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What if we looked beyond the Swartz case? Then what do you think about these types of TOS?

Maybe another example would be more interesting. Say you have a choice between an API that allows a "reasonable" number of requests in any 24 hour period and one that allows n number of requests in any 24 hour period. Which one would you prefer?

First assume you're an API user. Then assume you're the API provider.

Anyway, this kind of question is what I was getting at. What is reasonable? I don't know what their server capacity is.

I like using automation, I prefer non-interactive to point and click, and I have always found TOS on academic databases, not to mention most websites, interesting. Because they fail to account for anyone who might want to use automation (reasonably, having respect for the resources of the server). But maybe I'm the only one who finds this question interesting.

Nice explanation. Thanks for this.

You are jumping around a bit. We were talking about TOS and now we're in a court room and using the words "judge" and "dumb" in the same sentence. I was kidding about doing research. Humor. We all know what he was doing. But the truth is I'm serious about these types of TOS. And I'm looking at this mainlly from the end user's perspective. You see the same type of ambiguous TOS language everywhere on the web. Let's stay focused on TOS for a moment, and leave aside the Swartz case. Do you think ambiguous contracts (TOS) are "better"[1] than unambiguous ones? For example, would reducing ambiguity lower the probability of (costly) disputes?

1. better for who?

If I can use my own bootloader with Surface, I'd buy one.

So if I understand correctly, the answer is no.

Is there some sort of iTunes kiosk, a publicly accessible device with iTunes installed where a customer could purchase songs, download them to removable media and then move the songs from the media to whereever they need to have them?

Or maybe you can use a friend's device with iTunes installed?

I'm not sure if I am interpreting your last sentence correctly. Can you rephrase it?

"The problem is the price is not right for me at this stage."

Well, I'm pretty sure Whitney's enlightened path to k went through LISP, so maybe the author will get there one day. And LUSH seems a pretty nice choice of LISP's to work with - extendable, but not too big out of the box.

As if Python was the most powerful language, heh. :)

Maybe he was going for a world record of most citations in a single paper. Who's to say he wasn't just doing research? How many downloads is too many?

I would be willing to bet that the JSTOR TOS do not give a specific number. e.g. "You may not download more than n papers in 24 hours." And if they don't state a maximum in the TOS, then why shouldn't they, for clarity?

So true. It's not like publishing your paper on your lab's website will satsify the "publish" requirement for obtaining tenure. Why can't we separate the process of peer review from the process of letting a journal handle distribution of the paper?

My pet peeve when downloading articles from journals is that it is a chain of needless HTTP redirects and elaborate cookies. If you are accessing the network from an approved IP address, is all that really necessary? Why can't it be a simple direct download? Answer: Because they've commercialized the process of reading publicly-funded research results. And with that comes the usual mindless hoop-jumping for even the simplest things.

Many investigators will just post a copy on their lab's website anyway. And that's the link that they will often give to students who need a copy of the paper. So the whole scheme of commercializing the publishing of noncommercial research just looks silly.

Don't question it, just follow along.

So if I purchase some songs from this store (e.g. someone gives me iTunes credit as a gift) I can still play them without iTunes? I don't need iTunes installed anywhere?

It's just mathematical notation. Why is that insane?

What is computing at its most basic level but maths?

If you can handle working with symbols, more power to you. If you can't, move on. It's like calling mathematicians insane because you cannot understand the symbols they use.

I'm never sure if the conditioning of programmers toward certain styles has been good or bad for computing overall. It's troubling when this conditioning causes us to reject what is obviously excellent and useful work. (_if_ we learn how to make use of it)

Working with limitations is what yields creativity. But unlike the limitations of computing's yesteryear, the limitations of the iPad seem artificial. OSX is built from BSD UNIX, and iOS is built from OSX. Why should it be so limited? Where is the "iPad Pro"? The uncrippled version with USB and SD card slots.

Would HN actually affect the price of AAPL though?

Why would they care about HN if HN readers are not all Apple worshippers?

"the exclamation point implied"

Well, if it did it wasn't intentional.

I am always editing. It's just how I write. HN faux pas I guess.

I'm not sure I follow the rest of your comment.

I was not suggesting the author of the article was arguing for the value of lawyers, I was saying that as a general statement. (And not that it proves anything but in this very thread we have a lawyer - you - arguing in favor of lawyers.)

It may be I'm just too stupid to undertand whatever else you are trying to show me with your quotes. But it does seem like you are reading things into my words and coming up with your own interpretation which, alas, does not match my intent.

"as if we should assume"

Whoa. Where are you getting that?

I will let the @strawman take it from here. Because that's who I think you are trying to argue with. :)

I'm surprised you would actually take the statistics seriously. At face value, the article is pure entertainment. I would not consider an evaluation of a lawyer as a liability or an asset to be something that can be measured objectively. Every client is different and every client's situation is different. And it is the client who ultiimately decides whether the services are an asset or a liability, and no one else. My opinion is that lawyers do not add anything to the client's bottom line (but it doesn't matter what I think, only what the client thinks). In my view, lawyers function to limit the costs of the client's activities to the client (while at the same time adding to the client's costs themselves with legal fees). In other words, they operate to try to minimize the client's losses, to limit the client's liabilities. But we often have no evidence that such losses would have occurred absent the lawyers' involvement. We resort to speculation. Unfortunatley, lawyers play on fears to generate business. But there are some situations where this is not necessary, because the fears come from a real situation not a hypothetical. In these situations, there is a real, measurable risk of loss.

That's why I gave the (extreme) example of facing criminal charges. That's a situation where the losses seem quite imminent. The chance of serious losses is real and the accompanying fears are justified. I would argue society needs enough lawyers to handle those types of situations. Clients with serious problems where loss is imminent. But beyond that, it gets very subjective and very speculative. Needless to say, lawyers are very good at arguing the need for their existence and for their value to the client.

Whether it's 40% more than we needed in 1994, more than that or some lesser percentage, is anyone's guess. We all know it's too many. You don't need to conduct a study to see that.

You are the type of customer I want to sell my stuff to. Form is important. But not more important than function. But do others share your view?

There's no reason you shouldn't have the full uncrippled power of UNIX in the palm of your hand.

For many a sensible person, lawyers seem to be more a liability than an asset. Rightly so. Indeed they are more often than not rent-seekers, and the rent is sky high. That is, until you are faced with a serious problem.

Imagine you are falsely accused and facing charges that could land you in some maximum security prison, sitting on death row. Or, even worse, imagine you get caught downloading too many JSTOR articles in a university library. Then, lawyers don't seem like rent seekers. They are an asset, not a liability. And you need one. Or two. Or a whole team of them. You can't have too many. The more the merrier.

As with anything else in life, context is relevant.

So Gruber is some kind of paid blogger for Apple? His stuff always ends up on the front page of HN. What's up with that?

Here's how it's done, in simple terms. This is not some new thing. IBM was doing this before there was a Microsoft and before there was a WWW.

If you amass enough vague patents, any one of which on its own isn't worth the paper it's printed on, then automagically they no longer remain worthless. Suddenly you have something valuable: a patent portfolio! This is because it costs a significant sum to pay someone (e.g. a patent attorney) to go through your wonderful portfolio of junk and determine which ones are worthless. And that is in turn because patent law firms charge very high fees to do that work. And that is in turn because not every lawyer is permitted to become a patent lawyer - so there's only a limited number of patent lawyers - hence they have less competition to drive prices down. The uncertain validity of a bundle of patent claims that I can allege others are infringing is the value. Threat == value.

Therefore if I have several hundred vague patents of which a definitely large proportion are worthless and I sue you alleging you have infringed a significant number of them, you are screwed. Because it is going to cost you a lot of time and money to have someone go through each and every claim and convince me you are not infringing. So you just concede it's not worth it to fight me and my deep portfolio of junk software patents. And we start negotiations. Needless to say everyone at the negotiating table is not going to be in a happy mood going into this given that we had to start the whole process off with threatened or actual litigation. This is "business", American-style. A model for the world to follow.

If there's a third party doing store and forward or even just forwarding traffic, it is not "p2p". At least, not as I understand what p2p means. So any service that purports to be peer-to-peer ("p2p") should be able to show you exactly how the data moves from one peer to another to prove that the system is truly peer-to-peer. And they should do that without asking. If they won't show you this, I would be very skeptical. "p2p" looks to be a potential "big data" style buzzword to sell stuff. I hope I'm wrong.

If it is being used this way, that's a shame. Because peer-to-peer is really a goal worth working toward. It's the way the internet was supposed to work.

But the inventors don't work for them and they didn't file these patents nor were they assignees. They acquired the patents from someone else for a price.

Think about it. What would happen if they were cheap?

Anyone could amass a large portfolio. We could all block each other's every move. No one would have any leverage.

But the second question you have to ask is what does it cost to sue? What if that were cheap?

There are exceptions, and as you might guess they tend to be interpreted quite broadly. ;)

It is not ridiculous. But it does not solve the problem. It plays right into the problem. What you are describing is already done, and has been done for many years, in one form or another, between corporations e.g. in the semiconductor industry with patent pools and cross-licensing; but it is not a matter of discussion in web forums. The reason why this stuff is now discussed in web forums is because this sort of protectionist racket is now reaching beyond a circumspect group of companies and is touching the free software world.

The solution as any informed but objective observer can tell you lies in taking away the power to sue - the junk patents which give people the right to sue for frivolous i.e. overly broad patent claims - and taking away the financial incentives - high fees by patent offices, high fees by patent lawyers and even the court fees - one could imagine E.D. Texas must thankful for all the patent troll business all stemming from the issuance of junk software patents. Stop issuing these junk patents. We deliberately opened the door for these in the not too distant past and we can also close it.

Needless to say, there is a fair bit of capital moving through the business method patent racket. That's why it's difficult to shut it down. We need to have junk software patent trolling declared as a class of white collar crime and then get some Giuliani-style prosecutors to come in and clean this mess up. I'm joking but you get the idea. It's not easy to stop this machine.

Creating another protectionist "insurance" scheme is not the answer. The perceived need for something like that is a symptom of the problem itself. The risk should not exist to begin with.

Yep. One of the co-founders is a former lawyer who in fact coined the term "patent troll". Now they are world leader in patent trolling. "If you can't beat `em, ..."

It's great lesson in copouts. Instead of using your resources (e.g. a former Microsoft CTO's intelligence and amassed wealth) to fix a problem, you take the easy way out and exploit the broken system. What a tremendous success story.

Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Clown College

It was worth the read just for that alone.

"A plurality of personas"

The patent system has become a joke. Only because of how it is being used, and it's one industry that is driving things to the point of absurdity. There is no integrity to the system, no matter how well-designed it is in theory, when they keep accepting nonsense like this. If filing for these was affordable for anyone, accepting them would have to come to an end. It would not be worth anyone's time to review.

"Social computing". In other words sending messages over a wire using a computer. No one was doing that in the late 60's, in the 70's or in the 80's or even the 90's. This is totally new. Totally fresh. Bleeding edge. Hot. And patentable!

There's actually a technique to this, going back to Usenet. You can draw out the answer you want this way, by saying something technically incorrect as if it were correct.

Nope. (Granted, this is possible if the domain name resgitrant designates an open resolver as authoritative but almost no one does that. The reasons should be obvious.)

How much time have you devoted to learning how DNS works?