I am positive prior art could be claimed for most if not all of those. Square Enix could cry afoul of the “mounting creatures” one as well as I’m sure many, many other earlier games on a plethora of platforms.

You could mount and ride Chocobos in Final Fantasy 2, i.e. the real “2,” the JDM only one on Famicom, which was released in 1988. The aforementioned patent was only filed on Nintendo’s part in 2024.

They can, to use a technical legal term, get fucked.

And while we’re at it, a physical tactile keyboard.

I can do you one better: My GPD laptop has a charging indicator on the center type-C port indicating that this is where the power supply goes, but it can actually be charged from either port regardless of the icon. Both ports are USB 3.0 or 3.2 or whatever the current fast standard is this week, but only the center one supports video out via an external GPU enclosure. So if you want to use it docked with an eGPU, it’s actually required to not plug the power supply into the port that says you should plug the power supply into it.

So not only is the marking meaningless, it’s arguably worse than meaningless because in one of the headline hardware setups for the machine it is actually 100% incorrect to do what the marking is telling you to do. Wrap your head around that one…

But if they omit the symbol entirely, they save 0.003 cents per unit, but they will continue to charge the same inflated retail price for it and all their cult members will cover for them by gushing about how sleek the “minimalist” design is.

We’re not calling it that anymore. It’s been rebranded to “SuperDuper Speed USB ]|[” now. Note that this is a different standard than the previous “SuperDuper Speed USB 3,” and under no circumstances should you call it “SuperDuper Speed USB 3.0,” because there was never any such spec and pedantic nerds will climb up your nose in the comments if you ever utter it.

Recharging isn’t the issue, refilling is. The disposables are designed not to be refilled, so the manufacturer can turn around and sell you another entire one instead.

That’s always been my take. I would also much rather be able to easily refill the thing with whatever I want – and have control over what’s going into it (insofar as anyone can, via buying through trusted sources).

I’ve seen Big Clive’s musings on extracting rechargeable cells from these things as well. I’ve always wanted to give it a try, but somehow the apparently conscientious oiks in my neck of the woods don’t seem to litter disposable vapes everywhere so I’ve never been able to get my hands on any significant quantity of them.

It’s astounding that these things are made to just be thrown away. What an absurd amount of waste.

Fucking magnets. Saved you a click.

(Magnetic clothing buttons have already been invented. Repeatedly. You can buy 20 for six bucks on Amazon.)

Go for it.

Doesn’t look too tough. I’m quite certain I could print that out of ABS for you. Any color you want as long as it’s black (which is all I have in stock right now).

Re: the dimensions. .STL files inherently have their dimensions baked in, as drafted by the designer. If you print it straight up without modification it will come out at the dimensions at which it was designed.

IKR?

Cheaters who cheat rather than learn don’t learn. More on this shocking development at 11.

I see. Yeah, that could pose a problem.

For use in a vehicle I would definitely recommend printing out of ABS at minimum (which is what most OEM plastic car components are made out of anyway, at least the ones I’ve looked at in my life that were marked as such on the back), so you’ll need someone who can do that with their machine also. PLA and probably even PETG will deform in a car sitting in the sun.

I’m probably not local but I am a nerd, and my machine can indeed print ABS. Post the file and I’ll take a look at it?

Yeah, PETG or ABS/ASA would probably be my go-to. For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure basically all commercial plastic spools are injection molded out of ABS.

Where are you located, as in what country? That will probably change the answer a lot.

I would advise finding a local nerd to print it for you rather than using a commercial print service. For functional parts, it may take multiple attempts or some fiddling to ultimately get it right, which is going to be a massive pain in the ass if you’re ordering parts by mail and paying for each one.

If the US government bitching was enough to get the flight simulator easter egg removed from Excel (allegedly), I can’t imagine a similar stern glare from the Pentagon would not cause Recall to magically turn out to be uninstallable after all. At least from any US government owned computers originally so equipped.

Anyway, isn’t this only going to roll out on “Copilot” compatible PC’s with the requisite AI acceleration chips in them? I would be furthermore immensely surprised if it could not be locked out in Group Policy for corporate customers.

Nah, loot it for the magnets at least. Frisbee the platters, save the chassis for the scrap bucket (it’s solid aluminum).

And they had to work so hard to cook the books to make it look like it lost money on it so they didn’t have to pay out their cast and crew, too. Won’t anyone think of the poor executives!?!?

It’s possible just at the outside that one of the Waymo autonomous taxis could pull it off, but they rely on that giant sensor lump on the roof so you’d have nowhere to put your boat…

That, and every time I see video from one somehow the inbuilt cameras on a Tesla produce worse picture quality than a $30 Amazon dashcam. And why do they tint everything brown?