Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47126779

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

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.

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.

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!"

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

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

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.

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, 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.

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?