"Return of the Jedi was released five months after I was born...One of the most touching moments in the original trilogy was a scene where one Ewok is killed by an imperial laser blast, and another leans down beside him, prodding him, clearly not realising his friend is dead...."
I was 14 when RoTJ was released. Most of the theater was visibly (and audibly) touched by the death of the Ewok. There were a lot of sniffles, and a lot of awwws. If Jar Jar had traded places with the dead Ewok, there would have been a lot of laughs, cheers, and high fives instead.
Jar-Jar was the sole reason that TPM sucked sooooooo bad. If that piece of drunken idiocy had never made it into the movies, then I would have liked TPM a lot (except for the excessively tiresome pod race, which should have been half its length). Attack of The Clones, aside from having a B-movie title, was enjoyable. Revenge of The Sith was on par with A New Hope.
The Empire Strikes Back owns them all.
Re:speaking of proprietary
on
Open Source Math
·
· Score: 3, Informative
"While it was typeset with TeX (open), only the PDF (closed and uneditable) is provided."
PDF is neither closed nor uneditable. Adobe publishes the complete PDF format for anyone to use free of charge. It may not be FSF Free (since Adobe requires that implementers adhere to certain rules that violate the principle of Free), but it's definitely not closed. Also, KWord will import it for further editing, text and images, so it's not uneditable (even if it's not ideal).
I agree with your main point, but let's cut PDF some slack.
And how long do you think it will be before spammers find ways to piggyback their crap on IM networks via Windows vulnerabilities, using friends lists to bypass false-negatives? I give it three...two...one....
"So basically this looks like a classic noob blunder. Just because there is "automatic" garbage collection doesn't mean that you can turn your brain off."
Having programmed in C, C++, and Java for several years each (and many other languages, but these are the three most relevant ones), I've concluded that the last major improvement in general memory management that solved more problems than it caused was the move from malloc()/free() to new/delete. Actually, Qt's auto-deletion of objects via parent/child relationships is a close second. Garbage collection seemed nice in theory, but it was just a lateral move from new/delete with a slight backwards motion.
The complicated overhead needed to implement garbage collection systems eliminates all of the theoretical benefits it is supposed to provide. It not only has diminishing returns over explicit memory management via new/delete, it has negative returns in the false sense of security it gives to programmers. It doesn't cause bad programming practices, but it certainly encourages them. It also allows for the exact same problems it was supposed to solve, with the only difference being how it arrives there.
"Carmack's code is always interesting. Most famously, there's the infamous square root approximation from Quake."
That is indeed impressive code, but John claims he didn't write it. In fact, nobody at id has claimed authorship of it. It was speculated that perhaps Michael Abrash wrote it, but he denies authorship as well. My speculation is that it was a cool snippet of code floating around the public domain, and somebody at id had the good judgment to realize that it was significantly faster than the standard library sqrt().
"Win 2K is a very legacy product and its crypto functionality is very limited compared to 2K3 and Vista."
I'm usually rather willing to accept sincere sounding apologies if they're wrapped with enough market speak and technobabble, but I'm just not buying this. I still remember the years of NT4, when Microsoft was trumpeting how well written it was, how secure it was, and how it was just the best...thing...ever. Of course empirical experience showed that NT4 and Windows 2000 (which was the next shallow iteration of NT) showed that it still had the same severe problems that have always plagued Windows, but Microsoft trumpeted the greatness of NTx despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Then XP came around, and Microsoft really needed people to ditch NT4 and Windows 2000 in favor of XP. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, Monkey Boy starts bad-mouthing NT4 as a steaming pile of unfixable crap, and started with the additional pile of steaming crap that XP was the best...thing...ever. People seem to overlook the obvious implication of that: Microsoft implicitly admitted it was lying about NT4 during its heyday.
With Microsoft's history of telling any lie that will drive sales, and its complete disregard for security, who on this planet is stupid enough to believe anything coming out of Redmond now? Microsoft is the quintessential boy crying "wolf" from every hillside. It's really not a matter of whether Microsoft is competent to fix the problem, but rather it's mostly a matter of trust.
"I have never worked for Microsoft and to be honest, I'd probably never want to."
When I was nearing university graduation in 1999, and my school was preparing the the annual job fair, I got a call from the Microsoft contingent offering to set up a programmer interview at the fair. I told the caller that Microsoft's business practices were so unacceptable that I would never be able to ethically work for them.
I graduated, got a shitty temp-to-hire corporate programming job for six months, quit, went unemployed for a year, then found the local government programming job I still hold today. I'm sure I make substantially less than if I had taken the Microsoft job (or any number of other out of state, corporate job offers I'd gotten), but I'm much happier where I'm at now than I would have been at Microsoft. I don't have to sacrifice my sense of ethics and morality at my job.
As an added bonus, I was responsible for getting rid of a number of Windows "servers" and replacing them with real servers running Linux. I also managed to change the entire job culture from "Windows-only" over to "Windows on the desktop, mostly Linux on the server". That's not bad at all considering how thoroughly Windows-entrenched the place was when I first got here. I even got formerly Linux-hostile employees to love Linux and hate Windows, and that was merely by showing them Linux's strengths and weaknesses (the strengths far outweigh the weaknesses).
Attitudes are slowly changing for the better, and Microsoft is being further forced onto the defensive as time goes by.
"Yahoo! China has to follow the laws of that country, just as we expect Yahoo! U.S. to do so."
This seems quite simple to me: if a foreign company can't simultaneously abide by both its native country's laws and its host country's laws, then it should not be allowed to conduct business in the foreign country. Obviously our government is far too corrupt to enforce this.
"He stops short of describing how Auntie arrives at these two widely different sets of numbers and how their initial estimate is two orders of magnitude out."
Simple. He invented the first set of numbers on the spot, and then had someone actually look at the logs to come up with the second set of numbers. It really wouldn't surprise me if the numbers he gave are still lower than reality.
Still, the actual numbers are a red herring. There is no extra expense with using 100% cross-platform, Free media formats which covers everyone in one fell swoop. This whole bucket of horse shit about catering to the majority needs to stop when it's just as easy (and less costly to boot!) to cater to everyone by using Free formats.
"If they started implementing this, I would probably just have to stop buying music altogether."
I started doing this about ten years ago. If you decide to take this route, you'll discover the same thing I did: you're not missing anything. For any given musical style, there is a VERY small subset of originality which gets exhausted after just a few songs.* From that point on, it's all just minor variations on the same old themes.
* Yes, I know that mathematically music has much more range than I'm stating. However, the range that is marketable/marketed is a tiny, insignificant fraction of that total range. Also, like the range of octaves on a piano, most of that range is painful to listen to for any significant length of time.
"Google needs to be shut down for 'facilitation of copyright infringement on the internet', or even 'facilitation of terrorism on the internet'."
IANAL, etc.
You're missing a key point. The DeCSS case decision in the U.S. held that knowingly linking to infringing material was a copyright violation in and of itself. The sheer vastness of Google's links is probably what protects it from prosecution. If Google is informed by a copyright holder of an infringing link, then Google may have to no longer link to any part of the site that hosts the infringing material since Google now knows about the infringement. YouTube is in the same situation. It has significant non-infringing uses, so it is not illegal per-se. When it receives notices of infringement, the infringing material must be removed or Google opens itself up to massive lawsuits.
This guy operated a site which has the sole purpose of knowingly linking to scads of infringing material, and has no significant non-infringing uses.
Radar detectors have legitimate uses that don't involve evading the police while breaking speed laws, so they are legal to manufacture and sell as long as they are not advertised to evade the police while breaking speed laws. It's probably still illegal to have one in your car, but that's a different issue entirely.
I viewed the PDF showing the font differences, and I saw no reason at all to change. The new fonts are no better and no worse than the old fonts. They're just different, apparently for no other purpose than to be different.
"And KOffice can open PDFs for editing. Awesome. Sure, the layout rendering is not always exact, but it does a tremendous job of converting the PDF to paragraphs, with the occasional embedded images."
I just tried it using KWord 1.6, with mixed results. The PDF did indeed get imported as text, but the layout was very bad. The title image contained in the PDF was inverted on the X axis, the font was way too big and of the wrong family, causing the text alignment to be non-existent. The "Select All" function only selects everything in the current frame, with no apparent way to select all text in all frames. There are several other usability problems along these lines, which I'll skip here.
That said, KOffice has made amazing progress this year alone. It's even more amazing when you consider the very small developer base working on this office suite. Even with the significant layout problems I saw converting the PDF for editing, it can convert PDF files to be editable! Those guys seriously rock.
I graduated from high school in 1987, but I'm finding that the problems back then are still the problems of today. There are a near infinite number of problems facing the public school system, and I obviously can't hope to cover even a fraction of them, but here is one that has always stuck out:
There is a bigger problem in what is taught rather than how it's taught. I was forced to spend four years of high school enduring social studies, physical education, and arts when my interests were in science and technology. It doesn't matter what gadgets are used to teach a class if the subject sucks. Most of my time in high school was spent not doing my social studies homework, turning in unintelligible globs of kiln-fired clay, and not sinking "nothing but net" game-winning dazzlers. Instead, I was teaching myself assembler, learning how microprocessors executed code, and how various computer technologies operated at as low a level as my resources allowed (which was strikingly limited since my learning environment was very hostile to learning outside the box).
Sure kids have a bagful of technologies, but do many of them know how those gadgets work under the hood? I will hazard a guess that less than one tenth of one percent (at the most) of technology-using kids are anything but technology users. So yeah, teachers are correct in telling them to leave that shit at home. Bringing them to school serves no useful purpose in the classroom. Maybe if the iPods allowed the teacher to wirelessly transmit lecture notes to them, or if kids used them to record the lessons, then they would have some purpose. But we all know that the kids are going to use them solely to tune out of the lecture rather than to get more our of it. And who can blame them? If any school curriculum resembles the one I had at Radford in the mid-80's, it should be shut down as a Geneva Convention violation against torture.
"...didnt some tests show that as long as the first and last letter of the word was in the right place, the other letters could be all over the place and not affect readability?"
The tests showed that the words were still intelligible. Readability suffered greatly, but the words were not incomprehensible.
I don't remember when (or how) I first came upon Slashdot, but it was in the early years. I used it for a long time before registering for an account, simply to rebel against what was then deemed to be an unacceptable invasion of privacy (I was quite paranoid back then). If I had known how horny the hot chicks got over low Slashdot IDs, I would have registered far earlier -sigh-.
"Once you spend the time (say a day or two) it's really quick and productive."
You made a typo, so I'm going to politely fix it for you. I think this is what you meant to say:
"Once you spend the time (say a year or two) it's really quick and productive."
If you have all of Blender's enormous number of key combinations memorized, then it is indeed very quick to get around. I started learning to model over a year ago by using Blender, and it's been a love-hate relationship from the beginning. I love that Blender is so powerful and that it's Free (and free), but I absolutely hate that it's so incredibly hostile to new users. Once I learn each required mental and manual contortion, I am glad that it is keyboard driven. But getting to that point is a HUGE time sink, during which I am cursing Blender's lack of a non-shitty visual interface.
So yes, once you've invested an enormous amount of time memorizing Blender's harsh and obscure keyboard command structure, getting around in it is very fast. But like vi and emacs, it's appeal is limited to a relatively tiny segment of its potential audience. If I had a rich uncle who would buy me any modeling program I wanted, Blender's interface would put it at or near the bottom of the list regardless of how powerful it is otherwise. Since I
"3. Most briefs that are submitted cite plenty of non-binding (emphasis mine) judicial authorities, and even where they are citing binding higher authority, it is usually based on vastly different sets of facts."
With all of that being true (IANAL, unlike yourself, so I won't counter-argue), that is why I consider them to not count for much. The non-binding decisions are a gamble for citation, whereas a binding precedent is something that can be relied upon. I would consider this court decision to be a fallback position to be used only if "real" precedents fail (whatever they may be), where I would then appeal. While I realize I was casting a wide net with my first post, the uncertainty involved with non-binding decisions at this court level makes them second or third string arguments in other courts.
This devices causes what's known as a positive feedback loop: you're going poorly in your game, so you get stressed. The device detects this and degrades performance, which makes you even more stressed. Repeat until your frustration approaches infinity and your game performance reaches negative infinity.
Lower court decisions, such as this one, do not set precendents in any court other than their own. If the RIAA were to bring another similar case before this particular court, then this decision could be used to argue attorney fees against the RIAA. No other court is required to consider this result in its own decision.
If the decision is appealed and upheld, then a precendent has been set for the circuit in which it was appealed. All lower courts within that one circuit would be required to apply the appeals court's decision in all subsequent similar cases.
Slashdot Mirror
"Return of the Jedi was released five months after I was born...One of the most touching moments in the original trilogy was a scene where one Ewok is killed by an imperial laser blast, and another leans down beside him, prodding him, clearly not realising his friend is dead...."
I was 14 when RoTJ was released. Most of the theater was visibly (and audibly) touched by the death of the Ewok. There were a lot of sniffles, and a lot of awwws. If Jar Jar had traded places with the dead Ewok, there would have been a lot of laughs, cheers, and high fives instead.
Jar-Jar was the sole reason that TPM sucked sooooooo bad. If that piece of drunken idiocy had never made it into the movies, then I would have liked TPM a lot (except for the excessively tiresome pod race, which should have been half its length). Attack of The Clones, aside from having a B-movie title, was enjoyable. Revenge of The Sith was on par with A New Hope.
The Empire Strikes Back owns them all.
"While it was typeset with TeX (open), only the PDF (closed and uneditable) is provided."
PDF is neither closed nor uneditable. Adobe publishes the complete PDF format for anyone to use free of charge. It may not be FSF Free (since Adobe requires that implementers adhere to certain rules that violate the principle of Free), but it's definitely not closed. Also, KWord will import it for further editing, text and images, so it's not uneditable (even if it's not ideal).
I agree with your main point, but let's cut PDF some slack.
And how long do you think it will be before spammers find ways to piggyback their crap on IM networks via Windows vulnerabilities, using friends lists to bypass false-negatives? I give it three...two...one....
"So basically this looks like a classic noob blunder. Just because there is "automatic" garbage collection doesn't mean that you can turn your brain off."
Having programmed in C, C++, and Java for several years each (and many other languages, but these are the three most relevant ones), I've concluded that the last major improvement in general memory management that solved more problems than it caused was the move from malloc()/free() to new/delete. Actually, Qt's auto-deletion of objects via parent/child relationships is a close second. Garbage collection seemed nice in theory, but it was just a lateral move from new/delete with a slight backwards motion.
The complicated overhead needed to implement garbage collection systems eliminates all of the theoretical benefits it is supposed to provide. It not only has diminishing returns over explicit memory management via new/delete, it has negative returns in the false sense of security it gives to programmers. It doesn't cause bad programming practices, but it certainly encourages them. It also allows for the exact same problems it was supposed to solve, with the only difference being how it arrives there.
"Carmack's code is always interesting. Most famously, there's the infamous square root approximation from Quake."
That is indeed impressive code, but John claims he didn't write it. In fact, nobody at id has claimed authorship of it. It was speculated that perhaps Michael Abrash wrote it, but he denies authorship as well. My speculation is that it was a cool snippet of code floating around the public domain, and somebody at id had the good judgment to realize that it was significantly faster than the standard library sqrt().
Allow me to translate:
"Don't worry about this because if you're running Windows, you're already screwed."
"Win 2K is a very legacy product and its crypto functionality is very limited compared to 2K3 and Vista."
I'm usually rather willing to accept sincere sounding apologies if they're wrapped with enough market speak and technobabble, but I'm just not buying this. I still remember the years of NT4, when Microsoft was trumpeting how well written it was, how secure it was, and how it was just the best...thing...ever. Of course empirical experience showed that NT4 and Windows 2000 (which was the next shallow iteration of NT) showed that it still had the same severe problems that have always plagued Windows, but Microsoft trumpeted the greatness of NTx despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Then XP came around, and Microsoft really needed people to ditch NT4 and Windows 2000 in favor of XP. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, Monkey Boy starts bad-mouthing NT4 as a steaming pile of unfixable crap, and started with the additional pile of steaming crap that XP was the best...thing...ever. People seem to overlook the obvious implication of that: Microsoft implicitly admitted it was lying about NT4 during its heyday.
With Microsoft's history of telling any lie that will drive sales, and its complete disregard for security, who on this planet is stupid enough to believe anything coming out of Redmond now? Microsoft is the quintessential boy crying "wolf" from every hillside. It's really not a matter of whether Microsoft is competent to fix the problem, but rather it's mostly a matter of trust.
"8. You can throw a rock in urban cities and hit 3 starbuck locations."
That's a good thing?
I propose replacing number 8 with this:
8. Canadian women are hot (at least the ones who have profiles on plentyoffish.com).
"I have never worked for Microsoft and to be honest, I'd probably never want to."
When I was nearing university graduation in 1999, and my school was preparing the the annual job fair, I got a call from the Microsoft contingent offering to set up a programmer interview at the fair. I told the caller that Microsoft's business practices were so unacceptable that I would never be able to ethically work for them.
I graduated, got a shitty temp-to-hire corporate programming job for six months, quit, went unemployed for a year, then found the local government programming job I still hold today. I'm sure I make substantially less than if I had taken the Microsoft job (or any number of other out of state, corporate job offers I'd gotten), but I'm much happier where I'm at now than I would have been at Microsoft. I don't have to sacrifice my sense of ethics and morality at my job.
As an added bonus, I was responsible for getting rid of a number of Windows "servers" and replacing them with real servers running Linux. I also managed to change the entire job culture from "Windows-only" over to "Windows on the desktop, mostly Linux on the server". That's not bad at all considering how thoroughly Windows-entrenched the place was when I first got here. I even got formerly Linux-hostile employees to love Linux and hate Windows, and that was merely by showing them Linux's strengths and weaknesses (the strengths far outweigh the weaknesses).
Attitudes are slowly changing for the better, and Microsoft is being further forced onto the defensive as time goes by.
"Says here 'Scott was charged with the distribution of Microsoft products among employees.'"
Man, I'm going to let my boss know about this. If not even Microsoft wants to use Microsoft products at work, then the rest of should get a clue.
"Yahoo! China has to follow the laws of that country, just as we expect Yahoo! U.S. to do so."
This seems quite simple to me: if a foreign company can't simultaneously abide by both its native country's laws and its host country's laws, then it should not be allowed to conduct business in the foreign country. Obviously our government is far too corrupt to enforce this.
"He stops short of describing how Auntie arrives at these two widely different sets of numbers and how their initial estimate is two orders of magnitude out."
Simple. He invented the first set of numbers on the spot, and then had someone actually look at the logs to come up with the second set of numbers. It really wouldn't surprise me if the numbers he gave are still lower than reality.
Still, the actual numbers are a red herring. There is no extra expense with using 100% cross-platform, Free media formats which covers everyone in one fell swoop. This whole bucket of horse shit about catering to the majority needs to stop when it's just as easy (and less costly to boot!) to cater to everyone by using Free formats.
"All I ask is that your next mail to me doesn't have WTF? as the subject."
Do you not realize what you've just invited half of Slashdot to do?
"If they started implementing this, I would probably just have to stop buying music altogether."
I started doing this about ten years ago. If you decide to take this route, you'll discover the same thing I did: you're not missing anything. For any given musical style, there is a VERY small subset of originality which gets exhausted after just a few songs.* From that point on, it's all just minor variations on the same old themes.
* Yes, I know that mathematically music has much more range than I'm stating. However, the range that is marketable/marketed is a tiny, insignificant fraction of that total range. Also, like the range of octaves on a piano, most of that range is painful to listen to for any significant length of time.
"Google needs to be shut down for 'facilitation of copyright infringement on the internet', or even 'facilitation of terrorism on the internet'."
IANAL, etc.
You're missing a key point. The DeCSS case decision in the U.S. held that knowingly linking to infringing material was a copyright violation in and of itself. The sheer vastness of Google's links is probably what protects it from prosecution. If Google is informed by a copyright holder of an infringing link, then Google may have to no longer link to any part of the site that hosts the infringing material since Google now knows about the infringement. YouTube is in the same situation. It has significant non-infringing uses, so it is not illegal per-se. When it receives notices of infringement, the infringing material must be removed or Google opens itself up to massive lawsuits.
This guy operated a site which has the sole purpose of knowingly linking to scads of infringing material, and has no significant non-infringing uses.
Radar detectors have legitimate uses that don't involve evading the police while breaking speed laws, so they are legal to manufacture and sell as long as they are not advertised to evade the police while breaking speed laws. It's probably still illegal to have one in your car, but that's a different issue entirely.
I viewed the PDF showing the font differences, and I saw no reason at all to change. The new fonts are no better and no worse than the old fonts. They're just different, apparently for no other purpose than to be different.
"And KOffice can open PDFs for editing. Awesome. Sure, the layout rendering is not always exact, but it does a tremendous job of converting the PDF to paragraphs, with the occasional embedded images."
I just tried it using KWord 1.6, with mixed results. The PDF did indeed get imported as text, but the layout was very bad. The title image contained in the PDF was inverted on the X axis, the font was way too big and of the wrong family, causing the text alignment to be non-existent. The "Select All" function only selects everything in the current frame, with no apparent way to select all text in all frames. There are several other usability problems along these lines, which I'll skip here.
That said, KOffice has made amazing progress this year alone. It's even more amazing when you consider the very small developer base working on this office suite. Even with the significant layout problems I saw converting the PDF for editing, it can convert PDF files to be editable! Those guys seriously rock.
I graduated from high school in 1987, but I'm finding that the problems back then are still the problems of today. There are a near infinite number of problems facing the public school system, and I obviously can't hope to cover even a fraction of them, but here is one that has always stuck out:
There is a bigger problem in what is taught rather than how it's taught. I was forced to spend four years of high school enduring social studies, physical education, and arts when my interests were in science and technology. It doesn't matter what gadgets are used to teach a class if the subject sucks. Most of my time in high school was spent not doing my social studies homework, turning in unintelligible globs of kiln-fired clay, and not sinking "nothing but net" game-winning dazzlers. Instead, I was teaching myself assembler, learning how microprocessors executed code, and how various computer technologies operated at as low a level as my resources allowed (which was strikingly limited since my learning environment was very hostile to learning outside the box).
Sure kids have a bagful of technologies, but do many of them know how those gadgets work under the hood? I will hazard a guess that less than one tenth of one percent (at the most) of technology-using kids are anything but technology users. So yeah, teachers are correct in telling them to leave that shit at home. Bringing them to school serves no useful purpose in the classroom. Maybe if the iPods allowed the teacher to wirelessly transmit lecture notes to them, or if kids used them to record the lessons, then they would have some purpose. But we all know that the kids are going to use them solely to tune out of the lecture rather than to get more our of it. And who can blame them? If any school curriculum resembles the one I had at Radford in the mid-80's, it should be shut down as a Geneva Convention violation against torture.
"...didnt some tests show that as long as the first and last letter of the word was in the right place, the other letters could be all over the place and not affect readability?"
The tests showed that the words were still intelligible. Readability suffered greatly, but the words were not incomprehensible.
I don't remember when (or how) I first came upon Slashdot, but it was in the early years. I used it for a long time before registering for an account, simply to rebel against what was then deemed to be an unacceptable invasion of privacy (I was quite paranoid back then). If I had known how horny the hot chicks got over low Slashdot IDs, I would have registered far earlier -sigh-.
"Once you spend the time (say a day or two) it's really quick and productive."
You made a typo, so I'm going to politely fix it for you. I think this is what you meant to say:
"Once you spend the time (say a year or two) it's really quick and productive."
If you have all of Blender's enormous number of key combinations memorized, then it is indeed very quick to get around. I started learning to model over a year ago by using Blender, and it's been a love-hate relationship from the beginning. I love that Blender is so powerful and that it's Free (and free), but I absolutely hate that it's so incredibly hostile to new users. Once I learn each required mental and manual contortion, I am glad that it is keyboard driven. But getting to that point is a HUGE time sink, during which I am cursing Blender's lack of a non-shitty visual interface.
So yes, once you've invested an enormous amount of time memorizing Blender's harsh and obscure keyboard command structure, getting around in it is very fast. But like vi and emacs, it's appeal is limited to a relatively tiny segment of its potential audience. If I had a rich uncle who would buy me any modeling program I wanted, Blender's interface would put it at or near the bottom of the list regardless of how powerful it is otherwise. Since I
"What with the hundreds of pounds of plutonium atomized into the atmosphere in the 40's & 50's"
Male pattern baldness.
"3. Most briefs that are submitted cite plenty of non-binding (emphasis mine) judicial authorities, and even where they are citing binding higher authority, it is usually based on vastly different sets of facts."
With all of that being true (IANAL, unlike yourself, so I won't counter-argue), that is why I consider them to not count for much. The non-binding decisions are a gamble for citation, whereas a binding precedent is something that can be relied upon. I would consider this court decision to be a fallback position to be used only if "real" precedents fail (whatever they may be), where I would then appeal. While I realize I was casting a wide net with my first post, the uncertainty involved with non-binding decisions at this court level makes them second or third string arguments in other courts.
This devices causes what's known as a positive feedback loop: you're going poorly in your game, so you get stressed. The device detects this and degrades performance, which makes you even more stressed. Repeat until your frustration approaches infinity and your game performance reaches negative infinity.
Lower court decisions, such as this one, do not set precendents in any court other than their own. If the RIAA were to bring another similar case before this particular court, then this decision could be used to argue attorney fees against the RIAA. No other court is required to consider this result in its own decision.
If the decision is appealed and upheld, then a precendent has been set for the circuit in which it was appealed. All lower courts within that one circuit would be required to apply the appeals court's decision in all subsequent similar cases.
See this article for details.