The trademark argument is actually an interesting one. A trademark is a form of monopoly to prevent customer confusion. And a DRM based on trademark might be something the could have a legal foundation. But not under the DMCA, so unlocking the trademark protection would not be illegal if you can find a workaround.
That could be a fun toy to play with.
Double fun to design it as opensource. (Triple fun, as it could apparently piss off the suitānātie bastards who would love to control technologies. These ones make me mad like a cut snake.)
Pulsed power tech is fascinating. And the large capacitors are expensive as a brand-name place-of-eternal-damnation, but can be done as homemade. (Pro tip: use more layers of thinner foils instead of a single thick one, keeps the trouble with pinholes away.) For the uninitiated, check out Youtube for āMarx generatorā. This one, for example, looks fully homemade including spark gaps and caps.
Wouldnāt fly that well in East Europe. Compare a new washing machine (300-400 euro), a replacement board (140 euro), and a replacement switching power supply chip (5 euro). Itās a no-brainer.
The cost of work is not counted as it was a nice evening at a friendās house and I got a dinner.
On a side note, it was a 5V+12V power supply. I was tempted to not bother with sourcing the chip and just use an ATX PSU from a computer. (Most of such deaths of consumer stuff are power supplies giving up a ghost, sometimes in smoky form. The margins on the parts were sacrificed to the Profit God and the reliability therefore suffers. The good part of the PSU faults is that they can be fairly simple to debug, and that you can mix and match PSUs from different things. E.g. you can power a monitor backlight with a 24 volt module made from a 19V laptop brick with tampered-with voltage feedback; these things are somewhat adjustable. Poke around the control chip for what looks like a resistor divider, with output of 2.5 or 1.2 volts, the adjustment is usually around there. If output voltage responds to a change in the divider, youāre on it. Then just add a trimpot.)
(Edit: You wonāt get a full-scale regulation from that, though. The 19V brick was good down to about 13V, then it became violently unstable. And good to about 25V, then the second optocoupler that is a second line of defense against overvoltage tripped the primary. It could be further extended if this protection got shifted, e.g. by changing the zener or adding e.g. a LED in series, the green ones double as 2V stabilizers and visual indicators, reds are good for 1.5V; thermally not too stable but good for low-requirements uses.)
(Side note: for thermal stability, you can make bigger Zeners by stacking the 5.1V ones. These are the optimum where two different mechanisms of thermal dependence just about cancel out.)
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āFair useā wouldnāt help you in a trademark matter; but Sega v. Accolade specifically involved the trademarked Sega logo being used as part of a lockout mechanism. The court found that the legal purpose of protected trademarks was to prevent confusion and misrepresentation, and was specifically not supposed to allow monopolization(which was one strike against Sega, since they were attempting to tie āSega gameā, in the very-much-protected-by-trademark-sense, to āgame compatible with Sega-brand consoleā by technical means, in order to control all games that worked with their console, not merely to protect a trademark implying their publication or endorsement of a given game). They further found that, when used as a necessary functional element, the trademarked mark was not a misrepresentation to the customer; but simply a compatibility feature that ensured operation with the console(in the same way that most browsers still have a user agent that claims to be Mozilla 5, for reasons dating back to the dark age of the browser wars.) and that if Sega decided to make it so that interoperability involved displaying their logo during load time, that was Segaās problem.
Given theā¦dubiously consistentā¦nature of court outcomes, and the high cost, I wouldnāt want to stick my neck out on the matter; but Sega v. Accolade was(at least to my laymanās eye) a nearly perfect analog to your hypothetical use of a trademarked label pattern on a coffee pod.
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Thereās a precedent that says, no, itās OK.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Enterprises_Ltd._v._Accolade,_Inc.
That link doesnāt work. I assume you meant this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Enterprises_Ltd._v._Accolade,_Inc.
And they are apples and oranges, IMO. The trademark concerned the use of the letters SEGA appearing in a particular place in the code of a game, which unlocked the 3rd party games to play on the console. No one could see the trademarked name in the code, unlike a corporate logo printed on a container. A lawyer could certainly try to use this as precedent, but whether or not it would actually fly in a court of law, is iffy, as far as Iām concerned.
Add a disclaimer - problem solved.
Except that code triggered the display on the screen, so it was seen.
I got my freedom clip in the mail the other day. I donāt own a 2.0 machine, but I am ready! Rogers also sent three samples of their K-compatible biodegradable pods. I tried one this morning and the coffee was pretty good. A step above the usual K-offering.
What would be luxury if it wasnāt wasteful?
There can be so many other attributes; comfort is one of them.
Yes but our comfort is luxury to the majority of the rest of the planet. Also, you might like to have a peek at that article and think again:
Being wasteful can be a choice of lifestyle but then, at least, donāt try to make excuses.
Somebody takes their morning pleasure from a cup of quick, comfortably made coffee.
Somebody takes their morning pleasure from lecturing others how wrong that is.
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ā¦while sipping a cup of delicious, quick, confortably made, almost waste free, (supposedly) fairly traded and freshly brewed coffee.
Which still required significantly more effort than click-click-run operation of a coffeemaker which got the cup filled automatically while the operator was away to pee. (And potentially could be even run automatically by a timer or a signal from the alarm clock.)
And no hassle with the coffee grounds.
And possibility to make different kinds of coffee for every person who wants it, with almost no waiting.
But some holier-than-thou people want to flog others for their choices.
Sorry for trying to make you think a little further than your cup oā joeās with ideas that would actually require you to make an effort beyond your level of convenience. If you donāt like to question, then why in the world do you read a blog thatās a beacon of critical thinking and take part in discussions in which you insult people who give you critical impulses with such labels as āholier-than-thouā?
tl;dr: you realize you complain about critical thinking on a site thatās mainly about critical thinking?
Why should I? Conversely, why are you so resisting to accept that other people can (and do) have different values in different importance orders?
Because of the other questions (e.g. how to hack a cups-using coffee maker), and other people, most of which arenāt so adamant in pushing their One True Way Of Making Coffee down the throat of everybody who dares to dissent?
I thought Iād made it clear that I accept and even embrace other people having other values. What I have a problem with is when people make excuses for what they do. If youāre ready to say: Iām okay with pollution, then weāre good. I accept that. Beside, Iām certainly everything but a saint myself.
I admit to having lost enough care for the world over the years that I am not non-okay with this kind of pollution anymore.
A bit less black-and-white answer but also a more accurate one.
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Okay. This sounds way more accurate to me.
I just think everybody should at least be conscious of what he does and then decide. I generally donāt judge that decision because I could never tell what concept of life is best.
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