I'm assuming my down votes are for the link being off-topic. Just wanted to apologize if I annoyed some people with it. I thought it would be fun to share it since Velcro doesn't come up very often in online discussions.
It's alright. One of the things that separates discussion on HN from other sites is that we like to try to stay on-topic. In the past I've witnessed many articles on Slashdot go from discussing the article with the first two or three comments to somehow having a 100-comment discussion of the merits of Open Source and Linux. This would happen even on discussions of some new science or new widget. Inevitably there would be some derogatory comment about Microsoft in there regardless of the content of the original article.
As a consequence I try to avoid mentioning things that will go in a political direction, like Trademark, Copyright, etc. as these terms tend to be very charged for certain people. Once you bring it up people will dogpile the discussion and eventually your article on the Lost Art of Lacing Cable is full of comments about how Trademarks are stupid and Copyright is Copywrong.
It's not really about relevance, but rather that the main focus of the comment is something that invites a lot of political discussion with very little substance.
Innocent though it might have been, we were discussing tying cables together, someone dared to mention the word "Velcro", and out comes Captain Pedantic to remind us that it is a trademarked term. Hey, we were trying to discuss cables, not trademark law. You also don't know that parent wasn't specifically calling out the Velcro brand: "buy the Velcro ties, not the shitty off-brand, Velcro; I used the word for a reason."
That's my guess, I don't necessarily hold that view. But it did drag the conversation in a vastly different direction. :-)
