Does this patent not cover the same sort of things that RTF already does?
The patent doesn't cover any features of a serialization format, it covers features of what a system does with the data; it certainly covers things that a system using RTF might want to do with it, and if, in fact, RTF applications did use the patented system before the patent was filed, they would be prior art which would invalidate the patent. But, given that Microsoft invented and was a big user of RTF, you'd expect that's the kind of thing that they would have raised rather forcefully at trial.
There is supposed to be a requirement that a patent not be awarded if the idea would be obvious to anyone skilled in the area. Seeing as XML was designed to have 'applications' such as word processor document formats how is this not obvious?
That might be an argument against Microsoft's recent patent on using XML for a word processor document format, but is hardly an argument against i4i's patent on a particulary way of handling data, regardless of serialization format, containing both a raw content stream and tags that apply at points within that stream.
(Note that I am not saying that there aren't reasonable arguments based on obviousness, prior art, or other bases against i4i's patent, just that "XML was intended to be used for word processor document formats, so its use for them is obvious" isn't even close to one of them, since that's not what i4i's patent covers.)
Last I checked, the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas was a court of the federal government.
it also happens to always mean the US Supreme Court when used in citations.
No, the phrase "US Court" does not mean that when used in citations. "US", when used as an abbreviation in case citations, does mean "United States Reports", which is one of the reporters for the US Supreme Court, but you'd never use the phrase "US Court" in a proper legal citation to mean "the US Supreme Court".
For those that are all happy and "Yay, MSFT got screwed!" I would suggest looking at this picture explaining the patent in question and seriously think about it.
That picture does not, on its own, explain anything, and certainly not the patent in question. It is one of a series of 10 similar figures that are part of the patent (the whole patent is attached to the complaint as Exhibit A.)
From the looks of it this patent is so vague pretty much ANYTHING that uses the XML format to manipulate data in any way would could possibly be looking at a lawsuit, should this patent troll decide they are a potential cash cow.
No, the patent covers a particular approach to handling data wherein you track a raw content stream separately from the tags ("metacodes"). Something similar to what is patented (but maybe not enough to be within the scope of the patent) might conceivably be used (at least, the approach makes sense) in lots of text-oriented applications (word processors, browsers, etc.), but probably not used in most applications that use structured data where the text content wouldn't also be used, as-is, as a text stream without the tags. So the scope is much narrower with respect to XML use than you suggest (conversely, its broader in another respect, since it is not limited to XML -- in fact, it refers to use with SGML as the main example throughout the patent, but the claim isn't limited to any particular markup language.)
MS claiming linux violates 235 patents without telling which ones, is not patent trolling?
Its mostly patent FUD designed to inhibit Linux adoption. Its only patent trolling when its used to back lawsuits or extortion of license fees (which doesn't seem to be the main use of the claim.)
The ruling was handed down in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, which is a US federal court located in Texas, not a Texas Court. And the ruling was based on federal patent law, not on some provision of Texas law, and applies to sales in the whole of the US.
As I understand it, no, it's not so obvious. It seems to me that what we have are two laws that are coming into direct conflict with each other. One says that you can do something, and one says you can't. The issue at hand, the thing that these court cases are supposed to be settling, is which one has priority.
Actually, there is no conflict. The fair use provision of US copyright law does not say "you can do something". It says that that the a particular provision of copyright law which create specific exclusive rights does not apply to certain actions. It does not say that no other provisions of law limit those actions. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), while within (not, as you say, "a front for") copyright law, is not the particular exclusive rights provision to which the fair use exception applies, but a separate prohibition. So its prohibitions in no way conflict with the limitations on the other provisions imposed by the fair use provision.
Has the Fair Use provision originally been written as a positive consumer right notwithstanding any other provision of law, rather than an exception to the particular exclusive rights provision of copyright law, there would be a conflict, but probably (under normal canons of legal construction) the DMCA would still win out: newer enactments that are clearly intended to overturn or limit older ones generally take priority.
Now, there is an argument that Fair Use, while broader than the rights given under the First Amendment, overlaps with those rights, and that some of the things the DMCA prohibits may be protected under the First Amendment, and that would be a real conflict between two provisions of law, and one that (as the US Constitution trumps any mere statute) the DMCA would lose if the conflict existed. But as long as the argument is on Fair Use, per se, and not the First Amendment, the DMCA is going to win in court every time, and it will be a proper application of the rules of legal construction that it does.
No, the net effect is that there is no possible way to exercise your right to a single backup of a DVD for your personal use.
As this appears to be the intent of the DMCA -- to make it legally impossible to copy "protected" media -- this doesn't show that the ruling is horrible. It shows that it is a correct application of a horrible law.
While fair use in some respects overlaps with Constitutional rights under the First Amendment, and there might be some argument that there is a First Amendment restriction here, I haven't heard that, just complaints that the application here of a later statute (the DMCA) sharply limited exercise of a statutory right that existed before the new law in a way which seems clearly within both the letter and intent of the newer law. Doing so may make the law bad, but it doesn't make the ruling bad; judges aren't supposed to issue rulings based on what laws Congress should and should not have passed (but for Constitutional restrictions on Congress' power), but on the laws they have passed.
If you don't like the DMCA, take it up with Congress.
Even after several thousand years, domesticated cats are no more useful now then they have ever been.
That's because cats weren't actively domesticated in the sense that dogs were, so much as they were tolerated around humans because we liked them doing what they do on their own (mostly, eat rodents.) That doesn't mean they haven't been significantly changed by their contact with humans (the complex social structures seen in feral domestic cats are not, AFAIK, found in their wild ancestors), just that the changes aren't driven by utility to humans the way they have been with dogs, which were selectively bred for various uses.
They have learned a lot more than other animals given the same opportunity.
No, they've been bred for lots of specific tasks. An ability to learn may be part of the product of that, and it may be part of the reason that they were used and bred for those tasks in the first place, but they aren't up against other animals that were "given the same opportunity".
Cats were naturally useful to humans without any effort by humans to change them, and so humans didn't put the effort into changing them that they did into dogs. And, so, unsurprisingly, dogs have changed in ways useful to humans more than cats have over the same period of time.
No one is going to keep an animal that will challenge its owner for leadership.
Then why, pray tell, do we keep cats around?
Cats don't usually have any interest in leadership. Most feline species live as solitary hunters, as opposed to canine species that are usually pack animals. Lions are the only feline species I can think of offhand that live in groups.
While most large cats may be solitary hunteers, there is a commonly encountered (and more relevant to this discussion) cat that lives in groups where resources permit: the domestic cat. Feral domestic cats, when living in areas where there sufficient resources form colonies with complex social organizations.
a) Why would a strong wall move stop bearing load and overload others?
I'm not sure if this is what GPs source was saying, but I would think the real problem with the extra-strong wall is the same with the extra-strong bones (if there is a problem with the former at all): it doesn't flex, so if its attached firmly to another weaker section, and that weaker section is subject to a load which causes the weaker section to deform, instead of the stronger section deforming elastically and removing the strain on the connection with the weaker section, the stronger section stays firm and the connection fails.
A company can put whatever it wants on a page and call it a "contract", but illegal contracts are not enforceable.
Sure but, unfortunately, though, there's generally no added penalty for putting illegal terms in a contract with a severability clause, so there is little incentive for companies not to use their contracts as vehicles for distributing FUD that scares people away from exercising rights they have in law.
It definitely holds little value to business and industry because they like to retain control over there information and rightly so.
Actually, "business and industry" likes to outsource anything that isn't a core competency, and that often includes managing computer hardware. Paid server hosting services don't mostly survive on individual, nonbusiness users, they survive by hosting servers for businesses.
This even includes handling material covered by mandates like HIPAA; e.g., many healthcare providers outsource billing and other functions that involve the exchange of HIPAA PHI using HIPAA standard transactions.
If Google passes the line between privacy and convenience, we will read some horror stories about it and it can actually lead to some very interesting developments like FSF getting into the future drama as it will be based on Linux.
How does that give the FSF a roll in it? The only link FSF has to the Linux kernel is that they wrote the GPL, and Linux is licensed under v2 of that license. The FSF doesn't own the Linux kernel.
Now, I admit, Stallman personally is likely to comment on Chrome OS, and, given his reactions to cloud computing in general, those comments are likely to be generally negative. But I don't see why the FSF, as such, would be likely to have any kind of issue with Chrome, unless Google violates the terms of the GPL v2 with it, which there doesn't seem to be any reason to assume they would.
Google thinks everyone buys their "not evil" kind of slogans and design software based on it.
Actually, I think Google designs software based on what they think will be well-received in the market so as to advance their various corporate goals (all of which boil down to "profit", through one avenue or another.) I don't think that they assume that everyone believes their "do no evil" slogan, or any of their other marketing copy.
We may end up reading things like "World's first spyware OS" right here, on Slashdot.
Well, sure, all kinds of crazy things get posted on Slashdot.
Also, being open source won`t change a thing. If it gathers your location and posts it to Google servers, it won`t matter if it is open source or not.
Well, yeah, it will; because if it is open source, a less-evil competitor will be able to (legally) create and release an alternative version that strips out the offending functionality (even if Google's backend requires it, someone will create an alternate implementation of the backend protocol than the less-evil desktop OS can connect to.) Whereas if you tried to do the same thing stripping out features of windows you didn't like and distributing it as "Joe's Improved OS", Microsoft lawyers would be all over you like white on rice.
The web caught on because the alternatives like gopher or dumb terminals were terrible compared to being able to embed images and other content.
The web (at least, the HTTP/HTML combo) caught on, in no small part, because it was free at a time when gopher had just become non-free; that perhaps was more important, given that gopher had acheived significant penetration first, then the technical advantages (which, early one, weren't really exploited all that fully.)
E-mail is an application that only makes sense if there's a network connection.
Neither reading nor writing email requires a net connection, and back before always-on internet connections were affordable for most people (and even with BBS's back when the internet wasn't so ubiquitous that they were irrelevant as something separate from it), offline mail readers were popular. Heck, mobile devices with mail applications often use what amounts to an offline reader that can send and receive when it has a connection and do everything else without one now.
Of course, Google isn't exactly unfamiliar with the concept of "web" apps that can function offline, and so one would expect that Chrome OS -- even if it used "web" (HTML + Javascript) apps as its main applications -- wouldn't be limited to functioning with a live connection, and wouldn't only support apps that make sense "online".
Um, running your apps on timeshared mainframes is hardly "new".
Running continuously available services on shared distributed systems where you are charged by the actual processing load and other usage is a little bit different than running batch jobs on a timeshared mainframe.
In a way, the "cloud" is much worse, because it's piggybacking asynchronous protocols on top of http, rather than making or utilizing or building much more efficient asynchronous protocols directly connecting the client to the server.
Nothing is forcing you to use HTTP for cloud apps. Sure, if you want to use Google App Engine (which is probably one of the easiest cloud services to use -- and its free of charge for limited use), you're stuck with HTTP, but if you are using Amazon EC2, for instance, nothing stops you from using XMPP, AMQP, or any other protocol (asynchronous or synchronous) for moving data around. Cloud computing and particular choices of communication protocols are largely separate issues, though as always if you choose the cheapest, easiest to use option, you'll have the narrowest array of options.
On the other hand, the XML file inside an ODF file is itself a document stored in a single XML file.
IIRC, a word processing document is stored as four seperate XML files within the ODF zip structure, each file covering different aspects (structure and text content, styles, etc.) of the document. Now, given the way XML works, anything that you can represent as multiple XML files it is trivial to represent as a single XML file, but that's not how it is actually done in ODF (though, presuming ODF predates what is claimed in the patent, I think ODF might be a basis for arguing obviousness on a putting a word processing document into a single XML File.)
There is a theoretically robust test against obviousness, and it's that if basically any reasonably competent worker in the industry could have come up with the same idea, then it's not supposed to be patentable.
This is not a "theoretically robust test". Its a highly subjective one, because there is no way to really test it (you can't gather all the actual -- much less all the potential -- reasonably competent workers in the field and see if they would come up with that as one of the solutions to the same problem), even if "reasonably competent" was itself an objective standard, which its not.
You need to remember that seminarys are strange animals academically. The degree of academic freedom runs the gamete from little (fundamentalist schools) to a great deal (liberal seminaries).
"seminarys" -> "seminaries" and (I certainly hope) "run the gamete" -> "run the gamut".
Seminaries are professional schools for training pastors, not academic institutions.
As a "school" (including a "professional school" and, consequently, also including a "professional school for training pastors") is "an academic institution", this statement is self-contradictory.
Sure, there's "evidence" to support these claims, but has it been 100% proven? No!
Nothing in science is 100% proven. Science doesn't do proof. It generates models which have falsifiable predictions; when those predictions are tested and are not falsified, and provide the most parsimonious explanation of observations, they become dominant scientific models (indeed, they may remain so, though acknowledged as being limited, even once falsified, in the absence of models that account for the situations in which they have shown to be inaccurate.)
Unfortunately a lot of science is dogmatic as well. If I were to claim that I invented a machine that produced more energy than I put in, would I get a fair hearing?
If you produced a description of a model which predicted a way to construct a system from which more energy could be extracted than was put in, built the system, and produced a detailed description of the observed results, you'd probably get a lot of a lot of theoretical analysis based on existing well-established results that were relevant to the particular design about whether or not it could work and whether or not the results claimed could be the results of experimental error and not the underlying mechanism proposed, and a number of groups in various places trying to recreate it. A relevant example is the cold fusion claims of Pons & Fleischmann in 1989.
If you take the act of posting on a message board, especially one as hostile to religion as Slashdot, and consider it less an act of trolling but one of encouraging discussion, then encouraging thoughtful posts creates an opportunity for the student to have his beliefs challenged and subsequently shaped.
A requirement to post with a quota of a certain number of posts, alone, does nothing to promote that. A requirement to post, gather responses, and present a report summarizing and critiquing the response (if the critique were held to rigorous standards) might.
Besides, we're talking about Science here, not "Biblical Creationism" as such.
No, we aren't talking about science (much less "Science"), we're talking about Intelligent Design, a pile of pseudoscience wrapped around creationism to give it a skin-deep appearance of science that was invented after the Supreme Court struck down requirements that creationists had won for the teaching of "creation science" (itself, an earlier effort to wrap a veneer of 'science' around creationism) alongside evolution in science classes as a violation of the Establishment clause. And since the same kind of rulings have begun being handed down against ID, one can expect creationists to come up with a new label for the pseudoscience they use to try to use public dollars to advance unscientific miseducation, unless maybe the realize that the whole relabelling approach isn't working and they shift courses entirely.
The idea that the Earth was created in 6 literal days replete with "faith-challenging" dino fossils and other fairy tales is the story that Evolutionists spread as Intelligent Design dogma.
Uh, no, young earth creationism isn't a myth created by those who accept the theory of evolution as the best scientific model of the phenomena it explains.
It shows a very big gap in their knowledge of the ID field which is quite a bit less dogmatic about the 6 day theory and much more in tune with mainstream scientific method.
ID has nothing in common with the modern scientific method. Repeatedly raising the same questions that there are well-supported answers to, with no evidence to challenge the existing explanations or even acknowledgement of them, isn't the scientific method.
What ID brings to the table is a new reexamination of facts.
No, it doesn't. What it brings is a lot of deliberately obtuse repeated questioning of things that have already been explored and answered; its adherents are required to (figuratively, at least) stick their fingers in the ears and close their eyes to avoid seeing and hearing the answers that have been around since before "creationism" renamed itself "creation science" to try to mislead and force its non-scientific dogma into science classrooms, and then, when that failed, renamed itself "intelligent design".
Why are clam fossils at the top of very young mountains?
Why wouldn't they be expected to be if the dominant scientific models in the relevant fields (including, but not limited to, evolution) were correct?
What is the evolutionary progression of DNA?
What is this question even supposed to mean? If you mean, what are the mechanisms of the genetic mutations which produce the phenotypic variations on which natural selection operates, many of those mechanisms are well understood (some so well that they have been adapated for, controlled modifications, creating the whole field of genetic engineering.)
Why are there still discrepancies in the geologic and biologic record where we would expect certain types of data but find none?
The processes which create the fossil record (which appears to be what you are likely referring to as the "geological and biologic record") are fair
So basically, OOXML was a way to acquire a patent that could kill ODF-using applications in the US
This patent wouldn't seem to affect OpenDocument, since OpenDocument files are not, AFAIK, single XML files, they are JAR archives with several XML files (and others) inside.
Slashdot Mirror
The patent doesn't cover any features of a serialization format, it covers features of what a system does with the data; it certainly covers things that a system using RTF might want to do with it, and if, in fact, RTF applications did use the patented system before the patent was filed, they would be prior art which would invalidate the patent. But, given that Microsoft invented and was a big user of RTF, you'd expect that's the kind of thing that they would have raised rather forcefully at trial.
That might be an argument against Microsoft's recent patent on using XML for a word processor document format, but is hardly an argument against i4i's patent on a particulary way of handling data, regardless of serialization format, containing both a raw content stream and tags that apply at points within that stream.
(Note that I am not saying that there aren't reasonable arguments based on obviousness, prior art, or other bases against i4i's patent, just that "XML was intended to be used for word processor document formats, so its use for them is obvious" isn't even close to one of them, since that's not what i4i's patent covers.)
Last I checked, the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas was a court of the federal government.
No, the phrase "US Court" does not mean that when used in citations. "US", when used as an abbreviation in case citations, does mean "United States Reports", which is one of the reporters for the US Supreme Court, but you'd never use the phrase "US Court" in a proper legal citation to mean "the US Supreme Court".
That picture does not, on its own, explain anything, and certainly not the patent in question. It is one of a series of 10 similar figures that are part of the patent (the whole patent is attached to the complaint as Exhibit A.)
No, the patent covers a particular approach to handling data wherein you track a raw content stream separately from the tags ("metacodes"). Something similar to what is patented (but maybe not enough to be within the scope of the patent) might conceivably be used (at least, the approach makes sense) in lots of text-oriented applications (word processors, browsers, etc.), but probably not used in most applications that use structured data where the text content wouldn't also be used, as-is, as a text stream without the tags. So the scope is much narrower with respect to XML use than you suggest (conversely, its broader in another respect, since it is not limited to XML -- in fact, it refers to use with SGML as the main example throughout the patent, but the claim isn't limited to any particular markup language.)
Its mostly patent FUD designed to inhibit Linux adoption. Its only patent trolling when its used to back lawsuits or extortion of license fees (which doesn't seem to be the main use of the claim.)
The ruling was handed down in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, which is a US federal court located in Texas, not a Texas Court. And the ruling was based on federal patent law, not on some provision of Texas law, and applies to sales in the whole of the US.
Actually, there is no conflict. The fair use provision of US copyright law does not say "you can do something". It says that that the a particular provision of copyright law which create specific exclusive rights does not apply to certain actions. It does not say that no other provisions of law limit those actions. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), while within (not, as you say, "a front for") copyright law, is not the particular exclusive rights provision to which the fair use exception applies, but a separate prohibition. So its prohibitions in no way conflict with the limitations on the other provisions imposed by the fair use provision.
Has the Fair Use provision originally been written as a positive consumer right notwithstanding any other provision of law, rather than an exception to the particular exclusive rights provision of copyright law, there would be a conflict, but probably (under normal canons of legal construction) the DMCA would still win out: newer enactments that are clearly intended to overturn or limit older ones generally take priority.
Now, there is an argument that Fair Use, while broader than the rights given under the First Amendment, overlaps with those rights, and that some of the things the DMCA prohibits may be protected under the First Amendment, and that would be a real conflict between two provisions of law, and one that (as the US Constitution trumps any mere statute) the DMCA would lose if the conflict existed. But as long as the argument is on Fair Use, per se, and not the First Amendment, the DMCA is going to win in court every time, and it will be a proper application of the rules of legal construction that it does.
As this appears to be the intent of the DMCA -- to make it legally impossible to copy "protected" media -- this doesn't show that the ruling is horrible. It shows that it is a correct application of a horrible law.
While fair use in some respects overlaps with Constitutional rights under the First Amendment, and there might be some argument that there is a First Amendment restriction here, I haven't heard that, just complaints that the application here of a later statute (the DMCA) sharply limited exercise of a statutory right that existed before the new law in a way which seems clearly within both the letter and intent of the newer law. Doing so may make the law bad, but it doesn't make the ruling bad; judges aren't supposed to issue rulings based on what laws Congress should and should not have passed (but for Constitutional restrictions on Congress' power), but on the laws they have passed.
If you don't like the DMCA, take it up with Congress.
That's because cats weren't actively domesticated in the sense that dogs were, so much as they were tolerated around humans because we liked them doing what they do on their own (mostly, eat rodents.) That doesn't mean they haven't been significantly changed by their contact with humans (the complex social structures seen in feral domestic cats are not, AFAIK, found in their wild ancestors), just that the changes aren't driven by utility to humans the way they have been with dogs, which were selectively bred for various uses.
No, they've been bred for lots of specific tasks. An ability to learn may be part of the product of that, and it may be part of the reason that they were used and bred for those tasks in the first place, but they aren't up against other animals that were "given the same opportunity".
Cats were naturally useful to humans without any effort by humans to change them, and so humans didn't put the effort into changing them that they did into dogs. And, so, unsurprisingly, dogs have changed in ways useful to humans more than cats have over the same period of time.
While most large cats may be solitary hunteers, there is a commonly encountered (and more relevant to this discussion) cat that lives in groups where resources permit: the domestic cat. Feral domestic cats, when living in areas where there sufficient resources form colonies with complex social organizations.
I'm not sure if this is what GPs source was saying, but I would think the real problem with the extra-strong wall is the same with the extra-strong bones (if there is a problem with the former at all): it doesn't flex, so if its attached firmly to another weaker section, and that weaker section is subject to a load which causes the weaker section to deform, instead of the stronger section deforming elastically and removing the strain on the connection with the weaker section, the stronger section stays firm and the connection fails.
Sure but, unfortunately, though, there's generally no added penalty for putting illegal terms in a contract with a severability clause, so there is little incentive for companies not to use their contracts as vehicles for distributing FUD that scares people away from exercising rights they have in law.
Actually, "business and industry" likes to outsource anything that isn't a core competency, and that often includes managing computer hardware. Paid server hosting services don't mostly survive on individual, nonbusiness users, they survive by hosting servers for businesses.
This even includes handling material covered by mandates like HIPAA; e.g., many healthcare providers outsource billing and other functions that involve the exchange of HIPAA PHI using HIPAA standard transactions.
How does that give the FSF a roll in it? The only link FSF has to the Linux kernel is that they wrote the GPL, and Linux is licensed under v2 of that license. The FSF doesn't own the Linux kernel.
Now, I admit, Stallman personally is likely to comment on Chrome OS, and, given his reactions to cloud computing in general, those comments are likely to be generally negative. But I don't see why the FSF, as such, would be likely to have any kind of issue with Chrome, unless Google violates the terms of the GPL v2 with it, which there doesn't seem to be any reason to assume they would.
Actually, I think Google designs software based on what they think will be well-received in the market so as to advance their various corporate goals (all of which boil down to "profit", through one avenue or another.) I don't think that they assume that everyone believes their "do no evil" slogan, or any of their other marketing copy.
Well, sure, all kinds of crazy things get posted on Slashdot.
Well, yeah, it will; because if it is open source, a less-evil competitor will be able to (legally) create and release an alternative version that strips out the offending functionality (even if Google's backend requires it, someone will create an alternate implementation of the backend protocol than the less-evil desktop OS can connect to.) Whereas if you tried to do the same thing stripping out features of windows you didn't like and distributing it as "Joe's Improved OS", Microsoft lawyers would be all over you like white on rice.
Open source makes a difference.
The web (at least, the HTTP/HTML combo) caught on, in no small part, because it was free at a time when gopher had just become non-free; that perhaps was more important, given that gopher had acheived significant penetration first, then the technical advantages (which, early one, weren't really exploited all that fully.)
Neither reading nor writing email requires a net connection, and back before always-on internet connections were affordable for most people (and even with BBS's back when the internet wasn't so ubiquitous that they were irrelevant as something separate from it), offline mail readers were popular. Heck, mobile devices with mail applications often use what amounts to an offline reader that can send and receive when it has a connection and do everything else without one now.
Of course, Google isn't exactly unfamiliar with the concept of "web" apps that can function offline, and so one would expect that Chrome OS -- even if it used "web" (HTML + Javascript) apps as its main applications -- wouldn't be limited to functioning with a live connection, and wouldn't only support apps that make sense "online".
Running continuously available services on shared distributed systems where you are charged by the actual processing load and other usage is a little bit different than running batch jobs on a timeshared mainframe.
Nothing is forcing you to use HTTP for cloud apps. Sure, if you want to use Google App Engine (which is probably one of the easiest cloud services to use -- and its free of charge for limited use), you're stuck with HTTP, but if you are using Amazon EC2, for instance, nothing stops you from using XMPP, AMQP, or any other protocol (asynchronous or synchronous) for moving data around. Cloud computing and particular choices of communication protocols are largely separate issues, though as always if you choose the cheapest, easiest to use option, you'll have the narrowest array of options.
IIRC, a word processing document is stored as four seperate XML files within the ODF zip structure, each file covering different aspects (structure and text content, styles, etc.) of the document. Now, given the way XML works, anything that you can represent as multiple XML files it is trivial to represent as a single XML file, but that's not how it is actually done in ODF (though, presuming ODF predates what is claimed in the patent, I think ODF might be a basis for arguing obviousness on a putting a word processing document into a single XML File.)
This is not a "theoretically robust test". Its a highly subjective one, because there is no way to really test it (you can't gather all the actual -- much less all the potential -- reasonably competent workers in the field and see if they would come up with that as one of the solutions to the same problem), even if "reasonably competent" was itself an objective standard, which its not.
That's hardly a big deal. Genesis contradicts Genesis itself.
"seminarys" -> "seminaries" and (I certainly hope) "run the gamete" -> "run the gamut".
As a "school" (including a "professional school" and, consequently, also including a "professional school for training pastors") is "an academic institution", this statement is self-contradictory.
Nothing in science is 100% proven. Science doesn't do proof. It generates models which have falsifiable predictions; when those predictions are tested and are not falsified, and provide the most parsimonious explanation of observations, they become dominant scientific models (indeed, they may remain so, though acknowledged as being limited, even once falsified, in the absence of models that account for the situations in which they have shown to be inaccurate.)
If you produced a description of a model which predicted a way to construct a system from which more energy could be extracted than was put in, built the system, and produced a detailed description of the observed results, you'd probably get a lot of a lot of theoretical analysis based on existing well-established results that were relevant to the particular design about whether or not it could work and whether or not the results claimed could be the results of experimental error and not the underlying mechanism proposed, and a number of groups in various places trying to recreate it. A relevant example is the cold fusion claims of Pons & Fleischmann in 1989.
For
A requirement to post with a quota of a certain number of posts, alone, does nothing to promote that. A requirement to post, gather responses, and present a report summarizing and critiquing the response (if the critique were held to rigorous standards) might.
No, we aren't talking about science (much less "Science"), we're talking about Intelligent Design, a pile of pseudoscience wrapped around creationism to give it a skin-deep appearance of science that was invented after the Supreme Court struck down requirements that creationists had won for the teaching of "creation science" (itself, an earlier effort to wrap a veneer of 'science' around creationism) alongside evolution in science classes as a violation of the Establishment clause. And since the same kind of rulings have begun being handed down against ID, one can expect creationists to come up with a new label for the pseudoscience they use to try to use public dollars to advance unscientific miseducation, unless maybe the realize that the whole relabelling approach isn't working and they shift courses entirely.
Uh, no, young earth creationism isn't a myth created by those who accept the theory of evolution as the best scientific model of the phenomena it explains.
ID has nothing in common with the modern scientific method. Repeatedly raising the same questions that there are well-supported answers to, with no evidence to challenge the existing explanations or even acknowledgement of them, isn't the scientific method.
No, it doesn't. What it brings is a lot of deliberately obtuse repeated questioning of things that have already been explored and answered; its adherents are required to (figuratively, at least) stick their fingers in the ears and close their eyes to avoid seeing and hearing the answers that have been around since before "creationism" renamed itself "creation science" to try to mislead and force its non-scientific dogma into science classrooms, and then, when that failed, renamed itself "intelligent design".
Why wouldn't they be expected to be if the dominant scientific models in the relevant fields (including, but not limited to, evolution) were correct?
What is this question even supposed to mean? If you mean, what are the mechanisms of the genetic mutations which produce the phenotypic variations on which natural selection operates, many of those mechanisms are well understood (some so well that they have been adapated for, controlled modifications, creating the whole field of genetic engineering.)
The processes which create the fossil record (which appears to be what you are likely referring to as the "geological and biologic record") are fair
This patent wouldn't seem to affect OpenDocument, since OpenDocument files are not, AFAIK, single XML files, they are JAR archives with several XML files (and others) inside.