Of course you could install Linux but the agreement was for a working computer so even if contract law does not apply, unless Lenovo installed it for you it would be possible to argue that it is not "fit for purpose" under sales law.

Not forgetting that a few years ago, when Windows came pre-installed it was declared not "fit for purpose" by Microsoft itself! - you had to install further software to make it so fit.

The problem comes that you don't buy Windows (which can be argued is not fit for purpose), but a licence to USE Windows (which IS fit for it's purpose...just).

Take a GPL'd piece of code and remove the GPL - what do you have left? All you are left with is plain old Copyright which means you can't use the code (which was GPL'd) at all without the holder's permission; you could contact them for a licence (so that argument of having to re-invent the wheel is bogus), or get your own code written any way. The only reason GPL is viral or poison is the underlying Copyright - GPL takes Copyright and adds rights you would not normally have; without GPL you lose those right and would be in [danger of] copyright infringement if you were to use it commercially.

As a commercial company your aim is to generate profits which means as low as possible with the costs and as high as possible with the income from sales (whether that be sales of goods, services, etc). Which means that if you need a code library you try to get it as cheaply as possible - ie something like BSD licensed code where you don't have to pay the authors a single cent.

However, some authors object to you piggy backing them and making money off their effort with no reward to themselves; so they insist that the payment to them is that you release any modification to their code like they originally released their code so that others can also benefit from the code (ie GPL). Now if a company doesn't like this way of doing things, they are free to contact the original author(s) to license the code under different terms, one where money would more than likely have to change hands from the company to the author(s), thus putting up the costs, especially if a piece of GPL code has had a few modifications in which case EVERY one of those authors would have to be contacted and a licence agreed between each and every one of them (not needing to re-invent the wheel).

Also, how much can you trust closed source software? Can you be sure it isn't infringing someones copyright?

The only conclusion I can come to is that all those who moan about the GPL are those who would rather not pay the author(s) for their work - get something for nothing. Aaaaarrrrrrrrr, Jim Lad...

Microsoft played by the rules, and you're upset about it?

Not quite...they decided to use GPL'd code contrary to the licence and so were guilty of copyright infringement (or piracy). When pointed out, they decided to obey the licence and release the code as GPL.

What most people are upset about is not that they've released the code as GPL, but the REASON they gave for doing it. To be honest they would have announced (something like):

However, they hushed up the fact of the GPL violation.

So the conclusion is that MS weren't interested in playing by the rules and were only forced to release the code when they were caught red handed with a copyright infringement (which is the result of ignoring the GPL).

The question that comes to me as a result of this is: how much code have they got away with using contrary to the licence of said code, ie of how much copyright infringement are MS guilty? The advantage of closed source code...

What do you mean by "300x400 resolution" photos?

I have a stack of my wedding photos done digitally, Picking two of them, they are both 640x480 "resolution" (in your terms). However, one of them shows a fairly good picture of my wife's upper body, whilst the other shows a ridiculously large picture of her nose!

The fact is that the first is at a resolution of about 120dpi whereas the second is at a resolution of about 670dpi and I cropped a 640x480 rectangle (just covering her nose) - the whole photo is 4304x2680; at the given resolutions, they both print at about 6"x4". Obviously the former would suffer quite badly as the size of print increased.

My 18" [visible] monitor is running at 1600x1200 or about 110dpi. If I view the photos pixel-for-pixel, the first appears complete at about 6"x4", whereas the second (complete, not just the "nose" extract) only shows a part of it (on the whole screen).

If wikipedia is mainly intended as an online encyclopaedia, then surely it doesn't need pictures with a resolution greater than about 110 dpi (which also has the advantage of less bandwidth to download them)?

Being pedantic?

In that case, you'd better specify to WHICH average you are referring and your exact definition of "most", because, mathematically, there are three averages which can be taken from the data given:

MEAN: sum the data and divide by the number: 30 / 8 = 3.75
MEDIAN: write in order, the one in the middle (or mean average of middle two if number of data is even): (3 + 4) / 2 = 3.5
MODE: the data item which appears the most often (has the highest frequency count): 1

[The last average is often stated as "the data item that appears the most", with "most" meaning "highest frequency count".]

So the error in the GP's post is to say that "'most of those numbers are 1' even though the numbers are not 1 on average" when in fact, using the MODAL average, the numbers ARE 1 on average!

In fact, using the data given, it is perfectly true to say that most[1] of the numbers are above average (when the average used is the MODAL average as 5 numbers are greater than 1, giving 62.5% greater than average).

[1]most here being defined by taking the numbers and dividing them into two sets: those larger than the modal average, and those not larger, and "most" being the size of the set with the larger number of elements.

Those lovely ads equating car theft to movie piracy... did that convince anyone?

More to the point, have they actually realised that far from educating the public (downloading in not stealing - it is copyright infringement), they are actually involved in stealing to do it? The ad is unskippable which means that 30seconds of the DVD HAS to be played. I have a 8 disk set of a TV series which has 23 episodes. Watching one episode at a time, 23x30 = 690 seconds, or 11 1/2 minutes have been spent playing the DVD which do not relate to copyright notice, nor the programme itself. I watched them when I first brought them, and since getting married have been re-watching them with my new wife. In total 23 minutes of the ad will have been aired.

So how have they stolen?

1 - they haven't paid me to air the ad in my house (I think £10 is reasonable (actually I'd prefer £100+) per showing seeing as a 30 second slot on ITV probably costs £1000s...that's at least £460 they've stolen from me) - they could argue that they didn't agree to pay before the ad was shown and so do not owe me - fair enough, but

2 - to play the ad my DVD player has used electricity. It may be minimal just for my DVD player, but it is still electricity I have had to pay for and which cannot be got back - I no longer have it, the generating station no longer has it: it has been STOLEN.

3 - I also have a sound system and TV in use to watch DVDs which are also going to be using electricity during the unskippable ad - are they going to insist that I have them turned off during the 30 second ad so that they don't use any electricity? But that totally defeats the purpose of the unskippable ad as it is intended to be watched. Thus it is fair to say that the electricity that at least the TV uses is also being STOLEN.

But I'm not the only person who is likely to have bought this set of DVDs, and the unskippable ad also appears on other DVDs I have, so it is also fair to say that although they may steal a minimal amount of electricity from me, they will also be stealing electricity from others. It will soon add up to quite a bit of electricity they have STOLEN with their unskippable ad.

A bit of news for you...only the Republic of Ireland (Eire) became independent in 1922

UK is "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" in full.

So at a guess, "Britain and Ireland" can either mean "UK and Eire" (interpreting Ireland as "the whole of Ireland, Northern & Republic") or UK (interpreting "Ireland" as "Northern Ireland"); Perhaps we should ask Reuters.

...And no, .com is not a US-specific domain. .us is. Though I haven't noticed [m]any .co.us registrations...in fact I can't think of any .us domains (I've never seen one on a web search); are there any?

I think they mean: bash - my current IDE

bash is the most extensible IDE I've ever come across (along with csh, tcsh, zsh, ash, etc). It has features to reformat code (cb, etc), check code (lint, etc), compile code (almost any language: C, C++, fortran, Lisp, Pascal, etc), debug code (gdb, strace, etc). What more does anyone want?

...with no ability to tune in to a signal before you could argue exemption for TV licenses...

So I'm required to get a TV licence (sic) to use a TV ONLY as a monitor for my games console or Video player or DVD player (used to watch pre-recorded tapes & DVDs) which use channel 36?

Wrong. You ONLY need a Licence if the TV* is INSTALLED or USED for the purpose of receiving a broadcast programme service regardless of if it being installed or used for another purpose. If it is installed and used for another purpose but NOT for receiving a broadcast television programme service then NO licence is required [check the law...I can't get to my copy at the moment as we're redecorating and its bookcase is currently buried behind 2 others].

*TV is (roughly) defined as a device capable of receiving a broadcast television programme service - that includes Video & DVD recorders with a built-in tuner; AND a computer with a TV card (tuner); and more recently, IIRC, a computer that is used to watch a broadcast television service on the web ALSO need a licence, even if it has no tuner!

By having all the channels detuned, except the "closed circuit" channel required for games consoles, computers, etc and having no aerial connection (except the cable to the source device) is a very good indicator to a judge as to its intended purpose of installation.

[roughly] When a file is "deleted" on *nix its directory entry is removed, the inode link count is reduced by one and when the inode link count reaches zero the disk space is released for reusage. When a "file" is run, its inode link count is increased by one as there's a link to the open "incore" "copy". Thus you can unlink (delete) directory entries of ANY open file, not just a running program.

So to have more protection over temporary data in a program, open a file and then immediately unlink it - only programs that can manage to open it between(/at) its creation and unlinking from the directory structure will be able to access the data within it; this also leads to situations where the total space allocated on a disk [partition] (looking at, say df) can be much larger than is obviously apparent (using, say du) - this can happen if you have a large log file that is being written and you rm the directory entry for it: only when the program filling the log exits will the space be released.

Oddly, making a scratch worse can make it better: a CD I own had a slight scratch that would 'jam' my players at that track (it ran roughly circularly, not radially), but by making it worse by deliberately scratching it into a slight 'v' groove, the laser is able to read the data under it again and the track plays fine!

Depends which coast...

For our honeymoon last July, we went to Canada and visited Niagara Falls (well you have to, don't you) and I got a text: "Welcome to the USA and AT&T,..." whilst I was standing, overlooking the Falls from Canada.

It has worked well.

Are you, by chance, referring to things like this:

(X) Line 3, Column 2106: general entity "tab" not defined and no default entity.

http://images.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi" onclick=gbar.qs(this) class=gb1>

In this case, the "literal" string includes an ampersand (&) which is used as an "escape character" in html so that various characters can be inserted, eg a less than (<) symbol (via &lt;) which is normally an opening tag indicator. To include an ampersand the correct markup is "&amp;" and not "&",

It's the browers being "helpful" in parsing any unknown "escape" (the bit between the '&' and the ';', or if the ';' is missing) as literal text, ie ignoring it as an escape the first place.

On a left handed keyboard (like the one I have) the keypad is at the left hand end (followed by the arrow keys and the main keyboard on the right; means CTRL-ALT-DL is achievable using only 1 hand as well ^_^).