Paul Hutchinson’s Blog

The 1.9 million dollar fine issued against Jammie Thomas-Rasset came as a big surprise to me since I hadn’t been following the case. Then I read the six part coverage of the trial at Ars Technica starting with, Jury selected in Thomas retrial: shockingly law-abiding. If I had read those articles before the verdict the fine would not have surprised me. Frankly I’m surprised the defense lawyers didn’t settle the case earlier given what came out at trial.

Much of the media coverage of this case has once again mistakenly called this a case of prosecution for downloading. It was no such thing, it, like all the other cases that I’ve looked at, was about file sharing. Jammie’s IP address was caught sharing files via KaZaA.

MediaSentry presented its evidence of having caught the tereastarr@KaZaA user sharing files; the company downloaded complete copies of 11 songs from that user and grabbed the metadata on nearly 2,000 more. Source: Sony lawyer: $150K damages per song "certainly" appropriate – Ars Technica

My advice to everyone, if you are sharing copyrighted music via a file sharing program/network and you get a notice from the RIAA lawyers, take the settlement, it is tiny compared to the fines you get from losing at trial. Jammie was offered a settlement for 5 thousand dollars when they first caught her IP address sharing.

If you’re positive you are not sharing music but receive an RIAA notice, stop using the PC and get experts on the case immediately. It is possible for the RIAA investigators to be fooled by spoofing or other people tapping into your LAN but that is a rare enough occurrence that a court is not likely to side with you unless you provide strong evidence.

Blaise Pascal was born June 19, 1623 in Clermont-Ferrand, France. Pascal was a truly great mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. I see his name all the time in my work because the SI unit of pressure is the pascal.

Over at Rationally Speaking Massimo Pigliucci has a post with a nice quote from Monsieur Pascal.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

The Wikipedia entry for Monsieur Pascal I find to be excellent so I’ll send you there for more about this giant of science.

You’ve probably seen this story at many blogs recently.

FDA Advises Consumers Not To Use Certain Zicam Cold Remedies

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today advised consumers to stop using three products marketed over-the-counter as cold remedies because they are associated with the loss of sense of smell (anosmia). Anosmia may be long-lasting or permanent.

The products are:
    –Zicam Cold Remedy Nasal Gel
    –Zicam Cold Remedy Nasal Swabs
    –Zicam Cold Remedy Swabs, Kids Size (a discontinued product)

While this is good news, what took so long for the FDA to act on this? As pointed out at What’s The Harm? What’s the harm in homeopathy? (Lisa Weatherington & 339 others) Zicam settled a lawsuit over this issue nearly 3 1/2 years ago.

By Sandra G. Boodman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 31, 2006

The manufacturer of Zicam Cold Remedy has agreed to pay $12 million to settle 340 lawsuits brought by consumers who claim the popular over-the-counter zinc nasal gel damaged or destroyed their sense of smell.

Full article: Paying Through the Nose – washingtonpost.com.

Did the FDA really need over three years to act on this problem? Are the 130 injured mentioned in the FDA notice in addition to the 340 from the 2006 lawsuit?

Lets see, the science has shown a potential problem since 2004 and further documented in 2006, the manufacturer settles a lawsuit in 2006, then finally the FDA acts in 2009. The FDA should have acted much sooner!

For some interesting additional information info on the men behind the company see: The Men Behind Zicam – washingtonpost.com.

FDA links:

• Information on Zicam Cold Remedy Nasal Gel, Zicam Cold Remedy Nasal Swabs, and Zicam Cold Remedy Swabs, Kids Size
• FDA Advises Consumers Not To Use Certain Zicam Cold Remedies
• Loss of Sense of Smell with Intranasal Cold Remedies Containing Zinc
• Matrixx Initiatives, Inc. AKA Zicam LLC 6/16/09
• Zicam Fact Sheet
• Warnings on Three Zicam Intranasal Zinc Products
• Loss of Sense of Smell with Intranasal Cold Remedies Containing Zinc podcast

Score another one for the good guys!

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has announced that it will revoke an illegitimate patent on Internet subdomains as a result of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) Patent Busting Project campaign.

Read the full story: EFF Busts Bogus Internet Subdomain Patent

Ryan is back at 95% Of You Are Morons with some great posts on MLM scams.

John of Stranger Fruit has left Sb for his own space at a simple prop.

The guy in this comic strip must has seen my demotivator, the gals retort is funny.  Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has been added to my blog roll.

Bob from Travels in the Riel World has another nice blog going now, he’s the North American Travel Examiner for Examiner.com.

Tip O’ the Hat to Phil Plait for pointing me to this very well done video.

This weeks EETimes has an opinion piece about the EU ruling against Intel, Setting the record straight on Intel. It ends with this statement I completely agree with.

There’s no question Intel has made great contributions to the industry with its technology. Now it’s time to make an equally great contribution with its honesty.

My best guess is that Intel’s sales and marketing division has made some mistakes in how they’ve handled their fierce competition with AMD. By coming totally clean right now, before they get more bad press, I think it will go a long way toward keeping the good company image they have with the public.

This is not about another Acrobat Reader alternative, it’s an excellent alternative to the $299.00 Adobe Acrobat PDF editor. For the past couple months I’ve been using the free PDF-XChange Viewer from Tracker Software Products for all my PDF editing needs. I found the UI to be as easy to learn and use as my favorite office suite, OpenOffice. The free version has all of the features many users will ever need in a PDF editor. For only $29.50 the Viewer PRO edition adds the rest of the features that are in Adobe’s product. My employer provides me with the full Acrobat product on my workstations but I’ve liked PDF-XChange Viewer so much that I bought the Pro version myself and am using it exclusively now.

Keep in mind this program is not for creating PDF’s it’s for editing existing PDF’s. For creating PDF’s I exclusively use and highly recommend the free open source PDF Creator from PDF forge.

The AMS has opened up their archives of 20th century articles to the public. Previously you had to go to a college library or pay $$ to see these articles, now we can get PDF’s for free!

This is a fantastic resource that covers all of their publications:
Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences
Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology
Journal of Physical Oceanography
Monthly Weather Review
Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology
Weather and Forecasting
Journal of Climate
Journal of Hydrometeorology
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society
Meteorological Monographs
Earth Interactions

The archives search page is here:
http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=search-simple

I was using Google Books today and spotted this new “Generate book report” link, curious what it would actually do, I clicked it.

This is what you get.