When I decided I wanted a domain, about ten years ago, .nu was the cheapest registry. It’s now €60 to renew for two years; I suspect I can do better than that. So don’t be surprised if my address changes on March 28.
Abercrombie & Kent, a travel agency that uses a Times Roman ampersand as a trademark, sued andBEYOND, a travel agency, not for the tacky capitalization but for using a Gill Sans ampersand as a trademark.
I doubt that such a suit would succeed if the marks in question were very different graphic treatments of the same letter, say an angular S forming a thunderbolt versus a more stolid sort of S in a ring. How different would the newcomer’s mark need to be, and is the necessary difference greater for quasi-letters such as ampersand?
Ladle Rat Rotten Hut with a straight face
Someone considered this passage, in “The Night of the Legion of Death” (an episode of The Wild Wild West), worth quoting on IMDb:
You’re not the Governor. Your one of the down faith, commandor present, your value silver voice! Your a howl chain faint fraud Brubaker! I am the Governor, I made you, I put you in office, I create your faint legion, I writing speech for you, tell you what to said, what to think, what to reach for, who to reward or execute your greek mass! It’s I speak proof and don’t ever forget that.
Ya gotta wonder about the person who transcribed this: did they think it made sense, or find it an admirable piece of nonsense?
Well, I hope I improved it some:
You’re not the Governor. You’re a wonderfully endowed face, a commanding presence, a bell-like silver voice. You’re a hollow tin-plated fraud, Brubaker! I am the Governor. I made you. I put you into office. I created your Black Legion. I write your speeches for you, tell you what to say, what to think, what to reach for, who to reward, who to execute. You’re a Greek mask that I speak through. Don’t ever forget that.
In Greg Egan’s latest novel, as is not uncommon in first contact novels, the chapters alternate between the viewpoints of a human explorer and a member of the newly discovered species. In defiance of convention, Rakesh never finds Roi’s world. (There is room for a sequel, but I don’t expect one.) Roi lives in a tiny artificial world orbiting a black hole, and Rakesh finds a similar world orbiting a neutron star.
So why is Roi in the book? Because she is a leader in the blossoming of science in her world – going from pretechnological ignorance to general relativity in one lifetime, thanks to the peculiar environment – while the world contacted by Rakesh is stagnant.
No one could have predicted the housing bubble pop, right?
a very clever picture — clean, but be warned, much of that site is NSFW.
Bon mot from Sheldon Richman:
Advocates of the free market are sometimes parodied for their seemingly all-purpose answer to any problem: Let the market handle it. What may sound like a simplistic answer, however, is actually the most complex prescription imaginable. In the modern world, the workings of any particular market are so complicated, they are beyond the grasp of mere mortals. Moment by moment, day by day, so many subtly interrelated decisions are made by so many people worldwide that no individual or group could possibly understand the big picture in any detailed way. So there is nothing simplistic about proposing the market as a solution to an economic problem. It’s short way of saying: let the multitude of knowledgeable people seeking profit, risking their own money, and responding to incentives find a solution based on persuasion not force. Translated that way, it sounds like a promising approach.
Ironically, those who don’t appreciate markets are in fact the ones who offer a simplistic, even empty alleged solution to economic problems: government regulation. That phrase is uttered like an incantation, the magical answer to all doubts about how, in the absence of fully free markets, problems would be solved. The irony is that while “let the market handle it” can be unpacked and made specific, “regulation” cannot.
The latest fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains recalls an idea of mine: import ice boulders from Saturn’s rings, put them in Earth orbit, and drop them on fires as needed. Is that crazy?
Misc links: a somewhat nerdy pun; a summary of Lost