Seems that way. I've been wondering if Lulzsec is just the banner Anons fly under when they want to do things more harmful to the general public than Anonymous would want to associate themselves with.
I enjoy this not because I hate Sony (although I'll never buy another Sony product) but because Sony has engaged in what should be considered criminal activity themselves, and got away with it. The actions against Sony are a form of vigilante justice, they're being punished because of what they did. And yes, the things they've done are wrong. The rootkit mess was awful, and giving customers a choice between two things they've already paid for (second OS or online play) is stealing. Yes, stealing, in a very real sense. And then they went after a man who sought to give back what Sony stole. I know this is very one-sided, but it's what the situation boils down to. I don't agree with the things Lulzsec has done because it's damaging to innocent people as well, but I'll be happy to watch it continue because I do feel that Sony deserves to be punished and I don't see that happening through the proper channels. I'd also love to see Lulzsec go after organizations like the RIAA and the MPAA, not because it's okay to steal music, but because it's not okay to have absurd punitive fines over downloading something that, in almost all cases, didn't amount to any losses because the truth is people wouldn't just go buy everything they download if they couldn't pirate it.
After reading the article, it seems it didn't have anything to do with the school, aside from the fact that he'd used it in a school project as well. Maybe the information is elsewhere, but it seems to me that the videos themselves have nothing to do with anyone at the school except for the teacher who voluntarily did some voice acting for it and the student who made them. Please dear commenter: go find out if the media is sensationalizing something before you assume that's what's happening and discredit a young student while his rights are being abused and his future sabotaged.
...they just need to start a more official trade-a-kidney program. That way they can trade an iPad for a kidney and then turn around and sell the kidney to someone who needs it! They'll just need to do better than Sony, who tried this once in the '90s but after only shipping empty boxes to the first few thousand people decided it was easier to just call it "donating" a kidney. You can buy Sony-brand kidneys over in Japan, you know.
Don't you know computers don't make mistakes? Putting black boxes in cars will ensure that noone is ever found at fault when they shouldn't be, and that you're never wrongfully ticketed. This is the way things are going, it's like the cameras they use to catch speeders and red light runners, and those things have never made a mistake, certainly never been shown to consistently make mistakes... Seriously though, I like the idea of a black box system that will reliably determine who is at fault in an accident, but just like everything else, this bit of information will be misused. Anyone else remember when those plate-scanning cameras weren't going to be used to bust people with expired registrations and lapsed insurance?
I was under the impression that even worldwide ICQ trailed behind AIM. I could be wrong, but weren't there typically five or six times as many users on AIM when both services were in wide use?
Dr. Bob, do you realize that you come off as nothing more than crazy, and your ranting is actually helping "BIG PHARMA" by discrediting the people who speak out against them? Don't get me wrong, I don't like the way the system works and I'd love to see an end to corruption in government and business, as well as a separation of the two, but rants from people like you help to accomplish the opposite by giving everyone something to point at and say "See, they're just a bunch of raving lunatics!"
Since when do we train every Marine to do this? Since never. Think big, more along the lines of special forces or spies, there's quite a bit of training involved overall and it goes far deeper than trying to consciously control your actions to look less suspicious. I haven't gone through boot camp myself, so this is no expert testimonial, but from what I've been told that time is what you need to train and learn to survive in the battlefield, they don't touch espionage, infiltrating enemy forces, or anything that would require hiding behavior patterns to be in your skill set. There's no doubt in my mind that behavior profiling would be more effective than random selection to go through a scanner.
I second this. If I could tack on premium content to my Netflix subscription for a fee I'd do it, as long as it didn't shoot the price up over cable. I was actually thinking the other day stations like HBO and Showtime should be doing this already, I'm sure I'm not the only one who would pay a few dollars to get new episodes of Spartacus and Dexter without paying the insane price of cable that I haven't even plugged into my TV since I moved in January.
Communism in it's purest form would work, the problem is we always have to involve people, and as we've all seen only people who will abuse power and use it strictly to benefit themselves ever have the drive to take a position of power. This is also why democracies, republics, monarchies, dictatorships, and every other form of government fail to adequately govern people; even when they start off well, bad people will inevitably take control and turn it into something terrible.
No form of government, or lack there of as in anarchy, is inherently evil. It's people that are evil.
It's always looked to me like Adobe realizes the obvious, that the people pirating their software wouldn't be buying it anyway even if there was no other choice. It's widely used by hobby artists mainly because of piracy, otherwise they'd simply be forced to use a cheap or free alternative. I tend to think the situation is not all that different from piracy in other industries, most people who download things without paying would not have bought them even if downloading wasn't an option.
I'm wondering if this means the same is true for all broadband. Obviously there will always be heavier users, and I think everyone here knows they need to worry more about upgrading infrastructure and less about how to limit users to make it work as it is, but could they realistically NEED to increase their capacity within the next few years to avoid having their pipes always clogged by what's become regular usage?
Admittedly, this isn't news to anyone who's read even a little Chomsky or the like, but the vast majority of America is ignorant of all this because they have to go looking for the information. There isn't anything being published that we didn't already know or couldn't figure out, just like with the last set of documents about Afghanistan and Iraq, but most of the US (and much of the rest of the world, I suspect) needs to have it thrown in their faces before they'll believe it. It's sad that it takes controversy like what Wikileaks is stirring up just to get people to pay attention. I'm not saying this is the best way to change things, or that it'll work, but it's an attempt and I think the benefits to getting this information out there outweighs the cost.
Which has always been, and will still be, included in your initial purchase price.
Enough trying to justify Intel's actions by comparing it to what HP or IBM did in the past. I don't know the details surrounding mainframes sold with additional hardware to be activated later, but it could just as easily be as wrong as this is. You're not understanding why this is a problem.
The problem here is that in order for Intel to appropriately price the chip so they'll make money, they have to assume not everyone will buy the upgrade. In fact they should assume most people won't buy the upgrade. So if the actual value of the upgrade is $50, and they assume 20% of people will buy the upgrade, they have to recover $40 per chip sold, meaning that $40 will just get tacked onto the initial purchase price. Right there, is where we all get ripped off. If they can afford to let people not upgrade the chip, it means they've included the actual cost in the chip price already, and that's the rip off. If you don't upgrade, then $40 of your chip price goes to cover hardware you're not using, and if you do upgrade, then $40 of the $50 you paid is actually to recover money lost due to other people not upgrading.
If you still don't understand the problem, I can't help you.
My Macs have been able to do this for some time now, and not just in "small testbeds or simulations," so what's new? Oh, I know! Microsoft is going to take an existing technology, that works rather well in my experience, and they're going to turn it into a bloated software package that costs more than the hardware you run it on, but never actually works right without the use of additional third party hardware and software, and then it'll get praised by mindless Windows jockies claiming that Apple's version was "too simple" and only good for people who don't understand how to run Windows properly.
Wait... what?
1. Where does Verizon's $30 data plan say there's a cap? Oh it doesn't, it says it's unlimited. I'm looking at the plans now. There's a 25mb service, and unlimited, and unlimited is even required for alot of phones. So, that first point of yours, yeah, wrong. You're paying for unlimited, but you're not getting it.
2. Fair enough.
3. I wouldn't call it debatable any more than the earth being flat. Yes, it's unfair to judge based on speed alone, you can't really say speeds are available to any number of people unless their available to all of them at once. What's offered around the US is typically shared connections, so your neighborhood has a great broadband connection, but when the guy next door is abusing it your connection slows to a crawl. I'm not saying it's not shared connections anywhere else, but with so much more bandwidth available you're able to get the consistent speed you should.
Now on to the article. Anyone who claims we don't need to upgrade our infrastructure but that ISPs should be allowed to throttle heavy users is contradicting themselves. If heavy users need to be throttled, it's because the infrastructure needs to be upgraded to handle the heavy loads. He comes off as the type of guy who would accept huge tax breaks while agreeing to upgrade infrastructure without ever actually doing it. Not that that would ever actually happen.
Last time I signed up for Comcast (a long while ago, I admit) they gave me three options for a cable modem: Rent one of theirs, buy one of theirs, or provide my own. That last option is the key here. If I was allowed to provide my own modem, why wouldn't I be allowed to use a modified one? The way I figure, if Comcast (or any other company) relies on the user's hardware to impose limitations, and they then provide their own hardware that doesn't include the ability to impose such limitations, the user hasn't broken any laws, nor has the provider of the modified modem. The exception to this would be if the agreement with the internet provider states you can't use modified hardware or hardware that can't impose the limitations the require, but even in this case the hardware provider shouldn't be charged only the end user who agreed not to use the hardware. As near as I can figure, this is just another case of America, Inc. using the legal system to support big companies. I'm not a lawyer, or expert in any way shape or form, but it seems to me that two things should happen here: this man should be allowed to walk, and internet providers should start capping bandwidth from their own routers and not the users' hardware. Sure, they might not have the hardware in place to already do this, weren't internet providers supposed to be trying to upgrade our national network infrastructure anyway?
Obviously you've yet to interact with the mysterious beings known as "women" or you'd realize that the typical woman has fragile emotions. Imagine that they did this to your mother, or grandmother, and how they would react. I honestly can't even continue because frankly, it's making me mad that people like you are out there convincing any possible alien observers that we're still to stupid to handle a formal greeting.
Your comparisons are ridiculous. A search warrant grants officers access to anything that is valid to the search. Meaning, when they search your house for a gun, they can reasonably search through your physical possessions, anything that could contain or be hiding said gun. They absolutely can not, however, search data on my hard drive for a gun, as it wouldn't be a reasonable place to find an actual gun. If the warrant states that they're searching for evidence of a gun, and they have reason to believe said evidence is in digital form and sitting on my hard drive, then they can search it.
So let me clear this up for you. Believe it or not, officers shouldn't be using the bathroom or sitting on the couch in the house they're searching, as they could potentially be contaminated or destroying evidence. Nobody wants to be the a-hole that flushes the last of the guy's coke down the can. The doors and the floor, they require access to those in order to conduct the search for the drugs. The wii... where does the wii fit in... Oh, right, the Wii had to be searched so the officers could determine if he was on drugs while playing in the past, so they had to create comparison scores by themselves, both on and off drugs, and then... Don't be an idiot. If your house is being searched the officers do not have the right to use your stuff, they have the right to conduct the search and that's all. Even if they didn't use any of his things, the simple fact that officers were playing games while conducting the search shows them to be unprofessional and arguably irresponsible, so irresponsible in fact that they can't be trusted to accurately document evidence. Or so any half-wit lawyer could argue, and likely win.
What they did was wrong in a number of ways, and the officers who were playing the game as well as their superiors should be reprimanded. Sure, they're just people too, but they're people who chose to become officers of the law, they chose a life that holds them to a higher standard, and they need to meet that standard or step down.
Amazon is still to blame for the act of removing his book, but I'm certain any schoolteacher will tell you the same thing, it's ultimately your own responsibility to handle your own work. Everyone else didn't lose their copy of 1984, and it's nobody's fault but his own for relying on his Kindle. It's no different than if you had a dog named Amazon who chewed up your real copy and threw up worthless post-it notes with your notes, it's the dog's fault he ate it but that doesn't get you off the hook.
The point I was trying to get across in the second paragraph is that he would rather sue Amazon than put forth the effort to complete his project regardless, as any other situation would have required. This one just opens up a new option, blame a big business and make some money.
Would the distribution of 1984 in this case be the same as distributing any other stolen property? If that's the case, then Amazon wouldn't have the right to take it back (unless the contract between users and Amazon said they could) but the police could. I'm inclined to believe that this young man has a solid case, as would any other Kindle user who had purchased 1984. Amazon did something illegal, their users had no idea and really no way of knowing without doing more research than anyone should have to just to buy a book. I'm sure the US Courts will decide otherwise, but I think Amazon should be held responsible for everything that occurred because of their own illegal act, and therefore should have to pay damages in any scenario like this one. That's not to say they should have to pay everyone beyond the refund, but if it can be proven that more damage was caused by the removal of the book then yeah, users should be entitled to something.
That said, time to bash Americans. Fat, lazy, stupid, and everyone wants to sue everyone else for everything. Yeah, Amazon may have screwed this kid over, but data loss is something everyone should be prepared for today. It's still ultimately his own fault for relying on an electronic device, if it crashed and he lost his data he wouldn't have a right to sue then and he'd be in the same boat. This is just another case of one prick suing a bunch of other pricks, when really they're all wrong.
Every day I grow more ashamed of the citizens of my country. While I know not all Americans are bad, the vast majority have this false idea that they're better than everyone, entitled to more for less, and it makes us all look like shitheads. Look, we even think "American" means "US Citizen," forget about those other countries throughout the American continents.
It's stated that a user must sign an admission of guilt before reconnecting service, I don't see how that isn't a breach of due process. I'm not a lawyer or an expert, but could one logically conclude that this business is using it's unique position of power to force users to wave their right to a free trial? I read another comment where someone claims it could be an infringement to one's basic human rights, and while I don't quite agree, I think it's an infringement of our legal rights. Karoo is the only provider of wired broadband internet access for these people from what I can tell, and really dial-up and satellite are not feasible options for alot of users, especially those that need a good reliable connection for work with any amount of speed. I know this still isn't forcing a user to admit guilt, but their options are slim unless they choose to go without the internet. Cutting off service is nothing new, but perhaps they should be required to seek more than just any "suspicion" considering that really leaves no need for evidence to back the decision and can be done on the whim of an employee who may just be having a bad day. Or, at the very least, they shouldn't require an admission of guilt, just a contract stating you won't share copyrighted files illegally and if you do you can be held legally responsible.
Please, pick that apart and respond, I want to know how far off I could be with this one. Or how right it is...
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Seems that way. I've been wondering if Lulzsec is just the banner Anons fly under when they want to do things more harmful to the general public than Anonymous would want to associate themselves with.
I enjoy this not because I hate Sony (although I'll never buy another Sony product) but because Sony has engaged in what should be considered criminal activity themselves, and got away with it. The actions against Sony are a form of vigilante justice, they're being punished because of what they did. And yes, the things they've done are wrong. The rootkit mess was awful, and giving customers a choice between two things they've already paid for (second OS or online play) is stealing. Yes, stealing, in a very real sense. And then they went after a man who sought to give back what Sony stole. I know this is very one-sided, but it's what the situation boils down to. I don't agree with the things Lulzsec has done because it's damaging to innocent people as well, but I'll be happy to watch it continue because I do feel that Sony deserves to be punished and I don't see that happening through the proper channels. I'd also love to see Lulzsec go after organizations like the RIAA and the MPAA, not because it's okay to steal music, but because it's not okay to have absurd punitive fines over downloading something that, in almost all cases, didn't amount to any losses because the truth is people wouldn't just go buy everything they download if they couldn't pirate it.
After reading the article, it seems it didn't have anything to do with the school, aside from the fact that he'd used it in a school project as well. Maybe the information is elsewhere, but it seems to me that the videos themselves have nothing to do with anyone at the school except for the teacher who voluntarily did some voice acting for it and the student who made them. Please dear commenter: go find out if the media is sensationalizing something before you assume that's what's happening and discredit a young student while his rights are being abused and his future sabotaged.
...they just need to start a more official trade-a-kidney program. That way they can trade an iPad for a kidney and then turn around and sell the kidney to someone who needs it! They'll just need to do better than Sony, who tried this once in the '90s but after only shipping empty boxes to the first few thousand people decided it was easier to just call it "donating" a kidney. You can buy Sony-brand kidneys over in Japan, you know.
Nah, just put him on the pending list like the big boys do.
I figured that's what was happening when federal agents became the tools used to investigate and help prosecute people for copyright infringement.
Don't you know computers don't make mistakes? Putting black boxes in cars will ensure that noone is ever found at fault when they shouldn't be, and that you're never wrongfully ticketed. This is the way things are going, it's like the cameras they use to catch speeders and red light runners, and those things have never made a mistake, certainly never been shown to consistently make mistakes... Seriously though, I like the idea of a black box system that will reliably determine who is at fault in an accident, but just like everything else, this bit of information will be misused. Anyone else remember when those plate-scanning cameras weren't going to be used to bust people with expired registrations and lapsed insurance?
I was under the impression that even worldwide ICQ trailed behind AIM. I could be wrong, but weren't there typically five or six times as many users on AIM when both services were in wide use?
Dr. Bob, do you realize that you come off as nothing more than crazy, and your ranting is actually helping "BIG PHARMA" by discrediting the people who speak out against them? Don't get me wrong, I don't like the way the system works and I'd love to see an end to corruption in government and business, as well as a separation of the two, but rants from people like you help to accomplish the opposite by giving everyone something to point at and say "See, they're just a bunch of raving lunatics!"
Since when do we train every Marine to do this? Since never. Think big, more along the lines of special forces or spies, there's quite a bit of training involved overall and it goes far deeper than trying to consciously control your actions to look less suspicious. I haven't gone through boot camp myself, so this is no expert testimonial, but from what I've been told that time is what you need to train and learn to survive in the battlefield, they don't touch espionage, infiltrating enemy forces, or anything that would require hiding behavior patterns to be in your skill set. There's no doubt in my mind that behavior profiling would be more effective than random selection to go through a scanner.
I second this. If I could tack on premium content to my Netflix subscription for a fee I'd do it, as long as it didn't shoot the price up over cable. I was actually thinking the other day stations like HBO and Showtime should be doing this already, I'm sure I'm not the only one who would pay a few dollars to get new episodes of Spartacus and Dexter without paying the insane price of cable that I haven't even plugged into my TV since I moved in January.
Communism in it's purest form would work, the problem is we always have to involve people, and as we've all seen only people who will abuse power and use it strictly to benefit themselves ever have the drive to take a position of power. This is also why democracies, republics, monarchies, dictatorships, and every other form of government fail to adequately govern people; even when they start off well, bad people will inevitably take control and turn it into something terrible. No form of government, or lack there of as in anarchy, is inherently evil. It's people that are evil.
It's always looked to me like Adobe realizes the obvious, that the people pirating their software wouldn't be buying it anyway even if there was no other choice. It's widely used by hobby artists mainly because of piracy, otherwise they'd simply be forced to use a cheap or free alternative. I tend to think the situation is not all that different from piracy in other industries, most people who download things without paying would not have bought them even if downloading wasn't an option.
I'm wondering if this means the same is true for all broadband. Obviously there will always be heavier users, and I think everyone here knows they need to worry more about upgrading infrastructure and less about how to limit users to make it work as it is, but could they realistically NEED to increase their capacity within the next few years to avoid having their pipes always clogged by what's become regular usage?
Admittedly, this isn't news to anyone who's read even a little Chomsky or the like, but the vast majority of America is ignorant of all this because they have to go looking for the information. There isn't anything being published that we didn't already know or couldn't figure out, just like with the last set of documents about Afghanistan and Iraq, but most of the US (and much of the rest of the world, I suspect) needs to have it thrown in their faces before they'll believe it. It's sad that it takes controversy like what Wikileaks is stirring up just to get people to pay attention. I'm not saying this is the best way to change things, or that it'll work, but it's an attempt and I think the benefits to getting this information out there outweighs the cost.
I think there was an exception, fairly recently...
Which has always been, and will still be, included in your initial purchase price. Enough trying to justify Intel's actions by comparing it to what HP or IBM did in the past. I don't know the details surrounding mainframes sold with additional hardware to be activated later, but it could just as easily be as wrong as this is. You're not understanding why this is a problem. The problem here is that in order for Intel to appropriately price the chip so they'll make money, they have to assume not everyone will buy the upgrade. In fact they should assume most people won't buy the upgrade. So if the actual value of the upgrade is $50, and they assume 20% of people will buy the upgrade, they have to recover $40 per chip sold, meaning that $40 will just get tacked onto the initial purchase price. Right there, is where we all get ripped off. If they can afford to let people not upgrade the chip, it means they've included the actual cost in the chip price already, and that's the rip off. If you don't upgrade, then $40 of your chip price goes to cover hardware you're not using, and if you do upgrade, then $40 of the $50 you paid is actually to recover money lost due to other people not upgrading. If you still don't understand the problem, I can't help you.
My Macs have been able to do this for some time now, and not just in "small testbeds or simulations," so what's new? Oh, I know! Microsoft is going to take an existing technology, that works rather well in my experience, and they're going to turn it into a bloated software package that costs more than the hardware you run it on, but never actually works right without the use of additional third party hardware and software, and then it'll get praised by mindless Windows jockies claiming that Apple's version was "too simple" and only good for people who don't understand how to run Windows properly.
Wait... what?
1. Where does Verizon's $30 data plan say there's a cap? Oh it doesn't, it says it's unlimited. I'm looking at the plans now. There's a 25mb service, and unlimited, and unlimited is even required for alot of phones. So, that first point of yours, yeah, wrong. You're paying for unlimited, but you're not getting it.
2. Fair enough.
3. I wouldn't call it debatable any more than the earth being flat. Yes, it's unfair to judge based on speed alone, you can't really say speeds are available to any number of people unless their available to all of them at once. What's offered around the US is typically shared connections, so your neighborhood has a great broadband connection, but when the guy next door is abusing it your connection slows to a crawl. I'm not saying it's not shared connections anywhere else, but with so much more bandwidth available you're able to get the consistent speed you should.
Now on to the article. Anyone who claims we don't need to upgrade our infrastructure but that ISPs should be allowed to throttle heavy users is contradicting themselves. If heavy users need to be throttled, it's because the infrastructure needs to be upgraded to handle the heavy loads. He comes off as the type of guy who would accept huge tax breaks while agreeing to upgrade infrastructure without ever actually doing it. Not that that would ever actually happen.
Last time I signed up for Comcast (a long while ago, I admit) they gave me three options for a cable modem: Rent one of theirs, buy one of theirs, or provide my own. That last option is the key here. If I was allowed to provide my own modem, why wouldn't I be allowed to use a modified one? The way I figure, if Comcast (or any other company) relies on the user's hardware to impose limitations, and they then provide their own hardware that doesn't include the ability to impose such limitations, the user hasn't broken any laws, nor has the provider of the modified modem. The exception to this would be if the agreement with the internet provider states you can't use modified hardware or hardware that can't impose the limitations the require, but even in this case the hardware provider shouldn't be charged only the end user who agreed not to use the hardware. As near as I can figure, this is just another case of America, Inc. using the legal system to support big companies. I'm not a lawyer, or expert in any way shape or form, but it seems to me that two things should happen here: this man should be allowed to walk, and internet providers should start capping bandwidth from their own routers and not the users' hardware. Sure, they might not have the hardware in place to already do this, weren't internet providers supposed to be trying to upgrade our national network infrastructure anyway?
Obviously you've yet to interact with the mysterious beings known as "women" or you'd realize that the typical woman has fragile emotions. Imagine that they did this to your mother, or grandmother, and how they would react. I honestly can't even continue because frankly, it's making me mad that people like you are out there convincing any possible alien observers that we're still to stupid to handle a formal greeting.
Your comparisons are ridiculous. A search warrant grants officers access to anything that is valid to the search. Meaning, when they search your house for a gun, they can reasonably search through your physical possessions, anything that could contain or be hiding said gun. They absolutely can not, however, search data on my hard drive for a gun, as it wouldn't be a reasonable place to find an actual gun. If the warrant states that they're searching for evidence of a gun, and they have reason to believe said evidence is in digital form and sitting on my hard drive, then they can search it.
So let me clear this up for you. Believe it or not, officers shouldn't be using the bathroom or sitting on the couch in the house they're searching, as they could potentially be contaminated or destroying evidence. Nobody wants to be the a-hole that flushes the last of the guy's coke down the can. The doors and the floor, they require access to those in order to conduct the search for the drugs. The wii... where does the wii fit in... Oh, right, the Wii had to be searched so the officers could determine if he was on drugs while playing in the past, so they had to create comparison scores by themselves, both on and off drugs, and then... Don't be an idiot. If your house is being searched the officers do not have the right to use your stuff, they have the right to conduct the search and that's all. Even if they didn't use any of his things, the simple fact that officers were playing games while conducting the search shows them to be unprofessional and arguably irresponsible, so irresponsible in fact that they can't be trusted to accurately document evidence. Or so any half-wit lawyer could argue, and likely win.
What they did was wrong in a number of ways, and the officers who were playing the game as well as their superiors should be reprimanded. Sure, they're just people too, but they're people who chose to become officers of the law, they chose a life that holds them to a higher standard, and they need to meet that standard or step down.
Amazon is still to blame for the act of removing his book, but I'm certain any schoolteacher will tell you the same thing, it's ultimately your own responsibility to handle your own work. Everyone else didn't lose their copy of 1984, and it's nobody's fault but his own for relying on his Kindle. It's no different than if you had a dog named Amazon who chewed up your real copy and threw up worthless post-it notes with your notes, it's the dog's fault he ate it but that doesn't get you off the hook.
The point I was trying to get across in the second paragraph is that he would rather sue Amazon than put forth the effort to complete his project regardless, as any other situation would have required. This one just opens up a new option, blame a big business and make some money.
Would the distribution of 1984 in this case be the same as distributing any other stolen property? If that's the case, then Amazon wouldn't have the right to take it back (unless the contract between users and Amazon said they could) but the police could. I'm inclined to believe that this young man has a solid case, as would any other Kindle user who had purchased 1984. Amazon did something illegal, their users had no idea and really no way of knowing without doing more research than anyone should have to just to buy a book. I'm sure the US Courts will decide otherwise, but I think Amazon should be held responsible for everything that occurred because of their own illegal act, and therefore should have to pay damages in any scenario like this one. That's not to say they should have to pay everyone beyond the refund, but if it can be proven that more damage was caused by the removal of the book then yeah, users should be entitled to something.
That said, time to bash Americans. Fat, lazy, stupid, and everyone wants to sue everyone else for everything. Yeah, Amazon may have screwed this kid over, but data loss is something everyone should be prepared for today. It's still ultimately his own fault for relying on an electronic device, if it crashed and he lost his data he wouldn't have a right to sue then and he'd be in the same boat. This is just another case of one prick suing a bunch of other pricks, when really they're all wrong.
Every day I grow more ashamed of the citizens of my country. While I know not all Americans are bad, the vast majority have this false idea that they're better than everyone, entitled to more for less, and it makes us all look like shitheads. Look, we even think "American" means "US Citizen," forget about those other countries throughout the American continents.
It's stated that a user must sign an admission of guilt before reconnecting service, I don't see how that isn't a breach of due process. I'm not a lawyer or an expert, but could one logically conclude that this business is using it's unique position of power to force users to wave their right to a free trial? I read another comment where someone claims it could be an infringement to one's basic human rights, and while I don't quite agree, I think it's an infringement of our legal rights. Karoo is the only provider of wired broadband internet access for these people from what I can tell, and really dial-up and satellite are not feasible options for alot of users, especially those that need a good reliable connection for work with any amount of speed. I know this still isn't forcing a user to admit guilt, but their options are slim unless they choose to go without the internet. Cutting off service is nothing new, but perhaps they should be required to seek more than just any "suspicion" considering that really leaves no need for evidence to back the decision and can be done on the whim of an employee who may just be having a bad day. Or, at the very least, they shouldn't require an admission of guilt, just a contract stating you won't share copyrighted files illegally and if you do you can be held legally responsible. Please, pick that apart and respond, I want to know how far off I could be with this one. Or how right it is...