Or, Montsanto will, besides owning the entire food business, also own the entire alcoholic drink business as well.

Or, you know, you could grow your own food and make your own drink using 'heirloom' stock. Rumor has it people have based entire businesses around heirloom strains.

Welcome to the new world - where the only thing you can have is specially filtered water. After all, a plain glass of tap or bottled may have Monstanto yeast in it, and you'll need to license that bottle if you want to drink it.

I've looked at every reported decision where Monsanto has sued some poor innocent farmer who allegedly had pollen blown into his fields -- which is really hard when you're talking about Roundup-ready soybeans -- and, amazingly, the poor farmer always manages to convince the judge that he intentionally planted large quantities of the Roundup-ready crop. He doesn't mean to convince the judge of that. He just happens to do so by 1. nuking a field with Roundup and then collecting the seeds of the surviving crop to replant or 2. buying seed from a non-seed elevator (unusual but not illegal) and then nuking the planted seedlings with Roundup (because of course you'd apply a non-selective herbicide to your non-Roundup-ready crop).

So it's obvious you can karma-whore by railing against the agri-villan, but can you back it up with facts? Or not?

Since TFA didn't bother clearly saying what versions are vulnerable (except, as you assert, in the comments) then it wasn't worthy of a /. post, which is my whole fucking point. English, motherfucker, do you speak it?

Your point never addressed whether the TFA was worthy of a /. post. Your point was directed at the article summary and Soulskill's editing up until 8:04 EDT. Once you finally notices that TFA contracted your rant, you suddenly chose to attack it. I can't read something that hasn't been written yet. And speaking is not involved at all. Idiot.

SparkFun doesn't really mind Fluke's trade dress (other than believing it to be overly broad - they themselves deem the old SFE DMM's border to be more of an orange..). What they mind is the inflexibility of the system once you're confronted with such an issue. For example, SFE didn't appear to have any way to tell CBP that they believed the borders to be orange and thus not even run afoul of the trade dress to begin with and enter e.g. arbitration with either the CBP or with Fluke.

What they mind is having to take any responsibility for investigating their situation at all. Or, apparently, spending any money to modify the meters, ship the meters out, or do anything to help themselves short of whining that the world is being so unfair to their $25+ million-per-year import-from-China-all-the-time business that has remained blissfully ignorant concerning a routine import-export problem. Just wait until they find out that there are arms control laws that apply to their international electronics shipments. It'll blow their minds.

Contacting a trademark attorney is not hard. Using Google is even easier: "customs exclusion order appeal"
First page result: Your Options After An ITC Exclusion Order - Law360

While it's easy enough to say that SFE should have done better in figuring out this could occur beforehand, that doesn't help once the issue does arise.

Picking up a phone or using Google helps a lot more than claiming that the yellow surround included in your very own picture of your very own device, which is quite clearly yellow, is not in fact yellow while writing couple thousand words about how this is everyone's fault but your own.

Clearly they went for a trademark rather than the appropriate design patent so it wouldn't expire. But a trade mark is supposed to be exactly that: A word or mark on a product or marketing material that indicates the company or brand that is selling it. Like a Nike swoosh or the Apple with a bite out of it or even a word mark like IBM. It would be like Nike trying to trademark a two toned sneaker or Ford trying to trademark a black muscle car with a yellow stripe rather than just the swoosh or the word "Ford" in an oval.

Just because we can say that the government is at fault for awarding this trademark in the first place, doesn't mean we can absolve the company of an abuse of intellectual property law.

Yet we can absolve the company of this 'abuse' of intellectual property law, and we can say that the government is not at fault for awarding the trademark, because the law concerning the use of color as a trademark has very clear ever since 1995.

In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court in Qualitex Co. v. Jacobson Products Co., Inc., 514 U.S. 159 concluded that "a color may sometimes meet the basic legal requirements for use as a trademark" and that "[opposing] arguments do not justify a special legal rule preventing color alone from serving as a trademark..." The trademark that was upheld was a gold-green color for dry cleaning press pad covers.

You can throw the word "abuse" around all you like, but it is you who are attempting to abuse the law. The law is not what you think the law is, the law is what the statutes and court decisions specify the law is. If you do not like the law, it is your responsibility to change it through the legislative process. Until then, telling others that the law is what it is what you think it ought to be is either wanton recklessness or sheer fraud.

No, you're point is to completely ignore TFA's statement that "We saw affected machines with a whole range of kernel 2.6 subversions."

There's no point in demanding that the summary list the 36 subversions that are vulnerable and/or the 4 which are not when the source article does not include any such information to begin with. Any whoever moderated your subsequent replay as insightful is a moron.

And an unfortunate submission with "Michael" rather than "Martin" sucks the air out of the room. Wheeee...

Not even wrong. I guarandamntee you that none of the affected computers were actually running 2.6.0, and it wouldn't have been /that/ long ago that such an obviously stupid and ill-researched claim wouldn't have been posted.

Soulskill didn't write "the 2.6.0 version," he wrote "the 2.6 version." As in potentially 2.6.0 through 2.6.39.4. When posters refer to Windows, you don't automatically assume Windows 1.0. When posters refer to Windows XP, you don't automatically assume Windows XP RTM. Why would you assume that someone referring to "the 2.6 version," when there never was a single "2.6" version, is referring to 2.6.0 versus most of the 2.6 subversions?

FYI, from an author comment in TFA:
"Thanks for the comment. We saw affected machines with a whole range of kernel 2.6 subversions. Version 2.6.18 appeared to be particularly prevalent."

You may have done five minutes of googling, but you didn't do 5 minutes of reading, and you for sure didn't read the article's clear statement that "All of the affected web servers that we have examined use the Linux 2.6 kernel."

Now go flame Michael Lee so that we can watch him destroy you...

I didn't claim to be opposed. I also, pretty clearly, did not agree with Sparkfun's argument that their multimeter was somehow "orange."

Actually read the TFA (and the links to the trademark in question) and you can see that:

1. Fluke did not trademark yellow multimeters.

1. The linked document is not the trademark, it is the USPTO's TSDR entry. You can download the actual trademark "Registration Certificate" by clicking on the "Documents" tab and looking for it. When you pull the the registration certificate, there is no disclaimer of color. That's a USPTO data entry error from their conversion to an electronic records system.

So yes, Fluke didn't trademark yellow multimeters. They trademarked dark gray and yellow multimeters with a particular positioning of colors.

If you look at an image of SparkFun's multimeter, there is a striking resemblance.

Exactly. Sparkfun claims that "Our multimeters are actually kind of orange, not Fluke yellow.". Uh huh. Pull the other one.

Because Fluke's trademark specifically states "Color is not claimed as a feature of the mark" As such, it is difficult to see how Customs is turning them away for a trademark violation because of color.

The linked document is not the trademark, it is the USPTO's TSDR entry. You can download the actual trademark "Registration Certificate" by clicking on the "Documents" tab and looking for it. The registration application never disclaims color. In fact, when you pull the the registration certificate, there is no disclaimer of color.

Because the ITC looks at the actual registration document, not a semi-official electronic index, its order doesn't adopt that indexing mistake as gospel. Customs is following the ITC exclusion order. Not that difficult to see.

this IS from one of the sub-departments of DHS; I'm not surprised that they didn't really bother to read the line that says "Color is not claimed as a feature of the mark."

DHS probably read the published general exclusion order (pp. 7-10 of the .pdf), which, like Fluke's trademark registration certificate, does not disclaim or exclude color.

This just highlights the need for adding an appeals process to the whole thing.

Like this one?. Item (b)(4)?

(that and perhaps ICE needs some basic legalese comprehension requirements for their agents)

ICE doesn't look at the USPTO's Trademark Status & Document Retrieval system. They look at the ITC exclusion order. The ITC looks at the actual trademark registration certificate. Only the Slashdot crowd unquestioningly accepts the first semi-official looking document provided to them by an anonymous reader and/or Soulskill.

This is indeed odd. From the actual document of the trademark owned by Fluke it specifically states: Color is not claimed as a feature of the mark. Either there is some other reason the items are being refused entry or Fluke is falsely claiming a trademark infraction, at least if it is because a similar color yellow was used.

That is not the "actual document of the trademark owned by Fluke," it is the USPTO's TSDR entry. You can download the actual documents by clicking on the "Documents" tab and downloading them. The actual documents do not disclaim color. In fact, if you look at the "Registration Certificate" for 2,796,480, there is no disclaimer of color.

Fluke is not falsely claiming a trademark infraction. A USPTO contractor has screwed up the electronic summary of the (then-official) paper record. Since the description of the mark specifically states a color scheme, it's pretty clear that there's a some sort of problem. You simply haven't taken the next step of looking at the actual record.

Besides, isn't it up to the courts to determine trademark violations, not customs?

One obtains a customs exclusion order from the US International Trade Commission, which functions as a so-called "Article I tribunal." ITC decisions can be appealed to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. Any way you slice it, a "court" has found a that there was a trademark violation. Sparkfun could appeal the application of that exclusion order to their meters (a protest under 19 C.F.R. 174), but it doesn't sound like they will.

Customs simply enforces the ITC's exclusion order. You might as well ask whether it's up to the US Marshals to determine whether someone is a fugitive, while ignoring that the police have already obtained a summons and the court has already issued an arrest warrant.

FYI, don't believe the "aww shucks, we're a small business" story. Sparkfun was eager to tout in 2012 that it had "more than 140 employees, revenues of more than $25 million and posted 128 percent revenue growth from 2009 to 2011." While the SBA may define a small business as any enterprise with fewer than 500 employees, that's a pretty substantial business in everyone else's eyes.

So, you're arguing that water is cheaper for the fracking companies than for farmers? Or that farmers should be charged less than fracking companies? Or that both should be charged more or less than residential users?

I'm confused, since you've injected yourself into the middle of a conversation where my reply was rather self-evidently sarcastic, and the GP wanted to prioritize human consumption (see your reply's title). Nevermind that agircultrual users pay substantially less than residential users for each acre-foot of water used, even after you add in capital expense (see this CBO report.

Taken together, all the wells surveyed from January 2011 to May 2013 consumed 97 billion gallons of water, pumped under high pressure to crack rocks containing oil or natural gas.

Anyone using 'industrial' quantities of water should be charged in such a way as to discourage its use.

Hell yeah!

But not the farmers... they only use about 100-150 billion gallons per day. Says the USGS. But Willie Nelson says they're good people...

From the post:

They object to the measures we have taken to defend freedom because they see the
inconvenience of them and do not recognize (or don't care about) the need for them.

Or they believe that the "inconvenience" outweighs the need for those measures -- e.g., the inconvenience is very large or the need is not as great as Stallman believes.

Most of Stallman's post is quite balanced and reasonable. However, suggesting that another group's thought process is defective ("do not recognize" or "do not care") merely because they consider other factors and reach different conclusions than yours is a bit of a cheap shot.