One, it's circular. Two, the devil is in the detailed definition of "what it needs to do".
If I could come up with a succinct definition of "what it needs to do" I'd be running for president. Unfortunately exactly what the government is supposed to be doing is rather much up for debate, although generally speaking, it should do the bare minimum that it possibly can while still meeting the needs of the people. The primary function of government is to provide those services that the public needs, but are unprofitable to provide, or which can not be trusted to private enterprise for one reason or another (law enforcement comes to mind). Of course, that's mostly my opinion of what the government is to provide, others disagree as can be seen by the many forms of government currently in existence on our planet, as well as all those that came before them.
My point was essentially that power corrupts, and a corrupt government is either a dictatorship, or a aristocracy (possibly the neologism of a corporatocracy as well), so the best way to maintain a non-abusive government is to limit its power to the bare minimum. Exactly what that minimum is, is going to vary depending on exactly what you define power as, and what you think the government needs to be doing.
It's ok, I'm not hurting for karma, and I was wrong about the salary cap apparently. Better that people see the follow up responses than the original comment as there's better discussions and arguments there.
N.B. Posted sans-karma because this isn't really on topic.
I don't know from where you post, but in the USA very few (actually, I can't think of any) professions have a legal salary cap.
I've always been told that most engineering fields, doctors, and athletes, have salary caps. I tried doing a google search, but all I get is page after page talking about salary caps for various sports leagues, so at least the athletes have salary caps, although from the results it looks like those are mandated by the leagues, not law. Seeing as I can't find any results to backup that statement I guess I'll have to retract it, but the rest of the post is still valid, and we do give the lawyers and judges way too much power. I wish we could come up with some way of separating attorneys and politicians, otherwise it's the case of the fox guarding the hen house.
Interestingly this implies you had faith in all of the above to begin with. For myself I trust government (any government) about as far as I can throw it. It's a necessary evil though, the trick is giving it just enough power to do what needs to be done, and not an ounce beyond that (same for the legal system). Unfortunately lawyers and judges have been running our country for far too long, and our legal and government systems show it. Fun fact, one of the only major professions without a legal salary cap is an attorney. Think about that and consider the implications.
I'll agree with the humor. But it's a sad state of affairs when genuinely interesting arguments are reduced to the drivel of a geek-form response.
There's nothing preventing humor from also making a point. One of the primary purposes of satire is in fact to point out the absurdity of every day things that we might otherwise tend to overlook. In this case the post shows many of the common flaws with anti-SPAM techniques, and in addition to entertaining you for a few moments, should also make you consider the various ways in which SPAM can be combated and which if any of the reasons on the "form" it falls afoul of.
Although that is indeed a valid colloquial usage of the word theft, it's not a proper usage in a legal setting (and by extension when discussing legal matters). The first response to your post is indeed correct, in a legal setting the proper term for that is plagiarism. English is a rather inexact language rife with ambiguous terms. Although this allows it a great deal of flexibility in describing abstract concepts, it also means that the burden is on the speaker to pick the most specific and concrete word possible for a given meaning, particularly in formal conversation (such as in legal matters). Even though theft can broadly be applied in this case, the more specific and therefore appropriate word is plagiarism. For an example of the kinds of legal ramifications the difference between a general and specific word can make, compare the difference between man-slaughter and murder in a legal case.
What really needed to happen, IMNSGDHO, was for the higher court to find unambiguously in Jacobsen's favor and then issue a hardcore smackdown to both Katzer and the lower court judge.
Damnit, when I read that my mind auto-translated IMNSGDHO, and I'm pretty sure that's a sign of some kind of mental disorder. I wonder if there's a name for it yet.
Excellent point. TFA also mentions possible perjury charges for filing what he must have known was a fraudulent patent application, deliberately trying to claim a creation date prior to the date of the work he was ripping off, and utterly failing to mention any of the copious prior art. The US patent system (and indeed almost all patent systems) are in shambles and are a complete joke in terms of fulfilling their social promise. Now that this ruling has given the OSS community (and CC as well) some teeth, maybe the *AAs of the world will think twice about pushing to have those particular legal fangs sharpened, and maybe, just maybe we'll see some patent reform as well.
The GP is right, it's not theft. The ruling sets forth that violating a open source license revokes that license, and that subsequently distributing software using that licensed work is therefore done without a license and is a case of copyright infringement. As such, this guy is committing copyright infringement against the developers of the software he's using. That's not theft, it's copyright infringement, and there is a difference.
Of course, there's also the patent issue coming up here and that's a whole other can of worms. Maybe we'll get really really lucky and this whole thing will somehow invalidate software patents as well, but somehow I doubt that's going to happen.
I seem to recall Greenpeace going after Apple in the past as well. Haven't they been trying to slam Apple for not being ecologically friendly for years now? Not saying there isn't a problem, just saying Greenpeace isn't exactly a neutral party. Maybe one of these problem systems should be sent off to a lab that really is neutral and can say for sure whether there's a problem or not.
He didn't mean the MacBookPro (MBP), he meant Mac Pro, you know, the big desktop systems, one of these.
Seems there might be something to the report, but it's too early to say for sure. If it's correct then the problem is most likely related to either a protective coating applied to the motherboard, or possible some plastic pieces on the inside of the case (my money would be on the coating though).
So, to re-iterate, this isn't talking about any of the laptops, this is just the desktops, and even then not any of the iMacs (at least only Mac Pros have reported this problem).
There is, but all that occurs outside of the virtual world this is going to be based on. The storyline is also not applicable, as in the books the main characters are investigating why people are getting trapped in the virtual world and once they themselves become trapped attempting to work their way out of it. As several others have already commented, the virtual world parts of the book are really very shallow because it's mostly about them attempting not to get killed long enough to make it to the next world. I would say it's comparable to trying to convert something like Portal into an MMO. There's a story there, and I don't think anyone would argue it's a pretty good story, but it's sort of a one shot thing. Sure the gameplay mechanic could be carried over, but the story itself is no good for an MMO setting. Likewise the over-arching story from the books, what made them good, is no good for an MMO setting.
Wake me up when a mutant is using hypnotic mind-control to make me believe I'm actually in the game. Until then I don't think this is going to be a particularly compelling MMORPG.
SPOILER TO FOLLOW
Hint to the mods, this is a reference to the books. You eventually find out a psychic mutant is the one responsible for getting the people stuck in the virtual worlds. As for whether it'll be a good MMO or not, well, hard to say. Its greatest strength looks to be its biggest weakness, that is, it's so open ended it's going to be hard to motivate the players.
I think we need to have something cleared up. I keep seeing people refer to the "lore" of Otherland, but that kind of misses the point. Otherland doesn't really have "lore" in the same way that things like WoW, LoTR, Warhammer, or even StarTrek do. The basic premise of the book was that the internet has evolved to the point where everyone interfaces via a direct neural interface and it's experienced as a immersive 3d world with avatars etc., but that something weird is happening and some people are getting "stuck" in the virtual worlds. This is similar to the premise of.Hack, but very different in other ways. Anyway, there's really only 2 bits of "lore" I can think of from the books that could conceivably be brought across. The first would be the major antagonists from the book, which is a fat man and a skinny man that hunt the characters across the various virtual worlds (always wearing an avatar that matches them in some way, for instance the fat man as a toad and the skinny man as a praying mantis). The second item would be the use of certain gestures to perform various actions, such as moving fingers in a very specific pattern to open a portal to another world. It's important to note however that in the books when the characters get sucked into the virtual worlds and lose their ability to log out, the worlds also stop responding to the standard gestures.
Anyway, the important thing is, that for the purposes of something like this MMO, Otherland isn't really a single world with lore, rather it's more of a meta-world in which the players randomly get dropped into one of many worlds each with their own lore.
Wow, I didn't actually expect a response, let alone a well thought out and reasoned one. Ok, well, that's a plausible explanation for how the Tunguska impact could be tied to the spread of a virus in Africa, but still doesn't explain some of the HIV like viruses that pre-date the Tunguska event and are speculated to be the pre-cursor to HIV. Unfortunately at this point we run up against an extreme lack of information as even the link between the simian strains of immune viruses and HIV is tenuous at best.
On a related note, is there any research into the viability of a virus in space? I know it's not strictly speaking alive, but it does possess a chemical structure as well as DNA (well, RNA) which would require protection from if nothing else radiation. Assuming it was inside whatever exploded in Tunguska (which we aren't even sure about), but was close enough to the surface of the object to be ejected prior to explosion, how much radiation would it have soaked up just getting to Earth?
Although an interesting correlation (repeat old saw about correlation not equaling causation), I'm interested in how your "hypothesis" accounts for the HIV relatives in the simian population prior to that date, and also how this "space virus" managed to migrate from the Russian boondocks to the middle of Africa without apparently spreading through any of the intermediary countries.
Re:What the problem with Gmail?
on
Good Email For Kids?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Correct, but you have it backwards. The proxy sits in between the child and gmail. The proxy will poll the gmail inbox periodically (via either POP3 or SMTP), then apply the whitelist to those results. Anything that passes that then gets put in the proxy inbox. The child then connects with whatever client to the proxy to retrieve his/her e-mail. As a bonus you can apply other forms of filtering to the e-mail at the same time you perform the whitelisting. For a really great write up of how to setup filtering, read this.
Re:What the problem with Gmail?
on
Good Email For Kids?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The solution is whitelisting. Give them an e-mail account with G-Mail, then proxy it through a local mail handler that you have a whitelisting filter configured on. Any address not on the white list gets deleted. Problem solved.
You misunderstand, copyright is not a "business model", however it can be used to enforce an unworkable business model. Whether copyright is reformed or not, the business model will still fail, it's merely a question of how long it takes, and how much of an inconvenience on the rest of us it is until then. Whether the RIAA wants to admit it or not they're dieing, and the old model of albums is dying as well. People do not want to buy albums, they want to buy songs. They also don't want to be told when and how they can listen to those songs they buy, nor are they going to buy a new copy every time they want to listen to the song in a new format.
As for the reason piracy will go down, that has to do with the basic rules of supply and demand. There's a certain level of demand at a certain price point. With traditional goods demand is directly related to whether people feel it's worth there money to purchase that item. In the case of non-physical goods, so called "intellectual property", potential piracy (or a certain percentage anyway) can be represented by taking all the people who would purchase the item at a lower price point (for simplicity assume something close to 0) minus the people who would purchase it at the current price point. This leaves us with a number of people that are the potential pirates of said item. Next you must graph the the perceived value of the item versus the risk of being caught committing piracy (as a corollary when the cost of the product goes up, so does perceived value, although not a strictly 1 to 1 ratio). Everyone on the graph of potential pirates who falls below the line of the value/risk graph is then a pirate. You can reduce the number of pirates by either reducing the perceived value of the product, or increasing the perceived risk of being caught. Since it's much simpler to reduce the value of the product (seeing as the value is mostly artificial and arbitrary in the first place) than to increase the risk of being caught, that's the best way to solve the problem. As an added bonus reducing the cost of the product not only reduces piracy, but it increases sales due to increasing the demand.
Ok, fine, we'll see if we can tighten up the math a bit. To start with, according to a article on/. from a while back, the RIAA since 2003 has filed 28000 lawsuits. According to this PDF I found based on public available tax data, court records, and a bit of extrapolation it costs an average of 3112.26 per case to bring a civil case to trial in NJ (assuming similar cost in other states). This figure does not take into account the costs to both parties in terms of legal fees, and costs involved in maintaining the buildings, hiring more people to handle extra case load, or social cost involved in displacing other court cases. The same PDF also lists the average cost for settling via arbitration to be 1296.81 per case.
Lets assume that 75% of the cases are settled out of court (I've no idea how many have actually gone to trial of the 28000). This gives us 21000 settlements, and 7000 trials. Lets also assume that it costs on average 20000 to hire a defense lawyer (and that's probably at the low end). Based on these numbers we come to the following totals:
Cost to the public to settle cases: 27,233,010 (not including infrastructure costs)
Cost to the public to prosecute cases: 21,785,820 (once again not including infrastructure costs)
Total taxes wasted: 49,018,830
Cost to defend against RIAA lawsuits: 140,000,000
Cost to settle against RIAA lawsuits (based on $3000 settlement): 63,000,000
Total cost to public and accused: 252,018,830
In addition each of these cases must of necessity displace other cases that could be utilizing the courts time. I don't know about you, but I consider it a bigger crime for a company to waste 49 million dollars of the publics tax money, than that same company to lose 200 million to people subverting it's dying business model, not to mention costing people 203 million to defend themselves (or settle), a great many of which will be innocent people.
Wish we could come up with some way of doing a distributed secure DNS system that way no one country, group, or organization could control it, but distribution and security seem to be opposing ideals.
Simple, the judge is out of his god damned mind. It's becoming increasingly clear that the legal and administrative bodies of the US government have only the most tenuous of grasps on the way the internet works, and absolutely boneheaded rulings like this one only go to reinforce that opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
One, it's circular. Two, the devil is in the detailed definition of "what it needs to do".
If I could come up with a succinct definition of "what it needs to do" I'd be running for president. Unfortunately exactly what the government is supposed to be doing is rather much up for debate, although generally speaking, it should do the bare minimum that it possibly can while still meeting the needs of the people. The primary function of government is to provide those services that the public needs, but are unprofitable to provide, or which can not be trusted to private enterprise for one reason or another (law enforcement comes to mind). Of course, that's mostly my opinion of what the government is to provide, others disagree as can be seen by the many forms of government currently in existence on our planet, as well as all those that came before them.
My point was essentially that power corrupts, and a corrupt government is either a dictatorship, or a aristocracy (possibly the neologism of a corporatocracy as well), so the best way to maintain a non-abusive government is to limit its power to the bare minimum. Exactly what that minimum is, is going to vary depending on exactly what you define power as, and what you think the government needs to be doing.
It's ok, I'm not hurting for karma, and I was wrong about the salary cap apparently. Better that people see the follow up responses than the original comment as there's better discussions and arguments there.
N.B. Posted sans-karma because this isn't really on topic.
I don't know from where you post, but in the USA very few (actually, I can't think of any) professions have a legal salary cap.
I've always been told that most engineering fields, doctors, and athletes, have salary caps. I tried doing a google search, but all I get is page after page talking about salary caps for various sports leagues, so at least the athletes have salary caps, although from the results it looks like those are mandated by the leagues, not law. Seeing as I can't find any results to backup that statement I guess I'll have to retract it, but the rest of the post is still valid, and we do give the lawyers and judges way too much power. I wish we could come up with some way of separating attorneys and politicians, otherwise it's the case of the fox guarding the hen house.
Interestingly this implies you had faith in all of the above to begin with. For myself I trust government (any government) about as far as I can throw it. It's a necessary evil though, the trick is giving it just enough power to do what needs to be done, and not an ounce beyond that (same for the legal system). Unfortunately lawyers and judges have been running our country for far too long, and our legal and government systems show it. Fun fact, one of the only major professions without a legal salary cap is an attorney. Think about that and consider the implications.
I'll agree with the humor. But it's a sad state of affairs when genuinely interesting arguments are reduced to the drivel of a geek-form response.
There's nothing preventing humor from also making a point. One of the primary purposes of satire is in fact to point out the absurdity of every day things that we might otherwise tend to overlook. In this case the post shows many of the common flaws with anti-SPAM techniques, and in addition to entertaining you for a few moments, should also make you consider the various ways in which SPAM can be combated and which if any of the reasons on the "form" it falls afoul of.
My kingdom for some mod points. This totally deserves either a +5 Funny, or a +5 Insightful, not sure which though.
Although that is indeed a valid colloquial usage of the word theft, it's not a proper usage in a legal setting (and by extension when discussing legal matters). The first response to your post is indeed correct, in a legal setting the proper term for that is plagiarism. English is a rather inexact language rife with ambiguous terms. Although this allows it a great deal of flexibility in describing abstract concepts, it also means that the burden is on the speaker to pick the most specific and concrete word possible for a given meaning, particularly in formal conversation (such as in legal matters). Even though theft can broadly be applied in this case, the more specific and therefore appropriate word is plagiarism. For an example of the kinds of legal ramifications the difference between a general and specific word can make, compare the difference between man-slaughter and murder in a legal case.
What really needed to happen, IMNSGDHO, was for the higher court to find unambiguously in Jacobsen's favor and then issue a hardcore smackdown to both Katzer and the lower court judge.
Damnit, when I read that my mind auto-translated IMNSGDHO, and I'm pretty sure that's a sign of some kind of mental disorder. I wonder if there's a name for it yet.
Excellent point. TFA also mentions possible perjury charges for filing what he must have known was a fraudulent patent application, deliberately trying to claim a creation date prior to the date of the work he was ripping off, and utterly failing to mention any of the copious prior art. The US patent system (and indeed almost all patent systems) are in shambles and are a complete joke in terms of fulfilling their social promise. Now that this ruling has given the OSS community (and CC as well) some teeth, maybe the *AAs of the world will think twice about pushing to have those particular legal fangs sharpened, and maybe, just maybe we'll see some patent reform as well.
The GP is right, it's not theft. The ruling sets forth that violating a open source license revokes that license, and that subsequently distributing software using that licensed work is therefore done without a license and is a case of copyright infringement. As such, this guy is committing copyright infringement against the developers of the software he's using. That's not theft, it's copyright infringement, and there is a difference.
Of course, there's also the patent issue coming up here and that's a whole other can of worms. Maybe we'll get really really lucky and this whole thing will somehow invalidate software patents as well, but somehow I doubt that's going to happen.
It's the curse-ed day star, and it burns us so. Now where did I put my SPF 9 billion.
I seem to recall Greenpeace going after Apple in the past as well. Haven't they been trying to slam Apple for not being ecologically friendly for years now? Not saying there isn't a problem, just saying Greenpeace isn't exactly a neutral party. Maybe one of these problem systems should be sent off to a lab that really is neutral and can say for sure whether there's a problem or not.
He didn't mean the MacBookPro (MBP), he meant Mac Pro, you know, the big desktop systems, one of these.
Seems there might be something to the report, but it's too early to say for sure. If it's correct then the problem is most likely related to either a protective coating applied to the motherboard, or possible some plastic pieces on the inside of the case (my money would be on the coating though).
So, to re-iterate, this isn't talking about any of the laptops, this is just the desktops, and even then not any of the iMacs (at least only Mac Pros have reported this problem).
Someone mod parent insightful. I'd do it myself but I already posted comments on here.
There is, but all that occurs outside of the virtual world this is going to be based on. The storyline is also not applicable, as in the books the main characters are investigating why people are getting trapped in the virtual world and once they themselves become trapped attempting to work their way out of it. As several others have already commented, the virtual world parts of the book are really very shallow because it's mostly about them attempting not to get killed long enough to make it to the next world. I would say it's comparable to trying to convert something like Portal into an MMO. There's a story there, and I don't think anyone would argue it's a pretty good story, but it's sort of a one shot thing. Sure the gameplay mechanic could be carried over, but the story itself is no good for an MMO setting. Likewise the over-arching story from the books, what made them good, is no good for an MMO setting.
Wake me up when a mutant is using hypnotic mind-control to make me believe I'm actually in the game. Until then I don't think this is going to be a particularly compelling MMORPG.
SPOILER TO FOLLOW
Hint to the mods, this is a reference to the books. You eventually find out a psychic mutant is the one responsible for getting the people stuck in the virtual worlds. As for whether it'll be a good MMO or not, well, hard to say. Its greatest strength looks to be its biggest weakness, that is, it's so open ended it's going to be hard to motivate the players.
I think we need to have something cleared up. I keep seeing people refer to the "lore" of Otherland, but that kind of misses the point. Otherland doesn't really have "lore" in the same way that things like WoW, LoTR, Warhammer, or even StarTrek do. The basic premise of the book was that the internet has evolved to the point where everyone interfaces via a direct neural interface and it's experienced as a immersive 3d world with avatars etc., but that something weird is happening and some people are getting "stuck" in the virtual worlds. This is similar to the premise of .Hack, but very different in other ways. Anyway, there's really only 2 bits of "lore" I can think of from the books that could conceivably be brought across. The first would be the major antagonists from the book, which is a fat man and a skinny man that hunt the characters across the various virtual worlds (always wearing an avatar that matches them in some way, for instance the fat man as a toad and the skinny man as a praying mantis). The second item would be the use of certain gestures to perform various actions, such as moving fingers in a very specific pattern to open a portal to another world. It's important to note however that in the books when the characters get sucked into the virtual worlds and lose their ability to log out, the worlds also stop responding to the standard gestures.
Anyway, the important thing is, that for the purposes of something like this MMO, Otherland isn't really a single world with lore, rather it's more of a meta-world in which the players randomly get dropped into one of many worlds each with their own lore.
Wow, I didn't actually expect a response, let alone a well thought out and reasoned one. Ok, well, that's a plausible explanation for how the Tunguska impact could be tied to the spread of a virus in Africa, but still doesn't explain some of the HIV like viruses that pre-date the Tunguska event and are speculated to be the pre-cursor to HIV. Unfortunately at this point we run up against an extreme lack of information as even the link between the simian strains of immune viruses and HIV is tenuous at best.
On a related note, is there any research into the viability of a virus in space? I know it's not strictly speaking alive, but it does possess a chemical structure as well as DNA (well, RNA) which would require protection from if nothing else radiation. Assuming it was inside whatever exploded in Tunguska (which we aren't even sure about), but was close enough to the surface of the object to be ejected prior to explosion, how much radiation would it have soaked up just getting to Earth?
HIV = Tunguska event?
Although an interesting correlation (repeat old saw about correlation not equaling causation), I'm interested in how your "hypothesis" accounts for the HIV relatives in the simian population prior to that date, and also how this "space virus" managed to migrate from the Russian boondocks to the middle of Africa without apparently spreading through any of the intermediary countries.
Correct, but you have it backwards. The proxy sits in between the child and gmail. The proxy will poll the gmail inbox periodically (via either POP3 or SMTP), then apply the whitelist to those results. Anything that passes that then gets put in the proxy inbox. The child then connects with whatever client to the proxy to retrieve his/her e-mail. As a bonus you can apply other forms of filtering to the e-mail at the same time you perform the whitelisting. For a really great write up of how to setup filtering, read this.
The solution is whitelisting. Give them an e-mail account with G-Mail, then proxy it through a local mail handler that you have a whitelisting filter configured on. Any address not on the white list gets deleted. Problem solved.
You misunderstand, copyright is not a "business model", however it can be used to enforce an unworkable business model. Whether copyright is reformed or not, the business model will still fail, it's merely a question of how long it takes, and how much of an inconvenience on the rest of us it is until then. Whether the RIAA wants to admit it or not they're dieing, and the old model of albums is dying as well. People do not want to buy albums, they want to buy songs. They also don't want to be told when and how they can listen to those songs they buy, nor are they going to buy a new copy every time they want to listen to the song in a new format.
As for the reason piracy will go down, that has to do with the basic rules of supply and demand. There's a certain level of demand at a certain price point. With traditional goods demand is directly related to whether people feel it's worth there money to purchase that item. In the case of non-physical goods, so called "intellectual property", potential piracy (or a certain percentage anyway) can be represented by taking all the people who would purchase the item at a lower price point (for simplicity assume something close to 0) minus the people who would purchase it at the current price point. This leaves us with a number of people that are the potential pirates of said item. Next you must graph the the perceived value of the item versus the risk of being caught committing piracy (as a corollary when the cost of the product goes up, so does perceived value, although not a strictly 1 to 1 ratio). Everyone on the graph of potential pirates who falls below the line of the value/risk graph is then a pirate. You can reduce the number of pirates by either reducing the perceived value of the product, or increasing the perceived risk of being caught. Since it's much simpler to reduce the value of the product (seeing as the value is mostly artificial and arbitrary in the first place) than to increase the risk of being caught, that's the best way to solve the problem. As an added bonus reducing the cost of the product not only reduces piracy, but it increases sales due to increasing the demand.
Ok, fine, we'll see if we can tighten up the math a bit. To start with, according to a article on /. from a while back, the RIAA since 2003 has filed 28000 lawsuits. According to this PDF I found based on public available tax data, court records, and a bit of extrapolation it costs an average of 3112.26 per case to bring a civil case to trial in NJ (assuming similar cost in other states). This figure does not take into account the costs to both parties in terms of legal fees, and costs involved in maintaining the buildings, hiring more people to handle extra case load, or social cost involved in displacing other court cases. The same PDF also lists the average cost for settling via arbitration to be 1296.81 per case.
Lets assume that 75% of the cases are settled out of court (I've no idea how many have actually gone to trial of the 28000). This gives us 21000 settlements, and 7000 trials. Lets also assume that it costs on average 20000 to hire a defense lawyer (and that's probably at the low end). Based on these numbers we come to the following totals:
Cost to the public to settle cases: 27,233,010 (not including infrastructure costs)
Cost to the public to prosecute cases: 21,785,820 (once again not including infrastructure costs)
Total taxes wasted: 49,018,830
Cost to defend against RIAA lawsuits: 140,000,000
Cost to settle against RIAA lawsuits (based on $3000 settlement): 63,000,000
Total cost to public and accused: 252,018,830
In addition each of these cases must of necessity displace other cases that could be utilizing the courts time. I don't know about you, but I consider it a bigger crime for a company to waste 49 million dollars of the publics tax money, than that same company to lose 200 million to people subverting it's dying business model, not to mention costing people 203 million to defend themselves (or settle), a great many of which will be innocent people.
Is all of them an option?
Wish we could come up with some way of doing a distributed secure DNS system that way no one country, group, or organization could control it, but distribution and security seem to be opposing ideals.
Simple, the judge is out of his god damned mind. It's becoming increasingly clear that the legal and administrative bodies of the US government have only the most tenuous of grasps on the way the internet works, and absolutely boneheaded rulings like this one only go to reinforce that opinion.