There is a standing international law where all countries are financial liable for all the actions of their government regardless of how corrupt they are. So for example prosecute Bush Cheney and co for illegal entry to the Iraq war, win the case and immediately get sued by every US family (and allies) whose family member died in a illegal war, 4,200 odd, times by ten million dollars 42 billion dollars now to make that even more interesting add civil suits coming out of Iraq. Send Bush Cheney and Co to prison for torture and murder, something on the order of a thousand people and a ten billion goes down the drain.
In fact pretty much where ever you look people have been hurt and killed all over the world by the corruption of the US government under the republicans both the administration and in the congress and the senate. You pretty much always end up having to pay billions of dollars in civil damages, something the US can't afford in the current economic climate. In doing so it is something that immediately brands them as unjust and as accessories to the crimes of the previous administration for failing to prosecute them.
As it turns out the likely safest route is to go whole hog and charge specific members with treason for the overall destructiveness and corruption of that administration. That way all their criminal activities just become evidence for the greater crime rather than convictions for the lesser crimes and, you can bury some things for reasons of national security (pardon the pun). Obama and his administration are stuck in between a rock and a hard place. Prosecute and possibly cost the US billions in civil damages, don't prosecute and be immediately tarred by the previous administrations corruption and that is the only thing they will be remembered for, that and for inviting even worse administration to appear in the future, after all Bush Cheney and Co got away with what they did, how much more corrupt can future administrations be.
It is closed source code. It only has to be good enough to just barely work. No employee takes it upon themselves to improve modules for free because they want to or because they want to publicly demonstrate their skills. A back end bean counter decides whether to spend money on improving code or not. Questions are 'does it work now', 'will the typical end user notice how bad it is', 'is it a security risk - we will get blamed for', 'can we charge for the improvement', 'can we patent the improvement', 'can we steal 'er' borrow somebody else's code' and of course last but not least 'how much will it cost'. So bad code survives far longer in closed source software than it does in open source software it can even last decades.
Don't over exaggerate the internet. It is simply a digital network with open access. What is happening is the internet basically illuminates the difference between a radio station, a televisions station and a newspaper. They all have web sites and they compete with web only sites for viewer numbers.
So streamlining, modern media companies will run having all those segments covered, they will be a newspaper, a radio stations, a tv station and a website.
They will have to compete on a global basis, even more so in the future with automated 'accurate' translation services. The best way to think of a web sites is a real estate, your create value on that page view by providing quality information that end users are interested in, now as you replace content with advertising you devalue that view and are forced to charge less for it to advertisers, so it is a careful balancing act. How much you spend on creating content, how much add space on a page, how much you charge for that add space and all of this in a very competitive environment.
So competitive you have to compete against people giving away free specialised content because they enjoy to so or manufacturers who advertise direct by creating specialised web sites to draw the end user directly to them. So you also will have companies that produce content and don't make it available directly to the public but sell it to others who base their web site on it and advertising around it.
Boils down too, no journalists and no reporters and you will lose market share hand over fist to companies that can produce better quality content which attracts end users who in turn attract advertisers. Also if you B$ on your content, you will get caught as people can now compare information from all over the web. Get caught lying too often and you will perish, regardless of how big you are.
What this letter really does highlight is M$'s willingness to take on bad press to collect money from workers it has fired. The revenues have go to be looking pretty poor for them accept the bad publicity and attempt to claw back money that up till now would have been a minuscule percentage. Better to swallow the loss than expose your company to the public as being so desperate they need to take money back from fired employees.
The depression will eliminate all upgrades and companies are not going to throw away money on pointless service and support contracts from M$ that only real pay for pointless upgrades and provide no real service and support. It would be interesting to find out how bad they are really doing, especially as most governments around the world are leaning towards open source so they can demonstrate to the public how much money they are saving during a depression and that they are not wasting a tax payer funded stimulus on making billionaires even richer.
Three quarters of the atmosphere's mass is within 11 km (6.8 mi; 36,000 ft) of the surface. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_atmosphere. Bet I could readily set you on fire with 100,000 m2 of mirrors at that range, even at sea level.
Do it the cheapest way possible, this will be the third time I covered this very same point. Implement large scale mirror arrays on earth and reflect solar light back into orbit, the focal point of all those mirrors, many thousands of square metres of mirror can readily vaporise all the debris and the really effective part of using a distributed array is that anything above or below the focal point will only get a few mirrors worth of reflected light while those pieces at the focal can get hundreds of thousands of mirrors worth. Energy input required, just sufficient to control the facing of the mirrors as well as of course radar to target all orbiting junk.
So Federal sales taxes, where all revenue goes back to the state on a per capita basis and all the US states can sit down together and nut out the appropriate sales tax rates upon the various items, from essentials (food,water 0-5 percent), to basic necessities (energy, books, digital content, clothing, furniture 5-15 percent), luxuries (high pollution ostentatious goods, jewellery, luxury cars, mansions, luxury yachts etc etc 25-100%).
Books and digital content go in basic necessities because it is difficult to differentiate between educational content and entertainment except of course some content of a more 'exposed' variety would obviously not belong in this category.
The previous versions of kubuntu were pretty good and it is just that the latest version of KDE got released a bit too early and the latest version of gnome is really quite good. There is a definite shift from Kubuntu to Ubuntu and Canonical are simply shifting their development efforts to match current user preference. The forums at Canonicals are an important part of the development process and that make adapt the efforts pretty rapidly to changes of preference community. So simply try out the latest version of Ubuntu and see how you go.
The more important issue is, it is just a wee bit too deep. For it to have sunk so deep, would have required some massive tectonic forces and generated massive tidal waves, of the mass extinction variety, just wee bit unrealistic.
The best model I like for Atlantis is as an ice age civilisation. A timber based coastal civilisation spread around the periphery of the Atlantic ocean, mainly focused at river mouths, so evidence for them would be not deeper than 150 metres. So rising sea levels destroyed their civilisation and moving inland would have resulted in violet clashes with inland savages who also would have been suffering from the enormous floods from melting miles deep ice caps.
The catch with finding evidence of their existence, the transition of the structures through the surf zone of rising seas, from above water to below water, the waves pounding any evidence into oblivion. Possible their docks and temples might have been crafted from stone and possibly have survived, just buried beneath 10,000 years of silt.
It is a strange thing, but you must always remember we are at the high water mark and over the last couple of million years, the planet spends most of it's time with the seas more than a 120 metres shallower and shore line quite a few kilometres further out than the current shore line. So to look for Atlantis, first you have to find the buried river mouths, establish a grid and start analysing thousands of bore logs to see what you can find, perhaps sub-sea floor underwater sonar might help you find larger stone structures, if they are there.
In most of the world that is untrue, a EULA as a post purchase agreement has no legal value, is just a bluff and can be readily ignored. Now because I know that to be true, I do not typical bother to read EULAs as it is just a waste of time as it has no legal weight, click, sure I'll click, rather pointless as the contract established at purchase is the only one I am bound to and any contract post purchase is meaningless.
At the end of the day, they provide 'unedited' lists of torrents, they neither check nor review any of them as that is completely outside the business aims, no different to a carrier the provide the wire. The must pursue those people that copy the copyrighted content, and then distribute it for a profit, that is the whole principle of copyright law. In reality the worst thing they can say about them is their choice of name, 'The Pirate Bay', this tends to demonstrate intent. The only real defence for the choice of name was they specifically choose to to mock old world publishing companies and their copyright paranoia, with new world publishing techniques for a new style of published works, the various creative commons licences, open source and public domain works.
So they are just part of the distribution chain to get creative commons work, open source and public domain, for the collective effort of everybody involved in it's production, the constant exchange of work from creator to creator, that a subversive element choose to subvert a portion digital exchange for their own purposed is hardly their fault. The real threat to the publishers is not the copying of copyrighted content but all that copylefted content freely available that out competes their 19th century distribution model.
The reality is, this court is all about prosecuting them for the name they choose for their domain and nothing else, so is calling yourself 'The Pirate Bay' enough to send you to jail or not? Perhaps there also is a baseball in Pittsburgh that should be joining them on trial do a quick web search and you will find there are tens of thousands of other companies that also choose to use that name.
As long as the system is open. Problem with digital evidence collected on such a wide basis, is the external view of you day can be selectively edited to present what ever they want to present and any information that may work in your defence is not made available. Where many elected officials are involved in the legal system and the pressure is on them to get convictions, whether the individuals involved are guilty or innocent, be very careful about how much additional power you give them.
If politician and law enforcement are so hot on surveillance lets start with them first. What would be wrong with a web cam in every politician's office monitoring their actions and accessible by the general public, after all they are meant to be working for the public so the public should be able to supervise them. The benefits of dash cam in police vehicles has been demonstrated, (although some thugs in uniform seem to develop a mental block and forget their actions are being recorded), so the system should be extended to a cap/hat/helmet cam, perhaps with a camera mounted to their head, they wont forget it is there and will adjust their behaviour accordingly.
You know the saying, who watches they watchers, everybody else. So before they start trying to surveil the public 24/7/365, let's test the system out on them first.
What you need to do is compare state based police forces in modern democratic countries to county based police forces, you will see that state based tend to be less corrupt, as officers are transferred around the state upon a regular basis reducing the opportunity for long term questionable associations to form and it gives the opportunity to 'insert' internal affairs officers in areas where corruption is suspected (undercover).
With county based policing the county is always tempted to bend the law to protect itself from civil suits even when it knows full well that the police officers in question are corrupt or abusive. It is better that the local county favours the local community in disputes with law enforcement and it takes politics completely out of 'local' law enforcement. Politics and law enforcement do not mix well as has been amply demonstrated in US in the last eight years. Simply better and more effective checks and balances to minimise corruption.
Well in the case he most likely is guilty, of being a bit of a control freak. After having read the complaint, it seems much more like he over stepped his bounds and certainly did not display the best attributes of a system administrator and became far to bound in achieving perfection on 'his' network (in terms of ownership of effort) and became paranoid about it, it would seem from the interview that his psychological state has stabilised since he is no longer up pressure to maintain security of the system and responsibility that he obviously took far to seriously (life or death) and became paranoid about it.
So definitely a breakdown in communications and personality clashes as a result but hardly a criminal offence or even criminal intent. At the very least a temporary mental aberration and paranoid behaviour as a result of attempting to maintain network security is a reasonable defence. One needs to develop a sense of humour when it comes to network admin, one thing I did to relieve the stresses was to print out a large format copy of the Windows EULA and put it on the wall next to my desk. What you expect me to keep this network running, just look at the warranty put out by the manufacturer of the operating system you are using, it is a miracle I can get it to work at all;D.
Ultimately the Vista downgrade to Xp is a 'LIE'. M$ get's to lie to it's investors about the success of Vista and hide Ballmer's failure. M$ gets to lie to customers about the acceptability of Vista as an OS. M$ get's to cheat on support for XP which is what the customer is really after and even charges a premium for it. M$ get's to lie about what the customers views as a downgrade, clearly from a customer perspective Vista and Windows version 7 are a downgrade from XP and even win2kPRO.
At the very least M$ should be forced to offer all versions of XP and even win2kpro updated, OEM and retail boxes and let the customers decide, as a convicted monopolist it is the only fair remedy.
As far as M$ investors are concerned it is the only reasonable way by which they can gauge Ballmer's failure and how much of the shareholders money was wasted upon Ballmer's failed version of the windows operating system.
In some countries no agreements can exist beyond the point of purchase, even then all conditions must be clearly visible at the point of sale. So an EULA can only existing if it is printed on the outside of the box, even inside the box is a fail and there are evens laws governing the size of the text, let alone buried changeable digital formats, or attempting to change the agree when patches for faults are supplied.
Only where laws have been corrupted has the EULA any force in law as it completely ignores the customers additional costs to purchase the goods and the return of the goods should they disagree with a post purchase agreement. Example drive to the store, time in store, return home, install software, disagree with the post purchase contract, uninstall software, return goods to store. The customer is just as entitled to be paid for their time and costs as the seller ie. an EULA is 100% prejudicial law as it is blatantly prejudiced against the costs of one party of the contract and only the most corporate corrupted legal jurisdictions would implement it.
In this case police involvement was appropriate as it appeasr in the report that the school was unable to control the behaviour of the student by non-physical means.
What is becoming obvious, is as result of repeated highly visible incedents of excessive fore being used by polce fore personal, people are becoming reluctant to call them and don't want them in contact with their children. This is a deplorable state of affairs, something must be down to increase the quality and behaviour of the police force, when parents no longer trust the police to be in contact with their children.
The underpaid low IQ thugs have to be winnowed from the police and likely policing should be shifted from a city or town basis to a state basis. Allowing more extensive training and a far more uniform application of the law. This has the advantage of the city or town coming to the defence of the individual against abusive policing, as it is the state that gets sued, not the county.
The idea is just wrong. The very concept of local and state planning requirements puts the external view of your property as owned by the community around you, as they are the ones who must see it and their property values in turn are affected by it. This goes for commercial as well as residential and of course government properties. Anybody can see as it is on public display and anybody by extension can preserve a memory of it either upon a biological, digital or printed form.
Google certainly should be required to blank out parts of the image that show internal views, perhaps even people and vehicle registration plates but the external view of your property is something that is on show to the public. A blatant grab for money, mainly by the lawyer who of course profited by their 'advice' to their client. In Australia google was given a hard time for missing streets, this likely does relate to the greater sense of community in Australia and far stricter local and state planning controls and a much more developed idea of community ownership of the shared street scape.
I see you missed the bits about adding a fuel line to a regular jetpack or sinking your own boat;). I could of course add this http://alp-aksu.com/parasail_equipment.html but why do it the cheap simple way when you could spend $100,000 dollars and if you want to avoid the whole silly boat thing http://barnettrotorcraft.com/Barnett123006/J4B2_Prices.html and it is without doubt going to be a whole lot more fuel efficient and get you up just a wee bit higher then strap a nozzle on a hose to your back solution. I think someone has been watching way too much three stooges (a various other slapstick comedy bits, you know, the clown on the end of a fire hose bit).
If your really serious about reducing energy waste and the production of pollution, then a carbon tax needs to be more accurately directed. First calculate the average persons use and if your use exceeds that, then you should be paying more tax to clean it up, it you use ten times the average then you should pay 100 times the tax, so private jets, luxury yachts, and mansions, all massive consumers of energy and producers of pollution, should come with a massive tax burden, want to be a 'pollution pus hog', then you should pay for other people having to put up with and clean up after your toxic lifestyle.
A simple example of Vista DRM. I tested it with CD/DVD burning software (all default install from Dell), it ran with a HDisk monitoring software, monitoring all content on 'my' hdisk drive. Not wanting to run a service which sucked up cycles or monitored my HDisk drive against me rather than for me (my hardware, my software, my electricity and my time), I disabled it, Vista immediately went into reduced functionality mode, disabled the control panel, parts of windows explorer and internet explorer (I wasn't actually using IE, I just tested it to see what is does in reduced functionality mode and which parts of the windows GUI which are actually part of IE, were now broken) and broke the internet connection, all with zero warning and no notification. So Vista, DRM'ed up the wazoo and hiding it. Several hours (slow install, updates and patches etc) latter Vista was gone and XP was on there to play games, 20 minutes after that Ubuntu was on there, for work and of course to control, repair and backup bits of XP as necessary.
The reality is this 'er' jet pack has no real practical application at all. Can't make the hose longer, as you have to lift the weight of a large bore hose and the water within it. It would be far simpler to fit a fire resistant small bore hose attached to a small pump and fuel tank on the ground to a regular jet pack.
Only real use for the silly thing, bored rich people who want to have some fun while watering their lawns, as long as they have a canal down the middle of their paddock. One warning on the device, absolutely do not hover over your own boat because when it fills full of water and sinks, so will you;).
Perhaps this quote from the article will cheer you up "No charges have been filed against executives of the detention centers.". Now if that is not a 'WTF', I don't know what is, after to all, they were just giving the judges a percentage of the profits and, it was their idea and they were the ones who corrupted the system.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides there is a more interesting bit off the coast of North Carolina at 3416'24.68"N 76 2'10.39"W, in much shallower water.
There is a standing international law where all countries are financial liable for all the actions of their government regardless of how corrupt they are. So for example prosecute Bush Cheney and co for illegal entry to the Iraq war, win the case and immediately get sued by every US family (and allies) whose family member died in a illegal war, 4,200 odd, times by ten million dollars 42 billion dollars now to make that even more interesting add civil suits coming out of Iraq. Send Bush Cheney and Co to prison for torture and murder, something on the order of a thousand people and a ten billion goes down the drain.
In fact pretty much where ever you look people have been hurt and killed all over the world by the corruption of the US government under the republicans both the administration and in the congress and the senate. You pretty much always end up having to pay billions of dollars in civil damages, something the US can't afford in the current economic climate. In doing so it is something that immediately brands them as unjust and as accessories to the crimes of the previous administration for failing to prosecute them.
As it turns out the likely safest route is to go whole hog and charge specific members with treason for the overall destructiveness and corruption of that administration. That way all their criminal activities just become evidence for the greater crime rather than convictions for the lesser crimes and, you can bury some things for reasons of national security (pardon the pun). Obama and his administration are stuck in between a rock and a hard place. Prosecute and possibly cost the US billions in civil damages, don't prosecute and be immediately tarred by the previous administrations corruption and that is the only thing they will be remembered for, that and for inviting even worse administration to appear in the future, after all Bush Cheney and Co got away with what they did, how much more corrupt can future administrations be.
It is closed source code. It only has to be good enough to just barely work. No employee takes it upon themselves to improve modules for free because they want to or because they want to publicly demonstrate their skills. A back end bean counter decides whether to spend money on improving code or not. Questions are 'does it work now', 'will the typical end user notice how bad it is', 'is it a security risk - we will get blamed for', 'can we charge for the improvement', 'can we patent the improvement', 'can we steal 'er' borrow somebody else's code' and of course last but not least 'how much will it cost'. So bad code survives far longer in closed source software than it does in open source software it can even last decades.
Don't over exaggerate the internet. It is simply a digital network with open access. What is happening is the internet basically illuminates the difference between a radio station, a televisions station and a newspaper. They all have web sites and they compete with web only sites for viewer numbers.
So streamlining, modern media companies will run having all those segments covered, they will be a newspaper, a radio stations, a tv station and a website.
They will have to compete on a global basis, even more so in the future with automated 'accurate' translation services. The best way to think of a web sites is a real estate, your create value on that page view by providing quality information that end users are interested in, now as you replace content with advertising you devalue that view and are forced to charge less for it to advertisers, so it is a careful balancing act. How much you spend on creating content, how much add space on a page, how much you charge for that add space and all of this in a very competitive environment.
So competitive you have to compete against people giving away free specialised content because they enjoy to so or manufacturers who advertise direct by creating specialised web sites to draw the end user directly to them. So you also will have companies that produce content and don't make it available directly to the public but sell it to others who base their web site on it and advertising around it.
Boils down too, no journalists and no reporters and you will lose market share hand over fist to companies that can produce better quality content which attracts end users who in turn attract advertisers. Also if you B$ on your content, you will get caught as people can now compare information from all over the web. Get caught lying too often and you will perish, regardless of how big you are.
What this letter really does highlight is M$'s willingness to take on bad press to collect money from workers it has fired. The revenues have go to be looking pretty poor for them accept the bad publicity and attempt to claw back money that up till now would have been a minuscule percentage. Better to swallow the loss than expose your company to the public as being so desperate they need to take money back from fired employees.
The depression will eliminate all upgrades and companies are not going to throw away money on pointless service and support contracts from M$ that only real pay for pointless upgrades and provide no real service and support. It would be interesting to find out how bad they are really doing, especially as most governments around the world are leaning towards open source so they can demonstrate to the public how much money they are saving during a depression and that they are not wasting a tax payer funded stimulus on making billionaires even richer.
Three quarters of the atmosphere's mass is within 11 km (6.8 mi; 36,000 ft) of the surface. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_atmosphere. Bet I could readily set you on fire with 100,000 m2 of mirrors at that range, even at sea level.
Would that be enough money to fight the court case or enough money to satisfy the judge?
Do it the cheapest way possible, this will be the third time I covered this very same point. Implement large scale mirror arrays on earth and reflect solar light back into orbit, the focal point of all those mirrors, many thousands of square metres of mirror can readily vaporise all the debris and the really effective part of using a distributed array is that anything above or below the focal point will only get a few mirrors worth of reflected light while those pieces at the focal can get hundreds of thousands of mirrors worth. Energy input required, just sufficient to control the facing of the mirrors as well as of course radar to target all orbiting junk.
So Federal sales taxes, where all revenue goes back to the state on a per capita basis and all the US states can sit down together and nut out the appropriate sales tax rates upon the various items, from essentials (food,water 0-5 percent), to basic necessities (energy, books, digital content, clothing, furniture 5-15 percent), luxuries (high pollution ostentatious goods, jewellery, luxury cars, mansions, luxury yachts etc etc 25-100%).
Books and digital content go in basic necessities because it is difficult to differentiate between educational content and entertainment except of course some content of a more 'exposed' variety would obviously not belong in this category.
The previous versions of kubuntu were pretty good and it is just that the latest version of KDE got released a bit too early and the latest version of gnome is really quite good. There is a definite shift from Kubuntu to Ubuntu and Canonical are simply shifting their development efforts to match current user preference. The forums at Canonicals are an important part of the development process and that make adapt the efforts pretty rapidly to changes of preference community. So simply try out the latest version of Ubuntu and see how you go.
The more important issue is, it is just a wee bit too deep. For it to have sunk so deep, would have required some massive tectonic forces and generated massive tidal waves, of the mass extinction variety, just wee bit unrealistic.
The best model I like for Atlantis is as an ice age civilisation. A timber based coastal civilisation spread around the periphery of the Atlantic ocean, mainly focused at river mouths, so evidence for them would be not deeper than 150 metres. So rising sea levels destroyed their civilisation and moving inland would have resulted in violet clashes with inland savages who also would have been suffering from the enormous floods from melting miles deep ice caps.
The catch with finding evidence of their existence, the transition of the structures through the surf zone of rising seas, from above water to below water, the waves pounding any evidence into oblivion. Possible their docks and temples might have been crafted from stone and possibly have survived, just buried beneath 10,000 years of silt.
It is a strange thing, but you must always remember we are at the high water mark and over the last couple of million years, the planet spends most of it's time with the seas more than a 120 metres shallower and shore line quite a few kilometres further out than the current shore line. So to look for Atlantis, first you have to find the buried river mouths, establish a grid and start analysing thousands of bore logs to see what you can find, perhaps sub-sea floor underwater sonar might help you find larger stone structures, if they are there.
In most of the world that is untrue, a EULA as a post purchase agreement has no legal value, is just a bluff and can be readily ignored. Now because I know that to be true, I do not typical bother to read EULAs as it is just a waste of time as it has no legal weight, click, sure I'll click, rather pointless as the contract established at purchase is the only one I am bound to and any contract post purchase is meaningless.
At the end of the day, they provide 'unedited' lists of torrents, they neither check nor review any of them as that is completely outside the business aims, no different to a carrier the provide the wire. The must pursue those people that copy the copyrighted content, and then distribute it for a profit, that is the whole principle of copyright law. In reality the worst thing they can say about them is their choice of name, 'The Pirate Bay', this tends to demonstrate intent. The only real defence for the choice of name was they specifically choose to to mock old world publishing companies and their copyright paranoia, with new world publishing techniques for a new style of published works, the various creative commons licences, open source and public domain works.
So they are just part of the distribution chain to get creative commons work, open source and public domain, for the collective effort of everybody involved in it's production, the constant exchange of work from creator to creator, that a subversive element choose to subvert a portion digital exchange for their own purposed is hardly their fault. The real threat to the publishers is not the copying of copyrighted content but all that copylefted content freely available that out competes their 19th century distribution model.
The reality is, this court is all about prosecuting them for the name they choose for their domain and nothing else, so is calling yourself 'The Pirate Bay' enough to send you to jail or not? Perhaps there also is a baseball in Pittsburgh that should be joining them on trial do a quick web search and you will find there are tens of thousands of other companies that also choose to use that name.
As long as the system is open. Problem with digital evidence collected on such a wide basis, is the external view of you day can be selectively edited to present what ever they want to present and any information that may work in your defence is not made available. Where many elected officials are involved in the legal system and the pressure is on them to get convictions, whether the individuals involved are guilty or innocent, be very careful about how much additional power you give them.
If politician and law enforcement are so hot on surveillance lets start with them first. What would be wrong with a web cam in every politician's office monitoring their actions and accessible by the general public, after all they are meant to be working for the public so the public should be able to supervise them. The benefits of dash cam in police vehicles has been demonstrated, (although some thugs in uniform seem to develop a mental block and forget their actions are being recorded), so the system should be extended to a cap/hat/helmet cam, perhaps with a camera mounted to their head, they wont forget it is there and will adjust their behaviour accordingly.
You know the saying, who watches they watchers, everybody else. So before they start trying to surveil the public 24/7/365, let's test the system out on them first.
What you need to do is compare state based police forces in modern democratic countries to county based police forces, you will see that state based tend to be less corrupt, as officers are transferred around the state upon a regular basis reducing the opportunity for long term questionable associations to form and it gives the opportunity to 'insert' internal affairs officers in areas where corruption is suspected (undercover).
With county based policing the county is always tempted to bend the law to protect itself from civil suits even when it knows full well that the police officers in question are corrupt or abusive. It is better that the local county favours the local community in disputes with law enforcement and it takes politics completely out of 'local' law enforcement. Politics and law enforcement do not mix well as has been amply demonstrated in US in the last eight years. Simply better and more effective checks and balances to minimise corruption.
Well in the case he most likely is guilty, of being a bit of a control freak. After having read the complaint, it seems much more like he over stepped his bounds and certainly did not display the best attributes of a system administrator and became far to bound in achieving perfection on 'his' network (in terms of ownership of effort) and became paranoid about it, it would seem from the interview that his psychological state has stabilised since he is no longer up pressure to maintain security of the system and responsibility that he obviously took far to seriously (life or death) and became paranoid about it.
So definitely a breakdown in communications and personality clashes as a result but hardly a criminal offence or even criminal intent. At the very least a temporary mental aberration and paranoid behaviour as a result of attempting to maintain network security is a reasonable defence. One needs to develop a sense of humour when it comes to network admin, one thing I did to relieve the stresses was to print out a large format copy of the Windows EULA and put it on the wall next to my desk. What you expect me to keep this network running, just look at the warranty put out by the manufacturer of the operating system you are using, it is a miracle I can get it to work at all ;D.
Ultimately the Vista downgrade to Xp is a 'LIE'. M$ get's to lie to it's investors about the success of Vista and hide Ballmer's failure. M$ gets to lie to customers about the acceptability of Vista as an OS. M$ get's to cheat on support for XP which is what the customer is really after and even charges a premium for it. M$ get's to lie about what the customers views as a downgrade, clearly from a customer perspective Vista and Windows version 7 are a downgrade from XP and even win2kPRO.
At the very least M$ should be forced to offer all versions of XP and even win2kpro updated, OEM and retail boxes and let the customers decide, as a convicted monopolist it is the only fair remedy.
As far as M$ investors are concerned it is the only reasonable way by which they can gauge Ballmer's failure and how much of the shareholders money was wasted upon Ballmer's failed version of the windows operating system.
In some countries no agreements can exist beyond the point of purchase, even then all conditions must be clearly visible at the point of sale. So an EULA can only existing if it is printed on the outside of the box, even inside the box is a fail and there are evens laws governing the size of the text, let alone buried changeable digital formats, or attempting to change the agree when patches for faults are supplied.
Only where laws have been corrupted has the EULA any force in law as it completely ignores the customers additional costs to purchase the goods and the return of the goods should they disagree with a post purchase agreement. Example drive to the store, time in store, return home, install software, disagree with the post purchase contract, uninstall software, return goods to store. The customer is just as entitled to be paid for their time and costs as the seller ie. an EULA is 100% prejudicial law as it is blatantly prejudiced against the costs of one party of the contract and only the most corporate corrupted legal jurisdictions would implement it.
What is becoming obvious, is as result of repeated highly visible incedents of excessive fore being used by polce fore personal, people are becoming reluctant to call them and don't want them in contact with their children. This is a deplorable state of affairs, something must be down to increase the quality and behaviour of the police force, when parents no longer trust the police to be in contact with their children.
The underpaid low IQ thugs have to be winnowed from the police and likely policing should be shifted from a city or town basis to a state basis. Allowing more extensive training and a far more uniform application of the law. This has the advantage of the city or town coming to the defence of the individual against abusive policing, as it is the state that gets sued, not the county.
The idea is just wrong. The very concept of local and state planning requirements puts the external view of your property as owned by the community around you, as they are the ones who must see it and their property values in turn are affected by it. This goes for commercial as well as residential and of course government properties. Anybody can see as it is on public display and anybody by extension can preserve a memory of it either upon a biological, digital or printed form.
Google certainly should be required to blank out parts of the image that show internal views, perhaps even people and vehicle registration plates but the external view of your property is something that is on show to the public. A blatant grab for money, mainly by the lawyer who of course profited by their 'advice' to their client. In Australia google was given a hard time for missing streets, this likely does relate to the greater sense of community in Australia and far stricter local and state planning controls and a much more developed idea of community ownership of the shared street scape.
I see you missed the bits about adding a fuel line to a regular jetpack or sinking your own boat ;). I could of course add this http://alp-aksu.com/parasail_equipment.html but why do it the cheap simple way when you could spend $100,000 dollars and if you want to avoid the whole silly boat thing http://barnettrotorcraft.com/Barnett123006/J4B2_Prices.html and it is without doubt going to be a whole lot more fuel efficient and get you up just a wee bit higher then strap a nozzle on a hose to your back solution. I think someone has been watching way too much three stooges (a various other slapstick comedy bits, you know, the clown on the end of a fire hose bit).
If your really serious about reducing energy waste and the production of pollution, then a carbon tax needs to be more accurately directed. First calculate the average persons use and if your use exceeds that, then you should be paying more tax to clean it up, it you use ten times the average then you should pay 100 times the tax, so private jets, luxury yachts, and mansions, all massive consumers of energy and producers of pollution, should come with a massive tax burden, want to be a 'pollution pus hog', then you should pay for other people having to put up with and clean up after your toxic lifestyle.
A simple example of Vista DRM. I tested it with CD/DVD burning software (all default install from Dell), it ran with a HDisk monitoring software, monitoring all content on 'my' hdisk drive. Not wanting to run a service which sucked up cycles or monitored my HDisk drive against me rather than for me (my hardware, my software, my electricity and my time), I disabled it, Vista immediately went into reduced functionality mode, disabled the control panel, parts of windows explorer and internet explorer (I wasn't actually using IE, I just tested it to see what is does in reduced functionality mode and which parts of the windows GUI which are actually part of IE, were now broken) and broke the internet connection, all with zero warning and no notification. So Vista, DRM'ed up the wazoo and hiding it. Several hours (slow install, updates and patches etc) latter Vista was gone and XP was on there to play games, 20 minutes after that Ubuntu was on there, for work and of course to control, repair and backup bits of XP as necessary.
Monopoly, plus class action law suit are pretty much guaranteed to solve this particular problem.
Only real use for the silly thing, bored rich people who want to have some fun while watering their lawns, as long as they have a canal down the middle of their paddock. One warning on the device, absolutely do not hover over your own boat because when it fills full of water and sinks, so will you ;).
Perhaps this quote from the article will cheer you up "No charges have been filed against executives of the detention centers.". Now if that is not a 'WTF', I don't know what is, after to all, they were just giving the judges a percentage of the profits and, it was their idea and they were the ones who corrupted the system.