Some of my cells were travelling self-propelled at 5 km/h earlier today. In fact, all of the were.

Which is "better than an hour", 59 minutes or 61 minutes, and why is it better?

This is why we can't have nice things!

You have to do more than "make it available". Since it is being commercially distributed, and isn't accompanied with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, they need to satisfy section 3b of the GPLv2:

Can anyone who has a Xoom confirm whether it came with such a written offer?

As others have pointed out, this only applies to any GPL'd components of the software, which includes the Linux kernel but little else.

It's now obvious that it's really Goldman Sachs that is the Bank of Evil.

That would be way beyond "epic". I'm not sure that a suitable adjective for that level of fail has even been invented.

I've got 800bip nine-track tapes from a PDP-10 system from 1969. They're still readable on an HP 88780A SCSI tape drive. There are text files from 1968. The text is all in ASCII, though it's the 1963 standard, which has up-arrow and left-arrow in place of caret and underscore of the 1967 and later standards.

The Story of Sputnik

Having tried Sense on the EVO, and stock Android 2.1 and 2.2 on the Nexus One, I *much* prefer stock Android. HTC, how about giving us an option to completely disable Sense, without having to install third-party firmware builds? On the EVO you can sort of partially disable Sense, but apparently on many other HTC phones you can't even do that.

They only give the source to paying customers. But do they prevent those paying customers from redistributing the source? If not, then it really is open source. Nothing about open source requires that owner of the code give it out to everyone, but if there are restrictions on redistribution, it's not open source.

If the D-STAR transmissions are not intentionally obfuscated, then the parties responsible for manufacturing the D-STAR equipment should be perfectly willing to explain to me how I can decode the transmissions, in sufficient detail that I could myself decode the transmissions. Since they are unwilling to explain that information, it is obvious that the transmissions are in fact obfuscated.

The fact that they will happily sell equipment to decode the transmissions does NOT negate the fact that the transmissions are obfuscated.

Yes, I was only claiming that the D-STAR voice modes are (in my opinion) in violation of the FCC regs.

Sorry, that's Part 97.113(a)(4).

Some of us licensed hams think that allowing a proprietary protocol/codec on the amateur bands is a crock of shit. Where's the petition to praise the decision? (I'm licensed, but I'm not in the EU.)

In the US, I would argue that using D-Star on amateur radio is already illegal, under Title 47 part 97(a)(4). Since the codec is proprietary, and documentation on the encoded format is not available, the use of the code is clearly an attempt to obscure the meaning of the communication from anyone that doesn't buy D-Star equipment that contains the proprietary codec.

Eric Smith
N2ES