Honestly, that was why Apple Corps wanted Apple Computers to stay the hell out of the music industry.

When one entity starts to bleed into what another does, then it gets much more into lawyers and all sorts of stuff.

You'll notice that the resolution of this was Apple Computers bought Apple Corps and then licensed back the trademark.

Most entities don't have the luxury of splashing out $500 million to fix that kind of situation.

But my concrete and balloon animals example still holds.

Well, here's the problem with that:

Trade Marks and Service Marks are only meaningful in the area of business. It is not exclusive across all possible kinds of business. That's not how they work.

You can't simply look up a domain name and check it against trademarks and decide who owns it. You and I can Trademark the same thing, and as long as you're making concrete and I'm making balloon animals, we can both keep it, because we're doing different things which won't reasonably be confused.

So, unless the original registrant is in the same kind of business as the assholes^Wplaintiff in this case, it simply doesn't matter.

I'm of the opinion the people suing don't have a leg to stand on. This guy had registered this domain a long time ago, and renewed it before this Service Mark was applied for.

Which means unless they're in the same area of business and the Service Mark/Trade Mark then trumps prior ownership ... the assholes^Wplaintiff hasn't for a leg to stand on.

I sincerely hope the court basically tosses this and says "you can't cybersquat if you do it 15 years before the whiny plaintiff".

Stupid lawyers.

Well, if's only viral if you're stupid and self entitled enough to think you can use it and not abide by the terms.

Yes, BSD is completely free, and has its place in the world. I've worked on commercial software based on BSD licensed code.

But when people who weren't forced to use GPLd code bitch about it being viral, they're essentially being childish idiots.

Its screams "waaah, the bad man won't let me take his code and change the license and use it how I see fit". Nobody promised you the code, nobody owes you the code. That someone then decides they should be able to take the code and use it anyway just says they think they're special, and the rules are too cumbersome.

So, "viral" in this context means the person saying it's viral has acted like an idiot, an decided after the fact they don't like the terms of the license.

It sure as hell isn't a "problem" with GPL code. It's a problem with people who don't want to abide by the license on code and somehow think using someone else's code is a right.

V2V is coming whether it's a good idea or not

Except, it won't. Not really nearly as soon as you think, and nowhere near as widespread.

Sure, there will be some fancy expensive cars with it. But look around at the cars on the road. The overwhelming majority of people will simply NOT be paying for this feature.

They'll be driving older cars, or they'll be unwilling to pay a premium for it.

All of these wonderful future pieces of tech are contingent on two things: people actually paying for them, and adoption of the technology so that it goes beyond just a few.

All of this future "we're all going to have V2V" sounds all good and Flash Gordon. In reality, that guy behind you in the 1987 Malibu isn't going to have it, and never will.

All technologies which depend on the world splashing out money to make it happen are probably doomed to fail.

A few here and there, sure. But everybody, or even a majority? Not happening.

Your wife has a flying car? That is so cool.

All 'vette owners think they're pilots.

Apparently, a surprisingly large amount of pilots also own 'vettes. Because, you know, it was good enough for the astronauts. ;-)

And yet something written against the Java API can fairly trivially be made to work against the Google API -- well, in theory.

The interfaces for APIs have been borrowed and re-implemented for literally decades. If you retroactively go back and say all of them are licensed and you need to pay money ... you fuck up the entirety of computing history.

Like I said, the standard C library, most of POSIX, the C++ template libraries, Mono ... all sorts of stuff was basically a re-implementation of an API.

This ruling completely ignores several decades worth of precedent, and grants Oracle something nobody else has ever had.

Hell, even Microsoft's vaporware to provide Android support is covered by this. This has very far reaching implications, and makes no sense in the context of computers since the 70s.

So ... basically every modern implementation of C illegally copied AT&T's or K&R's shit?

Mono has illegally copied Microsoft's shit?

The API is a contract, which you publish in order to allow people to use it. But you specifically do publish it.

Java was released by Sun without licensing, just saying you needed to be compatible with the core and not screw things up -- and now retroactively Oracle can claim copyright on it? There sure as hell were other implementations of Java out there which nobody was complaining about.

That pretty much sounds like bullshit. Interoperability is part of fair use. Have we so thoroughly eroded this concept that the copyright lawyers have won?

I'm pretty sure at the time Google was copying those interfaces, not a damned person EVER suggested this required licensing.

This isn't a question, but thanks for games like Chez Geek.

Discovering games which were goofy, not "me against you", and often won by sheer dumb luck opened a whole new kind of gaming for me.

The game mechanics of a bunch of people playing silly games for the purpose of hanging out and not having winners and losers was far more interesting, inclusive, and fun.

Much more enjoyable as a group game than so many other games with terrible game mechanics.

This has been known for years. Those privacy promises do not survive bankruptcy, and your personal information they promised never to sell becomes another asset to be disposed of.

This has been happening for years. Don't want your personal information sold, don't provide it to them.

Even their privacy policies which say they'll never sell it will have legal language which says "unless we change our mind".

The promises by corporations to play nicely aren't legally binding and can be changed on a whim. I'm pretty sure we've seen other examples of this over the last decade.

Unless there are actual laws preventing this, any promises are pretty much worthless.

Some countries have enacted privacy laws, but I'm pretty sure the US never would -- because that would limit corporations.

This might finally becoming plain to everybody else, but the vast majority of people here should already know this.

And to whom do you file the bug report again?

I can just imagine it now "Yeah, we run this cool thing called CodePhage which patched the software, but now it broke". They'll laugh at you and hang up.

This sounds like an automated system for mangling together random bits of software and hoping you still have something usable.

"The longer-term vision is that you never have to write a piece of code that somebody else has written before," Rinard says. "The system finds that piece of code and automatically puts it together with whatever pieces of code you need to make your program work."

Sounds totally cool. Also sounds like complete fiction.

Well ... duh?

So, you ask Google a semantic/natural language question ... are you actually surprised that Google uses their own results to determine this?

Do you expect an objective determination of this? Would we need a court to decide who is actually the best?

You asked a search engine to give you a subjective response based on the information is has. Do you expect it to give you the results from Bing or Yahoo?

So, yes, the subjective evaluation as returned by Google using their own stuff as a basis is skewed to their own stuff.

Why is anybody surprised by this? Does anybody think Google is going to promote someone else's stuff?

Search results are a starting point. But if you want to know the best burger joint, eat there, or read a whole bunch of different review sites.

This seems to be a lot of hand wringing about the fact that some kinds of search results, which aren't based on objective facts, aren't returning objective facts.

Hell, I've seen user voted polls in newspapers which were as subjective and broken just because the stuff in the area where all the bars were got reviewed more. So all of the downtown stuff was reviewed more. That didn't make it better, just better known.

You asked Google to provide you what is essentially a distillation of opinions, and you're surprised it's not a 100% accurate set of results?

I just don't know why people are surprised by this. Whose stuff do you think Google should be promoting?

Looks like Chromecast has gone the way of Google Chrome: Arbitrary and random A/B testing that you're never notified of, and no way to opt out of.

And gmail, and google maps, and pretty much everything else.

Google's stuff, while mostly cool and interesting, is essentially perpetually in beta, subject to arbitrary changes, or simply being made to go away.

Google products are endlessly fiddled with, with the users as testers in a lot of cases.

I honestly don't think anybody should be surprised by this. Because I'm hard pressed to think of a single "product" (and since most of them are free betas that's debatable) which Google has never treated any differently. It's their service, you're just using it in whatever state they give it to you today.

I imagine that there are parts of a given ride where you can safely deploy a 'selfie stick'; but what kind of idiot waves a pole around when moving at nontrivial speed near walls, beams, etc. that the pole can catch on?

The kind of shallow, vain, social media obsessed person who carries around a damned selfie stick in the first place?

This isn't people thinking "gee, this could be stupid and dangerous", it's people thinking "I'm so putting this on Instagram".

Yeah, but the concept of what a jet pack is has already crept into our minds.

So when someone comes along with a single-occupant aircraft you fly in an upright position, and calls is a jetpack, the only thing people think is "maybe a small plan, or a personal helicopter ... but jetpack? Not likely".

Because, you will note, there was an actual real thing used in real James Bond movies which set our expectations.

A stand up, open air cockpit helicopter isn't it.