Patents

No, there are electrodes the manual mentions that might need to be cleaned if it stops working.

Everything I have seen alludes to them using current derived from deionizin g the water. And looking at it, and the cost that wass below low, it cannot be very complex.

I think it uses electrodes like in a car battery and when the acid is all u sed up you change it rather than charge it. It is not the same thing, but y ou do have to change the water in it form time to time. I forgot what they exactly said but it was like six months or a year.

It is only running an LCD clock, no alarm no nothing.

But really the thing is, if you can get a microwatt you can get a milliwatt and if you can get a milliwatt you can get a watt. Who knows, maybe one da y we can throw out electordes in the lake and charge our electric car.

If i may ... pfffft...!

As an engineer, looking at the protection that the copyright system provides to songwriters and performers, vs the protection patents provide me, I feel something is very wrong.

Aren't individual songwriters and artists in the same boat? What gives them "protection" is an industry that fiercely defends the industry's ability to exploit artists.

In medieval times knowledge and techniques were hoarded and were not widely available, to society's detriment.

Patents were developed to enable knowledge to be *shared* and therefore more widely available, with the originator being given monetary reward for doing that.

That is a very different motivation than copyright, so it is unsurprising that the protection is different.

As one example of the difference, one reason for getting a patent is so that nobody else can *stop* you doing what you have invented. That's why big companies periodically enter agreements over portfolios of many many patents.