Yes, that's true, but the thing that makes GP a troll in this situation is that his lack of insight is completely uninteresting. His post is completely useless.

For the record, knitting is just banging two metal sticks together with some curled-up thread mashed in. I don't know anything about it, but knitting is stupid, and there can be no relevant difference between different kinds of knitting since "it takes 'true mastery' to even find any kind of difference". I include weaving, sewing and embroidery in the set {differend kinds of knitting}, by the way, since they all look the same to me.

That makes it clearer for me. Thanks for taking the time :)

IANAL, but are you sure this is the case? I believe that in my country (Norway) at least, you're still the sole proprietor of your IP. You can sign an exclusivity contract, which of course puts restrictions on what you can do with your IP, but it can't put any liability on you for rights you've granted in the past (although an already contracted exclusivity can be transferred). Did they want to gain exclusive rights to code you'd already published under the GPL?

Under our laws, (again I believe that) that would make no sense. If there was a mechanism by which the license for a piece of code could be retroactively retracted most O project would have had huge problems. A license is different from a contract, and a license can't preclude other uses in the manner that a contract can. Even ignoring that, however, you would still be able to apply as many licenses a you want to your code. Does the GPL preclude that you grant, for instance, a BSD or Apache license for code which you wrote yourself?

Naturally I otherwise agree with your post :)

True, that. "wierds" is indeed a very weird word.

No, the light from the sun is white. The reason why it appears yellow in the sky is that a good portion of the blue-ish spectrum is spread in the atmosphere, making the sky blue, but hindering most of the blue light coming directly from the sun. The aggregated daylight during mid-day is indeed white, being the sum of direct sunlight plus the other parts of the spectrum reflected in the atmosphere from other directions. Sunlight's not a certain colour in the spectrum, more or less by necessity it's a mix of *all* visible colours.

The human eye is most sensitive to green light a lower intensities, and yellowish-green at higher intensities. This is due to the nature of the colour receptors in our eyes. Observe the visibility of equally powerful red, blue and green laser beams to verify this.

Yes, that's common. As a curiosity, in Norway we use liters/10 km. That's because 10km is the length of a Scandinavian mile, commonly used in colloquial speech in Norway.

Of course the l/100km unit is intuitively understandable for us, and it's also true that it makes more sense than mpg.

I'd say that the really dumpy hotels are just badly managed. Yes, it costs a bit more to keep your facilities maintained and properly cleaned as opposed to let everything run down, but nothing like the 2-3x increase in price that you'll typically pay at a decent hotel compared to a dump. The hotel might need to have a bit more cost for cleaning and maintenance personnel, but the cost is seriously not that high, and it makes sense to aim for repeat business.

As an example: one of my nicest stays was five nights at a nine-room B&B in Edinborough, run by an elderly widow (not active anymore, she probably retired) . Although the building was old and creaky the staff (one girl) was very friendly and helpful, the rooms were spotlessly clean, they had a cosy library-ish common room with a fireplace constantly lit in the evening, and the landlady prepared a home-cooked breakfast every day (brought to you in your room if you were to badly hung-over from sampling lokal whisky the previous night, regardless of whether you really wanted it). The price was £23/night. They made a good bit of extra money by providing simple food and drinks in the evening, but that was also at a reasonable price.

The point is that as they managed to make money (they did, I asked) running a pleasant establishment at budget prices, there's no reason why any dump motel shouldn't be able to convert into a nice place to stay while keeping a similar price point. No, they might not be able to provide shirt press and shoe polishing included (although I'm quite confident that the landlady at the mentioned B&B would have done that at no extra cost), but they *can* keep the place clean, have helpful and service-minded staff, and generally be not-a-dump at a budget as long as they have proper management that cares.

PS my keyboard has a marginal 's' key, apologies if I missed any of them.

It's short for Gibibyte.

Install all games to an HDD, and only keep the games you're actually playing on the SSD. Under Windows 7 I use a 120GB SSD for OS and the 2-3 games I'm currently playing by using Steam Mover. Since it's simply a GUI for a few cmd commands (mklink being the central one) it'll work for any directory you point it at, not just Steam games, and it's very robust.

If you're on Linux you're likely already familiar with some ways of doing this, if not I can give you a few pointers :)

Um, science fiction doesn't have to be technology-focused, and most of the best stories aren't (with some exceptions where some exotic tech is a plot device). Sure, as many sci-fi stories occurs in the future there is an assumption that new technology have been marching on, but many interesting stories concern themselves with how humans react to the possibilities enabled by technology and new societal structures, rather than the technology itself. Nineteen Eigthy-four is specifically a future dystopia, but I'd certainly place it within the Sci-Fi genre.

On a side note, I've found that providing performance specifics about technology, specifically computers, are a sure sign of *bad* Sci-Fi. I read a novel written in 1992 set in 2007 where one particular computer had a CPU of 400 MHz and was equipped with "several hundred megabytes of memory". Bad Sci-Fi writers: restrict yourself to describing what amazing feats the wrist-computer is capable of, do not venture into providing explicit hardware specifications :)

I can't prove it as I don't know the math, but I've heard it explained this way:

Imagine a lot of parallel chess games between Magnus Carlsen and Vishy Anand. There might be all three outcomes and a lot of different games played, but not every possible game. The ones where one player loses in five moves, or one player overlooks a trivial mate-in-one, or both players fumble so much as to resemble novice players aren't likely to exist anywhere. The probabilities are simply too low in a game between two high-level chess players.

Yup, Norwegian here. We weren't really affected adversely over here. I am not at all qualified to discern why, but the people who are generally claim it's because of our very solid societal structure and general lack of private interests' influence on our political system, which makes us less vulnerable to external market swings.

Norway as a nation is dependant on export industries (oil & gas, power, cargo shipping services, fish), and a few companies did suffer, but the regular Joes and Joettes didn't really feel any impact at all from the crash.

And I habitually bring my Kobo reader everywhere I go, and read every time I have a few minutes to kill. It fits nicely in a jacket/cargo pocket. I usually read several hours each day, and there are several reasons why I also bring it when leaving my apartment:

• * When reading for hours at a time the better display eliminates eyestrain
• * Battery concerns is not an issue
• * The display is larger and fits more text, making for a more comfortable reading experience
• * Fewer distractions than on a phone

If the phone is good enough for you when it comes to reading, that's great, and I would also like that to be the case for me. But for me it's not cutting it, so I end up choosing clothes based on whether they can store my (admittedly light and sleek, but bulkier than a phone) e-reader. I really, really hope that E-Ink aren't going away anytime soon.

The problem with this line of thought is that, to continue the analogy, a lot of your legitimate house guests will be kept out by the locks, while the criminals outside all know that you don't lock your cellar hatch and can help themselves.

Most DRM to date don't even slow down the pirates, as long as someone can see the content they can copy it. My experience is mostly from working at a publishing company, and the legitimate customers have a far easier time using a non-crippled file than a DRM'ed one. Basically, DRM is just a big fuck you to your legitimate customers, especially on downloaded files that are ostensibly usable anywhere like an ebook.

That said, I don't really understand why DRM-free streaming is so scary to content providers. Strong authentication would hinder casual link sharing, and the pirates would be able to make a copy of your stream even with any DRM you could imagine, as long as they could see the content. The only ones to suffer are legitimate customers that can't view the content because they don't have the right combination of equipment and software. The music business, and to a lesser degree the ebook industry, have found that in going DRM-free you can still rely on the majority of customers to be perfectly allright with paying for a good product, and they are happy that they can be sure of it being accessible. Currently the pirates are far superior when it comes to objective quality of product in the movie/TV-show department.