I don't think that there's any doubt that they are. Unfortunately, and I think most people don't really grasp this, being a patent troll in the United States is not just legal, it's extremely lucrative. That's why, while I certainly hope that Newegg eventually successfully appeals this case and continues defending against patent trolls, what we really need is better legislation to make all of this shit illegal.

This. Exactly. I'd rather pay Newegg a few bucks more knowing that those bucks will be spent fighting patent trolls than saving a few bucks at Amazon knowing that the reason they're able to offer prices a few bucks lower is because they sued some other company out of existence for having the audacity to put a button on their web page that charges your credit card and checks you out in one action.

Not surprisingly, the submitter grossly misrepresented what was said. In TFA, the Arial font thing was just a couple of lines in a much more troubling string of rants, stuff like:

- "it’s always awkward when I see one of my pervs in the parking lot after a hearing"
- he (the hearing examiner) “likes taking motions under advisement, but gets greater satisfaction denying them”
- On November 20, 2008, the day of the plaintiff’s hearing, the following comment was posted during working hours: “it’s always a mistake when people testify, because they get destroyed in cross examination”
- On that same day, the day of the plaintiff’s hearing, the hearing examiner also posted the following (apparently with reference to a different sex offender): he (the examiner) “hopes this guy doesn’t show up!!” which was followed up with “Tyson Lynch says yay!! He didn’t show up!”

...And so on. This is someone who is supposed to be fair and impartial, and the guy clearly has issues with the people he has a duty to work with.

So yeah, if I had a hearing before the guy that went south, I'd be trying to have it overturned also. I hope that the guy is fired and the people who did have hearings before him get new hearings.

We're going to have to start using a new theme. In Olympic Russia, games report on journalists.

That logic would be fine if all the OP wanted to buy is just a proprietary Amazon front-end, which means that the value of the device is significantly lower than what would justify the price. But assuming that he wants a "tablet" in the traditional sense of the word, a general-purpose device that he can customize to suit his particular needs that can be obtained from other companies at comparable prices and that can also run the same Amazon-available applications but also other stuff as well, then he is correct in that he should continue to avoid these.

I do have to make a serious response to this, though. You seem to be under the false impression that there were "original mandates" that limited the federal government. This simply isn't true. The current Constitution was written after the dismal failure of the Articles of Confederation, which established a federal government but explicitly denied any enforcement capabilities to it. It basically said that the name of our new country was the United States of America, and each of those states acted like little mini sovereign entities. As a result, when the federal government asked the states to pay their taxes, the states politely told it to go fuck itself, resulting in the Continental Army to fall apart and damn near resulted in the destruction of our new country.

So the founding fathers convened another Constitutional Convention for four months in 1787 to address these problems. They decided that the federal government HAD to have power, and that the new Constitution needs to be fairly open-ended to account for new legal needs to refine our government. That's why they put phrases in such as "promote the general Welfare" and left out phrases such as "and such is an exhaustive list of the only things this governmental entity can do".

While I would never pretend like the "founding fathers" were a monolithic hive mind in complete agreement on all points, and I do recognize that some of them fought to limit the power of government, those people were generally overruled or else had their concerns addressed by enumerating things that are explicitly denied to government, especially in the Bill of Rights ("Congress shall make no law..."). Most of them understood that we would be facing completely new and unforeseen challenges today than we were in 1787, and they deliberately avoided enumerating things that government could only do.

So there was never any kind of set of "original mandates" that government has grown past, other than a handful of don'ts, such as don't trample of free speech, don't establish a state religion, don't inflict cruel or unusual punishment, etc.

You're building an entire solar system just to power your house? You must go through a LOT of light bulbs.

And you honestly don't think this happens today? Seriously?

Make no mistake: There are death panels in existence right now, this very moment. They work for the private insurance companies, doing their damned best to figure out how to kick people off of insurance rolls and rescind coverage for whatever reason will legally scrape by. Or even illegally, if they think that it would be cheaper to fight the battle until you die than to pay out your claim. The big difference is that today, you frequently don't find out what's not covered until after you're sick and need the coverage.

You don't trust government, I get it, I really do. And to some extent, neither do I. But you know what I trust even less than government? For-profit companies with a perverse incentive to deny you coverage you're paying for using whatever underhanded tactic they can and an historical willingness to do so, especially when the people being denied coverage don't have time or the money for a protracted legal battle and are at a physical or mental disadvantage that directly impacts their ability to fight such battles.

So yeah, I'd take a single-payer system over the crappy system we have today any time. Ultimately, that is the solution to our health care system, not private insurance, not employer-paid insurance, not even Obamacare, although it's a hell of a lot better than what we had. Maybe one of these days if you have the gut-wrenching experience of watching your mother fighting her insurance company for payment of cancer treatments while suffering from the "downtime" effects of chemotherapy, you'll prefer the general incompetence of government over the outright malice of for-profit insurance companies. Personally, I'm nice enough to rather you use common sense to arrive at the conclusion that having for-profit insurance companies responsible for funding your health care is and always has been a dumb idea.

Bosom Buddies was a cute show and he was funny as Michael in Newhart, but he's not even British. What are they thinking! I know he has a little sci-fi experience when he played the dad in the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids the television series, but I still think they would have done a lot better if they'd gotten someone who had some experience with British television.

Don't forget, 20k of it was unusable, unless you swapped out the character bitmaps and the BASIC ROM banks.

I remember when CD writers were like this, about 25%-33% you tried to burn were coasters because your machine couldn't keep the write buffer full, so you had this delicate balancing act of setting it to burn and OH GOD DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING and hope for the best. They still blew my mind with how handy they were, and now CD/DVD burners are so dirt cheap and reliable that it's hard to imagine the days when they were so sensitive. I figure in a few years, 3D printers will get similarly more reliable and mainstream, and continue to fall in price, until people are churning out all sorts of widgets without giving it much thought or worry.

So please, explain to me how exactly your privacy is being violated. Because if you think it is, then you really need to actually read the government's explanation of the programs instead of getting it secondhand (you know, like sheep) from people who are grossly hyperbolizing the scope of what is being collected and used. They are not reading your email. They are not poring over your phone records. All they are doing is collecting the information so that, if a warrant is issued and they have probable cause to think that you might be involved in terrorism activities, they can come back later and evaluate the information to try to track down other possible terrorism suspects.

You call me a "sheep", yet it is you who is making baseless assumptions, not me. You're assuming that the people who are in charge of these programs are outright lying about the scope of them and the scrutiny and oversight they're subjected to. If Snowden had come out and said, "...and as proof that this program is being abused, the Slashdot poster Wookact is actually Joe Schmo in Walla Walla, Washington, and here are the contents of some of the private emails he's sent to people and some of the phone numbers he's called, even though I have no reason to suspect that he's involved in anything illegal," then your argument might hold water.

As it is, though, you're just throwing out baseless allegations that some hypothetical evil has been committed based on premises that I do not hold to be true, things like government is always evil, the people in charge of these programs are saying stuff that conflicts with your foregone conclusion therefore they must be lying, that there is no oversight of these programs and/or any oversight of them must be corrupt, etc. And by the way, last time I checked, people have in fact died from terrorist attacks. Also, last time I checked, several plots have been thwarted thanks to the hard work of the intelligence community, and there hasn't been an attack of the scale of 9/11 since, well, 9/11, so I have to think that something must be working pretty well and what you dismiss offhandedly as people being afraid is actually people taking some common sense precautions to not die by the thousands. It is in fact your fears of some hypothetical abuse for which there is no evidence that is warrantless. When you have some actual evidence that the programs are being abused and that their leadership is lying to us, try again and you'll make some more headway.

Is it hypothetically possible that such a program, under certain contrived circumstances, could be abused? Well, yeah, but in the sense that the fact that we have a nuclear arsenal could hypothetically be abused. Yet I don't sit around worrying all day about the possibility that a nuclear bomb might explode in my neighborhood, I have more important things to worry about and better things to do with my time.

So please, again, exactly what rights of yours have been violated? Some imaginary right to not have information about what you're doing collected by the government? If so, then do you drive a car? Then please stop reading these posts and immediately go to your local DMV and express your outrage over having to have a tag number that--gasp!--is actually retained on file that, if you commit a crime, can be used after the fact to track back to you. Have you ever worked? If so, then make sure to express outrage over the government keeping your Social Security Number and W2s on file so that if you commit tax evasion, they can find out about it and prosecute you instead of just sitting around saying, "Gosh, I sure wish we knew who this 714-89-3110 person was." Do you own a home? Make sure they don't have your address on file, because god knows that if someone calls 911 and reports gunshots at 123 Main Street, you don't want those bastards to be able to figure out that that's your house, that would be a gross violation of privacy!

Now here's the thing--I don't even believe that the government collecting all of this information is a good thing. I do not believe that it's being abused, but I do believe that there is the potential of it being abused at some point by less scrupulous people. But to be blunt, I'm not even a fraction as worried about the government abusing such power as I am private corporations with strong financial incentives to screw people over doing so, yet the vast majority of Americans don't give a shit about that happening, even being flaunted right in their faces. Also to be blunt, it's frustrating to me that we're just now all mad and upset about these programs when they were in place years ago under a different administration and the Libertarians and right-wing seemed to be perfectly fine with it then. And last but not least, to be blunt, it pisses me off that everyone's all upset about agencies and administrations exercising power that, I remind you again, was legally granted to them by the Patriot Act, acting as if, gosh, we didn't think they'd take it seriously!

Well, the reason that immediately comes to mind is because you and I might not be going to the same place.

I know this isn't going to be a popular opinion with the Slashdot crowd, but here goes anyway...

So honest question: What makes you believe that the government is doing "the wrong thing" now? I'm being serious here, because as far as I can tell, nothing that Snowden has said has proving that the NSA is abusing what it's been doing. If he had some documented evidence, for example, that the NSA had used its surveillance capabilities to spy on someone for non-terrorism political purposes, things might be different.

From what I can tell, the programs at the NSA are designed only to collect the data. It's specifically to avoid this situation:

Steve: Ha ha, you capitalist pigs, I've blown up buildings and killed hundreds of your citizens!
NSA: Hello, Verizon? We have a warrant, could you please pull Steve's phone records for the past five years so that we can see who he's been hanging out with, to see if maybe there's a mastermind here that we can take down?
Verizon: Gee, we wish we could help, but our data retention policy is that we purge those records after a year. Sorry, but here's what we've got, hope it helps.
NSA: Well, shit, we think that Steve was radicalized back in 2009, we could really use those records. Hey Google, any chance you've kept his emails?
Google: Sorry, nope. We can tell you that he sure does like My Little Pony and prefers Angel Soft brand toilet tissue, though.
Dan: Remember Steve? Well, I'm his buddy and now I have blown up buildings and killed hundreds more people, ha ha!
NSA: Fuck.

In other words, I don't think this is an inherently evil program, as long as it has proper oversight, assurances that it can't be abused, and that the oversight and legal framework under which it operates is transparent. That is, none of these secret laws that we have currently. There are some Congresscritters that are currently working to make those laws public, which is a Good Thing(tm). Assurances that it can't be abused would come in the form of auditing. This isn't unheard of, it's the same kind of auditing that, for example, holds credit card companies accountable for ensuring that the customer service person you talk to when you call their 800 number doesn't write your card number down and carry it out with them to go shopping with that night.

Of course, oversight is always the sticking point. When George W. Bush was in office, Democrats didn't trust him to carry out proper oversight of these programs, but Republicans simply brushed off criticism saying, "Just trust him, he's a nice guy, he wouldn't do that kind of evil stuff." Now that Barack Obama is in office, Republicans are crying foul. Oversight needs to be in the form of non-partisan courts and subject to multiple levels of scrutiny, and we the public need to be aware of what kind of system is in place to oversee this stuff.

Otherwise, you and everyone else decrying these programs are going to have to accept that without them, people WILL needlessly die, that we could have prevented it and deliberately chose not to. And when they do and there's an outcry over how awful it is that our intelligence organizations failed us so miserably, you're going to have to be on the front lines defending it, explaining to an angry and grieving public that those lives were simply the price we have to pay for freedom and privacy. And if you think that it's a small price to pay for freedom and privacy, then more power to you. But instead of getting all butt-sore about the NSA, PRISM, or the Bush and/or Obama administrations, the actual EFFECTIVE recourse is to lobby your Congresscritters to repeal or amend the USA PATRIOT act. Because for all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth, the organizations and administrations involved in these programs are merely exercising the legal authority that Congress granted them. And I'm not being facetious--go for it. Hell, you might be able to start a movement and convince enough people that it will happen.

But you'll also need to realize when you do that not everyone agrees with you. For all of the trite repetition of telling people that they deserve neither freedom nor liberty, most of us live out here in the practical world where we don't view the world as black and white as you do, so you might (probably, in my estimation) not get your way. And when that happens, instead of whining about how awful it is that we live in such oppressive times under such a tyrannical regime, consider that forcing your notion of "freedom" on a public that expresses through elections that they disagree with you is about as tyrannical as it gets, so what does that make you?

Anyway, I strongly suspect that I'll be modded down because of the knee-jerk "Oh noes, government surveillance is teh ebil!" leaning that Slashdot in general has, and I don't entirely disagree with the general ideal. But until more information comes out that this specific program has been abused in some non-hypothetical instance and exactly how, I'm willing to not jump to conclusions, to let it ride for a while and see where it ends up. And while I find the notion of persistent surveillance distasteful, I'm also practical enough to understand the shades of gray involved in these issues.