Slashdot Mirror
Obama Picks RIAA's Favorite Lawyer For Top DoJ Post
The Recording Industry of America's favorite courtroom lawyer, Tom Perrelli, who has sued individual file swappers in multiple federal courts, is President-elect Barack Obama's choice for the third in line at the Justice Department. CNet's Declan McCullagh explores the background of the man who won the RIAA's lucrative business for his DC law firm: "An article on his law firm's Web site says that Perrelli represented SoundExchange before the Copyright Royalty Board — and obtained a 250 percent increase in the royalty rate for music played over the Internet by companies like AOL and Yahoo," not to mention Pandora and Radio Paradise. NewYorkCountryLawyer adds, "Certainly this does not bode well for CowboyNeal's being appointed Copyright Czar."
Dig, they were not all "lifers", some of them were fooled by the NLP talk used in the elections.
(NLP= Neuro Linguistic Programming-- look at my sig for an example)
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
A damp basement stagnant with a combination of undeodorized armpits, sour cream and onion chips, and cheetos where a small 15" TV is hooked up to a greasy VHS deck playing reruns of Sailor Moon and Big O. The whole area, whose size is about 110 feet squared, is dimmly lit by a single incandecent bulb but is overpowered by 6 or so glowing CRTs. The floors are littered with montain dew cans but you can find a single can of diet coke which once meant a 400 lb developer or editor was "trying to lose weight".
On one side of the tiny slashdot basement, which shares a corporate overloard of VA Linux (the ficticious business name for the lead editor's mother) are the editors which spend most of their time leeching stories from Arstechnica and Digg. The editor's work process involves taking submissions and fact checking them against wikipedia. Once a submission is fact checked an editor takes the time to deliberately misspells or entirely mangles the summary while at the same time throwing in a missleading link to a sponsor. This process is entirely time consuming usually taking 4-6 hours per submission since editors use 386DX machines with 4-8MB of ram. This can sometimes explain why articles are posted 72 hours after the rest of the world has read and commented on the subject elsewhere.
The other side of the room are the slashdot developers. There is really only about 2 or 3 developers but their obesity problem allows them to get counted twice and get 2 payroll checks. The working day of a developer involves 15 minutes of javascript and perl programming and 4 hour breaks to watch UFO hunters on Sci Fi. On the perl side of the development, most slashdot developers look at how to get every last bit of performance out of their 1 mySQL server running on a 350 mhz G4 Mac by running an SQL query through a loop for about 150000 times. This often explains why it takes 12-16 minutes to submit a comment on the story pages. Being on the forefront of Web 2.0, many (read 2) of their developers push AJAX to the next level by using xmlhttprequest() to download linux ISOs and store them secretly on the page on every page view creating the illusion that slashdot javascript is actually beneficial to their website.
Mod parent up please. This is an interesting point, and little understood or reported.
- The race is not [always] to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. -