Two Curious Trademarks From Hon Hai

Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. (Ltd) is best known to techies as Foxconn, a contract manufacturer of electronics. They’ve assembled devices for Apple, among others.

The company has only 67 trademarks filed. And these two are Published for Opposition with a date a month in advance: February 2, 2010.

It makes me wonder what they have up their sleeve.

Lenovo Smartbook: Skylight?

Will Lenovo’s upcoming smartbook be called the Skylight?

I saw that at Liliputing and immediately searched TESS.

Quote Of The Day: Writer David Hewson

Book theft myth No 2: It’s about price

We steal books because they’re too expensive on our $300 ereader or $600 laptop. Simple as that.

Previously here:

Would A US$50 eBook Reader Be A Disaster?

Ray Bradbury: Mike Cane Is An Eejit

Well, this time I have lots and lots of company.

According to Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 is not about the words in books at all.

Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted

Now, Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.

This, despite the fact that reviews, critiques and essays over the decades say that is precisely what it is all about. Even Bradbury’s authorized biographer, Sam Weller, in The Bradbury Chronicles, refers to Fahrenheit 451 as a book about censorship.

Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

So, there goes part of what I wrote here: Whiny Bookstore-Loving Hypocrites (thanks to the two Commenters who pointed out this Bradbury article).

Bradbury, by the way, also hates the Internet:

The Internet? Don’t get him started. “The Internet is a big distraction,” Mr. Bradbury barked from his perch in his house in Los Angeles, which is jammed with enormous stuffed animals, videos, DVDs, wooden toys, photographs and books, with things like the National Medal of Arts sort of tossed on a table.

“Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,” he said, voice rising. “They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’

“It’s distracting,” he continued. “It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.”

Go figure.

Tell me, what is not a “distraction,” Ray? Do you know that there are religious groups that see literature as a “distraction”?

Farewell, Russell T Davies & David Tennant