Actually, if you live in one of those houses then you probably know about the three prong to two prong plus ground clamp converter. They are meant to be used with the clamp actually grounded but you COULD get by without using it like that. Of course if you live in a house like this your lucky to get a computer to work at all as your power is probably 20 shades of dirty.
Those adapters are dangerous. Most people ignore the warnings printed on them and don't connect the ground tab, and of those that do they often times don't know or understand the difference between a grounded and non grounded receptacle and don't understand that just because there is a screw in the middle of the two pronged receptacle to connect the ground tab to it doesn't mean that the screw or receptacle is properly grounded, in fact most of the time it isn't in those old houses as there is no proper ground source at the receptacle at all. The only way to properly ground one of those receptacles is to get a qualified electrician to ground it properly who will find a nearby ground source (such as a cold water pipe) and run a ground wire from it to the receptacle and replace the receptacle with a proper three prong receptacle.
If you don't know what you're doing you could end up thinking that you're safe when you really aren't. That's worse than knowing you aren't safe.
1) The ground wire goes to the metal casing of the outlet, not all the way to the grounding bar, to eliminate the possibility of 'floating' voltages or charge buildup along the neutral.
Actually, the ground wire goes to both. It is normally grounded to any ground screws or wires on attached receptacles, switches, light fixtures, etc, plus it is grounded to the casing on any metal boxes it passes through (but not on the plastic boxes that are more and more common these days as it's rather pointless to ground plastic). The ground wire does terminate on the ground or ground/neutral bar in the service panel.
2) The ground wire typically connects directly to the metal case of the device, so that if the hot wire accidentally makes contact with the case inside the device it won't shock the user.
This is correct, plus it will also trip the circuit breaker.
3) Although in principle you could get these benefits from hooking up the neutral to the case and doing away with the ground wire, it would have dire consequences if the user reversed the plug. Therefore the ground plug is triangular and not reversible.
If the plug is polarized then you could not reverse it without filing down the wide (neutral) prong. That said, there are other reasons to properly ground a metal casing as others have pointed out the neutral can carry a small current and is not suitable as a proper ground, plus faults in the neutral will leave you with a 120 V AC hot casing. Note also that the ground prong on a typical ground plug is longer than the other two prongs. This is on purpose to ensure that the ground is always connected first when plugging an appliance in and disconnected last when unplugging.
But its true that the ground wire is a holdout from those days when we used to have metal cases on everything (remember those metal drills - and the XPS, apparently). If the hot wire touched the case the user would get a shock, hence the ground prong.
I would hardly call it a "holdout". There are lots of devices that still require a proper ground and have metal casings a brief list off the top of my head is:
Major Appliances such as refrigerator, dishwasher, electric ranges and ovens, washing machines, dryers, waste disposal.
Desktop computers
Workshop tools such as drill presses, Skill saws, etc.
Almost all industrial workshop equipment.
Certainly we will not have an end to the requirement for grounding any time in the foreseeable future.
The ground (green) wire has to be connected to the neutral bus or it would be point less (no return path).
Not necessarily true. The ground wire (third prong, etc), simply has to be grounded. There are lots of cases of old houses where a power point has to be adapted from non-grounded (two prong) to grounded (three prong) and there is no ground wire in the outlet to do it with. The most common way is to run a ground wire from the outlet to the nearest cold water pipe (plumbing codes in the US actually require that enough iron or copper be buried so that the pipe can serve as an electrical ground).
* The neutral wire has the same amount of energy running through it as the black wire!
This is only true for a single phase circuit, in dual or triple phase circuits or two or three circuits that share a neutral (because they're on different phases) the current through the neutral wire depends on how much current is being taken up by the different hot branches. It is entirely possible that you have current flowing in one hot wire and out another hot wire and the neutral doesn't pull any current at all. Of course that said, you should always assume (for safety purposes) that the neutral is pulling as much current as the hot because it can.
Why on earth would my mother care to sift through tens of thousands of anythings? And I'd wager my mom's in the 95th percentile of technically apt moms....
Why what a great point, wouldn't it be just real dandy if they provided a search tool there so you could just type in what you're looking for and up pops all the matching packages? Oh wait, they do!
You mean your mom can't click on Applications, then Add/Remove Applications and pick from tens of thousands of applications all easily searchable from a single place? When was the last time you tried installing apps in a good distro? It's way easier than anything Microsoft
Because, yeah, Control Pannel, Add/Remove Programs sounds infinitely more complex than Applications, Add/Remove Applications... where was that bridge you mentioned?
Browsing through Add/Remove Applications... let's see... FireFox, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Pidgin, gimp... I'll get away from specifics or I'll be here all day, let's see, there's over 800 games, 400 email packages, 200 editors, 400 graphics packages, 600 multimedia packages, 500 word processors, almost 1000 world wide web packages (browsers, etc), and loads more, and I can install any or all of them very easily from that one interface and all of them are free (as in beer) and most of them are free (as in speech). Does "Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs" let you do all that? Oh right, it only lets you install or remove a few core operating system components and remove other installed apps, hrmmm, lousy comparison there, try again.
Who has a better understanding of the end-user, than the end-user him/herself? How can we let ourselves be trolled so easily? I do not know.
When a developer (or power user) considers himself to be the typical end-user, the project is a failure. The developer assumes a level of knowledge that may not exist in the real world. Even a very technical potential user of a product may be intimidated by the product because of the facade that the developers/users have built around the product.
Even if linux is better than MS or OSX, it will still have a hard time gaining acceptance because when I walk down the aisle at Wal-Mart, there is no linux section in the games. Office Depot does not have a linux section for business. If I don't see the software at the store, it must not exist. Download software you say? I just went to download.com - where's the linux tab on the left (the area that has MS, OSX, Mobile, etc.).
For the average person, linux is not a choice because you can't buy a computer with linux installed (yes, I know you can, but they are hard to find) and there is no software for the linux machine even if you got a computer with pre-installed linux (again, yes I know where to download it, but my mom doesn't).
You mean your mom can't click on Applications, then Add/Remove Applications and pick from tens of thousands of applications all easily searchable from a single place? When was the last time you tried installing apps in a good distro? It's way easier than anything Microsoft or Apple have managed to come up with. Your argument is old and tired and hasn't applied to Linux for at least the past 5 years or so, go troll somewhere else or better yet go bury yourself back under your bridge.
...and who modded this guy insightful anyways? This is just a tired old argument, not insightful in the slightest.
Linux market share has increased by 117%, while Apple's increase is only 74%.
Exactly, and don't forget that it is still very difficult to buy a Desktop or Laptop computer with Linux pre-installed (Dell has made some great progress for that but I still can't buy a Dell or any other laptop with Linux pre-installed in New Zealand). I'd say that Linux has made incredible progress considering just how difficult it is to buy a computer with Linux on it and as the 2007 trend of companies such as Dell offering Linux pre-installed continues to expand in 2008 and beyond I have no doubts that Linux will become much more popular than OS-X in no time.
There are global wind currents that allow you to sail in either direction depending on what latitude you're sailing at. So if you're crossing the Atlantic, for example, you simply sail one way at a certain latitude to catch the wind current favorable to you and come back at a different latitude, thus you get favorable winds in *both* directions.
Also, these same wind currents are what drives the ocean currents that even modern day vessels take advantage of to save on fuel and decrease travel time, so it stands to reason that current shipping routes will already be ideal to take advantage of favorable wind and ocean currents.
Agreed, mod parent up.
In fact I would go as far as to say that the store manager should be brought up on misdemeanor theft charges, and physical assault, and of course then he would have a criminal record which may (depending on their hiring policies) preclude him from working at best buy in the future, especially since the criminal activity took place in the store against a customer.
Parent is right, what the store manager did was theft, pure and simple. A call to his lawyer on his cellphone at the store in front of the manager would likely have cleared the whole mess up rather quickly, especially after teh lawyer has had a chance to explain to the manager what the penalties are for said theft.
IANAL but I would venture to guess that you can in a counter suit, because you are not the one who picked the party to sue, they picked you and this is just an offensive/defensive move against their lawsuit.
I won't venture to guess how successful you'll be, though.
The strange thing about excluding "genocide" is that it is a crime that historically has been a government sanctioned activity. It makes you wonder if he is trying to block people from finding out what genocide is what his real purpose is behind all of this.
Say... for example that in the name of fighting "terrorism" the European Union (at some point in the future) decides to stamp out the Islamic religion because they decide that the religion itself is largely responsible for encouraging and perpetrating terrorism. It might be in your best interest to try to prevent people from discovering that what you are doing is not very different than the atrocities perpetrated by Nazi Germany during WWII.
I recall that before I left the states after dialing a number I could hear faint DTMF tones before the ringing started. That sounds very much like what you're describing as the telco sending out my caller ID over the line to the other phone.
Presumably document.all is an IE specific extension to javascript, so he's checking for it. He's also redirecting via a meta refresh if you have javascript turned off, so while you can defeat the first check by turning off JS, that triggers the second check.
Secondly, you don't have a Constitutional right to get on a plane any more than you do to attend a private party.
Right, but does the federal govt. have the constitutional authority to prevent you from getting on a plane? There is a difference between you having the right to do something and the govt. having the right to prevent you from doing that very same thing. And if you argue that the owner can prevent you from getting on the plane, he sold you a ticket for a service which gives him a contractual obligation to provide that service (yes, they have outs for that as well, such as in the case of overbooking or flight delays or cancellations, but then they have to compensate you for the purchase price).
The existing power points for QANTUS 747 planes (I've flown them long haul a few times from LAX to AKL) are 115v (they have them in the bathrooms for electric razors and in a few other spots on the planes). I doubt that they'd bother putting in a new 240v system since all modern laptops come with travel chargers that can work with anything from about 90v on up through 240v anyways.
Also consider that Boing is an American company (Airbus is French and I've never flown the airbus planes so you may be right about them, but still I would guess that even those are 115v).
The job of president is not to be "supreme overlord" as many seem to think. The job of president is to be in charge of the day to day running of the country according to the constitution and the laws passed by congress. The president quite literally works for us (the people). Unfortunately the current president has claimed "executive powers" and is attempting to run the country contrary to the will of congress and the will of the people, but that's not the way it's designed to work.
The US government is very similar to the structure of a corporation. The president is the CEO, congress is the board of directors and the people are the shareholders (each citizen holds an equal share in the corporation and is entitled to one vote at the elections or "shareholder meetings"). As such, the president is answerable to both congress and the people, and congress is answerable to the people.
It is very important for Americans to be able to vote for all the different things that we have the power to vote for, and I would never want to see that power taken away from the citizen because the ballot is deemed "too complicated". There is nothing preventing someone from just voting for president and leaving the rest of the ballot blank if that is what they want.
What's the point of electing people if you can't delegate to them some of the decision making. Here you're confusing state and local government with Federal government. In the Federal government congress has full power to make all laws, so the people don't do that directly. The people do vote in representatives of congress to make laws for them, so your statement doesn't even apply to Federal government. State governments vary and while most allow the people to propose referendums (commonly known as "propositions") and vote for them at election time there are some that follow the same model as the federal government.
It all does seem very complicated but in the end you have a government that is more responsive to the will of the people, especially at the state level and that is a good thing imo. I would like to see the federal government adopt the ability for the people to vote on referendums as well, I think it would make things way better, then.
IIRC most merchant agreements with credit card companies do not allow them to refuse a legitimate card (or to prefer a different payment method) except for anti-fraud reasons. While I don't think that a single complaint to the bank will cause them to drop an account like Dell, I think that repeated complaints will cause them to sit up and take notice.
For what reason should I remove the other licenses from files where I include other GPL code? If it's N-licensed, and one of these licenses is GPL, technically I'm merging GPL code with GPL code, so where's the problem (assuming it's the same GPL version, of course)?
Because when you are listing licenses at the top of a file you are in essence saying that all the code in that file can be used under any of those licenses and you cannot (without permission) re-license someone else's GPL code under a different license, which would be the effect of what you would be doing by including their code in a file with licenses other than GPL.
Here's the problems you will face. If you license under GPL version 2 or later then you can't incorporate code that is licensed under version 3 (but not version 2) into your project (others here seem to imply that you can) until you move up to version 3 yourself. Basically you need to think of it this way, in order to use other people's code in your project your license has to be a subset of their license. In order for others to use your code their license has to be a subset of yours. Here is what I would recommend:
License your project as a whole (and all included files) under GPL version 2 or later for now.
Continue to License under GPL 2 or later until you need to incorporate code that is licensed under GPL version 3.
When you need to include code licensed under GPL 3 or later (try to avoid any code licensed under GPL 3 only) then you can relicense your project as a whole under GPL version 3 or later, but keep most of the individual files licensed under GPL 2 or later. Only those files that include the code that was licensed under GPL 3 or later need to have their license headers changed.
If you need to include code licensed under GPL 2 only, then contact the authors and ask for permission to relicense that specific code under GPL 2 or later, most (but not all) will happily give you permission to do that. Barring that you will have to find another source of the code or write it yourself.
You can, of course link to libraries licensed under the LGPL, and include code licensed under BSD (as long as you comply with the attribution clause). As of GPL 3 you can also include code licensed under the Apache license, plus there are several licenses (such as the perl license) that are actually dual licenses of GPL plus some other license and code from those can be used freely under the GPL (watch out for what versions they specify). Have a look at the Free Software Foundation License Compatibility Page for more details on lots of licenses and their compatibility to the GPL.
Watch out for version numbers. If a program specifies that it is licensed under the GPL (without any version number) then it can be used under any version of the GPL. If a program specifies that it is licensed under GPL Version 2 (or some other specific version number) then you can only use the code under that specific version of the GPL. Most programs will specify version 2 or later (and many will soon change to version 3 or later) which means that you can use the code under that version or (at your option) any later version.
As for allowing others to use your code, you have some options with that as well:
You can dual license, or multi-license specific files in your project so that they are compatible with other licenses you want them to be usable with, just don't forget to remove the other licenses from any files that you include someone else's GPL code in.
You can give explicit permission to others to license under other licenses of your choice when they write you and ask, just make sure that you specify which parts of the code they can only use under the GPL (and which versions) due to it not being your code.
I think this about as comprehensive of a guide as I can give you. I'm not a lawyer or a representative of the Free Software Foundation and my statements above are just opinion and not to be taken as legal advice. I just know what I know and am passing that knowledge on.
Extra bonus points if you can manage to get Bill Gates to read one out loud at the appearance.
I would hand him a copy of the EULA for one of M$ products and ask him to read it and when he refuses ask how he can expect the average consumer to read and understand one if he can't do it here and now.
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Those adapters are dangerous. Most people ignore the warnings printed on them and don't connect the ground tab, and of those that do they often times don't know or understand the difference between a grounded and non grounded receptacle and don't understand that just because there is a screw in the middle of the two pronged receptacle to connect the ground tab to it doesn't mean that the screw or receptacle is properly grounded, in fact most of the time it isn't in those old houses as there is no proper ground source at the receptacle at all. The only way to properly ground one of those receptacles is to get a qualified electrician to ground it properly who will find a nearby ground source (such as a cold water pipe) and run a ground wire from it to the receptacle and replace the receptacle with a proper three prong receptacle.
If you don't know what you're doing you could end up thinking that you're safe when you really aren't. That's worse than knowing you aren't safe.
1) The ground wire goes to the metal casing of the outlet, not all the way to the grounding bar, to eliminate the possibility of 'floating' voltages or charge buildup along the neutral.
Actually, the ground wire goes to both. It is normally grounded to any ground screws or wires on attached receptacles, switches, light fixtures, etc, plus it is grounded to the casing on any metal boxes it passes through (but not on the plastic boxes that are more and more common these days as it's rather pointless to ground plastic). The ground wire does terminate on the ground or ground/neutral bar in the service panel.
2) The ground wire typically connects directly to the metal case of the device, so that if the hot wire accidentally makes contact with the case inside the device it won't shock the user.This is correct, plus it will also trip the circuit breaker.
3) Although in principle you could get these benefits from hooking up the neutral to the case and doing away with the ground wire, it would have dire consequences if the user reversed the plug. Therefore the ground plug is triangular and not reversible.If the plug is polarized then you could not reverse it without filing down the wide (neutral) prong. That said, there are other reasons to properly ground a metal casing as others have pointed out the neutral can carry a small current and is not suitable as a proper ground, plus faults in the neutral will leave you with a 120 V AC hot casing. Note also that the ground prong on a typical ground plug is longer than the other two prongs. This is on purpose to ensure that the ground is always connected first when plugging an appliance in and disconnected last when unplugging.
But its true that the ground wire is a holdout from those days when we used to have metal cases on everything (remember those metal drills - and the XPS, apparently). If the hot wire touched the case the user would get a shock, hence the ground prong.I would hardly call it a "holdout". There are lots of devices that still require a proper ground and have metal casings a brief list off the top of my head is:
- Major Appliances such as refrigerator, dishwasher, electric ranges and ovens, washing machines, dryers, waste disposal.
- Desktop computers
- Workshop tools such as drill presses, Skill saws, etc.
- Almost all industrial workshop equipment.
Certainly we will not have an end to the requirement for grounding any time in the foreseeable future.The ground (green) wire has to be connected to the neutral bus or it would be point less (no return path).
Not necessarily true. The ground wire (third prong, etc), simply has to be grounded. There are lots of cases of old houses where a power point has to be adapted from non-grounded (two prong) to grounded (three prong) and there is no ground wire in the outlet to do it with. The most common way is to run a ground wire from the outlet to the nearest cold water pipe (plumbing codes in the US actually require that enough iron or copper be buried so that the pipe can serve as an electrical ground).
* The neutral wire has the same amount of energy running through it as the black wire!
This is only true for a single phase circuit, in dual or triple phase circuits or two or three circuits that share a neutral (because they're on different phases) the current through the neutral wire depends on how much current is being taken up by the different hot branches. It is entirely possible that you have current flowing in one hot wire and out another hot wire and the neutral doesn't pull any current at all. Of course that said, you should always assume (for safety purposes) that the neutral is pulling as much current as the hot because it can.
Why what a great point, wouldn't it be just real dandy if they provided a search tool there so you could just type in what you're looking for and up pops all the matching packages? Oh wait, they do!
Because, yeah, Control Pannel, Add/Remove Programs sounds infinitely more complex than Applications, Add/Remove Applications... where was that bridge you mentioned?
Browsing through Add/Remove Applications ... let's see ... FireFox, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Pidgin, gimp ... I'll get away from specifics or I'll be here all day, let's see, there's over 800 games, 400 email packages, 200 editors, 400 graphics packages, 600 multimedia packages, 500 word processors, almost 1000 world wide web packages (browsers, etc), and loads more, and I can install any or all of them very easily from that one interface and all of them are free (as in beer) and most of them are free (as in speech). Does "Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs" let you do all that? Oh right, it only lets you install or remove a few core operating system components and remove other installed apps, hrmmm, lousy comparison there, try again.
I'm sure you can find the bridge.
When a developer (or power user) considers himself to be the typical end-user, the project is a failure. The developer assumes a level of knowledge that may not exist in the real world. Even a very technical potential user of a product may be intimidated by the product because of the facade that the developers/users have built around the product.
Even if linux is better than MS or OSX, it will still have a hard time gaining acceptance because when I walk down the aisle at Wal-Mart, there is no linux section in the games. Office Depot does not have a linux section for business. If I don't see the software at the store, it must not exist. Download software you say? I just went to download.com - where's the linux tab on the left (the area that has MS, OSX, Mobile, etc.).
For the average person, linux is not a choice because you can't buy a computer with linux installed (yes, I know you can, but they are hard to find) and there is no software for the linux machine even if you got a computer with pre-installed linux (again, yes I know where to download it, but my mom doesn't).
You mean your mom can't click on Applications, then Add/Remove Applications and pick from tens of thousands of applications all easily searchable from a single place? When was the last time you tried installing apps in a good distro? It's way easier than anything Microsoft or Apple have managed to come up with. Your argument is old and tired and hasn't applied to Linux for at least the past 5 years or so, go troll somewhere else or better yet go bury yourself back under your bridge.
...and who modded this guy insightful anyways? This is just a tired old argument, not insightful in the slightest.
Excellent Ads, I'd love to see those on the air. There's also this one.
Exactly, and don't forget that it is still very difficult to buy a Desktop or Laptop computer with Linux pre-installed (Dell has made some great progress for that but I still can't buy a Dell or any other laptop with Linux pre-installed in New Zealand). I'd say that Linux has made incredible progress considering just how difficult it is to buy a computer with Linux on it and as the 2007 trend of companies such as Dell offering Linux pre-installed continues to expand in 2008 and beyond I have no doubts that Linux will become much more popular than OS-X in no time.
There are global wind currents that allow you to sail in either direction depending on what latitude you're sailing at. So if you're crossing the Atlantic, for example, you simply sail one way at a certain latitude to catch the wind current favorable to you and come back at a different latitude, thus you get favorable winds in *both* directions.
Also, these same wind currents are what drives the ocean currents that even modern day vessels take advantage of to save on fuel and decrease travel time, so it stands to reason that current shipping routes will already be ideal to take advantage of favorable wind and ocean currents.
More info
Yeah, but what if someone already did that and substituted what were really good scripts for the crappy ones we got to see?
Agreed, mod parent up. In fact I would go as far as to say that the store manager should be brought up on misdemeanor theft charges, and physical assault, and of course then he would have a criminal record which may (depending on their hiring policies) preclude him from working at best buy in the future, especially since the criminal activity took place in the store against a customer.
Parent is right, what the store manager did was theft, pure and simple. A call to his lawyer on his cellphone at the store in front of the manager would likely have cleared the whole mess up rather quickly, especially after teh lawyer has had a chance to explain to the manager what the penalties are for said theft.
IANAL but I would venture to guess that you can in a counter suit, because you are not the one who picked the party to sue, they picked you and this is just an offensive/defensive move against their lawsuit.
I won't venture to guess how successful you'll be, though.
The strange thing about excluding "genocide" is that it is a crime that historically has been a government sanctioned activity. It makes you wonder if he is trying to block people from finding out what genocide is what his real purpose is behind all of this.
... for example that in the name of fighting "terrorism" the European Union (at some point in the future) decides to stamp out the Islamic religion because they decide that the religion itself is largely responsible for encouraging and perpetrating terrorism. It might be in your best interest to try to prevent people from discovering that what you are doing is not very different than the atrocities perpetrated by Nazi Germany during WWII.
Say
I recall that before I left the states after dialing a number I could hear faint DTMF tones before the ringing started. That sounds very much like what you're describing as the telco sending out my caller ID over the line to the other phone.
He's got this at the top of his page (in addition to the useragent check that he runs in php):
Presumably document.all is an IE specific extension to javascript, so he's checking for it. He's also redirecting via a meta refresh if you have javascript turned off, so while you can defeat the first check by turning off JS, that triggers the second check.
Right, but does the federal govt. have the constitutional authority to prevent you from getting on a plane? There is a difference between you having the right to do something and the govt. having the right to prevent you from doing that very same thing. And if you argue that the owner can prevent you from getting on the plane, he sold you a ticket for a service which gives him a contractual obligation to provide that service (yes, they have outs for that as well, such as in the case of overbooking or flight delays or cancellations, but then they have to compensate you for the purchase price).
The existing power points for QANTUS 747 planes (I've flown them long haul a few times from LAX to AKL) are 115v (they have them in the bathrooms for electric razors and in a few other spots on the planes). I doubt that they'd bother putting in a new 240v system since all modern laptops come with travel chargers that can work with anything from about 90v on up through 240v anyways.
Also consider that Boing is an American company (Airbus is French and I've never flown the airbus planes so you may be right about them, but still I would guess that even those are 115v).
The US government is very similar to the structure of a corporation. The president is the CEO, congress is the board of directors and the people are the shareholders (each citizen holds an equal share in the corporation and is entitled to one vote at the elections or "shareholder meetings"). As such, the president is answerable to both congress and the people, and congress is answerable to the people.
It is very important for Americans to be able to vote for all the different things that we have the power to vote for, and I would never want to see that power taken away from the citizen because the ballot is deemed "too complicated". There is nothing preventing someone from just voting for president and leaving the rest of the ballot blank if that is what they want. What's the point of electing people if you can't delegate to them some of the decision making. Here you're confusing state and local government with Federal government. In the Federal government congress has full power to make all laws, so the people don't do that directly. The people do vote in representatives of congress to make laws for them, so your statement doesn't even apply to Federal government. State governments vary and while most allow the people to propose referendums (commonly known as "propositions") and vote for them at election time there are some that follow the same model as the federal government.
It all does seem very complicated but in the end you have a government that is more responsive to the will of the people, especially at the state level and that is a good thing imo. I would like to see the federal government adopt the ability for the people to vote on referendums as well, I think it would make things way better, then.
IIRC most merchant agreements with credit card companies do not allow them to refuse a legitimate card (or to prefer a different payment method) except for anti-fraud reasons. While I don't think that a single complaint to the bank will cause them to drop an account like Dell, I think that repeated complaints will cause them to sit up and take notice.
For what reason should I remove the other licenses from files where I include other GPL code? If it's N-licensed, and one of these licenses is GPL, technically I'm merging GPL code with GPL code, so where's the problem (assuming it's the same GPL version, of course)?
Because when you are listing licenses at the top of a file you are in essence saying that all the code in that file can be used under any of those licenses and you cannot (without permission) re-license someone else's GPL code under a different license, which would be the effect of what you would be doing by including their code in a file with licenses other than GPL.
because Gnubuntu doesn't sound good?
Actually it doesn't sound that bad either, they could've flipped a coin for all I care, fact is you can have either easily.
Here's the problems you will face. If you license under GPL version 2 or later then you can't incorporate code that is licensed under version 3 (but not version 2) into your project (others here seem to imply that you can) until you move up to version 3 yourself. Basically you need to think of it this way, in order to use other people's code in your project your license has to be a subset of their license. In order for others to use your code their license has to be a subset of yours. Here is what I would recommend:
As for allowing others to use your code, you have some options with that as well:
I think this about as comprehensive of a guide as I can give you. I'm not a lawyer or a representative of the Free Software Foundation and my statements above are just opinion and not to be taken as legal advice. I just know what I know and am passing that knowledge on.
The Supreme Court's recent decision should do a lot to bring back the obviousness argument.
Extra bonus points if you can manage to get Bill Gates to read one out loud at the appearance.
I would hand him a copy of the EULA for one of M$ products and ask him to read it and when he refuses ask how he can expect the average consumer to read and understand one if he can't do it here and now.