There's an article in The Guardian about how the authorities asked the plane manufacturers to take part in discussions about volcanic ash safety levels but they weren't interested.
Well yeah, because if they give estimates, and they're wrong, planeloads of people die, and they have a PR disaster and a pile of lawsuits. Balanced against that is a nice thank-you note. Tough call.
California Penal Code 485 requires only "reasonable and just efforts to find the owner and to restore the property to him".
And taking the phone home from the bar with him, calling Apple's Tech Support line, and then selling it qualifies as "reasonable and just efforts"? Any 12 jurors you find are going to ask the obvious question - "If you wanted to return the phone, why not either give it to the bartender or just facebook the guy?" Those are two blindly obvious ways to get the phone back to its owner that require minimal effort. He knew which bar it was lost in, and he (according to Gizmodo) saw the guy's Facebook page on the phone before it got wiped. There's no way you're going to convince a jury that "reasonable and just efforts" don't include either or both of those steps.
"...and knowingly having purchased stolen property."
I'm not getting how you concluded this part. Up until the time Gizmodo examined and concluded the device was actually Apple's property, they could not have known it was a lost prototype and who knows whether they had verified that a credible effort had not been made to return it.
You're saying you think Gizmodo regularly spends $5,000 buying used iPhones? They wouldn't have spent $5,000 on the phone if they didn't believe it to be an actual prototype, and no tech journalist would believe that Apple just up and gave a prototype to some random Joe.
Instead, this really is about an inadvertant (or deliberate?) leak and did involve stolen property.
If it were a deliberate leak, Gizmodo wouldn't have posted the personal info of the guy who lost the phone. They wouldn't dickishly stab their co-conspirator in the back and deny him the ability to get new employment in the short term.
A finder could easily have popped out the SIM card to look at its labeling.* From there, a finder could have contacted the carrier and asked that the carrier request the subscriber to give him a call for return of the device. It defies belief that none of these experienced tech journalists would have realized this possibility existed.
Given that they knew the guy's name because they saw his facebook profile on the phone before he bricked it remotely, it seems like they could have skipped all that and messaged him on Facebook. Or stuck it in a box and FedEx'd it to ATTN:[Guy's Name], 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino CA.
Oh there's plenty of room for debate on that. People love shouting the "Bush is the worst ever" hyperbole because he's just the worst during their lifetime.
An argument about whether Bush is the worst President or merely the second-worst or third-worst isn't really flattering to the ex-President.
My own vote for worst president ever is Andrew Johnson. Did a complete 180 on Lincoln's policies, vindictively screwing over the South in the process. Took decades for state economies to recover. Guy was pretty much an all-around dick too.
Oh please. Basically all the Reconstruction stuff was passed of Johnson's veto. Johnson was way, way less vindictive towards the South than the majority of the Northern politicians in Congress. Johnson may have been worse than Lincoln, but he was an order of magnitude less extreme than Congress was. Wherever you come down in terms of Reconstruction, it's silly to blame Johnson for it.
My God! How can something like this possibly get by QA as a company the size of McAfee? Have they outsourced all of their QA to a team with no clue?
If it only hits certain versions of Windows 2000 and Windows XP, it's possible McAfee testing didn't cover those versions for some reason. Given all the various patches, updates, and service packs for Windows 2000 or XP, either one of those is gonna have dozens if not hundreds of possible states for SVCHost.exe, depending on which patch it received. Of course, if it affects the fully-updated build or all the builds, that's no excuse.
I'm not saying that is what happened, I'm saying that that could possibly get by QA at a large company. Testing against every permutation of Windows update would mean thousands of installations of Windows to test.
No - there is a difference in it that I think most people would agree on. With a trailer, you are trying to build hype for the movie. Get its name out there and make it desirable to watch.
...I grab a demo which means I'm already interested in seeing what the game is like. I use the demo to determine whether or not I want to purchase it.
The difference is that it's harder to juice up a demo than a movie trailer. You can just throw all the good bits into the trailer (funny lines, robots fighting, whatever) and make a good trailer out of all but the crappiest of movies, but not so for game demos. The game demo highlights the mechanics of the game, which you don't usually change between the demo and the final version. I mean, if I play the Call of Duty 7 demo, that's basically how the game is going to play out. There might be one or two mechanics missing from the demo, but it's unlikely that the game company's going to be able to put "only the good stuff" in the demo.
"The medium is the massage." -- Crazy Nigel
