Re:Criminal charges against Microsoft too.
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I believe you're confusing your DRM software -- the software you're talking about is by SunnComm, and those audio CDs are still being distributed by Sony. This software might have its own legal issues, but not in the same class as the Sony RootKit.
Of course, this won't really matter, as the court case will go on for the next 30 years, by which point the outcome will be meaningless as various new bits of statute law will have already been created to deal with such situations. Eventually Sony and MSFT will only have one junior lawyer on the case each, and it won't be covered by popular media at all.
However, the issue here is more one of API than anything else, I think; if they go with Apple, they have to go with software designed to run on the Apple OS; if they go with RedHat, anyone with a copy of GCC should be able to compile the software they need. While Apple may have the better OS, they might not have the wide range of available software to run on that OS -- I'm sure users of the $100 computer won't be wanting to do internet conferencing, edit video and plug their electric guitar into GarageBand. They most likely will want to have access to encyclopedia tools, word processors, and some basic programming tools *in their own language*. Even if they're only planning on deploying the computer in India, I'm sure Apple is not going to volunteer to write all the software needed for all 16 official languages and the hundreds of variants.
I'm not saying that all this can't be done with OS X, but the point is that it would be *more difficult* in the long run to do it with OS X. It's sort of like the difference between owning an old Volkswagen Beetle versus owning a modern BMW -- if something happens to the Beetle, someone's going to be able to fix it pretty easily; if something happens to the BMW, you need to take it in to a diagnostic centre just to figure out where to begin.
When packages are installed instead of just dragging the app to the appropriate location, the OS gets involved and creates a package manifest file that records where everything is installed. There are even a few programs out there that read this data and use it to uninstall previously-installed apps.
I would guess Apple apps use an installer to work well with the Software Update system; Software Update then knows at a glance exactly what has been installed, and where.
Virtual PC is a computer emulator; WINE allows you to run apps compiled for the Windows API under another system. My guess is that he doesn't want to run Windows; he just wants to run a few apps compiled to run on Windows, but keep OS X as is OS.
Remember, we're talking about Canadian Libel Law, not US Libel law. They are quite different. The issues you are talking about are probably not what the company is complaining about.
This assumes the spacecraft would be constructed from earth-based materials, well inside the earth's gravity well. Why not manufacture the navigation system here, and use an existing asteroid as the hull?
In reference to the GP: weren't the ideals of the founding fathers of the US based on those of the intelligencia of pre-revolutionary France, as well as those of Germany?
...the US will find a way to return to the days when it was a country run by the people, for the people, where ultimately it was the citizens who were held up above all else, instead of the corporations and corrupt politicians.
Ever heard of The War of 1812? This was started by corporations and corrupt politicians less than 40 years after the country was founded. The corporations involved were mostly international fur companies, who had offices in the US, the Canadas, and the UK. The politicians were those with little power who wanted a larger influence in government -- so they painted the Indians and Canadians as evil foreigners who were out to invade and terrorize US soil, while invading Indian and Canadian territories as a pre-emptive strike, and also to "liberate" these places from the "freedom-hating" British.
I think it's more accurate to say that what goes around comes around. I'm sure there were lawsuits similar to the one SCO is involved in way back in 1776.
(Not to say this is an American thing -- such lawsuits and power grabs exist in the earliest records of "civilization").
Well, I think you picked a bad example; if you had picked Adobe, or Symantec, the answer would probably be no -- although nobody would want to use old versions of that software anyway. However, in Microsoft's case, there actually is a case -- after all, they are trying to remove choice from the word processing and OS markets (not to mention a number of others, like video decoding and web browsing). Being a monopoly, they effectively give up some of the rights most businesses are given by the local government. The trick here is that with non-real property, any "bad" things done are defined as "bad" by the society... so if the society no longer considers them "bad", what makes them so?
Then again, the Native American aboriginals held that real estate was not something that could be owned; then Europeans came in and said it could, and justified taking it by force by saying that the Indians were attacking their settlements, so they had a right to respond in kind. Seems to me that the arguments on both sides of the coin aren't really new, nor are they limited to IP.
I think a better argument would be: don't break the local laws of the land unless a conflict of laws, or of law and morality, forces you to, or you have a very good reason to, and are willing to face the legal consequences (not hide from them and escape unscathed). I think the gist of what you've been arguing is that a lot of people hide behind straw man arguments to validate something that they couldn't otherwise justify in our present society. However, there are many people who break current copyright law because they feel it conflicts with other laws already on the books -- and I hope they're willing to go to court to stand up for what they believe.
For me, the more interesting cases are people who are caught speeding (illegal), and go to court to get the ticket revoked, hoping that either a) the witness (police officer) won't turn up, or b) that they can get off on a technicality. Then they go out and speed again. This mentality is now often seen in copyright infringement cases too. I think this really reflects a widening gap between society and state.
I think what many of the other people here (myself included) are pointing out is that your rationalization is no less cheap and easy than the value eroding one you are arguing against.
Corporations are not individuals; they have no conscience, and they can't be arrested. Of course, those working at the corporations have consciences and can be arrested, but we've seen a lot of examples lately where those in charge have abused their consiences and avoided being arrested for things an individual would get severe prison time for attempting.
I bring this up because of the following: let's say you want to use OpenDocument format for your business, but Microsoft doesn't want you to, as it hurts their business model. Using OpenDocument format anyway will cause the same loss to Microsoft as if you had pirated a version of Office and used that. If you've been following this, you'll realize that Microsoft *really* doesn't want the government to use OpenDocument, for exactly the above reason.
So, by your rationalization, we should use the Microsoft product. By the pirate's rationalization, we should use the Microsoft product. But by the logical rationalization, we should use OpenDocument. The answer lies somewhere in the middle; I fear we are arguing about the wrong thing.
Or, if you want a different kind of example: let's say that the estate of William Shakespeare wants to assert copyright control on all of his works, collecting money from everyone who makes copies or derivative works from those he has written. Would you say that this is moral, legal, just? Remember that Corporations are closer to estates than they are to people; the individuals have usually already been paid for assigning their copyright to the corporation; they no longer hold it.
Or, let's say that the estate of JM Barrie wants to assert copyright control over Peter Pan... this one is more at issue because currently, they *do* assert control over the work in the UK, but not in the US. As a US citizen, would you avoid downloading the etext from the pirates at Project Gutenberg because the estate would suffer for it? Or, do you download it, as you like the work, have no way of paying the original (dead) author, and it is currently legal to do so in the US?
Funny; the grandparent's is the exact same point I raised the first time all this stuff hit slashdot; a number of informative replies pointed out that ICANN is more than a TLD server.
Maybe what we should really have is everyone using IPv6, and have each country run a search engine. Then, we have an entirely new DNS system, where your gateway gets the DN GATEWAY, your search engine gets the DN SEARCH, etc. (in non-english countries, the DNs would be in the local language). Everything else is referenced solely by IPv6 address, and is linked from other locations. Email would go to you@longipv6address and nobody would mind, as actual humans would rarely have to look at the address part anyway.
In case you hadn't noticed, that last paragraph wasn't very serious.
Sure, you and others have written how access to computers at your school enabled you to obtain computer skills. But did any of you learn history, math or social studies from them?
Well, apart from learning some American history from Oregon Trail, I didn't learn much outside the computing field from our labs.
However, in the early 90's, I was developing a computer assisted math enrichment program (lesson, not computer) for grade 6 students. This program included using BASIC and some simple math games to teach algebra and general problem solving. One of the things I had the students do was design algorithms on paper to solve problems, and then enter them into the computer to see how their algorithms did; this taught specificity and a wide range of maths-related skills that I'm sure those students are still using today.
Back to the original issue with these "third world laptops," I think these computers will be useful in a number of areas -- as digital textbooks most importantly, but also as a means for learning advanced writing. Remember that "child" can mean anyone between the age of 0 and 16/17/18/19/21 -- It is useful to have a tool that can be used in different ways depending on the needs of the child at a specific point in time. The interesting thing will be to see if these computers last more than a year in the field.
So... is it ok if I steal a new Pontiac Aztec off the lot? They're so unpopular that they've canceled that model, it probably wouldn't have sold anyway. It'll get the Pontiac name out there. They should be happy.
Wrong illustration: more like "So... is it OK if I take a Volkswagen concept car apart and figure out exactly how it is built, and then build another one just like it? After all, Volkswagen isn't planning to sell the original, and my knockoff will get the Volkswagen name out there, as it's identical right down to the branding. They should be happy."
The way most people are morally retrograde about copyright violations (I'm not preventing anyone else from installing OS X) continues to piss me off. No, downloading warez is not the same thing as stealing, but it is just a bad. To say otherwise is to be either willfully ignorant or uninformed.
You're continuing to be pissed off by the wrong thing; Intellectual property is property; it's just not real property. The definitions of what is legal in the IP realm are much murkier than they are in the real property realm. You appear to be mixing morality and legality. To say otherwise is to be either willfully ignorant or uninformed.
Up until the DMCA, copyright was closer to a contract issue than a property issue in the US. Now it's closer to a personal rights violation.
If Apple wants to give their OS away they will do so; making a half-assed guess about what would make them happy doesn't count as consent.
I don't see what the issue here is... OS X can now run on PPC and IA86 architectures. No matter which one flops, the OS can still be run on the other hardware. This means Apple can use the best supplier for the job, instead of using the *only* supplier for the job like they used to. Wake me up when Apple actually starts buying one chip or the other in quantity, and we find out that specific chip has issues.
Part of the problem is that Safari's default download folder is the desktop
Actually, sometime recently, this changed -- I now find that the default download folder is a date stamped folder within the default download folder -- this confused me for a few downloads when it first happened, until I eventually noticed the date stamped folder sitting there, opened it up, and discovered 10 copies of what I had been trying to download.
I think it might, at this point, drastically cut down on the use of MPEG formats, as everyone moves to the H.* codecs.
5 years ago, they might have got away with it. Now, though, everyone is used to making their own home videos that can play in a DVD player. There are a lot of independent filmmakers out there, and a lot of non-US studios making content for other countries. I really can't see Bolliwood, the Porn industry, Chinese films, the French film industry, etc. agreeing to this from the content creation end.
Add to this video game consoles that can also play video, camcorders, etc. and you've got a very large content base that does not require MPEG, but does require an analog hole. The demand for such content is large enough that *someone* will create a device that plays this content.
Now, this device will not be allowed to play MPEG video, but that just means that the MPEG video will have to be converted to another format to play on the bulk of video players used worldwide. This means that to get DVD sales, the movie studios will have to encode in a non-encumbered format.
Of course, none of this really matters, as the rest of the world doesn't have to abide by US laws anyway; the result will be that either MPEG is deprecated as a standard, or middle-class Americans will be screaming bloody murder and fight to get the law repealed. If the proposed law gets through the system in the first place, which it won't, at least not in its current state.
You see, the way of getting a law passed is to make a proposal like this, and then put the legislation you really want to pass in the middle of a bill that looks unassuming and can be easily pushed through. Put them both in the same reading slot, and the other one gets quickly passed so more time can be devoted to debating this more contentious bill.
Who do you think puts the stores [sic] on the newswires in the first place? Haliburton?
AP and Reuters have their own people to put the stories on the newswires. However, some of you must wonder: where do they get these stories from? Corporations regularly submit "stories" to AP and Reuters, as well as other places Reuters and AP pick up their topics from -- generally they aren't printed verbatim, but if you're a reporter for AP, and get a number of newsworthy pre-written articles from some company, that's going to be a lot easier to use as an initial source than going out and investigating "something" from scratch. As soon as they have accepted the "story" as an initial source, the reporting becomes biased.
Remember: there always has to be an initial source for news, and reporters are rarely there to experience the events themselves. All news is biased by the people available to tell the reporters what they think has happened that would be of interest. In the case of this article we're discussing, it was a special interest group who were digging through government documents looking for abuses by the FBI. I'm sure Haliburton submits many pieces of news through one avenue or another. This isn't necissarily bad, as long as it is balanced by proper reporting and submissions by people holding an opposing view.
I got around all this by giving my pseudonym a last name and a nickname. Everywhere I go, at least one combination is available. TacoDeLaSlash should work well on WoW - or, change it to TacodeLaSlash if they don't like Taco in the name either.
As a clarification to this, many 419 scams are set up as follows:
An organized crime ring in some country goes into a low-income district, and finds a few mildly educated people who are short on cash. They loan them some money, and then tell them they can pay it back by pulling a few 419 scams on some rich americans they've got lined up who deserve it.
The scammer sends out the scam to the email list provided, and eventually hooks a sucker or two.
At this point, a number of things may happen, but the scammer is usually not allowed to actually handle any "real" cash themselves; organized crime steps in and takes it from here.
In some cases, the scammer is told to lure the victim to an airport in some country. The crime ring has someone (sometimes even the scammer) set up to meet them, and then has someone else "vanish" the rich foreigner and take their money/ID. The money/ID is then used in the crime ring's other operations, usually to move between countries or launder dirty goods/money.
One thing I've never heard of in these cases is what happens to the hired scammers; one could conjecture that they might also be "vanished" at the end of a job, or it could be a situation where if they get results, they're added onto the payroll permanently, and if they don't, they're pressed to repay the loan some other way and things go on from there.
Of course, there are also the educated teenagers who hang out at internet cafes, and do it for kicks. Usually you can tell the difference, as the hired scammers tend to use one of a limited set of form mails, wheras the bored teens get a bit more original, although they usually end up leaving out something necessary to make the scam actually work.
Just a queston: which is more newsworthy, that Toyota has installed a slightly larger fuel tank in its 2006 line of Corollas (assuming the majority of people own a 2001-2005 Corolla), or that Ferrari now offers a new custom design on their seat covers?
I think you'll find that the same standards apply to computers.
Coming in a little late, but your original sentence is too ambiguous to convert into a specific active sentence.
Which meaning did you intend?
The unit was strapped in.
At the time of question, straps securely held the unit in place.
In the past, binding twine secured the unit.
I don't know why the unit is missing. Straps held it in place five minutes ago.
I know the entire unit was strapped in front of the mess hall, as an example to the rest of us.
It is sentences such as "The unit was strapped in" that obfuscate the concepts one usually tries to use to communicate to others via standard sentence structure.
As you stated, there isn't really any reason for the US government to mess with the servers, so the whole question is academic.
And what happens when a country outside of the us doesn't allow you to use any DNS server but their own?
That's already as possible as it can get; short of filtering the ICANN IP addresses, there's no way a country can keep someone from using the US DN servers; the Great Firewall shows exactly what happens when a country doesn't allow you access to specific domains/pages.
As it is, someone can already use AlterNIC, OpenNIC, InterNIC, or one of the other alternate root servers; these servers happen to do a 1:1 mapping to all entries registered with ICANN, but there's nothing that says they have to.
Really, the only issue I can see here is that fragmenting the DNS database could open up opportunity for widespread phishing. However, if every country had its country tld at the end, including the US, any phishing would be limited to in-country, where local laws still apply.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe you're confusing your DRM software -- the software you're talking about is by SunnComm, and those audio CDs are still being distributed by Sony. This software might have its own legal issues, but not in the same class as the Sony RootKit.
Of course, this won't really matter, as the court case will go on for the next 30 years, by which point the outcome will be meaningless as various new bits of statute law will have already been created to deal with such situations. Eventually Sony and MSFT will only have one junior lawyer on the case each, and it won't be covered by popular media at all.
However, the issue here is more one of API than anything else, I think; if they go with Apple, they have to go with software designed to run on the Apple OS; if they go with RedHat, anyone with a copy of GCC should be able to compile the software they need. While Apple may have the better OS, they might not have the wide range of available software to run on that OS -- I'm sure users of the $100 computer won't be wanting to do internet conferencing, edit video and plug their electric guitar into GarageBand. They most likely will want to have access to encyclopedia tools, word processors, and some basic programming tools *in their own language*. Even if they're only planning on deploying the computer in India, I'm sure Apple is not going to volunteer to write all the software needed for all 16 official languages and the hundreds of variants.
I'm not saying that all this can't be done with OS X, but the point is that it would be *more difficult* in the long run to do it with OS X. It's sort of like the difference between owning an old Volkswagen Beetle versus owning a modern BMW -- if something happens to the Beetle, someone's going to be able to fix it pretty easily; if something happens to the BMW, you need to take it in to a diagnostic centre just to figure out where to begin.
I would guess Apple apps use an installer to work well with the Software Update system; Software Update then knows at a glance exactly what has been installed, and where.
Virtual PC is a computer emulator; WINE allows you to run apps compiled for the Windows API under another system. My guess is that he doesn't want to run Windows; he just wants to run a few apps compiled to run on Windows, but keep OS X as is OS.
Remember, we're talking about Canadian Libel Law, not US Libel law. They are quite different. The issues you are talking about are probably not what the company is complaining about.
This assumes the spacecraft would be constructed from earth-based materials, well inside the earth's gravity well. Why not manufacture the navigation system here, and use an existing asteroid as the hull?
Ever heard of The War of 1812? This was started by corporations and corrupt politicians less than 40 years after the country was founded. The corporations involved were mostly international fur companies, who had offices in the US, the Canadas, and the UK. The politicians were those with little power who wanted a larger influence in government -- so they painted the Indians and Canadians as evil foreigners who were out to invade and terrorize US soil, while invading Indian and Canadian territories as a pre-emptive strike, and also to "liberate" these places from the "freedom-hating" British.
I think it's more accurate to say that what goes around comes around. I'm sure there were lawsuits similar to the one SCO is involved in way back in 1776.
(Not to say this is an American thing -- such lawsuits and power grabs exist in the earliest records of "civilization").
Then again, the Native American aboriginals held that real estate was not something that could be owned; then Europeans came in and said it could, and justified taking it by force by saying that the Indians were attacking their settlements, so they had a right to respond in kind. Seems to me that the arguments on both sides of the coin aren't really new, nor are they limited to IP.
I think a better argument would be: don't break the local laws of the land unless a conflict of laws, or of law and morality, forces you to, or you have a very good reason to, and are willing to face the legal consequences (not hide from them and escape unscathed). I think the gist of what you've been arguing is that a lot of people hide behind straw man arguments to validate something that they couldn't otherwise justify in our present society. However, there are many people who break current copyright law because they feel it conflicts with other laws already on the books -- and I hope they're willing to go to court to stand up for what they believe.
For me, the more interesting cases are people who are caught speeding (illegal), and go to court to get the ticket revoked, hoping that either a) the witness (police officer) won't turn up, or b) that they can get off on a technicality. Then they go out and speed again. This mentality is now often seen in copyright infringement cases too. I think this really reflects a widening gap between society and state.
Corporations are not individuals; they have no conscience, and they can't be arrested. Of course, those working at the corporations have consciences and can be arrested, but we've seen a lot of examples lately where those in charge have abused their consiences and avoided being arrested for things an individual would get severe prison time for attempting.
I bring this up because of the following: let's say you want to use OpenDocument format for your business, but Microsoft doesn't want you to, as it hurts their business model. Using OpenDocument format anyway will cause the same loss to Microsoft as if you had pirated a version of Office and used that. If you've been following this, you'll realize that Microsoft *really* doesn't want the government to use OpenDocument, for exactly the above reason.
So, by your rationalization, we should use the Microsoft product. By the pirate's rationalization, we should use the Microsoft product. But by the logical rationalization, we should use OpenDocument. The answer lies somewhere in the middle; I fear we are arguing about the wrong thing.
Or, if you want a different kind of example: let's say that the estate of William Shakespeare wants to assert copyright control on all of his works, collecting money from everyone who makes copies or derivative works from those he has written. Would you say that this is moral, legal, just? Remember that Corporations are closer to estates than they are to people; the individuals have usually already been paid for assigning their copyright to the corporation; they no longer hold it.
Or, let's say that the estate of JM Barrie wants to assert copyright control over Peter Pan... this one is more at issue because currently, they *do* assert control over the work in the UK, but not in the US. As a US citizen, would you avoid downloading the etext from the pirates at Project Gutenberg because the estate would suffer for it? Or, do you download it, as you like the work, have no way of paying the original (dead) author, and it is currently legal to do so in the US?
Just some food for thought.
Maybe what we should really have is everyone using IPv6, and have each country run a search engine. Then, we have an entirely new DNS system, where your gateway gets the DN GATEWAY, your search engine gets the DN SEARCH, etc. (in non-english countries, the DNs would be in the local language). Everything else is referenced solely by IPv6 address, and is linked from other locations. Email would go to you@longipv6address and nobody would mind, as actual humans would rarely have to look at the address part anyway.
In case you hadn't noticed, that last paragraph wasn't very serious.
Well, apart from learning some American history from Oregon Trail, I didn't learn much outside the computing field from our labs.
However, in the early 90's, I was developing a computer assisted math enrichment program (lesson, not computer) for grade 6 students. This program included using BASIC and some simple math games to teach algebra and general problem solving. One of the things I had the students do was design algorithms on paper to solve problems, and then enter them into the computer to see how their algorithms did; this taught specificity and a wide range of maths-related skills that I'm sure those students are still using today.
Back to the original issue with these "third world laptops," I think these computers will be useful in a number of areas -- as digital textbooks most importantly, but also as a means for learning advanced writing. Remember that "child" can mean anyone between the age of 0 and 16/17/18/19/21 -- It is useful to have a tool that can be used in different ways depending on the needs of the child at a specific point in time. The interesting thing will be to see if these computers last more than a year in the field.
Wrong illustration: more like "So... is it OK if I take a Volkswagen concept car apart and figure out exactly how it is built, and then build another one just like it? After all, Volkswagen isn't planning to sell the original, and my knockoff will get the Volkswagen name out there, as it's identical right down to the branding. They should be happy."
The way most people are morally retrograde about copyright violations (I'm not preventing anyone else from installing OS X) continues to piss me off. No, downloading warez is not the same thing as stealing, but it is just a bad. To say otherwise is to be either willfully ignorant or uninformed.
You're continuing to be pissed off by the wrong thing; Intellectual property is property; it's just not real property. The definitions of what is legal in the IP realm are much murkier than they are in the real property realm. You appear to be mixing morality and legality. To say otherwise is to be either willfully ignorant or uninformed.
Up until the DMCA, copyright was closer to a contract issue than a property issue in the US. Now it's closer to a personal rights violation.
If Apple wants to give their OS away they will do so; making a half-assed guess about what would make them happy doesn't count as consent.
This part I agree with.
I don't see what the issue here is... OS X can now run on PPC and IA86 architectures. No matter which one flops, the OS can still be run on the other hardware. This means Apple can use the best supplier for the job, instead of using the *only* supplier for the job like they used to. Wake me up when Apple actually starts buying one chip or the other in quantity, and we find out that specific chip has issues.
Actually, sometime recently, this changed -- I now find that the default download folder is a date stamped folder within the default download folder -- this confused me for a few downloads when it first happened, until I eventually noticed the date stamped folder sitting there, opened it up, and discovered 10 copies of what I had been trying to download.
5 years ago, they might have got away with it. Now, though, everyone is used to making their own home videos that can play in a DVD player. There are a lot of independent filmmakers out there, and a lot of non-US studios making content for other countries. I really can't see Bolliwood, the Porn industry, Chinese films, the French film industry, etc. agreeing to this from the content creation end.
Add to this video game consoles that can also play video, camcorders, etc. and you've got a very large content base that does not require MPEG, but does require an analog hole. The demand for such content is large enough that *someone* will create a device that plays this content.
Now, this device will not be allowed to play MPEG video, but that just means that the MPEG video will have to be converted to another format to play on the bulk of video players used worldwide. This means that to get DVD sales, the movie studios will have to encode in a non-encumbered format.
Of course, none of this really matters, as the rest of the world doesn't have to abide by US laws anyway; the result will be that either MPEG is deprecated as a standard, or middle-class Americans will be screaming bloody murder and fight to get the law repealed. If the proposed law gets through the system in the first place, which it won't, at least not in its current state.
You see, the way of getting a law passed is to make a proposal like this, and then put the legislation you really want to pass in the middle of a bill that looks unassuming and can be easily pushed through. Put them both in the same reading slot, and the other one gets quickly passed so more time can be devoted to debating this more contentious bill.
AP and Reuters have their own people to put the stories on the newswires. However, some of you must wonder: where do they get these stories from? Corporations regularly submit "stories" to AP and Reuters, as well as other places Reuters and AP pick up their topics from -- generally they aren't printed verbatim, but if you're a reporter for AP, and get a number of newsworthy pre-written articles from some company, that's going to be a lot easier to use as an initial source than going out and investigating "something" from scratch. As soon as they have accepted the "story" as an initial source, the reporting becomes biased.
Remember: there always has to be an initial source for news, and reporters are rarely there to experience the events themselves. All news is biased by the people available to tell the reporters what they think has happened that would be of interest. In the case of this article we're discussing, it was a special interest group who were digging through government documents looking for abuses by the FBI. I'm sure Haliburton submits many pieces of news through one avenue or another. This isn't necissarily bad, as long as it is balanced by proper reporting and submissions by people holding an opposing view.
A little creativity goes a long way.
An organized crime ring in some country goes into a low-income district, and finds a few mildly educated people who are short on cash. They loan them some money, and then tell them they can pay it back by pulling a few 419 scams on some rich americans they've got lined up who deserve it.
The scammer sends out the scam to the email list provided, and eventually hooks a sucker or two.
At this point, a number of things may happen, but the scammer is usually not allowed to actually handle any "real" cash themselves; organized crime steps in and takes it from here.
In some cases, the scammer is told to lure the victim to an airport in some country. The crime ring has someone (sometimes even the scammer) set up to meet them, and then has someone else "vanish" the rich foreigner and take their money/ID. The money/ID is then used in the crime ring's other operations, usually to move between countries or launder dirty goods/money.
One thing I've never heard of in these cases is what happens to the hired scammers; one could conjecture that they might also be "vanished" at the end of a job, or it could be a situation where if they get results, they're added onto the payroll permanently, and if they don't, they're pressed to repay the loan some other way and things go on from there.
Of course, there are also the educated teenagers who hang out at internet cafes, and do it for kicks. Usually you can tell the difference, as the hired scammers tend to use one of a limited set of form mails, wheras the bored teens get a bit more original, although they usually end up leaving out something necessary to make the scam actually work.
I think you'll find that the same standards apply to computers.
However, it would do nothing to stop the "Buy up every trivial and at face value worthless patent under the sun" companies.
Which meaning did you intend?
The unit was strapped in. At the time of question, straps securely held the unit in place.
In the past, binding twine secured the unit.
I don't know why the unit is missing. Straps held it in place five minutes ago.
I know the entire unit was strapped in front of the mess hall, as an example to the rest of us.
It is sentences such as "The unit was strapped in" that obfuscate the concepts one usually tries to use to communicate to others via standard sentence structure.
If I hadn't posted the parent, I'd mod this up as Insightful right now :)
And what happens when a country outside of the us doesn't allow you to use any DNS server but their own?
That's already as possible as it can get; short of filtering the ICANN IP addresses, there's no way a country can keep someone from using the US DN servers; the Great Firewall shows exactly what happens when a country doesn't allow you access to specific domains/pages.
As it is, someone can already use AlterNIC, OpenNIC, InterNIC, or one of the other alternate root servers; these servers happen to do a 1:1 mapping to all entries registered with ICANN, but there's nothing that says they have to.
Really, the only issue I can see here is that fragmenting the DNS database could open up opportunity for widespread phishing. However, if every country had its country tld at the end, including the US, any phishing would be limited to in-country, where local laws still apply.
Everyone else has their pick of tech-geeks to hire to do it for them, instead of relying on a single company to decide to add the feature.