While I agree this seems like a bad trademark, to be fair, trademarks do not impact your ability to communicate. They are for conflicts between companies, deciding which company gets to use which words in their product names. They have zero impact outside that narrow domain.
And the vast majority of the time this is a good thing, even if occasionally we get bad actors like this that somehow manage to get a trademark they probably should not have been able to get issued.
That strikes me as a MUCH better solution. Well, not quite solution, but it would help a great deal.
Part of the problem with trying to use market ideas to improve the situation is that available organs will always be in VERY short supply. The number of bodies that are actually in a condition to have organs harvested per day is pretty small (except for organs that can non-fatally be removed like kidneys), while demand is pretty high. No matter how good the incentive is, the supply will simply never be there, which means the market would shift to only the very wealthy being able to afford them while today the availably across the economic range is pretty good.
This is actually a good example of where regulation probably would have helped. To skim the game theory element of this, there was an arms race among advertisers for increasingly intrusive ads, with any firm that did not participate seeing its revenue vanish because its competitors would. No one could depend on voluntary industry regulation since any company breaking ranks would make out like bandits and all the companies playing nice suffer. Thus you had the classic race to the bottom since the reward structure punished otherwise.
Regulators did not step in, industry regulation was broken, so consumers found a way to deal with the problem, but it was a way that hurt the whole advertising ecosystem.In a very real way, industry fighting against the idea of an external entity keeping everyone in check doomed us all.
radfem is still around and does get new members, but they have pretty much zero political or influence on society outside being held up as examples of feminism according to people who really want feminism to go away.
Yeah, this really strikes me as an FAA matter rather then an FCC one. The FCC's domain is determining if cell phones interact with flight systems, and it pretty much ends there. The FAA on the other hand might have the authority to re-ban them. I am actually not sure on that though.
The key is the belief in natural laws. I see it a lot in the EvoPsych crowd, which uses a pop interpretation of evolution to explain why women and men each have their place in society and deviating from that is unhealthy.
It is also possible that their underwriters could claim that Target did not take due diligence in protecting its network and thus a full payout is not warranted. Insurance companies do not like being treated like a blank check to not take precautions.
I am picturing all the people I have known over the years that get up in arms when they hear about creationism being taught in school but also believe that feminism is destroying society by interfering with natural laws or whatever.
Who deserves what is a huge part of their current philosophy. I have always been amazed at how they can both claim that the poor deserve what they get, yet they deserve more because other groups are artificially interfering with what they are owed.
While PayPal turned into a juggernaught, it is still a useful argument since the vast majority of services doing the same thing as PayPal failed. PayPal managed to overcome the problem, but it is still a fundamental obstacle that stood in its way.
I suspect that like many auctions, they will simply offer up the entire wallet (or wallets) as a single item for sale and some hedge fund will buy it up. I doubt they will bother with even touching the exchanges.
Frustrating, but cheap. However, this is not a black and white thing, we are not seeing an elimination of EE in the US, only a reduction. The things that can easily be moved to off shore design teams who work closely with manufacturers are having that done, while other tasks stay local. The troubling part is that as more infrastructure develops off shore, more and more parts of a project can be shifted there. They can handle higher and higher level parts of the project, meaning the language barrier becomes a smaller and smaller problem.
The problem is, what they wrote has very little to do with how communism is actually implemented. The words are aesthetically linked, but when we talk about communism in the real world in stead of a class on political theory or history, the definitions get a lot more murky.
I would actually point a finger at a different culprit, firmware and SoC. Over the last decade or so there has been a steady move away from specialized hardware to more general devices that can be programmed. While far from a complete conversion, it has been slowly reducing the amount of EE specific work needed for many projects. Why have someone design an entire board when you can have a chip do it? Esp given the simplified testing and FCC/UL validation?
On the other hand, it is GTK is LGPL rather then GPL, which means many projects favor it for pragmatic or philosophical reasons. WxWidgets, while the license is pretty permissive, has some pretty sketchy bindings (ok, I am mostly thinking wxPython, which makes my life miserable). So GTK can be a 'best worst option'.
Though more commonly, it offends people who have their self image tied up in the idea that they fully earned what they have with no inherent advantages. Bring up the idea that some particular factor made things easier for them somehow invalidates everything else they have done in their minds.
In actual economic models and historical records, yes, increasing wages almost always has a positive effect on the economy as a whole. The problem with things like raising wages is largely political/philosophical. It is kinda strange in that it is one of those areas where 'bleeding hearts' and 'realpolitik' overlap.
*nod* communism and capitalism, as pure forms, suffer from the same basic flaw which results in them being nearly indistinguishable when actually implemented in practice. Ideologues judge their systems based on the best case scenario and how much better things would be, but the real value in a system is how resilient it is to things NOT being ideal and how much impact corruption can have.
I think the difference, at least where the FTC comes in, is the 'deceptive trade practices', probably from complaints registered with them. Until we see some kind of official document from the FTC it is hard to say why this company is being singled out (or if they even ARE being singled out) or what the actual charges are.
On the other hand, "MPHJ" arguments for why they should be exempt are pretty baseless. Not commerce? Sorry, IP is still commerce. 1st Amendment? Sorry, the government can not stop you from talking but there are many things that when said to other people are crimes when they threaten negative actions unless the other party pays up. These are pretty desperate arguments by someone who found a way to scam money and is discovering that authoritatively creative talk works well on small businesses without the resources to check but poorly when used on actual lawyers.
The problem with 'rich guys' is that as a society we highly prize wealth and associate it with superiority in general. If one knows how to make lots of money then usually they are seen (and see themselves) as being generally more intelligent then people who do not. Some get really wrapped up in this perception and forget that they are domain experts, really good at a narrow (but profitable) field but not necessarily skilled in other fields. It is the same basic problem we see in tech sites like slashdot (I am an engineer! that means I understand sociology and economics better then those experts that make half my income!) and why the small business lobby is so easy to manipulate (I made a bunch of money, so I understand how to build a good economy!). Scale up to richer people and the effect can get even more pronounced.
*nods* small companies can easily be bullied into submission by legal threats and bizzar arguments, federal institutions not so much. Granted if you are a multi-billion dollar company you can bully the government into leaving you alone, but I doubt this troll has the resources to make much of a mark.
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While I agree this seems like a bad trademark, to be fair, trademarks do not impact your ability to communicate. They are for conflicts between companies, deciding which company gets to use which words in their product names. They have zero impact outside that narrow domain.
And the vast majority of the time this is a good thing, even if occasionally we get bad actors like this that somehow manage to get a trademark they probably should not have been able to get issued.
That strikes me as a MUCH better solution. Well, not quite solution, but it would help a great deal.
Part of the problem with trying to use market ideas to improve the situation is that available organs will always be in VERY short supply. The number of bodies that are actually in a condition to have organs harvested per day is pretty small (except for organs that can non-fatally be removed like kidneys), while demand is pretty high. No matter how good the incentive is, the supply will simply never be there, which means the market would shift to only the very wealthy being able to afford them while today the availably across the economic range is pretty good.
This is actually a good example of where regulation probably would have helped. To skim the game theory element of this, there was an arms race among advertisers for increasingly intrusive ads, with any firm that did not participate seeing its revenue vanish because its competitors would. No one could depend on voluntary industry regulation since any company breaking ranks would make out like bandits and all the companies playing nice suffer. Thus you had the classic race to the bottom since the reward structure punished otherwise.
Regulators did not step in, industry regulation was broken, so consumers found a way to deal with the problem, but it was a way that hurt the whole advertising ecosystem.In a very real way, industry fighting against the idea of an external entity keeping everyone in check doomed us all.
Not anymore. Firefox for instance removed the ability to disable javascript through a simple checkbox.
radfem is still around and does get new members, but they have pretty much zero political or influence on society outside being held up as examples of feminism according to people who really want feminism to go away.
Yeah, this really strikes me as an FAA matter rather then an FCC one. The FCC's domain is determining if cell phones interact with flight systems, and it pretty much ends there. The FAA on the other hand might have the authority to re-ban them. I am actually not sure on that though.
The key is the belief in natural laws. I see it a lot in the EvoPsych crowd, which uses a pop interpretation of evolution to explain why women and men each have their place in society and deviating from that is unhealthy.
It is also possible that their underwriters could claim that Target did not take due diligence in protecting its network and thus a full payout is not warranted. Insurance companies do not like being treated like a blank check to not take precautions.
I am picturing all the people I have known over the years that get up in arms when they hear about creationism being taught in school but also believe that feminism is destroying society by interfering with natural laws or whatever.
Who deserves what is a huge part of their current philosophy. I have always been amazed at how they can both claim that the poor deserve what they get, yet they deserve more because other groups are artificially interfering with what they are owed.
While PayPal turned into a juggernaught, it is still a useful argument since the vast majority of services doing the same thing as PayPal failed. PayPal managed to overcome the problem, but it is still a fundamental obstacle that stood in its way.
I suspect that like many auctions, they will simply offer up the entire wallet (or wallets) as a single item for sale and some hedge fund will buy it up. I doubt they will bother with even touching the exchanges.
Well, there are always oil futures....
Frustrating, but cheap. However, this is not a black and white thing, we are not seeing an elimination of EE in the US, only a reduction. The things that can easily be moved to off shore design teams who work closely with manufacturers are having that done, while other tasks stay local. The troubling part is that as more infrastructure develops off shore, more and more parts of a project can be shifted there. They can handle higher and higher level parts of the project, meaning the language barrier becomes a smaller and smaller problem.
The problem is, what they wrote has very little to do with how communism is actually implemented. The words are aesthetically linked, but when we talk about communism in the real world in stead of a class on political theory or history, the definitions get a lot more murky.
I would actually point a finger at a different culprit, firmware and SoC. Over the last decade or so there has been a steady move away from specialized hardware to more general devices that can be programmed. While far from a complete conversion, it has been slowly reducing the amount of EE specific work needed for many projects. Why have someone design an entire board when you can have a chip do it? Esp given the simplified testing and FCC/UL validation?
oops. I was actually thinking of PyQt, which does not have the LGPL option. I had forgotten that the underlying QT implementation did.
On the other hand, it is GTK is LGPL rather then GPL, which means many projects favor it for pragmatic or philosophical reasons. WxWidgets, while the license is pretty permissive, has some pretty sketchy bindings (ok, I am mostly thinking wxPython, which makes my life miserable). So GTK can be a 'best worst option'.
Though more commonly, it offends people who have their self image tied up in the idea that they fully earned what they have with no inherent advantages. Bring up the idea that some particular factor made things easier for them somehow invalidates everything else they have done in their minds.
Which often becomes a bit of a cycle which results in people (starting as children) fill the roll that people assume they will fill.
In actual economic models and historical records, yes, increasing wages almost always has a positive effect on the economy as a whole. The problem with things like raising wages is largely political/philosophical. It is kinda strange in that it is one of those areas where 'bleeding hearts' and 'realpolitik' overlap.
*nod* communism and capitalism, as pure forms, suffer from the same basic flaw which results in them being nearly indistinguishable when actually implemented in practice. Ideologues judge their systems based on the best case scenario and how much better things would be, but the real value in a system is how resilient it is to things NOT being ideal and how much impact corruption can have.
I think the difference, at least where the FTC comes in, is the 'deceptive trade practices', probably from complaints registered with them. Until we see some kind of official document from the FTC it is hard to say why this company is being singled out (or if they even ARE being singled out) or what the actual charges are.
On the other hand, "MPHJ" arguments for why they should be exempt are pretty baseless. Not commerce? Sorry, IP is still commerce. 1st Amendment? Sorry, the government can not stop you from talking but there are many things that when said to other people are crimes when they threaten negative actions unless the other party pays up. These are pretty desperate arguments by someone who found a way to scam money and is discovering that authoritatively creative talk works well on small businesses without the resources to check but poorly when used on actual lawyers.
The problem with 'rich guys' is that as a society we highly prize wealth and associate it with superiority in general. If one knows how to make lots of money then usually they are seen (and see themselves) as being generally more intelligent then people who do not. Some get really wrapped up in this perception and forget that they are domain experts, really good at a narrow (but profitable) field but not necessarily skilled in other fields. It is the same basic problem we see in tech sites like slashdot (I am an engineer! that means I understand sociology and economics better then those experts that make half my income!) and why the small business lobby is so easy to manipulate (I made a bunch of money, so I understand how to build a good economy!). Scale up to richer people and the effect can get even more pronounced.
*nods* small companies can easily be bullied into submission by legal threats and bizzar arguments, federal institutions not so much. Granted if you are a multi-billion dollar company you can bully the government into leaving you alone, but I doubt this troll has the resources to make much of a mark.