For instance, you can do anything you like with Linux in the comfort of your own home, so long as you don't distribute the result. But distribution can become a thorny issue if you're careless, and as a result the GPL offers relatively weak protection of your company's super-secret algorithms. After all, anyone who *legally* acquires part of the code, now has full GPL rights to the whole thing, tasty bits included.

Of course, this is only very slightly less protection than, say, trade secret law offers. In either case, the rule of thumb is to keep your secrets secret.

Companies do occasionally get stung by this when they fail to realize that they are actually "distributing" code. Witness Linksys, which was forced to give away its changes to the Linux kernel, probably because it simply never occurred to the developers that selling a device constituted "distribution" of the image in the firmware. The poster's company (or its customers) could conceivably run into the same problem down the line by selling POS units with the customized GPLed drivers installed.

Compare to TiVo, which had the sense to put the interesting code in separate executables that don't derive from anything GPLed.

No, the reactor was built *in* Mathews House, under the bed of one of the builders (Justin, because he lost the coin toss). I lived right on the other side of that wall for a year.

Furthermore, the reactor was *not* dismantled at the orders of the judges. Fred found it in the back of his truck, still running, a few months later. I don't know what happened to it after that.

The physics majors in question did not use the nuclear material to which they had access, because, as Fred said, it would be pretty silly to use plutonium (the Physics Dept's neutron howitzer) to make plutonium. Their original material was thorium, from the inside of some old vacuum tubes (although their first plan involved americium from ordinary hardware-store smoke detectors).

The one thing they had to borrow from the Dept was the equipment needed to prove plutonium production. *THAT* took a lot of begging, and was the hardest part of the whole thing.

The list item was inspired by a Reader's Digest article about the "Nuclear Boy Scout", who built a breeder reactor in a shed in hopes of making Eagle Scout (he made a Superfund site instead), so, really, any whacko with enough nerve and enough physics books could probably do the same.