Car With Smashed Windows Yet Another Example Of Why You Don’t Park In Front Of Fire Hydrants

(NBC News)

So you think your car is special, huh? Like maybe it has some magical power that reorganizes its atoms as such that a fire hose can pass through it without breaking, or emergency jet packs that can lift it up and away when the fire hydrant it’s parked in front of needs to be used. Well, it’s not, and yet again, another hapless driver gives us the perfect reason why you shouldn’t leave your ride where it isn’t supposed to be.

A Wilmington, Del. driver learned that there is no such thing as a special car that’s allowed to sit in front of hydrants after firefighters bashed out the windows of the Ford Fusion vehicle while battling a three-story house fire that was spreading, reports NBC News Philadelphia.

With the fire on the move, firefighters broke the car’s two front windows and fed the fire house through them to access the hydrant and get the water to the scene.

And lest you think you’ve got wiggle room, be careful — in this case, it’s illegal to park within 15 feet of a hydrant, and not just directly in front of it. Many cities have similar regulations, all put in place to make sure firefighters have water when they need it.

After 40 minutes of battling the blaze, the fire was brought under control, say officials. No one was inside the homes at the time, but a dog was killed and a firefighter was taken to the hospital for heat exhaustion and later released.

As for that car, police issued a ticket and had it towed, providing a no doubt unwelcome surprise for the owner. Although again, it shouldn’t be a surprise if you act like the rules don’t apply to you. Or if your car’s emergency jet pack lifting capabilities are on the fritz.

Firefighters Trying to Fight Blaze Bust Windows of Car Blocking Hydrant [NBC News Philadelphia]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

Park In Lot At The Abandoned Kmart, Get Your Car Towed

The signs in the parking lot warned that it was only for Kmart customers and employees. If the Kmart store had long since closed, does that mean that it’s OK to park there? The $200 towing bills that four friends each received after leaving their cars there say “no.”

A group of friends have been using the Kmart as a spot to meet up and then carpool to their destination for about eight years. Now that the Kmart store is closed and the company’s lease has expired, the out-of-state company that owns the property is in charge of the lot.

“There’s no Kmart, there’s no employees, there’s no customers, so what were we hurting if we parked there?” one of the friends told TV station KCTV.

Well, about that: the towing company with the contract for the parking lot pointed out the tragic story of a trucker from Arizona who disappeared and was found dead four months later, stuffed inside a freezer. Guess where his truck was found? That’s right, that vacant Kmart parking lot. His murder is still unsolved.

Instead of “no overnight parking,” the owners changed the policy to “no parking, ever” after the Kmart closed. That simplified things: the towing company says that when any of their drivers are in the neighborhood and spot someone parked in the former Kmart

Don’t park in closed Merriam Kmart lot or face tow bill [KCTV]

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

Tyson Foods Ups Hillshire Bid To $8.5B, Competitor Pilgrim’s Pride Withdraws Offer

(Tyrone Mitchell)

If there were a book dedicated to showing companies how to win bidding wars, one of the surefire way to come out on top might include raising your offer by $2 billion. The tactic seems to have worked for Tyson Foods in its quest to outbid Pilgrim’s Pride in acquiring Hillshire Brands.

Arkansas-based Tyson Foods increased its initial offer of $6.8 billion for the Jimmy Dean and Ball Park frank producer to a whopping $8.5 billion, The New York Times DealBook reports.

“The Hillshire Brands acquisition would represent a defining moment for Tyson Foods,” Donnie Smith, Tyson’s president and chief executive officer, says in a news release Monday. “Now we will have those iconic [No. 1] and [No. 2] brands in numerous categories.”

Shortly after Tyson’s latest bid was revealed, Hillshire’s other suitor, Colorado-based Pilgrim’s Pride, announced in a statement Monday that the company withdrew its latest offer of $6.7 billion, leaving Tyson the defacto victor.

“As a disciplined acquirer, we determined that it was in the best interests of our shareholders not to increase our proposed price of $55.00 per share in cash,” Bill Lovette, Pilgrim’s Chief Executive Officer, says in a news release.

Officials at Hillshire tell DealBook they have received the most recent bid from Tyson, but the board has yet to make a formal recommendation.

Once again, Tyson’s latest deal includes the caveat that Hillshire terminate its $4.2 billion agreement to purchase Vlasic pickles and Birds Eye frozen vegetable maker Pinnacle Foods.

The escalating bidding war for Hillshire began on May 27 when Pilgrim’s Pride made an unsolicited offer of $5.5 billion. Just two days later Tyson entered the ring with a $6.1 billion offer.

Not one to bow out without a fight, Pilgrim’s Pride countered with a second bid of $6.7 billion last week. That move led Hillshire’s board to begin formal talks with both suitors.

Tyson Is Said to Win Battle for Hillshire Brands [New York Times DealBook]

by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist

Elon Musk Wants To Share Supercharger Patents In Order To Spread The Electric Car Love

While Tesla continues to work on spreading its network of supercharging stations around the country to more easily serve drivers of its electric cars, CEO Elon Musk doesn’t want those stations to be used solely by owners of Tesla vehicles like the Model S. In his quest to spread the popularity of electric cars, Musk says he wants other manufacturers to know how to build their own Supercharger stations.

After teasing the public with suggestions that he might “do something controversial” with Tesla’s technology patents, Musk said over the weekend at the UK launch of the Tesla Model S that what that means is, he wants to share the design patents for the Supercharger system, reports Engadget.

By doing so, Musk hopes that there can then be a standard technical specification for other electric car makers to build their own stations, that could charge up any electric car, no matter who makes it.

In order to share in the design plans, Musk would reportedly need other electric car manufacturers to get in line with his model of giving electricity away “free for life,” including all the costs of charging in the price of the car, and contribute a “fair” proportion of the maintenance and running costs of the Supercharger network at large.

Engadget notes that this is in line with Musk’s idea that he doesn’t want Supercharger stations to create a “walled garden” effect, keeping out competitors just to protect itself. After all, what would it be like if you could only fill up your Toyota car at a Toyota gas station? Ridiculous, that’s what it’d be like.

Tesla will open up its Supercharger patents to boost electric car adoption [Engadget]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

Burt Of Burt’s Bees Says He Was Ousted From Company Over Affair

Burt’s Bees co-founder Burt Shavitz is the subject of the new documentary, Burt’s Buzz.

For three decades, Burt Shavitz’s bearded face has graced the labels of Burt’s Bees products, but he hasn’t been part of the company that bears his name for 20 years. The reason for his exit is now being put in the spotlight thanks to a new documentary on the private man with the well-known face.

Shavitz had been producing honey on his property in central Maine in the early ’80s when he met Burt’s Bees co-founder Roxanne Quimby. They began selling beeswax candles and then eventually the personal care products the company is now famous for.

By 1994, the company had expanded far beyond its small-town beginnings and had expanded to the point where production relocated to North Carolina. At that time, Quimby bought out Shavitz’s portion of the company and he retreated to Maine where he still resides.

While Burt’s anti-corporate leanings and desire to live a normal life have long been considered the reason for his departure, he now tells the makers of the documentary Burt’s Buzz that Quimby gave him the boot because he had an affair with a Burt’s Bees employee.

And so he got some money — and his face continues to grace the products — but Burt wasn’t running the company anymore when Quimby sold the brand to Clorox in 2007; a sale that reportedly netted $300 million for Quimby.

“In the long run, I got the land, and land is everything,” Burt says of the 37 acres he received as part of his severance “Land is positively everything. And money is nothing really worth squabbling about.”

Of his former partner, Burt says, “Roxanne Quimby wanted money and power, and I was just a pillar on the way to that success.”

He does, however, say he has no regrets about what happened. “The bottom line is she’s got her world and I’ve got mine, and we let it go at that.”

In an e-mail to the AP, Quimby claims that “Everyone associated with the company was treated fairly, and in some cases very generously, upon the sale of the company and my departure as CEO. And that, of course, includes Burt.”

Did Burt’s Bees oust co-founder because he had a honey? [AP]

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

Teen Supercomputer Eugene Just Wants To Be A Real Boy; Gets Eerily Close To It

While you were busy second-mortgaging the house to lay down a massive bet on California Chrome at the Belmont Stakes this past Saturday, the robot apocalypse was beginning in earnest across the Atlantic in London, where a supercomputer named Eugene Goostman was able to convince the world that he was a sentient being.

A competition put on by the University of Reading put Eugene and others through what’s known as the Turing Test, which is intended to determine whether computers can approximate human behavior to the point of being indistinguishable from the rest of us.

Judges at the competition got a chance to have five-minute typed conversations with various computers and real people. The judges must then decide whether the “person” they just conversed with was human or a computer pretending to be human. In order to pass the Turing Test, devised by British scientist Alan Turing more than 60 years ago, a computer must convince at least 30% of the judges that it is actually a human.

In Saturday’s test, 13-year-old Eugene — the electronic Pinocchio — may have been the first computer to ever pass the test, with one-third of the judges unable to tell it apart from a real person.

A stroke of genius for Eugene’s creators was to make him an adolescent boy; a creature well known for thinking it knows everything, but for also being mistaken… a lot.

“Our main idea was that he can claim that he knows anything, but his age also makes it perfectly reasonable that he doesn’t know everything,” explained the scientist who led the winning team. “We spent a lot of time developing a character with a believable personality. This year we improved the ‘dialog controller’ which makes the conversation far more human-like when compared to programs that just answer questions. Going forward we plan to make Eugene smarter and continue working on improving what we refer to as ‘conversation logic.’”

Eugene almost passed the test back in 2012, but came just short of the 30% needed. We’ve recently discovered previously unseen footage from that competition of the one judge who just didn’t fall for Eugene’s schtick:

While we joke (sort of) about the impending robopocalypse, a program like Eugene has immediate applications in automated customer service, where artificial intelligence represents the ultimate in outsourcing — no shifts, no vacations, no training, no worrying about “Jane” or “Ted” saying something wrong to a litigious customer that could get their employer sued.

Sadly, as we’ve shown before, some human chat CSRs wouldn’t pass the Turing Test, while some automated CSR-bots do their best to convince customers of their humanity.

TURING TEST SUCCESS MARKS MILESTONE IN COMPUTING HISTORY [University of Reading]

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

Bidding For World’s Largest Video Game Collection Passes $90K

Once you’ve been certified by the Guinness folks as the owner of the world’s largest video game collection, you can either sit around looking at your library… or you can auction it off in the hopes of making a pile of cash.

A Buffalo, NY, man who owns more than 11,000 individual titles (covering 21 different consoles) got the Guinness stamp of world-record-ness back in December. At the time, he estimated its value at somewhere between $700,000 and $800,000 and now he’s testing the market to see if he can get anywhere near that much.

“While I do not wish to part with these games, I have responsibilities that I have made to others and this [auction] is how I will help meet them,” writes the seller in the auction listing on GameGavel.com [via Polygon].

The bidding started last Wednesday at $1, but quickly escalated, jumping from $51,000 to $90,0001 in a single bid on Friday afternoon. As of early Monday morning, the bidding stands at $90,751.

That’s a pretty sizable number, but the listing states that the seller’s reserve price has not been met. There are still several days remaining before the auction closes on Sunday June 15, at 10:30 P.M. ET.

If any of you ends up buying this lot, we hope you’ll be a pal and invite us over for an afternoon of Ninja Golf. We’ll bring the generic ginger ale and rice cakes.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

Hershey Sues Edible Marijuana Maker Over Punny Product Names

We can’t imagine anyone with even the most basic grasp of the English language would confuse Hershey’s Almond Joy with “Ganja Joy,” an edible marijuana product. Nor do we think anyone will mistakenly buy a “Dabby Patty” thinking it’s a York peppermint patty. But we don’t work for the Hershey legal department, which has sued a Colorado company over punny pot product names that the chocolate goliath believes are too close to its trademarked brands.

The Denver Channel reports that Hershey recently filed the lawsuit in a federal court in Denver, alleging trademark infringement and dilution.

“Defendants, who are well aware of the fame and popularity of these Hershey products and marks, are manufacturing and selling cannabis- and/or tetrahydrocannabinol-laced chocolate and candy products,” reads the complaint, “using names, marks and designs that are knock-offs of Hershey’s famous REESE’S, HEATH, ALMOND JOY and YORK trademarks and trade dresses, in order to increase sales of defendants’ cannabis and tetrahydrocannabinol candy products, draw additional attention to their products, confuse consumers as to the source of their products, call to consumers’ minds Hershey’s famous and beloved brands, and otherwise to trade on the goodwill of Hershey and its brands.”

Hershey also contends that the similar branding and packaging of these products “creates a genuine safety risk with regard to consumers” who may inadvertently eat them, as “Individuals and families the world over trust Hershey and its various brands as signifying safe and delicious treats for people of all ages.”

You have to love it when a company manages to work marketing language into its lawsuits.

Marijuana munchies have been in the news recently, following last week’s admission by NY Times columnist Maureen Down that she’d sampled some while visiting Colorado and that it didn’t go so well for her.

What was probably worse for Dowd than any anxiety she might have felt during her brief freak-out, was the mocking she received at the hands of the Internet for not doing her research ahead of time and probably biting off more than she should have chewed.

The alleged misuse of brand names has also made headlines recently, with a number of big-time cookie and candy companies — General Mills, Tootsie Roll, the Girl Scouts — asking the makers of liquid nicotine products to please stop using their trademarked brand names on their goods.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

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Qué es la Marca Personal

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