I mean.. wow. No matter how big the film is.. it's not really a 'film' if it was on the web first. Hmm.
So if you don't want a film to get an Academy Award, you hire a thief to break in and dupe the prints, then screen it from some site in Taiwan, and it can't win.
This is the dozenth or so time I've seen stupid spelling flames like this.
I'm half-tempted to adopt British spelling, to add a certain colour to my prose. I recognise that this may annoy some people left-of-centre of the IQ bell-curve, but I recommend they have a gin-and-tonic and bloody well bugger off, the bally wankers.
I don't know if you had/have this in the states, but it is a system which sends text pages either in the scan-lines at the beginning of a television frame or in simple dialup systems like the French Minitel or BT's own Prestel.
Similar things exist in the US, such as closed-captioning. The bandwidth used for most data services in the US that transmit over NTSC-based TV signals is the "vertical blanking interval." I once set up a special modem which dumped to a fax machine with faxes of the NYT delivered via VBI.
I don't think this is terribly common now, or ever really caught on, except for such systems as closed-captioning for the deaf. I'm not sure whether CC systems use the VBI or some other unused area of the TV signal.
Most hydrogen atoms have merely 1 proton and no neutrons. A small percentage has 1 proton and 1 neutron, and this is called deuterium. An even rarer (the rarest) configuration is 1 proton and 2 neutrons, this is called tritium and is radioactive.
Now that I re-read that, it does seem someone might take it the wrong way. ..so if it strikes any of the admins that way go ahead and zap it. Or mod it "Inciteful." And in either case, DO NOT DO DUMB SHIT.
People, don't become this moron's hatchet man and do his dirty-work for him. If you wan to do it muldrake, do it yourself. YOU face jail time and YOU get hanged!
I'm OBVIOUSLY not suggesting hacking a site I just posted to slashdot. Duh. For all I know they're already freaking out about it.
Go find your own site if that's what you're going to do. (Incidentally that's as far as I went or will go.) Or better yet, actually discuss the issue rather than getting all hysterical and raving. If I were actually going to incite such an action, I'd flat-out say "D0 17 N0W D00DZ."
I'm more interested in the legal ramifications than actually experiencing them personally.
(Incidentally the idiot-simple thing to do would be to take out the satellite link the whole country seems it may rely on--but that would just be *stupid* and not interesting. DOS attacks are lame.)
Ok, just about no one seems to have read and understood Madore's page, so I'll summarize his idea: when two people independently serve statistical "white noise" (which just happens to XOR to controversial material), it is ridiculous for either to be convicted.
I understand this legal argument, but it's a rather highly technical legal argument. Suppose the DA decides to prosecute anyway and has some imbecile willing to testify to your guilt?
Ok, at this point you then have to find yourself an expert witness to testify at a price of a couple grand a day. So then the DA hires a lot more "experts" to shout down your expert. So now you are paying massive legal expenses on doctored-up kiddie porn created by a crooked DA.
The jury will be told that obviously you are some kind of criminal because otherwise why would you be doing something like this in the first place. Anyone who knows anything about the Internet or even has an AOL account will be excluded from the jury. Then any jury you have, presuming you can even afford lawyers, will already be drooling idiots, and will be pummeled into submission by a parade of trained circus ponies and clowns with seltzer water.
To counter this you will have to spend every penny you ever had, and indenture yourself into slavery for your lawyers. Then the idiot jury will probably find you guilty anyway.
That's assuming you get a trial. They could just invoke the name of Mitnick and deny you bail, and lock you up in solitary until you agree to waive your right even to have a bail hearing. Then they won't let you examine any of the "evidence" in your case and will generate a few gigabytes of crap. When you finally get the right to examine it, they'll print out tens of thousands of pages of binaries on a dot-matrix printer and let you look at it with a flashlight for five minutes a day in a dark room.
All this is well and good as a mathematical exercise, but the real trick in creating a security system is to have one which is so ubiquitous that having it won't even seem suspicious.
Because even looking suspicious is enough to get demonized these days. And what's the legal excuse? Ooooooh, we need to protect the CHILDREN. They'll use it for CHILD PORN!
(IMO fuck the children, but that's not good politics. Anyone using this system will be portrayed ipso facto as some sort of pervert or molestor, and PGP already does this stuff fine.)
(Oh and I forgot. While this is all going on a bunch of idiots will be posting on slashdot, ohhhh, but he's a criminal, hell with him.)
as soon as you distribute 1 pad, along with a suggestion that you combine it with certain other pads at particular internet addresses, it could be argued you are distributing an encrypted version of said document.
Take any "pad" or even any data whatsoever on the Internet, and you can create a "pad" for that data which will result in anything.
So if I take a kiddie porn image and generate a pad based on a jpg on whitehouse.gov, which when combined with the jpg on whitehouse.gov reconstructs the kiddie porn, is the White House then distributing kiddie porn?
There is no reason you couldn't do this with any such random pad, then frame the guy with distributing child porn by saying "combining X with Y" gets you this child porn image.
I'm not sure, but the law is probably stupid enough to allow something like this.
Does anyone have any wild-ass guesstimates as to the likelihood of being prosecuted for guerilla infowar on China's Internet, hacking their government's web sites, stealing and publishing their government secrets, etc.?
I'm fairly sure this would be illegal under international law, but hey, they don't uphold our copyrights, I wonder if the government would tacitly condone such action, or at least not do anything about it.
I am certain it would be popular and would attract attention to this issue.
The funny thing is most of their sites are on US ISPs and even on user sites on fucking AOL and thus governed directly by US law, and thus a bad idea to mess with.
Their Ministry of Foreign Affairs appears to be based in China if the traceroute is any indication. Hits an OC3 off sprintlink, and at that point I presume a cable uplink, as the ping goes up to 1669.641 ms (from about 80 ms).
I'd best not touch it, and bad bad me for even thinking such thoughts. In China it would be illegal to think that way.
All the sites listed under "Military" are in the US. ROFL.
telnet www.moftec.gov.cn HP-UX www B.10.20 A 9000/861 (ttyp1)
login:
Naaaaaaah, best not go there;-) The idea is fascinating, but I'd best stop there before I start an international incident.
What's the deal, is getting ugly with those totalitarian scum a good idea likely to make one an international hero lionized by the world, or is it more likely to get you shanghai'ed to Shanghai by goons, disappeared in the middle of the night with nothing left behind but a fortune cookie for the authorities to discover?
Or would our own goons in our own respective liberty-loving nations drag us off themselves?
I'm definitely willing to go to jail to break intellectual property laws.
You may get your wish.
Defendant Sentenced for First Criminal Copyright Conviction Under the "No Electronic Theft" (NET) Act for Unlawful Distribution of Software on the Internet
EUGENE, OREGON -- The Justice Department, the United States Attorney for the District of Oregon, Kristine Olson, and the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI, Portland, Oregon Division, David W. Szady, announced that Jeffrey Gerard Levy was sentenced today by United States District Judge Michael R. Hogan for his involvement in criminal infringement of copyrights, in violation of 18 U.S.C. 2319(c)(1) and 17 U.S.C. 506(a)(2). Judge Hogan sentenced Levy to a two year period of probation with conditions. The probationary sentence was imposed because a sentence for criminal infringement of a copyright under the United States Sentencing Guidelines is based largely upon the retail value of pirated software which was distributed. Although the retail value of pirated software posted on Levy's web site was conservatively estimated at approximately $70,000, a determination of the value of software distributed was unable to be made. Levy agreed that the quantity of distributed software exceeded $5,000, but a determination beyond that was unable to be made.
I agree with you that there is nothing inherently wrong with Napster, but for a different reason.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with Napster either, except ONE easily fixable thing.
Napster comes automatically set up to share the files in the directory you download to. So you could claim (and I bet the lawyers will) that this indicates an intent to encourage copyright infringement, or at least negligence.
(Those internal memos from Napster seem to indicate deliberate encouragement.)
They should probably have set it only to share files like that if the USER set it to do that, and then popped up a warning worded similarly to the FBI warning you see on videotapes you rent, basically telling you not to infringe copyrights. Sure, that'd be a "nudge nudge wink wink click here to infringe copyrights," but it would probably let Napster off the hook.
They should also not be running the actual server that facilitates the infringements; that's just begging for trouble. Perhaps they ought to sell server software, and caveat emptor.
Do you really want to compare downloading music with physical violence?
Of course not. It's obviously much more similar to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, as the wise and noble Edgar Bronfman has pointed out:
World War II was won by the Allied forces, not only because we were right, but also because we had more men and women, more weaponry and more money, and that money in turn would train more men and women and build more weaponry.
(AP) Evidently feeling the stress of numerous copyright infringement lawsuits from Metallica and other popular bands, today Napster took the unusual move of filing suit against itself for copyright infringement and libel. "Napster has gone too far this time," said an unidentified Napster spokesperson, or at least some guy in front of Napster headquarters who claimed to be a spokesperson. "Napster has been using the Napster logo and selling Napster merchandise without the permission of Napster. We think this lawbreaking has to be put to an end and we are prepared to go to total war to prevent this blatant piracy." Napster legal counsel David Boies replied to Napster's allegations, saying "Whatever." Contacted for his input into the situation, Lars Ulrich of Metallica commented: "I don't think too much of this, I don't worry about it. Bowie hasn't done anything decent since Ziggy Stardust anyway." (C)2000 Associated Pundits
Unfortunately, libel and slander require that you prove malice. A mistake, even as the result of incompetence, does not constitute libel or slander.
Bogus. You are only required to prove "actual malice" when you are a public figure. When you are making statements about someone you must exercise "due diligence." Mere negligence in fact checking is, indeed, grounds for a libel suit when it causes damage to the person.
Further, an allegation of criminality is what is called libel per se. In libel per se one need not even prove actual damages. Damages are assumed.
What's the big fuss about? Do we really need.banc and.food and.widget and.skankyho?
I even find the idea of TLDs for countries unnecessary, and am tired of seeing silly-ass things registered in Christmas Island and countries like Tonga that seem to exist just so people can have "come.to" addresses.
[...]I am a member of the public, and I am a proud Microsoft customer, supporter and shareholder. Yeah, crazy, huh?
Not really, you're one of the more coherent Microsoft proponents. It's easy to forget not everyone who supports Microsoft is a crazy troll sometimes. Incidentally if MSFT hits 50 I'll probably pick up some myself.
(I'm not going to defend the Godwin's law breaking, incidentally, that was just an example of mob rule--Hitler could not have been swept to power without a groundswell of support for his anti-Semitic rhetoric, but that's beside the point and I shouldn't have mentioned it.)
Ah, one last thing. Yeah, I know you were referring to judges in your example, but they're not necessarily paragons of enlightenment.
I hope I didn't seem to imply that. I said that they at least sometimes have a clue. They're also *usually* grounded in the law, and while their decisions can be based on stupid laws, that should be fixed at the legislative level--a law that pisses off enough people to influence an election will be repealed. ..eventually.
[. ..]and at the federal level, they're politically-motivated appointees a lot of times.
This is true. However, that doesn't necessarily end up being a bad thing. For example, Clarence Thomas, whose motivation for appointment was transparently political, has turned out not to be quite so ghastly as was feared at first. He's no Thurgood Marshall but he's been a tolerable Supreme Court justice. While candidates for these positions have to jump through a lot of political hoops to get there and are often appointed for the worst reasons, generally once they are there they have less motivation to kowtow to special interests. Sometimes you see an entirely different judicial personality with this pressure removed. Personally, in the long run I prefer appointed judges to elected ones, partly for elitist reasons. (I am an unapologetic elitist.)
If Adobe Systems can find the Joe who showed the site the feature list, then Adobe can sue the beta licensee, but not the website.
That depends on whether they were acting in concert with the beta licensee, or whether they deliberately induced the beta licensee to violate the agreement. If they did that, then they are liable for the original trade secret violation and conspiracy, as well as tortious interference by third party.
If they acquired the trade secret info innocently, then they are liable for nothing. Still, this is an incredibly bogus comment by Adobe from the source content:
"Adobe says both the existence of the new versions of its products -- Adobe Photoshop 6.0 and Adobe ImageReady 3.0 -- and their features are trade secrets."
Now there's a crock! They've just claimed the very existence of Adobe Photoshop 6.0 and Adobe ImageReady 3.0 are trade secrets, in an article where they spill the trade secrets themselves.
What dipshits. They just destroyed their own trade secret.
The President doesn't have the power to call off the case, but he can persuade the Justice Dept. lawyers to not argue as well as they could.
I don't think Boies would go for that, and I think there would be tremendous political fallout if Bush tried some stunt like firing him.
Clinton, for example, tried pressuring Reno on a number of occasions into not appointing prosecutors, and had only mixed success, and looked worse for having tried. A newbie prexy would be ill-advised to start his term by attempting to pressure the DoJ.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean.. wow. No matter how big the film is.. it's not really a 'film' if it was on the web first. Hmm.
So if you don't want a film to get an Academy Award, you hire a thief to break in and dupe the prints, then screen it from some site in Taiwan, and it can't win.
Then you put it on Napster.
Only if you are American...
This is the dozenth or so time I've seen stupid spelling flames like this.
I'm half-tempted to adopt British spelling, to add a certain colour to my prose. I recognise that this may annoy some people left-of-centre of the IQ bell-curve, but I recommend they have a gin-and-tonic and bloody well bugger off, the bally wankers.
I don't know if you had/have this in the states, but it is a system which sends text pages either in the scan-lines at the beginning of a television frame or in simple dialup systems like the French Minitel or BT's own Prestel.
Similar things exist in the US, such as closed-captioning. The bandwidth used for most data services in the US that transmit over NTSC-based TV signals is the "vertical blanking interval." I once set up a special modem which dumped to a fax machine with faxes of the NYT delivered via VBI.
I don't think this is terribly common now, or ever really caught on, except for such systems as closed-captioning for the deaf. I'm not sure whether CC systems use the VBI or some other unused area of the TV signal.
"We will be inviting ISP's in the U.S. to license that technology from us."
And ISPs in the US will be inviting this moron to sit on their dick and spin, fast.
He did spell it correctly, at least as far as non-US usage goes.
All spelling flames must include a blatant spelling error.
All grammar flames must include flagrantly bad grammar. Furthermore, at least half of all grammar flames have to spell it 'grammer.'
Hydrogen atoms have 1 proton and 2 nuetrons.
Most hydrogen atoms have merely 1 proton and no neutrons. A small percentage has 1 proton and 1 neutron, and this is called deuterium. An even rarer (the rarest) configuration is 1 proton and 2 neutrons, this is called tritium and is radioactive.
Here you go again...
No, I do not, you hard-of-hearing moron. I specifically said that DOS attacks are stupid and lame.
Now that I re-read that, it does seem someone might take it the wrong way. . .so if it strikes any of the admins that way go ahead and zap it. Or mod it "Inciteful." And in either case, DO NOT DO DUMB SHIT.
People, don't become this moron's hatchet man and do his dirty-work for him. If you wan to do it muldrake, do it yourself. YOU face jail time and YOU get hanged!
I'm OBVIOUSLY not suggesting hacking a site I just posted to slashdot. Duh. For all I know they're already freaking out about it.
Go find your own site if that's what you're going to do. (Incidentally that's as far as I went or will go.) Or better yet, actually discuss the issue rather than getting all hysterical and raving. If I were actually going to incite such an action, I'd flat-out say "D0 17 N0W D00DZ."
I'm more interested in the legal ramifications than actually experiencing them personally.
(Incidentally the idiot-simple thing to do would be to take out the satellite link the whole country seems it may rely on--but that would just be *stupid* and not interesting. DOS attacks are lame.)
Ok, just about no one seems to have read and understood Madore's page, so I'll summarize his idea: when two people independently serve statistical "white noise" (which just happens to XOR to controversial material), it is ridiculous for either to be convicted.
I understand this legal argument, but it's a rather highly technical legal argument. Suppose the DA decides to prosecute anyway and has some imbecile willing to testify to your guilt?
Ok, at this point you then have to find yourself an expert witness to testify at a price of a couple grand a day. So then the DA hires a lot more "experts" to shout down your expert. So now you are paying massive legal expenses on doctored-up kiddie porn created by a crooked DA.
The jury will be told that obviously you are some kind of criminal because otherwise why would you be doing something like this in the first place. Anyone who knows anything about the Internet or even has an AOL account will be excluded from the jury. Then any jury you have, presuming you can even afford lawyers, will already be drooling idiots, and will be pummeled into submission by a parade of trained circus ponies and clowns with seltzer water.
To counter this you will have to spend every penny you ever had, and indenture yourself into slavery for your lawyers. Then the idiot jury will probably find you guilty anyway.
That's assuming you get a trial. They could just invoke the name of Mitnick and deny you bail, and lock you up in solitary until you agree to waive your right even to have a bail hearing. Then they won't let you examine any of the "evidence" in your case and will generate a few gigabytes of crap. When you finally get the right to examine it, they'll print out tens of thousands of pages of binaries on a dot-matrix printer and let you look at it with a flashlight for five minutes a day in a dark room.
All this is well and good as a mathematical exercise, but the real trick in creating a security system is to have one which is so ubiquitous that having it won't even seem suspicious.
Because even looking suspicious is enough to get demonized these days. And what's the legal excuse? Ooooooh, we need to protect the CHILDREN. They'll use it for CHILD PORN!
(IMO fuck the children, but that's not good politics. Anyone using this system will be portrayed ipso facto as some sort of pervert or molestor, and PGP already does this stuff fine.)
(Oh and I forgot. While this is all going on a bunch of idiots will be posting on slashdot, ohhhh, but he's a criminal, hell with him.)
as soon as you distribute 1 pad, along with a suggestion that you combine it with certain other pads at particular internet addresses, it could be argued you are distributing an encrypted version of said document.
Take any "pad" or even any data whatsoever on the Internet, and you can create a "pad" for that data which will result in anything.
So if I take a kiddie porn image and generate a pad based on a jpg on whitehouse.gov, which when combined with the jpg on whitehouse.gov reconstructs the kiddie porn, is the White House then distributing kiddie porn?
There is no reason you couldn't do this with any such random pad, then frame the guy with distributing child porn by saying "combining X with Y" gets you this child porn image.
I'm not sure, but the law is probably stupid enough to allow something like this.
And was it linux that was named its offical OS?
If that's true then why did I get this?
telnet www.moftec.gov.cn
HP-UX www B.10.20 A 9000/861 (ttyp1)
login:
Lying commies.
Does anyone have any wild-ass guesstimates as to the likelihood of being prosecuted for guerilla infowar on China's Internet, hacking their government's web sites, stealing and publishing their government secrets, etc.?
I'm fairly sure this would be illegal under international law, but hey, they don't uphold our copyrights, I wonder if the government would tacitly condone such action, or at least not do anything about it.
I am certain it would be popular and would attract attention to this issue.
The funny thing is most of their sites are on US ISPs and even on user sites on fucking AOL and thus governed directly by US law, and thus a bad idea to mess with.
Their Ministry of Foreign Affairs appears to be based in China if the traceroute is any indication. Hits an OC3 off sprintlink, and at that point I presume a cable uplink, as the ping goes up to 1669.641 ms (from about 80 ms).
Also, their China Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation appears to be in China.
There are other such sites on Yahoo!, but the interesting stuff is probably elsewhere.
I'd best not touch it, and bad bad me for even thinking such thoughts. In China it would be illegal to think that way.
All the sites listed under "Military" are in the US. ROFL.
telnet www.moftec.gov.cn
HP-UX www B.10.20 A 9000/861 (ttyp1)
login:
Naaaaaaah, best not go there ;-) The idea is fascinating, but I'd best stop there before I start an international incident.
What's the deal, is getting ugly with those totalitarian scum a good idea likely to make one an international hero lionized by the world, or is it more likely to get you shanghai'ed to Shanghai by goons, disappeared in the middle of the night with nothing left behind but a fortune cookie for the authorities to discover?
Or would our own goons in our own respective liberty-loving nations drag us off themselves?
I'm definitely willing to go to jail to break intellectual property laws.
You may get your wish.
Defendant Sentenced for First Criminal
Copyright Conviction Under the
"No Electronic Theft" (NET) Act for Unlawful
Distribution of Software on the Internet
EUGENE, OREGON -- The Justice Department, the United States Attorney for the District of Oregon, Kristine Olson, and the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI, Portland, Oregon Division, David W. Szady, announced that Jeffrey Gerard Levy was sentenced today by United States District Judge Michael R. Hogan for his involvement in criminal infringement of copyrights, in violation of 18 U.S.C. 2319(c)(1) and 17 U.S.C. 506(a)(2). Judge Hogan sentenced Levy to a two year period of probation with conditions. The probationary sentence was imposed because a sentence for criminal infringement of a copyright under the United States Sentencing Guidelines is based largely upon the retail value of pirated software which was distributed. Although the retail value of pirated software posted on Levy's web site was conservatively estimated at approximately $70,000, a determination of the value of software distributed was unable to be made. Levy agreed that the quantity of distributed software exceeded $5,000, but a determination beyond that was unable to be made.
Full story here
I agree with you that there is nothing inherently wrong with Napster, but for a different reason.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with Napster either, except ONE easily fixable thing.
Napster comes automatically set up to share the files in the directory you download to. So you could claim (and I bet the lawyers will) that this indicates an intent to encourage copyright infringement, or at least negligence.
(Those internal memos from Napster seem to indicate deliberate encouragement.)
They should probably have set it only to share files like that if the USER set it to do that, and then popped up a warning worded similarly to the FBI warning you see on videotapes you rent, basically telling you not to infringe copyrights. Sure, that'd be a "nudge nudge wink wink click here to infringe copyrights," but it would probably let Napster off the hook.
They should also not be running the actual server that facilitates the infringements; that's just begging for trouble. Perhaps they ought to sell server software, and caveat emptor.
Do you really want to compare downloading music with physical violence?
Of course not. It's obviously much more similar to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, as the wise and noble Edgar Bronfman has pointed out:
- World War II was won by the Allied forces, not only because we were right, but also because we had more men and women, more weaponry and more money, and that money in turn would train more men and women and build more weaponry.
--Edgar Bronfman's brilliant speech(AP) Evidently feeling the stress of numerous copyright infringement lawsuits from Metallica and other popular bands, today Napster took the unusual move of filing suit against itself for copyright infringement and libel. "Napster has gone too far this time," said an unidentified Napster spokesperson, or at least some guy in front of Napster headquarters who claimed to be a spokesperson. "Napster has been using the Napster logo and selling Napster merchandise without the permission of Napster. We think this lawbreaking has to be put to an end and we are prepared to go to total war to prevent this blatant piracy." Napster legal counsel David Boies replied to Napster's allegations, saying "Whatever." Contacted for his input into the situation, Lars Ulrich of Metallica commented: "I don't think too much of this, I don't worry about it. Bowie hasn't done anything decent since Ziggy Stardust anyway." (C)2000 Associated Pundits
he died on june 8, 1954 after eating an apple soaked in cyanide.
Which was frankly a disgraceful way to treat someone who had more to do with defeating the Nazis than any other single person.
And then some AC dipshits come along with dipshit comments about it. Pshaw, I spit on them, they weren't fit to lick his boots.
I actually don't think having five fingers is that bad but making the robot look like a human seems kind of pointless.
They should make it look like Natalie Portman.
Unfortunately, libel and slander require that you prove malice. A mistake, even as the result of incompetence, does not constitute libel or slander.
Bogus. You are only required to prove "actual malice" when you are a public figure. When you are making statements about someone you must exercise "due diligence." Mere negligence in fact checking is, indeed, grounds for a libel suit when it causes damage to the person.
Further, an allegation of criminality is what is called libel per se. In libel per se one need not even prove actual damages. Damages are assumed.
I even find the idea of TLDs for countries unnecessary, and am tired of seeing silly-ass things registered in Christmas Island and countries like Tonga that seem to exist just so people can have "come.to" addresses.
Piss.on.that
[. ..]I am a member of the public, and I am a proud Microsoft customer, supporter and shareholder. Yeah, crazy, huh?
Not really, you're one of the more coherent Microsoft proponents. It's easy to forget not everyone who supports Microsoft is a crazy troll sometimes. Incidentally if MSFT hits 50 I'll probably pick up some myself.
(I'm not going to defend the Godwin's law breaking, incidentally, that was just an example of mob rule--Hitler could not have been swept to power without a groundswell of support for his anti-Semitic rhetoric, but that's beside the point and I shouldn't have mentioned it.)
Ah, one last thing. Yeah, I know you were referring to judges in your example, but they're not necessarily paragons of enlightenment.
I hope I didn't seem to imply that. I said that they at least sometimes have a clue. They're also *usually* grounded in the law, and while their decisions can be based on stupid laws, that should be fixed at the legislative level--a law that pisses off enough people to influence an election will be repealed. . .eventually.
[. . .]and at the federal level, they're politically-motivated appointees a lot of times.
This is true. However, that doesn't necessarily end up being a bad thing. For example, Clarence Thomas, whose motivation for appointment was transparently political, has turned out not to be quite so ghastly as was feared at first. He's no Thurgood Marshall but he's been a tolerable Supreme Court justice. While candidates for these positions have to jump through a lot of political hoops to get there and are often appointed for the worst reasons, generally once they are there they have less motivation to kowtow to special interests. Sometimes you see an entirely different judicial personality with this pressure removed. Personally, in the long run I prefer appointed judges to elected ones, partly for elitist reasons. (I am an unapologetic elitist.)
If Adobe Systems can find the Joe who showed the site the feature list, then Adobe can sue the beta licensee, but not the website.
That depends on whether they were acting in concert with the beta licensee, or whether they deliberately induced the beta licensee to violate the agreement. If they did that, then they are liable for the original trade secret violation and conspiracy, as well as tortious interference by third party.
If they acquired the trade secret info innocently, then they are liable for nothing. Still, this is an incredibly bogus comment by Adobe from the source content:
"Adobe says both the existence of the new versions of its products -- Adobe Photoshop 6.0 and Adobe ImageReady 3.0 -- and their features are trade secrets."
Now there's a crock! They've just claimed the very existence of Adobe Photoshop 6.0 and Adobe ImageReady 3.0 are trade secrets, in an article where they spill the trade secrets themselves.
What dipshits. They just destroyed their own trade secret.
Money today is worth more than money tomorrow.
That depends on how much money today versus how much money tomorrow.
Giving away a browser for free is effectively throwing away money today for the opportunity to get much larger amounts of money tomorrow.
The President doesn't have the power to call off the case, but he can persuade the Justice Dept. lawyers to not argue as well as they could.
I don't think Boies would go for that, and I think there would be tremendous political fallout if Bush tried some stunt like firing him.
Clinton, for example, tried pressuring Reno on a number of occasions into not appointing prosecutors, and had only mixed success, and looked worse for having tried. A newbie prexy would be ill-advised to start his term by attempting to pressure the DoJ.