What I find interesting is that Internet Explorer has, from the very beginning, had a little tab on its settings window to choose your preferred programs for the more common URI protocols like mail and news. So we've known for a long time that it is useful for browsers to be able to hand off non-http protocols to external programs, and that it's the sort of thing that a user might want to configure and customize themselves. How come these days it seems like all the management of that (in Windows at least) happens silently behind the scenes, and the user can't touch it without hacking the registry? Why hasn't the Programs tab of the Internet Options control panel evolved to a completely customizable list of protocol handlers, just the same as the one for file extensions? I haven't used Vista; does its infamous "allow or cancel" watchdog notify you of changes to your registered protocol handlers? It seems to me that the first step in dealing with these "browser flaws" is to bring this piece of the OS into the light and give the user control over it.
The ARC's thing isn't a trademark; there's a special law recognizing it.
Yes, I'm finding the passages from the Geneva Convention that have been posted here very interesting. That wrinkle could make this case completely different from your run-of-the-mill trademark infringement. However...
mostly, they're going against what are effectively fraudulent uses, people trying to create the impression that they're allied with the red cross.
What are you basing that on? I don't have any data on whom the ARC have sent legal notices to, and I certainly don't have any data on the intentions of people who use the mark without authorization. I'd be willing to bet that the majority of misuses are on the presumption that it was generic, due to the whole Geneva Convention thing.
What I do know is that when they bothered us about it, there was no fraud or intent to defraud involved. It was your typical genericizing of a mark out of innocent ignorance. ARC's complaining about it was just the same as the owners of the Kleenex or DayGlo brands taking out ads in writers' trade magazines asking them if they could please not throw around their trademarks as though they were generic words. If that idea takes hold in the public mind, it dilutes the brand, which causes a very real weakening of the holder's legal control over it. ARC's legal team takes steps to prevent that just like any other corporation's does. I'm sure Johnson & Johnson has done it too. If they haven't done it for the red cross symbol, you can bet your ass they do it constantly for the Band-Aid brand name.
Besides (although IANAL) it should be, as others have and will mention, prior art.
Prior art is a meaningless concept in trademark law. Patents are clear-cut: If someone else can prove they invented it first, you don't have a valid patent. Compared to that, trademark/trade dress/service mark issues are incredibly nebulous. The strength of your mark is determined far less by its age than by its consistent association with your company in the public mind. ARC and J&J can both claim a pretty good share of that, although ARC would probably edge out in a hardcore survey. Infringement, on the other hand, depends not only on using a mark that is confusable with someone else's, but on how much your market overlaps with theirs. That's the main reason it's only now coming to a head for these two.
The cross is a symbol for many things, and I'm sue it's been used on packaging
Sure, but the complaint here is a lot more specific than that. Look at the Red Cross logo and the logo Johnson & Johnson uses on Band-Aid products side by side. They're identical in every respect: same color, same shape, same proportions. Since the mark is now being put onto competing products in the same market, there's no question that it's an infringement. It's just not clear which way. ARC may be at a disadvantage being the newcomer to the market.
The red cross symbol has become synonymous with 'First Aid' in the public mind.
Which is exactly why the Red Cross has been putting a lot of effort for years into tightening their grip on that mark. Let's be clear about something, people. I know the knee-jerk reaction is to root for the charitable organization over the big corporation, but I've got to point out a little hypocrisy on the part of the Red Cross president. I have never before seen a cease-and-desist letter from Johnson & Johnson for the use of this mark. I have, however, seen them from the Red Cross.
Some years ago I worked for a company that publishes clip art collections. We maintained a list of "bad elements" that slipped into our sources because it didn't occur to the artists that they were protected by IP law, but that we had received legal notices about. The red cross was one of our biggest offenders (alongside Weber-shaped grills, Olympic rings, cars that looked too much like Beetles, etc.). It was the ARC, not Johnson & Johnson, that made work for me converting them all to puke green. (That's the standard IP-neutral first aid symbol now, by the way: a butt-ugly fluorescent green cross.) I'd often wondered how Johnson & Johnson got away with it, and figured they must have some sort of agreement since they'd both been using it for so long.
So you're right that the defensibility of ownership for either of them is a little iffy, but the fact that I've started to see that horrible green in more places means that it's starting to become known that somebody owns it. My gut tells me that it's usually the ARC that people think of (or get letters from), but if they're now starting to directly compete in the market with Johnson & Johnson, who knows which way a judge or jury would go?
I remember enough of my Latin to know that anno could be either the dative or the ablative of annus.
Romans [...] would not have understood it to mean the same as the prepositional phrase "in the year XXX"; after all, Latin does have the preposition "in" which means (unsurprisingly) "in", and if they meant "in the year XXX", they would say it.
Not necessarily. Romans dropped prepositions all the time, especially in, when they could be safely inferred from the noun's case and context. I distinctly remember this tripping me up constantly until I got used to it. (Now I study Japanese, where leaving words to the imagination is practically an art form.)
Given the wide leeway the dative case allows for, [...] "relative to the year of (our) Lord" is just as good a translation as any
True, if you assume it's dative. But since it could also be ablative, which can agree with in and indicate current position, "[in] the year X, which belongs to the Lord" is still at least as likely a translation. More likely, Latin-speakers hearing the phrase would take the two translations to be close enough in meaning that they wouldn't care. I go with "in the year of the Lord X" mainly because that's the set phrase used in formal English writing.
With Latin's very different sentence structure and lack of punctuation, arguing about word order in Latin using modern English standards is buffoonery!
Not as much as you might think. The medieval English language (and as you pointed out, this is when the phrase arose) took a lot of syntax and grammar cues from Latin, especially when people were trying to sound educated, and most especially in religious/clerical/scriptural contexts. We used to have a full declension paradigm, very much like Latin's. (You can still see a hint of it in pronouns like he/him or who/whom.) So really my argument is the other way around. I say that the set English translation is "in the year of the Lord X" because the original Latin phrase was anno Domini X. It was considered erudite to stick as close to the Latin structure as possible.
When, and why, did "BC" transmogrify into "BCE" (before the Christian era)?
Actually it didn't. There may be argument over this point, but when I first heard the abbreviation BCE, it was expanded to me as "before the Common Era" and explained as a renaming of BC that was meant to be less theocentric without requiring any extra math. Basically, "Let's stop invoking Christ every time we have to list a date more than a thousand years ago, since AD 1 January 1 isn't Christ's actual birthdate anyway."
Accordingly, AD was renamed to CE at the same time. It only adds to the confusion over before-or-after-the-number that CE properly comes after (thus, "[year] 300 of the Common Era") while AD goes before.
Yes, I'm totally down with the sentiments at http://www.getafirstlife.com/. There is no need for a second life if you've already got a first one.
But then I stop and think for a second, and I realize that Second Life in general, and events like this in particular, and the attention they get, are good things for a specific reason. Most people don't have the vaguest notion how their first life actually works. Getting in on the ground floor of a micro-society that would like to mirror all the stuff its external macro-society has, but has to start from scratch, is incredibly educational.
The gambling ban is one example. Put aside the obvious explanation of conflicts with real-world anti-gambling laws for a moment, and assume that the inherent untrustability of player-run gaming is reason enough. Follow that through, and you realize that the problem could be mostly fixed with a regulatory program of standards, inspections, and certifications. Surprise, surprise: That's exactly what the Nevada Gaming Commission does.
The bank run is an even better example. Someone who takes their real-world bank account for granted may not realize that putting their money into the hands of a stranger with the promise that they can walk up to an ATM and take it back out any time is any riskier. When there's a run and the demand for withdrawals far exceeds funds available, they may realize that their deposits were completely at risk because there was no trusted body that could guarantee that they would keep an eye on the institution's behavior and back them up if they were unable to keep their promises. Guess what: That's the FDIC.
If anyone comes away from Second Life with a little more appreciation for the ways that even the most flawed government allows its constituents to live safer and easier, then I don't hate it. Say what you want about the furries who populate it; it's still an interesting social experiment, and I'm curious to see how closely its development of these kinds of infrastructures will parallel the history the real world. Perhaps people will seize this opportunity for new and creative solutions to well-known problems.
All right, if Slashdotters are going to continually jump all over misuse of "begs the question", then there's a pet peeve I'd like to add to that fervor. "300 AD", as it appears in the summary, is also incorrect usage. "AD" stands for anno domini, which is Latin for "in the year of the Lord". The phrase in Latin usage and traditional English usage comes properly before the number, not after. (Say it in full: "300 in the year of the Lord" sounds like an explanation of when something's tricentennial occurred. "In the year of the Lord 300" makes more sense as an absolute time reference.)
The convention of putting "AD" after the number is nothing but sloppy analogizing to "BC", which (being the English phrase "before Christ") does make more sense that way.
Note that the Royal Society writers did get it right. It's the Slashdot summary that's wrong.
Assuming the natural Java version works the same as the LiveConnect version, that's absolutely right. The relevant lines are:
var w = new java.awt.Window(new java.awt.Frame()); //...Add the content, then... d = java.awt.Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getScreenSize (); d.height += 80; w.setSize(d);
The fix shouldn't be too hard: Validate and silently correct the argument to java.awt.Window.setSize(), and/or put screen-adaptive bounds checking at the lowest feasible level of the painting routines. The hard part is getting all the runtime libraries in the wild updated. That's always the hard part, of course, but ironically Java's multitude of platforms and paradigms makes it even harder.
But just how hard? I've completely lost track of the saga of Java's preferred GUI framework. Is AWT the hot new thing, or is it obsolete to SWT or Swing or something? Even if it's technically obsolete, am I right in guessing there's too much software counting on it to just kill it? I'm presuming the java.awt package doesn't even exist in the micro edition of the runtime; is that true? (I sure hope so, or cell phone users may be in bad shape on this one.)
for females who are reading - want to know how to get on with your male collegues - take the piss, have fun, take the piss out of yourself, go out to the pub and drink with the boys - and maybe realise that if you present yourself as an equal rather than a 'weak and frail women' you might actually get included as 'one of the boys'. Socialising is the key.
All right, I'll bite. Why on God's green earth should a woman need or want to be included as "one of the boys"? You're saying in so many words that it's a man's world, woman have to learn to live in it? And you don't see a problem with that? Well, I sure as hell do. Let's flip this around for a second.
In my previous job, I was the lone IT/office support worker for a six-or-seven employee non-profit. The one other man left after I was there a few months, so then I was the only man in the office. (The president of the board was also a woman.) I was also, except for the intern, the lowest on the totem-pole, in terms of both seniority and hierarchy. (Salary, too, I think.)
The gender issue came up twice. First was when the program coordinators were reviewing applications of public school teachers that wanted to be included in our service-learning program for the year. In discussion, they were giving a male applicant poor marks because he'd answered an essay question with bullet points instead of a paragraph. Even though it had nothing to do with my job, I had to point out to them that, since there weren't explicit instructions to that effect, they were applying a non-useful bias on communication style, and it just might be gender-related. Men think and communicate differently from women, with bullet points being a paradigmatic example. As far as I could tell, they took my thoughts to heart and were grateful for the input. (Unfortunately, I do not recall whether that applicant was accepted.)
The other time was when I decided to move on and we were trying to choose my replacement. I was conflicted, because it went very much against my grain not to give affirmative-action-style preference to a female candidate for an IT job, let alone to give preference to a man, while at the same time, I firmly believed that an all-female office is just as bad an idea as an all-male office. I finally decided that balance to the office was of more immediate importance than balance to the industry, and I put in my two cents in favor of a man, all other things being roughly equal. Again, as far as I could tell, they took my thoughts to heart and were grateful for the input. I'm also fairly certain that if I hadn't been there, that point would not have occurred to that particular table full of women, and they would have chosen the new hire with a mostly blind eye to gender. As it turned out, I was replaced by a man (and another man was hired as program staff after I left), and I think the flexibility and responsiveness of the enterprise is the better for it.
Men and women collaborating in an office is most emphatically not about "doing as the Romans do". If there is a weakness in your organization, it is your duty as an employee to correct it if you can, point it out to management if you can't. Failure in the organization to allow any of its human assets to express themselves naturally is definitely a weakness. Expecting a woman to act like one of the boys is such a failure, as is expecting a man to act like one of the girls.
I'm not the first to point out that men and women do, according to a large body of psychological and anthropological research, think, communicate, and behave differently, but then so many use the same breath to justify the division of labor along gender lines. That doesn't make any sense to me. If there are such material differences, why wouldn't you want them both represented in the organization? Wouldn't that just ma
If everyone stopped submitting their games to the ESRB, and we pink slipped those censor's like they badly deserve, would anyone even notice?
Hells, yeah, they'd notice. You seem to be leaving some key groups out of "anyone". Consider the two possible scenarios:
One or two established publishers stop going through the ESRB. In this case, the move would first be noticed by two groups: Retail store buying agents who might notice that some games suddenly dropped off the list of what company policy allows them to buy, and fans of those publishers' games who might notice that suddenly they can't find them in any retail stores. Both of those would move on to the available alternatives. If the publishers are publicly-traded companies, you can bet your ass their stockholders would notice, and storm the castle.
A large majority of established publishers unite in ignoring the ESRB. Let's just assume for the moment that this is even remotely likely. Since the ESRB is an industry-created group, this would be tantamount to the industry changing their mind and deciding to dismantle it. The retail buyers would notice, but with their alternatives being limited, they'd probably just change policy and get over it. Consumers might notice, but their reaction probably wouldn't be much more than tepid. Who would really notice are lawmakers. You obviously realize that our lawmakers are terribly reactionary on this sort of thing (although drawing the line straight to religion is rather oversimplified), but don't you realize the only thing that's kept the government censorship hounds at bay is the ESRB? If the games industry hadn't created its own "censorship" agency on its own terms, federal and/or state legislatures would have done it for them years ago, and they'd be a lot worse off. If the ESRB disappeared, you'd better believe government would fill the void in a heartbeat.
I think the best think Spore can do is release a Beta of the *First* level, the Bacteria level. That'll whet the appetites of most people there, show it's not dead in the water.
Honestly, what difference would that make? Appetite-whetting—indeed, any sort of showing off—at a stage where they aren't even claiming what year the game will be released without doubting themselves I think works more against them than for them. It both distracts them from getting the game finished, and tips their hand to competitors. Releasing a beta teaser like that would surely help to increase hype and enthusiasm among those who haven't yet heard of Spore or haven't been following it that closely. That will be a very good thing in a few months (hopefully), but at this time I think it's counter-productive.
As for the people who are following Spore, well, I speak for myself and perhaps for many when I say that, while I would enjoy playing a beta single-cell phase, it has no chance of increasing my enthusiasm for the game. If I found out nothing more about Spore between now and release, the probability of my buying it would be 100%. The only thing that might change that is if it took so horrendously long that some other developer released a game that completely trumped it, but I think the chances of that are slim. On the other hand, if I played a beta that was less than fun because it hadn't been through rigorous play-testing, that number just might go down.
Besides, if you really want to play a beta of the single-cell phase, just play Flow.
Because technically it's not IE7 that's broken and allowing the exploit. It's Windows' routines that route and execute arbitrary protocol requests. It goes like this:
User clicks an email link, which starts with "mailto:" instead of "http:".
Firefox sees "mailto:" and realizes it's not a protocol it's designed to handle.
Firefox says, "Hey, Windows, I don't know what to do with a mailto: request. You handle it."
Windows compares the mailto: to its list of registered handlers, decides that Outlook Express is the application the user really wants, and launches it.
The bug, however, is that corrupting the part after mailto: with null characters causes that last step to malfunction and blithely pass the remainder of the request directly to the Windows shell, not Outlook Express, allowing it to do pretty much anything the user is allowed to. Two things should be clear here. First, that it's not really Firefox's fault. Invalidating or truncating the link if it contains null characters is certainly a good idea, but that doesn't mean that Windows' bug is justified. As has been pointed out, the bug would still be a problem for any other application that passes requests to the protocol handler.
The second thing is the answer to your question. Notice that Internet Explorer was not involved in this exchange at all. Even if it were registered as one of the protocol handlers it would be irrelevant, as the bug prevents the real handler from ever being launched. The reason IE7 is dragged into this is because something about the protocol handling routines changes when you install it, such that the exploit is not possible before and is possible after.
So it's a bug in the IE7 installation, not really IE7 itself.
With "frequent-player" cards (think grocery store discount card, but for slot machines), real-life gambling machines aren't technically any harder to rig. Dealer-based games can be too, if the dealer is a skilled cheater. The only reason this doesn't happen is because of strict governmental regulation and inspection for machines, or the risk of personal injury to the dealer if they get sloppy. It's the absence of those balancing factors that makes owner cheating easier in Second Life. It's not an unfixable problem, but it does take thought and effort.
He noted that we homo sapiens are a terraforming species, pointing to our own planet's alteration over time. [...] "The terraforming impulse in humankind will be quenched only by massive adverse selective pressure," Wood reported. Terraforming nay-sayers seem to ignore the fundamentals of population genetics, sociobiology and human history, he argued.
Um, what? Is he seriously saying that the historical "terraforming" of Earth, all of which has been either on a comparatively minuscule scale and disorganized, or just completely accidental, is the same thing as terraforming Mars, which will take global cooperation and "marshaled will" sustained for at least a generation? That's like saying, "It's inevitable that ants will make a trans-Atlantic tunnel. Look how much dirt they've been moving all this time!" Sorry, terraforming Mars is not something humans will do on an "impulse". You can't wish away the long political and ethical debates that will indubitably precede such a project by citing what amounts to human destiny.
Without context being filmed, and with TV news reporters on a tight time line (spurred on by a sense of ratings), this will likely compel the filmers and the reporters to leave out the context in order to grab the sensational footage.
You've got a point about the likelihood of contextual events not being filmed in the first place, just owing to circumstances. But the editing by filmers or media outlets should be irrelevant, at least to official justice. If footage were needed as evidence in an actual court proceeding, they would not subpoena the evening news, they would subpoena the original tapes. Which raises an interesting question. Certainly the original photographer has the capability to destroy portions of their own recording to suit their own agenda, but would there ever be grounds to prosecute them for destruction of evidence if they did so?
As for the court of public opinion, sadly you've got a point there too. But thankfully these days it's mitigated a little by YouTube and the like. It used to be that the mass media was the only way the public would ever get to see footage like that. Of course they would edit it for time and ratings, with just the result you described. Nowadays, however, the full extent of the original footage is more likely to be available to a public that cares to know more.
The fact that people use The Pirate Bay to post child porn instead of blank panther stuff is a measure of how awful society has become, not a measure of TBP's intentions.
I'd appreciate it if you didn't judge the awfulness of my society by what people do when you hand them anonymity and a global publishing medium at the same time. That's a measurement of the minimum, not the mean, of human virtue.
There is no TOS. The FAQ reproduced in its entirety in the Lawbean article is actually the full extent of explanation that exists on the site. In the absence of specific legalese, the phrase "NO COPYRIGHT. NO LICENSE." could be taken as notification that you waive your copyrights by uploading. But in the event it was disputed, that would be an extremely far-reaching interpretation that no sane judge would make. My own intuitive interpretation based on its placement on the page (i.e., where links to TOS, privacy policy, copyright attribution, etc. usually live) is that it's just as likely to mean the website has no copyright or license.
But more to the point of the original question, Bayimg has no powers, no matter how specific their notification is, to destroy the copyrights on any images uploaded by people who don't own them in the first place. A weak case may be made that if the copyright holder themselves uploaded the picture they would then be unable to defend against any infringement that resulted from that. But no case can be made that if someone uploads content they don't hold copyrights for, it magically absolves anybody who downloads it from Bayimg of any infringement.
I call them open source and likely will be doing so again, and I will license (or not) my application however the hell I want to (or not at all)
If you market an application and describe it as open source, but you don't at the very least offer the source code to be viewed by anyone who asks, that's a good candidate for misrepresentation, which can get you in front of a judge. The stand-alone term "open source" may have yet to be rigidly defined by the courts and/or the FTC, but that doesn't mean it means whatever you want it to mean.
Thank you, Bruce. Like many here, I was trying to figure out what Tiemann found so objectionable about SugarCRM's license. Being based on the Mozilla Public License, it looks very much like a lot of open-source licenses out there. It took a while to spot the "badgeware" clause hiding down at the very bottom:
However, in addition to the other notice obligations, all copies of the Covered Code in Executable and Source Code form distributed must, as a form of attribution of the original author, include on each user interface screen (i) the "Powered by SugarCRM" logo and (ii) the copyright notice in the same form as the latest version of the Covered Code distributed by SugarCRM, Inc. at the time of distribution of such copy. In addition, the "Powered by SugarCRM" logo must be visible to all users and be located at the very bottom center of each user interface screen. Notwithstanding the above, the dimensions of the "Powered By SugarCRM" logo must be at least 106 x 23 pixels. When users click on the "Powered by SugarCRM" logo it must direct them back to http://www.sugarforge.org./ In addition, the copyright notice must remain visible to all users at all times at the bottom of the user interface screen. When users click on the copyright notice, it must direct them back to http://www.sugarcrm.com/
And suddenly that's no longer open source, because "open" doesn't just mean you can see it. It means you can use it and modify it for any purpose you want, including making new software for distribution, without jumping through hoops. As a developer, that's always been my understanding. This is "available, but branding-encumbered" source.
There are billions of emails flying about constantly. Anyone who beleives they can be effectivelly monitored has to be kidding themselves, so how useful is a law that says you can't do this?
You've got an awfully low opinion of information technology. Emails don't "fly about", they pass in an orderly, organized, somewhat predictable fashion through multiple servers. Along the way they are almost always written to at least medium-term storage (meaning something less volatile than RAM, although not necessarily archived for posterity) on each machine they pass through, and to longer-term (possibly much longer; see Gmail) storage in the final receiving mailbox. Even if none of the intermediate servers held on to the message for more than the few seconds or minutes it took to work through the queue, and even if you delete the message from your mailbox as soon as you read it, there's still a chance that it made it onto some archived backup that your mail host made. And even if none of that happens, you're almost guaranteed to have it at least mentioned in long-held logs on most of those servers. The software to pull any message of interest out of all that information has been part of every mail admin's toolkit since email was invented.
Who needs to monitor anything in real-time when such good records are kept? I, for one, am terribly glad that you now need a warrant or subpoena to get those records into court, just like any other personal records.
This is the first I've heard of this EULA restriction, and it begs a question. Software developers often use a virtualized environment for far, far easier testing of their software on multiple platforms. Do they get a different EULA that allows them to run the low-priced editions in a VM? If they're making consumer software, it would be awfully silly to deny them that convenience or force them to test on a Vista edition that few of their customers would use. Maybe you get a completely different license if you get Vista through MDSN? Which would legally mean, I presume, that a small-time developer who didn't want to pony up for an MSDN subscription and just bought a couple Vista editions at his local store would still not be allowed to virtualize for testing?
The funny thing is, I don't want [credit]... The only debt I ever want to have, and I don't really want it very much, is a mortgage.
From personal experience I can attest that some, probably most, mortgage lenders won't give you the time of day if your credit history is blank. I'm in the early stages of buying a house with my girlfriend. With our combined incomes and clean records, we figured we'd have no trouble. But she feels the same as you: She never saw any need for any sort of credit account. She figured she was being fiscally responsible by avoiding credit cards and living in her mother's house rent-free.
As a result, all of the lenders we've talked to about pre-approval have (at least officially) refused to consider her income in their formulas determining how much they would offer us. Even if she rushed out and got a credit card right now, according to one loan officer it wouldn't impress the lenders until it had been on her sheet for some minimum length of time. I think it was six months?
I'd heard in the past that getting a credit card just to establish a history, even if you never used it, was beneficial to good credit, but I'd always had a hard time believing it. Now we have to settle for a smaller loan than we can afford.
Slashdot Mirror
What I find interesting is that Internet Explorer has, from the very beginning, had a little tab on its settings window to choose your preferred programs for the more common URI protocols like mail and news. So we've known for a long time that it is useful for browsers to be able to hand off non-http protocols to external programs, and that it's the sort of thing that a user might want to configure and customize themselves. How come these days it seems like all the management of that (in Windows at least) happens silently behind the scenes, and the user can't touch it without hacking the registry? Why hasn't the Programs tab of the Internet Options control panel evolved to a completely customizable list of protocol handlers, just the same as the one for file extensions? I haven't used Vista; does its infamous "allow or cancel" watchdog notify you of changes to your registered protocol handlers? It seems to me that the first step in dealing with these "browser flaws" is to bring this piece of the OS into the light and give the user control over it.
Yes, I'm finding the passages from the Geneva Convention that have been posted here very interesting. That wrinkle could make this case completely different from your run-of-the-mill trademark infringement. However...
mostly, they're going against what are effectively fraudulent uses, people trying to create the impression that they're allied with the red cross.What are you basing that on? I don't have any data on whom the ARC have sent legal notices to, and I certainly don't have any data on the intentions of people who use the mark without authorization. I'd be willing to bet that the majority of misuses are on the presumption that it was generic, due to the whole Geneva Convention thing.
What I do know is that when they bothered us about it, there was no fraud or intent to defraud involved. It was your typical genericizing of a mark out of innocent ignorance. ARC's complaining about it was just the same as the owners of the Kleenex or DayGlo brands taking out ads in writers' trade magazines asking them if they could please not throw around their trademarks as though they were generic words. If that idea takes hold in the public mind, it dilutes the brand, which causes a very real weakening of the holder's legal control over it. ARC's legal team takes steps to prevent that just like any other corporation's does. I'm sure Johnson & Johnson has done it too. If they haven't done it for the red cross symbol, you can bet your ass they do it constantly for the Band-Aid brand name.
Prior art is a meaningless concept in trademark law. Patents are clear-cut: If someone else can prove they invented it first, you don't have a valid patent. Compared to that, trademark/trade dress/service mark issues are incredibly nebulous. The strength of your mark is determined far less by its age than by its consistent association with your company in the public mind. ARC and J&J can both claim a pretty good share of that, although ARC would probably edge out in a hardcore survey. Infringement, on the other hand, depends not only on using a mark that is confusable with someone else's, but on how much your market overlaps with theirs. That's the main reason it's only now coming to a head for these two.
The cross is a symbol for many things, and I'm sue it's been used on packagingSure, but the complaint here is a lot more specific than that. Look at the Red Cross logo and the logo Johnson & Johnson uses on Band-Aid products side by side. They're identical in every respect: same color, same shape, same proportions. Since the mark is now being put onto competing products in the same market, there's no question that it's an infringement. It's just not clear which way. ARC may be at a disadvantage being the newcomer to the market.
Which is exactly why the Red Cross has been putting a lot of effort for years into tightening their grip on that mark. Let's be clear about something, people. I know the knee-jerk reaction is to root for the charitable organization over the big corporation, but I've got to point out a little hypocrisy on the part of the Red Cross president. I have never before seen a cease-and-desist letter from Johnson & Johnson for the use of this mark. I have, however, seen them from the Red Cross.
Some years ago I worked for a company that publishes clip art collections. We maintained a list of "bad elements" that slipped into our sources because it didn't occur to the artists that they were protected by IP law, but that we had received legal notices about. The red cross was one of our biggest offenders (alongside Weber-shaped grills, Olympic rings, cars that looked too much like Beetles, etc.). It was the ARC, not Johnson & Johnson, that made work for me converting them all to puke green. (That's the standard IP-neutral first aid symbol now, by the way: a butt-ugly fluorescent green cross.) I'd often wondered how Johnson & Johnson got away with it, and figured they must have some sort of agreement since they'd both been using it for so long.
So you're right that the defensibility of ownership for either of them is a little iffy, but the fact that I've started to see that horrible green in more places means that it's starting to become known that somebody owns it. My gut tells me that it's usually the ARC that people think of (or get letters from), but if they're now starting to directly compete in the market with Johnson & Johnson, who knows which way a judge or jury would go?
I remember enough of my Latin to know that anno could be either the dative or the ablative of annus.
Romans [...] would not have understood it to mean the same as the prepositional phrase "in the year XXX"; after all, Latin does have the preposition "in" which means (unsurprisingly) "in", and if they meant "in the year XXX", they would say it.Not necessarily. Romans dropped prepositions all the time, especially in, when they could be safely inferred from the noun's case and context. I distinctly remember this tripping me up constantly until I got used to it. (Now I study Japanese, where leaving words to the imagination is practically an art form.)
Given the wide leeway the dative case allows for, [...] "relative to the year of (our) Lord" is just as good a translation as anyTrue, if you assume it's dative. But since it could also be ablative, which can agree with in and indicate current position, "[in] the year X, which belongs to the Lord" is still at least as likely a translation. More likely, Latin-speakers hearing the phrase would take the two translations to be close enough in meaning that they wouldn't care. I go with "in the year of the Lord X" mainly because that's the set phrase used in formal English writing.
With Latin's very different sentence structure and lack of punctuation, arguing about word order in Latin using modern English standards is buffoonery!Not as much as you might think. The medieval English language (and as you pointed out, this is when the phrase arose) took a lot of syntax and grammar cues from Latin, especially when people were trying to sound educated, and most especially in religious/clerical/scriptural contexts. We used to have a full declension paradigm, very much like Latin's. (You can still see a hint of it in pronouns like he/him or who/whom.) So really my argument is the other way around. I say that the set English translation is "in the year of the Lord X" because the original Latin phrase was anno Domini X. It was considered erudite to stick as close to the Latin structure as possible.
Actually it didn't. There may be argument over this point, but when I first heard the abbreviation BCE, it was expanded to me as "before the Common Era" and explained as a renaming of BC that was meant to be less theocentric without requiring any extra math. Basically, "Let's stop invoking Christ every time we have to list a date more than a thousand years ago, since AD 1 January 1 isn't Christ's actual birthdate anyway."
Accordingly, AD was renamed to CE at the same time. It only adds to the confusion over before-or-after-the-number that CE properly comes after (thus, "[year] 300 of the Common Era") while AD goes before.
Yes, I'm totally down with the sentiments at http://www.getafirstlife.com/. There is no need for a second life if you've already got a first one.
But then I stop and think for a second, and I realize that Second Life in general, and events like this in particular, and the attention they get, are good things for a specific reason. Most people don't have the vaguest notion how their first life actually works. Getting in on the ground floor of a micro-society that would like to mirror all the stuff its external macro-society has, but has to start from scratch, is incredibly educational.
The gambling ban is one example. Put aside the obvious explanation of conflicts with real-world anti-gambling laws for a moment, and assume that the inherent untrustability of player-run gaming is reason enough. Follow that through, and you realize that the problem could be mostly fixed with a regulatory program of standards, inspections, and certifications. Surprise, surprise: That's exactly what the Nevada Gaming Commission does.
The bank run is an even better example. Someone who takes their real-world bank account for granted may not realize that putting their money into the hands of a stranger with the promise that they can walk up to an ATM and take it back out any time is any riskier. When there's a run and the demand for withdrawals far exceeds funds available, they may realize that their deposits were completely at risk because there was no trusted body that could guarantee that they would keep an eye on the institution's behavior and back them up if they were unable to keep their promises. Guess what: That's the FDIC.
If anyone comes away from Second Life with a little more appreciation for the ways that even the most flawed government allows its constituents to live safer and easier, then I don't hate it. Say what you want about the furries who populate it; it's still an interesting social experiment, and I'm curious to see how closely its development of these kinds of infrastructures will parallel the history the real world. Perhaps people will seize this opportunity for new and creative solutions to well-known problems.
All right, if Slashdotters are going to continually jump all over misuse of "begs the question", then there's a pet peeve I'd like to add to that fervor. "300 AD", as it appears in the summary, is also incorrect usage. "AD" stands for anno domini, which is Latin for "in the year of the Lord". The phrase in Latin usage and traditional English usage comes properly before the number, not after. (Say it in full: "300 in the year of the Lord" sounds like an explanation of when something's tricentennial occurred. "In the year of the Lord 300" makes more sense as an absolute time reference.)
The convention of putting "AD" after the number is nothing but sloppy analogizing to "BC", which (being the English phrase "before Christ") does make more sense that way.
Note that the Royal Society writers did get it right. It's the Slashdot summary that's wrong.
The fix shouldn't be too hard: Validate and silently correct the argument to java.awt.Window.setSize(), and/or put screen-adaptive bounds checking at the lowest feasible level of the painting routines. The hard part is getting all the runtime libraries in the wild updated. That's always the hard part, of course, but ironically Java's multitude of platforms and paradigms makes it even harder.
But just how hard? I've completely lost track of the saga of Java's preferred GUI framework. Is AWT the hot new thing, or is it obsolete to SWT or Swing or something? Even if it's technically obsolete, am I right in guessing there's too much software counting on it to just kill it? I'm presuming the java.awt package doesn't even exist in the micro edition of the runtime; is that true? (I sure hope so, or cell phone users may be in bad shape on this one.)
Well, someone has to be.
for females who are reading - want to know how to get on with your male collegues - take the piss, have fun, take the piss out of yourself, go out to the pub and drink with the boys - and maybe realise that if you present yourself as an equal rather than a 'weak and frail women' you might actually get included as 'one of the boys'. Socialising is the key.
And here I thought it was only a problem in Korea
All right, I'll bite. Why on God's green earth should a woman need or want to be included as "one of the boys"? You're saying in so many words that it's a man's world, woman have to learn to live in it? And you don't see a problem with that? Well, I sure as hell do. Let's flip this around for a second.
In my previous job, I was the lone IT/office support worker for a six-or-seven employee non-profit. The one other man left after I was there a few months, so then I was the only man in the office. (The president of the board was also a woman.) I was also, except for the intern, the lowest on the totem-pole, in terms of both seniority and hierarchy. (Salary, too, I think.)
The gender issue came up twice. First was when the program coordinators were reviewing applications of public school teachers that wanted to be included in our service-learning program for the year. In discussion, they were giving a male applicant poor marks because he'd answered an essay question with bullet points instead of a paragraph. Even though it had nothing to do with my job, I had to point out to them that, since there weren't explicit instructions to that effect, they were applying a non-useful bias on communication style, and it just might be gender-related. Men think and communicate differently from women, with bullet points being a paradigmatic example. As far as I could tell, they took my thoughts to heart and were grateful for the input. (Unfortunately, I do not recall whether that applicant was accepted.)
The other time was when I decided to move on and we were trying to choose my replacement. I was conflicted, because it went very much against my grain not to give affirmative-action-style preference to a female candidate for an IT job, let alone to give preference to a man, while at the same time, I firmly believed that an all-female office is just as bad an idea as an all-male office. I finally decided that balance to the office was of more immediate importance than balance to the industry, and I put in my two cents in favor of a man, all other things being roughly equal. Again, as far as I could tell, they took my thoughts to heart and were grateful for the input. I'm also fairly certain that if I hadn't been there, that point would not have occurred to that particular table full of women, and they would have chosen the new hire with a mostly blind eye to gender. As it turned out, I was replaced by a man (and another man was hired as program staff after I left), and I think the flexibility and responsiveness of the enterprise is the better for it.
Men and women collaborating in an office is most emphatically not about "doing as the Romans do". If there is a weakness in your organization, it is your duty as an employee to correct it if you can, point it out to management if you can't. Failure in the organization to allow any of its human assets to express themselves naturally is definitely a weakness. Expecting a woman to act like one of the boys is such a failure, as is expecting a man to act like one of the girls.
I'm not the first to point out that men and women do, according to a large body of psychological and anthropological research, think, communicate, and behave differently, but then so many use the same breath to justify the division of labor along gender lines. That doesn't make any sense to me. If there are such material differences, why wouldn't you want them both represented in the organization? Wouldn't that just ma
Hells, yeah, they'd notice. You seem to be leaving some key groups out of "anyone". Consider the two possible scenarios:
One or two established publishers stop going through the ESRB. In this case, the move would first be noticed by two groups: Retail store buying agents who might notice that some games suddenly dropped off the list of what company policy allows them to buy, and fans of those publishers' games who might notice that suddenly they can't find them in any retail stores. Both of those would move on to the available alternatives. If the publishers are publicly-traded companies, you can bet your ass their stockholders would notice, and storm the castle.
A large majority of established publishers unite in ignoring the ESRB. Let's just assume for the moment that this is even remotely likely. Since the ESRB is an industry-created group, this would be tantamount to the industry changing their mind and deciding to dismantle it. The retail buyers would notice, but with their alternatives being limited, they'd probably just change policy and get over it. Consumers might notice, but their reaction probably wouldn't be much more than tepid. Who would really notice are lawmakers. You obviously realize that our lawmakers are terribly reactionary on this sort of thing (although drawing the line straight to religion is rather oversimplified), but don't you realize the only thing that's kept the government censorship hounds at bay is the ESRB? If the games industry hadn't created its own "censorship" agency on its own terms, federal and/or state legislatures would have done it for them years ago, and they'd be a lot worse off. If the ESRB disappeared, you'd better believe government would fill the void in a heartbeat.
Honestly, what difference would that make? Appetite-whetting—indeed, any sort of showing off—at a stage where they aren't even claiming what year the game will be released without doubting themselves I think works more against them than for them. It both distracts them from getting the game finished, and tips their hand to competitors. Releasing a beta teaser like that would surely help to increase hype and enthusiasm among those who haven't yet heard of Spore or haven't been following it that closely. That will be a very good thing in a few months (hopefully), but at this time I think it's counter-productive.
As for the people who are following Spore, well, I speak for myself and perhaps for many when I say that, while I would enjoy playing a beta single-cell phase, it has no chance of increasing my enthusiasm for the game. If I found out nothing more about Spore between now and release, the probability of my buying it would be 100%. The only thing that might change that is if it took so horrendously long that some other developer released a game that completely trumped it, but I think the chances of that are slim. On the other hand, if I played a beta that was less than fun because it hadn't been through rigorous play-testing, that number just might go down.
Besides, if you really want to play a beta of the single-cell phase, just play Flow.
Because technically it's not IE7 that's broken and allowing the exploit. It's Windows' routines that route and execute arbitrary protocol requests. It goes like this:
User clicks an email link, which starts with "mailto:" instead of "http:".
Firefox sees "mailto:" and realizes it's not a protocol it's designed to handle.
Firefox says, "Hey, Windows, I don't know what to do with a mailto: request. You handle it."
Windows compares the mailto: to its list of registered handlers, decides that Outlook Express is the application the user really wants, and launches it.
The bug, however, is that corrupting the part after mailto: with null characters causes that last step to malfunction and blithely pass the remainder of the request directly to the Windows shell, not Outlook Express, allowing it to do pretty much anything the user is allowed to. Two things should be clear here. First, that it's not really Firefox's fault. Invalidating or truncating the link if it contains null characters is certainly a good idea, but that doesn't mean that Windows' bug is justified. As has been pointed out, the bug would still be a problem for any other application that passes requests to the protocol handler.
The second thing is the answer to your question. Notice that Internet Explorer was not involved in this exchange at all. Even if it were registered as one of the protocol handlers it would be irrelevant, as the bug prevents the real handler from ever being launched. The reason IE7 is dragged into this is because something about the protocol handling routines changes when you install it, such that the exploit is not possible before and is possible after.
So it's a bug in the IE7 installation, not really IE7 itself.
With "frequent-player" cards (think grocery store discount card, but for slot machines), real-life gambling machines aren't technically any harder to rig. Dealer-based games can be too, if the dealer is a skilled cheater. The only reason this doesn't happen is because of strict governmental regulation and inspection for machines, or the risk of personal injury to the dealer if they get sloppy. It's the absence of those balancing factors that makes owner cheating easier in Second Life. It's not an unfixable problem, but it does take thought and effort.
Um, what? Is he seriously saying that the historical "terraforming" of Earth, all of which has been either on a comparatively minuscule scale and disorganized, or just completely accidental, is the same thing as terraforming Mars, which will take global cooperation and "marshaled will" sustained for at least a generation? That's like saying, "It's inevitable that ants will make a trans-Atlantic tunnel. Look how much dirt they've been moving all this time!" Sorry, terraforming Mars is not something humans will do on an "impulse". You can't wish away the long political and ethical debates that will indubitably precede such a project by citing what amounts to human destiny.
You've got a point about the likelihood of contextual events not being filmed in the first place, just owing to circumstances. But the editing by filmers or media outlets should be irrelevant, at least to official justice. If footage were needed as evidence in an actual court proceeding, they would not subpoena the evening news, they would subpoena the original tapes. Which raises an interesting question. Certainly the original photographer has the capability to destroy portions of their own recording to suit their own agenda, but would there ever be grounds to prosecute them for destruction of evidence if they did so?
As for the court of public opinion, sadly you've got a point there too. But thankfully these days it's mitigated a little by YouTube and the like. It used to be that the mass media was the only way the public would ever get to see footage like that. Of course they would edit it for time and ratings, with just the result you described. Nowadays, however, the full extent of the original footage is more likely to be available to a public that cares to know more.
I'd appreciate it if you didn't judge the awfulness of my society by what people do when you hand them anonymity and a global publishing medium at the same time. That's a measurement of the minimum, not the mean, of human virtue.
There is no TOS. The FAQ reproduced in its entirety in the Lawbean article is actually the full extent of explanation that exists on the site. In the absence of specific legalese, the phrase "NO COPYRIGHT. NO LICENSE." could be taken as notification that you waive your copyrights by uploading. But in the event it was disputed, that would be an extremely far-reaching interpretation that no sane judge would make. My own intuitive interpretation based on its placement on the page (i.e., where links to TOS, privacy policy, copyright attribution, etc. usually live) is that it's just as likely to mean the website has no copyright or license.
But more to the point of the original question, Bayimg has no powers, no matter how specific their notification is, to destroy the copyrights on any images uploaded by people who don't own them in the first place. A weak case may be made that if the copyright holder themselves uploaded the picture they would then be unable to defend against any infringement that resulted from that. But no case can be made that if someone uploads content they don't hold copyrights for, it magically absolves anybody who downloads it from Bayimg of any infringement.
If you market an application and describe it as open source, but you don't at the very least offer the source code to be viewed by anyone who asks, that's a good candidate for misrepresentation, which can get you in front of a judge. The stand-alone term "open source" may have yet to be rigidly defined by the courts and/or the FTC, but that doesn't mean it means whatever you want it to mean.
Thank you, Bruce. Like many here, I was trying to figure out what Tiemann found so objectionable about SugarCRM's license. Being based on the Mozilla Public License, it looks very much like a lot of open-source licenses out there. It took a while to spot the "badgeware" clause hiding down at the very bottom:
However, in addition to the other notice obligations, all copies of the Covered Code in Executable and Source Code form distributed must, as a form of attribution of the original author, include on each user interface screen (i) the "Powered by SugarCRM" logo and (ii) the copyright notice in the same form as the latest version of the Covered Code distributed by SugarCRM, Inc. at the time of distribution of such copy. In addition, the "Powered by SugarCRM" logo must be visible to all users and be located at the very bottom center of each user interface screen. Notwithstanding the above, the dimensions of the "Powered By SugarCRM" logo must be at least 106 x 23 pixels. When users click on the "Powered by SugarCRM" logo it must direct them back to http://www.sugarforge.org./ In addition, the copyright notice must remain visible to all users at all times at the bottom of the user interface screen. When users click on the copyright notice, it must direct them back to http://www.sugarcrm.com/And suddenly that's no longer open source, because "open" doesn't just mean you can see it. It means you can use it and modify it for any purpose you want, including making new software for distribution, without jumping through hoops. As a developer, that's always been my understanding. This is "available, but branding-encumbered" source.
You've got an awfully low opinion of information technology. Emails don't "fly about", they pass in an orderly, organized, somewhat predictable fashion through multiple servers. Along the way they are almost always written to at least medium-term storage (meaning something less volatile than RAM, although not necessarily archived for posterity) on each machine they pass through, and to longer-term (possibly much longer; see Gmail) storage in the final receiving mailbox. Even if none of the intermediate servers held on to the message for more than the few seconds or minutes it took to work through the queue, and even if you delete the message from your mailbox as soon as you read it, there's still a chance that it made it onto some archived backup that your mail host made. And even if none of that happens, you're almost guaranteed to have it at least mentioned in long-held logs on most of those servers. The software to pull any message of interest out of all that information has been part of every mail admin's toolkit since email was invented.
Who needs to monitor anything in real-time when such good records are kept? I, for one, am terribly glad that you now need a warrant or subpoena to get those records into court, just like any other personal records.
This is the first I've heard of this EULA restriction, and it begs a question. Software developers often use a virtualized environment for far, far easier testing of their software on multiple platforms. Do they get a different EULA that allows them to run the low-priced editions in a VM? If they're making consumer software, it would be awfully silly to deny them that convenience or force them to test on a Vista edition that few of their customers would use. Maybe you get a completely different license if you get Vista through MDSN? Which would legally mean, I presume, that a small-time developer who didn't want to pony up for an MSDN subscription and just bought a couple Vista editions at his local store would still not be allowed to virtualize for testing?
Yes. This article about EA's financial reports refers to "Fiscal Year 2007" and explicitly states that it ended on March 31, 2007.
From personal experience I can attest that some, probably most, mortgage lenders won't give you the time of day if your credit history is blank. I'm in the early stages of buying a house with my girlfriend. With our combined incomes and clean records, we figured we'd have no trouble. But she feels the same as you: She never saw any need for any sort of credit account. She figured she was being fiscally responsible by avoiding credit cards and living in her mother's house rent-free.
As a result, all of the lenders we've talked to about pre-approval have (at least officially) refused to consider her income in their formulas determining how much they would offer us. Even if she rushed out and got a credit card right now, according to one loan officer it wouldn't impress the lenders until it had been on her sheet for some minimum length of time. I think it was six months?
I'd heard in the past that getting a credit card just to establish a history, even if you never used it, was beneficial to good credit, but I'd always had a hard time believing it. Now we have to settle for a smaller loan than we can afford.