Copyright law protects the author for 100 years, but there is no expiration date on a trademark as long as it is continuously in use and renewed every 10 years.
Judging from what I've seen, if WDC trademarked the original Steamboat Willie character and renewed the mark as required, it has been in use continuously via pins, toys, etc..
Writing a letter to a company asking them a question doesn't entitle you to an answer. Let alone a legally-binding answer. I can imagine it's reasonable to expect a positive answer if you are going to get sued. But for a company to explicitly declare you in the clear is a courtesy, not something I'd think you can compel.
I'm sure M&M would have replied with a clear answer if they represented Disney and the question was put to them. It seems just like another ploy to get news coverage. The more their name is out there, the more people know them and maybe call them when injured. I suspect they have lwayers smart enough to hav answered the question without asking Disney. As for Disney, I suspect they will do anything they can to protect their trademarks.
Like your presentation but not your Subject--even though I had a couple of negative encounters with rule-based librarians recently.
Tea, it wasn't meant as a shot at librarians but rather how AI is making people view them (and clickbait).
Unfortunately I think libraries are losing there relevance and it's related to the AI reference in your FP. However I just started thinking about a more insidious version of the problem. You can say that it's a big problem that generative AIs will fabricate BS, but even when we realize an answer is BS, we may learn the wrong lesson from it. After all, many of the AI answers are pretty good (on the theory you can make sufficient allowance for your own tendency to believe what you want to believe), so there's a kind of reinforcement in favor of those questions and prompts.
Good point. The reinforcing nature of AI do to prompt choices as well as design is an insidious feature that is no doubt viewed a a positive by companies since it keeps people coming back.
Most people like oracles and want to get "authoritative" answers to their questions.
Yet it's not so much that we may learn to think like machines (which is still a big problem), but rather that we may learn not to ask certain kinds of questions. We won't even be able to ask why those questions are so problematic because we already "know" the oracular AI can't handle them. (Even if the government or some greedy megalomaniac intervened to make sure the question was unanswerable.) Hallucinated books may the smallest of our future worries.
It think it's not just the authoritative nature but the belief that somehow AI is unbiased in the answers it provides. I have friends who truly believe, because AI has so much data the answers must be correct and unbiased, and GIGO is no longer a problem even though they are fishing in a data sewer.
(Also a concern that reading is being crushed by cute cat videos, but out of time just now...)
There is no such thing as a cute cat. ChatGPT told me so so that must be right.
People have an idea that international law doesn't work but the vast majority works fine, and we often just notice the serious failures and breakdowns, not all the stuff that is quietly working on a day-to-day basis.
International law works as long as the major powers want it to work.
My wife works in a library. Some of these people become not just defensive, but outright hostile.
I suspect part of it is also being told something they asked for is incorrect and taking it a being told they are wrong and thus taking it personally, even when though that is not the librarian's intent.
They can barely make a phone at that price point.
Sure they can, they just don’t want to.
Most are bought by corps or individuals who treat them as an appliance.
Funny you mention corps. I work for a multinational and what our IT does is buy the base level as an appliance and then manually upgrade user RAM on an as needs / as approved basis. Multitasking rarely requires a higher end computer, but always requires more available RAM. Corps definitely play with this stuff.
Mine did too, but it was to circumvent a requirement to get CEO approval for purchases over x. We weren’t a multinational, ut would custom order laptops with no hard drive and hard drives separately so we weren’t below the limit and then put the machines together.
You're not wrong, but this is a website populated mostly by that 1%. I suspect that most of the people here do upgrade components or build their own PCs from parts.
For those that want to do that a Mac is not the machine for them.
Back when the iPhone was introduced I was convinced that within 10 years computing would be mostly done this way; connecting your portable computer (smart phone) to a dock that turned it into your home computer. I'm surprised that this idea never gained traction.
I think there have been a few reasons for this.
I think the biggest one is that nobody could meaningfully agree on a form factor. Now, *I* always thought that a great option would be to have a 'zombie laptop' that had a keyboard, trackpad, webcam, and a battery, with a slot to slide your phone into. The phone would connect to the peripherals and give a 12" screen and a keyboard, while charging the phone in the process.
The devil, of course, was in the details. Even if Apple made such a device and molded it to the iPhone, the problem then became that a user couldn't put their phone in a case, or it wouldn't fit in the clamshell's phone slot. There would also need to be adapters to fit the different sized phones, or different SKUs entirely with per-device slots, which then also pigeonholes Apple into a particular physical form factor. That begets the "use a C-to-C cable" option, which is better, but makes it ergonomically annoying to use if one isn't sitting at a desk. A wireless option solves both of these problems, but kills both batteries in the process. Finally, there's the price point: the cost for the end user would need to be low enough that it doesn't just make sense to have two devices, AND the first-gen owners would likely feel some kind of way if they were stuck with their old phone because it meant buying a new clamshell. It works well on paper, but pretty much any real-world testing would show the shortcomings pretty quickly.
Supposed that was solved somehow...while the Samsung Fold phones are helping justify time spent in adding a multi-window interface to Android, try installing Android x86 on a VM for a bit and watch what happens. It's been a while since I tried, but the experience was pretty bad - the inability to open e-mails in new windows was particularly infuriating; many apps take exception to having multiple concurrent instances for side-by-side usage, and window focus gets pretty tricky to navigate. It *can* be done, but it ultimately felt like all-compromise, no-improvement.
Finally, there *is* such a thing, at least to an extent. Many, MANY apps are just frontends on a website. iCloud is like this, the whole Google ecosystem is like this, Salesforce is like this...for a solid number of apps, there is a browser-based frontend that works just as well, if not better in at least some cases. Data is commonly synced with Google or iCloud or Dropbox. The number of apps that are worth running on a phone, without a desktop or browser analogue, that would justify a user getting a clamshell to run that app in a larger window...is small enough that it is seldom worth dealing with all of the *other* compromises involved.
Precisely.
When anyone pulls the GDPR card it's almost always cause they're marketing your private data to everyone and their uncle.
It's more than just GDPR compliance, which can be substantial and why some companies block their websites from access by EU IP addresses. Apple, as a gatekeeper, is in the EU's crosshairs and on issue is interoperability. Apple sees this translation feature as a selling point, and if the EU were to require Apple to allow other manufacturers to access and offer it, they lose what they think I an important feature unique to AirPods. As a result, no soup for the EU.
Alien spacecraft are not going to travel for hundreds of years just so they can fly over a trailer park in Arkansas and then go back home.
I often wonder how they manage to sneak into the solar system undetected, only to be seen buzzing that trailer park, and then disappearing again. Alien teenagers on a joy ride?
What model did you use? I used GPT-5 and it responded with Chiefs, Titans, Texans, Ravens, Giants, Eagles, Saints, and Browns. Looks right.
Whatever model, I just used the web browser version. You do point out an interesting quirk, sometimes the same prompt will yield different answers; not sure if that is a result of model differences.
Here is a list of the NFL teams that have six letters in their name: Bears, Bengals, Browns, Colts, Giants, Lions,Packers, Ravens, and Saints.
How many NASA managers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? "That's a known problem... don't worry about it."
