The statistics are not kosher because the Burglary rate has to do with more than just one law...
I doubt that burglars even are aware of that law in either state..
It has much more to do with the Socio-Economic Status of each place. There are a hell of a lot more poor people in Texas than there are in Michigan. Because Texas has a lower overall SES, there is going to be more property crime. There are other factors such as race that also contribute to the higher crime rate in Texas.
In order to prove the validity of the poster's claim, we would have to repeal the law in texas and see if the burglary rate changes. I doubt it would change in any significant way.
Damn I wish I hadn't posted to this thread before reading this post. This is first-rate comedy... It's too bad the MPAA owns a patent on online comedy, but since they have never enforced their rights, they probably will lose their patent. Maybe they can sue under the DCMA for infringement or something. I guess they've been too busy working with Micro$oft and the stupid government to take away our fair use rights to worry about enforcing it. Next thing you know, those cheese-eating surrender monkeys will start downloading all kinds of stuff on P2P networks, but that's ok because they wouldn't have bought the stuff in a store without first having listened to it. Piracy isn't theft anyway, it's just trying before you buy. If music weren't such garbage, it might be worth taking a risk. And, anybody who doesn't agree with me is probably a commie pinko bastard. I swear, with God's help, I'll turn back the aggressors against my karma. Victory is near!
Ok, I'm not a big finance guy but I had just thought that to be interesting. I don't have enough money to do business with any of them so I don't know that much about the markets, except that they suck right now:)
What would be really interesting to know is if Bill Gates and/or his cronies own big shares of LionBridge. I'm not sure how to find that info, though..
Measuring a 2x4 is different from multiple software programs running on a system. A multi-threaded computing platform is far from deterministic. It would have been a more deterministic test had they stopped all threads except for the one necessary to run the test. It was not stated in the published document that this was the case.
This problem is huge in the field of realtime embedded process control systems. My Employer spends lots of money and has dozens of patents on technology to make such systems more deterministic and predictable. You would be amazed at the lengths to which a designer must go to get even close.
If you're running any kind of test on a software platform, you've got to run that test dozens if not hundreds of times in order to have enough information to weed out the effects of other threads that might be running on the machine, the server, and even the effects of traffic that may be emanating from other machines on the network. It is furthermore insufficient to collect information on only one variable. Throwing the test bed against the wall and measuring the throughput alone is meaningless. You have to collect realtime data on each machine involved in the test, each switch, each NIC...
You've also got to run those tests at different temperatures (because digital hardware has different error rates at different temperatures), different times of day (if the machines are running something like cron jobs, and the test document did not say these were disabled), and through variances in many other factors in order to gain reliable and valid data.
So, in summary, if you're in your grade school science lab measuring the spatial dimensions of a 2x4, twice is probably enough because there aren't many factors that could affect the information you're trying to obtain. However, if you have 240 computers on a network, all talking to one machine, there are plenty of areas where minute variances in behavior of just one or a few of the clients can cause profound effects on the server. So it is more like a social science in the sense that statistically significant data is not easy to obtain.
And on your comments about the business relationships: it would be one thing for Microsoft to have paid some lab to do the test. It's quite another when MicroSoft and the Lab's parent company are so deeply in bed together that the benefit of the doubt disappears completely.
Flawed testing methodology / conflict of interest
on
What's Microsoft Up To?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I only skimmed the "benchmark" document, but I immediately saw a couple of fundamental flaws in their methods.
First, they said they conducted each test twice to ensure the "repeatability" and "accuracy." First of all, running a test only twice in no way gives you enough data to claim accuracy. Second of all, "repeatability" is meaningless in terms of determining statistically significant results. The terms you want to claim are *reliability* and *validity*, not accuracy and repeatability.
Simply averaging the results of two tests is idiotic in terms of sound scientific methods. That's the kind of testing I would expect from a grade school chemistry experiment, not an expensive "commissioned" test of a real-life installed system of this kind of complexity.
The other thing they said, which directly contradicts what they said in the main highlights in the beginning of the report, is that "Our investigation showed that, with some minor tweaks, the default configuration values set for SAMBA generated the best overall performance in our configuration." I'm not sure if this means just their linux configuration, or if they tuned linux and discovered that it was faster and just published the slower non-tweaked numbers.
Here are some interesting URLs that help to reveal the obvious conflict of interest here:
http://www.etestinglabs.com/about/news/press/lio nb ridge_microsoft.asp
Also, partial solar eclipses often follow or predate lunar eclipses by 14 days. Chances are that, if there's a lunar eclipse coming, there could very well be a partial solar eclipse two weeks before or after...
I'm an engineer, and I constantly get calls from people with thick, usually Jamaican-sounding, accents, asking to "verify" my information for a free subscription that I supposedly asked for.
I immediately ask them "Who are you calling?" (because I don't answer the phone with my name) and they are never able to tell me. Unfortunately, they do not have to maintain a do-not-call list because they are not required to. They can call me right back after I hang up on them if they want to.
I can always hear hundreds of voices in the background, because these are telemarketing sweatshops. These people probably get paid in food or something like that, to annoy the crap out of people.
Last week was pitiful. The phones rang around my office for days on end. After conducting a brief non-scientific survey, I found out that the engineers I work with, on average, received 4 "magazine calls" per day last week. Adjusting that number for exaggeration gives at least twice per day.
The saddest thing is that it's cheaper to call the U.S. from some third world country than it is to call across the river from here to New Jersey.
If the courts have any intelligence whatsoever (and I know this might just be wishful thinking), they'll realize that SBC failed in its responsibilities to protect their own patent. In short, they waited too long to have any enforceable rights under the patents. One of the requirements of owning a patent is that you promptly and vigorously act to protect your rights. If you wait, you lose your patent rights. This is to prevent companies like SBC from waiting until there are lots of high-profile infringers and THEN suing.
The purpose of a patent is so that you can protect your invention from copycats, therefore protecting your revenue stream from YOUR OWN USE of the technology. If you do not even use the technology in your own patent, then your patent is even less enforceable because it shows that your motives behind the patent are to stifle innovation - which directly contradicts the entire purpose of the patent system.
For example - say SBC patents frames, but then they do not use that technology nor do they actively offer the technology for sale. They just somehow work their technology into the standard and then sit on it. They don't tell anybody they own patents on it, and since it's part of the standard, people are given the impression that there are no licenses required. After all, it's an adopted public standard. 10 Years later, they get slapped with a lawsuit for $10M for infringing a patent that they didn't know existed, for using an ancient technology that not only isn't widely used anymore, but is downright UGLY to look at, and they don't have a clue what the hell is going on until after their lawyer settles for $1.5M and a perpetual $100K/yr license to use the obsolete technology.
This is the kind of thing that the patent office needs to form an enforcement body for - to prevent these kinds of things from happening.
Do you now? Well then under the Homeland Security Act, you're a terrorist.
Recall that part of the Homeland Security Act makes having an open AP a terrorist act if it is actually used by someone to aid, comfort, or assist a terrorist organization. Osama binLaden connects through your AP and sends an email, and you're going to prison for the rest of your life (while he roams free, mind you)...
Usually, homeowners associations cannot regulate the activities inside the confines of your home. They can only regulate the physical appearance and external upkeep.
Zoning restrictions may prevent you from doing things like having employees at your home, keeping inventory of any kind, and other things like daily or even weekly shipping pickup. Zoning laws, however, also usually cannot regulate the activities going on inside your home.
If worse comes to worst, get a co-lo and do your development over your DSL. You'd technically be working from home, with your "employer" being at the address of the co-lo facility. Bam, they can't touch you.
Well, the whole point of a layered networking model is that no one layer cares about any other layer. In reality, TCP doesn't care whether it's running over IP any more than IP cares whether TCP is running on top of it. You can have TCP running over any Network layer protocol, just like you can have any Network layer protocol running on top of any Data Link layer... and so on and so forth. Some other popular abstractions are Netbios/IP, UDP/IP, and just about anything over IPX (legacy games, notably), and a few others.
Let's dissect your average internet packet, say, an HTTP request. HTTP is the application layer, and has its own protocol (say, HTTP 1.0)... this application uses Port 80 as its "address" on the envelope (headers). The application uses TCP as its transport method because it needs a connection-oriented, acknowledged service, so TCP is the Transport Layer. The global network is addressed using IP addresses, so Internet Protocol is the Network Layer. However, the network could be addressed just about any other way and the application would have no idea. Finally, you have your Data Link Layer (ethernet driver with MAC address), and the physical layer, say, UTP.
There are any number of things happening at any given time and on any given layer, just to get packets where they're going. You have constant Layer-2 (DLL) activity going on inside switches and routers, as well as your ethernet driver (ARP). Likewise, routing (OSPF,BGP) is done at Layer 3 (Network Layer) based on IP address. None of these care what type of connection (or non-connection in the case of UDP) is happening, or what application is using them...
The article kept talking about "trustworthy" email, which means to me that MicroSoft will somehow have to see it before it's considered "trustworthy..."
No, thanks...
Any time the word "trustworthy" pops up, I immediately feel as if it is someone trying to violate my trust, my privact, and my right to be left the hell alone...
Well, I thought TCP/IP only describes two layers of the 5-layer model - the transport and network layers. The application layer is a layer at which any abstract protocol can be used based on the application - which is what made me think of it.
Flipping open the Bible (Tannenbaum), I see the seven layer model. The 5-layer model I was thinking of is Tannenbaum's hybrid reference model, and is almost identical to Netware.
Tannenbaum has some interesting political insights about why things happened the way they did. Now that I've re-read chap 1, it makes a bit more sense...
... to add 3 address bits to the Memory bus. wow, that must have been hard...
When sales slump a little more, and their market research indicates people want more RAM, maybe they'll add another address bit.
When are people going to realize that technological innovation ISN'T. Intellectual Property law has completely ended innovation. All we can do is expand, complicate, and repackage, the same damn IP that we invented 10 years ago because we're not allowed to innovate anymore. Even if we could, it wouldn't be worth it because we'd just get sued by some jackass that thinks he invented it first and the lawyers would bleed us dry..
Since when does the government bureaucracy have the goal of benefitting society?
Anyway, I've sent in dozens of rebates and have received every stinkin' one of them. I've never had to call, complain, write, pray, or do the rebate dance.... Some of my rebates include:
Compaq Laptop ($100HPQ + $200 Best Buy) Toshiba Laptop ($200) Philips Monitor ($50) Kodak Film ($36 sams club) Energizer Batteries ($10) SMC Networking Stuff (about $200 over the years) Sprint PCS ($100)
and probably a couple of dozen in the $10 range from various items...
You just have to be patient and fill the forms out EXACTLY as they want you to, which means actually reading the instructions and following them to the letter. There is no room for interpretation in these things. Most people don't get rebates because they decide that they can simply make up new rules that are easier to follow. If you follow the instructions, federal law is on your side, and the rebate companies know it. If you fill out the form incorrectly, they a) know you're too stupid to follow instructions and b) can probably assume you're ignorant of your rights under federal law regarding rebates so c) they can ignore you.
"Method and apparatus for the protection of methods, procedures, systems, and apparatuses by grant of exclusive rights by a governing body having executive authority over such rights" (Grant of Patent)
"Method and procedure for the dismantling of civilized society by exclusive diversion with legistative processes" (making people so busy defending themselves against lawsuits to do anything productive)
"Method and apparatus for the production of intellectual property and information by means of the exercise of a passive or active electromechanical or electronic relay or switch causing the dissipation of energy in various ceramic, plastic, semiconductor, or organic elements, causing the semi-permanent organization of atomic or subatomic particles on a dielectric, metallic, organic, semiconductor, ceramic, or plasticine substrate, also causing the luminescence of phosphorescent or electronic optoelectrical or optoelectronic elements." (use of computer)
Tax free? Compensatory damages are tax free. However, punitive damages are not. I believe that damages awarded under the TCPA are classified as punitive, considering the compensatory portion, the actual cost of a page of paper and the ink on it, is like 3 cents (or $54.95 if you have an HP inkjet).
That, and the fact that lawyers are generally not allowed in small claims court (unless one of the litigants just happens to BE a lawyer, but "Sears & Roebuck" is not a lawyer).
Slashdot Mirror
The statistics are not kosher because the Burglary rate has to do with more than just one law...
I doubt that burglars even are aware of that law in either state..
It has much more to do with the Socio-Economic Status of each place. There are a hell of a lot more poor people in Texas than there are in Michigan. Because Texas has a lower overall SES, there is going to be more property crime. There are other factors such as race that also contribute to the higher crime rate in Texas.
In order to prove the validity of the poster's claim, we would have to repeal the law in texas and see if the burglary rate changes. I doubt it would change in any significant way.
Yet in spite of all of his patently libelous and slanderous feedback, he is still on e-bay...
Why?
Because he makes them LOTS of money on fees with his high level of activity...
Just goes to show e-bay is just like a bank... the rules don't apply to you as long as you're profitable...
Damn I wish I hadn't posted to this thread before reading this post. This is first-rate comedy... It's too bad the MPAA owns a patent on online comedy, but since they have never enforced their rights, they probably will lose their patent. Maybe they can sue under the DCMA for infringement or something. I guess they've been too busy working with Micro$oft and the stupid government to take away our fair use rights to worry about enforcing it. Next thing you know, those cheese-eating surrender monkeys will start downloading all kinds of stuff on P2P networks, but that's ok because they wouldn't have bought the stuff in a store without first having listened to it. Piracy isn't theft anyway, it's just trying before you buy. If music weren't such garbage, it might be worth taking a risk. And, anybody who doesn't agree with me is probably a commie pinko bastard. I swear, with God's help, I'll turn back the aggressors against my karma. Victory is near!
I've had nothing but trouble getting linux to work on the three fujitsu laptops that I've owned.
But, at the same time, maybe this means we'll be able to buy laptops with linux pre-installed again, which would be a wonderful wonderful thing.
Maybe I'll have to consider fujitsu laptops again, so long as they're not still twice the price of an equivalent Compaq...
Except that it's dark outside and your pupils are dilated...
What would be really interesting to know is if Bill Gates and/or his cronies own big shares of LionBridge. I'm not sure how to find that info, though..
This problem is huge in the field of realtime embedded process control systems. My Employer spends lots of money and has dozens of patents on technology to make such systems more deterministic and predictable. You would be amazed at the lengths to which a designer must go to get even close.
If you're running any kind of test on a software platform, you've got to run that test dozens if not hundreds of times in order to have enough information to weed out the effects of other threads that might be running on the machine, the server, and even the effects of traffic that may be emanating from other machines on the network. It is furthermore insufficient to collect information on only one variable. Throwing the test bed against the wall and measuring the throughput alone is meaningless. You have to collect realtime data on each machine involved in the test, each switch, each NIC...
You've also got to run those tests at different temperatures (because digital hardware has different error rates at different temperatures), different times of day (if the machines are running something like cron jobs, and the test document did not say these were disabled), and through variances in many other factors in order to gain reliable and valid data.
So, in summary, if you're in your grade school science lab measuring the spatial dimensions of a 2x4, twice is probably enough because there aren't many factors that could affect the information you're trying to obtain. However, if you have 240 computers on a network, all talking to one machine, there are plenty of areas where minute variances in behavior of just one or a few of the clients can cause profound effects on the server. So it is more like a social science in the sense that statistically significant data is not easy to obtain.
And on your comments about the business relationships: it would be one thing for Microsoft to have paid some lab to do the test. It's quite another when MicroSoft and the Lab's parent company are so deeply in bed together that the benefit of the doubt disappears completely.
I only skimmed the "benchmark" document, but I immediately saw a couple of fundamental flaws in their methods.
o nb ridge_microsoft.asp
_ 02 -06-27.asp?visitor=X
3 16 1
2 80 1
First, they said they conducted each test twice to ensure the "repeatability" and "accuracy." First of all, running a test only twice in no way gives you enough data to claim accuracy. Second of all, "repeatability" is meaningless in terms of determining statistically significant results. The terms you want to claim are *reliability* and *validity*, not accuracy and repeatability.
Simply averaging the results of two tests is idiotic in terms of sound scientific methods. That's the kind of testing I would expect from a grade school chemistry experiment, not an expensive "commissioned" test of a real-life installed system of this kind of complexity.
The other thing they said, which directly contradicts what they said in the main highlights in the beginning of the report, is that "Our investigation showed that, with some minor tweaks, the default configuration values set for SAMBA generated the best overall performance in our configuration." I'm not sure if this means just their linux configuration, or if they tuned linux and discovered that it was faster and just published the slower non-tweaked numbers.
Here are some interesting URLs that help to reveal the obvious conflict of interest here:
http://www.etestinglabs.com/about/news/press/li
http://www.etestinglabs.com/about/news/press/pr
These two show how LionBridge, the parent company of VeriTest, has a long-standing and EXTREMELY lucrative contract with MicroSoft.
http://boston.internet.com/news/article.php/137
http://boston.internet.com/news/article.php/148
Here's some more interesting info:
Fidelity Management and Research Co. is Microsoft's top institutional shareholder, and is LionBridge's 6th largest institutional shareholder.
Barclays Global Investors Int'l is #2 for Microsoft and #9 for LionBridge.
Morgan Stanley Investment Mgmt is #13 for Microsoft and #3 for LionBridge.
State Street is #3 for MicroSoft, #8 for LionBridge.
So, the top 3 institutional shareholders of Microsoft own a very significant chunk of LionBridge, which shows lots of common interest between the two.
I could probably go on, but this should be enough..
Yeah, especially because water reflects ultraviolet so well - you can cook your eyes even while looking down :)
Also, partial solar eclipses often follow or predate lunar eclipses by 14 days. Chances are that, if there's a lunar eclipse coming, there could very well be a partial solar eclipse two weeks before or after...
I'm an engineer, and I constantly get calls from people with thick, usually Jamaican-sounding, accents, asking to "verify" my information for a free subscription that I supposedly asked for.
I immediately ask them "Who are you calling?" (because I don't answer the phone with my name) and they are never able to tell me. Unfortunately, they do not have to maintain a do-not-call list because they are not required to. They can call me right back after I hang up on them if they want to.
I can always hear hundreds of voices in the background, because these are telemarketing sweatshops. These people probably get paid in food or something like that, to annoy the crap out of people.
Last week was pitiful. The phones rang around my office for days on end. After conducting a brief non-scientific survey, I found out that the engineers I work with, on average, received 4 "magazine calls" per day last week. Adjusting that number for exaggeration gives at least twice per day.
The saddest thing is that it's cheaper to call the U.S. from some third world country than it is to call across the river from here to New Jersey.
If the courts have any intelligence whatsoever (and I know this might just be wishful thinking), they'll realize that SBC failed in its responsibilities to protect their own patent. In short, they waited too long to have any enforceable rights under the patents. One of the requirements of owning a patent is that you promptly and vigorously act to protect your rights. If you wait, you lose your patent rights. This is to prevent companies like SBC from waiting until there are lots of high-profile infringers and THEN suing.
The purpose of a patent is so that you can protect your invention from copycats, therefore protecting your revenue stream from YOUR OWN USE of the technology. If you do not even use the technology in your own patent, then your patent is even less enforceable because it shows that your motives behind the patent are to stifle innovation - which directly contradicts the entire purpose of the patent system.
For example - say SBC patents frames, but then they do not use that technology nor do they actively offer the technology for sale. They just somehow work their technology into the standard and then sit on it. They don't tell anybody they own patents on it, and since it's part of the standard, people are given the impression that there are no licenses required. After all, it's an adopted public standard. 10 Years later, they get slapped with a lawsuit for $10M for infringing a patent that they didn't know existed, for using an ancient technology that not only isn't widely used anymore, but is downright UGLY to look at, and they don't have a clue what the hell is going on until after their lawyer settles for $1.5M and a perpetual $100K/yr license to use the obsolete technology.
This is the kind of thing that the patent office needs to form an enforcement body for - to prevent these kinds of things from happening.
Do you now? Well then under the Homeland Security Act, you're a terrorist.
Recall that part of the Homeland Security Act makes having an open AP a terrorist act if it is actually used by someone to aid, comfort, or assist a terrorist organization. Osama binLaden connects through your AP and sends an email, and you're going to prison for the rest of your life (while he roams free, mind you)...
"There are no copyright issues for me to go into a gallery and make a sketch of a rembrandt picture,"
:)
That's because the Copyright holder of the Rembrandt is dead...
Usually, homeowners associations cannot regulate the activities inside the confines of your home. They can only regulate the physical appearance and external upkeep.
Zoning restrictions may prevent you from doing things like having employees at your home, keeping inventory of any kind, and other things like daily or even weekly shipping pickup. Zoning laws, however, also usually cannot regulate the activities going on inside your home.
If worse comes to worst, get a co-lo and do your development over your DSL. You'd technically be working from home, with your "employer" being at the address of the co-lo facility. Bam, they can't touch you.
Well, the whole point of a layered networking model is that no one layer cares about any other layer. In reality, TCP doesn't care whether it's running over IP any more than IP cares whether TCP is running on top of it. You can have TCP running over any Network layer protocol, just like you can have any Network layer protocol running on top of any Data Link layer... and so on and so forth. Some other popular abstractions are Netbios/IP, UDP/IP, and just about anything over IPX (legacy games, notably), and a few others.
Let's dissect your average internet packet, say, an HTTP request. HTTP is the application layer, and has its own protocol (say, HTTP 1.0)... this application uses Port 80 as its "address" on the envelope (headers). The application uses TCP as its transport method because it needs a connection-oriented, acknowledged service, so TCP is the Transport Layer. The global network is addressed using IP addresses, so Internet Protocol is the Network Layer. However, the network could be addressed just about any other way and the application would have no idea. Finally, you have your Data Link Layer (ethernet driver with MAC address), and the physical layer, say, UTP.
There are any number of things happening at any given time and on any given layer, just to get packets where they're going. You have constant Layer-2 (DLL) activity going on inside switches and routers, as well as your ethernet driver (ARP). Likewise, routing (OSPF,BGP) is done at Layer 3 (Network Layer) based on IP address. None of these care what type of connection (or non-connection in the case of UDP) is happening, or what application is using them...
So, everything is independent.
The article kept talking about "trustworthy" email, which means to me that MicroSoft will somehow have to see it before it's considered "trustworthy..."
No, thanks...
Any time the word "trustworthy" pops up, I immediately feel as if it is someone trying to violate my trust, my privact, and my right to be left the hell alone...
Well, I thought TCP/IP only describes two layers of the 5-layer model - the transport and network layers. The application layer is a layer at which any abstract protocol can be used based on the application - which is what made me think of it.
Flipping open the Bible (Tannenbaum), I see the seven layer model. The 5-layer model I was thinking of is Tannenbaum's hybrid reference model, and is almost identical to Netware.
Tannenbaum has some interesting political insights about why things happened the way they did. Now that I've re-read chap 1, it makes a bit more sense...
This patent is still bullshit...
His patent describes the application layer of the OSI network model (presentation layer, too, in the old 7-layer version)...
Doesn't the OSI model predate all of his patents?
... to add 3 address bits to the Memory bus. wow, that must have been hard...
When sales slump a little more, and their market research indicates people want more RAM, maybe they'll add another address bit.
When are people going to realize that technological innovation ISN'T. Intellectual Property law has completely ended innovation. All we can do is expand, complicate, and repackage, the same damn IP that we invented 10 years ago because we're not allowed to innovate anymore. Even if we could, it wouldn't be worth it because we'd just get sued by some jackass that thinks he invented it first and the lawyers would bleed us dry..
Since when does the government bureaucracy have the goal of benefitting society?
Anyway, I've sent in dozens of rebates and have received every stinkin' one of them. I've never had to call, complain, write, pray, or do the rebate dance.... Some of my rebates include:
Compaq Laptop ($100HPQ + $200 Best Buy)
Toshiba Laptop ($200)
Philips Monitor ($50)
Kodak Film ($36 sams club)
Energizer Batteries ($10)
SMC Networking Stuff (about $200 over the years)
Sprint PCS ($100)
and probably a couple of dozen in the $10 range from various items...
You just have to be patient and fill the forms out EXACTLY as they want you to, which means actually reading the instructions and following them to the letter. There is no room for interpretation in these things. Most people don't get rebates because they decide that they can simply make up new rules that are easier to follow. If you follow the instructions, federal law is on your side, and the rebate companies know it. If you fill out the form incorrectly, they a) know you're too stupid to follow instructions and b) can probably assume you're ignorant of your rights under federal law regarding rebates so c) they can ignore you.
And I clicked on this story link because I thought it was about corporate accounting... darn...
"Method and apparatus for the protection of methods, procedures, systems, and apparatuses by grant of exclusive rights by a governing body having executive authority over such rights" (Grant of Patent)
"Method and procedure for the dismantling of civilized society by exclusive diversion with legistative processes" (making people so busy defending themselves against lawsuits to do anything productive)
"Method and apparatus for the production of intellectual property and information by means of the exercise of a passive or active electromechanical or electronic relay or switch causing the dissipation of energy in various ceramic, plastic, semiconductor, or organic elements, causing the semi-permanent organization of atomic or subatomic particles on a dielectric, metallic, organic, semiconductor, ceramic, or plasticine substrate, also causing the luminescence of phosphorescent or electronic optoelectrical or optoelectronic elements." (use of computer)
Tax free? Compensatory damages are tax free. However, punitive damages are not. I believe that damages awarded under the TCPA are classified as punitive, considering the compensatory portion, the actual cost of a page of paper and the ink on it, is like 3 cents (or $54.95 if you have an HP inkjet).
That, and the fact that lawyers are generally not allowed in small claims court (unless one of the litigants just happens to BE a lawyer, but "Sears & Roebuck" is not a lawyer).