I have no particular problems with people protecting their investment however they wish and with DRM. My main concern is with the totally obnoxious and excessive duration of copyright and there should be provision for removing DRM when copyright ends. It should last no more than the 20 years of inventions which also are a big investment, often much larger, on the part of the people who make them. People are I think conflating the problems in their minds and it sours the whole business.

Well if I was in another manufacturing company contracted with Oracle I'd be start thinking would I be breaking my contract by shovelling a bit of money to the free alternatives so my customers don't get locked in with Oracle. After all Oracle might find some such other such reason of equal validity for not supporting them.

Yes I would agree this is the main problem. The place is infested with people with a mission to make their view the only view that WIkipedia will show. And not just on the topics you'd expect like climate change and abortion and Israel and evolution etc. Even fairly trivial topics have their local warriors. And many of the people complaining about WIkipedia are edit warriors who they have finally managed to get themselves banned despite the extreme difficulty of doing so if they just remain halfway polite. Admins are not the problem. They have too little power if anything to get rid of troublemakers efficiently.

They use anti-terrorism for all sorts of things in the UK like throwing a party member out of a political meeting because they heckle.

I don't see anything about what these people in the intelligence services are engaged in. For instance if they rob, kill or torture people will publishing anything about that be lawful? Does it mean that the intelligence services can employ lowlife to do their work and if they do a few crimes on their way they get immunity from investigation? Looks like a bunch of opportunities to me. And why anyway are intelligence services so special compared to anybody else? If you know someone is going to be endangered by your actions shouldn't you tell them in advance anyway so they can prepare?

If that's true then he might have been responsible at least in part for the end of the medieval warm period start of the little ice age. Same as the cooling down again after America was discovered has been attributed by some to the death by disease of so many people there and the regrowth of trees in the Amazon basic. You can have too much of a good thing as far as being green is concerned!

I just checked two sites I run. Seemingly the site I want to be basic is 60% basic 34% intermediate and 4% advanced. So in parts it's more advanced than slashdot so probably I have failed a little there! The other one is just my general stuff and it works out a quarter basic, half intermediate and a quarter advanced which I guess is probably about right. Thanks Google, I think that can be a great help to me even if I won't be dumbing down my searches. ~~~~

And how often have you replied to some spam saying you want to opt out? It's a recipe for having a hundred times as much spam now they know you read it. It's confirmation that you are a prime candidate for spam. So now they want you to stick your email in a register saying you don't want the stuff. Give me a break. Anyone like that I'll avoid like a plague.

Well Wikipedia has had to contend with lots of enraged idiots who think they are something to do with WIkiLeaks, lets see how OpenOffice does with this lot. Can't they think of a decent name or themselves?

Well I had a read of the Acceptable Use Policy above and I can't see any grounds under that unless you include embarrassing officials as offensive. They're doing nothing illegal, mainly it's a question of extent compared to what newspapers do every day of the week. I guess they must have an 'or any other reason why' clause somewhere or else have just done it knowing they won't be sued.

Anglo Irish I meant of course - dunno why I make slips like that

Everywhere needs its unique selling points. Germany is in the centre of a large population and doesn't need to transport stuff by ship and air, Ireland has to compete by cutting down costs to companies. As to the huge amount, yes I think Ireland would have been better just guaranteeing its own citizens and letting Allied Irish fall over. The other banks weren't anywhere near so bad. It had a bank strike for ages once and the economy grew during that time so there's no need to lie down like a doormat for the banks. A proportion of the debt was due to a construction boom which was a large financial bubble but most was nothing to do with Ireland but more to other banks mainly in Europe channeling stuff through Ireland so quite a bit now if anything is Ireland helping prop up America which is just plain stupid. Those other banks know they'd be in very big trouble if the Irish bans fell over and that's why the other countries are rallying around offering loans. They know if anything happened it wouldn't just affect Ireland - in fact some of them could easily be far worse hit.