Actually we should all be armed to the teeth and shoot any idiot that attempts to infringe our rights. It is not a matter for debate. And "God" hasn't a damn thing to do with it. See, that was a bit of irony. I was mocking people who quote passages from the Declaration of Independence, thinking they're in the Constitution (like "they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights... life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness"). That hadn't specifically happened here. I was just grouping the Bush-ranters with people who do that.
Bush? Bush merely inherited and made more hay with decades of Americans not understanding and not standing up for their own freedom. As long as we tolerate it we will get more of the same and much much worse in the not too distant future.
And thank you for making my point for me.
For anybody who's interested, it has only been in the last few "decades" that the Fourth Amendment has even been applied to the States. Until the 14th Amendment was ratified, it was well-settled law that the Bill of Rights applied only to the Federal Government. After the 14th, for quite a while, nobody could agree on what it meant. In the middle part of the last century, great civil libertarians like Chief Justice Holmes and (my personal favorite) Justice Hugo Black fought very hard to apply the 4th Amendment to the States in a meaningful way.
Once they started doing that, they had to make some decisions. States conduct far more searches and seizures than the Federal Government, so they had to start dealing with questions that hadn't been raised much before. And that's how we got case law on things like searches incident to arrest and "Terry" stops. The Court was dealing with issues that had never really been addressed before. And because it dealt with those things, States had far LESS power than they had before. And of course, the case law that defined 4th Amendment rights also applied to the Federal Government. So the result is that people have MORE privacy rights now than they ever had in the past. In fact, the 4th Amendment reasonable expectation of privacy and the 14th Amendment due process clause have been used by the Court to create rights that would have been totally absurd in English Common Law (which is where we get "due process")---like the judicially-created rights to have an abortion and engage in homosexual sex. So, while there are legitimate debates to be had about things like Bush's wire-tapping program, it's not just the latest in a long line of abuses. You have liberties now your great-great grandparents would not have dreamed of.
Since this sounds like an opinion about a law, I have to say it: This is my personal opinion, nobody should rely on it for anything, it's not endorsed by my firm, and I don't represent anybody.
That would be a good point if it were true. But some of the very first posts were ignorant Bush rants. That's what irritated me to start with. Yes, I was indulging in a little exaggeration with the Declaration of Independence thing, but beyond that, it was a genuine gripe.
Let's see. Somebody speculates on how the fourth amendment may be applied to electronic gadgets. The blurb panics about "without a warrant and without probable cause" (and ignores the fact that there is long-standing precedent for certain searches without warrant and without probable cause, which even TFA probably point out---I'm not going to read it; it's hardly news). A bunch of people who have probably never even read the Constitution, much less taken a course on constitutional criminal procedure spout flames and blame Bush for this erosion of their God-given right---guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence---to have a porn-filled iPod. Yup, looks like I'm in the right place.
What gives them the right to download and listen to the file and not me? And how else would you positively know that copyright infringement is taking place?
I can see how they're setting themselves up for failure. Apparently, they failed to notice that the vast majority of users exceed those proposed limits on a regular basis. I mean, it's not like it's a few obsessive downloaders who use up most of the bandwidth, while the rest of the population is checking e-mail and surfing CNN. And it certainly doesn't make sense to charge those obsessive downloaders more than the other folks. And if upstart wireless providers start to become viable and provide meaningful competition, the cable company is stuck in a "broadband ghetto," just like the article says. I mean, it's not like they could raise and/or remove the caps in response to competition if/when the competition becomes a problem. In short, these guys are morons. If this is what they call business sense, they must really be struggling to make ends meet.
Can you do a Fast Forurier Transform in Fortran using a native operator? You can in APL.
Whoa. How'd we get from C# to APL? I'm supposed to be the one advocating arcane mathematical languages.
You are never going to be able to support every possible function in the core.
Exactly. Which is why you use the right tool for the job. If you want to make online games, use a byte code interpreter. FORTRAN was meant to be a straightforward way to TRANslate FORMulas for those who were primarily concerned with having a powerful tool for solving big math problems. It's not built for eye candy and networking. It has a very specialized function, and it does it well. And that's why I said a couple of posts ago that FORTRAN is not obsolete. FORTRAN code still powers lots and lots of mathematical simulation code.
I'll yield the point to you as soon as you can show me a serious byte code language implementation of FSCATT (compute X-ray transfer given an X-ray event with an arbitrary black body spectrum through an arbitrary material) or proof that OrCad has re-worked the SPICE (yes, SPICE) core in Java.
My wife has it [Vista] on her new laptop. It replaced her Windows ME laptop. Now somebody remind me, what is the appropriate agency for reporting spousal abuse?
It is FORTRAN, as in FORmula TRANslation. Not an acronym; an abbreviation.
What specific feature of Fortran do you consider to make it more suitable for mathematical operations? Can your namby pamby little Java applet correctly multiply two complex matrices with a simple, native multiplication operator? Didn't think so.
FORTRAN is not obsolete. It is still the most powerful language for hard-core mathematical operations. Sure, there are modern updates of it, so you don't have to worry about whether you're in column 5 or column 6. But the guts are still FORTRAN. It's not what people normally use for stuff like GUIs and stupid little web animations, but as long as computers have to do real math, FORTRAN is there to do the job. Now get off my lawn.
Shocked I say! A secretive agency has lied about the existence and/or content of a possibly very sensitive file with a very real potential for having ongoing security implications. Why, next thing you know, the CIA will start marking files "Top Secret" and telling people they can't look at them.
Criminal defendants do not prove that they are innocent. In fact, they do not have to affirmatively prove anything at all. It is fairly common for criminal defense attorneys to not present a case. Instead, they will simply argue to the jury that the prosecutor has not met his burden. The burden is always on the prosecutor to prove that the defendant is guilty. He either carries that burden or he doesn't. If he doesn't, then you are not found guilty (which is probably more accurate than "found not guilty", which implies an affirmative finding). This is hypothetically true even if the jury is 75% convinced of your guilt, but does not feel convinced "beyond a reasonable doubt."
Fortunately, we are seeing the rise of blogs where there are many people who know what they are talking about. Sweet! Can you point me to those? Most of what I see is Jane Doe posting the x^nth picture of her stupid, lazy cat curled up in a ball with a "cute" caption like "The REAL Boss Around Here!"
The 4th Amendment already makes explicit the right to such privacy, but it clearly isn't enough anymore - not for a long time. But since the 4th Amendment itself was merely an emphasis of a right already implicit in the Constitution, but worth repeating explicitly to ensure government protection of it (like the rest of the Bill of Rights), it's perfectly appropriate to reiterate it in terms easily enforceable in the current era, like copyright terms.
The 4th Amendment to what? Certainly not the U.S. Constitution. In fact, the word "privacy" does not explicitly appear anywhere in the Constitution. The 4th protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures by the federal government (the 14th Amendment applies the 4th Amendment to your state government). In Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court found a vague, ill-defined right to privacy somewhere in the "penumbras" of the 4th, 9th and 14th Amendments (based loosely on English common law rights). But it's always been vague, controversial and tenuous at best. It certainly was never "already implicit in the Constitution [before amendment]." In fact, it's a fairly recent concept. And what you seem to propose---the government protecting your right of privacy from other private entities---is entirely novel. The purpose of the Bill of Rights was to protect you from the federal government, not your neighbor. Protecting citizens from each other is (and ought to remain) the province of legislation, not the Constitution. And even then, the federal government isn't supposed to have a lot of power to legislate. It should be the states legislating privacy, except to the extent interstate commerce is directly involved.
DISCLAIMER: This post is just my opinion and does not constitute legal advice to anybody and is not endorsed by my employer and should not be relied on by anybody for any reason.
My firm requires me to have a disclaimer. I'll admit I'm not always meticulous about it, but I can get really screwed by a post that sounds like I might be opining on whether a patent is valid or infringed. They basically own me, just like your employer probably owns you, so they can tell me to do stuff like that. Link or no link, I'm still an attorney, I work for a firm, and they can be held accountable for many of my actions.
That said, sure, no reasonable person would think I represent them or that they're entitled to rely on my post as legal advice. But there are a lot of unreasonable people in the world, and they're the ones most likely to sue. Lawsuits are expensive, even when you win. So practicing law turns out to be lots of making sure stupid people don't sue you. If you want proof, hire a lawyer to give you a legal opinion, and read the disclaimers in that.
Why don't they go after microsoft too? They've been distributing a computer solitaire game for many years in clear violation of this patent, and they have plenty of money to sue them for!
Because the claims don't read on a single-player card game. The claims positively recite multiple players. Taking a quick look at the claims, it looks like this is one of those instances of doing something well-known over a network. Given the Supreme Court's recent KSR decision, you could probably invalidate this by finding an instance of somebody doing the same thing not on a network.
I am a patent lawyer, but I don't represent you. This post should not be relied on by anyone for any reason. This post is my personal opinion, and is not endorsed by Jackson Walker LLP, its agents, or partners.
No, you're in the right place. The crazy alternative universe would be the one where Congress doesn't sell stupid draconian laws to the highest bidder and where (a) people have fair use rights in media and (b) can't be held criminally liable for exercising those rights.
Can Microsoft be sued for not supporting "Apple File Protocol" or some other Apple-specific protocol? Yes. And sadly, it wouldn't even be the stupidest law suit I've seen in the past year.
I believe you can do the same with a Snap-On tool.
I Didn't Know Anybody Still Shopped at Sears
on
Sears Installs Spyware
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Wow! I'm so FLAMING HOT MAD about this, that I would boycott Sears if not for the fact that I never shop there anyway. Are you with me people?! MAKE YOUR VOICES HEARD! Punish Sears by refusing to purchase from them the things you already don't purchase from them!
I know of no such law. I know that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure require litigants to produce archived data, and I know that litigants can be sanctioned for destroying data in bad faith. The Rules also provide a safe harbor for data destroyed in good faith in accordance with a reasonable data retention policy. So what's reasonable? What is the real probability that a business will have non-litigation problems?
E-mail is the biggest burden on the storage space, and so much of that is garbage (I'm not even talking about spam---most "legitimate" e-mail is garbage). I wonder if there would be appreciable negative repercussions to deleting most of it. It seems like as often as not, all you get from archived e-mails is well-documented and discoverable "smoking guns" when you get sued. What if we just stored less of it? Would it be that bad? How likely is it that you're going to need some random Word document from 1998? Not criticizing---I'd really like to know.
The fact that it was done at a Spanish restaurant does not make it prior art for U.S. purposes. If it was known in the U.S. before Apple "invented" it, that counts. The Spanish prior art will only be available if somebody described it in a printed publication (that can be anywhere in the world).
Slashdot Mirror
And thank you for making my point for me.
For anybody who's interested, it has only been in the last few "decades" that the Fourth Amendment has even been applied to the States. Until the 14th Amendment was ratified, it was well-settled law that the Bill of Rights applied only to the Federal Government. After the 14th, for quite a while, nobody could agree on what it meant. In the middle part of the last century, great civil libertarians like Chief Justice Holmes and (my personal favorite) Justice Hugo Black fought very hard to apply the 4th Amendment to the States in a meaningful way.
Once they started doing that, they had to make some decisions. States conduct far more searches and seizures than the Federal Government, so they had to start dealing with questions that hadn't been raised much before. And that's how we got case law on things like searches incident to arrest and "Terry" stops. The Court was dealing with issues that had never really been addressed before. And because it dealt with those things, States had far LESS power than they had before. And of course, the case law that defined 4th Amendment rights also applied to the Federal Government. So the result is that people have MORE privacy rights now than they ever had in the past. In fact, the 4th Amendment reasonable expectation of privacy and the 14th Amendment due process clause have been used by the Court to create rights that would have been totally absurd in English Common Law (which is where we get "due process")---like the judicially-created rights to have an abortion and engage in homosexual sex. So, while there are legitimate debates to be had about things like Bush's wire-tapping program, it's not just the latest in a long line of abuses. You have liberties now your great-great grandparents would not have dreamed of.
Since this sounds like an opinion about a law, I have to say it: This is my personal opinion, nobody should rely on it for anything, it's not endorsed by my firm, and I don't represent anybody.
That would be a good point if it were true. But some of the very first posts were ignorant Bush rants. That's what irritated me to start with. Yes, I was indulging in a little exaggeration with the Declaration of Independence thing, but beyond that, it was a genuine gripe.
Let's see. Somebody speculates on how the fourth amendment may be applied to electronic gadgets. The blurb panics about "without a warrant and without probable cause" (and ignores the fact that there is long-standing precedent for certain searches without warrant and without probable cause, which even TFA probably point out---I'm not going to read it; it's hardly news). A bunch of people who have probably never even read the Constitution, much less taken a course on constitutional criminal procedure spout flames and blame Bush for this erosion of their God-given right---guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence---to have a porn-filled iPod. Yup, looks like I'm in the right place.
I can see how they're setting themselves up for failure. Apparently, they failed to notice that the vast majority of users exceed those proposed limits on a regular basis. I mean, it's not like it's a few obsessive downloaders who use up most of the bandwidth, while the rest of the population is checking e-mail and surfing CNN. And it certainly doesn't make sense to charge those obsessive downloaders more than the other folks. And if upstart wireless providers start to become viable and provide meaningful competition, the cable company is stuck in a "broadband ghetto," just like the article says. I mean, it's not like they could raise and/or remove the caps in response to competition if/when the competition becomes a problem. In short, these guys are morons. If this is what they call business sense, they must really be struggling to make ends meet.
Whoa. How'd we get from C# to APL? I'm supposed to be the one advocating arcane mathematical languages.
You are never going to be able to support every possible function in the core.Exactly. Which is why you use the right tool for the job. If you want to make online games, use a byte code interpreter. FORTRAN was meant to be a straightforward way to TRANslate FORMulas for those who were primarily concerned with having a powerful tool for solving big math problems. It's not built for eye candy and networking. It has a very specialized function, and it does it well. And that's why I said a couple of posts ago that FORTRAN is not obsolete. FORTRAN code still powers lots and lots of mathematical simulation code.
I'll yield the point to you as soon as you can show me a serious byte code language implementation of FSCATT (compute X-ray transfer given an X-ray event with an arbitrary black body spectrum through an arbitrary material) or proof that OrCad has re-worked the SPICE (yes, SPICE) core in Java.
It is FORTRAN, as in FORmula TRANslation. Not an acronym; an abbreviation.
What specific feature of Fortran do you consider to make it more suitable for mathematical operations? Can your namby pamby little Java applet correctly multiply two complex matrices with a simple, native multiplication operator? Didn't think so.FORTRAN is not obsolete. It is still the most powerful language for hard-core mathematical operations. Sure, there are modern updates of it, so you don't have to worry about whether you're in column 5 or column 6. But the guts are still FORTRAN. It's not what people normally use for stuff like GUIs and stupid little web animations, but as long as computers have to do real math, FORTRAN is there to do the job. Now get off my lawn.
Shocked I say! A secretive agency has lied about the existence and/or content of a possibly very sensitive file with a very real potential for having ongoing security implications. Why, next thing you know, the CIA will start marking files "Top Secret" and telling people they can't look at them.
Criminal defendants do not prove that they are innocent. In fact, they do not have to affirmatively prove anything at all. It is fairly common for criminal defense attorneys to not present a case. Instead, they will simply argue to the jury that the prosecutor has not met his burden. The burden is always on the prosecutor to prove that the defendant is guilty. He either carries that burden or he doesn't. If he doesn't, then you are not found guilty (which is probably more accurate than "found not guilty", which implies an affirmative finding). This is hypothetically true even if the jury is 75% convinced of your guilt, but does not feel convinced "beyond a reasonable doubt."
Wow, whoever modded this "Funny" really missed the point. It's true, folks. The British nuclear arsenal is basically leased from the U.S.
The 4th Amendment already makes explicit the right to such privacy, but it clearly isn't enough anymore - not for a long time. But since the 4th Amendment itself was merely an emphasis of a right already implicit in the Constitution, but worth repeating explicitly to ensure government protection of it (like the rest of the Bill of Rights), it's perfectly appropriate to reiterate it in terms easily enforceable in the current era, like copyright terms.
The 4th Amendment to what? Certainly not the U.S. Constitution. In fact, the word "privacy" does not explicitly appear anywhere in the Constitution. The 4th protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures by the federal government (the 14th Amendment applies the 4th Amendment to your state government). In Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court found a vague, ill-defined right to privacy somewhere in the "penumbras" of the 4th, 9th and 14th Amendments (based loosely on English common law rights). But it's always been vague, controversial and tenuous at best. It certainly was never "already implicit in the Constitution [before amendment]." In fact, it's a fairly recent concept. And what you seem to propose---the government protecting your right of privacy from other private entities---is entirely novel. The purpose of the Bill of Rights was to protect you from the federal government, not your neighbor. Protecting citizens from each other is (and ought to remain) the province of legislation, not the Constitution. And even then, the federal government isn't supposed to have a lot of power to legislate. It should be the states legislating privacy, except to the extent interstate commerce is directly involved.DISCLAIMER: This post is just my opinion and does not constitute legal advice to anybody and is not endorsed by my employer and should not be relied on by anybody for any reason.
Depends. Which state do you live in?
My firm requires me to have a disclaimer. I'll admit I'm not always meticulous about it, but I can get really screwed by a post that sounds like I might be opining on whether a patent is valid or infringed. They basically own me, just like your employer probably owns you, so they can tell me to do stuff like that. Link or no link, I'm still an attorney, I work for a firm, and they can be held accountable for many of my actions.
That said, sure, no reasonable person would think I represent them or that they're entitled to rely on my post as legal advice. But there are a lot of unreasonable people in the world, and they're the ones most likely to sue. Lawsuits are expensive, even when you win. So practicing law turns out to be lots of making sure stupid people don't sue you. If you want proof, hire a lawyer to give you a legal opinion, and read the disclaimers in that.Because the claims don't read on a single-player card game. The claims positively recite multiple players. Taking a quick look at the claims, it looks like this is one of those instances of doing something well-known over a network. Given the Supreme Court's recent KSR decision, you could probably invalidate this by finding an instance of somebody doing the same thing not on a network.
I am a patent lawyer, but I don't represent you. This post should not be relied on by anyone for any reason. This post is my personal opinion, and is not endorsed by Jackson Walker LLP, its agents, or partners.No, you're in the right place. The crazy alternative universe would be the one where Congress doesn't sell stupid draconian laws to the highest bidder and where (a) people have fair use rights in media and (b) can't be held criminally liable for exercising those rights.
That's not a bug. It's a feature. It's part of their "Keep Mechanics and Carpenters Fit" initiative.
I believe you can do the same with a Snap-On tool.
Wow! I'm so FLAMING HOT MAD about this, that I would boycott Sears if not for the fact that I never shop there anyway. Are you with me people?! MAKE YOUR VOICES HEARD! Punish Sears by refusing to purchase from them the things you already don't purchase from them!
I know of no such law. I know that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure require litigants to produce archived data, and I know that litigants can be sanctioned for destroying data in bad faith. The Rules also provide a safe harbor for data destroyed in good faith in accordance with a reasonable data retention policy. So what's reasonable? What is the real probability that a business will have non-litigation problems?
E-mail is the biggest burden on the storage space, and so much of that is garbage (I'm not even talking about spam---most "legitimate" e-mail is garbage). I wonder if there would be appreciable negative repercussions to deleting most of it. It seems like as often as not, all you get from archived e-mails is well-documented and discoverable "smoking guns" when you get sued. What if we just stored less of it? Would it be that bad? How likely is it that you're going to need some random Word document from 1998? Not criticizing---I'd really like to know.
The fact that it was done at a Spanish restaurant does not make it prior art for U.S. purposes. If it was known in the U.S. before Apple "invented" it, that counts. The Spanish prior art will only be available if somebody described it in a printed publication (that can be anywhere in the world).