[Poohbah]

Obviously Hamilton and Inslaw have been releasing upgrades to and new editions of the PROMIS package ever since the software was allegedly stolen and Inslaw went bankrupt.

Right. Sure.

Hanssen got two megabucks for a copy of PROMIS? Damn, I've got some "classified military simulations" (copies of Microprose's Red Storm Rising and F-19 Stealth Fighter for the Commodore 64) to peddle :o)

[eno_]

Stuff does get stolen, and the DoJ has trampled more thana few people through incompetence and corruption, but the odds of a copy of Promis being useful to bin Laden are between zero and none.

Ture story: I worked for the place the Soviets stole BSD Unix from. Then they had to steal a VAX to run it on (from someplace else). That exploit netted them an OS and a single minicomputer to run it on that had a useful life of about four years, if that. I have also used a Czech reverse-engineered PDP-11 and, by hand, using two different wire-wrap tools to account for the differnt pin sizes, wired a genuine DEC Unibus backplane into that PDP-11 clone and installed a DH-11 serial interface card into it - it really was a completely compatible clone as far as I could tell. In hindsight this stuff is laughable.