The world's oldest running car is an 1830's vintage French steamer, currently on exhibit at the Automobile Museum in St. Petersburg FL.

FWIW.

In Bivens versus six unnamed agents (1971), the US Supreme Court said that sovereign immunity does not apply for violations of Constitutional rights; moreover, liability goes all the way to the top, to the official which sets the policy. And the 7th Circuit recently said that Donald Rumsfeld gets to enjoy that lack of immunity, for what happened at Gitmo.

She should follow the lead of Aaron Tobey http://m.reason.com/26819/show/3fe6fddb77a895bbc137549ae0bff688&t=179ecfc42749c8364dcc4ef8ef6095a6: not to be raped is certainly a Fourth-Amendment Constitutional right, and in Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents (1971), the Supreme Court ruling in Bivens says you can seek monetary damages for the violation of your constitutional rights -- all the way to the top of the responsible agency; sovereign immunity does not apply for violation of Constitutional rights . Following this precedent, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals said that Rumsfeld is not immune for violations at Gitmo.

Tobey is suing Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole; she should, too.\

I've used Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, CentOS, etc, and all of them have relatively poor repos compared to Mandriva and I had to hunt around...they are still pumping out an excellent distro.

I have to work with a variety of distros (RHEL, SuSE, Fedora, CentOS, ubunto) on the servers at my office, as well as running Mandriva on desktops and at home, and agree it is far the easiest to deal with in terms of available repos, etc. (Just try building the latest GRASS on SuSE!)

French people + documentation apparently = disastrous mess

Agreed. When I was studying computability theory, one of the texts was by a native French-speaker, the other native-Greek. I had to understand the proofs in order to be able to figure out what the words in the theorem-statements meant!

However, liberals are often anti-copyright, so they may surprise me.

Interestingly enough, the two Justices who got the Eldred decision right were Breyer on the left and Thomas on the right...

NO

As a mathematician I claim to be professionally expert in the meaning of the word "limited". Working with limits is my profession.

In my nonhumble amd expert opinion, the Eldred decision took as fanciful a definition of "limited" as Bill Clinton did with his "It all depends upon what the meaning of 'is' is.".

Frankly, in Eldred the Supreme Court broke the Law of the Land.

But patent law requires sufficient disclosure for the patented invention to be duplicated by one with only normal skills in the subject area.

I strongly doubt he does this :-)

Many contracts are not legally binding.

IANAL, but...

Two good examples: real estate transfers and copyright transfers, both of which require specific written language.

The dentist's contract is inconsistent with the copyright law's requirements for copyright transfer (and hence is null and void, as a matter of law).

It is extortion for the doctor or dentist to use his position of authority so to attempt to coerce the patient in a manner contrary to law.

... and show up with a federal marshall and an ex parte seizure order allowing Google to seize all the relevant hardware !!

IMNHO, copyright law gives the copyright holder far too much power in this matter, but that's the way the law is written.

I've got one word to describe you: Thief! -- Carlie Coats
Author of >380,000 lines of GPL/LGPL environmental modeling code.