Actually, Wikipedia considers itself to be a tertiary source, but the basic point of drilling back to the best available starting point is exactly correct.
This may be the first time I wanted to mod an anonymous coward up. I remember reading about this years ago in a Philip K. Dick short story:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I totally remember that story.
What?
Mike O'Donnell
Thanks for the excellent summary of what the two articles seem to say. If I were competent with the Slashdot interface, I would mod this up for "Informative," but I can't find the right buttons.
The puzzle, which I hope someone with real understanding of quantum theory will explain (I will dig into the original paper, but not with great optimism for my understanding):
It seems that when a single electron hits this blob of helium, it has many possible paths through the helium in bubbles, each with a different wave function (which, as I understand, has complex values that add up to values whose magnitudes are probabilities at some point that I don't understand how to characterize). So far, I'm cool.
Presumably (I don't see any mention of this in the articles) an electron eventually pops out of one of the bubbles, and we could (even if we don't at present) find out which bubbles were inhabited and which not.
At that point, my crude understanding of quantum theory indicates that only the inhabited bubble(s) existed in a coherent description of passage through the helium.
But, these guys are observing all of the bubbles, including those that don't turn out to be inahbited, and therefore according to my crude understanding shouldn't have been there.
My best highly ignorant guess is that the bubbles are all there, and the qualities of a bubble determine its likelihood of being inhabited. Even that highly ignorant guess begs a lot of questions regarding the mechanism that gives the bubbles fractional-charge-like qualities.
Boy, do I wish someone with real understanding would really explain things.
IANAL, but I've studied contract law for Scotland. A contract is an offer and an acceptance, that's all it takes.
From Wikipedia: "In common law legal systems, a contract (or informally known as an agreement in some jurisdictions) is an agreement having a lawful object entered into voluntarily by two or more parties, each of whom intends to create one or more legal obligations between them. The elements of a contract are "offer" and "acceptance" by "competent persons" having legal capacity who exchange "consideration" to create "mutuality of obligation." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract)
It's not obvious to me whether the purchase of a ticket with stuff written on the back constitutes such "acceptance," so I hope that someone with deeper knowledge will pitch in. I have read statements from apparently knowledgable people to the effect that opening a package does not constitute "acceptance" of the shrink-wrap license conditions, nor that use of a service constitutes "acceptance" of everything in the published "Terms of Service" or "End User License Agreement." I have also read that "acceptance" requires some ability in principle for each party to negotiate details. The "mutuality" part is also not obvious. The exchange of money for the ticket and the implicit right to enter the venue at a particular time seems clear to me, but it is not at all clear that there is any "mutuality" in the additional terms stated on the back of the ticket or in the program.
You've agreed to not talk to a small gathering of your own friends about the game too.
No. The vendor of the ticket has stated its refusal of permission, but you haven't agreed to that condition. The enforcability of the prohibition depends on lots of subtleties in the law, but it is certainly not based on an agreement.
I am almost certain (given that IANAL) that there is no contract here, because a contract must be negotiated and must have some consideration passed in each direction. I think that the distinction is more than a quibble, because contract law is quite different from license law and rights of venue owners.
In particular, each of these branches of law appears to have different limitations on which sorts of requirements may be enforced, and how they may be enforced.
I'm as certain as I could be without being a lawyer that there is no contract between the vendor and buyer of a ticket. I *think* that the ticket represents a license provided to the buyer. I definitely need a lawyer (not currently available to me) to determine what sorts of limitations on that license are and are not enforcable, and what sorts of remedies are available to the vendor when a buyer violates a limitation expressed by the vendor.
(2) Is it easy for a non-academic to get the required data?
I am not familiar with this particular academic community, but generally it is not easy for an academic to get data. The most useful resource is probably the co-operation of those who have gathered the data, and in order to get that you have to find out who they are. The inclination to be helpful varies immensely across disciplines and people within disciplines, but all you lose by trying to make contact is possible embarassment. Step 2 in the list below will give you a tag to use when introducing yourself, which may make you feel less awkward and therefore may improve co-operation.
I suggest 3 steps, in increasing cost, that are likely to help:
1. Get a community membership in the nearest university library. This should be cheap enough to be a no-brainer. It doesn't matter too much which university, because a lot of materials will be online through their Web catalogue, and there will be interlibrary loan. I'm not sure whether small 4-year colleges and community colleges have similar arrangements, but it's worth checking if one of those is much more convenient than a research university.
2. Join a professional society, and/or the special interest group of a professional society, interested in your topic. Costs vary wildly, order of magnitude $100 to $1,000 per year. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) probably have interest groups, and there are almost surely such groups within some cognitive science societies, but I am not familiar with those.
3. Attend a conference sponsored by a group from step 2. This is likely to cost $1,000s when you add up travel, hotel, registration. If you have the time, and get lucky on location, you can save a bunch on travel. Saving by staying far from the conference hotel is usually a mistake. The value of the conference is less in attending talks than in meeting people, and having breakfast in the same hotel with everybody else can make a big difference. The success of unsolicited introductions will vary immensely across the people you try to meet, but you lose nothing but embarassment by trying. The main thing you can do to improve success is to avoid the Charybdis & Scylla of diffident awkwardness and bluff. Let on that you're an outsider, but don't downgrade whatever insight/ability/motivation you have. You'll probably have the greatest success meeting people who are networked in, but are not famous stars. That includes grad students and postdocs. It may be nice and polite to hang out with other outsiders, but probably not productive for your mutual goals.
Attempts have been made in the past to automate programming, it's never worked very well
On the contrary, automated programming has worked repeatedly, each time redefining "programming":
Machine language automated the programming of patch boards.
Assembly language automated programming in machine language, particularly the assignment of addresses.
FORTRAN automated assembly language programming, particularly the programming of formulae into sequences of operations.
Each time someone automated "programming," the word stopped referring to the automated part, and referred to the remaining part of algorithmic problem solving. After FORTRAN, the pieces of automation were less clearly ordered, and less likely to be referred to as "automated programming," but re-entrant procedures, recursive procedures, virtual memory, garbage collection, class instantiation, tail recursion removal,... all automated activities that were formerly part of "programming." In all cases, whatever specification remained to be done by hand became the new "programming."
Attempts have been made in the past to automate programming, it's never worked very well
On the contrary. The first attempt to automate programming produced assembly language, which automated the assignment of addresses to variables and instructions. The second one produced FORTRAN, which automated the "programming" of formulae into sequences of individual operations. Every time we successfully automate some programming activity, the nature of programming changes.
Your choice. Other people have other reasons to make other choices.
The question here is not, "why run a WWW server at home?" but, "why prohibit people from running servers at home?"
a 44.1kHz sampling rate can perfectly encode any signal that is =22.05kHz, and nobody can hear over 20kHz.
People keep saying this, but it involves two different meanings of a signal with content below 20 kHz. The Nyquist theorem says (correctly) that, for an infinite number of perfectly accurate samples at S Hz, there is only one signal agreeing with those samples and containing Fourier components all below S/2 Hz. Fourier components are infinitely long sine waves, with no variation in frequency or amplitude. People hear components that are modulated sine waves with carrier frequency below (for most of us, far below) 20kHz. "Modulated" means that the amplitude and/or frequency (usually both) vary. Fourier components of a signal with arbitrarily high frequency affect the modulation of audible components with arbitrarily low frequency. Whether the effect on that modulation is audible is a very subtle thing, quite difficult to measure, and not completely known at present.
Not if you can mathematically prove that the two sound reproductions are identical
The best possible signal reproductions at different sample rates are not identical, so of course you can't prove such a falsehood mathematically. The argument is that they are indistinguishable in human perception. That's a very difficult thing to study, with many variables that are hard to control.
A modulated (varying frequency or amplitude) signal with an audible carrier frequency has Fourier components of unboundedly high frequency. These components can, and sometimes do, have an audible effect on the modulation. The value of >44.1 KHz sampling is debatable, but it's not dismissable mathematically.
Put another way, the "components" below 22.05 KHz that are preserved by 44.1 KHz sampling are the infinitely long unmodulated sine waves of Fourier analysis. The "components" that we hear are modulated sine waves. Cutting off the Fourier components above 22.05 KHz changes the modulation of the audible components below 22.05 KHz. Whether that change is perceptible depends on deep study of human perception, not on the mathematics of sampling.
The problem is that the genetic code alone isn't a programming language.
The genetic code is indeed a programming language. It was designed by evolution, while the artificial programming languages for digital computers were at worst (Ada?) designed by government-appointed committee. The user's manual hasn't been written yet, and of course the notion that we know how to program a prehensile tail is a joke. We know how to program sequences of amino acids. We know that there are conditional mechanisms, but they are more numerous and trickier than if... then... else. We can learn a lot, but not by a long shot everything, by investigating the control mechanisms in nucleic acid expression, using insights that were stimulated by computer programming languages.
deceived a generation of computer scientists into thinking biology is easy to understand and hack
Sigh. Can we stop extrapolating useful ideas in silly ways in order to ridicule them, and put more effort into squeezing out insight in many different ways? I have met a few thousand computer scientists, and not one of them expressed such an opinion, or anything near to it. It was certainly not the spirit in which I understood Sussman. Come to think of it, I don't know anyone who thinks that computer programming languages are easy to understand and hack, so the notion doesn't even start with computer languages much less carry over to an attitude about biology.
In the late 1980s or 1990ish, I attended a meeting sponsored by the National Science Foundation, to promote interaction between biologists and computer scientists. Much of the discussion focussed on designing algorithms and producing programs to answer questions posed by biologists. That part of the discussion was dominated by laments: biologists describe problems, computer scientists create programs to solve them, biologists find that the solution isn't really what they wanted.
Gerald Sussman (MIT, creator of Scheme) was at the meeting. At one point he got excited, and captured the podium. Alas, there is no transcipt, but here's my paraphrase of his inspiring speech:
Writing programs to serve biologists is cool as far as it goes, but our collaboration should cut much deeper. The genetic code is a programming language, and we should help biologists figure out the structure of the programs written in the alphabet of the bases. What I really want is the Emacs mode to edit the genome, so I can give myself a prehensile tail.
I have a great memory. I remember good stuff, and some of it happened. Please don't blame Mr. Sussman for any idiocies in my paraphrase. Maybe I projected the prehensile tail from my own repressed desires. But, I do think Mr. Sussman deserves great credit for observing the deep conceptual connections between CS and genetics at a time when very few of us thought beyond the idea of writing computer programs to help solve genetic problems.
But they already know the IP address, and since they named someone that means they must have already contacted the ISP and found the subscriber.
That's an interesting assumption, but the decision explicitly says that Plaintiff provided no information (no allegations) regarding the connection between Defendant and the given IP number. Plaintiff did not state whether the number is assigned to Defendant by some ISP, according to the judge Plaintiff merely mentioned the number. The segment that you quoted was part of the judge's explanation of further information required to justify proceeding in the suit, but was not part of a dismissal. He asked Plaintiff to reveal Plaintiff's information about Defendant's relation to the IP number cited. According to the article, Plaintiff withdrew the suit without ever providing that explanation.
E.g., instead of this being a case, as you "suspect," of "geeks want to be able to downlad everything they can for free," it might just as well be a case of Plaintiff having made a clerical error, accusing the wrong Defendant, and withdrawing the suit when that error became apparent. Since Plaintiff did not reveal the connection that he alleged between the IP number and Defendant, we don't know what it was, much less whether it was correct. The judge merely required Plaintiff to reveal that information.
The only way that a Plaintiff could obtain the evidence needed is with a subpoena. The judge dismissed the case before allowing any subpoenas to occur.
That's not what the decision says. The judge did not dismiss the 2 copyright infringment claims. He did not require evidence. He required before proceeding that Plaintiff reveal information, which Plaintiff claimed to possess already, linking Defendant to the IP number. Plaintiff dropped the suit without revealing that information. Subpoenas are by no means neccesary for all forms of investigation. There was no indication of a request for a subpoena of ISP registration information. The judge noted that Plaintiff had not even stated that the IP number in question was registered in any way to Defendant. Accepting the judge's statement (I did not check it against the actual complaint), Plaintiff merely mentioned the IP number, alleged that it was involved in an alleged copyright violation, accused Defendant of that copyright violation, but did not even mention any alleged connection between Defendant and the IP number, much less any other detail regarding Defendant's actual behavior. The judge did not require evidence, merely plausible statement of the evidence that Plaintiff expected to produce.
This ruling says that they must tie it to an individual, but they are not allowed to do any investigation that would help them in doing that.
I have hunted the 7-page decision in vain for the spot where the judge forbade Plaintiff "to do any investigation that would help...." The judge merely required Plaintiff to mention some alleged facts that, if proved, would associate Plaintiff with the alleged copyright infringment. According to the decision, Plaintiff merely mentioned an IP number, and did not even claim that it was associated with a service subscribed to by Defendant. Plaintiff was at liberty to do all sorts of other investigation, or merely to share with the judge the details of earlier investigation. Until then, the Plaintiff would be unable to demand that Defendant or other parties (such as ISP) do the investigation for Plaintiff under the rules of discovery.
The problem is that the judge forbids discovery. Apparently no one on Slashdot knows what that means. It means that they are forbidden from obtaining any more evidence or doing any more research.
Well, I do know what "discovery" means (Wikipedia entry). The judge indicated that Plaintiff had not explained allegations well enough to justify certain types of discovery. By no means did he say "that they are forbidden from obtaining any more evidence or doing any more research." "Discovery" means requiring others, including the opposition, to deliver information that may support the case. Plaintiff had, and was apparently already using, other means of obtaining evidence and doing research. As I understand the decision, Plaintiff must explain a plausible case well enough to justify placing that burden upon others, and the judge ruled that Plaintiff had not done so.
The problem is that the judge forbids discovery. Apparently no one on Slashdot knows what that means. It means that they are forbidden from obtaining any more evidence or doing any more research.
I hunted through the judge's decision, and could not find where he forbade discovery. I found that he required some alleged facts actually connecting the defendant to the alleged infringement. He didn't require evidence at this stage, merely a statement of a plausible specific claim that the Plaintiff possessed some evidence associating the Defendant with the alleged copyright infringement.
From the judge's decison, a footnote:
In its Opposition, Plaintiff states in a footnote that “Plaintiff’s allegations and identification of Defendant are based off of much more information than a lone IP address . . ..” Plaintiff does not, however, specify what information it has.
It appears to me that the judge was requiring Plaintiff to explain in a bit of detail the reason for associating the defendant with the alleged copryight infringement.
Elsewhere, the judge mentions that the Plaintiff has not even alleged specifically that the IP address in question is associated in any particular way with Defendant:
Indeed, the FAC does not explain what link, if any, there is between Defendant and the IP address. It is possible that Plaintiff sued Defendant because he is the subscriber to IPaddress 68.8.137.53. (The Court notes that it is actually unclear whether the IP address is registered to Defendant).
So, it appears (pending a reading of the complaint, to see whether the judge described it correctly) that Plaintiff sued Defendant, mentioned "68.8.137.53" as though this were relevant, but did not explain the connection between that number and Defendant, and the judge required an explanation. There is more in the decision to indicate that a mere registration of the number would not suffice, but no indication at all that Plaintiff's ability to discover additional facts is actually inhibited if they can provide a plausible explanation.
To the extent that Plaintiff’s negligence claim alleges that Defendant failed to properly secure his internet connection or failed to properly monitor the use of his secured internet connection by others, Plaintiff’s claim fails because there is no underlying duty. One who fails to act to protect another is generally not liable for breaching a duty unless there is a special relationship giving rise to a duty to act. Mid-Cal National Bank v. Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, 590F.2d761, 763 (9th Cir. 1979). There is no special relationship between Plaintiff and Defendant which gives rise to a duty on the part of Defendant to ensure, through heightened security measures and hawkish monitoring of internet usage, that nobody uses his internet connection to infringe Plaintiff’s copyright.
This part of the decision applied only to claim 3 of negligence, which was dismissed, not to claims 1 & 2 of copryight infrigement, which were held pending further information. It appears to nix the notion that individuals are required to police Internet connections for which they subscribe, and take liability for the behavior of other users.
I have offered free open wireless Internet to my neighbors and passersby for many years, with no problem. Occasionally, I see a car parked in front of my house to use the connection. It's the good neighborly thing to do. Those who are more stingy and/or fearful need not follow suit, but they need not spew negative speculation about those of us who do.
Bruce Schneier, security expert, does the same.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/my_open_wireles.html
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Wikipedia considers itself to be a tertiary source, but the basic point of drilling back to the best available starting point is exactly correct.
Wikipedia has explicit instructions on this topic.
Mike O'Donnell
This may be the first time I wanted to mod an anonymous coward up. I remember reading about this years ago in a Philip K. Dick short story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... I totally remember that story. What? Mike O'Donnell
My best highly ignorant guess is that the bubbles are all there, and the qualities of a bubble determine its likelihood of being inhabited. Even that highly ignorant guess begs a lot of questions regarding the mechanism that gives the bubbles fractional-charge-like qualities. Boy, do I wish someone with real understanding would really explain things.
To my surprise, I found some evidence that a ticket does constitute a contract: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
IANAL, but I've studied contract law for Scotland. A contract is an offer and an acceptance, that's all it takes.
From Wikipedia: "In common law legal systems, a contract (or informally known as an agreement in some jurisdictions) is an agreement having a lawful object entered into voluntarily by two or more parties, each of whom intends to create one or more legal obligations between them. The elements of a contract are "offer" and "acceptance" by "competent persons" having legal capacity who exchange "consideration" to create "mutuality of obligation." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract) It's not obvious to me whether the purchase of a ticket with stuff written on the back constitutes such "acceptance," so I hope that someone with deeper knowledge will pitch in. I have read statements from apparently knowledgable people to the effect that opening a package does not constitute "acceptance" of the shrink-wrap license conditions, nor that use of a service constitutes "acceptance" of everything in the published "Terms of Service" or "End User License Agreement." I have also read that "acceptance" requires some ability in principle for each party to negotiate details. The "mutuality" part is also not obvious. The exchange of money for the ticket and the implicit right to enter the venue at a particular time seems clear to me, but it is not at all clear that there is any "mutuality" in the additional terms stated on the back of the ticket or in the program.
You've agreed to not talk to a small gathering of your own friends about the game too.
No. The vendor of the ticket has stated its refusal of permission, but you haven't agreed to that condition. The enforcability of the prohibition depends on lots of subtleties in the law, but it is certainly not based on an agreement.
it's contract law (essentially)
I am almost certain (given that IANAL) that there is no contract here, because a contract must be negotiated and must have some consideration passed in each direction. I think that the distinction is more than a quibble, because contract law is quite different from license law and rights of venue owners. In particular, each of these branches of law appears to have different limitations on which sorts of requirements may be enforced, and how they may be enforced.
I'm as certain as I could be without being a lawyer that there is no contract between the vendor and buyer of a ticket. I *think* that the ticket represents a license provided to the buyer. I definitely need a lawyer (not currently available to me) to determine what sorts of limitations on that license are and are not enforcable, and what sorts of remedies are available to the vendor when a buyer violates a limitation expressed by the vendor.
I am not familiar with this particular academic community, but generally it is not easy for an academic to get data. The most useful resource is probably the co-operation of those who have gathered the data, and in order to get that you have to find out who they are. The inclination to be helpful varies immensely across disciplines and people within disciplines, but all you lose by trying to make contact is possible embarassment. Step 2 in the list below will give you a tag to use when introducing yourself, which may make you feel less awkward and therefore may improve co-operation.
I suggest 3 steps, in increasing cost, that are likely to help:
Attempts have been made in the past to automate programming, it's never worked very well
On the contrary, automated programming has worked repeatedly, each time redefining "programming":
Each time someone automated "programming," the word stopped referring to the automated part, and referred to the remaining part of algorithmic problem solving. After FORTRAN, the pieces of automation were less clearly ordered, and less likely to be referred to as "automated programming," but re-entrant procedures, recursive procedures, virtual memory, garbage collection, class instantiation, tail recursion removal, ... all automated activities that were formerly part of "programming." In all cases, whatever specification remained to be done by hand became the new "programming."
Attempts have been made in the past to automate programming, it's never worked very well
On the contrary. The first attempt to automate programming produced assembly language, which automated the assignment of addresses to variables and instructions. The second one produced FORTRAN, which automated the "programming" of formulae into sequences of individual operations. Every time we successfully automate some programming activity, the nature of programming changes.
Mike O'Donnell
Your choice. Other people have other reasons to make other choices. The question here is not, "why run a WWW server at home?" but, "why prohibit people from running servers at home?"
a 44.1kHz sampling rate can perfectly encode any signal that is =22.05kHz, and nobody can hear over 20kHz.
People keep saying this, but it involves two different meanings of a signal with content below 20 kHz. The Nyquist theorem says (correctly) that, for an infinite number of perfectly accurate samples at S Hz, there is only one signal agreeing with those samples and containing Fourier components all below S/2 Hz. Fourier components are infinitely long sine waves, with no variation in frequency or amplitude. People hear components that are modulated sine waves with carrier frequency below (for most of us, far below) 20kHz. "Modulated" means that the amplitude and/or frequency (usually both) vary. Fourier components of a signal with arbitrarily high frequency affect the modulation of audible components with arbitrarily low frequency. Whether the effect on that modulation is audible is a very subtle thing, quite difficult to measure, and not completely known at present.
Not if you can mathematically prove that the two sound reproductions are identical
The best possible signal reproductions at different sample rates are not identical, so of course you can't prove such a falsehood mathematically. The argument is that they are indistinguishable in human perception. That's a very difficult thing to study, with many variables that are hard to control.
A modulated (varying frequency or amplitude) signal with an audible carrier frequency has Fourier components of unboundedly high frequency. These components can, and sometimes do, have an audible effect on the modulation. The value of >44.1 KHz sampling is debatable, but it's not dismissable mathematically.
Put another way, the "components" below 22.05 KHz that are preserved by 44.1 KHz sampling are the infinitely long unmodulated sine waves of Fourier analysis. The "components" that we hear are modulated sine waves. Cutting off the Fourier components above 22.05 KHz changes the modulation of the audible components below 22.05 KHz. Whether that change is perceptible depends on deep study of human perception, not on the mathematics of sampling.
The genetic code is indeed a programming language. It was designed by evolution, while the artificial programming languages for digital computers were at worst (Ada?) designed by government-appointed committee. The user's manual hasn't been written yet, and of course the notion that we know how to program a prehensile tail is a joke. We know how to program sequences of amino acids. We know that there are conditional mechanisms, but they are more numerous and trickier than if ... then ... else. We can learn a lot, but not by a long shot everything, by investigating the control mechanisms in nucleic acid expression, using insights that were stimulated by computer programming languages.
Sigh. Can we stop extrapolating useful ideas in silly ways in order to ridicule them, and put more effort into squeezing out insight in many different ways? I have met a few thousand computer scientists, and not one of them expressed such an opinion, or anything near to it. It was certainly not the spirit in which I understood Sussman. Come to think of it, I don't know anyone who thinks that computer programming languages are easy to understand and hack, so the notion doesn't even start with computer languages much less carry over to an attitude about biology.
In the late 1980s or 1990ish, I attended a meeting sponsored by the National Science Foundation, to promote interaction between biologists and computer scientists. Much of the discussion focussed on designing algorithms and producing programs to answer questions posed by biologists. That part of the discussion was dominated by laments: biologists describe problems, computer scientists create programs to solve them, biologists find that the solution isn't really what they wanted.
Gerald Sussman (MIT, creator of Scheme) was at the meeting. At one point he got excited, and captured the podium. Alas, there is no transcipt, but here's my paraphrase of his inspiring speech:
I have a great memory. I remember good stuff, and some of it happened. Please don't blame Mr. Sussman for any idiocies in my paraphrase. Maybe I projected the prehensile tail from my own repressed desires. But, I do think Mr. Sussman deserves great credit for observing the deep conceptual connections between CS and genetics at a time when very few of us thought beyond the idea of writing computer programs to help solve genetic problems.
That's an interesting assumption, but the decision explicitly says that Plaintiff provided no information (no allegations) regarding the connection between Defendant and the given IP number. Plaintiff did not state whether the number is assigned to Defendant by some ISP, according to the judge Plaintiff merely mentioned the number. The segment that you quoted was part of the judge's explanation of further information required to justify proceeding in the suit, but was not part of a dismissal. He asked Plaintiff to reveal Plaintiff's information about Defendant's relation to the IP number cited. According to the article, Plaintiff withdrew the suit without ever providing that explanation.
E.g., instead of this being a case, as you "suspect," of "geeks want to be able to downlad everything they can for free," it might just as well be a case of Plaintiff having made a clerical error, accusing the wrong Defendant, and withdrawing the suit when that error became apparent. Since Plaintiff did not reveal the connection that he alleged between the IP number and Defendant, we don't know what it was, much less whether it was correct. The judge merely required Plaintiff to reveal that information.
That's not what the decision says. The judge did not dismiss the 2 copyright infringment claims. He did not require evidence. He required before proceeding that Plaintiff reveal information, which Plaintiff claimed to possess already, linking Defendant to the IP number. Plaintiff dropped the suit without revealing that information. Subpoenas are by no means neccesary for all forms of investigation. There was no indication of a request for a subpoena of ISP registration information. The judge noted that Plaintiff had not even stated that the IP number in question was registered in any way to Defendant. Accepting the judge's statement (I did not check it against the actual complaint), Plaintiff merely mentioned the IP number, alleged that it was involved in an alleged copyright violation, accused Defendant of that copyright violation, but did not even mention any alleged connection between Defendant and the IP number, much less any other detail regarding Defendant's actual behavior. The judge did not require evidence, merely plausible statement of the evidence that Plaintiff expected to produce.
I have hunted the 7-page decision in vain for the spot where the judge forbade Plaintiff "to do any investigation that would help ... ." The judge merely required Plaintiff to mention some alleged facts that, if proved, would associate Plaintiff with the alleged copyright infringment. According to the decision, Plaintiff merely mentioned an IP number, and did not even claim that it was associated with a service subscribed to by Defendant. Plaintiff was at liberty to do all sorts of other investigation, or merely to share with the judge the details of earlier investigation. Until then, the Plaintiff would be unable to demand that Defendant or other parties (such as ISP) do the investigation for Plaintiff under the rules of discovery.
Well, I do know what "discovery" means (Wikipedia entry). The judge indicated that Plaintiff had not explained allegations well enough to justify certain types of discovery. By no means did he say "that they are forbidden from obtaining any more evidence or doing any more research." "Discovery" means requiring others, including the opposition, to deliver information that may support the case. Plaintiff had, and was apparently already using, other means of obtaining evidence and doing research. As I understand the decision, Plaintiff must explain a plausible case well enough to justify placing that burden upon others, and the judge ruled that Plaintiff had not done so.
I hunted through the judge's decision, and could not find where he forbade discovery. I found that he required some alleged facts actually connecting the defendant to the alleged infringement. He didn't require evidence at this stage, merely a statement of a plausible specific claim that the Plaintiff possessed some evidence associating the Defendant with the alleged copyright infringement. From the judge's decison, a footnote:
It appears to me that the judge was requiring Plaintiff to explain in a bit of detail the reason for associating the defendant with the alleged copryight infringement. Elsewhere, the judge mentions that the Plaintiff has not even alleged specifically that the IP address in question is associated in any particular way with Defendant:
So, it appears (pending a reading of the complaint, to see whether the judge described it correctly) that Plaintiff sued Defendant, mentioned "68.8.137.53" as though this were relevant, but did not explain the connection between that number and Defendant, and the judge required an explanation. There is more in the decision to indicate that a mere registration of the number would not suffice, but no indication at all that Plaintiff's ability to discover additional facts is actually inhibited if they can provide a plausible explanation.
This part of the decision applied only to claim 3 of negligence, which was dismissed, not to claims 1 & 2 of copryight infrigement, which were held pending further information. It appears to nix the notion that individuals are required to police Internet connections for which they subscribe, and take liability for the behavior of other users.
Communication with a single word has already been implemented in the land of Og: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_World_of_Og
I have offered free open wireless Internet to my neighbors and passersby for many years, with no problem. Occasionally, I see a car parked in front of my house to use the connection. It's the good neighborly thing to do. Those who are more stingy and/or fearful need not follow suit, but they need not spew negative speculation about those of us who do. Bruce Schneier, security expert, does the same. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/my_open_wireles.html