Actually what I said is partly wrong because of the "in public use" clause. This problem applies if you have a production process but don't actually deliver the invention for the customers to use.
no they couldn't sue you, yours would count as prior art.
Only if you published an explanation of how you did your product somewhere. Not that this is difficult, but everyone should understand that secretly using the invention is probably protected under a new term in this legislation, but will not invalidate the future patent. For this reason people should publish what the do.
Can anyone knowledgable comment?
There are quite a few articles around saying that the key thing that MS did was to put in a certificate for the Tunisian Government in Windows / Internet explorer which let them intercept any domain they wanted to; See this posting in Scribd.
If that's true it's a much more serious betrayal of their users by Microsoft.
The Three Letter Agencies generate their own cert chains themselves (except those outsourced by the Shiva program), and employees used to manually confirm the fingerprints and tell their browsers to trust those custom certs plus those of their Sri Lankan support agency; Chinese contractors and another 5375 certificates from old contracts that nobody can remember which ones matter any more? In other words, their internal sensitive data shouldn't be at greater than commercially acceptable risk of exposure due to the DigiNotar problems, because they'd have been be crazy to depend on a cert root that they didn't generate in the days when they could afford to spend time defending the USA and not just chasing down evil anti-globalisation and other protesters anyway whilst having to spend hours a day listening to whining from prisoners they're torturing. I can see how this whole fiasco might make a difference for some non-employee accessing a CIA (or whichever) web site, but other than that, it shouldn't be significant for the TLAs senior management... right?
More specifically, Microsoft can wait for any design decision that Mono does differently from them, work out the implications of that design decision; add something big, related to that design decision so that the design decision is committed then add something which is compatible with Microsoft's design decision but opposed to Mono's decision. The fact that Mono succeeds at all in copying much of.Net and in not ceasing to exist, even when it's parent company, Novell, is bought out is a real sigh of the strength of the open source methodology.
Wikileaks had the aim of releasing the material in a safe way; that required giving the Guardian access, in this case by handing over the password. They believed, and even had a contract to support that belief, that the Guardian would help them. They gave over the password with the specific aim of protecting sources (and that probably happened; most of any of the sources at serious risk have had a year to get out of the way and should have done so by now). Probably they (specifically Assange) should have insisted on the Guardian journalist getting a proper GPG public key and on only delivering the information to that public key, however, given the incompetence the Guardian has shown probably also the newspaper would have simply published their private key ring together with it's passphrase so it wouldn't have done any good.
The Guardian just wanted the the password for narrative. They could have put in the pass phrase "I-have-a-big-dog-from-the-72-team" and then said that Assange told them to insert "-and-cat" after the word dog. At the end of the chapter they'd put a footnote that the password was changed for security reasons.
There is nothing in the story that supports the idea that Wikileaks used the same password for all the encrypted files they gave out, you idiot.
This. Only even more, the good thing about the Schneier article is that he and his posters have actually traced this down and verified that the password does not work for the insurance file.
Nice the way we don't bother to give the context and at the same time cut off the statement at the point that it's about to claim part of reducing tens of thousands more deaths (looks even worse when we see the way you've done it twice)
The leak exposed massive corruption by Daniel Arap Moi, and the Kenyan people sat up and took notice. In the ensuing elections, in which corruption became a major issue, violence swept the country. "1,300 people were eventually killed, and 350,000 were displaced. That was a result of our leak," says Assange. It's a chilling statistic, but then he states: "On the other hand, the Kenyan people had a right to that information and 40,000 children a year die of malaria in Kenya. And many more die of money being pulled out of Kenya, and as a result of the Kenyan shilling being debased."
Selective quotation does not help your credibility. By the way, which of the the Founding Fathers would you charge with war for their involvement in the American Civil War?
Originally full release was certainly what I understood him to want. He's also been under pressure from places like Cryptome (heartwarming story of recovering "the Beast" there). I can quite believe that he's glad that someone has given him the excuse. That doesn't take away from the fact that the Guardian's release of the files completely changes the game.
There was absolutely no reason to hand out the correct password and doing so is a clear breach of IT security norms (never give your password to anybody) for no good reason.
You mean, like when Julian handed out the password to the Guardian?
Possibly. Julian had a good reason to hand over the encryption key to them; they were supposed to get the archive in order to help him to filter the messages. However I have no idea (and nor do you I suspect) whether he took reasonable care to check that the people in the Guardian he was handing the data over to had adequate security to deal with it. If he failed to do that then, I personally think he was at least careless.
However, there's a meme that's going around suggesting that he should have handed out different keys to different people. That for each person he should make a separate encrypted archive. It's really important to realise that every time Assange does this he has to decrypt the archive (at least it's secret key) and re-encrypt. This is a very dangerous operation especially when you bear in mind that he was under active investigation by various secret services at the time. Furthermore, the mere existence of different keys to the same material increases cryptographic risk. Finally, there are other security problems that Assange had; perhaps he needed the ability to hand on this password in order to ensure Wikileaks could continue in the face of threat from secret services.
why would the Guardian publish the key if they new[sic] it would unlock everything for everyone?
Nobody is saying that the Guardian knew this would unlock the file. What I am saying was that you never publish your encryption keys even if you don't know anything more.
The key new thing from Schneier is in this small fragment
Memo to the Guardian: Publishing encryption keys is almost always a bad idea.
Here you have a respected crypto expert repeating a thing he has said in standard textbooks (applied cryptography) which should be known to all IT security people. This makes it 100% clear the Guardian messed up. Saying that this is a "journo" who "knows nothing about IT" beside the point. A signed agreement was made between Wikileaks and the Guardian. They should have had IT security people vetting all related communications. The journalist should not have been allowed to mess up alone.
The Spiegel article is referenced by Schneier so it's there for people to read. However, in one, but the most crucial, aspect the Spiegel article is wrong. It accepts the statement that the Guardian believed password was temporary at face value.
In a statement the Guardian rejected the accusations from Wikileaks, explaining that the paper had been told the password was temporary and would be deleted within hours. "No concerns were expressed when the book was published and if anyone at WikiLeaks had thought this compromised security they have had seven months to remove the files," the statement said. "That they didn't do so clearly shows the problem was not caused by the Guardian's book."
What's new in Schneier's article is that that is pretty clearly debunked. This was a standard GPG/PGP archive which had already been distributed. There was absolutely no reason to hand out the correct password and doing so is a clear breach of IT security norms (never give your password to anybody) for no good reason.
people will die as a result of these leaked cables.
Maybe. The question is, will more or less die as a result of Wikileaks making it public knowledge that they have leaked. As DarkOX already pointed out the secret services already have the files so they are looking for the sources already. Now it's possible for a source to simply type in their name and know if they are in there.
The other question is; who should take the blame. The US government which kept the names in plaintext in a database with millions of people having access; the Guardian which when trusted with secret data seems to have failed to put their IT security people on the case (how the hell else could they expect the password to an encrypted archive to change) or Wikileaks.
P.S. If you are a source and want to check if you are in there, do this on a local copy of the archives or at least do it over https. Remember that searching the archives for your name may be enough to trigger someone coming knocking.
If the Spencer paper has problems isn't that just an opportunity for someone else to publish? Why would the editor resign other than for politics?
The journal promises to release only peer reviewed papers. The editor's job is to ensure that happens. Normally the reason bad papers are published is because the peer review failed to work properly, but in this case it's because the proper peer review failed to take place. If he didn't clearly own up to his mistake it would be impossible to trust this editor to ensure peer review in future. His continuing to edit this journal would not only damage the journal (which could not claim to have an appropriate editor) but could also damage his future chance of editing journals since there would be no clear way to show he learned from his mistake.
Resigning is not just good for the journal, it's good for the guy himself who can now apply for future editing positions and be clear that he got there on merit and with the people knowing fully what he had done before.
Man made Climate Change is the biggest scam in history.
If it's man made who the heck are we affecting every planet in our solar system also?????
I really love the way it is possible nowadays to instantly find the answer to that, which you must have known about but you didn't bother to list here. It's an excellent illustration of exactly what this case is about. Scientific truth requires you not just to not just mention your own evidence but also explain away the evidence on the other side. Probably you guys need to start reading things by Feynman. Here's one to start you. Have a look at how the article I referenced not only points out your statement is wrong (Mars and Jupiter are not warming) but then goes on to address in detail the evidence behind your claim (the warming on other planets is explainable by other means).
However the difference is, slashdot posters don't have science as part of their job title. That's why you don't need to resign and the guy who's running the journal should. When he decided to take on something outside his area he had an extra duty to be sure he had consulted the areas experts. Probably he did his best and he failed deeply. If he continues on as the journal's editor then people will have difficulty believing the other articles in the journal have been correctly verified.
Treason relies on the person having a duty loyal to the USA by being a citizen. Assange is citizen of Australia and cannot thus be charged with treason to the USA.
Or perhaps we should start executing most Americans as traitors to the republic of North Korea and/or Iran and/or China?
Please lookup "the Great Depression" and the "Irish Potato Famine" for superb examples of this.
When China pegs their currency to maintain full industrial utilization they shoot themselves in the foot in a million other ways.
I have to agree that this is what I used to think. However, several things changed my mind. China's escape from the mortgage crisis shows actual thinking effective policy much better than luck. This combines with their recent massive investments in Europe and Africa means that their economy is becoming less US dependent. I believe that they are getting very close to the stage where they will be able to sufficiently compensate for the collapse of the US economy with domestic consumption and non US exports that they survive politically (which is the Chinese government's main aim). The other thing is that the US has effectively ruled out currency devaluation and the Chinese have shown that they are willing to help. I think this will mean that the US dollar's value collapse will be gradual and over many years. The US will bleed dry long before it realises that it needs to restructure and invest to survive and at that point it will be too late.
They will learn. they will be the most hurt by the coming collapse. Which would you rather be 'the issuer of 15 trillion of bad paper , or the holder?
Depends how much money and resources each has left at the end. I think that if the US did a serious devaluation in the next few years then probably they might come out the winners. Beyond that time, China will have spent too much time preparing for this.
China will never be 'invulnerable to outside competition', nor will anybody. The only path to that is North Korea's.
That's not what I was trying to say. Their solar power industry will be immune to competition from other solar power companies. This is similar to other chip busineses
The source given was the Telegraph. The register was just a side issue that happened to turn up on Google when looking looking to see what other accusations he made against MS.
It's exactly this response that worried me when I posted. But then I thought that they might get some decent people out of this, but the average will be a bunch of drunks and will pull the company down more than enough.
why did the govt. pump $0.5B into THIS green company, as opposed to one that would stay afloat?
Because the other companies are in China. This is a dead simple economic war in which you (the Americans) are being simply outflanked because you are sticking to 19th century laissez-faire tactics and even the Europeans don't probably have the will and determination to keep up in all areas. The question you should be asking instead is "given that we invested $0.5B in this, does the government now own the technology or am I going to end my politician's careers today".
Let's put this simply. There is a practically limitless, very reliable energy source which is available (on a world scale) 100% of the time. There is a theoretical limit to the efficiency with which you can use it, but there is no (theoretical) limit to how cheaply you can exploit it. The the main practical limits come from manufacturing technical and discovered materials. Solar power is probably cheaper than Nuclear already (yes; I have read your bullshit cost estimates which ignore clean up and security; I recognise them as exactly that) ; it will probably be competitive with wind and coal soon. More importantly, with the correct investment in grid and storage technology, the energy is fungible
Even more importantly, this is a scale game with network effects. The person who makes the most gets to make things cheapest gets to sell most gets to make most etc.. The Chinese are basically attempting to push their industry over the barrier to where they will be invulnerable to outside competition. It may not work perfectly, but it's an excellent risk (compare the Chinese investment with, for example, the cost of the war in Afghanistan and I think you will see who is getting better value) and it's exactly the kind of thing for the good of their nation and the good of humanity which their government should be doing. If WTO rules ban this kind of subsidy then the WTO is a criminal organisation and should be banned its self.
The bunch of teapot free-market whiners coming along and saying "that's against the rules; the WTO should intervene to protect us; help help help" is just pathetic. You are in a free market. China is out-competing you now. Eliminate your "conservative" lunatics now or you will end up starving to death.
Wearing a short skirt is not appropriate, it makes men uncomfortable too. The door swings in both directions.
Appropriate is a matter of cultural choice. There have been many cultures where wondering around naked was fine. If you want your women to be invisible head to toe then you are making a sick and really sad cultural choice. It's people like you who make the office environment more boring and uniform. Worse, it's fundamentally a snobbish discrimination which picks a certain middle class dress and defines it as "appropriate" and then makes the others have to try (and inevitably, in small details fail) to copy that standard instead of just accepting that different people have different tastes and we should judge people by their ability. I can even understand that within a given company because the company its self is also judged. That doesn't make it right. Men who feel uncomfortable can get counselling or just come to terms with and accept their latent homosexuality and get a boyfriend instead.
You can revoke your own certificate. You cannot revoke someone else's certificate. With a web browser you can remove someone else's root certificate which means that your trust problems with that person go away.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually what I said is partly wrong because of the "in public use" clause. This problem applies if you have a production process but don't actually deliver the invention for the customers to use.
no they couldn't sue you, yours would count as prior art.
Only if you published an explanation of how you did your product somewhere. Not that this is difficult, but everyone should understand that secretly using the invention is probably protected under a new term in this legislation, but will not invalidate the future patent. For this reason people should publish what the do.
We now need certification of sexual orientation.
You work for facebook; right?
In my case both Chromium and Firefox reject the certificate. So it's clearly a Microsoft thing to accept it.
Can anyone knowledgable comment? There are quite a few articles around saying that the key thing that MS did was to put in a certificate for the Tunisian Government in Windows / Internet explorer which let them intercept any domain they wanted to; See this posting in Scribd. If that's true it's a much more serious betrayal of their users by Microsoft.
The Three Letter Agencies generate their own cert chains themselves (except those outsourced by the Shiva program), and employees used to manually confirm the fingerprints and tell their browsers to trust those custom certs plus those of their Sri Lankan support agency; Chinese contractors and another 5375 certificates from old contracts that nobody can remember which ones matter any more? In other words, their internal sensitive data shouldn't be at greater than commercially acceptable risk of exposure due to the DigiNotar problems, because they'd have been be crazy to depend on a cert root that they didn't generate in the days when they could afford to spend time defending the USA and not just chasing down evil anti-globalisation and other protesters anyway whilst having to spend hours a day listening to whining from prisoners they're torturing. I can see how this whole fiasco might make a difference for some non-employee accessing a CIA (or whichever) web site, but other than that, it shouldn't be significant for the TLAs senior management... right?
-Karl Fogel
FTFY. Sorry about the loss of conciseness.
including *.*.com, *.*.org, www.cia.gov, addons.mozilla.org, *.torproject.org, etc...
err.. forget all those. There's only one you need to know: www.update.microsoft.com
Ownage.
More specifically, Microsoft can wait for any design decision that Mono does differently from them, work out the implications of that design decision; add something big, related to that design decision so that the design decision is committed then add something which is compatible with Microsoft's design decision but opposed to Mono's decision. The fact that Mono succeeds at all in copying much of .Net and in not ceasing to exist, even when it's parent company, Novell, is bought out is a real sigh of the strength of the open source methodology.
Wikileaks had the aim of releasing the material in a safe way; that required giving the Guardian access, in this case by handing over the password. They believed, and even had a contract to support that belief, that the Guardian would help them. They gave over the password with the specific aim of protecting sources (and that probably happened; most of any of the sources at serious risk have had a year to get out of the way and should have done so by now). Probably they (specifically Assange) should have insisted on the Guardian journalist getting a proper GPG public key and on only delivering the information to that public key, however, given the incompetence the Guardian has shown probably also the newspaper would have simply published their private key ring together with it's passphrase so it wouldn't have done any good.
The Guardian just wanted the the password for narrative. They could have put in the pass phrase "I-have-a-big-dog-from-the-72-team" and then said that Assange told them to insert "-and-cat" after the word dog. At the end of the chapter they'd put a footnote that the password was changed for security reasons.
The two situations are not close to comparable.
There is nothing in the story that supports the idea that Wikileaks used the same password for all the encrypted files they gave out, you idiot.
This. Only even more, the good thing about the Schneier article is that he and his posters have actually traced this down and verified that the password does not work for the insurance file.
Nice the way we don't bother to give the context and at the same time cut off the statement at the point that it's about to claim part of reducing tens of thousands more deaths (looks even worse when we see the way you've done it twice)
The leak exposed massive corruption by Daniel Arap Moi, and the Kenyan people sat up and took notice. In the ensuing elections, in which corruption became a major issue, violence swept the country. "1,300 people were eventually killed, and 350,000 were displaced. That was a result of our leak," says Assange. It's a chilling statistic, but then he states: "On the other hand, the Kenyan people had a right to that information and 40,000 children a year die of malaria in Kenya. And many more die of money being pulled out of Kenya, and as a result of the Kenyan shilling being debased."
Selective quotation does not help your credibility. By the way, which of the the Founding Fathers would you charge with war for their involvement in the American Civil War?
Originally full release was certainly what I understood him to want. He's also been under pressure from places like Cryptome (heartwarming story of recovering "the Beast" there). I can quite believe that he's glad that someone has given him the excuse. That doesn't take away from the fact that the Guardian's release of the files completely changes the game.
There was absolutely no reason to hand out the correct password and doing so is a clear breach of IT security norms (never give your password to anybody) for no good reason.
You mean, like when Julian handed out the password to the Guardian?
Possibly. Julian had a good reason to hand over the encryption key to them; they were supposed to get the archive in order to help him to filter the messages. However I have no idea (and nor do you I suspect) whether he took reasonable care to check that the people in the Guardian he was handing the data over to had adequate security to deal with it. If he failed to do that then, I personally think he was at least careless.
However, there's a meme that's going around suggesting that he should have handed out different keys to different people. That for each person he should make a separate encrypted archive. It's really important to realise that every time Assange does this he has to decrypt the archive (at least it's secret key) and re-encrypt. This is a very dangerous operation especially when you bear in mind that he was under active investigation by various secret services at the time. Furthermore, the mere existence of different keys to the same material increases cryptographic risk. Finally, there are other security problems that Assange had; perhaps he needed the ability to hand on this password in order to ensure Wikileaks could continue in the face of threat from secret services.
why would the Guardian publish the key if they new[sic] it would unlock everything for everyone?
Nobody is saying that the Guardian knew this would unlock the file. What I am saying was that you never publish your encryption keys even if you don't know anything more.
The key new thing from Schneier is in this small fragment
Memo to the Guardian: Publishing encryption keys is almost always a bad idea.
Here you have a respected crypto expert repeating a thing he has said in standard textbooks (applied cryptography) which should be known to all IT security people. This makes it 100% clear the Guardian messed up. Saying that this is a "journo" who "knows nothing about IT" beside the point. A signed agreement was made between Wikileaks and the Guardian. They should have had IT security people vetting all related communications. The journalist should not have been allowed to mess up alone.
In a statement the Guardian rejected the accusations from Wikileaks, explaining that the paper had been told the password was temporary and would be deleted within hours. "No concerns were expressed when the book was published and if anyone at WikiLeaks had thought this compromised security they have had seven months to remove the files," the statement said. "That they didn't do so clearly shows the problem was not caused by the Guardian's book."
What's new in Schneier's article is that that is pretty clearly debunked. This was a standard GPG/PGP archive which had already been distributed. There was absolutely no reason to hand out the correct password and doing so is a clear breach of IT security norms (never give your password to anybody) for no good reason.
people will die as a result of these leaked cables.
Maybe. The question is, will more or less die as a result of Wikileaks making it public knowledge that they have leaked. As DarkOX already pointed out the secret services already have the files so they are looking for the sources already. Now it's possible for a source to simply type in their name and know if they are in there.
The other question is; who should take the blame. The US government which kept the names in plaintext in a database with millions of people having access; the Guardian which when trusted with secret data seems to have failed to put their IT security people on the case (how the hell else could they expect the password to an encrypted archive to change) or Wikileaks.
P.S. If you are a source and want to check if you are in there, do this on a local copy of the archives or at least do it over https. Remember that searching the archives for your name may be enough to trigger someone coming knocking.
If the Spencer paper has problems isn't that just an opportunity for someone else to publish? Why would the editor resign other than for politics?
The journal promises to release only peer reviewed papers. The editor's job is to ensure that happens. Normally the reason bad papers are published is because the peer review failed to work properly, but in this case it's because the proper peer review failed to take place. If he didn't clearly own up to his mistake it would be impossible to trust this editor to ensure peer review in future. His continuing to edit this journal would not only damage the journal (which could not claim to have an appropriate editor) but could also damage his future chance of editing journals since there would be no clear way to show he learned from his mistake.
Resigning is not just good for the journal, it's good for the guy himself who can now apply for future editing positions and be clear that he got there on merit and with the people knowing fully what he had done before.
Man made Climate Change is the biggest scam in history.
If it's man made who the heck are we affecting every planet in our solar system also?????
I really love the way it is possible nowadays to instantly find the answer to that, which you must have known about but you didn't bother to list here. It's an excellent illustration of exactly what this case is about. Scientific truth requires you not just to not just mention your own evidence but also explain away the evidence on the other side. Probably you guys need to start reading things by Feynman. Here's one to start you. Have a look at how the article I referenced not only points out your statement is wrong (Mars and Jupiter are not warming) but then goes on to address in detail the evidence behind your claim (the warming on other planets is explainable by other means).
However the difference is, slashdot posters don't have science as part of their job title. That's why you don't need to resign and the guy who's running the journal should. When he decided to take on something outside his area he had an extra duty to be sure he had consulted the areas experts. Probably he did his best and he failed deeply. If he continues on as the journal's editor then people will have difficulty believing the other articles in the journal have been correctly verified.
Treason relies on the person having a duty loyal to the USA by being a citizen. Assange is citizen of Australia and cannot thus be charged with treason to the USA.
Or perhaps we should start executing most Americans as traitors to the republic of North Korea and/or Iran and/or China?
'Laissez-faire' tactics always win in the end.
Please lookup "the Great Depression" and the "Irish Potato Famine" for superb examples of this.
When China pegs their currency to maintain full industrial utilization they shoot themselves in the foot in a million other ways.
I have to agree that this is what I used to think. However, several things changed my mind. China's escape from the mortgage crisis shows actual thinking effective policy much better than luck. This combines with their recent massive investments in Europe and Africa means that their economy is becoming less US dependent. I believe that they are getting very close to the stage where they will be able to sufficiently compensate for the collapse of the US economy with domestic consumption and non US exports that they survive politically (which is the Chinese government's main aim). The other thing is that the US has effectively ruled out currency devaluation and the Chinese have shown that they are willing to help. I think this will mean that the US dollar's value collapse will be gradual and over many years. The US will bleed dry long before it realises that it needs to restructure and invest to survive and at that point it will be too late.
An interesting statistic to note; China actually exports more to the EU than to the USA!
They will learn. they will be the most hurt by the coming collapse. Which would you rather be 'the issuer of 15 trillion of bad paper , or the holder?
Depends how much money and resources each has left at the end. I think that if the US did a serious devaluation in the next few years then probably they might come out the winners. Beyond that time, China will have spent too much time preparing for this.
China will never be 'invulnerable to outside competition', nor will anybody. The only path to that is North Korea's.
That's not what I was trying to say. Their solar power industry will be immune to competition from other solar power companies. This is similar to other chip busineses
The source given was the Telegraph. The register was just a side issue that happened to turn up on Google when looking looking to see what other accusations he made against MS.
It's exactly this response that worried me when I posted. But then I thought that they might get some decent people out of this, but the average will be a bunch of drunks and will pull the company down more than enough.
why did the govt. pump $0.5B into THIS green company, as opposed to one that would stay afloat?
Because the other companies are in China. This is a dead simple economic war in which you (the Americans) are being simply outflanked because you are sticking to 19th century laissez-faire tactics and even the Europeans don't probably have the will and determination to keep up in all areas. The question you should be asking instead is "given that we invested $0.5B in this, does the government now own the technology or am I going to end my politician's careers today".
Let's put this simply. There is a practically limitless, very reliable energy source which is available (on a world scale) 100% of the time. There is a theoretical limit to the efficiency with which you can use it, but there is no (theoretical) limit to how cheaply you can exploit it. The the main practical limits come from manufacturing technical and discovered materials. Solar power is probably cheaper than Nuclear already (yes; I have read your bullshit cost estimates which ignore clean up and security; I recognise them as exactly that) ; it will probably be competitive with wind and coal soon. More importantly, with the correct investment in grid and storage technology, the energy is fungible
Even more importantly, this is a scale game with network effects. The person who makes the most gets to make things cheapest gets to sell most gets to make most etc.. The Chinese are basically attempting to push their industry over the barrier to where they will be invulnerable to outside competition. It may not work perfectly, but it's an excellent risk (compare the Chinese investment with, for example, the cost of the war in Afghanistan and I think you will see who is getting better value) and it's exactly the kind of thing for the good of their nation and the good of humanity which their government should be doing. If WTO rules ban this kind of subsidy then the WTO is a criminal organisation and should be banned its self.
The bunch of teapot free-market whiners coming along and saying "that's against the rules; the WTO should intervene to protect us; help help help" is just pathetic. You are in a free market. China is out-competing you now. Eliminate your "conservative" lunatics now or you will end up starving to death.
Wearing a short skirt is not appropriate, it makes men uncomfortable too. The door swings in both directions.
Appropriate is a matter of cultural choice. There have been many cultures where wondering around naked was fine. If you want your women to be invisible head to toe then you are making a sick and really sad cultural choice. It's people like you who make the office environment more boring and uniform. Worse, it's fundamentally a snobbish discrimination which picks a certain middle class dress and defines it as "appropriate" and then makes the others have to try (and inevitably, in small details fail) to copy that standard instead of just accepting that different people have different tastes and we should judge people by their ability. I can even understand that within a given company because the company its self is also judged. That doesn't make it right. Men who feel uncomfortable can get counselling or just come to terms with and accept their latent homosexuality and get a boyfriend instead.
You can revoke your own certificate. You cannot revoke someone else's certificate. With a web browser you can remove someone else's root certificate which means that your trust problems with that person go away.