I've been using Dashblock in a production environment and it's super easy to create and use the APIs on sites. We'd previously written our own scripts to do this at scale, but it was difficult to keep them all up to date. You're right that fixing a single page's dom changes is trivial, but it's a real pain to scale that. Regarding the ML aspect, I've tested changing the dom for a page in Dashblock and it seems to work... it didn't break the scraping I had set up. The price might not make sense for everybody, but for me it's definitely worth it.

Because they can side-step background checks and be resold to anyone.

Anyone who's not a criminal can buy a gun, thats the law. Background checks may prevent criminals from buying guns, but they often do not because criminals don't buy guns from legal gun dealers or other legal gun owners. They either steal them or they buy them from an illegal dealer.

The background check issue is a red herring according to the US-NIJ studies.

Well private gun sale laws vary from state to state. For instance, in Oregon private transfers of firearms are perfectly legal without background checks or going through FFL dealers. So anyone can side-step a background check in a state like Oregon by asking someone else to purchase the gun legally and then give them cash for it. Does that mean we should expect more gun violence in states like Oregon?

Background checks examine the person, not the gun!

You may not know this if you've never bought a gun at a gun store, but they call in your identifying information, they say nothing to the Federal government about the gun or guns to be bought except if they include handguns as I recall.

There are forms to be filled out that do include recording the serial number, but that came long before the national background check system (1968 vs. mid-90s).

Great point about the value of the social validation from high-profile media coverage! That's usually more important than the minimal traffic it drives.

This was definitely our biggest surprise: we expected an early spike and quick tapering, just like we were accustomed to from web traffic.

It's hard for us to know how much residual traffic we still get from Better Homes & Gardens, since there's no referrer to track people coming from magazines.

Yep, same here, I only know because people occasionally say "I saw an article in Woman's Day" when they send a support email.

We're actually working on an export feature now. We keep full resolution copies of all photos because so many people want to use Moment Garden to backup their baby photos.

Great! I think this could be a big market, especially with the ability to post quickly from mobile devices.

Where did you get the $70MM figure? Published reports show half that.

unable to find it now. it was in one of techcrunch articles. 76 to be exact. now it says half of it.

Incorrect. Only what is specifically claimed (in the claims themselves) holds up in court.

The key requirement in that is going to court.

Exactly - no matter now badwrong the patent, it still takes time and money to go to court, and the kind of people that IBM will be using this patent against don't have that time or that money.

The key is to read the claims (particularly the independent ones) - that is the only part of a patent that holds water.

In this case, the first independent claim is seriously narrow. The OP's title is extremely misleading.

This is what I read in the claims section:

"What is claimed is:

1. A system for generating an electronic notification containing a portion of a day out of office notice, ..." (and then goes on to explain its implementation).

Could you please tell me how the title is misleading?

This was the reason I co-founded Moment Garden http://momentgarden.com, to help parents securely save the memories of their child.

I know it's a leap to trust a small startup with such important data, but with stories of Google arbitrarily shutting down accounts, it helps make our case.

Sure, we've had some growing pains, but when a parent emails us with problems, they get in touch with a founder who will make the situation right. Good luck getting that with Google.

Is there a paid plan? I'd love to use something like this, but before I build on it, I'd like some assurance it will stay around for awhile.

No paid plan at the moment, but if was something that people were genuinely interested in using, I would consider a (very cheap) paid plan. It will be sticking around 'as is' for a good while at the very least though.