"getting innocent people convicted"

The guy was not innocent.

He was guilty, just that the charge was overstated for the offense.

Keep things in perspective.

Modifying equipment to get a higher level of service than was paid for is, in fact, stealing. Morally and legally.

And the argument that just because (fill in the blank) is going on and is much more serious, we shouldn't prosecuted lesser crimes...well, that's not exactly logical or desirable either.

Take the shoplifter I mentioned earlier, just because we have bank robberies going on, does that mean police shouldn't arrest shoplifters? If it was my music store, I'd sure as hell be angry and raising hell at City Hall if the local police said that to me.

Now, do I think they should trick them into incriminating themselves for more serious charges just to pad felony arrest numbers?

Absolutely not.

A shoplifter is told that the court will look positively on his cooperation after being arested, and then is asked did he intend to steal the item(s) when he entered the store, or did he decide to steal them once inside the store.

He admits he went there to steal the item.

Petting theft just turned into Felony Commercial Burglary (Burglary being defined in California Penal Code as entering a premises with the intent to commit larceny).

Will it get pled down? Now he HAS to plea it down and take whatever they offer to avoid a felony record.

Saw this exact scenario play out when a college student was busted stealing a $20 CD.

Beagleboard includes 256MB of DDR RAM, and 256MB of NAND Flash. 1GB of DDR2 ram is $15.00 for the Ion board. So yeah, maybe a little off, but the small amount more gives you a huge difference in system performance, and for HiDef media, the difference would be night and day for what amounts to a small difference in cost.

Forgot to mention the $172 and $190 prices include a mini-pci-e wireless card installed. And with a low cost M350 Mini-ITX case, you can mount the system on the tv itself using the wall mounts.

Personally, I think this isn't a very attractive option at all. The Beagleboard is.roughly $150? The Zatec Ion board (Intel Atom dual core processor using Nvidia's Ion chipset) is around $172 ($190 with the powerbrick), cheaper if you go for the single core version. And would far out perform the Beagleboard.

Not just complicated, but impossible. You can't pass laws that retroactively revoke immunity. The immunity for acts committed up until the enactment of any law that removes the immunity cannot be revoked.

The most they could do is make it so that any future acts are not covered by immunity.

There isn't even any room to wiggle on this point, it is a simple fact of US Constitutional law.

The constitution does not call for "separation of church and state" as it is so often misrepresented. It simply says that the Government cannot respect one religion over another. Freedom OF religion, not freedom FROM religion (And for the record, I'm not a believer in any religion)

Not all legal judgments can be discharged via bankruptcies. The judgment holder can file an adversary complaint and oppose the discharge of the judgment debt. Judgments related to normal debt issues can almost always be discharged via bankruptcies (i.e., you own a credit card company, they sue, get a judgment, that judgment can be resolved via the bankruptcy), but since the RIAA judgment alleges injury related to misconduct, they can argue to have their judgment considered outside of the bankruptcy process, and avoid its discharge.

You miss the point. You seem to think that discussing the bad decisions by a software publisher and being annoyed/angry about them, and discussing the hows and whys is because of a sense of entitlement.

You are wrong to make that leap.

Does Google have the RIGHT to require you to run an updater to use their software? Sure, provided they are DISCLOSING what they are doing and what you are agreeing to (something that was NOT the case until the last couple of days).

Does that make their demand acceptable?

No.

And every time you rerun one of the google apps, it reloads the updater and sets it to auto run again.

So no, this isn't a solution.

So Google gets to run a stay resident updater. Now, every other software publisher whose software you have installed starts to do the same. That 500k is now 500k x # of Publishers.

Offer the updater, to those like you who want it. But provide a means to disable it, or change its behavior, for those who choose to do that.

Google is offering no choice in the matter except to not use their software at all.