This is a federal judge, not a federal appellate panel. The company will pay to have amazing representation on appeal and is much more likely to win.

Actually, the customary punishment for most human rights violations, including war crimes and crimes against humanity, is none. Nuremberg was a first, and only the defeated powers were prosecuted. (In a perfectly neutral world, allies would have been prosecuted for things like the fire-bombing of Dresden and the nuking of Nagasaki, and possibly the nuking of Hiroshima.)

Nuremberg was a first, the International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda were much more recent and were beginning some international movement toward accountability for war crimes, and the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court also took us closer, but we are *nowhere* near a place where there is a "customary punishment" for crimes against humanity.

The average consumer of 3D printers may be able to, the average consumer of personal printers in no way can afford to spend $1,000 on a printer.

Yes, but the US also does more with its military than those countries combined. It is also facing different cost balloon problems than some of them--e.g. China and Russia--and has a larger portion of its budget that is declassified. China with 1/3rd of the US Military budget has a good chance of approaching par with the US Military in the next two decades, if they run an efficient program.

Yes; I was saying the problems inherent with the zeroeth law arise in one of the best scenarios we could have, and it is fraught with problems. That does not mean that that is the scenario we will have; it is more likely we will not, or will have some AI that develops that way but more that does not.

I'm sure ArmoredDragon (3450605) is secretly Sandra Bullock from Crash.

Even in the best scenario, the zeroeth law of robotics applies. Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, for example, both recognized how humans as a whole make terrible decisions for themselves and their society. A benevolent AI could take us a long way toward being a better world and still take away a lot of our freedom.

I had Comcast for residential service for two years not long ago (2010-2012), and they gave me no problem with using my own modem. (They did try to charge me for not returning it when I disconnected service, but corrected their error without a hassle.)

They also still list acceptable personal modems on their website:

http://mydeviceinfo.comcast.ne...

To be clear, torture is a human rights violation against customary international law and treaty; it is not a crime against humanity unless it is part of widespread or systemic practice.

It is, however, widely practiced as a practical matter. Sometimes even by heads of state. This guy has personally tortured people, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

No, you probably didn't, but it's a copyright law, not a contract. You are obligated to obey the law even if you didn't agree to it.

As to show you a case, the Ninth Circuit has held for Parent in a related fact-pattern, while the seventh circuit has sided more with you, so it depends where in the United States you are. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

In addition, the parent was talking about moral rights, which are more of a European thing. So you'd have to check their law.

No -- consider for a moment that we could be there again 90 years from now. Science fiction looks toward the future, and the current trend is that antibiotics are becoming useless.

True; all signs point to North Korea but it could be a false flag operation, or just someone they trained, for example. However, motive, opportunity, and skill fingerprint are pointing to them. While we are engineers trained to think in counterexamples and recognize the possibility that it was someone else, it seems highly unlikely.

That being said, I do think the "wait and see" from the UN Mission Rep from North Korea, despite seeming to implicate them, was more of an "I have no clue whether we did it or not."

It absolutely has downsides; the problem is a game-theory one, not a turn-the-other-cheek one. Mutual phased reduction in hostilities is the goal. The net benefit of escalation for the aggressor at any time must be outweighed by the net cost, so a threat is necessary.

I would be seriously tempted to both lobby for and bankroll offensive cyber-operations against North Korea. (Lobby for ones on the public dime from every country where SONY has a sizeable presence; bankroll one from some country where it's legal.)

Whether through cyberoperations or plain old believable threats, SONY has to come up with a way to show North Korea (or perhaps independent actors in North Korea) that there's a penalty for this kind of behavior. So does the developed world generally--attacks like this cost a fortune in productivity and potentially lost jobs, and reputation. SONY is in a better position to recover than many businesses (notably in the financial or legal sectors, where the loss of trust could be fatal), but even so.

I would expect they also got some fairly damning privileged information--emails exchanged with lawyers on everything from sexual harassment to copyright infringement suits. It's a BIG firm.

Plus Patents. Sony files THOUSANDS of patents a year. If that patent information (or research that could be patented) is published to the wild before SONY patents it, you have a LOT of new prior art and a fortune in IP at risk... SONY would have to patent everything within a year in the US; I am not sure that you even have that grace period everywhere else.