IANAA, but there's "creative accounting", and then there's fraud. One is perfectly legal, the other not. It's like the difference between "tax avoidance" and "tax evasion".

The thing with creative accounting is not that it hides or creates money from nothing (which would be fraud), but that it moves it around from other places/times. If you see a really good quarter now, it's possibly because some income has been moved from elsewhen. So it might be expected for the next few fiscal quarters to be more disappointing.

The old guy gets to leave on a high, and the new guy gets to "improve" the company's financials after an initial few bad quarters. It's an accountancy win-win.

You say that like it's not feasible, from a religious perspective, that the concepts behind the Star Wars universe were divine inspiration bestowed upon mankind by some supernatural Force.
That is, after all, no different to the root source of religious "knowledge" quoted by most (if not all) religions. The only difference is that other religions generally started with oral traditions and writing books, rather than going straight to cinema.

Think about the ways social engineering occurs. If you have, say, a call centre operator who gives out sensitive information to someone who is not who they say they are, there may be two failings:
1. They have deviated from the security procedure, or
2. The security procedures were insufficient.

In the case of (1), retraining. In the case of (2) redesign. Expecting the call centre operator to think back to some "social engineering" training is a ridiculous control notion, you instead tell them not to ever deviate from the security procedure.

But surely, if it is even possible for (1) to occur, it is a failure of the system storing the data; that sensitive information was disclosed without the security procedures being enforced.

The only thing I find strange is that GPL have been fairly efficient when it comes to being a sort of DRM.

The GPL isn't about Digital Rights(/Restriction) Management, it's about Legal Rights Management. That is; it doesn't actively try to prevent you from breaking the license, it just describes consequences for doing so.

I am surprised that no-one have released GPL-software on TPB with the license stripped away yet.

Piracy isn't generally an intellectual philosophy for the abolition of copyright; it's a practical philosophy for getting stuff cheaply and conveniently - which the GPL already allows.

Not only that, but the article linked provides no actual background to how it is "known" that Google "snitched" - just an unsourced quote.
A little digging indicates that the quote comes from a Financial Times article (registration required). Here are the relevant paragraphs:

Brussels punished Microsoft for failing to give at least 15m consumers a choice of web browser - a violation of a voluntary antitrust pact that was spotted and raised by Google and Opera, according to several people familiar with the case.

The US software group was left to police its own compliance and Mr Almunia said the lapse was brought to his attention by a Microsoft rival. According to people involved, Google and Opera informally provided the tip-off and helped investigators.

A lot of intelligent, enlightened people pursue peace, relaxation, and fun, through their work.

The Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license is currently the closest thing you're going to find to an official, globally effective, public domain grant.

I've seen several people comment that they have their home directory config files under version control. If you're using git for that, it's a fairly simple next step to then "backup" the repo to github.
"It's only config files; nobody would be interested in those."

Wont this legitimize any and all collections of personal information as long as the tax gets paid?

No.
Tax is levied on alcohol and tobacco, yet there are still licences and regulations behind selling either one.

I use the graph to see whose fork of a codebase is most up-to-date, or has potentially useful revisions not merged into the master. I've come across a few projects whose "master" repo is all but dead, and a dozen other people have continued development independently - sometimes having created duplicate bugfixes, etc.

Developers come and go (often without warning), so what I'd *really* like to see is an interface where the codebase is the focus, and no one user or team "owns" any kind of one-true-fork. All forks should be considered fundamentally equal, and judged on their individual merits (recent activity, most activity, most contributors, etc.).
And having issues, pull requests, etc. tied to one single fork is just wrong. If something affects the "main" fork, then it quite likely affects all the others, too, and those forks' maintainers should be allowed to accept or reject those items as it relates to their own fork.

They don't have to serve their constituents, they only have to do it *very slightly better* than the other party.

Not even that; they just have to say they will.
How many campaign "promises" are actually implemented, by any politician, in any country? Generally very few, from what I can tell.

Personally, I think that, at the end of an elected representative's term, they should be held to account in a court of law for every campaign "promise" they didn't fulfil; each such incident bringing a charge of fraud and/or treason.

Why is it that people who have evaded authorities find it irresistible to gloat about how "clever" they are to have outwitted cops.

I'd imagine that they generally don't.
The cops sure as hell aren't going to make an international song and dance about all the suspects who've slipped through their grasp, so the only such people you'll hear from are the self-aggrandising gloaters.

You're not likely to hear from anyone who's keeping a low profile, by definition.

Okay, so what US laws did Wikileaks break? How are the legal proceedings against the organisation going? Anyone been extradited to the US to stand trial?
No?
So on what legal grounds did Visa, Mastercard, et al, block payments to Wikileaks? I'm pretty sure they haven't blocked donations to Bradley Manning's defence fund; he being the only person actually charged with a crime directly relating to Wikileaks' activities.

If they expected something like that to be enforced, they should have made sure a clause to that effect was part of the license under which the software was released.

As they did, by choosing a copy-left licence.

From a practical point of view, though - attempting to track something as ephemeral as all previous developers' intentions would be a royal pain in the keister.

Not at all. The intentions of the previous developers are, for all practical purposes, described by the license under which they chose to distribute their contributions.

That probably wouldn't be easy as too many things are evolving too rapidly in Linux ATM

Two words: Debian Stable
Or, if they stick to Ubuntu, three words: Long Term Support