That’s probably an impossible task - getting enough people who are experts in every possible field enough to judge novelty and innovativeness wouldn’t be feasible.

An alternative is the way the Dutch assess patents - they don’t, and grant them automatically on filing, but that means you remove the assumption that they are valid on their face if they get challenged

Unfortunately, the way patent suits work it could be enormously expensive to defend something like this, even when the patent is clearly bad.

You’d be arguing that the patent is invalid to start with, but the court would probably start from the position that you are actually infringing a valid patent (it was granted after all), and grant an injunction to prevent further harm (“stop giving people the software until we can work out if there is any merit to your claim that you aren’t infringing”). You then need to put together a case to show the prior art, and you can bet that they’d contest every single point. This whole process could take years, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that you won’t get back even if you win - there isn’t really a provision to recover costs in patent cases because there is the assumption that every claim is made in good faith

Not in the US; in NZ most houses will have a “wash tub” - essentially a sink in a metal cabinet specifically for doing “dirty” jobs like laundry. That will have water hookups for the washer, so that goes next to it where there is space, then the dryer will do next to that or on top of the washer.

The last few places I’ve lived in have all had the tub in a corner with space on its left, so it’s been dryer, washer, tub. Annoying, my dryer door opens to the right and the washer to the left, so it’s harder than it should be to move clothes between them

“Doctor” is a title you become entitled to use by virtue of holding a PhD - you have the option to use it, but nothing compels you to do so if you don’t want to.

Note that the reverse isn’t true - representing yourself as holding a doctorate when you don’t can be a fairly serious crime - if you did for the purposes of getting money from some, then it’s probably some kind of fraud

Some (usually cheaper) indicating desiccants use cobalt-based dies which are fairly toxic, but unless you are using them to keep food dry it’s not a huge issue. Having them break into powder in the microwave probably isn’t great though, I’d avoid breathing any of it in

I want to see the high-octane action thriller where the grizzled old hand and the renegade upstart trek to the remote compound in the woods of Montana to find Bob, the last man alive who understands how some obscure part of the IRSs core systems works and bring him back in from the cold for one last job… to save America(s neglected computer systems from decades of under investment)

I’ve used 85GB of the 128GB of my current phone after using it for 2 years and never deleting anything. I suppose if I took a lot more video I might burn through it quicker.

Transposition error

…

So awhile ago I worked on a system that moved education records between 2 different systems at a university. It kept choking on one particular record; turns out the date of birth was in 1499, and MSSQL won’t store dates from before the start of the Gregorian calendar unless you specifically configure it to do so.

We sent a request through to have the record corrected - clearly someone has just typoed 1949 - and moved on, but maybe…

Yup, this - batteries are consumables. They have a service life of ~2-5 years depending on load. If the manual doesn’t tell you how to replace them then it’s basically ewaste already

Depends on what you need:

• As cheap as possible, but actually want a VM: OCI free tier will be way bigger than you will probably need
• Happy paying money but still want to learn about Linux things: I’ve had good experiences with Scaleway
• I just want something I can set up and not think about: don’t use a VPS. Architect your site as a pure-static site, stick it in an S3 bucket. You’ll probably be within the free tier unless you do absolutely bonkers traffic, and once it’s running you can leave it alone for literal years without worrying about patches or upgrades

https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2017/11/creating-autonomous-system-for-fun-and.html?m=1

It’s doable, just needs a fair bit of hardware, time and money

I’m just a little sad that there are people in the world who have lived such empty, passionless lives that they can’t conceive of being so excited and invested in something that they could lose their self control for a moment

As an additional point; “weird” isn’t a slur. A slur is an expression where the very words themselves are considered obscene - a slur is offensive, even when it is used to describe someone or something according to its strict definition.

There is no context where describing someone as a “removed” or a “retard” isn’t offensive. “Weird” isn’t like that, as you’ve pointed out - it’s being used as a simple insult, and it’s persistent because it seems to really annoy the people it is directed at

Edit: to further my point, one of my examples is so objectionable that it was automatically filtered from my post

500w TDP Vs 360w on previous generation - cooling this thing is going to be fun

Basically none. The satellite link isn’t getting traffic directly between you and the server you are reaching - the satellite just relays the data to the nearest ground station that then uses the normal fibre network to get the rest of the way.

Even if you managed to reconfigure starlink to be a peering network rather than an access network, you’d still have the issue that the starlink network as a whole has orders of magnitude less bandwidth than even one under sea cable

I learnt a ton about Linux by fucking up my boot config and being too stubborn to just nuke and pave

A well built power supply will have a current limit on the connector to prevent the cable melting problem, but that means if you have a card that needs 200w, but only power it via 1 connector you are going to run into problems

lithium batteries

People in the office next to mine deal with prototype lithium cells and yeah, terrifying. They charge them in a special fire cabinet in case they go pop, and have buckets of sand everywhere (although the official advice is to not bother, gtfo). If you plot energy density on a line, there is an overlap between the highest density lithium cells and lowest density high explosives

Only if a dog does it.

Is that the plot of Air Bud? Idk, I only know the meme