You can't just go by time zone names because there are weird exceptions, like most of Arizona not doing DST. Then there's Indiana, which didn't do DST until 20 years ago, and there are some counties that switched time zones when the DST law took effect... if you're in one of those counties will you just accept old timestamps being an hour off? Granted, this gradually becomes less of an issue the further we get from the change. But nothing guarantees that there won't be further changes in the future.
And that's just the US, there's almost 200 other countries each with their own laws.
> But nothing guarantees that there won't be further changes in the future.
There are guarantees that there will be changes in the future! There are changes regularly, some expected, some not. In some countries the suspension of DST due to Ramadan is decided on the first night of Ramadan itself when a group of elders look at the moon and decide whether Ramadan starts tonight, or tomorrow.
You very much can with board and card games. Monopoly was patented and so was Magic: the Gathering.
My question is whether this patent only covers specific game mechanics introduced in the most recent Pokemon game or whether it's broad enough to monopolize the entire genre. Because if a clone of the original Pokemon from 30 years ago (has it really been that long? I feel old) is infringing, then the patent is clearly invalid due to Nintendo's own prior art.
IANAL, but I think you're misunderstanding their point. MtG did not patent the genre/game type. There are countless other cards games that are essentially MtG, just not called that. Same with monopoly and any other established board game.
It's mostly trademarks with physical games, not patents.
But video games are ultimately software, and that's easy to patent...
Obviously there have been lots of other TCGs, but up until that patent expired in 2014, they had to either be sufficiently different from MtG to avoid the patent, or pay royalties to WOTC.
There were also cases that just invalidated it in place. It was a dead patent. You still can't call turning cards to indicate use "tapping" though.
edit: to be clear, anyone can copy every single element of any board game, as long as they don't infringe on the game's copyrights or trademarks i.e. the art and the text, including the names of things. This is absolutely true in the US, but not necessarily true in other countries, and I'm pretty sure false in Germany. Also, there is a European alliance of board game designers who will blacklist retailers that sell your copied game, and the sites that promote it.
Monopoly harassed the game "Anti-Monopoly" forever over this, but eventually when the law became clear, realized they would lose, so settled by paying the designer and giving him a perpetual license to any IP involved in the mechanics of Monopoly so there wouldn't actually be a court decision recorded that officially invalidated their patents (I'm not sure if it was still Parker Brothers by the conclusion.) They could theoretically go after people still, and probably have sent letters (everybody who was going to get rich off the next big board game in the 60s and 70s made a Monopoly clone.) But after the Anti-Monopoly guy published about the experience, everybody knows that any threats are toothless.
Motif was the real "classic" API. But let's do a little justice to GTK1. Motif was still a proprietary library when GTK1 was released. GTK1 was also already easier to develop with, and the default look&feel was somehow better. For some reason, all the widgets in the Motif UI were huge. Given the small resolutions of that time, it was very space inefficient.
The free clone "LessTif" already existed when "GTK+" 1.x came along.
I agree that GTK was much easier to program, and had a better feel but the look was mimicking Motif except that every widget instead used a shaded button-style border — and that looked very ugly IMHO.
However, GTK 1.x supported theme engines. Back in the day, my theme for GTK 1.x was one of the most popular, giving programs a look reminiscent of NeXTStep and Windows 95.
The engine also (optionally) hacked the GTK widgets, adding triangular tabs and subtly improved menu behaviour. When GTK 2.0 came along, it had a much improved default look that felt like its own thing, and also the new menu behaviour so my theme wasn't needed any more.
Xaw was also really awful to program in. When I tried using it once I ended up reverting to just plain Xlib and was much happier, even having to build my own widgets out of low level primitives.
The ISA is only part of the computer platform, and the x86 PC is the only platform that's significantly standardized between vendors. There were several incompatible 6502-based computers in the 1970s and likewise for the 68k in the '80s, and now ARM is in the same position. I don't know if there's any way this can change, certainly it's not in any vendor's interest to make their products easy to clone, that's the "mistake" IBM made with the PC. And ARM is doing well for themselves just licensing CPU cores and letting their customers do the rest.
There were also many incompatible 8086 machines before (and at the same time as) the IBM PC, including many that ran MS-DOS but had different memory layouts (e.g. without the 640k limit), different floppy disk formats etc.
IBM's machine had great market success and was trivially easy to copy, at least if you illegally simply copied their ROM too. IBM sued many such companies out of existence (including Exzel here in New Zealand.
But then Phoenix reverse engineered the BIOS -- easy as it was small, simple, and even badly written (compared to e.g. the large 64k very cleverly coded ROM on the Mac) -- documented it, including the bugs, and then had other engineers do a clean-room reimplementation of the BIOS.
At that point IBM couldn't touch them, as there were no custom chips used in their machine.
Then Compaq beat IBM to using the 80386 by seven months, and when IBM's PS/2 machines did appear they used a different BIOS, different and incompatible expansion bus, different keyboard and mouse connectors and video display.
The market basically ignored IBMs (expensive!) machines and copied Compaq and IBM lost control of the "PC".
People did adopt the PS/2 connectors (easy enough) and VGA, but otherwise continued with the same BIOS and memory map and "ISA" expansion bus until Intel did PCI 6 or 8 years later.
The most significant contribution that DEC BASIC made was the REPL-like "immediate mode" that lets you execute individual statements without having to RUN the whole program. It was copied by both Microsoft and almost every other BASIC implementation since. Being able to fiddle around with "PRINT 2+2" is so fundamental to the BASIC experience that it surprised me to learn that Kemeny & Kurtz didn't come up with it, DEC did. (It came from DEC's earlier language FOCAL, which had an "English-like" syntax and doesn't resemble BASIC in any other way, and probably ultimately from LISP.)
For all the complaints about our corpus being contaminated by AI slop, there's been plenty of human-generated slop being regurgitated over the years as well. Lazy textbook writers copy and paste from older books, lazy test makers quiz on arbitrary phrases from the textbooks, nobody ever does any fact checking to see if any of it makes sense.
My favorite example is the "tongue map" - decades of schoolchildren have been taught that different parts of the tongue are responsible for tasting sweetness and saltiness and so on. This is contrary to everyone's experience, and it turns out to have been a mistranslation of some random foreign journal article on taste buds, but it's stuck around in the primary school curriculum because it's easy to make it into a "fill in the map" activity. As long as the kids can regurgitate what they're told, who cares if anything they're learning is true?
Percival Lowell misunderstanding the Italian word “canali”[1] should rank pretty high in terms of similar phenomena and is probably the most impactful example.
It looks like Wikipedia [1] has a better explanation of the actual misunderstanding, the page you linked wasn't very clear to me (Italian "canali" corresponds to English "channel", not English "canal").
If you make a PG movie without it being called PG, does that mean it's any less of a deviation from the G-rated content? Even the G-rated content wouldn't have had a rating as well, but these would have been noticeably different at the time.
The funny thing is the classic Looney Tunes weren’t made for Saturday morning kids shows, but for movie theaters to be shown between the newsreel and the feature. (And weren’t necessarily kid stuff either - they were full of topical references that nobody has understood since the 1940s.)
Warner Bros has been a lousy manager of the Looney Tunes property lately but I expect they’ll remembered fondly for decades more, while most of the repetitive schlock that was made for Saturday morning will be forgotten.
When Congress passed the CPB defunding bill, the Republican sponsors paraded around the most deranged takes to air on NPR in the last few years and asked, why should our tax dollars keep going to this?
And I'll be the first to admit that NPR has completely lost its mind, it's losing its listenership, and it needs to be humbled a bit. But audio is much cheaper than video and NPR's remaining listeners will easily be able to make up the shortfall. Meanwhile we're going to see PBS, whose news coverage mostly avoided the pitfalls NPR fell into and who run a lot more non-news programming, take a huge funding hit and resort to even more pledge drives and reruns, while local affiliates in large swaths of the country have to close entirely.
This is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and not even throwing out the bathwater.
Oh wow, really? I didn't look because I assumed mail over FTP was transferred over a separate data connection, just like other files. Thank you!
And yes, in August 01972 probably nobody at MIT had ever used ed(1) at Bell Labs. Not impossible, but unlikely; in June, Ritchie had written, "[T]he number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected." But nothing about it had been published outside Bell Labs.
The rationale is interesting:
> The 'MLFL' command for network mail, though a useful and essential addition to the FTP command repertoire, does not allow TIP users to send mail conveniently without using third hosts. It would be more convenient for TIP users to send mail over the TELNET connection instead of the data connection as provided by the 'MLFL' command.
So that's why they added the MAIL command to FTP, later moved to MTP and then in SMTP split into MAIL, RCPT, and DATA, which still retains the terminating "CRLF.CRLF".
> A Terminal Interface Processor (TIP, for short) was a customized IMP variant added to the ARPANET not too long after it was initially deployed. In addition to all the usual IMP functionality (including connection of host computers to the ARPANET), they also provided groups of serial lines to which could be attached terminals, which allowed users at the terminals access to the hosts attached to the ARPANET.
> They were built on Honeywell 316 minicomputers, a later and un-ruggedized variant of the Honeywell 516 minicomputers used in the original IMPs. They used the TELNET protocol, running on top of NCP.
And that's just the US, there's almost 200 other countries each with their own laws.