I don't think a company as large, rich and as resourceful as Oracle would find it hard to anything it wants ;-)

Such action wouldn't necessarily come directly from Oracle.

If that happens (and you may well be correct), I predict that Oracle will follow up by attacking LibreOffice with patent claims in order to re-assert OpenOffice's market position.

I think it's plain to see that Oracle is not interested in FOSS principles, fairness, "community spirit", free market competition, patent-free software (regardless of Ellison's past claims) or even (as it seems at present) their reputation with us technical folk; they want to be a highly-profitable, dominant force in big-business IT with reputation with management, and screw everyone else.

Personally, I think (hope) their current seeming disdain for the technical and FOSS community will be a problem for them in the long run, and they will probably end up back-pedalling on their stance to open community projects. I also think they bit off more than they could chew when they bought up Sun, SleepyCat, InnoBase, et al, and may be struggling to know what to do with all the projects they have inherited. After all, it's us geeks who are often in the position to choose which technologies to deploy in an organisation, and it seems there's a lot of us who are going off Oracle pretty quickly.

"How about a nice game of chess?"

Nope. Dalvik is not compatible with Java. It can not "correctly execute Java programs". There are tools that can *convert* Java class files and bytecode into Dalvik bytecode, so a subset of all valid Java programs can be converted to run on Dalvik, but the Dalvik VM is utterly incapable of running those programs directly.

It would be like trying to run, say, MIPS machine code on a SPARC CPU. They're very very similar architectures in many ways. Many of the instructions have the same names, and are semantically identical. You could convert it, but it ain't gonna work out of the box. But a MIPS processor is not a SPARC processor, even though they're similar in many ways.

That's not to say that patents on one don't cover the other, but what you said was just plain wrong.

But you can easily argue that the damage was done the second the system was left unsecured:

Let's say he *didnt* break in, or wasn't caught and left no trace. Eventually someone discovers the system is not secure: what do they do? Just close the holes and pretend that everything's OK? No, you assume someone may have broken in and perform the due diligence you just described, at the same cost. Nobody even has to break in for this cost to be incurred, there only needs to be the possibility of break in.

So, is it damage done by the hacker? Or is it damage done by the idiot who set up the system in the first place? Let the lawyers fight it out!

In Ireland, killing a human being is illegal.

If you were in Ireland, and you shot someone across the border (or anywhere), and killed them, then you are indeed guilty of a crime in Ireland. You were in Ireland. You shot somebody. You killed them. Therefore, you broke Irish law. It doesn't matter that the victim was elsewhere, only that your *act* was illegal, and your illegal action was instigated and took place in Ireland. It is the act of "deliberately causing death" that is illegal, not the "event of someone getting killed", or "the act of killing someone in Ireland, whilst in Ireland"! I confess that I know nothing of Irish law, but this would certainly be the case in Britain due to the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 (then Great Britain and Ireland) and I believe this act, or an equivalent, still stands in Irish law. If this wasn't the case then you'd be saying that "killing people is fine, so long as you don't kill anyone in Ireland", and that's not what we really want is it? (Obviously there are exceptions for lawful killing in combat at war, etc.)

Of course, from the point of view of Northern Island, you may *simultaneously* be considered guilty of a crime there too, as N.I. considers the murder of its citizens a crime regardless of the location of the murderer or the victim, but if you're not actually there, and the crime is already illegal in the jurisdiction where you are, then there may be little to be gained from extradition, and the jurisdiction is, in my mind at least, clear. (At least, if Justice truly is meant to be blind and the two country's legal systems are relatively compatible.) Perhaps there might be complications involving evidence, witnesses, etc. where extradition might be negotiated to facilitate justice, but in this case, the crime itself really isn't in doubt on either side. Similarly, in the McKinnon case, the crime is not in doubt on either side of the pond.

The real arguments would come when the countries involved have a completely different idea of what's illegal, or where the punishments for the same crime are at odds. It could be argued that this is the case with McKinnon, since the US is quite likely to dish out much harsher penalties than a UK court (in addition to the fact that he will be removed from his home country, family, way of life, etc.) There are also some political issues in that this extradition is being done under a one-sided agreement that the US would not honour if the roles were reversed. (My understanding is that the agreement was signed by the UK, but not by the US.)

Of course, IANAL, and I highly doubt that real-life international law is anywhere near this clear/sane.. Gotta keep it nice and complicated to keep up those international lawyers' fees!

And somewhere out there a lone user of a modded Dragon 32 is cursing the slashdot comment filter.... ;)

(Just what were those shift keys for ?)