dunmalg

Here is a link to Gass' patent portfolio:

https://patents.justia.com/inventor/stephen-f-gass

Notice that the vast majority of his patents have to do with various aspects of "active injury mitigation technology", primarily related to saws, and that the most recent one was filed in August 2021. The only patent being offered up is the original--- Patent 9,724,840--- which basically only releases a very specific, early implementation of the safety system that has since undergone 20 years of additional patent activity.

Gass also has a PhD in physics and was the person who designed and engineered the product.

So what? That doesn't make him NOT an attorney. There's nothing that says a PhD and product inventor can't ALSO be a engaged in a scheme to have their own patent encumbered invention mandated by law.

Airbus is a threat, but they have a huge obstacle Boeing doesn't: they don't build planes in the US except for the A319-320-321. Any defense contract won with an Airbus airframe as its basis (e.g. NG's KC-X submission based on the Airbus A330 MRTT) also includes the expense and possible difficulty building a factory in the US to manufacture them. Boeing may have a bad reputation for screwing up manufacturing, but that's a known quantity vs. the giant question mark that is the quality of a theoretical Airbus factory--- run by a US defense contractor rather than Airbus--- that hasn't been built.

That far north is definitely outside the central valley. Once you travel north out of Redding, you're climbing up into the mountains, and it's 60 miles of that before you get to Shasta. Lassen is better candidate, since it actually erupted recently (1921) and is only ~40 miles east of Redding... but it's also part of the Cascade range like Shasta, which sn't really IN the valley.

SpaceX will never have an IPO because being publicly traded means ceding a certain degree of control. The founders' goal is to make life multiplanetary, and the typical goal of rando shareholders is to pump up the stock price. They don't want to have to deal with the latter. They may at some point spin off Starlink and IPO that, but not until it's fully deployed and not heavily dependent on frequent, super cheap, low bureaucratic friction launch services from SpaceX.

Firearm and ammunition manufacturers are already not culpable for people getting shot. Your argument would be better made comparing Comma 3X hardware + OpenPilot software to something that unintentionally causes injury despite being used as intended.

Then again, if you used that line of reasoning you'd have to show a comparable example of OpenPilot unintentionally causing injury, rather than just waving your hands and saying "it COULD happen, because unregulated!"

Like any public utility, there's a huge cost to get the infrastructure in place because there is... well... a CITY in the way. The immense capital outlay is generally worth it for the first to enter the market in a given area, because they stand to collect 100% of the demand for the service they offer. In contrast, a second competing entity incurs the same capital outlay, but can only count on as much of it's competitors business as it can wrest away. Unless their offering is of substantially better value, the most they can realistically hope for is 50%. In cases like local rail service, the initial outlay is so immense that there's little chance that anyone could make a compelling business case for it.

Lustvig is a crackpot.

https://anthonycolpo.com/sweet-stupidity-part-2-the-bitter-t...

His understanding of what happens to fructose in the liver is fundamentally incorrect.

Problem is, both sides of the ideological spectrum have spent 100+ years studiously ignoring the actual basis for rights in the US--- Natural Rights theory--- in favor of more "malleable" approaches that can be twisted to their desired ends. Both the crazy strict textualists, who think that the constitution as-written is the end-all be-all of human rights, and at the opposite end of the spectrum, the crazy extreme "living document" theorists with their "anything goes" approach; neither of them want to acknowledge that there's an underlying philosophical framework that potentially flips the table on their shenanigans.

$10/gal gasoline is not the answer, because it's a regressive tax that just prices the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder out of the transportation they need to get to work. It also adversely affects businesses that can't use public transit, like technical service people with tools and materials, and delivery drivers. The actual answer is to build a comprehensive mass transit system that makes driving unnecessary for most people. Trying to force people to use an inadequate public transit system by making the alternative unaffordable is just a shitty thing to do to people.

Comparatively cheap because you're just handing off magnet links, but when you're serving millions of unique visitors daily, it all adds up.

lol, step 1 destroys the entire stock market!

The other problem with increased complexity is that the more intricate your mechanism is, the more prone to failure due to wear or contamination it becomes. A security measure is only as good as it can remain usable. As a locksmith for working in the industry for 25 years, I've seen a lot of high security designs come and go, and the stuff that sticks is the stuff that's simple and reliable. The fundamental fact of locks and security is that people just don't pick locks much. The vast overwhelming majority of unauthorized accesses are via an acquired key or via bypass attacks on other aspects of the locking hardware than the keyed cylinder.

To put it bluntly, all these fancy pick-proof designs people are coming up with have zero real world utility and are just toys for locksport enthusiasts to play with.

EDIT: and really, I'd say all the patent discussion is moot. A patent is only useful if there's a market for your product. This product has design shortcomings that render it a non-starter for most applications, i.e. no master keying capacity, which makes it useless in any institutional setting, and a design necessity of using critical precision parts that won't handle outdoor exposure well, and a physical size that makes it incompatible with even the largest north american cylinder format. This is a product without a profitable customer base.

Yeah, it's a bit of a tautology. It amounts to "complex problem solving tools tend to converge with existing tools for addressing similar complex problems as their level of complexity approaches parity".

A) I think this is one of those jokes that has enough of a core of truth that it isn't entirely a joke. Murphy's Law is likewise a joke, but it speaks to a core facet of reality, so it also gets treated seriously.

And B) there's the fact that Greenspun's 10th Rule is written using just enough technical jargon that the vast majority of non-programmers don't see the joke, and therefore take it as a serious assertion. If he had said "C/Fortran programmers keep reinventing the wheel, only square shaped and crooked, while the round wheel Common Lisp already exists", they'd delete it as a joke.

Yeah, there's still value in Amazon reviews despite the noise. If you take the time to just sit there and read through them one by one, you can definitely learn things about the product. Obviously you skip over the trash "ya this product great, exactly what I needed" stuff. If you just read the long, multi-paragraph ones you effectively eliminate the fake stuff, because fake reviews don't get paid more for being longer. Long ones tend to have detailed discussion of actually product function and/or appearance, and THAT'S where you find the the product's potential shortcomings.

Let's just say the country isn't new to food safety scandals...

Yeah, just because I can't taste the melamine they used to water down the milk doesn't mean I want to drink melamine. I especially don't want to drink the chemical they later added in addition to melamine in order to spoof the melamine detection process and continue to sell watered down, tainted milk.

The low end of food production has some seriously determined bad actors. "Let the consumer decide" definitely isn't good enough.

we should mandate some form of this technology so we don't waste foundary output on throw-away parts (planned obsolescence).

That's not planned obsolescence. Planned obsolescence is INTENTIONALLY rendering a product unusable/undesirable in order to sell more product. A prime example is changing the chapter questions in a college textbook to force new students to buy new books that teach the same thing.

Things that are NOT planned obsolescence but people mistakenly think they are include cheap inkjet printers (they last as long as any reasonable person should expect).... or NOT including an expensive oxide layer regenerating heater in a THUMB DRIVE that's only intended for casual file transfers, not long term storage of frequently changing data.

Ans really, does it make sense to MANDATE a complex heating scheme for flash drives? The way drive capacity and usage continuously scales upwards, old drives would be pointless long before they died. Do you REALLY still use old 32 megabyte flash memory in today's age of terabyte drives?

"living charismatic leader the enemy can't seem to catch" has much greater recruitment value than "dead leader martyred, but we'll keep fighting".

I used to work in intelligence. "Secrecy creep" has long been a serious problem inside DoD. How information get classified has largely been left up to low level federal bureaucrats, people my father used to angrily refer to as "big haired women from Mississippi". Basically, they are low level federal office drones, with minimal knowledge about the actual content of classified programs, who re left to determine how they are classified. They start with the core information of a project and classify it "Top Secret". Then they take all the peripheral information of that project and classify it TS as well, just to be safe, because it might overlap with the core info, but they have no clue because they're a GS-4 clerk from Boogerville with a high school diploma. Later as more content is generated in a program, stuff peripheral to the previous peripheral data, which realistically should be classified "Confidential" at most, it too gets classified as TS because of its proximity to the previously over-classified peripheral data. Lather-Rinse-Repeat for a few decades and you have huge swathes of widely known, utterly inconsequential information classified Secret or Top Secret.

No one is saying they shouldn't make money. It is our right to gripe about it when they do so in an annoying or obnoxious manner. We might even abandon the platform if the advertising push becomes too obnoxious. If that happens and they fold, apparently they did not have a viable business model. There is no "should" about any of it.

"rare" != "unique"

I have a stack of old laptops 2 feet high, and my old Dell that frayed at the strain relief is the only one whose cable crapped out.

On the list of most marginally relevant edge cases, I think "beach proof design" ranks pretty high.

why not expand to not limiting your search to only one manufacturer

Software. People become accustomed to the closed ecosystem of OSX, which you can't duplicate on others' hardware. This is a key facet of Apple's business model and as GP poster illustrates, it works. Apple can screw up the hardware for 7 years, and GP poster will simply wait for them to come back to doing it right.

they will actually be more likely to follow his lead

Good leadership is less about convincing people to follow you than it is about being able to lead people in the right direction. David Koresh was highly charismatic and convinced a lot of people to follow him, but I doubt anyone would consider him a "good leader".

It's a great "mind-blown" insight story, but just not true. People do judge each other and have opinions and put them in little mental boxes all the time

Yes, we all understand that people stereotype. I think you're getting bogged down in the details and missing the overall point, which is far more generalized. The above story is meant to be short and clever, and to do so it glosses over a few things that you're meant to pick up contextually. The point it's trying to make is this:

20 year olds tend to think people are watching, judging, and remembering their every move and are concerned about it

40 year olds still tend to think they're being watched and judged, but don't care

60 year olds realize that everyone is too busy thinking about their own situation to really pay much attention to others beyond superficial stereotyping, and that unless you affect someone deeply with your presentation, they won't likely cling to previous judgements of you.

Atlas Air, ATSG, and the like provide the pilots and therefore the training. Amazon has nothing to do with it.

Not maintaining a foreign bank account is a non-trivial thing, equivalent to saying "just pay for everything in cash". In many European countries pretty much all routine bill payments are handled by direct bank transfer between local banks. The US banking system doesn't interface with this system.

I think the point is that if you can't install Linux running natively, you can't escape "undesirable behavior" by the Apple-supplied OS. For example, if you want to ensure your laptop isn't sending Apple information about what you're transmitting over the network, running a VM sandbox in OSX doesn't eliminate that possibility.

I'm an atheistically and scientifically inclined type, non-religious, without a mystically-oriented mind, and these types of coincidences or oddities always throw me a bit regardless.

Personally, I've had enough weird things happen to me in my life that I've left that entire thing open to explanations simply aren't covered by our current body of scientific knowledge. I'm a non-mystical atheist also, but I'm not willing to completely write off the unexplained as simply "coincidence" just because a lot of folks ascribe it to religion or other magic. I mean, what did people think of bacterial/viral infection 200 years ago? A lot of crazy mystical stuff, for sure, all laughably inaccurate. What sort of stuff will they laugh at US about in 200 years?