As it turned out, in 2002, the UN inspections went ahead (it just took a couple of months to happen following the passing of UN SC Resolution 1441). The inspectors considered that the disarmament programme was "going rather well". Basically at that point I suspect Iraq & Saddam realised that the US was after an excuse to go in, and was trying desperately to avoid a war. They weren't 100% entirely into the inspections but who can blame them? It takes months to get things moving in bureaucracies and to get past decades of suspicion and resentfulness against inspectors. Unfortunately the situation got very bad very quickly not long after that and we had the war.
Also the "intel that pointed to there being some [WMDs]" wasn't just wrong, it was (a) at least partially fabricated (the "Curveball" informant) and (b) blown completely out of proportion.
Personally I've not seen any major problems with OWA2010 and Chrome, only one that bothers me - Chrome seems to not keep the name of an attachment (as it appears in the email) intact when downloading it, instead using the name embedded in the URL.
I suspect this is more a chome issue than an OWA issue though - probably a policy decision in Chrome at some point to not recognize the relevant HTTP header when offering to save a file.
If you're posting evidence of yourself committing a criminal act online then you've got bigger issues than what your employer thinks about it...
(Note - No judgement here on whether this particular act should be illegal or not, just that it currently is)
If there was no piracy, there would be no need for DRM. Piracy will never go away, therefore DRM will never go away.
If there was no piracy, there would have to be a different excuse for DRM.
It's normal for businesses (and people for that matter) to try to leverage their existing position to expand their power/reach. Whilst DRM debatably has an anti-piracy effect, it's also a way for copyright holders/copyright managers to change the way users deal with their already legally licensed copies... for instance by preventing useful loaning/resale of media (game and ebook industries anyone?) or preventing backup copies or media changes. This forces people to purchase more licenses that would otherwise be purchased.
As for interoperability of DRM schemes - you either have a system where a limited group of organizations control the access to the DRM scheme (which leads to excessive control and lockout of competing businesses/business models/licensing models) or you have an open access DRM system, in which case there's not really much point to DRM at all.
Being an experienced judge, "if he so desired" has a lot less to do with it than it would for you and I. He has to base his decision on the law and on arguments, and yes, to an extent, on major decisions on similar cases overseas, because it would be imprudent not to consider them.
If it came down to desire the US legal system just wouldn't work, ever, at all. [and before someone says it doesn't - most of the time it's about as effective as any other modern western legal system, which is reasonably acceptable in the scheme of things]
First of all, I happen to agree that distribution against the author's wishes is somewhat disrespectful.
However.
- Something being merely disrespectful has rarely stopped people actually doing something. This applies to both individuals and companies.
- It is reasonably rare these days (at least in big-business copyright trade like pop music, pop cinema etc) that the person(s) who actually created a given work is/are the same as the people earning the majority of income from the work, or doing the marketing, setting distribution terms etc - and of course often also seperate from those initiating legal actions
- Authors rights are hardly inherent natural rights - they are social rights. That is, the existance, and continued respect, of Authors' rights is dependent on society and culture (and increasingly, on business culture). Should society generally move in a different direction in terms of considering authors to have rights over their work, then it's possible that Authors' rights will diminish or cease to exist. It is possible we are seeing such a movement in social/cultural perception of a social right occuring
Now, there are other issues implied in your post.
For instance, those who control copyright in a work may act at odds with the wishes of the author, or even at times at odds with the legal owner of the copyright. Even when technically legal, this is itself a form disrespect that should be fought (though whether the fighting is done by breaking the law or by changing the law is an open question)
Also, there is the question of inappropriate influence. Compared to the size of the "copyright industry" (by which I mean primarily film and music, and to an extent software, where the product is copyright-enforced artificial scarcity), there is an argument that inappropriate levels of political influence are exerted. Possibly this is due to the "fame" obsession in the general populace - ie, perceptual bias.
I think this issue can be safely generalized into "Politicians love wasting money to get votes" - the only real difference is whose votes those politicians are trying to get, which determines how they waste said money:)
(Posting from AU here so US party politics is a fight I have no dog in)
Yeah the Mikrotik kit isn't bad - we use/sell them at work after having stumbled across them looking for kit for a wifi mesh a while back.
They're very flexible - the feature set is huge, and you can run OpenWRT in, essentially, a virtual machine (they call it a "metarouter") on top of the RouterOS that comes with the Mikrotik Routerboard hardware.
Like anything though, they can be finicky, and you have to be careful with updates as they can quite often break one thing trying to fix another:) The OS definitely has some quirks you need to keep in mind with more complex configurations though.
They actually use a linux kernel with a mostly proprietary userland atop it, so it shouldn't be too hard getting other Linux-based router distros to work on their hardware either.
If you cluster at the application/OS level, as well as at the virtual environment hardware level, you can design to ensure phtysical or virtual reboots aren't a big deal.
If hardware/hypervisor needs rebooting - migrate off the VM to another system and reboot hardware
If VM needs rebooting - perform whatever failover steps your application clustering requires (if any) and reboot VM
On (1) - assuming they're involved enough in the economy in question for taxation to be relevant, either they're too poor to pay taxes (in which case taxing them would make things worse) or they're rich enough to figure out a way around taxes (in which case they're cheating, morally if not technically)
On (2) - everyone in the given state/economy for which taxes are levied generally benefits in *some* way - direct or indirect. The imposition of safety regulations on products (such as food or cars?), the maintenance of public order (police and military), public safety (police, fire and ambulance services), the provision of public infrastructure (ever used a road, or a service that utilizes or relies a public road in some manner?). Pretty much everyone benefits from taxes somehow
On (3) - One problem is coming up with a safe definition of who does not contribute to society. Generally making that call or drawing that line turns out to be simply incorrect, dangerous, and/or downright evil. It's better to assume most people contribute to society in some way, even if just by providing more people or shuffling money around a bit.
People get so wound up about taxation. I'd love to see what would happen if taxation (and the benefits it brings) was made optional. That is - you can choose to pay no taxes whatsoever - but you get charged the full cost - in advance - to use anything. Roads, fresh water, national parks, police services (hourly investigation rate including all the necessary public and per officer insurances, fuel expenses, admin fees etc), surcharge on products for regulation/standards-compliance fees, military protection fees (enforced by military officers and competing with private military operators - love to see someone be late on fees here), even fresh air (recouping costs of enactment and enforcement of clean air regulations)everything. It may then become clear to people against taxation just how much benefit is derived from taxation, and how you may not notice the benefits now, but you may need them or want them later.
So for example if police or security services have information about a crime to be committed but what to keep it secret so they can catch the criminals in the act , you think they should just make that information public ASAP and if the criminals find out, well too bad eh? At least your moral high ground is intact.
Well... it would result in either the crime not being committed, or (if the criminals didn't know or ignored the release) the crime and therefore capture going ahead anyway. Since both are good outcomes, I fail to see the problem with the information being released. And if someone doesn't commit a crime then they've nothing to be imprisoned for.
Disclaimer: I do NOT condone the "breaking and entering" of information storage (physical or virtual) in order for a third party to release that information - it should be a voluntary or at least information-holder initiated (in the case of legal requirements etc) release. In other words - I do not condone LulzSec's actions in any way - the ends do not justify the means.
Heh - I remember working in the emacs lab there (which was ancient even then) - first thing I'd do would be to fire up X and launch a desktop session from the Eris sun server
I much prefered working on a solaris desktop than an osx one...
So in other words, they chose not to use any proven standards for wireless access. Clever given the standard of proprietary crypto work (see Sony et al) vs open standard crypto work (See WPA2 & AES)
Is there really anyone left these days who couldn't be considered a US enemy in some sense or another? They even spy on the brits and the aussies these days...?
I would suggest that being a US company, its behaviour abroad is still governed at least in part by US law. Much like the behaviour of US citizens abroad would be subject to some US laws.
(Or apparently these days the behaviour of non-US Citizens, if they've ever actually come in contact or so much as seen or even heard of a US citizen;) )
Seriously - it's the equivalent of the death penalty for corporations. Given the death penalty is still in use throughout much (most?) of the US, this would be an appropriate equivalent for use in corporations.
I wonder what the corporate equivalent to inprisonment would be though...? X years working exclusively for the government for free on a fixed rate income and eating into existing capital or something?
Well...
Patent holders DO have the right to prevent use/distribution of infringing "devices". So an" AVC patent holder outside MPEG-LA's pool" could use that right to force users, distributors and implementors into paying ridiculous, perhaps even retrospective, license fees, to continue operating. Given in many fields h.264 is so entrenched it would be almost impossible to change, some relatively large customers would just have to pay up. Plus - not all litigiously-minded companies decide that the sane economic approach is best, as some have proven in the last few years:)
Slashdot Mirror
As it turned out, in 2002, the UN inspections went ahead (it just took a couple of months to happen following the passing of UN SC Resolution 1441). The inspectors considered that the disarmament programme was "going rather well".
Basically at that point I suspect Iraq & Saddam realised that the US was after an excuse to go in, and was trying desperately to avoid a war. They weren't 100% entirely into the inspections but who can blame them? It takes months to get things moving in bureaucracies and to get past decades of suspicion and resentfulness against inspectors. Unfortunately the situation got very bad very quickly not long after that and we had the war.
Also the "intel that pointed to there being some [WMDs]" wasn't just wrong, it was (a) at least partially fabricated (the "Curveball" informant) and (b) blown completely out of proportion.
Personally I've not seen any major problems with OWA2010 and Chrome, only one that bothers me - Chrome seems to not keep the name of an attachment (as it appears in the email) intact when downloading it, instead using the name embedded in the URL.
I suspect this is more a chome issue than an OWA issue though - probably a policy decision in Chrome at some point to not recognize the relevant HTTP header when offering to save a file.
If you're posting evidence of yourself committing a criminal act online then you've got bigger issues than what your employer thinks about it...
(Note - No judgement here on whether this particular act should be illegal or not, just that it currently is)
If there was no piracy, there would be no need for DRM. Piracy will never go away, therefore DRM will never go away.
If there was no piracy, there would have to be a different excuse for DRM.
It's normal for businesses (and people for that matter) to try to leverage their existing position to expand their power/reach. Whilst DRM debatably has an anti-piracy effect, it's also a way for copyright holders/copyright managers to change the way users deal with their already legally licensed copies... for instance by preventing useful loaning/resale of media (game and ebook industries anyone?) or preventing backup copies or media changes. This forces people to purchase more licenses that would otherwise be purchased.
As for interoperability of DRM schemes - you either have a system where a limited group of organizations control the access to the DRM scheme (which leads to excessive control and lockout of competing businesses/business models/licensing models) or you have an open access DRM system, in which case there's not really much point to DRM at all.
Being an experienced judge, "if he so desired" has a lot less to do with it than it would for you and I. He has to base his decision on the law and on arguments, and yes, to an extent, on major decisions on similar cases overseas, because it would be imprudent not to consider them.
If it came down to desire the US legal system just wouldn't work, ever, at all.
[and before someone says it doesn't - most of the time it's about as effective as any other modern western legal system, which is reasonably acceptable in the scheme of things]
However.
Now, there are other issues implied in your post. For instance, those who control copyright in a work may act at odds with the wishes of the author, or even at times at odds with the legal owner of the copyright. Even when technically legal, this is itself a form disrespect that should be fought (though whether the fighting is done by breaking the law or by changing the law is an open question)
Also, there is the question of inappropriate influence. Compared to the size of the "copyright industry" (by which I mean primarily film and music, and to an extent software, where the product is copyright-enforced artificial scarcity), there is an argument that inappropriate levels of political influence are exerted. Possibly this is due to the "fame" obsession in the general populace - ie, perceptual bias.
The Chaser tried this a while back - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j748BnuPJfo
I think this issue can be safely generalized into "Politicians love wasting money to get votes" - the only real difference is whose votes those politicians are trying to get, which determines how they waste said money :)
(Posting from AU here so US party politics is a fight I have no dog in)
Seriously though - I love the irony in someone saying
"Name any market Google has created [...] It's all polished implementations of other peoples well proven ideas."
in response to a comment about Google "stealing" from Apple
In an urban setting, guns are like fire extinquishers. They're something you hope you never need, but you should have one around anyways.
You carry around a fire extinguisher on the off chance you'll need it!?
Yeah the Mikrotik kit isn't bad - we use/sell them at work after having stumbled across them looking for kit for a wifi mesh a while back. They're very flexible - the feature set is huge, and you can run OpenWRT in, essentially, a virtual machine (they call it a "metarouter") on top of the RouterOS that comes with the Mikrotik Routerboard hardware.
Like anything though, they can be finicky, and you have to be careful with updates as they can quite often break one thing trying to fix another :) The OS definitely has some quirks you need to keep in mind with more complex configurations though.
They actually use a linux kernel with a mostly proprietary userland atop it, so it shouldn't be too hard getting other Linux-based router distros to work on their hardware either.
So now that USD isn't too stable either, the Ukraine will be switching to Euro?
To put it in context, that's 7 minutes, 47.52 seconds in prison per card number, or about 8.8 seconds per dollar in losses.
At that rate it's positively profitable to steal card numbers!
If you cluster at the application/OS level, as well as at the virtual environment hardware level, you can design to ensure phtysical or virtual reboots aren't a big deal.
If hardware/hypervisor needs rebooting - migrate off the VM to another system and reboot hardware
If VM needs rebooting - perform whatever failover steps your application clustering requires (if any) and reboot VM
Either way things shouldn't be a big deal.
On (1) - assuming they're involved enough in the economy in question for taxation to be relevant, either they're too poor to pay taxes (in which case taxing them would make things worse) or they're rich enough to figure out a way around taxes (in which case they're cheating, morally if not technically)
On (2) - everyone in the given state/economy for which taxes are levied generally benefits in *some* way - direct or indirect. The imposition of safety regulations on products (such as food or cars?), the maintenance of public order (police and military), public safety (police, fire and ambulance services), the provision of public infrastructure (ever used a road, or a service that utilizes or relies a public road in some manner?). Pretty much everyone benefits from taxes somehow
On (3) - One problem is coming up with a safe definition of who does not contribute to society. Generally making that call or drawing that line turns out to be simply incorrect, dangerous, and/or downright evil. It's better to assume most people contribute to society in some way, even if just by providing more people or shuffling money around a bit.
People get so wound up about taxation. I'd love to see what would happen if taxation (and the benefits it brings) was made optional. That is - you can choose to pay no taxes whatsoever - but you get charged the full cost - in advance - to use anything. Roads, fresh water, national parks, police services (hourly investigation rate including all the necessary public and per officer insurances, fuel expenses, admin fees etc), surcharge on products for regulation/standards-compliance fees, military protection fees (enforced by military officers and competing with private military operators - love to see someone be late on fees here), even fresh air (recouping costs of enactment and enforcement of clean air regulations)everything. It may then become clear to people against taxation just how much benefit is derived from taxation, and how you may not notice the benefits now, but you may need them or want them later.
"Information's natural state is to be free "
So for example if police or security services have information about a crime to be committed but what to keep it secret so they can catch the criminals in the act , you think they should just make that information public ASAP and if the criminals find out, well too bad eh? At least your moral high ground is intact.
Well... it would result in either the crime not being committed, or (if the criminals didn't know or ignored the release) the crime and therefore capture going ahead anyway. Since both are good outcomes, I fail to see the problem with the information being released. And if someone doesn't commit a crime then they've nothing to be imprisoned for.
Disclaimer: I do NOT condone the "breaking and entering" of information storage (physical or virtual) in order for a third party to release that information - it should be a voluntary or at least information-holder initiated (in the case of legal requirements etc) release. In other words - I do not condone LulzSec's actions in any way - the ends do not justify the means.
Hey, score one for open government I suppose. Hard to keep things hidden under "State Secrets" if Facebook keeps setting everything to "public" ;)
Heh - I remember working in the emacs lab there (which was ancient even then) - first thing I'd do would be to fire up X and launch a desktop session from the Eris sun server
I much prefered working on a solaris desktop than an osx one...
So in other words, they chose not to use any proven standards for wireless access. Clever given the standard of proprietary crypto work (see Sony et al) vs open standard crypto work (See WPA2 & AES)
Is there really anyone left these days who couldn't be considered a US enemy in some sense or another? They even spy on the brits and the aussies these days...?
Not a Yank here, but from what I've been given to understand of SCOTUS - if you don't have a case it simply doesn't get that far?
I would suggest that being a US company, its behaviour abroad is still governed at least in part by US law. Much like the behaviour of US citizens abroad would be subject to some US laws.
;) )
(Or apparently these days the behaviour of non-US Citizens, if they've ever actually come in contact or so much as seen or even heard of a US citizen
5) Unincorporate the company
Seriously - it's the equivalent of the death penalty for corporations. Given the death penalty is still in use throughout much (most?) of the US, this would be an appropriate equivalent for use in corporations.
I wonder what the corporate equivalent to inprisonment would be though...? X years working exclusively for the government for free on a fixed rate income and eating into existing capital or something?
Well... :)
Patent holders DO have the right to prevent use/distribution of infringing "devices". So an" AVC patent holder outside MPEG-LA's pool" could use that right to force users, distributors and implementors into paying ridiculous, perhaps even retrospective, license fees, to continue operating. Given in many fields h.264 is so entrenched it would be almost impossible to change, some relatively large customers would just have to pay up. Plus - not all litigiously-minded companies decide that the sane economic approach is best, as some have proven in the last few years
In other words, for it to be fully effective, Bob can no longer be really Eve's computer anymore? ;)