A lot of developers start coding open source for free... but almost no one would stick it out for the long haul of a big project if they weren't getting paid for it. Do you really think linus would or could afford to keep spending all of his time on the kernel without economic support?
Projects start for a lot of reasons. Most of the people I know who do open source do it for a mixture of 1. They are just creative, and part of their personality makes it necessary to do creative things to be happy 2. They want to impress their friends 3. They want to make money (which they could often to otherwise), but want to do it on their own terms.
Honestly though, the way corporate culture is becoming at some companies, where engineers are getting more freedom and higher pay, I expect more projects to start for the same reasons, but this time starting from the beginning with corporate support.
>That certainly is an interesting way of looking at it. >Here are the people that make more than half of the software on any given computer What... I'm writing this from linux now... but if I turn to my right there a whole lab of windows machines that only have *one* piece of open source software on them (firefox).
>and are the drive behind most (if not all) of the innovation in the software industry >being referred to as bored people idly filling their time...
Open source is the drive behind innovation in the software industry? Wha? The vast majority of open source software I use is a clone of pre-existing commercial software, including the entire unix operating system...
I'm not saying that the open source world is *stagnant*, but I'd hardly say that it's driving innovation in the rest of the industry. In the case of google I'd maybe say they were... enabling it.
immediately after columbine, back when I was in middle school (I guess that was quite a while ago) I remember a lot of kids getting expelled because for no particular reason other than that they were problem kids, had ADD, were loners, acted out a little, etc. If they made the administration nervous, they'd chuck them out the door. School and government bureaucrats tend to fear people who stick out more than anyone else.
In context it's kind of hilarious because our school had a problem with gang violence (it was the suburbs and middle school, so this wasn't exactly the stuff you see in the movies, but it was pretty bad), that the administration more or less ignored.
"On Monday, Superior Court Judge Don Clay issued a gag order barring attorneys on both sides from discussing Sturgeon."
How can they gag that? That seems highly relevant to the case, considering that Sturgeon clearly had a grudge against Reiser.
Most of the other posters seem to assume that the case will be dropped because of this, but if the jury is *never allowed to hear about it* how can the come to the pretty reasonable conclusion that the highly circumstantial evidence against Reiser doesn't amount to much when the victim had dated (and dumped) a known serial killer with a grudge against the defendant?
If the prosecution knew about this, why'd they even bring it to trial?
That is indeed the proper use of gotos (although the example code in question was obviously quickly written and contained a few errors). If you aren't familiar with this, the gotos here are essentially emulating a "finally" clause.
Several responders mentioned "nested ifs"... which is obviously a horrible idea if you think about it for 10 seconds. The nesting gets unreadably deep if you have enough calls that can return error codes (which is quite common).
It is quite annnoying that people who obviously have no real experience with C or programming in general will make blanket statements about never using gotos or other practices... I've found it to be the sort of statement that people who aren't that good at programming make to make themselves sound smarter.
Java and higher level languages tend to not use gotos as much since they have finally clauses. However, if you have *ever* read through any large c code base, you will see tons of goto statements being used to handle errors. Take the linux kernel for example, just run a grep on it or something and you will find tons of gotos.
I don't think that anyone was ever led to believe that microsoft would be bringing.NET to linux... Microsoft's long term stance on linux has been to develop no software for it whatsoever.
What I am surprised about is that it has taken microsoft this long to bring any part of.NET to OSX. Frankly, I'd have expected them to bring at least a slimmed down runtime to OSX quite a while ago. My guess is that apple has been pretty unenthusiastic about the whole idea since.NET would mostly just compete with their existing cocoa and java toolsets.
At this point I'm doubting that the runtime on osx will ever be used for anything other than the browser plugin, or at least I doubt microsoft will make it easy to do so on OSX.
They clearly mean they will have OSX compatibility when they said cross platform...
I'd be pretty surprised if they released a linux port, since they seem to have a policy of not touching linux. I wouldn't be suprised if there was a solaris or BSD port. They did make a port of the CLR to BSD in the past (http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/02/07/sh aredsourcecli/).
Don't have been counters in management positions. A lot of people doing management are CS grads these days. That said, even they would (or should) not make a bad business decision just because it sounds cool.
square focusses too much on building brands...
on
Ten Years of FFXIII?
·
· Score: 1
and not enough on making good games.
Most of their games are cookie cutter crap, and they only draw a profit because occasionally they'll bother to put together an interesting story and throw a good game in the grab bag that is square's product line up. People buy their games, each time figuring they have about a 10% chance of it being another chrono trigger, but 9 times out of 10 the come back with some pretty forgettable games.
These secondary installments are just another way of milking money out of the few good games they make. Some *real* sequels to some of the really good games have come out of square would be nice, but instead we get psuedo sequels that can't stand on their own as a game, or once a real sequel to a crappy game like FFX.
>>We spend a lot of time complaining about all the evil ways Microsoft uses to foist >>themselves on the world. By doing this, we automatically remove any blame that we >>ourselves may bear for their successes and our failures.
This is what I see as essentially stalling progress in many areas of open source. The community isn't capable of evaluating the community's own flaws. There's a brand of open source "nationalism" where anyone who criticizes community policies and practices is derided as not being patriotic enough.
Nothing but a bad driver, bad hardware, or a *bad kernel* can cause a BSOD (read kernel panic). It doesn't matter that other movie players don't cause it. If the driver's and kernel didn't have a bug, it would be impossible for *any* userspace application, quicktime or otherwise, to cause a kernel panic.
Quicktime isn't the greatest movie player ever... but it couldn't possibly be at the root of this problem. It is clearly simply exposing an underlying problem.
>You may try with VLC media player. >Works very well with tons of formats.
except the format in question... VLC can't play most modern quicktime movies.
The real issue here is a bad driver, which could be anyone's fault *but* quicktime's. That said, for most purposes VLC or mediaplayer classic is a better player on windows than quicktime.
If people actually start using other servers, won't they lost their income stream? If someone sets up free second life server for particular interest groups, what's the point of using the official one?
What benefit does linden labs get from open sourcing their server?
Computer science is not like physics... for all practical purposes computer science is an engineering degree with a few theory classes mixed in. A "computer engineering" degree sometimes means the same things as computer science, and otherwise means more emphasis on lower level hardware details.
The problem is that most of what we study in computer science can't be studied theoretically, because there is no real theory behind it. There are proofs embedded in the analysis of many problems, but most of what people do is empirical and highly contingent on industry trends and particular hardware architectures. It would be pointless to teach someone to *study* these things without teaching them how to write code.
Don't get me wrong, I love the theory in computer science, but if you want a computer science degree that just goes over theory and ignores application... then check out the mathematics and philosophy departments.
that prevent women from coming into IT. However, they usually can't be blamed on workplaces and educational institutions as discrimination has been in the past, and as many posters responding to this article seemed to assume.
At my school, the UW (I'm taking classes with most of the students pictured in the article) there seems to be a fairly active effort to provide outreach to women. There are quite a few more women here than at some other cs departments, and all of my CS classes have women in them. Even so, we aren't nearly at 50%.
The main issues keeping women out of fields like CS now have more to do with how they are raised, and the basic values that they are impressed with at a young age. Frankly, the reason I went into cs was that I played with computers and robotic toys as a kid, and so learned to derive joy from interactions with electronics. My grand father was a watch maker and my father is a photographer, so from them I learned to take pride in technical excellence. My basic psychological makeup has been geared since a young age towards the appreciation of tools, and all things that people create with some practical purpose.
The toys girls play with when they are young, and the values they learn from their mothers or other female role models stand in stark contrast to this. By the time women are entering college, many of them have gone their lives without learning to appreciate functional and practical things. Without this intrinsic appreciation, there's little to draw them to fields like cs, except maybe money which can be had easier elsewhere.
10.5 is a fairly incremental release for apple, with not a lot of major features. Keep in mind that in the time it took vista to ship, something like 4 or 5 releases came out from apple. This is because the difference between 10.2 and 10.3 is only as big as you'd expand from a second point release, a few new cool features that people will pay for, and not much else.
>the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is not about helping people. >Period, the end. It's about power.
Bill gates is not the anti christ, deal with it. He's contributed far more to the betterment of this world than you have, or ever could, or ever tried to. Dick.
Just because someone made some software you don't like doesn't make them a bad person, and doesn't negate all of the good things they've done.
>Did you get paid to prop up Mr. Gates, or are you just easily led? Do even you really believe what your write? Stop being so fucking paranoid and deal with he real world.
What's the deal with comcast charging $60 a month for such lousy support? I seem to recall broadband not costing nearly that much in the past... also, what happened to the good alternative isp's like speakeasy? Have regulations changed and they are gone again or something?
but "why does the universe exist" isn't really a question that can be answered with scientific i.e. empirical methods.
All of our information about the big bang indicates that all of the matter and energy in the universe is moving away from a central point, and thus we can infer that in the past all of that matter was compacted at that point.
These simple observations don't do anything to answer how that matter got there in the first place. That Hawking statement that the universe came from nothing, is just to say that the simplest explanation about something we have no information on whatsoever, (like the universe before the big bang) is to say that it doesn't exist. There's no actual information whatsoever to back up Hawking's claim, but there's no *emperical evidence* to contradict it, and it's very simple, so some are apt to take it seriously.
However, there *do* seem to be some *logical* contraditions in the idea that the universe came from nothing, or at the very least there are some very difficult questions that must be answered before you can just say "the universe came from nothing." If the universe just happened, it implies that something causally weird is going on i.e. that the universe is self caused or somehow uncaused. Self causation, or necessitation is the sort of thing that was historically attributed to god by Descartes and others, although some philosophers, like Spinoza, who thought that the universe *was* god necessarily attributed it to the universe as well.
However, the statement "came from nothing" seems to imply uncaused, which is a more difficult thing to grasp, because a self caused thing exists necessarily from it's own essense, but a thing with no cause has a very uncertain existence. Frankly, I'm a little iffy on what "uncaused" even means. It seems to indicate something that isn't causally, or logically necessary, but is somehow possible and manages to obtain. If that's the case, it seems to suggest there *is* no determining factor that made that possible event obtain, which is a hard thing to understand and accept.
To me it almost makes sense to suggest if that all possible universe might necessarily exist (in a loose sense of the word exist) somehow. The only reason that I can think of for this, is if the Spinozan notion that limitations such as nonexistence imply the existence of something else to constrain them, and that existence of all things is sort of the "default." However, even that seems like an unnecessary sort of thing to be true about the universe.
If people would actually fix some of the longstanding problems with linux on the desktop, instead of blaming microsoft for all of their problems, linux might actually see adoption on the desktop.
What I think is hilarious, is that when you mentioned something like "problems with linux" people will say something like "what problems?" or "that doesn't compare to problem x that windows has." Well obviously it does, because on the desktop people have made that comparison and chosen the competition...
Arguing for linux on the desktop is a process of denial, blame, and self righteousness that I have no interest in taking part in.
next on fox new-er slashdot, flying hippos are eating your invisible babies, and you can't do anything to stop them! Known terrorist, bill gates, pledges to sell more software! Is linux under attack?!?!
>Obviously Microsoft prefers the market to use their software even >if it's pirated, rather than the alternative: the use of free software....
let's be serious. Microsoft does not take free software as a serious competitor for most of it's software. They *do* take google, and the products of a few other companies seriously, but no one there seriously expects users to start installing linux en masse and using openoffice in the place of real office.
They were merely echoing what a lot of software companies believe: that the pirated versions of software often act as a sort of trial.
then we'd be referring to terminal, mail, etc for all the common tools that are named after generic things... the.app extension is only used in those cases. You'd note I didn't refer to iterm as iterm.app.
If you had a specific grep binary that you wanted to refer to (that had specific things compiled in), you'd say "the grep binary" instead of just grep in general. It's a linguistic device to make a semantic distinction.
In general people who nit pick too much about how other people speak are those who simply do not understand the variations in the language...
what's more sensible than an *oil company* relocating to the *middle east*? Dubai isn't just some random village in the middle of nowhere, it's a major economic hub http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubai
A lot of people have mentioned the Halliburton contracts in iraq, but Halliburton is spinning off it's military division anyway and is likely to be distanced from iraq. Aside from that, I don't think anyone at Halliburton takes the notion seriously that they will be sued when an ex-CEO is practically running the country... if they were ever afraid of that the abuses wouldn't have happened in the first place.
Also, a bunch of people have mentioned criminal charges. A lot of the problems with Halliburton, Halliburton can't really be held responsible, since the problems originated in the fact that we negotiated such crappy contracts with them. If you're contract has holes in it, you're pretty fucked when it comes to trial.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of developers start coding open source for free... but almost no one would stick it out for the long haul of a big project if they weren't getting paid for it. Do you really think linus would or could afford to keep spending all of his time on the kernel without economic support?
Projects start for a lot of reasons. Most of the people I know who do open source do it for a mixture of
1. They are just creative, and part of their personality makes it necessary to do creative things to be happy
2. They want to impress their friends
3. They want to make money (which they could often to otherwise), but want to do it on their own terms.
Honestly though, the way corporate culture is becoming at some companies, where engineers are getting more freedom and higher pay, I expect more projects to start for the same reasons, but this time starting from the beginning with corporate support.
>That certainly is an interesting way of looking at it.
>Here are the people that make more than half of the software on any given computer
What... I'm writing this from linux now... but if I turn to my right there a whole lab of windows machines that only have *one* piece of open source software on them (firefox).
>and are the drive behind most (if not all) of the innovation in the software industry
>being referred to as bored people idly filling their time...
Open source is the drive behind innovation in the software industry? Wha? The vast majority of open source software I use is a clone of pre-existing commercial software, including the entire unix operating system...
I'm not saying that the open source world is *stagnant*, but I'd hardly say that it's driving innovation in the rest of the industry. In the case of google I'd maybe say they were... enabling it.
immediately after columbine, back when I was in middle school (I guess that was quite a while ago) I remember a lot of kids getting expelled because for no particular reason other than that they were problem kids, had ADD, were loners, acted out a little, etc. If they made the administration nervous, they'd chuck them out the door. School and government bureaucrats tend to fear people who stick out more than anyone else.
In context it's kind of hilarious because our school had a problem with gang violence (it was the suburbs and middle school, so this wasn't exactly the stuff you see in the movies, but it was pretty bad), that the administration more or less ignored.
"On Monday, Superior Court Judge Don Clay issued a gag order barring attorneys on both sides from discussing Sturgeon."
How can they gag that? That seems highly relevant to the case, considering that Sturgeon clearly had a grudge against Reiser.
Most of the other posters seem to assume that the case will be dropped because of this, but if the jury is *never allowed to hear about it* how can the come to the pretty reasonable conclusion that the highly circumstantial evidence against Reiser doesn't amount to much when the victim had dated (and dumped) a known serial killer with a grudge against the defendant?
If the prosecution knew about this, why'd they even bring it to trial?
That is indeed the proper use of gotos (although the example code in question was obviously quickly written and contained a few errors). If you aren't familiar with this, the gotos here are essentially emulating a "finally" clause.
Several responders mentioned "nested ifs"... which is obviously a horrible idea if you think about it for 10 seconds. The nesting gets unreadably deep if you have enough calls that can return error codes (which is quite common).
It is quite annnoying that people who obviously have no real experience with C or programming in general will make blanket statements about never using gotos or other practices... I've found it to be the sort of statement that people who aren't that good at programming make to make themselves sound smarter.
Java and higher level languages tend to not use gotos as much since they have finally clauses. However, if you have *ever* read through any large c code base, you will see tons of goto statements being used to handle errors. Take the linux kernel for example, just run a grep on it or something and you will find tons of gotos.
I don't think that anyone was ever led to believe that microsoft would be bringing .NET to linux... Microsoft's long term stance on linux has been to develop no software for it whatsoever.
.NET to OSX. Frankly, I'd have expected them to bring at least a slimmed down runtime to OSX quite a while ago. My guess is that apple has been pretty unenthusiastic about the whole idea since .NET would mostly just compete with their existing cocoa and java toolsets.
What I am surprised about is that it has taken microsoft this long to bring any part of
At this point I'm doubting that the runtime on osx will ever be used for anything other than the browser plugin, or at least I doubt microsoft will make it easy to do so on OSX.
They clearly mean they will have OSX compatibility when they said cross platform...
h aredsourcecli/).
I'd be pretty surprised if they released a linux port, since they seem to have a policy of not touching linux. I wouldn't be suprised if there was a solaris or BSD port. They did make a port of the CLR to BSD in the past (http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/02/07/s
Don't have been counters in management positions. A lot of people doing management are CS grads these days. That said, even they would (or should) not make a bad business decision just because it sounds cool.
and not enough on making good games.
Most of their games are cookie cutter crap, and they only draw a profit because occasionally they'll bother to put together an interesting story and throw a good game in the grab bag that is square's product line up. People buy their games, each time figuring they have about a 10% chance of it being another chrono trigger, but 9 times out of 10 the come back with some pretty forgettable games.
These secondary installments are just another way of milking money out of the few good games they make. Some *real* sequels to some of the really good games have come out of square would be nice, but instead we get psuedo sequels that can't stand on their own as a game, or once a real sequel to a crappy game like FFX.
>>We spend a lot of time complaining about all the evil ways Microsoft uses to foist
>>themselves on the world. By doing this, we automatically remove any blame that we
>>ourselves may bear for their successes and our failures.
This is what I see as essentially stalling progress in many areas of open source. The community isn't capable of evaluating the community's own flaws. There's a brand of open source "nationalism" where anyone who criticizes community policies and practices is derided as not being patriotic enough.
that he blames quicktime for a BSOD...
Nothing but a bad driver, bad hardware, or a *bad kernel* can cause a BSOD (read kernel panic). It doesn't matter that other movie players don't cause it. If the driver's and kernel didn't have a bug, it would be impossible for *any* userspace application, quicktime or otherwise, to cause a kernel panic.
Quicktime isn't the greatest movie player ever... but it couldn't possibly be at the root of this problem. It is clearly simply exposing an underlying problem.
>You may try with VLC media player.
>Works very well with tons of formats.
except the format in question... VLC can't play most modern quicktime movies.
The real issue here is a bad driver, which could be anyone's fault *but* quicktime's. That said, for most purposes VLC or mediaplayer classic is a better player on windows than quicktime.
If people actually start using other servers, won't they lost their income stream? If someone sets up free second life server for particular interest groups, what's the point of using the official one?
What benefit does linden labs get from open sourcing their server?
Computer science is not like physics... for all practical purposes computer science is an engineering degree with a few theory classes mixed in. A "computer engineering" degree sometimes means the same things as computer science, and otherwise means more emphasis on lower level hardware details.
The problem is that most of what we study in computer science can't be studied theoretically, because there is no real theory behind it. There are proofs embedded in the analysis of many problems, but most of what people do is empirical and highly contingent on industry trends and particular hardware architectures. It would be pointless to teach someone to *study* these things without teaching them how to write code.
Don't get me wrong, I love the theory in computer science, but if you want a computer science degree that just goes over theory and ignores application... then check out the mathematics and philosophy departments.
that prevent women from coming into IT. However, they usually can't be blamed on workplaces and educational institutions as discrimination has been in the past, and as many posters responding to this article seemed to assume.
At my school, the UW (I'm taking classes with most of the students pictured in the article) there seems to be a fairly active effort to provide outreach to women. There are quite a few more women here than at some other cs departments, and all of my CS classes have women in them. Even so, we aren't nearly at 50%.
The main issues keeping women out of fields like CS now have more to do with how they are raised, and the basic values that they are impressed with at a young age. Frankly, the reason I went into cs was that I played with computers and robotic toys as a kid, and so learned to derive joy from interactions with electronics. My grand father was a watch maker and my father is a photographer, so from them I learned to take pride in technical excellence. My basic psychological makeup has been geared since a young age towards the appreciation of tools, and all things that people create with some practical purpose.
The toys girls play with when they are young, and the values they learn from their mothers or other female role models stand in stark contrast to this. By the time women are entering college, many of them have gone their lives without learning to appreciate functional and practical things. Without this intrinsic appreciation, there's little to draw them to fields like cs, except maybe money which can be had easier elsewhere.
10.5 is a fairly incremental release for apple, with not a lot of major features. Keep in mind that in the time it took vista to ship, something like 4 or 5 releases came out from apple. This is because the difference between 10.2 and 10.3 is only as big as you'd expand from a second point release, a few new cool features that people will pay for, and not much else.
>the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is not about helping people.
>Period, the end. It's about power.
Bill gates is not the anti christ, deal with it. He's contributed far more to the betterment of this world than you have, or ever could, or ever tried to. Dick.
Just because someone made some software you don't like doesn't make them a bad person, and doesn't negate all of the good things they've done.
>Did you get paid to prop up Mr. Gates, or are you just easily led?
Do even you really believe what your write? Stop being so fucking paranoid and deal with he real world.
What's the deal with comcast charging $60 a month for such lousy support? I seem to recall broadband not costing nearly that much in the past... also, what happened to the good alternative isp's like speakeasy? Have regulations changed and they are gone again or something?
but "why does the universe exist" isn't really a question that can be answered with scientific i.e. empirical methods.
All of our information about the big bang indicates that all of the matter and energy in the universe is moving away from a central point, and thus we can infer that in the past all of that matter was compacted at that point.
These simple observations don't do anything to answer how that matter got there in the first place. That Hawking statement that the universe came from nothing, is just to say that the simplest explanation about something we have no information on whatsoever, (like the universe before the big bang) is to say that it doesn't exist. There's no actual information whatsoever to back up Hawking's claim, but there's no *emperical evidence* to contradict it, and it's very simple, so some are apt to take it seriously.
However, there *do* seem to be some *logical* contraditions in the idea that the universe came from nothing, or at the very least there are some very difficult questions that must be answered before you can just say "the universe came from nothing." If the universe just happened, it implies that something causally weird is going on i.e. that the universe is self caused or somehow uncaused. Self causation, or necessitation is the sort of thing that was historically attributed to god by Descartes and others, although some philosophers, like Spinoza, who thought that the universe *was* god necessarily attributed it to the universe as well.
However, the statement "came from nothing" seems to imply uncaused, which is a more difficult thing to grasp, because a self caused thing exists necessarily from it's own essense, but a thing with no cause has a very uncertain existence. Frankly, I'm a little iffy on what "uncaused" even means. It seems to indicate something that isn't causally, or logically necessary, but is somehow possible and manages to obtain. If that's the case, it seems to suggest there *is* no determining factor that made that possible event obtain, which is a hard thing to understand and accept.
To me it almost makes sense to suggest if that all possible universe might necessarily exist (in a loose sense of the word exist) somehow. The only reason that I can think of for this, is if the Spinozan notion that limitations such as nonexistence imply the existence of something else to constrain them, and that existence of all things is sort of the "default." However, even that seems like an unnecessary sort of thing to be true about the universe.
If people would actually fix some of the longstanding problems with linux on the desktop, instead of blaming microsoft for all of their problems, linux might actually see adoption on the desktop.
What I think is hilarious, is that when you mentioned something like "problems with linux" people will say something like "what problems?" or "that doesn't compare to problem x that windows has." Well obviously it does, because on the desktop people have made that comparison and chosen the competition...
Arguing for linux on the desktop is a process of denial, blame, and self righteousness that I have no interest in taking part in.
next on fox new-er slashdot, flying hippos are eating your invisible babies, and you can't do anything to stop them! Known terrorist, bill gates, pledges to sell more software! Is linux under attack?!?!
it goes on and on...
>Obviously Microsoft prefers the market to use their software even ...
>if it's pirated, rather than the alternative: the use of free software.
let's be serious. Microsoft does not take free software as a serious competitor for most of it's software. They *do* take google, and the products of a few other companies seriously, but no one there seriously expects users to start installing linux en masse and using openoffice in the place of real office.
They were merely echoing what a lot of software companies believe: that the pirated versions of software often act as a sort of trial.
then we'd be referring to terminal, mail, etc for all the common tools that are named after generic things... the .app extension is only used in those cases. You'd note I didn't refer to iterm as iterm.app.
If you had a specific grep binary that you wanted to refer to (that had specific things compiled in), you'd say "the grep binary" instead of just grep in general. It's a linguistic device to make a semantic distinction.
In general people who nit pick too much about how other people speak are those who simply do not understand the variations in the language...
you mentioned most of the things that I was going to say to that guy.
As a side note, I believe that ndis is actually based on reactos' driver code.
what's more sensible than an *oil company* relocating to the *middle east*? Dubai isn't just some random village in the middle of nowhere, it's a major economic hub http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubai
A lot of people have mentioned the Halliburton contracts in iraq, but Halliburton is spinning off it's military division anyway and is likely to be distanced from iraq. Aside from that, I don't think anyone at Halliburton takes the notion seriously that they will be sued when an ex-CEO is practically running the country... if they were ever afraid of that the abuses wouldn't have happened in the first place.
Also, a bunch of people have mentioned criminal charges. A lot of the problems with Halliburton, Halliburton can't really be held responsible, since the problems originated in the fact that we negotiated such crappy contracts with them. If you're contract has holes in it, you're pretty fucked when it comes to trial.