Good god, this is political correctness RUN AMUCK!
Political correctness is a form of hate. You are expressing hatred and anger at someone for making a joke, a joke that CLEARLY had no hatred or bigotry in it whatsoever.
I realize I am also saying "shut up", which in general I think is ugly, but political correctness is so disgusting and counterproductive I had to say something. It's counterproductive because when someone wants to complain about real racism and bigotry, people ignore those valid complaints because they've been so numbed by all the BS PC whining like the above nonsense.
Agreed... honestly I've already pre-ordered Doom 3 anyway, but I would be really happy with id if they had taken a stand here. I disagree that it would hurt only the users; it would hurt id a bit, it would hurt creative more (lots of people would switch over to using their mobo audio or buy a new sound card).
In any case I will certainly never buy any Creative products again. I realize every tech company has patents and most of them have bad patents; it's the bad patent bullies I won't forgive.
I think we'd all be living in caves still, if no one ever criticized or complained about anything. It's a good tactic for self-help gurus to say things like that, because those kind of platitudes lead to people nodding their heads and saying, "that sounds right," which leads to more money for the self-help guru; though really, there's nothing right about it at all. This is the main reason I ignore self-help books/fads; the more people hype it, the less substance there usually is. The good stuff usually takes time and contemplation to understand and apply. A good analogy is TV vs. print; "Who moved my cheese?" and "The 7 Habits..." are like the E! Network of spiritual development.
Back to the topic of criticism... when people say "constructive criticism is OK", what they are usually referring to is the tone with which the criticism is delivered. In truth, most criticism can be constructive. "Criticism" is what the other person does, and "constructive" is what you do with it. Even when they're completely wrong, often you can still learn something from it.
I do believe that Firefly was my favorite show of all time. Not perfect - and I did love B5 while it was at its height (before the descent into TV movie style mediocrity) - but all in all my favorite. Great characters and character interaction. The writing made me feel like the writers thought I was an adult, and not stupid to boot; I can't think of another show that did that as well.
Value function is applications, not architecture
on
Smart Mobs
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· Score: 2, Interesting
You've hit directly on the critical flaw in all of these "Laws" - the "value" of a network is primarily a function of how the network is used, not its architecture.
The value function f(n) of a network, where n is the number of nodes, is determined by the application(s) built on that network. f(n) is certainly linear for most one-to-many broadcast networks; but to say it is exponential (or polynomial or sigmoidal or logarithmic) based only on the architecture is presumptuous.
Whether a given network architecture is end-to-end or broadcast, allows subgroups, etc., merely puts constraints on what kinds of applications can run over that network; but the value is determined by the applications, not the architecture.
Some non-architectural factors also contribute to the value function; consider two networks with identical architecture, one with ping times of 1 millisecond and the other with ping times of 1 month.
Nonetheless, the argument about the value of subgroups is important. (As an aside, the number of distinct unordered subgroups of a network with N nodes is not N^N, it is the sum of (N choose M) for all M=1..N, which turns out to be more than N^N for N>4, I think... just add up all the numbers on the N+1th row of Pascal's triangle.) But not all possible subgroups are interesting, and the real-world constraint on their "value" is again based on the application.
If one considers subgroups based on some kind of social relationships, I would suggest that the real-world multiplier of value here is the average number of subgroups that participants are comfortable with, and the number that the application can usefully manage. For example, some MMORPGs have various different chat channels for different kinds of social structures; but any given player is going to have a hard time differentiating chat from more than 2-4 channels/organizations, with the primary constraint there being usability of the chat UI. Once it becomes too confusing to figure out which chat goes with which organization, it all blurs together and the value is reduced to near the value of having one global channel.
Saying "2000/XP" is like saying "MacOS X/BSD". The two are completely different beasts. Windows 2000 is indeed stable, and all-around is the best OS M$ has ever put out. XP, on the other hand, is a nightmare at all levels. The UI changes are ridiculous and counterintuitive, the stability is a joke, and the mothership-calling/DRM/licensing/totalitarianism is insulting, painfully annoying, undesirable, and runs directly counter to the philosophy that made Microsoft, DOS, and Windows a success, which is putting more power and control in the hands of the end user.
Thankfully I am not forced to use XP at work (our IT director feels roughly the same way about it), but I know many people who are, and every one of them has continuous difficulty with it.
It has now become clear to me that in the next year or two, once finding drivers for new hardware for Win2K starts to become an issue, that I will be forced to switch to MacOS or Linux, after being a Windows user since 3.0. Good work, M$.
I thought the premiere was excellent and I am quite looking forward to more. Though the preview of next week's episode looks like your typical trek/farscape "ooh look a haunted abandoned ship floating dead in space how spooky let's stay here for the whole episode", I give Whedon enough credit to hope that he might just be trying to poke some fun at that cliche.
I would like to say, there is at least one person who will not buy WC3 solely because of the Blizzard/eVilvendi lawyer attack on interoperability, and that person is me. You can hold me to that. And I buy a lot of games. I liked Warlords Battlecry 2 a lot, and I'm sure I would have bought WC3.
I'd think a mature OSS project with lots of developers is much more likely to have its own dedicated hosting, rather than SourceForge. Likewise, OSS projects that predate SourceForge would already have had their own hosting and community platform/tools, and thus would be less likely to migrate to SourceForge.
So I agree, the use of SourceForge projects is not a very scientific sample.
Stop writing all this crap that a) says nothing, b) is as in-tune with your readers as a waffle and c) is just plain poorly written.
Hear, hear! And poorly researched besides. Nowhere did Katz mention, as gobs of mainstream articles do, that the marketing effort for AotC was substantially reduced from Episode I's, and it had way less hype than Spider-Man. Personally I saw Spider-Man ads on billboards and the sides of buses about ten times more than AotC ads.
Other Occam's razor points in favor of AotC:
AotC opened on a lot fewer screens, because Lucas required any opening weekend screen to show it for at least 4 weeks;
AotC is a longer movie by twenty minutes, so it can't show as many times;
Spider-man had no significant competition, whereas AotC was up against Spider-man; and
if Spider-man really had a negative impact on AotC, why did Episode II have a better opening than Episode I?
Indeed it is immortal, and it is a perfect, simple example of the close-mindedness of the scientific establishment. A certain amount of skepticism is healthy; but if we already know everything, then all science is pointless and we should all go join the crack suicide squad.
For a lengthier example of this bad meme see this John Horgan garbage. An example of his thinking: because it is impractical to build an device large enough to test superstring theory, it is therefore bad science. What an idiot.
Re:Why Review this old movie?
on
Review: U-571
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· Score: 1
Hear, hear! This was a fun review. More people need to spit this much venom at Hollywood crapola like U571.
If you're not going to rip off your customers, why do you need the clause? Saying, "the lawyers made us do it" is a cop-out; they work for you, not vice versa. Saying, "other companies do it too" is also a cop-out; your mother should have taught you that (something about people jumping off a bridge... ring a bell?)
You seem to have a lot of rules about how people aren't allowed to play your game. I think it's pretty lame that you're preventing the creation of an economy around NWN; that was the potential that really excited me (but not any more). With all the years you've spent on it, and all the promise it shows, it could be become the biggest thing ever to hit computer gaming. Except you don't seem to want that to happen. Get on the cluetrain.
domainnamebuyersguide.com was mentioned here about a year ago, but it's since been bought by a registrar (which is why I didn't make it a link).
Since there are so many ill-behaved registrars out there (starting with the root of all DNS evil, Verisign), I would really like to see some unbiased reviews of some of them. But Googling around, I'm having a hard time finding anything.
I'm mostly looking for a registrar whose customer agreement does not state somewhere in subparagraph J that they actually own my domain and can take it away anytime they feel like it for no good reason. I know the courts have said that they have that right anyway, at least in the US, but I'd at least prefer that they not shove it in my face.
I'm no encryption expert but this whole thing looks pretty pathetic to me.
"...anyone who logs on through a Web browser or Internet link will automatically be given an encrypted connection. A small 4- to 10-kilobit file, a bit like a Web cookie, is loaded into the client computer's memory." So the program is transmitted through breakable encryption.
"The file contains a program to generate random encryption keys, so that the keys themselves don't have to be sent over the network connection." So the keys are generated using a pseudo-random number generator, which makes them quite guessable.
"The client generates a series of random numbers to use as an encryption key. This is number is exchanged with the server through a secure process known only to Prescient..." Then the key is transmitted over the network via breakable encryption, which they just said they wouldn't have to do.
It seems to me the general point of this speech is not to make precisely correct statements, but to challenge your assumptions. And the general usefulness of source code is an assumption that should be challenged.
I'm a huge fan of open source, and more importantly free software, but the fact that successful open source projects exist does not mean that releasing any pile of garbage code will produce positive results for that project. The obvious example is Mozilla - the original release of Mozilla was a festering pile of spaghetti code. The Gecko project looks much better (can you say "focus"? A sharp kitchen knife is much more useful than a dull Swiss Army knife)... but Netscape could have built Gecko as an open source project without opening up the crappy Netscape 4 code, harming their reputation, or stalling badly-needed bugfix releases of Navigator.
The judge acknowledged that indeed it may be useful to have a backup of software as allowed under the CDPA 1988, and there could possibly be cases of 'where necessary', but also the aspect of 'swapping' of backup disks between people would be uncontrollable, and damaging to Sony as nobody would obviously pay £25-45 for a game, therefore 'piracy' becomes the main factor for consideration above all other.
Though IANAL and am not familiar with UK courts, it seems this case should have a decent chance of being overturned on appeal (assuming it's appealed) as the judge contradicted both himself and the law. He admitted that the law explicitly allows for legal backups, but then he disallowed this explicitly legal act of backup simply because, in his opinion, people would be likely to commit crimes with the same tool. This seems similar to prior restraint, or perhaps guilt by association - he's disallowing something legal because it's associated with something illegal.
If we followed this argument to its logical conclusion, then guns, cars, knives, photocopiers, rocks, and pencils should all be illegal, along with every other kind of object that you might commit a crime with. If I can kill you by hitting you on the head with a phone book, should phone books be illegal for all purposes??
Perhaps a more rational question is: should a tool or technology be illegal if its principal or most likely use is by definition part of a larger criminal act? This applies to nuclear bombs, smallpox, and handguns, but not rifles (rifles are for killing everything, whereas handguns are only useful for killing people). Applying this argument to copy protection circumvention technologies is a bit of a stretch.
Personally, I choose to use circumvention technologies simply to avoid the pain of the copy protection technologies, which ALWAYS interfere with the quality of the media they're used with. In the mid-80s, my Commodore 64 floppy drive was destroyed by the hardcore copy protection in EA games; I stopped buying them, started pirating them, got a new drive, and everything was fine. Which is a perfect example of one reason copy protection will never work - it doesn't hurt pirates because they circumvent it, so the only people it hurts are legitimate customers. Of course, from the perspective of the record labels, there are no legitimate customers; we're all thieves.
This paper came out last year. I found the analysis to be 10 times better than the conclusions that the Nature reporter jumped to (not to mention all the previous posts here, good lord!!).
To me, the key conclusion here is that the observed behavior IS rational self-interest. The previous ideas of self-interest I've encountered in economics always seemed to be distillations of raw stupid greed, without any allowance for intelligence on the part of the actor, and lacking any model whatsoever for social forces, e.g., shame, embarrassment, fame or notoriety.
This is the fundamental flaw in the idea of "the tragedy of the commons" - it assumes that the actors who overuse the commons have no social relationship to each other, and that their overuse will not be penalized in other arenas, which is of course totally ridiculous. This kind of theorizing has no use in the real world.
Re:Fight this law at the roots if you want to win.
on
Sklyarov Indicted
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· Score: 1
Though writing your representative is certainly better than emailing or faxing them, especially if it's clearly a personally written letter, the best thing you can do by far is to make direct personal contact. A phone call is good, but visiting their local office in person is several steps better than that. If you take the time to do that, to demonstrate to them that you are passionate enough about the issue to show up in person, then you're also demonstrating that you're passionate enough about it to vote based on it, and maybe to influence other people as well. Decorum mandates that they speak with constituents in person (maybe not the rep, but someone) if you show up at their office, so you will be heard.
Rick Boucher (D-VA) said he was planning to sponsor some fair use legislation this session, so mentioning that might be a good thing, it's something concrete.
Re:Perhaps this is not what it seems...
on
Sklyarov Indicted
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· Score: 1
Hear, hear! No one in the press seems to consider this possibility, but it may be partly true.
For a US Attorney, officially there is no such thing as a bad law. But they're smart people and I'm sure most of them can spot bad laws when they see them. It's giving the DOJ a bit too much credit to think they're all on the side of civil liberties here, but it's also unlikely that they're all mindless corporate stooges like "our representatives" in Congress (who have given away their legislative power to corporations via the DMCA... rules are rules, whether they're law-code or bit-code, and now the corporations get to make up whatever rules they want for "copyright protection" and those rules have the force of law).
So maybe some of the Northern California US Attorneys have read Lessig's Code, or are otherwise smart enough to see that Congress has sold this legislative power to corporations (never mind the constitutionality); and maybe they aren't necessarily interested in spending their time enforcing what amount to laws made up by corporations, many of which are foreign companies anyway (several of the media companies and most of the consumer electronics companies); and so maybe they'd like to see the law struck down.
The Felten case might be a better straw man, what with Felten being a professor trying to publish real research, instead of some Russians selling circumvention software (which, despite what Sklyarov's lawyer says, is exactly what Congress/RIAA/MPAA/etc. had in mind with the anti-circumvention provisions). But the declaratory judgement that Felten and the other academics may get will be narrow in scope, whereas with this case, we might possibly see the anti-circumvention provisions struck down in their entirety.
Then again, the prosecutors may actually believe this is a good law; or they may be consummate professionals and not care. In any case, it's going forward, which in the end may be good for everyone (including the incredibly short-sighted media companies) except Dmitry, who, regardless of whether he's cleared or not, will be stuck here away from his family for a long time. Martyrs sometimes advance their causes greatly, but it's not much fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Good god, this is political correctness RUN AMUCK!
Political correctness is a form of hate. You are expressing hatred and anger at someone for making a joke, a joke that CLEARLY had no hatred or bigotry in it whatsoever.
I realize I am also saying "shut up", which in general I think is ugly, but political correctness is so disgusting and counterproductive I had to say something. It's counterproductive because when someone wants to complain about real racism and bigotry, people ignore those valid complaints because they've been so numbed by all the BS PC whining like the above nonsense.
Agreed... honestly I've already pre-ordered Doom 3 anyway, but I would be really happy with id if they had taken a stand here. I disagree that it would hurt only the users; it would hurt id a bit, it would hurt creative more (lots of people would switch over to using their mobo audio or buy a new sound card).
In any case I will certainly never buy any Creative products again. I realize every tech company has patents and most of them have bad patents; it's the bad patent bullies I won't forgive.
Never critisize...
I think we'd all be living in caves still, if no one ever criticized or complained about anything. It's a good tactic for self-help gurus to say things like that, because those kind of platitudes lead to people nodding their heads and saying, "that sounds right," which leads to more money for the self-help guru; though really, there's nothing right about it at all. This is the main reason I ignore self-help books/fads; the more people hype it, the less substance there usually is. The good stuff usually takes time and contemplation to understand and apply. A good analogy is TV vs. print; "Who moved my cheese?" and "The 7 Habits..." are like the E! Network of spiritual development.
Back to the topic of criticism... when people say "constructive criticism is OK", what they are usually referring to is the tone with which the criticism is delivered. In truth, most criticism can be constructive. "Criticism" is what the other person does, and "constructive" is what you do with it. Even when they're completely wrong, often you can still learn something from it.
I do believe that Firefly was my favorite show of all time. Not perfect - and I did love B5 while it was at its height (before the descent into TV movie style mediocrity) - but all in all my favorite. Great characters and character interaction. The writing made me feel like the writers thought I was an adult, and not stupid to boot; I can't think of another show that did that as well.
Ohhhhh it was April Fools! I thought ThinkGeek was broken, I kept trying to buy one of those USB George Foreman grills.
I guess I can just take my PC cover off and grill up a burger on my GeForce 4 card.
The Office file formats will be open if M$ decides to:
- Document them, and
- Not change them with every update.
I doubt they will do either of those things.Sorry, the sum of (N choose M) for all M=1..N is never greater than N^N, because it is always 2^N.
So it is "exponential", just not N^N.
Here's a cool page about Pascal's triangle.
You've hit directly on the critical flaw in all of these "Laws" - the "value" of a network is primarily a function of how the network is used, not its architecture.
The value function f(n) of a network, where n is the number of nodes, is determined by the application(s) built on that network. f(n) is certainly linear for most one-to-many broadcast networks; but to say it is exponential (or polynomial or sigmoidal or logarithmic) based only on the architecture is presumptuous.
Whether a given network architecture is end-to-end or broadcast, allows subgroups, etc., merely puts constraints on what kinds of applications can run over that network; but the value is determined by the applications, not the architecture.
Some non-architectural factors also contribute to the value function; consider two networks with identical architecture, one with ping times of 1 millisecond and the other with ping times of 1 month.
Nonetheless, the argument about the value of subgroups is important. (As an aside, the number of distinct unordered subgroups of a network with N nodes is not N^N, it is the sum of (N choose M) for all M=1..N, which turns out to be more than N^N for N>4, I think... just add up all the numbers on the N+1th row of Pascal's triangle.) But not all possible subgroups are interesting, and the real-world constraint on their "value" is again based on the application.
If one considers subgroups based on some kind of social relationships, I would suggest that the real-world multiplier of value here is the average number of subgroups that participants are comfortable with, and the number that the application can usefully manage. For example, some MMORPGs have various different chat channels for different kinds of social structures; but any given player is going to have a hard time differentiating chat from more than 2-4 channels/organizations, with the primary constraint there being usability of the chat UI. Once it becomes too confusing to figure out which chat goes with which organization, it all blurs together and the value is reduced to near the value of having one global channel.
Saying "2000/XP" is like saying "MacOS X/BSD". The two are completely different beasts. Windows 2000 is indeed stable, and all-around is the best OS M$ has ever put out. XP, on the other hand, is a nightmare at all levels. The UI changes are ridiculous and counterintuitive, the stability is a joke, and the mothership-calling/DRM/licensing/totalitarianism is insulting, painfully annoying, undesirable, and runs directly counter to the philosophy that made Microsoft, DOS, and Windows a success, which is putting more power and control in the hands of the end user.
Thankfully I am not forced to use XP at work (our IT director feels roughly the same way about it), but I know many people who are, and every one of them has continuous difficulty with it.
It has now become clear to me that in the next year or two, once finding drivers for new hardware for Win2K starts to become an issue, that I will be forced to switch to MacOS or Linux, after being a Windows user since 3.0. Good work, M$.
...the nothing-is-good-enough-for-whiney-slashdot-posters bandwagon...
I thought the premiere was excellent and I am quite looking forward to more. Though the preview of next week's episode looks like your typical trek/farscape "ooh look a haunted abandoned ship floating dead in space how spooky let's stay here for the whole episode", I give Whedon enough credit to hope that he might just be trying to poke some fun at that cliche.
Indeed, Zilla is very diluted.
ZZ Top used the car "Cadzilla" in their videos. Hot Wheels even made one for their "Legends" series.
NYT(FRBBB)
Hear, hear! These arguments are right on.
I would like to say, there is at least one person who will not buy WC3 solely because of the Blizzard/eVilvendi lawyer attack on interoperability, and that person is me. You can hold me to that. And I buy a lot of games. I liked Warlords Battlecry 2 a lot, and I'm sure I would have bought WC3.
I'd think a mature OSS project with lots of developers is much more likely to have its own dedicated hosting, rather than SourceForge. Likewise, OSS projects that predate SourceForge would already have had their own hosting and community platform/tools, and thus would be less likely to migrate to SourceForge.
So I agree, the use of SourceForge projects is not a very scientific sample.
Hear, hear! And poorly researched besides. Nowhere did Katz mention, as gobs of mainstream articles do, that the marketing effort for AotC was substantially reduced from Episode I's, and it had way less hype than Spider-Man. Personally I saw Spider-Man ads on billboards and the sides of buses about ten times more than AotC ads.
Other Occam's razor points in favor of AotC:
Rebutting Katz is so easy it's boring. Yawn.
Indeed it is immortal, and it is a perfect, simple example of the close-mindedness of the scientific establishment. A certain amount of skepticism is healthy; but if we already know everything, then all science is pointless and we should all go join the crack suicide squad.
For a lengthier example of this bad meme see this John Horgan garbage. An example of his thinking: because it is impractical to build an device large enough to test superstring theory, it is therefore bad science. What an idiot.
Hear, hear! This was a fun review. More people need to spit this much venom at Hollywood crapola like U571.
If you're not going to rip off your customers, why do you need the clause? Saying, "the lawyers made us do it" is a cop-out; they work for you, not vice versa. Saying, "other companies do it too" is also a cop-out; your mother should have taught you that (something about people jumping off a bridge... ring a bell?)
You seem to have a lot of rules about how people aren't allowed to play your game. I think it's pretty lame that you're preventing the creation of an economy around NWN; that was the potential that really excited me (but not any more). With all the years you've spent on it, and all the promise it shows, it could be become the biggest thing ever to hit computer gaming. Except you don't seem to want that to happen. Get on the cluetrain.
domainnamebuyersguide.com was mentioned here about a year ago, but it's since been bought by a registrar (which is why I didn't make it a link).
Since there are so many ill-behaved registrars out there (starting with the root of all DNS evil, Verisign), I would really like to see some unbiased reviews of some of them. But Googling around, I'm having a hard time finding anything.
I'm mostly looking for a registrar whose customer agreement does not state somewhere in subparagraph J that they actually own my domain and can take it away anytime they feel like it for no good reason. I know the courts have said that they have that right anyway, at least in the US, but I'd at least prefer that they not shove it in my face.
So the program is transmitted through breakable encryption.
So the keys are generated using a pseudo-random number generator, which makes them quite guessable.
Then the key is transmitted over the network via breakable encryption, which they just said they wouldn't have to do.
It seems to me the general point of this speech is not to make precisely correct statements, but to challenge your assumptions. And the general usefulness of source code is an assumption that should be challenged.
I'm a huge fan of open source, and more importantly free software, but the fact that successful open source projects exist does not mean that releasing any pile of garbage code will produce positive results for that project. The obvious example is Mozilla - the original release of Mozilla was a festering pile of spaghetti code. The Gecko project looks much better (can you say "focus"? A sharp kitchen knife is much more useful than a dull Swiss Army knife)... but Netscape could have built Gecko as an open source project without opening up the crappy Netscape 4 code, harming their reputation, or stalling badly-needed bugfix releases of Navigator.
From the Channel home page:
The judge acknowledged that indeed it may be useful to have a backup of software as allowed under the CDPA 1988, and there could possibly be cases of 'where necessary', but also the aspect of 'swapping' of backup disks between people would be uncontrollable, and damaging to Sony as nobody would obviously pay £25-45 for a game, therefore 'piracy' becomes the main factor for consideration above all other.
Though IANAL and am not familiar with UK courts, it seems this case should have a decent chance of being overturned on appeal (assuming it's appealed) as the judge contradicted both himself and the law. He admitted that the law explicitly allows for legal backups, but then he disallowed this explicitly legal act of backup simply because, in his opinion, people would be likely to commit crimes with the same tool. This seems similar to prior restraint, or perhaps guilt by association - he's disallowing something legal because it's associated with something illegal.
If we followed this argument to its logical conclusion, then guns, cars, knives, photocopiers, rocks, and pencils should all be illegal, along with every other kind of object that you might commit a crime with. If I can kill you by hitting you on the head with a phone book, should phone books be illegal for all purposes??
Perhaps a more rational question is: should a tool or technology be illegal if its principal or most likely use is by definition part of a larger criminal act? This applies to nuclear bombs, smallpox, and handguns, but not rifles (rifles are for killing everything, whereas handguns are only useful for killing people). Applying this argument to copy protection circumvention technologies is a bit of a stretch.
Personally, I choose to use circumvention technologies simply to avoid the pain of the copy protection technologies, which ALWAYS interfere with the quality of the media they're used with. In the mid-80s, my Commodore 64 floppy drive was destroyed by the hardcore copy protection in EA games; I stopped buying them, started pirating them, got a new drive, and everything was fine. Which is a perfect example of one reason copy protection will never work - it doesn't hurt pirates because they circumvent it, so the only people it hurts are legitimate customers. Of course, from the perspective of the record labels, there are no legitimate customers; we're all thieves.
This paper came out last year. I found the analysis to be 10 times better than the conclusions that the Nature reporter jumped to (not to mention all the previous posts here, good lord!!).
To me, the key conclusion here is that the observed behavior IS rational self-interest. The previous ideas of self-interest I've encountered in economics always seemed to be distillations of raw stupid greed, without any allowance for intelligence on the part of the actor, and lacking any model whatsoever for social forces, e.g., shame, embarrassment, fame or notoriety.
This is the fundamental flaw in the idea of "the tragedy of the commons" - it assumes that the actors who overuse the commons have no social relationship to each other, and that their overuse will not be penalized in other arenas, which is of course totally ridiculous. This kind of theorizing has no use in the real world.
Rick Boucher (D-VA) said he was planning to sponsor some fair use legislation this session, so mentioning that might be a good thing, it's something concrete.
For a US Attorney, officially there is no such thing as a bad law. But they're smart people and I'm sure most of them can spot bad laws when they see them. It's giving the DOJ a bit too much credit to think they're all on the side of civil liberties here, but it's also unlikely that they're all mindless corporate stooges like "our representatives" in Congress (who have given away their legislative power to corporations via the DMCA... rules are rules, whether they're law-code or bit-code, and now the corporations get to make up whatever rules they want for "copyright protection" and those rules have the force of law).
So maybe some of the Northern California US Attorneys have read Lessig's Code, or are otherwise smart enough to see that Congress has sold this legislative power to corporations (never mind the constitutionality); and maybe they aren't necessarily interested in spending their time enforcing what amount to laws made up by corporations, many of which are foreign companies anyway (several of the media companies and most of the consumer electronics companies); and so maybe they'd like to see the law struck down.
The Felten case might be a better straw man, what with Felten being a professor trying to publish real research, instead of some Russians selling circumvention software (which, despite what Sklyarov's lawyer says, is exactly what Congress/RIAA/MPAA/etc. had in mind with the anti-circumvention provisions). But the declaratory judgement that Felten and the other academics may get will be narrow in scope, whereas with this case, we might possibly see the anti-circumvention provisions struck down in their entirety.
Then again, the prosecutors may actually believe this is a good law; or they may be consummate professionals and not care. In any case, it's going forward, which in the end may be good for everyone (including the incredibly short-sighted media companies) except Dmitry, who, regardless of whether he's cleared or not, will be stuck here away from his family for a long time. Martyrs sometimes advance their causes greatly, but it's not much fun.