I agree that does seem to be something of a smoking gun.
And it’s not without precedent to secure an injunction against as US tech company launching a new service - gmail was known as googlemail in the UK and some European countries for several years owing to a trademark dispute (https://www.theguardian.com/media/pda/2010/may/04/digital-me...)
But sadly a lot of trademark and copyright cases come down to who has the bigger pile of cash behind them.
(Not a lawyer, but have gained some working knowledge of UK trademarks.)
I don’t think this is totally clean cut. UK trademarks are registered against specific classes and those classes are categorised in families of goods and services.
A quick search suggests that this company holds the trademark for the word ‘Threads’ for class 9 (goods) and class 42 (services).
Meta will almost certainly make the argument that they are not operating in these classes or overlapping with the categories listed for this trademark. Class 42 does not seem to apply here, and for class 9 the Thread trademark lists ‘computer software, software and apparatus for the extraction of business information and knowledge’ which may not overlap.
Meta couldn’t also trademark Threads under class 9 (can’t trademark the same word twice in the same class) but just because they can’t secure the trademark does not automatically mean they are infringing on the existing use.
They could argue that their use of Threads as a trademark falls solely within something like class 38: Telecommunications services; chat room services; portal services; e-mail services; providing user access to the Internet; radio and television broadcasting.
If they could land this then there is no claim against them - their use can coexist with trademark’s registered in different classes.
For an app which can be downloaded getting around class 9 could be difficult - so whether they could land and make this stick is far from clear, but Meta have the resources to explore this indefinitely where as the pre-existing user making the complaint may not be able to afford the legal costs to stay the course.
Trademarks are messy and subjective and there is much scope for interpretation - even a seemly clear-cut case is anything but predictable.
I’ve walked along that part of Hadrian’s Wall and stopped at that tree a number of times and it truly was a beautiful spot with real impact.
I don’t think there is any rational significance to the tree - it was just an ancient beautiful tree, standing alone in a very dramatic landscape. A tree that many folks paused to rest at and admire as they walked along Hadrian’s wall (itself steeped in history).
It’s the sensors themselves that have a limited life - the units that have a fixed battery have a battery life that exceeds the sensors useful life.
The common / low cost carbon monoxide detectors use a chemical reaction (either a fuel cell or one of a few reactions that produce a colour change in the presence of CO) - the chemistry degrades with time and exposure causing the sensitivity to drop off over time.
I’m not sure how much of a safety margin they have (like could it still detect dangerous levels at 2x it’s design life or something) but a quality generator would have a life of several times that of a CO sensor at least so replacement will definitely/hopefully be a design consideration.
In a perfect world a ring circuit is a clever invention - it offers a circuit that can safely deliver about 7.3kW with hardly any more copper than normally could deliver about 4.6kW.
However in practice they have a hidden failure mode - if you break the ring they will carry on working apparently without problem except it’s quite possible that you now have overheating cables in a wall somewhere. In the real world houses are full of changes (both DIY and professional) that inadvertently break the ring and it’s not at all uncommon to see in a house with even modest refurb works having been done.
I think the analysis is really interesting, but I suspect it’s quite possible that this behaviour is just a result of optimising the implementation than GVR taking sides in a 2,500 year old philosophical debate.
Both implementations of all() and any() short-circuit by returning as soon as a fasly element in all or a truthy element in any is iterated over.
Guido makes no comment on empty iterables, but does comment on the final implementation needing to be efficient. It’s possible this behaviour is just the engineering trade off made for a slightly more efficient implementation.
I think this is sound advice. What I’d add builds on this point:
> he does not see the situation as you do
At the moment you may be lacking the perspective of the founder, perhaps the coaching and input they’ve had from investors and other advisors on the direction of the business. I would go into a conversation with the founder but seek to gain a true understanding of their perspective as much as to emphasise your own point.
> we unanimously felt that the product works, and the team is amazing
It takes more than a working product and an amazing team to make a startup succeed. The product might be amazing but do the unit economics work? Is there a market fit? Does the market fit scale? Is there something that needs to be hit to secure the next round of funding? Maybe you have this info and omitted it for brevity in your post… but if you approach your investors for a dialogue without a complete understanding of this side of the equation I’d say your in for a rough time.
In legal systems with some basis in English Common Law the idea of an implied contract is fairly common.
Lets I buy some service from you and we sign some one-off contract. The next year I text you ‘same again please’ - you provide the same service to me. A reasonable person would conclude that there is an implied contact to provide the services under the terms perviously agreed. I can’t argue that I don’t have to pay because we didn’t sign a new set of terms.
Or you give me a quote and terms to build a house. If I let you start building it for me (and you can prove that I gave that instruction) there is an implied contract based the proposed terms even if we don’t sign any paperwork.
In the judgement here it seems to be a simpler assertion that the thumbs up in the context of asking about previously sent terms constitutes acceptance.
I think if anything it demonstrates that Disney are playing with a relatively weak hand here.
Disney have a broader problem - they are not the only player in central Florida. Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World is the most attended theme park in the world… but Universal just down the road hold the number 2 and 3 slots.
Yes, WDW is the most attended group of parks on the planet, but Universal are on an epic roll and have a 3rd Florida gate under construction.
It’s not just that Disney can’t pack up WDW and move it to a state friendlier to them. They can’t pack up the critical mass of demand drawn to central Florida either - replicating that elsewhere would take decades.
I don’t think that the Florida legislature are that worried about whether Disney will create however many thousand jobs. They know full well the central Florida tourism market is a juggernaut that’s not slowing down anytime soon and that Disney will maximise their presence in this market regardless of the political climate.
Keeping some corporate and creative jobs in California instead of relocating them to Florida is fairly small fry in that context.
The description of this interaction in the article makes me sad for the author - they criticise and belittle another. Imagine instead what they could have learnt if they opened themselves up to another persons perspective.
It’s notable how little this article actually discusses the delivery of any form of value. The tech is not the end in itself, it’s a means to an end - and we live in an age with so many well matured and valid options that for many of the problems we seek to solve what tech we use isn’t necessarily a critical decision.
The author answers their own question - where have the hackers gone? We are getting on with it and building stuff. This kind of language flame war stuff just isn’t as important as it once (debatably) was. It’s a dying trope.
Thinking on the initial mistake our author made - framing the conversation rigidly through their own frame of reference - I’ve personally found Matthew Syed’s work on cognitive diversity helpful in understanding and addressing this. [1]
The parent article touches on this point too - both Oracle and SQL Server (and any other major db) supports parameterising values in dynamic sql. some_user would become @some_user (SQL Server) or :some_user (Oracle).
(The characters never actually get escaped with parameterisation - they are not part of the query text when it is parsed so can’t affect it - hence parameterising a value in sql query replaces the need to escape it with something much more robust.)
And it’s not without precedent to secure an injunction against as US tech company launching a new service - gmail was known as googlemail in the UK and some European countries for several years owing to a trademark dispute (https://www.theguardian.com/media/pda/2010/may/04/digital-me...)
But sadly a lot of trademark and copyright cases come down to who has the bigger pile of cash behind them.