You forgot: self-diagnosed "Aspie" with an unearned superiority complex.

Ironically, in my experience, the majority of self-diagnosed "Aspies" seem to be perfectly normal people who chose to focus on academics to the exclusion of social skills because they didn't have what it takes to master both. Nevertheless, geeks with social skills are, in my experience, the vast majority. For every John Nash, there are dozens of Richard Feynmans. Asocial geeks tend not to realize this because, well, because they don't get out much. (And because they watch too many Hollywood movies.) :)

No. First of all, this is a complex case with dozens of claims on both sides, and dozens of motions for summary judgment have been filed, but the one you're probably thinking of is IBM's motion to dismiss SCO's infringement claims. That has not been ruled on. The basis for the motion was two-fold: A) SCO was not sufficiently specific about where the infringement occurred, and B) SCO didn't own the code in the first place and had no standing to sue. Point A was used to throw out about 90% of SCO's alleged evidence, leaving approx. 300 lines of code, but the motion (and the trial) was then suspending pending the outcome of SCO v Novell. Once the trial resumes, the question of ownership is almost certainly going to be one of the first things looked at, and it's nearly certain that IBM will finally win their motion.

Second of all, you have the "issues of law" thing backwards. The judge decides issues of law, while a jury decides issues of fact. Issues of law are exactly what summary judgment is intended to resolve--and legal claims almost always involve both matters of law and fact. For the infringement, it seems like there will be no facts left in dispute--SCO doesn't own the code they claim was infringed, and thus, as a matter of law, has no standing to sue. (Although it's possible that those 300 lines of code will re-appear when it comes time to discuss IBM's Lantham Act claims, as SCO desperately tries to show that they had some basis for all the horrific public statements they made about IBM.)

Darl was just a hired gun all along, brought in by the real villains of the piece who have been doing their best to hide behind the curtain of the corporate veil, but almost certainly include Ralph Yarro as a (if not the) real mastermind. The fact that Canopy told Yarro to go away and take The SCO Group with him is pretty strong (albeit circumstantial) evidence that Yarro is deeply involved in the whole plot.

Darl just did what he was paid to do. Sure, he shouldn't get off scott-free, but trying to paint him as the villain who deserves all our fury is exactly what the real bad guys want.

Have you read Brooks? Set a zombie on fire, and now you're facing a flaming zombie, lurching around, trying to eat your brains, and, incidentally, setting everything around it on fire--possibly including you.

Before you try fire as an anti-zombie measure, you need to find out whether you're dealing with a Pratchett zombie or a Brooks/Romero type zombie. One key difference is that Pratchett zombies are smart. SCO? Not so much. :)

Say what? The big three US broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) all have three hours of prime-time, shown from 8-11 everywhere except the central time zone. This is the way its been done for decades, and nothing has changed. There's no "distant past" about it. Fox only produces two hours of prime-time, so Fox affiliates may show news at 10. The only broadcast stations that show "9pm news" are independents (or maybe affiliates of The CW--I don't really pay that much attention), and Fox affiliates in the central time zone.

"Film at 11" means the news footage is going to be shown during the 11 pm news broadcast. If the phrase doesn't make sense to you, you either live in the central time zone, outside the US, or don't pay much attention to broadcast television. All of which are reasonable excuses for ignorance, but not for posting nonsense.

Bzzt, thanks for playing!

I don't mind grammar nazis; what I do mind are people who espouse incorrect grammar based on ridiculous, made-up rules that don't actually apply to English.

Here's what the M-W Dictionary of English Usage has to say:

(Emphasis mine.)

As an obvious example, you will never hear someone say, "I made fewer than $50k last year," even though money is perfectly countable. You'll never hear it because it's ungrammatical, even though it follows your made-up rule. The actual rules are non-trivial, which is why M-W devotes a couple of pages to 'em.

Wikipedia does allow others to mirror their content! Which rather throws a spanner in your argument. As for Linux distros, the traffic is negligible; the free distros can get by on donations from big companies that are already paying for enough bandwidth to make the distro-related traffic a drop in the bucket. Debian, for example, has relied for years on hosting services provided by HP (which uses a lot of Debian internally). If something changed--if, for example, Debian became as popular as Wikipedia--you'd see Debian out there begging for funds too.

Amusing, but...

Except for all those asexual life-forms, like amoebae and bacteria--the vast majority of life on this planet.

Unless you're talking about the heat-death of the universe, then the 100% fatality thing is pretty much limited to sexual creatures. If you are talking about the heat-death of the universe, then carbon atoms are as close to being alive by your definition as E. Coli.

Hmm, that's a fair point. OTOH, if your virus were intended to target one or more GPL'd programs specifically (if, for example, MS decided to release a virus to go after Cygnus), then it could be considered an attempt to distribute a derivative work, just as the original NeXT Objective-C compiler was. NeXT carefully tried to separate their front end from the rest of GCC, and make the users link it in manually, but after their lawyers talked to the FSF lawyers, they quickly backed down and released their formerly binary-only front end under the GPL. Which is why GCC includes an Objective-C compiler today. On paper, it may look like NeXT had found a perfect way around the GPL, but the law takes intent into account, and it was clearly their intent to distribute a derivative work, even though technically all they distributed was their own work and a set of instructions.

Note that this could be a problem for anyone writing a virus to target GNU/Linux, at least if it were at all dependent on either the kernel or core GNU facilities. A POSIX-compliant or Single-Unix-Spec-compliant virus that just happened to be able to target Linux, though, would probably be ok. But since viruses often take advantage of flaws in an implementation, it would probably be a lot harder to create a successful virus that ignored implementation completely.

Heck, in the end, it's probably just easier and safer to go ahead and GPL your virus. There's no downside, and it may have unexpected benefits. :)

You know what? I'm shocked to find myself saying this--I didn't even think it was possible--but...I think you just insulted Best Buy!