And then, of course, I would bring in a testimony (a technical authority) to confirm this.
IANAL, but I believe that since the case is already at the appeals stage, they aren't allowed to introduce new witnesses or new evidence not already presented at the first trial. If this was brought forward at the original trial (and I believe it was) then Sullivan followed the avenue that was open to her, stressing the fact to the appeals court.
However, I tend to agree with the MPAA that the DMCA doesn't require 'actual' harm. Of course, I disagree with the MPAA on the Constitutionality of the DCMA. Copyright holders have a right to be protected from actual harm the same way virtually all other potential victims are 'protected' from potential crimes, by the deterrance of the actual crime through prosecuting the criminals that commit them, not through the prosecution of people who possess legitimate multipurpose tools that have the potential to be used in a crime.
Using the Justice Dept. lawyer's own soundbite against him, while DeCSS may very well be a 'digital crowbar', it is not a crime to own/design/distribute a real crowbar, but the DMCA makes it a crime to own/design/distribute a 'digital' one. Real crowbars are a legitimate tool with many legitimate uses besides breaking and entering. If he wants consistency, then the Justice Dept. lawyer should be lobbying Congress to outlaw real crowbars (and VCRs, tape recorders, CD-RW drives, DVD-RAM drives, floppy disk drives, hard drives, zip disks, etc., etc.).
This is not stealing. Canadians broadcasters have agreed to allow rebroadcast as part of their licensing agreement to get the spectrum. US broadcasters have no right to allow their broadcasts to 'leak' into Canadian airspace. If anyone is stealing, it is the US broadcasters that are stealing spectrum from potential Canadian broadcasters. These are free, over-the-air broadcasts that include all local and national commercials. The broadcasters should be looking at this as a way of expanding their advertising reach to new audiences. Strange to hear them arguing for lower ratings isn't it?
I don't understand JumpTV's delay based on a $.75/month (it appears that's C$) fee to copyright holders. The ideal security solution is to charge a c$9/year subscription for the service charged to a credit card with a Canadian billing address. This would satisfy the security requirements and the copyright holders. The fee is low enough (about the same as one meal at McDonalds, or two coffees at Starbucks) that I can't see anyone balking at it, it surely beats the cost of satellite or cable. In fact, it's low enough that you would expect ISPs, especially DSL providers trying to ward-off cable ISPs, to bundle it with their service.
Scientist at the University of Pittsburg are testing a temporary artificial 'lung' that consists of a tube connected to an external oxygen tank that is threaded through the leg to the vena cava where a tiny bladder like pump pushes blood across microfiliments that release the oxygen and absorb the CO2.
It is capable of exchanging about half the oxygen you need to survive and can last for two weeks. The team thinks it will be useful for smoke inhalation victims, emphysema patients suffering from secondary lung conditions like pnuemonia, or individuals needing supplemental oxygen who are not good candidates for going on a respirator.
I agree, I remember something like this capability being in Moraff's Revenge which came out for 8086 machines running CGA graphics in the late 80's. It didn't use a seperate server, but if I recall correctly, you could get a monster's eye view of your party, though that might only have occurred while you were in the process of being eaten by the monster.
Nice try, but won't work. You have to keep the position of that serie of '1'. That position will use about log2(position) bits. Unsuprisingly, 2^n is the size the file needs to be to have a good chance to have a serie of n '1's.
Not if you expand on Patrick's original idea replace the series of 1's (or zeros, your compressor should determine the longest continues series of each and then use the longer) and replace it with EOF. Since EOF can't appear in the original file except at the end, your de-compressor will know that this is the position to insert the original series. You could also repeat this as many times as like, provided the replaced series is at least as long as length of the EOF character plus the length of each new file name created plus memory space needed to store the value of the length of the series.
Since the challenge allows you to see the file before building the compressor (and the neither the size or speed of the compressor is relevant), all you need to do is find the single array of bytes (I'd say string, but presumably the 'arbitrary file' would be binary) greater than three bytes, that occupies the greatest percentage of file space in the compressed file. Then replace that array wherever it occurs with an EOF character and name each new section of the file sequentially using a 1 byte name.
(As noted in another post) As long as you pick an initial file length long enough that 2% of the time there statistically should be enough repeats of some 3 byte (or longer) array to equal the number of bytes in your decompressor (which would be roughly the same size as Patrick's), then you will win the challenge enough times to make it profitable.
In New Zealond, a bunch of fans are claiming "Jedi" as their religion on the census! If enough people do it, it must be declared as a viable religion... Food for thought, young Jedi.
It's a hoax, read this story regarding the same thing when it was tried in Britain. (note the author of the story, I don't know if this is a coincidence, or part of the hoax).
If the aim is really to establish a Jedi religion, then why not go about it through the normal channels, have regular meetings of the followers, write some authoritative tome, then begin hating and warring with practicioners of other religions. That's how all the other 'great' religions started: Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Linux, etc.
Then trying to invite people to a Unix rollover party will surely get me put in the geek hall of fame by my non-geek friends. It does coincidentally fall just before my SO's birthday though, so maybe I can get a away with it if I don't tell the the real reason for the party until just before the roll over occurs.
There are Palms and Handsprings available in the $149 range, but they come with 2M of user accessible memory. That is just slightly more than a floppy disk, making the device as a whole slightly more usable than a calculator and an address book.
This has 8M of RAM, plus since its open source I expect you can use some of the Flash area for your own archived files.
Take a look at the stock of I Village (IVIL) or Women.com (WOMN) and tell me they are booming.
IVIL today: $0.50/share 52-week high: $16/share
WOMN today: $0.15625/share 52-week high: $8.25/share
While I agree that anyone who has admin responisbility for machines running MS must be on the Microsoft security notification service distribution, it would not have helped in this case as they haven't issued a notice of the faulty patch yet. The last bulletin to go out was MS01-020 on 3/29/01, and is still revision 1.0 (it hasn't been updated). While it does contain the caveat that the error message should be ignored, this is buried more than 2/3rds of the way through it and is not highlighted in any way other than being under the sub-heading caveats. The caveat MUST be displayed in as obvious a manner as the message will be that the patch is not necessary.
My question about this hole is that the MS Security Bulletin keeps phrasing it in terms of an "HTML email" but notes that the "HTML email" could be hosted on a website. This sounds like a deliberate attempt to downplay that is a hole in the MSIE browser itself, not in one of MS email products. I think this may relate to the fact that the Court of Appeals has yet to rule in US v. MS, since this hole demonstrates clear consumer harm from MS bundling/integrating the browser with the OS and MS's main argument before the Court of Appeals is that the government did not prove consumer harm.
Sunspot 9393 with the surface area 13 times larger than the Earth, has ejected a coronal mass due to arrive Tuesday. A smaller ejection Thursday resulted in fantastic Aurora displays as far south as Carlsbad, NM, and Stoneville, NC. The downside is that the resulting magnetic storm could disrupt satellites, or even interfere with powergrids.
Though the ejection did occur on 4/1/01, this isn't April Fool's joke. SpaceWeather.com rates this ejection as M5, capable of causing significant radio interference, though probably unlikely to interfere with power transmission. But the spot 9393 is still facing Earth and appears to be building up to another ejection which could be much more devastating (especially if you live in California where the grid is already so stretched).
Plastic just ran a thread regarding an article on the subscription side of Inside.com. It was about an as yet unpublished book by UK physicist Sir Martin Rees titled "Our Final Century?" as of the date I checked, there was nothing to be found on that book on the three search engines that combined have never let me down before: GOOGLE (Web & groups), RAGING (secondary web search) & DOGPILE (Print news). Part of the the problem is likely to be how current the story was, so my back up was to hit the big UK media sites BBC.co.uk, thetimes.co.uk, etc. but these also drew blanks.
Makes me wonder if the radio stations are going to mind Realnetworks copying their broadcasts for profit. Or do the radio stations get a cut of the $20 million? The broadcasts aren't the exclusive property of MLB, they are jointly owned by the broadcaster and MLB.
I have the same question. Perhaps MLB does have an agreement that allows them to use to use the broadcasts for mediums other than the live radio broadcast (like NFL Films has an agreement to use the radio broadcasts in its videos), but unless this is an agreement on paper, if I were a radio announcer, especially one as popular and well known to the fans as many of the players themselves (such as Harry Carey was), then I think you could have a lot of bargaining power to withhold your consent to use your voice for commercial gain without your consent.
Anyway, no way is Real going to get close to pulling $20 million out of subscribers for thewir crappy service. From the article I read, it sounded like they will be adding a lot on-screen content to the broadcasts, however, unless the audio streams themselvs are available in 28.8k and 56k and ad breaks are filled with value-added content, I can't see paying for the games. At night you can get AM broadcasts from anywhere within 500 miles, which usually allows you to pull in at least one affiliate of your favorite team (or of the team they are playing that night), the broadcast quality isn't wonderful, but neither is the 8kbs streams that had been free last year.
As someone theat trying to build a fansite for new TV show i have to say it sounds like it was probably a bad investment on the studio's part.
Even though my site is dedicated to a show with an extremely high geek quotient, I haven't been able to get my daily hit count above the low double digits. The only way I see this working is if they paid the major search engines and web directories for preferred placement, or if they got links to the site planted in online media with the (also likely paid) cooperation of the media outlet (which we know happens).
Alternatively, they could draw people in (as was aparently the case with American Pie) by using material supposedly obtained surrepticiously from insiders, but that in fact was provided directly by the film's marketing Dept.
In the US there is no such date, since we go by mm/dd/yyyy. Of course, this means that if Einstein's European birthday were used (he was after all European), it would be written 14/3, which of course wouldn't be Pi day. Ironic huh?
Actually, according the their history page, it did go off line for a while during the eighties. So maybe this is a good precedent that we will once agin see the beloved Cambridge coffee pot at some future date.
> In the mid-seventies expansion of the department caused people's
> offices to be located ever further away from the main terminal room
> where the Coke machine stood. It got rather annoying to traipse down
> to the third floor only to find the machine empty - or worse, to shell
> out hard-earned cash to receive a recently loaded, still-warm Coke.
> One day a couple of people got together to devise a solution.
>
> They installed micro-switches in the Coke machine to sense how many
> bottles were present in each of its six columns of bottles. The
> switches were hooked up to CMUA, the PDP-10 that was then the main
> departmental computer. A server program was written to keep tabs on
> the Coke machine's state, including how long each bottle had been in
> the machine. When you ran the companion status inquiry program, you'd
> get a display that might look like this:
>
> EMPTY EMPTY 1h 3m
> COLD COLD 1h 4m
>
> This let you know that cold Coke could be had by pressing the
> lower-left or lower-center button, while the bottom bottles in the two
> right-hand columns had been loaded an hour or so beforehand, so were
> still warm. (I think the display changed to just "COLD" after the
> bottle had been there 3 hours.)
>
> The final piece of the puzzle was needed to let people check Coke
> status when they were logged in on some other machine than CMUA. CMUA's
> Finger server was modified to run the Coke status program whenever
> someone fingered the nonexistent user "coke". (For the uninitiated,
> Finger normally reports whether a specified user is logged in, and if
> so where.) Since Finger requests are part of standard ARPANET (now
> Internet) protocols, people could check the Coke machine from any CMU
> computer by saying "finger coke@cmua". In fact, you could discover the
> Coke machine's status from any machine anywhere on the Internet! Not
> that it would do you much good if you were a few thousand miles away...
Having won its target demographics in the overnight ratings. With better ratings than most of the Mulder-Free X-Files episodes this season.
Afterall, a spin-off doesn't have to be better than the original show, it just as to be almost as good as it. It already has an established fan base which helps with the word-of-mouth/email/IM marketing efforts. Also, they'll be helped by the original series going off the air if they get sufficient ratings to justify the original show's time slot, as Frasier did eventually (though not permanently), and by the orginal show becoming a big screen franchise (for example, it was Star Trek's big screen success that prompted the STNG era spinoffs).
I don't remember who orginated the term. My first experience with computing was with an NCR 9600, which was an early (1977) desktop model made for office use that used a cassette tape drive (and later an 8" floppy disk).
I agree, the graphic provided makes it look like graphite (layered 2D hexagons) with the tungsten just wedged inside, bonded to the silicon cage. Definately not buckyballs, where all the bonds are only to the other carbon atoms.
Is this a default when you run the @home install CD or something?
AFAIK its not, but the reverse should be true. Cable and DSL ISPs should install (or at least warn you to install with an included download link) ZoneAlarm or other personal firewall software when you configure your broadband account.
This might also give the Broadband ISP's some teeth when they try to enforce a 'no server' policy against their customers, since the customer couldn't plead that they were running Napster or an FTP site unknowingly if they had to specifically enable the ZoneAlarm to allow each piece software that was running as a server.
I know I was not the first to discover them, but that doesn't seem to be very relevant to the PTO, so I think I'll submit my patent for private sids on slashcode based websites.
The patent is for searching by using crawling. i.e. whenever a new page is found, searching the source of that page for links to other pages that haven't been indexed yet.
While you could possible do this for FTP sites by reading the mirrors list, it's hardly the same thing.
If there is a precedent, then I think it would have to have been from Gopher space. Has anyone talked to the creator of Veronica, or the mother Gopher people at UMN to find out how they created their databases?
Another possiblity is that the precedent would be from hypercard searches, or some other localized searching algorythm for linked data, but unless it was used for searching a network of computers, the CMGI patent might still have some validity.
Slashdot Mirror
And then, of course, I would bring in a testimony (a technical authority) to confirm this.
IANAL, but I believe that since the case is already at the appeals stage, they aren't allowed to introduce new witnesses or new evidence not already presented at the first trial. If this was brought forward at the original trial (and I believe it was) then Sullivan followed the avenue that was open to her, stressing the fact to the appeals court.
However, I tend to agree with the MPAA that the DMCA doesn't require 'actual' harm. Of course, I disagree with the MPAA on the Constitutionality of the DCMA. Copyright holders have a right to be protected from actual harm the same way virtually all other potential victims are 'protected' from potential crimes, by the deterrance of the actual crime through prosecuting the criminals that commit them, not through the prosecution of people who possess legitimate multipurpose tools that have the potential to be used in a crime.
Using the Justice Dept. lawyer's own soundbite against him, while DeCSS may very well be a 'digital crowbar', it is not a crime to own/design/distribute a real crowbar, but the DMCA makes it a crime to own/design/distribute a 'digital' one. Real crowbars are a legitimate tool with many legitimate uses besides breaking and entering. If he wants consistency, then the Justice Dept. lawyer should be lobbying Congress to outlaw real crowbars (and VCRs, tape recorders, CD-RW drives, DVD-RAM drives, floppy disk drives, hard drives, zip disks, etc., etc.).
This is not stealing. Canadians broadcasters have agreed to allow rebroadcast as part of their licensing agreement to get the spectrum. US broadcasters have no right to allow their broadcasts to 'leak' into Canadian airspace. If anyone is stealing, it is the US broadcasters that are stealing spectrum from potential Canadian broadcasters. These are free, over-the-air broadcasts that include all local and national commercials. The broadcasters should be looking at this as a way of expanding their advertising reach to new audiences. Strange to hear them arguing for lower ratings isn't it?
I don't understand JumpTV's delay based on a $.75/month (it appears that's C$) fee to copyright holders. The ideal security solution is to charge a c$9/year subscription for the service charged to a credit card with a Canadian billing address. This would satisfy the security requirements and the copyright holders. The fee is low enough (about the same as one meal at McDonalds, or two coffees at Starbucks) that I can't see anyone balking at it, it surely beats the cost of satellite or cable. In fact, it's low enough that you would expect ISPs, especially DSL providers trying to ward-off cable ISPs, to bundle it with their service.
Scientist at the University of Pittsburg are testing a temporary artificial 'lung' that consists of a tube connected to an external oxygen tank that is threaded through the leg to the vena cava where a tiny bladder like pump pushes blood across microfiliments that release the oxygen and absorb the CO2.
It is capable of exchanging about half the oxygen you need to survive and can last for two weeks. The team thinks it will be useful for smoke inhalation victims, emphysema patients suffering from secondary lung conditions like pnuemonia, or individuals needing supplemental oxygen who are not good candidates for going on a respirator.
I agree, I remember something like this capability being in Moraff's Revenge which came out for 8086 machines running CGA graphics in the late 80's. It didn't use a seperate server, but if I recall correctly, you could get a monster's eye view of your party, though that might only have occurred while you were in the process of being eaten by the monster.
Nice try, but won't work. You have to keep the position of that serie of '1'. That position will use about log2(position) bits. Unsuprisingly, 2^n is the size the file needs to be to have a good chance to have a serie of n '1's.
Not if you expand on Patrick's original idea replace the series of 1's (or zeros, your compressor should determine the longest continues series of each and then use the longer) and replace it with EOF. Since EOF can't appear in the original file except at the end, your de-compressor will know that this is the position to insert the original series. You could also repeat this as many times as like, provided the replaced series is at least as long as length of the EOF character plus the length of each new file name created plus memory space needed to store the value of the length of the series.
Since the challenge allows you to see the file before building the compressor (and the neither the size or speed of the compressor is relevant), all you need to do is find the single array of bytes (I'd say string, but presumably the 'arbitrary file' would be binary) greater than three bytes, that occupies the greatest percentage of file space in the compressed file. Then replace that array wherever it occurs with an EOF character and name each new section of the file sequentially using a 1 byte name.
(As noted in another post) As long as you pick an initial file length long enough that 2% of the time there statistically should be enough repeats of some 3 byte (or longer) array to equal the number of bytes in your decompressor (which would be roughly the same size as Patrick's), then you will win the challenge enough times to make it profitable.
In New Zealond, a bunch of fans are claiming "Jedi" as their religion on the census! If enough people do it, it must be declared as a viable religion... Food for thought, young Jedi.
It's a hoax, read this story regarding the same thing when it was tried in Britain. (note the author of the story, I don't know if this is a coincidence, or part of the hoax).
If the aim is really to establish a Jedi religion, then why not go about it through the normal channels, have regular meetings of the followers, write some authoritative tome, then begin hating and warring with practicioners of other religions. That's how all the other 'great' religions started: Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Linux, etc.
Then trying to invite people to a Unix rollover party will surely get me put in the geek hall of fame by my non-geek friends. It does coincidentally fall just before my SO's birthday though, so maybe I can get a away with it if I don't tell the the real reason for the party until just before the roll over occurs.
There are Palms and Handsprings available in the $149 range, but they come with 2M of user accessible memory. That is just slightly more than a floppy disk, making the device as a whole slightly more usable than a calculator and an address book.
This has 8M of RAM, plus since its open source I expect you can use some of the Flash area for your own archived files.
Take a look at the stock of I Village (IVIL) or Women.com (WOMN) and tell me they are booming.
IVIL today: $0.50/share 52-week high: $16/share
WOMN today: $0.15625/share 52-week high: $8.25/share
While I agree that anyone who has admin responisbility for machines running MS must be on the Microsoft security notification service distribution, it would not have helped in this case as they haven't issued a notice of the faulty patch yet. The last bulletin to go out was MS01-020 on 3/29/01, and is still revision 1.0 (it hasn't been updated). While it does contain the caveat that the error message should be ignored, this is buried more than 2/3rds of the way through it and is not highlighted in any way other than being under the sub-heading caveats. The caveat MUST be displayed in as obvious a manner as the message will be that the patch is not necessary.
My question about this hole is that the MS Security Bulletin keeps phrasing it in terms of an "HTML email" but notes that the "HTML email" could be hosted on a website. This sounds like a deliberate attempt to downplay that is a hole in the MSIE browser itself, not in one of MS email products. I think this may relate to the fact that the Court of Appeals has yet to rule in US v. MS, since this hole demonstrates clear consumer harm from MS bundling/integrating the browser with the OS and MS's main argument before the Court of Appeals is that the government did not prove consumer harm.
Sunspot 9393 with the surface area 13 times larger than the Earth, has ejected a coronal mass due to arrive Tuesday. A smaller ejection Thursday resulted in fantastic Aurora displays as far south as Carlsbad, NM, and Stoneville, NC. The downside is that the resulting magnetic storm could disrupt satellites, or even interfere with powergrids.
Though the ejection did occur on 4/1/01, this isn't April Fool's joke. SpaceWeather.com rates this ejection as M5, capable of causing significant radio interference, though probably unlikely to interfere with power transmission. But the spot 9393 is still facing Earth and appears to be building up to another ejection which could be much more devastating (especially if you live in California where the grid is already so stretched).
Plastic just ran a thread regarding an article on the subscription side of Inside.com. It was about an as yet unpublished book by UK physicist Sir Martin Rees titled "Our Final Century?" as of the date I checked, there was nothing to be found on that book on the three search engines that combined have never let me down before: GOOGLE (Web & groups), RAGING (secondary web search) & DOGPILE (Print news). Part of the the problem is likely to be how current the story was, so my back up was to hit the big UK media sites BBC.co.uk, thetimes.co.uk, etc. but these also drew blanks.
Makes me wonder if the radio stations are going to mind Realnetworks copying their broadcasts for profit. Or do the radio stations get a cut of the $20 million? The broadcasts aren't the exclusive property of MLB, they are jointly owned by the broadcaster and MLB.
I have the same question. Perhaps MLB does have an agreement that allows them to use to use the broadcasts for mediums other than the live radio broadcast (like NFL Films has an agreement to use the radio broadcasts in its videos), but unless this is an agreement on paper, if I were a radio announcer, especially one as popular and well known to the fans as many of the players themselves (such as Harry Carey was), then I think you could have a lot of bargaining power to withhold your consent to use your voice for commercial gain without your consent.
Anyway, no way is Real going to get close to pulling $20 million out of subscribers for thewir crappy service.
From the article I read, it sounded like they will be adding a lot on-screen content to the broadcasts, however, unless the audio streams themselvs are available in 28.8k and 56k and ad breaks are filled with value-added content, I can't see paying for the games. At night you can get AM broadcasts from anywhere within 500 miles, which usually allows you to pull in at least one affiliate of your favorite team (or of the team they are playing that night), the broadcast quality isn't wonderful, but neither is the 8kbs streams that had been free last year.
The photo acompanies this article but it's much smaller (though better detailed).
They also have a link to a RealVideo Clip which was obviously filmed on a camcorder but manages to catch quite a bit of the debris fly-over.
As someone theat trying to build a fansite for new TV show i have to say it sounds like it was probably a bad investment on the studio's part.
Even though my site is dedicated to a show with an extremely high geek quotient, I haven't been able to get my daily hit count above the low double digits. The only way I see this working is if they paid the major search engines and web directories for preferred placement, or if they got links to the site planted in online media with the (also likely paid) cooperation of the media outlet (which we know happens).
Alternatively, they could draw people in (as was aparently the case with American Pie) by using material supposedly obtained surrepticiously from insiders, but that in fact was provided directly by the film's marketing Dept.
It's on an easier to remember day: 22/7.
In the US there is no such date, since we go by mm/dd/yyyy. Of course, this means that if Einstein's European birthday were used (he was after all European), it would be written 14/3, which of course wouldn't be Pi day. Ironic huh?
This news is reaaly five months old, this just confirms what all the Tech press was saying back in October when MS invested $135Mus in Corel.
.NET for Linux?
BYTE:Analyzing Microsoft's Corel Investment Strange Bedfellows: Curiouser And Curiouser
ZDNet: Microsoft
WIRED: Corel, Microsoft form alliance
Having won its target demographics in the overnight ratings. With better ratings than most of the Mulder-Free X-Files episodes this season.
Afterall, a spin-off doesn't have to be better than the original show, it just as to be almost as good as it. It already has an established fan base which helps with the word-of-mouth/email/IM marketing efforts. Also, they'll be helped by the original series going off the air if they get sufficient ratings to justify the original show's time slot, as Frasier did eventually (though not permanently), and by the orginal show becoming a big screen franchise (for example, it was Star Trek's big screen success that prompted the STNG era spinoffs).
Then how do you explaing the PCjr in my basement?
Or this page from IBM's history timeline?
I don't remember who orginated the term. My first experience with computing was with an NCR 9600, which was an early (1977) desktop model made for office use that used a cassette tape drive (and later an 8" floppy disk).
I agree, the graphic provided makes it look like graphite (layered 2D hexagons) with the tungsten just wedged inside, bonded to the silicon cage. Definately not buckyballs, where all the bonds are only to the other carbon atoms.
Of course, I am not a Physicist or a Chemist.
Is this a default when you run the @home install CD or something?
AFAIK its not, but the reverse should be true. Cable and DSL ISPs should install (or at least warn you to install with an included download link) ZoneAlarm or other personal firewall software when you configure your broadband account.
This might also give the Broadband ISP's some teeth when they try to enforce a 'no server' policy against their customers, since the customer couldn't plead that they were running Napster or an FTP site unknowingly if they had to specifically enable the ZoneAlarm to allow each piece software that was running as a server.
I know I was not the first to discover them, but that doesn't seem to be very relevant to the PTO, so I think I'll submit my patent for private sids on slashcode based websites.
If you care to dispute this patent, please do so at the private sid http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=patent
Of course doing so may incur royalty fees for use of the patent.
I don't think the precedent is that good.
The patent is for searching by using crawling. i.e. whenever a new page is found, searching the source of that page for links to other pages that haven't been indexed yet.
While you could possible do this for FTP sites by reading the mirrors list, it's hardly the same thing.
If there is a precedent, then I think it would have to have been from Gopher space. Has anyone talked to the creator of Veronica, or the mother Gopher people at UMN to find out how they created their databases?
Another possiblity is that the precedent would be from hypercard searches, or some other localized searching algorythm for linked data, but unless it was used for searching a network of computers, the CMGI patent might still have some validity.