And, of course, Notes ran best on the OS/2 server platform.:)
I should know. I WAS a Lotus Notes admin/developer/E-mail admin until '03. Boy, did I pick the wrong horse! The malfunctioning Domino Web server, which would render only some of the Native Notes elements requiring me to create parallel HTML/XML code for every single database form, the bloated Web Mail Java Applets that refuse to download/upload, and a total mess of the Email/database system.
I still cringe when hearing references to programing in Lotus Notes. The native language to Lotus Notes is the Lotus Formula language, where no looping allowed and certain functions could not be put before others for no good reason (or unpredictable side effects will occur).
Then the dreaded DbLookup function. That one function alone caused so many intradatabase dependencies that I could not remove out-of-date documents in fear of causing problems in other seemly unrelated documents in bloated Databases.
The best textbook I ever read about the Zen and Psychology of writing code is "The Psychology of Computer Programming" (now in Silver Edition) by Gerald M. Weinberg. This book was "ancient" by Computer Science standards, but since the people coding programs have not changed much.
Other Computer Science books by this author that was helpful for me was "Introduction to General Systems Thinking", in graduate school, and "The Secrets of Consulting" for programming in the real world.
His books may or may not be the best academically, but his humorous and self-effacing writing style takes the drudgery out of reading such normally dry topics.
This is what is happening to the American "no fly" list. As the over 1.6 billion air passengers are being screened, thousands and thousands of named are added to this list. Since it takes several acts of Congress to remove ONE name, the number simply will increase until it is very likely you will be on that list.
Also the TSA can falsely flag tens and hundreds of people by the same name. This exponentially increase the odds that you will experience needless harassment.
And this assumed that names appear on this list in a legal and legitimate fashion. I am convinced that activists that protest neo-con policies of the US administration are being put on this list illegally.
At this rate it will not be long before 50% of the passengers will be on this list.
This is why they came up with the CLEAR program, the very program would-be real terrorists would apply for while those of us that wish not to be spied upon by our government will get harassed.
This should be an alarm for those that cherish our rights and those Bush supporting Evangelical Christians out there since this is right out of "Revelation to John" and the "mark of the beast".
This is at least a big concern in the US -- computer forensic investigations are slow and costly, and there's a huge backlog.
What if the story was about a detective superintendent saying that these autopsy investigations are being completely backlogged because we don't have enough coroners and he wants the law changed so that anyone that can hold a bone saw can do an autopsy.
I am hoping you would say to him "hire more coroners, you wimp!"
They want something where cheaper people in greater supply (i.e., regular officers) can, in a forensically-valid manner, look for preliminary information so that they can take advantage of it in the investigation and so they can limit the evidence they send for forensic analysis (e.g., the one device out of those five that was used in the crime).
McMurdie would also like it if he had regular officers do valid autopsies without a well-paid fully medically trained coroners, or have his regular officers do valid DNA tests without the expense of highly trained lab technicians. And I bet he wants the laws changed to make this possible as well.
McMurdie should shut his stupid trap, man up, and either hire the proper personnel or have some of his people properly trained.
The major problem I see in my country (USA) is that much of our primary education system did not emphasize problem solving skills in the 50's, 60's, and 70's, based on my experience deal with people my age and older. I personally can't speak for anything later than that.
I think the reason for that was that learning to problem solve requires lots of time (in teaching and practice), is not Scantron(TM) friendly (which is still used in schools around here), and even normally bright kids would rather learn how to make high scores on the SAT or ACT to get into the college of their choice and possibly a scholarship than spend oodles of time in practicing problem solving skills.
As a result, we have tens of millions of Americans that cannot problem solve themselves out of a paper bag.
These people were not even allowed to touch a computer back decades ago and now they are on the "innerwebs" by the millions. Many of these people had AOL but they want DSL/Cable Modem and abandoned the once "idiot-proof" domain of AOL (which hasn't been seriously broken since 7.0).
Mathematically speaking:
Theorem of "LOTS OF FAIL on the Internet and LOTS of frustration at the help desk"
Let "Wide open Internet" be A; Let "Millions of people that are not familiar to computers" be B; Let "Millions of people that can't problem solve" be C; Let "LOTS of FAIL!" be D;
Oh, then it doesn't matter how many or few letters I have of the key, I have permission to use a key cracker on this game, right? They DID give the authority for their customers to do so, correct?
I don't even trust pencil and paper. I prefer white and black stones, just like the old days of Greek Democracy! Once a few people get Blackballed, we would have a better government.
Well, let's compare accidents, since they can, and do happen. American and Soviet reactors had similar accidents. The first one is Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. It frightened many people, but did little in reality, not because anyone in the control room knew what to do, for they were clueless for a long while, but because it was designed well. In the Soviet Union, dozens of people died soon after, thousands and thousands died later, and millions were affected due to poor design and a negligent Supervisory Engineer.
Let's compare the Chemical Industry to Three Mile Island(TMI), since many environmentalist seem to act like anything Nuclear is far more dangerous that anything else. TMI causes millions of dollars in damages to the power plant, and not much else. Yet Chemical accidents, large and small, are routine, causing death and destruction. Munition plants have exploded, many petrochemical plants have exploded, and the now widespread well water contamination caused by a gasoline additive are only a few examples. Remember the Praxair lot in St. Louis? Have we forgotten the images of canisters full of flammable gases being launched like rockets into a nearby residental neighborhood?
Maybe if we can make more environmentalists see the hard numbers of current deaths due to chemical based pollution and accidents in America, then maybe they will realize that it is our chemical modern world that is killing us, not Nuclear Power. I find it ironic that it was the outcry against chemical based pollution in our air, water, and food that jump started the environmental movement in the 1970s in the first place.
If the committee comes up with some outlandish plan to regulate the Internet as a result of their research, then I agree we need to get worked up about it.
I'll wait for the committee to do exactly that, or something even more stupid. It shouldn't take them too long.
No power plant last forever without being rebuilt. Those devices need to be replaced every so often. Essentially, these sites are going to be in the constant state of rebuilding. This is no different from conventional power plants. Only it is in Nuclear sites that we are not allowed to rebuilt and restart units like other power plant, and for good reason!
Yes, Wind and Solar are about ready to take off, technologically and economically, but today, the political will is not there to subsidize these technologies so that they can get scale up quickly. For example, the government has been more than happy to use Eminent Domain for getting Wal-Mart's into communities, but when someone wants to put in a large scale wind power plant, the NIMBYs take a hard line and win, at least with the Cape Wind project in Massachusetts. Also, if anyone even suggests that all new homes require solar water heaters, which is mandatory in Israel, the opposition from electrical companies becomes substantial. This lack of political will is slowing down, and will continue to slow down, the wide scale adoption of both alternative energy sources. Therefore, solar and wind power, won't be ready to do replace both nuclear and coal power for at least a few decades. All large scale power plants take time to finance, plan, and build. Time we won't have if we allow both coal and nuclear power to run down (i.e. no new plants, no new units on plant sites).
On of the two, I would rather see coal power, in its current dirty form, go away quickly. Dirty Coal Energy is a killer today. We know that in 2004, over 3,780 deaths were attributed to asthma and 118,171 deaths were attributed to COPD (ALA). We will probably never know exactly how many of these people would be alive today if some of them did not live in areas that have severe air pollution and we know that the current dirty coal technology is still being used inside such metro areas (like Atlanta), contributing to a bad air problem.
Also, remember that certain chemical accidents can make an area unusable for at least a century or two. Bhopal, India, would still be considered uninhabitable by American standards due to chemical residue and ground water contamination, which is affecting the surrounding watershed. That is not unlike parts of the Ukraine polluted by radiation or former Kurdish lands in Iraq made unusable by mustard gas and other neurotoxins. Unfortunately, the ongoing environmental damage, which is likely to continue for at least a century, in Bhopal, India and the Kurdish lands in Iraq suffer don't get the press that the environmental damage done to the Ukraine by the Chernobyl power plant.
But Coal is killing people from the chemicals in the smokestack exhaust. The increased pollution is causing problems in several cities. In Atlanta for example, had three coal-fired power plants in its metro Area, adding to the now lethal summertime pollution problem. At least with Radioactive Iodine, you can take Iodine pills for that. The extra iodine will prevent the body from uptaking the radioactive form. Once you have Asthma or COPD, your options in living within an area with polluted air are very bleak. As for quickly running out of nuclear fuel, more Nuclear fuel can be made from converting non-fissionable Uranium-238 into fissionable Plutonium-239, if we chose to do so, giving us centuries of use.
All power plants have an expected lifetime. No power plant, coal or nuclear, is expected to last over 50 years. In fact, coal fired plants last about half as long as nuclear power plants. The reason we don't see coal fired plants being closed left and right is that they get completely rebuilt on that site. Nuclear power plants do not. Once they are done with their 40 years lifespan, they are decommissioned permanently. If that is a plus for coal, then so be it.
As for the CO2 emissions, they mostly stop once a nuclear power plant is made, not so for a coal-fired plant. Now I do realize that some coal plants are sequestering their CO2 emissions. That would make coal a much better power source than nuclear. Unfortunately the power companies would rather not do this and will spend millions in bribes....er...political contributions to make sure it is never made mandatory.
The big question is: Why doesn't the government treat them as a "telecommunications common carrier" in some cases? Thanks to Comcast's expansion into telephony (not as a backup carrier, but as a primary carrier) and their residential ISP monopoly, in some locations, they seem to be acting more like a common carrier than another service provider.
Was it the possibility of being treated as a common carrier that made them launch politically motivated ads for the "Modernization of the Telecommunications Laws" for the last few years?
We have more food, water, power, etc. than we need and we can get the goods we need (at a price). Now, if we can't get stuff we want at any price and we no longer have water, or power, or food, then that's the stuff that revolutions are made from. In today's political climate, economic realities make a major revolution unlikely in America or Western Europe.
And YES, we have at least a million Americans totally brainwashed and mindf*cked enough that if, for some highly outlandishly unlikely chance, President Bush decides to declare a State of Emergency and suspends elections next year, these people would not terribly mind this inconvenience. They would come to believe that this would be a necessary action and the President Bush would be in the right for doing it. For them, the President cannot be wrong and can do no wrong. I guarantee we will hear a LOT from this group during the next 12 months because they don't like any of the current Republicans and they certainly hate the Clintons with all of their soul.
Soo... is Earth getting obese as well? Do we really live on a pre-super massive black hole? Is Leon really getting laaaarrrrrger? Do we really have the dark matter, or have we turned to the dark side?
The con is very old, but extremely effective. People, unlike computer systems, don't change every five years. People are usually complaint, if not trusting.
Long ago, when I was a pimply-faced youth working at a somewhat sensitive location, we were trained over and over again to escort one guest per employee and no more, and to BE that person's shadow. We were to keep that person on task or escort them out. If they bolted, you grab anyone's phone and call security ASAP (welcome to the 80's). That way it is less likely that one person is to pull off something, but it is not totally impossible.
Unrelated note: you do realize, don't you, that Fox News has successfully argued in court that it should not be held accountable for factual errors in its reports because it presents 'opinion and commentary', not 'news', programming?
Not just factual errors, but known factual errors (the rest of us call them lies). They were given a statement, they checked and found the statement to be false. They used the statement anyway because it sounded better than the truth. They knowingly spread information they believed to be false.
That is called "Truthiness", or by Fox News "Fair and Balanced", or by many people in my neighborhood, "The Truth".....
If other judges look at this decision and follow, the game is over as it should be. This judge has come close to understanding that the charges themselves are unsupportable
Not yet, but I do think many of the RIAA cases (RIAA meaning a "suing machine" syndicate created by Capital Records, Atlantic Records, Sony BMG, etc.) might be in serious jeopardy now.
I think the RIAA thought that their last win (which was easier to get than shooting dead whales in a barrel with a Tommy-Gun) would somehow be duplicated in very unlike cases; cases where they don't have the solid evidence that this particular real-life person did the act they allege.
How many times have we heard ruling that essentially said "ban the interwebs" because some judge made a decision without adequate (or any) knowledge of the technology involved?
When judges are judging technology based lawsuits, why won't they ask for "Friend of the Court" briefs explaining the technology and what are practical steps that can be done (i.e. reasonable steps that any competent system admin can do). After all, in this society, no one can know everything of every technology. If you study law for your entire life, how would you innately know about the complexities of electronic communication today?
I agree, there is no difference between the two, except neo-cons can't function unless they are wearing expensive suits, even while sleeping.
But I think the RIAA could not have missed with this case. It was like shooting fish in a barrel, with an elephant gun, and the fish was already dead. With the defendant using a easily known handle, not using a router while heavily using KaZaa, not being a leecher, the RIAA's intact legal team, deep pocket computer forensics, and a hand picked non-technical jury, I would be surprised if the RIAA did not win this one.
The rest cannot be so easy. It is the rest of the cases that will much more difficult. Also, time is quickly running out for the RIAA legal beagles so they had to win at least something to justify their high pay.
- In Soviet Russia, the music sues you....hey, wait a minute!
Perhaps we should arrest everyone studying chemistry (and presumably physics, engineering...). Don't worry, your government is hard at work doing this right now...
- Tell me, what good is a phone call, if you're unable to speak?
Slashdot Mirror
And, of course, Notes ran best on the OS/2 server platform. :)
I should know. I WAS a Lotus Notes admin/developer/E-mail admin until '03. Boy, did I pick the wrong horse! The malfunctioning Domino Web server, which would render only some of the Native Notes elements requiring me to create parallel HTML/XML code for every single database form, the bloated Web Mail Java Applets that refuse to download/upload, and a total mess of the Email/database system.
I still cringe when hearing references to programing in Lotus Notes. The native language to Lotus Notes is the Lotus Formula language, where no looping allowed and certain functions could not be put before others for no good reason (or unpredictable side effects will occur).
Then the dreaded DbLookup function. That one function alone caused so many intradatabase dependencies that I could not remove out-of-date documents in fear of causing problems in other seemly unrelated documents in bloated Databases.
Please, somebody kill Lotus Notes with FIRE!
The best textbook I ever read about the Zen and Psychology of writing code is "The Psychology of Computer Programming" (now in Silver Edition) by Gerald M. Weinberg. This book was "ancient" by Computer Science standards, but since the people coding programs have not changed much.
Other Computer Science books by this author that was helpful for me was "Introduction to General Systems Thinking", in graduate school, and "The Secrets of Consulting" for programming in the real world.
His books may or may not be the best academically, but his humorous and self-effacing writing style takes the drudgery out of reading such normally dry topics.
This is what is happening to the American "no fly" list. As the over 1.6 billion air passengers are being screened, thousands and thousands of named are added to this list. Since it takes several acts of Congress to remove ONE name, the number simply will increase until it is very likely you will be on that list.
Also the TSA can falsely flag tens and hundreds of people by the same name. This exponentially increase the odds that you will experience needless harassment.
And this assumed that names appear on this list in a legal and legitimate fashion. I am convinced that activists that protest neo-con policies of the US administration are being put on this list illegally.
At this rate it will not be long before 50% of the passengers will be on this list.
This is why they came up with the CLEAR program, the very program would-be real terrorists would apply for while those of us that wish not to be spied upon by our government will get harassed.
This should be an alarm for those that cherish our rights and those Bush supporting Evangelical Christians out there since this is right out of "Revelation to John" and the "mark of the beast".
This is at least a big concern in the US -- computer forensic investigations are slow and costly, and there's a huge backlog.
What if the story was about a detective superintendent saying that these autopsy investigations are being completely backlogged because we don't have enough coroners and he wants the law changed so that anyone that can hold a bone saw can do an autopsy.
I am hoping you would say to him "hire more coroners, you wimp!"
They want something where cheaper people in greater supply (i.e., regular officers) can, in a forensically-valid manner, look for preliminary information so that they can take advantage of it in the investigation and so they can limit the evidence they send for forensic analysis (e.g., the one device out of those five that was used in the crime).
McMurdie would also like it if he had regular officers do valid autopsies without a well-paid fully medically trained coroners, or have his regular officers do valid DNA tests without the expense of highly trained lab technicians. And I bet he wants the laws changed to make this possible as well.
McMurdie should shut his stupid trap, man up, and either hire the proper personnel or have some of his people properly trained.
The major problem I see in my country (USA) is that much of our primary education system did not emphasize problem solving skills in the 50's, 60's, and 70's, based on my experience deal with people my age and older. I personally can't speak for anything later than that.
I think the reason for that was that learning to problem solve requires lots of time (in teaching and practice), is not Scantron(TM) friendly (which is still used in schools around here), and even normally bright kids would rather learn how to make high scores on the SAT or ACT to get into the college of their choice and possibly a scholarship than spend oodles of time in practicing problem solving skills.
As a result, we have tens of millions of Americans that cannot problem solve themselves out of a paper bag.
These people were not even allowed to touch a computer back decades ago and now they are on the "innerwebs" by the millions. Many of these people had AOL but they want DSL/Cable Modem and abandoned the once "idiot-proof" domain of AOL (which hasn't been seriously broken since 7.0).
Mathematically speaking:
Theorem of "LOTS OF FAIL on the Internet and LOTS of frustration at the help desk"
Let "Wide open Internet" be A;
Let "Millions of people that are not familiar to computers" be B;
Let "Millions of people that can't problem solve" be C;
Let "LOTS of FAIL!" be D;
Therefore:
D = ABC
Q.E.D.
Oh, then it doesn't matter how many or few letters I have of the key, I have permission to use a key cracker on this game, right? They DID give the authority for their customers to do so, correct?
Silly, Ethanol comes from Ethels. I have a neighbor named Ethel. Hmmmmmm.
I don't even trust pencil and paper. I prefer white and black stones, just like the old days of Greek Democracy! Once a few people get Blackballed, we would have a better government.
Well, let's compare accidents, since they can, and do happen. American and Soviet reactors had similar accidents. The first one is Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. It frightened many people, but did little in reality, not because anyone in the control room knew what to do, for they were clueless for a long while, but because it was designed well. In the Soviet Union, dozens of people died soon after, thousands and thousands died later, and millions were affected due to poor design and a negligent Supervisory Engineer.
Let's compare the Chemical Industry to Three Mile Island(TMI), since many environmentalist seem to act like anything Nuclear is far more dangerous that anything else. TMI causes millions of dollars in damages to the power plant, and not much else. Yet Chemical accidents, large and small, are routine, causing death and destruction. Munition plants have exploded, many petrochemical plants have exploded, and the now widespread well water contamination caused by a gasoline additive are only a few examples. Remember the Praxair lot in St. Louis? Have we forgotten the images of canisters full of flammable gases being launched like rockets into a nearby residental neighborhood?
Maybe if we can make more environmentalists see the hard numbers of current deaths due to chemical based pollution and accidents in America, then maybe they will realize that it is our chemical modern world that is killing us, not Nuclear Power. I find it ironic that it was the outcry against chemical based pollution in our air, water, and food that jump started the environmental movement in the 1970s in the first place.
If the committee comes up with some outlandish plan to regulate the Internet as a result of their research, then I agree we need to get worked up about it.
I'll wait for the committee to do exactly that, or something even more stupid. It shouldn't take them too long.
No power plant last forever without being rebuilt. Those devices need to be replaced every so often. Essentially, these sites are going to be in the constant state of rebuilding. This is no different from conventional power plants. Only it is in Nuclear sites that we are not allowed to rebuilt and restart units like other power plant, and for good reason!
Yes, Wind and Solar are about ready to take off, technologically and economically, but today, the political will is not there to subsidize these technologies so that they can get scale up quickly. For example, the government has been more than happy to use Eminent Domain for getting Wal-Mart's into communities, but when someone wants to put in a large scale wind power plant, the NIMBYs take a hard line and win, at least with the Cape Wind project in Massachusetts. Also, if anyone even suggests that all new homes require solar water heaters, which is mandatory in Israel, the opposition from electrical companies becomes substantial. This lack of political will is slowing down, and will continue to slow down, the wide scale adoption of both alternative energy sources. Therefore, solar and wind power, won't be ready to do replace both nuclear and coal power for at least a few decades. All large scale power plants take time to finance, plan, and build. Time we won't have if we allow both coal and nuclear power to run down (i.e. no new plants, no new units on plant sites).
On of the two, I would rather see coal power, in its current dirty form, go away quickly. Dirty Coal Energy is a killer today. We know that in 2004, over 3,780 deaths were attributed to asthma and 118,171 deaths were attributed to COPD (ALA). We will probably never know exactly how many of these people would be alive today if some of them did not live in areas that have severe air pollution and we know that the current dirty coal technology is still being used inside such metro areas (like Atlanta), contributing to a bad air problem.
Also, remember that certain chemical accidents can make an area unusable for at least a century or two. Bhopal, India, would still be considered uninhabitable by American standards due to chemical residue and ground water contamination, which is affecting the surrounding watershed. That is not unlike parts of the Ukraine polluted by radiation or former Kurdish lands in Iraq made unusable by mustard gas and other neurotoxins. Unfortunately, the ongoing environmental damage, which is likely to continue for at least a century, in Bhopal, India and the Kurdish lands in Iraq suffer don't get the press that the environmental damage done to the Ukraine by the Chernobyl power plant.
Ok, time to the lot of them to go back to school! Darwinisation not need.
But Coal is killing people from the chemicals in the smokestack exhaust. The increased pollution is causing problems in several cities. In Atlanta for example, had three coal-fired power plants in its metro Area, adding to the now lethal summertime pollution problem. At least with Radioactive Iodine, you can take Iodine pills for that. The extra iodine will prevent the body from uptaking the radioactive form. Once you have Asthma or COPD, your options in living within an area with polluted air are very bleak. As for quickly running out of nuclear fuel, more Nuclear fuel can be made from converting non-fissionable Uranium-238 into fissionable Plutonium-239, if we chose to do so, giving us centuries of use.
All power plants have an expected lifetime. No power plant, coal or nuclear, is expected to last over 50 years. In fact, coal fired plants last about half as long as nuclear power plants. The reason we don't see coal fired plants being closed left and right is that they get completely rebuilt on that site. Nuclear power plants do not. Once they are done with their 40 years lifespan, they are decommissioned permanently. If that is a plus for coal, then so be it.
As for the CO2 emissions, they mostly stop once a nuclear power plant is made, not so for a coal-fired plant. Now I do realize that some coal plants are sequestering their CO2 emissions. That would make coal a much better power source than nuclear. Unfortunately the power companies would rather not do this and will spend millions in bribes....er...political contributions to make sure it is never made mandatory.
The big question is: Why doesn't the government treat them as a "telecommunications common carrier" in some cases? Thanks to Comcast's expansion into telephony (not as a backup carrier, but as a primary carrier) and their residential ISP monopoly, in some locations, they seem to be acting more like a common carrier than another service provider.
Was it the possibility of being treated as a common carrier that made them launch politically motivated ads for the "Modernization of the Telecommunications Laws" for the last few years?
We have more food, water, power, etc. than we need and we can get the goods we need (at a price). Now, if we can't get stuff we want at any price and we no longer have water, or power, or food, then that's the stuff that revolutions are made from. In today's political climate, economic realities make a major revolution unlikely in America or Western Europe.
And YES, we have at least a million Americans totally brainwashed and mindf*cked enough that if, for some highly outlandishly unlikely chance, President Bush decides to declare a State of Emergency and suspends elections next year, these people would not terribly mind this inconvenience. They would come to believe that this would be a necessary action and the President Bush would be in the right for doing it. For them, the President cannot be wrong and can do no wrong. I guarantee we will hear a LOT from this group during the next 12 months because they don't like any of the current Republicans and they certainly hate the Clintons with all of their soul.
Soo... is Earth getting obese as well? Do we really live on a pre-super massive black hole? Is Leon really getting laaaarrrrrger? Do we really have the dark matter, or have we turned to the dark side?
- End of the world at 10, film at 11.
The con is very old, but extremely effective. People, unlike computer systems, don't change every five years. People are usually complaint, if not trusting.
Long ago, when I was a pimply-faced youth working at a somewhat sensitive location, we were trained over and over again to escort one guest per employee and no more, and to BE that person's shadow. We were to keep that person on task or escort them out. If they bolted, you grab anyone's phone and call security ASAP (welcome to the 80's). That way it is less likely that one person is to pull off something, but it is not totally impossible.
The rest is up to the reader's imagination.
Every move you make
Every fish you bake
I'll be watching yooooooou
(BAD SOUSAPHONE SOLO, with apologies to Sting)
I couldn't help it.
Unrelated note: you do realize, don't you, that Fox News has successfully argued in court that it should not be held accountable for factual errors in its reports because it presents 'opinion and commentary', not 'news', programming?
:)
Not just factual errors, but known factual errors (the rest of us call them lies). They were given a statement, they checked and found the statement to be false. They used the statement anyway because it sounded better than the truth. They knowingly spread information they believed to be false.
That is called "Truthiness", or by Fox News "Fair and Balanced", or by many people in my neighborhood, "The Truth".....
Let's call it "bald-faced lying" and go home
If other judges look at this decision and follow, the game is over as it should be. This judge has come close to understanding that the charges themselves are unsupportable
Not yet, but I do think many of the RIAA cases (RIAA meaning a "suing machine" syndicate created by Capital Records, Atlantic Records, Sony BMG, etc.) might be in serious jeopardy now. I think the RIAA thought that their last win (which was easier to get than shooting dead whales in a barrel with a Tommy-Gun) would somehow be duplicated in very unlike cases; cases where they don't have the solid evidence that this particular real-life person did the act they allege.
How many times have we heard ruling that essentially said "ban the interwebs" because some judge made a decision without adequate (or any) knowledge of the technology involved?
When judges are judging technology based lawsuits, why won't they ask for "Friend of the Court" briefs explaining the technology and what are practical steps that can be done (i.e. reasonable steps that any competent system admin can do). After all, in this society, no one can know everything of every technology. If you study law for your entire life, how would you innately know about the complexities of electronic communication today?
What do you think?
I agree, there is no difference between the two, except neo-cons can't function unless they are wearing expensive suits, even while sleeping.
But I think the RIAA could not have missed with this case. It was like shooting fish in a barrel, with an elephant gun, and the fish was already dead. With the defendant using a easily known handle, not using a router while heavily using KaZaa, not being a leecher, the RIAA's intact legal team, deep pocket computer forensics, and a hand picked non-technical jury, I would be surprised if the RIAA did not win this one.
The rest cannot be so easy. It is the rest of the cases that will much more difficult. Also, time is quickly running out for the RIAA legal beagles so they had to win at least something to justify their high pay.
- In Soviet Russia, the music sues you....hey, wait a minute!
Quite right. We certainly need government supported research to keep mice living longer and longer. That is the primary goal, right?....
- Tell me, what good is a phone call, if you're unable to speak?