Because the powers that be who serve neither the conservative interests nor the liberal interests but rather their own political interests happen to like the TSA.
Did your GUI include a scrollbar-like UI element that was only visible while you were touching the screen? If not, no, your GUI is not prior art. Yes, the patent in question is stupid, but it is not overly broad like the summary makes it sound. And not reading what the patent is actually covering just makes you look dumb.
Web Services (of various breeds - SOAP, REST, etc.) over HTTP are still pretty common, as the overhead of the HTTP headers is outweighed by the simplicity of building the services. However, for certain applications where the HTTP overhead may be an issue, there are protocols that send raw data over a plain TCP socket such as the FIX protocol used for financial transactions.
In the original discovery, did Sony, Warner, et al. show how many times the exact files Tenenbaum uploaded were downloaded, or was 'distributing to millions of other people' hyperbole based on the number of people downloading from those services in general and not with regards to the specific files he uploaded? The answer to that goes a long way in deciding whether the damages are excessive or not.
As a matter of good policy, copyright shouldn't necessarily be abolished, as that is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Rather, copyright should be retooled to define it as a protection against plagiarism, rather than a guarantee of profits. If I came up with something unique and original, and you went around presenting it as your own work regardless of whether you were charging for it or not, that would be dishonest and fraudulent and without copyright laws, perfectly legal.
But yes, the constitutional issue at hand is the excessive fine, not the sharing itself. And it is unfortunate the supreme court declined to hear the appeal.
You are confusing ends versus means. The ends are what government does to solve problems, e.g. funding the building of roads. The means are what government must do in order to accomplish those solutions, e.g. levying taxes. It is the ends that AC was referring to as government's 'job'. We don't ask government to raise taxes. We ask government to build and maintain roads. Allocating funds and commissioning designs for a road counts as a 'solution it can implement' in my book.
As far as I recall, all of the actual terrorists that have been caught have been discovered by intelligence efforts long before they got anywhere close to the airport. See for example the recent underwear bomber 2.0 plot. Meanwhile, the TSA has failed on numerous times to actually catch bad things going through their checkpoints, such as underwear bomber 1.0, the shoe bomber, and Adam Savage's razor blades. Yet every time the intelligence community successfully disrupts a terrorist plot, it is used as an excuse to 'enhance' the TSA checkpoints even further.
"Hot Jupiters" are thought to have formed in an outer orbit, and then migrated inwards, perhaps by being perturbed by another passing star. It is highly unlikely for a gas giant to form that close to a star, but very likely for a planet's orbit to be jostled by something passing by.
The whole problem with finding a definition of 'planet' is that stuff in the solar system can either be defined by its composition or its location. Objects with similar composition that look like exactly the same sort of thing when seen in isolation are often found in very different locations. And the IAU decided in its infinite wisdom to use location as the primary means classification rather than composition. Unfortunately, that decision is at odds with both sentimentality (as is seen with the whole Pluto fiasco) and with scientific usefulness. As we study extrasolar planetary systems, it has become clear that objects orbiting stars are very likely to change locations over time. Objects move from higher orbits to lower orbits and vice versa, Objects are captured into orbit by other objects, and objects are ejected from orbit around other objects, etc. So when studying a solar system, classifying objects by where they are in the system is scientifically meaningless as the objects quite possibly did not form in that location, and certainly may not remain in that location for the lifetime of the system's star.
So I propose Harperska's planetary classification system:
Terrestrial dwarf - large enough to attain hydrostatic equilibrium and differentiation. Mantle/crust comprised of rock, with iron core. 6 objects in solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Luna, Mars, Vesta.
Asteroid - terrestrial dwarf like object, not large enough to attain hydrostatic equilibrium.
Ice dwarf - large enough to attain hydrostatic equilibrium and differentiation. Mantle/crust comprised of frozen volatiles (water, methane, ammonia), with rocky core. This class includes Ceres, the moons of the gas and ice giants, and Kuiper belt objects like Pluto and Eris.
Comet - ice dwarf like object, not large enough to attain hydrostatic equilibrium.
Gas Giant - comprised largely of hydrogen and helium. 2 objects in solar system: Jupiter and Saturn.
Ice Giant - comprised largely of volatiles (water, methane, ammonia) with a hydrogen/helium atmosphere. 2 objects in solar system: Neptune and Uranus.
I HATE the 'cleared its orbit' definition that the IAU came up with. It is an absolutely meaningless definition. Jupiter, which no one will argue as to whether or not it is a planet, has not cleared out its orbit. There are thousands of objects that share the same orbit as Jupiter around the sun, known as the trojan asteroids. Jupiter, with all its mass, will never clear those objects out of its orbit as they are perfectly stable due to the physics of the Lagrangian points.
The pluto decision was purely a political one, as the IAU couldn't handle the possibility of there being dozens of planets in the solar system for some reason.
No, what they have found, and what makes this newsworthy, is that Vesta's composition is much more like the terrestrials (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Luna, Mars) than what they believe Ceres' composition is. They now believe that Vesta belongs to the terrestrial family, having a silicate rock crust/mantle surrounding an iron core. Ceres, on the other hand, is probably made primarily of an ice crust/mantle with a rock core, putting it in the same family as the moons of the gas giants, and the Kuiper Belt objects like Pluto. So while Ceres and Vesta live in the same castle, they are adopted from different families.
They will know more when Dawn leaves Vesta and visits Ceres, though.
I've always wondered why 0x1F delimited files aren't the standard. Why use textual characters as control characters in the first place when we have perfectly good control characters made for exactly that purpose just waiting to be used?
I always liked Hydronium Hydroxide better than Dihydrogen Monoxide as it gives an accurate description of its structure as well as its composition (and therefore its behavior, i.e. contributing both an H3O+ and an OH- to solution). Plus, it may even work better for the prank because unsuspecting chemophobes may recognize the 'hydroxide' from Sodium Hydroxide, a well known 'nasty chemical'.
Juries rule on facts, judges rule on law. All that the jury did was take an assumption that a thing was law (APIs being copyrightable), and rule on whether the facts of the case support an infringement of that hypothetical law. In this case, it is pretty clear that the Dalvik APIs are a rather direct copy of the Java APIs. So assuming that APIs are in fact copyrightable, there really was no way that the jury could find in a way other than what they did. So in the end, the jury's decision was pretty minor and unremarkable in the grand scheme of things. The judge's decision on the law of whether copyright protection extends to APIs is much more important, and I am sure many more judges from appeals courts and possibly even the supreme court will also get their chance to weigh in on that law.
By my understanding of the case, there were several things that needed to be decided, specifically 1. whether APIs can be copyrighted, and 2. if they can, do the facts of the case support the argument that Google did violate them? It is certainly possible that legally APIs can be copyrighted, but Dalvik is derivative enough that it doesn't count as a violation. Because of the timing of things, and to ensure expediency, the judge asked the jury to rule on #2 before #1 even though #2 technically depends on #1. If the jury decides to acquit on #2, then Google is off the hook regardless of what is later decided on #1.
IANAL, but it is not as simple as 'the judge instructed the jury to assume X, therefore X is true'.
The app store clearly marks which apps have in-app purchases right next to place where it specifies the price. You can even look at all available in-app purchases there, including their price. There is no excuse to claim that you were unaware that a free app has in-app purchases when the app store shows them clearly.
If you want to go with that analogy, it would be more akin to "Sure you bought a car model that was prone to burst in to flames, but we fixed that just last month, and we issued a recall." That's what 'it had already been fixed by Apple' means. Apple providing a software update that provided the means to close the 15 min loophole is just like the car manufacturer with the defective car issuing a recall. A retailer who provides a defective product is not obligated to personally go to every customer who purchased the product and forcibly remove it from their possession. They merely have to provide the means for the customer to remedy the situation. If the customer then decides to not take the available action, if they get burned, tough shit.
It happens more often than you'd think. Unfortunately, problems that go away on their own have a habit of also coming back on their own at the worst possible moment. Also, see the TV repairman joke above.
This does in fact appear to be true. I happen to have two google accounts, as I have two @gmail.com addresses. When I went to the newer one, my entire search history was there as I apparently didn't realize I had to opt out when I set it up. It has now been deleted per the EFF instructions. When I logged in to the older one, it said web history wasn't enabled, and so that account must have been created while web history was still opt-in.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the powers that be who serve neither the conservative interests nor the liberal interests but rather their own political interests happen to like the TSA.
No, they patented the behavior of the scroll bar in UITableView, not the view itself like the summary makes it sound.
Did your GUI include a scrollbar-like UI element that was only visible while you were touching the screen? If not, no, your GUI is not prior art. Yes, the patent in question is stupid, but it is not overly broad like the summary makes it sound. And not reading what the patent is actually covering just makes you look dumb.
Web Services (of various breeds - SOAP, REST, etc.) over HTTP are still pretty common, as the overhead of the HTTP headers is outweighed by the simplicity of building the services. However, for certain applications where the HTTP overhead may be an issue, there are protocols that send raw data over a plain TCP socket such as the FIX protocol used for financial transactions.
No, the best test for a government funded launcher: is the first stage a SRB built by ATK?
In the original discovery, did Sony, Warner, et al. show how many times the exact files Tenenbaum uploaded were downloaded, or was 'distributing to millions of other people' hyperbole based on the number of people downloading from those services in general and not with regards to the specific files he uploaded? The answer to that goes a long way in deciding whether the damages are excessive or not.
As a matter of good policy, copyright shouldn't necessarily be abolished, as that is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Rather, copyright should be retooled to define it as a protection against plagiarism, rather than a guarantee of profits. If I came up with something unique and original, and you went around presenting it as your own work regardless of whether you were charging for it or not, that would be dishonest and fraudulent and without copyright laws, perfectly legal.
But yes, the constitutional issue at hand is the excessive fine, not the sharing itself. And it is unfortunate the supreme court declined to hear the appeal.
You are confusing ends versus means. The ends are what government does to solve problems, e.g. funding the building of roads. The means are what government must do in order to accomplish those solutions, e.g. levying taxes. It is the ends that AC was referring to as government's 'job'. We don't ask government to raise taxes. We ask government to build and maintain roads. Allocating funds and commissioning designs for a road counts as a 'solution it can implement' in my book.
As far as I recall, all of the actual terrorists that have been caught have been discovered by intelligence efforts long before they got anywhere close to the airport. See for example the recent underwear bomber 2.0 plot. Meanwhile, the TSA has failed on numerous times to actually catch bad things going through their checkpoints, such as underwear bomber 1.0, the shoe bomber, and Adam Savage's razor blades. Yet every time the intelligence community successfully disrupts a terrorist plot, it is used as an excuse to 'enhance' the TSA checkpoints even further.
"Hot Jupiters" are thought to have formed in an outer orbit, and then migrated inwards, perhaps by being perturbed by another passing star. It is highly unlikely for a gas giant to form that close to a star, but very likely for a planet's orbit to be jostled by something passing by.
The whole problem with finding a definition of 'planet' is that stuff in the solar system can either be defined by its composition or its location. Objects with similar composition that look like exactly the same sort of thing when seen in isolation are often found in very different locations. And the IAU decided in its infinite wisdom to use location as the primary means classification rather than composition. Unfortunately, that decision is at odds with both sentimentality (as is seen with the whole Pluto fiasco) and with scientific usefulness. As we study extrasolar planetary systems, it has become clear that objects orbiting stars are very likely to change locations over time. Objects move from higher orbits to lower orbits and vice versa, Objects are captured into orbit by other objects, and objects are ejected from orbit around other objects, etc. So when studying a solar system, classifying objects by where they are in the system is scientifically meaningless as the objects quite possibly did not form in that location, and certainly may not remain in that location for the lifetime of the system's star.
So I propose Harperska's planetary classification system:
Terrestrial dwarf - large enough to attain hydrostatic equilibrium and differentiation. Mantle/crust comprised of rock, with iron core. 6 objects in solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Luna, Mars, Vesta.
Asteroid - terrestrial dwarf like object, not large enough to attain hydrostatic equilibrium.
Ice dwarf - large enough to attain hydrostatic equilibrium and differentiation. Mantle/crust comprised of frozen volatiles (water, methane, ammonia), with rocky core. This class includes Ceres, the moons of the gas and ice giants, and Kuiper belt objects like Pluto and Eris.
Comet - ice dwarf like object, not large enough to attain hydrostatic equilibrium.
Gas Giant - comprised largely of hydrogen and helium. 2 objects in solar system: Jupiter and Saturn.
Ice Giant - comprised largely of volatiles (water, methane, ammonia) with a hydrogen/helium atmosphere. 2 objects in solar system: Neptune and Uranus.
I HATE the 'cleared its orbit' definition that the IAU came up with. It is an absolutely meaningless definition. Jupiter, which no one will argue as to whether or not it is a planet, has not cleared out its orbit. There are thousands of objects that share the same orbit as Jupiter around the sun, known as the trojan asteroids. Jupiter, with all its mass, will never clear those objects out of its orbit as they are perfectly stable due to the physics of the Lagrangian points.
The pluto decision was purely a political one, as the IAU couldn't handle the possibility of there being dozens of planets in the solar system for some reason.
No, what they have found, and what makes this newsworthy, is that Vesta's composition is much more like the terrestrials (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Luna, Mars) than what they believe Ceres' composition is. They now believe that Vesta belongs to the terrestrial family, having a silicate rock crust/mantle surrounding an iron core. Ceres, on the other hand, is probably made primarily of an ice crust/mantle with a rock core, putting it in the same family as the moons of the gas giants, and the Kuiper Belt objects like Pluto. So while Ceres and Vesta live in the same castle, they are adopted from different families.
They will know more when Dawn leaves Vesta and visits Ceres, though.
I've always wondered why 0x1F delimited files aren't the standard. Why use textual characters as control characters in the first place when we have perfectly good control characters made for exactly that purpose just waiting to be used?
As did half of slashdot.
I always liked Hydronium Hydroxide better than Dihydrogen Monoxide as it gives an accurate description of its structure as well as its composition (and therefore its behavior, i.e. contributing both an H3O+ and an OH- to solution). Plus, it may even work better for the prank because unsuspecting chemophobes may recognize the 'hydroxide' from Sodium Hydroxide, a well known 'nasty chemical'.
Juries rule on facts, judges rule on law. All that the jury did was take an assumption that a thing was law (APIs being copyrightable), and rule on whether the facts of the case support an infringement of that hypothetical law. In this case, it is pretty clear that the Dalvik APIs are a rather direct copy of the Java APIs. So assuming that APIs are in fact copyrightable, there really was no way that the jury could find in a way other than what they did. So in the end, the jury's decision was pretty minor and unremarkable in the grand scheme of things. The judge's decision on the law of whether copyright protection extends to APIs is much more important, and I am sure many more judges from appeals courts and possibly even the supreme court will also get their chance to weigh in on that law.
By my understanding of the case, there were several things that needed to be decided, specifically 1. whether APIs can be copyrighted, and 2. if they can, do the facts of the case support the argument that Google did violate them? It is certainly possible that legally APIs can be copyrighted, but Dalvik is derivative enough that it doesn't count as a violation. Because of the timing of things, and to ensure expediency, the judge asked the jury to rule on #2 before #1 even though #2 technically depends on #1. If the jury decides to acquit on #2, then Google is off the hook regardless of what is later decided on #1.
IANAL, but it is not as simple as 'the judge instructed the jury to assume X, therefore X is true'.
Which is why we don't build very large dams much any more, unless absolutely forced to.
3 Gorges come to mind?
The app store clearly marks which apps have in-app purchases right next to place where it specifies the price. You can even look at all available in-app purchases there, including their price. There is no excuse to claim that you were unaware that a free app has in-app purchases when the app store shows them clearly.
If you want to go with that analogy, it would be more akin to "Sure you bought a car model that was prone to burst in to flames, but we fixed that just last month, and we issued a recall." That's what 'it had already been fixed by Apple' means. Apple providing a software update that provided the means to close the 15 min loophole is just like the car manufacturer with the defective car issuing a recall. A retailer who provides a defective product is not obligated to personally go to every customer who purchased the product and forcibly remove it from their possession. They merely have to provide the means for the customer to remedy the situation. If the customer then decides to not take the available action, if they get burned, tough shit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard
Also, I take it you feel emacs is the epitome of UI design as well?
It happens more often than you'd think. Unfortunately, problems that go away on their own have a habit of also coming back on their own at the worst possible moment. Also, see the TV repairman joke above.
This does in fact appear to be true. I happen to have two google accounts, as I have two @gmail.com addresses. When I went to the newer one, my entire search history was there as I apparently didn't realize I had to opt out when I set it up. It has now been deleted per the EFF instructions. When I logged in to the older one, it said web history wasn't enabled, and so that account must have been created while web history was still opt-in.
Maybe it's just me, but I had a hard time accepting the credibility of TFA when it misused "effects"/"affects".