This question, and the very act of asking itself, is full of fallacies and silent assumptions.

What is this "general public" you speak of, what does it mean to "still matter", how do you evaluate this property?

I'm using Linux because I am used to it, the tools I need, many subtle features included, are there (and they aren't there on Windows or OS X), and in general I can get the job done in a most timely, convenient and pleasant manner on Linux compared to any other environment out there. So, yeah, it's relevant for me.

Wait, what did you expect, that some ephemeral being called "The General Public" will descend upon this thread and lay pure truth upon it, drawn from its unbound knowledge? Sorry, no cake for you. I know some people have this tendency to readily extrapolate "I" into "we", "everyone" and such and happily provide answers to these questions, but you shouldn't listen to their bullshit. I mean, respect your own intelligence and try to see through dumb generalisations. And don't ask meaningless questions that invoke them.

Off the top of my head: LLVM and CUPS. Please get your facts straight before posting overly general statements. Your posts will be much more difficult to discredit as a whole on the basis of a single "all", "none", "anything" or whatever disproven by a single example to the contrary, thanks to elementary mathematical logic.

If it's sensible, this could be useful in some areas, for some vehicles. Looks like the whole gassification assembly is not exactly a work of precision engineering and could be built in somewhat sub-standard conditions. I'd expect that many third-world plantations of easily gassified produce have lots of leftovers and not all of those have sensible uses to date - some might be just dumped somewhere to rot.

On a different note, if I were the CEO of Starbucks, I'd get such a car as a publicity and marketing stunt, and power it with dried left-overs from brewing.

That's an interesting question. I can't give a definitive answer, but I think such a claim could hold some weight.

Note, however, that if you're an author (or more precisely, a sole copyright holder) of an application, you can't - in the "logical impossibility" sense of "can't" - "violate GPL" by doing that, or just about anything else. You're free to distribute software that is under your copyright in any way and shape you like, but anyone redistributing it after downloading your incomplete source tarball would be unable to comply with the GPL if someone further down the chain asked them to provide the full source.

Yes, you have a point, the comparison to mnemonic assembly output of gcc is a good one. I was trying to find an example such as this, but couldn't think of anything at the moment.

My explanation, however, still answers the OP's question - what was distributed was enough to recreate the binary without raising any suspicions, and that's why this could happen.

The problem in this case is that the concepts of "source code" and "object code" are a bit fuzzy with generated code that is GPL-licensed.

Someone wrote the bison grammar files (which are the missing source code in this case) and "compiled" them, by running bison over them. The resulting files were "object code" in the light of GPL, as they're not really intended nor suitable to be read or edited by a human (and the GPL's definition of source code is "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it"), but at the same time, they were still technically source code, as in something that can be fed to another compiler, together with the actual source code of Emacs to build the executable Emacs binary.

Thus, the final binary can be recreated from those tarballs just fine, because *technically* it's the full Emacs source code all right. Legally, though, it's not, because of the definitions in GPL.

They're more durable - you can bang one against the desk, throw it around the room all day, then plug it in and it should still work (or, at worst, require fixing a broken solder joint or two, SMD capacitors sometimes fall off the PCB after a strong enough jolt), while no HDD in the world is going to survive that. Maybe people got that confused, the word "reliable" means many different things in layman's speech.

According to Nietsche, God is dead since at least 1882, which means that the source code is in public domain even by the standards of Disney. Sorry, no bonus.

[Feeding a troll? Sure, the bigger a piece, the better, more chance of choking!]

Oh my. I'm not even 25, and I feel the urge to call "get off my lawn" in response to your "old school games" list and the configuration you call "old hardware"...

AFAIK, on a desktop with two discrete graphics cards, you should be able to run Windows and Linux as guests at the same time, each using one card. I'm not sure about disk access, you might want to add a discrete PCI-E SATA controller for one of the systems to avoid any screwups caused by Windows doing something nasty, but other than that, this seems to be perfectly viable. A recent Sandy Bridge-based Core i7, with 8GB of memory on a good P67-based motherboard should run such a software stack with native performance of an SB i5 (roughly half the cache and threads of an i7 available most of the time for each guest) with 4GB of memory (if split evenly), which is more than adequate for everyday use.

Take a look at professional IPS panels. When I saw one at a hardware store last week, I was dead sure it's a mock-up with a printed sticker glued on. Then it crossfaded into another picture. I think it was an Eizo, but I'm not sure about the model number. It looked way, way better than the best CRT I've ever had, and that was a professional CTX with composite input, made for DTP work. It was appropriately expensive, of course.

The thing is, that those "gateways" can be smart and only allow certain packet types between certain senders and receivers. It is a kind of a very simple firewall, actually. In a C5, it most likely restricts communications only to those packets that were intended to be used by design, so it should let the airbag controller send a 112 request to the stereo, but not let the stereo deploy airbags spontaneously, even if the controller actualy does support triggering over CAN (I have no idea wether it does). I did not poke too much in the "vital" network even through the gateway and I certainly did not try making anything perform some action, only passive queries and some traffic sniffing, so I can't be sure, though. BTW, a CAN gateway also protects from network failure - even if a device gets a short on the bus lines or goes bonkers and floods out all the communication with some crap, or even gets taken over and distrupts it deliberately, the network on the other side of a gateway will still operate properly. Gateways must be prepared for this by design. In a car, this becomes pretty important during a crash - physical damage might short out communication lines and disable whole networks. Thus, we have another good reason to use network separation, or at least signal-level repeaters immune to shorts and noise.

And they actually share the address space without any network segmentation and routing? You know, CAN has something between a NAT and a network bridge - can't remember the term used by the spec right now - which was designed to allow controlled routing between parallel networks precisely for such things as this. I can't believe they wouldn't use that. For example, new Citroen C5s use such routing to separate vital and non-vital networking while allowing certain devices to communicate cross-network for reasons very similar to those you cited. They will even try to use the Bluetooth-connected handset (which is handled by the stereo, so that the music volume goes down when you get a call and the caller is heard in the in-car speakers) to call emergency services after a crash.

Please excuse the offtopic post, I'd just like to ask the poster above a question out of sheer language-related curiousity. I'm not a native English speaker and this phenomenon has been intriguing me for quite some time now.

That is, why do some English-speaking people Tend to capitalize some semi-Random words in their Sentences for no Good Reason?

How do you know? Are you a rocket scientist with a second degree in EE? Dare to show the diplomas?