Modern society wants to categorize everything, even the various minutia of a given category have names for everything. As such, even if we take a single point (murder) and decide that some cases warrant different punishment (sentence scaling) then we've turned a simple thing like m^0 into m^1, and even if society can avoid breaking m^1 down into a calculus problem to assign punishments, there will inevitably be someone who looks at direction of intent to harm and the interplay between it. Even if we can accept that this turns m^1 into m^2 by virtue of this still-analogous system, people will want to break analog into digital, as a 'fuzzy' line can get people into more (or less!) trouble than should be if there is bias in the judge(s).

That's how a 'simple' act such as murder can be analyzed and go from a single point (biblical thou shalt not kill) to a graphical plane that's still imprecise to measure. Not so simple, even if many of these dimensions were interchangeable to other crimes, do we argue for hard-line sentence modification on the intent scale, or should the scale be relative to the perceived 'severity' of the crime? (there's m^3 - emotional responses to 'gruesome' murders) People, in general, think better with explicit rules than with multiple dimensions in their heads, so the current system of writing laws explicitly is the best they can come up with.

Also, it should be noted that overcoming individual bias is easy, overcoming social bias within a social system is nearly impossible in the context of a society. If the society has access to affect change in laws, laws will reflect the bias of the people making those changes. (but not everyone - abstinence-only-education anyone?) Overcoming social bias in a jury might happen if you can somehow systematically get 12 people to discuss and agree on verdict without facilitating groupthink. Something this current system is terrible at doing.

Exactly. Unfortunately, standards have not been adopted for laptop structure or parts that would allow this guy to jump to a competitor. That leaves him trying to buy an obscure part 2nd hand because the company in control of the only source of first-hand equipment seems to think that denying sale to someone who claims to have a laptop of theirs is a brilliant idea.

Personally, Dell has been on my blacklist for a long time, no one I know ever gets that brand as a positive recommend from me, and now Alienware will get the same treatment.

Harsh? Not in the least. When I had trouble with my ASUS motherboard, sure they wanted an SN, but I never had to go through the hassle of telling them ahead of time that I bought that serial numbered product before I called up tech support. The fact that there was a serial number and (perhaps) it didn't kick back an error in their system was enough for them to just help me solve my problem, AND I never have to deal with them AT ALL if I decide to drop it into a new case, I DON'T need their say-so.

Develop standards for laptop hardware and enforce them, and then you'll see the provider market change. It worked for desktops.

Mod parent up! I can't wait till someone gets wise and publishes a story similar to this.

On the other hand, I wonder if there's anything to gaming decentralized records, such as attracting attention in the northeast states, slipping off through the border, circumvent the globe, and arrive in LA to do the same shit all over again with reduced risk.

Of course, I've probably landed on at least one of their watch-lists for simply mentioning it, but hey, what does that say about their organization if some lay-person can see vulnerabilities in their practices?

Indeed, if the 'compatibility' issue was the signal sent when the hacker refused to run the content, what's to stop him from sacrificing a spare box to catching (DL and physically disconnect) the thing and prodding it? As amusing as that may be, it aught to be interesting to watch virus wars from a distance.

You may be right on capitalism being a good driving force of economies, the problem is min/maxing.

Think about it this way: without [crock]"socialist"[/crock] services like minimum wage, minimizing help to the people that run your industry and maximizing personal gain leads to tipping points like the riots of the 1920s. Industry leaders were dead set against minimum wage, if anyone recalls, and they still cry when it goes up to (hardly) match cost of living increases. You can't have a single blind pipe-vision concept of wealth concentration run amok without its weakness becoming so glaring that peasants can stop it.

To those who would argue otherwise, I say we're all in this together, and though some may know how to make people do work, they themselves would be worthless if their deeds pushed all their allies away. So suck it up, personal gain isn't the only thing you have to worry about.

Business as usual includes systematic behavior of the government passing itself off as a democracy, but publicly holds its structure as a republic, and privately runs post-election decisions as a plutocracy.

People see this behavior as corruption, when in reality it's the logical extreme result of individualistic culture in a republic.

Before you reflexively mark me a troll for suggesting such a thing, think this through: The bottle-neck, or choke-point for decision-making in republics lies in the representatives, who in addition to having 'constituents' from their home region, are promoted to those constituents by large profit centers. Should the promotion money dry up, a position of power is now likely under threat, your very livelihood could vanish at the whims of some 'rich' individual(s). In the interest of living life easier rather than harder election year to election year, politicians make sacrifices of their constituents' interests for the profit center's interest, or as they put it in Washington, the 'hard' choices behind legislation. I doubt this is done consciously (in most cases), and certainly it is never articulated like this, but this does happen.

There's ways to fix it, but none (so far) are easy, and nearly all involve subcultures who aren't individualistic in their behavior. The incumbent system is not friendly to such radical change, so either people will put up or get fed up. Hopefully the fed up ones will be smart, and not get arrested for insurrection, but instead start their project outside the US to foster new values.

Sure, the wording there from your citation is also important: two thirds of the senators present. If ACTA gets drafted, the 'on-board' senators will simply schedule a weekend or holiday session quietly and hope no one notices. Once in session, even if there's only 3 of them, they could call the vote unanimous of senators present. The treaty portion you quoted simply needs to be re-worded as follows to fix this:

He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the elected Senators concur;

Treaties are a big deal, and cannot be treated with enough seriousness for any country. If this loophole isn't fixed, you can literally kiss your virtual rights goodbye as corporate interests move to change our world to favor their greed and desire for control. Really, people, wake up.

Yes, this should be the way it falls out, but as has been mentioned, law lags WELL behind technology. FAT was allowed to be used with no consequence, a consequence of expecting people to use the platform you provided. MS didn't license the use of fat to every software developer that ever had to write a save function. If it did, the software industry today might be stuck somewhere in the early 90s, and MS would have killed itself by scaring away the good developers from wanting to write anything, and the corps away from overly complex domain intersections of legal and software before the business world was ready to consider such things.

Now that EULAs are a mainstay in business practice (and some trying to write them to override right of first sale), MS can easily pursue this line of legal action because it was 'always' their prerogative to do so. MS doesn't do things because they are right, they do them because the legal landscape permits them to. Now that they have monopolistic leverage and billions stored up in cash and assets, getting rulings against these actions is going to be difficult to say the least.

My suggestion would be to leverage the free software market to leverage the online community to sign or write for action requests and send them all to the appropriate geomapped governor/senator emails AS they roll into the servers. Microsoft wants to play hardball with lobbyists? Why not turn the entire 'net into a giant lobbyist machine with auto-forwards to elected emails? MS's consumer base is easily larger than any lobbyist base it could buy. Why can't we show officials, in this manner or something similar, that the paths MS has been pursuing and the lobbyists it hires are NOT in the democratic interests?

Has Nintendo ever considered that getting feedback on their recent crap might illuminate why people make the price zero? Renting is probably the best try-before-you-buy that you can legally get, and even if Nintendo makes % on that, the crap will always become much slower in making money, and the good stuff will result in a fresh sale.

I broke away from the Nintendo addiction I acquired as a kid, and have come to view them now as every other mega-corp. That is to say, yes, people need to eat, and money is what the food chain demands, but if your company is sitting on billions in excess (profit) each year, some 'lost revenue' for an easy, less costly try-before-you-buy system cannot be justifiably contested with such zeal. Not everyone does it, or company X would have been broke on the street. Take your profits, be happy.

The small game publisher who goes hungry from piracy activity gets my sympathy, companies making good profit despite piracy don't. And I'll tell you why: No one's, not even Nintendo's, market base is saturated with enough technical savvy to pull off a total piracy saturation. Anyone who's sought instructions on a Pandora battery knows this. Lop-sided? Yeah, but the tax system (as well as many other people/institutions) in America would treat them no differently; make more money, pay more of a share to support your consumers as a large group (country).

You make quite a few assumptions in your last statement. There are still MANY consumers here who just use IE because it came with the computer and it works well enough, AND have never heard that there are alternatives, let alone what firefox is.

As to your first comment, people have pointed out the competition angle, but consider also that when you connect to some site, your browser type is transmitted. Being the dominant search engine on the web, Google is in an excellent position to present statistical usage data across unique locations (look at it by MAC address). So, not only does it help Google, but they are now in a position to take a direct stab at the company that inspired their 'Do no evil' slogan. Now, whether this action is construed as evil on Google's part or not is up to the public, but at this point I look at it like the breaking point between two giants, and war is going to erupt.

Think about something like this plugged into hyperlocal shopping indexes. It would finally drive prices through the floor as you could have 2, 3, or 50 of these things doing your shopping for you, consulting your list of barred outlets/products, and choosing the cheapest of all your shopping list from the rest. The trade-off for most bargain hunters was often the time aspect of running to many stores, but something like this with a decent navigation software bundle could change that.

You are referring to 1st world countries, aren't you? Yeah, I'm sure the Congalese patrols (of either flavor) would love to put foreigners through all sorts of crap just for being there, but that should not compare with the inconvenience of casual border crossers from Canada being turned away (creating HUGE problems in Niagara/Buffalo) because the site didn't work on their blackberry, or they forgot to before they left home, or other such things. This will all but wipe out casual baby boomer border trade - half of them don't own a computer themselves let alone know how to follow these new rules about a website. Major ports bordering southern Ontario will see dramatic hits in commerce when this starts to be enforced, and may see a small recovery after that hickup, but after the first two years another big hit will occur as a portion of boomers throw up their hands and say it's not worth it to renew.

Surely someone else sees this?

Classic indeed. I think the business administration community has heard enough about this, however. I know someone who recently got her bachelors in business management, and I was kind of skimming along on her materials. Turns out this is one of the pitfalls of systems meant to test honesty - the problem becomes that humans who aren't paying attention often aren't thinking exactly like the PhD's of psychology thought they would when the generic test was constructed, and the rest will probe the machine and become smarter than the tool.

Instead, the course material pointed to the value of tests like Myers-Biggs, and hiring to positions that fit personality types to avoid workplace pressure, things like the outgoing creative thinker in a technical sales position or the introverted linear thinker in places like QA.

You can't yet test honesty with a computer program unless there are stakes, and by the time there are stakes, you're already getting gamed by the dishonest people. There may be a solution for this in the future, but for now, the system is being gamed.

My wife works at a company with that implemented, and it works out relatively well except for going in early (45 minute commute). We're done dinner by 6:30 most days, she misses most of the bulk of traffic by about 20 minutes in the evening, and the off Fridays are great for getting in extra errands to places that maintain similar hours to when we work, like our banks.

The downside is she gets up at 5:15 every morning and gets into work at about 6:45, to leave around 4 and miss traffic. But she's gotten used to it now and enjoys the Fridays off.

I agree, but I'm not holding my breath. Several months ago I sent a scathing letter to Nintendo customer service as I felt I got the short end of the stick by a long shot by purchasing a Wii. The avoidance of "bundles of mini-games" would be a very welcome change to this hardcore gamer.

A quick run down of my letter is I outlined my number of nintendo purchases over the years and the fraction of those that I felt were worth the time and money. It went from 50/70 for the original gameboy to 11/30 for the Wii. I let them know that they lost my priceless customer loyalty. I'll return to a cold-hard analysis against their competitors for the next generation.