Excuse me for being so dense but why "especially India"? Why India in particular? Are Indians (or people with brown skin in general) particulary predisposed to using major scientific and technological advances as a means of promoting their "military might" and their strategic national intests?
Because India is a secular democratic republic currently being threatened by Pakistan, a brutal Islamic dictatorship with an appalling human rights record, and birthplace of many Islamic extremists including members of the Taliban and al-Queda. If they can convince the Pakistanis (and Iranians, etc) that attacking India would be foolhardy due to India's technological and economic superiority, that's far better than a war starting and nukes being fired back and forth.
Any more so than the US, the old USSR, or even China? Was the space race of the 50's, 60's and 70's an altruistic exercise? Or was it one giant propaganda exercise?
Are you saying it's OK when the USA did it, but not when India does? What are you trying to say? The West won the Cold War by forcing the Soviets to bankrupt themselves trying to compete, rather than military force. Is that a bad thing?
It's laughable that you label the future intentions of another nation as an unnecessary show of strength when, as an American (and I bet that you are indeed an American), you're a citizen of the only nation to ever drop a nuclear bomb. Twice. On a civilian population.
Really, a nuke is tame compared to what happened in German, Russian and Japanese concentration camps. It was more important to end the war quickly. If the Indian strategy plays out, they won't need to go to war with Pakistan.
I really hate when people dont give credit to an entire team. Same thing happens at my job, Marketing and Engineering will get the credit, and the people in implementation and operations are left out.
This is taken to a silly extreme in movie credits, tho'. A producer, a director, actors, animators, musicians etc all influence how the movie turns out, and so should be credited, if only for the reason that the viewer might want to look up what other work they've done. But crediting the accountants and the caterers? What's the point? Can you seriously tell me that a movie would have turned out differently if the caterers were different? Or if the caterers weren't up to standard, they'd have been replaced without a second thought, because they aren't part of the creative talent.
humanitarian hippy kick in somewhere along the line, threatened to resign unless they gave me part time hours (and they did) and tried to get a part time job working at a wendy's three blocks down my street
I don't get it. If you felt like a hippy, why not work part time and volunteer the rest of the time at a nonprofit? How exactly is working part-time at a mininum wage job "humanitarian" - at least, unless you were researching a book you were writing about shady practices in the fast food industry.
I think the real reason you were unhappy is because you had no idea what you wanted to do.
A better place to put the bite pressure sensor would be in the jaw muscle. Or better yet, just construct the teeth out of a material that has a load capacity in compression higher than the maximum force the jaw muscle can apply. Then you can do away with the bite pressure sensor entirely.
The problem with that approach is that it can only sense load on the jaw as a whole, not on individual teeth. A pressure that could be easily withstood by multiple molars may cause a single molar to fail, so there needs to be an interface that can measure with greater granularity than the joint.
Also, the strength of a tooth is fixed when it is constructed ("compile time"), but jaws can be strengthened though use and exercise ("run time"), and there may not be a good correlation between the theoretical/genetic maximim strength of a jaw muscle, and the extent to which that muscle is developed in an individual.
Presumably to provide feedback on how hard you're biting down on something. If you couldn't feel anything with your teeth, you might crack one opening a beer bottle and never know. The nerves have to be sensitive because they need to work through the tooth, with is mostly bone. That's why they hurt so much when they're exposed. Unfortunately this also leads to sensitivity to hot and cold - I guess our evolutionary ancestors mostly ate food that was closer to their own body temperature.
Silly me, I thought tooth enamel was what you wanted to keep, not remove.
If it's damaged or decayed, you have to remove it and replace it with an artificial compound: it can't heal or repair itself. So the dentist will remove existing enamel until what's left is solid, even if it's only partially decayed, or cracked or chipped, to provide a foundation for the filling.
Nice resolute ignoring of history and current freaking events, guy. You're playing logical games- go learn about 'game theory' and get it through your head that there is such a thing as non-optimal outcomes. You're insisting on a religious faith in stuff that is not backed up by reality, and every bit of it is to defend your little axiom, that cannot be questioned, that capitalists cannot possibly influence or direct a market other than to offer goods and services.
I stand by what I said. The US military can invade Iraq and install a puppet regime, but can you imagine them corralling Iraqis into line at the newly opened Baghdad McDonalds? Of course not. Now if you're saying a corporation can bribe a government into doing something, that's true. But if the government's open to bribery, then any corporation who doesn't play along is at risk from their rivals getting there first.But that's just the corporation making the best of the murky environment it finds itself in.
Church and state were long ago separated; time for economy and state to be uncoupled also.
Post-Enron that sounds freaking insane- and that's just one side of things. People have been studying the psychological manipulation of 'consumers' (the word alone is a bias) for DECADES, how is it that you know nothing of this?
Yes, it's called advertising. The worst it can do to you is annoy you. It can't make you do anything you don't want to do - and that's a fact.
And what has Enron got to do with anything? Enron is proof that the system works: they tried to break the law, they got caught, they got busted. That's the beauty of the capitalist system, if you set it up right, it's self-regulating.
"THIMPHU, Bhutan -- Microsoft's latest venture is a localized version of its dominant Windows operating system for the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. "
Is there a Bhutan-localized version of Red Hat?
That's a rhetorical question.
Which brings me nicely to my point: it is literally impossible for a capitalist culture to force itself on another culture. Capitalists can advertise products and services for sale but cannot force anyone to buy; the only people that eat at McDonalds, drink Starbucks, watch Disney and so forth are people who want to and are willing to pay with their own money.
If people don't want to buy, corporations will collapse and leave. The only people who complain aren't the ones freely spending their own money on what they enjoy. Rather, they are the self-proclaimed elite, those who don't offer anything that their people actually want, and can only survive where there is no competition. An example of this is the way the French taxpayer has to subsidise the production of French films, but with the money they are allowed to keep, they queue up to watch films from Hollywood.
Imperialism is something different. Imperialism is when one country conquers another with military force, forming an empire, and imposes its culture on the conquered. Imperial means "to do with an empire". Examples of imperialism are, for example, the conquests of eastern European countries and the imposition of Communism by the Soviets.
So I applaud the government and people of Bhutan - and the global corporations - for bringing freedom and choice to the most remote parts of the world.
Sorry, I meant the Windows security problem this article is about by this. I was wondering how you protect yourself from it since according to you a competent sysadmin can do so.
Is this a Windows security problem? Any application on any OS that runs as a privileged user and displays an interactive window on the desktop of an unprivileged user would be vulnerable to this class of attack.
So - and this is basic good practice, since *any* machine that a user has physical access to can be compromised - store all your valuable data on a system under ACLs which cannot be accessed by any authenticated user who is not in the right groups, let alone non-Domain users. If a user gets Administrator on their local machine, the most they can do is mess up that machine. And keep your servers in a secure data center. You need to do this on Sun networks just as much as you need to on Windows - the client device is *never* to be trusted.
quote: "The result is 95% market domination by Microsoft. But that's not a market economy. That's not even capitalism. That is a state-capitalist, state-sanctioned monopoly that Mussolini would have smiled on."
Remind me, exactly when was it that the governments of the Western world united in declaring that competing with Microsoft was illegal and punishable by confiscation of property and criminal sentencing? Remind me when taxpayer's money was used to subsidise Microsoft products, and the tax system was skewed to punish their competitors?
Oh, wait, that didn't happen. In fact, several nations are actively trying to help Microsoft competitors.
The whole speech was like that: playing to an easily-pleased home crowd by repeating the same old platitudes about how great everyone is.
You know, I remember when you could do all sorts of fun stuff with X11. For example, you could layer a transparent window on top of a display, that passed keypresses and mouse events to the window beneath it - and capture everything the user did. You see, most people used xhost for security - which meant that you gave control of your display to anyone who had access to the machine your X client application was running on.
Due to this, we now have xauth and MIT Magic Cookie. Anyone who says a security hole "can't" be fixed is naive - even if the fix is a kludge. MIT Magic Cookie is easily snoopable, so that's another security problem. The X11 protocol itself is easily intercepted, so we have to tunnel over SSH.
I could go on, but I've made my point. Linux users who take it on faith that they are secure are sadly misguided - as are those who believe that Windows is inherently less secure. Ultimately, it comes down to the skill of the sysadmin to secure any OS.
..and see what a dictature they live in ! Now not only does the state know people's gender, they know people's AGE too ! This is ludacris ! Before you'll know, they will keep people's ADRESS too ! Ludacris !
That's not the issue. We've all seen the movies set in, say, the old Soviet Empire in which citizens are stopped in the street by policemen who demand to see their "papers". No papers? Then you cannot walk down the street minding your own business.
You see, there are two basic forms of justice. Habeas Corpus is the system by which the prosecution must prove guilt, and is used by the US and UK. The Napoleonic code is used in Europe, and requires the defence to prove innocence. A national ID system that has to be shown on demand would fundamentally reshape the judicial landscape.
SAP-DB is pretty much the back end of SAP's commercial systems like SAP R/3.
It's a little more complex than that. SAP's R/3 product is an ERP system than competes with Oracle's ERP suite. For example, R/3 General Ledger competes with Oracle Financials. SAP were getting annoyed because every time they won a pitch against Oracle for ERP, Oracle ended up getting some money anyway, because R/3 required a database to run on, and Oracle was the most popular.
So, SAP bought ADABAS as tried to push ADABAS-D as the preferred database for R/3. That way, when they beat Oracle to win business, they would get all the business for themselves. Unfortuately, it never caught on, customers preferred Oracle, partly because it was a better product, and partly because they already had it and people who knew how to use it. So SAP were left with ADABAS-D which no-one wanted, so they renamed it to SAP DB to capitalize on their brand, and jumped on the Open Source bandwagon for some free publicity.
Becuase SAP DB doesn't support many of the critical features which are in the larger more respected database systems. The most important feature which is missing is transactions, ie: rollbacks, commits etc etc.
Umm, what are you talking about? Of course SAP DB (nee Adabas) has transactions; it's fully ACID, unlike, say, MySQL.
SAP DB is pretty much equivalent to Oracle 7.3.4 which is to say that it's a solid product for many real-world applications, but lacks many of the features for truly high-end deployment, like clustering, complex replication, guaranteed messaging, etc. I'd take Sapdb over MySQL any day, and probably over Postgres too. Another nice thing about SAP DB is that it can emulate Oracle's system tables, so an Oracle DBA can administer a SAP DB system very easily.
Also, SAP-DB doesn't have drivers for some of the more exotic tape systems, unlike DB2 or Oracle. The only tape system we could get working for backups with SAP-DB was an old single drive, manual loader DAT system.
Again, I'm not sure what you are talking about here. Do you mean you can't get an LSM plugin for SAP DB like you can for Oracle? Because that sort of stuff is really just fluff, you can do anything it can do with your regular storage manager (which may even be Legato) with a few simple scripts. I do agree that SAP DB's backup and recovery is primitive compared with Oracle's RMAN.
There are some freedoms worth fighting for but - the right to change an IMEI number? Get a grip. I'd prefer the right to walk down the street without getting the mobile robbed
But stealing is already illegal. What we need in Britain are not more stupid laws, we need to enforce the ones we have - without the EU telling us that arresting and jailing criminals violates their "human rights".
It's a little hard to get pissed off at your parent company.
Have you ever worked in corporate America? A subsidiary is usually wholly-owned, sure, but if it wasn't a separate organization with its own agenda, it wouldn't be a subsidiary, it would simply be an operating unit of the parent. It it not at all unusual for subsidiaries of the same parent to compete with one another, or even with the parent. (I once worked for a member of the Omnicom kieretsu, it was a real education into the way holding companies and conglomerates function).
All Apple, or any other parent company for that matter, care about is that their subsidiaries make money. How they do that is really a matter for their own management. It certainly makes little sense to run a subsidiary as a loss leader, and it would lead to a savaging by Wall Street.
eBay, Yahoo, et al should charge the ISPs for the privilege of presenting their content.
Exactly. Without content, ISPs would have far fewer customers. The Indians have badly misunderstood the business if they think that they can get users to sign up without content providers being accessible.
It already happens. All US telcos and ISPs refuse to peer with non-US providers, arguing only US traffic has any value. Non-US providers already get reamed in exactly the way you describe.
What do you mean "reamed"? Peering only makes sense when traffic between networks is roughly equivalent, i.e. for every Mb network A sends to network B, network B sends a Mb to A. It's nothing to do with the value of the traffic per se, because the carrier's customers concern, it's the volume that matters, because that's what the carrier's customers are paying for. Otherwise, the network that receives more than it sends is subsidized by the sending network.
If the carrier's customers are only interested in US traffic, then by definiton only US traffic has value, because the carrier's customers won't pay the carrier to carry anything else.
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Of course, the difference is, digital information can be copied infinitely, while labor can't.
Unless you're China, in which case you just imprison a few more people in a forced labor camp and make them do it.
Excuse me for being so dense but why "especially India"? Why India in particular? Are Indians (or people with brown skin in general) particulary predisposed to using major scientific and technological advances as a means of promoting their "military might" and their strategic national intests?
Because India is a secular democratic republic currently being threatened by Pakistan, a brutal Islamic dictatorship with an appalling human rights record, and birthplace of many Islamic extremists including members of the Taliban and al-Queda. If they can convince the Pakistanis (and Iranians, etc) that attacking India would be foolhardy due to India's technological and economic superiority, that's far better than a war starting and nukes being fired back and forth.
Any more so than the US, the old USSR, or even China? Was the space race of the 50's, 60's and 70's an altruistic exercise? Or was it one giant propaganda exercise?
Are you saying it's OK when the USA did it, but not when India does? What are you trying to say? The West won the Cold War by forcing the Soviets to bankrupt themselves trying to compete, rather than military force. Is that a bad thing?
It's laughable that you label the future intentions of another nation as an unnecessary show of strength when, as an American (and I bet that you are indeed an American), you're a citizen of the only nation to ever drop a nuclear bomb. Twice. On a civilian population.
Really, a nuke is tame compared to what happened in German, Russian and Japanese concentration camps. It was more important to end the war quickly. If the Indian strategy plays out, they won't need to go to war with Pakistan.
I really hate when people dont give credit to an entire team. Same thing happens at my job, Marketing and Engineering will get the credit, and the people in implementation and operations are left out.
This is taken to a silly extreme in movie credits, tho'. A producer, a director, actors, animators, musicians etc all influence how the movie turns out, and so should be credited, if only for the reason that the viewer might want to look up what other work they've done. But crediting the accountants and the caterers? What's the point? Can you seriously tell me that a movie would have turned out differently if the caterers were different? Or if the caterers weren't up to standard, they'd have been replaced without a second thought, because they aren't part of the creative talent.
humanitarian hippy kick in somewhere along the line, threatened to resign unless they gave me part time hours (and they did) and tried to get a part time job working at a wendy's three blocks down my street
I don't get it. If you felt like a hippy, why not work part time and volunteer the rest of the time at a nonprofit? How exactly is working part-time at a mininum wage job "humanitarian" - at least, unless you were researching a book you were writing about shady practices in the fast food industry.
I think the real reason you were unhappy is because you had no idea what you wanted to do.
Just out of curiosity, if you would sit on the couch and flip cable channels with your hand in your pants all day, what career does that imply?
Slashdot editor?
A better place to put the bite pressure sensor would be in the jaw muscle. Or better yet, just construct the teeth out of a material that has a load capacity in compression higher than the maximum force the jaw muscle can apply. Then you can do away with the bite pressure sensor entirely.
The problem with that approach is that it can only sense load on the jaw as a whole, not on individual teeth. A pressure that could be easily withstood by multiple molars may cause a single molar to fail, so there needs to be an interface that can measure with greater granularity than the joint.
Also, the strength of a tooth is fixed when it is constructed ("compile time"), but jaws can be strengthened though use and exercise ("run time"), and there may not be a good correlation between the theoretical/genetic maximim strength of a jaw muscle, and the extent to which that muscle is developed in an individual.
Sorry, but taking dental advice from the Brits is like taking security advice from Microsoft.
Or diet advice from a Yank!
What are nerves in your TEETH for anyway???
Presumably to provide feedback on how hard you're biting down on something. If you couldn't feel anything with your teeth, you might crack one opening a beer bottle and never know. The nerves have to be sensitive because they need to work through the tooth, with is mostly bone. That's why they hurt so much when they're exposed. Unfortunately this also leads to sensitivity to hot and cold - I guess our evolutionary ancestors mostly ate food that was closer to their own body temperature.
Silly me, I thought tooth enamel was what you wanted to keep, not remove.
If it's damaged or decayed, you have to remove it and replace it with an artificial compound: it can't heal or repair itself. So the dentist will remove existing enamel until what's left is solid, even if it's only partially decayed, or cracked or chipped, to provide a foundation for the filling.
Compare this with the Open Source attitude to charity.
Nice resolute ignoring of history and current freaking events, guy. You're playing logical games- go learn about 'game theory' and get it through your head that there is such a thing as non-optimal outcomes. You're insisting on a religious faith in stuff that is not backed up by reality, and every bit of it is to defend your little axiom, that cannot be questioned, that capitalists cannot possibly influence or direct a market other than to offer goods and services.
I stand by what I said. The US military can invade Iraq and install a puppet regime, but can you imagine them corralling Iraqis into line at the newly opened Baghdad McDonalds? Of course not. Now if you're saying a corporation can bribe a government into doing something, that's true. But if the government's open to bribery, then any corporation who doesn't play along is at risk from their rivals getting there first.But that's just the corporation making the best of the murky environment it finds itself in.
Church and state were long ago separated; time for economy and state to be uncoupled also.
Post-Enron that sounds freaking insane- and that's just one side of things. People have been studying the psychological manipulation of 'consumers' (the word alone is a bias) for DECADES, how is it that you know nothing of this?
Yes, it's called advertising. The worst it can do to you is annoy you. It can't make you do anything you don't want to do - and that's a fact.
And what has Enron got to do with anything? Enron is proof that the system works: they tried to break the law, they got caught, they got busted. That's the beauty of the capitalist system, if you set it up right, it's self-regulating.
"THIMPHU, Bhutan -- Microsoft's latest venture is a localized version of its dominant Windows operating system for the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. "
Is there a Bhutan-localized version of Red Hat?
That's a rhetorical question.
Which brings me nicely to my point: it is literally impossible for a capitalist culture to force itself on another culture. Capitalists can advertise products and services for sale but cannot force anyone to buy; the only people that eat at McDonalds, drink Starbucks, watch Disney and so forth are people who want to and are willing to pay with their own money.
If people don't want to buy, corporations will collapse and leave. The only people who complain aren't the ones freely spending their own money on what they enjoy. Rather, they are the self-proclaimed elite, those who don't offer anything that their people actually want, and can only survive where there is no competition. An example of this is the way the French taxpayer has to subsidise the production of French films, but with the money they are allowed to keep, they queue up to watch films from Hollywood.
Imperialism is something different. Imperialism is when one country conquers another with military force, forming an empire, and imposes its culture on the conquered. Imperial means "to do with an empire". Examples of imperialism are, for example, the conquests of eastern European countries and the imposition of Communism by the Soviets.
So I applaud the government and people of Bhutan - and the global corporations - for bringing freedom and choice to the most remote parts of the world.
Sorry, I meant the Windows security problem this article is about by this. I was wondering how you protect yourself from it since according to you a competent sysadmin can do so.
Is this a Windows security problem? Any application on any OS that runs as a privileged user and displays an interactive window on the desktop of an unprivileged user would be vulnerable to this class of attack.
So - and this is basic good practice, since *any* machine that a user has physical access to can be compromised - store all your valuable data on a system under ACLs which cannot be accessed by any authenticated user who is not in the right groups, let alone non-Domain users. If a user gets Administrator on their local machine, the most they can do is mess up that machine. And keep your servers in a secure data center. You need to do this on Sun networks just as much as you need to on Windows - the client device is *never* to be trusted.
secure myself from X issues by using X tunnelling. How do you secure yourself from this problem then?
I use Sun DES.
Sure, I'd like an anti-spam law. We'd all like an anti-spam law. We also know it ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
Well, it might. After all, it's already illegal to send unsolicited faxes.
Find some large corporation that hates spam as much as we do. You can't tell me that workers in these corporations aren't getting spam
Like Microsoft for example.
quote: "The result is 95% market domination by Microsoft. But that's not a market economy. That's not even capitalism. That is a state-capitalist, state-sanctioned monopoly that Mussolini would have smiled on."
Remind me, exactly when was it that the governments of the Western world united in declaring that competing with Microsoft was illegal and punishable by confiscation of property and criminal sentencing? Remind me when taxpayer's money was used to subsidise Microsoft products, and the tax system was skewed to punish their competitors?
Oh, wait, that didn't happen. In fact, several nations are actively trying to help Microsoft competitors.
The whole speech was like that: playing to an easily-pleased home crowd by repeating the same old platitudes about how great everyone is.
You know, I remember when you could do all sorts of fun stuff with X11. For example, you could layer a transparent window on top of a display, that passed keypresses and mouse events to the window beneath it - and capture everything the user did. You see, most people used xhost for security - which meant that you gave control of your display to anyone who had access to the machine your X client application was running on.
Due to this, we now have xauth and MIT Magic Cookie. Anyone who says a security hole "can't" be fixed is naive - even if the fix is a kludge. MIT Magic Cookie is easily snoopable, so that's another security problem. The X11 protocol itself is easily intercepted, so we have to tunnel over SSH.
I could go on, but I've made my point. Linux users who take it on faith that they are secure are sadly misguided - as are those who believe that Windows is inherently less secure. Ultimately, it comes down to the skill of the sysadmin to secure any OS.
..and see what a dictature they live in ! Now not only does the state know people's gender, they know people's AGE too ! This is ludacris ! Before you'll know, they will keep people's ADRESS too ! Ludacris !
That's not the issue. We've all seen the movies set in, say, the old Soviet Empire in which citizens are stopped in the street by policemen who demand to see their "papers". No papers? Then you cannot walk down the street minding your own business.
You see, there are two basic forms of justice. Habeas Corpus is the system by which the prosecution must prove guilt, and is used by the US and UK. The Napoleonic code is used in Europe, and requires the defence to prove innocence. A national ID system that has to be shown on demand would fundamentally reshape the judicial landscape.
SAP-DB is pretty much the back end of SAP's commercial systems like SAP R/3.
It's a little more complex than that. SAP's R/3 product is an ERP system than competes with Oracle's ERP suite. For example, R/3 General Ledger competes with Oracle Financials. SAP were getting annoyed because every time they won a pitch against Oracle for ERP, Oracle ended up getting some money anyway, because R/3 required a database to run on, and Oracle was the most popular.
So, SAP bought ADABAS as tried to push ADABAS-D as the preferred database for R/3. That way, when they beat Oracle to win business, they would get all the business for themselves. Unfortuately, it never caught on, customers preferred Oracle, partly because it was a better product, and partly because they already had it and people who knew how to use it. So SAP were left with ADABAS-D which no-one wanted, so they renamed it to SAP DB to capitalize on their brand, and jumped on the Open Source bandwagon for some free publicity.
Becuase SAP DB doesn't support many of the critical features which are in the larger more respected database systems. The most important feature which is missing is transactions, ie: rollbacks, commits etc etc.
Umm, what are you talking about? Of course SAP DB (nee Adabas) has transactions; it's fully ACID, unlike, say, MySQL.
SAP DB is pretty much equivalent to Oracle 7.3.4 which is to say that it's a solid product for many real-world applications, but lacks many of the features for truly high-end deployment, like clustering, complex replication, guaranteed messaging, etc. I'd take Sapdb over MySQL any day, and probably over Postgres too. Another nice thing about SAP DB is that it can emulate Oracle's system tables, so an Oracle DBA can administer a SAP DB system very easily.
Also, SAP-DB doesn't have drivers for some of the more exotic tape systems, unlike DB2 or Oracle. The only tape system we could get working for backups with SAP-DB was an old single drive, manual loader DAT system.
Again, I'm not sure what you are talking about here. Do you mean you can't get an LSM plugin for SAP DB like you can for Oracle? Because that sort of stuff is really just fluff, you can do anything it can do with your regular storage manager (which may even be Legato) with a few simple scripts. I do agree that SAP DB's backup and recovery is primitive compared with Oracle's RMAN.
new features of version 4 that uses the UNION clause.
As far as I know, IBM's System/R had UNION in 1974 and Oracle (back when the company was called Relational Software) had it in 1979...
There are some freedoms worth fighting for but - the right to change an IMEI number? Get a grip. I'd prefer the right to walk down the street without getting the mobile robbed
But stealing is already illegal. What we need in Britain are not more stupid laws, we need to enforce the ones we have - without the EU telling us that arresting and jailing criminals violates their "human rights".
It's a little hard to get pissed off at your parent company.
Have you ever worked in corporate America? A subsidiary is usually wholly-owned, sure, but if it wasn't a separate organization with its own agenda, it wouldn't be a subsidiary, it would simply be an operating unit of the parent. It it not at all unusual for subsidiaries of the same parent to compete with one another, or even with the parent. (I once worked for a member of the Omnicom kieretsu, it was a real education into the way holding companies and conglomerates function).
All Apple, or any other parent company for that matter, care about is that their subsidiaries make money. How they do that is really a matter for their own management. It certainly makes little sense to run a subsidiary as a loss leader, and it would lead to a savaging by Wall Street.
eBay, Yahoo, et al should charge the ISPs for the privilege of presenting their content.
Exactly. Without content, ISPs would have far fewer customers. The Indians have badly misunderstood the business if they think that they can get users to sign up without content providers being accessible.
It already happens. All US telcos and ISPs refuse to peer with non-US providers, arguing only US traffic has any value. Non-US providers already get reamed in exactly the way you describe.
What do you mean "reamed"? Peering only makes sense when traffic between networks is roughly equivalent, i.e. for every Mb network A sends to network B, network B sends a Mb to A. It's nothing to do with the value of the traffic per se, because the carrier's customers concern, it's the volume that matters, because that's what the carrier's customers are paying for. Otherwise, the network that receives more than it sends is subsidized by the sending network.
If the carrier's customers are only interested in US traffic, then by definiton only US traffic has value, because the carrier's customers won't pay the carrier to carry anything else.
This is how it works with voice telephones too.