If you're working on any kind of software that could piss off large corporations - console hacking, proprietary protocol reverse-engineering, DRM-breaking, etc - host the project on a darknet site anonymously so they can't send you takedown notices or sue you. This should be common sense by now.
The Dark Net is a geek thing.
Unknown and unlikely to be trusted by others.
The Dark Net is small. The Dark Net isolates the geek. In many ways it makes him an easier target.
Copyright is a right of a citizen, not a corporation. The legal definition of "legal entity", not withstanding, corporations should NEVER have rights of a citizen, because that diminishes the natural rights of people.
This is stupid.
The corporation is an organization. People in action.
It is flexible. It is powerful. It is damn near impossible to be politically or ecomically effective without such tools.
Probably just another pro-Apple troll post. By the time a handset is truly no longer being supported by Android, chances are good that it's out of warranty and you may as well just unlock it and install a custom firmware.
Here we have an answer will satisfy the geek ---
and be absolutely frightening or meaningless to tens or hundreds of millions of others.
In the end it's just going to keep Google honest and make sure they pay a fair price for the search traffic Firefox sends them. I think Google pays something like $60 or $70 million a year for all the Firefox user searches. That's chump change to someone like Google
It may be chump change for Google, but it is life and death for the Moz Foundation.
No. They have not. The Supreme Court decision happened in 1892, IIANM, when a former railroad lobbyist turned clerk of a Supreme Court Justice inserted it into an unrelated decision. The corporate lawyers ran with it, and it became impossible to call back.
American law has treated the corporation as a person from the beginning.
Seven years after the Dartmouth College opinion the Supreme Court decided Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts v. Town of Pawlet, (1823)...Justice Joseph Story, writing for the court, explicitly extended the same protections to corporate-owned property as it would have to property owned by natural persons. Seven years later, Chief Justice Marshall stated that, "The great object of an incorporation is to bestow the character and properties of individuality on a collective and changing body of men."
The court reporter, former president of the Newburgh and New York Railway Company, J.C. Bancroft Davis, wrote the following as part of the headnote for the case:
"The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does."
In other words, the headnote indicated that corporations enjoyed the same rights under the Fourteenth Amendment as did natural persons. However, this issue was not decided by the Court.
Before publication in United States Reports, Davis wrote a letter to Chief Justice Morrison Waite, dated May 26, 1886, to make sure his headnote was correct:
Dear Chief Justice, I have a memorandum in the California Cases Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific &c As follows. In opening the Court stated that it did not wish to hear argument on the question whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies to such corporations as are parties in these suits. All the Judges were of the opinion that it does.
Waite replied:
I think your mem. in the California Railroad Tax cases expresses with sufficient accuracy what was said before the argument began. I leave it with you to determine whether anything need be said about it in the report in as much as we avoided meeting the constitutional question in the decision.
And that is that.
Davis was 64 years old in 1886, a retired judge and career diplomat. He was not a clerk and he was not a lobbyist.
It is dishonest to try to demonize him.
The Reporter of Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States is the official charged with editing and publishing the Court's opinions both when announced and when they are published in permanent bound volumes of the United States Reports.
Newburgh is on the Hudson River 60 miles north of New York City.
Population 17,000 in 1870.
The rail line was surveyed around 1866 and there is really nothing more to say about it.
Davis was twice Assistant Secretary of State and perhaps best known for having presented the US case against the Confederate commerce raider Alabama at Geneva in 1871.
I don't have a problem with somebody recommending something. I have a problem with somebody taking over your decisions about your body and your health (and yes, I think an individual rights are more important than the society, because individual is the smallest minority).
You could and should spend some time reading about Typhoid Mary:
In the last week of October, 1918, 2,700 Americans died "over there" in battle against the kaiser's army. The same week 21,000 Americans died of influenza in the United States.
In Washington a public-health doctor noted that the only way he could assure room in his emergency hospital in an F Street storefront was to station undertakers at the door to remove the dead promptly. Health Commissioner Brownlow, at home with his sick wife, received a desperate call from a young woman. Of her three roommates two were already dead and the third was dying. Brownlow called the police and asked them to investigate. He soon received a sergeant's terse report: "Four girls dead" at that address.
The acting health commissioner of Buffalo, New York, announced that his city would begin the manufacture of coffins. "They will not be $1,000 caskets or even $100 caskets," he said. "They will be plain, with plain handles, and respectable.... The casket business," he added irritably, "is a worse trust than oil." In Pittsburgh stacked coffins lined the street for a city block. They were all used.
Philadelphia was staggered. The early record of 289 deaths in one day was easily surpassed. On October 10, while firemen hosed down the streets all day and people faithfully wore their face masks outside, 528 Philadelphians perished from influenza. The fury of this mortality rate can perhaps be better imagined in terms of 528 Philadelphians dying in a single day in traffic accidents or in a fire rather than, prosaically, in bed.
In the United States the final reckoning was 548,452 lives lost. Nearly ten times as many Americans died in those few weeks of pestilence as had been killed in eighteen months of war.
Modern vital statistics provide an illuminating comparison. In 1978, for every 100,000 persons in the population, 167 died of cancer and 494 of heart-related disease. In 1918 the comparable figure for those dying of influenza and related pneumonia was 588, a mortality rate for this country never approached before or since.
I guess it's more cost-effective to shakedown directly than using SCO as a proxy.
The geek cultivates a culture of victimhood.
But Microsoft has negotiated Android licensing agreements with corporations the size of General Dynamics.
The sixth largest defense contractor in the world. The geek knows these people or at least he ought to. They build nuclear sunmarines. The NSA certified smartphones used by Obama.
They are not the sort that rolls over and plays dead for anyone.
The sort that feels any need to apologize when they flex their own legal and political muscle.
The cheap notebooks are Windows proprietary s**t. It leads me to wonder what happened to the separation of OEM from Microsoft? Oh yeah went down the tubers when the legal restrictions expired.
What happened is sales.
The MSDOS and Windows PC has a thirty year track record in retail.
I recall paging through one on-line wholesaler's site which claimed to stock 40,000 products for the Windows PC market
Retailers love after-market sales and there Windows delivers big-time.
My Linux machine is well-protected and I don't need your meddling nor do I need Microsoft's
But is it your Linux machine or does it belong to your employer, your school, or your parents?
If your employer and others allow external access to secured internal systems, services and data, can they insist on dealing only with known, trusted, machines?
The Linux machine with no network access is, for all practical purposes, a doorstop.
I don't know what planet you live on, but neat, legible handwriting is still absolutely required in nearly any industry.
Elisha Gray's Telautograph [1888] was an early analog facsimile system that allowed handwritten messages and signatures to be exchanged in real time over a wire.
One of the great virtues of the system was its implied authenticity. It was as if you were looking over the shoulders of the writers.
The New York Times, like The Economist or The Wall Street Journal, is considered a must-read for the professional, the decision-maker. Slashdot is light entertainment.
I'm saying that local entities are only responsible to their local constituents. If a local entity is 100% in charge, they can let their section of the road go 100% to ruin if they don't want it there. And everyone else can just go suck eggs because anything else would be socialism!
You saw this all the time in early projects like the Lincoln Highway. Someone would finance a section of road as a demonstration project and then - maybe - a neighboring community or state would build and maintain a link to more or less the same standard.
Like all corporations, the automobile companies lobbied government at all levels to build infrastructure that was too expensive for them to build but which would make their products more desirable to purchase. Without government investment, their business would be quite different. Perhaps they would have invested more in floating cars that could cross rivers without bridges.
The amphibious car is idiotic.
Ford built a dirt and gravel tolerant mass market automobile before there were hard-surfaced roads outside the city limits --- before there were gas stations, mechanics, miniature golf, tourist cabins or roadside diners.
He put 20 millon cars on the road --- and each sale was a vote for a national highway system.
Evading the toll-booth had been a national pastime since the founding of the Republic. You might make a go of a privately funded bridge - but a road was impossible to police. That is what made government funding essential.
The price of kerosene dropped 80% during Standard Oil's reign primarily due to increased supply from drilling on (mostly) public lands. Who knows how much more it would have dropped if there had been a free market rather than a monopoly in charge.
Standard Oil delivered a product that was safe and predictable in use and sold in honest weights and measures.
Customers stood by the Standard's operating companies even after the trust was broken --- and the independents eulogized by the muckrakers fell by the wayside.
Re:Nice distro but they messed up the desktop
on
Ubuntu Turns 7
·
· Score: 2
I've read a lot of forums, not just computer related ones but other things where someone starts a "Linux" thread. I'd say the opinions run about 90% against unity, and 10% for.
The thing is, Canonical may not give a damn about posters to the "Linux" forums.
What it has is maybe 1/3 of Linux users. Which is still nothing but a ripple in a vey big pond.
The traditional community oriented Linux desktop distribution is not attracting converts from OSX or Windows. It threatens to be eclipsed in global market share by the walled garden of the iOS mobile device. That has implications for developer support. Retail support. The politcal effectiveness of the EFF and others.
'Doesn't Make a Jot of Difference'
Finally, for Barbara Hudson, a blogger on Slashdot who goes by "Tom" on the site, Ubuntu has bigger problems to worry about than just Unity.
Namely, Unity aside, "this latest Ubuntu doesn't make a jot of difference to the world because it doesn't add to the list of programs that Windows or OSX users can now use in Linux," Hudson told Linux Girl.
In fact, "this same mis-directed effort is also why the year of the Linux desktop won't happen," Hudson asserted. "None of the distros, including Ubuntu, are trying to meet the No. 1 demand of the majority of users: to run their existing programs."
'You're Not Growing the User Base'
Most users have at least one application that doesn't have a decent equivalent under Linux, "either open or proprietary," she explained. "Until that changes, 'fixing' the user interface or adding a music store will remain as useful as adding more cowbell. You're not growing the user base, just competing for more scraps from a tiny, stagnant market.
"Free software? For more than 99 percent of the world, Ubuntu is just another word for, 'I can't run your program,'" Hudson added. "The latest Ubuntu doesn't fix that, and neither will the next one, nor the one after it."
So, "until this fundamental weakness is addressed, you won't be able to sell most users on Ubuntu," she predicted. "Heck, you already pretty much can't even give it away to them for free.
"It's a shame that the future of linux in the consumer space is to toil away in obscurity, with products like Android getting all the credit," Hudson concluded. "It's also telling that when Novell took the first small steps to correcting this, they were roundly pilloried by the community."
Why does every distro but Debian have this weird hangup where the GUI cannot be decoupled from the OS?
Or rephrased, why does Debian apparently find it easy to do, whereas the big corporate OSes just can't handle it?
The big corporate OS - OSX and Windows - has 99% of the market.
Ubuntu about 1/3 of the Linux market.
The geek wants infinite customization.
What he gets is a hopelessly fragmented product that is difficult to "sell" to other users. Difficult to brand. Difficult to support.
That's probably only true if they bought it. If they silently obtain it from elsewhere (the producers don't even know about it), then I don't see how that is.
When the police search you car they find $10K in marked bills still in the wrappers you claim "fell off the back of a truck." But nothing you can say will ever convince a jury that you didn't know what you had in your possession.
That it wasn't yours to hide and that it wasn't yours to keep.
Of course a bunch of idiot lawyers couldn't tell the difference but ask any technologically inclined person to tell the difference and they would easily do so.
The judge asks for a layman's opinion because the layman is the market.
This kind of demonstration is the bread and butter of trial work. You need be prepared for it because it is going to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're working on any kind of software that could piss off large corporations - console hacking, proprietary protocol reverse-engineering, DRM-breaking, etc - host the project on a darknet site anonymously so they can't send you takedown notices or sue you. This should be common sense by now.
The Dark Net is a geek thing.
Unknown and unlikely to be trusted by others.
The Dark Net is small. The Dark Net isolates the geek. In many ways it makes him an easier target.
Why it doesn't matter?
Because: I've never known a single person who uses it.
This deserves preservation in amber as the ultimate in geek memes.
Copyright is a right of a citizen, not a corporation. The legal definition of "legal entity", not withstanding, corporations should NEVER have rights of a citizen, because that diminishes the natural rights of people.
This is stupid.
The corporation is an organization. People in action.
It is flexible. It is powerful. It is damn near impossible to be politically or ecomically effective without such tools.
Which is why the geek loses these battles.
Probably just another pro-Apple troll post. By the time a handset is truly no longer being supported by Android, chances are good that it's out of warranty and you may as well just unlock it and install a custom firmware.
Here we have an answer will satisfy the geek ---
and be absolutely frightening or meaningless to tens or hundreds of millions of others.
In the end it's just going to keep Google honest and make sure they pay a fair price for the search traffic Firefox sends them. I think Google pays something like $60 or $70 million a year for all the Firefox user searches. That's chump change to someone like Google
It may be chump change for Google, but it is life and death for the Moz Foundation.
95% of its annual income,
No. They have not. The Supreme Court decision happened in 1892, IIANM, when a former railroad lobbyist turned clerk of a Supreme Court Justice inserted it into an unrelated decision. The corporate lawyers ran with it, and it became impossible to call back.
American law has treated the corporation as a person from the beginning.
Seven years after the Dartmouth College opinion the Supreme Court decided Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts v. Town of Pawlet, (1823) ...Justice Joseph Story, writing for the court, explicitly extended the same protections to corporate-owned property as it would have to property owned by natural persons. Seven years later, Chief Justice Marshall stated that, "The great object of an incorporation is to bestow the character and properties of individuality on a collective and changing body of men."
Corporate personhood.
Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886) is of interest only for its headnote:
The court reporter, former president of the Newburgh and New York Railway Company, J.C. Bancroft Davis, wrote the following as part of the headnote for the case:
"The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does."
In other words, the headnote indicated that corporations enjoyed the same rights under the Fourteenth Amendment as did natural persons. However, this issue was not decided by the Court.
Before publication in United States Reports, Davis wrote a letter to Chief Justice Morrison Waite, dated May 26, 1886, to make sure his headnote was correct:
Dear Chief Justice, I have a memorandum in the California Cases Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific &c As follows. In opening the Court stated that it did not wish to hear argument on the question whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies to such corporations as are parties in these suits. All the Judges were of the opinion that it does.
Waite replied:
I think your mem. in the California Railroad Tax cases expresses with sufficient accuracy what was said before the argument began. I leave it with you to determine whether anything need be said about it in the report in as much as we avoided meeting the constitutional question in the decision.
And that is that.
Davis was 64 years old in 1886, a retired judge and career diplomat. He was not a clerk and he was not a lobbyist.
It is dishonest to try to demonize him.
The Reporter of Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States is the official charged with editing and publishing the Court's opinions both when announced and when they are published in permanent bound volumes of the United States Reports.
Reporter of Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States
Newburgh is on the Hudson River 60 miles north of New York City.
Population 17,000 in 1870.
The rail line was surveyed around 1866 and there is really nothing more to say about it.
Davis was twice Assistant Secretary of State and perhaps best known for having presented the US case against the Confederate commerce raider Alabama at Geneva in 1871.
To quote one of my favorite Simpson's lines, do they give the Nobel Prize out for attempted chemistry?
They will put you in jail for an attempted crime.
The failed experiment in crime.
There is no better targert for satire than the guy who isn't aware he is the butt of the joke.
The average judge managed to finish school, finish university, land a well paying job, and move out of their mother's home.
Not to mention twenty to twenty five years experience in trial or appellate practice and maybe a professorship.
No, it will become a network of VPN's sharing encrypted traffic, and you will never find out about the good sites because you're not invited.
The motion picture and recording industry can live with that.
The client apps for the licensed services are on hundreds of millions of systems and devices.
20% of prime time Internet traffic in the states was a licensed Netflix stream before Netflix offered a streaming only service.
The Dark Net is slow.
The Dark Net client is arcane and clumsy, pure geek.
The masses fled Usenet and IRC chat for perfectly intelligible reasons.
The Dark Net can be exposed.
Anonymous will attempt to break it open on a whim --- or in an attempt to gain credibility elsewhere.
"There is no honor among thieves. The chain is only as strong as its weakest link."
I don't have a problem with somebody recommending something. I have a problem with somebody taking over your decisions about your body and your health (and yes, I think an individual rights are more important than the society, because individual is the smallest minority).
You could and should spend some time reading about Typhoid Mary:
The Case Of The Disappearing Cook
The Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918:
In the last week of October, 1918, 2,700 Americans died "over there" in battle against the kaiser's army. The same week 21,000 Americans died of influenza in the United States.
In Washington a public-health doctor noted that the only way he could assure room in his emergency hospital in an F Street storefront was to station undertakers at the door to remove the dead promptly. Health Commissioner Brownlow, at home with his sick wife, received a desperate call from a young woman. Of her three roommates two were already dead and the third was dying. Brownlow called the police and asked them to investigate. He soon received a sergeant's terse report: "Four girls dead" at that address.
The acting health commissioner of Buffalo, New York, announced that his city would begin the manufacture of coffins. "They will not be $1,000 caskets or even $100 caskets," he said. "They will be plain, with plain handles, and respectable. ... The casket business," he added irritably, "is a worse trust than oil." In Pittsburgh stacked coffins lined the street for a city block. They were all used.
Philadelphia was staggered. The early record of 289 deaths in one day was easily surpassed. On October 10, while firemen hosed down the streets all day and people faithfully wore their face masks outside, 528 Philadelphians perished from influenza. The fury of this mortality rate can perhaps be better imagined in terms of 528 Philadelphians dying in a single day in traffic accidents or in a fire rather than, prosaically, in bed.
In the United States the final reckoning was 548,452 lives lost. Nearly ten times as many Americans died in those few weeks of pestilence as had been killed in eighteen months of war.
Modern vital statistics provide an illuminating comparison. In 1978, for every 100,000 persons in the population, 167 died of cancer and 494 of heart-related disease. In 1918 the comparable figure for those dying of influenza and related pneumonia was 588, a mortality rate for this country never approached before or since.
The Greats Swine Flu Epidemic Of 1918
This is what happens in an unprotected population --- and if you think tou have any freedom in such a world, think again.
You will be burnt or buried, walled in or walled out. You will not be allowed to infect others.
I guess it's more cost-effective to shakedown directly than using SCO as a proxy.
The geek cultivates a culture of victimhood.
But Microsoft has negotiated Android licensing agreements with corporations the size of General Dynamics.
The sixth largest defense contractor in the world. The geek knows these people or at least he ought to. They build nuclear sunmarines. The NSA certified smartphones used by Obama.
They are not the sort that rolls over and plays dead for anyone.
The sort that feels any need to apologize when they flex their own legal and political muscle.
The cheap notebooks are Windows proprietary s**t.
It leads me to wonder what happened to the separation of OEM from Microsoft? Oh yeah went down the tubers when the legal restrictions expired.
What happened is sales.
The MSDOS and Windows PC has a thirty year track record in retail.
I recall paging through one on-line wholesaler's site which claimed to stock 40,000 products for the Windows PC market
Retailers love after-market sales and there Windows delivers big-time.
We will create and use our own internet and if you have one of those chips on your computer, we'll disable your access to it.
And no one will give a damn.
The geek tends to spiral into ever-narrowing circles of influence.
Windows 7 Sins. The Other OS on the PS3. The "Walled Garden" of the iOS. Dead-end protests every one of them
My Linux machine is well-protected and I don't need your meddling nor do I need Microsoft's
But is it your Linux machine or does it belong to your employer, your school, or your parents?
If your employer and others allow external access to secured internal systems, services and data, can they insist on dealing only with known, trusted, machines?
The Linux machine with no network access is, for all practical purposes, a doorstop.
I don't know what planet you live on, but neat, legible handwriting is still absolutely required in nearly any industry.
Elisha Gray's Telautograph [1888] was an early analog facsimile system that allowed handwritten messages and signatures to be exchanged in real time over a wire.
One of the great virtues of the system was its implied authenticity. It was as if you were looking over the shoulders of the writers.
Not many forgers would be up to that challenge.
Compared to even obscure little slashdot.
The New York Times, like The Economist or The Wall Street Journal, is considered a must-read for the professional, the decision-maker. Slashdot is light entertainment.
I'm saying that local entities are only responsible to their local constituents. If a local entity is 100% in charge, they can let their section of the road go 100% to ruin if they don't want it there. And everyone else can just go suck eggs because anything else would be socialism!
You saw this all the time in early projects like the Lincoln Highway. Someone would finance a section of road as a demonstration project and then - maybe - a neighboring community or state would build and maintain a link to more or less the same standard.
Like all corporations, the automobile companies lobbied government at all levels to build infrastructure that was too expensive for them to build but which would make their products more desirable to purchase.
Without government investment, their business would be quite different. Perhaps they would have invested more in floating cars that could cross rivers without bridges.
The amphibious car is idiotic.
Ford built a dirt and gravel tolerant mass market automobile before there were hard-surfaced roads outside the city limits --- before there were gas stations, mechanics, miniature golf, tourist cabins or roadside diners.
He put 20 millon cars on the road --- and each sale was a vote for a national highway system.
Evading the toll-booth had been a national pastime since the founding of the Republic. You might make a go of a privately funded bridge - but a road was impossible to police. That is what made government funding essential.
The price of kerosene dropped 80% during Standard Oil's reign primarily due to increased supply from drilling on (mostly) public lands. Who knows how much more it would have dropped if there had been a free market rather than a monopoly in charge.
Standard Oil delivered a product that was safe and predictable in use and sold in honest weights and measures.
Customers stood by the Standard's operating companies even after the trust was broken --- and the independents eulogized by the muckrakers fell by the wayside.
Excellent trolling, I salute you.
I don't think it is trolling to look at the evidence and say that Linux is really, really, struggling to gain new users.
That the trend line has flatlined:
When you look at the countries and regions in whicn the Linux geek has invested most of his emortional capital, the numbers are disheartening:
Brazil
Russian Federation
India
China
Germany
I've read a lot of forums, not just computer related ones but other things where someone starts a "Linux" thread.
I'd say the opinions run about 90% against unity, and 10% for.
The thing is, Canonical may not give a damn about posters to the "Linux" forums.
What it has is maybe 1/3 of Linux users. Which is still nothing but a ripple in a vey big pond.
The traditional community oriented Linux desktop distribution is not attracting converts from OSX or Windows. It threatens to be eclipsed in global market share by the walled garden of the iOS mobile device. That has implications for developer support. Retail support. The politcal effectiveness of the EFF and others.
'Doesn't Make a Jot of Difference'
Finally, for Barbara Hudson, a blogger on Slashdot who goes by "Tom" on the site, Ubuntu has bigger problems to worry about than just Unity.
Namely, Unity aside, "this latest Ubuntu doesn't make a jot of difference to the world because it doesn't add to the list of programs that Windows or OSX users can now use in Linux," Hudson told Linux Girl.
In fact, "this same mis-directed effort is also why the year of the Linux desktop won't happen," Hudson asserted. "None of the distros, including Ubuntu, are trying to meet the No. 1 demand of the majority of users: to run their existing programs."
'You're Not Growing the User Base'
Most users have at least one application that doesn't have a decent equivalent under Linux, "either open or proprietary," she explained. "Until that changes, 'fixing' the user interface or adding a music store will remain as useful as adding more cowbell. You're not growing the user base, just competing for more scraps from a tiny, stagnant market.
"Free software? For more than 99 percent of the world, Ubuntu is just another word for, 'I can't run your program,'" Hudson added. "The latest Ubuntu doesn't fix that, and neither will the next one, nor the one after it."
So, "until this fundamental weakness is addressed, you won't be able to sell most users on Ubuntu," she predicted. "Heck, you already pretty much can't even give it away to them for free.
"It's a shame that the future of linux in the consumer space is to toil away in obscurity, with products like Android getting all the credit," Hudson concluded. "It's also telling that when Novell took the first small steps to correcting this, they were roundly pilloried by the community."
Ubuntu 11.10 and the Oddly Oneiric 'Countdown' [Oct 20]
Why does every distro but Debian have this weird hangup where the GUI cannot be decoupled from the OS? Or rephrased, why does Debian apparently find it easy to do, whereas the big corporate OSes just can't handle it?
The big corporate OS - OSX and Windows - has 99% of the market.
Ubuntu about 1/3 of the Linux market.
The geek wants infinite customization.
What he gets is a hopelessly fragmented product that is difficult to "sell" to other users. Difficult to brand. Difficult to support.
That's probably only true if they bought it. If they silently obtain it from elsewhere (the producers don't even know about it), then I don't see how that is.
When the police search you car they find $10K in marked bills still in the wrappers you claim "fell off the back of a truck." But nothing you can say will ever convince a jury that you didn't know what you had in your possession.
That it wasn't yours to hide and that it wasn't yours to keep.
It would seem strange that an employer would be required to report such a thing, particularly if there was no evidence that any child had been harmed
The photograph is evidence of the sexual abuse of a child --- the child in the photograph.
Its production is a criminal act. Its distribution is a criminal act. Its possesion is a criminal act. This is basic.
Of course a bunch of idiot lawyers couldn't tell the difference but ask any technologically inclined person to tell the difference and they would easily do so.
The judge asks for a layman's opinion because the layman is the market.
This kind of demonstration is the bread and butter of trial work. You need be prepared for it because it is going to happen.