That's what class actions were invented for. But republican legislators have cut back the situations in which class actions can be filed. If enough disgrunted fans agree they can hire a lawyer to check if class action is possible. If it is and they file one, companies like Worldcon could learn to be just as afraid of consumers as they are of Big Media.

Wonderful story of his, The Configuration of the North Shore.

An idea whose time as come. What a shame no one thought of it, or could make a credible beginning of it, sooner.

Open-source pharmaceuticals. It boggles the mind, but the overwhelming impression is of goodness, rectitude, unselfishness, and light.

If this works we should all thank God, or whomever we believe we owe.

FUCK ALL THESE GREEDY BASTARDS. Everywhere you turn there is anticonsumerism. It's just an extension of the copyright wars. What can we withhold for money? If "information wants to be free", what is taking so long? Why don't we squash power grabs when we see them happening? Why don't we have the clout to do it or the will to try?

Sickening.

How many students at one time, what career track (mostly)? Slackers or hackers? Important to know.

"Basically they are complaining the the DMCA makes them responsible for policing their own content at their expense."

                My God, how can this be America?

Yes, so?

Is there anyone who thinks these ISP warnings can't be kept from triggering by judicious proxy use and encrypted traffic? Or is deep-packed inspection good enough to identify P2P traffic? Even if it could, it surely couldn't determine the copyright status of the stream.

I was going to remark that we would surely see services like Tor and FreeNet grow exponentially in response, but what's wrong with a good old simple non-US proxy service plus traffic encryption? At least when we're talking about cyber-locker repositories if not bittorrent.

Hope it's hot-pluggable-- you sure can't do that with any other PCIe card.

NO ONE is going to want a plug-in peripheral that needs rebooting to register. So far it looks like that may be the case with eSATA (at least on my machine).

Dunno about your system but when I plug in a USB 3.0 drive I can use it almost immediately. If I plug in an eSATA drive I not only have to reboot, my motherboard likes to SUBSTITUTE the new drive for one of my original SATAs.

I submit that is one hell of an advantage USB 3.0 has over eSATA.

Not surprising this emphasis is being put on Indonesia since, if I remember right, it is the world's seventh most populous country.

Hm, two things occur to me.

1. If you have the right sheetfed scanner like a Visioneer Strobe, you just take the document, slide it into a slot behind your keyboard, and it's scanned and filed in a general folder in 20 seconds. I guess it would be a P.I.T.A. to try to use some scanners with lots of software steps to get started on their (fairly slow) scan runs. Yep, I guess if I had to use one of these, I wouldn't be so keen on electronic filing, either. So having the right scanner that effectively becomes a transparent portal onto your desktop seems essential. Later anytime you can drag from the general folder to specific folders. The Fujitsu ScanSnap series of scanners look very good, although the Strobes from Visioneer with their Twain drivers are more versatile, and used to be the easiest to use.

2. Even if scanning takes a bit longer than throwing in a drawer, isn't it WORTH the time a) not to have to take up room in your study or office for a cabinet, b) not to have to hop up 40 times while doing your filing, and c) never having to make copies (just scroll them out of your printer)? Maybe I'm atypical because I was a lawyer for 25 years before switching over to tech, and the value of having my case and client files organized, at my finger tips, and SEARCHABLE was extreme. Even now, for instance, when doing tasks like filling out financial aid forms for my son's college, it is SO EASY to click a mouse and find ALL of our tax data (without getting up), ALL of his transcripts, resumes, and award letters, etc., that I can't imagine having to go looking for paper. And how do you search a filing cabinet? PaperPort 9.0 (the last one that was good) does OCR on all scanned docs and boy is it a boon to find things by word search as in Google.

It is a damned shame that PaperPort, which was a fine product (and still is if you buy Version 9 rather than the current Version 12, which frankly sucks) got Bowdlerized, savaged and vandalized by the current owners (Nuance? which acquired ScanSoft). The product has become a real POS but lucky you can still get Version 9. I wish Nuance would make this product good again (but they aren't capable) or take pity on Userland and spin it off to someone who knows what it can be. It could be an affordable and virtually-as-good Lucion alternative. What a crime that a truly great, superior, even classic program can be trashed by fools and turned into stinkware. Nuance, SHAME ON YOU. Personally I run Win98 in a virtual machine just to use version 9 with the Win98 Visioneer Strobe drivers that make life as easy as sliding all your stuff into the scanslot. Really.

I absolutely know this is going to be an area of huge opportunity. Whoever can wrest PaperPort out of the clutches of Nuance has the potential to become, if not another Adobe, then at least the owner of a product as widely used and useful as Acrobat.

Um BAFFLEMENTS? Sorry.

Most dumbfounded I've ever been after reading any thread on Slashdot in at least a decade. There are paper filing cabinets galore, and even PaperPort has its merit, so who with any technical ability would muck with files when every filing cabinet you own, hundreds if you have them, can be on your desktop and every drawer icon a different color for selection by mouse and re-creating in printed form from where you sit??? Tell me about just *one* modern hospital that doesn't store, organize and re-create medical records just like that?

Underutilization of this technology has been one of my largest battlements. Now that I see even Slashdot isn't more into it, I think something more than technophobia is going on here. I'm really scratching my head but I can't see what it is.

The one profession that CAN NOT do without this software is Attorney. Pretty good for CPAs too. Doctors have eClinicalWorks. *What is the excuse* for being so far behind the curve, Slashdot?