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Comment by empressplay | Hacker News Reader

Cool concept! A couple things: 1) Using 'Tron' could be a bit problematic if Disney's lawyers get bored. 2) You might want to drop the annual price a bit, and maybe work on your shipping costs.

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Dictionary to the rescue! All they need to do is to include a piezo pressure sensor in the fist kit.

tron (trɒn) n: a public weighing machine

[C15: from Old French trone, from Latin trutina, from Greek trutanē balance, set of scales]

Amazon and google are also words to find in a dictionary but that doesn't get in the way of enforcing their trademark

Google is in the dictionary? Since when? Maybe you are thinking of 'googol'?

Yup, it's in the Oxford English Dictionary. I don't know when, but I'm guessing after September 4, 1998.

The online version says for me "This is a new entry (OED Third Edition, March 2006)" for capitalised "Google", meaning "To use the Google search engine to find information on the Internet."

It also has a lower-case "google", in a cricket-related meaning, from 1933; so it has that in common with Amazon, whose meaning in the OED is still unrelated to the company.

Of the ball: to have a ‘googly’ break and swerve. Of the bowler: to bowl a googly or googlies; also (trans.), to give a googly break to (a ball).

Disney most likely took the name from the TRON command which is/was a debugging feature in BASIC [0]. The site itself also (whether conciously or not) make no mention of the movie. "Tron" could also be an shortening of "Electron" but without the hassle of an apostrophy, e.g. 'tron-club. I could be talking bollocks though :)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_command

None of that matters if Disney's lawyers get bored :).

I hear Disney's lawyers are going after the descendants of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm because of the Grimm's use of Snow White and other Disney properties.

Our name comes from the word Mechatronics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechatronics

My favourite machine name is TIMTronic - ticket issuing machine electronic. It was a bus ticket machine made and sold by Almex control systems. It had 7 segment LED displays and mechanical keys and mechanical (not thermal) printer, and was huge. Bus drivers would push coins into them to short out the machine, thus allowing them to use hand-written emergency tickets which had much weaker auditing.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/calummelrose/8514115994

That Flickr account has some nice photos.

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