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.

In that case, perhaps it's more closely analogous to paying someone abroad to buy something cheap and ship it to you, but then complaining when your delivery arrives that you got charged the import taxes your oh-so-honest supplier didn't pay.

Sometimes things that look too good to be true really are, but usually there's a catch. Seeing a deal that good and not checking thoroughly for the catch is just asking for trouble.

Chargebacks can seriously hurt the affected merchants. For one thing, usually the merchant has to pay a fee on top of refunding the full amount for each individual chargeback, possibly losing that fee even if they subsequently challenge the chargeback and win. For another thing, an unusually high chargeback rate overall can result in much worse terms for future card payment services or even being denied the facility entirely, which for many businesses is effectively a mortal injury.

If it's Ubisoft that was taking the money directly, this hurts them directly. It potentially even follows their officers if they move to other businesses later as well. If it's not Ubisoft taking money directly, then it hurts their resellers, and word quickly gets around that being a reseller for Ubisoft is a lousy gig. Either way, Ubisoft are losing something.

All true, but paying actual money for a licence key at an unusually low price from an unlikely source is like paying five bucks for a 60" 4K TV off the back of a lorry. If you're the recipient of stolen goods, however unwitting, the law in most places will leave you empty-handed if the goods are identified and returned to their original owner, unless you can find and take legal action against whoever sold you the goods.

I'm not saying the situation doesn't suck for the innocent party, and I'm certainly not supporting Ubisoft's generally aggressive use of DRM, but in this case it does seem that the situation is exactly analogous on-line to how the law has worked in the real world for a long time.