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Allusion, nazi propaganda faggot.

Seriously, what Chinese cars are actually being sold in the US anyway?

A remarkably wide range of various kinds, actually... all slated to soon become that much more unaffordable, I'm afraid.

Apparently, the test track will be orange with banked curves and an actual loop.

A cavalcade of white dudes, of course. http://corporate.mattel.com/ab...

Which would be about the time that magnets were no longer allowed in toys for small children, and Magnetix (toys for children that included magnets) were recalled and relabeled for age 6+. (This was an extension of the recall from 2006) Mattel then recalled their toys with magnets in the fall of 2007. ... etc.

Are we still having problems with this 5 years later?

Are we going to need to havea story on here next week that small items are a choking hazard and shouldn't be given to children under 3?

Even better, this one only costs $12.99!

As valid as your point is with respect to Intelectual Property and copyright - they aren't suing someone on the grounds that they are making a word game but because they are trying (at least in Hasbros opinion) to associate with their trademark - which has to be defended or can be lost. If the product still sells under that name for 60 years then why wouldn't they defend it?

Incedentaly the original application for a patent on the game was rejected.

I agree completely. And what's worse is when I'm innocently looking for porn and I get to Mattel or Toys-R-Us. Do you know how embarresing that is for my co-workers to think I'm shopping for little girl's toys? They know I don't have a daughter. I have to lie and say I'm shopping for my niece.

Good response, and I do see your point. I should however clarify that the numbers were for Mattel as a whole which as I'm sure you'll know is far more than Barbie. http://www.mattel.com/our_toys/default.asp?f=false &s= obviously things like Fisher Price, Matchbox and the disney things don't harm their sales. :)

I'm not entirely sure if you could pull the exact profit numbers out of these monstrous companies.

A kid won a contest sponsored by Mattel and got a part in Masters Of The Universe (1987)

He had NO lines.

If you blinked fast, you'd miss him when he appeared on screen.

Will this be the fate of the HHGTTG movie part winner?...

I got all excited when I read the headline that I would soon be able to have my very own miniature New York City Subway car and Long Island Rail Road car. Thus being able take out any commuting frustrations in the comfort and safety of my home. :)

No shit. Companies are pushing porn on kids at younger and younger ages. My wife couldn't believe it when she saw an add that had the "What's Your Flava" song pushing barbies on Nickelodian.

FYI: Flava Dolls have night club theme music about oral sex. Check out the Lyrics.

Slipping in goatse links is easy. Too easy even. There are a number of redirector services (shorl.com) which allow you to hide the URL, and even most mainstream sites do have some way to redirect.

No, simply slipping in goatse into a comment is so easy that it has become uninteresting. The real art now is to have a goatsy comment moderated up rather than down as the usual troll or flamebait. Seems so far it is working well (+4, and counting...)

Next challenge: slip one into a story submission!

What kind of computer should I buy? Would Apple Mac be a good choice?

Well, here on Slashdot, we're heading for hemorrhoids or diarrhea instead. Don't look, it may damage your eyes forever!

No balls? Here is a small ping-pong ball for you, Patrick.

I just wonder what happens if you feed the software this image.

It was indeed Ken. Here is a photo.

The Consumerreports writer misread the Db level, that's only 1.57db, not 157. Btw, Mattel have posted a re-buttal on their site.

Fortunately, Mattel's lawyer's are on our side, according to their press release!

Fortunately, Mattel's lawyer's are on our side, according to their press release!

Click here for their take on the issue!

Hopefully, they'll make a better job at checking the URL than Slashdot does!

Fortunately, Barbie and Ken are there to tell them the truth.

Fortunately, Barbie and Ken are there to tell them the truth.

And how do they want to keep this kind of links out?

Yes, and we all know how well that works...

Mattel has a neat collection of action figures based on Sega game characters. Go and check them out!

Is that Ken in this picture? Wow, he's a tripod!

Look here!

Tyco Toys, Inc. was purchased by Mattel in 1997, and produced several notable toys including the Magic 8-Ball.

Tyco International Ltd. is a diversified manufacturing and service company (similar in concept to the conglomerate that is GE), with revenues of $38 billion and a market cap of $60 billion.

This Tyco is the one that runs undersea cables.

I'm not saying that it was right or wrong of them. I am saying that bullies like this only succeed when people don't fight. If you back down during a fight, it doesn't count when dealing with bullies!

I have the stones, I have been fighting SCUM. But, when Mattel was asked by a judge at a summary judgment motion hearing as to what was libelous, Mattel moved to dimiss.

I think its time they began hearing en masse from some of us pods. They have a cleverly obscure web form for contact. Heres the two cents I sent:

For a year or more I have been noting your bad behavior on the internet. You sue at the drop of a hat for some pretty nebulous reasons. I've read all about the employee with the carpal tunnel problems you harrassed. This morning I read about your DSSAgent spyware being included in childrens CD-ROMS. My children are grown, however, as one who is about to become a grandparent in plural, I wanted to let you know that until I see some evidence of a reformed, forward-thinking attitude with regard to the internet (on which, I might point out, your company is a GUEST, rather than an OWNER OF) no grandchild of mine will receive Mattel products. I have five brothers, all with children and grandchildren, and will be emailing them as well as posting to the family website my strong recommendation that they boycott Mattel and the reasons why. I see your attitude even boils down to the level of this "e-mail form", which displays such a tiny amount of the message body that it is very difficult to compose/edit a message here.

======
"Rex unto my cleeb, and thou shalt have everlasting blort." - Zorp 3:16

"..., computer source code, though unintelligible to many, is the preferred method of communication among computer programers."

Besides the obvious barbies and board games, what else does MAttel make? I don't particularly want to buy anything they're making, period.

Hope you don't have kids; they'll have to go without a lot of stuff. Besides Barbie, Mattel owns Cabbage Patch Kids, Fisher-Price, Hot Wheels, Tyco RC, Matchbox, and Mattel Interactive (their software division). They also make Sesame Street and Winnie-the-Pooh toys under license. Their Web site has more details.

They're also publicly traded (symbol: MAT) so if you really want to make a statement, make sure you haven't invested in them directly or through managed funds, and encourage others to do the same.

http://www.cyberpatrol.com/forms/lists ub.asp

Alternatively, why not suggest adding http://www.cyberpatrol.com/ and http://www.mattel.com/ as "inappropriate for the workplace" and "inappropriate for kids" respectively?

Or mail cybernot@microsys.com for more flexibility in giving your reasons for blocking these two offensive sites.

David

--
"We all know you're soft cos we've all seen you dancing.
We all know you're hard cos we've all seen you drinking from noon until noon again"

In case you're trying to email the executives at Mattel, here's some info you can use:

The list of directors and officers is at http://www.mattel.com/corporate/ company/investors/

Here's an nslookup on their mail servers and a conversation with it to try a few mail ID's. Unfortunately, it looks like their mail is a black hole with no bounces for bad accounts:

[scott@virtual2 ~]$ nslookup
Default Server: comet.execpc.com
Address: 204.29.202.6

> set type=mx
> mattel.com
Server: comet.execpc.com
Address: 204.29.202.6

Non-authoritative answer:
mattel.compreference = 10, mail exchanger = mail3.pilot.net
mattel.compreference = 20, mail exchanger = mail2.pilot.net
mattel.compreference = 30, mail exchanger = mail.pilot.net

Authoritative answers can be found from:
mattel.comnameserver = NS.pilot.net
mattel.comnameserver = NS2.pilot.net
mattel.comnameserver = NS3.pilot.net
mail3.pilot.net internet address = 205.139.40.16
mail3.pilot.net internet address = 205.139.40.17
mail2.pilot.net internet address = 198.232.147.18
mail2.pilot.net internet address = 198.232.147.16
mail2.pilot.net internet address = 198.232.147.17
mail.pilot.net internet address = 198.232.147.18
mail.pilot.net internet address = 198.232.147.16
mail.pilot.net internet address = 198.232.147.17
NS.pilot.net internet address = 198.232.147.10
NS2.pilot.net internet address = 198.232.147.12
NS3.pilot.net internet address = 205.139.40.10
> exit
[scott@virtual2 ~]$ telnet mail.pilot.net 25
Trying 198.232.147.16...
Connected to mail.pilot.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mail01-oak.pilot.net ESMTP Sendmail; Mon, 20 Mar 2000 08:56:14 -0800 (PST) y
helo 2tp.com
250 mail01-oak.pilot.net Hello scott@virtual2.execpc.com [169.207.2.36], pleaseu
mail from: scott@2tp.com
250 scott@2tp.com... Sender ok
rcpt to: jbarad@mattel.com
250 jbarad@mattel.com... Recipient ok
rcpt to: jill.barad@mattel.com
250 jill.barad@mattel.com... Recipient ok
rcpt to: anydumbass@mattel.com
250 anydumbass@mattel.com... Recipient ok
quit

The following is a rant I wrote on Saturday, when I first found out about Mattel being awarded the injunction. Anybody may feel free to copy or reproduce parts of it.

My mirror does not include any of the program files, but only the published analysis, Mattel's complaint, and an English translation of the Swedish copyright law 1960:729. I have no relation to the defendants in this case, and am only an interested third party.

- David Michael Turover(Perpetual Newbie)

(begin rant)

I am not in a good mood right now.

I've just had to troubleshoot NT's braindead permissions scheme, I've taken a test where several of the "correct answers" are wrong, my right wrist is aching(not good for a CS student), and it's barely noon. On my lunch break I crack open Netscape to read the news, and find that a United States federal judge has ordered two cryptology researchers to remove an essay that they had published on a Swedish website.

The two researchers in question are Matthew Skala, a Canadian, and Eddy L. O. Jansson, a Swede. They have reverse-engineered a program called Cyber Patrol, and described in detail the cryptography and computer file formats used by the program.

Cyber Patrol is a product made by Microsystems Software, which is a subsidiary of Mattel. The purpose of the product is to prevent any user of a computer where it is installed from accessing any of a list of several Internet web sites, ostensibly to prevent children from viewing pornography. As part of their report, Skala and Jansson offered a Win32 binary named cphack.exe, a utility which decodes Cyber Patrol's list of blocked URLs(website addresses).

Mattel promptly sued the authors of the report, charging them with copyright violations and ordering them to remove their program, report, and all supporting and related documents and materiel, claiming that the report and software will cost them over $75,000 in lost sales. On Friday March 17th, two days after Mattel's complaint was registered, Judge Edward F. Harrington awarded Mattel a preliminary injunction against the two. Jansson's internet service provider, though in Sweden and not subject to U.S. law, has removed his account and deleted the documents.

Reverse-engineering is the process of examining a product to see how it works. In almost every industry it is not only expected to occur but considered an integral part of the free market. In the software industry, however, products are often sold with "shrinkwrap licenses" that restrict reverse-engineering. A shrinkwrap license is a contract describing terms of use for a product, in which these terms cannot be read until after the product has been purchased, can not be disputed, and must be agreed to for the consumer to use the product which they have already paid for and in most cases cannot return. In most Western countries these shrinkwrap contracts are unenforcable, and in the U.S. their legality is disputed, although the upcoming UCITA bill will make them law.

In most Western countries, including Sweden, reverse-engineering of software is a right explicitly allowed by law that cannot be taken away by a contract(1960:729 26 g). Legal protections against reverse engineering can be obtained; they are called "Patents". Furthermore, an action undertaken in Canada and Sweden should be out of the United States' jurisdiction; However, the U.S. court did not refuse to hear the case as it should have done, and instead granted the injunction by weighing the action under U.S. law.

To make the situation more repugnant, Cyber Patrol doesn't work. And not just Cyber Patrol. It is well known that all content-blocking programs such as Cyber Patrol have a high rate of failure, and a high rate of erroneously blocking acceptable content despite any claims by their marketing departments of being 100% accurate.

This is not the first time Microsystems/Mattel's lawyers have been aggressive. A Microsystems software engineer who was fired from his job for seeking medical attention for his sore wrists has since been sued by Mattel for documenting his experiences. Outrageous lawsuits such as this have been happening often lately, and what is frightening is that in the United States' court culture, they have a good chance of succcess.

want to write to Mattel to explain this but I can't find any useful email address on their web site. Does anybody know such an email address?
Try this: http://www.service.mattel.com/contac t_mail.asp