Exactly. Bayer tried to defend against commercial use, but was unable to do during World War 1 because their assets were taken for the duration of the war. By the time they were able to respond, it was too late, and they would eventually lose the trademark completely.
Actually, Bayer *DID* try to defend against commercial use of the term "Aspirin" at their earliest opportunity, but primarily because by the time they were in a legal position to do so after WW1 (Bayer's assets had been expropriated from them for the duration of the war), the term "Aspirin" was already widely perceived as a generic term by the buying public, and ultimately led to their eventual loss of trademark status for the term.
Steisand never published the information she was trying to bottle up. Are you suggesting that Nyan Cat and Keyboard Cat were released upon the internet without their creator's knowledge or consent?
The images in that video are copyrighted, certainly... but the idea of a cat in a shirt playing a keyboard is still just an idea. Unless they are actually extracting real copyrighted content, I can't see how it can infringe any more than X12 infringes on Windows.
A meme, by definition. is a public idea. Nobody "owns" it, even if a specific person originated it, because it's just an idea. You can trademark specific characters, but you can't trademark the ideas behind them. A cat playing a keyboard is an idea, and not a copyrightable or trademarkable notion.
Then why were those trademarks not defended when they started being publicly used without authorization in the first place? There is an abundance of historical precedent that if you fail to defend your trademarks, you lose them.
Of course, if they had defended them in the first place, then by very definition of what a meme is, they never would have become one.
If the creators really wanted to protect their creations from such use, they should have trademarked them.
Of course, trademarked stuff can't really become a meme in the first place, since the trademark must be actively defended at all times. And not becoming a meme would have meant it probably wouldn't have been found in allegedly "unauthorized" works anyways.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with clever code or even deliberately using obtuse features of a language or framework to get a particular job done in an optimal fashion.
But...
Such things should always be gratuitously commented... clearly and quite thoroughly... because much as we'd like to think that anybody who maintains the code we write will be always know absolutely every trick or optimization that we might has either not been a professional programmer where they needed to work in a team for any significant amount of time, or is simply living in a perpetual state of denial. You don't have to assume that the person who might maintain your code is ignorant about common programming idioms or patterns, but that doesn't mean it's okay to deliberately do stuff that someone else might not think of without explaining it a little.
Elegant means readable. If the code isn't readable because it's too terse or uses obscure features, then readable comments can easily suffice.
This is true... but how it looks under the hood can play a huge factor in how feasible certain design change requests will be within a manageable schedule.
The extra discipline that it takes to do it in a readable and manageable way the first time, so that any potential other developers who might work on the project later can actually meet their deadlines as well is easily effort that is very well spent. The relatively minuscule amount of time you save during the initial phases of a project by being lazy is not worth the grief of the rewrites that may need to happen several months or even several years later.
The fact that they are actually illegal to operate on public property in many areas of both Canada and the USA may have affected the product's adoption rate somewhat. I would suggest this much moreso than how "dorky" it makes someone look.
The likelihood of producing a universe that gives birth to life exactly ONE time, is, in fact, infinitesimal.
Infinite diversity does not rule out the existence of singularities. The properties of 0, for instance, are unique in the Real Numbers (an uncountably large infinite set), and yet the properties of something unique as zero still exist exactly once in that domain. In fact, one can even show that in order for the system to be coherent, that 0 *MUST* exist (and must be unique).
They are only interchangeable so long as the answers to either are inconclusive, or if you assume the answer to both is no.
If the answer is yes to either of those questions, then the ramifications might be rather large, and potentially very different from eachother, unless you assume that "God" is necessarily equivalent to "alien".
You overestimate the amount of thought required to put into having a verbal conversation. Unless you are doing something that actually requires all of your undivided attention (in which case you wouldn't be able to talk to anyone else in the car with you anways, so the notion that cell phone calls may be somehow more distracting than people in the car is a moot point), you should probably be able to verbally engage somebody in casual conversation without any noticeable distraction from what you might otherwise be focused on.
Plus, we're nearly twice as far from the sun, and thus being exposed to much less heat from the sun anyways.
Realistically, even a runaway greenhouse effect happening on Earth would not cause temperatures to skyrocket more than a few degrees above what we have right now.
Still definitely catastrophic, but not to the point of being all-out apocalyptic.
Many "reflexes" that adults have are actually learned behaviors that people have been doing for such a long time that no significant amount of conscious attention needs to be delegated to them. Talking is an example of such a task, and does not generally impede someone from doing something that requires concentration unless the task requires the utmost, absolute, and completely undivided attention... which would not normally be the case while driving for an experienced driver (who has already learned many of the very complex tasks involved in driving, and their brain has created a mechanism by which a practiced person can practice it without expending as much effort on concentration as was required when they were learning).
Armed response is disproportionate to unarmed attack, regardless if it was unprovoked.
You have a legitimate right to defend yourself, certainly... but if your first response to somebody punching you in the face, before they can even get a second punch in the first place (and this is further assuming that they were ever even going to, which you have no reason to assume either), is to respond with armed and possibly lethal force, you may have anger management issues and probably need to just grow up.
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Exactly. Bayer tried to defend against commercial use, but was unable to do during World War 1 because their assets were taken for the duration of the war. By the time they were able to respond, it was too late, and they would eventually lose the trademark completely.
Actually, Bayer *DID* try to defend against commercial use of the term "Aspirin" at their earliest opportunity, but primarily because by the time they were in a legal position to do so after WW1 (Bayer's assets had been expropriated from them for the duration of the war), the term "Aspirin" was already widely perceived as a generic term by the buying public, and ultimately led to their eventual loss of trademark status for the term.
Steisand never published the information she was trying to bottle up. Are you suggesting that Nyan Cat and Keyboard Cat were released upon the internet without their creator's knowledge or consent?
That excuse didn't seem to work for Bayer losing the Aspirin trademark.
The images in that video are copyrighted, certainly... but the idea of a cat in a shirt playing a keyboard is still just an idea. Unless they are actually extracting real copyrighted content, I can't see how it can infringe any more than X12 infringes on Windows.
Tell that to Bayer.
A meme, by definition. is a public idea. Nobody "owns" it, even if a specific person originated it, because it's just an idea. You can trademark specific characters, but you can't trademark the ideas behind them. A cat playing a keyboard is an idea, and not a copyrightable or trademarkable notion.
Only if you consider an alternative of self-censorship to qualify as a non-draconian measure.
Then why were those trademarks not defended when they started being publicly used without authorization in the first place? There is an abundance of historical precedent that if you fail to defend your trademarks, you lose them.
Of course, if they had defended them in the first place, then by very definition of what a meme is, they never would have become one.
This.
If the creators really wanted to protect their creations from such use, they should have trademarked them.
Of course, trademarked stuff can't really become a meme in the first place, since the trademark must be actively defended at all times. And not becoming a meme would have meant it probably wouldn't have been found in allegedly "unauthorized" works anyways.
This is entirely true... but in that case, you should be commenting the code so that what is happening is clear.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with clever code or even deliberately using obtuse features of a language or framework to get a particular job done in an optimal fashion.
But...
Such things should always be gratuitously commented... clearly and quite thoroughly... because much as we'd like to think that anybody who maintains the code we write will be always know absolutely every trick or optimization that we might has either not been a professional programmer where they needed to work in a team for any significant amount of time, or is simply living in a perpetual state of denial. You don't have to assume that the person who might maintain your code is ignorant about common programming idioms or patterns, but that doesn't mean it's okay to deliberately do stuff that someone else might not think of without explaining it a little.
Elegant means readable. If the code isn't readable because it's too terse or uses obscure features, then readable comments can easily suffice.
This is true... but how it looks under the hood can play a huge factor in how feasible certain design change requests will be within a manageable schedule.
The extra discipline that it takes to do it in a readable and manageable way the first time, so that any potential other developers who might work on the project later can actually meet their deadlines as well is easily effort that is very well spent. The relatively minuscule amount of time you save during the initial phases of a project by being lazy is not worth the grief of the rewrites that may need to happen several months or even several years later.
The fact that they are actually illegal to operate on public property in many areas of both Canada and the USA may have affected the product's adoption rate somewhat. I would suggest this much moreso than how "dorky" it makes someone look.
Infinite diversity does not rule out the existence of singularities. The properties of 0, for instance, are unique in the Real Numbers (an uncountably large infinite set), and yet the properties of something unique as zero still exist exactly once in that domain. In fact, one can even show that in order for the system to be coherent, that 0 *MUST* exist (and must be unique).
They are only interchangeable so long as the answers to either are inconclusive, or if you assume the answer to both is no.
If the answer is yes to either of those questions, then the ramifications might be rather large, and potentially very different from eachother, unless you assume that "God" is necessarily equivalent to "alien".
Spock doesn't have two hearts. You may be thinking of Doctor Who.
How the heck can you know what operations you needed to perform on the data in the first place if you don't actually know what the data was?
Some do, yes. That's hardly universal.
You overestimate the amount of thought required to put into having a verbal conversation. Unless you are doing something that actually requires all of your undivided attention (in which case you wouldn't be able to talk to anyone else in the car with you anways, so the notion that cell phone calls may be somehow more distracting than people in the car is a moot point), you should probably be able to verbally engage somebody in casual conversation without any noticeable distraction from what you might otherwise be focused on.
Plus, we're nearly twice as far from the sun, and thus being exposed to much less heat from the sun anyways.
Realistically, even a runaway greenhouse effect happening on Earth would not cause temperatures to skyrocket more than a few degrees above what we have right now.
Still definitely catastrophic, but not to the point of being all-out apocalyptic.
Many "reflexes" that adults have are actually learned behaviors that people have been doing for such a long time that no significant amount of conscious attention needs to be delegated to them. Talking is an example of such a task, and does not generally impede someone from doing something that requires concentration unless the task requires the utmost, absolute, and completely undivided attention... which would not normally be the case while driving for an experienced driver (who has already learned many of the very complex tasks involved in driving, and their brain has created a mechanism by which a practiced person can practice it without expending as much effort on concentration as was required when they were learning).
You may want to reread the terms of use on Slashdot again. It explicitly says that submitters retain ownership of anything that they submit.
Armed response is disproportionate to unarmed attack, regardless if it was unprovoked.
You have a legitimate right to defend yourself, certainly... but if your first response to somebody punching you in the face, before they can even get a second punch in the first place (and this is further assuming that they were ever even going to, which you have no reason to assume either), is to respond with armed and possibly lethal force, you may have anger management issues and probably need to just grow up.