And if they don't want copyrights, they can put it under an NDA or anything they want.
Copyright law grants them legal retribution against people who copy their stuff, in return for giving it out. That's giving it out wthout restrictions. In return for contributing to the public good, the government will give them a monopoly.
Once they start putting additional restrictions on it...legally, the deal should be off. They aren't following the rules anymore.
At that point, if they want to have a contract, go right ahead...but it has to be a real contract, upfront, with a real signature and everything else a real contract has.
The whole problem started with the idiotic concept of copyrights as 'intellectual property'. No, it's not property...it's a limited term monopoly granted in return for something. And the same with patents. You do something for society, society will let you profit from it for a little. You do not 'own' it, in any meaningful sense of the word 'own'.
Then: "Well...we'll send someone by after Human Resourses gets though with all the paperwork, Good luck finding your next job.[even more stunned silence] What do you mean, you're not fired? I'm sure there's been some sort of mistake, you should check again."
Continue to express complete incredulity that they are continuing to work for the company, just to pound in how stupid they are.
If I purchased the software, it damned well is my software, and I can do anything with it allowed by copyright law.
And the GPL isn't a EULA, but that's been covered before in this story. You don't have to agree to the GPL, I certainly haven't had to, and I've been using GPL software for years. EULA are end-user license agreements, the GPL is a distributer license agreement.
The whole proof of one time pads rests on the fact that you're replacing a large secret (the plaintext) with an equally large secret (the key). Conventional cryptography aims to replace a large secret (the plaintext) with a small secret (the key). If you generate a one time pad and then encrypt it you aren't making it much more difficult for the attacker to break your system (think for a minute: how would you transmit the key to the conventional encryption algorithm securely anyway?!). You are essentially replacing your large secret with another large secret which is being replaced with a small secret -- nullifying the whole point!
Nonono, I was talking about splitting the data in two. If you have two channels that require two seperate ways to intercept (For example, a satelite link and a RF link.), you take the message, encrypt it like normal, using whatever encryption you want. Then you generate a 'OTP' from any random source (I'm not sure if it's technically a OTP if you use it this way, though) and send that over one channel and the already encrypted message, encrypted again with the 'OTP', over the other.
Encrypted in the OTP might be useful, too, but that wasn't my point, it was to require attackers to do more work. You've made them have to intercept two different channels of data, before they even have the merest possiblity of decoding the message.
Of course, you probably should, on general principles, encrypt the OTP channel also. Which has the fun side effect of not allowing them to know when that channel is decoded. So now they have to decrypt two completely independent things (Unlike merely encrypting a message twice, which can end up being not as strong as you'd think.), neither of which make sense alone, so they'd basically have to try all combinations of all the results to see if it decodes.
So if it's a 128 bit key, it has (2^128)^(2^128) combinations, on top of requiring two different interception points.
As the kernel maintainers say every single time this comes up if someone want to come out with a sane system to do this and package kernels using it, go ahead. No one's stopping you.
Well, I think at least a small percentage of them wouldn't happen. Both sides are being silly if they say 'all the murders would still happen' or 'none of the murders would happen'. Maybe half of them would happen.
And the accident related deaths wouldn't happen at all, and it's something anti-gun control people need to accept. But if we outlawed cars we wouldn't have any car accidents either, and those killa lot more people, mostly people who aren't the irresponsibly ones.
Gun accidents usually happen in a home and kill only the owner or someone in the family. Eventually, you have to let Darwin write some people off.
Whereas, logically, more than half the people who died in car accidents were perfectly good drivers, unless the vast majority of car accidents are a single person running his car off a bridge, which I doubt.
Anyway, my point was that it's certainly not going to do anything to reduce the number of suicides, because if you have someone desperate enough to eat a gun, you have someone desperate enough to drive their car into a wall. And suicides are the vast majority of gun related deaths. (In fact, suicides are the vast majority of all non-accidental and non-illness death.)
So the next time someone quotes you the number of 'gun related deaths', they are either misinformed or attempting to mislead you. Almost 60% of those are completely unstoppable, or at least wouldn't be stopped if we magically made all guns disappear.
And the number of murders that would remain are, of course, debateable.
In 1999, 58% of all gun deaths were suicides, and 38% were homicides.
I don't think tose figures say what you think they say. All deaths are either suicides, homocides, or accidents. (Or, of course, crossing the boundaries.) Presumably, the other 4% were accidents. That means that only 38% of the time a gun is fired at someone and kills them, it was an attack on someone else.
And I fail to see how that's an argument for gun control.
That means even if all guns magically disappeared tomorrow, 58% of the gun deaths would still happen, they'd just happen some other way. I mean, a suicide isn't going to go 'Hey, no gun, might as well keep living'. Yes, they might say something like that, but it's just as likely they'll stick a gun in their mouth and say, '...erm, maybe not today.' instead of taking fifty sleeping pills, which isn't scary at all, at least not as scary as pulling a trigger on yourself. If they can get the willpower do that, they can get the willpower to jump off a building, shooting yourself is really the most scary method of suicide I can think of, because you 'know' the second you pull that trigger it's going to hurt like hell. (It won't really, but whatever.)
So I think we can safely conclude that people who are willing to pull a trigger on themselves are mostly willing to try less scary measures like running the car in a garage or taking a bunch of sleeping pills. Some people might be less likely to kill themselves, but some people might be more if a gun isn't the first thing they think of.
So, basically, 58% of gun deaths are unpreventable, even without guns. Maybe a small percentable woul commit suicide another way, but not many. Think about that the next time you see a number that says 'X amount of people die from guns each year'.
Seriously, why is there a law against cannibalism? I mean, yes, if you kill someone, you probably shouldn't get to eat them, just like you shouldn't get anything from their will. (In fact, that might be the same thing...their body should be given out in their will.)
This is just one prohibition that baffles me. Was it honestly such a big problem it needed outlawing? Has canniblism ever been a big problem in any even vaguely modern society? Hell, has it been a problem since laws were codified?
Why the hell are we making laws against things that are not problems? Is it worthwide to prosecute the two cases that happen every decade?
Cannibalism is a victimless crime, especially if
you've learned how to cook the entire body.
At this point we need to question how he planned to carry 1000 people though immigration without being noticed. (And politely ask you not to call them 'fags', they are 'gay people'.)
America and Britian, divided by a common language.;)
Except, of course, every single time that laws are passed allowing conceled weapons, muggings, car jackings, basically every crime where a criminal waves a gun in a stranger's face, they all go down. And every single time they are repealed, they go up.
Now, you can make all the comparisions between different areas you want, crime varies from place to place. But I will bet you cannot show a single place and time that crime has not gone up the next year after concealed weapons were banned, or a place that crime has gone down the next year after they were allowed. Not even 'stayed the same', but gone up or down several percentages. And if you can think of a better explaination of this effect then 'Criminals are scared people might have a gun', I'd like to hear it.
Note this isn't a pro-gun control agrument in general, this is a agrument that criminals are in fact scared people might have a gun, because merely changing the law to allow people the be secretly carrying a weapon (without even changing the number of permits) scares them off, or at least scares them to other types of crime. If there's a concealed weapons law, they know the next person they mug make decide to pull out a gun instead of a wallet.
It reminds me of when Oklahoma City bombing happened. When at first it was blamed on Muslims in the media they were terrorists. But when it was white militia men...the word terrorist faded from the media
You misremember this. In fact, McVeigh is commonly called a 'terrorist' to this day. (Though he's a caught terrorist, and thus not really that important in this day of supposedly uncaught terrorists.) Possibly you don't live in the US, though, it may differ elsewhere.
And I certainly don't recall a outcry to profile these groups. Round them up and arrest them., etc.
I don't see any outcry to round up Muslims, either.
And your statement makes no sense at all. You can't round up or even security check all white people, you'd put half the country in jail. Whereas you can certainly round up all visiting people from a few countries. Which no one has suggested doing anyway.
Or the shootings, assults and arsons linked to these white power Christian fundamentalist groups. Why aren't they called Christian terrorists?!?
Because they call themselves 'white power' groups and not 'Christian' groups. In fact, they really aren't Christian groups, and I don't mean in the 'anyone who acts like that isn't a Christian' sense, I mean that they really aren't associated with Christianity in any way. They may personally be Christians, but that doesn't have anything to do with it, the 'white power' movement is the white power movement, it isn't an offshoot of Christianity.
And, yes, I'm sure there are exceptions that test the rule, but that's not the point. They don't 'recruit' in churches, they don't have anything to do with Christianity except some weird historical artifacts like burning crosses. (Which would be the KKK, not the 'white power' movement, anyway. The KKK at least has some historical precedent with claiming to be Christian.)
In fact, I'm a little confused at why people think the 'white power' movement has anything to do with Christianity at all. That claim might make sense for the KKK in the forties, but that's not even the same KK as the current one, which isn't the 'white power' movement anyway.
A number of which are members of the same Christian church sect!
Which, amazingly, you didn't even manage to mention, so I'll just completely ignore this. I suspect you made it up. (And, BTW, correlation doesn't equal casuality.)
Don't even get me started about the killings, bombings, assults, arsons and anthrax scares linked to anti-abortion groups. How come they aren't called terrorists?!?
Are you talking about that guy back in January? The one who called himself a terrorist? Yeah, the media didn't want to call him one, that's what he wanted them to do.
Anyway, you should read, more ABCNews, apparently. Or maybe the miltary's list of domestice terror groups, many of which are anti-abortion terrorists. (Now, if you want to call these people 'Christian fundementalists', go right ahead. But that's rather vague, 'Christian anti-abortion fundamentalists' is more specific, and at that point you might as well leave off 'Christian', there are basically no other anti-abortion terrorists in the US.)
You can bet, that if a group talked of a need to eliminate bankers. Posted assassination lists online of key bankers, some of which were later killed. Had bombed a number of banks, set fires to others, harassed customers, sent in anthrax scares to banks...You bet the FBI would be rounding them up fast!
Um...you're an idiot. The police DID force the people who ran the 'hit lists' to take them down, and charged them with criminal activities, though I don't think they could get accessory to murder to stick in court. (Which means you need to blame the jury, not the police.)
Or how with all the school shootings, the media avoids talking about the pattern of them being middle-class white teen males? It's all kept vague and they refer how it's hard to find a pattern!
Okay, now you're simply being stupid. The reason there was a focus on 'all' the school shootings (all five of them or so) was because they were middle-class white kids. Inner-city kids shoot themselves all the time.
And one attribute shared among the shootings doesn't make a pattern when that attribute is the only reason they're linked together in the first place.
If group A has a low rate of X, then suddenly the rate of X increases (Which it didn't really, it just got more high profile), then assuming it's because they are group A is idiotic...they were group A before the rate went up. The media is smart enough to realize this.
Link farms are against Google's written rules. Selling anything to do with Google's rankings are against Google's TOS. (Which could mean that Google could have a fun lawsuit against Search King, as Search King publically claims to accept money to do just that. If they've ever searched Google, they're in violation of Google's TOS...and it just so happens their website uses Google's API to...you guessed it.;..search Google.)
And Google explictly says they will remove people who try to manipulate their ranking system.
It's not a secret system at all. They explictly state they will do what they did if people do what he did.
Oh, and their algorythm isn't secret, it's just patented. You can go and look it up, I think it's on Google's site somewhere. Or you could just google for it. Plenty of other people license it, and if you do so, you can run a carbon copy of Google. (Of course, you need a lot of computers and a fast connection, and obviously if Google has manually assigned rankings you'll have to do it also.) This is actually how 'Search King' works, he writes pages that manipulate the (known) system of ranking by linking to each other, so Google has to manually delete them. I, personally, think that's a great thing for google to do.
And SPEWS isn't 'secret', either, BTW, it's just run secretly. How you get in SPEWS is well known, or at least well assumed...you send mail to their super secret spamtrap addresses. Now, it has no accountablity, but it's not using some voodoo to randomly pick people as spammers.
Even if google was a monopoly, it's not illegal to use a monopoly to randomly devalue poeple's businesses. It's illegally to use it against competitors, but SearchKing is not a competitor. (In fact, they use Google's search API.)
And, anway, it's not illegal to stop someone, even if you are a monopoly, from interferring with your stuff. Google was attempting to rank the most relevant sites, SearchKing was screwing that up on Google, Google fixed it. This is not an abuse of monopoly.
Even without opt-out, it's entirely legal. You stuck the information up in public, Google has the perfect right to read it. Google has the perfect right to quote parts of it, it's called fair use. (Google's cache is another issue entirely, and not addressed here.)
robots.txt is recognized because people are nice, it's not required by any law. Just like I have the right to buy a book by you and quote from it, I have the right to 'buy' a webpage (or, indeed, access one you're proved for free) and provide quotes from it. (Especially when I'm doing it with the intent of reviewing your site or book.)
robots.txt is rather like saying 'this part of the book is the copright page, you don't need to read it when you review the book.'.
As an aside, no one anti-spammer has a problem with actual opt-out, as long as you can make the server or account with a global opt-out, like a 'no solictors' sign up in a subdivision or on a house. (Of course, all mail servers would instantly use this as the default.) the problem is that there is no such way to do that, so every morning everyone wakes up to fifty people on their lawn yammering about penis enlargements.
And she didn't sue for that much, anyway, she sued for her medical expensives. Treating third degree burns isn't cheap. but it was only a couple thousand dollars, which McDonalds makes in ten seconds.
The X million dollar award was when everyone figured out that McDonalds had known about the 'Serving coffee 50 degrees hotter than everyone else' issue for years, and had settled out of court multiple times with other people burned.
You keep providing a product that causes people to sue you, and you keep settling out of court, you're eventually going to be hit with a huge fine. You don't get to pay people to shut up about safety issues.
Geez. If I really wanted to just go to the site that paid the most in advertising I'd stick with watching TV so I could just get my info from commercials. We all know how honest and accurate THAT system is.
Not only that, but google has fricken ads down the side of the page. If I want to see who's willing to pay for my eyeballs, I'll look over there (and, indeed, I do sometimes, depends on what I'm searching for). That's where people pay to show up. The search results are not for that.
People paying to get bumped up in the page ranking are idiots. You want to go up in the page rankings, get more people to honestly link to you. You want to pay for more hits, buy an ad.
Grok doesn't mean 'to understand', the best figurative translation given was 'to know completely'. (Literally, of course, it means 'to drink'.)
There's a rather large difference between knowing something and understanding it. I know my car. I do not 'understand' my car.
To grok something is to know it completely, to know how it will react to things. Understanding is not required. (Except where you have to understand something to know it, obviously.)
If it's trivial, than you shouldn't get a patent on it.
Actually, the patent should have been on the first invention of a light bulb, a wire in a vacuum. Swapping out wires to find the one that burns slowest should not be patentable.
Then what's the harm of not giving any patent at all of a very short one?
That sounds backwards, but the point of patents is not to reward people, it's to give them an incentive to create. People don't come up with, as an example, relativity, because it can be patented. (Your other example sucks, dozens of people invented TV.) As a matter of fact, relativity was not patentable. Nor was measuring the volume of an object by measuring the amount of water it displaced. (They didn't have patents back then.) Would patents existing made it more likely someone would have invented it? Of course not.
We need patents to encourage people to get 'in the race', to sit down and work on how to solve a problem. Patents don't really help with the out of the blue, incredibly world altering idea. If you're going to have it, you're going to have it. If you aren't, you aren't.
And I don't know what this 'experts in the field take a years of training'. The person who invents an idea is not the only expert in the field.
I think your first and third ideas are the same. And it's also the constitutionally supported reason.
The idea that people have a 'right' to their ideas is just silly. We'll give them the priviledge of not copying their book or using their idea for a cheaper version of widgets for a certain amount of years, because we want to encourage them to come up with them. It's not a right at all, we're just doing it to encourage them.
Or, at least, that's how I read the Constitution.
Of course, all this is the American reason, I don't know why patents and copyrights exist in other countries. Possibly there is a right of ownership of ideas in those places.
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Copyright law grants them legal retribution against people who copy their stuff, in return for giving it out. That's giving it out wthout restrictions. In return for contributing to the public good, the government will give them a monopoly.
Once they start putting additional restrictions on it...legally, the deal should be off. They aren't following the rules anymore.
At that point, if they want to have a contract, go right ahead...but it has to be a real contract, upfront, with a real signature and everything else a real contract has.
The whole problem started with the idiotic concept of copyrights as 'intellectual property'. No, it's not property...it's a limited term monopoly granted in return for something. And the same with patents. You do something for society, society will let you profit from it for a little. You do not 'own' it, in any meaningful sense of the word 'own'.
Continue to express complete incredulity that they are continuing to work for the company, just to pound in how stupid they are.
Why the fuck should you need to agree to anything to use software in the first place? We have copyright law for exactly this purpose.
And the GPL isn't a EULA, but that's been covered before in this story. You don't have to agree to the GPL, I certainly haven't had to, and I've been using GPL software for years. EULA are end-user license agreements, the GPL is a distributer license agreement.
Nonono, I was talking about splitting the data in two. If you have two channels that require two seperate ways to intercept (For example, a satelite link and a RF link.), you take the message, encrypt it like normal, using whatever encryption you want. Then you generate a 'OTP' from any random source (I'm not sure if it's technically a OTP if you use it this way, though) and send that over one channel and the already encrypted message, encrypted again with the 'OTP', over the other.
Encrypted in the OTP might be useful, too, but that wasn't my point, it was to require attackers to do more work. You've made them have to intercept two different channels of data, before they even have the merest possiblity of decoding the message.
Of course, you probably should, on general principles, encrypt the OTP channel also. Which has the fun side effect of not allowing them to know when that channel is decoded. So now they have to decrypt two completely independent things (Unlike merely encrypting a message twice, which can end up being not as strong as you'd think.), neither of which make sense alone, so they'd basically have to try all combinations of all the results to see if it decodes.
So if it's a 128 bit key, it has (2^128)^(2^128) combinations, on top of requiring two different interception points.
As the kernel maintainers say every single time this comes up if someone want to come out with a sane system to do this and package kernels using it, go ahead. No one's stopping you.
And the accident related deaths wouldn't happen at all, and it's something anti-gun control people need to accept. But if we outlawed cars we wouldn't have any car accidents either, and those killa lot more people, mostly people who aren't the irresponsibly ones.
Gun accidents usually happen in a home and kill only the owner or someone in the family. Eventually, you have to let Darwin write some people off.
Whereas, logically, more than half the people who died in car accidents were perfectly good drivers, unless the vast majority of car accidents are a single person running his car off a bridge, which I doubt.
Anyway, my point was that it's certainly not going to do anything to reduce the number of suicides, because if you have someone desperate enough to eat a gun, you have someone desperate enough to drive their car into a wall. And suicides are the vast majority of gun related deaths. (In fact, suicides are the vast majority of all non-accidental and non-illness death.)
So the next time someone quotes you the number of 'gun related deaths', they are either misinformed or attempting to mislead you. Almost 60% of those are completely unstoppable, or at least wouldn't be stopped if we magically made all guns disappear.
And the number of murders that would remain are, of course, debateable.
I don't think tose figures say what you think they say. All deaths are either suicides, homocides, or accidents. (Or, of course, crossing the boundaries.) Presumably, the other 4% were accidents. That means that only 38% of the time a gun is fired at someone and kills them, it was an attack on someone else.
And I fail to see how that's an argument for gun control.
That means even if all guns magically disappeared tomorrow, 58% of the gun deaths would still happen, they'd just happen some other way. I mean, a suicide isn't going to go 'Hey, no gun, might as well keep living'. Yes, they might say something like that, but it's just as likely they'll stick a gun in their mouth and say, '...erm, maybe not today.' instead of taking fifty sleeping pills, which isn't scary at all, at least not as scary as pulling a trigger on yourself. If they can get the willpower do that, they can get the willpower to jump off a building, shooting yourself is really the most scary method of suicide I can think of, because you 'know' the second you pull that trigger it's going to hurt like hell. (It won't really, but whatever.)
So I think we can safely conclude that people who are willing to pull a trigger on themselves are mostly willing to try less scary measures like running the car in a garage or taking a bunch of sleeping pills. Some people might be less likely to kill themselves, but some people might be more if a gun isn't the first thing they think of.
So, basically, 58% of gun deaths are unpreventable, even without guns. Maybe a small percentable woul commit suicide another way, but not many. Think about that the next time you see a number that says 'X amount of people die from guns each year'.
This is just one prohibition that baffles me. Was it honestly such a big problem it needed outlawing? Has canniblism ever been a big problem in any even vaguely modern society? Hell, has it been a problem since laws were codified?
Why the hell are we making laws against things that are not problems? Is it worthwide to prosecute the two cases that happen every decade?
Cannibalism is a victimless crime, especially if you've learned how to cook the entire body.
America and Britian, divided by a common language. ;)
Now, you can make all the comparisions between different areas you want, crime varies from place to place. But I will bet you cannot show a single place and time that crime has not gone up the next year after concealed weapons were banned, or a place that crime has gone down the next year after they were allowed. Not even 'stayed the same', but gone up or down several percentages. And if you can think of a better explaination of this effect then 'Criminals are scared people might have a gun', I'd like to hear it.
Note this isn't a pro-gun control agrument in general, this is a agrument that criminals are in fact scared people might have a gun, because merely changing the law to allow people the be secretly carrying a weapon (without even changing the number of permits) scares them off, or at least scares them to other types of crime. If there's a concealed weapons law, they know the next person they mug make decide to pull out a gun instead of a wallet.
You misremember this. In fact, McVeigh is commonly called a 'terrorist' to this day. (Though he's a caught terrorist, and thus not really that important in this day of supposedly uncaught terrorists.) Possibly you don't live in the US, though, it may differ elsewhere.
And I certainly don't recall a outcry to profile these groups. Round them up and arrest them., etc.
I don't see any outcry to round up Muslims, either.
And your statement makes no sense at all. You can't round up or even security check all white people, you'd put half the country in jail. Whereas you can certainly round up all visiting people from a few countries. Which no one has suggested doing anyway.
Or the shootings, assults and arsons linked to these white power Christian fundamentalist groups. Why aren't they called Christian terrorists?!?
Because they call themselves 'white power' groups and not 'Christian' groups. In fact, they really aren't Christian groups, and I don't mean in the 'anyone who acts like that isn't a Christian' sense, I mean that they really aren't associated with Christianity in any way. They may personally be Christians, but that doesn't have anything to do with it, the 'white power' movement is the white power movement, it isn't an offshoot of Christianity.
And, yes, I'm sure there are exceptions that test the rule, but that's not the point. They don't 'recruit' in churches, they don't have anything to do with Christianity except some weird historical artifacts like burning crosses. (Which would be the KKK, not the 'white power' movement, anyway. The KKK at least has some historical precedent with claiming to be Christian.)
In fact, I'm a little confused at why people think the 'white power' movement has anything to do with Christianity at all. That claim might make sense for the KKK in the forties, but that's not even the same KK as the current one, which isn't the 'white power' movement anyway.
A number of which are members of the same Christian church sect!
Which, amazingly, you didn't even manage to mention, so I'll just completely ignore this. I suspect you made it up. (And, BTW, correlation doesn't equal casuality.)
Don't even get me started about the killings, bombings, assults, arsons and anthrax scares linked to anti-abortion groups. How come they aren't called terrorists?!?
Are you talking about that guy back in January? The one who called himself a terrorist? Yeah, the media didn't want to call him one, that's what he wanted them to do.
Anyway, you should read, more ABCNews, apparently. Or maybe the miltary's list of domestice terror groups, many of which are anti-abortion terrorists. (Now, if you want to call these people 'Christian fundementalists', go right ahead. But that's rather vague, 'Christian anti-abortion fundamentalists' is more specific, and at that point you might as well leave off 'Christian', there are basically no other anti-abortion terrorists in the US.)
You can bet, that if a group talked of a need to eliminate bankers. Posted assassination lists online of key bankers, some of which were later killed. Had bombed a number of banks, set fires to others, harassed customers, sent in anthrax scares to banks...You bet the FBI would be rounding them up fast!
Um...you're an idiot. The police DID force the people who ran the 'hit lists' to take them down, and charged them with criminal activities, though I don't think they could get accessory to murder to stick in court. (Which means you need to blame the jury, not the police.)
Or how with all the school shootings, the media avoids talking about the pattern of them being middle-class white teen males? It's all kept vague and they refer how it's hard to find a pattern!
Okay, now you're simply being stupid. The reason there was a focus on 'all' the school shootings (all five of them or so) was because they were middle-class white kids. Inner-city kids shoot themselves all the time.
And one attribute shared among the shootings doesn't make a pattern when that attribute is the only reason they're linked together in the first place.
If group A has a low rate of X, then suddenly the rate of X increases (Which it didn't really, it just got more high profile), then assuming it's because they are group A is idiotic...they were group A before the rate went up. The media is smart enough to realize this.
And Google explictly says they will remove people who try to manipulate their ranking system.
It's not a secret system at all. They explictly state they will do what they did if people do what he did.
Oh, and their algorythm isn't secret, it's just patented. You can go and look it up, I think it's on Google's site somewhere. Or you could just google for it. Plenty of other people license it, and if you do so, you can run a carbon copy of Google. (Of course, you need a lot of computers and a fast connection, and obviously if Google has manually assigned rankings you'll have to do it also.) This is actually how 'Search King' works, he writes pages that manipulate the (known) system of ranking by linking to each other, so Google has to manually delete them. I, personally, think that's a great thing for google to do.
And SPEWS isn't 'secret', either, BTW, it's just run secretly. How you get in SPEWS is well known, or at least well assumed...you send mail to their super secret spamtrap addresses. Now, it has no accountablity, but it's not using some voodoo to randomly pick people as spammers.
And, anway, it's not illegal to stop someone, even if you are a monopoly, from interferring with your stuff. Google was attempting to rank the most relevant sites, SearchKing was screwing that up on Google, Google fixed it. This is not an abuse of monopoly.
robots.txt is recognized because people are nice, it's not required by any law. Just like I have the right to buy a book by you and quote from it, I have the right to 'buy' a webpage (or, indeed, access one you're proved for free) and provide quotes from it. (Especially when I'm doing it with the intent of reviewing your site or book.)
robots.txt is rather like saying 'this part of the book is the copright page, you don't need to read it when you review the book.'.
As an aside, no one anti-spammer has a problem with actual opt-out, as long as you can make the server or account with a global opt-out, like a 'no solictors' sign up in a subdivision or on a house. (Of course, all mail servers would instantly use this as the default.) the problem is that there is no such way to do that, so every morning everyone wakes up to fifty people on their lawn yammering about penis enlargements.
The X million dollar award was when everyone figured out that McDonalds had known about the 'Serving coffee 50 degrees hotter than everyone else' issue for years, and had settled out of court multiple times with other people burned.
You keep providing a product that causes people to sue you, and you keep settling out of court, you're eventually going to be hit with a huge fine. You don't get to pay people to shut up about safety issues.
Now we will see how many people exist who both watch Recess and read slashdot.
Not only that, but google has fricken ads down the side of the page. If I want to see who's willing to pay for my eyeballs, I'll look over there (and, indeed, I do sometimes, depends on what I'm searching for). That's where people pay to show up. The search results are not for that.
People paying to get bumped up in the page ranking are idiots. You want to go up in the page rankings, get more people to honestly link to you. You want to pay for more hits, buy an ad.
So obviously it's 'non-trivial'.
Anyway, it's not a real patent, it's just there to keep MS from using it without challanging it.
Speading truthful information about a company that shows them in a bad light is illegal.
Wait, no it's not.
There's a rather large difference between knowing something and understanding it. I know my car. I do not 'understand' my car.
To grok something is to know it completely, to know how it will react to things. Understanding is not required. (Except where you have to understand something to know it, obviously.)
I'm sorry to be pedantic, but I'm sick of 'humor' that isn't funny because it doesn't match up with reality.
Actually, the patent should have been on the first invention of a light bulb, a wire in a vacuum. Swapping out wires to find the one that burns slowest should not be patentable.
That sounds backwards, but the point of patents is not to reward people, it's to give them an incentive to create. People don't come up with, as an example, relativity, because it can be patented. (Your other example sucks, dozens of people invented TV.) As a matter of fact, relativity was not patentable. Nor was measuring the volume of an object by measuring the amount of water it displaced. (They didn't have patents back then.) Would patents existing made it more likely someone would have invented it? Of course not.
We need patents to encourage people to get 'in the race', to sit down and work on how to solve a problem. Patents don't really help with the out of the blue, incredibly world altering idea. If you're going to have it, you're going to have it. If you aren't, you aren't.
And I don't know what this 'experts in the field take a years of training'. The person who invents an idea is not the only expert in the field.
The idea that people have a 'right' to their ideas is just silly. We'll give them the priviledge of not copying their book or using their idea for a cheaper version of widgets for a certain amount of years, because we want to encourage them to come up with them. It's not a right at all, we're just doing it to encourage them.
Or, at least, that's how I read the Constitution.
Of course, all this is the American reason, I don't know why patents and copyrights exist in other countries. Possibly there is a right of ownership of ideas in those places.