Which drone crashed in Iran? My understanding is that it made a perfect landing and was completely intact for the Iranians to parade around on television. Sure it did not land where it was supposed to, but there was no crashing last I heard. Would a human pilot have done any better with his sensors and position data jammed? I guess no human pilot has ever made an emergency landing in enemy territory before.

If the planes flown in 9/11 had been fully automated then the terrorists could not have commandeered them the same way. Now every system will be ripe for abuse in some way, is it easier to hack a remote controlled plane or knock down the cockpit door and take out a pilot?

All I know is that computers are getting much better at flying planes than humans. Look at the 2009 Air France crash, the pilots ignored the warnings by the computer and did just the opposite of what they warnings told them and crashed the plane. There are plenty of examples of pilots ignoring the computer warnings and crashing. I am sure there are plenty of examples of the computer being wrong and the human pilot correcting that as well, but once the safety statistics and economics swing in favor of automation that is where we will be moving. There will always be risks, we will just be reducing them.

You call it a "magnet link", but it does not "link" to anything correct? It just contains information, has and size, about some file that is out there somewhere.

On a side note I am curious how you get a hold of the torrent without a link and only a magnet file?

But back to my question that I do not have an answer for but you have helped me clarify even further thank you:

Are sites containing strictly Magnet URIs, which I assume provide no resources for locating the tracker nor piers that would provide file, illegal or legal in the US?

If I sell the site as an anti-piracy means, provide a little file scanner that allows users to make sure their devices are "free" of pirated files, does that make it legit?

Take it one step further can I link the users back to Amazon as a way to replace their illegal files with legit ones and grab a commission?

But a torrent site will point me to a tracker which can point me to piers who are seeding the file.
I believe torrent index sites in the US have all been shut down and pushed out.

What I am proposing is a bit less than the torrent, only the file has and files size portion, but no information on how to obtain the file.
If the site is simply compiling a list of pirated files in the wild, then is it doing wrong?
Arguably the list could be sold in a way for consumers to verify that a file is of pirate origins and they should avoid it, assuming the consumer wants to make sure they are obtaining legal wares.
While of course it could be used for identifying the existence of a pirated file and searching it out.

How about an index of file hashes and file sizes somewhere that you can verify the todays.hot.movie.avi file against? Or would that be illegal to host in the US?

I am not convinced. I demand you prove it is impossible to prove something is negative. Sorry I can only offer you $10 if you succeed.

See Google Maps lures in unsuspecting users, whose eye balls are then sold to advertisers. Now these eye balls are not sold for free by any means.

I guess I am a terrorist, where do I turn myself in?

ARM Holdings does seem like one of the good guys from what little I know, especially compared how Intel seems to horde the x86 architecture rights and keep others out. With your knowledge and experience, do you think ARM Holdings could survive in a world with no patent or other IP laws? I would still imagine companies could enter into contract license agreements, like ARM could say to TI: we will give you the latest ARM design for some upfront money and a cut for each piece of silicon you produce. Now TI could find a way to get the ARM designs, perhaps Samsung would leak them, or they could reverse engineer a Tegra chip; but most likely they would be behind already and the competitors who pay for them would protect the design documents from ARM from leaking. But the damage to ARM could come from a competitor advancing the ARM architecture, using what would be protected by patents today, and selling it. Or could ARM be open source and survive, would there be an advantage to them in anyway?

While the registry trick was a nice find, why not just use Internet Explorer to set the wallpaper to something else?

If ARM holdings licensing came into question it would probably destroy the company's stock. I am loving the way the ARM architecture is handled, a lot more competition than x86, and it seems to be advancing quickly now that it has becoming popular.

I was trying to imagine today if ARM holdings could survive in a world without IP laws. I think yes it could. It seems that getting a hold of ARM holdings processor plans, from something like bittorrent, would not be super useful even to Texas Instruments, Samsung, or Nvidia engineers. ARM works with them to implement the design, so the payment agreement would probably just be altered slightly and ARM would have to protect its disclosure of ARM architecture details a little more closely. Perhaps ARM would morph more into a standards body and not be as profitable though? I am curious what someone with more info on the topic can share please!