The court, of course: they purportedly complained that Google hadn't made their case. That's why I mentioned "standing". Supreme courts of different jurisdictions have differing rules about rehearings, but almost all require an application to be considered, just because they are supreme.

Courts are based on both sides arguing their case: Google needs to gain standing and appeal.

It's a genuine risk if standards get lowered in some areas, as eventually they could "surround" the EU with a desert of lower standards and enable more and more poor products.

Historically, software that can only be sold in one country has suffered badly in the marketplace against software that can be sold everywhere. I first saw that at GEAC, when they were certified in (if memory serves) Germany and started seeing many more sales in countries we'd never heard of before (;-))

If you have to have software that's designed to meet a required lowness of confidentiality, you'll be the only country writing it. You probably won't trust another tin-pot country's software, and will have to keep doing it all yourself.

Vendors want to sell software that meets the highest standards, so they can sell it into lots of countries, not write individual specials for every tin-pot dictator on the planet.

Image how much fun it will be, trying to write your own routers, your own google, your own facebook, etc, etc. All so you can lower the quality.

They require notice, so the pilot can be informed of any localized special concerns, such as "this is an airport, stay away".

If ip in set(FCC) {
... permanently overprint "Welcome to your new, non-neutral, net"
... speed = slow
}
else {
... for 10 seconds overprint "We're slowing the FCC, you should too"
... speed = fast
}

Actually it doesn't scale: if you have strong enough dependencies, A: B, eventually you'll start getting B: A. If either has a bug, they all have a bug. This is one of the things that MVS programs suffered from, as people kept putting stuff into them, typically until they could send mail (;-))

Some chaps at Bell Labs saw the problem and invented pipes, tools and loose coupling.

... dictates the answer. Reasoning strictly inside the box that creates, if you then try to propose a robot can use it's own judgment for everything but firing a weapon, you'll get criticized for hitting the edge of the box and not allowing it to actually be autonomous.

In fact, the question isn't "how autonomous", it's "autonomous or not".

They're not granted monopolies unless they are telcos owning poles. The non-telephone companies typically bought up the space on hydro poles. Poles are a regulated monopoly, people using them are an unregulated monopoly.

At the technical level, treat it as if it were "bufferboat", make sure your buffers are configured properly, and use an AQM algorithm like fq_codel. Doubly so if you're Level 3 or any other poor ISP connected to the culprits!

See http://gettys.wordpress.com/20...

I wasn't asking about legitimate spin-offs, I was wondering how many of them are pure crooks (;-))

When Sun still existed, it wasn't at all unexpected for a couple of people to leave to start their own business, work on something on their own nickel that Sun wasn't going to fund, and see if they'd get bought.

The Sun very-very-multithreaded chips came out of two hardware designers thinking that there was a better way to go fast than "this chip is so hot it glows in the dark". They got lots of parallel threads almost immediately, whereupon Sun bought them! They eventually got faster single-threaded performance too, all out if breaking up the function units very differently.

All large organizations suffer from this phenomenon, whether they're public or private. All large organizations suffer from crooks walking out with thumb-drives, too...

I wonder how many of these companies were started by ex-sysadmins with their pockets full of thumb-drives? Is their security is that bad, there must be a thriving business in recycled secrets (;-))