They're anything but the only ISP or hosting provider that hosts botnet control servers or other shady deals.
OTOH, they may be the only one that got targetted for scrutiny after being the source of a hack into NASA in which, in the course of the investigation (among other things) federal authorities captured ICQ conversations in which senior officials of the provider were discussing their active participation in botnet management with customers.
It's got to be a joke, there are plenty of sections of the law that make ISP's not liable for such things.
There are safe harbor provisions that protect ISPs from liability for some of those things when the acts are committed by the ISPs users (not the ISP itself), and the ISP complies with certain other rules (including, as a general rule, taking effective action when they become aware of -- on their own or by notification -- the violation being perpetrated via their network.)
But this isn't about things Pricewert's users were doing without the knowledge of the ISP; from the complaint which resulted in the order here:
14. Pricewert is fully aware that it is hosting huge volumes of illegal, malicious, and harmful content. Moreover, Pricewert actively shields its criminal clientele by either ignoring take-down requests issued by the online security community or shifting its criminal clients to other Internet Protocol addresses controlled by Pricewert so that they may evade detection. 15. In addition to hosting illegal, malicious, and harmful content, Pricewert actively colludes with its criminal clientele in several areas, including the maintenance and deployment of bot nets. . . . 22. Pricewert's involvement in botnet activity is detailed in several Internet ICQ chat logs obtained by the FTC. In these logs, Pricewert's senior staff, including its Head of Programming, are observed directly participating in the creation and configuration of a botnet. 23. In one of the chats obtained by the FTC, Pricewert's Head of Programming is engaged in a conversation with a customer regarding the number of compromised computers the customer controls. The customer informs Pricewert that he controls 200,000 bots and needs assistance configuring the botnet. The head of Pricewert's Programming Department agrees to assist, but complains upon learning of the size of the botnet that it will require a lot of work. 24. In a second chat, a Senior Project Manager for Pricewert is told by a customer that the customer controls a massive and rapidly growing network ofbots. Pricewert's Sales Director reassures the customer that "[w]ell, we know how to manage it."
What does the Federal Trade Commission have to do with acting on illegal material such as the crazy stuff suggested by the article?
Well, the answer to that is found in the FTC's Memorandum of Points and Authorities in this case (available, here, along with other related documents):
Plaintiff, FTC, is an independent agency of the United States government created by the FTC Act, 15 U.S.C. 41-58 (2006). The FTC is charged with, among other things, enforcement of Section 5(a) of the FTC Act, 15 U.S.C. 45(a), which prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce. The FTC is authorized to initiate federal district court proceedings, by its own attorneys, to enjoin violations of the FTC Act, and to secure such equitable relief as may be appropriate in each case, including restitution and disgorgement. 15 U.S.C. 53(b) (2006).
What does the Federal Trade Commission have to do with acting on illegal material such as the crazy stuff suggested by the article?
If the conduct charged wasn't against the law (which is all that "illegal" means), neither the FTC nor any other government agency could bring a case to stop it. You may be mistakenly using "illegal" to mean "criminal" (which some of the conduct alleged would also be), in which case I will note that an act can be simultaneously a violation of civil and criminal provisions of the law, and move on to...
Where are the criminal charges here?
Again, from the FTC's Memorandum of Points and Authorities:
It is the Commission's understanding that a parallel criminal investigation of the Defendant is underway. Although the Commission is not privy to the details of that investigation, the Commission is informed that a search warrant will be executed at the Defendant's data center on or about Wednesday, June 3, 2009. The Commission respectfully requests that this Court rule on the Commission's Ex Parte Motion for Temporary Restraining Order prior to June 3, 2009, so that - if the Commission's Motion is granted - service of the TRO can be effected at the same time the search warrant is executed.
Hospitals managed without computers before the '60s/'70s, so why can't they get by with a paper-based backup process today?
Probably because if they are reliant on an electronic system, they don't have the staff to operate efficiently with a paper-based process, as in the case at issue here, where the hospital was using a paper-based backup process, but began turning away patients when the backlog of paper got too great.
I'm surprised they don't have such a process in place stemming from the cold war and fear of an EMP - with today's non-lethal microwave weapons could make EMP an even greater concern as the technology is miniaturized.
The contingency for a small attack would probably be to divert patients immediately to other hospitals. The contingency for a large attack (enough to make diverting patients impractical) is probably to fallback to paper process until either that hospital or the ones that would be backing it up are able to operate more efficiently, and accept the hit to quality of care that implies.
There needs to be a paper-based process in place!
There was a paper-based process in place. It was used (presumably, for patients already in the hospital, it continued being used even after new patients were being diverted.) Diversion of new patients is a normal contingency method of dealing with a hospital being overloaded, whether for staffing, system failure, or other reasons.
esides, it's a frigging hospital. They treat no-documentation illegal aliens for free all the time, so why can't they just deal with treating legal citizens for a short period that their computer systems are down?
They were treating patients since the previous afternoon without the computer system, and presumably continued to treat patients while the computer system was down even once new patients were being diverted. It was not a "short" time, by the standards usually applied to acceptable downtime of a critical production system.
Lives are at stake, fuck the billing and charging $50 for a tylenol or ibuprofen tablet.
Billing isn't the issue. The issue is the efficiency of communicating orders and results between, say, the treating physician, the pharmacy, and labs and diagnostic units within the hospital, all of which are impacted if the efficiency of dealing with "paperwork" is impacted.
Wolfram Alpha does state its sources involved in generating its answer.
It rather explicitly didn't originally, and still doesn't seem to (though its removed then notice that made it clear that it didn't.) It did, and still seems to, report generic lists of all the sources that may have contributed to the internal tables consulted to generate the results, not the sources of the data actually used for the results. Originally, W|A made it clear that that was what they were doing with a disclaimer in the Source Information box to the effect that the list of sources (other than the W|A internal data listed as the "Primary Source" for every search) was not necessarily related to any particular search result; while they have removed the disclaimer, the long list of sources, some of which clearly have no relevance to the results listed, makes it seem very much that the Source Information remains just as murky as it was when they had the disclaimer, they just don't want to tell people that any more.
It certainly isn't like Google in providing the sources for particular pieces of information.
W|A remains nearly useless as a serious research tool for this reason, since you don't know the sources for particular bits of information, and you don't know the methodology they have applied to synthesize the internal database that works as the direct source from the root sources.
But even leaving that aside -- why do problems with paperwork make it necessary to turn away patients?
Because orders for (and, where applicable, results from) lab tests, diagnostic imaging, medications, etc. are all "paperwork", and all rather essential parts of patient care, and are particularly time sensitive in the case of emergency care. If you can't process "paperwork" (with or without paper) accurately and timely, you can't properly treat patients.
Which is why an EHR system shouldn't be purchased without reliability (uptime, etc.) guarantees.
Technology Review has a story about a start-up company that has developed a more-accurate and less-invasive way to read a patients thoughts.
"More-accurate and less-invasive" is misleading, since the thing that it is "more accurate" than is not the same thing it is "less invasive" than. It is more accurate than the minimally-invasive electrodes-on-the-scalp method, and less-invasive than the more accurate electrodes-implanted-into-the-brain method.
It is, likewise, less accurate than the electrodes-in-the-brain method, and more invasive than the electrodes-on-the-scalp method, so it would be as accurate (and as hyperbolic, in the opposite direction) as TFS to call it a "less-accurate and more-invasive" method as it was to call it a "more-accurate and less-invasive" method (simply switching which existing method it was compared to for accuracy and which it was compared to for invasiveness.)
It would be most accurate (and not at all hyperbolic) to call it a method which is intermediate between two existing methods in terms of both accuracy and invasiveness.
The military (humvee) units are manufactured by AM General in Indiana. They sold the brand name to GM, who's now reselling it. The vehicles are built in Louisiana (?) (for the US) and South Africa (worldwide exports).
The H1 was built by AM General, who makes the military HMMWV on which the H1 is based. Of the current models, the H2 is built by AM General under contract from GM (its a GM design, based on the same platform as the Yukon and Tahoe) in Indiana. The H3 (based on a different GM platform) is built in Louisiana and South Africa as you describe.
Re:Why only one database language?
on
SQL in a Nutshell
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· Score: 1
I disagree. Existing query optimization and execution engines are built with the capabilities and constructs of SQL in mind. A new query language, on the other hand, presumably exists to enable things which existing languages (like SQL) don't... otherwise, why would you bother?
The same reason people bother with new Turing-complete programming languages, which can't do anything that isn't possible in existing Turing-complete programming languages: expressiveness, clarity, etc. Usually, new languages don't enable anything that old languages can't do.
It is as most people would fear, only lobby groups got themselves exempted. A little google work converting the lumens to a unit most people understand (a given wattage bulb running at 120V) results in: (drum-roll please)
If it is between 25 watts and 150 watts.... Banned.
Well, except that, first, as I noted in GP, incadescent bulbs in the range affected are not banned, they are required to be more efficient than the bulbs currently on the market (with a specific maximum wattage for each range of lumen output), and, second, the maximum allowed output at the lowest lumen range for general service incandescent lamps specified in the Act (310-749 lumes) is 29 W, so, no, 25W incandescent bulbs would not, even without any increase in efficiency, be affected in any case.
And advances like the one being discussed in this thread are a means of meeting the efficiency requirements in the Act. In fact, the improvement in efficiency claimed from this process would be enough of an improvement with respect to current output to meet the requirements of the Act.
I sit using ballasted fluorescent bulbs most of the time, but I would rather have a tax on regular bulbs to discourage use, not an out-right ban.
This is neither a tax nor a ban, it is set of efficiency standards. The goal is not to discourage the use of incandescent lights, it is to decrease overall energy use. It allows industry to choose whether to spend money making incadescent lamps more efficient, or in other directions. And it looks like progress is being made on the efficiency front for incadescent lamps.
Re:Why only one database language?
on
SQL in a Nutshell
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Creating a new query language is *hard*.
No more so than creating any other new programming language; most functional programming languages (and plenty of not-particularly-functional programming languages that have functionally-inspired features) have querying constructs roughly comparable to those in SQL or other dedicated query languages (and often clearer, more straightforward, and more expressive than SQL.)
What's hard to build is efficient storage engines and query optimizers, not query languages, but once those are built, the language you express the queries in shouldn't matter much as long as the what is expressible is the same.
The really hard part though is finding a market for a new dedicated query language; a big selling point of a dedicated query language is because it will be generally familiar for most users regardless of what prior products from a large set the user has used, and anything that isn't SQL, whatever it might have going for it, is going to lack that advantage as a query language.
But it doesn't matter (at least to those of us in the USA), because in 2014 incandescent bulbs will be banned.
This is not correct, and, in fact, the restriction that motivates this misconception is, in fact, the reason why it matters particularly to those of us in the USA. There is no restriction, first of all, of incandescent bulbs meeting one or more of the exclusions or exceptions in Section 321 of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (Pub.L. 110-140) (the law imposing the new restrictions), including: * Bulbs producing less than 310 lumens * Bulbs producing more than 2600 lumens * Bulbs whose operating range is not with 110 V - 130 V * Bulbs not intended for "general service" use * Bulbs that don't have a "medium screw base" * appliance lamps * black light lamps * bug lamps * infrared lamps * left-hand thread lamps * marine lamps * marine signal service lamps * mine service lamps * plant light lamps * reflector lamps * rough service lamps * shatter-resistant (including shatter-proof and shatter-protected) lamps * sign service lamps * silver bowl lamps * 3-way incadescent lamps * traffic signal lamps * G shape lamps with a diameter of 5 inches or more * T shape lamps using not more than 40 watts or having a length of not more than 10 inches * A B, BA, CA, F, G16-1/2, G-25, G30, S, or M-14 lamps using 40 watts or less
But, more importantly, even for the bulbs those that don't meet one of those exclusions, they aren't banned, they just need to be significantly more efficient than they currently are. Which the improved efficiency claimed by this process (more than meet.
IOW, if the results claimed are accurate and the process is commercially viable and this efficient for incandescent lamps generally, its quite likely that all classes of incandescent lamps (provided this process was applied to the manufacture of those covered by the Act) could continue to used in the US after the restrictions in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 go into effect, because this would make those bulbs covered by the Act efficient enough to continue to be used under the limits imposed by the Act.
I don't understand this statement "Tables lock your user into your content via your specific design" in that, how else are they going to view it?
If you use good semantic HTML, you don't care. Maybe they'll use a screen reader. Maybe they their scraping into another app and not "viewing" it, per se, at all, but processing it. Maybe they are using assistive technologies other than a screen reader, and so using CSS that changes the presentation.
If you use semantic HTML for content and CSS for presentation, you don't have to care that much about how your users are interacting with the content, except insofar as you should have one or more appropriate CSS stylesheets for the main ways people are expect to "view" it.
It is limited to geological, environmental, and weather datasets.
Among the "raw" datasets which demonstrate that this is incorrect: Global Trade - World Copper Smelters Patent Grant Bibliographic Data (2009) Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) Files, All Data, 2005 Benefits Data from the Benefits and Earnings Public Use File, 2004 Interactive Access To National Income and Product Accounts Tables Office of Advocacy's News Update File
However, material created while under contract to another entity is the property of that entity unless agreed otherwise.
Wrong. First of all, being "under contract" is a reciprocal relationship, so that doesn't even make sense, since if one party is under contract to another, the reverse is also true. Second, under US copyright law, a work is a work for hire if and only if either (a) the work is made by an employee within the scope of employment, or (b) if the work is "specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas" and there is an agreement signed by both parties in place when the explicitly designating the work as a work for hire; the mere fact that entity A has a contractual relationship entity B does not give entity B automatically copyright.
If you are employed by DuPont and invent Nylon II, DuPont will own the patent, and you will get a mention but have no further rights.
This isn't a patent case, and patent law is different from copyright law. But even in copyright the same would likely be true because it would be work done by an employee within the scope of employment. This is not, however, applicable here, insofar as users posting queries to Wolfram|Alpha are not Wolfram employees acting within the scope of their employment.
Similarly, if you write for a publication, there is normally a specific agreement as to who owns the rights to the material.
Yes, there is likely, if the work is not within the scope of regular employment, to be an agreement signed by the parties explicitly designating the writing you are assigned to do as a "work for hire" under copyright law, if the work is specially commissioned and is the kind of work which can be a "work for hire". The reason that such signed agreements, with explicit designation of the work as a work for hire are used is because this is a requirement for the work to be a work for hire under copyright law. However, there is no signed agreement between most users of W|A and Wolfram, and while the Terms of Service (which are not signed by either party) assert Wolfram's claim of copyright based on some legally spurious grounds, they do not designate the work produced explicitly as a "work for hire" by the user for Wolfram, and thus they would not, even if signed, suffice to meet the requirements of copyright law to make the work a work for hire, furthermore, even if the right kind of agreement existed, and it was signed, the work isn't "specially commissioned" by Wolfram.
Wolfram is making the same claim here, and since you are using their site, their TOS is a contract.
Wolfram is not only not making the same claim (that a work is a "work for hire") typically made by a newspaper that has a signed contract with a writer working on a commission, they don't have an agreement in the form required by copyright law to give effect to such a claim even if they did make it, and the work isn't produced in the circumstances that would allow it to be a work for hire even with an appropriate agreement in place.
No, it's a Federal case because it involves parties in two different jurisdictions (one in SC, one in CA).
Certainly, diversity jurisdiction is one of the bases on which federal jurisdiction could be established here, but so is federal question jurisdiction.
If Craigslist had offices in SC they could've easily filed suit in that state's superior court with the same allegations.
Assuming that the federal statute under which the statutory claim is raised (I believe its the Communications Decency Act) doesn't provide for exclusive federal jurisdiction (which I don't know off the top of my head), they could have filed it in SC courts even given the diversity of citizenship. Neither federal question nor diversity of citizenship generally requires a case to be filed in federal court, they just provide a basis for federal court jurisdiction, giving the plaintiff the opportunity to file in federal court, and, failing that, the defendant the opportunity to seek to have the case moved to federal court.
They are filing a civil case against a state's attorney general (which will make it a federal hearing) - alleging what?
Its not a federal case because its against a state's attorney general, as that is not a basis for federal jurisdiction. It is a federal case because it is alleging an violateions of both the federal Constitution and federal statute law through a prior restraint on free speech.
(Which also answers the "alleging what?" question -- the suit is alleging an illegal prior restraint on free speech.)
The suit does not seek damages, it seeks declaratory relief (essentially, a finding by the court establishing the legal rights of the parties) and a restraining order preventing the threatened criminal action.
Let's say you're doing a research and require certain information that is considered in a lower level than your research is targeting, you wouldn't want to waste your time researching that just tso that you continue your original work; Wolfram will do that part for you, therefor, they have presented you with the result of a research.
Yes, if that was what was happening -- I was contracting for Wolfram to go and expend human effort to create a new work for me -- that would be a valid point.
But copyright, what Wolfram is claiming, depends on authorship; they specifically claim that the work they are claiming copyright too does not exist before the request, and although sometimes the query is slow enough that they could be expending human effort putting it together, they claim that's not what they are doing. So on what basis are they claiming copyright, which depends on authorship? The only human effort, and therefore the only basis for any claim of authorship (though I am not saying even this is a strong one) is mine, by the claims in their own terms of service.
I say research because this is what it's intended for.
Yes, its intended as a tool the user applies to do research. A tool that I use to do something doesn't give the tool creator a right to claim authorship of what I create with the tool. Insofar as an original work subject to copyright is created through my interaction with W|A, their own claims refute any attempt by W|A to claim authorship of that work.
Don't think of it as a custom furniture shop where you claim copyright to your design of the furniture.
I don't think of it as a custom furniture shop -- after all, if it was, there would be human effort involved in response to my requirements, and the shop would be the default owner under copyright of any design they produced. What would give me a claim to copyright would be a written agreement making the work a work for hire. But here, there is no human at Wolfram creating the result, and hence no authorship.
It doesn't search in almost precisely the same sense that Google doesn't search; it does queries on a proprietary datastore and presents the results. The datastore contains different kinds of data that Google's indexes, and the query facility supports a different set of operators and different means of inferring when a particular term is a query term or an operator.
Google is for all intents and purposes a catalogue. It doesn't return any data
Well, unless you use any one of the many kinds of queries for which it does return data (anything using its calculator features, GDP of a country, population of a country, what time is it, etc., etc., etc.) as well as catalog-style links, assuming by "data", you mean "a specific answer to the query other than list of potentially relevant links".
How are people who show up to use a free service "customers?"
Since apparently the business model here is to use Wolfram|Alpha as a teaser to sell a more advanced premium version of the service and to sell Mathematica licenses, it might be slightly more precise to label the users of the free "service" as "prospective customers" and the "service" itself as a marketing tool.
Which, also, explains why you might want to be good to the people who show up to use it.
Man, you try too hard. I tried the simple "what time is it" and I got:
"Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.Tips for good results Â"
Tips for good results: cut down the hype.
Its kind of funny that this is the kind of fact-based query that W|A was hyped at being good at that, according to the hypesters, Google couldn't do. I asked Google the same query a few seconds ago, and here is the top of its response (with the actual city redacted):
4:49pm Tuesday (PDT) - Time in <redacted>, California Washington D.C. 7:49pm EDT Chicago 6:49pm CDT Denver 5:49pm MDT Phoenix 4:49pm MST Los Angeles 4:49pm PDT Anchorage 3:49pm AKDT Honolulu 1:49pm HST
If there's something that annoy me, it's unsourced calculations. If it's attributed to WA, then I can at least use the same query on WA and in turn see what WA used as sources for that specific query (under the "source information" link at the bottom of each page)
You are making the easily understandable mistake of assuming that the "Source Information" link does, in fact, liest the sources of information used in the query. While you'd think that would be the case, if you actually read the disclaimer at the bottom of the popup list of sources, you would see that it specifically states that the information provided is "intended as a guide to sources of further information", and disclaims any necessary connection between the cited sources and any particular Wolfram|Alpha search result.
Strangely, the "Totals as of May 14, 2009" table it presents there matches, in number of cases, the information shown on "Tuesday, May 19, 2009" row of the "Daily new reports for the world" table, rather than "Thursday, May 14, 2009" row as one would expect. It does, true, provide some pretty graphs, but its obviously doing something wrong with the data in at least one of the two tables. Nice presentation isn't worth anything if the system is mishandling or mislabelling data.
And, of course, since it doesn't identify the sources of the data actually used in the result, you can't even do what you would do normally with an inaccurate non-primary source, and go to the original sources (note that the "source information" link describes itself as a "guide to sources of further information", and specifically disclaims any necessary connection between the listed sources and the specific result.)
Slashdot Mirror
OTOH, they may be the only one that got targetted for scrutiny after being the source of a hack into NASA in which, in the course of the investigation (among other things) federal authorities captured ICQ conversations in which senior officials of the provider were discussing their active participation in botnet management with customers.
There are safe harbor provisions that protect ISPs from liability for some of those things when the acts are committed by the ISPs users (not the ISP itself), and the ISP complies with certain other rules (including, as a general rule, taking effective action when they become aware of -- on their own or by notification -- the violation being perpetrated via their network.)
But this isn't about things Pricewert's users were doing without the knowledge of the ISP; from the complaint which resulted in the order here:
14. Pricewert is fully aware that it is hosting huge volumes of illegal, malicious, and harmful content. Moreover, Pricewert actively shields its criminal clientele by either ignoring take-down requests issued by the online security community or shifting its criminal clients to other Internet Protocol addresses controlled by Pricewert so that they may evade detection.
15. In addition to hosting illegal, malicious, and harmful content, Pricewert actively colludes with its criminal clientele in several areas, including the maintenance and deployment of bot nets.
.
.
.
22. Pricewert's involvement in botnet activity is detailed in several Internet ICQ chat logs obtained by the FTC. In these logs, Pricewert's senior staff, including its Head of Programming, are observed directly participating in the creation and configuration of a botnet.
23. In one of the chats obtained by the FTC, Pricewert's Head of Programming is engaged in a conversation with a customer regarding the number of compromised computers the customer controls. The customer informs Pricewert that he controls 200,000 bots and needs assistance configuring the botnet. The head of Pricewert's Programming Department agrees to assist, but complains upon learning of the size of the botnet that it will require a lot of work.
24. In a second chat, a Senior Project Manager for Pricewert is told by a customer
that the customer controls a massive and rapidly growing network ofbots. Pricewert's Sales Director reassures the customer that "[w]ell, we know how to manage it."
Well, the answer to that is found in the FTC's Memorandum of Points and Authorities in this case (available, here, along with other related documents):
Plaintiff, FTC, is an independent agency of the United States government created by the FTC Act, 15 U.S.C. 41-58 (2006). The FTC is charged with, among other things, enforcement of Section 5(a) of the FTC Act, 15 U.S.C. 45(a), which prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce. The FTC is authorized to initiate federal district court proceedings, by its own attorneys, to enjoin violations of the FTC Act, and to secure such equitable relief as may be appropriate in each case, including restitution and disgorgement. 15 U.S.C. 53(b) (2006).
If the conduct charged wasn't against the law (which is all that "illegal" means), neither the FTC nor any other government agency could bring a case to stop it. You may be mistakenly using "illegal" to mean "criminal" (which some of the conduct alleged would also be), in which case I will note that an act can be simultaneously a violation of civil and criminal provisions of the law, and move on to...
Again, from the FTC's Memorandum of Points and Authorities:
It is the Commission's understanding that a parallel criminal investigation of the Defendant is underway. Although the Commission is not privy to the details of that investigation, the Commission is informed that a search warrant will be executed at the Defendant's data center on or about Wednesday, June 3, 2009. The Commission respectfully requests that this Court rule on the Commission's Ex Parte Motion for Temporary Restraining Order prior to June 3, 2009, so that - if the Commission's Motion is granted - service of the TRO can be effected at the same time the search warrant is executed.
Probably because if they are reliant on an electronic system, they don't have the staff to operate efficiently with a paper-based process, as in the case at issue here, where the hospital was using a paper-based backup process, but began turning away patients when the backlog of paper got too great.
The contingency for a small attack would probably be to divert patients immediately to other hospitals. The contingency for a large attack (enough to make diverting patients impractical) is probably to fallback to paper process until either that hospital or the ones that would be backing it up are able to operate more efficiently, and accept the hit to quality of care that implies.
There was a paper-based process in place. It was used (presumably, for patients already in the hospital, it continued being used even after new patients were being diverted.) Diversion of new patients is a normal contingency method of dealing with a hospital being overloaded, whether for staffing, system failure, or other reasons.
They were treating patients since the previous afternoon without the computer system, and presumably continued to treat patients while the computer system was down even once new patients were being diverted. It was not a "short" time, by the standards usually applied to acceptable downtime of a critical production system.
Billing isn't the issue. The issue is the efficiency of communicating orders and results between, say, the treating physician, the pharmacy, and labs and diagnostic units within the hospital, all of which are impacted if the efficiency of dealing with "paperwork" is impacted.
It rather explicitly didn't originally, and still doesn't seem to (though its removed then notice that made it clear that it didn't.) It did, and still seems to, report generic lists of all the sources that may have contributed to the internal tables consulted to generate the results, not the sources of the data actually used for the results. Originally, W|A made it clear that that was what they were doing with a disclaimer in the Source Information box to the effect that the list of sources (other than the W|A internal data listed as the "Primary Source" for every search) was not necessarily related to any particular search result; while they have removed the disclaimer, the long list of sources, some of which clearly have no relevance to the results listed, makes it seem very much that the Source Information remains just as murky as it was when they had the disclaimer, they just don't want to tell people that any more.
It certainly isn't like Google in providing the sources for particular pieces of information.
W|A remains nearly useless as a serious research tool for this reason, since you don't know the sources for particular bits of information, and you don't know the methodology they have applied to synthesize the internal database that works as the direct source from the root sources.
Because orders for (and, where applicable, results from) lab tests, diagnostic imaging, medications, etc. are all "paperwork", and all rather essential parts of patient care, and are particularly time sensitive in the case of emergency care. If you can't process "paperwork" (with or without paper) accurately and timely, you can't properly treat patients.
Which is why an EHR system shouldn't be purchased without reliability (uptime, etc.) guarantees.
"More-accurate and less-invasive" is misleading, since the thing that it is "more accurate" than is not the same thing it is "less invasive" than. It is more accurate than the minimally-invasive electrodes-on-the-scalp method, and less-invasive than the more accurate electrodes-implanted-into-the-brain method.
It is, likewise, less accurate than the electrodes-in-the-brain method, and more invasive than the electrodes-on-the-scalp method, so it would be as accurate (and as hyperbolic, in the opposite direction) as TFS to call it a "less-accurate and more-invasive" method as it was to call it a "more-accurate and less-invasive" method (simply switching which existing method it was compared to for accuracy and which it was compared to for invasiveness.)
It would be most accurate (and not at all hyperbolic) to call it a method which is intermediate between two existing methods in terms of both accuracy and invasiveness.
The H1 was built by AM General, who makes the military HMMWV on which the H1 is based. Of the current models, the H2 is built by AM General under contract from GM (its a GM design, based on the same platform as the Yukon and Tahoe) in Indiana. The H3 (based on a different GM platform) is built in Louisiana and South Africa as you describe.
The same reason people bother with new Turing-complete programming languages, which can't do anything that isn't possible in existing Turing-complete programming languages: expressiveness, clarity, etc. Usually, new languages don't enable anything that old languages can't do.
Well, except that, first, as I noted in GP, incadescent bulbs in the range affected are not banned, they are required to be more efficient than the bulbs currently on the market (with a specific maximum wattage for each range of lumen output), and, second, the maximum allowed output at the lowest lumen range for general service incandescent lamps specified in the Act (310-749 lumes) is 29 W, so, no, 25W incandescent bulbs would not, even without any increase in efficiency, be affected in any case.
And advances like the one being discussed in this thread are a means of meeting the efficiency requirements in the Act. In fact, the improvement in efficiency claimed from this process would be enough of an improvement with respect to current output to meet the requirements of the Act.
This is neither a tax nor a ban, it is set of efficiency standards. The goal is not to discourage the use of incandescent lights, it is to decrease overall energy use. It allows industry to choose whether to spend money making incadescent lamps more efficient, or in other directions. And it looks like progress is being made on the efficiency front for incadescent lamps.
No more so than creating any other new programming language; most functional programming languages (and plenty of not-particularly-functional programming languages that have functionally-inspired features) have querying constructs roughly comparable to those in SQL or other dedicated query languages (and often clearer, more straightforward, and more expressive than SQL.)
What's hard to build is efficient storage engines and query optimizers, not query languages, but once those are built, the language you express the queries in shouldn't matter much as long as the what is expressible is the same.
The really hard part though is finding a market for a new dedicated query language; a big selling point of a dedicated query language is because it will be generally familiar for most users regardless of what prior products from a large set the user has used, and anything that isn't SQL, whatever it might have going for it, is going to lack that advantage as a query language.
This is not correct, and, in fact, the restriction that motivates this misconception is, in fact, the reason why it matters particularly to those of us in the USA. There is no restriction, first of all, of incandescent bulbs meeting one or more of the exclusions or exceptions in Section 321 of the Energy
Independence and Security Act of 2007 (Pub.L. 110-140) (the law imposing the new restrictions), including:
* Bulbs producing less than 310 lumens
* Bulbs producing more than 2600 lumens
* Bulbs whose operating range is not with 110 V - 130 V
* Bulbs not intended for "general service" use
* Bulbs that don't have a "medium screw base"
* appliance lamps
* black light lamps
* bug lamps
* infrared lamps
* left-hand thread lamps
* marine lamps
* marine signal service lamps
* mine service lamps
* plant light lamps
* reflector lamps
* rough service lamps
* shatter-resistant (including shatter-proof and shatter-protected) lamps
* sign service lamps
* silver bowl lamps
* 3-way incadescent lamps
* traffic signal lamps
* G shape lamps with a diameter of 5 inches or more
* T shape lamps using not more than 40 watts or having a length of not more than 10 inches
* A B, BA, CA, F, G16-1/2, G-25, G30, S, or M-14 lamps using 40 watts or less
But, more importantly, even for the bulbs those that don't meet one of those exclusions, they aren't banned, they just need to be significantly more efficient than they currently are. Which the improved efficiency claimed by this process (more than meet.
IOW, if the results claimed are accurate and the process is commercially viable and this efficient for incandescent lamps generally, its quite likely that all classes of incandescent lamps (provided this process was applied to the manufacture of those covered by the Act) could continue to used in the US after the restrictions in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 go into effect, because this would make those bulbs covered by the Act efficient enough to continue to be used under the limits imposed by the Act.
If you use good semantic HTML, you don't care. Maybe they'll use a screen reader. Maybe they their scraping into another app and not "viewing" it, per se, at all, but processing it. Maybe they are using assistive technologies other than a screen reader, and so using CSS that changes the presentation.
If you use semantic HTML for content and CSS for presentation, you don't have to care that much about how your users are interacting with the content, except insofar as you should have one or more appropriate CSS stylesheets for the main ways people are expect to "view" it.
Among the "raw" datasets which demonstrate that this is incorrect:
Global Trade - World Copper Smelters
Patent Grant Bibliographic Data (2009)
Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) Files, All Data, 2005
Benefits Data from the Benefits and Earnings Public Use File, 2004
Interactive Access To National Income and Product Accounts Tables
Office of Advocacy's News Update File
Wrong. First of all, being "under contract" is a reciprocal relationship, so that doesn't even make sense, since if one party is under contract to another, the reverse is also true. Second, under US copyright law, a work is a work for hire if and only if either (a) the work is made by an employee within the scope of employment, or (b) if the work is "specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas" and there is an agreement signed by both parties in place when the explicitly designating the work as a work for hire; the mere fact that entity A has a contractual relationship entity B does not give entity B automatically copyright.
This isn't a patent case, and patent law is different from copyright law. But even in copyright the same would likely be true because it would be work done by an employee within the scope of employment. This is not, however, applicable here, insofar as users posting queries to Wolfram|Alpha are not Wolfram employees acting within the scope of their employment.
Yes, there is likely, if the work is not within the scope of regular employment, to be an agreement signed by the parties explicitly designating the writing you are assigned to do as a "work for hire" under copyright law, if the work is specially commissioned and is the kind of work which can be a "work for hire". The reason that such signed agreements, with explicit designation of the work as a work for hire are used is because this is a requirement for the work to be a work for hire under copyright law. However, there is no signed agreement between most users of W|A and Wolfram, and while the Terms of Service (which are not signed by either party) assert Wolfram's claim of copyright based on some legally spurious grounds, they do not designate the work produced explicitly as a "work for hire" by the user for Wolfram, and thus they would not, even if signed, suffice to meet the requirements of copyright law to make the work a work for hire, furthermore, even if the right kind of agreement existed, and it was signed, the work isn't "specially commissioned" by Wolfram.
Wolfram is not only not making the same claim (that a work is a "work for hire") typically made by a newspaper that has a signed contract with a writer working on a commission, they don't have an agreement in the form required by copyright law to give effect to such a claim even if they did make it, and the work isn't produced in the circumstances that would allow it to be a work for hire even with an appropriate agreement in place.
Certainly, diversity jurisdiction is one of the bases on which federal jurisdiction could be established here, but so is federal question jurisdiction.
Assuming that the federal statute under which the statutory claim is raised (I believe its the Communications Decency Act) doesn't provide for exclusive federal jurisdiction (which I don't know off the top of my head), they could have filed it in SC courts even given the diversity of citizenship. Neither federal question nor diversity of citizenship generally requires a case to be filed in federal court, they just provide a basis for federal court jurisdiction, giving the plaintiff the opportunity to file in federal court, and, failing that, the defendant the opportunity to seek to have the case moved to federal court.
Its not a federal case because its against a state's attorney general, as that is not a basis for federal jurisdiction. It is a federal case because it is alleging an violateions of both the federal Constitution and federal statute law through a prior restraint on free speech.
(Which also answers the "alleging what?" question -- the suit is alleging an illegal prior restraint on free speech.)
The suit does not seek damages, it seeks declaratory relief (essentially, a finding by the court establishing the legal rights of the parties) and a restraining order preventing the threatened criminal action.
Cute, but wrong.
Federal judges are appointed by the President subject to the consent of the Senate. So there is clearly more than one vote that matters.
Yes, if that was what was happening -- I was contracting for Wolfram to go and expend human effort to create a new work for me -- that would be a valid point.
But copyright, what Wolfram is claiming, depends on authorship; they specifically claim that the work they are claiming copyright too does not exist before the request, and although sometimes the query is slow enough that they could be expending human effort putting it together, they claim that's not what they are doing. So on what basis are they claiming copyright, which depends on authorship? The only human effort, and therefore the only basis for any claim of authorship (though I am not saying even this is a strong one) is mine, by the claims in their own terms of service.
Yes, its intended as a tool the user applies to do research. A tool that I use to do something doesn't give the tool creator a right to claim authorship of what I create with the tool. Insofar as an original work subject to copyright is created through my interaction with W|A, their own claims refute any attempt by W|A to claim authorship of that work.
I don't think of it as a custom furniture shop -- after all, if it was, there would be human effort involved in response to my requirements, and the shop would be the default owner under copyright of any design they produced. What would give me a claim to copyright would be a written agreement making the work a work for hire. But here, there is no human at Wolfram creating the result, and hence no authorship.
It doesn't search in almost precisely the same sense that Google doesn't search; it does queries on a proprietary datastore and presents the results. The datastore contains different kinds of data that Google's indexes, and the query facility supports a different set of operators and different means of inferring when a particular term is a query term or an operator.
Well, unless you use any one of the many kinds of queries for which it does return data (anything using its calculator features, GDP of a country, population of a country, what time is it, etc., etc., etc.) as well as catalog-style links, assuming by "data", you mean "a specific answer to the query other than list of potentially relevant links".
Since apparently the business model here is to use Wolfram|Alpha as a teaser to sell a more advanced premium version of the service and to sell Mathematica licenses, it might be slightly more precise to label the users of the free "service" as "prospective customers" and the "service" itself as a marketing tool.
Which, also, explains why you might want to be good to the people who show up to use it.
You are making the easily understandable mistake of assuming that the "Source Information" link does, in fact, liest the sources of information used in the query. While you'd think that would be the case, if you actually read the disclaimer at the bottom of the popup list of sources, you would see that it specifically states that the information provided is "intended as a guide to sources of further information", and disclaims any necessary connection between the cited sources and any particular Wolfram|Alpha search result.
Strangely, the "Totals as of May 14, 2009" table it presents there matches, in number of cases, the information shown on "Tuesday, May 19, 2009" row of the "Daily new reports for the world" table, rather than "Thursday, May 14, 2009" row as one would expect. It does, true, provide some pretty graphs, but its obviously doing something wrong with the data in at least one of the two tables. Nice presentation isn't worth anything if the system is mishandling or mislabelling data.
And, of course, since it doesn't identify the sources of the data actually used in the result, you can't even do what you would do normally with an inaccurate non-primary source, and go to the original sources (note that the "source information" link describes itself as a "guide to sources of further information", and specifically disclaims any necessary connection between the listed sources and the specific result.)