It is supposed to be sterile, but they have poor QC. They then pretend they don't have poor QC when it cross-pollinates, claiming either that your hybrid crop is impossible or something you've intentionally engineered to violate their patents.

Also, if you grow their corn, you have to sign a license stating that you won't hold onto seed to replant, just in case some of it is fertile.

If only rigging the seed to produce sterile plants actually worked 100% of the time. The difference is that if you have a QC failure with any other product, the manufacturer and consumer are the only ones who might potentially lose out. If your neighbor buys RoundupReady corn, some of it was sterilized properly, and that corn cross pollinates your field, then Monsanto has every right to sue you for not following the terms of a license you never agreed to. I really wish I were kidding.

Realistically, it wouldn't be so bad if Monsanto were in fact liable for their QC failures. Meaning that poorly sterilized corn infecting a neighboring "organic" farm meant that farm was responsible for ruining their crop (and potentially that farm suing Monsanto for selling defective seed that was able to do so), and of course that Monsanto had no claim against anyone growing crop descended from their poorly sterilized seed under any circumstances (but that would hurt them, and it's wrong to do anything that might hurt Monsanto).

They'd like that -- if we were all thinking of the children it'd *waaaaaay* easier to bust us for child porn. How about you and your pervert buddies just stop thinking about the children and have a seat, while I call in Chris Hansen...

So, you're saying we should drop the public education system? As someone put it, let's go back to the 1860s, I hope you weren't expecting basic literacy from your employees or those of your vendors, because you won't have that...

Even Adam Smith felt that the wealthy should pay a larger portion of their wealth in taxes than the poor -- in his mind they were ultimately the greatest beneficiaries of government. When you own more, the importance of things like courts and police goes up alongside your wealth. Indirectly, keeping the rest of the populace in a condition of "not desperate enough to use superior numbers and violence to take what's yours" (a.k.a. appeasing the peasants so they don't revolt) gains some importance as well.

PS3 games check online for updates at startup (heck most of the library for the PS Move is existing titles patched for support -- like Heavy Rain). So the change could require application level updates without any problems, since most online games won't let you play without the newest version anyways.

...and it certainly doesn't help that it happened the week of the release of Portal 2 and Mortal Kombat.

Hell, I haven't played Portal 2 Co-Op yet because PSN isn't up and my grand plan was to buy the PS3 version, redeem the PC copy to my Steam account, then have my nephew come over, log on his own PSN/Steam accounts so we could play MP together while only buying one copy. We both beat the single player the same day PSN went down.

You actually brought up something I've wondered about: When Sony, or the DVD consortium, or whoever it is *this* time start crying about the release of their respective signing key and claiming copyright to the number, why not just start representing it in decimal, or as the multiple of two primes, or some other form that is clearly not subject to copyright/patent?

For exqample, the so called "09 F9" AACS key is 13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640, so that decimal number in and of itself is now copyrighted? Or patented?

Maybe we should make a website that generates sequential numbers from 1->arbitrarily large, discounting those that are known to be things like the CSS key. If any other number is used as a cryptographic key in a commercial product, they would clearly be violating our copyright on that particular arbitrarily large number, right?

Your book example is a failure, because you switched which variety of IP you were talking about.

Software should fall under either copyright or patent, not both. Personally, I'd favor copyright despite it's ridiculously long terms, simply on the whole "pure math isn't patentable. software is an expression of math in a machine readable form, and nothing else; therefore, it should not be patentable."

Let me put it this way, if I added "in French" to something that was explicitly not patentable, it would not make it patentable. Adding "in machine language for some computer device" shouldn't either.

So, the argument is that someone posting pictures/a video online in some form (likely freenet, a TOR hidden service, or P2P of some flavor) who has no idea who might actually see it if anyone is making it because of the size of their audience?

That makes no sense.

You're talking about a scenario where the producer gains no economic benefit for having any number of viewers and has no way to know how many such viewers exist so there's limited fame incentive. That there exist people who view it doesn't create an incentive to create it. That you are already performing the actions that are needed to create it to do another psychologically damaged need (except for filming it) creates an incentive to create it.

Let me put it this way: Given that there's practically no commercial incentive to produce kiddy porn (thanks to our good friend the internet), do you think (assuming for the purpose of this question that viewing child pornography does not count as additional child abuse beyond that used to create it) that removing child pornography from the internet would reduce the number of children that get abused, or would it merely reduce the evidence that they had been?

Put simply: Do you think that there are people abusing children who are only doing it to put pictures/videos online, and if so, what is their motivation?

Assuming that that hack is what this is all about, wouldn't it have been simpler to shut off "developer" PSN for however long, rather than all PSN? It's not adding up.

So long as your price fixing loop doesn't cost an investment bank money. They're *entitled* to a profit, and if you harm that you need to be jailed and all the transactions you performed undone. I wish I had the link to that story still lying around.

Why would you need all of that? According to the whole Blizzard RealID scandal, his first and last name should be more than enough in and of itself to destroy his life.

So, they aren't "used" because they are retained in "working" condition (i.e. not necessarily in original packaging, not necessarily with manuals or secondary items, and possibly with some wear on the disc such as minor scratches, but still in good working condition)?

Do you only purchase used items if they no longer work or something?

I don't think the juror thing is limited to liberal lawyers -- I'm pretty sure no lawyer wants intelligent persons as jurors because people who lack intelligence are easier to manipulate. =p

Dark Star One also broke the game economy but not so subtly. The simply multiplied the price of all purchases by a fairly large number while not effecting the resale price of said items or the amount of money earned by doing tasks.