I wonder why they didn't go with the IMF Special Drawing Right, which is used in many other international contexts. (Including aviation - the liability limits under the Montreal Convention are in SDRs.)
You can't just go by time zone names because there are weird exceptions, like most of Arizona not doing DST. Then there's Indiana, which didn't do DST until 20 years ago, and there are some counties that switched time zones when the DST law took effect... if you're in one of those counties will you just accept old timestamps being an hour off? Granted, this gradually becomes less of an issue the further we get from the change. But nothing guarantees that there won't be further changes in the future.
And that's just the US, there's almost 200 other countries each with their own laws.
Obviously there have been lots of other TCGs, but up until that patent expired in 2014, they had to either be sufficiently different from MtG to avoid the patent, or pay royalties to WOTC.
You very much can with board and card games. Monopoly was patented and so was Magic: the Gathering.
My question is whether this patent only covers specific game mechanics introduced in the most recent Pokemon game or whether it's broad enough to monopolize the entire genre. Because if a clone of the original Pokemon from 30 years ago (has it really been that long? I feel old) is infringing, then the patent is clearly invalid due to Nintendo's own prior art.
The ISA is only part of the computer platform, and the x86 PC is the only platform that's significantly standardized between vendors. There were several incompatible 6502-based computers in the 1970s and likewise for the 68k in the '80s, and now ARM is in the same position. I don't know if there's any way this can change, certainly it's not in any vendor's interest to make their products easy to clone, that's the "mistake" IBM made with the PC. And ARM is doing well for themselves just licensing CPU cores and letting their customers do the rest.
The most significant contribution that DEC BASIC made was the REPL-like "immediate mode" that lets you execute individual statements without having to RUN the whole program. It was copied by both Microsoft and almost every other BASIC implementation since. Being able to fiddle around with "PRINT 2+2" is so fundamental to the BASIC experience that it surprised me to learn that Kemeny & Kurtz didn't come up with it, DEC did. (It came from DEC's earlier language FOCAL, which had an "English-like" syntax and doesn't resemble BASIC in any other way, and probably ultimately from LISP.)
It did, but CTAN was just a network of FTP mirrors. CPAN was that initially too, but quickly got supporting software to automatically download/update packages and resolve dependencies, which AFAIK nobody else did at the time. Even Linux package managers didn't get that until a couple years later.
I find Perl 5 best for the kinds of fire-and-forget text processing scripts that are a bit too complicated for awk but not involved enough to bring in a "real" language. It's a double-edged sword - in a throwaway script it's awesome to not have to bother converting between the number 12 and the string "12", both numeric and string operators will work on them the same way. In a large project that kind of thing is just going to cause a bunch of untraceable bugs due to unidentified invisible behavior. Or you need to resort to weird hackarounds like "0 but true". Also: $_ is like that, only more so.
CPAN invented the software repository, and I'm glad it was there so PyPI/Gems/NPM/etc. could learn from its mistakes.
Every few years I tried an alpha of Perl 6, but it was always too slow and unstable to get anything real done, and it was always a totally different implementation from the previous one I'd tried. Maybe this name change shows they're getting serious now.