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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 20th, 2023

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  • Not all patents are good. But a patent system is good. It could be better but the general concept is not flawed like the person I was responding to suggests.

    The physical object isn’t what is patented in this case. It is the method to create the object that has a patent. One that can’t be reversed engineered as it isn’t part of the final product. You could only reverse engineer it if the process was not novel or not obvious to anyone knowledgeable in the field. If both of these conditions are true then the patent should not have been granted.

    Patents are not inherently bad. This is a bad patent. Patent laws don’t have to be changed, because this patent shouldn’t have been granted. The issue is ineffective patent reviews, not patents. Getting rid of patents is not a good idea. If you think it is you probably don’t have a good enough grasp on what a patent is.

    You can make something if you figure out how they did it because it was obvious. In this case the patent isn’t valid. If you have to develop a solution then the patent is probably valid. The patent is a reward for developing and sharing the solution publically.

    If you still don’t grasp why patents are useful. It may be helpful to think of it like open source software. The patent is the code base that is freely accessible to everyone. This preserves the knowledge and lets others build on it. However, to incentivise people to make their code open source you provide protections that stop others from selling the same code you developed.

    The incentive mechanism is why far more businesses produce patents than produce open source code.

    If you remove patents businesses stop funding internal r and d overnight. It increase the risk and reduces the reward.








  • They also produce much more meat. They also eat indigestible (to humans) food. Cows stomachs can eat and gain calories from grass in a way humans or dogs can’t, for dogs and humans grass is fibre and doesn’t provide many calories.

    Cows are great in this case for food security, ground that would struggle to produce much grains or vegetables can still produce grass. If you feed your cows a lot of grains the food security aspect is nullified. Even feeding dogs grains for a country like North Korea that struggles with food security is not a rational unless the dogs provide a benefit like guard dogs etc. During World War Two many people in UK cities killed their dogs when rationing was put in place (not to eat) purely because it was suggested the pets would consume food that could have been human food.


  • People have attached pens to 3d printers and used them to write letters, effectively print. Most consumer 3D printers are useing or based on open source software.

    I think the issue is, printers are relatively cheap to buy and replace. So building your own and programming it hasn’t been necessary. Where as 3d printing was completely in accessible before the reprap movement. 3D printing software is open source as it is motivated by people wanting to build their own machines that could build machines. Something you couldn’t easily buy.


  • Dogs would be more expensive to farm chickens, cows and pigs. They eat meat, so you need to produce meat to produce meat. It doesn’t seem like a sensible thing for North Korea to be doing to feed its soldiers rations.

    In time where food is scarce it makes sense, but to actually farm them. They would have to be farming them as a ‘luxury’ product, in which case they aren’t going to be using it for rations.


  • It’s the most highly optimised software available for consumer computers. Much easier when you support a very limited set of devices which you have compete hardware control over.

    It is UNIX so very similar to using Linux when you use a terminal.

    The UI is very polished and very stable. MacOS has not changed how the UI works or feels in a long time, during which windows and Linux (gnome/kde) have changed a lot. Both becoming more like MacOS. macOS has changed a little mostly features and styling.

    It has wide support, including support for priority programs that Linux does not. Apple appears and feels like they respect user privacy much better than Windows. You feel like you paid for the product and you are the customer. Unlike windows, where you pay to be exploited for data harvesting to the real customer advertisers. Apple is in many ways in between windows and Linux. Not as free and open, but not as exploitive and limited as windows. It’s a common misconception that MacOS is somehow locked down or walled off, it’s less locked down and walled off than windows. But like Linux it requires some terminal know how.


  • It was very likely a designers decision. It forces the use the use case they wanted; wireless mice should be used wirelessly. I would bet they fought marketing and management to get this on the final product.

    Marketing would want the mouse they can advertise as being useable with and wireless. Female ports are easier to mount and manufacture with they have depth to set the socket. So a plug on the front is much cheaper and easier to manufacture.

    The fact the charging cable doesn’t get used in motion means it will last longer and you wouldn’t have people useing fraying cables on the front of their mouse.





  • The question wasn’t trying to assess your ability to analyse the picture accurately. It was testing your ability to determine the socially appropriate response. The ‘correct’ answer wasn’t relevant.

    You were unable to identify that the questioner only wanted and only required a short simple response. One that only indicated the key concept the image related to. Further more you got fustrated with the question not having the ‘correct’ answer and got obsessed with it.

    This type of question isn’t enough to diagnose someone, but it can be one of many indicators that may form a diagnosis.