It strikes me that the available prior art might hinge on whether you think that the distinction between the 'annotations' and the 'work' is terribly relevant(from the perspective of the patent, obviously the distinction between text and margin notes is relevant to the user).
If it is relevant, the only real possibilities are the document markup features in some of the PDF/publishing related stuff, or Office and similar.
If the distinction isn't materially relevant, practically any revision control system going back to the dark ages provides a superset of the features described:
Support for multiple users and multiple devices, with authentication and permissions? Check.
Stores 'annotations' in association with the digital work? Storing revision information in relation to the digital work being revised is only the entire point of revision control systems...(the revision control use case assumes that most changes checked in will be changes rather than comments; but, architecturally, comments and annotations are a proper subset of the sorts of revisions one can check in, and programmers certainly do check in code comments as well as changes to the 'work'
Provides abbreviated versions? Any of the 'friendly-display' mechanisms for a revision controlled repository will provide for some sort of 'here be diff by user Foo. click to expand?' function.
Access control? Yup, revision control systems do that as well, some only to file level of granularity, some more.
Provide full version of one or more annotations? Check out SVN checkout...
For my information(since I'm honestly not too much up on patents), does the expected use case of a tool count as a suitably weighty factor in determining validity? In this case, it is certainly fair to say that the expected use cases of Amazon's "digital margin notes" patent places it firmly in the same camp as other text annotation systems from Adobe, MS, and some more specialty vendors. Architecturally, though, the 'invention' is essentially 'partial re-implementation of a revision control system under the assumption that the base file(s) will always be treated as canonical, and the diffs as merely incidental'. Their implementation is likely to be a better fit than a straight revision control mechanism if you are, in fact, highlighting your way around an etext; but the underlying architecture will be equivalent to, or a mere subset of, revision control...
While I'm sure that the feds managed to do something tasteless and possibly illegal with this power, I'm a bit confused by the summary:
In order to 'have' a FOO.com/.net/.org domain name, you have to pay for the appropriate registration with Verisign, a US corporation, who handles those domains. If the feds secure the appropriate court order, they can direct Verisign to have your FOO.com point to a different IP.
Ok. Hasn't that always been the case?
Some sort of argument that a site having a.com pointing to it placed the site, server(s), or operator(s) under US jurisdiction would be rather more dramatic; but the DNS record that points FOO.com to your IP has always been under American jursdiction...
If there isn't a perfectly linear tube filled(emptied?) with hard vacuum between their GBIC and my GBIC, providing the lowest possible roundtrip time(that fiber crap can slow your photons by 30-50%), the connection isn't good enough.
They'd have been plagued by claims of fear-mongering with or without this incident since they do it chronically.
Unfortunately, in the 20 years since they've continued to be plagued by claims of fear-mongering and developed a reputation for parasitism and relative fecklessness against serious threats...
That's really the worst of it. The state of 'security' on the internet is pretty fucking dreadful. Atrocious all over the place; but the relatively low usefulness, and frequent commercial crassness, of the AV guys manage to still make them look like money-sucking fearmongers.
Organic material that has been enjoying the company of whatever rocks and minerals have been sitting next to it for a zillion years, possibly leaching interesting inorganics(sulfur is the star name, because it shows up in fair quantity and sulfur oxides are pretty visibly noxious; but all kinds of inorganics show up in smaller quantities: calcium, copper, lead, vanadium, sodium, etc.) Oil is mostly organic; but sometimes the exceptions count.
Quantities depend on where the crude the diesel was distilled from originated, how exacting the refining process was, what the additives were(and, depending on the plant and where it was grown, may well not be zero in the biodiesel either); but they definitely do show up, and in quantities significant enough to be of engineering concern for fuel users, particularly of very expensive or very delicate engines.
You'll see references to sulfur and trace metal limits and testing methods in various standards for fuels: ASTM D3605 is one testing method, MIL-F-16884 one standard that sets requirements for trace metal content.
I pretty much knew that that was the case. But I am surprised that the US government is admitting it in national news. Talk about brazen arrogance of power...
What might actually get slightly interesting is the case of any of the lulzsec victims during the period when the feds had some degree of control... I remember there being a bunch of litigation surrounding victims of various mob groups that the FBI had significantly infiltrated/compromised; but allowed to continue 'business as usual' for a period of time in order to gather evidence or similar. The relatives of those killed were less than pleased to learn that the FBI had sacrificed them for the case. It would be interesting to see if any of the entities knocked over by lulzsec feel like having a swing at the feds for damages...
It will also be interesting to see if the case against lulzsec itself is actually as strong as claimed, or if it quietly drags on for several years and then dissolves into a sticky mess of plea-bargains for relatively minor offenses; but that won't be knowable for a good while to come.
I suspect that part of the impetus behind anti-globalization sentiment is the (arguably quite realistic, based on present experience) belief that while "We have the potential of doing the necessary political and social reforms to ensure much higher worldwide prosperity", it'll be a cold day in hell before we actually exercise that potential, because it's easier and more profitable to just drive down the cost of 'human resources' and go jurisdiction shopping for favorable tax status and environmental non-regulation...
The 'gains from trade' argument certainly offers a strong foundation for the position that globalization can deliver greater overall wealth; but the domestic experience, at least, has been that the income distribution skews even faster than the pie grows. It's not a huge surprise that this leaves those holding a smaller slice looking back fondly on the days when they had a bigger slice of a smaller pie...
An efficient, if extralegal, approach might be to deliver the news of the results and coverup and then politely turn ones back and whistle innocently in order to allow the exposed miners and the coverers-up to enjoy a frank exchange of views in private.
Providing pickaxe handles is optional; but should speed the matter up.
Even if they don't specifically seek it out, and you start with a normal subset of the population at hiring, I'd assume that attrition would leave you with an employee pool consisting of newbs who haven't burned out yet, people who really need the job, and people who are entirely too happy about what they do(and, if you are running hackedFBchix.cx on the side, the buck an hour is just a bonus)...
It would certainly be interesting to see; but I'm not sure that the outcome would be so rosy. The plant stuff would probably have fewer interesting inorganic components; but the ultrafine soot particles commonly produced by diesel engines, as well as any cool partially combusted hydrocarbon structures(some innocuous, some surprisingly nasty for the elements involved), would presumably still be unpleasant...
"Everyone's got a mortgage to pay. [inner monologue] The Yuppie Nuremberg defense."
If you like the lawyers, you'll love the twisted mentats who establish and staff what is politely referred to as 'Product Defense Industry'. This curious little world delivers opposing evidence, scientific controversy, 'independent' toxicology/epidemiology, and whatever else might be needed to support your lawyers in their battle against whoever is accusing your benevolent product of causing cancer in orphans or whatever...
If ever the body of scientific evidence turns against you, these brave mercenaries of the laboratory can deliver enough doubt to buy years, potentially decades, of further freedom to operate!
Perversely, the best strategy might be to attempt to find ways to move globalization and outsourcing up the food chain as fast as possible...
Completely unshockingly, people in positions not experiencing strong downward pressure from globalization tend to be quite philosophical, even stoic, about the downsides and nearly rhapsodic about the upsides.
For that reason, the opponent of globalization might find no tactic more effective than identifying the intersection between 'people whose livelihoods are currently subject to substantial barriers to offshoring' and 'people who possess social and political influence' and then working to offshore the jobs held by that intersection population as rapidly and viciously as possible.
Going by this, I'd say that news of brutal law-mills where well-educated Indians earning $2/hour, and a few starving liberal-arts majors stateside earning 30k/year to show up in a suit for functions where physical presence is required, grinding out legal product would do more than any number of stories of the gutted formerly blue-collar class to freak congress out...
I haven't tested; but it wouldn't be a huge surprise to discover that, while the UI never changes, one's ability to 'flag' is silently adjusted in the background based on the past agreement between your 'flag' attempts and the facebook rater's assessments. That seems like the easiest way to quietly blow off the axe-grinding crazies of the world without either verifiably proving that you've 'banned them from flagging' or allowing them to DoS their pet victim's kitten pictures, or all vaguely homosexual content, or whatever their personal vendetta happens to be...
I wonder if their moderators ever run into trouble with the local authorities because of the material they are accessing?
If your job is to review an endless stream of too-nasty-for-facebook stuff, and you live in a slightly puritanical jurisdiction, I imagine that you could relatively easily end up handling a fair amount of material that is theoretically illegal, if not necessarily well enforced(and, unlike the higher-ups at facebook HQ, who probably benefit from the 'obviously, we are just screening material in order to hand over anything wicked to the cops' presumption, it might not be easy for Joe Temp to prove that he is just doing his job)...
I'm pretty sure that TSMC doesn't even fab AMD CPUs. They did GPUs for ATI, and likely still handle some portion of the discrete GPU parts under AMD; but I believe that AMD CPU production is all still in their formerly-in-house-now-spun-off fabs...
Re:That's why I like the basic Kindle
on
The eBook Backlash
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It seems to be about a number of things:
Ebooks on dedicated readers vs. general purpose devices: Shockingly, a 'book' that keeps throwing notifications in your face may not be the best for your sense of focus. Luckily, the e-ink brigade now has quality offerings under $100, with fairly fast refresh and crazy-long battery life.
Publishers 'cooling': There's a shock. Publishers, because they simply couldn't accept the thought that this might be the end, held a cargo-cult belief that something had to save them, and if tablets were the flavor of the month, it must be tablets! Wake up and smell the reality, chaps. It has been plausibly suggested that the ease of purchase and transport makes owners of dedicated ereaders somewhat heavier readers than they were previously. However, the self-selected "Yeah, I like reading enough to buy a reader device" market is rapidly saturating, since they've gotten so cheap, leaving them to knife-fight with Angry Birds and Facebook for the attention spans of the rest of the population...
Some novelist waxing nostalgic: Books die. A lot. There are a few very lucky winners, lovingly maintained by archivists and preservationists of various stripes; but the attrition is massive. Texts survive because they are easy to copy. Assuming DRM insanity doesn't get us all, ebooks are even more booklike that books. Sure, your reader widget will probably be in the landfill in five years; but electronic texts can be copied in the blink of an eye.
Instead of catching small time thieves, they could go after the bankers.
One can dream
Odds are that they'd be a direct subsidiary of the same shadowy holding company that the finance company you'd want investigated is. And I'm sure that their commitment to the enforcement of the law would trump concern for shareholder value.
Given the incredible enthusiasm with which the US has largely rolled over and wagged its tail in response to the steady expansion of police power and militarization to battle the drugs menace, I strongly suspect that the capability of the population to kill mercenaries would translate into virtually no action whatsoever. The few exceptions would then be characterized as extremists and dealt with(small arms are common, the sort of stuff you'd need to stop armored vehicles, less so...)
Arguably, placing one's faith in guns as an antidote to policing is like expecting the widespread availability of strong cryptographic algorithms to protect internet privacy: Architecturally it might be within the realm of the plausible; but it's behaviorally absurd.
Unfortunately, no matter how often 'privatization' enthusiasts ignore the issue or assert the contrary, 'privatization' tends to end up meaning an outcome that combines the least delightful aspects of state intrusion and ill-controlled corporate power...
'Privatization' almost never means "The state is going to abandon function X and leave people to figure it out on their own initiative." It means "The state is going to retain function X, and function X will continue to be taxpayer funded; but the execution of function X will be delegated to FooDyne LLC. who will now have access to the public purse and some measure of state power."
This isn't 100% certain to go badly; but it doesn't reduce the state's role(it just moves some of the state's role 'off the books' and into opaque contractual lumps, rather than those much-demonized public sector employees) and it tends to feed a class of contracting corporations that become essentially obligate parasites of the government, ever more efficient at landing juicy contracts, if not necessarily actually delivering on them...
Slashdot Mirror
It strikes me that the available prior art might hinge on whether you think that the distinction between the 'annotations' and the 'work' is terribly relevant(from the perspective of the patent, obviously the distinction between text and margin notes is relevant to the user).
If it is relevant, the only real possibilities are the document markup features in some of the PDF/publishing related stuff, or Office and similar.
If the distinction isn't materially relevant, practically any revision control system going back to the dark ages provides a superset of the features described:
Support for multiple users and multiple devices, with authentication and permissions? Check.
Stores 'annotations' in association with the digital work? Storing revision information in relation to the digital work being revised is only the entire point of revision control systems...(the revision control use case assumes that most changes checked in will be changes rather than comments; but, architecturally, comments and annotations are a proper subset of the sorts of revisions one can check in, and programmers certainly do check in code comments as well as changes to the 'work'
Provides abbreviated versions? Any of the 'friendly-display' mechanisms for a revision controlled repository will provide for some sort of 'here be diff by user Foo. click to expand?' function.
Access control? Yup, revision control systems do that as well, some only to file level of granularity, some more.
Provide full version of one or more annotations? Check out SVN checkout...
For my information(since I'm honestly not too much up on patents), does the expected use case of a tool count as a suitably weighty factor in determining validity? In this case, it is certainly fair to say that the expected use cases of Amazon's "digital margin notes" patent places it firmly in the same camp as other text annotation systems from Adobe, MS, and some more specialty vendors. Architecturally, though, the 'invention' is essentially 'partial re-implementation of a revision control system under the assumption that the base file(s) will always be treated as canonical, and the diffs as merely incidental'. Their implementation is likely to be a better fit than a straight revision control mechanism if you are, in fact, highlighting your way around an etext; but the underlying architecture will be equivalent to, or a mere subset of, revision control...
I hope that nobody would actually consider a remote X session without tunnelling over ssh...
While I'm sure that the feds managed to do something tasteless and possibly illegal with this power, I'm a bit confused by the summary:
.com pointing to it placed the site, server(s), or operator(s) under US jurisdiction would be rather more dramatic; but the DNS record that points FOO.com to your IP has always been under American jursdiction...
In order to 'have' a FOO.com/.net/.org domain name, you have to pay for the appropriate registration with Verisign, a US corporation, who handles those domains. If the feds secure the appropriate court order, they can direct Verisign to have your FOO.com point to a different IP.
Ok. Hasn't that always been the case?
Some sort of argument that a site having a
If there isn't a perfectly linear tube filled(emptied?) with hard vacuum between their GBIC and my GBIC, providing the lowest possible roundtrip time(that fiber crap can slow your photons by 30-50%), the connection isn't good enough.
You must take classier buses than some of us...
They'd have been plagued by claims of fear-mongering with or without this incident since they do it chronically.
Unfortunately, in the 20 years since they've continued to be plagued by claims of fear-mongering and developed a reputation for parasitism and relative fecklessness against serious threats...
That's really the worst of it. The state of 'security' on the internet is pretty fucking dreadful. Atrocious all over the place; but the relatively low usefulness, and frequent commercial crassness, of the AV guys manage to still make them look like money-sucking fearmongers.
Organic material that has been enjoying the company of whatever rocks and minerals have been sitting next to it for a zillion years, possibly leaching interesting inorganics(sulfur is the star name, because it shows up in fair quantity and sulfur oxides are pretty visibly noxious; but all kinds of inorganics show up in smaller quantities: calcium, copper, lead, vanadium, sodium, etc.) Oil is mostly organic; but sometimes the exceptions count.
Quantities depend on where the crude the diesel was distilled from originated, how exacting the refining process was, what the additives were(and, depending on the plant and where it was grown, may well not be zero in the biodiesel either); but they definitely do show up, and in quantities significant enough to be of engineering concern for fuel users, particularly of very expensive or very delicate engines.
You'll see references to sulfur and trace metal limits and testing methods in various standards for fuels: ASTM D3605 is one testing method, MIL-F-16884 one standard that sets requirements for trace metal content.
There's even a pricey textbook!
I pretty much knew that that was the case. But I am surprised that the US government is admitting it in national news. Talk about brazen arrogance of power...
What might actually get slightly interesting is the case of any of the lulzsec victims during the period when the feds had some degree of control... I remember there being a bunch of litigation surrounding victims of various mob groups that the FBI had significantly infiltrated/compromised; but allowed to continue 'business as usual' for a period of time in order to gather evidence or similar. The relatives of those killed were less than pleased to learn that the FBI had sacrificed them for the case. It would be interesting to see if any of the entities knocked over by lulzsec feel like having a swing at the feds for damages...
It will also be interesting to see if the case against lulzsec itself is actually as strong as claimed, or if it quietly drags on for several years and then dissolves into a sticky mess of plea-bargains for relatively minor offenses; but that won't be knowable for a good while to come.
I suspect that part of the impetus behind anti-globalization sentiment is the (arguably quite realistic, based on present experience) belief that while "We have the potential of doing the necessary political and social reforms to ensure much higher worldwide prosperity", it'll be a cold day in hell before we actually exercise that potential, because it's easier and more profitable to just drive down the cost of 'human resources' and go jurisdiction shopping for favorable tax status and environmental non-regulation...
The 'gains from trade' argument certainly offers a strong foundation for the position that globalization can deliver greater overall wealth; but the domestic experience, at least, has been that the income distribution skews even faster than the pie grows. It's not a huge surprise that this leaves those holding a smaller slice looking back fondly on the days when they had a bigger slice of a smaller pie...
An efficient, if extralegal, approach might be to deliver the news of the results and coverup and then politely turn ones back and whistle innocently in order to allow the exposed miners and the coverers-up to enjoy a frank exchange of views in private.
Providing pickaxe handles is optional; but should speed the matter up.
Even if they don't specifically seek it out, and you start with a normal subset of the population at hiring, I'd assume that attrition would leave you with an employee pool consisting of newbs who haven't burned out yet, people who really need the job, and people who are entirely too happy about what they do(and, if you are running hackedFBchix.cx on the side, the buck an hour is just a bonus)...
It would certainly be interesting to see; but I'm not sure that the outcome would be so rosy. The plant stuff would probably have fewer interesting inorganic components; but the ultrafine soot particles commonly produced by diesel engines, as well as any cool partially combusted hydrocarbon structures(some innocuous, some surprisingly nasty for the elements involved), would presumably still be unpleasant...
"Everyone's got a mortgage to pay. [inner monologue] The Yuppie Nuremberg defense."
If you like the lawyers, you'll love the twisted mentats who establish and staff what is politely referred to as 'Product Defense Industry'. This curious little world delivers opposing evidence, scientific controversy, 'independent' toxicology/epidemiology, and whatever else might be needed to support your lawyers in their battle against whoever is accusing your benevolent product of causing cancer in orphans or whatever...
If ever the body of scientific evidence turns against you, these brave mercenaries of the laboratory can deliver enough doubt to buy years, potentially decades, of further freedom to operate!
Perversely, the best strategy might be to attempt to find ways to move globalization and outsourcing up the food chain as fast as possible...
Completely unshockingly, people in positions not experiencing strong downward pressure from globalization tend to be quite philosophical, even stoic, about the downsides and nearly rhapsodic about the upsides.
For that reason, the opponent of globalization might find no tactic more effective than identifying the intersection between 'people whose livelihoods are currently subject to substantial barriers to offshoring' and 'people who possess social and political influence' and then working to offshore the jobs held by that intersection population as rapidly and viciously as possible.
Going by this, I'd say that news of brutal law-mills where well-educated Indians earning $2/hour, and a few starving liberal-arts majors stateside earning 30k/year to show up in a suit for functions where physical presence is required, grinding out legal product would do more than any number of stories of the gutted formerly blue-collar class to freak congress out...
I do hope that you didn't end up accusing a poor bestiality enthusiast of being a spammer...
Bestiality may be distasteful, controversial, and potentially unethical; but spamming is just plain evil.
"Just think of us as friends you haven't met yet and never will."
XOXO,
-The Facebook Team
I haven't tested; but it wouldn't be a huge surprise to discover that, while the UI never changes, one's ability to 'flag' is silently adjusted in the background based on the past agreement between your 'flag' attempts and the facebook rater's assessments. That seems like the easiest way to quietly blow off the axe-grinding crazies of the world without either verifiably proving that you've 'banned them from flagging' or allowing them to DoS their pet victim's kitten pictures, or all vaguely homosexual content, or whatever their personal vendetta happens to be...
I wonder if their moderators ever run into trouble with the local authorities because of the material they are accessing?
If your job is to review an endless stream of too-nasty-for-facebook stuff, and you live in a slightly puritanical jurisdiction, I imagine that you could relatively easily end up handling a fair amount of material that is theoretically illegal, if not necessarily well enforced(and, unlike the higher-ups at facebook HQ, who probably benefit from the 'obviously, we are just screening material in order to hand over anything wicked to the cops' presumption, it might not be easy for Joe Temp to prove that he is just doing his job)...
Are the moderators at least provided with a health insurance package that will pay for the eyebleach?
I'm pretty sure that TSMC doesn't even fab AMD CPUs. They did GPUs for ATI, and likely still handle some portion of the discrete GPU parts under AMD; but I believe that AMD CPU production is all still in their formerly-in-house-now-spun-off fabs...
It seems to be about a number of things:
Ebooks on dedicated readers vs. general purpose devices: Shockingly, a 'book' that keeps throwing notifications in your face may not be the best for your sense of focus. Luckily, the e-ink brigade now has quality offerings under $100, with fairly fast refresh and crazy-long battery life.
Publishers 'cooling': There's a shock. Publishers, because they simply couldn't accept the thought that this might be the end, held a cargo-cult belief that something had to save them, and if tablets were the flavor of the month, it must be tablets! Wake up and smell the reality, chaps. It has been plausibly suggested that the ease of purchase and transport makes owners of dedicated ereaders somewhat heavier readers than they were previously. However, the self-selected "Yeah, I like reading enough to buy a reader device" market is rapidly saturating, since they've gotten so cheap, leaving them to knife-fight with Angry Birds and Facebook for the attention spans of the rest of the population...
Some novelist waxing nostalgic: Books die. A lot. There are a few very lucky winners, lovingly maintained by archivists and preservationists of various stripes; but the attrition is massive. Texts survive because they are easy to copy. Assuming DRM insanity doesn't get us all, ebooks are even more booklike that books. Sure, your reader widget will probably be in the landfill in five years; but electronic texts can be copied in the blink of an eye.
It isn't really 'potential' anymore: meet Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan...
Instead of catching small time thieves, they could go after the bankers.
One can dream
Odds are that they'd be a direct subsidiary of the same shadowy holding company that the finance company you'd want investigated is. And I'm sure that their commitment to the enforcement of the law would trump concern for shareholder value.
Given the incredible enthusiasm with which the US has largely rolled over and wagged its tail in response to the steady expansion of police power and militarization to battle the drugs menace, I strongly suspect that the capability of the population to kill mercenaries would translate into virtually no action whatsoever. The few exceptions would then be characterized as extremists and dealt with(small arms are common, the sort of stuff you'd need to stop armored vehicles, less so...)
Arguably, placing one's faith in guns as an antidote to policing is like expecting the widespread availability of strong cryptographic algorithms to protect internet privacy: Architecturally it might be within the realm of the plausible; but it's behaviorally absurd.
Unfortunately, no matter how often 'privatization' enthusiasts ignore the issue or assert the contrary, 'privatization' tends to end up meaning an outcome that combines the least delightful aspects of state intrusion and ill-controlled corporate power...
'Privatization' almost never means "The state is going to abandon function X and leave people to figure it out on their own initiative." It means "The state is going to retain function X, and function X will continue to be taxpayer funded; but the execution of function X will be delegated to FooDyne LLC. who will now have access to the public purse and some measure of state power."
This isn't 100% certain to go badly; but it doesn't reduce the state's role(it just moves some of the state's role 'off the books' and into opaque contractual lumps, rather than those much-demonized public sector employees) and it tends to feed a class of contracting corporations that become essentially obligate parasites of the government, ever more efficient at landing juicy contracts, if not necessarily actually delivering on them...