I'm not sure whether I'm hopeful or ironically amused that this is currently on the Slashdot front page a few slots above a story called "Ron Wyden Introduces Bill To Ban FBI 'Backdoors' In Tech Products".
Inescapable truth of the day: If you force developers to build back doors into their hardware or software that your people can exploit, you also force them to build in back doors that anyone else can exploit.
You can't value and protect security except when you later decide you don't want it to be there. This is that rare kind of issue, a truly black and white one: either some hardware/software/communication has a certain vulnerability, or it does not.
I would agree that ideally it should be something everyone considers, but I think we both know that not everyone will unless it's pointed out front and centre...
That may all be true, but the information on the pages I linked to generally seems to be accurate and it's certainly much better than the wishful thinking nonsense posted by the AC I was replying to.
I'm sorry to hear that. I've never been in that position, but I've been in court as an independent witness after I saw a car crash. What the person being prosecuted (and ultimately found not guilty) went through, and for how long before the case was finally resolved, was absurdly disproportionate to the offence they were charged with. As far as I can tell, under our current system you also don't get any sort of automatic compensation for all the time spent and distress suffered, even if you do eventually win your case and you might be able to claim back at least some of the actual costs involved.
In any case, I admire your principled stand, and I wish you the best of luck in your case and in finding a way to get fair compensation afterwards.
For serious crimes it might well be a stolen vehicle anyway, so the plates won't help no matter how many cameras see them, unless as you say the vehicle used can be identified and tracked fast enough for actual police officers to catch up with it while the perps are still inside.
Meanwhile, the concern with cloned plates is not only the escape of the guilty party but also the innocent person whose plates were cloned, who is probably about to get numerous automated penalties for speeding, not paying congestion charges, parking violations, etc. There is a real problem with the level of such charges and the lack of compensation to the wrongly accused for losses they incur defending themselves. For many people, it simply won't be cost-effective to take time off work and/or retain legal counsel to travel to court and fight the charge, because you'd wind up spending more to clear your name than the original fine on the ticket even if you win.
Obviously the only blame lies with Sony for being so careless.
Sure it does, the same way the only blame for the theft lies with the homeowner who installed a defective lock on their front door, and the only blame for the rape lies with the pretty girl in the short skirt who was asking for it.
Oh, no, wait, maybe the blame for a crime lies with the people who committed the crime.
Oh, I completely agree. International tax rules are certainly not easy things to set up in way that is transparently fair to all parties. That's how these big businesses can play these games right now, but going too far the other way would be harmful to commerce as well.
The current thinking from the tax authorities in the UK seems to be that they should have generic rules available to them, so they can unilaterally and possibly retrospectively declare a tax scheme against the rules. The General Anti-Abuse Rules that came into effect last year were already one significant step in that direction. I'm not sure how I feel about those, because on the one hand abuse has obviously been taking place, but on the other the new rules fundamentally rely on the tax collection authorities (HMRC, in this case) to make fair decisions about who owes them money but they have a track record of interpreting other rules to claim more than they were entitled to.
If a single one of these points can't be proven with valid evidence, than either it was someone else or no copyright infringement has happened at all.
Just in case anyone here might mistake the above wishful thinking for, you know, law... It is not even close to what the law actually says or how courts actually work in this country.
I've already posted so can't moderate, but the parent AC post is something everyone reading this discussion should know, so I hope others will upvote it accordingly.
You jest, but the police in this country created a massive surveillance network watching our major roads with image recognition cameras. Their favourite excuse for this not-at-all-creepy step? "Denying criminals the use of the roads." Because the criminals always use real licence plates on their getaway cars, you see.
That operation was started without initial formal debate or authorisation from MPs, but has effectively been condoned since. In fact, it has been developed further, by co-opting cameras installed for other purposes despite explicit promises that this would not be done. Fortunately no innocent people have ever been issued with automated fines for something they didn't actually do, because it would probably cost those people more to fight such tickets in court than just paying up.
Basically, looking at how the road network is handled, the people running the show here really do seem to think the way forward for our society is universal surveillance and automated mass penalties for minor infringements of laws based on dubious evidence with no cost-effective means of defending yourself if you are wrongfully accused.
Yes, GoG is also a "positive player" that IMHO is good for the industry. In fact, that site was the main reason for the "usually" in my previous post.:-)
I don't pirate things, but I also don't buy things with nasty DRM, especially the always-online checkers, and I think many people here are the same.
At least one of us is. I basically gave up on AAA games after (a) DRM stuff got silly, and (b) several titles in a row had such serious bugs that they just weren't enjoyable to play, and often they were never fixed.
If the developers want to spend a fortune on these titles and fight the good fight against the evil pirates, be my guest, but personally I'll reserve my support for those who build games that I will enjoy and that don't compromise the integrity of my PC. Right now, that usually means the little guy (or at least, start-as-little-guy) who makes something innovative or even just a good puzzle game to pass a few minutes. I also have high hopes for a few of the much more ambitious crowd-funded titles, if they ever manage to ship.
I'm glad life is fair in your world. In mine, sometimes the people with no money are valuable, and sometimes the people with lots of money did little of real value to society to earn it. Looking out for our peers when life goes against them through no fault of their own is part of what we call "civilisation".
Incidentally, since you seem to have read a couple of capitalist handbooks too many, you might also consider that supporting the less well off in society to a basic level is much more cost-effective than the alternative of leaving them to fend for themselves, which inevitably results in high crime rates that you then have to deal with instead. Unless you are literally proposing to execute anyone who got fired, I suppose, which is about what I expect you to come back with next...
Your argument implicitly assumes that the cost of providing the services stays similar while the demand goes up relative to the available funding. That isn't necessarily the case, because the younger generations could potentially do the same work more cost-effectively, for example if new technologies make providing the expected services more efficient.
The problem is that new technology is a double-edged sword in this case, and right now any modest increases in efficiency from some new technologies are being outweighed by significant shortfalls in available funding because other new technologies are allowing the tactics in the business taxation game to change faster.
Their fundamental problem is that they can't do enough on spending alone to balance the books.
Politicians like to talk about efficiency savings, particularly when they're not the ones actually in government so they don't have to find actual savings to back up their rhetoric. But the reality is that we have an ageing population in the UK, and the younger generations who are still working and paying taxes have to pay for more social security and medical care for more people than ever before if services are to be maintained. You can't just wish that away by hand-waving, and the results of "austerity measures" are much more visible to the average voter than any theoretical long-term economic benefits.
So, one way or another, the government has to raise more tax revenues, and part of their strategy is to chase the big multinationals in major growth industries like technology, which are playing funny money accounting games to shift their profits to avoid tax obligations they would otherwise incur. Given how much business is now done on-line, in some industries at the expense of traditional physical versions, the government quite simply can't afford not to alter the tax regime to keep up with new technologies and the businesses built with them.
Ultimately, Google can operate in a country with zero physical presence.
But ISPs and telcos can't.
Cutting certain businesses or even entire countries out of the Internet is not nearly as difficult from a technical point of view as cloud-dreaming geeks like to think, and taking billions out of a national economy by blatantly playing the system is a very strong motivator.
If they aren't careful, the same big companies that have made the modern Internet so useful in many ways will also bring about its fragmentation and at great cost to themselves. In the end, you cannot win a war over tax or legal matters against a government that has the power to levy taxes and legislate.
So, the real question is how far you can push before it becomes more politically beneficial for the government to overtly throw you to the wolves regardless of the consequences. It turns out that the answer is pretty far if you're a business that in reality does already pay quite a bit of tax to that government, but it's not forever. Big businesses that do this kind of thing are extremely unpopular right now here in Europe, and at least in the UK, next year is an election year.
I'd love to spend the money and acquire great skill an experience, but most experienced folks (rightfully so) want to step in and take a leadership role, whether by conscious effort or not.. it's just based on their experience. A lot of times this won't fit with the dynamic of the team.
Have you considered that this could be because your existing team is generally less skilled and experienced, and so as with anything in life, if you introduce someone much better then that person will naturally drift into some sort of leader/mentor role? Often that will be a good thing, and if one better person coming in seriously disrupts your "team dynamic" then maybe your team wasn't very good in the first place and needed that disruption.
On the other hand, this sort of disruption is unlikely if your team is generally of a higher skill and experience level. In my experience, a good, experienced developer will very quickly recognise whether their peers also know what they are doing. If so, the team will typically self-organise to get things done and will readily share their expertise in all directions and learn from all directions, without needing anyone to tell them what to do or when to do it. It's just how effective people work.
Your general negative comments about "many older folks" and what they "often" have suggest to me that you've never seen a team like this, which is unfortunate. I have seen teams of 3-6 good people, each with 10+ years of experience and some much more, run rings around competitors who had a team of 5x or even 10x that size but predominantly composed of cheap, young developers. No doubt the youngsters were full of enthusiasm, but collectively they simply didn't know what they were doing to the same degree. The smaller teams had much lower overheads, and typically if you can get people like that on salary before they go freelance or otherwise start their own business, they are disproportionately effective for what they cost as well, so it's a double-win.
Of course, you'll never find this kind of team where the culture is that senior developers earn 2-3x what juniors do and hiring is done primarily via the HR department according to some standardised scale for everything.
Much easier to take someone fresh like that, put them on a team of good folks as the junior, and grow a super star.
But who are the good folks who are going to train those enthusiastic juniors up? It's easy to think you're training up rock stars when your most senior developer has five years of experience and a couple of successful projects under their own belt. However, while no doubt there are always a few exceptions, there is usually some heavy Dunning-Kruger going on in that kind of team.
Things that make me run away (as a guy in his late 30s with a successful software development career so far):
1. Organisations that don't value skill and experience and instead only want to hire young (== cheap) people
2. Organisations that assume older and more experienced developers can't use new technologies (!= choose not to use some new technologies, because they're smart enough to see through the hype and prefer to rely on tried and tested tools instead)
3. Organisations that rely on buzzwords or certificates for hiring (== you get to work with the kind of people who rely on buzzwords and certificates to get hired)
4. Organisations that expect you not to have a fair work/life balance (== it's not whether or not you have a family that we really care about, we just want people to put in crazy hours for no money, almost certainly because we're incompetent at management and don't realise this strategy rarely succeeds anyway)
Just avoid those four warning signs and there is plenty of work out there if you're an older programmer who is any good (== you have N years of experience and the skill of a senior developer, not the same 1 year of experience N times and still the skill level of a junior developer).
Google operates in Germany with its google.de domain name and its own Google legal entity for Germany.
That's a nice theory, but rather like the complicated international revenue shifting arrangements these companies use to avoid paying tax, you're going to have trouble finding any politicians who accept your argument.
If the EU does not want to deal with American companies, they should choose to disconnect.
Be careful what you wish for. That is the logical conclusion to your argument, and it would be damaging for everyone but much more so for the American companies. For a start, given the defaults in the relevant browsers, most Google users at least in English-speaking countries probably arrive via google.com not their local equivalent so just blocking that one domain would probably cost Google a small fortune.
And I honestly, honestly do not see a difference between the censorship in China and the censorship of the EU. Well, maybe one thing: at least China does it openly.
I don't really know how to respond to that. To me, the difference between allowing individuals to assert a right not to have misleading information about them knowingly propagated with damaging results and allowing a national government to arbitrarily censor access to information about the government itself by its own people is night and day.
Ok, so your point is that as long as Google operates within a certain country, it should comply with all laws in that country?
Yes, of course. And domain names are utterly irrelevant to this.
This would imply that China (or the EU for that matter) is now forcing its own laws on the international version of Google. Which means that they would be grossly overstepping the bounds of their own jurisdiction.
Not really. A state can only impose sanctions against a business to the extent that the business falls within its jurisdiction, but otherwise no business has any power to override national laws in nations where it operates, so it has to play by the rules or accept the consequences. It really is as simple as that.
And yes, this does create fundamental problems if one nation's laws are directly contradictory with another's and you want to operate in both. This is currently a significant problem for US IT companies who are subject to obligations under US law to supply information on demand to certain security organisations, but also subject to obligations under the laws of European countries where they operate that prohibit sharing personal data by default. However, the inability to lawfully operate everywhere in the world simultaneously is a problem for the business, not for any of the nations involved.
I guess my reaction to the trailer is: "I've got a bad feeling about this."
Indeed. A new JJ Abrams trailer often seems to be followed by millions of voices crying out in terror. I guess time will tell whether they will suddenly be silenced on release day.
Slashdot Mirror
...wrote the Anonymous Coward.
I'm not sure whether I'm hopeful or ironically amused that this is currently on the Slashdot front page a few slots above a story called "Ron Wyden Introduces Bill To Ban FBI 'Backdoors' In Tech Products".
Inescapable truth of the day: If you force developers to build back doors into their hardware or software that your people can exploit, you also force them to build in back doors that anyone else can exploit.
You can't value and protect security except when you later decide you don't want it to be there. This is that rare kind of issue, a truly black and white one: either some hardware/software/communication has a certain vulnerability, or it does not.
I would agree that ideally it should be something everyone considers, but I think we both know that not everyone will unless it's pointed out front and centre...
That may all be true, but the information on the pages I linked to generally seems to be accurate and it's certainly much better than the wishful thinking nonsense posted by the AC I was replying to.
I'm sorry to hear that. I've never been in that position, but I've been in court as an independent witness after I saw a car crash. What the person being prosecuted (and ultimately found not guilty) went through, and for how long before the case was finally resolved, was absurdly disproportionate to the offence they were charged with. As far as I can tell, under our current system you also don't get any sort of automatic compensation for all the time spent and distress suffered, even if you do eventually win your case and you might be able to claim back at least some of the actual costs involved.
In any case, I admire your principled stand, and I wish you the best of luck in your case and in finding a way to get fair compensation afterwards.
For serious crimes it might well be a stolen vehicle anyway, so the plates won't help no matter how many cameras see them, unless as you say the vehicle used can be identified and tracked fast enough for actual police officers to catch up with it while the perps are still inside.
Meanwhile, the concern with cloned plates is not only the escape of the guilty party but also the innocent person whose plates were cloned, who is probably about to get numerous automated penalties for speeding, not paying congestion charges, parking violations, etc. There is a real problem with the level of such charges and the lack of compensation to the wrongly accused for losses they incur defending themselves. For many people, it simply won't be cost-effective to take time off work and/or retain legal counsel to travel to court and fight the charge, because you'd wind up spending more to clear your name than the original fine on the ticket even if you win.
Obviously the only blame lies with Sony for being so careless.
Sure it does, the same way the only blame for the theft lies with the homeowner who installed a defective lock on their front door, and the only blame for the rape lies with the pretty girl in the short skirt who was asking for it.
Oh, no, wait, maybe the blame for a crime lies with the people who committed the crime.
You really think anyone that doesn't work for the movie/music industry is going to be voting in favour of this kind of political fluff talk?
No, but some people will always vote for a candidate with a stronger, better-funded campaign, and where does that funding come from?
One step at a time... I want politicians to be responsible for anything!
Oh, I completely agree. International tax rules are certainly not easy things to set up in way that is transparently fair to all parties. That's how these big businesses can play these games right now, but going too far the other way would be harmful to commerce as well.
The current thinking from the tax authorities in the UK seems to be that they should have generic rules available to them, so they can unilaterally and possibly retrospectively declare a tax scheme against the rules. The General Anti-Abuse Rules that came into effect last year were already one significant step in that direction. I'm not sure how I feel about those, because on the one hand abuse has obviously been taking place, but on the other the new rules fundamentally rely on the tax collection authorities (HMRC, in this case) to make fair decisions about who owes them money but they have a track record of interpreting other rules to claim more than they were entitled to.
If a single one of these points can't be proven with valid evidence, than either it was someone else or no copyright infringement has happened at all.
Just in case anyone here might mistake the above wishful thinking for, you know, law... It is not even close to what the law actually says or how courts actually work in this country.
In England, copyright infringement is usually a civil rather than criminal matter, so the standard of proof required is merely the balance of probabilities.
See also the Top 10 Copyright Myths page from the UK Copyright Service.
I've already posted so can't moderate, but the parent AC post is something everyone reading this discussion should know, so I hope others will upvote it accordingly.
You jest, but the police in this country created a massive surveillance network watching our major roads with image recognition cameras. Their favourite excuse for this not-at-all-creepy step? "Denying criminals the use of the roads." Because the criminals always use real licence plates on their getaway cars, you see.
That operation was started without initial formal debate or authorisation from MPs, but has effectively been condoned since. In fact, it has been developed further, by co-opting cameras installed for other purposes despite explicit promises that this would not be done. Fortunately no innocent people have ever been issued with automated fines for something they didn't actually do, because it would probably cost those people more to fight such tickets in court than just paying up.
Basically, looking at how the road network is handled, the people running the show here really do seem to think the way forward for our society is universal surveillance and automated mass penalties for minor infringements of laws based on dubious evidence with no cost-effective means of defending yourself if you are wrongfully accused.
Yes, GoG is also a "positive player" that IMHO is good for the industry. In fact, that site was the main reason for the "usually" in my previous post. :-)
I don't pirate things, but I also don't buy things with nasty DRM, especially the always-online checkers, and I think many people here are the same.
At least one of us is. I basically gave up on AAA games after (a) DRM stuff got silly, and (b) several titles in a row had such serious bugs that they just weren't enjoyable to play, and often they were never fixed.
If the developers want to spend a fortune on these titles and fight the good fight against the evil pirates, be my guest, but personally I'll reserve my support for those who build games that I will enjoy and that don't compromise the integrity of my PC. Right now, that usually means the little guy (or at least, start-as-little-guy) who makes something innovative or even just a good puzzle game to pass a few minutes. I also have high hopes for a few of the much more ambitious crowd-funded titles, if they ever manage to ship.
I'm glad life is fair in your world. In mine, sometimes the people with no money are valuable, and sometimes the people with lots of money did little of real value to society to earn it. Looking out for our peers when life goes against them through no fault of their own is part of what we call "civilisation".
Incidentally, since you seem to have read a couple of capitalist handbooks too many, you might also consider that supporting the less well off in society to a basic level is much more cost-effective than the alternative of leaving them to fend for themselves, which inevitably results in high crime rates that you then have to deal with instead. Unless you are literally proposing to execute anyone who got fired, I suppose, which is about what I expect you to come back with next...
Your argument implicitly assumes that the cost of providing the services stays similar while the demand goes up relative to the available funding. That isn't necessarily the case, because the younger generations could potentially do the same work more cost-effectively, for example if new technologies make providing the expected services more efficient.
The problem is that new technology is a double-edged sword in this case, and right now any modest increases in efficiency from some new technologies are being outweighed by significant shortfalls in available funding because other new technologies are allowing the tactics in the business taxation game to change faster.
Their fundamental problem is that they can't do enough on spending alone to balance the books.
Politicians like to talk about efficiency savings, particularly when they're not the ones actually in government so they don't have to find actual savings to back up their rhetoric. But the reality is that we have an ageing population in the UK, and the younger generations who are still working and paying taxes have to pay for more social security and medical care for more people than ever before if services are to be maintained. You can't just wish that away by hand-waving, and the results of "austerity measures" are much more visible to the average voter than any theoretical long-term economic benefits.
So, one way or another, the government has to raise more tax revenues, and part of their strategy is to chase the big multinationals in major growth industries like technology, which are playing funny money accounting games to shift their profits to avoid tax obligations they would otherwise incur. Given how much business is now done on-line, in some industries at the expense of traditional physical versions, the government quite simply can't afford not to alter the tax regime to keep up with new technologies and the businesses built with them.
Ultimately, Google can operate in a country with zero physical presence.
But ISPs and telcos can't.
Cutting certain businesses or even entire countries out of the Internet is not nearly as difficult from a technical point of view as cloud-dreaming geeks like to think, and taking billions out of a national economy by blatantly playing the system is a very strong motivator.
If they aren't careful, the same big companies that have made the modern Internet so useful in many ways will also bring about its fragmentation and at great cost to themselves. In the end, you cannot win a war over tax or legal matters against a government that has the power to levy taxes and legislate.
So, the real question is how far you can push before it becomes more politically beneficial for the government to overtly throw you to the wolves regardless of the consequences. It turns out that the answer is pretty far if you're a business that in reality does already pay quite a bit of tax to that government, but it's not forever. Big businesses that do this kind of thing are extremely unpopular right now here in Europe, and at least in the UK, next year is an election year.
I'd love to spend the money and acquire great skill an experience, but most experienced folks (rightfully so) want to step in and take a leadership role, whether by conscious effort or not.. it's just based on their experience. A lot of times this won't fit with the dynamic of the team.
Have you considered that this could be because your existing team is generally less skilled and experienced, and so as with anything in life, if you introduce someone much better then that person will naturally drift into some sort of leader/mentor role? Often that will be a good thing, and if one better person coming in seriously disrupts your "team dynamic" then maybe your team wasn't very good in the first place and needed that disruption.
On the other hand, this sort of disruption is unlikely if your team is generally of a higher skill and experience level. In my experience, a good, experienced developer will very quickly recognise whether their peers also know what they are doing. If so, the team will typically self-organise to get things done and will readily share their expertise in all directions and learn from all directions, without needing anyone to tell them what to do or when to do it. It's just how effective people work.
Your general negative comments about "many older folks" and what they "often" have suggest to me that you've never seen a team like this, which is unfortunate. I have seen teams of 3-6 good people, each with 10+ years of experience and some much more, run rings around competitors who had a team of 5x or even 10x that size but predominantly composed of cheap, young developers. No doubt the youngsters were full of enthusiasm, but collectively they simply didn't know what they were doing to the same degree. The smaller teams had much lower overheads, and typically if you can get people like that on salary before they go freelance or otherwise start their own business, they are disproportionately effective for what they cost as well, so it's a double-win.
Of course, you'll never find this kind of team where the culture is that senior developers earn 2-3x what juniors do and hiring is done primarily via the HR department according to some standardised scale for everything.
Much easier to take someone fresh like that, put them on a team of good folks as the junior, and grow a super star.
But who are the good folks who are going to train those enthusiastic juniors up? It's easy to think you're training up rock stars when your most senior developer has five years of experience and a couple of successful projects under their own belt. However, while no doubt there are always a few exceptions, there is usually some heavy Dunning-Kruger going on in that kind of team.
Really?
Things that make me run away (as a guy in his late 30s with a successful software development career so far):
1. Organisations that don't value skill and experience and instead only want to hire young (== cheap) people
2. Organisations that assume older and more experienced developers can't use new technologies (!= choose not to use some new technologies, because they're smart enough to see through the hype and prefer to rely on tried and tested tools instead)
3. Organisations that rely on buzzwords or certificates for hiring (== you get to work with the kind of people who rely on buzzwords and certificates to get hired)
4. Organisations that expect you not to have a fair work/life balance (== it's not whether or not you have a family that we really care about, we just want people to put in crazy hours for no money, almost certainly because we're incompetent at management and don't realise this strategy rarely succeeds anyway)
Just avoid those four warning signs and there is plenty of work out there if you're an older programmer who is any good (== you have N years of experience and the skill of a senior developer, not the same 1 year of experience N times and still the skill level of a junior developer).
Oh, I don't know. Making Jar Jar Binks responsible for handing the galaxy over to the most evil man in it was a nice touch. ;-)
Google operates in Germany with its google.de domain name and its own Google legal entity for Germany.
That's a nice theory, but rather like the complicated international revenue shifting arrangements these companies use to avoid paying tax, you're going to have trouble finding any politicians who accept your argument.
If the EU does not want to deal with American companies, they should choose to disconnect.
Be careful what you wish for. That is the logical conclusion to your argument, and it would be damaging for everyone but much more so for the American companies. For a start, given the defaults in the relevant browsers, most Google users at least in English-speaking countries probably arrive via google.com not their local equivalent so just blocking that one domain would probably cost Google a small fortune.
And I honestly, honestly do not see a difference between the censorship in China and the censorship of the EU. Well, maybe one thing: at least China does it openly.
I don't really know how to respond to that. To me, the difference between allowing individuals to assert a right not to have misleading information about them knowingly propagated with damaging results and allowing a national government to arbitrarily censor access to information about the government itself by its own people is night and day.
Ok, so your point is that as long as Google operates within a certain country, it should comply with all laws in that country?
Yes, of course. And domain names are utterly irrelevant to this.
This would imply that China (or the EU for that matter) is now forcing its own laws on the international version of Google. Which means that they would be grossly overstepping the bounds of their own jurisdiction.
Not really. A state can only impose sanctions against a business to the extent that the business falls within its jurisdiction, but otherwise no business has any power to override national laws in nations where it operates, so it has to play by the rules or accept the consequences. It really is as simple as that.
And yes, this does create fundamental problems if one nation's laws are directly contradictory with another's and you want to operate in both. This is currently a significant problem for US IT companies who are subject to obligations under US law to supply information on demand to certain security organisations, but also subject to obligations under the laws of European countries where they operate that prohibit sharing personal data by default. However, the inability to lawfully operate everywhere in the world simultaneously is a problem for the business, not for any of the nations involved.
I guess my reaction to the trailer is: "I've got a bad feeling about this."
Indeed. A new JJ Abrams trailer often seems to be followed by millions of voices crying out in terror. I guess time will tell whether they will suddenly be silenced on release day.