Reminds me how the way drives recognized 1.44MB floppies (3.5") from 720KB ones was by checking if there was a hole in the bottom-right corner (the bottom-left corner being for write protection). And sure enough, if you made a hole in a 720KB floppy it would be possible to format it as 1.44. There might have been a few more errors, but I remember when HD floppies were 3-4 times more expensive, so it was definitely worth it. At least for a teenager with only pocket money. Ah, those floppy drilling afternoons... Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?

French trader Kerviel was sentenced to $6.7 billion. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/business/global/06bank.html

In general I would agree, if the conclusion is debatable (even if ever so slightly). But if you find more dogs than cats in your neighbourhood, you could as well declare there are less cats than dogs, because it is formally equivalent. The case we are talking about now is actually the same degree of equivalence (I just did the math, it's worth to do it once to convince yourself).

I get your point. But since the two sentences are statistically equivalent, it is completely irrelevant which method you used, they lead to the same conclusion. So you could very well examine the population of people who spend a lot of time on the internet, find that they are more depressed than average, and conclude that "people showing signs of depression are more likely to spend a lot of time surfing the internet".

OK, let's be technical. Let:

D be the number of depressed people; A be the number of internet addicted people; DA be the number of depressed and internet addicted people. T be the total number of people.

Then: "internet addicts are more likely than the general population to be depressed" means "the proportion of DA among A is greater than the proportion of D among T", or "DA/A > D/T", which is mathematically equivalent (since all number are positive) to "DA*T > D*A".

"depressed people could be less likely than the general population to be internet addicts" means "the proportion of DA among D is greater than the proportion of A among T", or "DA/D < A/T", which is equivalent "DA*T < D*A".

No.

True, we would be ... all content! I'm so glad to be dissatisfied with life instead! ;)

Well, "spending a lot of time on the internet and showing signs of depression are correlated" would be good, but clearly not understood straight away by many people. One could argue it is better than to be wrongly understood by those people (and then even people understanding correlation can be influenced by the "wrong" formulations, when not paying full attention), and it could provide the opportunity to explain the concept. Yes, it's a pain, but then the fact that not knowing it makes you much more vulnerable to manipulation might justify it. Definitely this is something that should be given more attention in schools, until "correlation" becomes as much understood as "likely".

The word "cause" would assert causation. When the summary says:

it suggests causation, because that does not sound the same as:

One might agree that those sentences are formally equivalent (in an idealized version of english), but the way most people speak, those sentences suggest different causations.

I think you're wrong. From the coverage I've read, it's a method of processing and manipulating XML documents, and they designed an piece of XML editing software around it which they showed to Microsoft and Microsoft then stole the ideas from.

News coverage of technical things is so effing horrible. Most tech articles are written by people who don't understand programming but don't see why that should stop them from broadcasting their misinterpretation of technical information. You should just read the patent; most of it is very clearly-written.

It does not predate XML, and has nothing to do with XML-based standards.

Filed in 1994, it does predate XML. It doesn't predate SGML, though, and since core XML is essentially the same thing, it's probably safe. However, I it does affect XML-based standards -- specifically the ones that separate content from structure/presentation.

The Patent

It's a way to separate content from structure. So, for example, where and SGML document would store data like "<p>Hi <i>friend</i></p>", they store it as two separate pieces of data. The content piece would be "Hi friend", the structure piece would be "0:p, 3:i, 9:/i, 9:/p" (roughly). So now if you wanted to format that document differently, you could just use a different structure piece; the content piece doesn't change.

This exact technique obvious, so I don't think it should have been awarded a patent. But maybe what's obvious to us in 2009 may not have been obvious to the patent examiner in 1994 and, in any case, it doesn't look like any of the affected parties are going to try and argue obviousness. The important question is how generally will their technique be interpreted?

Taken narrowly, it's a way of putting XML-like tags in a separate file, mapping them back into the content using byte offsets. This is easy enough to work around. Taken broadly, it's a way of separating content from structure. So, any time you augment the content in one file by some kind of annotations in another, you're violating their patent. So HTML and CSS are problematic because the style information is in a separate file, even though the mapping is done using tag and class names and not using byte offsets.

I don't know much about patent litigation, so I don't know how much leeway they give plaintiffs. But I doubt Microsoft Word uses their exact technique; they probably do something similar to HTML+CSS or XSLT. So this victory could indicate that the courts are interpreting the technique broadly. Which sucks. Man, patents like this are killing the industry.