"You give us the right to make derivative works from your stuff" is just about as far away from "usual" as you can get it.

With a clause like that, Dropbox can do the smallest of alterations to your stuff, sell it, and not give you a dime. Even if it's something that you sell for $$ and don't give away for free. Hell, with a clause like that, Dropbox can take your software code and release it under any license they want, essentially as if they were you.

No part of the law requires them to not list out what they do. "Make any derivitive works necessary for this service" would do it. This isn't the law -- this is their lawyers being either dickish or lazy.

Can they enforce what you do with an iPad? Not legally. They can do some PRACTICAL things, and they aren't necessarily doing criminal things to stop you... but the things they can do to keep you from using, selling, breaking, or whatever with your iPad after you buy it are pretty short.

Now, there IS some authority that attaches to advertising that uses their trademarks... but, AFAIK (IANAL - don't trust legal advice you get from the internet) as long as you're not claiming to be Apple, claiming to be associated with Apple, or spreading misinformation about their products, they don't really have much legs to stand on.

To wit: the same laws that say you CAN buy five iPads and tell everyone around that you are giving away five free iPads are also the ones that say you can buy an iPad, review it, and then tell everyone your opinion about it.

Oh, and also:

Warranties come in two parts. What's legally required in the jurisdiction of sale, and what the company does above and beyond that. While they can add special conditions to that part of the warranty that goes beyond your local legal mandates, said mandates themselves are applied based on your local law and not the arbitrary dictates of the manufacturer.

(What kind of warranties are forced? Well, for starters there's the warranty that the iPad won't burn down your house due to a flaw in design or manufacturing. So, that's something.)

Why not recommend he light a homeopathic candle while he's at it?

Sheesh. And I won't even comment on your food choice, aside from noting that "organic" food is, by and large, more expensive for little or no gain. So-called "organic" foods are farmed differently... but unless you care enough about their farming practices to pay the surcharge, the "non-organic" ones are just fine.

(And when's the last time you saw "in-organic" food, anyway? And salt doesn't count. ;) )

They are noteworthy because their survivals are unusual -- and each one you cite, including Vesna, suffered injuries that could have very easily killed them.

See:

1: Probable Cause
2: Personality Profiling
3: Jury trials.

A DA doesn't need to prove your kiddie porn habit to a geek-fandom level. He just needs to convince 12 more or less random strangers that it's very likely you traffic in child porn. And that's only if he wants to throw you in jail. If he just wants to harass you, he just needs to show a judge that IP address -- and he's got "probable cause" to bust down your door and take your PC from you. (Hell, if we're talking about a vice squad geek and not a DA, he can put off the judge until latter -- since you're so likely to alter your own logs or try and cover your tracks.)

Few laptops will be anything but "obsolete" in two years. But that's the same if you buy an HP, Apple, Dell, Acer, or whatever. Just keep an eye out on any forthcoming tech bumps (Wireless-N, Blue-ray, # of cores, discrete vs. shared video ram) and you'll do fine.

I pick laptops on vendor first (Gateway didn't get their reputation for crappy computers for nothing, for example -- and I like HP, as I have a bunch of laptops that all use the same power cords), features second (I'm a sucker for the touchsmart laptop), and price third.

Price on the web first, but don't forget to check your local big-box stores. I scored a sweet deal on my first laptop from best buy -- they had it for the same price it would have been built and shipped from HP, but with more options than I needed.

(FWIW, My current recommendation would be at least a dual-core CPU, Wireless-N if you have it now or will before you replace the laptop, and skip the blue-ray or DVD player unless there's no additional charge or they're very important to you. Discrete RAM is entirely dependent on if you're going to do any gaming with the laptop; if it's just email and word docs, don't bother. If you're going to fire up The Sims or City of Heroes or Eve Online, it's a must.)

You are the devil. Sorry, but that was clear by the end of your first sentence.

If the company needed you to spend 100 hour weeks to keep from going bust, then it should have gone bust. That's how capitalism works. If the company had ANY value, it would have been bought by a competitor and its foolish owners would have been let go. If the company wasn't bought, even when it had to put itself up for pennies on the dollar... well, then it didn't have any value, and it's just a value-sucking leech.

Look, I don't care what kool-aid you drink. We're suffering the worst recession since FDR, and it's the fault of YOUR chosen market segment. The risk of sub-prime mortgages should NEVER have been so hidden by derivatives, and the short-term profit that your ilk extracted has brought about the long-term pain that the world is suffering through now. If the CEO and CFO don't understand at a gut level what the fiance-geeks are doing... then they shouldn't be doing it. Period, full stop, end of story. And shame on the finance-geeks for letting them do it!

Wow. Someone doesn't appreciate just what legal benefits a marriage grants. Let me start with the big ones:

1: Presumption of paternity. I'm married, and my daughter is sitting beside me. I do NOT need to do anything to prove that she is my daughter, and should it ever come up (like, say, if my wife decided to leave me after becoming pregnant) the burden of proof is on whomever is saying my child is not mine.

2: Tax benefits. In addition to being able to pool income for income tax purposes (which would be much more significant if we didn't both work), we also jointly own all marital property. Which means when one of us passes away, the other one doesn't "inherit" anything -- and so, even if we owned billions of dollars, there would be no inheritance tax. It also means we can give each other money without having to have the other one potentially report it as gift income. (Yes, the benefit is fairly mediocre for most folks. But if you're an edge case, it can be a lot.)

3: Legal protection. The only person who is absolutely prohibited from testifying against you in court is your spouse. (Ok, not "absolutely", but provided it's not a domestic crime, it's pretty high. Higher than lawyers or doctors or priests.)

4: Automatic visitation / power of attorney. When one of us goes into the hospital, not only can the other one automatically visit, but we also automatically get a limited power of attorney for medical decisions as the next of kin.

5: Inheritance rights. She can't write me out of her will, and I cannot write her out of mine. (see #2, above. And yes, it does matter in several cases.)

So, those are the benefits that a polygamist (or a polyandrist, or a polymorist) gains. But multiple concurrent marriages aren't illegal because they somehow grant too many benefits; they're illegal because they stress the dating pool. If we adopted bigamy, for example, we'd have ~25% of the population that simply cannot find a wife, because they're all taken. And that 25% of the population might just stay home and play video games -- or they might go out and take wives wherever they can be found, including acts as vile as rape and murder among the instances which would increase.

(And, yes, a gender-neutral multiple marriage law would make sense. But it also makes sense to just ban them altogether.)

In the 70s, there were only three nationwide networks, and the typical household had maybe a dozen channels to pick from, many of whom were just duplicates of the same nationwide network.

Forty years later, a typical household has well over a hundred networks -- possibly a lot more. A tenfold increase in options equating to less than a tenfold drop in the top popularity doesn't really describe TV "collapsing."

And mass-media does fairly well, btw. Pure digital typesetting and Print-on-demand can let a typical mass-media book do very well on surprisingly narrow margins. Hell, if you want a good example look at comic books. In the 70s there were, what, four publishers, two of which were Disney and Archie comics? And today there are, easily, a solid half-dozen publishers on the rack, and the big two produce far more variety than they did in the 70s.

It keeps publishers from simply taking whatever they want and re-selling it, without giving a dime to the author. If you abandoned copyright and relied only on contract law protection, you would quickly find publishers creating subsidiary corporations with the intent of having said subsidiary declare bankruptcy and thus nullify the contract. This unprotected script would then be re-printed with wild abandon by the publisher, and the author would be without any recourse to gain any share of their revenue. If the author attempted to publish themselves, they would soon find a greater and greater share of their time spent on the legal and managerial aspects of publishing, instead of creating a new work.

Or, in other words, COPYRIGHT MAKES IT PROFITABLE TO BE CREATIVE.

(Maybe you were wondering about the current duration of copyright law, which is an entirely separate matter than the inherent reason of copyright itself.)

Hah!

HP's webOS ships with a Linux-based OS and a simple, easy way to get root access on your device. In fact, they provide instructions on how to do so on their website.

And it doesn't even come close to voiding your warranty. Even if you put on custom software.

balderdash.

The rhetorical "you" here is "en oh tea" NOT trapped by the whims of Apple. If you buy a non-DRM'd file, you can read it on the device of your choice -- and it's apple's loss if they try banning the neat reader that your document vendor so nicely put in Apple's app store, just because it serves its purpose as pointing you to a place where you can buy more tasty e-books.

"You" are trapped by the DRM'd files you bought from your document vendor. THEY are the ones trapped by apple's whims.

"Unlimited" does not mean "infinite." Think, "there is no two." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_One_Infinity

In this case, as with software, "unlimited" means that there is no arbitrary limitation on the number of plantiffs or lawsuits. Sure, there is a theoretical maximum of some 308 million plantiffs, and a further theoretical maximum of some six billion defendants... meaning that if the theoretical maximum were reached, we'd have more lawsuits on this law than have ever been filed in the history of our jurisprudence.

So, yeah, "unlimited" sounds about right.

Yes, yes they are. Read up on "harassment" for starters, and that's just the one I know off the top of my head.

Bollocks. It may not be against THAT law... but sending faxes with as benign an intent as annoying someone can be criminal. In NYS, for instance, you'd be violating the penal code.

There may be a federal equivalent elsewhere in the law. Good rule of thumb: If it interferes with someone else, don't assume you're not violating any laws until you talk to a lawyer.

(And don't get hang up on that "how could they figure out my intent!" argument. Near every criminal locked up in the state had a jury of their peers infer their intent. [the exceptions being those who pled guilty])