Castro's country is in the Western Hemisphere. It is therefore "of the West". Death penalty for tax evasion? It's quite easy if you refuse to pay the taxes, and then refuse to submit to arrest for your court case on tax evasion. Refusal to submit to arrest typically creates a violent situation, and resolutions in which someone is shot by the cops is not unheard of.
That is not at all the same thing. You could similarly argue that shoplifting carries the death penalty because you might draw a firearm and shoot a police officer in the head while he attempts to arrest you. Resisting arrest, however, is a separate crime, and has absolutely nothing to do with what they were arresting you for- tax evasion.
Your absurd strawmen attacks aside, the death penalty for tax evasion is a fantasy, nothing more.
History has shown that it doesn't work at all. Unless, of course, your goal is to quickly engage in genocides, get the most power to the ruler, and other such things that socialism has proven very good at.
Of course, this is why the scandinavian socialist nations don't have the best standard of living in the world, some of the highest per-capita incomes in the world, some of the best healthcare in the world...
Oh, wait. They do.
What country do you live in? In every one I can think of, all taxation is forced.
Your residence in the jurisdiction of that nation is entirely voulentary.
Your definition of socialism is off. Socialism is simply the medium step between capitalism and communism. The United States today is a socialist state. The more it leans toward capitalism, the less regulated the market becomes, and the less free it is. Hence, logically speaking, if you want a free market, you want a more socialist state.
How about, then, I take issue with quotes directly from their text?
...the resultant economic system, the only one compatible with the protection of individual rights, is the free market.
This is historically bullshit. A free market only exists through government force of arms to make it free!
All public lands and resources, as well as claims thereto, except as explicitly allowed by the Constitution, shall be returned to private ownership, with the proceeds of sale going to retire public liabilities.
OMG! Public parks are TEH EVILZ!
These people seriously need to grow up. The language is adult, the sentiment isn't- it's just childish ME ME ME.
This sort of prince ruling by force of arms is alive and well in the West. Not only in the more blatant examples (like Castro), but consider the fact that you face a good chance of violent death if you refuse to pay the prince his due when he comes to rob you (taxes) in the "progressive" countries.
Castro is not the West, as you well know. Moreover, I know no western nation which practices the death penalty for tax evasion.
Similarly, your use of the word 'rob' for 'tax' also betrays you. Tax is not robbery, it is entirely voulentary.
That contradicts everything the libertarians fight for. Also, libertarians tend to be strong on property rights, so those RIAA cops could come nowhere near you. The one that really blunts your argument, however, is that the libertarians are the ones who want the weakest copyright laws in the first place.
Except that weaker government means someone will take up the slack, and that someone is the strongest- companies, the wealthy, etc- and those people are not bound by, for example, the constitution or bill of rights.
If the government hasn't already shot you dead.
Because the government often shoots innocent civillians down like dogs in the street, right?
I mean, I'm all for lesser governmental interference in private affairs, but this is taking it to a rediculous extreme. History has shown that the only workable form of economy is socialism, to one extent or another. The US has a more capitalist-biased socialism, and the scandinavian countries have a more communist-biased socialism. Guess which one works better, on the whole?
I agree. But I think that the side-effects of passing an act like the above would simply be to brush aside all the 'dead wood', so to speak, with positive reprecussions, (or at least benificial reprecussions), whether intended or not.
So what's the difference between this and what we have now? Oh. the size of the city-states. Never mind.
That'd be the rule of law for one thousand, Alex. The fact is that the 'warlord-prince city-state' died out in the west hundreds of years ago, replaced by pseudo-democratic governmental entities which ensure relatively stable continuity of government between leaders.
I think you are confusing the libertarian ideal of "the least government we can feasibly get away with" and the "no government at all" of your example.
I know, I pointed out two different cases- and as I pointed out, different people have very different understandings of what 'the smallest government we can get away with' is.
Also, why is it OK that in a strong state (not libertarian) that the government gets to do the things that the RIAA and Microsoft do in your examples? You'd be hard pressed to find support for such private (or public) marauding cops in libertarianism at all. I wonder if it is even in Randism (the more extreme form of libertarianism).
It's not, but in most strong states, there's something preventing the government from doing so- checks and balances. A libertarian state removes those checks and balances, because they are checks and balances on the government, and without a government...
If a government throws you in jail, a court can issue a writ of habeus corpus. If the RIAA throws you in jail, what's your recourse?
The Libertarian Party? Oh, like the Probability Broach, called the 'seminal work in libertarian literature'? The one where the absense of government makes everything happy and sparkling and gay and crime-free and perfect?
I'm sorry to break your bubble of ignorance, but that only works in extremely bad science fiction.
In the real world, instead of being ruled by a government which is ruled only by it's own incompetence and presumably by its constitution, a libertarian state would be ruled over by either warlord princes who govern small city-states via force of arms (if government is gone completely) or corprations which govern through greed and abuse of justice, (if there actually was a police force and state military.)
Slashdot, you think microsoft's monopoly was bad? Imagine Microsoft funding a private army to go out, hunt down people using pirated copies of Windows, and put them to work in a gulag. Imagine the RIAA breaking down the doors and arresting anyone it suspects of showing a movie to more than the members of their immediate family.
The only problem? His amendment is so broadly worded that it would probably outlaw credit histories as well. Do you lend money to people? Is this something you'd condone?
Oh, because the credit history companies have just done an excellent job of protecting our credit histories and protecting us from fraud!
The swartzchild radius of a black hole with the mass of the earth is, IIRC, 9 millimeters. I have no idea what the LHC is supposed to do, but if it turns the earth into a blackhole (which seems fantastically unlikely to me, but then, I'm no physicist either), yeah the ISS will be out of the atmosphere. Unless the earth gains an accretion disk...
Well, I can see a lot of your points, especially with regard to application compatability, I can't see myself going back to Windows XP- I'll probably grab a copy of Vista Ultimate when it comes out and upgrade from RC1. When I have to use a copy of Windows XP (at work, for example), I am always smacked in the face by the lack of little things- inability to set different system sound volumes for different programs, inability to search in the start menu, the lack of the "Description" field under process manager, the lack of accessible search under Windows Explorer... sure they're not big things, but they are little things, and they make the experience that much better.
(The fact that all my hardware works flawlessly (which wasn't true under XP) and that crashing WoW, (which happens every so often due to overheating) is a simple seamless step-down of system processor speed and a simple error message informing me that I might notice a system performance slowdown temporarily.)
I suppose I'd say if I wasn't already on Vista, and if everything didn't already work, I probably wouldn't upgrade. But once I tried it, I was hooked.
Let me guess, you're a anarcho-capitalist who believes that a world without government will be magical and sparkling and Ayan Rand would have been elected in 1952 and visted the lunar colony before flying around the world on her fusion-powered dirgible the next year, right? (the Probability Broach, in case you were wondering- apparently a seminal work in libertarian fiction.)
The fact is, there's no real evidence the court is corrupt. I think that's quite a significant jump, and you'll need to provide me with proof of that. Sure, it's made a lot of mistakes, and even so it's more conservative than I'd like, but corrupt? I'm not willing to go that far.
Frankly, the fact is that the court exists to interpret the constitution and oversee it's implimentation. As I can't see any particularly glaring errors in it's interpretation, your "not the type of commerce wich the text refers too" nonwithstanding, (because it's unfounded and irrelevant), it's interpretation stands until altered by a higher court.
that's the problem: "it would seem to me" does not mean that it is.
Okay, according to the court it does.
Moreover, you're being totally illogical. This is obviously interstate commerce, as the judge points out specifically. The reason this legislation was enacted in the first place was because of the difficulty of relegating this interstate commerce-related behavior.
Page 11, section C of the judgement, states...
"Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce implicity prohibits states from passing any law that discriminates against or unduly burdens interstate commerce and thereby impedes free private trade in the national marketplace."... "We have previously deemed it relevant that one state's internet laws may impose compliance costs on businesses throughout the country, because it is difficult for businesses to determine where internet users are located. (relying upon extraterritorial implications in finding statute criminalizing internet dissemination of material harmful to minors violated dormant commerce clause.)"
It would seem to me that this falls absolutely under the Interstate Commerce Clause, and that that provision is totally redundant- because this matter is solely of federal jurisdiction anyway. It was only placed there, I figure, to do exactly what it did here- stop the state governments from screwing with something that is definately of federal jurisdiction.
Read the judgement- there's almost no question in my mind- this case was extremely clear cut. On page six, quoted is the Can-SPAM act in which
This chapter supersedes any statute, regulation, or rule of a state or political subdivision of a state that expressly regulates the use of electronic male to send commerical messages...
is quoted. That strikes down the application of Oklahoma's law, which the judge ruled
...is not limited to inaccuracies in transmission information that were material, lead to detrimental reliance by the recipient, and were made by a sender who intented that the misstatements be acted upon and either knew them to be inaccurate or was reckless about their truth.
And then, the judge ruled that it didn't violate the CAN-SPAM act (The apellant, mummagraphics argued that the senders of the e-mails mislead mummagraphics as to the origin of the message, when the judge pointed out that it was a marketing e-mail- hence, it had all sorts of links and phone numbers and stuff to contact the people who had sent it.)
With all that established, the appellants had no case.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with this, unless you have a problem with the doctrine of preemption- and if you do, that's a much, much larger issue than just spam e-mail.
George Washington was the president But now he's dead (dead) Mackenzie King was Prime Minister But now he's dead (dead)
So don't go into politics You'll end up dead Don't go into politics You'll end up dead
Oppenheimer built the bomb But now he's dead (dead) Einstien was very very smart But not enough not to be dead (dead)
So don't go into science You'll end up dead Don't go into science You'll end up dead And don't go into politics You'll end up dead Don't go into politics You'll end up dead
Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin, Brian Jones, Keith Moon, Jim Morrison, Roy Orbison, John Lennon, Bob Marley, Leonard Bernstien, Elvis Presley Well, we're not too sure about Elvis But I think you get the point
Don't go into music You'll end up dead Don't go into music You'll end up dead And don't go into science You'll end up dead Don't go into politics You'll end up dead
Break it down You'll be burned, you'll be fried You'll be buried alive And there's no hope thinkin' That you're gonna survive 'Cause there's the drowning and choking And cancer from smoking And smothered while sleeping And blood will start seeping
So I have found, you'll end up in the ground And you'll be dead So I have found, you'll end up in the ground I wish there was an option instead But you'll be dead Dead Maybe with a bullet in your head But you'll be dead Dead Very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very dead
Humm. I don't know. All I can say is that I know (without being too specific here and getting anyone in trouble) is that Bell's in a shitload of trouble. I've seen the status reports on the code they're working on now, and it's pure shit- upgrades that can't be uninstalled, patches that break critical functionality, patches delivered late, code that just doesn't run.
I've been there when they've had the network offline from 10 PM Saturday night to 8 AM Sunday morning- and they don't even have the proper manuals there for the test cases they're running. The code is just that flawed.
And guess what? It's running on production systems anyway, because they don't have a choice.
You're right, I dropped a decimal place and got 0.5ms. On the other hand, inter-satellite data transfer could be a massive improvement over terrestrial systms; if you give each satellite a direct laser link with every other visible satellite in the constellation, you could lose huge chunks of the constellation and still maintain an operable, albeit slower, network.
Given the GSM codec of 13 kb/s, and a total estimated mobile phone subscriber base of 2.15 billion, that's 3.25 TB/s across the entire network. According to Wikipedia, you need a minimum of 24 satellites for a MEO constellation. Teledesic, for example, proposed 840 satellites at an altitude of 700 km- so a very large LEO constellation. That gives each satellite a bandwidth of 1.609 GB/s, which is not totally unreasonable.
(Of course, also, the fact that not ALL 2.15 billion subscribers will be online at any one time, so you could probably get away with chopping that number by an order of magnitude.)
The difference, I suppose, is that a large portion of your satellite constellation will be over, say, the Atlantic... where it won't be very helpful. Those portions of the network could serve as route-and-relay, or they could do the computing backbone, maybe.
You'd need on-the-fly reprovisioning of the satellites, however, I think, depending on where they're orbiting.
Yes, and no. There are many types of orbits. Maintaining communications satellites in geosync orbit is probably both inefficient and a bad idea in terms of signal latency. A constellation of LEO satellites at about 750 km altitude or so will have a round-trip latency of less than a millisecond- practical for all applications. Obviously inter-satellite routing and ground-station routing will increase latency, but that'd happen anywhere.
Moreover, you'd have signal practically anywhere you could get a dedicated satellite lock, which should be almost anywhere. And if not, all you need is to up the density of the constellation. You'd probably need to anyway, because the minimum cluster size (what, four dozen satellites or so?) is probably not sufficient to route millions or hundreds of millions of seperate, individual phone calls.
Except the point is that the cost isn't worth it. There are no 'potential markets'. Your potential markets are probably equivilant to a day's operating revenue, if that- if making the game cross-platform, or supporting it once it is, takes more than a company-day, it's just not worth it.
Given that, why would they give half a damn about vendor lock-in? It's not doing anything but helping them.
But what you miss is that without those desktops working correctly, all of the above systems (other than LDAP, since AD is basically being used as LDAP in this case) become aboslutely pointless. The desktop is the reason, the desktop is the driving impetus. There's no point in having piles and piles of fancy silicon to defend a network... that doesn't do anything. Or exist.
Moreover, I don't know exactly what their mission-critical stuff is running on, (since I don't work there- I just know people who work in relatively high-up positions) but I would doubt it's even that. From what I've heard, their mission-crit stuff (which is basically switches, since their billing systems and stuff don't even have online backups) runs a completely custom-made codebase.
Everything datacenter-wise, like billing systems and provisioning, don't have backup systems, and they regularly take them down for almost a dozen consecutive hours at a time. The reason being, I think, is that the switches can operate totally independently, and can/do cache all the data when they're not uplinked; when they re-establish the link, they just burst upload all of the data and re-synchronize the longer-term systems in the datacenter.
These are, quite frankly, not systems that require those enormous protection methods. They have offline backups taken every day, IIRC.
That said: I can't imagine how you'd spread a virus on that network. Everything is centralized and run via Terminal Server or Citrix. Their external firewall is rediculously overprotective. It's fucking impossible to get anything done, even when that's just visiting slashdot. Everything work-related can be accessed from Citrix, and if it isn't work related... good luck.
Canada Customs operates under a different set of rules than most government agents, and in fact, they apply a very different metric to what they consider legal and not legal.
A) Canada Customs is not bound to permit any material they like to enter the country. There is absolutely no requirement for them to permit you entry to the country under any circumstances at all.
B) Canada Customs is able to confiscate any material they feel necessary.
C) The only way, to the best of my knowledge, to appeal a Canada Customs declaration is via the court system.
-However-
I know that in at least one case, Canada Customs makes a point of confiscating everything borderline to one shop, and every time the shop wanted to get it back, they had to appeal to the court- which, of course, pointed out that Canada Customs was being an ass and ordered it released.
That didn't stop Canada Customs from doing it the next time... and the next time...
Canada Customs is a special case, for some reason. I don't know exactly why.
Slashdot Mirror
That is not at all the same thing. You could similarly argue that shoplifting carries the death penalty because you might draw a firearm and shoot a police officer in the head while he attempts to arrest you. Resisting arrest, however, is a separate crime, and has absolutely nothing to do with what they were arresting you for- tax evasion.
Your absurd strawmen attacks aside, the death penalty for tax evasion is a fantasy, nothing more.
Of course, this is why the scandinavian socialist nations don't have the best standard of living in the world, some of the highest per-capita incomes in the world, some of the best healthcare in the world...
Oh, wait. They do.
Your residence in the jurisdiction of that nation is entirely voulentary.
Your definition of socialism is off. Socialism is simply the medium step between capitalism and communism. The United States today is a socialist state. The more it leans toward capitalism, the less regulated the market becomes, and the less free it is. Hence, logically speaking, if you want a free market, you want a more socialist state.
This is historically bullshit. A free market only exists through government force of arms to make it free!
OMG! Public parks are TEH EVILZ!
These people seriously need to grow up. The language is adult, the sentiment isn't- it's just childish ME ME ME.
Castro is not the West, as you well know. Moreover, I know no western nation which practices the death penalty for tax evasion.
Similarly, your use of the word 'rob' for 'tax' also betrays you. Tax is not robbery, it is entirely voulentary.
Except that weaker government means someone will take up the slack, and that someone is the strongest- companies, the wealthy, etc- and those people are not bound by, for example, the constitution or bill of rights.
Because the government often shoots innocent civillians down like dogs in the street, right?
I mean, I'm all for lesser governmental interference in private affairs, but this is taking it to a rediculous extreme. History has shown that the only workable form of economy is socialism, to one extent or another. The US has a more capitalist-biased socialism, and the scandinavian countries have a more communist-biased socialism. Guess which one works better, on the whole?
Hint: it's not the capitalist-biased socialism.
I agree. But I think that the side-effects of passing an act like the above would simply be to brush aside all the 'dead wood', so to speak, with positive reprecussions, (or at least benificial reprecussions), whether intended or not.
That's not what I said- I simply mentioned the Probability Broach in my preamble, nothing more. The points are still valid.
That'd be the rule of law for one thousand, Alex. The fact is that the 'warlord-prince city-state' died out in the west hundreds of years ago, replaced by pseudo-democratic governmental entities which ensure relatively stable continuity of government between leaders.
I know, I pointed out two different cases- and as I pointed out, different people have very different understandings of what 'the smallest government we can get away with' is.
It's not, but in most strong states, there's something preventing the government from doing so- checks and balances. A libertarian state removes those checks and balances, because they are checks and balances on the government, and without a government...
If a government throws you in jail, a court can issue a writ of habeus corpus. If the RIAA throws you in jail, what's your recourse?
I think it's a good idea. Frankly, the US banking system scares the shit out of me, and I would really like it to be undermined in exactly this way.
Maybe it'd put a quick end to the whole 'credit culture' that has built up in America and is slowly destroying the national economy.
The Libertarian Party? Oh, like the Probability Broach, called the 'seminal work in libertarian literature'? The one where the absense of government makes everything happy and sparkling and gay and crime-free and perfect?
I'm sorry to break your bubble of ignorance, but that only works in extremely bad science fiction.
In the real world, instead of being ruled by a government which is ruled only by it's own incompetence and presumably by its constitution, a libertarian state would be ruled over by either warlord princes who govern small city-states via force of arms (if government is gone completely) or corprations which govern through greed and abuse of justice, (if there actually was a police force and state military.)
Slashdot, you think microsoft's monopoly was bad? Imagine Microsoft funding a private army to go out, hunt down people using pirated copies of Windows, and put them to work in a gulag. Imagine the RIAA breaking down the doors and arresting anyone it suspects of showing a movie to more than the members of their immediate family.
THat's the libertarian state.
Oh, because the credit history companies have just done an excellent job of protecting our credit histories and protecting us from fraud!
Is this something I'd condone? Hell yeah!
The swartzchild radius of a black hole with the mass of the earth is, IIRC, 9 millimeters.
I have no idea what the LHC is supposed to do, but if it turns the earth into a blackhole (which seems fantastically unlikely to me, but then, I'm no physicist either), yeah the ISS will be out of the atmosphere.
Unless the earth gains an accretion disk...
Well, I can see a lot of your points, especially with regard to application compatability, I can't see myself going back to Windows XP- I'll probably grab a copy of Vista Ultimate when it comes out and upgrade from RC1. When I have to use a copy of Windows XP (at work, for example), I am always smacked in the face by the lack of little things- inability to set different system sound volumes for different programs, inability to search in the start menu, the lack of the "Description" field under process manager, the lack of accessible search under Windows Explorer... sure they're not big things, but they are little things, and they make the experience that much better.
(The fact that all my hardware works flawlessly (which wasn't true under XP) and that crashing WoW, (which happens every so often due to overheating) is a simple seamless step-down of system processor speed and a simple error message informing me that I might notice a system performance slowdown temporarily.)
I suppose I'd say if I wasn't already on Vista, and if everything didn't already work, I probably wouldn't upgrade. But once I tried it, I was hooked.
Odd. I went from Beta2 to RC1, and that upgrade solved all my driver and application problems...
Then again, my laptop came with a sticker that said "Designed for Windows XP- Windows Vista Capable". What were you installing on, hardware wise?
Let me guess, you're a anarcho-capitalist who believes that a world without government will be magical and sparkling and Ayan Rand would have been elected in 1952 and visted the lunar colony before flying around the world on her fusion-powered dirgible the next year, right? (the Probability Broach, in case you were wondering- apparently a seminal work in libertarian fiction.)
The fact is, there's no real evidence the court is corrupt. I think that's quite a significant jump, and you'll need to provide me with proof of that. Sure, it's made a lot of mistakes, and even so it's more conservative than I'd like, but corrupt? I'm not willing to go that far.
Frankly, the fact is that the court exists to interpret the constitution and oversee it's implimentation. As I can't see any particularly glaring errors in it's interpretation, your "not the type of commerce wich the text refers too" nonwithstanding, (because it's unfounded and irrelevant), it's interpretation stands until altered by a higher court.
Okay, according to the court it does.
Moreover, you're being totally illogical. This is obviously interstate commerce, as the judge points out specifically. The reason this legislation was enacted in the first place was because of the difficulty of relegating this interstate commerce-related behavior.
Page 11, section C of the judgement, states...
It would seem to me that this falls absolutely under the Interstate Commerce Clause, and that that provision is totally redundant- because this matter is solely of federal jurisdiction anyway. It was only placed there, I figure, to do exactly what it did here- stop the state governments from screwing with something that is definately of federal jurisdiction.
Well, of course. If you think the law is wrong, then obviously there's a problem- but that doesn't make the ruling bad.
is quoted. That strikes down the application of Oklahoma's law, which the judge ruled
And then, the judge ruled that it didn't violate the CAN-SPAM act (The apellant, mummagraphics argued that the senders of the e-mails mislead mummagraphics as to the origin of the message, when the judge pointed out that it was a marketing e-mail- hence, it had all sorts of links and phone numbers and stuff to contact the people who had sent it.)
With all that established, the appellants had no case.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with this, unless you have a problem with the doctrine of preemption- and if you do, that's a much, much larger issue than just spam e-mail.
George Washington was the president
But now he's dead (dead)
Mackenzie King was Prime Minister
But now he's dead (dead)
So don't go into politics
You'll end up dead
Don't go into politics
You'll end up dead
Oppenheimer built the bomb
But now he's dead (dead)
Einstien was very very smart
But not enough not to be dead (dead)
So don't go into science
You'll end up dead
Don't go into science
You'll end up dead
And don't go into politics
You'll end up dead
Don't go into politics
You'll end up dead
Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin, Brian Jones, Keith Moon,
Jim Morrison, Roy Orbison,
John Lennon, Bob Marley, Leonard Bernstien, Elvis Presley
Well, we're not too sure about Elvis
But I think you get the point
Don't go into music
You'll end up dead
Don't go into music
You'll end up dead
And don't go into science
You'll end up dead
Don't go into politics
You'll end up dead
Break it down
You'll be burned, you'll be fried
You'll be buried alive
And there's no hope thinkin'
That you're gonna survive
'Cause there's the drowning and choking
And cancer from smoking
And smothered while sleeping
And blood will start seeping
So I have found, you'll end up in the ground
And you'll be dead
So I have found, you'll end up in the ground
I wish there was an option instead
But you'll be dead
Dead
Maybe with a bullet in your head
But you'll be dead
Dead
Very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very dead
Humm. I don't know. All I can say is that I know (without being too specific here and getting anyone in trouble) is that Bell's in a shitload of trouble. I've seen the status reports on the code they're working on now, and it's pure shit- upgrades that can't be uninstalled, patches that break critical functionality, patches delivered late, code that just doesn't run.
I've been there when they've had the network offline from 10 PM Saturday night to 8 AM Sunday morning- and they don't even have the proper manuals there for the test cases they're running. The code is just that flawed.
And guess what? It's running on production systems anyway, because they don't have a choice.
You're right, I dropped a decimal place and got 0.5ms. On the other hand, inter-satellite data transfer could be a massive improvement over terrestrial systms; if you give each satellite a direct laser link with every other visible satellite in the constellation, you could lose huge chunks of the constellation and still maintain an operable, albeit slower, network.
Given the GSM codec of 13 kb/s, and a total estimated mobile phone subscriber base of 2.15 billion, that's 3.25 TB/s across the entire network. According to Wikipedia, you need a minimum of 24 satellites for a MEO constellation. Teledesic, for example, proposed 840 satellites at an altitude of 700 km- so a very large LEO constellation. That gives each satellite a bandwidth of 1.609 GB/s, which is not totally unreasonable.
(Of course, also, the fact that not ALL 2.15 billion subscribers will be online at any one time, so you could probably get away with chopping that number by an order of magnitude.)
The difference, I suppose, is that a large portion of your satellite constellation will be over, say, the Atlantic... where it won't be very helpful. Those portions of the network could serve as route-and-relay, or they could do the computing backbone, maybe.
You'd need on-the-fly reprovisioning of the satellites, however, I think, depending on where they're orbiting.
Yes, and no. There are many types of orbits. Maintaining communications satellites in geosync orbit is probably both inefficient and a bad idea in terms of signal latency. A constellation of LEO satellites at about 750 km altitude or so will have a round-trip latency of less than a millisecond- practical for all applications. Obviously inter-satellite routing and ground-station routing will increase latency, but that'd happen anywhere.
Moreover, you'd have signal practically anywhere you could get a dedicated satellite lock, which should be almost anywhere. And if not, all you need is to up the density of the constellation. You'd probably need to anyway, because the minimum cluster size (what, four dozen satellites or so?) is probably not sufficient to route millions or hundreds of millions of seperate, individual phone calls.
Except the point is that the cost isn't worth it. There are no 'potential markets'. Your potential markets are probably equivilant to a day's operating revenue, if that- if making the game cross-platform, or supporting it once it is, takes more than a company-day, it's just not worth it.
Given that, why would they give half a damn about vendor lock-in? It's not doing anything but helping them.
Frankly, you just sound bitter, and it shows.
But what you miss is that without those desktops working correctly, all of the above systems (other than LDAP, since AD is basically being used as LDAP in this case) become aboslutely pointless. The desktop is the reason, the desktop is the driving impetus. There's no point in having piles and piles of fancy silicon to defend a network... that doesn't do anything. Or exist.
Moreover, I don't know exactly what their mission-critical stuff is running on, (since I don't work there- I just know people who work in relatively high-up positions) but I would doubt it's even that. From what I've heard, their mission-crit stuff (which is basically switches, since their billing systems and stuff don't even have online backups) runs a completely custom-made codebase.
Everything datacenter-wise, like billing systems and provisioning, don't have backup systems, and they regularly take them down for almost a dozen consecutive hours at a time. The reason being, I think, is that the switches can operate totally independently, and can/do cache all the data when they're not uplinked; when they re-establish the link, they just burst upload all of the data and re-synchronize the longer-term systems in the datacenter.
These are, quite frankly, not systems that require those enormous protection methods. They have offline backups taken every day, IIRC.
That said: I can't imagine how you'd spread a virus on that network. Everything is centralized and run via Terminal Server or Citrix. Their external firewall is rediculously overprotective. It's fucking impossible to get anything done, even when that's just visiting slashdot. Everything work-related can be accessed from Citrix, and if it isn't work related... good luck.
*mutter*
I'm rambling...
Canada Customs operates under a different set of rules than most government agents, and in fact, they apply a very different metric to what they consider legal and not legal.
A) Canada Customs is not bound to permit any material they like to enter the country. There is absolutely no requirement for them to permit you entry to the country under any circumstances at all.
B) Canada Customs is able to confiscate any material they feel necessary.
C) The only way, to the best of my knowledge, to appeal a Canada Customs declaration is via the court system.
-However-
I know that in at least one case, Canada Customs makes a point of confiscating everything borderline to one shop, and every time the shop wanted to get it back, they had to appeal to the court- which, of course, pointed out that Canada Customs was being an ass and ordered it released.
That didn't stop Canada Customs from doing it the next time... and the next time...
Canada Customs is a special case, for some reason. I don't know exactly why.