As I suspected (and noted in another comment) you're losing lots of bits in your audio. Try compressing it into.ac3 (not sure if there are any legal, free tools for this) or.mp2 (not NTSC compatible in the spec, but generally works in most DVD players I've tried). PCM is uncompressed and huge, leaving little room for your video. Nero might even make your DVD look ok if you can compress the audio a little, but I'd still use a better encoder to make the actual MPEG.
First of all, DVDShrink doesn't drop frames. It modifies the coefficient data in the stream to reduce the overall file size. It leaves the motion vector information (which is really the hardest part of encoding) untouched. It is extremely fast compared to re-encoding because the bulk of the work is done. Nero has a very similar product, but it doesn't work on CSS-encrypted discs. In neither case are frames dropped--in fact, because they maintain the motion vector information, every frame is necessarily maintained in the output. These are considered transcoders.
Nero also has an AVI to MPEG encoder you can use. This one might "drop" frames (or more accurately, there may not be a 1:1 correlation in frames between the two products) but it will still produce roughly 30fps NTSC output. This is a true encoder and will go through roughly the same steps as any other MPEG encoder (including CCE). The difference is that it's not really made for high-quality encodings. It's made for your average Joe to put his videos on DVDs.
You want a multi-pass, high quality encoder to create your output files. For video and on Windows, I suggest Tsunami Mpeg Encoder (TMPGEnc). It's been a few years since I've messed with any of this, but it was quite good and inexpensive 3-4 years ago. It does 2-pass encoding and can output any number of DVD-compatible formats.
If you're still having problems, you might try reducing the resolution. DVD supports 704(720) or 352 vertical lines. Obviously quality suffers as you reduce resolution, but if you're having problems squeezing your content onto a DVD at 720 lines, you may just get an overall increase in quality this way.
Also, you don't talk much about your audio. Is it raw audio (which is really big and uses up lots of room on the disc that could be devoted to video)? You may have good results compressing this, as well.
I like http://www.doom9.net/ for all things video/dvd/vcd. They have a number of guides which detail the various methods of compression and burning. It's pretty likely that you'll find the tips you need there.
Some of the problems alleged by the Wiki are that the drug trials were improperly administered and that the differences in humans and primates may not have been taken into account. These are both issues which could have been prevented.
Similarly, they allegedly gave the doses approximately 2 minutes apart, and the first negative symptoms were displayed shortly after the last patient was injected. With 8 people in the test, that's 16 minutes. If they'd stuck to the implied 2 hour delay, they would have been able to abort the test long before a second human being was injected.
Lastly, the issue is compensation. With everything that went wrong, the companies in question have an obligation to provide care for these people. Unfortunately, by the time it's all sorted out in the legal system, it may be too late to give them anything resembling a life (if they are even alive at the end of it).
Actually, if you are found to be running a pirated copy of Windows, Microsoft tends to give you a legit key in exchange for the information on where you got that copy. Because of this, it seems unlikely that they're running a racket in the way you imply.
The problem is that parents/aren't/ paying attention to their kids. So the kids can go buy games which are inappropriate for their age. That is the very reason that people think laws like this need to exist. If parents were paying attention to their kids and not letting them get games like this, there would be no perceived problem.
That said, almost every law I've seen which addresses this issue is targetted atminors. I can't recall a single one which suggested that such games should be banned outright (at least, not in the US--I recall Greece having some funky legislation like this). Sure, there are one or two freaks who want to take it to the extreme, but the laws that have come out of it are for minors.
And frankly, there's a lot of good precedent for this already. Take movie ratings. For PG, PG13, or R, the parents can take the kids to the theater. For any rating, the parents can rent the DVD for the kids and let them watch it. Otherwise, the kid only gets to view things which are "appropriate".
Of course, that's the biggest problem with any rating system. Who decides what is "appropriate" for what age levels? You also have parents which use the rating system to decide what is ok for their kids rather than taking a look at the content and deciding for themselves. That's what this story is about. According to this particular rating system, Pac Man is 64% violent. Some parents, not knowing what Pac Man is, might blacklist an innocent game because some ratings board somewhere had a stick up its ass.
I'm not the first guy who fell in love with a woman that he met at a restaurant who turned out to be the daughter of a kidnapped scientist only to lose her to her childhood lover who she last saw on a deserted island who then turned out fifteen years later to be the leader of the French underground.
Actually, I think they just realized that they shouldn't do anything to hinder the adoption of their new formats until the formats are well-entrenched in the market. They don't want to make the same mistakes that were made with the original Divx--they want to wait until everyone has an HD player before making the discs worthless to a bunch of people.
The most interesting and innovative aspect of Eternal Darkness was how it breaks the fourth wall. Each sanity trick works once, and then it's mostly an annoyance for the rest of the game (except for some of the cheap scare tactics like you get in most horror movies these days--these are situational and you don't tend to come across them more than once, anyway).
I got one of these and did some Google searching on some of the phrases used in the e-mail. After I got no hits, I searched for the phone number. No hits. So I searched Google for "Paypal Phone Number". The first hit is to a faq explaining to go to the Help Center. Clicking there, you find a link which takes you to their phone number, which happened to be in a different area code than the number I was sent via the phishing e-mail.
So it actually isn't all that hard to get a phone number for Paypal. For the record, from their home page, click "Help" then "Contact Us" to get to the same page I mentioned above.
Only "dangerous" speech has to have artistic merit. Threatening speech counts. Pornography counts (if pornography has no artistic merit, it is considered obscenity).
I shall quote: The federal government and the states have long been permitted to restrict obscene or pornographic speech. While obscene speech generally has no protection under the First Amendment, pornography is subject to little regulation. The exact definition of obscenity and pornography, however, has changed over time.
So my first mistake was, perhaps, using the words "obscenity" and "pornography" almost interchangeably (in fact, I did not mention obscenity at all). It's a tricky situation because the line is extremely fuzzy.
Under the Miller test, a work is obscene if it would be found appealing to the prurient interest by an average person applying contemporary community standards, depicts sexual conduct in a patently offensive way and has no serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.
Here we see that an expression (which I called pornography earlier) may be considered an obscenity with the primary basis being whether there is some artistic value (or merit).
So my overall flaw was in the wording, and I would consider that semantics. If it is deemed obscene by community standards, a work is no longer pornography, but obscenity, which has almost no protection under the 1st amendment, and can thus be banned. Note that this only affects the expression of the "speech" and not the possession. It may be illegal to create or distribute the obscenity, but it is not legal to possess it. Child pornography falls under different laws and restrictions, and is of course illegal to possess.
Going back to the original reason for the discussion: the song which asks people to "Kill $X" has to have artistic merit. Telling someone to kill another human being probably has no artistic merit, and I suspect that doing so will get you arrested faster than that bovine you mentioned can sneeze. Creating an artistic work which contains the command "kill $X" is protected, and if a person was arrested (and not sent to Gitmo over it) then they would probably have the case dismissed outright if the judge has even a modicum of common sense. You might even be able to sue for false arrest afterwards.
Freedom of speech is a tricky thing. The intent--that is, the very reason it was put into the Bill of Rights--was indeed so that people could be critical of the government without fear of government repercussion. But that's not how it's worded and that's not how years of court rulings interpret it.
Freedom of speech has grown to encompass any form of artistic expression. This includes pictures, imagery, and music in addition to traditional forms of speech, both written and verbal. It is protected precisely because there are things some people might not want to hear you say, yet their rights shouldn't trump yours. Freedom of speech was key in allowing some forms of music (specifically "rock and roll") to survive when some cities and towns banned it from their radios and record stores. Certainly this form of music is not speech against the government, however contrary to your claim, it was deemed protected speech and had to be allowed to exist.
There are still some forms of "speech" which are outlawed. Obscenities are illegal in many places. Copyright infringement breaks other laws. Libel and slander, untruths which can damage a person's character, are illegal because they infringe of the rights of another person. And death threats are illegal for much the same reason. All of these exceptions to Freedom of Speech have at least a little merit, though right now there efforts to curb legitimate speech--without any sort of merit at all. I am, of course, referring to flag burning, which is clearly a statement about the government and which is being fought against by this very government. Those in power do not appear to think that freedom of speech should cover this particular criticism of the government--despite your assertion that FoS protects that specific right.
All-in-all, it's murky and one of the most important rights we possess. We must not allow Freedom of Speech to be taken from us, or we lose any and all ability to govern ourselves.
It's an easy mistake to make, since most of the time, people don't care about civil law. A great deal of it is common sense. In fact, I made the same mistake once, and had someone actually point me to a law on the books which allowed only for civil penalties but not criminal punishment. I wish I could find a good example for you, but my cursory search didn't turn up anything handy.
It obviously has to have some sort of artistic merit. Lots of "speech" is banned if you can't prove that it has artistic merit (some forms of pornography, for example).
The question should be whether an AIM icon can have artistic merit, and if it does, is this particular icon artistic?
Yes, speech is variable. I often talk online with/college/students/ who don't seem to be able to form complete sentences and whose meaning is vague. Maybe this kid meant, "I'm going to kill $name" but due to space considerations, laziness, or any of the other reasons that people abbreviate on the Internet, it came out as "Kill $name" instead.
The reason it's a "slippery slope" is because prosecutors start pushing the law ever so slightly and get convictions until the act that is being punished has changed drastically from the intent of the lawmakers.
Either that, or the lawmakers themselves make small changes in the laws which, over time, add up to something utterly absurd.
Right now, with the current laws, legal system, and judicial rulings, it's inconceivable that someone would be convicted for thinking about committing a crime. That doesn't mean that in a few years time, such convictions will not happen.
The three clauses are pretty clear, but I'll try to sum them up. You must do one of the following if you want to redistribute GPL'd code:
3a: Give the code or the option of the code at the same time as the binary. Pointing someone to another site for the code does not count.
3b: Give a written offer for the code, good for 3 years. This means that for three years from the last time you distributed the software, you must give the code to someone who asks for it.
3c: If-and-only-if you received a written offer for code when you received the binary, yourself, then you may include a copy of the written offer you received in place of offering the source code yourself.
Most people use 3a or don't even bother distributing binaries and only distribute source. If you received the binary/source in this way, your only options for redistribution of source are 3a or 3b, neither of which allow you to "point back to your upstream".
You may not think it should be required, but the GPL is pretty simple and pretty clear.
The user does not own the rights to the source code, but they certainly have the rights to the source code. The original distributor is under zero obligation to give it to them--so if that site goes down, where should they get it?
It's a big presumtion that the written offer of source code was on the CD. But obviously, this is not something we can readily determine.
As for the software in the CDs on the magazines (the other poster mentioned)--again, it depends entirely upon whether the source was available on the CD or whether there was a written offer for the magazine to offer the source upon request OR whether they had such a letter from their distributor.
It's not really all that hard to figure out if you're compliant--unless it's referring to an event from years ago when you weren't really paying attention anyway.
This shouldn't have been modded 'insightful'. It's filled with the same misinformation that most of the rest of the posts contain.
If you as a distributor do not provide the source code in accordance with section 3a of the GPL, then the distributor must comply with 3b or 3c. 3c requires that your upstream provider provided the code in accordance with 3b. If they used 3a, then your only option is 3b.
3b is quite clear: b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange;
The written offer for the code must accompany the distribution of the binary or object code. How many of these small providers say on the download page, "Say, if you'd like this code, shoot us an e-mail!"? Probably none, because most people never really read the GPL--they just assume its conditions based on FUD and misinformation.
Now if Mepis is providing this written offer, then yes, they only have to provide the source code if asked. However I went to the site, followed the links to the mirrors, and was never provided with a written offer of source code. I have not yet mounted my ISO to see if it's on there (it's still downloading), but my guess is that it isn't.
The problem here isn't that the source isn't available somewhere--it's that the GPL is vital to Linux. If we start letting some people disregard it, why not all? Why not let Microsoft rip parts of the Kernel out of the tree and use it in their own OSs? Why not let someone sell Linux on a router and not provide the source code/modifications?
Of course, first sale distribution is legal without the consent of the original copyright owner. How does this fit in with the GPL? Can't I pass on my legally owned copy of GPL'd software for free without having to respect the GPL's source distribution clause?
Sure, I'm fully aware of that, and I don't discuss sensitive information over the phone.
Remember always that the point isn't that we necessarily want everything we do to be private, but that we want to have the option of privacy. If the government is snooping, that option is gone. If a neighbor is snooping, it's probably my own fault and I probably thought about that ahead of time.
Slashdot Mirror
As I suspected (and noted in another comment) you're losing lots of bits in your audio. Try compressing it into .ac3 (not sure if there are any legal, free tools for this) or .mp2 (not NTSC compatible in the spec, but generally works in most DVD players I've tried). PCM is uncompressed and huge, leaving little room for your video. Nero might even make your DVD look ok if you can compress the audio a little, but I'd still use a better encoder to make the actual MPEG.
You're incorrect, sir.
First of all, DVDShrink doesn't drop frames. It modifies the coefficient data in the stream to reduce the overall file size. It leaves the motion vector information (which is really the hardest part of encoding) untouched. It is extremely fast compared to re-encoding because the bulk of the work is done. Nero has a very similar product, but it doesn't work on CSS-encrypted discs. In neither case are frames dropped--in fact, because they maintain the motion vector information, every frame is necessarily maintained in the output. These are considered transcoders.
Nero also has an AVI to MPEG encoder you can use. This one might "drop" frames (or more accurately, there may not be a 1:1 correlation in frames between the two products) but it will still produce roughly 30fps NTSC output. This is a true encoder and will go through roughly the same steps as any other MPEG encoder (including CCE). The difference is that it's not really made for high-quality encodings. It's made for your average Joe to put his videos on DVDs.
You want a multi-pass, high quality encoder to create your output files. For video and on Windows, I suggest Tsunami Mpeg Encoder (TMPGEnc). It's been a few years since I've messed with any of this, but it was quite good and inexpensive 3-4 years ago. It does 2-pass encoding and can output any number of DVD-compatible formats.
If you're still having problems, you might try reducing the resolution. DVD supports 704(720) or 352 vertical lines. Obviously quality suffers as you reduce resolution, but if you're having problems squeezing your content onto a DVD at 720 lines, you may just get an overall increase in quality this way.
Also, you don't talk much about your audio. Is it raw audio (which is really big and uses up lots of room on the disc that could be devoted to video)? You may have good results compressing this, as well.
I like http://www.doom9.net/ for all things video/dvd/vcd. They have a number of guides which detail the various methods of compression and burning. It's pretty likely that you'll find the tips you need there.
Some of the problems alleged by the Wiki are that the drug trials were improperly administered and that the differences in humans and primates may not have been taken into account. These are both issues which could have been prevented.
Similarly, they allegedly gave the doses approximately 2 minutes apart, and the first negative symptoms were displayed shortly after the last patient was injected. With 8 people in the test, that's 16 minutes. If they'd stuck to the implied 2 hour delay, they would have been able to abort the test long before a second human being was injected.
Lastly, the issue is compensation. With everything that went wrong, the companies in question have an obligation to provide care for these people. Unfortunately, by the time it's all sorted out in the legal system, it may be too late to give them anything resembling a life (if they are even alive at the end of it).
Actually, if you are found to be running a pirated copy of Windows, Microsoft tends to give you a legit key in exchange for the information on where you got that copy. Because of this, it seems unlikely that they're running a racket in the way you imply.
The problem is that parents /aren't/ paying attention to their kids. So the kids can go buy games which are inappropriate for their age. That is the very reason that people think laws like this need to exist. If parents were paying attention to their kids and not letting them get games like this, there would be no perceived problem.
That said, almost every law I've seen which addresses this issue is targetted at minors. I can't recall a single one which suggested that such games should be banned outright (at least, not in the US--I recall Greece having some funky legislation like this). Sure, there are one or two freaks who want to take it to the extreme, but the laws that have come out of it are for minors.
And frankly, there's a lot of good precedent for this already. Take movie ratings. For PG, PG13, or R, the parents can take the kids to the theater. For any rating, the parents can rent the DVD for the kids and let them watch it. Otherwise, the kid only gets to view things which are "appropriate".
Of course, that's the biggest problem with any rating system. Who decides what is "appropriate" for what age levels? You also have parents which use the rating system to decide what is ok for their kids rather than taking a look at the content and deciding for themselves. That's what this story is about. According to this particular rating system, Pac Man is 64% violent. Some parents, not knowing what Pac Man is, might blacklist an innocent game because some ratings board somewhere had a stick up its ass.
Blah. It's obviously a very complicated issue.
I'm not the first guy who fell in love with a woman that he met at a restaurant who turned out to be the daughter of a kidnapped scientist only to lose her to her childhood lover who she last saw on a deserted island who then turned out fifteen years later to be the leader of the French underground.
Actually, I think they just realized that they shouldn't do anything to hinder the adoption of their new formats until the formats are well-entrenched in the market. They don't want to make the same mistakes that were made with the original Divx--they want to wait until everyone has an HD player before making the discs worthless to a bunch of people.
You're obviously quite capable of using Google. Why are you complaining?
Honestly, the people most interested in this story are the ones who know what it is. It's easy enough to skip the story if you don't know.
The most interesting and innovative aspect of Eternal Darkness was how it breaks the fourth wall. Each sanity trick works once, and then it's mostly an annoyance for the rest of the game (except for some of the cheap scare tactics like you get in most horror movies these days--these are situational and you don't tend to come across them more than once, anyway).
I got one of these and did some Google searching on some of the phrases used in the e-mail. After I got no hits, I searched for the phone number. No hits. So I searched Google for "Paypal Phone Number". The first hit is to a faq explaining to go to the Help Center. Clicking there, you find a link which takes you to their phone number, which happened to be in a different area code than the number I was sent via the phishing e-mail.
So it actually isn't all that hard to get a phone number for Paypal. For the record, from their home page, click "Help" then "Contact Us" to get to the same page I mentioned above.
Only "dangerous" speech has to have artistic merit. Threatening speech counts. Pornography counts (if pornography has no artistic merit, it is considered obscenity).
h e_United_States_Constitution
Here's a Wiki article that discusses the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_t
I shall quote:
The federal government and the states have long been permitted to restrict obscene or pornographic speech. While obscene speech generally has no protection under the First Amendment, pornography is subject to little regulation. The exact definition of obscenity and pornography, however, has changed over time.
So my first mistake was, perhaps, using the words "obscenity" and "pornography" almost interchangeably (in fact, I did not mention obscenity at all). It's a tricky situation because the line is extremely fuzzy.
Under the Miller test, a work is obscene if it would be found appealing to the prurient interest by an average person applying contemporary community standards, depicts sexual conduct in a patently offensive way and has no serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.
Here we see that an expression (which I called pornography earlier) may be considered an obscenity with the primary basis being whether there is some artistic value (or merit).
So my overall flaw was in the wording, and I would consider that semantics. If it is deemed obscene by community standards, a work is no longer pornography, but obscenity, which has almost no protection under the 1st amendment, and can thus be banned. Note that this only affects the expression of the "speech" and not the possession. It may be illegal to create or distribute the obscenity, but it is not legal to possess it. Child pornography falls under different laws and restrictions, and is of course illegal to possess.
Going back to the original reason for the discussion: the song which asks people to "Kill $X" has to have artistic merit. Telling someone to kill another human being probably has no artistic merit, and I suspect that doing so will get you arrested faster than that bovine you mentioned can sneeze. Creating an artistic work which contains the command "kill $X" is protected, and if a person was arrested (and not sent to Gitmo over it) then they would probably have the case dismissed outright if the judge has even a modicum of common sense. You might even be able to sue for false arrest afterwards.
Freedom of speech is a tricky thing. The intent--that is, the very reason it was put into the Bill of Rights--was indeed so that people could be critical of the government without fear of government repercussion. But that's not how it's worded and that's not how years of court rulings interpret it.
Freedom of speech has grown to encompass any form of artistic expression. This includes pictures, imagery, and music in addition to traditional forms of speech, both written and verbal. It is protected precisely because there are things some people might not want to hear you say, yet their rights shouldn't trump yours. Freedom of speech was key in allowing some forms of music (specifically "rock and roll") to survive when some cities and towns banned it from their radios and record stores. Certainly this form of music is not speech against the government, however contrary to your claim, it was deemed protected speech and had to be allowed to exist.
There are still some forms of "speech" which are outlawed. Obscenities are illegal in many places. Copyright infringement breaks other laws. Libel and slander, untruths which can damage a person's character, are illegal because they infringe of the rights of another person. And death threats are illegal for much the same reason. All of these exceptions to Freedom of Speech have at least a little merit, though right now there efforts to curb legitimate speech--without any sort of merit at all. I am, of course, referring to flag burning, which is clearly a statement about the government and which is being fought against by this very government. Those in power do not appear to think that freedom of speech should cover this particular criticism of the government--despite your assertion that FoS protects that specific right.
All-in-all, it's murky and one of the most important rights we possess. We must not allow Freedom of Speech to be taken from us, or we lose any and all ability to govern ourselves.
It's an easy mistake to make, since most of the time, people don't care about civil law. A great deal of it is common sense. In fact, I made the same mistake once, and had someone actually point me to a law on the books which allowed only for civil penalties but not criminal punishment. I wish I could find a good example for you, but my cursory search didn't turn up anything handy.
Civil matters are still based on laws which are on the books.
It obviously has to have some sort of artistic merit. Lots of "speech" is banned if you can't prove that it has artistic merit (some forms of pornography, for example).
The question should be whether an AIM icon can have artistic merit, and if it does, is this particular icon artistic?
There's nothing special about them. But should text that says "Kill $name" or a picture with the caption "Kill $name" be considered a threat?
Apparently it should.
Yes, speech is variable. I often talk online with /college/students/ who don't seem to be able to form complete sentences and whose meaning is vague. Maybe this kid meant, "I'm going to kill $name" but due to space considerations, laziness, or any of the other reasons that people abbreviate on the Internet, it came out as "Kill $name" instead.
The reason it's a "slippery slope" is because prosecutors start pushing the law ever so slightly and get convictions until the act that is being punished has changed drastically from the intent of the lawmakers.
Either that, or the lawmakers themselves make small changes in the laws which, over time, add up to something utterly absurd.
Right now, with the current laws, legal system, and judicial rulings, it's inconceivable that someone would be convicted for thinking about committing a crime. That doesn't mean that in a few years time, such convictions will not happen.
The three clauses are pretty clear, but I'll try to sum them up. You must do one of the following if you want to redistribute GPL'd code:
3a: Give the code or the option of the code at the same time as the binary. Pointing someone to another site for the code does not count.
3b: Give a written offer for the code, good for 3 years. This means that for three years from the last time you distributed the software, you must give the code to someone who asks for it.
3c: If-and-only-if you received a written offer for code when you received the binary, yourself, then you may include a copy of the written offer you received in place of offering the source code yourself.
Most people use 3a or don't even bother distributing binaries and only distribute source. If you received the binary/source in this way, your only options for redistribution of source are 3a or 3b, neither of which allow you to "point back to your upstream".
You may not think it should be required, but the GPL is pretty simple and pretty clear.
The user does not own the rights to the source code, but they certainly have the rights to the source code. The original distributor is under zero obligation to give it to them--so if that site goes down, where should they get it?
It's a big presumtion that the written offer of source code was on the CD. But obviously, this is not something we can readily determine.
As for the software in the CDs on the magazines (the other poster mentioned)--again, it depends entirely upon whether the source was available on the CD or whether there was a written offer for the magazine to offer the source upon request OR whether they had such a letter from their distributor.
It's not really all that hard to figure out if you're compliant--unless it's referring to an event from years ago when you weren't really paying attention anyway.
This shouldn't have been modded 'insightful'. It's filled with the same misinformation that most of the rest of the posts contain.
If you as a distributor do not provide the source code in accordance with section 3a of the GPL, then the distributor must comply with 3b or 3c. 3c requires that your upstream provider provided the code in accordance with 3b. If they used 3a, then your only option is 3b.
3b is quite clear:
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange;
The written offer for the code must accompany the distribution of the binary or object code. How many of these small providers say on the download page, "Say, if you'd like this code, shoot us an e-mail!"? Probably none, because most people never really read the GPL--they just assume its conditions based on FUD and misinformation.
Now if Mepis is providing this written offer, then yes, they only have to provide the source code if asked. However I went to the site, followed the links to the mirrors, and was never provided with a written offer of source code. I have not yet mounted my ISO to see if it's on there (it's still downloading), but my guess is that it isn't.
The problem here isn't that the source isn't available somewhere--it's that the GPL is vital to Linux. If we start letting some people disregard it, why not all? Why not let Microsoft rip parts of the Kernel out of the tree and use it in their own OSs? Why not let someone sell Linux on a router and not provide the source code/modifications?
Of course, first sale distribution is legal without the consent of the original copyright owner. How does this fit in with the GPL? Can't I pass on my legally owned copy of GPL'd software for free without having to respect the GPL's source distribution clause?
Sure, I'm fully aware of that, and I don't discuss sensitive information over the phone.
Remember always that the point isn't that we necessarily want everything we do to be private, but that we want to have the option of privacy. If the government is snooping, that option is gone. If a neighbor is snooping, it's probably my own fault and I probably thought about that ahead of time.