The Lanham Act essentially includes all the federal laws governing trademark registration and usage (but not state laws). Apple appears to be seeking protection under Title VIII of the Act, which has to do with misappropriation or misrepresentation of trademarks for use in commerce.
I'm just a college student who's taken a few law classes, but it seems to me this is a fairly weak claim, and Apple could make a much stronger one under other areas of federal law. Can anyone with more legal knowledge comment on the strength of Apple's claim?
Another no-copy-protection alternative is Minidisc player/recorders -- I switched from an MP3 player about a year ago and I've been pretty happy. They have their drawbacks and can be slightly more expensive (mine was about $300), but the discs are much cheaper than memory cards and can hold a lot more music (up to 5 or 6 hours in the most extended format), and the audio quality is at least marginally better.
As far as I know, there is no security technology on the horizon for MD media. And with the USB-based "MD link" that's now included with most players, it's virtually as easy to record things off of a random friend's computer as it would be with an MP3 player.
The only big drawback is that they record in real time (so, for example, 40 minutes of music would take 40 minutes to record.) And recording from an MD onto your computer is a little bit more of a hassle. But other than that, I'd say they're worth checking out.
I hate to be the one who takes this flamebait, but...if anything, most of the people on this site are closer to libertarians than anything else, as you'll see if you read the comments on any privacy/security/government related article. You can dislike a big corporation (especially microsoft) and still not be a socialist.
And needless to say, we shouldn't take too seriously a libertarian who can't spell "libertarian" right.
A lot of it depends on how well the deal is received by stockholders. The overall impetus for the deal was to cut costs by eliminating overlapping divisions (not just Linux-related stuff), but so far HP's stock is down- there's a front page story on this in the Financial Times today (www.ft.com). This could indicate that stockholders and investors are scared that the consolidation plans are too aggressive, and it might scare HP away from eliminating support for older *nix systems in the near future. Still, we can hope....
Independent of the controversy surrounding its application, this kind of technology is pretty fascinating.
In general, it works by morphing together thousands of photos to create a set of "average" faces, which are known as eigenfaces. When the system is presented with a new face, it first uses a general comparison mechanism to pick out the nearest eigenface, and then identifies the face by a set of values which represent differences from that eigenface.
This could have some interesting applications that are much less Orwellian, like certain kinds of specialized image search engines.
Slashdot Mirror
The Lanham Act essentially includes all the federal laws governing trademark registration and usage (but not state laws). Apple appears to be seeking protection under Title VIII of the Act, which has to do with misappropriation or misrepresentation of trademarks for use in commerce.
I'm just a college student who's taken a few law classes, but it seems to me this is a fairly weak claim, and Apple could make a much stronger one under other areas of federal law. Can anyone with more legal knowledge comment on the strength of Apple's claim?
Here's a link to the complete text of the Act.
Another no-copy-protection alternative is Minidisc player/recorders -- I switched from an MP3 player about a year ago and I've been pretty happy. They have their drawbacks and can be slightly more expensive (mine was about $300), but the discs are much cheaper than memory cards and can hold a lot more music (up to 5 or 6 hours in the most extended format), and the audio quality is at least marginally better.
As far as I know, there is no security technology on the horizon for MD media. And with the USB-based "MD link" that's now included with most players, it's virtually as easy to record things off of a random friend's computer as it would be with an MP3 player.
The only big drawback is that they record in real time (so, for example, 40 minutes of music would take 40 minutes to record.) And recording from an MD onto your computer is a little bit more of a hassle. But other than that, I'd say they're worth checking out.
I hate to be the one who takes this flamebait, but...if anything, most of the people on this site are closer to libertarians than anything else, as you'll see if you read the comments on any privacy/security/government related article. You can dislike a big corporation (especially microsoft) and still not be a socialist.
And needless to say, we shouldn't take too seriously a libertarian who can't spell "libertarian" right.
IBM and HP/Compaq "strongly in the Linux corner"?
I'd like to smoke what he's smoking...
A lot of it depends on how well the deal is received by stockholders. The overall impetus for the deal was to cut costs by eliminating overlapping divisions (not just Linux-related stuff), but so far HP's stock is down- there's a front page story on this in the Financial Times today (www.ft.com). This could indicate that stockholders and investors are scared that the consolidation plans are too aggressive, and it might scare HP away from eliminating support for older *nix systems in the near future. Still, we can hope....
Independent of the controversy surrounding its application, this kind of technology is pretty fascinating.
In general, it works by morphing together thousands of photos to create a set of "average" faces, which are known as eigenfaces. When the system is presented with a new face, it first uses a general comparison mechanism to pick out the nearest eigenface, and then identifies the face by a set of values which represent differences from that eigenface.
This could have some interesting applications that are much less Orwellian, like certain kinds of specialized image search engines.
-pete