His accusation is that Hugo Boss are going well beyond reasonable defense of their trademark, by suing businesses in entirely unrelated industries that use either 'Hugo' or 'Boss' in their names or their product names. One example he cited was Boss Brewing, a Welsh brewery who said they spent about £30,000 / 38,200 USD on legal costs and rebranding after being targeted by Hugo Boss. They're also alleged to have sent cease and desists about surfboards, speakers, knives, and treadmills for having 'boss' in the name. It's hard to argue that those weaken the Hugo Boss trademark.
He has a show about consumer rights ("Joe Lycett's Got Your Back", which I suppose will be "Hugo Boss's Got Your Back" next season) so it's in his wheelhouse.
> His accusation is that Hugo Boss are going well beyond reasonable defense of their trademark
The problem is that this question ultimately hinges on a court's judgment, and they can't know in advance what evidence of "reasonable defense of their trademark" will satisfy all the judges in all the cases where this issue is examined.
So from the trademark-holder's point of view, the approach has to be to do everything they can to be seen by the courts to be doing anything necessary to defend their brand; particularly for such a big/valuable brand like Hugo Boss, it's too risky to do anything less.
When you talk to people in these kinds of companies privately, they don't personally care at all if some largely-unrelated small business somewhere has a name that is vaguely reminiscent of theirs, and they'd rather not have to waste time and money taking action against them.
These indignant reactions always happen when a big corporate is seen to be bullying small, defenceless companies over trademarks, but on this topic it's a case of "don't hate the player, hate the game".
"Hey, we think your use of <x> is a bit too close for comfort. We recognize it's not actually problem but it's in both our interest to avoid trademark dilution issues; let's discuss some minor changes and nail down an agreement".
Then both sides can point to the agreement if someone else tries to use that usage as a defense.
The real issue is not that they're communicating with people to ensure a clear delineation of uses, but that they're doing so in a very aggressive and hostile way and costing companies they do it to a lot of money.
There is no requirement to be hostile. They can always go for the hostile option if the friendlier approach doesn't work.
All they need is to be able to demonstrate that they take action to protect their mark. If they do so by agreeing license terms that covers reasonable uses that is sufficient.
As for examples: Pretty much any company you don't see in the media harassing companies with similar names. Hugo Boss are being exceptionally aggressive here.
It's a "cheap, easy, reliable: pick any two" situation.
Cheap and easy: buy a 2 TB drive and keep it at home. If some disaster affects your home -- flood, fire, burglary -- it can take out your data and its backup.
Cheap and reliable: buy a 2 TB hard drive and keep it somewhere else. Keeping the backup up-to-date means regularly bringing the drove home, updating it, and putting it back.
Easy and reliable: pay for a service like Backblaze that automatically backs up all your files to a remote server.
There are other benefits to services like B2 especially, namely being able to access your backed-up files from any device or location, or being able to link people to your files on a high-speed server.
You put the 2 TB drive somewhere else (at a relative's) and keep it updated regularly via network.
That's my set up (but with a bigger drive).
At home, I have the master copy of the data on my file server.
Then I have backup #1 that is in the same location and backup #2 that is in a different location.
Both #1 and #2 get updated at night with a "timemachine-like" backup system based on rsnapshot. The network traffic goes over ssh.
Remote backup system #2 cost a UPS, a RaspberryPi and an 8 TB drive, which is about ~$250-$300 total.
The initial sync is best done locally of course, but deltas can generally easily go over network at night.
Cheap, reliable, and (relatively) easy (if you're a geek, that is).
I remember there being software back in the day that did exactly this.
The name escapes me right now, but basically you had to add "friends" in the software, then dedicate a certain amount of HDD space to it. It would then back up your files to your friends' computers, and theirs to yours. Backups were encrypted so your friends wouldn't be able to see your files.
It was a super neat idea, I wish I could remember what it was called so I could see if they're still around...
There's an open source one called Tahoe: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs
There used to be a company with a more usable similar product called allmydata, but it seems to be defunct.
Nothing bad, if you use "bup" or "borg"; The latter has better delete support, so is a better choice for rolling backup if you sometimes delete data. "bup" has the advantage that its repo format is git, which makes it easier to hack.
Both use rsync-style deltas to only send changes, but they use a content-addressable scheme like git so renames are a small metadata change record.
Also, both offer ftp and fuse interfaces if you need to access an older backup.
Bad things! rsync isn't smart enough (AFAIK) to know that files have been renamed or moved: it just sees files disappearing on one side and appearing on the other side, so the daily delta can get big.
DRBD may be a good solution to this problem, although I haven't spent the time to see what it would take to replicate over ssh, and the kind of traffic that is incurred vs changes in origin.
I think the popular opinion (and my own) is that VS Code has been the better editor for a long time now. Performance, features, and reliability have all been drastically better, its one weak spot might be the slightly more limited interface for extensions.
To be fair, I wouldn't have found him on IRC in 1998 either. IRC has really always been a relatively niche thing and I think it's fair to say it's doing well if you define that as remaining popular within the niches it's always been associated with. Though I think this is starting to change with the popularity of Discord.
Yes Discord is starting to really starting to dominate.
More and more often these days you'll find at the bottom of a community info page a discord rather than an IRC channel. Even big pirating communities are making the switch.
How does that work? I'm a regular in the C# Discord community and one of the rules we enforce and have to enforce regularly is no illegal or shifty activity (pirating, cracking, hacking, aimbots, cheating, etc.) because the discord admins don't take kindly to that sort of thing.
Well there's obviously far too much conversation for the admins to actually snoop in on what everybody is saying so unless anybody in the group reports it then it would just fly under the radar.
Not necessarily, there are lots of phone service providers who except certain websites or services from the data tracking. Some of them Google services already -- Virgin Mobile in Australia excepted YouTube traffic for years.
What do you consider to be low? Anecdotally, the Google app on my phone almost perfectly recognised, played over speakers, this fairly rapid dialogue between two people encoded as 6 Kbit/sec Opus.
Its only mistake was missing the "you" in "you want to be."
Codec2 remains fairly clear down to human ears down to 2.4 Kbit/sec but I had no luck getting it recognised, even with much simpler and clearer samples.
This individual anecdote tells you nothing about the state of the art, but I wanted to note it anyway because I was astonished at how well 6 Kbit/sec is handled.
This hasn’t been my experience, I’ve only spent the money for a leather case once (always used to go caseless) but I’ve had this case for more than a year and It’s held up beautifully.
I’ve noticed that their silicone cases peel as you’ve described, but I’ve had great luck with the leather case even after years of abuse, drops, and getting it damp.
ESPN only really cover one country. If you're in the US I'm sure it's fine but for everyone else the coverage is not only almost nonexistent but often factually wrong when it does exist. I saw AFL coverage on ESPN where they did not understand the distinction between goals and points and left the wrong scores up for ages.
The term fair use is US-only but many nations have similar concepts or concepts that overlap with it. Australia's 'fair dealing' policy allows for the use of copyrighted material without seeking approval if its purpose is in satire, research, reviewing, media criticism, or news reporting, for example. What's notable there is that length or amount used aren't as important, which has some positive effects but also some important negative ones (it would not be possible to create Google in Australia because taking the summary snippets and image thumbnails has no legal justification). Interestingly in the last big debate over loosening Australian copyright law and adopting broader fair use, the American MPAA was the biggest funder of opposition efforts.
An emoji isn't really a shorthand for a word or phrase, using an emoji has its own unique meaning. Responding to something with (heart-eyes) is interpreted differently to anything verbal, like "I love that." In the same way, you can't substitute facial expressions and vocal tones with more words. It used to be that you'd have 10-30 emoticons directly representing facial expressions, the only thing that's changed is that now people pair multiple emojis to create emoji-phrases that can represent more elaborate gestures and actions. A lot of the weirder "why is that a thing" emojis are there to enable that. Stuff like rolling-eyes + gun-to-head, ️blank-stare + man-fleeing, raised-hand + crossed-arms (time out), etc. If your SO tells you they're picking up pizza on the way home, pizza + heart-eyes, pizza + orgasm, partners + pizza = love, etc have different meanings and vibes to stating "I love pizza."
It's interesting because it's no longer just filling a gap in textual communication, but using textual communication to express a thought or joke that you can't really express with the same interpretation in any other conversational medium. Responding to "and Dave will be there" with blank-stare + man-fleeing expresses something you could only really express otherwise by drawing a comic strip on the spot and handing it to someone.
He has a show about consumer rights ("Joe Lycett's Got Your Back", which I suppose will be "Hugo Boss's Got Your Back" next season) so it's in his wheelhouse.