I bet that company was glad they ripped off workers rather than the music labels

If this lopsided penalty situation is not strong evidence that the USA is slipping into a plutocracy, I don't know what is.

I've personally worked in a shop where they paid the H1B visa workers once every 6 months. They also didn't pay overtime, just the strait hour rate. (But at least it was the right total amount, overtime aside.)

The visa workers had no intention of complaining because they risked getting booted home if they did. (It was during a recession.)

It was at a big company that contracted through a smaller company so that the big company didn't inherent any legal risk of cheating. From the big co's perspective, they are merely paying the contracting company for hours. Where and how the workers were actually paid was legally the small contracting firm's responsibility. Thus, the big co got the benefits of cheating but not the risk. (And the small co. was probably a reshuffle-able front of some larger outfit.)

As intuitive as molasses. All these years the option was in the lower left somewhere. Now it's at the upper right, the complete opposite, and under your name. What's a name have to do with logging out? I'm not exiting my body. That may be intuitive for an exorcist.

Why is that allowed?

The Mars probe mishap still haunts everybody, especially when it comes to body parts.

Sorry, you can only subtract things, not add to them.

Voodoo doctors are salivating over the possibilities...

This seems like circular logic. First one has to define what a "Neanderthal" is before answering that question.

Drawing hard lines in the sand is perhaps not possible. Neanderthals would share a vast majority of our DNA just by being hominids. There are clusterings of genetic patterns, but a cluster is not a clear-cut distinction.

Corporations are not just people, but protected people now.

Frequent inspections cost money; they ain't free. A biz would factor that into the cost when choosing between supplier A and B from the example.

Moral issues aside, this seems like a bad business move. If you are a device manufacturer choosing between chip A and chip B, and the vendor for chip B bricks their clones, then you would prefer chip A.

This is because if you accidentally get a bad shipment of clone chips, and put them into your devices, your devices will be subject to bricking, creating returns and bad PR.

Plus, having some cloners around gives you a spare option if the main company bellies up.

Ask.com still exists?

I don't know about the company, but their damned tool-bar still does.

And in another 100 years, we'll see a dupe.

And if the slick salesperson lies and says "yes, they are legit"?

It's a mistake in my opinion to dump this problem onto the consumer; it's not realistic for them to police all the parts of gizmos they buy.

I get new ideas by cleaning out old files.