Patent law in Japan works different than in the rest of the world.

And your stupid idea, just because someone else did it already: is just that, stupid.

I know an anecdote about lightbulbs. One company (A) sued another one (B) for patent infringement. It was about the windings. So A claimed B copied the improved winding that ensured better conduction or something. Company defended by saying, close to the bulb we have this "rim". Our conduction is better because of that rim, we do not know anything about windings, we do them like we thought is common sense.

So B won over A.

Keep in mind: patent disputes and similar are extremely rare in Japan. Usually companies approach each other and try to solve disputes like that over a half a year of dinner parties.

Well, as I said legal words have a meaning.
Breaking into a car is most certain similar to breaking into a house, and similar to burlaring.

However robbery means: you use threat or violence to get an item a person does not want to give away.

So, if I hold a bag under my arm, and you snatch it and run away, that is a (mild?) case of robbery. If you wait behind a corner, threaten me and make me hand it over: a not so mild form of robbery, depending if you show a weapon ... even worse!

If I sit on a bench and back is beside me, and you pass by, snatch it, and run away: theft.

when you've only been taught whole words,
That is not how it works.

That is until you have learned the whole alphabet. Then you learn words letter by letter, but READ them as whole words when you know the word.

So, if you have an unknown word, obviously you can not read it as a whole word, but have to decipher it.

I'd imagine that figuring out how to do it on the fly can be rather intimidating if you've never even encountered the idea before No idea what that is supposed to mean. While you learn how to read whole words, obviously you simultaneously learn how to put them together as sounds. Otherwise no one would learn reading ... very strange attitude of yours. You basically learn: reading, writing, and the alphabet. Not sure what there is confusing about. The first 100 important words you learn as words, in parallel you learn the alphabet and how to recognize/pronounce words you did not learn yet. I for my part read half sentences "at once", sometimes the whole one.

but I can assure you from personal experience that even in a Sefer Torah, there are spaces between the words is that modern Hebrew? I was the opinion that historically they had no spaces, like Greek and Latin or Egyptian, or cuneiform.

The AI overview is interesting. I copy/paste it here:

Well, regarding Thai. Sometimes being able to deceiver the alphabet does not help. As it is written like it was incepted 600 years ago, and the pronunciation was different. That basically you need to know two things: the real word/meaning, and the ancient writing. Or you can not read it at all at present time. Especially loanwords from other languages. That is of course not very common. I stumbled over such a word yesterday ... but forgot already which it was, sigh. Gosh, should have made a photo or put it into my dictionary.

It really should matter. If we can just decide the text means whatever we want it to mean, what's the point in writing it down?

As clearly shown by the current hacks on the Supreme Court. "Privacy in the 9th Amendment? Never heard of it." "Limited government? What's that?"

The violence in the Middle East dates back to the early Bronze Age. The Shah was violent and assassinated political rivals. In the 1940s, half of the Middle East sided with the Nazis.

The violence did not start in the 1970s, it didn't even start with Islam. It predates all of that.

Blaming individual X or modern event Y is to ignore the violence and open warfare leading up to those.

Only an idiot fixates purely on Iran. One genocidal Syrian despot has been replaced with another genocidal Syrian despot. IS is back on the rise. Egypt is a military dictatorship. Libya went from military dictatorship to perpetual civil war. The Arab Spring was ultimately crushed not because of a hatred of freedom but because the entire region is riddled with corruption.

Iran is a minor side show.

In America, laws are made by paying the politicians under the table. That's common knowledge. It's how the DMCA got passed, for example. But it's also made by having financially valuable information information, particularly that which permits politicians to have insider information that they can sell for votes/influence or use to make a killing on the stock market.

(You notice anything odd about oil price fluctuations recently?)

Musk had access to money, some of the largest databases the USG had, and the ability to fire civil servants who might have been inconvenient to Congress.

He was in government for how many years? If he wanted the statute of limitations altered, then surely that would have been the time to do it.

It would seem to me that he didn't care about the statute of limitations until AFTER other people started getting rich and he didn't.

I was under the impression that an appeal against a not guilty verdict was not permitted in the US, and was only permissible in the UK in the event of murder when overwhelming evidence showed wilful interference of the trial or exceptional new evidence.

I partially agree with you, but would like to bring something to your attention. I would say about five countries in the Middle East have been formenting a great deal of trouble for the others, along with a number of terrorist organisations. There is no particular reason to assume that the Middle East will deal with one problem and not the others. Yes, Iran has infuriated a great many countries, none of which (individually) can do much but could collectively act.

We could well see a genuine Middle East Union of nations that simple says enough is enough and clears the deck of all warring parties in the region -- and may well tell the US government that it needs to calm the F down or face a few reprisals of its own. Of course, if it does, then the subcontinent will likely join in - India and Pakistan are closely tied to Iran, and I shouldn't need to tell you both are armed with nuclear weapons. This is something the US also needs to consider, if it tries to invade Iran - you don't need missiles to attack a nation that's on the same landmass you're in, you just need trucks and an unsecured route.

Equally, this is a war that has been going on for the past 4,000-5,000 years now without showing much sign of anyone coming to their senses. This might not be enough to push everyone else over the edge. Precisely because several nations with a vested interest are indeed nuclear armed, there may well be a realpolitik view that kicking the collective arses of all of the power abusers in the region carries unacceptable escallation risks.

My hope is that the current wars being fought, all of which are mindboggingly expensive and stupid beyond all possible definitions of sanity, have a similar result as WW1 and WW2 - to push the world governments into saying that they will not tolerate this continued juvenile delinquency, but this time decide to do something effective about it.

The world has become vastly more destabilised with the wars since the 1990s, and I think there's just a glimmer of realisation amongst some of the politicians that they might well have pushed their luck too far.

Exams are a waste.

Rather, you want continuous practice that is also continuous assessment.

But US methods of teaching are also pretty 18th and 19th century. They are not sensible methods and result in students who are more advanced than the material being penalised. The US obsession with standardising is a recipe for subnormalising.

If you learned whole word reading, you can read every language whole word.
If you know the words.

Hebrew (at least historically, no idea about right now) and Thai for instance have no spaces between words.

Also it is a silly misconception that people who learned whole word reading can not read letters and build up a word with sound, that is a ridiculous idea.

You must have strange unions in your country.

With Free Pascal you can compiler for all majour platforms.
No idea however how the GUI library looks like.

I prefer Dart, it is more C++ - ish :D

You never have to worry about someone turning off access to a book you purchased thirty years ago.

You don't have to find workarounds to get a book. They're available practically everywhere.

Text within a book will never change. Once you have the book, it remains the same forever.

No one can remotely remove access to your books.

The only real benefit to Kindles and the like is you can have multiple books on you at the same time even though you can only read one at a time. Until your power runs out. Which doesn't happen when you have a book.

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