Slashdot Mirror

I'd like to see a responsibility system put in place. Something like Stackexchange where it is easy to have an account, but you have to earn privileges to post or comment

According to this walkthrough of Stack Exchange, you first earn 10 by improving formatting or grammar in five posts. This gives "participate in meta", allowing you to ask for clarification of a site's scope, and "remove new user restrictions", allowing you to cite sources in questions and answers, provide screenshots in questions and answers if necessary, and answer protected questions. Then you earn 40 more by providing useful answers to a couple questions. This gives "comment everywhere".

In your vision of ResponsibleTube, how would a new user go about earning enough points to comment? Would initial reputation be based on an invite tree (like the field trials of Orkut, Gmail, and Google+), a valid enrollment in higher education (like the field trial of Facebook), a valid subscription to mobile phone service (like Yahoo! and current Gmail), or a months-long waitlist (like Google Contributor)?

Perhaps you could demonstrate the difficulty of building a cross-GCC by phrasing your rant in the form of a good Stack Overflow question. Explain what you are trying to do, what web search queries you used, what you tried, what you expected, and what each failure looked like. If they are in fact "beginner problems", getting the question onto SO should eventually help future web searchers find the answer more easily. Or if Stack Overflow scares you, you might try looking at how it was done in devkitARM.

For line numbers in an M4 script, have you tried adding --synclines ?

If error messages from some compiler or interpreter are unhelpful, have you tried filing bugs against said compiler or interpreter to improve the usefulness of its error messages?

I'm a bicyclist, and I have two tips that may help. First, it's not weight as much as metal surface area. So if you can see the crack in the road where the induction loop is buried, try making a chord with your bike, placing both wheels directly over the loop.

The second tip is a bit of argumentum ad nauseam. Every time you have to wait at least five minutes, report the offending intersection to the city. If on or crossing a state highway, also report it to the state. If they're anything like Indiana, they'll eventually get the hint and enact a dead red law that allows treating an induction-loop-actuated red light as a flashing red after two minutes of failure to detect.

At this point I think tepples wants to summon APK. You can tell by this page on his web site.

Who would want an x-box anyway?

To play games that are exclusive to an Xbox platform or games that are released on Xbox and PlayStation platforms but not PC. Or because a video game console can be cheaper and easier to operate than a comparable gaming PC.

Pirating software means having to make a bit-for-bit copy with enough changes that it runs without DRM.

The video game Mino was not a bit-for-bit copy of Tetris but was still ruled pirated.

Then why isn't your build system written in the same language?

If I'm writing firmware for a microcontroller based on the MOS Technology 6502 architecture, I don't especially think writing the build system in 6502 assembly would be the best choice. That's why I use mostly Make and Python for my 6502 projects.

The Dice program warns that rolling the dice 5,000+ times will take a long time. A typical hobbyist computer back then had a 1MHz processor.

It's all in the choice of a good algorithm. I program for a 1.8 MHz 6502-based computer as a hobby. When I need pseudorandom numbers in a game, I usually use Greg Cook's CRC16, which takes about 70 cycles to spit out 8 bits (0-255). Rescaling to 0-5 is a matter of shifts and adds, equivalent to d = (((x >> 1) + x) >> 6) + 1. With nearly 30,000 cycles per frame, I could easily produce several dozen 2d6 rolls per frame. Is two seconds "a long time"?

(clicks the link) Oh, it's interpreted floating-point BASIC. That explains the slowness.

For a settop box is there any reason not to use a low-end PC in a quiet case and run OpenELEC, XMBC or even Windows Media Center?

Home theater PCs are for geeks because they're not quite as easy as a dedicated device. Dedicated devices in small, quiet cases are easier to obtain, as they're sold pre-built in major electronics chains, unlike a small form factor PC where you usually have to buy it over the Internet and deal with mail order drawbacks, buy it as parts and assemble it yourself, or both. (Or since when has Best Buy started to carry a small, quiet PC other than the $600 Mac mini?) A dedicated device is also less complicated to maintain than a general-purpose computer.

For a settop box is there any reason not to use a low-end PC in a quiet case and run OpenELEC, XMBC or even Windows Media Center?

Home theater PCs are for geeks because they're not quite as easy as a dedicated device. Dedicated devices in small, quiet cases are easier to obtain, as they're sold pre-built in major electronics chains, unlike a small form factor PC where you usually have to buy it over the Internet and deal with mail order drawbacks, buy it as parts and assemble it yourself, or both. (Or since when has Best Buy started to carry a small, quiet PC other than the $600 Mac mini?) A dedicated device is also less complicated to maintain than a general-purpose computer.

For a settop box is there any reason not to use a low-end PC in a quiet case and run OpenELEC, XMBC or even Windows Media Center?

Home theater PCs are for geeks because they're not quite as easy as a dedicated device. Dedicated devices in small, quiet cases are easier to obtain, as they're sold pre-built in major electronics chains, unlike a small form factor PC where you usually have to buy it over the Internet and deal with mail order drawbacks, buy it as parts and assemble it yourself, or both. (Or since when has Best Buy started to carry a small, quiet PC other than the $600 Mac mini?) A dedicated device is also less complicated to maintain than a general-purpose computer.

It isn't even possible to mod most games out there these days.

There are a couple reasons for that. One is that consoles' ease of use outweighs desire to play mods for a lot of users. Another is that publishers may have realized that people squeezing the last bit of replay value out of a years-old game by playing mods is competing with sales of the same publisher's newer games.

NES for example is 256x224

I have programmed games for the NES, and I can assure you that the NTSC NES picture is 256x240. The Super NES is most commonly 256x224 with the black borders you mentioned, and the Sega Genesis is 256x224 or 320x224. On these systems, the size in pixels of the part of the signal that fills the 4:3 frame is 280x240 (or 350x240 in the case of 320px mode on the Genesis), including some borders at the sides that most TVs cut off. The borders would be included in the video uploaded to YouTube, and these borders would still be smaller than the top and bottom borders on letterboxed videos that I see so often on the service.

480p is so-so, at least you have a full video pixel for each original, but the edges doesn't align so it's a bit jittery/blurry.

The nominal bandwidth of a composite signal is 4.2 MHz. The Nyquist rate for a 640-pixel-wide sampling of a 480i component signal is 135/22 = 6.136 MHz. So ideally, one would sample the NTSC signal at 640x240, line-double it to 480p, and let the encoder sort it out. But YouTube punted on this and allowed 60 fps only for high definition, causing flicker transparency effects in these classic games to be rendered incorrectly: either fully opaque or fully invisible.

That depends on 1. signal sets that can detect bicycles rather than leaving them at a dead red,

They need to rewrite the law to allow bikers to treat stop signs and yields, and to treat stop lights as stop signs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

Of course that doesn't work at a busy intersection where the bike cannot safely cross without a green light, but it's a good start to making biking more efficient for bikers.

They can bike or walk or take the bus.

That depends on 1. signal sets that can detect bicycles rather than leaving them at a dead red, 2. zoning policies that encourage pedestrianism, and 3. paying bus drivers for a minimal level of service even during low-ridership periods, such as nights, Sundays, and holidays. Is Oregon willing to invest in all three of these?

a battery pack is heavier

True, a 500 kg Tesla model S battery is heavier than the 30 kg of gasoline in a 40 L tank. But is an electric motor and drivetrain also heavier than a gasoline engine and drivetrain?

However the player wants it to be displayed.

How does a player who lacks the time to specify how it shall be displayed want it to be displayed?

square pixels (even if the system would never display them as such, like the Master System or SNES)

Incidentally, the exact pixel aspect ratio for Master System, NES, Genesis H32 mode, and Super NES is 8:7. This can be calculated from their pixel clock rate (945/176 MHz), the nominal scanline width of Rec. 601 (704 cycles of a 13.5 MHz clock), and the 240-pixel height and 4:3 shape of the visible portion of an NTSC field. I've been collecting other platforms' pixel clock rates and PARs as well.

You really can please all the people all the time, if your software is capable of supplying the things they want.

For most people, a reasonable default is high on the list of "the things they want". Out-of-box experience is very important with the short-form games common on mobile. I imagine that most short-form reviewers of a mobile app will not want to touch every combination of settings. As Havoc Pennington pointed out, an "unbreak my application please" checkbox buried in a huge settings list is not acceptable. This means a game has to look good without explicit configuration. Some people will complain if there are massive borders by default to ensure lack of blur; others will complain if there is blur by default to ensure lack of massive borders. So given the problem of scaling art intended to be viewed at 256x208 with 8:7 pixel aspect ratio to multiple modern devices, what are the "good defaults that Just Work" as Havoc put it?

Why is their not room for both the open and closed cultures?

Assuming s/their/there/:

Because the concentrated non-free media use their vast financial resources to lobby governments to make existence harder for free culture.

Big media uses copyright to squelch competition. It has successfully lobbied for successive extensions of the term of copyright, which reduces the chance that a work will enter the public domain while it remains culturally significant. It uses copyright claims to squelch comment on its works and "similarity" claims under copyright to interfere even with creation of original works, as you have no way of telling whether the song you wrote infringes the copyright of some other existing song out there.

Big media uses its massive selling power to convince viewers to purchase player devices designed to play only works created by sufficiently large commercial enterprises, giving it a captive audience. These include such as video game consoles (with their code signing), Blu-ray Disc players (with the requirement of an AACS license for BDMV), home Internet service plans (with their bans on running a home server, enforced through carrier-grade NAT or TOS disconnection), and AM and FM radio receivers (governed by scarce exclusive licenses to transmit). Furthermore, there exists only a finite amount of electromagnetic spectrum. Case in point: People commuting to and from work who are unwilling to pay for expensive cellular data plan have only AM and FM radio as means of discovering new music. When was the last time, for example, that you heard free recordings of free music on radio? (Here, by "free" I mean distributed under a license conforming to the Definition of Free Cultural Works.)

Big media even controls elections. All major U.S. television news outlets share a corporate parent with a major movie studio: CBS is Paramount, ABC is Disney, NBC is Universal, CNN is Warner Bros., and Fox is (duh) Last Century Fox. This gives them enormous power over name recognition, both in campaign contributions and in "in-kind" donations of name recognition through news coverage. It also helps them control what issues voters feel are important to them, as they tend not to report on threats to the existence of free culture unless it's something extraordinarily high-profile like Wikipedia's PROTECTIP protest blackout of 2012.

Here's the solution that nobody apparently has the balls to implement. Have a blacklist of common malicious adware plugins then block them all.

I know someone who makes a blacklist of the sites from which these "common malicious adware plugins" are served. He distributes this blacklist as a configuration file that your computer administrator can place in the etc folder. Once the file is installed, your machine will try to access 0.0.0.0 instead of the malware distribution site, which causes the malware to not get downloaded.

Learn more about blacklisting malware sites

"I know that people's lives are not their own; it is not for them to direct their steps."
--Jeremiah 10:23, NIV.

Unless they're stupid enough to need an App Store to steer their choices for them, I guess.

Apparently there is such a thing as "analysis paralysis". People do prefer someone with more expertise to steer their choices. Otherwise, there would be more PCs in the living room.

there is no good reason for the Xbox to be incompatible with the PC and the PC incompatible with the xbox.

Other than that Intel was unwilling to cut costs on PC components to hit the price target that Microsoft sought. This didn't change much until the eighth generation (PlayStation 4 and Xbox One), when AMD offered its "Jaguar" laptop chipset to Sony and Microsoft at console prices.

we will permit any Xbox game to run on any windows machine but we will only permit MS approved products to run on the Xbox.

Let's say Microsoft makes Xbox games work on Windows. If end users buy Xbox games and play them on a gaming PC running Windows, they have no incentive to buy more Xbox games when other Windows games are available to them. But if users instead have to buy Xbox hardware to play Xbox games, users are more likely to buy more Xbox games to play on their Xbox hardware.

Another fun thing they could do with Xboxes is permit them to work as totally normal PCs.

That's one thing Windows Media Center was trying to be.

But if I want to surf websites, do my taxes, or check my email on my xbox, it should be something that works basically the same way as on the PC.

It already does. IE runs on Xbox, and IE can run websites, webmail, and even web-based tax preparation.

Why not?

If you were referring to native mail clients or native tax preparation, then developers could make games through the subset of Windows that the Xbox runs without tithing to Microsoft.

I'd like the firmware chip [in cellular phones] to just be a micro SD card hiding under the battery. So if something goes wrong you can pull the stupid chip, pop it into another machine, sort out whatever went wrong, and then put it back into the phone.

Is that even legal under national radio communication regulators' type approval guidelines? I thought devices had to be robust against end-user attempts to modify the devices to transmit or receive on prohibited frequencies or with prohibited power levels.

Now sure, most of the GUIs for most of those programs are going to be inappropriate.

Non-technical end users prefer the simplicity of a system that shows a list of all-and-only appropriate applications.

Why do we have to use ARM cpus?

Because end users have invested in existing proprietary applications for iOS or Android OS and expect to remain able to run them on new devices. These applications are compiled for ARM, either completely in the case of iOS or the NDK portions in the case of Android OS. It's in fact the same reason that x86 has stuck around so long: people expected to run both existing proprietary DOS apps and Windows 3.1 apps, people expected to run both existing proprietary Windows 3.1 apps and Win32 apps, and people expected to run both existing proprietary Win32 apps and Win64 apps. And these applications were compiled for ARM in the first place because iOS and Android OS debuted before Intel had a credible Atom competitor.

It sounds to me more like the x86 processors just need an additional feature added to them to make them more mobile friendly.

For the reason I just stated, this "additional feature" would need to involve emulation of ARM binaries.

Most PCs do not include range finding hardware. If they do include a webcam, it isn't stereoscopic. So you'll need to tell the window system explicitly how far away you plan to sit. Divide 2688 by your viewing distance in inches (1 m = 39.37 in), increase it somewhat if you have poor vision, and put that into your window system's DPI field.

Playing games on that PS4 is "Easy Button Easy", no muss, no fuss. "It Just Works"

Then would you agree with most of my essay "Consoles are easy"? And is there anything you'd add?

Perhaps if they spent less money on hardware they'd have more money for games"

Then you buy a PlayStation 4 for most games, Wii U for Wii U exclusives, and Xbox One for Xbox One exclusives, and the total bill is on the order of $1100. How much does a gaming PC cost?

So why aren't we fixing the real issue of overly broad copyrights?

Because that would require national legislatures to actually do non-trivial work. They're already busy enough deciding whether and how much to spend on particular military, entitlement, and military entitlement projects. Nor have they seen any evidence that reforming overly broad copyright would win them more votes, especially when Hollywood promises them essentially free ad time to reach their constituents during election season but only if they "behave" (FOX News; The Hollywood Reporter).

<APK>Yeah, but it works in user mode so it's probably slow as shit. Hosts files work in kernel mode, making them inherently faster to process with fewer context switches.</APK> :p

But seriously, thank you for the recommendation. Do you know whether it uses an algorithm suited for efficient processing of multi-megabyte hosts files?

the cameras were almost useless. The photos they produced looked like something you'd see on an 8-bit NES.

Photos on an NES would have had 2 bits per pixel, looking roughly like these. Even a JPEG at quarter VGA res (320x240) is N64 quality, and I think a lot of these old phones' cameras did VGA res (640x480) which is GameCube quality. You must be confusing pre-2007 phones' cameras with the Game Boy Camera.

They were crappy games because the screens were too small and had terrible resolution.

And smartphones have crappy games because the only input device is a flat sheet of glass. I tried playing the free version of Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure on an Android device, and I ended up missing the on-screen buttons with my thumbs because I couldn't see them clearly while I was looking at the action in the middle of the screen. It was fine after I paired a Bluetooth keyboard though.

There was no keyboard. Typing messages on a 0-9 keypad is shit.

Plenty of feature phones had slide-out QWERTY keyboards.

They didn't have any real storage capacity or enough CPU power to decode MP3s.

SD card and dedicated MP3 decoder chip. That's why a lot of them could play MP3 but not Vorbis.

I guess he never travels?

Likely.

He never needs to talk to his wife when he's at the grocery store or something?

A dumbphone is enough for that, and the carrier won't cram a data plan onto your bill.

Even in a networked environment, if you can convince the owner of a home PC to download a binary package and elevate to install it, you 0wn his PC. Trusting your operating system's default repository doesn't help if a trojan poses as a type of desirable software that's often excluded from repos on licensing grounds, such as games or media players.

This is "optional" for OEMs in the same way as they have the option to have MS break their legs or not.

Solution: Buy from OEMs with no legs to break, like Arkadians, Terra-Fermians, Weebles, Bile Demons, or maybe Mr. Wobblyman.

Even if copyright enforcement doesn't completely stop the spread of a work among the technological elite, it still chills awareness among the general public. For a lot of people, if it's not on Netflix and it's been repeatedly taken down from YouTube, it doesn't exist. Major news media are unlikely to report on it positively, as their parent companies also own movie studios and don't want to appear to condone copyright infringement.

I always wanted to copyright my name, do something outrageous, and then sue all the media that runs a story on it.

I'm no lawyer, but I fail to see how that sort of case wouldn't be dismissed in summary judgment early on. The exclusive right in one's name is a trademark, not a copyright. It's an easy mistake to make, seeing as how the term "intellectual property" has caused people to confuse copyright and trademark. At least in my country, trademarks have a defense called "nominative fair use", which allows others to use a name freely in a work in ways that do not suggest endorsement of the work by the trademark's owner.

I have yet to see one that shows the keyboard as a graphic in the way I've seen some games show the controller, as a graphic or technical drawing with clearly defined labels.

Good point. I worked on a game back in 1999 whose key bindings configuration screen showed the current bindings on top of a generic keyboard. Will players be confused if I show a generic keyboard, such as a Unicomp Model M, instead of the specific keyboard model connected to the system?

Another problem is that controllers for PCs are highly varied. Except for Xbox 360 controllers, you can't predict how the controller's buttons are laid out to display a diagram without either A. restricting yourself to Xbox 360 controllers (which use the XInput API) or B. buying hundreds of controllers, building a massive VID/PID database, and including this database with each copy of the game. So all you can display is something like "controller 1 axis 2 +" or "controller 1 button 3". How have other PC game developers solved this?

PC games aren't going away because I bought a PlayStation or a Wii U or an XBox.

You by yourself won't cause PC games to go away. But if enough other gamers abandon PC for consoles, even more major game studios will consider the PC unprofitable.

All I'm trying to do is explain why anyone would buy a console and what the upsides are.

In that case, does this page sum up something close to your position?

I want a box that plugs into the TV and plays games with out being fiddly, loud, power sucking and horrible.

Integrated graphics have become adequate, and I don't see how a PC with integrated graphics is especially "loud" or "power sucking" compared to a PS3, 360, PS4, or Xbox One. I may be willing to grant you "fiddly" and "horrible" if you can explain them.

[Someone who needs a PC to game on while another family member is using another PC] can use a $199 PC, which together with the $99 streaming box is going to be no more expensive than the fancy console - and provide more versatility.

Just to be sure: You mean keep the gaming PC and run the non-gaming stuff on the $199 PC, right? Then the question for households that currently have a $199 PC becomes whether to buy the expensive gaming PC or to buy one of the consoles.

I hate to come on like one of those "PC Master Race" dicks

Don't worry; I agree that PC users are masters of their own respective experiences.

but the consoles are either especially gutless (like Nintendo's) or spectacularly curated.

Some other Slashdot users would argue that this curation serves a purpose, namely saving people's time from having to wade through the crappiest of the crap, which is 90% according to Theodore Sturgeon, and that the profitable majority of people have been Stockholmed into not "feel[ing] hampered by that. Have you looked into what caused the North American video game recession of 1983-1984?

Now obviously the next question is why would you want to connect [a gaming PC] to a TV, the answer would be that there are games (like local multiplayer ones with controller support) that people want to play that benefit from it.

A bunch of Slashdot users over the past several years have been repeatedly telling me that almost nobody is willing to do that. At first, it was because most TVs were CRT SDTVs that could not display PC video without an obscure scan converter box. But once HDMI took off, the big excuses repeated in past comments were that the family's PC has integrated graphics, or it's in a separate room from the TV, or just "it's too hard, and consoles are easy". Instead, I've been told that people interested in developing local multiplayer games are expected to spend years "paying their dues": 1. make single-player games for Windows or Android to build a portfolio, 2. move to another state or country to get a job at an incumbent studio to build verifiable industry experience, and only then 3. start a company.

Thank you. I've revised my list of arguments used by console peasants to include Mr. Goffin's clarification.

So, it is probably more correct to say Linux without the GNU unless we should call Windows "GNU Windows" since one might choose to run a Mingw app.

MinGW is just GCC with the C library of Microsoft Visual C++ 6. If someone were to install Cygwin, on the other hand, that might stand a better chance of being called GNU/Windows. (In fact, Cygwin stands for Cygnus GNU/Windows.) And you're not the only person to present this sort of reduction to absurdity argument. So I set out to define a "GNU/$kernel" userland for myself as GNU Coreutils plus two other major GNU components, such as Bash, Emacs, GCC, or shared glibc. GNU/Linux counts, Cygwin counts, and MSYS counts.

Would "X11/Linux" be a better term to distinguish Fedora, Debian, and the like from Android and uses of Linux on router appliances?

(infamous "triangle, circle, square" comes to mind)

Which one was change weapon again?

X. But X is in all four positions. So was it X, Square, Circle? Or X, Box, 360?

Yes there is. It's called Xcode. Try to develop an app, and if a necessary public API doesn't exist, there's no app for that. Or if you develop an app and a submission to Apple's App Store gets rejected for a reason other than sloppy implementation, there's no app for that.

A hosts file has many uses, but defeating a captive portal isn't one of them. A competent captive portal will produce "Connection refused" on all ports of all other IP addresses until you've completed the authentication and preference-setting process.

with the government saying it wants to create a "family friendly" Internet free from pornography, gambling, extreme violence and other content inappropriate for children

Would this exclude, say, a site containing a drawing of kids playing a gambling game with a toy gun?

You can do anything with Beethoven's music, for instance, that you want.

That's the option I took for the music in Thwaite . Half of it is remixes of Beethoven's "Pathetique" Sonata. I just wondered if there were another way, because an all-PD soundtrack makes a production feel trite. And the situation makes copyright look like it's doing the exact opposite of the purpose stated in the preamble to the copyright clause of the US Constitution, namely "to promote the progress of science and useful arts".

There are no gatekeepers on the internet.

Except for customers living in areas whose incumbent home ISP has decided to "slow-lane" any traffic that doesn't pay the prioritization toll. See previous stories about Comcast's "congestion by choice".

Anyone can publish anything at any time.

How can someone usefully publish any application at any time for an iOS device without the blessing of Apple, or any application at any time for a game console without the blessing of the console's manufacturer?

That's the old model. It's been discarded.

If the gatekeeper model has "been discarded", then why do iOS and the game consoles still use it? And why haven't end users "discarded" them en masse in favor of Android and living-room gaming PCs? I think I know why: consoles are easy.

What is with the defeatism? The only point to it is to prevent you from reaping the benefits everyone else is enjoying.

I'm trying to figure out the best way to jump in and reap benefits without running the risk of being bankrupted or worse. For example, I don't want to write a song and then get hit with a $150,000 copyright infringement lawsuit for having accidentally recreated something from decades ago.

SQL injection. My work place had a typical example:
INSERT INTO users SET fname='$fname', lname='$lname';

Apart from the fact that you're mixing UPDATE syntax with INSERT syntax, substitution is perfectly valid so long as each string has been sanitized in the correct manner for a particular database connection (that is, not addslashes()). For the MySQLi client library, it looks like this:

$fname = $db->escape_string($fname);
$lname = $db->escape_string($lname);

Don't get me wrong; it's bad practice to escape manually unless you're using operator IN on a database client library that supports neither array parameters nor named placeholders (such as MySQLi). But code that correctly uses $db->escape_string() (or the equivalent for other languages or database drivers) should be safe from SQL injection, just as code that correctly uses htmlspecialchars() should be safe from script injection.

With Clonebox, if a customer's web server is hacked or otherwise damaged, we can switch it over to a ~read-only mirror. Sure that protects against hackers, and some customers have been hacked and used the protection. More often, customers simply screw up and delete important files or databases.

But how long do you keep these mirrors around, in case there's a screw-up that goes undiscovered for a while?

Has Tinkerbell been fucking bunnies again!
[...]
[John]

That depends, John. Have you been doing "dust" to stay young?

In the last case, I think that taking the artistic liberty of adding an actual story, with a real conflict to be resolved, necessitates communication of some kind.

The problem in the novel is "I have to get my time machine back", and the conflict is between the Time Traveller and the environment. Learning how to communicate with the locals is a subproblem of this problem.

While the solution in both movies (people still speak English!) leaves something to be desired

It just bugs me that the writers of both adaptations were afraid to spend a mere three minutes of the script on language elicitation. A feature film is not like an episode of Star Trek: $subtitle where you have 44 minutes to tell a story with no time to spend on language-of-the-week. It could have been done as in Avatar or Dances With Wolves before it. Even The Fifth Element managed to work Leeloo's ongoing acquisition of English as a second language into a plot thread. (Multipass!) The Eloi have the mental capacity of five-year-olds, whether by evolution or by the mind-altering pesticides that their Morlock masters spray on their food. So based on the scant clues in the novel, their language can't be that hard to pick up.

The general public as audience, via their respective governments, can impose whatever terms they want to ensure fairness

Not if the creative industries have captured the governments through their co-owned news media.

The US Population has been conditioned since the days of the Atari 2600 Crash of 1983 to believe that limiations on who has the right to make software should be tightly controlled and if its not the result is Market Collapse.

I've collected some of the console peasants' arguments in this page. But this 1980s argument that "the market needs the console maker to act as a sole curator with veto power" has largely evaporated thanks to the Internet. First, it's easier to find a reviewer whose tastes match yours. Second, the playable demo has been around since the shareware era. And third, much of the 1983-1984 crash of the North American video game market was due to distributors that would offer retailers a money-back guarantee for returned unsold product but then go bankrupt. Paid downloads have made returned unsold product largely a thing of the past.

A few commercial NES games, such as Super Mario Bros., have been disassembled and commented on RomHacking.net. And of course, homebrew games for NES often come with source code.

Sometimes I wear a shirt that comes down to my ankles. (Think 1980s Alvin and the Chipmunks or John from Peter Pan or what men wear in parts of the Middle East.) All I have to prove is that with horseback riding largely a thing of the past, trousers are no longer necessary.

The AJC article mentioned the weight and the rough ride. I'd guess that yet another disadvantage of a wooden bicycle, at least when sharing the road with motor vehicles, is that it's impossible to trigger a green traffic signal without enough metal surface to disturb the flux in the induction loop beneath the approach to the intersection. At some intersections, even a metal bicycle has a problem with that.

While an all wooden bike (including wheels)might have problems tripping lights, I almost always can trip the lights with my Carbon Fiber bike with aluminum wheels, I just have to careful where I stop. I don't think an all-wooden bike (including wooden wheels) would be practical enough for much riding around town - the road vibrations noted in the article would make long rides unpleasant.

The AJC article mentioned the weight and the rough ride. I'd guess that yet another disadvantage of a wooden bicycle, at least when sharing the road with motor vehicles, is that it's impossible to trigger a green traffic signal without enough metal surface to disturb the flux in the induction loop beneath the approach to the intersection. At some intersections, even a metal bicycle has a problem with that.

If you haven't been following Slashdot memes, I've written elsewhere about the "Lord of /etc/hosts"