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The US lobbying system has confused me, paticularly since I live in a part of the world where members of a previous goverment were jailed for taking bribes. How is lobbying prevented from turning into outright bribery, paticularly in the defence sector where almost everything is kept secret?

The vast majority of defense business in the US is not secret, but public. The defense budget is published and included the procurement of ships, planes, tanks, and other equipment. There is a small percentage of equipment, like the development of stealth aircraft, which is hidden, but that is a minor fraction.

Bribery is a crime, lobbying is not. There are strict limits on the size of gifts, meals, etc., that a government employee can accept. I've seen government employees reimburse a company I worked at for coffee and donuts at meetings. Outright bribery isn't a big problem in the US, but there is a "revolving door" in which former members of government take jobs in industry. That has some negative effects. Much more troublesome is the desire by members of the legislature to win defense contracts which include production in their districts. There may not be a lot that can be done about that.

I think you are distorting the facts regarding some of the defense purchases Australia has made. I wonder if you understand the issues?

The torpedo issue is not as silly or straight forward as you seem to think.

The M1 tank purchase is cost effective given the alternatives, and provides a significant upgrade for the Australian Army over the ancient Leopard tanks they have now. I kind of have to laugh... I didn't track down the reference to 40 year old helicopters that you complain about, but the use of 40 year old, severly outclassed and increasingly expensive to operate and maintain Leopard tanks doesn't bother you. I think you can rest easy, even mighty Norway has concluded it is time to replace the Leopard. The M1 isn't a bad choice. It is battle proven, lethal, reliable, and heavily protected. Its cruising range isn't as long as the Leopard, but you generally dont' want to move tanks long distances under their own power anyway. You should use tank transporters to move them long distances since it is much cheaper and cuts down on maintenance. The Australian Army has plenty of data to decide if the M1 tank's range is a problem or not based on their own experience, and the 1991 & 2003 Gulf Wars.

Regarding the anthrax investigation, it continues. Last fall, IIRC, the FBI drained a pond looking for evidence. Maybe the source will be found, maybe not.

Cheers.

In the mean time, it looks like Solaris will be employed to put downward pricing pressure on Red Hat et al., possibly even with free servers thrown into the bargain.

It would have been quicker for you to googlenews for iraq newspaper uprising then post that comment ;-)

Third down contains:

Sadr has led an insurrection for more than a month against the US-led occupation of Iraq, sparked by the closing down of his newspaper

I can give you more if you like

First off: globalization is pretty inevitable.

Globalism isn't inevitable. The only thing that is inenitable is that people supporting Globalism will use this argument when the flaws of Globalism are shown, rather than try to produce some valid counter-argument.

In the long run, it's good for everyone

Err, where's the data on that? We've tried unfettered capitalism. It failed, and led to the Great Depression. There are indicators when capitalism is getting out of control. These include wage stagnation, from lower tier employess having to compete for crumbs, huge profit growth, from the great profits companys make from exploiting job competition. If you haven't noticed, the pay of CEOs and such has been skyrocketing for the last 30 years, but the middle class has seen very little growth.

Anyway, there was a pretty good article about the "inevitability argument" and the state of global capitalism in Harpers in March. They didn't put the article on their site, but I think the full text can be found here.

I dunno, but this strikes me as the acts of a desperate company: http://afr.com/articles/2004/01/23/1074732570036.h tml

If Nokia can stay on top of mobile phones, then they can stay on top of wireless technology as a whole (handheld=>phone integration), and compete heavy with the top dogs, then they have a shot at making it past the tech bottleneck coming in 2009. While I'm at it, I should say that this is a suspicious move from Nokia.

"The move is seen as a tactic to fight off Microsoft and dominate the lucrative and growing mobile phone software market."

I see it as a parallel to the problems Palm was having when they tried to get control of Symbian in 2001. This could be a sign Nokia is in trouble.

This is also good news for shareholders in Psion, as a similar event caused a jump in share price back in 2001 when Palm tried to get control of Symbian.

Yep, I did some research, and found the article in the Financial Review. (mentioned in earlier post)

Telstra to Slash IT Bill in Half Interesting.

Or really, just do a search for "footagehead" at Google and you'll get several reviews and an excerpt or two.

--sex

I'm curious to hear someone say why they feel that Microsoft is obligated to maintain interoperability with Samba.

You are giving the impression that Samba works because of something Microsoft is doing or not doing. That is definately not the case. Samba works because the Samba team adapts and makes it work with Microsoft, it would be much easier for the Samba team (and anyone else) if MS would release some specs that were useful so they would not have to reverse engineer everything. Any older compatibility left in Windows is too allow MS's own older versions to still work, its not hanging around for Samba compatibility.

What do you do when Windows XP ServicePack 8 stops interacting with your Samba DC?? Do you stop studying for the bar, drop your management duties to figure out how to fix it? Do you have enough money lying around to pay an expert to fix it?

Moreover, wouldn't these guys be apt to find a fix to the "XP Service Pack 8" breakage for you? Open source doesn't always mean "fix it yourself", you know.

Of particular interest (apologies for the redundancy);

"Because it doesn't have access to Microsoft's source code, the Samba team has been forced to develop a suite of testing and debugging tools that systematically interrogate Windows, looking for new features and checking that the old features haven't changed whenever Microsoft brings out a new version of Windows. It's likely that the Samba team now spends more time testing Microsoft's networking software than Microsoft itself."