What’s it going to take to get Hacker News commenters to stop perpetuating the myth that trademark holders are required to be litigious assholes if they don’t want their trademarks to lapse?
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
This is a baffling response. You posited something very specific and interesting that other commenters are not touching on (that "must defend to retain" is exaggerated), but when asked about it, you responded with the same generic point as all the other commenters ("it's frivolous") - as though you had never even said the interesting thing in the first place.
But there is no logic or legal ground for trademarking the word "monster" or the green/white colours in a logo. It is all about bullying smaller companies using their much higher budget.
When you pay for an expensive legal team on retainer you probably need to get them to start bringing in money for the org to justify their size. From the article it seems like they just troll for any sort of putative copyright violation and just roll the dice.
Suing indie game developers is not a way to do it. There's a good chance these lawyers need to be paid much more for the time of dealing with this case than the devs ever had available.
Maybe most are small fish, but maybe some are big fish too. Maybe catching all of these small fish gives you precedence when you do go up to face some big fish in the future, so the benefits to these costs perhaps will just materialize in the future.
The pitch is that businesses can reduce parking congestion (is there a dollar value you can pin to this?) by paying you to act as a personal scooter consultant for their employees?
During research did you come across any mass-market applications of this sort of concierge service? It sounds very niche/upscale. I can’t think of any purchase I’ve made where I could have even found someone to hold my hand through it that wasn’t the person making the sale. The closest analogue I can think of is a travel agency.
A good (new) scooter costs $4500 out the door, and plan on another $600 for a jacket, gloves, a Snell-certified helmet, cell phone mount, and bluetooth headset so you can hear directions from your phone.
Take a motorcycle rider training course, and get the motorcycle endorsement on your drivers license.
Next would be skills-building around slow-speed turns on the scooter. It'll be pretty easy, but you'll have to practice it at least a little.
For that cash I can just have a motorcycle or an e-bike. Why would I want a scooter in this case? Not dissing on scooters, I don't get it though. Bikes and motorocyles are a lot more stable at speed than scooters.
OH YOU MEAN A MOPED... not a Lime Scooter. OK... we're on the same page.
Yeah I'll keep rocking my FJR but I'd do a e-moped if I had rides around my house, tho for that an e-bike is more compelling. FJR oddly gets 40+mpg.
Hah! I wonder how many other people have made the same mistake. There's really not a great word for this class of vehicle. I have been tempted to use the word 'moped', but got sternly corrected by the staff at sportique scooters when I was last there.
I think I might keep using the word moped though, motor scooter doesn't quite do it, and scooter is too confusing.
Or maybe I could say 'gas scooter' or '125cc scooter' or something.
I recently crossed paths with the the electric moped I met in the wild, and it was beautiful and quiet.
I'm not going to get rid of my 170cc scooter anytime soon, but I would totally consider adding an electric moped to the fleet.
There is indeed a dollar value one can pin to the extra parking availability. It's business dependent, but absolutely it can be tied to additional revenue.
And yeah, 'personal scooter consultant' is the pitch.
It's concierge and not traditional, but so am I.
As far as mass market application of this concierge service, I don't think there needs to be a mass market adaptation. Once there's some minimum buy-in, scooters will be normalized and more and more people will default into using them.
Its way more likely you would buy a scooter once you'd ridden on a friend's scooter from the gym to a local park for throwing a Frisbee. If, however, you didn't know anyone who owned a scooter, maybe you'd never own your own.
So... I'll hand-hold and concierge whatever is required to get critical mass.
I've already got two friends that have bought scooters, and they love it. I have four more friends now about to take the plunge. Scooters spread through friend groups, it seems.
Once you see how many problems they solve, and how much more fun and convenient they are, it's hard to unsee.
But it's damned hard to be the first person to make that choice.
I, too, don't know that I have seen this exact model before, but each scooter purchase saves a parking spot for another customer, so the businesses I work with will be invested in the results.
It's fun to work on, and everyone I've talked to has been super interested. Parking issues dominate the lives of general managers/directors/owners of Denver area businesses.
They'll try nearly anything to make those problems be less of an issue.
It's a fair bit more complicated than that. They could choose to show all of the "you're a nerd!" videos to youths in other nations and all of the "look at what I did using science and engineering!" videos to youths in their own nation. It might be considered that such a move would put them in a more competitive position years to decades down the line.
> The average intelligent viewer will be left confused and intimidated
I’m not qualified to know if your post is better or worse than Netflix’s documentary, Bill, but this is an egregious example of a pot calling a kettle black.
To be fair, it does a decent job of plowing through set theory in only a short rant about why the documentary is bad, forgetting to rant about the documentary because there's so much math to cover.
It only commits the cardinal sin of trimming it down so much that it makes sense if and only if the reader is already familiar with it, leaving other intelligent readers confused and intimidated.
All people engage in mysticism, but when Materialists do it they expect a free pass, and due to being the dominant ideology (and also: cheating) they ~always win arguments, keeping everyone locked inside their artificial and invisible reality dome.
Yes, not all readers will follow everything but my post is true and studying it will clear things up. However the movie will resit any attempted clarification.
> Mozilla _has_ to look for new avenues, because the current ones (Firefox, Thunderbird) will not ever make money on their own.
The implicit assumption here seems to be that Mozilla needs to exist and if Firefox can’t sustain that existence they need to pivot to something that will. Why? So Google can keep using them as a fig leaf for their browser monopoly? So Mitchell Baker can keep collecting $3 million per year? Because the blind squirrel might find a nut someday?
Maybe there’s a point where the remaining employees should just pack it up.
the collectibles market always was able to benefit from transparent supplies, transparent volume. NFT's added that and people acted surprised that the collectibles market was that big, when in reality nobody knows how many baseball cards (for example) were issued, how many rare ones are really out there and more. the analog collectibles market has wash trading too.
if NFT purchasers can remove the parasocial relationships they rely on with the creators and just build their own communities for resales then it'll be fine.
Further devaluation of our holistic humanity. We already define ourselves largely by the functions we perform in society, but at least current class distinctions are still mostly social. Imagine how much worse it would be if people could literally be bred for certain functions. An engineer will always be a engineer because their traits were optimized for that. A ditch digger will always be a ditch digger because their parents couldn’t afford the engineer package at Build-A-Baby.
I can think of few worlds more dystopian than one where there’s a causal, quantifiable relationship between wealth and biological superiority.
Intelligence and ability already have a much weaker correlation with wealth and success than familial wealth and sheer luck do. Also, why would one genetic modification be any more expensive than another? This is going to happen anyway, sooner or later. The "oh no it will make rich people richer" argument could be applied to a good chunk of all the technologies ever invented, from automobiles to the internet.
The fact that there isn't a causal relationship from wealth to biological superiority is the cause of so many of our problems! Imagine if all the people who got positions via nepotism were actually good at their jobs...
For the record, I agree it was probably a joke, albeit one that reveals something true about how he and people like him view the world. But if the idea is that Musk personally supported the coup because the Morales government wouldn’t hand the rights to Bolivia’s lithium reserves over to US firms, Tesla not using batteries made with Bolivian lithium would be expected.
