Okay, so if Disney wanted to make a toy Hulk saw, would Disney need to get a license from the tool company to make a diminutive green saw "just like daddy's", even though Disney already has a pretty solid lock on the green+masculine=hulk customer mindshare?
This is where the moron-in-a-hurry standard comes in. I'd like to think I'm not a moron, but if I saw such a toy, it would be tough for me to guess the actual affiliation-- was it made by the tool maker and endorsed by the comic maker, or the other way around?
I am a pretty strong privacy advocate, but I fail to see how this story is not exactly the kind of "grandstanding" that you often thrash the various politician-cum-prosecutors for. Every single organization has to deal with effective policies and what to do with internal people who fail to follow the policies. There is no technical uber-solution that can fully address the existence of impropriety, and there is no general right that every policy or technical half-solution must be publicly explained.
I've read it, and I agree it's short of the mark of addressing the accuracy down to each head. Disappointing.
However, they are definitely trying to get a better guess at X (in the above-commented formula): the passengers get heavier in the winter, and if still talking about school, presumably over the course of a school year.
Even though the arithmetic may be schoolyard simple, the actual techniques may be pretty sophisticated if we assume that they're trying to guess accurately. Given that an obese sixth-grader can weigh over twice the amount of a small first-grader, and given that we see so many kids being forgotten, misrouted, or otherwise unaccounted, it's hard to say that an accurate method is simple, or even possible, but quite sought-after. Many parents cringe at the issues of individual tracking, but all parents go ballistic if their precious child is not exactly where the school system says they are. I'd be interested to see what this group did, to see if it's as laughably useless as everyone's assuming; it may be, it may not.
Agree with Rekrul above about what Blumenthal is... but U-Verse is only the tip of the iceberg. He's never met a podium that he didn't like. Attention whore to the extreme, and 'grandstanding' isn't even adequate to describe the least of his behaviors.
It's not just the reporters who get the copyright/trademark/patent/secret distinctions wrong. On NPR a couple weeks back, they were interviewing the lawyer for the Ansel Adams estate, and the LAWYER claimed on the air "we have a copyright on the Ansel Adams name..." *facepalm*
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On the post: Disney To Maker Of Hulk Power Tools: You Wouldn't Like Us When We're Angry...
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This is where the moron-in-a-hurry standard comes in. I'd like to think I'm not a moron, but if I saw such a toy, it would be tough for me to guess the actual affiliation-- was it made by the tool maker and endorsed by the comic maker, or the other way around?
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On the post: IBM Patents Guessing How Many Kids Are On A School Bus
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However, they are definitely trying to get a better guess at X (in the above-commented formula): the passengers get heavier in the winter, and if still talking about school, presumably over the course of a school year.
On the post: IBM Patents Guessing How Many Kids Are On A School Bus
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