This quite cool: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidinger's_brush

They'd never have got that one past Steve.

I think Sartre and George Lucas said it best:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-uQWNd540I

Moore knows the history perfectly well. The book isn't about Guy Fawkes, it's about an anarchist who uses powerful symbols associated with Fawkes in a dystopia set centuries later, which owes much more to the politics of Britain under Margaret Thatcher than it does to historical plots against James I. By the time Moore was growing up, Guy Fawkes had become an ambiguous figure in the popular imagination; still burnt in effigy, but somehow 'remembered' with a degree of respect or even affection (especially if you weren't a fan of the government of the day). FTA:

"Jump forward 300 years, though, to the battered post-war England of the 1950s, and the saturnine insurrectionary had taken on more ambiguous connotations...When parents explained to their offspring about Guy Fawkes and his attempt to blow up Parliament, there always seemed to be an undertone of admiration in their voices, or at least there did in Northampton...While that era's children perhaps didn't see Fawkes as a hero, they certainly didn't see him as the villainous scapegoat he'd originally been intended as."

Nothing, really. Their solution, for all the smoke and mirrors about 'revolutionary patent pending technology', sounds like it would make cheating a bit inconvenient, but far from difficult. However sophisticated their 'policing' software is, there'd be nothing to stop a user (e.g.) manually backing up their iPod to a second computer before each sale. The tracks will supposedly be wiped from the first (policed) computer, and from the iPod when it re-syncs, but not from the backup location.

Harder to do this 'legally' for ebooks, which are still mostly DRMd, allowing the publishers to invoke laws like the DMCA to crack down on this type of service.

It's much more flexible than that - e.g., if you start with the mini.iso you can choose a basic text-mode minimal installation. You can then add one of several alternative KDE bundles with a single sudo apt-get install command. The 'kde-plasma-desktop' system is pretty minimal. No Gnome, no Unity, no Kubuntu, just basic KDE on an Ubuntu base. The 'kde-standard' and 'kde-full' packages give you progressively larger standard installations, but still without the Kubuntu stuff (which is available in the 'kubuntu-desktop' package if you ever want it).

Well, exactly. But you can have a plain Ubuntu/KDE if you prefer.

http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/download#ubuntu
http://mate-desktop.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAT%C3%89_(desktop_environment)

You could use Ubuntu.

Kubuntu is not the only way to get KDE on Ubuntu. There are also full, standard and minimal KDE packages available to any Ubuntu variant from the standard repositories. Just like the equivalent Debian packages, you get a standard desktop without all the Kubuntu customisations. The same applies to Xfce and LXDE, which are also available in vanilla forms without the Xubuntu or Lubuntu tweaks or alternative packages.

The guy who successfully campaigned for the UK government to issue an official apology about the treatment of Turing (rather than a pardon) comments about this here:

http://blog.jgc.org/2011/11/why-im-not-supporting-campaign-for.html

"I could get behind a petition for a pardon for all those people, especially since living people are still hurt by that law, but not just for Turing. Pardoning him doesn't help the living...But even that's unnecessary...Chapter 4 of the [Protection of Freedoms Bill 2010-12 - legislation in progress and close to completion] specifically allows for the disregarding of convictions under the old law that was used against Turing. Once disregarded the law causes their convictions to be deleted. It's not quite the same thing as a pardon, but its effect is to lift the burden of a criminal record from these living men."

Free? That's a clear violation of Edison's EULA!:

http://boingboing.net/2009/01/13/thomas-edisons-crapp.html