Agreed, apart from working in very difficult conditions (under water, near intense heat or chemical spills - where you're likely not saving lives but clearing up or preventing further disasters) a human is almost always going to be a better option, and certainly far less expensive. My guess is that "disaster response" is bandied about simply because it's more likely to be welcomed by the public than "army of killer robots under the command of the military".
I'm guessing this works, or will end up working, by looking at a subset of common searches and matching what you typed against them (i.e. trying to predict what you want rather than doing a full search on each keypress), meaning they can probably benefit a lot from caching. Definitely looks useful (so long as it's entirely optional, there will be days when having the results changing as I type will really give me a headache).
You seem a little confused. The entity doesn't get to decide anything - the courts do. The entity can only bring the challenge before them. Looking at it another way, at which point is it fair for an entity to defend it's business? If not the pretty specific "*book+social networking" then what, would you allow Fasebook? Fácebook? Facebook but with a slightly different hue of blue? How close is too close?
There could easily be confusion if people believe that the smaller site is in some way affiliated with the larger - it doesn't have to be an identical name, quite often a big company will be umbrella to smaller offshoots who use some derivative of the name, so it's not a huge to stretch to think, if Facebook ever did a teacher specific site, that they'd use the name Teachbook. More importantly, actual confusion is only one aspect of such a claim, the courts take many other criteria into account. And since the law is rooted in tort and principles of equity, they'll certainly be looking at the smaller site's motives in choosing the name - do you honestly believe they didn't choose the name to piggyback off the popularity of Facebook? After all "Teachbook" is meaningless. If you take a name that's close to another's trademark specifically to associate your business with theirs, don't be surprised if the court finds you weren't exactly acting with clean hands.
He didn't say lose the case, he said lose money. You said it yourself, Facebook are likely to take a sledgehammer approach to the case and pour money into lawyers (after all, if they lose after making such a big stink that will be an open invitation to everyone else to jump on the bandwagon), and the defendents are a tiny company with likely not much money. I doubt FB would ever recoup more than they spent in a case like this, so they could effectively win the case but (unless there was a serious chance of this site stealing business from them which justified the expense) still lose money.
The fact that it's a little known fact is a defence in itself to any trademark claim you might bring (since nobody's going to confuse my being human with your ownership of the concept of being human if it's little known that you own said concept), so thanks:)
They do have a legitimate point. It doesn't matter that you instantly make the distinction between Facebook and Teachbook, the courts have defined through precedent criteria that may mean there is room for confusion and these do not have to involve any actual confusion. They will take into account factors such as the defendant's intention in selection the mark (for instance, if "Teachbook" is a common teaching term that predates Facebook, they could argue the name derives from that, it's more likely in this case that they specifically chose the name to allude to the plaintiff's site, to convey the site's social networking purpose), and likelihood of expansion (if Facebook have plans to break up the site into sectors such as teaching, for instance, or if they already to this - I'm not a FB user so I wouldn't know). Of course, just because they have a legitimate point in raising the action, doesn't necessarily mean on the weight of the criteria that their case is valid, just that there is enough to merit the case being heard.
That makes no difference once the usage is generic enough. Just ask Xerox - they expend massive effort trying to fight the use of their trademark name as a synonym for copying.
It might have some limited application - hospitals spring to mind, and by extension public terminals, airports and the like. Places where lots of people congregate together to share their interesting diseases, where you might want touch screen inputs but you don't particularly want to have to touch them. Other than that, you're right - for activating equipment you're close enough to touch the equipment (and can you imagine a stereo that jumps to full volume or a TV that changes channel any time someone walks too close). For any other touch screen input you pretty much want the feedback of touching something solid, couple this UI with any amount of lag for ensuing hilarity (did I just press that button and it's lagging, or did it miss the input and I need to press it again... I'll press it again, it's been a while... oh ffs now it's loading two instances, I'll just click close... hmm, did I press close and it's lagging or do I need to press it again... gah! And so on).
I guess you could use the automatic door mechanism as a binary input device, but it might be a bit long-winded. On the plus side you'd get a great workout posting to/.
Most of these screw ups are genuine mistakes, because untrained nurses aren't let loose unsupervised, so they must be happening at the hands of reasonably experienced professionals, and they never would have reached that point if they couldn't carry out these procedures. So how do you improve on a competent person in order to make them flawless, and more importantly how much does that cost, pray tell? You could give everyone more training, you could double everyone up so they can watch each other performing such procedures, you could have more supervisors whose only job is to check all procedures are carried out correctly, you could give nurses shorter hours or longer breaks so they're less likely to be tired and make errors, of course that will mean you'll need still more bodies on the hospital floor at the same time. The cost of doing all that makes putting a coloured stripe or an adaptor on a tube pale into insignificance, and you're still unlikely to solve the underlying issue that people make mistakes.
Seriously, we employ a hell of a lot of people in health, the fact that this type of screw up isn't several orders of magnitude more common than it is is because they're generally doing a very good job under very difficult circumstances. You're right that we shouldn't need laws to enact this kind of thing, because it's common sense and if the medical manufacturers and hospitals cared as much about patient welfare as they do about the bottom line, it would already be happening without regulation. There's an adaptor on my car to stop me using the wrong fuel, there are colour coded ports on my pc so I know where to plug things, but we don't offer the same level of basic thought to a process that could mean the difference between life or death to a patient.
Yes, it would be a cheap way to eliminate the vast majority of simple human errors. It might not help the very edge cases with extreme colour blindness, but it doesn't make their situation any worse and it would massively reduce the risks for everyone else (even those with mild colour blindness).
Well said! If car manufacturers can fit an adaptor on a fuel pump to stop me filling up my diesel with unleaded when I fill up tired first thing, then it's ridiculous to claim the responsibility for tracing every damn pipe to origin in the middle of a life saving procedure when you've been run into the ground by an emplyer terminally short staffed putting constant pressure on you to work long hours, take extra shifts, work through the night because they're using what should be on-call emergency time to get the waiting list for routine operations down should rest entirely on a nurse. This is all about cutting costs and shifting all the responsibility onto the shoulders of people who are already overworked and underpaid (hey, we know you won't quit because you joined the caring industry for a reason, so we'll just dump crap on you until we need a scapegoat to fire when it all goes wrong). IANANBMGFI so I see first hand the ridiculous lengths they're expected to go to. They're often so tired that, were I in that state, I'd not feel happy writing competent code, never mind making life or death decisions. If standardising some tubes makes their life a little easier, the patients' a little safer, then why haven't we had this years ago!
Nobody said this was about free indie games, just indie games (properly meaning independent of the big names in the industry, but seemingly used in this context to just mean games which don't cater to the mainstream ideals).
Actually it made me think of this one. I loved this back on the C64. My favourite part were the disguised ninja - you could give money to peasants for karma and they'd reply "Thank you, it's a hard life being a peasant", occasionally you'd get a ninja in disguise who would attack you once your back was turned, but by giving him money you'd trick him into revealing himself, saying "Thank you, it's a hard life being a ninja" at which point the hack and slashery began!
I think that was his point - that we'd see fewer, less serious screw ups in the financial sector if they didn't know that they have carte blanche to fail spectacularly and rely on public money bailing them out because we need them too much for them to go under.
There's also dillution to consider. Just because Disney don't currently sell Mickey Mouse smartphones, it doesn't mean they'd never intend to or that they'd be happy for a phone vendor to use the name in such a way. And it's still suggesting an endorsement of the product by Lucas which simply doesn't exist, so even though there's no product to be confused about, there is nevertheless plenty of opportunity for consumers to be confused.
Well unless this company is called Jidai Mind, they're certainly using the word that he modified for his own purposes. In fact, if they used the alternate spelling that seems like it would be a perfectly valid defence, the only reason to use Lucas' spelling is to associate their product with his fictional universe - even if Lucas isn't in a competing market, it's still more than likely going to fall foul of trademark dillution.
What's to say they're not already doing that? If a significant portion of readers prefer electronic versions and a similarly significant portion prefer dead tree editions then the smart move would be to cater to both markets, not just tell the dead tree people to move with the times and dump them. And as to why they prefer dead tree editions, any number of valid reasons, maybe it's easier to relax with a magazine than with a laptop or eReader, maybe they like to stick it in a back pocket while out in the field so they can read it over lunch without worrying about it breaking or getting lost, maybe they just prefer to read articles on paper. I'm sure a good percentage of the readership here still prefer books to eReaders, and this is hardly a site with a luddite leaning.
If the technology becomes widespread enough that it's commonplace, you're probably right. I suspect the first few magazines to do this will be more interested in the temporary readership boost they'll get from being one of the first to offer it than in offering better value to customers. This is no doubt what's attractive about it to the advertisers, too (i.e. it might not justify the cost by itself, but they're probably banking on the extra publicity they'll get).
Of course, when he says that he's failing to account for the likelihood that if the system ever takes off in a big way, it will have the effect of pushing up fuel prices from energy companies (due to lower demand), while driving down the price for which you can sell energy back (due to higher supply). Whether that is offset by the falling cost of the installation we'll have to wait and see.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, apart from working in very difficult conditions (under water, near intense heat or chemical spills - where you're likely not saving lives but clearing up or preventing further disasters) a human is almost always going to be a better option, and certainly far less expensive. My guess is that "disaster response" is bandied about simply because it's more likely to be welcomed by the public than "army of killer robots under the command of the military".
I'm guessing this works, or will end up working, by looking at a subset of common searches and matching what you typed against them (i.e. trying to predict what you want rather than doing a full search on each keypress), meaning they can probably benefit a lot from caching. Definitely looks useful (so long as it's entirely optional, there will be days when having the results changing as I type will really give me a headache).
And for god's sake don't Google the UK town of Clitheroe
You seem a little confused. The entity doesn't get to decide anything - the courts do. The entity can only bring the challenge before them. Looking at it another way, at which point is it fair for an entity to defend it's business? If not the pretty specific "*book+social networking" then what, would you allow Fasebook? Fácebook? Facebook but with a slightly different hue of blue? How close is too close?
There could easily be confusion if people believe that the smaller site is in some way affiliated with the larger - it doesn't have to be an identical name, quite often a big company will be umbrella to smaller offshoots who use some derivative of the name, so it's not a huge to stretch to think, if Facebook ever did a teacher specific site, that they'd use the name Teachbook. More importantly, actual confusion is only one aspect of such a claim, the courts take many other criteria into account. And since the law is rooted in tort and principles of equity, they'll certainly be looking at the smaller site's motives in choosing the name - do you honestly believe they didn't choose the name to piggyback off the popularity of Facebook? After all "Teachbook" is meaningless. If you take a name that's close to another's trademark specifically to associate your business with theirs, don't be surprised if the court finds you weren't exactly acting with clean hands.
He didn't say lose the case, he said lose money. You said it yourself, Facebook are likely to take a sledgehammer approach to the case and pour money into lawyers (after all, if they lose after making such a big stink that will be an open invitation to everyone else to jump on the bandwagon), and the defendents are a tiny company with likely not much money. I doubt FB would ever recoup more than they spent in a case like this, so they could effectively win the case but (unless there was a serious chance of this site stealing business from them which justified the expense) still lose money.
The fact that it's a little known fact is a defence in itself to any trademark claim you might bring (since nobody's going to confuse my being human with your ownership of the concept of being human if it's little known that you own said concept), so thanks :)
They do have a legitimate point. It doesn't matter that you instantly make the distinction between Facebook and Teachbook, the courts have defined through precedent criteria that may mean there is room for confusion and these do not have to involve any actual confusion. They will take into account factors such as the defendant's intention in selection the mark (for instance, if "Teachbook" is a common teaching term that predates Facebook, they could argue the name derives from that, it's more likely in this case that they specifically chose the name to allude to the plaintiff's site, to convey the site's social networking purpose), and likelihood of expansion (if Facebook have plans to break up the site into sectors such as teaching, for instance, or if they already to this - I'm not a FB user so I wouldn't know). Of course, just because they have a legitimate point in raising the action, doesn't necessarily mean on the weight of the criteria that their case is valid, just that there is enough to merit the case being heard.
That makes no difference once the usage is generic enough. Just ask Xerox - they expend massive effort trying to fight the use of their trademark name as a synonym for copying.
Apparently what you want is a juvenile Torosaurus.
It might have some limited application - hospitals spring to mind, and by extension public terminals, airports and the like. Places where lots of people congregate together to share their interesting diseases, where you might want touch screen inputs but you don't particularly want to have to touch them. Other than that, you're right - for activating equipment you're close enough to touch the equipment (and can you imagine a stereo that jumps to full volume or a TV that changes channel any time someone walks too close). For any other touch screen input you pretty much want the feedback of touching something solid, couple this UI with any amount of lag for ensuing hilarity (did I just press that button and it's lagging, or did it miss the input and I need to press it again... I'll press it again, it's been a while... oh ffs now it's loading two instances, I'll just click close... hmm, did I press close and it's lagging or do I need to press it again... gah! And so on).
I guess you could use the automatic door mechanism as a binary input device, but it might be a bit long-winded. On the plus side you'd get a great workout posting to /.
Most of these screw ups are genuine mistakes, because untrained nurses aren't let loose unsupervised, so they must be happening at the hands of reasonably experienced professionals, and they never would have reached that point if they couldn't carry out these procedures. So how do you improve on a competent person in order to make them flawless, and more importantly how much does that cost, pray tell? You could give everyone more training, you could double everyone up so they can watch each other performing such procedures, you could have more supervisors whose only job is to check all procedures are carried out correctly, you could give nurses shorter hours or longer breaks so they're less likely to be tired and make errors, of course that will mean you'll need still more bodies on the hospital floor at the same time. The cost of doing all that makes putting a coloured stripe or an adaptor on a tube pale into insignificance, and you're still unlikely to solve the underlying issue that people make mistakes.
Seriously, we employ a hell of a lot of people in health, the fact that this type of screw up isn't several orders of magnitude more common than it is is because they're generally doing a very good job under very difficult circumstances. You're right that we shouldn't need laws to enact this kind of thing, because it's common sense and if the medical manufacturers and hospitals cared as much about patient welfare as they do about the bottom line, it would already be happening without regulation. There's an adaptor on my car to stop me using the wrong fuel, there are colour coded ports on my pc so I know where to plug things, but we don't offer the same level of basic thought to a process that could mean the difference between life or death to a patient.
Yes, it would be a cheap way to eliminate the vast majority of simple human errors. It might not help the very edge cases with extreme colour blindness, but it doesn't make their situation any worse and it would massively reduce the risks for everyone else (even those with mild colour blindness).
There are literally dozens of ways to solve this problem. None of them are exactly brain surgery.
Although ironically some of them might be of benefit when carrying out brain surgery.
Well said! If car manufacturers can fit an adaptor on a fuel pump to stop me filling up my diesel with unleaded when I fill up tired first thing, then it's ridiculous to claim the responsibility for tracing every damn pipe to origin in the middle of a life saving procedure when you've been run into the ground by an emplyer terminally short staffed putting constant pressure on you to work long hours, take extra shifts, work through the night because they're using what should be on-call emergency time to get the waiting list for routine operations down should rest entirely on a nurse. This is all about cutting costs and shifting all the responsibility onto the shoulders of people who are already overworked and underpaid (hey, we know you won't quit because you joined the caring industry for a reason, so we'll just dump crap on you until we need a scapegoat to fire when it all goes wrong). IANANBMGFI so I see first hand the ridiculous lengths they're expected to go to. They're often so tired that, were I in that state, I'd not feel happy writing competent code, never mind making life or death decisions. If standardising some tubes makes their life a little easier, the patients' a little safer, then why haven't we had this years ago!
Nobody said this was about free indie games, just indie games (properly meaning independent of the big names in the industry, but seemingly used in this context to just mean games which don't cater to the mainstream ideals).
Actually it made me think of this one. I loved this back on the C64. My favourite part were the disguised ninja - you could give money to peasants for karma and they'd reply "Thank you, it's a hard life being a peasant", occasionally you'd get a ninja in disguise who would attack you once your back was turned, but by giving him money you'd trick him into revealing himself, saying "Thank you, it's a hard life being a ninja" at which point the hack and slashery began!
I think that was his point - that we'd see fewer, less serious screw ups in the financial sector if they didn't know that they have carte blanche to fail spectacularly and rely on public money bailing them out because we need them too much for them to go under.
There's also dillution to consider. Just because Disney don't currently sell Mickey Mouse smartphones, it doesn't mean they'd never intend to or that they'd be happy for a phone vendor to use the name in such a way. And it's still suggesting an endorsement of the product by Lucas which simply doesn't exist, so even though there's no product to be confused about, there is nevertheless plenty of opportunity for consumers to be confused.
Well unless this company is called Jidai Mind, they're certainly using the word that he modified for his own purposes. In fact, if they used the alternate spelling that seems like it would be a perfectly valid defence, the only reason to use Lucas' spelling is to associate their product with his fictional universe - even if Lucas isn't in a competing market, it's still more than likely going to fall foul of trademark dillution.
Tear out the one offending page?
What's to say they're not already doing that? If a significant portion of readers prefer electronic versions and a similarly significant portion prefer dead tree editions then the smart move would be to cater to both markets, not just tell the dead tree people to move with the times and dump them. And as to why they prefer dead tree editions, any number of valid reasons, maybe it's easier to relax with a magazine than with a laptop or eReader, maybe they like to stick it in a back pocket while out in the field so they can read it over lunch without worrying about it breaking or getting lost, maybe they just prefer to read articles on paper. I'm sure a good percentage of the readership here still prefer books to eReaders, and this is hardly a site with a luddite leaning.
If the technology becomes widespread enough that it's commonplace, you're probably right. I suspect the first few magazines to do this will be more interested in the temporary readership boost they'll get from being one of the first to offer it than in offering better value to customers. This is no doubt what's attractive about it to the advertisers, too (i.e. it might not justify the cost by itself, but they're probably banking on the extra publicity they'll get).
Of course, when he says that he's failing to account for the likelihood that if the system ever takes off in a big way, it will have the effect of pushing up fuel prices from energy companies (due to lower demand), while driving down the price for which you can sell energy back (due to higher supply). Whether that is offset by the falling cost of the installation we'll have to wait and see.