It's just one file which has the wrong permissions. That's correctable with "chmod". That's not a cork in the hole, it's someone building a huge castle with all sorts of fortifications and then not locking the door. Stupid, but trivially easy to fix.

I don't think so. I usually agree with him - I often dislike the way how he says things though. Also there is his insistence on the "GNU/Linux" thing, which not only goes against the FSF ideals (you don't get to keep naming rights) it's also a really stupid name.

It's not fraud, but it may well be misleading advertising. It confuses customers about their rights, and creates wrong impressions about the rights they have if they were to buy competing products. In many European jurisdictions misleading advertising is also against the law.

That's only regarding advertising, btw - Apple is still entitled to offer extended warranties with more comprehensive coverage than what the law requires, provided they state clearly what the customer gets.

Well, in general I can only advise to walk away from any deal which sounds fishy - there is no amount of money which can compensate for that. That's because a con-man will *know* what the con is about, so anything he'll offer as guarantee will always be worth less than what he expects to gain. Trying to outwit a con man is a fool's game.

Otherwise it wouldn't be irrational to accept bitcoins per se, but it's difficult to see how that would ever make sense - it's not impossible, merely not compelling. You could also offer to pay in silkworm futures - if you just happen to have a large amount of those - you will similarly have problems finding someone to accept the deal, and for similarly reasons: your potential business partners will not have any idea how much silkworm futures are worth, how to convert them into money, how to transfer and handle them. Just looking into that is effort, and most people will be unwilling to invest that effort.

That's why money is such a great trading tool, and has almost completely replaced bartering with goods.

You could achieve the very same thing without using bitcoins. Disregarding the risk of using bitcoin exchanges, and disregarding the quality of this particular market - if I get paid in USD, I can buy gold or gold futures for that. The extra step of converting into bitcoins first gains me exactly nothing.

In the same way I could convert my USD into EUR and trade on the Athens Derivatives Exchange. But why?

I don't really see anything compelling about your example. If you want me to do some work for you and we agree on the price, I would prefer not to receive payments in bitcoin - it's a hassle for me. Certainly I would want to be compensated for that hassle - if I bother at all - so using bitcoin for that transaction would be a disadvantage to you.

Assuming you would offer me more significantly more than the amount asked, simply by going the redundant bitcoin step, I'd step away from the deal since I'd take that as an indication that something fishy is going on.

They bought the data from different sources, but apparently messed up merging it. E.g. in Japan a slightly different GPS standard is used - which can shift your location by 250m or so if you get it wrong. They apparently also used data from openstreetmaps, which doesn't seem to be quite as good as they hoped for. Still considering all the data they bought, it's surprising the result is so bad.

But NZ is not responsible for the servers, or are they? They'd point to the US government for that, and I think that would be correct in this case.

Dialing *2767*3855# seems slightly more complicated than going through the menus and selecting factory reset, though. So in that sense I think it's not a problem. Apart from that, I recommend NoTelURL - then you can set that as default when the "choose dialer" dialog comes up, and it won't do anything with USSD codes in websites. (It's free, too.)

Lame. "in their work, that is their attribution" - that's most definitely not what we were talking about in this thread, and you could have made your point in the first post without this whole dance. What we were talking about is whether you have to keep that note intact in derivative copies. Do you think you have contributed to clarify that point through your posts? Seriously: this style of discussion sucks.

That's a somewhat useless comment. If you think I'm missing something at least tell me what that is. If you want to talk about some legal technicality: either tell us what it is or have a hard look whether it's relevant in the context of this thread. Surely you can do better than this "I know something and you common people couldn't possibly understand" act?

Not sure what you mean by that. GPL v2 is incompatible with attribution requirements, v3 allows you to amend the terms to require attribution. It's not a requirement by default.

I worked on one of those. The customer needed a PCB with an FPGA on it, which was to be the prototype. They already had VC funding. They contracted us for the hardware design and were developing the software themselves. The effort for the hardware design was two engineers for 6 months (at contracting rates) plus material, PCB manufacturing etc. On top of that they had to live of something while they developed the software, so for a few individuals that hard to pull off without any funding.