Actually, trademarks only apply to other uses in the same trade. So they will first have to show that the geek bake-off is in fact trade (believable), and that the trade is in food service (never in a million years).
Actually, they don't. Check this, from nolo.com:
In addition, under federal and state laws known as "anti-dilution statutes," a trademark owner may go to court to prevent its mark from being used by someone else if the mark is famous and the later use would dilute the mark's strength -- that is, weaken its reputation for quality (called tarnishment) or render it common through overuse in different contexts.
Anti-dilution statutes can apply even if there is no way customers would be likely to confuse the source of the goods or services designated by the later mark with the famous mark's owner. For instance, consumers would not think that Microsoft Bakery is associated with Microsoft, the software company, but Microsoft bakery could still be forced to choose another name under federal and state anti-dilution laws.
There is no good definition of what makes a mark famous. This means that to avoid dilution claims, it is necessary to stay away from all existing marks that have widespread and significant consumer recognition.
So Pillsbury needs to show that "bake-off" is in danger of becoming a generic term for "competition," and they have an interest in preventing that. All of which seems credible enough to get you into court.
I'm sure you're wrong about the case having no merit-- Pillsbury invented the term, they've held a trademark on it since 1971 (according to their website), and they've defended their trademark successfully in the past.
As I understand it, they could lose a suit like this if it could be shown that "bake-off" has become a generic term for "competition", or smething like that. And if they were claiming rights to the "-off" suffix, that would definitely be overreaching. But as it is, I don't see where this is a slam-dunk for the geeks.
And as for a "public relations fiasco," who's more sympathetic-- the doughboy, or Scott McNealy?
"I don't think it matters at all whether we've been economically hurt," she said.
So they're just pursuing the lawsuits to promote ethical concepts? I wonder if the RIAA board knows about this...
I can't imagine that if the execs thought that they were actually increasing sales by condoning Napster that they would continue. Maybe the musicians would keep it up, to preserve "the integrity of the performance," but the suits would drop the case in a second.
I'm assuming that this is the question that kept them from granting trademarks on scents up to now.
Presumably, every variety of grass (bluegrass, zoysia, etc.) smells slightly different. If I make a product that smells like a different variety of grass, am I violating their trademark? Or do they have a patent on the smell of every variety of grass?
If someone violates the trademark, how does a judge or jury decide whether that product smells exactly like the trademarked product?
What sort of documentation did they have to file with the patent office? Descriptions of the smell of new-mown grass? Srcatch-and-sniff cards?
but now we have lesstif, which does a really good job.
Bear in mind, though, that Lesstif is fully compatible only with Motif 1.2, so there will be some apps built against Motif 2.x that won't run properly with Lesstif.
I was going to point out that DC's problems stem from a lot of things other than their gun regulations.
I would have pointed out that Virginia (which is just across the river, for those who aren't up on their geography) had soe of the loosest gun sales regulations in the country at the time DC was the murder capital.
I would have pointed out that while most of the shooting in DC take place in Southeast, most of the hospitals are in Northwest, where the politicians and journalists live (the salience of which point is proved by the fact that in the 80s Baltimore had an equivalent assaults-with-a-deadly-weapon rate to DC's, but a murder rate half of DC's).
I would also have pointed out that at the time DC was the murder capital, its police force also had one of the highest turnover rates in the country, thanks to the hiring policies instituted by the city's crackhead mayor.
I would have further pointed out that assault rates have been historically highest in the South, where gun ownership is highest.
But then I thought, what would be the point? The kneejerk response has already been moderated up to five, so my comments will just get buried.
...why does anybody need the full text of MS's document?
Someone could produce an abstract of the document that explains the extensions Microsoft has made. Liberally quoting from the code should be allowable under the doctrine of fair use. It should be fairly easy to get the spec out there without simply reposting MS's copyrighted material.
Then/. could remove the offending posts, and MS would have to fall back to their original claim, that anyone who sees the document is obligated to protect their trade secrets.
On a similar note, the latest issue of Wired, which carries a special section about machine translation and similar subjects, predicts that English will cease to be the majority language of the web by the end of this year.
It's not a matter of raw numbers, it's a matter of the assets you can bring to the table. Industry groups can guarantee massive contributions in blocks. Issue groups like the Christian Coalition can turn out a big mass of bodies to knock on doors or man phone banks. That's how you get the parties to advocate for your issues.
Conversely, groups whose members tend to go their own way wind up without much influence-- witness the Auto Workers, where the leadership stayed with the Democrats while the rank and file turned out for Reagan.
If geeks can show that they are both coherent and effective as a political force, politicians will come begging to be the voice of the geeks.
Interesting side note: yesterday's Washington Post carried this column by their pollster about a study of the way the White House and Congress use public opinion research in forming policy. Long story short: they don't. Only lobbyists and activists matter when it comes to making policy; the polls are just used to decide how to market the policies.
It is MS being their usual "we work with them (almost)" self, but in this case, they're not hiding anything. They just happen to use more of the spec than the reference one.
from ZDNet's article:
Shanen Boettcher, Windows 2000 product manager at Microsoft, said last week that the company has only made use of an existing feature of Kerberos and is not undercutting an existing standard. But he acknowledged the change is not documented, noting that some developers may believe they need to know the details of Microsoft's change before they will be able to get their software to work with it.
....
When asked how developers will work with the specifics of Microsoft's implementation, Boettcher said: "The contents of the field are currently not available. We have been asked to document them, and we are trying to figure out what to do with that request."
That Katzdot headline generator is good for a laugh, but I was hoping it would actually write an article. You know, like Pakin's automatic complaint letter generator. Oh well.
Take a totally implausible example: say a company patents the process by which books are ordered by employing a single click.
This isn't so implausible. NPR had this story a couple of weeks ago about a couple of developers who claim to hold a patent on the concept of delivering video over networks.
Then you truly, truly, don't know how Congress works on a day-to-day basis. [snip] The Conference Committees keep members from duplicating tons and tons of effort. Most of the bills Congress votes on are incredibly complicated and non-controversial.
You truly, truly don't understand how Congress works if you're going to insist on calling party caucuses "Conference Committees." A conference committee is a joint House-Senate committee charged with negotiating a compromise version of a bill that's passed in differing versions in the two houses. It has nothing to do with the parties.
The House Republicans refer to their caucus as a "conference" only because they have a phobia of the word "caucus."
Can you name any American elections in which the outcome of electoral college elections did not match the actual election results? How many times did this happen?
There are several examples. In 1824, John Quincy Adams finished a distant second to Andrew Jackson, but splinter candidates siphoned off enough electoral college votes to deny jackson the majority and give the decision to the House of Representatives, which anointed Adams. (Adams's presidency was and is regarded universally as a failure.) In 1876, the Democrat Samuel Tilden won both a popular vote and an apparent electoral vote victory, but the Republicans managed to bring the vote counts in two states into dispute, keeping them from naming an electoral slate. After several months of debate, the Republicans cut a deal with Southern Democrats giving the Republicans the White House in exchange for an end to Reconstruction. And again in 1888, Grover Cleveland won the popular vote by a narrow margin but lost in the electoral college. The AC makes some eloquent arguments for the electoral college system, but as history shows, the system can break down from time to time. And at this stage of our history, any president elected in one of those failures would certainly suffer a crippling loss of legitimacy.
Have alternate voting methods (approval, ranking, etc.) been considered by the US government? Lani Guinier, Clinton's first nominee for head of the Justice Dept. civil rights division, had some very interesting proposals for alternatives to both proportional representation and the "first-past-the-post" system in place now. When she was nominated, the conservative activists made those proposals part of their brief against her. Liberalish talking heads like Cokie Roberts and David Broder, being too ignorant about the math behind them too understand, took up the conservatives' case. She ended up getting savaged by both sides, and Clinton weaselled out and withdrew her nomination (claiming he hadn't known about her "indefensible" views beforehand).
In "The Mathematician Reads the Newspaper" John Allen Paulos gives a good synopsis of the whole episode, along with an analysis of her proposed systems.
Why should this project stand or fall on contributions from American software companies? As the article states, one could make a compelling case that Alan Turing "contributed more than any individual" to defeating the Geramns. And how did official Britain repay him for saving their country?
They publicly humiliated him. They chemically castrated him. They drove him to suicide.
And then there's that hideous postage stamp...
The House of Commons is supposed to vote soon to harmonize the age of consent rule for gays with the one for heterosexuals. They should take the opportunity to redress the wrong done to the old law's most prominent victim.
The article referenced in the Economist article is here: http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html The authors have written a series of papers supportive of Microsoft's claim not t be a monopolist; this page indexes some of them: http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/netpage.htm l Interesting stuff, but one statement really sums up the limitations of their theory: "Monopolists cause harm to consumers by reducing output and raising price." In other words, product variety has no value in itself, it's only a means of forcing producers to hold down prices and maintain output. Or, I shouldn't complain if I have to use a Microsoft product as long as I don't have to pay any more from it or go to any more trouble obtaining it than I would for a competing product.
>it's an unsolicitied email, which isn't illegal. Actually, he was arrested in Virginia, where spamming is illegal. And since he could reasonably be charged with spamming everyone who got a copy of his infected message, he could be up against some serious penalties if the state decided to charge him.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, they don't. Check this, from nolo.com:
In addition, under federal and state laws known as "anti-dilution statutes," a trademark owner may go to court to prevent its mark from being used by someone else if the mark is famous and the later use would dilute the mark's strength -- that is, weaken its reputation for quality (called tarnishment) or render it common through overuse in different contexts.
Anti-dilution statutes can apply even if there is no way customers would be likely to confuse the source of the goods or services designated by the later mark with the famous mark's owner. For instance, consumers would not think that Microsoft Bakery is associated with Microsoft, the software company, but Microsoft bakery could still be forced to choose another name under federal and state anti-dilution laws.
There is no good definition of what makes a mark famous. This means that to avoid dilution claims, it is necessary to stay away from all existing marks that have widespread and significant consumer recognition.
So Pillsbury needs to show that "bake-off" is in danger of becoming a generic term for "competition," and they have an interest in preventing that. All of which seems credible enough to get you into court.
[Can I have my karma now?]
I'm sure you're wrong about the case having no merit-- Pillsbury invented the term, they've held a trademark on it since 1971 (according to their website), and they've defended their trademark successfully in the past.
As I understand it, they could lose a suit like this if it could be shown that "bake-off" has become a generic term for "competition", or smething like that. And if they were claiming rights to the "-off" suffix, that would definitely be overreaching. But as it is, I don't see where this is a slam-dunk for the geeks.
And as for a "public relations fiasco," who's more sympathetic-- the doughboy, or Scott McNealy?
So they're just pursuing the lawsuits to promote ethical concepts? I wonder if the RIAA board knows about this...
I can't imagine that if the execs thought that they were actually increasing sales by condoning Napster that they would continue. Maybe the musicians would keep it up, to preserve "the integrity of the performance," but the suits would drop the case in a second.
I'm assuming that this is the question that kept them from granting trademarks on scents up to now.
Presumably, every variety of grass (bluegrass, zoysia, etc.) smells slightly different. If I make a product that smells like a different variety of grass, am I violating their trademark? Or do they have a patent on the smell of every variety of grass?
If someone violates the trademark, how does a judge or jury decide whether that product smells exactly like the trademarked product?
What sort of documentation did they have to file with the patent office? Descriptions of the smell of new-mown grass? Srcatch-and-sniff cards?
Didn't pan out,
It wasn't so much that it didn't pan out, as that the Atmospheric nuclear Test Ban treaty was signed before they could carry out the plan.
Bear in mind, though, that Lesstif is fully compatible only with Motif 1.2, so there will be some apps built against Motif 2.x that won't run properly with Lesstif.
I was going to point out that DC's problems stem from a lot of things other than their gun regulations.
I would have pointed out that Virginia (which is just across the river, for those who aren't up on their geography) had soe of the loosest gun sales regulations in the country at the time DC was the murder capital.
I would have pointed out that while most of the shooting in DC take place in Southeast, most of the hospitals are in Northwest, where the politicians and journalists live (the salience of which point is proved by the fact that in the 80s Baltimore had an equivalent assaults-with-a-deadly-weapon rate to DC's, but a murder rate half of DC's).
I would also have pointed out that at the time DC was the murder capital, its police force also had one of the highest turnover rates in the country, thanks to the hiring policies instituted by the city's crackhead mayor.
I would have further pointed out that assault rates have been historically highest in the South, where gun ownership is highest.
But then I thought, what would be the point? The kneejerk response has already been moderated up to five, so my comments will just get buried.
Ah, well...
...why does anybody need the full text of MS's document?
/. could remove the offending posts, and MS would have to fall back to their original claim, that anyone who sees the document is obligated to protect their trade secrets.
Someone could produce an abstract of the document that explains the extensions Microsoft has made. Liberally quoting from the code should be allowable under the doctrine of fair use. It should be fairly easy to get the spec out there without simply reposting MS's copyrighted material.
Then
On a similar note, the latest issue of Wired, which carries a special section about machine translation and similar subjects, predicts that English will cease to be the majority language of the web by the end of this year.
Conversely, groups whose members tend to go their own way wind up without much influence-- witness the Auto Workers, where the leadership stayed with the Democrats while the rank and file turned out for Reagan.
If geeks can show that they are both coherent and effective as a political force, politicians will come begging to be the voice of the geeks.
Interesting side note: yesterday's Washington Post carried this column by their pollster about a study of the way the White House and Congress use public opinion research in forming policy. Long story short: they don't. Only lobbyists and activists matter when it comes to making policy; the polls are just used to decide how to market the policies.
Of course, if you actually like PDF, you can run all that HTML through HTMLDOC and get a fairly spiffy PDF book out of it.
from ZDNet's article:
Shanen Boettcher, Windows 2000 product manager at Microsoft, said last week that the company has only made use of an existing feature of Kerberos and is not undercutting an existing standard. But he acknowledged the change is not documented, noting that some developers may believe they need to know the details of Microsoft's change before they will be able to get their software to work with it.
....
When asked how developers will work with the specifics of Microsoft's implementation, Boettcher said: "The contents of the field are currently not available. We have been asked to document them, and we are trying to figure out what to do with that request."
Sounds to me like they're hiding something...
That Katzdot headline generator is good for a laugh, but I was hoping it would actually write an article. You know, like Pakin's automatic complaint letter generator. Oh well.
Or the fabulous Australian Postmodernism Generator.
So it's bad to block information, but if ou define it as disinformation, then it's okay?
This reminds me of an old Peanuts cartoon: Charlie Brown comes upon Lucy squashing a bug and says "I thought your philosophy was "Live and let live.'"
Lucy thinks about it a second and replies, "He wasn't really *living*."
Take a totally implausible example: say a company patents the process by which books are ordered by employing a single click.
This isn't so implausible. NPR had this story a couple of weeks ago about a couple of developers who claim to hold a patent on the concept of delivering video over networks.
Then you truly, truly, don't know how Congress works on a day-to-day basis.
[snip]
The Conference Committees keep members from duplicating tons and tons of effort. Most of the bills Congress votes on are incredibly complicated and non-controversial.
You truly, truly don't understand how Congress works if you're going to insist on calling party caucuses "Conference Committees." A conference committee is a joint House-Senate committee charged with negotiating a compromise version of a bill that's passed in differing versions in the two houses. It has nothing to do with the parties.
The House Republicans refer to their caucus as a "conference" only because they have a phobia of the word "caucus."
Can you name any American elections in which the outcome of electoral college elections did not match the actual election results? How many times did this happen?
There are several examples. In 1824, John Quincy Adams finished a distant second to Andrew Jackson, but splinter candidates siphoned off enough electoral college votes to deny jackson the majority and give the decision to the House of Representatives, which anointed Adams. (Adams's presidency was and is regarded universally as a failure.)
In 1876, the Democrat Samuel Tilden won both a popular vote and an apparent electoral vote victory, but the Republicans managed to bring the vote counts in two states into dispute, keeping them from naming an electoral slate. After several months of debate, the Republicans cut a deal with Southern Democrats giving the Republicans the White House in exchange for an end to Reconstruction.
And again in 1888, Grover Cleveland won the popular vote by a narrow margin but lost in the electoral college.
The AC makes some eloquent arguments for the electoral college system, but as history shows, the system can break down from time to time. And at this stage of our history, any president elected in one of those failures would certainly suffer a crippling loss of legitimacy.
Have alternate voting methods (approval, ranking, etc.) been considered by the US government?
Lani Guinier, Clinton's first nominee for head of the Justice Dept. civil rights division, had some very interesting proposals for alternatives to both proportional representation and the "first-past-the-post" system in place now. When she was nominated, the conservative activists made those proposals part of their brief against her. Liberalish talking heads like Cokie Roberts and David Broder, being too ignorant about the math behind them too understand, took up the conservatives' case. She ended up getting savaged by both sides, and Clinton weaselled out and withdrew her nomination (claiming he hadn't known about her "indefensible" views beforehand).
In "The Mathematician Reads the Newspaper" John Allen Paulos gives a good synopsis of the whole episode, along with an analysis of her proposed systems.
The man he pled guilty to having relations with was nineteen, not fourteen, according to Turing's biography.
Why should this project stand or fall on contributions from American software companies? As the article states, one could make a compelling case that Alan Turing "contributed more than any individual" to defeating the Geramns. And how did official Britain repay him for saving their country?
They publicly humiliated him. They chemically castrated him. They drove him to suicide.
And then there's that hideous postage stamp...
The House of Commons is supposed to vote soon to harmonize the age of consent rule for gays with the one for heterosexuals. They should take the opportunity to redress the wrong done to the old law's most prominent victim.
It wouldn't be enough, but it would be a start.
The article referenced in the Economist article is here:m l
http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html
The authors have written a series of papers supportive of Microsoft's claim not t be a monopolist; this page indexes some of them:
http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/netpage.ht
Interesting stuff, but one statement really sums up the limitations of their theory:
"Monopolists cause harm to consumers by reducing output and raising price."
In other words, product variety has no value in itself, it's only a means of forcing producers to hold down prices and maintain output. Or, I shouldn't complain if I have to use a Microsoft product as long as I don't have to pay any more from it or go to any more trouble obtaining it than I would for a competing product.
>it's an unsolicitied email, which isn't illegal.
Actually, he was arrested in Virginia, where spamming is illegal. And since he could reasonably be charged with spamming everyone who got a copy of his infected message, he could be up against some serious penalties if the state decided to charge him.