I feel your sarcasm, but I think the comparison is apt. As a publicly traded company, BP is responsible to the shareholders. This means there is the possibility that BP might, for instance, withhold information about the size and scope of the disaster in the Gulf in an effort to limit their liability. This is not a value judgment...it is only normal behavior for any public company. The President, however, is responsible to the American people, and nationalization of BP for the duration of the crisis (as recently advocated by Robert Reich) would ensure that the correct incentives are in place to stop the leak and clean up the spill, rather than limit liability. Viewed through this lens, I think nationalization of the telecoms in the event of a cyberattack may be the right step to take.

You said it. If you get in bed with Microsoft, you don't get out. Just ask Sega.

Dune II comes to mind.

Oh, I'm sure it'll never be abused...like wiretapping, or tasers. *cough*

When I read the last line, I spit coffee all over two monitors, a docking station, keyboard, mouse, and computer speakers. Bravo, sir.

In the non-canon Trek novel Prime Directive, they referred to this as the Danylkiw Limit. Perhaps the Reeves-Stevens got this idea from Elite. In canon Trek, they're horribly inconsistent on this. In TMP, they "risk going to warp while still in the solar system", while in TVH they take the Klingon Bird-of-Prey to warp while inside the Earth's atmosphere. :P

Logically, then, once a user has licensed a particular piece of content, that same piece of content should then be available to the user for each succeeding generation of media. Buy a movie on VHS, get the DVD five years later for only the cost of the media. Five years later, get the Blu-Ray for only the cost of the media. Five years later, get the UberVideoHiRes digital download for only the cost of the bandwidth.

Right?

Content providers should not get to have it both ways.