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There are many misconceptions about the intelligent race commonly known as `elves.' Elves are the descendants of Adam and Eve before they ate the apple. Though they are often depicted as midgets, elves are not midgets. They are as tall as human beings, and the only apparent difference to the `man on the street' is that elves have pointier ears. However, they age 140 to 150 times slower than humans do. After going to school off-and-on between the ages of 600 and 700 years and learning several professions, they often land a job working at the North Pole Inc. warehouses around the world.

`Santa's helpers' have incredible job security; they generally hold their jobs until age 2,000. They then work at various human jobs for 30 years each, retire, and route the pensions back through the school system and North Pole Inc. until death at around age 11,000. (Yes, like all other creatures, elves die.)

When I questioned my adoptive parents (who happen to be my bio-grandparents) about elves and Santa Claus, I made sure that my teachers agreed that it was plausible. I stopped believing when I set up a homemade burglar alarm around the tree one Christmas in hopes that Santa would trigger it. Nothing happened. After seeing the Disney movie The Santa Clause, I began to form this alternative version of the Santa myth:

It would be physically impossible for one Santa Claus to deliver toys to all the children in the whole world in 31 hours, even considering Jehovah's Witnesses, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and others who do not celebrate Yule holidays such as Christmas and Hanukkah (or is it Chanukah?). The current CEO and Santa Claus, named Tim Allen, has numerous helpers of both races.

Regional North Pole offices and warehouses employ quite a few elves and one human Santa. The Santa hits the shopping malls and tabulates kids' wish lists. Elves then purchase toys in megabulk from the big manufacturers (Hasbro, Mattel, Nintendo, Sony, Tyco, etc.) with (among other income sources) the fines paid by the families of naughty juvenile delinquents, wrap up the toys, and distribute them by truck or train (the cars say North Pole Express, or `Norpolex') to other regional offices. The mall Santa then handles toy delivery in each town.

Now isn't that a bit more plausible than what your parents probably told you?

All you need is a little device between your controller and your harddisks, which replaces the serial number given by the harddisk with another one or even return an error. Such device should not be too complicated to build

Except for a little four-letter word: DMCA. This law, in effect in the largest market for such devices (United States), would kill demand.

Now, to take a different view, hardisks aren't licsensed in the way that DVDs are. That means that hardisk makers aren't bound to follow the coding standard. That means that you'll likely end up with 2 standards: encoded (E) and (N) not encoded.

Parts of the Serial ATA standard are encumbered by patents on technologies that are necessary and irreplaceable to comply with the standard. One of the terms of the patent license will most likely be along the lines: "Licensee shall manufacture only E drives."

Solar Wars is a clone of Scorched Earth for your NES. The developers (Chris Covell and friends) have released the full source and binaries for download RIGHT HERE! (You'll need an NES emulator; get it for Linux86, DOS, or Windows.)

Of course, you could also scorch your brain at Goats.com (not Goatse.cx!)
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.

QWERTY was designed to split common digraphs between hands. This reduces jams (which occurred when adjacent letters were pressed) and has the side effect of making typing faster.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.

MP3 streams are already compressed. The MP3 system is your basic spectral transform-quantize-encode system. To compress the streams, re-encode them at a lower bitrate with an MP3 encoder designed for this (e.g. Fraunhofer).

Icecast requires that your MP3 files already be at the bitrate at which you will stream them (normally 32 kbps). Shoutcast, OTOH, uses a licensed MP3 codec to downsample from 192 kbps to 32 kbps, which Icecast can't do because of some stupid patent.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.

You have your simpli-yin' and your simpli-yang.

-- Pinocchio Poppins

I think the aformentioned should be seen the same in the eyes of tax law; you get the tax rate of the state that the server resides in.

So what if the server isn't in a state? What if the server is colocated in HavenCo, Sealand?

Step-by-step instructions are available on OpenNIC's web site on getting your nameserver to support both ICANN and OpenNIC TLDs.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.

Godwin's law applies only when the Nazi reference is metaphorical (for example, he's a Nazi or the simile he's like a Nazi), not when National Socialist parties are the topic under discussion. Applying Godwin's Law whenever Nazis are brought up as a legitimate topic (and not as a strawman, etc.) is not in accordance with the spirit of the rule.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.

so you want to use chrons, do you?

Some people are just as crazy, except they call their chrons tims.

The Quake Done Quick people have beaten Quake in under fifteen minutes.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.

Some Sega Genesis controllers are compatible with Atari 2600 consoles, presumably for compatibility with the Sega Master System.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.

but wasn't Glide open source?

Yes, it was once released as free software. There was even a project to port it to DJGPP (a DOS version of GCC).

wasn't it quite easy to use (better than what was available when it was launched)?

Glide beat even DirectEcch 5 in just about every way.

It is possible to create content you know, you don't have to get it all from somewhere else

You miss the other points I was making:

1. They need to pay their staff to create the content.
2. The delivery system for animations is patented; LZW licenses are expensive.
3. Bandwidth costs money too.

Distribution of binaries is of the utmost importance for platforms like Windows, where a compiler does not come with the operating system, and the compilers that are readily available are often non-free.

So what if MinGW or Cygwin doesn't come with the system? They're both easy to download and install, and they're both GPL'd free software (based on GCC and other GNU stuff). Or, you can use the (non-free but free beer) LCC compiler. However, Mac OS 9 systems (that can't run OS X because don't have a G3 mobo and 128 MB of RAM), on the other hand, don't even have a command line; good luck getting GNU anything to work.

"Precompiled binaries"? As if there were some other kind of binary?

Easy. Basic bytecode. Early versions of Basic stored programs in RAM as bytecode to save space. For example, print was stored as a ? character on GW-Basic. Some systems even allowed the user to enter the bytecodes directly as a keystroke saver, leading to the common shortcut ? for print.

Another kind of nonprecompiled binary is heavily obfuscated C code used in portable yet proprietary "Unix programs." There are several automatic obfuscators for C code, to remove comments, shorten variable names, and turn keywords into line noise.

Yet another is the system used by many Alpha compilers. The Alpha architecture is notoriously hard to generate efficient jumps for; many Alpha compilers store RTL (an intermediate format used internally by compilers) in object files so that they can do additional code optimizations at link time, when jumps are easier to handle.

Rubbish. Believe it or not the web extends beyond the borders of your country.

Wherever there's Disney, there's perpetual copyright. The Walt Disney Company buys puppet politicians in every major country and, every 20 years, lobbies for another 20-year extension to all subsisting copyrights.

But that's beside the point. The point I was trying to make was that web sites have to buy their content somewhere. Not only that, but they also have to pay Unisys for a license to display animated banner ads, as the patent-free alternative only works in recent Mozilla builds.

why should an ad be there, I already pay to use the internet.

You pay to use an Internet connection; the advertising pays for the content on that connection. All content created on or after January 1923 (pretty much everything on the Web except Project Gutenberg) is under perpetual copyright; somebody needs to pay royalties for the content.

I've been wondering recently why ads in print media continue to be used, while "banner" ads in online media are universally decried as ineffective and ignored by consumers.

Look at your average full-screen pop-up. Now look at your average full-page print ad. Notice the similarity?

Banners are "decried as ineffective" because click-through rate (the most commonly used statistic) is not a reliable indicator of the effectiveness of an ad. I've recently seen banners that make no attempt to build a brand; they don't even give the name of the product or company. The real power in advertising comes in building the brand in viewers' subconscious minds.

So you want to replace all pop-ups with pop-ups?

No, infiniti99 wants to replace all of a domain's pop-ups with one pop-up to rule them all "on a per-domain basis."

Normally, in browser whack-a-mole, I cheat by pressing Ctrl+W (Command+W on Macs) repeatedly before a window has time to execute its EcmaScript popup code. If you really want a platform-independent whack-a-mole game, you should try Hampsterdeath, which works on Linux, DOS, and Windows.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.

I thought they already did, what was all that news about a while back?

No, the DOD didn't turn off the decryption on the military GPS band. All that was turned off was the noise added to the civilian band.

of all, books can be read aloud per the First Amendment

You mean, books in the public domain can be read aloud. Public performance of a copyrighted work is an exclusive right of a copyright holder.

and second, Alice in Wonderland is in the public domain

Just like every other work created on or before December 31, 1922. Works created on or after January 1, 1923, on the other hand, are under perpetual copyright in the United States.

Fuck you Walt Disney.

copywrite does not last forever

Bullshit. Copyright is perpetual now.

Because the person who created Mickey Mouse, the one who should benefit from MM's fame and fortune, is long gone, so who are the laws protecting?

Politicians. Every time Congress retroactively extends copyright, every senator and representative who voted for it gets a huge chunk of change from The Walt Disney Company.

All works created on or before December 31, 1922, are in public domain in the United States. On the other hand, all works created on or after January 1, 1923, and not expressly released by their owners into PD, are under perpetual copyright in the United States.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.

AFAIK, both ping and traceroute use ICMP (internet control message protocol). On most systems, the ICMP socket is privileged such that only root can use it. Some systems tend to have sophisticated access control lists, for instance giving ping.exe and traceroute.exe access to a certain number of ICMP packets per minute.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.

Look at the link in the follow-up post. It's one of those that fills your screen with pop-up porn.

In this case, the follow-up should have been moderated down instead.

• Next time, link "OGG VORBIS encoder" to your OSDN SourceForge project page.
• The compiled C language encoder for OggVorbis doesn't even encode at 128 kbps in real time; how do you expect an interpreted Perl or Java language version to perform better?

Is tacking a Copyleft (GPL) in the header of your code a real way to protect it? Shouldn't it actually be copyrighted and released under the GPL, et al?

Correct. Code licensde under the GNU General Public License contains a comment at the top containing a copyright notice, a permission statement that places the program under GPL, a warranty disclaimer, and where to find a copy of the License. A shorter notice is commonly used in interactive programs' about boxes and in the "verbose" mode of command-line programs. For more information, read the end of the GNU GPL to see how to apply the License to your own code.

I read somewhere that Microsoft is committed to interoperability with IETF standards. Jabber's protocol is based on an IETF draft. If AOL opens AIM to MSN, this may produce a more reliable AIM/Jabber gateway.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.

unfortunately, I do not have any points left

Come to Everything, where (once you get 50 xp) you get modpoints every day.

Motorola 6507 CPU

No, MOS Technologies made the original 6500 series.

The 6502 was an 8-bit processor with a 16-bit address bus. The 6507 was the exact same processor with two modifications -- a 13-bit address bus and it had no interrupt lines.

More Atari 2600 specs: The system had two 1-bit sprites and three rectangular sprites. It also had only 128 bytes of RAM and half a scanline's worth of video RAM. Even making Tetris is close to impossible, as Tetris uses a 10x20 field which at first glance does not fit into 128 bytes.

Also, what about those great TI calcs? Aren't they 8-bit?

The TI-82, -83, -85, and -86 use an 8-bit Z80 processor. (The Game Boy uses a Z80 clone.) The TI-89, on the other hand, uses the same 68000 processor that the Sega Genesis console and early Macintosh computers used.

my 86 has Zelda, Lemmings, Mario, Tetris, and various other things on it

Didn't Nintendo sue TICalc.org for infringing on Nintendo's trademarks and copyrighted character likenesses? If not, they probably will soon.

The NES uses a modified 6502 processor that loses the binary coded decimal instructions and adds on-die sound hardware. The SMS (and its portable cousin Game Gear) uses the Z80 processor, which has a set of rollback registers remarkably similar to the Crusoe CPU's. But it still wouldn't be hard for One80 to port the 8-bit JVM to other 8-bit CPUs.

in practice, most people don't write their programs in 6502 assembler.

(ICK! The language is called assembly, not assembler. Would you like it if I called the C++ language "compiler"?)

That's because most people don't develop for C=64, Apple II, or NES. I still write NES software in assembly because I haven't yet taken the time to get CC65 working and get a C library written. But handcoded assembly does give you the tightest code if you know what you're doing with respect to the pipeline (6502 has one short pipeline so it's easier here).

BSI's Everything 2 BBS is profusely linked in much the same way. But are you trying to link to Goats (a comic strip) or Goatse (the One True Ass Pic)?
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.

I actually applaud and am amazed that there even exists a GNU compiler, but then again from what I've read about it, its pretty outdated as far as front and back-end optimizations and intermediate languages.

You're referring to the GCC 2.95.2 release, which already generates code of the same quality as Watcom's. GCC 2.97, OTOH, employs some pretty sneaky optimizations, making code run fast (especially on x86). However, Alpha generated code is still slow because the Alpha architecture has never been optimized for inter-module jumps; the expensive compilers store RTL in object files and actually generate code during linking. Is this patented?

If you like the links in the article, you'll love Everything 2, BSI's collaboratively filtered, profusely linked database of, well, everything.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.

Speaking for my company (a games company) if we released a game which was only "fairly fast" we wouldn't last long ;)

When a game of Tetanus (a popular Tetris clone) first starts, it is quite literally running at two frames per second. Two! The graphics are simplistic but easy to parse. But once Alice makes lines, it starts speeding up until her brain explodes.

Some of us still want gameplay, not graphics. If we wanted graphics, we'd be playing GIMP or POV-Ray.

they're not an isp, they provide dynamic dns services

ISP == Internet service provider. Are you claiming that "dynamic dns services" do not fall under the category "Internet service"?

There is a difference. Fanfic is textual and static; most pop games are graphical and interactive. Fanfic would not include likenesses of the characters; game mods do.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.

"Gangsta's Paradise" by Coolio borrowed its track from "Pastime Paradise" by Stevie Wonder. Time to go get the MP3 off Napster...
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.

They should just do a 'clean room' implementation of all the skins and models

This is called "creating your own cartoon environment, based on the same character stereotypes that the DBZ creators used, and making a mod about it." This would work and would be legal, but you'd need to pay lots of animators. Character stereotypes are uncopyrightable (see also Capcom v. Data East), but implementations of those stereotypes in any commercialized cartoon (Draggin'BallZ, PokeMoney, etc.) are trademarks of their respective companies; trademark infringement is unfair competition under the Lanham Act. And don't count on waiting for trademarks to expire; USPTO trademark registrations are renewable for an unlimited number of 10-year terms, and copyright is already perpetual.

you can have one window be focused by mouse 1 and one window focused by mouse 2

And to which text editor window would keyboard input go? Mouse 1 focus or mouse 2 focus?

and I do have the choice of going to an ISP that doesn't use it

Consider this: DSL generally requires customers to live within 12,000 wire feet of the central switch, making it nearly impossible to service a whole city or large town. AOL Time Warner Inc., the cable provider, obfuscates its login/password to force customers to use its client software, which is not compatible with your FreeBSD, BeOS, or GNU/Linux system. T1 is priced out of reach of most residential consumers. What other broadband solution is there other than to pack up your belongings and move?

Lotus also lost a lawsuit against Borland involving Borland's Quattro spreadsheet (vs. Lotus 123) over the fact that Quattro had a macro system that enabled you to load in and make Quattro exactly emulate 123's keystroke sequences

Does this remind you in any way of the Tetris Company cases? Copyright on a general look and feel copyright is dead. But doesn't the Aqua theme remind you a bit of Dr. Mario?

Even if ICANN was to come out with a new TLD, it should be .parody . That way, the corporations can still sue everyone with a com/net/whatever for "false representation of their trademark"

That's why OpenNIC created the .parody domain. Install OpenNIC nameservers in resolv.conf (or the Windoze equivalent) and learn more at http://www.parody. (Note that you have to know somebody who has root on your mailserver to be able to send a registration request to hostmaster@parody.)
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.