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2 yr. ago

  • Actually, that's not the real reason patents are public. The reason is to allow everyone to freely use the patent after the expiry.

    The tradeoff is supposed to be the inventor gets exclusive use for a decade in exchange for detailing exactly how the thing works for everyone else.

  • Khorne is honourable and honest. Khorne will never stab you in the back or lie to you. He'd stab you in the front, shouting obscenities in your face.

  • Funnily enough, median income actually went up quite a bit here in Romania over the last year. Mainly because of successful union action.

  • Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

  • It currently looks very much like a bubble. After the dot com bubble, the internet didn't go away, but most companies died off and all the stupid monetisation went bankrupt.

    We may be seeing something similar

  • The best use case for purchasing FOSS software is contractor work, specific modules for existing platforms and/or FOSS projects. I've done that myself in the past. The client pays for the custom software, it's written, and then they gets to do absolutely whatever they want with it. If the client wants to publish it, they're well within their rights. Most of the time it's too entangled with their internal company workflow to be useful to anyone else though.

  • According to a quick Google search (I'm no expert on copyright law), a sufficiently original email is automatically copyrighted. What constitutes "sufficiently original" seems to be pretty arbitrary.

    So I guess if you post a short story, that's automatically copyrighted. Commenting "this" is not. And then there's a huge grey zone in the middle.

  • That's not to say that I still don't honestly consider Linux a better option in most use cases. I just don't generally wade in past the most simple explanations of stuff.

    If people want to switch, they will. I've realized I'm not doing anyone any favours by being pushy.

  • Totally understandable. Haven't used windows at all, home or work, in at least a decade. However, I went through my insufferable Linux zealot phase about 15 years ago.

    I was an annoying judgemental ass, but I got better.

  • people like you

    I'm not even American. I don't think I was "shouting" or "pushing" anything. Was just commenting my opinion, for as little as that's worth.

  • Maybe a battery weight limitation?

    I'm no aviation engineer, but as far as I understand it that's exactly it. The more weight, the more thrust you need, which means your fuel (or in this case, stored energy) needs to be very efficient in thrust per kg.

  • It seems pretty clear that queer people would be persecuted a hell of a lot more under Trump than Biden.

  • The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

    Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

    But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

    This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

    • Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
  • For the families who can afford it, daycare is the replacement.

  • "It takes a village to raise a child" is an old expression for a reason. Historically (EDIT: And today in most of the world), parents wouldn't take care of their kids 24/7. They would have parents, siblings, neighbours and friends to help share the load.

    The idea that parents and parents alone do 100% of everything to raise a child is a very modern western thing.

  • I don't know the details of this app, but if it's specifically US streets and notes on households there, then GDPR does not apply, as they're not mapping EU households. GDPR is only invoked if the personal information of Europeans is at risk.

  • That was a loophole to the original GDPR. That's now against the law in the EU, but bringing cases against all these sites is time consuming.

  • There's a lot of evolutionary processes that don't have to do with having more offspring, but increasing the viability of less offspring. Having kids, no matter the species, is a very costly affair. You could argue that mate selection generally reduces the number of offspring, but increases the viability.

    I've read a hypothesis (very much unproven) that having some gay members of a species increases the viability by having more people to care for the offspring without being in mate competition. It's called the gay uncle hypothesis