If the USA would enforce her anti-trust laws, all that money would be going to the US government. Think about it. It is a case to lobby your government to do better enforcement.
Watch for Microsoft to come out with a Netbook. I just occurred to me that this is just the kind of thing they would try. I'm sure they die of envy every time they think of Apple's profit margins. They have experience with hardware now - and even contemplated creating their own OLPC. Watch them try to scoop Apple on this. They will come out with a touch screen interface, and it will run a fully functional Windows 7, IE, Silverlight, and tie into Windows Live and Microsoft's Cloud. They will have their own app store, and they will figure they can completely bypass anti-trust challenges on such a device. Now if they do this, I wish them all the success they had with Zune.
That's what I was thinking - you could run a whole new generation of Flash/AS3 RIAs, Java apps from Sun's new Java store - maybe with a processor dedicated to Java byte code, and these new Google extensions to Java script. Why not have a desktop created in one of these technologies?
That's exactly how web standards got to be the mess they are. Browser manufacturers wrote browsers to be compatible with each other and to support new features, instead of following the standards. And thus the standard fell behind and became increasingly useless.
What an outrageous defence! It was Microsoft who deliberately broke the web with IE and since they dominated the browser after they eliminated Netscape, others had no choice but code their websites to work with IE. See "Standards as a means of sabotage"
Microsoft did what they had to do to break compatibility. They must have been laughing themselves silly when they realised that other users of ODF had left the door open for them to both break compatibility AND
claim compliance.
Don't kid yourself, they may have been very happy to claim that they are compliant, but compliance was not the aim. Breaking compatibility was the primary purpose.
Why was this modded Flamebait? It is actually insightful, given Microsoft's history. That moderators rarely award points to ACs is somewhat understandable, but to censor an AC when it is already invisible is puzzling to me. Must have been an unintentional error is the only thing I can imagine.
It has been stated that maybe what is needed for a CTO position is someone who understands how government and policy is applied. If you watch this video where Paul Chopra in his capacity as Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia keynoted the 5th Annual State of the Net Conference 2009, you may come to the conclusion as I did that he is a very capable man, with the requisite political savvy to get things done. Political skills may turn out to be more important than geek level technical knowledge in the end. In this entire 51 minute video, it is hard to find fault with Mr. Chopra as he discusses such things as Virginia's open text book initiative. However it isn't until near the very end that some serious concerns are triggered for me. At 38:13 he speaks of a new initiative called "Plugged In" that rests on a very basic hypothesis that "In 6 months we can take a high school drop out and prepare them for a technology job." It is a GED program that reconstitutes the curriculum for adults adding in certificates "with the help of partners like Microsoft". A state government promoting a private company is worrisome to me.
The second concern I had was at 48:30 where he is responding to a question about how to best stimulate innovative start-ups and entrepreneurship. To this he replies by talking about his "GAP Fund" that supplies $100 K investments to new start-ups "Restricted only to innovative technology companies that are grounded in intellectual property." "We have a billion service companies, but it's the grounding in intellectual property that to us is the secret, so it's targeting limited resources to intellectual property". He does not explain why "a billion service companies" are not important to him.
Now when I played the question from the audience that provoked this response over a couple of times, it struck me as very strange. The question was: "There are tens of thousands of small startups that are really producing innovative products based on intellectual property. What is the best way that a state can promote small startups, and making sure of course that they collaborate with their IP, but it's protected and monetized in a way that they can sell it out to other places?" It leads one to ponder - why does the speaker consider intellectual property so important? Why does he emphasise it in just that way, rather than speak about hi tech startups in general? Could he have been a Microsoft plant? Suddenly as I listened to this, I got a vision of Microsoft lobbyists and sales people crawling all over government initiatives everywhere, making little deals here and there to ensure the open source is blocked at every turn.
"Thinly disguised editorial consisting mostly of anti-Microsoft remarks and an assertion that confirmation hearings are a sham process is submitted as a news story to Slashdot."
I don't get what you are complaining about here. Is it the "anti-Microsoft remarks" that put you off? Here on Slashdot, we enjoy a sprinkling of anti-Microsoft remarks in just about any article or comment, as others enjoy a dash of pepper on their pasta to spice up their food. I suppose if you personally don't enjoy this, perhaps this is not the forum for you.
I don't think anybody said all Windows machines are part of botnets, but millions upon millions are, so I would't call "FUD" here. In fact, when choosing an operating system it may be wise to consider what percent of all attacks/exploits/viruses/phishing attacks or what have you are targeting a given OS. If, for example, your research tells you that there 97% of all attacks are targeting platform A, and 2.5% of all attacks target platform B, and only 0.5% target platform C, then it may be a good idea to buy into platform B or C, as platform A in this example would be just asking for trouble. Now I would simply call this good, common sense advice, not FUD.
Now someone may argue that it is not entirely fair to blame Microsoft's operating systems for this problem. Perhaps it has more to do with the fact that we happen to have a very unhealthy monoculture of Microsoft OSes, so they became a magnet for malware developers. We can't blame Microsoft for the fact that they build the most popular operating systems in the world - oh wait - perhaps it is their monopolistic anti-competitive practises and lock-in that made theirs the most popular operating system in the world, and the fact that it is now the most targeted platform in the world is all their chickens coming home to roost.
"Consumers face potential identity theft, system failures and unrecoverable data loss," he said.
"Windows 7 will include new methods of protecting consumers from software piracy..."
"Customers want to know that they are using the genuine high-quality Microsoft product..."
"Counterfeit software delivers a poor experience and impacts customer satisfaction with our products..."
"Customers running genuine Windows Vista Service Pack 1 are protected from that experience."
"We see many cases of customers who wanted to buy genuine software and believed they did, only to find out later that they were victims of software piracy. We want to prevent that kind of thing in the first place."
"Windows Genuine Advantage [in] Windows 7 will make it harder to ignore repeated messages."
Williams also hinted at tools pitched at enterprises designed to improve and speed up company-wide systems authentication. "When customers see and use the tools we are providing to
support Windows Vista and Windows 7 deployments, we think they will be impressed," he said.
Even though the the post says "...by following links one gets the impression that they will be powered by Linux, not XP", we better wait to see if Microsoft will yet find a way to sabotage this project by turning it into yet another promotion for One Microsoft Way. The higher profile this becomes, the greater likelihood Microsoft will step in and you will suddenly find all those laptops running Windows, and therefore your donations going to promote Microsoft lock-in.
You're kidding aren't you? "85 percent of attacks were blocked after the configuration was installed"....and the remaining 15% were not! The concept of a secure computer running Windows XP is a contradiction in terms. The military needs to do better than this, or China is gonna whup their ass.
The USA couldn't fight its way out of a wet paper bag in a cyberwar. It can't even defend itself against common hackers, who have already penetrated all of its defence contractors, etc, and already have all its military secrets. They must be the laughing stock of the whole hacker world at this point, so for them to be discussing what targets are legitimate in a cyberwar is a laugh - as if they could hit the broad side of a barn door - so to speak - with a cyber attack. I think they are now discussing what is a legitimate target in the hopes that their enemies are listening and will think about this discussion when they attack to US and be careful not to hit civilian infrastructure too hard!
The proposition before us is that the developing world is a profit sink for web companies. We have seen some excellent responses from participants from South America who suggest there is money to be made in developing countries if you know how. I remember reading about a company that garnered considerable success specializing in marketing to developing countries with some incredibly innovative thinking, and I feel the answer lies in this direction.
There was a country not mentioned as yet, however, that has a very quickly growing rate of internet participation, and that is China. I don't suppose they would have that much impact on sites like YouTube because of the cultural/language barrier, but on my own web site I have seen a tremendous increase in hits from China in just the past year. My web statistics tell me that in this past month,.cn was number 7 in the list for bytes transferred, and "unresolved numerical addresses" (which is usually China as well) was in the number 2 spot - both together accounting for 25% of content downloaded from my site.
This leads me to ponder - who are these people? I have never received any feedback from them, so they contribute nothing to me in that way. On my web site I have a humble offering of a few free software utilities, some of which have enjoyed wide-spread popularity, but basically it is just a hobby site. There is no advertising, and the bandwidth consumed overall is quite modest. However, though I have no problem with the Chinese people downloading my software, I do have a problem with the totalitarian Chinese government. For example, I hate what they are doing to the people of Tibet - deliberately trying to destroy their culture and religion. I also have a problem with how the Chinese government represses their own people, and the Great Firewall of China and censorship and everything else that comes with a totalitarian government. Just yesterday I got to thinking about maybe blocking China from my web site, but that would affect perfect innocent people, and then I had an idea. Why not just put a couple of lines on each web page saying things like "Free Tibet now!" and "Remember Tiananmen Square!", and let the Great Firewall of China block the.cn domain for me.
What is the impact of China on the Internet for others? What are your thoughts about it?
By bundling an XP VM with Win7, they can - for the first time - take the backwards compatibility crap out of Windows and concentrate on providing a stable OS.
My fear is that once they have provided for running legacy software in a VM, they will feel free to move on towards their ultimate goal - an OS that will no longer run native code. They will come out with an OS that only runs.NET managed code, and thereby exercise total control over what you can ultimately run on the platform. It will be a form of "Trusted Computing" in disguise. Only specially certified "Microsoft Partners" will be allowed special access to develop the libraries underlying.NET, and the rest of us will be shut out. Microsoft will excercise absolute control over what can be run on their OS and thereby gain enormous powers far beyond what they have today.
Thanks to the AC who said he found access to the paper via Google, I finally managed to read it again. It was available the whole time here but the download button does nothing but flash the abstract. You have to be awake to read the fine print that says "Click Location Below to Start Download". Then I just clicked the first of the 5 buttons and down came the pdf.
There was a brief reference to the Napster case in the paper, a citation in favour of the judge for giving credence to due process concerns about grossly excessive statutory damage awards in copyright cases.
To the AC and principal respondent of my first post who say that the judge is unlikely to be aware of "some obscure paper" to which I referenced, I would suggest that judges would be aware of the latest developments of thought on copyright law as much as we here on Slashdot would be aware of the latest developments in technology. Of course, that is just an assumption on my part, and I have no way of knowing that.
Finally, I just want to say that in my opinion, RealNetworks deserves our support on this issue, as it is defending against an attack on fair use, and the outcome of this trial may end up redefining fair use for better or for worse.
This paper wasn't that obscure. "Among other things, the paper concludes that the State Farm/Gore due process test is applicable to statutory damage awards under the Copyright Act, a position which is consistent with the position taken in the amicus curiae brief filed by the Free Software Foundation in SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, and inconsistent with the positions taken by the Department of Justice in Tenenbaum and in SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Cloud"
However, I believe I may be in error about what the point of view of those authors was on the Napster case. Perhaps I confused that with the Mp3DotCom case. There you go - they withdrew their paper from free public access and now I can't read it to check my facts! The Mp3DotCom case was sited as an example of a grossly excessive award against defendants in the name of protecting copyrights, a (potentially) $118 million award was made against mp3.com, even though there was no discussion or proof of damages to the copyright owner and no evidense of profit derived from the use of the copyrighted goods on the part of Mp3.com. (The judge was prepared to impose over $118 million but Mp3.com was able to reach a settlement with UMG Recordings for $53.4 million)
This may be good. By now, this judge should realize he made a big mistake in the Napster case. When "Statutory Damages in Copyright Law: A Remedy in Need of Reform" by Pamela Samuelson and Tara Wheatland came out, the Napster case was featured as one of the examples of how justice has gone wrong. Courts have strayed far from the intentions of Congress who wrote the laws governing compensation to copyright holders who's IP have been infringed. There is, for example, absolutely no basis in the law for the practise of awarding huge settlements for the purpose of "setting an example to deter other potential infringers". Congress intended for statutory damages to be mainly compensatory in nature and its wishes have not been respected in the case law. "The application of statutory damages has too often strayed from the compensatory impulse underlying statutory damages... and has focused too heavily on deterrence and punishment, especially given that too many ordinary infringements are treated as willful infringements" concludes the authors of this paper. I first freely accessed this paper via a temporary link on Recording Industry vs People. Unfortunately, that link has been replaced by a link to where you can buy the paper, but is it no longer available for free, so I will not supply that link.
I would not easily accept the results of Professor Berger's informal research, without a great deal of detail about the methodology. The fact that he is getting the same results each year does help a bit, but does nothing to eliminate investigator bias. At a minimum a double-blind study is required, but there are many things beyond that that are essential. For one thing, we have a very short memory for audio details, and what is needed is A to B tests of short musical passages of about two seconds in duration with good equipment. I really doubt that much effort was put into these tests.
I would suggest that mp3 is not as bad as the audiophiles would have you believe, but the last thing I want to do is get into an argument with that group, so I will qualify that by saying "With the most common equipment and in the most common listening situations, mp3 is generally indistinguishable with lossless compression formats". I will go on to define the most common equipment would be iPods with ear buds or PCs with cheap on board sound cards and cheap computer speakers.
In my own experience, most music sounds great until you hit the odd passage that does not compress well and causes compression artefacts. However, you need good equipment to hear that.
As I write this I am listening to my mp3 collection on my computer using my own software that I created (and just updated) via an ASIO audio interface to an external sound card and high end studio monitors. I am satisfied with what I am hearing for the most part.
...experimenters have more than doubled the amount of data analyzed and sharpened selection and analysis techniques, making the discovery possible. For each experiment, the probability that background events have faked the signal is now only one in nearly four million, allowing both collaborations to claim a bona fide discovery...
Emphases mine... I am not convinced this isn't a faked signal. With that possibility having a chance of one in four million, how many millions of collisions have they done in the past 15 years? Far more than 4 million, I would suspect.
The two collaborations have been searching for this rare process for the last fifteen years, starting before the discovery of the top quark in 1995.
...and another thing. Look at that diagram showing a muon went here and a neutrino went there - how in the world did they detect that neutrino, I ask? I bet it zipped right through their detector without so much a pausing to say hello.
Multiply the $0.99 price that's typically charged per on-line song by the 15 tracks one finds in a typical CD and you get the same $15 one pays for the CD. If people don't want to buy CDs at $15, then why do they think people would be willing to pay the equivalent of $15 for a CD online?
Ah but there's a huge flaw in your argument. When one buys a CD for $15, there is likely only one or two tracks on the entire disk worth ripping to your collection. On the other hand, when buying individual tracks at $1 each, likely every one is a winner to the purchaser. What you have in this case is a 15 to 1 increase in value when you are able to buy single tracks.
So where's the drop-in replacement for Photoshop?
What I want to do is create a system for pro photographers to use computers and the net to sell photos...
I find the concept of the "Life recorder" quite interesting. This idea has been around for awhile, but when reading the article or the comments below it, more dimensions then simply preserving the day to day experience came to my attention. For example, it was mentioned that perhaps a Life recorder - transmitting data recorded to remote data storage in real time - could identify the assailant of a person who was attacked or robbed. Such a thing could also identify who was at fault if you were involved in a car accident. And finally, there is the sinister side where in some future scenario, people could be compelled to always wear a Life recorder to prove they did not commit crimes. Anybody who did not wear one would be suspect.
While there is much food for thought in what I have just said, I have considered practical uses for a device constantly recording the daily experience. I developed a environmental audio monitor that I have experimented with running on my computer many hours a day. I have also left it running overnight or even days when I am away from the house. It records what it hears, saving the audio in mp3 format to minimize disk space. With triggering adjustable by both magnitude and frequency, it can be set up to capture only "interesting" data. I have been playing around with this concept for many years. One day I discovered a conversation I had recorded several years ago an old hard drive. It was very uncanny, an instant flashback to a long forgotten fleeting moment of the past. You would be welcome to experiment with this software (Windows platform) and share your ideas with me.
The capacitor they created occupied less than 1 square millimetre, but had a capacity of 1.0 uF. Lacking were specifics on break down voltage and on how long they can hold a charge. The micro-capacitor was tested at 0.6 volts and was bi-polar. This research suggests that 5 Farads per gram is a reasonable figure for super capacitors made with carbon electrodes employing sulfuric acid as the electrolyte. Imagine a cluster of these occupying, say, a cubic inch. That could yield thousands of Farads. If the capacitor can hold a charge for a considerable length of time, this indicates a considerable capacity for storing a charge to power small devices, even laptops.
This endless wrangling about prior art should be rendered moot by the Bilski Decision anyhow - I would hope. The Bilski Decision puts the whole concept of software patents into question.
I think one of the silliest notions I ever heard is the idea that we could propel a carriage without a horse, by using explosions from a highly explosive liquid substance. Obviously the first time they try this they are just going to blow the carriage sky heigh. The simple reason this will never work is that they forgot that a carriage has a thing called inertia, and it will quickly buckle under the force of the explosions rather than be propelled down the lane. Even if it could withstand the force of the explosions, could you imagine what kind of jerky ride you would have?
Slashdot Mirror
If the USA would enforce her anti-trust laws, all that money would be going to the US government. Think about it. It is a case to lobby your government to do better enforcement.
Watch for Microsoft to come out with a Netbook. I just occurred to me that this is just the kind of thing they would try. I'm sure they die of envy every time they think of Apple's profit margins. They have experience with hardware now - and even contemplated creating their own OLPC. Watch them try to scoop Apple on this. They will come out with a touch screen interface, and it will run a fully functional Windows 7, IE, Silverlight, and tie into Windows Live and Microsoft's Cloud. They will have their own app store, and they will figure they can completely bypass anti-trust challenges on such a device. Now if they do this, I wish them all the success they had with Zune.
That's what I was thinking - you could run a whole new generation of Flash/AS3 RIAs, Java apps from Sun's new Java store - maybe with a processor dedicated to Java byte code, and these new Google extensions to Java script. Why not have a desktop created in one of these technologies?
What an outrageous defence! It was Microsoft who deliberately broke the web with IE and since they dominated the browser after they eliminated Netscape, others had no choice but code their websites to work with IE. See "Standards as a means of sabotage"
Why was this modded Flamebait? It is actually insightful, given Microsoft's history. That moderators rarely award points to ACs is somewhat understandable, but to censor an AC when it is already invisible is puzzling to me. Must have been an unintentional error is the only thing I can imagine.
It has been stated that maybe what is needed for a CTO position is someone who understands how government and policy is applied. If you watch this video where Paul Chopra in his capacity as Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia keynoted the 5th Annual State of the Net Conference 2009, you may come to the conclusion as I did that he is a very capable man, with the requisite political savvy to get things done. Political skills may turn out to be more important than geek level technical knowledge in the end. In this entire 51 minute video, it is hard to find fault with Mr. Chopra as he discusses such things as Virginia's open text book initiative. However it isn't until near the very end that some serious concerns are triggered for me. At 38:13 he speaks of a new initiative called "Plugged In" that rests on a very basic hypothesis that "In 6 months we can take a high school drop out and prepare them for a technology job." It is a GED program that reconstitutes the curriculum for adults adding in certificates "with the help of partners like Microsoft". A state government promoting a private company is worrisome to me.
The second concern I had was at 48:30 where he is responding to a question about how to best stimulate innovative start-ups and entrepreneurship. To this he replies by talking about his "GAP Fund" that supplies $100 K investments to new start-ups "Restricted only to innovative technology companies that are grounded in intellectual property." "We have a billion service companies, but it's the grounding in intellectual property that to us is the secret, so it's targeting limited resources to intellectual property". He does not explain why "a billion service companies" are not important to him.
Now when I played the question from the audience that provoked this response over a couple of times, it struck me as very strange. The question was: "There are tens of thousands of small startups that are really producing innovative products based on intellectual property. What is the best way that a state can promote small startups, and making sure of course that they collaborate with their IP, but it's protected and monetized in a way that they can sell it out to other places?" It leads one to ponder - why does the speaker consider intellectual property so important? Why does he emphasise it in just that way, rather than speak about hi tech startups in general? Could he have been a Microsoft plant? Suddenly as I listened to this, I got a vision of Microsoft lobbyists and sales people crawling all over government initiatives everywhere, making little deals here and there to ensure the open source is blocked at every turn.
I don't get what you are complaining about here. Is it the "anti-Microsoft remarks" that put you off? Here on Slashdot, we enjoy a sprinkling of anti-Microsoft remarks in just about any article or comment, as others enjoy a dash of pepper on their pasta to spice up their food. I suppose if you personally don't enjoy this, perhaps this is not the forum for you.
I don't think anybody said all Windows machines are part of botnets, but millions upon millions are, so I would't call "FUD" here. In fact, when choosing an operating system it may be wise to consider what percent of all attacks/exploits/viruses/phishing attacks or what have you are targeting a given OS. If, for example, your research tells you that there 97% of all attacks are targeting platform A, and 2.5% of all attacks target platform B, and only 0.5% target platform C, then it may be a good idea to buy into platform B or C, as platform A in this example would be just asking for trouble. Now I would simply call this good, common sense advice, not FUD.
Now someone may argue that it is not entirely fair to blame Microsoft's operating systems for this problem. Perhaps it has more to do with the fact that we happen to have a very unhealthy monoculture of Microsoft OSes, so they became a magnet for malware developers. We can't blame Microsoft for the fact that they build the most popular operating systems in the world - oh wait - perhaps it is their monopolistic anti-competitive practises and lock-in that made theirs the most popular operating system in the world, and the fact that it is now the most targeted platform in the world is all their chickens coming home to roost.
Even though the the post says "...by following links one gets the impression that they will be powered by Linux, not XP", we better wait to see if Microsoft will yet find a way to sabotage this project by turning it into yet another promotion for One Microsoft Way. The higher profile this becomes, the greater likelihood Microsoft will step in and you will suddenly find all those laptops running Windows, and therefore your donations going to promote Microsoft lock-in.
You're kidding aren't you? "85 percent of attacks were blocked after the configuration was installed". ...and the remaining 15% were not! The concept of a secure computer running Windows XP is a contradiction in terms. The military needs to do better than this, or China is gonna whup their ass.
The USA couldn't fight its way out of a wet paper bag in a cyberwar. It can't even defend itself against common hackers, who have already penetrated all of its defence contractors, etc, and already have all its military secrets. They must be the laughing stock of the whole hacker world at this point, so for them to be discussing what targets are legitimate in a cyberwar is a laugh - as if they could hit the broad side of a barn door - so to speak - with a cyber attack. I think they are now discussing what is a legitimate target in the hopes that their enemies are listening and will think about this discussion when they attack to US and be careful not to hit civilian infrastructure too hard!
The proposition before us is that the developing world is a profit sink for web companies. We have seen some excellent responses from participants from South America who suggest there is money to be made in developing countries if you know how. I remember reading about a company that garnered considerable success specializing in marketing to developing countries with some incredibly innovative thinking, and I feel the answer lies in this direction.
There was a country not mentioned as yet, however, that has a very quickly growing rate of internet participation, and that is China. I don't suppose they would have that much impact on sites like YouTube because of the cultural/language barrier, but on my own web site I have seen a tremendous increase in hits from China in just the past year. My web statistics tell me that in this past month, .cn was number 7 in the list for bytes transferred, and "unresolved numerical addresses" (which is usually China as well) was in the number 2 spot - both together accounting for 25% of content downloaded from my site.
This leads me to ponder - who are these people? I have never received any feedback from them, so they contribute nothing to me in that way. On my web site I have a humble offering of a few free software utilities, some of which have enjoyed wide-spread popularity, but basically it is just a hobby site. There is no advertising, and the bandwidth consumed overall is quite modest. However, though I have no problem with the Chinese people downloading my software, I do have a problem with the totalitarian Chinese government. For example, I hate what they are doing to the people of Tibet - deliberately trying to destroy their culture and religion. I also have a problem with how the Chinese government represses their own people, and the Great Firewall of China and censorship and everything else that comes with a totalitarian government. Just yesterday I got to thinking about maybe blocking China from my web site, but that would affect perfect innocent people, and then I had an idea. Why not just put a couple of lines on each web page saying things like "Free Tibet now!" and "Remember Tiananmen Square!", and let the Great Firewall of China block the .cn domain for me.
What is the impact of China on the Internet for others? What are your thoughts about it?
My fear is that once they have provided for running legacy software in a VM, they will feel free to move on towards their ultimate goal - an OS that will no longer run native code. They will come out with an OS that only runs .NET managed code, and thereby exercise total control over what you can ultimately run on the platform. It will be a form of "Trusted Computing" in disguise. Only specially certified "Microsoft Partners" will be allowed special access to develop the libraries underlying .NET, and the rest of us will be shut out. Microsoft will excercise absolute control over what can be run on their OS and thereby gain enormous powers far beyond what they have today.
Thanks to the AC who said he found access to the paper via Google, I finally managed to read it again. It was available the whole time here but the download button does nothing but flash the abstract. You have to be awake to read the fine print that says "Click Location Below to Start Download". Then I just clicked the first of the 5 buttons and down came the pdf.
There was a brief reference to the Napster case in the paper, a citation in favour of the judge for giving credence to due process concerns about grossly excessive statutory damage awards in copyright cases.
To the AC and principal respondent of my first post who say that the judge is unlikely to be aware of "some obscure paper" to which I referenced, I would suggest that judges would be aware of the latest developments of thought on copyright law as much as we here on Slashdot would be aware of the latest developments in technology. Of course, that is just an assumption on my part, and I have no way of knowing that.
I would also like to point out a very interesting blog from two years ago that I just ran across that has direct bearing on the RealDVD Legal Battle. FAIR USE Act analysis: DMCA reform left on the cutting room floor"
Finally, I just want to say that in my opinion, RealNetworks deserves our support on this issue, as it is defending against an attack on fair use, and the outcome of this trial may end up redefining fair use for better or for worse.
This paper wasn't that obscure. "Among other things, the paper concludes that the State Farm/Gore due process test is applicable to statutory damage awards under the Copyright Act, a position which is consistent with the position taken in the amicus curiae brief filed by the Free Software Foundation in SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, and inconsistent with the positions taken by the Department of Justice in Tenenbaum and in SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Cloud"
However, I believe I may be in error about what the point of view of those authors was on the Napster case. Perhaps I confused that with the Mp3DotCom case. There you go - they withdrew their paper from free public access and now I can't read it to check my facts! The Mp3DotCom case was sited as an example of a grossly excessive award against defendants in the name of protecting copyrights, a (potentially) $118 million award was made against mp3.com, even though there was no discussion or proof of damages to the copyright owner and no evidense of profit derived from the use of the copyrighted goods on the part of Mp3.com. (The judge was prepared to impose over $118 million but Mp3.com was able to reach a settlement with UMG Recordings for $53.4 million)
This may be good. By now, this judge should realize he made a big mistake in the Napster case. When "Statutory Damages in Copyright Law: A Remedy in Need of Reform" by Pamela Samuelson and Tara Wheatland came out, the Napster case was featured as one of the examples of how justice has gone wrong. Courts have strayed far from the intentions of Congress who wrote the laws governing compensation to copyright holders who's IP have been infringed. There is, for example, absolutely no basis in the law for the practise of awarding huge settlements for the purpose of "setting an example to deter other potential infringers". Congress intended for statutory damages to be mainly compensatory in nature and its wishes have not been respected in the case law. "The application of statutory damages has too often strayed from the compensatory impulse underlying statutory damages ... and has focused too heavily on deterrence and punishment, especially given that too many ordinary infringements are treated as willful infringements" concludes the authors of this paper. I first freely accessed this paper via a temporary link on Recording Industry vs People. Unfortunately, that link has been replaced by a link to where you can buy the paper, but is it no longer available for free, so I will not supply that link.
I would not easily accept the results of Professor Berger's informal research, without a great deal of detail about the methodology. The fact that he is getting the same results each year does help a bit, but does nothing to eliminate investigator bias. At a minimum a double-blind study is required, but there are many things beyond that that are essential. For one thing, we have a very short memory for audio details, and what is needed is A to B tests of short musical passages of about two seconds in duration with good equipment. I really doubt that much effort was put into these tests.
I would suggest that mp3 is not as bad as the audiophiles would have you believe, but the last thing I want to do is get into an argument with that group, so I will qualify that by saying "With the most common equipment and in the most common listening situations, mp3 is generally indistinguishable with lossless compression formats". I will go on to define the most common equipment would be iPods with ear buds or PCs with cheap on board sound cards and cheap computer speakers.
In my own experience, most music sounds great until you hit the odd passage that does not compress well and causes compression artefacts. However, you need good equipment to hear that.
As I write this I am listening to my mp3 collection on my computer using my own software that I created (and just updated) via an ASIO audio interface to an external sound card and high end studio monitors. I am satisfied with what I am hearing for the most part.
Emphases mine... I am not convinced this isn't a faked signal. With that possibility having a chance of one in four million, how many millions of collisions have they done in the past 15 years? Far more than 4 million, I would suspect.
...and another thing. Look at that diagram showing a muon went here and a neutrino went there - how in the world did they detect that neutrino, I ask? I bet it zipped right through their detector without so much a pausing to say hello.
Ah but there's a huge flaw in your argument. When one buys a CD for $15, there is likely only one or two tracks on the entire disk worth ripping to your collection. On the other hand, when buying individual tracks at $1 each, likely every one is a winner to the purchaser. What you have in this case is a 15 to 1 increase in value when you are able to buy single tracks.
Have you seen this?
I find the concept of the "Life recorder" quite interesting. This idea has been around for awhile, but when reading the article or the comments below it, more dimensions then simply preserving the day to day experience came to my attention. For example, it was mentioned that perhaps a Life recorder - transmitting data recorded to remote data storage in real time - could identify the assailant of a person who was attacked or robbed. Such a thing could also identify who was at fault if you were involved in a car accident. And finally, there is the sinister side where in some future scenario, people could be compelled to always wear a Life recorder to prove they did not commit crimes. Anybody who did not wear one would be suspect.
While there is much food for thought in what I have just said, I have considered practical uses for a device constantly recording the daily experience. I developed a environmental audio monitor that I have experimented with running on my computer many hours a day. I have also left it running overnight or even days when I am away from the house. It records what it hears, saving the audio in mp3 format to minimize disk space. With triggering adjustable by both magnitude and frequency, it can be set up to capture only "interesting" data. I have been playing around with this concept for many years. One day I discovered a conversation I had recorded several years ago an old hard drive. It was very uncanny, an instant flashback to a long forgotten fleeting moment of the past. You would be welcome to experiment with this software (Windows platform) and share your ideas with me.
The capacitor they created occupied less than 1 square millimetre, but had a capacity of 1.0 uF. Lacking were specifics on break down voltage and on how long they can hold a charge. The micro-capacitor was tested at 0.6 volts and was bi-polar. This research suggests that 5 Farads per gram is a reasonable figure for super capacitors made with carbon electrodes employing sulfuric acid as the electrolyte. Imagine a cluster of these occupying, say, a cubic inch. That could yield thousands of Farads. If the capacitor can hold a charge for a considerable length of time, this indicates a considerable capacity for storing a charge to power small devices, even laptops.
This endless wrangling about prior art should be rendered moot by the Bilski Decision anyhow - I would hope. The Bilski Decision puts the whole concept of software patents into question.
I think one of the silliest notions I ever heard is the idea that we could propel a carriage without a horse, by using explosions from a highly explosive liquid substance. Obviously the first time they try this they are just going to blow the carriage sky heigh. The simple reason this will never work is that they forgot that a carriage has a thing called inertia, and it will quickly buckle under the force of the explosions rather than be propelled down the lane. Even if it could withstand the force of the explosions, could you imagine what kind of jerky ride you would have?