Names titles and short literary phrases are not protected by copyright. Single literary titles are also not necessarily protected by trademark.
However, as with most law, there are cases where a title can be protected (unfair competition, trademark common law if the title has acquired secondary meaning).
The rash of teen movies that are simply titled by appropriating the name of a popular song should be evidence of this enough.;-)
Which carries more weight: the right of Apple to protect their trade secrets or the rights of journalists to protect their sources?
Well, in the investigation over the Valerie Plame leak, the U.S. appeals court said today "There is no First Amendment privilege protecting the evidence sought."
In others words, journalistic source "protection" is subject to the law. It may very well be that Apple's right to protect its trade secrets is more important. It'll be up the courts to decide.
In a revealing speech given by the Google founders, Larry Page says he would 'like to see a model where you can buy into the world's content. Let's say you pay $20 per month.
The only thing "revealing" about that article is that Page continues "Somebody else needs to figure out how to reward all the people who create the things that you use. " In other words, what Page would like to see is a system where "users" pay for accessing content and "contributors" are paid for providing it.
This/. story could have equally read "Does Google Want to Pay Wiki authors?" but of course, that would have derailed cryptoluddite's agenda to smear Google.
To the editors: when you see the words may be planning, just ignore the submission in the future. TIA.
Given Microsoft's cavalier attitude towards pricing the XBox and indulging Sony in the console price war, I don't think Microsoft is interested in profit...for the moment. Microsoft's carrot has always been marketshare, even to the point of pricing products at zero (Internet Explorer). Microsoft believes that faster hardware = larger developer interest = larger customer interest, or put simply, the console on the technological forefront is the one that wins the market, and thus the revenue, in the long run.
Nevertheless, this strategy didn't work for Sega, 3DO, Atari or the others, so I'm not sure why Ballmer thinks it will work for them. The console market has shown time and again, software -- whether weak titles leading to demise (Atari 2600) or strong titles leading to dominance (Playstation 1) -- is the key. Microsoft's success with the XBox is largely due to Halo and Halo 2, so you'd think they'd realize that the "bleeding edge" cuts both ways.
The collapse has been evident, and although it's surprising to see someone go out on a limb, I think those in the know have felt the tide turning for a while:
1) Stalled growth. The stock price has flattened. MS has thrown out dividends to keep investors interested, but the stock is played out.
2) Tapped markets. Financials show a disturbing trend: the only operations in the black are the Windows and Office units. Despite relentless spending in R&D, acquistions and experimental to expand their market (MSN, WebTV, etc.), nothing seems to pan out.
3) Apathetic customers. Inability to move entrenched (NT, 95, 98, ME) users, especially business users towards new products. The threats to drop legacy OS support have always ended in retreat -- and for a company as powerful as MS, those actions betray their ultimate dependence on Windows sales to stay alive.
3) Longhorn. For a company that makes so much of its money in OS sales, the inability to deliver a next-generation OS on time and as promised (Avalon, Indigo, WinFS moved out either to bolt on to XP or "for the future") is not an indication of engineering failure, but instead management failure. MS is too large to turn on a dime anymore.
4) Security. This is the death knell, and truly the slippery slope that Apple and the Linux community will use to the most advantage. If you can't get your customers to upgrade to a faser OS (see 3), then you're doomed to see them suffer the fate of today's spyware, malware, trojan and virus ridden reality.
5) Dubious "initiatives." IPTV? Tablet PCs? Wired watches? Again a management failure. Someone needs to keep their "visionaries" on an even keel.
And you can add to this list for a long time. Do one or two of these things signify the end of MS? No, but the trend is clear and the "end of MS" meme is gaining momentum. MS has finally become IBM of yesteryear. IMHO, their pathetic "grasp" at Google's share makes this clear.
When a company throws the term "innovation" around like rice at a wedding, you know that's the thing they're most nervous about.
After reading this startling bit from the article:
Octopuses have intrigued scientists for years, because they have both long- and short-term memory, they remember solutions to problems, and they can go on to solve the same or similar problems. They have been known to climb aboard fishing boats and open holds in search of crabs. They can figure out mazes, open jars, and break out of their aquariums in search of food.
It was a bit disheartening to see this "sponsored link" at the bottom of the article:
A Seafood Delicacy: Order Octopus Gorton's Fresh Seafood delivers octopus - fully cleaned and freshly prepared. Delicious and mild in flavor - great boiled, stewed or grilled. Special packaging ensures freshness.
over the air broadcast is covered under fair use and timeshifting
Yes, but only for your own personal use. The minute you "share" it with potentially millions of other users, you've thrown your fair use out the window.
I have always believed that SCO was well aware that the merits of their case, in terms or real evidence (not just a handful of "similar" header files), was not sufficient to win in court.
Darl McBride and his minions decided to go for the gambling "long-shot" that so many litigants see as an ample victory: getting the defendant to, in a cost-benefit analysis, decide its better to settle out of court.
In SCO's case, their gamble had a nice silver lining: not only could IBM decide to settle, but in doing so (or if others believed they would do so), SCO could then easily extract miliions upon millions in licensing fees from Linux installations during and perhaps after the suit. Clearly, they tried to do this and from the numbers, failed miserably.
So, SCO put all it's money on black to get in the black, and their number is increasingly looking red which of course will put them in the red, and effectively out of business.
That's what happens when you gamble without a whit of common sense.
A few RSS readers on the Mac now support "smart feeds" which are basically filters such as "show me articles from all my scubscriptions with the words: blah, feh, huh"
This is one solution to the information overload problem, but unfortunately, requires one to determine your interests ahead of time. It can be a good way to check up on the latest news about a specific subject, however.
1) The UI problem. As many have noticed, MSN Search is a near copy of Google's interface: even the "Settings" look identical. At best, making Google "switchers" comfortable will aid in driving traffic, but at worst it's an admission that "Google has done it right, and it can't be done better."
Innovation: Microsoft should research how to make the UI
better than Google. If it's possible, they should do it. It'll pay off even if people have to learn a new paradigm (ugh, hate that word).
2) The domain problem. For those few who do not have a Google bookmark (or have a built-in window a la Safari and Firefox), they can likely type "google.com" into their browser faster than...(they're already typing in their query). "search.msn.com" is just, for lack of a better word, ugly.
Innovation: Microsoft should buy a simple domain as a home for their search. Which brings us to...
3) The branding problem. For a company has huge and rich as Microsoft, they are strangely conservative about protecting the amazingly well-entrenched brand "Windows" (whether that's a valid trademark is an other issue). It's almost as if Microsoft has given up on branding and just "wings it" (Windows Movie Maker? Windows Media 9?). Face it, just adding "Windows" or "Microsoft" or "msn" (ooh, that rolls of the tongue) breaks all the rules of branding. Google is a verb because it is fanciful.
Innovation: Come up with a new name for your search technology, advertise the hell out of it (and per 2 above buy a single word domain for it) and then Google will be worried. If you build it, they will come.
In most trades, when someone comments on SEO, it's almost always a quote from one of the founders of SearchEngineWatch, a subscription only forum and web site focused on "Search Engine Marketing." Reasearching the site, it really is amazing how many people and companies are involved in "optimization." This field is getting huge, and as the article says, just about every major business is doing it. FYI, most of the strategies involved aren't fraud (like farm linking) but rather how certain keywords and meta tags result in different search engine rankings.
Re:liar, liar, pants on fire
on
State of the Union
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
You're apparently confusing "liar" with "person telling me the truth but I don't want to think about it because it's a really long ways off". The fact that everyone predicts SS will, in fact, backs up his statement. The question is, and always has been, when.
Actually, saying that the Social Security fund will go bankrupt is indeed a lie, because no matter what date you choose to believe, that is the date when the Social Secuirty fund will continue to pay out, but at only 70% of current benefits. Due to the interest on the fund and the pay in, Social Security will never go "bankrupt." For Bush and other Republicans to use that word is completely misleading.
Furthermore, according to the White House's own economic projections (which they insist are correct because they show that making the tax cuts permament will help the economy), the Social Security fund will never experience a shortfall. So, which is it? If you believe permament tax cuts are going to help the economy, then you have to believe that Social Security is in no trouble at all. Or, if you believe Social Security is in trouble, then you have to believe that the tax cuts should not be made permament. The fact that the White House uses whatever projections are "convenient" for making their points smacks of pure politics.
My company develops a data mining program for OS X (theConcept) that uses Google (or other search engines) to provide links to data for mining.
For example, searching on Google for "tom cruise" brings up pages upon pages of links, but -- from a cursory glance at the results -- it is impossible to learn anything about Tom Cruise unless one visits those results.
Our software visits each of those results (for example, the first 100) and looks for the most significant keywords and phrases used over all the data. As you might expect, these typically end up being the names of people (e.g. Nicole Kidman, Penelope Cruz) or movies (e.g. Top Gun, Color of Money) that are associated with Tom Cruise. As far as our software goes, this is ample for doing keyphrase analysis.
But the problem with deriving any additional meaning from the Internet web space is this: the biases that exist due to the very reasons for mentioning Tom Cruise (namely those things he is famous for) simply outweigh -- by a wide margin -- any other quite relevant interesting data about Tom Cruise. So, in fact, the web, in general, is an awful corpus of valid semantic data.
If you want a rough model of popular ideas then perhaps Google and the web en masse is useful (it is for our software). But if you want any real meaning at all you come to the same conclusion that has given rise to sites like Wiki: the web, to be blunt, has a whole lot of shit in it. Coming up with a perfect (and rational) filter is quite a task.
You can't really go down much lower on the price of blades. But the iPod is quite simply overpriced.
The market leader in blades+razors is Gillette selling premium priced blades for their Mach-3 brands of razor (a 6 billion dollar business for them in 2003). Even though Schick has been selling more razors, they simply cannot match Gillette's dominance in blades. So, if selling premium (read: overpriced) blades is good for Gilette, I don't see why it can't be good for Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
For those who might be interested:
;-)
Names titles and short literary phrases are not protected by copyright. Single literary titles are also not necessarily protected by trademark.
However, as with most law, there are cases where a title can be protected (unfair competition, trademark common law if the title has acquired secondary meaning).
The rash of teen movies that are simply titled by appropriating the name of a popular song should be evidence of this enough.
Which carries more weight: the right of Apple to protect their trade secrets or the rights of journalists to protect their sources?
Well, in the investigation over the Valerie Plame leak, the U.S. appeals court said today "There is no First Amendment privilege protecting the evidence sought."
In others words, journalistic source "protection" is subject to the law. It may very well be that Apple's right to protect its trade secrets is more important. It'll be up the courts to decide.
In a revealing speech given by the Google founders, Larry Page says he would 'like to see a model where you can buy into the world's content. Let's say you pay $20 per month.
/. story could have equally read "Does Google Want to Pay Wiki authors?" but of course, that would have derailed cryptoluddite's agenda to smear Google.
The only thing "revealing" about that article is that Page continues "Somebody else needs to figure out how to reward all the people who create the things that you use. " In other words, what Page would like to see is a system where "users" pay for accessing content and "contributors" are paid for providing it.
This
To the editors: when you see the words may be planning, just ignore the submission in the future. TIA.
This reminds me of the old UNIX joke:
$ cat "food in tin cans"
cat: cannot open food in tin cans
Of course, BSD's "cat: food in tin cans: No such file or directory" doesn't have quite the same effect.
Microsoft's motivation as profit.
Given Microsoft's cavalier attitude towards pricing the XBox and indulging Sony in the console price war, I don't think Microsoft is interested in profit...for the moment. Microsoft's carrot has always been marketshare, even to the point of pricing products at zero (Internet Explorer). Microsoft believes that faster hardware = larger developer interest = larger customer interest, or put simply, the console on the technological forefront is the one that wins the market, and thus the revenue, in the long run.
Nevertheless, this strategy didn't work for Sega, 3DO, Atari or the others, so I'm not sure why Ballmer thinks it will work for them. The console market has shown time and again, software -- whether weak titles leading to demise (Atari 2600) or strong titles leading to dominance (Playstation 1) -- is the key. Microsoft's success with the XBox is largely due to Halo and Halo 2, so you'd think they'd realize that the "bleeding edge" cuts both ways.
Graphics are nice, but gameplay is what counts.
Absolutely. Which is why the only game I have never tired of playing is Nethack.
Of course, I still like playing new games (Katamari Damacy is ingenious), but long-term replay value in new games is rare IMHO.
...The Typo Milionaires? ;-)
The collapse has been evident, and although it's surprising to see someone go out on a limb, I think those in the know have felt the tide turning for a while:
1) Stalled growth. The stock price has flattened. MS has thrown out dividends to keep investors interested, but the stock is played out.
2) Tapped markets. Financials show a disturbing trend: the only operations in the black are the Windows and Office units. Despite relentless spending in R&D, acquistions and experimental to expand their market (MSN, WebTV, etc.), nothing seems to pan out.
3) Apathetic customers. Inability to move entrenched (NT, 95, 98, ME) users, especially business users towards new products. The threats to drop legacy OS support have always ended in retreat -- and for a company as powerful as MS, those actions betray their ultimate dependence on Windows sales to stay alive.
3) Longhorn. For a company that makes so much of its money in OS sales, the inability to deliver a next-generation OS on time and as promised (Avalon, Indigo, WinFS moved out either to bolt on to XP or "for the future") is not an indication of engineering failure, but instead management failure. MS is too large to turn on a dime anymore.
4) Security. This is the death knell, and truly the slippery slope that Apple and the Linux community will use to the most advantage. If you can't get your customers to upgrade to a faser OS (see 3), then you're doomed to see them suffer the fate of today's spyware, malware, trojan and virus ridden reality.
5) Dubious "initiatives." IPTV? Tablet PCs? Wired watches? Again a management failure. Someone needs to keep their "visionaries" on an even keel.
And you can add to this list for a long time. Do one or two of these things signify the end of MS? No, but the trend is clear and the "end of MS" meme is gaining momentum. MS has finally become IBM of yesteryear. IMHO, their pathetic "grasp" at Google's share makes this clear.
When a company throws the term "innovation" around like rice at a wedding, you know that's the thing they're most nervous about.
After reading this startling bit from the article:
Octopuses have intrigued scientists for years, because they have both long- and short-term memory, they remember solutions to problems, and they can go on to solve the same or similar problems. They have been known to climb aboard fishing boats and open holds in search of crabs. They can figure out mazes, open jars, and break out of their aquariums in search of food.
It was a bit disheartening to see this "sponsored link" at the bottom of the article:
A Seafood Delicacy: Order Octopus
Gorton's Fresh Seafood delivers octopus - fully cleaned and freshly prepared. Delicious and mild in flavor - great boiled, stewed or grilled. Special packaging ensures freshness.
Ah, the potential irony of keyword triggered ads!
Nash also said that the number of patches shouldn't be the only criteria users apply to tell if Microsoft's doing its job.
/
How about:
(# installations w/ active malware, spyware, trojans or viruses)
(# installations)
This seems a much fairer criteria with respect to the notion of being "more secure." And one, IMHO, I imagine isn't very favorable to MS.
over the air broadcast is covered under fair use and timeshifting
Yes, but only for your own personal use. The minute you "share" it with potentially millions of other users, you've thrown your fair use out the window.
I have always believed that SCO was well aware that the merits of their case, in terms or real evidence (not just a handful of "similar" header files), was not sufficient to win in court.
Darl McBride and his minions decided to go for the gambling "long-shot" that so many litigants see as an ample victory: getting the defendant to, in a cost-benefit analysis, decide its better to settle out of court.
In SCO's case, their gamble had a nice silver lining: not only could IBM decide to settle, but in doing so (or if others believed they would do so), SCO could then easily extract miliions upon millions in licensing fees from Linux installations during and perhaps after the suit. Clearly, they tried to do this and from the numbers, failed miserably.
So, SCO put all it's money on black to get in the black, and their number is increasingly looking red which of course will put them in the red, and effectively out of business.
That's what happens when you gamble without a whit of common sense.
As a matter of fact, he is now a licensed human cloner.
Something tells me he wouldn't have a problem creating a fake ID if he really needed one.
A few RSS readers on the Mac now support "smart feeds" which are basically filters such as "show me articles from all my scubscriptions with the words: blah, feh, huh"
This is one solution to the information overload problem, but unfortunately, requires one to determine your interests ahead of time. It can be a good way to check up on the latest news about a specific subject, however.
If the question was "Do I hire my own programmer or buy this technology?" then you would be correct.
But, given this is an optimization and replacement for STL then the question is "Do I just live with STL, or buy this technology?"
In other words, it isn't an essential development cost, it's an extra (I imagine most interested parties already have shipping apps that use STL).
And at this price point, IMHO, I think the answer may be "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Sounds great, but $2499 for a redistributable binary? Ouch.
2) The domain problem. For those few who do not have a Google bookmark (or have a built-in window a la Safari and Firefox), they can likely type "google.com" into their browser faster than...(they're already typing in their query). "search.msn.com" is just, for lack of a better word, ugly.
Innovation: Microsoft should buy a simple domain as a home for their search. Which brings us to...
3) The branding problem. For a company has huge and rich as Microsoft, they are strangely conservative about protecting the amazingly well-entrenched brand "Windows" (whether that's a valid trademark is an other issue). It's almost as if Microsoft has given up on branding and just "wings it" (Windows Movie Maker? Windows Media 9?). Face it, just adding "Windows" or "Microsoft" or "msn" (ooh, that rolls of the tongue) breaks all the rules of branding. Google is a verb because it is fanciful.
/* todo: add six laws here */
In most trades, when someone comments on SEO, it's almost always a quote from one of the founders of SearchEngineWatch, a subscription only forum and web site focused on "Search Engine Marketing." Reasearching the site, it really is amazing how many people and companies are involved in "optimization." This field is getting huge, and as the article says, just about every major business is doing it. FYI, most of the strategies involved aren't fraud (like farm linking) but rather how certain keywords and meta tags result in different search engine rankings.
You're apparently confusing "liar" with "person telling me the truth but I don't want to think about it because it's a really long ways off". The fact that everyone predicts SS will, in fact, backs up his statement. The question is, and always has been, when.
Actually, saying that the Social Security fund will go bankrupt is indeed a lie, because no matter what date you choose to believe, that is the date when the Social Secuirty fund will continue to pay out, but at only 70% of current benefits. Due to the interest on the fund and the pay in, Social Security will never go "bankrupt." For Bush and other Republicans to use that word is completely misleading.
Furthermore, according to the White House's own economic projections (which they insist are correct because they show that making the tax cuts permament will help the economy), the Social Security fund will never experience a shortfall. So, which is it? If you believe permament tax cuts are going to help the economy, then you have to believe that Social Security is in no trouble at all. Or, if you believe Social Security is in trouble, then you have to believe that the tax cuts should not be made permament. The fact that the White House uses whatever projections are "convenient" for making their points smacks of pure politics.
was Cheney's attire
Anyone here actually use RPG (or it's descendants)? Any war stories?
Yes, I've passed the RPG level in Tron. My tank pattern insures that I have no interesting war stories.
See for yourself: this scan shows some definite signs of instabilty.
My company develops a data mining program for OS X (theConcept) that uses Google (or other search engines) to provide links to data for mining.
For example, searching on Google for "tom cruise" brings up pages upon pages of links, but -- from a cursory glance at the results -- it is impossible to learn anything about Tom Cruise unless one visits those results.
Our software visits each of those results (for example, the first 100) and looks for the most significant keywords and phrases used over all the data. As you might expect, these typically end up being the names of people (e.g. Nicole Kidman, Penelope Cruz) or movies (e.g. Top Gun, Color of Money) that are associated with Tom Cruise. As far as our software goes, this is ample for doing keyphrase analysis.
But the problem with deriving any additional meaning from the Internet web space is this: the biases that exist due to the very reasons for mentioning Tom Cruise (namely those things he is famous for) simply outweigh -- by a wide margin -- any other quite relevant interesting data about Tom Cruise. So, in fact, the web, in general, is an awful corpus of valid semantic data.
If you want a rough model of popular ideas then perhaps Google and the web en masse is useful (it is for our software). But if you want any real meaning at all you come to the same conclusion that has given rise to sites like Wiki: the web, to be blunt, has a whole lot of shit in it. Coming up with a perfect (and rational) filter is quite a task.
You can't really go down much lower on the price of blades. But the iPod is quite simply overpriced.
The market leader in blades+razors is Gillette selling premium priced blades for their Mach-3 brands of razor (a 6 billion dollar business for them in 2003). Even though Schick has been selling more razors, they simply cannot match Gillette's dominance in blades. So, if selling premium (read: overpriced) blades is good for Gilette, I don't see why it can't be good for Apple.