Various places use the old Caprice and New Impala, though the Vic is undisputed king of the 5-0 ride. Lots of small town fuzz buy the Taurus because it fits the budget.
I've seen cops in Corvettes, (Small town, CA) 'Stangs, (Lots of state boys used the 5.0 as a Highway Interceptor) Cherokees, AMC Eagle Wagons (Forestry Service seems to love these), Toyota pickups, S10 4wd, (Department of Natural Resources, have to be able to stuff that confiscated carcass somewhere)
Just because you haven't seen em doesn't mean they're not being used!:)
Re:They're after the college students again...
on
RIAA Files 532 Lawsuits
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Ask them who they represent. Ask them what content is allegedly infringing. Ask them where the DMCA-compliant takedown notice or court order is. If they start getting pissy, I remind them that there ain't squat I'm going to do about it (or am required to do about it) until they at least have the courtesy to write me a real takedown notice.
Oh, yeah. Then go look and see if the fool actually is infringing, and scream at him.
*cackles* Woop. That's not a Civic. That's someones idea of a toy. This is like the morons that stick GM small-blocks in an Opel GT and claim the Opel is a fast car.. (BTW, Opels with the FI Buick blocks make 8 second quarters @ 170, none of this "I'm barely beating a cheesy Camaro" nonsense.)
Think that was mine too.. FTP over a 28.8 modem to grab a 96kbps file. I schluffed it over a plip cable to another machine and used some ancient mp3 player to play it because it was the only one I could find Slack packages for.
I had seen them before, being a fringe warez dood, heard them before (one of the sales guys at work loved our T3 a little too much, and would just loop whatever he had downloaded over the course of the day in Winplay on his P120 desktop), just never wasted the time downloading them.
Eh.. You can pick purebred dogs out of a linup at most any pound. And I'm sure 99% of the pounds out there are going to waive the "neuter/spay and shots" fee when the guys wandering through the door are a bunch of monks.
Airplane? Woop. Was prolly a $4,000 ont time tax writeoff, and three guys in an antique Cessna probably works out cheaper than commercial, especially when all you're paying for is gas.
It is technologically feasable to cut a majority of spam with a very simple implementation of existing software. (Combinations of blacklisting and text pattern matching) It is technologically feasable to cut a majority of ads from your users browsers. (proxies already rewrite a number of things, it is trivial to make them redirect to a blank image.) It is technologically feasable to cut a majority of pop-ups from your users sessions. (proxies, yadda yadda.)
It is not, however, technically feasable to filter child porn. No accurate blacklists exist. Pattern matching? The state of the art for a subject matter like this is so complex it usually takes a year and several hundred people to do the job.
1. Cell phone towers use sector antennas, typically aroung 45 degrees. 2. There is no distance data available.
This gives them very good information on where you are with two towers. Plot the two sectors, you're somewhere in the overlap. Three towers gives them slightly better data, four only marginally better then three, and on and on. Moving, especially over a long period of time, gives them better data too.
It is named after former US Vice-President Gerry. 200 years ago, when he was govenor of Massachusetts, a bunch of his Republican pals redistricted the state to screw the Federalists.
The 'mander' part is from what a map of the redistricting looked like, a salamander, which is neither a serpent nor hypothetical.
Having done San Fran to Detroit and Detroit to Seattle, I can tell you all the stations will sound the same the whole way through. There might be one slight difference between the stations in one market to another, but otherwise they're carbon copies.
For example; Seger doesn't do too well on stations outside MI/IL/OH, so you don't hear it played at all. Same to a lesser extent with Ted Nugent and Alice Cooper. Jersey, Pennsylvania and NY overplay Springsteen. Heard more than enough Tom Petty for a lifetime while I was in Sarasota. I actually had to flip the radio four times passing through Kansas, I think, to avoid Steppenwolf, as the "hits", "classic rock", and "oldies" stations were all playing it. I finally ended up listening to one of the country stations. Garth Brooks is better than "Magic Carpet Ride" for the fifth time in six hours.
I work for a smallish ISP in Seattle. Our policy equates to "If you're not making us more work, it's cool".
A fellow on a 6mbit wireless connect that decided to peg it for a day straight might get a "What the hell is going on? We're seeing weird bandwidth usage" call/email, but that's more to make them aware of it and fix any problems (IE, someone wormed their Win2K box and is using it as a warez FTP) than it is to imply we're pissed. We monitor a lot of the aspects of our wireless links closely simply because we can't pass the buck to Qwest or Verizon on it and it's a higher dollar service.
We don't monitor individual DSL users bandwidth at all, though we watch the aggregate at the router. 90% of the problem calls we see with DSL is something Qwest or Verizon has responsibility for, so when we get a "our DSL dosen't work call" we're already mostly sure it's not us, so there's really little point in watching them like a hawk. (The last 10% are usually things like we turned a moron off after three months of them not paying and their child/significant other calls and bitches it isn't working, or someone that gets Qwest in a good month and actually gets service before the due date and we haven't turned it on in the router yet.)
Anyone who hand rolls is working for his little cancer carrot on the end of the stick. The rest of the smokers are lazy sons of bitches who let the machines spoon feed them their doses in little paper and cellophane satchels.
Me, I'm a lazy SOB.
2. Also nothing wrong with barhopping at 9:30am.
You're lucky when you've found one bar that opens at 9am. If you're lucky enough to know enough to bar hop, daamn. I worked 11pm to 8am for a year, I had finally found a second 9am bar I could stand the week before I quit. Meet a lot of weirdos in bars at that hour, and there is a shortage of eligible women, but...
One note on another item.
Fark after Slashdot?
The correct order is Penny Arcade, Fark, Slashdot, then SecurityFocus/whatever passes for a industry wrap-up site in your line of biz.
Wish I knew someone like you when I was trying to put together a couple marine radios from the 30's a couple years back. The former owner told me they worked when he last put 30v in batteries to them, came to discover over lunch (after purchasing them) that his youngest daughter had decided to play music on them once, and had basically smacked every tube in the units with a large metal spoon repeatedly.
If I had a dime for every dead tube, *sigh*
One never made it back to life, the other took two years of trading tubes to make it work.
As far back as I can remember, even back to the full-body Photon "laser-tag" suits they sold for many hundreds of dollars before it caught on, it's always been IR. I remember tricking the both the Photon suits and the Lazer Tag stuff from a few Christmas' later with one of those All-in-One remotes. (set it to some archaic GE model, jam half the keys down with a book, force little brother through the living room into it. He didn't learn for weeks. That's when I switched to using the mirrors on the back of half the doors in the house and one of my stepfather's inspection mirrors to get him.)
The Photon stuff had two clear lenses on it, and no real emitted light to it.
The Laser Tag branded stuff had a red light to it tho. It could have been an additional LED to indicate to someone they were being shot at (think of it like a muzzle flash), or it could have been they were using very bright red LEDs and an IR filter to save money. (Red LED, $.29, IR LED, $1.70) They always had a colored "lens" on them, am thinking it was a cheesy filter so probably the latter and not the former.
Not going to work.. On the other hand, it'd be pretty simple to glue tack some IR LED to some hearing aid batteries and sneak em in if all the sensors require is IR light to trigger them. (Most hearing aid batteries are air gap; You have to pull a little foil tab off the top of them before they generate appreciable voltage, so no worries about the batteries dying in your pocket)
If the sensors respond to pulsed IR light, you may be able to use one of them to "wash out" the signal from other people's guns. The sensor isn't going to see a spike in the IR signal level if you've already got it at saturation from the IR LED stuck to it with putty.
Another alternative is a xenon flash tube. Fit the tube in a film canister, glue a cheapy IR filter over the top. Pulse that baby as fast as the tube will allow, lots of dead people when they walk past.
Agreed. It was a blatent dig at Mister GOP. Personally, I dislike all politicians equally until they do something non-idiotic, which ain't all that often.
Americans won't seem to have a problem voting for socialism when they select a Democratic canidate in 2004. They will seem to miss the fact that they will be voting away the freedoms protected explicitly by the US Constitution.
I don't see where the hell you're getting the idea that socialism is inherently incompatable with Constitutional freedoms, or that Democrats are socialists.
If anything, the current gung-ho Republican fascist pograms against anything that doesn't please the corporate masters and their resulting "War on Terror" laws are whats going to put holes in the Constitution.
Time to get over the Cold War stigma of socialism already anyway. Some of our very good allies have horribly bad "red" tendancies; The Brits, the Canadians, the Swiss, etc.
The only difference between Capitalism and Socialism is who profits from who. In a socialist society everyone is asked to bend over and take it; Sometimes you get a little, sometimes you get taken up the ass. In a capitalist system it's the corporations bending everyone over; No reacharound, no Vaseline, no "Thank you!"
Slip in a priveledge escalation bug that's hard to catch. Wait a week or two for it to make its way into the main repository unnoticed, then go back and add a little bit of code to the networking stack or Apache, etc, that allows you to execute arbitrary code as the user running the service.
what is creepy is that the latter may have preceeded the former, and some remote execution exploit has gone unnoticed somewhere.
And that mix of sulphur, sodium nitrate, and charcoal produces a substance called black powder. About the only people using it are those historical reenactment guys or some of the harder core hunters. Real small explosion, lots of white smoke. You've seen it on the History Channel.
Modern gunpowder (smokeless powder) is nitrocellulose. It's easy to make, relativly stable, and better at its job.
TNT = trinitrotoluene. It's not exactly a plastic explosive, it's kind of like wax. Requires an explosive train to get going, you can do about anything to TNT and it will not go boom. Burn it, mash it, electric charges, no effect. Don't want to get it on your hands tho.
dynamite = Nobel's brand of nitroglycerine in clay explosive. Other people made similar, out of other kinds of clay, using wood pulp as binder, etc. No one makes much use of dynamite anymore; Commercial blasting explosives are all TNT, nitrostarch, or nitrogel.
The military makes extensive use of TNT still, as well as things like RDX in a plastic binder. Things aren't terribly simple, for example your average munition might have nitrostarch, picric acid and TNT in it.
Set up nfs servers on all the the computers that would store the data (servers), and setup loopback and software raid on the systems that would access it (clients). There was overlap between the two groups.
Created a couple hundred meg file on each of the computers in the exported directory. dd, yadda yadda..
Wrote a short script to mount all the exported trees, slap the files it found on loopback, and copied it around the clients. Made sure it would look for a lockfile, don't want more than one client accessing them at a time. Was a simple touch and exists affair.
Used one machine to make a raid, FS, etc, on the loopbacked devices.
Wrote a second script that would take the loopbacked devices and mount the raid.
Never quite got it to run right tho, just bought a tape drive instead. Guess you could play with it. The significant logical prob seemed to be that until you unmounted the raid and the NFS tree, you couldn't rely on data actually being written. Course, the raid code sucked donkey back then, and the NFS code was just erratic, so.. Mebbe things have improved.
From what I've read of the RHE licensing scheme, when you buy it you agree to enter into a support contract for a year or such.
They say "You can download our certified working binaries, and our certified working source, for all these future security updates and feature updates, and we'll support them on X number of machines. We're not going to support more than that, and we're not going to like you if you try and download more than you have licenses for. We do, hover, grant you a the right to continue using the non-GPL portions without a service contract."
That's all fine. No operating system vendor, OSS or not, has any obligation to fix any bug in their software. You've read the EULA/GPL, right? No service contract, no service.
Most of the whiney "But this violates the GPL!" bitches are all centered around Redhat refusing to provide free updates. Usually they'll moan that they already have the binary and are merely "updating it" or that they have the source so RH must be doing something shady because they won't let them download the binary.. The GPL only works one direction: If you have the GPL binary, you have to be able to get the source.
They do, however, release source packages freely to their updates. You can take a RHE box without a contract and still update it to patched, it just takes a slightly longer process. Since they're not going to give you the binary, they don't even have to give you the source.
Now why not clone the CD, hand it out, and patch using source rpms? Because the distro contains non-GPL software as well.
Yup. The dealer will ogle it for an hour, tell you what might be wrong, and then send you to the gear-head shop down the road. Had more than one dealer do the work for free on my '77 Camaro tho.. They thought it looked nice up on the lift, and it was just a part swap, so.
Mercedes will mostly service their own even that far back, as will Jaguar. Had Mercedes tell me that they couldn't service the car locally, but would be more than happy to split the cost of sending it to Chicago where the dealer that still had the equipment was and cover the difference in the billable cost, despite not having to do that.
In the end, they consented to beg the other dealer to borrow the test gear and then let me basically borrow it.
Signed a little form saying "If you break this it's your ass", give us a CC with more than a $500 limit, (one of the mechanics figured that's what it cost the company in 1965, just in case I dropped it out of a truck or something) and $4. (They billed me the lowest cost code they could find in the computer with a short search)
My uncle still had his '71 Jag factory serviced till he died. Course, he'd only put 500 miles a year on it, but it got an oil change twice a year and maint at the dealer.
Slashdot Mirror
Various places use the old Caprice and New Impala, though the Vic is undisputed king of the 5-0 ride. Lots of small town fuzz buy the Taurus because it fits the budget.
:)
I've seen cops in Corvettes, (Small town, CA) 'Stangs, (Lots of state boys used the 5.0 as a Highway Interceptor) Cherokees, AMC Eagle Wagons (Forestry Service seems to love these), Toyota pickups, S10 4wd, (Department of Natural Resources, have to be able to stuff that confiscated carcass somewhere)
Just because you haven't seen em doesn't mean they're not being used!
Ask them who they represent. Ask them what content is allegedly infringing. Ask them where the DMCA-compliant takedown notice or court order is. If they start getting pissy, I remind them that there ain't squat I'm going to do about it (or am required to do about it) until they at least have the courtesy to write me a real takedown notice.
Oh, yeah. Then go look and see if the fool actually is infringing, and scream at him.
*cackles*
Woop. That's not a Civic. That's someones idea of a toy.
This is like the morons that stick GM small-blocks in an Opel GT and claim the Opel is a fast car.. (BTW, Opels with the FI Buick blocks make 8 second quarters @ 170, none of this "I'm barely beating a cheesy Camaro" nonsense.)
Think that was mine too.. FTP over a 28.8 modem to grab a 96kbps file. I schluffed it over a plip cable to another machine and used some ancient mp3 player to play it because it was the only one I could find Slack packages for.
I had seen them before, being a fringe warez dood, heard them before (one of the sales guys at work loved our T3 a little too much, and would just loop whatever he had downloaded over the course of the day in Winplay on his P120 desktop), just never wasted the time downloading them.
Eh.. You can pick purebred dogs out of a linup at most any pound. And I'm sure 99% of the pounds out there are going to waive the "neuter/spay and shots" fee when the guys wandering through the door are a bunch of monks.
Airplane? Woop. Was prolly a $4,000 ont time tax writeoff, and three guys in an antique Cessna probably works out cheaper than commercial, especially when all you're paying for is gas.
It is technologically feasable to cut a majority of spam with a very simple implementation of existing software. (Combinations of blacklisting and text pattern matching)
It is technologically feasable to cut a majority of ads from your users browsers. (proxies already rewrite a number of things, it is trivial to make them redirect to a blank image.)
It is technologically feasable to cut a majority of pop-ups from your users sessions. (proxies, yadda yadda.)
It is not, however, technically feasable to filter child porn. No accurate blacklists exist. Pattern matching? The state of the art for a subject matter like this is so complex it usually takes a year and several hundred people to do the job.
1. Cell phone towers use sector antennas, typically aroung 45 degrees.
2. There is no distance data available.
This gives them very good information on where you are with two towers. Plot the two sectors, you're somewhere in the overlap. Three towers gives them slightly better data, four only marginally better then three, and on and on. Moving, especially over a long period of time, gives them better data too.
Gerrymandering is not named after a coiled snake.
It is named after former US Vice-President Gerry. 200 years ago, when he was govenor of Massachusetts, a bunch of his Republican pals redistricted the state to screw the Federalists.
The 'mander' part is from what a map of the redistricting looked like, a salamander, which is neither a serpent nor hypothetical.
Having done San Fran to Detroit and Detroit to Seattle, I can tell you all the stations will sound the same the whole way through. There might be one slight difference between the stations in one market to another, but otherwise they're carbon copies.
For example; Seger doesn't do too well on stations outside MI/IL/OH, so you don't hear it played at all. Same to a lesser extent with Ted Nugent and Alice Cooper. Jersey, Pennsylvania and NY overplay Springsteen. Heard more than enough Tom Petty for a lifetime while I was in Sarasota. I actually had to flip the radio four times passing through Kansas, I think, to avoid Steppenwolf, as the "hits", "classic rock", and "oldies" stations were all playing it. I finally ended up listening to one of the country stations. Garth Brooks is better than "Magic Carpet Ride" for the fifth time in six hours.
I work for a smallish ISP in Seattle. Our policy equates to "If you're not making us more work, it's cool".
A fellow on a 6mbit wireless connect that decided to peg it for a day straight might get a "What the hell is going on? We're seeing weird bandwidth usage" call/email, but that's more to make them aware of it and fix any problems (IE, someone wormed their Win2K box and is using it as a warez FTP) than it is to imply we're pissed. We monitor a lot of the aspects of our wireless links closely simply because we can't pass the buck to Qwest or Verizon on it and it's a higher dollar service.
We don't monitor individual DSL users bandwidth at all, though we watch the aggregate at the router. 90% of the problem calls we see with DSL is something Qwest or Verizon has responsibility for, so when we get a "our DSL dosen't work call" we're already mostly sure it's not us, so there's really little point in watching them like a hawk. (The last 10% are usually things like we turned a moron off after three months of them not paying and their child/significant other calls and bitches it isn't working, or someone that gets Qwest in a good month and actually gets service before the due date and we haven't turned it on in the router yet.)
Most other smallish ISPs I've seen are similar.
Couple issues with your Do Not list.
:)
1. Nothing wrong with rolling your own smokes..
Anyone who hand rolls is working for his little cancer carrot on the end of the stick. The rest of the smokers are lazy sons of bitches who let the machines spoon feed them their doses in little paper and cellophane satchels.
Me, I'm a lazy SOB.
2. Also nothing wrong with barhopping at 9:30am.
You're lucky when you've found one bar that opens at 9am. If you're lucky enough to know enough to bar hop, daamn. I worked 11pm to 8am for a year, I had finally found a second 9am bar I could stand the week before I quit. Meet a lot of weirdos in bars at that hour, and there is a shortage of eligible women, but...
One note on another item.
Fark after Slashdot?
The correct order is Penny Arcade, Fark, Slashdot, then SecurityFocus/whatever passes for a industry wrap-up site in your line of biz.
The rest are dead on.
Wish I knew someone like you when I was trying to put together a couple marine radios from the 30's a couple years back. The former owner told me they worked when he last put 30v in batteries to them, came to discover over lunch (after purchasing them) that his youngest daughter had decided to play music on them once, and had basically smacked every tube in the units with a large metal spoon repeatedly.
If I had a dime for every dead tube, *sigh*
One never made it back to life, the other took two years of trading tubes to make it work.
Parent/Child nomenclature was already taken before IDE/ATA was thought up. Child processes? Child nodes?
As far back as I can remember, even back to the full-body Photon "laser-tag" suits they sold for many hundreds of dollars before it caught on, it's always been IR. I remember tricking the both the Photon suits and the Lazer Tag stuff from a few Christmas' later with one of those All-in-One remotes. (set it to some archaic GE model, jam half the keys down with a book, force little brother through the living room into it. He didn't learn for weeks. That's when I switched to using the mirrors on the back of half the doors in the house and one of my stepfather's inspection mirrors to get him.)
The Photon stuff had two clear lenses on it, and no real emitted light to it.
The Laser Tag branded stuff had a red light to it tho. It could have been an additional LED to indicate to someone they were being shot at (think of it like a muzzle flash), or it could have been they were using very bright red LEDs and an IR filter to save money. (Red LED, $.29, IR LED, $1.70) They always had a colored "lens" on them, am thinking it was a cheesy filter so probably the latter and not the former.
Not going to work.. On the other hand, it'd be pretty simple to glue tack some IR LED to some hearing aid batteries and sneak em in if all the sensors require is IR light to trigger them. (Most hearing aid batteries are air gap; You have to pull a little foil tab off the top of them before they generate appreciable voltage, so no worries about the batteries dying in your pocket)
If the sensors respond to pulsed IR light, you may be able to use one of them to "wash out" the signal from other people's guns. The sensor isn't going to see a spike in the IR signal level if you've already got it at saturation from the IR LED stuck to it with putty.
Another alternative is a xenon flash tube. Fit the tube in a film canister, glue a cheapy IR filter over the top. Pulse that baby as fast as the tube will allow, lots of dead people when they walk past.
Momma's got a squeezebox, Daddy never sleeps at night?
Wonder if they'll use it in the ad campaigns..
Republicans are just as bad as Democrats
Agreed. It was a blatent dig at Mister GOP. Personally, I dislike all politicians equally until they do something non-idiotic, which ain't all that often.
Americans won't seem to have a problem voting for socialism when they select a Democratic canidate in 2004. They will seem to miss the fact that they will be voting away the freedoms protected explicitly by the US Constitution.
I don't see where the hell you're getting the idea that socialism is inherently incompatable with Constitutional freedoms, or that Democrats are socialists.
If anything, the current gung-ho Republican fascist pograms against anything that doesn't please the corporate masters and their resulting "War on Terror" laws are whats going to put holes in the Constitution.
Time to get over the Cold War stigma of socialism already anyway. Some of our very good allies have horribly bad "red" tendancies; The Brits, the Canadians, the Swiss, etc.
The only difference between Capitalism and Socialism is who profits from who. In a socialist society everyone is asked to bend over and take it; Sometimes you get a little, sometimes you get taken up the ass. In a capitalist system it's the corporations bending everyone over; No reacharound, no Vaseline, no "Thank you!"
Who says this wasn't one part of a larger plan?
Slip in a priveledge escalation bug that's hard to catch. Wait a week or two for it to make its way into the main repository unnoticed, then go back and add a little bit of code to the networking stack or Apache, etc, that allows you to execute arbitrary code as the user running the service.
what is creepy is that the latter may have preceeded the former, and some remote execution exploit has gone unnoticed somewhere.
Charcoal. It's basically carbon.
And that mix of sulphur, sodium nitrate, and charcoal produces a substance called black powder. About the only people using it are those historical reenactment guys or some of the harder core hunters. Real small explosion, lots of white smoke. You've seen it on the History Channel.
Modern gunpowder (smokeless powder) is nitrocellulose. It's easy to make, relativly stable, and better at its job.
TNT = trinitrotoluene. It's not exactly a plastic explosive, it's kind of like wax. Requires an explosive train to get going, you can do about anything to TNT and it will not go boom. Burn it, mash it, electric charges, no effect. Don't want to get it on your hands tho.
dynamite = Nobel's brand of nitroglycerine in clay explosive. Other people made similar, out of other kinds of clay, using wood pulp as binder, etc. No one makes much use of dynamite anymore; Commercial blasting explosives are all TNT, nitrostarch, or nitrogel.
The military makes extensive use of TNT still, as well as things like RDX in a plastic binder. Things aren't terribly simple, for example your average munition might have nitrostarch, picric acid and TNT in it.
I tried something like this back in 97-98.
Set up nfs servers on all the the computers that would store the data (servers), and setup loopback and software raid on the systems that would access it (clients). There was overlap between the two groups.
Created a couple hundred meg file on each of the computers in the exported directory. dd, yadda yadda..
Wrote a short script to mount all the exported trees, slap the files it found on loopback, and copied it around the clients. Made sure it would look for a lockfile, don't want more than one client accessing them at a time. Was a simple touch and exists affair.
Used one machine to make a raid, FS, etc, on the loopbacked devices.
Wrote a second script that would take the loopbacked devices and mount the raid.
Never quite got it to run right tho, just bought a tape drive instead. Guess you could play with it. The significant logical prob seemed to be that until you unmounted the raid and the NFS tree, you couldn't rely on data actually being written. Course, the raid code sucked donkey back then, and the NFS code was just erratic, so.. Mebbe things have improved.
Office '98 was a "Bug Fix" retail release of Office '97 timed to coincide with Windows '98.
From what I've read of the RHE licensing scheme, when you buy it you agree to enter into a support contract for a year or such.
They say "You can download our certified working binaries, and our certified working source, for all these future security updates and feature updates, and we'll support them on X number of machines. We're not going to support more than that, and we're not going to like you if you try and download more than you have licenses for. We do, hover, grant you a the right to continue using the non-GPL portions without a service contract."
That's all fine. No operating system vendor, OSS or not, has any obligation to fix any bug in their software. You've read the EULA/GPL, right? No service contract, no service.
Most of the whiney "But this violates the GPL!" bitches are all centered around Redhat refusing to provide free updates. Usually they'll moan that they already have the binary and are merely "updating it" or that they have the source so RH must be doing something shady because they won't let them download the binary.. The GPL only works one direction: If you have the GPL binary, you have to be able to get the source.
They do, however, release source packages freely to their updates. You can take a RHE box without a contract and still update it to patched, it just takes a slightly longer process. Since they're not going to give you the binary, they don't even have to give you the source.
Now why not clone the CD, hand it out, and patch using source rpms? Because the distro contains non-GPL software as well.
Yup. The dealer will ogle it for an hour, tell you what might be wrong, and then send you to the gear-head shop down the road. Had more than one dealer do the work for free on my '77 Camaro tho.. They thought it looked nice up on the lift, and it was just a part swap, so.
Mercedes will mostly service their own even that far back, as will Jaguar. Had Mercedes tell me that they couldn't service the car locally, but would be more than happy to split the cost of sending it to Chicago where the dealer that still had the equipment was and cover the difference in the billable cost, despite not having to do that.
In the end, they consented to beg the other dealer to borrow the test gear and then let me basically borrow it.
Signed a little form saying "If you break this it's your ass", give us a CC with more than a $500 limit, (one of the mechanics figured that's what it cost the company in 1965, just in case I dropped it out of a truck or something) and $4. (They billed me the lowest cost code they could find in the computer with a short search)
My uncle still had his '71 Jag factory serviced till he died. Course, he'd only put 500 miles a year on it, but it got an oil change twice a year and maint at the dealer.