Sunday November 22, 2009
This year (2009) Thanksgiving Day, a bit of a roving holiday, falls on November 26. Did you know that "MACY'S THANKSGIVING DAY PARADE" is a word mark? That's a registered trademark - Registration Number 2206890.
Food often takes center stage at Thanksgiving, and there are many well-known Thanksgiving-related products protected by patents and trademarks. One way to spend more time with family and less in the kitchen cleaning up is by using a disposable cooking pan (patent #5,628,427) or a cooking jacket (patent #4,942,809) for the turkey, ham or roast. One non-traditional, but increasingly popular, way to cook a turkey is deep-frying, and one type of equipment used in this preparation is protected by patent # 5,758,569.
Some well-known trademarks associated with turkey and dressing, must-haves at many Thanksgiving tables, are Butterball (registration #1151836) for turkey products. What holiday feast would be complete without cranberry sauce such as Ocean Spray (registration #2150919) Desserts are always the final complement to a Thanksgiving feast. For those that do not bake their own, Sara Lee's slogan for its pies and cakes, "Nobody Doesn't Like Sara Lee," is protected by a trademark (registration #1885156). Photo Credit: Erik Rank/Getty Images Illustration: Mary Bellis
Saturday November 21, 2009
Check it out. QVC has posted a message in our forum looking for new products.
Saturday November 21, 2009
Marc wrote to me asking for clarification about who invented cream cheese. Marc, after a bit more research I now have a name. In 1872, cream cheese was invented by American dairymen, William Lawrence of Chester, N.Y., who accidentally developed a method of producing cream cheese while trying to reproduce a French cheese called Neufchatel.
Friday November 20, 2009
UC San Diego computer scientists have built a software program that can perform key duplication without having the key. Instead, the computer scientists only need a photograph of the key.
"We built our key duplication software system to show people that their keys are not inherently secret," said Stefan Savage, the computer science professor from UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering who led the student-run project. "Perhaps this was once a reasonable assumption, but advances in digital imaging and optics have made it easy to duplicate someone's keys from a distance without them even noticing."
The bumps and valleys on your house or office keys represent a numeric code that completely describes how to open your particular lock. If a key doesn't encode this precise "bitting code," then it won't open your door.
In one demonstration of the new software system, the computer scientists took pictures of common residential house keys with a cell phone camera, fed the image into their software which then produced the information needed to create identical copies. In another example, they used a five inch telephoto lens to capture images from the roof of a campus building and duplicate keys sitting on a café table about 200 feet away.
