It's not the social customs that explain why we don't have "pay at pump". Believe me, if someone thought they could make it work as a business they'd have done so long ago. An automatic, unattended money making machine? Where do I sign?!
There's virtually zero profit in selling fuel in the UK. 70% of fuel cost is tax; much of the rest is the fuel itself and the costs of getting it to you. The reason why most filling stations have a small convenience store onsite is because they're hoping to sell you something else at the same time.
To be fair, I don't think it's entirely the insurance industry. I think it's more a perfect storm of circumstances - much of which came about through various bits of legislation.
Initially, we all have to have insurance. This doesn't necessarily make insurance cheaper - if we all have insurance, then we all may make a claim.
Then cars get more complicated with mandated things like airbags that go off and cost an arm and a leg to replace; hazardous chemical laws make operating a body shop dearer and hence repairs more expensive. So insurance companies find that their claims start to cost more. They put the prices up.
Then lawyers are allowed to advertise direct to the public. "Had an accident? You could claim compensation! It's your right! Call us now and we'll help you!". Apparently the legal profession doesn't want people to think "sue the bastards", however, as many of these companies don't use any words that are even remotely related to the legal profession (like lawyer, solicitor or sue). They describe themselves as "claims experts", call themselves things like "National Accident Helpline" and tell you to "Make a claim". I assume it's because most people find the idea of going to court somewhat intimidating. More people suing? Higher insurance costs.
Having said that, I don't think the insurance industry is by any stretch of the imagination blameless. If they've kept similar profit margins for the last 10-15 years, then that would imply they're earning, say, 5% profit on £100 million whereas ten years ago they might have been earning 5% on £10 million. One of these numbers is rather larger than the other....
I don't think "Refused to insure" and "refused to quote" are the same thing. Otherwise you'd be in trouble every time you go to a broker - they run your details through a computer that checks every insurer in a whacking great big list, and there's always a few in that list who refuse to quote.
I'm pretty sure - though I suggest you double check - that what it means is your insurance policy came up for renewal and instead of writing to you saying "This year, your insurance will be £XXX", your insurance company wrote to you saying "We're refusing to cover you this year". Usually an insurer will only do this if they suspect shenanigans - if they want rid of you simply because you're slightly higher risk than they'd like, the computer will take care of this by the simple expedient of making sure your insurance quote is way dearer than you're prepared to pay.
Actually, they haven't. But I can see how you'd think they had.
Every single insurance broker in the country has had a computer system that works a bit like Go Compare and the like for years - punch in the answers the prospective customer gives you to a set of standardised questions, it doesn't come back with one price. It comes back with a list of insurers and the price each will insure at. Quite often with a set of columns showing what's included (eg. windscreen cover, courtesy car, excess). Usually it's in order of price, because that's how most people choose their insurance.
Go Compare, Compare the Market and Money Supermarket are basically putting that last bit where you see the list of insurers in front of the prospective customer so they can see everything. They're insurance brokers, but they've essentially re-invented insurance broking (brokering?).
Nah, any idiot can buy a set of plates in the UK, and most garages have the equipment to make up number plates on the spot. You need proof of ownership (or a dodgy mechanic) in order to get a spare plate made up, but that's easy enough.
You can't move them between vehicles without registering it, but you can certainly move them between trailers.
I've been responsible for software licensing myself and I've reached the inescapable conclusion that you are not expected to get it right. Whether by accident or design, the system is set up to make you fail.
Why? Simple. The licensing agreements are so labyrinthine that you practically need a team of lawyers in charge of licensing software.
You've got some licenses that allow for employee personal use at home, some that allow for no more than a single spare copy for backup purposes (Oh that's good. So I can't put a copy on my fileserver that gets automatically gets backed up every day on a 30-day rotation with monthly backups kept as archives?), some that allow you to use each license twice on condition you won't have both copies in use simultaneously, some products that can trivially be copied and installed by people who don't have admin rights (and you know there are people who will do this if it's at all possible) though the license forbids it, some that are aimed at a specific type of business yet have a licensing model that doesn't make any sense for such a business, you've got licenses that must be renewed, you've got licenses that don't have to be renewed, you've got licenses that the salesman insist don't have to be renewed but are worded in such a fashion that it doesn't sound like it, you've got software that can only be used for specific purposes unless you buy a different type of license.
You've got invoices for software you bought seven years ago, yet legally you're not obliged to keep invoices for more than six years. The BSA doesn't accept anything but a sales invoice; your accounts department disposes of invoices that are over six years old.
You've got invoices for software that are so badly written that they're almost entirely incomprehensible, and you've no idea what they represent.
Then you've got salesmen with laptops that show up back at head office once in a blue moon, and somehow or other have done all sorts of odd things despite the fact that the laptop is locked down so tight it may as well be a dumb terminal.
You can't get it right. The best you can hope for is to get it as close as possible to being right and using words like "to the best of my knowledge" to cover the rest.
HomerLOVESDonuts! - is a lot harder to crack as is encouraging them to swap out numbers for vowels even if it's just one. H0merL0vesD0nuts! - is a lot better.
Until you learn that the people who wrote cracker tools have already thought of this, and start their "dictionary with common letter/number substitutions check" long before they drop into "random string of characters check".
Not to mention that you fall into the XKCD problem (that I'm not going to link because it's been done in every other post in this thread).
The problem with the Britannica - well, any big encyclopaedia really - is that they're often bought by parents hoping that it'll help the kids with their homework. But the editors have a problem with deciding how detailed to make it. Too detailed? Then by the time the kids are mature enough to be able to understand any of it, they'll have reached the point where quoting bits out of the encyclopaedia isn't enough to get a good grade.
Not enough detail? Then it won't contain enough information to be any use.
In the end, I suspect the great majority of copies of the Britannica wound up sitting in the bookshelf, with maybe one volume opened a couple of times a year.
IIRC the controller had to do something slightly different to talk to a 5.25" drive. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if that something doesn't function on a modern controller and/or it requires specific software support that's suffered bit rot in a modern Linux kernel because nobody uses it.
For years, pretty much the only reason anybody had a computer in the home was:
- Because they had a business and needed some way to manage it.
- To "help the kids with the homework" (which almost invariably degenerated into "kids game machine")
Then the Internet came along and everyone wanted a computer. They didn't magically start using them for lots of different things though - 9 times out of 10 they were Internet machines, perhaps with the occasional digital camera use.
What we're seeing with the iPad in terms of take-up and usage is probably what we would have been seeing with WebTV and similar products about fifteen years ago had they actually been any good.
The moral, judges are used to lawyers telling them the law, and therefore if you want a judge to respect your rights, you have to explain your rights to the judge, and why the judge has to respect them, otherwise its, "Next case. We have a lot get through today".
My understanding is that this is pretty much how the legal system works. It's not "Your honour, I'm not very happy at X, what do you think they've done wrong and what can be done about it?". It's "You're honour, I'm not very happy at X because I think they've done A, B and C wrong. I think that for the following reasons: 1, 2, 3. I would direct your honour to a similar case two years ago where the plaintiff won and the defendant was ordered to pay £N thousand. Oh and by the way, you are aware of this particular code which states that a person representing themselves has to be cut some slack?"
Someone upthread has already pointed out that most US states have a curious definition of what counts as "able".
It's something stupidly low like an income of $14-15k in many states. Quite how you're meant to pay a lawyer when you earn that sort of money is not explained - were I to hazard a guess I'd say it sounds like the sort of law that was written two hundred years ago which simply listed a flat amount for the income limit without any sort of "accounting for inflation" clause.
Profiteering is not the same as making a (fair) profit.
Define "fair".
People say Microsoft is profiteering. Yet they're often very competitive - you ever priced up a complete end-to-end Exchange alternative that integrates all the features nicely so you don't risk the sales team's contacts not getting backed up? You'd be surprised how close it comes to Exchange, even using something like the commercial version of Zimbra.
Time and again we've seen evidence that a telco's business model is "sign up as many customers as you can, gouge them for as much money as you can and provide the bare minimum service necessary to be able to claim that the customer was getting exactly what they paid for in the event you get into trouble. We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company."
You've been modded funny but you're absolutely correct.
More-or-less all ships take on water in one form or another. Maybe tiny bits that aren't 100% watertight, maybe spray landing on the top deck and dripping down, maybe a problem with sewage disposal that results in black or grey water not being jettisoned. Whatever - the upshot is that the very bottom of the ship - the bilges - invariably has a certain amount of fairly disgusting water in it.
So you have (depending on the size of the ship) a number of pumps that pump this water up and out through a hole some way up the hull. Usually these pumps are sized such that they're substantially overpowered relative to the amount of water you'd normally expect to see in the bilges. The reason for this is so that they can cope with pumping out the water in the event of an accident causing the boat to take on more water than it should be - if the water's coming in at fifty gallons a minute (number plucked from thin air) but your pumping system can get rid of eighty gallons a minute, you're OK.
Of course, if the damage is bad enough that you're taking on water at a hundred gallons a minute, you're in trouble.
More-or-less all the Internet in most developed countries goes through a handful of telcos; the giants of the Internet like Google or Facebook are operated by big corporations. You might not like it, but they have lots of very clever engineers too. If we instruct them to operate a locked-down Internet in our country, they'll do that.
Route around it you say? Oh, sure, a handful of you may have the expertise to do so - but there's no such thing as a system that can be enforced with perfect efficiency. A few international treaties and not only can we make it harder, we can punish you for "routing around", as you put it.
Will it be 100% effective? No, of course not. But it doesn't need to be. It just needs to be effective enough that the great majority of people either can't figure out their way around it or are not prepared to break the law to do so. We'll deal with any miscreants through the usual channels.
No it isn't, OpenVPN is a protocol in its own right, the security comes from SSL. Usually it runs on UDP/1194, though you could run it on TCP/443.
It wouldn't be over HTTPS, but even so it may well be able to get through the firewall this way - assuming the firewall isn't doing some clever DPI work to fingerprint traffic type. (Possible, but IME rare).
I think you may have got the HTTP/S idea from the full version of OpenVPN that also installs a web-based GUI. But when users log in, the first thing they're prompted to do is download a pre-configured client.
The point of an ASBO is that magistrates can basically make up a law on the spot and announce that it applies to just a few people.
In theory, it's meant to deal with small numbers - maybe as few as one - of people that are known to cause trouble by making it illegal for them to do things that would normally be perfectly OK because most people would be able to apply some common sense - but in their case aren't. Essentially it gives some flexibility when you've got someone who's discovered a way of persistently annoying people but can usually stay on the right side of the law. The BBC picked up some good examples a few years ago.
Critics have pointed out that it's absolutely ripe for abuse.
I can only assume this guy is living ten or fifteen years in the past. Between cable TV (UK televisions have never had cable decoders built-in), Freeview and a PVR, I think I've used the internal tuner on a TV for a total of about 6 months since 1999.
A DVDs value isn't really related to the number of pirate copies out there - mainly because it's not recognised as a currency. I can't go to a restaurant and pay for my meal with DVDs, I can't buy a car with a case full of DVDs.
Currency's a bit different. Yeah, sure, so in theory a bunch of fake banknotes doesn't make much difference. In practise, however, it's not that simple because any fiat currency (practically ever major currency in the world today) only has value as long as people believe it has value. Hence why we hear talk of "consumer confidence".
If there's a small amount of poor-quality fake money on the market, no big deal. I buy a UV light and a forgery detecting pen (both of which are cheap enough), train my staff how to tell the difference between a real and a fake note and hope for the best. If there's an enormous amount of extremely high quality fake money on the market that may not be detected by my staff but will be detected when I take it to the bank, I have a problem. How do I solve it?
Well, the easiest answer is for me to adopt a "no cash for anything over a relatively low value, no high-denomination currency" policy. This doesn't work for all businesses, of course, but it works for enough and if we all make the same decision, sooner or later the general public is going to think "Hang on a minute. I've got all this paper money in my pocket and half the businesses here won't take it! What the hell is going on? I'm not sure I trust this currency....".
On December 8, 2011, U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg dismissed the last remaining count of the class action lawsuit, stating: "As a legal matter, [..] plaintiffs have failed to allege facts or articulate a theory on which Sony may be held liable." He then removed massive amounts of wax from his ears after the trial.
IIRC, it's not as simple as it sounds. AIUI you can't just go to court and tell the judge "Organisation X did something and I'm not happy!" - you have to explicitly say why you think it's illegal. The judge isn't supposed to figure out for himself why something may or may not be legal, simply which argument is the most persuasive.
Yet this is precisely what happened in the Sony case.
Slashdot Mirror
You mot definitely can get an MOT without insurance. But you can't get road tax (another legal requirement) without it.
Do you not have an entire industry full of self-employed driving instructors who will happily teach you on an hourly basis, being paid by the lesson?
Yes it's expensive but you don't have to pay them all at once.
You haven't seen UK insurance prices.
It's not the social customs that explain why we don't have "pay at pump". Believe me, if someone thought they could make it work as a business they'd have done so long ago. An automatic, unattended money making machine? Where do I sign?!
There's virtually zero profit in selling fuel in the UK. 70% of fuel cost is tax; much of the rest is the fuel itself and the costs of getting it to you. The reason why most filling stations have a small convenience store onsite is because they're hoping to sell you something else at the same time.
To be fair, I don't think it's entirely the insurance industry. I think it's more a perfect storm of circumstances - much of which came about through various bits of legislation.
Initially, we all have to have insurance. This doesn't necessarily make insurance cheaper - if we all have insurance, then we all may make a claim.
Then cars get more complicated with mandated things like airbags that go off and cost an arm and a leg to replace; hazardous chemical laws make operating a body shop dearer and hence repairs more expensive. So insurance companies find that their claims start to cost more. They put the prices up.
Then lawyers are allowed to advertise direct to the public. "Had an accident? You could claim compensation! It's your right! Call us now and we'll help you!". Apparently the legal profession doesn't want people to think "sue the bastards", however, as many of these companies don't use any words that are even remotely related to the legal profession (like lawyer, solicitor or sue). They describe themselves as "claims experts", call themselves things like "National Accident Helpline" and tell you to "Make a claim". I assume it's because most people find the idea of going to court somewhat intimidating. More people suing? Higher insurance costs.
Having said that, I don't think the insurance industry is by any stretch of the imagination blameless. If they've kept similar profit margins for the last 10-15 years, then that would imply they're earning, say, 5% profit on £100 million whereas ten years ago they might have been earning 5% on £10 million. One of these numbers is rather larger than the other....
I don't think "Refused to insure" and "refused to quote" are the same thing. Otherwise you'd be in trouble every time you go to a broker - they run your details through a computer that checks every insurer in a whacking great big list, and there's always a few in that list who refuse to quote.
I'm pretty sure - though I suggest you double check - that what it means is your insurance policy came up for renewal and instead of writing to you saying "This year, your insurance will be £XXX", your insurance company wrote to you saying "We're refusing to cover you this year". Usually an insurer will only do this if they suspect shenanigans - if they want rid of you simply because you're slightly higher risk than they'd like, the computer will take care of this by the simple expedient of making sure your insurance quote is way dearer than you're prepared to pay.
Actually, they haven't. But I can see how you'd think they had.
Every single insurance broker in the country has had a computer system that works a bit like Go Compare and the like for years - punch in the answers the prospective customer gives you to a set of standardised questions, it doesn't come back with one price. It comes back with a list of insurers and the price each will insure at. Quite often with a set of columns showing what's included (eg. windscreen cover, courtesy car, excess). Usually it's in order of price, because that's how most people choose their insurance.
Go Compare, Compare the Market and Money Supermarket are basically putting that last bit where you see the list of insurers in front of the prospective customer so they can see everything. They're insurance brokers, but they've essentially re-invented insurance broking (brokering?).
Nah, any idiot can buy a set of plates in the UK, and most garages have the equipment to make up number plates on the spot. You need proof of ownership (or a dodgy mechanic) in order to get a spare plate made up, but that's easy enough.
You can't move them between vehicles without registering it, but you can certainly move them between trailers.
I've been responsible for software licensing myself and I've reached the inescapable conclusion that you are not expected to get it right. Whether by accident or design, the system is set up to make you fail.
Why? Simple. The licensing agreements are so labyrinthine that you practically need a team of lawyers in charge of licensing software.
You've got some licenses that allow for employee personal use at home, some that allow for no more than a single spare copy for backup purposes (Oh that's good. So I can't put a copy on my fileserver that gets automatically gets backed up every day on a 30-day rotation with monthly backups kept as archives?), some that allow you to use each license twice on condition you won't have both copies in use simultaneously, some products that can trivially be copied and installed by people who don't have admin rights (and you know there are people who will do this if it's at all possible) though the license forbids it, some that are aimed at a specific type of business yet have a licensing model that doesn't make any sense for such a business, you've got licenses that must be renewed, you've got licenses that don't have to be renewed, you've got licenses that the salesman insist don't have to be renewed but are worded in such a fashion that it doesn't sound like it, you've got software that can only be used for specific purposes unless you buy a different type of license.
You've got invoices for software you bought seven years ago, yet legally you're not obliged to keep invoices for more than six years. The BSA doesn't accept anything but a sales invoice; your accounts department disposes of invoices that are over six years old.
You've got invoices for software that are so badly written that they're almost entirely incomprehensible, and you've no idea what they represent.
Then you've got salesmen with laptops that show up back at head office once in a blue moon, and somehow or other have done all sorts of odd things despite the fact that the laptop is locked down so tight it may as well be a dumb terminal.
You can't get it right. The best you can hope for is to get it as close as possible to being right and using words like "to the best of my knowledge" to cover the rest.
HomerLOVESDonuts! - is a lot harder to crack as is encouraging them to swap out numbers for vowels even if it's just one. H0merL0vesD0nuts! - is a lot better.
Until you learn that the people who wrote cracker tools have already thought of this, and start their "dictionary with common letter/number substitutions check" long before they drop into "random string of characters check".
Not to mention that you fall into the XKCD problem (that I'm not going to link because it's been done in every other post in this thread).
We had one when I was a kid.
The problem with the Britannica - well, any big encyclopaedia really - is that they're often bought by parents hoping that it'll help the kids with their homework. But the editors have a problem with deciding how detailed to make it. Too detailed? Then by the time the kids are mature enough to be able to understand any of it, they'll have reached the point where quoting bits out of the encyclopaedia isn't enough to get a good grade.
Not enough detail? Then it won't contain enough information to be any use.
In the end, I suspect the great majority of copies of the Britannica wound up sitting in the bookshelf, with maybe one volume opened a couple of times a year.
IIRC the controller had to do something slightly different to talk to a 5.25" drive. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if that something doesn't function on a modern controller and/or it requires specific software support that's suffered bit rot in a modern Linux kernel because nobody uses it.
More to the point, businesses haven't wanted an email service for nearly 15 years.
They want the group productivity application. But they don't call it that because the most visible part - the part they really see - is the email.
I don't think it's an age think.
For years, pretty much the only reason anybody had a computer in the home was:
- Because they had a business and needed some way to manage it.
- To "help the kids with the homework" (which almost invariably degenerated into "kids game machine")
Then the Internet came along and everyone wanted a computer. They didn't magically start using them for lots of different things though - 9 times out of 10 they were Internet machines, perhaps with the occasional digital camera use.
What we're seeing with the iPad in terms of take-up and usage is probably what we would have been seeing with WebTV and similar products about fifteen years ago had they actually been any good.
The moral, judges are used to lawyers telling them the law, and therefore if you want a judge to respect your rights, you have to explain your rights to the judge, and why the judge has to respect them, otherwise its, "Next case. We have a lot get through today".
My understanding is that this is pretty much how the legal system works. It's not "Your honour, I'm not very happy at X, what do you think they've done wrong and what can be done about it?". It's "You're honour, I'm not very happy at X because I think they've done A, B and C wrong. I think that for the following reasons: 1, 2, 3. I would direct your honour to a similar case two years ago where the plaintiff won and the defendant was ordered to pay £N thousand. Oh and by the way, you are aware of this particular code which states that a person representing themselves has to be cut some slack?"
Someone upthread has already pointed out that most US states have a curious definition of what counts as "able".
It's something stupidly low like an income of $14-15k in many states. Quite how you're meant to pay a lawyer when you earn that sort of money is not explained - were I to hazard a guess I'd say it sounds like the sort of law that was written two hundred years ago which simply listed a flat amount for the income limit without any sort of "accounting for inflation" clause.
Profiteering is not the same as making a (fair) profit.
Define "fair".
People say Microsoft is profiteering. Yet they're often very competitive - you ever priced up a complete end-to-end Exchange alternative that integrates all the features nicely so you don't risk the sales team's contacts not getting backed up? You'd be surprised how close it comes to Exchange, even using something like the commercial version of Zimbra.
They're a phone company.
Time and again we've seen evidence that a telco's business model is "sign up as many customers as you can, gouge them for as much money as you can and provide the bare minimum service necessary to be able to claim that the customer was getting exactly what they paid for in the event you get into trouble. We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company."
You've been modded funny but you're absolutely correct.
More-or-less all ships take on water in one form or another. Maybe tiny bits that aren't 100% watertight, maybe spray landing on the top deck and dripping down, maybe a problem with sewage disposal that results in black or grey water not being jettisoned. Whatever - the upshot is that the very bottom of the ship - the bilges - invariably has a certain amount of fairly disgusting water in it.
So you have (depending on the size of the ship) a number of pumps that pump this water up and out through a hole some way up the hull. Usually these pumps are sized such that they're substantially overpowered relative to the amount of water you'd normally expect to see in the bilges. The reason for this is so that they can cope with pumping out the water in the event of an accident causing the boat to take on more water than it should be - if the water's coming in at fifty gallons a minute (number plucked from thin air) but your pumping system can get rid of eighty gallons a minute, you're OK.
Of course, if the damage is bad enough that you're taking on water at a hundred gallons a minute, you're in trouble.
Dear Internet,
More-or-less all the Internet in most developed countries goes through a handful of telcos; the giants of the Internet like Google or Facebook are operated by big corporations. You might not like it, but they have lots of very clever engineers too. If we instruct them to operate a locked-down Internet in our country, they'll do that.
Route around it you say? Oh, sure, a handful of you may have the expertise to do so - but there's no such thing as a system that can be enforced with perfect efficiency. A few international treaties and not only can we make it harder, we can punish you for "routing around", as you put it.
Will it be 100% effective? No, of course not. But it doesn't need to be. It just needs to be effective enough that the great majority of people either can't figure out their way around it or are not prepared to break the law to do so. We'll deal with any miscreants through the usual channels.
- Every government everywhere in the world.
No it isn't, OpenVPN is a protocol in its own right, the security comes from SSL. Usually it runs on UDP/1194, though you could run it on TCP/443.
It wouldn't be over HTTPS, but even so it may well be able to get through the firewall this way - assuming the firewall isn't doing some clever DPI work to fingerprint traffic type. (Possible, but IME rare).
I think you may have got the HTTP/S idea from the full version of OpenVPN that also installs a web-based GUI. But when users log in, the first thing they're prompted to do is download a pre-configured client.
The point of an ASBO is that magistrates can basically make up a law on the spot and announce that it applies to just a few people.
In theory, it's meant to deal with small numbers - maybe as few as one - of people that are known to cause trouble by making it illegal for them to do things that would normally be perfectly OK because most people would be able to apply some common sense - but in their case aren't. Essentially it gives some flexibility when you've got someone who's discovered a way of persistently annoying people but can usually stay on the right side of the law. The BBC picked up some good examples a few years ago.
Critics have pointed out that it's absolutely ripe for abuse.
I can only assume this guy is living ten or fifteen years in the past. Between cable TV (UK televisions have never had cable decoders built-in), Freeview and a PVR, I think I've used the internal tuner on a TV for a total of about 6 months since 1999.
Because it's not true.
A DVDs value isn't really related to the number of pirate copies out there - mainly because it's not recognised as a currency. I can't go to a restaurant and pay for my meal with DVDs, I can't buy a car with a case full of DVDs.
Currency's a bit different. Yeah, sure, so in theory a bunch of fake banknotes doesn't make much difference. In practise, however, it's not that simple because any fiat currency (practically ever major currency in the world today) only has value as long as people believe it has value. Hence why we hear talk of "consumer confidence".
If there's a small amount of poor-quality fake money on the market, no big deal. I buy a UV light and a forgery detecting pen (both of which are cheap enough), train my staff how to tell the difference between a real and a fake note and hope for the best. If there's an enormous amount of extremely high quality fake money on the market that may not be detected by my staff but will be detected when I take it to the bank, I have a problem. How do I solve it?
Well, the easiest answer is for me to adopt a "no cash for anything over a relatively low value, no high-denomination currency" policy. This doesn't work for all businesses, of course, but it works for enough and if we all make the same decision, sooner or later the general public is going to think "Hang on a minute. I've got all this paper money in my pocket and half the businesses here won't take it! What the hell is going on? I'm not sure I trust this currency....".
On December 8, 2011, U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg dismissed the last remaining count of the class action lawsuit, stating: "As a legal matter, [..] plaintiffs have failed to allege facts or articulate a theory on which Sony may be held liable." He then removed massive amounts of wax from his ears after the trial.
IIRC, it's not as simple as it sounds. AIUI you can't just go to court and tell the judge "Organisation X did something and I'm not happy!" - you have to explicitly say why you think it's illegal. The judge isn't supposed to figure out for himself why something may or may not be legal, simply which argument is the most persuasive.
Yet this is precisely what happened in the Sony case.