I haven't used it in many years, but tomsrtbt (Tom's RootBoot) used to be the go-to linux-on-a-floppy system. Boots just as fast as DOS but also (usually) supports networking.
Hm, you seem to have omitted those on Google's order of magnitude...
Fiscal Year 2011 Operating income in USD (according to Wikipedia):
Disney: $8.043 billion
Fox Entertainment Group (owns 20th Century Fox): $2.9 billion (parent company News Corp is $4.5 billion)
NBCUniversal is owned by Comcast (51%) and GE (49%), so estimate at.51*6.104+.49*15.166 = $10.5 billion
Sony Pictures: $300 million
Paramount Pictures: $300 million, but owner Viacom, full-in on movie/tv content, is: $2.13 billion
Warner Brothers: $845 million (parent Time Warner is $26.9 billion)
Let's low-ball it and assume lower interest loosely based on members' divestments outside of TV/movies or even outside of the named MPAA members:
Disney: 50% - $4 billion
Fox: 60% - $2 billion
Universal: 10% - $1 billion
Sony Pictures: 80% - $250 million
Paramount: 80% - $250 million
WB: 60% - $500 million
That totals $8 billion. Now pit that against Google, whose $10.4 billion operational budget isn't much higher. If Google goes on the offensive, they'll have to back down pretty quickly once it's clear that MPAA members fighting to stay in business will dig deeper into their reserves than a company with very little skin in the game (relatively speaking; youtube is what percentage of Google's operation? especially if you cut out cute cats and crotch shots?).
"Free press" does not, and never has, meant that any and everyone has access to a press. "Free press" does not, and never has, meant that any and everybody has access to the materials printed. "Free press" means that IF you have a press the government does not control what you print.
I never said it does. I agree that it does not mean the government must buy its people newspaper subscriptions, books, and therefore computers and internet connections, but it does mean that those with such things should not be restricted from using them.
"Free press" ensures that if somebody wants to write something, he or she can. It also ensures that that writer can distribute his or her works (publish). The web is bidirectional; it would lack content if there were nobody writing anything. POSTING to the web, particularly via social media, is highly restricted in certain places. Freedom of expression doesn't say you are allowed to express yourself quietly to your bedroom wall, it facilitates expression to the masses. This also means that the masses need to be able to digest your works.
The [US] 1st amendment already covers this. There is no need to further clutter up our founding documents with some "right" to access the internet. The Constitution is vaguely silent on your "right" to access the library yet I don't hear you calling us backwards for that.
That's the one, freedom of expression — unsuppressed communication with local and global communities.
We've seen social media sites act as catalysts to revolutions in places that restrict other forms of expression. This is largely because it is very difficult to suppress "the internet" as a whole, or even specific popular general interest sites.
The printing press and books aren't "human rights" either, just a means by which to achieve communication (expression). What we need is to draw a firm line that shows that, at the moment, the internet is the predominant form of communication and must therefore be protected as a human right; the term "free press" needs a modern equivalent.
Having a proprietary version hasn't helped Nokia sell interest in QT. If anything it has had a negative effect.
Qt has been GPL for most of its history. Nokia bought it and soon made it LGPL just to get it on par with GTK+ (and because they did not care about monetizing it, instead wanting more adoption). Their only misstep was when they turned around and ran like hell rather than putting their weight behind it with real phones and marketing. HP doesn't have to make the same mistake, but they certainly seem to be heading that way.
I submit that the LGPL model is the best for WebOS, with optional proprietary licenses available cheaply when desired.
Getting back to the heart of the article, which parrots something I said here just a few days ago, it needs dedicated full time devs and lots of corporate-sponsored advocacy if it's to go anywhere interesting. It also needs real devices, even if they're not from HP.
Thanks, EBU R128 is the missing piece. It is covered on Wikipedia in the Loudness war article's section on Loudness in broadcasting.
Average?! The average of 1,1,1,1,50 is 5.4 ...
on
US Bans Loud Commercials
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
There already was a standard requiring commercials to limit loudness. A commercial could not be louder than the program it was accompanying, which meant it could not be louder than the loudest point in the programming. What that meant is if there was a single gunshot in an hour, your commercials in that hour could be very, very loud. Also, loudness was not weighted. High-pitched ringing and speaking at the same level were considered equally loud, even though human hearing is skewed (A-weighting) to perceive speech as inherently louder.
So what this really does is 1) re-define what constitutes "loud", and 2) give the process some teeth.
Not really. It keys on the average volume of a commercial needing to be the average volume of the show. We don't want averages, we want ReplayGain.
Averages can be gamed quite trivially. Think of a thirty second ad in which the first 25 seconds contain very soft speaking with bits of silence between lines. The CALM Act affords the rest of the ad the luxury of BLASTING the product's tag line at well over the current maximum volume level.
Still no word on the license as of Dec 12. Hopefully it's because they're talking about this pretty seriously and/or wanting the announcement to make a second big splash. More likely, they're just trying to secure the (legal) rights to various pieces of code they may have sub-licensed themselves (and/or the search for submarine patents or accidentally stolen code).
I'm hoping this is LGPL, like GTK+ and Qt (though hopefully at version 3). This ensures any OS-level change must be submitted upstream, but there won't be any fears of the license virally infecting linked software.
Licensing aside, this really needs HP to dedicate paid full-time developers, which they do not look likely to do. It also needs serious and committed non-HP developers. Even with those two satisfied, any progress they make would be fully undone by a single hint of age to the existing devices, especially since they're all EOL'd. To get this on track and acknowledged as having a chance in the future, those full time WebOS devs would need some company actively developing hardware for it, or else a commitment to full hardware compatibility with some existing phone line plus some sort of non-opposing acknowledgment from that hardware's dev team.
So then how does 4G do it? The White Spaces Coalition was set up for the express purpose of using white space radio ranges for wifi, though I'm not sure of the range (Wikipedia says "short-range" but neither it nor its source specify how large that actually is).
Even if it's only as much as 802.11a (though hopefully larger), that would be significant with mesh networking as you'd be able to more easily bridge between neighbors and form neighborhood W-MANs (wireless metro-area networks). Better still if it were done in step with local government (ideally led by a private nonpartisan nonprofit partly funded with tax dollars).
I had this idea once upon a time, still haven't gotten around to blogging it. The gist of it is that there's a whole bunch of newly (and pending) publicly available radio white space (up to a 50 mile radius at full power!), which could be used for wireless mesh networking. Consider a few high-power fixed antennae blanketing an area as a pseudo-backbone, then delivered to people's home routers (which could use this and traditional (shorter-range) 802.11a/b/g/n wifi) which extend range, provide redundancy and alternate paths, etc, then go to the phones and other wireless devices.
Dead spots get cleaned up by adding new home routers, which extend the range of the blanketing backbones, and even phones and laptops can extend range in limited circumstances (limited to conserve battery life, maybe something like limiting data transfers to super-low bandwidth like SMS) .
Plop VoIP and IP TV atop this network layer and you've got a telco killer. Terminate VoIP and IP TV inside the mesh WLAN (e.g. via a few PBXs and some PVRs), add a caching web proxy, and you'll limit the external network traffic pretty significantly.
I'm replying to the one positive post I see in order to deliver another positive post that includes similar topics.
Yes, loyalty matters. Be frank about the situation with both sides, see how much the new employer wants you by asking how flexible they are in your start date (showing loyalty to your current employer should demonstrate to the future employer that this will translate to loyalty to them, so this actually helps). With the current company, tell them about the offer and that you have asked to postpone it (there's nothing wrong with giving a very large amount of time when you leave notice, but always leave the door open with your current boss before accepting an outside offer). Tell them about the pay increase and the shorter commute; in a capitalist economy, they have to compete with it or otherwise lose you.
These steps are all important because they win you brownie points even if your mind is made up on going to the new company; you made an effort to do what was best and leave on good terms with your current employer -- this is extremely important because you need to retain good contacts there and a good impression or else you'll be hurting when you need the job after this new one, and the value of your social network (the work kind, not facebook/linkedin) is one of your biggest assets, even when not job-hunting.
According to a Harris document, its devices are sold only to law-enforcement and government agencies.
Harris isn't the only one building these (other brands look a lot less like 1960's era gear) and we don't have assurances from these other manufacturers that they aren't being sold to private individuals or investigative firms.
We also don't have assurances that this can't be built by enterprising criminals. In another few years, home-brewed equivalent devices will likely be easy to make, thus empowering criminals, overprotective parents, and wannabe stalkers. If a warrant is not required, doesn't this mean that this technology fair game for anybody to use?
Better to have the technology exposed and patch the security hole, then consider a warrant-requiring backdoor for law enforcement (i.e. use the existing providers' antennae rather than shelling out the money for taxpayer-funded stalkers in vans).
Is this the return of Dotcom accounting?
Sell at a loss, make up in volume?
Almost. I think it's the model Toyota used to create a market for hybrids before the battery technology was affordable: sell at a loss to build a base of loyal supporters who can recognize a superior product. Though in some ways, this is the opposite; rather than heralding the future, this is more akin to exploring the past (which is to say, what could have been). I'd definitely call this a stunt; why else would they make another run at something they're selling at a loss anyway? Why was the HP Pre 3 debuted two weeks ago? They're not out yet.
I'd like to see webOS succeed. With MeeGo mostly dead, Openmoko fully dead, and LiMo completely forgotten, it would be nice for webOS to make another run at things. Otherwise, we're left with Android (Linux by kernel, not OS), iOS, and BlackBerry OS (Java), plus some minor players destined to fail (Windows Phone, Java ME). WebOS is our (current) last chance at a (mostly) open phone OS (look, a non-jailbreak third-party app store!).
As a Ph.D. candidate who writes scientific software at a large research university in the US under NIH grant funds, I can say that simply adding more developers to a scientific software project is an unrealistic solution to the problem. Having been to a conference of developers for a well-known chemistry software package (which will remain nameless) I have seen firsthand how seemingly good intentions can quickly turn into an epic battle of conquest and control of the software. Add in the huge egos and arrogance of these scientists (some very famous in their field), and you wind up with software that no one wants to develop due to problems that have nothing to do with funding or lack of qualified developers. This is probably one of the main reasons new scientific software is created in the first place.
There are examples of problems in every solution. Zotero is a great example of F/OSS working beautifully, exemplifying researcher collaboration to develop a research collaboration tool. With some standardization and better communication between the F/OSS community and the research industry, I think we can open the door to more of Zotero and less of your chemistry software example.
I wonder why China never thought of securing their systems more tightly. Surely they must have realized that retaliation would come their way at some point, no? I mean, aside from the fact secure systems are usually preferably to ones that are not...
That might be related to their lack of confidence in their enemies' ability to attack. Alternatively, they might be considering it like nuclear warfare, in that there's no way to do a perfect job, so the threat of retaliation is more potent. Therefore, they're focusing all resources on aggression.
Additionally, everything is built in-house (for a very large "house"), so they have some security-through-obscurity for the items that aren't just forked F/OSS projects. If I were them, I'd lull other nations into a false sense of my security systems; utilizing the Great Firewall, I'd make all border systems look only marginally secured but then add a second level behind that which features the full spectrum of security.
Assuming this is an accurate count of online subscriptions (and not an artificially inflated count since all paper subscriptions are also online subscriptions), the next question is to wonder how many of those are inherited from their e-reader circulation... As of April 2010, the New York Times had 90,934 e-reader subscriptions (which was about twice the number from the previous year). If they doubled from 2009 to 2010 and then only attracted an extra 10% by 2011, I wouldn't call that much of a success.
Isn't Novell one of the companies in the Open Invention Network that collects patents for defensive purposes? Shouldn't that pool get these MS-can't-own patents?
Boffins at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, near Oxford have invented an ‘artificial’ petrol, which costs just 90 pence per gallon and could run in existing cars. Motorists could even be able to drive for 300 to 400 miles before needing to fill up.
Our highest [rated][trolling][karmawhoring][paying] users can start new tweaks on individual words, while everyone else will be rating existing tweaks.
What's the threshold? What does it look like to those that qualify?
The article says that browser makers rushed to put out patches to blacklist the fraudulent certs. Isn't this what certificate revocation lists are for? Are CRLs completely broken and unused?
The RIAA assumes that each copy of each song is worth a dollar and is independently covered by copyright violation fines. This couldn't be farther from the truth. People end up with freely obtained music that they would never (in any world) pay for. Separately, the immature behavior of the RIAA (primarily their scare tactics and markup) couples with the enormity of copyleft content now freely available to spell a significantly reduced value (supply and demand). We're heading towards a new media paradigm that just doesn't have room for the RIAA.
I think by calculating the value as perceived by the RIAA, we have this on display for all to see. The press and the courts will have no choice but to see this for the fear-mongering death flails of a dying industry.
Talk about shooting themselves in the foot — they may have just blown off their whole leg — and the ground they stood on.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't used it in many years, but tomsrtbt (Tom's RootBoot) used to be the go-to linux-on-a-floppy system. Boots just as fast as DOS but also (usually) supports networking.
Hm, you seem to have omitted those on Google's order of magnitude...
Fiscal Year 2011 Operating income in USD (according to Wikipedia):
Let's low-ball it and assume lower interest loosely based on members' divestments outside of TV/movies or even outside of the named MPAA members:
That totals $8 billion. Now pit that against Google, whose $10.4 billion operational budget isn't much higher. If Google goes on the offensive, they'll have to back down pretty quickly once it's clear that MPAA members fighting to stay in business will dig deeper into their reserves than a company with very little skin in the game (relatively speaking; youtube is what percentage of Google's operation? especially if you cut out cute cats and crotch shots?).
"Free press" does not, and never has, meant that any and everyone has access to a press. "Free press" does not, and never has, meant that any and everybody has access to the materials printed. "Free press" means that IF you have a press the government does not control what you print.
I never said it does. I agree that it does not mean the government must buy its people newspaper subscriptions, books, and therefore computers and internet connections, but it does mean that those with such things should not be restricted from using them.
"Free press" ensures that if somebody wants to write something, he or she can. It also ensures that that writer can distribute his or her works (publish). The web is bidirectional; it would lack content if there were nobody writing anything. POSTING to the web, particularly via social media, is highly restricted in certain places. Freedom of expression doesn't say you are allowed to express yourself quietly to your bedroom wall, it facilitates expression to the masses. This also means that the masses need to be able to digest your works.
The [US] 1st amendment already covers this. There is no need to further clutter up our founding documents with some "right" to access the internet. The Constitution is vaguely silent on your "right" to access the library yet I don't hear you calling us backwards for that.
That's the one, freedom of expression — unsuppressed communication with local and global communities.
We've seen social media sites act as catalysts to revolutions in places that restrict other forms of expression. This is largely because it is very difficult to suppress "the internet" as a whole, or even specific popular general interest sites.
The printing press and books aren't "human rights" either, just a means by which to achieve communication (expression). What we need is to draw a firm line that shows that, at the moment, the internet is the predominant form of communication and must therefore be protected as a human right; the term "free press" needs a modern equivalent.
Having a proprietary version hasn't helped Nokia sell interest in QT. If anything it has had a negative effect.
Qt has been GPL for most of its history. Nokia bought it and soon made it LGPL just to get it on par with GTK+ (and because they did not care about monetizing it, instead wanting more adoption). Their only misstep was when they turned around and ran like hell rather than putting their weight behind it with real phones and marketing. HP doesn't have to make the same mistake, but they certainly seem to be heading that way.
I submit that the LGPL model is the best for WebOS, with optional proprietary licenses available cheaply when desired.
Getting back to the heart of the article, which parrots something I said here just a few days ago, it needs dedicated full time devs and lots of corporate-sponsored advocacy if it's to go anywhere interesting. It also needs real devices, even if they're not from HP.
EBU R128 is the more recent standard (vs replay gain) but the concept is the same. Ultimately, that's what the FCC is calling for if you actually look into what's going on: http://blog.bjornroche.com/2011/12/fcc-calls-for-quieter-commercials-but.html
Thanks, EBU R128 is the missing piece. It is covered on Wikipedia in the Loudness war article's section on Loudness in broadcasting.
There already was a standard requiring commercials to limit loudness. A commercial could not be louder than the program it was accompanying, which meant it could not be louder than the loudest point in the programming. What that meant is if there was a single gunshot in an hour, your commercials in that hour could be very, very loud. Also, loudness was not weighted. High-pitched ringing and speaking at the same level were considered equally loud, even though human hearing is skewed (A-weighting) to perceive speech as inherently louder.
So what this really does is 1) re-define what constitutes "loud", and 2) give the process some teeth.
Not really. It keys on the average volume of a commercial needing to be the average volume of the show. We don't want averages, we want ReplayGain.
Averages can be gamed quite trivially. Think of a thirty second ad in which the first 25 seconds contain very soft speaking with bits of silence between lines. The CALM Act affords the rest of the ad the luxury of BLASTING the product's tag line at well over the current maximum volume level.
Still no word on the license as of Dec 12. Hopefully it's because they're talking about this pretty seriously and/or wanting the announcement to make a second big splash. More likely, they're just trying to secure the (legal) rights to various pieces of code they may have sub-licensed themselves (and/or the search for submarine patents or accidentally stolen code).
I'm hoping this is LGPL, like GTK+ and Qt (though hopefully at version 3). This ensures any OS-level change must be submitted upstream, but there won't be any fears of the license virally infecting linked software.
Licensing aside, this really needs HP to dedicate paid full-time developers, which they do not look likely to do. It also needs serious and committed non-HP developers. Even with those two satisfied, any progress they make would be fully undone by a single hint of age to the existing devices, especially since they're all EOL'd. To get this on track and acknowledged as having a chance in the future, those full time WebOS devs would need some company actively developing hardware for it, or else a commitment to full hardware compatibility with some existing phone line plus some sort of non-opposing acknowledgment from that hardware's dev team.
So then how does 4G do it? The White Spaces Coalition was set up for the express purpose of using white space radio ranges for wifi, though I'm not sure of the range (Wikipedia says "short-range" but neither it nor its source specify how large that actually is).
Even if it's only as much as 802.11a (though hopefully larger), that would be significant with mesh networking as you'd be able to more easily bridge between neighbors and form neighborhood W-MANs (wireless metro-area networks). Better still if it were done in step with local government (ideally led by a private nonpartisan nonprofit partly funded with tax dollars).
I had this idea once upon a time, still haven't gotten around to blogging it. The gist of it is that there's a whole bunch of newly (and pending) publicly available radio white space (up to a 50 mile radius at full power!), which could be used for wireless mesh networking. Consider a few high-power fixed antennae blanketing an area as a pseudo-backbone, then delivered to people's home routers (which could use this and traditional (shorter-range) 802.11a/b/g/n wifi) which extend range, provide redundancy and alternate paths, etc, then go to the phones and other wireless devices.
Dead spots get cleaned up by adding new home routers, which extend the range of the blanketing backbones, and even phones and laptops can extend range in limited circumstances (limited to conserve battery life, maybe something like limiting data transfers to super-low bandwidth like SMS) .
Plop VoIP and IP TV atop this network layer and you've got a telco killer. Terminate VoIP and IP TV inside the mesh WLAN (e.g. via a few PBXs and some PVRs), add a caching web proxy, and you'll limit the external network traffic pretty significantly.
I have coworkers that do this (on Posix systems). They prefix temporary files' names with commas. Then all they need is a daily cron job like this:
Voilà!
I'm replying to the one positive post I see in order to deliver another positive post that includes similar topics.
Yes, loyalty matters. Be frank about the situation with both sides, see how much the new employer wants you by asking how flexible they are in your start date (showing loyalty to your current employer should demonstrate to the future employer that this will translate to loyalty to them, so this actually helps). With the current company, tell them about the offer and that you have asked to postpone it (there's nothing wrong with giving a very large amount of time when you leave notice, but always leave the door open with your current boss before accepting an outside offer). Tell them about the pay increase and the shorter commute; in a capitalist economy, they have to compete with it or otherwise lose you.
These steps are all important because they win you brownie points even if your mind is made up on going to the new company; you made an effort to do what was best and leave on good terms with your current employer -- this is extremely important because you need to retain good contacts there and a good impression or else you'll be hurting when you need the job after this new one, and the value of your social network (the work kind, not facebook/linkedin) is one of your biggest assets, even when not job-hunting.
From TFA:
According to a Harris document, its devices are sold only to law-enforcement and government agencies.
Harris isn't the only one building these (other brands look a lot less like 1960's era gear) and we don't have assurances from these other manufacturers that they aren't being sold to private individuals or investigative firms.
We also don't have assurances that this can't be built by enterprising criminals. In another few years, home-brewed equivalent devices will likely be easy to make, thus empowering criminals, overprotective parents, and wannabe stalkers. If a warrant is not required, doesn't this mean that this technology fair game for anybody to use?
Better to have the technology exposed and patch the security hole, then consider a warrant-requiring backdoor for law enforcement (i.e. use the existing providers' antennae rather than shelling out the money for taxpayer-funded stalkers in vans).
Is this the return of Dotcom accounting? Sell at a loss, make up in volume?
Almost. I think it's the model Toyota used to create a market for hybrids before the battery technology was affordable: sell at a loss to build a base of loyal supporters who can recognize a superior product. Though in some ways, this is the opposite; rather than heralding the future, this is more akin to exploring the past (which is to say, what could have been). I'd definitely call this a stunt; why else would they make another run at something they're selling at a loss anyway? Why was the HP Pre 3 debuted two weeks ago? They're not out yet.
I'd like to see webOS succeed. With MeeGo mostly dead, Openmoko fully dead, and LiMo completely forgotten, it would be nice for webOS to make another run at things. Otherwise, we're left with Android (Linux by kernel, not OS), iOS, and BlackBerry OS (Java), plus some minor players destined to fail (Windows Phone, Java ME). WebOS is our (current) last chance at a (mostly) open phone OS (look, a non-jailbreak third-party app store!).
As a Ph.D. candidate who writes scientific software at a large research university in the US under NIH grant funds, I can say that simply adding more developers to a scientific software project is an unrealistic solution to the problem. Having been to a conference of developers for a well-known chemistry software package (which will remain nameless) I have seen firsthand how seemingly good intentions can quickly turn into an epic battle of conquest and control of the software. Add in the huge egos and arrogance of these scientists (some very famous in their field), and you wind up with software that no one wants to develop due to problems that have nothing to do with funding or lack of qualified developers. This is probably one of the main reasons new scientific software is created in the first place.
There are examples of problems in every solution. Zotero is a great example of F/OSS working beautifully, exemplifying researcher collaboration to develop a research collaboration tool. With some standardization and better communication between the F/OSS community and the research industry, I think we can open the door to more of Zotero and less of your chemistry software example.
I wonder why China never thought of securing their systems more tightly. Surely they must have realized that retaliation would come their way at some point, no? I mean, aside from the fact secure systems are usually preferably to ones that are not...
That might be related to their lack of confidence in their enemies' ability to attack. Alternatively, they might be considering it like nuclear warfare, in that there's no way to do a perfect job, so the threat of retaliation is more potent. Therefore, they're focusing all resources on aggression.
Additionally, everything is built in-house (for a very large "house"), so they have some security-through-obscurity for the items that aren't just forked F/OSS projects. If I were them, I'd lull other nations into a false sense of my security systems; utilizing the Great Firewall, I'd make all border systems look only marginally secured but then add a second level behind that which features the full spectrum of security.
Assuming this is an accurate count of online subscriptions (and not an artificially inflated count since all paper subscriptions are also online subscriptions), the next question is to wonder how many of those are inherited from their e-reader circulation ... As of April 2010, the New York Times had 90,934 e-reader subscriptions (which was about twice the number from the previous year). If they doubled from 2009 to 2010 and then only attracted an extra 10% by 2011, I wouldn't call that much of a success.
Isn't Novell one of the companies in the Open Invention Network that collects patents for defensive purposes? Shouldn't that pool get these MS-can't-own patents?
Our highest [rated][trolling][karmawhoring][paying] users can start new tweaks on individual words, while everyone else will be rating existing tweaks.
What's the threshold? What does it look like to those that qualify?
Sorry, Slashdot pranksters, to rain on your parade, but you needed to add tweaks to every single article to compete...
Every article published after this one uses it. Close enough without getting annoying. (Though it's too bad submissions can't do it.)
It [appears][looks][sounds][smells][CowboyNeal] like that [is not][is][might be][takes][eats] the case.
(I tried the exact HTML syntax of TFA plus some variants, no dice on actual <select> and <option> tags)
Maybe I can still get the "The April Fool" Achievement? (this is my first April 1 post in years).
The article says that browser makers rushed to put out patches to blacklist the fraudulent certs. Isn't this what certificate revocation lists are for? Are CRLs completely broken and unused?
As a matter of fact, yes. SSL revocation mehcanisms are broken and nobody knew until a few days ago. Jacob Appelbaum wrote a nice write-up yesterday about how he noticed the emergency patches in Firefox and Chrome regarding blacklisted SSL certificates.
I strongly approve.
The RIAA assumes that each copy of each song is worth a dollar and is independently covered by copyright violation fines. This couldn't be farther from the truth. People end up with freely obtained music that they would never (in any world) pay for. Separately, the immature behavior of the RIAA (primarily their scare tactics and markup) couples with the enormity of copyleft content now freely available to spell a significantly reduced value (supply and demand). We're heading towards a new media paradigm that just doesn't have room for the RIAA.
I think by calculating the value as perceived by the RIAA, we have this on display for all to see. The press and the courts will have no choice but to see this for the fear-mongering death flails of a dying industry.
Talk about shooting themselves in the foot — they may have just blown off their whole leg — and the ground they stood on.
I thought that was a rubber band around the IE logo at first, had to zoom in to see that it's probably just sugar. (These cakes aren't gags ... yet)