The burden of proof rests with the customer

Federal law has said the exact and complete opposite, at least since the 1975 Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, and other related acts.

Your continual assertions that fly in the face of all reality, has been a complete waste of my time. I see every reason to believe you don't posses the knowledge or position you claim to, and are actually quite ignorant of the subject.

I got four letters for you:J-U-R-Y

I got some letters for you, too: Voir dire. This is the process wherein lawyers weed out all your peers in favor of compliant idiots. That's not what it's supposed to do, of course, but that's how it's used. It's then almost always followed by admonishment by the judge to the effect that the jury has to apply the law as written, with nothing at all about the jury's actual duty to evaluate the law -- in fact, if that's brought up, likely you'll have a mistrial.

If you go to court in the US, you can pretty much look forward to success in ratio with the money you spend on your lawyer, and how well your lawyer manages to pass that largesse along to the judge. And too bad if the judge thinks public opinion means more than your money.

The question of whether Machines Can Think... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.
-- Dijkstra (1984) The threats to computing science

As a corollary -- we did not need to actually understand much about how biological organisms swim to be able to build a submarine.

The perceptron as used in the sixties had particular limits, namely that they could not do anything more when layered than when they were not. This was because the perceptrons in use were linear. Minsky pointed out this simple fact as a response to a number of outrageous claims from the NN community about the capabilities of those linear perceptrons. NN was done in by selling snake-oil. They did it again in the 90s, and they're again having a go at it now.

The loss prevention organization has it within their authority to gather their equipment, forcibly terminate service, and add the contractual disconnect fee to be made against the bill, or by forfeiture of the deposit for leasing the equipment

That may be written in the contract, but it would never stand up in court. You can't rent out defective products, then instead of fixing them during their mandatory warranty period, *charge* the customer for the broken equipment and additional fees. And you've got a high burden to prove that the customer's actions caused irreparable damage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

its name changed to BP Amoco plc in 1998 and to BP plc in 2001.

So it's not fair to call them by the name they've used for the overwhelming majority of their existence, because they very quickly changed their name, not once but TWICE in 3 years?

I think what you just described is called fraud, though

Nope. The user is under no obligation to say if they've done anything to the device to cause it to stop working, while the company that provided it, IS obligated to fix it.

When the problem repeats a few times, they are eventually going to figure out that the user is breaking it.

Doesn't matter what they assume is happening. Legally, they need to PROVE the cause of the problem is nothing even incidental to the equipment, and the user even doing reasonable amounts of dicking around with it won't qualify.

The company is on legally indefensible ground, if they're doing what you've claimed.

the courts have actually spanked them rather than shrugging and saying "oh well, you found a loophole, have a nice day"...

Nope. MOST of the court cases have gone their way... They're appealing ONE that did not, right now.

You or I have every right to time-shift what we watch; that doesn't even play in the same fair-use-ballpark as a for-profit company actively rebroadcasting someone else's content without permission.

Except it does... Courts have found that cable companies can host "Network DVRs", legally, without broadcaster's permission.

I think you'll find that, for most people (though not necessarily the courts), the key test of "fair use" ends with a single word: commercial.

Complete nonsense. Many for-profit works use excerpts of material. See any documentaries, ever. See any news reports, ever. See cable companies' DVRs. etc.

And if you don't want to rely in third-party gatekeepers, how most people will use it? In your phone? in your (for the majority, windows) pc? You can't use gatekeepers because a lot got hacked or just run with the coins, and you can't have them yourself because the most used platforms are ripe for external exploit, either making the user do something or just making popular good looking trojans.

And if that insecurity is not enough, having over that government sponsored weakened encryption algorythms and mandated backdoors don't help a lot.

We are still not ready for a distributed digital money in those terms.

Someone here doesn't keep up with philosophy.

A good deal of philosophy is mythology, trendy mythology, which is why I tend to ignore the signals coming from that direction. It's not even a soft science: it's not science at all. So yes, you're quite right, and thank you for noticing I'm not taking part in that mostly-bewildered sideshow.

There is nothing -- repeat, absolutely nothing -- to indicate, in any way, that there is anything going on in brains that isn't mundane physics. Further, not anywhere in the body, not anywhere in the world, not anywhere in the entire universe. The tendency of certain personality types to attribute the unknown to various imaginary basics without bothering with objective fact, measurable cause and effect, and the inconvenience of presenting a falsifiable proposal is what got us gods, elves, banshees, ghosts, chupacabras, and so forth.

Me, I'll wait to assert that force X is making something happen until someone demonstrates that there is a force X. In the interim, we already know the living brain is replete with electrical, chemical and physical activity (by which I mean the actual physical configuration is known to change over time... I'm not just talking about niceties like oxygen transport.) We don't know what it all does in any kind of holistic sense; that makes it far too early to be presuming the existence of further activity of another order. If, however, we look into all the known activities and find that they cannot account for the end result, that's the time to look further -- that, or if someone builds an X detector and demonstrates that X is, in fact, going on -- as it were. I must point out to you that no such thing has occurred.

In the interim, the way to bet is clearly that it's all mundane, in the sense that we already understand the underlying physics principles. Everything from Occam's Razor to basic statistics tells us the probable solution lies in the set of solutions we've determined describe everything else; for one, we know of nothing else, for another, there's no evidence whatsoever that points to something else. There's simply no path from here to Dualism. Chalmer's assertions are baseless at this point in time, as they were when made. There's simply no evidence for consciousness as "it's own thing"; it exists in the mundane world, odds are that it is of the mundane world -- just like everything else we've ever looked into.

c'mon. Every indication says your brain is you. Chemical reactions, electrical impulses, stored states, massive, active and dynamic connectivity. That's what "you" arise from. When your brain stops, you stop. Your head contains a most effective EM shield consisting of wet, conductive layers that are sufficient to prevent huge RF and EM fields from getting into your brain tissue. The tiny, minuscule events going on inside your head can't get out under any circumstance for the same reason, unless you (a) punch a hole in your skull or (b) scan it with instruments so sensitive you can hardly comprehend the idea, or (c), you effectuate your mind's activity in some manner by moving your body via the nerves that connect your muscles and other parts to the brain through the base of your skull. Your brain is not an interface. Your brain is the computer. Everything we know about physics points this way; nothing points the way you suggest. It's simply not the way to bet. What you're talking about has basis only in mythology at this point in time.

o we don't know what "thinking" is -- at all -- not even vaguely. Or consciousness.

o so we don't know how "hard" these things are

o and we don't know if we'll need new theories

o and we don't know if we'll need new engineering paradigms

o so Alan Winfield is simply hand-waving

o all we actually know is that we've not yet figured it out, or, if someone has, they're not talking about it

o at this point, the truth is that all bets are off and any road may potentially, eventually, lead to AI.

Just as a cautionary tale, recall (or look up) the paper written by Minsky on perceptrons (simple models of neurons and in groups, neural networks.) Regarded as authoritative at the time, his paper put forth the idea that perceptrons had very specific limits, and were pretty much a dead end. He was completely, totally, wrong in his conclusion. This was, essentially, because he failed to consider what they could do when layered. Which is a lot more than he laid out. His work set NN research back quite a bit because it was taken as authoritative, when it was actually short-sighted and misleading.

What we actually know about something is only clear once the dust settles and we --- wait for it --- actually know about it. Right now, we hardly know a thing. So when someone starts pontificating about dates and limits and what "doesn't work" or "does work", just laugh and tell 'em to come back when they've got actual results. This is highly distinct from statements like "I've got an idea I think may have potential", which are interesting and wholly appropriate at this juncture.

Calling it a British company is debatable, but more defensible than calling it "British Petroleum (BP)". British Petroleum isn't even its previous name.

No idea what you're talking about. Here's the top line from Wikipedia:

BP plc, sometimes referred to by its former name British Petroleum, is a British multinational oil and gas company headquartered in London, England.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I have gotten so sick of companies dodging the intent of the law lately.

You're talking about Aereo, right?

No?

Awkward...