I used to use Pinterest for recipes a few years back, but their recommendations sucked (or they didn't have enough content). I would either keep getting the same suggestions again and again or recommendations for meat dishes though I'm vegetarian. Now I just follow a few well-known chefs on youtube instead.
Great. Drug dealing may bring in money to but what kind of value do they deliver? Except staling content all over the internet, spamming google picture search and then offering click bait?
My dog gets bitten a lot (has a collar now) but why are you getting bitten?
I was told ticks don't fall from the trees, as I assumed, but linger in the grass and then walk up your legs. Stuffing your trousers into your socks should prevent most of them, no?
This is not so much a lie as an over-simplification. Anyone suggesting that the US did not play a major role in WW2 is foolish.
I'm sure that as a thought exercise, someone could identify a number of different events or courses of action in WW2 which could have in principle changed the outcome of the war. In that sense, there are many things which "won" WWII.
Further, number of casualties is a perfectly fine argument for "who sacrificed the most," but not necessarily for who "won" the war.
> Further, number of casualties is a perfectly fine argument for "who sacrificed the most," but not necessarily for who "won" the war.
Exactly. It's possible to have that many casualties and then lose the war. All those casualty numbers tell us is that the war on the Eastern front was far more brutal than the war on the Western front, not how strategically important the victory on either front ended up being.
> "If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war," he wrote in his memoirs.[1] "One-on-one against Hitler's Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me."
It's equally wrong to say that the USSR won the war as it is to say the US did, but the USSR unquestionably paid the highest price to ensure the Allies won.
'Only' about half of those were in Russia itself. Breaking things out by Soviet 'provinces', which are now independent countries: Belarus had 2.3M and Ukraine had 6.9M.
Absolute numbers also don't tell the whole story: 25% of Belarus' population was killed, while 'only' 12.7% of Russia's was. Ukraine, 16.3%; Latvia, 13.7%; Armenia, 13.7%; Poland, 17%.
While it's worth noting the individuals nationalities of those that died, you can compare any one of them to the US's .32% of the population killed to see the point I am making.
When a group works well together you can't find any single winner when they succeed. Russia and the rest barely worked together at all, but still worked together well enough that you cannot find a single winner.
Yep the US was an important arms dealer, getting rich selling weapons to Europeans. No argument there. It also helped defeating what remained of the Nazi soldiers after millions had already been killed by Europeans and Russians. Also no argument there. However going from there to say that the US won the war is unbelievably disrespectful to the millions of people who died fighting the Nazis for years before the US finally decided to play an active role.
It’s part of the myth Americans teach each other. All countries have their myths and the myths are always constructed to make people feel good about themselves or to make people feel good about how much better they are today. America functioned mostly as an arms dealer during the 2nd world war, getting rich in gold selling weapons to Europe, financing a huge boom in manufacturing that made the US #1 in the world for many years following the 2nd WW. It is absolutely true that the US played a major role in the allied winning the war. But not the way it is told in movies/stories. The majority of Americans, for many years, wanted to do nothing helping Europeans. While millions of Europeans were fighting the Nazis, giving their lives to defend their homes.
If parent post is correct, though, the "innovation" being protected is basically "we used to send signal over wire. Now that both endpoints have LAN, I'll send that signal over the LAN".
That, like many other software patents, is not "obvious is retrospect". It's not even "obvious idea at the time", it's less than that. It's just inertia. It's a decisionless decision.
But aren't patents supposed to protect implementations of ideas, not the ideas themselves? So then "keeping state between autonomous devices connected via LAN" seems like a worthwhile implementation, regardless of whether all the individual components were already existing in other technology domains.
Besides, I don't think that consensus-based asynchronous state protocols like Paxos were widely available in 2003 (and even so, implementing Paxos on a resource-constrained device like e.g. an Arduino might still qualify for a patent in 2021).
> But aren't patents supposed to protect implementations of ideas, not the ideas themselves?
This is the problem with software patents. The border between ideas and implementation is not as clear.
Strictly the answer to your question is no. Copyright protects the implementation, and patents protect the ideas. But where's the difference between an idea, and a design?
For software, what's the difference between a design and the implementation? Sure, you may actually have a separate design (and not "the implementation is the design"), but in software the step from "design" to "implementation" isn't "manufacturing".
Sure, even for physical goods, and their patents, the patent is often not sufficient to create a working system.
For those holding software patents, they have to also list all ideas they have around that. Because there are patent trolls who check for new patents, and then file patents around that, creating a mine field so tight that you cannot even use your own invention.
Analogy: you patent a laser pointer, and immediately someone patents all possible use cases for a laser pointer they can think of (point at things during presentation, aim weapons, exercise cats[1], project things onto a wall, stick the laser pointer in a handheld device, have a button on the laser pointer, non-chargable batteries in the laser pointer, chargable batteries, mains powered, capacitor powered, etc… etc…
Anyway, a comment field is not sufficient to explore just why software don't fit well under the model of patents.
> For those holding software patents, they have to also list all ideas they have around that. > Because there are patent trolls who check for new patents, and then file patents around that, creating a mine field so tight that you cannot even use your own invention.
This is something I never understood. When someone submits those type of patents, the patent officer most certainly knows the 'prior art' original patent exists. So why is this not patent 'obviousness'?
Aside from how the patent office no longer checks for prior art, but lets court fight it out, there's also the fact that technically these are not duplicates of prior art.
Technically using a laser pointer to exercise a cat is a new invention. Technically after that exercising a dog is another invention.
But even when not as obvious as that, imagine that you file a patent for the phone, and immediately someone patents every "step two", like the phone exchange, the ring, etc, to the point where you can't actually use your invention without licensing the next step.
That's one reason patent applications can be vague. It's not that they are not going to do the next step, is that they are patenting step 1 now, and are "inventing" step two right after.
Because the patent office now pretty much just checks if something is the same as prior art and let's the issue of obviousness or usefulness be settled in litigation.
Which seems like a missed opportunity for a service all its own: a babysitter who babysits while bringing the child somewhere, rather than in a static location. Which could mean "Uber where every driver has a babysitting certificate and the car has a bassinet and a minifridge" or it could mean "someone who'll watch over your child on public transit." It's fundamentally about the babysitting, not really about providing the transportation.
