If, OTOH, Jared did profit, they might want to seek damages, for no other reason than to dissuade others from trying to unlawfully profit from Hasbro properties.
Preventing people from profiting from their trademark is a secondary concern. What's really important is that they be seen to be protecting their trademark. If they're not, they can lose it. Which is why trademark holders are so obnoxious with their C&D letters.
I can imagine them suing somebody who does something really massive, like selling counterfeit Scrabble sets. But an amateur web site? Even if the web master made a few bucks, his pockets aren't going to be deep enough to pay back the cost of a lawsuit.
If your goal is not to turn people into developers, why are you teaching these tools? PHP is an arcane scripting language that requires a pretty good knowledge of HTML and HTTP to be useful. SQL is a declarative language full of subtle DBMS concepts. Talk about throwing people in at the deep end of the pool!
Have you considered teaching them to program a system they already understand? Everybody knows how to use a word processor or a spreadsheet, and these programs usually come with scripting engines. Hacking in a new feature or two to Open Office is a more accessible homework assignment than writing a database-driven web application!
If you read the C&D letter, you'll see that Hasbro is also alleging copyright violations, namely the board layout and the use of their rules.
So, unless he can completely reinvent the game, I think he's TSOL...
Well of course he has to completely re-invent the game. But all that would take is some real imagination, instead of blindly stealing copyrighted rules.
He's probably not going to consider that worth the effort. But that's beside the point. Which was: Hasbro isn't trying to make him hand over his site, just the domain name. He's free to continue the site if he can figure out a way to do it without stealing their trademarks and copyrighted material.
He should still consult a lawyer, if for no other reason that to reach an agreement with Hasbro not to sue him if he complies with their demand.
Consulting a lawyer is probably a good idea. But I very much doubt if Hasbro is interested in suing him. Like all trademark hassles, this is about bullying people into shutting down, not about mugging them for sums that are trivial by Hasbro's standards.
Isn't this just Hasbro saying "we'll take the game and the site from you and run it ourselves...
No. They're not asking for the site -- I can't imagine them running it themselves. They want the domain.
The site itself could continue, if it were changed enough to not infringe on the Scrabble trademark. Obviously one of those changes would be a new domain name!
I remember reading about war-between-the-states (for some reason it's not PC to call it the Civil War? WTF?) era use of maggots...
"Civil war" is not PC if you're from the south, because it implies that the pro-Confederate people were acting seditiously. Heaven forfend!
Bernard Cornwell, in his novels about the Napoleonic wars, has British soldiers using maggots to treat wounds. If that's at all historical, the practice probably dates back from prehistory, since it would have been taken up the first time somebody noticed the effects of maggots on tissue.
But that's a big "if". Modern medical maggots have been around for a few decades, but they're not something a nineteenth-century soldier would have had access to. They're carefully raised on a sterile broth, because maggots in the wild carry some really nasty germs. Putting wild maggots in a wound would be asking for a really bad infection. Which, in the pre-antibiotic era, was a death sentence.
And the percentage that they siphon from the credit card / direct check transaction goes to cover any fraud. So I fail to see how this is an issue. If someone uses my card fruadulently, then I get reimbursed.
In other words, fraud costs you nothing, so what's the big deal.
Wrong. That percentage adds a lot to the cost of goods. Often more than the merchant's own profit.
I use one of the programs mentioned, Supermemo, a lot. It's not specifically a language program -- in fact, I think it would be rather bad for language drill. It is good at learning a big mass of facts that have some kind of structural relationship. I've been using it to study for the A+ exam.
One frustrating thing is that it's got a huge amount of very bad documentation, both from its inventor and from various enthusiasts. I've had a hard time understanding a lot of its features (and it has a lot of features) because there's no clear description for most of them, despite massive efforts to write them. Supermemo seems to be based on that Asimov/MENSA mindset that says that you understand something if you can regurgitate lots of crap about it. I prefer the Richard Fenynman mindset which says that you understand something if you can explain it clearly.
SQL is certainly a language, though it's hardly dead. (What do you suppose the L stands for?) It's true that DB and Paradox are primarily data engines, but a big part of using them is learning their proprietary programming languages.
There's nothing in the article that says that people aren't interested in science films. As far as I can see, people are more interested in science than ever.
Nor is this really about "controversy". Nobody's picketting theaters accusing them of being part of some pro-evolution brainwashing conspiracy. What is happening is that a tiny number of theater owners have fallen victim to the great weapon of mediocrity -- the "test audience" AKA the "focus group". People who don't know how to make decisions grab a bunch bozos off the street with nothing better to do, and use them to write meaningless reports that justify their own ineptitude. It's an old story.
The only thing I find seriously sad is that a reporter can be dumb enough to see a story in something as lame and un-new as this.
That's certainly what will happen for new AP products. But it's not suprising that they've dropped the ball on existing products. That's always the way it is with security issues. Initially, getting the product out the door, and outdoing your competitors takes priority. Its only after you start taking flak for security holes that you worry about them. You should do so from day one, but it takes more time and imagination than people care to spare.
Wrong! The first story pointed to an article on Microsoft Watch. The second story points to an article on eWeek. It's not the editors' fault that the eWeek article is just a summary of the Microsoft Watch article!
So Firefox is up to 6%. Cool! And IE is below 90%. Also cool!
On the other hand, Firefox only gained about half a point in January, whereas in previous months they usually gained nearly a full point. Perhaps they're leveling off. Or perhaps its just statistical noised. Or perhaps all Firefox "gains" are just statistical noise, and the "trend" people keep jumping on is in their own imaginations.
I look at the other posts in this story and I stats that even sillier. Like, "almost 20% of the users on my Dark Angel fansite use Firefox!" Means nothing.
Reports of Firefox's growth "spurt" began last year, egged on by all those IE security failures. At least some of that reported growth was probably real. But if there were a serious trend, we'd see something like 10% by now.
We need a moratorium on a these UFO sightings -- excuse me, I mean reports of "evidence" that Firefox is making serious inroads. Firefox advocates that jump on every statistical fluke this way are just huring their own credibility.
Useful, perhaps, but Frank seems easily sidetracked. He wastes a lot of his time (and yours) explaining things you don't really need to know, like why he calls a section "Britain and Ireland" and not "United Kingdom and Ireland" or how the UK can be a country that contains other country.
It's a comic book movie to be penned by Joss Whedon. I've yet to see a comic book movie that required much crafstmanship beyond not walking into walls while wearing fifty pounds of latex.
I seem to recall that Joss Whedon vowed never to make a movie with latex in it. In any case, if that's the kind of movie he ends up making, not only will his fans be disappointed in him, his career will be pretty much over. His reputation, such as it is, is based entirely on his ability to do things in a really original way.
Not that I expect this to be a great movie, or even a good one. But if it falls apart it will be because of the usual Hollywood politics. Not because everybody's just going through the motions. (Buffy reference unavoidable.)
Look at the source material. It's an Amazon in a gold bustier who flies an invisible plane. Tell me you need the female equivalent of Olivier to pull this off with a straight face.... I appreciate that you think playing Wonder Woman will be an acting challenge of Herculean proportions.
That's not what I think at all. I do think that no matter how brainless the material, it takes a certain minimum level of skill to make the audience accept it. It may not be the kind of acting that goes down in history, but there's a lot more to it than not bumping into the scenery.
You seem to think that all actors are either Lawrence Olivier or Pamela Anderson. But there are whole levels of acting in between that aren't exactly high art -- but are a lot harder to do than you're willing to accept.
Which is precisely the point that bothers me. Welte donates his own time and takes all the financial risk. This only works because everybody he's gone after has quietly backed down. (Probably most or all of them were just sloppy about compliance.) But suppose just one company takes the "fuck you" approach? All of a sudden Welte is spending enough time to impact his day job and spending more money than hey can afford.
In any case, he's eventually going to get bored, get sick, get too involved in his day job, die, whatever. Having the whole GPL licensing system depend on the voluntary efforts of one individual strikes me as a fragile setup.
You know jack about acting. You think because the story is dumb (or rather, you think its dumb), the role is easier to do convincingly? No, it's actually harder.
It's often said of a first-rate actor that people would pay to see them read a phone book. On the other hand, really bad acting is painful to watch, no matter how good the material.
Your attitude towards bagels is disturbing, but you make a good point when you talk about "mainstream appeal". There's a weird disconnect between JW and a lot of his potential audience. He's never been able to persuade most people that he wasn't trying to be camp when he invented Buffy. That included almost everyone involved in making the original movie!
I think one big reason Firefly failed is that JW failed to communicate his premise. He chose to tell a story without all the standard gimmicks of TV/movie SF: aliens, magic-looking technology (like on Star Trek where they don't seem to even have buttons or pockets on their clothes!), etc. Now for old-fashioned "hard" SF geeks like me, that's perfectly fine -- all those difference have logical justifications, and are actually a more plausible future than Star Trek. But for the typical TV viewer, that kind of suprise required more explanation than JW could be bothered to give.
One point that must have really frustrated JW was the CGI on Firefly. He went to a lot of trouble to fine an effects company that could make his spaceships look like they were being filmed with a handheld camera. But most critics and viewers saw the shaky images and decided that it was just shoddy CGI!
Slashdot Mirror
I can imagine them suing somebody who does something really massive, like selling counterfeit Scrabble sets. But an amateur web site? Even if the web master made a few bucks, his pockets aren't going to be deep enough to pay back the cost of a lawsuit.
Have you considered teaching them to program a system they already understand? Everybody knows how to use a word processor or a spreadsheet, and these programs usually come with scripting engines. Hacking in a new feature or two to Open Office is a more accessible homework assignment than writing a database-driven web application!
He's probably not going to consider that worth the effort. But that's beside the point. Which was: Hasbro isn't trying to make him hand over his site, just the domain name. He's free to continue the site if he can figure out a way to do it without stealing their trademarks and copyrighted material.
Consulting a lawyer is probably a good idea. But I very much doubt if Hasbro is interested in suing him. Like all trademark hassles, this is about bullying people into shutting down, not about mugging them for sums that are trivial by Hasbro's standards.The site itself could continue, if it were changed enough to not infringe on the Scrabble trademark. Obviously one of those changes would be a new domain name!
Get back to me when you've graduated from simple-minded contradiction to actual argument.
Bernard Cornwell, in his novels about the Napoleonic wars, has British soldiers using maggots to treat wounds. If that's at all historical, the practice probably dates back from prehistory, since it would have been taken up the first time somebody noticed the effects of maggots on tissue.
But that's a big "if". Modern medical maggots have been around for a few decades, but they're not something a nineteenth-century soldier would have had access to. They're carefully raised on a sterile broth, because maggots in the wild carry some really nasty germs. Putting wild maggots in a wound would be asking for a really bad infection. Which, in the pre-antibiotic era, was a death sentence.
It's a cordless phone. An extremely powerful one, but still just a cordless phone. The basestation isn't a "cell tower" just because it's big.
Wrong. That percentage adds a lot to the cost of goods. Often more than the merchant's own profit.
One frustrating thing is that it's got a huge amount of very bad documentation, both from its inventor and from various enthusiasts. I've had a hard time understanding a lot of its features (and it has a lot of features) because there's no clear description for most of them, despite massive efforts to write them. Supermemo seems to be based on that Asimov/MENSA mindset that says that you understand something if you can regurgitate lots of crap about it. I prefer the Richard Fenynman mindset which says that you understand something if you can explain it clearly.
SQL is certainly a language, though it's hardly dead. (What do you suppose the L stands for?) It's true that DB and Paradox are primarily data engines, but a big part of using them is learning their proprietary programming languages.
Nor is this really about "controversy". Nobody's picketting theaters accusing them of being part of some pro-evolution brainwashing conspiracy. What is happening is that a tiny number of theater owners have fallen victim to the great weapon of mediocrity -- the "test audience" AKA the "focus group". People who don't know how to make decisions grab a bunch bozos off the street with nothing better to do, and use them to write meaningless reports that justify their own ineptitude. It's an old story.
The only thing I find seriously sad is that a reporter can be dumb enough to see a story in something as lame and un-new as this.
All your HVAC are belong to us!
It is! But it consumes more space than time...
Frank probably just "reversed-engineered" addresses he'd seen. Like most geeks, he prefers learning by doing, not by reading the documentation.
That's certainly what will happen for new AP products. But it's not suprising that they've dropped the ball on existing products. That's always the way it is with security issues. Initially, getting the product out the door, and outdoing your competitors takes priority. Its only after you start taking flak for security holes that you worry about them. You should do so from day one, but it takes more time and imagination than people care to spare.
Wrong! The first story pointed to an article on Microsoft Watch. The second story points to an article on eWeek. It's not the editors' fault that the eWeek article is just a summary of the Microsoft Watch article!
On the other hand, Firefox only gained about half a point in January, whereas in previous months they usually gained nearly a full point. Perhaps they're leveling off. Or perhaps its just statistical noised. Or perhaps all Firefox "gains" are just statistical noise, and the "trend" people keep jumping on is in their own imaginations.
I look at the other posts in this story and I stats that even sillier. Like, "almost 20% of the users on my Dark Angel fansite use Firefox!" Means nothing.
Reports of Firefox's growth "spurt" began last year, egged on by all those IE security failures. At least some of that reported growth was probably real. But if there were a serious trend, we'd see something like 10% by now.
We need a moratorium on a these UFO sightings -- excuse me, I mean reports of "evidence" that Firefox is making serious inroads. Firefox advocates that jump on every statistical fluke this way are just huring their own credibility.
So only 3 of your 10 friends use Firefox? You should have a talk with the other 7!
Useful, perhaps, but Frank seems easily sidetracked. He wastes a lot of his time (and yours) explaining things you don't really need to know, like why he calls a section "Britain and Ireland" and not "United Kingdom and Ireland" or how the UK can be a country that contains other country.
Not that I expect this to be a great movie, or even a good one. But if it falls apart it will be because of the usual Hollywood politics. Not because everybody's just going through the motions. (Buffy reference unavoidable.)
That's not what I think at all. I do think that no matter how brainless the material, it takes a certain minimum level of skill to make the audience accept it. It may not be the kind of acting that goes down in history, but there's a lot more to it than not bumping into the scenery.You seem to think that all actors are either Lawrence Olivier or Pamela Anderson. But there are whole levels of acting in between that aren't exactly high art -- but are a lot harder to do than you're willing to accept.
In any case, he's eventually going to get bored, get sick, get too involved in his day job, die, whatever. Having the whole GPL licensing system depend on the voluntary efforts of one individual strikes me as a fragile setup.
It's often said of a first-rate actor that people would pay to see them read a phone book. On the other hand, really bad acting is painful to watch, no matter how good the material.
I think one big reason Firefly failed is that JW failed to communicate his premise. He chose to tell a story without all the standard gimmicks of TV/movie SF: aliens, magic-looking technology (like on Star Trek where they don't seem to even have buttons or pockets on their clothes!), etc. Now for old-fashioned "hard" SF geeks like me, that's perfectly fine -- all those difference have logical justifications, and are actually a more plausible future than Star Trek. But for the typical TV viewer, that kind of suprise required more explanation than JW could be bothered to give.
One point that must have really frustrated JW was the CGI on Firefly. He went to a lot of trouble to fine an effects company that could make his spaceships look like they were being filmed with a handheld camera. But most critics and viewers saw the shaky images and decided that it was just shoddy CGI!
Sure, any high school drama major could do it.