In most legal systems, you can't just directly ignore a court order without it becoming a criminal case. Even if it wasn't criminal before, violating a court order is itself an offense.

The police do often act as if it is, though. Not under a specific "illegal to record the police" statute, but making bullshit use of other laws, e.g. "interfering with a crime scene". At the very least they can often stop the filming and arrest someone, even if the charges don't stick.

The Heartbleed logo is the first logo designed in almost 50 years that has no need for a drop shadow.

Are drop shadows really that popular in logos? The trend as I see it seems to be towards "flat" designs, both in logos and other areas like UIs (e.g. recent versions of iOS and OSX have dropped the pseudo-3d elements and specular highlights). When I think of a typical modern corporate logo I think of something like the new (2001) BP logo, which is entirely flat.

Instead of just fucking around on someone's wifi, the 21st-century's wardriving kids will be heating your house to 90 F, freezing your vegetables, and ruining your coffee!

If you mean compared to the official C# release, for the moment it's still Windows-only, so Mono's main advantage is being a cross-platform C# compiler/runtime.

Yes, recidivism is a different situation: if you've been in prison 6 months, are released, and commit the exact same crime, than you will probably get more than 6 months. But you won't get 18 years on a first trial for a crime, regardless of how many small crimes are bundled up.

One reason is that recidivism is usually prevented through other means anyway. Once you're caught, you aren't just released completely unattended; you may have restrictions on movement or things like computer usage. There are ways to monitor people short of physically confining them to a jail cell, and these ways are both cheaper and less disruptive to society.

But he still didn't commit a violent crime or anything. I could see 18 years if he'd mugged 50 people and killed 3. But that doesn't seem to be what happened. It seems like you could protect society from recidivism by just putting him on supervised parole and restricting his use of a computer. The only people who really have to be locked up for 18 years to protect society, because there is no other way to do so, are really violent people who will kill or at least seriously injure people if you let them out.

The maximum prison sentence in Denmark for a non-violent crime is 3 years, with very few exceptions. Only mass-murderers get on the order of 18 years. In Denmark I believe there have been fewer than 10 people in the past 50 years to serve a prison sentence that long. Locking people in cages for decades just isn't a thing that is very reasonable to do, as there are other ways to protect society from repeat offenders in all but a very small handful of extreme cases involving violent psychopaths.

In civilized countries, you don't get 18 years in prison for extortion of $30,000. In Scandinavia you'd get one or two.

As I read it (but this is getting into some nitty-gritty agency-jurisdiction law I might misunderstand), the jurisdictional argument is about what "common carrier" status does for oversight. Telecommunications law gives the FCC exclusive authority to regulate common carriers, because they aren't quite normal market participants, but instead more like a regulated utility with special requirements that apply to them. So the FCC is tasked with drawing up those rules and overseeing them, and the FTC doesn't oversee them the way it would oversee other market participants.

Mobile data did not used to be classified as a common-carrier service, but was reclassified recently (3 weeks ago, in fact). The court found: 1. The fact that AT&T provides a common-carrier mobile service doesn't mean that it automatically is immune from FTC jurisdiction in any mobile-related case. Instead it needs to show that the specific conduct in dispute is related to its provision of common-carrier telecommunications services, and therefore exclusively within FCC jurisdiction; 2. The specific conduct at issue here happened before the reclassification as common carrier, so the FTC properly has jurisdiction.

Australia's one of the few parts of the developed world you could find where the ISPs are ripping people off even more than in the USA. :-)

It also seems weirdly inconsistent. It's legal for Americans to travel to all kinds of countries with authoritarian governments: Uzbekistan, Belarus, Egypt, even North Korea ffs. But traveling to Cuba is illegal for some reason.

According to the indictment, part of how they were caught is that as part of laundering their proceeds, they tried to strongarm the payment processor Venmo, who had closed their accounts as part of automated fraud detection. Venmo was unhappy with being strongarmed, and sent a complaint to someone higher up at the agency. The agents then tried to suppress the complaint, and simultaneously retaliate against Venmo by trying to start an investigation. That attempted investigation pulled in the IRS, whose investigators thought a bunch of things looked suspicious, and dug up enough dirt to blow the whistle on the agents in this case.

So I guess in short, they pissed off both a payment company and the IRS.

The area of geography she studies is how communities/economies are impacted by and adapt to changes in prevailing climates, which seems pretty relevant, depending on what question you're asking. She would be a poor authority on questions like modeling the impact of CO2 on weather, but more within her area if asking questions like, "how easy/difficult would it be for Indonesians to adapt to a 2" ocean-level rise?".

In terms of the IPCC reports, the research/authorship is divided into three working groups: #1 studies the underlying science; #2 studies impacts & adaptation; #3 studies possible mitigation strategies. She's part of #2.

They've fiddled with the licensing as part of competition for developers with Valve's Unreal engine, which makes it work for some use-cases where it didn't previously (e.g. the mobile exporter is now free, too) but it's been pretty popular for a while now.