But can't a tool itself be a form of speech? Even something as ordinary as a word processor - every release of [Open|Libre]Office is a testament to the power of crowdsourcing and open source; the fact such a tool remains competitive while MS pumps untold millions into MSWord speaks volumes.

Some other tools that are arguably speech:

DeCSS (the US courts upheld that it was speech, in source OR binary form. Consider other politically and ideologically motivated tools, such as DDoS software, Stuxnet, ink-cartridge resetters, jailbreaking tools...)

Not only software tools. What if you built a hammer that plays the sound of Baby Jesus crying if it detects you are pounding nails into a non-sustainable type of lumber? Or nails with a mugshot of a dictator on the head of every one?

I think no matter how you slice it, someone inevitably has to make a judgment call on where the line between speech and non-speech lies. In this case, a human judge would still have to decide whether your tool counts as an "attempt to communicate" or merely just a tool.

The average buyer (my parents, etc.) is expected to have a Linux livecd and working knowledge of fdisk handy?

Yes, we nerds have clever workarounds (If I did not value my time, I could build the partition by hand in a hexeditor - I've actually had to do this for embedded systems in my day job), but just like the mouse in TFA, a somewhat onerous requirement for the average user to have to register online to use a commodity product they already paid for.

A few days ago I bought a 2TB Western Digital hard drive, which uses the newer 'Advanced' (4KB) sector format and an emulation layer (in controller firmware) to present normal 512-byte sectors to the host. To avoid a massive performance hit, the drive has to be partitioned using WD's special sector-alignment software - an 80MByte (Windows-only) download with mandatory account registration and validated email address.

What massively fancy, complex thing does this 80MB worth of software do? Move all the partitions forward by 1 sector. Yes, literally! (For legacy reasons, most disk utilities partition a HD with a 63-sector offset; the alignment utility moves it to 64 so that all disk structures will align on 4KB boundaries.)

(Why not just ship the drive with a default 4k-aligned partition? Where's the money in that?)

Don't trust a "legislative" solution to a technical problem. DNT is a polite suggestion, nothing more; implementation is on-your-honor (or dishonor, in this case). Is anyone *that* surprised about stories like this?

Now begin (or should) the technical countermeasures. Suggestions to MS for IE 10.01: If *.yahoo.com in domain:

* Expiry for all cookies and cache resources from this domain set to 7 days or the end of a session (browser exited), whichever comes first. "Cache resources" includes without limitation caches maintaned by plugins (e.g. Flash persistent storage).

* Cookie and cookie-equivalent data retrieval sandboxed by clickstream. E.g. hit yahoo.com - sets cookie. Click to yahoo.com/link - cookie readable (same clickstream scope). User opens a new window and manually browses to yahoo.com - cookies set in first window's session unreadable (out of scope) to 2nd window's session. This behavior may have to extend to cache objects (see "evercookie" and friends)

This is interesting. What I am curious about is whether the US/EU systems are designed to be directly compatible or if this multi-system compatibility will come (as it does now for cell networks and local-area wireless networking) from receiver designers smooshing multiple separate radios (and possibly antennas) into the same die/package.

Interestingly, the '826 pinch-to-zoom patent could be more correctly called "double pinch to zoom": it covers a more narrow implementation in which the system recognizes a user doing a pinch-to-(activity) gesture followed by a 2nd pinch-to-(activity) within a preset time, maintaining the activity state in between. A naked pinch-to... activity (or any number of them) isn't covered if the system doesn't explicitly connect the repeated pinches together. This is probably why Apple hasn't asserted it. (And between you and me, an oddly-specific qualifier in an independent claim is almost always is a smoking gun pointing to prior art on the claim sans-qualifier.)

On the resonance front, AFAICT the main way the modern crop of wireless charging systems differ from Tesla's is that (now in a cheap-as-free microcontroller world) they include some form of 2-way communication/collusion between the charger and gadget, allowing it to actively home in on the resonant frequency for the specific device.

How long until they notice Gnome 3?

How does this compare to existing ad-hoc WiFi mesh protocols such as B.A.T.M.A.N. / Open-Mesh, or some of the others listed at the bottom of the Wikipedia entry?

I know you are joking, but it's an interesting point. Right now there is a sort of "no harm done" attitude to false claims. The harm, for the purposes of court judgments against claimers, must be quantified and proven in dollars. But an individual victim cannot really quantify or prove the financial harm of, say, their viral cat video being pulled off Youtube for a couple weeks.

I may be taking a big toke off the same pipe, but what if Google (or individual false-claim victims) could claim that a false DMCA notice caused them real, measurable monetary harm by poisoning their search rankings?

Depending on Android version / distributor (this may be more of a thing enabled in unofficial builds, e.g. cyanogenmod), you may have the option to revoke individual permissions on a per-permission and per-app basis. Revoke its 'Internet' permission and you're good to go. Worked for Angry Birds last time I checked (with auto-updates disabled since then), however, it's possible they've added a workaround for this (e.g. force crash if certain permissions revoked).

I know reading the friendly article (and especially PDFs linked from it) is not a certainty around these parts, but this one's pretty interesting. The article itself kind of entirely misses the point (whether the iDevice is a "computer" was pretty much completely irrelevant*), but the opinion itself taught me a lot. In particular, there are such things as "contributory infringement" and "inducement" in patent law. I did not know of such a thing until now.

All of the independent claims of the patent explicitly require a music source whose files have at least two types of metadata and a sorting feature (probably because "DAC-in-a-box" on its own is as old as the hills and not patentable). Assume for the purposes of discussion that the patent is valid (it's not**) and that an average mp3 file + iDevice (or most any mp3 player software) meets the metadata + sort criteria (doubly so if "file name" counts as one of the metadata).

Clearly, these companies are selling only the DAC-in-a-box, *not* including any kind of "computer", user interfaces, mp3 files, metadata or sort capabilities (although the end user can trivially add one and thus infringe the patent). Thus, most of the opinion - including a treasure trove of references to deciding cases - centers on whether the companies were liable for end-user infringements by encouraging and/or inducing them. The gist I got from the opinion is that merely knowing that a user *could* infringe is not enough - the manufacturer must either know of the patent (or believe beyond reasonable doubt that such a patent must exist), be shown to believe that it is valid, AND knowingly encourage an end user to commit actual infringement, or else be shown to have purposely avoided awareness of the existence of the patent ("willfull blindness"). Showing that you believed the patent invalid - in particular, obtaining and relying on an expert legal opinion of invalidity - is a strong defense against such "indirect infringement" claims. In other words, the burden is on the plaintiff to show indirect infringement, and the bar is pretty high.

* There is nothing about a "computer" in the independent claims (although one is briefly mentioned in a dependent claim) - only a list of features which could be performed by a computer (or iDevice). In fact, a footnote in the case notes mentions: "This Court declined to construct the term 'computer' and in this case the analysis need not turn on that definition." . For reasons I don't entirely understand, the check for direct infringement centered on the "interface" part of the claims, which the court constructed to mean a DAC (more or less).

** All of the claims were invalidated upon re-examination, several times (e.g. through several Bose objections to the reexamination results, including to the "Final Decision").

Except they don't do this because it's not useful information for a provider. An individual's usage habits are uniquely worthless.

To the utility's own operations, probably pretty useless. But the data that can be extracted - depending on the update rate the utility can pull, right down to what TV show you are watching - would have high commercial value on the open market (think well-known consumer data-aggregators (Experian), advertisers, etc.). How long will the utility leave that money on the table?

Does anyone else find it ironic that the actual infringer's sites [ http://chicksandpolitics.com/ , http://atty4kids.org/ ] have an anti-right-click script that produces a smarmy message about respecting copyrights?

Mod parent up.
The ruling further hammers the point by comparing the Atari vs. Nintendo ruling to the SEGA vs. Accolade ruling. A reverse-engineered implementation of a console "unlock" protocol was deemed infringing in the former case (despite not even being written in the same language) and noninfringing in the latter (despite being a direct copy). The judge points out the difference is in whether or not the API that was copied was the only compatible way to do it. In the case of the 10NES lockout, many alternative bitstreams could have been used to unlock the console, while in the SEGA case, the way the defendant did it was deemed the only sensible implementation*.

*IIRC, gurus in the SEGA case with intimate knowledge of the hardware were able to come up with a couple hacks that proved there was at least one alternate sequence that could theoretically work, but the judge did not find this to be something the defendant could have reasonably known, as the copying of the "magic" sequence predated the existence of the lockout mechanism, and was done in anticipation of such a mechanism being deployed in the future.