Too-Close Encounters of the Third Party Kind: Will the Liability Convention Stand the Test of the Cosmos 2251-Iridium 33 Collision?

Cynics would say: space lawyers must have been waiting for this for decades, and now will of course immediately call for additional regulation. But indeed, the recent collision between the Cosmos 2251 and the Iridium 33 satellite, the first time since the Cosmos 954 disintegrated over Canada that the Liability Convention stands a chance of officially being invoked, raises a number of issues regarding the applicability of that Convention, and the level of precision with which it can be applied. The present paper undertakes a critical analysis of some of these issues. Notably, this concerns the involvement of a commercial satellite run by a private operator in the collision (the Liability Convention providing for a very much state-oriented liability regime), the issue of \u27fault\u27 as determinative of the level of liability of the two principal states involved in the collision, and the concept of \u27space debris\u27 - as Cosmos 2251 was apparently non-operational and out of control for more than thirteen years - and what to do with it legally, in terms of liability as well as otherwise. In view of the gradually growing population of outer space with manmade artefacts the Cosmos 2251-Iridium 33 unfortunately but very likely will not be the last too-close encounter of this third-party kind. And cynics or not, lawyers will have to address the extent to which the current space law regime may need elaboration and refinement to deal with such incidents in the optimal fashion

Validation of the Parlay API through prototyping

The desire within the telecommunications world for new and faster business growth has been a major drive towards the development of open network API. Over the past 7 years several (semi) standardization groups have announced work on network API, including TINA-C, JAIN, IEEE P1520, INforum, 3GPP, JAIN, Parlay. The Parlay group seems most successful in attracting industry awareness with their API, called the Parlay API. The rational behind the Parlay API is that it attracts innovation from third parties that are outside the network operator's domain to build and deploy new network-hosted applications. This also means that the public telecommunication network is opened for niche and short-lived applications as well as for applications that possibly integrate telephones with other terminals such as PC. The Parlay group has successfully passed the first two phases of success, namely publishing their API on the right moment in time and attracting a critical mass within the telecommunication industry with their results. Prototyping the API on a real network execution platform is the only way to show its technical feasibility. Such an exercise was executed internally within Lucent Technologies and raised a number of questions as well as recommendations on both the technical and the semantical behavior for systems that will be interconnected via the Parlay API. We share these results, showing the drawbacks and advantages as well as challenges for this AP

Too-Close Encounters of the Third Party Kind: Will the Liability Convention Stand the Test of the Cosmos 2251-Iridium 33 Collision?

Cynics would say: space lawyers must have been waiting for this for decades, and now will of course immediately call for additional regulation. But indeed, the recent collision between the Cosmos 2251 and the Iridium 33 satellite, the first time since the Cosmos 954 disintegrated over Canada that the Liability Convention stands a chance of officially being invoked, raises a number of issues regarding the applicability of that Convention, and the level of precision with which it can be applied. The present paper undertakes a critical analysis of some of these issues. Notably, this concerns the involvement of a commercial satellite run by a private operator in the collision (the Liability Convention providing for a very much state-oriented liability regime), the issue of \u27fault\u27 as determinative of the level of liability of the two principal states involved in the collision, and the concept of \u27space debris\u27 - as Cosmos 2251 was apparently non-operational and out of control for more than thirteen years - and what to do with it legally, in terms of liability as well as otherwise. In view of the gradually growing population of outer space with manmade artefacts the Cosmos 2251-Iridium 33 unfortunately but very likely will not be the last too-close encounter of this third-party kind. And cynics or not, lawyers will have to address the extent to which the current space law regime may need elaboration and refinement to deal with such incidents in the optimal fashion

Employee voice and collective formation in the Indian ITES-BPO industry

The growth of the information technology enabled services-business process outsourcing industry calls for attention to employees' working conditions and rights. Can an independent organisation such as unites Pro (the union of information technology enabled services professionals) represent employees' interests and effectively work towards protecting their rights and improving their working conditions? A survey of unites members indicates that they identify with the need for such an organisation to deal with poor supervisory and managerial treatment, concerns for employee safety, grievances related to pay and workload, and even the indignities of favouritism

Value-driven Security Agreements in Extended Enterprises

Today organizations are highly interconnected in business networks called extended enterprises. This is mostly facilitated by outsourcing and by new economic models based on pay-as-you-go billing; all supported by IT-as-a-service. Although outsourcing has been around for some time, what is now new is the fact that organizations are increasingly outsourcing critical business processes, engaging on complex service bundles, and moving infrastructure and their management to the custody of third parties. Although this gives competitive advantage by reducing cost and increasing flexibility, it increases security risks by eroding security perimeters that used to separate insiders with security privileges from outsiders without security privileges. The classical security distinction between insiders and outsiders is supplemented with a third category of threat agents, namely external insiders, who are not subject to the internal control of an organization but yet have some access privileges to its resources that normal outsiders do not have. Protection against external insiders requires security agreements between organizations in an extended enterprise. Currently, there is no practical method that allows security officers to specify such requirements. In this paper we provide a method for modeling an extended enterprise architecture, identifying external insider roles, and for specifying security requirements that mitigate security threats posed by these roles. We illustrate our method with a realistic example

Out of Step, Out of Office: Electoral Accountability and House Members’ Voting

Does a typical House member need to worry about the electoral ramifications of his roll-call decisions? We investigate the relationship between incumbents’ electoral performance and roll-call support for their party—controlling for district ideology, challenger quality, and campaign spending, among other factors—through a series of tests of the 1956–1996 elections. The tests produce three key findings indicating that members are indeed accountable for their legislative voting. First, in each election, an incumbent receives a lower vote share the more he supports his party. Second, this effect is comparable in size to that of other widely recognized electoral determinants. Third, a member’s probability of retaining office decreases as he offers increased support for his party, and this relationship holds for not only marginal, but also safe members

Spartan Daily, March 24, 1987

Volume 88, Issue 39https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/7565/thumbnail.jp