Are you an intellectual property lawyer with some serious teeth? Do you eat NDA-violating, trademark-abusing, copyright-ignoring little punks for breakfast? When you walk the halls of your firm, do people make "daaa-dum daaa-dum" noises until someone murmurs, "We're going to need a bigger boat"? Then if you're looking for clean-up work in the Santa Clara Valley, has Apple got a job for you...

Thanks to a tip from The Register, we dug up this job posting over at Apple's site: the company seeks a Trademark Counsel, who will be tasked with "U.S. and International trademark and copyright searching, filing, prosecution, maintenance and enforcement, including trademark litigation." Yes, sign up today and you, too, can sue leaking John Does, issue cease-and-desist orders to infringing web sites, and nail to the wall all those nefarious PC manufacturers who would dare sully the iMac's reputation by overusing translucent colored plastic. Katie, AtAT's resident fact-checker and Goddess of Minutiae, just happens to be an intellectual property litigator in her "spare time"-- and we imagine that right about now, visions of sunny California torts are dancing in her head.

Anyway, whether or not skewering trademark violators for Apple is your idea of a dream job, the fact that Steve is beefing up his elite team of legal hatchetmen may indicate a further crackdown on rumors and an even more rigorous protection of Apple's valuable intellectual property. In addition to the Trademark Counsel slot, we notice that Apple's also seeking a pair of patent lawyers to round out the squad. So is this just normal job turnover, or a strengthening of the legal echelon that's just one step in a grand plan to secure Apple's Knowledge Turf at any and all costs? After all, knowledge is power.

Incidentally, if you do wind up taking that Trademark Counsel job, don't forget the plucky little well-meaning soap opera who told you about it in the first place. No need to thank us; just keep those cease-and-desist orders far, far away...

Back at the dawn of time, before AtAT had yet dragged itself forth from the primordial ooze, there was an epoch known to Apple paleontologists as "1996-1997." During that time, Apple was run by a specimen called Gilius Ameliosus, or "Gil" for short. Some of you will remember ol' Gil, the Semiconductor Suit assigned the daunting task of pulling Apple out of its vertical death plunge. To be fair, only the rarest Übermensch could pull off such a task, and in his own way, he did just that-- by buying NeXT and bring Stevius Jobius back on board. But before that, Gil oversaw the release of a lot of Macs we classify both chronologically and otherwise as "Amelioisms." There's the boxy, beige, trying-to-look-a-PC Power Mac 4400. There's the boxy, black, trying-to-look-like-a-PC-laptop, might-burst-into-flames PowerBook 5300. There's the lumpy, oversized, underpowered Performa 6x00 series. And so forth.

But there were also some real standout Amelioisms, like the fabled Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh. This thing was (and is) cool. Integrated LCD display, custom-designed Bose sound system, a bronze-looking finish on delicate swoops and curves-- wow. When we first saw one in the summer of 1997, we immediately started calculating whether selling everything we owned at fair market price would have yielded enough money to let us buy one. The answer was a resounding "no"-- since the TAM cost an embolism-popping $7500 when it was first introduced.

Now, for that kind of dough, one would expect that Apple might have taken special pains to avoid the kind of quality control "issues" that plagued the rest of its lineup, right? But nooooooo... In addition to having the sort of performance one would expect from the 603e processor and slow bus of a $7500 tricked-out PowerBook 3400, it soon became apparent that, on many systems, the awesome-looking Bose sound system had a significant problem: a constant hiss or static crackle emanating from the speakers.

Steve, ever anxious to rid the world of all Amelioisms, has apparently instituted an intriguing repair process for hissing TAMs. According to MacNN, it goes something like this: 1) User sends in hissing TAM. 2) Apple sends back a brand new Power Mac G4. 3) Steve personally smashes the TAM to powder with an axe handle whilst screaming "Die, Gil Spawn, DIE!!" (We're using a little license in describing step 3, there, but given how badly Steve hates computer noise, we figure he'd want to make sure he sent the hissing speakers to Silicon Hell in his own inimitable fashion.) So basically, as cool as it looked, it seems that Apple is giving up on the TAM as a failed experiment. C'est la vie. Hey, maybe it's just us, but we'd have thought that Apple would instead be replacing faulty TAMs with what the twentieth anniversary Mac should have been-- the G4 Cube and a 15-inch LCD Studio Display. Go figure.

Sadly, we didn't get to this in time to let you bask in the full glory of the moment, but we're going to mention it now anyway. You are aware, perhaps, that Microsoft's latest operating system for consumers is named "Windows Millennium Edition," or "Windows Me" for short? That's funny enough in itself, but what you may not know is that Microsoft has been running a massive Windows Me promotion, in which it vowed to give away fifty copies of the software each day for the length of the contest. (It's the least the company could do, since most reports of what Me actually is seem to imply that Microsoft has a lot of gall not to release it as a free update.) There's more info at the contest page.

Or, at least, there should be, although at production time all attempts to visit the page yielded "Socket is not connected" network errors. Earlier today, the page was functional-- mostly-- but yesterday it was a whole different story. People who surfed over hoping to win a free copy of Me were instead greeted with the following message: "Due to technical difficulties with the WinMe Sweepstakes site, we are currently not accepting registrations. Please check back often as we are working to remedy the issue. Registrations will resume once the issue is resolved."

So much for stability and ease of use. We're not sure which is worse: the explicit admission of failure that was posted yesterday, or today's 100% complete dead air. Not that AtAT doesn't experience more than its share of server problems-- but Microsoft is a huge corporation with billions of dollars at its disposal, presumably hosting a site with some massive server sitting on a fat pipe and running Windows 2000, that crash-proof server OS that's the envy of the industry. (Cough.) Whereas AtAT is hosted by a couple of couch potatoes running a second-hand Power Mac 7500 with Mac OS 9 sitting on the floor of our study. And which of those two sites is up and running right now?