Walmart Is Unclear On The Difference Between Maryland And Massachusetts

Walmart said these two states look pretty much alike,
so who cares if a University of Maryland t
shirt has a Massachusetts map on it?  

At Walmart, they had  t-shirt that touted the University of Maryland.

Go Terps!

Here's the problem. The logo on the shirt shows a map of Massachusetts, not Maryland.

I'm not sure how many University of Maryland students, faculty and alumni don't know whether they are in Amherst, Massachusetts or College Park, Maryland, but I'm sure it's not many.

That doesn't stop Walmart, though, no way! Facts are stupid anyway, right?

According to Consumerist, a shopper tried to point out to Walmart that perhaps the University of Maryland is in, um, Maryland and maybe the t-shirts should reflect this notion.

I hope the initial response from Walmart was meant as tongue in cheek, but I'm not sure and that scares me.

I, and pretty much everyone else disagree on this point, but Walmart said both Massachusetts and Maryland start with the letter "M" and maps of the two states kinda, sorta look alike.

Good enough, then!

Or maybe not. The Washington Post reports, amid the growing embarrassment of these shirts, that Walmart is pulling them from the shelves and apologizing to University of Maryland fans.

Maybe Walmart could have fun, though, confusing other states and their universities. Colorado and Wyoming are both shaped like squares, so you could switch their university logo shirts.

Mississippi and Alabama look vaguely like mirror images of each other. New Hampshire looks very remotely like an upside down Vermont, and Delaware looks a bit like a mini mirror image of New Hampshire.

This is getting confusing.

Hey Patent Trolls: Listing Your Favorite Things Isn't Patent Infringement

Hoping a trend is starting to reign in greedy,
corrupt patent trolls.  

A Pennsylvania photographer named Ruth Taylor had an innocent website called Bytephoto, on which she ran photo contests in where winners were chosen by viewers choosing which images they liked best.

It's something that's been going on since there were humans: People rank things in order of how much they like or dislike them. Nothing innovative about that. 

The problem is, there are still epic problems with patent trolls, people who find examples of mundane activities and sue, or more accurately, try to extort money by claiming the idea is stealing from a patent the trolls say they own.

My complaints about patent trolls might seem esoteric, but the reason I do is because  it affects everybody.

 Like shoplifting, it drives up prices for all of us. The unfairness of it is also galling. People getting rich of things that aren't an original idea, or not any kind of real idea at all. They're just scammers and crooks. 

Unfortunately, it's easier to pay the ransom trolls demand than pay lawyers piles of money to fight these cases, so people hand over money to the trolls to make they go away. Which encourages them to keep extorting. 

Every once in awhile, though, somebody fights back. While I don't know if I would fight back, I still wish more people would, since Congress doesn't have the balls to pass sensible legislation to reign in the trolls and bring a whacked out U.S. Patent Office back under control.

A guy named Michale Garofalo, who had a little-used video website called Garfum.com, sued Taylor, saying she was infringing on U.S. Patent 8,209,618, Ars Technica reports.   Taylor, he said, was somehow infringing on the patent with her photo contests, reports Ars Technica

Garofalo initially demanded $50,000, but cut the demand to $5,000, and later $2,500 when he discovered Bytephoto didn't have much of an income. 

Taylor decided, instead of paying, she'd take a shot at contacting the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is kind of an ACLU for free and open and fair access to the web.

EFF filed a motion to dismiss Garafalo's suit, saying the photo contest patent should be thrown out, as per a 2014 U.S. Supreme Court decision that said that adding technological sounding or computeresque language to an existing idea isn't enough to claim patent rights.

Garofalo at that point gave up and dropped the case.

But it gets better. Finally, a patent troll has really been held accountable.

U.S. Chief District Judge Jerome Simandle said Garofalo's company, Garfum, should pay the lawyers fees because of its "unreasonable" behavior during the litigation, Ars Technica says.

"The practice of ranking things in categories based on popular vote was well-known before the advent of the internet, or even computers, and the requirement to involve an online database does not make this claim inventive," Simandle wrote. "Any person with a pen or paper could perform the same steps."

Well, duh!

But that doesn't stop patent trolls. Ars Technica says the Garfum case was handled by Austin Hansley, a Texas law firm that worked on some of the most outrageous patent troll cases.

Austin Hensley also represented an outfit called aDekka, a patent troll that was ordered to pay $390,000 in attorney's fees for 168 cases thrown out by a Texas federal court,  Ars Technica says.

By the way, the town of Marshall in eastern Texas, from where those 168 cases grew, illustrates the most extreme example of corruption surrounding patents and patent trolls

The story is unbelievable.

Local federal judges there began encourage these patent troll cases to be heard there, instead of in places closer to where the alleged patent misdeeds happened. All these high powered lawyers and consultants and such that were forced to make trips to Marshall made the town prosperous, because they went to local businesses.

Locals serving on the juries in these cases knew it and acted accordingly.

So the area became a patent troll mill.

According a 2014 article in Texas Monthly:

"Over the years, Marshall has earned a reputation as the intellectual property equivalent of a speed trap, a place where juries smack big companies with huge judgements. And over the years, federal lawmakers have tried to do something about it, with little success.

The U.S. Supreme Court and the federal appeals court in New Orleans have enacted restrictions on new filings. (The late) U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia declared Marshall "a renegade jurisdiction.' "

Last year, a bipartisan bill in Congress was being considered to reign in patent trolls, but so far, nothing has been passed.

The bill was blocked by conservative lawmakers who said strong patent protection create wealth and  jobs in the U.S. and encourage innovation.

Sure, but can't you have strong patent protection and stop patent trolls too? Kinda like walking and chewing gum at the same time?

Patent trolls don't deserve any protection. Time to reign them in, and punish those who abuse honest entrepreneurs and others. Let people who come up with great, innovative ideas obtain patents and the protections they deserve to preserve their investments and inventions.

Commerce and wealth should rise from good, innovative businesses. Not from extortion and corruption. 

Crime Fighting Kids Point Helicopter In Right Direction During Crime Manhunt

In this image from a British police helicopter, kids
on an Easter Egg hunt point the way, using their bodies,
toward two burglary suspects police were looking for.  

Some kids in Surrey, England found a quick way to fight crime while out on an Easter Egg hunt.

Surrey Police were chasing down a couple of burglary suspects and the National Police Air Service had a helicopter in the air looking for the two men.

Several kids, ages six to 12, accompanied by parents,  spotted the police helicopter overhead and correctly guessed the cops in the air were looking for the two men the kids had seen earlier.

The kids quickly got down on the ground in a plowed field and formed an arrow with their bodies to point the helicopter in the right direction, Surry Police said.

The helicopter crew steered in the direction the human arrow was pointing and spotted the two crooks. They relayed that information to Surrey Police on the ground, who quickly arrested the pair.  .

"The swift action taken by the group of parents and their childres was the sort of thing you would usually associate with an Enid Blyton adventure, but their ingenuity proved a great help for our crews," said Sgt. Paul Sochon of the National Air Service Police.

After the chase, the helicopter landed so airmen aboard could thank the children. The children responded by sharing chocolate Easter treats with the crew from the helicopter.

All in all, a great day for everyone, except the burglers.

Here's a video of the incident taken from the NPAS helicopter:

Quilted Northern's Literally Painful New Product

I hope this isn't in your powder room. 

April Fool's Day is over, but I have to look back and chuckle at one of the day's best spoofs.

Quilted Northern, the toilet paper company, put out an ad for "artisan" toilet paper.

It was a nod to today's trend of making everything handmade, old fashioned, artisan, whatever.

It might not be any good, but it's artisan so you have to buy it!

In what in reality would be a supremely bad idea, Quilted Northern put out this ad. Luckily, the artisan toilet paper is not for sale, but the ad sure is good. But I'll keep buying Quilted Northern's regular products instead.

See why:

The Inevitable Just Happened At A Kum & Go Convenience Store

Yes, there is a chain of convenience stores in the Midwest
with this unfortunate name.  

There is only one thing I don't like about going out to see my in-laws in South Dakota periodically.

In South Dakota and surrounding states, there's a chain of convenience stores with the unfortunate name Kum & Go.  Yes, it's spelled that way.

I always feel a flush of embarrassment when I'm the car with my sweet 89 year old mother in law every time we pass by the Yankton, South Dakota Kum & Go.

I know I have a dirty mind, and the owners of the convenience store chain are just inviting people to come in and be served gasoline, coffee or whatever quickly and be on their way.

But I'm sure I'm not the only person whose inner middle school boy emerges when he sees a Kum & Go store.

Finally, the inevitable just happened at one of these Kum & Go stores.

A guy named Gabriel Newell-Terren Lee, 18,  was arrested for masturbating inside a Kum & Go in Mason City, Iowa, says television station KIMT in Mason City. 

Well, what did you expect?

Police said people in the store saw this guy being a pervert,, and he exposed himself to at least one person there. He drove away in a blue SUV, but police later caught up with him, says KIMT.

All this just reinforces my M.O. when I'm visiting Yankton, South Dakota. When I need my soda, beer or munchies fix, I'll just avoid the Kum & Go and head on over to the HyVee Supermarket.

Cookie Monster Shills For Siri and I Have Mixed Emotions

The cookie monster has Siri on an iPhone help him,  hands free
with timing a batch of cookies, and starting his
"waiting for cookies" musical playlist.  

Ever since I was a toddler, I admired and related to the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street.

His enthusiasm, his lack of self control, his goofiness, his impatience and ultimate warm heartedness perfectly matched my ADHD addled brain, and I am grateful to him.

Side note: Did you know the Cookie Monster has his own Twitter feed? I didn't, until now. Cool!

I'm also something of a cookie monster myself, so there's that.

Which led me to mixed emotions over the past couple weeks when I've seen the Cookie Monster shilling for an iPhone 6S with timer on frequent television ads.  The ad video is at the bottom of this post.

I don't know why, but I'm a bit uncomfortable seeing one of my childhood favorites hawking products on TV.  It's actually a little worse than hearing one of my favorite songs from the past being the theme for, I don't know, a constipation medication ad or something.

On the other hand, the commercial is funny, and even after seeing it a few times, it still makes both me and my husband Jeff chuckle.

In the ad, the Cookie Monster is, obviously, making cookies. To tout the iPhone with a voice activated Siri, he tells Siri to set the timer for 14 minutes. The cookies will be ready in just 14 minutes! Yay!

He then asks Siri to start his "waiting"music playlist. We hear the plaintive song "Time In A Bottle" by Jim Croce as we see the Cookie Monster agonizingly wait out the timer for his cookies.

So, see what you think. Is the ad a childhood memory besmirched for you, or a clever, fun ad, or both.

You decide.

Here's the Cookie Monster Ad:

Joke's On Google As Minion April Fools Prank Backfires

Due to a failed Gmail April Fool's Day mishap,
images of Minions went out with some Gmail
users messages without the sender intending to,
causing lots of problems. 

Never trust a Minion.

As everyone who is a fan of Minions, those pill-shaped yellow characters from "Despicable Me" who also have their own franchise, they usually muck things up pretty spectacularly.

Usually hilariously, too, but you have to be careful.

So Google learned when it used Minions in an April Fools Day feature it introduced in its popular Gmail.

The April Fools Joke that was added to Gmail was a feature in which a GIF of a Minion  goofily dropping a mic.  The thought was you could add it to an email message

Problem was, it was extremely easy to accidentally hit the feature to automatically send the Minion GIF with an email.

Even worse, there was a bug in the system so that the Minion GIF would automatically go out even if the person sending the email never wanted it to.

According to Mashable, one Minion GIF went out with an emailed prayer request to 50 people, mortifying the sender. Another sent it with an important job application, even though the guy never hit the button to send the Minions. So much for that job.

Seeing the chaos unfolding in front of them, Google frantically shut off the dropped mic Minion thing before even more harm could be done.

But as ArsTechnica put it:

"At the very least, here's hoping that the next time Google pulls a prank, it doesn't do it with mission critical software used by millions of people."

And if I inadvertently send weird Minions in an email, I'm really, really, REALLY sorry.