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Change video cameras to blur copyrighted material

If video equipment makers are not required to do so by law, at least one manufacturer will take away others' business by not recognizing watermarks. This brand would look attractive to the MPAA representative who recommended camcording for classroom fair use. If they are, someone would sue to have the law overturned. The opinion of the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft hinted that fair use is the necessary part of copyright that keeps it from violating the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of expression.

Just because you can drop in a bigger engine, all-wheel-drive transmission, new suspension, and turbocharge a Honda Civic does not make these actions "features" of the car; it's not even close.

Sure, you can modify anything, but isn't the rating of a piece of hardware only considered regarding how it is when it is shipped to the customer?

Regarding jailbreaking and going to jail; I figure that if Apple had a monopolistic hold on its markets (say smart phones), it would definitely try to prosecute some people to make a point. The last thing they want at the moment is to have people being outwardly unhappy with their hardware as well as receiving negative press regarding their products (especially since image is a large factor of their business model). This might sway people to buy competitor's products.
On a side note, if you're going to reply to this thread saying something like "iPhone already has a smartphone monopoly," there are many sources saying they're not quite there at the moment, so check your facts instead of stating hype or personal belief.

Hate to sound like an Apple apologist, but there's not a whole lot to be gained from going from Core to i, and some good reasons not to.

And if it seems that they're focusing on new devices at the expense of their traditional lineup: well, sad though it may be, there's a damn good reason for it. 5.4 billion good reasons for it (40% of revenue) in fact.

You need to look into websites, there is no magazine that captures the zeitgeist of the personal computer industry today:

http://www.arstechnica.com/
http://www.lifehacker.com/
http://www.tomshardware.com/

then there are specialty sites that focus on very particular topics, but those are some good, general sites to start with...

To get your John C. Dvorak fill, you could go here:

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/

And Jerry Pournelle is here:

http://www.chaosmanorreviews.com/

Hope that helps

Ars has an article: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/why-the-13-macbook-pro-didnt-get-a-core-i5-upgrade.ars

You already responded to a post where I put up a link, but just in case others miss it and are curious, Ars had the story a few days ago.

These ludicrous lawsuits are already in jeopardy, as the judge has ruled they have to prove a valid legal reason to roll up all these John/Jane Does in one lawsuit. Rightfully so. I have no problem with them suing these people, but trying to roll them up into single lawsuits so that their filing costs and complexity remain low is abuse of the justice system.

I think you're thinking of Sears. I purchased a Wii at launch from them and was forced to buy a game and two accessories as well. Here's an article from Ars Technica about it. http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2006/11/6030.ars

Ars Technica wrote an interesting article about this almost a year ago. What is happening now isn't anything all that new. As several people have already mentioned, yes this is dangerous because these tools trade in extremely large sums. Slashdot even covered United Airlines stock dropping from $12 to $3 when the news crawler for one of these tools thought an old story was new and the tool proceeded to dump its entire United holdings causing a massive sell off by other investors. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/-it-sounds-like-something.ars http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/09/10/203233.shtml

I'm nearsighted, and have been all my life. I find it amazing that this 318 PPI display will look like 'crap' when I've been using 90-120 PPI monitors all my life, and none of them looked like 'crap' once they got past the old VGA standard. This whole argument is ridiculous. I don't see the Android folks in here defending their displays because they must also look like 'crap', since all of them are a lower pixel density than the iPhone and they use a sub-quality PenTile Matrix display on top of that. Where is the outrage?

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/03/secrets-of-the-nexus-ones-screen-science-color-and-hacks.ars/

I'm looking at a 27" display at a distance of about 18", and it has a PPI of something like 208. I can't see any individual pixels, nor could I on my older 150 PPI monitor. This whole argument that it will look like shit is patently stupid not to put too fine a point on it.

What the hell happened to slashdot. I used to expect intelligent discussion in here but not it's gotten so bad with rhetoric and 'taking sides' that facts and logic have become meaningless. I keep wondering when Engadget took over the ./ domain.

and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs.

Apple recently added an official API to access the H.264 decoding features of certain NVIDIA GPUs used in recent Macs. I'm sure Adobe was just rushing to get this out because of the zero-day.

Adobe will accelerate Flash video using new Apple API

If it's anything like PowerGig, there will be a little bumper that you can raise up against the strings while using it as a guitar controller. That will go a long way to keeping it in tune. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a tuner built into the guitar accessible through the game as well.

After a quick Google Search... Here is an article on Ars Technica that reports data from Gartner saying that Apple has 99.x% of the market share for mobile app sales. I believe 99% constitutes a majority. Of course this article is 6 months old, so who knows where Android and BB app sales are now.

First off, I'm pretty sure TFA is talking about the ideal case of human vision. So, for those of us with merely average eyesight, the DPI required to exceed the angular resolution of your retina is a bit lower than quoted in the article. Secondly, who holds their phone 8 inches from their face? I just tried it, and it's uncomfortably close. I tend to hold mine about 12-18 inches away in common usage.

Finally, this is one of (if not the) highest DPI full color displays ever brought to market. Apple is counting pixels based on RGB triplets, not RG/BG pairs like many OLED displays such as the one found in the Nexus One (see this article for more info on the strange way OLED displays count pixels, and the problems this causes)

They also claim a few other enhancements in the display, such as reducing the space between the display and the front glass, and reducing the distance between individual subpixels, but I'll reserve judgement on those until I get a chance to see the display on an iPhone 4 in person.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/06/apples-evil-genius-plan-to-punk-the-web-and-gild-the-ipad.ars

Combined with Apple's HTML5 demo site that shut out non-Safari web browsers, it starting to look like Apple is becoming a very anti-Web company... even more so than Microsoft.

I've been a Mac fan since 2004, but Apple has gone too far: They want to see then end of the Web and the personal computer now. They can go to hell.

According to arstechnica's keynote LiveBlog, Steve said:

Retina display has 326 pixels per inch ...
It turns out there's a "magic number" right around 300 pixels per inch. When you hold something about 10-12 inches away from your eye, there's a limit in the human retina to differentiate the pixels ...
at 326 pixels, we are comfortably over that limit

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/06/wwdc-keynote-steve-jobs-liveblog.ars

I do not think that many of their papers are provided on a "free basis" (well yes mostly they are):

Obviously, there's a tradeoff for faculty, in that many of the NPG journals are recognized for their high quality, and provide a level of prestige that may be essential for advancing a researcher's career. The libraries recommend alternatives, such as the Public Library of Science journals, but those have yet to reach an equivalent level of recognition. The letter also recommends other open access policies, such as following the NIH open access guidelines, but NPG has already taken actions to support these policies.

source

They submitters also get compensated (not highly enough as some would argue). In addition I found this very interesting (from arstechnica):

Nature's take

In response to our query, Nature Publishing group provided us with a public statement in which it voices distress that what it had assumed were ongoing, confidential negotiations have been disclosed to the public. As for the assertions made along with the disclosure, NPG thinks they're misleading. "The implication that NPG is increasing its list prices by massive amounts is entirely untrue," the statement reads. According to Nature, its library subscriptions are currently capped at seven percent annually.

Where did the massive increase mentioned by the UC libraries come from? The statement argues that the price increase seems dramatic simply because UC was operating under a discount that NPG terms "unsustainable." NPG claims that it's providing the UC libraries with a discount from list of close to 90 percent, and that "other subscribers, both in the US and around the world, are subsidizing them." Even with the new pricing in place, NPG estimates that the average download of a paper would only cost UC a bit more than 50.

NPG seems convinced that cooler heads and a detailed analysis of the numbers will see the UC libraries return to the negotiating table. "We are confident that the appointment of Professor Keith Yamamoto and other scientific faculty to lead the proposed boycott," it states, "will mean they will be in a position to assess value with a rigorous and transparent methodology."

same source linked againsource

If those facts are all true, they really should be fair to the other universities...but to be honest I bet both sides are exaggerated as that is how media works.

I do not think that many of their papers are provided on a "free basis" (well yes mostly they are):

Obviously, there's a tradeoff for faculty, in that many of the NPG journals are recognized for their high quality, and provide a level of prestige that may be essential for advancing a researcher's career. The libraries recommend alternatives, such as the Public Library of Science journals, but those have yet to reach an equivalent level of recognition. The letter also recommends other open access policies, such as following the NIH open access guidelines, but NPG has already taken actions to support these policies.

source

They submitters also get compensated (not highly enough as some would argue). In addition I found this very interesting (from arstechnica):

Nature's take

In response to our query, Nature Publishing group provided us with a public statement in which it voices distress that what it had assumed were ongoing, confidential negotiations have been disclosed to the public. As for the assertions made along with the disclosure, NPG thinks they're misleading. "The implication that NPG is increasing its list prices by massive amounts is entirely untrue," the statement reads. According to Nature, its library subscriptions are currently capped at seven percent annually.

Where did the massive increase mentioned by the UC libraries come from? The statement argues that the price increase seems dramatic simply because UC was operating under a discount that NPG terms "unsustainable." NPG claims that it's providing the UC libraries with a discount from list of close to 90 percent, and that "other subscribers, both in the US and around the world, are subsidizing them." Even with the new pricing in place, NPG estimates that the average download of a paper would only cost UC a bit more than 50.

NPG seems convinced that cooler heads and a detailed analysis of the numbers will see the UC libraries return to the negotiating table. "We are confident that the appointment of Professor Keith Yamamoto and other scientific faculty to lead the proposed boycott," it states, "will mean they will be in a position to assess value with a rigorous and transparent methodology."

same source linked againsource

If those facts are all true, they really should be fair to the other universities...but to be honest I bet both sides are exaggerated as that is how media works.

For me, Slashdot is still the top link in the Awesome bar, but it is being seriously challenged by:
http://arstechnica.com/ and http://anandtech.com/

It's a lot easier to make Big Paradigm Shifts when you have your own proprietary environment with the hardware and OS directly under your control. Of course, there's a price for having your own proprietary environment.

Though come to think of it, didn't Apple move to EFI and the same time they moved to Intel architecture? If the market is forcing you to redesign all your motherboards, you might as well go to the latest and greatest firmware. And before that they were using the Open Boot firmware that's sort of standard in the non-x86 market, so switching to EFI wasn't that major. So sorry, Apple doesn't get any points for being ahead of the curve.

This is a reminder that commodity systems evolved from the old "IBM compatible" PCs. (It dates me that I'm old enough to remember when IBM's decisions determined the course of the entire marketplace; now they don't even make PCs anymore!) The weird thing is that IBM never intended the BIOS to be a general-purpose bootstrap environment. It was just a place to stick ROM-resident I/O code that they thought would be shared by all the different OSs that would run on the PC. Hence the crude nature of the BIOS's bootstrap support. Like all the other early hardware makers, IBM had no clue as to how to deal with OS issues. The world would be a simpler and kinder place if they had. But then, Bill Gates would still be writing code for a living, and that would be truly evil!

where do you make this shit up? ever looked at the steam on windows vs linux article, or was that sarcasm?

How about this or this .

So yeah, I'd like an actual response as opposed to your imagination.

Anti-science bigot, meet the perfect description of you.

What evidence is there in Expelled, by the way? I'd love to hear a couple of examples! LOL.

Regarding denialists, I'm merely pointing out the fact: They are fundamentalists who reject the science because it contradicts their superstition.

I for one won't be jealous. We've already got that where I live.. http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2010/06/city-of-chattanooga-to-serve-up-150mbps-home-fiber.ars

Mobile usages are limited by available battery technology at least as much as processing power; and the former moves forward much slower. Process lead of Intel doesn't quite work the same as before in this case...

Sure, there's one future, unreleased, next year Intel product; as you can see from the article, basically "smartphones only", no Win for you or generic Linux distro (not a big deal so far). But now it gets interesting..."southbridge" has "system controller/32 bit risc" - would be surprising if that's not some ARM (plus at least another one in radio interface; that's already probably more ARM cores than x86 ones, to keep power consumption at merely acceptable levels; Intel just couldn't do it without ARM). Less efficient and more expensive multichip solution (and of course other manufacturers are expected to make this effort, for miniscule portion of the market...while Intel doesn't risk anything; but anyway, there are no announcements - while phones would need to get certs quite some time before release; Android players have no incentive to switch; Apple has none, either, considering their inhouse ARM team; Samsung goes its own way, their own SoCs; Nokia devices with MeeGo are an uberniche product - they will certainly ride on Symbian for a long time)

Plus Intel doesn't even tell everything - they show those nice power usage numbers only in scenarios...when x86 core is idling; when the "supporting" hardware (with a great help of ARM cores :D ) does the real work. Power usage when x86 is doing something intensive (using its "impressive" speed) is strangely absent...

It will be still probably around an order of magnitude difference. Plus ARM won't stand still, look at the progress in the past decade from, say, ARM7TDMI to latest Cortex.
Again - a progress constrained by battery technology; Intel offering doesn't help that, quite the contrary - their greatest strength, process shrinking, no longer works quite the way as before.

BTW, how is the i960 or Itanium going?

Funny the only case I can think of for a "shrink wrapped" EULA product is the AutoDesk case. In that case the judge ruled that the item in question was sold and not licensed.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/court-smacks-autodesk-affirms-right-to-sell-used-software.ars

Here is a linked copy of the Judge's decision:

http://www.citizen.org/documents/vernororder.pdf

I see you cited plenty of these cases. Oh wait this is /. where AC's make broad comments with nothing to back them up.

Ohhh, I'm sorry, I did miss that you talk in present tense about future, unreleased, next year products; basing it on an article with as sensationalist headline as they get, generally aping Intel PR. I guess that's what passes as "paying attention" these days...

Or...maybe...might look at one site with typically quite decent articles; which paints somewhat different picture.
Atom "for smartphones" only, no Win for you or generic Linux distro. "Southbridge" has "system controller/32 bit risc" - would be surprising if that's not some ARM (plus at least another one in radio interface; that's already probably more ARM cores than x86 ones, to keep power consumption at merely acceptable levels; Intel couldn't do it without ARM). Less efficient and more expensive multichip solution (and of course other manufacturers are expected to make this effort, for miniscule portion of the market...while Intel doesn't risk anything; but anyway, there are no announcements - while phones would need to get certs quite some time before release; Android players have no incentive to switch; Apple has none, either, considering their inhouse ARM team; Samsung goes its own way, their own SoCs; Nokia devices with MeeGo are an uberniche product - Symbian is their powerhouse)

Plus Intel doesn't even tell everything - they show those nice power usage numbers only in scenarios...when x86 core is idling; when the "supporting" hardware (with a great help of ARM cores :D ) does the real work. Power usage when x86 is doing something intensive (using its "impressive" speed) is strangely absent...

It's still probably around an order of magnitude difference. And if you don't see the progress in the past decade from, say, ARM7TDMI to latest Cortex...that's your problem.
A progress constrained by battery technology BTW; Intel offering doesn't help that, quite the contrary. Their greatest strength, process shrinking, no longer works quite the way as before.

BTW, how is the i960 or Itanium going?

Not a virus (really, this isn't 1998 anymore). But an honest to bog, real, live trojan running in the wild on OS X. Just like on Windows, it picks on clueless users intent on picking up something for free. TANSTAAFL.

then apple needs a desktop mid tower at $800-$1000+

Apple won't do this, it would hurt their brand image. Part of Apples brand image is in the price, aka 'you get what you pay for' theme. The price is higher to give the idea that your paying for a higher-then-normal quality item (even though thats questionable). Its like many other brand items, like Calvin Klein jeans (made in china with other lower brand jeans), many perfumes are sold at a high price to seem more exclusive, drug companies do this even though generic brands will be identical just lower prices, even brand name food items at the grocery store do this (they typically add a more salt so they 'taste better' and seem like they must be better foods)

...according to ArsTechnica:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/05/android-tablet-prototypes-not-yet-ready-for-prime-time.ars

"The performance stank. It was a stutter-fest (...) Resizing pages with the Web browser was jerky and uneven. The Gallery app stuttered a bit and generally wasn't nearly as responsive as it is on my Nexus One phone. And the Wired tablet app was just awful, running as it did on Adobe's AIR platform (...) In all, it's a genuine mystery as to why these tablets were in such rough shape. It could be some combination of beta software and beta GPU drivers--but really, I have no idea. It seems to defy the laws of physics that a Tegra 2-based Android tablet would have a less responsive UI than the Snapdragon-based Nexus One, but that was my experience yesterday. "

This is even with a nVidia Tegra2 processor, which should be more pwerful than Apple A4 processor.

Tetris company doesn't like clones

iPhone users hoping to download the free Tetris clone, Tris, had better do so quickly: the game is being pulled from the App Store on iTunes tomorrow due to pressure from both Apple and The Tetris Company, which owns the rights to Tetris.

- August 26, 2008

To the developers: pick a different game. Tetris has quite a litigious history
Or, more to the point... if you're going to spend the time to make a game clone, couldn't you at least do a quick google for "[Game] lawsuits"?

In fact I run Linux, and all software I run is free, under various licenses that allow me to make as many copies as I want.

Key word: licenses. A license that allows copying is still as much a distribution license under copyright law as a license that unconditionally prevents copying, the law is simply being applied with a different intent. See Copyleft

For example, the GPL permits copying, but imposes conditions on derivative works. If there was no copyright on the original work it would not be possible to impose any conditions on derivative works.

I suggest to you, that as a Linux user, it would be wrong to assume it IS copyrighted.

Then your suggestion would be based on a fundamental misnderstanding (see third paragraph), and could lead to prosecution under the wrong circumstances.

99% of Internet-connected computers isn't internet connected machines. Not all phones have flash and new devices are constantly coming out. There is no way your company can support them all compared to html+javscript.

Mobile currently accounts for an extremely tiny share of overall Internet traffic. One study suggests iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch combined are < 1%. I'll take 99% over that any day. (The market is shifting, of course, but so is Flash's availability on mobile devices).

Flash doesn't support screen readers "just fine", it supports two, are you really trying to say it supports more then html. What a joke.

You're comparing apples to oranges -- I'm not talking about static text here. Your statement is like saying Firefox is a dog because Lynx renders .txt files faster than it does. DHTML is basically not properly supported by any screenreader. So for something comparable (an AJAX-style RIA), two > zero.

Yes it does. Almost every typical flash file is over 1 Meg and makes the user wait before they can do anything else on the web.

Care to back that figure up?

To take just one simple counterexample: I load nytimes.com and watch the traffic with a proxy. There are multiple Flash ads plus a Flash video player on the page. Total Flash content downloaded: 163 KB. And no preloaders to be seen anywhere.

Except they don't because most developers use Swfdec and a video using html5 would work 100% with or without javascript.

I'm not sure what your point you're making here... with JavaScript disabled, you can still watch Flash video. You can probably also still watch HTML 5 video, though it depends on whether the playback controls are implemented by the browser or using JS (both are possible). So, what's the difference?

For someone who works at Adobe you don't seem to know that actionscript is ECMAscript with stuff on top. How can it be superior when it's the same language.

You might want to do a little more research. JavaScript is based on ECMAScript 3, while ActionScript is based on the much more recent ECMAScript 4 effort. This means AS has more in common with Java than it does with JS, including: strong typing, true OOP, public/private scoping, package scoping, generic lists, and annotations. JS is borderline a toy language in comparison.

You're experience in clusterfuck jobs using non standard tools means nothing.

There is a huge movement behind HTML5 and jQuery.

YouTube, Vimeo are switching to HTML 5.

• Thanks for insulting my credentials without even knowing what they are. I've spent years doing enterprise AJAX development as well as years doing serious Flex/Flash development. I think that gives me fair standing to compare the two. What about you?
• Standards bodies have nothing to do with tools, so I'm not sure what you mean by "non standard tools." But certainly AJAX was never a standard, and HTML 5 isn't officially one yet either -- so I don't really see how I could have been doing "standard" HTML+JS development in 2004.
• Flash is not just a video player. (Although even at pure video, it offers many things HTML 5 does not, including more codecs, true streaming, peer-to-peer (RTMFP), and adaptive-bitrate streaming).
• Just because two sites have opt-in, experimental HTML 5 video players does not mean they (let alone the whole web) are ditching Flash video anytime soon.

iPhone developers use HTML+javascript to develop their apps on iPhone and everything is being standardised around this.

Show me one major, popular iPhone app that is HTML rather than a native iPhone-only app. Apple has done a great job talking the talk about HTML 5, but until a sol

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/05/new-intel-ulv-processors-still-a-bad-fit-for-macbook-air.ars
"Because Intel is still battling NVIDIA in court over whether it has the necessary license to make chipsets for Intel's latest processors,
Apple can't pair these new Core i5 processors with the new NVIDIA 320M used in the new 13" MacBook Pro and white MacBook."
AMD is back by default :)

Also, this sounds like Intel wants to team up with nVidia. nVidia manages to put out something better than Intel, so Intel pulls their licence. http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/03/nvidia-countersues-intelright-on-schedule.ars

Back in 2004, Ars Technica reported that the PTC was responsible for 99% of the complaints that the FCC receives and was seeking to get auto-generated complaints (aka spam complaints) accepted as valid by the FCC. (Source: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2004/12/4442.ars )

I don't know if they're still generating most of them, but whenever someone is complaining about indecency on TV, it seems to be the PTC. In my mind, they're just a bunch of stuck up whiners. (Though they do seem to be for ala carte cable* so they're not all bad.)

* Granted this is so they could ditch channels that show "dirty" programs like Friends or *gasp* Family Guy and only have channels that show clean programs like Everyone Loves Raymond.

If you want to know just how the PTC takes 'freedom of speech' and twists it into something far from pure, here's a statistic for one year.

99.8%.

The one organization was responsible for 99.8% of all complaints received by the FCC. If you're ever interested in how that looks like as a pie chart, click on this link.

Gives a whole new meaning to the old phrase "we've received hundreds of complaints from one or two people..."

The following is mostly unopinionated and uses actual cited facts.

Of the total cellphone market the iphone is around the 3% mark, although I do not have a source for this. You specifically said *smartphone market*, which according to http://comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/4/comScore_Reports_February_2010_U.S._Mobile_Subscriber_Market_Share and http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/02/google-makes-biggest-gain-in-smartphone-market-share.ars Apple holds 25 % market share. Now android may be growing fast but it will reach a market saturation point. It is worth noting that at launch, iPhones were $600 and Droids were $200 http://blog.flurry.com/bid/31410/Day-74-Sales-Apple-iPhone-vs-Google-Nexus-One-vs-Motorola-Droid and they had almost identical sales figures in the first 74 days. Granted, that is just the droid and not all android phones, but as my previous citations indicate, the iPhone still has greater market share despite lower priced android based phones on multiple carriers.

As far as your data plan pricing goes http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/splash/plansingleline.jsp?lid=//global//plans//individual for a 3g 'smartphone' you will need the $29.99 a month, exactly the same as an iPhone data plan. Even with sprint http://shop.sprint.com/NASApp/onlinestore/en/Action/DisplayPlans the base plan with unlimited data is $69.99 a month, same as iPhone. Im not going to bother looking at tmobile.

Not to open up a flame war but I need to make a quick point on how useful the ability to tether, use linux and flash, I will keep it to a minimal here. I do not mean just on one smart phone, if you are using you laptop, you are sitting down somewhere which in all likelihood has (free) wifi, mainstream consumers(read: non technically inclined people) have little use with linux(not to fault distros like ubuntu which will serve most users needs but most people do not want to learn something new), and flash is a good way to heat up my computer.

If you want to give citations for your 'better' network, 'cheaper' data plan(inexpensive was the word you were looking for, which I still think would be inaccurate) and 'better' data service, that would be nice. That does not include tv ads demonstrating 3g speed differences, some form of 3rd least biased party, please.

Microsoft now owns and controls the netbook segment and they are doing a good job at killing it off. More specifically, they dictate what screen size a "netbook" has, what the maxium processor size can be and other specifics which pin the device down.

This claim is more than a year and a half out-of-date. Before September 2008, cheaper "netbook pricing" for Windows XP Home limited the screen size to 10.2", hard drive to 80GB, RAM to 1GB, and CPU to single-core. In September 2008, MS updated the screen limit ot 14.1" and hard drive to 160GB.

• Microsoft eases restrictions on the use of Windows XP Home for netbooks

Besides, Windows 7 Starter has gradually replaced Windows XP Home as the most popular pre-loaded netbook OS. Also, as another replier mentioned, Intel sets hardware limits for Atom netbooks, probably because they don't want to cannibalize sales of higher margin Core-based processors.

At least with our capitalist systems, we have Constitutions to chain our governments from being abusive, elections to remove dickheds from said government, and Courts to protect the citizens from abuse by one another or the corporations.

Of course thats what those laws are for, to prevent people from being abused by things like fake DMCA notices, , litigation that is more or less 'legal blackmail', and no president would invade another country for no reason and highly support crimes like torture for fear of impeachment. Isn't it great?

Why was the Google StreetView system collecting this data to begin with?

To build a database of open wifi hotspots for Wi-Fi Geolocation to add location-based services to Android, much like how the iPhone and iPod Touch use Skyhook to do the exact same thing.

Glad I could help.

It'd never work. A bacteria has enough redundancy so that DNA polymerase's error rate usually won't cause any issues. Linux is built with the assumption that data replication is flawless. Therefore, the two differ dramatically in regulatory strategies.

(Even though you jest, there is some debate as to whether DNA and its enzymes are Turning-complete or not. Obviously, at one extreme, a human can function as a Turing machine, but at the other, DNA & protein synthesis don't quite work that way.)

Yes. Pictures of women over 18 with small breasts are illegal on the grounds that it is "virtual child pornography":

http://www.somebodythinkofthechildren.com/australia-bans-small-breasts/

Drawings of girls under 18 are banned because that too is virtual child pornography:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/01/simpsons-powerpuff-girls-porn-nets-jail-time-for-australian.ars

Basically then if they want to arrest you I'm sure they could find something in your porn collection that's illegal, whether its a girl with small breasts or some cartoon porn.

Much like Canada they're very concerned with "virtual" things down there and far less concerned about real crimes. No doubt they'll be banning virtual murder and virtual dangerous driving in computer games next.

I am not sure what would qualify a benchmark as "real world" but this (some comments here) looks pretty realistic, and might be enough to give you your shock:

Source

The Mozilla development team released Firefox 3.6, codenamed Namoroka, on 21 January 2010 after some anticipation; Firefox 3.5 was a step forward in features but two steps backward in performance. As a minor update, Namoroka was a chance to optimize the last release.

So, now that it's out, did it alleviate some of these problems? Well, let's find out by looking at what 3.6 offers over 3.5.

First and most visible is support for skins, called personas. Firefox developers have been tinkering with the XUL format and they cite its power. They also claim that it has been under-utilized, so personas were a "natural addition."

TraceMonkey received a performance boost, caching more bytecode in RAM using the new "Stored History Integration Table" system which dynamically stores each JavaScript routine as an object in memory in order to more quickly access it during execution.

Firefox's plugin system also received an overhaul, and now lets the user know when a plugin is incompatible. Mozilla also included support for full-screen Theora and WOFF, the Web Open Font File format, as well as additional but otherwise unspecified performance and security enhancements.

Overall, it's a nice list of bullet points for the bump from 3.5 to Nakamora, but the fact that performance wasn't a priority already points away from optimization and to new features. And the features are actually not new at all, but fixes for issues that should have been taken care of during the initial design stages or other numerous upgrades.

For instance, Firefox has been skinnable for years using XUL, and personas are just a hack to this system that allows the user to use bitmapped images as toolbar backgrounds. You are not mistaken if you just had a flashback to Internet Explorer 3.

These personas also slow the browser down, negating any advantage from the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. One writer on the web even suggests that the TraceMonkey enhancements were done in anticipation of new-feature bloat. Talk about the tail wagging the fox!

Plugin incompatibility usually occurs when a plugin was written for an older version of the plugin system, which demands a question about the wisdom of upgrading the plugin system for Nakamoru the first place. But that's just how Firefox developers roll.

Now, if you're running an incompatible plugin, Firefox alerts you at startup and launches the plugin manager, a JavaScript-based app that contacts Firefox's plugin server and swaps all kinds of metadata in a frantic attempt to update your third party add-ons.

Several of the changes are plainly just developmental masturbation. For example, Theora is the least-used web video codec, with the penetration that the newer QuickTime X has. And WOFF is an open standard that Mozilla wants to support for political reasons that isn't actually in use anywhere.

So what exactly are Mozilla development managers doing?

If a private company with an opaque development model like Apple can apply the breaks and optimize an entire operating system, à la Leopard to Snow Leopard, why can't a public, transparent development team be bothered to do the same for something much less complex like a web browser?

h.264 is a non-issue

H.264 is 26% of web video now. 160% increase in H.264 video online since January

H.264 video support is everywhere. In cell phones. Camcorders. Webcams. Blu-Ray and HDTV. In OSX. Windows 7. In Canonical's OEM distribution of Ubuntu...

Hardware accelerated in Flash 10. Silverlight.

Netflix Now Streams HD Movies to the Web [May 18]

H.264 is a problem for Firefox that can not be wished away.
 

• The position of each molecule of neurotransmitter
• The position, state, and substrate of each membrane receptor
• The voltage potential across the membrane at each point along its 2D surface (to map the location of action potentials, IPSPs, and EPSPs)
• The voltage potential around the membrane as it diminishes to the baseline (the action potential is confined to a few micrometers around the membrane, and wire effects are important)
• The metabolic profile of the brain and its structures (emergent properties of higher organization and their interaction with the body)
• The map of synapses (the neural network)
• The state of the second messenger systems in the neurons
• The mRNA gene expression profile in the neuron (snapshot of protein synthesis)
• The superstructure of the DNA in the neuron (DNA packing & gene regulation)
• The genome for each neuron (DNA replication isn't 100% accurate, so each copy is different)

There'd be a ton of entropy if you wanted to express that as a series of bits... Heck, there're probably several mol of neurotransmitters alone. With positional information that becomes a ridiculous amount of information. But to be truely accurate you'd also need to take into account stuff like hydration shells, which just makes the whole thing impossibly complex. I'm not sure the number is really knowable unless you make massive simplifications (not that we could actually verify if they're safe assumptions or not). Unlike computers, biology doesn't use too many layers of abstraction, so low-level processes matter quite a bit.

Look H.264 has patents on it therefore it is proprietary. H.264 can be run within Flash SFW. The reasons Apple gave for not supporting Flash has nothing at all to do with what they said if so then why is Quicktime such a POS? It has to be an even worse media player than flash or anything else I ever saw but because it's on a shinny Apple then go waste your money and believe all the BS Jobs spouts.

H.264 can be DRM'd. It can run in Flash too. So WTF. Oh and BTW Apple is about the only data phone maker that doesn't support Flash. A lot better than something that fits in my hand. For what exactly? The only thing I can think of is hooking to your TV?

--Jobs made it clear that aside from practical concerns about Flash performance and so forth, the reason Apple is being so hard-line about it is that they don't want to concede control of any important APIs for writing iPhoneOS apps to a third party, because Apple has been burned by similar things in the past. How is that a lame excuse? You might not like it much, but it doesn't seem like a dishonest half-explanation. To me anyways.--

That's because of your being naive. And..that ain't exactly what he said. He's saying they are not open but because they are using H.264 they are WTF. I haven't debated whether it can be DRM'd or not. H.264 is just as closed as Flash.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/poll-technica-steve-jobs-letter-on-flash.ars

Again, Jobs makes the concession that iPhone OS users won't be able to play Flash games, but says that there are plenty of other games on the App Store. Get the picture. Also, some are not caving to Apple. Want to watch hulu, we'll I guess now you can't without paying Apple for something that was free.

What Adobe ought to do is take their creative suites off of Apples. They don't make that much from Flash anyhow. Go try to find an alternative for PhotoShop. See how many of you art guys stick with them when you are left without tools. Then Microsoft could take Office off of there too. Then Apple is not even as good as Unbuntu. Of course M$ will go along so they can run down the blue ray patent bandwagon. If W3C puts H.264 into HTML5 as the defacto standard, they are using patented tech to make things more open?

--H.264 is not DRM; DRM is not H.264. Stop talking about things you don't understand.--

You are plain stupid H.264 is a "patented codec" that can be wrapped in you drm of choice. There is nothing free and open about it once and for all.

Ars had a very nice article up a couple of months ago covering sector sizes in detail and the problem of the " 512-byte leaden albatross". Link: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/03/why-new-hard-disks-might-not-be-much-fun-for-xp-users.ars

http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=891505&p=16510422#p16510422 - a collection of apk (Alexander Peter Kowalski) trollspam.
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1046804http://www.thorschrock.com/2008/05/19/how-to-respond-when-people-threaten-to-sue-you-on-the-web/
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1046804
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=453001
http://www.jeremyreimer.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=4128 The "I have a lawyer and I'm going to sue the Internets" thread - very funny. Thee are updates on subsequent pages mixed in with the comments.
http://www.jeremyreimer.com/APKware/index.html screenshots

http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=891505&p=16510422#p16510422 - a collection of apk (Alexander Peter Kowalski) trollspam.
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1046804http://www.thorschrock.com/2008/05/19/how-to-respond-when-people-threaten-to-sue-you-on-the-web/
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1046804
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=453001
http://www.jeremyreimer.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=4128 The "I have a lawyer and I'm going to sue the Internets" thread - very funny. Thee are updates on subsequent pages mixed in with the comments.
http://www.jeremyreimer.com/APKware/index.html screenshots