Your wife may not have committed the crime the police were investigating, but she may have committed several crimes by making the recordings. If your wife didn't need a lawyer before, she likely does now.

Unfortunately, in order for that to happen, a case would have to go to trial. It appears the police departments involved have been smart enough not to let any of these cases actually go to trial. I remain optimistic that, when one of these cases finally does make it to trial, courts will in fact interpret the law consistently with loads of case law that have found that an individual in a public space has no expectation of privacy. Hopefully, the court will throw in there the public good that is served by videotaping law enforcement officials in the line of duty as well. But I'm not as confident in that one actually happening.

...I'd bet a lot of money that napkins hold up BETTER than hard drives and floppy drives for data retention. It's hard to beat ink on paper for longevity.

This doesn't explain it.

American consumers are watching companies abandon customer service and outsourcing these functions to overseas companies that employ call-takers that have no knowledge of the products they support, no ability to do any real troubleshooting, and no authority to give any help at all outside the script on their desk.

India isn't the cause of the problem; it's the symptom. When we call and talk to someone in India, we're not upset at India, we're upset at the company we're trying to do business with, which has let us down. Talking to someone in India is simply the indication that the company we're working with doesn't care about us as customers.

I'd be happy if they'd just provide competent support, at any price. We have ~10,000 SUN servers and Oracle is happy to let my servers sit out of production for weeks at a time when they can't figure out the cause of a problem. If my software platform didn't have redundancy built in at the application layer I'd be losing millions of dollars a month to this. Dell, HP, or IBM would replace a server if they couldn't get it back into production. Not Oracle. Oracle will "research" the problem for weeks on end while my server sits, powered up, but out of production.

It wouldn't. But neither would an antivirus program.

The Gameduino handles the video output. Any input device you'd like can be connected to the Arduino that's running the show.

Maybe VMWare was doing something that the documentation says you shouldn't do, and the security patch came along and actually started enforcing what the documentation said. Don't be so quick to judge MSFT. Without further details it's not possible to know whose fault this is (as if assigning blame is productive).

Since when can the courts only use 'public' information as evidence? This whole thread is based on a flawed premise.

So I report you to DHS as a terrorist. No evidence to support my claim, just an anonymous tip. For the rest of your life, you're subjected to additional screening and harassment every time you fly. You have no recourse to clear your name. You have no idea how your name got on the watch list. For the rest of your life you learn to show up at the airport an hour earlier than everyone else does and see everyone in the security line looking at you, getting your extra pat-down, wondering, "I wonder that that guy did." And your civil liberties are not at stake?

If you were an author, songwriter, or other artist who produced copyrighted works to feed your family, maybe you'd understand that for some people, this *is* an issue to fight over like it's a matter of life and death.

Antitrust lawsuits start flying.

I came here to say this. Me: "Don't track me." Them: "Thanks for visiting our website! In order to know whether or not we should track you, please tell us who you are." In order for this to work, the web would have to abandon any pretense of anonymity. Which do you think is the lesser of two evils? I know where my vote goes.

Price has nothing to do with cost. It's all about supply and demand. Verizon, like any other company, will price their products at what they believe the market will bear.

...my ISP starts punishing me for using the Internet to do legal things that the Internet was designed for?