Could be, but that's not the point. That still be the fault of the activation scheme, not the user being a moron as the OP said in his first sentence.

My wife ran into an issue with a key for another company years ago for an expansion for a game. Fresh from the store it said it was invalid because it had already been used. Returned it for another copy, same thing, returned for refund and bought it online from the company instead. Definitely not reasonable to consider cracked key gen systems to be user error. I have no idea if that's what is going on here, but at least half of the conditions you listed aren't reasonable user error either. Unless you mean using a Microsoft product in 2013; in that case you've been proven right apparently.

Depending on context, the original question did seem like it might have been worded to misdirect readers into a particular answer. But context is really hard to read in a response if you don't personally know the writer (and sometimes even if you do) so maybe it was intended innocently.

That was far too well written for slashdot. Especially that last paragraph. What are you doing here?

Someone has an odd idea of 'short'.

But there the population might be small enough for "Accidents" to fix them. I know, wishful, psychotic thinking, huh?

I have an example for you. A company I used to work for in Vancouver, Washington outsourced entry level data entry to a couple of different companies in India. The cost was about 80% of what it cost us to have it down by employees here in the US. Except the quality was so variable (occasionally very good, but usually a high percentage of errors, varying from 20% to 100% (you wouldn't believe the sort of errors I found sometimes) and we demanded an error rate of less than 1% from our own employees (and could consistently get that from most), that we spent far more than that 20% discount in increased quality assurance costs. They finally stopped using them more than 2 years after this was pointed out to them. Sometimes businesses are glacially slow at reacting to problems, even really small ones (and this was a very small family owned company).

Damn it, every time I think about moving somewhere (*anywhere*) to escape the advancing stupidity here (the USA) I hear about a different form of stupidity somewhere else. We need to start colonizing Mars or something so we have somewhere we can move to start a new country. And with current technology, Mars might be far enough to make it economically infeasible to fight a war against the colonists, so the inevitable revolution might actually work.

Harrassment, perhaps, though extremely hard to prove from a single incident, but not libel or defamation. You could be sued, but not successfully. You could be sued for anything at any time, but there's no chance of winning a case like that.

I say it was a witch hunt. They were looking for a scape goat for society's ills rather than taking any responsibility themselves for what their children were caught doing at the time, which is a pretty good definition of "Witch hunt". Is that good enough for you? Anyone else care to back me up?

Maybe they mean it more as in the GPS will possibly work?

I thought there were no lawyers allowed in heaven by definition?

What we really need is a time travel device of some sort. And it would probably be good if we included some kind of cloaking technology. We could call it a chameleon circuit or something. But it would probably be built by the lowest bidder and fail upon the first use, getting stuck in some era/location specific form. Well, it would still be a time travel device, oh, and we could make it bigger on the inside than on the outside!

Playing Devil's advocate here, but isn't that what they did? If that's what you're trying to point out, then let me be the first to *Whoosh* me.

Sounds like you found nerd ruffies. Could be the starter scene to a CSI: SVU episode.