Are you sure about that? This was someone filming two other persons engaging in intimate acts without their knowledge or consent. If the couple being spied upon were heterosexual and the spy was a stalker getting his rocks off, he'd actually get worse than this, particularly if NJ has a sex offender registry.

Not saying I agree entirely with the law on this one, but I don't personally believe that the accused here was given worse sentencing because of the orientation of his victim.

Yeah, I left that out to be polite, since the OP was talking about running a FOSS only business. Wouldn't do to conflate the businesses that don't pay the BSA because they don't use BSA software with the businesses that don't pay the BSA because bittorrent is cheaper. Apples hate being called oranges.

I don't doubt that some businesses do get threatened by the BSA thanks to anon complaints from ex employees, and actually do have pirated software. Even in the case of those companies, I'd tell them to get the IT guy(s) to do an internal audit and clean up their act, not let the BSA run the audit for them.

I think you're treating the BSA as if they were a law firm. They follow a different approach than actual lawyers do.

They don't actually sue, see the line about "hasn't pursued a court case in 5 years". Lawsuits cost money. They threaten to sue if you've got pirated software, then sell you on an audit to prove your innocence. If they find pirated software, they offer to legitimize it by selling you a licence, rather than go to court. It's a revenue generating approach where unleashing the lawyers is a last resort.

They're the equivalent to an angry McDonald's customer demanding to see the manager (for whatever reason), threatening to sue/call head office/stir up a ruckus, and walking out with a refund or free food. If they don't get their free mcnuggets, they give up and try the same approach in the next store down the road.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at, should have phrased it more clearly. So, refining my original statement:

If you get a threatening letter from the BSA demanding an audit, disregard it.

If you get a subpoena, or anything else official, forward it to your lawyer.

The letter is bait. Don't rise to it, and most likely they won't do anything about it. Actual court documents are too serious to ignore.

Doesn't really help, what with the whole false accusations from disgruntled employees angle. Replying "no thanks, I use Linux" to them isn't going to do you much good. Replying at all isn't going to do you much good. It shows them that you're listening.

A better approach is to simply ignore the BSA on principle. Threatening letters are cheap, subpoenas are expensive, and they do their business in bulk (meaning they can't actually sic their lawyers on most of their targets).

Also, try not to have disgruntled employees. A big company can't avoid a few bad apples, but smaller businesses can vet new hires better and treat existing employees less like disposable resources. If nothing else, the BSA isn't the only recourse for a pissed off ex employee to screw his former boss. I once worked at a restaurant that got hit with a surprise health inspection shortly after a round of layoffs - the people running the place treated employees and health code rules about equally well and almost got shut down as a result (I would have said good riddance if they had, but it would have meant looking for a new job myself).

I doubt we'd use them in general communication applications anyway, for the simple reason that what we have right now isn't broken, and thus doesn't need to be fixed. Hell, if we're still using telephone wires in 2012, good money is on there still being cell towers in 2112.

They mention submarine communications, and that upon reflection makes absolutely perfect sense to me. Subs are hard to reach with radio (baring ELF radio, which is a pain in the ass). Likewise, if we ever found it necessary to communicate with man made objects deep beneath the earth, neutrino communicators would make sense.

Space based communication is also mentioned, and that struck me as a little more suspect. Vacuum is the one environment where you can use practically anything to talk, and line of sight is rarely an issue when the objects in the way are tiny compared to the distances involved. How often do astronomical bodies get in the way, and wouldn't it be simpler to use a relay for the rare occasions when they do?

Second that. I've had bad bosses (and a few good ones), and I would never, ever trust the worst of them to be an employment reference.

If an employer tries to assert control by intimidation, to the effect of "quit and you'll never get a job again", they're bluffing. They know that the moment you turn in your notice, their control over your future goes out the window. They don't want you to realize this. Mostly because, if they're the sort who resorts to intimidation, they're also the sort who can't afford to rely on employee goodwill.

Most future employers will not expect to speak to all of your previous employers, and as long as you yourself aren't the problem, there will be other references you can use. Plus, if you apply for a job while holding an existing one, they generally won't insist on contacting your current employer, meaning the best time to jump ship from a toxic boss is while still employed.

I think if you've got a laser with enough light pressure to generate significant recoil, you've won with the first shot that actually hits, regardless of what the target is made of.

As for what space combat would look like, assuming no exotic tech like controlled gravity, shields, reactionless engines or faster than light travel:
-Manoeuvring would be limited by the g forces the crew can withstand on manned craft. Small combat craft would be drones, without exception.
-Range would be longer than any current theatre of battle. Including strategic nuclear warfare.
-Any drive worth using for long both range force projection and combat manoeuvres would be a fearsome weapon in itself. Think "thermonuclear blowtorch". With an Orion or antimatter engine, the fuel is potently explosive.
-Stealth is flat out impossible.

So, messy, expensive and strategic would be a good guess, and it probably wouldn't look very interesting to the naked eye (lots of bright flashes and empty blackness). Think less "Top Gun" and more "Wargames".

Actually, the "pretend to be the cops, force the victim to pull over" thing has been done IRL on several occasions I've read about.

The major reason it doesn't happen often is risk relative to reward. Impersonating a police officer is not a good way to endear yourself to the justice system. You'd need a convincing cop car, and that isn't something you can just go out and buy. When robbing a truck, you can usually do that more easily when it's still waiting at a loading dock. If it's an armoured car, fat chance they're going to be taken in by a fake badge and phony traffic stop. If your object is murder or kidnapping, there are less conspicuous ways to go about it than flashing lights on the open highway.

Crooks are lazy, after all, and the desperate or chemically assisted ones don't have the money or patience to pretend to be cops, while the ones with the ability to pull it off are smart enough to be risk averse.

So an autopilot car or truck that reacts to the cops the way a driver would won't generate a rash of highwaymen pretending to be police. Robbing an automated truck would probably be best accomplished by paying the minimum wage box-jockeys who man the warehouse a bribe to let the crook sneak in and change the destination on the truck's autopilot.

Yep, it was a plot point in Richard Morgan's "Black Man" (re-titled "Thirteen" in the US to avoid confusion IIRC).

Car is on autopilot, bad guys want driver dead, they reprogram the car to stop on a deserted highway remotely. It's a little odd that nobody thought to include a manual override in the car design, but chalk that up to author fiat.

Look up "Banqiao dam failure" on wikipedia, or google it. 26k dead from flooding alone, more than 140k dead from secondary effects. Severe ecological effects and property damage as well. China's got a bad history when it comes to dams.

Even the most severe estimates for Chernobyl are a fraction as many dead, short and long term combined - the highest figure I've ever seen put forward was grossly inflated (the person posting it treated every additional cancer caused by the radiation as "fatal", see if you can spot the logical error there), and it still fell well short of Banqiao in deaths. Fukushima's repercussions aren't fully known yet (Chernobyl's are known because it's been twenty-five years), but there will be far fewer deaths than Chernobyl caused, even according to the people who think Tepco is downplaying the severity.

Other nuclear accidents have single digit fatalities (SL-1 comes to mind), or no fatalities at all. Three Mile Island was a zero casualty disaster, where nobody was killed or irradiated and the final cost was measured in dollar figures alone.

It isn't that nuke plants are intrinsically safe - they aren't. It's that we're so paranoid about nuclear safety we go out of the way when designing for failure, such that the actual damage done by a meltdown is a fraction of what it would be in a plant with few or no safety systems. If we built hydro dams the way we build nuclear plants they'd be incapable of killing anybody when they fail. But we don't. We don't built anything non-nuclear to nuclear-spec safety levels. Which means both the anti-nuke ninnies and the nuclear fanboys are wrong - the former for inflating the danger by pretending there are no adequate safeties and the later for pretending there are no risks.

(Crap, I just realized you might be talking about a different game; I responded as if you were replying to the GP about Arkham City, but now I suspect you were referring to GTA4. My bad if I misunderstood.)

Actually no, I'm gonna chime in here as another person who owns Arkham City and does not have a live account. Your statement is incorrect.

What happens instead is, you get prompted to log into GFWL, and can click "cancel" to just work offline. Save game still works, no features lost. You can't do online scores, but who cares, really? Dunno if it'll require a login for DLC, but I rarely bother with that anyway. And, just to be clear on this point, I'm currently a quarter way through the game, have never made a live account (I dislike Microsoft), have saved plenty of times and am playing a non-pirated, bought off of steam version of the game.

I don't know where you got your information, but it's either out of date, was never correct in the first place, or something got misunderstood along the way.

Actually, omnivores are all over the map in terms of taste. Pigs are tasty, bears are edible, but nobody's lining up to try crow-pie.

Regarding carnivores, I can vouch for the fact that sharks are indeed tasty.

Might want to amend your rules to say that scavengers aren't tasty, herd animals are delicious, and seafood is exempt.

Don't be stupid, the whole point of a strategic nuclear weapon is deterrence and/or nationalistic posturing. Hiding your capabilities does not further either cause. Delivery systems may have some secrecy about them to prevent the development of countermeasures, but the actual bomb yields are no secret.

Plus, you don't know if a design works until you test it, and you can't test a nuke without essentially letting every other nation with an intelligence agency know the yield, since the math for determining TNT equivalence isn't hard, and the detonation isn't subtle.

Further to that, most of the really big designs are older and outdated, as miniaturization became the focus (smaller bombs equals more warheads per missile/bomber). Meaning the bombs from the end of the cold war are actually lower yield than the ones from the middle.

In short, you're letting knee jerk "the government is hiding secrets" paranoia get in the way of common sense, and you don't know nukes.