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I find this lawsuit to be more than ridiculous. I find it disgusting.

To sue Google for acting in its best interest and with a view to retain its effectiveness and credibility is nothing short of despicable. Whether SearchKing did it because it truly believes it is right or because it seeks publicity is irrelevant. Its actions are illogical:
a) SearchKing has come to depend on Google (as it stated) because Google can be trusted.
b) Google can be trusted because its algorithms are pretty accurate.
c) SearchKing tried to interfere with those algorithms, seeking INACCURATE results from Google.
d) Google modified said algorithms to counterbalance the interference, seeking its much-valued accuracy.
e) SearchKing sues Google.

I've read the LawMeme analysis and SearchKing's opinions and all I see is another unscrupulous dotcom trying to discredit a very respectable service to serve its own needs, regardless of the damage it may cause. So, fellow /.'ers, I propose we take an active role in this wretched little saga: I propose we write to EVERY SINGLE CLIENT displayed on SearchKing's site and tell them that we despise the SearchKing lawsuit against Google and that we will NOT visit, support, recommend or in any way help them until they have moved to another hosting service or convinced SearchKing to desist in their legal efforts. The same treatment should be directed at SearchKing's advertisers, even if one of them is, sadly, Penguin Computing.

Last time I checked, /. had over half a million subscribers. I think that should get their attention. Don't you?


Cheers,
Morel

For one thing, perhaps they are so happy with the recent court decisions in SearchKing's home jurisdiction, that they don't feel the need for a change. The Law Meme analysis shows that Google had some excellent precendents in Oklahoma to rely on.

From the link you posted, Bob Massa (of SearchKing) writes:
" If you take your web presence seriously, and accept that the words research.yale.edu means something, doesn't that put a responsibility on you to be open-minded and fair? To at least try to report objectively?"

This guy is almost as whiny as the Bernard Shifman twit! If you look at what was written, it says, basically, "this is a loser of a case and a waste of SearchKing's money." In other words, James Grimmelmann doesn't talk to Google either, he simply looks at the case on its merits and proclaims it is a loser.

I guarantee that if James stood on the opposite side of the fence it would be Massa proclaiming him a genius.

People like searchking should be lined up and shot next to all the spammers

Funny you should mention that, there's a post at Lawmeme :

First, according to OpenRBL SearchKing either IS, or is affiliated with, Mach 10 Hosting, a known spammer. I have to wonder if Bob Massa is in fact the owner of, or a principal in, Mach 10 Hosting (i.e. a spammer) in addition to being a purveyor of banner ads? I think it's funny that his web site's IP address (209.217.135.144) has a reverse-DNS name of "dave144.mach10hosting.com" instead of any name concerning "searchking.com"...

We can save Bob Massa's bullet and have two for Alan Ralsky

There is an interesting quote in the article that says: "Perhaps a search engine is important enough to be treated as a regulated utility, the same way that water, gas, and the cables over which search requests travel are. Google is good, most netizens seem to think, but what if it weren't?" If it weren't good the principles of free enterprise would kick in a Google would no longer be important... One of the hundred other search engines would become king of the pile. Remember Google is the third or fourth search engine that has been THE search engine. This is not a monsterous company with Billions of Assets like Microsoft or Standard Oil etc. Google is a reasonably small company doing what they do, and doing it well.

Previous LawMeme Coverage here, including a nasty reply from the SearchKing himself.

Little Known Facts About the Bill of Rights

Have a look here. It's the English Bill of Rights, dated 1698. Some quotes:

That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law;
That jurors ought to be duly impanelled and returned, and jurors which pass upon men in trials for high treason ought to be freeholders;
That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted;

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

As regards Smart Guns and how they work, have a look here for an Australian one. There's a page with a 4.5 Mb streaming video and a 45 Mb hi-res zipped version.

Until recently, RNA was thought to do little more than carry out DNA's instructions for building proteins.

However, the new picture, which Science says came into focus this year, shows small RNAs at the heart of many of the cell's genetic workings.

This is an oversimplification, probably intended for a lay audience. For the past 20 years or so, RNA has been known to have enzymatic functions. At first this catalytic property of RNA had been thought to be limited to primitive organisms. However, recent research has shown that rRNA, which is the RNA component of ribosomes, is in fact the catalytic component of the peptidyltransferase reaction that creates polypeptides, which in turn make up proteins. Moreover, although there is no direct proof yet, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence that indicates mRNA splicing in eukaryotes is also catalyzed by RNA (in the form of "small nuclear RNAs" or snRNAs). To state that RNAs are only part of the information chain from DNAs to proteins is a misjustice to the complexity of RNA biology.

The small RNAs that are described in this article are not even catalytic; in fact, to your average RNA biochemist these small RNAs are not all that interesting. They are, however, very interesting to people who study gene regulation, because that appears to be the normal role of these small RNAs. Biotech companies are also interested because they are a way to target specific genes for inactivation.

The South, which exported agricultural products to and imported manufactured goods from Europe...

Their constitution was nearly identical to the U.S. Constitution except that it outlawed protectionist tariffs, business handouts and mandated a two-thirds majority vote for all spending measures.

(3) The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several States; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.

Most importantly there is of course the EFF. Also check out Yale's Lawmeme, Harvard's Grep Law, and Gigalaw.

I'm posting AC since I don't want to come over as a karma whore.

The individuals who are members of the militia of the United States are clearly defined in US Law. Whether or not there exists list contains all and only those who qualify is a separate question.

No but it clearly states that a well ordered militia is the reason for your right to own guns. Those two phrases are clearly related. If they simply wanted all people to have guns they would not have included the first phrase.

First, it does not stipulate a well ordered militia, it specifies a well regulated militia. This refers at the time to military discipline, not laws. To understand the context of the debate, see Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Paper 29 quoting one of his critics:

"The project of disciplining all the militia of the United States is as futile as it would be injurious, if it were capable of being carried into execution. A tolerable expertness in military movements is a business that requires time and practice. It is not a day, or even a week, that will suffice for the attainment of it. To oblige the great body of the yeomanry, and of the other classes of the citizens, to be under arms for the purpose of going through military exercises and evolutions, as often as might be necessary to acquire the degree of perfection which would entitle them to the character of a well-regulated militia, would be a real grievance to the people, and a serious public inconvenience and loss."

Seventeenth, That the people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well regulated Militia composed of the body of the people trained to arms is the proper, natural and safe defence of a free State. That standing armies in time of peace are dangerous to liberty, and therefore ought to be avoided, as far as the circumstances and protection of the Community will admit; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to and governed by the Civil power.

Regarding the comparison of free code to the law, I think Stallman (and Timothy) might be disappointed to read this at LawMeme. For those who don't want to follow the link:

New York based securities litigation firm Milberg Weiss known for representing stockholders of Enron, last September started copyrighting some complaints it files on behalf of its clients by registering with the U.S. Copyright Office. Milberg's attorneys recently sent out ten letters to other attorneys who represent other plaintiffs in same cases with Milberg asking them to stop copying their work after discovering that documents it filed with courts were being copied, in some instances virtually unchanged. Aside from sending out the letters Milberg has not taken any action as of now, but that may change since the firm starting to feel that its expertise is being used without compensation. Milberg also feels that because of copying it has suffered monetary losses.

Apparently, nothing is sacred. :-)

Microsoft applied for a trademark on Windows, but in the Lindows case Judge Coughenour ruled that it was invalid:

"Lindows.com has presented sufficient evidence to rebut the presumption of validity of the Windows mark," Coughenour wrote. "It is necessary to emphasize that, at this nascent stage in the litigation, the court's determination that there are serious questions regarding whether Windows is a non-generic name and thus eligible for the protections of federal trademark law is not a conclusive finding that the trademark is invalid."

source.

Another informative summary of the same ruling on MS's preliminary injunction.

Yet another report, or, uh, bricolage, whatever.

We alienate the arab nations, which control half the world's oil supply, in order to support a nation that has no oil whatsoever.

So, I guess when Bush takes over Iraq (at the risk of millions of young men and women), he doesn't really want a country which has the second largest crude oil reserves in the world. If sympathy was the sole motive, then we would have been there for the Cambodians and Armenians.

but they've never sent in suicide bombers, or taken actions with no strategic value whatsoever

Uh, they don't need to. We give them all the weapons that they would ever want.

Here's a list of the sites that were blocked by default that I had to unblock manually:

• Florida Gulf Coast University www.fgcu.edu
• NoodleTools.com www.noodletools.com (I can understand this one a little, though in this case "noodle" means "brain")
• Access Atlanta www.accessatlanta.com
• Inclusive Scouting www.inclusivescouting.com
• Yale University's Law Web www.yale.edu/lawweb
• Scentiments.com www.scentiments.com
• Pasadena Public Library LibraryTeens LibraryTeens
• Pepperdine's Graduate school faculty pages gsep.pepperdine.edu
• Scouting for all www.scoutingforall.com

People who back such laws as this and oppose the recent ruling concerning the "under God" portion of the "Pledge of Allegience" are at odds with America's diverse morality and (non)spirituality. To include a reference to God in the Pledge begs the question "Which God?" or "Whose?". Likewise when legislating morality the question becomes "Whose morals?".

Because nearly every commercial filtering system is protected by "trade secrets" it becomes impossible to expect and answer to the above questions, and illegal to discover them on your own.

Are expected to purchase software that controls our childrens access to information without knowing what it's really doing? Absolutely, and if this law is upheld it'd be illegal to choose otherwise.

Don't entirely know what it blocks and doesn't. Don't know why. Blocking software companies won't tell us. Illegal to find out. Illegal to not install. Likely illegal to circumvent.

Orwellian. Yep.

As an aside:

"Protecting children" is a convenient way to get government to move, and it's a red herring. No American politician is going to come out and say "I'm anti-children" or "I think children should look at porn and the taxpayers should foot the bill.". Evoking "protecting children" is just a carrot (or whip if you'd rather) for people who have an agenda to wave in front of legislators.

"Protecting children" also sells tires, and Volvos, and antibacterial soap, and milk, and private schools, and cell phones, and guns...

-dameron

My personal favorite is Adapted Wavelet Analysis from Theory to Software by Victor Wickerhauser. Victor wrote the fast wavelet routines I used in my tool XWPL, and he contributes practical coder's experience, not just theory. One of the examples he gives from his own personal experience is the FBI's fingerprint compression algorithm, developed in 1993 or so.

• A home page with an extra list item.
  
  Where does it take me? To URL not found.
  
• This article is a disturbing manifesto of hate and distrust. He has a paraniod conviction that people are evil and stupid. He talks about "round ups" and demonstrates a thorough lack of understanding of mob psychology, stoping just short of recomending punishment and death to an entire class of people. He questions the ability of human intleligence to prevent the evil things stupid people wish to do and seeks protection by machines. It's hard to imagine a computer science professor not understanding that computers only do as they are told, but he seems to trust Microsoft. I have not read a more disturbing statement of hatred since reading Hitler. Hitler was coherent by comparison.
  
• Back on topic is good for the man. He's obviously offbase elswhere. And again we have the first two links broken. Hupfer, the third link, at least uses device independent file formats. Cool, then you read it. Snore, "we are just beginning.."
  

OK, I've had enough. This fellow might develop some interesting replacement for Clippy, but it looks like hype hype hype from 1992 thus far. Dave's paranoia would do him some good when dealing with M$.

• A home page with an extra list item.
  
  Where does it take me? To URL not found.
  
• This article is a disturbing manifesto of hate and distrust. He has a paraniod conviction that people are evil and stupid. He talks about "round ups" and demonstrates a thorough lack of understanding of mob psychology, stoping just short of recomending punishment and death to an entire class of people. He questions the ability of human intleligence to prevent the evil things stupid people wish to do and seeks protection by machines. It's hard to imagine a computer science professor not understanding that computers only do as they are told, but he seems to trust Microsoft. I have not read a more disturbing statement of hatred since reading Hitler. Hitler was coherent by comparison.
  
• Back on topic is good for the man. He's obviously offbase elswhere. And again we have the first two links broken. Hupfer, the third link, at least uses device independent file formats. Cool, then you read it. Snore, "we are just beginning.."
  

OK, I've had enough. This fellow might develop some interesting replacement for Clippy, but it looks like hype hype hype from 1992 thus far. Dave's paranoia would do him some good when dealing with M$.

Through his pioneering work in distributed and parallel computing systems, Gelernter and his colleagues are laying the theoretical foundation for a third generation of personal computing. In this next generation, the Web will go beyond mere "fun and games" to become a ubiquitous, almost transparent presence in our everyday affairs, and the PC will change from an expensive box of wires into a collection of smaller digital tools designed to be electronic extensions of the human mind.

David Gelernter's research interests include information management, parallel programming, software ensembles and artificial intelligence. The coordination language called "Linda" that he developed with Nicholas Carriero (also of Yale) sees fairly widespread use world-wide for parallel programming.

Gelernter's current interests include adaptive parallelism, programming environments for parallelism, realtime data fusion, expert databases and information-management systems (the Lifestreams system in particular). He is co-author of two textbooks (on programming languages and on parallel programming methods), author of Mirror Worlds (Oxford: 1991), the Muse in the Machine (Free Press: 1994 -- about how thinking works), and a forthcoming book in the "Masterclasses" series about aesthetics and computing. He has published cultural-implications-of-computing-type pieces in many newspapers and magazines, is contributing editor at the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, the National Review and is art critic at the Weekly Standard.

Representative Publications

• Lifestreams: An Alternative to the Desktop Metaphor, with Scott Fertig and Eric Freeman. Proc. CHI'96 (April 1996: paper and ACM video).

• Adaptive Parallelism, with Nicholas Carriero, Eric Freeman and David Kaminsky. IEEE Computer, Feb. 1995.

• Coordination Languages and their Significance, with Nicholas Carriero, Communications of the ACM, 35 (2), February 1992, pp. 97-107.

There are men who believe that democracy, as a form of Government and a frame of life, is limited or measured by a kind of mystical and artificial fate that, for some unexplained reason, tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future--and that freedom is an ebbing tide.

But we Americans know that this is not true.

LawMeme points out a glaring loophole in the bill.

LawMeme points out a glaring loophole in the bill.

Professor Jonathan Zittrain and Ben Edelman of Harvard's Berkman Center are studying exclusions from Google and have so far found some 113 sites excluded, in whole or in part, from the French google.fr and German google.de. Learn more about the situation and context, test the exclusions for yourself, and submit further sites suspected to be excluded. LawMeme and C|Net have more info.

LawMeme is dissecting the letter and note line by line.

Hate to tell you Bob, an action cannot be arbitrarily ("determined by chance") and purposefully ("intentional") committed.

That reminds me of a joke in Law School in a Nutshell, Part III...

There's a lawyer joke you hear pretty early on in law school. It goes:

What did the lawyer say when accused of breaking a vase?

1. It's my vase . . .
2. . . . it was broken when you gave it to me . . .
3. . . . it was in perfect shape when I gave it back . . .
4. . . . and I've never seen that vase before in my life.

This is called "arguing in the alternative." Lawyers do it all the time. For some reason it seems to drive non-lawyers absolutely nuts. The way it works is that you provide a whole bunch of reasons for something, so that even if you lose on N-1 of them, you still win on the last one. The twist is that you act completely innocent whenever anyone complains that your reasons contradict each other. You just look at them and smile, as though you have utterly no idea what they're talking about. All you have to do is pretend that you're living in a Douglas Adams novel and it's surprisingly easy.

-

Lawmeme has a poll on how you think it Eldred will come out. Read the transcript and vote.

Surely you jest. LIbraries are the oldest and ultimate repository of geek-ness. WHat could be more 31337.

Interestingly, the world's first library just reopened a couple of days ago.

Or you could visit this extraordinary place.

I came across some more old maps the other day, quite a few from the 1500's.

Your recap is a list of nonsense, all of it false.

1. Point to the prohabition, in the US Constitution, to military action by the Commander in Chief unless the Congress allows said action.

2. Find ANYTHING you assert here and please post it.

3. Since I have done your homework for you, come back and apolodize for confusing the folks not as well read on these topics.

Read this for some good info.

There are such things as immortal cells. You can make them in a lab.

LawMeme has an entire post on this in pirate lingo - Shiver Me Timbers! Pirates Take to the High Seas

LawMeme has an entire post on this in pirate lingo - Shiver Me Timbers! Pirates Take to the High Seas

LawMeme has a pretty good analysis of the bill here.

LawMeme has a pretty good analysis of the bill here.

LawMeme has a quick-n-dirty analysis here. Conclusion: The bill has good points and bad points, but is a good idea in order to balance out the debate.

LawMeme has a quick-n-dirty analysis here. Conclusion: The bill has good points and bad points, but is a good idea in order to balance out the debate.

"I would accept any copyright extensions if they serve to protect Micky Mouse and Goofy."

The whole point is that new creation is very often based on old creation, viz Cinderella, Snow White, et al. These days, all these copyright extensions do is protect the profit of the corporations.

Heinlein said (as quoted by Yale Law in Top Ten New Copyright Crimes,

There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years , the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped ,or turned back, for their private benefit.

This pretty much says it all. What is a copyright extension but "turning back the clock?" I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the Supremes will follow the intent of the framers of the Constitution, rather than pandering to those in Congress who are in the pockets of those who have a vested interest in keeping the laws as they are, or worse.

The Los Angeles Times has a very good article about this whole thing, with particular emphasis on Lessig and on the historical perspective (this debate goes back more than two hundred years); find it here.

Yale's LawMeme actually has concrete suggestions for archive.org Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for Scientology

LawMeme not only has a detailed report with lots of links, they have suggestions on what archivel.org should do. See, Sherman, Set the Wayback Machine for Scientology .

I dunno what'll happen. Scalia's on their side, hence the focus on harm to the public in Larry's final briefs. You will find many who share your viewpoint, of course.

But it was while surfing sites like LawMeme, GrepLaw, and Copyfight, among others that I thought about what might be the worst development to come out of this, from a copyright holder's standpoint.

You've got a whole generation of law students following along, rooting for Larry, and sharing his belief that copyright as currently constructed, only benefitting the holders, is wrong (Michael Hart's too-easily dismissed manifestoes, as the reporter condescendingly put it, echo this view).

And that same generation of law students may very well find a lot of other ways to beat up on the publishing industry (hint here: the industry's biggest market is schools, while prices are set rather high by a few players). It's quite possible that industry types will win the Eldred battle but lose the war.

We'll know soon enough.

Go get 'em, Larry.

When I grow up, I want to be a Karma Whore.

• The Sedition Act of 1798
• The Espionage Act of 1917
• Executive Order 9066

I don't know if anyone reads this far down into a Slashdot thread but... The last post was correct. The Turbo Grafx 16 game system (or the PCEngine in Japan) was produced by NEC, with some significant Hudson Soft development effort.

In case anyone cares, Turbo Zone Direct still sells new TG16 hardware and software (This is not a plug, I have no relationship with TZD). There is also a Turbo mailing list still in existence, where people discuss the PCE/TG16, as well as buy/sell/trade games and accessories. There's even a few fan sites left out there.

The Turbo Duo was the American re-release of the original TG16, which included the cartridge (HuCard) port, and integrated CD-ROM unit. The TG16 was also the first game system to utilize as CD-ROM, and the only system to ever have a successful expansion device. Until the Game Boy Advance, the portable Turbo Express was the most powerful handheld gaming system, and it was capable of playing the entire library of games from the parent system, since they were on the extremely portable HuCards.

While most people in the U.S. have never heard of the Turbo Grafx, the system was extremely successful in Japan (as the PCEngine), much more so than the MegaDrive (Sega Genesis). Send me a message if your a fan of the system. :)

Re: The Ada catastrophe:

It is a pity that the catastrophe of ADA brought down the idea of dimensional analysis with it. Of course Hoare's Turing award lecture (please don't use this for anything safety critical the compilers are certain to be full of bugs) gave a salutary warning on unbounded complexity.

Gradually these objectives have been sacrificed in favour of power, supposedly achieved by a plethora of features and notational conventions, many of them unncessary and some of them, like exception handling, even dangerous.

But I come not to bury Hoare, but to praise him (Hell, he invented the case statement..):

It is not too late! I believe that by careful pruning of the Ada language, it is still possible to select a very powerful subset that would be reliable and efficient in implementation and safe and economic to use

Quick reminder: 1945 the American government was directly responsible for destroying TWO WHOLE CITIES. Millions of innocent people became vapor in a millisecond.

In 1998 my wife visited the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, specifically to look at the Voynich Manuscript. She only got to see it for 20 minutes or so (the library was about to close), and needless to say she didn't crack the mystery. She did observe that some of the letters look like Arabic, and some of the plant illustrations reminded her of medieval herbals (books about herbs). She speculates that the author intended it as a spellbook to summon female spirits. It was a highly intriguing, frustrating, and very cool experience.

Other than that, I used to make tons of tapes when I was copying my parents hippie records to tape. Why is it all of a sudden dangerous to do that?

Check out Point Roberts, WA to see an example of an outcome of treaty-making without good surveying. The outcome of the war of 1812 caused the Americans and British to firm up borders. Finally, in 1846 the border between the US and what is now British Columbia was established at 49 degrees North. Apparently they didn't realize Point Roberts would be an isolated outpost of the US!

Apparently the border markers along this part of the world were done with 1800's technology, and the generally accepted border in the area is about 300m too far north. So there is some strip of "Canadian" territory being "occupied" by Americans just south of Vancouver. This is an academic joke because both countries have since agreed that the border stands where the markers are. However, the State of Washington, until fairly recently, had officially defined the border as 49 degrees North, and a number of court cases for crimes committed in this 300m strip, notably illegal fishing just off-shore, were thrown out due to lack of jurisdiction!

Eh? The Civil War wasn't about slavery. Slavery was abolished more as a punitive measure against the Southern states than as a goal of the war. Lincoln stated flatly that his goal was to preserve the Union -- whether with such preservation every slave was freed, some slaves were freed, or no slaves were freed.