Many forms of recycling take more energy than working from raw materials. Such recycling is only commercially viable thanks to the high charges for landfill and dumping of used goods.

Because classically, "recycling" means putting it back through industrial processes to manufacture a new item. The extended meaning of recycling to cover reuse, repair and repurposing inadvertently puts carbon-intensive collection and reprocessing of glass on an equal footing with not putting the glass in the bin at all and using it to store things instead of silly plastic Tupperware items.

If you do a work for hire, there's one person who's paying you. If you are an author, there isn't one person who just pays for everything -- you actually need to sell the book again and again to make back the time you spent on it.

There's a huge difference between copyright and patent.

Patent law was designed to prevent factory machinery designs being kept secret. Factory owners were inventing better and better machines, but keeping them secret so that they would retain competitive advantage. Some designs died with their owners. Patents protection was invented to encourage inventors to document their creations while preventing others from using them, but then to allow the next inventor to create a better machine without being blocked by the patent.

A book isn't a machine or technique, so it's not like technological advancement is hanging on being able to use a copyright work.

(That's not to say I don't think copyright terms aren't too long.)

However, Project Gutenberg does very very little to promote the fact that copyright terms are different in different countries. It would have been pretty trivial to set up the site with an awareness of international terms and dynamically generate correct copyright information for any users from outside of the US.

Leftie keyboards are harder to come by, and I used to work in a hot-desk office. Switching the mouse buttons and moving the mouse has been trivially easy in most places I've worked, so I've stuck with that.

Óbh-óbh.

Look, this is more like pointing out that you're measuring the total length of the world's rivers wrong when you measure the source of the Rio Negro and the Rio Amazon from source to sea, because for a fair portion of that length, the Rio Negro is the Amazon. If hydrological researchers were making such a fundamental error, someone would have to point it out.

But code researchers were making a completely analogous error, and it needed quantified. And now it is.

I'm a rightie, but my left's my mouse hand -- the bloody numerical keypad on most keyboards makes rightie-mousing a practical impossibility.

Weird nature point: lefties and ambidextrous people typically have less of a "sworl" on the crown of their heads, meaning their hair is more symmetrical at the back (righties' hair tends to spiral to behind the left ear before going downwards, lefties' hair tends to go straight down across the back.)

You realise us righties are closer to snails than lefties are...? You can see it in your hair.

When I fenced, there were no lefties in my club. I went to a competition. I met a leftie. I was utterly annihilated.

How about reading the point made in TFS?

The researchers did this study because Github is used as a source of data for identifying trends in computing. As they say, this duplication of code skews the results, and anyone wanting to draw serious conclusions from this data needs to account for this.

The important data isn't the headline, it's... well... the data. I'm hoping there will be less (virtual) printing of sensationalist "JavaScript is the best language in the world" headlines due to this prompting people to question the methodology.

Well it was in the fields, of course. Some people sabotaged the machinery, some people picketed the farms.

If it's not enough to be your sole source of income because of limited hours, that's one thing. If it's not enough to be your sole source of income when done full-time, it's not paying enough. If the job is worth employing someone to do, it's worth paying them enough that they can eat and not die of hunger on the job, as was common during the Industrial Revolution.

The problem is that ignorance is considered a fair market force by many -- any price a customer is willing to pay is by nature fair.

The main benefit of regulated markets is that they stop ignorance being a market force, because they explicitly prohibit exploiting consumer ignorance. At the end of the day, we can't expect every consumer to carry out their own due diligence on every purchase they make -- it would be totally inefficient and wouldn't benefit wider society.

Who really wants free markets?

Of course they're happy that not letting competitors pick up their code for free and profit off it is stopping competitors picking up their code for free and profitting off it -- I hardly think that's what "chilling effect" means. They have produced something that is badly needed at considerable expense to themselves. They have made the source available for non-commercial uses, which is part self-promotion and part generosity, but mostly just a responsible, sensible move for something that claims to be secure. Security-by-obscurity doesn't protect Microsoft or Apple, and having the code available means they have to make damned sure they're genuinely secure.