You'd hope that they start out ethical. Judge Wright in California said that their porn trolling cases were basically allowed because they found the nexus of outdated copyright laws, a paralyzing social stigma for the defendant, and potentially expensive litigation that people want to avoid. It just seems like the lawyer's version of a get-rich-quick scheme. They can interject into class action suits and extract a payment that way with minimal effort, they can monitor bittorrent and send settlement letters to downloaders for a few thousand with minimal effort, etc.

I'm not an attorney, but Judge Otis Wright in the California case was looking at rule 11 sanctions against Prenda Law. The basis for that was because he was under the impression that the shell companies that the lawyers were representing were in fact owned by the lawyers themselves, but they did not notify the court of that. They would have been allowed to proceed if they had notified the court that they had a monetary interest (their claims and discovery requests simply would have been given more scrutiny in that case), but Judge Wright alleged that they committed fraud on the court by trying to hide that relationship. So it's fine if a lawyer has a monetary stake in the case (as far as I know, again, not a lawyer), but they need to be up front about that from the start. I doubt Hansmeier was trying to hide his relationship with his wife, the goal was simply to extract $20k or $30k from the defendant (Groupon) so that they would withdraw their objection and let the case settle. They file their objection just before the deadline for filing in the hope that the defendant wants a quick settlement. Most of this is just my speculation though, which comes from following Ken's great coverage on Popehat, as well as the coverage on fightcopyrighttrolls.com and dietrolldie.com.

If you've been following the coverage on Popehat or FightCopyrightTrolls, you'll know that the Groupon class-action case is another one of Hansmeier's schemes to make money. He has a few cases where someone in his family files as an objector in a class-action case at the 11th hour (meaning that they are going to hold the case up and not let it settle, unless they get a nice payout of course), and then Hansmeier himself acts as the attorney for the objector. There are theories that he simply files the objections himself under a family member's name, and then proceeds to represent them. The objector in the Groupon case is Padraigin Browne, Hansmeier's wife (and a patent attorney). He's also represented his father, another attorney, in other class-action cases. I like how the judge ordered Hansmeier to provide proof to the court that he notified his client (wife) that he wasn't eligible to represent her.

I don't think anyone argues that the GOP is the root of all evil so much as they are a successful implementation of the evil specification.

By "spewing volcano", do you mean the volcano which last erupted in 1984 and which is home to many permanent science installations?

That's sort of a weird criticism. They aren't saying that their instruments are measuring 400. They aren't out there measuring integers. The measurement is 400 parts of CO2 per million parts of air. That's what the reading is, that's the chemical significance. The significant fact of that measurement is that it's the highest one they've ever recorded. There's plenty to discuss about this without resorting to some sort of weird misdirection tactic that 400 is just an integer.

Why? What exactly do you think this system is designed to protect against, an attack from a sophisticated air force? There's a reason they say that they are testing the system on Qassam style rockets. A Qassam rocket isn't supersonic. But you can bet that if they get a few years of good experience with this thing deployed in the field, they'll eventually end up with a bigger version.

I would bet that someone with poor business sense and a high degree of greed got hold of a successful product with 87% market share, and started thinking about how they could make as much money as possible with it.

http://www.rrauction.com/preview_itemdetail.cfm?IN=405

Fine, you own the data. You can have access to it whenever you want, I'm sure. But you don't own this, the actual paper sheet and the plaque that they mounted it on. It was given to a private individual, who sold it. Now you can buy it. Or perhaps instead you would like a sword, or Buzz's underwear, or this fine handle.

The size of a single phone conversation isn't the limiting factor. The problem is volume, the number of phone calls that take place every single day has to be staggering. Maybe a single 1-minute call is only 100kb, but if you have 1 billion conversations every day then that's going to be a storage problem eventually.

I'm fine with vendors trying to add their own DRM, I don't have any problem with that. I'm not necessarily going to use their products, but I don't have a moral objection to some company deciding to try DRM in the marketplace. I just don't think it should be standardized. If that means that certain protected content will only play on certain devices, so be it. If I want the content that badly to use DRM then I'll take that into account. If I don't want to deal with the DRM, then I won't be their customer. See EA for a good example. I'm not going to berate them for the fact that they use DRM, that's their choice. I'm just not going to buy their products because I don't agree with the decisions they've made.

If Minecraft is something you refuse to live without, then maybe people like you can lobby the vendor for a version that doesn't use Java. But, take it from a person who has never played Minecraft: you can live without it.

It's not about me, Flamey McTrollerson. The W3C exists to promote open standards. DRM by definition is not open. Look over this page and tell me which of these points relates to the W3C endorsing DRM:

http://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission

DRM is a choice for the market to make, not the open standards body. If someone wants to sell your coveted program on a DRM-laden DVD, great, go out and buy it. But don't standardize that bullshit on the open web.

Stallman is right on this. The W3C should not endorse DRM. If that means that it requires Flash for certain things, then certain companies have to be OK with using Flash to display their content to their customers. The W3C shouldn't endorse DRM, that is a battle that deserves to be fought.