RegalPotoo

That's probably an impossible task - getting enough people who are experts in every possible field enough to judge novelty and innovativeness wouldn't be feasible.

An alternative is the way the Dutch assess patents - they don't, and grant them automatically on filing, but that means you remove the assumption that they are valid on their face if they get challenged

Unfortunately, the way patent suits work it could be enormously expensive to defend something like this, even when the patent is clearly bad.

You'd be arguing that the patent is invalid to start with, but the court would probably start from the position that you are actually infringing a valid patent (it was granted after all), and grant an injunction to prevent further harm ("stop giving people the software until we can work out if there is any merit to your claim that you aren't infringing"). You then need to put together a case to show the prior art, and you can bet that they'd contest every single point. This whole process could take years, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that you won't get back even if you win - there isn't really a provision to recover costs in patent cases because there is the assumption that every claim is made in good faith

Not in the US; in NZ most houses will have a "wash tub" - essentially a sink in a metal cabinet specifically for doing "dirty" jobs like laundry. That will have water hookups for the washer, so that goes next to it where there is space, then the dryer will do next to that or on top of the washer.

The last few places I've lived in have all had the tub in a corner with space on its left, so it's been dryer, washer, tub. Annoying, my dryer door opens to the right and the washer to the left, so it's harder than it should be to move clothes between them

If you follow it, you quickly end up with the Infinite Improbability Drive from The Hitchhikers Guide - if you have an infinite number of typewriters, an infinite number of them will be loaded with paper that already has the complete works of Shakespeare written on it

Planes rarely reverse into mountains.

And the survival statistics have a lot to do with the amount of work that has been put into making the worst case "controlled descent into terrain" scenario exceptionally rare.

Something like

!"A line with exactly 0 or 1 characters, or a line with a sequence of 1 or 3 or more characters, repeated at least twice"!<

Syntactically valid Perl

Yeah, the machine turns off automatically at 3:15pm if I don't override it, cos otherwise that's a fast track to zero sleep

"Doctor" is a title you become entitled to use by virtue of holding a PhD - you have the option to use it, but nothing compels you to do so if you don't want to.

Note that the reverse isn't true - representing yourself as holding a doctorate when you don't can be a fairly serious crime - if you did for the purposes of getting money from some, then it's probably some kind of fraud

Oh man that's rough, I'm sorry you've not had that. I hope you've managed to find other opportunities to spend time with family or do things that you enjoy

• Back up your data now
• Reseat the cables for the drive
• Run a self test on the drive - smartctl -t long - if it doesn't pass, then the drive is trash. If it does, then it might limp along a bit longer before catastrophically failing

Illegally smol