"Reasonable expectation of privacy" is a legal term, and doesn't have to mean complete or perfect privacy. It simply means that the law should treat it as a private area as regards things like search and seizure. For example, if I have a big box on my driveway, the police can't approach it and open it without a search warrant or probable cause. It doesn't mean that plain sight rules don't apply, but to take the example of the article, if I parked a car on my driveway and covered it with a tarp, they'd have no right to look under the tarp to see if it's my car (without a warrant or cause, of course).
Second, in theory anyway, the laws do actually have quite a few things to say about what we "can" do. The first amendment rights like freedom of speech, assembly, religion, petition, and press come to mind.
The very wording of that amendment proves you wrong. It doesn't say what the people can do, it says what Congress cannot do. It doesn't apply directly to the people, who have the right to do things that the law does not forbid.
The simple upshot of this is that, if there's no law that says you can't do something, then prosecutors will have a hard time taking you to task for doing it.
You missed on this one. The essence of ownership is control, and if you truly own it, that control cannot be taken away unless your possession is stolen from you. At least where I live, if you fail to pay your property taxes each year, your home will be sold out from under you by the county. It's called a "tax sale." Consequently, I don't really consider myself to "own" my home. If I truly owned it, nobody could take it away from me. Most people believe they own their homes, but try not paying your taxes one year. Then it will become apparent to whom it really belongs.
Swing and a miss. You can claim that property taxes mean that you don't own your land, but it's not accurate to the mainstream defnition of ownership.
Also, failure to pay taxes does not guarantee loss of the property. If you fail to pay taxes the court will demand that you pay them, and most tax sales are because the defendant has no other assets of sufficient value. But, if you had enough money in the bank to pay the bill, then the court could (and often will) sieze that asset to satisfy the debt, and you get to keep the deed in that case.
Most people think that when they lay out several hundred dollars for a sophisticated piece of electronics that it is theirs to do with as they wish. That is, I might add, a reasonable assumption, after all, they paid for it. But they don't have that ability, even though they are the nominal owners of said console, because the manufacturer is retaining control over the use of the product after it has been supposedly sold.
Again, you're missing the concept of what you own and what you license. When you buy a Nintendo DS, you own the device, and you license the program that runs on it. If you were sufficiently skilled, you could open it up, remove the ROM chip inside that contains the Nintendo code, and substitue your own chip in its place. At that point, Nintendo would lose all claim to whatever you ran on it (assuming you didn't turn around and run a Nintendo game on it) because you would no longer be using licensed code. This concept prevents Sony from crashing down on the PSP homebrew market, because custom firmwares for that device are entirely software based so a jailbroken PSP doesn't run any Sony code. The fact that there's Nintendo code built into the hardware of a DS is a problem for DS owners to address. Don't like that? Buy a console that doesn't have built-in licensed code and you won't have this problem.
The reality is that, with the exception of Nintendo, the console manufacturers lose money with each system sold. They sell it below cost with the expectation of recouping their lost profits in future game sales. Someone who buys a console to use as, say, a Linux box is denying them that revenue. So, they're doing everything they can to limit the ability of the nominal owners of that equipment to do anything but buy and play games. And you know what? If they could have a law passed that prevented their customers from using their consoles as paperweights... they would. Because a console used as a paperweight doesn't make them any money.
This is all true, but who cares? If they could, they'd pass a law saying it's a crime to buy any other console. The point is that they haven't passed any such laws.
He had the keys to the janitorial closet. The city broke down the door, damaging some of the items inside, rather than just suing him for the keys.
This is the same fellow who withheld passwords and, when he finally caved in, gave them the wrong passwords. Suing him for the keys could easily have taken weeks, and you know that.
He indirectly caused expenses. He caused no damage. The law requires that he, personally, damage something.
Beg pardon? Indirect damages have been a part of tort law for more than a century.
He installed locks (as per regular procedure) on doors that needed to be secured and no one else needed access to. Or are you arguing that you shouldn't secure routers? No one else "needed" to get in there to keep things working.
This is almost silly. You're trying to conflate giving your direct supervisors access to a secured location with "unsecured" like the only two choices are him alone versus everybody in the neighborhood. There's no rational reason why he should have forbidden access to his own supervisors, even if he thought they were incompetent, because they're his supervisors. As you said, "the city owned the network" so he doesn't get to decide who's got the right to access, if that decision contradicts his superiors.
You can very easily get more time in jail for, what most would consider a prank, than for rape or other violent crimes.
His actions ended up costing his employer a big pile of money. This wasn't a prank, it was a purposeful lockout to make himself indispensable.
I know this sounds very arrogant, but I would love to see trials change so you're actually judged by your peers instead of members of the public, so for example doctors by doctors, network admin by other network admin, and such.
There was a network admin with a CCIE on the jury. He got exactly what you wanted for him.
Just for clarity, what Terry Childs did was wrong - but he certainly didn't deserve jail. Even if he did deserve jail he already spent a year inside before the trial (for some ungodly reason) and that was more than enough time served for this. The only reason they kept pushing this is to avoid the huge lawsuit if they failed to get a sentence longer than the time he already spent inside.
It makes for a nice conspiracy, but the reason stated for holding him in jail (well, for applying for a very high bail so he'd have to stay in jail) is because he was a flight risk. He had already tried to flee the jurisdiction and at the time, he was suspected of having backdoor access points into the network. They were afraid that if he got out, he'd split and then attack the system remotely. Based on the case information (and the first attempt to flee) I'd say they were reasonably justified in holding him.
No, they ruined his life over criminal interference. Read the court records.
did he steal or destroy anything of value? was anyones life put in danger? did he HARM anything at all but the ego of some of his asshole bosses?
His action directly resulted in over $200,000 in lost money. That money was spent cleaning up the problems he caused through purposeful effort on his part. Do you think that money has no value? If he'd done $200,000 dollars of damage by attacking the server room with a crowbar, would that have made it different? It doesn't matter that he didn't endanger anyone's life. Someone who forges a check and steals your bank account doesn't threaten your health.
Way to go americia. Just as bad as any 3rd world shithole dictatorship. But with a better PR department and a mcdonalds on every corner. And we don't kill you directly. We just ruin your life and put you with people who will kill you.
Oh, boo hoo. Maybe if he'd avoided breaking the law and doing nearly a quarter million dollars in damage he'd have avoided going to jail. The court records plainly show that he did this in an effort to keep everyone else, including his bosses, out of the systems, and that's not his place any more than he had the right to install locks on the doors and not let anyone into the building. If he didn't do it on purpose to make himself irreplaceable, then he'd have to be astonishingly bad at his job.
Makes me glad, Yet again. I got the fuck out of IT. When things work right you get no rewards. When things go wrong you get all the blame.
I have to say, based on this comment, that I'm glad you got out of IT as well.
I understand that in many countries it is now illegal to distribute a device that circumvents a copy-protection mechanism, but where are the alleged victims here ?
The crime is circumvention of DRM, and Nintendo owns the DRM control that's being circumvented to allow the programs on the cartridge to run. They have standing to bring the suit because of this. This isn't a copyright infringement lawsuit, although the claim of widespread copyright infringement by users of this device drives the decision.
You missed on this one. The relevant part of the SCOTUS ruling is "...does not constitute contributory infringement if the product is widely used for legitimate, unobjectionable purposes." The UK court ruled that the vast majority of DS flash cart users were using them for piracy, and therefore the mere existence of legitimate uses wasn't sufficient to allow them to continue.
But they don't: they want me to pay cold hard cash for the illusion of ownership (ha, kind of like buying a house, when you think about it.)
Um, what? Buying a house is buying a house. When I buy a house, I own it outright. The only exception to this is if I don't have enough money to buy it on my own, in which case I have to borrow the balance. In that case, the lender I got the money from has a legitimate claim to the part of that house that I haven't paid back, but that's very different from leasing, where I'm paying for use but not an ownership claim. Likewise, when you buy a DS, you own the physical device outright. If you wanted to use it as a paperweight or a frisbee, Nintendo would have no claim against you. In fact, if you took it apart and turned it into a little television, they'd still have no claim against you. It's when you want to use Nintendo's firmware in a way that the license you bought doesn't support that you start getting into legal hot water. Your choice is the right one. If you don't like the lack of ability to run homebrew, don't buy a DS(whatever) to run it.
Technically, this ruling doesn't outlaw "jailbreaking" (or whatever that scene calls it) the DS, you just can't buy the hardware that enables it. If you found some software-only method of achieving this, that wouldn't be covered by this ruling.
Since you used "technically", this isn't technically reasonable either. From the article:
""The court affirmed that game copiers first circumvent Nintendo's security systems before any non-infringing application can be played on Nintendo's handheld products," it said in a statement."
This means that your suggested software method would also violate the ruling if it circumvented the protections in the firmware. If you could get a hardware cartridge that somehow didn't circumvent the protections built into the firmware (I have no idea how you would do that, but let's assume you could), then that hardware wouldn't violate the ruling. The hangup is the circumvention of the blocks built in by Nintendo, not hardware versus software.
This means that your discussion about jailbreaking an iPhone isn't accurate either. Jailbreaking an iPhone involves replacing its OS with a different one, which means that you're not using Apple's OS any more (therefore not infringing on Apple's copyrights). Using hardware or software to change the phone's OS isn't relevant.
Well, just to take the piss out of you for this, but your statement implies that nobody ever dies in a car that's involved in an accident while not moving, which is provably not true.
Well, if you're using FAT32 and you want to prevent an application from writing to a directory, you can try the old DOS trick. Create a file with the same name as the directory (after removing the directory, of course). For example, to block files from being written to C:\TEMP you could create an empty file on the root of C: called "TEMP" and then any writes to that directory would fail because the filesystem gags on the identical file name.
Pakistan's Deputy Attorney General filed the FIP and the "Pakistani police" are investigating this seriously. That's functionally equivalent to the FBI doing the work here. Because the charges are based firmly in Sharia law and no highly placed Islamic folks are standing up and saying that this is excessive, then we draw the conclusion that Muslims approve of such action. Until some Muslims stand up and say that this is off the grid, they earn the same ridicule as Pakistan's government.
Here's a thought: get somebody reasonably important in Islamic hierarchy to speak out against executing Zuckerberg and we'd lighten up on the stereotypes.
You're comparing apples and oranges here. Let me plot the weather here on Earth with the same level of granularity as the predictions made in TFA:
"For the next few months, temps in the Northern Hemisphere will tend to remain warm, after which they'l begin a downward trend, which will probably level out about six to seven months from now. Then they'll trend upward again, reaching an average temperature right around current temperatures by the end of a year. The cycle will likely repeat over the year following that."
See, that was easy. They're not trying to say, "On Tuesday, a solar storm giving off X energy will cause degradation over Europe", which would be equivalent to trying to plot the weather for one locality accurately enough to judge whether it's going to rain.
The fact that rich people pay sales/property taxes doesn't negate that poor people also pay those taxes. Since the original statement was that poor people don't pay taxes, your comment doesn't disprove eldepeche.
Not so. AOL was virtually all dialup access when it started taking off. In fact, there are many who consider the rise of the Internet to be what drove AOL down.
I don't think you could strike closer to the definition of "hypocrisy" if you tried. First, you talk about "political spin created by the left" and then act like you can't manage to figure out that there's an agenda based on political spin behind including "Hussein" in President Obama's name (here's a hint: it's an attempt to play on anti-Islamic sentiment to bias people against the president based on his name; here's another hint: nobody bothered to spell out "Walker" in George W. Bush's name until this particular ploy was engaged). Then on top of that, you puzzle as to why making the point that "separation of church and state" should be politically charged, and wonder why it's such a big deal that you point out that it's not phrased in that exact manner in the Constitution with no mention as to why we should care that this particular phrase isn't directly quoted. You and I both know that you're attempting to spin the statement such that the Constitution doesn't support separation of church and state despite said document clearly forbidding establishment of religion and despite many years and many court decisions supporting the concept.
Xyrus's statement that it had nothing to do with proper education is right, and you're proof positive of that.
I hate to take the piss out of you over this (who am I kidding? I'm quite pleased to do it...) but if the person they "set up" just handed to phone back to Apple there'd be no grounds for a suit. It's those who would take such a find and try to turn a profit off of it that would be at risk. Greed engenders risk; don't try to get what isn't yours to have and you won't run afoul of Apple's "dastardly plan", now will you?
The apologist's take on this is that the computer system isn't completely unknown. Scientists had been in posession of (and been closely examining) the ship in the Area 51 hangar for fifty years. Considering that there's virtually no change from that ship to the ones that showed up to attack, I'd say that they had a pretty up-close understanding of the hardware at least. Given that, it might be possible to engineer a virus that can be uploaded wirelessly, that would affect the hardware directly. Imagine writing a worm that forced a computer to reboot and run its own OS.
It seems anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable prejudice.
This alone shows that you're living in a box. If you think that this is true, why don't you take a look outside your insular world? There are plenty of people all over the world "poking fun at Jews" and quite a number of other groups as well. I don't see any reason why Catholicism should get a pass for moral failing, and in fact I think they deserve more ridicule for having moral failings because they claim the moral high ground so often.
The way ye are going on, you'd think the great Utopia that is secular society (you know, the one that you slashdotters subscribe to and pay taxes towards) had never produced a paedophile or a cover-upping bureaucrat.
This is the price paid when a group who claims a monopoly on morality shows a serious moral failing. The Catholic Church itself rails endlessly on others for their moral failings, so they take it on the chin when it's discovered that they're being wildly hypocritical.
Anyway, despite the bigotted commentary, I get the distinct feeling that there's also a lot of begrudgery towards the Catholic Church (an institution that is incredibly wealthy). A Church that brings too much attention to the failings of the modern society that you live in.
This is precisely why they got a smackdown. If they were less anxious to point out the failings of "society" then they'd take less abuse when they're shown to have these same failings. If they're going to hold my feet to the fire, then I'm damn well going to do the same to them. If they don't like it, they can fix it easily enough by cleaning their own houses or keeping their mouths shut.
The police will ask for a form of ID first... which they routinely do during things like traffic stops anyway. In my state, there are random sobriety checkpoints set up where state troopers will ask to see your license and registration and ask if you've been drinking. And they've been doing this for decades. So it's not like Americans have never had to deal with the inconvenience of police asking for ID before.
This is very different, because of licensure. The mistake you're making is in thinking that an officer making a traffic stop is asking you for ID. He/she isn't. The officer is asking for proof that you're allowed to drive the vehicle. You're required to have a license to drive, and to produce that license when an officer needs to see proof that you're licensed (for example, during a traffic stop or checkpoint). But you'll notice that officers never ask anyone in the car except the operator for ID, and you'll notice that officers can't generally stop you on the street at random and ask for your license, because they're not allowed to demand "papers please" without a good reason. This law changes that in a significant way, by making it much easier to declare probable cause for a demand of proof of ID.
The "rumor" that you mention is a real problem, because it does indeed require you to prove that you're a citizen. If you don't have proof of citizenship when an officer stops you and asks for it, you'll be detained. Sure, you can solve it by presenting proof of citizenship, but that's exactly the point of "papers please" and that's why it's wrong.
To answer your real question, though: others being rich relative to me, or society at large, does not hurt me in any way.
This would only be true in a society where "the rich" are an even cross-section of society at large. Since that's never happened in the history of man, it's a pipe dream to think that huge class disparity isn't harmful to society at large, in the long run.
More importantly to me, their rightfully-acquired property is theirs to do with as they will, provided they in turn respect the property rights of others. How much property they might have, relative to me or others, is entirely irrelevant. What's theirs is theirs, and that's the end of it.
This sits at the heart of feudalism, and we saw how well that worked out for the "common man". You seem to think that the concept of "wage slavery" is just a term the commies use to trick right-thinking people into redistribution programs. The problem you encounter is that thousands of years of history have shown that a functional middle class makes for a better society than the lack of it, and even the Romans collected taxes and distributed them to the poorer elements of society. I agree that there's an upper limit on how well this works, but the U.S. today is very far away from that point. You extended the concept that someone making $12M a year will only decide to earn $10M a year to saying things like "...make it so people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs or their original employees who became rich developing their products have no motivation to get rich." That's a foolish hyperextension at this point, because (pusuant to the Law of Diminishing Returns) that last $2M doesn't add nearly as much to society as the first $10M worth of effort. More to the point, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs don't make the vast majority of their money through sweat of their brow anyway, and the vast majority of innovators in society aren't driven solely by profit motive (the two mentioned above started innovating long before it was worth any money to either of them). By the time someone is in the position to choose between $10M and $12M a year in earnings, they've stepped beyond the labor model that you're trying to apply to them.
It shouldn't be illegal to sell (or otherwise distribute) fake brand-name merchandise provided the recipient knows they're not getting the real thing.
What a bizarre argument. What would be the point of using a band name on a fake if you were going to announce that it's fake? Why wouldn't you just sell it unbranded? There's no reason to stamp "Rolex" on a watch unless you want people to think it's a Rolex watch.
More to the point, though, Windows is a licensed product, not a durable good. If you want to sell an OS, feel free, but you can't take Windows and sell it with no brand on it, because it's Windows and you don't own the rights to sell Windows. Write your own OS if you want to sell it.
It's the very context that makes it so awful. If they paid astronomical wages for working in such hellish conditions, then I'd find it more reasonable. After all, there are a lot of awful jobs, and by paying really well they get takers. But the pay these workers are getting doesn't match up to the conditions, which is what defines it as a sweatshop. Stated in your context, the pay is horrendous considering the job and conditions.
I wasn't the one dramatizing "everything" with exaggerations. That was the National Labor Committee, as quoted by houghi, and now you. I said that his claim that they're exploiting workers by breaking the law is valid even without his exaggeration, and therefore your calling out was nitpicking.
Slashdot Mirror
"Reasonable expectation of privacy" is a legal term, and doesn't have to mean complete or perfect privacy. It simply means that the law should treat it as a private area as regards things like search and seizure. For example, if I have a big box on my driveway, the police can't approach it and open it without a search warrant or probable cause. It doesn't mean that plain sight rules don't apply, but to take the example of the article, if I parked a car on my driveway and covered it with a tarp, they'd have no right to look under the tarp to see if it's my car (without a warrant or cause, of course).
Virg
Second, in theory anyway, the laws do actually have quite a few things to say about what we "can" do. The first amendment rights like freedom of speech, assembly, religion, petition, and press come to mind.
The very wording of that amendment proves you wrong. It doesn't say what the people can do, it says what Congress cannot do. It doesn't apply directly to the people, who have the right to do things that the law does not forbid.
The simple upshot of this is that, if there's no law that says you can't do something, then prosecutors will have a hard time taking you to task for doing it.
Virg
You missed on this one. The essence of ownership is control, and if you truly own it, that control cannot be taken away unless your possession is stolen from you. At least where I live, if you fail to pay your property taxes each year, your home will be sold out from under you by the county. It's called a "tax sale." Consequently, I don't really consider myself to "own" my home. If I truly owned it, nobody could take it away from me. Most people believe they own their homes, but try not paying your taxes one year. Then it will become apparent to whom it really belongs.
Swing and a miss. You can claim that property taxes mean that you don't own your land, but it's not accurate to the mainstream defnition of ownership.
Also, failure to pay taxes does not guarantee loss of the property. If you fail to pay taxes the court will demand that you pay them, and most tax sales are because the defendant has no other assets of sufficient value. But, if you had enough money in the bank to pay the bill, then the court could (and often will) sieze that asset to satisfy the debt, and you get to keep the deed in that case.
Most people think that when they lay out several hundred dollars for a sophisticated piece of electronics that it is theirs to do with as they wish. That is, I might add, a reasonable assumption, after all, they paid for it. But they don't have that ability, even though they are the nominal owners of said console, because the manufacturer is retaining control over the use of the product after it has been supposedly sold.
Again, you're missing the concept of what you own and what you license. When you buy a Nintendo DS, you own the device, and you license the program that runs on it. If you were sufficiently skilled, you could open it up, remove the ROM chip inside that contains the Nintendo code, and substitue your own chip in its place. At that point, Nintendo would lose all claim to whatever you ran on it (assuming you didn't turn around and run a Nintendo game on it) because you would no longer be using licensed code. This concept prevents Sony from crashing down on the PSP homebrew market, because custom firmwares for that device are entirely software based so a jailbroken PSP doesn't run any Sony code. The fact that there's Nintendo code built into the hardware of a DS is a problem for DS owners to address. Don't like that? Buy a console that doesn't have built-in licensed code and you won't have this problem.
The reality is that, with the exception of Nintendo, the console manufacturers lose money with each system sold. They sell it below cost with the expectation of recouping their lost profits in future game sales. Someone who buys a console to use as, say, a Linux box is denying them that revenue. So, they're doing everything they can to limit the ability of the nominal owners of that equipment to do anything but buy and play games. And you know what? If they could have a law passed that prevented their customers from using their consoles as paperweights ... they would. Because a console used as a paperweight doesn't make them any money.
This is all true, but who cares? If they could, they'd pass a law saying it's a crime to buy any other console. The point is that they haven't passed any such laws.
Virg
He had the keys to the janitorial closet. The city broke down the door, damaging some of the items inside, rather than just suing him for the keys.
This is the same fellow who withheld passwords and, when he finally caved in, gave them the wrong passwords. Suing him for the keys could easily have taken weeks, and you know that.
He indirectly caused expenses. He caused no damage. The law requires that he, personally, damage something.
Beg pardon? Indirect damages have been a part of tort law for more than a century.
He installed locks (as per regular procedure) on doors that needed to be secured and no one else needed access to. Or are you arguing that you shouldn't secure routers? No one else "needed" to get in there to keep things working.
This is almost silly. You're trying to conflate giving your direct supervisors access to a secured location with "unsecured" like the only two choices are him alone versus everybody in the neighborhood. There's no rational reason why he should have forbidden access to his own supervisors, even if he thought they were incompetent, because they're his supervisors. As you said, "the city owned the network" so he doesn't get to decide who's got the right to access, if that decision contradicts his superiors.
Virg
You can very easily get more time in jail for, what most would consider a prank, than for rape or other violent crimes.
His actions ended up costing his employer a big pile of money. This wasn't a prank, it was a purposeful lockout to make himself indispensable.
I know this sounds very arrogant, but I would love to see trials change so you're actually judged by your peers instead of members of the public, so for example doctors by doctors, network admin by other network admin, and such.
There was a network admin with a CCIE on the jury. He got exactly what you wanted for him.
Just for clarity, what Terry Childs did was wrong - but he certainly didn't deserve jail. Even if he did deserve jail he already spent a year inside before the trial (for some ungodly reason) and that was more than enough time served for this. The only reason they kept pushing this is to avoid the huge lawsuit if they failed to get a sentence longer than the time he already spent inside.
It makes for a nice conspiracy, but the reason stated for holding him in jail (well, for applying for a very high bail so he'd have to stay in jail) is because he was a flight risk. He had already tried to flee the jurisdiction and at the time, he was suspected of having backdoor access points into the network. They were afraid that if he got out, he'd split and then attack the system remotely. Based on the case information (and the first attempt to flee) I'd say they were reasonably justified in holding him.
Virg
They still ruined a mans life.. over a password.
No, they ruined his life over criminal interference. Read the court records.
did he steal or destroy anything of value? was anyones life put in danger? did he HARM anything at all but the ego of some of his asshole bosses?
His action directly resulted in over $200,000 in lost money. That money was spent cleaning up the problems he caused through purposeful effort on his part. Do you think that money has no value? If he'd done $200,000 dollars of damage by attacking the server room with a crowbar, would that have made it different? It doesn't matter that he didn't endanger anyone's life. Someone who forges a check and steals your bank account doesn't threaten your health.
Way to go americia. Just as bad as any 3rd world shithole dictatorship. But with a better PR department and a mcdonalds on every corner. And we don't kill you directly. We just ruin your life and put you with people who will kill you.
Oh, boo hoo. Maybe if he'd avoided breaking the law and doing nearly a quarter million dollars in damage he'd have avoided going to jail. The court records plainly show that he did this in an effort to keep everyone else, including his bosses, out of the systems, and that's not his place any more than he had the right to install locks on the doors and not let anyone into the building. If he didn't do it on purpose to make himself irreplaceable, then he'd have to be astonishingly bad at his job.
Makes me glad, Yet again. I got the fuck out of IT. When things work right you get no rewards. When things go wrong you get all the blame.
I have to say, based on this comment, that I'm glad you got out of IT as well.
Virg
I understand that in many countries it is now illegal to distribute a device that circumvents a copy-protection mechanism, but where are the alleged victims here ?
The crime is circumvention of DRM, and Nintendo owns the DRM control that's being circumvented to allow the programs on the cartridge to run. They have standing to bring the suit because of this. This isn't a copyright infringement lawsuit, although the claim of widespread copyright infringement by users of this device drives the decision.
Virg
But they don't: they want me to pay cold hard cash for the illusion of ownership (ha, kind of like buying a house, when you think about it.)
Um, what? Buying a house is buying a house. When I buy a house, I own it outright. The only exception to this is if I don't have enough money to buy it on my own, in which case I have to borrow the balance. In that case, the lender I got the money from has a legitimate claim to the part of that house that I haven't paid back, but that's very different from leasing, where I'm paying for use but not an ownership claim. Likewise, when you buy a DS, you own the physical device outright. If you wanted to use it as a paperweight or a frisbee, Nintendo would have no claim against you. In fact, if you took it apart and turned it into a little television, they'd still have no claim against you. It's when you want to use Nintendo's firmware in a way that the license you bought doesn't support that you start getting into legal hot water. Your choice is the right one. If you don't like the lack of ability to run homebrew, don't buy a DS(whatever) to run it.
Virg
Technically, this ruling doesn't outlaw "jailbreaking" (or whatever that scene calls it) the DS, you just can't buy the hardware that enables it. If you found some software-only method of achieving this, that wouldn't be covered by this ruling.
Since you used "technically", this isn't technically reasonable either. From the article:
""The court affirmed that game copiers first circumvent Nintendo's security systems before any non-infringing application can be played on Nintendo's handheld products," it said in a statement."
This means that your suggested software method would also violate the ruling if it circumvented the protections in the firmware. If you could get a hardware cartridge that somehow didn't circumvent the protections built into the firmware (I have no idea how you would do that, but let's assume you could), then that hardware wouldn't violate the ruling. The hangup is the circumvention of the blocks built in by Nintendo, not hardware versus software.
This means that your discussion about jailbreaking an iPhone isn't accurate either. Jailbreaking an iPhone involves replacing its OS with a different one, which means that you're not using Apple's OS any more (therefore not infringing on Apple's copyrights). Using hardware or software to change the phone's OS isn't relevant.
Virg
Well, just to take the piss out of you for this, but your statement implies that nobody ever dies in a car that's involved in an accident while not moving, which is provably not true.
Virg
Clothes are subject to sales tax in most states. Gas is taxed. Utilities are taxed.
Virg
Well, if you're using FAT32 and you want to prevent an application from writing to a directory, you can try the old DOS trick. Create a file with the same name as the directory (after removing the directory, of course). For example, to block files from being written to C:\TEMP you could create an empty file on the root of C: called "TEMP" and then any writes to that directory would fail because the filesystem gags on the identical file name.
Virg
Pakistan's Deputy Attorney General filed the FIP and the "Pakistani police" are investigating this seriously. That's functionally equivalent to the FBI doing the work here. Because the charges are based firmly in Sharia law and no highly placed Islamic folks are standing up and saying that this is excessive, then we draw the conclusion that Muslims approve of such action. Until some Muslims stand up and say that this is off the grid, they earn the same ridicule as Pakistan's government.
Here's a thought: get somebody reasonably important in Islamic hierarchy to speak out against executing Zuckerberg and we'd lighten up on the stereotypes.
Virg
You're comparing apples and oranges here. Let me plot the weather here on Earth with the same level of granularity as the predictions made in TFA:
"For the next few months, temps in the Northern Hemisphere will tend to remain warm, after which they'l begin a downward trend, which will probably level out about six to seven months from now. Then they'll trend upward again, reaching an average temperature right around current temperatures by the end of a year. The cycle will likely repeat over the year following that."
See, that was easy. They're not trying to say, "On Tuesday, a solar storm giving off X energy will cause degradation over Europe", which would be equivalent to trying to plot the weather for one locality accurately enough to judge whether it's going to rain.
Virg
The fact that rich people pay sales/property taxes doesn't negate that poor people also pay those taxes. Since the original statement was that poor people don't pay taxes, your comment doesn't disprove eldepeche.
Virg
Not so. AOL was virtually all dialup access when it started taking off. In fact, there are many who consider the rise of the Internet to be what drove AOL down.
Virg
I don't think you could strike closer to the definition of "hypocrisy" if you tried. First, you talk about "political spin created by the left" and then act like you can't manage to figure out that there's an agenda based on political spin behind including "Hussein" in President Obama's name (here's a hint: it's an attempt to play on anti-Islamic sentiment to bias people against the president based on his name; here's another hint: nobody bothered to spell out "Walker" in George W. Bush's name until this particular ploy was engaged). Then on top of that, you puzzle as to why making the point that "separation of church and state" should be politically charged, and wonder why it's such a big deal that you point out that it's not phrased in that exact manner in the Constitution with no mention as to why we should care that this particular phrase isn't directly quoted. You and I both know that you're attempting to spin the statement such that the Constitution doesn't support separation of church and state despite said document clearly forbidding establishment of religion and despite many years and many court decisions supporting the concept.
Xyrus's statement that it had nothing to do with proper education is right, and you're proof positive of that.
Virg
I hate to take the piss out of you over this (who am I kidding? I'm quite pleased to do it...) but if the person they "set up" just handed to phone back to Apple there'd be no grounds for a suit. It's those who would take such a find and try to turn a profit off of it that would be at risk. Greed engenders risk; don't try to get what isn't yours to have and you won't run afoul of Apple's "dastardly plan", now will you?
Virg
The apologist's take on this is that the computer system isn't completely unknown. Scientists had been in posession of (and been closely examining) the ship in the Area 51 hangar for fifty years. Considering that there's virtually no change from that ship to the ones that showed up to attack, I'd say that they had a pretty up-close understanding of the hardware at least. Given that, it might be possible to engineer a virus that can be uploaded wirelessly, that would affect the hardware directly. Imagine writing a worm that forced a computer to reboot and run its own OS.
Virg
It seems anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable prejudice.
This alone shows that you're living in a box. If you think that this is true, why don't you take a look outside your insular world? There are plenty of people all over the world "poking fun at Jews" and quite a number of other groups as well. I don't see any reason why Catholicism should get a pass for moral failing, and in fact I think they deserve more ridicule for having moral failings because they claim the moral high ground so often.
The way ye are going on, you'd think the great Utopia that is secular society (you know, the one that you slashdotters subscribe to and pay taxes towards) had never produced a paedophile or a cover-upping bureaucrat.
This is the price paid when a group who claims a monopoly on morality shows a serious moral failing. The Catholic Church itself rails endlessly on others for their moral failings, so they take it on the chin when it's discovered that they're being wildly hypocritical.
Anyway, despite the bigotted commentary, I get the distinct feeling that there's also a lot of begrudgery towards the Catholic Church (an institution that is incredibly wealthy). A Church that brings too much attention to the failings of the modern society that you live in.
This is precisely why they got a smackdown. If they were less anxious to point out the failings of "society" then they'd take less abuse when they're shown to have these same failings. If they're going to hold my feet to the fire, then I'm damn well going to do the same to them. If they don't like it, they can fix it easily enough by cleaning their own houses or keeping their mouths shut.
Virg
The police will ask for a form of ID first... which they routinely do during things like traffic stops anyway. In my state, there are random sobriety checkpoints set up where state troopers will ask to see your license and registration and ask if you've been drinking. And they've been doing this for decades. So it's not like Americans have never had to deal with the inconvenience of police asking for ID before.
This is very different, because of licensure. The mistake you're making is in thinking that an officer making a traffic stop is asking you for ID. He/she isn't. The officer is asking for proof that you're allowed to drive the vehicle. You're required to have a license to drive, and to produce that license when an officer needs to see proof that you're licensed (for example, during a traffic stop or checkpoint). But you'll notice that officers never ask anyone in the car except the operator for ID, and you'll notice that officers can't generally stop you on the street at random and ask for your license, because they're not allowed to demand "papers please" without a good reason. This law changes that in a significant way, by making it much easier to declare probable cause for a demand of proof of ID.
The "rumor" that you mention is a real problem, because it does indeed require you to prove that you're a citizen. If you don't have proof of citizenship when an officer stops you and asks for it, you'll be detained. Sure, you can solve it by presenting proof of citizenship, but that's exactly the point of "papers please" and that's why it's wrong.
Virg
To answer your real question, though: others being rich relative to me, or society at large, does not hurt me in any way.
This would only be true in a society where "the rich" are an even cross-section of society at large. Since that's never happened in the history of man, it's a pipe dream to think that huge class disparity isn't harmful to society at large, in the long run.
More importantly to me, their rightfully-acquired property is theirs to do with as they will, provided they in turn respect the property rights of others. How much property they might have, relative to me or others, is entirely irrelevant. What's theirs is theirs, and that's the end of it.
This sits at the heart of feudalism, and we saw how well that worked out for the "common man". You seem to think that the concept of "wage slavery" is just a term the commies use to trick right-thinking people into redistribution programs. The problem you encounter is that thousands of years of history have shown that a functional middle class makes for a better society than the lack of it, and even the Romans collected taxes and distributed them to the poorer elements of society. I agree that there's an upper limit on how well this works, but the U.S. today is very far away from that point. You extended the concept that someone making $12M a year will only decide to earn $10M a year to saying things like "...make it so people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs or their original employees who became rich developing their products have no motivation to get rich." That's a foolish hyperextension at this point, because (pusuant to the Law of Diminishing Returns) that last $2M doesn't add nearly as much to society as the first $10M worth of effort. More to the point, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs don't make the vast majority of their money through sweat of their brow anyway, and the vast majority of innovators in society aren't driven solely by profit motive (the two mentioned above started innovating long before it was worth any money to either of them). By the time someone is in the position to choose between $10M and $12M a year in earnings, they've stepped beyond the labor model that you're trying to apply to them.
Virg
It shouldn't be illegal to sell (or otherwise distribute) fake brand-name merchandise provided the recipient knows they're not getting the real thing.
What a bizarre argument. What would be the point of using a band name on a fake if you were going to announce that it's fake? Why wouldn't you just sell it unbranded? There's no reason to stamp "Rolex" on a watch unless you want people to think it's a Rolex watch.
More to the point, though, Windows is a licensed product, not a durable good. If you want to sell an OS, feel free, but you can't take Windows and sell it with no brand on it, because it's Windows and you don't own the rights to sell Windows. Write your own OS if you want to sell it.
Virg
It's the very context that makes it so awful. If they paid astronomical wages for working in such hellish conditions, then I'd find it more reasonable. After all, there are a lot of awful jobs, and by paying really well they get takers. But the pay these workers are getting doesn't match up to the conditions, which is what defines it as a sweatshop. Stated in your context, the pay is horrendous considering the job and conditions.
Virg
I wasn't the one dramatizing "everything" with exaggerations. That was the National Labor Committee, as quoted by houghi, and now you. I said that his claim that they're exploiting workers by breaking the law is valid even without his exaggeration, and therefore your calling out was nitpicking.
Virg