Reznor was unable to find a band that could articulate his songs as he wanted. Instead, inspired by Prince, he played all the instruments except drums himself.
Yeah, I know... never trust Wikipedia. But at least there's a reference after that sentence (Fine, Jason (July/August 1994). "The Truth About Trent".)
Prince was pretty much nobody when Warner Brothers took his name from him. The last few albums before "The artist formerly knows as" were fairly lackluster, both in terms of production and sales, not to mention the gimmicky New Power Generation. While Prince was the butt of a large number of jokes for choosing the unpronounceable symbol he actually gained some credibility back as an artist among underground and indie musicians. By the time he had earned his name back, he had enough draw to pretty much get any contract he wanted with record companies, including single album deals with a majority of the earnings and complete creative control in the studio.
Considering how Trent Reznor has often been inspired by Prince (such as playing a vast majority of the instruments himself on recordings) it's really not surprising to see him start to publicly battle the record companies. Taking such a stance would probably also resonate much better with NIN fans. People who listen to industrial music generally tend to hold a much stronger anti-establishment ideal than fans of dance-pop.
That's trivial... all that has to happen is a fundamental change of the gravitational constant. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out just how that happens.
If you think about it, the article mentions lower power usage as one of the benefits of solid state storage. Lower power usage means less heat, therefore less fans or lower RPMs on existing fans for adequate cooling.
Fan noise is one of the largest sources of sound in most commercial computing applications. In silent computing applications such as sound recording, however, those have been reduced to the point where often times the hard drive is one of the larger components. I have heard of setups where a smallish flash drive is used to bootstrap a computer that then saves data on a remote server, but then bandwidth and latency can become the limiting factors. Attempting to build a box around a hard drive will cut the noise levels, but the box generally insulates against heat at least as well as against noise. Trying to isolate the hard drive sounds can lead to overheating problems and the associated shortened life expectancy and therefore potential for data loss.
But for the average slashdotter, yes, the sound of the fans far outweighs any hard drive noise.
I have heard of these studies, and seen similar ones such as children from families which have 3 or more pets are about 1/3 as likely to develop asthma and allergies.
The one concern I have is that basically, correlation does not prove causation. It is also quite that people with asthma and allergies are more likely to keep their house clean to prevent flare-ups. They are also more likely to pass down genes which make their children predisposed to allergies.
And like everything in life, it's probably more complicated than that. People who are predisposed to allergies/asthma clean their houses more. This cleaning in turn prevents their children (who are already genetically disadvantaged) from developing a "normal" immune system, leading them to have an even higher chance of having allergy problems, leading to more thorough cleaning...
I notice a distinct lack of high fructose corn syrup in that data. It simply measures cane and beet sugar. Also such extremely inexpensive calorie laden ingredients such as "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil" are missing as well.
You ratscallion punks with your fancy mechanical mu-ziq. Back in my day, we had to trade entire orchestras to share our music. Ponder hiding THAT from the local constibulary!
There is another thing that allows B movies to become cult classics while so far B games have not. The social aspect: watching B movies with friends is fun. Watching B movies alone generally runs from boring to painful. I'll give Army of Darkness an exception because I think it also works as a straight comedy... but it's still the kind of movie that's better with friends. Because of the lack of social aspect, cheesy video games will never succed. Oops... I gotta go. It's almost rollover. Gonna spend some more adventurers on The Naughty Sorceress so I can finally free King Ralph and ascend (again.)
Assuming the no soul paradigm, I wouldn't call the changes caused by a "hard reboot" enough to change the essence of self. From what I understand, the natural changes in the brain from childhood to adulthood are far greater, yet you are still considered the same person you were when you were still crawling. The common wisdom (though I haven't actually seen any hard evidence to back it up, so I may file under old wives' tale) is that on average every atom in your body is replaced every seven years. This is also a far greater change than what I hear happens to a person from before and after a clinical death related OBE.
Oh, and I don't believe that there is anything supernatural about what is experienced when somebody is brought back from death. The "tunnel of light" can be explained by a random firing of photoreceptors which are much more highly concentrated in the middle than on the edges. This combined with a loss of higher order pattern filtering due to oxygen starvation in the brain lead to sensory input that could easily be confused with a light at the end of a tunnel. The howling winds could easily be the same concept applied to the nerve endings of the cochlea. I'm not saying that these shared phenomenon are not supernatural, just that I don't personally believe that they are. But I would be willing to wager that one could recreate each of the individual shared post death experiences could be recreated in a laboratory setting with such techniques as meditation, isolation tanks and psychoactive pharmaceuticals.
There would probably be a lot of value in a database full of mostly "don't know" blobs. The one's that are not don't know are then probably of good enough resolution to actually spend resources studying.
This particular one would not work. There are inefficiencies in every end of the stage that in all likelihood would add up to more energy lost than gained through the water falling through the turbine. The primary losses would be in the electrolysis and burning ends. Currently electrolysis of water has an efficiency of around 50%, give or take. Direct combustion of hydrogen to run a generator to supply electricity to run the electrolysis also has inefficiencies, as would any other technology I currently know of such as fuel cells. The efficiency of this end of the cycle would also be capped at around 50%. Study of Carnot heat engines would give a better insight into why this is the maximum under most reasonable circumstances. Overall the electrolysis/burning system would then be at maximum about 25% efficient. Other problems such as friction, efficiency of the turbine used for the falling water, etc would come into play such that I doubt that the hydroelectric dam style turbine would produce more than 3X the energy of the burning of liberated hydrogen and oxygen from the whole process. I haven't actually looked into those numbers to see how far the water would have to fall, but my gut reaction is that the drop would be large enough to make manufacture of such a system infeasible on any significant economic level.
Not to say that there is not some other system that could tap into gravitational energy, but my guess is that it would take a structure on the level of a space elevator to actually make it energy positive. And that would be a good idea anyways as lowering the ambient temperature of the top reaction end would indeed increase the efficiency of the Carnot engine portion of the system. However, frame dragging would probably be a much more practical phenomenon to exploit for energy once we are at that level of technology.
In my opinion, that would be a far worse scenario than copyright law. Anybody purchasing software or media would have to agree to licensing contracts to use it. These contracts would likely be at least as binding as current contracts. The only difference is that there is no expiration on the contracts, and therefore the information would never reach the public domain. Under copyright law, the information in theory will eventually reach the public domain and be usable by society as a whole without an arduous contract. It may be said that the current copyright system is broken, but simply getting rid of it will cause more harm than good.
On a different note, it is not necessarily incongruous to simultaneously hold the belief that copyright is bad while supporting open source. One can feel that copyright inherently causes harm to society, but still support open source as a means to work within a system that is already broken. True, without copyright open source would be unenforceable. But without copyright, one would also have no need to enforce the GPL, as any releases made would be into the public domain assuming it is possible to disassemble the software. This includes software that incorporates code that would have been released under the GPL, satisfying what I see to be the intent of the drafters of the GPL.
My guess for the Amazon natives having lighter skin would be that they live in the jungle? Not out in the plains, and so they would still be receiving less sunlight than people living in the Savannah. Just a guess, but it fits with the theory.
Bingo. Dense rainforest canopies block a very significant amount of light. IIRC about 5% makes it through to the lower levels where people would reside. Jungles are quite dark, something that doesn't come through in pictures and movies due to compensating with exposure time and aperture size.
Also, in many military and other surveillance tasks, letting people know that they are being watched can be more effective than secret surveillance. It can prevent undesirable activity rather than simply monitor it. Similar to the ubiquitous tinted glass globes in the ceiling of many retail outlets. Often times, these aren't even hiding a camera, just making would be thieves think there is a camera there without actually spending money on the camera or the people to watch the feed.
Slavery would be forcing people to take these actions. I was referring to giving wealthy people economic incentives to use more manual labor. Technological improvements can make the tools to switch to people power not that ridiculous, such as modern push reel lawnmowers which require about as much effort to use as a gasoline powered walk behind lawnmower. They have the added benefit of being near silent. These lawnmowers generally cost a little more than the gasoline powered equivalent, but government subsidies taken from the more conventional type would help close the gap.
And again, I am not advocating forcing people to use their own muscle power instead of fuel or electric, but see providing economic incentive for them to do so (while providing economic disincentive for the fuel/electric options) to be a reasonable idea.
But I do agree, that while we use technology to make muscle power a more attractive choice, we should also be using technology to reduce the negative effects of using fuel and electricity. Energy use is not a problem with one magical solution. It will take a large number of different approaches working in concert to fully supply the energy needs of the US and the rest of the world. The main tools we have to work with are varied: reducing individual consumption, increasing efficiency of industrial processes, finding and utilizing multiple alternative sources of energy, innovation in energy storage mechanisms to allow for more efficient utilization of off-peak energy production, as well as allowing cleaner energy sources to be used in transportation, and working to reduce the impact of the energy sources we do use all have to be explored.
And our society is indeed looking at all these options and has been gradually phasing them in as the technology becomes economically implementable. The modern fleet of automobiles runs much cleaner and more efficiently than previous generations. Alternative (as in not fossil fuel) energy sources are available in many places. Batteries, fuel cells and other technologies are being improved to allow for various energy sources for transportation. In some areas mass transportation is being constantly improved to allow for many more people to get to their destination in decent comfort and dignity. Industrial and personal efficiency is on the rise, with technologies such as insulation, more efficient lighting, etc. Some people are consciously making the decision to walk or bike based on environmental concern, and many municipalities offer credits to those who take mass transportation to work rather than driving a personal automobile. On average the American consumption level (and likely the rest of the world) has been increasing and will likely increase for some time now, but there are several techniques that can be used to mitigate the harm and provide for a more sustainable growth without a significant decrease in quality of living or even basic human dignity.
In addition to the technological tools used to mitigate the effects of personal consumption, there are social tools a government (as a proxy to society's desire) has which can provide incentives for individuals to decrease their overall consumption, or at the very least provide disincentive for increasing overall consumption. These include mandating behavior through laws, providing tax or other economic incentives for more sustainable behavior, education, funding research for more sustainable technology, and laying a framework for sustainable urban growth and improvement. Using these tools will extend the length that our society will survive and increase the standard of living for those in the society. Ignoring these tools will lead to our energy resources being exhausted, followed by complete economic collapse and social chaos. I'm not saying this is tomorrow, I'm not saying this is next year. But it is conceivable that if we don't continue working on solutions to the energy problem, that we will run out of cheap petroleum in our lifetimes without anything to fall back on.
I read the implication as subsidizing wages of human labor with higher energy costs. Human labor does not need be in a traditional idea of people going to work in a factory, but could include such things as tax credits for non motorized commuting (walking and biking) or even washing clothes by hand instead of in a washing machine (if the hand washing method is proven to use less energy, as I can see it feasible that an efficient washing machine uses less hot water than hand washing.) This could even leave the opportunity for interesting technological innovation, such as a human powered generator in which riding a stationary bicycle powers a television (even if it only partially powers the television and takes some energy off the grid if the wattage is too great, or a person is just sick of pedaling.)
Ethanol fuel production is not the ONLY reason that slash and burn exists and is on the rise, but it greatly increases the rate at which it occurs. Currently implemented biofuel production methods use food crops, or at the very least crops which use land that would otherwise support food crop farming. A ban on using slash and burn farming for ethanol production would therefore just shift food crop growth to freshly slashed and burned areas.
Not that slash and burn farming is always detrimental, it can sometimes be used in a sustainable manner where fields that are losing productivity are allowed to lie fallow for a while, and then the resulting growth is burned which in essence recharges the fields. This, however, isn't the method that is of concern. Sustainable slash and burn techniques offer less short term financial growth, and many soil types (primarily those which are found where the most impoverished people live) are not amenable to a sustainable method.
Excepting the fact that you conveniently didn't RTFA. Biofuels are encroaching on native habitats, which often includes slash and burn farming. These techniques mean that, depending on the oil used for fuel, the carbon output of biofuels can be about 10 times that of petroleum. Who cares if the end carbon burned in a car was pulled from the atmosphere, when many times the stored carbon are released in production? Not to mention the absolutely huge numbers of native habitat that will simply be destroyed to accommodate biofuel production. The risk to the ANWR from petroleum is nothing compared to the risk to the rainforests and other sensitive habitats that biofuels present.
It could be relevant to the discussion. All that has to happen is an accusation that the infringer reproduced or distributed more than $1,000 worth of copies in a 180 day period. Assuming the RIAA makes a claim of value of $15 per album, that's 66 albums available over the course of a half year. A more reasonable interpretation may be 1,000 files as that is the going rate of music at iTunes. I'd be willing to bet that most college students with computers have at least 1,000 songs shared.
The RIAA could easily bring this into felony territory if they wished, but they aren't interested in preventing copyright infringement so much as getting money and putting on a show of unsuccessfully trying to stop piracy so they can lobby for laws that mandate ubiquitous DRM and blackball P2P so independent publishers are effectively barred from the industry.
Slashdot Mirror
Prince was pretty much nobody when Warner Brothers took his name from him. The last few albums before "The artist formerly knows as" were fairly lackluster, both in terms of production and sales, not to mention the gimmicky New Power Generation. While Prince was the butt of a large number of jokes for choosing the unpronounceable symbol he actually gained some credibility back as an artist among underground and indie musicians. By the time he had earned his name back, he had enough draw to pretty much get any contract he wanted with record companies, including single album deals with a majority of the earnings and complete creative control in the studio.
Considering how Trent Reznor has often been inspired by Prince (such as playing a vast majority of the instruments himself on recordings) it's really not surprising to see him start to publicly battle the record companies. Taking such a stance would probably also resonate much better with NIN fans. People who listen to industrial music generally tend to hold a much stronger anti-establishment ideal than fans of dance-pop.
That's trivial... all that has to happen is a fundamental change of the gravitational constant. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out just how that happens.
If you think about it, the article mentions lower power usage as one of the benefits of solid state storage. Lower power usage means less heat, therefore less fans or lower RPMs on existing fans for adequate cooling.
Fan noise is one of the largest sources of sound in most commercial computing applications. In silent computing applications such as sound recording, however, those have been reduced to the point where often times the hard drive is one of the larger components. I have heard of setups where a smallish flash drive is used to bootstrap a computer that then saves data on a remote server, but then bandwidth and latency can become the limiting factors. Attempting to build a box around a hard drive will cut the noise levels, but the box generally insulates against heat at least as well as against noise. Trying to isolate the hard drive sounds can lead to overheating problems and the associated shortened life expectancy and therefore potential for data loss.
But for the average slashdotter, yes, the sound of the fans far outweighs any hard drive noise.
I have heard of these studies, and seen similar ones such as children from families which have 3 or more pets are about 1/3 as likely to develop asthma and allergies.
The one concern I have is that basically, correlation does not prove causation. It is also quite that people with asthma and allergies are more likely to keep their house clean to prevent flare-ups. They are also more likely to pass down genes which make their children predisposed to allergies.
And like everything in life, it's probably more complicated than that. People who are predisposed to allergies/asthma clean their houses more. This cleaning in turn prevents their children (who are already genetically disadvantaged) from developing a "normal" immune system, leading them to have an even higher chance of having allergy problems, leading to more thorough cleaning...
I think they figured that comment editing would be utilized mainly by trolls.
I notice a distinct lack of high fructose corn syrup in that data. It simply measures cane and beet sugar. Also such extremely inexpensive calorie laden ingredients such as "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil" are missing as well.
You ratscallion punks with your fancy mechanical mu-ziq. Back in my day, we had to trade entire orchestras to share our music. Ponder hiding THAT from the local constibulary!
William S. Burroughs would disagree. Third line after the cough
It's about 90% isopropyl alcohol, not ethanol. I assume it's not that trivial for a device to detect only ethanol.
There is another thing that allows B movies to become cult classics while so far B games have not. The social aspect: watching B movies with friends is fun. Watching B movies alone generally runs from boring to painful. I'll give Army of Darkness an exception because I think it also works as a straight comedy... but it's still the kind of movie that's better with friends. Because of the lack of social aspect, cheesy video games will never succed. Oops... I gotta go. It's almost rollover. Gonna spend some more adventurers on The Naughty Sorceress so I can finally free King Ralph and ascend (again.)
Assuming the no soul paradigm, I wouldn't call the changes caused by a "hard reboot" enough to change the essence of self. From what I understand, the natural changes in the brain from childhood to adulthood are far greater, yet you are still considered the same person you were when you were still crawling. The common wisdom (though I haven't actually seen any hard evidence to back it up, so I may file under old wives' tale) is that on average every atom in your body is replaced every seven years. This is also a far greater change than what I hear happens to a person from before and after a clinical death related OBE.
Oh, and I don't believe that there is anything supernatural about what is experienced when somebody is brought back from death. The "tunnel of light" can be explained by a random firing of photoreceptors which are much more highly concentrated in the middle than on the edges. This combined with a loss of higher order pattern filtering due to oxygen starvation in the brain lead to sensory input that could easily be confused with a light at the end of a tunnel. The howling winds could easily be the same concept applied to the nerve endings of the cochlea. I'm not saying that these shared phenomenon are not supernatural, just that I don't personally believe that they are. But I would be willing to wager that one could recreate each of the individual shared post death experiences could be recreated in a laboratory setting with such techniques as meditation, isolation tanks and psychoactive pharmaceuticals.
There would probably be a lot of value in a database full of mostly "don't know" blobs. The one's that are not don't know are then probably of good enough resolution to actually spend resources studying.
This particular one would not work. There are inefficiencies in every end of the stage that in all likelihood would add up to more energy lost than gained through the water falling through the turbine. The primary losses would be in the electrolysis and burning ends. Currently electrolysis of water has an efficiency of around 50%, give or take. Direct combustion of hydrogen to run a generator to supply electricity to run the electrolysis also has inefficiencies, as would any other technology I currently know of such as fuel cells. The efficiency of this end of the cycle would also be capped at around 50%. Study of Carnot heat engines would give a better insight into why this is the maximum under most reasonable circumstances. Overall the electrolysis/burning system would then be at maximum about 25% efficient. Other problems such as friction, efficiency of the turbine used for the falling water, etc would come into play such that I doubt that the hydroelectric dam style turbine would produce more than 3X the energy of the burning of liberated hydrogen and oxygen from the whole process. I haven't actually looked into those numbers to see how far the water would have to fall, but my gut reaction is that the drop would be large enough to make manufacture of such a system infeasible on any significant economic level.
Not to say that there is not some other system that could tap into gravitational energy, but my guess is that it would take a structure on the level of a space elevator to actually make it energy positive. And that would be a good idea anyways as lowering the ambient temperature of the top reaction end would indeed increase the efficiency of the Carnot engine portion of the system. However, frame dragging would probably be a much more practical phenomenon to exploit for energy once we are at that level of technology.
In my opinion, that would be a far worse scenario than copyright law. Anybody purchasing software or media would have to agree to licensing contracts to use it. These contracts would likely be at least as binding as current contracts. The only difference is that there is no expiration on the contracts, and therefore the information would never reach the public domain. Under copyright law, the information in theory will eventually reach the public domain and be usable by society as a whole without an arduous contract. It may be said that the current copyright system is broken, but simply getting rid of it will cause more harm than good.
On a different note, it is not necessarily incongruous to simultaneously hold the belief that copyright is bad while supporting open source. One can feel that copyright inherently causes harm to society, but still support open source as a means to work within a system that is already broken. True, without copyright open source would be unenforceable. But without copyright, one would also have no need to enforce the GPL, as any releases made would be into the public domain assuming it is possible to disassemble the software. This includes software that incorporates code that would have been released under the GPL, satisfying what I see to be the intent of the drafters of the GPL.
I usually just go with "a little North of Chicago." haven't met anyone in the US who doesn't understand that.
Bingo. Dense rainforest canopies block a very significant amount of light. IIRC about 5% makes it through to the lower levels where people would reside. Jungles are quite dark, something that doesn't come through in pictures and movies due to compensating with exposure time and aperture size.
Also, in many military and other surveillance tasks, letting people know that they are being watched can be more effective than secret surveillance. It can prevent undesirable activity rather than simply monitor it. Similar to the ubiquitous tinted glass globes in the ceiling of many retail outlets. Often times, these aren't even hiding a camera, just making would be thieves think there is a camera there without actually spending money on the camera or the people to watch the feed.
Or at the very least lead to slash and digest rather than slash and burn...
Slavery would be forcing people to take these actions. I was referring to giving wealthy people economic incentives to use more manual labor. Technological improvements can make the tools to switch to people power not that ridiculous, such as modern push reel lawnmowers which require about as much effort to use as a gasoline powered walk behind lawnmower. They have the added benefit of being near silent. These lawnmowers generally cost a little more than the gasoline powered equivalent, but government subsidies taken from the more conventional type would help close the gap.
And again, I am not advocating forcing people to use their own muscle power instead of fuel or electric, but see providing economic incentive for them to do so (while providing economic disincentive for the fuel/electric options) to be a reasonable idea.
But I do agree, that while we use technology to make muscle power a more attractive choice, we should also be using technology to reduce the negative effects of using fuel and electricity. Energy use is not a problem with one magical solution. It will take a large number of different approaches working in concert to fully supply the energy needs of the US and the rest of the world. The main tools we have to work with are varied: reducing individual consumption, increasing efficiency of industrial processes, finding and utilizing multiple alternative sources of energy, innovation in energy storage mechanisms to allow for more efficient utilization of off-peak energy production, as well as allowing cleaner energy sources to be used in transportation, and working to reduce the impact of the energy sources we do use all have to be explored.
And our society is indeed looking at all these options and has been gradually phasing them in as the technology becomes economically implementable. The modern fleet of automobiles runs much cleaner and more efficiently than previous generations. Alternative (as in not fossil fuel) energy sources are available in many places. Batteries, fuel cells and other technologies are being improved to allow for various energy sources for transportation. In some areas mass transportation is being constantly improved to allow for many more people to get to their destination in decent comfort and dignity. Industrial and personal efficiency is on the rise, with technologies such as insulation, more efficient lighting, etc. Some people are consciously making the decision to walk or bike based on environmental concern, and many municipalities offer credits to those who take mass transportation to work rather than driving a personal automobile. On average the American consumption level (and likely the rest of the world) has been increasing and will likely increase for some time now, but there are several techniques that can be used to mitigate the harm and provide for a more sustainable growth without a significant decrease in quality of living or even basic human dignity.
In addition to the technological tools used to mitigate the effects of personal consumption, there are social tools a government (as a proxy to society's desire) has which can provide incentives for individuals to decrease their overall consumption, or at the very least provide disincentive for increasing overall consumption. These include mandating behavior through laws, providing tax or other economic incentives for more sustainable behavior, education, funding research for more sustainable technology, and laying a framework for sustainable urban growth and improvement. Using these tools will extend the length that our society will survive and increase the standard of living for those in the society. Ignoring these tools will lead to our energy resources being exhausted, followed by complete economic collapse and social chaos. I'm not saying this is tomorrow, I'm not saying this is next year. But it is conceivable that if we don't continue working on solutions to the energy problem, that we will run out of cheap petroleum in our lifetimes without anything to fall back on.
I read the implication as subsidizing wages of human labor with higher energy costs. Human labor does not need be in a traditional idea of people going to work in a factory, but could include such things as tax credits for non motorized commuting (walking and biking) or even washing clothes by hand instead of in a washing machine (if the hand washing method is proven to use less energy, as I can see it feasible that an efficient washing machine uses less hot water than hand washing.) This could even leave the opportunity for interesting technological innovation, such as a human powered generator in which riding a stationary bicycle powers a television (even if it only partially powers the television and takes some energy off the grid if the wattage is too great, or a person is just sick of pedaling.)
Ethanol fuel production is not the ONLY reason that slash and burn exists and is on the rise, but it greatly increases the rate at which it occurs. Currently implemented biofuel production methods use food crops, or at the very least crops which use land that would otherwise support food crop farming. A ban on using slash and burn farming for ethanol production would therefore just shift food crop growth to freshly slashed and burned areas.
Not that slash and burn farming is always detrimental, it can sometimes be used in a sustainable manner where fields that are losing productivity are allowed to lie fallow for a while, and then the resulting growth is burned which in essence recharges the fields. This, however, isn't the method that is of concern. Sustainable slash and burn techniques offer less short term financial growth, and many soil types (primarily those which are found where the most impoverished people live) are not amenable to a sustainable method.
Excepting the fact that you conveniently didn't RTFA. Biofuels are encroaching on native habitats, which often includes slash and burn farming. These techniques mean that, depending on the oil used for fuel, the carbon output of biofuels can be about 10 times that of petroleum. Who cares if the end carbon burned in a car was pulled from the atmosphere, when many times the stored carbon are released in production? Not to mention the absolutely huge numbers of native habitat that will simply be destroyed to accommodate biofuel production. The risk to the ANWR from petroleum is nothing compared to the risk to the rainforests and other sensitive habitats that biofuels present.
It could be relevant to the discussion. All that has to happen is an accusation that the infringer reproduced or distributed more than $1,000 worth of copies in a 180 day period. Assuming the RIAA makes a claim of value of $15 per album, that's 66 albums available over the course of a half year. A more reasonable interpretation may be 1,000 files as that is the going rate of music at iTunes. I'd be willing to bet that most college students with computers have at least 1,000 songs shared.
The RIAA could easily bring this into felony territory if they wished, but they aren't interested in preventing copyright infringement so much as getting money and putting on a show of unsuccessfully trying to stop piracy so they can lobby for laws that mandate ubiquitous DRM and blackball P2P so independent publishers are effectively barred from the industry.
Grr... I did a minimum of research. I suppose I should stop believing Wikipedia. Well, at least I didn't put a number on that wager...