This is a total bluff on Microsoft's part. Yes, you can sue end users for patent infringement, but it only makes sense to do that if you have no customers and no products (i.e., only a paper patent).
It would be suicidal for Microsoft to sue true end users for patent infringement. It will never happen. IT managers have nothing to fear on that point. It's Microsoft that fears the collective power of the IT managers. It's just SO good when there is real competition. And that's what we have now, due to Linux, Oracle, Sun, etc. So Microsoft is forced to respond.
Balmer addressed this at the end of his answer: "[our customers are saying '] don't come try to license this individually.' So customer push drove us to where we got"
SCO was a much more credible threat, while it lasted, because you could see a company like that, which had nothing much to lose, actually going out and suing end users (at one point I believe they did).
If Microsoft can find (another) way to do this through a proxy, maybe that will work (if people don't immediately see through it).
But Microsoft has no practical ability to enforce its patents against end users without SERIOUSLY damaging their brand.
Sure, they can go after distributors, but then what - sue ALL of them? Shut down all Linux distros? Can you imagine the antitrust backlash from that? Trying to extinguish the competition en masse based on vague patent claims? Forget about it.
Then there is the question of what the patents are, whether they are valid, and whether they can be worked around.
Conventional wisdom, which probably holds true here, is that for companies like Microsoft, patents largely have defensive value. Any attempt to go out and wield them offensively usually has unbearable associated risks and/or costs.
Get a good laugh, because Microsoft is very far from accomplishing anything on these fronts, other than further validating Linux and open source.
If you can charge this sucker with that much energy in five minutes, just IMAGINE what would happen if you were short it out. If you've ever shorted a plain old electrolytic capacitor with a screwdriver (a classic high school science stunt), you should understand. This is several orders of magnitude more powerful. With a capacitor like this, the entire screwdriver would instantly zap into a bright flash of light (hope you weren't holding it) - without even seriously discharging the capacitor. Really shorting it out would be like blowing up an entire tank of gas instantaneously. I think power supplies like this would have fearsome military uses, actually. I don't even want to say what comes to mind.
Pretty, I suppose, but looks like an operational nightmare. Just IMAGINE having to check for a cabling problem somewhere in one of these tightly packed systems, or worse yet, reconfiguring your server setup. This is one big reason for going with a simpler physical server setup and running VMs.
For a lot of people, AOL is the de facto OS, and that really isn't the same under Linux. Linux is way out of their comfort zone. I think this applies especially to people still on Windows 98. They are going to buy new computers anyway, with XP/Vista installed, and AOL preinstalled. No Linux for these folks.
That's all it would have taken. It's the default setting in IIS, but not the default in Apache2, as far as I recall. Anyway, the Gov's web site neglected to apply this fundamental protection. Tough crap, This is pretty silly stuff anyway.
Actually, this brings to mind that I have a small database (~ 15 MB) that I back up with a daily chron job that dumps the database, zips it with some related files, spilts this into emailable chunks and sends them in series to an account on gmail. The "split" files from each session show up in a single thread on Gmail, so they are very easy to fetch and restore. Every so often I go into gmail and weed out the superfluous backups. Other than that, there is no maintenance required, whatsoever, and I have pretty reliable off-site storage accessible from anywhere. Great solution for a small amount of critical data (you could encrypt the zip file if you were really paranoid). My daily sweep with BackupPC gets all this as well (original database plus the backup zip). I could of course have my email backup initiated by BackupPC, but I like having independent mechanisms. I just never want to get burned again by losing data through a drive failure or virus.
If you're not processing transactions 24/7 this is pretty simple. I took an old machine, threw in a big ATA drive, and installed Ubuntu Linux and Backuppc, which Ubuntu has packaged. It automatically backs up every machine on my network, both Windows (via SMB) and Linux (via rsync). It has a Web browser interface with the manual permanently on line in the browser. While it doesn't do true "snapshots" it does give you a series of backup points going back in time, It shares redundant files to avoid needless duplication. My backup drive is less than half full. without compression. If space gets tight I can keep adding cheap drives to the backup box (and put them under LVM if I want to see them as a single large storage space). Any one of my drives (including the backup) could of course fail at any time, However, as long as I don't have multiple simultaneous failures, I should be pretty much covered. Barring a fire, I'm pretty safe. I check it every couple of weeks to make sure it is still alive (it always is). You could back up the backup drive to a portable drive every so often and keep those off site. if you were really paranoid,
I have had the occasion to restore from the backup when I did something stupid to a production directory. I found the most recent valid version of the directory among the backups, and just scp'd the entire directory to my production machine.
I've had much more trouble with unreadable tapes than with unreadable drives. I don't know where you are finding sub-$100 tape drives with any capacity. The ones I see are more like $2,000.
Watch for EMC to become a dominant player in the IT market, going way beyond disk drives and data storage. These folks are making some very strategic acquisitions.
However, it must also be said that Java does not play well with Linux, and this is a major problem for Linux users. The Java substitutes on Debian never seem to cut it - among other things, they tend to be a version behind. You download a package from somewhere - it just runs under Windows, every time, but on Debian, Ubuntu, very often something will break. Fedora doesn't seem to fully solve the problem either, but I have very limited experience on it and may be missing something. Maybe there are gurus out there who can really work around this, but I've come to the conclusion that I can't rely on Linux when I have something that needs major a Java component. I try to avoid Java, but there are too many things that are implemented better on Java than on anything else. What I've ended up doing is keeping a Windows machine to provide the necessary services over the network, and hosting the rest on Linux.
A good example here is Lucene, the wonderful text indexing engine written in Java (and itself completely free, except for the language that it is implemented in). While Lucene has been extensively ported, you also end up needing the related document filters (PDF, Word, etc.) that are far better implemented in Java than anywhere else, at least in the form of a code library or component that you can natively include or link. Inevitably, you need a piece that is only available in Java, and inevitably, you run into problems trying to use such pieces under Linux.
All this is probably why Debian would love to find a way to include real Sun Java.
Still, in my estimation, it just isn't worth it to accept flawed license terms in order to solve this problem. Screw it. Debian, of all the distributions, must remain free. It is the bedrock, as you say. Let Sun be the one to yield on this.
I am hoping that more people will start writing things in Ruby and that more of the major packages in Java will be ported to Ruby.
I've tried it now on my low end Windows box and my relatively powerful 64-bit Linux machine (Mozilla 1.5.0.3, Ubuntu Dapper). It is reasonably fast on even the wimpiest Windows machine (like the one I have), but annoyingly slow on Mozilla/Linux. At least that's what I saw in 2 minutes of testing. I would say there was at least a 300% difference in speed between the two platforms. Given equal hardware, it would be closer to 1000%.
Also in the real world, as others have pointed out, without macros and Visual Basic, this is going nowhere. It's an interesting toy.
Basically, this (below), plus a litte SQL, and 15 minutes of installation is all you really need to know/do to get very well started - you don't need a book --
<?php $connection = mysql_connect($location,$user,$pass) or die("Couldn't connect to DB server."); success_code = @mysql_select_db($db, $connection) or die("Couldn't select database."); $sql = "SELECT * FROM $table"; $result_set = mysql_query( $sql ); while ($row = mysql_fetch_array( $result_set )) { do_something_with( $row ); } ?>
The only even slightly tricky part is initially setting up permissions on MySQL and creating a database. The MySQL and PHP online manuals will show you that and everything else you need to know. Also, the package phpmyadmin automates a lot of MySQL administration tasks (from a Web-based client), so you don't initially have to learn a lot of command line stuff.
Ubuntu has all of this packaged and readily installable from Synaptic (as does Debian for that matter). Just click and install apache2, php5, php5-mysql, mysql-server, mysql-client and phpmyadmin and you should be ready to go.
Really though, after you get the basic concept, you should try Ruby on Rails.
I bought a $79 NAS device - a Hawking HNAS1, which runs on embedded Linux and works with both Windows and Linux systems (and I would guess Macs). It goes on my network, and gets mounted locally via NFS (on Linux) or as a Share (on Windows) (Linux can also access it via Samba, in addition to NFS, but NFS is faster). The Hawking comes without a drive, so you can put in any IDE drive. You then set up cron jobs to run scripts that back up important files and databases, rotate the archives, and save them on the NAS device. Also, for really critical stuff, another script breaks up the archive into 6 meg chunks and sends it to gmail (where each backup job comes out as one thread). I use a 120G drive in the NAS device. Stuff that doesn't change (music, photos, old docs) periodically get backed up to DVDs. Stuff that actively changes gets backed up onto the NAS device and off-site email. No point in repeatedly backing up stuff that never changes. The automated email part also works well, but obviously has very limited capacity, and constantly has to be manually cleaned out - but for really critical stuff, it is great.
The Hawking is somewhat primitive and quite slow, but it gets the job done for me. I don't pay any attention to it, yet it has worked witout a hitch, completely in the background, for about a year. There are much faster NAS solutions out there, but most of them require Windows (or Samba).
Of course, this is all for home/SOHO tinkering. At the enterprise level, there are truly sophisticated systems involving mirroring, snapshotting and all kinds of stuff like that.
That was the theory a few years back. These days, the prevailing view, I think, is that, really, you know about the "language on the back of the ticket" before you even walk into the software store (or click on the download button). Most of the legal world, I'm afraid, views this sort of thing as routinely enforceable.
Moreover, more and more transactions are starting to involve a pre-payment clickwrap "I Agree" button.
But it doesn't work that way. The EULA says that the software is licensed and not sold. I.e., that you agree to characterize your acquisition of the software as a license and not a sale. This isn't just some statement of opinion - by being in the EULA it supposedly reflects your own AGREEMENT to just that.
What the hell does an end user "license" mean, anyway, if anything other than that the software itself is "licensed"? What other "license" are you getting (other than a "license" to do what Section 117 -- if it applied -- would allow you to do without a license)?
Anyway, the case that the Supreme Court actually declined to review was an employer-employee dispute (no doubt an employee seeking to hold up his former employer because there was no written agreement and therefore he owned the copyright to what he had written). But the employee probably never had something resembling an MS-style EULA to protect HIM. So he probably had nothing to trump the employer's Section 117 rights (or implied license rights, etc.). Therefore the employer won. It wasn't as if the employer was going out with the software to compete with the poor guy. It was just a routine case, and the Supreme Court was utterly indifferent about stepping in.
Lucene implementations can parse MS Office files
on
Lucene in Action
·
· Score: 1
So here you have a free alternative to proprietary search engine indexing software that allows you to run an intranet with MS Office (as well as PDF, HTML, text, etc.) files on a non-MS web platform (it's "free" except insofar as Java itself is not "free"). In truth, the document parsers are external to Lucene, but they do work together, plus Lucene itself is a solid piece of work. Also, Lucene itself is just an indexing engine - the other plumbing and connections of a full "search engine" have to be constructed around it (the book gives you the basics you'll need to do that, or you can look at the numerous freely available solutions that make use of Lucene).
It's about time Slashdot has picked up on Lucene - This book has been out since last December, and the Lucene project has been around quite a bit longer than that. This is very powerful stuff.
That's right. However, it is only an APPLICATION - it may not be granted, but you never know. It would be an infringement of this "patent" - if it ever issues - to perform the claimed "method" by hand - manually bolding (say) all the numbers in a document. In fact, this process is perfomed in the usual process of writing a patent application - by convention, in a patent application, all of the numeric references to the drawings are put in bold face. So, someone revising a draft patent application so as to bold all of the figure references would infringe this patent (assuming there were no other numbers in the document, which is quite possible). Absurd.
The main ingredient here seems to be the Junxion box. But can't you replicate that with a bridge device on any laptop? The EV-DO card brings in the signal. Any el-cheapo wireless access point broadcasts it, and the bridge (in software) bridges the two devices.
You are right. There are two theories for this type of liability (and this is based on patent law really, rather than copyright law): (1) "actively inducing" another's direct infringement; and (2) selling something that is specifically adapted to facilitate infringement - something that has "no substantial noninfringing use".
The unanimous court opinion was based on the first (active inducement) analysis. That is much less devastating (to P2P, and indeed to the internet as we know it) than a holding based on the second theory (no substantial noninfringing use) would have been.
The concurring opinions were the Ginsburg opinion, to the effect of "who are you kidding, of course this technology has no substantial noninfringing use", and the Breyer concurrence, which says "looks like it may" and that the Ginsburg approach would require trashing the Sony decision.
So the real action, as the OP states, is in the concurring opinions, as to which the vote was 3-3. The "swing votes" here -- the guys who stayed on the sidelines of the concurring opinion debate -- are none other than Scalia, Thomas and the author of the lead opinion, Souter. Better put them in your goodnight prayers.
My guess is that the "swingers" are hoping that this decision will put this issue enough to rest and quell the present ferment just enough that they won't have to revisit it any time soon. I think there is a lot of unease in that quarter about the implications of in effect outlawing an entire technology, and worse, with no clear definition that would differentiate that from virtually any network transaction involving one machine serving content to another. I hope they are right, and will be able to leave this area alone for a while. It takes four votes to accept a case for review.
Slashdot Mirror
What are you relying on?
This is a total bluff on Microsoft's part. Yes, you can sue end users for patent infringement, but it only makes sense to do that if you have no customers and no products (i.e., only a paper patent).
It would be suicidal for Microsoft to sue true end users for patent infringement. It will never happen. IT managers have nothing to fear on that point. It's Microsoft that fears the collective power of the IT managers. It's just SO good when there is real competition. And that's what we have now, due to Linux, Oracle, Sun, etc. So Microsoft is forced to respond.
Balmer addressed this at the end of his answer: "[our customers are saying '] don't come try to license this individually.' So customer push drove us to where we got"
SCO was a much more credible threat, while it lasted, because you could see a company like that, which had nothing much to lose, actually going out and suing end users (at one point I believe they did).
If Microsoft can find (another) way to do this through a proxy, maybe that will work (if people don't immediately see through it).
But Microsoft has no practical ability to enforce its patents against end users without SERIOUSLY damaging their brand.
Sure, they can go after distributors, but then what - sue ALL of them? Shut down all Linux distros? Can you imagine the antitrust backlash from that? Trying to extinguish the competition en masse based on vague patent claims? Forget about it.
Then there is the question of what the patents are, whether they are valid, and whether they can be worked around.
Conventional wisdom, which probably holds true here, is that for companies like Microsoft, patents largely have defensive value. Any attempt to go out and wield them offensively usually has unbearable associated risks and/or costs.
Get a good laugh, because Microsoft is very far from accomplishing anything on these fronts, other than further validating Linux and open source.
You betchum. This is not going to last long enough to make it to market witout a back door for "National Security". No way, no how.
If you can charge this sucker with that much energy in five minutes, just IMAGINE what would happen if you were short it out. If you've ever shorted a plain old electrolytic capacitor with a screwdriver (a classic high school science stunt), you should understand. This is several orders of magnitude more powerful. With a capacitor like this, the entire screwdriver would instantly zap into a bright flash of light (hope you weren't holding it) - without even seriously discharging the capacitor. Really shorting it out would be like blowing up an entire tank of gas instantaneously. I think power supplies like this would have fearsome military uses, actually. I don't even want to say what comes to mind.
Pretty, I suppose, but looks like an operational nightmare. Just IMAGINE having to check for a cabling problem somewhere in one of these tightly packed systems, or worse yet, reconfiguring your server setup. This is one big reason for going with a simpler physical server setup and running VMs.
For a lot of people, AOL is the de facto OS, and that really isn't the same under Linux. Linux is way out of their comfort zone. I think this applies especially to people still on Windows 98. They are going to buy new computers anyway, with XP/Vista installed, and AOL preinstalled. No Linux for these folks.
That's all it would have taken. It's the default setting in IIS, but not the default in Apache2, as far as I recall. Anyway, the Gov's web site neglected to apply this fundamental protection. Tough crap, This is pretty silly stuff anyway.
Actually, this brings to mind that I have a small database (~ 15 MB) that I back up with a daily chron job that dumps the database, zips it with some related files, spilts this into emailable chunks and sends them in series to an account on gmail. The "split" files from each session show up in a single thread on Gmail, so they are very easy to fetch and restore. Every so often I go into gmail and weed out the superfluous backups. Other than that, there is no maintenance required, whatsoever, and I have pretty reliable off-site storage accessible from anywhere. Great solution for a small amount of critical data (you could encrypt the zip file if you were really paranoid). My daily sweep with BackupPC gets all this as well (original database plus the backup zip). I could of course have my email backup initiated by BackupPC, but I like having independent mechanisms. I just never want to get burned again by losing data through a drive failure or virus.
Absolutely.
If you're not processing transactions 24/7 this is pretty simple. I took an old machine, threw in a big ATA drive, and installed Ubuntu Linux and Backuppc, which Ubuntu has packaged. It automatically backs up every machine on my network, both Windows (via SMB) and Linux (via rsync). It has a Web browser interface with the manual permanently on line in the browser. While it doesn't do true "snapshots" it does give you a series of backup points going back in time, It shares redundant files to avoid needless duplication. My backup drive is less than half full. without compression. If space gets tight I can keep adding cheap drives to the backup box (and put them under LVM if I want to see them as a single large storage space). Any one of my drives (including the backup) could of course fail at any time, However, as long as I don't have multiple simultaneous failures, I should be pretty much covered. Barring a fire, I'm pretty safe. I check it every couple of weeks to make sure it is still alive (it always is). You could back up the backup drive to a portable drive every so often and keep those off site. if you were really paranoid,
I have had the occasion to restore from the backup when I did something stupid to a production directory. I found the most recent valid version of the directory among the backups, and just scp'd the entire directory to my production machine.
I've had much more trouble with unreadable tapes than with unreadable drives. I don't know where you are finding sub-$100 tape drives with any capacity. The ones I see are more like $2,000.
Watch for EMC to become a dominant player in the IT market, going way beyond disk drives and data storage. These folks are making some very strategic acquisitions.
Amen! And thank God for the GPL as well.
However, it must also be said that Java does not play well with Linux, and this is a major problem for Linux users. The Java substitutes on Debian never seem to cut it - among other things, they tend to be a version behind. You download a package from somewhere - it just runs under Windows, every time, but on Debian, Ubuntu, very often something will break. Fedora doesn't seem to fully solve the problem either, but I have very limited experience on it and may be missing something. Maybe there are gurus out there who can really work around this, but I've come to the conclusion that I can't rely on Linux when I have something that needs major a Java component. I try to avoid Java, but there are too many things that are implemented better on Java than on anything else. What I've ended up doing is keeping a Windows machine to provide the necessary services over the network, and hosting the rest on Linux.
A good example here is Lucene, the wonderful text indexing engine written in Java (and itself completely free, except for the language that it is implemented in). While Lucene has been extensively ported, you also end up needing the related document filters (PDF, Word, etc.) that are far better implemented in Java than anywhere else, at least in the form of a code library or component that you can natively include or link. Inevitably, you need a piece that is only available in Java, and inevitably, you run into problems trying to use such pieces under Linux.
All this is probably why Debian would love to find a way to include real Sun Java.
Still, in my estimation, it just isn't worth it to accept flawed license terms in order to solve this problem. Screw it. Debian, of all the distributions, must remain free. It is the bedrock, as you say. Let Sun be the one to yield on this.
I am hoping that more people will start writing things in Ruby and that more of the major packages in Java will be ported to Ruby.
More pressure needs to be put on Sun.
I've tried it now on my low end Windows box and my relatively powerful 64-bit Linux machine (Mozilla 1.5.0.3, Ubuntu Dapper). It is reasonably fast on even the wimpiest Windows machine (like the one I have), but annoyingly slow on Mozilla/Linux. At least that's what I saw in 2 minutes of testing. I would say there was at least a 300% difference in speed between the two platforms. Given equal hardware, it would be closer to 1000%.
Also in the real world, as others have pointed out, without macros and Visual Basic, this is going nowhere. It's an interesting toy.
Basically, this (below), plus a litte SQL, and 15 minutes of installation is all you really need to know/do to get very well started - you don't need a book --
<?php
$connection = mysql_connect($location,$user,$pass) or die("Couldn't connect to DB server.");
success_code = @mysql_select_db($db, $connection) or die("Couldn't select database.");
$sql = "SELECT * FROM $table";
$result_set = mysql_query( $sql );
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array( $result_set )) {
do_something_with( $row );
}
?>
The only even slightly tricky part is initially setting up permissions on MySQL and creating a database. The MySQL and PHP online manuals will show you that and everything else you need to know. Also, the package phpmyadmin automates a lot of MySQL administration tasks (from a Web-based client), so you don't initially have to learn a lot of command line stuff.
Ubuntu has all of this packaged and readily installable from Synaptic (as does Debian for that matter). Just click and install apache2, php5, php5-mysql, mysql-server, mysql-client and phpmyadmin and you should be ready to go.
Really though, after you get the basic concept, you should try Ruby on Rails.
Added plus is that you may be able to sue the lawyer if she gives you bad advice.
I bought a $79 NAS device - a Hawking HNAS1, which runs on embedded Linux and works with both Windows and Linux systems (and I would guess Macs). It goes on my network, and gets mounted locally via NFS (on Linux) or as a Share (on Windows) (Linux can also access it via Samba, in addition to NFS, but NFS is faster). The Hawking comes without a drive, so you can put in any IDE drive. You then set up cron jobs to run scripts that back up important files and databases, rotate the archives, and save them on the NAS device. Also, for really critical stuff, another script breaks up the archive into 6 meg chunks and sends it to gmail (where each backup job comes out as one thread). I use a 120G drive in the NAS device. Stuff that doesn't change (music, photos, old docs) periodically get backed up to DVDs. Stuff that actively changes gets backed up onto the NAS device and off-site email. No point in repeatedly backing up stuff that never changes. The automated email part also works well, but obviously has very limited capacity, and constantly has to be manually cleaned out - but for really critical stuff, it is great.
The Hawking is somewhat primitive and quite slow, but it gets the job done for me. I don't pay any attention to it, yet it has worked witout a hitch, completely in the background, for about a year. There are much faster NAS solutions out there, but most of them require Windows (or Samba).
Of course, this is all for home/SOHO tinkering. At the enterprise level, there are truly sophisticated systems involving mirroring, snapshotting and all kinds of stuff like that.
I thought of hiding my root password from myself
You gotta buy more to get more kick, but if you cut back the increased dosage you go into withdrawal.
The guy is a functional illiterate, or so ADD he can't remember the beginning of the sentence he wrote before finishing the end. Ugghh.
Could be there is a valid point in all of this, but I don't see how TFA advances it. What crap!
That was the theory a few years back. These days, the prevailing view, I think, is that, really, you know about the "language on the back of the ticket" before you even walk into the software store (or click on the download button). Most of the legal world, I'm afraid, views this sort of thing as routinely enforceable.
Moreover, more and more transactions are starting to involve a pre-payment clickwrap "I Agree" button.
But it doesn't work that way. The EULA says that the software is licensed and not sold. I.e., that you agree to characterize your acquisition of the software as a license and not a sale. This isn't just some statement of opinion - by being in the EULA it supposedly reflects your own AGREEMENT to just that.
What the hell does an end user "license" mean, anyway, if anything other than that the software itself is "licensed"? What other "license" are you getting (other than a "license" to do what Section 117 -- if it applied -- would allow you to do without a license)?
Anyway, the case that the Supreme Court actually declined to review was an employer-employee dispute (no doubt an employee seeking to hold up his former employer because there was no written agreement and therefore he owned the copyright to what he had written). But the employee probably never had something resembling an MS-style EULA to protect HIM. So he probably had nothing to trump the employer's Section 117 rights (or implied license rights, etc.). Therefore the employer won. It wasn't as if the employer was going out with the software to compete with the poor guy. It was just a routine case, and the Supreme Court was utterly indifferent about stepping in.
So here you have a free alternative to proprietary search engine indexing software that allows you to run an intranet with MS Office (as well as PDF, HTML, text, etc.) files on a non-MS web platform (it's "free" except insofar as Java itself is not "free"). In truth, the document parsers are external to Lucene, but they do work together, plus Lucene itself is a solid piece of work. Also, Lucene itself is just an indexing engine - the other plumbing and connections of a full "search engine" have to be constructed around it (the book gives you the basics you'll need to do that, or you can look at the numerous freely available solutions that make use of Lucene).
It's about time Slashdot has picked up on Lucene - This book has been out since last December, and the Lucene project has been around quite a bit longer than that. This is very powerful stuff.
That's right. However, it is only an APPLICATION - it may not be granted, but you never know. It would be an infringement of this "patent" - if it ever issues - to perform the claimed "method" by hand - manually bolding (say) all the numbers in a document. In fact, this process is perfomed in the usual process of writing a patent application - by convention, in a patent application, all of the numeric references to the drawings are put in bold face. So, someone revising a draft patent application so as to bold all of the figure references would infringe this patent (assuming there were no other numbers in the document, which is quite possible). Absurd.
The main ingredient here seems to be the Junxion box. But can't you replicate that with a bridge device on any laptop? The EV-DO card brings in the signal. Any el-cheapo wireless access point broadcasts it, and the bridge (in software) bridges the two devices.
You are right. There are two theories for this type of liability (and this is based on patent law really, rather than copyright law): (1) "actively inducing" another's direct infringement; and (2) selling something that is specifically adapted to facilitate infringement - something that has "no substantial noninfringing use".
The unanimous court opinion was based on the first (active inducement) analysis. That is much less devastating (to P2P, and indeed to the internet as we know it) than a holding based on the second theory (no substantial noninfringing use) would have been.
The concurring opinions were the Ginsburg opinion, to the effect of "who are you kidding, of course this technology has no substantial noninfringing use", and the Breyer concurrence, which says "looks like it may" and that the Ginsburg approach would require trashing the Sony decision.
So the real action, as the OP states, is in the concurring opinions, as to which the vote was 3-3. The "swing votes" here -- the guys who stayed on the sidelines of the concurring opinion debate -- are none other than Scalia, Thomas and the author of the lead opinion, Souter. Better put them in your goodnight prayers.
My guess is that the "swingers" are hoping that this decision will put this issue enough to rest and quell the present ferment just enough that they won't have to revisit it any time soon. I think there is a lot of unease in that quarter about the implications of in effect outlawing an entire technology, and worse, with no clear definition that would differentiate that from virtually any network transaction involving one machine serving content to another. I hope they are right, and will be able to leave this area alone for a while. It takes four votes to accept a case for review.
Close call, folks.