A company or individual putting “Facebook” or “Instagram” in their domain name without Facebook’s authorization would constitute trademark infringement.
Pretty sure this lawsuit is just Facebook doing what they’re supposed to do to “protect” their trademarks.
When you have a trademark, you’re obligated — by law — to attempt to protect it in cases of seeming infringement. If you don’t, you lose the power of the trademark.
>A company or individual putting “Facebook” or “Instagram” in their domain name without Facebook’s authorization would constitute trademark infringement.
That is not true in the US.
A trademark consists of both a name and the goods/services which a company provides under that name. If you use the trademarked name in a completely different industry or context from the entity which registered the mark, you aren't infringing on it.
So if you had a business selling...I dunno, physical books made out of faces, then you might be able to use "Facebook" without infringing.
In practice, Facebook could spend enough money to convince the legal system that they are right, but merely having some letters in a domain name does not imply infringement.
Icann provides a method of getting domains that break trademark that doesn't require a warrant or the courts, this is facebook trying to give themselves that power wheater the domain is infringing trademark or not.
Devil's advocate here... and I'm adding the caveat that I still use my iPad 1 daily (with the grandfathered, unlimited data plan).
A lot of this is about generating revenues. At the end of the day, Apple is a public corporation. It's not a charity. Apple's primary reason for existence is to generate shareholder value. It's hard for a device company to do that if they aren't... you know... selling devices.
Apple doesn't believe everyone should buy a new Apple product every 5 years. Sure, they'd love it, but that's not the market they're targeting. Apple has branded itself as a luxury technology brand. Would someone make this same argument about Lexus or Rolex or Coach?
If you can't afford that shiny new Macbook, there are plenty of alternate options. No one is forcing people to buy Apple products.
Beyond pricing, older technology can limit software innovation. What if every App developer out there -- including the folks at apple developing the latest versions of iOS -- still had to support my "ancient" iPad 1?
Legacy support would put a lot of young companies out of business. As a developer, one of things that costs me the most time is cross-device support. It's a huge drain on resources, and not every company can afford it.
During my day job I run a full-time startup, but, as a weekend hack a couple years ago, I built an automated email sales tool called Autopest (https://autopest.com). I've never done any promotion for it, but it keeps growing on its own organically via word-of-mouth.
About a year and a half ago I mentioned Autopest in an HN thread titled "Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months?" Since then, it keeps getting featured in Reddit and Quora lists for "best growth hacking tools" and "best sales hacks," and I've also seen it popup on sites like Inc.com and LifeHacker.
I guess Autopest isn't technically passive in the sense that every few months I code a new feature or two based on user feedback, but I also go months without touching it, and more people just keep signing up.
If there was a way for autopest to automatically stop when the other party responds to your "pests" (maybe via an email client plugin) I would sign up for sure.
That's actually my next big update. I've got a Gmail plugin about 80% complete that will auto-stop the messages, too.
I still kind of count it as "passive" work because I had to learn to develop Gmail plugins for my startup. I was able to transfer that experience to Autopest.
FYI to anyone reading this... InboxSDK is amazing for Gmail plugins.
This is awesome! As a musician and bandleader, I could absolutely use something like this. Are there any plans to make it work with a standard SMTP/IMAP setup? I don't use Gmail for privacy concerns, and have hosted my own email server for years now.
I can make it work on SMTP/IMAP, but, right now, it requires a custom setup. I've got a couple accounts that pay to do this... but they also have lots of team members using it.
I'm an adjunct. No... adjuncting does not pay well. But anyone getting a degree with the expectation of being a professional academic should know this going in. I certainly did so I approached the job marketing accordingly.
I've never tried to be a tenure track professor. Instead, my approach -- for what it's worth -- is to make adjuncting my passion.
Instead of "being a professor," my profession is software engineer. As a result, being an English professor gets to be my hobby. I teach one course a semester and I love it. It allows me to be a member of an academic community, I can participate in talks/lectures/conferences, I can publish, and I can do all the other "academic" things I want to do and no one has ever told me I'm not qualified or made me feel unwelcome. Usually, the opposite is true. I get at least half-a-dozen invites every semester from my university and neighboring schools asking me to come lecture about my work. In addition, I can bring real-world experience and expertise into my classes every day, which my students appreciate.
This article seems more reflective of a generational technology gap than an actual loss of student interest in building relationships with professors. The author doesn't seem to want to bother leveraging all the wonderful tools currently available to interact digitally with students beyond the walls of a classroom or office.
I give my students my phone number and encourage texting. I find that sending Facebook messages usually gets a quicker response than emails. And, in lieu of office hours, I prefer Google Hangouts so we can be more flexible with meeting times. (Yes... I've had many "office hour" sessions at 11:00 at night!)
Contrary to what this article asserts, I've found that digital technologies bring me closer to my students. Using tools like Facebook Groups, Google Docs, and whatever course forum software the school is operating on at the time, I get to expand the classroom well beyond our 2.5 hours per week and create a sort of 24/7 learning environment.
I wish I could have had those kinds of opportunities as an undergrad.
> an actual loss of student interest in building relationships with professors
Relationships are built in person, except for getting "married" on EverQuest when you're 15.
> I give my students my phone number and encourage texting.
That's a disaster waiting to happen.
> …sending Facebook messages…
I hope to God you've got separate profiles for your personal life and your professorial identity. And being connected to their personal profiles? Another disaster waiting to happen.
> I get to expand the classroom well beyond our 2.5 hours per week and create a sort of 24/7 learning environment.
Mostly what you've done is destroyed any ability for you to have a life and do your own research. Reminds me of the jibe that people used to give to Linux enthusiasts, "Linux is only free if your time is worthless." You've abrogated any expectation that your students respect your time—you're on-call 24/7.
You don't have to respond to a text immediately, you don't have answer a phone call. Students can contact you all they want and you can simply ignore them when necessary.
Many students work part or full time jobs. Some of them have kids of their own so stagnant office hours will prevent many of them from contacting their instructors at all. Why not make use of the modern tools everyone else is using to communicate? Why lock yourself away in an office that no one will find?
Yeah, instead you had to get up off your ass and do some leg work. So you had to determine whether it was worth your time and the professor's time to do so, instead of a quick and easy "how do I do this work even though I've put in no effort to figure it out for myself".
Seemingly there is significant more hand holding of students and they all expect an A because simply showing up in high school meant they'd get an A. The entitlement is different now as well.
It's amazing how far my school in particular has fallen in reality while in perception (god awful rankings) have them higher than ever. It's the typical perception is more important than reality. However, this is good for students, because this is exactly my experience in the "real world" as well.
I wouldn't trade my 90s undergrad for the crap kids are getting today. And I thought it was bad then. Hindsight makes me sad for the meager amount of actual learning going on today.
I can obviously only speak for my students in terms of willingness to do legwork, but I don't find this to be the case at all. And just because they ask me something in an email that they could figure out themselves, I don't necessarily have to give them the answer.
The opposite is usually the case. I prefer to use their hastily sent digital questions as teaching opportunities -- opportunities I wouldn't have had if not for the ease with which they can engage with me. For example, I often respond to questions that need to be researched elsewhere by reminding students they have Google, as well as world class libraries.
Like any profession, different professors approach their work in different ways. How a professor chooses to engages with his or her students isn't the fault of students. I don't see much value in metaphorically shaking my fist and lamenting "What's the matter with kids these days? They're overly entitled! How dare they expect success!"
I, like most professors, am in control of the education I provide. That's my favorite part about being a professor. (It's definitely not the salary...)
Luckily, at my uni this is not the case - obviously visible when on average, 70% fail the first time. In almost every class. (Math usually worse, functional programming usually better).
And even though professors and their assistants answer emails, you have to write a real email - which is something that makes you think more about it than just being able to send a FB message.
Google groups is a godsend. Students post a question, and more often than not other students answer it before you can, and either way the question is publicly answered for everyone to see and refer to later.
Far better than an idolized professor is a community of students who can collaborate and feed off each other with your guidance.
I'm not convinced the accelerated growth in administrative positions is entirely a result of corporatization. FWIW - I'm commenting as someone who has served on a few committees at a top 50 public, Research I institution. Not a single meeting ever included anything remotely resembling the phrase "we need to decrease costs in order to increase revenues and line our pockets!"
In the US (which is all I can speak to), the growth in administrative staff seems more like a response to increased layers of political bureaucracy. For example, schools are scrambling to add Title XI administrators because the federal government requires them in order to get federal funding (including student loans). Faculty don't want to be responsible for the associated administration and paperwork, so someone has to do it.
Regarding increases in tuition prices, most if not all states are slashing higher education funding. That shortfall has to be made up for somehow.
I have trouble accepting the general premise of the question. Not the $100m part... even a $100k job or a $10k job... doesn't matter. It implies that the program being developed has a definitive "done" moment. But software (at least software in constant use) doesn't really get finished. So you build, and you expand, and you rebuild, and new things happen that change your approach and new tech gets developed and your software changes. I can (technically) start coding in Language X and ultimately port the entire codebase to Language Y (or take bits of Language A, B, and C). It's not so much about choosing the right language as reacting to the ever-changing world in which your software is being deployed.
Since you're a developer, you already have the most important asset, which is the ability to basically create anything (web services related, obviously). From there, it's "just" a matter of finding something to build that other people will value and then telling as many people as possible about it.
The best way to figure out what to build is by thinking about what YOU would find useful, and then build that. Don't get too big with the idea, though. Just analyze your day-to-day routine and ask yourself what kind of little piece of software would make your day 1%-5% less annoying.
For example, I'm a developer but also a startup founder. I've wasted entire days doing repetitive email follow-ups to investors, partners, customers, etc., which means I wasn't committing code. So I put aside a weekend and built a system to automate my email follow-ups. After it worked well for me, I showed it to some colleagues, they started using it, too, and before I knew it, I had a nice little SaaS app going. With another weekend of work, I added a frontend and billing system, and I launched it as https://autopest.com.
(I'm including the link at the suggestion of some of the other folks in this thread, and also to show how it matches well with their advice -- target B2B, build a SaaS app, keep it simple, rely on quick solutions like Bootstrap and Stripe, etc.)
Step two is getting people to it. Best way I found for that is social media -- especially Twitter. It only takes me 15 minutes a day to be "active" on Twitter, I can easily target BizDev people and GrowthHackers (my target audience), and slowly but surely, they start signing up. It's been a few months and I'm on pace to hit your $500/mo target in the next 30 days.
Best of all, because I built something that I REALLY WANTED, even if no one ever pays me another penny, I'll still come out ahead because the thing I built works really well for me.
This article wrongly implies that people getting English PhDs are only doing so in order to become tenure-track English professors. But I just completed my PhD in English two weeks ago, and I'm also the TECH co-founder of a VC-backed startup. Many of my peers are not just tech savvy, they're also developers, designers, and entrepreneurs. They just also happen to be interested in studying slightly older forms of technology -- literary technologies.
Yes... books and poems and epics and dramas are all technologies, too.
I should hope the HN community isn't fooled by the _New Yorker_ article's professional typecasting. After all, Paul Graham has an entire book called _Hackers and Painters_, and he argues: "Of all the different types of people I've known, hackers and painters are among the most alike. What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things." (http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html).
"Hacking" -- as both Paul Graham and much of my dissertation argues -- isn't a purely scientific discipline. It's also a humanist and aesthetic pursuit.
If you don't believe me, go pick up a collection of Emily Dickinson poems (you know... the things you probably haven't looked at since you were in 9th grade). You might be surprised to discover all of the conditional logic, the programatic loops, and the object oriented structures.
This article wrongly implies that people getting English PhDs are only doing so in order to become tenure-track English professors. But I just completed my PhD in English two weeks ago, and I'm also the TECH co-founder of a VC-backed startup. Many of my peers are not just tech savvy, they're also developers, designers, and entrepreneurs. They just also happen to be interested in studying slightly older forms of technology -- literary technologies.
Impressive. However, judging from the available empirical evidence from recent professional surveys [1], you and your like-minded peers are indeed the exception, not the rule: over the last 35 years, a consistent 90-95% of newly-minted English PhDs sought academic faculty positions; with only 5-10% seeking careers outside academia [Fig. 2]. There is a reason why the so-called 'alt-ac' career track is called that way in the broader MLA community.
This is an important point, I think. It's not that English PhD's aren't hireable, it's that they drink the kool-aid where the only possible route is a tenure-track job in their field. On the other hand, some of my best mathematics and computer science teachers (with PhD's, not at a research university) have started in English.
I think it's really a culture problem. PhD students aren't encouraged to think about their career early on. My PhD advisor (mathematics) is very insistent that I know all of my options, and as such I have a huge list running of potential employers and avenues to seek furthering my career. I have a list of the "tricks" I need to try to get various kinds of postdocs, I go to both theoretical and applied conferences, I maintain a list of interested industry contacts, and I exercise my teaching, programming, and writing skills just enough to keep them in shape. I have backups for my backups for my backups if I don't get a tenure-track job, and I would be happy with all of them.
And this doesn't mean a PhD isn't worth doing! My experience, at least, has been immensely satisfying in most respects, and has unlocked many more of these options than I would have had just as an undergraduate looking for a coding job.
apdinin, thanks for sharing your perspective, professionally however, you shared that you chose to go into IT instead of humanities academia.
I see the value of literature in conveying the human experience but don't see the value of literary criticism. I like to read on my own and the direct experiencing with the author with their characters and stories, and forming my own interpretation. I've read Harold Bloom's literary criticism and found it wanting, like an old man hanging onto the vestiges of the past century of whatever someone called the "Western Cannon" and isn't his theory of authors' "anxiety of influence" a bit formulaic, a little bit derivative, a little bit obvious. Not everyone attended Execter and then attended Yale and took Harold Bloom and Bloom's mentor's literary course and read from Shakespeare to Dickson to Faulkner, and said "yes" eagerly and thusly beamed at his literary professor's exaltations as the sunbeams shifted dramatically its orientation on late New England spring afternoons through the ivied windows in the harrowed lecture hall. How do you go about to qualify Jack Kerouac and Murakami who takes as much influence from Jazz? Or novels composed of text messages?
Conversely, I form my own interpretation from Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright and find it a bit presumptuus that these so-called "multi-cultural" AFAM professors cram down their sociological manifestos down in their criticism; why should I care about the African American or Chicano experience told by Henry Gates Sr. pontificating, when I care about my upbringing as an Asian American and see only through that selfish lenses and rightfully so; and instead like the strong black female characters' sexual awakening and relate to the search for that sexual fulfillment under the strict matriarchy and small-mindedness of her ethnic community that has internalized that hatred and hierachies that was imposed upon them such that the enemy has slowly become themselves,
Our reading experiences is a sensuous, viceral and private one and I don't see why a literary professor's interpretation of that great work is worth than my love for erotica or Michael Crichton or a mom's love for Anne Rice or a monkey's love for a banana. As for comparing literature to coding, coding in the sense of "startup's, exit's" is like comparing Emily Dickson to the slave traders traveling in tugboats in deep south, individual monastic pursuit vs. merchantile activity. Emily may be poorer but she certainly didn't feel a need to overcompensate with digital humanities.
Pretty sure this lawsuit is just Facebook doing what they’re supposed to do to “protect” their trademarks.
When you have a trademark, you’re obligated — by law — to attempt to protect it in cases of seeming infringement. If you don’t, you lose the power of the trademark.