Eric_WVGG

In retrospect, it's unfortunate that they didn't name High Sierra "MacOS 11" back in 2017, we'd be several years in sync by now.

sflocal said:

You may not think it will deter people, but I would bet that people in this criminal's circle that think about following the same path will give pause to contemplate.

Again, I ask: if you think that is a good deterrent, then why didn't the countless other cases of people getting decades behind bars deter these two from their crime? 

sflocal said:

Eric_WVGG said:

sflocal said:

In addition to the fine, will they be responsible for reimbursing the school?  I couldn't find any mention on that.  

Isn't it kind of moot? Stealing $2.3m worth of laptops doesn't mean they're sitting on $2.3 million dollars, stolen goods sell for a fraction of retail prices. After legal fees, maybe sitting on a couple hundred thousand dollars… if the courts say "okay now you owe four million dollars" in ten years, well where's that money going to come from? A lifetime of debt and servitude? No, the university is going to take a wash on it.

Not really... a while back, a CEO/Founder friend of mine caught his CFO embezzling money from him for years.  Was jailed for a few years and in addition to a fine, was ordered to pay back all the money he stole.  The miscreant is broke, but nonetheless, he's on the hook for all that money.  Any job he gets, it will be garnished.  My friend know's he'll never see all the money, but it's more the principal.  So no, it's not moot.  I'd rather the cloud of debt hover over these thieves than not.

I would expect the same from these Apple thieves.  It's irrelevant if they don't have any of the money they made selling the stolen laptops.  They should be responsible for the full retail price of each and every MacBook that was stolen, not the value they sold it at.

Alright, well we're on the same page re: the university, they're fucked and will never get their money back. The question I have is, what exactly are we looking for out of punishment? Ten years in prison is a LONG FUCKING TIME. Even five years is just unfathomable. What are we actually trying to get out of condemning a person to a lifetime of poverty on top of all those years in prison? At a certain point, it's just institutional sadism.

And before anyone says "this will be a warning to others who might steal shit," if that was effective, then it would have worked and these guys wouldn't have stolen those laptops in the first place, so no, that's pointless.

sflocal said:

In addition to the fine, will they be responsible for reimbursing the school?  I couldn't find any mention on that.  

Isn't it kind of moot? Stealing $2.3m worth of laptops doesn't mean they're sitting on $2.3 million dollars, stolen goods sell for a fraction of retail prices. After legal fees, maybe sitting on a couple hundred thousand dollars… if the courts say "okay now you owe four million dollars" in ten years, well where's that money going to come from? A lifetime of debt and servitude? No, the university is going to take a wash on it.

Just pretending for a moment that they had the UI acumen and industrial design necessary to design the device, there's still the problem of the Apple S6 CPU. There's nothing else like it on the market. The best performing Qualcomm CPU in that watt range has nowhere close to the performance. Personally, I think this is why Google has more or less ceded the market… they literally can't make an equivalent wearable without hardware that they can't design and money can't buy.