Almost always choose ATI over NVidia due to driver licensing differences,
When I though I needed a new video card (in fact I needed new capacitors for the motherboard) I bought nVidia even though I usually am a an of ATI. Why? It had CUDA and PhysX. I ended up returning the card when I found out that it had very blurry image over the analog (VGA) output.
Also, I do not consider closed source to be immoral. The source code is not useful to me anyway (if it was I would have already made a version of Firefox tat played h264 video).
Sometimes, actually, the relationship with balky hardware is best ended before the OS installer has consummated a working reboot.
Depends on the situation. If I already have the device, I want to use it and not ave to buy another one. In some cases I could just buy a license for Windows and just use the device. Now, if I am looking to buy a device and know that I'll be using it with Linux, I'll of course check to see if it works with Linux before buying it. Still, the drivers could be open or closed source (or even written in asm or machine code) for all I care.
Same thing when I think about Linux. I want to play games, so I need Windows. Now, I could use Linux for other things and dual boot to Windows for games, but then I can just use Windows for everything and not need to reboot my computer unless there is some problem. If Linux only has a subset ow functions that Windows has I might as well use Windows.
Same here - it looks like Chrome OS is just the Chrome browser as an OS. I can just use Chrome on Linux or Windows and get the same result but I would still have the option of running other programs. Hell, I probably can make "Chrome OS" UI equivalent just by changing the Windows shell to chrome.exe yet it would still allow me to run other programs.
They are ensuring a monopoly by creating a non-standard format...
h.264 is standard. Even digital TV (DVB-T) in my country uses it. My 4 year old cellphone can play it (not all profiles though), most of the HD movies and TV shows on pirate bay are h.264, so are most of anime fansubs (even SD ones). Youtube and blip use it. IIRC there is a codec that also works on Linux and it may even be open source (x264), though I do not really care about the openness of the source as long as it works.
In short - h264 is supported almost everywhere, so it is standard. Whatever codec Firefox has - now that's non-standard, since probably only Firefox and Opera can play it.
Now there is going to be a much tougher time getting a H.264 plug-in for Firefox when and if it becomes a critical component of the web
Well, Firefox can just use system codecs. I have two h.264 decoders - ffdshow and CoreAVC. Actually, I would prefer FF using CoreAVC instead of having its own less efficient decoder (CoreAVC manages to divide the load to all of my CPUs quite well). People with video cards that support CUDA would probably like that too.
Well, being unable to upgrade to a newer version may be bad, but it's not as bad as the device not working with any version. Also, I would have the same luck trying to modify both open or closed source (with a hex editor) drivers myself so I would still have to rely on somebody to update the drivers.
And if my router worked with 2.4 kernel I would not try to upgrade the kernel - well, at least I would try to find out if the hardware was supported and if not, well, it works with 2.4, right?
Again, I do not know about the internals of Linux, but isn't it possible to make an older driver work without modification? I mean some of WinNT4 drivers work on XP and some may even work on 7. Some XP drivers do work on Vista/7 (or at least the Vista/7 drivers work on XP too).
Ubuntu releases new versions faster than Microsoft releases Service Packs. That's why I choose Debian if I need Linux. However, I want my stuff to work and I do not care about non-free software, well, as long as I (legally) do not need to pay for it. I have installed Debian on a few desktops and I also installed proprietary video card drivers (where they were needed), Adobe Flash, video codecs, Mozilla Firefox...
And if I need a device that works with Linux, I still do not care about open or closed source drivers. And this is when I am buying the device knowing that it will need to work with Linux. I would never buy a device just because it has "free" drivers, as long as the "non-free" drivers for the device that I already have work. If they do not and I really need a device that works with Linux, the the openness of the driver source is quite low priority - I need a device that works (with Linux, even if the drivers are closed source), has the functions that I want, is not very expensive etc.
But isn't the entire point of IPSEC keeping confidential information secure while in transit? If I have to use SSL or some other protocol on top of IPSEC then I might as well use that protocol on top of IP and save a bit of CPU power.
Adventure games would probably translate well, since they have a lot of story and not much gameplay, that is you are walking around, getting items etc, but that is a smaller part compared to the story, unlike some FPS games that basically tell you "This is an invasion, you are a space marine, go kill that army" - that is a lot of gameplay and not much story.
Still, half life probably would make a good movie, but you would have to include the events that happened between HL1 and HL2, otherwise it would be just a guy shooting almost everyone.
As for adventure games, I think I would enjoy Syberia or The Longest Journey as a movie, they probably would be even better - less pixel hunting:)
Probably not, but I read somewhere that one reactor design actually slows down the reaction if it starts to overheat (and that is in the design, not some computer system that controls the reactor). The reactor in Chernobyl actually increased the reaction speed when it started overheating, so it was positive feedback (more heat -> faster reaction -> even more heat). Still, it took a lot of human errors for te reactor to melt down (having not very experienced night staff running a dangerous test, the operators decreased the reaction too fast, then pulled out the rods too far (instead of waiting for the reaction to go back to normal), automatic protection systems were disabled for the test and so on).
OTOH, no reactor is safe from a right amount of explosives, but this should not prevent us from using nuclear power instead of coal or natural gas. Solar, wind and hydro are great, but not for everyone - you have to be in the right place for them to be useful.
I have a few PCs. They all share one external IP address using NAT. It works.
In a company, here are a lot of PCs that are not supposed to receive incoming connections. Why should they have their own external IPs?
Yes, we will run out of IPv4 addresses and we will have to start using IPv6. However, there are still IPv4 addresses left. Also, the "perfect network in theory where my printer can receive an incoming connection from outside (that is, it could if not for the firewalls and access lists) just because the theory says so" is not worth it. IPv6 will get its own modifications and then the network will be imperfect in some other way and some people will want to go to IPv8.
One ISP I know (not my ISP though) offers three additional IPv4 addresses for its fastest "home" connection (and less or none for the slower ones, but all get at least one real IP). I honestly would not know what to do with them.
NAT is the wrong solution to that problem anyway. They should instead block incoming SYN packets, problem solved... (your TCP connections can persist after the firewall reboots)
So, all that would be needed to go trough the firewall would be to start the connection without the SYN flag. This would simplify NAT-T and would allow P2P software to work where it shouldn't.
Also, instead of using a separate firewall, you can use NAT and get the same result (no incoming connections). A small company (a few users, no externally accessible servers and slow connection) can just use a cheap consumer NAT router. Is there a cheap consumer firewall? Also, there is no point giving every computer a public IP address, especially if you have a "deny SYN from all" rule in the firewall.
Also, about the TCP connections - they would still time out while the firewall is rebooting (if there is only one firewall box), so no point there too.
NAT works. Even more, it works now. Random user PC that is used to browse the web does not need a real IP, all incoming ports would be blocked by a firewall anyway. Most of the computers in a given company are client-only PCs.
IPv6 is badly designed (not that I could have made anything better). There are a lot of devices that do not support IPv6 and will never support it (for example my printer). So, you need to either replace the devices (and get the money where? Especially if the device does its primary function well enough) or you need to use both protocols - IPv4 for communicating with the old devices and IPv6 for everything else. But then why not have some sort of NAT so you can just use IPv6 outside of your network? Oh yea, there is no way of doing that. OK, then what do I get if I spend my money (and time) and get IPv6 configured correctly (replacing some devices if needed)? All websites work on IPv4, P2P works on IPv4 too, so why should I bother?
Re:That's one heck of a "long goodbye"
on
Goodbye, VGA
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· Score: 1
Connect a CRT monitor to your PC and make it so both monitors display the same image, then move windows around. Some LCDs, to reduce the latency (the original LCD problem) use overvoltage on the cells to make them switch faster, however, as I understand it, this requires some processing and the monitor gets input lag. Some monitors even have some weird color artifacts because the cells overshoot the intended value due to the overvoltage. My CRT monitor just scans the beam across the screen and paints the pixels as it receives them.
Interesting, a few months ago when I used eMule to find a certain song, I managed to get the real file on the first try. Actually, other than the download speed, eMule is quite OK, especially for rare files (ones that nobody bothers creating a torrent for).
No, centralized control of the internet is a bad thing. Also, why should the US be in control, why not $VeryReligiousMuslimCountry, China or North Korea? I'm sure they would like to shut down some sites too.
And botnets can cause problems in the current situation too. However, I still think that properly implemented decentralized DNS is a good thing. A completely decentralized P2P system that's actively in use will make torrent sites obsolete and make it harder for US companies to take down the files.
We have garbage even now, but currently it's harder to get around it, since the garbage is part of the centralized system (domain takeovers of WikiLeaks, some torrent sites etc).
Criminals can abuse almost any technology, but that does not mean that everybody else should be prevented from using it: Do you use encryption to do your banking? Do you know that terrorists use encryption too? How about anonymous networks (tor etc)? Terrorists also use them. A knife is useful to cut food. It is also easier to kill someone with a knife than just bare hands. A car is useful for going long distances. It can also be used to deliver illegal drugs or run someone over.
I think that integrated search is a good idea - now if I want to download something, I have to search on pirate bay, if I don't find it there, I go to isohunt and so on. I'd like the ability to search on all public trackers at once. As a mater of fact I'd also like to be able to search all private trackers (that I am a member of, or optionally can become a member) at once. Centralized search would be bad, but a decentralized search that looks like centralized (you only search in one place) would be great.
And I think that BT became popular not because it relied on the web for searching (you can search for ed2k links too), but because it usually is faster than eMule and similar. Usually people do not keep a lot of torrents seeding at one time so each torrent gets better upload speed than if it was divided among thousands of files in the "shared" folder. The original BitTorrent client even had one window for each.torrent, with uT it's easier to seed 100 torrents, but still more difficult than it would be with eMule, especially if I want to move the files around.
Also, there are private trackers for BitTorrent, that enforce good ratio and thus make downloads faster (since there are more seeders), I never heard of private eDonkey servers and Gnutella does not even have servers.
However, BitTorrent also has its disadvantages. Sharing is more difficult than "drop the file in your 'shared' folder or share the folder that the file s in", users that have/want the same files cannot download from each other because the files are in different.torrents.
Re:That's one heck of a "long goodbye"
on
Goodbye, VGA
·
· Score: 1
good riddance to blurry, hot, huge, power-hungry CRTs.
blurry - depends on the monitor, god ones can display high resolution without problems hot, power hungry - not as power hungry as the PC they are connected to huge - at lest on my desk, if I used a LCD monitor, the space behind it would be wasted anyway, since the monitor is on the corner of the desk.
However, a CRT monitor can display a lot of resolutions correctly, also, it does not have the long response time that LCDs do (or the lag and image artifacts that LCDs with a short response time have).
Re:That's one heck of a "long goodbye"
on
Goodbye, VGA
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· Score: 1
DvI-D to VGA adapters also exist (as do HDMI to VGA) but are more expensive as they have a DAC in them.
Re:That's one heck of a "long goodbye"
on
Goodbye, VGA
·
· Score: 1
Re:That's one heck of a "long goodbye"
on
Goodbye, VGA
·
· Score: 1
However, new video cards usually come with only DVI connectors - which is fine, because there is a simple wiring adapter to VGA. And if need be, I'll just get the D/A converter (HDMI to VGA or whatever) so that I can continue using my CRT monitor, with a maximum usable resolution of 1920x1440@85Hz (max possible resolution is 2048x1536@75Hz).
Yes, after all, the music is produced only once but there are a lot of CDs made. For every CD you need some plastic, some aluminium, work to actually make the CD etc. The cost of recording of music, just like the cost of the machines to make the CD or the factory building should be fixed, so the more CDs you make, the smaller part of the price is the cost of recording.
The musician spent a few hours recording the song, should he be paid millions for the hour that he actually worked?
They remain secret; they don't gradually flow into the public domain, because there is no incentive to share them.
Yes, as if copyrighted stuff will ever enter public domain now that the length of copyright gets extended whenever the copyright on Mickey Mouse gets near expiration date.
Some damage is bound to occur to the genetic copying mechanism even with the cells continually fixing themselves.
So, have backups of the DNA with error correction on different media (magnetic, optical, flash so that it would be less likely to get corrupt all at once) and have nanobots periodically refresh the DNA in the cells. The DNA is just a gigabyte or so.
Somewhere along the way, it would be cheaper to simply transfer the the thing that matters most (the mind or a person's memories) into another body or an android.
But wouldn't that be like creating a copy of me? That is, for some time, there would be two Pentiums, then only the copy would remain - so I would still die, but some other guy who has all my memories would live. OTOH, becoming a cyborg with my original brain intact would be OK.
The thing that gets me is when I watch a movie or TV show and the "hero" beats answers out of a suspect. Everyone cheers for it. Bad guys deserve what is coming to them, right?
The thing is that usually in movies and TV shows we the viewers already know that it is the bad guy that the hero is beating up, maybe it was shown to us or the bad guy openly brags that he planted a bomb and won't tell where. Then it's nice seeing Jack Bauer or similar pull the information out of him, and the more painful method the hero uses the better, because the bad guy deserves it (he has killed a lot of people before, has planted the bomb etc).
However, in real life things are not that clear. The suspect might know something. If you beat him enough, he will confess and say whatever you want just so you stop beating him. Even if he does not now where the bomb is, he'll make something up, because while you are looking for the bomb in the place he told you, you are not beating him up. There is also no other way. If the suspect is saying "I don't know where the bomb is" he might really not now or he might be lying and there is no way to tell. We do not have telepaths or thought reading devices and (AFAIK) anybody trained can beat a lie detector.
If your friends were dying around you, and you saw the enemy bomb civilians, or use civilian as human targets. And you believed a little pain or psychological torture would get answers that would save lives, what would you honestly do in the scenario? Where should that line be drawn?
This works for both sides. If you support American soldiers who torture Iraqis then you should also support Iraqis who torture American soldiers, since both of them want to save lives of their friends.
Game resolution, texture resolution, polygon counts, lighting, shading etc.
Yes, there are games on NES that look great when you take the age of the system into account. Modern games with high quality (not just resolution) graphics can look almost as realistic as movies or photos.
Also, 160x120 looks bad no matter how many polygons and textures you have. 1920x1440 can lok good or bad depending on the other factors.
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Almost always choose ATI over NVidia due to driver licensing differences,
When I though I needed a new video card (in fact I needed new capacitors for the motherboard) I bought nVidia even though I usually am a an of ATI. Why? It had CUDA and PhysX. I ended up returning the card when I found out that it had very blurry image over the analog (VGA) output.
Also, I do not consider closed source to be immoral. The source code is not useful to me anyway (if it was I would have already made a version of Firefox tat played h264 video).
Sometimes, actually, the relationship with balky hardware is best ended before the OS installer has consummated a working reboot.
Depends on the situation. If I already have the device, I want to use it and not ave to buy another one. In some cases I could just buy a license for Windows and just use the device. Now, if I am looking to buy a device and know that I'll be using it with Linux, I'll of course check to see if it works with Linux before buying it. Still, the drivers could be open or closed source (or even written in asm or machine code) for all I care.
Same thing when I think about Linux. I want to play games, so I need Windows. Now, I could use Linux for other things and dual boot to Windows for games, but then I can just use Windows for everything and not need to reboot my computer unless there is some problem. If Linux only has a subset ow functions that Windows has I might as well use Windows.
Same here - it looks like Chrome OS is just the Chrome browser as an OS. I can just use Chrome on Linux or Windows and get the same result but I would still have the option of running other programs. Hell, I probably can make "Chrome OS" UI equivalent just by changing the Windows shell to chrome.exe yet it would still allow me to run other programs.
They are ensuring a monopoly by creating a non-standard format ...
h.264 is standard. Even digital TV (DVB-T) in my country uses it. My 4 year old cellphone can play it (not all profiles though), most of the HD movies and TV shows on pirate bay are h.264, so are most of anime fansubs (even SD ones). Youtube and blip use it. IIRC there is a codec that also works on Linux and it may even be open source (x264), though I do not really care about the openness of the source as long as it works.
In short - h264 is supported almost everywhere, so it is standard. Whatever codec Firefox has - now that's non-standard, since probably only Firefox and Opera can play it.
Now there is going to be a much tougher time getting a H.264 plug-in for Firefox when and if it becomes a critical component of the web
Well, Firefox can just use system codecs. I have two h.264 decoders - ffdshow and CoreAVC. Actually, I would prefer FF using CoreAVC instead of having its own less efficient decoder (CoreAVC manages to divide the load to all of my CPUs quite well). People with video cards that support CUDA would probably like that too.
Well, being unable to upgrade to a newer version may be bad, but it's not as bad as the device not working with any version. Also, I would have the same luck trying to modify both open or closed source (with a hex editor) drivers myself so I would still have to rely on somebody to update the drivers.
And if my router worked with 2.4 kernel I would not try to upgrade the kernel - well, at least I would try to find out if the hardware was supported and if not, well, it works with 2.4, right?
Again, I do not know about the internals of Linux, but isn't it possible to make an older driver work without modification? I mean some of WinNT4 drivers work on XP and some may even work on 7. Some XP drivers do work on Vista/7 (or at least the Vista/7 drivers work on XP too).
Ubuntu releases new versions faster than Microsoft releases Service Packs. That's why I choose Debian if I need Linux. However, I want my stuff to work and I do not care about non-free software, well, as long as I (legally) do not need to pay for it. I have installed Debian on a few desktops and I also installed proprietary video card drivers (where they were needed), Adobe Flash, video codecs, Mozilla Firefox...
And if I need a device that works with Linux, I still do not care about open or closed source drivers. And this is when I am buying the device knowing that it will need to work with Linux. I would never buy a device just because it has "free" drivers, as long as the "non-free" drivers for the device that I already have work. If they do not and I really need a device that works with Linux, the the openness of the driver source is quite low priority - I need a device that works (with Linux, even if the drivers are closed source), has the functions that I want, is not very expensive etc.
But isn't the entire point of IPSEC keeping confidential information secure while in transit? If I have to use SSL or some other protocol on top of IPSEC then I might as well use that protocol on top of IP and save a bit of CPU power.
Adventure games would probably translate well, since they have a lot of story and not much gameplay, that is you are walking around, getting items etc, but that is a smaller part compared to the story, unlike some FPS games that basically tell you "This is an invasion, you are a space marine, go kill that army" - that is a lot of gameplay and not much story.
Still, half life probably would make a good movie, but you would have to include the events that happened between HL1 and HL2, otherwise it would be just a guy shooting almost everyone.
As for adventure games, I think I would enjoy Syberia or The Longest Journey as a movie, they probably would be even better - less pixel hunting :)
Probably not, but I read somewhere that one reactor design actually slows down the reaction if it starts to overheat (and that is in the design, not some computer system that controls the reactor). The reactor in Chernobyl actually increased the reaction speed when it started overheating, so it was positive feedback (more heat -> faster reaction -> even more heat). Still, it took a lot of human errors for te reactor to melt down (having not very experienced night staff running a dangerous test, the operators decreased the reaction too fast, then pulled out the rods too far (instead of waiting for the reaction to go back to normal), automatic protection systems were disabled for the test and so on).
OTOH, no reactor is safe from a right amount of explosives, but this should not prevent us from using nuclear power instead of coal or natural gas. Solar, wind and hydro are great, but not for everyone - you have to be in the right place for them to be useful.
I have a few PCs. They all share one external IP address using NAT. It works.
In a company, here are a lot of PCs that are not supposed to receive incoming connections. Why should they have their own external IPs?
Yes, we will run out of IPv4 addresses and we will have to start using IPv6. However, there are still IPv4 addresses left. Also, the "perfect network in theory where my printer can receive an incoming connection from outside (that is, it could if not for the firewalls and access lists) just because the theory says so" is not worth it. IPv6 will get its own modifications and then the network will be imperfect in some other way and some people will want to go to IPv8.
One ISP I know (not my ISP though) offers three additional IPv4 addresses for its fastest "home" connection (and less or none for the slower ones, but all get at least one real IP). I honestly would not know what to do with them.
NAT is the wrong solution to that problem anyway. They should instead block incoming SYN packets, problem solved ... (your TCP connections can persist after the firewall reboots)
So, all that would be needed to go trough the firewall would be to start the connection without the SYN flag. This would simplify NAT-T and would allow P2P software to work where it shouldn't.
Also, instead of using a separate firewall, you can use NAT and get the same result (no incoming connections). A small company (a few users, no externally accessible servers and slow connection) can just use a cheap consumer NAT router. Is there a cheap consumer firewall? Also, there is no point giving every computer a public IP address, especially if you have a "deny SYN from all" rule in the firewall.
Also, about the TCP connections - they would still time out while the firewall is rebooting (if there is only one firewall box), so no point there too.
NAT works. Even more, it works now. Random user PC that is used to browse the web does not need a real IP, all incoming ports would be blocked by a firewall anyway. Most of the computers in a given company are client-only PCs.
IPv6 is badly designed (not that I could have made anything better). There are a lot of devices that do not support IPv6 and will never support it (for example my printer). So, you need to either replace the devices (and get the money where? Especially if the device does its primary function well enough) or you need to use both protocols - IPv4 for communicating with the old devices and IPv6 for everything else. But then why not have some sort of NAT so you can just use IPv6 outside of your network? Oh yea, there is no way of doing that. OK, then what do I get if I spend my money (and time) and get IPv6 configured correctly (replacing some devices if needed)? All websites work on IPv4, P2P works on IPv4 too, so why should I bother?
Connect a CRT monitor to your PC and make it so both monitors display the same image, then move windows around. Some LCDs, to reduce the latency (the original LCD problem) use overvoltage on the cells to make them switch faster, however, as I understand it, this requires some processing and the monitor gets input lag. Some monitors even have some weird color artifacts because the cells overshoot the intended value due to the overvoltage. My CRT monitor just scans the beam across the screen and paints the pixels as it receives them.
A video of LCD input lag (not mine) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pi2OE6hSh00
Interesting, a few months ago when I used eMule to find a certain song, I managed to get the real file on the first try. Actually, other than the download speed, eMule is quite OK, especially for rare files (ones that nobody bothers creating a torrent for).
No, centralized control of the internet is a bad thing. Also, why should the US be in control, why not $VeryReligiousMuslimCountry, China or North Korea? I'm sure they would like to shut down some sites too.
And botnets can cause problems in the current situation too. However, I still think that properly implemented decentralized DNS is a good thing. A completely decentralized P2P system that's actively in use will make torrent sites obsolete and make it harder for US companies to take down the files.
We have garbage even now, but currently it's harder to get around it, since the garbage is part of the centralized system (domain takeovers of WikiLeaks, some torrent sites etc).
Criminals can abuse almost any technology, but that does not mean that everybody else should be prevented from using it:
Do you use encryption to do your banking? Do you know that terrorists use encryption too?
How about anonymous networks (tor etc)? Terrorists also use them.
A knife is useful to cut food. It is also easier to kill someone with a knife than just bare hands.
A car is useful for going long distances. It can also be used to deliver illegal drugs or run someone over.
I think that integrated search is a good idea - now if I want to download something, I have to search on pirate bay, if I don't find it there, I go to isohunt and so on. I'd like the ability to search on all public trackers at once. As a mater of fact I'd also like to be able to search all private trackers (that I am a member of, or optionally can become a member) at once. Centralized search would be bad, but a decentralized search that looks like centralized (you only search in one place) would be great.
And I think that BT became popular not because it relied on the web for searching (you can search for ed2k links too), but because it usually is faster than eMule and similar. Usually people do not keep a lot of torrents seeding at one time so each torrent gets better upload speed than if it was divided among thousands of files in the "shared" folder. The original BitTorrent client even had one window for each .torrent, with uT it's easier to seed 100 torrents, but still more difficult than it would be with eMule, especially if I want to move the files around.
Also, there are private trackers for BitTorrent, that enforce good ratio and thus make downloads faster (since there are more seeders), I never heard of private eDonkey servers and Gnutella does not even have servers.
However, BitTorrent also has its disadvantages. Sharing is more difficult than "drop the file in your 'shared' folder or share the folder that the file s in", users that have/want the same files cannot download from each other because the files are in different .torrents.
good riddance to blurry, hot, huge, power-hungry CRTs.
blurry - depends on the monitor, god ones can display high resolution without problems
hot, power hungry - not as power hungry as the PC they are connected to
huge - at lest on my desk, if I used a LCD monitor, the space behind it would be wasted anyway, since the monitor is on the corner of the desk.
However, a CRT monitor can display a lot of resolutions correctly, also, it does not have the long response time that LCDs do (or the lag and image artifacts that LCDs with a short response time have).
DvI-D to VGA adapters also exist (as do HDMI to VGA) but are more expensive as they have a DAC in them.
And for DVI-D or HDMI to VGA, get HDFury (also supports HDCP) or similar.
However, new video cards usually come with only DVI connectors - which is fine, because there is a simple wiring adapter to VGA. And if need be, I'll just get the D/A converter (HDMI to VGA or whatever) so that I can continue using my CRT monitor, with a maximum usable resolution of 1920x1440@85Hz (max possible resolution is 2048x1536@75Hz).
Yes, after all, the music is produced only once but there are a lot of CDs made. For every CD you need some plastic, some aluminium, work to actually make the CD etc. The cost of recording of music, just like the cost of the machines to make the CD or the factory building should be fixed, so the more CDs you make, the smaller part of the price is the cost of recording.
The musician spent a few hours recording the song, should he be paid millions for the hour that he actually worked?
They remain secret; they don't gradually flow into the public domain, because there is no incentive to share them.
Yes, as if copyrighted stuff will ever enter public domain now that the length of copyright gets extended whenever the copyright on Mickey Mouse gets near expiration date.
Some damage is bound to occur to the genetic copying mechanism even with the cells continually fixing themselves.
So, have backups of the DNA with error correction on different media (magnetic, optical, flash so that it would be less likely to get corrupt all at once) and have nanobots periodically refresh the DNA in the cells. The DNA is just a gigabyte or so.
Somewhere along the way, it would be cheaper to simply transfer the the thing that matters most (the mind or a person's memories) into another body or an android.
But wouldn't that be like creating a copy of me? That is, for some time, there would be two Pentiums, then only the copy would remain - so I would still die, but some other guy who has all my memories would live. OTOH, becoming a cyborg with my original brain intact would be OK.
The thing that gets me is when I watch a movie or TV show and the "hero" beats answers out of a suspect. Everyone cheers for it. Bad guys deserve what is coming to them, right?
The thing is that usually in movies and TV shows we the viewers already know that it is the bad guy that the hero is beating up, maybe it was shown to us or the bad guy openly brags that he planted a bomb and won't tell where. Then it's nice seeing Jack Bauer or similar pull the information out of him, and the more painful method the hero uses the better, because the bad guy deserves it (he has killed a lot of people before, has planted the bomb etc).
However, in real life things are not that clear. The suspect might know something. If you beat him enough, he will confess and say whatever you want just so you stop beating him. Even if he does not now where the bomb is, he'll make something up, because while you are looking for the bomb in the place he told you, you are not beating him up. There is also no other way. If the suspect is saying "I don't know where the bomb is" he might really not now or he might be lying and there is no way to tell. We do not have telepaths or thought reading devices and (AFAIK) anybody trained can beat a lie detector.
If your friends were dying around you, and you saw the enemy bomb civilians, or use civilian as human targets. And you believed a little pain or psychological torture would get answers that would save lives, what would you honestly do in the scenario? Where should that line be drawn?
This works for both sides. If you support American soldiers who torture Iraqis then you should also support Iraqis who torture American soldiers, since both of them want to save lives of their friends.
a competent photographer can take good pictures with a crappy camera and better pictures with a better camera.
a crappy photographer cannot take a good picture even with the best camera in the world.
Game resolution, texture resolution, polygon counts, lighting, shading etc.
Yes, there are games on NES that look great when you take the age of the system into account. Modern games with high quality (not just resolution) graphics can look almost as realistic as movies or photos.
Also, 160x120 looks bad no matter how many polygons and textures you have. 1920x1440 can lok good or bad depending on the other factors.