IANAL. Neither are you*. But I will poke holes in your logic.

Yeah. I didn't sign an agreement at that gas station, so there's no contract and I can just take the gas!

Maybe. Depends on how they got there. Does the newspaper site have an entry pop-up it tries to show to every visitor? Is it forcing them to click past a warning? Are the terms there at all?

That's just dumb. Folk can and have been identified based on IP address, DHCP be damned. You might as well say "you can't proove I was the one in that brown coat!" Of course they can. That's what juries are for.

*: You may very well BE a lawyer, but if so... and you're neither drunk nor purposefully trolling... you suck.

WTF?

A consumer hard drive you buy today, desktop or laptop, will have a bog-standard SATA port with a bog-standard size. With the possible exception of Apple, NO ONE bothers trying to make those darn things proprietary. They just slap their "use HP spare # XX-XXXXX" on a standard part, and are done with it.

I wouldn't want one in my TiVo, but if the lowest price for a flash SSD was anything close to a classic HDD, I'd make that my system & app partition in a heartbeat. As it is, their entry level is twice as much for half the space.

SSD's on Newegg start over $70: http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=636&Tpk=Flash%20SSD&Order=PRICE

Desktop HDD's start at $35: http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=14&name=Internal-Hard-Drives&Order=PRICE

Nope. the summary was seriously screwed up. GM's engineers determined that, IF the batteries were low enough to need charging from the engine AND the car was going over 70 mph, it was more efficient to have the gasoline engine provide kinetic energy directly.

Unless you're on a highway, the car runs exactly as GM described it would: like a diesel-electric hybrid train.

But there's ZERO profit in it. Go on and name a period of human exploration of Earth, and all of them have one thing in common: profit.

Unions are paid directly by their membership, or in certain legislated instances, directly by those they represent in contract negotiations.

The only "middle-man" cost to a union is the wages that workers receive when they bargain collectively. To argue that this is an "increased" cost, you need to refute the union's basic premise -- that collective bargaining brings about a "fair" wage.

While you're about it, please include an example where everyone having to haggle for the cost of a head of lettuce is also "fair", please.

You should never, EVER think platform, then app. Think audience, application, and THEN learn what you need.

Your school district is using iPads? Then learn iOS. You have an android phone at home, or have java experience? Learn Android. You want to just make something work? Get the Android, iOS, and WebOS SDKs, and test like @#% so your mobile phone works everywhere. (Heck, get Blackberry and windows mobile if you can.)

Wait, you mean they want the capacity to raise price when demand spikes, so as to help the market forces discourage use when reduced use causes the most benefit to the market, and thus allow them to stretch out their infrastructure allotment and help save the planet?

Shocking, SHOCKING I say! :)

No. Mixing a song is a professional art, and wanting to take out of part of it is like taking out one parts of speech from a novel, or removing one color from a painting.

In the instance that someone wants to setup a "mix playground", the end-user medium is NOT the right format. A multilayer data DVD would be a far better choice, although it would be best if targeted to a specific software mixer's format.

HCFS is, by design, essentially liquid table sugar. 50% of it is fructose. Just like table sugar. Is fructose a fairly bad sugar? Sure. But "Corn Sugar" is really no worse than "cane sugar" in this regard.

Eating a lot of sugar is not healthy. the fact that the sugar was made from over-subsidized corn does NOT make it significantly more not-healthy.

Thankfully, you only need to spend six months beating your developers to be aware of memory bloat once. So, count the 40% as a capital cost and move on. (Added bonus: your cultural shift will cause new programmers to adapt or fail, thus extending the value of your investment in proper discipline!)

Nothing. But when your market is based on iOS revenue, and then suddenly jobs switches to "AHTML" where anything not using his new, proprietary standard runs twice as slow... alot.

I'm with this guy. You punish AFTER you inform, and if you don't have traffic lights you don't have controlled intersections -- and that means you have chaos.

Anything you do will have to have government buy-in, or it's just plain ol' thuggery. (yes, you might wind up with just government-approved thuggery. But you also might end up with law and order.) Unless you're going to fundamentally change the nature of automobiles, you should start with basic traffic signals and road patterns. They are FAR cheaper and FAR more effective than some unevenly applied Orwellian scheme.

Funny, the cigarette companies felt the exact same way. And, in fact, I think they made the exact same argument. Hell, I think RAPISTS and CHILD MOLESTORS feel the same way. (And, yes, so do folk who get sued by the RIAA)

It's a fundamental component of liberty that, if you cannot come to a reasonable settlement with someone between the two of you, you can go to a court of law to have an impartial jury decide on what "reasonable settlement" you'll get.

The bar for just dismissing a case is VERY high, and should require either a lack of applicable law ("I'm sorry, but Bob has the right to call you stupid to your face"), or an impossibility of the facts ("you're alleging that Bob had UFO's brainwash your wife into leaving you?").

Companies intentionally getting customers addictive IS established as a tort in the law already (cigarettes!), so if you think this lawsuit should be thrown out you're claiming, what... that it's impossible for a video game to be addictive? People had died from playing video games, and there are thousands of stories of video game addiction. Are you claiming that Lineage II isn't that addictive? That NCSoft shouldn't be liable for the consequences of how they made their game? The first is a point of fact, and the second is a point of law. Both are supposed to be resolved, by a jury and judge in particular, AT TRIAL.

Go shout fire in a crowded theater. That's "psychologically manipulating" the crowd to panic. And then you're liable for any injuries that result.

Heck, it even works if we go for that mother-of-all libertarian examples, the 2nd amendment. You have an absolute right to own a gun. You have the right to keep it unlocked, loaded, and sitting on your desk in your home office while you're doing whatever. You even have the right to shoot it--but if you hit anything, you're 100% liable for what happens.

MMOs make their games intentionally addictive. Nothing wrong with that, per se, and there's no reason to formally regulate it. The basic rule of "be responsible for your actions" should apply here, and to the extent that NCSoft making Lineage II addictive caused this guy harm, they should be held accountable. But, he's also an adult, and needs to have at least SOME self-control.

Thankfully, we have an amazing system to decide how liable NCSoft is. It's called a trial, and the judge is letting that happen.

Monster Cable is intentional overcharging. Aren't they a subsidiary of Best Buy or something?