Author: admin

Posted on

rePost :: – South Butt Creator Fires Back at North Face

Go South Butt! We need more levity and fun in this world.

South Butt Creator Fires Back at North Face
Matt Straquadine
The American Lawyer
January 12, 2010
It’s one of the most chuckle-inducing trademark claims in recent memory: The North Face Apparel Corp. has sued 19-year-old University of Missouri freshman James Winkelmann for trademark infringement and dilution. According to its motion filed in December in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, North Face says Winkelmann, a biomedical engineering student, has caused it “irreparable harm” by producing his parody clothing line, The South Butt (motto: “Never Stop Relaxing”).
Last week Winkelmann and his attorneys filed an irreverent reply brief, which is excerpted below, along with a motion to dismiss the suit. According to his filing — as well as his Web site and his attorney, Albert Watkins of St. Louis firm Kodner, Watkins, Muchnick, Weigley & Brison — Winkelmann started the clothing line as a joke. Winkelmann says he was inspired to do so after noticing that all his friends were buying North Face gear even though they weren’t mountaineers. He decided to poke fun at the idea by coming up with a “South Butt” logo; slapping it on T-shirts, jackets and sweatshirts; and selling the clothes via a Columbia, Mo., pharmacy and the Web.
North Face didn’t find the joke funny. The company learned that Winkelmann had moved to trademark the South Butt name, and in August sent him a cease-and-desist letter. Winkelmann — who Watkins claims had sold less than $5,000 worth of South Butt merchandise by that point — ignored the demand.
via Law.com – South Butt Creator Fires Back at North Face.

Posted on

rePost::Why newspapers should host blogs. (Scripting News)

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a resource for the multitude of interesting things undereported or lacking a hub.  Blogs and wikis are the starting point, hope somebody makes the next generation of communication/sharing platform the current one is getting stale.

But! A web resource devoted to boosting Internet connectivity in Manhattan, now that would attract some serious money. I met with Jeff Jarvis on this trip and he asked me to think about ways for news orgs to make money. This is how you do it. Understand your community and the needs of its economy, where money is flowing, and where it’s being held back due to a lack of information, and pour resources into that area. You will find a way to draw money from the activity you’re covering.
Now, back to John Robinson’s query. Why should news orgs host blogs for members of their community? Because the business of news organizations is information. Gather it up, sort it, organize it, keep it current and do it again. People have a huge thirst for new information, more these days than ever and increasing all the time. It's ridiculous that information-gathering orgs should be shrinking in a time where what they do is in such high demand. We’re constantly checking our Droids and Nexus One’s for new stuff to interest our short attention span.
Let the people in so you can find the wells that need digging. We can poke around the surface, but we have lives and jobs — other missions. Watch where we go, and help us achieve. The rewards will be our trust and the money of businesses that want to learn from and educate through that flow. Same way Twitter, Facebook and Google are expanding now, that should be happening in the news business.
via Why newspapers should host blogs. (Scripting News).

Posted on

rePost::Orson Welles on Privacy, the Passport and Personal Rights | The Januarist

Orson Welles continues to be one of the really interesting actors of any generation. I have to lament a certain affinity towards his sentiment towards how little dignity the way our world works allows us. I hope that charter cities or seasteading  takes of, I’d probably join one of these places if the chance comes.

I’d like it very much if somebody would make a great big international organization for the protection of the individual. That way, there could be offices at every frontier. And whenever we’re presented with something unpleasant, that we don’t want to fill one of these idiotic questionnaires, we could say “Oh no, I’m sorry, it’s against the rules of our organization to fill out that questionnaire.” And they’d say “Ah, but it’s the regulations,” and we’d say, “Very well, see our lawyer,” because if there were enough of us, our dues would pay for the best lawyers in all the countries of the world. And we could bring to court these invasions of our privacy, and test them under law. It would nice to have that sort of organization, be nice to have that sort of card. I see the card as fitting into the passport, a little larger than the passport, with a border around it, in bright colors, so that it would catch the eye of the police. And they’d know who they were dealing with … The card itself should look rather like a union card, I should think, a card of an automobile club. And since its purpose is to impress and control officialdom, well, obviously, it should be as official looking as possible. With a lot of seals and things like that on it. And it might read something as follows:
This is to certify that the bearer is a member of the human race. All relevant information is to be found in his passport. And except when there is good reason for suspecting him of some crime, he will refuse to submit to police interrogation, on the grounds that any such interrogation is an intolerable nuisance. And life being as short as it is, a waste of time. Any infringement on his privacy, or interference with his liberty, any assault, however petty, against his dignity as a human being, will be rigorously prosecuted by the undersigned …
via Orson Welles on Privacy, the Passport and Personal Rights | The Januarist.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Posted on

rePost:: Big Questions

This reminds me of Richard Hamming, questioning colleagues of the important questions of their field and whether or not they are working on it. I believe some people choose to  go the easier path, for it offers foreseeable rewards whilst some others go for the impossible questions reveling on the easy excuse for failure, that Big Questions are often times hard, and mere mortals  cannot expect to overcome it; While most fall in the middle finding the balance of reward and excuse for failure that suits their personalities. Are you tackling the Big Questions of your field?

When young, I imagined that the giants of the intellectual world would be found chipping away at our deepest most important questions. Sure perhaps most intellectuals would work on practical problems with paying customers, or do less glorious but needed ground work, but the best and the brightest would focus on combining that ground work into deep answers. Aspiring to high status, I also tried to identify and chip away at deep questions.
Imagine how strange, then, the real world seems to me. For example, Caltech prof and top science blogger Sean Carroll publishes a well-written book, From Eternity to Here, arguing for his explanation for the arrow of time, clearly one of our deepest questions. Yet not only are such attempts rare, they get surprising little engagement. Of the fourteen other blurbs, reviews, and articles (besides mine) listed at the book website, none express an opinion on whether Carroll’s answer is right, much less offer reasons for such an opinion. Of the six Amazon reviews, two do express an opinion, one by complete-crank Ranger McCoy, and one by Lubos Motl, who says there is no arrow of time problem. I also found a review by Peter Woit, who rejects the whole idea of a multiverse. Geez, what does it take to get serious engagement of a proposed answer to a deep question?
via Overcoming Bias : Big Questions.

Posted on

rePost:: Mr. Smith Rewrites the Constitution – NYTimes.com

found this article really interesting. It’s funny to notice that in the case of the Philippines we still have a considerable number of people alive who were part of the Filipinos who created the Philippine Constitution and yet we have Congress people who have the gall to twist the meaning of certain provisions/articles(I have no idea how to refer to them) in our constitution.

Whether any such approach works, the founders would have expected us to do something about this unconstitutional filibuster. In Federalist No. 75, Hamilton denounced the use of supermajority rule in these prophetic words: “The history of every political establishment in which this principle has prevailed is a history of impotence, perplexity and disorder.” That is a suitable epitaph for what has happened to the Senate.
via Op-Ed Contributor – Mr. Smith Rewrites the Constitution – NYTimes.com.

Posted on

rePost::Marginal Revolution: The Chait-Manzi debate

This is what bothers me with most people who want to bring change to the country. A lot seem to believe that it is easy to revise the internal culture of our country, rather than to build on what we are really good at, or have a comparative advantage on. I’m looking at you would be industrialist or technologist. We have an abundance of beautiful places, a naturally happy friendly people.

8. Countries have to start from where they’re at. If you’re constructing policy advice, you can either build on what a country is really good at or you can try to revise the internal culture of the country. If you’re going to do the latter, come out and say so. Most of my policy recommendations are based on the former approach, namely strengthening what (the better-functioning) countries already are good at. I’m not suggesting that countries never change, but getting such changes right by deliberate policy interventions is very hard to do. I wish to stress this point applies to the pro-U.S. as much as the pro-Europe side.
via Marginal Revolution: The Chait-Manzi debate.

Posted on

rePost::Sticking to What I’m Good At – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com

I saw something similar to this dynamic during the Ondoy relief efforts of Tulong Bayan Operations. It was in stark contrast to how other operations work(personally I preferred the self-organizing kind than the heavily managed kind in use by most centers.)

The group started off with most people switching among the several tasks. Pretty soon it became clear that some people had comparative advantages at certain tasks (my wife at raking), while others had comparative and absolute advantages at other tasks (a burly retired ophthalmic surgeon at cutting with shears).
Productive groups generally learn quickly how to maximize output in situations like this, even with no guidance from a manager. Some people in the group (like me) were uniformly relatively good (or bad) at all tasks (had no obvious comparative advantage), so that their skills (or lack thereof) led them to spend the time alternating among all the tasks. I would think that primitive farming groups and, even further back, groups of hunters quickly learned who was relatively and absolutely good at which tasks.
via Sticking to What I’m Good At – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com.

Posted on

rePost::Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Mr. Tracy's library

There are a lot of libraries that are closing down, maybe we could get those books and put up libraries in the poor provinces in the Philippines.

Mr. Tracy’s library
January 11, 2010
Edge's annual question for 2010 is “How is the Internet changing the way you think?” Some 170 folks submitted answers, including me. (I found it a bit of a challenge, since I wanted to avoid pre-plagiarizing my upcoming book, which happens to be on this subject.) Here's my submission:
As the school year began last September, Cushing Academy, an elite Massachusetts prep school that’s been around since Civil War days, announced that it was emptying its library of books. In place of the thousands of volumes that had once crowded the building’s shelves, the school was installing, it said, “state-of-the-art computers with high-definition screens for research and reading” as well as “monitors that provide students with real-time interactive data and news feeds from around the world.” Cushing’s bookless library would become, boasted headmaster James Tracy, “a model for the 21st-century school.”
via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Mr. Tracy’s library.