That seemed like the most reasonable judgment that the government should not be adjudicating the content that may be trademarked. Even though trademark itself is a restriction of speech by saying if I trademark my band name, no one else may use that name for their band.
IANAL. I read the article but not the ruling.
I am not sure how this is a victory for free speech ruling. A trademark restricts everyone's ability to use the speech in question. If naming my band is speech, if I pay the government I get to restrict anyone else's speech to name their band with the same name. So, restricting 300 million people's speech in favor of a single person's speech with authority of law. A victory for free speech would have struck down trademarks entirely. Now trademarks are not unconstitutional because the first amendment is not without any restriction and we can argue there is an important government need under the commerce clause to provide trademarks to help prevent confusion in the marketplace.
So, allowing offensive trademarks increases the scope of speech that trademarks may restrict. There might be some reasoning that if the government is allowed to have a free speech carve out for trademarks then that carve out has to be generic as to the content of the speech. That might be reasonable,
When I get some time I want to read the ruling instead of an article about the ruling to see how the justices reconcile the paradox of increasing the scope of speech that trademarks can restrict on first amendment grounds.
I agree on the point about kirkland signatures goal.
Let's assume for fun that it is not a goal, but an actual claim the balls were "equivalent or better than leading national brands". Every single term has to be defined, and likely in court, since those are not legal terms. Leading national brands is plural so, top 3, top 5, top 50%? Then, in golf balls each brand has many different balls. So, which products are we comparing from each brand. Then, what parameters are golf balls measured against each other. Once we have that what does equivalent or better mean. Equivalent in plain English does not usually mean exactly equal, and there is such a thing as measurement error. So, equivalent could mean within 5% of the leading brands in whatever parameters are measured.
About $199 new from Costco, when I bought mine many years ago. Not sure what the current Costco sets run.
And, you can get a custom built set from Monark Golf for about $350. Pick your own knock off gold head, shafts, and grips and the desired length. Which is nice if you are shorter or taller than average. Funny when people are paying thousands for custom name brand clubs.
Costco's profit is the membership fees not overhead. Easy to confirm too.
2016 profit 2.35 billion.
Membership count about 44 million in 2015, I didn't look for 2016 numbers, but close enough.
2.35 billion/44million = ~$53.
Yearly price of a Costco membership $50 or $100.
Every state has a minimum of 3 electors regardless of population. So, using 2010 population.
from http://www.thegreenpapers.com/Census10/HouseAndElectors.phtml
California has 37000K people and 55 electors.
3 electors per...
Alaska 721K, Delaware 900K, Montana 100K, North Dakota 675K, South Dakota 819K, Wyoming 568K, Vermont 630K = 4,413K 21 electors
4 electors per...
Hawaii 1300K, Idaho 1500K, Maine 1300K, New Hampshire 1300K, Rhode Island 1000K = 6,400K 20 Electors
5 electors per
New Mexico 2000K, Nebraska 1800K, West Virginia 1850K = 5650K 15 electors
Total: 16000K people control 56 electors.
States with half the people have as much influence over Presidential Elections as California. I am not necessarily saying the Electoral College or 2 Senators per state are bad. But, let's realize that the Founding Fathers constructed a system that gives less populous states a non-trivially greater influence over presidential elections and the Senate.
Actually, synthetic diamond will be vastly more useful than natural diamonds, since the jewels are a side-effect of the actual reasons for synthetic diamond research which is to create 12 inch diamond wafers.
The article is even more wrong. The money is booked to subsidiaries incorporated overseas, but most of it is probably held in US financial institutions. That does limit what the money can be used for, but not where it is actually held.
When I have run into long methods the solution usually is not a deep call stack, but instead that the method has chained together 20 10 line logical units. It would make the code more readable to have that be 20 sequential (not nested) calls to well named functions that accurately describe what they are doing. Often those logical units are different if/else blocks as well, so extracting them makes it easier to unit test all branches rather than trying to set up 200 different branch possibilities on one method.
I think that DevOps or more accurately deployment automation and Continuous Delivery make microservices possible. Without the end to end automated tests and the deployment automation to deploy the microservices, plus Electric Cloud's software or its equivalent to track what configuration of microservices is actually being tested and track that into production. Trying to manually attempt a microservices integration test across a dozen teams working on tens of microservices would likely result in a halting of development for a significant amount of time while all the integration issues are worked out, and then making sure that makes it to production is another manual headache. Automation to run that multiple microservice integration multiple time a day means less change to blame for problems which should make it easier to track the problem to a culprit and fix quickly.
Once you are doing continuous delivery into test, it should stretch to production, so you are not only testing the application but the production deployment process as well. If you want that to happen the silos between operations and development need to be broken down because it is a little silly for development to work on all that reliable automation and have operations say "Nope, we have our own automation tools.", or to wait until the very end to hand off the tools to operations instead of having them involved from the beginning.
I will say I am not attempting fine grained microservices. I like to say microservices with "micro" very loosely defined.
All large projects should be modularized in general, if for no other reason than to maintain the sanity of people. Microservices are slapping a remote interface onto a module. In Java, a little clever use of interfaces and dependency injection, and a "microservice" can be remote or local with almost no change to client code (think proxy pattern). There is change to client configuration due to local needing data store connection information and remote needing remote discovery information.
You could divide teams along these modules, but I find that causes a lot of coordination overhead. I like dividing teams along lines of delivering end user visible features and they work on whatever module is necessary. It helps to reduce the temptation to write the same thing 3 or 4 times in slightly different ways because no one wants to go through the effort required to convince some one else to put that in their module. I generally try to have teams work in the same area for a long period of time which means they usually don't have to be experts in every module, but instead a few that are core to their area, know a few that are peripheral, and have a passing understanding of the rest. It does require good test driven development, continuous integration, teams that will fix whatever regression they cause, and teams that respect other teams enough to "do unto others..." and write comprehensible and testable code.
As for deciding what your modules are... That depends. It can evolve, but it requires some one to pay attention to what is being developed and realize when new responsibilities are showing up that belong in a new module. Hopefully, many team members learn to recognize and raise modularization opportunities. I like the Domain Driven Design approach as a starting point, but that it has quite a bit of overhead that would not be appropriate for some software.
Some other suggestions...
Another place to look is whether the Spring Planning meeting is really just Sprint Planning.
Has backlog prioritization been rolled into Sprint planning? Could the product owner do that during the Sprint?
Is defect triage being done during "Sprint Planning"? Then you are doing two meetings. Which might be just fine, but maybe not everyone has to be present.
Are you doing design and coordination during the meeting? Then, you are combining sprint planning with design and coordination efforts. This may be a good thing. It can be better to just block off the time each Sprint to get everyone together, rather than doing it adhoc and having to deal with a key person having a conflict. Plus design can often elicit questions about requirements, so it can be good to have the product owner available.
And, if either tool works use the one you know best. And, try to write code well, so you don't get stuck when the right decision now becomes the wrong decision later because things change.
From a data store side, there are reasons to use an RDBMS and one or more NoSQL solutions all together. They handle different situations better and if you have any decent level of complexity you find the boxes defined by LAMP or MEAN too confining. I generally stay away from MySQL due to the licensing issues, but MariaDB and Amazon Aurora fit the same space. I used PostgreSQL for one solution. Of course in the AWS case you might forgo MongoDB altogether for Dynamo because why deal with operating Mongo when Amazon will take care of that with Dynamo.
Some of us have to deal with corporate standards and actually neither LAMP or MEAN is actually allowed, which makes this whole thing a pointless flame war.
"Senate appropriators suggested that NASA’s plans announced earlier this year to procure Soyuz seats for missions in 2018 indicated that the agency was not confident at even this early stage that the two companies with commercial crew contracts, Boeing and SpaceX, could remain on schedule to begin flights in 2017."
Clearly the correct approach is to put all your eggs in one basket at any given time.
If you delay American crew launches until 2019, then NASA is going to procure Soyuz seats for 2019 and maybe 2020.
Run wire to every room might also be reasonable, as well, but terminate at a blank wall plate. 2 Cat5E + 2 RG6 coax can run around
The Tao is like a glob pattern: used but never used up. It is like the extern void: filled with infinite possibilities.
