You definitely could write your computer program and come up with thousands of potential trademarks.
Then I suppose you plan to register them, right? Well, that will be $275, $325 or $375 per class per trademark. Assuming you do the filing on your own of course. Oh, don't forget to be extremely specific on your required statement of how and on what your trademarks will be used.
Also, you shouldn't forget that it's an extra $100 per class per trademark if your mark isn't in use but you plan to use it. Assuming all of your trademarks pass muster, you will be given 6 months to put them into use. You can continue to file extensions of course, so don't fret! It's only $150 per trademark per class.
And finally, you should not forget the final $100 statement of use that you have to file once you actually use your thousands of generated trademarks.
Now, let's do some math. Your program generated 3000 trademarks. Since you want them to be broad, let's say you are creative enough to get them approved for 3 classes. You are filing electronically, so let's see... That's $3,825,000. Now we have to keep postponing them until we are ready to use them for 3 years. That's $8,100,000. And then we have to actually create the websites in which they will be used (Let's just say the websites are free) and file the final statement of uses for the trademarks. That's $900,000.
Alright, your little plan is just going to cost $12,825,000. Chump change! And not likely to work anyway. Oh well.
The guy that used to work there told me that the USPTO recently changed their benefits and no longer pay for their workers to get a law degree, etc., if they stay with the USPTO for a certain amount of time after getting it. This is the main reason he left - he did part time schooling for awhile but now decided to just leave and get it done asap to get his law degree faster.
You can argue whether it is for the better or for the worse, but the patent office stopped paying for law degrees because as soon as anybody got the degree a DC law firm would hire them away and pay the debt off.
Yes, it wasn't costing the patent office money in that regard, but it was reducing the patent office to being just a feeder source for the law firms. Paying for advanced degrees is done to retain top employees while gaining the advantage of them having advanced education. The patent office was seeing none of this, so they canned it.
16 years later, evidently, it still is. 10 of those years were the broadcast standard wars, which was silly, because, overpaid steroid-pumped entertainers aside, the real value of HDTV was prerecorded movies, not over-the-air broadcasts
If you are a sports fan, the real value of HDTV is sports broadcasting. There is no comparison between standard definition and high definition broadcasts of sporting events. My former roommate purchased an HDTV solely to watch the Super Bowl, and now nearly everyone at that first party owns an HDTV set. Movies are great, especially with the widescreen, but sports are where it's at. The fact that the Super Bowl has been broadcast in HD for the past 5 years has sold more sets than all other reasons combined. Now that every major sporting event and nearly all routine sporting events are broadcast in HD, I think you can say that HDTV sets are established.
ABC used to broadcast movies in HD back before they had routine programming on their HD feed. Yes they are much, much better than DVD, but nobody cares. A DVD at 480P looks fine, especially to the masses. They are not going to throw out their TV sets to buy new HDTVs specifically for 1080 movies. But Joe-everyday-guy is doing everything he can to buy a current HDTV set in time for the NFL season opener. And he's not going to replace it with a new one in two years. He can't afford it.
The movie studios just don't want to accept that fact.
I would ask you to try something out: Run over to Radio Shack and buy the single bowtie VHF antenna. Yes, the single bowtie antenna. It costs about $3 or $4. Please report back to us with the results of using the cheapest possible VHF antenna to receive your VHF television signals.
I used this setup for 2 years while living 35-40 miles from the broadcasting towers in Chicago and I got all the stations and had a picture so perfect it put digital cable to shame. By the way, using rabbit ears in the same house would get me 2 stations and a horrible, fuzzy, barely viewable picture. But only on the top floor of the house. Downstairs where the TV was located there was nothing.
Are 10,000 songs automagically worth $10k? Seriously, how is that determined? If Starbucks gives me a free lifetime supply of coffee, do I owe them 20% of $infinity?
I know a guy that actually won a lifetime supply of chocolate bars. Perhaps that wasn't worth enough to have to pay taxes (he didn't as far as I know), but I can tell you that he now hates them and tries to give them away to anybody that visits his house.
Giving away too much of a good thing is not necessarily a good thing.
Err... yeah, the ALA as well. In other words, Chicago is friggin' busy this weekend. Getting anywhere downtown is probably a nightmare on wheels.
On the bright side, at least the city has the infrastructure to absorb it. You should see how San Francisco shuts down every time the JavaOne Expo rolls into town! I would really love to strangle the guy who thought that taking the conference to the Sony Metronome in SF was a good idea.
As someone that lives in downtown Chicago (and walked over to the Taste for some food and music - my wife likes country and LeAnn Rimes was putting on a free show), I have to say that Chicago isn't any busier this weekend than your normal summer weekend.
Getting anywhere downtown via car is a nightmare, and always will be. If you're coming from out of town, park at one of the park-and-rides the CTA has and take the train downtown. It's like $1.75 for 12 hours of parking. You will not find anything cheaper or more convenient.
It doesn't make much sense. VoIP looks like it just might be the voice communication medium of the near future. It might even completely replace land lines.
Right now, the 911 system (and the other emergency numbers in other parts of the world, such as 112) is a very good system that does a lot of public good. It saves a lot of lives and is worth having around.
VoIP should work with 911 services. No, there isn't a clear solution to make it work well. That doesn't mean it shouldn't happen. Someone needs to figure out how to make it work. And it should be implemented. It's probably going to be difficult, but hopefully it's not expensive and doesn't require special hardware. Regardless, there is a public need for the 911 system to work extremely well with VoIP, especially with the rapidly growing popularity.
I would hope that a solution is found and that the government requires every provider that gives out US phone numbers to implement that solution.
After all, their "Tiger" trademark covers the "Computer programs that plays games" domain, which appears to be an order of magnitude more relevant to OS X 10.4 than Tiger Direct's "Mail order catalog services featuring computers and computer-related products" trademark.
Why the hell would it do that? Do you live in the pre-1978 era or something?
Copyrights must be defended. Failing to do so means you lose your copyright. By intentionally placing a copyrighted work into an area in which it can be used freely and not placing such use under the protections of a license, a very good argument can be made that the copyright owner is not practicing due diligence in the defense of their copyright and the copyright is then no longer valid.
On the topic of video game violence, and the thing that I most remember from that presentation is that the evidence is overwhelming - violent video games make "normal" children less violent in the real world. Only in a very small subsection of children that have mental or emotional problems (but not all children with mental or emotional problems) do they cause problems. Caring parents and society should have identified those who are in danger long before they cause these problems. It's not the fault of the video game, it is the fault of society and/or the parents of not identifying the child and offering the support the child needs to mature into a healthy adult.
For this reason, these type of suits will never win. Most if not all lawyers know this, too.
1. GPS stopped working at point a, and started working at point b. Measure the distance and tax'em.
Except that when there are 12 different ways to get from point a to point b, all of which are are different distances and none of which is a direct line, you run into a problem. If the taxing authority is going to seriously do this, they aren't going to settle for an as-the-crow-flies approximation everytime a Burger King wrapper manages to get stuck on your GPS antenna.
A friend of mine bought a large table saw from Amazon and got the free Super Saver shipping. Of course, since it was a few hundred pounds Amazon had to use freight shipping. A week later a large truck arrived and forklifted it into his garage for him!
I personally know someone that was mugged for her iPod. I actually thought it was strange because it happened in the "safe" environment of her university campus instead of the neighborhood she lives in, which is not the best neighborhood in the city.
I would just like to point out that Motorola's existing bluetooth headsets are very small and lightweight so it's not fair to automatically assume the resulting sunglasses will be as large as the MP3 player sunglasses.
Then again, the Apple iPod Shuffle is tiny too. And once you chew it up like a piece of gum I'm sure it's downright miniscule*.
* Don't swallow the chewed up iPod Shuffle. It will stay in your stomach for 7 years.
It is possible to "pierce the corporate veil," even in Delaware (which is surely where someone with a Harvard education is going to incorporate). Knowingly and intentially breaking the law is one way to do it. Hell, even signing company checks the wrong way can do it.
You might as well tell Nick to plead no contest if you are going to seriously recomend that he hire inexperienced lawyers to take on Apple's legal team.
I recently participated in a mock trial that was the "final exam" for a litigation class at a local top tier law school. I was the defendant in a slander suit. It was a lot of fun and a good learning experience for me (but that's another story for another time). My particular case featured 4 lawyers-to-be litigating a case after being taught how to litigate for an entire semester by one of the top law schools in the country - up there with Harvard;) Only 1 of the 4 could even properly impeach a witness (hey, we were all volunteers and were given our depositions to learn less than a week in advance!). Some objected to too much, others objected to too little, and some even voluntarily excluded evidence in pre-trial meetings that was damning and admisible (according to my friend, who also turned out to be the one that could impeach a witness).
In short, I wouldn't take a team consisting of the entire 2004 graduating class at Harvard against the experienced legal team Apple is sure to posess. You are absolutely correct that you might as well plead no contest.
If it doesn't allow users to share contacts then it's no competition. My customers could care less about shared calendaring. What people need is an alternative to the simple shared contact database that Exchange provides.
There are three components to the holy grail of exchange destroyers:
1. Shared mail store 2. Shared calendaring 3. Shared contacts....
People need their personal contact database and shared db's in their organization to be accessible from anywhere, anytime. I can't believe MS is the only player in this court. Groupwise doesn't count because it's still sucks. Opengroupware and it's clones only work with outlook. The point is to get away entirely from the crushing thumb of MS.
I never thought of that but now that you mention it I can't live without this feature of Outlook/Exchange. I am in a company of 90,000 employees spread over many countries and when I need to send an email I need that shared database of contacts or I would be lost. Outlook handles this so seamlessly that you don't really even notice it exists. Just start typing a name and it autocompletes it (with their email address) as soon as it can find a match. If there are multiple matches, the email address it produces is underlined - right click the name and it shows you all the matches. It can even handle some basic mispellings and shortening of names.
I hate MS as much as anyone else, but Outlook and Exchange are a pretty good software combination and it's going to take a lot of work to make something better.
That Global Ethics press release is dated 2002. I'm not sure when exactly many of the mobile phone operators started their collection programs, but I can remember them occuring when I replaced my first mobile phone and that was more than 2 years ago. You see, all mobile phones have the capability (well, some Samsung models of a few years ago were unable and Samsung paid the price through a lawsuit) to place emergency calls whether they are activated or not. Manufacturers periodically collect old phones to donate to such places as women's shelters who then distribute them to battered women in need of an emergency phone. I'm sure the manufacturers receive a huge tax deduction for this act of charity.
Anyway, if you do not want to wait for a local collection event, you can go to Motorola's web site and print out a postage-paid sticker and you can mail them your old phone. If it is in good shape it may end up helping someone in need and if not, they make sure it is disposed of in an environmentally-friendly way. And as far as I can tell, Motorola collects any mobile phone, not just Motorola phones.
Having said this, I don't need an SUV to commute to work. If it were possible for me to switch my plates to a more fuel efficent car - without taking out a separate policy - and only use my SUV when I needed it, I would be saving myself money, and doing a great deal for the environment. As it is, here in BC, if you have two vehicles, you have two insurance policies, there is no sharing allowed.
What happens when you are commuting to work and a tree falls on your parked SUV? Under your plan, it seems reasonable that your insurance company will be able to say that they were insuring your commuter car at the time of the tree falling and thus are under no obligation to fix your SUV.
My comcast service works great. And most certainly i don't see it throttled down. Enable the service codes and you can see the bitrate if you really want to.
Here in Chicago Comcast does a lot of compression on the HD channels and the artifacts are quite noticable. Over the air broadcasts here are much nicer and even the non-technogeeks can tell a difference when I have shown them.
I'm so fed up with cable that I dropped it and don't subscribe anymore. A small $3.00 single bowtie antenna from Radio Shack gets me all the HD channels, and they're crystal clear and free from artifacts.
I had a tough time translating his statements from management/consultant to english, but I think one of the things he was trying to say is that the cost and effort required to continually shrink the die and up the clock rate are growing quickly, so much so that IBM doesn't feel that it's worth it to focus on that aspect in the quest for improved performance.
IBM is surely going to continue to shrink the die and increase clock rate, but it seems as though for the same amount of R&D they feel that there are more gains in performance to be had by looking elsewhere.
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I assume you are in the US...
You definitely could write your computer program and come up with thousands of potential trademarks.
Then I suppose you plan to register them, right? Well, that will be $275, $325 or $375 per class per trademark. Assuming you do the filing on your own of course. Oh, don't forget to be extremely specific on your required statement of how and on what your trademarks will be used.
Also, you shouldn't forget that it's an extra $100 per class per trademark if your mark isn't in use but you plan to use it. Assuming all of your trademarks pass muster, you will be given 6 months to put them into use. You can continue to file extensions of course, so don't fret! It's only $150 per trademark per class.
And finally, you should not forget the final $100 statement of use that you have to file once you actually use your thousands of generated trademarks.
Now, let's do some math. Your program generated 3000 trademarks. Since you want them to be broad, let's say you are creative enough to get them approved for 3 classes. You are filing electronically, so let's see... That's $3,825,000. Now we have to keep postponing them until we are ready to use them for 3 years. That's $8,100,000. And then we have to actually create the websites in which they will be used (Let's just say the websites are free) and file the final statement of uses for the trademarks. That's $900,000.
Alright, your little plan is just going to cost $12,825,000. Chump change! And not likely to work anyway. Oh well.
The guy that used to work there told me that the USPTO recently changed their benefits and no longer pay for their workers to get a law degree, etc., if they stay with the USPTO for a certain amount of time after getting it. This is the main reason he left - he did part time schooling for awhile but now decided to just leave and get it done asap to get his law degree faster.
You can argue whether it is for the better or for the worse, but the patent office stopped paying for law degrees because as soon as anybody got the degree a DC law firm would hire them away and pay the debt off.
Yes, it wasn't costing the patent office money in that regard, but it was reducing the patent office to being just a feeder source for the law firms. Paying for advanced degrees is done to retain top employees while gaining the advantage of them having advanced education. The patent office was seeing none of this, so they canned it.
16 years later, evidently, it still is. 10 of those years were the broadcast standard wars, which was silly, because, overpaid steroid-pumped entertainers aside, the real value of HDTV was prerecorded movies, not over-the-air broadcasts
If you are a sports fan, the real value of HDTV is sports broadcasting. There is no comparison between standard definition and high definition broadcasts of sporting events. My former roommate purchased an HDTV solely to watch the Super Bowl, and now nearly everyone at that first party owns an HDTV set. Movies are great, especially with the widescreen, but sports are where it's at. The fact that the Super Bowl has been broadcast in HD for the past 5 years has sold more sets than all other reasons combined. Now that every major sporting event and nearly all routine sporting events are broadcast in HD, I think you can say that HDTV sets are established.
ABC used to broadcast movies in HD back before they had routine programming on their HD feed. Yes they are much, much better than DVD, but nobody cares. A DVD at 480P looks fine, especially to the masses. They are not going to throw out their TV sets to buy new HDTVs specifically for 1080 movies. But Joe-everyday-guy is doing everything he can to buy a current HDTV set in time for the NFL season opener. And he's not going to replace it with a new one in two years. He can't afford it.
The movie studios just don't want to accept that fact.
Forgive me, I said VHF when I should have said UHF. What you need is a UHF antenna, basically.
I would ask you to try something out: Run over to Radio Shack and buy the single bowtie VHF antenna. Yes, the single bowtie antenna. It costs about $3 or $4. Please report back to us with the results of using the cheapest possible VHF antenna to receive your VHF television signals.
I used this setup for 2 years while living 35-40 miles from the broadcasting towers in Chicago and I got all the stations and had a picture so perfect it put digital cable to shame. By the way, using rabbit ears in the same house would get me 2 stations and a horrible, fuzzy, barely viewable picture. But only on the top floor of the house. Downstairs where the TV was located there was nothing.
Are 10,000 songs automagically worth $10k? Seriously, how is that determined? If Starbucks gives me a free lifetime supply of coffee, do I owe them 20% of $infinity?
I know a guy that actually won a lifetime supply of chocolate bars. Perhaps that wasn't worth enough to have to pay taxes (he didn't as far as I know), but I can tell you that he now hates them and tries to give them away to anybody that visits his house.
Giving away too much of a good thing is not necessarily a good thing.
Err... yeah, the ALA as well. In other words, Chicago is friggin' busy this weekend. Getting anywhere downtown is probably a nightmare on wheels.
On the bright side, at least the city has the infrastructure to absorb it. You should see how San Francisco shuts down every time the JavaOne Expo rolls into town! I would really love to strangle the guy who thought that taking the conference to the Sony Metronome in SF was a good idea.
As someone that lives in downtown Chicago (and walked over to the Taste for some food and music - my wife likes country and LeAnn Rimes was putting on a free show), I have to say that Chicago isn't any busier this weekend than your normal summer weekend.
Getting anywhere downtown via car is a nightmare, and always will be. If you're coming from out of town, park at one of the park-and-rides the CTA has and take the train downtown. It's like $1.75 for 12 hours of parking. You will not find anything cheaper or more convenient.
It doesn't make much sense. VoIP looks like it just might be the voice communication medium of the near future. It might even completely replace land lines.
Right now, the 911 system (and the other emergency numbers in other parts of the world, such as 112) is a very good system that does a lot of public good. It saves a lot of lives and is worth having around.
VoIP should work with 911 services. No, there isn't a clear solution to make it work well. That doesn't mean it shouldn't happen. Someone needs to figure out how to make it work. And it should be implemented. It's probably going to be difficult, but hopefully it's not expensive and doesn't require special hardware. Regardless, there is a public need for the 911 system to work extremely well with VoIP, especially with the rapidly growing popularity.
I would hope that a solution is found and that the government requires every provider that gives out US phone numbers to implement that solution.
After all, their "Tiger" trademark covers the "Computer programs that plays games" domain, which appears to be an order of magnitude more relevant to OS X 10.4 than Tiger Direct's "Mail order catalog services featuring computers and computer-related products" trademark.
Why the hell would it do that? Do you live in the pre-1978 era or something?
Copyrights must be defended. Failing to do so means you lose your copyright. By intentionally placing a copyrighted work into an area in which it can be used freely and not placing such use under the protections of a license, a very good argument can be made that the copyright owner is not practicing due diligence in the defense of their copyright and the copyright is then no longer valid.
On the topic of video game violence, and the thing that I most remember from that presentation is that the evidence is overwhelming - violent video games make "normal" children less violent in the real world. Only in a very small subsection of children that have mental or emotional problems (but not all children with mental or emotional problems) do they cause problems. Caring parents and society should have identified those who are in danger long before they cause these problems. It's not the fault of the video game, it is the fault of society and/or the parents of not identifying the child and offering the support the child needs to mature into a healthy adult.
For this reason, these type of suits will never win. Most if not all lawyers know this, too.
1. GPS stopped working at point a, and started working at point b. Measure the distance and tax'em.
Except that when there are 12 different ways to get from point a to point b, all of which are are different distances and none of which is a direct line, you run into a problem. If the taxing authority is going to seriously do this, they aren't going to settle for an as-the-crow-flies approximation everytime a Burger King wrapper manages to get stuck on your GPS antenna.
A friend of mine bought a large table saw from Amazon and got the free Super Saver shipping. Of course, since it was a few hundred pounds Amazon had to use freight shipping. A week later a large truck arrived and forklifted it into his garage for him!
I personally know someone that was mugged for her iPod. I actually thought it was strange because it happened in the "safe" environment of her university campus instead of the neighborhood she lives in, which is not the best neighborhood in the city.
Then again, the Apple iPod Shuffle is tiny too. And once you chew it up like a piece of gum I'm sure it's downright miniscule*.
* Don't swallow the chewed up iPod Shuffle. It will stay in your stomach for 7 years.
It is possible to "pierce the corporate veil," even in Delaware (which is surely where someone with a Harvard education is going to incorporate). Knowingly and intentially breaking the law is one way to do it. Hell, even signing company checks the wrong way can do it.
You might as well tell Nick to plead no contest if you are going to seriously recomend that he hire inexperienced lawyers to take on Apple's legal team.
;) Only 1 of the 4 could even properly impeach a witness (hey, we were all volunteers and were given our depositions to learn less than a week in advance!). Some objected to too much, others objected to too little, and some even voluntarily excluded evidence in pre-trial meetings that was damning and admisible (according to my friend, who also turned out to be the one that could impeach a witness).
I recently participated in a mock trial that was the "final exam" for a litigation class at a local top tier law school. I was the defendant in a slander suit. It was a lot of fun and a good learning experience for me (but that's another story for another time). My particular case featured 4 lawyers-to-be litigating a case after being taught how to litigate for an entire semester by one of the top law schools in the country - up there with Harvard
In short, I wouldn't take a team consisting of the entire 2004 graduating class at Harvard against the experienced legal team Apple is sure to posess. You are absolutely correct that you might as well plead no contest.
If it doesn't allow users to share contacts then it's no competition. My customers could care less about shared calendaring. What people need is an alternative to the simple shared contact database that Exchange provides.
...
There are three components to the holy grail of exchange destroyers:
1. Shared mail store
2. Shared calendaring
3. Shared contacts.
People need their personal contact database and shared db's in their organization to be accessible from anywhere, anytime. I can't believe MS is the only player in this court. Groupwise doesn't count because it's still sucks. Opengroupware and it's clones only work with outlook. The point is to get away entirely from the crushing thumb of MS.
I never thought of that but now that you mention it I can't live without this feature of Outlook/Exchange. I am in a company of 90,000 employees spread over many countries and when I need to send an email I need that shared database of contacts or I would be lost. Outlook handles this so seamlessly that you don't really even notice it exists. Just start typing a name and it autocompletes it (with their email address) as soon as it can find a match. If there are multiple matches, the email address it produces is underlined - right click the name and it shows you all the matches. It can even handle some basic mispellings and shortening of names.
I hate MS as much as anyone else, but Outlook and Exchange are a pretty good software combination and it's going to take a lot of work to make something better.
That Global Ethics press release is dated 2002. I'm not sure when exactly many of the mobile phone operators started their collection programs, but I can remember them occuring when I replaced my first mobile phone and that was more than 2 years ago. You see, all mobile phones have the capability (well, some Samsung models of a few years ago were unable and Samsung paid the price through a lawsuit) to place emergency calls whether they are activated or not. Manufacturers periodically collect old phones to donate to such places as women's shelters who then distribute them to battered women in need of an emergency phone. I'm sure the manufacturers receive a huge tax deduction for this act of charity.
m l
Anyway, if you do not want to wait for a local collection event, you can go to Motorola's web site and print out a postage-paid sticker and you can mail them your old phone. If it is in good shape it may end up helping someone in need and if not, they make sure it is disposed of in an environmentally-friendly way. And as far as I can tell, Motorola collects any mobile phone, not just Motorola phones.
http://promo.motorola.com/recycle/phones/index.ht
Having said this, I don't need an SUV to commute to work. If it were possible for me to switch my plates to a more fuel efficent car - without taking out a separate policy - and only use my SUV when I needed it, I would be saving myself money, and doing a great deal for the environment. As it is, here in BC, if you have two vehicles, you have two insurance policies, there is no sharing allowed.
What happens when you are commuting to work and a tree falls on your parked SUV? Under your plan, it seems reasonable that your insurance company will be able to say that they were insuring your commuter car at the time of the tree falling and thus are under no obligation to fix your SUV.
If I'm not mistaken, Toyota added the Avalon to their lineup after Lexus was started.
My comcast service works great. And most certainly i don't see it throttled down. Enable the service codes and you can see the bitrate if you really want to.
Here in Chicago Comcast does a lot of compression on the HD channels and the artifacts are quite noticable. Over the air broadcasts here are much nicer and even the non-technogeeks can tell a difference when I have shown them.
I'm so fed up with cable that I dropped it and don't subscribe anymore. A small $3.00 single bowtie antenna from Radio Shack gets me all the HD channels, and they're crystal clear and free from artifacts.
Would a judge and jury be considered a neutral party? Perhaps Google should be kicking themselves for failing to think of that.
I had a tough time translating his statements from management/consultant to english, but I think one of the things he was trying to say is that the cost and effort required to continually shrink the die and up the clock rate are growing quickly, so much so that IBM doesn't feel that it's worth it to focus on that aspect in the quest for improved performance.
IBM is surely going to continue to shrink the die and increase clock rate, but it seems as though for the same amount of R&D they feel that there are more gains in performance to be had by looking elsewhere.
Perhaps, but it requires a talented and dedicated engineer to produce this kind of work.
I'm willing to appear superficial to get some good, quality engineering on my desktop.