I thought the purpose of agenda is that you have an agenda in the meeting and you prepare for and discuss about things in the agenda :) If everyone can change the agenda the meeting can disorganize rather quickly.

This is in fact quite correct.

There's a country in Africa, which name I just forgot, which was doing quite OK by their own. They had stable food market there and so on. Enter the charity organizations...

Charity organizations brought free food to the country because it was said that people there are starving. Well, they weren't, but hey! it's Africa and everyone MUST be starving there because it's Africa. Now what happens to economy, when free goods are introduced to the market? It collapses! Production drops to zero. No-one did any farming after that because food prices were zero. Why waste time and resources on farming when you can't get any income from it?

No imagine what happens when that free food is taken away from the market and production is near zero? Starvation. It takes time to put your fields back in order and start growing things. Then it takes time to things to grow. After that you need to harvest and take it to the market place.

So charity organization destroyed a good stable economy just that they could get publicity points in the eyes of the rest of the world. They would have probably done much better job by just staying at home.

No wonder it leads to stagnation. We need a good, brisk, war to drive development!

That's what I'm hoping, an all out patent war. Maybe some good would come out of it because things can't get bad any more.

They couldn't get any sharks so they had to settle with ill-tempered mutated sea bass.

Yes, I see your point and understand it. I'm a programmer and whenever I've made a dumb error I put on a hat which says "ass". Well, I used to, not anymore. It always gave a good laugh to coworkers :)

But on the other hand if manufacturer has found the defect, offered to fix the thing with no costs, and I refuse it... I don't see why manufacturer should feel shame anymore. It's my shame not to allow them to fix it.

Well, yes, that could be explanation but still I'm not sure how that could be a problem.

This interests me because my son is 7 and couple of weeks ago somebody thought he was around 11 and 12. He's taller and heavier than average 7 year boys but he's not fat. He's just big like Eric Lindros. Should I be worried about this and what the heck I could do about it, saw him to half? :)

Maybe it just runs the family because I'm not a little guy myself. I'm 190cm tall and weight a little over 100kg. My brother is tall also, 200cm with socks on :)

That is a good question. Currently we've had to give admin accesses to people on some machines. I wasn't in the house when this decision was made and I don't know history about it. In the future, with Windows 7, this is sure going to change.

A lot of applications are developed against directions in MSDN. For instance a lot of apps write stuff under %ProgramFiles% or replaces DLLs under %SystemRoot%. This means that they don't work well (read: at all) in Vista or 7 without administrator rights. As a member of our IT staff I'm really reluctant to give administrator password or administrator rights to, well, anyone. That's why we've been sticking to XP.

In fact, I can't think a single ActiveX component that's holding us back. In fact we just upgraded IE6 to IE8 on all our machines. Some internal website didn't look so good in IE8 but that was easy to fix. Personally I've been running Windows 7 and IE9 beta for couple of months now.

Should Linux developers feel shame also when someone gets his/her machine compromised by running ten years old unpatched stuff? Should door lock makers feel shame if I get my house robbed because I didn't fix broken outdoor lock?

Please, someone help me out with this. From TFA

Paediatric dietician Susie Burrell said children who were overweight often didn't carry obvious fat but instead looked older than their age.

She said children risked weight problems or diseases such as diabetes and fatty liver.

So they aren't fat but risked weight problems. Where does the weight (and weight problems) comes from if they aren't fat?

And what the heck means "looking older than their age" and how's that a problem?!

Nope. I think don't you understand patents.

If this IS a Microsoft scheme to enforce usage of their OS, surely it'd backfire, considering the manufacturers don't want to pay royalties as it is?

If manufacturers don't want to pay royalties then they have to switch to a country that doesn't recognize patents. Otherwise they can be taken to court and ordered to pay hefty fines + pay hefty royalties or pay hefty fines + stop manufacturing.

I think it would encourage makers to use Open Source even further.

This is a question about patents, not copyrights. Open Source doesn't cover you from patent suits. And unless you didn't notice, TFA is about vendors using Open Source.

Patents have upsides and downsides. I'm not sure how they balance. It seems that at least in the software world there's more downsides than upsides to put it nicely.

I don't know this case particular but my understanding is that if you are the copyright owner it is in your power to license your code any way you like. You license it under GPL and that's fine too. Then you license it under some other license and that's fine. There's a restriction thought that you can't relicense your GPL version because it's already out in the wild. What I mean that you can't change the license of the version you licensed under GPL and released into the wild (like SCO tried to do with Linux I think). What you can do is to license the same version or modified version again under some other license thus ending up with multiple licenses. You can't relicense code you don't have ownership, of course.

Now FSF would want all the code be under GPL and that's their right. But FSF isn't an author in interpreting the license, even though they wrote it. Courts and/or juries, depending of your legal system, are. FSF might have a good opinion about it of course but until a court of law has said its opinion in the matter, it's "just" FSF's opinion. Just like members of parliament don't interpret the laws they write, courts do that.

ps. I don't if GPL has been tested in court of law (in country X). If it is I would be thankful for links to the matter. (I'm too lazy to google)

Then the four freedoms and Apple. I'm not going to express my opinion about the subject, since it's irrelevant, I just wanted to say that that's a matter of opinion. Apple is allowed to reject any GPL code if they want and FSF is allowed to feel bad about it. It's then up to the developers and consumers to make their decision about it. Ultimately it's the consumers that votes with their wallets like in any open market (except monopoly situation which I on the other hand wouldn't call very open market).

Just my two cents (and I got a change to practice my English) :)

Because democracy is only good when it's on your side. If it's not then you have two choices: live with it or whine about how people voted "wrong".

Sadly opposition almost always chooses the latter one instead of bringing something constructive to the table.

The sentence starts with conditional "if" and it looks like a question but has no actual question mark so I'm not sure if that is a question that one should answer or a statement of opinion. But either way it is highly biased sentence. If it's a question then it's a leading one and would be objected if asked in court of law. If it's a statement of opinion then it's biased by definition.

And no, I have never wondered that exact thing ;)