I bet it will still be better than Highlander 2.

They might if they saw a bottle of honey in an odd place.

Not true for most of the /. crowd, you insensitive clod!

I like that, but how do you count the people involved? If they were targeting Bin Laden but wanted to wire tap someone here in the US to get intel and there are 3 phones believed to belong to that person, but 1 of then in a household with 5 people living there and one is a pay phone, how many people are involved in that? 1? 1 plus however many people they call or get called by? 6? 6 + people called? I think that kind of metric would need to be worked out in detail because beforehand because they will use it against this sort of thing.

And the FBI routinely ignores requires that are difficult to comply with (or at least used to). I recall a news story back several years ago about a requirement that after a certain period of time they were (maybe not now, I have no idea) required to notified people who had their conversations recorded after a certain period of time if charges were not brought against them. In the case of payphones, they didn't know how to contact most of those people, so they did nothing. They didn't post a sign at the payphone, made no attempt to contact the other end of the call (they had the number dialed at least) because they said it was too troublesome. I had no idea the law just allowed them to ignore portions that were too troublesome to deal with.

Maybe the AC just thinks he's in the US (and is wrong)? I'm pretty sure I am and the link worked fine for me. Wait, maybe I'm the one who is wrong?!?

Is the 5th actually protection against torture, though? I mean, you can give it up and if you were tortured you would be tortured into giving it up, assuming you consider torture to be possible without physical damage (which I do, but that's another discussion). This has happened in this country recently as others in this conversation have mentioned. Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbzlLadbMDQ

In your example above about not wanted to tell the authorities where you were when a crime was committed, why wouldn't the next question they ask be, "Well, where were you then?" to which you will be committing a crime if you don't answer, even though it proves your innocence? With the 5th you can just refuse to answer at all and they can't assume you are refusing because you are guilty. Under your scenario, you must answer whatever they ask because it isn't until after you answer that they can determine it really wasn't any of their business.

I think the line of questioning in your scenario is good to ask because if we don't ask these question every generation we will forget why we have these rights, and how they should apply when the conditions change in some way (due to technology, etc).

Perhaps something to consider in this scenario as well is under what conditions you lose the 5th's protections; if you are granted immunity, for example, so if they [the State] thought you knew something important but weren't the person they are after they could grant you immunity and compel you to testify.

Why do I have tons of mod points every day _except_ today? This needs to be modded up to 5, stat!

It's all relative. Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Maybe this is a Whoosh! moment for me (it is late and I'm getting sleepy), but isn't your comment the same thing the OP said, just in another format? Yet you seem to be disagreeing with him?

So people will take it off when they enter restrooms?

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?