"When another company takes inspiration from the game and they try to make a different game out of it, that's when getting imitated turns into a compliment," said Rami Ismail, a co-founder of Vlambeer.
I think it represents the inventiveness and creativity of Taiwan street vendors that ends up getting imitated around the world, like gua bao (pork belly buns with ground peanuts) and snowflake shaved ice.
On Wall Street, as elsewhere, hot ideas quickly get imitated.
And I still get imitated all the time.
That changed when, at the age of 24, he saw the film "House of Games" and joined the generation of young writers who got their start imitating David Mamet, who wrote and directed it.
Lawsuits against the unscripted entertainment shows known as reality television used to be filed by people who got hurt imitating stunts on shows like "Jackass" or believed that the rules on shows like "Survivor" were applied unfairly.
In fact, given the importance to fashion of what the law professor Jonathan Barnett calls "aspirational utility" — the enjoyment people get from imitating the life style of the rich and famous — one might think of knockoffs as being like gateway drugs: access to the lower-quality version makes buyers all the more interested in eventually getting the real stuff.
Its reaction with the odour molecules changes a detector's electrical resistance, and this signal is fed into a neural net (the closest that computer technology has got to imitating the pattern-recognising abilities of networks of nerve cells) to work out what is being smelt.
But what benefit do drongos get by imitating the alarm calls of other animals?
So we've got life imitating art all over the place here, and yet, Melanie Mills never charged me a nickel for her services.
