Your friends don't step in and save you at the end.
It sounds like you need some better friends.
Perhaps I'm too young, but I've had friends come traveling overnight by car to help me when I needed it. A friend from my childhood went out, got into heroin, watch a dozen people die in front of her, and has since rebuilt her life into a reasonable facsimile of success. Happy endings do happen, and people can be loyal. Now, granted, having the ability to rebuild a life usually requires good friends, and having good friends usually requires being a decent person in the first place, but there are exceptions. Don't be an ass, and you'll find plenty of karma to work life out.
What's the fun in a story where everything just goes wrong? Oh, sure, there's a few things that pull it off well, like a certain Pisan tower, but they're best viewed as works of art rather than works of entertainment. A significant part of the fun in a movie is seeing how the hero can pull things together at the end. Maybe he apologizes to his friends, and assembles a team of dedicated sidekicks to combat some evil. Maybe he falls into an inventive trance and builds a perfect widget to save the day. Maybe he turns an earlier defeat into motivation to improve. Maybe he gives up, accepts the status quo, and realizes that he's actually the one causing problems.
The resolution is half of the story. If you don't want a happy ending, don't let the movie end. Walk out. When the Big Bad Monster is coming to eat the hero's soul, just leave and assume the hero's defeated. Are you missing something you really want to see, anyway?
Real life does have its happy endings, but they aren't placed squarely in front of your eyes. Go look for them. Go look for the kid graduating high school despite a brain injury in his third year. Go look for the guy who walks into a road, stopping traffic from hitting a child. Go look for the friend who will drop everything and come across the country to help clean up a deceased parent's house. Go find the other half of life.
Reviews don't have an absolutely game-changing effect on coupon use. If someone reviews a restaurant, and says their food is really good, how does that reflect my personal tastes? After volunteering in Africa, I have a very difficult time eating beans, rice, and other such things. Traditional Mexican food is awful to me, but more Americanized dishes are fine. Reviews often won't cover such details. Coupons still lower the risk, so they're still a factor in the decision process.
As for the product being hard to screw up, the issue then becomes one of market share. If, by offering a coupon, a coffee shop can make $0.50 profit by stealing a customer from somewhere else, that's still $0.50 more than they'd make normally. Maybe their location is a little more convenient, or their service is faster, and you will abandon your normal coffee shop for theirs. If nothing else, you'd have visited them, so they're more likely to stick in your mind when you want coffee in that area. Marketing is a long-term game.
So, it's just like every other form of advertising?
Coupons lower the barrier to entry for trying new things. If you have a really good product, but relatively few people know about it, offering a good deal is a reasonable way to get exposure. The coupon reduces the risk to the customer, because they don't lose as much if the product is bad. No, the business won't profit much from the initial coupon run, but it shows people that their product is worth the higher normal price. Ideally, at least.
According to the Wookiepedia (which I've been reading lately, because I know far less about Star Wars than someone of my nerdiness should), the blade has a significant gyroscopic effect, and as such requires great dexterity to use. Somehow, being sensitive to the Force makes that easier, to within the reasonable limits of human capacity.
Oh, yes... let's turn all government functions directly over to the people, such as those currently running amok at 4chan. The point of TFA is that the leaked cables show that international policymaking is hard, and the US government should be "looking on the bright side" and pointing out the tough situations the diplomats work in on a daily basis. Do you really think that high-school dropout down the street will be better at diplomacy than the appointed diplomat we have now?
Short-term stability makes a much more conducive environment to work out long-term stability. I'd imagine that almost every oppressive dictator out there really thinks they're doing what's best for their people. If they can be convinced that peace and acceptance are best, that's what they'll do. It's just much harder to convince anyone of such an idea while their neighbor is arming for war. Once everyone in the area is on friendly terms, then you can talk reasonably about maintaining peace long-term. Of course, there hasn't been short-term stability in the Middle East for the past thousand years, so I don't expect it anytime soon.
Every person on that board will go down in history as the guys who got the district sued, screwing over the next several years of already-tight budgets. Getting a job in education again will involve a heck of a lot of smooth talking.
Not so much. You can't really shut down 90% of a mainframe to cut costs during off-hours. If you've reached the limit of the mainframe's capacity, you can't just plug in a module and expand it linearly, without downtime. In short, you're missing a major factor in the "dynamic resources" component.
Data in the cloud can be stored encrypted, and transferred to a secure location for actual processing. The storage location can be staffed by not-so-trusted folks, because they're only handling encrypted data. The encryption keys can be stored in the processing facility, right where the data's going to be used. It all falls under the management of the Government Cloud Department, who are the ones responsible for managing a high-availability cluster, and nothing else. It'll cost extra processing time, but that's a trivial problem compared to convincing government bureaucrats to give up their control over servers.
Government departments can "outsource" their processing needs to another government department. The only people I've seen expecting clouds to be outside the organization entirely are people inventing problems to complain about.
When you switch to a "cloud", you consolidate management. When you consolidate data centers, you just end up with all of your duplicate machines in the same place.
A cloud might run across multiple data centers, but still only use as much hardware is needed at the time. If 50% of the cloud is unused at the time, then (less than) 50% can be shut down to cut expenses. Running jobs can be switched to underutilized machines, improving efficiency. Without a centralized management, no government agency would ever take the time to move jobs for efficiency's sake. Hell, they might not even be allowed to know what other departments are running jobs.
It's meaningless in the same way that "steam" is meaningless in "steam engine".
Back in the good ol' days, the universities had a small group of people qualified to operate the million-dollar computers. It was assumed that there would be no expensive redundancy. Now, anybody with a spare computer can set up a "server", so there's a need to distinguish centrally-managed systems as being different than the norm.
I doubt very much that all research is done on those research clusters. It's far more likely that some professor set up their own box to run processing jobs, so he wouldn't need to talk to those cluster folks. That's the kind of duplication that gets expensive for government work, so it's perfectly reasonable to cut it out.
It's entirely possible to have an internal cloud. The Government Cloud Department could be charged with managing all processing resources, availability, data storage, etc. as needed. The road-managing people need to run a simulation for a new traffic light's effects? Ask the GCD for a half-dozen CPUs for 6 hours. The bean counters need to count many hills of beans? Ask for 1000 CPUs for 2 hours. Don't know how long something will take? Send in the job anyway, and you'll get a call when it's done. From the perspective of all the other departments, they're dealing with this nebulous system that just does what they need.
Having one single Cloud Department means idle servers can be eliminated, redundant employees can be cut, and redundant mistakes aren't as likely to be made. Yes, security's still an issue, but not something that can't be resolved with the liberal application of encryption and security checks.
Not necessarily. It could be internal to the corporation, but not to a specific department/team/developer. Each department could get isolated use of that cloud. From the department's perspective, it's an internal private cloud.
Google went about social networking all wrong. With Buzz, the idea is to build a network of contacts, and post updates to them. As Facebook has shown us, social networking is really all about recommending "friends" you've never met, showing how many thousand people think they might know you from somewhere, and bombarding users with trivial accomplishments in thoughtless games.
Social networking isn't about being social. It's about filling bars.
It's a tale cautioning against allowing government to manipulate people without restraint. The constant surveillance was just a side effect of the totalitarian regime. Preventing progress on technology out of fear won't change anything. The paranoid life of 1984 already exists in places like North Korea, where people disappear because a government officer doesn't like the way they look, and such a life arrived without the help of any pervasive surveillance.
The NYSE cannot selectively choose now to be the time to start enforcing it when then haven't in the past.
Yes, they can. The trademark holder may choose not to pursue uses which are inconsequential. It may choose to grant permission to use the trademark. It may just plain not care. As long as the general appearance is that the holder hasn't abandoned the mark, and the mark still identifies the holder, the trademark is still likely to be considered valid. If a court determines that the trademark is valid, the holder controls its use. Requiring absolute enforcement would place an undue burden on the holder, so it's not required.
Laches would only apply to the current case, and only if the delay was found to be unreasonable. Six months is pretty quick for a legal claim. Whether NYSE has sent C&D letters to others who used their trademark would only affect whether the trademark is genericized to the point of being invalid, but even then the enforcement is only one of several criteria considered.
Wow. Three replies to a single comment. Either you have problems organizing your thoughts, or you love your jerking knee.
I find it amazing that your definition of "true" trademark dilution is different from everyotherdefinition, where associating a trademark with something undesirable is illegal. It's irrelevant that the picture was a "stock image", as there is no such legal status. What matters is that the picture is distinctly recognizable as the NYSE, even without the existence of any other logos.
One of your examples illustrates this well. You can go into any Subway restaurant and take a picture, and it will be recognizable as a Subway, even without logos. The employee uniforms, shape of the counter, posted signs, and even the color scheme all contribute to a recognizable image. Likewise, if you see a picture of any trading floor in the United States, it's almost always the NYSE. The fact that the picture doesn't blatantly say "NYSE" is irrelevant.
It also doesn't matter that the "stock" picture is a different angle, with different people, in different colors. In fact, that image you linked to isn't even the complete registered trademark. The registered mark "consists of a representation of an actual building interior, namely, a securities exchange trading floor." Again, since almost any picture you'll see in the United States of a trading floor is the NYSE, that's pretty distinctive. It's also pretty vague, and intentionally so. Trademarks are supposed to protect a brand from being diminished by an unscrupulous company damaging or hijacking their good reputation. A vague description of the mark can protect from a much wider range of alterations than an exact detail.
The legal system does not have a set of absolute criteria to sort out "right" and "wrong" behavior, no matter how much computer folks might wish for it. Sure, the NYSE may have missed a few uses of their trademark, or chose not to send a C&D for articles they liked, but that doesn't automatically invalidate the trademark. If this case were to ever reach a court, a judge might determine that now, (ten years after registration), folks are more likely to see images of trading floors other than NYSE, and call it a dead mark. It's also not a definite problem that there was a six-month delay in sending out the C&D. A judge might consider that a bit too long to care, or he might just assume the legal department was busy. The legal system is not run by computers. It's sad, but true.
Apparently, though, the legal system is full of the same shit I am.
Libel means probably going through an expensive lawsuit to get anything fixed. A trademark issue means they send a cease & desist letter, and the responsible news agency either clarifies why the image is newsworthy or removes it. TPM instead felt it necessary to complain.
Slashdot Mirror
Your friends don't step in and save you at the end.
It sounds like you need some better friends.
Perhaps I'm too young, but I've had friends come traveling overnight by car to help me when I needed it. A friend from my childhood went out, got into heroin, watch a dozen people die in front of her, and has since rebuilt her life into a reasonable facsimile of success. Happy endings do happen, and people can be loyal. Now, granted, having the ability to rebuild a life usually requires good friends, and having good friends usually requires being a decent person in the first place, but there are exceptions. Don't be an ass, and you'll find plenty of karma to work life out.
What's the fun in a story where everything just goes wrong? Oh, sure, there's a few things that pull it off well, like a certain Pisan tower, but they're best viewed as works of art rather than works of entertainment. A significant part of the fun in a movie is seeing how the hero can pull things together at the end. Maybe he apologizes to his friends, and assembles a team of dedicated sidekicks to combat some evil. Maybe he falls into an inventive trance and builds a perfect widget to save the day. Maybe he turns an earlier defeat into motivation to improve. Maybe he gives up, accepts the status quo, and realizes that he's actually the one causing problems.
The resolution is half of the story. If you don't want a happy ending, don't let the movie end. Walk out. When the Big Bad Monster is coming to eat the hero's soul, just leave and assume the hero's defeated. Are you missing something you really want to see, anyway?
Real life does have its happy endings, but they aren't placed squarely in front of your eyes. Go look for them. Go look for the kid graduating high school despite a brain injury in his third year. Go look for the guy who walks into a road, stopping traffic from hitting a child. Go look for the friend who will drop everything and come across the country to help clean up a deceased parent's house. Go find the other half of life.
Reviews don't have an absolutely game-changing effect on coupon use. If someone reviews a restaurant, and says their food is really good, how does that reflect my personal tastes? After volunteering in Africa, I have a very difficult time eating beans, rice, and other such things. Traditional Mexican food is awful to me, but more Americanized dishes are fine. Reviews often won't cover such details. Coupons still lower the risk, so they're still a factor in the decision process.
As for the product being hard to screw up, the issue then becomes one of market share. If, by offering a coupon, a coffee shop can make $0.50 profit by stealing a customer from somewhere else, that's still $0.50 more than they'd make normally. Maybe their location is a little more convenient, or their service is faster, and you will abandon your normal coffee shop for theirs. If nothing else, you'd have visited them, so they're more likely to stick in your mind when you want coffee in that area. Marketing is a long-term game.
So, it's just like every other form of advertising?
Coupons lower the barrier to entry for trying new things. If you have a really good product, but relatively few people know about it, offering a good deal is a reasonable way to get exposure. The coupon reduces the risk to the customer, because they don't lose as much if the product is bad. No, the business won't profit much from the initial coupon run, but it shows people that their product is worth the higher normal price. Ideally, at least.
According to the Wookiepedia (which I've been reading lately, because I know far less about Star Wars than someone of my nerdiness should), the blade has a significant gyroscopic effect, and as such requires great dexterity to use. Somehow, being sensitive to the Force makes that easier, to within the reasonable limits of human capacity.
That's not what TFA implies at all.
Oh, yes... let's turn all government functions directly over to the people, such as those currently running amok at 4chan. The point of TFA is that the leaked cables show that international policymaking is hard, and the US government should be "looking on the bright side" and pointing out the tough situations the diplomats work in on a daily basis. Do you really think that high-school dropout down the street will be better at diplomacy than the appointed diplomat we have now?
Short-term stability makes a much more conducive environment to work out long-term stability. I'd imagine that almost every oppressive dictator out there really thinks they're doing what's best for their people. If they can be convinced that peace and acceptance are best, that's what they'll do. It's just much harder to convince anyone of such an idea while their neighbor is arming for war. Once everyone in the area is on friendly terms, then you can talk reasonably about maintaining peace long-term. Of course, there hasn't been short-term stability in the Middle East for the past thousand years, so I don't expect it anytime soon.
Every person on that board will go down in history as the guys who got the district sued, screwing over the next several years of already-tight budgets. Getting a job in education again will involve a heck of a lot of smooth talking.
In quoting, you cut out the part about questions of efficiency, then replaced it with more verbose questions about efficiency. Good job.
Not so much. You can't really shut down 90% of a mainframe to cut costs during off-hours. If you've reached the limit of the mainframe's capacity, you can't just plug in a module and expand it linearly, without downtime. In short, you're missing a major factor in the "dynamic resources" component.
timesharing + dynamic resources + virtualization + isolation = cloud
Let's all stop innovating because of cost, then! This silly progress thing is just plain too expensive!
Data in the cloud can be stored encrypted, and transferred to a secure location for actual processing. The storage location can be staffed by not-so-trusted folks, because they're only handling encrypted data. The encryption keys can be stored in the processing facility, right where the data's going to be used. It all falls under the management of the Government Cloud Department, who are the ones responsible for managing a high-availability cluster, and nothing else. It'll cost extra processing time, but that's a trivial problem compared to convincing government bureaucrats to give up their control over servers.
Government departments can "outsource" their processing needs to another government department. The only people I've seen expecting clouds to be outside the organization entirely are people inventing problems to complain about.
When you switch to a "cloud", you consolidate management. When you consolidate data centers, you just end up with all of your duplicate machines in the same place.
A cloud might run across multiple data centers, but still only use as much hardware is needed at the time. If 50% of the cloud is unused at the time, then (less than) 50% can be shut down to cut expenses. Running jobs can be switched to underutilized machines, improving efficiency. Without a centralized management, no government agency would ever take the time to move jobs for efficiency's sake. Hell, they might not even be allowed to know what other departments are running jobs.
Please do not transfer the ex-admin to work the phones at the IRS. That will not end well for anybody.
It's meaningless in the same way that "steam" is meaningless in "steam engine".
Back in the good ol' days, the universities had a small group of people qualified to operate the million-dollar computers. It was assumed that there would be no expensive redundancy. Now, anybody with a spare computer can set up a "server", so there's a need to distinguish centrally-managed systems as being different than the norm.
I doubt very much that all research is done on those research clusters. It's far more likely that some professor set up their own box to run processing jobs, so he wouldn't need to talk to those cluster folks. That's the kind of duplication that gets expensive for government work, so it's perfectly reasonable to cut it out.
It's entirely possible to have an internal cloud. The Government Cloud Department could be charged with managing all processing resources, availability, data storage, etc. as needed. The road-managing people need to run a simulation for a new traffic light's effects? Ask the GCD for a half-dozen CPUs for 6 hours. The bean counters need to count many hills of beans? Ask for 1000 CPUs for 2 hours. Don't know how long something will take? Send in the job anyway, and you'll get a call when it's done. From the perspective of all the other departments, they're dealing with this nebulous system that just does what they need.
Having one single Cloud Department means idle servers can be eliminated, redundant employees can be cut, and redundant mistakes aren't as likely to be made. Yes, security's still an issue, but not something that can't be resolved with the liberal application of encryption and security checks.
That's what the firehose is for.
My fiancée came across a page that automatically downloaded it two days before I'd heard anything about it in the media..
Not necessarily. It could be internal to the corporation, but not to a specific department/team/developer. Each department could get isolated use of that cloud. From the department's perspective, it's an internal private cloud.
Google went about social networking all wrong. With Buzz, the idea is to build a network of contacts, and post updates to them. As Facebook has shown us, social networking is really all about recommending "friends" you've never met, showing how many thousand people think they might know you from somewhere, and bombarding users with trivial accomplishments in thoughtless games.
Social networking isn't about being social. It's about filling bars.
It's a tale cautioning against allowing government to manipulate people without restraint. The constant surveillance was just a side effect of the totalitarian regime. Preventing progress on technology out of fear won't change anything. The paranoid life of 1984 already exists in places like North Korea, where people disappear because a government officer doesn't like the way they look, and such a life arrived without the help of any pervasive surveillance.
The NYSE cannot selectively choose now to be the time to start enforcing it when then haven't in the past.
Yes, they can. The trademark holder may choose not to pursue uses which are inconsequential. It may choose to grant permission to use the trademark. It may just plain not care. As long as the general appearance is that the holder hasn't abandoned the mark, and the mark still identifies the holder, the trademark is still likely to be considered valid. If a court determines that the trademark is valid, the holder controls its use. Requiring absolute enforcement would place an undue burden on the holder, so it's not required.
Laches would only apply to the current case, and only if the delay was found to be unreasonable. Six months is pretty quick for a legal claim. Whether NYSE has sent C&D letters to others who used their trademark would only affect whether the trademark is genericized to the point of being invalid, but even then the enforcement is only one of several criteria considered.
Wow. Three replies to a single comment. Either you have problems organizing your thoughts, or you love your jerking knee.
I find it amazing that your definition of "true" trademark dilution is different from every other definition, where associating a trademark with something undesirable is illegal. It's irrelevant that the picture was a "stock image", as there is no such legal status. What matters is that the picture is distinctly recognizable as the NYSE, even without the existence of any other logos.
One of your examples illustrates this well. You can go into any Subway restaurant and take a picture, and it will be recognizable as a Subway, even without logos. The employee uniforms, shape of the counter, posted signs, and even the color scheme all contribute to a recognizable image. Likewise, if you see a picture of any trading floor in the United States, it's almost always the NYSE. The fact that the picture doesn't blatantly say "NYSE" is irrelevant.
It also doesn't matter that the "stock" picture is a different angle, with different people, in different colors. In fact, that image you linked to isn't even the complete registered trademark. The registered mark "consists of a representation of an actual building interior, namely, a securities exchange trading floor." Again, since almost any picture you'll see in the United States of a trading floor is the NYSE, that's pretty distinctive. It's also pretty vague, and intentionally so. Trademarks are supposed to protect a brand from being diminished by an unscrupulous company damaging or hijacking their good reputation. A vague description of the mark can protect from a much wider range of alterations than an exact detail.
The legal system does not have a set of absolute criteria to sort out "right" and "wrong" behavior, no matter how much computer folks might wish for it. Sure, the NYSE may have missed a few uses of their trademark, or chose not to send a C&D for articles they liked, but that doesn't automatically invalidate the trademark. If this case were to ever reach a court, a judge might determine that now, (ten years after registration), folks are more likely to see images of trading floors other than NYSE, and call it a dead mark. It's also not a definite problem that there was a six-month delay in sending out the C&D. A judge might consider that a bit too long to care, or he might just assume the legal department was busy. The legal system is not run by computers. It's sad, but true.
Apparently, though, the legal system is full of the same shit I am.
Libel means probably going through an expensive lawsuit to get anything fixed. A trademark issue means they send a cease & desist letter, and the responsible news agency either clarifies why the image is newsworthy or removes it. TPM instead felt it necessary to complain.