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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Well, one time my kid said some misogynistic shit (it’s been a decade, I can’t remember the details) and I spent 10 or 15 minutes chewing him out in front of his siblings about how that’s inappropriate and wrong, with examples of the errors and results. When we were talking one time after he’d reached adulthood, he told me this turned him away from the path of radical anti-feminism.

    No guarantees this will work in most circumstances, but it did this one time.










  • Pretty sure that list applies to paint as well, and can be found in most car manuals.

    I just searched the most recent manual for my model car, and it said this:

    Washing

    To help protect your vehicle’s finish from rust and deterioration, wash it thoroughly and frequently at least once amonth with lukewarm or cold water. If you use your vehicle for off-road driving, you should wash it after each off-road trip. Pay special attention to the removal of any accumulation of salt, dirt, mud, and other foreign materials. Make sure the drain holes in the lower edges of the doors and rocker panels are kept clear and clean. Insects, tar, tree sap, bird droppings, industrial pollution and similar deposits can damage your vehicle’s finish if not removed immediately.

    Please try to keep your criticisms of Musk fair and unbiased. Otherwise, you risk weakening your point.


  • There are generally 2 ways patents get infringed.

    The first is some little guy comes to market, a competitor sees their product, and figures they can out-lawyer them in court. A great example is Fox pealess whistles. A variant of this is hiring experts who previously worked on patented or patentable material and having them copy the work without following reverse engineering practices in order to make sure you don’t violate your previous employer’s patents.

    The second one is a patent troll gets an overly broad patent where anyone else doing work in the industry is going to infringe, mostly because the patent fails the obviousness test or there is prior art that the patent examiner isn’t aware of. The SCO patents generally fall under this (as well as MS patenting Windows in the context of computers, Apple with their rounded rectangles, and others I can’t bother to remember.

    There are relatively rare cases where two inventors come up with the same idea to solve a problem (the flushing toilet is one) or someone reads filed patents and decides to copy the method directly, rather than obtaining the results using a different process.


  • Our experience about internal combustion engines are the same. We get lower emissions, better mileage, more horsepower in a given form factor, and vehicles get bigger, have more features, and maybe a smaller gas tank and they feel like they have the same capacity as 60 years ago.

    Likewise with phones. The phone I described had a 24-hour capacity, just like the one I have now. But the old one could only do phone calls and SMS, and had an amber LED display. Now my phone has more power, capacity, and connectivity than my first home computer…and needs to be charged daily.

    People become accustomed to new things, and manufacturers design their products to utilize new capabilities in the way they think is most marketable. My phone could have a 10000 mAh battery, but then people would complain about weight and thickness.