Algorithmic patents amount to patenting maths which, by very longstanding precedence, is not a thing, for good reason. Same goes for business methods and other stuff.

In the EU there’s only one way to patent software and that’s if you’re using it to achieve direct physical ends. E.g. you can patent washing machine firmware in so far as you patent a particular way to combine sensor data to achieve a particular washing result. Rule of thumb: If, 30 years ago, you’d have an electromechanical mechanism to do the task then you can patent the software that’s now replacing it.

Oh: It’s also possible to patent silicon, that is, you can patent your hardware acceleration methods for video decoding. That doesn’t extend to decoders running on general-purpose hardware, though.

If you want to monopolise your brand-new hash algorithm there’s a simple way: Don’t publish the source, use copyright to collect royalties… though that doesn’t mean that reverse engineering is outlawed, especially if necessary for interoperability. Practically speaking nope hash algorithms just can’t be protected which is fair and square because it’s academia who comes up with that kind of stuff and we paid for it with taxpayer money. Want to make money off it? Get tenure.

Just for the record, and context: That wasn’t misogyny, it’s not calling any woman anything (though using a word vulgarly referring to female genitalia), it’s the established insult for Merz. Really doesn’t translate well, not so much word-wise but connotation and implication-wise. Cf. the American vs. English vs. Australian usage of the word, doesn’t translate at all and that’s within the same language.

It’s an imputed high-school nickname calling him, in my reading, an immature braggart. You know, 12yold brags about their extensive sexual experience, gets called “pussy hunter” in return to make fun of him. There’s also the additional linguistic quibble that the word, to the amusement of the rest of the republic, simply means “face” in Bavarian and can be used there more or less in the sense of “gob”, as in “shut your gob”. He indeed has a big one.

Habeck is a realo, not fundie. Support for him among green voters (which is what actually counts, not party members, he’ll get his nomination because who else should they run) is overwhelming, very good among SPD voters, AfD voters hate him and that won’t change any time soon, CDU is where he’s going to have to make inroads. Perception-wise the problem is competence, blame that on the Bild campaign and I absolutely expect that to shift very quickly once people actually hear him in a debate.

I think activity spread out quite a bit. During the exodus everyone was posting into the same two and a half meme communities causing massive churn on the front page and giant threads, but now everyone has created and/or settled into their comfortable little corners so any particular portion of lemmy looks less active, while overall it’s larger.

Organisation is actually pretty good at the battalion level, there’s plenty of EU Battlegroups integrating neighbouring armies on a deep level – or at least making them acquainted with each other. Gotta know the MRE exchange rates. And that’s not counting stuff that you mentioned, like the Dutch land army being rolled into German C&C or the German/French brigade.

What’s lacking are strategic C&C capabilities on the EU level: There’s just too few of them, there should be more cooperation on that level (member states have those kinds of capabilities) which is exactly what the “EU army” thing is about, operationally. Although it has to be said that push come to shove, with so many EU members in NATO, everyone would just re-assign everything NATO to the EU should the NATO fall flat. Armies have scrambled into fighting stances from worse positions.

Macron could lead Europe, yes, but first he has to manage to lead France.

Back then, Germany was barely warming up to the idea of a EU military. Now it seems to be a done deal, the European motor is going to churn and Poland seems to want to be part of it.

The French want to expand the programme precisely because it is expensive: Under French doctrine you don’t really need more nukes to defend the continent vs. the country, but the costs can be shared.

Also there’s no way to get Germany to stop buying F35s without switching Germany’s nuclear sharing over from the US to France: Eurofighters aren’t certified for US nukes due to industrial espionage concerns. France wants to extend their doctrine of strategic autonomy to the whole of Europe, again, costs, which is why they regularly get pissy when other member states buy US equipment.

Hey I’m not a train nerd it’s just that nerds are fascinating :)

For anyone who doesn’t know: Ukraine uses Russian wide gauge (1,520 mm) as was standard in the Soviet Union, the bulk of Europe uses standard gauge (1,435 mm) modulo Baltics and Finland who are also on wide gauge, at least for regional trains (e.g. Rail Baltica will be standard gauge), and the Iberian peninsula is a complete mess of standard gauge and 1,668 mm. Which is why the Spaniards are word-leading when it comes to building multi-gauge trains.

“Mediterranean corridor” is probably specifically the TEN-T one. TEN-T lines are supposed to be standard gauge only and Ukraine is bound to have standard gauge long-distance lines in the future but it also makes sense to team up with the Spaniards to make sure there’s trains that can navigate non-standard gauge on both ends. Passenger trains are fine going from what Madrid to Kiev and then you change trains to change gauges to get to your actual destination, that’s not that easy with cargo wagons. Containers, sure, there reloading only takes a moment but grain hoppers and stuff you want axles that change gauge. Oh and it’s not just about gauges but also signalling (broadly speaking). Trains can drive on sight but you don’t want them to do that.

An IRIS-T costs on the order of a quarter million Euros and certainly doesn’t have a worse track record. This isn’t just about having other things to shoot easy targets with but US military tech being quite overpriced. And this isn’t even comparing to South Korea who produce notoriously inexpensive stuff this is German tech, with all the usual gold plating.

…also, apparently, eye-balling that figure of “several hundred” patriot missiles per year: That’s probably fewer than the production rate of IRIS-T (450-500 this year) and definitely fewer than next year (Diehl said they’re double the rate).

Very relatedly: If you’re a EU citizen make sure to sign this petition.

If not a EU citizen do not sign it, that’d be the opposite of helping, but do enjoy numbers go up from afar. Also you can spread the word that’s fair game.

To threaten Russia all you need to do is threaten Moscow and Petersburg. The rest of the country doesn’t exist as far as power structures are concerned.

Figures that I don’t like to go to bed late, I just like to be up the hours after midnight. Oh how the tables have turned.

The latest annoyance is that they will AI-translate posts and stick those into search engines.

a) how powered and for how long?

Might even be passive, a tuned resonator. Heck it could be a bug, IIRC ironically passive bugs are (age-old) soviet tech. Imagine sweeping the whole frequency spectrum for resonators with 50s tech they were a nightmare to screen for.

and b) why a chocolate bar if so?

Maybe the idea is to track people for some time to gather intelligence on trench operations? Most probably aren’t going to eat the thing right away.

Yes in principle to male plug, no to 240V unless the inverter sees a frequency to sync to. They won’t power anything during a power outage that requires the whole electrical installation to be set up for it so you don’t leak power to the outside and fry a lineman. Also that inverter attaches to one phase only which means that its power won’t even reach 2/3rds of your circuits. It does make the power meter go backwards though which is the point.

That said, ideally you’re using Wieland plugs and not Schuko so you won’t have exposed prongs. The VDE certified Schuko for feeding in up to 800W though and that’s exactly the amount parliament said doesn’t require a permit or even talking to your utility. If you’re doing everything new going with Wieland is the sane choice those outlets don’t cost a fortune, if it’s an existing installation though a) your landlord might not like it and b) electricians will demand more in travel costs than the outlet is worth.

So you can find things by “that spicy chicken recipe” instead of having to remember what it was actually called, or slog through a gazillion chicken recipes in your history when you realise that “spicy” was nowhere in the name. Basically stemming/thesaurus search on steroids.

It’s quite likely to be opt-in as I imagine ingesting the sites you’re looking at is a significant computational load. The translators are also opt-in, there’s enough stuff inbuilt to detect languages but not to translate, you have to download those models first. And they’re quite good btw.

Another thing I could see them offering is stuff like tl;dr bot. It’s probably not for everyone, but I definitely can see that it can be a useful feature for many people.

There’s already AI in firefox: The integrated translator. From what I’ve heard they’re looking into ingesting browsing history locally so that you can find stuff again easier.

They’ll probably still have an instance in the sense that mozilla folks with have @mozilla.social addresses. That’s the kind of thing their hosting staff can easily administer on the side, and moderation is already covered by HR.

https://www.make-it-in-germany.com/en/

Coming to study is possible but you’ll have to have cash to support yourself, vocational training is also possible and you’d generally earn money while training so that’s probably more approachable, if you already have an academic degree that’s a definitive plus, for IT people three years of work experience counts as a degree for these purposes. For all that there’s also the option to get a visa for the purpose of finding a job but you should definitely shop around beforehand otherwise that’s just an expensive tourist visa. If you, say, already worked as electrician or lorry driver you might lack qualifications to work here but that kind of experience will still count for companies hiring you.