... you're wrong. Estoppel stops people from changing facts... it cannot be used as a get-out-of-jail-free card for preventing prosecution.

Prosecutorial discretion is not governed by estoppel, because (1) the decisions are made upon each individual case, so just because a prosecutor declines to prosecute in one case, does not mean that he must decline to prosecute a different case with similar facts. (2) just because a prosecutor declines to prosecute, he does not make any statements of fact as to if something is legal or not. In fact, a prosecutor can make every assertion that something is illegal, but he is simply unable to prosecute due to for instance, lack of evidence.

While laws are provided to state that giving alcohol to children is explicitly illegal, that does not mean that one could not be charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The reason why it is separately stated, is because giving alcohol to a minor is a more specifically "heinous" crime, and thus treated with a larger fine, or longer jail time.

Drug paraphernalia was made illegal in order to be able to convict drug addicts of something even if they no longer have actual drugs on themselves. Drug paraphernalia used to be simply evidence of drug use... then they turned it into something illegal itself.

The "contributing to the delinquency of a minor" is a specific catch all that holds that if you are a contributing factor in that child breaking the law, then you are at fault yourself. In fact, giving children alcohol is typically charged with not only providing alcohol to children, but with contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

You're showing a profound lack of understand of the law in this case. The DA is directly stating that any teacher who materially contributes to a child of age 16 or under having sex could be arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. AND HE IS MAKING A VALID LEGAL ARGUMENT.

The raid controller to get anywhere near the IOPs of this is prohibitive. I run 24 drive software raid 6's in storage servers all the time the cost of the 24 port raid card is more than the server chassis power supply and motherboard add int he fact that having 24 GB of cache does great things as well. With enterprise class drives we loose a drive in one of those chassis every month and a half or so per chassis (36 months average drive lifespan roughly). Conversely I also run a lot of DB's and over the last year we have been using the Intel SSD's only one failed (infant mortality) the hardest problem is getting some form of raid that does not cripple there IOPS.

Although I'll grant you that Apple doesn't have a monopoly, putting them in the same market segment as RIM is disingenuous at best.

AFAIK, there are no legitimate competitors to RIM's BES, giving them a nearly 100% market share in their segment.

In the consumer segment, there's Apple, Android, Palm, Blackberry, and other phones of above-average intelligence. It's actually a fairly competitive market at the moment.

Apple's behavior here is pretty rotten (they finally passed Hanlon's razor with these new restrictions), although they're not a monopoly. IMHO, we need some consumer protection laws to prevent Apple/Sony from arbitrarily locking down their devices. Their current behavior is definitely wrong, and definitely against the public interest -- however, it's also almost definitely legal.

Yes, and we're proud of it. Different interests and skill sets. Graphics people are about graphics. Linux people are about Linux. The overlap is very small. For most of us the Gimp is not viable. The command line is a total PITA and less than viable. Customizability? Absolutely. I've customized the hell out of Photoshop.

What? No mention of the (in)famous iPod sock keynote announcement?