smacktoward

WWW eventually pulled out into the lead, due largely to licensing considerations; WWW had been developed at CERN, which explicitly disclaimed any ownership over it, while Gopher had been developed at the University of Minnesota, which preferred to leave its ownership claims ambiguous. People gravitated towards WWW for the simple reason that they knew no one would sue them for using it.

As WWW's userbase grew, demand grew as well to add features to it. Mosaic added images and image maps; Netscape added JavaScript; and on and on and on. Eventually WWW grew to the ginormous, do-it-all system we know and (ahem) love today. Because Gopher had been left behind in adoption, it didn't have those pressures to extend its capabilities; it was free to remain the simple hypertext system it was in the early '90s.

I see a lot of people today point to Gopher as an example of what the Web should be. But this misses the point; the Web isn't what it is because of some design decision it made that Gopher did not, the Web is what it is because it had users. The more users there were, the more things people wanted to do with it; and the more things people wanted to do with it, the more features got tacked on.

If Gopher had been the one with the permissive licensing back in the '90s, it's very possible that it would have been the hypertext system everybody used, and today we'd be complaining about how complex Gopher has become and asking "hey, whatever happened to that toy Tim Berners-Lee was hacking on back in the day? Remember how simple that was?"

Cotton’s entire argument was that the military should be sent into the cities to crack protesters’ heads, which is something significantly more aggressive than “a harsh tone.”

If I were to take to the op-ed page of the Times with the argument that national stability requires that we send the military to crack the heads of everybody who writes for the National Review, I suspect they would waver somewhat in their commitment to unlimited free speech.

Eventually someone listens to that person, and decades of painstakingly built-up brand value gets thrown out the window in order to bring home six nickels tomorrow instead of five.

> Candidly, the Roboflow team does not know.

It seems like, unless you can say with certainty that you have a legitimate claim to use an existing name, the right and safe thing to do would be to not use it. Just name your project something else. You lose the brand recognition of the existing name, but on the other hand you avoid the risk of your project getting dragged like this.

When in doubt, save yourself a headache and just use a different name.

Nobody becomes a schoolteacher to get rich.

Criterion's web store (https://www.criterion.com/shop) has sales all the time. There's one on right now through June 15 that gives you 30% off all titles. I picked up two titles through a 50% off sale last month. Subscribe to their email list or follow them on social media and they'll give you a heads up when the next one is coming.

This includes the original MicroProse Mighty 8th (https://retroism.com/b-17-flying-fortress-the-mighty-8th/), along with the Silent Service games, F-117A and F-19, the original Sid Meier's Colonization and a bunch of others. Though there are some notable MicroProse titles missing from their catalog: M1 Tank Platoon, the original Gunship and Gunship 2000, and F-15 Strike Eagle III all jump out at me.

Be interesting to see how close it is to your wife’s modern version!

That would have been uncomfortable, so the AI prophets have instead responded by changing the meaning of the term.

That’s not to say there isn’t a place in the news world for services like Business Wire - corporate press releases can be valuable sources of information. Just that any reporter who would take something off Business Wire and run it verbatim as a news item is not very good at their job.

What’s extra weird is that the first TrackPoint laptops appeared more than 20 years ago, so any IBM/Lenovo patents on the technology must have expired by now...