I wonder why they didn't go with the IMF Special Drawing Right, which is used in many other international contexts. (Including aviation - the liability limits under the Montreal Convention are in SDRs.)
896 karma · joined April 1, 2013
And that's just the US, there's almost 200 other countries each with their own laws.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
There's a federal law from the 1990s banning any such taxes or fees from being charged on internet service, so cities don't collect anything based on that.
The story behind the lawsuit was that the Dodge brothers had just left Ford (then a private company) and they planned to use their dividends to start a competitor - which Ford suspected and which is the reason why the dividend was canceled.
An interesting idea, but I have to figure the majority of Unix sites kept /usr on the local machine like always.
It'd be nice to have some documentation of the internals of old DOC and XLS formats, just for the sake of recovering old files for archival purposes, but it's likely that Microsoft never bothered documenting them, even internally.
Many of us like to think of the First Amendment as broadly protecting the right to say whatever you want, dating back to its enactment over 200 years ago, but that interpretation is much newer.
(Which I 99% agree with, there are some rare cases when you want old snapshots that haven't been subsequently revised, but does that mean we need to keep printing tables in every copy of every day's paper?)
As of 2024 private entities in the US will need to report ownership to FinCEN though it still won’t be available to the public.
Maybe TeX, written in 1982? Though pdfTeX displaced the classic TeX DVI compiler long ago, and all the major TeX distributions translate the Pascal source code to C. I don't know whether that means it's a different program from the one Knuth wrote 40 years ago.
Back in the early days, a Usenet server represented a natural community - a university or employer. The early regional ISPs like Panix were small enough to still be community-like, though the common bond was looser. Modern ISPs, your Comcasts and Verizons, aren't communities at all, any more than customers of any other large business are. So although from a technological standpoint it makes sense to organize user-facing decentralized services on an ISP basis, from a social perspective it really doesn't anymore.
One thing that sticks out is how much technical constraints defined Usenet. The decentralized store-and-forward structure was designed based on the extremely low bandwidth available (initially 300 baud modems, connected for a few minutes each night) and the various newsgroup hierarchies were largely meant to signal which groups should be prioritized over others when a site was determining what to carry. Hence the insistence on comp.women over soc.women because only the comp.* groups made it to Europe. As described in the article, the switchover from UUCP to TCP/IP made the "backbone cabal" and their carriage decisions obsolete shortly after the Great Renaming took place, yet the naming conventions remained.
A big difference between Usenet and modern services is that, except on the rare moderated newsgroups (where a moderator had to approve all messages before posting) anyone could post, all posts went to all servers carrying the newsgroup, and nobody could force other servers to delete posts. It was expected for users to "killfile" anyone whose posts they didn't want to read, but it was nearly impossible to ban someone from a newsgroup so that nobody could read their posts. Ban someone from one server and they could just sign up on another. Defederating a server, the so-called Usenet Death Penalty, was almost exclusively used against spam servers. These properties of Usenet made it an attractive platform for sharing pirated and other illegal content, which in turn led to the demise of ISP-hosted Usenet servers in the late 2000s (by which time most of the legitimate discussion groups had migrated elsewhere).
There was nothing like the current Mastodon drama with sites defederating each other over whether certain political views should be allowed by moderators, because there were no moderators and no notion that any political views were unacceptable to post. (Of course, political posts outside political newsgroups were considered rude, but there were no bans for rudeness, only killfiles...)