Typical partisan hack commie; your ticket would bring only serfdom.

I, and any true American lover of liberty, demand a Libertarian president and Green Party vice president! ;-)

Nice false dichotomy, you fucking imbecile.

Did you read the article? He wants a degree as easily as possible, just so that he can make more money. If an accredited institution offered Bachelor's degrees in CS for sucking dick in the parking lot, I'm sure our erstwhile submitter wouldn't have bothered asking for anything else.

Risk is the product of probability and cost

No it isn't, you fucking moron. The product of probability and cost is the expected cost; risk is almost exactly the opposite. Risk is a measure of uncertainty; it's vague because there are many ways to define risk. For instance, one may define risk as the probability that seeking medical care will completely ruin you financially. It's easy to reduce this risk, even if it increases the average cost of medical care. There are many other definitions which I won't bother going over. The point is that you're an idiot. Don't use probabilistic lingo if you don't know what it means.

Wow. Maybe you should try reading a few of these books yourself.

yeah, and Dara Ó Briain did it before Tim Minchin.

who cares?

They could sell them, and then use that money to pay for a new non-infringing shipment of (inferior) multimeters.

Of course since it's important for them to appear altruistic, they'll probably just give away a smaller number of (superior) multimeters.

There are about 500 active trademarks matching the string "multimeter". I could go through them myself in a few hours manually, or about ten minutes if I could grep the records first for relevancy.

My conclusion is that Sparkfun are just incompetent. I'm sure they would have no problem paying their lawyers to enforce their trademark, but they plead for special treatment as a poor widdle small business when they're on the receiving end. Fuck 'em.

I meant "would work against." Sorry about that.

Heh. Yeah, but whose common sense and human decency? Why, yours, of course, and no one else's! It's amazing how many disputes can be settled by individual whim.

If you can't think of a case where your own permissive standards wouldn't work against what you consider good and decent if the shoe were on the other foot, then you aren't very imaginative.

Uh, yeah, that is no reason. A lawyer could make everyone happy (at least for the short term), but it would still dilute the mark (correctly, imho, but that's not important).

I notice that SparkFun Electronics is a registered trademark. I'm sure they'd have no problem with my competing companies, SporkFun electronics and Sp@rkFun Electronics.

In the law, ignorance is not an excuse and hasn't been for centuries if not millennia. You are responsible for what you sell and, yes, for better or worse, colors have been trademarkable for a while now. I know of several examples like T-Mobile's magenta and Reese's orange, and I'm not even a retailer.

I have no doubt that SparkFun would exercise its trademark against infringers, so I have little sympathy for their case even if their violation was unintentional.

The thing is, allowing trademark violations to go unchallenged for no particular reason at all (in law, being kind is not a reason) will dilute the mark just as if they did nothing, or even worse. So, there is heavy incentive for them not to allow it, and they probably wouldn't.

What a great feeling it must be to pay extra for the privilege of fixing their bugs for them. Did they at least give you a discount? (Rhetorical question; I know they didn't.)

Look at those assholes. Ordinary fucking people. I hate 'em.

Well, if he's anything like me, the 'emotion' is amusement and schadenfreude.