Really? Stuxnet - the one Windows malware with zero payload/effect for 99.999% of infectees - is the one that made every government slap their collective foreheads and say "holy crap! Windows is vulnerable to malware! Who knew?"
Now Siemens, on the other hand, will likely be seeing some very real losses as a direct result of Stuxnet publicity.
Your mention of inter-building communication reminded me of RONJA, a somewhat older (and open source!) free-space optics design. In this case, the transmitter and receiver LEDs are placed in a length of pipe behind a magnifying glass, and pointed at each other up to a mile or so away. Theirs does 10Mbps though:-)
Unfortunately, I have found spammers WILL target high-profile sites singly in such a case. In my case (a relatively well-known message board, running phpBB at the time) spambot scripts would post hundreds of fake user registrations per day for google juice (the list of registered users was public, even for unconfirmed users, and included a 'website' field). Performing a very similar mod to your example (leaving the 'Website' field intact but hidden from human users; adding a new field 'asdfilgfknn' for humans to enter a website address) staved off the spam for less than two weeks, at which point the bot scripts were updated with an equally trivial change.
Don't know; Left 4 Dead 2 pretty well turned me off Steam. It requires a continuous Internet connection to play, even in SINGLE PLAYER MODE. So if your 'net connection goes Comcastic for a bit (as mine does from time to time, being...Comcast), you get kicked out of the game and lose any progress since the last save point. (I wonder if there is a crack available...)
They are getting smarter with those cards (in the US, anyway). Rather than provide the "discount" at the point of use, more and more structure it so that they *mail* your "rewards" (requiring a valid address) or else provide the lion's share of the "discount" in a non-cash form, e.g. points toward lower-priced fuel at a participating gas station (so no more card-swapping or using the cashier's own card...)
... the patent's claims explicitly mislabel critical assembly instructions as 'c++ functions'... so to be non-infringing to those claims, all you have to do is NOT create c++ wrapper functions for these assembly instructions with these specific names.
The method according to Claim 2, wherein the creating of the array C is executed by a C++ function PCMPGTB, and the creating of M from C is executed by a C++ function PMOVMSKB.
It was going to be grand. I had worn my nicest boxers, with a button-fly to ensure no actual laws would be violated, even accidentally (giving a valid reason to jail me). No belt, loose-fitting jeans. When the man asked to to step into the scanner, I would politely accept, step inside and, when his back was turned, drop 'em.
"Oh-h say can you SEE, by the dawn's early LIGHT!..."
Amid the lengthy mouse-maze queue of holiday travelers, a few lightbulbs would come on as the irony began to sink in. Nervous TSA officials would move in. Maybe they'd react, pulling me aside by force, ordering me to shut my face and put my pants back on. Maybe I'd get through the whole thing before being tased into submisison.
"In the land of the FREE, and the home of the BRAVE!..." *dzzt!* *thud*
What really happened:
My gf and I show up at the Logan Airport security checkpoint. It was a ghost town. We present our boarding passes (not IDs); I swear I see a tumbleweed blow by. Every TSA lane is staffed, but where are the passengers? There are exactly two travelers ahead of us, in separate lanes, and nobody behind. They're gone by the time we get our shoes off and all our crap onto the conveyer. Dropping my pants for a handful of screeners and zero travelers suddenly doesn't seem worthwhile any more.
My gf (who is not particularly bothered by the body scan) steps into the scanner, and I get waved through the metal detector, despite there being two other open scanners and nobody behind us in line. Cheery TSA guy at the metal detector says he likes my t-shirt. If I was a bad guy, you'd have seen it on the news already, because this "screen" was a complete joke. Afterward, I realized I was so busy contemplating my own "security theater" performance that I left my laptop in its case inside my backpack. They didn't care. My gf had separately forgotten to unpack her big bag o' liquids. They didn't care.
Conclusions: TSA's "solution" to both the holiday crush and the potential protests was to drop the theater act and just let everyone sail on through. To me, this speaks volumes about both their perceived effectiveness and value of the new "enhanced" security processes. I can't say to what extent the potential for protests was a factor in this, but if it was, this was a doubly-brilliant move on the part of the TSA. The best way to stop a protest cold is to take away its audience, and that is exactly what happened here. Meanwhile, everyday sheep travelers are probably marveling at how painless the process was today - on the busiest travel day of the year! - and making associations between this and the new body scanner procedure. Well played, TSA, well played.
"Entirety" is only one of four factors used in deciding whether a use of a copyrighted work is fair use. Some other biggies are whether it is transformative (yes! You've turned a pro-x argument into an anti-x argument, and added plenty of original material), "purpose and character" of your use (whether the goal of your use is to serve a societal purpose or just make money), the nature of the original work (in general, the more 'creative' rather than functional/factual the work is, the stronger its protection), and whether the other party directly loses profit from the use.
I agree that in general posting a whole article shouldn't be fair use, so I was quite surprised at this judges expectation they show it wasn't fair use.
Why? If it were a murder trial and the prosecution's argument was "Well Your Honor, this guy's a murderer", I'm sure the judge would expect them to show their work. If anything, it sounds like the judge is encouraging the plaintiff to put together a good argument for infringement, rather than "well, you just have to trust us on this", which would be dismissed for failure to state a claim.
So... the newspaper sold the copyright. How would they sue if they wanted to? Not that this takes anything from the possible fair-use argument, but it sounds like the only recourse of the newspaper itself would be to "encourage" Righthaven to sue (that is probably the exact arrangement) and if possible, feed in ad-revenue data in the hopes of bolstering the case.
I want to be able to sell virtual goods at $0.00056 per transaction if I want to.
That is, a banking transaction system in which 1/1000 of a cent is statistically significant. What's the cost of the electricity to run all the computers involved in that transaction for the duration of the transaction? Like it or not, there are probably reasons other than penny-shaving scams for banks to put a practical floor on transaction size.
Or, if you have some end-of-life pants, let an ink pen 'accidentally' leak all over outside of your junkal area. Poor TSA guy will have "I grabbed a guy's inky junk" hands for weeks. Me, I'm just going to opt for the x-ray, drop my pants in the middle of it and hum the national anthem. If anybody complains I'll just claim I was confused about the procedure...
...to nip legal huffing and puffing in the bud - you can go in circles for months and months basically arguing "did not, did too!" with the puffer while potential damages accrue, or file for declaratory judgment, in which you present the evidence to a judge who (you hope) says "yup, did not, now bugger off." (Any parallels to running to the teacher on the playground are purely uncoincidental). For example look up Symantec v. HotBar (DirectRevenue?): a spyware company was sending threats to an A/V vendor for detecting its "product"; A/V vendor sues for declaratory judgment that it is legal to remove 3rd-party software.
I do wonder though; and maybe someone more familiar with law knows the answer: In cases like these it is common (standard?) practice that if Facebook filed suit, they would argue their first threatening letter was proof that Lamebook was aware of the infringement from that point forward, making them liable for mondo additional damages due to "willful infringement" during the months between the first letter and the eventual suit. If Lamebook succeeded in its declaratory judgment, only to have it later overturned somehow, would this have any effect (relative to a plain old "Facebook sues Lamebook" scenario) on the likelihood of a willful infringement ruling? (I.e. showing there was enough uncertainty as to the validity of the claim -- even the judges don't agree! -- that it could not possibly be considered putting Lamebook on notice?)
I think the point of the project (which, let's all remember, is mainly an *art project* to make people think, not intended to be enterprise-ready or even remotely practical) is to plant a cheap public p2p system that is relatively immune to e.g. RIAA attack - assuming the chain of liability (contributory/vicarious/"technically feasible" infringement) plus the chain of proof linking ownership of any given USB stick to any given person is too weak to prosecute, the worst they could do is smash the USB stick. Adding someone's server closet or even wall outlet (tied to a building with a servable suing address) would defeat this purpose. Maybe if you could get the computer/AP to run completely off-grid, but the power requirements of WiFi are such that it would require a big enough solar panel / batterypack to not really be cheap or covert anymore in a public space. (plus, "hey, free solarpanel!...wait, free computer/AP!"
I remember reading about a flap not too long ago, in which the founders of Seed Savers Exchange (a large heirloom seed organization; mentioned a few times in the threads above) wound up in a bitter and very public dispute concerning transfer of member-supplied seed to Svalbard. Unfortunately, between the increasingly over-the-top rants, deletion of posts on the topic and PR spin control as the thing heated up, I could never get a clear picture of just what it was factually about. The complaint as I understand it was (in this case) extensive collections of member-donated seed from SSE's private collections (some 25k varieties - not all of which are released to the general public) were supplied under a "safety deposit box" style agreement, but later transferred to Svalbard without permission. More generally, it is asserted that supplying seed of any species/cultivar/etc. to Svalbard places that genetic material under what's known as the FAO Treaty, allowing legally free-and-clear access to seed of that variety by interested parties, including GMO companies. The side opposing the SSE/Svalbard deal asserts that while the stored seed itself remains the property of the donor, the donor "cannot refuse" requests for genetically-equivalent seed from interested parties under the terms of treaty.
To make a more Slashdot-friendly analogy (sorry, no cars), it sounds like the concern is that placing any seed there puts it automatically under a BSD-style license, which goes against the intentions of many heirloom growers/donors whose stance against GMO (terminator genes, seeds with IP protection) may be considered more GPL-like.
Googling various combinations of the terms Svalbard, Seed Savers Exchange, FAO, Kent Whealy and Cary Fowler turns up various collections of rumors, damage control and tinfoil hat rants (including widespread claims that Monsanto is a primary investor to Svalbard...a claim Monsanto denies.)... does anyone know the full / factual story on this?
and they want their clickthru-verification trick back. "To view the porn: Click this adbanner, then come back and enter the 7th word from the 3rd paragraph..."
Also: does anyone else see rabid advances in the state-of-the-art of Firefox OCR plugins in the near future?
Well-actually... the latin word virus was non-count, the way we use "water" - they did not know at the time that a virus was a discrete object rather than a substance. So the plural of virus is... virus:-)
I hope the prior-artiness of this is obvious even to the Patent Office, but in case not... All the claims I read include the qualifier "where the virtual currency is not redeemable for real currency", probably to exclude LindenBucks as prior art. Worst case, you could get around this the same way purveyors of offline virtual currency (coupons, etc.) do to comply/avoid various laws. On each virtual token: "Cash value 1/zillionth cent"
Slashdot Mirror
Really? Stuxnet - the one Windows malware with zero payload/effect for 99.999% of infectees - is the one that made every government slap their collective foreheads and say "holy crap! Windows is vulnerable to malware! Who knew?"
Now Siemens, on the other hand, will likely be seeing some very real losses as a direct result of Stuxnet publicity.
Sounds more like DRM to me.
Your mention of inter-building communication reminded me of RONJA, a somewhat older (and open source!) free-space optics design. In this case, the transmitter and receiver LEDs are placed in a length of pipe behind a magnifying glass, and pointed at each other up to a mile or so away. Theirs does 10Mbps though :-)
Nuts, someone already suggested the Ctrl-Alt-Delete store.
Unfortunately, I have found spammers WILL target high-profile sites singly in such a case. In my case (a relatively well-known message board, running phpBB at the time) spambot scripts would post hundreds of fake user registrations per day for google juice (the list of registered users was public, even for unconfirmed users, and included a 'website' field). Performing a very similar mod to your example (leaving the 'Website' field intact but hidden from human users; adding a new field 'asdfilgfknn' for humans to enter a website address) staved off the spam for less than two weeks, at which point the bot scripts were updated with an equally trivial change.
Sure it is, if you have fluorescent lights in the lab and leave the tesla coil running, you will never have to fumble for a lightswitch again...
Don't know; Left 4 Dead 2 pretty well turned me off Steam. It requires a continuous Internet connection to play, even in SINGLE PLAYER MODE. So if your 'net connection goes Comcastic for a bit (as mine does from time to time, being...Comcast), you get kicked out of the game and lose any progress since the last save point. (I wonder if there is a crack available...)
They are getting smarter with those cards (in the US, anyway). Rather than provide the "discount" at the point of use, more and more structure it so that they *mail* your "rewards" (requiring a valid address) or else provide the lion's share of the "discount" in a non-cash form, e.g. points toward lower-priced fuel at a participating gas station (so no more card-swapping or using the cashier's own card...)
... the patent's claims explicitly mislabel critical assembly instructions as 'c++ functions'... so to be non-infringing to those claims, all you have to do is NOT create c++ wrapper functions for these assembly instructions with these specific names.
The method according to Claim 2, wherein the creating of the array C is executed by a C++ function PCMPGTB, and the creating of M from C is executed by a C++ function PMOVMSKB.
It was going to be grand. I had worn my nicest boxers, with a button-fly to ensure no actual laws would be violated, even accidentally (giving a valid reason to jail me). No belt, loose-fitting jeans. When the man asked to to step into the scanner, I would politely accept, step inside and, when his back was turned, drop 'em.
"Oh-h say can you SEE, by the dawn's early LIGHT!..."
Amid the lengthy mouse-maze queue of holiday travelers, a few lightbulbs would come on as the irony began to sink in. Nervous TSA officials would move in. Maybe they'd react, pulling me aside by force, ordering me to shut my face and put my pants back on. Maybe I'd get through the whole thing before being tased into submisison.
"In the land of the FREE, and the home of the BRAVE!..." *dzzt!* *thud*
What really happened:
My gf and I show up at the Logan Airport security checkpoint. It was a ghost town. We present our boarding passes (not IDs); I swear I see a tumbleweed blow by. Every TSA lane is staffed, but where are the passengers? There are exactly two travelers ahead of us, in separate lanes, and nobody behind. They're gone by the time we get our shoes off and all our crap onto the conveyer. Dropping my pants for a handful of screeners and zero travelers suddenly doesn't seem worthwhile any more.
My gf (who is not particularly bothered by the body scan) steps into the scanner, and I get waved through the metal detector, despite there being two other open scanners and nobody behind us in line. Cheery TSA guy at the metal detector says he likes my t-shirt. If I was a bad guy, you'd have seen it on the news already, because this "screen" was a complete joke. Afterward, I realized I was so busy contemplating my own "security theater" performance that I left my laptop in its case inside my backpack. They didn't care. My gf had separately forgotten to unpack her big bag o' liquids. They didn't care.
Conclusions:
TSA's "solution" to both the holiday crush and the potential protests was to drop the theater act and just let everyone sail on through. To me, this speaks volumes about both their perceived effectiveness and value of the new "enhanced" security processes. I can't say to what extent the potential for protests was a factor in this, but if it was, this was a doubly-brilliant move on the part of the TSA. The best way to stop a protest cold is to take away its audience, and that is exactly what happened here. Meanwhile, everyday sheep travelers are probably marveling at how painless the process was today - on the busiest travel day of the year! - and making associations between this and the new body scanner procedure. Well played, TSA, well played.
"Entirety" is only one of four factors used in deciding whether a use of a copyrighted work is fair use. Some other biggies are whether it is transformative (yes! You've turned a pro-x argument into an anti-x argument, and added plenty of original material), "purpose and character" of your use (whether the goal of your use is to serve a societal purpose or just make money), the nature of the original work (in general, the more 'creative' rather than functional/factual the work is, the stronger its protection), and whether the other party directly loses profit from the use.
I agree that in general posting a whole article shouldn't be fair use, so I was quite surprised at this judges expectation they show it wasn't fair use.
Why? If it were a murder trial and the prosecution's argument was "Well Your Honor, this guy's a murderer", I'm sure the judge would expect them to show their work. If anything, it sounds like the judge is encouraging the plaintiff to put together a good argument for infringement, rather than "well, you just have to trust us on this", which would be dismissed for failure to state a claim.
So... the newspaper sold the copyright. How would they sue if they wanted to? Not that this takes anything from the possible fair-use argument, but it sounds like the only recourse of the newspaper itself would be to "encourage" Righthaven to sue (that is probably the exact arrangement) and if possible, feed in ad-revenue data in the hopes of bolstering the case.
I want to be able to sell virtual goods at $0.00056 per transaction if I want to.
That is, a banking transaction system in which 1/1000 of a cent is statistically significant. What's the cost of the electricity to run all the computers involved in that transaction for the duration of the transaction? Like it or not, there are probably reasons other than penny-shaving scams for banks to put a practical floor on transaction size.
But where were you when "if $something saves one child it is worth it" crowd is going nuts?
FTFA, it sounds like TSA employees "saving the children" is part of why the crowd is going nuts...
Or, if you have some end-of-life pants, let an ink pen 'accidentally' leak all over outside of your junkal area. Poor TSA guy will have "I grabbed a guy's inky junk" hands for weeks. Me, I'm just going to opt for the x-ray, drop my pants in the middle of it and hum the national anthem. If anybody complains I'll just claim I was confused about the procedure...
I've also had great success with a free/OSS program called SnoopyPro.
...to nip legal huffing and puffing in the bud - you can go in circles for months and months basically arguing "did not, did too!" with the puffer while potential damages accrue, or file for declaratory judgment, in which you present the evidence to a judge who (you hope) says "yup, did not, now bugger off." (Any parallels to running to the teacher on the playground are purely uncoincidental). For example look up Symantec v. HotBar (DirectRevenue?): a spyware company was sending threats to an A/V vendor for detecting its "product"; A/V vendor sues for declaratory judgment that it is legal to remove 3rd-party software.
I do wonder though; and maybe someone more familiar with law knows the answer: In cases like these it is common (standard?) practice that if Facebook filed suit, they would argue their first threatening letter was proof that Lamebook was aware of the infringement from that point forward, making them liable for mondo additional damages due to "willful infringement" during the months between the first letter and the eventual suit. If Lamebook succeeded in its declaratory judgment, only to have it later overturned somehow, would this have any effect (relative to a plain old "Facebook sues Lamebook" scenario) on the likelihood of a willful infringement ruling? (I.e. showing there was enough uncertainty as to the validity of the claim -- even the judges don't agree! -- that it could not possibly be considered putting Lamebook on notice?)
I think the point of the project (which, let's all remember, is mainly an *art project* to make people think, not intended to be enterprise-ready or even remotely practical) is to plant a cheap public p2p system that is relatively immune to e.g. RIAA attack - assuming the chain of liability (contributory/vicarious/"technically feasible" infringement) plus the chain of proof linking ownership of any given USB stick to any given person is too weak to prosecute, the worst they could do is smash the USB stick. Adding someone's server closet or even wall outlet (tied to a building with a servable suing address) would defeat this purpose. Maybe if you could get the computer/AP to run completely off-grid, but the power requirements of WiFi are such that it would require a big enough solar panel / batterypack to not really be cheap or covert anymore in a public space. (plus, "hey, free solarpanel! ...wait, free computer/AP!"
I remember reading about a flap not too long ago, in which the founders of Seed Savers Exchange (a large heirloom seed organization; mentioned a few times in the threads above) wound up in a bitter and very public dispute concerning transfer of member-supplied seed to Svalbard. Unfortunately, between the increasingly over-the-top rants, deletion of posts on the topic and PR spin control as the thing heated up, I could never get a clear picture of just what it was factually about. The complaint as I understand it was (in this case) extensive collections of member-donated seed from SSE's private collections (some 25k varieties - not all of which are released to the general public) were supplied under a "safety deposit box" style agreement, but later transferred to Svalbard without permission. More generally, it is asserted that supplying seed of any species/cultivar/etc. to Svalbard places that genetic material under what's known as the FAO Treaty, allowing legally free-and-clear access to seed of that variety by interested parties, including GMO companies. The side opposing the SSE/Svalbard deal asserts that while the stored seed itself remains the property of the donor, the donor "cannot refuse" requests for genetically-equivalent seed from interested parties under the terms of treaty.
To make a more Slashdot-friendly analogy (sorry, no cars), it sounds like the concern is that placing any seed there puts it automatically under a BSD-style license, which goes against the intentions of many heirloom growers/donors whose stance against GMO (terminator genes, seeds with IP protection) may be considered more GPL-like.
http://www.patnsteph.net/weblog/2010/10/seed-savers-exchange-3/
Googling various combinations of the terms Svalbard, Seed Savers Exchange, FAO, Kent Whealy and Cary Fowler turns up various collections of rumors, damage control and tinfoil hat rants (including widespread claims that Monsanto is a primary investor to Svalbard...a claim Monsanto denies.)... does anyone know the full / factual story on this?
and they want their clickthru-verification trick back. "To view the porn: Click this adbanner, then come back and enter the 7th word from the 3rd paragraph..."
Also: does anyone else see rabid advances in the state-of-the-art of Firefox OCR plugins in the near future?
Slotted spoon? ;-)
I sure wish you were joking.
Well-actually... the latin word virus was non-count, the way we use "water" - they did not know at the time that a virus was a discrete object rather than a substance. So the plural of virus is... virus :-)
I hope the prior-artiness of this is obvious even to the Patent Office, but in case not...
All the claims I read include the qualifier "where the virtual currency is not redeemable for real currency", probably to exclude LindenBucks as prior art. Worst case, you could get around this the same way purveyors of offline virtual currency (coupons, etc.) do to comply/avoid various laws. On each virtual token: "Cash value 1/zillionth cent"