The comment you're replying to made a good point about how aggressively Disney has lobbied to keep extending copyright law to keep Mickey Mouse and such out of the public domain, whereas your comment refers to "intellectual property", which by drawing an incorrect analogy with physical property leads people into sloppy and incorrect thinking about the issues, and imprecisely lumps together several distinct areas of law, like copyright and trademark. With all due respect, your comment is one of the most ignorant things I have ever heard about intellectual property law.
How does any discussion of Mickey Mouse not touch upon "several distinct areas of law, like copyright and trademark"? When Disney forced that daycare company to remove the Mickey cartoons from the walls of the daycare center the issue was use of a trademarked image. With or without copyright extensions that daycare center will never have Mickey Mouse cartoons on the wall without Disney's express permission.
>With or without copyright extensions that daycare center will never have Mickey Mouse cartoons on the wall without Disney's express permission. //
Trademarks are supposed to be to indicate the _origin_ of goods or services. The use of an image of a mouse on a nursery wall is highly unlikely to create any confusion in anyone of sound mind that Disney are providing the service of that nursery - if there is a potential for doubt then a simple disclaimer can alleviate that (yes on the wall if necessary).
After copyright expiration of the original cartoons from which a Mickey Mouse like image might be copied there is no reason that a sane application of trademark law would prevent a nursery from using such an image.
Now "famous" marks often get special treatment but this swings both ways. If you don't use an actual Disney mark [as opposed to a simple image of one of their characters which isn't a trademark] then people know that it's not actually from Disney. Indeed just being affordably priced is sometimes all the indication that one needs.
Yes, could you link me up please? Was it by any chance settled.
However, it's not at all a surprise to me. I would note that I say "there is no reason that a sane application of trademark law would prevent a nursery from using such an image" (emphasis added).
As a Dvorak typing sysadmin who used to use QWERTY, the vi navigation keys work just fine on Dvorak. As it turns out, once you're used to Dvorak, you see that having the keys next to each other on the keyboard and on the home row doesn't count for anything in any regard, either memorability or efficiency. I had that reservation about Dvorak too, but ... nope. It's just not confusing or a slow down. It's far less of an issue that the sort of kludgy moded editing and reaching for escape. (I'm an Emacs user at heart. I gave both years of usage, and organically ended up using vi for quick edits, emacs for long editing sessions.)
It's sort of like the much-talked-about switch to reverse scrolling in OS X. You may think it's a big deal, but your brain makes the adjustment, and it just doesn't matter. Your vi editing efficiency should be pretty nearly unaffected. It might be very fractionally slower, since the navigation keys aren't on the home row, but .. I never notice it at all. It's definitely not far less efficient.
Not arguing that you should switch, incidentally. I could also touch type 100+ wpm on QWERTY. I never regained my original speed after switching. That's very common for very fast typists. If you don't put systematic effort into speed training, you'll lose some speed for switching. Not that it's that big of a deal.
The first thing I did when upgrading to Lion was to turn off "natural" scrolling. While arguably more natural when using a touchpad (and definitely when using a touchscreen) is entirely unnatural when using a mouse or trackball. It is counter to how every other OS on the planet has worked for 30 years and doesn't provide any efficiency gain.
In the US, such orders usually have to be in writing, be pretty specific, and the meaning has to be fairly clear. You would have a very difficult time holding someone in contempt for a court order that's not written. And, so, what's written IS the order, regardless of the judge's intent.
In other words, a third party judge should be able to judge compliance with the order, so it certainly would not be the case that if the original judge thinks something doesn't comply with his order that it necessarily doesn't comply.
The court order is in writing, and it includes a proposed text of the statement. Apple changed it. This is what the court wrote:
"Finally I should say something about the notice itself. We heard no discussion about that. Plainly Judge Birss's Schedule has been overtaken by events. Subject to anything that may be submitted by either side I would propose the following:
On 9th July 2012 the High Court of Justice of England and Wales ruled that Samsung Electronic (UK) Limited's Galaxy Tablet Computers, namely the Galaxy Tab 10.1, Tab 8.9 and Tab 7.7 do not infringe Apple's registered design No. 0000181607-0001. A copy of the full judgment of the High court is available on the following link [link given].
That Judgment has effect throughout the European Union and was upheld by the Court of Appeal on ….. A copy of the Court of Appeal's judgment is available on the following link […]. There is no injunction in respect of the registered design in force anywhere in Europe.
In the result I would dismiss both appeals but vary the publicity order as indicated or in such other way as may be agreed or settled by further argument. I would hope that any such argument (and any other consequential) arguments can be resolved by written submissions.:"
If Apple thinks that "I would propose the following" means they're free to change the text as they please, they better fire their lawyer, especially given the preceding "Subject to anything that may be submitted by either side".
You actually can't make that assertion in confidence. To do so, you have to measure the utility of the benefits to a given individual, and the utility of the money they spend on it, and quantify the risk of Amazon revoking/pulling the content.
As hard as it might be for you to believe, your subjective worldview is not absolute reality, and not everyone shares your world-view and definition of utility, so you can't actually judge whether their actions are self-defeating for them.
I got my first Mac about 1 year and 4 months ago. I've been pretty happy with it. My fallback plan was just to install Windows or Linux on it. To me, the worst case scenario was that I was over-paying for some decent hardware. As it turns out, I never needed to exercise the backup plan.
I've been buying Amazon ebooks for the Kindle. I like the Kindle 3 keyboard without special offers well enough, but I don't really like the "we want to make money when you use the device" angle. Making money when I'm buying content is okay, but this Kindle will have to be replaced eventually, and then my entire ebook collection is retroactively adified.
Very irritating. I suppose I'll have to rip the DRM off of them and use them with another device if every eInk kindle has mandatory ads in the future.
Just never give authorization for recurring billing. I use my credit card for one-time payments for monthly services all of the time, and I never authorize recurring billing. When you do that, you establish an on-going relationship with the merchant that isn't so easy to cancel. But you can cancel their authorization to do recurring billing in writing, and then any charge made on that ground should be refunded to you as a simple matter of course.
It generally works out pretty well if you just never authorize automatic recurring billing.
I went to a good school for CS, and some of the professors did work for private industry and interesting research, and why hardware like this can seem so dated came up a few times. One professor worked doing formal verifications of hardware and such things. (for example, Toyota might want something close to formal, mathematical proof that the chips and software in their car can never cause uncontrolled acceleration.)
Basically, if you dump a lot of money into making sure something works, and works exactly as intended, as long as it does and can do the job, you don't change anything. You don't stick in one extra memory chip without redoing your formal verifications and tolerance testing, etc. Very expensive people will have to run very expensive processes to prove that even the most minor change doesn't compromise certain key properties when you can't afford for those properties to be compromised for any reason whatsoever.
