Yes. People would do well to read Bob the Angry Flower's guide to the apostrophe... you idiots!

I really like the name that phk (of FreeBSD and Varnish fame) came up with for permissions required for apps like that: chernobyl bits.

It has a really nice ominous and "this is wrong and you shouldn't do it" ring to it.

It is corruption because whenever money and opinions intermingle there is always a shift in perception on the part of the recipient. We humans are social animals. We cannot help but think "he helped me, I should help him".

Even if it doesn't sway the recipient's opinions, it causes the perception that it has. Part of the reason why Congress has such a low approval rating (lower than the US going communist for crying out loud!) is that people perceive that representatives are bought and paid for by special interests and whatever personal opinions and principles they might have had have been sold for filthy lucre long ago.

No. The patent system grants monopolies in order to encourage people to share the knowledge that goes into the things they invent. The fact that there is money to be had from licensing patents is an incentive against people locking up their inventions as trade secrets that die with their inventors.

Of course with software patents that sort of doesn't work because you can keep the actual implementation of your idea under wraps, so society doesn't really benefit much from granting a monopoly in this case.

The thing is... I don't think a free and open internet is possible together with strong, enforcable and actively enforced copyright laws.

Mozilla still haven't fixed Firefox to be able to handle automatic updating of language packs. Every time I update Firefox here, it reverts back to the language I installed it in (the rest of my family isn't as good as English as I am), so I have to manually go and get the newest en-GB.xpi.

Have you ever heard of ASCAP?

Or change your profile picture to a giant erect penis and start uploading full frontal nudity/porn. Your account will be banished shortly, I think.

Obligatory xkcd link.

And of course "Eternal Flame".

Yes, the capitalisation of my comment's subject is deliberate.

Mod Parent up. Leap seconds are a big part of why the timezone database needs to contain historic information.

"ooh I know this" — was it a Unix system? ;-)

As I understand it, VB.NET is a successor to VB6 in name only, i.e. it's more like C# with a BASIC-y syntax. Or am I completely off-base?

"open it's door"? Way to fail at a grammar nazi post there. http://www.angryflower.com/aposter3.jpg

But Stephen Fry had told us that there are two moons right now! The Moon and Cruithne... of course in a later episode he claimed there's 4 or 5...

They won't do that. That of course means they can't have a consistent policy on what should be outlawed, but that doesn't matter since the blocked sites will be outlaws.

Nice and arbitrary. And of course Working As Intended.