I've been considering building my own HMD given the ridiculous retail prices for the Rift and Vive. What's silly to me is that the hardware looks like it wouldn't cost more than a couple hundred dollars. It really makes you wonder what they are doing that they believe warrants such a huge markup. A number of the DIY projects I've looked at already use a simple HDMI cable, and some free software. If these were Apple products the markup would be totally expected, and this EULA thing really pushes it over the edge.
It has already happened. The EFF is currently working with 2 such cases I believe. They actually made it to the 9th circuit appeals court and weresent back down to be reconsidered in terms of the "USA Freedom Act" which made superficial changes to the NSL code.
Except, that is exactly the point of a government. It is an organization of people who band together to see that their social interests are upheld. If a democratic government which you live under does not represent your social interests and ideals then you either are not in the majority or it is possible that the government has been corrupted and is representing the interests of a minority which possesses or wields more power.
What's funny is that until relatively recently, in the US, a company was not allowed to exist solely for the motive of making money. In order to obtain a business license the company had to be shown to have some purpose that would benefit society, and funneling wealth to an ever shrinking minority doesn't really accomplish that.
Taxing wealth vs taxing income has been a pretty contentious topic when I've seen it come up before. I think the most succinct argument against it is that as a society we should be encouraging people to build their wealth as it builds the wealth and value of our nation. In the US the only notable wealth taxes I'm aware of are property and estate/inheritance taxes. The notable downside of this though is that the outliers at the top eventually wind up controlling extremely disproportionate amounts of wealth, which points back at a new form of aristocracy.
Stereotyping bad, or at least not always representative of reality.
There are definitely poor people who sit around slacking all day getting by on welfare programs. But most of the poor people I know are busier than the middle class people I know. Many poor people work more than one job while still dealing with all the same crap the middle class does. I think of how tired I am when I get home from work and how I really don't want to bother fixing dinner. The idea of fixing a meal and then heading off to another job would frankly make me seriously consider turning to crime.
If we limited SNAP benefits to just simple raw ingredients it might in convenience the welfare queens out there. But I can't help but think that it'll make life that much more miserable for an even larger block of people that is the working poor.
I think the absolute capping of income is probably something we should avoid. However an infinitely scaling income tax curve is something I could support. Perhaps every time you double your income earned above the basic income you get to keep 10% less of it, in increments of the basic income.
So if Basic income started at $10K it would look like this: Basic Income: $10,000 No Tax Income over basic: $0.00 - $10,000 10% Tax $10,000.01 - $30,000 19% Tax $30,000.01 - $70,000 27.1% Tax $70,000.01 - $150,000 34.39% Tax $150,000.01 - $310,000 40.951% Tax $310,000.01 - $630,000 46.8559% Tax $630,000.01 - $1,270,000 52.17031% Tax $1,270,000.01 - $2,550,000 56.953279% Tax
I don't know if 10% reduction would work well or not but I like the idea that as your income increases you always get to keep some of it, but that portion gets a bit smaller at each step, but you never actually reach a point were earning another dollar becomes impossible. Looking at the numbers though 10% might be a bit steep to start with and then not scale up quickly enough as income starts to rocket up, maybe a variable starting at 7% or something and scaling up a percent or two per step would work better.
And of course I'd want this whole thing tied to various budget reforms like ending the military adventures and taxing essential goods like unprepared food. I also think it'd be good, once the debt is paid off, to refund surpluses by increasing the basic income. That would have the knock on affect of increasing the size of the tax brackets. In which case everyone would get a little more cash in hand, and everyone working to earn above that would pay a bit less taxes. I would also establish basic income as a per person thing, with Children perhaps getting a fractional portion unless emancipated.
I'm thinking the password is likely to be much larger than a 20 bit space. 20 bits is only slightly larger than the number of words in the English language. If the password can be more than a single word, or a word in another language, or uses even rudimentary and obvious character substitutions this number scales up very rapidly. Maybe you won't get up to the true 256 bit space, but it can still be enough to make brute force costs prohibitive.
Why not? You may as well ask why somebodies hair is dyed green, or spiked in a mohawk. In the end it's a constitutionally protected right, and so long as it isn't being used to violate another person's constitutional right or some other law, then the answer doesn't really matter.
That said, I don't carry as I spend much of my waking time in a place where firearms are largely prohibited. And on top of that even though carrying is legal doing so is likely to win you an interview with the police on a regular basis, and that isn't something most people want.
I don't think you could be anymore spot on about BMW and electronics. A friend of mine had a BMW which would short out and stop working in any significant rain storm. Some critical electrical bit was placed in a metal tray which was positioned perfectly to catch runoff from somewhere. So whenever it was raining more than a drizzle you just couldn't take it as transportation because it would likely short out and refuse to start again until it dried out.
For me 3D TV is a bust because of the high cost of the media. Which is a problem the industry brought on itself by setting an arbitrarily high markup for the discs. The TV I bought came with "passive" 3D basically as a free feature, comparable TVs without 3D weren't any cheaper. I did have to buy a new disc player since our old one was just a DVD player that was nearly a decade old, but again 3D was just one of a dozen features that didn't seem to add to the cost of the device. Since the TV had "passive" 3D all it required is the light weight polarized plastic glasses, which you can buy very cheaply online for practically a dime a dozen.
So it all comes down to the cost of the discs, and honestly that's probably not a big deal either. I'm just a scrooge and don't buy much in the way of movies regardless.
For the VR goggles I really don't care about standing up and moving around with them on. If I wanted that kind of experience I'd stand up and walk out of my house. The only motion controls I'm really interested in is enough to know when I'm moving my head a bit to look around. The price point right now though is absurdly high. I considered buying in when the dev kits were a few hundred but held off because that was too much in my mind plus it wasn't anything like a finished product.
That's a good point, but it is important to note that many Gen4 reactor designs can't explode or meltdown dangerously because they are designed to be passively safe. Previous generations claims of safety came from layers of engineered solutions that still required human or machine intervention. Old claims to passive safety were basically saying that we have one or more automated systems that will kick in to save the day, ignoring the fact that those systems were subject to faults and failures.
One of the biggest safety issues in older designs is that they rely on water as the coolant. At operating temperatures water will turn to steam instantly under normal atmospheric pressures. To keep the water liquid the reactor is kept under very high atmospheric pressures, which means that a breach of the pressure vessel is likely to be explosive, not nuclear bomb explosive but massive kinetic explosion. Boiler explosions, which could be thought of as an analog, have been known to cause massive damage. In a nuclear reactor the big danger though would be the release, via the explosion, of radioactive material. If memory serves, a steam explosion is what literally blew the lid off the containment vessel at Chernobyl. These reactors are also designed so that they require intervention to stop the nuclear reaction. This means in the case of an emergency shutdown that someone or something must act properly to stop the reaction and then continue to provide cooling or you risk pressure building to such a point that the reactor vessel breaches catastrophically.
Many modern designs are using coolants that operate safely at normal atmospheric pressures, namely molten salts and metals like lead. With no high pressure containment the risk of a kinetic explosion is removed almost entirely. There are still some risks with these solutions for instance molten salts are often very corrosive and so the material engineering to contain them is a work in progress and will likely need close monitoring until the material science is proven solidly. Molten salts also tend to react poorly with atmospheric oxygen and water, so any breaches of their containment will get ugly. That said though, the containment for molten salts doesn't have to deal with high pressures, just keeping the molten salts in, and everything else out. These types of coolants aren't going to change into a gaseous state, and hence raise operating pressures, in the event that cooling stops.
In the event that cooling stops the reactors are designed to shutdown without mechanical or human intervention. That means no valves have to be opened, pumps activated, or rods scrammed. To prevent run away reactions in a meltdown state I've read of a few solutions. Mostly they center around molten fuel flowing out of the reactor into one or more holding tanks. In the case of multiple tanks the point is to distribute the amount of reacting material such that there is not enough density for a critical mass. I the case of a single tank I believe the reacting material was only critical while surrounded with a neutron reflective shield, and so it is allowed to flow into a tank which lacks the reflector which ends the reaction. These methods basically only require that gravity continue to function and that the reactor and its tanks stay in the same orientation, although you probably could design a spherical reactor with many tanks on the periphery.
No one can factually say that a nuclear disaster won't ever happen at a generating facility again, because frankly human stupidity knows no bounds. Regardless of that though nuclear is demonstrably safe and clean enough we should continue improving it.
The contract probably wasn't a flat one time cost. Netflix was probably required to pay for each individual title they wanted to use. So they likely only put up the titles they thought would bring in and keep subscribers, instead of just padding the number of crap titles that no one bothers to watch.
It's hard to see Amazon Prime as a competitor to Netflix. I have both and my queue on Netflix is about 15 times the size of my amazon list. Hulu doesn't qualify in mind at all as competition since they are showing mostly TV shows that you can get OTA and and with commercials on top of a paid subscription.
Napster was fscked a long time before they ever tried to make it legit. Going legit was an effort to make some money trading on the name recognition but it was already too late at that point as competitors had moved in and the market was being dominated by other commercial ventures as well as other file sharing methods.
The failure to stop 9/11 had very little if anything to do with the sitting president at the time. It had a lot more to do with how promotions and pats on the back are distributed in the bureaucracy. The CIA was aware of and monitoring at least two of the hijackers. When the hijackers entered the USA the CIA agent in charge of watching them made a deliberate decision not to notify the FBI. That decision was made out of the fear that the FBI would get to bust them on something and hog all the glory. So instead the CIA let them enter the USA and go unmonitored in the hope that they'd leave again and re-enter the jurisdiction of the CIA.
Essentially 9/11 wasn't stopped because someone at the CIA didn't want to share or lose any credit to the FBI. This has been resolved, at least in theory, through the department of homeland security. DHS is supposed to ensure that cases which cross other agency jurisdictions and related to national security get handled properly.
This is what I was hoping to find in this discussion. It doesn't really matter whether or not Cellebrite would have turned in this vulnerability to Apple for some pittance of a bug bounty. But since they aren't offering any bounties it is unlikely that anyone else who also discovered this weakness would turn it in.
9/11 was not an example of not being able to spot valuable information hidden among mountains of chaff. The CIA was actively investigating some of the conspirators prior to 9/11. The CIA managers in charge of that investigation weren't interested in sharing any of the glory from busting the conspirators and so when they entered the USA didn't inform the FBI. The CIA wasn't aware what the plan was but hoped that they'd be leaving the USA again soon so they could continue investigating them and eventually bust them for something worth a promotion. There was actually an FBI agent on loan or something to the CIA team who wanted to inform his agency of the conspirators US entry but he was threatened with having his career ruined. PBS's Frontline did a very good episode about the whole thing years and years ago that should be available for free on their site.
Homeland Security is supposed to be the solution to this kind of crap by making one agency that can readily handle investigations that cross into other agencies domains. A cheaper and simpler solution would probably have been to separate some heads from bodies, metaphorically speaking, and strengthening policy and punishments around not informing other agencies when something crosses domains.
I'm not really sure that beaming energy from the moon, or just earth orbit, would be that much better for reducing our global warming contributions. All that energy that we'd be beaming down is radiation that would have passed our planet by, except we're redirecting it. That means we'd actually be increasing the amount of energy in our habitat. Transmitting energy in the form of radiation to receive it elsewhere and convert into electricity is extremely inefficient, especially as the distance increases, and all that waste would be adding heat directly to our environment. The moon is a quarter of a million miles away, the inverse-square law would scale pretty badly at that kind of distance even with very good transmitters.
I don't have any expertise in this really but the simplest method I can think of would be a hardware hack to feed the iOS the serial number it is designed for. If the serial is part of the encryption key this would obviously be right out. Another possibility would be altering the value of the expected serial in memory after iOS has loaded and the code signature verified.
Granted getting a court order for a new version of the iOS each time they need it might be easier in the short term. But in the long term figuring out how to do it on their own would be more advantageous because they could then use it without the courts getting involved.
Even if the original binaries they hand the FBI are locked to that particular iphone there is no reason to believe the FBI won't eventually reverse engineer that lock so they can use it on all iphones of the same generation.
My Father quit a six figure job after more than 15 years, essentially because his new immediate boss was having an affair(s). He asked to either have the manager replaced or to be transferred himself so that he didn't have to work for the guy. The company refused to do either so my Dad walked out. People who act on their principles are definitely out there.
I'm not sure that they are actually required to give a hearing at all. The law just says they may or may not consent. I believe the hearing is just a tradition that came up in the last 60 years.
As others have mentioned they also pop up a window periodically that asks to install windows 10. And then here's the catch, the second option, which is usually the "no" or "cancel", is an install later button that is worded in such a way that you wouldn't necessarily suppose that it'll do that upgrade without warning you or giving a postpone option like for every other update. The way to avoid the install in this case is to close out the dialog box using the little red x in the upper right corner. I have the feeling though that lots of people click that second button either thinking it's a cancel button as per standard practice, or they think it won't hurt anything to download the upgrade as they can then install it later at their convenience.
I use steam and really can't find the will to care about this. Granted I don't play any games that use steam marketplace stuff in an important way. The most I use the market for is completing holiday badges for personal amusement. There is never more than a couple dollars in my balance and the items in my inventory are hardly worth posting in the market for sale.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been considering building my own HMD given the ridiculous retail prices for the Rift and Vive. What's silly to me is that the hardware looks like it wouldn't cost more than a couple hundred dollars. It really makes you wonder what they are doing that they believe warrants such a huge markup. A number of the DIY projects I've looked at already use a simple HDMI cable, and some free software. If these were Apple products the markup would be totally expected, and this EULA thing really pushes it over the edge.
It has already happened. The EFF is currently working with 2 such cases I believe. They actually made it to the 9th circuit appeals court and weresent back down to be reconsidered in terms of the "USA Freedom Act" which made superficial changes to the NSL code.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/...
Except, that is exactly the point of a government. It is an organization of people who band together to see that their social interests are upheld. If a democratic government which you live under does not represent your social interests and ideals then you either are not in the majority or it is possible that the government has been corrupted and is representing the interests of a minority which possesses or wields more power.
What's funny is that until relatively recently, in the US, a company was not allowed to exist solely for the motive of making money. In order to obtain a business license the company had to be shown to have some purpose that would benefit society, and funneling wealth to an ever shrinking minority doesn't really accomplish that.
Taxing wealth vs taxing income has been a pretty contentious topic when I've seen it come up before. I think the most succinct argument against it is that as a society we should be encouraging people to build their wealth as it builds the wealth and value of our nation. In the US the only notable wealth taxes I'm aware of are property and estate/inheritance taxes. The notable downside of this though is that the outliers at the top eventually wind up controlling extremely disproportionate amounts of wealth, which points back at a new form of aristocracy.
Stereotyping bad, or at least not always representative of reality.
There are definitely poor people who sit around slacking all day getting by on welfare programs. But most of the poor people I know are busier than the middle class people I know. Many poor people work more than one job while still dealing with all the same crap the middle class does. I think of how tired I am when I get home from work and how I really don't want to bother fixing dinner. The idea of fixing a meal and then heading off to another job would frankly make me seriously consider turning to crime.
If we limited SNAP benefits to just simple raw ingredients it might in convenience the welfare queens out there. But I can't help but think that it'll make life that much more miserable for an even larger block of people that is the working poor.
I think the absolute capping of income is probably something we should avoid. However an infinitely scaling income tax curve is something I could support. Perhaps every time you double your income earned above the basic income you get to keep 10% less of it, in increments of the basic income.
So if Basic income started at $10K it would look like this:
Basic Income:
$10,000 No Tax
Income over basic:
$0.00 - $10,000 10% Tax
$10,000.01 - $30,000 19% Tax
$30,000.01 - $70,000 27.1% Tax
$70,000.01 - $150,000 34.39% Tax
$150,000.01 - $310,000 40.951% Tax
$310,000.01 - $630,000 46.8559% Tax
$630,000.01 - $1,270,000 52.17031% Tax
$1,270,000.01 - $2,550,000 56.953279% Tax
I don't know if 10% reduction would work well or not but I like the idea that as your income increases you always get to keep some of it, but that portion gets a bit smaller at each step, but you never actually reach a point were earning another dollar becomes impossible. Looking at the numbers though 10% might be a bit steep to start with and then not scale up quickly enough as income starts to rocket up, maybe a variable starting at 7% or something and scaling up a percent or two per step would work better.
And of course I'd want this whole thing tied to various budget reforms like ending the military adventures and taxing essential goods like unprepared food. I also think it'd be good, once the debt is paid off, to refund surpluses by increasing the basic income. That would have the knock on affect of increasing the size of the tax brackets. In which case everyone would get a little more cash in hand, and everyone working to earn above that would pay a bit less taxes. I would also establish basic income as a per person thing, with Children perhaps getting a fractional portion unless emancipated.
Lots of games also don't actually rely on Steam for DRM and are playable without launching the Steam client.
I'm thinking the password is likely to be much larger than a 20 bit space. 20 bits is only slightly larger than the number of words in the English language. If the password can be more than a single word, or a word in another language, or uses even rudimentary and obvious character substitutions this number scales up very rapidly. Maybe you won't get up to the true 256 bit space, but it can still be enough to make brute force costs prohibitive.
Why not? You may as well ask why somebodies hair is dyed green, or spiked in a mohawk. In the end it's a constitutionally protected right, and so long as it isn't being used to violate another person's constitutional right or some other law, then the answer doesn't really matter.
That said, I don't carry as I spend much of my waking time in a place where firearms are largely prohibited. And on top of that even though carrying is legal doing so is likely to win you an interview with the police on a regular basis, and that isn't something most people want.
I don't think you could be anymore spot on about BMW and electronics. A friend of mine had a BMW which would short out and stop working in any significant rain storm. Some critical electrical bit was placed in a metal tray which was positioned perfectly to catch runoff from somewhere. So whenever it was raining more than a drizzle you just couldn't take it as transportation because it would likely short out and refuse to start again until it dried out.
For me 3D TV is a bust because of the high cost of the media. Which is a problem the industry brought on itself by setting an arbitrarily high markup for the discs. The TV I bought came with "passive" 3D basically as a free feature, comparable TVs without 3D weren't any cheaper. I did have to buy a new disc player since our old one was just a DVD player that was nearly a decade old, but again 3D was just one of a dozen features that didn't seem to add to the cost of the device. Since the TV had "passive" 3D all it required is the light weight polarized plastic glasses, which you can buy very cheaply online for practically a dime a dozen.
So it all comes down to the cost of the discs, and honestly that's probably not a big deal either. I'm just a scrooge and don't buy much in the way of movies regardless.
For the VR goggles I really don't care about standing up and moving around with them on. If I wanted that kind of experience I'd stand up and walk out of my house. The only motion controls I'm really interested in is enough to know when I'm moving my head a bit to look around. The price point right now though is absurdly high. I considered buying in when the dev kits were a few hundred but held off because that was too much in my mind plus it wasn't anything like a finished product.
That's a good point, but it is important to note that many Gen4 reactor designs can't explode or meltdown dangerously because they are designed to be passively safe. Previous generations claims of safety came from layers of engineered solutions that still required human or machine intervention. Old claims to passive safety were basically saying that we have one or more automated systems that will kick in to save the day, ignoring the fact that those systems were subject to faults and failures.
One of the biggest safety issues in older designs is that they rely on water as the coolant. At operating temperatures water will turn to steam instantly under normal atmospheric pressures. To keep the water liquid the reactor is kept under very high atmospheric pressures, which means that a breach of the pressure vessel is likely to be explosive, not nuclear bomb explosive but massive kinetic explosion. Boiler explosions, which could be thought of as an analog, have been known to cause massive damage. In a nuclear reactor the big danger though would be the release, via the explosion, of radioactive material. If memory serves, a steam explosion is what literally blew the lid off the containment vessel at Chernobyl. These reactors are also designed so that they require intervention to stop the nuclear reaction. This means in the case of an emergency shutdown that someone or something must act properly to stop the reaction and then continue to provide cooling or you risk pressure building to such a point that the reactor vessel breaches catastrophically.
Many modern designs are using coolants that operate safely at normal atmospheric pressures, namely molten salts and metals like lead. With no high pressure containment the risk of a kinetic explosion is removed almost entirely. There are still some risks with these solutions for instance molten salts are often very corrosive and so the material engineering to contain them is a work in progress and will likely need close monitoring until the material science is proven solidly. Molten salts also tend to react poorly with atmospheric oxygen and water, so any breaches of their containment will get ugly. That said though, the containment for molten salts doesn't have to deal with high pressures, just keeping the molten salts in, and everything else out. These types of coolants aren't going to change into a gaseous state, and hence raise operating pressures, in the event that cooling stops.
In the event that cooling stops the reactors are designed to shutdown without mechanical or human intervention. That means no valves have to be opened, pumps activated, or rods scrammed. To prevent run away reactions in a meltdown state I've read of a few solutions. Mostly they center around molten fuel flowing out of the reactor into one or more holding tanks. In the case of multiple tanks the point is to distribute the amount of reacting material such that there is not enough density for a critical mass. I the case of a single tank I believe the reacting material was only critical while surrounded with a neutron reflective shield, and so it is allowed to flow into a tank which lacks the reflector which ends the reaction. These methods basically only require that gravity continue to function and that the reactor and its tanks stay in the same orientation, although you probably could design a spherical reactor with many tanks on the periphery.
No one can factually say that a nuclear disaster won't ever happen at a generating facility again, because frankly human stupidity knows no bounds. Regardless of that though nuclear is demonstrably safe and clean enough we should continue improving it.
The contract probably wasn't a flat one time cost. Netflix was probably required to pay for each individual title they wanted to use. So they likely only put up the titles they thought would bring in and keep subscribers, instead of just padding the number of crap titles that no one bothers to watch.
It's hard to see Amazon Prime as a competitor to Netflix. I have both and my queue on Netflix is about 15 times the size of my amazon list. Hulu doesn't qualify in mind at all as competition since they are showing mostly TV shows that you can get OTA and and with commercials on top of a paid subscription.
Napster was fscked a long time before they ever tried to make it legit. Going legit was an effort to make some money trading on the name recognition but it was already too late at that point as competitors had moved in and the market was being dominated by other commercial ventures as well as other file sharing methods.
The failure to stop 9/11 had very little if anything to do with the sitting president at the time. It had a lot more to do with how promotions and pats on the back are distributed in the bureaucracy. The CIA was aware of and monitoring at least two of the hijackers. When the hijackers entered the USA the CIA agent in charge of watching them made a deliberate decision not to notify the FBI. That decision was made out of the fear that the FBI would get to bust them on something and hog all the glory. So instead the CIA let them enter the USA and go unmonitored in the hope that they'd leave again and re-enter the jurisdiction of the CIA.
Essentially 9/11 wasn't stopped because someone at the CIA didn't want to share or lose any credit to the FBI. This has been resolved, at least in theory, through the department of homeland security. DHS is supposed to ensure that cases which cross other agency jurisdictions and related to national security get handled properly.
This is what I was hoping to find in this discussion. It doesn't really matter whether or not Cellebrite would have turned in this vulnerability to Apple for some pittance of a bug bounty. But since they aren't offering any bounties it is unlikely that anyone else who also discovered this weakness would turn it in.
9/11 was not an example of not being able to spot valuable information hidden among mountains of chaff. The CIA was actively investigating some of the conspirators prior to 9/11. The CIA managers in charge of that investigation weren't interested in sharing any of the glory from busting the conspirators and so when they entered the USA didn't inform the FBI. The CIA wasn't aware what the plan was but hoped that they'd be leaving the USA again soon so they could continue investigating them and eventually bust them for something worth a promotion. There was actually an FBI agent on loan or something to the CIA team who wanted to inform his agency of the conspirators US entry but he was threatened with having his career ruined. PBS's Frontline did a very good episode about the whole thing years and years ago that should be available for free on their site.
Homeland Security is supposed to be the solution to this kind of crap by making one agency that can readily handle investigations that cross into other agencies domains. A cheaper and simpler solution would probably have been to separate some heads from bodies, metaphorically speaking, and strengthening policy and punishments around not informing other agencies when something crosses domains.
I'm not really sure that beaming energy from the moon, or just earth orbit, would be that much better for reducing our global warming contributions. All that energy that we'd be beaming down is radiation that would have passed our planet by, except we're redirecting it. That means we'd actually be increasing the amount of energy in our habitat. Transmitting energy in the form of radiation to receive it elsewhere and convert into electricity is extremely inefficient, especially as the distance increases, and all that waste would be adding heat directly to our environment. The moon is a quarter of a million miles away, the inverse-square law would scale pretty badly at that kind of distance even with very good transmitters.
I don't have any expertise in this really but the simplest method I can think of would be a hardware hack to feed the iOS the serial number it is designed for. If the serial is part of the encryption key this would obviously be right out. Another possibility would be altering the value of the expected serial in memory after iOS has loaded and the code signature verified.
Granted getting a court order for a new version of the iOS each time they need it might be easier in the short term. But in the long term figuring out how to do it on their own would be more advantageous because they could then use it without the courts getting involved.
Even if the original binaries they hand the FBI are locked to that particular iphone there is no reason to believe the FBI won't eventually reverse engineer that lock so they can use it on all iphones of the same generation.
My Father quit a six figure job after more than 15 years, essentially because his new immediate boss was having an affair(s). He asked to either have the manager replaced or to be transferred himself so that he didn't have to work for the guy. The company refused to do either so my Dad walked out. People who act on their principles are definitely out there.
I'm not sure that they are actually required to give a hearing at all. The law just says they may or may not consent. I believe the hearing is just a tradition that came up in the last 60 years.
As others have mentioned they also pop up a window periodically that asks to install windows 10. And then here's the catch, the second option, which is usually the "no" or "cancel", is an install later button that is worded in such a way that you wouldn't necessarily suppose that it'll do that upgrade without warning you or giving a postpone option like for every other update. The way to avoid the install in this case is to close out the dialog box using the little red x in the upper right corner. I have the feeling though that lots of people click that second button either thinking it's a cancel button as per standard practice, or they think it won't hurt anything to download the upgrade as they can then install it later at their convenience.
I use steam and really can't find the will to care about this. Granted I don't play any games that use steam marketplace stuff in an important way. The most I use the market for is completing holiday badges for personal amusement. There is never more than a couple dollars in my balance and the items in my inventory are hardly worth posting in the market for sale.