The US system was originally an attempt to turn older, European style copyright laws on their heads. The thinking of the founding fathers on this is more analogous to RMS's or Eldred's positions than many know. I'm amazed that all life+ legislation isn't considered unconstitutional on the transfer of rights vrs manufacture of rights conflict alone (but then IANAL - some of them swallow the logical contradiction without blinking).
If the people doing the assesement cut ethical corners to get this contract, then they probably will cut corners in performing this contract. Give the company six months or so, then contact some of your fellow employees who are still there and, at a convenient point in the conversation, steer it towards whether the new service is doing its job well. If the network has been down with a virus five ties in the last six months or so, the board members or minor stock holders might be very interested in your opinion. You won't get your job back, and unless you handle it delicately, you might just get branded as a trouble maker, but if you can stay focused and professional, you might get the people who actually made the decision to join you on unemployment.
In a case like your not entrapment example, the "evidence suggesting" is probably the dealer's being able to quickly lay his hands on some crack. If he can get it, he must have been keeping connections with other dealers, at the least. That's like the question of probable cause. We don't require the police to have certain cause for many actions, only probable.
The real question is not whether the RIAA needs to be restrained from entrapment, it's whether testimony from RIAA agents posing as file sharers or spreading trojans is tainted testimony, in the same way as testimony from known criminals offered in exchange for reduction of sentence. If it is, the DA prosecuting the case didn't have probable cause, or evidence suggesting an inclination. If the DA took the word of someone who admitted to spreading a malicious program in explaining how they got the evidence, the issue becomes selective prosecution, as well.
There's also the definition of agent of the government. A policeman is an agent, but so is a unpaid minor who volunteers to attempt to purchase boose as part of a sting operation. Just when are RIAA employees acting on behalf of their employer, and when are they acting as agents of the government? If I were a federal law enforcement agency director, I'd be very careful in accepting the RIAA's "help" because it would be my bureau that would be a risk for any entrapment proceedings resulting if these untrained non-agents overstep the limits.
You can tell a someone who knows nothing about the constitution or the legal system is in denial of their ignorance, when he supports turning something that wasn't even a crime ten years ago into one, then conflates that crime with stealing, then claims that any who disagree with him are nitpickers.
Look, congress agrees that copyright violation isn't theft. The supreme court agrees copyright violation isn't theft. If you've got the guts to write them letters demanding that they lump copyright law in the same section as theft law, or you will organize recall petitions, then go do it, and afterwards you can preach at the rest of us. Otherwise, your just going for a cheap sense of moral superiority that is unsupported by the facts.
And by the time they can get together an execution, Theoden has been reawakened by Gandalf. What are you expecting here? That a death sentence means everyone with a sword is supposed to jump at Eomer on sight, risking immediate death themselves rather pause to get organized and risk letting him live another 15 minutes? That a King has less power to commute the sentence his servant passed than a modern day president? That no one in Rohan has noticed that this death sentence didn't come from the king but that slimy guy who's been pushing everyone around, and from what they know of Eomer, he's a stand-up guy?
One of the posters I've noticed here has a sig that reads (aproximately) "I am not a Consumer, I am a Citizen of this country!". He could probably say this better than I could, but here goes.
A recent/. story was about billboards that pick up on what radio station a driver is listening to, and fine tune advertising acordingly. Those drivers count as consumers for that article. "What makes them consumers?" is my question.
If I turn on a TV, I know to expect commercials. The programs are paid for by commercials. So, unless I was ignorant of some rather basic facts, it could be argued that I have willingly entered a mode of being a consumer, or at least a potential consumer.
Now what's the equivalent for the billboard? I got in a car and traveled. That billboard may or may not pay some tax that may or may not go to help make the road more affordable, given differing state policies, but it surely isn't adding much to the 38c/gallon in state and federal taxes I'm paying for gas.
So, driving down the road is more like HBO than broadcast TV, but I still count as a consumer just the same. I don't purchase things 24 hours a day, but to the people who started calling me a consumer, I am one, 24 hours a day. The opposite of consumption is production. I lead a productive life, and create more than I consume (that's why I am worth taxing). Even when I am doing the opposite of consuming, to these people, I'm a consumer. Maybe that's why it's fundamentally insulting.
It's a fundamental, but taking it out of a broader context is something that has been developing among MBAs and pro-capitalism speakers lately. It's like the principle that there is no cap on potential investment gains. That only makes real sense if two other principles are included - 1. There is no cap on losses either - 2. Even though gain can go arbitrarily high, there are always market forces trying to bring it into line with the rest of the economy.
What the market will bear for a single quarter is not what the market will bear. What the market will bear with the government providing police to enforce it isn't what the market will bear (and isn't capitalism either once the government tries to supercede the invisible hand).
There's a largish difference between symbolism and allegory. One of JRRT's efforts in LOTR seems to have been a recapituation of early English Lit. Since much of that is told from a Christian perpective, the symbolism needs to be noticible there. Tolkien may have wanted to avoid making his own work allegory, but he still used works that had their own allegorical elements. Boromer's death is only derived from sources such as the Song of Roland, not slavishly copied, but Song of Roland has its own allegory inside, and it would be hard, probably impossible to leave all of that out without losing the juice of it.
In the same way, there's pagan symbolism in Tom Bombadill, and it would have been a mistake to Christianise him (or to base him on the watered-down Xian versions of English Faery tales instead of the older pagan versions), but since Bombadill was dropped for the film, we don't have to concern ourselves with whether any part of him would be allegorical.
It's also worth noting that several people, such as critic Edmund Wilson and author Michael Moorcock have simply said that, for someone who doesn't like allegory, Tolkien let an awful lot slip in.
"A patent, historically, applied to a new device or a new way of doing something (there are process patents, but typically they apply to things like "here's what you need to do to make chemical X")."
When a process for producing medical grade acytlsalycilic acid was first developed, a major case broke out over whether the patent office could grant a new patent for something that was already produceable by a recognized process, simply because the new process resulted in fewer impurities. The court, noting in their remarks that they relied heavily upon Aspirin in dealing with patent law cases, extended the concept of process patent in favor of Bayer.
This case is roughly a hundred years old. I hope it wasn't a bad decision that helped lead to the current problems, but I wouldn't be entirely surprised. As screwed up as patent law has been lately, there have probaly been some bad precedents set long before software patents became the issue.
I think the first poster's point is that their industrial revolution faltered, and more and more genuinely important technologies were first developed in the US. There's some truth to this, even as early as Whitney's Cotton Gin or Fulton's steamboat (especially if you look at the patent situation for all the little modifications that made such big inventions more and more practical and efficient). On the other hand, the British system still worked well enough that they were the primary inventors of Radar in WW2, so it's not all that clear cut.
Sadly, the legal precident for this may have been set by the recording industry sueing Napster. At one point, the RIAA was claiming ownership of 14,000+ pieces of intellectual property. When required to produce proof, they initially provided records of their ownership of less than a dozen items, and sought repeated delays in providing more. Unfortunately, these were granted, rather than the judge saying, for example, "99.94% of your claim is hereby rejected, and damages will be calculated based only on the items you have shown."
It appears to be one of SCO's tactics, to claim many bits of code that IBM will have to trace to another creator to refute, and so waste a lot of IBM's legal budget. Possibly, SCO is planning to do an in court fishng expedition, offering a few possible examples of infringing code and looking to see where IBM has concentrated its tracking efforts, hoping to find areas that IBM hasn't tracked very well. Eventually, there will likely be some bit of code IBM hasn't been able to track to a legitmate creative source, and SCO will pounce on that and say, "see, that proves it's ours.".
If they were at risk of either losing the whole case or having damages set at a trivially low cap after the first 999 challenges that IBM could refute, this wouldn't work, but SCO may expect to be treated like the RIAA and thus leverage the court.
Fnord! I give up. Every time we try to conquer the world, it's the same old thing. I swear two lab mice could do better. That's it, I'm quitting the Illuminated Seers of Bavaria, Berdoo chapter. Here's my pyramid shaped badge, I am so outta here. What'cha gonna do now, all you "No one quits the Illuminati" Geezers?
WMA actually has some real uses which will give it at least a small minority share. (Until Microsoft's DRM tech doubtless obliterates them, by about Longhorn). If you've ever seen an MP3 sampled at 192 or 256 K and 44 Khz stereo, for a source on analog tape or LP, Microsoft offers free (as in beer) conversion programs that will make it a WMA file about 1/5th to 1/10th the size with no significant losses. (Naturally for MS, they don't work the other way). Until a lot of home rippers realize that there is just no way to get more quality out of a source than it has, or someone writes OSS to "distill" an oversized MP3 to a smaller one, this will make WMA popular with people whose hard drives have become overly filled with oversampled old Vinyl.
Then there's the other open source way, as in "I can't code, but I will send beer, brownies, or otherwise pass the hat". Seriously, people who wnat more support for OGG or FLAC can expect some coder to have the same interest, and wait a few months, or they can try to interest more coders in doing the work. Show one who shares your taste in music how much better OGG can sound, and get him motivated. Offer to beta test, or do graphics for a GUI, or ask around until you find several people who have an interest and then put them in touch with each other. You'ld be surprised how quickly you can have that Ogg based software you want.
Given things we are just learning, from a number of fields that appear initially very far apart, I think we might be able to do some very subtle things to keep people from interpreting what they see in an undesired way, or steer them towards a desired interpretation.
I can imagine this working in a lot of ways, some good, some not so good:
You come to an intersection in a hallway. Even though there are no signs, you are normally not a person with a good bump of direction and you are deep inside a very large building, you immediately get a feeling that left leads towards the shortest route to an emergency exit. Each time you come to another junction, this feeling adjusts to the new location.
You are outside a building. There is an unlocked door there, but unless you are supposed to go inside the building, it looks so uninteresting that you ignore it. If you were actually planning to rob the building, the door looks extremely dangerous in some ill defined way.
A highway crew re-grades a stretch of interstate, and installs some new reflective edging and lane markers. Traffic flow rate increases by 50% and traffic jams during rush hour are greatly reduced. Accident rates drop. Close observation reveals that people planning to use the exits or business bypass-loop are getting over into the best lanes much sooner than before, and are somehow more prone to pick good times to pass or make lane changes.
Obviously, if this is doable, it could also be abused:
"Our country allows free emmigration. These people could leave if they wished. Unless you think they can't see the crossing gate at the border."
"It's funny, but until I made up my mind to vote for Geefler, I hadn't even noticed those new "polling place here ->" signs. They really stand out, don't they."
While all this may sound far fetched, there are already some modest examples. Disney has built a "Tiger Hunt in India" themed ride in one of its parks, and uses decorative pictograms on a mock up crumbling ancient temple to tell a story of a race who angered the generic Disney "mother earth goddess" by ecological shortsightedness. They are punished by natural disasters, and then clean up their acts and the disasters stop happening. While most visitors don't have nearly enough time to puzzle out all the pictograms consiously, supposedly this ride has the lowest littering rate of any ride in the park.
I can see how this might become a much more robust and reliable technology, but given some of the examples, I'm not at all sure I want it to. A lot of it sounds like extensions of what some advertisers are using to overcome resistance to ads, and some of it sounds Orwellian, but either way, it may be possible to go a lot further towards mind control than most expect.
Some biologists have suggested that wings can evolve only because a wing too small to get a creature off the ground can still be used like a spoiler, held at an angle where it helps force a running animal down so it can keep more traction when dodging predators or chasing prey. Possibly, that's another shade of gray.
There's a way obscurity could still be a major factor. Science right now has become extremely poly-disciplined. Even very skilled practicioners (such as Nobel prize winners), tend to think of themselves as very specific sub-classes of scientist. Instead of saying "I'm a biologist", one is likely to say "I'm a cladistic taxononomist practicing middle Jurassic focused paleo-botany". Both good theoretical science and spinning it off into technology has become increasingly a matter of teams of such specialists working together.
Suppose there really was something to some fringe research from years or decades ago. Like Tesla really did make some theretical breakthrough in coupling broadcast power and geologic effects, or those stories about the USS Eldredge have just a grain of truth to them. If any such situation dropped into obscurity, what disciplines would you look in to build the team that might bring it out?
I'm not sure about the land seizure part, but I recall watching one debate in the House of Commons where it was claimed that the British monarchy had only one remaining power with no checks and balances - the Queen can sell off the British navy at will, even if she sold every ship for 1 pound each to an enemy nation.
There's lots of evidence Saddam killed at least tens of thousands of his own people (Mass graves for example). There's equally good evidence for systematized torture, for killings specifically targeted at supressing political dissent, and lots of crimes worth the death penalty.
Re. the gassing of northern Kurds though, there's some fair evidence that this was accomplished by Iranian weapons used by Iranian commanders during the Iran/Iraq war.
The best thing here, would be for Iraq to try him and the rest of the world be willing to accept it if he is found not guilty of some of these crimes. If it's shown that he never had weapons of mass distruction, or didn't order the gassing of the Kurds, or isn't the guy who robbed that Pizza place on 34th street, he still personally ordered the execution of numerous political foes and their families, and still actually carried out some of these executions himself.
Cells ARE a way of maintaining central control without most members knowing how to get to that controller. "individual cells independant of central control" is as big an oxymoron as "Microsoft Works".
If theory 3 is even a significant part of the problem, the arrest itself won't inspire much if anything in the way of increased hostilities. Now Saddam's EXECUTION would, if the US doesn't get out quickly afterwards, and dawdling enough on turning him over might as well (but nobody really knows just how long "enough" is). I'd like to see the US move quickly in turning over Saddam. The Iraquis certainly have more of a right to try him than anyone else, and a real push to let them handle the matter so we can leave more quickly is one of the best ways the US can show they don't want to stay forever.
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The US system was originally an attempt to turn older, European style copyright laws on their heads. The thinking of the founding fathers on this is more analogous to RMS's or Eldred's positions than many know. I'm amazed that all life+ legislation isn't considered unconstitutional on the transfer of rights vrs manufacture of rights conflict alone (but then IANAL - some of them swallow the logical contradiction without blinking).
Do Moties have a lawyer caste?
(If you don't get it, Google for Niven+Pournelle+Mote).
If the people doing the assesement cut ethical corners to get this contract, then they probably will cut corners in performing this contract. Give the company six months or so, then contact some of your fellow employees who are still there and, at a convenient point in the conversation, steer it towards whether the new service is doing its job well. If the network has been down with a virus five ties in the last six months or so, the board members or minor stock holders might be very interested in your opinion. You won't get your job back, and unless you handle it delicately, you might just get branded as a trouble maker, but if you can stay focused and professional, you might get the people who actually made the decision to join you on unemployment.
In a case like your not entrapment example, the "evidence suggesting" is probably the dealer's being able to quickly lay his hands on some crack. If he can get it, he must have been keeping connections with other dealers, at the least. That's like the question of probable cause. We don't require the police to have certain cause for many actions, only probable.
The real question is not whether the RIAA needs to be restrained from entrapment, it's whether testimony from RIAA agents posing as file sharers or spreading trojans is tainted testimony, in the same way as testimony from known criminals offered in exchange for reduction of sentence. If it is, the DA prosecuting the case didn't have probable cause, or evidence suggesting an inclination. If the DA took the word of someone who admitted to spreading a malicious program in explaining how they got the evidence, the issue becomes selective prosecution, as well.
There's also the definition of agent of the government. A policeman is an agent, but so is a unpaid minor who volunteers to attempt to purchase boose as part of a sting operation. Just when are RIAA employees acting on behalf of their employer, and when are they acting as agents of the government? If I were a federal law enforcement agency director, I'd be very careful in accepting the RIAA's "help" because it would be my bureau that would be a risk for any entrapment proceedings resulting if these untrained non-agents overstep the limits.
"radioactive scrubbing bubbles."
If it's not a blooper, it sounds like product placement. I gotta get me some of those.
You can tell a someone who knows nothing about the constitution or the legal system is in denial of their ignorance, when he supports turning something that wasn't even a crime ten years ago into one, then conflates that crime with stealing, then claims that any who disagree with him are nitpickers.
Look, congress agrees that copyright violation isn't theft. The supreme court agrees copyright violation isn't theft. If you've got the guts to write them letters demanding that they lump copyright law in the same section as theft law, or you will organize recall petitions, then go do it, and afterwards you can preach at the rest of us. Otherwise, your just going for a cheap sense of moral superiority that is unsupported by the facts.
And by the time they can get together an execution, Theoden has been reawakened by Gandalf. What are you expecting here? That a death sentence means everyone with a sword is supposed to jump at Eomer on sight, risking immediate death themselves rather pause to get organized and risk letting him live another 15 minutes? That a King has less power to commute the sentence his servant passed than a modern day president? That no one in Rohan has noticed that this death sentence didn't come from the king but that slimy guy who's been pushing everyone around, and from what they know of Eomer, he's a stand-up guy?
One of the posters I've noticed here has a sig that reads (aproximately) "I am not a Consumer, I am a Citizen of this country!". He could probably say this better than I could, but here goes. /. story was about billboards that pick up on what radio station a driver is listening to, and fine tune advertising acordingly. Those drivers count as consumers for that article. "What makes them consumers?" is my question.
A recent
If I turn on a TV, I know to expect commercials. The programs are paid for by commercials. So, unless I was ignorant of some rather basic facts, it could be argued that I have willingly entered a mode of being a consumer, or at least a potential consumer.
Now what's the equivalent for the billboard? I got in a car and traveled. That billboard may or may not pay some tax that may or may not go to help make the road more affordable, given differing state policies, but it surely isn't adding much to the 38c/gallon in state and federal taxes I'm paying for gas.
So, driving down the road is more like HBO than broadcast TV, but I still count as a consumer just the same. I don't purchase things 24 hours a day, but to the people who started calling me a consumer, I am one, 24 hours a day. The opposite of consumption is production. I lead a productive life, and create more than I consume (that's why I am worth taxing). Even when I am doing the opposite of consuming, to these people, I'm a consumer. Maybe that's why it's fundamentally insulting.
It's a fundamental, but taking it out of a broader context is something that has been developing among MBAs and pro-capitalism speakers lately. It's like the principle that there is no cap on potential investment gains. That only makes real sense if two other principles are included - 1. There is no cap on losses either - 2. Even though gain can go arbitrarily high, there are always market forces trying to bring it into line with the rest of the economy.
What the market will bear for a single quarter is not what the market will bear. What the market will bear with the government providing police to enforce it isn't what the market will bear (and isn't capitalism either once the government tries to supercede the invisible hand).
There's a largish difference between symbolism and allegory.
One of JRRT's efforts in LOTR seems to have been a recapituation of early English Lit. Since much of that is told from a Christian perpective, the symbolism needs to be noticible there. Tolkien may have wanted to avoid making his own work allegory, but he still used works that had their own allegorical elements. Boromer's death is only derived from sources such as the Song of Roland, not slavishly copied, but Song of Roland has its own allegory inside, and it would be hard, probably impossible to leave all of that out without losing the juice of it.
In the same way, there's pagan symbolism in Tom Bombadill, and it would have been a mistake to Christianise him (or to base him on the watered-down Xian versions of English Faery tales instead of the older pagan versions), but since Bombadill was dropped for the film, we don't have to concern ourselves with whether any part of him would be allegorical.
It's also worth noting that several people, such as critic Edmund Wilson and author Michael Moorcock have simply said that, for someone who doesn't like allegory, Tolkien let an awful lot slip in.
"A patent, historically, applied to a new device or a new way of doing something (there are process patents, but typically they apply to things like "here's what you need to do to make chemical X")."
When a process for producing medical grade acytlsalycilic acid was first developed, a major case broke out over whether the patent office could grant a new patent for something that was already produceable by a recognized process, simply because the new process resulted in fewer impurities. The court, noting in their remarks that they relied heavily upon Aspirin in dealing with patent law cases, extended the concept of process patent in favor of Bayer.
This case is roughly a hundred years old. I hope it wasn't a bad decision that helped lead to the current problems, but I wouldn't be entirely surprised. As screwed up as patent law has been lately, there have probaly been some bad precedents set long before software patents became the issue.
I think the first poster's point is that their industrial revolution faltered, and more and more genuinely important technologies were first developed in the US. There's some truth to this, even as early as Whitney's Cotton Gin or Fulton's steamboat (especially if you look at the patent situation for all the little modifications that made such big inventions more and more practical and efficient). On the other hand, the British system still worked well enough that they were the primary inventors of Radar in WW2, so it's not all that clear cut.
Sadly, the legal precident for this may have been set by the recording industry sueing Napster. At one point, the RIAA was claiming ownership of 14,000+ pieces of intellectual property. When required to produce proof, they initially provided records of their ownership of less than a dozen items, and sought repeated delays in providing more. Unfortunately, these were granted, rather than the judge saying, for example, "99.94% of your claim is hereby rejected, and damages will be calculated based only on the items you have shown."
It appears to be one of SCO's tactics, to claim many bits of code that IBM will have to trace to another creator to refute, and so waste a lot of IBM's legal budget. Possibly, SCO is planning to do an in court fishng expedition, offering a few possible examples of infringing code and looking to see where IBM has concentrated its tracking efforts, hoping to find areas that IBM hasn't tracked very well. Eventually, there will likely be some bit of code IBM hasn't been able to track to a legitmate creative source, and SCO will pounce on that and say, "see, that proves it's ours.".
If they were at risk of either losing the whole case or having damages set at a trivially low cap after the first 999 challenges that IBM could refute, this wouldn't work, but SCO may expect to be treated like the RIAA and thus leverage the court.
Fnord! I give up. Every time we try to conquer the world, it's the same old thing. I swear two lab mice could do better. That's it, I'm quitting the Illuminated Seers of Bavaria, Berdoo chapter. Here's my pyramid shaped badge, I am so outta here. What'cha gonna do now, all you "No one quits the Illuminati" Geezers?
WMA actually has some real uses which will give it at least a small minority share. (Until Microsoft's DRM tech doubtless obliterates them, by about Longhorn). If you've ever seen an MP3 sampled at 192 or 256 K and 44 Khz stereo, for a source on analog tape or LP, Microsoft offers free (as in beer) conversion programs that will make it a WMA file about 1/5th to 1/10th the size with no significant losses. (Naturally for MS, they don't work the other way). Until a lot of home rippers realize that there is just no way to get more quality out of a source than it has, or someone writes OSS to "distill" an oversized MP3 to a smaller one, this will make WMA popular with people whose hard drives have become overly filled with oversampled old Vinyl.
Then there's the other open source way, as in "I can't code, but I will send beer, brownies, or otherwise pass the hat". Seriously, people who wnat more support for OGG or FLAC can expect some coder to have the same interest, and wait a few months, or they can try to interest more coders in doing the work. Show one who shares your taste in music how much better OGG can sound, and get him motivated. Offer to beta test, or do graphics for a GUI, or ask around until you find several people who have an interest and then put them in touch with each other. You'ld be surprised how quickly you can have that Ogg based software you want.
And often, it's a novel use of the word "music" as well.
Given things we are just learning, from a number of fields that appear initially very far apart, I think we might be able to do some very subtle things to keep people from interpreting what they see in an undesired way, or steer them towards a desired interpretation.
I can imagine this working in a lot of ways, some good, some not so good:
You come to an intersection in a hallway. Even though there are no signs, you are normally not a person with a good bump of direction and you are deep inside a very large building, you immediately get a feeling that left leads towards the shortest route to an emergency exit. Each time you come to another junction, this feeling adjusts to the new location.
You are outside a building. There is an unlocked door there, but unless you are supposed to go inside the building, it looks so uninteresting that you ignore it. If you were actually planning to rob the building, the door looks extremely dangerous in some ill defined way.
A highway crew re-grades a stretch of interstate, and installs some new reflective edging and lane markers. Traffic flow rate increases by 50% and traffic jams during rush hour are greatly reduced. Accident rates drop. Close observation reveals that people planning to use the exits or business bypass-loop are getting over into the best lanes much sooner than before, and are somehow more prone to pick good times to pass or make lane changes.
Obviously, if this is doable, it could also be abused:
"Our country allows free emmigration. These people could leave if they wished. Unless you think they can't see the crossing gate at the border."
"It's funny, but until I made up my mind to vote for Geefler, I hadn't even noticed those new "polling place here ->" signs. They really stand out, don't they."
While all this may sound far fetched, there are already some modest examples. Disney has built a "Tiger Hunt in India" themed ride in one of its parks, and uses decorative pictograms on a mock up crumbling ancient temple to tell a story of a race who angered the generic Disney "mother earth goddess" by ecological shortsightedness. They are punished by natural disasters, and then clean up their acts and the disasters stop happening. While most visitors don't have nearly enough time to puzzle out all the pictograms consiously, supposedly this ride has the lowest littering rate of any ride in the park.
I can see how this might become a much more robust and reliable technology, but given some of the examples, I'm not at all sure I want it to. A lot of it sounds like extensions of what some advertisers are using to overcome resistance to ads, and some of it sounds Orwellian, but either way, it may be possible to go a lot further towards mind control than most expect.
Some biologists have suggested that wings can evolve only because a wing too small to get a creature off the ground can still be used like a spoiler, held at an angle where it helps force a running animal down so it can keep more traction when dodging predators or chasing prey. Possibly, that's another shade of gray.
There's a way obscurity could still be a major factor. Science right now has become extremely poly-disciplined. Even very skilled practicioners (such as Nobel prize winners), tend to think of themselves as very specific sub-classes of scientist. Instead of saying "I'm a biologist", one is likely to say "I'm a cladistic taxononomist practicing middle Jurassic focused paleo-botany". Both good theoretical science and spinning it off into technology has become increasingly a matter of teams of such specialists working together.
Suppose there really was something to some fringe research from years or decades ago. Like Tesla really did make some theretical breakthrough in coupling broadcast power and geologic effects, or those stories about the USS Eldredge have just a grain of truth to them. If any such situation dropped into obscurity, what disciplines would you look in to build the team that might bring it out?
Osama, Shiek Omar, the moneymen who funded Al-Quida, whoever was mailing Anthrax...
Still, this is a very good thing.
I'm not sure about the land seizure part, but I recall watching one debate in the House of Commons where it was claimed that the British monarchy had only one remaining power with no checks and balances - the Queen can sell off the British navy at will, even if she sold every ship for 1 pound each to an enemy nation.
There's lots of evidence Saddam killed at least tens of thousands of his own people (Mass graves for example). There's equally good evidence for systematized torture, for killings specifically targeted at supressing political dissent, and lots of crimes worth the death penalty.
Re. the gassing of northern Kurds though, there's some fair evidence that this was accomplished by Iranian weapons used by Iranian commanders during the Iran/Iraq war.
The best thing here, would be for Iraq to try him and the rest of the world be willing to accept it if he is found not guilty of some of these crimes. If it's shown that he never had weapons of mass distruction, or didn't order the gassing of the Kurds, or isn't the guy who robbed that Pizza place on 34th street, he still personally ordered the execution of numerous political foes and their families, and still actually carried out some of these executions himself.
Cells ARE a way of maintaining central control without most members knowing how to get to that controller. "individual cells independant of central control" is as big an oxymoron as "Microsoft Works".
If theory 3 is even a significant part of the problem, the arrest itself won't inspire much if anything in the way of increased hostilities. Now Saddam's EXECUTION would, if the US doesn't get out quickly afterwards, and dawdling enough on turning him over might as well (but nobody really knows just how long "enough" is). I'd like to see the US move quickly in turning over Saddam. The Iraquis certainly have more of a right to try him than anyone else, and a real push to let them handle the matter so we can leave more quickly is one of the best ways the US can show they don't want to stay forever.