Technically, he is the one who actually viewed the child pr0n. I think they'd have a pretty good case for that as well as the breaking and entering and theft charges.

My guess? He left some physical evidence on the drive itself.

<sarcasm>The obvious right answer here is to never let your wife leave the house. If she's barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, no one will get obsessed with her and try to break into your house to plant evidence against you.</sarcasm>

Your response didn't make a lot of sense in places, so I'll just reply to the one part that did. Yes, we are the people, but so are they. Just because you feel like copyrights get in the way of you being able to do what you want doesn't mean that copyrights are wrong, and doesn't give you the right to simply ignore them. You do not have the right to say that they can't try to make a profit off their creative work. There is no right to free entertainment.

Furthermore, you state that "More people have voted against copyright as we know it than have voted for any political candidate in history." When did these votes take place? I wasn't aware that copyright has been put before the voting public in recent history. I'd love to see a reference that backs up your statement.

Finally, I'm inclined to side with you, that these people could be considered to be an advertising resource. However, the copyright owner is not obliged to view them that way. I can't fault them for trying to get money from those who have illegally copied their work, and actually, I think that suites of this scale might encourage copyright owners to use more realistic values for damages.

So, using the legal system to go after people who are misusing their copyrighted works is abusing the legal system? What are they supposed to do? Give up making money at something they enjoy? I never had a problem with the **AA suing people in court over their IP being misappropriated. My contention was with their "accounting" practices in estimating piracy and it's effects, and the monetary "damages" they were claiming.

Most of us did tell him that years ago. He refused to listen. Better late than never, I guess.

I think his point is that there is more ways to do multiplayer than free-for-all or team deathmatch. Left 4 dead and borderlands are some great examples of co-op multiplayer, though certainly not the oldest examples (diablo, for example, featured co-op multiplayer as well).

Yeah, apparently you're only allowed to help lost children if your a woman. Obviously a man trying to help a kid is just grooming...

I've found that developers make ridiculously poor system administration decisions. Something that seems acceptable to set up on a development machine is not necessarily something you'd want to do on a production system.

Actually, $1 billion is between 5% and 10% of the states operating budget, and is approximately 50% of their losses in 2008 due to the economy. Hardly a drop in the bucket.

This is exactly the reason Ubuntu has created the LTS release. The supported lifetime of the LTS release is geared towards businesses that don't need to be on the bleeding edge.

I second the motion computing. The ones I've seen at work also include a detachable USB keyboard, so you have a faster input device on hand when it's needed.

Without any complaints from Apple? Are you living in the same world I'm living in? Apple constantly breaks these third party apps with each new version of iTunes. They're like the kid on the playground with the ball, who really doesn't want the other kids to play with it. To play with the ball, you gotta play by their rules, but they keep changing the rules to make sure they win.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not condoning what Palm did. I just don't think anyone is in the right in this situation. Palm has proven it, there's really no reason to have to rely on third party apps to integrate with iTunes, other than that's the way Apple wants it.

It's like I tell my kids: It'd be nice, and I'd prefer it, if they shared, but really, it's their toy, and I can't make them.

Yeah, but it's not the tasing that people remember, it's the physical violence against him.

The other thing is that the Taser works a longer range than the baton, and so doesn't require the officer to put himself into the suspects range. It subdues a suspect faster than the use of a baton, and doesn't have that "Rodney King" stigma attached (though it's rapidly gaining its own level of infamy).