What really, really Grinds My Gears about this, is what about the passenger? They can't watch TV or a movie on this because the driver might look at it?
Enforce more personal responsibility, make fines and sentences much harsher for those who cause accidents and problems because they can't pay attention and let the rest of us make our own choices and not be restricted because of the Lowest Common Denominator of human stupidity.
Texting while driving isn't allowed in many areas, but your cellphone doesn't warn you if you are trying to text while moving down the road. Is this the next step in human de-evolution? Just dumb everything down so the Idiots Among Us never need to engage any extra brain cells?
All of this just makes me to want to get my own island and outlaw stupidity.
Except for the cases where you can't access your account from an unknown computer without supplying both the password, and the correct answers to the security questions.
For example, if you ever get a new computer, lose your computer, etc.
Unless of course, you make frequent backups, as I'm sure everyone here does, and you bother to backup the cookies directory . . .
One of my credit card banks just forced this onto its customers -- and you can't use the same answer for all three.
I prefer answers that have absolutely nothing to do with the question, but I can't remember exactly all my witty and funny responses to their inane questions, so this "security" frequently fails.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned it before, but I thought it was becoming obvious lately.
I buy a lot of stuff at Home Depot, with either cash, a credit card, debit card, or my home depot card. Whenever I need to return something and I don't have the receipt, they just swipe one of the cards, and everything but my cash purchases come up. This is no big surprise.
They link the accounts in their system.
The OP said he didn't give them any info during this purchase, but what about a different purchase with the same card? Best Buy often asks for phone numbers or other info "for warranty purposes", so they could have easily gotten his address. But what I don't know is how they specifically link my different credit cards (compare digital signatures, names + zip codes on the cards, whatever).
People on here always talk about data collection and aggregation, and then they are surprised when Best Buy "magically" has their address?
The longer-term goal is to create a system with the level of complexity of a cat's brain.
"The system can't be accessed right now Sir."
"And why is that? This system cost millions. It better be working."
"Well, the system all of a sudden decided it needed to be in a different room, took off running, got scared by it's shadow and a blinking red light, and has spent the last few hours hiding under the couch in the basement. We tried to coax it out with a rabbit's foot keychain, but haven't yet been successful. Roger is trying a can of tuna fish."
he probably would not have used if he'd taken time and effort to get the design right!
. . . yeah, because people never change their minds after you interview them and later they discover that what would be "really great" is if the project could also do such and such . ..
Of course, you could always tell your manager that if they wanted that added functionality they just mentioned, that they should have requested it 6 months ago when you asked them. Because you know, that usually works, and goes over quite well to boot.
I'm sure your manager will know better next time. Will know better than to ask you to work on their projects.
I think they could find it pretty quickly if they wanted to, or were motivated enough to look.
If someone were to make bomb threats or death threats against the government, congress, white house, etc. then I think the FBI and Secret Service could find them pretty quickly, don't you?
I'm sorry, but I don't buy the line that with all the technology and spying the phone companies are doing, that they can't find these people within a matter of minutes.
I would call the following agencies, in this order, write down everything, and then if you get nowhere, call up ALL of the local news stations:
Complain to the phone company.
Complain to the FBI.
Complain to the FTC.
Complain to your Congressman.
Complain to your Senator.
Ask all of them, if they refuse to help, who you should call. If you get nowhere, or think any of them are dragging their feet, contact the news stations.
Passing on the right is NEVER EVER EVER justified. It is just stupid dangerous.
I disagree. There are a lot of stupid drivers out there. I try to avoid them. If there are three lanes, and you're in the middle, and some idiot soccer mom is driving her minivan in the far left lane at the same speed as you (60mph), and I would like to pass both of you, I can either use the right lane (which is not illegal in my state, or any other state I've heard of, despite what anyone claims on here. Try actually looking up your state's laws before stating what they are) or wait for one of you to get far enough away from the other one to pass without having to use the mostly open right lane.
If the speed limit is 70mph, and 2 lanes are occupied by vehicles of any size going 60mph, I'll pass on the right and go about my way, instead of trying to get one of the inconsiderate other drivers to change lanes first. That's just the way it is.
I've also driven large trucks, and you really shouldn't have much of a blind spot at all. When I'm on the right of a semi on city streets, I can see the side mirrors, which means they should be able to see me. If they still have problems, they should get the 6"-7" fish-eye mirrors which lets you see everything over there. It really isn't all that difficult. If you can't do that, setup one of those "backup cameras" so you can have a little screen that can show you the right side.
MASSIVE blind spots are irresponsible, unnecessary and should be unacceptable.
In my wonderful town of Ann Arbor, Mich., about 99% of the turn lanes at traffic lights have those little red arrows restricting you from turning even if the light is green for traffic going straight and nobody is on the road (sometimes even at 4am). They give you a few seconds of a green turn arrow at the beginning of the cycle, but that's all.
A small handful of them here (e.g. Geddes and Earhart), as well as most of them in other areas around here (Macomb County, Oakland County, etc.) use flashing red lights for the turn lane while people going straight have green lights. At the end of the cycle, the turn arrows turn green in case traffic is too busy and you couldn't turn while it was flashing red.
It makes no sense to me, especially all those times I'm sitting at the red turn arrow, there is no traffic going straight, but they have the green light anyway, and I can't turn. How much gas do you think is wasted everyday at these situations? What makes it worse is that most lights have the sensors at them so they can determine if cars are there or not, but still don't work very efficiently.
And forget about it if you happen to be riding a motorcycle, the sensors can't determine if you're there, so they never turn green for you unless a car pulls up behind you, so you just have to run the red lights / turn arrows when it's clear.
You'd think a somewhat environmentally-friendly city like Ann Arbor would be better at finding ways to reduce pollution, including simple ones like adjusting the traffic lights to reduce wasteful idling where possible.
My Gmail account has never received any spam. I use it quite sparingly, as I have many others, but for the most part random addresses don't receive spam because someone guessed your email addresses.
Spammers prune their email lists regularly. If they have a list of two million addresses, and half of them are no longer valid, they waste half their processing time sending emails to non-existent accounts. It might only take a few cycles to send out one spam email, but for spammers, each email sent to an actual account is worth $0.0000?, so they need to send out as many as possible. Wasting a million emails because their lists are out of date becomes a problem.
3 ways to reduce spam:
1. If you receive spam on your email account, someone you gave it to most likely gave it away, or got hacked and it was stolen from them, etc. Avoid giving your email address to every TDH (Tom, Dick and Harry.com) that asks for it. Keep a junk email address for those sites that you can check if necessary.
2. If you can make the spammers believe your account is no longer valid, they will stop sending you spam. (Automated 'user not found' or undeliverable responses to spam should help.)
3. I keep a catch-all email domain NameOfWebSite@mydomain.com, and if any website gives my address away, or gets hacked, a simple filter rule to never receive mail from that site again takes care of that problem. e.g. eharmony got hacked at some point a few years ago after I signed up with them, and I started receiving pr0n spam on eharmony@mydomain.com. A simple filter rule took care of the problem.
I've often wondered this as well. Why not put sending limits on accounts, plus spam check outgoing mail? An account is used to send spam? disable it (permanently or temporarily.)
I also think ISPs should be forced to do this. If they have a customer who sends massive amounts of email, they should have to investigate the nature of those emails. If they have an IP that is sending out spam, disable that customer's account until the problem is fixed. It would really disrupt a botnet if every time they acquire control of a new computer, the ISP shuts down the connection.
The ISPs claim that P2P software takes up too much bandwidth, but what about all of the spam and other botnet activities?
Unless you can get 50 million or so people to all vote for someone else together, Either Obama or McCain will be president. And Ron Paul said on TV, in an interview, that he isn't running for the job, so who would you suggest?
Sadly enough, we often vote against someone rather than for someone, but in this country that is so widespread and diverse in terms of economy, beliefs, values, priorities, etc., you have to kiss so many people's ass (often who completely conflict with each other), that becoming elected is almost a joke -- until that is, you realize that this election is for who should be the next "Most Powerful Person in the World."
All of it makes me physically sick. The corporations control far too much power, because politicians need money to campaign, and corporations give them millions to do so, so they owe the companies for helping them get elected. It's Legalized Bribery.
It is literally, "I'll give you $300,000 if you vote this way, but if you don't, I'll give $400,000 to your opponent to beat you at next election."
We should switch to more of an actual democracy, instead of a republic, in which every fall, we all get to vote on what congress did throughout the year.
This, of course, leads to Monty Python, as all good arguments should:
"We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week. But all the decision of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting, by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, --
--but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more-- "
I remember in the mid-80s a friend of mine would dial into the Merit Network for this type of connection. Something he was doing wasn't completely legit (LD codes and such) and he ended up getting HUGE phone bills months later.
Coincidentally, Merit was the group that received grants from the NSF to implement this new network.
No, back in the mid-80's we actually could stream text in realtime. Although with a 300 Baud Modem (.3kbps) you could read the text faster than it could be sent to your computer, but with 1200 Baud (1.2kbps) the text would come too fast to read and you'd have to scroll through it.
These low speeds made the pr0n really bad and of such low-quality that I switched over to interacting with real women. If we had better technology then that was affordable, I might never have left the basement . . .
This is talked about as if we were "using up" the materials, instead of just using them.
Do flat panel TVs destroy the Gallium, Indium, Hafnium or whatever else is used in them?
We use zinc instead of copper to make pennies, so, when we run out of zinc and copper, we just search in everyone's couches and junk drawers and under their car seats for however much we need.
I don't think that these companies will ever really "get" it and stop trying to eliminate the effects of DRM and sharing and look at the cause.
This type of n-variant system will never work because if I own a copy of a song, I want to play it on my mp3 player, in my car, on my home stereo, or on my computer, depending on where I am and what I'm doing. All of these are legal activities, and I don't need to buy 4 copies of a song.
So, if I can have 4 copies of a song I bought, then it becomes highly difficult for the record companies to make sure I don't take one of these copies and give it to someone else. This is one of the biggest flaws in their current business model.
The other thing these people will never understand, is that with digital copies of ANYTHING, modifications can and will be made. A copy of a song that can only play on your mp3 player? Only until someone hacks the copy so it can play everywhere, rendering this "new technology" useless.
People have and will always share music and movies and software and whatever else they either can't or don't want to pay for. What these companies should do is to make these items Convenient, Low-Cost and Available everywhere. Why steal that song when you can get it for under $1? Why burn a copy of that movie when you can get a high-quality version cheaply? Customers get what they want (high-quality, convenience, low-cost, etc.), and the companies continue to make money.
Yet, these companies continue to piss more and more people off, and remain clueless. They screwed the customers with $15 CDs that had 1-2 songs anybody actually wanted. Then they resisted making individual songs available because the rest of the crap on a CD would never sell.
The lesson they should have learned YEARS ago, is that if you piss off your customers, and don't give them what they want at a reasonable price, some of them will find a way around your restrictions, illegally if necessary.
The term 'Anonymous Coward' fits really well here.
So, when choosing which side to take, you obviously go with the RIAA, over the lawyer defending the Cassin family.
While their are many aspects to IP, illegal file sharing, copyrights, etc., you choose to side with the group that sends out blanket lawsuits in an attempt to do as much money-grabbing as easily as possible. This is the same group that has sued homeless people, elderly people, DEAD people, and people without computers. Based on what, they have to be right EVENTUALLY?
So many people hate these lawyers and the RIAA not just because they'd really like to download music for free (even though iTunes now sells more music than WalMart), but because they are extremely underhanded, conniving and despicable, even for lawyers. Even other lawyers can't stand them, and that says a lot.
Their MO is "find people to sue, threaten much, try to extract money, drop the case if they want to fight or it will be too hard, and don't worry about whether they did it or not, hopefully they'll just pay some money to make us go away."
Then every now and then, to show they are serious and that they can fight, push hard to win regardless of the facts so more people will be afraid.
This is not acceptable behavior in a free country. Personally, I don't know the Cassin family, and I know nothing about the evidence against them or whether they're guilty or not, but given the RIAA's tactics and prior behavior, I want the RIAA to lose, badly, expensively and repeatedly until these types of actions are no longer allowed in civilized society.
In a courtroom, your actions and your reputation as a lawyer follow you in every case you argue. These lawyers are scum and have proved it many times, they should be treated as such.
Slashdot Mirror
What really, really Grinds My Gears about this, is what about the passenger? They can't watch TV or a movie on this because the driver might look at it?
Enforce more personal responsibility, make fines and sentences much harsher for those who cause accidents and problems because they can't pay attention and let the rest of us make our own choices and not be restricted because of the Lowest Common Denominator of human stupidity.
Texting while driving isn't allowed in many areas, but your cellphone doesn't warn you if you are trying to text while moving down the road. Is this the next step in human de-evolution? Just dumb everything down so the Idiots Among Us never need to engage any extra brain cells?
All of this just makes me to want to get my own island and outlaw stupidity.
"Not all those who wonder are lost" ;)
Me, staring in the fridge: "I wonder how old this pasta is?"
My roommate, seeing me ponder this: "Are you lost?"
Except for the cases where you can't access your account from an unknown computer without supplying both the password, and the correct answers to the security questions.
For example, if you ever get a new computer, lose your computer, etc.
Unless of course, you make frequent backups, as I'm sure everyone here does, and you bother to backup the cookies directory . . .
One of my credit card banks just forced this onto its customers -- and you can't use the same answer for all three.
I prefer answers that have absolutely nothing to do with the question, but I can't remember exactly all my witty and funny responses to their inane questions, so this "security" frequently fails.
So, basically it's one of these:
http://www.eye.fi/
I'm surprised no one has mentioned it before, but I thought it was becoming obvious lately.
I buy a lot of stuff at Home Depot, with either cash, a credit card, debit card, or my home depot card. Whenever I need to return something and I don't have the receipt, they just swipe one of the cards, and everything but my cash purchases come up. This is no big surprise.
They link the accounts in their system.
The OP said he didn't give them any info during this purchase, but what about a different purchase with the same card? Best Buy often asks for phone numbers or other info "for warranty purposes", so they could have easily gotten his address. But what I don't know is how they specifically link my different credit cards (compare digital signatures, names + zip codes on the cards, whatever).
People on here always talk about data collection and aggregation, and then they are surprised when Best Buy "magically" has their address?
The longer-term goal is to create a system with the level of complexity of a cat's brain.
"The system can't be accessed right now Sir."
"And why is that? This system cost millions. It better be working."
"Well, the system all of a sudden decided it needed to be in a different room, took off running, got scared by it's shadow and a blinking red light, and has spent the last few hours hiding under the couch in the basement. We tried to coax it out with a rabbit's foot keychain, but haven't yet been successful. Roger is trying a can of tuna fish."
He said 50% of the people you meet are of average intelligence. Because, you know, there's 25% above average and 25% below average as well.
Methinks he doesn't know how averages work . . .
he probably would not have used if he'd taken time and effort to get the design right!
. . . yeah, because people never change their minds after you interview them and later they discover that what would be "really great" is if the project could also do such and such . . .
Of course, you could always tell your manager that if they wanted that added functionality they just mentioned, that they should have requested it 6 months ago when you asked them. Because you know, that usually works, and goes over quite well to boot.
I'm sure your manager will know better next time. Will know better than to ask you to work on their projects.
Well, then why don't we all just start some of these corrupt, fraudulent businesses because it'll be impossible to catch us?
We break the law, cover our tracks, and presto, instant riches with no repercussions or consequences!!!
what do you do when they say "Yes"?
Hmm, they say "yes". What could then happen? Oh, I know, get more information about them so you could "meet" them somewhere . . .
I think they could find it pretty quickly if they wanted to, or were motivated enough to look.
If someone were to make bomb threats or death threats against the government, congress, white house, etc. then I think the FBI and Secret Service could find them pretty quickly, don't you?
I'm sorry, but I don't buy the line that with all the technology and spying the phone companies are doing, that they can't find these people within a matter of minutes.
I would call the following agencies, in this order, write down everything, and then if you get nowhere, call up ALL of the local news stations:
Complain to the phone company.
Complain to the FBI.
Complain to the FTC.
Complain to your Congressman.
Complain to your Senator.
Ask all of them, if they refuse to help, who you should call. If you get nowhere, or think any of them are dragging their feet, contact the news stations.
Passing on the right is NEVER EVER EVER justified. It is just stupid dangerous.
I disagree. There are a lot of stupid drivers out there. I try to avoid them. If there are three lanes, and you're in the middle, and some idiot soccer mom is driving her minivan in the far left lane at the same speed as you (60mph), and I would like to pass both of you, I can either use the right lane (which is not illegal in my state, or any other state I've heard of, despite what anyone claims on here. Try actually looking up your state's laws before stating what they are) or wait for one of you to get far enough away from the other one to pass without having to use the mostly open right lane.
If the speed limit is 70mph, and 2 lanes are occupied by vehicles of any size going 60mph, I'll pass on the right and go about my way, instead of trying to get one of the inconsiderate other drivers to change lanes first. That's just the way it is.
I've also driven large trucks, and you really shouldn't have much of a blind spot at all. When I'm on the right of a semi on city streets, I can see the side mirrors, which means they should be able to see me. If they still have problems, they should get the 6"-7" fish-eye mirrors which lets you see everything over there. It really isn't all that difficult. If you can't do that, setup one of those "backup cameras" so you can have a little screen that can show you the right side.
MASSIVE blind spots are irresponsible, unnecessary and should be unacceptable.
In my wonderful town of Ann Arbor, Mich., about 99% of the turn lanes at traffic lights have those little red arrows restricting you from turning even if the light is green for traffic going straight and nobody is on the road (sometimes even at 4am). They give you a few seconds of a green turn arrow at the beginning of the cycle, but that's all.
A small handful of them here (e.g. Geddes and Earhart), as well as most of them in other areas around here (Macomb County, Oakland County, etc.) use flashing red lights for the turn lane while people going straight have green lights. At the end of the cycle, the turn arrows turn green in case traffic is too busy and you couldn't turn while it was flashing red.
It makes no sense to me, especially all those times I'm sitting at the red turn arrow, there is no traffic going straight, but they have the green light anyway, and I can't turn. How much gas do you think is wasted everyday at these situations? What makes it worse is that most lights have the sensors at them so they can determine if cars are there or not, but still don't work very efficiently.
And forget about it if you happen to be riding a motorcycle, the sensors can't determine if you're there, so they never turn green for you unless a car pulls up behind you, so you just have to run the red lights / turn arrows when it's clear.
You'd think a somewhat environmentally-friendly city like Ann Arbor would be better at finding ways to reduce pollution, including simple ones like adjusting the traffic lights to reduce wasteful idling where possible.
Pictures of applicants drinking?
"Look, this guy is at a restaurant and there's a beer on the table. Better not hire that one, must be a lush!"
It's not like the tickets have peoples names on them. If 'Daniel' just gave the tickets away, how does this change the security?
Can't anyone just give their tickets to someone else if they are unable to go?
My Gmail account has never received any spam. I use it quite sparingly, as I have many others, but for the most part random addresses don't receive spam because someone guessed your email addresses.
Spammers prune their email lists regularly. If they have a list of two million addresses, and half of them are no longer valid, they waste half their processing time sending emails to non-existent accounts. It might only take a few cycles to send out one spam email, but for spammers, each email sent to an actual account is worth $0.0000?, so they need to send out as many as possible. Wasting a million emails because their lists are out of date becomes a problem.
3 ways to reduce spam:
1. If you receive spam on your email account, someone you gave it to most likely gave it away, or got hacked and it was stolen from them, etc. Avoid giving your email address to every TDH (Tom, Dick and Harry.com) that asks for it. Keep a junk email address for those sites that you can check if necessary.
2. If you can make the spammers believe your account is no longer valid, they will stop sending you spam. (Automated 'user not found' or undeliverable responses to spam should help.)
3. I keep a catch-all email domain NameOfWebSite@mydomain.com, and if any website gives my address away, or gets hacked, a simple filter rule to never receive mail from that site again takes care of that problem. e.g. eharmony got hacked at some point a few years ago after I signed up with them, and I started receiving pr0n spam on eharmony@mydomain.com. A simple filter rule took care of the problem.
I've often wondered this as well. Why not put sending limits on accounts, plus spam check outgoing mail? An account is used to send spam? disable it (permanently or temporarily.)
I also think ISPs should be forced to do this. If they have a customer who sends massive amounts of email, they should have to investigate the nature of those emails. If they have an IP that is sending out spam, disable that customer's account until the problem is fixed. It would really disrupt a botnet if every time they acquire control of a new computer, the ISP shuts down the connection.
The ISPs claim that P2P software takes up too much bandwidth, but what about all of the spam and other botnet activities?
Yes, we've had this discussion many times on /.
Unless you can get 50 million or so people to all vote for someone else together, Either Obama or McCain will be president. And Ron Paul said on TV, in an interview, that he isn't running for the job, so who would you suggest?
Sadly enough, we often vote against someone rather than for someone, but in this country that is so widespread and diverse in terms of economy, beliefs, values, priorities, etc., you have to kiss so many people's ass (often who completely conflict with each other), that becoming elected is almost a joke -- until that is, you realize that this election is for who should be the next "Most Powerful Person in the World."
All of it makes me physically sick. The corporations control far too much power, because politicians need money to campaign, and corporations give them millions to do so, so they owe the companies for helping them get elected. It's Legalized Bribery.
It is literally, "I'll give you $300,000 if you vote this way, but if you don't, I'll give $400,000 to your opponent to beat you at next election."
We should switch to more of an actual democracy, instead of a republic, in which every fall, we all get to vote on what congress did throughout the year.
This, of course, leads to Monty Python, as all good arguments should:
"We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week. But all the decision of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting, by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, -- --but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more-- "
I remember in the mid-80s a friend of mine would dial into the Merit Network for this type of connection. Something he was doing wasn't completely legit (LD codes and such) and he ended up getting HUGE phone bills months later.
Coincidentally, Merit was the group that received grants from the NSF to implement this new network.
No, back in the mid-80's we actually could stream text in realtime. Although with a 300 Baud Modem (.3kbps) you could read the text faster than it could be sent to your computer, but with 1200 Baud (1.2kbps) the text would come too fast to read and you'd have to scroll through it.
These low speeds made the pr0n really bad and of such low-quality that I switched over to interacting with real women. If we had better technology then that was affordable, I might never have left the basement . . .
I thought, but didn't want to actually READ the article, so I just posted something anyway, and then others can think for me.
This is talked about as if we were "using up" the materials, instead of just using them.
Do flat panel TVs destroy the Gallium, Indium, Hafnium or whatever else is used in them?
We use zinc instead of copper to make pennies, so, when we run out of zinc and copper, we just search in everyone's couches and junk drawers and under their car seats for however much we need.
Problem solved. Where's my Nobel Peace Prize?
I don't think that these companies will ever really "get" it and stop trying to eliminate the effects of DRM and sharing and look at the cause.
This type of n-variant system will never work because if I own a copy of a song, I want to play it on my mp3 player, in my car, on my home stereo, or on my computer, depending on where I am and what I'm doing. All of these are legal activities, and I don't need to buy 4 copies of a song.
So, if I can have 4 copies of a song I bought, then it becomes highly difficult for the record companies to make sure I don't take one of these copies and give it to someone else. This is one of the biggest flaws in their current business model.
The other thing these people will never understand, is that with digital copies of ANYTHING, modifications can and will be made. A copy of a song that can only play on your mp3 player? Only until someone hacks the copy so it can play everywhere, rendering this "new technology" useless.
People have and will always share music and movies and software and whatever else they either can't or don't want to pay for. What these companies should do is to make these items Convenient, Low-Cost and Available everywhere. Why steal that song when you can get it for under $1? Why burn a copy of that movie when you can get a high-quality version cheaply? Customers get what they want (high-quality, convenience, low-cost, etc.), and the companies continue to make money.
Yet, these companies continue to piss more and more people off, and remain clueless. They screwed the customers with $15 CDs that had 1-2 songs anybody actually wanted. Then they resisted making individual songs available because the rest of the crap on a CD would never sell.
The lesson they should have learned YEARS ago, is that if you piss off your customers, and don't give them what they want at a reasonable price, some of them will find a way around your restrictions, illegally if necessary.
The term 'Anonymous Coward' fits really well here.
So, when choosing which side to take, you obviously go with the RIAA, over the lawyer defending the Cassin family.
While their are many aspects to IP, illegal file sharing, copyrights, etc., you choose to side with the group that sends out blanket lawsuits in an attempt to do as much money-grabbing as easily as possible. This is the same group that has sued homeless people, elderly people, DEAD people, and people without computers. Based on what, they have to be right EVENTUALLY?
So many people hate these lawyers and the RIAA not just because they'd really like to download music for free (even though iTunes now sells more music than WalMart), but because they are extremely underhanded, conniving and despicable, even for lawyers. Even other lawyers can't stand them, and that says a lot.
Their MO is "find people to sue, threaten much, try to extract money, drop the case if they want to fight or it will be too hard, and don't worry about whether they did it or not, hopefully they'll just pay some money to make us go away."
Then every now and then, to show they are serious and that they can fight, push hard to win regardless of the facts so more people will be afraid.
This is not acceptable behavior in a free country. Personally, I don't know the Cassin family, and I know nothing about the evidence against them or whether they're guilty or not, but given the RIAA's tactics and prior behavior, I want the RIAA to lose, badly, expensively and repeatedly until these types of actions are no longer allowed in civilized society.
In a courtroom, your actions and your reputation as a lawyer follow you in every case you argue. These lawyers are scum and have proved it many times, they should be treated as such.