It's like Margaritaville. Somebody once asked Jimmy Buffett where the hell Margaritaville was & he said, "It's wherever you want it to be."
Some folks say DHTML is JavaScript-enhanced HTML. Others like to throw in a pinch of Perl or PHP with their JavaScript & cook it up like gumbo. Some add a smidgen of Flash while they're at it. And then they complain because nobody's browser will run it.
DOM detection is such a P.I.T.A. (and I don't mean middle eastern bread;-)
Sure can. You redefine the variable i. Departing radically from/. convention, I actually pasted your code into my trusty text editor to see if there was some cool trick that I didn't notice just reading it & found that it behaved exactly as I expected:
myfunc1() passes 0 (zero) to myfunc2() on the first iteration of the myfunc1 loop.
myfunc2() then increments i stepwise to 14 whereupon it returns to myfunc1() & ends because 14 > 10.
In fact, this same code (with slight syntax changes) produces the same result in Perl unless 'i' is localized in each function & the value passed to myfunc2 is handled as @_. I'm pretty certain the result would also be the same in C, but here I bow to laziness &/. norms. In fact, I would regard a different outcome as a "problem".:-D
Are you trying to illustrate the sloppy code that happens because JavaScript is easy & free & a bunch of folks with no concept of good coding practice can just kludge away? Or is there something more substantive to the example?
Assuming that the overarching goal of computer (and software) design is to emulate the human brain -- or even the brain of a flatworm -- hardware is going to have to break free of the confines of binary true-false logic, tight tolerances, etc., and embrace variation.
Since physical science (and by extrapolation, engineering) is built on a "reductionist" paradigm where every problem is broken to its simplest components & solved piecemeal at that level, it makes sense for a "probabilistic" approach to chip design to happen some time. Might as well be now.
But when we operate under the reductionist model, we forget emergent properties at the system level. In developing a "learning" system -- which again, I assume to be the overarching goal -- we have to learn to deal with variation. Situations are almost never exactly the same. In the beginning of a "learning" system, things probably (pun intended) do look random. But as special cases, exceptions, subtle cues, etc. are encountered by the system & incorporated into the decision-making process, things appear to become increasingly deterministic.
So, if a "probabilistic" chip design is implemented properly, it likely will look pretty "deterministic" to the end-user, who expects certain kinds of results.
The problem now is that the hardware is "deterministic" & any attempt to create a "probabilistic" learning system has to happen in software. Right now, the limit to AI, IMO, is simply that chips aren't even in the same league with neurons. "Learning" software built on "learning" hardware ought to be a pretty powerful concept.
Of course, this may just be a way to get around the fact that manufacturing may be pushing the limits for tight tolerances & probabilistic chip design is the only out. Whatever it takes to force a paradigm shift.
"Most places a paradigms won't buy you a cup of coffee..."
The way to fix this is legislative anyway. We need to go grassroots and make candidates on EITHER SIDE OF THE AISLE understand this issue.
And the quickest way to make a candidate understand the issue is to explain that YOU and a significant number of like-minded people will not vote for him if he doesn't get with the program! And salesgeek is right: party affiliation has nothing to do with it -- find a candidate who "thinks the way you do" and vote for him. If you can't find a candidate who thinks the way you do, educate one or become a candidate yourself!
** tries to image county board of supervisors made up of geeks:-D **
Undergraduate degrees are meaningless now-a-days, so you might as well spend as little as possible getting one. Going to a community college for the first 2 years to get the basics out of the way is a good start.
Spot on!
Another point is that the majority of community college faculty are actually interested in teaching students. Most university faculty, particularly those at the "prestigious" institutions, have absolutely no interest in teaching. They want to do research. Odds are that the undergrad classes at those top universities are being taught by graduate assistants anyway.
I've worked as an institutional research administrator for a couple of community colleges, and I've found that when community college students transfer to universities, they perform as well as or better than students who started as freshmen at the universities.
On the tuition side of things, attending a community college translates into savings sufficient to pay for the junior year at a public university.
The end result is that unless you're one of those rare/.ers that could actually get admitted to Harvard, Stanford, Princeton or MIT, you're going to attend a state university, and most state universities already have "articulation agreements" with their local community colleges to expedite transfer of credit, etc.
Has SCO named any specific Linux developers in their accusations, or has everything been generic?
IANAL (thank God), but wouldn't "slander" require them to say, "Mr Smith steals our product"? And wouldn't Mr Smith then be required to demonstrate that he was, in fact, not a criminal? And that would shift the burden of proof to the wrong person, wouldn't it?
What SCO is doing now is saying, "A group of people are stealing our code." No specific accusation, no slander, just a generic prejudicial statement. Safe & sound.
I say, it's time for SCO to put up or shut up. But now that they've locked horns with Big Blue -- which presumably has more lawyers on staff than SCO has employees -- SCO isn't about to call the hand.
"We have absolute direct knowledge of this. If you go behind the scenes, the attacks that we get that don't have IBM's name on them, underneath the covers, are sponsored by IBM," McBride said.
~OK~... Why haven't I gotten at least a nice thank-you note from IBM for the "Boycott SCO" icon on my website?
This case serves no purpose, but to have the RIAA, going forward, serve sopoenas correctly (i.e. through a court).
If the case achieves that, it will have serves a massively useful purpose. Why should us "little people" have to follow the law (due process), while organizations (non-people) with lots of money can do whatever they like?
I am pretty sure that the legal definition of a subpoena is very solid.
So if I use the right legal form, I can issue a subpoena? That's pretty much the state of the ones RIAA issues.
Wake up, folks! RIAA is just another "private citizen." They are not the government, they are not law enforcement, they are just like you or me. They just want you to think that they are law enforcement & they do that by threatening schools & other organizations with lawsuits.
And that's the due process question here, I think.
Maybe they should be spending that money on finding new Artists or reducing the cost of exsiting material? Perhaps even setting up their own "online" song distribution system (as theres obviously a market for it [iTunes etc])
<gasp> Heaven forbid that RIAA actually encourage the "industry" to focus on its product & distribution system! What they want is FREE MONEY by forcing folks to pay for inferior product that can only be obtained online through "illegal" means.
Has anyone ever checked the bitrate of most tunes on P2P systems? Sucky almost-FM-Quality with that "loss of midrange" inherent to mp3s. So is RIAA now going to have subpoenas packaged with FM receivers & cassette decks?
I applaud "Jane Doe" for finally pushing the resistance as a due process issue, which is what it is. However, "due process" is immaterial as long as John Ashcroft is Attorney General. And the only way to change that,/.ers is to vote accordingly in November 2004. If you get to vote in November 2004...
First, a $2 million fine is chump change for Warner and Universal.
Second, although the Australian court decision is couched in the guise of "copyright law," it's no different in effect from protective tariffs or import taxes.
This raises the question why Australia didn't just enact an import tariff on compact discs equivalent to 100% of the price of an Australian-made CD.
I was kinda thinking of maybe taking a book out of public domain -- hmmm... how about Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" -- sticking it between a preface & epilogue that I write & then filing suit against anyone who says, "God bless us every one."
The copyright clearly says 1986 & University of California Berkeley. If SCO bought that code legitimately, then they would have to have changed that attribution, no? What it looks like to me is that SCO is claiming ownership of code snippets that they took out of the public domain in the first place!
I need to take my coon dawgs out to Utah. Something tells me when they get on the trail, it's going to head in a northwesterly direction toward Redmond...
A PhD probably won't help if your goal is to sit in a cubicle somewhere & write code for a company that will summarily dismiss you when its stock price goes south.
But if you re-think academe as a workplace (which is what it is), the PhD is your ticket to a different kind of job. Initially, "tenure track" professors don't earn killer salaries, but in my part of the country, neither do the coders sitting in cubes. In fact, at the college where I work, the faculty earn about the same as the "system analysts" in the computer center.
The big difference is that, if you get in the right groove & enjoy helping people learn & think that developing new things beats the heck out of just using tools that other folks develop, work in higher education doesn't feel like a "job."
25 years ago, I started teaching at a community college. 20 years ago, I got that PhD sheepskin. For the past dozen years, I've been in administration, basically being the interface between the programmers who extract data & the "executive administrators" who need that data digested, formatted & interpreted. There have been times I've worked very very hard, but it never felt like a "job." It feels more like a "mission."
Oh yeah, I'll be eligible for a state pension next year, coinciding with my 50th birthday! And that pension does NOT include stock options, thank goodness! How many/. readers have NO pension plan, because they're either working as consultants or because the.com that fired 'em 2 years ago based more than half their pension on (now worthless) stock?
In short, the PhD is what you want if creativity, invention & the "thrill" of watching someone you taught carry the ball farther than you dreamt possible sound important. (I know that sounds corny, but it's true.) The PhD is not what you want if you're content to spend the rest of your life kludging code for pointy-headed bosses.
Do you want a "job" or a "mission"? Do you want to use tools or invent them?
Isn't it amazing the scientists can pretty much say, without a doubt, that the launch of the Webb telescope, which is nearly 7 years away, will likely be delayed?
Perhaps they have already committed to using Windows Longhorn in the Webb project...
Well, we can pare that 10,000,000,000 neuron figure down quite a bit if our AI device doesn't have to do a lot of organ-system regulation or sensorimotor functions. And the AI guy would only need enough horsepower to process whatever sensory input we chose to give it.
This doesn't take away one bit from what Slick Snake's saying.
Neurons grow new dendritic connections all the time & membrane potentials are more than binary (on-off) but can be hyperpolarized or depolarized on a continuum. In short, it's not just 10,000,000,000 neurons with thousands of connections. Rather, it's 10,000,000 neurons with thousands of dynamic connections that can be continually resetting themselves anywhere from "on" to "almost on" to "off" to "extremely off"...
One thing that I've never been satisfied has been appropriately addressed in AI (which I call "counterfeit intelligence" in honor of an old Journal of Improbable Results article) is forgetting.
Human beings don't "forget" by simply deleting data from memory. Sure, things that have been learned-by-rote (i.e., verbatim & arbitrary S-R associations) are deleted (forgotten) if not reinforced. But what we learn "meaningfully" by associating new input with previously-acquired knowledge, is forgotten "meaningfully" as we assimilate the new input into the mental stew of cognitive structure & lose extraneous detail.
What comes out is seldom exactly what we learned. This variability is what really constitutes a lot of "intelligence" IMO -- the ability to assimilate a lot of input & then barf back something new.
Humans ability to "reduce" memory by merging new input into existing cognitive structure conserves resources. AI just adds more RAM.
See Educational Psychology: A Cognitive View by Ausubel, Novak & Hanesian (Werbel & Peck, 1978), if for no other reason than to enjoy Ausubel's penchant for inventing technical terminology. Need convincing? How about "progressive differentiation," "integrative reconciliation," "memorial reduction," & "obliterative subsumption"?
By your definition of "allows", the post office allows mail fraud the police depatments allow police brutality, etc...
Finally responding to my own story...:-)
My take on the Joint Committee report -- other than wondering how many joints got burned while it was being written -- is that it pretty much establishes that the college or university is NOT responsible for "allowing" P2P that may occur on its network. Ancillary to this, the college is not responsible for defending students who may violate laws using the university network.
The *AAs may not realize it (yet), but that last sentence is a sword that cuts two ways. The universities have protected themselves as institutional entitites from punitive action for "allowing" P2P to happen merely by providing a network for student use.
What I am waiting for is a case where a P2P file-sharer distributes a song performed by my favorite songwriter (see sig) & gets prosecuted only to have it come out in court that the performer owned no rights to the song (e.g., traditional folk song) or even more interestingly, that the performer himself stole the song or major portions thereof. Do a google for "Love" and "Theft" (Mr Zimmerman's latest). The whole premise of the album is stolen lines ("theft") from favorite traditional songs ("love"). Another good google is "folk tradition"...
Not that I'm trying to ruin someones fun but the FCC could issue a NAL (notice of aparent liability) over this.
This would be possible, I suppose, if the FCC had any proof other than the DEFCON account of what happened. Of course, the FCC could have staked out the competition & made busts on the site. But that didn't happen.
My local police can't write me up because I tell someone that I drove 85 mph to the party. They have to catch me.
IANAL (thank God) but I wonder if, in the current "legal" climate, the FCC might bring charges against DEFCON for "conspiracy to commit terrorist acts" or something simply for holding the contest...
I'd like to see a similar competition in an urban area or campus (buildings) or eastern woodland (trees). And what about wi-fi competition over water?
35 miles in the desert might equate to the other side of a decent-sized college campus. That still might be pretty impressive...
We are living in the future,
Tell you how I know,
I read it in the paper
Fifteen years ago.
We're all riding rocket ships
And talking with our minds,
And wearing turquoise jewelry,
Standing in soup lines.
(John Prine)
Keep in mind that the form requests that Minnesotans identify themselves I suppose to let his staff triage and prioritize his email.
This demonstrates that Sen. Norm Coleman's first priority is serving his constituents.
And let's just say that my 5 minute cursory review of the RIAA website did not turn up the state in which RIAA is incorporated. I do not think it happens to be Minnesota...
Something tells me that if it really came down to an "unsuspecting grandparent" vs RIAA, Coleman would come down on granny's side. And probably so would the Court.
Perhaps we should hope that RIAA brings these cases to trial a.s.a.p. & that some "angels" fund a good legal defense. I think the outcome might be interesting: in all likelihood, RIAA would win a settlement, but in the process so alienate artists & decent-minded folks everywhere that it would destroy itself.
Now the RIAA does have a gripe. But their hands aren't clean either. They have been pushing for exorbinately high fees for internet broadcast rights. They have also been fighting the compulsory licensing scheme for internet file sharing.
IIRC, the RIAA is paid out of the licensing proceeds.
I might also add that everyone is still paying a surcharge that was originally slapped on compact discs to pay for "research & development costs." We also pay surcharges on blank media, do we not? After 20 years of absurdly jacked-up prices, one would think they've recouped enough R&D costs to have more than covered their presumed piracy losses. If they dropped their add-on costs for new "premium" CDs by "top flight artists," how many filesharers would find it feasible to purchase the product again? (Let's not go into the debate as to whether the "industry" actually releases "premium" CDs by "top flight artists";-)
IANAL, but isn't the burden on RIAA to demonstrate that a particular filesharer has in fact cost the "industry" $15,000 per track? Or is the reason that they are pursuing civil rather than criminal action is that the burden gets shoved over onto the defendant?
RIAA is nothing more than a glorified private investigation outfit. But as an "industry watchdog," it's been able to deceive courts & law enforcement agencies about this, presenting itself as a bona fide police group. "There is no coincidence that a synonym for 'private investigator' is 'dick.'"
I for one am delighted that so many telemarketeers have set up their call centers in India, Singapore, Malaysia & Pakistan, because invariably the callers are unable to pronounce my name. This keeps me honest & true to the Boy Scout Law:
Caller: May I speak to Mr Yozepp Cleeboorn?
Me: Nobody by that name lives here.
*click*
I'm sure the last caller was the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. <sigh>
My wife's favorite strategy is to look at caller ID. If it's "unknown name & number", she quickly taps the answer & then the end button. This denies the caller the chance to tag our answering machine, which my wife says they get some sort of credit for doing. Dunno if this is true, but I've learned never to argue with my wife over this sort of thing.
Meanwhile, I'm still working on my telemarketer zapper device which will send a 140 db burst of noise up the line... And now it looks like the no-call lists will steal all my potential market:-(
Slashdot Mirror
It's like Margaritaville. Somebody once asked Jimmy Buffett where the hell Margaritaville was & he said, "It's wherever you want it to be."
Some folks say DHTML is JavaScript-enhanced HTML. Others like to throw in a pinch of Perl or PHP with their JavaScript & cook it up like gumbo. Some add a smidgen of Flash while they're at it. And then they complain because nobody's browser will run it.
DOM detection is such a P.I.T.A. (and I don't mean middle eastern bread ;-)
Maybe the "D" in DHTML stands for "duh"...
OK. I see your point now. Just remember it when the next PHP book is reviewed! :-D
Sure can. You redefine the variable i. Departing radically from /. convention, I actually pasted your code into my trusty text editor to see if there was some cool trick that I didn't notice just reading it & found that it behaved exactly as I expected:
- myfunc1() passes 0 (zero) to myfunc2() on the first iteration of the myfunc1 loop.
- myfunc2() then increments i stepwise to 14 whereupon it returns to myfunc1() & ends because 14 > 10.
In fact, this same code (with slight syntax changes) produces the same result in Perl unless 'i' is localized in each function & the value passed to myfunc2 is handled as @_. I'm pretty certain the result would also be the same in C, but here I bow to laziness &Are you trying to illustrate the sloppy code that happens because JavaScript is easy & free & a bunch of folks with no concept of good coding practice can just kludge away? Or is there something more substantive to the example?
Since physical science (and by extrapolation, engineering) is built on a "reductionist" paradigm where every problem is broken to its simplest components & solved piecemeal at that level, it makes sense for a "probabilistic" approach to chip design to happen some time. Might as well be now.
But when we operate under the reductionist model, we forget emergent properties at the system level. In developing a "learning" system -- which again, I assume to be the overarching goal -- we have to learn to deal with variation. Situations are almost never exactly the same. In the beginning of a "learning" system, things probably (pun intended) do look random. But as special cases, exceptions, subtle cues, etc. are encountered by the system & incorporated into the decision-making process, things appear to become increasingly deterministic.
So, if a "probabilistic" chip design is implemented properly, it likely will look pretty "deterministic" to the end-user, who expects certain kinds of results.
The problem now is that the hardware is "deterministic" & any attempt to create a "probabilistic" learning system has to happen in software. Right now, the limit to AI, IMO, is simply that chips aren't even in the same league with neurons. "Learning" software built on "learning" hardware ought to be a pretty powerful concept.
Of course, this may just be a way to get around the fact that manufacturing may be pushing the limits for tight tolerances & probabilistic chip design is the only out. Whatever it takes to force a paradigm shift.
"Most places a paradigms won't buy you a cup of coffee..."
...and I think you'll have it right.
And the quickest way to make a candidate understand the issue is to explain that YOU and a significant number of like-minded people will not vote for him if he doesn't get with the program! And salesgeek is right: party affiliation has nothing to do with it -- find a candidate who "thinks the way you do" and vote for him. If you can't find a candidate who thinks the way you do, educate one or become a candidate yourself!
** tries to image county board of supervisors made up of geeks :-D **
Spot on!
Another point is that the majority of community college faculty are actually interested in teaching students. Most university faculty, particularly those at the "prestigious" institutions, have absolutely no interest in teaching. They want to do research. Odds are that the undergrad classes at those top universities are being taught by graduate assistants anyway.
I've worked as an institutional research administrator for a couple of community colleges, and I've found that when community college students transfer to universities, they perform as well as or better than students who started as freshmen at the universities.
On the tuition side of things, attending a community college translates into savings sufficient to pay for the junior year at a public university.
The end result is that unless you're one of those rare /.ers that could actually get admitted to Harvard, Stanford, Princeton or MIT, you're going to attend a state university, and most state universities already have "articulation agreements" with their local community colleges to expedite transfer of credit, etc.
IANAL (thank God), but wouldn't "slander" require them to say, "Mr Smith steals our product"? And wouldn't Mr Smith then be required to demonstrate that he was, in fact, not a criminal? And that would shift the burden of proof to the wrong person, wouldn't it?
What SCO is doing now is saying, "A group of people are stealing our code." No specific accusation, no slander, just a generic prejudicial statement. Safe & sound.
I say, it's time for SCO to put up or shut up. But now that they've locked horns with Big Blue -- which presumably has more lawyers on staff than SCO has employees -- SCO isn't about to call the hand.
~OK~ ... Why haven't I gotten at least a nice thank-you note from IBM for the "Boycott SCO" icon on my website?
If the case achieves that, it will have serves a massively useful purpose. Why should us "little people" have to follow the law (due process), while organizations (non-people) with lots of money can do whatever they like?
I'm voting for Jane Doe in 2004!
So if I use the right legal form, I can issue a subpoena? That's pretty much the state of the ones RIAA issues.
Wake up, folks! RIAA is just another "private citizen." They are not the government, they are not law enforcement, they are just like you or me. They just want you to think that they are law enforcement & they do that by threatening schools & other organizations with lawsuits.
And that's the due process question here, I think.
<gasp> Heaven forbid that RIAA actually encourage the "industry" to focus on its product & distribution system! What they want is FREE MONEY by forcing folks to pay for inferior product that can only be obtained online through "illegal" means.
Has anyone ever checked the bitrate of most tunes on P2P systems? Sucky almost-FM-Quality with that "loss of midrange" inherent to mp3s. So is RIAA now going to have subpoenas packaged with FM receivers & cassette decks?
I applaud "Jane Doe" for finally pushing the resistance as a due process issue, which is what it is. However, "due process" is immaterial as long as John Ashcroft is Attorney General. And the only way to change that, /.ers is to vote accordingly in November 2004. If you get to vote in November 2004...
Second, although the Australian court decision is couched in the guise of "copyright law," it's no different in effect from protective tariffs or import taxes.
This raises the question why Australia didn't just enact an import tariff on compact discs equivalent to 100% of the price of an Australian-made CD.
... put another "S" in "USA"?
The copyright clearly says 1986 & University of California Berkeley. If SCO bought that code legitimately, then they would have to have changed that attribution, no? What it looks like to me is that SCO is claiming ownership of code snippets that they took out of the public domain in the first place!
I need to take my coon dawgs out to Utah. Something tells me when they get on the trail, it's going to head in a northwesterly direction toward Redmond...
But if you re-think academe as a workplace (which is what it is), the PhD is your ticket to a different kind of job. Initially, "tenure track" professors don't earn killer salaries, but in my part of the country, neither do the coders sitting in cubes. In fact, at the college where I work, the faculty earn about the same as the "system analysts" in the computer center.
The big difference is that, if you get in the right groove & enjoy helping people learn & think that developing new things beats the heck out of just using tools that other folks develop, work in higher education doesn't feel like a "job."
25 years ago, I started teaching at a community college. 20 years ago, I got that PhD sheepskin. For the past dozen years, I've been in administration, basically being the interface between the programmers who extract data & the "executive administrators" who need that data digested, formatted & interpreted. There have been times I've worked very very hard, but it never felt like a "job." It feels more like a "mission."
Oh yeah, I'll be eligible for a state pension next year, coinciding with my 50th birthday! And that pension does NOT include stock options, thank goodness! How many /. readers have NO pension plan, because they're either working as consultants or because the .com that fired 'em 2 years ago based more than half their pension on (now worthless) stock?
In short, the PhD is what you want if creativity, invention & the "thrill" of watching someone you taught carry the ball farther than you dreamt possible sound important. (I know that sounds corny, but it's true.) The PhD is not what you want if you're content to spend the rest of your life kludging code for pointy-headed bosses.
Do you want a "job" or a "mission"? Do you want to use tools or invent them?
Perhaps they have already committed to using Windows Longhorn in the Webb project...
This doesn't take away one bit from what Slick Snake's saying.
Neurons grow new dendritic connections all the time & membrane potentials are more than binary (on-off) but can be hyperpolarized or depolarized on a continuum. In short, it's not just 10,000,000,000 neurons with thousands of connections. Rather, it's 10,000,000 neurons with thousands of dynamic connections that can be continually resetting themselves anywhere from "on" to "almost on" to "off" to "extremely off"...
Human beings don't "forget" by simply deleting data from memory. Sure, things that have been learned-by-rote (i.e., verbatim & arbitrary S-R associations) are deleted (forgotten) if not reinforced. But what we learn "meaningfully" by associating new input with previously-acquired knowledge, is forgotten "meaningfully" as we assimilate the new input into the mental stew of cognitive structure & lose extraneous detail.
What comes out is seldom exactly what we learned. This variability is what really constitutes a lot of "intelligence" IMO -- the ability to assimilate a lot of input & then barf back something new.
Humans ability to "reduce" memory by merging new input into existing cognitive structure conserves resources. AI just adds more RAM.
See Educational Psychology: A Cognitive View by Ausubel, Novak & Hanesian (Werbel & Peck, 1978), if for no other reason than to enjoy Ausubel's penchant for inventing technical terminology. Need convincing? How about "progressive differentiation," "integrative reconciliation," "memorial reduction," & "obliterative subsumption"?
Finally responding to my own story... :-)
My take on the Joint Committee report -- other than wondering how many joints got burned while it was being written -- is that it pretty much establishes that the college or university is NOT responsible for "allowing" P2P that may occur on its network. Ancillary to this, the college is not responsible for defending students who may violate laws using the university network.
The *AAs may not realize it (yet), but that last sentence is a sword that cuts two ways. The universities have protected themselves as institutional entitites from punitive action for "allowing" P2P to happen merely by providing a network for student use.
What I am waiting for is a case where a P2P file-sharer distributes a song performed by my favorite songwriter (see sig) & gets prosecuted only to have it come out in court that the performer owned no rights to the song (e.g., traditional folk song) or even more interestingly, that the performer himself stole the song or major portions thereof. Do a google for "Love" and "Theft" (Mr Zimmerman's latest). The whole premise of the album is stolen lines ("theft") from favorite traditional songs ("love"). Another good google is "folk tradition"...
This would be possible, I suppose, if the FCC had any proof other than the DEFCON account of what happened. Of course, the FCC could have staked out the competition & made busts on the site. But that didn't happen.
My local police can't write me up because I tell someone that I drove 85 mph to the party. They have to catch me.
IANAL (thank God) but I wonder if, in the current "legal" climate, the FCC might bring charges against DEFCON for "conspiracy to commit terrorist acts" or something simply for holding the contest...
35 miles in the desert might equate to the other side of a decent-sized college campus. That still might be pretty impressive...
And let's just say that my 5 minute cursory review of the RIAA website did not turn up the state in which RIAA is incorporated. I do not think it happens to be Minnesota...
Something tells me that if it really came down to an "unsuspecting grandparent" vs RIAA, Coleman would come down on granny's side. And probably so would the Court.
Perhaps we should hope that RIAA brings these cases to trial a.s.a.p. & that some "angels" fund a good legal defense. I think the outcome might be interesting: in all likelihood, RIAA would win a settlement, but in the process so alienate artists & decent-minded folks everywhere that it would destroy itself.
Dream on...
I might also add that everyone is still paying a surcharge that was originally slapped on compact discs to pay for "research & development costs." We also pay surcharges on blank media, do we not? After 20 years of absurdly jacked-up prices, one would think they've recouped enough R&D costs to have more than covered their presumed piracy losses. If they dropped their add-on costs for new "premium" CDs by "top flight artists," how many filesharers would find it feasible to purchase the product again? (Let's not go into the debate as to whether the "industry" actually releases "premium" CDs by "top flight artists" ;-)
IANAL, but isn't the burden on RIAA to demonstrate that a particular filesharer has in fact cost the "industry" $15,000 per track? Or is the reason that they are pursuing civil rather than criminal action is that the burden gets shoved over onto the defendant?
RIAA is nothing more than a glorified private investigation outfit. But as an "industry watchdog," it's been able to deceive courts & law enforcement agencies about this, presenting itself as a bona fide police group. "There is no coincidence that a synonym for 'private investigator' is 'dick.'"
Caller: May I speak to Mr Yozepp Cleeboorn?
Me: Nobody by that name lives here.
*click*
I'm sure the last caller was the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. <sigh>
My wife's favorite strategy is to look at caller ID. If it's "unknown name & number", she quickly taps the answer & then the end button. This denies the caller the chance to tag our answering machine, which my wife says they get some sort of credit for doing. Dunno if this is true, but I've learned never to argue with my wife over this sort of thing.
Meanwhile, I'm still working on my telemarketer zapper device which will send a 140 db burst of noise up the line... And now it looks like the no-call lists will steal all my potential market :-(