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Two Senators Call For ACTA Transparency
angry tapir writes "Two US senators have asked President Barack Obama's administration to allow the public to review and comment on a controversial international copyright treaty being negotiated largely in secret. The public has a right to know what's being negotiated in the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), Senators Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, and Bernard Sanders, a Vermont Independent, argue in the letter."
Back before memory was cheap and RAM speeds were fast, we couldn't use a full 32 bits to represent a pixel on the screen. If you did that, even at VGA resolution, you'd end up with approximately 1.2MB of memory reserved just to render to the screen. Double that if you want to have an off-screen buffer to prepare the next frame. On systems that had 8MB of RAM in total you can probably sympathize with the graphics guys when they had to skimp on bpp.
Even until very recently, many image formats only used 24bpp. Seeing as there's no real need to go above and beyond 8 bits per color, you can save a full fourth of the total memory just cutting out the unnecessary byte. Of course, you lose something very important: the Alpha channel. Suddenly, the great cost savings you get with that extra saved byte mean little since your image now can't blend nicely with anything else.
Our government is a 2bpp system in a 32bpp world.
Reading political discourse among most slashdotters is like watching old people fuck.
It's messy, clumsy, and a little bit revolting.
You are welcome on my lawn.