In "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs", an extensive first-year programming textbook by Abelson and Sussman, everything is introduced in terms of Scheme and for the most part they use only the functional subset of Scheme. In particular, they show how to implement objects as closures. But IIRC they did use setq to modify state variables.

It's a nice horror story, but it doesn't hold water in a democratic society. Plenty of companies in Europe are partly or wholly owned by states, and yet they operate as public companies in the open market, and all government influence is channeled through the board, just like any other majority shareholder of a public company would do.

There is absolutely no problem with selling copies of copyright items and letting the consumer do everything they want to within the bounds of copyright law. The point of copyright law is to delineate the basic rules for such exchange of money for a creative product. In the particular case of software there is a special exemption in copyright law for the copies created within RAM etc. as the legal owner of a software product uses the software. The makers of books, CDs, posters and garden gnomes don't see any need for EULAs and are perfectly content relying on copyright law. Why should it be so different for software?

What's even more amazing is how they know all their names! I think this is the most direct evidence we have of aliens secretly visiting Earth - they must be telling the government all kinds of things, but the names of the stars is the only thing the government hasn't held away from us, and even there they don't admit where they got all that data from.

What's really bizarre that both US and European copyright laws explicitly state that the copies a computer system creates internally are not subject to copyright protection, so that it's perfectly legal to run a copy of software you have legal possession of. In other words, legislators do understand that it's fine to purchase a copy of software and run it, you don't need a license agreement for that. But most of the time courts seem to completely ignore this aspect of copyright law.

They are broadcasting right now for free (really, on advertising money) over airwaves. In principle, there's no reason why they couldn't broadcast for free (again, on advertising money) over the internet. I bet the long-term costs of a high-bandwidth video distribution network (something like youtube has) would be far lower on the internet than they are on the airwaves.

It's because science cannot advance if you don't tell enough people about your findings. Publishing is not just a way to get an ego boost, it's how future researchers are able to improve on your work.

It's all too rare in Europe, and in that respect we are positively mediaeval compared to the US. The thinking here is that government organizations should charge as much as they can for specialist products (as opposed to public services intended for everyone), in order to reduce their burden for the taxpayer. On top of that, in some fields we have public-private partnerships where are single private company resells government-created data to the public.

Yes it is, at least in Sweden and Finland no penalties can be given unless the defendant is positively identified. A license plate does not identify the driver, and so a speed camera picture that doesn't show the driver cannot serve as evidence against a person.

I don't know about canonical, but I use control-backspace for the escape character - that's "escape ^\\" in ~/.screenrc. Works great. The standard function of control-backspace in a terminal would be to send SIGQUIT, but I never needed that anyway. The only problem is when you think you're in a screen but you aren't, and end up killing the foreground process. That is easily remedied by never running anything out of a screen.