Yeah, I mean, why let something like logic get in the way of some good Slashdot nerdrage?
In any case, I think people here are worked up in part because they think she's a quack and there's no medical science behind what she's selling, which is almost surely true. But that's a failure of the FDA and FTC and the powers vested in them by Congress, not of trademark law.
While this sounds like a somewhat aggressive use of trademark law, if she's really just preventing people from falsely creating the impression that they are selling endorsed or licensed products or otherwise making use of her name to compete against her own products, I don't see anything worth nerdraging about from a trademark perspective.
I hate quacks as much as the next geek, but we should hate them because they reject science and mislead the public, rather than that they are enforcing trademarks aggressively.
Or... because I've had mobile email with everybody I work with and my immediate family for at least 6-7 years now. Texting is inferior in almost every way. I only use it when I need to ensure that a message is read immediately, or I am sending a message to somebody that I know doesn't have mobile email. The idea of having long, IM-style conversations via text message like teenagers do is sort of absurd to me.
Well, obviously they have no obligation to stick around, but usually once that many people get sucked into a game, it takes a while for them to get sick of it and leave. But yes, I am completely aware that this isn't a magical perpetuity.
130,000 players, spending $28/month, that's about $48M/year gross revenues. If nobody could figure out how to buy that asset out of bankruptcy, spend a couple mil a year on servers and bandwidth, pay a few people to administer it and create ongoing content and turn a profit, that's baffling to me. There must be more to the story than that, like they simply were unhappy with the bids they were getting because they were valuing it based on crazy metrics, or the amount they spent to develop it in the first place. Weird.
Yeah, I think this stuff is used in small quantities in lots of clever applications that we just don't tend to think of regularly. The people whining about it being just hype are pissed that it hasn't enabled flying cars or large mechanical robot suits yet.
Hey, those fancy glasses of mine have saved me hundreds of dollars over the last 6-7 years. Do you have any idea how often I used to fall asleep with my glasses on, only to wake up in the morning only to find a cracked pair of glasses frames? Now I can fall asleep on top of my glasses, bending them in half, and my nose will break long before my glasses.
Okay, in that case, rather than the previous owner regaining the property, they'd settle with the title insurer for an amount equal to the fair market value of the house, and the innocent buyer of the property would get to keep the property.
In either situation, the title insurer assumes the liability and protects the purchaser from a claim from a defrauded prior owner somewhere along the chain of ownership, which is a valuable function (although title insurance seems in general to be quite overpriced relative to the actual probability of this happening).
Title insurance guarantees that the seller has the right to transfer the title at the time of the sale. In this case, the person claiming to be the seller wasn't actually the seller, so they didn't have the right to transfer that title.
I just visited the web sites of several title insurance companies and they all seem to talk about protecting against identity theft and faked signatures transferring title, so they at least seem to be *claiming* to insure against this sort of event.
The major browser Javascript engines (with the apparent exception of IE) are all now within the ballpark of each other. And they all make slightly different tradeoffs and are optimized for slightly different conditions, and have all released benchmarks that illustrate the strong points of their browsers.
If you look at v8bench (Google's Javascript benchmark), sunspider (the Webkit Javascript benchmark), and now Kraken (Mozilla's Javascript benchmark), you'll see that the latest browser versions are basically within 5-30% of each other on identical hardware. Which one comes out ahead depends on whose set of optimization parameters you think is most important.
Attacking Mozilla for doing the same thing every other major browser maker does (not that your post was, but other posters have) is silly.
And it's not like our broadband is cheaper in Manhattan, despite the population density. Know why? Most buildings are mini-monopolies or oligopolies, and so cable and internet companies have a patchwork of areas that they "own". I'm sure it's fairly expensive to support the infrastructure here due to that patchwork effect and high labor costs.
In my building, your cable can come from Time Warner. You do, admittedly, have a choice between Verizon and Time Warner for internet service (FiOS from Verizon as of 6 months ago, cable modem from Time Warner), but those are your only two choices.
I'd switch to FiOS, but it's not any cheaper, though it might be faster or more reliable (in truth, Time Warner cable internet service is very fast in my building 99% of the time, much better than in previous buildings I've lived in).
My cell reception was always minimal in our classrooms, but I suppose that's not the case everywhere. You could of course just say "you can use a calculator, you can use your laptop without wifi, but no cellular phones or devices with cellular network access". Then if you catch them violating that rule you fail them.:)
It's never going to possible to prevent all forms of cheating, the disabled wifi access just prevents casual and rampant cheating.
Alternatively, a multi-band cell phone jammer to cover a small area costs a few hundred dollars, if you must have a technological solution.
In business school at Columbia University, wifi access was disabled for your login and password when you were scheduled for a final exam, at least if a professor requested it. This was In 2006/2007 when I was getting my MBA. Obviously this requires a proper provisioning system for wifi access school wide, but it is the ideal solution to allow gizmo and laptop use without network-based cheating.
Actually, in the US the unknowing buyers would be compensated by their title insurance company and the seller would get his house back. This is exactly why we have title insurance on real estate transactions.
Just a piece of advice - the local town lawyer, you know, the guy who advertises on billboards and bus stops, is probably useless for anything but the simplest and most common legal issues. Based on your description of your experiences, that's probably who you are seeing. Or you just had exceptionally bad luck or suck at picking lawyers as others have suggested.
When you have an IP issue, you really can't talk to a non-IP-lawyer about it, it's a waste of time. If an IP lawyer didn't understand the difference between copyright and trademark, you are probably talking about a local podunk lawyer who hung a shingle on his office door that said "IP lawyer". That's not a real IP lawyer.
If you have a labor law issue as the original poster does, you go to a labor/employment lawyer, explain your case, and if they can't tell you about the applicable laws in your state that protect you and how you can use those laws in this situation, move on to the next labor lawyer.
Having a good relationship with one smart lawyer in a large enough firm, who can refer you to specialists in other areas of the law, either within their firm or within other firms, is always a good thing.
According to http://arewefastyet.com/ they have come from being 2x-3x slower than Safari and Chrome a few months ago (v8/sunspider benchmarks) to being within a few percent to 25% of Safari and Chrome, depending on the benchmark.
I think that's pretty impressive - it basically puts them in the right ball game now, and narrows the performance gap to the barely noticeable range for most practical purposes.
Oh, come on. I was born in 1979 and the word "gay" most certainly meant "homosexual". If anybody had used that word to mean "happy" or "colorful" when I was in school, a roomful of children would have laughed raucously. I can only assume you aren't from the United States if it had a different meaning to you a decade ago.
These default judgments for absurd amounts of money just show how broken our legal system is. If somebody doesn't show up to a court house for a lawsuit in the millions of dollars, it's probably because they weren't properly notified.
In fact, looking at thedirt.com, there's a posting about it on top of the page. The person seems as baffled and confused as the rest of us. The site looks like a random Wordpress blog tracking celebrity gossip, almost certainly a one-person operation with no budget or staff. The address on file for the domain is that of DomainsByProxy, and notice was probably never delivered to the actual site owner.
Did the judge ever consider that possibility before issuing an $11M default judgment against an individual? By simple inspection, one can see that Thedirt.com is very obviously not the product of a global mega-media-corporation with billions of dollars to sue for.
Why would you ruin someone's life without forcing proper process-serving and making sure the person or a lawyer for them show up? The civil system in the US needs to be torn apart and started again from scratch, or merged into the criminal system like in (some?) European countries.
Oh come on, he was pretty fucking cool when he worked with Dr. Dre to make The Chronic, back in 1992. That was a great album.
Doggystyle, Snoop's first real studio album, came out in 1993 and it wasn't bad. It definitely had its cool moments. But yeah, I think it's been mostly downhill since then for him in terms of "cool".
I don't disagree that Wikileaks is stepping in to fill a vacuum of real, investigative journalism and actual news created by the shift to infotainment-BS created by Fox News and the rush to follow their model by formerly-real-news sources like CNN. I do however strongly disagree with your claim the the war in Afghanistan was "illegal" or even unjustified - it was entirely justified by the fact that the regime controlling most of Afghanistan (the Taliban) was supporting and harboring Al Qaeda. Don't lump Afghanistan in with George Bush's ridiculous, ill-conceived war in Iraq that truly had nothing to do with global terrorism when it was started - the Al Qaeda elements there only moved in after we toppled the Iraqi regime.
Afghanistan needed to be invaded. It's just that the war there was so utterly botched after the initial invasion that it's not clear how to go about stabilizing the country enough to make it self-sufficient and reasonably secure.
After reading this, assuming it's at all accurate, whatever you attribute these charges to, they are all absolutely ridiculous. So... the guy had sex with two women, both groupies, who found out about the other one, and then got angry that they had agreed to have sex without a condom with him because shocker-of-shockers, he had banged some other woman recently.
This is classic rape-after-the-fact, i.e. not rape at all, since they had already consented to the relationship. There is nothing in any of this to indicate that the guy forced himself or coerced anybody. Nor even that he lied or misled anybody, beyond saying that he'd call and then not calling.
I think Julian Assange is a narcissistic creepy fellow, and I have serious reservations about some of what Wikileaks has done. I support the goal of more openness in government, but they do a terrible job at presenting information in an unbiased fashion (at least with those leaked videos) and they dump out huge volumes of classified information without consideration as to whether the public interest in that material outweighs the risk to people's lives of having that information disclosed.
I don't claim to know whether these charges originate with the US Government in any way, but it sounds more like the by-product of the Swedish legal system gone completely and absolutely bonker-nuts-insane, having criminalized relatively normal everyday behavior among single men and women.
You are using the word "creationist" in an absurd fashion, to describe everybody who existed before Darwin (or were his contemporaries). Most people here on Slashdot and in general use it to describe people in the *modern* era who reject the large body of scientific work that has followed from Darwin's work and that of some of his contemporaries. This evidence has been built up over the last hundred-and-fifty years or so, and is more-or-less impossible for a rational scientific person to reject at this point in time.
A young-earth-creationist is somebody who rejects more than just that, but also much of the rest of physics, chemistry, geology, etc. Those are the serious loons. But a few hundred years ago, plenty of scientists might have believed in a young earth - doesn't mean we'd call them "young earth creationists" in the modern sense.
The point is that in order to label somebody for rejecting something, they had to have had access to a similar body of evidence.
The Statue of Liberty trip is practically an in-joke among New Yorkers. Many (most?) New Yorkers have never been to it, though everybody can see it when you're driving around the bottom of the FDR or West Side Highway. I actually have a beautiful view of it from my living room (I live right on the Hudson River), and have never actually taken the ferry to the Statue of Liberty proper, though I once took a ferry trip to Ellis Island, and that boat took us around the Statue for a fairly close look.
The lines to take the ferry to Liberty Island are ridiculously long on weekends (like 3-4 hours), I walk by them every weekend on my morning walks through Battery Park, so unless you have a weekday off in the city, it actually takes as long to go to the Statue of Liberty as it does to drive to Boston.
Same reason I've never been to the top of the Empire State Building - ridiculous lines.
And then they promptly dropped all charges and admitted there was no reason to suspect he had committed rape. Basically this turns out to have been a dirty trick to smear the guy's name. So much for probably cause and highest degree of suspicion.
While we have undoubtedly exported some nasty results with our foreign policy, the US is also unique in the amount of good it has produced - you know, little things that better the world like computers, the internet, and a large amount of modern medical technology. Whether that has, overall, outweighed the evil we have produced, I'm just not sure and I doubt anybody can easily answer that question.
And I'm not really sure that the stuff done in the name of fighting communism was truly evil though some of the results were very nasty. Communism and the threat of nuclear war were scary and were perceived as existential threats by many at the time. It sounds completely ludicrous now that we know that the Soviet economy was overextended and straining to keep up during the Cold War era, but it's unfair to judge the past with full knowledge of the outcomes.
Yes, yes, and double yes! Firefox *IS* faster than most other browsers in every part of browser performance that matters *except* Javascript speed. But yeah, browser load time and overhead, as well as initial rendering and scroll-rendering speed are all critical to the browser experience for me.
I have tried Chrome 3 times now and every time I give up on it - mostly because I find scrolling performance on complex HTML pages to be distractingly bad. Firefox does not have this problem - it is zippy and smooth, at least on modern Core 2 Duo or better hardware. I gather that for lower end hardware, Webkit seems to do better.
I know that on the 10% of websites with intensive Javascript code, Chrome will blow the pants off of Firefox right now, but this is not the primary use case of the web for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I mean, why let something like logic get in the way of some good Slashdot nerdrage?
In any case, I think people here are worked up in part because they think she's a quack and there's no medical science behind what she's selling, which is almost surely true. But that's a failure of the FDA and FTC and the powers vested in them by Congress, not of trademark law.
While this sounds like a somewhat aggressive use of trademark law, if she's really just preventing people from falsely creating the impression that they are selling endorsed or licensed products or otherwise making use of her name to compete against her own products, I don't see anything worth nerdraging about from a trademark perspective.
I hate quacks as much as the next geek, but we should hate them because they reject science and mislead the public, rather than that they are enforcing trademarks aggressively.
Or... because I've had mobile email with everybody I work with and my immediate family for at least 6-7 years now. Texting is inferior in almost every way. I only use it when I need to ensure that a message is read immediately, or I am sending a message to somebody that I know doesn't have mobile email. The idea of having long, IM-style conversations via text message like teenagers do is sort of absurd to me.
Well, obviously they have no obligation to stick around, but usually once that many people get sucked into a game, it takes a while for them to get sick of it and leave. But yes, I am completely aware that this isn't a magical perpetuity.
130,000 players, spending $28/month, that's about $48M/year gross revenues. If nobody could figure out how to buy that asset out of bankruptcy, spend a couple mil a year on servers and bandwidth, pay a few people to administer it and create ongoing content and turn a profit, that's baffling to me. There must be more to the story than that, like they simply were unhappy with the bids they were getting because they were valuing it based on crazy metrics, or the amount they spent to develop it in the first place. Weird.
Yeah, I think this stuff is used in small quantities in lots of clever applications that we just don't tend to think of regularly. The people whining about it being just hype are pissed that it hasn't enabled flying cars or large mechanical robot suits yet.
Hey, those fancy glasses of mine have saved me hundreds of dollars over the last 6-7 years. Do you have any idea how often I used to fall asleep with my glasses on, only to wake up in the morning only to find a cracked pair of glasses frames? Now I can fall asleep on top of my glasses, bending them in half, and my nose will break long before my glasses.
Okay, in that case, rather than the previous owner regaining the property, they'd settle with the title insurer for an amount equal to the fair market value of the house, and the innocent buyer of the property would get to keep the property.
In either situation, the title insurer assumes the liability and protects the purchaser from a claim from a defrauded prior owner somewhere along the chain of ownership, which is a valuable function (although title insurance seems in general to be quite overpriced relative to the actual probability of this happening).
Title insurance guarantees that the seller has the right to transfer the title at the time of the sale. In this case, the person claiming to be the seller wasn't actually the seller, so they didn't have the right to transfer that title.
I just visited the web sites of several title insurance companies and they all seem to talk about protecting against identity theft and faked signatures transferring title, so they at least seem to be *claiming* to insure against this sort of event.
The major browser Javascript engines (with the apparent exception of IE) are all now within the ballpark of each other. And they all make slightly different tradeoffs and are optimized for slightly different conditions, and have all released benchmarks that illustrate the strong points of their browsers.
If you look at v8bench (Google's Javascript benchmark), sunspider (the Webkit Javascript benchmark), and now Kraken (Mozilla's Javascript benchmark), you'll see that the latest browser versions are basically within 5-30% of each other on identical hardware. Which one comes out ahead depends on whose set of optimization parameters you think is most important.
Attacking Mozilla for doing the same thing every other major browser maker does (not that your post was, but other posters have) is silly.
And it's not like our broadband is cheaper in Manhattan, despite the population density. Know why? Most buildings are mini-monopolies or oligopolies, and so cable and internet companies have a patchwork of areas that they "own". I'm sure it's fairly expensive to support the infrastructure here due to that patchwork effect and high labor costs.
In my building, your cable can come from Time Warner. You do, admittedly, have a choice between Verizon and Time Warner for internet service (FiOS from Verizon as of 6 months ago, cable modem from Time Warner), but those are your only two choices.
I'd switch to FiOS, but it's not any cheaper, though it might be faster or more reliable (in truth, Time Warner cable internet service is very fast in my building 99% of the time, much better than in previous buildings I've lived in).
My cell reception was always minimal in our classrooms, but I suppose that's not the case everywhere. You could of course just say "you can use a calculator, you can use your laptop without wifi, but no cellular phones or devices with cellular network access". Then if you catch them violating that rule you fail them. :)
It's never going to possible to prevent all forms of cheating, the disabled wifi access just prevents casual and rampant cheating.
Alternatively, a multi-band cell phone jammer to cover a small area costs a few hundred dollars, if you must have a technological solution.
In business school at Columbia University, wifi access was disabled for your login and password when you were scheduled for a final exam, at least if a professor requested it. This was In 2006/2007 when I was getting my MBA. Obviously this requires a proper provisioning system for wifi access school wide, but it is the ideal solution to allow gizmo and laptop use without network-based cheating.
Actually, in the US the unknowing buyers would be compensated by their title insurance company and the seller would get his house back. This is exactly why we have title insurance on real estate transactions.
Just a piece of advice - the local town lawyer, you know, the guy who advertises on billboards and bus stops, is probably useless for anything but the simplest and most common legal issues. Based on your description of your experiences, that's probably who you are seeing. Or you just had exceptionally bad luck or suck at picking lawyers as others have suggested.
When you have an IP issue, you really can't talk to a non-IP-lawyer about it, it's a waste of time. If an IP lawyer didn't understand the difference between copyright and trademark, you are probably talking about a local podunk lawyer who hung a shingle on his office door that said "IP lawyer". That's not a real IP lawyer.
If you have a labor law issue as the original poster does, you go to a labor/employment lawyer, explain your case, and if they can't tell you about the applicable laws in your state that protect you and how you can use those laws in this situation, move on to the next labor lawyer.
Having a good relationship with one smart lawyer in a large enough firm, who can refer you to specialists in other areas of the law, either within their firm or within other firms, is always a good thing.
According to http://arewefastyet.com/ they have come from being 2x-3x slower than Safari and Chrome a few months ago (v8/sunspider benchmarks) to being within a few percent to 25% of Safari and Chrome, depending on the benchmark.
I think that's pretty impressive - it basically puts them in the right ball game now, and narrows the performance gap to the barely noticeable range for most practical purposes.
Oh, come on. I was born in 1979 and the word "gay" most certainly meant "homosexual". If anybody had used that word to mean "happy" or "colorful" when I was in school, a roomful of children would have laughed raucously. I can only assume you aren't from the United States if it had a different meaning to you a decade ago.
These default judgments for absurd amounts of money just show how broken our legal system is. If somebody doesn't show up to a court house for a lawsuit in the millions of dollars, it's probably because they weren't properly notified.
In fact, looking at thedirt.com, there's a posting about it on top of the page. The person seems as baffled and confused as the rest of us. The site looks like a random Wordpress blog tracking celebrity gossip, almost certainly a one-person operation with no budget or staff. The address on file for the domain is that of DomainsByProxy, and notice was probably never delivered to the actual site owner.
Did the judge ever consider that possibility before issuing an $11M default judgment against an individual? By simple inspection, one can see that Thedirt.com is very obviously not the product of a global mega-media-corporation with billions of dollars to sue for.
Why would you ruin someone's life without forcing proper process-serving and making sure the person or a lawyer for them show up? The civil system in the US needs to be torn apart and started again from scratch, or merged into the criminal system like in (some?) European countries.
Oh come on, he was pretty fucking cool when he worked with Dr. Dre to make The Chronic, back in 1992. That was a great album.
Doggystyle, Snoop's first real studio album, came out in 1993 and it wasn't bad. It definitely had its cool moments. But yeah, I think it's been mostly downhill since then for him in terms of "cool".
I don't disagree that Wikileaks is stepping in to fill a vacuum of real, investigative journalism and actual news created by the shift to infotainment-BS created by Fox News and the rush to follow their model by formerly-real-news sources like CNN. I do however strongly disagree with your claim the the war in Afghanistan was "illegal" or even unjustified - it was entirely justified by the fact that the regime controlling most of Afghanistan (the Taliban) was supporting and harboring Al Qaeda. Don't lump Afghanistan in with George Bush's ridiculous, ill-conceived war in Iraq that truly had nothing to do with global terrorism when it was started - the Al Qaeda elements there only moved in after we toppled the Iraqi regime.
Afghanistan needed to be invaded. It's just that the war there was so utterly botched after the initial invasion that it's not clear how to go about stabilizing the country enough to make it self-sufficient and reasonably secure.
After reading this, assuming it's at all accurate, whatever you attribute these charges to, they are all absolutely ridiculous. So... the guy had sex with two women, both groupies, who found out about the other one, and then got angry that they had agreed to have sex without a condom with him because shocker-of-shockers, he had banged some other woman recently.
This is classic rape-after-the-fact, i.e. not rape at all, since they had already consented to the relationship. There is nothing in any of this to indicate that the guy forced himself or coerced anybody. Nor even that he lied or misled anybody, beyond saying that he'd call and then not calling.
I think Julian Assange is a narcissistic creepy fellow, and I have serious reservations about some of what Wikileaks has done. I support the goal of more openness in government, but they do a terrible job at presenting information in an unbiased fashion (at least with those leaked videos) and they dump out huge volumes of classified information without consideration as to whether the public interest in that material outweighs the risk to people's lives of having that information disclosed.
I don't claim to know whether these charges originate with the US Government in any way, but it sounds more like the by-product of the Swedish legal system gone completely and absolutely bonker-nuts-insane, having criminalized relatively normal everyday behavior among single men and women.
You are using the word "creationist" in an absurd fashion, to describe everybody who existed before Darwin (or were his contemporaries). Most people here on Slashdot and in general use it to describe people in the *modern* era who reject the large body of scientific work that has followed from Darwin's work and that of some of his contemporaries. This evidence has been built up over the last hundred-and-fifty years or so, and is more-or-less impossible for a rational scientific person to reject at this point in time.
A young-earth-creationist is somebody who rejects more than just that, but also much of the rest of physics, chemistry, geology, etc. Those are the serious loons. But a few hundred years ago, plenty of scientists might have believed in a young earth - doesn't mean we'd call them "young earth creationists" in the modern sense.
The point is that in order to label somebody for rejecting something, they had to have had access to a similar body of evidence.
The Statue of Liberty trip is practically an in-joke among New Yorkers. Many (most?) New Yorkers have never been to it, though everybody can see it when you're driving around the bottom of the FDR or West Side Highway. I actually have a beautiful view of it from my living room (I live right on the Hudson River), and have never actually taken the ferry to the Statue of Liberty proper, though I once took a ferry trip to Ellis Island, and that boat took us around the Statue for a fairly close look.
The lines to take the ferry to Liberty Island are ridiculously long on weekends (like 3-4 hours), I walk by them every weekend on my morning walks through Battery Park, so unless you have a weekday off in the city, it actually takes as long to go to the Statue of Liberty as it does to drive to Boston.
Same reason I've never been to the top of the Empire State Building - ridiculous lines.
And then they promptly dropped all charges and admitted there was no reason to suspect he had committed rape. Basically this turns out to have been a dirty trick to smear the guy's name. So much for probably cause and highest degree of suspicion.
While we have undoubtedly exported some nasty results with our foreign policy, the US is also unique in the amount of good it has produced - you know, little things that better the world like computers, the internet, and a large amount of modern medical technology. Whether that has, overall, outweighed the evil we have produced, I'm just not sure and I doubt anybody can easily answer that question.
And I'm not really sure that the stuff done in the name of fighting communism was truly evil though some of the results were very nasty. Communism and the threat of nuclear war were scary and were perceived as existential threats by many at the time. It sounds completely ludicrous now that we know that the Soviet economy was overextended and straining to keep up during the Cold War era, but it's unfair to judge the past with full knowledge of the outcomes.
Yes, yes, and double yes! Firefox *IS* faster than most other browsers in every part of browser performance that matters *except* Javascript speed. But yeah, browser load time and overhead, as well as initial rendering and scroll-rendering speed are all critical to the browser experience for me.
I have tried Chrome 3 times now and every time I give up on it - mostly because I find scrolling performance on complex HTML pages to be distractingly bad. Firefox does not have this problem - it is zippy and smooth, at least on modern Core 2 Duo or better hardware. I gather that for lower end hardware, Webkit seems to do better.
I know that on the 10% of websites with intensive Javascript code, Chrome will blow the pants off of Firefox right now, but this is not the primary use case of the web for me.