You’ve heard of New York style, Chicago deep dish, Detroit square pans. But Colorado-style pizza? Probably not. And there’s a perfectly ridiculous reason why this regional style never spread beyond a handful of restaurants in the Rocky Mountains: one guy trademarked it and scared everyone else away from making it. This story comes via a […]
When books were rare and extremely expensive, they were often chained to the bookcase to prevent people walking off with them, in what were known as “chained libraries”. Copyright serves a similar purpose today, even though, thanks to the miracle of perfect, zero-cost digital copies, it is possible simultaneously to take an ebook home and […]
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. When President Donald Trump told reporters on Sept. 5 he’d started looking at sending the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, he said it was because of something he saw on television. He said the city was being destroyed by paid agitators. “What they’ve done to that […]
Let’s say, hypothetically, you want to gerrymander some congressional districts to help your party win more seats. Here are a couple of options: Which do you choose? If you said “obviously option 1,” congratulations, you understand the law better than the Trump administration’s Department of Justice. Because the Trump administration just got legally smacked down […]
The Complete Superstar Photographer Bundle has 11 courses to help take your photography skills to the next level. Two course start you off with the basics of photography and how to take advantage of your DSLR camera. Other courses focus on lighting and posing techniques, how to photograph landscapes, food, portraits, and groups, night photography […]
This won’t matter to Donald Trump or the dozens of administration officials who live to please him. In all likelihood, it will just lead to Trump and his administration smearing one of this nation’s allies for being weak on crime and too supportive of people who are being murdered by the US government. But it […]
Last week we noted how the BBC has been tripping over itself to apologize to Donald Trump for some edits made to a BBC documentary. Admittedly the edits weren’t the best idea; they effectively cobbled together two different parts of Trump’s January 6 speech 54 minutes apart not to misrepresent, but to make it more […]
It was only a few weeks ago that we wrote about a trademark dispute in the UK between a deli shop owner and a book publisher over the use of the word “sabzi.” Kate Attlee is the founder of Sabzi, the name of her deli, while Bloomsbury published a cookbook by Yasmin Khan called Sabzi: […]
Amazon Ring’s upcoming face recognition tool has the potential to violate the privacy rights of millions of people and could result in Amazon breaking state biometric privacy laws. Ring plans to introduce a feature to its home surveillance cameras called “Familiar Faces,” to identify specific people who come into view of the camera. When turned […]
This isn’t even the end of the fallout, but it’s a lot of it. A small Kansas town that basically conspired to silence local journalists who were asking too many questions continues to face the consequences of its actions. That’s a relief. Far too often, power gets abused and the justice system sides with the […]
A federal judge just ruled that computer-generated summaries of novels are “very likely infringing,” which would effectively outlaw many book reports. That seems like a problem. The Authors Guild has one of the many lawsuits against OpenAI, and law professor Matthew Sag has the details on a ruling in that case that, if left in […]
Not content to simply deport as many South American migrants from this country as possible, the Trump administration leaned into its lies about the latent threat to national security the mere existence of foreign people poses to national security. This administration pretends everything is a “war,” even as it actively avoids seeking congressional approval to […]
MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creating of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages. That’s all well and good, but it means nothing if you don’t have a firm grasp of the data types used within MATLAB. In the Complete MATLAB Programming Master Class, you’ll […]
Democratic Senator Mark Kelly and Republican Senator John Curtis want to gut Section 230 to combat “political radicalization”—in honor of Charlie Kirk, whose entire career was built on political radicalization. Kirk styled himself as a “free speech warrior” because he would show up on college campuses to “debate” people, but as we’ve covered, the “debate […]
Donald Trump and his earlobe nibbler (FCC boss Brendan Carr) are threatening to try and censor some more comedians after their efforts to cancel Jimmy Kimmel went so well (read: not well at all). Over at the right wing white propaganda website formerly known as Twitter, Brendan Carr retweeted some whining from Donald Trump calling […]
There is an incredible dearth of nuance when it comes to how some companies attempt to enforce their trademarks. A couple of things are true. First, an entity risks losing their marks if they don’t rigorously enforce them against actual infringement. Second, the USPTO is far too lenient in granting marks that are non-creative or […]
More than 80 law enforcement agencies across the United States have used language perpetuating harmful stereotypes against Romani people when searching the nationwide Flock Safety automated license plate reader (ALPR) network, according to audit logs obtained and analyzed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. When police run a search through the Flock Safety network, which links […]
You know this is a spectacle, right? A show. That’s what it is. A performance for social media. With blood. Pete Hegseth just ordered the twenty-first strike on a suspected drug boat. Three more bodies. Another video posted to X showing a vessel bursting into flames. “Three male narco-terrorists” dead, the military announces. No trial. No evidence […]
Imagine you’re writing an article about a popular policy trend. The trend is expensive to implement, disruptive to normal operations, and—here’s the key part—there’s substantial research showing it doesn’t actually work and can cause other significant problems. How would you structure that article? One approach: Lead with the evidence. “Despite growing enthusiasm for [policy proposal], […]
Well, well, well. If it isn’t the system of checks and balances. We’ve missed you, buddy! Long story somewhat short: ICE has been terrible for years, but it’s been much worse under Trump. During Trump’s first regime (~2016-2020), ICE got rocked by a court decision that prevented it from engaging in traffic stops just so […]
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