Not a personal dig, just the other side of the coin ... it is sometimes possible for people to over estimate how creative they are.
Wedding photographers are an example. The venue, people and outfits are all laid on, they charge a reasonable hourly rate as a skilled professional photographer, and what they produce is hopefully good quality but usually not especially original or creative. If you are lucky they have managed to get a group shot where nobody has their eyes closed.
At that point they really have done their job and ought to take the money, hand over the jpegs and go away. But no, they use copyright to gouge the happy couple and their relatives for every single print.
Somebody always gets screwed over by copyright, but it isn't always the creator.
Depends what sort of nonsense. ID is a bit silly - anything science can't currently explain MUST be the work of god. That has been going on since they blamed Thor for thunderstorms, and science doggedly chips away at it. Young earth creationism (earth created 6000 years ago), which I think is taught in some schools, calls into doubt many areas of science (cosmology, nuclear physics, geology etc). But also it refutes the scientific method. That is seriously bad.
The problem is it makes people with limited scientific knowledge think that proven science is "just a theory". Well it is, but not in the sense that anything any idiot makes up is equally valid. So then you get teenage mums, who only have a kid because they were too stupid to use contraception, deciding that their opinion on the safety of MMR is at least as good as that of the entire medical profession. Suddenly measles epidemic, who knew.
Some parts of the USA teaching evolution is banned in schools, which in a democracy I take to mean >50% of the population don't believe in science. (At least I hope so, because any educated person who can sit by and watch science removed from schools because they can't be bothered to vote deserves the theocratic state they are going to get).
So at least 30% of the population use the internet, but think god makes it work.
It says in the article his hard drive crashed. That would imply that the only backup of his business critical files was on a single file sharing site.
Not a very sensible backup strategy, especially now that there are so many alternative free online file storage services available. Should have had the data on at least 2 or 3 of them.
What were Megaupload's terms? If that didn't include guaranteed backups of users' data (which it probably didn't) I can't see he has a case. His situation is exactly the same as if the company had gone bust, or some disaster had happened to their servers.
The population of China is more than 4 times the population of the USA, and most of the people there are poor. Putting up the price of an iPad and paying Chinese workers a bit more to manufacture them isn't going to fix that situation.
I am just wondering - what would actually happen if a factory popped up in China and started offering the same salaries and t&c's* as the west? The lucky few would get jobs there, everyone else would just shrug their shoulders and say that's life? I don't think so. There wouldn't be 500 people queuing for jobs, there would be riots and murders.
These countries will go through the same journey as the west, possibly a lot faster than the 200 years it took us to stop treating factory workers as expendable slave labour. Heaven help the fat and lazy UK when they get there, but they will.
*I know, but it doesn't look right without the aberrant apostrophe.
Well, I doubt that you can copyright the choice of font size, style, page size or margin widths.
Given that, how much of the pagination and layout is the result of complex design (on the part of the authors) and how much is simply the result of the authoring software doing its job automatically?
If someone paraphrases the textbook, taking care to keep the paragraphs the same size, they will get the same pagination and layout.
Clearly doing something like that is, at some level, taking advantage of someone else's work (unfairly IMHO), but claiming copyright on something which was created automatically by some piece of software isn't the way to go.
Hope this isn't a silly question, but is zero ice really a significant state change?
Your point is that declining ice produces positive feedback (there is more sea, which absorbs more heat rather than reflecting it like ice does). There is less and less ice, then at some point there is no ice at some point in the year.
At that point, in sea level terms, things stop getting any worse. Sure the ice can decline further (no ice for one month each year, no ice for three months each year ...). And that might lead to bigger storms to exacerbate the problems with sea levels.
But in this continuous decline, what is so special about the point when the ice disappears? It's just a point on a curve, not a step change.
"the ability to park anywhere, including pavements at a pinch"
Where do you live? Round our way it is not uncommon to see cars parked on the pavement (all four wheels sometimes). Nobody ever seems to do anything about it.
Anybody else sickened by the commemorations today? One minute silence FFS. Someone on the BBC bleating on about "poignant memories" - you would have to be well over 100 to have the vaguest recollection of it. People grieving for distant relatives they never met who died a century ago.
Get some perspective, this happened two years before the deadliest war in human history.
Still, the great and the good of Southampton seem to have taken the excuse to treat themselves to a bit of a bash at the council taxpayers' expense.
When you see "RIP Jesus" trending on good friday, you can't help but admire the church for inventing botnets 2000 years before the rest of us. And as various people pointed out, didn't they read the ending?
The cap doesn't make any distinction between somebody who uses 10GB at peak times every single day, or someone who downloads a 10GB game upgrade every couple of months.
I think as connections get faster, there probably has to be some kind of limit, but surely part of the point of high speeds is that you can occasionally download a big file quickly, otherwise why bother? A soft limit based on, say, average usage, would be just as effective, but possibly acceptable to a lot more people.
Re: Breaking news - Technological break through in domain purchasing..
Not sure how common this is, but the host I use will grab the domain name for you if, eg the credit card fails for auto-renew.
They sting you for $80 to sell it back to you, but it's better than risking losing it. In fact, it is probably better that they charge something, it gives them an incentive to make sure their system is working.
Well this morning I used the Companies House website (a government site) and discovered that it DOESN'T WORK unless you are using IE. They know about it, don't seem to see it as any kind of problem.
It isn't a particularly complicated site (just gathering a few basic details that form the annual return), and I bet they paid a fortune to have it developed. They really should have made it standards compliant.
So please cross one user off the IE count because I wasn't using it out of choice.
I may be misunderstanding the situation, but it seems to me that the people who put the billboards up were well out of order, and the mall were well within their rights to take them down. They don't even look safe.
Now it is possible the security guards decided to beat up the people who had put the banners up just for the hell of it, but it seems more likely that the fight started because the rival group tried to stop them removing the banners.
Our shopping centre has, I don't know, four security guards. Mainly to help people who are lost.
Where the hell did all those chinese guards come from? Not just the ones taking down the banners, there is also a wall of guards standing shoulder to shoulder enclosing the customers. There must be hundreds of them. Bizarre.
Re: I'll bet we'll find plenty of other species too.
Ironically, the mechanism by which the smartest get to rule the tribe is religion. Invent a plausible explanation for what happens when you die (heaven or hell depending on whether you do what god wants), convince people that you know what god wants, tell them that he is all seeing so they will go to hell even is nobody catches them doing wrong. Everyone will do what you tell them.
If you are really smart, and intuitively understand that evolution applies to memes as well as genes, also tell them god doesn't like masturbation or birth control.
Most of the developers I worked with, certainly in my early career, were self taught. These days it is easier than ever to teach yourself programming.
Anybody who has been sat on their arse for however many months/years, drawing benefits and watching Jeremy Kyle, without realising that teaching themselves to program the computer in the corner might be some help ... probably doesn't have what it takes. How are you going to train them to be decent developers?
Its a shame people are not more aware of this when buying gift cards. It is an unsecured loan which doesn't pay any interest.
This same thing happened with Zavvy a few years ago, so it was hardly a bolt out of the blue when Game got into trouble. Why would anyone lend them money for free?
Yeah, sure, it means you don't have to choose what to buy for that person you love so much.
I think the deal is that you get some kind of discount for trading in your phone (and agreeing to be photographed, which is a condition).
But if the challenge is to find the weather in two cities and the Microsoft guy does it in 2 second because he has the apps pre-loaded, is that actually going to impress anybody? If anything it would make me suspicious that if they had to pull stunts like that their phone probably isn't that fast.
That said, with my phone (10 quid Asda special) if I wanted to know the weather I would have to phone my wife and ask her to check on her laptop.
forcing the competitors to use the store's WiFi, which curiously enough seems to be throttled, while the Win Phone is connected to a separate secure and fast WiFi.
Would be possible, I'm not saying that's what they actually did.
Most of my junk boxes are filled with things which saw plenty of use at the time, but have either been replaced by something better (eg a bigger memory stick) or are no longer needed because things have changed (I used my KVM switch every day in my old job because I worked from home. Now things have changed it is no use at all to me).
But we all make mistakes. Can't imagine why I bought a PDA - and worse still the docking station is still on my desk, plugged in. No idea where the PDA itself is.
The point of steganography is that the enemy don't even know there is an encrypted message so they leave you alone rather than locking you up/torturing you/kidnapping your family to force you to give up the keys.
If you "hide" your message in a bunch of random meaningless text, you are wasting your time with the stego part because it is fairly obvious that the message has a hidden meaning. You might as well use Base 64.
The pub name probably isn't the problem here (although they would probably do a bit of sabre rattling anyway), it is more likely things like the cocktails. They have trademarked the name Hobbit for every imaginable film spin off, including beverages. If they let this pub sell cocktails with trademarked names, they would lose the trademark (for the broad class which includes beverages and many other things).
You don't go to a pub because of its name, but some people like themed pubs, so there is a potential commercial benefit from using the copyrighted imagery. If you want to argue that the pub provides free promotion for the film - fine, that is something good to throw into the negotiations *when you ask permission*. It isn't a valid excuse to not ask.
Yes, if you take images from a recent high profile film and use them to theme your pub, you are going to have to pay fro the privilege. One business using another business's copyright material for commercial gain, of course they have to pay.
I don't really understand most peoples' attitude to this case, so I will probably get downvoted. But I don't see how this pub have won some kind of moral victory. Please tell me where my logic is wrong here.
SVC own the rights (trademarks of the names use in relation to beverages amongst other things). They have to defend those rights or risk losing them.
The pub knew someone owned some kind of rights on those names, or ought to have (obvious to anybody who thinks about it for 10 seconds) and it is not exactly difficult to find out who owns the trademark and what it covers these days - its searchable on the IPO site.
If the pub had asked permission before doing it, SVC would have been perfectly within their rights to just say no. And they might well have said no, simply because it is too expensive to deal with a little pub so they can't be arsed. Or because they thought such a deal might cheapen the brand. Would anyone have got on their high horse about that? I doubt it.
So this pub infringe SVC's rights, either because they didn't have the common sense to find out what the legal situation is, or they just hoped they would never get caught out. When SVC do find out, why on earth shouldn't they adopt the same policy they would have done if the pub had asked?
I don't think they originally only wanted the £100 fee - they wanted to restore the situation to what it would have been if the pub had asked permission (ie no LOTR theme). Nothing evil about that, it is their entitlement as rights holders. Having backed down in the face of a somewhat unjustified public backlash, you can't blame them for trying to put a positive spin on it.
Isn't their a real ale called Hobbit? Assuming they paid for the rights, I wonder what they think about Hobbit themed cocktails?
INAL, but they only have the trademark registered for certain classes - virtually any type of toy, game, food, drink and other product which might exploit the name.
I don't see anything to stop a pub using the name, or indeed anything to stop the pub trade marking the name (I am no expert, but I recently registered a trade mark which was already registered by someone else, just in a totally different business).
If it is actually a copyright issue, are they using images etc from the film? That would be easily fixed without having to changethe name of the pub. I am pretty sure the name "Hobbit" can't be copyrighted - can it?
Re: Just like buying a DVD without the physical disk.
The trouble is, buying a DVD without the physical disk is nothing like buying a DVD.
You can't give it as a gift, lend it to a friend, sell it or give it to Oxfam when you are fed up with it. And if you happen across it in X years time and decide you would like to watch it again, you will probably find the latest hardware/software won't play it.
What I am saying is that they are already as good as extinct for reasons which probably don't have anything to do with us. They aren't exactly bristling with defence mechanisms, so when they encounter any creature which enjoys eating crunchy insects, they have pretty much had it. Could just as easily have been migrating birds as imported rats. Presumably they evolved before this was so much of a problem.
They are nearly extinct because they aren't viable. Yes human intervention has made it a bit awkward for the only remaining population on a tiny remote island, but that population only existed through pure fluke.
2 of the 4 died, according to the linked article, so its worse than that.
This species effectively became extinct aeons ago when new preditors evolved, rats and probably many others. A tiny population survived on a small, totally isolated island, as a throwback to prehistoric times.
Fair enough trying to breed them to study them, but it is difficult to see how they will survive in the wild. Their time has been and gone. I don't think you can blame evil humanity for this one, it is just evolution.
Why is the word "gunm4n" even in the auto-correct dictionary to start with? It isn't a word any sane person would include in a text message.
Does it insert obscenities too?
Surely it wouldn't be too difficult to come up with a list of sensitive words where the damage caused by inserting it accidentally far outweighs the benefit of not having to type it in full?
Re: New case now available for Raspberry Pi model B.
Seriously, though, wouldn't this thing be a lot better for most users if it was built into BBC Micro style case?
Sure the uncased board is useful for some of the applications mentioned here, but most users a keyboard is a requirement, and having a tiny unprotected circuit board dangling off 4 cables is just stupid.
Hopefully some enterprising person is already designing one.
So what you are saying is, if the drug companies investigated traditional medicies, found the ones which work, and isolated the active ingredients, they might find lots of useful new drugs?
Yes, but what about a mousetrap where you spot the mouse and turn a ratchet which makes a boot kick a ball bearing down some higgeldy piggeldy stairs causing a diver to jump into a barrel which releases a cage which falls down and catches the mouse?
They should mention the fine every single time the write about any cuts to council services, or increases in council charges. Remind us of the amount of the fine, the senior manager responsible. Point out that the cut or price rise would have been unnecessary if they hadn't been fined. Every single time.
You can't realistically fine or fire a senior manager if one of the thousands of workers they are responsible for makes a mistake - nobody would do the job. But they should feel the pressure of a lot of angry voters.
I just love that. Sell unlimited data on infrastructure which can't hope to provide it. When people use the service to download large amounts of data, throttle them.
But its ok, they are doing t to be fair to everyone else.
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511 posts • joined Saturday 31st January 2009 23:46 GMT
Page:
Re: Conspicuous by absence
Not a personal dig, just the other side of the coin ... it is sometimes possible for people to over estimate how creative they are.
Wedding photographers are an example. The venue, people and outfits are all laid on, they charge a reasonable hourly rate as a skilled professional photographer, and what they produce is hopefully good quality but usually not especially original or creative. If you are lucky they have managed to get a group shot where nobody has their eyes closed.
At that point they really have done their job and ought to take the money, hand over the jpegs and go away. But no, they use copyright to gouge the happy couple and their relatives for every single print.
Somebody always gets screwed over by copyright, but it isn't always the creator.
Re: This is enough to piss-off-a-Pirate
29 people took the time and trouble to downvote an AC?
What lasting harm will that do?
"They sign up for the job because they want to help people"
No they don't. The sole purpose of HR is to prevent the company being sued by its employees. That all.
I think it will be a bit of a shame when there is nowhere to go to actually look at stuff before you go back home and order it off the internet.
Calm down
They are only blocking blasphemy. People who say bad things about the baby Jesus don't deserve to be heard, do they?
@ John A Blackley
Depends what sort of nonsense. ID is a bit silly - anything science can't currently explain MUST be the work of god. That has been going on since they blamed Thor for thunderstorms, and science doggedly chips away at it. Young earth creationism (earth created 6000 years ago), which I think is taught in some schools, calls into doubt many areas of science (cosmology, nuclear physics, geology etc). But also it refutes the scientific method. That is seriously bad.
The problem is it makes people with limited scientific knowledge think that proven science is "just a theory". Well it is, but not in the sense that anything any idiot makes up is equally valid. So then you get teenage mums, who only have a kid because they were too stupid to use contraception, deciding that their opinion on the safety of MMR is at least as good as that of the entire medical profession. Suddenly measles epidemic, who knew.
Some parts of the USA teaching evolution is banned in schools, which in a democracy I take to mean >50% of the population don't believe in science. (At least I hope so, because any educated person who can sit by and watch science removed from schools because they can't be bothered to vote deserves the theocratic state they are going to get).
So at least 30% of the population use the internet, but think god makes it work.
Re: Copying files is not stealing
It says in the article his hard drive crashed. That would imply that the only backup of his business critical files was on a single file sharing site.
Not a very sensible backup strategy, especially now that there are so many alternative free online file storage services available. Should have had the data on at least 2 or 3 of them.
What were Megaupload's terms? If that didn't include guaranteed backups of users' data (which it probably didn't) I can't see he has a case. His situation is exactly the same as if the company had gone bust, or some disaster had happened to their servers.
Re: But ...
The population of China is more than 4 times the population of the USA, and most of the people there are poor. Putting up the price of an iPad and paying Chinese workers a bit more to manufacture them isn't going to fix that situation.
Re: it's all relative isn't it?
I am just wondering - what would actually happen if a factory popped up in China and started offering the same salaries and t&c's* as the west? The lucky few would get jobs there, everyone else would just shrug their shoulders and say that's life? I don't think so. There wouldn't be 500 people queuing for jobs, there would be riots and murders.
These countries will go through the same journey as the west, possibly a lot faster than the 200 years it took us to stop treating factory workers as expendable slave labour. Heaven help the fat and lazy UK when they get there, but they will.
*I know, but it doesn't look right without the aberrant apostrophe.
Well, I doubt that you can copyright the choice of font size, style, page size or margin widths.
Given that, how much of the pagination and layout is the result of complex design (on the part of the authors) and how much is simply the result of the authoring software doing its job automatically?
If someone paraphrases the textbook, taking care to keep the paragraphs the same size, they will get the same pagination and layout.
Clearly doing something like that is, at some level, taking advantage of someone else's work (unfairly IMHO), but claiming copyright on something which was created automatically by some piece of software isn't the way to go.
Re: Is the tide turning?????
Hope this isn't a silly question, but is zero ice really a significant state change?
Your point is that declining ice produces positive feedback (there is more sea, which absorbs more heat rather than reflecting it like ice does). There is less and less ice, then at some point there is no ice at some point in the year.
At that point, in sea level terms, things stop getting any worse. Sure the ice can decline further (no ice for one month each year, no ice for three months each year ...). And that might lead to bigger storms to exacerbate the problems with sea levels.
But in this continuous decline, what is so special about the point when the ice disappears? It's just a point on a curve, not a step change.
Re: target market
"the ability to park anywhere, including pavements at a pinch"
Where do you live? Round our way it is not uncommon to see cars parked on the pavement (all four wheels sometimes). Nobody ever seems to do anything about it.
Slightly OT
Anybody else sickened by the commemorations today? One minute silence FFS. Someone on the BBC bleating on about "poignant memories" - you would have to be well over 100 to have the vaguest recollection of it. People grieving for distant relatives they never met who died a century ago.
Get some perspective, this happened two years before the deadliest war in human history.
Still, the great and the good of Southampton seem to have taken the excuse to treat themselves to a bit of a bash at the council taxpayers' expense.
Indeed
When you see "RIP Jesus" trending on good friday, you can't help but admire the church for inventing botnets 2000 years before the rest of us. And as various people pointed out, didn't they read the ending?
DesignCrowd
Is that for real? People will do design work for free just for a 1 in 100 chance they might get paid for it?
The cap doesn't make any distinction between somebody who uses 10GB at peak times every single day, or someone who downloads a 10GB game upgrade every couple of months.
I think as connections get faster, there probably has to be some kind of limit, but surely part of the point of high speeds is that you can occasionally download a big file quickly, otherwise why bother? A soft limit based on, say, average usage, would be just as effective, but possibly acceptable to a lot more people.
Re: Breaking news - Technological break through in domain purchasing..
Not sure how common this is, but the host I use will grab the domain name for you if, eg the credit card fails for auto-renew.
They sting you for $80 to sell it back to you, but it's better than risking losing it. In fact, it is probably better that they charge something, it gives them an incentive to make sure their system is working.
Someone downvoted this?
Re: Lazy
Well this morning I used the Companies House website (a government site) and discovered that it DOESN'T WORK unless you are using IE. They know about it, don't seem to see it as any kind of problem.
It isn't a particularly complicated site (just gathering a few basic details that form the annual return), and I bet they paid a fortune to have it developed. They really should have made it standards compliant.
So please cross one user off the IE count because I wasn't using it out of choice.
I may be misunderstanding the situation, but it seems to me that the people who put the billboards up were well out of order, and the mall were well within their rights to take them down. They don't even look safe.
Now it is possible the security guards decided to beat up the people who had put the banners up just for the hell of it, but it seems more likely that the fight started because the rival group tried to stop them removing the banners.
Blame lays squarely with the rival mall, imho.
Our shopping centre has, I don't know, four security guards. Mainly to help people who are lost.
Where the hell did all those chinese guards come from? Not just the ones taking down the banners, there is also a wall of guards standing shoulder to shoulder enclosing the customers. There must be hundreds of them. Bizarre.
Re: An opposable big toe, huh?
But where would you buy shoes that fit? Doesn't work for me.
Re: I'll bet we'll find plenty of other species too.
Ironically, the mechanism by which the smartest get to rule the tribe is religion. Invent a plausible explanation for what happens when you die (heaven or hell depending on whether you do what god wants), convince people that you know what god wants, tell them that he is all seeing so they will go to hell even is nobody catches them doing wrong. Everyone will do what you tell them.
If you are really smart, and intuitively understand that evolution applies to memes as well as genes, also tell them god doesn't like masturbation or birth control.
Re: the unemployed of the UK aren't developers
Most of the developers I worked with, certainly in my early career, were self taught. These days it is easier than ever to teach yourself programming.
Anybody who has been sat on their arse for however many months/years, drawing benefits and watching Jeremy Kyle, without realising that teaching themselves to program the computer in the corner might be some help ... probably doesn't have what it takes. How are you going to train them to be decent developers?
@John Robson
"The media got a bit excited, the foundation had to offload the distribution (and scale up production)."
But were they unaware that this would mean lengthy certification, causing months of delay to shipments?
Were RS and Farnell aware of that?
It seems to me that they were offering shipment dates which they ought to have known were never possible.
Re: Suspension of Refunds, Exchanges?
Its a shame people are not more aware of this when buying gift cards. It is an unsecured loan which doesn't pay any interest.
This same thing happened with Zavvy a few years ago, so it was hardly a bolt out of the blue when Game got into trouble. Why would anyone lend them money for free?
Yeah, sure, it means you don't have to choose what to buy for that person you love so much.
I think the deal is that you get some kind of discount for trading in your phone (and agreeing to be photographed, which is a condition).
But if the challenge is to find the weather in two cities and the Microsoft guy does it in 2 second because he has the apps pre-loaded, is that actually going to impress anybody? If anything it would make me suspicious that if they had to pull stunts like that their phone probably isn't that fast.
That said, with my phone (10 quid Asda special) if I wanted to know the weather I would have to phone my wife and ask her to check on her laptop.
Re: "throttling non-WinPhone devices"
forcing the competitors to use the store's WiFi, which curiously enough seems to be throttled, while the Win Phone is connected to a separate secure and fast WiFi.
Would be possible, I'm not saying that's what they actually did.
Failing to distinguish...
between pointless gadgets and obsolete items.
Most of my junk boxes are filled with things which saw plenty of use at the time, but have either been replaced by something better (eg a bigger memory stick) or are no longer needed because things have changed (I used my KVM switch every day in my old job because I worked from home. Now things have changed it is no use at all to me).
But we all make mistakes. Can't imagine why I bought a PDA - and worse still the docking station is still on my desk, plugged in. No idea where the PDA itself is.
The point of steganography is that the enemy don't even know there is an encrypted message so they leave you alone rather than locking you up/torturing you/kidnapping your family to force you to give up the keys.
If you "hide" your message in a bunch of random meaningless text, you are wasting your time with the stego part because it is fairly obvious that the message has a hidden meaning. You might as well use Base 64.
Re: What's in a name?
The pub name probably isn't the problem here (although they would probably do a bit of sabre rattling anyway), it is more likely things like the cocktails. They have trademarked the name Hobbit for every imaginable film spin off, including beverages. If they let this pub sell cocktails with trademarked names, they would lose the trademark (for the broad class which includes beverages and many other things).
You don't go to a pub because of its name, but some people like themed pubs, so there is a potential commercial benefit from using the copyrighted imagery. If you want to argue that the pub provides free promotion for the film - fine, that is something good to throw into the negotiations *when you ask permission*. It isn't a valid excuse to not ask.
Re: More to come?
Yes, if you take images from a recent high profile film and use them to theme your pub, you are going to have to pay fro the privilege. One business using another business's copyright material for commercial gain, of course they have to pay.
The pub is a business, not an amateur fan site.
I don't really understand most peoples' attitude to this case, so I will probably get downvoted. But I don't see how this pub have won some kind of moral victory. Please tell me where my logic is wrong here.
SVC own the rights (trademarks of the names use in relation to beverages amongst other things). They have to defend those rights or risk losing them.
The pub knew someone owned some kind of rights on those names, or ought to have (obvious to anybody who thinks about it for 10 seconds) and it is not exactly difficult to find out who owns the trademark and what it covers these days - its searchable on the IPO site.
If the pub had asked permission before doing it, SVC would have been perfectly within their rights to just say no. And they might well have said no, simply because it is too expensive to deal with a little pub so they can't be arsed. Or because they thought such a deal might cheapen the brand. Would anyone have got on their high horse about that? I doubt it.
So this pub infringe SVC's rights, either because they didn't have the common sense to find out what the legal situation is, or they just hoped they would never get caught out. When SVC do find out, why on earth shouldn't they adopt the same policy they would have done if the pub had asked?
I don't think they originally only wanted the £100 fee - they wanted to restore the situation to what it would have been if the pub had asked permission (ie no LOTR theme). Nothing evil about that, it is their entitlement as rights holders. Having backed down in the face of a somewhat unjustified public backlash, you can't blame them for trying to put a positive spin on it.
Isn't their a real ale called Hobbit? Assuming they paid for the rights, I wonder what they think about Hobbit themed cocktails?
Re: Bad feeling...
INAL, but they only have the trademark registered for certain classes - virtually any type of toy, game, food, drink and other product which might exploit the name.
I don't see anything to stop a pub using the name, or indeed anything to stop the pub trade marking the name (I am no expert, but I recently registered a trade mark which was already registered by someone else, just in a totally different business).
If it is actually a copyright issue, are they using images etc from the film? That would be easily fixed without having to changethe name of the pub. I am pretty sure the name "Hobbit" can't be copyrighted - can it?
Re: Just like buying a DVD without the physical disk.
The trouble is, buying a DVD without the physical disk is nothing like buying a DVD.
You can't give it as a gift, lend it to a friend, sell it or give it to Oxfam when you are fed up with it. And if you happen across it in X years time and decide you would like to watch it again, you will probably find the latest hardware/software won't play it.
"must not contain anything that is likely to cause serious or widespread offence"
"The ASA received a single complaint about the video"
Honestly, how do these people reach these crazy decisions? Its a travesty!
A duet with Freddie Mercury? He's been dead for over 20 years, it must have been a fantastic track if they haven't released it yet.
Re: @Just Thinking
What I am saying is that they are already as good as extinct for reasons which probably don't have anything to do with us. They aren't exactly bristling with defence mechanisms, so when they encounter any creature which enjoys eating crunchy insects, they have pretty much had it. Could just as easily have been migrating birds as imported rats. Presumably they evolved before this was so much of a problem.
They are nearly extinct because they aren't viable. Yes human intervention has made it a bit awkward for the only remaining population on a tiny remote island, but that population only existed through pure fluke.
Re: Maybe it's just me, but...
Everything is a stick to an Australian. Their equivalent of a noun is adjective-stick (razor=shaving stick etc).
Re: so....
2 of the 4 died, according to the linked article, so its worse than that.
This species effectively became extinct aeons ago when new preditors evolved, rats and probably many others. A tiny population survived on a small, totally isolated island, as a throwback to prehistoric times.
Fair enough trying to breed them to study them, but it is difficult to see how they will survive in the wild. Their time has been and gone. I don't think you can blame evil humanity for this one, it is just evolution.
WTF
Why is the word "gunm4n" even in the auto-correct dictionary to start with? It isn't a word any sane person would include in a text message.
Does it insert obscenities too?
Surely it wouldn't be too difficult to come up with a list of sensitive words where the damage caused by inserting it accidentally far outweighs the benefit of not having to type it in full?
Re: New case now available for Raspberry Pi model B.
Seriously, though, wouldn't this thing be a lot better for most users if it was built into BBC Micro style case?
Sure the uncased board is useful for some of the applications mentioned here, but most users a keyboard is a requirement, and having a tiny unprotected circuit board dangling off 4 cables is just stupid.
Hopefully some enterprising person is already designing one.
@AC
So what you are saying is, if the drug companies investigated traditional medicies, found the ones which work, and isolated the active ingredients, they might find lots of useful new drugs?
That is a really good idea.
Has anyone told them?
Re: Virginpedia
Priests, then...
Re: Time for a Jeffersonian slapdown!
Yes, but what about a mousetrap where you spot the mouse and turn a ratchet which makes a boot kick a ball bearing down some higgeldy piggeldy stairs causing a diver to jump into a barrel which releases a cage which falls down and catches the mouse?
Could you patent that?
Re: Wrong numbers
Yes, the system failed in China for that exact reason.
Mines the one with the ancient book of dubious jokes in the pocket.
Re: User error or maliciousness.
It is a bit of an upheaval when your employer relocates. Especially is you are too overpaid to contemplate leaving.
Local press could have a role
They should mention the fine every single time the write about any cuts to council services, or increases in council charges. Remind us of the amount of the fine, the senior manager responsible. Point out that the cut or price rise would have been unnecessary if they hadn't been fined. Every single time.
You can't realistically fine or fire a senior manager if one of the thousands of workers they are responsible for makes a mistake - nobody would do the job. But they should feel the pressure of a lot of angry voters.
"Fairness" argument
I just love that. Sell unlimited data on infrastructure which can't hope to provide it. When people use the service to download large amounts of data, throttle them.
But its ok, they are doing t to be fair to everyone else.
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