You’d have to appoint an attorney to stand for the critter’s interests who would argue diminished capacity

They don't have diminished capacity; they have standard capacity for their species.

Also; they could be charged with a strict liability offense such as drunknen and or disorderly conduct, or poo-flinging, in which they commit a crime even with no mens rea.

It seems routine to me that a company such as a Telco or Cableco is making an application for various things and asserting that there is or is not effective competition in a certain market.

It is used as justification on the application to allow the Telco/Cable company to do things they might not be allowed to do otherwise.

If there is effective competition in the market; they can essentially raise rates and do a number of other things however they please. If there is not effective competition in the market, then those things are more restricted, but they can essentially acquire other companies in the market however they please without objection (since there is no competition, the other Telco/Cable co. in the market must not be a competitor).

Example: 3/29/13 Comcast Cable Petitions for Effective Competition, Pennsylvania.

Petitioner alleges that its cable system serving the Communities is subject to effective competition pursuant to Section 623(l)(1)(B) of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended (“Communications Act”),2 and the

Commission’s implementing rules,3 and is therefore exempt from cable rate regulation in the Communities because of the competing service provided by two direct broadcast satellite (“DBS”) providers, DIRECTV, Inc. (“DIRECTV”), and DISH Network (“DISH”). The petitions are unopposed.

I think Web 5.0 will be called The Cloud of Things or simply The CloudThingNet, or the ThingNet seeing as....

Web 2.0 was about user feedback and social media; Web 3.0 was about application-rich web content, and Web 4.0 was about Cloud computing.

and when the electric grid needs it most, they are producing only 15 percent of peak.

Do why not mount the panels on something that can change their orientation to keep them pointed at the angle that maximizes expected power collection based on time of the day?

Or just point south to maximize power collected during the day by charging batteries.

At 5pm start discharging the batteries to offset increased demand and sell energy back to the grid at the higher price.

But when you say intelligent agent, this would be modeled on typical standards of driving

A good study/experiment has to include a control group, so the unrealistic nature of the modelled baseline should be detected for sure.

In my experience, these CDs will play fine in a PC (and iTunes can rip them without issue), but many car stereos struggle with them.

I would say in this case the CD players that have trouble playing the media session are somewhat defective.

It's a pretty shitty thing for manufacturers to do this, especially if they know that certain units will be unable to play the media which consumers expect to play, they are literally intentionally making a less useful product since it will cause problems and generate more sales being returned for refund, but it's clearly not antitrust, since competing players can of course play the media, they just need to be revised to correct implementation problems.

Bing's copyright filter based on the Creative Commons licensing system will let users get royalty-free images which they can use, share, or modify for either personal or commercial use.

Sorry... you can't safely vet for copyright using an automated tool.

What happens when someone mistakenly (or maliciously?) mislabels a copyright-protected work managed by a rights troll as CC0 or CCBY ?

The fact that they were leveraging their monopoly in digital players to advance a format that stifled competition is.

*Cough* Bullshit. At no point in time did Apple have a monopoly on digital players. In fact, one of the biggest competitors in this market is the Windows PC, which millions of people use and can play many open audio formats such as MP3 which people purchase from competitors such as Amazon or Rhapsody. 10 years ago there were plenty of competing digital players, which all ultimately failed in the marketplace following Apple's success with the iPod on their own merits or lack of consumer perception of merits compared to iPod.

It just turns out Apple had popularized many innovations in the digital player space, and it was not as if Apple added on DRM later to snuff out competition, they came to market with these features at time of the 2003 launch of the iTunes store. For example, in 2001 Apple launched the iPod. There were plenty of digital players at the time such as the Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox or the SonicBlue Rio.

Last I checked; antitrust legislation doesn't mean you're under an obligation to help competitors interoperate or consume components of your product.

Shoppers at the iTunes store willingly accepted this DRM, at a time when there were competing alternatives Such as Microsoft Windows Protected WMA and RealNetworks Helix used by other digital media playing devices.

The iPod connected via firewire; it synced with a PC using itunes, and it contained a hard drive with an innovative Anti-Skip feature; at a time when nearly all the digital players were using limited capacity flash, Microdrives, or required a burned CDROM to be inserted.

So I guess the question becomes, would it still be unlawful if third-parties were allowed to license the DRM to produce their own music players?

I would like to make a competing DVD player, but they won't let me have access to the software and crypto codes I need, without signing an onerous agreement with the DVDCCA that unfairly restricts legal customer use of the player and playing backup media.

"It would be egregious and unlawful for a major retailer, such as Tower Records, for example, to require that all music CDs purchased at Tower Records can be played only with CD players purchased at Tower Records. Yet, this is precisely what Apple has done."

No... CDs are an industry standard format, which the consumer experience shows can be used with any devices, so selling a CD that cannot be played in a CD player would be deceptive marketing. Instead it would be more like Tower records creating a proprietary media format, say Compact Cubes, instead of Compact Disks, which store the music in a completely different format, and of course, they would manufacture the Cubes for their cube players; they would both be in a proprietary form factor, both would be patented, and a custom firmware on each Cube needed to boot the player which would only work if digitally signed by the Cube maker.

Strictly speaking..... nothing requires the maker of the proprietary media to license it to competitors.

Otherwise.... Where are all the 3rd party clones of the Nintendo Wii or Sony Playstation that can consume the same media, or games for those platforms not licensed by the maker?

Apple will say that it is impossible to put media on the ipod with out itunes... I know a few jailborken ipods that show otherwise.

How is it an antitrust violation to make hardware that requires an included proprietary tool (iTunes) to be used, in order to configure, operate, or manage the device?

My USB RFID reader only works if I use proprietary but free of cost software as well. Also, it requires a proprietary program called a hardware driver.

I can think of a few major access control hardware products that also have a required (free) Windows based software program you are required to download and install, before you can manage the device.

The difference in gas miliage between 45-50 MPH and 70-75 seems to be far more influenced by traffic conditions

Yes.... perhaps we have been measuring the wrong thing all along. Miles driven are not fungible.

We could take a standardized mile, but it would not reflect the real world.

Instead we should say...

The total fuel consumption rate accelerating from 0 to 65, maintaining speed at 65 and driving a distance from point A to point B is X.

X forms a "baseline"

Next you need to add realistic random traffic to the road, and an intelligent agent which attempts to maintain 65 while it is safe to do so.

And you obtain a "second baseline"; real-world gas consumption.

Then if you want to decide whether a different speed limit other than 65 is beneficial or not, you need to make the adjustment, and compare the results against the second baseline over a few thousand trials with a representative sample of travelers.

The ideal circumstances on a road by yourself does not reflect this complex system, and simple physics cannot even solve the N body problem, let alone this one; the only way to come at a decent answer is to experiment and gather the statistics.

If people aren't painting their roofs white and silver today, do they really think their paint will change that?

I would if the Home owner's association police would allow it.

I'm afraid no new mod types will appear until Slashdot Beta has a minor update to make it Slashdot General Release.

We'll ignore for a few minutes the fact that the moderation system and threaded discussion in effect goes away.