Okay, then. Your homework, if you think you can do it better than the USPTO, is to write a proper rejection of any one claim in that patent under 35 USC 102 or 103.
Oh, I know the answer to this one. You basically can't reject on prior art, because any tiny difference between the prior art and the patent means the prior art doesn't apply (though such differences are waved away during infringement prosecutions). So then you go to obviousness. Well, it's easy to show all the components A,B, C, and D existed, but that's not sufficient to prove it was obvious to combine them. OK, so here are several prior systems which combined A and B, B and C, A B and C, C and D, and A and D... sorry, not enough, you have to show combination of A B C and D. OK, here's a system which did A B C and D; nope, sorry, not in the context of a "social network". Now here's one which did A B C and D in what is arguably a social network... was it patented? No, of course not, it was obvious even then. Published? No, of course not, it was just made and used... sorry, it's not enough to have a product out there which embodies everything in the patent.
Yep. What sucks is that they are taking a case where the defendant is clearly someone that the government should have been tracking and just didn't go through the correct channels of authorization (warrants). For the supreme court to decide to hear this case makes me think that they want to look like the good guys when they decide that the government can track anyone for any reason at any time.
Successfully reading the court in advance requires a degree in divining, Harry Potter style. It could be just the opposite -- they want to make the point that it would have been easy to get a warrant, so forbidding warrantless tracking won't actually hurt the state's interest in catching criminals.
Seriously, I'm a fucking neuroscientist with a PhD and _no one_ I know considers themselves a geek, including physicists, chemists, and computer scientists.
Of course. You PhD types are too damned hoity-toity to accept the term "geek". Those of us with only a bachelors and who have been stuck with the moniker since before our elementary school graduation damn well earned the use of the term. Sure, it's an insult, but like Yankee Doodle to New Englanders, we'll take it for our own.
The language was unambiguous, but pretty deceitful. Basically, it said "if you are not with the company at the time it is sold, it can take back all your vested options."
And, if you've exercised them, they can buy back the shares -- at the strike price, not the market value (which in this case, even though Skype is private, can be inferred from the value of the Microsoft deal). That's just plain vitiating the vesting. I hope Skype gets spanked in court.
That really seems to me to be a non-sequitur. It doesn't follow that, if one opposes illegal immigration that one also opposes legal immigration simply because the legal caps are lower than one would like.
The legal caps are not merely "lower than one would like". They are so low to almost forbid legal immigration. The priority dates for a Mexican coming here with family sponsorship range from 10 to 20 years ago. Legal immigration without family sponsorship for a Mexican citizen is basically impossible, unless he manages to qualify for an H-1B (not likely). Under these conditions, claiming one is against illegal immigration but not against legal immigration, while supporting harsh measures against illegal immigrants, is disingenuous. To be against illegal immigration when legal immigration is next to impossible, without supporting a change in that situation, is to be against immigration.
Some would say, as many do, that they then have no choice but to come illegally, when the correct solution is to respect the laws of your new home and wait for a diplomatic solution.
One could die of old age waiting for a diplomatic solution.
To break the laws of the country from the word "go" puts you on the wrong foot to begin with, and makes any kind of success very difficult to achieve.
But from the illegals' point of view, the answer to this is twofold: 1) Success as an illegal is difficult to achieve... but likely not more difficult than success in Mexico. 2) One's children have a better chance of success if born as American citizens.
That second one, of course, is why many of these supposed anti-illegal-immigration activists want to repeal or ignore that part of the 14th Amendment. Some of them clothe it in "anchor baby" terms, others are more up front about not wanting the children of illegal immigrants to be citizens. Which again, exposes the stuff about being against "illegal" immigration to be nonsense. If the problem is merely that the illegal immigrants have violated the law, why object to their children (who are 100% legal)?
Also, and more to the rest of your post, the reason cops hate recordings is because people like yourself expect that every single one of them is a murderer. Good cops hate to be cast in the same light as the bad ones.
We know there are some cops who do evil things. We know that when they do this, all the other cops will defend them to the point of perjury and beyond. The action of defending a bad cop that way is bad. Therefore, all cops are bad cops.
Just this week, I had a cop yell at me that he was going to "fuck me up". Then he cuffed me, put me in the back of the police car, and repeated several times that I was going to jail. My crime? Allegedly running a red light on a bicycle. (and no, he neither "fucked me up" nor took me to jail)
Yeah, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking there must be more to it, that I must have done something more. That I must have had it coming because of something I did. That's what all good citizens think when they hear of any sort of police wrongdoing, from minor stuff like pulling someone over on a DWB, to major things like beating a suspect to death. That's why they need to be recorded.
and doesn't understand what happens when you're even a bunch of *degrees* out of sync, much less a few decihertz.
They understand very well. This isn't about allowing generators to drift out of sync with each other in the short term. It's about not correcting the long-term variations in the grid as a whole.
Household clocks and coffeemakers seem unlikely to be a problem. Most of them nowadays aren't synced to house current, but use quartz oscillators. More likely problems would be old systems which have never been replaced because they've never needed to be; traffic light controllers are a reasonable example.
I've heard this argument in several forms, but it's essentially "Well, the US won't just let everyone in, so they HAVE to sneak in!" Um, no, they don't. If you're not welcome, go somewhere else.
That's not the argument I'm making. The argument I'm making is that it is disingenuous to claim you're against illegal immigration but not immigration in general, when legal immigration is essentially unavailable. If your answer to that is "go away", you're simply anti-immigration in general.
If your river has sufficiently high levels of chemical nasties and heavy metals that it isn't swimmable, trusting a pool filter to remove them probably isn't the best idea, and maybe you should be doing something about the 'chemical plants upstream of major population centers' problem. Isn't that stuff supposed to be in New Jersey, anyway?
NYC is at the mouth of the Hudson. Everything on the river is upstream of it Moving NYC to the source is an idea, but I don't think it's going to go over well. The Hudson is the NY/NJ border for a long ways, and pollution from NJ doesn't respect the political boundary.
But pulling someone over for driving erratically isn't. Good luck proving that you weren't driving erratically.
In fact, once the cops find one or two nondisprovable reasons for pulling someone over, it'll just become part of the standard narrative in court. Testilying: It works.
It's anti-illegal-immigrant. There's a difference.
Sure, they claim not to oppose legal immigration. Which essentially isn't permitted (the US is currently not processing visa applications from Mexico any more recent than 10 years ago). So there's a distinction without a difference.
Mike Rowe says that we are also lacking skilled tradesman in this country. I have a hard time believing that with 9% unemployment, housing market in the toilet and new construction levels also in the toilet that none of those 9% would learn a trade in one of these short-handed fields.
You can't; the barriers of entry to the licensed trades are high, and no working tradesman wants a 40-year-old ex-IT guy as a go-fer.
You programmers rest on the achievements of the physical sciences which allowed the production of billion transistor CPUs, gigahertz clock rates and gigabytes of RAM , etc. There is no consequence to writing academically "bad" software. Just keep waiting and hoping for a faster computer and blame the hardware for being "slow", even though you wouldn't even understand how a 25 year old computer actually worked inside.
Of course there's consequence for writing bad software. Because the problems scaled up along with the computers. Not all of them, but a lot of them; by definition, most of the interesting ones. And of course faster computers bring some problems from the range of "obviously infeasible" to "expensive but feasible". Has nothing to do with understanding how a computer works inside; knowing the details of the quantum physics happening inside transistors really won't help you write programs...
Software is now a personal thing, everyone with a glimmer of an idea invents a new language or "framework" for one specific task, creating a tidal wave of buzzwords, incompatible ways of doing things and general confusion. Software is a world where you learn something one day, flush it down the sink at the end of the day and start again from scratch the next day.
Bad experience with Enterprise Java?
Software is a world in which people can say with a straight face they are "craftsmen" when in reality a craft is all about learning a set of tools that DOESN'T CHANGE, so you CAN learn the tool!
Nonsense. Never been true even in woodworking. Craftsmen build tools to help them make things all the time; a lot of them one-off jigs of some sort, others eventually become standards of the craft.
If you still have the original, then I'm pretty sure you are still legally sound (provided local laws allow for those rips) - but in the GP case, a fire claimed his stuff; if you are insured, you are reimbursed for those losses, but you don't get both, you can't both claim it was destroyed and cash out and also claim you still have those licenses.
And if you aren't insured then tough luck - you don't get to take a new couch from the store because the old one was destroyed.
None of this follows from copyright law, as far as I can tell. Assuming the rip is a copy of an original CD made under 17 USC 107 fair use provisions, there's no "license" involved. The destruction of the original CD has no impact on the fair-use copy. If it were a copy of a computer program involved, the provisions of 17 USC 117(a) would be involved, but it does not require that you destroy all copies when the original was destroyed either; in the insurance case, you could argue that the insurance company takes ownership of the backups (by 17 USC 117(b)), but in the no-insurance case, this does not hold.
The issue being highlighted is that there are "known" pirated mp3 files that can be identified via watermark or hash.
They aren't even talking about hidden watermarks (in the audio itself) or hashes. They're talking about purchaser information stored in the metadata. Given that you know it's there (and it's not hard to find, since it's stored uncompressed in the clear), you can remove it. It's not even illegal to remove in the US, due to a little known section of the DMCA, 17 USC 1202(c)
While an IRC server or a BBS could meet the media file database part, or be a "computing device configured to receive user requests," I don't believe I saw any BBSs in the 80s or 90s that would identify average network throughput and route user requests accordingly. IRC certainly doesn't do it.
An FTP server, holding media files, attached to the Internet and on a machine with at least two interfaces in a load-balancing configuration would cover this claim. Just being on the Internet with at least one load-balancing router in between client and server would cover it if prior art was counted the same way infringement is.
Legally, a trademark must be viewed in its entirety. You can't excise part of a mark in order to claim that the remaining part is generic.
If a trademark must be viewed in its entirety, Best Buy would have no case at all, because the names it objects to are not "Geek Squad". Rather, they are various combinations of "Geek" with something besides "Squad", such as "Take it from a Geek".
Or is it one of those things where if you're claiming the mark is no good, it must be viewed in its entirety, but if you're claiming infringement, even a generic piece of it counts?
Just let them pass... so much resources wasted on things that we're about to throw away anyhow. I'm about to turn 30 but make no mistake I know when my useful time is up.
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Oh, I know the answer to this one. You basically can't reject on prior art, because any tiny difference between the prior art and the patent means the prior art doesn't apply (though such differences are waved away during infringement prosecutions). So then you go to obviousness. Well, it's easy to show all the components A,B, C, and D existed, but that's not sufficient to prove it was obvious to combine them. OK, so here are several prior systems which combined A and B, B and C, A B and C, C and D, and A and D... sorry, not enough, you have to show combination of A B C and D. OK, here's a system which did A B C and D; nope, sorry, not in the context of a "social network". Now here's one which did A B C and D in what is arguably a social network... was it patented? No, of course not, it was obvious even then. Published? No, of course not, it was just made and used... sorry, it's not enough to have a product out there which embodies everything in the patent.
I'm still betting on "a boot stamping on a human face, forever".
Successfully reading the court in advance requires a degree in divining, Harry Potter style. It could be just the opposite -- they want to make the point that it would have been easy to get a warrant, so forbidding warrantless tracking won't actually hurt the state's interest in catching criminals.
Not such a big deal. The actual location, 11 East 26th Street, is a block away from the Museum of Sex.
Of course. You PhD types are too damned hoity-toity to accept the term "geek". Those of us with only a bachelors and who have been stuck with the moniker since before our elementary school graduation damn well earned the use of the term. Sure, it's an insult, but like Yankee Doodle to New Englanders, we'll take it for our own.
And, if you've exercised them, they can buy back the shares -- at the strike price, not the market value (which in this case, even though Skype is private, can be inferred from the value of the Microsoft deal). That's just plain vitiating the vesting. I hope Skype gets spanked in court.
In the UK, it's generally instilled in public schools, yes?
The legal caps are not merely "lower than one would like". They are so low to almost forbid legal immigration. The priority dates for a Mexican coming here with family sponsorship range from 10 to 20 years ago. Legal immigration without family sponsorship for a Mexican citizen is basically impossible, unless he manages to qualify for an H-1B (not likely). Under these conditions, claiming one is against illegal immigration but not against legal immigration, while supporting harsh measures against illegal immigrants, is disingenuous. To be against illegal immigration when legal immigration is next to impossible, without supporting a change in that situation, is to be against immigration.
One could die of old age waiting for a diplomatic solution.
But from the illegals' point of view, the answer to this is twofold:
1) Success as an illegal is difficult to achieve... but likely not more difficult than success in Mexico.
2) One's children have a better chance of success if born as American citizens.
That second one, of course, is why many of these supposed anti-illegal-immigration activists want to repeal or ignore that part of the 14th Amendment. Some of them clothe it in "anchor baby" terms, others are more up front about not wanting the children of illegal immigrants to be citizens. Which again, exposes the stuff about being against "illegal" immigration to be nonsense. If the problem is merely that the illegal immigrants have violated the law, why object to their children (who are 100% legal)?
We know there are some cops who do evil things. We know that when they do this, all the other cops will defend them to the point of perjury and beyond. The action of defending a bad cop that way is bad. Therefore, all cops are bad cops.
Just this week, I had a cop yell at me that he was going to "fuck me up". Then he cuffed me, put me in the back of the police car, and repeated several times that I was going to jail. My crime? Allegedly running a red light on a bicycle. (and no, he neither "fucked me up" nor took me to jail)
Yeah, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking there must be more to it, that I must have done something more. That I must have had it coming because of something I did. That's what all good citizens think when they hear of any sort of police wrongdoing, from minor stuff like pulling someone over on a DWB, to major things like beating a suspect to death. That's why they need to be recorded.
They understand very well. This isn't about allowing generators to drift out of sync with each other in the short term. It's about not correcting the long-term variations in the grid as a whole.
Household clocks and coffeemakers seem unlikely to be a problem. Most of them nowadays aren't synced to house current, but use quartz oscillators. More likely problems would be old systems which have never been replaced because they've never needed to be; traffic light controllers are a reasonable example.
That's not the argument I'm making. The argument I'm making is that it is disingenuous to claim you're against illegal immigration but not immigration in general, when legal immigration is essentially unavailable. If your answer to that is "go away", you're simply anti-immigration in general.
NYC is at the mouth of the Hudson. Everything on the river is upstream of it Moving NYC to the source is an idea, but I don't think it's going to go over well. The Hudson is the NY/NJ border for a long ways, and pollution from NJ doesn't respect the political boundary.
In fact, once the cops find one or two nondisprovable reasons for pulling someone over, it'll just become part of the standard narrative in court. Testilying: It works.
Sure, they claim not to oppose legal immigration. Which essentially isn't permitted (the US is currently not processing visa applications from Mexico any more recent than 10 years ago). So there's a distinction without a difference.
Largely because we have so many petty crimes that doing so makes people feel harassed.
As the IRA once said: "You have to be lucky all the time. We only have to be lucky once."
They only need one claim in one patent to survive to cause a world of hurt.
You can't; the barriers of entry to the licensed trades are high, and no working tradesman wants a 40-year-old ex-IT guy as a go-fer.
Of course there's consequence for writing bad software. Because the problems scaled up along with the computers. Not all of them, but a lot of them; by definition, most of the interesting ones. And of course faster computers bring some problems from the range of "obviously infeasible" to "expensive but feasible". Has nothing to do with understanding how a computer works inside; knowing the details of the quantum physics happening inside transistors really won't help you write programs...
Bad experience with Enterprise Java?
Nonsense. Never been true even in woodworking. Craftsmen build tools to help them make things all the time; a lot of them one-off jigs of some sort, others eventually become standards of the craft.
None of this follows from copyright law, as far as I can tell. Assuming the rip is a copy of an original CD made under 17 USC 107 fair use provisions, there's no "license" involved. The destruction of the original CD has no impact on the fair-use copy. If it were a copy of a computer program involved, the provisions of 17 USC 117(a) would be involved, but it does not require that you destroy all copies when the original was destroyed either; in the insurance case, you could argue that the insurance company takes ownership of the backups (by 17 USC 117(b)), but in the no-insurance case, this does not hold.
They aren't even talking about hidden watermarks (in the audio itself) or hashes. They're talking about purchaser information stored in the metadata. Given that you know it's there (and it's not hard to find, since it's stored uncompressed in the clear), you can remove it. It's not even illegal to remove in the US, due to a little known section of the DMCA, 17 USC 1202(c)
Lesson learned: Never talk to the authorities.
An FTP server, holding media files, attached to the Internet and on a machine with at least two interfaces in a load-balancing configuration would cover this claim. Just being on the Internet with at least one load-balancing router in between client and server would cover it if prior art was counted the same way infringement is.
If a trademark must be viewed in its entirety, Best Buy would have no case at all, because the names it objects to are not "Geek Squad". Rather, they are various combinations of "Geek" with something besides "Squad", such as "Take it from a Geek".
Or is it one of those things where if you're claiming the mark is no good, it must be viewed in its entirety, but if you're claiming infringement, even a generic piece of it counts?
Going to the red-light district with cash in your pocket doesn't count.
That would be about now, Logan.