Seriously! My new-year morning cobweb-covered mind was puzzled, thinking to itself, "Why are they saying *Apple* pays in 'in principals?' The Chinese struggle for freedom is constantly paying in principals, such as Wang Xiaoning, and it *is* a bitter price, but what do they have to do with Apple?" Then, uh, duh.

(But I do love me some orthographic ambiguities. See also "smote the sledded pole-ax on the ice" vs. "smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.")

Right, and ooh, a subpoena is SO hard to issue! No judge need be involved; prosecutors get to write them themselves -- motivated, perhaps, by nothing more than a hunch.

There's a huge difference between a warrant and a subpoena.

Everything is a risk.

Except, apparently, cellphones.

It sounds like you are saying something along the lines of, "It's impossible to build an accelerometer"; but that is patently false. It's easy to measure large accelerations such as gravity, and geoscientists already measure variations in gravity. The tricky part (or so we thought) was "just" engineering an adequately sensitive detector.

Yeah, but what about in the good old days when you used different units for different dimensions? Fathoms were for depth and height measurements, leagues were for horizontal measurements, and ells and hands were what you used when you couldn't be sure which direction it might be (such as rope).

(Yet more practical knowledge drawn from LOTR.)

Problem? What problem are you talking about? GP didn't dis eastern Europe, he advocated it. The only people he painted in an arguably bad light were drug-using tourists from the West.

IMO, unless they get Dave Herman back, it's not the whole cast. That guy is awesome. His regular voices like Roberto, Mayor Poopenmeyer and Dr. Wernstrom are all hilarious, but also he's got range: he can produce amazingly different voices for all those one-time characters he does, whom you don't really remember, like Leela's martial arts sensei Fnog.

Also it's silly to focus just on the voice acting cast. I don't know their names, but I know it takes a huge crew of talented artists and writers to make the magic happen, and I hope all those talented people come back. It would be bad to cut back on the visual and writing talent to pay for the voice talent. The last thing any of us want is 26 half-baked, mediocre episodes. Better the show should end at five good seasons.

Sorry to be the grammar Nazi, but you, or perhaps others, might enjoy this bit of orthographic hairsplitting: it's scrip not script.

I can tell this /. thread is going to make my inner GN antsy enough to burn down the Reichstag.

There is always a copyright.

No, not for public domain works, such as anything deliberately placed into Public Domain, or anything old enough.

The problem is, the Berne Convention has conditioned everyone to believe that there is always a copyright. (sigh)

To say "you don't vote with your feet" is to betray ignorance of what the expression means. When you choose one store over another, you vote with your feet. When you emigrate and thus pay your taxes to one state rather than another, you vote with your feet. "Vote with your feet" means, "By your patronage, you indicate your approval." The expression is perfectly appropriate here.

That is true; what you describe is known as the prohibition on ex post facto laws: new legislation cannot put you in jeopardy for something that is over and done with, and that was not illegal when you did it. But in this case we are not talking about new legislation, just registration of copyrights, i.e., a bit of important paperwork. IANAL, but as I understand US copyright law, you cannot get monetary damages unless and until you register your copyright, and you can only get damages for infringement that occurs after registration. So the RIAA has no legal right to collect damages for works if they were unregistered at the time of the infringement.

Yeah, the no-retroactive-liability issue is similar. So I guess there is a parallel there.

Although your item #3 is above is technically correct, it distorts the story badly:

Nonetheless she could have appealed the penalty,

Yes, she could and did appeal the penalty.

[She] decided instead to appeal the ruling that she was guilty instead on the basis of a dubious technicality which was unlikely to change the final jury verdict.

The word "instead" here is incorrect or misleading.

You call it a "dubious technicality," referring I assume to the making-available legal theory. However, the making-available argument was the linchpin of the RIAA's argument in the first trial, and the subject of fairly heated debate. Personally I consider this argument to be bunkum and balderdash, but federal judges have weighed in on both sides. It's no technicality, it is a live wire of case law.

It was not a pointless retrial -- when the judge gives the jury rotten instructions, a citizen damn well deserves a new trial.

She lost in court, was given a penalty that while high, was actually on the lower end of the possible outcomes.

No, the law says penalties range from $750 to $150k per offense, so the median there is $75375, and so a per-offense fine of almost-$80k is on the higher end of possible outcomes (exceeding the median, to be precise). Moreover, the real story here is that the penalty wasn't just "high," it was stratospheric compared to the worth of the items in question.

I agree with you on the facts of the case though -- the evidence was squarely against her, she (IMO) lied to the jury, and deserves some penalty. The important question is how much, and that is where the debate should lie. Pretending this punishment is anything but manifest injustice and a cruel absurdity is, I think, misinformed or disingenuous.

That's Holliday, pardner, and since he was a dentist I don't think he really belongs in this bunch.

. . . unless you are proposing some sort of medical furlough, in which case I'll shut my mouth and tip my hat.

Without exception [the African immigrants I knew] agreed on one thing: American blacks are racist dumb shits.

Wow, your foreign friends must be amazingly skilled sociologists, in order to draw such concise conclusions on such a large population. They must have studied the social patterns of the United States for many years, in order to make any such claim. Because most people would not dare to try to summarize the nature of a population of 36 million individuals in a three-word phrase. Why your sociologist foreign friends must be absolute fucking geniuses! Either that, or maybe they don't really know what they're talking about (that is if your friends really did say what you claim they did).

May I offer my summary instead: that some black folks are racist and some are not; some are dumb and some are not. But now it's not such a pungent little assessment, and applies to all sorts of groups.

Oh, I forgot, your friends are from Africa, so that gives them the right to make blanket generalizations about American blacks!

They couldn't understand where the "dignity" was in rap "music," hip-hop "culture"

. . . and therefore it must not exist!

[They] didn't think the government owed them a living like 99% of American blacks seem to.

You need to meet more black folks, bro.

That's right. All those fake files floating around are sapping and impurifying our precious bodily fluids.