This would be the perfect opportunity for the Pope to fire a second salvo by commenting on the Turkish oppression of its Kurdish minority...

Well, you're indeed correct; whisky is made through treating the malt with peat smoke. Whiskey, otoh, isn't.

Surely a class 4 should be enough? If you have to deal with temporary or prolonged soaking in liquid you've got bigger problems; a crawlspace isn't supposed to be under water.

You know what? Books contain an even greater potential for spoilers. Yet I bet you don't typically flip to the last chapter and read that before reading the rest of the book. Yet those who do probably do so because they want to. Just like no gamer would dive into the source code unless they had a reason to.

Not needed if you've ever heard of Donald Knuth's reward checks, something that I'd expect most Slashdot readers have.

2006 is almost a decade ago...

Just use a variant of the Donald Knuth reward check method. The first patent that gets invalidated will incur a 1 cent cut from the patent office budget. The second one a 2 cent cut, etc. After a few weeks the USPTA would have no option except shut down.

I'm fairly certain that the terms of service explicitly forbids that kind of use.

Yeah, same here -- the various Humble Bundles put me way past $50 yearly.

I have bought three non-HB apps though. Bridge Baron, Wordfeud and Carcassonne.

FWIW the film in question (Beck - Levande begravd) was a total fiasco at the box office... The fine (if ever paid) would likely provide a higher income than the film netted at the cinema.

The *real* solution is to stop issuing software patents in the short term and patents in general in the longer term.

Nope. If he was intending to use possessive sense then that "for" shouldn't be there.

Either he meant "others' spelling" ("other people's spelling") or "someone else's spelling" or "others about spelling" (ok, I admit, "for" might possible correct too -- English is not my native tongue, nor am I a language scholar). "other's for spelling" doesn't make sense.

In before the, now, stereotypical US response of "your governments do it too!"...

1) No, we have liberty and freedom in Europe.

I dunno about other European countries, but in Sweden we definitely have a counterpart to NSA (FRA) that does similarly all-encompassing surveillance, all of course under the guise of "anti-terrorism". As an added "bonus" the laws regulating FRA explicitly says that they're allowed to exchange the information with foreign nations (read the US).

To dupe citizens into believing that the information isn't abused (of course the mere fact that the information is collected is abuse, but...) a special group has been set up to monitor the use of the information. But despite finding a lot of violations of the (already very permissive) regulations, FRA does not rectify any of their so called mistakes.

One example is that they're not allowed to save the information more than a certain time period (I believe it's 6 months). "Oh, but we copied the information to a different database! Now it's not raw data anymore, it's refined intellgence reports that aren't covered by that time limitation".

But other than that I agree. Two (or many) wrongs doesn't make a right.

So far my planning involves three different 2-star restaurants; 1-2 festivals (Amphi plus maybe something else); Roger Waters' The Wall (second time I see it); a C=64 demoparty; a visit to Legoland and then two weeks I haven't yet made plans for (will probably involve more restaurant visits).