For want of a better word? Um, guys, we have a better word for it: timesharing service bureau. We came up with it back in the 60s to describe a business that bought these hugely powerful, hugely expensive things called "mainframes" and sold access to them to customers. Customers could load their software and data onto the TSB's mainframes and run their programs there, paying for only the compute time they needed as they needed it. The TSB would also charge per kilobyte per month for disk storage (data and programs) and per minute for terminal connect time. Replace "mainframe" with "supercomputer" and you've got this new service (minus the connect-time charges since we're no longer using dial-up modems).
Yep, the character has to be logged into an account. The problem is that there's three types of characters involved:
The "shill" characters. These are the ones that broadcast the advertisements and often deliver the goods. They're generally recent accounts created just for the purpose, preferrably (from the farmers' POV) using trial accounts or the free time for new accounts to minimize the cost to the farmer.
"Farming" characters. These go out and harvest, kill mobs for loot and otherwise acquire in-game coin or goods that can be sold for coin. These need to be fairly high level to access the most lucrative areas, but don't need to be particularly well-equipped since they'll be going after easy content (eg. full groups of 6 against solo mobs or previous-iteration instances, raids going against previous-iteration raid zones, etc.).
"Bank" characters. These are the ones that hold the gold until it's sold. The farmers need these characters to not be noticed and to stick around. That's not hard because these characters can keep a low profile and not make themselves obvious except through the economy logs.
The big problem is that type 1 accounts tend to be created with pre-paid cash cards, game-time cards or stolen credit card numbers. Combined with fake names, it makes billing information almost useless as far as identifying who's behind it goes. So the game companies tend to not bother. When type 1's gold-spam, they get kicked and the account closed and that's pretty much the end of it. If they get caught selling the GMs will start an investigation through the economy logs, but that doesn't happen often for obvious reasons.
Type 2 characters are more lucrative for the GMs. Those eventually have to connect with the type 3 characters, because the money farmed has to get funneled into the gold-seller's banks sooner or later. And it's the type 3's the GMs really want to nail. Take them out and you really put a crimp in the gold-selling operation. So you'll often see no immediate action against type 2 characters who get reported. The GMs are letting them run, watching the economy logs to see who they transfer the loot to, and where the loot goes from there. For a large ring it may take 2-3 months to track everything down and identify all the central accounts involved. But even once a major ring's taken down, the billing information probably won't be helpful. Most of the accounts will probably have been paid for with pre-paid cards or game-time cards, leaving no permanent connection to the actual people behind it. They'll just go get new pre-paid cards, use new fake names and start setting up their accounts all over again with no connection to the previous set the game company can see. And the game companies can't eliminate game-time cards and refuse to take pre-paid cards, too many of their legitimate customers also need (for one reason or another) to use those payment methods.
As far as IP bans, they do get used. But they're often of limited usefulness. Too many games have too many legitimate subscribers in the same IP ranges, any block that'd be effective against the gold-sellers would knock too many real players out of the game. Plus, if IP range blocks become too common, the gold-sellers will probably just start using Tor or botnets or the like to make themselves appear to be comming from unblocked IP ranges. It ends up being a losing proposition.
No, I wouldn't. But if I go in to that restaurant and start eating and, after 5 plates, they tell me that they won't give me any more, that I've reached my cap, then yes I will expect a refund. They didn't include a 5-plate cap in what they offered, it isn't included in what they offered. If they want to change the deal to something that does include it, then you better believe I'm going to want to change my end of the deal too to reflect what they're offering from their side.
The difference between TW and your scenario is that in your scenario the consumer's deciding not to use all he's entitled to, with TW it's TW deciding the consumer won't be allowed everything he's entitled to.
Possible. One difference: I use Firefox, not IE. All the people I know of who get weird results from Google have one thing in common: they use IE. Not everybody using IE gets bad results, but the bad results seem confined to the one browser on the market with the absolute worst track record for security. It's possible that some malware infiltrates IE and redirects searches or messes with the search terms behind the scenes.
When I punched your search terms into Google, the first result I get back is the wdc.com (Western Digital's site) page for that model of drive. Second result is a questionable tech site, third result is a PCWorld review of the drive. I suspect the problem is on your end, not Google's.
True, but I tended to ignore "My Documents" anyway. Settings... I assume Windows is a mess there, and take precautions like keeping important information recorded elsewhere. If I'm doing a clean install I'm going to have to re-enter all that anyway, or play games with settings transfer and regedit and such. But none of that is critical. If it comes right down to it I can reconfigure Firefox and other applications, reinstall fonts, all of that, by hand. It's my documents themselves, data files, images, all of that that's the really crucial can't-replace stuff, and all of that fits nicely in folders on the D: drive. If I've got that I can recover most everything under "Documents & Settings", and if I don't then I've got lots bigger problems than just having my browser start page set right.
TBH I gave up on upgrade installs of Windows long ago. If I need to upgrade I back up my data, make sure I've got install media and keys for all my software, then wipe C: and do a clean install of the new version. Fewer headaches and inexplicable glitches that way. Ideally I'm also doing a forklift upgrade of the hardware so I can keep the old machine running and available until the new system's up and working.
Helps that I also follow the first commandment of Unix: thou shalt not place / and/home on the same filesystem. It's a lot easier to preserve data when it's all on a completely different physical drive from C:.
I can understand this. The RC is coded to handle upgrading from a Windows XP or Vista installation, it's not coded to handle upgrading from itself. A Win 7 beta installation's not going to match, it's going to have things already upgraded and other things upgraded to different versions from what the RC has. It's one of those situations that nobody who gets Windows 7 once it's released will ever have to deal with, and it doesn't make sense most of the time to have code in the release to handle a situation that can't happen. Except that it can happen if you happen to be part of the beta program, so you're warned loud and clear that the software isn't designed to do that so don't try it.
Now, if I were getting the RC, I would be testing upgrades from WinXP and Vista installs in varying states of disrepair. A clean install is easy. Upgrading from a fresh, untouched XP or Vista install should be easy. Upgrading from a Vista install that's an upgrade of an XP install, after having a couple of dozen games (with all their DRM), audio and video codecs (with their DRM), media players (with their DRM), browser toolbars, Firefox, Opera, Thunderbird, a double handful of applications that've gone through multiple upgrades, all after multiple malware-removal tools have been run multiple times to try and clean things up, all the while trying to preserve the D: (second partition on the main drive) E: and F: (the two partitions on the second (old) drive that got repurposed for holding your archives) drives... that may be a bit more interesting.
Actually, we still would. 1988 or 2009, you still have to download the updated components from the central server before you can install them locally. It's just that back in 1988 the entire OS didn't occupy 400MB, or even a tenth that. And that it hasn't been implemented on Windows simply isn't relevant as far as patents go. You don't see it often simply because it's usually not needed. Very few desktop applications need on-the-fly updating, and it's just simpler to update them at startup instead of adding the code needed to do it while they're running. Web-based applications obviously don't have that added complexity, the browser's always been designed to automatically update components that've been updated on the server the next time a page that uses them is loaded or reloaded (it follows directly and inevitably from having a local content cache).
Children. No sense of history. You probably think the whole mess over how to make Web applications more interactive and responsive to the user is something new too.
How would *we* feel if our customers sold the backup concept or Perl script to someone else? Is that OK? What about cloning the hard disk with the OS and database we installed? Is that OK?
Except that what the AP is complaining about isn't the equivalent of your customers giving away the backup system, it's about someone who isn't your customer telling anybody who asks "These are all the people using this nifty backup system, talk to them if you want it.". And when people who get that referral go to your customers and get the backup system, well, your customers paid you for the right to do that. Because when a newspaper pays for an AP wire feed so they can put AP stories up on their Web site, that's exactly what they're paying for: the right to show AP news stories to anybody visiting their Web site. If the AP wants to say that's not what newspapers and news sites are paying for, I suspect they'll be getting some letters from annoyed customer legal departments quoting relevant contract provisions.
What the AP wants isn't to get paid when a news site reproduces their stories, they're already being paid for that. What they want is to be paid whenever anybody out there says "Hey, news site X is carrying this neat story! Go read it!". Well, I want a pony, too, but that doesn't mean somebody's obliged to give me one.
With old operating systems it'd be almost impossible. With current operating systems supporting loadable libraries, it's fairly straightforward if a bit picky when it comes to getting the implementation exactly right (but then, interlocking to allow concurrent access and modification has always been picky that way, it's why programmers with experience in heavy-duty multi-threaded programming are so valued). And Web applications aren't even that complex to update, the browser already handles the majority of the work.
Extremely non-trivial, yes, but not non-obvious. Once you understand how the OS in question handles program linking and loading, the process needed to replace a portion of a running executable is usually blatantly obvious. It's also pretty obvious what the one portion of the program that can't be updated without interruption is, and how to handle it. It took me all of 2 minutes to work out how to do it on Linux using the dlopen() function, and another couple of minutes to work out how to arrange the program build to split things up into shared-object libraries and organize them so I could:
Lock out entrance into that module.
Rename the module's.so file and put the new version in place.
Load the new module and patch it into the function table so all new calls will use it.
Unlock the module to allow new tasks to begin.
When the last task using the old version ends, unload the old version from memory.
There are a few caveats. You have to code the modules to interlock properly, and keep the data structures and locking consistent enough across versions that two versions of a module can coexist peacefully for at least a limited time. If there's a change that violates those conditions, you need to do the update during program start or defer the update until the next program start (easy enough to do, just do the.so file rename-and-replace portion without loading and patching in the new version, remember that in Unix files are not directory entries and you can muck about with a directory entry for a file all you want without affecting any programs that happen to have that file open).
There's probably a few quirks to iron out yet, but nothing that's particularly difficult for a skilled programmer to deal with. If I can, from a standing start, work out the solution that quickly given nothing but a description of the problem to be solved, the solution is not non-obvious.
The impression I get is more "We claim our patent's sufficiently different, so please don't bother looking over these other ones that we mention only to avoid getting nailed later for willful deception when one of our targets brings them up.". Having read the two patents, I fail to find any claims in Apple's that aren't covered in essentially the same form in the earlier patent, which I believe in patent law is exactly the definition of prior art.
*sigh* Patent 5155847, referenced in Apple's patent, covers everything Apple's does. The only differences are obvious minor adaptions based on the different communications channels in use, things any network programmer does automatically every day.
You might be right, if people stopped finding the story through Search Engine A. But they won't. They'll continue to find the story, just through outlets not taking their story from the AP wire service. So Search Engine A continues to be the favorite, all those other outlets get a big boost in traffic from suddenly showing up higher in the search results (because all the AP-carrying sites aren't showing), and the sites that use the AP are left trying to explain the sudden drop in traffic to their sites.
As for the last, remember that Google doesn't index the AP. It indexes newspaper sites which themselves carry AP stories and pay the AP for the right to do so. So the AP is getting paid for their stories. They're just not getting paid by Google. And why should they be? Google isn't carrying their stories, why should it have to pay for something it's not doing. All Google does is tell people who is carrying AP stories, and I don't see why I should need the AP's permission or pay them a fee to tell someone else that a certain Web site has a specific AP story on it (which is what the AP seems to be demanding).
Sounds more like coverage for things like their SafeSearch feature (defaults on, you can turn it off easily), or their blocking of direct links to known malware sites (if you click on a link in their search results that'd take you to a site known to serve up malware, you'll go instead to a warning screen from which you can continue on to the actual site if you choose, or abort if you don't want to take the risk).
I think it's a more general statement: "All programmers should understand and be reasonably fluent in one common language.". It just makes collaboration easier if there's one language everybody can use when they need to talk to each other. It just so happens that English happens to be the one language with the largest "market share", because of the way computer programming started off. Personally I don't think English should get primacy just because it's English, but at the moment it probably involves the fewest people having to learn a language they don't already know. Plus, as noted, it's such a mongrel. As the joke goes, it doesn't so much borrow from other langauges as chase them down a dark alley, whack them up the back of the head and riffle their pockets for vocabulary. English is probably the best language out there when it comes to having short, direct ways of saying technical things. To me, those things give English the best claim to the position.
"So, you're saying that people can't tell anybody else what articles your paper has today?"
That sums it up succinctly. Google doesn't (aside from it's cache) serve up the article. All it does is state what articles are available and where they can be found. Exactly what someone saying "Hey, the Guardian had this article yesterday on page 17, you gotta read it." is doing.
Alternatively, Google should simply stop spidering the objecting sites. End of problem. Well, for Google anyway. The lack of traffic may cause a problem for those sites, but that's what they asked for.
It'd be a good object lesson, though. There's an ancient curse: "May you get exactly what you wish for.". The monkey's paw, the genie in the lamp, there's a pattern there.
Or you can take a page from the RIAA and sue ESPN for statutory damages. Commercial use... yep, ESPN's stories are definitely commercial, they make money from publishing them. Willful... yep, ESPN knows (being in the publishing business) that written works are automatically copyrighted and that they can't reproduce them outside of fair use without the copyright owner's permission. Quoting the entirety of a work for commercial gain doesn't sound much like fair use. Statutory damages run up to $150,000 per work.
Not really. In science it's called "cherry-picking your results", and it's a big no-no. Scientists are expected to provide their data sets (observations) along with their results, and to explain which data points they discarded and why they discarded them. Having too many data points discarded, or not having good reasons for considering the discarded points to be errors rather than valid-but-anomalous data, will tend to lead to the results (and the reputation of the researcher) being shredded by peer review.
There is no such thing as 'no evidence'. A lack of fossils supporting the theory of evolution is evidence, and it does indeed help support their theory, it doesn't matter if you like that or not, or if you believe it, science doesn't care, its still evidence.
To quote, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.". If no fossils have been found, that's evidence only that no fossils have been found. It's not evidence that there exist no fossils to be found. The fossils may simply be somewhere we haven't looked yet (the planet's awfully big, there's a lot of places we haven't dug yet). The creatures may not have died somewhere where fossils could be formed. The fossils could have been destroyed before we got there (a large bed of them forms, then a flood comes along and exposes them and weathering and erosion reduce them to sand on a riverbed somewhere a few millenia before we showed up in the area to search). With all those possibilities, there's a fairly high bar to clear before you can say "We've eliminated all the other possibilities. The only one left is that the creature never existed.". And until you can say that, you can't treat lack of fossils as evidence one way or the other.
It's like claiming that because you haven't seen a red pick-up truck on your street today, that's evidence that no red-colored pick-up trucks exist. If someone made that claim, you'd laugh at them because it's so obvious that one day on one street isn't nearly enough to draw a conclusion from. There's simply too many cars, and too few of them will happen to come down that particular street on that particular day.
The courts do take notice. But the courts don't like trivial technicalities. An IP address doesn't identify an individual, for instance, but in the typical residential case it does identify a household. There may be 2 adults and 2 children in that household, but the account holder will be one of the adults, has legal responsibility for what the children do and is presumed to have a certain degree of knowledge of what all of them are doing. The attitude of the court will be "If the account holder doesn't know who's responsible, they reasonably should. If they choose to shield the responsible party, on their head be it.". The court distinguishes between family, or two roommates at a college, vs. two random people who don't know each other. Try treating the former types of relationship between the possible responsible parties as the latter and the court'll school you on the matter. As for open wireless access, the court's simply going to treat that as an attractive nuisance: you knew or reasonably should have known about the possibility, you failed to take any steps to mitigate or eliminate the problem, you accept responsibilty for what happens next.
Rules lawyers. Judges, like GMs, have many tools for dealing with them.
Well, it's a really major thing. It's not saying the attorney being sanctioned made a mistake. It's saying that they didn't make a mistake, that they deliberately and knowingly lied to the court. Even when that's the honest truth, judges are loathe to level that charge at an attorney. So while Rule 11 sanctions are often asked for, they're usually only granted in extreme cases where the judge can't find any way of justifying not imposing them.
And yes, I do think they should be imposed more often. They shouldn't be routinely granted, but at least the second time an attorney does the same thing he should be smacked for it.
Federal rule. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 11 about what an attorney filing a pleading, motion or paper is representing to the court. The key part is that it requires the attorney to represent that the filing is not just to harrass or annoy the other party and that it's not frivolous and has some basis in law and/or evidence.
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For want of a better word? Um, guys, we have a better word for it: timesharing service bureau. We came up with it back in the 60s to describe a business that bought these hugely powerful, hugely expensive things called "mainframes" and sold access to them to customers. Customers could load their software and data onto the TSB's mainframes and run their programs there, paying for only the compute time they needed as they needed it. The TSB would also charge per kilobyte per month for disk storage (data and programs) and per minute for terminal connect time. Replace "mainframe" with "supercomputer" and you've got this new service (minus the connect-time charges since we're no longer using dial-up modems).
Yep, the character has to be logged into an account. The problem is that there's three types of characters involved:
The big problem is that type 1 accounts tend to be created with pre-paid cash cards, game-time cards or stolen credit card numbers. Combined with fake names, it makes billing information almost useless as far as identifying who's behind it goes. So the game companies tend to not bother. When type 1's gold-spam, they get kicked and the account closed and that's pretty much the end of it. If they get caught selling the GMs will start an investigation through the economy logs, but that doesn't happen often for obvious reasons.
Type 2 characters are more lucrative for the GMs. Those eventually have to connect with the type 3 characters, because the money farmed has to get funneled into the gold-seller's banks sooner or later. And it's the type 3's the GMs really want to nail. Take them out and you really put a crimp in the gold-selling operation. So you'll often see no immediate action against type 2 characters who get reported. The GMs are letting them run, watching the economy logs to see who they transfer the loot to, and where the loot goes from there. For a large ring it may take 2-3 months to track everything down and identify all the central accounts involved. But even once a major ring's taken down, the billing information probably won't be helpful. Most of the accounts will probably have been paid for with pre-paid cards or game-time cards, leaving no permanent connection to the actual people behind it. They'll just go get new pre-paid cards, use new fake names and start setting up their accounts all over again with no connection to the previous set the game company can see. And the game companies can't eliminate game-time cards and refuse to take pre-paid cards, too many of their legitimate customers also need (for one reason or another) to use those payment methods.
As far as IP bans, they do get used. But they're often of limited usefulness. Too many games have too many legitimate subscribers in the same IP ranges, any block that'd be effective against the gold-sellers would knock too many real players out of the game. Plus, if IP range blocks become too common, the gold-sellers will probably just start using Tor or botnets or the like to make themselves appear to be comming from unblocked IP ranges. It ends up being a losing proposition.
No, I wouldn't. But if I go in to that restaurant and start eating and, after 5 plates, they tell me that they won't give me any more, that I've reached my cap, then yes I will expect a refund. They didn't include a 5-plate cap in what they offered, it isn't included in what they offered. If they want to change the deal to something that does include it, then you better believe I'm going to want to change my end of the deal too to reflect what they're offering from their side.
The difference between TW and your scenario is that in your scenario the consumer's deciding not to use all he's entitled to, with TW it's TW deciding the consumer won't be allowed everything he's entitled to.
Possible. One difference: I use Firefox, not IE. All the people I know of who get weird results from Google have one thing in common: they use IE. Not everybody using IE gets bad results, but the bad results seem confined to the one browser on the market with the absolute worst track record for security. It's possible that some malware infiltrates IE and redirects searches or messes with the search terms behind the scenes.
When I punched your search terms into Google, the first result I get back is the wdc.com (Western Digital's site) page for that model of drive. Second result is a questionable tech site, third result is a PCWorld review of the drive. I suspect the problem is on your end, not Google's.
True, but I tended to ignore "My Documents" anyway. Settings... I assume Windows is a mess there, and take precautions like keeping important information recorded elsewhere. If I'm doing a clean install I'm going to have to re-enter all that anyway, or play games with settings transfer and regedit and such. But none of that is critical. If it comes right down to it I can reconfigure Firefox and other applications, reinstall fonts, all of that, by hand. It's my documents themselves, data files, images, all of that that's the really crucial can't-replace stuff, and all of that fits nicely in folders on the D: drive. If I've got that I can recover most everything under "Documents & Settings", and if I don't then I've got lots bigger problems than just having my browser start page set right.
TBH I gave up on upgrade installs of Windows long ago. If I need to upgrade I back up my data, make sure I've got install media and keys for all my software, then wipe C: and do a clean install of the new version. Fewer headaches and inexplicable glitches that way. Ideally I'm also doing a forklift upgrade of the hardware so I can keep the old machine running and available until the new system's up and working.
Helps that I also follow the first commandment of Unix: thou shalt not place / and /home on the same filesystem. It's a lot easier to preserve data when it's all on a completely different physical drive from C:.
I can understand this. The RC is coded to handle upgrading from a Windows XP or Vista installation, it's not coded to handle upgrading from itself. A Win 7 beta installation's not going to match, it's going to have things already upgraded and other things upgraded to different versions from what the RC has. It's one of those situations that nobody who gets Windows 7 once it's released will ever have to deal with, and it doesn't make sense most of the time to have code in the release to handle a situation that can't happen. Except that it can happen if you happen to be part of the beta program, so you're warned loud and clear that the software isn't designed to do that so don't try it.
Now, if I were getting the RC, I would be testing upgrades from WinXP and Vista installs in varying states of disrepair. A clean install is easy. Upgrading from a fresh, untouched XP or Vista install should be easy. Upgrading from a Vista install that's an upgrade of an XP install, after having a couple of dozen games (with all their DRM), audio and video codecs (with their DRM), media players (with their DRM), browser toolbars, Firefox, Opera, Thunderbird, a double handful of applications that've gone through multiple upgrades, all after multiple malware-removal tools have been run multiple times to try and clean things up, all the while trying to preserve the D: (second partition on the main drive) E: and F: (the two partitions on the second (old) drive that got repurposed for holding your archives) drives... that may be a bit more interesting.
Actually, we still would. 1988 or 2009, you still have to download the updated components from the central server before you can install them locally. It's just that back in 1988 the entire OS didn't occupy 400MB, or even a tenth that. And that it hasn't been implemented on Windows simply isn't relevant as far as patents go. You don't see it often simply because it's usually not needed. Very few desktop applications need on-the-fly updating, and it's just simpler to update them at startup instead of adding the code needed to do it while they're running. Web-based applications obviously don't have that added complexity, the browser's always been designed to automatically update components that've been updated on the server the next time a page that uses them is loaded or reloaded (it follows directly and inevitably from having a local content cache).
Children. No sense of history. You probably think the whole mess over how to make Web applications more interactive and responsive to the user is something new too.
How would *we* feel if our customers sold the backup concept or Perl script to someone else? Is that OK? What about cloning the hard disk with the OS and database we installed? Is that OK?
Except that what the AP is complaining about isn't the equivalent of your customers giving away the backup system, it's about someone who isn't your customer telling anybody who asks "These are all the people using this nifty backup system, talk to them if you want it.". And when people who get that referral go to your customers and get the backup system, well, your customers paid you for the right to do that. Because when a newspaper pays for an AP wire feed so they can put AP stories up on their Web site, that's exactly what they're paying for: the right to show AP news stories to anybody visiting their Web site. If the AP wants to say that's not what newspapers and news sites are paying for, I suspect they'll be getting some letters from annoyed customer legal departments quoting relevant contract provisions.
What the AP wants isn't to get paid when a news site reproduces their stories, they're already being paid for that. What they want is to be paid whenever anybody out there says "Hey, news site X is carrying this neat story! Go read it!". Well, I want a pony, too, but that doesn't mean somebody's obliged to give me one.
With old operating systems it'd be almost impossible. With current operating systems supporting loadable libraries, it's fairly straightforward if a bit picky when it comes to getting the implementation exactly right (but then, interlocking to allow concurrent access and modification has always been picky that way, it's why programmers with experience in heavy-duty multi-threaded programming are so valued). And Web applications aren't even that complex to update, the browser already handles the majority of the work.
Extremely non-trivial, yes, but not non-obvious. Once you understand how the OS in question handles program linking and loading, the process needed to replace a portion of a running executable is usually blatantly obvious. It's also pretty obvious what the one portion of the program that can't be updated without interruption is, and how to handle it. It took me all of 2 minutes to work out how to do it on Linux using the dlopen() function, and another couple of minutes to work out how to arrange the program build to split things up into shared-object libraries and organize them so I could:
There are a few caveats. You have to code the modules to interlock properly, and keep the data structures and locking consistent enough across versions that two versions of a module can coexist peacefully for at least a limited time. If there's a change that violates those conditions, you need to do the update during program start or defer the update until the next program start (easy enough to do, just do the .so file rename-and-replace portion without loading and patching in the new version, remember that in Unix files are not directory entries and you can muck about with a directory entry for a file all you want without affecting any programs that happen to have that file open).
There's probably a few quirks to iron out yet, but nothing that's particularly difficult for a skilled programmer to deal with. If I can, from a standing start, work out the solution that quickly given nothing but a description of the problem to be solved, the solution is not non-obvious.
The impression I get is more "We claim our patent's sufficiently different, so please don't bother looking over these other ones that we mention only to avoid getting nailed later for willful deception when one of our targets brings them up.". Having read the two patents, I fail to find any claims in Apple's that aren't covered in essentially the same form in the earlier patent, which I believe in patent law is exactly the definition of prior art.
*sigh* Patent 5155847, referenced in Apple's patent, covers everything Apple's does. The only differences are obvious minor adaptions based on the different communications channels in use, things any network programmer does automatically every day.
You might be right, if people stopped finding the story through Search Engine A. But they won't. They'll continue to find the story, just through outlets not taking their story from the AP wire service. So Search Engine A continues to be the favorite, all those other outlets get a big boost in traffic from suddenly showing up higher in the search results (because all the AP-carrying sites aren't showing), and the sites that use the AP are left trying to explain the sudden drop in traffic to their sites.
As for the last, remember that Google doesn't index the AP. It indexes newspaper sites which themselves carry AP stories and pay the AP for the right to do so. So the AP is getting paid for their stories. They're just not getting paid by Google. And why should they be? Google isn't carrying their stories, why should it have to pay for something it's not doing. All Google does is tell people who is carrying AP stories, and I don't see why I should need the AP's permission or pay them a fee to tell someone else that a certain Web site has a specific AP story on it (which is what the AP seems to be demanding).
Sounds more like coverage for things like their SafeSearch feature (defaults on, you can turn it off easily), or their blocking of direct links to known malware sites (if you click on a link in their search results that'd take you to a site known to serve up malware, you'll go instead to a warning screen from which you can continue on to the actual site if you choose, or abort if you don't want to take the risk).
I think it's a more general statement: "All programmers should understand and be reasonably fluent in one common language.". It just makes collaboration easier if there's one language everybody can use when they need to talk to each other. It just so happens that English happens to be the one language with the largest "market share", because of the way computer programming started off. Personally I don't think English should get primacy just because it's English, but at the moment it probably involves the fewest people having to learn a language they don't already know. Plus, as noted, it's such a mongrel. As the joke goes, it doesn't so much borrow from other langauges as chase them down a dark alley, whack them up the back of the head and riffle their pockets for vocabulary. English is probably the best language out there when it comes to having short, direct ways of saying technical things. To me, those things give English the best claim to the position.
"So, you're saying that people can't tell anybody else what articles your paper has today?"
That sums it up succinctly. Google doesn't (aside from it's cache) serve up the article. All it does is state what articles are available and where they can be found. Exactly what someone saying "Hey, the Guardian had this article yesterday on page 17, you gotta read it." is doing.
Alternatively, Google should simply stop spidering the objecting sites. End of problem. Well, for Google anyway. The lack of traffic may cause a problem for those sites, but that's what they asked for.
It'd be a good object lesson, though. There's an ancient curse: "May you get exactly what you wish for.". The monkey's paw, the genie in the lamp, there's a pattern there.
Or you can take a page from the RIAA and sue ESPN for statutory damages. Commercial use... yep, ESPN's stories are definitely commercial, they make money from publishing them. Willful... yep, ESPN knows (being in the publishing business) that written works are automatically copyrighted and that they can't reproduce them outside of fair use without the copyright owner's permission. Quoting the entirety of a work for commercial gain doesn't sound much like fair use. Statutory damages run up to $150,000 per work.
Not really. In science it's called "cherry-picking your results", and it's a big no-no. Scientists are expected to provide their data sets (observations) along with their results, and to explain which data points they discarded and why they discarded them. Having too many data points discarded, or not having good reasons for considering the discarded points to be errors rather than valid-but-anomalous data, will tend to lead to the results (and the reputation of the researcher) being shredded by peer review.
There is no such thing as 'no evidence'. A lack of fossils supporting the theory of evolution is evidence, and it does indeed help support their theory, it doesn't matter if you like that or not, or if you believe it, science doesn't care, its still evidence.
To quote, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.". If no fossils have been found, that's evidence only that no fossils have been found. It's not evidence that there exist no fossils to be found. The fossils may simply be somewhere we haven't looked yet (the planet's awfully big, there's a lot of places we haven't dug yet). The creatures may not have died somewhere where fossils could be formed. The fossils could have been destroyed before we got there (a large bed of them forms, then a flood comes along and exposes them and weathering and erosion reduce them to sand on a riverbed somewhere a few millenia before we showed up in the area to search). With all those possibilities, there's a fairly high bar to clear before you can say "We've eliminated all the other possibilities. The only one left is that the creature never existed.". And until you can say that, you can't treat lack of fossils as evidence one way or the other.
It's like claiming that because you haven't seen a red pick-up truck on your street today, that's evidence that no red-colored pick-up trucks exist. If someone made that claim, you'd laugh at them because it's so obvious that one day on one street isn't nearly enough to draw a conclusion from. There's simply too many cars, and too few of them will happen to come down that particular street on that particular day.
The courts do take notice. But the courts don't like trivial technicalities. An IP address doesn't identify an individual, for instance, but in the typical residential case it does identify a household. There may be 2 adults and 2 children in that household, but the account holder will be one of the adults, has legal responsibility for what the children do and is presumed to have a certain degree of knowledge of what all of them are doing. The attitude of the court will be "If the account holder doesn't know who's responsible, they reasonably should. If they choose to shield the responsible party, on their head be it.". The court distinguishes between family, or two roommates at a college, vs. two random people who don't know each other. Try treating the former types of relationship between the possible responsible parties as the latter and the court'll school you on the matter. As for open wireless access, the court's simply going to treat that as an attractive nuisance: you knew or reasonably should have known about the possibility, you failed to take any steps to mitigate or eliminate the problem, you accept responsibilty for what happens next.
Rules lawyers. Judges, like GMs, have many tools for dealing with them.
Well, it's a really major thing. It's not saying the attorney being sanctioned made a mistake. It's saying that they didn't make a mistake, that they deliberately and knowingly lied to the court. Even when that's the honest truth, judges are loathe to level that charge at an attorney. So while Rule 11 sanctions are often asked for, they're usually only granted in extreme cases where the judge can't find any way of justifying not imposing them.
And yes, I do think they should be imposed more often. They shouldn't be routinely granted, but at least the second time an attorney does the same thing he should be smacked for it.
Federal rule. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 11 about what an attorney filing a pleading, motion or paper is representing to the court. The key part is that it requires the attorney to represent that the filing is not just to harrass or annoy the other party and that it's not frivolous and has some basis in law and/or evidence.