http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/418684789/AS_KAZAKHSTAN_RUSSIA_SPACE

http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/A/AS_KAZAKHSTAN_RUSSIA_SPACE?SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2008-10-12-11-37-02

http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/418671816/video-the-priso.html

http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/10/video-the-priso.html

http://philbradley.typepad.com/i_want_to/2008/10/quarkbase-everything-about-a-website.html

http://philbradley.typepad.com/i_want_to/2008/10/socialmeter.html

http://blog.laurellkhamilton.org/2008/10/concentrating-on-positives.html

What do you do when you’re overwhelmed and a little down, and you know that the true end of the stress in nowhere in sight? What I normally do is off the books, because my sweetie is broken until further notice. So that’s off the table. So, what to do? I had errands I had to run just to keep things running in the household, so I turned necessity into pleasure by driving The Foose. I hadn’t driven the Baby in ages, because Jon can’t bend well enough to get in and out of it. I’d forgotten how good it feels to slip into that seat and have the car infold me. It still has that new car smell, or maybe it’s just the scent of the Foose. Maybe this car, like some men just smells good to me. Maybe. I let that throaty roar of engine envelop me, and concentrated on the movements you need to drive a car like the Foose. I’ve gotten good enough that I can listen to music while I drive. I don’t need the sound of the engine to tell me when to shift. But I found that I wanted to hear the engine. I wanted that purring, vibrating sound, to be the only sound in the car. It’s peaceful. It’s fun to pull up beside some guy in a car, and watch his eyes. It’s the car, not me. I know where the car geeks are looking, and that’s okay, it’s a nice car.

I was able to do the errands because our friend, Richard, came over for a play date with Jon. The new 360, and the new games beckoned the boys. They played Dynasty Warrior 6 and LEGO Batman, until Jon got tired and then they put on the latest tivo episode of Mythbusters. One of our favorite shows. But Richard, allowed me enough time to go out shopping for a birthday present which is due, and now overdue. I hit my favorite metaphysical store, stocked up on incense and other necessities. They were also having a book sale, which is something I can seldom resist especially when informed that most of the books are now out of print. Then to the nearest Hallmark store, because we needed a card to go with the present. I love card stores, always have. I have a present closet here at home which has cards filed and ready for use. I was getting low, so I bought extras of things I might need. I love finding the perfect card for someone. It just makes me happy. I also bought some Halloween decorations, and some new mugs. I do love mugs. I bought two with the kind of sayings that Anita could take to work to bug Bert, and one that was a positive statement to help remind me that I really do love my job. I’m just stretched a little thin in other areas of my life, and having trouble finding ways to recharge my batteries. I found a leather bracelet at the metaphysical store, that smells like leather, like saddles and well cured pelts. One sniff of it, and I keep feeling that sensation of cinching a saddle in place. That creak of the saddle as you settle into it. Strangely, I’ve not ridden much, but the tactile memory is so strong, so comforting, so real. A flash from the past maybe. I don’t usually find the thought of horses comforting. They tend to try and get me off their backs in interesting ways. But the bracelet smells wonderful and the scent is very calming. I like leather, the smell of it, the touch of it, but it’s a little hot for a leather jacket right now, so the bracelet was a nice find.

I’m re-reading the Spenser series by Robert B. Parker from the beginning. It was one of my early favorites, and a new Spenser book will still send me to the bookstore. Why read from the beginning, because I’m having such trouble reading other people’s fiction. I find myself editing it as I read, and that’s no fun. But the familiarity of these books is helping me ease past that, and it’s fun to watch Spenser meet Susan, the love of his life, for the first time. I’m looking forward to Hawk’s first on stage appeareance. The writing is good, and it’s interesting to watch how his style changed over the years. Reading someone else’s stuff is helping calm me, too. When the anxiety builds I grab a book and read for a few minutes. It helps slow the noise in my head.

Right now, I’m drinking hot, black tea, with more sugar and cream than I should probably be using, but I’m easing up on myself in some areas for the duration of Jon’s recovery. We’re still on Jenny Craig, we’re still being good. One of the my errands yesterday was a trip to there to restock on food. My goal today is treadmill, bubble bath, and to make an appearance at my Writing Group’s twentieth anniversary dinner. Yep, that’s right, the Alternate Historians have been together for twenty years this year. We had this dinner planned ages before we knew Jon would be having the knee operation. Sigh. He can’t go, and I can’t leave him alone that long, so I’m hoping to be able to pop in for a few minutes at least. We’ll see how it goes.

Must concentrate on the positive outcome. When Jon is through physical therapy we will be able to: Go dancing again, yea! Hiking. Bird watching. Ren Faires. Walking together. Walking the dogs. He’ll be able to exercise again. (not sure he sees that as a plus but he’s promised to do what needs doing, and I’m holding him to it). Just being able for me to go out and know that he’s not going to hurt himself, or be trapped with no way to move around safely. Jon being able to get on a plane and not be on crutches. Be able to do a lot of things without being on crutches. And, yes, sex. When his knee is well, we’ll be back to our more usual adventuresome selves. Really looking forward to that part. I have to say, if I ever had the home life that some of you believe I had, with all the extra men, this would be the perfect time for it to be true. I don’t just mean the sex. I mean errands, and helping take care of Jon. What most people don’t get about truly being poly is that it’s not about being promiscuous, but about having an extended family. (Admittedly, some people use it as an excuse to simply sleep around and feel justified, but to me, they miss the point.) Right now, it would be very nice to be able to tag team other adults for some of this work, and truly know you could count on that comforting puppy pile at the end of the day. Extra hugs would also be very nice. But I will muddle through like most of us do, with my little nuclear family. But come on, wouldn’t it be nice to have just one more adult you could count on, or a couple of them? You guys fantasize about the sex if you want to, I’m beginning to fantasize more about help around the house, and emotional support. Admittedly, all three would be nice.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=707

I’m running a couple months behind on this but I’m finally getting around to commenting on the issue that Bill Poser posted about the eventually aborted effort by Dell to register, trademark and thereby prevent other companies from using “cloud computing.” It seems to me that Dell’s effort illustrated one of the struggles that both the Patent and Trademark Office and trademark lawyers have when they try to deal with the conventionally accepted (but sometimes difficult to define) trademark categories.

In case you aren’t too sure about the interesting language of trademark categories, let me give a simplified overview. They include fanciful marks (coined words like Exxon oil or Kodak cameras), arbitrary marks (words that convey a very different meaning from the way they are known and used (like Glad wrap), suggestive marks (words that cause the reader to make a “mental leap” to associate the product with the name, like Tide laundry soap), and descriptive marks (words that simply describe the qualities, ingredients and characteristics of a product, like Chapstick lip balm and Raisin Bran cereal).

Although most trademark disputes take place in that murky area between descriptive and suggestive (along with considerable speculation about how to define and measure that required “mental leap”), once in a while corporate lawyers will get desperate and try to register, trademark and protect descriptive or even generic marks, often with little or no success.

One example of such an effort took place in 1992 in the case of Registry Hotel Corporation d/b/a Hospitality Management Corporation v. American Hospitality Management Company (US District Court, District of Minnesota Third Division, Civil Action No. 3-92-852). Registry’s lawyers claimed that even though “hospitality management” may be descriptive, it is not generic, and therefore their client had the exclusive rights to use that name because of the fame and promotion it had invested in it. This means that because of Registry’s extensive marketing and promotion (creating what they hoped would be evidence of strong secondary meaning), their lawyers believed that they should prevail even if the court found that “Hospitality Management” was descriptive. Lawyers for defendant Hospitality Management asked me for whatever linguistic assistance I could offer about whether “Hospitality Management” was a generic mark.

To answer this question, I began by conducting data based research of magazines and newspapers written in the ten-year period prior to the case. I found some 300 different citations of “hospitality management,” including 47 service companies that included these words in their titles, and 44 academic training programs at universities and other schools that used those exact words to describe their programs and courses. If Registry wanted to go after hundreds of potential violators for this broad, general use, they could give it a shot I suppose, but their mark was looking pretty generic.

In addition to its common and general use, other characteristics of a generic word or expression are its grammatical flexibility and an increasing frequency of use. Grammatical flexibility means that it has the ability to move dynamically across grammatical categories with relative ease–for example, from a noun to a verb or adjective. I found that “hospitality management” was commonly used adjectivally before other nouns, such as “hospitality management programs,” “__services,” “__training,” “-__school,” “__group,” and “__courses.” In fact, it was even flexible enough to be commonly used without the preceding word, “management.” It’s difficult to protect names for products and services from charges of trademark infringement when they become so grammatically flexible. We don’t read much about laundry soap that is Tideable, or photos that have been Kodaxed. Okay, we may hear “xeroxed” a lot, but the owner of that mark tends to raise a big stink when that happens.

Another indication of the common, generic characteristics of a word or expression can be seen when there has been a dramatic recent increase in its frequency of use. In the four years leading up to this case, my relatively small database showed 137 public uses of “hospitality management” but only 37 uses in the six years before that. So clearly it was both grammatically flexible and had increased recent frequency, strong candidate measures for it to fit the trademark category of generic.

Even Registry’s hail-Mary claim that its descriptive mark had strong secondary meaning didn’t help them. Perhaps relying somewhat on my analysis or maybe just using good sense, the judge ruled that “hospitality management” was generic and therefore not protectable.

http://blog.laurellkhamilton.org/2008/10/concentrating-on-positives.html

What do you do when you’re overwhelmed and a little down, and you know that the true end of the stress in nowhere in sight? What I normally do is off the books, because my sweetie is broken until further notice. So that’s off the table. So, what to do? I had errands I had to run just to keep things running in the household, so I turned necessity into pleasure by driving The Foose. I hadn’t driven the Baby in ages, because Jon can’t bend well enough to get in and out of it. I’d forgotten how good it feels to slip into that seat and have the car infold me. It still has that new car smell, or maybe it’s just the scent of the Foose. Maybe this car, like some men just smells good to me. Maybe. I let that throaty roar of engine envelop me, and concentrated on the movements you need to drive a car like the Foose. I’ve gotten good enough that I can listen to music while I drive. I don’t need the sound of the engine to tell me when to shift. But I found that I wanted to hear the engine. I wanted that purring, vibrating sound, to be the only sound in the car. It’s peaceful. It’s fun to pull up beside some guy in a car, and watch his eyes. It’s the car, not me. I know where the car geeks are looking, and that’s okay, it’s a nice car.

I was able to do the errands because our friend, Richard, came over for a play date with Jon. The new 360, and the new games beckoned the boys. They played Dynasty Warrior 6 and LEGO Batman, until Jon got tired and then they put on the latest tivo episode of Mythbusters. One of our favorite shows. But Richard, allowed me enough time to go out shopping for a birthday present which is due, and now overdue. I hit my favorite metaphysical store, stocked up on incense and other necessities. They were also having a book sale, which is something I can seldom resist especially when informed that most of the books are now out of print. Then to the nearest Hallmark store, because we needed a card to go with the present. I love card stores, always have. I have a present closet here at home which has cards filed and ready for use. I was getting low, so I bought extras of things I might need. I love finding the perfect card for someone. It just makes me happy. I also bought some Halloween decorations, and some new mugs. I do love mugs. I bought two with the kind of sayings that Anita could take to work to bug Bert, and one that was a positive statement to help remind me that I really do love my job. I’m just stretched a little thin in other areas of my life, and having trouble finding ways to recharge my batteries. I found a leather bracelet at the metaphysical store, that smells like leather, like saddles and well cured pelts. One sniff of it, and I keep feeling that sensation of cinching a saddle in place. That creak of the saddle as you settle into it. Strangely, I’ve not ridden much, but the tactile memory is so strong, so comforting, so real. A flash from the past maybe. I don’t usually find the thought of horses comforting. They tend to try and get me off their backs in interesting ways. But the bracelet smells wonderful and the scent is very calming. I like leather, the smell of it, the touch of it, but it’s a little hot for a leather jacket right now, so the bracelet was a nice find.

I’m re-reading the Spenser series by Robert B. Parker from the beginning. It was one of my early favorites, and a new Spenser book will still send me to the bookstore. Why read from the beginning, because I’m having such trouble reading other people’s fiction. I find myself editing it as I read, and that’s no fun. But the familiarity of these books is helping me ease past that, and it’s fun to watch Spenser meet Susan, the love of his life, for the first time. I’m looking forward to Hawk’s first on stage appeareance. The writing is good, and it’s interesting to watch how his style changed over the years. Reading someone else’s stuff is helping calm me, too. When the anxiety builds I grab a book and read for a few minutes. It helps slow the noise in my head.

Right now, I’m drinking hot, black tea, with more sugar and cream than I should probably be using, but I’m easing up on myself in some areas for the duration of Jon’s recovery. We’re still on Jenny Craig, we’re still being good. One of the my errands yesterday was a trip to there to restock on food. My goal today is treadmill, bubble bath, and to make an appearance at my Writing Group’s twentieth anniversary dinner. Yep, that’s right, the Alternate Historians have been together for twenty years this year. We had this dinner planned ages before we knew Jon would be having the knee operation. Sigh. He can’t go, and I can’t leave him alone that long, so I’m hoping to be able to pop in for a few minutes at least. We’ll see how it goes.

Must concentrate on the positive outcome. When Jon is through physical therapy we will be able to: Go dancing again, yea! Hiking. Bird watching. Ren Faires. Walking together. Walking the dogs. He’ll be able to exercise again. (not sure he sees that as a plus but he’s promised to do what needs doing, and I’m holding him to it). Just being able for me to go out and know that he’s not going to hurt himself, or be trapped with no way to move around safely. Jon being able to get on a plane and not be on crutches. Be able to do a lot of things without being on crutches. And, yes, sex. When his knee is well, we’ll be back to our more usual adventuresome selves. Really looking forward to that part. I have to say, if I ever had the home life that some of you believe I had, with all the extra men, this would be the perfect time for it to be true. I don’t just mean the sex. I mean errands, and helping take care of Jon. What most people don’t get about truly being poly is that it’s not about being promiscuous, but about having an extended family. (Admittedly, some people use it as an excuse to simply sleep around and feel justified, but to me, they miss the point.) Right now, it would be very nice to be able to tag team other adults for some of this work, and truly know you could count on that comforting puppy pile at the end of the day. Extra hugs would also be very nice. But I will muddle through like most of us do, with my little nuclear family. But come on, wouldn’t it be nice to have just one more adult you could count on, or a couple of them? You guys fantasize about the sex if you want to, I’m beginning to fantasize more about help around the house, and emotional support. Admittedly, all three would be nice.

http://www.wraithbait.com/viewstory.php?sid=14268

• 21:41 Homework: what is a body cavity? Identify the 5 body cavities & their major structures. #

http://tushnet.blogspot.com/2008/10/catfish-by-many-other-names.html

http://philbradley.typepad.com/i_want_to/2008/10/popurius.html

http://philbradley.typepad.com/i_want_to/2008/10/compete.html

http://postsecret.blogspot.com/2008/10/sunday-secrets_12.html