Slashdot Mirror

Look at Casos at cmu they pull in all parts of social stuff to explore Social Networks, they have socilaity, CS, physics, etc... I am personaly like Vista, but I am very bias to that program..

Wouldn't software distributed only as source code be non-infringing?

That is a famous discussion even beyond patent law, namely whether source code should be protected as free speech. It might well be.

Then open-source code would be legally privileged over binary executables - something Richard Stallman must have been dreaming about for years. Make it actually illegal to distribute binaries...

For an example of the shallow border between source code and constitutionally protected speech, have a look at the Gallery of CSS Descramblers.

8 Sep 2004: Indymedianates publishes an article with photos of at least 1 (maybe 2?) undercover swiss police. Google cache of another site with pictures here. Translation of original Indymedia post.

Unknown date: FBI asks the post to be removed, but admitted no laws were violated: "The FBI agents told me that they were not concerned with the photos, but with the identifying information. There never was any such identifying information, and even if there was, it would likely be protected by the first amendment if it was obtained legally. (There was a recent case here in Washington that you may be familiar with on this very issue). But, even assuming it is illegal to post identifying information (which it is not), there WAS NO SUCH info. The FBI agents freely admitted to me that individuals have a right to take photographs of agents in public places and post those photos on the internet."

7 Oct 2004: Two Indymedia servers hosted by Rackspace (a US Company) but physically located in LONDON are taken. FBI agents are present at the seizure. No information is given other than the servers were taken. The order was issued to Rackspace (not Indymedia) and Rackspace was apparently barred from talking about it.

8 Oct 2004: Rackspace publishes that they turned over the servers in response to an order under MLAT (Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty).

8 Oct 2004: The AFP states that the request for the seizure originated with the Italian and Switzerland governments.

Here is a reproduction of the post with the photographs of the two individuals who are allegedly undercover Swiss police officers.

DeCSS c code is only 216 lines !
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/c-anony mous.c

I have worked at CIMM level -3 and at CMMi level 5 groups. Starting at level 5, you're about as likely to win the lottery and while on the vacation at the moon than getting fired for bad software; at level 1 your highly likely to get fired for a bad programming mistake; level -3 you try to point the finger for anything.

Now there's a mathematical formula (let me see if I can derive one) for each level you go down, the half-life of bad software divided by the software engineer goes up a log base 10 (4 - 95%, 3 - 90%, 2 - 75%, 1 - 50%, 0 - 25%, -1 10%, -2 - 2%, -3 - .01%). Thus, if you want management to point fingers go down in levels but if you want the group to be aware of problems then look for a high CMM level group to work for. Disclaimer this is now way scientific but used as illustrative purposes; objects may be closer than they appear; no left turn on red; do not pass Go.

Great illusion, shame about the words. The author seems to thing this has something profound to say about the nature of consciousness. Where do these people get such grandiose ideas? All it shows is that there are some bugs in the way images are processed. Similarly the fact that the Lucas-Kanade algorithm fails to track certain types of feature correctly tells us nothing about computer consciousness.

They might be using Cyrus IMAPD as their IMAP server. It uses that notation for personal folders for each user like INBOX.Sent INBOX.Trash and so on. Search through their mailing lists - it has been discussed there.

Incidentally, Sphinx 3 development has resumed recently and is up to Sphinx 3.4 now. Performance and accuracy are much improved over version 3.3, to the tune of 1.0-1.5x real time instead of 3.0-4.0x real time. It blows Sphinx 2 and 3.3 (and 4) out of the water.

I'll tell you what is good...Chocolate Mousse! Bork bork bork bork!

I thought the article was about Cthulhu Linux .
No wonder why the web page wouldn't load

Previously mentioned on /. I built one very similar to the original design (plus camera inverter for floor-level shots) and I love it. Here.

Each rat has electrodes implanted in three areas of the brain which process odour signals, plan movements and experience rewards. The scientists stimulated the reward centre to generate feelings of pleasure when the rodent's nose picked up a whiff of human. In this way, the rats were trained to seek out human odours.

http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/talks/Extras/roomba .JPG

check out my blog, where i post comments interesting stuff related to robotics...

My post on this topic is here and below.

Flexible sensors make robot skin. This could have a number of applications. The first two I imagine are a richer interface between machines and humans and advanced manipulation.

If cheap enough, the machine can understand the precise location and posture of a human. Mentioned in the article are car seats. Imagine a bed which adjusted itself to minimize pressure points.

I should mention a project out of CMU by Chris Atkeson and Daniel Wilson, where he put only a few cheap accelerometers in the floorboard of a house. The algorithm processing these sensors could localize humans in the rooms with remarkable accuracy. The challenge then becomes sensor fusion and system integration, in using this information to boost performance of the entire system. For instance, a human tracker using vision alone would be dwarfed by such a system which had a reasonable seed guess from pressure sensors.

The second application is for rich manipulation. A robot grasping a glass must do so with enough pressure to not drop it, but also enough sensitivity to not break it. I doubt humans use significant higher reasoning in this process, unlike the advantage humans have over computer vision programs. Rather, robots could sense the weight fairly easily, but also the type of surface, and learn how brittle such a surface is.

I didn't realize that it had automatic expiration. I must have missed that somewhere while reading the documentation.

The cache going away does not lead to data loss. It does lead to really shitty performance while the cache repopulates, but all of the data will still be in the database which is completely separate from the cache. If it was considered necessary, it wouldn't really be hard to load up a bunch of key objects into the cache from a script but that would be guessing which objects are going to be needed while just letting it repopulate and suffering some slowness for a few hours gets the right objects into the cache. Different applications have different needs.

Don't feed me bullshit. memcached dies and so does your entire cache. That's significant data loss no matter how you want to spin it.

I don't know what HA-NFS and AFS are, but I know that using Squid (assuming you're talking about the HTTP proxy) would be caching at the wrong level. Caching constructed pages is pointless because most pages are completely different for each logged in user. memcache caches the atoms of data necessary to build the page, such as information about users and journal templates.

Squid doesn't just cache pages, you know. I can cache a wide range of data that's served over http. Sound familiar? If you've read the memcached protocol documentation, it should.

As for the others: OpenAFS and HA-NFS. So much for "evaluated other solutions". These are both lightning fast high-availability NFS replacements - AFS sports numerous features such as client-side caches. And yes, they are open source.

Whoop de doo. Slashdot is looking at memcached. Their DBMS is notorious for corrupting itself, so that tells me quite a bit about their availability concerns.

Like I said - this may work great for LJ and Slashdot, but there are enormous e-commerce sites (that believe it or not, use a heckuva lot of OSS) that have a little more to worry about than losing ad revenue for the 10 minutes it takes to repopulate memcached. Having that kind of downtime simply is not possible. You not only lose sales, depending on your caching strategy, you can get unrecoverable orders, or just outright lose customers because your site is slow. It's not uncommon, either, it's pretty much a guarantee if your site gets slow or goes down for any extended period of time - your full-service uptime directly correlates to sales for sometimes several months, and god knows you're fucked if it happens during the christmas season.

Honestly, the technology exists right now to automatically drive my car along a freeway.

Carnegie Mellon's: No Hands Across America
UC Berkeley's platoon of cars at Demo '97

But this will never be a mainstream product in our society. Too many lawyers and other disinterested parties (such as insurance companies).

This is actually pretty close to the truth. This is a major reason why Adaptive Cruise Control is being sold by OEMs as a "convenience" feature rather than a safety benefit. Another major factor is that many of these systems rely on rather expensive sensors (from a car component perspective). Consumer willingness to plunk down thousands of dollars to enable their car with these systems is not present except for the luxury models.

For example...?

Let's see.... the internet, the web, email, chat, network-aware windowing systems, DNS, NTP, security systems (like kerberos), and a slew of other network stuff that we take for granted these days.

More recently:

CODA, GNOME Storage (RDBMS-based filesystem), Dashboard (which Microsoft bit off of and calls "implicit query"), Wiki, . . .

A *lot* of true software innovation starts in the free software world. Often it's taken, usurped, and out-marketted by commercial vendors (like the case of MS Internet Explorer). That doesn't mean it didn't start as free software.

There are quite a few examples of commercial innovation, too, especially in the case of business software like the various office suites, database query tools, etc. Innovation is not exclusively a free software activity. But I think the GP post was correct: the free software community has demonstrably provided more innovation than Microsoft.

Based on a short read of the article and the patent, I think that my former company (Audre, Inc., now eXtr@ct and Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, among others, produced prior art as far back as the middle 1980's, back in the day before software and algorithms were patentable. I would go so far to say, at least at first glance, that some of the claims are superceded by convolution hardware dating to the 1960's at GE.

GE generated X:Y location & degree-of-match for an image regarding each of a set of simple image filters (rings of various radii and angular slits at 2 degree separation). This data was then cross correlated (some experiments used early neural nets, IIRC). They were successful at finding different types of features in aerial photography, such as farm, urban, water, grass, and forest.

The Audre Entity Recognition system used, among other things, input from a convolution/correlation system and a variety of other feature extraction methods, and used various means to build feature models from scanned engineering drawings, contour maps and other large format images. The system could produce a complete 3D terrain model from a simple contour map. The Visual Understanding Lab at CMU with which we worked also worked on using color features, more than Audre did. We even explored X-ray images, but scanning hardware of the time didn't have sufficient reliable gray scale capability.

A company in Denver or thereabouts was building systems using fractal decomposition of images as the fundamental data model for both display and recognition. They used a hexagonal cell model rather than the common rectangular one.

The patent is written in "patentese", so it'll take some study before I can be sure.

[Easter Egg: Check these movies (1, 2) and animated gif of ray tracing at 0.99c, by R. Thibadeau at CMU.]

Based on a short read of the article and the patent, I think that my former company (Audre, Inc., now eXtr@ct and Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, among others, produced prior art as far back as the middle 1980's, back in the day before software and algorithms were patentable. I would go so far to say, at least at first glance, that some of the claims are superceded by convolution hardware dating to the 1960's at GE.

GE generated X:Y location & degree-of-match for an image regarding each of a set of simple image filters (rings of various radii and angular slits at 2 degree separation). This data was then cross correlated (some experiments used early neural nets, IIRC). They were successful at finding different types of features in aerial photography, such as farm, urban, water, grass, and forest.

The Audre Entity Recognition system used, among other things, input from a convolution/correlation system and a variety of other feature extraction methods, and used various means to build feature models from scanned engineering drawings, contour maps and other large format images. The system could produce a complete 3D terrain model from a simple contour map. The Visual Understanding Lab at CMU with which we worked also worked on using color features, more than Audre did. We even explored X-ray images, but scanning hardware of the time didn't have sufficient reliable gray scale capability.

A company in Denver or thereabouts was building systems using fractal decomposition of images as the fundamental data model for both display and recognition. They used a hexagonal cell model rather than the common rectangular one.

The patent is written in "patentese", so it'll take some study before I can be sure.

[Easter Egg: Check these movies (1, 2) and animated gif of ray tracing at 0.99c, by R. Thibadeau at CMU.]

Based on a short read of the article and the patent, I think that my former company (Audre, Inc., now eXtr@ct and Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, among others, produced prior art as far back as the middle 1980's, back in the day before software and algorithms were patentable. I would go so far to say, at least at first glance, that some of the claims are superceded by convolution hardware dating to the 1960's at GE.

GE generated X:Y location & degree-of-match for an image regarding each of a set of simple image filters (rings of various radii and angular slits at 2 degree separation). This data was then cross correlated (some experiments used early neural nets, IIRC). They were successful at finding different types of features in aerial photography, such as farm, urban, water, grass, and forest.

The Audre Entity Recognition system used, among other things, input from a convolution/correlation system and a variety of other feature extraction methods, and used various means to build feature models from scanned engineering drawings, contour maps and other large format images. The system could produce a complete 3D terrain model from a simple contour map. The Visual Understanding Lab at CMU with which we worked also worked on using color features, more than Audre did. We even explored X-ray images, but scanning hardware of the time didn't have sufficient reliable gray scale capability.

A company in Denver or thereabouts was building systems using fractal decomposition of images as the fundamental data model for both display and recognition. They used a hexagonal cell model rather than the common rectangular one.

The patent is written in "patentese", so it'll take some study before I can be sure.

[Easter Egg: Check these movies (1, 2) and animated gif of ray tracing at 0.99c, by R. Thibadeau at CMU.]

Based on a short read of the article and the patent, I think that my former company (Audre, Inc., now eXtr@ct and Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, among others, produced prior art as far back as the middle 1980's, back in the day before software and algorithms were patentable. I would go so far to say, at least at first glance, that some of the claims are superceded by convolution hardware dating to the 1960's at GE.

GE generated X:Y location & degree-of-match for an image regarding each of a set of simple image filters (rings of various radii and angular slits at 2 degree separation). This data was then cross correlated (some experiments used early neural nets, IIRC). They were successful at finding different types of features in aerial photography, such as farm, urban, water, grass, and forest.

The Audre Entity Recognition system used, among other things, input from a convolution/correlation system and a variety of other feature extraction methods, and used various means to build feature models from scanned engineering drawings, contour maps and other large format images. The system could produce a complete 3D terrain model from a simple contour map. The Visual Understanding Lab at CMU with which we worked also worked on using color features, more than Audre did. We even explored X-ray images, but scanning hardware of the time didn't have sufficient reliable gray scale capability.

A company in Denver or thereabouts was building systems using fractal decomposition of images as the fundamental data model for both display and recognition. They used a hexagonal cell model rather than the common rectangular one.

The patent is written in "patentese", so it'll take some study before I can be sure.

[Easter Egg: Check these movies (1, 2) and animated gif of ray tracing at 0.99c, by R. Thibadeau at CMU.]

Based on a short read of the article and the patent, I think that my former company (Audre, Inc., now eXtr@ct and Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, among others, produced prior art as far back as the middle 1980's, back in the day before software and algorithms were patentable. I would go so far to say, at least at first glance, that some of the claims are superceded by convolution hardware dating to the 1960's at GE.

GE generated X:Y location & degree-of-match for an image regarding each of a set of simple image filters (rings of various radii and angular slits at 2 degree separation). This data was then cross correlated (some experiments used early neural nets, IIRC). They were successful at finding different types of features in aerial photography, such as farm, urban, water, grass, and forest.

The Audre Entity Recognition system used, among other things, input from a convolution/correlation system and a variety of other feature extraction methods, and used various means to build feature models from scanned engineering drawings, contour maps and other large format images. The system could produce a complete 3D terrain model from a simple contour map. The Visual Understanding Lab at CMU with which we worked also worked on using color features, more than Audre did. We even explored X-ray images, but scanning hardware of the time didn't have sufficient reliable gray scale capability.

A company in Denver or thereabouts was building systems using fractal decomposition of images as the fundamental data model for both display and recognition. They used a hexagonal cell model rather than the common rectangular one.

The patent is written in "patentese", so it'll take some study before I can be sure.

[Easter Egg: Check these movies (1, 2) and animated gif of ray tracing at 0.99c, by R. Thibadeau at CMU.]

Based on a short read of the article and the patent, I think that my former company (Audre, Inc., now eXtr@ct and Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, among others, produced prior art as far back as the middle 1980's, back in the day before software and algorithms were patentable. I would go so far to say, at least at first glance, that some of the claims are superceded by convolution hardware dating to the 1960's at GE.

GE generated X:Y location & degree-of-match for an image regarding each of a set of simple image filters (rings of various radii and angular slits at 2 degree separation). This data was then cross correlated (some experiments used early neural nets, IIRC). They were successful at finding different types of features in aerial photography, such as farm, urban, water, grass, and forest.

The Audre Entity Recognition system used, among other things, input from a convolution/correlation system and a variety of other feature extraction methods, and used various means to build feature models from scanned engineering drawings, contour maps and other large format images. The system could produce a complete 3D terrain model from a simple contour map. The Visual Understanding Lab at CMU with which we worked also worked on using color features, more than Audre did. We even explored X-ray images, but scanning hardware of the time didn't have sufficient reliable gray scale capability.

A company in Denver or thereabouts was building systems using fractal decomposition of images as the fundamental data model for both display and recognition. They used a hexagonal cell model rather than the common rectangular one.

The patent is written in "patentese", so it'll take some study before I can be sure.

[Easter Egg: Check these movies (1, 2) and animated gif of ray tracing at 0.99c, by R. Thibadeau at CMU.]

<a href="http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/projects/buzzard/r hex/">some work that is now a bit dated</a>

<URL:http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/projects/buzzard/rh ex/>

<a href="http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/projects/buzzard/r hex/">some work that is now a bit dated</a>

<URL:http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/projects/buzzard/rh ex/>

For $50 million, Viterbi of Qualcomm got a whole engineering school in his name . I am sure $20 million for a building isn't that bad. But, I'd have preferred it to be named after Turing. Even Raj Reddy , Turing Award Winner wouldn't have been a bad choice. He's alive and still active in research, but then, so is Bill Gates.

I found another great picture, of the roof of Wean Hall at CMU:

BILL PH34RZ WEAN!!1!1

Also, here's some better pics of the front and back of the blue fence of death:
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~akj/stuff/gates/blue_scre en_fence_front_small.jpg
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~akj/stuff/gates/blue_scre en_fence_back_small.jpg

I found another great picture, of the roof of Wean Hall at CMU:

BILL PH34RZ WEAN!!1!1

Also, here's some better pics of the front and back of the blue fence of death:
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~akj/stuff/gates/blue_scre en_fence_front_small.jpg
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~akj/stuff/gates/blue_scre en_fence_back_small.jpg

I found another great picture, of the roof of Wean Hall at CMU:

BILL PH34RZ WEAN!!1!1

Also, here's some better pics of the front and back of the blue fence of death:
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~akj/stuff/gates/blue_scre en_fence_front_small.jpg
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~akj/stuff/gates/blue_scre en_fence_back_small.jpg

I actually like his new haircut. Now if only he would finally notice that he can't beat OSS and therefore join the bandwagon, so that I need not talk my mouth fuzzy with convincing my customers to use Linux I'd be cool with the man.

Now, if 20,000 large doesn't freshen your breath to CERT, dunno what will.

Actually CERT is within SEI which is pretty much a free-standing entity.

Actually, they wanted to build an academic building there already. Check out the Master Plan.

It's the tan outline (for new) on page 19 of the pdf (labeled 15), south of the main road (Forbes Ave) right in the center.

So his gift is, in fact, helpful.

I am a student at CMU, we knew about this yesterday. They announced it by handing out fliers with a drawing of the new building on it. Well it turns out that the building and the Society of Automotive Engineers http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/org/sae/ garage seem to occupy the same space. Hum, I wonder what is going to happen to our garage. Dear Mr.Gates, do you think you could spare an extra $30,000 to help build something other then more computer clusters on our campus?

because BILL PH34RZ WEAN!!1!1

(from when he came to speak on campus last year).

CMU claims it has 138 alumni working for Microsoft which is about the size of one year's graduating class in CS.

Carnegie Mellon already has one blue building. It's called Donner Hall (large JPEG) and it'd be a nice joke if CMU were to name it after Gates instead. It's the residence hall where they stuff hundreds of freshmen every year.

hey aht about Sphinx

This is like a dream come true. I need voice recognition capabilities for a number of applications and I was just making plans to try out some of the code from CMU's speech project. It looks like it should work well, but I haven't heard much about it so I'm skeptical about its accuracy. Now I'll have another choice and I won't feel like I'm locked into just one, arguably immature, choice for my apps.
Regards,
Steve

Swing and a miss. You're referring to a page where the author is uninformed. The geocities.com part of the URL should have been your first clue.

The Brady Bill (actually called the Brady Act) is a law that regulates HANDGUNS, not assault weapons. Two different laws, two different sets of rules.

Here is a more credible link.

Let's try that again:

anyone [who can pass a full Federal backgound check, be finger-printed, have a cop sign a form, pay a tax of $200, and register with the government] can go buy a $300 AK-47 or $800 AR-15 today.

Your wording was a bit misleading I think.

For this Carnegie Mellon professor, at MIT, to proclaim that this Nano-robot has any design similarities with the Water Strider is a lie.

As I shall name it, On the surfacetension water-robot's page, it has no correlation to the design of a living Water Strider because all of this robot's "legs" are coated by a water-repelling plasting and is necessary to repel water with thousands of times more surface area of water-surface tension applied to its legs. In short terms, a living Water Strider has small follicles on its legs with an oil that simply makes the insect water-proof and it can in no way easily peirce the surface tension on the water's surface perhaps because it weighs so little. Comparing this "nano robot" to a Water Strider is like comparing a cannon ball on a tripod with the tripod legs all horizontal pointing opposite directions.

This nano robot's weight is excessive and the fact that it is not duplicating that a Water Strider floats on the tips of its tarcel folli is no comparison. The nano robot requires all surface area of its "legs" to be in contact with the water surface. Maybe they can ask IBM to refab it down to 0.13nm?

Jesus jokes aside...

The water strider project's home page can be found here.
The CM NanoRobotics home page is here.

Both have pictures of the bot and many others.

The water strider project's home page can be found here.
The CM NanoRobotics home page is here.

Both have pictures of the bot and many others.

Also at CMU, the college I attend. Not to be confused with the CMU

My school banned them too.

Then again, every square inch of dorm space is saturated with a school-owned wireless signal.

The military and the police are different parts of the government. And the CIA and other spooks is yet another. They're not at all the same organization.

They're all agents of the state.

I'm starting to wonder what you have against the police,

Having to deal with them.

In my experience, cops won't hassle you unless they think you are doing something illegal. And even then, they might let you go.

Then apparently you either come from an affluent family, or you haven't had much experiences.

Overall, though, I feel safer with a cop car around, than without it, despite the fear of getting a speeding ticket.

It's been years since my last speeding ticket, and I can't fault the cops for it. I was exceeding the speed limit. It was my own fault.

The fact that you seem to overly fear and distrust cops leads me to believe that you either have

It's not fear, it's dislike.

1) little experience with the real world

I'm coming up on 30 years of it.

2) some kind of problem with authority (teenage angst?)

See last answer.

3) are involved in something illegal

I quit smoking the green about a decade ago. So far you're 0 for 3.

I see you attend CMU, I grew up less than 15 minutes away from Oakland. Google for John Vojtas or Jeffrey Cooperstein. In 1997 the Pittsburgh police dept reached a settlement with the US DOJ to end a "pattern and practice" of police misconduct. These are just the police within a 20 mile radius of where you are right now.

There are myriad other cases like Abner Louima, Malice Green, and Byron Gillum; I could go on about itfor hours.

Why don't I trust agents of the state? Because they can't be trusted.

LK

The military and the police are different parts of the government. And the CIA and other spooks is yet another. They're not at all the same organization.

They're all agents of the state.

I'm starting to wonder what you have against the police,

Having to deal with them.

In my experience, cops won't hassle you unless they think you are doing something illegal. And even then, they might let you go.

Then apparently you either come from an affluent family, or you haven't had much experiences.

Overall, though, I feel safer with a cop car around, than without it, despite the fear of getting a speeding ticket.

It's been years since my last speeding ticket, and I can't fault the cops for it. I was exceeding the speed limit. It was my own fault.

The fact that you seem to overly fear and distrust cops leads me to believe that you either have

It's not fear, it's dislike.

1) little experience with the real world2) some kind of problem with authority (teenage angst?)

See last answer.

3) are involved in something illegal

I quit smoking the green about a decade ago. So far you're 0 for 3.

I see you attend CMU, I grew up less than 15 minutes away from Oakland. Google for John Vojtas or Jeffrey Cooperstein. In 1997 the Pittsburgh police dept reached a settlement with the US DOJ to end a "pattern and practice" of police misconduct. These are just the police within a 20 mile radius of where you are right now.

There are myriad other cases like Abner Louima, Malice Green, and Byron Gillum; I could go on about itfor hours.

Why don't I trust agents of the state? Because they can't be trusted.

LK

...Your response seems to indicate that you think the recipient of these letters has standing to sue the sender, but you are wrong, and so your argument is taken in the wrong direction...

My response here assumes there are no infringing files, as is the case in the parent article.

Well, let's see, possible slander (or libel; I forget which one is print and which is spoken), plus if the web host takes down first (common), the time it takes to restore the site (perhaps even the cost of moving to a new ISP because the old one drops you as a customer), plus loss income from the time it was down (even with a counter notice letter, the ISP can wait 10 days to restore it, *AFTER* receiving the counter letter). All due to the negligence of the company sending the letter (most /.er's could figure out it was not an infriging file in 3 minutes [the slow ones] or less in the case above and many other cases). I'd say that was cause for damages.

From the 512:

(f) Misrepresentations. &#151; Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section &#151;

(1) that material or activity is infringing, or

(2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification,

shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys' fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner's authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it.

Now admittedly, the knowingly part could be a big stumbling block for counter suing. IANAL, but does gross negligence count as knowingly? Could you convince a judge/jury of that? Personally, I hope the answer is yes.

BTW, a sample counter notice letter is available at http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Terrorism/form-letter .html.

audacity's back-end is based on a custom version of sound package nyquist. It is a lisp and has a linux port. It can be used for programmatic sound generation, and being a lisp, you're always in the environment (no need to hack up a multithreaded editor/ interpreter).