Then a couple of weeks later they'll visit the site on Aunt Betty's old machine with IE6 and FF1.5 and demand that the site should look the same on all, and we'll be back to having sites that use images (or proprietary plugins) for all text just to get the fonts right...

You could simply tack the images on only on the browsers that don't support the new features, and use the bleeding edge standard features in the browsers that do support it. That way, the PHB can decide whether he thinks it's justified to spend all that money on creating non-essential features for browsers that will be gone in a few years (go willing). If he still thinks it's worth the money, it's probably an actual issue, rather than some PHB-ism.

The problem with the $79K award is that, if you work on the assumption that she is expected to be able to pay, then the damages an artist can get from a single count of copyright infringement is greater than the total income that they would otherwise get from selling music.

But, if that happened, then owning the rights to music would become more important to music labels than actually producing good music. The whole business of making music would become a perverse combination of hype and ownership on a multinational level. Then, their legal arm would grow stronger and stronger and it would begin a maffia-like extortion of insignificant music downloaders, ruining people's lives without regard for any kind of proportion.

Imagine such a world.

+4 funny for a poultry little pun like that...

It's not only vastly impractical, it turns the whole idea of the Internet on it's head. The whole idea of putting a file behind a publicly accessible URL is that you are making it public. All the rest, search engines, websites, aggregators everything else is just add-ons to make that act, and the act of typing the url into the address bar to get the file, more user-friendly. The act of putting something behind a URL without restricting access in any way, means you've made it public. That's the rule of the Internet. If you want to restrict access a bit more, you can use http-authentication or session based authentication, there's certainly no lack of options.

Now if you want to build a business model on the internet, I wish you all the luck in the world, we know it's possible, but you do have to follow the one rule. Nobody forced you to be on the internet, feel free to leave again if you don't like it.

Now, newspapers can legitimately gripe about people stealing their content, and semi-legitimately gripe about aggregators displaying it, but that has nothing to do with linking, and this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. The fact that he wants to ban paraphrasing others' content as well makes me wonder how the hell this guy came to be a judge.

That sounds like it would be the single biggest threat to free speech in the last fifty years if it were to go anywhere. Imagine what the media conglomerates would do with a law like that.

I'd really like to make some lofty comment on the grandiosity of the internet, and what a great driving force of intellectual progress it is, but I would be doing so on slashdot. I'm not sure the universe could take the irony.

Saying that Amazon and Google stifle innovation because they sit as an intermediary between creators and audiences is a bit like saying the Roman Catholic church stifles religion because a priest sits between the Creator and his followers.

You mean it's a valid opinion, shared by many people?

So instead of having to use the brakes to convert energy into waste heat, they can convert it into electricity.

So if I drive a hybrid, they're stealing my energy? Those bastards!

Also

... and instructions to call if anything changes at all.

suggests that he may have actually expected something like this to happen, and you getting sick was a calculated risk. Maybe this was the best way to find out what was wrong with you, and the 104 fever was just a little higher than expected.

IWtR woerkedd oouth briplliantly fopr me . Engvry bok;dy shold tryuk oit. Nevtr fgelt nbetytere.

And I bet it still interfaces flawlessly with your modern computer. Today's engineers could learn from that.