Similar to the good old days of the ESN (think Analog, TDMA, CDMA)? Granted, the ESN was printed right in the back of the thing, and all someone needed was a few minutes to get that (at most) and cloning isn't far behind--not that the GSM method is unclonable, but really, it's more often going to be easier to just yoink someone's SIM and use it while you can.

You also lose the benefit of being able to just switch to a different phone on your own if the identifier is a value stored in the phone--every phone would have to have it's own identifier on the network (letting multiple phones share the same would make it hard to claim cloning with your provider, should it happen--it's built in for multiple phones to say they're the same person at that point), so if you wanted or needed to change handsets, it's another call to your provider.

Nah, doing that could break windows.

This is the downside to Rule 34. This will probably soon exist, and necessitate the gouging out of eyes.

Really, their poetry sucks, the pr0n has to be a war crime at best.

Breaking News: Bill Gates goes apoplectic with rage. Film at 11.

And then maybe some Vogon poetry?

He's dead, Jim!

Now, just get Michael on the plane and he can be done with Purgatory.

This will now replace 'What does X have to do with the price of tea in China' in my daily conversation. You almost got a beverage spray from me because this bit of wit.

Cursory search points me to Wikipedia. The summation at the top pretty much covers how this instance would NOT apply:

The last sentence notwithstanding, all tests against this doctrine are with regards to child trespassers.

If a child walked into a house with a loaded gun on the coffee table and popped his pal who happened to be with him, this holds merit; an adult walks in, however, grabs the gun, and goes house-to-house offing neighbours, this is completely off the table.

Except for the fact that there isn't currently a completely impervious method to secure a wireless network, even with 'respectable' best practices on your home network, you're still at risk for your connection being hijacked and used for nefarious purposes.

All in all, the analogies presented aren't unreasonable; if someone exceeds a known boundary (walking into a house whose door happens to be unlocked; opening the door of and operating a car that they don't own--things known to be crimes), that liability is theirs, not the person whose property has been misused, whether or not 'respectable' practices such as locking a door or car have been used. I don't see where a wireless network is much different, regardless of whether or not BP have been adhered to.

This is a question that comes to mind to me frequently. If you share, say, 20 blocks of a video file whose torrent is 1070 blocks, and none of the blocks you share contain any information that would directly allow the recipient's software to do anything with it, have you done anything more than shuffle a bunch of 1s and 0s around? If those 20 blocks are contiguous, might you have a fair use defence? Hell, if your ratio on the torrent is less than 1.0, did you really share a copy?

That last argument is one that I could see used on the other end...a given user might keep a 1.0 ratio, but people are still completing their downloads, so there's some semblance of acting in concert, though that logic seems to be a little bit flaky as of late (or maybe Mr. Steele didn't explain it right, I don't know anymore).

That's the general gist of it, but I've never met a torrent client that won't let me disable uploading. And how do you prove uploading is occurring? Easiest way is to download from an alleged seeder. Then it goes downhill really fast for them; they might have to defend that they weren't uploading themselves at the same time as they were downloading. Even then, they're only downloading from (and seeding to) an IP address, and there is the central controversy--with just an IP address, how do you know who you're able to sue?

To you: you REALLY clicked a shortened link, in a /. comment, with no real description of what it is/was, while AT WORK?

You were pretty much ASKING for that.

You forgot #winning, Mr. Sheen.

How did I miss this one? That's like the old lady who calls to piss and moan about her cell phone not giving her a dial tone...

But, as TWC have already done once, they can prevent having an 'undue burden' being placed on their business operations, and stem the flow of responses to a reasonable level; after all, they have other requests from government agencies that take precedence. Finally, National Security is helping us!