While researching on S-E-X, this totally irrelevant trivia came up:

It only takes 7 shuffles to mix a deck of cards thoroughly.

And now, back to doing the dirty - Research.

Doing the shuffle

1,103 words
19 March 1990
Straits Times
English
(c) 1990 Singapore Press Holdings Limited

No fancy casino-style moves. All you need to mix a deck of cards thoroughly is seven simple shuffles, say researchers.

IT TAKES just seven ordinary, imperfect shuffles to mix a deck of cards thoroughly, researchers have found. Fewer are not enough and more do not significantly improve the mixing.

The mathematical proof, discovered after studies of results from elaborate computer calculations and careful observation of card games, confirms the intuition of many gamblers, bridge enthusiasts and casual players that most shuffling is inadequate.

The finding has implications for everyone who plays cards and everyone, from

casino operators to magicians, who has a stake in knowing whether a shuffle is random.

The mathematical problem was complicated because of the immense number of possible ways the cards in a deck can be arranged; any of 52 could be first in the deck, any of 51 could be second, 50 could be third and so on.

Multiplied out, the number of possible permutations is 10 with 62 zeros afte r it.

Dr Dave Bayer, a mathematician and computer scientist at Columbia Uni-versit y who is one of those who made the discovery, says this approach may be used to solve other problems in statistics, like analysing speech patterns to identify speakers.

Dr Persi Diaconis, a mathematician and statistician at Harvard University wh o is the other person who made the discovery, said the methods used are already helping mathematicians analyse problems in abstract mathematics that have nothing to do with shuffling or with any known real-world phenomena.

Dr Diaconis, who is also a magician, has been carefully watching casino dealers and casual card players shuffle for the past 20 years.

The usual shuffling produces a card order that "is far from random," he said . "Most people shuffle cards three or four times. Five times is considered excessive."

The realisation that most shuffled decks are not actually random allows gamblers to improve their odds of winning.

In Las Vegas, cards are shuffled from four to seven times, at the discretion

of the casino owners, said Mr Richard Ingram, an enforcement agent for the state Gambling Control Board.

Dr Diaconis said his research also shows that when dealers shuffle several decks at once, they need to shuffle more.

Two decks should be shuffled nine times, he said, and six decks should be shuffled 12 times, which is unheard of in the casinos.

Bridge players usually shuffle about four times, except in some tournaments when a computer randomly mixes the cards, said Mr Edgar Kaplan, who is editor and publisher of Bridge World magazine.

"There'll be a few who will doggedly shuffle several times to the irritation

of everyone else."

Dr Diaconis has found that many bridge players take advantage of the non-randomness of seemingly shuffled cards.

By figuring out that the cards are not being randomly shuffled, they "cheat"

in predicting the card distribution by knowing what the deck looks like at the end of the previous hand. - NYT

Labels: Sightings

No life

The state of my blog is the state of my life. And right now, I have no life.

Currently researching on the onset of sexual behaviour in sunny island, but there's a blanket of confidentiality surrounding the issue. Are the protagonists involved meant to find out about everything in the dark behind closed doors??!!

More on MY results soon. Bearing in mind all sunk costs and uphill adversities, this is my personal contribution to this crummy piece of stateland I call home. I'm very tempted to call it Sexless in the Lion City even though all that SATC whoo haa has since died down.

Anyway, one of my peers was doing on depression, and shared this, a friend - of hers. I know I'm not supposed to do stuff like that, linking without permission or credit, but i suppose all dead people would like to be immortalised in some way or another, sharing their story. Love - or at least the pretence of it, homosexual or not gets dangerous, once suckered into it.

He jumped 3 hours later.

Still thinking about how miserable life is or a lack thereof? No pun intended.

Labels: Whine

Why Nerds Are Unpopular - Part 16

By Paul Graham from his website, reproduced without permission (Please do not prosecute me).

The real problem is the emptiness of school life. We won't see solutions till adults realize that. The adults who may realize it first are the ones who were themselves nerds in school. Do you want your kids to be as unhappy in eighth grade as you were? I wouldn't. Well, then, is there anything we can do to fix things? Almost certainly. There is nothing inevitable about the current system. It has come about mostly by default.

Adults, though, are busy. Showing up for school plays is one thing. Taking on the educational bureaucracy is another. Perhaps a few will have the energy to try to change things. I suspect the hardest part is realizing that you can.

Nerds still in school should not hold their breath. Maybe one day a heavily armed force of adults will show up in helicopters to rescue you, but they probably won't be coming this month. Any immediate improvement in nerds' lives is probably going to have to come from the nerds themselves.

Merely understanding the situation they're in should make it less painful. Nerds aren't losers. They're just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world. Adults know this. It's hard to find successful adults now who don't claim to have been nerds in high school.

It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it.

If life seems awful to kids, it's neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It's because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do. Any society of that type is awful to live in. You don't have to look any further to explain why teenage kids are unhappy.

I've said some harsh things in this essay, but really the thesis is an optimistic one-- that several problems we take for granted are in fact not insoluble after all. Teenage kids are not inherently unhappy monsters. That should be encouraging news to kids and adults both.

Thanks to Sarah Harlin, Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris, Eric Raymond, and Jackie Weicker for reading drafts of this essay, and Maria Daniels for scanning photos.

Labels: Sightings

Why Nerds Are Unpopular - Part 15

By Paul Graham from his website, reproduced without permission (Please do not prosecute me).

Nerds aren't the only losers in the popularity rat race. Nerds are unpopular because they're distracted. There are other kids who deliberately opt out because they're so disgusted with the whole process.

Teenage kids, even rebels, don't like to be alone, so when kids opt out of the system, they tend to do it as a group. At the schools I went to, the focus of rebellion was drug use, specifically marijuana. The kids in this tribe wore black concert t-shirts and were called "freaks."

Freaks and nerds were allies, and there was a good deal of overlap between them. Freaks were on the whole smarter than other kids, though never studying (or at least never appearing to) was an important tribal value. I was more in the nerd camp, but I was friends with a lot of freaks.

They used drugs, at least at first, for the social bonds they created. It was something to do together, and because the drugs were illegal, it was a shared badge of rebellion.

I'm not claiming that bad schools are the whole reason kids get into trouble with drugs. After a while, drugs have their own momentum. No doubt some of the freaks ultimately used drugs to escape from other problems-- trouble at home, for example. But, in my school at least, the reason most kids started using drugs was rebellion. Fourteen-year-olds didn't start smoking pot because they'd heard it would help them forget their problems. They started because they wanted to join a different tribe.

Misrule breeds rebellion; this is not a new idea. And yet the authorities still for the most part act as if drugs were themselves the cause of the problem.

Labels: Sightings

Why Nerds Are Unpopular - Part 14

By Paul Graham from his website, reproduced without permission (Please do not prosecute me).

The mediocrity of American public schools has worse consequences than just making kids unhappy for six years. It breeds a rebelliousness that actively drives kids away from the things they're supposed to be learning.

Like many nerds, probably, it was years after high school before I could bring myself to read anything we'd been assigned then. And I lost more than books. I mistrusted words like "character" and "integrity" because they had been so debased by adults. As they were used then, these words all seemed to mean the same thing: obedience. The kids who got praised for these qualities tended to be at best dull-witted prize bulls, and at worst facile schmoozers. If that was what character and integrity were, I wanted no part of them.

The word I most misunderstood was "tact." As used by adults, it seemed to mean keeping your mouth shut. I assumed it was derived from the same root as "tacit" and "taciturn," and that it literally meant being quiet. I vowed that I would never be tactful; they were never going to shut me up. In fact, it's derived from the same root as "tactile," and what it means is to have a deft touch. Tactful is the opposite of clumsy. I don't think I learned this until college.

Labels: Sightings

Why Nerds Are Unpopular - Part 13

By Paul Graham from his website, reproduced without permission (Please do not prosecute me).

In almost any group of people you'll find hierarchy. When groups of adults form in the real world, it's generally for some common purpose, and the leaders end up being those who are best at it. The problem with most schools is, they have no purpose. But hierarchy there must be. And so the kids make one out of nothing.

We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be created without any meaningful criteria. We say that the situation degenerates into a popularity contest. And that's exactly what happens in most American schools. Instead of depending on some real test, one's rank depends mostly on one's ability to increase one's rank. It's like the court of Louis XIV. There is no external opponent, so the kids become one another's opponents.

When there is some real external test of skill, it isn't painful to be at the bottom of the hierarchy. A rookie on a football team doesn't resent the skill of the veteran; he hopes to be like him one day and is happy to have the chance to learn from him. The veteran may in turn feel a sense of noblesse oblige. And most importantly, their status depends on how well they do against opponents, not on whether they can push the other down.

Court hierarchies are another thing entirely. This type of society debases anyone who enters it. There is neither admiration at the bottom, nor noblesse oblige at the top. It's kill or be killed.

This is the sort of society that gets created in American secondary schools. And it happens because these schools have no real purpose beyond keeping the kids all in one place for a certain number of hours each day. What I didn't realize at the time, and in fact didn't realize till very recently, is that the twin horrors of school life, the cruelty and the boredom, both have the same cause.

Labels: Sightings

Smitten
Who'd have guessed, the singer of my fav song from (one of) my fav anime would have looked this cute, with my dream hair to match? And to think prior to this clip, i didn't even know who she was nor the song title! JPP - just push play.



ユンナ (Yunna)
<<ほうき星>>　(Houki Boshi)

Can almost hear me say: "かこいいと可愛いでね！" (Unicode)

Labels: Sightings

Why Nerds Are Unpopular - Part 12

By Paul Graham from his website, reproduced without permission (Please do not prosecute me).

Teenage kids used to have a more active role in society. In pre-industrial times, they were all apprentices of one sort or another, whether in shops or on farms or even on warships. They weren't left to create their own societies. They were junior members of adult societies.

Teenagers seem to have respected adults more then, because the adults were the visible experts in the skills they were trying to learn. Now most kids have little idea what their parents do in their distant offices, and see no connection (indeed, there is precious little) between schoolwork and the work they'll do as adults.

And if teenagers respected adults more, adults also had more use for teenagers. After a couple years' training, an apprentice could be a real help. Even the newest apprentice could be made to carry messages or sweep the workshop.

Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be in the way in an office. So they drop them off at school on their way to work, much as they might drop the dog off at a kennel if they were going away for the weekend.

What happened? We're up against a hard one here. The cause of this problem is the same as the cause of so many present ills: specialization. As jobs become more specialized, we have to train longer for them. Kids in pre-industrial times started working at about 14 at the latest; kids on farms, where most people lived, began far earlier. Now kids who go to college don't start working full-time till 21 or 22. With some degrees, like MDs and PhDs, you may not finish your training till 30.

Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food, which evolved to exploit precisely this fact. In almost any other kind of work, they'd be a net loss. But they're also too young to be left unsupervised. Someone has to watch over them, and the most efficient way to do this is to collect them together in one place. Then a few adults can watch all of them.

If you stop there, what you're describing is literally a prison, albeit a part-time one. The problem is, many schools practically do stop there. The stated purpose of schools is to educate the kids. But there is no external pressure to do this well. And so most schools do such a bad job of teaching that the kids don't really take it seriously-- not even the smart kids. Much of the time we were all, students and teachers both, just going through the motions.

In my high school French class we were supposed to read Hugo's Les Miserables. I don't think any of us knew French well enough to make our way through this enormous book. Like the rest of the class, I just skimmed the Cliff's Notes. When we were given a test on the book, I noticed that the questions sounded odd. They were full of long words that our teacher wouldn't have used. Where had these questions come from? From the Cliff's Notes, it turned out. The teacher was using them too. We were all just pretending.

There are certainly great public school teachers. The energy and imagination of my fourth grade teacher, Mr. Mihalko, made that year something his students still talk about, thirty years later. But teachers like him were individuals swimming upstream. They couldn't fix the system.

Labels: Sightings

Why Nerds Are Unpopular - Part 11

By Paul Graham from his website, reproduced without permission (Please do not prosecute me).

When I was in school, suicide was a constant topic among the smarter kids. No one I knew did it, but several planned to, and some may have tried. Mostly this was just a pose. Like other teenagers, we loved the dramatic, and suicide seemed very dramatic. But partly it was because our lives were at times genuinely miserable.

Bullying was only part of the problem. Another problem, and possibly an even worse one, was that we never had anything real to work on. Humans like to work; in most of the world, your work is your identity. And all the work we did was pointless, or seemed so at the time.

At best it was practice for real work we might do far in the future, so far that we didn't even know at the time what we were practicing for. More often it was just an arbitrary series of hoops to jump through, words without content designed mainly for testability. (The three main causes of the Civil War were.... Test: List the three main causes of the Civil War.)

And there was no way to opt out. The adults had agreed among themselves that this was to be the route to college. The only way to escape this empty life was to submit to it.

Labels: Sightings

Why Nerds Are Unpopular - Part 10

By Paul Graham from his website, reproduced without permission (Please do not prosecute me).

Life in this twisted world is stressful for the kids. And not just for the nerds. Like any war, it's damaging even to the winners.

Adults can't avoid seeing that teenage kids are tormented. So why don't they do something about it? Because they blame it on puberty. The reason kids are so unhappy, adults tell themselves, is that monstrous new chemicals, hormones, are now coursing through their bloodstream and messing up everything. There's nothing wrong with the system; it's just inevitable that kids will be miserable at that age.

This idea is so pervasive that even the kids believe it, which probably doesn't help. Someone who thinks his feet naturally hurt is not going to stop to consider the possibility that he is wearing the wrong size shoes.

I'm suspicious of this theory that thirteen-year-old kids are intrinsically messed up. If it's physiological, it should be universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? I've read a lot of history, and I have not seen a single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance seem to have been cheerful and eager. They got in fights and played tricks on one another of course (Michelangelo had his nose broken by a bully), but they weren't crazy.

As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don't think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they're made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.

Labels: Sightings

Why Nerds Are Unpopular - Part 09

By Paul Graham from his website, reproduced without permission (Please do not prosecute me).

If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I'd tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn't really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.

Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could endanger children.

And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.

What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren't told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they're called misfits.

Labels: Sightings

Why Nerds Are Unpopular - Part 08

By Paul Graham from his website, reproduced without permission (Please do not prosecute me).

As a thirteen-year-old kid, I didn't have much more experience of the world than what I saw immediately around me. The warped little world we lived in was, I thought, the world. The world seemed cruel and boring, and I'm not sure which was worse.

Because I didn't fit into this world, I thought that something must be wrong with me. I didn't realize that the reason we nerds didn't fit in was that in some ways we were a step ahead. We were already thinking about the kind of things that matter in the real world, instead of spending all our time playing an exacting but mostly pointless game like the others.

We were a bit like an adult would be if he were thrust back into middle school. He wouldn't know the right clothes to wear, the right music to like, the right slang to use. He'd seem to the kids a complete alien. The thing is, he'd know enough not to care what they thought. We had no such confidence.

A lot of people seem to think it's good for smart kids to be thrown together with "normal" kids at this stage of their lives. Perhaps. But in at least some cases the reason the nerds don't fit in really is that everyone else is crazy. I remember sitting in the audience at a "pep rally" at my high school, watching as the cheerleaders threw an effigy of an opposing player into the audience to be torn to pieces. I felt like an explorer witnessing some bizarre tribal ritual.

Labels: Sightings

Why Nerds Are Unpopular - Part 07

By Paul Graham from his website, reproduced without permission (Please do not prosecute me).

Why is the real world more hospitable to nerds? It might seem that the answer is simply that it's populated by adults, who are too mature to pick on one another. But I don't think this is true. Adults in prison certainly pick on one another. And so, apparently, do society wives; in some parts of Manhattan, life for women sounds like a continuation of high school, with all the same petty intrigues.

I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's populated by adults, but that it's very large, and the things you do have real effects. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.

When the things you do have real effects, it's no longer enough just to be pleasing. It starts to be important to get the right answers, and that's where nerds show to advantage. Bill Gates will of course come to mind. Though notoriously lacking in social skills, he gets the right answers, at least as measured in revenue.

The other thing that's different about the real world is that it's much larger. In a large enough pool, even the smallest minorities can achieve a critical mass if they clump together. Out in the real world, nerds collect in certain places and form their own societies where intelligence is the most important thing. Sometimes the current even starts to flow in the other direction: sometimes, particularly in university math and science departments, nerds deliberately exaggerate their awkwardness in order to seem smarter. John Nash so admired Norbert Wiener that he adopted his habit of touching the wall as he walked down a corridor.

Labels: Sightings

Why Nerds Are Unpopular - Part 06

By Paul Graham from his website, reproduced without permission (Please do not prosecute me).

For me the worst stretch was junior high, when kid culture was new and harsh, and the specialization that would later gradually separate the smarter kids had barely begun. Nearly everyone I've talked to agrees: the nadir is somewhere between eleven and fourteen.

In our school it was eighth grade, which was ages twelve and thirteen for me. There was a brief sensation that year when one of our teachers overheard a group of girls waiting for the school bus, and was so shocked that the next day she devoted the whole class to an eloquent plea not to be so cruel to one another.

It didn't have any noticeable effect. What struck me at the time was that she was surprised. You mean she doesn't know the kind of things they say to one another? You mean this isn't normal?

It's important to realize that, no, the adults don't know what the kids are doing to one another. They know, in the abstract, that kids are monstrously cruel to one another, just as we know in the abstract that people get tortured in poorer countries. But, like us, they don't like to dwell on this depressing fact, and they don't see evidence of specific abuses unless they go looking for it.

Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.

In outline, it was the same at the schools I went to. The most important thing was to stay on the premises. While there, the authorities fed you, prevented overt violence, and made some effort to teach you something. But beyond that they didn't want to have too much to do with the kids. Like prison wardens, the teachers mostly left us to ourselves. And, like prisoners, the culture we created was barbaric.

Labels: Sightings

Why Nerds Are Unpopular - Part 05

By Paul Graham from his website, reproduced without permission (Please do not prosecute me).

Nerds would find their unpopularity more bearable if it merely caused them to be ignored. Unfortunately, to be unpopular in school is to be actively persecuted.

Why? Once again, anyone currently in school might think this a strange question to ask. How could things be any other way? But they could be. Adults don't normally persecute nerds. Why do teenage kids do it?

Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel. Some torture nerds for the same reason they pull the legs off spiders. Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.

Another reason kids persecute nerds is to make themselves feel better. When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.

But I think the main reason other kids persecute nerds is that it's part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It's much more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.

Like a politician who wants to distract voters from bad times at home, you can create an enemy if there isn't a real one. By singling out and persecuting a nerd, a group of kids from higher in the hierarchy create bonds between themselves. Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders. This is why the worst cases of bullying happen with groups. Ask any nerd: you get much worse treatment from a group of kids than from any individual bully, however sadistic.

If it's any consolation to the nerds, it's nothing personal. The group of kids who band together to pick on you are doing the same thing, and for the same reason, as a bunch of guys who get together to go hunting. They don't actually hate you. They just need something to chase.

Because they're at the bottom of the scale, nerds are a safe target for the entire school. If I remember correctly, the most popular kids don't persecute nerds; they don't need to stoop to such things. Most of the persecution comes from kids lower down, the nervous middle classes.

The trouble is, there are a lot of them. The distribution of popularity is not a pyramid, but tapers at the bottom like a pear. The least popular group is quite small. (I believe we were the only D table in our cafeteria map.) So there are more people who want to pick on nerds than there are nerds.

As well as gaining points by distancing oneself from unpopular kids, one loses points by being close to them. A woman I know says that in high school she liked nerds, but was afraid to be seen talking to them because the other girls would make fun of her. Unpopularity is a communicable disease; kids too nice to pick on nerds will still ostracize them in self-defense.

It's no wonder, then, that smart kids tend to be unhappy in middle school and high school. Their other interests leave them little attention to spare for popularity, and since popularity resembles a zero-sum game, this in turn makes them targets for the whole school. And the strange thing is, this nightmare scenario happens without any conscious malice, merely because of the shape of the situation.

Labels: Sightings

U can never have too much of a good thing

if you can't read chinese, the following can be summed up as follows:

1) www.baidu.com = www.napster.com (as in the napster of donkey years ago)
2) the only difference being, it's a search engine with cheena mp3 search functions
3) kena fined by Beijing court
4) 7 other major record company suits in following
5) www.baidu.com = napster.com (as in the napster now)?

It's a sad day for chinese music industry, when the artiste are making music so bad, that I sometimes just download, listen and delete the damn song straightaway. And technically, the site shouldn't be sued too since they're not hosting anything, just running a search engine. So now if i can successfully search for an mp3 at yahoo.com den they'd be liable to copyright infrindgement too? That's bullshit man.

Haven't these dudes learned anything? Basing their webservers in some ulu foreign countries for eg.? Personally, I think the best way of combating piracy this way is to stream the music online, then if the user likes it, they can source for their own programs to rip or convert the song they've heard into their own. Which kind of makes things back to the good old days of cassette and radio recording. Kids these days don't deserve that much spoonfeeding anyway.

MP3下载官司 百度被判赔6.8万 (unicode)

本报讯 据新京报报道，因提供歌曲MP3下载服务，网络搜索公司百度被告侵权。北京市海淀区人民法院16日一审判决，百度公司败诉，并赔偿原告上海步升公司6.8万元。百度当天表示不服这一判决，并将提出上诉。　　上海步升公司诉称，百度在网站上向公众提供涉及胡彦斌、花儿乐队等演唱的歌曲的MP3下载服务，共计46首。这些曲目的录音制作权均归步升公司所有，从未许可百度通过互联网向公众传播，百度事实上在以自身经济利益为出发点满足用户下载的需求，并没有考虑到对版权拥有者的侵权。百度的行为给步升造成重大经济损失，为此步升请求法院判令：百度停止提供涉案歌曲的下载服务，赔偿经济损失46万元，并公开赔礼道歉。　　一审判决认为，百度以营利为目的，在其网站上提供上述歌曲的MP3下载服务，其行为已超出其所定义的搜索引擎的服务范围，应属侵权，故应立即停止侵权并赔偿步升公司经济损失6.8万元，并停止在网站上提供原告享有录音制作权的涉案歌曲的MP3文件下载服务。　　对于一审败诉的结果，昨天下午，百度副总裁梁冬紧急召集记者并表示：“百度不服这样的判决，我们会立即上诉。”　　“问题的关键在于，提供盗版MP3下载服务的并不是百度，而是其他网站。百度只是根据用户的需求向他们提供一个搜索结果。”梁冬说，百度不愿意也不应该为那些不属于自己的侵权行为负责。互联网上存在大量不受版权保护的内容服务，就算没有搜索引擎服务商提供搜索服务，也并不会影响到用户通过其他方式去找到这些内容服务，并在事实上构成侵权。因此，百度被要求为这些不属于自己的盗版行为负责是不公平的。　　法庭上，原告律师的一个证据就是：在用户下载过程中，百度网页上所弹出的对话框注明“相关的MP3文件来自mp3.baidu.com”。对此，百度公司一不愿透露姓名者说：“这种生拉硬扯的说法完全是因为对互联网技术的无知。对话框里弹出来的‘来自mp3.baidu.com’的意思是说搜索结果来自百度，存放MP3文件的下载服务器根本与百度无关。”　　记者观察　　唱片巨头起诉百度 MP3搜索面临关闭　　对比上海步升带来的麻烦，更让百度头疼的事情其实是其他的巨头级唱片公司的联名诉讼。昨天的另外一条消息是，环球唱片、百代唱片、华纳唱片、索尼BMG以及它们的中国子公司新艺宝和正东唱片已经对百度提起联名起诉，指控百度的搜索引擎侵犯了它们数百首歌曲的版权。　　分析人士认为，唱片公司起诉的要求将不仅限于经济赔偿和侵权链接删除，更终极的目的在于逼迫百度步网易后尘关闭其MP3搜索服务。　　但数据显示，来自MP3搜索的流量在过去一个季度甚至为百度带来了30%以上的用户和流量。MP3搜索服务在百度和网易的不同地位决定了百度不可能接受“关闭服务”要求。　　本周三，百度在北京召集数十家唱片公司座谈，直接将“数字音乐产业链”的构成摆到桌面上来。在这样的态度下，一种新的合作模式已经开始萌芽。到目前为止，百度CEO李彦宏还没有公布百度未来的MP3计划。但他表示：“我们并不排除同唱片公司合作，推广正版音乐下载的可能性。”

Labels: Sightings