Voting with your dollars is just as valid as the premise that corporations run the country because the government does not create draconian laws oppressing them in favor of the people who typically could care less.
Corporations deserve/require a voice in government too. Our system of investment would crumble along with our economy if it wasn't there. The government has to be conducive to business if you expect jobs and/or a middle class of people. The government just needs to get out of Keynesian economics outside of the extend of creating an environment that can be profitable (I.E. stable taxes that are competitive to other country along with competitive fixed costs like energy and labor productivity).
They wouldn't need to do that for several reasons. One, the card's serial number will be logged so all they would have to do is parse the logs and find the time and machine is was purchased from. Then all they need to do is pull the relevant footage from the area near the time. Of course that is assuming they keep records of what cards go into what kiosks and how much was purchased on them for their accounting so a: the cards actually end up in a machine and b: the money put into the machine doesn't end up in the pocket of whoever collects said money from the machines.
Another reason they might not need to do that is because once they accuse you, they will raid your apartment and look through the belongings you have on you. If at any time they find equipment and or software that could reset these cards, you will be busted.
I know a guy who moved into a home he rented on 80 some acres of wooded land. 3 days after moving in, he decided to explore the woodland a bit. He wandered down a few deer trailed and noticed a couple pot plants. He started to move towards them and out jumped a bunch of cops dresses in black and camouflage. They searched his home and found a bag of weed and a film canister with about 10 seeds in it that he picked out of a fat bud a couple days before. Despite the fact that the plants growing were at least 3-4 months old and the cops had been sitting on them for over a week trying to catch whoever was tending them (probably the old tenant who left moved out the previous month for whatever reason), the seeds in the canister was enough to bust him on cultivating marijuana charges.
At that time (mid 90's), growing and dealing were covered by the same statutes and because they weighed the plants green with whatever dirt came out of the ground with them, he was over the federal bulk amount making it a felony worth 18 months in prison that he was charged and convicted of. His lawyer was convinced that going for a plea deal working off the fact that he had never been in trouble before was better then attempting to deny ownership of the plants based on them being older then him ever being on the property because the seeds and some potting soil that was on a back porch when he moved in was strong enough to support the connection to the cultivation charge. He was sentenced to 8 months but got released after 2 with 5 years parole/probation because of some clerical error in the recording of the verdict but had to endure 2 1/2 years of the cops pissing with him every time he turned around near them. He eventually moved to another county and was never bothered again except when reporting to his parole officer.
Depends on how he became a traitor to his side. If it's a fight and you are essentially taking your ball and going home, then yes. But if it is a moral stand, (suppose robbing people is fine but someone got killed and that isn't) then maybe not. Also, if your side is out of ignorance (relevant to the topic), it can be a moral stand and not so much suspect or limited for changing sides (suppose one of the enemy cultivates you and convinces you their position is more moral or righteous or justified or something).
I think that's where the conversation would end abruptly.
I doubt that. Facebook seems to be of the leftist leaning. They recently refused to advertise a book by a conservative radio talk show host named "50 things liberals love to hate".
It seems they would be fine with the leftist and might ask you for help on the litigating part.
I can see some people who would only be on the site if they were anonymous. The problem with these people is that outing them could mean they or their families end up dead or the potential is there. I would think anyone willing to do that to me would be on my short list to kill if i was in that position.
Imagine an army sniper who posts he took out 5 enemies planting a roadside IEDs from 1 kilometer out today. Someone recognizes the date and realizes it was when their brother died. Two years later, he looks up everyone with this name until he finds him. Suppose he looks at the exif data on a pic posted to the account and narrows it down to a geographical location then assaults the family and ex soldier killing them all.
I'm in the same boat. I have an account only because I sometimes need to check people's pages for work. No friends, posts or anything on it. I don't get the incest emails, but they try to get me to acknowledge if random people in my area (I guess from the IP allocation) are people i know and offer to send them an automatic friend request.
You mean I can't find fictitious name like bob's carpet barn? The government actually made it a law for the phone companies to provide every name, address, and phone numbers of everyone with a land line in the local calling area. But the phone company also allows you to publish numbers under names other then real names.
You can get a phone number published for FantasyFairy337, OMGCATS88 and cutiecupcakes264 if you are a customer.
in this context, it doesn't mean much. Public and private in the context of the parent is differentiating between government and private sector as apposed to privately owned or publicly traded.
Almost certainly does not mean will. He could become some born again pillar of model citizenry and be released after 10 years.
He got 10-20 years and nothing more. What might happen in the future is meaningless because he was sentenced to a max of 20 years for the crimes already commited.
I would like to see some information about that. Do you have any numbers to cite?
Also, are you sure it isn't a chicken and egg concept type problem? I mean was the death penalty brought back (they generally never went away, just a moratorium places on them) that caused the upsurge or was it the upsurge that brought the penalty back?
It's been my understanding that the lawyer and appeals costs are well known and most people who support the death penalty think we should get away from that portion of it and just streamline the process.
To me, it is not about the costs. Some crimes are simply heinous and people should understand that in doing them, they are committing suicide if caught, not getting 3 hots and a cot for the rest of their life with the chance of romance and drama along the way. But then again, I don't think the death penalty should be given out like the court costs in a speeding ticked someone tried to fight. It should be reserved for the most heinous crimes involving clear motivation and guilt. I think it is completely ridiculous that someone can murder 77 unarmed people- mostly women and children- and only get 10 to 21 years in prison.
It will likely count as income too. The value of everything he receives in trade for the bacon is considered income by the IRS.
The IRS has been insisting that trading for value is income. Someone ( I forget who) took it to the extreme and started writing checks for two chickens and a pig to pay for his porch to be painted or something like that. They went after him/them for bank fraud and tried to storm his home creating a standoff situation that made brief national news. I forget the names but it was one of the many stand off situations during the Clinton years. Strangely, those types of law enforcement actions have seemed to disappear from national coverage if not from reality. I guess CNN has more important things to cover now.
Well, yes, but what if you can encase them in the lining of an industrial chimney or along the steam lines leaving the turbine generators of the coal, oil, gas, or nuclear plants.
I think what the op was getting at was recovering energy from waste heat streams. The term heat sink I think was more illustrative of a process of waste heat rather then a function of gathering energy.
Let's assume your hybrid electric car has a gas engine. What is we ran the exhaust alongside some materials like this so not only do you get a power boost when the engine kicks in to charge or add more power as needed, you get a charge from the waste stream of the process too (sort of like regenerative breaking for internal combustion engines).
Interesting. I'm wondering if Google dropping support for earlier versions of IE is more of a move to switch users to alternative browsers by introducing problems with the IE.
I mean what if the summery is off and the result will not be a mass upgrade for windows products but a mass migration off of Internet Explorer by these default users who see nothing else wrong with winXP?
Your extreme failure stems from your attempt to assign malice to incompetence. This in turn makes you appear like a blabbering idiot which I hope is not the case but I have yet to be shown otherwise.
Haliburton had no bid contracts with the US before Cheney was even connected to them. The US government creates these contracts specifically for contingency purposes to limit costs in emergency situations and many companies other then Haliburton receive them too. What happened after the bidding process was opened? Halibuton won the bid on a much larger profit margin. The no bid contracts actually saved us money.
Bush went into Iraq because of the threat of WMDs and the potential for them to end up in terrorist hands. Sanctions weren't working because France and Russia were actively using them to exploit Iraq's oil reserves which was brought to lite in the oil for food scandal as it unwound. I personally believe that 9/11 wouldn't have happened if we run and hide every time Iraq shoot us down in the no fly zone or kick UN inspectors out. The reason we thought Iraq had WMDs is because Iraq wanted the world to think they had them. Saddam admitted in post capture interviews that he kept the appearance of possessing WMDs up because he thought the neighboring countries (Iraq's enemies) would see it as a weakness without them and invade. The UNSCOM and UNMOVIC reports definitely supported the idea of Iraq trying to hide banned weapons programs whether they existed or not.
As for nothing in the Obama administration to compare? You mean blaming their foreign policy failures and ineffectual terrorism prevention on a movie trailer hosted by Youtube? It was the anniversary of 9/11 and we didn't beef up the security at any of our foreign embassies in these hotspot countries until after our ambassador was killed. They then started apologizing for the US having freedom of speech and some jackass taking advantage of it when British intelligence claimed they had been warning of terrorist attacks on US assets for weeks. The big lie right now is that the embassy attacks are because of a movie trailer showing an illiterate pedophile as a bumbling womanizing idiot not because someone forgot to prepare for 9/11 anniversary attacks that we were warned about before hand.
The real problem is Obama should stop pretending he's like Clinton "but better" and actually be like Clinton except when it comes to foreign policy, then he should be like Reagan was or Carter wanted to be. Your slogans and misinterpretations weren't effective when Bush was in office and running to get reelected, I suggest you drop them and adopt a reality closer to the truth.
I do not know about millions per year, but I support two sites (50 or less users at each) who have 2 or 3 pieces of software each that suffers this problem. New user licenses and server licenses for these applications would be on the order of $25,000 to $40,000 each site. The yearly license costs are around one third of that to keep existing programs the same. That is on top of any costs for new hardware and the operating system and labor involved in making the switch. All told, with paying the MS tax or replacing the hardware to do an upgrade and the upgrade itself can easily topple $60-90k before we get into budgeting the labor to put it into play. The last forced upgrade at one site ended up costing about $150,000 by the end of it all.
And before someone says you do not need to upgrade the hardware to run windows 7, unless you can find me AGP video cards "with windows 7 drivers" that "support multiple monitors", which is in and of itself an upgrade, the workstations will need replaced with a move to windows 7 or 8.
Hell, even with the lowest volume licensing plan, the 5 servers and 45 workstations at one site is almost $20K for the minimum. Granted that's for 2 years (minimum I could check on) of upgrade assurance, but it isn't exactly something to sneeze at when considering everything else involved.
That's a lot of unneeded spending for small businesses in this economy. It might be different if we were booming with money to spare.
I did that to win a fake argument and poke fun with someone once. This was a while ago when Wikipedia was newish and I was messing with someone who I know claimed that everything on Wikipedia was 100% correct. He was learning about networking and I tried to convince him that the E in cat5e stood for elevated, it was the cables you used to run above the ceiling tiles. He insisted I was wrong and demanded I checked the Wikipedia entry. I had a friend change the entry while we were arguing about it and not only did he edit it to say that cat 5e stood for the "elephant- because it never forgets" standard, but added that anyone listening to (his first name) would be wrong in any explanation by default.
You should have seen the look on his face when he looked it up to prove me wrong seconds later in front of 4 or 5 of us. Priceless.
You mean just in case some other computer system attempts to deny you access to the system based on the mac address right? I'm not sure intent is completely divorced from the action unless you can find another legitimate reason for doing so.
It's like having a crow bar with you and claiming it wasn't a criminal tool used to break into a house they are accusing you of breaking into with the crowbar because you always have one around.
I think you are forgetting mid air refueling. The fa 18 super hornet has a range of about 1500 miles without refueling. So potentially, yes, a 1000 miles or so depending on where they can refuel mid air.
The defenses on aircraft carriers are pretty stout. With air support their group air space is at 50 nautical miles with the ability to see and projected force well beyond that. The carrier ballistic missile is probably one of the reasons we have a renewed interest in a missile defense shield capabilities (despite the rhetoric about rogue nations and terrorists). A combat mounted laser on a jet could potentially intercept any one or a number of them, not to mention missile seeking missiles that are already in place on the carriers and support crafts. But there are also electronic warfare measures in place reducing the effectiveness of the incoming missiles.
With the development of the ASBMs, I'm willing to be the development of something to deal with them specifically will come. Whether that is stealth, electronic counter measures, interception or a combination of any or all will be interesting to find out. We can probably be sure that it will be in use before we know about it.
Probably not. That is because the terms of service were not specifically in controlling your access to the information. However, if the terms said you must run a program called yodel that validate your ability to be on the network or the parts of the system you are accessing, and you failed to do so, they probably would.
This isn't about what the guy did on his own time with his own devices while using the service. This is about the guy going past his access with the service and doing things with or on the service explicitly not authorized. The laptop in the closet and the hard drives being changed out are just evidence of that. They alone are not breaches of the law, they are tools used to violate the access authorized to the user which was a breach of the law.
That is a bad precedent. It makes it too easy to get rid of people and classes of people. Suppose the sitting president and a good portion of the congress decided that blacks or Hispanics were becoming too powerful in the nation. Quick answer, start a war, draft them, put them on the front lines, and all the sudden problem solved.
Now I know I tried to light a fire with picking on minorities, but the same things could happen with poor people who rely on government services, or any demographic that can be significantly identified.
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Exactly. And this is also why the constitutional requirement for states is to have a republic form of government not a strict republic.
Voting with your dollars is just as valid as the premise that corporations run the country because the government does not create draconian laws oppressing them in favor of the people who typically could care less.
Corporations deserve/require a voice in government too. Our system of investment would crumble along with our economy if it wasn't there. The government has to be conducive to business if you expect jobs and/or a middle class of people. The government just needs to get out of Keynesian economics outside of the extend of creating an environment that can be profitable (I.E. stable taxes that are competitive to other country along with competitive fixed costs like energy and labor productivity).
They wouldn't need to do that for several reasons. One, the card's serial number will be logged so all they would have to do is parse the logs and find the time and machine is was purchased from. Then all they need to do is pull the relevant footage from the area near the time. Of course that is assuming they keep records of what cards go into what kiosks and how much was purchased on them for their accounting so a: the cards actually end up in a machine and b: the money put into the machine doesn't end up in the pocket of whoever collects said money from the machines.
Another reason they might not need to do that is because once they accuse you, they will raid your apartment and look through the belongings you have on you. If at any time they find equipment and or software that could reset these cards, you will be busted.
I know a guy who moved into a home he rented on 80 some acres of wooded land. 3 days after moving in, he decided to explore the woodland a bit. He wandered down a few deer trailed and noticed a couple pot plants. He started to move towards them and out jumped a bunch of cops dresses in black and camouflage. They searched his home and found a bag of weed and a film canister with about 10 seeds in it that he picked out of a fat bud a couple days before. Despite the fact that the plants growing were at least 3-4 months old and the cops had been sitting on them for over a week trying to catch whoever was tending them (probably the old tenant who left moved out the previous month for whatever reason), the seeds in the canister was enough to bust him on cultivating marijuana charges.
At that time (mid 90's), growing and dealing were covered by the same statutes and because they weighed the plants green with whatever dirt came out of the ground with them, he was over the federal bulk amount making it a felony worth 18 months in prison that he was charged and convicted of. His lawyer was convinced that going for a plea deal working off the fact that he had never been in trouble before was better then attempting to deny ownership of the plants based on them being older then him ever being on the property because the seeds and some potting soil that was on a back porch when he moved in was strong enough to support the connection to the cultivation charge. He was sentenced to 8 months but got released after 2 with 5 years parole/probation because of some clerical error in the recording of the verdict but had to endure 2 1/2 years of the cops pissing with him every time he turned around near them. He eventually moved to another county and was never bothered again except when reporting to his parole officer.
Depends on how he became a traitor to his side. If it's a fight and you are essentially taking your ball and going home, then yes. But if it is a moral stand, (suppose robbing people is fine but someone got killed and that isn't) then maybe not. Also, if your side is out of ignorance (relevant to the topic), it can be a moral stand and not so much suspect or limited for changing sides (suppose one of the enemy cultivates you and convinces you their position is more moral or righteous or justified or something).
I doubt that. Facebook seems to be of the leftist leaning. They recently refused to advertise a book by a conservative radio talk show host named "50 things liberals love to hate".
It seems they would be fine with the leftist and might ask you for help on the litigating part.
I can see some people who would only be on the site if they were anonymous. The problem with these people is that outing them could mean they or their families end up dead or the potential is there. I would think anyone willing to do that to me would be on my short list to kill if i was in that position.
Imagine an army sniper who posts he took out 5 enemies planting a roadside IEDs from 1 kilometer out today. Someone recognizes the date and realizes it was when their brother died. Two years later, he looks up everyone with this name until he finds him. Suppose he looks at the exif data on a pic posted to the account and narrows it down to a geographical location then assaults the family and ex soldier killing them all.
I'm in the same boat. I have an account only because I sometimes need to check people's pages for work. No friends, posts or anything on it. I don't get the incest emails, but they try to get me to acknowledge if random people in my area (I guess from the IP allocation) are people i know and offer to send them an automatic friend request.
You mean I can't find fictitious name like bob's carpet barn? The government actually made it a law for the phone companies to provide every name, address, and phone numbers of everyone with a land line in the local calling area. But the phone company also allows you to publish numbers under names other then real names.
You can get a phone number published for FantasyFairy337, OMGCATS88 and cutiecupcakes264 if you are a customer.
in this context, it doesn't mean much. Public and private in the context of the parent is differentiating between government and private sector as apposed to privately owned or publicly traded.
except when participating in commerce and using credit cards and the such.
That and other obvious exceptions (like filing taxes) aside, Facebook is simply a joke.
I was thinking the same thing. Perhaps the xbian group has a lot of high school kids behind it?
Almost certainly does not mean will. He could become some born again pillar of model citizenry and be released after 10 years.
He got 10-20 years and nothing more. What might happen in the future is meaningless because he was sentenced to a max of 20 years for the crimes already commited.
I would like to see some information about that. Do you have any numbers to cite?
Also, are you sure it isn't a chicken and egg concept type problem? I mean was the death penalty brought back (they generally never went away, just a moratorium places on them) that caused the upsurge or was it the upsurge that brought the penalty back?
It's been my understanding that the lawyer and appeals costs are well known and most people who support the death penalty think we should get away from that portion of it and just streamline the process.
To me, it is not about the costs. Some crimes are simply heinous and people should understand that in doing them, they are committing suicide if caught, not getting 3 hots and a cot for the rest of their life with the chance of romance and drama along the way. But then again, I don't think the death penalty should be given out like the court costs in a speeding ticked someone tried to fight. It should be reserved for the most heinous crimes involving clear motivation and guilt. I think it is completely ridiculous that someone can murder 77 unarmed people- mostly women and children- and only get 10 to 21 years in prison.
It will likely count as income too. The value of everything he receives in trade for the bacon is considered income by the IRS.
The IRS has been insisting that trading for value is income. Someone ( I forget who) took it to the extreme and started writing checks for two chickens and a pig to pay for his porch to be painted or something like that. They went after him/them for bank fraud and tried to storm his home creating a standoff situation that made brief national news. I forget the names but it was one of the many stand off situations during the Clinton years. Strangely, those types of law enforcement actions have seemed to disappear from national coverage if not from reality. I guess CNN has more important things to cover now.
Well, yes, but what if you can encase them in the lining of an industrial chimney or along the steam lines leaving the turbine generators of the coal, oil, gas, or nuclear plants.
I think what the op was getting at was recovering energy from waste heat streams. The term heat sink I think was more illustrative of a process of waste heat rather then a function of gathering energy.
Let's assume your hybrid electric car has a gas engine. What is we ran the exhaust alongside some materials like this so not only do you get a power boost when the engine kicks in to charge or add more power as needed, you get a charge from the waste stream of the process too (sort of like regenerative breaking for internal combustion engines).
Interesting. I'm wondering if Google dropping support for earlier versions of IE is more of a move to switch users to alternative browsers by introducing problems with the IE.
I mean what if the summery is off and the result will not be a mass upgrade for windows products but a mass migration off of Internet Explorer by these default users who see nothing else wrong with winXP?
Could your reality be any further from the truth.
Your extreme failure stems from your attempt to assign malice to incompetence. This in turn makes you appear like a blabbering idiot which I hope is not the case but I have yet to be shown otherwise.
Haliburton had no bid contracts with the US before Cheney was even connected to them. The US government creates these contracts specifically for contingency purposes to limit costs in emergency situations and many companies other then Haliburton receive them too. What happened after the bidding process was opened? Halibuton won the bid on a much larger profit margin. The no bid contracts actually saved us money.
Bush went into Iraq because of the threat of WMDs and the potential for them to end up in terrorist hands. Sanctions weren't working because France and Russia were actively using them to exploit Iraq's oil reserves which was brought to lite in the oil for food scandal as it unwound. I personally believe that 9/11 wouldn't have happened if we run and hide every time Iraq shoot us down in the no fly zone or kick UN inspectors out. The reason we thought Iraq had WMDs is because Iraq wanted the world to think they had them. Saddam admitted in post capture interviews that he kept the appearance of possessing WMDs up because he thought the neighboring countries (Iraq's enemies) would see it as a weakness without them and invade. The UNSCOM and UNMOVIC reports definitely supported the idea of Iraq trying to hide banned weapons programs whether they existed or not.
As for nothing in the Obama administration to compare? You mean blaming their foreign policy failures and ineffectual terrorism prevention on a movie trailer hosted by Youtube? It was the anniversary of 9/11 and we didn't beef up the security at any of our foreign embassies in these hotspot countries until after our ambassador was killed. They then started apologizing for the US having freedom of speech and some jackass taking advantage of it when British intelligence claimed they had been warning of terrorist attacks on US assets for weeks. The big lie right now is that the embassy attacks are because of a movie trailer showing an illiterate pedophile as a bumbling womanizing idiot not because someone forgot to prepare for 9/11 anniversary attacks that we were warned about before hand.
The real problem is Obama should stop pretending he's like Clinton "but better" and actually be like Clinton except when it comes to foreign policy, then he should be like Reagan was or Carter wanted to be. Your slogans and misinterpretations weren't effective when Bush was in office and running to get reelected, I suggest you drop them and adopt a reality closer to the truth.
I do not know about millions per year, but I support two sites (50 or less users at each) who have 2 or 3 pieces of software each that suffers this problem. New user licenses and server licenses for these applications would be on the order of $25,000 to $40,000 each site. The yearly license costs are around one third of that to keep existing programs the same. That is on top of any costs for new hardware and the operating system and labor involved in making the switch. All told, with paying the MS tax or replacing the hardware to do an upgrade and the upgrade itself can easily topple $60-90k before we get into budgeting the labor to put it into play. The last forced upgrade at one site ended up costing about $150,000 by the end of it all.
And before someone says you do not need to upgrade the hardware to run windows 7, unless you can find me AGP video cards "with windows 7 drivers" that "support multiple monitors", which is in and of itself an upgrade, the workstations will need replaced with a move to windows 7 or 8.
Hell, even with the lowest volume licensing plan, the 5 servers and 45 workstations at one site is almost $20K for the minimum. Granted that's for 2 years (minimum I could check on) of upgrade assurance, but it isn't exactly something to sneeze at when considering everything else involved.
That's a lot of unneeded spending for small businesses in this economy. It might be different if we were booming with money to spare.
I did that to win a fake argument and poke fun with someone once. This was a while ago when Wikipedia was newish and I was messing with someone who I know claimed that everything on Wikipedia was 100% correct. He was learning about networking and I tried to convince him that the E in cat5e stood for elevated, it was the cables you used to run above the ceiling tiles. He insisted I was wrong and demanded I checked the Wikipedia entry. I had a friend change the entry while we were arguing about it and not only did he edit it to say that cat 5e stood for the "elephant- because it never forgets" standard, but added that anyone listening to (his first name) would be wrong in any explanation by default.
You should have seen the look on his face when he looked it up to prove me wrong seconds later in front of 4 or 5 of us. Priceless.
A district court in Texas seems to see a lot of patent and copyright cases and the rulings often side with the complainant (read IP owner).
So in short, yes, it's common. It seems to be the court of choice.
You mean just in case some other computer system attempts to deny you access to the system based on the mac address right? I'm not sure intent is completely divorced from the action unless you can find another legitimate reason for doing so.
It's like having a crow bar with you and claiming it wasn't a criminal tool used to break into a house they are accusing you of breaking into with the crowbar because you always have one around.
I think you are forgetting mid air refueling. The fa 18 super hornet has a range of about 1500 miles without refueling. So potentially, yes, a 1000 miles or so depending on where they can refuel mid air.
The defenses on aircraft carriers are pretty stout. With air support their group air space is at 50 nautical miles with the ability to see and projected force well beyond that. The carrier ballistic missile is probably one of the reasons we have a renewed interest in a missile defense shield capabilities (despite the rhetoric about rogue nations and terrorists). A combat mounted laser on a jet could potentially intercept any one or a number of them, not to mention missile seeking missiles that are already in place on the carriers and support crafts. But there are also electronic warfare measures in place reducing the effectiveness of the incoming missiles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-ship_ballistic_missile
With the development of the ASBMs, I'm willing to be the development of something to deal with them specifically will come. Whether that is stealth, electronic counter measures, interception or a combination of any or all will be interesting to find out. We can probably be sure that it will be in use before we know about it.
Probably not. That is because the terms of service were not specifically in controlling your access to the information. However, if the terms said you must run a program called yodel that validate your ability to be on the network or the parts of the system you are accessing, and you failed to do so, they probably would.
This isn't about what the guy did on his own time with his own devices while using the service. This is about the guy going past his access with the service and doing things with or on the service explicitly not authorized. The laptop in the closet and the hard drives being changed out are just evidence of that. They alone are not breaches of the law, they are tools used to violate the access authorized to the user which was a breach of the law.
That is a bad precedent. It makes it too easy to get rid of people and classes of people. Suppose the sitting president and a good portion of the congress decided that blacks or Hispanics were becoming too powerful in the nation. Quick answer, start a war, draft them, put them on the front lines, and all the sudden problem solved.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyhHzzaTV2M
Now I know I tried to light a fire with picking on minorities, but the same things could happen with poor people who rely on government services, or any demographic that can be significantly identified.