Season's Greetings!

As the local fetish crowd says, Season's Beatings!

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Cursitor Doom may think that he is a Christian conservative and a liberation (which happen to inconsistent ideologies) but the depressing reality is that he is a gullible sucker for the kind of propaganda that autocratic psychopaths (like Trump and Putin) dish out.

Merry Christmas to you as well. If you have a free minute, a fun ssh destination for those with the spirit in your heart.

ssh tiny.christmas

Enjoy,

Daniel sysop : air & wave bbs finger : snipped-for-privacy@bbs.erb.pw

Thank you for the lovely Christmas spirit.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

... who proposed to nuke the Chinese mere minutes earlier.

Jeroen Belleman

For the lulz, here's Wojak woman's hot take on Happy Holidays wishers:

Thank you for the fun present.

Christians may be encouraged to love their enemies, but they are also encouraged to combat evil, and Cursitor Doom is a thoroughly nasty piece of work.

It was Bill and his fellow countryman Phil Alison who are responsible for me adopting the "Gentlemen" prefix to all my original posts here, in the hope that they'd both observe the implied wish that trolls were not welcome to respond. Sadly, it hasn't worked. In any event, I'd have thought Bill would have his time taken up elsewhere at this season of the year playing the pantomime villain at some local theatre in Sydney. A role for which he is, of course, perfectly suited.

He trashes everyone, even when it makes no sense. He must be very unhappy.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Yes.

There seems to be a lot of Christmas spirit around here lately. Trees, lights, people being friendly and driving nice and baking treats for their neighbors. Even when it's likely that a minority are active Christians.

Somebody left a $20 bill under my windshield wiper with a smiley note. I have no idea why.

People knocked on our door yesterday with a plate of warm goodies, ginger cookies and some sort of Canadian brownie thing that looked awful but tasted great. I plan to retaliate with bread pudding.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

As Cursitor Doom is a perfect example of the anonymous troll, and both Phil and I post under our real names, this is deeply ironical.

Cursitor Doom's command of the mechanics of casting aren't impressive. I was involved in a variety of theatrical performances when young, but never as a performer - I lack the capacity to deceive the audience, unlike Cursitor Doom, who has it in spades (if not all that convincingly).

Decidedly comic, coming from a perfect example of an anonymous troll, denouncing two people who posted under their real names

I don't even trash John Larkin all the time - only when he posts stuff that is even more off the wall than usual. He's a sensitive little flower, and gets very upset when he doesn't get the flattery he craves, and seems to think that everybody else who posts here has the same craving for unjustified admiration. It blinds him to those rare occasions when I do express the occasional bit of moderate approbation.

Then again, he doesn't understand much, so he may not notice it when it happens.

If you reflexively reject crazy ideas, you won't invent many good ones, typically none.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I've got three patents, you've got your name on one. Most of the good ideas I've had haven't been patentable - mostly they had already been thought up somewhere else, but quite a few weren't addressing large enough markets to justify the expense of getting a patent, and at least one wasn't practical when I thought it up (around 1975), but still looked original when cheap programmable logic parts got big enough to make it practical around 1992.

I certainly don't reflexively reject crazy ideas, but I had a had a lot of practice at working out which crazy ideas have had some hope of working.

Patents are expensive and most always useless.

I didn't want my name on the patent, but the company wanted to show a lot of patents to encourage investors. They got the investors all right: VCs who pumped and dumped and made $20 million or so for themselves.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Almost always useless admits of some dramatic exceptions. A friend of mine patented a better way of making a confocal microscope - he'd asked my father and I for advice before he applied for the patent, and after he'd made some $A12 million from it he did say that we had given him the best advice he'd got back then, even if he hadn't taken it.

That's what patents are frequently used for. The aim is to get people to publish useful innovations rather than hiding them as trade secrets.

The patenting process does test whether the idea is genuinely novel (if not all that rigorously) and getting a patent is a real achievement, though not one that should be treated as an end in itself.

One of my colleagues at EMI Central Research put in some fifty patent queries one year when I worked there, topping that particular league table. None of them actually turned into a patent, so it was all a waste of time. The one patent query I did put in did turn into a patent, but it was submitted because I'd gotten sick of explaining why an obvious idea actually was obvious, and exploited the point that it clearly wasn't obvious to those skilled in the art.