It will never be seen again. And the journalist will be considered lucky that he still has his camera. Given all of the talk I hear from people down in the USA concerning the sanctity of private property, it seems somewhat strange that the government would be so myopic in matters like this. I suppose I shouldn't find that strange, I guess. Just another example of how the people with power live under different laws than the rest of us.
Violation of TOS is breach of contract at most. A civil matter, not even a crime, and nowhere near a felony. The notion that violating a TOS is also a violation of CFAA would mean that anybody could make their own laws, simply by writing them into the TOS on their website. The very idea is ridiculous.
Ah, but but doesn't the DMCA already cause the breakage of any digital lock to become a violation of the law? This is just a logical extension of that sort of thinking is it not? "Digital Trespassing" oh the possibilities...
To all the whiny complainers above: they're free to decide what they want to sell or not.
As a customer, you can always choose to buy somewhere else if unhappy.
Absolutely not. When there are few suppliers available in the market, monopolistic and oligarchic pricing make consumer choice very limited, in some cases to the point where they have no choice but to either purchase a product that is gimped, needlessly inefficient, or priced through the roof, or do without entirely. Consumer-marketed printers and ink/toner, the pre-installed crapware that comes with most PCs, and of course US ISPs are good examples of this I believe.
This decision by seagate almost certainly doesn't fall into that category, since, as other posters have noted, there may soon not be a substantial market for 7200 RPM laptop hard drives. However, simply stating "they are free to decide what they want to sell or not" is not a good reason to dismiss this.
Somehow "Just like...Obama" isn't very encouraging to me
Very much this; mod parent up. I wonder what the consequences of an ad-less approach would be, however.
It may become harder for certain widget-making companies to achieve the sort of market penetration we see today when starting from scratch without using nuke-from-orbit style marketing. This could mean a greater duplication of effort in creating products (less economies of scale, potentially increasing the price of goods) and therefore less monopolization (potentially decreasing the price of goods), but also potentially makes it more difficult for small businesses to grow which may maintain established monopolies/oligarchies.
At any rate, I don't expect the results of forcing the current market into an ad-less or nearly ad-less state to be like anything that existed before.
Not entirely true. Wall street did back Romney much more than Obama, but Obama was also primarily supported by the 1%, just not to the extent that Mitt was. A quick search shows that large tech firms (M$, Apple, Google), the MPIAA firms (Disney, Time Warner, etc.), and various finance firms (many were also top Romney supporters) among Obama's top supporters.
RMS is a religion.
Indeed, I'm only running an intel CPU right now because the Bulldozer architecture...lets say it needs work.
Actually, I haven't seen any evidence recently that the democrats aren't just as supportive of the military front as the republicans.
Consoles, Apple, and now Windows- how many times do we have to learn the same lesson?
Don't forget Ubuntu.
While what you said is all true, instruments are also much less likely to give false positives just because the handler wants it to do so. I agree that dogs can be reliable when used well, but in situations where the true positive rate is less than 0.01%, there are other issues with dogs.
It isn't that there should be a very light sentence for reckless actions unless injury occurs, it is that no reckless action of this type has *ever* caused detectable injury despite thousands of instances of this reckless action occurring. Think for a moment about what is necessary to cause injury.
The laser can only cause injury when shone directly into an area of a few square centimeters (although the actual target area may be larger if the beam is somewhat diffuse, but still sufficiently focused). And this from a distance that would likely need to be half of a mile away (unless the plane is just taking off or landing, in which case its probably more like a quarter-mile). In addition, this is only possible if the aircraft is flying more or less directly towards the laser source. In any case, anyone who succeeds in such marksmanship should probably be offered a large salary by a military contractor as soon as they get out of jail. The person would probably even be enough of an idiot to accept.
Prosecution, fine. What these people are doing *can* cause harm. Three years is idiotic.
So what exactly are you proposing then, a Russian revolution? Seriously, what *can* they do? They have no governmental authority outside of a vote, and even supposing Putin steps down (itself a ridiculous proposition) they still will have no governmental authority. All they would be able to do, without guns and ammo, is make some noise and hope his replacement listens.
They already have a plan of action and it is shout into the wind and hope people hear. Perhaps enough people will hear so that Putin won't win the next election, perhaps Putin will make some effort to be less of a PITA for them, and perhaps Putin's eventual replacement will take note of their discontent more than he does. Year sure, they can hope Putin will step down, but who among the protestors really think that's gonna happen. Remember that Putin in all likelihood won the vote without direct fraud, so making noise in public really is an end to itself right now.
Indeed. To give the government that kind of moral power seems to be a bit of a slippery slope to me.
Mod parent up.
"Little else matters than to write good code." -- Karl Lehenbauer
