What toxic chemicals are used to make solar panels?

cadmium, copper-indium, gallium arsenide, polyvinyl fluoride, etc.

Thankfully, those of us who use emacs just run M-x calc to get back to an RPN calculator which actually calculates numbers. (It's pretty much the main reason why my 48gx sits on my shelf waiting to be used.)

2 + x - 4 = 3x

It's simple to solve for x using RPN:

2
4
-
3
1
-
/

Now perhaps your argument is that that required thought, but what else is the point of doing algebra problems without thinking about what precisely is being done?

Or maybe the fact that one of his parents was born overseas, and his parents lived overseas a fairly substantial amount of time before he was born?

Stanley Ann Dunham lived in Kansas, and then moved to Hawaii. She had never been overseas at all, let alone for a fairly substantial amount of time.

Since she was clearly a citizen, and by jus sanguinis, Obama was a citizen at birth (natural born), it's totally irrelevant where Obama was born, just as it is irrelevant where McCain was born. See 301(g) or 309(c) of the INA for details.

The metric system was IMPOSED by governments.

Almost all systems of weights and measures used in trade are imposed and regulated by governments. Certainly the ones in the United States are.

ever noticed even the scientists can't bring themselves to decimalize the circle?

We have. Half a circle is pi radians.

On a related note, why doesn't slashcode support UTF-8 properly? (Or at least things like ϖ?) That is all.

Please don't act like everything was so much better in the glory days of DVDs. You're getting "better than they were before" confused with "better than they are now"

Sure, but then the alternative was trying to get my computer to play VHS, Betamax or my LaserDiscs. Though honestly, my VCDs just worked fine.

DVDs were better than the alternatives then, and still has advantages over Bluray today.

R makes great graphs functionally speaking, but without mucking about with the options and some post-processing they are not the most attractive.

Base graphics aren't that nice looking, but that's why ggplot and lattice exist. You can fairly easily produce publication quality graphs with them without spending much time dealing with additional options. There are also packages which produce many of the plots which Tufte promulgates.

Just from examining the few preview pages on amazon.com, this book appears to be far too basic for anyone who has actually done any serious work with R. I personally would forgo this entire book, and spend the time wandering through the R Graph Gallery which has far more examples with source code and underlying data. It's also rather odd that this book doesn't cover ggplot, grid graphics, lattice, or any of the more commonly used tools in advanced R graphics.

Perhaps this book could be useful as your first foray into graphing with R... but I'm unconvinced it even covers that well.

What does this even mean? It's either a copyright violation or fraud. There's no such thing as legal plagiarism in any US state I'm familiar with.

You say that in the face of the story, which is a counterexample disproving your assertion.

The story is an example of a newspaper possibly passing of factual statements as having come from research of their own. That could very well be plagiarism, but it's certainly not a copyright violation (since facts cannot be copyrighted), and doesn't seem to be fraud. Thus it doesn't seem to be illegal.

How does the story in any way act as a counterexample to disprove my assertion that plagiarism itself isn't against the law? Furthermore, even if it did, a random article isn't particularly convincing. Cite the code.

In other words, it is legal plagiarism.

What does this even mean? It's either a copyright violation or fraud. There's no such thing as legal plagiarism in any US state I'm familiar with.

Now if your point is that its unethical or immoral, that's fine, but that is orthogonal to whether laws were broken.

For a large project one could create an organization that would hold the copyright of the entire project.

Yes. The issue is that now you are putting faith in an organization to "do the right thing", an organization which has far more power to alter licensing terms than the FSF does. (After all, the FSF is unable to take away rights granted by a previous version of the GPL, whereas the copyright holder can.)

Want to use GPL 3, go ahead, but you would be wise to delete any "version 3 or any future version" type of language. Wait to see what that future version actually contains and make sure its goals are in line with your goals.

While this advice is reasonable if there are very few contributors to a project, it doesn't work at all for large projects. By chosing only GPL vX, you have basically made it impossible for you to ever select a later version of the GPL unless you can get all contributors to sign off. But then again, some consider that to be a feature.

IANAL, but that's not true in the USofA (Australia, too, IIRC). Although the facts themselves are not copyrightable, specific aggregates of those facts are.

That's incorrect. See FEIST PUBLICATIONS, INC. v. RURAL TEL. SERVICE CO for a case which deals with precisely this issue (and is widely quoted when someone brings this up.)

We all know what it means, and most of us don't use it.

That's perfectly fine, but your preference is entirely orthogonal to Debian's usage.

It's just Stallman trying to ride a successful brand name.

RMS doesn't have any authority over how Debian labels its distributions. You may disagree with his pressure on other people to acknowledge the work that the GNU project has done in making a Free Software operating system a possibility, but that argument is irrelevant to Debian's distribution naming policy.