They didn't. They said an arguably political paper "played a role in the prosecution" . They don't consider the paper political or they don't consider it the whole motivation. It's a short paper, probably worth reading so you can make up your own mind how wrong they were.

http://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt

>Law is a great thing until you realize you're on the wrong side of the line, at the wrong moment in time

Ever download something copywritten, participate in a fantasy football league or shower naked in Florida....criminal? If so it sounds like you were carrying a gun during the commission of a crime so the penalties are strengthened (ok not with the showering perhaps).

Law has progressed to the point where if you piss off a DA he can find something to charge you with. You are always on the wrong side when they want you to be.

Hey let's push the state into exempting out of state companies so we can get the exemption too. Oh crap, we just screwed it up for everyone and wasted millions in legal fees for a ruling that will get us nothing. Who could have ever guessed California would take the money grab option?

Welcome to life as a small business. I hope you're good at finding work for your robot.

V2.0, no doubt destined for Kickstarter momentarily courtesy of some local hacker, would probably have onboard storage for your data to deal with just such a concern.

No point, a market couldn't possibly compete with the illegal firmware you'll be able to download off of Pirate Bay.

If the information in any laptop (or desktop) could be worth tens of thousands in fines we might just see an increase in health care thefts and blackmail. Cheaper to pay to get the laptop back than to pay the fine if the data goes public.

Will they be happy if I send them 300 copies of Planetside2? There's a lot of shooting in that one.

Wouldn't you?

It's really amazing to take a look at the first strips then walk through as the artist has improved in technique and detail. There's an easy jump to the first strip. Compare that to the latest one. The difference is profound.

In Texas we call this list the phone book. Not published much any more.

China has had 4+ times the population of the US for a very long time. The real reason they haven't been ahead of the US in production for many decades is that the productivity of the people was squandered by political forces within the country. It was corruption at the highest level, trading the productive potential for political stability.

We have corruption too. Bad politicians who do sweetheart deals with contributors, crappy patent or copyright laws, lawsuits over unreasonable things with unreasonable settlements and banking malfeasance are all examples of our elements of corruption and there are many more. I think it's relative corruption that will decide if one population is a dozen times as effective as another. That means it will decide who's economy runs things in the 21st century.

[citation required] DC has gun laws but a high homicide rate. North Dakota has few laws but a low one. I know Mexico has strict laws that simply don't work.

The reasonable question I would ask is "What is the complete impact of stricter gun laws on crime." You then need to decide what mix of gun deaths, crime, cost, laws and civil liberties you want to go with. Just saying gun death rate reduction is the only acceptable goal is not a reasonable way to consider the whole question.

The problem is that the processing filled system appeals to the masses. Niche search - in this case defined as searches by people who know how to exactly specify what they mean with great precision - will never be as common as poorly specified searches that benefit from correction and prediction, even if it's done badly. Turning off such features would be wonderful but the demand for them to do so is probably pretty limited.

So the fourth column would be a combination of the fourth estate and the fifth column or in other words a government like organization that pretends to monitor the others and be on your side while actually setting you up to be sheared like a sheep. Great.