Not only a losing battle, but one lost many centuries ago.

It really was not, unless complete eradication of unfortunate language usages is the goal, which it is not.

There's a constant ebb and flow of bad usage and pushback. I only mentioned it's a losing battle because I think there should be a bit more ebb and a little less flow.

*citation needed

I think this passes under the rule of "common knowledge", at least for anyone in the field of linguistics or literature. The writing in question, A Modest Proposal, was written centuries ago, if you read the Christian Bible you can see examples of satire that are thousands of years old.

IANAL, but I think "knowledge ... a crime" means a particular crime, not a general category. So if you reasonably suspect that your work might be useful to criminals, that's not conspiracy, but as soon as one particular criminal tells you he intends to use your software for a particular crime, you're a conspirator unless you report him to the authorities. So honest cryptographers have nothing to fear, unless a criminal tells them about his crypto-assisted crimes and they don't report it.

The OED defines sarcasm as 'a sharp, bitter, or cutting expression or remark; a bitter gibe or taunt'. Irony is often used in a sarcastic remark, but it's generally the cheap sort of irony - 'Well done, genius' in response to a stupid error - rather than the more literary sort, which when particularly well-developed we call satire.

In the UK, 'free-range' is a legal designation, as opposed to battery-farmed. To call eggs or poultry free-range, certain standards must be met - not very high standards, but enough to exclude stacked-cage-based methods. We also have various other marks defined by other bodies: some companies (e.g. Marks & Spencer, a supermarket chain) define an in-house standard, some are defined by charities (e.g. the RSPCA, a bird conservancy), and so on.

I suppose similar things exist in the US?

*RSPB

Quite right, thank you.

This has been my experience as well. Truly free-ranging hens give the best eggs, often almost up to the quality of ducks' eggs. Interestingly I find very little perceptible difference between the eggs of different breeds (once cooked at least), but roasted cocks of different breeds taste vastly different.

One advantage of different breeds is it enables you to produce white or even blue eggs. Blue hens eggs look pretty cool.

We've only eaten one of our roos. He was delicious in a speckled sussex-au-vin. And the bits from the carcass were amazing as leftovers in a fritatta.

I'd call this person a technical writer, and it's a pretty tough job to fill. I have some experience in this area, so if you'd like to talk about options feel free to email me - jim@harundo.com.

By the GP's definition there are a lot of us hobby programmers. I used to write code to run on all kinds of weird servers, SPARCs, IBM POWER kit, ARM dev boards and so on - I hate to think how a non-hobby programmer would have approached that job...

Here's an example, but it's hardly scholarly: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong.

You're right that it doesn't get discussed much, I think largely because the explanatory material is dense and rather turgid, so would-be critics don't get far enough to make meaningful criticisms; that's certainly the case for me.

All the comments have a 'reply' link for me - is it still broken for you?

I'd also mention that it's in Leeds - even if I'd known the event was in the UK, I'd have assumed it was in London. Great to see this kind of thing in the North, keep up the good work.