Oh, I don't know, people using BitTorrent to download legal things, like Linux distros, OpenOffice.org, World of Warcraft patches, or anything else that offers BitTorrent downloads.
Seriously, why is that insightful? There are plenty of legal uses of BitTorrent that don't involve pirating movies.
(And, of course, things like, uh, porn and fansubs may not be available on demand. Not that I'd know anything about that. Oh, and indie films and less popular films and all sorts of digital things that aren't likely to be available on demand.)
So what is Huckabee's policy on video games? I sure can't find one on his site. (Which, to be fair, covers a whole lot of issues that I'd consider to be far more important.)
So, some victory for video game's rights, since none of the candidates seem to really be addressing this issue and it would appear that all of them agree that video games need to be federally regulated. (With the presumable exception of Ron Paul.)
I expect it depends on your definition of "full game":). I can't find any direct quote either, but I doubt that it's going to be a "full game" in the sense most people think.
The DS has had the "download play" feature since it was released, but this is essentially a wireless version of the same GBA feature that allowed games to be downloaded and played on the GBA, off either the GameCube or another GBA. Anyone remember Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles? That game downloaded a small game (really more of an app) to the GBA and then used the GBA as a very expensive controller. (Another example would be the "Tingle Tuner" from Wind Waker.)
I expect this is similar to that - the DS has essentially the same feature. So you'll probably be able to download small minigames to the Wii, which will then upload them to a DS via its built-in wireless. And these could be complete games, depending on their size - but not a "full game," really. As an example, Nintendo already has Download Stations available in some stores, so it's not a big stretch to allow the Wii to act as a Download Station.
Anyway, I can't find any mention of such a feature on the Nintendo site, but I don't think the DS has any form of permanent storage. Unless they're releasing a flash-card for the DS themselves, I doubt we'll be seeing downloaded full DS games.
But who knows, maybe they are - there's just not enough information yet. The entire thing seems to revolve around Fils-Aime saying "complete game" at some point.
IE's string concatenation is ridiculously slow. I've found that in all browsers (except Firefox) it's faster to use an Array, push() together the string elements, and finally join('') them together to create the final string.
In Firefox, this is ever-so-slightly slower. In Internet Explorer, it's a good order of magnitude faster. (Depending on the length of the string. Concatenating a string 100 chars long together 10,000 times, I got a time of 13.7 seconds for plain old string concatenation ("string" + "string") versus.04 seconds for Array.push(). Firefox did the same test in.7 seconds using both methods.)
The SunSpider tests appear to be using plain-old string concatenation. I'll have to try rewriting them using Array.push() and see what the result is. Doing that IE's performance would almost certainly beat Firefox.
If it would let me use my phone's built-in GPS with Google Maps, sure I'd pay $150 extra for the phone. If I were allowed to transfer applications between phones, sure it'd be worth it.
The reason my phone doesn't allow Google Maps access to the GPS is because Sprint sells a similar service for $10/month. So if the phone lasts more than 15 months, it would have been worth it.
Add in other locked down features (can't email photos from the phone, can't easily copy files off the phone, etc.) and it would be easily worth paying an extra $150 to get full access to the phone.
'Course, your question was really "would most people shell out an additional $150" and I have to admit the answer is almost certainly no.
I also detest rebooting, and will attempt to avoid it if I know that it's not a real solution and only solves the symptoms.
Of course, this aversion to rebooting might have something to do with IT installing so much crap onto the machine that it literally takes five minutes to boot. (It's actually kind of funny, I've compared my main Windows XP laptop's boot time to Ubuntu's - but it no longer matters, because Ubuntu starts faster than the IT-required encryption software. And I'm talking about loading the login screen, not doing any decryption. It takes it a good 20 seconds to get to the point it accepts input. And to add insult to injury, it refuses to accept input faster than about a character a second. Well, sort of. It really only breaks on mixed-case input, such as, say, a mixed-case password. Which, since it's not echoed, you can't actually tell is coming in incorrectly until you attempt to actually log in. Mind you, this stuff runs before Windows boots. It inserts itself before NTLDR.)
But then once Windows actually boots, I have to wait a half-age for the IT installed update software and the anti-virus software and the firewall software and the IT policy checker to finish loading before I can actually use the machine. And once that's done, it's time for even more loading to start up the email client and IDE so I can actually, you know, work.
So being asked to reboot the machine is the same as being asked to waste literally several minutes of time. I'd much rather solve the problem forcing the reboot than just reboot.
Of course, in the case of this machine, whoever wrote the wireless drivers were apparently retarded, because the wireless driver will occasionally fail to start. And when it fails to start, there's only one solution: reboot. (It also always fails to restart when resuming from suspend or hibernation, meaning I never suspend or hibernate, since I'd have to reboot anyway.)
So if the problem can be solved without rebooting, I'd much rather solve it that way. Even if it takes a half hour, it only has to prevent six reboots to be worthwhile.
I assume you're asking for the original press release from Ontrack Data Recovery. And, helpfully, not linked from either the Slashdot summary or the Computerworld article.
I can't help but think that it could only help the gene pool if the type of people who would think "hey, let's go look up important medical information on YouTube!" were given bad medical advice. Darwinism and all that.
(Except, of course, that this is more about misinformed parents harming their children. But still - I can't imagine why anyone would think "hey, I wanna find out more about immunization on YouTube!" I suppose they could be starting on a search engine and winding up at YouTube. But that ruins the joke.)
You missed the two screen shots. Essentially the post shows a "before and after" screenshot of the MPA University Toolkit page. The before picture contains a link that the after picture doesn't: "Click Here to Download The Beta Version of the Toolkit"
There's also another link that links to a blog entry about the MPAA toolkit which, if you dive into the comments, explains the GPL violation. (Just search for GPL, it's easier than trying to find it.)
So not entirely worthless, and therefore not a new low, just meeting the same low standards.
Remember when you activated the Shop Channel and they made you read through the agreement and it said that, if you need to replace the unit, you must replace it through Nintendo if you want to keep your Wii Shop points and downloads? And they made you agree to that several times, and pointed it out several times?
Well - they meant it. If you wanted to keep your Wii Shop points and downloads, you needed to send the unit back to Nintendo. As a plus, they also copy all your settings and save data over to the new unit.
You do have to re-download all your Wii Shop purchases, but you don't have to re-buy them if you go through Nintendo.
I really can't fault Nintendo for your failure to read their terms and conditions. You did agree to them, since you can't use the Wii Shop channel without reading them and agreeing to them.
Based on a Google search I made when I first noticed the problem, it's occurred for quite a few people. Not enough for Nintendo to have a FAQ entry for it, but enough that they didn't even ask any questions when I requested a warranty replacement online.
The other big difference, of course, is that the Wii dies while under warranty, while the Xbox 360 waits until just after the warranty period to give up.
That and the Wii remains playable even with the graphical corruption. Although it did really mess up the scan visor in Metroid Prime 3, apparently it uses the graphics memory to decide what "type" of thing is being scanned, and prior to getting it replaced I'd get all these random "scan targets" as I moved the Wiimote around.
Plus I was mainly intending it as a joke. It always seems that the most popular consoles have this tendency to die shortly after their warranty ends. So if the Wii starts toasting itself, it obviously has a very bright future! It worked for the PS2, after all.
The Wii can too. That's when I knew Nintendo really was going to be a player in this generation, when I had to ship my Wii back for replacement under warranty.
(OK, it didn't actually die, but it did start showing a lot of graphical corruption. I can't say exactly what's wrong, but the warranty repair indicated that the "main board" had to be replaced.)
OK, this is somewhat pointless, but I'm curious where they got the screenshots shown in this review from. Compare the boat screenshot shown first with the last screenshot shown. The first screenshot is from the final game. The last is apparently from some pre-release.
Notably, the health bars became hearts, the ship has only one speed ("Go") in the final versus two in the pre-release, and the cannon became always equipped versus selected in the pre-release shot. Plus, having played most of the way through the game, I don't remember any section of the game that looked anything like the last screenshot.
The middle screenshot also appears to be from a pre-release build. The phantom appears to be gold, and the map shows a gray phantom icon. I think the heart icons are also a little different from the final release. I also don't recognize that level of the Ocean King's Temple but I could just simply not remember it.
So where does Slashdot get these screenshots? They obviously aren't getting them during Zonk's play-through.
Surely you could solve that particular issue by running Firefox-itself code in one thread, and on-page-javascript-or-whatever-script in another thread (or perhaps one thread per.js, or per site, or per tab, or whatever). You wouldn't need to actually let the script writer work in multiple threads, would you?
Yes, you would. The basic reason is that while, conceptually, you're right that you could use your solution to prevent the browser from locking up, you'd still have to worry about the page locking up.
JavaScript code is generally only executed during events. These events include relatively minor things like scrolling, clicking, typing, or basically any form of interaction with the page. Now you could make the page code "smart" and avoid locking the page if there are no JavaScript event handlers interested in the current event, but you'd still potentially have issues where the page would essentially "freeze" until whatever long-running task completed. Since JavaScript events also fire when the page is unloaded, such a "freeze" could also prevent the user from navigating away from the page.
This leaves us with a potentially responsive browser UI, but a tab that can't be used until its task completes. This is still better than the Firefox situation (and, due to the way Firefox is designed, something that isn't going to change in Firefox for a long while), but still undesirable.
To allow the page to remain responsive while the page is doing some long-running task, you'd have to allow multiple threads so that the event handlers could run.
This is, in a way, the problem that "asynchronous" part of AJAX solves. It doesn't allow another thread to be run via script, but it does allow the page to send the task back to the server to execute, allowing the page to remain responsive while whatever long-running task completes.
I think a similar solution could work via JavaScript: instead of sending it off to the server, allow a script to be executed asynchronously. It would have no access to any information not sent to it when it was started (as otherwise the thread synchronization issues would remain), but it could run a task and then return a result.
There can be some argument over whether JavaScript should ever be used for a "long-running task" but the reality is that more and more web applications are finding that it makes sense to allow certain tasks to run on the client instead of burdening the servers. Most clients have the memory and CPU to spare, and it makes sense to use those resources instead of making the bottle-neck be the server.
Unfortunately the current solutions cause the page to become non-responsive while JavaScript executes and, in the case of poorly designed browsers, cause the entire browser to be non-responsive.
I think it's more of the "kid with hands in the cookie jar" type of blatant and deceptive.
Parent: "Are you stealing cookies?"
Child: "No, I'd never do that!"
Parent (pulling childs hand out of cookie jar, revealing a hand covered with melted chocolate bits): "Then why is your hand in the cookie jar?"
Child: "It wasn't!"
Parent: "And why are there crumbs all over your shirt and your face?"
Child: "There aren't!"
Parent: "Really?"
Child: "Of course! You know I'd never disobey you!"
Parent: "So your hands are smeared with chocolate, your mouth isn't covered with crumbs, and cookie jar that was full when I left isn't now half-empty?"
Child: "Sounds right!"
Although in the case of Comcast, it's not like the people in the "parent" role can do anything, and Comcast gets to continue providing Comcastic service. ("Why are you blocking BitTorrent?" "We're not!" "But I can see you sending RST packets!" "I can't see any!" "I've got a log right here!" "Your client is just pining for the fjords!" etc.)
And I think there's also a Senator Craig joke in there somewhere.
Half-Life 2 most certainly had cutscenes. Half-Life 2: Episode 2 even has a cutscene in the most traditional sense: there's a section after the Antlion Nest where you lose control of everything, including the camera, while the Gman talks to you.
Back to Half-Life 2, though: it also had cutscenes. Early in the game it mostly consisted of waiting around for someone to finish talking and finally open the door until you can move on. Not a cutscene in the traditional "you lose control of the game" cutscene but a cutscene in the "you can't progress until Alyx stops talking and opens the door" cutscene. Later in the game there were cutscenes were you had a limited view - you could look around and zoom in on things, but you had no real control until the event completed.
I actually find Half-Life 2's style to be more annoying than the more traditional "interrupt the action" cutscene for two reasons. The first, huge, giant, annoying reason is that cutscenes in Half-Life 2 can't be skipped. Ever. You have to wait for the event to play out before you can move on. This isn't a big deal the first run through the game, but if you ever find yourself replaying a section, waiting for Alyx to finish talking to her dad and just deactivate the damned force field can get annoying.
The second thing is that it turns the game from playing into a game of "run to whoever's talking so you can hear them." In response to this, most people just turn on the captioning and sit and watch while the NPCs run around poking things. Ultimately Half-Life 2's cutscenes become these events that you can hop up and down during, but no more a "real" part of the game than any other cutscene.
If I can't do anything useful during the cutscene, there's no real point to give me control, other than to allow me to miss something because I'm not looking in the right direction. They might as well use an actual cutscene: at least then you don't have to worry about missing something.
Slashdot is a site that receives international visitors. How would you propose we label Slashdot in your scheme?
Likewise, if I talk about the Starbucks in Burlington, I know what I mean, but without some context you'll have no way of figuring out what I'm talking about.
A quick Google search comes up with Starbucks in Burlingtons in Vermont, Ontario, North Carolina, Washington, and Massachusetts. Which one do I mean when I say "the Starbucks in Burlington?"
Well, I mean the Starbucks in Burlington, Massachusetts. But here's the thing: there are two Starbucks in Burlington, Massachusetts. (More if you count Starbucks served inside of other stores.) Which one do I mean? Well, for this example, I mean the one on Mall Road.
So I can't just say "the Starbucks" because that is too vague. I can't just say "the Starbucks in Burlington" because that's too vague. I have to exactly specify it, down to a street. People aren't going to want to have to do that just to link to places like CNN or aren't going to think that there might be a different, "closer" CNN in some parts of the world.
A real-world example could be the difference between Nissan Computer and Nissan Motor. Currently Nissan Computer has nissan.com, but under your scheme if I said "Nissan" based on my location (Massachusetts) it'd be obvious I meant Nissan Motor because Nissan Computer are further away than the nearest Nissan dealer.
How would I explicitly point to Nissan Computer in your scheme? By specifying an exact location?
Back to the Slashdot example. Where is Slashdot? I guess it's in the United States. So I could address it as "Slashdot US" in your scheme. But what if someone sets up a Slashdot Massachusetts? I don't want that Slashdot, I want the original. I guess that's in Michigan. But the servers are in California, aren't they?
Your scheme fails because it doesn't allow an exactly specified address, it instead works solely for discovering locations. So instead of remembering Slashdot's new fully qualified domain in your scheme, I could just search Google for it. Something I can do already.
Ultimately, though, it doesn't solve the problem. At some point you still need a registrar to assign names for whatever your smallest geographic region is.
It's not even slightly like pirating music or movies.
Tickets are by definition a scarce resource. There are a finite number of tickets for a finite number of seats, and once the tickets are all sold, that's it: there are no more tickets. Contrast that with pirating music which does not remove a copy of music from distribution.
I'm going to skip any moral argument, but suffice it to say that it's not a "victimless crime" as it really does remove items that would otherwise be available to "legitimate" purchasers.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there's a rather obvious problem with that. The print line should be:
sprintf(stdout, "People are stupid.\n");
Otherwise it doesn't compile.
(Disclaimer: Yes, this is intended as a joke.)
The top level poster may have been, but there was a comment in between that wasn't:
Fine by me.
Who needs BT if the legit on-demand video launches and plays at HD resolution as soon as you request it?
Which is what I was responding to.
Oh, I don't know, people using BitTorrent to download legal things, like Linux distros, OpenOffice.org, World of Warcraft patches, or anything else that offers BitTorrent downloads.
Seriously, why is that insightful? There are plenty of legal uses of BitTorrent that don't involve pirating movies.
(And, of course, things like, uh, porn and fansubs may not be available on demand. Not that I'd know anything about that. Oh, and indie films and less popular films and all sorts of digital things that aren't likely to be available on demand.)
I rolled a 22/7, does that count?
So what is Huckabee's policy on video games? I sure can't find one on his site. (Which, to be fair, covers a whole lot of issues that I'd consider to be far more important.)
On the Democrat side, it would appear that Edwards and Obama both want to regulate the industry.
So, some victory for video game's rights, since none of the candidates seem to really be addressing this issue and it would appear that all of them agree that video games need to be federally regulated. (With the presumable exception of Ron Paul.)
I expect it depends on your definition of "full game" :). I can't find any direct quote either, but I doubt that it's going to be a "full game" in the sense most people think.
The DS has had the "download play" feature since it was released, but this is essentially a wireless version of the same GBA feature that allowed games to be downloaded and played on the GBA, off either the GameCube or another GBA. Anyone remember Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles? That game downloaded a small game (really more of an app) to the GBA and then used the GBA as a very expensive controller. (Another example would be the "Tingle Tuner" from Wind Waker.)
I expect this is similar to that - the DS has essentially the same feature. So you'll probably be able to download small minigames to the Wii, which will then upload them to a DS via its built-in wireless. And these could be complete games, depending on their size - but not a "full game," really. As an example, Nintendo already has Download Stations available in some stores, so it's not a big stretch to allow the Wii to act as a Download Station.
Anyway, I can't find any mention of such a feature on the Nintendo site, but I don't think the DS has any form of permanent storage. Unless they're releasing a flash-card for the DS themselves, I doubt we'll be seeing downloaded full DS games.
But who knows, maybe they are - there's just not enough information yet. The entire thing seems to revolve around Fils-Aime saying "complete game" at some point.
You have to love how YouTube came up with five copies of the video for the "related videos" it displays at the end.
I guess YouTube is intent on giving Slashdot a run for their money on dupes. :P
IE's string concatenation is ridiculously slow. I've found that in all browsers (except Firefox) it's faster to use an Array, push() together the string elements, and finally join('') them together to create the final string.
In Firefox, this is ever-so-slightly slower. In Internet Explorer, it's a good order of magnitude faster. (Depending on the length of the string. Concatenating a string 100 chars long together 10,000 times, I got a time of 13.7 seconds for plain old string concatenation ("string" + "string") versus .04 seconds for Array.push(). Firefox did the same test in .7 seconds using both methods.)
The SunSpider tests appear to be using plain-old string concatenation. I'll have to try rewriting them using Array.push() and see what the result is. Doing that IE's performance would almost certainly beat Firefox.
If it would let me use my phone's built-in GPS with Google Maps, sure I'd pay $150 extra for the phone. If I were allowed to transfer applications between phones, sure it'd be worth it.
The reason my phone doesn't allow Google Maps access to the GPS is because Sprint sells a similar service for $10/month. So if the phone lasts more than 15 months, it would have been worth it.
Add in other locked down features (can't email photos from the phone, can't easily copy files off the phone, etc.) and it would be easily worth paying an extra $150 to get full access to the phone.
'Course, your question was really "would most people shell out an additional $150" and I have to admit the answer is almost certainly no.
I also detest rebooting, and will attempt to avoid it if I know that it's not a real solution and only solves the symptoms.
Of course, this aversion to rebooting might have something to do with IT installing so much crap onto the machine that it literally takes five minutes to boot. (It's actually kind of funny, I've compared my main Windows XP laptop's boot time to Ubuntu's - but it no longer matters, because Ubuntu starts faster than the IT-required encryption software. And I'm talking about loading the login screen, not doing any decryption. It takes it a good 20 seconds to get to the point it accepts input. And to add insult to injury, it refuses to accept input faster than about a character a second. Well, sort of. It really only breaks on mixed-case input, such as, say, a mixed-case password. Which, since it's not echoed, you can't actually tell is coming in incorrectly until you attempt to actually log in. Mind you, this stuff runs before Windows boots. It inserts itself before NTLDR.)
But then once Windows actually boots, I have to wait a half-age for the IT installed update software and the anti-virus software and the firewall software and the IT policy checker to finish loading before I can actually use the machine. And once that's done, it's time for even more loading to start up the email client and IDE so I can actually, you know, work.
So being asked to reboot the machine is the same as being asked to waste literally several minutes of time. I'd much rather solve the problem forcing the reboot than just reboot.
Of course, in the case of this machine, whoever wrote the wireless drivers were apparently retarded, because the wireless driver will occasionally fail to start. And when it fails to start, there's only one solution: reboot. (It also always fails to restart when resuming from suspend or hibernation, meaning I never suspend or hibernate, since I'd have to reboot anyway.)
So if the problem can be solved without rebooting, I'd much rather solve it that way. Even if it takes a half hour, it only has to prevent six reboots to be worthwhile.
I assume you're asking for the original press release from Ontrack Data Recovery. And, helpfully, not linked from either the Slashdot summary or the Computerworld article.
I can't help but think that it could only help the gene pool if the type of people who would think "hey, let's go look up important medical information on YouTube!" were given bad medical advice. Darwinism and all that.
(Except, of course, that this is more about misinformed parents harming their children. But still - I can't imagine why anyone would think "hey, I wanna find out more about immunization on YouTube!" I suppose they could be starting on a search engine and winding up at YouTube. But that ruins the joke.)
You missed the two screen shots. Essentially the post shows a "before and after" screenshot of the MPA University Toolkit page. The before picture contains a link that the after picture doesn't: "Click Here to Download The Beta Version of the Toolkit"
There's also another link that links to a blog entry about the MPAA toolkit which, if you dive into the comments, explains the GPL violation. (Just search for GPL, it's easier than trying to find it.)
So not entirely worthless, and therefore not a new low, just meeting the same low standards.
Which nation's national anthem are you referring to? And if you mean the Star Spangled Banner, let's hear all four verses! :)
Nope, it really is $399 for the low-end model now. (It even comes with a Blu-Ray movie, which says something about the PS3's game library...)
The $399 model is a 40GB model, which I presume doesn't include hardware backwards compatibility.
Remember when you activated the Shop Channel and they made you read through the agreement and it said that, if you need to replace the unit, you must replace it through Nintendo if you want to keep your Wii Shop points and downloads? And they made you agree to that several times, and pointed it out several times?
Well - they meant it. If you wanted to keep your Wii Shop points and downloads, you needed to send the unit back to Nintendo. As a plus, they also copy all your settings and save data over to the new unit.
You do have to re-download all your Wii Shop purchases, but you don't have to re-buy them if you go through Nintendo.
I really can't fault Nintendo for your failure to read their terms and conditions. You did agree to them, since you can't use the Wii Shop channel without reading them and agreeing to them.
Based on a Google search I made when I first noticed the problem, it's occurred for quite a few people. Not enough for Nintendo to have a FAQ entry for it, but enough that they didn't even ask any questions when I requested a warranty replacement online.
The other big difference, of course, is that the Wii dies while under warranty, while the Xbox 360 waits until just after the warranty period to give up.
That and the Wii remains playable even with the graphical corruption. Although it did really mess up the scan visor in Metroid Prime 3, apparently it uses the graphics memory to decide what "type" of thing is being scanned, and prior to getting it replaced I'd get all these random "scan targets" as I moved the Wiimote around.
Plus I was mainly intending it as a joke. It always seems that the most popular consoles have this tendency to die shortly after their warranty ends. So if the Wii starts toasting itself, it obviously has a very bright future! It worked for the PS2, after all.
The Wii can too. That's when I knew Nintendo really was going to be a player in this generation, when I had to ship my Wii back for replacement under warranty.
(OK, it didn't actually die, but it did start showing a lot of graphical corruption. I can't say exactly what's wrong, but the warranty repair indicated that the "main board" had to be replaced.)
OK, this is somewhat pointless, but I'm curious where they got the screenshots shown in this review from. Compare the boat screenshot shown first with the last screenshot shown. The first screenshot is from the final game. The last is apparently from some pre-release.
Notably, the health bars became hearts, the ship has only one speed ("Go") in the final versus two in the pre-release, and the cannon became always equipped versus selected in the pre-release shot. Plus, having played most of the way through the game, I don't remember any section of the game that looked anything like the last screenshot.
The middle screenshot also appears to be from a pre-release build. The phantom appears to be gold, and the map shows a gray phantom icon. I think the heart icons are also a little different from the final release. I also don't recognize that level of the Ocean King's Temple but I could just simply not remember it.
So where does Slashdot get these screenshots? They obviously aren't getting them during Zonk's play-through.
Of course you can, it's just that it's just a matter of time until they start calling you a Nazi. You Nazi.
Yes, you would. The basic reason is that while, conceptually, you're right that you could use your solution to prevent the browser from locking up, you'd still have to worry about the page locking up.
JavaScript code is generally only executed during events. These events include relatively minor things like scrolling, clicking, typing, or basically any form of interaction with the page. Now you could make the page code "smart" and avoid locking the page if there are no JavaScript event handlers interested in the current event, but you'd still potentially have issues where the page would essentially "freeze" until whatever long-running task completed. Since JavaScript events also fire when the page is unloaded, such a "freeze" could also prevent the user from navigating away from the page.
This leaves us with a potentially responsive browser UI, but a tab that can't be used until its task completes. This is still better than the Firefox situation (and, due to the way Firefox is designed, something that isn't going to change in Firefox for a long while), but still undesirable.
To allow the page to remain responsive while the page is doing some long-running task, you'd have to allow multiple threads so that the event handlers could run.
This is, in a way, the problem that "asynchronous" part of AJAX solves. It doesn't allow another thread to be run via script, but it does allow the page to send the task back to the server to execute, allowing the page to remain responsive while whatever long-running task completes.
I think a similar solution could work via JavaScript: instead of sending it off to the server, allow a script to be executed asynchronously. It would have no access to any information not sent to it when it was started (as otherwise the thread synchronization issues would remain), but it could run a task and then return a result.
There can be some argument over whether JavaScript should ever be used for a "long-running task" but the reality is that more and more web applications are finding that it makes sense to allow certain tasks to run on the client instead of burdening the servers. Most clients have the memory and CPU to spare, and it makes sense to use those resources instead of making the bottle-neck be the server.
Unfortunately the current solutions cause the page to become non-responsive while JavaScript executes and, in the case of poorly designed browsers, cause the entire browser to be non-responsive.
I think it's more of the "kid with hands in the cookie jar" type of blatant and deceptive.
Parent: "Are you stealing cookies?"
Child: "No, I'd never do that!"
Parent (pulling childs hand out of cookie jar, revealing a hand covered with melted chocolate bits): "Then why is your hand in the cookie jar?"
Child: "It wasn't!"
Parent: "And why are there crumbs all over your shirt and your face?"
Child: "There aren't!"
Parent: "Really?"
Child: "Of course! You know I'd never disobey you!"
Parent: "So your hands are smeared with chocolate, your mouth isn't covered with crumbs, and cookie jar that was full when I left isn't now half-empty?"
Child: "Sounds right!"
Although in the case of Comcast, it's not like the people in the "parent" role can do anything, and Comcast gets to continue providing Comcastic service. ("Why are you blocking BitTorrent?" "We're not!" "But I can see you sending RST packets!" "I can't see any!" "I've got a log right here!" "Your client is just pining for the fjords!" etc.)
And I think there's also a Senator Craig joke in there somewhere.
Half-Life 2 most certainly had cutscenes. Half-Life 2: Episode 2 even has a cutscene in the most traditional sense: there's a section after the Antlion Nest where you lose control of everything, including the camera, while the Gman talks to you.
Back to Half-Life 2, though: it also had cutscenes. Early in the game it mostly consisted of waiting around for someone to finish talking and finally open the door until you can move on. Not a cutscene in the traditional "you lose control of the game" cutscene but a cutscene in the "you can't progress until Alyx stops talking and opens the door" cutscene. Later in the game there were cutscenes were you had a limited view - you could look around and zoom in on things, but you had no real control until the event completed.
I actually find Half-Life 2's style to be more annoying than the more traditional "interrupt the action" cutscene for two reasons. The first, huge, giant, annoying reason is that cutscenes in Half-Life 2 can't be skipped. Ever. You have to wait for the event to play out before you can move on. This isn't a big deal the first run through the game, but if you ever find yourself replaying a section, waiting for Alyx to finish talking to her dad and just deactivate the damned force field can get annoying.
The second thing is that it turns the game from playing into a game of "run to whoever's talking so you can hear them." In response to this, most people just turn on the captioning and sit and watch while the NPCs run around poking things. Ultimately Half-Life 2's cutscenes become these events that you can hop up and down during, but no more a "real" part of the game than any other cutscene.
If I can't do anything useful during the cutscene, there's no real point to give me control, other than to allow me to miss something because I'm not looking in the right direction. They might as well use an actual cutscene: at least then you don't have to worry about missing something.
Slashdot is a site that receives international visitors. How would you propose we label Slashdot in your scheme?
Likewise, if I talk about the Starbucks in Burlington, I know what I mean, but without some context you'll have no way of figuring out what I'm talking about.
A quick Google search comes up with Starbucks in Burlingtons in Vermont, Ontario, North Carolina, Washington, and Massachusetts. Which one do I mean when I say "the Starbucks in Burlington?"
Well, I mean the Starbucks in Burlington, Massachusetts. But here's the thing: there are two Starbucks in Burlington, Massachusetts. (More if you count Starbucks served inside of other stores.) Which one do I mean? Well, for this example, I mean the one on Mall Road.
So I can't just say "the Starbucks" because that is too vague. I can't just say "the Starbucks in Burlington" because that's too vague. I have to exactly specify it, down to a street. People aren't going to want to have to do that just to link to places like CNN or aren't going to think that there might be a different, "closer" CNN in some parts of the world.
A real-world example could be the difference between Nissan Computer and Nissan Motor. Currently Nissan Computer has nissan.com, but under your scheme if I said "Nissan" based on my location (Massachusetts) it'd be obvious I meant Nissan Motor because Nissan Computer are further away than the nearest Nissan dealer.
How would I explicitly point to Nissan Computer in your scheme? By specifying an exact location?
Back to the Slashdot example. Where is Slashdot? I guess it's in the United States. So I could address it as "Slashdot US" in your scheme. But what if someone sets up a Slashdot Massachusetts? I don't want that Slashdot, I want the original. I guess that's in Michigan. But the servers are in California, aren't they?
Your scheme fails because it doesn't allow an exactly specified address, it instead works solely for discovering locations. So instead of remembering Slashdot's new fully qualified domain in your scheme, I could just search Google for it. Something I can do already.
Ultimately, though, it doesn't solve the problem. At some point you still need a registrar to assign names for whatever your smallest geographic region is.
It's not even slightly like pirating music or movies.
Tickets are by definition a scarce resource. There are a finite number of tickets for a finite number of seats, and once the tickets are all sold, that's it: there are no more tickets. Contrast that with pirating music which does not remove a copy of music from distribution.
I'm going to skip any moral argument, but suffice it to say that it's not a "victimless crime" as it really does remove items that would otherwise be available to "legitimate" purchasers.