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The control room doesn't have to be in your country. It's tricky for anyone who isn't a superpower to remove a satelite owned and operated by another country.

Distributed DNS etc doesn't really help if all the cables in and out of your country run through one building and the government owns it.

when I bought my minidisc they were about $100, a comparable Creative flash based Mp3 player was 32Mb.

You could have a handful of disks with 80mins of HQ music on each whereas the MP3 players of the time were either very expensive (like the first harddisk iPod) or had so little space you had to chose a few songs for each trip.

>Dear Egyptian Police and Military. The US government gives Egypt $1.5 Billion every year. That's what is paying your salary. If you want to get paid, just get out of the way.

And replace him with who ?

We had a nice pet leader in Iran once, he used to buy weapons and nuclear reactors from us. He did torture people and his secret police weren't terribly nice. Then he got overthrown and for some reason the people that replaced him didn't like us very much ( although we did still sell them weapons ).

It would be very easy to turn it off to somewhere like Greece. There are probably only a few companies connecting to the outside world. And these are either government owned, or were until recently but are still so civil service minded and government linked that they will do as they're told. Any commercial outfits want to keep operating in that country, so unless they think they will get a better deal from the next ruler - are also going to obey order.

California is trickier, there will be lots of links to towns in other states just because the cable run was shorter or a telco in Oregon wanted more of the market. There will also be a more complex backbone links so someone in Seattle may connect through california to Texas, so blocking out those individual routes without killing the whole network is a lot more difficult.

A similar thing happened with a famous Word Processor not having a word count.

The designers found that nobody used word count - except for Journalists. Guess who write reviews of new word processors?

Sony of the late 70s early 80s was different.

You don't remember how bad everyone else's industrial design and build quality was compared to Sony - it was like Audi or BMW in a world of Buicks.

Sorry I meant line in - the point was that you had to go the analog route because they wanted to restrict your use for their studio's sake.

If Sony had made a cheap PC drive that took minidisk it would have been as popular as floppies and been a real selling point for their PCs.

Not quite the same though - Apple setup iTunes to make it easier for iPod owners to use their product - and making Apple some money in the process.

They didn't decide to limit the iPod to 32Kb/s playback to protect sales of their CD players

It was standard issue from about 1985/1986 - before that they used self loading rifles ie. one trigger - one round.

Have you seen netflix's offerings in Canada?

The British army only just relented - the new SA80 is the first fully automatic rifle to be standard issue.

Colonel Kalashnikov was paid by a west german company that owned the marketing rights to the name - I think they made aftershave!

Sony went corporate American.

After the Betamax debacle it decided it would win the next format war by owning studios.

That meant that anything it built for the consumer also had to be good for the studio. So for example it launched the excellent minidisk player (a 76Mb minifloppy) with better than MP3 quality when MP3 players were 32Mb for twice the price.

But it refused to release the minidisk drives for computers, because that would lead to piracy - so the only way to get music on the units was to buy all your albums again on minidisk (the studio's preferred option !) or record them on the microphone in. Then they did the same again with the PSP.

Suppose Apple had decided to ensure the success of the iPhone, not by making it great, but by buying a cell carrier - then limiting your calls to other iPhone users.

What about a country where the head of the church is also the head of the armed forces? Where nuclear missile submarines are launched with "god bless her and all who sail in her"?

Where belief in God, the head of state and the superiority over foreigners are pretty much the same creed