//whhhhhooossssshhhhhhh//

I believe the prior art he was blatantly infringing upon can be found here:

http://patimg2.uspto.gov/.piw?Docid=00096681&idkey=NONE ...and that, kind sir, was the whole buggery point.

The wireless spectrum is publicly owned and is only leased to private interests.

I know this isn't Fark... but, uhm... THIS.

In the EU, you don't exit university and start your professional career effectively bankrupt. No other financing arrangement you will ever have in life simply writes you checks for an essentially intangible asset, granting pretty well anyone the same credit line with no regard to the value of the asset or the individual's ability to repay it -- and then as a matter of law make it impossible to ever discharge that debt if you fall flat on your face. This is a worse combination of adverse selection and moral hazard than the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

Primarily because of scale. It would be more honest to compare, say, people going to California and Texas vs. people going to France or Germany. Start talking about U.S. vs. Europe as a whole and the numbers aren't so striking anymore.

For your edification:

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Tertiary_education_statistics ..and further:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_Index ...wherein incidentally, the United States ranks on a par with Lithuania, just above Kazakhstan, and just below Slovenia.

It certainly was with me. Technical expertise required has been absolutely minimal for quite some time.

I've always been, and still am, paranoid that my (hypothetically) jailbroken phone will be bricked or otherwise have its functionality reduced, e.g. no more access to the App Store, iTunes, or developer account. I especially have little faith that this invalidates the last of those. I can definitely see how this sensibly guarantees your legal use of the phone on your own, but I don't see how this prevents Apple from telling you to piss off, take your toys and stay out of their playground.

Yes, it refreshes because the BIG GODDAMNED SHINY "AUTO-REFRESH" option at the top is set to "ON," dipshit. The whole fucking point is that you're following along LIVE and want the newest comments at the top so you don't have to keep scrolling to the bottom.

Down to more tangible scale, it is roughly 3 grams per square meter. A typical cube of sugar is roughly 4 grams. Now consider that's just surface area, not volume. You're not going to be able to see much of it even if you're swimming in it.

I really don't see this as terribly evil.

I currently pay $50/month for my "unlimited" laptop card, which burns through about 5-6GB per month watching movies on Netflix and TV on Hulu etc., and another $30/month for the iPhone data plan, which uses about 1GB. So, for 7GB, I'm paying $80, which is pretty ridiculous. However, if I signed up as a new customer today, I could ditch the laptop card and just use tethering -- and pay precisely the same amount of money.

If I got an iPad all else equal sans tethering, I'd have to shell out yet another $30/month for another redundant modem, bringing my data outlay to $110. Under the new terms, that'd be 10GB for even money if I just used tethering. As a new customer, that would also save me $120 on the iPad and another $100 for my laptop, because I'd just run them all through my phone. In two years, that means I'd actually be $10/month ahead of where I would be otherwise.

Now, if I tried to sell, say, my mom on getting this same collection, she'd scoff at $110/month and write-off the idea of bothering with any of it. She'd also scoff at $250 of superfluous radios. But, given the entry model WiFi-only iPad, $100 iPhone 3G, her existing computer and twenty bucks a month to tether them all up and poke around? Sold. That's precisely the market they're trying to tap. It's right there in the press release: almost no one -- on iPhones -- uses more than 2GB. To get more customers like that, they've got to lower the entry price, which is precisely what this change does.

I fail to see how that is evil.

Form of, a jackass:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann

"Seriously, what was the argument for concluding that his boss or boss's boss didn't qualify as an authorized user?"

Your average "peer" wouldn't have the foggiest idea why this is an astoundingly naive question. In many matters, even being cleared for a particular piece of information does not mean that you are actually permitted access to it at any time of your choosing and accessing it at an inappropriate time, though you are "authorized" in general, the inappropriate circumstances can land you in criminal court. Personally identifiable information in databases being a good example. I have access to tens of millions of records. I am NOT permitted to just go browsing through them at will. The _circumstances_ of how I handle that data could in many cases get me fired and in quite a few land me in jail for a /VERY/ long time. If my boss asked me to dump a bunch of records for him and have me bring them on a USB stick to the bar across the street, you bet your ass I'd say no because we could /both/ land in the clink.

That they were not given a coherent, unambiguous and precise definition of this very critical term and were allowed to convict someone on criminal charges using a definition they necessarily just made up from whole cloth based on common sense and gumption is frightening as hell.

I pray this is reversed on appeal.

"That was the first aspect of it, the second aspect was the denial to an authorized user. And for us that's what we really had to spend the most time on, defining who an authorized user was. Because that wasn't one of the definitions given to us." ...and on that point alone, this conviction should be overturned, since it was the entire fracking point..

Few, if any, people are so selfless as to choose suicide over going to the ER full well intending on stiffing the bill. In many cases, they aren't even conscious enough to decide until the bill is a multiple of their annual income. It is this liability to others you are insuring against unless you intend to have "just kill me" tattooed on your forehead and a law passed allowing anyone passing you in distress to summarily dispatch you for the mere cost of a bullet.

Yet in DC/MD/VA, Blue Cross costs $89/month.

Anyone who has negotiated a software licensing purchase has had to agree to similar terms. Anyone who has after accepted a severance package has agreed to similar terms. Hell, anyone who has accepted an offer of salaried employment has done so. This is common in just about every type of contractual agreement.

Besides, anyone can go to developer.apple.com, click about three times and pull the thing up. There's about as much secrecy and coercion involved in reading a pay-walled article on the New York Times, so could we all GTF over it already?

The way every other member of your species has done in every conceivable field since time immemorial. You simply DO.

For the rest, here's a quick run-down:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFQkMAPVoIo