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A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

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Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#161

Post by rustynails77 »

zem wrote: post #55
jarrett wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, it always, locally, makes sense not to challenge claims and let some other small company deal with it. I would argue in favor of fighting back in most cases, even from a local standpoint. "Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute." How you behave towards bullies sends a powerful signal to other bullies. Your response can either encourage more bullying, and thus a cycle that ends in your…

Kipling put it well: It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation, For fear they should succumb and go astray; So when you are requested to pay up or be molested, You will find it better policy to say: -- "We never pay any-one Dane-geld, No matter how trifling the cost; For the end of that game is oppression and shame, And the nation that pays it is lost!"

This is an ideal time to bring up the Mongols. Anyone in Eastern Europe that paid the Mongol tax still exists. The inverse can be said for those that didn't pay, or decided to fight.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_under_the_Mongol_Em...

I respect Kipling's quote - but history shows YMMV. If in doubt, just ask why you don't hear of the Khwarezmid Empire - who were one of the biggest empires around at the time of the Mongols.

Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#162

Post by gruseom »

bane wrote: post #160
phillc73 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We must speak with different people, because I hear it commonly used in the correct manner.

I can guarantee with near 100% certainty that unless you deal with people who speak in a formal style as their normal vernacular, you do not hear it either commonly nor consistently used in a correct manner. - the OED remarks "whom is 'no longer current in natural colloquial speech'" and notes multiple cases in Shakespeare, Defoe, Chaucer and the King James Bible where "whom" is used "incorrectly" by modern standards…

Holy shit! What a great comment.

I love how serious inquiry into language almost always reveals that the "Rules" are wrong.

Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#163

Post by Pitarou »

phillc73 wrote: post #135
Pitarou wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learnt an even better trick: don't use it. Or rather, only use it if you intend to go the whole hog and comply with all the pedantic, pseudo-latinate prescriptions of traditional formal English grammar. "It is I." "Bad grammar is something up with which I shall not put." "This is an historic occasion." And so on....

> "This is an historic occasion." What's wrong with this? I cannot think of another way in which to say this?

"an" or "a"?

It's a long story. If you've never had to deal with this quaint piece of British pedantry, count yourself lucky. But you can still sometimes here BBC journalists who say "This is an historic occasion." with both the "n" and the "h" pronounced clearly.

Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#164

Post by Pitarou »

meepmorp wrote: post #153
Pitarou wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learnt an even better trick: don't use it. Or rather, only use it if you intend to go the whole hog and comply with all the pedantic, pseudo-latinate prescriptions of traditional formal English grammar. "It is I." "Bad grammar is something up with which I shall not put." "This is an historic occasion." And so on....

> Or rather, only use it if you intend to go the whole hog and comply with all the pedantic, pseudo-latinate prescriptions of traditional formal English grammar. The who/whom I/me distinction isn't a pseudo-Latinate grammatical prescription - it's the last vestages of overt case marking in English. An + words starting with "h" is a phonological side-effect of h-dropping in some dialects. The preposition stranding thi…

Yes, I know. I'm tarring all these formalisms with the same etymological brush.

Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#165

Post by bane »

gruseom wrote: post #162
bane wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can guarantee with near 100% certainty that unless you deal with people who speak in a formal style as their normal vernacular, you do not hear it either commonly nor consistently used in a correct manner. - the OED remarks "whom is 'no longer current in natural colloquial speech'" and notes multiple cases in Shakespeare, Defoe, Chaucer and the King James Bible where "whom" is used "incorrectly" by modern standards…

Holy shit! What a great comment. I love how serious inquiry into language almost always reveals that the "Rules" are wrong.

Thanks, linguistic prescriptivism is a pet peeve of mine. It's astonishing how paper thin and clearly unnatural most of the arguments are.

Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#166

Post by leephillips »

Scramblejams wrote: post #152
leephillips wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PDF is excellent for presenting information on the web, but sribd certainly sucks.

"PDF is excellent for presenting information on the web" Except when you want to link to somewhere in the middle of it, or view it on a resource-constrained device, or reflow the text to a window size of your own choosing, or or or... More here: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/pdf-unfit-for-human-consumpt...

You can actually embed fragment identifiers inside PDFs, but I don't know if any web browsers can understand them. Your other points are of course known to everybody - I even know these things myself, and yet I maintain that "PDF is excellent for presenting information on the web". Especially PDFs designed for delivery on the web, rather than 20 MB files designed for printing. HTML solves problems, like reflow, that are unsolved by PDF, but PDF is still the best choice if precise control over typography and layout are needed, as they are for some documents. The article you link to was right on target in 2003, when it appeared, but is obsolete now. Browsers no longer crash when asked to render a PDF; no external readers are needed, if you use the right browser. In Chrome I can navigate into and out of PDF documents completely seemlessly; if used carefully they can be an integral part of the web.

Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#167

Post by Imagenuity »

yareally wrote: post #89
Imagenuity wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works fine on my stock Android browser. Android 4.2.2 on a Nexus 7.

For what it's worth, the stock browser on the nexus 7 is chrome (unless you root and sideload the actual stock aosp browser or use a custom Rom with it).

The browser on a Nexus 7 when an app requests a webview is WebKit 534.30. Chrome 27.0.1452.90 on Android 4.2.2 is WebKit 537.36. Appears there are two 'stock' browsers, no rooting or sideloading necessary.

Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#168

Post by ianferrel »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #157
ianferrel wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy a Jack Daniels T-shirt with the label printed on it. Presumably, no one thinks they can drink a T-shirt, but the product is produced by (or at least licensed by) Jack Daniels.

If the controversy were over copyrights (presumably JD holds a copyright on their label), where the book cover reproduces that copyrighted work, then I'd get it. The T-shirt would be subject to the same copyright concerns, and need to license the image. But the referenced letter explicitly says it's a trademark issue. I can't see how consumers are potentially confused between a book bearing a particular product on it…

If the average person understood the vagaries of intellectual property law and the distinction between copyright and trademark, then a swoopy design that looks a lot like the Jack Daniels label wouldn't cause confusion in the marketplace.

Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#169

Post by kyrias »

sp332 wrote: post #144
coldpie wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love requiring javascript to view text . The mind spins.

It's till better than needing a plugin or stand-alone app to read text in the original PDF format.

They could at least give you the choice, especially now that ~60% of web users use a web browser with a built in PDF viewer and I'd bet that a large part of the remaining 40% already have a PDF viewer with a browser plugin installed.

Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#170

Post by meepmorp »

Pitarou wrote: post #164
meepmorp wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or rather, only use it if you intend to go the whole hog and comply with all the pedantic, pseudo-latinate prescriptions of traditional formal English grammar. The who/whom I/me distinction isn't a pseudo-Latinate grammatical prescription - it's the last vestages of overt case marking in English. An + words starting with "h" is a phonological side-effect of h-dropping in some dialects. The preposition stranding thi…

Yes, I know. I'm tarring all these formalisms with the same etymological brush.

These aren't formalisms.

Some are prescriptivist rules for how grammar ought to be, some are observed facts about how language functions.

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