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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • You mentioned the areas being countries. This leads me to believe that they are concave figures, correct? If you are unfamiliar, a concave figure is something that has a space that doubles back into the interior of the shape. So an o is convex, and a c is concave, as an example. Convex shapes are much simpler to find the area of. You can use a Riemann Sum as others have suggested. I would probably just pick a point inside the shape and do a bunch of triangles around with the point as an apex and the bases as two points on the edge of the surface, then sum up the areas of each triangle. You could even probably use a triangulation algorithm built into the engine to do this. (I am unfamiliar with the specifics of the Godot engine).

    For concave shapes it becomes a little more complex. It has been mentioned that you can draw a bounding box around the shape, so that would allow you to calculate it using a numerical method. Take random samples inside the bounding box and count up the number that are inside the shape and divide by the total number of samples. The value you get will be the % of the area of the bounding rectangle that the shape takes up, so just multiply the easy area by the % and you will get an answer that is close enough. It may take a bit to get the sample count right, but it will get there. Try to make sure the samples are as uniform as possible. You could even scatter the sample points then relax them for a couple iterations before counting to increase accuracy without increasing samples.








  • Indeed. I agree with everything you said here.

    Most of my quandary stems from patants at this point I guess. Copyright reform advocates are plentiful, but patant reform is much more rarely mentioned and IMHO is a bigger issue for progress and development of society. The anticompetitive practice of purchasing patants so you can bury them gets deep under my skin. There are so many things that have been invented, problems that have been solved, potential progress that has had the first steps made, that was squelched because some person/company with more money than civic duty realized that it would negatively affect their revenue stream. And instead of developing the idea and incorporating it to make their own products better, they just hide if in a vault somewhere.

    That all said, I cannot describe how happy I was when I heard of some rogue patant whore activists out there coming up with ideas for enshittification and patanting them so corpos cannot use those specific methods to enshittify our world more. I wish I had been able to patant the SaaS architecture when I graduated HS in 2003. Maybe the world would be a much better place.






  • Unpopular opinion around here, but I feel that there is a place for IP in the world. Yes, it is a flawed system that is abused by corpos, but it is also a system that can and does protect the work of the little guy. Copyleft has a place, FOSS has a place, and copyright, needs reformed.

    DMCA should never have been signed into law the way it was. It limited “free use” way too much and is now being weaponized by police to shirk accountability. Corporations abuse it by buying up technology which would compete with them and burying it. Etc.

    My fix:

    • Repeal DMCA. Full stop.
    • Place a requirement on patant/IP purchases that they have to be a material component of a product brought to market within 5 years of purchase else the ownership of the patant/IP reverts to its original creator with no recompense to the purchaser.
    • No transfer of ownership of purchased IP can be made without informing the original creator and giving a reasonable period for them to object. If they object, they must have the right to file the complaint in court to reassert ownership, which may involve reasonable recompense as decided by the court. Also, all clauses in current contracts related to transfer of ownership become void and unenforceable.
    • Any purchases made of patants or technical IP must be commensurate with the market cap of the highest level owner in the subsidiary chain. Nestlè does not get to buy the design for a new water filtration under some barely visible water brand to pretend like they cannot afford to pay what it is worth.
    • Not specific, but still relevant, to patant/IP situations: Forced arbitration becomes illegal and unenforceable. Everyone has the right to demand their case go before, and be adjudicated by, an impartial and uninvolved judge.

    I have had other reforms, but they are not coming to mind currently. I know it is all a very unpopular opinion around here, but I am personally an independent developer and I want my tools and the code I designed to be used for the purposes I have designed them for, and I don’t want someone lifting algorithms I invented and not giving credit or licensing it from me. I am one man who has a family that he struggles to feed, and I recognize that the copyright and patant protections are, ostensibly, there to protect my work as well.








  • Adalast@lemmy.worldtoGames@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    4 months ago

    Fair enough. I guess I am just so used to the way things are I struggle to see how a government payment processor works without running the risk of police overreach. I do understand that long standing agencies like the IRS and DoE do a good job of fending off advances of police trying to illegally obtain private info, but a new agency or new power for an agency wherein they have access to the exact purchase data of every transaction done using anything other than cash gives me strong pause. It would be trivial to put it under the executive branch and put in there that if someone uses it they waive their 4th Amendment rights in such a way that it is not unconstitutional. The police state already wants to push us towards a cashless society because getting the information is already borderline too easy and there are privacy laws in place to supposedly protect us from such intrusion. Taking out the middle man means I have to trust some department head who is probably a political appointee, and we all see how well that can go.

    Rock meet hard place.