Name me one company that sells online music that is even remotely interested in their on-line music being copy-left. Just because a company thinks DRM is a bad idea(and trust me they believe it's a bad idea for pragmantic, not moralistic reasons), doesn't mean they want information to be free.
Actually, and I say this as someone who has lived in the US, and now lives outside it. What you actually LOVE, is the fact that your politicians let it happen.
There's nothing wrong with the US attempting to police the world, or with George Bush thinking he's the leader of the free world. The problem is that it works, and he's right.
I remember a company that decided to do that. I think they were called Intel, they designed this chip, Itanium I think it was, which ran only in 64 bit mode. They reckoned that the added stability would make up for the fact that nothing you currently owned would run on it.
As I recall, the chip died, and the company, despite being the dominant market force in the industry, and despite bribing manufacturers to use their product, lost a very large chunk of market share and had a very unpleasant time.
Backwards compatibility is key to success in the business world. Get rid of it, and no business will ever buy your product.
Flat taxes are moronic. Taking 30% from someone who makes 20 grand a year, is very different than taking 30% from someone who makes a quarter of a million dollars a year. The percentage of income stays the same, but the impact does not. That's why we have graduated tax schemes in the first place(the one in the US is needlessly complicated, and can end up with a raise lowering your after tax income instead of raising it, but a flat tax is not the answer to that.
I wouuld also like to know exactly how you believe that a flat tax would do anything at all to illegal aliens(don't even get me started on how the whole illegal alien thing in and of itself is screwing us). They already don't get welfare(you have to have worked full time for a period of time to get that), and they're paid under the table, so they wouldn't pay any more income tax that they already do. Do you really think that a business or individual who is employing illegals(which by the way carries rather stiff penalties) is going to stop paying them cash under the table just because you have a flat tax system? The businesses(not the illegals) are already rorting the system, why would they stop?
The problem with this argument is that Microsofts prices haven't been affected by Piracy at all. Getting anything but an OEM version was ludicrously expensive in 1995, and it's just as ludicrously expensive now. I'd pay $50-100 for a legal version of Windows quite happily, however when the full version of Windows is about $400, and the full version of Office is about $800, and neither of them offer any substantially new features, I won't pay it.
I know this isn't a production app, but XMMS is dead and it's what you'd call a "major" project. That's just one I can think of off the top of my head.
True, closed source applications can die(or more likely move onto a new non compatible version), but close source applications die in different ways than open source ones.
Closed source applications die because they are unprofitable, or because the company that makes them tanked for some other reason. This is a problem, particularly with smaller applications, but a good product worth paying for is usually profitable, and most large companies don't tank, and if they do their profitable assets are bought by someone else. Companies rarely decide to stop making a profitable product simply because they don't want to make it anymore, and if a product goes from profitable to unprofitable it's probably becauses there's something else most of the market has switched to and you probably want to as well.
Open source developers on the other hand, can stop working on a project for a whole host of reasons. The lead developers could become bored with the project(this happens a lot with software for which all the "cool" parts are already done. They could have a change in lifestyle which decreases the time they have available to the project(ie getting married, having a kid, etc). They could be in an accident.
Companies are relatively stable, and they're motivated by money, so long as the money flows the product flows, whether it's boring or not. Open Source, particularly much smaller products, is much more fickle. The fact that you have the source available afterwards is really rather immaterial, since if the company had sufficient development staff to maintain the software they would have written it, or forked it themselves.
The problem is that rewards != funding. Offering a million dollars to solve a Math problem doesn't mean that someone can quit their job and go work on the problem, because until they've solved it they don't have any money.
Yes, the seasoned HR professional might return damned good payroll apps. What they probably won't don't do is return well written, maintanable, supportable, payroll app. I work in healthcare, and the vast majority of our apps were written by pharmacists, or doctors, or nurses, etc. They work really well, they do exactly what the users want them to do, often in ways which are intuitive for the users to use.
They also tend to be monolithic, buggy, unsupportable, and in many cases have either still not become true 32 bit windows applications or have just become so within the last 18 months. Keeping these applications running is a gigantic pain, updates come incredibly sparsely, and generally speaking deployment of them is a nightmare(not that many programmers actually consider deployment when they write corporate apps, but such is life).
The ideal software team is someone who knows the business to explain exactly what is wanted and someone who knows software to design it properly. The problem is that most businesses don't want to provide resourcing for this sort of thing. You might get ex-nurses/pharmacists/accountants/etc working in an IT department, but you'll rarely see any of those people on loan to the department.
Firstly, RPM isn't the problem, but RPM isn't a package manager, it's a packaging system. RPM is used by pretty much every binary distribution except for debian and it works just fine. The problem is with fetching, updating, installing, and uninstalling packages intelligently. I love apt-get, I love emerge, I even love yast, because you can ask for a package, see exactly what it's installing and uninstalling, and when you want to remove a package you can find out what depends on it. Last time I used Redhat(AS 4), you couldn't do that.
I also agree about the multi-media thing, with the excpetion of 32 bit windows binaries on my 64 bit system I've never had a media problem in linux and I've had many in windows.
The problem is still getting linux set up, not using it. Updates still break a lot of functionality, and it still takes quite a bit of fiddling to make all your hardware work(if it works at all).
No, they would not. Most people would not learn linux, most people could not learn linux. Linux is designed for nerds by nerds, always has been, and until the majority of the people writing the OS and the software that runs on it grow the hell up, it always will be.
I like linux, I use linux, but then again I'm a nerd. I like fidding around with stuff and learning how it works. The idea of a computer that "just works" isn't something that appeals to me. That said, even I hate a lot of the garbage that ccomes with linux.
Why is it virtually impossible to configure a decent firewall without knowing everything there is to know about every interface on your PC(I know this and can do it, at least with gui help, but your average user can't).
Why is Redhat(at least the enterprise edition) still using the same craptastic package manager they've been using for the last 15 years?
Why are there always 25 versions of the same basic program type, none of which is actually fully functional, and most of which are clones of windows versions anyway?
I love linux, but it isn't ready for prime time, it's just not, and if you really think that having to pay for Windows would mean that people would use linux, you're insane. Would your parents be able to use linux? How about your grandparents?
As much as I hate to say it, if Microsoft started enforcing their licensing, and didn't reduce the cost thereof, you'd just see a whole lot more people without PC's, without access to the internet.
There's not really all that much innovation in OS X(sure putting a pretty gui on a unix background hadn't been done successfully before, but that doesn't make it innovative), there's not really even all that much innovation going on in linux lately. Nearly everything that gets included into an OS existed in a third party app before anyway, that's what third party apps do, they add functionality to the OS, and if they turn out to be a good idea they get incorporated into the operating system later.
Vista contains quite a few very nice new features, volume shadow copy(sure novell's had it for 15 years, but not on the desktop), bitlocker(sure you could do that with third party apps, or if you configured it reasonably well, linux, but whole drive encryption is still pretty new, especially having it work in an efficient manner. Even the DRM is about as "innovative" as operating systems get(that's not to say it's a good thing, but not all innovation is good).
Most of the truly innovative technologies in Operating Systems are really low level, new file systems, new kernel designs, new process schedulers, emulation, etc. We haven't really seen much innovation in any of these things in a number of years, certainly not anything that just changes the whole way we do things.
ReiserFS is just another way of looking at journalling file systems, not a major new step. GNU Hurd has been working on a microkernal design for nearly 20 years and it's still not ready for prime-time, Microsoft has been working on WinFS for a long time too, and maybe eventually they'll have it, but not this time.
In essence Vista is what 2000 was supposed to be and XP almost was. It's a reasonably functional and reasonably secure multi-user operating system from Microsoft. One which is relatively secure, but which can still run most of the programs you want to run on it. Yeah, it took them 10 years to get there, but if you think of what things were like in the NT/9x days, where you had to choose between an OS which wouldn't work at home(and didn't even always work in the corporate environment) or an OS which was about as secure as a sieve, we've come a long way.
If you're a rent-a-cop, no one really cares. If you get caught, you'll probably get fired, but no one is going to be specifically looking for you, you've got as much chance of getting caught as anyone else. Your salary sucks so you can always go get a different job, and I don't know a whole lot of folks who are in the age ranges where they've got two tenths of stuff all in their retirement accounts who frequently bittorrent.
If you're running around with top secret or better, you might want to be careful, but companies won't usually go through the 18 months or so it's been taking for those clearances unless they're going to pay you enough money to keep you around. So you go out and buy DVD's(or rent them, it's not like it's all that expensive, especially in the US).
The other problem is that it runs on the default bittorrent ports, which are very likely to be shaped.
And of course the background downloader is actually throttled by blizzard so that it doesn't eat up your connection, even if you have a dial-up modem(I suppose it should be smarter than this, but blizz didn't really want complaints). The actual downloads on the day(at least up until the last few weeks) have always been quite snappy.
Having lived in both the US and now in Australia, I call BS. In australia, you have quite a number of options, for DSL, if you live in or very close to a major population point. If you live out of range for a DSL line, you're basically screwed. For cable there's what Optus and Foxtel? Neither of those are great. Plus Telstra is rather heavily regulated(perhaps too regulated, but that's what you get when a private company owns the telco infrastructure for the whole country).
Well either your company will modify this policy(perhaps by having a usb stick which isn't allowed to leave the building), or else your bioses won't get updated. If they won't give you the tools to do your job, or even let you provide your own, then the job doesn't get done.
Saying that you don't need to worry about security on linux. Just because it's a more secure platform than Windows, doesn't mean that "you don't have to worry about security". This will be especially true if you get more of a user base.
I'd also like to add that while I like and use linux, I've done most of those things he talks about being "easy" and "just a few mouse clicks". In pretty well every distribution I've ever tried(ubuntu might be different), they aren't easy, nor just a few mouse clicks.
No one is objecting to some degree of copyright for artists, that's not what DRM objections are about.
DRM objections are based around the fact that like every single technical form of copy protection ever invented, it screws over the legitimate consumer and does nothing whatsoever to stop piracy. All any copy protection scheme ever invented has ever done is piss off the legitimate user.
A technical solution to piracy cannot exist, short of giving up complete and total control of your PC to the content publishers. This is because for every one person that the MPAA or RIAA employs to create a DRM system, there are at least 50 people, at least as intelligent trying to break it.
Show me a system of DRM which prevents illegitimate copying and distribution, without restricting the rights of people who actually paid for the product and I'll support it, but it's never going to happen.
To reiterate, technical copy protection has never stopped pirates. It will not ever stop pirates. All it does is piss off the people who actually bought your product.
The problem with this system, is that it's basically a really, really complicated form of blacklisting, and blacklisting sucks. It sucks because 99% of the time you blacklist the innocent along with the guilty.
Say you've got a regional provider(ie a Chinese ISP), anyone in a given region can only connect to that ISP because there are no alternatives(this is most definitely the case). Now say that that ISP, as is often the case in certain parts of the world, doesn't give a rats about its clients sending SPAM, and is perfectly willing to certify them. Now by your system the ISP should lose its certification, which means that any legitimate users of the system also lose their certification, which means they can't send certified e-mail to anyone.
This system is also expensive, not so much in bandwidth, but in human time. Verifying someone's identity and intentions is expensive and time consuming, even for an ISP, and for something like hotmail or gmail, which people use for perfectly legitimate reasons, it's be pretty much impossible.
So in the end, what you have is an expensive system which is essentially a complicated form of blacklisting, which as I said, sucks.
It doesn't really matter what the laws are, because it isn't about Microsoft violating the law. Microsoft's ability to strong-arm the media companies comes from saying "If those are your requirements for having HD content on Windows we don't want it". The media industry needs Microsoft a lot more than Microsoft needs the media industry.
There is no battle for the living room, at least not in the form of multi-media PC's. They're more expensive than conventional equipment, they're harder to manage than conventional equipment and unless you roll a MythTV linux box(which half the conventional equipment is anyway, at least outside the US), you will be hamstrung by Copyright laws which allow the MPAA to screw your region.
Hollywood wants premium content to succeed, they want it out there(in theory at least), they want it on PC's. Microsoft loses a few sales for multimedia pc's and gains credibility with it's client base if they refuse this, the MPAA loses video on desktops, who loses more?
All of these issues are totally unrelated to laptops.
A laptop purchased buy your employer is the property of your employer, not you. So if the government has a warrant(or reasonable cause) to search your employer's property they have the right to search your laptop(and they should have, or else every dodgy company in the world would keep all their financial records on laptops and make the government get hundreds of warrants to search it all). Don't keep private stuff on your company laptop!!! Buy your own, don't put work related stuff on it, then the feds need a warrant against you to search it.
Laptops at the border are a problem, but not because they're laptops. They're a problem because of all the "what if he/she is a terrorist" BS that we've allowed to give the government the rights to do whatever they want. They shouldn't be able to search your laptop not because it's a laptop, but because once they've determined that it's not a bomb and it's not contraband they shouldn't be able to search it without a warrant in the first place. There is no reasonable reason for the government to do a warrantless data search at the border. They can search for drugs, bombs, weapons, imported fresh fruit and meat, but data is not a border threat.
The database issue is a bit hairy, but it's more a problem with allowing centralized databases in the first place. The government obviously has reason to be suspicious of whatever company is holding the database(they are after all in theory privy to criminal activity even if it's only in the sense that they have the data), and therefor cannot trust them to export the data in question, so they need the whole database. The US constitution has so far allowed for the admission of evidence found during the execution of a search so long as it's reasonable to have looked there(ie, if you're looking for a stolen car you can't look through cabinets since a car can't fit there). The question, and legal defense, here is whether law enforcement had any legitimate reason to look at your records while investigating another crime, and this issue would be the same with a filing cabinet as with a database.
All these things are simple privacy issues which would apply whether technology were used or not, and as soon as we stop pretending that it's all complicated technology issues we don't have laws for, and as soon as we stop letting the government preted the same things, the sooner we'll have the problem solved.
A computer isn't really all that much different from a filing cabinet as far as searches go, if you couldn't search a filing cabinet under the same circumstances, you shouldn't be able to search the computer, end of story.
If you would RTFA, or for that matter RTFSummary, you'd notice that they aren't painting for air strikes(though that is an option), they're painting the target for soldiers with night vision goggles. You don't drop a 500 lb bomb on the sniper(unless you have to), you light him up like a Christmas tree and shoot him in the head with a 50 cent bullet.
Whether you're going to find snipers not using night vision goggles in light situations that allow for the use of night vision goggles I don't know, but I think the camera is supposed to provide you with an image in daylight.
The whole point of this device is not having to drop a 500 lb bomb to clear out snipers, and of course to stop people from getting shot when they're trying to find the sniper.
I reckon most folks who've had to tangle with the RIAA wish it were exactly the same as walking into a walmart and pocketing a jewel case. The penalties for actual theft of music are much, much, more lenient than the penalties for copying it. Plus of course as the RIAA has already been paid for any jewel case you steal you're much less likely to be pursued by anyone with money or power.
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Name me one company that sells online music that is even remotely interested in their on-line music being copy-left. Just because a company thinks DRM is a bad idea(and trust me they believe it's a bad idea for pragmantic, not moralistic reasons), doesn't mean they want information to be free.
There's nothing wrong with the US attempting to police the world, or with George Bush thinking he's the leader of the free world. The problem is that it works, and he's right.
As I recall, the chip died, and the company, despite being the dominant market force in the industry, and despite bribing manufacturers to use their product, lost a very large chunk of market share and had a very unpleasant time.
Backwards compatibility is key to success in the business world. Get rid of it, and no business will ever buy your product.
I wouuld also like to know exactly how you believe that a flat tax would do anything at all to illegal aliens(don't even get me started on how the whole illegal alien thing in and of itself is screwing us). They already don't get welfare(you have to have worked full time for a period of time to get that), and they're paid under the table, so they wouldn't pay any more income tax that they already do. Do you really think that a business or individual who is employing illegals(which by the way carries rather stiff penalties) is going to stop paying them cash under the table just because you have a flat tax system? The businesses(not the illegals) are already rorting the system, why would they stop?
The problem with this argument is that Microsofts prices haven't been affected by Piracy at all. Getting anything but an OEM version was ludicrously expensive in 1995, and it's just as ludicrously expensive now. I'd pay $50-100 for a legal version of Windows quite happily, however when the full version of Windows is about $400, and the full version of Office is about $800, and neither of them offer any substantially new features, I won't pay it.
I know this isn't a production app, but XMMS is dead and it's what you'd call a "major" project. That's just one I can think of off the top of my head.
Closed source applications die because they are unprofitable, or because the company that makes them tanked for some other reason. This is a problem, particularly with smaller applications, but a good product worth paying for is usually profitable, and most large companies don't tank, and if they do their profitable assets are bought by someone else. Companies rarely decide to stop making a profitable product simply because they don't want to make it anymore, and if a product goes from profitable to unprofitable it's probably becauses there's something else most of the market has switched to and you probably want to as well.
Open source developers on the other hand, can stop working on a project for a whole host of reasons. The lead developers could become bored with the project(this happens a lot with software for which all the "cool" parts are already done. They could have a change in lifestyle which decreases the time they have available to the project(ie getting married, having a kid, etc). They could be in an accident.
Companies are relatively stable, and they're motivated by money, so long as the money flows the product flows, whether it's boring or not. Open Source, particularly much smaller products, is much more fickle. The fact that you have the source available afterwards is really rather immaterial, since if the company had sufficient development staff to maintain the software they would have written it, or forked it themselves.
The problem is that rewards != funding. Offering a million dollars to solve a Math problem doesn't mean that someone can quit their job and go work on the problem, because until they've solved it they don't have any money.
Wasn't my entire point that nothing is innovative anymore, not that vista was?
They also tend to be monolithic, buggy, unsupportable, and in many cases have either still not become true 32 bit windows applications or have just become so within the last 18 months. Keeping these applications running is a gigantic pain, updates come incredibly sparsely, and generally speaking deployment of them is a nightmare(not that many programmers actually consider deployment when they write corporate apps, but such is life).
The ideal software team is someone who knows the business to explain exactly what is wanted and someone who knows software to design it properly. The problem is that most businesses don't want to provide resourcing for this sort of thing. You might get ex-nurses/pharmacists/accountants/etc working in an IT department, but you'll rarely see any of those people on loan to the department.
I also agree about the multi-media thing, with the excpetion of 32 bit windows binaries on my 64 bit system I've never had a media problem in linux and I've had many in windows.
The problem is still getting linux set up, not using it. Updates still break a lot of functionality, and it still takes quite a bit of fiddling to make all your hardware work(if it works at all).
I like linux, I use linux, but then again I'm a nerd. I like fidding around with stuff and learning how it works. The idea of a computer that "just works" isn't something that appeals to me. That said, even I hate a lot of the garbage that ccomes with linux.
Why is it virtually impossible to configure a decent firewall without knowing everything there is to know about every interface on your PC(I know this and can do it, at least with gui help, but your average user can't).
Why is Redhat(at least the enterprise edition) still using the same craptastic package manager they've been using for the last 15 years?
Why are there always 25 versions of the same basic program type, none of which is actually fully functional, and most of which are clones of windows versions anyway?
I love linux, but it isn't ready for prime time, it's just not, and if you really think that having to pay for Windows would mean that people would use linux, you're insane. Would your parents be able to use linux? How about your grandparents?
As much as I hate to say it, if Microsoft started enforcing their licensing, and didn't reduce the cost thereof, you'd just see a whole lot more people without PC's, without access to the internet.
Vista contains quite a few very nice new features, volume shadow copy(sure novell's had it for 15 years, but not on the desktop), bitlocker(sure you could do that with third party apps, or if you configured it reasonably well, linux, but whole drive encryption is still pretty new, especially having it work in an efficient manner. Even the DRM is about as "innovative" as operating systems get(that's not to say it's a good thing, but not all innovation is good).
Most of the truly innovative technologies in Operating Systems are really low level, new file systems, new kernel designs, new process schedulers, emulation, etc. We haven't really seen much innovation in any of these things in a number of years, certainly not anything that just changes the whole way we do things.
ReiserFS is just another way of looking at journalling file systems, not a major new step. GNU Hurd has been working on a microkernal design for nearly 20 years and it's still not ready for prime-time, Microsoft has been working on WinFS for a long time too, and maybe eventually they'll have it, but not this time.
In essence Vista is what 2000 was supposed to be and XP almost was. It's a reasonably functional and reasonably secure multi-user operating system from Microsoft. One which is relatively secure, but which can still run most of the programs you want to run on it. Yeah, it took them 10 years to get there, but if you think of what things were like in the NT/9x days, where you had to choose between an OS which wouldn't work at home(and didn't even always work in the corporate environment) or an OS which was about as secure as a sieve, we've come a long way.
If you're running around with top secret or better, you might want to be careful, but companies won't usually go through the 18 months or so it's been taking for those clearances unless they're going to pay you enough money to keep you around. So you go out and buy DVD's(or rent them, it's not like it's all that expensive, especially in the US).
And of course the background downloader is actually throttled by blizzard so that it doesn't eat up your connection, even if you have a dial-up modem(I suppose it should be smarter than this, but blizz didn't really want complaints). The actual downloads on the day(at least up until the last few weeks) have always been quite snappy.
Having lived in both the US and now in Australia, I call BS. In australia, you have quite a number of options, for DSL, if you live in or very close to a major population point. If you live out of range for a DSL line, you're basically screwed. For cable there's what Optus and Foxtel? Neither of those are great. Plus Telstra is rather heavily regulated(perhaps too regulated, but that's what you get when a private company owns the telco infrastructure for the whole country).
Well either your company will modify this policy(perhaps by having a usb stick which isn't allowed to leave the building), or else your bioses won't get updated. If they won't give you the tools to do your job, or even let you provide your own, then the job doesn't get done.
Not to be politically incorrect or anything, but the Israelis toss at least as many missiles at Hezbollah as vice versa.
I'd also like to add that while I like and use linux, I've done most of those things he talks about being "easy" and "just a few mouse clicks". In pretty well every distribution I've ever tried(ubuntu might be different), they aren't easy, nor just a few mouse clicks.
DRM objections are based around the fact that like every single technical form of copy protection ever invented, it screws over the legitimate consumer and does nothing whatsoever to stop piracy. All any copy protection scheme ever invented has ever done is piss off the legitimate user.
A technical solution to piracy cannot exist, short of giving up complete and total control of your PC to the content publishers. This is because for every one person that the MPAA or RIAA employs to create a DRM system, there are at least 50 people, at least as intelligent trying to break it.
Show me a system of DRM which prevents illegitimate copying and distribution, without restricting the rights of people who actually paid for the product and I'll support it, but it's never going to happen.
To reiterate, technical copy protection has never stopped pirates. It will not ever stop pirates. All it does is piss off the people who actually bought your product.
Say you've got a regional provider(ie a Chinese ISP), anyone in a given region can only connect to that ISP because there are no alternatives(this is most definitely the case). Now say that that ISP, as is often the case in certain parts of the world, doesn't give a rats about its clients sending SPAM, and is perfectly willing to certify them. Now by your system the ISP should lose its certification, which means that any legitimate users of the system also lose their certification, which means they can't send certified e-mail to anyone.
This system is also expensive, not so much in bandwidth, but in human time. Verifying someone's identity and intentions is expensive and time consuming, even for an ISP, and for something like hotmail or gmail, which people use for perfectly legitimate reasons, it's be pretty much impossible.
So in the end, what you have is an expensive system which is essentially a complicated form of blacklisting, which as I said, sucks.
There is no battle for the living room, at least not in the form of multi-media PC's. They're more expensive than conventional equipment, they're harder to manage than conventional equipment and unless you roll a MythTV linux box(which half the conventional equipment is anyway, at least outside the US), you will be hamstrung by Copyright laws which allow the MPAA to screw your region.
Hollywood wants premium content to succeed, they want it out there(in theory at least), they want it on PC's. Microsoft loses a few sales for multimedia pc's and gains credibility with it's client base if they refuse this, the MPAA loses video on desktops, who loses more?
A laptop purchased buy your employer is the property of your employer, not you. So if the government has a warrant(or reasonable cause) to search your employer's property they have the right to search your laptop(and they should have, or else every dodgy company in the world would keep all their financial records on laptops and make the government get hundreds of warrants to search it all). Don't keep private stuff on your company laptop!!! Buy your own, don't put work related stuff on it, then the feds need a warrant against you to search it.
Laptops at the border are a problem, but not because they're laptops. They're a problem because of all the "what if he/she is a terrorist" BS that we've allowed to give the government the rights to do whatever they want. They shouldn't be able to search your laptop not because it's a laptop, but because once they've determined that it's not a bomb and it's not contraband they shouldn't be able to search it without a warrant in the first place. There is no reasonable reason for the government to do a warrantless data search at the border. They can search for drugs, bombs, weapons, imported fresh fruit and meat, but data is not a border threat.
The database issue is a bit hairy, but it's more a problem with allowing centralized databases in the first place. The government obviously has reason to be suspicious of whatever company is holding the database(they are after all in theory privy to criminal activity even if it's only in the sense that they have the data), and therefor cannot trust them to export the data in question, so they need the whole database. The US constitution has so far allowed for the admission of evidence found during the execution of a search so long as it's reasonable to have looked there(ie, if you're looking for a stolen car you can't look through cabinets since a car can't fit there). The question, and legal defense, here is whether law enforcement had any legitimate reason to look at your records while investigating another crime, and this issue would be the same with a filing cabinet as with a database.
All these things are simple privacy issues which would apply whether technology were used or not, and as soon as we stop pretending that it's all complicated technology issues we don't have laws for, and as soon as we stop letting the government preted the same things, the sooner we'll have the problem solved.
A computer isn't really all that much different from a filing cabinet as far as searches go, if you couldn't search a filing cabinet under the same circumstances, you shouldn't be able to search the computer, end of story.
Whether you're going to find snipers not using night vision goggles in light situations that allow for the use of night vision goggles I don't know, but I think the camera is supposed to provide you with an image in daylight.
The whole point of this device is not having to drop a 500 lb bomb to clear out snipers, and of course to stop people from getting shot when they're trying to find the sniper.
I reckon most folks who've had to tangle with the RIAA wish it were exactly the same as walking into a walmart and pocketing a jewel case. The penalties for actual theft of music are much, much, more lenient than the penalties for copying it. Plus of course as the RIAA has already been paid for any jewel case you steal you're much less likely to be pursued by anyone with money or power.