'Tis indeed a drama, but the real telling question is: To whom does the WebOS division/group/team report in the organization?

The answer to that question often speaks volumes for future plans for a line of business.

The link is to a scribd page, not a PDF, and scribed--a you-can't-copy-this-document publishing solution--uses a UI that sucks for many people.

Were it a PDF, it probably would have been fine. Perhaps we should check our facts before we jump all over the person.

Naaaaaaaaa! (Apologies to Steve Martin...)

Money orders, checks, and credit cards are not legal tender, either, but many court-imposed payments may be made with them.

OTOH, pennies are legal tender, but don't try paying your taxes (or tolls--except in Illinois) with them!

Legal tender or not, refusing to accept proffered payment can have some interesting legal ramifications, but are not the be-all, end-all answer to the question.

From what I've seen, courts pretty much set their own rules on what payments they will (or will not) accept. Ignore their rules at your peril.

Their trademark.

No, I don't think so. Intellectual Property, perhaps, but the takedown request, which may be seen by following one of the links in TFA, specifically mentions "17 U.S.C. sect. 501", which is copyright, not trademark law. (For trademark law, see the Lanham Act, 15 U.S.C.)

This really looks like they think he's distributing their property. He should take a deep breath and send them a letter, clearly stating that he's doing no such thing.

Here are what appear to be the salient points of Atari's letter:

I was curious about that myself. This is the second /. article mentioning him in the last 5 hours or so. How did he manage that, I wonder?

No, SecuROM really is DRM, just like CSS or region encoding on a commercial video DVD. Anything that restricts free, unencumbered use of digital media is Digital Rights Management (some say Digital Restrictions Management).

SecuROM can be used by the publisher as simple copy protection (by verifying unusual data written to the disc), it can perform date checks and disallow use of the package before a certain date, it can "phone home" to request permission to install, or it can count the number of installations and prevent any that exceed a pre-set limit.

If it phones home and the validation server is not reachable (or says "no"), you can't play your game. I'm sorry but that doesn't sound like it "preserves your rights" at all; it sounds to me like it thwarts them.

I have no hatred of SecuROM (or any other DRM system) provided the limitation are spelled out to me before I buy. What I hate are surprises.

In all of Bethesda's previous games, the answer to that would be an unambiguous 'yes'. They haven't indicated anything to suggest different for Skyrim.

No, not quite all. While the original Oblivion was fairly unprotected, the Shivering Isles expansion and the GOTY Edition DO contain the dreaded SecuROM DRM. AFAIK, it does not "phone home" like some other titles, but it's there, nevertheless and will prevent use of some drive emulators and utilities like ProcessExplorer.

In my experience, the COST of security matters much less to people than does the INCONVENIENCE it entails. Many organizations are quite willing to spend money on security hardware, software, and services. Secure implementations can be defeated by authorized users who either perceive the security as inconvenient or unnecessarily harsh ("I'm not going to lock my screen before I get coffee; I'll only be gone for a couple of minutes.")

One solution might consist of better user training coupled with better security design (protect truly secret data but don't worry about disclosure of information freely obtainable by outsiders via mechanisms like FOIA, stockholder inquiry, etc.)

It's a challenge, regardless of what you have to protect--or how you choose to protect it.

That's an AOL--not a Google--search that you linked. Nevertheless, the problem reported on that page seems to indicate a misconfigured or malfunctioning mail gateway, not a DNS problem. Since you didn't post any details, I can't tell anything about the problem you were having.

Yeah, it's really an awkward usage of the word "quashes". We're not speaking Middle English, so it's probably safe to stick with modern usage. Since one really doesn't "void", "vacate", "suppress", "defeat" or "smash" software bugs, I can only imagine the wording was an attempt to humorously play on the word "bugs", in which case a better word might have been "squashed" or "squished".

Just my $0.02...
 

Please remember that disclosing classified material is only illegal if the person has a security clearance. Once the material is made public (i.e. leaked), possession of it by a non-cleared person is not a statutory violation unless, of course, that person used illegal means to obtain it (e.g. breaking and entering).

(You may have trouble with the Special Rendition team, though...)

Conceivably, though, possession AND DISCLOSURE of, say, TS/SCI information could rise to the level of treason, particularly if the data was sold.

While Amazon may have a contractual obligation to do what they did, I don't believe they were legally required to do so.

Perhaps you should read Executive Order 13526 (and 13292, perhaps). Issued in 2009 and 2003, respectively, they codify (alongside 32 C.F.R. 2001), the United States' legal framework for protecting classified data. All of them are quite a bit newer than Thoreau's writing.