I don't remember what I had in mind when writing that, but the first thing that comes to mind is Microsoft Office formats. There were a few years where they would release a new version of Office with incompatible versions of their Office file formats, which meant that if one person in the company upgraded, every file they touched suddenly became unreadable in older versions. That was a few years ago, but they've gotten so much flack for it that they've stabilized the formats after Office 2007.

IIRC they did similar shenanigans at some point with WMA/WMV files, where they released a new version of Windows Media Player that automatically used the new version of their codec, which was unsupported on older versions of Windows Media Player. That would be fine, since Windows Media Player was free, except that they didn't allow you to install the new version of Windows Media Player on older versions of Windows. They've done similar things with DirectX and IE.

It doesn't happen very often anymore, but for many years I kept hearing people say things like, "The story of Bill Gates shows what's so great about our country. The guy started out poor, he had absolutely nothing, but he was pretty much the best programmer in the world. Using nothing but his programming skills, he managed to become the richest guy in the world. It's a great success story."

Yeah, Bill Gates got rich by being a brilliant programmer, and Steve Jobs got rich by being a really nice guy. Meanwhile, Ballmer just skated by on his good looks, social graces, and beautiful head of hair.

Even if they used it now, I'm not sure they'd sue. It would make them look pretty crappy. As it is, they got a request to use their logo on a statue of a murdered child, and they were like, "Eh... we'd rather not." It's really not that hard to understand why DC wouldn't want to be strongly linked to child abuse and murder in such a potentially long-lasting medium, given the choice. How much trouble they'd go through to stop it, though, is another issue.

Part of the question, I'd imagine, is whether they're denying the use of the logo via copyright protection or trademark protection. I'm not sure it makes sense for them to claim trademark protection here, but if so, there are some legal requirements for them to protect their trademark, so they might need to at least send a cease and desist letter. I'm not a lawyer, but that's my understanding.

Isn't part of the problem caused by checked baggage? They don't like when you check baggage and then decide not to get on the plane.

This. And while the government is at it, please fine the bajeezus out of Amazon for having a "disable" switch on one-click that doesn't actually disable one-click in large parts of their website (e.g. Amazon Instant Video). I complained about this, and they said to set a PIN on the account to prevent purchases. Unfortunately, that also prevents streaming viewing, and there's no way whatsoever to prevent purchases or streaming of G-rated material, because there's no setting lower than "G".

Amazon has a lot of 'splainin' to do.

Yeah, in Vermont, it took all of about a year.

Vermont's state constitution forbids slavery and was adopted in 1777.

Several other rebel colonies declared themselves free even before independence was formally gained.

During the Revolutionary War, Britain transported slaves of loyalists to other British colonies. (The slaves were not emancipated.)

There was a British court decision in 1763, but it was not binding overall, seems to have been pretty widely ignored by other British courts at the time, and the matter would not be settled in the British Empire for several more decades.

You also managed to get both dates wrong. Nice going.

We don't actually have any sort of twilight this time of year in Stockholm, even though the sun does go down for about 5½ hours. It gets dark only if it happens to be cloudy between 2200 and 0330.

Not quite the midnight sun thing you hear about (that's further north), but it still takes some getting used to.

You really need some better reading material.

And you're THE ONLY ONE who can see this... right.

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

Are you sure you were around 20 years ago? Mainstream/formula music has been around since the dawn of commercial audio recording. Blaming its existence on piracy is silly, and just makes you sound like a **AA shill.

No, they're reporting that it ran in the NYT, which is exactly what they're supposed to be doing.

I believe you intended to say "HTML isn't as popular a beverage".

I hate it when poor delivery spoils what would have been a good punch line.