If you're going to go by that definition, then EVERYTHING is a cost center (including sales)!
Sadly, it seems like this is simply what they're teaching MBA candidates these days.
Q: Why does software suck? A: Product development is a cost center. Q: Why does the TV news suck? A: News reporting is a cost center.
But whether people get away with this kind of thinking in real-world companies, I believe, depends on corporate culture. If you happen to work for a company with a culture that values product development, you'll do well as a product developer. If you work for a company in which the only people who ever participate in the really important meetings are salespeople, board members, and consultants, then your job might start to suck.
Be creative: That starts with laptops in the space shuttle and surely doesn't end with onboard systems of surveillance planes.
And bring it down to earth, too. As I just replied to somebody else before I saw your post, think about the oil and gas industry. Alaska. Siberia. Offshore platforms. The deserts of Kuwait. And when it comes to checkbooks, same rule applies.
My God, you act as if Microsoft invented this. Auto dealers talk about "open pricing options." Real estate agents hold "open houses" all the time -- but guess what, you can't just stay there for free! Seriously, some days it's like a frickin' nursery around here. Adjust your diapers and move on.
As always, IANAL. If Chuck wins this one, it will significantly change the legal landscape. I don't think that's going to happen.
Change the legal landscape? I don't see that at all. This seems to be a completely valid use of trademark, to me. Chuck Norris is in the business of being a celebrity entertainer. The public could easily make the assumption that a book full of jokes with Chuck Norris's name and photograph on the cover has something to do with Chuck Norris. This book had nothing to do with him; it's just using his name and image to capitalize on his business. Seems pretty clear-cut, to me.
Similarly, you can't put out your own brand of motor oil and call it "Mario Andretti motor oil" on the basis that Mario Andretti is a public figure who drives a car. It implies an endorsement by the public figure.
Likewise, if you tried to publish "Yoda's Book of Knock-Knock Jokes"(*) without getting the go-ahead from Lucasfilm Ltd., I'd expect a lawsuit.
(*) Q: Knocking, I am. A: Who's there? Q: Police, it is. A: Police who? Q: Stop telling awful knock-knock jokes, police do.
It seems to me that a trademark holder would only have a complaint about a parody if it was represented in a way that might cause the false impression that this book was written or endorsed by the trademark holder.
Sure. So what if the bottom line is that Chuck Norris doesn't think the jokes are funny? And that he was planning to publish his own book of Chuck Norris jokes -- or series of books -- and these would include only the Chuck Norris jokes that he thinks are funny and is therefore willing to endorse? It seems like a trivial thing, certainly much more so than getting knockoff rivets for your airplane wing or whatever...but if you make jokes into a commercial commodity, then maybe putting Chuck Norris's picture on a book of the jokes really does imply his authorization/consent.
If Chuck can use trademark to control how people use his name and image, then so can every other movie star and public figure.
And your point is?
Lego could not use trademark law to do what it had previously done with patent law.
...which is the salient point that illustrates that this case has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Chuck Norris's case. You CAN trademark your name and image. You can't patent it.
Again, not necessarily: if the use of his image/likeness are clearly an inextricable part of the satire (and thus not some secondary misappropriation), he's probably doomed.
For a contrary argument (and I'm assuming NOUAL -- None Of Us Are Lawyers): The general public "knows" that you can't just go and put somebody's photograph on the front cover of any book you want, if that person didn't have anything to do with the book. Therefore, to the general public, putting Chuck Norris's picture on the front of the book implies his consent, cooperation, or even material involvement with the book. The general public has a reasonable expectation that this is some kind of licensed Chuck Norris product. Since it is not, Chuck has a valid suit.
I disagree that this book is the equivalent of a book of blonde jokes, as some other poster said. If it were just a book of jokes, and half of them were all about Chuck Norris, and it didn't have a picture of Chuck Norris on the cover, then Chuck probably wouldn't have a leg to stand on. But this, to me, really does seem to be capitalizing on his name. For all you know, he's not even trying to sue the book out of existence -- maybe he just wants his cut, which will then be donated to one of his charities.
Imagine the worst-case scenario -- which is probably not the case here, but still -- imagine that most of the "satire" about Chuck Norris in this book with Chuck Norris's picture on the cover was about how Chuck Norris likes to have sex with underage girls. Wouldn't he have a case then? The laws governing satire are not nearly so cut-and-dried as some people on here want to believe.
Be ready for disappointment - we've seen this "shoot the prequels after the main trilogy" bit before. $5 says Bilbo stabs first, Gimli will be replaced by an annoying CGI sidekick, and we'll learn that the rings get their special power because they're made of high-strength mitochlorian alloy.
Don't be ridiculous. Whatever changes Jackson makes to the original plot will only be to engage the audience and create a more enjoyable movie experience. For example:
We will find out exactly why nobody tosses a dwarf.
We will witness the pulse-pounding "River Elf Olympics," complete with log rolling, barrel tossing, and other feats of leaping and agility.
Dori will be revisioned as a bearded, female dwarf -- but will her fondness for gold jewelery doom the expedition?
Jackson has secured the rights to the "Down, down to goblin town" song from the Rankin-Bass production, to be sung by Meatloaf during the end credits.
Due to pacing issues, Gollum's riddle game will be replaced with a form of Sudoku based on elf-runes -- expect toy tie-ins to be hot sellers for the Christmas season!
Extended sequences featuring Sauron in his guise as the Necromancer, complete with much foreshadowing.
We are enthralled as Andy Serkis succumbs to the Gollum persona as the movies progress; he completes his transformation by the end of the second film. Also, we are treated to a sneak preview of the riddle (sorry, Sudoku) game, in which Bilbo sees Gollum playing against Smeagol.
Beorn saves the party by battling several dinosaurs and a giant ape.
While in the house of Elrond, Bilbo plays Cyrano to a young Aragorn as he attempts to court his lady love, Arwen.
You can argue the ethics behind what these people did, but you can't ignore the ethics behind what the media does when they leave somebody subject to death threats.
OK, look...you are subject to death threats. If I find you, I'm going to kill you. See how that works?
But there's a big difference between someone receiving death threats based on something that has been misreported -- like, a guy who was reported to be a sex offender getting death threats even after all the charges have been dropped -- and somebody getting death threats for something they really, actually did do. Now, death threats are illegal, and whomever was threatening this poor schmuck should probably get to spend a night or two in the can. But come on... if the government had an official "rape squad" and they got outed by the media, and those people then received death threats... cry me a river!
The media has a responsibility to report the truth. The fact that everybody complains about it when they actually succeed is one of the things that's reducing our media to a pile of worthless crap. There is probably an ethics question around the wisdom of posting this person's full name, or whatever. But to decry the media for doing so on the basis that some yahoo decided to send the dude a death threat kinda sounds like shooting the messenger, to me.
Every time I hear about Vista on Slashdot, somebody has to jump in with the "DRM, DRM, DRM!" I've had Vista installed for months, and I can tell you there is no DRM problem in Vista. The stuff you hear about has something to do with playing HD content from their computer over HDMI -- or something -- and nobody does that.
Repeat after me:
Vista plays MP3s just fine.
Vista plays AVIs of your favorite shows just fine.
Vista plays DVDs just fine.
You can run software to rip DVDs on Vista.
You can rip CD audio on Vista.
You can convert your DVD movies to AVIs on Vista.
If none of that is good enough for you, you can install a couple plug-ins in Vista and play all the Ogg and Matroska files you want.
Seriously, Vista does kinda suck, but when you go around talking about how it sucks for reasons that aren't even true you kinda just sound like a dumbass fanboy.
One thing that a lot of help desk staff fail to do is try to empathize with the user. In the case of the know-nothing type user, the IT person wants to explain what happened so the user doesn't make the same mistake again. It won't work. The user doesn't know anything. So the IT person says, "This happened because you did this when you were supposed to do that. If you do this three times, the setting gets changed and you can't do that anymore. I've reset it now. Don't do this again, just do that from now on." The user is left feeling like a scolded schoolchild and they inevitably resent it. Next time they have a problem, they're even less likely to call you until it's completely FUBAR.
Instead, try this one: "It's not you. The interface is stupid. You looked for the setting you wanted in Preferences, but actually there aren't any useful settings in Preferences. You need to go to the menu called Document Properties. I don't know why they designed it that way." Watch the little light switch on in their eyes. Just a little basic empathy -- acknowledge that the user may be forced to use a program that doesn't seem logical to the way they do things -- and you may find that some of the people whom you had categorized as idiots have actually just been browbeaten into believing they "don't know computers." As with schoolchildren, let them know that it's OK to make mistakes and they'll start to learn.
I agree that some kind of life-or-death situation needs to be involved. I have experienced time-slowdown (or rather, perceptual speed-up) twice in my life, both in very threatening situations. Both times the feeling was coupled with a deep sense of calmness.
Happened to me, too. I was in the passenger seat of a car when I noticed a flare lying on a stretch of dark highway. My friend, the driver, hadn't noticed it. I was wondering what the heck it was doing there when all of a sudden, ahead in the car's headlights, I saw something in the road.
What went through my head next was something like: "Oh man this isn't going to be good am I going to die now? I better have my seatbelt on at least yes I do that's good then too bad it's only a lap belt I'm probably going to hit the dashboard man that thing looks like it's made out of reinforced steel that's going to hurt I wonder if I should try to brace myself on something ahh I'm involuntarily turning my head does that make me a wimp? anyway oh well I guess I've done everything I can do to get ready it's been a pretty good run here goes nothing."
A split-second later our '72 Chevy Nova smashed straight through two cars, which had been parallel-parked across the two fast lanes of the freeway, at 65mph. (The driver had never seen the cars, either -- I think he maybe should have been wearing glasses.) We tore the two cars in half -- ripped their backs off and kept going -- blew out all four of our own tires, and yes I did indeed smash my face up against the steel reinforcement of the dashboard. Other than that, we were fine. I peeled my baseball hat off the shattered glass of the windshield and we got out of there, moments before another car smashed into the back of our wreckage at speed and turned the Nova into a crumpled-up cube.
I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of my Linux Computer for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to load a 2 Meg file
Unless by "Linux computer" you mean "Nokia Internet Tablet," I call B.S. As an experiment, I just switched over to a terminal window and used VIM to open a couple of different ~234MB AVI files. Each time, VIM managed the task in around 10 seconds. (Saving the file back, on the other hand, was another matter.)
...it's pretty awful. Ford's voice is completely flat and it sounds like he's reading his script from the desk in his hotel room. The voiceovers themselves add nothing to your understanding of the film. They're along the lines of:
DECKARD: (while fiddling with his badge and gun) I'm a cop.
Deckard's flying car cruises through futuristic L.A. until it arrives at a large building, upon which he disembarks and goes to see his boss in the police department. DECKARD: I was on my way to headquarters to meet with the chief.
I wonder if this has anything to do with him not particularly liking ogg?
His name is Wenger, and you're probably right. If I had this guy's level of experience in digital multimedia and was as actively involved as he is in implementing such widely-used, RAND-licensed formats as MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264 etc. (which is what UB Video provided, before it was bought by Scientific Atlanta, itself now a subsidiary of Cisco), then I might have reason to not particularly like OGG, Vorbis, Theora, etc., either. Or, for you tin-foil hatters, just because it's a conspiracy doesn't mean the conspiracy doesn't know what it's talking about.
A nation that tries to deal with its social problems completely before tackling expansion and technological progress will be destroyed by the nations that don't.
Could be that the "encryption" is just a way to handle multiple keyboards in one reception range...
That's pretty much my assumption, too, but if you pull up the control panel on my Logitech wireless keyboard (that's right, I use one -- come an' get me, copper!), select the "Keyboard" pane, and click the icon that looks like a "wireless thing", you see this:
Your keyboard is not secured.
To securely encrypt your keyboard so your keystrokes cannot be detected by any other computer, click the Secure button.
Maybe the marketing folks got hold of this particular feature and gave it a more saleable spin.
(Incidentally, that's correct... there is a "security" feature on my keyboard, but it doesn't bother to let you know that the connection has been reset to insecure until you go and check the control panel yourself. I have no idea when the almost-meaningless encryption got shut off, but I'll click it back on now.)
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, it seems like this is simply what they're teaching MBA candidates these days.
Q: Why does software suck? A: Product development is a cost center.
Q: Why does the TV news suck? A: News reporting is a cost center.
But whether people get away with this kind of thinking in real-world companies, I believe, depends on corporate culture. If you happen to work for a company with a culture that values product development, you'll do well as a product developer. If you work for a company in which the only people who ever participate in the really important meetings are salespeople, board members, and consultants, then your job might start to suck.
And bring it down to earth, too. As I just replied to somebody else before I saw your post, think about the oil and gas industry. Alaska. Siberia. Offshore platforms. The deserts of Kuwait. And when it comes to checkbooks, same rule applies.
ORLY? You don't suppose the oil and gas industry would have any use at all for high-capacity, low-power, no-moving-parts data storage?
Uhhh... maybe I'm dense but I don't see what's wrong with that. Or maybe you just hate CSS?
You mean R'dmnd, don't you? Richmond is in Virginia (or California).
My God, you act as if Microsoft invented this. Auto dealers talk about "open pricing options." Real estate agents hold "open houses" all the time -- but guess what, you can't just stay there for free! Seriously, some days it's like a frickin' nursery around here. Adjust your diapers and move on.
In Soviet Antigua, Caribbean makes pirates of Disney?
Change the legal landscape? I don't see that at all. This seems to be a completely valid use of trademark, to me. Chuck Norris is in the business of being a celebrity entertainer. The public could easily make the assumption that a book full of jokes with Chuck Norris's name and photograph on the cover has something to do with Chuck Norris. This book had nothing to do with him; it's just using his name and image to capitalize on his business. Seems pretty clear-cut, to me.
Similarly, you can't put out your own brand of motor oil and call it "Mario Andretti motor oil" on the basis that Mario Andretti is a public figure who drives a car. It implies an endorsement by the public figure.
Likewise, if you tried to publish "Yoda's Book of Knock-Knock Jokes"(*) without getting the go-ahead from Lucasfilm Ltd., I'd expect a lawsuit.
(*) Q: Knocking, I am.
A: Who's there?
Q: Police, it is.
A: Police who?
Q: Stop telling awful knock-knock jokes, police do.
Au contraire. He just never left his mother's basement.
Sure. So what if the bottom line is that Chuck Norris doesn't think the jokes are funny? And that he was planning to publish his own book of Chuck Norris jokes -- or series of books -- and these would include only the Chuck Norris jokes that he thinks are funny and is therefore willing to endorse? It seems like a trivial thing, certainly much more so than getting knockoff rivets for your airplane wing or whatever...but if you make jokes into a commercial commodity, then maybe putting Chuck Norris's picture on a book of the jokes really does imply his authorization/consent.
And your point is?
...which is the salient point that illustrates that this case has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Chuck Norris's case. You CAN trademark your name and image. You can't patent it.
For a contrary argument (and I'm assuming NOUAL -- None Of Us Are Lawyers): The general public "knows" that you can't just go and put somebody's photograph on the front cover of any book you want, if that person didn't have anything to do with the book. Therefore, to the general public, putting Chuck Norris's picture on the front of the book implies his consent, cooperation, or even material involvement with the book. The general public has a reasonable expectation that this is some kind of licensed Chuck Norris product. Since it is not, Chuck has a valid suit.
I disagree that this book is the equivalent of a book of blonde jokes, as some other poster said. If it were just a book of jokes, and half of them were all about Chuck Norris, and it didn't have a picture of Chuck Norris on the cover, then Chuck probably wouldn't have a leg to stand on. But this, to me, really does seem to be capitalizing on his name. For all you know, he's not even trying to sue the book out of existence -- maybe he just wants his cut, which will then be donated to one of his charities.
Imagine the worst-case scenario -- which is probably not the case here, but still -- imagine that most of the "satire" about Chuck Norris in this book with Chuck Norris's picture on the cover was about how Chuck Norris likes to have sex with underage girls. Wouldn't he have a case then? The laws governing satire are not nearly so cut-and-dried as some people on here want to believe.
Don't be ridiculous. Whatever changes Jackson makes to the original plot will only be to engage the audience and create a more enjoyable movie experience. For example:
Great fun for the whole family!
Urectum? From the sound of it, u probably killed em.
OK, look...you are subject to death threats. If I find you, I'm going to kill you. See how that works?
But there's a big difference between someone receiving death threats based on something that has been misreported -- like, a guy who was reported to be a sex offender getting death threats even after all the charges have been dropped -- and somebody getting death threats for something they really, actually did do. Now, death threats are illegal, and whomever was threatening this poor schmuck should probably get to spend a night or two in the can. But come on ... if the government had an official "rape squad" and they got outed by the media, and those people then received death threats ... cry me a river!
The media has a responsibility to report the truth. The fact that everybody complains about it when they actually succeed is one of the things that's reducing our media to a pile of worthless crap. There is probably an ethics question around the wisdom of posting this person's full name, or whatever. But to decry the media for doing so on the basis that some yahoo decided to send the dude a death threat kinda sounds like shooting the messenger, to me.
- Vista plays MP3s just fine.
- Vista plays AVIs of your favorite shows just fine.
- Vista plays DVDs just fine.
- You can run software to rip DVDs on Vista.
- You can rip CD audio on Vista.
- You can convert your DVD movies to AVIs on Vista.
- If none of that is good enough for you, you can install a couple plug-ins in Vista and play all the Ogg and Matroska files you want.
Seriously, Vista does kinda suck, but when you go around talking about how it sucks for reasons that aren't even true you kinda just sound like a dumbass fanboy.SF Bay, huh? Let me guess -- San Mateo Bridge?
But you're still standing, right? Yay for the Nova!!
One thing that a lot of help desk staff fail to do is try to empathize with the user. In the case of the know-nothing type user, the IT person wants to explain what happened so the user doesn't make the same mistake again. It won't work. The user doesn't know anything. So the IT person says, "This happened because you did this when you were supposed to do that. If you do this three times, the setting gets changed and you can't do that anymore. I've reset it now. Don't do this again, just do that from now on." The user is left feeling like a scolded schoolchild and they inevitably resent it. Next time they have a problem, they're even less likely to call you until it's completely FUBAR.
Instead, try this one: "It's not you. The interface is stupid. You looked for the setting you wanted in Preferences, but actually there aren't any useful settings in Preferences. You need to go to the menu called Document Properties. I don't know why they designed it that way." Watch the little light switch on in their eyes. Just a little basic empathy -- acknowledge that the user may be forced to use a program that doesn't seem logical to the way they do things -- and you may find that some of the people whom you had categorized as idiots have actually just been browbeaten into believing they "don't know computers." As with schoolchildren, let them know that it's OK to make mistakes and they'll start to learn.
Happened to me, too. I was in the passenger seat of a car when I noticed a flare lying on a stretch of dark highway. My friend, the driver, hadn't noticed it. I was wondering what the heck it was doing there when all of a sudden, ahead in the car's headlights, I saw something in the road.
What went through my head next was something like: "Oh man this isn't going to be good am I going to die now? I better have my seatbelt on at least yes I do that's good then too bad it's only a lap belt I'm probably going to hit the dashboard man that thing looks like it's made out of reinforced steel that's going to hurt I wonder if I should try to brace myself on something ahh I'm involuntarily turning my head does that make me a wimp? anyway oh well I guess I've done everything I can do to get ready it's been a pretty good run here goes nothing."
A split-second later our '72 Chevy Nova smashed straight through two cars, which had been parallel-parked across the two fast lanes of the freeway, at 65mph. (The driver had never seen the cars, either -- I think he maybe should have been wearing glasses.) We tore the two cars in half -- ripped their backs off and kept going -- blew out all four of our own tires, and yes I did indeed smash my face up against the steel reinforcement of the dashboard. Other than that, we were fine. I peeled my baseball hat off the shattered glass of the windshield and we got out of there, moments before another car smashed into the back of our wreckage at speed and turned the Nova into a crumpled-up cube.
All I could think was: "Cooooooolll."
Unless by "Linux computer" you mean "Nokia Internet Tablet," I call B.S. As an experiment, I just switched over to a terminal window and used VIM to open a couple of different ~234MB AVI files. Each time, VIM managed the task in around 10 seconds. (Saving the file back, on the other hand, was another matter.)
...it's pretty awful. Ford's voice is completely flat and it sounds like he's reading his script from the desk in his hotel room. The voiceovers themselves add nothing to your understanding of the film. They're along the lines of:
DECKARD: (while fiddling with his badge and gun) I'm a cop.
Deckard's flying car cruises through futuristic L.A. until it arrives at a large building, upon which he disembarks and goes to see his boss in the police department.
DECKARD: I was on my way to headquarters to meet with the chief.
(etc.)
His name is Wenger, and you're probably right. If I had this guy's level of experience in digital multimedia and was as actively involved as he is in implementing such widely-used, RAND-licensed formats as MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264 etc. (which is what UB Video provided, before it was bought by Scientific Atlanta, itself now a subsidiary of Cisco), then I might have reason to not particularly like OGG, Vorbis, Theora, etc., either. Or, for you tin-foil hatters, just because it's a conspiracy doesn't mean the conspiracy doesn't know what it's talking about.
That's why Canada should strike first.
That's pretty much my assumption, too, but if you pull up the control panel on my Logitech wireless keyboard (that's right, I use one -- come an' get me, copper!), select the "Keyboard" pane, and click the icon that looks like a "wireless thing", you see this:
Maybe the marketing folks got hold of this particular feature and gave it a more saleable spin.
(Incidentally, that's correct ... there is a "security" feature on my keyboard, but it doesn't bother to let you know that the connection has been reset to insecure until you go and check the control panel yourself. I have no idea when the almost-meaningless encryption got shut off, but I'll click it back on now.)