While a petition to cancel the trademarks could arguably be filed on the grounds that Disney is not able to *legitimately* exercise control over the use of the mark (see below) if they get enough nasty feedback and public commentary they will probably choose to withdraw or just abandon their application.
307 Time for Filing Petition to Cancel 15 U.S.C. 1064 [Section 14 of the Trademark Act] A petition to cancel a registration of a mark, stating the grounds relied upon, may, upon payment of the prescribed fee, be filed as follows by any person who believes that he is or will be damaged... *** (5) At any time in the case of a certification mark on the ground that the registrant (A) does not control, or is not able legitimately to exercise control over, the use of such mark,
A shortage of housing for those who make under $75,000.00 per year plagues virtually every American city. In some areas one needs an annual income over $100,000.00 to buy a house for a family of more than two, and in some places you need more than that to rent an apartment. In Silicon Valley there is concern that the snowballing cost of living will be what ends the tech industry prosperity surge.
Everybody wants affordable housing, but nobody wants a "housing project" in their neighborhood. There are many concerns about the perceived failure of previous government housing projects and their much publicized faults.
What specifically do you intend to do that would cause the supply of homes for the non-rich to increase in a healthy fashion, and why do you think no-body has done it yet? If you think somebody has, please give a specific example of a plan or project you can document the success of.
Hear, Hear! Blasphemous as it may be, I do occasionally want to go outside, and I would prefer that "outside" not be toxic. For those interested in being part of the solution rather than part of the problem, I have compiled the following list of organizations/sites:
-In 1966, a handful of river-lovers decided to change the course of events that was destroying the Hudson, and reclaim a natural treasure for us all. They wanted to dramatize the rivers plight, recall its history, and help guide its future. They wanted to provide their fellow citizens with a first-hand look at the neglect and pollution of the river, and move them to action. So they built a boat. http://www.clearwater.org/
-The Keeper Concept. The Keeper concept started on New York's Hudson River where a coalition of commercial and recreational fishermen mobilized in 1966 to reclaim the Hudson from its polluters...The Hudson's miraculous recovery has helped make the Keeper program an international model for ecosystem protection. http://www.keeper.org/ http://www.riverkeeper.org/
-BayKeeper was founded to stop the increasing pollution of San Francisco Bay. http://www.sfbaykeeper.org/bayinfo.html
-http://www.greenpeace.org/
-http://www.emagazine.com/
-Run or recharge just about any notebook computer, mobile phone, PDA, GPS, or digital music player with one of our Sun Catcher solar chargers. http://www.powerqwest.com/PQ/Products/Sun_Catche r_Mobile_Power/sun_catcher_mobile_power.ht m
-http://www.earthfriendlybaby.com/
-The Orion Society is an award-winning publisher, an environmental education organization, and a communications and support network for grassroots environmental and community organizations across North America. It is a nonprofit membership organization with 8000 members, individual and organizational, representing all fifty states and thirty-one foreign countries. http://www.orionsociety.org/
-Eagle Research - A non-profit organization that develops & distributes practical energy saving methods and devices. http://www.eagle-research.com/
-The Information Center for the Environment is a cooperative effort of environmental scientists at the University of California, Davis and collaborators at over thirty private, state, federal, and international organizations interested in environmental protection. http://ice.ucdavis.edu/
-Pace Virtual Environmental Law Library http://joshua.law.pace.edu/env/vell6.html
-Northern Sun Merchandising. Merchandise to provoke, amuse, touch the heart and just generally stir up people's thinking. http://www.northernsun.com/
-Mojo Wire - Daily News and resources for the skeptical citizen http://www.motherjones.com/
-Alternet.org - independant News and Information http://www.alternet.org/index.html
If you really want to do something, write letters/email to the USPTO http://www.uspto.gov/ with laundry lists of stuff you consider basic, common knowledge. With examples. Make a list of stuff that would really suck if it got patented, and demonstrate that it is common knowledge.
Go to http://www.itsabout.com/resource_govt/gov_us_offic es.html and look around. Take every patent you consider absurd - or even just one! - and give examples of prior art. They keep stuff like that on file. Then, if someone tries to enforce the patent, the prior art gets pulled out and the patent holder is told to get over it.
This method may not get you hysterical articles, cool parody sites or an excuse to give folks with jobs that suck a bad time, but it will actually go a long way towards solving the problem.
I think any further whining from programmers who haven't done anything useful (and no, posting doctored photos of patent holders doesn't count, even if it is really, really funny) ought to be met with the total lack of respect it deserves.
A huge number of the really bad problems I've seen could have been avoided had the UI been tested (or even looked at) by someone who thinks "television" when someone says "program". Most computer users in this day and age are not programmers and have no more interest in how their hard/software works than in how the tv networks pick reruns of Gilligans Island. Less, probably.
A few basic rules: 0) An attempt should be made to accomodate people with disabilities/the differently abled. 1) number sequences start with 1 (one) not zero. 2) never scare the customer unless that is what they paid for. Most people are scared of things they don't understand, and most error messages are completely incomprehensible to a non programmer. That's just plain mean. 3) Most users don't want to adjust, change, modify, tweak or otherwise fiddle with their computer much beyond the desktop theme any more than the average car driver wants to manually adjust the idle. 4) Consistency is key. The same types of actions should have at least similar results. 5) Simplicity & legibility are more important than being cool, fancy and/or cutting edge. 6) If you're reading this, odds are your computer is light years ahead of the average users. All software developers should have access to a box with the minimum system requirements, and should be forced to actually use the software they developed on said machine. For more than five minutes.
Some useful URL's:
a [free!] web-based tool that analyzes web pages for their accessibility to people with disabilities: http://www.cast.org/bobby/
Interface Hall of Shame http://www.iarchitect.com/shame.htm
http://www.useit.com/
User Interface Engineering: http://world.std.com/~uieweb/moreart.htm
Other Software testing and QA resources: http://www.softwareqatest.com
Those who will not study history are doomed to repeat it. It never ceases to amaze me that there are people intelligent enough to type -and who seem to care about other people- who can willfully ignore the lessons of history.
First of all, enforcing religious doctrine is directly in conflict with the US constitution. Many of the founders of this nation came here in search of religious freedom, so they tried to set things up so that our new government wouldn't repeat the mistakes of the old ones and try to legislate religious matters, and/or force anyone to join the State religion, or even act like they do. If you want to live in a country where religion is enforced by the government, I suggest you move to Iran and see how you like it. OH! You meant you wanted YOUR religion shoved down everybody else's throat? Not somebody else's religion? Guess what - that's why we need laws to protect us!
Secondly, your comment is precisely the sort of thing that much censorware would block.
Third, if kids don't get information about STD's BEFORE they have sex, how is it going to help them avoid it?
Fourth, I notice you don't mention violence. In my mind, watching a man kill a woman is (or should be!) more disturbing to a child than watching him make love to her - but the makers of censorware by and large don't seem to feel that way, which I think is truly sinful.
Fifth, I suspect that the hundreds of thousands of Christians that were burned, hung, crucified, enslaved, raped, encarcerated, fed to lions etc. because they did not have "such modern illusions as "free speech" and "equal rights"" are probably howling with despair right now. Aaargh! Enough. I am going to kneel down and pray that my kids are never, ever at the mercy of people as willfully ignorant as you - especially since you may be a perfectly nice person, but the average person incarcerated for child molestation in the US is a white, male, middle class self-identified "practicing Christian".
I'm so glad I wasn't the only one to notice this. It especially bothered me because
MY mother can (and does) use any damn OS she wants to just fine, thank you very much!
I've taught both males & females how to use computers and/or new software. I'd rather teach a woman to use a new OS than a man - she might listen to all of what I have to say and even -gasp!- read the release notes.
I worked at an insurance company in '87 where one manager had the entire secretarial pool's typewriters removed and replaced with boxes running the Wang VS Word Processing System. Over the weekend. They all learned how to use it on the fly, without any training. They had to retrieve a few typewriters for forms, but they actually managed to do all their day-to-day work without slowing down enough for managers & partners to notice. Can you imagine? The thing is, a top-of-the-line electronic typewriter was/is far more complicated and user-unfriendly than most computers (rather like using somebody else's proprietary DOS-based system without a monitor), and nobody questions a woman's ability to use a typewriter anymore!
On behalf of myself and all the other women who as Secretaries/Administrative Assistants/Receptionists etc. had to use an appalling assortment of early word processing systems, I say these guys (yes, I used that word on purpose) better stop and think.
Re:Welcome to RealWorld(tm)
on
NetSlaves
·
· Score: 1
check out my favorite "fake" world this week - but only if you're ready to laugh about this topic... http://www.herdthinners.com/weekly.html
"..trying to explain drug crazed madness"? No, trying to prevent madness. One of the things that would help a lot would be if geeks like you would spend some energy and time trying to help the geeks still in school. Think of it this way; how many marvelous toys are you never going to get 'cause the geek-in-training who would have dreamed them up got his/her computer taken away?
Maybe you aren't lucky enough to enjoy the relaxed dress and behavioral codes this geek enjoys in the workplace, and/or maybe you've never suffered the horrors of corporate attire, but you should consider the possibility that adult geek privileges may not be as sacrosanct as you think. Had an online discussion lately with a teenager who owns a black trenchcoat? Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
There's a marvelous quote that goes something like this: "When they came for the Jews, I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew. When they came for the Catholics, I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Catholic. When they came for the Trade Unionists, I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Trade Unionist. When they came for me, there was no-one left to speak up."
My mother got the children's division of the ACLU to come down like the wrath of the goddess on my Junior High School. By then I'd been set on fire, along with the usual horrors. Suburban NY in 1980. So I have some idea of what these kids go through. I would suggest going to http://aclu.org/issues/student/hmes.html
if you haven't already.
For me the biggest irony/nightmare here is: The shooters were supposed to be Nazi wannabes, right? Advocates of Aryan conformity? Stamp out the different and the physically weak? Remove from society those who disagree with the party line, or differ from a physical ideal? Censorship? Children made into spies & informants? As I see it, the reaction of mainstream society is precisely in line.
So, if mainstream society reacts this way every time, then it would be very much in the interest of totalitarian fringe groups to encourage this kind of shooting spree.
The hard part of staffing a totalitarian movement is getting people accustomed to having no rights, no privacy and taking orders unquestioningly. The other good way to raise participation in violent hate groups is to increase the number of people who feel they have no place in society and therefore have nothing to lose and everything to gain. It seems to me the schools are working hard at both.
I was lucky; I had supportive parents & graduated early.
Slashdot Mirror
You can also leave a comment for Disney here - http://corporate.disney.go.com/citizenship/feedback.html
While a petition to cancel the trademarks could arguably be filed on the grounds that Disney is not able to *legitimately* exercise control over the use of the mark (see below) if they get enough nasty feedback and public commentary they will probably choose to withdraw or just abandon their application.
307 Time for Filing Petition to Cancel
15 U.S.C. 1064 [Section 14 of the Trademark Act] A petition to cancel a registration of a mark, stating the grounds relied upon, may, upon payment of the prescribed fee, be filed as follows by any person who believes that he is or will be damaged...
***
(5) At any time in the case of a certification mark on the ground that the registrant
(A) does not control, or is not able legitimately to exercise control over, the use of such mark,
Everybody wants affordable housing, but nobody wants a "housing project" in their neighborhood. There are many concerns about the perceived failure of previous government housing projects and their much publicized faults.
What specifically do you intend to do that would cause the supply of homes for the non-rich to increase in a healthy fashion, and why do you think no-body has done it yet? If you think somebody has, please give a specific example of a plan or project you can document the success of.
Hear, Hear! Blasphemous as it may be, I do occasionally want to go outside, and I would prefer that "outside" not be toxic. For those interested in being part of the solution rather than part of the problem, I have compiled the following list of organizations/sites:
t al.html
e r_Mobile_Power/sun_catcher_mobile_power.ht m
o nment_and_Nature/Water_Resources/Organizat ions/
i ence/Environment_and_Nature_News/
-In 1966, a handful of river-lovers decided to change the course of events that was destroying the Hudson, and reclaim a natural treasure for us all. They wanted to dramatize the rivers plight, recall its history, and help guide its future. They wanted to provide their fellow citizens with a first-hand look at the neglect and pollution of the river, and move them to action.
So they built a boat.
http://www.clearwater.org/
-The Keeper Concept.
The Keeper concept started on New York's Hudson River where a coalition of commercial and recreational fishermen mobilized in 1966 to reclaim the Hudson from its polluters...The Hudson's miraculous recovery has helped make the Keeper program an international model for ecosystem protection.
http://www.keeper.org/
http://www.riverkeeper.org/
-more Resources:
http://www.riverkeeper.org/resources/environmen
-BayKeeper was founded to stop the increasing pollution of San Francisco Bay. http://www.sfbaykeeper.org/bayinfo.html
-http://www.greenpeace.org/
-http://www.emagazine.com/
-Run or recharge just about any notebook computer, mobile phone, PDA, GPS, or digital music player with one of our Sun Catcher solar chargers.
http://www.powerqwest.com/PQ/Products/Sun_Catch
-http://www.earthfriendlybaby.com/
-The Orion Society is an award-winning publisher, an environmental education organization, and a communications and support network for grassroots environmental and community organizations across North America. It is a nonprofit membership organization with 8000 members, individual and organizational, representing all fifty states and thirty-one foreign countries.
http://www.orionsociety.org/
-Eagle Research - A non-profit organization that develops & distributes practical energy saving methods and devices.
http://www.eagle-research.com/
-The Information Center for the Environment is a cooperative effort of environmental scientists at the University of California, Davis and collaborators at over thirty private, state, federal, and international organizations interested in environmental protection.
http://ice.ucdavis.edu/
-Pace Virtual Environmental Law Library
http://joshua.law.pace.edu/env/vell6.html
-Northern Sun Merchandising. Merchandise to provoke, amuse, touch the heart and just generally stir up people's thinking.
http://www.northernsun.com/
-Mojo Wire - Daily News and resources for the skeptical citizen
http://www.motherjones.com/
-Alternet.org - independant News and Information
http://www.alternet.org/index.html
-http://dir.yahoo.com/Society_and_Culture/Envir
-http://fullcoverage.yahoo.com/Full_Coverage/Sc
If you really want to do something, write letters/email to the USPTO http://www.uspto.gov/ with laundry lists of stuff you consider basic, common knowledge. With examples. Make a list of stuff that would really suck if it got patented, and demonstrate that it is common knowledge.
Go to http://www.itsabout.com/resource_govt/gov_us_offic es.html and look around. Take every patent you consider absurd - or even just one! - and give examples of prior art. They keep stuff like that on file. Then, if someone tries to enforce the patent, the prior art gets pulled out and the patent holder is told to get over it.
This method may not get you hysterical articles, cool parody sites or an excuse to give folks with jobs that suck a bad time, but it will actually go a long way towards solving the problem.
I think any further whining from programmers who haven't done anything useful (and no, posting doctored photos of patent holders doesn't count, even if it is really, really funny) ought to be met with the total lack of respect it deserves.
Earn Your Attitude.
A huge number of the really bad problems I've seen could have been avoided had the UI been tested (or even looked at) by someone who thinks "television" when someone says "program". Most computer users in this day and age are not programmers and have no more interest in how their hard/software works than in how the tv networks pick reruns of Gilligans Island. Less, probably.
A few basic rules:
0) An attempt should be made to accomodate people with disabilities/the differently abled.
1) number sequences start with 1 (one) not zero.
2) never scare the customer unless that is what they paid for. Most people are scared of things they don't understand, and most error messages are completely incomprehensible to a non programmer. That's just plain mean.
3) Most users don't want to adjust, change, modify, tweak or otherwise fiddle with their computer much beyond the desktop theme any more than the average car driver wants to manually adjust the idle.
4) Consistency is key. The same types of actions should have at least similar results.
5) Simplicity & legibility are more important than being cool, fancy and/or cutting edge.
6) If you're reading this, odds are your computer is light years ahead of the average users. All software developers should have access to a box with the minimum system requirements, and should be forced to actually use the software they developed on said machine. For more than five minutes.
Some useful URL's:
a [free!] web-based tool that analyzes web pages for their accessibility to people with disabilities:
http://www.cast.org/bobby/
Interface Hall of Shame
http://www.iarchitect.com/shame.htm
http://www.useit.com/
User Interface Engineering:
http://world.std.com/~uieweb/moreart.htm
Other Software testing and QA resources:
http://www.softwareqatest.com
Bad examples:
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/
Those who will not study history are doomed to repeat it. It never ceases to amaze me that there are people intelligent enough to type -and who seem to care about other people- who can willfully ignore the lessons of history.
First of all, enforcing religious doctrine is directly in conflict with the US constitution. Many of the founders of this nation came here in search of religious freedom, so they tried to set things up so that our new government wouldn't repeat the mistakes of the old ones and try to legislate religious matters, and/or force anyone to join the State religion, or even act like they do. If you want to live in a country where religion is enforced by the government, I suggest you move to Iran and see how you like it. OH! You meant you wanted YOUR religion shoved down everybody else's throat? Not somebody else's religion? Guess what - that's why we need laws to protect us!
Secondly, your comment is precisely the sort of thing that much censorware would block.
Third, if kids don't get information about STD's BEFORE they have sex, how is it going to help them avoid it?
Fourth, I notice you don't mention violence. In my mind, watching a man kill a woman is (or should be!) more disturbing to a child than watching him make love to her - but the makers of censorware by and large don't seem to feel that way, which I think is truly sinful.
Fifth, I suspect that the hundreds of thousands of Christians that were burned, hung, crucified, enslaved, raped, encarcerated, fed to lions etc. because they did not have "such modern illusions as "free speech" and "equal rights"" are probably howling with despair right now. Aaargh! Enough. I am going to kneel down and pray that my kids are never, ever at the mercy of people as willfully ignorant as you - especially since you may be a perfectly nice person, but the average person incarcerated for child molestation in the US is a white, male, middle class self-identified "practicing Christian".
MY mother can (and does) use any damn OS she wants to just fine, thank you very much!
I've taught both males & females how to use computers and/or new software. I'd rather teach a woman to use a new OS than a man - she might listen to all of what I have to say and even -gasp!- read the release notes.
I worked at an insurance company in '87 where one manager had the entire secretarial pool's typewriters removed and replaced with boxes running the Wang VS Word Processing System. Over the weekend. They all learned how to use it on the fly, without any training. They had to retrieve a few typewriters for forms, but they actually managed to do all their day-to-day work without slowing down enough for managers & partners to notice. Can you imagine? The thing is, a top-of-the-line electronic typewriter was/is far more complicated and user-unfriendly than most computers (rather like using somebody else's proprietary DOS-based system without a monitor), and nobody questions a woman's ability to use a typewriter anymore!
On behalf of myself and all the other women who as Secretaries/Administrative Assistants/Receptionists etc. had to use an appalling assortment of early word processing systems, I say these guys (yes, I used that word on purpose) better stop and think.
check out my favorite "fake" world this week - but only if you're ready to laugh about this topic... http://www.herdthinners.com/weekly.html
"..trying to explain drug crazed madness"? No, trying to prevent madness. One of the things that would help a lot would be if geeks like you would spend some energy and time trying to help the geeks still in school. Think of it this way; how many marvelous toys are you never going to get 'cause the geek-in-training who would have dreamed them up got his/her computer taken away?
Maybe you aren't lucky enough to enjoy the relaxed dress and behavioral codes this geek enjoys in the workplace, and/or maybe you've never suffered the horrors of corporate attire, but you should consider the possibility that adult geek privileges may not be as sacrosanct as you think.
Had an online discussion lately with a teenager who owns a black trenchcoat? Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
There's a marvelous quote that goes something like this:
"When they came for the Jews, I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew. When they came for the Catholics, I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Catholic. When they came for the Trade Unionists, I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Trade Unionist. When they came for me, there was no-one left to speak up."
My mother got the children's division of the ACLU to come down like the wrath of the goddess on my Junior High School. By then I'd been set on fire, along with the usual horrors. Suburban NY in 1980. So I have some idea of what these kids go through. I would suggest going to
http://aclu.org/issues/student/hmes.html
if you haven't already.
For me the biggest irony/nightmare here is: The shooters were supposed to be Nazi wannabes, right? Advocates of Aryan conformity? Stamp out the different and the physically weak? Remove from society those who disagree with the party line, or differ from a physical ideal? Censorship? Children made into spies & informants? As I see it, the reaction of mainstream society is precisely in line.
So, if mainstream society reacts this way every time, then it would be very much in the interest of totalitarian fringe groups to encourage this kind of shooting spree.
The hard part of staffing a totalitarian movement is getting people accustomed to having no rights, no privacy and taking orders unquestioningly. The other good way to raise participation in violent hate groups is to increase the number of people who feel they have no place in society and therefore have nothing to lose and everything to gain. It seems to me the schools are working hard at both.
I was lucky; I had supportive parents & graduated early.