I was thinking along similar lines, but kind of backwards.
If I was 13 years old, and somebody offered to show me a copy of Playboy magazine, I'd probably say hell yes. On the other hand, if somebody's 45 year old mom were to "accidentally" wander into the room stark naked, I'd probably go "Yuuuucccchh" and tell all my friends what happened, and we'd all laugh at what a wrinkled, saggy old lady she was. (Maybe some of you were more advanced than I was at that age, but that's the simple fact for me.)
Nowadays I'm 32, and I've dated at least one woman in her 40s. Moreover, this particular woman I'm thinking of seemed cute to me -- not "attractive" in a sort of "she's a warm body and she's basically good-looking enough" way, but actually in an "I'd rather date her than anybody else in this room" kind of way. And when I talked to her and went out to do things with her, she didn't seem like an old lady at all. So something about my mind has changed there, as I've gotten older.
On the other hand, I doubt I'll ever date a 19 year old again. Those chicks are nuts!! Give 'em some time to sort their brains out, I say.
So something's definitely changed. When I was in high school, I was definitely attracted to 16 year old girls. Nowadays I just see them as little girls. When I see them dressing sexy, or making sexual comments or performing sexualized behaviors, body language etc., I think it looks like they're posing, imitating things they learned in the movies or something. To my mind, they're just not very good at it, and as a result it's not particularly flattering on them.
That's just me. I have other friends who see a young girl and go, "Hey hey heyy!" But part of the way this article was written seemed to have an undercurrent of, "any one of us could be a child molester, we're only steps away"... and if that's what's creeping you out, I just don't think it's true.
If you showed me a sexy photograph of a 16 year old girl, could I be turned on by that? It's possible -- but that's a posed photograph, designed by a photographer who knows how to manipulate an image to get the desired result. Am I attracted to real-life, living and moving 16 year old girls? No sir, I believe I am telling you the god's honest truth when I say that I am just not. I somehow doubt you or your friend are two steps away from being child molesters either.
I'll concede the point. I think the company I was working at the time skipped that version. But the only viable competitor? Office 5.1. So my opinion is unchanged.
I would say that yes, it has caused price reduction in office suites. Amazon lists Corel WordPerfect Office Suite 12 at $250, the home edition at $90. I guarantee you they wouldn't be selling for those prices if WordPerfect had retained the dominance it had over the word processor market in the late 80s to early 90s.
But there's the catch. I don't think the market for office suites is a really good example, because it's one area where Microsoft's products really did get out into the market and kick ass. The competitors simply failed to keep up. Early versions of Word sucked compared to WordPerfect. These days, no matter how many irritating gripes I have with Word, I can't see switching to WordPerfect for any reason.
On the Mac, Office totally dominated. The Mac version of Word has always been, and remains to this day, superior to the Windows version. In ten years of working with Macs and running IT for Mac shops, I've never seen a product for the Mac OS that could really compete with Office.
OpenOffice? Sure, I'd like to make that my main product. But it still needs some work, and there are more reasons why I'd like to use it than just price and/or features. If OpenOffice retailed for the same price as any version of Microsoft Office today, I'd say no thanks and good luck to 'em.
The point: if you're going to compete with Microsoft Office, you have to think about keeping your price low, because you just can't compete on features alone. Believe it or not, there are countless reasons why people keep buying Office besides just "vendor lock-in." Even if WordPerfect packs every single feature you personally could want in a word processor, how about Access, just for starters? Has anyone even tried to compete?
And don't say Microsoft doesn't continue to innovate. OneNote is a pretty promising newcomer to the Office family. The stuff Microsoft is doing with XML export and BizTalk Server is all pretty interesting.
So, OK, you'll maybe say that competing with Microsoft hasn't driven prices down in the overall market because Microsoft's prices haven't come down -- only everyone else's have. But I say that's fine. If you're far and away the market leader in your category and you do brisk sales at the prices you charge today, why on earth would you lower your prices? Are we asking for fair markets here or just a hand-out?
Bottom line: There are other examples out there where you could argue against Microsoft, but I just don't think you'll win talking about office suites.
Decent, but a little funny
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Linux, Inc.
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It is BusinessWeek after all, so I guess we shouldn't expect much else. But it is a little funny to hear Linux repeatedly called "Linux Inc."... only to have the author backtrack and say that, actually, it doesn't work like a corporation at all. Er, not like a traditional corporation, that is... yeah, that's the ticket, Linux is some new kind of corporation we've never seen before! (I guess that works for the kind of folks who can't think about anything but corporations.)
It's also kind of missing the point to talk about Linux's "market share" and rattle out the rhetoric about Linux being "Microsoft's biggest rival" and "brass knuckle tactics" and "sword rattling" and all this. What makes Linux so competetive is that, while Microsoft may see it as a rival, the Linux and open source community don't necessarily have to see Microsoft as a rival at all. Sure, a lot of people see Microsoft as having had a negative impact on the tech industry and would like to see Microsoft fail because of that. But you could just as easily contribute to Linux and not care one whit what Microsoft does. Really, the only thing that will ever impact Linux's "market share" is if people decide some other software gets the job done better for less. Until that happens, it doesn't really matter all that much what "tactics" Microsoft uses. The people who like Linux's price point and see it as almost good enough to do what they want to do will continue to contribute just enough code to push it over the edge of "almost"... and Linux will continue to get better and better. That will always make it an attractive product, and Linus doesn't even need to sit around in a boardroom discussing market share to make it happen. Imagine that!
The article says Apple is suing 19-year-old Nick Ciarelli. But surely they are actually suing The DePlume Organization, LLC, the limited-liability corporation that claims copyright to everything on the site? It seems unlikely that Ciarelli himself will suffer financial liability for this.
So did he sign an NDA with Apple? If not, then he has nothing to worry about.
Unless the courts determine he was trafficking in stolen trade secrets for commercial gain (i.e. revenue from advertisements on his Web site). Wouldn't that suck?
If you go with T-Mobile, they will actually send you an unlock code and instructions for your handset if you've been a customer in good standing for 90 days.
I call it a P4-M because intel used the term "Pentium M" for their P3 mobile CPU as well
Are you sure? The only reference I can find is to the "mobile Pentium III Processor -M." There's also a Pentium 4-M, as the previous poster mentioned. And then there's the Pentium M, which is the entirely new CPU that's part of the Centrino chipset package. You may be getting confused because the Pentium M actually relies on a lot of Pentium III technology, despite having the full Pentium 4 instruction set.
Re:"Technically" not directed by Miller...
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Sin City Trailer
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Actually, the whole Coppola family are members of the Director's Guild, including Christopher and Roman. You can do a search on the Guild's official site.
The movie business is going to hit the same wall as the audio business did, and the solution the audio business came up with (well, more accurately, were forced into) was to make the downloading of songs relatively cheap (under $1). As soon as it's not worth it to go through the hassle of copying the data, it is once again a viable product. At the moment, the movies are not viable products...
Back in the 1980s, the movie industry propped up the video market by charging a fortune for movies. Most were priced in the $90-150 range, well out of the market for the common consumer. Then video stores came along and started charging anywhere from $5 down to $2 a night to rent movies. The movie industry wasn't too happy at first, but then they realized they suddenly had a decent market who could afford their products, in the form of video stores. Eighteen zillion mom-n-pop video stores were popping up in every town in America. So instead of dropping the prices of all the tapes to encourage people to buy them, rather than rent them, the movie industry hung onto the high price point and that became "priced for rental." You weren't meant to buy it, unless you were rich -- video stores were. Only certain sure sellers were "priced for sale," which meant around $15-20.
It was only when DVDs came out that the industry's policy shifted to issuing new releases priced for sale. That's because there was a guy in the industry somewhere that convinced everybody that a durable media format (vs. shoddy VHS tapes) that contained a high-quality version of the movie was something a large number of people would be willing to own, rather than just rent. And he was right! People are buying DVDs in droves. DVD players were adopted by the mainstream public faster than any other electronic gadget in history, from what I've heard.
What I'm saying is, this theory that people download AVIs because DVDs cost too much just doesn't ring true. DVD sales have been phenomenal. If you think there's a DVD piracy problem in this country, think again -- check out the situation in Asia if you want to see a DVD piracy problem. I think people download AVIs because they're there. They can get the AVI before the actual movie comes out, and they can get the AVI for free for a movie that they probably wouldn't have bothered to buy, or even walk down to the video store to rent.
I mean, come on -- you can still rent DVDs. Are you honestly telling me that a price point of $3 for three nights (or whatever Blockbuster is doing right now) is more than most Americans are willing to pay to see some random shitty Hollywood movie? Of course it's not. But downloading AVIs, for many people, is just too easy.
Like the other guy said, et cetera is two words. You might even want to consider italicizing them, though that's a matter of style.
Similarly, putting spaces between ellipses is one of those things that dates back to the typewriter. When printing using a proportionally spaced font, you don't need to do it. Similarly, you may have been taught that you type two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence. While this is correct form for fixed-proportion typewriter fonts, typesetters never use two spaces after periods, and neither should writers who use proportionally spaced fonts (e.g. people who type on modern word processors using Times Roman).
I guess my point is, before you bitch about tiny nit-picks, maybe you ought to really know what you're talking about. A reference like The Chicago Manual of Style is a good place to start, though there are many discrepancies between it and other style guides, such as the Associated Press guide.
Yeah, but it took Apple until Mac OS 9 to break the 31-character filename limit, and even then the support was only there at the filesystem level... the OS couldn't really deal with long filenames until Mac OS X.
And we got bit more than once by overflows. It took like three separate f-ups to get this guy to acknowledge that he needed to stop being stingy with the bytes. Even then, he'd still try to sneak in some memory "savings", but at least he stopped arguing when we called him on them.
Wait a sec -- the root problem that leads to overflows isn't a lack of bytes. It's a lack of bounds checking. Right?
What next? One-Man does the Geek Trilogy? (Matrix, Star Wars, LOTR)
Don't laugh. You should see how he handles the scnee where Neo fights all the Agent Smiths from The Matrix Reloaded. Simply brilliant.
Re:MMV and MMVI = The Miller Years ?
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Oh my god, Once Upon a Time in Mexico was one of the worst movies I've ever seen in my life! From Dusk Til Dawn was similarly unwatchable, and though I enjoyed Desperado I never really rated El Mariachi, either. The Faculty was amusing and, believe it or not, most people seem to say the Spy Kids movies are probably his best work, albeit a little "mainstream" for most geeks' tastes.
Re:Shoot me for my ignorance...
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Sin City Trailer
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Actually, I think the ninjas came into the picture first with Frank Miller's Wolverine limited series (the very first one, before Wolverine ever had a book of his own) and his work on Daredevil. There had also been a great many limited series before Ronin.Ronin was mostly notable for its extravagant design values (for the period) and the fact that one of the major comic book companies would actually publish something so far out-there and completely unconnected to mainstream superhero continuity -- and, if I'm not mistaken, it was one of the first books from DC to be targeted at the direct-sales channel (i.e. comic book stores were the only place you could buy it, rather than supermarkets and 7-11s).
Re:"Technically" not directed by Miller...
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Sin City Trailer
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Right, but who ends up running Hollywood? The little guys? Or the same mass of corrupt people as before? Seems like breaking a decades-old union isn't the way to go.
Where are all these IIS servers that are being targeted? Apache outnumbers them 2 to 1. Wouldn't it make more sense to target Apache?
Because publicizing a fault in an open source software product like Apache -- by publishing an exploit in the form of a pushbutton script kiddie tool, for example -- results in the fault getting fixed. Meanwhile, even if Microsoft does patch a known fault in IIS, a lot of home users/amateur server admins either won't know about the patch, or do know about it but don't bother to apply it. Open source users are much more attuned to the benefits of point-release upgrades, because they tend to be 1.) timely, and 2.) effective. Plus, if a patch applied to open source software causes more problems than it fixes (something admins frequently complain of Microsoft patches), it's usually trivial to roll back to the previous version, and you can be confident that another version will come out on a timely basis that will correct the new issues discovered -- so there's less hesitance to apply patches when they arrive.
Ingres was originally intended to compete with the likes of Oracle and MS SQL Server, but never had the power or client base. OpenSourcing Ingres looks like CA's attempt to beef up both in one shot.
There's another aspect of this, too. Believe it or not, CA is interested not just in the community contributions to Ingres, but also the free beer aspect. Why? Because CA is moving toward a model of providing business integration services and a suite of enterprise application and network management software to go along with them. Pretty much all of this software requires a database to run on. By relying on the open source community to develop Ingres (rather than employing a full time team in-house), CA is able to offer its customers a complete solution at a lower price than what it would cost to get a separate Oracle license, with the additional advantage that the entire application stack down to the database is offered with full support from a single vendor.
That's true. I was a little surprised to see this article focusing on databases, because you see this sort of thing across the board in the industry right now. BEA launched an open source framework with the Apache Group; Novell is open sourcing bits and pieces and pushing a strong Linux message (while still banking on its proprietary products); even Microsoft is quick to tell you that its source code is available (for a price, and for whatever it's worth). I actually wrote an article about this for InfoWorld recently, if anyone's interested. In a sidebar, Bruce Perens also contributed some thoughts on when working with open source is beneficial to companies, and when it might make sense to go another way.
You could go even further. You could say that BitTorrent is a distributed protocol, such that no one host sends every block of a given file to a single recipient. If you an I are both in the same Torrent swarm, I might only send you a few blocks of the file, and almost never the whole thing. You could liken these blocks to the short clips and quotations from books that literary critics and scholars regularly reprint in their reviews and dissertations -- something that's well protected under Fair Use doctrine. Therefore, my sending you a few blocks over BitTorrent could be seen as protected under Fair Use. It's not copyright infringement, because I never even sent you a full copy. Just a couple of packets here and there.
Unfortunately, I think the real message from these raids is that this kind of hair-splitting just isn't going to fly with a sane, rational judge behind the bench. Sorry.
Giving away your fair-use copies CAN also be legal fair use as well in some circumstances; it can also be illegal copyright infringement in others. It is a legal grey area -- giving a copy to a relative is unquestionably OK. Giving a copy to 10 casual accquaintances is probably OK. Giving a copy to everyone in a class you are teaching might be OK. *SELLING* a copy is *NOT* OK.
You almost had me, up until the paragraph quoted above. Unfortunately, your opinions sound very nice but they don't have much of anything to do with the law as it actually exists. In particular, your idea that selling a copy of something is the only clearly defined form of infringement is one of those hoary old fallacies that needs to go away, just like the story about mailing yourself a copy of a manuscript in a sealed envelope to "prove" copyright. They're nice wives' tales, but they just ain't fact.
"Fair use," in and of itself, is nowhere clearly defined in the copyright law, and its interpretation is largely left up to judges in individual cases. Whether or not a given case of suspected infringement constitutes Fair Use is determined on the basis of several factors, including the nature of the work infringed and the purpose for which it was copied.
I can assure you that several of the examples you cite are most certainly not Fair Use; checking a book out from the library does not give you the right to give a copy to a relative. ("Unquestionably"? Are you so naive you actually believe that?) And I certainly hope you don't teach any classes, because if you do, you might want to do a little bit of research before you find yourself in a mess of trouble with your boss.
Possibly, or maybe you just can't search the catalog without generating one with their software. That's how the iRiver players work. You use a Windows-based utility to generate the catalog file (some OSS alternatives are available, too) and switch on a "browse by ID3" mode in the player. If you don't do that, you have to browse it like a normal directory/file hierarchy -- which is what I actually prefer, anyway.
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I was thinking along similar lines, but kind of backwards.
... and if that's what's creeping you out, I just don't think it's true.
If I was 13 years old, and somebody offered to show me a copy of Playboy magazine, I'd probably say hell yes. On the other hand, if somebody's 45 year old mom were to "accidentally" wander into the room stark naked, I'd probably go "Yuuuucccchh" and tell all my friends what happened, and we'd all laugh at what a wrinkled, saggy old lady she was. (Maybe some of you were more advanced than I was at that age, but that's the simple fact for me.)
Nowadays I'm 32, and I've dated at least one woman in her 40s. Moreover, this particular woman I'm thinking of seemed cute to me -- not "attractive" in a sort of "she's a warm body and she's basically good-looking enough" way, but actually in an "I'd rather date her than anybody else in this room" kind of way. And when I talked to her and went out to do things with her, she didn't seem like an old lady at all. So something about my mind has changed there, as I've gotten older.
On the other hand, I doubt I'll ever date a 19 year old again. Those chicks are nuts!! Give 'em some time to sort their brains out, I say.
So something's definitely changed. When I was in high school, I was definitely attracted to 16 year old girls. Nowadays I just see them as little girls. When I see them dressing sexy, or making sexual comments or performing sexualized behaviors, body language etc., I think it looks like they're posing, imitating things they learned in the movies or something. To my mind, they're just not very good at it, and as a result it's not particularly flattering on them.
That's just me. I have other friends who see a young girl and go, "Hey hey heyy!" But part of the way this article was written seemed to have an undercurrent of, "any one of us could be a child molester, we're only steps away"
If you showed me a sexy photograph of a 16 year old girl, could I be turned on by that? It's possible -- but that's a posed photograph, designed by a photographer who knows how to manipulate an image to get the desired result. Am I attracted to real-life, living and moving 16 year old girls? No sir, I believe I am telling you the god's honest truth when I say that I am just not. I somehow doubt you or your friend are two steps away from being child molesters either.
I'll concede the point. I think the company I was working at the time skipped that version. But the only viable competitor? Office 5.1. So my opinion is unchanged.
I would say that yes, it has caused price reduction in office suites. Amazon lists Corel WordPerfect Office Suite 12 at $250, the home edition at $90. I guarantee you they wouldn't be selling for those prices if WordPerfect had retained the dominance it had over the word processor market in the late 80s to early 90s.
But there's the catch. I don't think the market for office suites is a really good example, because it's one area where Microsoft's products really did get out into the market and kick ass. The competitors simply failed to keep up. Early versions of Word sucked compared to WordPerfect. These days, no matter how many irritating gripes I have with Word, I can't see switching to WordPerfect for any reason.
On the Mac, Office totally dominated. The Mac version of Word has always been, and remains to this day, superior to the Windows version. In ten years of working with Macs and running IT for Mac shops, I've never seen a product for the Mac OS that could really compete with Office.
OpenOffice? Sure, I'd like to make that my main product. But it still needs some work, and there are more reasons why I'd like to use it than just price and/or features. If OpenOffice retailed for the same price as any version of Microsoft Office today, I'd say no thanks and good luck to 'em.
The point: if you're going to compete with Microsoft Office, you have to think about keeping your price low, because you just can't compete on features alone. Believe it or not, there are countless reasons why people keep buying Office besides just "vendor lock-in." Even if WordPerfect packs every single feature you personally could want in a word processor, how about Access, just for starters? Has anyone even tried to compete?
And don't say Microsoft doesn't continue to innovate. OneNote is a pretty promising newcomer to the Office family. The stuff Microsoft is doing with XML export and BizTalk Server is all pretty interesting.
So, OK, you'll maybe say that competing with Microsoft hasn't driven prices down in the overall market because Microsoft's prices haven't come down -- only everyone else's have. But I say that's fine. If you're far and away the market leader in your category and you do brisk sales at the prices you charge today, why on earth would you lower your prices? Are we asking for fair markets here or just a hand-out?
Bottom line: There are other examples out there where you could argue against Microsoft, but I just don't think you'll win talking about office suites.
It is BusinessWeek after all, so I guess we shouldn't expect much else. But it is a little funny to hear Linux repeatedly called "Linux Inc." ... only to have the author backtrack and say that, actually, it doesn't work like a corporation at all. Er, not like a traditional corporation, that is... yeah, that's the ticket, Linux is some new kind of corporation we've never seen before! (I guess that works for the kind of folks who can't think about anything but corporations.)
... and Linux will continue to get better and better. That will always make it an attractive product, and Linus doesn't even need to sit around in a boardroom discussing market share to make it happen. Imagine that!
It's also kind of missing the point to talk about Linux's "market share" and rattle out the rhetoric about Linux being "Microsoft's biggest rival" and "brass knuckle tactics" and "sword rattling" and all this. What makes Linux so competetive is that, while Microsoft may see it as a rival, the Linux and open source community don't necessarily have to see Microsoft as a rival at all. Sure, a lot of people see Microsoft as having had a negative impact on the tech industry and would like to see Microsoft fail because of that. But you could just as easily contribute to Linux and not care one whit what Microsoft does. Really, the only thing that will ever impact Linux's "market share" is if people decide some other software gets the job done better for less. Until that happens, it doesn't really matter all that much what "tactics" Microsoft uses. The people who like Linux's price point and see it as almost good enough to do what they want to do will continue to contribute just enough code to push it over the edge of "almost"
Look, kid, the world doesn't owe you a living. Nobody said eternal life was fair.
The article says Apple is suing 19-year-old Nick Ciarelli. But surely they are actually suing The DePlume Organization, LLC, the limited-liability corporation that claims copyright to everything on the site? It seems unlikely that Ciarelli himself will suffer financial liability for this.
If you go with T-Mobile, they will actually send you an unlock code and instructions for your handset if you've been a customer in good standing for 90 days.
Actually, the whole Coppola family are members of the Director's Guild, including Christopher and Roman. You can do a search on the Guild's official site.
It was only when DVDs came out that the industry's policy shifted to issuing new releases priced for sale. That's because there was a guy in the industry somewhere that convinced everybody that a durable media format (vs. shoddy VHS tapes) that contained a high-quality version of the movie was something a large number of people would be willing to own, rather than just rent. And he was right! People are buying DVDs in droves. DVD players were adopted by the mainstream public faster than any other electronic gadget in history, from what I've heard.
What I'm saying is, this theory that people download AVIs because DVDs cost too much just doesn't ring true. DVD sales have been phenomenal. If you think there's a DVD piracy problem in this country, think again -- check out the situation in Asia if you want to see a DVD piracy problem. I think people download AVIs because they're there. They can get the AVI before the actual movie comes out, and they can get the AVI for free for a movie that they probably wouldn't have bothered to buy, or even walk down to the video store to rent.
I mean, come on -- you can still rent DVDs. Are you honestly telling me that a price point of $3 for three nights (or whatever Blockbuster is doing right now) is more than most Americans are willing to pay to see some random shitty Hollywood movie? Of course it's not. But downloading AVIs, for many people, is just too easy.
Like the other guy said, et cetera is two words. You might even want to consider italicizing them, though that's a matter of style.
Similarly, putting spaces between ellipses is one of those things that dates back to the typewriter. When printing using a proportionally spaced font, you don't need to do it. Similarly, you may have been taught that you type two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence. While this is correct form for fixed-proportion typewriter fonts, typesetters never use two spaces after periods, and neither should writers who use proportionally spaced fonts (e.g. people who type on modern word processors using Times Roman).
I guess my point is, before you bitch about tiny nit-picks, maybe you ought to really know what you're talking about. A reference like The Chicago Manual of Style is a good place to start, though there are many discrepancies between it and other style guides, such as the Associated Press guide.
Yeah, but it took Apple until Mac OS 9 to break the 31-character filename limit, and even then the support was only there at the filesystem level ... the OS couldn't really deal with long filenames until Mac OS X.
Oh my god, Once Upon a Time in Mexico was one of the worst movies I've ever seen in my life! From Dusk Til Dawn was similarly unwatchable, and though I enjoyed Desperado I never really rated El Mariachi, either. The Faculty was amusing and, believe it or not, most people seem to say the Spy Kids movies are probably his best work, albeit a little "mainstream" for most geeks' tastes.
Actually, I think the ninjas came into the picture first with Frank Miller's Wolverine limited series (the very first one, before Wolverine ever had a book of his own) and his work on Daredevil. There had also been a great many limited series before Ronin. Ronin was mostly notable for its extravagant design values (for the period) and the fact that one of the major comic book companies would actually publish something so far out-there and completely unconnected to mainstream superhero continuity -- and, if I'm not mistaken, it was one of the first books from DC to be targeted at the direct-sales channel (i.e. comic book stores were the only place you could buy it, rather than supermarkets and 7-11s).
Right, but who ends up running Hollywood? The little guys? Or the same mass of corrupt people as before? Seems like breaking a decades-old union isn't the way to go.
That's true. I was a little surprised to see this article focusing on databases, because you see this sort of thing across the board in the industry right now. BEA launched an open source framework with the Apache Group; Novell is open sourcing bits and pieces and pushing a strong Linux message (while still banking on its proprietary products); even Microsoft is quick to tell you that its source code is available (for a price, and for whatever it's worth). I actually wrote an article about this for InfoWorld recently, if anyone's interested. In a sidebar, Bruce Perens also contributed some thoughts on when working with open source is beneficial to companies, and when it might make sense to go another way.
You could go even further. You could say that BitTorrent is a distributed protocol, such that no one host sends every block of a given file to a single recipient. If you an I are both in the same Torrent swarm, I might only send you a few blocks of the file, and almost never the whole thing. You could liken these blocks to the short clips and quotations from books that literary critics and scholars regularly reprint in their reviews and dissertations -- something that's well protected under Fair Use doctrine. Therefore, my sending you a few blocks over BitTorrent could be seen as protected under Fair Use. It's not copyright infringement, because I never even sent you a full copy. Just a couple of packets here and there.
Unfortunately, I think the real message from these raids is that this kind of hair-splitting just isn't going to fly with a sane, rational judge behind the bench. Sorry.
"Fair use," in and of itself, is nowhere clearly defined in the copyright law, and its interpretation is largely left up to judges in individual cases. Whether or not a given case of suspected infringement constitutes Fair Use is determined on the basis of several factors, including the nature of the work infringed and the purpose for which it was copied.
I can assure you that several of the examples you cite are most certainly not Fair Use; checking a book out from the library does not give you the right to give a copy to a relative. ("Unquestionably"? Are you so naive you actually believe that?) And I certainly hope you don't teach any classes, because if you do, you might want to do a little bit of research before you find yourself in a mess of trouble with your boss.
Possibly, or maybe you just can't search the catalog without generating one with their software. That's how the iRiver players work. You use a Windows-based utility to generate the catalog file (some OSS alternatives are available, too) and switch on a "browse by ID3" mode in the player. If you don't do that, you have to browse it like a normal directory/file hierarchy -- which is what I actually prefer, anyway.