Saw one at a trade show a couple years back - using one of the dime-sized disks for memory.
Appears as a drive to the system and launches a full-screen window displaying its own X server's screen buffer when plugged in (to a Windows, BSD, or Linux box).
Has enough power storage in a capacitor to automatically save state when suddenly unplugged - so you can just pull it out, take it somewhere else, plug it into another box (perhaps with a different underlying op system), and pick up right where you left off (cursor position, keystroke, and all).
Was intended to be licensed to manufacturers and to sell for $100 for kids to carry between school, library, and home. I think they eventually got a model to market for $125 with a flash drive.
Don't recall the name right now (a somewhat simian word) but there have been a number of stories about it on Slashdot.
The one in THIS article isn't it. Doesn't seem to have any mass storage onboard.
They are not giving the students names to the RIAA, just letting them know the RIAA intends to file suit if they dont settle now. They are actually giving those receiving these notices time to find representation and legal help.
Not true.
They are aiding the RIAA in their extortion scheme by forwarding the extortion letters, when they do not need to do so.
As with any other ISP, if they don't forward the letters when asked, the RIAA's next step is to file the John Doe suit, subpoena the records, and obtain the names. The step following that on the RIAA's playbill is to DROP THE JOHN DOE SUIT AND SEND THE LETTER.
The RIAA doesn't want to sue unless they must. Especially in the case of college students, many of which are bankrolled by a deep-pockets family with connections and access to high-powered attorneys. Instead they want to try intimidation first, collect their N grand, and move on.
The UW is not heading off surprise suits of the students. It's just accelerating the timetable on the RIAA's extortion scheme.
If anything it's increasing the risk of a surprise suit. If a student doesn't get the letter or loses it without responding, the RIAA now has reason to believe it was forwarded and deliberately ignored - but doesn't have the student's name. At that point they need to file the John Doe suit to get the name - after which it makes sense for them to immediately pursue the suit rather than dropping it and sending another letter directly to the student.
To the folks who made the Nazi analogy: It is a historical fact that the Nazis were greatly aided by careful records on religious affiliation kept in the countries they invaded. That's why most European countries (namely the ones invaded by the Nazis) do not, in fact, are legally prohibited from, keeping track of the religious affiliations of their own citizens.
They were also aided by the careful records on gun ownership. The blitzkreig motorcycled up to the local cop shop, grabbed the records, and went house-to-house collecting guns. Then any resistance movements had to start from scratch with stolen or air-dropped weapons. That's why many gun owners - especially those who were involved in WW II or know its history - are so dead-set against gun registration databases.
Just because it's illegal doesn't mean the RIAA needs to force the kids to pay thousands of dollars (nowhere near the value of the music)...
Back in the print days the chance of catching any particular copyright violator were pretty slim (much like today). In compensation, congress set the penalties at draconian levels, so they would serve as a deterrent despite the low chance of getting caught.
The issue with the RIAA is not that they're playing whack-a-mole with a big hammer. The issue is that their aim is bad and when they've stunned an innocent rabbit or squirrel they keep on hitting until it's a road-waffle.
I've noticed that articles in the YRO category lately aren't what articles in this category used to mean.... I think many articles in YRO are misplaced.
"Your right to due process when sued over allegations of illegal online activity" doesn't qualify?
Up here in Canada, federal elections are administered by a single Federal body; Elections Canada. That means the ballot you get in Toronto is identical in structure to the ballot you'll get on Baffin Island. There's a single standard for marking and counting ballots.
Given that Canada is a single republic and the provinces are divisions of it, that is easy to do.
But the US is a federation of separate republics - the "several states" - which banded together, creating a central mechanism to handle defense, foreign policy, and inter-republic trade.
As such, the elections are the business of the individual states. The federal government only has an interest when federal officials are being elected, the fed is exercising its constitutional mandate to insure that the governmental forms in each of the states continue to be some kind of republic, or some other election-related constitutional issue (such as voting rights) is in play.
So while the Fed gets to make some requirements and veto some things, the states get to make the decisions on how the elections are run. With 50 of 'em and wildly different circumstances among them you get a lot of variation.
You'd think the big companies like AutoDesk would prefer to make it easy for students to learn the software's ins and outs by offering a nice student discount, or maybe some sort of "student edition" of the program.
Autodesk does.
My wife was taking interior design courses at a Silicon Valley community college and used it.
If I understand it correctly it's just like the commercial version except much cheaper, you're not licensed to use it for commercial work, and when you make a hardcopy of a drawing it prints something to that effect in heavy block lettering along the border on each of the four sides of the drawing.
If they ever did deploy it at all airports, seaports, and road border checkpoints, any terrorists on the watch list would just hire a "coyote" and be escorted across the southern border.
The point of the ancient question is that you can't count on cops to bust other cops.
But runaway cops are a much more dangerous thing, long term, than even letting an occasional murderer get off free because the cops broke the law when gathering evidence.
When was the last time you ever heard of a cop getting a kick in the nuts for malfeasance. At worst, the city gets sued and you end up paying for his crimes.
Which was the whole point of the multi-millenia-old question. Cops can not be expected to go after other cops - for fear of still other cops failing to cover their back in the future. So who DOES go after bad cops?
Never forget that judges may have to depend on police protection.
"Yawn -- Joe, did you hear anything that sounded like gunfire?"
"Nope -- pass me more of them donuts."
Not just judges, but everybody else, too. Which is why folks like me are all for concealed carry - not just for special official people, but for any law-abiding citizen who cares to pack heat.
Why be dependent on cops for defense when you can take care of it yourself?
(Hunting down the perps after the fact is a different ball of worms from self-defense. That you leave to the pros or you become a vigilante.)
... unless Copyright Abuse was one of the charges, I fail to see how it would be usual to forfeit copyrights.
Given that Count 13 IS "Misuse of Copyright Laws" and, in that count, paragraph 18.6 claims "Such actions constitute a misuse of copyrights, and lead to a forfeiture of the exclusive rights granted to defendants by these laws." I'd say the conditions you ask for are met.
"Who shall watch the watchers?" is a problem posed millennia ago. In the case of police violating the fourth and fifth amendments, the answer the courts found was: "If you cops/prosecutors break the law in collecting evidence for a case, all that evidence - and all evidence collected as a result of it - is thrown out. Keep YOUR act clean or you lose the case."
Similarly congress has said: "Copyright gives you certain exclusive rights for a (long) time. It's hard to play 'whack a mole' with all the infringers, so we're giving you draconian penalties to make an example of those you do catch, to make examples of them and scare off others. If you misuse these rights, you lose them - not just for THAT case, but FOREVER."
If the court rules "You misuse the copyrights, you lose the copyrights" it will, IMHO, be correctly interpreting the law. Setting up a situation where the RIAA and its members get judgments when they go after a real copyright violator but lose the copyright on the songs involved if they maliciously or negligently prosecute an innocent non-violator would create a DANDY incentive for the RIAA to abandon its reign of terror and do their best to be squeaky-clean on any cases they pursue.
The only thing out of whack is the remain sharable and the concept of shielding from liability. You don't have to share a program you changed as long as you don't distribute it.
It doesn't force you to distribute. But one of the core points of the GPL is to head off a pitfall of releasing to the public domain: The ability of someone making a modified version to use his IP claim on the modification to lock others (including the original author(s)) out of making the same mod.
As to "shielding from liability", I think they meant:
"Open-source software... encourages individuals to add to or modify the software without fear of legal repercussions [from the original authors or their successors],"
rather than a total shield against liability to all outside parties.
The GPL is a large legal document. The infrastructure and thinking around it is even larger, and enforcement activities based on it can be initiated by a large number of people, some of whom have different interpretations of what it means. Packing all of that into a one-sentence summary for the layman is bound to have inaccuracies, if only from omission and sumarization.
Seems to me they did a damend fine job of getting the core of it right and comprehensible.
In addition to any other vote-counting or verification system, a county elections office could take a full optical scan of the ballot papers. The data from these scans would be made available to all who request it; anyone could acquire the data and perform their own re-count with any method of their own devising.
Vote-buyers could pay people to vote a particular way and make an individual identifying mark in some non-significant part of the ballot. The scan would enable them to check whether the voter had voted as he had been paid to do.
(I found out about these laws when looking into getting FOIA access to the raw output of an OCR scan of ballots, intending to do statistical analysis to look for various kinds of vote fraud, which might show up as long runs of identical or near-identical ballots or other anomalies. Sorry, no can get.)
You've got this backwards - the people working in this field are fully aware of the effect of dye staining and UV on DNA. They don't stain the nucleus of the somatic cell, they stain the nucleus of the egg (to make it easy to get rid of). Supposedly the problem isn't DNA damage, but (perhaps) damage to unspecified 'programming factors' elsewhere in the egg.
Which brings up the question of how they get rid of ALL the DNA-binding die. In addition to the havoc it could wreak on the rest of the cellular machinery (such as by binding to RNA), once the new nuclear material is inserted some of the remaining dye could be expected to attach to it. Then you have the same problem with mechanical interference AND excitation by light at any frequency at or above the glow color.
A switch to using polarized light in labwork instead of dye and ultraviolet light traditionally used to identify cell chromosomes may have led to the breakthrough,...
So for years the scientists have been finding the chromosomes to transplant by:
- Flooding the donor cell with a fluorescent dye that bonds to DNA, then
- Shining ultraviolet light (i.e. ionizing radiation) on the cell, causing the dye to fluoresce (and also dump enough energy into the DNA molecule to break molecular bonds and produce free radicals in the nearby area).
And then they wondered why, after they transplanted this DNA into the denucleated egg, the resulting cell didn't work right.
Good grief!
Re:Witch hunts last until they're unprofitable.
on
Judge Deals Blow to RIAA
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"etc." includes "sell it to a freeholder and add a nice hunk of change to his treasury (or pay off a bunch of his own debt)."
Re:Witch hunts last until they're unprofitable.
on
Judge Deals Blow to RIAA
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
A serf is an indentured labourer who works on the land of the lord (not lord god, lord farthingsworth etc), I cant remember the term but you probably meant freeholder or something like that
Actually they went after both.
Serfs often had other assets: houses, tools, money, jewelry. Also, serfs weren't just interchangeable workers, ala migrant farmhands. Serfdom was a two-way obligation. Serfs typically (depending on country's rules, of course) had an inherited right to farm a PARTICULAR chunk of land for a cut of the profits.
If the serf (or his ancestors) had put in a lot of work on the land (like by putting in deep wells, constructing good buildings, treating the soil right, etc.) he would improve its value, both to the lord and to himself. The serf could become very well-to-do if his land produced lots of crops, the plants were hardier and resisted plant diseases, his wells didn't run dry while everybody else's did, his animals survived bad weather, etc.
Of course when there was a bad year and everybody else's wells ran dry or crops failed and mistreated, starved, and overcrowded animals got sick, while Mr Hardworking Serf's crops, livestock, and wells did just hunky-dory, it could easily be used to start rumors of witchcraft.
Once the pesky serf was eliminated, not only were his liquid assets divied up, but the Lord was free of his obligation to let the serf continue farming this particularly good hunk of land. The lord could then add it to his personal estate, farm it with his household staff and get ALL the profits, make a new serfdom arrangement on better-for-the-lord terms with another family, etc.
The Uni did show spine. Now if the ISPs would...
on
Judge Deals Blow to RIAA
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
You know what would be nicer? If the universities showed some spine.... "They entrust us with their future, their physical well-being, and... personal information... We have an obligation not to allow every scum-sucker who wants a piece of them to abuse that unique relationship."
AIUI that's exactly what the University did, which is what got this decision from the court.
If the ISPs had shown similar spine the RIAA would have hit this wall long ago.
Costs Us more than ISPs when their users get bit.
on
Judge Deals Blow to RIAA
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
So did the Judge get busted for selling cocaine to the RIAA, or did the RIAA get busted for buying it?
Unlike ISPs, which have either knuckled under or put up a very weak defense of their users, the university-as-ISP decided to put some effort into defending its students' interests against the RIAA.
For-profit ISPs have little to lose (beyond their own inconvenience) in handing over logs, and each customer represents a very small revenue stream. Bean counters might decide that failing to defend them costs the ISP little, while defending them costs more than they can ever recoup from that customer's fees.
Universities have a lot invested in each student and receive a lot from each in the form of tutition and various grant monies, along with other rewards from their success. And they have a lot to lose in other intangibles (such as security of their papers, reputation when recruiting students, staff, and faculty, etc.) So letting students swing in the wind is not just a bad idea academic-freedom wise, it's bad financially as well. (Doubly so if the RIAA's target is a faculty member, staffer, or administrator. Letting one of those get hit, or even distracted, by an RIAA suit comes right out of the University's "intellectual capital".)
Witch hunts last until they're unprofitable.
on
Judge Deals Blow to RIAA
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
... in the long term a witch hunt only lasts as long as there are angry villagers to burn the resulting witch.
Actually, witch hunts (at least the "Spanish Inquisition" kind) worked by targeting the deep-pocketed serfs and, once they were convicted, splitting their assets between the church's witch hunters and the local governmental nobles. (That's why they didn't get going very well in England - where the swag would all go to the King.)
Similarly the RIAA witchhunt will continue until either the RIAA can't profit from it or the courts (the "governmental nobles") stop allowing it.
(Remember, too, that the RIAA can profit from it by dunning its members, even if it's not making money off the accused. The members may go along with that, thinking that the witch hunt is profiting THEM some other way - such as by diverting some fraction of music users from "pirated-content" downloaders to purchasers.)
The radical new design of the Scuderi power plant splits the cylinders of an internal-combustion engine in two, compressing air in one chamber, then shooting it into a combustion chamber where it's mixed with gas and ignited....
This technology already exists in a sense. It is called a "turbo" or a "super-charger", and has been in use for years.
Actually, it's older than that. It's the "brayton" cycle - as opposed to the "otto" cycle where it's all done in one cylinder in four strokes.
The FIRST patent on automobiles was the Seldon patent (No. 549,160 - November 5, 1895) - where he patented cars as a side-effect of patenting a particular design for a brayton engine. That little piece of IP - sold to an early auto company which turned into a patent troll operation - ended up with him collecting royalties on all cars made by all early automakers until Henry Ford got his dander up and refused to pay. After a long and expensive battle the courts agreed with Ford, because Ford used the otto cycle and the patent specified the brayton cycle.
Slashdot Mirror
First "Kill Bill" reference!
Maybe on slashdot. But powerline blog has you beaten by a day or more.
I think drudge used it, too.
Saw one at a trade show a couple years back - using one of the dime-sized disks for memory.
Appears as a drive to the system and launches a full-screen window displaying its own X server's screen buffer when plugged in (to a Windows, BSD, or Linux box).
Has enough power storage in a capacitor to automatically save state when suddenly unplugged - so you can just pull it out, take it somewhere else, plug it into another box (perhaps with a different underlying op system), and pick up right where you left off (cursor position, keystroke, and all).
Was intended to be licensed to manufacturers and to sell for $100 for kids to carry between school, library, and home. I think they eventually got a model to market for $125 with a flash drive.
Don't recall the name right now (a somewhat simian word) but there have been a number of stories about it on Slashdot.
The one in THIS article isn't it. Doesn't seem to have any mass storage onboard.
They are not giving the students names to the RIAA, just letting them know the RIAA intends to file suit if they dont settle now. They are actually giving those receiving these notices time to find representation and legal help.
Not true.
They are aiding the RIAA in their extortion scheme by forwarding the extortion letters, when they do not need to do so.
As with any other ISP, if they don't forward the letters when asked, the RIAA's next step is to file the John Doe suit, subpoena the records, and obtain the names. The step following that on the RIAA's playbill is to DROP THE JOHN DOE SUIT AND SEND THE LETTER.
The RIAA doesn't want to sue unless they must. Especially in the case of college students, many of which are bankrolled by a deep-pockets family with connections and access to high-powered attorneys. Instead they want to try intimidation first, collect their N grand, and move on.
The UW is not heading off surprise suits of the students. It's just accelerating the timetable on the RIAA's extortion scheme.
If anything it's increasing the risk of a surprise suit. If a student doesn't get the letter or loses it without responding, the RIAA now has reason to believe it was forwarded and deliberately ignored - but doesn't have the student's name. At that point they need to file the John Doe suit to get the name - after which it makes sense for them to immediately pursue the suit rather than dropping it and sending another letter directly to the student.
To the folks who made the Nazi analogy: It is a historical fact that the Nazis were greatly aided by careful records on religious affiliation kept in the countries they invaded. That's why most European countries (namely the ones invaded by the Nazis) do not, in fact, are legally prohibited from, keeping track of the religious affiliations of their own citizens.
They were also aided by the careful records on gun ownership. The blitzkreig motorcycled up to the local cop shop, grabbed the records, and went house-to-house collecting guns. Then any resistance movements had to start from scratch with stolen or air-dropped weapons. That's why many gun owners - especially those who were involved in WW II or know its history - are so dead-set against gun registration databases.
Just because it's illegal doesn't mean the RIAA needs to force the kids to pay thousands of dollars (nowhere near the value of the music) ...
Back in the print days the chance of catching any particular copyright violator were pretty slim (much like today). In compensation, congress set the penalties at draconian levels, so they would serve as a deterrent despite the low chance of getting caught.
The issue with the RIAA is not that they're playing whack-a-mole with a big hammer. The issue is that their aim is bad and when they've stunned an innocent rabbit or squirrel they keep on hitting until it's a road-waffle.
I've noticed that articles in the YRO category lately aren't what articles in this category used to mean. ... I think many articles in YRO are misplaced.
"Your right to due process when sued over allegations of illegal online activity" doesn't qualify?
Maybe you need to adjust your filters.
Up here in Canada, federal elections are administered by a single Federal body; Elections Canada. That means the ballot you get in Toronto is identical in structure to the ballot you'll get on Baffin Island. There's a single standard for marking and counting ballots.
Given that Canada is a single republic and the provinces are divisions of it, that is easy to do.
But the US is a federation of separate republics - the "several states" - which banded together, creating a central mechanism to handle defense, foreign policy, and inter-republic trade.
As such, the elections are the business of the individual states. The federal government only has an interest when federal officials are being elected, the fed is exercising its constitutional mandate to insure that the governmental forms in each of the states continue to be some kind of republic, or some other election-related constitutional issue (such as voting rights) is in play.
So while the Fed gets to make some requirements and veto some things, the states get to make the decisions on how the elections are run. With 50 of 'em and wildly different circumstances among them you get a lot of variation.
You'd think the big companies like AutoDesk would prefer to make it easy for students to learn the software's ins and outs by offering a nice student discount, or maybe some sort of "student edition" of the program.
Autodesk does.
My wife was taking interior design courses at a Silicon Valley community college and used it.
If I understand it correctly it's just like the commercial version except much cheaper, you're not licensed to use it for commercial work, and when you make a hardcopy of a drawing it prints something to that effect in heavy block lettering along the border on each of the four sides of the drawing.
If they ever did deploy it at all airports, seaports, and road border checkpoints, any terrorists on the watch list would just hire a "coyote" and be escorted across the southern border.
If said cops are breaking the law when it comes to gathering evidence what other laws might they be breaking?
Like maybe faking the evidence?
The general principle is that those charged with enforcing the law need to be held to a higher standard than the general public.
Sounds good. Now tell us HOW TO DO IT with REAL PEOPLE as cops!
Meanwhile: If the evidence was gathered illegally, do you propose to let the prosecution use it anyhow?
The point of the ancient question is that you can't count on cops to bust other cops.
But runaway cops are a much more dangerous thing, long term, than even letting an occasional murderer get off free because the cops broke the law when gathering evidence.
When was the last time you ever heard of a cop getting a kick in the nuts for malfeasance. At worst, the city gets sued and you end up paying for his crimes.
Which was the whole point of the multi-millenia-old question. Cops can not be expected to go after other cops - for fear of still other cops failing to cover their back in the future. So who DOES go after bad cops?
Never forget that judges may have to depend on police protection.
"Yawn -- Joe, did you hear anything that sounded like gunfire?"
"Nope -- pass me more of them donuts."
Not just judges, but everybody else, too. Which is why folks like me are all for concealed carry - not just for special official people, but for any law-abiding citizen who cares to pack heat.
Why be dependent on cops for defense when you can take care of it yourself?
(Hunting down the perps after the fact is a different ball of worms from self-defense. That you leave to the pros or you become a vigilante.)
... unless Copyright Abuse was one of the charges, I fail to see how it would be usual to forfeit copyrights.
Given that Count 13 IS "Misuse of Copyright Laws" and, in that count, paragraph 18.6 claims "Such actions constitute a misuse of copyrights, and lead to a forfeiture of the exclusive rights granted to defendants by these laws." I'd say the conditions you ask for are met.
"Who shall watch the watchers?" is a problem posed millennia ago. In the case of police violating the fourth and fifth amendments, the answer the courts found was: "If you cops/prosecutors break the law in collecting evidence for a case, all that evidence - and all evidence collected as a result of it - is thrown out. Keep YOUR act clean or you lose the case."
Similarly congress has said: "Copyright gives you certain exclusive rights for a (long) time. It's hard to play 'whack a mole' with all the infringers, so we're giving you draconian penalties to make an example of those you do catch, to make examples of them and scare off others. If you misuse these rights, you lose them - not just for THAT case, but FOREVER."
If the court rules "You misuse the copyrights, you lose the copyrights" it will, IMHO, be correctly interpreting the law. Setting up a situation where the RIAA and its members get judgments when they go after a real copyright violator but lose the copyright on the songs involved if they maliciously or negligently prosecute an innocent non-violator would create a DANDY incentive for the RIAA to abandon its reign of terror and do their best to be squeaky-clean on any cases they pursue.
"Microsoft® Silverlight(TM) is ...
OK, it's a browser plugin that has SOMETHING to do with displaying video. The rest is buzz.
So what the heck does it DO?
The only thing out of whack is the remain sharable and the concept of shielding from liability. You don't have to share a program you changed as long as you don't distribute it.
... encourages individuals to add to or modify the software without fear of legal repercussions [from the original authors or their successors],"
It doesn't force you to distribute. But one of the core points of the GPL is to head off a pitfall of releasing to the public domain: The ability of someone making a modified version to use his IP claim on the modification to lock others (including the original author(s)) out of making the same mod.
As to "shielding from liability", I think they meant:
"Open-source software
rather than a total shield against liability to all outside parties.
The GPL is a large legal document. The infrastructure and thinking around it is even larger, and enforcement activities based on it can be initiated by a large number of people, some of whom have different interpretations of what it means. Packing all of that into a one-sentence summary for the layman is bound to have inaccuracies, if only from omission and sumarization.
Seems to me they did a damend fine job of getting the core of it right and comprehensible.
In addition to any other vote-counting or verification system, a county
elections office could take a full optical scan of the ballot papers.
The data from these scans would be made available to all who request it;
anyone could acquire the data and perform their own re-count with any
method of their own devising.
Vote-buyers could pay people to vote a particular way and make
an individual identifying mark in some non-significant part of
the ballot. The scan would enable them to check whether the
voter had voted as he had been paid to do.
(I found out about these laws when looking into getting FOIA
access to the raw output of an OCR scan of ballots, intending to
do statistical analysis to look for various kinds of vote fraud,
which might show up as long runs of identical or near-identical
ballots or other anomalies. Sorry, no can get.)
You've got this backwards - the people working in this field are fully aware of the effect of dye staining and UV on DNA. They don't stain the nucleus of the somatic cell, they stain the nucleus of the egg (to make it easy to get rid of). Supposedly the problem isn't DNA damage, but (perhaps) damage to unspecified 'programming factors' elsewhere in the egg.
Which brings up the question of how they get rid of ALL the DNA-binding die. In addition to the havoc it could wreak on the rest of the cellular machinery (such as by binding to RNA), once the new nuclear material is inserted some of the remaining dye could be expected to attach to it. Then you have the same problem with mechanical interference AND excitation by light at any frequency at or above the glow color.
Unlike ISPs, which have either knuckled under or put up a very weak defense of their users, ... RIAA v. Verizon.
Good point. Make that "Unlike most ISPs...".
Rah, Verizon!
A switch to using polarized light in labwork instead of dye and ultraviolet light traditionally used to identify cell chromosomes may have led to the breakthrough, ...
So for years the scientists have been finding the chromosomes to transplant by:
- Flooding the donor cell with a fluorescent dye that bonds to DNA, then
- Shining ultraviolet light (i.e. ionizing radiation) on the cell, causing the dye to fluoresce (and also dump enough energy into the DNA molecule to break molecular bonds and produce free radicals in the nearby area).
And then they wondered why, after they transplanted this DNA into the denucleated egg, the resulting cell didn't work right.
Good grief!
"etc." includes "sell it to a freeholder and add a nice hunk of change to his treasury (or pay off a bunch of his own debt)."
A serf is an indentured labourer who works on the land of the lord (not lord god, lord farthingsworth etc), I cant remember the term but you probably meant freeholder or something like that
Actually they went after both.
Serfs often had other assets: houses, tools, money, jewelry. Also, serfs weren't just interchangeable workers, ala migrant farmhands. Serfdom was a two-way obligation. Serfs typically (depending on country's rules, of course) had an inherited right to farm a PARTICULAR chunk of land for a cut of the profits.
If the serf (or his ancestors) had put in a lot of work on the land (like by putting in deep wells, constructing good buildings, treating the soil right, etc.) he would improve its value, both to the lord and to himself. The serf could become very well-to-do if his land produced lots of crops, the plants were hardier and resisted plant diseases, his wells didn't run dry while everybody else's did, his animals survived bad weather, etc.
Of course when there was a bad year and everybody else's wells ran dry or crops failed and mistreated, starved, and overcrowded animals got sick, while Mr Hardworking Serf's crops, livestock, and wells did just hunky-dory, it could easily be used to start rumors of witchcraft.
Once the pesky serf was eliminated, not only were his liquid assets divied up, but the Lord was free of his obligation to let the serf continue farming this particularly good hunk of land. The lord could then add it to his personal estate, farm it with his household staff and get ALL the profits, make a new serfdom arrangement on better-for-the-lord terms with another family, etc.
You know what would be nicer? If the universities showed some spine. ... "They entrust us with their future, their physical well-being, and ... personal information ... We have an obligation not to allow every scum-sucker who wants a piece of them to abuse that unique relationship."
AIUI that's exactly what the University did, which is what got this decision from the court.
If the ISPs had shown similar spine the RIAA would have hit this wall long ago.
So did the Judge get busted for selling cocaine to the RIAA, or did the RIAA get busted for buying it?
Unlike ISPs, which have either knuckled under or put up a very weak defense of their users, the university-as-ISP decided to put some effort into defending its students' interests against the RIAA.
For-profit ISPs have little to lose (beyond their own inconvenience) in handing over logs, and each customer represents a very small revenue stream. Bean counters might decide that failing to defend them costs the ISP little, while defending them costs more than they can ever recoup from that customer's fees.
Universities have a lot invested in each student and receive a lot from each in the form of tutition and various grant monies, along with other rewards from their success. And they have a lot to lose in other intangibles (such as security of their papers, reputation when recruiting students, staff, and faculty, etc.) So letting students swing in the wind is not just a bad idea academic-freedom wise, it's bad financially as well. (Doubly so if the RIAA's target is a faculty member, staffer, or administrator. Letting one of those get hit, or even distracted, by an RIAA suit comes right out of the University's "intellectual capital".)
... in the long term a witch hunt only lasts as long as there are angry villagers to burn the resulting witch.
Actually, witch hunts (at least the "Spanish Inquisition" kind) worked by targeting the deep-pocketed serfs and, once they were convicted, splitting their assets between the church's witch hunters and the local governmental nobles. (That's why they didn't get going very well in England - where the swag would all go to the King.)
Similarly the RIAA witchhunt will continue until either the RIAA can't profit from it or the courts (the "governmental nobles") stop allowing it.
(Remember, too, that the RIAA can profit from it by dunning its members, even if it's not making money off the accused. The members may go along with that, thinking that the witch hunt is profiting THEM some other way - such as by diverting some fraction of music users from "pirated-content" downloaders to purchasers.)
The radical new design of the Scuderi power plant splits the cylinders of an internal-combustion engine in two, compressing air in one chamber, then shooting it into a combustion chamber where it's mixed with gas and ignited....
This technology already exists in a sense. It is called a "turbo" or a "super-charger", and has been in use for years.
Actually, it's older than that. It's the "brayton" cycle - as opposed to the "otto" cycle where it's all done in one cylinder in four strokes.
The FIRST patent on automobiles was the Seldon patent (No. 549,160 - November 5, 1895) - where he patented cars as a side-effect of patenting a particular design for a brayton engine. That little piece of IP - sold to an early auto company which turned into a patent troll operation - ended up with him collecting royalties on all cars made by all early automakers until Henry Ford got his dander up and refused to pay. After a long and expensive battle the courts agreed with Ford, because Ford used the otto cycle and the patent specified the brayton cycle.