Nuffing.com

We’ve talked ongoing about how ridiculous and aggressive many universities are becoming on trademark matters. Now colleges and universities do many, many annoying things, but their tendency towards trademark bullying certainly ranks up there near the top of the list. Not as high, of course, as Ohio State’s neverending insistence that everyone call it "THE Ohio State University." The school likes to point out that the "the" (sigh) is actually part of the school’s legal name, when the reality is that the school is simply being haughty and pedantic.

Well, now these two worlds are colliding in what might just be the dumbest trademark application I’ve ever seen. You’ll never guess what single word OSU wants to trademark.

Application No. 88571984, filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Thursday, was discovered and publicized Tuesday by Josh Gerben, a prominent trademark lawyer in Washington. The application seeks a trademark on the single word "THE" for use on T-shirts and baseball caps and hats.  

For years, the university’s demand that it be called "THE Ohio State University" has rankled sports fans and journalists, who’ve called it "pompous and stupid," "ridiculous" and "arrogant."

Partisans, including the university, point out that "the" is part of its name under state law. And Chris Davey, a spokesman for the university, told The Columbus Dispatch on Tuesday that it’s important to "vigorously protect the university’s brand and trademarks."

This, simply, is absurd. Trademark law is written in such a way to be wide open for abuse, but even this is a bridge further than the law will allow. Trademarks require original identifiers that indicate the source of a good or service and the bar for approval by the Trademark Office goes up the shorter and less original the identifier is. The idea that someone might apply for a trademark on the single most commonly used determiner in the English language is the sort of thing reserved for jokes in our comments section. But THE Ohio State University went ahead and did it anyway.

Other schools took notice, of course, and some of them are having fun at OSU’s expense.

Michigan getting a trademark on the word "of" makes every bit as sense as OSU’s application. Fortunately, despite all of the madness we see from the USPTO on a frequent basis, nobody seems to think this application is going to be approved.

Gerben predicted on Tuesday that Ohio State was "likely to receive an initial refusal of the application."

For a trademark to be registered for a brand of clothing, the trademark "must be used in a trademarked fashion," he said on Twitter. "In other words, it has to be used on tagging or labeling for the products. In this case, just putting the word ‘the’ on the front of a hat or on the front of a shirt is not sufficient trademark use," he said.

That careful analysis is almost certainly correct, but I much prefer to simply point out that this is all very, very crazy and be done with it.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

via Techdirt
THE Ohio State University Applies For THE Stupidest Trademark In THE World

Quite often in e-shops you can see many level of categories and subcategories, sometimes even unlimited. This article will show you how to achieve it elegantly with Laravel Eloquent.

We will be building a mini-project to views children shop sub-categories, five level deep, like this:

---

Database Migration

Here’s a simple schema of DB table:

Schema::create('categories', function (Blueprint $table) { $table->bigIncrements('id'); $table->string('name'); $table->unsignedBigInteger('category_id')->nullable(); $table->foreign('category_id')->references('id')->on('categories'); $table->timestamps(); }); 

We just have a name field, and then relationship to the table itself. So most parent category will have category_id = NULL, and every other sub-category will have its own parent_id.

Here’s our data in the database:

---

Eloquent Model and Relationships

First, in app/Category.php we add a simple hasMany() method, so category may have other subcategories:

class Category extends Model { public function categories() { return $this->hasMany(Category::class); } }

Now comes the biggest “trick” of the article. Did you know that you can describe recursive relationship? Like this:

public function childrenCategories() { return $this->hasMany(Category::class)->with('categories'); }

So, if you call Category::with(‘categories’), it will get you one level of “children”, but Category::with(‘childrenCategories’) will give you as many levels as it could find.

---

Route and Controller method

Now, let’s try to show all the categories and subcategories, as in the example above.

In routes/web.php, we add this:

Route::get('categories', 'CategoryController@index');

Then, app/Http/CategoryController.php looks like this:

public function index() { $categories = Category::whereNull('category_id') ->with('childrenCategories') ->get(); return view('categories', compact('categories')); } 

As you can see, we’re loading only parent categories, with children as relationships. Simple, huh?

---

View and Recursive Sub-View

Finally, to the Views structure. Here’s our resources/views/categories.blade.php:

<ul> @foreach ($categories as $category) <li></li> <ul> @foreach ($category->childrenCategories as $childCategory) @include('child_category', ['child_category' => $childCategory]) @endforeach </ul> @endforeach </ul>

As you can see, we load the main categories, and then load children categories with @include.

The best part is that resources/views/admin/child_category.blade.php will use recursive loading of itself. See the code:

<li></li> @if ($child_category->categories) <ul> @foreach ($child_category->categories as $childCategory) @include('child_category', ['child_category' => $childCategory]) @endforeach </ul> @endif

As you can see, inside of child_category.blade.php we have @include(‘child_category’), so the template is recursively loading children, as long as there are categories inside of the current child category.

---

And, that’s it! We have unlimited level of subcategories – in database, in Eloquent relationships, and in Views.

via Laravel Daily
Eloquent: Recursive hasMany Relationship with Unlimited Subcategories

This short article explains how to integrate a Material Design Vue Bootstrap project with Laravel. You’ll prepare & import your first Vue component in a Laravel app!
Every resource used is free.
via Laravel News Links
Material Design, Bootstrap, Vue & Laravel – quick start quide

3rd part of my blog series on how to build a JSON API with Laravel using all of it’s great tools and automation
via Laravel News Links
Building a JSON API with Laravel: Episode 3

A brief introduction to implementing JSON Web Tokens to your Laravel API using a proxy.
via Laravel News Links
How to authenticate your Laravel API with JWT using a proxy

You can’t put a price tag on the value of sticking it to the man—specifically, trying to own an official surveillance system. Except maybe when you are owned right back.

A security researcher going by the name of Droogie attempted to fuck with Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) systems by customizing a vanity California license plate with the word “NULL.” The word was a play on the term used in programming to indicate no value, and Droogie hoped that it would mess with the systems.

ALPR systems involve surveillance cameras mounted on cop cars and around cities that collect a vehicle’s license plate as well as the time, date, and location. And the collection of this data isn’t relegated to suspects—anyone’s vehicle is subject to being surveilled and subsequently loaded into a comprehensive database with robust information on their real-time whereabouts. It’s also presently unclear all the ways in which government agencies and private companies are using (and potentially abusing) this data.

Droogie presented his misadventure at the DEF CON security conference in Las Vegas on Saturday, in which he explained that while his customized plate was successful in confusing the systems, it resulted in thousands of dollars of other people’s parking tickets.

When he went to renew his tags on the DMV website, the website informed him that his license number was invalid, Mashable reported. Droogie then started receiving thousands of dollars in parking tickets, totaling over $12,000, addressed to him. He told the convention audience that a processing center was assigning “NULL” to vehicles with outstanding tickets that the DMV didn’t have license plate information on. And so Droogie received all of those unassigned tickets.

The DMV and LAPD reportedly told him to change his plates (he didn’t), but eventually the processing center erased the fines that were mistakenly sent to Droogie. But the system is still operating as it was prior to the erasure of his fines, and the system has since assigned him over $6,000 more in tickets.

“I was like, ‘I’m the shit, I’m gonna be invisible,’” Droogie told the crowd at DEF CON, Mashable reported. “Instead, I got all the tickets.”

Droogie’s stunt is a powerfully comedic statement about a mass surveillance system being deployed without the consent of civilians, and until recently, with little to no oversight. In June, a California legislative committee voted to enforce a state audit into ALPR systems used by cops. Leading up to that, reports indicated that these systems were being exploited by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and potentially other government agencies and that agencies often obfuscated the honest accounts of how the data gleaned from these readers was being used.

“These systems wouldn’t work at all if the government did not require drivers to post identifying numbers in public view,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in a blog post. “But unlike an officer writing down plate numbers by hand, the collection and storage on a massive, automated scale can reveal intimate details of our travel patterns that should be none of the government’s business.”

via Gizmodo
Security Researcher’s ‘NULL’ Vanity Plates Cause Glitch That Lands Him $12,000 in Parking Tickets

Transcript

Boss: I hired a bad analogy guy. Instead of giving reasons for his opinions, he asks ridiculous questions while acting arrogant.
Dilbert: That doesn’t seem useful.
Man: Would you say that about oxygen?

via Dilbert Daily Strip
Comic for August 13, 2019

One month after offering up archaeological evidence to back up a contested claim about the First Crusade, researchers say they’ve found traces of the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in a deeper layer of their excavation on Mount Zion.

The newly reported find demonstrates how the site, just outside the walls of the Old City’s Tower of David citadel, serves as a “time machine” documenting the twists and turns of Jerusalem’s history.

The Babylonian conquest, which dates to the year 587 or 586 BCE, is one of the major moments of Jewish history. As detailed in the biblical Book of Kings, the Babylonians laid siege to Jerusalem for months, eventually broke through the walls and burned “all the houses of Jerusalem,” including Solomon’s Temple.

After the fall of Jerusalem, the Jewish people were sent into exile – an event that Jews commemorate with mourning and fasting every year on the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av. This year’s Tisha B’Av observance began at sundown tonight.

During this year’s Mount Zion excavation, which is managed by the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, researchers came across a layer of material that included burnt wood and ash, potsherds, lamps and arrowheads dating from the time of the conquest. They also found a piece of period jewelry – a tassel or earring made of gold and silver.

An area around the dig yielded up signs of what appears to have been a substantial Iron Age structure, but that particular area has yet to be fully excavated.

Today, the focus of the Mount Zion Archaeological Project is a triangular wedge of ground that lies between a busy Jerusalem thoroughfare and the citadel’s walls. But at the time of the Babylonian siege, the area was a neighborhood within the fortifications of the Iron Age city, said Shimon Gibson, a co-director of the excavation and a professor of history at UNC Charlotte.

By itself, the ash wouldn’t serve as conclusive evidence of the city’s biblical destruction, Gibson said.

“For archaeologists, an ashen layer can mean a number of different things,” he explained in a news release. “It could be ashy deposits removed from ovens, or it could be localized burning of garbage.”

But the fact that the ash and debris were mixed with Scythian-type bronze and iron arrowheads that date to the sixth century BCE, plus the presence of a precious bauble from the same era, helps strengthen the case.

“Nobody abandons golden jewelry, and nobody has arrowheads in their domestic refuse,” Gibson said.

The clay artifacts, which include the high-based pinched lamps that were common at the time of the siege, help to date the deposit.

“It’s the kind of jumble that you would expect to find in a ruined household following a raid or battle,” Gibson said. “Household objects, lamps, broken bits from pottery which had been overturned and shattered … and arrowheads and a piece of jewelry which might have been lost and buried in the destruction.”

Gibson said he likes to think that the site represents one of the “great houses” mentioned in 2 Kings 25:9. “This spot would have been at an ideal location, situated as it is, close to the western summit of the city with a good view overlooking Solomon’s Temple and Mount Moriah to the northeast,” he said.

But he and the rest of the team are proceeding carefully.

“We are slowly taking the site down, level by level, period by period, and at the end of this last digging season, two meters of domestic structures from later Byzantine and Roman periods have still to be dug above the Iron Age level below,” Gibson said. “We plan to get down to it in the 2020 season.”

Excavation co-director Rafi Lewis, an archaeologist at Ashkelon Academic College and Haifa University, said the historical context that surrounds the discoveries at the Mount Zion site adds to the project’s appeal.

“It is very exciting to be able to excavate the material signature of any given historical event, and even more so regarding an important historical event such as the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem,” he said in the news release.

This season’s other notable discovery relates to another battle at Jerusalem’s walls – the siege by the Crusaders in 1099. The UNC Charlotte team excavated the outlines of a defensive ditch that, combined with artifacts including arrowheads, crucifixes and a piece of jewelry found amid a layer of burned debris, served to confirm a long-debated chapter in the saga of the First Crusade.

The team also uncovered vaulted basements dating from the time of Herod the Great, and a Byzantine street that was the continuation of a thoroughfare in Jerusalem known as the Cardo Maximus. Previous finds at the site include a rare gold coin bearing the visage of Nero as a young Roman emperor, and a first-century Jewish mansion that came complete with a bathtub.

The Mount Zion archaeological project is conducted by researchers, students and volunteers under the direction of Gibson, Lewis and James Tabor, a professor of religious studies at UNC Charlotte. The site is within an Israeli national park near the Old City’s Zion Gate. The project’s sponsors include Aron Levy, John Hoffmann, Cherylee and Ron Vanderham, Patty and David Tyler. Sheila Bishop of the Foundation for Biblical Archaeology is a facilitator for the project. 

GeekWire’s Alan Boyle traveled to the Mount Zion site last month as part of a field trip associated with the World Conference of Science Journalists and organized by CERN with support from the Open SESAME consortium.

via GeekWire
Archaeological dig in Jerusalem unearths evidence of biblical Babylonian conquest

Aire is the form builder for PHP artisans. Tailwind-based templates, client-side validation, and smart defaults out of the box. Customize what you need, but don’t write code you don’t need to.
via Laravel News Links
Aire: the form builder for PHP artisans

AP Photo/Richard Drew

Judge Andrew Napolitano is bringing the heat in a stinging column for the Washington Times, rebutting and refuting the arguments by gun control activists that they can simply ignore the text of the 2nd Amendment and Supreme Court decisions and enact whatever anti-gun laws they want.

The U.S. Supreme Court has twice ruled in the past 11 years that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual pre-political liberty. That is the highest category of liberty recognized in the law. It is akin to the freedoms of thought, speech and personality. That means that the court has recognized that the framers did not bestow this right upon us. Rather, they recognized its pre-existence as an extension of our natural human right to self-defense and they forbade government — state and federal — from infringing upon it.

It would be exquisitely unfair, profoundly unconstitutional and historically un-American for the rights of law-abiding folks — “surrender that rifle you own legally and use safely because some other folks have used that same type of weapon criminally” — to be impaired in the name of public safety.

It would also be irrational. A person willing to kill innocents and be killed by the police while doing so surely would have no qualms about violating a state or federal law that prohibited the general ownership of the weapon he was about to use.

The judge is absolutely right. And frankly, we know that even if an “assault weapons ban” managed to get millions of legally owned guns out of the hands of Americans (which it wouldn’t), the monsters in our midst would just adapt. We just saw a twisted individual take more than 30 lives by setting fire to a studio in Japan. We’ve seen a wanna-be jihadi mow down 86 people and injure more than 400 with a truck in France. We don’t think we’d see new tactics used by the twisted individuals here at home intent on destroying as many innocent lives as possible?

The judge also had a strong rebuke to those proposing or supporting red flag laws.

The president also offered his support for “red flag” laws. These horrific statutes permit police or courts to seize guns from those deemed dangerous. Red flag laws are unconstitutional. The presumption of innocence and the due process requirement of demonstrable fault as a precondition to any punishment or sanction together prohibit the loss of liberty on the basis of what might happen in the future.

In America, we do not punish a person or deprive anyone of liberty on the basis of a fear of what the person might do. When the Soviets used psychiatric testimony to predict criminal behavior, President Ronald Reagan condemned it. Now, the president wants it here.

We have civil commitment laws on the books in states across the nation. If we believe that someone is truly a danger to themselves or others, isn’t that a more appropriate place to seek help rather than a court hearing where a judge only hears one side of the case before making a determination about whether or not someone poses a threat to themselves or others?

As Napolitano points out, if one of our rights is gutted by ignoring the Constitution, you set a precedent to the same to any or all of the rest. If you think the 2nd Amendment is old or outdated, don’t ignore the Constitution. Abide by it. Try to repeal the 2nd Amendment. Of course that’s hard, which is one reason we haven’t seen a serious effort. We’re also dealing with some folks who really don’t care much about the Constitution. It’s an old and outdated document in their opinion, which should be ignored whenever possible and completely changed at the first given opportunity. Unfortunately that means that Napolitano’s column, as good as it is, will likely fall on deaf ears.

The post Napolitano: The 2nd Amendment Isn’t A Gift From The Government appeared first on Bearing Arms.

via Bearing Arms
Napolitano: The 2nd Amendment Isn’t A Gift From The Government