Except Dish didn't brick just pirate hardware. They bricked my personally owned Dish network box about fifteen minutes after I called up to cancel service. My personal property, which I should have been able to sell to someone else so they could get Dish service if they wanted it, useless. It would be exactly like Comcast bricking your personally owned cable modem scant minutes after you cancel their service, preventing you from selling it to someone else to use with their cable provider.

Words change meaning all the time, and you cannot predict which ones will or will not in advance, dude. See what I did there? I used a word which has changed meaning.

But it doesn't matter if "entrapment" WILL change meanings, you've already shown that it has multiple meanings, only one of which should be covered by a law against entrapment. I thought that would have been clear when I used your own list of definitions to show you that.

This is a completely different issue than what I replied to, which was your claim that the law should not define the words it uses, it should use common usage definitions. But in any case, no, that's not what the court said. It is not illegal for the police to entrap you, but it is an affirmative defense against the charge they have entrapped you into.

Since I wasn't talking about this mythical "two forms of justice", just the part where you claimed that legal definitions should be based on the standard dictionary, you're just resorting to ad hominem when you got caught with your pants down. Yep, I called you a nutter, but that wasn't part of my argument why you were wrong. I went ahead and said explicitly why you are wrong. I'm sorry you didn't comprehend that.

You're projecting, now.

And you can buy Chinese copycat crap from mainstream vendors, too. So what does the customer do? He walks into Fry's, sees a USB to serial adapter on the rack, and asks a Fry's droid "is this Chinese copycat crap?" The Fry's droid is going to know? I've asked such people what the chip in such devices is (so I can avoid Prolific) and most of them have zero clue. They wouldn't know how to spell FTDI if it was written on the box. So what do they say? "Why no, sir, we don't sell Chinese copycat crap here." And you get a bricked adapter when you plug it in.

I've done this same thing with other devices, notably firewire cards where I want only Agere and never VIA or whatever. I've asked, and then had to open the box and sometimes pull the firmware version sticker off the chip to see ... because the sales people have no clue what's inside the magic boxes, they just know the magic boxes are great and good and you should buy many of them.

I'm going to bet that even some of the most jihad-obsessed radicals, fresh from what passes for school Taliban-land, are better at math than you are.

If there are 6 billion Muslims, and they make up 23% of the world population, that means the world as a population of over 26 billion people.

Do you know some secret place on the planet where we're hiding almost 20 billion extra, previously unknown people?

Presumably the whitebox device would include as core components all of the FCC-approved hardware necessary to use said frequencies. Upgrading the GPU, the amount of RAM, or the battery shouldn't have anything to do with this.

When you build your own PC from separate components, you don't have to worry about whether it can be powered by 60hz AC. The power supplies sold in this country are built to handle the electric supply found in this country and come with all of the UL (etc.) approvals.

The idea is that open source and the freedoms that come with it facilitate and ensure that you can continue to do cool and interesting things, often things the original designers didn't think of. It's certainly easier to be creative when you have the full specifications, source code, and documentation. It's easier to share your creativity with others when you can legally redistribute your derived works without violating someone else's copyright.

Obsession with anything is not good; on that I agree. However I haven't seen that in this thread. To cry "obsession" merely because someone points out a controversy isn't helpful (and ironically raises the question of whether you have an obsession with the perceived obsessions of others). All I saw was someone stating that they wish to avoid certain Broadcom hardware because it does not provide the degree of open source access that he or she desired. That people have their own criteria and express a desire to choose products that best suit their own needs is a good thing. Your own priorities being different is not surprising and doesn't indicate fault with anyone else.

This particular arrogant asshole "President" has shown himself perfectly willing to operate outside the Constitution for any purpose he cares about. If he really wanted the CDC to have more funding he would declare a state of emergency, recall Congress and demand it. If they didn't come through he would just throw a tantrum and stage showy shutdowns of selected highly visible government operations until they caved in.

Easy with the fan boi sucking-up there. Samsung is a CORPORATION. If they can't make products that are any fucking goddam good, to hell with them. You stand by your family and close friends through thick and thin, NOT corporations trying to get rich off the money you pay for their products. I'll reward the corps that prove themselves with my custom, just as long as it is to my advantage. Those that cynically betray me can go try to soak other customers; they will be dead to me.

If Samsung Heavy Industries makes good supertankers and windmills, fine. That doesn't affect my buying.

A combination of the two is a better deterrent than either alone.

The latter gets you used to seeing that there is enforcement of the laws. The former gets you used to never knowing where that enforcement may take place. If all that was allowed was visible patrols, then you'd simply obey the law when you saw, or you got notice by any of the existing phone apps that report sightings, a police car. If all that took place were hidden patrols, you'd not realize the extent that the laws were being enforced. With both, you know they will ticket you but you don't know when they'll catch you. Thus you may, or a reasonable person may, obey the law more often.

Thus you obey the law only when a car is in sight. A very small amount of the time.

You may have such a daredevil attitude towards points on your license and insurance rates, but I think most people wouldn't need the hidden patrols to be ubiquitous for them to be wary that they might get caught and thus should obey the law. The fact that they know they are a good possibility would deter them, at a level well below ubiquitous, but the level needs to be above zero.

Oh my God. What a nutter. Of COURSE a word that has multiple common usage definitions should have one clear definition when it comes to the law, simply because common usage changes over time and the law shouldn't, and the law should not cover the unintended common use cases for the word just because they are in the same entry in the dictionary.

The perfect example is the last definition listed which talks about being "entrapped by expectations". Why should it be illegal for someone to be entrapped by their own expectations just because you want the real action of entrapment by police to be illegal? The only definition that should even be considered in law is definition 3 which deals with action by the police.

Uhhh, ok. Whatever. Laws should always use every possible definition of a word instead of being as precise as possible because Socrates said so. The next time you put out a mouse trap, expect a visit from the police because you were engaging in entrapment of the mouse.

Bad example. The traffic laws I am familiar with all put the instructions of a uniformed police officer above an automated traffic signal. It is assumed the officer is acting in an official capacity to correct a malfunctioning signal, or to manage traffic that the signal is not dealing with.

That means it is actually against the law to ignore the police officer in this situation, and not a violation of law to ignore the signal. A better example would be if the meter maid tells you that it is ok to park in that handicapped space (without a handicapped permit) for just a few minutes so you can run in to buy a six-pack. Another meter maid comes along and tickets you ... because the first one didn't have the authority to override the parking laws.

In 1987 you were probably back home in the basement before the Beeb had covered the event, so you could shout up the stairs to your mother that "I was there, look, I'm ok, can you bring down some meatloaf" when the news came over the telly.

Noah had it easy back then. No one knew about bacteria, and no one ever dreamed in their wildest dreams that there were such things as viruses (whose status as life forms is debatable anyway). That's why all you ever see in the illustrations is giraffes, elephants, cattle and so on. As far as I can tell, it never occurred to anyone to wonder how insects were dealt with.

The ark was only 159 meters long if you take the Egyptian royal cubit as 529 mm. I'm pretty sure the animals had special orders not to eat or shit for the duration, because then it would have required a LOT more than two of each, eh? Also, losses must have been waved away - same reason.

Or, for those who wish to use appropriate and accepted units, 19 knots instead of 24 knots.

Are you really that obtuse? Does it physically hurt?