You're confusing patents, copyright, and trademark so much that I can't make heads or tails of what you're raving about.
A company I know of applies for a copyright to a word (not common everyday word, but the name of a famous person from old times).
Copyright does not apply to "a word". Perhaps the company in question applied for a trademark.
There are hundreds upon HUNDREDS of other patents that were granted the copyright
This is complete gibberish. I really have no clue what you're trying to say.
The copyright that this particular company applied for was not only under a different category than all of the above, but it even had another acronym attached to the name, so it was TRULY unique.
Assuming you're referring to trademarks, appending a couple letters to the end doesn't make an old trademark new again. Trademarks exist to protect consumers from getting confused between different brands. Ever seen "Durasell" batteries? That would never fly in the US, because under trademark law, even though Durasell is "unique", it could (and, of course, does) confuse consumers into thinking that it is the same as Duracell.
Similar trade names can be granted individual trademarks if they exist in separate-enough markets. That's why Apple Computer was once barred from entering the music business by the court system. Even though Apple Computer didn't want to get into the label business, the Beatles' label's market was close enough to warrant concern about consumer confusion.
So if what you say is true and "hundreds" of other trademarks have already been granted, there stands a high chance that the intended market for your new trademark was too close to one of the hundreds.
So moral of the story is, you can have prior art all you want. You can LACK prior art all you want.
Prior art has little to do with trademark law.
I understand that saying "patents", "copyright", and "bad" is key to/. karma, but really. Get a clue. Thanks.
As part of the deal, Verizon would agree not to selectively throttle Internet traffic through its pipes. That would not, however, apply to data traveling over its wireless network for mobile phones, the report says.
I immediately found a very large irritant after upgrading. Previously, I had line-in set to play through to the speakers. There was a simple slider in sound preferences that existed back since at least 6.06. The same option exists under Windows. But suddenly, 9.10 removed this option. Line-in no longer plays through, and the option has been completely removed from the revamped (and somewhat disorganized) sound preference panels. I appreciate the effort to "modernize" the sound options like per-application tuning, but not at the cost of tossing simple, basic options that have existed since the invention of the sound card.
Also, regarding the bootup animations, they've changed for three or four consecutive upgrades now. I don't mind a refresher when appropriate, but "refreshing" every six months tells me that some priorities need some reordering.
So you say that the work required moving the cold water to the hot water is necessarily equivalent to that of directly heating the water. What if the water is 1mm away? 10m away? 1000 light years away? The work required for each of these is equivalent? Did you just discover a way to move water 1000 light years minus 1mm for free?
The problem with your "basic physics" is that work is equivalent only when the outcomes are exactly the same. Think about why heating x liters of water is not the same outcome as raising x liters of water some height.
Let me offer another example. Suppose that we want to heat 1L of 1-degree-C water to 50 degrees. It just so happens that we could move the 1L of water.00001m into thermal contact with a close-by 1L of water kept at 99 degrees. Now, the outcome of heating 1L of water to 50 degrees is the same, but the outcomes of the universe outside of that narrow scope are not identical. Opting for a 40% (or even far, far less) efficient mechanical pump saves energy over a heat pump heating the water 49 degrees because the work required for the two processes is not equivalent. (And, of course, if.00001m is changed to some obscenely large distance, opting for the the heat pump instead would be more efficient.)
No, it's not incorrect, you just failed to understand my point. You are isolating this study from other research and taking it at face value, whereas I am putting it in the context of substantial previous work and knowledge.
Imagine there were a study that correlated people letting go of things and those things falling to the ground. Taken at face value, as you do with this story, one should ask, for example, whether something else caused both the letting-go and the dropping-to-the-ground. But taken with previous knowledge, that would be an exercise in pointlessness; we all know what gravity is and that it exists, and so we can conclude that letting go of things is in a causal relationship with those things falling to the ground.
In other words, pedantry doesn't do anyone any good here, because we already have substantial evidence applicable to this new work. I appreciate your and the community's attention to correctness, but in this instance, it's being misapplied.
People, please stop tagging every study on Slashdot with correlationisnotcausation. I know it's standard here to believe this community is somehow more enlightened than all others, but do you really think that researchers became researchers without being able to ask simple questions? In fact, in an idealized study, it's not even a relevant question!
Moreover, this moronic practice is especially stupid for this story because the neurological effects of lithium salts have been explored for decades. This is not a revolutionary study by any means. So unless years and years of studies have gone horribly wrong, then yes, in this case, correlation does, in fact, imply causation.
If you voluntarily incapacitate yourself by getting drunk, you're responsible for any and all contracts you enter into while impaired. See Lucy v. Zehmer, the "heh, sure, I'll sell you my house for $100. I'll even sign a contract. I know you don't have a hundred dollars on you- oh, crap" case.
Erm... that's not even close to what Lucy was about. Lucy had little to do with intoxication. Straight from the op. Ct., "In was in fact conceded by defendants' counsel in oral argument that under the evidence Zehmer was not too drunk to make a valid contract."
Lucy revolved around whether the contract was valid based on "outward expression" rather than secret intent. Zehmer claimed he was "joking", despite talking for months about it, despite writing it down, despite getting his wife to co-sign it. The Court found that Lucy entered into the contract in good faith. If this contract weren't valid, how could any reasonable person want to enter into a contract ever without mind-reading capabilities?
Not only did Lucy actually believe, but the evidence shows he was warranted in believing, that the contract represented a serious business transaction and a good faith sale and purchase of the farm.
..."We must look to the outward expression of a person as manifesting his intention rather than to his secret and unexpressed intention...."
And that's why Lucy is taught in every contract law intro class.
So if you are not held back by external requirements like dependencies on packages or third party software that hasn't been ported to 3.0 yet or working in an environment where everyone else is using another version. If you're learning Python for the first time, 3.0 is a great way to learn the language. There's a couple of things that trip over beginners have been removed.
Like basic grammatical structure, for instance? When did Palin become a Python dev?
Why create a virus that only hits 7% of computers when you can hit one that hits 85% of computers?
Yeah. Why achieve the fame and glory of being the first to write a real Mac OS X virus? Why feel satisfied in crushing the worldview of every Mac fanboy in existence?
I seem to recall that he did a lot of research into black holes. Maybe he's done studying now and is leaving the country so he can get outside the event horizon to publish his findings.
Yes, perhaps he could teach you a thing or two about them.;)
Good thing you weren't modded up. Basically nothing you said was enlightening or even correct, except for the contents of the first sentence.
You didn't even bother to correct the OP, you just sat back and decided to be a useless pedant. Yes, OP is technically incorrect, but your post is uninformative and completely worthless.
All possible partial derivatives of a point on a 3-dimensional graph fall on a tangential plane. Usually we speak of a tangent line, setting x or y constant, but if one redefines the coordinates, then any line on that plane that passes through that point is a partial derivative. So that "partial derivative plane" contains all possible partial derivatives of that point. This designation is intuitive and not particularly misleading, so there was little point in being an ass about it.
Wait, Slashdot told me that Foxconn was in the hole for Microsoft, purposely sabotaging Linux so Windows can live on! But now they're releasing a fix? That's not sabotage!
We need a better system for referencing the contents of Websites. Perfect example: the link to Yahoo Answers in the summary is already broken. It's of little use quibbling over the language if the original is lost.
To make matters worse, the referencing styles reek of the hammer-nail syndrome. Websites are NOT periodicals, but every citation style treats them as such. Author's full name? Title of Periodical^WWebsite? And what use is the access date if we don't have reliable archiving (or time machines)?
I think we need, at the very least, to set up reliable archiving before we can tackle any other citation questions raised by the nature of the Web. Perhaps a central, trustworthy source could copy a single page at request along and add metadata (date/time of archival, etc.), and then cite that?
All I'm saying is that the citation standards have more pressing problems. "Babby" versus "baby" doesn't make a lick of difference if the link cited gets you "This question has been deleted."
So don't call them "Diebold" any more and don't forget!
You're a little off. Diebold, Inc. still exists and is still called such.
Remember back when electronic voting (EV) was the hot topic and people on Slashdot were complaining (and rightly so) about how sloppy and insecure Diebold's EV systems were compared to their ATMs, vaults, safes, and their other systems related to money? Diebold, Inc., the parent company, deals with much more than EV systems. It remains Diebold. Their link to EV systems is contained entirely in a subsidiary, formerly Diebold Voting Systems, Inc., a year ago renamed Premier Election Solutions. New great name, same red hands.
It's a little confusing to distinguish, I know, especially when even the summary makes no effort to do so.
"Diebold Election Systems, Inc.", the subsidiary of Diebold, Inc. involved in electronic voting systems, was renamed "Premier Election Solutions", a.k.a. Premier or PES. The parent company remains Diebold.
I am not a professional linguist, but I think I can explain.
In any spoken language, different sounds are loosely associated with different ideas. As a simple example, voiceless sounds, like p, k, t, f, and s, are well suited for pointed use, as in pejoratives; and r, especially the alveolar trill variety, is associated with intimidation or primality. These associations are made either because it sounds like something else ("rrrr" sounds like an animal's growl or roar -- notice the Rs in "growl" and "roar"?) or because the sound serves a purpose (hard, clipped sounds serve well as punctuation -- notice all the hard sounds in "punctuate"?). In the latter case, combinations of sounds can invoke a wide array of ideas or feelings. Utilization of these things is key to a good punchline or to controlling semiconscious undertones of speech. I admire Dr. Seuss in particular for his mastery of sound combinations in making up suitable words to balance sing-song silliness with gravity and purpose.
Now, returning to "tebibyte" and all the other -bibytes, soft, voiced consonants like B are associated with childishness (a baby might make these sounds), silliness, bounciness, or informality. Two Bs in a row are especially so: bib, baboon, babble, bob, boob. The reason tebibyte sounds "stupid" is that it describes a technical idea using unsuitable sounds.
This being said, if you were used to using the word, you wouldn't think twice about it. You would probably complain about "flop" and "watt" in the same way if the words were new, but established use overrides the weak sound associations. The President could be instead called the Biggyloppalo and few would care, as long as the term were already established in the common vocabulary. I'd think people would move on even if a video game console were named something as ridiculous as "Wii"... but that's just a wild guess.
As for my opinion on the matter, I'm in favor of it. The SI prefixes are already assumed to be powers of 10 in all other fields except the computer and information sciences. Tebibyte will maybe sound silly for awhile, but the problem will go away given time. And I, for one, look forward to buying futuristic data storage without feeling a little cheated.
Standards can be withdrawn by committee. From the ISO website:
All International Standards are reviewed at the least three years after publication and every five years after the first review by all the ISO member bodies. A majority of the P-members [participating members] of the TC/SC [Technical/SubCommittee] decides whether an International Standard should be confirmed, revised or withdrawn.
Actually, selling absolutely nothing qualifies as commercial enough for a.com domain..com,.org, and.net domains have no restrictions anymore.
The point the GP was making is that.com is seen as the primary domain suffix by most people. Given a domain without its suffix, people are far more likely to try the.com version first. Thus, despite the puritan demands that.com be reserved for commercial use, nearly every owner of a website tries for a.com domain -- even if for just a redirect, like slashdot.com -- so any price hiking of.com domains affects everyone.
Let's just post all the targeting information, launch codes, encryption keys, advanced weapons and defense systems. etc. Let's just post it all on.mil in the interest of openness.
Well, the Air Force did send that stuff to mildenhall.com... that's close to.mil, right?
Well, close enough for government work, evidently.
Slashdot Mirror
You're confusing patents, copyright, and trademark so much that I can't make heads or tails of what you're raving about.
A company I know of applies for a copyright to a word (not common everyday word, but the name of a famous person from old times).
Copyright does not apply to "a word". Perhaps the company in question applied for a trademark.
There are hundreds upon HUNDREDS of other patents that were granted the copyright
This is complete gibberish. I really have no clue what you're trying to say.
The copyright that this particular company applied for was not only under a different category than all of the above, but it even had another acronym attached to the name, so it was TRULY unique.
Assuming you're referring to trademarks, appending a couple letters to the end doesn't make an old trademark new again. Trademarks exist to protect consumers from getting confused between different brands. Ever seen "Durasell" batteries? That would never fly in the US, because under trademark law, even though Durasell is "unique", it could (and, of course, does) confuse consumers into thinking that it is the same as Duracell.
Similar trade names can be granted individual trademarks if they exist in separate-enough markets. That's why Apple Computer was once barred from entering the music business by the court system. Even though Apple Computer didn't want to get into the label business, the Beatles' label's market was close enough to warrant concern about consumer confusion.
So if what you say is true and "hundreds" of other trademarks have already been granted, there stands a high chance that the intended market for your new trademark was too close to one of the hundreds.
So moral of the story is, you can have prior art all you want. You can LACK prior art all you want.
Prior art has little to do with trademark law.
I understand that saying "patents", "copyright", and "bad" is key to /. karma, but really. Get a clue. Thanks.
Actually, NYT got this story very wrong, according to cnet:
I immediately found a very large irritant after upgrading. Previously, I had line-in set to play through to the speakers. There was a simple slider in sound preferences that existed back since at least 6.06. The same option exists under Windows. But suddenly, 9.10 removed this option. Line-in no longer plays through, and the option has been completely removed from the revamped (and somewhat disorganized) sound preference panels. I appreciate the effort to "modernize" the sound options like per-application tuning, but not at the cost of tossing simple, basic options that have existed since the invention of the sound card.
Also, regarding the bootup animations, they've changed for three or four consecutive upgrades now. I don't mind a refresher when appropriate, but "refreshing" every six months tells me that some priorities need some reordering.
So you say that the work required moving the cold water to the hot water is necessarily equivalent to that of directly heating the water. What if the water is 1mm away? 10m away? 1000 light years away? The work required for each of these is equivalent? Did you just discover a way to move water 1000 light years minus 1mm for free?
The problem with your "basic physics" is that work is equivalent only when the outcomes are exactly the same. Think about why heating x liters of water is not the same outcome as raising x liters of water some height.
Let me offer another example. Suppose that we want to heat 1L of 1-degree-C water to 50 degrees. It just so happens that we could move the 1L of water .00001m into thermal contact with a close-by 1L of water kept at 99 degrees. Now, the outcome of heating 1L of water to 50 degrees is the same, but the outcomes of the universe outside of that narrow scope are not identical. Opting for a 40% (or even far, far less) efficient mechanical pump saves energy over a heat pump heating the water 49 degrees because the work required for the two processes is not equivalent. (And, of course, if .00001m is changed to some obscenely large distance, opting for the the heat pump instead would be more efficient.)
A tip for both you and the submitter: fiance is the groom, fiancee is the bride.
There's also an accent on the first e, but I'm not going to attempt it because Slashdot eats my unicode for breakfast.
No, it's not incorrect, you just failed to understand my point. You are isolating this study from other research and taking it at face value, whereas I am putting it in the context of substantial previous work and knowledge.
Imagine there were a study that correlated people letting go of things and those things falling to the ground. Taken at face value, as you do with this story, one should ask, for example, whether something else caused both the letting-go and the dropping-to-the-ground. But taken with previous knowledge, that would be an exercise in pointlessness; we all know what gravity is and that it exists, and so we can conclude that letting go of things is in a causal relationship with those things falling to the ground.
In other words, pedantry doesn't do anyone any good here, because we already have substantial evidence applicable to this new work. I appreciate your and the community's attention to correctness, but in this instance, it's being misapplied.
People, please stop tagging every study on Slashdot with correlationisnotcausation. I know it's standard here to believe this community is somehow more enlightened than all others, but do you really think that researchers became researchers without being able to ask simple questions? In fact, in an idealized study, it's not even a relevant question!
Moreover, this moronic practice is especially stupid for this story because the neurological effects of lithium salts have been explored for decades. This is not a revolutionary study by any means. So unless years and years of studies have gone horribly wrong, then yes, in this case, correlation does, in fact, imply causation.
Erm ... that's not even close to what Lucy was about. Lucy had little to do with intoxication. Straight from the op. Ct., "In was in fact conceded by defendants' counsel in oral argument that under the evidence Zehmer was not too drunk to make a valid contract."
Lucy revolved around whether the contract was valid based on "outward expression" rather than secret intent. Zehmer claimed he was "joking", despite talking for months about it, despite writing it down, despite getting his wife to co-sign it. The Court found that Lucy entered into the contract in good faith. If this contract weren't valid, how could any reasonable person want to enter into a contract ever without mind-reading capabilities?
And that's why Lucy is taught in every contract law intro class.
it is probably wiser to keep your mouth shut and let the world think you are intelligent rather than removing all doubt.
I don't think you're quite as clever as you think you are.
Like basic grammatical structure, for instance? When did Palin become a Python dev?
Why create a virus that only hits 7% of computers when you can hit one that hits 85% of computers?
Yeah. Why achieve the fame and glory of being the first to write a real Mac OS X virus? Why feel satisfied in crushing the worldview of every Mac fanboy in existence?
There's just no draw.
I seem to recall that he did a lot of research into black holes. Maybe he's done studying now and is leaving the country so he can get outside the event horizon to publish his findings.
Yes, perhaps he could teach you a thing or two about them. ;)
Good thing you weren't modded up. Basically nothing you said was enlightening or even correct, except for the contents of the first sentence.
You didn't even bother to correct the OP, you just sat back and decided to be a useless pedant. Yes, OP is technically incorrect, but your post is uninformative and completely worthless.
All possible partial derivatives of a point on a 3-dimensional graph fall on a tangential plane. Usually we speak of a tangent line, setting x or y constant, but if one redefines the coordinates, then any line on that plane that passes through that point is a partial derivative. So that "partial derivative plane" contains all possible partial derivatives of that point. This designation is intuitive and not particularly misleading, so there was little point in being an ass about it.
Wait, Slashdot told me that Foxconn was in the hole for Microsoft, purposely sabotaging Linux so Windows can live on! But now they're releasing a fix? That's not sabotage!
Help me out here, Slashdot!
It's "Caltech", not "Cal Tech".
"Oll Korrect"?
We need a better system for referencing the contents of Websites. Perfect example: the link to Yahoo Answers in the summary is already broken. It's of little use quibbling over the language if the original is lost.
To make matters worse, the referencing styles reek of the hammer-nail syndrome. Websites are NOT periodicals, but every citation style treats them as such. Author's full name? Title of Periodical^WWebsite? And what use is the access date if we don't have reliable archiving (or time machines)?
I think we need, at the very least, to set up reliable archiving before we can tackle any other citation questions raised by the nature of the Web. Perhaps a central, trustworthy source could copy a single page at request along and add metadata (date/time of archival, etc.), and then cite that?
All I'm saying is that the citation standards have more pressing problems. "Babby" versus "baby" doesn't make a lick of difference if the link cited gets you "This question has been deleted."
You're a little off. Diebold, Inc. still exists and is still called such.
Remember back when electronic voting (EV) was the hot topic and people on Slashdot were complaining (and rightly so) about how sloppy and insecure Diebold's EV systems were compared to their ATMs, vaults, safes, and their other systems related to money? Diebold, Inc., the parent company, deals with much more than EV systems. It remains Diebold. Their link to EV systems is contained entirely in a subsidiary, formerly Diebold Voting Systems, Inc., a year ago renamed Premier Election Solutions. New great name, same red hands.
It's a little confusing to distinguish, I know, especially when even the summary makes no effort to do so.
"Diebold Election Systems, Inc.", the subsidiary of Diebold, Inc. involved in electronic voting systems, was renamed "Premier Election Solutions", a.k.a. Premier or PES. The parent company remains Diebold.
I am not a professional linguist, but I think I can explain.
... but that's just a wild guess.
In any spoken language, different sounds are loosely associated with different ideas. As a simple example, voiceless sounds, like p, k, t, f, and s, are well suited for pointed use, as in pejoratives; and r, especially the alveolar trill variety, is associated with intimidation or primality. These associations are made either because it sounds like something else ("rrrr" sounds like an animal's growl or roar -- notice the Rs in "growl" and "roar"?) or because the sound serves a purpose (hard, clipped sounds serve well as punctuation -- notice all the hard sounds in "punctuate"?). In the latter case, combinations of sounds can invoke a wide array of ideas or feelings. Utilization of these things is key to a good punchline or to controlling semiconscious undertones of speech. I admire Dr. Seuss in particular for his mastery of sound combinations in making up suitable words to balance sing-song silliness with gravity and purpose.
Now, returning to "tebibyte" and all the other -bibytes, soft, voiced consonants like B are associated with childishness (a baby might make these sounds), silliness, bounciness, or informality. Two Bs in a row are especially so: bib, baboon, babble, bob, boob. The reason tebibyte sounds "stupid" is that it describes a technical idea using unsuitable sounds.
This being said, if you were used to using the word, you wouldn't think twice about it. You would probably complain about "flop" and "watt" in the same way if the words were new, but established use overrides the weak sound associations. The President could be instead called the Biggyloppalo and few would care, as long as the term were already established in the common vocabulary. I'd think people would move on even if a video game console were named something as ridiculous as "Wii"
As for my opinion on the matter, I'm in favor of it. The SI prefixes are already assumed to be powers of 10 in all other fields except the computer and information sciences. Tebibyte will maybe sound silly for awhile, but the problem will go away given time. And I, for one, look forward to buying futuristic data storage without feeling a little cheated.
Actually, selling absolutely nothing qualifies as commercial enough for a .com domain. .com, .org, and .net domains have no restrictions anymore.
.com is seen as the primary domain suffix by most people. Given a domain without its suffix, people are far more likely to try the .com version first. Thus, despite the puritan demands that .com be reserved for commercial use, nearly every owner of a website tries for a .com domain -- even if for just a redirect, like slashdot.com -- so any price hiking of .com domains affects everyone.
The point the GP was making is that
You might try telling that to NASA.
Well, close enough for government work, evidently.