"people"? You misspelled "legislators" - in 2003/4, Qwest (now CenturyStink) and Comcast went nuts and brib^M convinced Utah legislators to abandon the UTOPIA multi-city municipal broadband project, then they began slathering on lawsuits and threats thereof.

heh - don't eat much? You should see the electrical and HVAC bills...

One small problem with that theory... if they "inconveniently lose" a critical bit of video evidence at trial, the defense would savage them for it, and the jury is likely to let that fact color their decision in a way that is not advantageous to the prosecution.

All said, since most prosecutions end up plea-bargains this may be moot, but for those that go to trial...?

Unless you meant AWS or similar, err, WTF?

If you buy any actual server iron at most companies, you get to play with an RFQ/RFP, untangle the resulting bids, and deal with the PO process, courtesy of Accounts Payable (and Lord help you if you try and circumvent that!)

Seriously - a VAR is usually the only way to make comprehensible sense out of such a purchase, because usually you're not only buying the metal, but you're buying VMWare/Oracle/Whatever licenses to go along with it as well (and if you're dumb enough to do Windows and don't have an SA/EA, you get to buy that too).

Shit, man - the time saved by having a VAR bundle that mess and bid against each other is *way* more than worth the hassle sometimes...

They do - well, if you put it in an LPAR ;)

I can vouch for this one - the whole LPAR/IVM set is licensed in such a way that makes it effing impossible to be a 3rd-party VAR for the things.

Then again, I'd hate to be the sorry mofo that either a) had to manage the things, or b) had to write a web-based wrapper to track and tie together individual iSeries/i5/AS400-based IVM interfaces (*shudder*).

(no, seriously, I'd much prefer to do that with Solaris/Sparc Logical Domains, if only because LDOMS can be way more easily handled from the command prompt, and thus scriptable...)

Dunno if you can apply a criminal statute to it, but there has to be some precedent formed around taxi companies getting borked out of a fare that way, or perhaps something similar to how pizza delivery was once crank-called... it would depend on the locale, though, and I doubt you'd find anything beyond local laws to support it.

Oh, it gets even better - wait until politispam pages all over the site go apeshit and claim outright censorship...

This is not always true, for a couple of reasons:

1) If you got that H1-B by way of Infosys or Tata (as opposed to getting it straight from the US company), the dynamics are radically different than what you state, and those two companies alone make up an almost-majority of visa-holders (how that happened? 'hell if I know.)

2) Your statement only applies to those workers who are sufficiently competent in the field they work in, which is, sadly, only a fraction of the total (mind you, this is the case in any given group of people in any given field, so don't take it as a snipe against foreign workers specifically). I say this because you still have to demonstrate the competence at an interview. It is one thing to get recruiter offers, but another entirely when you have to sit in the interview.

Exception:
My ancient and long-dead first domain/site ever had never got hacked, and it never will: I shuttered it in 2001 (-ish) when I sold the domain name (spark.org). ;)

True - and how is it that they say they're not counting vulns when that is precisely what they're doing (albeit counting past vulns and extrapolating...)

Both eventually become open records to the public anyway (after an expiration date, naturally), so aside from keeping such exceptional data sufficiently isolated from the public until their expiration dates (which happens anyway), what do you think detracts from GP's philosophy as per data format?

Back in the Bad Old Days, everything was typewritten on paper... a completely open data format. So...

I think it'd be a combination of the two - sure, the top three gents would still control the thing, but if GOOG dropped to $0.01 (assuming they weren't delisted first), then they'd have nothing but existing cash reserves to draw from, plus any patent royalties and alternate non-site-related sources of income. That in turn would dry up in a few years (not quite "decades") just from operational costs alone.

Question is, would the more proper term be "disruption"? :)

True - though to be fair, the really old stuff was based on what they knew at the time (with the rest being based on theories and suppositions; e.g. where posited that "ether" existed in space, where we know hard vacuum exists today.)

It's still fun to read, though - anyone with sufficient knowledge on the subject and a love of the evolution of human thinking can see and appreciate how far we've come, no? For instance, I have a 2nd Edition copy of Worlds Other Than Ours, printed in 1870-something (forgot exactly which year - it's at home.) It even came with color illustrations of various planets that were known about at the time. A huge chunk of it is grossly and flat-out wrong about what our environment is like viz. the Solar System. Some of it is so far off kilter that it's funny that folks seriously thought certain things were true, but at the same time you can still see in those words the yearning to learn more, and to know more - even in a book that claimed to be authoritative on the subject.

So yeah - I wouldn't go too hard on those now long-dead folks. I just wouldn't take everything they wrote as gospel, either.