The company will (temporarily) make some extra profit, which is good for management bonuses. And after a few years the manager moves to another company... Rinse, repeat!

Another option is that it is just a manufacturing hack (because of component shortage) without properly thinking about the consequences.

If you think a bit further... An operating system could load an executable at a different address every time it is used, without recompilation!

Executives make decisions.
Lock the bastards up.

Most likely one of the conditions of the settlement is that the executives are not prosecuted for their transgressions.

And the executives will have the fine paid from the corporate funds... business as usual.

The customers of the company I work for do not like it when their blueprints are publicly available. Would you like to have your code and documentation searched by gmail to show ads? (What information do these ads leak to the company that pays for it?)
And any "alien" Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo or Google cloud data is up for collection by the NSA. Sounds like a good reason to encrypt at least some of your mail.

I started with various British computers (Sinclair QL and Acorn Archimedes), pretty soon acquired a RISCiX (Acorn ARM based Unix) machine. Moved to AMD/Intel hardware with Linux as OS. DOS/Windows is for work... and usable when it comes with a system administrator.

Nothing in the "Encrypted Media Extension" specs prevents or forbids proxying of both the key and the encrypted media stream to an external "decryption and caching" service. And all of the usual "how do we prevent the plaintext from leaking from the user's machine" questions are still in full force. It is unlikely that the W3C will get "effective protection".

KPN tried "carrier grade" IP4-NAT in the Netherlands a decade ago... Unfortunately the router software was too buggy and made the routers trash and crash. And how can the customers of the ISP run servers on their computers? NAT has implications for the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet.

There already is a picture of Mickey crossing light-sabers: http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/63819000/jpg/_63819199_starwars.jpg (Minnie is in the picture too. *sigh*)

Canadian $, Australian $ or Zimbabwe $?

I agree that the biggest danger is close to home, family and friends of the family. And while there are "predators" on the net they are far less dangerous than the predators the child may meet in real life. Children are pretty safe with the online equivalent of "don't go with the stranger offering you candy."

What are some good rules of the thumb:

• Don't talk to people you are not comfortable with.
• Don't tell where you live. "Near Big City" is good enough for someone until you trust him/her.
• Be careful with what you show on your webcam.

If you following the advice the Internet is a good place to experiment with political and sexual discussion, pregnancies and STDs come from meeting IRL.

It depends on the exact bug that is triggered. When a security researcher mentions "potentially exploitable bug" it could be serious. Very often a memory corruption is a first step into more serious exploits.

For the people that were lucky enough to use it on the Acorn Archimedes...

While I don't mind putting some restrictions on someone while (s)he's on probation; the laundry list of conditions sounded like something typed in a decade (or more) ago with some conditions added over time. It is so convenient to have a standard list, without regard for the probatee or his crime!

It is good to have relevant restrictions as conditions for porbation (no alcohol for people convicted of intoxication related crimes), but I don't see any good in a total restriction of computer use for a petty thief (unless he brokers on ebay).