ScottRiqui

ScottRiqui t1_je65jk7 wrote

The modern quadcopter drone dates back to a 1959 patent application.

The biggest difference is obviously that the new drones are battery powered rather than gas-powered, but the big characteristics (four rotors at the ends of folding arms, avoiding interference between rotors, maneuvering by varying the rotor tilt, etc.) were there almost 65 years ago.

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ScottRiqui t1_jbrmxmm wrote

I had that book - the patterns/sequences to solve the first two layers were pretty easy to memorize, but you got to the third layer and the number of potential moves just exploded. I never did get to where I could solve the last layer without referring to the book.

Surprisingly, any initial cube configuration can be solved in 26 or fewer quarter-turns, although that wasn't proven until 2014, thirty-four years after the Rubik's Cube was released.

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ScottRiqui t1_j81kwv7 wrote

She was in a relationship, became pregnant, and then the father "noped" out of the relationship. Single motherhood is not ideal, but what would you have had her do, especially considering that she was at least in a better financial situation than most women who have to make the choice?

And are you really saying that anyone (male or female) in a "busy career" shouldn't even have a spouse since they "have no time" for one?

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ScottRiqui t1_j27sjog wrote

Agreed - I think "Serenity" from 2005 is a good example of a modern(ish) cult film. It was a follow-up movie to a TV show ("Firefly") that only ran for one season twenty years ago. It had a $39 million budget and only grossed $40 million, so it wasn't a commercial success at the time, but it's got an 82% critic score and a 91% audience score so there are a lot of people out there that enjoy/enjoyed it. And you can't go to a con without seeing people cosplaying the characters or selling related merch. Who knows how much of the popularity is from the TV show and how much is from the movie, but regardless - there's still an enthusiastic fanbase ~20 years later for productions that weren't widely successful when they came out.

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ScottRiqui t1_ixxg955 wrote

This looks familiar - we had to have our original cast iron sewer pipes replaced last year. The house is on a slab foundation, so the only options were to dig down through the flooring and foundation from the front of the house to the back, or 100 feet of tunnels under the house to remove/replace everything from underneath. We chose the second approach and had 6-8 foot piles of dirt around our house for a week. Totally worth it in the end, though.

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ScottRiqui t1_iu7fx1j wrote

We had a cat years ago who would troll us shamelessly - she'd get all wide-eyed staring up at a corner in the ceiling, and when my wife and I would try to see what she was looking at, we'd look back at her and she'd be staring right at us with a look on her face like "hahah - got you!"

I miss her so much.

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ScottRiqui t1_iu2nkrj wrote

It was a trademark application, not a patent application; Harley-Davidson claimed that the sound made by their engines was distinctive enough to act as a "source identifier" to consumers.

A bunch of other manufacturers filed oppositions to the filing, basically pointing out "Hey, we also make large-displacement, common-crankpin 45-degree engines and guess what - they sound just like yours."

H-D gave up after 6 years and some litigation, but they probably wouldn't have been successful anyway - you can't trademark *functional* aspects of a design, and the "Harley" sound just comes from the mechanical characteristics of the engine.

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