US patents expire after 20 years.
Mechanismatic
Yeah, that is a pattern I've seen. I grew up having to troubleshoot stuff offline just to get a modem on PC to work on dialup to get to a BBS or CompuServe or editing mods for computer games, whereas my Mac friends were mostly playing with artistic programs on Mac. I also used artistic software on PC but that too required more skill. I don't recall seeing them deal with a command line interface whereas most of my earliest games ran in DOS.
Weird. I was thinking the post was saying Mac kids were less digitally literate because of the whole "it just works" culture. When I ran a help desk, the Mac users were definitely less adept. The pattern seems to continue with iPhone and Android users I encounter today.
I tried, but I just can't go back and play Oblivion after playing Skyrim with all the quality of life mods. I'm waiting on the Skyblivion release to revisit it.
35-40 You realize you've spent so much time trying to level up that you haven't done any of the fun quests and crafting you really wanted to do, so you start focusing on those.
40-45 You look around and realize you've somehow managed to accrue skills and experience and loot and feel cringingly compelled to give advice to other players who are newer to the game. "When I was your level..."
Technically, you could say we're the ones who set since it's the Earth's rotation causing the change.
"Okay, I switched to Linux, now I'm getting this error message: _______."
"Install ______."
"It gives me this error now: ______."
"You have to update the _____ library first."
"It won't let me."
"You have to use sudo."
"It tells me to clone the git via the command line, but git says verifying login from command line isn't supported any more."
"You're following seven year old instructions."
"They're the only instructions I can find."
"You should switch to this other flavor of Linux."
Still pretty common today.