Hey no worries, you forget these little kids replying to your post have no remembrance of what Porn was before the VCR.
Before Video Tape Porn was going to an X-Rated theater, usually in the worst part of your town, sitting in a theater with a bunch of other people and watching Porn. When the police would raid these type of places they would wear trash bags taped around their feet and legs because of how "sticky" everything was. It was routinely easy to not only watch other people masturbate but some of the attendance went specifically to do so (Gay sex was common at theaters playing certain types of porn). Women didn't set foot in places like this, the theaters were dirty beyond belief, they were in seedy neighborhoods and muggings were frequent and usually unreported (you gonna file a police report saying you were mugged leaving the X-rated theater?)
Again, being a child of the information age and having pornography at his fingertips your responder doesn't realize how massively the VCR changed porn and likewise how Porn changed home Video. The Porn Industry was a one off business that produced films for theaters and barely broke even with 2-3 films a year, most of the producers were in California with the brain child's of the business in SanFran. Once home video became available Porn sales went from at best 1 million a year to hundreds of millions with a span of a few years. By the end of the 80's porn was a billion dollar industry producing over 100 films a year. VCR succeeded over the technically better Sony standard because it could hold a 2 hour movie and the porn industry didn't want to pay for two tapes (early porn was a $34 a tape). It's pretty easy to correlate the massive porn sales with the VCR sales, especially considering some of the highest initial sales were pornography not popular films.
With easy access to porn it's hard for these young kinds to imagine never having seen it and suddenly being able to buy a player that will let you watch it at home in privacy, either alone or with a loved one and not have endanger themselves with a trip to the X-rated theater. The entire industry was changed and the number of people watching porn was in exponential growth. They even started making porn for women, lesbians and gay men. That's all because of the VCR. Your posters "myth" is common knowledge to those of us who lived through the 80's and remember how dramatically porn changed the Home video system and how the VCR changed porn.
The key thing to remember here is that Sony owned Betamax and they wouldn't allow porn on their tapes, you had to have a license to produce movies on their tapes (the ban wasn't immediate on release, it was several months after VHS appeared that Sony decided to differentiate itself as a family safe format that Porn went exclusively VHS). That porn exclusive use of VHS decimated betamax sales, because contrary to what people would respond in public surveys, they did buy the video system to watch movies at home but they also wanted the ability to watch Debbie does Dallas and the Green Door at home. Multifunction always wins.
It is not a secret (it's a stated fact on both Intel and AMD's roadmaps) to integrate GPU like programmable FP into the FP units of the general processor. The likely result will be the same general purpose CPU you love, but there will be dozens of additional FP units that excel at mathematics like the parent described except more flexible. When the fusion'eske products ramp and GPGPU functionality is integrated into the CPU Nvidia is out of business. Oh I don't expect these fusion products to have great GPU's, but once you destroy the low end and mid range graphics marketplace there is very little $$ wise left to fund R&D (3dfx was the first one into the high end 3d market and they barely broke even on their first sales, the only reason they survived was because they were heavy in the arcade sector sales). If Nvidia hasn't been allowed to purchase Via's x86 license by that point they are quite frankly out of business. Not immediately of course, they will spend a few years evaporating all assets while they try to compete with only the highend marketplace but in the end they won't survive. Things go in cycles and the independent graphics chip cycle is going to end very shortly, maybe in a decade it will come back, but I'm skeptical. CPU's have exceeded the speed needed for 80% of most tasks out there.
When I first started my Career computer runs of my design work took about 5-30 minutes to run on bare minimum quality. These days I can exceed that bare minimum by 20 times and the run will take seconds. It's to the point where I can model with far more precision than the end product needs with almost no time penalty. In fact additional CPU speed at this point is almost meaningless and my business isn't alone in this. In fact most of the software in my business is single threaded (and the apps run that fast with single threads). Once the software is multi-threaded there is really no additional CPU power needed and it may come to the point where my business just stops upgrading hardware beyond what's need to replace failures and my business isn't alone. I just don't see a future for independent graphics chip/card producers.
And how many patches has Microsoft submitted to BSD? None you say? So MS took all the BSD code, modified it and tied it to Windows and never gave back any of the code? I thought you said they will give it back because it's so painful to maintain it separately? You would be right if they were taking the whole BSD system, but when someone takes a piece of the system and integrates it into another system they don't give back changes and have no motivation to do so. Regardless this has never been about community, it's the difference between BSD being free for developers and GPL being free for users that's the difference.
Hey, I admit I don't know how Treaties in the UK are approved, but even if it requires both parliament and the PM to approve it's still going to be a far quicker process than the US approval process. With the requirement of senate consultations and a super majority in the Senate along with the Presidential ratification there hasn't been a treaty ratified by the US in less than 3 years in 20 years. If the treaty is ratified it's enforceable from the original symbolic signing by the executive. It's a slow process, but regardless that's NOT an excuse to violate a treaty.
What the due process rules have to do with this case is absolutely nothing. The gentleman in question will be afforded all due process rights when he appears before the court. He's also had ample opportunity to prove the US has no case at his extradition hearing which your courts upheld as a valid and meeting the requirements of the statue and treaty.
And much like the other supporters you suggest that the UK break a treaty negotiated in good faith, to prevent cross-border crime, for the sole reason of making the US remember it's founding principles and allow Juries and no cruel and unusual punishment? What does ANY of that have to do with this case? The answer is not a damn thing. So you support the breaking of a treaty for no reason other than you are mad at the US for other completely unrelated reasons. Great idea there, how about the US impose a Naval blockade on the UK and destroy the Channel Tunnel because British soldiers burned the White House in 1812. It makes as much sense to do that as what you suggest. And while were at it why not ban all commerce with the UK because of the tea tax on the colonies. Yea, lets engage in retaliation for unrelated incidents.
And your final suggestion is that because the Victim was lax in security that until the Victim is punished the criminal should not be punished. (Do you actually think the US didn't up security and fix the problems?) So if you have a weak lock on your house and someone breaks in rumages through your possessions and takes a few choice items, they can't prosecute the criminal until you yourself are jailed for having a weak lock. Makes perfect sense, I knew the British had a fascination with punishing Victims that defended themselves, but now you want to punish them for NOT defending themselves as well. Sounds like any crime committed the victim goes to jail or the criminal isn't prosecuted at all. Makes perfect sense!
How about you be honest and just admit that you don't want the UK to have relations with the US and that the UK should sever all relationships with the US including dissolving NATO, ending all cross border trade and commerce, severing the cross Atlantic telephone and internet connection, stopping the purchase of all US weapon systems (including the new joint strike fighter), ending all cross-Atlantic travel, baring currency trade and seizing all US property in the UK and jailing every American in the UK for crimes against Humanity for being alive.
If McKinnon isn't extradited it should be precedent to allow anyone in the US to hack into any UK based computer system for any reason and publicly disclose anything found without fear of extradition to the UK.
Ah, that's not shooting themselves in the foot. Shooting themselves in the foot is making a claim that Limewire caused 1.5 Trillion in damages in a filed court document while at the same time having failed to pay tens of thousands of artists for rights to sell their music. There are a LOT of artists out there still waiting to be paid, including many the companies never even had contracts with. This same claim and the math that elicited it can now be used by all those artists with claims to take the record companies to the cleaners. Think of all the sales and revenue lost because of what the record companies themselves have done. I really hope some of the artists that have claims turn this filing around and use it against the record companies where the record companies claimed in court documents the record companies misuse of copyright is at most worth the cost of an iTunes download. It would make me feel peachy to see an artist turn this around and use this filing against the record companies for massive damages.
I hope all your lawyers working for these artists are copying and filing the documents in your cases because they are making contrary claims in the courts.
What gets my goat is that a UK citizen damaged US government property (you have no convincing argument that what he did didn't cost money and time to repair) and a bunch of British are trying to convince their government that he shouldn't be extradited to the country he caused damage to for trial. Hell if this goes through I want the US government to make hacking UK computer systems perfectly legal because if this Jackass can get no punishment for crimes he committed in the US I wanna be able to hack into and damage/destroy British systems and disclose all information acquired without fear of repercussion. The US has extradited numerous US citizens to the UK for equal crimes for trial under UK law for crimes committed against UK property.
And for the record, the UK trying him for crimes he committed in the UK has little to nothing to do with the crimes he committed in the US and for that matter, what the crime was has little to no relevance to the extradition. This extradition request falls under those allowed by the treaty and either UK honors the extradition treaty or we scrap the whole treaty and neither country extradites anyone. I always believed the UK was one of those countries that honors the treaties they negotiate and sign in good faith but maybe this is a sign that NO treaty with the UK is worth the paper it's printed on if the party or prime minister changes. I hope that's not true because if it is then the UK is in for a world of problems and retaliatory treaty breaches. I'd hate to think that the word of a citizen or the government of the UK is worthless and unreliable, but maybe that's the country YOU want it to be. That way you can be right up there with Jamaica with it's politicians protecting criminals and preventing extradition.
Now, on the other hand if the jail he serves his time in is such a big issue, I don't have a problem (and I doubt anyone else would either) with him being jailed in the UK as a humanitarian measure as long as the trial and sentencing are in the US and any consideration of parole is made by US authorities alone. I have a feeling that his supporters would oppose that because they hope to use anti-American feelings to get the sentence reduced or the charges dropped entirely. All this talk is nothing more than his supporters saying that US law and property isn't worth anything and it's perfectly OK to damage or destroy US property.
If this was some American hacker that had breached MI5,6 or Scotland yard and disclosed confidential or private information publicly you would be demanding extradition and long sentencing for the "hacker yank". You supporters should just be honest about the reason you support him, it's all about anti-Americanism and has little to do with anything else.
something.com is easier to remember than city.state.gov? In what world? I find it particularly difficult to forget the city and state I live in, yet you think it easier to have some weird city abbreviation coupled with a non-standard abbreviation for some department in the city followed by the.com (commercial) domain name. Hell, I'm not even sure I wouldn't think a.com domain wasn't in fact a parody or scam site. Government websites should be under.gov.
Maybe these "civilians" 30 minutes earlier were all firing guns at troops then disposed of their weapons and jumped in the van and took off or they were planting a bomb, or they were seen unloading weapons. There could be a thousand different scenarios indicating they had a reasonable suspicion that the van housed "insurgent civilians". The problem with Iraq is that the enemy IS civilians. The ones bombing and shooting people are not an organized fighting force in military uniforms, they are civilians, most from Iraq but some are foreigners from other middle east countries but they are all technically civilians. This greatly complicates identifying the killers. If the insurgents wore uniforms or other identifying gear civilians would be killed by accident far less frequently, but they don't want to wear distinguishing uniforms because it would make it easier to target them and they WANT civilians to get killed as they are targeting civilians in a significant number of operations. Technically the troops are in violation of the Geneva conventions on targeting civilians every time they kill an insurgent. The CIA missile strikes in Pakistan always kill civilians, again they are usually part of the insurgency but they are still civilians.
IMO the Geneva convention ban on directly attacking civilians is simply untenable as it's based on uniform fighting outside populated areas, a mythical situation that might have existed in WWIII but has rarely existed in combat. In reality civilians are the base of any armed conflict, either supplying and providing safe harbor for the fighters or they are directly providing supplies, munitions and people for the fighting force. The quickest way to win a war is destroy the industrial capacity and supply lines behind an opponent and bombing factories/supply lines is always going to kill civilians unintentionally. The Geneva convention on civilians needs to be interpreted liberally, again IMO, in that the intent of the Treaty is to prevent the intentional direct targeting of civilians with the knowledge that they are civilians, such as bombing a residential neighborhood on purpose. One comparison of whether the civilian casualties appear to violate the treaty would be if civilian casualties are significantly higher than friendly fire casualties, thus indicating a widespread intentional targeting of civilians. Friendly fire incidents are almost as common as these civilian incidents, and I would dare you to argue that even though they intentionally target the friendly fire casualties that their intent was to kill friendlies. Intent is the key factor, did the soldiers intend to kill civilians or did they believe they were killing insurgents? Ignoring intent doesn't give a fair evaluation of the situation. IMO it's only criminal if they actually knew they were killing only civilians and intentionally did so.
And dead goes a decade or more of research on growing genetic identical replacement organs and tissue for transplant. The intermediate step to growing these things in a lab is growing them in an animal while the perfect the technique. No hybrid' the research stops dead. I wish legislators would stop looking at SciFi scare movies and actually start talking to real scientists in the field in question on what is going on, what the benefits could be and what the risks are. As it is they get their information from movies, wacko uneducated religious zealots and fantasy novels. There is an ethical issue with this work but outright bans without regard to intent, purpose, controls and benefits is just plain stupid.
Epoxy coating the re-bar has not been proven effective. What the masons you had a beer with is typical of the trades, they don't understand the big picture because they are focused on their job. No engineers or architects screwed up (other than the very few public examples of failure). Buildings are designed for a certain life, typically that's 50-70 years and after that the building is expected to need capital investment in the infrastructure beyond routine maintenance to extend that life. Buildings could easily be designed to last longer but the longer the life the higher the cost and it's rare for an owner to care. Buildings could easily be designed to take fires, earthquakes, tornado's and hurricanes but the costs of such design make it illogical.
The masons you mentioned talked about paint, it's not paint it's epoxy and it's a highly unproven technology (unless you are talking to the epoxy association, then it's the end all be all of re-bar protection). There are some in the engineering sector that think Epoxy coating re-bar is going to be one of those big mistakes that comes back and haunts us endlessly in a few decades (epoxy coated steel has been in use since the late 80's). The thing is concrete by itself is highly alkaline, the steel itself is alkaline as well and this prevents corrosion (which needs acidic environments to thrive, remember it's an oxidation process). The problem with epoxy is it negates the alkalinity effect of the concrete. In a perfect world the epoxy would be clean and perfect after the concrete sets but in reality the epoxy is going to have abrasions and cuts from erection, pouring and finishing (not counting what a decade of thermal expansion does to it). These abrasions in the epoxy coat provide a path of corrosion and once it penetrates the abrasion and infects the steel it can move along the steel much quicker because of the epoxy coat protecting the corrosion from alkalinity of the concrete. IMO a much better solution is galvanizing, the zinc coating has an additional alkaline protection and is much more durable during construction than epoxy ever can be. Either that or use high ksi stainless steel.
Boston is not alone in problems with re-bar corrosion, the issue involves the use of salt, cities and states that use salt in the winter on the roads, the salt provides the corrosion path and negates the alkalinity resulting in corrosion way ahead of schedule. The salt on the road moves through the environment and affects lots of ancillary structures including nearby buildings and tunnels. Black-bar re-bar used in concrete where salt isn't applied, even underwater and in freeze/thaw cycles has been very durable. There is reinforced concrete out there that is still in perfect shape that was poured 50 years ago and it's harder than ever.
Also, all concrete sets underwater, concrete doesn't dry, it hardens, it is a chemical reaction that involves hydration and the formation of a crystalline structure using the water. Without water there isn't concrete or if you allow the concrete to "dry" before it sets will degrade the concrete severely. This is why they have to keep the concrete moist for several days after pouring. Premature drying has similar symptoms to over-finishing, the surface of the concrete spalls the top surface off after a time rusulting in the loss of about a 1/4 - 1 inch of concrete on the surface spalling off.
And finally, organic additives to concrete are NEVER a good thing. Organics deteriorate after time, this leaves voids in the concrete where the organics ended up and the decay can create acids and bases that can adversely affect the concrete. Organics are bad, period. Now, Roman use of organics, such as blood may have resulted in more air-entrainment. The little tiny air-bubbles formed after the organics decayed (or as a result of mixing them in) would have provided freeze-thaw protection. Concrete placed in the open weather typically needs ~5% air entrainment to eliminate the effect of water saturation and freeze/thaw cycles. The heavy use of
What Hollywood wants is active policing of the internet by all world governments with prison terms handed out to infringes. If governments did go to that step I guarantee they would succeed, at the cost of imprisoning a few million more people while paroling truly violent criminals.
This is the reason the US government hasn't pursued it, but you should be very afraid of the influence the MPAA can exert, before it was just the RIAA, but now with Hollywood behind it there is a very good chance ACTA will force all the WTO countries to enforce restrictions (that includes China). Once the WTO starts imprisoning people the major easy distribution channels will go dead leaving only secure encrypted and very low volume exchanges, reducing the trade to very minimal which is Hollywood's goal. The tax increases to support the enforcement and the destruction of millions of lives will be enormous, but Hollywood doesn't care.
It shouldn't be legal, nor is it ethical to use taxpayer money to develop research and then patent that research and profit from it. All government projects should be public domain. I have a serious issue any time someone uses government funded research to patent anything and I'm horrified by the idea of a government entity itself patenting anything at all. And the worst point is your defending it because "CISRO does good things". I don't care if they personally save the lives of 1 million people a day, they shouldn't be taking taxpayer money and using it to patent anything. I'd also be willing to bet that contrary to your assertion that someone in CISRO is directly benefiting from this patent, whether it's the director or review board or even the patent developer, bonuses are most certainly changing hands and I'm certain they are large.
Also we are talking 300 million from the computer makers and probably another 300 million from the telcom's, probably another 300 million from all the other entities using wifi and i bet it's a billion dollars in total revenue if they win all lawsuits. What does a research organization need with a that much money? I guarantee they aren't spending 1 billion a year on research. A staff of around 400 people would be around 30 million a year, with 1 b1illion that's full staff funding for 33 years. The amount of money collected here is far more than they can ever spend, so ask yourself, where is the excess going because they're getting government money too right?
What's scarier than radio affecting cells is that you had to explain that it doesn't. It doesn't take a lot of common sense to realize that we have been using radio for more than a century and broad spectrum use has been in effect since WWII and the Sun itself bathes the planet in more radiation than any human caused emissions. Had cellular function been impaired by radio, microwave or any of the EM waves bigger than visible light this planet would be barren and devoid of life. The scariest thing is that you would have to explain that, do people not have common sense to think about what they have been told? Is critical thinking dead?
Only foolish (lowercase f) investors believe market capitalization (or number of shares times share price) is meaningfull as any real metric of the value of a company or it's stock. It can be a valuable indicator of a company that's price is way to high though (usually because of stupid investors).
Let me give in you an example, it's a test I call the Walmart Test. Walmart does billions in revenue a year and make billions in profit, they are a highly successful business with solid growth in earnings every quarter, reliable profits and has a massive book value (the total value of assets). At the peak of the Dotcom era Cisco had a market capitalization that was the highest on the stock market, close to 500B IIRC. This exceeded the Walmart Market cap by more than 5 times (~76Billion IIRC) and edged GE by several dozen Billion. Even if every dollar of revenue for Cisco was profit and that profit was passed directly to shareholders they weren't even a 1/5th of the earnings per share Walmart was making. In the ideal world all profit from the enterprise passes onto the stockholder, in fact that's the basis of the worth, the promise of future dividends for companies that are reinvesting capital rather than paying a dividend (but that's another lecture all together)
Because Cisco was valued so much higher than Walmart with significantly less earnings it was apparent that the stock was highly overvalued. Later at the dot-boom correction Cisco lost nearly 90% of their market capitalization (falling to less than 10Billion from 500Billion). That translated into a decline in price of the stock by about 90%. The same can be said for Apple, compared against real (boring) companies making solid profits they are extremely overvalued. Even if Apple were to grow sales 100% a year for 5 years they still couldn't match Microsofts actual profits. If you are looking for a long time short Apple is your game boys and girls. It's going to correct some day and it's going to be a brutal correction.
This over-valuation is quite common in tech stocks, people invest in companies whose products they like (terrible investment strategy BTW). Stocks of this nature are almost 100% over valued and when they correct due to bad news it's a very vivid correction. Beta on these stocks can be 3-5 because of the casual investor who panics at the bad news, that and the stocks usually have high short percentages that will exacerbate a drop.
The lesson of this post People is don't invest based on meaningless metrics and in tech stocks with rabid fan-bases that invest in the company. They are almost always over priced, and react much faster to negative news with the potential for much larger declines in the price. Put simply the market cap of Apple should scare you away from investing in it easily.
Although I don't know the full history I wouldn't be amiss speculating that it was deliberately renamed to vulcanism to associate it to Vulcan the Greek god of fire. As it was traditional in the 17-19th centuries scientific pursuits were named using ancient Greek names/alphabet and gods. Plutoism was the theory that spawned vulcanism and I doubt the scientists of Newtons time could avoid naming the study of Volcano's after the god Vulcan simply because that's what you did. Almost no one in the profession refers to it as anything other than Vulcanism.
You don't think Windows for the Navy actually runs the mission critical systems like the reactor do you? Regardless, every system on the modern navy has a manual control system, not that you can actually hit a target with manual fire control as was proved many times during WWII, but the controls are there just in case you want to fire 1000 shells and only hit the target once.
If you have a public company with a massive workforce and huge PR campaigns that pretty much everyone from the entire metropolitan area knows someone who works for them personally you hold your lawsuits in the city because of the home court advantage. It would be silly for MS to sue anyone outside the Seattle metro area because of the effect being a massive local employer will have on the Jury. It'll be damn near impossible for salesforce to reject every Juror that has a direct family connection to MS and in a case where the decision is preponderance of the evidence rather than unanimous the effect of those connections could be the difference between winning and losing. Picking Seattle could also force salesforce to settle rather than risk a trial in MS's home court.
After reading that document I'm convinced Hogan lifted the phone from Gray's bag. He knew from the moment he had it that it was stolen, he told his roommate as much and that's the reason she turned him in because she didn't want to be convicted for being involved. The warrant also lists that when lost the phone was actually inside a 3GS case, a case that was removed and discarded by Brian Hogan along with some stickers indicating the serial number. Something he no doubt removed to conceal the origin until sale. He got $8500 for the phone from two separate organizations. And the best part is the "friend" Brian Hogan called to throw away all the evidence of the crime (also a crime) had two warrants out for his arrest.
Next Gizmodo takes the phone apart and rips a ribbon cable in half, strips the screws and shorts the phone out by putting a screw in wrong and hitting the circuit board. So not only did they pay for stolen property, publish trade secrets (and admit to as much in an email to Jobs) but they destroyed the prototype.
It gives me a rich satisfaction to read this warrant as it's clear right now that at least two people are going to be convicted. Hogan and Chen are going to be convicted and they can probably get the Gizmodo editor (for involvement in the transfer of stolen property and blackmail) and Hogan's friend that helped dispose of evidence (nice big felony conviction). The best part is Hogan's roommate is going to be testifying against him. Not only do they have all the physical evidence and likely all the email and stuff but they also have personal witness testimony. It's pretty much a slam dunk case to convict Hogan.
As for all the people saying the cops wouldn't do this if it wasn't Appl,e really don't understand stolen property cases. When the police are handed slam dunk cases like this they always follow through. You want the cops to investigate your stolen property case have the thief admit to the theft to a witness who goes to the police, have him sell the stolen property to someone who then publishes all about the theft in public and sends then evidence of the crime to owner. That's what happened in this case, it's a damn near perfect case and that's why it's being investigated so heavily by the police, it's a guaranteed conviction, being Apple is involved plays a small part but the biggest factor is how easy the evidence collection is. The funny thing is property theft cases are usually concentrated in a small number of individuals, I personally wouldn't be surprised if in the search of Hogan's apartment they find other stolen property and find out he goes to bars and lifts people's property quite frequently and end up solving many theft cases.
It's foolish to believe you need federal court experience to be a supreme court justice. In fact I believe the court would be much better off with some appointments that aren't even lawyers! I'd personally like to see a constitutional historian on the court. Part of the problem with the current system is that it's being run and dictated by "experts" on the law. Perhaps the system could be simplified by appointments that believe in the constitution and the few (restricted) powers it gives government not partisan issues! We've been eroding state and individual rights since the union was formed and it's time it stopped.
He may not hate apple. Believe it or not this belief that you can give mp3's to people online extracts a toll on society, some of the more impressionable people justify it to themselves by believing theft has much narrower boundaries. They start thinking finders/keepers is a legal argument and other very damaging ideas.
The law requires you take the item to the police station. It's pretty clear, and it's used to prosecute cases like this. People are going to jail for this. Prosecutors LOVE huge publicity cases like this so they can start political careers or get judgeships out of it. Gizmodo and the thief will both be prosecuted and they will lose. They exchanged stolen goods for money, and that's a slam dunk conviction regardless of motive or intent as it's irrelevant to the law. Had no money changed hands the prosecution would be very difficult as they might be able to claim press immunity, but that's not the case here.
I think you need to read case law on trade secrets. Revelation of the "secret" accidentally does not revoke it's protections and knowledge of it obligates you to conceal it. Intentional release of said secret (where the company doesn't do due diligence to prevent release) allows publication. The key here is a piece of hardware was lost. Said hardware was sealed with a user inaccessible case by design. Opening said device and photographing the items for publication is breach of trade secret or corporate espionage. Believe me, you want the first charge as the second is very severe and results in very ugly sentences. The prosecutor in this case actually has a pretty good case of corporate espionage here.
Read the law before you comment on it's applicability. California law requires anything over $100 be turned over to the police and only after 90 days if no one claims it can you then have it. His due diligence was NEVER even started, let alone fulfilled. This has been posted like 500 times in regard to this story yet idiots like you continue to talk about him doing his due diligence when he didn't even fulfill the first requirement of the law!
Now he didn't turn it into the police because then he couldn't sell stolen property for $5000. The ironic thing is legal fees will cost more than that, and he's going to be fined what he received for the property. My guess is the judge will make sure this costs 2-3 times what he received for the property so he never does it again.
The prosecutor also has a highly political prosecution here with Gizmodo, something that makes them do very aggressive prosecutions to extend their political career.
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Hey no worries, you forget these little kids replying to your post have no remembrance of what Porn was before the VCR.
Before Video Tape Porn was going to an X-Rated theater, usually in the worst part of your town, sitting in a theater with a bunch of other people and watching Porn. When the police would raid these type of places they would wear trash bags taped around their feet and legs because of how "sticky" everything was. It was routinely easy to not only watch other people masturbate but some of the attendance went specifically to do so (Gay sex was common at theaters playing certain types of porn). Women didn't set foot in places like this, the theaters were dirty beyond belief, they were in seedy neighborhoods and muggings were frequent and usually unreported (you gonna file a police report saying you were mugged leaving the X-rated theater?)
Again, being a child of the information age and having pornography at his fingertips your responder doesn't realize how massively the VCR changed porn and likewise how Porn changed home Video. The Porn Industry was a one off business that produced films for theaters and barely broke even with 2-3 films a year, most of the producers were in California with the brain child's of the business in SanFran. Once home video became available Porn sales went from at best 1 million a year to hundreds of millions with a span of a few years. By the end of the 80's porn was a billion dollar industry producing over 100 films a year. VCR succeeded over the technically better Sony standard because it could hold a 2 hour movie and the porn industry didn't want to pay for two tapes (early porn was a $34 a tape). It's pretty easy to correlate the massive porn sales with the VCR sales, especially considering some of the highest initial sales were pornography not popular films.
With easy access to porn it's hard for these young kinds to imagine never having seen it and suddenly being able to buy a player that will let you watch it at home in privacy, either alone or with a loved one and not have endanger themselves with a trip to the X-rated theater. The entire industry was changed and the number of people watching porn was in exponential growth. They even started making porn for women, lesbians and gay men. That's all because of the VCR. Your posters "myth" is common knowledge to those of us who lived through the 80's and remember how dramatically porn changed the Home video system and how the VCR changed porn.
The key thing to remember here is that Sony owned Betamax and they wouldn't allow porn on their tapes, you had to have a license to produce movies on their tapes (the ban wasn't immediate on release, it was several months after VHS appeared that Sony decided to differentiate itself as a family safe format that Porn went exclusively VHS). That porn exclusive use of VHS decimated betamax sales, because contrary to what people would respond in public surveys, they did buy the video system to watch movies at home but they also wanted the ability to watch Debbie does Dallas and the Green Door at home. Multifunction always wins.
All 3 of them?
It is not a secret (it's a stated fact on both Intel and AMD's roadmaps) to integrate GPU like programmable FP into the FP units of the general processor. The likely result will be the same general purpose CPU you love, but there will be dozens of additional FP units that excel at mathematics like the parent described except more flexible. When the fusion'eske products ramp and GPGPU functionality is integrated into the CPU Nvidia is out of business. Oh I don't expect these fusion products to have great GPU's, but once you destroy the low end and mid range graphics marketplace there is very little $$ wise left to fund R&D (3dfx was the first one into the high end 3d market and they barely broke even on their first sales, the only reason they survived was because they were heavy in the arcade sector sales). If Nvidia hasn't been allowed to purchase Via's x86 license by that point they are quite frankly out of business. Not immediately of course, they will spend a few years evaporating all assets while they try to compete with only the highend marketplace but in the end they won't survive. Things go in cycles and the independent graphics chip cycle is going to end very shortly, maybe in a decade it will come back, but I'm skeptical. CPU's have exceeded the speed needed for 80% of most tasks out there.
When I first started my Career computer runs of my design work took about 5-30 minutes to run on bare minimum quality. These days I can exceed that bare minimum by 20 times and the run will take seconds. It's to the point where I can model with far more precision than the end product needs with almost no time penalty. In fact additional CPU speed at this point is almost meaningless and my business isn't alone in this. In fact most of the software in my business is single threaded (and the apps run that fast with single threads). Once the software is multi-threaded there is really no additional CPU power needed and it may come to the point where my business just stops upgrading hardware beyond what's need to replace failures and my business isn't alone. I just don't see a future for independent graphics chip/card producers.
And how many patches has Microsoft submitted to BSD? None you say? So MS took all the BSD code, modified it and tied it to Windows and never gave back any of the code? I thought you said they will give it back because it's so painful to maintain it separately? You would be right if they were taking the whole BSD system, but when someone takes a piece of the system and integrates it into another system they don't give back changes and have no motivation to do so. Regardless this has never been about community, it's the difference between BSD being free for developers and GPL being free for users that's the difference.
Hey, I admit I don't know how Treaties in the UK are approved, but even if it requires both parliament and the PM to approve it's still going to be a far quicker process than the US approval process. With the requirement of senate consultations and a super majority in the Senate along with the Presidential ratification there hasn't been a treaty ratified by the US in less than 3 years in 20 years. If the treaty is ratified it's enforceable from the original symbolic signing by the executive. It's a slow process, but regardless that's NOT an excuse to violate a treaty.
What the due process rules have to do with this case is absolutely nothing. The gentleman in question will be afforded all due process rights when he appears before the court. He's also had ample opportunity to prove the US has no case at his extradition hearing which your courts upheld as a valid and meeting the requirements of the statue and treaty.
And much like the other supporters you suggest that the UK break a treaty negotiated in good faith, to prevent cross-border crime, for the sole reason of making the US remember it's founding principles and allow Juries and no cruel and unusual punishment? What does ANY of that have to do with this case? The answer is not a damn thing. So you support the breaking of a treaty for no reason other than you are mad at the US for other completely unrelated reasons. Great idea there, how about the US impose a Naval blockade on the UK and destroy the Channel Tunnel because British soldiers burned the White House in 1812. It makes as much sense to do that as what you suggest. And while were at it why not ban all commerce with the UK because of the tea tax on the colonies. Yea, lets engage in retaliation for unrelated incidents.
And your final suggestion is that because the Victim was lax in security that until the Victim is punished the criminal should not be punished. (Do you actually think the US didn't up security and fix the problems?) So if you have a weak lock on your house and someone breaks in rumages through your possessions and takes a few choice items, they can't prosecute the criminal until you yourself are jailed for having a weak lock. Makes perfect sense, I knew the British had a fascination with punishing Victims that defended themselves, but now you want to punish them for NOT defending themselves as well. Sounds like any crime committed the victim goes to jail or the criminal isn't prosecuted at all. Makes perfect sense!
How about you be honest and just admit that you don't want the UK to have relations with the US and that the UK should sever all relationships with the US including dissolving NATO, ending all cross border trade and commerce, severing the cross Atlantic telephone and internet connection, stopping the purchase of all US weapon systems (including the new joint strike fighter), ending all cross-Atlantic travel, baring currency trade and seizing all US property in the UK and jailing every American in the UK for crimes against Humanity for being alive.
If McKinnon isn't extradited it should be precedent to allow anyone in the US to hack into any UK based computer system for any reason and publicly disclose anything found without fear of extradition to the UK.
Ah, that's not shooting themselves in the foot. Shooting themselves in the foot is making a claim that Limewire caused 1.5 Trillion in damages in a filed court document while at the same time having failed to pay tens of thousands of artists for rights to sell their music. There are a LOT of artists out there still waiting to be paid, including many the companies never even had contracts with. This same claim and the math that elicited it can now be used by all those artists with claims to take the record companies to the cleaners. Think of all the sales and revenue lost because of what the record companies themselves have done. I really hope some of the artists that have claims turn this filing around and use it against the record companies where the record companies claimed in court documents the record companies misuse of copyright is at most worth the cost of an iTunes download. It would make me feel peachy to see an artist turn this around and use this filing against the record companies for massive damages.
I hope all your lawyers working for these artists are copying and filing the documents in your cases because they are making contrary claims in the courts.
What gets my goat is that a UK citizen damaged US government property (you have no convincing argument that what he did didn't cost money and time to repair) and a bunch of British are trying to convince their government that he shouldn't be extradited to the country he caused damage to for trial. Hell if this goes through I want the US government to make hacking UK computer systems perfectly legal because if this Jackass can get no punishment for crimes he committed in the US I wanna be able to hack into and damage/destroy British systems and disclose all information acquired without fear of repercussion. The US has extradited numerous US citizens to the UK for equal crimes for trial under UK law for crimes committed against UK property.
And for the record, the UK trying him for crimes he committed in the UK has little to nothing to do with the crimes he committed in the US and for that matter, what the crime was has little to no relevance to the extradition. This extradition request falls under those allowed by the treaty and either UK honors the extradition treaty or we scrap the whole treaty and neither country extradites anyone. I always believed the UK was one of those countries that honors the treaties they negotiate and sign in good faith but maybe this is a sign that NO treaty with the UK is worth the paper it's printed on if the party or prime minister changes. I hope that's not true because if it is then the UK is in for a world of problems and retaliatory treaty breaches. I'd hate to think that the word of a citizen or the government of the UK is worthless and unreliable, but maybe that's the country YOU want it to be. That way you can be right up there with Jamaica with it's politicians protecting criminals and preventing extradition.
Now, on the other hand if the jail he serves his time in is such a big issue, I don't have a problem (and I doubt anyone else would either) with him being jailed in the UK as a humanitarian measure as long as the trial and sentencing are in the US and any consideration of parole is made by US authorities alone. I have a feeling that his supporters would oppose that because they hope to use anti-American feelings to get the sentence reduced or the charges dropped entirely. All this talk is nothing more than his supporters saying that US law and property isn't worth anything and it's perfectly OK to damage or destroy US property.
If this was some American hacker that had breached MI5,6 or Scotland yard and disclosed confidential or private information publicly you would be demanding extradition and long sentencing for the "hacker yank". You supporters should just be honest about the reason you support him, it's all about anti-Americanism and has little to do with anything else.
something.com is easier to remember than city.state.gov? In what world? I find it particularly difficult to forget the city and state I live in, yet you think it easier to have some weird city abbreviation coupled with a non-standard abbreviation for some department in the city followed by the .com (commercial) domain name. Hell, I'm not even sure I wouldn't think a .com domain wasn't in fact a parody or scam site. Government websites should be under .gov.
Maybe these "civilians" 30 minutes earlier were all firing guns at troops then disposed of their weapons and jumped in the van and took off or they were planting a bomb, or they were seen unloading weapons. There could be a thousand different scenarios indicating they had a reasonable suspicion that the van housed "insurgent civilians". The problem with Iraq is that the enemy IS civilians. The ones bombing and shooting people are not an organized fighting force in military uniforms, they are civilians, most from Iraq but some are foreigners from other middle east countries but they are all technically civilians. This greatly complicates identifying the killers. If the insurgents wore uniforms or other identifying gear civilians would be killed by accident far less frequently, but they don't want to wear distinguishing uniforms because it would make it easier to target them and they WANT civilians to get killed as they are targeting civilians in a significant number of operations. Technically the troops are in violation of the Geneva conventions on targeting civilians every time they kill an insurgent. The CIA missile strikes in Pakistan always kill civilians, again they are usually part of the insurgency but they are still civilians.
IMO the Geneva convention ban on directly attacking civilians is simply untenable as it's based on uniform fighting outside populated areas, a mythical situation that might have existed in WWIII but has rarely existed in combat. In reality civilians are the base of any armed conflict, either supplying and providing safe harbor for the fighters or they are directly providing supplies, munitions and people for the fighting force. The quickest way to win a war is destroy the industrial capacity and supply lines behind an opponent and bombing factories/supply lines is always going to kill civilians unintentionally. The Geneva convention on civilians needs to be interpreted liberally, again IMO, in that the intent of the Treaty is to prevent the intentional direct targeting of civilians with the knowledge that they are civilians, such as bombing a residential neighborhood on purpose. One comparison of whether the civilian casualties appear to violate the treaty would be if civilian casualties are significantly higher than friendly fire casualties, thus indicating a widespread intentional targeting of civilians. Friendly fire incidents are almost as common as these civilian incidents, and I would dare you to argue that even though they intentionally target the friendly fire casualties that their intent was to kill friendlies. Intent is the key factor, did the soldiers intend to kill civilians or did they believe they were killing insurgents? Ignoring intent doesn't give a fair evaluation of the situation. IMO it's only criminal if they actually knew they were killing only civilians and intentionally did so.
And dead goes a decade or more of research on growing genetic identical replacement organs and tissue for transplant. The intermediate step to growing these things in a lab is growing them in an animal while the perfect the technique. No hybrid' the research stops dead. I wish legislators would stop looking at SciFi scare movies and actually start talking to real scientists in the field in question on what is going on, what the benefits could be and what the risks are. As it is they get their information from movies, wacko uneducated religious zealots and fantasy novels. There is an ethical issue with this work but outright bans without regard to intent, purpose, controls and benefits is just plain stupid.
Epoxy coating the re-bar has not been proven effective. What the masons you had a beer with is typical of the trades, they don't understand the big picture because they are focused on their job. No engineers or architects screwed up (other than the very few public examples of failure). Buildings are designed for a certain life, typically that's 50-70 years and after that the building is expected to need capital investment in the infrastructure beyond routine maintenance to extend that life. Buildings could easily be designed to last longer but the longer the life the higher the cost and it's rare for an owner to care. Buildings could easily be designed to take fires, earthquakes, tornado's and hurricanes but the costs of such design make it illogical.
The masons you mentioned talked about paint, it's not paint it's epoxy and it's a highly unproven technology (unless you are talking to the epoxy association, then it's the end all be all of re-bar protection). There are some in the engineering sector that think Epoxy coating re-bar is going to be one of those big mistakes that comes back and haunts us endlessly in a few decades (epoxy coated steel has been in use since the late 80's). The thing is concrete by itself is highly alkaline, the steel itself is alkaline as well and this prevents corrosion (which needs acidic environments to thrive, remember it's an oxidation process). The problem with epoxy is it negates the alkalinity effect of the concrete. In a perfect world the epoxy would be clean and perfect after the concrete sets but in reality the epoxy is going to have abrasions and cuts from erection, pouring and finishing (not counting what a decade of thermal expansion does to it). These abrasions in the epoxy coat provide a path of corrosion and once it penetrates the abrasion and infects the steel it can move along the steel much quicker because of the epoxy coat protecting the corrosion from alkalinity of the concrete. IMO a much better solution is galvanizing, the zinc coating has an additional alkaline protection and is much more durable during construction than epoxy ever can be. Either that or use high ksi stainless steel.
Boston is not alone in problems with re-bar corrosion, the issue involves the use of salt, cities and states that use salt in the winter on the roads, the salt provides the corrosion path and negates the alkalinity resulting in corrosion way ahead of schedule. The salt on the road moves through the environment and affects lots of ancillary structures including nearby buildings and tunnels. Black-bar re-bar used in concrete where salt isn't applied, even underwater and in freeze/thaw cycles has been very durable. There is reinforced concrete out there that is still in perfect shape that was poured 50 years ago and it's harder than ever.
Also, all concrete sets underwater, concrete doesn't dry, it hardens, it is a chemical reaction that involves hydration and the formation of a crystalline structure using the water. Without water there isn't concrete or if you allow the concrete to "dry" before it sets will degrade the concrete severely. This is why they have to keep the concrete moist for several days after pouring. Premature drying has similar symptoms to over-finishing, the surface of the concrete spalls the top surface off after a time rusulting in the loss of about a 1/4 - 1 inch of concrete on the surface spalling off.
And finally, organic additives to concrete are NEVER a good thing. Organics deteriorate after time, this leaves voids in the concrete where the organics ended up and the decay can create acids and bases that can adversely affect the concrete. Organics are bad, period. Now, Roman use of organics, such as blood may have resulted in more air-entrainment. The little tiny air-bubbles formed after the organics decayed (or as a result of mixing them in) would have provided freeze-thaw protection. Concrete placed in the open weather typically needs ~5% air entrainment to eliminate the effect of water saturation and freeze/thaw cycles. The heavy use of
What Hollywood wants is active policing of the internet by all world governments with prison terms handed out to infringes. If governments did go to that step I guarantee they would succeed, at the cost of imprisoning a few million more people while paroling truly violent criminals.
This is the reason the US government hasn't pursued it, but you should be very afraid of the influence the MPAA can exert, before it was just the RIAA, but now with Hollywood behind it there is a very good chance ACTA will force all the WTO countries to enforce restrictions (that includes China). Once the WTO starts imprisoning people the major easy distribution channels will go dead leaving only secure encrypted and very low volume exchanges, reducing the trade to very minimal which is Hollywood's goal. The tax increases to support the enforcement and the destruction of millions of lives will be enormous, but Hollywood doesn't care.
It shouldn't be legal, nor is it ethical to use taxpayer money to develop research and then patent that research and profit from it. All government projects should be public domain. I have a serious issue any time someone uses government funded research to patent anything and I'm horrified by the idea of a government entity itself patenting anything at all. And the worst point is your defending it because "CISRO does good things". I don't care if they personally save the lives of 1 million people a day, they shouldn't be taking taxpayer money and using it to patent anything. I'd also be willing to bet that contrary to your assertion that someone in CISRO is directly benefiting from this patent, whether it's the director or review board or even the patent developer, bonuses are most certainly changing hands and I'm certain they are large.
Also we are talking 300 million from the computer makers and probably another 300 million from the telcom's, probably another 300 million from all the other entities using wifi and i bet it's a billion dollars in total revenue if they win all lawsuits. What does a research organization need with a that much money? I guarantee they aren't spending 1 billion a year on research. A staff of around 400 people would be around 30 million a year, with 1 b1illion that's full staff funding for 33 years. The amount of money collected here is far more than they can ever spend, so ask yourself, where is the excess going because they're getting government money too right?
What's scarier than radio affecting cells is that you had to explain that it doesn't. It doesn't take a lot of common sense to realize that we have been using radio for more than a century and broad spectrum use has been in effect since WWII and the Sun itself bathes the planet in more radiation than any human caused emissions. Had cellular function been impaired by radio, microwave or any of the EM waves bigger than visible light this planet would be barren and devoid of life. The scariest thing is that you would have to explain that, do people not have common sense to think about what they have been told? Is critical thinking dead?
Only foolish (lowercase f) investors believe market capitalization (or number of shares times share price) is meaningfull as any real metric of the value of a company or it's stock. It can be a valuable indicator of a company that's price is way to high though (usually because of stupid investors).
Let me give in you an example, it's a test I call the Walmart Test. Walmart does billions in revenue a year and make billions in profit, they are a highly successful business with solid growth in earnings every quarter, reliable profits and has a massive book value (the total value of assets). At the peak of the Dotcom era Cisco had a market capitalization that was the highest on the stock market, close to 500B IIRC. This exceeded the Walmart Market cap by more than 5 times (~76Billion IIRC) and edged GE by several dozen Billion. Even if every dollar of revenue for Cisco was profit and that profit was passed directly to shareholders they weren't even a 1/5th of the earnings per share Walmart was making. In the ideal world all profit from the enterprise passes onto the stockholder, in fact that's the basis of the worth, the promise of future dividends for companies that are reinvesting capital rather than paying a dividend (but that's another lecture all together)
Because Cisco was valued so much higher than Walmart with significantly less earnings it was apparent that the stock was highly overvalued. Later at the dot-boom correction Cisco lost nearly 90% of their market capitalization (falling to less than 10Billion from 500Billion). That translated into a decline in price of the stock by about 90%. The same can be said for Apple, compared against real (boring) companies making solid profits they are extremely overvalued. Even if Apple were to grow sales 100% a year for 5 years they still couldn't match Microsofts actual profits. If you are looking for a long time short Apple is your game boys and girls. It's going to correct some day and it's going to be a brutal correction.
This over-valuation is quite common in tech stocks, people invest in companies whose products they like (terrible investment strategy BTW). Stocks of this nature are almost 100% over valued and when they correct due to bad news it's a very vivid correction. Beta on these stocks can be 3-5 because of the casual investor who panics at the bad news, that and the stocks usually have high short percentages that will exacerbate a drop.
The lesson of this post People is don't invest based on meaningless metrics and in tech stocks with rabid fan-bases that invest in the company. They are almost always over priced, and react much faster to negative news with the potential for much larger declines in the price. Put simply the market cap of Apple should scare you away from investing in it easily.
Although I don't know the full history I wouldn't be amiss speculating that it was deliberately renamed to vulcanism to associate it to Vulcan the Greek god of fire. As it was traditional in the 17-19th centuries scientific pursuits were named using ancient Greek names/alphabet and gods. Plutoism was the theory that spawned vulcanism and I doubt the scientists of Newtons time could avoid naming the study of Volcano's after the god Vulcan simply because that's what you did. Almost no one in the profession refers to it as anything other than Vulcanism.
You don't think Windows for the Navy actually runs the mission critical systems like the reactor do you? Regardless, every system on the modern navy has a manual control system, not that you can actually hit a target with manual fire control as was proved many times during WWII, but the controls are there just in case you want to fire 1000 shells and only hit the target once.
If you have a public company with a massive workforce and huge PR campaigns that pretty much everyone from the entire metropolitan area knows someone who works for them personally you hold your lawsuits in the city because of the home court advantage. It would be silly for MS to sue anyone outside the Seattle metro area because of the effect being a massive local employer will have on the Jury. It'll be damn near impossible for salesforce to reject every Juror that has a direct family connection to MS and in a case where the decision is preponderance of the evidence rather than unanimous the effect of those connections could be the difference between winning and losing. Picking Seattle could also force salesforce to settle rather than risk a trial in MS's home court.
After reading that document I'm convinced Hogan lifted the phone from Gray's bag. He knew from the moment he had it that it was stolen, he told his roommate as much and that's the reason she turned him in because she didn't want to be convicted for being involved. The warrant also lists that when lost the phone was actually inside a 3GS case, a case that was removed and discarded by Brian Hogan along with some stickers indicating the serial number. Something he no doubt removed to conceal the origin until sale. He got $8500 for the phone from two separate organizations. And the best part is the "friend" Brian Hogan called to throw away all the evidence of the crime (also a crime) had two warrants out for his arrest.
Next Gizmodo takes the phone apart and rips a ribbon cable in half, strips the screws and shorts the phone out by putting a screw in wrong and hitting the circuit board. So not only did they pay for stolen property, publish trade secrets (and admit to as much in an email to Jobs) but they destroyed the prototype.
It gives me a rich satisfaction to read this warrant as it's clear right now that at least two people are going to be convicted. Hogan and Chen are going to be convicted and they can probably get the Gizmodo editor (for involvement in the transfer of stolen property and blackmail) and Hogan's friend that helped dispose of evidence (nice big felony conviction). The best part is Hogan's roommate is going to be testifying against him. Not only do they have all the physical evidence and likely all the email and stuff but they also have personal witness testimony. It's pretty much a slam dunk case to convict Hogan.
As for all the people saying the cops wouldn't do this if it wasn't Appl,e really don't understand stolen property cases. When the police are handed slam dunk cases like this they always follow through. You want the cops to investigate your stolen property case have the thief admit to the theft to a witness who goes to the police, have him sell the stolen property to someone who then publishes all about the theft in public and sends then evidence of the crime to owner. That's what happened in this case, it's a damn near perfect case and that's why it's being investigated so heavily by the police, it's a guaranteed conviction, being Apple is involved plays a small part but the biggest factor is how easy the evidence collection is. The funny thing is property theft cases are usually concentrated in a small number of individuals, I personally wouldn't be surprised if in the search of Hogan's apartment they find other stolen property and find out he goes to bars and lifts people's property quite frequently and end up solving many theft cases.
It's foolish to believe you need federal court experience to be a supreme court justice. In fact I believe the court would be much better off with some appointments that aren't even lawyers! I'd personally like to see a constitutional historian on the court. Part of the problem with the current system is that it's being run and dictated by "experts" on the law. Perhaps the system could be simplified by appointments that believe in the constitution and the few (restricted) powers it gives government not partisan issues! We've been eroding state and individual rights since the union was formed and it's time it stopped.
It would be ignorance to think that the big fat paycheck he gets that stamped nVidia doesn't taint his opinions regardless.
He may not hate apple. Believe it or not this belief that you can give mp3's to people online extracts a toll on society, some of the more impressionable people justify it to themselves by believing theft has much narrower boundaries. They start thinking finders/keepers is a legal argument and other very damaging ideas.
The law requires you take the item to the police station. It's pretty clear, and it's used to prosecute cases like this. People are going to jail for this. Prosecutors LOVE huge publicity cases like this so they can start political careers or get judgeships out of it. Gizmodo and the thief will both be prosecuted and they will lose. They exchanged stolen goods for money, and that's a slam dunk conviction regardless of motive or intent as it's irrelevant to the law. Had no money changed hands the prosecution would be very difficult as they might be able to claim press immunity, but that's not the case here.
I think you need to read case law on trade secrets. Revelation of the "secret" accidentally does not revoke it's protections and knowledge of it obligates you to conceal it. Intentional release of said secret (where the company doesn't do due diligence to prevent release) allows publication. The key here is a piece of hardware was lost. Said hardware was sealed with a user inaccessible case by design. Opening said device and photographing the items for publication is breach of trade secret or corporate espionage. Believe me, you want the first charge as the second is very severe and results in very ugly sentences. The prosecutor in this case actually has a pretty good case of corporate espionage here.
Read the law before you comment on it's applicability. California law requires anything over $100 be turned over to the police and only after 90 days if no one claims it can you then have it. His due diligence was NEVER even started, let alone fulfilled. This has been posted like 500 times in regard to this story yet idiots like you continue to talk about him doing his due diligence when he didn't even fulfill the first requirement of the law!
Now he didn't turn it into the police because then he couldn't sell stolen property for $5000. The ironic thing is legal fees will cost more than that, and he's going to be fined what he received for the property. My guess is the judge will make sure this costs 2-3 times what he received for the property so he never does it again.
The prosecutor also has a highly political prosecution here with Gizmodo, something that makes them do very aggressive prosecutions to extend their political career.