The saddest indication of how jaded we are with big business these days is that your post was modded funny.

Unfortunately, given the typical denizen here, she could pay that bill from the change she found in the couch.

Yet, even that's going to be off when you look at radically differing upload speeds and things like that.

I still think this is a possible defense avenue. I don't think you can actually prove (in the typical case with multiple up- and down-loaders) that a particular computer ever sends a complete copy of a file to any other single computer. But I don't know the tech deeply enough, hence my questions.

It's been a loophole in the past for shipping weapons around - ship the parts (which is legal) and the recipient assembles them. And since a part of an MP3 file is unusable without the rest, I'd think a similar defense might work here.

I know the defendant in this case wasn't using bittorrent, but is there actually any way to prove a person has uploaded one entire, complete, copy to anyone? I expect it's more like 30% to that person, 40% to another, 30% to a third, but since people are connected to multiple uploaders, how can you tell?

Or, given the odds of that, we may just need to think of the child.

We've already had Christine Brinkley/Billy Joel.

Odds of another truly ugly man overchicking that much? Very small.

One other issue that eventually doomed the German war effort was their abject refusal to commit their industrial resources to "total war."

Allied factories were running around the clock. Not the German. They actually hamstrung their own industrial capacity by not doing this almost as much as the allied bombing efforts did.

Of course, by not taking Britain out of the war before Barbarossa, the allies were eventually able to deny Germans access to resources, and the German industrial capacity eventually wore out.

See, the thing is, it doesn't have to be THAT loud.

All it has to be is loud enough for someone else to hear. Could be the person in the neighboring car. If we're both stopped at a light next to each other, it doesn't take a whole lot of volume for my music to be audible in your car. And that, by ASCAP's logic, is a public "performance."

And you can't tell me you've never cranked your stereo when one of your favorite songs comes on. We've all done it.

They gonna come after me when I've got my car stereo cranked and the windows down?

I know the people driving around me probably should, but is that really a "public performance?" A ringtone is no different than playing a stereo. It just goes off when you're not expecting it.

What would be really interesting is if the ultimate solution to the problem ended up doing something very similar to this.

And no, I don't have the faintest clue how.

That's the enterprise version of Alfresco. Check out the Labs version. Free, open source version.

...something like this:

1. You want to be able to store documents that currently exist electronically, and also handle documents you're going to scan. The latter may, or may not, be OCR'd.

2. You want to attach keywords to the articles, and be able to bring up a list of articles that match some arbitrary combination of these keywords.

3. Full-text search isn't as important (but would be useful if available).

If that's the case, I'm thinking Alfresco might be what you're looking for. Multi-platform, open source, java-based content repository. Supports document tagging (and loads, loads more). Relatively easy to use right out of the box, and has a CIFS interface so you can just create a project and simply tree-copy your current documents into the project. Don't let the "enterprise" designation on the software scare you away.

I've actually considered going that route for my own personal document library, but while Alfresco might be one of the only good solutions, it's like killing a fly with a cannon.

I'm frankly amazed that with the "paperless living" meme currently going through the productivity circles that someone hasn't come up with a simple tool to do something just like what you're looking for: point it at a root folder, let it suck in all the files, then start tagging away. Search with keywords or filenames or both, and provide a clickable list of hits. Full-text search isn't needed, as there's already a ton of tools out there that'll happily index your hard drive for you.

And, if a tool like that exists, could someone point me to it, please?

If you dig back into storage and find some of those early 1st edition dungeon crawls, you'll find that they were printed in a lightish blue ink.

Mimeograph machines and black and white copiers at the time (I don't think color copiers were commercially available yet) had real trouble with that color ink.

This was intentional. It was, in effect, DRM.

Absolutely, 100%, dead on wrong.

My wife only knew what Watchmen was about from the one minute summary I gave her, and the trailers.

She absolutely loved it. She was quite surprised by the amount of sex, and had expected a fair amount more violence given the director. She described her experience watching the movie as nearly the fastest three hours she can remember.

It was refreshing to see a movie with some actual pace to it, not full-bore the entire time.

You haven't been through the jury selection process, have you?