So when their first victim, Thomas, turns out to be a single American Indian mother of two making a measly $36,000 a year -- latte money for the RIAA boys -- you have a hard time picturing these guys nailed to a cross.

Here's an industry so bloated with executives and middlemen, all of them greedily slurping up profit like bluepoint oysters, that the people who actually write the songs and play the music -- the "talent" -- are getting royally screwed in the royalty department.

Radiohead is the latest band to offer an album's worth of music online, for free. Fans are being asked to pay what they feel is fair, and my guess is that most people will kick in something. Given the chance to be reasonable, we usually will.

For years we've been pointing out business models involving free music that don't need require the RIAA to sue everyone. For years, we've been highlighting the very basic economics for why these business models will almost certainly take over the industry. And, now that we're starting to see some serious traction among bands adopting these models (without RIAA help), we've even explained why the RIAA should still have an important place within this model.

In other words, nearly everything the industry has done has backfired and made things worse. And how does the RIAA respond? By saying it needs to keep doing the same thing over and over again. The spokesman for the RIAA calls their activities "tough love" but hasn't anyone pointed out to them that what they're doing has not worked and has only made the situation worse?

Windows Vista's market share in businesses logs barely more users than Windows 98, reports Softpedia.

Vista wasn't released for consumers until January 2007. However, figures gathered and recently released by security vendor SunBelt Software indicate that businesses are staying away from Vista in droves, as opposed to home users who often have had no other choice but to run Vista on a new PC.

DirectBuy is a company that claims to offer a deal on furniture and home supplies by letting consumers buy directly from the manufacturer. Apparently, the company doesn't want you to hear from customers who don't think the deal is such a good one.

Nevertheless, DirectBuy's lawyer, Donald Morris, relies on an extraordinarily broad reading of the Ninth Circuit's decision in Fair Housing Council v. Roommates.com to claim that InfomercialRatings.com is liable for "encourag[ing] and solicit[ing] defamatory statements." Even worse, Morris threatens to file suit in Canada, because DirectBuy does business there in addition to the United States. And, to top it off, he claims that his threat letter is copyrighted, and that to post it online would give rise to copyright liability.

First, the letter is not registered with the copyright office, and until it is, DirectBuy's law firm can't sue to enforce it. Second, posting the letter is a clear example of fair use.

CEO of OIN Jerry Rosenthal believes that Microsoft's statements are empty threats. He says the Vole should either disclose exactly which patents its talking about or cut out slandering Linux and drop its claims.

OIN and many open sauce developers suspect that, if Microsoft actually has any software patents to back up its bluster, those could either be invalidated by finding prior art or easily worked around with programming changes.

The president of the Open Source Consortium, Mark Taylor, was even more direct in denouncing Microsoft's patent claims about Linux. He said, "We say show us the patents. This has been the strategy against open source all along. It's precisely the same tactics as SCO used: implied threats and mafia techniques. This is just FUD. It's smoke and mirrors."

It's doubtful that Microsoft really wants to get into a software patent war with OIN, which has millions of dollars in a patent litigation war chest. In addition, OIN's members include Google, IBM, NEC, Novell, Philips, Red Hat and Sony.

Celebrity US scientist Craig Venter, seen here in June 2007, has built a synthetic chromosome using chemicals made in a laboratory, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported Saturday.

Venter told Britain's The Guardian newspaper Saturday that he has built a synthetic chromosome using chemicals made in a laboratory, and is set to announce the discovery within weeks, possibly as early as Monday.

However the prospect of engineering artificial life forms is highly controversial and likely to arouse heated debate over the ethics and potential ramifications of such an advance.

The chromosome which Venter and his team has created is known as Mycoplasma laboratorium and, in the final step of the process, will be transplanted into a living cell where it should "take control," effectively becoming a new life form.

Authorities in several countries have cracked down on Nigerian e-mail scammers, resulting in the seizure of over $2.1 billion in fraudulent checks. The National Consumers League, in conjunction with the US Postal Inspection Service, announced yesterday that 77 arrests have been made in connection with the scams.

"The most important thing consumers need to know to protect themselves from fake check scams is that there is no legitimate reason why anyone would give you a check or money order and ask you to wire money anywhere in return," NCL VP Susan Grant said in a statement. "No matter the details of the scheme—whether they're trying to purchase something from you, asking for your help moving money around, or saying you've won a foreign lottery—it's a scam."

During an occasionally testy cross examination, a Sony executive said what many observers have suspected for a long time. The RIAA's four-year-old lawsuit campaign is costing the music industry millions of dollars and is a big money-loser for the record labels.

One of the biggest bombshells from the cross-examination was Pariser's admission that the RIAA's legal campaign isn't making the labels any money, and that, furthermore, the industry has no idea of the actual damages it suffers due to file-sharing.

"We haven't stopped to calculate the amount of damages we've suffered due to downloading, but that's not what's at issue here," replied Pariser, who was reminded by Judge Michael Davis to answer the questions actually asked by Toder, not hypotheticals.

Toder then pressed the Sony executive on the question of how many people actually downloaded music from the defendant. "We don't know," she replied.

The next line of questioning was how many suits the RIAA has filed so far. Pariser estimated the number at a "few thousand." "More like 20,000," suggested Toder. "That's probably an overstatement," Pariser replied. She then made perhaps the most startling comment of the day. Saying that the record labels have spent "millions" on the lawsuits, she then said that "we've lost money on this program."

As Pariser admitted under oath today, the entire campaign is a money pit.

In testimony in the flagship Capitol Records, et al versus Jammie Thomas Jennifer Pariser, case, the head of litigation for Sony BMG told the world that it was piracy for someone to back-up a CD they have bought or upload it onto their MP3 player.

She said that when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, Sony can say he stole a song." Making "a copy" of a purchased song is just "a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy'.

This suggests that punters have no 'fair use' rights to make backups of the music that they have purchased.

Many websites use an automated test to tell computers and humans apart when signing up to an account or logging in.

Carnegie Mellon is using this test to help decipher words in books that machines cannot read by letting sites use them to authenticate log-ins.

The team is involved in digitising old books and manuscripts supplied by a non-profit organisation called the Internet Archive, and uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to examine scanned images of texts and turn them into digital text files which can be stored and searched by computers.

The only reliable way to decode them is for a human to examine them individually - a mammoth task since CMU processes thousands of pages of text every month.

Thanks to the adoption of reCAPTCHAs by popular websites like Facebook, Twitter and StumbleUpon, the system is helping to decipher about one million words every day for CMU's book archiving project, according to von Ahn.

"There's no danger of us running out of words," says von Ahn. "There's still about 100 million books to be digitised, which at the current rate will take us about 400 years to complete."