The origin of this (at least in part) was a campaign launched by the movie theater owners in the late 1960s. They called Cable TV "Pay TV", as if cable was going to force us to pay for TV. [Yes, we know people in the UK have to pay for over the air TV - this is a news story about the U.S.]
Of course, their motivation was they thought people would stop going to theaters if they could watch movies at home.
Last time I checked, there were more over the air free TV stations than ever, and theater owners are still selling tickets and popcorn.
If I were king (or the head of the FCC) the one thing that needs fixing is the 24 hour a day shopping channels being required to be "must carry" stations. I just question whether 24 hour a day "Genuine cubic Zirconia" rings is really serving the public interest.
Another little detail - once the transition is complete, and the "big channel shuffle" (tm) is completed, the goal is to have all of the stations moved to the "core" channels of 2-51... freeing up channels 52-69 for use for something useful like that "free" citywide WiFi.
The Lower VHF band (channels 2-6) is largely expected to be abandoned after this cutoff date. Digital does not propogate well there... the upper VHF band (7-13) will have digital stations. So I could see that lower VHF spectrum ultimately being used for something else.
Trivia Factoid: There is no UHF TV station on Channel 37 (over the air) in the United States.
An interesting point has been overlooked... the Wayback machine only stores the HTML text.... when you pull up an old page in the wayback machine (per the example), the other elements of the page (particularly the graphical elements) are pulled from the *current* web site by the browser, not the internet archive.... The Wayback Machine does not store graphics, only text.
The "92 Instances" cited were not the Internet Archive retrieving the graphics, but the person at the Law firm using a browser.
That person at the law firm is -not- a robot, so any theory about robots.txt having any legal significance is just plain wrong.
Just testing it now, the IA system did pull robots.txt at the time I asked to see the archived page. Whether it then uses that as a basis to refuse to pull up an archived HTML file may be another question, but at least at the time of this incident, blocking the page didn't happen...
[Again, I understand and in fact posted in another story that robots.txt has no legal significance, at least as of today)
Perhaps we need an expanded REP, adding different types of usage:
The one sentence that concerned me a bit, but probably the author's oversimplication - it says the operators wait to move the other car forward until they're sure the launch car has cleared the tower and isn't going to return backwards to the starting point.
I seriously hope there is a mechanical interlock involved, and not a human judgement involved.... "Well, it looked like it was going to make it up, but then I saw this cute chick walk by and I took my eyes off the tower..."
Of maybe SCO could buy up SGI.... I'm sure that could create enough confusion over copyrights and who wrote which lines of code in which variations of *nix to start the trial all over again.
The motivation here is not that Wired needs $12 - sending out 6 letters of their own, plus three from this company cost them more than the portion of the $12 they might collect.
In the magazine business, with very few exceptions, almost all of the subscription fee is going to people who sign you up for the subscription and the fulfillment company handling the subscription.
Magazines earn their income from advertising.
Audited circulation numbers in all of the print publishing is under severe scrutiny at the moment as a number of publishers have been using techniques (like sending out unpaid subscriptions but calling them paid) to inflate subscriber numbers to keep up their advertising rates.
Was "Shortest way" stated as a requirement for this function? Fastest? Uses the least amount of temporary storage? Portable on 16, 32 and 64 bit machines? Most easily understood by the programmer coming behind you?
Now for the real world test. Now please write a Unit Test plan for this function, and document the function's purpose, correct invocation, inputs, and expected outputs, including any error conditions.
When you have successfully completed the scripts for your unit test plans, run your regression test and save the test results. Check the code into the Source Code management system, schedule a code walkthrough with your peers. After the issues raised in the walkthrough are adressed and corrected, please submit your documenation package to QA for independent verification and testing.
Writing the code is such a small part of the job of programming.
I would have all 3 devices reread the block and see if they still disagree, and if they don't, then rewrite the entire block with the correct data so that the same bit error doesn't recur anytime in the near future. Do one device at a time, thank you!
After rereading, if the three copies still don't agree, then apply the vote... but really, by looking at just one int at a time, you risk corrupting all three copies. Put a check sum around the whole thing, and the one (or two copies) that have the checksum correct are the correct copies.
See the bigger picture... of course, if you're hiring a coding grunt that will salute and glady write the code that wipes out all three copies of your unrecoverable data, then I guess you deserve what you asked for.
As soon as someone encounters an encrypted communication stream using WEP and then use a tool to decrypt it, that person has demonstrated criminal intent. You can no longer claim that you thought the access port was open for public use.
To analogize, which seems to be the trend on this story, you are arguing "Yes, I know you caught me inside his house", but he only used a deadbolt on his wood frame door. He should have used a steel door and attached it to 4x8 poles embedded 20 feet in the ground.
As soon as you open the lock, you are the criminal, not the person who didn't create a strong enough lock. A lock's purpose is to keep honest people out.
One way that pre-European cultures in America hunted buffalo (since they did not have horses or firearms) was to get the buffalo to start stampeding and drive them off a cliff. In that case, it was the ones at the front of the herd that died first.
Never were taught that in college, were you? Kind of breaks that fantasy story about how Native Americans respected nature and have an inherent moral superiority.
An interesting point, and one of my favorite stories...
After the passage of the telecom reform act (Note to submitter: it created CLECs, not ILECs), the ILECs figured the surest way to protect their local turf from CLEC competition was to jack up the interconnection tariffs as high as the state would allow. If someone was "stupid" enough to switch to a CLEC, every time they dialed into a local phone number that was controlled by the ILEC, the CLEC had to pay a per minute charge - talk about a non-viable business plan (for the CLECs)...
Then a funny thing happened. Dialup Internet exploded, and suddenly most of the ISPs were getting access numbers from the CLECs and turning off the PRIs they rented from the ILEC. Now when people were dialing into AOL or their favorite dialup ISP, the ILEC was having to pay the CLEC to terminate the call for them!... The ILEC customer is paying a flat monthly rate, and the longer their customer stays dialed into the internet, the more money the ILEC has to pay to the CLEC (since they jacked up the rates as high as possible, this turned out to be a lot of money). SBC finally lost in California, and had to cut a major check recently to Pacwest, a CLEC that operates mainly in California.
This process is called "reciprocal compensation" if you want to read up on all the lurid details of how the ILECs screwed themselves.
Of course, now the ILECs see the folly of their ways. Different states and different ILECs are responding to this in different ways:
1) Try to get the reciprocal comp removed from calls to ISPs by calling them interstate in nature, even though the person is dialing a local access number (they lost in court on that idea)
2) Impose an artificial cap on the limit on how much the ILECs have to pay (based on no legislation, and in contradiction to the intent of the 96 act)
3) Refuse to pay and make the CLECs sue, and hope they run out of money or time first, or you can pay off enough politicians to repeal the law.
4) Ask the state regulators to lower the per minute charge back to the number it should have been in the first place
5) Scrap the entire idea, and build the costs of 'terminating' calls into each subscribers basic rate, so nobody pays anyone a per minute fee (Florida has been heading in that direction)
6) Buy up all the viable CLECs (see: SBC/AT&T + Verizon/MCI)...
(note that AT&T and MCI were long distance carriers *only* (IXCs) before the 96 act, but became very active in the local marketplace recently - Sprint was and is a hybrid - they are the ILEC in many communities - they are the US's largest non-RBOC local phone company - but also a nationwide long distance provider)
Because I run a web server with a database that everyone wants to "scrape", I see this kind of rogue spider hiding behind proxy servers that don't read robots.txt and try to hide every day.
I now ban every known -open- proxy IP and aggressively gather lists in order to block access.
However I think his claim that ignoring robots.txt as being "illegal" is unfounded. Civil suits are not the same thing as criminal matters.
In the same paragraph in the letter he both says:
"None of HMS's harvesting source code even mentions the ROBOTS file, let alone obeys it." and
"Yet at least one of the authors of the harvesting system did know about it, since the "RequestDistribution.txt" document in the harvester source code actually contains a reference to the W3C standard for ROBOTS.TXT."
Your honor, I would submit that one or the other of those statements is not true.
And robots.txt is -not- a W3C standard. It is a voluntary agreement among web spider authors.
"It is not an official standard backed by a standards body, or owned by any commercial organisation. It is not enforced by anybody, and there no guarantee that all current and future robots will use it. Consider it a common facility the majority of robot authors offer the WWW community to protect WWW server against unwanted accesses by their robots."
If fact, WC3 -explicity- says on their web site that robots.txt is not a compulsary standard:
An organization deliberately not keeping IP logs in order to hide criminal behavio[u]r is just an invitation for some power-hungry government to pass new laws requiring it. It seems like I read about that recently on Slashdot.
It may be unneccessary anyhow - in all likelihood some upstream router does a complete IP trace which allows reconstruction of TCP/IP traffic at a later time. Web Logs are just simpler to access.
The best ally of a totalitarian despot is the anarchist.
Read on down to the end of MasterCard's press relesase.
The U.S. Government is currently considering legislation to expand the Gramm-Leach-Bliley law requiring better security procedures for personal financial information. Currently MasterCard is subject to this law - third party processors are not. I would not be at all surprised if no real accounts have actually been compromised, but then I like tin foil hats.
Now the number of cards considered "at risk" is only 68,000 - and the spokesperson for Master card says "It wasn't a large amount of fraud, just an abnormal pattern that triggered our system.... We have tracking systems in place to find the common point of interaction."
Of course, no person who isn't a criminal could oppose "protecting" your personal information better, could they? Especially if it helps protect the children...
Even better method to stop this - suggest that we need access to ISP server logs in order to identify and deport illegal immigrants. That will be the last you ever hear of this legislation.
I was named as a co-inventor on a number of patent aplpications (-after- I left the job managing the software design for the system) related to electronic stock trading... such novel ideas as storing the open orders in main computer memory in order to match them quickly.
I refused to sign the application. I provided the lawyers with details of how each claim matched software a group I was a part of had designed 10 years earlier, and it was no more novel at that point 10 years earlier. Every claim was something that every high volume financial instrument trading system has to do. In fact, my employer had done a survey of every major exchange in the world prior to developing the software, and very clearly established the concepts were prior art.
What was explained to me was the patents were being submitted for the purpose of having them thrown out, so that any similar future attempts to patent such things would be thrown out as well. They had just recently "won" a protracted patent infringement suit filed against them - but had to spend millions of dollars to bounce out a patent claim about showing bids on the left side or the screen and offers on the right side of a computer screen.
Had they agreed to turn over the patents (if issued) to a non-profit organization that would license them without charge in the unlikely situation that the patent was approved, I would have been more cooperative. To have a broad patent issued in an area where I am a subject matter expert would have the effect of interfering with my ability to work for another similar organization in the future.
My theory about this patent is someone forgot to tell the patent examiner that the applicant -wanted- her to reject it.
I love using that line on people, since the culture has done such a good job on confusing people about penguins and where they live.
Perhaps we should start a compaign to reduce the annual losses of the penguin populations due to increasing polar bear predation... We can blame it on the failure of the US to ratify the Kyoto Treaty.
I'm sure that campaign could raise as much money as Jerry Lewis has done trying to "cure" diseases that are the result of genetic defects.
of course that cuts both ways. It could give aging script kiddies ideas for methods to attempt to insert bogus code into an open source project that they were incapable of thinking of on their own.
Just like Orwell's "1984" was a warning, it also has the potential to become a roadmap.
Nothing would make many libertarians and "small government" Conservatives happier than the Supreme Court reversing WICKARD v. FILBURN, 317 U.S. 111. - that was the core of this highly charged issue. If wasn't about just about pot smoking.
Had the liberals on the court joined with the most conservative (to allow states to overrule Federal laws where there is no interstate commerce), everything the government has done since the New Deal would be "in play" as having no Federal Jurisdiction... the 9th and 10th Amendments might even be looked at again as being relevant.
The background on WICKARD v. FILBURN was that in order to stabilize farm production, FDR set up agencies that can regulate food production, characteristics, assess 'fees' on people growing the product - with the force of law behind them. Many of these exist to this day - [blue diamond] almonds, [sunkist] fruits, [Ocean Spray] Cranberries, [Sun Maid] raisins. If you have land in California and plant almond trees, and then sell those almonds, you are breaking the law (unless you belong to the blue almond cooperative, agree to their rules and pay them a fee that is used to fund marketing of the product).
In the 1942 case[1], a farmer was growing wheat on his farm in excess of what the Federal marketing program permitted. He did not sell any of the excess wheat. He fed the wheat to his cattle, used it for "personal consumption" (important for the current case), and kept some as seed for the following year. The Court in 1942 decided they had to protect the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938[2], even though on an individual basis there was no actual interstate commerce... (the needs of the many...)
3) "Back" is ambiguous about whether you want to back up within the frame or back up from the main frame... 4) poorly designed frames make assumptions about the screen size or text size of the browser, making some portion of the text unviewable because it exceeds the width or height of the frame (think people using larger text sizes due to vision issues)
Even more annoying are the frames pages that gratuitously force the main frame to be loaded if you try to look at only the frame..... or people who try to disable right clicking with javascript...
I sure hope the disaster recovery plan has provisions for storage of the private decryption key. If it is stored with the backup, then the encryption was worthless. If the primary data is destroyed and only then someone realizes there is no backup of the key, then the backup is worthless.
One place I worked had a very extensive manual process for operations (run program A, when it finishes, start program B and the job to transmit the file to another computer, etc.... 1000s of steps (it as insane, but that's not the point)... The file being used to track all of this critical information was being kept on a development machine in the primary data center, with no special backup procedure. Had the "worst case" scenario happened, they would have fallen over to the backup facility only to realize that the backup operations staff in another state would have no set of instructions for what to do the first evening after the disaster... Unless every step was done correctly and in order, the systems would be useless on Day 2.
With all of that ultramafic/peridotite rock on the Earth and most of it in constant contact with vast quantities of Dihydrogen Monoxide - the amount of naturally occuring methane gas must be incredibly huge!
We must launch an aggressive global program to isolate these dangerous substances, otherwise life as we know it will surely end due to the global warming caused by all of that methane gas. The United Nations is the only organization capable of protecting us.
Slashdot Mirror
The origin of this (at least in part) was a campaign launched by the movie theater owners in the late 1960s. They called Cable TV "Pay TV", as if cable was going to force us to pay for TV. [Yes, we know people in the UK have to pay for over the air TV - this is a news story about the U.S.]
Of course, their motivation was they thought people would stop going to theaters if they could watch movies at home.
Last time I checked, there were more over the air free TV stations than ever, and theater owners are still selling tickets and popcorn.
If I were king (or the head of the FCC) the one thing that needs fixing is the 24 hour a day shopping channels being required to be "must carry" stations. I just question whether 24 hour a day "Genuine cubic Zirconia" rings is really serving the public interest.
Another little detail - once the transition is complete, and the "big channel shuffle" (tm) is completed, the goal is to have all of the stations moved to the "core" channels of 2-51... freeing up channels 52-69 for use for something useful like that "free" citywide WiFi.
The Lower VHF band (channels 2-6) is largely expected to be abandoned after this cutoff date. Digital does not propogate well there... the upper VHF band (7-13) will have digital stations. So I could see that lower VHF spectrum ultimately being used for something else.
Trivia Factoid: There is no UHF TV station on Channel 37 (over the air) in the United States.
An interesting point has been overlooked... the Wayback machine only stores the HTML text.... when you pull up an old page in the wayback machine (per the example), the other elements of the page (particularly the graphical elements) are pulled from the *current* web site by the browser, not the internet archive.... The Wayback Machine does not store graphics, only text.
/
The "92 Instances" cited were not the Internet Archive retrieving the graphics, but the person at the Law firm using a browser.
That person at the law firm is -not- a robot, so any theory about robots.txt having any legal significance is just plain wrong.
Just testing it now, the IA system did pull robots.txt at the time I asked to see the archived page. Whether it then uses that as a basis to refuse to pull up an archived HTML file may be another question, but at least at the time of this incident, blocking the page didn't happen...
[Again, I understand and in fact posted in another story that robots.txt has no legal significance, at least as of today)
Perhaps we need an expanded REP, adding different types of usage:
User-agent: *
Disallow-in-Lawsuits:
The one sentence that concerned me a bit, but probably the author's oversimplication - it says the operators wait to move the other car forward until they're sure the launch car has cleared the tower and isn't going to return backwards to the starting point.
I seriously hope there is a mechanical interlock involved, and not a human judgement involved.... "Well, it looked like it was going to make it up, but then I saw this cute chick walk by and I took my eyes off the tower..."
Of maybe SCO could buy up SGI.... I'm sure that could create enough confusion over copyrights and who wrote which lines of code in which variations of *nix to start the trial all over again.
The motivation here is not that Wired needs $12 - sending out 6 letters of their own, plus three from this company cost them more than the portion of the $12 they might collect.
In the magazine business, with very few exceptions, almost all of the subscription fee is going to people who sign you up for the subscription and the fulfillment company handling the subscription.
Magazines earn their income from advertising.
Audited circulation numbers in all of the print publishing is under severe scrutiny at the moment as a number of publishers have been using techniques (like sending out unpaid subscriptions but calling them paid) to inflate subscriber numbers to keep up their advertising rates.
Was "Shortest way" stated as a requirement for this function? Fastest? Uses the least amount of temporary storage? Portable on 16, 32 and 64 bit machines? Most easily understood by the programmer coming behind you?
Now for the real world test. Now please write a Unit Test plan for this function, and document the function's purpose, correct invocation, inputs, and expected outputs, including any error conditions.
When you have successfully completed the scripts for your unit test plans, run your regression test and save the test results. Check the code into the Source Code management system, schedule a code walkthrough with your peers. After the issues raised in the walkthrough are adressed and corrected, please submit your documenation package to QA for independent verification and testing.
Writing the code is such a small part of the job of programming.
Piling on as we all love to do...
I would have all 3 devices reread the block and see if they still disagree, and if they don't, then rewrite the entire block with the correct data so that the same bit error doesn't recur anytime in the near future. Do one device at a time, thank you!
After rereading, if the three copies still don't agree, then apply the vote... but really, by looking at just one int at a time, you risk corrupting all three copies. Put a check sum around the whole thing, and the one (or two copies) that have the checksum correct are the correct copies.
See the bigger picture... of course, if you're hiring a coding grunt that will salute and glady write the code that wipes out all three copies of your unrecoverable data, then I guess you deserve what you asked for.
As soon as someone encounters an encrypted communication stream using WEP and then use a tool to decrypt it, that person has demonstrated criminal intent. You can no longer claim that you thought the access port was open for public use.
To analogize, which seems to be the trend on this story, you are arguing "Yes, I know you caught me inside his house", but he only used a deadbolt on his wood frame door. He should have used a steel door and attached it to 4x8 poles embedded 20 feet in the ground.
As soon as you open the lock, you are the criminal, not the person who didn't create a strong enough lock. A lock's purpose is to keep honest people out.
One way that pre-European cultures in America hunted buffalo (since they did not have horses or firearms) was to get the buffalo to start stampeding and drive them off a cliff. In that case, it was the ones at the front of the herd that died first.
e r=25
http://lewisandclark.state.mt.us/sites.asp?IDNumb
Never were taught that in college, were you? Kind of breaks that fantasy story about how Native Americans respected nature and have an inherent moral superiority.
An interesting point, and one of my favorite stories...
After the passage of the telecom reform act (Note to submitter: it created CLECs, not ILECs), the ILECs figured the surest way to protect their local turf from CLEC competition was to jack up the interconnection tariffs as high as the state would allow. If someone was "stupid" enough to switch to a CLEC, every time they dialed into a local phone number that was controlled by the ILEC, the CLEC had to pay a per minute charge - talk about a non-viable business plan (for the CLECs)...
Then a funny thing happened. Dialup Internet exploded, and suddenly most of the ISPs were getting access numbers from the CLECs and turning off the PRIs they rented from the ILEC. Now when people were dialing into AOL or their favorite dialup ISP, the ILEC was having to pay the CLEC to terminate the call for them!... The ILEC customer is paying a flat monthly rate, and the longer their customer stays dialed into the internet, the more money the ILEC has to pay to the CLEC (since they jacked up the rates as high as possible, this turned out to be a lot of money). SBC finally lost in California, and had to cut a major check recently to Pacwest, a CLEC that operates mainly in California.
This process is called "reciprocal compensation" if you want to read up on all the lurid details of how the ILECs screwed themselves.
Of course, now the ILECs see the folly of their ways. Different states and different ILECs are responding to this in different ways:
1) Try to get the reciprocal comp removed from calls to ISPs by calling them interstate in nature, even though the person is dialing a local access number (they lost in court on that idea)
2) Impose an artificial cap on the limit on how much the ILECs have to pay (based on no legislation, and in contradiction to the intent of the 96 act)
3) Refuse to pay and make the CLECs sue, and hope they run out of money or time first, or you can pay off enough politicians to repeal the law.
4) Ask the state regulators to lower the per minute charge back to the number it should have been in the first place
5) Scrap the entire idea, and build the costs of 'terminating' calls into each subscribers basic rate, so nobody pays anyone a per minute fee (Florida has been heading in that direction)
6) Buy up all the viable CLECs (see: SBC/AT&T + Verizon/MCI)...
(note that AT&T and MCI were long distance carriers *only* (IXCs) before the 96 act, but became very active in the local marketplace recently - Sprint was and is a hybrid - they are the ILEC in many communities - they are the US's largest non-RBOC local phone company - but also a nationwide long distance provider)
So perhaps the VoIP would have worked if they had stopped the kidz from sharing all that music and stuff... :)
Your statement of fact is based on what?
/robots.txt rules affect only user agents that honor it; it is not a generic method for access control."
As just one example, PlanetLab.org runs an entire network of open proxies.
http://codeen.cs.princeton.edu/
Because I run a web server with a database that everyone wants to "scrape", I see this kind of rogue spider hiding behind proxy servers that don't read robots.txt and try to hide every day.
I now ban every known -open- proxy IP and aggressively gather lists in order to block access.
However I think his claim that ignoring robots.txt as being "illegal" is unfounded. Civil suits are not the same thing as criminal matters.
In the same paragraph in the letter he both says:
"None of HMS's harvesting source code even mentions the ROBOTS file, let alone obeys it." and
"Yet at least one of the authors of the harvesting system did know about it, since the "RequestDistribution.txt" document in the harvester source code actually contains a reference to the W3C standard for ROBOTS.TXT."
Your honor, I would submit that one or the other of those statements is not true.
And robots.txt is -not- a W3C standard. It is a voluntary agreement among web spider authors.
From:
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html
"It is not an official standard backed by a standards body, or owned by any commercial organisation. It is not enforced by anybody, and there no guarantee that all current and future robots will use it. Consider it a common facility the majority of robot authors offer the WWW community to protect WWW server against unwanted accesses by their robots."
If fact, WC3 -explicity- says on their web site that robots.txt is not a compulsary standard:
http://validator.w3.org/docs/checklink#bot
"Note that
If you're going to accuse your employer of illegal activity, you sure better have your facts right.
An organization deliberately not keeping IP logs in order to hide criminal behavio[u]r is just an invitation for some power-hungry government to pass new laws requiring it. It seems like I read about that recently on Slashdot.
It may be unneccessary anyhow - in all likelihood some upstream router does a complete IP trace which allows reconstruction of TCP/IP traffic at a later time. Web Logs are just simpler to access.
The best ally of a totalitarian despot is the anarchist.
97.32% of all statistics on the Internet are made up.
Perhaps like Paris Hilton's cell phone being hacked! (?) Pictures at 11.
Read on down to the end of MasterCard's press relesase.
. asp?ID=61946
... We have tracking systems in place to find the common point of interaction."
The U.S. Government is currently considering legislation to expand the Gramm-Leach-Bliley law requiring better security procedures for personal financial information. Currently MasterCard is subject to this law - third party processors are not. I would not be at all surprised if no real accounts have actually been compromised, but then I like tin foil hats.
In fact, Master Card is already backtracking:
http://www.accessnorthga.com/news/ap_newfullstory
Now the number of cards considered "at risk" is only 68,000 - and the spokesperson for Master card says "It wasn't a large amount of fraud, just an abnormal pattern that triggered our system.
Of course, no person who isn't a criminal could oppose "protecting" your personal information better, could they? Especially if it helps protect the children...
Even better method to stop this - suggest that we need access to ISP server logs in order to identify and deport illegal immigrants. That will be the last you ever hear of this legislation.
I was named as a co-inventor on a number of patent aplpications (-after- I left the job managing the software design for the system) related to electronic stock trading... such novel ideas as storing the open orders in main computer memory in order to match them quickly.
I refused to sign the application. I provided the lawyers with details of how each claim matched software a group I was a part of had designed 10 years earlier, and it was no more novel at that point 10 years earlier. Every claim was something that every high volume financial instrument trading system has to do. In fact, my employer had done a survey of every major exchange in the world prior to developing the software, and very clearly established the concepts were prior art.
What was explained to me was the patents were being submitted for the purpose of having them thrown out, so that any similar future attempts to patent such things would be thrown out as well. They had just recently "won" a protracted patent infringement suit filed against them - but had to spend millions of dollars to bounce out a patent claim about showing bids on the left side or the screen and offers on the right side of a computer screen.
Had they agreed to turn over the patents (if issued) to a non-profit organization that would license them without charge in the unlikely situation that the patent was approved, I would have been more cooperative. To have a broad patent issued in an area where I am a subject matter expert would have the effect of interfering with my ability to work for another similar organization in the future.
My theory about this patent is someone forgot to tell the patent examiner that the applicant -wanted- her to reject it.
I love using that line on people, since the culture has done such a good job on confusing people about penguins and where they live.
Perhaps we should start a compaign to reduce the annual losses of the penguin populations due to increasing polar bear predation... We can blame it on the failure of the US to ratify the Kyoto Treaty.
I'm sure that campaign could raise as much money as Jerry Lewis has done trying to "cure" diseases that are the result of genetic defects.
of course that cuts both ways. It could give aging script kiddies ideas for methods to attempt to insert bogus code into an open source project that they were incapable of thinking of on their own.
Just like Orwell's "1984" was a warning, it also has the potential to become a roadmap.
Nothing would make many libertarians and "small government" Conservatives happier than the Supreme Court reversing WICKARD v. FILBURN, 317 U.S. 111. - that was the core of this highly charged issue. If wasn't about just about pot smoking.
i al s/conlaw/wickard.html u ra l_adjustment_act_of_2.htm
Had the liberals on the court joined with the most conservative (to allow states to overrule Federal laws where there is no interstate commerce), everything the government has done since the New Deal would be "in play" as having no Federal Jurisdiction... the 9th and 10th Amendments might even be looked at again as being relevant.
The background on WICKARD v. FILBURN was that in order to stabilize farm production, FDR set up agencies that can regulate food production, characteristics, assess 'fees' on people growing the product - with the force of law behind them. Many of these exist to this day - [blue diamond] almonds, [sunkist] fruits, [Ocean Spray] Cranberries, [Sun Maid] raisins. If you have land in California and plant almond trees, and then sell those almonds, you are breaking the law (unless you belong to the blue almond cooperative, agree to their rules and pay them a fee that is used to fund marketing of the product).
In the 1942 case[1], a farmer was growing wheat on his farm in excess of what the Federal marketing program permitted. He did not sell any of the excess wheat. He fed the wheat to his cattle, used it for "personal consumption" (important for the current case), and kept some as seed for the following year. The Court in 1942 decided they had to protect the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938[2], even though on an individual basis there was no actual interstate commerce... (the needs of the many...)
IANAL
[1]http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftr
[2]http://www.webref.org/agriculture/a/agricult
3) "Back" is ambiguous about whether you want to back up within the frame or back up from the main frame...
4) poorly designed frames make assumptions about the screen size or text size of the browser, making some portion of the text unviewable because it exceeds the width or height of the frame (think people using larger text sizes due to vision issues)
Even more annoying are the frames pages that gratuitously force the main frame to be loaded if you try to look at only the frame..... or people who try to disable right clicking with javascript...
I sure hope the disaster recovery plan has provisions for storage of the private decryption key. If it is stored with the backup, then the encryption was worthless. If the primary data is destroyed and only then someone realizes there is no backup of the key, then the backup is worthless.
One place I worked had a very extensive manual process for operations (run program A, when it finishes, start program B and the job to transmit the file to another computer, etc.... 1000s of steps (it as insane, but that's not the point)... The file being used to track all of this critical information was being kept on a development machine in the primary data center, with no special backup procedure. Had the "worst case" scenario happened, they would have fallen over to the backup facility only to realize that the backup operations staff in another state would have no set of instructions for what to do the first evening after the disaster... Unless every step was done correctly and in order, the systems would be useless on Day 2.
Next thing, IBM will be launching a research project to simulate God.
Life is not a Finite State Machine. Deal with it.
Wow!
With all of that ultramafic/peridotite rock on the Earth and most of it in constant contact with vast quantities of Dihydrogen Monoxide - the amount of naturally occuring methane gas must be incredibly huge!
We must launch an aggressive global program to isolate these dangerous substances, otherwise life as we know it will surely end due to the global warming caused by all of that methane gas. The United Nations is the only organization capable of protecting us.