Did anyone else notice the sets of nested quotation marks in the summary?

Those are scare quotes within a quotation within a quotation. Which I just quoted above. ("Ever-quotable" is right, I guess.) It reminds me of nested parentheses in Lisp, in a good way.

Indeed, the only time I ever see the sky is when I'm using Windows XP.

I've never seen a fish eat a bird, but it sounds interesting to watch, so I guess I like it too.

I think it might count as a single phoneme in its native Czech? Not sure, IANAL (I am not a linguist).

So you're saying we need to make sure that geographic limitations remain in force even in a medium where they are totally irrelevant? That kind of wastes some of the potential of the ol' information superhighway there, doesn't it?

Actually, the word "fanboys" comes to mind. For any given fictional franchise, there will inevitably be enough people floating around the Internet who care so much about the movie being good that (in their minds) it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So, ironically, not the kind of languages that would start a word with the phoneme "dv".

From the summary, it seems like the software wasn't really sold though. They're trying to extract the money due to the user's agreement to a EULA, which (if that means in this context what it usually does) binds the user to some terms on the condition of using the copyrighted software. But, according to LGPL 2.1 (which is OOo's license):

Selling a copy of the software—with an up-front price, like you said—would be one thing, but it appears that they are trying to impose a secondary license agreement (the EULA) on top of the LGPL that contractually binds the user to some payment after the fact. The license, and all other versions of the GPL and LGPL, forbid that outright. In fact, that company may now be forbidden from distributing OpenOffice.org to anyone at all, since they voided the entire license for themselves. (Not a lawyer.)

Nice. More on the Newtonian level, my high school physics teacher said that police don't really issue speeding tickets, since the ticket will list your direction of travel at the time of the infraction. So it's really a velocity ticket.

Actually, he instructed us to correct the police officer on this if we were ever pulled over. He was a funny guy.

I think the GP's point was that politicians tend to act based not on whether "enough" people want it, but on what a particular small group of people wants. The silent majority may be more permissive about the sex-and-drugs-on-the-Internet issue than you think. I don't know either; it's hard to find a real dialogue on these "objectionable speech" issues in this society.

Your example may be undermined by the underlying issues around voters being able to override constitutional principles by passing amendments with only a simple majority. (That is: The supreme court is supposed to be able to make decisions like "equal protection implies that gay marriage is legal" and have it stick even if it's unpopular. A majority vote by the people is not the last word in a constitutional republic; it's subject to checks and balances like everything else. That a 52% majority had the power to circumvent that by amending the constitution is troubling.)

That's not true. The campaign for Prop 8 didn't owe its success to grassroots support; most of that work was paid for by out-of-state religious interest groups with deep pockets (who cared very strongly, for reasons I can't fathom, whether people neither from their church nor from their state could get married). The campaign against Prop 8 was quite ambitious, with many impassioned supporters whose lives were changed by its passing, which unfortunately wasn't enough.

It doesn't sound so bad when you phrase it that way, actually -- choosing between slavery and free soup. Does that work anything like "cake or death"?

I am among many open-source supporters who think Richard Stallman is generally too far out on the fringe, but I think the opinions illustrated in his sci-fi story "The Right to Read" are a pretty dead-on assessment of what is going on here. Basically this is what happens when software vendors are confronted with the uncomfortable truth that software is not a tangible good and can't really be sold or rented out for a unit price, no matter how profitable it may be, and they redouble their efforts to force that business model into existence, to hell with the consumers.

If you use Microsoft Office, do yourself a favor and switch to OpenOffice as soon as possible. The sooner you do it, the fewer of your files you'll need to convert/jailbreak some day. (Plus you might help to stave off some big dystopian-future scenario, which is nice.)

So you're given an incentive to cover your eyes while speeding? Wow, this system just keeps sounding better and better.