Why do you care that much about decorum? Stop with the superficial bullshit please. It's not like these people insert phrases like "epic fail" every 2 seconds of their speech. They used it appropriately and judiciously.

Can we please chill with the rhetoric? Oracle is not a superpower, for fuck's sake. Secondly, Oracle's relationship with open source is not entirely clear. Oracle currently seems to be at odds with at least some open source initiatives. So I wouldn't be saying that Oracle is "buying in" if I were in your place.

It's neither here nor there for the actual Free Software movement itself because the Free Software movement transcends governments, nations, and other such trifles. So any new user of the Free Software is a welcome addition, but to say that it's a breakthrough people are waiting for is a bit much.

I seriously hope Firefox doesn't change how the awesome bar works. That's one of the many things I prefer in Firefox to Chrome and all other browsers.

FF, and especially FF4 are very fast for me on Macbook. As fast as Chrome for all intents and purposes. Of course that's not scientific, but then there do exist some benchmarks and you can look them up yourself.

These are the same type of guys that gave us statistically accurate risk modeling for the complex derivative securities and we know how well that turned out. One must be careful with mathematical models, especially when you're modeling sentiment.

Contemporaries? Really now? There was a big diversity of opinion on this matter inside China even during the time of Confucious. Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi) was a notorious critic of Confucian thinking, and Daoism, of which Chuang Tzu is the second highest ranking patriarch after Lao Tzu, is arguably as popular and as essentially Chinese as is Confucianism.

Bullshit. Please cite the codex of the law that allows copyright of characters. I'm waiting.

Wrong. It has to be a perfect copy. Obviously if you add a pimple to the exact copy, it will be infringing. There is some standard to how much novelty is required to make a non-infringing work, but you can certainly make a non-infringing inspired-by mouse.

You're making shit up. Copyright is very simple. Copyright doesn't protect ideas. (Patents don't protect ideas either btw, no law does.) It doesn't even protect likeness! Copyright only protects the exact image, the exact sound, and the exact text. That's it. You are allowed to cite text without breaking copyright. You're allowed to mix sound and art also without breaking copyright. You're basically not allowed to cut-n-paste things verbatim. That's it.

So if you draw something that is reminiscent of pac-man but isn't a direct cut-n-paste of the original graphic, it's not a copyright violation. It's that simple.

There is no such thing as "IP." IP is a bogus concept that doesn't exist in law. It's more like a dream of some greedy people rather than reality. The dream is that virtual things and ideas could be privatized. It won't happen.

I don't. I get all my books on paper. ebooks are raw deal.