In addition to the renewable energy “extenders,” the law boosts subsidies to invest in non-conventional fossil fuels–so-called dirty fuels, such as making liquid fuel from coal or sand and rock. Also included are breaks to develop technologies to burn coal more cleanly and to sequester carbon dioxide emissions from coal plants underground.

Energy efficiency gets a nod as well with measures, such as rebates for appliances and bonds available to building operators that decrease building energy usage by 20 percent.

Representatives from the wind and solar industries have lobbied for months to extend the credits to ensure continued growth. Without the supports in place, they warned business would stall, resulting in thousands of lost jobs.

The massive U.S. financial bailout plan, signed into law Friday afternoon, renews existing tax credits for renewable energy and includes rebates for plug-in hybrid drivers.

Similarly, the American Wind Energy Association on Friday put out a statement lauding politicians for maintaining a policy in place. Previous, renewable energy tax credits have lapsed and delayed growth of the industry.

The existing production tax credit for large-scale geothermal and biomass projects were extended for two years.

• Extends for eight years the 30 percent tax credit for solar residential and commercial solar installations.

Residential geothermal heat pumps have a $2,000 tax credit. And credits for marine power systems were extended eight years as well.

Important to the clean-tech industry is $800 million in available bonds for renewable energy generation facilities from renewable sources, such as biomass and geothermal.

• Allows utilities to benefit from these tax credits.

Research firm New Energy Finance, in a note to clients on Saturday, said that the payback time for a typical solar panel installation will go from from 10 years to 7 years in California and from 15 years to 12 years in Florida.

Transportation and efficiency

The law will give drivers of plug-in hybrid vehicles a tax credit between $2,500 and $7,500, depending on the capacity of the battery. Larger vehicles, such as trucks, have larger credits.

Also in the fuels arena, the law extends the alternative fuels tax credits and extends for one year the existing $1 per gallon credit for biodiesel and renewable diesel production. That’s good news for biodiesel producers, some of which are struggling because of rising feedstock prices.

The biggest impact in renewable energy will be in solar, for both residential customers and larger businesses. For solar, the law:

Updated on October 4 6:30 a.m. PDT with more details and analyst comments.

He said that by 2016, solar energy will be the least expensive source of electricity for consumers.

Wind industry subsidies, called a production tax credit, were extended for one year, a policy which doesn’t disrupt ongoing wind projects but falls short of the long-term footing the industry was seeking.

“The new tax credits for plug-in
cars are higher than either presidential candidate has proposed. Now automakers and car buyers will no longer see higher up-front costs as a showstopper,” Felix Kramer, founder, the California Cars Initiative, said in a statement. “And with this legislation, we’ll also get more wind and solar energy that will make plug-in cars drive cleaner every year they’re on the road.”

New Energy Finance called the wind power extension a “good patch” but not enough to spur manufacturers to expand capacity.

In a statement, Rhone Resch, the president of the Solar Energy Industry Association (SEIA), said that “this bill is a major step in our long journey toward energy independence and ensures that solar energy will be a significant part of America’s energy future.”

These changes make solar a far more attractive investment, particularly for consumers in states with good sun and supportive state policies.

“By passing this bill, Congress has finally given the solar energy industry ‘policy certainty’ that will attract investment, expand manufacturing, and lower the cost of solar energy to consumers,” Roger Efird, SEIA chairman and president of Suntech America, said in a statement.

• Eliminates the $2,000 cap on that tax credit for solar electric panels installed after the end of this year.

“Overall, the legislation’s passage represents good news for clean energy projects and firms which, like the rest of the economy, rely on access to capital from banks and other financial institutions,” New Energy Finance said in its note.

One attorney for BJB said there were no First Amendment problems, invoking a U.S. Supreme Court precedent dealing with an intercepted conversation played by a radio station because, “We allege, your honor, that Wikileaks has actively solicited the theft of private information…they are participants in the illegality.”

White said he will issue a written order very soon and added that he is skeptical that an injunction would survive free-speech scrutiny: “There are serious questions about prior restraint, possible violations of the First Amendment, which the court can make no definitive findings about at this point.”

Some of the filings amounted to an implicit criticism of White, who granted the allegedly First Amendment-problematic order in the first place. So the first thing White did on Friday was defend himself–more to the half dozen reporters in the back of the room than to the attorneys.

“The court denies the motion for preliminary injunction, and the court hereby dissolves the injunction against (domain name registrar) Dynadot, and the litigation may now proceed,” said U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White, who had called a brief recess around 11:40 a.m. PST, indicating that he was inclined to revisit his order from earlier this month that effectively pulled the plug on the Wikileaks.org domain name.

After spending more than three hours hearing arguments from a raft of attorneys–two representing the Swiss bank that fought to get the site’s plug pulled and about 10 who have been trying to get the site back online–a federal judge here has ruled in favor of Wikileaks.

But a host of free-speech groups, including Public Citizen, the California First Amendment Coalition, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Project on Government Oversight, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, requested to intervene in the case on behalf of Wikileaks.

Wikileaks, which uses Wikileaks.org as its primary domain, is a whistle-blowing site that focuses on posting leaked documents.

The judge’s preruling reply: “Let me play devil’s advocate here. Is it newsworthy if some prominent citizen is…evading taxes, laundering funds? Wouldn’t that be something in the public interest?”

SAN FRANCISCO–Wikileaks is getting its domain name back.

“The parties need to understand, and those in this courtroom need to understand, the status of this case,” White said. “This is a case in which we had a (dispute) with named parties, and the parties were duly served. One of which properly responded and came to this court with a proposed settlement in this lawsuit…Nobody filed any timely responses to the court’s order.”

While giving his ruling, White explained that the case is properly in his jurisdiction, in part because the domain name holder, an Australian citizen living in Kenya, sent an attorney to court Friday.

BJB also said, “We’re talking about private banking information, account numbers, personal numbers like Social Security numbers…all this is private information that’s not newsworthy…None of the publishers here today would want their own banking information posted on the Internet.”

Public Citizen attorney Paul Levy, who had asked to intervene in the case on behalf of Wikileaks, speaks to reporters outside the federal courthouse in San Francisco after the judge hands down his ruling.

(Update 5:02 p.m. PST) The judge’s written opinion is out. It does three things; it denies BJB’s request for a preliminary injunction; it dissolves the permanent injunction against Dynadot; and it sets a hearing schedule. One key phrase: “It is clear that in all but the most exceptional circumstances, an injunction restricting speech pending final resolution of the constitutional concerns is impermissible.” As for the timing, the motions are due March 14, oppositions to those motions are due March 28, and reply briefs are due on April 4. The next hearing will be on May 16 at 9 a.m.

From the bank’s perspective, it sued Wikileaks in federal court in California because the registrar, Dynadot, is located here. (Wikileaks alleges that the documents in question show that the bank supports the “ultrarich’s offshore tax avoidance, tax evasion, asset hiding, and money laundering.”)

“The court has the obligation to get it right,” White had told attorneys for Bank Julius Baer, or BJB, earlier Friday. “I took an obligation to uphold the Constitution. The court has its own obligation to raise these issues. Contrary to what you say, my obligation is to look down the road and see where this thing is going.”

Updated at 1:42 p.m. and again at 5:02 p.m. PST.

They threw down a series of legal land mines against BJB, including that Wikileaks can’t be sued in a U.S. court by a foreign company because it consists of foreigners; that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act prevents any action against Dynadot; that the First Amendment prohibits an overly broad attack against a Web site just to delete a subset of pages; that Dynadot cannot refuse to transfer the domain name to another registrar; and so on.

Those are just two of the rumors accompanying a video trumpeting some recent triumphs of Chinese aviation.

(Credit:
PLAAF)

And the “Flying Dorito”? The stealth McDonnell Douglas A-12 carrier-borne attack aircraft was canceled in the 1990s by then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. Or was it?

Oh, and it was made possible by stolen American technology. Even with pilfered stealth technology, though, China will probably not have had “enough time to (successfully) fabricate and assemble a working aircraft,” Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense hopes.

What we know for sure is that it has a range of 11,000 kilometers, without refueling, but it could refuel if it wanted to–possibly. In any case, it has extralarge fuel tanks. It has a crew of two and travels at Mach 1.2, or maybe 1.4. It carries an 18-ton bomb payload and/or 12 new stealth cruise missiles with a range of 3,000 kilometers. And three nuclear missiles, at least.

Although it’s “top secret,” Chinese quasi-official Web sites brag that the Xian H-8 is a stealth carbon fiber, “special nanotechnology”-coated strategic heavy bomber.

Then again, it’s an enlarged version of the H-6 with the underwing engines, a project that was canceled in the 1970s. It has four Ws-10A engines based on Russian or U.S. technology–or both–and was designed by the 603 Institute.

China’s H-8 stealth bomber may be more advanced than the American B-2A and capable of delivering a 350-kiloton nuclear warhead to the continental United States, or it could be a mock-up of the A-12 “Flying Dorito.”

A prototype was successfully tested last year (witnessed by the deputy mayor of Xian) and will enter mass production and active service in the People’s Liberation Army Air Force by 2010.

“The Pentagon, State Department and Commerce Department all have been victimized by widespread computer intrusions blamed on China since July 2006,” with the Commerce Department even having to unplug itself from the Internet, as a result, the article says.

The U.S. government is looking into allegations that Chinese officials snagged a laptop left unattended by a top U.S. official there, copied the data and then used it to try to hack into U.S. government computers, according to a report by The Associated Press.

Since then, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, known as US-CERT, responded to computer network break-ins at least three times, the report says.

Click here for CNET News’ complete iPhone 3G coverage.

Ready for your work e-mail.

With the iPhone 2.0 software update, the first
iPhone is getting another day in the sun, and it’s a nice toasty sunshine at that. Although Apple has yet to release the update officially–it should happen Friday as well–the software became available on Thursday through the magic of the Internet.

The iPhone Apps Store

What’s most remarkable about the online applications store is the sheer breadth of titles available. As of this writing, there are 27 pages available in a staggering range of categories. If there is one thing about the software update that changes the original iPhone for the better, it’s the Apps Store–even if not all the applications are keepers. Of course, before you get carried away, remember that some apps are free but others will cost you.

(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

By and large, those updates were quick, but there was at least one instance where it took a couple of minutes. In fact, it was so long that we thought that the phone had frozen. We also noticed that if the iPhone loses its Wi-Fi connection, the syncing is interrupted. But even with these caveats, the experience was satisfactory. Syncing via EDGE took a few seconds longer, but it wasn’t too bothersome.

Download process
At the moment, the downloading process is a bit convoluted, though that experience will change, once Apple releases the software update officially. But once we started the process of installing it on our iPhone, it proceeded successfully without any hiccups.

Your choice of keyboards

The whole process took about 10 minutes from start to finish. Since the iPhone treats the update as a system restore, it will erase any saved information. Fortunately, iTunes creates a one-time media backup of your files. Although some users have reported that iTunes failed to create a backup file for them, we didn’t have any problems.

GPS
As the iPhone Atlas reports, the 2.0 software update also brings GPS tracking. We tested both while walking in downtown San Francisco and riding in a taxi. Considering that the tracking is relying solely on cellular towers and Wi-Fi hot spots, it was pleasantly accurate. When walking we could see the little bull’s-eye moving along with us. Not surprisingly, the tracking was a bit off when we were in a
car. The bull’s-eye jumped block by block as we came to stoplights. On the whole it works well, but it’s no replacement for a standalone GPS system. Also, remember that while you can get directions through Google Maps, the iPhone does not support real-time turn-by-turn directions.

That’s it for now, but check back tomorrow as we divulge into more details on the software update and delve into our full review of the iPhone 3G.

iWork documents and PowerPoint
We haven’t tried iWork documents just yet, but we were able to view PowerPoint e-mail attachments. The attachment was rather large (1.3MB) but it didn’t take very long to download.

Third-party applications
Once the software update installed, an icon for the App Store appeared on our iPhone’s home screen. When selected, you’re taken to the Apps Store main menu, which somewhat resembles the mobile iTunes store in design. You search applications by name and category and you can browse through the lists of Featured applications or the Top 25. There also is a feature for seeing if your purchased applications have any updates.

The new scientific calculator

Once you’ve chosen to add a new e-mail account in the main Settings menu, you’ll be taken to the standard list of available e-mail systems. “Microsoft Exchange” and “MobileMe” (we’ll try that later) will appear at the top of the list just above the choice for Gmail. You’ll then be prompted to enter the applicable e-mail address, domain/username, server, and password.

Bulk delete and move
This works in your e-mail boxes only. In your in-box you’ll see a small “edit” button at the top right-hand corner. When you press the button a small circle will appear next to each e-mail. Touch the circle to highlight as many messages as you like and then select the “delete” or “move” options.

Although Friday’s launch of the iPhone 3G is grabbing all the headlines, there’s no need to put the original iPhone out to pasture just yet.

Contacts search
A search bar now appears above your contacts list. Typing in any portion of the same will take you immediately to that person. The software update also added a special Contacts to the home screen, which is something we weren’t expecting.

You can access all folders in your in-box and move messages from your in-box to a specific folder. You can’t search for messages, but you can call a contact if they include their phone number in their e-mail. Opening attachments worked as promised, and we like how the software update now lets you save attached images directly to your photo gallery simply by tapping the image. To e-mail photos, you will need to do so in the traditional manner by opening the photo, selecting the e-mail option, and choosing which account you’d like to send from.

Exchange server support
One of the most coveted additions is the full support for Microsoft Exchange server. Adding an account was ridiculously easy, once we had the correct settings from our IT department.

Though according to AT&T, using Exchange server support on the iPhone 3G will require the business data plan (the one that costs $45 per month), we received no notice on the original iPhone advising us of any data plan issues (not that we would). It will be interesting to see how AT&T enforces this policy on the iPhone 3G.

When we deleted a message on our phone, the same e-mail vanished on our PC just a couple of seconds later. Messages deleted on the PC took longer to disappear from the phone; typically, we had to do a manual update to see them gone. Messages deleted on the phone will show up in your PC’s Recycle Bin and vice versa.

When using Wi-Fi, the syncing was very quick most of the time. As new messages came in, the iPhone registered them almost immediately. It seemed to get bogged down when we received a large clump of messages at one time. In those cases, we had to update the phone manually.

We purchased two applications from the iPhone: AP Mobile News and a currency rates application. Downloads over Wi-Fi were pretty quick; it took just about 10 seconds total. Though wireless iTunes song downloads are available only through a Wi-Fi connection, you can purchase applications over EDGE. Just keep in mind that downloads will take a lot longer.

It gets updated.

Language support
The software update will brings language support and typing keyboards in French, Canadian French, UK English, German, Japanese (QWERTY and Kana), Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian, and Polish. You can select as many languages you want by opening the “International” selection under the General tab of the main Settings menu. For Chinese you choose from Pinyin or a graffiti-style application for writing characters. As you enter characters, suggestions will appear to the right. To change between menus, choose from the small globe icon next to the space bar.

We also purchased applications through the online iTunes (7.7) store. Though you could access the applications store only through a back-door method this morning, it’s now prominently featured in the store. We downloaded Super Monkey Ball and then synced it to our phone–a new applications tab appears under the iPhone menu. The process was quick and painless. What’s more, navigation through the online apps store is easy.

The authentication process took just a couple of minutes, and we were up and running fairly quickly. Installing CNET’s security certificate posed a bit of a challenge–we ended up mailing it to ourselves through Yahoo–but we installed it eventually.

Once you’re ready to go, it will sync your Outlook e-mail, contacts, and calendar. Be advised that the iPhone can sync only with one calendar or contacts list at a time. If you have a separate personal calendar, your work calendar will replace it, once you start the sync (you’ll be notified before it happens).

What we didn’t get
As we’ve told you already, the software update didn’t give us a lot of things we were hoping for. But if you’d like to see the list again, Nicole Lee has the details.

Scientific calculator
As Steve Jobs said in his WWDC keynote, you’ll now get a scientific calculator when you turn the phone on its side. You’ll see a lot more buttons that will set a mathematician’s heart aflutter. Jobs said a lot of people asked for this but again, I’d like to know who they are.

Parental controls
You now will find a “Restrictions” selection under the General tab of the main Settings menu. There you can restrict access to the
Safari browser, explicit songs, YouTube, and the iTunes and iTunes Apps stores. You can select as many restrictions as you like.

As we reported during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference last month, the 2.0 software update adds a number of important features to the original iPhone, including Microsoft Exchange server support and access to the App Store. After installing the new iTunes 7.7 (available for Windows and Mac) update on our PC, we downloaded the update and installed it on our phone. Here’s what we found.

Personal digital assistants, cell phones, smartphones–whatever you want to call them–keep getting smaller, thinner, and lighter. Congrats to the engineers who keep coming up with this stuff, but I’m going blind trying to keep up with them.

“Obviously, the screen’s a limit in terms of the visuals,” he added. “Certainly, you can access the Internet but you have to be careful. Some sites don’t render well on small screens. So we’ve been looking in the labs at what would be a more idealized version of mobility.”

“One and a half years ago, this was entirely a PowerPoint presentation,” he told me before leaving to attend the IDF conference. “Now, a lot of pieces are becoming real in a lab sense. We’re looking at technologies which will be very real.”

I recall sitting through sundry Comdex video keynotes, in which “tech visionaries” promised a future where regular folks would be able to easily do similar things, beaming business cards or enacting transactions wirelessly. To date, the performance hasn’t come close to the hype, but Kevin Kahn, who directs Intel’s communications technology lab, says the pieces are finally coming together.

“I’m going to be in China,” he said. “If I have camera and an Internet connection, I ought to be able to point that device and ask, ‘What does that say?’ and get back an answer in a sensible way.”

OK, it’s corny, but while this remains a work in progress, things are getting interesting. With enough computation resources and built-in sensors, Intel says a device could connect to the Internet via wide-area connectivity and sense physical motion (a la the Nintendo Wii), wirelessly dock with a nearby display in an office, or store and “borrow” the use of a bigger display.

Some attempts to answer those questions will come out of the developer forum Intel is hosting this week in Shanghai, China, where the company will provide updates about the progress made by its researchers. In particular, Intel has been trying to find new ways to extend the intelligence of personal devices. The company’s marketing term for this is “carry small, live large.”

In Shanghai, Intel will demo a multi-band, power-efficient CMOS transceiver, with the ultimate aim being a true digital multi radio. But this will involve a lot more work on multi-radio integration and miniaturization, as well as the resolution of authentication questions so that a device knows that display X is the one where you want to display your data, and not some random screen.

My tired eyes could use a break, though I know this is the equivalent of tilting at windmills. We get older and our bodies inevitably start betraying us–sometimes sooner, sometimes later. But if the inventors of tomorrow’s gadgets are going to continue to think small, they’ve also got to start thinking big. From a purely design perspective, Apple did a nice job with the display on the iPhone. Still, that’s only a half step. You’re still stuck staring at a relatively small screen surface, not to mention you input data via hunt and peck.

Beyond any technical hurdles, Intel also will face industry politics: the consumer electronics and computer businesses don’t have a great history of talking to each other. But as fragmented as it often seems, the PC side has done a marvelous job when it comes to agreeing upon standards. When it comes to the consumer electronics business, well, just look at the pile of television remote controls piling up on your coffee table.

Click here for more stories on IDF Shanghai.

But Kahn says 2011 or 2012 is a realistic time frame. If so, we’re going to find ways to use everyday personal digital devices in very cool and unexpected ways.

5. Browser – The G1 has a full HTML browser present on most touch-screen phones as well as most Windows Mobile smartphones, so there’s nothing new there. It has onscreen controls to zoom in and out, which is a different than the pinching method of the iPhone, but quite similar to other devices. You can open multiple pages and share Web pages as well. The one difference is that it uses Webkit, an open-source browser built to be lean and fast. Do note that the iPhone uses
Safari, which is based on Webkit.

6. Location-based services – Here’s where the G1 really makes a difference. It comes with Google Maps Street View built-in, providing you with a street view of any location covered with Google Maps. It also comes with compass mode with the scene on the screen moving as you do. No other phone supports this Street View application just yet. It doesn’t have applications like Where or Buddy Beacon built-in, but with the Android Market application store, I can’t imagine it’ll take too long for more location-based applications to be available.

Now that we’ve had a taste of what the T-Mobile G1 offers, we compare it with other phones on the market and see if it brings anything different to the table.

4. Messaging – Like most other phones, the G1 has e-mail and instant messaging with special preference given to Gmail and Google Talk (To answer one of the comments, the G1 will also offer IM for AIM, Yahoo, and MSN). It doesn’t have Exchange support out of the box, which both the iPhone and the Instinct do (and of course every Windows Mobile smartphone out there). But if you’re a Gmail fan, you’ll love the push Gmail on the G1. Also unlike the iPhone, the G1 does have multimedia messaging, plus you can multitask applications while chatting. There’s a “windowshade” that you can pull down on the G1 to retrieve an ongoing instant message conversation.

8. Memory – The G1 comes with 1GB of internal memory, which is pretty small for a smart phone, but it does come with an expansion slot. The iPhone comes with either 8GB or 16GB built-in without an expansion, while most other smart phones come with expansion slots in addition to internal storage.

T-Mobile G1

These are just a few comparisons I’ve come up with in the first hour since the G1 announcement. Are there any more that you can think of? Let us know in the comments.

Since the G1 runs an operating system made by Google, it only makes sense that it has excellent search capabilities. Just like that on the Helio Ocean, the G1 has something called one-click contextual search, which lets you search your contacts as well as the Web just by typing in a few letters and hitting Enter. We’ll know more about the G1’s interface once we try it out for ourselves.

3. Connectivity – The G1 is one of the first devices to work on T-Mobile’s 3G network. It also works on both Wi-Fi and 3G, and has quad-band GSM plus dual-band UMTS, which means it will work abroad as well. The iPhone has both Wi-Fi and 3G as well as quad-band GSM and tri-band HSDPA while both the Instinct and the Dare are CDMA with EV-DO and don’t have Wi-Fi (We made the mistake of saying the iPhone was tri-band earlier, sorry for that). The HTC Touch Pro has Wi-Fi, 3G, and a quad-band GSM version, but is not yet available in the U.S. The G1 has Bluetooth but not stereo Bluetooth, similar to the iPhone. Other devices like the Instinct and Dare do have stereo Bluetooth. Also, the G1 does not allow tethering as a modem, which most Windows Mobile smartphones allow.

Click here for full coverage of Google Android.

(Credit:
T-Mobile)

Another important factor: The G1 has copy and paste.

PS: It also appears that the G1 has voice dialing. We’ll confirm that shortly. We have confirmed that the G1 does have voice dialing capabilities.

1. Design – The combination of a touch screen and a keyboard isn’t new of course, but I thought it would be good to remind people that others exist. The HTC Touch Pro is a Windows Mobile device that has both a touch screen and a keyboard, while the LG Voyager is a non-smartphone with both a touch screen and a keyboard as well. That said, the addition of a QWERTY keyboard does make it a little more easy to use than touch-screen-only devices like the
Apple iPhone or the Samsung Instinct. Also note that so far, it seems that the G1 has a removable battery while the iPhone does not.

Update: It turns out that the G1 does not have a 3.5-mm headset jack, which is a big downside considering it does have a music player with access to the Amazon MP3 store. And because it doesn’t have stereo Bluetooth either, you might have to cough out some extra cash for a headphone adapter.

2. Interface – Of course, we won’t be able to really tell the difference between the G1 and that of other touch-screen phones until we get one in our hands, but from the demo, it appears that you use the touch screen just like you would with the others. You swipe the touch screen to switch pages and scroll down menus, and you tap an application to open it. However, you can also hold down something (or a long press) to open up options. Just like the LG Dare, the T-Mobile G1 lets you drag and drop any application to the home screen as a convenient shortcut.

RIM reported fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday after the close of the stock market, and the numbers were good. The company took in $1.9 billion in revenue, more than double last year’s fourth-quarter haul of $930.4 million. And it had $412.5 million left over in profits, equal to 72 cents a share in earnings and two cents better than what Wall Street analysts were expecting.

However, Jim Balsillie, co-CEO of RIM, noted on a conference call that RIM is starting to develop more of a following among consumers, expanding beyond its typical business users. He pointed out that 1 million Facebook users have downloaded a BlackBerry application that lets them access their profiles through their devices.

RIM is confident about the next quarter: it delivered guidance above and beyond what Wall Street was expecting. The company predicted revenue to fall between $2.23 billion to $2.3 billion and earnings per share of between 82 cents to 86 cents. Financial analysts were expecting revenue of $2 billion and earnings per share of 76 cents.

The company shipped 4.4 million smartphones during the quarter, and 14 million for the year. Many of those phones were sold to new customers, as RIM added 2.8 million subscribers to the BlackBerry service during the quarter.

With phones like the BlackBerry Curve, more and more consumers are becoming RIM customers.

(Credit:
RIM)

Research in Motion’s BlackBerry business is chugging along, and the company has the money to prove it.

Does that sound a little harsh? Good. The fact of the matter is the RIAA has operated for years as the so-called “recording industry’s protector” and has tried numerous times to tell the world that what it’s doing to people all over the United States is best for us all.

The RIAA is one of the worst organizations in the world and one that should be held in contempt until it changes its practices and stops hunting easy prey. Is piracy right? Of course not. But neither are the practices the RIAA currently employs.

Knowing this, why has the RIAA, an organization who has gone on record saying “college students have yet to reach their full development”, continued its practice of suing or settling out of court? Simply put, the organization believes it works.

Is there ever an excuse for trying to force a woman’s 10-year old daughter into a deposition that could incriminate her mother? Is there ever an excuse for suing people for a ridiculous sum of money? Is there ever an excuse for battling the low-hanging fruit when huge overseas piracy cartels are free to roam and steal music? Never.

According to one report released in the Journal of Law and Economics, the lawsuits have not been effective at all. In fact, the organization has only been able to reduce the number of files currently available on large file-sharing sites, but smaller sites and piracy in general has plateaued or steadily grown at a slow rate.

If these facts sound staggering, they should. But what the RIAA is quick to point out is that it’s doing this for the artists and the lawsuits have been effective. Of course, most recent surveys suggest otherwise.

Every now and then, some organizations come along that make me wonder what’s wrong with this world. How did we ever get to a point where an organization is free to hunt poor college students in the hopes of more cash? How did we get to a point in this country where people are being charged more than 100 times the value of a song because they allegedly pirated it? Am I missing something?

And yet, the organization actually won a court case against Jammie Thomas last year doing just that. According to the court documents, Thomas was forced to pay $222,000 for allegedly pirating 24 songs. In other words, the RIAA was able to win a case where the damages amount to a whopping $9,250 per song.

And it’s that last point that tells you everything you ever needed to know about the RIAA. This organization has the gall to sue people for more than 1,000 times the value of a song because it was pirated? Wow.

And while some misguided artists have come out in favor of the organization’s practices, the vast majority of people in the recording industry have started to realize that the RIAA is a a PR nightmare for musicians and is the root of much of the evil you see in this anti-piracy campaign.

Of course not.

But alas, lawsuits don’t work and the chances of the RIAA winning big cases going forward are slim. And although it’s quick to cite its stance as the artist’s friend, don’t be so quick to believe it. If the RIAA was truly the “artist’s friend”, wouldn’t it give all of its lawsuit cash back to the people who create the music? Wouldn’t it to fight long and hard for artist rights in music and help them get out from under the thumb of the recording industry?

I really don’t like the RIAA and I never will. You’ve probably heard that said by thousands of people on the Internet and some have said worse than I, but as I learn more about this organization and the industry it “protects”, I dislike it more each day. If you ask me, this organization is the lowest of the lows.

The RIAA is and always has been the voice of the record labels that enjoy keeping the artists hungry while the executives enjoy the fruits of someone else’s labor. The RIAA isn’t doing what’s best for the artists, it’s doing what’s best for the record labels and those that pay their salaries. Knowing this, why does it feel the need to pretend it’s on the artist’s side? Doesn’t it know that we can see through every lawsuit and ever PR move for what this organization really is?

In just the past six years, the RIAA has allegedly: tried to acquire privacy data from ISPs in the hopes of finding pirates; mostly (albeit not completely) abandoned its practice of going after services in favor of individuals; attempted to sue a mother and after losing, sued her children; was forced to pay attorneys fees because of “alleged abusive legal action”; filed a lawsuit against AllofMP3.com for $1.65 trillion (11 million songs times $150,000 per song); tried to sue someone based on the term “making available”; and had a case thrown out because a judge called the RIAA’s specifications for damages — $750 per song — unconstitutional because the real cost to the recording industry is just $0.70.