> While the US and EU patents around MPEG-4 Part 2 expired in recent years, until today there remained one patent still active in Brazil.

Since MPEG-this Part that is hard to keep straight, this is the MPEG standard backing Xvid and DivX codecs. So let's encode video and torrent like it's 2002!

Time do get out the old CD of The.Matrix.1999-DVDrip(aXXo).Xvid.

I specifically remember that my dad brought from work crappy projector and I watched Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix that was RMVB encoded camera rip from cinema. RMVB was all the rage on my 128kbps internet.

FWIW, Via Licensing listed this patent as standards-essential to several MPEG codecs (AVC/H.264, HEVC/H.265, VVC/H.266), and it's also listed for VC-1 (a SMPTE standard).

The openness of those codecs depend on the last patent expiring, not the first.

Of course.

> So let's encode video and torrent like it's 2002!

Let's have a meet up a Circuit City!!

I’m not sure how to get there. Do you have Microsoft Streets and Trips directions I can print off?

Given what this is, your readme could use a screenshot.

Noted and added.

Merchants almost never pass along interchange fees to the customer. Instead, it's built into the prices that every customer pays the merchant, regardless if the customer uses a credit card, which means everyone pays for credit card rewards.

Are you saying that in the US, there's no "credit card surcharge" line item near the bottom of your receipts to cover it?

Yeah, they include the surcharge in the list price and give you a "discount" for paying in cash (or direct debit).

Some merchants include it as a separate line item. But remember that taxes aren't included in the list price, so it doesn't stand out as much as it does in other countries.

Sometimes, not always.

> No. One charger. One cable. One standard.

USB-C being "one standard" is a bit of a stretch. It is the Unintuitive Serial Bus, after all. Most will charge. Some faster than others. Some will supply data with 2.0 speeds, others 3.0, yet others will do more. Some will only work with the other devices they came with. Few cables will tell you which is which, unless you have a tester.

There were two major flaws with the rollout of USB-C, none of them technical:

To have unmarked cables. This should have been explicitly forbidden by spec as non-compliant. Today unmarked is the norm, even with premium brands. And the few ones that actually mark their cables have their own markings (which I assume is because the official logos are so incredibly bad). So now instead of wondering if the charger will work, you’re wondering if the cable will work.

Secondly, the USB-C rollout was only successful on the sink (device) side. Almost all cheap gadgets come with an A-to-C cable, and chargers and PC ecosystems are very biased on the A ports for the host side. This created an awfully ugly side effect: devices are not always compliant with even basic charging. Since C-to-C should not have live 5V line active at all times, these devices don’t charge at all. I think they’re missing that resistor that tells a compliant charger to make it live. But in either case they only work with A-to-C.

Looking both ways before crossing the street slows you down too, but it's done for good reasons. Ignore reading code at your own peril.

Great example! You usually don’t look both ways if you have a semaphor though, so maybe all we need is good semaphors. I hope the metaphor holds :)

Is it really a 2026 car if it was made in 2026? (New cars in 2026 are manufactured and sold as 2027)

Clicked a search result that went there probably last week. I might have an account there, but I've never asked nor answered a questioned, nor voted.

Probably something no one's ever heard of ending in "Capital Partners".

What if someone has evaluated the pros and cons, maybe even tried using AI, and decided it's not worth it?

1% failure rate of a hundred might be acceptable. 1% failure rate of a million is not.

Isn't that a named law?