The crown and co-op models do allow for shareholder investment and bonds, so there is an ROI aspect to their business, but it's one built around a stabilized return, not maximized profits. Blue chip vs. high risk.
I question the definition of "State Regulated". There is a difference between paying filing fees for registering a decision to operate or expand a business, and the "state" making the decisions for the business.
What is the difference between a monopolist or oligopoly developing a market and a state department or crown corporation developing the market?
The first is motivated entirely by ROI and maximized profits.
The latter is motivated by providing reliable service to the customers who vote for the politicians that allocate their budget.
SaskTel is a Crown corp here. Access is a co-op. Both have done a tremendous job of building out our internet capabilities in the province, though the last mile is as challenging here as anywhere.
In both cases, the profit motive of the corporation is severely limited. The mentality is that the profits are used to build out the infrastructure, not to worry about share prices. Once the greed is eliminated from the equation, it's a lot easier to build out a stable self-supporting business where the revenues are a reasonable coverage of current and future expenses.
The infrastructure of society is there to support everyone, not just shareholders and the board of directors.
I haven't been to China, but I've worked with many people who immigrated from China. All deny the horror stories that keep getting brought up from events of a few decades ago.
China has been forced into an accelerated social and economic growth that far outstrips what any other nation has been able to bear to date. The vast majority of their country was far behind north america from an infrastructure perspective only a few years ago, so the rollout of high speed networks and technology has had a much greater impact on their society than ours.
Until I see it myself or hear it from the people I know and trust, I'll be treating the above flamage as litte more than propaganda.
A nation's currency and trade are worth as much as their word. If they don't deliver, their word is worthless, and their currency devalues. No one trades with a liar and a cheat. Obviously China is neither, as they're one of the world's biggest trading partners.
Excuse me, but the DNS is designed to be distributed based on the TLD. There is nothing in the design to mandate the use of a central DNS authority, provided that the character set rules and such are followed.
There are far fewer than 255 TLDs in existence. Assign each a root server map, and even with the protocol reserved values like 192, 0, 255, there should be no problem simplifying the routing maps.
Especially with IPv6.
The US may have started DARPA, but Canada paid for it's own network via the Bell alliance, thank you very much.
There is no reason the GPS locator data could not be sent automatically in virtually any format, including an XML email body, whether forwarded from a text messaging account or via the web browser in many phones.
Certainly I don't see this as a price-doubling "feature".
More like a drag and drop from the GPS locator field to an email body.
Of course you can bill for services people didn't agree to pay for. Their use of those services is an implicit contract, and if they didn't bother reading it before taking what they wanted, that's their fault.
Caveat Emptor.
Even if you didn't think you were buying anything...
My understanding was that most of the military/DoD certifications require a complete software development history, identifying who made any changes and when. I'm not sure that OSS could ever qualify under that requirement.
Personally I wouldn't worry much about the milspec markets. I don't see Linux as "better" than Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, BSD, or QNX when it comes to development. It's philosophical and marketing differences that I like about Linux, and I can't see that being relevant to a milspec environment.
Liking Linux is one thing; trying to stuff it into every possible niche just for the sake of doing so is a waste of time. One size does not fit all.
Who puts in the effort and expense of delivering to a non-existent market? There is always a market, or just a bunch of bankrupt fools with old business cards living on the streets.
If there is a fixed-size market, then "normal" business competition comes into play. In such a situation, it is about "making the other guy lose" so you can steal their share, because it's the only way to grow. For whatever reason, people don't consider stability and long-term viability worthwhile anymore -- only perpetual growth and expansion is rewarded.
Unfortunately for the unimaginative, markets aren't infinite on a finite planet. You can't keep growing at the expense of others. Sooner or later you have to get the neurons firing and come up with ideas that target new markets others haven't exploited (fully) yet, or start acquiring those who have new ideas.
But how much benefit is their to acquisition if you didn't perceive the potential in the first place? If the monopolist never thought of the idea in the first place, how can they possibly grow that new market?
Success takes more than money and contacts -- it takes a clear understanding of goals and a decent plan on how to get there. The monopolist may be a viable investor, but as a controlling owner a monopolist usually just strangles the acquisition in their frustration to make it fit their existing, stagnant model.
Ok, so RedHat provides buzzwords and certs so managers and business owners can comfort themselves with the warm fuzzies that their techie has a cert. Is the cert really that much better than Microsoft's various techie certs? Has a cert ever actually demonstrated someone has the skills and training needed to do the job right, or does it just prove someone had the time and money for a course?
Clearly certs aren't enough to maintain a company of RedHat's size, or there would be major competition from companies like Learning Tree by now.
Security audits of code, patches, updates, enhancements -- those are what a vendor is supposed to be focused on delivering. The problem is that with OSS, the benefits of those corrections go to everyone, but the expense only goes to the company that developed the fix or enhancement (and their customers.)
SuSE/Novell put in a lot of time, money, and effort. RedHat put in a lot of time, money, and effort. So has Mandrake, whatever their latest name is.
What has Oracle put into Linux?
Show me the pieces of system code that have been enhanced and updated by Oracle. I want to know which security issues and performance tweaks they've implemented. That trail of invested effort will show how good their team is at providing service and support.
If they haven't invested the time, budget, and effort before someone paid them to provide support, why in the world would I trust a database vendor to maintain my operating system?!?!?!
I'm involved with a wee activist group that has that same power base: people with a lot of free time. It's really quite amazing what a few hundred people can do when they work together and have the time to put in; I can only imagine the power of tens or hundreds of thousands behind an "issue" like the Firefly fan base.:)
But what I really like is the reverse invoicing -- it's a great response and 100% legal AFAIK. I used the same tactic on a doctor or two over the years. When I had to sit more than an hour waiting for a scheduled appointment and the doc hadn't been called off to some emergency but was merely over booked, I invoiced him for a full emergency consulting service bill rate.
Obviously he objected, but after a bit of discussion he understood my time was as valuable as his, and I never had to wait more than 15 minutes again. (Except one afternoon when there was an emergency, which was perfectly understandable.)
I just hope the fan base doesn't underbill. They should make sure they find out what a marketing agency charges for advertising, and what advertising companies charge for creating an ad campaign. Include the service delivery rates for content delivery, the expenses for promotional content creation, and a reasonable overhead.
Most important of all, don't forget the late fees for failing to negotiate and pay in a timely fashion.:D
If the system were only used to highlight a camera the security operators should pay attention to, I could see the system being helpful.
We're a long way off from allowing such a system to automatically call the police without human confirmation, much less the obvious next steps of tying it to automated weaponry (whether lethal or not.)
But I fail to see how such a system is going to do anything about the majority of violence that occurs in homes, back alleys, and other areas where these systems aren't as likely to be installed. The areas that need it the most are also the poorest and least likely to have access to the technology.
Unless it's used as an excuse to cut back physical police patrols even further than they already are in high-crime areas. I can just picture the politicians trying to convince the inner cities and other such districts that they don't actuall need police because there are cameras on the streets.
Betcha the well-heeled areas will have both police and surveillance cameras...
Sounds to me like the advertising is only being delivered to people who paid for service, while those who don't pay aren't required to view advertising. Sounds like a pretty twisted reversal of the usual approach, where those who don't pay have to suffer the indignity of perpetual ad-pushing.
I think it'd be pretty pathetic to pay to see a preview without actually getting real content. It makes about as much sense as paying for a CD case, but not actually getting a disk inside. All the gloss and advertising, but no product.
Surely there is some other reason people pay for memberships?
This humanoid has spent more time in the media and courts trying to suck money he doesn't deserve from game companies than any other single individual I've ever read about.
He's not a real lawyer. He's a professional thief who uses the courts as the tools of his trade.
That "piece of paper" is supposed to define the nation. What a pity it's now "just" a piece of paper to the government. Had that change happened elsewhere, people would be saying the government had been overthrown or that a coup had taken place.
I find it absolutely sickening that the Canadian, US, British, and other government have been making this big deal about protecting us from "terrorists", spending money, restricting travel, demanding more travel documents, hiring more guards, arming them more heavily, etc. Our rights as human beings and our freedoms as citizens are being ripped to shreds, and the entire world seems to be going along with that insanity.
To call for the arrest of someone who managed to print out a replica of a boarding pass is a bit insane. Any actual criminal could have had a forger create false documents long before this software was released. All this software does is demonstrate that plain-paper security documents are useless, exposing the truth about all the billions spent on anti-terrorism security:
The only "winner" in the war against terrorism is the military industrial complex.
However, that's irrelevant to the topic at hand. The simple truth is you have exactly as many rights as you can afford to defend in court, if you have the resources to avoid being locked up without charges in the first place. Nothing in the law or the US Constitution will protect you from false charges, planted evidence, or interference with the judicial process unless you have the resources to do something about it -- including having cases moved to jurisdictions that don't have a direct interest in the case, and where the judge doesn't work in the same building as the "officers" who rousted you.
Did Microsoft actually discover a critical failure in the last moments before delivery, or is it tied to Rutkowska, as mentioned in another thread today?
...Joanna Rutkowska, the stealth malware researcher who created 'Blue Pill' VM rootkit and planted an unsigned driver on Windows Vista, bypassing the new device driver signing policy
As to "They had a lot of bugs in the past that were incredibly annoying but didn't force you to reinstall"...
A Microsoft Update for Win2K completely and utterly destroyed my primary development box shortly after WinXP had been released (I forget exactly how long.) 100% destruction -- I couldn't even recover the HDD without forensic tools.
While I'm glad they caught this one before release, I seriously doubt the testing was any more thorough this time than with previous releases of Windows. Sure, more people were running the betas, but they're all still from the same crowd: techies accessing pre-release technology who don't typically do the "creative" things that regular users do (e.g. pasting image files into text fields.)
That other article about an unsigned driver being injected worries me more. The OS hasn't even been released, and it's already got it's first virus bypassing purportedly "bulletproof" DRM. Just like the X-Box and every other attempt at DRM done to date.
DRM is a great concept for protecting the core OS and applications from infection, but it's rapidly becoming apparent the only thing it really does is provide an extra level of revenue protection for Microsoft by making it harder (for now) to pirate.
What kind of testing was actually done such that Microsoft discovers a "critical bug"
So if not Shrub, what other term would you like to see used to express my utter lack of respect for that man's policies and decisions? While I sympathize that he acts on the information provided by advisors, he is nonetheless the one making the decisions for the US administration.
G-Dub and Shrub don't qualify as all-out insults or leave one open to charges of defamation and such.
The terms I'd like to use would leave me open to legal action.
I've seen a few presentations Gore has done on the environment, global warming, and other issues.
The man is educated, well-spoken, personable, and seems to have a much better grasp on such issues than the current administration. I have no doubt that the US and the world would be very, very different right now if he'd been allowed the presidency he won.
Guess the Shrub-lovers either don't like the truth or don't see the humour of worrying about whether voting machines can be hacked when voting machines weren't responsible for that fraudulent "victory."
Make sure you have enough connections that if the vote is questionable or close, the courts will arbitrarily award you victory regardless of the numbers.
Try their community relations department for your country. Don't bother with sales or support -- they have work to do. You're looking for charitable donations, unless of course you're not a registered charity, in which case you're probably SOL.
Take an operating systems class. Look at kernel code from different systems.
Then you'll realize a properly written daemon that's been swapped out generates virtually no overhead on a modern system. The problem is all the crap code written by idiots who still do polling loops, database scans, update checks, and other such nonsense without the need to do so.
Well, perhaps there is a need to do so: they threw their first hack into the public arena rather than learn how to do it right before showing the code.
I've seen "modern" code that is so crappily written that a couple of subroutines take more runtime memory than entire applications used to. I've seen applications burn more cycles loading splash screens and beep-boop noises than it took to launch the application's core functionality.
Once upon a whence, you loaded an application and used it. Now you load an application which loads the pretty pictures, the video help, the sound effects, a couple dozen extra fonts, adds to the color maps, waits for the splash screen, waits for the intro music, and then finally displays a GUI 5-10 seconds later over top of the same functionality that used to launch in under a second.
Customs is considered to operate outside the bounds of law because they are determining if someone is allowed in to the country. If they weren't technically outside the country already, the visitor or immigrant would already be in the country and there would be nothing for Customs to do.
They've taken advantage of that for decades.
I personally have had my car trashed because of the jackboot mentality of US Customs, and much, much worse. I know others who have had the same happen to them.
And there is NOTHING we are legally allowed to do about it from out of country.
Totalitarian is as totalitarian does, no matter how much the US prattles about "freedom" or "democracy."
Try immigrating to Canada and moving to Quebec if you don't speak French.
Why do people consider it so onerous to learn the language of a nation they claim to want to live in? It's the least you could do if you're not a political refugee.
So far I've read dozens of reports over the past 5-6 years about failed, hacked, and broken electronic voting machines.
How many failures does it take before those providing the crap equipment are sued and forced to FIX the results of their incompetent designs and testing?
Slashdot Mirror
The crown and co-op models do allow for shareholder investment and bonds, so there is an ROI aspect to their business, but it's one built around a stabilized return, not maximized profits. Blue chip vs. high risk.
I question the definition of "State Regulated". There is a difference between paying filing fees for registering a decision to operate or expand a business, and the "state" making the decisions for the business.
What is the difference between a monopolist or oligopoly developing a market and a state department or crown corporation developing the market?
The first is motivated entirely by ROI and maximized profits.
The latter is motivated by providing reliable service to the customers who vote for the politicians that allocate their budget.
SaskTel is a Crown corp here. Access is a co-op. Both have done a tremendous job of building out our internet capabilities in the province, though the last mile is as challenging here as anywhere.
In both cases, the profit motive of the corporation is severely limited. The mentality is that the profits are used to build out the infrastructure, not to worry about share prices. Once the greed is eliminated from the equation, it's a lot easier to build out a stable self-supporting business where the revenues are a reasonable coverage of current and future expenses.
The infrastructure of society is there to support everyone, not just shareholders and the board of directors.
I haven't been to China, but I've worked with many people who immigrated from China. All deny the horror stories that keep getting brought up from events of a few decades ago.
China has been forced into an accelerated social and economic growth that far outstrips what any other nation has been able to bear to date. The vast majority of their country was far behind north america from an infrastructure perspective only a few years ago, so the rollout of high speed networks and technology has had a much greater impact on their society than ours.
Until I see it myself or hear it from the people I know and trust, I'll be treating the above flamage as litte more than propaganda.
A nation's currency and trade are worth as much as their word. If they don't deliver, their word is worthless, and their currency devalues. No one trades with a liar and a cheat. Obviously China is neither, as they're one of the world's biggest trading partners.
Softwood. NAFTA. Well over a decade.
'nuff said.
Excuse me, but the DNS is designed to be distributed based on the TLD. There is nothing in the design to mandate the use of a central DNS authority, provided that the character set rules and such are followed.
There are far fewer than 255 TLDs in existence. Assign each a root server map, and even with the protocol reserved values like 192, 0, 255, there should be no problem simplifying the routing maps.
Especially with IPv6.
The US may have started DARPA, but Canada paid for it's own network via the Bell alliance, thank you very much.
There is no reason the GPS locator data could not be sent automatically in virtually any format, including an XML email body, whether forwarded from a text messaging account or via the web browser in many phones.
Certainly I don't see this as a price-doubling "feature".
More like a drag and drop from the GPS locator field to an email body.
Of course you can bill for services people didn't agree to pay for. Their use of those services is an implicit contract, and if they didn't bother reading it before taking what they wanted, that's their fault.
Caveat Emptor.
Even if you didn't think you were buying anything...
I almost forgot...
My understanding was that most of the military/DoD certifications require a complete software development history, identifying who made any changes and when. I'm not sure that OSS could ever qualify under that requirement.
Personally I wouldn't worry much about the milspec markets. I don't see Linux as "better" than Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, BSD, or QNX when it comes to development. It's philosophical and marketing differences that I like about Linux, and I can't see that being relevant to a milspec environment.
Liking Linux is one thing; trying to stuff it into every possible niche just for the sake of doing so is a waste of time. One size does not fit all.
Sorry. I should have clarified that I was referring to admin and developer certs, not software certification.
By definition a software vendor is certifying their product for it's purpose, despite the handwaving disclaimers of many licenses.
Who puts in the effort and expense of delivering to a non-existent market? There is always a market, or just a bunch of bankrupt fools with old business cards living on the streets.
If there is a fixed-size market, then "normal" business competition comes into play. In such a situation, it is about "making the other guy lose" so you can steal their share, because it's the only way to grow. For whatever reason, people don't consider stability and long-term viability worthwhile anymore -- only perpetual growth and expansion is rewarded.
Unfortunately for the unimaginative, markets aren't infinite on a finite planet. You can't keep growing at the expense of others. Sooner or later you have to get the neurons firing and come up with ideas that target new markets others haven't exploited (fully) yet, or start acquiring those who have new ideas.
But how much benefit is their to acquisition if you didn't perceive the potential in the first place? If the monopolist never thought of the idea in the first place, how can they possibly grow that new market?
Success takes more than money and contacts -- it takes a clear understanding of goals and a decent plan on how to get there. The monopolist may be a viable investor, but as a controlling owner a monopolist usually just strangles the acquisition in their frustration to make it fit their existing, stagnant model.
Ok, so RedHat provides buzzwords and certs so managers and business owners can comfort themselves with the warm fuzzies that their techie has a cert. Is the cert really that much better than Microsoft's various techie certs? Has a cert ever actually demonstrated someone has the skills and training needed to do the job right, or does it just prove someone had the time and money for a course?
Clearly certs aren't enough to maintain a company of RedHat's size, or there would be major competition from companies like Learning Tree by now.
Security audits of code, patches, updates, enhancements -- those are what a vendor is supposed to be focused on delivering. The problem is that with OSS, the benefits of those corrections go to everyone, but the expense only goes to the company that developed the fix or enhancement (and their customers.)
SuSE/Novell put in a lot of time, money, and effort. RedHat put in a lot of time, money, and effort. So has Mandrake, whatever their latest name is.
What has Oracle put into Linux?
Show me the pieces of system code that have been enhanced and updated by Oracle. I want to know which security issues and performance tweaks they've implemented. That trail of invested effort will show how good their team is at providing service and support.
If they haven't invested the time, budget, and effort before someone paid them to provide support, why in the world would I trust a database vendor to maintain my operating system?!?!?!
I'm involved with a wee activist group that has that same power base: people with a lot of free time. It's really quite amazing what a few hundred people can do when they work together and have the time to put in; I can only imagine the power of tens or hundreds of thousands behind an "issue" like the Firefly fan base. :)
But what I really like is the reverse invoicing -- it's a great response and 100% legal AFAIK. I used the same tactic on a doctor or two over the years. When I had to sit more than an hour waiting for a scheduled appointment and the doc hadn't been called off to some emergency but was merely over booked, I invoiced him for a full emergency consulting service bill rate.
Obviously he objected, but after a bit of discussion he understood my time was as valuable as his, and I never had to wait more than 15 minutes again. (Except one afternoon when there was an emergency, which was perfectly understandable.)
I just hope the fan base doesn't underbill. They should make sure they find out what a marketing agency charges for advertising, and what advertising companies charge for creating an ad campaign. Include the service delivery rates for content delivery, the expenses for promotional content creation, and a reasonable overhead.
Most important of all, don't forget the late fees for failing to negotiate and pay in a timely fashion. :D
If the system were only used to highlight a camera the security operators should pay attention to, I could see the system being helpful.
We're a long way off from allowing such a system to automatically call the police without human confirmation, much less the obvious next steps of tying it to automated weaponry (whether lethal or not.)
But I fail to see how such a system is going to do anything about the majority of violence that occurs in homes, back alleys, and other areas where these systems aren't as likely to be installed. The areas that need it the most are also the poorest and least likely to have access to the technology.
Unless it's used as an excuse to cut back physical police patrols even further than they already are in high-crime areas. I can just picture the politicians trying to convince the inner cities and other such districts that they don't actuall need police because there are cameras on the streets.
Betcha the well-heeled areas will have both police and surveillance cameras...
Sounds to me like the advertising is only being delivered to people who paid for service, while those who don't pay aren't required to view advertising. Sounds like a pretty twisted reversal of the usual approach, where those who don't pay have to suffer the indignity of perpetual ad-pushing.
I think it'd be pretty pathetic to pay to see a preview without actually getting real content. It makes about as much sense as paying for a CD case, but not actually getting a disk inside. All the gloss and advertising, but no product.
Surely there is some other reason people pay for memberships?
This humanoid has spent more time in the media and courts trying to suck money he doesn't deserve from game companies than any other single individual I've ever read about.
He's not a real lawyer. He's a professional thief who uses the courts as the tools of his trade.
That "piece of paper" is supposed to define the nation. What a pity it's now "just" a piece of paper to the government. Had that change happened elsewhere, people would be saying the government had been overthrown or that a coup had taken place.
I find it absolutely sickening that the Canadian, US, British, and other government have been making this big deal about protecting us from "terrorists", spending money, restricting travel, demanding more travel documents, hiring more guards, arming them more heavily, etc. Our rights as human beings and our freedoms as citizens are being ripped to shreds, and the entire world seems to be going along with that insanity.
To call for the arrest of someone who managed to print out a replica of a boarding pass is a bit insane. Any actual criminal could have had a forger create false documents long before this software was released. All this software does is demonstrate that plain-paper security documents are useless, exposing the truth about all the billions spent on anti-terrorism security:
The only "winner" in the war against terrorism is the military industrial complex.
However, that's irrelevant to the topic at hand. The simple truth is you have exactly as many rights as you can afford to defend in court, if you have the resources to avoid being locked up without charges in the first place. Nothing in the law or the US Constitution will protect you from false charges, planted evidence, or interference with the judicial process unless you have the resources to do something about it -- including having cases moved to jurisdictions that don't have a direct interest in the case, and where the judge doesn't work in the same building as the "officers" who rousted you.
Did Microsoft actually discover a critical failure in the last moments before delivery, or is it tied to Rutkowska, as mentioned in another thread today?
As to "They had a lot of bugs in the past that were incredibly annoying but didn't force you to reinstall"...
A Microsoft Update for Win2K completely and utterly destroyed my primary development box shortly after WinXP had been released (I forget exactly how long.) 100% destruction -- I couldn't even recover the HDD without forensic tools.
While I'm glad they caught this one before release, I seriously doubt the testing was any more thorough this time than with previous releases of Windows. Sure, more people were running the betas, but they're all still from the same crowd: techies accessing pre-release technology who don't typically do the "creative" things that regular users do (e.g. pasting image files into text fields.)
That other article about an unsigned driver being injected worries me more. The OS hasn't even been released, and it's already got it's first virus bypassing purportedly "bulletproof" DRM. Just like the X-Box and every other attempt at DRM done to date.
DRM is a great concept for protecting the core OS and applications from infection, but it's rapidly becoming apparent the only thing it really does is provide an extra level of revenue protection for Microsoft by making it harder (for now) to pirate. What kind of testing was actually done such that Microsoft discovers a "critical bug"
So if not Shrub, what other term would you like to see used to express my utter lack of respect for that man's policies and decisions? While I sympathize that he acts on the information provided by advisors, he is nonetheless the one making the decisions for the US administration.
G-Dub and Shrub don't qualify as all-out insults or leave one open to charges of defamation and such.
The terms I'd like to use would leave me open to legal action.
I've seen a few presentations Gore has done on the environment, global warming, and other issues.
The man is educated, well-spoken, personable, and seems to have a much better grasp on such issues than the current administration. I have no doubt that the US and the world would be very, very different right now if he'd been allowed the presidency he won.
Troll, eh?
Guess the Shrub-lovers either don't like the truth or don't see the humour of worrying about whether voting machines can be hacked when voting machines weren't responsible for that fraudulent "victory."
There is so a step 2.
Make sure you have enough connections that if the vote is questionable or close, the courts will arbitrarily award you victory regardless of the numbers.
Worked for Shrub... :(
Try their community relations department for your country. Don't bother with sales or support -- they have work to do. You're looking for charitable donations, unless of course you're not a registered charity, in which case you're probably SOL.
http://support.microsoft.com/contactus/?ws=mscom
Take an operating systems class. Look at kernel code from different systems.
Then you'll realize a properly written daemon that's been swapped out generates virtually no overhead on a modern system. The problem is all the crap code written by idiots who still do polling loops, database scans, update checks, and other such nonsense without the need to do so.
Well, perhaps there is a need to do so: they threw their first hack into the public arena rather than learn how to do it right before showing the code.
I've seen "modern" code that is so crappily written that a couple of subroutines take more runtime memory than entire applications used to. I've seen applications burn more cycles loading splash screens and beep-boop noises than it took to launch the application's core functionality.
Once upon a whence, you loaded an application and used it. Now you load an application which loads the pretty pictures, the video help, the sound effects, a couple dozen extra fonts, adds to the color maps, waits for the splash screen, waits for the intro music, and then finally displays a GUI 5-10 seconds later over top of the same functionality that used to launch in under a second.
Customs is considered to operate outside the bounds of law because they are determining if someone is allowed in to the country. If they weren't technically outside the country already, the visitor or immigrant would already be in the country and there would be nothing for Customs to do.
They've taken advantage of that for decades.
I personally have had my car trashed because of the jackboot mentality of US Customs, and much, much worse. I know others who have had the same happen to them.
And there is NOTHING we are legally allowed to do about it from out of country.
Totalitarian is as totalitarian does, no matter how much the US prattles about "freedom" or "democracy."
Try immigrating to Canada and moving to Quebec if you don't speak French.
Why do people consider it so onerous to learn the language of a nation they claim to want to live in? It's the least you could do if you're not a political refugee.
So far I've read dozens of reports over the past 5-6 years about failed, hacked, and broken electronic voting machines.
How many failures does it take before those providing the crap equipment are sued and forced to FIX the results of their incompetent designs and testing?