We jest, but in fact this is precisely how the entertainment industry has worked for decades, if not over a century.
1. New technology which impacts entertainment comes out. 2. Industry fights tooth and nail to eliminate it. 3. Industry adopts it and winds up embracing it so thoroughly that they make even more money than before.
The time between step 2 and 3 varies, but the end result is always the same. The only time this hasn't been the model followed is when the technology is developed hand-in-glove with the entertainment industry (eg. DVDs) or it is only practical for big companies to set up and produce (eg. CDs before the advent of CD burners).
It happened with recorded music (artists complained that nobody would want to see them play, eventually started selling their own music), it happened with radio (who will buy the record if you can just listen to the radio? Eventually the radio became a marketing tool), it happened with videos (who will go to the cinema when they can tape the movie? Eventually they sold pre-recorded videos), it happened with compressed digitised audio (who will buy the CD when they can pirate it online? Yet today we have a whole slew of online music stores).
I guarantee if CD burners had become cheap and half-decent five years earlier than they did, we'd have had the music industry trying to ban them too.
If over a decade of Linux distros has taught us one thing, it is that one man's "half assed" is another man's "usable".
Go look up cheap Linux PCs and laptops. There's a few e-tailers keep them for real bottom-of-the barrel customers, and they do occasionally ship with Linux - but they're generally just sold as ordinary low-end PCs with very little marketing push rather than "New! Buy now! Comes with Linux! OMG S00P3R D34L!11".
In particular, I want you to look at sites which keep customer reviews (and don't seem to be actively editing out the ones that aren't complimentary).
Every time I've seen these - and they do come up from time to time - 80 or 90% of the reviews say "Runs Windows like a charm". The other 10-20% are from people who know Linux, and more often than not they say "Erm... is there a good reason why the Linux distribution on here doesn't support the hardware you've shipped it on? Wireless|power saving|graphics didn't work...."
I don't know about you, but IMV "they're installing Linux all right but they're not actually making any effort to ensure the Linux distro works with the hardware they're providing" is definitely half-assed.
It's better than that. You must have not only the installation media but also the code on the back. The one is no good without the other - yet the labels they're using for that code have been getting cheaper and nastier every year for some time, and laptops in particular pose a problem because the label usually winds up on the underside where it's particularly susceptible to damage.
You ring up Microsoft and say "I need to reinstall the OS but the label is damaged and I can't read the first few characters. Everything else is fine". I guarantee they'll say "Tough. Sucks to be you."
The only way out of it is if the OEM was able to organise it so the original install media doesn't prompt for the code on the label. This used to be possible a few years ago, I don't know if it is now. Dell certainly aren't doing that with their OEM images of Windows Server.
You're not suggesting that this is an unreasonable course of action are you?
If you're audited, and found to have 500 legal copies of the software running on 1500 systems, demanding that the person who is in violation of the license terms pay for the other 1000 copies they're using seems pretty reasonable to me.
Most businesses - if they're sued by someone they have a business relationship with - will generally speaking cut all business ties with that organisation once the lawsuit's done and dusted.
The BSA essentially provides software companies with a third-party to do the suing. "Oh no, we didn't sue you", say Adobe, "that was the BSA. Sorry to hear of the troubles you've had - how many copies of Photoshop shall I put you down for?".
In many cases, even when the business owner is well aware that the BSA is nothing more than a front so you can pretend you don't have to cut business ties with Microsoft, Adobe et al, there's not a lot they can do about it. While we may bang on about F/OSS on/., for many products even when there are F/OSS alternatives, by the time you've written the requirements down there's a good chance you've excluded most, if not all of them.
Sounds exactly like management in my employer's US office. Before they closed the US office.
They closed it because every six months we had to send someone over there to sack about 40-70% of the staff - and every six months staff numbers had crept back up again. It would appear we were filling our offices with empire builders to the extent that there was nobody left to do any work.
I believe at one point I counted the layers of management and came back with about 6 or 7. In an office with 100 staff.
"Talk to" isn't the problem, I've yet to meet a manager who didn't like the sound of his own voice. "Listen to", however, is a totally different kettle of fish.
Money is a really poor incentive for a lot of people - just talk to any manager who's hired someone that demanded a huge salary and still it didn't work out.
Thing is, most managers don't really have any idea of what might be a better incentive. We've got a few good ideas, like "If you hire someone with professional experience and qualifications and you ask them to make recommendations based on that experience, don't be too surprised if they're unhappy when you consistently ignore their suggestions." Or "Rather than micromanaging every little thing we do, why don't you talk to us to discuss and resolve issues as they come up?".
Neither of these are going to happen without a huge change to the way the entire industry is perceived - even within the industry itself.
I'm going to make a number of assumptions. All are what I would consider "reasonable", though obviously they're assumptions so make of them what you will.
Government bodies the world over are realising that many of their documents (of which there are thousands) really need to be stored in a standardised format so it's easy to continue to open them in future. The big cheeses at the top are waking up to this not because they've been told (when was the last time you saw someone listen to you that closely?), but because the last time they needed to get their hands on the computerised original of a document that was created ten years ago, there was a problem and it was going to take a long time to fix.
Most people (who aren't heavily involved with either the ISO or with IT) are wholly unaware of the corruption surrounding Microsoft getting their document approved as an ISO standard.
While we bang on about how Office isn't always compatible with documents created in older versions, for most people that has seldom been a big problem. And even if it has, we're talking about a file format which isn't supported in older versions anyhow so they'd have to upgrade sooner rather than later.
Nobody ever got fired for buying ${FLAVOUR_OF_THE_DECADE}.
So at just about the time that it becomes apparent that some sort of standardised document format is necessary, enter Microsoft stage left, proudly announcing that they've spent a long time working on just that and if they upgrade now, they can have an office suite that uses a standard document format. All they need to do is dictate that every department purchases something that is compatible with OOXML. The issues surrounding OOXML aren't brought up because the big cheeses are unaware that they even exist and the Microsoft sales team certainly aren't going to volunteer such information - in fact, there's a good chance they're not aware of the issues either.
Where's the salesman for OO.o? Where's the flashy suit, the company car and the briefcase full of numbers showing cost savings? These guys are from a very traditional background, and know little or nothing of the F/OSS world. From their perspective, software is developed by businesses - and what sort of a business can't even be bothered to put together a sales department? If you've ever tried explaining F/OSS to that cousin of yours who runs a business and has always bought Microsoft products - and before you've even got the first couple of sentences out you can see you're getting looks of open disbelief, by the time you've finished your cousin is seriously thinking you need to see a psychiatrist - those are the people who are making the decisions.
Gates is well-known for the predatory business practices by those of us in IT - but what about those who aren't?
I wonder if he's just seen as someone who started from relatively modest beginnings and has since built a huge company and an enormous fortune. Seen like that, he would appear to be a perfectly reasonable person to both respect and admire.
It's an issue with any country that has a complicated tax system. You have a byzantine set of laws, many of which could reasonably be interpreted in a number of ways.
Now for most of us with fairly simple tax requirements, the way in which those laws should be interpreted is well-known within the accounting profession and thoroughly settled through numerous lawsuits - there's not a lot of room for manoeuvre. But for these guys, with their millions - it's worth paying an accountant to find loopholes.
There's plenty of loopholes, and quite often what the accountant is doing is simply looking at a way of interpreting a particular piece of legislation which works out in their clients favour. If the tax office decides that they don't like that interpretation - well, it'll have to be tested in a court of law then. That'll take a while, of course, and it'll cost a fair chunk of cash. Further, IANAL but I imagine that if it's all kept open (you're not trying to avoid tax, simply limit your liability - something which we're all entitled to do, but for most of us there's a limit to how much effort it's worth going to to do so), worst case scenario is you'll have to pay the tax along with penalties and interest. If the money you pay back has been making better money as an investment than the tax office demands in interest, you're still onto a winner. Prison time is more likely to happen if it can be demonstrated you were blatantly defrauding the tax office (by under-declaring something), not creatively interpreting law (by declaring you received £N but you immediately did something else with it which means you shouldn't pay tax on it).
(Note: IANAL, nor an accountant. If you rely on this rather than professional advice to keep out of trouble, you're an idiot)
The concern is how heavily involved Jobs is with so much product development. By all accounts, many of Apple's products since Jobs took over have been very heavily driven by him and him alone. (Which doesn't mean Jobs himself wrote OS X or designed the iPhone. Just that he was heavily involved in deciding how they'd work - there's very little "design by committee" that tends to drag on companies like Microsoft)
There really isn't anyone else in the industry with the combination of experience at the helm of a top company and single-minded focus on driving decent products forward to take over from Jobs.
3D isn't the only thing on Linux that has a lot of ideology driving it. IIRC supermount had a number of issues which meant that - even though it generally worked pretty well - it wasn't a particularly neat solution.
However, as happens so often in the F/OSS world (and so seldom in proprietary software), the pragmatic mostly-works-but-somewhat-messy solution was ditched by many distros long before there was any realistic alternative.
Even then, it's a huge security issue. Unless literally every piece of core infrastructure is firewalled off so it's inaccessible except through the virtual infrastructure (which I can't see happening), you'd have people bringing in all sorts of malware.
Of course, that eliminates the ability to get site-license pricing on things, but you're supposed to get that back in lower IT and hardware costs, na?
It's going to be an absolute nightmare if the BSA rock up because I bet you anything you like they won't go quietly when the IT director shows them a policy document stating "Employee PCs are the employee's problem".
1. There most certainly are costs associated with getting a new version of android to run on a given phone. It's an embedded device, not a PC, many of the luxuries you take for granted on a PC (like being reasonably sure that any standard OS compiled for the platform will JFW) don't exist.
2. Let's see. Sell you a £200 piece of hardware every 18 months, or a £400 piece of hardware every five years. And the £200 piece of hardware will be substantially easier to shift because the telcos will subsidise it 100% on a relatively cheap contract. Hmm, tough one that.
Nice idea, but I know of no hardware manufacturer (with the glaring exception of, er, Apple) that designs their phones such that it's virtually impossible to totally brick them because if push comes to shove, there's a way to emergency-reload the firmware on there.
I don't know how it's working out for people with Google-branded phones, but most of us get the version of android the manufacturer ships and - if we're lucky - the manufacturer feels like updating it at some point in the product's life cycle and the carrier decides to roll the upgrade out.
If the next version of Android introduces API changes that vast numbers of developers start to work with but my handset doesn't get an upgrade - oh look, a whole bunch of apps I can't run. Gee thanks. Upgrading the handset to a newer release is not a case of "Click here to upgrade if you really must, but it's unsupported and if it breaks you'll have to click here to roll back" - it's a case of root the phone, upgrade and - unless you already have lots of reports from others who have been successful - pray to the flying spaghetti monster that the upgrade will work. Which it may well not.
It's a classic culture clash - you've got Google who are used to "release early, release often, work out the bugs in the next release" and mobile telcos and handset manufacturers coming from a background of "release once when the handset hits the market, after that nothing but bugfixes - and then only for the most heinous bugs".
You're doing what a sensible, intelligent person does when they hear a phrase they don't know. You're looking up what it means.
IME stupid people frequently become afraid to ask questions or look into things because they don't want to appear stupid by asking a stupid question. This frequently has the opposite effect, as they instead try to guess the answers and get it royally wrong. Had you heard the phrase "blood libel" and guessed as to the meaning, IMV it seems a perfectly reasonable guess to assume it means something along the lines of "libelling someone by unjustly accusing them of being involved in the killing or maiming of others".
Wouldn't be the first time someone's used a phrase thinking it was appropriate without first making sure they knew what it meant. FWIW, I think it makes perfect sense to describe what people were saying about Palin, and if I hadn't seen all the furore about the proper meaning of the phrase, I would probably have thought it quite a good description.
They encourage tourism (and they're doing pretty well at that - it's a lot more built up than it was ten years ago - though perhaps at the expense of their own culture. It's rapidly becoming the sort of place Brits who want sun and sea but don't want to be exposed to any foreign food or culture might go. Think Gran Canaria but not quite as bad yet), it's much more progressive than most arabic nations and the official line is essentially that they're dragging themselves out of the mud by their own bootstraps.
Yet everywhere you go you see photos of a (now-dead) president, it's nominally democratic yet the same party wins every time with an 80something% majority and while the locals are generally very chatty, very friendly - if you ask what they think of their government they suddenly go very quiet. While hard information for outsiders is tricky to find (Wikipedia and the CIA world factbook simply say it's a democratic republic where the same government keeps getting in with a huge margin) I suspect it's a half-crazed banana republic with rather better PR.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true.
We jest, but in fact this is precisely how the entertainment industry has worked for decades, if not over a century.
1. New technology which impacts entertainment comes out.
2. Industry fights tooth and nail to eliminate it.
3. Industry adopts it and winds up embracing it so thoroughly that they make even more money than before.
The time between step 2 and 3 varies, but the end result is always the same. The only time this hasn't been the model followed is when the technology is developed hand-in-glove with the entertainment industry (eg. DVDs) or it is only practical for big companies to set up and produce (eg. CDs before the advent of CD burners).
It happened with recorded music (artists complained that nobody would want to see them play, eventually started selling their own music), it happened with radio (who will buy the record if you can just listen to the radio? Eventually the radio became a marketing tool), it happened with videos (who will go to the cinema when they can tape the movie? Eventually they sold pre-recorded videos), it happened with compressed digitised audio (who will buy the CD when they can pirate it online? Yet today we have a whole slew of online music stores).
I guarantee if CD burners had become cheap and half-decent five years earlier than they did, we'd have had the music industry trying to ban them too.
If over a decade of Linux distros has taught us one thing, it is that one man's "half assed" is another man's "usable".
Go look up cheap Linux PCs and laptops. There's a few e-tailers keep them for real bottom-of-the barrel customers, and they do occasionally ship with Linux - but they're generally just sold as ordinary low-end PCs with very little marketing push rather than "New! Buy now! Comes with Linux! OMG S00P3R D34L!11".
In particular, I want you to look at sites which keep customer reviews (and don't seem to be actively editing out the ones that aren't complimentary).
Every time I've seen these - and they do come up from time to time - 80 or 90% of the reviews say "Runs Windows like a charm". The other 10-20% are from people who know Linux, and more often than not they say "Erm... is there a good reason why the Linux distribution on here doesn't support the hardware you've shipped it on? Wireless|power saving|graphics didn't work...."
I don't know about you, but IMV "they're installing Linux all right but they're not actually making any effort to ensure the Linux distro works with the hardware they're providing" is definitely half-assed.
It's better than that. You must have not only the installation media but also the code on the back. The one is no good without the other - yet the labels they're using for that code have been getting cheaper and nastier every year for some time, and laptops in particular pose a problem because the label usually winds up on the underside where it's particularly susceptible to damage.
You ring up Microsoft and say "I need to reinstall the OS but the label is damaged and I can't read the first few characters. Everything else is fine". I guarantee they'll say "Tough. Sucks to be you."
The only way out of it is if the OEM was able to organise it so the original install media doesn't prompt for the code on the label. This used to be possible a few years ago, I don't know if it is now. Dell certainly aren't doing that with their OEM images of Windows Server.
You're not suggesting that this is an unreasonable course of action are you?
If you're audited, and found to have 500 legal copies of the software running on 1500 systems, demanding that the person who is in violation of the license terms pay for the other 1000 copies they're using seems pretty reasonable to me.
Most businesses - if they're sued by someone they have a business relationship with - will generally speaking cut all business ties with that organisation once the lawsuit's done and dusted.
The BSA essentially provides software companies with a third-party to do the suing. "Oh no, we didn't sue you", say Adobe, "that was the BSA. Sorry to hear of the troubles you've had - how many copies of Photoshop shall I put you down for?".
In many cases, even when the business owner is well aware that the BSA is nothing more than a front so you can pretend you don't have to cut business ties with Microsoft, Adobe et al, there's not a lot they can do about it. While we may bang on about F/OSS on /., for many products even when there are F/OSS alternatives, by the time you've written the requirements down there's a good chance you've excluded most, if not all of them.
Sounds exactly like management in my employer's US office. Before they closed the US office.
They closed it because every six months we had to send someone over there to sack about 40-70% of the staff - and every six months staff numbers had crept back up again. It would appear we were filling our offices with empire builders to the extent that there was nobody left to do any work.
I believe at one point I counted the layers of management and came back with about 6 or 7. In an office with 100 staff.
"Talk to" isn't the problem, I've yet to meet a manager who didn't like the sound of his own voice. "Listen to", however, is a totally different kettle of fish.
Money is a really poor incentive for a lot of people - just talk to any manager who's hired someone that demanded a huge salary and still it didn't work out.
Thing is, most managers don't really have any idea of what might be a better incentive. We've got a few good ideas, like "If you hire someone with professional experience and qualifications and you ask them to make recommendations based on that experience, don't be too surprised if they're unhappy when you consistently ignore their suggestions." Or "Rather than micromanaging every little thing we do, why don't you talk to us to discuss and resolve issues as they come up?".
Neither of these are going to happen without a huge change to the way the entire industry is perceived - even within the industry itself.
How will they test that compliance?
Let me play devil's advocate for a minute here.
I'm going to make a number of assumptions. All are what I would consider "reasonable", though obviously they're assumptions so make of them what you will.
So at just about the time that it becomes apparent that some sort of standardised document format is necessary, enter Microsoft stage left, proudly announcing that they've spent a long time working on just that and if they upgrade now, they can have an office suite that uses a standard document format. All they need to do is dictate that every department purchases something that is compatible with OOXML. The issues surrounding OOXML aren't brought up because the big cheeses are unaware that they even exist and the Microsoft sales team certainly aren't going to volunteer such information - in fact, there's a good chance they're not aware of the issues either.
Where's the salesman for OO.o? Where's the flashy suit, the company car and the briefcase full of numbers showing cost savings? These guys are from a very traditional background, and know little or nothing of the F/OSS world. From their perspective, software is developed by businesses - and what sort of a business can't even be bothered to put together a sales department? If you've ever tried explaining F/OSS to that cousin of yours who runs a business and has always bought Microsoft products - and before you've even got the first couple of sentences out you can see you're getting looks of open disbelief, by the time you've finished your cousin is seriously thinking you need to see a psychiatrist - those are the people who are making the decisions.
Gates is well-known for the predatory business practices by those of us in IT - but what about those who aren't?
I wonder if he's just seen as someone who started from relatively modest beginnings and has since built a huge company and an enormous fortune. Seen like that, he would appear to be a perfectly reasonable person to both respect and admire.
Arguably, it's not criminal.
Bear with me here.
It's an issue with any country that has a complicated tax system. You have a byzantine set of laws, many of which could reasonably be interpreted in a number of ways.
Now for most of us with fairly simple tax requirements, the way in which those laws should be interpreted is well-known within the accounting profession and thoroughly settled through numerous lawsuits - there's not a lot of room for manoeuvre. But for these guys, with their millions - it's worth paying an accountant to find loopholes.
There's plenty of loopholes, and quite often what the accountant is doing is simply looking at a way of interpreting a particular piece of legislation which works out in their clients favour. If the tax office decides that they don't like that interpretation - well, it'll have to be tested in a court of law then. That'll take a while, of course, and it'll cost a fair chunk of cash. Further, IANAL but I imagine that if it's all kept open (you're not trying to avoid tax, simply limit your liability - something which we're all entitled to do, but for most of us there's a limit to how much effort it's worth going to to do so), worst case scenario is you'll have to pay the tax along with penalties and interest. If the money you pay back has been making better money as an investment than the tax office demands in interest, you're still onto a winner. Prison time is more likely to happen if it can be demonstrated you were blatantly defrauding the tax office (by under-declaring something), not creatively interpreting law (by declaring you received £N but you immediately did something else with it which means you shouldn't pay tax on it).
(Note: IANAL, nor an accountant. If you rely on this rather than professional advice to keep out of trouble, you're an idiot)
It also performs a whole lot better. In x86 terms, the raw CPU power of an ARM is like a Pentium 300Mhz.
Intel might even be able to throw together some recycled 90s technology with comparable performance and end up with something ARMs equal in power.
That was the model for mobile computing for a time (adapt outdated desktop tech).
What sort of ARM are we talking about? A 1987 ARM 2 (which ran at all of 8MHz with no cache whatsoever), a StrongARM, an ARM 610, a Cortex A9?
The concern is how heavily involved Jobs is with so much product development. By all accounts, many of Apple's products since Jobs took over have been very heavily driven by him and him alone. (Which doesn't mean Jobs himself wrote OS X or designed the iPhone. Just that he was heavily involved in deciding how they'd work - there's very little "design by committee" that tends to drag on companies like Microsoft)
There really isn't anyone else in the industry with the combination of experience at the helm of a top company and single-minded focus on driving decent products forward to take over from Jobs.
3D isn't the only thing on Linux that has a lot of ideology driving it. IIRC supermount had a number of issues which meant that - even though it generally worked pretty well - it wasn't a particularly neat solution.
However, as happens so often in the F/OSS world (and so seldom in proprietary software), the pragmatic mostly-works-but-somewhat-messy solution was ditched by many distros long before there was any realistic alternative.
I mean, yeah this was funny and all, but if I wanted to read an aggregation site covering spoof sites like The Onion, I'd do so.
Even then, it's a huge security issue. Unless literally every piece of core infrastructure is firewalled off so it's inaccessible except through the virtual infrastructure (which I can't see happening), you'd have people bringing in all sorts of malware.
Of course, that eliminates the ability to get site-license pricing on things, but you're supposed to get that back in lower IT and hardware costs, na?
It's going to be an absolute nightmare if the BSA rock up because I bet you anything you like they won't go quietly when the IT director shows them a policy document stating "Employee PCs are the employee's problem".
Two things there:
1. There most certainly are costs associated with getting a new version of android to run on a given phone. It's an embedded device, not a PC, many of the luxuries you take for granted on a PC (like being reasonably sure that any standard OS compiled for the platform will JFW) don't exist.
2. Let's see. Sell you a £200 piece of hardware every 18 months, or a £400 piece of hardware every five years. And the £200 piece of hardware will be substantially easier to shift because the telcos will subsidise it 100% on a relatively cheap contract. Hmm, tough one that.
Nice idea, but I know of no hardware manufacturer (with the glaring exception of, er, Apple) that designs their phones such that it's virtually impossible to totally brick them because if push comes to shove, there's a way to emergency-reload the firmware on there.
IIRC, it's not free for companies - in fact, it's really rather pricey.
I don't know how it's working out for people with Google-branded phones, but most of us get the version of android the manufacturer ships and - if we're lucky - the manufacturer feels like updating it at some point in the product's life cycle and the carrier decides to roll the upgrade out.
If the next version of Android introduces API changes that vast numbers of developers start to work with but my handset doesn't get an upgrade - oh look, a whole bunch of apps I can't run. Gee thanks. Upgrading the handset to a newer release is not a case of "Click here to upgrade if you really must, but it's unsupported and if it breaks you'll have to click here to roll back" - it's a case of root the phone, upgrade and - unless you already have lots of reports from others who have been successful - pray to the flying spaghetti monster that the upgrade will work. Which it may well not.
It's a classic culture clash - you've got Google who are used to "release early, release often, work out the bugs in the next release" and mobile telcos and handset manufacturers coming from a background of "release once when the handset hits the market, after that nothing but bugfixes - and then only for the most heinous bugs".
You're doing what a sensible, intelligent person does when they hear a phrase they don't know. You're looking up what it means.
IME stupid people frequently become afraid to ask questions or look into things because they don't want to appear stupid by asking a stupid question. This frequently has the opposite effect, as they instead try to guess the answers and get it royally wrong. Had you heard the phrase "blood libel" and guessed as to the meaning, IMV it seems a perfectly reasonable guess to assume it means something along the lines of "libelling someone by unjustly accusing them of being involved in the killing or maiming of others".
Wouldn't be the first time someone's used a phrase thinking it was appropriate without first making sure they knew what it meant. FWIW, I think it makes perfect sense to describe what people were saying about Palin, and if I hadn't seen all the furore about the proper meaning of the phrase, I would probably have thought it quite a good description.
Tunisia is a bit of an odd one.
They encourage tourism (and they're doing pretty well at that - it's a lot more built up than it was ten years ago - though perhaps at the expense of their own culture. It's rapidly becoming the sort of place Brits who want sun and sea but don't want to be exposed to any foreign food or culture might go. Think Gran Canaria but not quite as bad yet), it's much more progressive than most arabic nations and the official line is essentially that they're dragging themselves out of the mud by their own bootstraps.
Yet everywhere you go you see photos of a (now-dead) president, it's nominally democratic yet the same party wins every time with an 80something% majority and while the locals are generally very chatty, very friendly - if you ask what they think of their government they suddenly go very quiet. While hard information for outsiders is tricky to find (Wikipedia and the CIA world factbook simply say it's a democratic republic where the same government keeps getting in with a huge margin) I suspect it's a half-crazed banana republic with rather better PR.
You do realize that he isn't a UK citizen? Sort of invalidates your theory.
He isn't, but he has one thing that nobody else who's been the subject of such rendition has.
Enough information to pretty much guarantee an enormous amount of publicity the world over, and he's not afraid to use it.