I have read the entire judgement and beside the fact you can not register the name of a country, he had not also the right to register a trademark from the beginning.
The page you link talks about agreements for the New gTLDs, and as far as I know the contract for .com has not been amended to match this, so it does not apply to France.com. The trademark angle of course isn't changed by that.
It certainly could be a trademark, just not an exclusive one like Coca-Cola. If you wanted to market a "France" brand of chairs in the US, that'd be allowed most likely, but wouldn't prevent a "France" brand of dish towels from being registered by someone else.
You'd still need to avoid a false impression of origin for your chairs, but it could work if they're actually from France, you provide an alternate association for the word France in your context ("From Mr. France himself, your Kentucky neighbor since 1993!"), or just include in your branding/advertising enough clarity on where the chairs are from.
> Defendants knew that they did not, and do not, have a right to the word "France," as evidenced by Defendant Atout France's US Trademark Registration No. 4027580, filed in 2009, in which Defendant expressly disclaimed the exclusive right to the word "France."
Yup, agreed. Exclusive being the key word there. They were using the word France as a reference to the country, and couldn't prevent others from doing so. That's different from using the word to reference something else like chairs.
Coca Cola probably doesn't have a trademark for chairs, so this is a bit of an odd example. If you tried to trademark Coca Cola chairs, Coca Cola would sue you based on confusion, not because they already have a trademark in the category of household furniture.
Right - their trademark effectively means "from The Coca-Cola Company" as it's intrinsic meaning. As you say, anything called Coca-Cola would create confusion if not actually from them, since people would assume it was theirs. So they effectively have exclusive rights to such trademarks.
Whereas for a country name like France, people assume much less about the purveyor of a good simply based on that kind of a reference in its name.
WebAssembly is a tool in work, supported by Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc... Currently it lacks a garbage collector, but this is planned. I would bet on wasm to be the holly graal in the future, more than anything else.
"Excited, we presented our prototype to a small number of non-programmers and sat back to watch the magic. To our horror, not a single one of them could figure out what the simple example program did or how it worked, nor could they produce any useful programs themselves." (From the article linked above).
As a programmer, I had the same reaction, actually.
yeah, that was a very early version that we never released publicly, but was effectively a cleaned up version "Aurora," which I presented at Strange Loop once upon a time ago.
"The North Vietnamese government and the Viet Cong were fighting to reunify Vietnam. They viewed the conflict as a colonial war and a continuation of the First Indochina War against forces from France and later on the United States. The U.S. government viewed its involvement in the war as a way to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam."
Unlike JVM, though, it has semantics that make it possible to compile to optimized native code easily, without having to do complicated analysis for more advanced optimizations.
It is hard to compete with a new technology against an older that was optimized for decades (see electric cars). But in the present case, resources in lithium are not unlimited so we expect its cost to rise in the future.
Note that it took a decade or so before lithium batteries were reliable and trustworthy. I remember every second report in the '80s being "fascinating technology! huge capacity! whoops it caught fire again, but"
Personal attacks like this are not allowed on HN and will get your account banned, regardless of whether another comment was self-righteous or had other negative qualities.
You might not believe it - me being an asshole after all - but I do feel sorry for the author.
The best he probably can (and from his writing likely does) expect from this on a personal level is to have learned a valuable lesson and to serve as cautionary tale for others to not fall in the same trap.
He likely has little in the way of legal recourse but he'd have to consult with a lawyer for that anyway.
I'm also an asshole because I was downvoted heavy for the same sort of stand.
As with any business, he needs to realize this isn't working and move on to something else. If he's staring at the possibility of being homeless after 5 years on this platform, then something isn't working and he will need major change so that the next 5 years doesn't end with the same results.
Running a business requires a certain management capability. At #1 on the list of financial bullets which can take you down is medical expenses. If you're writing a to-do list and there's a pack of wolves ransacking your house, then that problem should be at the top of your list. This guy got cleaned out by medical expenses. He didn't mention anything beyond the money, so I assume that the injury wasn't a major barrier to work. He had savings, but he probably didn't have medical insurance. That's a major fail.
If you're going into business dressed up like an employee, then prepare to be a victim. If you go into business fully expecting to run a business, then your #1 priority is business survival. There are no victims in business survival stories, only funerals.
He didn't say "proprietary code is evil" or "property is theft", dude's not Richard Stallman. Also, Google does plenty of open source stuff, including Go, which Thompson works on.
I have used Google's beta products for years (Gmail for example). You remark is valid for an alpha version, but a beta version should be the final product with maybe bugs to be fixed.
I have read the entire judgement and beside the fact you can not register the name of a country, he had not also the right to register a trademark from the beginning.