No; the character would continue to be protected by trademark rights. The name "Superman", the S logo, etc. are all indicators that a particular work that bears them originate from the "actual" owner of the marks; i.e., they are trademarks. And trademark is indefinite, so long as they continue in use. But that is how it should be: not just every movie studio should be able to make a Superman movie, because this would undermine the "real"/canonical Superman line. Fans could not be sure that the movie that they were going to see was the "official" Superman; the protection of trademark is therefore important to provide information to the consumer.

Now, that said, I agree that copyright's derivative work protection should not continue to prevent similar stories, so long as there is no risk of customer confusion. If another studio wants to make a movie about "Superduperman," from the planet Argon, who flies around in his caped underwear while saving the world, they should have every right to do so -- even while the copyright for "Superman" still runs.

Let's cut straight to the point: the denial itself means nothing. To anyone. Not even to the parties in a future case, certainly not to other courts, not to the same court, not to anyone. It means zero. Zip. Zilch. It is as if the Supreme Court hadn't spoken. In fact, that's EXACTLY what it is -- the Supreme Court refusing to speak. The denial is no more persuasive than it is binding. It is nothing. A favorable denial of cert and $2.49 will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

If you are trying to say that the denial of cert means that the Seventh Circuit decision is now binding in the Seventh Circuit -- yes, you are certainly correct. But the denial does not add or subtract to the weight of that precedent. It means nothing.

They do claim to be bound by precedent -- right up until the moment where they decide to overturn it. Essentially, to say that something is a "Supreme Court precedent" means two things: In addition to the more common meaning that it is binding on the lower courts, it also means that it can be cited back to the Supreme Court in a future case, as persuasive authority that one's interpretation of law is the correct one. "Non-precedential" decisions such as this cannot be cited back to the court (at least, not without a lecture from the court, as in the Carver case I cited above). While, ultimately, the Court can go any way it likes, it strongly prefers (as do all common law courts) to side with previous cases, than to overturn them. In fact, the courts will often jump through hoops to avoid explicitly overturning precedent, even when that's effectively what they're doing. Favorite strategies are saying that the case was "limited to its facts," or that the bar and the lower courts simply misunderstood for a century or so.

The optimist would say that the courts attempt to preserve the stability of the law; the cynic would say that they can't admit they were wrong. Take your pick...

No. You're misusing the words "precedential effect," or at least applying them to the wrong thing. The Seventh Circuit decision of course has precedential effect, and is binding on the district courts within that circuit, as well as other three-judge panels of the Seventh Circuit -- though NOT of the Seventh Circuit sitting as a whole ("en banc"), an admittedly rare circumstance. But this would be the same effect as if the losing party in the appeal never applied for certiorari, and if the Supreme Court never touched the issue -- the denial of certiorari, in and of itself, means NOTHING in terms of binding law for future cases. It is completely irrelevant, and if you attempted to cite the denial in court, you would get in response the same cite to Justice Holmes from 1923, probably along with an admonition that you've have 90 years to have figured this out.

Of course, the Seventh Circuit was ruling on this particular law. It does not mean that any analogous laws in states other than Illinois are automatically invalid, nor does it mean that Illinois could never pass a narrower law that would pass constitutional scrutiny.

Moreover, if you mean to say that the denial now binds the en banc Seventh Circuit to the decision rendered in this case, you're absolutely wrong.

As to whether it reduces the chances that the Supreme Court will hear the issue in the future: the only thing that decides which cert petitions are granted, is how 4 justices feel on the days that cert petitions are reviewed. You might be able to come up with some conditional probability of future acceptance given past denials, but it's not likely to be very clear one way or the other.

No, no, no. Not at all. The Supreme Court has been overwhelmingly clear that a refusal to grant certiorari (that is, a refusal to hear an appeal) has no precedentiary value *whatsoever.* But you're not the first to make that mistake. See, e.g., United States v. Carver, 260 U.S. 482, 490 (1923) ("The denial of a writ of certiorari imports no expression of opinion upon the merits of the case, as the bar has been told many times."), quoted in Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288, 296 (1989).

If the Court wishes to express that a lower court case is a "non-case," as you put it, they will make what is known as a summary disposition.

It is true that you sue the driver of the car; however, in some states (e.g. New York) the owner of the car is "vicariously liable" for the negligence of any driver of that car who was driving with the owner's permission. This means that, so long as they can show that the driver was negligent, they do not need to show anything about the owner.

This is the same manner in which, for example, if you're run over by a negligent, red-light-running Pizza Hut delivery guy, Pizza Hut is automatically liable,
no matter how careful they were in screening or training the guy (and if they were negligent there, that is ANOTHER basis for their liability, known as "negligent entrustment").

Now, the driver is liable to the owner for any judgment that the owner had to pay out ("indemnification"). And yes, the driver is separately liable to you for his own negligence in damaging your property. But as you pointed out, good luck getting anything from him.

The one saving grace is that, in many states, a valid insurance agreement, to indemnify the owner, allows (or even requires) the insurance company to immediately step in to deal with defending the lawsuit. So at least the owner won't personally have to find a lawyer and go to court. But good luck trying to find affordable insurance premiums after that.

Actually, when I was a grad student at NYU in 2002, when Jeff started there, he wasn't paid or funded at all. He wasn't a student, and didn't even have an office. He was just there for fun.

From what I recall, Jeff made a decent amount of money right out of college in the dot-com boom (I think it was with CUSeeMe, an early teleconference software). After cashing that out just in time, he didn't need to work, from what I gathered, so he just was looking for a place to hang out around other interesting people doing graphics research. So he got in touch with one of the professors, and they let him hang out at what was then the "Center for Advanced Technologies" (since long defunct). All of his work was self-funded. Like I said, he didn't even have an office; he worked at the public terminals in the middle of the lab floor after everyone else left for the day.

Maybe that changed at some point later (I left after a year), but I suspect he probably brought in far more funding (or at least positive publicity) than he ever used.

I actually have the exact *opposite* problem on Mac; Chrome will open PDFs natively in a tab, while Firefox wants me to open Preview. This was the primary reason I switched. If the Firefox developers added native PDF support on Mac, I'd consider switching back.

AC is absolutely right. Of course someone would make that pill, because it would completely wipe out all their competitors' market share, assuming that the price of that pill was less than the present value (including inconvenience) of taking the other pills over the length of the patent term.

And I'm not forced to buy their new pills; their old (no-longer-patented) ones work just fine for me. But they don't work well enough for some people, whereas the new ones may. So I'm quite happy to have given them their monopoly-inflated price (about $100/month) for the 3 years I was on it until the patent expired, because they've turned that around into making new drugs that help other people. More importantly, I appreciate that they've given me my life back, and hope for the future. For that, $100/month was a bargain.

Now, I don't deny that there can be problems where companies, or individuals therein, take actions that are fraudulent, exploitative or otherwise unethical. So of course, there should be some level of government oversight. But profit is exactly what motivates these companies to make new drugs. If a disease only affects a small number of people (as opposed to, perhaps, a wide-spread pandemic), governments don't have much motivation to produce drugs.

Suppose that you were a politician proposing to spend billions of dollars towards developing a drug for, let's say, those with schizophrenia, which are less than half a percent of the population. The drug may never pan out. And your opponent says that we should just throw those psychos in institutions, if not in prison (because we all know that that's really what they "deserve," and that their illness is just an "excuse") and spend that money on decent people instead. Which do you think would be more popular, and thus more likely to be implemented by a government? (Hint: one of these is exactly what has been done by governments for most of human history, and the other has never been done, at least on any large scale).

Profit from other people's pain? The pharmaceutical companies that make the drugs I take every day, Merck and Pfizer, are profiting from RELIEVING my once-substantial, and now nearly non-existant pain. I am thankful every day that we have companies committed to such "evil" practices.

Unfortunately, HousingMaps doesn't work. If you compare the listings on HM vs those on CL, you will see that HM has only a small, and unclearly-defined, subset of those. In otherwords, it has a bug, and doesn't pull out all the listings. Moreover, it has very limited options for searching, and divides up filters by bizarre factors (for example, I can look for apartments under $750, or between $500 and $1000, but not under $1000.

Unlike PadMapper, which was a site that actually tried to maintain a useful product, HousingMaps appears to have been only a one-off project by some coder looking for something to do (and to be clear, I give him credit for offering it to the world, but it's not the same as an actively developed project).

This is a horrible action by Craigslist. If they don't want their site to be useful, that's fine. But the postings are the property of their posters, not of Craigslist. Presumably, the posters would be happy to have anyone in the world coming to those listings. It should be *their* intellectual property rights that are at issue, not those of the intermediary.

No, that's not quite correct; they had not (yet) ballooned the deficit (I assume you mean debt) by "trillions" of dollars (defined as two trillion or more). He said that to Paul O'Neil in December 2002:

http://www.ontheissues.org/2004/Dick_Cheney_Budget_+_Economy.htm

In the last year of the Clinton administration (FY 2000) the debt was 5.6 trillion. At the end of the last fiscal year before that statement, (FY 2003, ending October 1, 2002) the debt was 6.7 trillion, which is an increase of just over a single trillion. By the end of FY 2004, it was 7.3 trillion, which is closer to "trillions" increased from the beginning of the Bush administration, but not quite there (an increase of 1.7 trillion).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt

If you did mean deficit, then the statement is even less true. The largest deficit under the Bush administration was for FY 2008 (because of the bailouts) at about 1.1 trillion.

However, from FY 2008 through the present (that is, the increase under Obama), the debt has gone up ~5.2 trillion dollars. That counts as "trillions." It also counts as almost a trillion dollars more than the increase in debt for the entire Bush presidency.

http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np

A lot of people here make a good point that is, however, not relevant. Namely, that "we don't need more programmers." I'm inclined to agree, especially hearing from friends about how difficult the job market is for many of them. However, this criticism misses the point: we want to teach those that *aren't* going to programmers, in order to provide them with a well-rounded education.

Most of the people that are taught algebra (or any math above basic arithmatic) will never use it in their work, much less be mathematicians. Same for a foreign language, or history, geography, chemistry, physics, etc. For that matter, it is completely irrelevant to the lives of the vast majority of people whether humankind developed after billions of years of evolution, or created in a day. Yet I don't see many slashdotters arguing in favor of those religious groups that don't want to teach accurate biology. Children should be given exposure to as much information and knowledge as possible, to make them better informed and educated adults. What they do with it then is up to them.

Other countries do a better job producing more well-rounded students. Let me give an example: A German friend, a Ph.D. student in comparative literature, asked what my CompSci Ph.D. thesis was about. I said "mathematical integration," and asked her if she was familiar with the term (from experience, most Americans without science backgrounds are not). "Obviously," she said "I did graduate from high school, you know."

Apparently, in Germany, everyone at university-bound high schools takes calculus. It's just expected. It doesn't matter if they're going to be in science or math. It is taught in case they might use it, and so that they can be generally more-knowledgeable people. The same, in my view, should apply with programming. It teaches rigorous, formal thinking skills, something that is sorely lacking in American academia.

I hate to say it, especially thinking of all the people that will be losing their jobs in this hard economy, but GamePro's demise is long overdue, and no great loss. I haven't been into video games much for the last 10 years, but as a high-schooler in the 90's, I was quite a devoted reader of the video game press. Compared to Electronic Gaming Monthly, perhaps its major competitor for most of that time, GamePro was essentially a purveyor of hype and marketing buzz, rather than a serious commentator on the state of the field (assuming that a magazine about games can ever be serious). Nearly every (well-marketed/buzzworthy) game had an almost perfect rating on the scale that they used -- one could never rely on GamePro to give any sort of critical view. Many games had absolutely perfect scores.

By contrast, EGM had a scale of 1-10, through for the first year or so I thought it was a 1-9 scale because I never saw any 10's (I want to say it was Final Fantasy III that got the first 10 that I saw, but I'm not sure). I remember that EGM prided themselves for many years on never having rated a game 10 by all four reviewers. Moreover, unlike EGM (or earlier-90's Nintendo Power), GamePro had a saccarine, plastic, slick, manufactured feel (I apologize for my lack of a better term), and lacked any real sense of personality or character. Kind of like cheap candy -- yeah, it has an overwhelming sweetness, but has so little else that it ends up feeling as if it tasted bland. I've kept all the Nintendo Power issues from when it started in 1988, until I stopped subscribing around 2000. Most of the EGMs from that time period as well. GamePro, if I ever somehow ended up with an issue, went straight to the trash.

Sorry, but that simply isn't the state of the law -- certainly not in America, at least. The general theory for slip-and-fall cases is one of negligence: did the defendant fail to meet the standard of behavior that a reasonable person in similar circumstances would take, and if so, did that conduct cause the plaintiff's injury. If not, no liability.

The Hot Coffee case operated on a more plaintiff-friendly theory: in product-liability cases, liability is "strict." That is, courts will not ask whether the standard of care was negligent, only whether the product was defective, and did that defect cause the injury. The plaintiff there argued that coffee served at 185F was per se "defective," thus it didn't matter whether McDonald's was otherwise negligent. This is arguably the most questionable part about that lawsuit, since many people (including other courts) disagree with that premise, and instead argue that coffee *should* be served that hot. See McMahon v. Bunn-O-Matic Corp., 150 F.3d 651 (7th Cir. 1997):

But one way or the other, causation is absolutely required. If you slip on your own shoelaces at McDonalds, and there is no link whatsoever to McDonald's conduct, you're necessarily out of luck.