinks the text was typed on the keyboard). If you're into highly advanced stuff, you can even copy and paste between X applications running on different machines. There is no need to disrupt your flow by touching the keyboard or selecting an item from a menu.
Doesn't option+3 give you a comment sign on a UK Apple Macintosh?
What about somebody writing a browser extension that performs bogus searches in the background, for no better reason than to frustrate "profiling" attempts? Is this feasible?
What about patenting it, but then dedicating the patent to the Public Domain? Then there is definitely published prior art, so nobody should be able to patent the same thing again. Anybody building one need only label it with the patent number you were originally allocated.
Depends how blocked. As long as there's enough of a reaction going to liberate enough energy to break some C-H bonds, you'll get a mess of carbon monoxide, soot and water vapour.
As for preheating, my experience has been the other way around; gas ovens need less preheating. You do have to get used to what cooks best on which shelf, but that's all part of the fun. Maybe there's even some innate tendency to prefer one cooking fuel over another. Maybe worth submitting a study proposal for a bit of Government funding?
Yes, obviously. If you knew which was cooked by gas and which was cooked by electricity, you'd be cheating. So get someone to take samples from each one for you. It's even better if the person cutting the samples and passing them to you doesn't know themself which was cooked on gas and which on electric.
I have Sky Plus (not HD, though; my eyesight is so poor I can barely see 625 lines, and that's already a bit Monet-esque; so what am I going to do with another 465?). I do generally skip the adverts. However, maybe about one advert per hour of programming will catch my eye and I will rewind it to watch in normal speed. Not that I'll actually go out and buy the product being advertised, though.
Other times, I'll simply let the advert break run through but without actually watching, because I'm taking a leak / feeding the cat / answering the phone / skinning up / whatever else I used to do in advert breaks before Sky Plus; but I don't have to be so careful to return in time for the start of the programme proper, because I can just rewind it.
I suspect this is what's actually happening: the recorder lets you not have to be there dead on the end of the break, because you can just rewind if you missed the start. Anyway, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter how many people see your advert. All that matters is how many people buy your product.
How does someone else calling you use your minutes up? You pay to dial out, not to answer the phone!
CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O.
I'm guessing the extra moisture that gets released into the oven cavity from the combustion of the gas is what makes the difference. You'll get that even if the air supply is blocked, since hydrogen is "hornier" than carbon (which will make do with just one oxygen atom; or even none, if it comes to that). I've also noticed that methane produces slightly better tasting food than propane, which sort of bears out the moisture theory (C3H8 gives off less moisture for the same amount of heat).
Anyway, don't just take my word for it -- try it sometime. Cook the same recipe in two ovens and see for yourself.