I hope you are paying royalties to the guy who patented a line, since you used two of them.

GNU is considerably larger than Linux. My paper napkin calculations show the entire kernel to be roughly half the size of gcc. No, not including g++, just gcc. So if a distro is built and distributed with gcc as the default compiler, then it's already more like GNU/Linux. Most Linux-based distros, though, easily come with 10 times as much GNU.

Hehehe. I, for one, don't understand for the life of me why it is OK to share videos of soldiers shooting at children with automatic weapons, for real. Or what Lucas did with kids in the prequels. How is that OK, and a depiction of a fictional sex abuse act is not OK? I think children involved in actual acts would strongly agree with me, too.

Or what about any movie where a super-villain is trying to destroy the world? Why are we OK with looking at that imagery? Isn't that the worst fucking thing that one can try to do? Why do people get gold prizes for depicting this, and prison time for monkeys with no clothes on?

This. I think there is a fundamental limitation on passwords: human brains suck at remembering good ones. This excuse will make a ton of sense in the future world, where digital security is taken seriously. At least as seriously as locking doors today.

Even though I would love to see every racketeer prosecuted to the full extent of the law, a more useful approach would be to end the war on sharing. Only legalizing non-commercial file-sharing will protect the public from these sharks.

And don't forget about the Human horn!

Look at the patent, which, by the way, has 1 content-free claim (you didn't know that?), and a few crude pictures. I remember drawing things like that in high school. All I claim is that it's been thought of before, but nice trolling.

So his argument is flawed because he didn't chew it up for you like I did? Try again.

It's worse than that. Patents don't deny access to information, but they curtail our freedom to help each other. And those who register patents almost never think of it first. Did Apple think first of a rectangular device with rounded corners?

As usual, Richard Stallman has a great solution:

This will work because a very similar law already works in the medical field. Just like surgeons, who can safely ignore procedural patents to save lives, programmers and distributors of free software deserve complete patent immunity because their work is entirely gratis, and benefits the whole world.

Wired article (gods help you if you don't use adblock and noscript).

Don't bother.

sed s/CVS/CSV/

Yes, yes, yes. The submitter sounds like he wants to digitize a bunch of files, so I would recommend a good file system. Any stable filesystem will do, like ext4 for instance.

Avoid metadata within a file for as long as possible. It will bury you. If date and bill amount is all you need, then just stick them into the file name.

YYYY-MM-DD.amount.unit.short-description.pdf

2013-04-07.-3975.us-cents.how-much-this-advice-will-cost-you.pdf

Now you can pile your files into, say, ~/my-files/ in any way whatever. You can create a category tree, for example, to allow you to find files in a file manager in 3 clicks. For more complex tasks you can just use bash, find, and the rest of the userland. It does not get simpler or more portable than that. In particular, it is trivial to convert this structure into a CVS, which you can suck into a spreadsheet or a database of your choice.

Lensing effects in visible light should count as a photo of a blackhole, IMHO, since the event horizon is theoretically invisible.

Could easily be a god dividing by every real number other than zero, which would be good enough.

Irrelevant, even of true. There are much simpler ways that don't have to use any fancy chemistry or manufacturing processes, like solar updraft towers, solar thermal collectors, and concentrated solar power.

You seem to think that an appeal to authority is a valid rule of inference. In mathematics, too. Oookay.

Does it occur to you that just because some way of doing science is very popular, it doesn't mean it's valid, or even superior?

Please, don't reply (unless you wont to agree for a change), just ponder.