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Comment Re:Wrinkle (Score 1) 295

Picture a cube if you lived in 2-dimensional space. You might see it as a square, or as an oblique slice through a cube.

Actually you'd see it as something like a line. To see a square, you'd have to be "above" the sheet of paper that is your two dimensional world, which necessitates a third dimension.

Comment Re:Last Sentence (Score 2) 322

It's not really that. It's that you have a right not to be forced to incriminate yourself, and if you are forced to turn over encryption keys to something, you are admitting that the media is yours. If there's something illegal on the drive, this would be self-incrimination (admitting "this illegal stuff is mine").

I remember this being a hot issue when I took Evidence in law school years ago. Of course, it being law school, we really didn't talk about anything useful. ;)

Comment Re:Region locked movies (Score 1) 648

What does this mean (if anything) for region-locked movies - can I legally break the region lock (or buy a player that does it) so I can watch a movie I bought overseas?

Not comparable issues at all. This opinion is only about re-selling items.

In your implied analogy, the book is the DVD, the re-seller is a re-seller. This case essentially says you can buy a Region X DVD in country X and re-sell it in the States provided that the Region X DVD was legally made. So this means if you buy a legal Chinese DVD in China, you can sell it in the US. It does not mean you can buy a pirated DVD in China and sell it in the US. It does not say anything about region unlocking.

You should always read SCOTUS cases narrowly. Anything that the decision of the Court does not rest on is called "dicta" and has no controlling authority, but merely persuasive authority. This means if the decision of the Court does not rely on a statement in the opinion, then that statement can persuade other courts, but it doesn't instruct them to do anything.

Comment Re:Very strange breakdown of votes (Score 2) 648

The breakdown of votes is very different to what I'm used to seeing on Supreme Court cases – you've got Breyer, Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Sotomayor, and Kagan in the majority, and Scalia, Kennedy, and Ginsburg in dissent.

Actually, if you look at actual voting records, it's not unusual at all. 2012 2011. In 2012, of note is that the lowest affinity with the majority was Sotomayor at 82.5% (she was around 79% for 2011). This suggests all justices, regardless of political affiliation, agree more often than they disagree. If the breakdown was along conservative vs. liberal lines like the media would have you believe (hot Supreme Court catfights! more on TMZ!), you'd see a lot more clustering somewhere closer to 50% than 90%.

Also note that the links above are just for the opinions. Those are the ones that are supposed to be most controversial of all the SCOTUS hears!

Comment Re:sweet, self powered store (Score 1) 186

Both CVS and Walgreens have their business model in "spend 30 minutes getting anything at the grocery store; spend 5 minutes getting it here [but pay more]."

I can run into HEB (the local grocery store chain in the better parts of Texas (suck it, Dallas)) and grab some Gatorade in about twenty minutes after parking way in the back of the huge parking lot, running across the huge store to the sports drink aisle, coming back to the register, waiting behind a bunch of people buying at minimum 15 items, and then cross the parking lot again to get to my car (while dodging tons of foot traffic and waiting in the driving lanes for minutes while some lazy bastard waits for some person who hasn't even started his car yet to back out so he can get the parking space about 20 feet closer to the entrance to the store.

Or I can go to Walgreens, pay $1 more for the drink, park right by the entrance, wait behind at most one or two people buying a mere couple items each, and walk out the door and there's my car. No one else is driving in the parking lot, so I'm in and out in five minutes.

Sometimes it's worth the extra $1 spent.

That is how Walgreens stays in business compared to the big grocery store. CVS is the same way down here.

K-Mart isn't in business anywhere around here, though. Maybe for the very reason you mentioned. The last K-Mart I saw closed about ten years ago in my hometown. I have not seen a K-Mart since then.

Comment Re:Why do people watch these things? (Score 1) 67

Because some of us don't mind being advertised to provided the advertisement is entertaining and useful. The nine Best Picture nominees are all excellent for different reasons, and the show itself was entertaining. I imagine Slashdot wants to hate Seth Macfarlane for Family Guy and other reasons, but he was a pretty funny host.

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