Well, I can see some argument in profit, because to some extent things that aren't profitable OFTEN aren't of real benefit.
The problem becomes when you look at things from a short-sighted perspective. There are lots of things that would benefit everybody which wouldn't make a profit for anybody which we should be doing. For less than the cost of a war in Iraq we could probably all be riding in self-piloting cars, greatly reducing our oil consumption in the process as well as the number of people killed in accidents and all the costs associated with that.
I'm not convinced that manned spaceflight is really the best place to be investing - at least not quite yet. Now, I'm all for greatly expanding the basic R&D that will make manned spaceflight actually practical in the future (better ways of getting stuff into space, terraforming, self-sustaining habitats, and so on). In a sense I'm all for spending on manned spaceflight, but doing it with manned projects on the ground, or unmanned projects in space. We're just wasting a lot of money by taking already-understood rocket designs and just constantly putting people at risk at tremendous expense just so that they can spend a week in space. Let's come up with something new, and actually spend the kind of money that is likely to make that actually happen.
In today's television world of History being taught by Pawn Stars, and The Learning Channel showing us insights of child beauty pageants, reality shows are now the bread and butter for almost every network. It has seriously diluted the education that is occurring from television (and let's be honest, whether it should be or not, there is no escape that a lot of people do substitute television watching for actual learning). While PBS and a few other stray networks help a bit, this new series of Cosmos offers some hope.
Well, maybe, but in some sense the fact that the show doesn't really intend to communicate new science so much as put it into perspective just illustrates how bad the problem is. I can see the argument that they're not trying to deliver science so much as to impress people that it is important - that you have to fix the problem before you can start delivering decent content.
I feel like the TV audiences are virtually a lost cause. Mythbusters is one of the better shows but it seems like they miss the most obvious controls and it is less about science and answering questions and more about entertainment and finding things to blow up. Honestly, the explosions start getting old after a while - yes, I understand that if you take just about anything and load it with C4 it goes away. It was amusing when they did it with the cement truck, and that was about when that meme jumped the shark. I have nothing against explosions when they're relevant (testing the propensity of stills to explode and such), but they don't have to get a successful explosion in every show.
I'm not sure I'd call the digits of Pi the central premise of the book. It explored a lot of concepts around SETI, religion, and so on. The digits of Pi thing at the end was more of a culmination than a central premise, and it didn't really resolve anything. The main character was a skeptic who had an experience which was then met with public skepticism. That was actually how the movie went as well (though I thought it was far inferior to the book). The digits of Pi really was just another level of that, except that it explicitly turned the debate from whether humans had in fact met with aliens to weather humans had in fact received a message from God. However, the skeptical paradox is still there - a message embedded in Pi is unlikely in one sense, and all but certain in another. If a bunch of monkeys end up typing Shakespeare is that proof of a God, or proof that somebody finally found enough monkeys?
Disclaimer - it has been a long time since I read the book, so I could be forgetting something.
I imagine that they'll get the same experience as somebody who runs a Tor relay-only node. Admins will block them because it is easy to do, and has a minimal impact on their sales. They really don't care if it has no impact on security.
Yup. When I watch recordings without commercials it is really jarring when suddenly the show switches to recap mode and then I realize, "oh, that must have been a commercial break." They spend half of the show doing this sort of thing.
The original Cosmos was made for PBS, which is commercial-free.
The other poster mentioned Mythbusters, and that show drives me crazy because they constantly switch between unrelated segments with the goal of stringing you along. I'm fine with documentaries that weave together different elements into a larger story which requires some jumping around, but that is in the goal of making it all come together so that you get a really comprehensive understanding of an issue. Taking what could be 3x 9 minute mini-episodes, dicing them up, and adding 13min of recaps for continuity and 20min of commercials is just really annoying.
I believe so, but I think it is more dependency-driven. That is, instead of writing a bunch of rules for what happens when the net goes down, you just specify what depends on the net, and so on. That said, the only device I have that runs upstart is a Chromebook, so I haven't really spent time studying it. I've run systemd on a few things, but none of them really benefit from event-driven service management.
A truly 'everything is a file' Unix would implement BSD sockets and X11 windows as files, just for a start. Can you do that on Linux yet?
The problem with this is when does it end? How about menus? How about browser tabs? How about form fields in a browser? How about layers and pixels in gimp? How about paths in SVG?
Why can't I just cp a tab from chrome to firefox and have the page magically open? Oh, with the forms filled out with the same data if I use -r.
The problem is that this really only works if every application on the OS ends up being completely standardized, which means you can't add a feature to anything until you add it to everything.
Plan9 could abstract X11 windows as files, but only if you used their window manager.
Don't get me wrong, Plan9 did a lot of things right and I think linux could benefit from borrowing more of it. However, many of those things have already been ported over (where do you think/proc and/sys came from?). The everything-is-a-file paradigm doesn't always work out for everything.
Well, I'll certainly agree that channel bundling drives up costs. I'm not convinced that any of the parties is interested in the consumer here.
I think bundling of any kind should be banned. EVERYTHING should be a-la-carte. If they want to offer packages that is fine, but the cost of the package has to equal the cost of buying all the components individually.
However, I think they really need to go a step further. I'd separate content from transmission and have them provided by different companies. Transmission would be regulated as a utility and would be billed purely on the cost to provide the line, and the cost per packet if the line is shared (and just the cost of the line if the line is not shared). Content would be fairly non-regulated other than a ban on exclusive deals or discriminatory pricing and you could buy content for as many or few companies as you wished. Content providers would rent space in the CO at a regulated (and equal) rate. The barriers to entry for a content provider should be low enough so that there would be many of them in any geographic area.
I always figured that it makes sense to regulate the last mile of telecom just like you regulate the last mile of electricity. The telecom company provides you with a cable of some sort that transmits bits back and forth, and that's it. By all means regulate some protocol that sits on top of that like ethernet or whatever to aid the underlying infrastructure (packet switching, multicasting, etc).
That all terminates in a central office where anybody can rent space at a standard rate. Then service providers can set up and sell whatever services they want to at any price they want to. If you want to start your own ISP you just need some hardware and rental fees for a couple of central offices - a very low barrier to entry. The regulated utility telecoms would not be allowed to operate ISPs - they just route packets.
This minimizes the footprint of regulation but it doesn't allow anybody to abuse monopoly power.
Well, most physicists believe that just about everything is quantized (granted, at an incredibly small scale), which is exactly what you'd expect from a simulation.
Honestly, we have no idea what universe might exist outside of the simulator, and what kinds of computation resources might be available as a result. Simulating something the size of our universe might not be a big deal in light of the physics that govern computers in the "real world."
And as somebody else below points out, it may not be necessary to fully simulate all elements of the universe at all times - they can just focus on what conscious beings actually observe. They can even do it retroactively - if you think hard about something that you observed the other day that didn't make sense, they could always just go back and make it make sense, either in your memory, or in "reality."
As I said before in some Slashdot posts, if you are serious about scientific skepticism, you have to admit is is possible we live in a simulation that has only been running for 6000 (or whatever) simulated years, and was started either from a check pointed version or started from some hand-crafted parameters and data files.
Uh, you can't prove that you're not living in a simulation that has only been running for 15 minutes (your perceived time) that started from a checkpoint. All we have in the present are our memories of the past.
the replacement cost for the videotape is probably only a few dollars (check on eBay).
Well, that doesn't really make sense as a basis for damages, otherwise if somebody steals a $50k car and doesn't get caught for 15 years they can argue it is only worth $500. She didn't steal a 9-year-old video today, she stole it 9 years ago. She isn't paying restitution 9 years ago either.
It probably makes sense to fine her $100-200 or something like that. If she had paid $20 or something reasonable back when she lost the tape and this were an argument over whether the $50 late charge in the contract was reasonable I'd be taking her side. When you borrow something you have an obligation to take care of it and return it.
Now, jail is just ridiculous for something like this.
If you wanted to go slow, I always thought that a simple transition strategy would be:
1. Create a shell script that reads in a systemd unit and implements the start/stop behaviors for the legacy service manager. 2. Slowly replace all your existing service manager scripts with the new one and systemd units, still running under the legacy service manager. 3. Once all your scripts are replaced, begin testing systemd in earnest. 4. Make the switch in service manager.
The idea is that you only have to maintain one service manager config per service at any time, and you can update them as you go. You're basically adding the fairly simple elements of the systemd service manager to your legacy sysvinit as a compatibility layer. You wouldn't need to build all the fancy stuff (namespaces for daemons and all that) - just the stuff that you already do with your legacy service manager.
It could use some better documentation around the various targets and recommended best practices. There are a million ways you can get a daemon to run, but you really need to do it the right way if you want it to handle all the edge cases (like a file it needs is NFS-mounted, and thus it has a net dependency that might not otherwise be apparent, and so on).
This really isn't any different in SysV, but at least there I could trivially edit the startup script of the dependent service and add some sort of test.
You should be able to call a script from a systemd unit to run your test.
Also, systemd is able to manage dependencies for sockets/etc. So, in many cases if the units are properly implemented you can avoid starting a new program before the old is ready, or more often start them in parallel but have the second program block when it tries to do something before the dependency is ready. I suspect many daemons haven't had this implemented yet, since for the most part systemd is new and most of its users are just working to get it working at all.
Well, it sounds like #3 might require an additional option in systemd if it doesn't already exist. The problem is that systemd has no way to know that your previous incarnation of the daemon refused to die because it knows what it is doing, vs it refusing to die because it is broken. There really isn't a workaround other than telling systemd not to kill off the old one. Your daemon is tagged with cgroups and I imagine that is hard to escape (maybe if it is root it can hack its way out).
So, the behavior you're struggling with is a feature. What your daemon does is a good thing, but few daemons work this way and so it probably hasn't gotten attention yet. All systemd should have to do is not kill off your old process before starting the new one - it could potentially stick each in a separate cgroup to help manage this.
I suspect he's trying to put pressure on everybody to quit with the soap opera and just go with systemd. He'd have probably preferred it if the ctte went with upstart, but I think half the linux world is scratching their head as half the debate seems to be about procedural nonsense and not the merits of the various init systems.
Sure, I can get the arguments about simplicity vs functionality and the unix way and all that. What I don't get is arguments about how the proposals are written, deposing chairs, and that sort of thing. Just pick an init system already, or decide to support both!
Don't get me wrong - I think companies should generally do more to improve security. The problem is that the short-term thinking that is incentivized by how companies are run makes it almost inevitable that security won't improve. Things will have to get a fair bit worse before companies take it seriously. When the same companies start getting breached annually they'll start taking it seriously.
Actually that's the only reason I like upstart. Maybe with Ubuntu onboard with systemd we can get an alternate, easier-to-use syntax than the default systemd.
Well, one of the advantages of systemd is that the unit files are more about describing the necessary configuration settings needed to start a service, and less about writing a program to just do it. It is like the difference between writing a configuration file for Postfix vs Sendmail. The config file tells systemd what to do, not how to do it. It is possible to call a bash script, but this is more for cases when you really need flexibility - it isn't used just to launch a daemon with a few options and capture the PID.
It should be very straightforward to make a unit editor that just wraps a GUI around editing unit files with helpful field labels, online help, good templates/defaults and so on.
Yup. I suspect Gentoo will be one of the last distros to make systemd a default, and I think that is because openrc really is the best traditional sysvinit implementation out there. I've used systemd on some of my Gentoo VMs and when you get into edge cases it can be clunky (I couldn't get it to wait until after getting an IP to try to mount NFS, for example).
The fundamental design is very good, but it will be a while before it completely surpasses openrc. It isn't unlike ext4 vs btrfs - the latter is almost certainly the future, but the former is very much the present.
Well clearly they didn't calculate the proper cost of their risk assessment, because this breach is going to cost them a hundred mill or so in the class actions and civil lawsuits that result.
Maybe they did calculate it wrong, or maybe they didn't. The odds of me rolling 10 6'a in a row are 1:60M. Now, suppose I roll 10 times and they all come up 6's - does that mean that I miscalculated?
That's the problem with these sorts of issues - the odds of them happening are generally very low, but the impact is high. That means that if you protect against them you lose money compared to all your competitors who don't protect against them. Most likely none of you will have any issues, making the person who decided to spend money beefing up security look dumb.
Low-probability issues tend to matter on the big scale. Most likely SOME company will have a high-profile data security issue in the next year or two. The problem is that on the micro scale it is not very likely that any particular company will have a problem.
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Well, I can see some argument in profit, because to some extent things that aren't profitable OFTEN aren't of real benefit.
The problem becomes when you look at things from a short-sighted perspective. There are lots of things that would benefit everybody which wouldn't make a profit for anybody which we should be doing. For less than the cost of a war in Iraq we could probably all be riding in self-piloting cars, greatly reducing our oil consumption in the process as well as the number of people killed in accidents and all the costs associated with that.
I'm not convinced that manned spaceflight is really the best place to be investing - at least not quite yet. Now, I'm all for greatly expanding the basic R&D that will make manned spaceflight actually practical in the future (better ways of getting stuff into space, terraforming, self-sustaining habitats, and so on). In a sense I'm all for spending on manned spaceflight, but doing it with manned projects on the ground, or unmanned projects in space. We're just wasting a lot of money by taking already-understood rocket designs and just constantly putting people at risk at tremendous expense just so that they can spend a week in space. Let's come up with something new, and actually spend the kind of money that is likely to make that actually happen.
In today's television world of History being taught by Pawn Stars, and The Learning Channel showing us insights of child beauty pageants, reality shows are now the bread and butter for almost every network. It has seriously diluted the education that is occurring from television (and let's be honest, whether it should be or not, there is no escape that a lot of people do substitute television watching for actual learning). While PBS and a few other stray networks help a bit, this new series of Cosmos offers some hope.
Well, maybe, but in some sense the fact that the show doesn't really intend to communicate new science so much as put it into perspective just illustrates how bad the problem is. I can see the argument that they're not trying to deliver science so much as to impress people that it is important - that you have to fix the problem before you can start delivering decent content.
I feel like the TV audiences are virtually a lost cause. Mythbusters is one of the better shows but it seems like they miss the most obvious controls and it is less about science and answering questions and more about entertainment and finding things to blow up. Honestly, the explosions start getting old after a while - yes, I understand that if you take just about anything and load it with C4 it goes away. It was amusing when they did it with the cement truck, and that was about when that meme jumped the shark. I have nothing against explosions when they're relevant (testing the propensity of stills to explode and such), but they don't have to get a successful explosion in every show.
I'm not sure I'd call the digits of Pi the central premise of the book. It explored a lot of concepts around SETI, religion, and so on. The digits of Pi thing at the end was more of a culmination than a central premise, and it didn't really resolve anything. The main character was a skeptic who had an experience which was then met with public skepticism. That was actually how the movie went as well (though I thought it was far inferior to the book). The digits of Pi really was just another level of that, except that it explicitly turned the debate from whether humans had in fact met with aliens to weather humans had in fact received a message from God. However, the skeptical paradox is still there - a message embedded in Pi is unlikely in one sense, and all but certain in another. If a bunch of monkeys end up typing Shakespeare is that proof of a God, or proof that somebody finally found enough monkeys?
Disclaimer - it has been a long time since I read the book, so I could be forgetting something.
I imagine that they'll get the same experience as somebody who runs a Tor relay-only node. Admins will block them because it is easy to do, and has a minimal impact on their sales. They really don't care if it has no impact on security.
Yup. When I watch recordings without commercials it is really jarring when suddenly the show switches to recap mode and then I realize, "oh, that must have been a commercial break." They spend half of the show doing this sort of thing.
The original Cosmos was made for PBS, which is commercial-free.
The other poster mentioned Mythbusters, and that show drives me crazy because they constantly switch between unrelated segments with the goal of stringing you along. I'm fine with documentaries that weave together different elements into a larger story which requires some jumping around, but that is in the goal of making it all come together so that you get a really comprehensive understanding of an issue. Taking what could be 3x 9 minute mini-episodes, dicing them up, and adding 13min of recaps for continuity and 20min of commercials is just really annoying.
I believe so, but I think it is more dependency-driven. That is, instead of writing a bunch of rules for what happens when the net goes down, you just specify what depends on the net, and so on. That said, the only device I have that runs upstart is a Chromebook, so I haven't really spent time studying it. I've run systemd on a few things, but none of them really benefit from event-driven service management.
A truly 'everything is a file' Unix would implement BSD sockets and X11 windows as files, just for a start. Can you do that on Linux yet?
The problem with this is when does it end? How about menus? How about browser tabs? How about form fields in a browser? How about layers and pixels in gimp? How about paths in SVG?
Why can't I just cp a tab from chrome to firefox and have the page magically open? Oh, with the forms filled out with the same data if I use -r.
The problem is that this really only works if every application on the OS ends up being completely standardized, which means you can't add a feature to anything until you add it to everything.
Plan9 could abstract X11 windows as files, but only if you used their window manager.
Don't get me wrong, Plan9 did a lot of things right and I think linux could benefit from borrowing more of it. However, many of those things have already been ported over (where do you think /proc and /sys came from?). The everything-is-a-file paradigm doesn't always work out for everything.
If you have daemons that keep falling over and needing restart, you're already at the hack stage.
Sounds like a great argument for why we don't need pre-emptive multitasking. If a process doesn't yield time, just don't run it!
It is called defense in depth. Yes, an application that crashes is broken. That doesn't mean that an OS that can't restart it isn't also broken.
Well, I'll certainly agree that channel bundling drives up costs. I'm not convinced that any of the parties is interested in the consumer here.
I think bundling of any kind should be banned. EVERYTHING should be a-la-carte. If they want to offer packages that is fine, but the cost of the package has to equal the cost of buying all the components individually.
However, I think they really need to go a step further. I'd separate content from transmission and have them provided by different companies. Transmission would be regulated as a utility and would be billed purely on the cost to provide the line, and the cost per packet if the line is shared (and just the cost of the line if the line is not shared). Content would be fairly non-regulated other than a ban on exclusive deals or discriminatory pricing and you could buy content for as many or few companies as you wished. Content providers would rent space in the CO at a regulated (and equal) rate. The barriers to entry for a content provider should be low enough so that there would be many of them in any geographic area.
I always figured that it makes sense to regulate the last mile of telecom just like you regulate the last mile of electricity. The telecom company provides you with a cable of some sort that transmits bits back and forth, and that's it. By all means regulate some protocol that sits on top of that like ethernet or whatever to aid the underlying infrastructure (packet switching, multicasting, etc).
That all terminates in a central office where anybody can rent space at a standard rate. Then service providers can set up and sell whatever services they want to at any price they want to. If you want to start your own ISP you just need some hardware and rental fees for a couple of central offices - a very low barrier to entry. The regulated utility telecoms would not be allowed to operate ISPs - they just route packets.
This minimizes the footprint of regulation but it doesn't allow anybody to abuse monopoly power.
Perhaps one day one of the programmers will look over at their printer and find a little note from someone way down here inside the simulation.
Or, perhaps one day one of the programmers will fix some of the paradoxes of quantum mechanics and restart the simulation. Cheery thought...
Well, most physicists believe that just about everything is quantized (granted, at an incredibly small scale), which is exactly what you'd expect from a simulation.
Honestly, we have no idea what universe might exist outside of the simulator, and what kinds of computation resources might be available as a result. Simulating something the size of our universe might not be a big deal in light of the physics that govern computers in the "real world."
And as somebody else below points out, it may not be necessary to fully simulate all elements of the universe at all times - they can just focus on what conscious beings actually observe. They can even do it retroactively - if you think hard about something that you observed the other day that didn't make sense, they could always just go back and make it make sense, either in your memory, or in "reality."
Maybe quantum mechanics is a big practical joke.
As I said before in some Slashdot posts, if you are serious about scientific skepticism, you have to admit is is possible we live in a simulation that has only been running for 6000 (or whatever) simulated years, and was started either from a check pointed version or started from some hand-crafted parameters and data files.
Uh, you can't prove that you're not living in a simulation that has only been running for 15 minutes (your perceived time) that started from a checkpoint. All we have in the present are our memories of the past.
the replacement cost for the videotape is probably only a few dollars (check on eBay).
Well, that doesn't really make sense as a basis for damages, otherwise if somebody steals a $50k car and doesn't get caught for 15 years they can argue it is only worth $500. She didn't steal a 9-year-old video today, she stole it 9 years ago. She isn't paying restitution 9 years ago either.
It probably makes sense to fine her $100-200 or something like that. If she had paid $20 or something reasonable back when she lost the tape and this were an argument over whether the $50 late charge in the contract was reasonable I'd be taking her side. When you borrow something you have an obligation to take care of it and return it.
Now, jail is just ridiculous for something like this.
If you wanted to go slow, I always thought that a simple transition strategy would be:
1. Create a shell script that reads in a systemd unit and implements the start/stop behaviors for the legacy service manager.
2. Slowly replace all your existing service manager scripts with the new one and systemd units, still running under the legacy service manager.
3. Once all your scripts are replaced, begin testing systemd in earnest.
4. Make the switch in service manager.
The idea is that you only have to maintain one service manager config per service at any time, and you can update them as you go. You're basically adding the fairly simple elements of the systemd service manager to your legacy sysvinit as a compatibility layer. You wouldn't need to build all the fancy stuff (namespaces for daemons and all that) - just the stuff that you already do with your legacy service manager.
++
systemd units are trivial to write.
It could use some better documentation around the various targets and recommended best practices. There are a million ways you can get a daemon to run, but you really need to do it the right way if you want it to handle all the edge cases (like a file it needs is NFS-mounted, and thus it has a net dependency that might not otherwise be apparent, and so on).
This really isn't any different in SysV, but at least there I could trivially edit the startup script of the dependent service and add some sort of test.
You should be able to call a script from a systemd unit to run your test.
Also, systemd is able to manage dependencies for sockets/etc. So, in many cases if the units are properly implemented you can avoid starting a new program before the old is ready, or more often start them in parallel but have the second program block when it tries to do something before the dependency is ready. I suspect many daemons haven't had this implemented yet, since for the most part systemd is new and most of its users are just working to get it working at all.
Well, it sounds like #3 might require an additional option in systemd if it doesn't already exist. The problem is that systemd has no way to know that your previous incarnation of the daemon refused to die because it knows what it is doing, vs it refusing to die because it is broken. There really isn't a workaround other than telling systemd not to kill off the old one. Your daemon is tagged with cgroups and I imagine that is hard to escape (maybe if it is root it can hack its way out).
So, the behavior you're struggling with is a feature. What your daemon does is a good thing, but few daemons work this way and so it probably hasn't gotten attention yet. All systemd should have to do is not kill off your old process before starting the new one - it could potentially stick each in a separate cgroup to help manage this.
I suspect he's trying to put pressure on everybody to quit with the soap opera and just go with systemd. He'd have probably preferred it if the ctte went with upstart, but I think half the linux world is scratching their head as half the debate seems to be about procedural nonsense and not the merits of the various init systems.
Sure, I can get the arguments about simplicity vs functionality and the unix way and all that. What I don't get is arguments about how the proposals are written, deposing chairs, and that sort of thing. Just pick an init system already, or decide to support both!
Don't get me wrong - I think companies should generally do more to improve security. The problem is that the short-term thinking that is incentivized by how companies are run makes it almost inevitable that security won't improve. Things will have to get a fair bit worse before companies take it seriously. When the same companies start getting breached annually they'll start taking it seriously.
Actually that's the only reason I like upstart. Maybe with Ubuntu onboard with systemd we can get an alternate, easier-to-use syntax than the default systemd.
Well, one of the advantages of systemd is that the unit files are more about describing the necessary configuration settings needed to start a service, and less about writing a program to just do it. It is like the difference between writing a configuration file for Postfix vs Sendmail. The config file tells systemd what to do, not how to do it. It is possible to call a bash script, but this is more for cases when you really need flexibility - it isn't used just to launch a daemon with a few options and capture the PID.
It should be very straightforward to make a unit editor that just wraps a GUI around editing unit files with helpful field labels, online help, good templates/defaults and so on.
Yup. I suspect Gentoo will be one of the last distros to make systemd a default, and I think that is because openrc really is the best traditional sysvinit implementation out there. I've used systemd on some of my Gentoo VMs and when you get into edge cases it can be clunky (I couldn't get it to wait until after getting an IP to try to mount NFS, for example).
The fundamental design is very good, but it will be a while before it completely surpasses openrc. It isn't unlike ext4 vs btrfs - the latter is almost certainly the future, but the former is very much the present.
Well clearly they didn't calculate the proper cost of their risk assessment, because this breach is going to cost them a hundred mill or so in the class actions and civil lawsuits that result.
Maybe they did calculate it wrong, or maybe they didn't. The odds of me rolling 10 6'a in a row are 1:60M. Now, suppose I roll 10 times and they all come up 6's - does that mean that I miscalculated?
That's the problem with these sorts of issues - the odds of them happening are generally very low, but the impact is high. That means that if you protect against them you lose money compared to all your competitors who don't protect against them. Most likely none of you will have any issues, making the person who decided to spend money beefing up security look dumb.
Low-probability issues tend to matter on the big scale. Most likely SOME company will have a high-profile data security issue in the next year or two. The problem is that on the micro scale it is not very likely that any particular company will have a problem.
He's a suspect in a crime... Since when do suspects get to set conditions for interviews?
Since the moment he left their jurisdiction and entered the protection of another sovereign country.
Sure, they can choose not to negotiate, but that doesn't really mean that he has to capitulate...
Specifically, what laws are you talking about that were broken?
Uh, the 4th amendment? And if they didn't break any laws it represents a defect in the laws more than anything else.