Who owns the trademark to the Apple? Granny Smith? Sir Isaac Newton? Eve?

Well apparently its a bit up in the air, but the apples that are being juggled are about to hit the floor for the round three of what is turning into a 25 year legal battle.

In this corner, we have a small unknown quartet named after some bugs, The Beatles. And in this corner, we have a little known computer manufacturer that holds about a 5% market share in the PC industry, Apple Computer.

So how can The Beatles have a quarrell with Apple Computer? After all isn’t Steve Jobs a reincarnated Techno Hippie? Didn’t he get cut from the cool mode of the 60’s, recognize the benefits of computer design at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center and Wozniak himself to center stage as a business mogul with impecable advertising taste? What can the beatles care about computers?

Well, in 1968 The Beatles formed a record company under a company name of Apple Corps. They produced their own records as well as other artists. Apparently, Steve Jobs wasn’t paying attention to trademark law 101 while he listened to his beatles album and watched the ‘Apple’ spin around and around eating eggplant.

So 8 years later he starts a computer company named Apple Computer. Both companies use an apple as their symbol. The Beatles as astute business men of the rip roaring greed is good 80’s promptly sue and settle with Apple Computer for $80,000 + a meaningless promise from Apple Computer to stay out of the music business (an obvious no brainer for some hacker nerds, right!)

Not so fast, Wozniak likes to play guitar! In 1989, Apple came out with music making software and the cage match was on again. This time Apple paid $26 million. The Beatles’ Apple Corps received the right to use the ‘apple’ on creations principally of musical content. Apple got the ability to run, reproduce or play said content but could not distribute content on physical media.

Obviously, Apple paid attention to that legal precedent. So now in 2006 The Beattles have reunited to sue Apple, again for itunes distribution.

An ipod owning judge will have to determine whether or not Apple is physically distributing creations principally of musical content in physical media.

Case law to be made here!

Is flash memory physical media and is the distribution of an MP3 file to flash memory or a hard drive even distribution of content on physical media? Or is Distribution of any musical content to Physical media the real issue. Originally, Apple wasn’t supposed to distribute CDs and tapes. Musical content had just gone digital on CD’s but had not come off the CD’s and onto MP3’s yet. Will evidence show that Apple shipped ipods with mucic pre-loaded?

I guess it boils down to a question of did Apple knowingly attempt to stretch the rope of what they were allowed or did they lengthen the noose that might ultimately hang them.

Apple(Jobs and Wozniak) danced circles around a different 60’s era company, Xerox. Could a 60’s era company with better Karma ultimately be Apple Computer’s undoing?

Britain, UK news from The Times and The Sunday Times - Times Online

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As we continue this series, there is a new consideration that digitized illegal transactions create. Each of outside of law enforcement must now concern ourselves with the perils of identity theft in an all together new fashion.

Stealth Identity Theft
In a world where drug dealers or other crooks can move funds around electronically, they have a new interest in doing so in a manner that doesn’t attract attention to themselves. There is already to many scenarios every day where people experience identity theft. The typical scenario is one where someone gets access to your credit card information, and runs up a tab on your account.

Over the last few years a new version started to occur where are personal information was used by criminals that would go out and setup a bank account only to then apply for credit and run up a tab under the fictitious account, which is under our name and social security number. In both situations they are stealing funds from creditors using our good name and credit history, which immediately becomes tarnished.

In a world where drug users have become the money launderers, drug dealers might attempt to learn from credit thieves and set up fictitious accounts under an alias. They could then have payments routed to this bank account for this name, and forward payments back out again through ACH transactions.

Their end goal is not to burn our good credit, but to run accounts under the radar such that we don’t know. The longer they can keep a dummy account up and running the easier their lives are.

Disposable Id’s? (To Keep or not to Keep)
There may be some natural time limits on the usefulness of such an account. As an example, as they run cash through these accounts, they may earn interest, which will be reported to the IRS under our names. So a natural limiter might include the amount of time the IRS takes to catch a discrepancy between what we report on our taxes(correctly but ignorantly not knowing that a criminal is operating under a stolen identity belonging to us).

Criminals masterminds may however seize upon checking accounts that pay no interest. So we must arm ourselves with the ability not only to monitor our credit, but with the ability to monitor open bank accounts or asset accounts. Watching our liability accounts through equifax is not enough.

Other criminal masterminds may not concern themselves with the time limit imposed by an IRS audit. They may look to torch the account on the way out. Compiling their ill gotten gains not in an interest free checking account, but instead opening up a brokerage account with the funds. They could trade stocks or options, possibly even on margin, and attempt to increase their booty.

Investment Fraud
Organized criminals could use multiple accounts to direct trades for or against accounts to push a stock price up or down. Hostile foreign governments could do the same thing. Imagine the double, triple whammy of 10 or 30,000 middle class Americans who have sacrificed their identity unknowingly to organized crime, which has funneled money from drug sales into multiple bank accounts around the country. The same funnel is then directed to margin trading accounts where its leveraged to drive up or down a stock price, while the same organized entity buys or cells the stock knowing the impact that is soon to occur.

Rumors of Al Qaida trading on the September 11th attack were rampant in the aftermath. So as we await to proceed into Part 4, I ask do you know how many bank accounts exist in your name? Can you prove that its no more and no less? If yes, how so?

A useful source I’ve found that continues this subject can be found in the Report titled “Cyberpayments and Money Laundering: Problems and Promise“

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Lots of people talk about the power or uselessness of Flash on the web. The link below to Brittleactica: Planet in need offers some different flash intros, that are almost interactive, and almost make you want to not push the ’skip intro’ button, which is one of the most selected button on any web page in cyberspace.
I happened to miss clicking the skip intro button on this site, and was bemusedly rewarded with a cow moving at the speed of light.

So this site is probably a veiled message from the milk industry or some such organization, but it points out that flash could be useful ‘almost’ if we can only become creative enough to embrace it and find a useful application that is more efficient than our current forms of text based web surfing.

In this flash example, a suser can start to click on planets and objects in the brittleactica(reference to brittle bones from not drinking milk probably) solar system.

I have to wonder if maybe the usefulness of flash could be applied to lackluster desktop applications. It seems to be wasted in cyberspace for now. Maybe its time will come, bulletin boards and their dial ups took a few years to take off as well.

Brittlelactica: Planet in need

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Simple programs written by programmers not affiliated with XM nor with Sirius have separately created software programs that allow satellite radio subscribers to tap into a streamed audio version of the radio service from the respective satellite radio websites, and push them out to their cell phones where they can listen to the music.

The programs are named:
SiriusWM5
PocketXM Radio

XM has sent cease and desist letters, and Sirius is threatening legal action.

The situation points to the failure of both companies to address the needs of their consumers. Both services have brought products to market targeted at releasing people from their cars and letting them listen to satellite radios in other areas. However, both products and services are poor in comparison to MP3 & Itune products.

They have failed to catch on because what you see is not what you get with the players. You have to record in advance of going mobile or else run the risk of getting very poor reception.

XM and Sirius have both missed the obvious (possibly on purpose out of short sitedeness and greed). Most people carry cell phones and with the advance of faster cellular networks, people could have streamed content pushed to their phones.

Despite Samsung’s claims last fall that they were coming out with a satellite capable radio, the option has not caught on. Motorola’s CEO Ed Zander’s was targeted by news casters on the day of the release of the irock due to the fact that Motorola did not have a satellite play with any of their phones on the horizon.

The Samsung phone had been anounced a couple days before the irock stealing some of its thunder. However, in retrospect, Samsung’s product has not shown up, and Apple stole more of the thunder with the Ipod Nano.

The satellite companies have both tried to go it alone designing sub-standard products that don’t deliver what their customers want - music on the go - anywhere with no static or interuptions and the ability to hold/play MP3 or itune files as well.

Until, they get it, fix it and offer it to the public, they will continue to have problems.

This is not the first time that XM has fought this type of battle. During the summer of 2004, XM had to fight off Canadian programmers that had designed products that could record Internet Streamed XM programs and record them to an MP3 file. This allowed their customers to take XM programs on the go 7 months before XM released the Delphi portable, and almost 12 months before portables were widely available.

At some point, you would expect one of these companies to get smart and stop fighting the technology and instead buy it up, and commercialize it. Unfortunately, when you run at a loss quarter after quarter, it must be tough to pull together enough cash to hire a programmer squirelled away in Canada or Texas or somewhere else. After all, it took one of the programmers that has recently been forced to stop selling his software, about an hour to write the program. Makes you wonder, why the team at the Satellite Radio companies can’t kick two or three of their programmers in to low gear and kick out a similar application in a week or two.

Fans put satellite radio on cellphones, draws fire - Yahoo! News

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Footage from the Hubo Labs

featuring the Albert Hubo

www.hansonrobotics.com/
Animatronics are starting to come into their own. This is a great example. There were a number of toys at CES some featuring other versions of animatronics.

The point is that society has to start somewhere and get used to the idea of how they can be used and how they function well.

A significant amount of programming goes into animatronics motions for facial expressions. Its important to understand that this is not just a gimmic, but a valid and speedy way to communicate concepts to humans attempting to interpret what something is saying.

The reason why a robot speaking with a classic sounding voice simulator feels so foreign to a human in one part is due to the absence of facial features. Features such as eyebrown movements, lip pursing, forehead wrinkles all face movements form expressions that compliment or counter the things we say.

Our eyes see and brain interprets what we see sometimes more completely and more quickly than what we here.
Robo EinsteinHanson LabsRobotic Facial AnimationAnimatronics

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