Not is you handle the filings yourself. You don't need a lawyer. In the words of Nolo Press, "Don't feed the sharks!".

I can prepare - for myself only, since I am not an accredited member of any bar - all of the filings outlined above with reference to a few books which are available in any university library.

Yes, it would take some time and some money - depending on your income you can get filing fees waived - but it can be done for a lot less than $400 an hour.

I most probably could pull it off for $100 in cash and a few hours of my time.

You can handle this outside of the criminal justice process for a fair amount of the process.

File a civil suit against "Joe Doe and Does 1 to N, etc." (just like the RIAA) for theft of private property and asking for a judgement ordering the return of the property, etc. In tandem with that, file a request for a subpoena with the ISP to whom this IP belongs for the associated address.

Because the filing of the suit, getting the subpoena, etc., is going to take some time, you should send a letter to the ISP informing them that the subpoena will be coming shortly and that you are informing them of their responsibility to preserve evidence in a pending civil suit.

Once you have the name and address of the party in question, you should do two things:

First, file a formal criminal complaint with the local police and DA concerning stolen property which is being used in their jurisdiction. The original theft may not be their concern, but the receipt of stolen property is there concern.

Second, file a request for in civil court for an order requiring the return of stolen property at address X. Once you have this court order, you can go and get a sheriff (usually at a cost to you) to accompany you to this address and force them to open up and show you it isn't there.

Too often people forget their are parallel legal systems - civil and criminal - in this country and fail to realize that they have control. The RIAA does and takes advantage of it. Why shouldn't you?

You said,
The thing is, Apple's enigmatic frontman doesn't turn up to these geeky WWDC shindigs unless he has something to announce which will get the hyped-up gang of Apple fanboys and girls a-whoopin' and a-hollerin'."

Actually, Jobs turns up at WWDC quite often.

Actually, this is part and parcel of the emasculation of juries which has been going on for some times. Oh, and by the way, some judges have been known to forbid jury members from taking notes in any way (yes, including with that old pen and paper)!

I am constantly frustrated to see comments like: "She said privacy laws prevented her from saying if he was fired or left on his own."

With respect to personnel actions, I am of the opinion that when you take a job in a government department, you are working for "The People". And "The People" have a right to know what has happened in these situations.

In California, we took a positive step in this direction, when it was ruled that government employees had no right to privacy with respect to compensation. When those numbers came out, some very interesting questions got asked. Very interesting.

It is my position, that when you become a government employee or agent of the government, you waive your right to privacy in personnel matters and any and all actions should be a matter of public record.

A extremely detailed overview on this topic is available at the Intellectual Ventures web site (see http://intellectualventureslab.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Stratoshield-white-paper-300dpi.pdf).

But to answer some of the questions, raised below, the necessary SO2 ranges - depending on scenario - from 200K (enough to offset Arctic Warming and establish a positive albedo feedback loop for cooling) to 2M tons per year (for a full on global cooling process.

This works out to from 2/10s of one percent to 2 percent of current SO2 emissions world wide (half of which come from man made sources). Current SO2 emissions are well below those we saw during the worse of acid rain.

To put it in perspective, Mt. Pinatubo kicked 20M tons of sulfur into the atmosphere in the course of a few days.

There have been studies on the impact of an additional 2M tons of SO2 in the atmosphere and they show miniscule impact.

It should be noted that any geo-engineering scheme is short term and designed to buy us the time to make the switch to more efficient and lower foot print energy systems.

The folks proposing these plans accept that AGW is real, but believe the measures being proposed are Too Little, Too Late, and Too Expensive.

If folks are actually interested in learning more about this - rather than taking cheap shots as anonymous cowards - take a look at what Intellectual Ventures have on their web site:

http://intellectualventureslab.com/?page_id=258

My understanding, from an admittedly cursory reading of the material, is that when the injection occurs in the upper atmosphere the issues with acid rain are not what they are with emissions from smoke stacks, etc. We are talking about injection at 70K feet or so.

Excuse me? How does a valid comment on a situation get rated a troll? Seems someone has an ax to grind and is doing it with mod points. First time I have ever had a post moderated as a troll.

If our goal is truly to reduce global temperature increases - for the moment let's concede they exist - then we should be looking for the most cost effective solution. Given that CO2 is not the number one global warming gas by far (it is actually methane and most of it comes from cows and other ruminates) and the contribution of CO2 to global warming lessens based on the amount in the atmosphere, curbing carbon emissions at a cost of billions per year, this isn't the best way to do it.

As outlined in Super Freakanomics, there are various geo-engineering approaches to address global warming being developed by people like Nathan Myhold and his Intellectual Ventures, which can do it at a much lower cost. The most promising is based on the Pinatubo Effect - sulfur in the upper atmosphere - and can be accomplished for under $100M per year (less than .30 cents per American per year). It also has the benefit of having been proven to be effective and safe.

So, think about that the next time a major push is on for a cap and trade system or carbon tax. And by the way, Al Gore, is opposed to doing this. He would much rather go the less effective, more expensive, and unproven way of reducing CO2 emissions.

Well, this article would have a lot more credibility, if the "Climate Gate" issue had not just hit the press. If you didn't read them, their were these emails promising to block any skeptical papers from appearing and to not cite papers in journals that accepted skeptical papers.

Unfortunately, no matter how you feel about Global Warming, the folks in "Climate Gate" have stuck a grievous blow to the credibility of the scientific method, the peer review process, and positions like this.

That said, if peer review was truly working in the field of Global Warming and skeptical papers which were backed up with legitimate data and arguments were able to get into peer reviewed journals, then this article would have a lot more weight and creditability.

This is just another example of Judges emasculating juries, dis-empowering them.

I long for the days when juries (before the 2nd half of the 20th century) actually decided cases and where not treated like mushrooms by all.

Jordan