[TechJunkYard]

.. in my opinion, "from scratch" means with basically nothing pre-existing.

Another common term re-defined.

So when your wife bakes a cake "from scratch", does she

• mill her own flour
• extract her own sugar from the cane
• get the vanilla beans from the garden in back yard
• churn her own butter
• go out to the henhouse to get some eggs
• etc...
• and never, ever, consult a cookbook; after all, those things are copyrighted y'know...

[Golden Eagle]

To be truly "from scratch", that's about what it would take, raw elements. My grandmother used to pretty much do all that except for the sugar. And that's the only way to get all the preservatives and other crap they add to things nowdays out of there - to literally make it from scratch.

[shadowman99]

Let him have it his way. Using Golden Eagle's logic there could be no more software patents and no more copyrights. Because nobody acually creates anything, it's all learned from somewhere else.

This means Microsoft hasn't created anything either. After all, everyone who has ever worked for them went to school. Read Books. Studied other people's code. It's all so dirty!

Everyone who ever learned something from somewhere else is unable to exclusively claim ownership of invention.

Damn, Golden Eagle! You're quite the little commie!

[antiRepublicrat]

You don't go far enough. Does she grow her own wheat using previously unused farming techniques and a wild form of wheat that has not been purposely crossbred to its current form? Does she have an original technique for milling it? I hope she doesn't burn the cane before extracting the sugar, because that's not an original idea. ...