RegalPotoo

This is a weirdly body-positive message for a gym; you can be fat and beautiful or skinny and ugly

28 megawatts at peak. Enough power for 21,000 homes.

bUt iTS soLaR!

Internet in NZ used to work a bit like the US does now with one large ISP that is also the network operator and gave exactly zero shits about quality of connections or internationally competitive pricing, except they got greedy and charged their retail arm half what they charged their competitors. Anti-monopoly folks got very pissy about this and managed to get the largest fine permitted by law, forced them to split their wholesale arm off into a separate company, banned them from tendering on the government-funded fibre network (which cost them literally billions of dollars) and then changed the law so that if they did it again there wouldn't be a cap on the penalty they could impose.

In 20 years we went from ~35th of the 38 OECD countries in internet speed and accessibility to 9th. Markets only work long-term if you actually regulate them

Yeah, pretty much. The way the rest of the world deals with it is by splitting the infrastructure maintenance and retail sides to eliminate the profit incentive to not do maintenance.

You have a company who owns a/the fibre network in an area and is obligated by anti-monopoly rules to sell access to the network at the same rate and terms to anyone who wants it. They have a profit incentive to maintain the network to a reasonable standard because having a functioning network is how they make money. In a lot of places this wholesale provider will be at least part government owned given that the government usually pays a good chunk of the cost to build out large national infrastructure projects like fibre networks.

Separately, you have retail ISPs who buy access to the fibre network (or 4g, satellite, ...) and sell it to the public along with value adds like tech support, IP addresses, peering agreement etc.

It's never work in the US because holding private companies accountable for how they spend public money and maintaining well regulated competitive markets is communism or something.

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

If you follow it, you quickly end up with the Infinite Improbability Drive from The Hitchhikers Guide - if you have an infinite number of typewriters, an infinite number of them will be loaded with paper that already has the complete works of Shakespeare written on it

Planes rarely reverse into mountains.

And the survival statistics have a lot to do with the amount of work that has been put into making the worst case "controlled descent into terrain" scenario exceptionally rare.

Something like

!"A line with exactly 0 or 1 characters, or a line with a sequence of 1 or 3 or more characters, repeated at least twice"!<

Syntactically valid Perl

"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