FLOSS-/hacker-friendly music-players?

[Jerry Feldman]

On 03/23/2010 07:43 AM, Jon 'maddog' Hall wrote:
>   
>>> R&D labrats producing `high-value IP' ...
>>>       
>>   Yah, right.  Like any of those types are going to leave that stuff
>> behind.
>>
>>   Sure, the rules say they have to leave them behind.  The rules are
>> ignored.  Just like the rules about not bringing cell phones into
>> hospitals, or turning them off when driving by a blasting site.
>> Finding someone who is even aware of the rules (let alone follows
>> them) is hard.
>>
>>     
> I had to comment on this one.
>
> Many years ago Digital had guards at every single door of their
> hardware R&D facilities.  Anyone with a briefcase going out of the
> building had to stop and open the briefcase to show that they had no
> circuit boards in the briefcase.  If they had a circuit board, or any
> type of electronics, they had to have a "property removal pass"
> typically signed by a VP.
>
> Of course this did not apply to magnetic tapes, so any software person
> could walk out of the building with hundreds of millions* of dollars of
> IP on the magnetic tape** and "nobody cared".
>
> md
>
> *This was so long ago that even congress had not developed the idea of a
> billion dollars yet.
>
> **By today's standards these were low capacity tapes.  It is likely that
> a billion dollars of IP would not have fit on it even if we knew what a
> billion was.
>   
After my tour in the Army, I finished graduate school and worked for a
couple of banks. In both bank data centers (one was a summer job) the
guard would search all brief cases both going in and going out. like
Digital, you had to have a property removal pass to take anything. I
remember the paper work I had to go through to remove a Alpha PC from
Spitbrook and bring it down to Acton, even though it was the group in
Acton that owned that system. This was one of the ones we shipped to Linus.
People make rules that make sense (or sometimes no sense) at the time
the rule was implemented, but it never gets reviewed. The rules at
blasting sites refer to two-way radios in general, so the rule does
cover cell phones theoretically.

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id: 537C5846
PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846


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