Again, I'm not voicing any opinion on whether there IS an infringement here--I'm not a lawyer (are you?)
Point is, once you've distributed code under a particular license, your intentions stop & the license takes over. If you don't like how it pans out, well, you should have chosen a different license. As I already stated, it still takes someone with an enforceable copyright to do anything about it. But this notion that the legal opinion of programmers is worth more than the legal opinion of lawyers is just wishful thinking.

Yeah, that's logical. There's a difference between being qualified to take medicine & being qualified to prescribe it.

Torvalds isn't a lawyer. He has no idea what constitutes a GPL infringement. His intentions are irrelevant--the code's licensed under the GPL, so an infringement's an infringement whether he likes it or not. I'm not saying in this case there IS any infringement--I'm not a lawyer, either. And it'd still take someone with some claim to copyright to make anything of it anyway. But Torvalds' (& other devs) views are essentially irrelevant here.

> with Gnome, or if sufficient memory, KDE

OK, but with a lightweight window manager it's blazingly fast--on Windows you don't get a choice.

That said, it's not all about the DE--Kubuntu crawls compared to Slackware, for example, both with KDE--too much background bloat. (And here again, Windows doesn't give you a great deal of choice.)

Best computer upgrade? Freedom.

Well, it did make the BBC News front page: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15287391

this

7k GBP is around 11k USD; loyalty schmoyalty, you're seriously underpaid

'takeout' implies that you, like, take the data out--you don't, you get to have a copy of it--whoo hoo, you get to have a copy of your own data
as long as google get to keep the data, too, there's nothing being /taken out/ and until you can actually take your data all the way out--until you can log in to a service which shows all the data google have on you and lets you delete it as you see fit--their claims to be privacy-respecting are hot air

yeah, in about version 5 actually--and as a built-in, no add-ons needed

I wish I could run openbox on my physical desk.

the situation singular? "EDS has been involved in a parade of government IT failures, budget overruns and data losses in recent years, including but not limited to the National Offender Management Information Service, the tax credits system, the Defence Information Infrastructure and the Child Support Agency." (the register)
it took them years to actually stump up the £71.25mil to the govt after the tax creds disaster and even then only on condition of further govt contracts
the parliamentary committee investigating their effed up ministry of defence system described it as 'catastrophic' and their mistakes as 'truly reprehensible'
as for corruption, there's the crooked peer, and the string of their lawyers involved in assorted scandals
this of course is EDS, not HP--one would hope things will improve, especially now that they'll be running the new gchq 'big brother' system to monitor each and every online communication
not just bashing for the sake of it, in all honesty as a british citizen their relationship with the govt & manner of conducting business really worries me--you won't find many EDS fans in the UK

a cursory glance at the mainstream UK news media will provide all the proof you need
or parliamentary reports for that matter
also guessing their lawyers are a bit busy coping with the billions of pounds of compensation claims against them
though they did have a crooked labour peer in their pockets
you could start here or here

ya, EDS really knew how to run a data center--the terms 'incompetence' and 'corruption' spring to mind

Yes and no: people aren't getting more stupid; but more stupid people are getting into univeristy. Now that an education's a product, if you can afford it, you can have it; if you can't, you can't. Net result: more stupid people with university degrees. Maybe not quite an idiocracy, but certainly no meritocracy. The worry isn't more stupid people--it's more stupid people in positions of authority.