While I agree generally w/ this advice, in my experience, companies try to make that impossible or very difficult for employees. For example, most hiring offers are exploding: I've been given exploding offers over a weekend, over holidays: try getting a lawyer when you're not at home. Further, again in my experience, getting a lawyer is actually significantly challenging to someone who hasn't done it: you need a lawyer in the relevant area of law, and you need to know their price, and these two critical pieces of information seem generally to be the things left off the website.
You can argue that an employee should try to negotiate for adequate time, and maybe they should, but not all will. Those too timid to do so are effectively being taken advantage of; thus I find most companies' positions morally reprehensible.
Does no-one see the irony in patenting an anti-piracy standard? If it is remotely effective, it will, itself, be pirated. If it is not effective, it will only make the lives worse of people who choose not to circumvent it.
Additionally, I just do not see how this passes subject-matter standards post Alice.[1] Seriously disappointing to see vague algorithms of this type receive patent protection.
When I buy a DVD, I have unskippable trailers and an ad that warns me not to pirate it at the beginning. Seriously, it's about 10 minutes of crap that I need to watch to see the movie I f*ing paid for!
The viewing experience with pirated movies is much more enjoyable and streamlined. I get the movie, double click on it and booom - it starts right away.
I mean, I've torrented every single DvD I own and the disks sit in the attic. Strangely, not once I have missed the lack of "hilarious cut scenes" or "Directors commentary" features.
Man I love clicking on a folder, scrolling for 30 secs and pressing play and the actual film just starts playing. The only thing that it fails on is remembering where I am in a series. So for eg. Blackadder I'd rather just stick on Netflix thank play in VLC
If you don't mind using a web client (and you shouldn't, it's pretty good), you can install the Plex server on your machine and then open the web client on the same machine.
I've noticed Plex has stopped working with my TVs. It's kinda a bummer that the only help, that those on forums are willing to give is "buy a better TV". Is spending another 700 bucks really a tenable solution?
It's not a great solution, but there are several "streaming sticks" like the Roku, Chromecast, or FireTV for less than $50 you can buy and plug into your current TV.
The original "Barbershop" DVD had over 25 minutes of non-skippable previews and ads on it... So much so, that when the DVD player started skipping 5 minutes in (scratches on netflix rental), I never got around to watching it later (or asking for a different disc).
That's when I started ripping DVD content, just so I could watch it as the studios had gone way too far.
Not ironic. Just very fitting. They're using a failed system (patents) to try to monopolise their (probably very obvious) method of enforcing a failed monopoly system.
Edit inb4 comments: I am not making any judgments of this firm, or implying that these things are in any way related. Additionally, as pointed out, this story is from 2013 and has been settled. It is interesting, however, to see this old story popping up now.
I am using postgres and redis - they are both trivial to set up and cost about a few lattes a month for a fairly scalable solution. If I had huge traffic, a few hundred bucks a month would be totally adequate - and this is running on the too-expensive heroku. So, unless Riak costs pennies and takes literal minutes to set up, the 10x claim won't hold.
Riak looks like it would be overpowered by my needs - but then again, I learn something new every day.
Author here. And to think of it that I wrote it over two days. Two days. Made a couple of my friends read it. I am embarrassed and will fix it by tonight.
No, there's not. Read what you posted more carefully. Planck temperature is the scale at which gravitation becomes as important as other forces, and thus without a working theory of quantum gravity we can't predict what happens at that scale.
IP Lawyer here. Note: I am a lawyer, but I am not your lawyer.
Upon using your name in commerce you acquire common law trademark rights. Filing a trademark before you are actually using it in commerce requires filing an Intent To Use trademark application and will cost you a few thousand dollars in legal fees (or a hell of a lot more if you are doing international) - either that or you are doing it yourself with trademarkia, and, in that case, I wish you bon chance.
Try to choose a strong name, but be prepared to change it.
If you want to search for competing marks, please note that this is an extremely technical process. You can try to search on TESS, but it is very difficult.
https://tess2.uspto.gov
The point of all the above is that you really do need to be a professional at this in order to have the wherewithal to make judgments about the likelihood of a trademark's success. In addition, it takes a few business quarters to a year and a half for a registration to issue.
The point of all this is that domai.nr is as important a tool as TESS, that you can easily get lost in the weeds on this issue, that your own judgment is in no way a replacement or a substitute for a licensed attorney, that trademark strategy is hugely complicated and can be a total sinkhole. What does that mean? It means that, for a startup, like many, many other issues, you do the best you can but keep in mind that you are going to have to spend a lot of time and effort on it down the road.
Tl:dr:
As a startup in general: IF YOU HAVE THE MONEY, it is worth starting this process this sooner rather than later. If you do NOT have the money, a reasonable strategy is to move forward with a name that you like but are willing to change. It is okay to change your name very early on. However, the goal is to avoid having to change your name when you already have a product out and some market presence.
For YC: Do you need a trademark before you apply to YC? Almost definitely not - unless you are already selling your product. Do you need a trademark before you start selling your service to enterprises or spending money on marketing? It would be foolish not to at least engage an attorney and start the process.
Note that many other IP attorneys may have different opinions. That's fine - reasonable minds can differ on this subject, the above is an extremely short primer. Also please note that I AM NOT YOUR ATTORNEY AND IF YOU ARE THINKING ABOUT FILING A TRADEMARK YOU NEED AN ATTORNEY.
Thanks for the intel. I love the disclaimer. Don't worry, I won't try to claim you :) My business is running under the current name, so i'm going to make it a goal to start the trademark app process via the USPTO sight by the end of the year. I don't have enough money to hire a lawyer as yet. I'm hoping to get into YC so that I can take care of this then. It's a unique name and I already own the domain and have a website running. This is all new to me, so I appreciate your intel.
Who just has an attorney sitting around who is competent to handle such things? I wouldn't know who the fuck to call if I found something on my bank's website.
