Being from the Twin Cities, I was actually able to watch the original KTMA episodes, before Comedy Central picked it up. They may have still been figuring out what the hell they were doing, but even then it was great fun. I'll never forget the "murderball" bit.
The cast really came together when Keven Murphy became the new voice of Tom Servo when the Comedy Central episodes began to air. His mellow delivery really balanced the wildness of Crow.
Anyway, my point was that the writing is what made MST3K work, and the same is true for Buffy. Cast changes can be endured as long as the writing stays good.
Damn, how could I forget to mention Tim Minear!? He's written several of my favorites!
Anyway, you get the idea. It's the writers that make Buffy a cut above other TV shows. Specifically, it's Joss Whedon.
As for Marti Noxon, don't be a playa hata. She gets a bad rap for being the person who wrote the Buffy/Spike "rough sex" scene, but she's also written some great episodes, and the direction of season 6 (which I actually liked) was every bit as much Joss's idea as it was Marti's.
I'm right there with you on the Farscape thing. I also picked up on the show mid-way though, and while I had no idea what the hell was going on half the time, it was obvious that the show was vastly better than any recent flavor of Star Trek. In any case, it was certainly more fun.
Seriously, though. I think you will grok Buffy if you give it a fair shake. In many ways, the language of the characters began to pop in such interesting ways by seasons 2 & 3 that there are entire web sites devoted to nothing but the way the Buffy cast talks.
Yes, I played the X-Box game, and yes, it was crap.
But the X-Box jokes where not written by the ME writers, and the story lines of the TV series are nothing like what you describe. If you somehow mistook BTVS for a "moster of the week" show with lesbian titilation on the side, you probably didn't understand it.
In fact, Willow's first kiss with Tara was probably the first ever non-exploitative lesbian kiss in TV history. The characters never kissed on camera for an entire season of being in a relationship, and the first on-screen kiss was during a moment when Willow was bawling her eyes out over the death of Buffy's mom, and Tara was comforting her. It was deliberatly done during a very un-sexy moment, to avoid the usual hype that surrounds TV girl-on-girl action, and respectfully depict a deeper relationship between to characters. There have been lots of lesbian couples on TV over the last 10 years or so, but Willow and Tara was the first one that could be taken seriously. Fuck you for trying to reduce it to mere "poontang."
BTW: I consider "The Sopranos" to be the second-best program on TV today, but for different reasons. Tony Soprano's story resonates with people because we all feel the stress of competing needs of work and family. The stories on BTVS resonate with a lot of us, because we all went through the hell of High School, but Buffy takes the further step of turning shopworn genre conventions on their heads.
As for your idea that the show is "formulaic," I'm guessing you never saw the episode "Passion," a very early (season 2) example of a "statement" episode, in which they clearly established that none of the cliche's of genre TV could be counted on to be followed.
But forcing a story to go on when the primary party/parties responsible for that story do not wish to continue would be simple profit-seeking.
As far as I'm concerned, the "primary parties responsible" for Buffy are not named Gellar, Hannigan, Head & Brendan. They are named Whedon, Noxon, Espinson, Fury, and Greenwaldt. As long as the Mutant Enemy writing crew remains intact, whatever it produces is bound to be good. Whedon's people seem to have a knack for finding good actors, too. Every major actor added to the show over the years (to play Anya, Dawn, Tara, Robin Wood, etc.) has been fantastic.
This is why I am convinced that a post-Gellar slayer show can easilly be terrific. SMG is a talented actress, but there are thousands of talented actresses bussing tables in shitty LA restaurants as we speak. It's good writers that are hard to find.
I think one or two of the ME writers must have gone through rehab at one point or another. The two-part Angel episode with Faith was also descibed by some as being very "twelve-steppy."
There is no program on American prime-time TV that comes closer, in content or tone, to Japanese animation:
A young school girl is a chosen warrior to fight vampires and demons. She has friends who use magic to help her. Comedy, melodrama, and action are freely mixed within almost every episode. Most of the stories are alegorical tales about growing up. There were even several cases of girls being attacked by tentacles, and Buffy was nearly raped by a disembodied demonic spirit two weeks ago, so you even have similarities to the Hentai stuff.
How could there even be room to question it? Buffy, in essence, is live-action anime. What could possibly be geekier than that?
It just doesn't work when the main character (Quinn or Duncan or Buffy) is gone. Let it go.
I disagree. Cheers got better, nor worse, after half of the main relationship (Diane) left.
Also, Mystery Science Theater 3000 was still hillarious after Joel left the show. Mike & the bots made for great TV. It didn't start to suck until they lost a lot of personel during the move to the Sci Fi channel, and was still pretty good until they lost the guy who did Dr. Forrester & Crow.
While she is certainly an attractive woman, SMG has always been one of those Hollywood women who really needs to eat a sandwitch sometime.
People didn't notice how skinny she was in the early seasons of Buffy, because she wore a padded bra on the show in those days, which created the illusion of a healthy figure. Once she became a big enough star to insist that she didn't want to wear fake boobs anymore, it became very obvious what a skinny woman she really is.
I'm right there with you on this point. You can keep the Jenifer Garners and Calista Flockharts of the world. They're all knees and elbows. I like woman-shaped women. I like soft curves. Can I get a witnes?
The point is that what could Whedon and co be doing if they weren't writing yet another series of Buffy?
Well, they could write a brilliant sci-fi western in which there is no sound in space, no rubber-headed aliens, and no cheap technobable deus-ex-machina endings. It would be everything Star Trek isn't, and it could be the best sci-fi show on TV.
But that would probably just get canceled by fox after 14 episodes.
P.S. Law and Order is not, and never was, good TV. Character-driven shows are the only ones that matter, and the way you keep them from getting stale is by letting the characters evolve over time, the way real people do. (The character of Willow bears almost no resemblence to the mousy little girl she was in season 1, but the elements of the person she would become were pretty much all there from the beginning. Her character slightly evolved every single year, so when certain things happened, such as her first lesbian experience, and her "addiction" to witchcraft, fans of the show were not surprised, because they were always logical places for her character to go. I, for one, would love to see what path Willow takes for the next few years.)
The subtle pleasures of the Buffy TV show takes about 10 episodes to fully appreciate, not 10 minutes (which is all it takes to understand everything the movie had to offer).
For example, one thing that you can't get from a brief glimpse of the show is JW's willingness to kill off a character just as you are getting attached to them. He loves to set up expectations based on your previous TV-watching experience, and then go in a completely different direction.
There's also the problem of anybody trying to tune in to current broadcasts (or recent reruns) and missing a lot of the context of what's being said and done. For example, I have one friend who's first experience watching BTVS was the season 5 episode, "The Body" (the one where Buffy comes home to discover her mother's corpse, finally taken by post-sugery complications) which is hailed as one of the best hours of television ever by those who follow the show, but utterly baffling to this friend of mine who saw it out of context after she had only seen the movie. She had a hard time seeing why I liked the show so much. Now that she's seen the first couple seasons of the show, she's yet another person who loves the show more than you are able to understand.
Believe me when I say that there's a reason why Buffy is a favorite of nearly every published TV critic, and practically worshipped in geek circles. If you know somebody who owns the DVD's, I would strongly reccomend borrowing them and giving the show more of a fair chance.
I would reccomend watching the two-part pilot, episode 3 ("The Witch"), and episode 11 ("Out of Mind, Out of Sight"). Then have a friend catch you up on the rest of season one and jump right into the season 2 DVD's, watching them in order. I think you will be surprised to discover how smart, funny, dramatic and groundbreaking this show really was.
After dealing with some sub-par allegory and poor storytelling in the third to sixth seasons,
Woah, woah, woah. Back up.
Buffy came in as a mid-season replacement, so you are saying you only thought the show was up to par for a season and a half!? Only to "appear" to improve this year? Why do you even care enough to post here?
Also, for the record, SMG's decision to leave is not an official declaration that the show is ending. They might have to take the name "Buffy" out of the title, but if Whedon, Espenson, Noxon & Fury are still on board, it's still going to be better than pretty much anything else on broadcast TV. Several cast members, including Alyson Hannigan & Nicholas Brendon, are signed on for two more years of BVTS, but are not signed in any way to any spin-off. This means that if Mutant Enemy wants to keep the other two of the big stars of the show locked in, they gotta find a way to continue the series with a new slayer. (It probably won't be Faith, as Dushku has already signed to star in a different show.)
I'm so fucking sick of all these "go out on top"/"don't jump the shark"/"Don't overstay your welcome" jackasses calling for the show to end while it's still good. The fact that the final two seasons of X-Files were horse shit did nothing to diminish what a great show it was in its prime. If a long-running show has even the potential to be good, I say keep producing it as long as people are willing to watch. Sometimes shows bounce back from slumps. Some of the best episodes of Cheers and M*A*S*H were made after the shows went through major cast changes.
Ah, you see, you are from a part of the south where almost everybody drinks Coke, and "coke," to them, means "cola". In the southern areas I was talking about, 7-Up, orange soda, Dr. Pepper, root beer, etc., are all considered, "kinds of coke," to the locals.
I shoudl mention that I learned about the whole Coke trademark spy thing when I was in D.C. It's an interesting story.
I was drinking my beer, when I noticed that the coster had the words, "this establishment does not serve Coca-cola products," in bold type on it. Figuring there must be a story behind it, I asked the bartender. He told me that somebody once walked into one of their bars and ordered a "rum and Coke." Upon being served a rum with Pepsi in it, he informed the management that he was a Coca-cola representative, and they would be bringing action against them for deceptive trade (re: selling Pepsi as if it was Coke). The owner of the establishment owned over 10 very popular bars and restaurants in the DC area. He paid the settlement, but also swore that none of his bars would ever serve any Coke product.
Unfortunately, you never really know why your customer ordered "Coke."
It could be that they just want a cola, and are used to calling it Coke. It could also be that they really strongly prefer Coke over Pepsi (which is not far-fetched; the majority of regular cola drinkers have a strong preference for one or the other).
In either case, nobody wants to be chastized by their waiter for ordering something the restaurant doesn't have. If you are in the business of serving customers, you should always come across as a little apologetic if you lack something the customer wants.
"Is Pepsi okay?" is the right question to ask. In my case, the answer is "no." If I order Coke, it's because I want a Coke, and a Pepsi is not a Coke. (Trivia: Pepsi and Coke are both colas with citrus flavoring. The main difference between them is one uses lemon for the citrus while the other uses lime.) When I'm told there are only Pepsi products, I usually ask for Mountain Dew, which is my second-favorite soda anyway.
It's good press in the short-term. The fact that people say "photoshopped," reminds people of the ubiquity of Photoshop... however, once your trademark is diluted, you suddenly find yourself without a name to differenciate your product down the road when you face actual competition.
In other words, suppose the gang in Redmond were to release "Microsoft Photoshop" in 2007. The people at Adobe would really regret it if they had not been careful to protect the name Photoshop until then.
Re:Redifference between uppercase and lowercase
on
Verbing Weirds Google
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· Score: 2, Interesting
There is no such verb. It only exists by verbing the trademark "Google."
The example he used was that "Ford" is the motor company, but "ford" is a part of a stream that you can walk across, and "to ford" is to walk across a stream.
Thus implying that there is some other meaning of the word "ford" which can be verbed.
The way you read it, it would imply that "to ford" means to drive a car, therefore "to google" can mean "to find on the Internet."
(BTW, "Internet" is supposed to be uppercase, as your better spell-checkers will inform you. It's not a noun, it's a proper name for a specific network.)
Thats why it is called Kleenex(tm) facial tissue, or Lycra(tm) spandex or Spam(tm) luncheon meat.
Huh. I always thought Spandex was the brand and Lycra was the fabric...
Turns out that you are right, though. Lycra is the trademark. To confirm that you were correct, I googled for the answer.
Re:Spam vs spam, and Google vs google
on
Verbing Weirds Google
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The situation is not analogous.
If I were to publish a popular "dictionary of lunch jargon" and included "to spam" as a generic term for eating salty ham-derived food, you can bet your ass Hormel's lawyers would be sending me a C&D letter.
Re:Redifference between uppercase and lowercase
on
Verbing Weirds Google
·
· Score: 0, Insightful
If you are referring to the number, that would be "googol," not "google."
I went back and looked. BBEdit may be $179 now, but it was usually about $120 then, depending on where you bought it.
The differences between TextWrangler & BBE Lite makes sense. Still, I find it kind of baffling that they are dropping Lite. It was the perfect "gateway drug" to get people to buy the full app. (At least, that strategy worked on me...)
Using "google" as a verb should be just fine... as long as you are talking about using Google to do your search. Otherwise, it's diluting their trademark. If people start saying "go to Alta Vista and Google around for it," then suddenly it becomes like how people were starting to say "Curad Band -Aids" instead of "Curad bandages" before the makers of Band-Aid bandages began going to great lengths to protect thier brand.
It reminds me of how "Coke" has become a generic word for soda pop in some parts of the South. If you order a "Coke" in some sourthern establishments, the redneck bartender will ask you "what kind of Coke do y'all want? Orange? Pepsi? Root Beer?"
For a while, Pepsi was selling really cheap to restaurants (to get more customers accoustomed to the taste). If you went into a restaraunt and ordered a "Coke," you would often get Pepsi... until recently. These days, if you order a "Coke" and they only have Pepsi products, your server will have been trained to ask "is Pepsi okay," because Coke occastionally sends reps out to look for restaurants who are substituting Pepsi for Coke orders without telling customers, and suing the asses off anybody they catch doing it.
Trademark laws are not set up to favor the nice guys. The law is pretty much, "be a bastard about your trademarks, or they become part of the language and it will be okay for your competition to use them."
Why this one, and not any of the other umpteen-jillion "press releases" that are published everyday?
Well, they didnt' put this on the/. front page; they put it in the Apple section. To Apple users this is news. Anything that happens with Toast, BBEdit or Photoshop is going to be of interest to 90% of the Mac users out there.
That said, this "paid advertisement" is not good news. The news that BBEdit Lite might be going away to be replaced by a $49 product that nobody will want, while the cost of BBEdit itself has shot through the roof, makes this a potentially dark day for Mac users.
Slashdot Mirror
The media is already telling you what songs you will be listening to. Why would they need a computer to tell them what they already know?
The cast really came together when Keven Murphy became the new voice of Tom Servo when the Comedy Central episodes began to air. His mellow delivery really balanced the wildness of Crow.
Anyway, my point was that the writing is what made MST3K work, and the same is true for Buffy. Cast changes can be endured as long as the writing stays good.
Anyway, you get the idea. It's the writers that make Buffy a cut above other TV shows. Specifically, it's Joss Whedon.
As for Marti Noxon, don't be a playa hata. She gets a bad rap for being the person who wrote the Buffy/Spike "rough sex" scene, but she's also written some great episodes, and the direction of season 6 (which I actually liked) was every bit as much Joss's idea as it was Marti's.
Seriously, though. I think you will grok Buffy if you give it a fair shake. In many ways, the language of the characters began to pop in such interesting ways by seasons 2 & 3 that there are entire web sites devoted to nothing but the way the Buffy cast talks.
But the X-Box jokes where not written by the ME writers, and the story lines of the TV series are nothing like what you describe. If you somehow mistook BTVS for a "moster of the week" show with lesbian titilation on the side, you probably didn't understand it.
In fact, Willow's first kiss with Tara was probably the first ever non-exploitative lesbian kiss in TV history. The characters never kissed on camera for an entire season of being in a relationship, and the first on-screen kiss was during a moment when Willow was bawling her eyes out over the death of Buffy's mom, and Tara was comforting her. It was deliberatly done during a very un-sexy moment, to avoid the usual hype that surrounds TV girl-on-girl action, and respectfully depict a deeper relationship between to characters. There have been lots of lesbian couples on TV over the last 10 years or so, but Willow and Tara was the first one that could be taken seriously. Fuck you for trying to reduce it to mere "poontang."
BTW: I consider "The Sopranos" to be the second-best program on TV today, but for different reasons. Tony Soprano's story resonates with people because we all feel the stress of competing needs of work and family. The stories on BTVS resonate with a lot of us, because we all went through the hell of High School, but Buffy takes the further step of turning shopworn genre conventions on their heads.
As for your idea that the show is "formulaic," I'm guessing you never saw the episode "Passion," a very early (season 2) example of a "statement" episode, in which they clearly established that none of the cliche's of genre TV could be counted on to be followed.
That, or you're just a trolling jackass.
As far as I'm concerned, the "primary parties responsible" for Buffy are not named Gellar, Hannigan, Head & Brendan. They are named Whedon, Noxon, Espinson, Fury, and Greenwaldt. As long as the Mutant Enemy writing crew remains intact, whatever it produces is bound to be good. Whedon's people seem to have a knack for finding good actors, too. Every major actor added to the show over the years (to play Anya, Dawn, Tara, Robin Wood, etc.) has been fantastic.
This is why I am convinced that a post-Gellar slayer show can easilly be terrific. SMG is a talented actress, but there are thousands of talented actresses bussing tables in shitty LA restaurants as we speak. It's good writers that are hard to find.
I think one or two of the ME writers must have gone through rehab at one point or another. The two-part Angel episode with Faith was also descibed by some as being very "twelve-steppy."
There is no program on American prime-time TV that comes closer, in content or tone, to Japanese animation:
A young school girl is a chosen warrior to fight vampires and demons. She has friends who use magic to help her. Comedy, melodrama, and action are freely mixed within almost every episode. Most of the stories are alegorical tales about growing up. There were even several cases of girls being attacked by tentacles, and Buffy was nearly raped by a disembodied demonic spirit two weeks ago, so you even have similarities to the Hentai stuff.
How could there even be room to question it? Buffy, in essence, is live-action anime. What could possibly be geekier than that?
I disagree. Cheers got better, nor worse, after half of the main relationship (Diane) left.
Also, Mystery Science Theater 3000 was still hillarious after Joel left the show. Mike & the bots made for great TV. It didn't start to suck until they lost a lot of personel during the move to the Sci Fi channel, and was still pretty good until they lost the guy who did Dr. Forrester & Crow.
People didn't notice how skinny she was in the early seasons of Buffy, because she wore a padded bra on the show in those days, which created the illusion of a healthy figure. Once she became a big enough star to insist that she didn't want to wear fake boobs anymore, it became very obvious what a skinny woman she really is.
I'm right there with you on this point. You can keep the Jenifer Garners and Calista Flockharts of the world. They're all knees and elbows. I like woman-shaped women. I like soft curves. Can I get a witnes?
Well, they could write a brilliant sci-fi western in which there is no sound in space, no rubber-headed aliens, and no cheap technobable deus-ex-machina endings. It would be everything Star Trek isn't, and it could be the best sci-fi show on TV.
But that would probably just get canceled by fox after 14 episodes.
P.S. Law and Order is not, and never was, good TV. Character-driven shows are the only ones that matter, and the way you keep them from getting stale is by letting the characters evolve over time, the way real people do. (The character of Willow bears almost no resemblence to the mousy little girl she was in season 1, but the elements of the person she would become were pretty much all there from the beginning. Her character slightly evolved every single year, so when certain things happened, such as her first lesbian experience, and her "addiction" to witchcraft, fans of the show were not surprised, because they were always logical places for her character to go. I, for one, would love to see what path Willow takes for the next few years.)
For example, one thing that you can't get from a brief glimpse of the show is JW's willingness to kill off a character just as you are getting attached to them. He loves to set up expectations based on your previous TV-watching experience, and then go in a completely different direction.
There's also the problem of anybody trying to tune in to current broadcasts (or recent reruns) and missing a lot of the context of what's being said and done. For example, I have one friend who's first experience watching BTVS was the season 5 episode, "The Body" (the one where Buffy comes home to discover her mother's corpse, finally taken by post-sugery complications) which is hailed as one of the best hours of television ever by those who follow the show, but utterly baffling to this friend of mine who saw it out of context after she had only seen the movie. She had a hard time seeing why I liked the show so much. Now that she's seen the first couple seasons of the show, she's yet another person who loves the show more than you are able to understand.
Believe me when I say that there's a reason why Buffy is a favorite of nearly every published TV critic, and practically worshipped in geek circles. If you know somebody who owns the DVD's, I would strongly reccomend borrowing them and giving the show more of a fair chance.
I would reccomend watching the two-part pilot, episode 3 ("The Witch"), and episode 11 ("Out of Mind, Out of Sight"). Then have a friend catch you up on the rest of season one and jump right into the season 2 DVD's, watching them in order. I think you will be surprised to discover how smart, funny, dramatic and groundbreaking this show really was.
Woah, woah, woah. Back up.
Buffy came in as a mid-season replacement, so you are saying you only thought the show was up to par for a season and a half!? Only to "appear" to improve this year? Why do you even care enough to post here?
Also, for the record, SMG's decision to leave is not an official declaration that the show is ending. They might have to take the name "Buffy" out of the title, but if Whedon, Espenson, Noxon & Fury are still on board, it's still going to be better than pretty much anything else on broadcast TV. Several cast members, including Alyson Hannigan & Nicholas Brendon, are signed on for two more years of BVTS, but are not signed in any way to any spin-off. This means that if Mutant Enemy wants to keep the other two of the big stars of the show locked in, they gotta find a way to continue the series with a new slayer. (It probably won't be Faith, as Dushku has already signed to star in a different show.)
I'm so fucking sick of all these "go out on top"/"don't jump the shark"/"Don't overstay your welcome" jackasses calling for the show to end while it's still good. The fact that the final two seasons of X-Files were horse shit did nothing to diminish what a great show it was in its prime. If a long-running show has even the potential to be good, I say keep producing it as long as people are willing to watch. Sometimes shows bounce back from slumps. Some of the best episodes of Cheers and M*A*S*H were made after the shows went through major cast changes.
Those of you who dig the show, keep hope alive.
If they wanted to, would you take the job to deliver them?
Ah, you see, you are from a part of the south where almost everybody drinks Coke, and "coke," to them, means "cola". In the southern areas I was talking about, 7-Up, orange soda, Dr. Pepper, root beer, etc., are all considered, "kinds of coke," to the locals.
I was drinking my beer, when I noticed that the coster had the words, "this establishment does not serve Coca-cola products," in bold type on it. Figuring there must be a story behind it, I asked the bartender. He told me that somebody once walked into one of their bars and ordered a "rum and Coke." Upon being served a rum with Pepsi in it, he informed the management that he was a Coca-cola representative, and they would be bringing action against them for deceptive trade (re: selling Pepsi as if it was Coke). The owner of the establishment owned over 10 very popular bars and restaurants in the DC area. He paid the settlement, but also swore that none of his bars would ever serve any Coke product.
It could be that they just want a cola, and are used to calling it Coke. It could also be that they really strongly prefer Coke over Pepsi (which is not far-fetched; the majority of regular cola drinkers have a strong preference for one or the other).
In either case, nobody wants to be chastized by their waiter for ordering something the restaurant doesn't have. If you are in the business of serving customers, you should always come across as a little apologetic if you lack something the customer wants.
"Is Pepsi okay?" is the right question to ask. In my case, the answer is "no." If I order Coke, it's because I want a Coke, and a Pepsi is not a Coke. (Trivia: Pepsi and Coke are both colas with citrus flavoring. The main difference between them is one uses lemon for the citrus while the other uses lime.) When I'm told there are only Pepsi products, I usually ask for Mountain Dew, which is my second-favorite soda anyway.
In other words, suppose the gang in Redmond were to release "Microsoft Photoshop" in 2007. The people at Adobe would really regret it if they had not been careful to protect the name Photoshop until then.
The example he used was that "Ford" is the motor company, but "ford" is a part of a stream that you can walk across, and "to ford" is to walk across a stream.
Thus implying that there is some other meaning of the word "ford" which can be verbed.
The way you read it, it would imply that "to ford" means to drive a car, therefore "to google" can mean "to find on the Internet."
(BTW, "Internet" is supposed to be uppercase, as your better spell-checkers will inform you. It's not a noun, it's a proper name for a specific network.)
Huh. I always thought Spandex was the brand and Lycra was the fabric...
Turns out that you are right, though. Lycra is the trademark. To confirm that you were correct, I googled for the answer.
If I were to publish a popular "dictionary of lunch jargon" and included "to spam" as a generic term for eating salty ham-derived food, you can bet your ass Hormel's lawyers would be sending me a C&D letter.
If you are referring to the number, that would be "googol," not "google."
The differences between TextWrangler & BBE Lite makes sense. Still, I find it kind of baffling that they are dropping Lite. It was the perfect "gateway drug" to get people to buy the full app. (At least, that strategy worked on me...)
It reminds me of how "Coke" has become a generic word for soda pop in some parts of the South. If you order a "Coke" in some sourthern establishments, the redneck bartender will ask you "what kind of Coke do y'all want? Orange? Pepsi? Root Beer?"
For a while, Pepsi was selling really cheap to restaurants (to get more customers accoustomed to the taste). If you went into a restaraunt and ordered a "Coke," you would often get Pepsi... until recently. These days, if you order a "Coke" and they only have Pepsi products, your server will have been trained to ask "is Pepsi okay," because Coke occastionally sends reps out to look for restaurants who are substituting Pepsi for Coke orders without telling customers, and suing the asses off anybody they catch doing it.
Trademark laws are not set up to favor the nice guys. The law is pretty much, "be a bastard about your trademarks, or they become part of the language and it will be okay for your competition to use them."
Well, they didnt' put this on the /. front page; they put it in the Apple section. To Apple users this is news. Anything that happens with Toast, BBEdit or Photoshop is going to be of interest to 90% of the Mac users out there.
That said, this "paid advertisement" is not good news. The news that BBEdit Lite might be going away to be replaced by a $49 product that nobody will want, while the cost of BBEdit itself has shot through the roof, makes this a potentially dark day for Mac users.