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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • There’s the smell of dogs, then there’s the smell of infrequently bathed dogs.

    Cats and dogs are very much the same in that non-owners usually can walk into an owner’s house and know there’s a cat or dog there. It’s, not necessarily a bad smell, buts there.

    The same way that I can tell if a specific coworker was hoteling in the office. She gets her perfume from Claire’s (yes, the same strawberry-bliss or whatever it’s called from middle school…).

    Infrequently bathed dogs, however is another story.





  • The basic concept is easy, the implementation details are not.

    Coding a slicer to stagger layer lines is definitely tedious, and frustrating. But in that case, the patent doesn’t patent brick-layering techniques. It patents a specific technique of achieving that.

    But when they’re supposed to judge “non-obviousness” it’s a bit more than just “is it simple”. the question is, would somebody else see it as obvious (if they had never looked at your work,). staggered layers are obvious. Anyone with any amount of experience in structural engineering would be like “Well, yeah”.

    Now this is where the non-obvious gets fun. If any one whose reasonably knowledgeable in the system would follow the same technique you used. there has to be something “special” about it. And since the patent itself is based on significant past work; the argument could be made that anyone following that past work would arrive at the same techniques should be okay. (Except they’re patent trolls and patent law lobbyists for said trolls have fucked everything over.)

    there’s a second caveat here that’s worth mentioning. you can lose your patents if you don’t exploit them. as far as I know there’s no slicer- paid or otherwise- using their patent.








  • oh, it’s definitely standardized, no doubt. But people are people, and some of them are going to call out as it’s familiar to them, and in some sort of urgent response… you’re not going to get too confused at the German guy reading off grid coordinates as ‘24-Richard Wilhelm Theodor…’ to get to a particular random stretch of the Atlantic. (using the MGRS coordinates. 24RWT)

    but most of my point was that’s not an actual language; you’re still going to have to designate some language as the common language- and get enough understanding to at least be functional in that. it seems logical to just pick one… but, uh… well. humans aren’t very logical.




  • Good god no. Conjugation is bad enough in English. You don’t want know what my latin grammar is like.

    For the record the phonetic alphabet isn’t language and I’m pretty sure there’s slight differences between regions/languages. (Alpha, Able, Apple; for example,)

    It’s just a way to spell out letters for clarity over radio. The idea is to create extra syllables in the letters using “familiar” words so that if static or something comes across, you can piece it together; also, “a” is easily confused for “way” or “say” or “may”, and such.


  • Latin was the market language of Rome, and commanders/generals would have issued orders and received reports written in Latin.

    Most soldiers would have spoken it, including the local auxiliaries that were conscripted. (Or at least a pidgin version of it.)

    Even if the conscripts would speak whatever amongst themselves, they’d have understood Latin. (It’s also very likely that foreigners brought into the province would pickup at least a pidgin version of the local language.)

    To clarify, this would be like the French foreign legion not speaking French. (The do. Maybe not natively, but French language skills are necessary for conscription.)

    The issue at hand is that the EU is not an empire, it’s an economic alliance of sovereign countries each with whatever language they happen to speak. For an empire, it’s easy to dictate things like “Latin is the official language, all business is conducted in Latin.”