At New York's Kennedy airport today, an individual later discovered to be a public school teacher was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a setsquare, a slide rule, and a calculator. At a morning press conference, Attorney general John Ashcroft said he believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-gebra movement. He is being charged by the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction.

"Al-gebra is a fearsome cult,", Ashcroft said. "They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in a search of absolute value. They use secret code names like "x" and "y" and refer to themselves as "unknowns", but we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country. "As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, there are 3 sides to every triangle," Ashcroft declared.

When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush said, "If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes. I am gratified that our government has given us a sine that it is intent on protracting us from these math-dogs who are willing to disintegrate us with calculus disregard. Murky statisticians love to inflict plane on every sphere of influence." The President continued, saying, "Under the circumferences, we must differentiate their root, make our point, and draw the line." Bush warned, "These weapons of math instruction have the potential to decimal everything in their math on a scalene never before seen unless we become exponents of a Higher Power and begin to factor in random facts of vertex."

Attorney General Ashcroft said, "As our Great Leader would say, read my ellipse. Here is one principle he is uncertainty of: though the al-gebrists continue to multiply, their days are numbered as the hypotenuse tightens around their necks."

So, my dear friends: All fear Al-gebra!

What I noticed is the following excerpt:

With the license change to XFree86 4.4, Dropline GNOME has also joined the revolution and moved to X.Org's X11 server (don't worry, the nVidia and ATI binary drivers still work).

How is anyone so clueless allowed to even make a statement such as this? XFree86 4.4 has licence changed so it is not completely free software anymore (actually, the main bottleneck is that it's incompatible with GPL, or, you cannot combine GPL pieces with it because of a new term in a licence). Yet, this smart guy who wrote the comment thinks it's all right to use binary nVidia and ATI drivers, yet it's not all right to use (almost) free software coming from XFree86?

The "revolution" that is happening is caused by slow pace of development in XFree86 (actually, not of development, but of accepting grand new features). Licence change has caused vendors to move from XFree86, but that's a non-issue if we're talking about [technical] "revolution". All of the changes in FreeDesktop's (perhaps even "Keith Packard's") server, mistakenly called "X.Org" (probably because XFree86 provides access to CVS in a "xorg" module, which is therefore used on FreeDesktop's X server implementation derived from XFree86's one), are equally applicable to XFree86 repository; they simply aren't merged back yet. So, all revolution there is will equally apply to XFree86 as to any other server.

This is also where we see GPL at work: as soon as XFree got licence incompatible with GPL, we saw a fork. Yeah, there was talk of fork even earlier, but it failed to materialize until it became inevitable, in order to make it possible to distribute whole free operating system stack on a single CD, without having to adhere to obscure conditions such as putting a name of contributor which provided 100 lines of code on each disk.