post 197

By anders pearson 13 Nov 2000

intellectual property stupidity knows no bounds. Pillsbury sent Columbia a cease-and-desist letter because of the computer science department’s use of the term “Bake-off” which Pillsbury owns the trademark on. for anyone that doesn’t know it already, “bake off” is a commonly used term in CS referring to the testing of several independent implementations of similar programs or protocols. it’s been used as such for quite a while. for example, RFC 1025 TCP and IP Bake Off was written in 1987 and refers to bake offs. somehow i don’t really think anyone is going to get confused. last time i looked, trademarks didn’t apply outside their original market. if it doesn’t actually have anything to do with food, the trademark doesn’t apply. what the hell are pillsbury’s lawyers thinking?

post 194

By jp 12 Nov 2000

hampster dance was only the beginning. at least this makes light of the impending four years.

post 191

By jp 10 Nov 2000

so aparently Dartmouth has a “Professor Exchange” program with other schools around the country.

It’s not what you think.

So when old Dr. So-and-so, PhD, dies, his corpse is shipped off to one of the participating exchange schools in return for one of their late faculty. This is to prevent young dashing Bobby Medskool from pulling back the sheet to discover his practice cadaver is his first year advisor.

It’d be an ironic kind of justice to have a mix up, and get to dissect your least favorite teacher from a year or two back.