The rest of us may gape in amazement at the fact that you're willing to shell out a premium for an inferior product, but that's fine as long as you believe it isn't inferior.

...and some of us will gape in amazement that you're willing to subject yourself on a permanent basis to a vastly inferior operating system just to save a few bucks on cheap hardware. Lotta gaping going on WRT both sides of the coin, apparently. :)

Nor was the new testament written and compiled over 2000 years.
More like 40 years max for both.

The NT has appeared in many distinctly different versions. Bishop's bible, King James, and so on. Because of the nature of the source material (Greek, Latin, Aramaic) the act of translation is prone to producing differences. The "modern" versions often read quite differently.

For instance, Matthew 5:18:

King James: For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

God's Word: I can guarantee this truth: Until the earth and the heavens disappear, neither a period nor a comma will disappear from Moses' Teachings before everything has come true.

New Living Translation: I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not even the smallest detail of God's law will disappear until its purpose is achieved.

...and so on. And that's without the various doctrinal interpretations that vary over the years and the various people who further interpret the text to others.

Those differences can be huge. The context of the above is with regard to the continued relevance of the laws of the old testament. Jesus (the speaker) says that until heaven and earth pass away (which I think we can go with "hasn't happened yet"), the law remains in place. But that doesn't stop entire Christian sects from trying to claim that the OT has been superseded in its entirety by the NT.

Notice that I very carefully said secure against a certain attack in my previous post. You are talking about something different to breaking the encryption technically: the xkcd attack, which any large organisation with weapons can apply, but not covertly and not without consequences if they try to apply it systematically against innocent people.

Well, if it worked for Cardinal Richelieu...

If you're locked up for years, despite having done nothing wrong, I'm not sure I see much difference.

Hang a lighter-than-air balloon off the top of the elevator. If the balloon pops, the force is released from the balloon cable (which can be very short) and the brake engages. No counterweight or long cable required. Now you have the same energy requirements for lift (because the balloon is countering the weight of the unloaded elevator) and you can go back to considering how to create rack and pinion out of short rail sections (to allow for flex) plus power pickup of some kind (induction is an excellent candidate, because you can ensure that the energy pickups are very close to the sources during all operations. Fractions of an inch should be entirely practical.)

The only real problem is all of our bloody balloons leak. :)

If you dont like it, dont look at it, its not that complicated.

Historically speaking, in the USA, it's been quite complicated: here, it's "if you don't like it, make a law against it" and that's about the way it continues to stand. How many cities and towns have rules about which magazines can be visible behind the counter? What about the FCC's various forbidden words? What about laws like "you can't put a flagpole / antenna / old car on your lawn"? And so on.

There used to be a saying, something about it being better to let ten guilty men go free than to imprison one innocent one.

Tragically, in today's culture of politics dominated by fear, it almost seems like everyone is presumed to be guilty of something. That means the idea that it might be necessary to protect someone who might actually be innocent, or simply to leave them alone to live their lives without interference, is not given a lot of thought.

Your position seems reasonable enough from an ethical/moral standpoint. Unfortunately, in reality, a device or communication channel is either secure against a certain attack or it isn't. There is not and never can be a middle ground of being secure against a certain attack unless that attack has been lawfully authorised by a competent court.

In short, if the government wants access to your encrypted information, even with appropriate oversight, then it must require your information to be insecure and therefore vulnerable to other parties accessing it as well. If the government wants to encourage security in communications, then it must accept that covert interception of those communications will no longer be possible. You can't eat your cake and have it.

In the US, the concepts of censorship and freedom of speech are inextricably bound up with speech to, for, and about government. It is not something that extends to the private sector in any legal sense. For instance, you have a case when you observe that the FCC won't let you say words 1-7 because that is actually government censorship and the 1st amendment does not contain, suggest or imply exceptions for unpopular or offensive speech. But you don't have a case when I apply exactly the same restriction in some non-governmental venue I control.

IOW, there's no legal requirement at all that I allow you to say whatever you want in my home. There's no requirement at all that I allow you to say whatever you want in a comment on my blog. And there's no legal requirement that Facebook must allow you to say anything in particular, either, or even that it allows you membership.

That doesn't mean you can't judge them on that basis; and therein lies the basis for "toleration", but it does mean that legally speaking, you don't have any support at all. All you can gain are the opinions you can sway -- and here in the US, anyway, the majority has long since demonstrated it does not care if Facebook controls its content and its membership and the identities used.

He just wants to make a mainstream product, which means conforming to the mainstream social norms - no matter what country you are operating in. This is not a big deal.

I take it you do not understand the concept of the tyranny of the majority. It's not exactly an insignificant issue, particularly when it is used to prohibit speech by whoever isn't popular with the majority as Facebook does.

When Facebook's TOS disallows gays from being members in places where fundamentalist Islam is dominant, will you continue to defend them? How about women? If women are forbidden to post and/or become members, is that ok?

Where should we draw the line between "we should keep some channels open for the privileged" and "we'll not be enabling that kind of repression"?

I suspect that in fact we probably agree on most of this issue then. The difficulty in this sort of case is that merely having a copy of software or other digital work (and thus fitting in just fine with traditional copyright law) is not sufficient to make that work useful if it has been artificially crippled with some sort of phone home functionality.

By its nature, that functionality might depend on a third party. That third party might have had nothing to do with the original sale to the person using the software/digital work. They may or may not want to make the software/work usable by the purchaser for commercial reasons. Most importantly at present, they may have no actual legal obligation to make the work useful even if every other deal in the process has been completely above board.

This creates a potential problem of abuse with DRM schemes, leading to the sort of case we've been discussing. It's also a real liability in terms of lots of things breaking if the authorising system is taken off-line and potentially its owning organisation isn't even there any more to be held responsible and make amends.

Sadly, I suspect there are about three elected representatives in the universe who are even close to understanding these issues. They have nowhere near enough influence to raise this issue at high levels within their legislative bodies alone, and even if they did, they'd be up against Big Software and Big Media concerned about copyright infringement and bribing other officials with substantial contributions to look that way first.

You're falling into the trap of confusing ethics and the law. Whatever you -- or I, since I expect we'd agree -- think of the ethics of the situation, so far I haven't seen anything to suggest their actions in not respecting keys used other than under the conditions they were sold with is actually illegal. The law with respect to digital purchases, DRM, and remote access/activation schemes may be some anachronistic dinosaur, but if it's the law right now then complaining about the action on a forum like Slashdot isn't going to change that.

Maybe, but for better or worse, the situation today is that Ubisoft is effectively empowered to "confiscate" keys acquired through illegitimate channels in violation of whatever terms of sale or licensing agreements those keys came with.

Now, you might argue that the law should be updated to address the rights of customers buying digital products in a more even-handed way. If you did, I'd be the first to agree. But even then, it's hard to see why those rights would or should protect someone with the digital equivalent of stolen property. If you wanted to legitimise reselling keys across borders as a matter of policy then you'd probably also need an explicit change so that DRM schemes attempting to prevent cross-border trade were prohibited and anyone operating them on a commercial basis was required to honour otherwise valid keys for any sort of activation or customer support purposes.