but censorship by the masses is very alive and very well here in these United States.
Please explain to me how "censorship by the masses" is different from plain old "voting with your wallet." For my part, I see a huge, fundamental difference between the people saying, "No, we're not interested," and the government saying, "No, you will not be interested."
You can reserve the right to unconditionally and unilaterally alter the terms of a contract after the fact without additional consideration, but (going back to first-year law school here, so a little shaky) that clause would be inherently suspect, so it may not be enforceable. In other words, go ahead and put it in the contract. Best case scenario, you can enforce it. Worst case scenario, you can't, and you're no worse off than if you hadn't tried. It's a little better when you put conditions on the option, like, "If X happens, I can elect to change the agreement in ways Y and Z." Ultimately, you'd probably have to fight about it in court to see if your particular unilateral option is enforceable (and does Joe User really care enough to go to court with Apple on a contract dispute?). The way to get around it is to say, "I have the right to change the terms, and you have a 30-day period in which to reject the modified terms. If you keep reaping the benefit of the contract after 30 days, we deem you to have accepted."
Any 1Ls who can, for example, still write a full synopsis of Hadley v. Baxendale at the drop of a hat, who still remember whether it was Pierson or Post who shot the stupid fox, or who still remember what exactly Pennoyer and Neff were fighting about, feel free to correct me.
The "drivel," as you call it, is the only thing that matters as to the scope of the patent. The GUI you "knock up" in about an hour using Tk/Tcl would not infringe the claim unless it had each and every one of those elements. And the fact that you can do something after somebody patents it doesn't say anything about whether the patent is obvious. That's what the patent's supposed to do.
The person analyzing this for groklaw is a lawyer well seasoned in tech and IP litigation, and disagrees with you.
Who? PJ? She's a paralegal. She lost credibility when she complained about the following paragraph:
Although the invention has been described in language specific to structural features and/or methodological steps, it is to be understood that the invention defined in the appended claims is not necessarily limited to the specific features or steps described. Rather, the specific features and steps are disclosed as preferred forms of implementing the claimed invention.
Guess what. That's boiler plate. Every patent application has it. It's just says, "Hey, you folks on the jury! The claims aren't limited to the embodiments in the specification." Which is just plain, vanilla patent law. It's just saying what the judge should tell them anyway. Every single patent I write has a similar paragraph, and any competent patent attorney wouldn't blink an eye at it.
This may not be the most earth-shattering patent in the world, but unless your program has every single feature of the claims, you don't infringe. And unless the prior art has every single feature of the claims, it doesn't anticipate. Sudo doesn't.
Does sudo have "information indicating the task and an entity that attempted the task; a selectable help graphic wherein responsive to receiving selection of the selectable help graphic, the computer-readable instructions further cause the computing device to present the information; identifiers, each of the identifiers identifying other accounts having a right to permit the task, wherein the identifiers presented are based on criteria comprising: frequency of use; association with the user; and indication of sufficient but not unlimited rights; one of the identifiers identifies a higher-rights account having a right to permit the task, wherein the one of the identifiers comprises: a graphic identifying the higher-rights accounts associated with the user; and a name of the higher-rights account; an authenticator region capable of receiving, from the user, an authenticator usable to authenticate the higher-rights account having the right to permit the task, wherein: the authenticator comprises a password, and the authenticator region comprises a data-entry field configured to receive the password"?
No? Then you're just posting a knee-jerk reaction to something you don't understand.
I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. Chief Justice Roberts questioned one of the attorneys about a footnote that brought up software patents, but none of the judges have "said" anything yet, because they haven't issued their ruling yet. There is no compelling reason that they have to address software in this case. The Federal Circuit didn't. They carefully avoided the issue. The Supreme Court could do the same and rule that bare business method patents are invalid without saying a single word about software patents. I would also be surprised to see them say anything about novelty, because that's not at issue in this case. This is about patentable subject matter. This is saying, you can have the most novel, innovative, brilliant new business method in the world, but it doesn't meet the test, so sorry, you don't get a patent.
I heard a great alternative to dismantling all those beautiful Peacekeepers. Remove the nuclear warheads and instead fit each missile with 10 or 11 800-lb chunks of heat-shielded metal in the shape of an RV. Find a terrorist training camp somewhere in the world? In 30 minutes you've got a custom-made meteor shower raining right down on top of them with a CEP smaller than a football field. No radiation. No fallout. Just lots of dead terrorists.
Doesn't really matter. The cost of producing the weapons is a sunk cost. And even better, it was money spent by somebody else. So the Soviets basically made a big, free investment in our future energy needs.
FTFA "But if more diluted weapons-grade uranium isn't secured soon, the pipeline could run dry, with ramifications for consumers, as well as some American utilities and their Russian suppliers."
Gotta end sometime, but was fun while it lasted
Yeah, too bad we can't, you know, mine the stuff or something.
How, exactly, is Justice Thomas "in the tank" for big business, and how, exactly, can "other ones... be bought"? There are of course the all-important campaign contributions. No, wait, federal judges are appointed for life. Scratch that. Well, Big Biz could lobby Congress to reduce their pay if they don't stay in line. Except that would be patently unconstitutional under Article III. But still, they need to kiss the right behinds to climb the ladder. Except they're already on the Supreme Court, so there's really nowhere to go. So are you suggesting that Monsanto and other big business interests outright bribe certain justices? Well now, I'm interested in what evidence you have to support this theory, because we have here the makings of one of the biggest scandals we've ever seen. Also, we have some pretty stupid justices who would jeapordize their careers and legacies for the sake of whatever bribe the baddies are willing to offer.
I often disagree with Supreme Court justices, but for better or worse, it's hard for me to find a reason for them deciding the way they do except they really believe that's the way things ought to be. Our clever little Constitution did a pretty good job of removing all other incentives. Now, they may be cozy with the interests they've sided with through the years, because we all love to be buddies with like-minded people, but nobody owns them. If Justice Thomas decided he wanted to put the smack down on Monsanto, there's nothing Monsanto could do to stop him.
1. Why the govt. does not want to resolve the mess that is software patents, now
that a golden opportunity has been presented?
This case isn't really suitable because the Bilski claims didn't have any software. They were pure business method claims. My guess is that the Court would say the question of software patents is not an actual case or controversy here, so it can't be decided.
3. How is it technically feasible, if at all, to make a ruling on the Business
Methods case without influencing whether software can or cannot be patented?
Again, because there was no software in Bilski. The Court can very easily say that these kinds of pure business method patents without any ties to anything physical---not even a piece of software on a computer---are not valid without touching the question of whether they would be valid if embodied in computer software. And you would still see thousands of patents invalidated, because since 1998's State Street decision, we have had thousands and thousands of pure business method patents issue. Note however that this doesn't automatically make those patent go away. I recently defended a case where the patent claims were almost certainly invalid under the Federal Circuit's Bilski decision, which is still good law until the Supreme Court rules. The plaintiffs admitted that they had Bilski problems, but they still sued because the patent is valid until a court says otherwise. We ended up settling to make the troll go away because even with the Bilski problems, it was cheaper than getting through a summary judgment motion.
Maybe the scientists at CERN can discover some hidden force of nature, a Force that may be with them in their fight against the Avian Empire?
Yeah, but then they would revise their theory to say that it's actually just a bunch of microscopic parasites, and that would take all the fun out of it.
I remember some comment here on Slashdot a while back (I foget who it was or what the story was about) where somebody was complaining that, as a person in the 99th intelligence percentile, it was simply impossible to be friends with people of mediocre intelligence. The comment struck me as amazingly arrogant and short-sighted. I didn't say anything at the time, but I thought exactly what you are saying. This guy's problem, in my not-so-humble opinion, was that he was letting his score on an IQ test define himself and his potential friends. As long as people who score well on IQ tests go around wearing it like a badge and looking down on everybody else, they are going to be outcasts, because even if you don't say it out loud, people will pick up on it, and then they don't want to be around you. Nobody wants to hang out with the guy who's always subtly reminding everybody of how smart he is. At that point, it's the natural human reaction to soothe your ego by thinking "average people just can't handle being around smart people like me. They're jealous of my vast intelligence." But it's just not true. I have plenty of friends who would probably score lower than I would on an IQ test (I say "would" because the last time I took an IQ test I was around eight years old). I also have friends who would probably score higher. You can be friends with anybody as long as you're mutually willing to accept each other as equals. And when you do that, you find that there's something to learn from everybody. Because I guarantee that even the homeless guy you pass on the street who sleeps on a park bench and pees on himself knows something that you don't. He has acquired some skill, knowledge or wisdom from his life experience that you haven't. As long as we define ourselves and others strictly in terms of a single, nearly meaningless number, we close ourselves off from a wealth of potential knowledge and experience.
And yet if this were a patent case instead of a trade secret case, this page would be swarming with comments decrying the corrupt and broken patent system, without so much as a cursory glance at the claims.
the effect of some of the firebombings was certainly comparable to the effect of nukes, just more labor-intensive.
To be precise, we actually caused more overall damage with conventional fire bombing. The two bombs accounted for only between a quarter and a third of Japanese bombing deaths. It's not that the bombs killed more people. It is (as you said) that they did it all at once and very impressively. An interesting read, for anybody who wants to look at the effects. The government also printed a manual in the 70s called "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons," which had very detailed analyses, but it's hard to come by now.
Congress, and thus monied corporations and lobbyists still have the power of the purse to decide whether or not our weapon systems can be autonomous or not.
The word you need to look at is "unreasonable." What makes an "unreasonable" search or seizure? We have hundreds of years of both English and American case law that tells us when a search or seizure is "unreasonable." I have yet to see a single one of those cases that says "unreasonable" means "warrantless." If they had meant "warrantless" they would have just said that. But you're right that you read the two clauses together. The "unreasonable" part implies that "in many cases, you need a warrant," and the next clause says, "in those cases where a warrant is required, it shall not issue except on probable cause."
Fortunately, judges tend to be pretty thick skinned, since you called Judge Mosman a "moron." I'm pretty sure I didn't call you any names. I did compare you to people who make knee-jerk decisions about things they don't understand.
The "P" stands for "portability", and not "privacy"
Yup. If only I'd made a slight typo in my href tag, you could have even seen the full title of the act right there in the URL.
There are specific allowances, too, so that providers may share your records with law enforcement when required by law.
Which means that HIPAA does, in fact, provide you a right to privacy (but again, it's less than what you would get in your home). There's probably even case law about this, but I'm not going to spend a lot of time hunting it down.
By using this judge's logic however, one could *certainly* draw the same analogy that I did in order to obtain such records without a warrant.
And once again, you entirely missed the biggest point. There already was a warrant in this case, supported by probable cause (the stupid, sensational headline to this story would lead you to believe otherwise, but whatever). The question the judge was addressing was whether they had to notify the person whose e-mails they were snooping. So once again, this opinion does not say that the cops can read your e-mails without a warrant. It says that if they get a warrant, they're not required to tell you about it. Now, reasonable people can disagree on whether that is the correct result. But calling the judge a moron because he held something he clearly did not hold is a poor way to start off that debate.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Okay, show me the place where it says "no searches shall ever be carried out except with a warrant." Or if not, show me just one court case that says no searches may ever be carried out without a warrant. Or just one single educated legal theorist who has ever espoused the position that the 4th Amendment always requires a warrant before any searches are ever carried out under any circumstances. Go ahead. Take your time.
When was the last time you complained about a PHB and his knee-jerk reactions about stuff he was clueless about? I'm talking about the guy who bought a huge suite of MS products because some sales drone bought him lunch. You know what? That's you. You are complaining, on a knee-jerk reaction, about something you clearly do not understand. First of all, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Insurance_Portability_and_Accountability_Act>your medical records are private. You also have common law privacy protections covering communication with your attorney, spouse, etc. These are rules that have been around since long before our own judicial system. You have a lot of privacy if you choose to exercise it.
Second, did you even bother to read the summary? This is not even about whether a warrant is needed. This is about whether the Feds have to call up Al Capone and let him know they're tapping his e-mail after they've gotten a warrant. This judge recognizes, much better than you apparently, that there is a very long, distinguished common law tradition of protecting the home as the pinnacle of private space. Once you go outside your home, or send information outside your home, the rules change. You can still have an expectation of privacy to certain degrees, but it's always going to be less than it is inside your home.
You have every right to disagree with a judge, even vehemently. I do it all the time. I even disagree with smart judges like William Brennan and Ruth Bader Ginsburg because I adamantly disapprove of their judicial philosophy. I even disagree with judges I like most of the time, like Hugo Black (very rarely) and Antonin Scalia (occasionally). The difference is I have a reason for disagreeing with them. I disagree with them after reading their actual opinions and thinking, "no, that doesn't jive with what I think the Constitution means when it says X." All you have is impotent rage because somebody on Slashdot told you that the evil neocons* like to get off on reading your e-mails. At least know what this judge said before you start calling him a moron.
*By the way, I have no idea who appointed this judge. He could be a left winger for all I know.
Slashdot Mirror
but censorship by the masses is very alive and very well here in these United States.
Please explain to me how "censorship by the masses" is different from plain old "voting with your wallet." For my part, I see a huge, fundamental difference between the people saying, "No, we're not interested," and the government saying, "No, you will not be interested."
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=search+engine&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g10
I don't know, but apparently they're still behind Dogpile (seriously?) and Alta Vista (SERIOUSLY?).
You can reserve the right to unconditionally and unilaterally alter the terms of a contract after the fact without additional consideration, but (going back to first-year law school here, so a little shaky) that clause would be inherently suspect, so it may not be enforceable. In other words, go ahead and put it in the contract. Best case scenario, you can enforce it. Worst case scenario, you can't, and you're no worse off than if you hadn't tried. It's a little better when you put conditions on the option, like, "If X happens, I can elect to change the agreement in ways Y and Z." Ultimately, you'd probably have to fight about it in court to see if your particular unilateral option is enforceable (and does Joe User really care enough to go to court with Apple on a contract dispute?). The way to get around it is to say, "I have the right to change the terms, and you have a 30-day period in which to reject the modified terms. If you keep reaping the benefit of the contract after 30 days, we deem you to have accepted."
Any 1Ls who can, for example, still write a full synopsis of Hadley v. Baxendale at the drop of a hat, who still remember whether it was Pierson or Post who shot the stupid fox, or who still remember what exactly Pennoyer and Neff were fighting about, feel free to correct me.
Vizzini... he can fuss.
The "drivel," as you call it, is the only thing that matters as to the scope of the patent. The GUI you "knock up" in about an hour using Tk/Tcl would not infringe the claim unless it had each and every one of those elements. And the fact that you can do something after somebody patents it doesn't say anything about whether the patent is obvious. That's what the patent's supposed to do.
The person analyzing this for groklaw is a lawyer well seasoned in tech and IP litigation, and disagrees with you.
Who? PJ? She's a paralegal. She lost credibility when she complained about the following paragraph:
Although the invention has been described in language specific to structural features and/or methodological steps, it is to be understood that the invention defined in the appended claims is not necessarily limited to the specific features or steps described. Rather, the specific features and steps are disclosed as preferred forms of implementing the claimed invention.
Guess what. That's boiler plate. Every patent application has it. It's just says, "Hey, you folks on the jury! The claims aren't limited to the embodiments in the specification." Which is just plain, vanilla patent law. It's just saying what the judge should tell them anyway. Every single patent I write has a similar paragraph, and any competent patent attorney wouldn't blink an eye at it.
This may not be the most earth-shattering patent in the world, but unless your program has every single feature of the claims, you don't infringe. And unless the prior art has every single feature of the claims, it doesn't anticipate. Sudo doesn't.
Does sudo have "information indicating the task and an entity that attempted the task; a selectable help graphic wherein responsive to receiving selection of the selectable help graphic, the computer-readable instructions further cause the computing device to present the information; identifiers, each of the identifiers identifying other accounts having a right to permit the task, wherein the identifiers presented are based on criteria comprising: frequency of use; association with the user; and indication of sufficient but not unlimited rights; one of the identifiers identifies a higher-rights account having a right to permit the task, wherein the one of the identifiers comprises: a graphic identifying the higher-rights accounts associated with the user; and a name of the higher-rights account; an authenticator region capable of receiving, from the user, an authenticator usable to authenticate the higher-rights account having the right to permit the task, wherein: the authenticator comprises a password, and the authenticator region comprises a data-entry field configured to receive the password"?
No? Then you're just posting a knee-jerk reaction to something you don't understand.
I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. Chief Justice Roberts questioned one of the attorneys about a footnote that brought up software patents, but none of the judges have "said" anything yet, because they haven't issued their ruling yet. There is no compelling reason that they have to address software in this case. The Federal Circuit didn't. They carefully avoided the issue. The Supreme Court could do the same and rule that bare business method patents are invalid without saying a single word about software patents. I would also be surprised to see them say anything about novelty, because that's not at issue in this case. This is about patentable subject matter. This is saying, you can have the most novel, innovative, brilliant new business method in the world, but it doesn't meet the test, so sorry, you don't get a patent.
The article doesn't say what level of damage would have resulted from an impact.
Depends. Is there a modifier for a sneak attack?
I heard a great alternative to dismantling all those beautiful Peacekeepers. Remove the nuclear warheads and instead fit each missile with 10 or 11 800-lb chunks of heat-shielded metal in the shape of an RV. Find a terrorist training camp somewhere in the world? In 30 minutes you've got a custom-made meteor shower raining right down on top of them with a CEP smaller than a football field. No radiation. No fallout. Just lots of dead terrorists.
Doesn't really matter. The cost of producing the weapons is a sunk cost. And even better, it was money spent by somebody else. So the Soviets basically made a big, free investment in our future energy needs.
FTFA "But if more diluted weapons-grade uranium isn't secured soon, the pipeline could run dry, with ramifications for consumers, as well as some American utilities and their Russian suppliers."
Gotta end sometime, but was fun while it lasted
Yeah, too bad we can't, you know, mine the stuff or something.
How, exactly, is Justice Thomas "in the tank" for big business, and how, exactly, can "other ones ... be bought"? There are of course the all-important campaign contributions. No, wait, federal judges are appointed for life. Scratch that. Well, Big Biz could lobby Congress to reduce their pay if they don't stay in line. Except that would be patently unconstitutional under Article III. But still, they need to kiss the right behinds to climb the ladder. Except they're already on the Supreme Court, so there's really nowhere to go. So are you suggesting that Monsanto and other big business interests outright bribe certain justices? Well now, I'm interested in what evidence you have to support this theory, because we have here the makings of one of the biggest scandals we've ever seen. Also, we have some pretty stupid justices who would jeapordize their careers and legacies for the sake of whatever bribe the baddies are willing to offer.
I often disagree with Supreme Court justices, but for better or worse, it's hard for me to find a reason for them deciding the way they do except they really believe that's the way things ought to be. Our clever little Constitution did a pretty good job of removing all other incentives. Now, they may be cozy with the interests they've sided with through the years, because we all love to be buddies with like-minded people, but nobody owns them. If Justice Thomas decided he wanted to put the smack down on Monsanto, there's nothing Monsanto could do to stop him.
1. Why the govt. does not want to resolve the mess that is software patents, now that a golden opportunity has been presented?
This case isn't really suitable because the Bilski claims didn't have any software. They were pure business method claims. My guess is that the Court would say the question of software patents is not an actual case or controversy here, so it can't be decided.
3. How is it technically feasible, if at all, to make a ruling on the Business Methods case without influencing whether software can or cannot be patented?
Again, because there was no software in Bilski. The Court can very easily say that these kinds of pure business method patents without any ties to anything physical---not even a piece of software on a computer---are not valid without touching the question of whether they would be valid if embodied in computer software. And you would still see thousands of patents invalidated, because since 1998's State Street decision, we have had thousands and thousands of pure business method patents issue. Note however that this doesn't automatically make those patent go away. I recently defended a case where the patent claims were almost certainly invalid under the Federal Circuit's Bilski decision, which is still good law until the Supreme Court rules. The plaintiffs admitted that they had Bilski problems, but they still sued because the patent is valid until a court says otherwise. We ended up settling to make the troll go away because even with the Bilski problems, it was cheaper than getting through a summary judgment motion.
Maybe the scientists at CERN can discover some hidden force of nature, a Force that may be with them in their fight against the Avian Empire?
Yeah, but then they would revise their theory to say that it's actually just a bunch of microscopic parasites, and that would take all the fun out of it.
I remember some comment here on Slashdot a while back (I foget who it was or what the story was about) where somebody was complaining that, as a person in the 99th intelligence percentile, it was simply impossible to be friends with people of mediocre intelligence. The comment struck me as amazingly arrogant and short-sighted. I didn't say anything at the time, but I thought exactly what you are saying. This guy's problem, in my not-so-humble opinion, was that he was letting his score on an IQ test define himself and his potential friends. As long as people who score well on IQ tests go around wearing it like a badge and looking down on everybody else, they are going to be outcasts, because even if you don't say it out loud, people will pick up on it, and then they don't want to be around you. Nobody wants to hang out with the guy who's always subtly reminding everybody of how smart he is. At that point, it's the natural human reaction to soothe your ego by thinking "average people just can't handle being around smart people like me. They're jealous of my vast intelligence." But it's just not true. I have plenty of friends who would probably score lower than I would on an IQ test (I say "would" because the last time I took an IQ test I was around eight years old). I also have friends who would probably score higher. You can be friends with anybody as long as you're mutually willing to accept each other as equals. And when you do that, you find that there's something to learn from everybody. Because I guarantee that even the homeless guy you pass on the street who sleeps on a park bench and pees on himself knows something that you don't. He has acquired some skill, knowledge or wisdom from his life experience that you haven't. As long as we define ourselves and others strictly in terms of a single, nearly meaningless number, we close ourselves off from a wealth of potential knowledge and experience.
And yet if this were a patent case instead of a trade secret case, this page would be swarming with comments decrying the corrupt and broken patent system, without so much as a cursory glance at the claims.
the effect of some of the firebombings was certainly comparable to the effect of nukes, just more labor-intensive.
To be precise, we actually caused more overall damage with conventional fire bombing. The two bombs accounted for only between a quarter and a third of Japanese bombing deaths. It's not that the bombs killed more people. It is (as you said) that they did it all at once and very impressively. An interesting read, for anybody who wants to look at the effects. The government also printed a manual in the 70s called "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons," which had very detailed analyses, but it's hard to come by now.
Congress, and thus monied corporations and lobbyists still have the power of the purse to decide whether or not our weapon systems can be autonomous or not.
Looks like you had a typo.
Really? I thought he was trying to leverage the cloud architecture to optimize his software services enterprise based on open standards.
The word you need to look at is "unreasonable." What makes an "unreasonable" search or seizure? We have hundreds of years of both English and American case law that tells us when a search or seizure is "unreasonable." I have yet to see a single one of those cases that says "unreasonable" means "warrantless." If they had meant "warrantless" they would have just said that. But you're right that you read the two clauses together. The "unreasonable" part implies that "in many cases, you need a warrant," and the next clause says, "in those cases where a warrant is required, it shall not issue except on probable cause."
I don't appreciate your insults.
Fortunately, judges tend to be pretty thick skinned, since you called Judge Mosman a "moron." I'm pretty sure I didn't call you any names. I did compare you to people who make knee-jerk decisions about things they don't understand.
The "P" stands for "portability", and not "privacy"
Yup. If only I'd made a slight typo in my href tag, you could have even seen the full title of the act right there in the URL.
There are specific allowances, too, so that providers may share your records with law enforcement when required by law.
Which means that HIPAA does, in fact, provide you a right to privacy (but again, it's less than what you would get in your home). There's probably even case law about this, but I'm not going to spend a lot of time hunting it down.
By using this judge's logic however, one could *certainly* draw the same analogy that I did in order to obtain such records without a warrant.
And once again, you entirely missed the biggest point. There already was a warrant in this case, supported by probable cause (the stupid, sensational headline to this story would lead you to believe otherwise, but whatever). The question the judge was addressing was whether they had to notify the person whose e-mails they were snooping. So once again, this opinion does not say that the cops can read your e-mails without a warrant. It says that if they get a warrant, they're not required to tell you about it. Now, reasonable people can disagree on whether that is the correct result. But calling the judge a moron because he held something he clearly did not hold is a poor way to start off that debate.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Okay, show me the place where it says "no searches shall ever be carried out except with a warrant." Or if not, show me just one court case that says no searches may ever be carried out without a warrant. Or just one single educated legal theorist who has ever espoused the position that the 4th Amendment always requires a warrant before any searches are ever carried out under any circumstances. Go ahead. Take your time.
When was the last time you complained about a PHB and his knee-jerk reactions about stuff he was clueless about? I'm talking about the guy who bought a huge suite of MS products because some sales drone bought him lunch. You know what? That's you. You are complaining, on a knee-jerk reaction, about something you clearly do not understand. First of all, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Insurance_Portability_and_Accountability_Act>your medical records are private. You also have common law privacy protections covering communication with your attorney, spouse, etc. These are rules that have been around since long before our own judicial system. You have a lot of privacy if you choose to exercise it.
Second, did you even bother to read the summary? This is not even about whether a warrant is needed. This is about whether the Feds have to call up Al Capone and let him know they're tapping his e-mail after they've gotten a warrant. This judge recognizes, much better than you apparently, that there is a very long, distinguished common law tradition of protecting the home as the pinnacle of private space. Once you go outside your home, or send information outside your home, the rules change. You can still have an expectation of privacy to certain degrees, but it's always going to be less than it is inside your home.
You have every right to disagree with a judge, even vehemently. I do it all the time. I even disagree with smart judges like William Brennan and Ruth Bader Ginsburg because I adamantly disapprove of their judicial philosophy. I even disagree with judges I like most of the time, like Hugo Black (very rarely) and Antonin Scalia (occasionally). The difference is I have a reason for disagreeing with them. I disagree with them after reading their actual opinions and thinking, "no, that doesn't jive with what I think the Constitution means when it says X." All you have is impotent rage because somebody on Slashdot told you that the evil neocons* like to get off on reading your e-mails. At least know what this judge said before you start calling him a moron.
*By the way, I have no idea who appointed this judge. He could be a left winger for all I know.
Read the 4th Amendment. It doesn't always require a warrant.