Who knew? Banking giant Citigroup has trademarked "THANKYOU" and is now suing technology giant AT&T for how it says thanks to its own loyal customers. This is "unlawful conduct" amounting to wanton trademark infringement, Citigroup claims in its federal lawsuit.
Here is a copy (PDF) of the trademark certificates and trademark applications connected to what Citigroup is calling its "THANKYOU Marks."
According to Citibank's lawsuit (PDF) lodged Friday in New York federal court:
The rarely flown heavy-lift vehicle delivered a secret spy satellite into space.
United Launch Alliance
In an image that looks like a van Gogh painting, the Delta IV Heavy rocket launches on Saturday afternoon.
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After the space shuttle retired in 2011, the Delta IV Heavy became, by default, the world's most powerful rocket. Standing 71.6 meters tall, fully 15 meters taller than the full space shuttle stack, the rocket built by United Launch Alliance can deliver up to 28.4 tons of mass to low-Earth orbit.
On Saturday, under splendid blue-and-white Florida skies, the rocket made one of its rare launches by delivering a spy satellite payload, NROL-37, for the National Reconnaissance Office into orbit. The agency has released no information about the satellite, but from the Delta IV Heavy's use we can conclude that it likely was one of the spy office's Advanced Orion satellites, which measure radio signals from the vantage point of geostationary orbit.
The Delta IV Heavy rocket has not flown since December, 2014, when it launched NASA's Orion spacecraft into a two-orbit test flight around Earth, reaching a peak altitude of 5,800km. In its entire history since 2004, the rocket, which uses three common booster cores to power its ascent, has flown only nine times. One of the reasons the Delta IV flies so infrequently is its cost—up to about $400 million per flight.
So you want to kill a drone. Maybe your neighbors are flying their machines over your backyard or zooming past your windows. Maybe you're on stage giving a talk about implementing SSL and you're being dive-bombed by drone cam. Heck, maybe you want to destroy your own drone just to watch it die. We understand, and that's why Ars' intrepid video editor Jennifer Hahn has made this helpful guide to drone destruction.
In Utah, state representatives are already considering a bill that would allow cops to shoot down drones. In most states, it's unclear whether it's lawful to shoot down a drone that doesn't belong to you. Just to be on the safe side, we advise putting the shotguns away for now. There are far better anti-drone weapons out there, like drone jammers that use directed RF signals to cut off communication between the drone and its controller. Or you can use another drone, equipped with a net, to yank the offending drone out of the sky. Of course, you can also go low tech. One person killed a drone with medieval weapons, while another used a simple t-shirt whip.
After uploading an analysis of Stanley Kubrick movies to YouTube, UK-based Lewis Criswell is now being sued by the company behind the main theme to the 1971 classic, A Clockwork Orange. The sad thing here is that while the piece is incredible, it too is a copy, having being written by composer Henry Purcell, 321 years ago.
Like many who first heard the news last weekend, I don’t admitting that I was moved by a video uploaded by YouTuber Lewis Bond. Seeing someone scared – terrified even – isn’t fun.
An aspiring young filmmaker, Bond runs Channel Criswell on YouTube and his work shows excellent promise for a fruitful career. Sadly, his immediate future looks decidedly more gloomy.
The details can be found here, but essentially a 20 minute video analysis of Stanley Kubrick movies created by UK-based Bond has provoked a lawsuit from a company holding the copyrights to some of the music tracks featured in the background.
In a nutshell, Bond appears to have a firm belief that he has a strong fair-use case. Serendip LLC, which owns the copyrights to the music featured in the 1971 movie ‘A Clockwork Orange’, beg to differ. Take a moment or two to listen to the track in question at the start of the video below, it’s important.
The end result is a lawsuit which could see Bond on the receiving end of $150,000 in statutory damages for each infringement. From everything seen to date, it seems unlikely the 23-year-old can come up with that kind of cash. It’s possible he’ll struggle to finance a defense.
Seeing Bond visibly choked was a sad sight and it got me thinking. While undoubtedly a wonderful and timeless piece of music, is a track from 1971 really bringing in the money for Clockwork Orange composer Wendy Carlos today? Has Bond’s fleeting reproduction of a part of this track in his documentary caused real financial damage?
I don’t have the answer to those questions but while researching this case I came across something that surprised even me, a huge ClockWork Orange fan. Although arranged and performed by Carlos, the main theme from A Clockwork Orange isn’t her work at all. In fact, the entire piece – virtually note for note – has been lifted from a piece penned by composer Henry Purcell.
Born in England in September 1659, Purcell developed into what many consider to be one of the country’s greatest composers. His 1695 piece ‘Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary’ was played at the funeral of Queen Mary II, who had died in December of the previous year.
It is an abridged version of this music that forms the entire basis of Carlos’ 1971 work. Arrangement and beautiful synthesizer work aside, it’s virtually identical.
Purcell died in 1695 and quite rightfully his work is now in the public domain. As a result Wendy Carlos was absolutely within her right to take this piece and run with it and as a supporter of remix culture, I salute her efforts entirely.
Sadly, however, I can’t help but note the sad hypocrisy here. Just for a moment, let’s cast aside the legalities of copyright law and instead focus on the notion of artists using the work of others to create new art.
In the 1970s, Carlos took Purcell’s work and modernized it beautifully and there are now millions of people out there who only know her version of the work. By taking his work, she has touched audiences in a way Purcell could not. It’s probably worth noting that Carlos undoubtedly made more money from Purcell’s work than Purcell ever did too, and good for her.
Like Carlos before him, Lewis Bond is also somewhat of a remixer. His Kubrick analysis by Serendip’s own description is a “mélange of brief snippets” and he too is bringing the work of the filmmaker and indeed Wendy Carlos to a brand new audience that Purcell himself could only dream of. I’d like to think Purcell would be pleased for their success.
Importantly, in the same manner that Carlos paid homage to Purcell with her work, by opening his video with Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary the main theme from Clockwork Orange, in turn Bond paid homage to Carlos. It strikes me that rather than having disrespect for each other, all involved in this downward chain deeply appreciate each other’s talents.
Of course, since Bond’s channel is monetized, Carlos believes she should be paid for her work. Bond, on the other hand, is stuck in a fair use dilemma, and will have to fight an expensive court battle to find out who is in the right. Let’s face it, that is not going to happen.
Bond is unlikely to put up any kind of fight and whatever happens – win or lose – Serendip/Carlos aren’t going to get a penny from Bond in the UK. What I’m saying today is that among business people – among artists – in today’s climate there must be a better way to sort this out.
Getting the parties to talk might not be easy, but there are plenty of options if they just take the opportunity. Bond won’t have made much from his video, but paying a small sum to Carlos might be an option, if he doesn’t have the stomach for a fair use war.
The option I like best, however, is a collaboration. Carlos has talents. Bond has talents too. So, as artists, why not do something together? When it comes down to it they have a lot in common. Both have made new creative works on the backs of other people’s efforts without paying them a dime. That alone provides the basis for discussion – they’re already on the same page.
But most of all, why are people wasting each other’s lives with these pointless lawsuits? On YouTube there are plenty of instances where people have uploaded the whole of Carlos’ work, literally a full-fledged pirate copy of everything notable she’s ever done. They’re freely available on the platform today yet Bond – someone who brings something creative to the party – faces financial ruination? That makes no sense.
Although Wendy Carlos and her representatives failed to respond to our requests for comment, there may be a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. A TorrentFreak reader managed to make contact with someone on Wendy Carlos’ site who fired back quite an email. It ends as follows:
“There is much bad advice on the internet about copyright and the use of music on YouTube, but some very good advice that should be followed is not to post other people’s copyrighted music on the internet ‘because you like it and want others to hear it’,” the email reads.
“This YouTube user would also be well advised to follow the old saw that ‘when you find yourself in a hole, you should stop digging.’ His problems might go away if he would just ‘undo’ his previous bad choices.”
That sounds like an olive branch. Someone might like to grab it.
A deep history argues that the scientific revolution was real and important.
For untold centuries, humans tracked the regularities of the natural world and developed systems that let us make predictions about the future. But, with a few rare exceptions, we did little more than that. The few stabs made at understanding things were anything but systematic, and they didn't produce unified theories about the underlying properties of the physical world. But then, roughly 500 years ago, everything changed.
To hear David Wootton tell it in his new book The Invention of Science, 16th-century Europe was the last place you'd expect an intellectual revolution. It was a region where witchcraft and unicorns were accepted as real, even by the intellectual classes. They also felt that the Greeks and Romans had already discovered everything worth knowing. An extended hangover from a night out with Aristotle and Christian theology stifled anything that looked like a sense of inquiry. Knowledge, if anything, was on the decline.
Yet, as Wootton explains, the intellectual ferment started by Copernicus and Galileo brought about a change that led to the breakthroughs of Boyle, Pascal, and Newton. Some of their findings are still in use today, and the scientific approaches they pioneered have expanded in scope to revolutionize the modern world.
Digital quantum network cleans up analog noise, allows quantum computation.
Making a qubit is easy. Controlling how they communicate, however... (credit: NSF)
There are many different schemes for making quantum computers work (most of them evil). But they pretty much all fall into two categories. In most labs, researchers work on what could be called a digital quantum computer, which has the quantum equivalent of logic gates, and qubits are based on well-defined and well-understood quantum states. The other camp works on analog devices called adiabatic quantum computers. In these devices, qubits do not perform discrete operations, but continuously evolve from some easily understood initial state to a final state that provides the answer to some problem. In general, the analog and digital camps don't really mix. Until now, that is.
The adiabatic computer is simpler than a quantum computer in many ways, and it is easier to scale. But an adiabatic computer can only be generalized to any type of problem if every qubit is connected to every other qubit. This kind of connectivity is usually impractical, so most people build quantum annealers with reduced connectivity. These are not universal and cannot, even in principle, compute solutions to all problems that might be thrown at it.
The issues with adiabatic quantum computers don't end there. Adiabatic quantum computers are inherently analog devices: each qubit is driven by how strongly it is coupled to every other qubit. Computation is performed by continuously adjusting these couplings between some starting and final value. Tiny errors in the coupling—due to environmental effects, for instance—tend to build up and throw off the final value.
25 years after its Amiga debut, Team17 soldiers on with Worms and indie publishing.
By the end of the 1980s, the story of the video game industry had become a Homeric epic. There was the rise and fall of Atari, the American company that defined both the art and commerce of video game development, placing games consoles in millions of homes and striking multi-million dollar deals with Hollywood before a market collapse saw the beleaguered company's games and machines literally buried in sand.
There was the Eastern saviour Nintendo, the century-old playing card manufacturer whose bright-eyed employee, Shigeru Miyamoto, designed games of such striking quality that they brought the industry back from the brink of oblivion. In the UK, a gaggle of nerdy young men, including David Braben, Peter Molyneux, Archer Maclean, and Jeff Minter, found fame by using the computer games they programmed in their bedrooms to escape Britain's troubles both at home (industrial strikes, economic shudders) and abroad (IRA bombings, war in the Falklands).
By 1990 things had begun to stabilise. The British games scene became defined by regional publisher-developers that operated out of computer shops or remote business parks. They burned games onto discs and cassette tapes before selling them from newsagents and computer stores. 17-Bit Software was one such outfit, based in a cramped office above an amusement park in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. A local entrepreneur, Michael Robinson, who also ran a popular chain of computer retail shops called Microbyte, started the company. His idea was simple yet ingenious: find the next generation of talented young game developers, sign their games the same way record labels sign bands, and sell their games through Microbyte stores.
With a list price of $50, the Amazon Fire is already one of the cheapest halfway decent tablets on the market. But every now and again Amazon offers it for an even lower price… and today is one of those times.
Right now you can pick up an Amazon Fire tablet for $40 and up… and Amazon is also offering discounts on a bunch of its other devices, including tablets, eReaders, and Fire TV media streamers.
With a list price of $50, the Amazon Fire is already one of the cheapest halfway decent tablets on the market. But every now and again Amazon offers it for an even lower price… and today is one of those times.
Right now you can pick up an Amazon Fire tablet for $40 and up… and Amazon is also offering discounts on a bunch of its other devices, including tablets, eReaders, and Fire TV media streamers.
Jury trial starts Tuesday. Infringement is in the ear of the beholder.
The cover of "Led Zeppelin IV" from 1971. "Stairway to Heaven" is song No. 4. The album was remastered in 2014. (credit: vinylmeister)
There's a lady who's sure
All that glitters is gold
And she's buying a stairway to heaven
"Stairway to Heaven" intro.
Starting Tuesday, one of rock and roll's most iconic songs, "Stairway to Heaven," will be scrutinized by a federal jury tasked with deciding whether the 1971 Led Zeppelin song—which has generated some $500 million in revenue—infringes the 1968 instrumental song "Taurus" produced by the psychedelic band Spirit.
This isn't the first time Zep has been accused of infringement. In 2012, the band struck an out-of-court deal with singer-songwriter Jake Holmes regarding his 1967 song "Dazed and Confused." Zep's 1969 debut album has a track with the same name and similar lyrics.
Despite being filed in 2014, the "Stairway to Heaven" case is only now making it to trial because of a slew of pre-trial motions, including those by Led Zeppelin seeking to have it dismissed. The case is being brought by the trust of Randy Wolfe, aka Randy California, and it essentially declares that Zep's mind-numbing opening to "Stairway to Heaven"—an acoustic guitar arpeggiating chords in a descending pattern—is a complete ripoff of California's "Taurus" which he wrote for the band Spirit. Zeppelin toured with Spirit in 1968, and California's complaint alleges that Zep guitarist Jimmy Page had heard "Taurus" before the debut of "Stairway to Heaven, which appears on "Led Zeppelin IV." Billboard describes the album as "a cultural touchstone and one of the most popular releases in US history." "IV" has gone platinum 23 times.
Die früher stark umstrittenen Körperscanner werden an immer mehr deutschen Flughäfen eingesetzt. Selbst der in (un)absehbarer Zeit schließende Berliner Flughafen Tegel wird noch mit solchen Geräten ausgestattet. (Überwachung, Scanner)
Die früher stark umstrittenen Körperscanner werden an immer mehr deutschen Flughäfen eingesetzt. Selbst der in (un)absehbarer Zeit schließende Berliner Flughafen Tegel wird noch mit solchen Geräten ausgestattet. (Überwachung, Scanner)
Die früher stark umstrittenen Körperscanner werden an immer mehr deutschen Flughäfen eingesetzt. Selbst der in (un)absehbarer Zeit schließende Berliner Flughafen Tegel wird noch mit solchen Geräten ausgestattet. (