I wouldn't exactly call it 'encourage[ment]'. It was used by the Romans to punish military units deemed cowardly or disobedient.

(Or maybe my sarcasm detector's not properly connected.)

No idea, I don't do 'buntu. Tried Ubuntu and Kubuntu back in the day, saw no reason to change to a distro that assumes I have no idea what I'm doing or even what I want to do.

OpenSUSE on the desktop here, CentOS or FreeBSD for servers.

(And I do use unofficial repos... But I don't try to cook sausages under the Brandenburger Tor.)

No, it's merely that we don't wish to hand over perpetual control over our power supply to GE any more than we want to hand the entire future of agriculture over to Monsanto.

But you guys never stop to think about that angle, do you?

Or perhaps you'd prefer that it not occur to us...

And yet you've never learnt to stop projecting, have you?

Pretty simple, really. It's so that:

(a) Apple can't claim on appeal that the USPTO are in cahoots with $apple_competitor, because

(b) the USPTO can state truthfully that they don't know who filed the challenge to Apple's patent, and thus USPTO will conduct the re-examination based on the merits, and not on the players.

Wikis are where information goes to die.

Meet your new best friends, the <code> and <tt> tags.

Stop. Right. There.

Seriously, are you high? This is Oma and Opa, and Onkel Jakob who runs a bratwurst stand on Unter den Linden, that we're talking about here.

I'm sure lister appreciates the assistance in making his point.

It's the same way in Swedish.

I have. In fact, I've written books using OOO and MS Word, and I can say without hesitation that MS Word does not even compete.

And No, Google doesn't get a free advance copy of my next one, thanks.

I'm sorry, were you speaking to me? I stopped using M$ in favour of Linux years ago.

Sheesh! That was hours ago.

Next time they immanentise the Eschaton, try not to get too stoned, too early.

Sounds like you ought to be using Window Maker.

No. Why do you ask?