Yes. It's called Shadow Copy, or Previous Versions, and it's been in Windows since 2003 Server.
And the features appeared in VMS in 1990.
Once you get used to a versioning file system it is very hard to give it up. Source code management is not the same, there is nothing like having it all done for you without having to think about it.
Disk space is dirt cheap. Its the work that matters.
Mr. Sage might be a law professor and physician, but he is obviosly not an economist. You have to be pretty foolish to believe that making doctors pay millions in insurance premiums, and driving thousands out of the medical field for fear of lawsuits, wouldn't make health care more expensive.
A very substantial fraction of health care lawsuits goes to the cost of healthcare. That is particularly the case with multi-million dollar malpractice suits. The juries award damages because they know its the only way the kid born with a congenital condition is going to get health care.
And then the trial lawyers fees mark cost that up by another 60-80%.
The EULA issue is irrelevant though. Damages are only due if negligence can be proved and that is pretty hard to do with software. In particular you have to prove that the cost of avoiding the software error was less than the expected harm times the probability of the harm (the Hands formula). Microsoft spends billions on software testing and they have state of the art software processes. To prove a negligence case you would need smoking gun type evidence where a bug was reported, there was a reason to expect specific harm and nothing was done to correct the problem in a timely fashion.
Call me skeptical but I don't see much chance of anyone winning a case like that very often. If they did the trial lawyers would have been over it ten years ago.
Get the rest of the difficult AI problems into CAPTCHAs. We've finally figured out a way to finance AI research
When I made that joke recently someone pointed out that the title of the original CMU paper is 'how lazy people do AI'.
The problems with CAPTCHAs are not just the fact that the problems are less difficult than they might appear. There is also the man-in-the-middle attack which I blogged on when there was discussion of the Microsoft passfaces scheme.
In the Microsoft scheme they had two million pictures of cats and dogs: distinguish one from the other. The problem is that regardless of what the acceptance criteria are we can use a mani-in-the-middle attack to get other folk to solve the puzzles for us. And if we need even more logins than we can get through man-in-the-middle we can take use the responses to sort the entire catalog of 2 million images in rather less time than the designers imagine.
The viability of CAPTCHA depends on the nature of the attack. They are quite up to preventing large scale ballot stuffing in Internet polls. They start to fail when there is money at stake. In particular if the value of breaking the CAPTCHA is more than the cost of paying people in Liberia or India to do so the scheme is broken.
The GPLv3 does not, anywhere, say anything remotely similar to "if you distributing this code every one gets to distribute all your other code as open source". No one, ever, has sanely argued that it does.
Have you ever actually met Stallman?
If so why would you think an idea appearing to be insane would be a contradiction?
SCO's legal argument appears pretty insane to me. But they have still managed to force IBM to spend $50 million or so defending themselves against the suit.
...that tax laws don't apply to me. Oh, and those pesky laws about parking and speeding, too.
The part of the GPLv3 that they are repudiating here is the part which might allow someone to claim that they can redistribute Microsoft code as open source by relying on the GPLv3.
This approach appears entirely reasonable and sustainable to me. If someone were to assert that they had the right to sell pirate versions of Vista based on some kooky reading of the GPL and the Novell deal it is going to fail pretty early on.
What Microsoft is attempting to ensure here is to deny any party the ability to claim that there was some form of constructive agreement to the GPLv3 terms. I think it probably works even if someone does prove that Microsoft has distributed GPLv3 code. Microsoft limits remedies for doing so to a tort claim brought by the actual copyright owner. They effectively cut the ability to claim rights derived through the GPL.
It is a perfectly sensible legal approach. RMS is not the law.
Sounds to me like the president has the power to convene Congress for the purpose of giving a speech. George Washington thought so too; the timing & manner of delivering the State of the Union dates back to the Washington administration.
No it does not.
Washington was the last President to give a state of the union speech for over a century. The state of the union was read by a clerk. This was also done by other Presidents since, the last to do so being Carter.
Oh well. To further clarify, the pardon basically gives back any rights that were lost as a result of the conviction. It looks like courts have ruled that it carries with it an assumption of guilt and the record continues to exist, but no confession needs to be made.
It is not a pardon.
If Libby had been given a pardon he could not then plead the fifth ammendment when asked about his involvement in the criminal behavior of Cheney's office by Congress.
Commuting the sentence while Libby continues to contest his conviction allows him to continue to lie to protect Cheney and Bush.
The Democrats should at a minimum cancel Bush's state of the union address. There is no constitutional requirement for the state of the union to be a speech. Deny him the trappings of office. Cancel funding for the Veeps office and airforce one while they are at it.
That's a very good point. Getting the Microsoft blessing is very expensive, and if you're a competitor to them, impossible. We've given-up supporting Windows with our newest products because Microsoft will not allow our drivers to be installed into Vista because we make a health-care product that they are going to attempt to compete against in the near future. I can easily see Microsoft not allowing Apple to use the iPhones with 64-bit Vista like they did to so many other companies.
Utter rot. Microsoft sell keyboards and mice, plenty of folk get their drivers signed.
The main reason that Windows has been unreliable in the past has been crappy drivers. Getting rid of kernel mode drivers is absolutely the way that Microsoft should have gone much earlier. The only devices for which kerenel mode should ever be necessary is graphics drivers. And that could be done away with if there were some hardware modifications.
Its about accountability. I want precisely one company I can blame if my machine crashes.
bzzzt, x64 Vista editions use the same driver model as 32-bit versions.
My understanding was that 64 bit Vista was going to be somewhat more finiky about doing the right thing.
Apple is just lazy. It's also a good thing they don't want to put so much as a "Works with Windows Vista" logo on any of their software since they would fail the certification process (must work with x64 Vista editions).
Well yes, and it is all the more irritating that they don't build products to Windows look and feel when they get all snotty about Windows products that don't have the Mac look and feel. There are plenty of shops that write Windows device drivers that pass certification. Why not use one of them, it would cost rather less than just one of the stupid iPhone ads drumming up business for a product thats going to be out of stock.
iTunes on Windows sucketh. I did a three part series on my blog on the various dimensions of its suckiness. If I could get Windows Media Player to do AAC and talk to an iPod I would switch back.
Building software for 64-bit windows would usually be a matter of a few compiler switches and using the proper types and macros. Or just building a 32-bit app that runs properly in 64-bit. Apple might have some crazy in-house cross-platform environment or a lack of QA resources which prevents doing either but that isn't much of an excuse.
No its not.
64 Bit Vista uses the new driver model. It requires code to be done right. The botchwork that programmers could get away with for 32 bit Windows no longer works.
And 64 Bit Vista drivers have to be signed. Which is something that vendors should do for all versions of Windows, its only been a recommendation for like 5 years.
That said, I beleive that to get the 'designed for Vista' logo you have to support 64 bit.
Taking the comment off the bulleting board is doubleplus lame. Makes it look like Apple can't deal with non cult members as customers.
The problem with using identical machines is that it is rather easy to use simple tests that are not practical in the general case. For example, the amount of disk space allocated. If you know that the machines are precisely identical you can simply look for the one with most disk space free.
I think you need to have another step in place so that the detection crew don't have any more information available than would be available in a real world situation where they are faced with a random box that might or might not be infected.
The real test here is to see if someone has a red pill.
Bwahahahaaaa. This congress has the lowest approval rating ever seen(worse than Bush's), and you think the dems will gain more power in the 08 elections. Heh. Too damned funny.
Thats a meaningless measurement. Take a look at polls on the performance of Democrats in Congress and Republicans in Congress. Both figures are higher than the score for Congress as a whole. The score for Democrats is considerably higher than for Republicans.
The complaints that lead to the low score are not exactly ones that herald a Republican victory in '08. People are upset that Congress has failled to impeach Gonzalez, Cheney and Bush. People are upset that Congress has not cut off funding of Bush's war.
The number of people who are upset that Congress has been insufficiently Republican looks just like Bush's own polling numbers.
Does it, or does it debunk the second report? It was my understanding that the first report included absolutely everything available for the distro, while the second report included less stuff, but still tons of stuff that isn't included in a base "windows" install.
Regardless of whether it does or does not the claims are as silly and irrelevant as the slashdot stories 'proving' that Linux is more secure.
The number of bugs is not relevant, it there is one bug the system is vulnerable. What matters is the window of vulnerability. The time between discovery of the bug by the bad guys and fixing it by the good guys.
UNIX used to be known for its insecurity. Richie and crew invented the buffer overrun bug, Tony Hoare was referring to this blunder in C when he gave his Turing Award lecture he brought up the fact that the first principle of ALGOL 60 had been security.
The perceived level of security of a system has much less to do with familiarity than any actual objective measure. None of the systems that are on the market today is built well enough for its supporters to start challenging others to this type of dick size measurement contest. Its silly and unhelpful.
1) The issue that killed the bill was amnesty, not Real ID. I don't believe I've seen a single story outside of here even mention the Real ID issue, and anyone who thinks that was the dealbreaker is either dishonest or delusional.
Nobody wanted the bill. The folk who favor more immigration and amnesty know they can almost certainly do better under the next Congress. The folk who want to build walls to keep immigrants out don't want to do that if the cost is an anmesty.
The only point where RealID comes in here is that it seemed a good idea to tie any proposals to change RealID to a ship that was already sinking.
2) Aside from point 1), this makes no sense. The immigration bill collapsed, the Real ID is going through and that somehow proves that Real ID is politically untenable?!?
Well the deadline is going ahead but what the deadline means is likely not a lot. nobody is going to tell the inhabitants on New Hampshire that they can't get on a plane using their driving license. It is simply not a credible threat.
And Congress isn't going to do anything to impose a more realistic threat either. RealID only passed Congress because it was attached to the Katrina relief bill. The Democrats are not going to be as accomodating to Sensenbrener.
So whatever happens in the next 12 months or so is going to be proclaimed to 'be' RealID even if nothing at all happens.
Given that Ashcroft took the DOJ off Microsoft's ass, and given that Ashcroft is a known criminal, I think assuming that there is a relationship there is probably more reasonable than believing that there is not. Maybe that's just because I'm paranoid, but more likely it's because I know a little something about history. Anyone read the CIA crown jewels yet? Or the parts that aren't marked out, heh heh...
Since the family jewels were written in 1973 under the Ford administration it is not at all likely that they have any mention of electronic voting.
The key here is whether there is the opportunity for someone to introduce a backdoor into the code.
If the code base is small enough for someone to actually perform a review, that is fine. The problem here is that the systems are huge and performing a comprehensive review is not practical on a hundred thousand plus lines of code.
Since I don't believe that its possible to review the entire code base the next best approach is to prevent collusion between the person writing the voting software and the platform provider.
That's some rigorous requirement you've got there. So how much does Redmond pay you to be the local/. shill?
So the only reason someone would disagree with your point of view is that they are paid to do so? That is some opinion of your abilities you have there. Would not have taken very much effort to follow the link to my blog and find out who I am.
Security is risk control, not risk elimination. In this particular case the risk of a trapdoor in the platform code is a lower concern than the risk of the running code being substituted on the final machine.
Security does not fit into rigid dogmas or political agendas. Nobody can provide an operating system that is 100% reviewed. Palladium is the nearest thing we have. At least I can audit the nexus (which is published source) and have the nexus validate the rest of the running code.
But platform code that is obtained from a third party vendor should be acceptable provided that it is widely used as a general purpose platform and there is a reliable demonstration that the code has not been modified.
I would rather see voting platforms built on microsoft trustworthy computing platforms without code review of the platform part of the system than built on a platform where I cannot be sure what code is running.
The code reviews are useless unless I am sure that the machines actually run the code that was reviewed.
Of course paper and pencil requires no code review.
No, that's the one thing you can put in the bank. No US president is going to be willing to subject a former US president to foreign (and the ICC counts as foreign) jurisdiction for his actions while in office, for obvious reasons of self-interest. Trying him here in the US is almost as unlikely for similar reasons.
The United States is a nation of laws. Bush and Cheney have set themselves up above the law. They have to be put on trial to protect the constitution.
They have conducted illegal wiretaps, they have used the Department of Justice for political prosecutions, they have protected their cronies from prosecution of corruption charges involving millions of dollars.
They might have got away with those, but torture is different.
If they do not pardon themselves they will go on trial in the US. If they do pardon themselves they will go on trial in an international court.
And don't expect there to be many Republicans huffing an puffing in their defense. If Bush pardons himself to avoid the US courts there isn't going to be any sympathy when he faces the ICC.
The ICC is not established by the Geneva Conventions, so they aren't relevant to the question of ICC jurisdiction over US nationals.
An irrelevant point. The ICC is simply a permanent version of the ad hoc tribunals that have been brought since Nuremberg. The recognition of the ICC as a venue can be made with retroactive effect or charges can be brought in another ad-hoc court. The US has recognized the Geneva conventions since they were first created. The US has recognized torture as a war crime before then.
The chance of any US court trying Bush for anything is as close to zero as doesn't matter. The chance of any future US administration allowing Bush to be tried by the ICC is even closer to zero.
Lets see what people say after all the evidence comes out, after the detailed document trail is released. Under the rules of the ICC the court can only try cases if they cannot be brought under national law. So the ICC does not have juridiction unless Bush were to attempt to pardon himself.
The idea that future administrations headed by Bush's political enemies are going to continue to cover up for the lawlessness of his administration is naive in the extreme.
No, it isn't. The US is subject only to that part of international law which it has acceded to by treaty.
Fortunately the US is a signatory to all of the Geneva conventions. Moreover there are clear provisions in US law that bar torture explicitly and the US has extradition treaties that apply.
The Congress has not repealled the Geneva Conventions. They thus remain the supreme law of the land. Opinions from the likes of Yoo or Gonzalez on their applicability can be tested in a court of law.
Faced with the choice between the ICC and the US courts Bush and Co would be well advised to chose the ICC. At least with the ICC there is no death penalty.
The US seems to have contracted countries not adherent to the torture provisions to extract information from the individuals they hand over into their custody. Since the CIA person who is present at these interrogations is only "observing", they are likely not in violation of the provision.
The point is to prosecute the people who gave the orders. Outsourcing is not a defense in US law or under international law.
In the case you describe the CIA official might be in a worse situation since the immunity given in the Patriot act might be upheld as constitutional in which case a CIA officer might be immune if they conducted the interogation themselves. There is no immunity for the outsourced case.
This administration does two things really well: outsourcing tasks and legal ass-hattery.
No, they are sloppy. In particular they are relying on the fact that there are very limited options for prosecuting malfeasance while an administration is in power. They lose all their powers in 574 days. Then its time to get medieval on their ass. I don't think that bunch of incompetents have kept track of how many crimes they have committed and so granting themselves immunity will be hard.
Slashdot Mirror
And the features appeared in VMS in 1990.
Once you get used to a versioning file system it is very hard to give it up. Source code management is not the same, there is nothing like having it all done for you without having to think about it.
Disk space is dirt cheap. Its the work that matters.
I care much more about the risk that I might lose work by accidentally deleting it than I do about the risk of someone subpoenaing me.
I have copies of my key files on three computers, two USB drives and google. I use Vista and will continue to do so.
A very substantial fraction of health care lawsuits goes to the cost of healthcare. That is particularly the case with multi-million dollar malpractice suits. The juries award damages because they know its the only way the kid born with a congenital condition is going to get health care.
And then the trial lawyers fees mark cost that up by another 60-80%.
The EULA issue is irrelevant though. Damages are only due if negligence can be proved and that is pretty hard to do with software. In particular you have to prove that the cost of avoiding the software error was less than the expected harm times the probability of the harm (the Hands formula). Microsoft spends billions on software testing and they have state of the art software processes. To prove a negligence case you would need smoking gun type evidence where a bug was reported, there was a reason to expect specific harm and nothing was done to correct the problem in a timely fashion.
Call me skeptical but I don't see much chance of anyone winning a case like that very often. If they did the trial lawyers would have been over it ten years ago.
When I made that joke recently someone pointed out that the title of the original CMU paper is 'how lazy people do AI'.
The problems with CAPTCHAs are not just the fact that the problems are less difficult than they might appear. There is also the man-in-the-middle attack which I blogged on when there was discussion of the Microsoft passfaces scheme.
In the Microsoft scheme they had two million pictures of cats and dogs: distinguish one from the other. The problem is that regardless of what the acceptance criteria are we can use a mani-in-the-middle attack to get other folk to solve the puzzles for us. And if we need even more logins than we can get through man-in-the-middle we can take use the responses to sort the entire catalog of 2 million images in rather less time than the designers imagine.
The viability of CAPTCHA depends on the nature of the attack. They are quite up to preventing large scale ballot stuffing in Internet polls. They start to fail when there is money at stake. In particular if the value of breaking the CAPTCHA is more than the cost of paying people in Liberia or India to do so the scheme is broken.
He would be breaking a court order. That is not the same as breaking the law.
Since the actions of Cheney and Bush in ordering warantless wiretaps are criminal the courts should not afford them the protection of state secrets.
It appears that they have copies of the papers in Saudi Arabia, beyond the power of the US courts.
Have you ever actually met Stallman?
If so why would you think an idea appearing to be insane would be a contradiction?
SCO's legal argument appears pretty insane to me. But they have still managed to force IBM to spend $50 million or so defending themselves against the suit.
The part of the GPLv3 that they are repudiating here is the part which might allow someone to claim that they can redistribute Microsoft code as open source by relying on the GPLv3.
This approach appears entirely reasonable and sustainable to me. If someone were to assert that they had the right to sell pirate versions of Vista based on some kooky reading of the GPL and the Novell deal it is going to fail pretty early on.
What Microsoft is attempting to ensure here is to deny any party the ability to claim that there was some form of constructive agreement to the GPLv3 terms. I think it probably works even if someone does prove that Microsoft has distributed GPLv3 code. Microsoft limits remedies for doing so to a tort claim brought by the actual copyright owner. They effectively cut the ability to claim rights derived through the GPL.
It is a perfectly sensible legal approach. RMS is not the law.
Or maybe Microsoft management just watched Sicko and have decided to take Moore's advice and move to a country with a real health service.
If this was a cost saving move they would have increased their setups in India and China.
There is no universal law that says that software can only be produced in the US
No it does not.
Washington was the last President to give a state of the union speech for over a century. The state of the union was read by a clerk. This was also done by other Presidents since, the last to do so being Carter.
The President is not the decider here.
It is not a pardon.
If Libby had been given a pardon he could not then plead the fifth ammendment when asked about his involvement in the criminal behavior of Cheney's office by Congress.
Commuting the sentence while Libby continues to contest his conviction allows him to continue to lie to protect Cheney and Bush.
The Democrats should at a minimum cancel Bush's state of the union address. There is no constitutional requirement for the state of the union to be a speech. Deny him the trappings of office. Cancel funding for the Veeps office and airforce one while they are at it.
Utter rot. Microsoft sell keyboards and mice, plenty of folk get their drivers signed.
The main reason that Windows has been unreliable in the past has been crappy drivers. Getting rid of kernel mode drivers is absolutely the way that Microsoft should have gone much earlier. The only devices for which kerenel mode should ever be necessary is graphics drivers. And that could be done away with if there were some hardware modifications.
Its about accountability. I want precisely one company I can blame if my machine crashes.
My understanding was that 64 bit Vista was going to be somewhat more finiky about doing the right thing.
Apple is just lazy. It's also a good thing they don't want to put so much as a "Works with Windows Vista" logo on any of their software since they would fail the certification process (must work with x64 Vista editions).
Well yes, and it is all the more irritating that they don't build products to Windows look and feel when they get all snotty about Windows products that don't have the Mac look and feel. There are plenty of shops that write Windows device drivers that pass certification. Why not use one of them, it would cost rather less than just one of the stupid iPhone ads drumming up business for a product thats going to be out of stock.
iTunes on Windows sucketh. I did a three part series on my blog on the various dimensions of its suckiness. If I could get Windows Media Player to do AAC and talk to an iPod I would switch back.
No its not.
64 Bit Vista uses the new driver model. It requires code to be done right. The botchwork that programmers could get away with for 32 bit Windows no longer works.
And 64 Bit Vista drivers have to be signed. Which is something that vendors should do for all versions of Windows, its only been a recommendation for like 5 years.
That said, I beleive that to get the 'designed for Vista' logo you have to support 64 bit.
Taking the comment off the bulleting board is doubleplus lame. Makes it look like Apple can't deal with non cult members as customers.
On the contrary, the response of the site has gone crap. They have managed to slashdot Google.
I think you need to have another step in place so that the detection crew don't have any more information available than would be available in a real world situation where they are faced with a random box that might or might not be infected.
The real test here is to see if someone has a red pill.
Thats a meaningless measurement. Take a look at polls on the performance of Democrats in Congress and Republicans in Congress. Both figures are higher than the score for Congress as a whole. The score for Democrats is considerably higher than for Republicans.
The complaints that lead to the low score are not exactly ones that herald a Republican victory in '08. People are upset that Congress has failled to impeach Gonzalez, Cheney and Bush. People are upset that Congress has not cut off funding of Bush's war.
The number of people who are upset that Congress has been insufficiently Republican looks just like Bush's own polling numbers.
Regardless of whether it does or does not the claims are as silly and irrelevant as the slashdot stories 'proving' that Linux is more secure.
The number of bugs is not relevant, it there is one bug the system is vulnerable. What matters is the window of vulnerability. The time between discovery of the bug by the bad guys and fixing it by the good guys.
UNIX used to be known for its insecurity. Richie and crew invented the buffer overrun bug, Tony Hoare was referring to this blunder in C when he gave his Turing Award lecture he brought up the fact that the first principle of ALGOL 60 had been security.
The perceived level of security of a system has much less to do with familiarity than any actual objective measure. None of the systems that are on the market today is built well enough for its supporters to start challenging others to this type of dick size measurement contest. Its silly and unhelpful.
Nobody wanted the bill. The folk who favor more immigration and amnesty know they can almost certainly do better under the next Congress. The folk who want to build walls to keep immigrants out don't want to do that if the cost is an anmesty.
The only point where RealID comes in here is that it seemed a good idea to tie any proposals to change RealID to a ship that was already sinking.
2) Aside from point 1), this makes no sense. The immigration bill collapsed, the Real ID is going through and that somehow proves that Real ID is politically untenable?!?
Well the deadline is going ahead but what the deadline means is likely not a lot. nobody is going to tell the inhabitants on New Hampshire that they can't get on a plane using their driving license. It is simply not a credible threat.
And Congress isn't going to do anything to impose a more realistic threat either. RealID only passed Congress because it was attached to the Katrina relief bill. The Democrats are not going to be as accomodating to Sensenbrener.
So whatever happens in the next 12 months or so is going to be proclaimed to 'be' RealID even if nothing at all happens.
Since the family jewels were written in 1973 under the Ford administration it is not at all likely that they have any mention of electronic voting.
The key here is whether there is the opportunity for someone to introduce a backdoor into the code.
If the code base is small enough for someone to actually perform a review, that is fine. The problem here is that the systems are huge and performing a comprehensive review is not practical on a hundred thousand plus lines of code.
Since I don't believe that its possible to review the entire code base the next best approach is to prevent collusion between the person writing the voting software and the platform provider.
So the only reason someone would disagree with your point of view is that they are paid to do so? That is some opinion of your abilities you have there. Would not have taken very much effort to follow the link to my blog and find out who I am.
Security is risk control, not risk elimination. In this particular case the risk of a trapdoor in the platform code is a lower concern than the risk of the running code being substituted on the final machine.
Security does not fit into rigid dogmas or political agendas. Nobody can provide an operating system that is 100% reviewed. Palladium is the nearest thing we have. At least I can audit the nexus (which is published source) and have the nexus validate the rest of the running code.
But platform code that is obtained from a third party vendor should be acceptable provided that it is widely used as a general purpose platform and there is a reliable demonstration that the code has not been modified.
I would rather see voting platforms built on microsoft trustworthy computing platforms without code review of the platform part of the system than built on a platform where I cannot be sure what code is running.
The code reviews are useless unless I am sure that the machines actually run the code that was reviewed.
Of course paper and pencil requires no code review.
The United States is a nation of laws. Bush and Cheney have set themselves up above the law. They have to be put on trial to protect the constitution.
They have conducted illegal wiretaps, they have used the Department of Justice for political prosecutions, they have protected their cronies from prosecution of corruption charges involving millions of dollars.
They might have got away with those, but torture is different.
If they do not pardon themselves they will go on trial in the US. If they do pardon themselves they will go on trial in an international court.
And don't expect there to be many Republicans huffing an puffing in their defense. If Bush pardons himself to avoid the US courts there isn't going to be any sympathy when he faces the ICC.
An irrelevant point. The ICC is simply a permanent version of the ad hoc tribunals that have been brought since Nuremberg. The recognition of the ICC as a venue can be made with retroactive effect or charges can be brought in another ad-hoc court. The US has recognized the Geneva conventions since they were first created. The US has recognized torture as a war crime before then.
The chance of any US court trying Bush for anything is as close to zero as doesn't matter. The chance of any future US administration allowing Bush to be tried by the ICC is even closer to zero.
Lets see what people say after all the evidence comes out, after the detailed document trail is released. Under the rules of the ICC the court can only try cases if they cannot be brought under national law. So the ICC does not have juridiction unless Bush were to attempt to pardon himself.
The idea that future administrations headed by Bush's political enemies are going to continue to cover up for the lawlessness of his administration is naive in the extreme.
Fortunately the US is a signatory to all of the Geneva conventions. Moreover there are clear provisions in US law that bar torture explicitly and the US has extradition treaties that apply.
The Congress has not repealled the Geneva Conventions. They thus remain the supreme law of the land. Opinions from the likes of Yoo or Gonzalez on their applicability can be tested in a court of law.
Faced with the choice between the ICC and the US courts Bush and Co would be well advised to chose the ICC. At least with the ICC there is no death penalty.
The point is to prosecute the people who gave the orders. Outsourcing is not a defense in US law or under international law.
In the case you describe the CIA official might be in a worse situation since the immunity given in the Patriot act might be upheld as constitutional in which case a CIA officer might be immune if they conducted the interogation themselves. There is no immunity for the outsourced case.
This administration does two things really well: outsourcing tasks and legal ass-hattery.
No, they are sloppy. In particular they are relying on the fact that there are very limited options for prosecuting malfeasance while an administration is in power. They lose all their powers in 574 days. Then its time to get medieval on their ass. I don't think that bunch of incompetents have kept track of how many crimes they have committed and so granting themselves immunity will be hard.
BTW Cheney is actually the 13th Baron Rudigore.