The web page has it as being the F14, but I remembered a posting from that time that said it was the F15 (and it makes more sense, since the F15 was one of the first fly-by-wire aircraft, while the F14, is (I think), pretty much fly by cable).
In any case, the SERIOUS problem was that when you flew over the equator, the computer would suddenly 'realize' that you were upside down from where you wanted to be and try to immediately turn the aircraft over to the 'proper' orientation. It was said that the aircraft would have survived the maneuver, but the pilot's neck would not.
Luckily this was found during simulations If it had happened during a real flight, it could have taken a long time (and lots of fatalities) to figure it out.
On a lighter note, there is apparently a subroutine -- phonetically referred to.. It was either wait_on_wheels() or weight_on_wheels(). In either case, it was added after some slap-happy test pilot tried retracting the landing gear while sitting on the runway (resulting in millions of dollars of repairs).
As far as I'm concerned, any agreement that I make in the purchase of software occurs before you accept my money. Once the money is accepted, the agreement is binding. Clicking on the 'i agree' button is just a stupid human trick that I have to go through to get the software that I purchased to do what you told me it would do.
Imagind if you purchased a car, and the first time you went to fill it up at the gas station, you found a sticker that said:
By breaking the seal on this gas cap, you agree to the following conditions:
You will not open the hood of your car.
You will not make any modifications to the engine
You will not drive it on any road not sanctioned by GM.
Even if the car fails to function as promised, you will not attempt to figure out how any of the features work.
You agree that GM is not liable for any defects in workmanship or design -- even if such defects cause your vehicle to periodically stop dead on train tracks, or spontaneously explode in a ball of flame that makes Die Hard's special effects look mundane.
I don't think that any court in the country would accept that as a binding contract -- yet people expect that to work for software.
Have you talked to NASA recently about their data transfer problems??
Even easier: would you be willing to transfer data from my 20 year old Radio Shack Color Comuter disks (much less my 8" Model 16 floppies?). My understanding is that 20 year old CDs are already starting to rot,
On the other hand, the stereo pictures that my father took in the 1950's are still quite viewable -- and they don't depend on illegal technology to decrypt them so that I can copy them to a new medium, either.
Great: Between the DMCA and digital broadcast, this means that when todays movies finally make it into the public domain (sometime around 2250, the way things are going), there won't be a legal copy in existence for anybody to use.
Not that I've got anything against digital theatres (presuming that they've got the quality up near what film provides) -- I just don't like the idea of the digital information blackhole that it looks like the media industry is attempting to create for our descendents.
That's absurd. The code isn't YOURS, it doesn't belong to THE OSS COMMUNITY, it belongs to MS. You, nor the government, nor anyone else, have the rights to the source code. It's not your property. It's theirs.
In other words, we've completely lost sight of the original intent of copyright laws.
The original intent of copyright laws was to encourage artists and scientists to creat works that would then fall into the public domain in a short period of time. That was also the reason behind the Library of Congress: Have a copy of everything that was copyrighted so that, when it fell into the public domain, there would be guaranteed to be at least one copy that the public had access to.
With current copyright laws, however, by the time anything became public domain, the storage medium would have crumbled to unusability, the technology to read it would be obsolete, and it would be impossible to read it anyways, because the technology to decrypt it would be illegal.
Unless the state lawyers are complete idiots, I think that MS has, once again, shot themselves in the foot.
Here we have yet another senior MS executive who is saying that
MS should be able to restrict competition if it thinks it's in the interests of the consumer
arguing that the decisions that they made about Netscape (and found to have been illegal and against consumer interests) are in the consumer's interests
arguing that having a machine boot up into Linux by default is bad for consumers. (remember that they argued that Linux is one of the few viable competetor to themselves).
They are, in effect, arguing that the DOJ agreement should stand because it would allow them to continue the sorts of anti-competitive actions that they've been convicted of, and that the agreement is supposed to remedy.
The article claims that the popping sound is the oxygen being forced out of the tubes. To quote: "The initial popping noise is generated by the heating of the oxygen inside and between the tubes, which causes a shock wave.
As to knowing that it's a slow burn: I watched the video (my new version of mplayer works quite nicely, thank you).
Given the longer description in the body of the article, I'm not sure where the 'explosion' tag comes from (other than journalistic hyperbole).
So, its not just heat dissipation, I think what we're seeing here is that intense light is powerful enough to break the bonds in the carbon nanotube, and once that happens, the bond strain energy is released catastrophically, thus causing the explosion/ignition. So each nanotube explodes at the same time, not one leading to another.
er, um, no. It's a simple burn, not an explosion. The 'pop' sound
is apparently from air inside the tubes being indirectly heated by the
tubes when the tubes absorb the heat. The combustion of the tubes,
however, is relatively slow and progressive in nature. The rest of your explanation,
however, seems to make sense.
My off-the-cuff thought is that - besides the shape-strain, the combustion
may have something to do with the heating of the oxygen inside the tubes.
If the tubes amplify the captured energy on the inside, the super-heated
tube guts may be where the combustion actually begins. This would also
explain why only singld-walled tubes exhibit this behaviour: the second wall
would act as an insulating layer for the oxygen inside
the tube.
I wouldn't be surprised to see that that's the case... I think that a couple of million pounds a day falls to the earth as space dust/micrometeors, etc. Thing is that a lot of the man-made stuff is likely to be on the larger end of the scale...
Even something like a dropped wrench is likely larger than much of the space dust that hits the earth daily.
Because of that, in my opinion, it's hard to make money in the U.S. because the companies are pretty happy with Windows. It works pretty well, and the cost savings that result from Linux on the desktop for most companies do not warrant the trauma of having to worry about whether your Microsoft Office document is going to open properly.
I'm not so sure that people are happy with Windows.... It's rather that they still don't have all of the pieces needed to make the switch. One company I worked for tried to force all of the geeks to switch over to Windows... The argument of the DTO was that we needed access to the Microsoft Calendering software. For him, this was pretty much the market-killer.
I've actually heard similar comments from someone who told me that RedHat had gotten queries from VP and CEO levels of Fortune 500 companies about switching the entire company from Windows to Linux. The big show-stopper was apparently things like Calendering software. This actually makes a lot of sense to me. In terms of beauty and ease of use, KDE/Gnome is right up there with Windows (in fact, I remember thinking that Win2K looked like a gnome knock-off).
I think that the next stage of the Linux World-Domination project would be to take a survey of what necessary functionality is missing from the Linux desk-top to allow a full-company switchover. I figure that -- if people are willing to take it on, there are probably Fortune-500 companies that would be willing to put a couple of million dollars into funding the core group to develop some of this functionality.
In terms of what it would save them to be able to walk away from the MS-Tax, I'm guessing that even $10M would be small change for a fortune-500 company -- but a hefty chunk of money to an OS development effort.
Man, that has to be a joke. The constitution of the US revolutionized the concept of freedom throughout the world. It's hard to imagine how long it would have taken to get where we are if we hadn't had a "virgin land" to try the Great Experiment in self-government by the people.
The US claim to have 'innovated' democracy is a usurpation of microsoftian proportions.
The idea of government by/for/of the people was taken from the natives of North America. Some say that the design of the US government was taken from the Iroquois confederation (but europeanized changes were make that introduced some fundamental flaws).
In the concept of many native cultures, a leader spoke for his people, as opposed to deciding for them. The concept of a leader having the inherent right (whether given via God or vote) to make all decisions for 'his' people is a european one. The presumptin that a leader would (without some structural encouragement) alway decide based on what was best for the country (as opposed to best for him(her) self) is especially european. Even in native cultures where a leader was chosen by some sort of inheritance system, there were many checks and balances that prevented abuse -- not the least of which was that a leader could be removed by a simple majority vote.
How the hell did this get rated "funny"? One of these days some asshole may get something like this past some judge somewhere, and a bunch of users are going to be SOL.
it is colsed sourc so unless NVIDIA is willing enough
This points to the heart of the difference between open-source and closed source.
Closed source anything is at the mercy of the source vendor's business model. If and when what you want to do is consistent with what the vendor makes money allowing you to do, then closed source is fine. If/when what you want to do is inconsistent with the vendor's business model (unless they don't realize it), then you're pretty much SOL.
Open source allows development to be at the whim of the user base. It's pretty common that buyer interests and seller interests are not the same. Those differences also tend to increase as the stuff being sold gets older and older.
I'm gonna have to write a piece of software where the EULA includes the phrasing:
By downloading and using this program, I agree to give to the author, on demand, my entire computer system -- including software, licenses for said software and all data contained on said computer. Should licensee decline to abide for the agreement, the licensee will, in addition to the computer system mentioned above, be required to pay legal fees............
(ianal).
I'm from Senator Disney's home state. Hollings is a Democrat, so voting against him means voting for a Republican.
You actually have a number of choices:
The easiest one is to get a Democrat membership, and then convince your entire CS faculty to do the same thing -- then stack the primary and blow Hollings out in the Democrat primary.
If that doesn't work, get Libertarian / Green / Pick-your-third-party membership for you and your 500 best allies, and then work for the third party... If you can get a noticable proportion of people to vote for some third party instead of Mr Hollings, it will get both his attention and the attention of others.... Please note that in a state like NC (by the sounds of it), any vote for a left-leaning third party is going to be obvious bleed from Hollings. It may not get him out of office, but it will scare the begesus out of him (and that's the whole point of the exercise).
I don't think I could, in good conscience, advance a destructive conservative agenda just so I can use Linux instead of Windows,
The "don't waste your vote" proclamations are really saying "voting for x is a wasted vote". That's really only true because people believe it.
My understanding is that the Republican party started out as a third party -- and people used to say the same thing about them. If people hadn't been willing to "waste their vote", the Republicans would still be an also-ran third-party (if they existed at all). Please ignore the fact that some people might consider this a good thing. My point is that the only way to change the setup is to be willing to walk up the hill for a long while.
Voting only scratches the surface of the difference you can make in a democratic system.
It's not just a case of us voting that way: It's a case of us convincing any and everybody who will listen to us to vote that way. In the case of The Senator from DisneyLand, it might be things like geeks in his district getting themselves and their 2000 best friends to sign up for the Democratic party and denying Hollings the Democratic nomination. Then, if he makes it, jump ship to the Republicans and make sure that he loses his seat anyways.
Similarly, every geek who cares should put up a 10-most-wanted list of senators and/or Representatives that you would like to see tossed out of office; what their riding is; and just what they've voted for that is so reprehensible.
Giving technical support to the enemies of free speech wouldn't hurt much either.
Oh yeah -- the double speak thing.... Make sure the people understand the principle of "an enemy of free speech". In much the same way as the NRA points out how rifles are a constitutional right. Personally, I figure that the right to get your speech distributed is somewhere above the right to shoot people.
A lot of people really don't understand that, if it were not for the interference of the Movie lobby, standards from the '60s and '70s would probably be public domain today.... It would be legal to make copies of "American Pie" or "Riders On the Storm" if legislators had followed the original intent of the First Amendment clause which allows copyrights for
a limited time. For the original congress, "limited times", comprised approximately 14 years. It's now 10 times that, and growing. This apparently infinite growth of the limited time exemption is a feature of the 20'th century and according to some, a result of the movie lobby.
Being able to make legal copies of songs written before the birth of most of the people on this venue would probably relieve some of the pressure on current music as well. It might also allow us to legally preserve copies of early software before it becomes completely unreadable
When My friend Chris Rasmusen used to GM, we'd know we were about to get our collective butts thrashed when he put on that song (or even just started to hum it, with an evil shit-spitting grin).
Although many provisions would lead to extreme results, Microsoft would not have the freedom to construe the non-settling States' proposed remedy in ways that it finds less extreme"
I.E. Microsoft won't be able to weasel it's way out of the non-settling States' proposal, but it would be able to do so with the DOJ proposal.
One example of that would be the second half of the provision that MS can't deny a company access to it's technology.. But they CAN deny access to a company after making two allegations of breach of contract.. However: There is no provision that provides that the allegations have to be either substantive or supportable. In other words, all that MS has to do to threaten someone with loss of their license is to send them two random allegations of breach and then grab them by the gonads. This massive loophole makes the whole provision useless.
I agree that the guy is playing fast and loose with the rules, but I think we should give him a chance by waiting until he meets his deadline.
I've got no problems giving leeway to someone who appears to have accidently oopsed his way onto the wrong side of the GPL, but I'm not seeing that here.
I'm not eager to give leeway to someone running a GPL-based for-profit business who's quoted whining that nobody's ever made money obeying the GPL. It'd feel kinda like giving your NATO code-book to a 'true patriot' with a Russian accent.
What I'm seeing here is someone who is showing symptoms of having intended to violate the GPL from day one. They claim that the GPL is not viable for a business; They have already had to be leaned on once before they released their source to the WINE changes they made some time ago (and now they're flagging it like they were the good guys in that exchange); and the cynic in me screams that the reason why they spent maybe $50K on baubles like sponsering a free-software oriented conference is that they knew that they were gonna need that goodwill to burn when they released their product without the source code (and, besides, it gave them inside access to the top developers of the code they were about to steal).
As far as I'm concerned, they're in violation of the GPL, and it'd be real easy for them to get back in compliance:
tar -cvf/source/tree | ssh ftp.site 'cd ~ftp/pub; tar -xvf -'
If the need my help to convert that snippet of code for the specifics of their site, I'd be glad to do it for the measly sum of $99US (plus airfare, expenses and accomodations).
3) You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
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; or,
c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
So, for further clarity, You can only give pointers to third-party sources of the source code if that's how/where you got the object code you're distributing, and you're doing it noncommercially. On the other hand, if you distribute modified code, you have to point people to copy of your modified source. Generally, the easiest way to do this is to make sure that anybody who gets your object code gets {,access to} a copy of the source code, at the same time.
And what percentage of corporate laptops are running linux? 1%?
Heh. Laptop use is what actually got me into linux. A few years ago I got handed an IBM laptop with a 3COM ethernet card. Turns out that trying to sleep that box in windows was an absolute nightmare. We were a SUN shop, so I tried installing Solaris on the thing -- but Solaris didn't support that 3com card.
Then I tried installing Linux. Worked like a charm (well -- MUCH easier to get working reasonably than the Windows driver, anyways)... and once I got it working, it was rock solid stable (more than I could say for Windows). Since then, every Laptop I've bought/ been issued has ended up a Linux partition on it. (more than I can say for Windows:-).
What this says is that the campaign is starting to have an effect. This could be a coincidental case of Herbalife attacking the same problem (and sincerely intending to address it), It could also be a legal facade. If they tell people "we don't suggest doing this" with this including detailed instructions and a wink-wink nudge-nudge, then they can claim plausable deniability if it ever goes to court (or congress).
If it's an insincere effort on Herbalife's part, then a good deal more effort is going to be required before they feel the need to seriously address the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
In any case, the SERIOUS problem was that when you flew over the equator, the computer would suddenly 'realize' that you were upside down from where you wanted to be and try to immediately turn the aircraft over to the 'proper' orientation. It was said that the aircraft would have survived the maneuver, but the pilot's neck would not.
Luckily this was found during simulations If it had happened during a real flight, it could have taken a long time (and lots of fatalities) to figure it out.
On a lighter note, there is apparently a subroutine -- phonetically referred to.. It was either wait_on_wheels() or weight_on_wheels(). In either case, it was added after some slap-happy test pilot tried retracting the landing gear while sitting on the runway (resulting in millions of dollars of repairs).
I'd really like to have the link, and I'd expect that many others would like that link too.
Imagind if you purchased a car, and the first time you went to fill it up at the gas station, you found a sticker that said:
I don't think that any court in the country would accept that as a binding contract -- yet people expect that to work for software.Even easier: would you be willing to transfer data from my 20 year old Radio Shack Color Comuter disks (much less my 8" Model 16 floppies?). My understanding is that 20 year old CDs are already starting to rot, On the other hand, the stereo pictures that my father took in the 1950's are still quite viewable -- and they don't depend on illegal technology to decrypt them so that I can copy them to a new medium, either.
I'd rather die than admit that my life ....er um, book... came from the likes of amazon!
Not that I've got anything against digital theatres (presuming that they've got the quality up near what film provides) -- I just don't like the idea of the digital information blackhole that it looks like the media industry is attempting to create for our descendents.
In other words, we've completely lost sight of the original intent of copyright laws.
The original intent of copyright laws was to encourage artists and scientists to creat works that would then fall into the public domain in a short period of time. That was also the reason behind the Library of Congress: Have a copy of everything that was copyrighted so that, when it fell into the public domain, there would be guaranteed to be at least one copy that the public had access to.
With current copyright laws, however, by the time anything became public domain, the storage medium would have crumbled to unusability, the technology to read it would be obsolete, and it would be impossible to read it anyways, because the technology to decrypt it would be illegal.
Here we have yet another senior MS executive who is saying that
- MS should be able to restrict competition if it thinks it's in the interests of the consumer
- arguing that the decisions that they made about Netscape (and found to have been illegal and against consumer interests) are in the consumer's interests
- arguing that having a machine boot up into Linux by default is bad for consumers. (remember that they argued that Linux is one of the few viable competetor to themselves).
They are, in effect, arguing that the DOJ agreement should stand because it would allow them to continue the sorts of anti-competitive actions that they've been convicted of, and that the agreement is supposed to remedy.As to knowing that it's a slow burn: I watched the video (my new version of mplayer works quite nicely, thank you).
Given the longer description in the body of the article, I'm not sure where the 'explosion' tag comes from (other than journalistic hyperbole).
er, um, no. It's a simple burn, not an explosion. The 'pop' sound is apparently from air inside the tubes being indirectly heated by the tubes when the tubes absorb the heat. The combustion of the tubes, however, is relatively slow and progressive in nature. The rest of your explanation, however, seems to make sense.
My off-the-cuff thought is that - besides the shape-strain, the combustion may have something to do with the heating of the oxygen inside the tubes. If the tubes amplify the captured energy on the inside, the super-heated tube guts may be where the combustion actually begins. This would also explain why only singld-walled tubes exhibit this behaviour: the second wall would act as an insulating layer for the oxygen inside the tube.
I wouldn't be surprised to see that that's the case... I think that a couple of million pounds a day falls to the earth as space dust/micrometeors, etc. Thing is that a lot of the man-made stuff is likely to be on the larger end of the scale... Even something like a dropped wrench is likely larger than much of the space dust that hits the earth daily.
I've actually heard similar comments from someone who told me that RedHat had gotten queries from VP and CEO levels of Fortune 500 companies about switching the entire company from Windows to Linux. The big show-stopper was apparently things like Calendering software. This actually makes a lot of sense to me. In terms of beauty and ease of use, KDE/Gnome is right up there with Windows (in fact, I remember thinking that Win2K looked like a gnome knock-off).
I think that the next stage of the Linux World-Domination project would be to take a survey of what necessary functionality is missing from the Linux desk-top to allow a full-company switchover. I figure that -- if people are willing to take it on, there are probably Fortune-500 companies that would be willing to put a couple of million dollars into funding the core group to develop some of this functionality.
In terms of what it would save them to be able to walk away from the MS-Tax, I'm guessing that even $10M would be small change for a fortune-500 company -- but a hefty chunk of money to an OS development effort.
The US claim to have 'innovated' democracy is a usurpation of microsoftian proportions.
The idea of government by/for/of the people was taken from the natives of North America. Some say that the design of the US government was taken from the Iroquois confederation (but europeanized changes were make that introduced some fundamental flaws).
In the concept of many native cultures, a leader spoke for his people, as opposed to deciding for them. The concept of a leader having the inherent right (whether given via God or vote) to make all decisions for 'his' people is a european one. The presumptin that a leader would (without some structural encouragement) alway decide based on what was best for the country (as opposed to best for him(her) self) is especially european. Even in native cultures where a leader was chosen by some sort of inheritance system, there were many checks and balances that prevented abuse -- not the least of which was that a leader could be removed by a simple majority vote.
How the hell did this get rated "funny"? One of these days some asshole may get something like this past some judge somewhere, and a bunch of users are going to be SOL.
This points to the heart of the difference between open-source and closed source.
Closed source anything is at the mercy of the source vendor's business model. If and when what you want to do is consistent with what the vendor makes money allowing you to do, then closed source is fine. If/when what you want to do is inconsistent with the vendor's business model (unless they don't realize it), then you're pretty much SOL.
Open source allows development to be at the whim of the user base. It's pretty common that buyer interests and seller interests are not the same. Those differences also tend to increase as the stuff being sold gets older and older.
By downloading and using this program, I agree to give to the author, on demand, my entire computer system -- including software, licenses for said software and all data contained on said computer. Should licensee decline to abide for the agreement, the licensee will, in addition to the computer system mentioned above, be required to pay legal fees............
(ianal).
You actually have a number of choices:
The easiest one is to get a Democrat membership, and then convince your entire CS faculty to do the same thing -- then stack the primary and blow Hollings out in the Democrat primary.
If that doesn't work, get Libertarian / Green / Pick-your-third-party membership for you and your 500 best allies, and then work for the third party... If you can get a noticable proportion of people to vote for some third party instead of Mr Hollings, it will get both his attention and the attention of others.... Please note that in a state like NC (by the sounds of it), any vote for a left-leaning third party is going to be obvious bleed from Hollings. It may not get him out of office, but it will scare the begesus out of him (and that's the whole point of the exercise).
I don't think I could, in good conscience, advance a destructive conservative agenda just so I can use Linux instead of Windows,
The "don't waste your vote" proclamations are really saying "voting for x is a wasted vote". That's really only true because people believe it.
My understanding is that the Republican party started out as a third party -- and people used to say the same thing about them. If people hadn't been willing to "waste their vote", the Republicans would still be an also-ran third-party (if they existed at all). Please ignore the fact that some people might consider this a good thing. My point is that the only way to change the setup is to be willing to walk up the hill for a long while.
Voting only scratches the surface of the difference you can make in a democratic system.
Similarly, every geek who cares should put up a 10-most-wanted list of senators and/or Representatives that you would like to see tossed out of office; what their riding is; and just what they've voted for that is so reprehensible.
Giving technical support to the enemies of free speech wouldn't hurt much either.
Oh yeah -- the double speak thing.... Make sure the people understand the principle of "an enemy of free speech". In much the same way as the NRA points out how rifles are a constitutional right. Personally, I figure that the right to get your speech distributed is somewhere above the right to shoot people.
A lot of people really don't understand that, if it were not for the interference of the Movie lobby, standards from the '60s and '70s would probably be public domain today .... It would be legal to make copies of "American Pie" or "Riders On the Storm" if legislators had followed the original intent of the First Amendment clause which allows copyrights for
a limited time . For the original congress, "limited times", comprised approximately 14 years. It's now 10 times that, and growing. This apparently infinite growth of the limited time exemption is a feature of the 20'th century and according to some, a result of the movie lobby.
Being able to make legal copies of songs written before the birth of most of the people on this venue would probably relieve some of the pressure on current music as well. It might also allow us to legally preserve copies of early software before it becomes completely unreadable
Dirty deeds, done dirt cheap!
Dirty deeds, done dirt cheap!
When My friend Chris Rasmusen used to GM, we'd know we were about to get our collective butts thrashed when he put on that song (or even just started to hum it, with an evil shit-spitting grin).
One example of that would be the second half of the provision that MS can't deny a company access to it's technology.. But they CAN deny access to a company after making two allegations of breach of contract.. However: There is no provision that provides that the allegations have to be either substantive or supportable. In other words, all that MS has to do to threaten someone with loss of their license is to send them two random allegations of breach and then grab them by the gonads. This massive loophole makes the whole provision useless.
I've got no problems giving leeway to someone who appears to have accidently oopsed his way onto the wrong side of the GPL, but I'm not seeing that here.
I'm not eager to give leeway to someone running a GPL-based for-profit business who's quoted whining that nobody's ever made money obeying the GPL. It'd feel kinda like giving your NATO code-book to a 'true patriot' with a Russian accent.
What I'm seeing here is someone who is showing symptoms of having intended to violate the GPL from day one. They claim that the GPL is not viable for a business; They have already had to be leaned on once before they released their source to the WINE changes they made some time ago (and now they're flagging it like they were the good guys in that exchange); and the cynic in me screams that the reason why they spent maybe $50K on baubles like sponsering a free-software oriented conference is that they knew that they were gonna need that goodwill to burn when they released their product without the source code (and, besides, it gave them inside access to the top developers of the code they were about to steal).
As far as I'm concerned, they're in violation of the GPL, and it'd be real easy for them to get back in compliance: /source/tree | ssh ftp.site 'cd ~ftp/pub; tar -xvf -'
tar -cvf
If the need my help to convert that snippet of code for the specifics of their site, I'd be glad to do it for the measly sum of $99US (plus airfare, expenses and accomodations).
So, for further clarity, You can only give pointers to third-party sources of the source code if that's how/where you got the object code you're distributing, and you're doing it noncommercially. On the other hand, if you distribute modified code, you have to point people to copy of your modified source. Generally, the easiest way to do this is to make sure that anybody who gets your object code gets {,access to} a copy of the source code, at the same time.
Heh. Laptop use is what actually got me into linux. A few years ago I got handed an IBM laptop with a 3COM ethernet card. Turns out that trying to sleep that box in windows was an absolute nightmare. We were a SUN shop, so I tried installing Solaris on the thing -- but Solaris didn't support that 3com card.
Then I tried installing Linux. Worked like a charm (well -- MUCH easier to get working reasonably than the Windows driver, anyways)... and once I got it working, it was rock solid stable (more than I could say for Windows). Since then, every Laptop I've bought/ been issued has ended up a Linux partition on it. (more than I can say for Windows :-).
Do you think you could scan a couple of those pages and make them available? (or email them to me, and I'll find a place for them).
If it's an insincere effort on Herbalife's part, then a good deal more effort is going to be required before they feel the need to seriously address the problem.