That would be wonderful. Here's an anecdote as to why this plan fails for me in particular.
I unfortunately have Mediacom in my area. They've effectively got it made so that you can't do this. First, they charge $20/month more (I believe it was) for a non-contract plan, which adds up, and so now I'll get hit with a $200+ cancellation fee if I try switching. I also pay for an internet/cable package even though I don't want cable because it is cheaper than the same speed internet by itself. A lot of the things they do don't make much sense until you look at it from their point of view - they've got you over a barrel and are going to take as much of your money as they can.
The main problem, alluded to in the summary, is that there really is no other option. When I moved to my current town, I tried finding something else - called their main competitor Qwest up, no service in my area. The only other option was Iowa Telecom, which went under and got bought out within a couple months of when I was trying to set up services. The new company was not in the phone book, did not have a functional website, and I think I finally found their number in a newspaper ad or something. It was going to be about $10 less for substantially slower DSL, and was going to take 3-4 weeks to set up if I remember correctly. Mediacom does take 2-3 weeks to make a house call. And as bad as Mediacom's service had been in my experience, everyone from the area told me Iowa Telecom was worse somehow. In fact there are many who get their internet through a cellular company because a wireless dongle with tiny bandwidth caps and an expensive data plan is superior to Mediacom in many ways.
I live out in the ass end of Iowa in a small town where I'm new without many friends. We are actually too far from every single major city to pick up any television stations, and only get a couple radio stations consistently. I was starved for entertainment before they got my internet hooked up and had a lot more trouble keeping up with friends from school and whatnot. Don't get me wrong, I hate this damn ad page that they're talking about. I hate getting hung up on while on hold with customer service/sales/anybody I call there. I hate getting an envelope stuffed full of ads every month so that I nearly throw away my bill with all of the crap I don't want. I would love to switch from Mediacom, there's just nowhere to go.
Titanium's not tremendously rare on Earth, it's just more expensive because it's a bitch to refine and process. As I understand it, most of the processing steps require either a high vacuum or a completely inert atmosphere to overcome the high reactivity of titanium at high temperatures (around room temp it forms an extremely well-bonded oxide on the surface, which is why it's known to be corrosion resistant.)
As the default state on the lunar surface is hard vacuum, this opens up a lot of interesting possibilities for metals development, if only we were able to get there, and bring along or develop a suitable power source as well.
That was kind of my first thought, but the more I think about it, the more I feel like this could be a tremendous poster child for Project Natal. If it's at all like advertised, they could throw in a cheap fake plastic controller or something, maybe even have you map your own equipment to controls and get all the control of a PC game on the console. Or maybe use the standard controller in conjunction with motion capture. Hell, I'd definitely spend sixty bucks to rain destruction from a Mech that mimicked my movements.
I used to love Chegg. It started out working as essentially an online classified geared towards books, and since it started at Iowa State, the school I go to, there were plenty of people using it, and it wound up being a very good deal, taking the cost of books per semester down to almost nothing (except of course when they switched editions every few years).
Now that they're pushing their rental service so hard, it's a lot harder to save as much money. I couldn't find any of my books used last semester, which may be due to my major classes getting more specialized and smaller, so I decided to give them a try. They usually rent at 40-60% the cost of a new book, which I suppose still saves money on both ends when you figure in the new edition cycle. However, it is more expensive if you end up keeping the book, and so I suppose I'll end up going to the bookstore again for anything I can't mooch of older friends next year.
Basically it differs from the typical cycle of buying and selling back in that you get a slightly better deal in exchange for letting them know ahead of time that you will be giving it back at the end of semester. Works well in a lot of cases, but it does imply that you expect no lasting value from the book and generally turn out to be correct.
I'm sure there's a way to do it right, though. Guitar Hero's doing all right selling games that require special controllers - not that putting out a new or crazy controller is guaranteed to be a great sales plan, but as long as they put out a few good games to go along with it it ought to do all right on the current xbox.
My fraternity actually used to do this and we've all but stopped now since nobody uses it. The reason is that nearly all of our classes have started posting old exams, answer keys, course notes, and a few of the good teachers will even post past homework. Most classes also have homework weighted pretty lightly so that learning the material (as tested on the exams) is what really matters. With this setup, past homework of course can't be used for cheating, but sometimes seeing something worked out will help make a connection you might not have otherwise and past exams really help take away the horrible feeling of not knowing if you're prepared for a test or not. I will agree with previous posters that if students are able to use past resources to cheat, this is more the fault of a lazy professor than anything.
Also, back when we did keep study files, it was an "advertised" benefit of joining the house, not swept under the rug as you seem to describe. As far as I know, no one at the university ever had a problem with us or any other house/organization/random group of friends doing it. Now we mainly focus on the fact that we've got older members from a wide array of majors who are willing to help out younger members as needed.
I realize you're probably joking, but our intro class actually teaches VBA, and even though it's a general overview for engineers of all shapes and sizes, they really do a poor job of teaching the fundamentals of programming, choosing instead to focus mainly on the syntax and the language itself. As far as I know, no subsequent class ever uses VBA, so we struggle with any future programming almost as much as we would have without an intro class. They may be looking to fix that, but for now it functions primarily as a weedout class and nothing else.
I didn't go into computer/software engineering, but I did TA the intro class for a semester and have worked with its graduates (my engineering peers) on group projects and the like. In my opinion, they really ought to teach the logic of programming (flowcharts and the like) much more heavily than focusing on any one language. That way, you don't have people sitting and memorizing the way a certain program is written but lacking the common sense to so much as use a loop rather than writing the same calculation over and over again.
So teach FORTRAN, teach VB6, teach them LOLCODE or whatever the hell you want but please make sure you're teaching them why the code is written the way it is and that computers don't necessarily think the way you do.
The download manager for eMusic works fine - they've released a version for linux. I have had a few problems with it (probably because I'm a bit of a n00b when it comes to Linux) but most can be straightened out by closing and restarting the manager. There's also a side project called eMusic J that works in linux and, of course, you can change your settings to download tracks individually in mp3 format if nothing else works for you.
I think it may be important to note that not everything needs "freshening up". Some teachers can pull off teaching the same thing every year, and teaching it very well.
For example, our department's statistics teacher uses the same powerpoint every year, same tests, and maybe even the same assignments and still manages to turn a field with very little joy to be found for most people into an interesting and enjoyable class. He also does most of the presentations for our department (materials engineering) which are enjoyed by everyone from grade-school age to adults. It's only once you see one of his presentations several times that you realize he's pretty much going through the same script verbatim.
It works very well for him, and as long as nothing's broke, I don't see any reason to fix it. On the other hand, I do agree with you that if a teacher thinks a large number of people would risk copying notes to avoid going to class and learning the material, she should probably look into alternate solutions rather than the one described.
I'm sure you're right in saying that she does not legally have the power to go into your backpack but it seems most people so far are forgetting the real power teachers have over students these days - grades.
I remember a chem class where we were "allowed" to turn in our lab notebooks for points as the labs/prelabs were going to be the same the next semester, and they wanted to prevent straight up copying if they could. I would guess the students here are in a similar, albeit worse-sounding, situation.
The students are well within their rights to refuse to turn over notes, or pull any of the copy-related stunts mentioned in this discussion. Problem is, the teacher is likely to have the power to go right home and dock them a letter grade or two, or, for example, require students to hand in notes to get the final exam. There just aren't a lot of options available to students if a professor's doing something wrong and they care about the class at all.
People who are ugly, inept, and poor are not welcome to join the "real" greek system.
This may have been true in the past, but it is not anymore, at least not universally. I grew up on a farm in the middle of Iowa, not in poverty but certainly not well-off, and when I went to college, I was recruited by an old family friend to a fraternity. I was very uncertain at first, but the rush chairman was a nice guy (he ended up my "big brother" and I followed in his footsteps as a materials engineering major). I came down and stayed in the house for orientation, and after a good look at the dorms I'd be living in, I joined the house.
Honestly, living in house is cheaper than dorms, we've got several people who came in very socially inept (myself included), and I'm not a great judge of male physical appearance, but I know there's no looks category we factor in when deciding whether to rush or activate someone. In fact, the only problems we've had activating people dealt with more of the "scumbags and assholes" mentioned in an uncle post. There are several houses on our campus, chapters of our fraternity on other campus, and even our house years ago that seem to exemplify these qualities; we use these as examples what not do when we plan out what we want the fraternity to be like.
The Greek system as a whole is undergoing a lot of changes now that a lot more options for incoming students are opening up. Our chapter is one of very few on our campus that is actually growing right now, and I'd like to think it's because we don't treat people like shit.
And before I forget, as to the grandparent's point, I do think it was very beneficial in my case to live in the fraternity. I'm the type that doesn't make friends as easily, but once I do, I make good friends, and the fraternity was very conducive to this. It's also provided activities that help me branch out more. I can easily picture myself cooped up in a dorm room for four years, but thankfully that didn't happen.
The bottom line is that if people in fraternities you know do act like complete dicks, they probably are and you should steer clear of them. But if they do seem like nice guys, it could be because they are. Even little stereotypes like the ones people hold against Greeks can be damaging, so try to get to know them a little and then make a judgment. And if you have done this and happened to only run into asshats, I am sorry.
Anyone below 30 who even knows what it was like at the time?
I'm 20, the first computers I ever saw would have probably been an Apple II lab my school had. I can't quite remember what we did with them, I think there was a math or typing game that we loaded from those massive floppies.
It was a little different then was I was used to, but everything works.
I think this is the main problem with Vista now that most of the big bugs have gotten fixed. So many people are completely computer illiterate and just get by through rote memorization of the correct keystrokes/mouse clicks to do the few things they want. When that changes, even a little bit, they are back to completely helpless and hate it, making them want to downgrade.
No kidding. The railroad companies seem to get by much better on their own than auto companies do (think who builds/maintains the roads vs. rails).
I think it's been proposed earlier in the thread, but perhaps the solution to the American auto problem is to let the Big 3 die if they can't shape up and give rail companies the incentives to retool, or perhaps allow them to absorb automakers. I think it makes more sense to expand a business that doesn't rely on government bailouts than one that seems to.
Too bad the grandparent is too bad throwing a self-righteous hissy fit to realize it.
I'm sorry if I came off that way, and that was not my intent. I know I'm not perfect by any means. I guess it just gets a little old when I live in a town where my (sober) friends have been fined several hundred dollars for cleaning up beer cans, or where a teenager can be driving down the street, get passed by an older driver, and still be the one who gets pulled over for speeding. It seems to me like a tremendous misuse of justice to target people who are too young or inexperienced to cause trouble.
In the same vein these stories about the RIAA targeting primarily students and others unwilling or unable to resist legal action really gets my blood going. I will admit that we are proportionally higher offenders and should therefore expect to see more lawsuits than the rest of the population. However, my point was that there are also a substantial number of us not frequenting the p2p networks, and that when the RIAA uses shaky detection methods and throws out another round of high-dollar lawsuits against people who can't defend themselves, people in the latter group are going to be badly hurt even though they haven't done anything wrong.
Although they are civil suits and the record companies seem to be within their legal rights to do so, this seems to me to be a morally bankrupt and predatory practice. I also see parallels to the earlier scenarios I described of police stereotyping or harassing younger people. The only difference is that there is something the ordinary person can do about it - refuse to support companies who practice these tactics and educate those who are unaware.
On a related note, I continue to be amazed that the RIAA continues its anti-piracy campaign in this way. Suing a small number of people for huge amounts which destroy their financial lives has not slowed piracy at all. As aussie_a pointed out, most people have next to no knowledge of copyright issues, and so the uneducated masses keep plugging right along. On the other hand, those of us who do have some understanding of the system and make a conscious effort to steer away from infringement have most likely heard of abuses of the legal system like this and are completely turned off from major record labels, if not all music. So the RIAA has effectively alienated most of its potential customer base while doing nothing to increase it.
As suggested by Mr. Beckerman later down in the comments, there are alternatives on much firmer moral/ethical ground which would probably be more effective at discouraging filesharing. If these companies would do a bit more extensive monitoring of p2p networks (I know, we hate to hear that on this site, but people need to learn that putting information out there for all to see has consequences), they could sweep out and catch more "pirates" and hit them with greatly reduced fines. Maybe something sane like "actual damages" times three plus a minor administrative cost for tracking them down. If the defendant believes they're wrongly accused they can contest or fight it, but should be made aware that losing a court case means elevated fines plus compensation for legal fees. When you hear that ten or twenty people at your university have been issued crushing fines, you're not much more likely to stop swapping music than you are to stop jaywalking because someone got hit on the street the other day. If you personally get a couple $50, $100, or $300 tickets and know you don't have a leg to stand on to contest them, you're probably going to stop.
In the same way you don't lock someone up for doing seven over the speed limit, you should not force a kid to drop out of college because they grew up listening to the radio and stupidly assumed it meant that music was free. The exorbitant fines written into copyright law are intended to discourage commercial pirate operations that make a lot of money off it. One of the reasons I still patron
Slashdot Mirror
That would be wonderful. Here's an anecdote as to why this plan fails for me in particular.
I unfortunately have Mediacom in my area. They've effectively got it made so that you can't do this. First, they charge $20/month more (I believe it was) for a non-contract plan, which adds up, and so now I'll get hit with a $200+ cancellation fee if I try switching. I also pay for an internet/cable package even though I don't want cable because it is cheaper than the same speed internet by itself. A lot of the things they do don't make much sense until you look at it from their point of view - they've got you over a barrel and are going to take as much of your money as they can.
The main problem, alluded to in the summary, is that there really is no other option. When I moved to my current town, I tried finding something else - called their main competitor Qwest up, no service in my area. The only other option was Iowa Telecom, which went under and got bought out within a couple months of when I was trying to set up services. The new company was not in the phone book, did not have a functional website, and I think I finally found their number in a newspaper ad or something. It was going to be about $10 less for substantially slower DSL, and was going to take 3-4 weeks to set up if I remember correctly. Mediacom does take 2-3 weeks to make a house call. And as bad as Mediacom's service had been in my experience, everyone from the area told me Iowa Telecom was worse somehow. In fact there are many who get their internet through a cellular company because a wireless dongle with tiny bandwidth caps and an expensive data plan is superior to Mediacom in many ways.
I live out in the ass end of Iowa in a small town where I'm new without many friends. We are actually too far from every single major city to pick up any television stations, and only get a couple radio stations consistently. I was starved for entertainment before they got my internet hooked up and had a lot more trouble keeping up with friends from school and whatnot. Don't get me wrong, I hate this damn ad page that they're talking about. I hate getting hung up on while on hold with customer service/sales/anybody I call there. I hate getting an envelope stuffed full of ads every month so that I nearly throw away my bill with all of the crap I don't want. I would love to switch from Mediacom, there's just nowhere to go.
I guess the good captain recycled a bit of intelligence for enthusiasm.
n00bium?
That's strange, the bartender usually has such a magnetic personality.
Titanium's not tremendously rare on Earth, it's just more expensive because it's a bitch to refine and process. As I understand it, most of the processing steps require either a high vacuum or a completely inert atmosphere to overcome the high reactivity of titanium at high temperatures (around room temp it forms an extremely well-bonded oxide on the surface, which is why it's known to be corrosion resistant.)
As the default state on the lunar surface is hard vacuum, this opens up a lot of interesting possibilities for metals development, if only we were able to get there, and bring along or develop a suitable power source as well.
Very nice, props to you sir. However, it seems you left out a few of my favorites.
Andrew Jackson eats the first marshmallow and declares that if you want to keep the second from him, you can enforce it with your army.
Rutherford Hayes eats his marshmallow just as you re-enter the room, and is awarded his prize only after you confer with your panel of co-researchers.
Grover Cleveland eats the first marshmallow, but gets his second when he comes back two days later.
William Howard Taft eats the marshmallow, then eats you, then gets stuck in the doorframe on the way out.
Warren Harding is dead when you come back.
You promise Herbert Hoover a second, but really just take away the first if he hasn't eaten it.
Gerald Ford tries to eat his marshmallow, but only manages to bite his tongue, fall down the stairs, and get shot at on the way out.
That was kind of my first thought, but the more I think about it, the more I feel like this could be a tremendous poster child for Project Natal. If it's at all like advertised, they could throw in a cheap fake plastic controller or something, maybe even have you map your own equipment to controls and get all the control of a PC game on the console. Or maybe use the standard controller in conjunction with motion capture. Hell, I'd definitely spend sixty bucks to rain destruction from a Mech that mimicked my movements.
I used to love Chegg. It started out working as essentially an online classified geared towards books, and since it started at Iowa State, the school I go to, there were plenty of people using it, and it wound up being a very good deal, taking the cost of books per semester down to almost nothing (except of course when they switched editions every few years).
Now that they're pushing their rental service so hard, it's a lot harder to save as much money. I couldn't find any of my books used last semester, which may be due to my major classes getting more specialized and smaller, so I decided to give them a try. They usually rent at 40-60% the cost of a new book, which I suppose still saves money on both ends when you figure in the new edition cycle. However, it is more expensive if you end up keeping the book, and so I suppose I'll end up going to the bookstore again for anything I can't mooch of older friends next year.
Basically it differs from the typical cycle of buying and selling back in that you get a slightly better deal in exchange for letting them know ahead of time that you will be giving it back at the end of semester. Works well in a lot of cases, but it does imply that you expect no lasting value from the book and generally turn out to be correct.
Sounds like the perfect gift for the ninja who's got it all.
...sorry.
I'm sure there's a way to do it right, though. Guitar Hero's doing all right selling games that require special controllers - not that putting out a new or crazy controller is guaranteed to be a great sales plan, but as long as they put out a few good games to go along with it it ought to do all right on the current xbox.
My fraternity actually used to do this and we've all but stopped now since nobody uses it. The reason is that nearly all of our classes have started posting old exams, answer keys, course notes, and a few of the good teachers will even post past homework. Most classes also have homework weighted pretty lightly so that learning the material (as tested on the exams) is what really matters. With this setup, past homework of course can't be used for cheating, but sometimes seeing something worked out will help make a connection you might not have otherwise and past exams really help take away the horrible feeling of not knowing if you're prepared for a test or not. I will agree with previous posters that if students are able to use past resources to cheat, this is more the fault of a lazy professor than anything.
Also, back when we did keep study files, it was an "advertised" benefit of joining the house, not swept under the rug as you seem to describe. As far as I know, no one at the university ever had a problem with us or any other house/organization/random group of friends doing it. Now we mainly focus on the fact that we've got older members from a wide array of majors who are willing to help out younger members as needed.
How could it permanently disfigure Orion? Can't you just say its name three times and have it pop right back?
Well, time to duck now.
I realize you're probably joking, but our intro class actually teaches VBA, and even though it's a general overview for engineers of all shapes and sizes, they really do a poor job of teaching the fundamentals of programming, choosing instead to focus mainly on the syntax and the language itself. As far as I know, no subsequent class ever uses VBA, so we struggle with any future programming almost as much as we would have without an intro class. They may be looking to fix that, but for now it functions primarily as a weedout class and nothing else.
I didn't go into computer/software engineering, but I did TA the intro class for a semester and have worked with its graduates (my engineering peers) on group projects and the like. In my opinion, they really ought to teach the logic of programming (flowcharts and the like) much more heavily than focusing on any one language. That way, you don't have people sitting and memorizing the way a certain program is written but lacking the common sense to so much as use a loop rather than writing the same calculation over and over again.
So teach FORTRAN, teach VB6, teach them LOLCODE or whatever the hell you want but please make sure you're teaching them why the code is written the way it is and that computers don't necessarily think the way you do.
I've heard it's a sure sign of lupus.
You also can't use stones to play Tetris with the cars on a 12-lane highway. Can't wait for that video to hit Youtube.
The download manager for eMusic works fine - they've released a version for linux. I have had a few problems with it (probably because I'm a bit of a n00b when it comes to Linux) but most can be straightened out by closing and restarting the manager. There's also a side project called eMusic J that works in linux and, of course, you can change your settings to download tracks individually in mp3 format if nothing else works for you.
I think it may be important to note that not everything needs "freshening up". Some teachers can pull off teaching the same thing every year, and teaching it very well.
For example, our department's statistics teacher uses the same powerpoint every year, same tests, and maybe even the same assignments and still manages to turn a field with very little joy to be found for most people into an interesting and enjoyable class. He also does most of the presentations for our department (materials engineering) which are enjoyed by everyone from grade-school age to adults. It's only once you see one of his presentations several times that you realize he's pretty much going through the same script verbatim.
It works very well for him, and as long as nothing's broke, I don't see any reason to fix it. On the other hand, I do agree with you that if a teacher thinks a large number of people would risk copying notes to avoid going to class and learning the material, she should probably look into alternate solutions rather than the one described.
I'm sure you're right in saying that she does not legally have the power to go into your backpack but it seems most people so far are forgetting the real power teachers have over students these days - grades.
I remember a chem class where we were "allowed" to turn in our lab notebooks for points as the labs/prelabs were going to be the same the next semester, and they wanted to prevent straight up copying if they could. I would guess the students here are in a similar, albeit worse-sounding, situation.
The students are well within their rights to refuse to turn over notes, or pull any of the copy-related stunts mentioned in this discussion. Problem is, the teacher is likely to have the power to go right home and dock them a letter grade or two, or, for example, require students to hand in notes to get the final exam. There just aren't a lot of options available to students if a professor's doing something wrong and they care about the class at all.
People who are ugly, inept, and poor are not welcome to join the "real" greek system.
This may have been true in the past, but it is not anymore, at least not universally. I grew up on a farm in the middle of Iowa, not in poverty but certainly not well-off, and when I went to college, I was recruited by an old family friend to a fraternity. I was very uncertain at first, but the rush chairman was a nice guy (he ended up my "big brother" and I followed in his footsteps as a materials engineering major). I came down and stayed in the house for orientation, and after a good look at the dorms I'd be living in, I joined the house.
Honestly, living in house is cheaper than dorms, we've got several people who came in very socially inept (myself included), and I'm not a great judge of male physical appearance, but I know there's no looks category we factor in when deciding whether to rush or activate someone. In fact, the only problems we've had activating people dealt with more of the "scumbags and assholes" mentioned in an uncle post. There are several houses on our campus, chapters of our fraternity on other campus, and even our house years ago that seem to exemplify these qualities; we use these as examples what not do when we plan out what we want the fraternity to be like.
The Greek system as a whole is undergoing a lot of changes now that a lot more options for incoming students are opening up. Our chapter is one of very few on our campus that is actually growing right now, and I'd like to think it's because we don't treat people like shit.
And before I forget, as to the grandparent's point, I do think it was very beneficial in my case to live in the fraternity. I'm the type that doesn't make friends as easily, but once I do, I make good friends, and the fraternity was very conducive to this. It's also provided activities that help me branch out more. I can easily picture myself cooped up in a dorm room for four years, but thankfully that didn't happen.
The bottom line is that if people in fraternities you know do act like complete dicks, they probably are and you should steer clear of them. But if they do seem like nice guys, it could be because they are. Even little stereotypes like the ones people hold against Greeks can be damaging, so try to get to know them a little and then make a judgment. And if you have done this and happened to only run into asshats, I am sorry.
...an individual filing a spurious lawsuit against Oprah, Google, and Amazon that has already cost him his job...Nice try.
No shit. Do they still have any form of debtor's prison around?
How about fail-at-life prison?
6. And get everyone you know to play along.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, but I'm really hard pressed to believe that the readership of Slashdot is what's driving the demand for the Big 4.
Anyone below 30 who even knows what it was like at the time?
I'm 20, the first computers I ever saw would have probably been an Apple II lab my school had. I can't quite remember what we did with them, I think there was a math or typing game that we loaded from those massive floppies.
It was a little different then was I was used to, but everything works.
I think this is the main problem with Vista now that most of the big bugs have gotten fixed. So many people are completely computer illiterate and just get by through rote memorization of the correct keystrokes/mouse clicks to do the few things they want. When that changes, even a little bit, they are back to completely helpless and hate it, making them want to downgrade.
No kidding. The railroad companies seem to get by much better on their own than auto companies do (think who builds/maintains the roads vs. rails).
I think it's been proposed earlier in the thread, but perhaps the solution to the American auto problem is to let the Big 3 die if they can't shape up and give rail companies the incentives to retool, or perhaps allow them to absorb automakers. I think it makes more sense to expand a business that doesn't rely on government bailouts than one that seems to.
Too bad the grandparent is too bad throwing a self-righteous hissy fit to realize it.
I'm sorry if I came off that way, and that was not my intent. I know I'm not perfect by any means. I guess it just gets a little old when I live in a town where my (sober) friends have been fined several hundred dollars for cleaning up beer cans, or where a teenager can be driving down the street, get passed by an older driver, and still be the one who gets pulled over for speeding. It seems to me like a tremendous misuse of justice to target people who are too young or inexperienced to cause trouble.
In the same vein these stories about the RIAA targeting primarily students and others unwilling or unable to resist legal action really gets my blood going. I will admit that we are proportionally higher offenders and should therefore expect to see more lawsuits than the rest of the population. However, my point was that there are also a substantial number of us not frequenting the p2p networks, and that when the RIAA uses shaky detection methods and throws out another round of high-dollar lawsuits against people who can't defend themselves, people in the latter group are going to be badly hurt even though they haven't done anything wrong.
Although they are civil suits and the record companies seem to be within their legal rights to do so, this seems to me to be a morally bankrupt and predatory practice. I also see parallels to the earlier scenarios I described of police stereotyping or harassing younger people. The only difference is that there is something the ordinary person can do about it - refuse to support companies who practice these tactics and educate those who are unaware.
On a related note, I continue to be amazed that the RIAA continues its anti-piracy campaign in this way. Suing a small number of people for huge amounts which destroy their financial lives has not slowed piracy at all. As aussie_a pointed out, most people have next to no knowledge of copyright issues, and so the uneducated masses keep plugging right along. On the other hand, those of us who do have some understanding of the system and make a conscious effort to steer away from infringement have most likely heard of abuses of the legal system like this and are completely turned off from major record labels, if not all music. So the RIAA has effectively alienated most of its potential customer base while doing nothing to increase it.
As suggested by Mr. Beckerman later down in the comments, there are alternatives on much firmer moral/ethical ground which would probably be more effective at discouraging filesharing. If these companies would do a bit more extensive monitoring of p2p networks (I know, we hate to hear that on this site, but people need to learn that putting information out there for all to see has consequences), they could sweep out and catch more "pirates" and hit them with greatly reduced fines. Maybe something sane like "actual damages" times three plus a minor administrative cost for tracking them down. If the defendant believes they're wrongly accused they can contest or fight it, but should be made aware that losing a court case means elevated fines plus compensation for legal fees. When you hear that ten or twenty people at your university have been issued crushing fines, you're not much more likely to stop swapping music than you are to stop jaywalking because someone got hit on the street the other day. If you personally get a couple $50, $100, or $300 tickets and know you don't have a leg to stand on to contest them, you're probably going to stop.
In the same way you don't lock someone up for doing seven over the speed limit, you should not force a kid to drop out of college because they grew up listening to the radio and stupidly assumed it meant that music was free. The exorbitant fines written into copyright law are intended to discourage commercial pirate operations that make a lot of money off it. One of the reasons I still patron