The fact that I'm only going to cut off one of your legs instead of both should not ease your dread at my producing a bonesaw[1]. I mean, flooding even 10% of a country like that is a humanitarian crisis in line with the 2004 tsunami or the Haiti Earthquake. Going from a "biblical disaster" to an "epic disaster" is a small change in terms of impact. They're both catastrophic.

[1] - For the analogy-impaired, that is in no way, shape, or form a threat.

If you read what either Kos or Nate Silver have said, it was independent researchers working with Kos (who gave them the needed data) who exposed it, and Kos who first published it. What 538 did a few weeks ago was rank R2K low on their pollster rankings. Combined with shoddy polling in a few straight elections, this caused Kos to sack R2K before any accusations of impropriety were made.

I think a lot of it is that the US legal system is designed to handle legitimate cases. There's just not much precedent for someone destroying their company to pursue legal action that served solely (IMO) as means to facilitate an extortion ring ($699 license fees on copyrights SCO doesn't own) and a stock scam (go Team FUD!). Throw in the technical complexities, and it's definitely an outlier that I'm not sure is good proof of anything.

I'm sorry for the tangent, but what is this "usually" called? Because I'm pretty sure keeping a rental for like 2 weeks is going to get you into trouble anywhere.

Correct. If they had just made up the story, they would not have purchased stolen Apple property, and thus Apple probably wouldn't have made them pay for their tickets.

Most of the press outlets attending WWDC have published stories that displeased Apple in one way or another, and they still get free tickets. If there's really an important story out there, any one of those press outlets would cover it, and would come out far ahead even if Apple made them buy their own WWDC tickets.

California law is pretty straightforward about the fact that they don't play by "finders keepers, losers weepers" on the West Coast. Specifically, if you find someone's property, you're supposed to return it to them or turn it over to the police[1], you can't just do whatever you want with it. At the point at which the finder decided to sell it to the highest bidder, it becomes theft.

[1] - While not technically legit, nobody's gonna bust your chops if you just hand it over to the bartender or hostess and have the business hang onto it instead.

For a lot of uncracked DRM, it's often not cracked because there's no need to crack it. Most of the stuff covered by things like FairPlay or RTMP go uncracked because there are more convenient ways for uploaders to pirate the material (buy the DVD or CD, TiVo the show off OTA/cable broadcast). I'd imagine similar logic with video game console games - it's a huge PITA to distribute, because unlike movies, you can't re-encode it easily, and you often have to mod the end user console to play it.

Bingo. If there's an incompatibility between Apple's license and the GPL, then the fault is that of the developer who made the port - he's the one who gave license to Apple to sell the game on his behalf under Apple's terms. If he didn't have the right to make that deal with Apple, he's the one who's at fault here.

In this case, there's actually a legitimate chance that they own relevant patents that'll survive a challenge.

Theora isn't participating. What's supposedly happening is that MPEG LA is saying "we owned Patents X, Y, and Z that we claim cover Theora, you can pay us $$ to license them" The Theora project is not involved in this patent pool, and the patents are mostly patents that companies own that were originally gotten for MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 stuff that they claim also apply to Theora.

To be fair, the US didn't actually have paper currency until around the time of the Civil War.

And if you shoot people in high-sec or low-sec, you take a hit to Security Status, and if it gets too low, you'll get nuked just for jumping into a high-sec system, and the only way to raise it is to grind pirates for hours. And if you shoot someone in low-sec and jump to high-sec within 15 minutes, you get CONCORDed anyhow. And gates and stations won't allow you access for 30 seconds after shooting someone. And, of course, 0.0 is divided into NPC sovereignty and Player sovereignty which affects whether or not you can dock in their stations in the first place (but you have an aggression timer of 30 seconds even for stations you own), and in addition to the police (CONCORD), if you have a low enough standing with one of the Empires, their Navy will attack you in their space. And different rules apply in Faction Warfare low-sec, where some factions can shoot at declared players of the other faction. Oh, and because of rounding, there are a handful of 0.0 systems that actually hit you with security status penalties if you shoot people in them.

Yeah, EVE is complicated.

Probably the part where calling Tech Support to report lost corporate property is considered legitimate? By your logic, if I call up the Lima, Ohio Post Office and they don't know anything about the secret military plans I found, I'm allowed to sell them to Iran.

Because he (or Apple IT) remotely disabled it so the guy couldn't go blindly wandering through his corporate emails and stuff.

OK, there's like three (3) problems with that claim.

• "A friend of Hogan’s then offered to call Apple Care on Hogan’s behalf, according to Hogan’s lawyer. That apparently was the extent of Hogan’s efforts to return the phone." For all we know, said friend didn't even call Apple's tech support line.
• If you know the name of the guy the phone belongs to (and they did), why on Earth would you call some tech support guy in India? You expect the Apple Care guys speak for Apple on the issue of iPhone prototypes?
• You're supposed to turn it over to the police if you can't reach the original owner (either Apple R&D or the engineer who lost it).

And that ignores the fact that you're taking as prima facie truth the word of people under criminal investigation.