I wonder if it is the company or the reporter who gave the wrong figures in the article. The article says:

A remarkable number, but as far as I can find Pimentel claims no such thing about BARRELS per acre, but I can find that number in GALLONS per acre per year, e.g., see http://healthandenergy.com/ethanol.htm. So 328 gallons of ethanol per acre = 7.8 barrels of ethanol per acre per year

Joule Unlimited's website does says "20,000 gallons of renewable ethanol or hydrocarbons per acre annually" ( http://www.jouleunlimited.com/news/2009/joule-biotechnologies-introduces-revolutionary-process-producing-renewable-transportation- )

So one thought has occurred to me. If this technology involves growing green gunk in vertical clear walled tanks, then perhaps they have chosen to talk about the yield per tank in terms of tank horizontal footprint, i.e the amount of light input coming in the side of 1 square foot of tank horizontal footprint could be many times the amount hitting just the top... I can imagine a tank fourteen feet tall, 3 feet wide, but only 4 inches deep. So its footprint is only 1 square foot, but it catches 30 square feet of light if at Boston's 42 degrees latitude (or heck, 60 feet if one reflects light in on the back side.)

I am not a lawyer, so this isn't legal advice, just my experience. I have sued a number of times (and won) in small claims court, including in Santa Clara County -- where Mountain View is located as it happens. I know of someone in Florida who files small claims spam cases in California and flies in for the hearing. Nolo Press has a great book dedicated to small claims court in California Incidentally, in California lawyers aren't allowed to represent clients in small claims cases, although they are allowed for the re-trial if the defendant appeals a loss. As far as collections goes, handily enough VeriSign is also in Santa Clara County. So rather than chase down a spammer in some far off state to collect, you can just threaten to go down the road and seize a non-paying defendant's business property i.e. their .com domain name if they don't pay.

As the Nolo Press book explains, you can file two $7500 small claims lawsuits a year and an unlimited number of $2500 suits. California law awards $1000 per illegal spam. Santa Clara county even has specific rules for filing two or more small claims cases at the same time. So for example I filed simultaneously two lawsuits both against the defendants for 8 spam each per lawsuit. The two cases were heard at the same time and ultimately I collected $16000 plus interest. (In the course of the cases I also raised $40,000 for Second Harvest and the Darfur Stove Project charities...)

IANAL, but that's not really true. They do have possession of email as it passes through. If I send Google a subpoena, then at least for 15-30 days they'd have to retain copies of all the responsive emails that they receive. But clearly that's not the case, otherwise I'd subpoena monthly the opposing party and get a continuous copy of their emails. Law firms can hire any number of outside agencies to handle privileged docs, e.g. paralegals from temp agency, graphic artists, etc and not lose privilege.

IANAL, as well, but that statement is incomplete. You can clearly outsource at least one IT function: email, without risking privilege. Google's Postini is the the email service provider for many (most) of the nation's best and/or biggest lawfirms. (e.g. lookup the mx records of steptoe.com, chadbourne.com, perkinscoie.com, gibsondunn.com, bakernet.com, dlapiper.com, whitecase.com, sidley.com, mayerbrown.com). All *.psmtp.com.

Call me cynical, but when they claim two MONTHS of standby time and 18 hours of talk time, all on a 1850 mAh battery -- it makes me a bit leery. After all, no matter how efficient its electronics are, it still has to burn power transmitting packets. For example the Nokia 6205 on its 1020mAh BL-5C battery only gets up to 4 hours talk, up to 11 day standby. Spec for Nokia: http://www.nokiausa.com/find-products/phones/nokia-6205/specifications Spec for the phone, I think: http://www.sonimtech.com/pdf/xp3quest_ds.pdf

Anti-spammer David Ritz lost the SLAPP lawsuit filed by Jerry Reynolds filed for running "unauthorized" DNS lookups on their servers. Knowing "commands are not commonly known to the average computer user" can get you into serious peril in some judges' court rooms.

I kid you not. The Judge ruled that "In all intended uses of a zone transfer, the secondary server is operated by the same party that operates the primary server." The original complaint is here.

Ritz was a thorn in Reynolds' side during the years when Ritz was trying to get the Netzilla/Sexzilla porn spam operation to stop spamming. Reynolds has been quite aggressive in trying to get his past erased from the net (including forged cancel posts). The North Dakota Judge also awarded attorneys fee which could theoretically make the total bill over $500k for doing a domain zone transfer. (I believe they had claimed $250k in attorney fees in their failed suit against Ed Falk) Reynolds also filed a criminal complaint against Ritz which was on hold pending resolution of this trial.

Here is a literal worst-case scenario of what can happen when a court fails miserably to understand technology. The judge ruled:

The scary sounding port scanning/hijacking computers is posting a test message through one of Verizon's machines to prove to Verizon they had an open relay --i.e. posting to 0.verizon.security via the relay a note to Verizon's security saying "What's it going to take to get you to secure this gaping hole in what you call your network," or words to that effect. Verizon apparently had no problem with the demo post and closed the relay.

Take note, for those anti-spammers out there, this Judge is ruling that if you post the whois record for a spammer's domain your are doing a malicious, tortious act. If you telnet to a spammer's mail server and type HELO or VRFY you're illegally impersonating a mail server.

It seems clear that the Judge for whatever reason really, really, really didn't like the Defendant Ritz. But the Judge seems to want no sunshine on her trial because she ordered the entire affair sealed, except of course for her judgments of "facts."

There is a legal defense fund that was set up for his case. I believe he does not have the resources to appeal and this would be a very bad precedent to stand.

Here's the code the _civil_ lawsuit is based on:

Ritz also got a $10k fine by the Judge for violating the preliminary Injunction, but since the Judge sealed the records, it is hard to tell what the story behind that.