Re:Good book, read it recently.
on
The Chronoliths
·
· Score: 1
Didn't even know it was a series, apparently I caught the first one. Darn, now I'll have to look for more.
Good book, read it recently.
on
The Chronoliths
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Specifically, I read it on June 18, on airplanes and in airports taking a trip with my daughter.
Good book, though IMHO "The Harvest" is still my Robert Charles Wilson favorite. (Kind of like "Childhood's End" but different.)
To clear up a few basics, the Chronoliths appear, smashing cities where they do. They have writing on them, commemorating a battle victory 20 years in the future. No carbon dating needed, they read the information. If you suddenly had a big monument materialize obliterating your city, would you be prone to distrust the writing on it?
Of a more interesting nature is a hero who is a hero by working his craft, not his fists. This aspect is reminiscent of Neal Stephenson's works or "Crosstime Engineer". (Author forgotten, but I think he was Polish) In most fiction no matter what the profession of the hero, the hero-work seems to get done with fists and guns. Nice to see a change.
You hit a key term here, but slightly off. It should be 'disruptive' instead of 'destructive' and then you not only get right to the truth, but you enlist years of sociological research behind legislation like this and other recording-industry abominations are bad.
The common opinion on/. and the geek community in general is that Internet, file sharing, and the like are bad for some current business models, but in the long run good for society. We point to examples like VCRs, for instance. The problem has been one of convincing the mainstream non-geek population that this is true.
Enter the term, "disruptive."
There is a sizable body of mainstream economic literature (sorry, no URLs handy, ran across this in dead-tree pre-URL days) that focuses on "disruptive technologies" - how they are bad for some businesses and business models, but good for society as a whole. This is non-geek literature.
Our problem is to cast the free and open nature of the Internet as a mainstream distruptive technology as important to society as the telephone, automobile, airplane, etc. Take a look at the international nature of Linux (or *BSD) and tell me that the Internet hasn't done something immensely valuable for mankind. Letter-writing and co-operative journals are old, so is travel, but this is international collaboration of an unprecedented scale by common people. Not only do we take it for granted, we're about to throw it away in exchange for an outmoded and defective business model. (I know, there are no words about shutting down the Internet, but the sum chilling effect of DRM effectively does so by turning it into radio/television.)
This needs to become a mainstream issue, not a geek one.
(IMHO, the most socially disruptive technology of recent history has been the sanitary napkin.)
I pushed the Good Omens on my son last year, and in conversations realized something...
Much of the humor is rooted in the 70's. He enjoyed the book, and much of the humor is not rooted in the 70's. But he wasn't culturally equipped to enjoy it as much as I did.
OTOH, he did get into Bohemian Rhapsody after that.
The Linux system I'm running when not booted to the Dark Side (My daughter was running Age of Empires - more Dark Side software.) isn't a single chunk that has to be built as one unit. The kernel's one piece, and each lib is another. To be sure, some libs won't work without specific versions of others, so the pieces aren't all independent. But it's still not all one giant chunk.
They're essentially making the RedHat distribution into one giant build. Kind of like Gentoo, which someone else brought up, and is a very appropriate comparison for build times.
But even with RedHat or Gentoo, it's not one giant chunk. I've upgraded pieces of my RedHat for years, and to be fair, Microsoft issues fixes. But there's still a difference, in that I have a better understanding of what RedHat's doing with an update, and better understand what parts of my system are affected.
While there may be modularity inside Windows, it appears to be intentionally hidden from the end user. I wonder if that's part and parcel of proprietary software, or if it's a side effect of the legal team arguing that Windows is "integrated" and IE can't be unbundled.
I really liked "Unbreakable" as a truly unusual treatment of the whole superhero thing. I guess most people didn't, because it didn't do that well at the box office.
In the same vein, I couldn't imagine Michael Keaton as Batman. He did well enough there, but his portrayal as Bruce Wayne was downright terrific. First time the character ever seemed believable, comic, TV, cartoon, whatever.
I was more rebelling about the concept of "Windows done right" when I made that reference. IMHO Windows is at least partly flawed in concept and architecture, and may not be possible to implement right. If one were talking about a clean, compatible Win32 implementation I would be much more certain that it couldn't be done. A workalike is probably possible, but I'd rather see effort invested in a good clean usable interface than in "chasing Windows."
The topic of Mac came up because OS/X looks like "Mac done right" where they ripped out a bunch of the old stuff that was no longer suitable and put a stronger BSD core in. In a way, perhaps it also resembles "neXt done right," too.(or at least "neXt done more marketably.")
Tell me more. I was thinking in terms of cardiovascular health. I know peanut oil is an oil of choice for high temperatures, but is there more to it than that? What are the properties of grapeseed oil?
Don't know that I agree, at least by "nature's perspective." I don't disagree in the slightest that nuclear waste is bad, but it's also "point contamination" and affects limited localities. Even considering leaching the area is still comparatively limited. Even if it is radioactive, part of nature's perspective is more like tens of thousands to millions of years. That's enough time for decay, and in the meantime there will be mutations and evolution-fodder, conceivably a good thing. It's only on puny human time scales that it's really a problem, and presumably we should be able to handle it over our own time scales. Part of the objection was, "What happens in a thousand years?"
For comparative damage, look at the Pueblo Indians. According to an NPR report I heard several years ago, they lived in a lush forested area. They overcut the timber and without the trees shading/transpiring, etc, the water table dropped and the area turned into a desert. It's still a desert a good part of a thousand years later, and doesn't show signs of becoming lush again any time soon.
In the long term (Nature's time) I'd be far more worried about the biological impoverishment now being caused by global warming and other human activities. Genetic diversity is Nature's toolbox for recovering from catastrophies, and that's where we're doing the greatest damage.
Perhaps we should do nature a favor and put out radioactive caches to increase the mutation rates and improve diversity. (tongue slightly in cheek, here)
Did you know that canola oil (2nd best to olive oil) is "genetically engineered"? Prior to WWII, it contained a few harmful substances, and was used for lubricaton. After WWII they began bombarding seeds with radioactivity and sifting through what popped up. Eventually they came up with a breed that produced edible oil that's also relatively non-unhealthy. Enhanced diversity in action.
Nuclear power is the first time we went into an energy source with a good idea of exactly how dangerous. The same statement very probably can't be said of any other powersource.
How about that clean hydropower. Then look at what it does to fisheries, and the fact that the salmon no longer take their nutrient-laden bodies back up the river, where the bears catch many and fertilize the forests. Look at the silting problems in dams, and the lack of that necessary silt below the dam.
How about fossil fuels and global warming?
At this point, I don't even know about trusting either solar or wind power. Extensive use of solar power may well change the albedo of the Earth, or something odd like that, affecting the climate. Extensive use of wind power could conceivably affect climate, in addition to killing large numbers of birds.
I'd prefer we learn to live more efficiently and control our breeding.
Tried GNOME, tried KDE, don't use either, but keep them around for some applications, though GNOME annoys by taking over MY desktop when I click any Help buttons. Both make my machine perform like last-generation compared to a raw window manager, even icewm with dfm and icedock extras.
Isn't GNOME supposed to be "Windows done right?"
Well, what if Windows is just plain so broken that it can't be done right?
I think Apple had the right idea, and now "Mac done right" is here.
Maybe Windows is the dominant platform, and we have to accomodate that to attract new users. But that should be "stupid, backward mode," not what we aspire to.
There's an old adage about, "trustworthy people trust others, and untrustworthy people don't." I suspect it may apply in this case. They *know* they're taking both consumers and musicians to the cleaners, and expect no less than the same treatment from both, given the option.
That way we can brew a *really* hot cup of tea, not limited by any puny 100C boiling problems. Good superhot tea should yield a drive that would leave the Heart of Gold in the dust, and maybe even pass the Bistromath.
Then you might want to look at getting out of the company.
After all, the highest brass are wasting money hiring technically oriented underlings. If they're wasting money on technical people, where else are they wasting it, and how soon will it catch up to them.
From a more conventional point of view...
Then you might want to look at getting out of the company.
After all, if the highest brass are not listening to the advice of technical people that they've hired, then they're missing some clues on management technique. What other clues are they missing, and how long will it take to catch up with them?
Very interesting comment, especially considering how Microsoft used home users to bootstrap business use. People had Windows and Windows applications at home, and carried them to work. Eventually Windows just got installed and supported at work, to increase productivity, "because that's what the employees are familiar with."
Now we're approaching a situation where home and work may well diverge, and Microsoft appears to be trying to "differentiate" Windows with the XP interface. The commonality is going away. Interestingly, *they* are splintering the market, and diffusing the meaning of "Windows Everywhere."
Lalla Ward played the princess (sixth daughter of sixth, etc. AKA sixth segment of the Key of Time.) in the episode just before Romana I regenerated into Romana II, played by Lalla Ward.
Actually, I suspect Americans and Canadians may well be #2 and #2, after the Japanese. I've heard news items before about how the Japanese are more culturally clean than we are, and may well be using technology to take it too far. Whereas Americans and Canadians are merely victims of Katzian corporatism because we have so blasted many antibiotic products thrown at us.
As for routine use of antibiotics, there appears to be another downside... The immune system appears to require some level of regular/constant challenge for proper development and maintenance. The news article I heard/saw this one in specifically mentioned the Japanese, and that they were having bad immunological side-effects as a result of being too clean.
As my mother-in-law used to day (in reference to my kids) and appears to be more sensible than might otherwise have been credited, "You'll eat dirt before you die." My wife looks hard to avoid antibiotic handsoaps and other households.
I have SSH and IMAPS ports open, so I can use both remotely. I sort of go by the original Terms Of Service from when I signed up. They said I may not run a server for the use of others. Well, I'm running servers for my own use. They have recently ammended the TOS to disallow ALL servers, but IMHO that's a bunch of crock concocted by managers who don't understand TCP/IP at all. After all, how can you do IRC without IDENT? What about the fact that strict DHCP requires that you respond to pings (acting like a server, here) by the DHCP server.
I also see that they fear that Joe 6-pack couldn't properly configure and run a server, and keep it safe. My remote access is only from a few IP ranges, and is tightened to that with firewall, tcp-wrappers, and every other way I can manage.
I understand the reason behind the TOS, and in my opinion am living by the spirit of the rules, no matter how much I might like to do a bit more.
Re:Doom3 != Good OpenGl 2 Implementation
on
Doom3 and OpenGL2.0
·
· Score: 2
Not necessarily bad news.
Look at it this way, a "Doom 3" OpenGL2 implementation at least gets it mindshare, and gets IHVs used to working with it. Back in the GLQuake days, there were a bunch of Quake-only OpenGL implementations.
But those restricted implementations eventually were dropped in favor of full ones. They were a good steppingstone.
Whatever became of Precision Insight?
on
Doom3 and OpenGL2.0
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
That was where much of the Linux Mesa and OpenGL work, especially the hardware stuff, was collected. I remember seeing a while back that they had laid off a bunch of workers, including Brian Paul. The Precision Insight URL no longer responds, but a quick Google shows Mesa work ongoing, and Brian Paul now at Tungsten Graphics doing largely the same type of stuff he's been doing all along.
Maybe there's hope of OpenGL 2 for Linux, after all. Next will be pursuading Carmack et al not to use Microsoft lock-in compilers.
I go for your #1, because of what I call the Bombs-to-starships gap.
Even today with the paltry stuff we practice, space travel is horribly energy-intensive. While it's believable that we'll get more efficient, we still don't have much interplanetary travel, much less interstellar. We will have to acquire the ability to control more energy.
My premise: If a species has more than the slightest tendancy to use weapons against itself, it will not survive to build starships. That includes us. We have the next few centuries to burn some of our most terrible aggressiveness out of ourselves, or else we'll use that same energy to blow ourselves up. Actually, the Cold War was a great success story, since we *did* develop a survival mechanism that held us through half a century. We've more work to do, because greater energies are on their way, with more chance for abuse. Moreover we've got to improve the common man, as rather common men turned relatively safe transportation devices into bombs last year.
One hole in the theory - alien psychology such as a highly xenophobic hive-mind.
how Islam is treating anybody with enough educatio
on
Cyber-Attacks?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
So right, and the really funny and tragic thing about this is that 1000 years back, Islam was the cultural light of the world. They had no problem with science, saw it as studying Allah's creation, and a truly proper thing to do. Large parts of the Rennaissance were merely bringing knowledge from the Islamic world into Europe.
Then sometime in the past few hundred years, they began to throw all of that away.
Now all we need to do is find a way to slip a GPL-ed file onto a Microsoft CD the same way this virus got there.
They could clearly argue that the file was NOT part of their distribution, and therefore the product does not have to have source released under the GPL. But I'll bet until they finally came to that conclusion, there'd be a TON of Brownian motion in Redmond on the part of execs and lawyers.
So before someone actually does this, the need to let the alternative energy people know, so the heat source can be tapped.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't even know it was a series, apparently I caught the first one. Darn, now I'll have to look for more.
Specifically, I read it on June 18, on airplanes and in airports taking a trip with my daughter.
Good book, though IMHO "The Harvest" is still my Robert Charles Wilson favorite. (Kind of like "Childhood's End" but different.)
To clear up a few basics, the Chronoliths appear, smashing cities where they do. They have writing on them, commemorating a battle victory 20 years in the future. No carbon dating needed, they read the information. If you suddenly had a big monument materialize obliterating your city, would you be prone to distrust the writing on it?
Of a more interesting nature is a hero who is a hero by working his craft, not his fists. This aspect is reminiscent of Neal Stephenson's works or "Crosstime Engineer". (Author forgotten, but I think he was Polish) In most fiction no matter what the profession of the hero, the hero-work seems to get done with fists and guns. Nice to see a change.
You hit a key term here, but slightly off. It should be 'disruptive' instead of 'destructive' and then you not only get right to the truth, but you enlist years of sociological research behind legislation like this and other recording-industry abominations are bad.
/. and the geek community in general is that Internet, file sharing, and the like are bad for some current business models, but in the long run good for society. We point to examples like VCRs, for instance. The problem has been one of convincing the mainstream non-geek population that this is true.
The common opinion on
Enter the term, "disruptive."
There is a sizable body of mainstream economic literature (sorry, no URLs handy, ran across this in dead-tree pre-URL days) that focuses on "disruptive technologies" - how they are bad for some businesses and business models, but good for society as a whole. This is non-geek literature.
Our problem is to cast the free and open nature of the Internet as a mainstream distruptive technology as important to society as the telephone, automobile, airplane, etc. Take a look at the international nature of Linux (or *BSD) and tell me that the Internet hasn't done something immensely valuable for mankind. Letter-writing and co-operative journals are old, so is travel, but this is international collaboration of an unprecedented scale by common people. Not only do we take it for granted, we're about to throw it away in exchange for an outmoded and defective business model. (I know, there are no words about shutting down the Internet, but the sum chilling effect of DRM effectively does so by turning it into radio/television.)
This needs to become a mainstream issue, not a geek one.
(IMHO, the most socially disruptive technology of recent history has been the sanitary napkin.)
I pushed the Good Omens on my son last year, and in conversations realized something...
Much of the humor is rooted in the 70's. He enjoyed the book, and much of the humor is not rooted in the 70's. But he wasn't culturally equipped to enjoy it as much as I did.
OTOH, he did get into Bohemian Rhapsody after that.
But here is part of the whole point...
The Linux system I'm running when not booted to the Dark Side (My daughter was running Age of Empires - more Dark Side software.) isn't a single chunk that has to be built as one unit. The kernel's one piece, and each lib is another. To be sure, some libs won't work without specific versions of others, so the pieces aren't all independent. But it's still not all one giant chunk.
They're essentially making the RedHat distribution into one giant build. Kind of like Gentoo, which someone else brought up, and is a very appropriate comparison for build times.
But even with RedHat or Gentoo, it's not one giant chunk. I've upgraded pieces of my RedHat for years, and to be fair, Microsoft issues fixes. But there's still a difference, in that I have a better understanding of what RedHat's doing with an update, and better understand what parts of my system are affected.
While there may be modularity inside Windows, it appears to be intentionally hidden from the end user. I wonder if that's part and parcel of proprietary software, or if it's a side effect of the legal team arguing that Windows is "integrated" and IE can't be unbundled.
I really liked "Unbreakable" as a truly unusual treatment of the whole superhero thing. I guess most people didn't, because it didn't do that well at the box office.
In the same vein, I couldn't imagine Michael Keaton as Batman. He did well enough there, but his portrayal as Bruce Wayne was downright terrific. First time the character ever seemed believable, comic, TV, cartoon, whatever.
Honestly I've never used OS/X.
I was more rebelling about the concept of "Windows done right" when I made that reference. IMHO Windows is at least partly flawed in concept and architecture, and may not be possible to implement right. If one were talking about a clean, compatible Win32 implementation I would be much more certain that it couldn't be done. A workalike is probably possible, but I'd rather see effort invested in a good clean usable interface than in "chasing Windows."
The topic of Mac came up because OS/X looks like "Mac done right" where they ripped out a bunch of the old stuff that was no longer suitable and put a stronger BSD core in. In a way, perhaps it also resembles "neXt done right," too.(or at least "neXt done more marketably.")
I'll see if I can talk with the guy who originally told me about it.
Tell me more. I was thinking in terms of cardiovascular health. I know peanut oil is an oil of choice for high temperatures, but is there more to it than that? What are the properties of grapeseed oil?
Don't know that I agree, at least by "nature's perspective." I don't disagree in the slightest that nuclear waste is bad, but it's also "point contamination" and affects limited localities. Even considering leaching the area is still comparatively limited. Even if it is radioactive, part of nature's perspective is more like tens of thousands to millions of years. That's enough time for decay, and in the meantime there will be mutations and evolution-fodder, conceivably a good thing. It's only on puny human time scales that it's really a problem, and presumably we should be able to handle it over our own time scales. Part of the objection was, "What happens in a thousand years?"
For comparative damage, look at the Pueblo Indians. According to an NPR report I heard several years ago, they lived in a lush forested area. They overcut the timber and without the trees shading/transpiring, etc, the water table dropped and the area turned into a desert. It's still a desert a good part of a thousand years later, and doesn't show signs of becoming lush again any time soon.
In the long term (Nature's time) I'd be far more worried about the biological impoverishment now being caused by global warming and other human activities. Genetic diversity is Nature's toolbox for recovering from catastrophies, and that's where we're doing the greatest damage.
Perhaps we should do nature a favor and put out radioactive caches to increase the mutation rates and improve diversity. (tongue slightly in cheek, here)
Did you know that canola oil (2nd best to olive oil) is "genetically engineered"? Prior to WWII, it contained a few harmful substances, and was used for lubricaton. After WWII they began bombarding seeds with radioactivity and sifting through what popped up. Eventually they came up with a breed that produced edible oil that's also relatively non-unhealthy. Enhanced diversity in action.
Nuclear power is the first time we went into an energy source with a good idea of exactly how dangerous. The same statement very probably can't be said of any other powersource.
How about that clean hydropower. Then look at what it does to fisheries, and the fact that the salmon no longer take their nutrient-laden bodies back up the river, where the bears catch many and fertilize the forests. Look at the silting problems in dams, and the lack of that necessary silt below the dam.
How about fossil fuels and global warming?
At this point, I don't even know about trusting either solar or wind power. Extensive use of solar power may well change the albedo of the Earth, or something odd like that, affecting the climate. Extensive use of wind power could conceivably affect climate, in addition to killing large numbers of birds.
I'd prefer we learn to live more efficiently and control our breeding.
Tried GNOME, tried KDE, don't use either, but keep them around for some applications, though GNOME annoys by taking over MY desktop when I click any Help buttons. Both make my machine perform like last-generation compared to a raw window manager, even icewm with dfm and icedock extras.
Isn't GNOME supposed to be "Windows done right?"
Well, what if Windows is just plain so broken that it can't be done right?
I think Apple had the right idea, and now "Mac done right" is here.
Maybe Windows is the dominant platform, and we have to accomodate that to attract new users. But that should be "stupid, backward mode," not what we aspire to.
There's an old adage about, "trustworthy people trust others, and untrustworthy people don't." I suspect it may apply in this case. They *know* they're taking both consumers and musicians to the cleaners, and expect no less than the same treatment from both, given the option.
They're trying to remove the option.
That way we can brew a *really* hot cup of tea, not limited by any puny 100C boiling problems. Good superhot tea should yield a drive that would leave the Heart of Gold in the dust, and maybe even pass the Bistromath.
Then you might want to look at getting out of the company.
After all, the highest brass are wasting money hiring technically oriented underlings. If they're wasting money on technical people, where else are they wasting it, and how soon will it catch up to them.
From a more conventional point of view...
Then you might want to look at getting out of the company.
After all, if the highest brass are not listening to the advice of technical people that they've hired, then they're missing some clues on management technique. What other clues are they missing, and how long will it take to catch up with them?
Very interesting comment, especially considering how Microsoft used home users to bootstrap business use. People had Windows and Windows applications at home, and carried them to work. Eventually Windows just got installed and supported at work, to increase productivity, "because that's what the employees are familiar with."
Now we're approaching a situation where home and work may well diverge, and Microsoft appears to be trying to "differentiate" Windows with the XP interface. The commonality is going away. Interestingly, *they* are splintering the market, and diffusing the meaning of "Windows Everywhere."
Lalla Ward played the princess (sixth daughter of sixth, etc. AKA sixth segment of the Key of Time.) in the episode just before Romana I regenerated into Romana II, played by Lalla Ward.
Actually, I suspect Americans and Canadians may well be #2 and #2, after the Japanese. I've heard news items before about how the Japanese are more culturally clean than we are, and may well be using technology to take it too far. Whereas Americans and Canadians are merely victims of Katzian corporatism because we have so blasted many antibiotic products thrown at us.
As for routine use of antibiotics, there appears to be another downside... The immune system appears to require some level of regular/constant challenge for proper development and maintenance. The news article I heard/saw this one in specifically mentioned the Japanese, and that they were having bad immunological side-effects as a result of being too clean.
As my mother-in-law used to day (in reference to my kids) and appears to be more sensible than might otherwise have been credited, "You'll eat dirt before you die." My wife looks hard to avoid antibiotic handsoaps and other households.
I want the optional map overlay so I can see where the heck I am.
I have SSH and IMAPS ports open, so I can use both remotely. I sort of go by the original Terms Of Service from when I signed up. They said I may not run a server for the use of others. Well, I'm running servers for my own use. They have recently ammended the TOS to disallow ALL servers, but IMHO that's a bunch of crock concocted by managers who don't understand TCP/IP at all. After all, how can you do IRC without IDENT? What about the fact that strict DHCP requires that you respond to pings (acting like a server, here) by the DHCP server.
I also see that they fear that Joe 6-pack couldn't properly configure and run a server, and keep it safe. My remote access is only from a few IP ranges, and is tightened to that with firewall, tcp-wrappers, and every other way I can manage.
I understand the reason behind the TOS, and in my opinion am living by the spirit of the rules, no matter how much I might like to do a bit more.
Not necessarily bad news.
Look at it this way, a "Doom 3" OpenGL2 implementation at least gets it mindshare, and gets IHVs used to working with it. Back in the GLQuake days, there were a bunch of Quake-only OpenGL implementations.
But those restricted implementations eventually were dropped in favor of full ones. They were a good steppingstone.
That was where much of the Linux Mesa and OpenGL work, especially the hardware stuff, was collected. I remember seeing a while back that they had laid off a bunch of workers, including Brian Paul. The Precision Insight URL no longer responds, but a quick Google shows Mesa work ongoing, and Brian Paul now at Tungsten Graphics doing largely the same type of stuff he's been doing all along.
Maybe there's hope of OpenGL 2 for Linux, after all. Next will be pursuading Carmack et al not to use Microsoft lock-in compilers.
I go for your #1, because of what I call the Bombs-to-starships gap.
Even today with the paltry stuff we practice, space travel is horribly energy-intensive. While it's believable that we'll get more efficient, we still don't have much interplanetary travel, much less interstellar. We will have to acquire the ability to control more energy.
My premise: If a species has more than the slightest tendancy to use weapons against itself, it will not survive to build starships. That includes us. We have the next few centuries to burn some of our most terrible aggressiveness out of ourselves, or else we'll use that same energy to blow ourselves up. Actually, the Cold War was a great success story, since we *did* develop a survival mechanism that held us through half a century. We've more work to do, because greater energies are on their way, with more chance for abuse. Moreover we've got to improve the common man, as rather common men turned relatively safe transportation devices into bombs last year.
One hole in the theory - alien psychology such as a highly xenophobic hive-mind.
So right, and the really funny and tragic thing about this is that 1000 years back, Islam was the cultural light of the world. They had no problem with science, saw it as studying Allah's creation, and a truly proper thing to do. Large parts of the Rennaissance were merely bringing knowledge from the Islamic world into Europe.
Then sometime in the past few hundred years, they began to throw all of that away.
Kind of like the US and Freedom.
Now all we need to do is find a way to slip a GPL-ed file onto a Microsoft CD the same way this virus got there.
They could clearly argue that the file was NOT part of their distribution, and therefore the product does not have to have source released under the GPL. But I'll bet until they finally came to that conclusion, there'd be a TON of Brownian motion in Redmond on the part of execs and lawyers.
So before someone actually does this, the need to let the alternative energy people know, so the heat source can be tapped.