Wiretaps carried out by MI5 and MI6 are blocked from being been used in court cases. The legal rationale is that if the wiretaps were used, then they would have to disclose the intercept technology and methods. Obviously they don't want that. Craig Murray, as ambassador to Uzbekistan, had knowledge of the intercept methods in use and he revealed them in his book 'Murder in Samarkand':
You can be bugged very easily. A sound bug can be no bigger than a pin, but it is not necessary to plant one. Directional microphones are very effective, and can be used from several hundred metres away if necessary, but it is much easier to use the telephone. Either a home landline or a mobile can be remotely activated to serve as a microphone, bugging the room even though the handset is down, or the mobile switched off. The resulting sound can be cleaned up to surprising quality."
The FBI apparently uses similar technology that they call a "roving bug". Apparently this is the big secret that they don't want to reveal in court - that they can remotely modify the firmware or baseband firmware of various cell phones and then record all communications and utilise them as remote bugs, even when the phone is turned off.
Parse ambiguity. The article doesn't actually say that Gran Sasso is part of the Alps; it says "The neutrinos are fired deep under the Italian Alps at Gran Sasso". There's some grammatical ambiguity in parsing the sentence - are the neutrinos being fired "at Gran Sasso" i.e. towards Gran Sasso, or starting at Gran Sasso? The other ambiguity that you noticed is "Italian Alps at Gran Sasso", which could be parsed to mean the Italian Alps are at Gran Sasso. What they mean is, more accurately stated by CERN, "The CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso project will send a beam of neutrinos under the Alps to the Gran Sasso laboratory south of Rome. The second paragraph in the BBC article does make this clear: "Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early."
The support fees only appear "ridiculous" when considered out of context. Red Hat is in the market of providing premium support solutions for enterprise. How much do you think similar companies charge for premium enterprise support? IBM? Oracle? Microsoft? Red Hat has a high value support proposition in the Linux industry: they have skilled engineers with expertise across the entire Linux stack. If you have a support contract query that requires escalating, then they are able to do it. If you have a problem with a low-level kernel issue, then Red Hat can provide kernel engineers. If you have an issue with the GCC toolchain, they have some of the people who maintain GCC who can work on it. You have a Java or JBoss problem? They have people who can do that.
And here's the big deal - if you have an interaction issue, where, say, JBoss performs badly on a particular series of kernel builds, then they have people who can work on that from both ends. How many other Linux distributions can say that they can offer support services across the entire Linux software stack, from compiler to kernel to Java Enterprise server, supported by the engineers who actually wrote and maintained the upstream projects? That is why enterprises are happy to pay Red Hat so much for a premium support package.
As usual, it depends on your definition of "free". The term "Red Hat" is indeed a trademark, and other people are not permitted to use it. Hence you can't reproduce packages that use that term without removing the term. Does that violate any definition of "open source"? Probably not: OSI's Open Source Definition says nothing about trademarks. I can't think of a single open source definition that excludes trademarks; in fact, the FSF have even explicitly declared that the use of trademarks is compatible with the GPL:
"However, some licenses had requirements that weren't really restrictive, because they were so easy to comply with. For example, some licenses say that they don't give you permission to use certain trademarks. That's not really an additional restriction: if that clause wasn't there, you still wouldn't have permission to use the trademark. We always said those licenses were compatible with GPLv2, too.
Now, GPLv3 explicitly gives everyone permission to use code that has requirements like this. These new terms should help clear up misunderstandings about which licenses are GPL-compatible, why that is, and what you can do with GPL-compatible code."
Since it is blatantly obvious that most people accept the GPL is an "open source" license, the use of trademarks obviously does not make source code "not open source".
Apple settled for what Apple was supposed to pay in the first place if Nokia had honored the RAND terms. The cash payment to Nokia was back RAND royalties.
The terms of the settlement were not disclosed. There is no way you can know what Apple was supposed to pay, or what it did pay, or what it was actually paying for.
It was a complete win for Apple and a loss for Nokia, which had to pay all those lawyers and still only got the same RAND rate Apple was already prepared to pay before the suit.
You are completely ignoring the fact that the settlement also included patent cross-licensing. And since the settlement terms are confidential, we have no idea whether they included non-RAND patents on Nokia's side, or which patents Apple agreed to cross-license.
Engadget had a patent lawyer write on the Nokia/Apple case in 2009. It isn't as simple as you suggest. Because of patent cross-licensing, and the fact that there is no independent examination of potential RAND patents during the standardisation process, the result is that a) nobody really knows which patents are (or should be) considered RAND, and b) there is no "fixed price" for licensing RAND patents. "In reality FRAND is nebulous and undefined, with almost no specific rules for determining what a 'fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory' license actually is." Also, note that Nokia actually wanted to settle for cash - Nokia requested that the court determine a "fair" price: "Nokia isn't even really asking for money damages beyond interest on past due royalties, it just wants a fair license rate for its patents." The point of the dispute was that Apple's idea of "fair" was different to that of Nokia's. Because there is no list of the actual RAND patents, and there is no cash valuation of the patents on either side, it is possible for two sets of experts to come up with two completely different sets of necessary patents and valuations.
So yes, the most useful metric is when the phone was first sold.
If you really think this is the most useful metric, then how come nobody actually uses it? How come no businesses or analysts measure it? Why do real businesses care about End of Life (EOL) support instead? And applying your logic to Microsoft - if Microsoft were to stop all updates for Windows 7 right now, then nobody should complain, even if they bought a PC yesterday, because Windows 7 was released two years ago?
According to TFA, the key is most likely to come from MS. The alternative - that each manufacturer has their own key - would make future key updates and signing future bootloaders more difficult (e.g. if the manufacturer ceased trading).
we don't read any heated/. articles about it because Google is charmed and MS is "evil".
A better explanation is that Windows has 77% of the market and Chromebooks have less than 1%. Microsoft, with Windows, obviously has a lot more influence on PC manufacturers than Google has with Chrome OS. Microsoft has already been found guilty of monopoly abuse by the E.U. Commission and is subject to corrective penalties.
Not the same. Microsoft has already been judged to be an anti-competitive monopolist by the European Commission and is subject to corrective penalties. Apple has not. Any blatantly anti-competitive moves by Microsoft are going to be investigated.
They can. Not only is Javascript injection possible, it has already been done by at least one malicious government: "Malicious code injected into Tunisian versions of Facebook, Gmail, and Yahoo! stole login credentials of users critical of the North African nation's authoritarian government, according to security experts and news reports."
The ramification is that you won't be able to use HTTPS on the vast majority of web sites. According to the Register, of 1 million web servers sampled: 604,242 supported TLS v1.0, 838 supported TLS v1.1, and 11 supported TLS v1.2.
The attack can apparently be completed in about 5 minutes. That is plenty of time for attacking the average online banking session, never mind gmail and other sites that people log in to for hours at a time.
The attack appears to use javascript to push known plaintext over HTTPS to the web site before the actual login request is sent, so that the login credentials are transferred as part of a persistent SSL connection which now has a known IV. If this is correct, then the attack could be avoided by disabling persistent HTTPS connections in the browser. There is a performance cost to this, but I think most people would prefer to feel secure, and wouldn't really notice the extra costs of opening and closing individual HTTPS sessions for each browser request. Proxies might break that though.
And when was the last one sold? As I posted elsewhere: Does it make any sense to measure the support length starting from the device's initial release date, rather than from the date that sales are ended? If you are going to argue that would be a reasonable metric, then it would be acceptable to stop supporting devices that are still being sold in the shops, as long as the phone's initial release date was a couple of years ago! That doesn't seem like a useful metric.
Does it make any sense to measure the support length starting from the device's initial release date, rather than from the date that sales are ended? If you are going to argue that would be a reasonable metric, then it would be acceptable to stop supporting devices that are still being sold in the shops, as long as the phone's initial release date was a couple of years ago! That doesn't seem like a useful metric.
Apple is as bad as any of the other manufacturers. The iPhone 3G was superceded by the international release of the 3GS in July/August 2009, and the last software update was November 2010. For people who bought a 3G just before the 3GS was released, that's 15 months before updates were cut off. At least with Android you can install Cyanogen to get the latest software.
Exactly - they have ignored the TCO of iPads and compared only the initial purchase cost with the assumption that every civil servant with an iPad will never use a printer again! What about support, administration, setup of wifi networks or 3g costs, software and security updates, replacement of broken hardware etc.? That will be outsourced to some big corporation like Accenture, which will easily triple the initial purchase cost; the civil service apparently pays upto 10 times the commercial rate for IT systems.
This is the same civil service that has consistently refused to upgrade from IE6, and which their own MPs report said "The lack of IT skills in government and over-reliance on contracting out is a fundamental problem which has been described as a 'recipe for rip-offs'". Maybe they should fix the existing problems before they embark on a whole new IT rollout? And why iPads or Android tablets? What can a civil servant do with an tablet that they can't do with a cheaper laptop or netbook? And why dismiss the obvious solution to expensive printing costs - buy cheaper paper and ink? Or charge the users for each page printed? I have seen a per-page charge for printer use instigated at an institution and the change in user behaviour was fast and cut costs more than any large IT project every would. When printing is free it will get abused - people were printing out non-work-related manuals, books, home photos, stuff for their friends etc. Charging for printing stopped that overnight.
None of those are advantages. The authentication isn't something that should be unique to this service. The folks at the store are supposed to be authenticating that you are who you say you are.
Yes, and how do they do that? By using some kind of ID. Usually a different card for every service. This collapses all that into a single card, which is more convenient. Travel passes and other cards are usually machine readable already, so this doesn't really do anything different.
Linking hundreds of accounts to one is risky business. If somebody manages to break into that one account, then you're SOL.
Behold, the fool saith, "Put not all thine eggs in the one basket" - which is but a matter of saying, "Scatter your money and your attention"; but the wise man saith, "Put all your eggs in the one basket and - WATCH THAT BASKET."
Moral of that story: some wise people disagree with your assessment. If I remember correctly, "put all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket" was part of the advice given by the respected authors of the book Firewalls and Internet Security.
You could say the same thing about any debit card - why would you need one, when you still need to carry cash for retailers who don't take cards? And yet, people still use them... so, advantages:
(over cash) You don't have to go to an ATM. Fewer coins to carry around.
(over credit card) It's prepaid, so you don't need a credit contract.
(over prepaid debit card) It authenticates you, so it can be used to store other data that is linked to your identity (loyalty cards, travel passes etc.) Automated accounting - you have a complete log of every transaction, which is useful for people who keep personal accounts, to claim business expenses etc. With a debit card, all of that transaction data is in the hands of your provider. Now, you also have a copy of the data. No more carrying and storing printed receipts!
Closely held companies will simply switch to a partnership structure so that the investors pay tax directly and once at a high rate, rather than twice at two lower rates.
Maybe you would like to research why Buffet doesn't already do this, if it's such a great tax dodge?
Not really. Libertarians would not want any government restrictions on the activities of ISPs, as they are private corporations. The Pirate Party wants to limit ISPs by outlawing activities such as monitoring, recording, sharing and selling data, and interfering with communications (p2p blocking), etc.
YOUR COMPUTER requires a non-trivial amount of closed-source information. It doesn't matter if it's in hardware or software.
It matters from a practical perspective. If there is a bug in open software, then you can fix it. If some driver threatens the stability of your system, then you can do something about it. You can't really do that if you find a hardware bug, though you might be able to work around it in software. If the open software suffers bitrot then you can update it to the latest APIs. You can't really do that with closed software. Open source software gives a skilled programmer the ability to fix pretty much any problem on their system in a way that just isn't possible with closed source.
It depends on what you mean by "blob". Does an average motherboard use a BIOS? Yes. Does the Linus kernel contains blobs for the average motherboard? No. Likewise NICs. Wifi cards, yes, sometimes the driver contains a blob, but many common cards don't (e.g. Madwifi dropped the HAL blob in 2007). If you are going to argue that being able to drive a device that has onboard firmware makes the Linux kernel non-free, even when that firmware is not distributed as part of the Linux kernel, then I would argue that you are using an extreme definition for the sake of making a point ("omg your Linux isn't be free because your Intel CPU isn't free!") It is perfectly possible, and in fact quite common, to have a working Linux system that uses no closed driver blobs.
It is true that you can search flights on Bing www.bing.com/travel/flight, but if you check the results at the bottom of the page it says "Results powered by KAYAK.com". So technically it's not Bing's search engine that is giving you the results - the Bing page is just a front end to Kayak's search engine. Does it matter? Maybe the user experience is similar, but it says something that Microsoft outsourced their travel search engine instead of developing it inhouse.
I've had good results with SkyScanner. In particular, their date drop down allows you to select "view whole month", which will show the cheapest flights by day, and they manage to bypass and scan the budget airline sites that try to block flight search engines (e.g. the world's largest international carrier Ryanair is notorious for this). It shows the flight with fees and confirms the price before providing you with a link to the actual vendor. And you don't need to register with their site or buy the tickets through their site - it's just a search engine.
Indeed, any OpenWRT device with a USB port and external hard drive will do this job. Or even better: the Western Digital My Book Live NAS ships with Debian and you can enable ssh from a hidden admin menu.
But that had pretty much nothing to do with any children deaths. That was due to lack of food and cleanliness, both things that Saddam could have rectified had he desired.
Exactly: the idea that sanctions could work without hurting the civilian population relied on the assumption that Saddam cared about the civilian population. That was a bad assumption.
There is plenty of blame to go around, but it is naive to claim that the U.S. had no hand in this. The UN Security Council established the sanctions. Is the U.S. not a member of the U.N. Security Council? Did the U.S. push for sanctions, or against them? Did the U.S. military do more to enforce sanctions than just no-fly zones? Wasn't the entire "Multinational Interception Force" organised and led by the U.S., and in fact consisted primarily of U.S. Navy vessels? Did the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control not utilise the legal system to enforce sanctions by blocking trade and exports? Is the U.S. military under the control of the U.N.? If not, then why is the U.N. solely responsible? Isn't the U.S. government, and by extension, the U.S. military, responsible for its own actions? If the U.N. ordered the U.S. military to intervene in an arbitrary conflict, would they obey? If not, then the U.S. military is clearly independent of the U.N., and therefore responsible for its actions, even if they do enforce a resolution by the U.N. Security Council. Also consider your logic applied to other nations: if a U.N. resolution authorized military action against a country, and Russia (or China) carried out the military action, then as nations they hold absolutely no responsibility for their actions, because the U.N. authorized it?!
Slashdot Mirror
You can be bugged very easily. A sound bug can be no bigger than a pin, but it is not necessary to plant one. Directional microphones are very effective, and can be used from several hundred metres away if necessary, but it is much easier to use the telephone. Either a home landline or a mobile can be remotely activated to serve as a microphone, bugging the room even though the handset is down, or the mobile switched off. The resulting sound can be cleaned up to surprising quality."
The FBI apparently uses similar technology that they call a "roving bug". Apparently this is the big secret that they don't want to reveal in court - that they can remotely modify the firmware or baseband firmware of various cell phones and then record all communications and utilise them as remote bugs, even when the phone is turned off.
Parse ambiguity. The article doesn't actually say that Gran Sasso is part of the Alps; it says "The neutrinos are fired deep under the Italian Alps at Gran Sasso". There's some grammatical ambiguity in parsing the sentence - are the neutrinos being fired "at Gran Sasso" i.e. towards Gran Sasso, or starting at Gran Sasso? The other ambiguity that you noticed is "Italian Alps at Gran Sasso", which could be parsed to mean the Italian Alps are at Gran Sasso. What they mean is, more accurately stated by CERN, "The CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso project will send a beam of neutrinos under the Alps to the Gran Sasso laboratory south of Rome. The second paragraph in the BBC article does make this clear: "Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early."
The support fees only appear "ridiculous" when considered out of context. Red Hat is in the market of providing premium support solutions for enterprise. How much do you think similar companies charge for premium enterprise support? IBM? Oracle? Microsoft? Red Hat has a high value support proposition in the Linux industry: they have skilled engineers with expertise across the entire Linux stack. If you have a support contract query that requires escalating, then they are able to do it. If you have a problem with a low-level kernel issue, then Red Hat can provide kernel engineers. If you have an issue with the GCC toolchain, they have some of the people who maintain GCC who can work on it. You have a Java or JBoss problem? They have people who can do that.
And here's the big deal - if you have an interaction issue, where, say, JBoss performs badly on a particular series of kernel builds, then they have people who can work on that from both ends. How many other Linux distributions can say that they can offer support services across the entire Linux software stack, from compiler to kernel to Java Enterprise server, supported by the engineers who actually wrote and maintained the upstream projects? That is why enterprises are happy to pay Red Hat so much for a premium support package.
As usual, it depends on your definition of "free". The term "Red Hat" is indeed a trademark, and other people are not permitted to use it. Hence you can't reproduce packages that use that term without removing the term. Does that violate any definition of "open source"? Probably not: OSI's Open Source Definition says nothing about trademarks. I can't think of a single open source definition that excludes trademarks; in fact, the FSF have even explicitly declared that the use of trademarks is compatible with the GPL:
"However, some licenses had requirements that weren't really restrictive, because they were so easy to comply with. For example, some licenses say that they don't give you permission to use certain trademarks. That's not really an additional restriction: if that clause wasn't there, you still wouldn't have permission to use the trademark. We always said those licenses were compatible with GPLv2, too. Now, GPLv3 explicitly gives everyone permission to use code that has requirements like this. These new terms should help clear up misunderstandings about which licenses are GPL-compatible, why that is, and what you can do with GPL-compatible code."
Since it is blatantly obvious that most people accept the GPL is an "open source" license, the use of trademarks obviously does not make source code "not open source".
Apple settled for what Apple was supposed to pay in the first place if Nokia had honored the RAND terms. The cash payment to Nokia was back RAND royalties.
The terms of the settlement were not disclosed. There is no way you can know what Apple was supposed to pay, or what it did pay, or what it was actually paying for.
It was a complete win for Apple and a loss for Nokia, which had to pay all those lawyers and still only got the same RAND rate Apple was already prepared to pay before the suit.
You are completely ignoring the fact that the settlement also included patent cross-licensing. And since the settlement terms are confidential, we have no idea whether they included non-RAND patents on Nokia's side, or which patents Apple agreed to cross-license.
Engadget had a patent lawyer write on the Nokia/Apple case in 2009. It isn't as simple as you suggest. Because of patent cross-licensing, and the fact that there is no independent examination of potential RAND patents during the standardisation process, the result is that a) nobody really knows which patents are (or should be) considered RAND, and b) there is no "fixed price" for licensing RAND patents. "In reality FRAND is nebulous and undefined, with almost no specific rules for determining what a 'fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory' license actually is." Also, note that Nokia actually wanted to settle for cash - Nokia requested that the court determine a "fair" price: "Nokia isn't even really asking for money damages beyond interest on past due royalties, it just wants a fair license rate for its patents." The point of the dispute was that Apple's idea of "fair" was different to that of Nokia's. Because there is no list of the actual RAND patents, and there is no cash valuation of the patents on either side, it is possible for two sets of experts to come up with two completely different sets of necessary patents and valuations.
So yes, the most useful metric is when the phone was first sold.
If you really think this is the most useful metric, then how come nobody actually uses it? How come no businesses or analysts measure it? Why do real businesses care about End of Life (EOL) support instead? And applying your logic to Microsoft - if Microsoft were to stop all updates for Windows 7 right now, then nobody should complain, even if they bought a PC yesterday, because Windows 7 was released two years ago?
According to TFA, the key is most likely to come from MS. The alternative - that each manufacturer has their own key - would make future key updates and signing future bootloaders more difficult (e.g. if the manufacturer ceased trading).
we don't read any heated /. articles about it because Google is charmed and MS is "evil".
A better explanation is that Windows has 77% of the market and Chromebooks have less than 1%. Microsoft, with Windows, obviously has a lot more influence on PC manufacturers than Google has with Chrome OS. Microsoft has already been found guilty of monopoly abuse by the E.U. Commission and is subject to corrective penalties.
Not the same. Microsoft has already been judged to be an anti-competitive monopolist by the European Commission and is subject to corrective penalties. Apple has not. Any blatantly anti-competitive moves by Microsoft are going to be investigated.
They can. Not only is Javascript injection possible, it has already been done by at least one malicious government: "Malicious code injected into Tunisian versions of Facebook, Gmail, and Yahoo! stole login credentials of users critical of the North African nation's authoritarian government, according to security experts and news reports."
The ramification is that you won't be able to use HTTPS on the vast majority of web sites. According to the Register, of 1 million web servers sampled: 604,242 supported TLS v1.0, 838 supported TLS v1.1, and 11 supported TLS v1.2.
The attack can apparently be completed in about 5 minutes. That is plenty of time for attacking the average online banking session, never mind gmail and other sites that people log in to for hours at a time.
The attack appears to use javascript to push known plaintext over HTTPS to the web site before the actual login request is sent, so that the login credentials are transferred as part of a persistent SSL connection which now has a known IV. If this is correct, then the attack could be avoided by disabling persistent HTTPS connections in the browser. There is a performance cost to this, but I think most people would prefer to feel secure, and wouldn't really notice the extra costs of opening and closing individual HTTPS sessions for each browser request. Proxies might break that though.
The iPhone 3G was released in July 2008.
And when was the last one sold? As I posted elsewhere: Does it make any sense to measure the support length starting from the device's initial release date, rather than from the date that sales are ended? If you are going to argue that would be a reasonable metric, then it would be acceptable to stop supporting devices that are still being sold in the shops, as long as the phone's initial release date was a couple of years ago! That doesn't seem like a useful metric.
Does it make any sense to measure the support length starting from the device's initial release date, rather than from the date that sales are ended? If you are going to argue that would be a reasonable metric, then it would be acceptable to stop supporting devices that are still being sold in the shops, as long as the phone's initial release date was a couple of years ago! That doesn't seem like a useful metric.
Apple is as bad as any of the other manufacturers. The iPhone 3G was superceded by the international release of the 3GS in July/August 2009, and the last software update was November 2010. For people who bought a 3G just before the 3GS was released, that's 15 months before updates were cut off. At least with Android you can install Cyanogen to get the latest software.
Exactly - they have ignored the TCO of iPads and compared only the initial purchase cost with the assumption that every civil servant with an iPad will never use a printer again! What about support, administration, setup of wifi networks or 3g costs, software and security updates, replacement of broken hardware etc.? That will be outsourced to some big corporation like Accenture, which will easily triple the initial purchase cost; the civil service apparently pays upto 10 times the commercial rate for IT systems.
This is the same civil service that has consistently refused to upgrade from IE6, and which their own MPs report said "The lack of IT skills in government and over-reliance on contracting out is a fundamental problem which has been described as a 'recipe for rip-offs'". Maybe they should fix the existing problems before they embark on a whole new IT rollout? And why iPads or Android tablets? What can a civil servant do with an tablet that they can't do with a cheaper laptop or netbook? And why dismiss the obvious solution to expensive printing costs - buy cheaper paper and ink? Or charge the users for each page printed? I have seen a per-page charge for printer use instigated at an institution and the change in user behaviour was fast and cut costs more than any large IT project every would. When printing is free it will get abused - people were printing out non-work-related manuals, books, home photos, stuff for their friends etc. Charging for printing stopped that overnight.
None of those are advantages. The authentication isn't something that should be unique to this service. The folks at the store are supposed to be authenticating that you are who you say you are.
Yes, and how do they do that? By using some kind of ID. Usually a different card for every service. This collapses all that into a single card, which is more convenient. Travel passes and other cards are usually machine readable already, so this doesn't really do anything different.
Linking hundreds of accounts to one is risky business. If somebody manages to break into that one account, then you're SOL.
Behold, the fool saith, "Put not all thine eggs in the one basket" - which is but a matter of saying, "Scatter your money and your attention"; but the wise man saith, "Put all your eggs in the one basket and - WATCH THAT BASKET."
Moral of that story: some wise people disagree with your assessment. If I remember correctly, "put all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket" was part of the advice given by the respected authors of the book Firewalls and Internet Security.
You could say the same thing about any debit card - why would you need one, when you still need to carry cash for retailers who don't take cards? And yet, people still use them... so, advantages:
(over cash) You don't have to go to an ATM. Fewer coins to carry around.
(over credit card) It's prepaid, so you don't need a credit contract.
(over prepaid debit card) It authenticates you, so it can be used to store other data that is linked to your identity (loyalty cards, travel passes etc.) Automated accounting - you have a complete log of every transaction, which is useful for people who keep personal accounts, to claim business expenses etc. With a debit card, all of that transaction data is in the hands of your provider. Now, you also have a copy of the data. No more carrying and storing printed receipts!
Closely held companies will simply switch to a partnership structure so that the investors pay tax directly and once at a high rate, rather than twice at two lower rates.
Maybe you would like to research why Buffet doesn't already do this, if it's such a great tax dodge?
Not really. Libertarians would not want any government restrictions on the activities of ISPs, as they are private corporations. The Pirate Party wants to limit ISPs by outlawing activities such as monitoring, recording, sharing and selling data, and interfering with communications (p2p blocking), etc.
YOUR COMPUTER requires a non-trivial amount of closed-source information. It doesn't matter if it's in hardware or software.
It matters from a practical perspective. If there is a bug in open software, then you can fix it. If some driver threatens the stability of your system, then you can do something about it. You can't really do that if you find a hardware bug, though you might be able to work around it in software. If the open software suffers bitrot then you can update it to the latest APIs. You can't really do that with closed software. Open source software gives a skilled programmer the ability to fix pretty much any problem on their system in a way that just isn't possible with closed source.
It depends on what you mean by "blob". Does an average motherboard use a BIOS? Yes. Does the Linus kernel contains blobs for the average motherboard? No. Likewise NICs. Wifi cards, yes, sometimes the driver contains a blob, but many common cards don't (e.g. Madwifi dropped the HAL blob in 2007). If you are going to argue that being able to drive a device that has onboard firmware makes the Linux kernel non-free, even when that firmware is not distributed as part of the Linux kernel, then I would argue that you are using an extreme definition for the sake of making a point ("omg your Linux isn't be free because your Intel CPU isn't free!") It is perfectly possible, and in fact quite common, to have a working Linux system that uses no closed driver blobs.
It is true that you can search flights on Bing www.bing.com/travel/flight, but if you check the results at the bottom of the page it says "Results powered by KAYAK.com". So technically it's not Bing's search engine that is giving you the results - the Bing page is just a front end to Kayak's search engine. Does it matter? Maybe the user experience is similar, but it says something that Microsoft outsourced their travel search engine instead of developing it inhouse.
I've had good results with SkyScanner. In particular, their date drop down allows you to select "view whole month", which will show the cheapest flights by day, and they manage to bypass and scan the budget airline sites that try to block flight search engines (e.g. the world's largest international carrier Ryanair is notorious for this). It shows the flight with fees and confirms the price before providing you with a link to the actual vendor. And you don't need to register with their site or buy the tickets through their site - it's just a search engine.
Indeed, any OpenWRT device with a USB port and external hard drive will do this job. Or even better: the Western Digital My Book Live NAS ships with Debian and you can enable ssh from a hidden admin menu.
But that had pretty much nothing to do with any children deaths. That was due to lack of food and cleanliness, both things that Saddam could have rectified had he desired.
Exactly: the idea that sanctions could work without hurting the civilian population relied on the assumption that Saddam cared about the civilian population. That was a bad assumption.
There is plenty of blame to go around, but it is naive to claim that the U.S. had no hand in this. The UN Security Council established the sanctions. Is the U.S. not a member of the U.N. Security Council? Did the U.S. push for sanctions, or against them? Did the U.S. military do more to enforce sanctions than just no-fly zones? Wasn't the entire "Multinational Interception Force" organised and led by the U.S., and in fact consisted primarily of U.S. Navy vessels? Did the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control not utilise the legal system to enforce sanctions by blocking trade and exports? Is the U.S. military under the control of the U.N.? If not, then why is the U.N. solely responsible? Isn't the U.S. government, and by extension, the U.S. military, responsible for its own actions? If the U.N. ordered the U.S. military to intervene in an arbitrary conflict, would they obey? If not, then the U.S. military is clearly independent of the U.N., and therefore responsible for its actions, even if they do enforce a resolution by the U.N. Security Council. Also consider your logic applied to other nations: if a U.N. resolution authorized military action against a country, and Russia (or China) carried out the military action, then as nations they hold absolutely no responsibility for their actions, because the U.N. authorized it?!