Of course it did. There's no reason whatsoever to think that basic laws of supply and demand would apply to music any differently than any other product. There's a lot more supply in the form of artists and songs, and relatively constant demand in the form of disposable income, therefore the music is worth less than it was back before the Internet broke the distribution monopoly.

Oh, but it was. The U.S. film industry being based in Southern California is due in large part to that fact.

A sort of 'appeal to authority by association'.

Or alliteration.

Don't you have employment rights in the US?

Not very many. You have whatever is negotiated in your employment contract (if you have one), and depending on where you work you may have the protection of a collective bargaining agreement. Otherwise, you're almost always an "at-will" employee and can be dismissed for any reason or no reason at all. Hell, my state (Florida) doesn't even have laws that make it illegal to not pay employees for work performed, so if you get screwed out of a paycheck, you can either complain to the federal Department of Labor and *maybe* get minimum wage + penalties for the hours you worked (which in my experience still has been substantially less than what I should have been paid anyway), or you can take your chances and spend a whole lot of money to sue your employer in civil court. Some states such as California actually do implement some strong labor laws that make it more difficult for employees to be abused, but they're definitely in the minority.

The server division might be doing better if they had some more competent folks in sales, too. Late last year I spent six weeks just trying to get a damned quote on a SAN. In that entire time, I got exactly one sales rep (not mine) to return a call, and during the few times I was able to get my own rep on the phone, each time I had to explain what I wanted a quote on. Even after all of that, when I finally did get a quote after six weeks, it was from a VAR he'd apparently pawned me off on, and the quote was for a $150K package after the rep been told repeatedly that the budget was $40K. The VAR was quite confused as he apparently had been told by the rep that the budget was $150K, and was quite unhappy with the HP rep by the time we got off the phone. At that point, I dismissed HP out of hand, and wrote a note to the HP regional sales manager about the fiasco, and of course got no response. I'd been quite pleased a number of years ago with the quality of their DL servers, but If they can't even get their act together in the pre-sales phase I don't have much faith in being taken care of if I need support.

Until you agree there is no actual sale.

Apple is not even a party to the sale - the transaction is between the buyer and whatever store he purchases the package from, not Apple (barring Apple Store sales, perhaps). Prior to that, there was a sales transaction between Apple (potentially via a distributor) and the store, but that's in the past and has nothing to do with the end-user sale.

In the U.S. anyway, all of the necessary elements of a contract are present and said contract is formed when you give a store/vendor your money for the OS X package, and the sale is complete. Saying otherwise requires arguing against many, many years of well-established contract law.

The only "probability" that must be satisfied is, "could a reasonable person reasonably SUSPECT that a crime may be in progress, may have occurred, or is about to occur."

And I would argue that there is no more reason to suspect someone of a crime merely because they set off a radiation detector than there would be to suspect that any random person carrying a newspaper had stolen it from a newsstand. The idea that a detector hit should result in pulling someone over is predicated on the assumption that radioactivity among the traveling public are A.) exceedingly rare, and B.) the result of criminal activity. Neither assumption is true.

You're implying that I said a lot more than actually did - please show me where I said "police have no public safety role whatsoever", nor did I give you any indication as to what level of understanding of legal terminology I may or may not have. All I did was show that it seems substantially more likely for the average law enforcement officer to have a radiation detector triggered by radioactive medical tracers than nefarious criminal activity.

Since most people transporting radioactive materials do so in properly shielded, marked, and placarded vehicles

I believe the evidence suggests that most people transporting radioactive materials are doing so with a very small amount of short half-life substances within their own unshielded, unmarked, and unplacarded bodies as a result of perfectly legal medical testing. I'm certainly open to other evidence suggesting anything else, though.

No, just that "unusual radioactivity" seen on the highways is almost always due to perfectly legal activities that harm no one.

yes that is what those little white box's that hang over the highway are

No, those are PrePass transponders that are used to "pre-clear" trucks belonging to carriers that participate in the PrePass program, usually allowing them to bypass the weigh station based on a variety of criteria. That's not to say that there aren't radioactivity sensors in places along the highway (dunno if there are or not), but the six-sided elongated devices mounted in widely-spaced pairs right before weigh stations are most definitely PrePass boxes.