Not to mention all his wanna-be ripoffs on various talk radio outlets. I can practically hear the frothy apoplexy dripping from my speakers.

You illustrate my point. The suits at Disney responsible for lobbying and litigating IP rules are not the people creating characters and animating stories. And the fact that the company takes creative content (e.g. new stories) and uses their copyrighted character to act them out does not make them creators of content. It makes them thieves.

Show me the independent artist who is being serviced by today's 120-year copyright protections, and I'll show you a BitTorrent user who isn't pirating stuff.

Actually it works against content *publishers* (not creators) who have traditionally been the purveyors of grossly unfair contracts and all manner of unsavory business practices (e.g. we own perpetual license to any works you create, etc.) that leveraged their knowledge and access to distribution channels in order to live off the creative efforts of actual content producers. See also: Payola.

For this no-value-added middleman clown to accuse any other operation of being parasitic is the apotheosis of laughable hypocrisy.

Um, no. A MITM is not necessary for corporations to keep their employees from visiting undesirable content on the internet. Content filtering does not require payload inspection to achieve. I know this because I've worked with clients who use ProxySG devices to help them construct and implement their access control policies.

Your assertion about TP being a "scare about nothing" is incredibly naive...it's only valid if the end user provides informed consent. In practice, there are organizations that silently push their MITM CA certificate into your device/browser's truststore without giving you any opportunity to opt out...and I'm not talking about corporate owned/issued devices, I'm talking about BYOD operations.

Assuming you believe this line, they're only providing countermeasures against data at rest or moving within their networks.

Does anyone remember that whole "trusted proxy" thing that's creeping into the HTTP 2.0 draft spec?

Is anyone else familiar with the MITM capabilities of a Blue Coat ProxySG device, and how widely deployed they are amongst ISPs?

I was referring to the institutionalization of the insanity, not the insanity itself. High courts doing crazy things like declaring corporations to be "persons" under the law, public servants trussing themselves up in military tactical gear and smashing their way into suburban homes to shoot pets and terrorize occupants over their possession of some plants they grew. Fun stuff like that.

You do understand that the peripheral bus is not the same thing as the core logic platform, right?

It's not about the ability of the platform to play PS1/2/3 games, but the ability of the device itself to utilize existing accessory input devices built on STANDARD communication link mechanisms.

You are aware that Sony has a long and storied history of forcing (expensive) unnecessarily proprietary peripheral devices onto their customers, right?

There's really no excuse for this, other than to say this is just Sony still showing complete contempt for their customers.

Around the time of the CD-R rootkit fiasco, I wrote off Sony as a vendor entirely. I simply refuse to do business with a company that shows such complete disregard for its customers. Does this mean I don't own ANY Sony tech? Of course not...but it does mean that I have not given Sony a red cent. My PS3 is a 2nd- (maybe 3rd) hand unit I pick up from Craigslist.

I just don't understand why any thinking person would support a company that still runs its business on the razor/blade model of entrenchment and vendor lock-in, especially for tech. To deliberately cripple functions or expend engineering resources to create obstacles to easy operation is just insane. The entire point of having standards is to make components interoperable. It's this modularity that vaulted the PC clone to the top of the microcomputing world. It's why I will likely never buy anything from Apple.

Ugh. Just UGH. Not knowing the first thing about the PS4, I hope it goes down in flames.

Apparently it isn't just our appellate courts here in the States that have gone batshit crazy. The insanity seems to be spreading.

I've never had that problem using CM7 or CM10,x on my HTC Inspire and Samsung GS3...but I've always used the latest stable builds, even when the RCs got pretty long in the tooth.

That's just my phone. Can you imagine how careful people would be with their cars?

It's a matter of prioritization that you're missing. The founders desired a free state, and understood that the existence of such is wholly contingent upon certain rights of the individual being sacrosanct. It's pretty clear from a reading of the Bill of Rights which those were: speech, press, religion, personal ownership of arms, security of house, home and private effects, right to a trial by jury with representation of legal counsel, etc., etc.

They understood that without these liberties **of individuals** being protected as inviolate (or as nearly so as practicable), a free state could not exist. To attempt to examine the relative worth of the 5th Amendment by evaluating its possible effects on crime in society misses the point...the free society desired by the architects of the republic simply does not exist without it (again, see Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay). Ergo, any utilitarian analysis of this sort is pointless on its face.

Then I read his article and had my answer: a pedantic nitwit who lacks the historical understanding of corrupt power.

The 5th Amendment, as with the others in the "Bill of Rights," was designed with the intent to guarantee an individual's liberty against encroachment by the State. The genesis arose from the Crown's ignoble history of coercing confessions under torture and duress, then using said confession as the centerpiece in some mummer's farce of a trial to imprison or execute the persons.

To examine such a precept through the lens of its utilitarian value to broader society is to fail completely to understand at all its reason for being. If we are to do so, then the author must accept that the consequences of abolishing the 5th will likely include a further degradation of our society into an authoritarian police state that will compel and coerce confessions from citizens. We need look no further than Abu Ghraib to see the truth in this. In this light, it's very simple to make the argument that the 5th Amendment is one of the essential protections that maintains ours as a "free" society.

Furthermore, it's been well-established that eyewitness and other human testimonials are consistently the least reliable evidence allowed at trials. Frankly, that we still allow for them to be used as the sole basis for indictment and conviction in this modern era of the NSA and forensic science baffles the rational mind.

I'm sure most readers here "got" it. It just wasn't funny.

Agreed.

Even if the kid hadn't been a dope-smoking, fight-starting, gangsta-wannabe thug who lacked the foresight to consider the lack of wisdom in physically attacking a random stranger in a southern state with both concealed-carry and stand-your-ground laws in effect, what scientific potential did he embody (forget actually accomplish) to warrant his name being carried into astronomic posterity?

Exactly my thinking. After reading the device permission requirements demanded by the most recent update for the Android app version of FB, I uninstalled it entirely. There's no good reason I can think of for Facebook to have visibility and control of the apps running on my device.