Welcome to the police state. Pretty soon, we'll have "pre-screened" passengers wearing armbands and we all know where it goes from there

:) That's the problem with many of the projects I've seen: No time for requirements gathering, no time for testing, and deployment should take less than a day. So no matter how well you design and execute your design - you end up with last minute poorly thought out enhancements and any testing done happening from a developers standpoint instead of an end user's.

I agree that colo is the way to go. I've had problems with hosting providers in the past, but never has anyone asked for root access.

I rarely have a need for physical access, but I have on a handful of occasions which is why I now colocate within driving distance. Shipping is expensive especially when you need to overnight equipment two times in a matter of days because of an emergency.

The downside of a colo where you can have 24x7 access is that everyone hosting there can have 24x7 access. That's why I recommend a locked cabinet for anybody. Generally people who pay for locked cabinets are more careful about things. In open space, you might have the occasional cord get unplugged when someone else is working on a nearby machine. It's happened to me three times in 6 or 7 years, but it is always at the worst possible moment.

If you can't trust your host, you have to walk away. If you don't trust the data center, encrypt your volumes, and virtualize. The hardware is more expensive, but you are a bit safer and abstracted.

The only way to ensure that you will move forward along with a company you started is to ensure that you are not a replaceable asset to the company. Once big money investors get involved, you can expect that any founders will be pushed out the door unless they have real long term value. Technical knowledge of an existing invention != value in a lot of cases. Technical knowledge of a future, more profitable invention might, but even then there must be faith in your ability to complete the task combined with the lack of faith in anybody else to do the same.

Never go after outside money unless you absolutely have to, and never allow your value to be underestimated. Easier said than done.

Even that touch wheel wasn't really something they thought of. They won the race to the patent office, but not by much.

I am occasionally responsible for troubleshooting paging in an enterprise environment in Northern California. The enterprise works with several telco vendors to support a wide variety of end-user cell phones.

Some telco vendors are extraordinarily helpful and dedicate staff to help track down issues. Others are completely blind and offer zero support.

We run into instances of SMS messages not being received, or being received after a long delay at least a few times a month. We send roughly 1000 messages a day.

Support is getting better, reliability is getting better, but problems still occur with regularity.

But I thought:

    __
3.14 = 3.14141414141414141414141414141414141414141414

Why couldn't we all just be happy with 22/7?

Is it me? Or is the internet getting lamer every day?

Interesting. We've had this in place in my area for over a year, maybe two. When i saw the page for the first time, the opt out form was on the ad page. It took exactly one view for me to opt out, so I haven't seen it since.

I guess they realized that the opt-out numbers went down significantly if you had to go to another page to actually opt-out.

1. It's not an attack on the statute, but on the award.
2. It's not an appeal.
3. There is nothing in the record to establish a penny in actual damages.
4. There is no such thing as "peripheral" damages.

1. I never stated that it was an attack on the statute - merely that the statute did not require actual damages be calculated, which as far as I know is true.
2. I did have the impression that this was an appeal. I blame that on it being 1:30 in the morning and not paying attention to detail. That doesn't affect my base opinion that this will fail miserably.
3. If there is nothing to establish actual damages, then how can you argue that the damages awarded are unconstitutionally disproportionate?
4. If I'm forcing the RIAA to come up with actual damages, they aren't going to respond with the retail cost. They are going to look at all of the ways that Thomas' action directly caused damage and cite many ways that she indirectly caused damage. The judge may not buy all of their arguments, but he certainly will give more than just the retail value of a single recording when calculating the appropriateness of an award. If he even starts to consider a new trial, he has to look at whether the award is appropriate and it doesn't take a giant leap of logic to make this award look constitutionally appropriate.

Now, if the case were handled differently from it's inception, I think you have something to work with. But it wasn't and the status is what it is.

Call my opinion baseless, fine. But the judge will agree with me.

It is an option to choose statutory or actual damages. There is nothing that requires actual damages be calculated.

The appeal would be that statutory damages are unconstitutional as they exhibit an extraordinary leap over actual damages. It sounds good on it's surface if you accept the argument that actual damages are 1/650th of the damages awarded, and in fact there is existing case law that extraordinary damages are not acceptable. Unfortunately, in this case, there is nothing established to make the leap that these damages are out of line. Further, there is the issue of peripheral damage that is incalculable. In my simple non-lawyer opinion, the appeal will fail miserably.

An 18K settlement is a part time job over two years including interest. I don't know that they are offering it after the re-trial, but if they did, or even if they offered double, she should take it. She's spinning her wheels and those of the people helping her, she has the ideal case from the RIAA's standpoint, and fighting the case is costing everybody involved money they can never hope to recover. She had her day in court. She blew it. Time to lick her wounds and move on.

$0.99 may seem like a going rate, but that pricing scale was established after Kazaa did it's thing. AFAIK, there was no establishment of cost during the trial - in other cases, but not in this one - at least not from the reports I read.

You might be able to establish the max on a 256K line, but how long was that line active for? How long were the songs available for download? How many partials could have been downloaded in that time?

If she was uploading at 256k full time, and the songs were 2 megabytes, you're looking at about 480 days if treble damages would be considered constitutional. If 10X damages are constitutional (and why would they not be at $.99?), you're now looking at 144 days of uptime. Take it a step further - $2.00 tracks, 10X damages, 51% uploads, and you can do that damage in just a little more than 1 month.

Certainly, if a set of facts establishing distribution costs for unsigned distributors, reasonable upload constraints and assumptions, song popularity, and changes in song income levels were established you could make an argument for what is reasonable, but none of that was brought up during the course of this case. As it stands, you have to give every tilt to the plaintiff when attempting to demonstrate their actual damages.

If she comes forward and says "I only uploaded at night, and the songs in question made up for less than 20% of my traffic" - which she would have to fight tooth and nail to get any appeals judge to believe at this point after having denied the charges for years - it's still quite easy to justify $1.92M in damages.

I can't see this even being heard. The only way this flies is if there can be an accounting of actual damages, and that is not likely to happen. There is entirely too much information missing in this case to prove actual damages. The only thing you could potentially do is compare income on the songs prior to and after the incident, and do trending on similar songs. Since that evidence does not exist, how can it be introduced during an appeal?

The only effective appeal I see is based on the allowance of evidence from an unlicensed investigator, and frankly I think that was argued poorly enough that it would have a rough time on appeal anyways.

This is a terrible test case.

That was the thing that caught me when reading the ruling.

Great that you know of another related case!

I was thinking of it this way - the same principles would seemingly apply to an investigator operating out of state who made phone calls as part of his investigation. Since he only recorded information that was sent to his out-of-state phone, the investigation would be legal.

Since it wasn't broadcast, but instead it was a two-way conversation, it should be treated as an in-state investigation.

It seems that having MediaSentry pick up 50 licenses for investigations would have been a good idea way back when. It's a very simple process in most states, and very inexpensive.