This may pass the test. From what I can tell, Wolfram Alpha is not a generic search engine that indexes content available on the web - it is, instead, an interface to a database of facts that were input by the Wolfram people. Since they most likely hold copyright to the input data, then the "mechanically generated translation" (ie: the results pages) of it retains the copyright of the original data.
General search engines that base their database off the results of spiders indexing the web cannot have their results pages independently copyright because it is a "mechanical translation" and therefore carries the copyright(s) of the original works. This holds true for the output of compilers and similar tools.
NOTE:IANAL and the above is based on numerous discussions I have had with lawyers and my own reading of the US Copyright statutes. So YMMV. Also note that the above only applies in the US - other countries copyright legislation may allow for the results of a "mechanical translation" to carry their own, independent copyrights.
There is an old saying - "Those who can - do. Those who can't - teach."
Not saying that there aren't professors out there who can do what they are teaching. What I'm getting at is you ran into one of the large number that actually fit the old saying perfectly.
Oh, done already? Now tell me - where has anyone claimed that the author of TFA was a shill? What has happened here is the guy got in a bit of trouble over use of the Ubuntu trademarks. Rather than just admit that he had made a mistake, he decided to start spewing FUD about how trademarks are bad.
That act - and that act alone - is why he has been called a troll.
Actually, the whole 'Piracy' thing was speculated in the original article that the original summary linked to.
However... If you RTFA you'll find that AT&T and Verizon are claiming that the owners of the datacenters are committing the fraud. If this is about interconnect fees I can see it, but from TFA it looks like it's about some other type of fee and the two big companies went to the FBI with claims of it being a massive violation of the RICO statutes.
If TFA is to be trusted then they are trying to claim that the datacenter owners also own the companies that are defrauding them. The owner of one of the datacenters has vehemently denied this and states that the companies at fault are clients and the bills they owe the Telco's are not his responsibility. (which sounds logical enough to be true - though logic seems to have little to do with the majority of laws)
----
And this post has probably blown what Karma I had...
And you don't get it... The truth is that Ext4 was writing the journal out before any changes took place. This means that when the crash happens between the metadata write and the actual write a replay of the journal will cause data loss.
Other filesystems with delayed allocation solve this by not writing the journal before the actual data commits happen. The fix that TFA is talking about introduces this to Ext4.
Given the KHTML/WebKit guys' reputation for actually targeting the spec (as opposed to Gecko--hello, moz-* CSS attributes), when there's a discrepancy between Gecko and WebKit, I'm going to assume that WebKit does it more correctly unless evidence to the contrary can be found.
And no, Firefox is not very fast, that's the whole fucking problem people have with it!
That's '--moz-*' - a lot of those are for chrome styling and those that aren't restricted to chrome-only are all CSS3 bits that have been implemented. Oh, and you don't know about the '--webkit-*' and '--khtml-*' CSS attributes? Like '--webkit-box-shadow' and '--webkit-border-radius' (or the KHTML variants of them)
Odd... must be that I tend to actually use the 'cast' operators. And yeah... looks like 'char * NULL' - which would be a zero-length C-style string - causes problems in C++ (which really irks me).
I'm guessing what happens is that the STL tries to guess something about the string and it doesn't like being handed a C-Style string of zero length. I didn't know this as I hadn't actually tried running the program, I just did a compile-check for correctness. (maybe -Wall would have reported something...)
Yeah... no implicit casting in those languages... And they also don't have the "a string is an array of type 'char' terminated by an explicit '0' (ASCII 'NUL') character.
So... I admit that I forgot about those two. Guess I spend too much time with my head stuck in masses of C and C++ and not enough in other languages.
Actually... that code shouldn't blow up. It should result in a string with zero length. At least in modern compilers it'll be seen as an implicit cast from a constant 'C-String' to a C++ class, which will instantiate the class and assign the value of the c-style string to it.
But you are correct in the essence of the example. For the code to actually 'blow up' you'd want something more like: String *tmp = const_cast<String*>(null); if(tmp->length() > 0 )/* this will blow up */ {//Do something }
And yes, this is just pedantry, but I believe in providing valid examples to help people understand what is happening.
That actually does, quite nicely, compromise "Prior Art" that invalidates both the primary claim (claim 1) and the secondary claim (claim 16) — all other claims rely, either directly or indirectly, on those two.
In other words, this single piece of "prior art" — if it is validated during a re-examination of this patent — will cause the patent to disappear entirely.
As far as I can tell this patent fails the Bilski test. It is neither tied to a particular apparatus or machine, nor does perform a unique transformation.
IANAL, but the test outlined in Bilski seems to make this patent NULL. Anyone can implement a one-click system on any machine connected to the internet.
The obviousness test is also valid in this case - at the time Amazon was pushing this through the USPTO... Well, my boss was handing me work from different clients that wanted a sign-in and one-click ordering system for their commerce sites. I had to tell him it was legally impossible each time.
So failing the "obviousness" test - it was a clearly obvious step to take. To both the people writing the code for commerce sites and to the people paying to have them written... And also seeming, to me (and I repeat - IANAL), failing the tests outlined in the Bilski case... Amazon can fight as much as they want, but this patent is a dud.
You seem to have a bad understanding of things. MS Operating Systems are on around 90% of all the PC's in the world. Apple is on about 8%, Linux and other free OS's on the remaining 2%. This means that there is, functionally, no choice - when 9 out of 10 people are using a certain operating system you can be assured that the rest of the computer industry - be it hardware or software manufacturers - are going to target that OS. This is a self-perpetuating system and while MS does not have a "monopoly" by your definition, it does have on in practice.
MS didn't gain this position by playing by the rules either. They may have started small, but once they gained a real market share (thanks, in no small part, to some idiocy in Santa Clara, California and IBM) they began their famous campaign of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". Since then they have maintained their position through monopolistic and anti-competitive practices. Name another major company that has been at the root of lawsuits over such in at least 3 different countries...
So while MS might not be a "Monopoly" by your constrained and somewhat myopic definition of the term, they are a monopoly in fact. Look at the lawsuit that was filed against them in the EU, In South Korea or even, <gasp> in the US... And the US one might have actually led to MS being split into multiple companies if not for George Bush interfering with the proceedings. (He did, in fact, interfere and tell the DOJ to remove the "break up the company" punishment from consideration)
This is being worked on - and most *nix filesystems have a way to store such "extended attributes
See SELinux. However your logic is flawed. MS tried this "the system administrator needs specific permissions" thing in the original NT release(s). It caused a lot of problems with users being removed and nobody being able to remove the files.
I agree about this - but Linux is Unix and that is covered by a set of standards that don't cover doing this.
Replying to myself to make a correction: My assumptions are apparently faulty, because the information about the vulnerability is already in the wild. This means that they have to fix it anyway — though who knows how many people that received one of those CD's with the data have already used it for less than legal purposes.
In this case the #1 item above comes more into play, though it is still highly unlikely. The likely reason for this was a knee-jerk reaction to the release of the data with the MBTA not realizing that the data about the vulnerability was already released.
One thing that I have not yet heard is whether the researchers had informed the MBTA of this vulnerability before going ahead with the publication of the details. Doing such — and giving the company a chance to fix the hole — is one of the keys of "responsible reporting".
the term "computer" means an electronic, magnetic, optical, electrochemical, or other high speed data processing device performing logical, arithmetic, or storage functions, and includes any data storage facility or communications facility directly related to or operating in conjunction with such device, but such term does not include an automated typewriter or typesetter, a portable hand held calculator, or other similar device;
With this definition on the books the ruling by the judge shouldn't be swayed by the MBTA argument that the CharlieCard and CharlieTicket are computers. If he was swayed by the claim that the "CharlieCard" and "CharlieTicket" are computers then there are some really good grounds for overturning the ruling. (note that I am assuming that both are nothing more complicated than a form of RFID tag)
Sadly this decision is not a good thing. If it is not struck down it opens the door for companies to quash the open reporting of any security vulnerability. Specifically, in this case, this move makes me think that there are only two motives
the MBTA knew of the vulnerabilities that they found before the system was put into place
that they don't want the details made public so there is no real reason for them to have to fix it.
If it is the former — and they presented the system as being "unbeatable", "unhackable" or similar — then they could face legal action. (Okay, legal action only if those claims were a big part of the reason the system was granted funding) If it is the latter Well What happens when the vulnerability is discovered by someone else and then published without them having a chance to block that action legally?
One of the original Demo's of Quake had the entire game - and the entirety of the ID collection at that time (IIRC) - on the disc. You payed for the game, you got a code that unlocked it. Someone soon learned how to crack the code system so they could access any game on the disc.
Unfortunately, you're pretty wrong here. KHTML provided the HTML and XML parsing engine, the DOM tree exports, the CSS parsing engine, the layout engine... KJS provided the entire JavaScript system... Basically, KHTML and KJS provided everything.
Apple took this code and removed the KDE specific stuff (which was all sub-classed and derived from QT) and replaced it with non-QT derived "generic classes". (like the STL string class instead of QString, etc...) That was it for KJS, but for KHTML they stripped down and gave it the ability to use what the OS/Toolkit provided widgets - or internally managed and "owner drawn" widgets - and the actual "canvas".
That means that WebCore is a derivative of a pair of LGPL'd products. That means that WebCore has to be released under the GPL or LGPL. Further, since WebKit is, apparently, a derivative of WebCore, that means that it has to be released under one of the aforementioned licenses.
Since none of these changes are really "separate" from the original code (the Widget and canvas stuff are needed for the code to remain functional) Apple had no choice but to license it under the (L)GPL. As they have shown, Apple can and will keep what they can closed - can you get the source to Safari?
Note: IIRC, WebKit and WebCore are parallel products - one isn't built on top of the other, but one was forked from the other. However... It has been a very long time since I looked at either.
You've hit the nail on the head here. The RIAA isn't going for the "dismissal without prejudice" to save money. They are doing it for the financial hurting it puts on the defendant and so they can point and say "we aren't done with it, but that's okay, we'll get that one next time".
Basically they are getting a victory without having proved their case and have the option of re-filing the case to get a second-chance at winning. Nobody should be able to do this - but until the RIAA is made to really hurt it will keep going on. Let's hope that Tanya Anderson's counter-suit ends with a victory for her.
And Ms. Lindor, I feel for your suffering and hope that Mr. Beckerman can get you the victory you deserve.
Sadly I spent my last mod-point correcting where some idiot modded a guy trying to be funny as "offtopic" or I'd have used it here to attempt to undo the bad "Troll" mod
I get this already with the flash plugin on my system. I use "nspluginwrapper" so I can run a 64bit version of FF and still have the flash plugin functional. Sure, all the flash from all the tabs run under that process, but...
Plus? You have to consider this - does China get into wars? No... they're NOT that stupid!
Then what do you call the massive flood of chinese troops and equipment into Korea when the UN had pushed past the 38th parallel?
China most certainly does "get into wars"
If you can't take an opponent directly? Stir up crap between HE & his biggest opponent, & watch them BOTH "take a dive", while you end up the victor mopping up the spoils of war/walking out of the saloon with the wench over your shoulder & jug of wine in the other hand, is what I suspect this REALLY is... apk
And guess what - the thing you describe was first used and put to paper more than 2000 years ago by Sun Tzu. It's part of "The Art of War". I'd suggest you go read it.
Slashdot Mirror
This may pass the test. From what I can tell, Wolfram Alpha is not a generic search engine that indexes content available on the web - it is, instead, an interface to a database of facts that were input by the Wolfram people. Since they most likely hold copyright to the input data, then the "mechanically generated translation" (ie: the results pages) of it retains the copyright of the original data.
General search engines that base their database off the results of spiders indexing the web cannot have their results pages independently copyright because it is a "mechanical translation" and therefore carries the copyright(s) of the original works. This holds true for the output of compilers and similar tools.
NOTE: IANAL and the above is based on numerous discussions I have had with lawyers and my own reading of the US Copyright statutes. So YMMV. Also note that the above only applies in the US - other countries copyright legislation may allow for the results of a "mechanical translation" to carry their own, independent copyrights.
There is an old saying - "Those who can - do. Those who can't - teach."
Not saying that there aren't professors out there who can do what they are teaching. What I'm getting at is you ran into one of the large number that actually fit the old saying perfectly.
RTFA. Go on, do it.
.
.
.
Done? Now go and re-read the comments.
Oh, done already? Now tell me - where has anyone claimed that the author of TFA was a shill? What has happened here is the guy got in a bit of trouble over use of the Ubuntu trademarks. Rather than just admit that he had made a mistake, he decided to start spewing FUD about how trademarks are bad.
That act - and that act alone - is why he has been called a troll.
Actually, the whole 'Piracy' thing was speculated in the original article that the original summary linked to.
However... If you RTFA you'll find that AT&T and Verizon are claiming that the owners of the datacenters are committing the fraud. If this is about interconnect fees I can see it, but from TFA it looks like it's about some other type of fee and the two big companies went to the FBI with claims of it being a massive violation of the RICO statutes.
If TFA is to be trusted then they are trying to claim that the datacenter owners also own the companies that are defrauding them. The owner of one of the datacenters has vehemently denied this and states that the companies at fault are clients and the bills they owe the Telco's are not his responsibility. (which sounds logical enough to be true - though logic seems to have little to do with the majority of laws)
----
And this post has probably blown what Karma I had...
And you don't get it... The truth is that Ext4 was writing the journal out before any changes took place. This means that when the crash happens between the metadata write and the actual write a replay of the journal will cause data loss.
Other filesystems with delayed allocation solve this by not writing the journal before the actual data commits happen. The fix that TFA is talking about introduces this to Ext4.
Given the KHTML/WebKit guys' reputation for actually targeting the spec (as opposed to Gecko--hello, moz-* CSS attributes), when there's a discrepancy between Gecko and WebKit, I'm going to assume that WebKit does it more correctly unless evidence to the contrary can be found.
And no, Firefox is not very fast, that's the whole fucking problem people have with it!
That's '--moz-*' - a lot of those are for chrome styling and those that aren't restricted to chrome-only are all CSS3 bits that have been implemented. Oh, and you don't know about the '--webkit-*' and '--khtml-*' CSS attributes? Like '--webkit-box-shadow' and '--webkit-border-radius' (or the KHTML variants of them)
Which Dr. Kim actually mentions in his report as part of the evidence that MediaSentry is not being rigorous in it's data collection activity.
Odd... must be that I tend to actually use the 'cast' operators. And yeah... looks like 'char * NULL' - which would be a zero-length C-style string - causes problems in C++ (which really irks me).
I'm guessing what happens is that the STL tries to guess something about the string and it doesn't like being handed a C-Style string of zero length. I didn't know this as I hadn't actually tried running the program, I just did a compile-check for correctness. (maybe -Wall would have reported something...)
Yeah... no implicit casting in those languages... And they also don't have the "a string is an array of type 'char' terminated by an explicit '0' (ASCII 'NUL') character.
So... I admit that I forgot about those two. Guess I spend too much time with my head stuck in masses of C and C++ and not enough in other languages.
Actually... that code shouldn't blow up. It should result in a string with zero length. At least in modern compilers it'll be seen as an implicit cast from a constant 'C-String' to a C++ class, which will instantiate the class and assign the value of the c-style string to it.
But you are correct in the essence of the example. For the code to actually 'blow up' you'd want something more like:
/* this will blow up */ //Do something
String *tmp = const_cast<String*>(null);
if(tmp->length() > 0 )
{
}
And yes, this is just pedantry, but I believe in providing valid examples to help people understand what is happening.
That actually does, quite nicely, compromise "Prior Art" that invalidates both the primary claim (claim 1) and the secondary claim (claim 16) — all other claims rely, either directly or indirectly, on those two.
In other words, this single piece of "prior art" — if it is validated during a re-examination of this patent — will cause the patent to disappear entirely.
As far as I can tell this patent fails the Bilski test. It is neither tied to a particular apparatus or machine, nor does perform a unique transformation.
IANAL, but the test outlined in Bilski seems to make this patent NULL. Anyone can implement a one-click system on any machine connected to the internet.
The obviousness test is also valid in this case - at the time Amazon was pushing this through the USPTO... Well, my boss was handing me work from different clients that wanted a sign-in and one-click ordering system for their commerce sites. I had to tell him it was legally impossible each time.
So failing the "obviousness" test - it was a clearly obvious step to take. To both the people writing the code for commerce sites and to the people paying to have them written... And also seeming, to me (and I repeat - IANAL), failing the tests outlined in the Bilski case... Amazon can fight as much as they want, but this patent is a dud.
You seem to have a bad understanding of things. MS Operating Systems are on around 90% of all the PC's in the world. Apple is on about 8%, Linux and other free OS's on the remaining 2%. This means that there is, functionally, no choice - when 9 out of 10 people are using a certain operating system you can be assured that the rest of the computer industry - be it hardware or software manufacturers - are going to target that OS. This is a self-perpetuating system and while MS does not have a "monopoly" by your definition, it does have on in practice.
MS didn't gain this position by playing by the rules either. They may have started small, but once they gained a real market share (thanks, in no small part, to some idiocy in Santa Clara, California and IBM) they began their famous campaign of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". Since then they have maintained their position through monopolistic and anti-competitive practices. Name another major company that has been at the root of lawsuits over such in at least 3 different countries...
So while MS might not be a "Monopoly" by your constrained and somewhat myopic definition of the term, they are a monopoly in fact. Look at the lawsuit that was filed against them in the EU, In South Korea or even, <gasp> in the US... And the US one might have actually led to MS being split into multiple companies if not for George Bush interfering with the proceedings. (He did, in fact, interfere and tell the DOJ to remove the "break up the company" punishment from consideration)
I've never liked that analogy. And, at least in California, this "licensed not sold" thing has been shot down in court. See the recent Autodesk case.
Replying to myself to make a correction: My assumptions are apparently faulty, because the information about the vulnerability is already in the wild. This means that they have to fix it anyway — though who knows how many people that received one of those CD's with the data have already used it for less than legal purposes.
In this case the #1 item above comes more into play, though it is still highly unlikely. The likely reason for this was a knee-jerk reaction to the release of the data with the MBTA not realizing that the data about the vulnerability was already released.
One thing that I have not yet heard is whether the researchers had informed the MBTA of this vulnerability before going ahead with the publication of the details. Doing such — and giving the company a chance to fix the hole — is one of the keys of "responsible reporting".
With this definition on the books the ruling by the judge shouldn't be swayed by the MBTA argument that the CharlieCard and CharlieTicket are computers. If he was swayed by the claim that the "CharlieCard" and "CharlieTicket" are computers then there are some really good grounds for overturning the ruling. (note that I am assuming that both are nothing more complicated than a form of RFID tag)
Sadly this decision is not a good thing. If it is not struck down it opens the door for companies to quash the open reporting of any security vulnerability. Specifically, in this case, this move makes me think that there are only two motives
If it is the former — and they presented the system as being "unbeatable", "unhackable" or similar — then they could face legal action. (Okay, legal action only if those claims were a big part of the reason the system was granted funding) If it is the latter Well What happens when the vulnerability is discovered by someone else and then published without them having a chance to block that action legally?
One of the original Demo's of Quake had the entire game - and the entirety of the ID collection at that time (IIRC) - on the disc. You payed for the game, you got a code that unlocked it. Someone soon learned how to crack the code system so they could access any game on the disc.
Unfortunately, you're pretty wrong here. KHTML provided the HTML and XML parsing engine, the DOM tree exports, the CSS parsing engine, the layout engine... KJS provided the entire JavaScript system... Basically, KHTML and KJS provided everything.
Apple took this code and removed the KDE specific stuff (which was all sub-classed and derived from QT) and replaced it with non-QT derived "generic classes". (like the STL string class instead of QString, etc...) That was it for KJS, but for KHTML they stripped down and gave it the ability to use what the OS/Toolkit provided widgets - or internally managed and "owner drawn" widgets - and the actual "canvas".
That means that WebCore is a derivative of a pair of LGPL'd products. That means that WebCore has to be released under the GPL or LGPL. Further, since WebKit is, apparently, a derivative of WebCore, that means that it has to be released under one of the aforementioned licenses.
Since none of these changes are really "separate" from the original code (the Widget and canvas stuff are needed for the code to remain functional) Apple had no choice but to license it under the (L)GPL. As they have shown, Apple can and will keep what they can closed - can you get the source to Safari?
Note: IIRC, WebKit and WebCore are parallel products - one isn't built on top of the other, but one was forked from the other. However... It has been a very long time since I looked at either.
You've hit the nail on the head here. The RIAA isn't going for the "dismissal without prejudice" to save money. They are doing it for the financial hurting it puts on the defendant and so they can point and say "we aren't done with it, but that's okay, we'll get that one next time".
Basically they are getting a victory without having proved their case and have the option of re-filing the case to get a second-chance at winning. Nobody should be able to do this - but until the RIAA is made to really hurt it will keep going on. Let's hope that Tanya Anderson's counter-suit ends with a victory for her.
And Ms. Lindor, I feel for your suffering and hope that Mr. Beckerman can get you the victory you deserve.
I hadn't noticed the abusive use, but I do agree that its not a good thing.
Sadly I spent my last mod-point correcting where some idiot modded a guy trying to be funny as "offtopic" or I'd have used it here to attempt to undo the bad "Troll" mod
I get this already with the flash plugin on my system. I use "nspluginwrapper" so I can run a 64bit version of FF and still have the flash plugin functional. Sure, all the flash from all the tabs run under that process, but...
no, that's "wllly hlll" - no "I's" in it, just "L's"
Then what do you call the massive flood of chinese troops and equipment into Korea when the UN had pushed past the 38th parallel?
China most certainly does "get into wars"
If you can't take an opponent directly? Stir up crap between HE & his biggest opponent, & watch them BOTH "take a dive", while you end up the victor mopping up the spoils of war/walking out of the saloon with the wench over your shoulder & jug of wine in the other hand, is what I suspect this REALLY is... apkAnd guess what - the thing you describe was first used and put to paper more than 2000 years ago by Sun Tzu. It's part of "The Art of War". I'd suggest you go read it.