westbywest

This story showed up on Gawker months ago, so I'm a bit confused why it reemerges now. http://gawker.com/tag/oceanavebooks/

I disagree with the writer's tagline that Yelp is such a new medium it can drive you nuts. The same could happen on other social networking services, discussion fora, AOL, etc. Yelp maybe could have done some diligence to connect dots between the biz owner and the negative review, but that could have been seen as special treatment of one business, out of the 1000's listed on its service.

I believe the biz owner is a bit unstable, and the ongoing media exposure just isn't doing her well.

As per my other comment on this thread, you can intentionally decrease the lifetime (aka MTBF) by running the part at 10 or 20% overvoltage, in addition to extreme temp, to create a corner case and stimulate premature failure in reasonable amount of time. 20% overvoltage won't kill the cap, as any part has absolute maximum ratings well beyond what the spec sheet says. Even bad caps have some degree of guard band, else they would never leave the factory.

If you know that a cap is suspect, and the article mentions what are probably helpful sources like badcaps.net, then you can accelerate the aging process by running the board in question at 10-20% overvoltage in a temp chamber heated to 100C or whatever your design's edge case is. MBTF values assume nominal voltage and temp, so increasing this has the effect of decreasing the mean time. This is not 100% guaranteed, since you are tweaking parameters of a statistical formula, but you nevertheless stand a good chance of weeding out a particular brand/model cap if you test multiple units and compare the results to those from a control group. A past job did exactly this to qualify part substitutions, and this sort of testing is effectively a requirement for temp-sensitive parts like caps. We were able to successfully weed out bad caps with this testing.

The concern I see being voiced is less about protecting copyright, for which many protections already exist, and more about implementing a level of regulation/protectionism that is out of step with what is usually just a civil complaint. True, criminal penalties do exist in US for certain instances of willful copyright infringement, but it is still overwhelmingly an area where there must be a plaintiff for any litigation to occur.

It is appropriate to treat copyright infringement in the same way one treats the international opium trade?

Although intriguing, this comparison is apples to oranges. Planes can achieve substantially better fuel economy than land-based vehicles because of 2 factors:

1) More flexibility in body design. Cars must have 2/3/4 wheels with reasonable clearance to maintain safe balance on the road surface, which usually adds to drag. Planes can vary from tri-wing to tailless flying wing.

2) Low air resistance at high altitude. Planes, passenger jets especially, capitalize on the reduced drag at high altitude for substantial fuel economy. Cars are generally stuck at sea level most of the time.