The modern epistemic culture of research, like all cultures, is the apex of the form and cannot be improved upon &tc. From this glorious pinnacle surely there could be no blind spots, epistemological or actual. Everything I see through the perfect lens of the culture I belong to belongs to the culture I belong to, from which even an illiterate buffoon could extrapolate .... a swan.

What you just described - making a new product by slightly altering an existing one - happens in the food world all the time with no legal issues at all.
What you didn't describe but probably intended to - copying a bread recipe - also happens all the time with no legal issues at all. When either of these things happen, the baker is thrilled. Some of them actually publish books helping you infringe on their own products!
In short, your metaphor fails to map to the primary event in every way possible. Please stick to car metaphors in the future. It's traditional.

This isn't the USA. This is Massachusetts. We have lots of traffic circles up here and generally know how to use them.

Everybody thinks they know what restaurants do.
This is why so many otherwise smart people get into the restaurant business and then fail.

Forget the word restaurant.
Instead, think highly competitive, low volume, high mix, low margin, short lead-time manufacturing.
Think highly perishable inventory.

Accurate inventory, accurate predictions of future demand, and data driven product design make all the difference between success and failure.

Data collection and analysis is what really successful restaurants do. Or did you really think it was like Top Chef?

The purpose of a patent is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts". (Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution)

Since sitting on a patent cannot possibly promote progress of any sort, doing so ~should~ invalidate the patent.

Facts are slippery little things. Given any restrictions you like I can construct a test that guarantees the electoral result I prefer. In fact, it would be difficult not to, even by accident.

Ownership requires stewardship. It is a responsibility that the old aristocracy understood, but the new aristocracy seems to think the government should do for them at no cost.

Just heat the child up to above the Curie temperature of the magnets and they will fall right off!

1. false equivalency. The fraud involved there is quantitatively and qualitatively worse.
2. irrelevant. Illegal and immoral behavior in one country does not make it OK in another.

until morale improves!

Oh, God, the foodies are posting on /. now. ...with the annoying pizza "must be cooked in a brick oven with exotic hardwoods in Brooklyn by a monk until it has burned spots all over it and then we throw arugula at it but we don't even say arugula anymore, we call it 'rocket' like the Brits, 'cause we're hip like that. Yeah, pizza needs to be super, super thin, and crispy as a stale matza with one teaspoon of sauce made exclusively from Amish Brandywine tomatoes topped with a few haphazard shavings of Piave, 'cause mozzarella is so over." Bullshit. Pizza is bread, not cracker. Pizza is no place for minimalism and a Spartan aesthetic.... load up the sauce and toppings, and run that shit through a regular stainless steel oven. Why on earth would I want a pizza that reeked of burned tree? And the big burned bubbles on you pizza? disgusting, and inedible. Not cool.

Seriously. Most of the kids coming up in real-stuff engineering these days have no idea who HP is, but they all know Agilent. That said, if Agilent doesn't start really competing with the stuff NI is coming up with they may end up a niche player. GPIB (aka HPIB aka IEEE-488) doesn't rule the instrumentation market anymore.

That comment is about variance, not expected value. EV/ticket is the same whether you buy one ticket or one million tickets.

Rule 34

Wake up!
You are a cost center.
You exist only to enable productive people to produce more efficiently.
You aren't in charge of anything.
You work for us.
Continue to annoy us and you will be replaced.
Just like the guy in the tool room that used to guard the pin gauges and the hammers like he owned them.
And the facilities guy who refused to add a 30 Amp circuit or run a Nitrogen line.
The IT support model that treats everyone like a serf doing word processing is over.
The design engineers need nonstandard hardware to do modeling. They might even need multiple computers.
In fact every individual user has specific and unusual needs that they understand better than you do.
And it's Not your call. Make it happen or go extinct. Computers aren't a new special thing anymore.
Many of us users understand every aspect of your network as well or better than you do,
we just have better things to do.
Things that are central to the business and make money.
Hey, this is your turf, and I understand that change is hard, and that you need to grumble, bitch, rant, whatever.
get it all out. It won't change anything though.