The Deseret News reports: A jury has found that Salt Lake Comic Con founders Dan Farr and Bryan Brandenburg, along with their company, violated a trademark when they named their fan convention a “comic con.” However, the jury decided that the trademark was not willfully violated, and only awarded $20, 000 of the $12 million that San Diego Comic-Con had asked for in damages. The decision came at the end of an eight-day jury trial and three years of legal maneuvering… And with an estimated 140 other fan conventions across the country calling themselves comic cons, the impact of the decision could be felt nationwide… The Salt Lake group also has an ongoing action with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office seeking to invalidate San Diego’s “comic-con” trademark… San Diego Comic-Con, which has been holding events since 1970, has a trademark on “comic-con” with a hyphen, but was unsuccessful in its 1995 bid to trademark “comic con, ” with a space. The unhyphenated name “Comic Con International, ” as well as the event’s iconic “eye logo, ” are also protected by trademark. The event maintains that its trademarks cover the term “comic con” in all its forms… San Diego Comic-Con wanted more than $12 million in damages from Salt Lake, including over $9 million for a three-month “corrective advertising campaign” to dispel confusion… In his closing arguments, Michael Katz, an attorney for Salt Lake Comic Con, questioned the amount San Diego was seeking, noting that San Diego authorities said during trial the organization generally spends between $20, 000 and $30, 000 for a month of advertising. Slashdot reader AlanBDee writes: When I attended the Salt Lake City Comic Con I did assume it was the same organization that put on San Diego Comic-Con… But now I have to wonder how that will affect other Comic Cons around the nation? What should these comic based fan conventions be called if not Comic Con? Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read More:
San Diego Comic-Con Wins Trademark Suit Against ‘Salt Lake Comic Con’
vinces99 writes A couple of years ago a scientist looking at dozens of MRI scans of human brains noticed something surprising: A large fiber pathway that seemed to be part of the network of connections that process visual information that wasn’t mentioned in any modern-day anatomy textbooks. “It was this massive bundle of fibers, visible in every brain I examined, ” said Jason Yeatman, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. “… As far as I could tell, it was absent from the literature and from all major neuroanatomy textbooks.'”With colleagues at Stanford University, Yeatman started some detective work to figure out the identity of that mysterious fiber bundle. The researchers found an early 20th century atlas that depicted the structure, now known as the vertical occipital fasciculus. But the last time that atlas had been checked out was 1912, meaning the researchers were the first to view the images in the last century. They describes the history and controversy of the elusive pathway in a paper published Nov. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. You’d think that we’d have found all the parts of the human body by now, but not necessarily. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Nate the greatest writes “Guilford County Schools’ headline grabbing tablet program is back in the news again. The program came to an abrupt end last Friday when the school district announced that they were recalling all of the Amplify tablets. GCS had leased over 15 thousand of the tablets (at a cost of $200 a year) for its middle school students, but decided to recall the tablets just one month into the school year after some 1500 students reported a broken screen. Around two thousand complained of improperly fitting cases, and there were also 175 reports of malfunctioning power supplies. There’s currently no explanation for the cases or power supplies, but GCS has stated that the tablets broke because they lacked a layer of Gorilla Glass. This was listed in the contract, but the school district did not confirm the condition of the tablets before accepting them. This program was the poster child for News Corp.’s entry into the educational market. It was the single largest program to use the Amplify tablet, and its failure represents a serious setback. The Amplify tablet now has a record for poor construction quality and a breakage rate that is 12 times higher than what Squaretrade reported in early 2012 for the iPad 2.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 