"Although these offences involve cartoon characters it is nonetheless serious"
Emm...really? Did they get an interview with the victim? The family of the victim?
Can the victim testify?
How would he confront his accuser...the mind boggles.

Are you seriously trying to tell me that if the Simpson's animators draw Lisa getting out of the bath naked, they will go to jail? For a line drawing of an imaginary figure? How specific is the law that they can determine when the animation became pornographic?

I'm sure i have seen episodes where you see Bart naked - I guess anyone who watched that eposide goes to jail, all 20M people? That would be a big jail.

So it's not the creator of the content they jail, it is the person who looks at it? OMG, how stupid. If I am watching a cable channel and there is a poster on the wall of the scene showing a naked child, I have to turn myself in at the local constabulary, and report anyone else in the room that might have seen the program? How far can this be taken?

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

the courts need to raise the standard for proof of this crime. Just because there is CP on a computer should not be considered enough to prove the owner of the computer put it there. Computers, especially home computers running Windows, are inherently insecure and able to operate autonomously, subject to outside control without the owners knowledge. I can't think of any other possession we are less in control of, which is probably why there is no real analogous precedent for the courts to relate to.
The courts need to require that the prosecutor can show the owner DID download the material with knowledge, not just that it was there. The requirement for proof should be something like correlating an online conversation to a request for the material or carrying it on a DVD, purchasing it with the offenders card, something that shows it could not have been automated.
There is the potential for severe miscarriages of justice with the lax standard for proof presently employed which will inevitably lead to abuse and misuse of power. Once prosecutors have a slamdunk way to leverage a confession that will use and abuse it. All they have to do in ANY case is to look for a piece of CP on the defendant's computer, even if that has nothing to do with the case. No-one wants to go to jail for that and will confess to any other crime, even if they are not guilty. Look at the present case against prosecutors for manufacturing evidence if you don't believe they would do this. "there is no freestanding right not to be framed."

I had an engineering team do a survey of a site and explain to me how the handheld GPS units they used to record the perimeter with would be accurate as they "zero'ed" them by taking a reading at a known location before they started. They actual put that in a report.

A lot of people are under the impression that all GPS units are just as accurate. If that was the case, Trimble would be out of business.

Inexpensive GPS receivers will not resolve to as high an accuracy as the high end gear, even if they are in the same location. They won't have the computational ability, they will round more of the calculations, and the radios will not be as sensitive.

One has to be stationary.

You are confusing inherently inaccurate devices with Differential GPS systems. In Differential GPS, the base station is located at a precisely known position and it constantly calculates the accuracy of the GPS measurement and broadcasts a correction signal. The location of the roving station is calculated relative to the base station using the correction signal as both know the measured location and the amount by which it is likely to be inaccurate.
This technique is used to establish highly accurate relative measurements, such as mapping a construction site. In these cases, absolute accuracy is irrelevant, the project can be feet away from where it is measured to be and no-one will care, but each building, pipe, duct will be placed to sub-centimeter accuracy relative to a known point on the site.
The correction can be applied in real time or in post-processing.

>they're both probably going to be equally inaccurate and in the same direction

No, they will be randomly inaccurate. However, if you have lost your beloved pet, 60 ft is close enough to tell you where it is.

Sure, because oil will just keep coming...right?
The ability to generate energy from wind depends on the ability to deliver it to the end user. The utilities have the lock on that. Unless they are forced to allow wind producers to sell to the grid, there is no market. If you don't have regulations allowing that, the utilities will be the only ones interested in generating from wind, and they already have all the capacity the need. Coal is cheap, why change?
This isn't just a business issue, it's a survival issue. We cannot continue to use fossil fuels to maintain our lifestyle for much longer. Utilities make money for their shareholders, they don't make decisions for the good of the human race.

The Europeans get this, they have Electricity Feed laws that make it cost effective to generate and sell electricity to the grid using wind. In a lot of cases the wind turbines belong to a cooperative that invests in the turbine(s) to make money and to make a difference. This only works with legislation.

It's not taxpayer money that will make the difference, it's making the consumer pay a little extra for energy in the interest of making renewable energy sources a viable solution. Pay now or pay later.

There is only one US company making Megawatt class wind turbines. Almost all the high quality Megawatt class units in the world come from Europe, where there has been an emphasis on research and progress on sustainable energy. The US has voluntarily stepped out of the field since the progress made in the 1980's. Deregulation of the utilities and the lack of Government incentives has killed this industry, not foreign competition. You cannot have the technological lead in alternate energy without government support.

Choosing your reviews is not illegal, nor should it be, movies do it all the time. But what if there never was a positive review, if they were all negative, so they made them up to make the product seem popular although everyone hated it? That must be illegal. Making up reviews then posting them to what you claim is a user feedback forum has got to be false advertising, fraudulent and unethical. It's the corporate equivalent of having a shill in the audience.

I have never understood how a country can expect to charge visitors for their marketing. Wouldn't you expect the people who benefit, i.e., the hospitality industry, the taxi drivers, the amusement parks, to pay the costs of marketing. Why the tourists? How does raising the cost to the customer increase the amount of business? As if the ignorant stupid immigration requirements weren't enough to keep visitors away, now they want to make it financially less desirable? Stupid.

Clearly neither the bank or the judge understand anything about the internet. The bank is completely clueless, has clueless idiot employees, and should be ordered to completely disconnect from the internet for the safety of their clients.
The judge has no clue how email works, knows nothing of POP, Spam, and should be banned form ruling on IT related cases ever again.
A stupid precedent that will be overturned.

Completely agree - if I get information and attachments from anyone I am not expecting to hear from, I delete it, and if it claims to be from a bank I do not have an account with, I delete it without reading it. I am almost certain that is what happened here. It is impossible to claim you emailed someone and should have received a reply, if you want that to work, get rid of spam.

The entire email system is fundamentally broken, does not work and cannot be relied on at all. As long as two parties agree to exchange an email, it is probably fine, but to expect to send am email to anyone who does not know you and to expect a response is naive.

Google should have used their financial might to halt this, they had reason and precedent on their side and more money than the bank.