It may be better to realize that rewriting it in Python will prevent this whole class of problems and a bunch of others, and is the way to go.

It's well known among programmer circles that rewriting a program in a different language in order to work around bugs you don't understand just tends to make things worse. Such may be the same with patent laws.

Normally journals claim copyright on the published version of the paper, after it's been edited and typeset by the journal, and don't mind academics sharing the original "preprint" version that was edited and typeset by the original author. (They don't have any reasonable copyright claim on the preprints anyway.) Sending takedowns on preprints is unusual enough to make the news, which is why it's on Slashdot now.

The journal also doesn't pay the academics for their papers; journals work like distributors in the retail market, i.e. their purpose is to make the papers more widely available / discoverable / searchable, in addition to reviewing them to ensure appropriateness and quality (although it's arguable that this is actually a useful function of the journal, given that they don't pay the reviewers either).

Incidentally, my papers have been published in multiple conference proceedings, and I didn't sign a contract for any of them. I assume the contract exists, but the papers were all coauthored, and I think the journals only sought a contract with one of the authors. If this is indeed the case, it makes the situation even more complex.

I currently develop on a laptop with a little under 3GB main memory (and around as much swap). I haven't really noticed memory pressure. (Probably because while I'm programming, I tend not to have much open other than terminals and text editors; maybe a separate window for documentation.) I have more memory pressure when I'm web-browsing (like I am now), rather than developing. (The two activities are mutually exclusive for me; I can't concentrate on programming when I have Slashdot to distract me.)

I'm not convinced that it necessarily means the hardware will be particularly Linux-suited. I bought a Linux (Ubuntu) laptop from Dell a while back (this was in the era of Ubuntu Feisty, I think?). It came with a manual for getting started on Windows, and had a Windows key on the keyboard (which the installed version of Ubuntu happily interpreted as Super, as it usually does). It didn't particularly feel like anything other than a standard Windows Dell laptop that someone had installed Ubuntu on prior to shipping. (Also, the touchpad didn't work, except for a few minutes a few weeks after I obtained it; I suspect that might have been a hardware issue rather than drivers, though. I got used to doing without it.)

If you want a "this cannot happen" with core dump in C, just use abort(). Unless its behaviour is specifically overriden, it's specified to exit the program as unsuccessful termination by the C standards (e.g. 7.22.4.1p2 of C11), and to core dump by POSIX (about as portable as you can get where core dumps are concerned; in straight C, they might not necessarily exist). It also has the benefit of being pretty short, and not undefined behaviour at all.

Of course, that doesn't work in the kernel, but then neither would the other methods you suggested.

You can do that in Windows 8 too, right-click the very bottom-left corner of the screen. (The main problem with that is that it's basically impossible to discover until someone tells you about it.)

It's worse than that. In general, there's nothing stopping anyone sending an email from any address they like; the From: address is simply written onto the email by the sender, much the same way as there's nothing preventing someone sending physical mail writing any return address they like on the envelope. Of course, this makes it kind-of easy to spam, so various methods have sprung up over the years for people to validate the From: address on an email, but there's no universal method that will work for every email you might ever receive.

In general, you should never trust the From: address on an email for any purpose whatsoever other than determining who the sender wants you to think they are.

It's best known for working in some old, buggy FORTRAN situations. Nowadays, it's legal INTERCAL too, albeit mostly to be perverse (and in some compilers, you may have to alias the constant to a variable to be able to assign to it without the compiler complaining).

In gcc, you can do -Werror=parentheses if you want to make this an error rather than a warning.

I like this trick, and am glad that you're publicising it. It was a pretty clever addition to many compilers; the compilers that don't understand it won't reject the code, the compilers that do will know it's intentional. And maintenance programmers reading the code will know it's intentional, too.

You have to do this no matter what privilege escalation method you use, because a rogue administrator might have left a random setuid binary around somewhere. Or has put a logic bomb in the script. Or something like that. Having only one door to guard is no use when the inside of the building carries a bunch of materials for building extra doors.

In the UK, it's impossible for the upper house to block a bill for more than two sessions; for bills purely about funding/taxation, it's one month. This seems to be a better solution to the solution used by the US, but I prefer Australia's solution even more.

Not every site does. For instance, I vaguely remembered that Microsoft EULAs have jurisdiction based on the country where you live, with the "you consent to jurisdiction in Washington" bit only applying to Americans. I checked the Terms of Service for Bing, and I was right. (For instance, for Europeans, it uses Luxembourg law for breaches of the ToS specifically, and the local jurisdiction for other claims.) Microsoft seems to have local companies set up for the purpose of sorting out contracts with people in countries other than the US. Many other sites don't seem to consider jurisdictional issues in their TOS at all. I suspect that that might lead to complications if they ever have to sue someone, but it's nicer for their users. Incidentally, local jurisdiction clauses in a ToS are actually one reason that causes me to avoid agreeing to them, unless they're set up in such a way that they only apply if I invoke them, they can't be invoked against me. (I end up avoiding a large number of major websites because of this.)

Alt-e opens a menu whose name starts with E. AltGr-e is (on Windows, at least) a standard way to type é. So you can't really conflate the two.

I use Caps Lock as my compose key, and fix two problems at once (not having a compose key, and hitting Caps Lock by mistake; hitting Compose by mistake is pretty minor, really).