They sound like a small shop that totally depended on a fast run through customs to make their ship dates, and it didn't happen. (If you can't ship it yet, don't sell it yet! or the internet will eat you.)
Also, Meathead Marketing really ought to be dismissed with grievance - that's just gross Fail there.

And if you read the article, you'll note his book had already passed review 13 months prior to publication. The subsequent demands to remove passages, as well as spurious investigation, would then seem to be retaliation for voicing criticism.

And if you're implying that linking to something constitutes publication... you've got to be joking.

- Yes, the firms can be trusted - caveat pay attention to ToS. Take note of which ones will certify destruction of the drive, some even cover PCI liability.

- You can run DBAN (or similar tools!) yourself, from any system w the right connects, on as many drives as the chipset can manage. Then you can resell or donate drives. Yes it takes some time, but unless it's a drive that predates UDMA, it's not going to take too long unless there are r/w errors - in which case just punt it to the next method.

- Power drill + hard drive = pretty sparks. Alternatively, you can just disassemble the drive - I find the metal platters make very nice coasters.

ps: Degaussing is not considered sufficient for business use, so if you're concerned about data destruction it's not the route to go.

>> I trust Google specifically because I know it's in their economic best interest to give me the best results and to weed out these crappy sites.

I don't anymore. They've apparently decided it is in their best interests to make it appear as though their other properties and endeavors are the best results.
See the trailing-comma test, it still works - most notably for stock symbol queries.

And to answer your second point : Tripadvisor's complaint against Google was completely legitimate. They were being scraped, straight up.

Fine, we can call it sell-and-yoink when a vendor pulls features from a captive product.

The obvious lesson to manufacturers is that if you yoink the wrong feature, the captive audience will jailbreak as the necessary solution.
Let's see how many iterations it takes to learn it.

I assure you that comparing apples and oranges is considerably more difficult in Britain, due to supply logistics considerations.

That's like a Best-New-Artist Award, Slashdot edition.

It has nothing to do with copyright principles or any clever agenda.

Copyleft cuts ASCAP style enforcers out of the money loop. Plain and simple, it hits them where it hurts: the business model. The letter is just FUD to scare up lobby money - though anything they could accomplish that would effectively halt copyleft licensing would be damaging to the US IT industry.

And nothing of value was lost.

How will they learn compilers? or Driver design?

"Gentlemen, I have met the code-monkeys and it is us."

They're not trying to stick a finger in the eye of Microsoft or promote open source, they just want a product that does what they want at the best price they can get.

That's exactly what makes it a finger to the eye. The fact that it's a nonpartisan, pure-tech decision. It's the kind of thing that salespeople for OSS-based solutions can take to the bank.

Assuming they're OK with the customer potentially buying them outright. :D

My friends and I measure frustration in milliVerizons.