In the real world, people can alter their hair colour, making it more of a choice than a case of heritage. A brunette could make herself blonde, or a natural blonde could dye her hair. We no longer associate hair colour with ethnicity but with choice.
So yeah, you could make that job requirement for, say, a goth club. If the blonde wants the job, she'll have to dye her hair regularly. It's only when you only want, say, natural blondes that you become suspect of racial prejudice.
On a related note...
That may be why racial prejudices carry over into the virtual world, as choosing certain racial characteristics is a choice. Thus the other users will often assume that certain ethnic stereotypes that are associated with the chosen appearance were desired.
in the USA, that may be the case. The article is about lawsuits in Germany, where the RIAA and the MPAA are not active. I am not sure if there is an analogue organisation, or if the labels sue directly (after all, BMG Ariola is a German consortium).
I think it's a case of German laws being so written that it was technically prosecutable as theft, and heavy-handed adverts in theatres here kept preaching that "Raubkopierer" (the German word for those who copy without permission) could be sentenced to up to 5 years in prison.
The movie and music industries have been so heavy-handed in their anti-copying campaigns here that it actually has hurt their cause. I think the German police are now pissed that they have been abused in such a manner, and the news has trickled up to the justice ministers as well. Yes, there have been cases where the cops pulled a raid on a suspected pirate, thinking that they were going after an actual copy resellers â" the people who make the fake DVD's that you can buy at floating markets and such.
Well, the actual actors, directors and set workers may lean democratic, but I posit that the actual owners lean heavily to the Republicans. You know, companies like General Electric and so on. Board members, people like that. The sort of people that see movies and songs as commodities, not as artworks. The people behind the RIAA and MPAA, who constantly lobby for longer copyright protections.
It isn't much different in newspapers either. The reporters may be more liberal and social-minded, but the owners often are Authoritarian and will lean on the editorial staff to ensure that the peons don't rock the boat.
All you are doing is repeating an old canard, one that has been stated for so long that "everyone knows" without even stopping to consider who "everyone" is. Cheers!
While I don't disagree with you, I think the biggest difference is that StudiVZ (and its spinoff SchuelerVZ) are more school-oriented, whereas Facebook in Germany is more socially-oriented. That's why I haven't seen StudiVZ from the inside, as my last semesters in the uni were back in the Eighties. Ahem.
I can tell from my daughter's usage that Schueler.CC trumps SchulerVZ, though. It too seems to borrow heavily from Facebook's look and feel, but the kids simply prefer Schueler.CC for chats and online nonsense. German kids just have different tastes, as ICQ still trumps AIM and the other IM protocols.
I also stand by my observation that Germans will rally around the local boy against the Big Bad American. It happens all the time, as the case with Walmart shows. Even Starbucks flopped on its first attempt to enter the German market, and even now they are having a hard time against the lookalikes that filled the niche before they could.
StudiVZ really did manage to capture a huge chunk of Facebook's old core of users, the students. Back when I was more interested in Facebook, there was a problem with the Germany network, namely that some Canadians tried to usurp the network message boards to post racist and offensive crap. Facebook did nothing for ages, despite tonnes of complaints, and many students migrated to StudiVZ instead.
Whether earned or not, StudiVZ has a better overall rep amongst Germans, and Facebook had been too slow in the past to react. Now they find themselves unable to crack the userbase, so they'll try to kill the competition with this strategy.
I think whatever they do, Facebook just doomed themselves in the German market. Either they look like another American trying to quash a local hero, or they look like the Goliath that the little StudiVZ managed to take on and beat.
"Sometimes I forget things and have to go back to get them. Now I leave my work laptop at home, and people laugh at me when I have to go back home to retrieve it."
It's not even news. It's just a pale, pale attempt to do Andy Rooney type fluff columns.
So yeah, I now regret reading the whole thing. It was a Rickroll that was so lame it didn't even have Rick Astley in it.
The most famous bootleggers were the unlicensed alcohol distillers. Pot stills making "moonshine" that was of questionable quality. Sure, it wasn't fine cognac, but often rotgut. But it wasn't stealing the grain or the equipment from the legal distillers, as they had their own materials.
Then there were the bootleg recorders of the concert scene in the 20th century. People who made sneak recordings at concerts. Again, the question of theft is debatable, since they were using their own materials. The recordings were also in demand because they were the only source of a recording of that concert.
Bootlegging nowadays is not the commercial problem that it is made out to be, or rather the problem is a different one. With the global market, more and more fake merchandise is being distributed. Plagiarised goods that claim to be a good of higher quality. But that is an issue of trying to deceive the customer, to rip people off with shoddy goods masquerading as the original.
That used to be the preferred term for unlicensed copies in music. Bands used to love or hate the bootlegs, with the simple rule being giving a buddy a bootleg was OK, but selling a bootleg was a no-no. The studios, of course, hated bootlegs. Even in the Seventies and Eighties, they would frisk you and turn you away from concerts if they thought your Walkman was capable of recording.
"Pirates" is just a bad term for copyright scofflaws. It is not stealing per se, but ignoring the legal limits to who may make a copy.
It is a legal system to protect publishers, from the days when making copies was an expensive enough to make it viable only for commercial publishers. Copyrights also were intended to encourage publishers to pay the authors a share of the profits, not to simply grant them a monopoly.
So yeah, I prefer the term "bootleggers". Like the namesakes of yore, the crime isn't theft but in ducking under the law, not paying for a license or taxes to make what they make. And like the bootleg hooch of old, the quality of the bootleg media is not guaranteed. It's rotgut, not fine wine.
Um, it's the poster that was concerned, as he had just come through a specific illness. If he wants to prevent that one specific germ from spreading, then why not?
I personally like to wipe my keyboard clean – not to protect myself from germs, but to extend the life of the keyboard. Skin oil and hairs can clog and gunk it up. Sure, I could just buy a new one eventually, but that's wasteful.
Oh, and I do wear gloves when gardening, but not to protect from germs. They are cotton and leather gardening gloves to reduce the amount of thorns that my roses keep trying to annoy me with.
Actually, that contains a grain of truth. The best methods of reducing piracy in the South China Seas and around the Horn of Africa do rely upon espionage tactics like infiltration. Not literal ninjas, but we are talking about modern pirates.
Except the G-8 seems to be going after copyright scofflaws, which I prefer to call bootleggers.:)
As good as this sounds at first, I don't think it's a good idea for regular usage as not all plastics respond well. You could end up eating away at the keys or the surface of the laptop with too aggressive chemicals.
I think that's the thing to remember here: the question really is about achieving the golden balance between hygienic cleaning and maintaining the equipment. The best solution would be one that doesn't harm the case or the keys, but disinfects the machine. Also consider that a truly thorough cleaning means cleaning the ports and ventilation openings.
I have to admit, that's the first thing I think of when I see talk of kill switches and overrides. Imagine the scene if Khan had known beforehand, and had used the codes to shut down the Enterprise first.
We think of overrides as protection against terrorists, but often they are backdoors that criminals can exploit just as easily.
Actually, they did try this many times. The problem came with the fact that breaking usability for the unwanted competitor also broke usability for many third-party applications that Microsoft didn't dare upset.
Remember also that they didn't merely bundle the apps, but rewrote the GUI so that their Internet Explorer was "critical" for normal operations. "You can't uninstall IE anyway, so why bother installing a second browser?" was the implied message to hardware manufacturers.
IBM and Apple are hardware manufacturers, though, so with bundling software they have a different mission. Their goal is to ensure that the computers they sell have enough software to function "out of the box", but not so much that third party authors are discouraged. The other thing is that Apple (for example) offers its applications as modules that can be removed without harming the OS. You are free to remove Safari and just use Firefox, for example.
As far as Linux distros go, well, that's another beastie. If anything, they offer too much at once, with a variety of choices since it's not just one vendor. Should I use Firefox, Konquorer or Opera? Heck, if there was Microsoft Internet Explorer for Linux, I'm sure most distros would include it side by side with Opera and Firefox.
As the two anonymous cowards pointed out, trademarks are not global. When applying for a trademark, the business in which the trademark will be used must be listed. So when applying for a trademark for Sephir, your original trademark only covers transportation. A Sephir ISP or cola could co-exist as long as neither brand makes an attempt to suggest that a relation exists. Doing something like "Sephir Cola, the perfect drink when driving your Fnord Sephir" would be a no-no. The same goes for "official" licensing: since Sephir Cola exists, Gurps Beverages can't offer "Gurps Cola Sephir Collector's Edition".
So since successful trademarks can expand into licensed merchandise, it is prudent to meet those with similar names, and define beforehand who gets what sector. Of course, this won't prevent legal battles down the road (see Apple Records versus Apple Computer)...
I think that is perhaps the best example of why trademarks are important, and why the name of the browser was changed again: having the same name as an unrelated business is allowable but taking the same name as a related product may make it harder for the lesser-known product to maintain a reasonable public image.
Hypothetically, it would have been the same if, say, some company made finance management services called "Outlook" before Microsoft introduced their mail client. In this imaginary situation, Microsoft's product is not in the same branch, but the older "Outlook" would have been suddenly shunted to obscurity, as everybody would only talk about the Microsoft application. We could even take this mind exercise further, and imagine that Microsoft did this to suffocate the older finance software before introducing their own finance management services (again, I'm just making this up to illustrate why trademarks are important).
Actually, I am not forgetting that. Those lessons were learned from an earlier version, where psyops were actually still valued. But there is a difference, namely that they were taught insurgency tactics, not counterinsurgency tactics.
(Your comment about Saddam Hussein's degree is irrelevant. It has nothing to do with counterinsurgency tactics.)
I am viewing this from a non-ideological stance, mind. My regret is that the ideologists have been interfering and forcing out the actual tacticians, reshaping policy with disregard to empirical results. All the good work from previous decades to refine and improve tactics has been tossed out the window.
Actually, I see there being a possibility of this being real, but written by a Bush appointee and not by anyone with real experience. It seems more like a manual designed to impress the political bosses in the Department of Defence like the ousted Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld.
So on some meta-level, it's a fake, but the actual manual as published. But we all know that special forces are supposed to think out of the box, and not trust everything they see (I hope it still holds true).
The sad thing is that huge swathes of this read as if they were redacted to fit an ideology, not truly written based on pragmatic achieving of a goal. It's all about doing the "dirty work" that the chairborne rangers with their neckties and air-conditioned offices dream about.
I am going to read this in more detail, but right now it depresses me that counterinsurgency tactics have fallen so deeply into doing the "glamourous", "badass" stuff and ignoring the repercussions. Current lack of success in Afghanistan and Iraq should have been a wake-up call to how important treating the locals is, how accepting moral limits can reap tactical benefits later on.
Actually, spam exists due to the feeding chain of confidence men. The spammers themselves are being conned by the spam software and botnet sellers. That's why so much spam is so bad, because it's thieves robbing thieves.
That might look like fun, but in reality it has two things going against it:
It's work setting it up. Who wants to spend time making it so that it isn't an obvious spoof?
Spoofing your competitor is a really bad idea, legally. We are talking opening yourself up to lawsuits here that could drive you bankrupt, never mind criminal law.
I realise you probably were trying to be humorous, but you never know who might get the wrong idea reading these threads. Best to state the obvious anyway...
I think the bottom line really is what has to be addressed as well, but explain it in other terms.
The legal risk is nothing to sneeze at. Explain patiently that there are liability issues involved in sending unsolicited mail, that it is rapidly becoming illegal and that he ought to run it past his legal advisor first. (As a small travel agency, this will cost money as the lawyer/solicitor is not in-house).
Many spam filters also subscribe to blacklists, and sending unsolicited mail will get him on one of these lists. This will make it harder to perform normal correspondence, as regular customers and business contacts will have problems receiving mail. It will cost time and money to undo that.
If he doesn't have a mailing list set up yet with options to unsubscribe or other functions, it will take time (and money) to set it up.
I would argue that for his business, the effort and risk involved makes sending unsolicited mail a losing proposition, that the hidden costs of setting up and maintaining the mailing list makes it non-profitable. Sending unwanted mails is not like distributing flyers, not even like unsolicited telephone calls, as there is less chance of getting past filters.
If you're the computer guy, I would tell him that it's an idea that the agency should only explore after Projects X, Y, and Z are done, as they have a better chance of generating new business at less cost. Then let it die from neglect.
I am afraid you are right, but for the wrong reasons. McCain has always been a team player that made a lot of noise, but still voted with the Republican caucus over 90% of the time. His relations with lobbyists is also a big issue.
All in all, he was simply better at establishing a cosy relationship with journalists.
In the end, he's really not changed from when he first cheated on then ditched his wife for a beauty queen millionaire heiress, his current wife. The only principle he seems to have is to look out for himself.
I think the driving force behind American politics is the accent on persons rather than groups, which leads to a "winner take all" mentality. Political parties are also not mentioned in the constitution, as the founders had naively hoped it would prevent partisan politics if parties weren't mentioned.
This situation is exacerbated by the electoral college system and other relics from when travel and communication made direct elections impractical. Eventually this means that elections are reduced to incumbent and challenger, or the two strongest contestants.
Income tax records are naturally the first place to look, but often the wrong place. His millionaire wife's records are not available, for example, nor are little perks like "fact-finding junkets" or preferred treatment.
There are so many ways a lobbyist could scratch the back of a legislator that direct bribery is rather gauche. Senator McCain is so deep into the lobbying culture that the bulk of his campaign staff is made up of lobbyists. For all of his talk of reform, he's made quite a nice living at their trough...
Slashdot Mirror
One slight problem, though...
In the real world, people can alter their hair colour, making it more of a choice than a case of heritage. A brunette could make herself blonde, or a natural blonde could dye her hair. We no longer associate hair colour with ethnicity but with choice.
So yeah, you could make that job requirement for, say, a goth club. If the blonde wants the job, she'll have to dye her hair regularly. It's only when you only want, say, natural blondes that you become suspect of racial prejudice.
On a related note...
That may be why racial prejudices carry over into the virtual world, as choosing certain racial characteristics is a choice. Thus the other users will often assume that certain ethnic stereotypes that are associated with the chosen appearance were desired.
The RIAA is using civil suits.
in the USA, that may be the case. The article is about lawsuits in Germany, where the RIAA and the MPAA are not active. I am not sure if there is an analogue organisation, or if the labels sue directly (after all, BMG Ariola is a German consortium).
I think it's a case of German laws being so written that it was technically prosecutable as theft, and heavy-handed adverts in theatres here kept preaching that "Raubkopierer" (the German word for those who copy without permission) could be sentenced to up to 5 years in prison.
The movie and music industries have been so heavy-handed in their anti-copying campaigns here that it actually has hurt their cause. I think the German police are now pissed that they have been abused in such a manner, and the news has trickled up to the justice ministers as well. Yes, there have been cases where the cops pulled a raid on a suspected pirate, thinking that they were going after an actual copy resellers â" the people who make the fake DVD's that you can buy at floating markets and such.
Well, the actual actors, directors and set workers may lean democratic, but I posit that the actual owners lean heavily to the Republicans. You know, companies like General Electric and so on. Board members, people like that. The sort of people that see movies and songs as commodities, not as artworks. The people behind the RIAA and MPAA, who constantly lobby for longer copyright protections.
It isn't much different in newspapers either. The reporters may be more liberal and social-minded, but the owners often are Authoritarian and will lean on the editorial staff to ensure that the peons don't rock the boat.
All you are doing is repeating an old canard, one that has been stated for so long that "everyone knows" without even stopping to consider who "everyone" is. Cheers!
While I don't disagree with you, I think the biggest difference is that StudiVZ (and its spinoff SchuelerVZ) are more school-oriented, whereas Facebook in Germany is more socially-oriented. That's why I haven't seen StudiVZ from the inside, as my last semesters in the uni were back in the Eighties. Ahem.
I can tell from my daughter's usage that Schueler.CC trumps SchulerVZ, though. It too seems to borrow heavily from Facebook's look and feel, but the kids simply prefer Schueler.CC for chats and online nonsense. German kids just have different tastes, as ICQ still trumps AIM and the other IM protocols.
I also stand by my observation that Germans will rally around the local boy against the Big Bad American. It happens all the time, as the case with Walmart shows. Even Starbucks flopped on its first attempt to enter the German market, and even now they are having a hard time against the lookalikes that filled the niche before they could.
StudiVZ really did manage to capture a huge chunk of Facebook's old core of users, the students. Back when I was more interested in Facebook, there was a problem with the Germany network, namely that some Canadians tried to usurp the network message boards to post racist and offensive crap. Facebook did nothing for ages, despite tonnes of complaints, and many students migrated to StudiVZ instead.
Whether earned or not, StudiVZ has a better overall rep amongst Germans, and Facebook had been too slow in the past to react. Now they find themselves unable to crack the userbase, so they'll try to kill the competition with this strategy.
I think whatever they do, Facebook just doomed themselves in the German market. Either they look like another American trying to quash a local hero, or they look like the Goliath that the little StudiVZ managed to take on and beat.
"Sometimes I forget things and have to go back to get them. Now I leave my work laptop at home, and people laugh at me when I have to go back home to retrieve it."
It's not even news. It's just a pale, pale attempt to do Andy Rooney type fluff columns.
So yeah, I now regret reading the whole thing. It was a Rickroll that was so lame it didn't even have Rick Astley in it.
My fave term as well, for many reasons.
The most famous bootleggers were the unlicensed alcohol distillers. Pot stills making "moonshine" that was of questionable quality. Sure, it wasn't fine cognac, but often rotgut. But it wasn't stealing the grain or the equipment from the legal distillers, as they had their own materials.
Then there were the bootleg recorders of the concert scene in the 20th century. People who made sneak recordings at concerts. Again, the question of theft is debatable, since they were using their own materials. The recordings were also in demand because they were the only source of a recording of that concert.
Bootlegging nowadays is not the commercial problem that it is made out to be, or rather the problem is a different one. With the global market, more and more fake merchandise is being distributed. Plagiarised goods that claim to be a good of higher quality. But that is an issue of trying to deceive the customer, to rip people off with shoddy goods masquerading as the original.
That used to be the preferred term for unlicensed copies in music. Bands used to love or hate the bootlegs, with the simple rule being giving a buddy a bootleg was OK, but selling a bootleg was a no-no. The studios, of course, hated bootlegs. Even in the Seventies and Eighties, they would frisk you and turn you away from concerts if they thought your Walkman was capable of recording.
"Pirates" is just a bad term for copyright scofflaws. It is not stealing per se, but ignoring the legal limits to who may make a copy.
It is a legal system to protect publishers, from the days when making copies was an expensive enough to make it viable only for commercial publishers. Copyrights also were intended to encourage publishers to pay the authors a share of the profits, not to simply grant them a monopoly.
So yeah, I prefer the term "bootleggers". Like the namesakes of yore, the crime isn't theft but in ducking under the law, not paying for a license or taxes to make what they make. And like the bootleg hooch of old, the quality of the bootleg media is not guaranteed. It's rotgut, not fine wine.
Um, it's the poster that was concerned, as he had just come through a specific illness. If he wants to prevent that one specific germ from spreading, then why not?
I personally like to wipe my keyboard clean – not to protect myself from germs, but to extend the life of the keyboard. Skin oil and hairs can clog and gunk it up. Sure, I could just buy a new one eventually, but that's wasteful.
Oh, and I do wear gloves when gardening, but not to protect from germs. They are cotton and leather gardening gloves to reduce the amount of thorns that my roses keep trying to annoy me with.
Actually, that contains a grain of truth. The best methods of reducing piracy in the South China Seas and around the Horn of Africa do rely upon espionage tactics like infiltration. Not literal ninjas, but we are talking about modern pirates.
Except the G-8 seems to be going after copyright scofflaws, which I prefer to call bootleggers. :)
As good as this sounds at first, I don't think it's a good idea for regular usage as not all plastics respond well. You could end up eating away at the keys or the surface of the laptop with too aggressive chemicals.
I think that's the thing to remember here: the question really is about achieving the golden balance between hygienic cleaning and maintaining the equipment. The best solution would be one that doesn't harm the case or the keys, but disinfects the machine. Also consider that a truly thorough cleaning means cleaning the ports and ventilation openings.
I have to admit, that's the first thing I think of when I see talk of kill switches and overrides. Imagine the scene if Khan had known beforehand, and had used the codes to shut down the Enterprise first.
We think of overrides as protection against terrorists, but often they are backdoors that criminals can exploit just as easily.
Actually, they did try this many times. The problem came with the fact that breaking usability for the unwanted competitor also broke usability for many third-party applications that Microsoft didn't dare upset.
Remember also that they didn't merely bundle the apps, but rewrote the GUI so that their Internet Explorer was "critical" for normal operations. "You can't uninstall IE anyway, so why bother installing a second browser?" was the implied message to hardware manufacturers.
IBM and Apple are hardware manufacturers, though, so with bundling software they have a different mission. Their goal is to ensure that the computers they sell have enough software to function "out of the box", but not so much that third party authors are discouraged. The other thing is that Apple (for example) offers its applications as modules that can be removed without harming the OS. You are free to remove Safari and just use Firefox, for example.
As far as Linux distros go, well, that's another beastie. If anything, they offer too much at once, with a variety of choices since it's not just one vendor. Should I use Firefox, Konquorer or Opera? Heck, if there was Microsoft Internet Explorer for Linux, I'm sure most distros would include it side by side with Opera and Firefox.
As the two anonymous cowards pointed out, trademarks are not global. When applying for a trademark, the business in which the trademark will be used must be listed. So when applying for a trademark for Sephir, your original trademark only covers transportation. A Sephir ISP or cola could co-exist as long as neither brand makes an attempt to suggest that a relation exists. Doing something like "Sephir Cola, the perfect drink when driving your Fnord Sephir" would be a no-no. The same goes for "official" licensing: since Sephir Cola exists, Gurps Beverages can't offer "Gurps Cola Sephir Collector's Edition".
So since successful trademarks can expand into licensed merchandise, it is prudent to meet those with similar names, and define beforehand who gets what sector. Of course, this won't prevent legal battles down the road (see Apple Records versus Apple Computer)...
I think that is perhaps the best example of why trademarks are important, and why the name of the browser was changed again: having the same name as an unrelated business is allowable but taking the same name as a related product may make it harder for the lesser-known product to maintain a reasonable public image.
Hypothetically, it would have been the same if, say, some company made finance management services called "Outlook" before Microsoft introduced their mail client. In this imaginary situation, Microsoft's product is not in the same branch, but the older "Outlook" would have been suddenly shunted to obscurity, as everybody would only talk about the Microsoft application. We could even take this mind exercise further, and imagine that Microsoft did this to suffocate the older finance software before introducing their own finance management services (again, I'm just making this up to illustrate why trademarks are important).
Actually, I am not forgetting that. Those lessons were learned from an earlier version, where psyops were actually still valued. But there is a difference, namely that they were taught insurgency tactics, not counterinsurgency tactics.
(Your comment about Saddam Hussein's degree is irrelevant. It has nothing to do with counterinsurgency tactics.)
I am viewing this from a non-ideological stance, mind. My regret is that the ideologists have been interfering and forcing out the actual tacticians, reshaping policy with disregard to empirical results. All the good work from previous decades to refine and improve tactics has been tossed out the window.
Actually, I see there being a possibility of this being real, but written by a Bush appointee and not by anyone with real experience. It seems more like a manual designed to impress the political bosses in the Department of Defence like the ousted Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld.
So on some meta-level, it's a fake, but the actual manual as published. But we all know that special forces are supposed to think out of the box, and not trust everything they see (I hope it still holds true).
I think it was Dick Cheney. Or George Bush, who in the first moments of the invasion of Iraq treated the attacks like some sports event,
The sad thing is that huge swathes of this read as if they were redacted to fit an ideology, not truly written based on pragmatic achieving of a goal. It's all about doing the "dirty work" that the chairborne rangers with their neckties and air-conditioned offices dream about.
I am going to read this in more detail, but right now it depresses me that counterinsurgency tactics have fallen so deeply into doing the "glamourous", "badass" stuff and ignoring the repercussions. Current lack of success in Afghanistan and Iraq should have been a wake-up call to how important treating the locals is, how accepting moral limits can reap tactical benefits later on.
Actually, spam exists due to the feeding chain of confidence men. The spammers themselves are being conned by the spam software and botnet sellers. That's why so much spam is so bad, because it's thieves robbing thieves.
I realise you probably were trying to be humorous, but you never know who might get the wrong idea reading these threads. Best to state the obvious anyway...
I would argue that for his business, the effort and risk involved makes sending unsolicited mail a losing proposition, that the hidden costs of setting up and maintaining the mailing list makes it non-profitable. Sending unwanted mails is not like distributing flyers, not even like unsolicited telephone calls, as there is less chance of getting past filters.
If you're the computer guy, I would tell him that it's an idea that the agency should only explore after Projects X, Y, and Z are done, as they have a better chance of generating new business at less cost. Then let it die from neglect.
I am afraid you are right, but for the wrong reasons. McCain has always been a team player that made a lot of noise, but still voted with the Republican caucus over 90% of the time. His relations with lobbyists is also a big issue.
All in all, he was simply better at establishing a cosy relationship with journalists.
In the end, he's really not changed from when he first cheated on then ditched his wife for a beauty queen millionaire heiress, his current wife. The only principle he seems to have is to look out for himself.
I think the driving force behind American politics is the accent on persons rather than groups, which leads to a "winner take all" mentality. Political parties are also not mentioned in the constitution, as the founders had naively hoped it would prevent partisan politics if parties weren't mentioned.
This situation is exacerbated by the electoral college system and other relics from when travel and communication made direct elections impractical. Eventually this means that elections are reduced to incumbent and challenger, or the two strongest contestants.
Income tax records are naturally the first place to look, but often the wrong place. His millionaire wife's records are not available, for example, nor are little perks like "fact-finding junkets" or preferred treatment.
There are so many ways a lobbyist could scratch the back of a legislator that direct bribery is rather gauche. Senator McCain is so deep into the lobbying culture that the bulk of his campaign staff is made up of lobbyists. For all of his talk of reform, he's made quite a nice living at their trough...