While I am not a lawyer, it seems to me that Theo is confused about what the dual licence in question actually says. I quote:
Alternatively, this software may be distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License ("GPL") version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation.
In other words, the author specifically allows you to distribute provided you meet all the requirements of the GPL and nothing else. Well, the GPL says that you have to license your work under the GPL (see section 2b), which they did.
In other words, the wording of this dual licence allows the redistributor to choose one licence or the other and thus remove the dual licensing; Theo is wrong.
Of course, Theo is right about removing the BSD licence from code.
With a little knowledge of the tape hardware and the way it's used to store data, you can store the data on a tape much more efficiently than an MP3 does (and get faster encoding and decoding to boot). Your average 8-bit with a tape deck (for example, a ZX Spectrum) essentially has a 1-bit ADC and DAC hooked up to the tape deck. Data is (mostly) stored on tape as a long series of pulses of two different lengths (each representing a 0 or 1). Therefore, to create a nice and small tape image file (even of data in a custom copy protected format), simply detect and store a description of these pulses in e.g. TZX format. Especially Spectrum emulation users often work with tape files like these.
The Windows ME I'm running right now says "4.90.3000" in the System Properties. Don't blame me; my parents actually like it (and I'm too addicted to Slashdot to wait until I get back to my own system).
Yes and no. While, for example, the MPlayer team distributes a lot of codecs in a way that is likely copyright infringement, there are compatible open-source codecs available for many common formats. While the original DivX;-) codec was, as you said, a hacked MS MPEG4 codec, DivX 4.0 (and later) and XviD are both (ostensibly clean-room) reimplementations. The real problem with these codecs is with patents, not copyright.
That experience isn't as easy to capture with PC games I may have played because ironically there's been less of an effort to preserve them. It's not hard to find MAME ROMs for every coin-op game ever made and even the old Apple, Commidore and Texas Instruments games (Parsec FTW!) are still available. But you're probably out of luck if you want to fire up an old Wing Commander, Inherit the Earth or Ultima game.
Actually, most of the time, late DOS era retrogaming is not too hard. Assuming you already have the game and can read the media (you did archive those old floppies to CD, didn't you?), DOSBox does a good job of getting old PC games to run on modern systems. While getting hold of older Wing Commander or Ultima games could be a bit tricky (read: not much harder than the MAME roms you mention), Inherit the Earth is still being sold and supported on a ridiculous amount of current platforms (partly thanks to ScummVM).
Asynchronous message passing removes the deadlock problem
Could you elaborate on your reasoning behind that? You can just as easily have processes deadlocked waiting for messages from each other as for semaphores or locks to be released (and I've seen hundreds of examples as a TA on a concurrent programming course).
I hate to shill, but I went Opera a long time ago when FF first started trying to do too much and I never once turned away. The only time I use it is on a fresh Linux install with FF -integrated-; I think it's Ubuntu or SuSE that integrates it so you can't remove it without disurpting the OS...didn't a certain Borg-led OS company do that once to ill-effect?
openSUSE 10.2 works fine without Firefox (I prefer SeaMonkey myself; Firefox just seems like it has bits missing all over the place). However, running KDE without having Konqueror installed is a bit tricky.
From my point of view, Firefox has a lot to gain by adding features, in particular by adding simple things that SeaMonkey has (for example, showing the last visited time in the history view, or having an UI control for turning GIF animation looping off). Extensions help quite a bit, though.
This article is not about copyrighting a number. U.S. Courts have already ruled that you cannot copyright a number. Thats why Intel switched to "Pentium" instead of "586".
You can't copyright a name, either. However, you can register it as a trademark.
The fan remake Maniac Mansion Deluxe may be of interest to the Maniac Mansion fans here. Looks mostly like the PC version, but with more colourful graphics (partially influenced by the sequel, Day of the Tentacle) and added sound and music.
I am not a lawyer, but I have read the applicable law reasonably carefully, and I'm familiar with the cases mentioned here.
Redistributing the Flash player is less a patent problem than side effects of a restrictive licence. For example, openSUSE goes out of its way to install browsers compatible with its bundled Flash player; Novell apparently has a deal with Adobe to allow redistribution of acroread and flash-player. Debian seems to circumvent this problem by having the package installer download Flash straight from Adobe. Nice and legal either way (assuming Adobe isn't violating a patent somewhere or something like that, which I doubt).
libdvdcss2 is trickier. Using Finland as an example of an EU country (applicable law), the situation seems to be that you are allowed to circumvent CSS to watch a movie, but I'm not lawyer enough to tell whether CSS qualifies for legal protection (that depends on whether it's an effective copy protection mechanism, I think) and whether the law requiring the copyright holder/distributor to provide a circumvention device, if necessary, is applicable. You'd also be very hard pushed to argue substantial non-circumventing use, making redistribution quite risky. In conclusion, I think libdvdcss2 users in Finland are safe, but redistributors may have a harder time. Other EU countries should be similar, as most of this legislation originates with the EU.
The win32 binary codecs are, in part at least, straightforward copyright infringment (unlicensed derivative works), but haven't been subject to any legal action I've heard of. Some of the codecs developed from scratch (e.g. some MPEG variants) seem to need patent licences in some areas; this is the primary cause of problems with MP3 (openSUSE circumvents this by using Real's Helix engine for MP3 decoding, which is licensed).
In conclusion, the situation is a mess and if you want to be safe, stick to what the major corps tell you is OK. If it isn't, they take the heat.
Why is the parent modded off-topic? The speech interface in ST:TNG is discussed in TFA!
My guess is that the answer is context-sensitivity: in a lift, you'd expect someone naming a possible destination outside a sentence to be choosing a destination. The same for standard lift control commands like "pause".
The longer the code, the easier it is to recognise plagiarism in programming assignments; the chance of 1000 lines being very similar between two students is a lot smaller than the chance of 100 lines.
Good warning flags include inability to explain how the code works, comments in a language the students can't identify, let alone speak (happened to me once!) and similarities in end-of-line whitespace (most cut-and-pasters don't notice this). If they're really lazy, you can catch them using the same identifiers.
European keyboards have a period on the numeric keypad.
Considering the sheer amount of European keyboards that exist, I'd be careful about making generalisations like that. For example, a quick check of Finnish keyboards at my workplace shows comma keys on the numpad everywhere, and that's the default symbol produced when you press it (although I vaguely remember some systems defaulting to a dot instead).
Tyrian is a bit tricky, but doable. Gameplay (at Pentium detail, General MIDI music, Sound Blaster effects) is fine on my 1.8 GHz Athlon XP (running DOSBox 0.65 on Linux) with the dynamic CPU core at about 70000 cycles. Unfortunately, you have to turn the CPU cycles way down for the menus to work properly (7000 cycles on my machine; there's something weird with their idle loop!). Turning the graphics detail in Tyrian down to "Low" circumvents this problem entirely.
Assuming "modern" means 2003 or later, DOSBox should help you out (for both Tyrian and Tyrian 2000, which is still a DOS program despite its Windows installer!).
In fact, it's quite hard to find DOS games that don't run on DOSBox.
FYI, right-clicking the OpenSUSE 10.2 SUSE menu and choosing "Switch to KDE Menu Style" changes it back to the way it was in 10.1 (as far as I can tell).
Or, in less confusing notation, 8 b = 1 B, therefore 8 Tb = 1 TB (or 1 Tb = 1/8 Tb if you prefer) and 300 Tb = 37.5 TB. The parent is apparently trying to say (x/Tb)/8 = (x/TB) or (1/Tb)/8 = 1/TB, which simplifies to what I said.
For those of you who dislike YouTube's low-quality video, the original video files are available here (scroll down to the bottom of the page for high-quality downloads).
Slashdot Mirror
With a little knowledge of the tape hardware and the way it's used to store data, you can store the data on a tape much more efficiently than an MP3 does (and get faster encoding and decoding to boot). Your average 8-bit with a tape deck (for example, a ZX Spectrum) essentially has a 1-bit ADC and DAC hooked up to the tape deck. Data is (mostly) stored on tape as a long series of pulses of two different lengths (each representing a 0 or 1). Therefore, to create a nice and small tape image file (even of data in a custom copy protected format), simply detect and store a description of these pulses in e.g. TZX format. Especially Spectrum emulation users often work with tape files like these.
You mean the Heinlein-Hubbard wager?
The Windows ME I'm running right now says "4.90.3000" in the System Properties. Don't blame me; my parents actually like it (and I'm too addicted to Slashdot to wait until I get back to my own system).
Yes and no. While, for example, the MPlayer team distributes a lot of codecs in a way that is likely copyright infringement, there are compatible open-source codecs available for many common formats. While the original DivX ;-) codec was, as you said, a hacked MS MPEG4 codec, DivX 4.0 (and later) and XviD are both (ostensibly clean-room) reimplementations. The real problem with these codecs is with patents, not copyright.
From my point of view, Firefox has a lot to gain by adding features, in particular by adding simple things that SeaMonkey has (for example, showing the last visited time in the history view, or having an UI control for turning GIF animation looping off). Extensions help quite a bit, though.
The fan remake Maniac Mansion Deluxe may be of interest to the Maniac Mansion fans here. Looks mostly like the PC version, but with more colourful graphics (partially influenced by the sequel, Day of the Tentacle) and added sound and music.
I am not a lawyer, but I have read the applicable law reasonably carefully, and I'm familiar with the cases mentioned here.
Redistributing the Flash player is less a patent problem than side effects of a restrictive licence. For example, openSUSE goes out of its way to install browsers compatible with its bundled Flash player; Novell apparently has a deal with Adobe to allow redistribution of acroread and flash-player. Debian seems to circumvent this problem by having the package installer download Flash straight from Adobe. Nice and legal either way (assuming Adobe isn't violating a patent somewhere or something like that, which I doubt).
libdvdcss2 is trickier. Using Finland as an example of an EU country (applicable law), the situation seems to be that you are allowed to circumvent CSS to watch a movie, but I'm not lawyer enough to tell whether CSS qualifies for legal protection (that depends on whether it's an effective copy protection mechanism, I think) and whether the law requiring the copyright holder/distributor to provide a circumvention device, if necessary, is applicable. You'd also be very hard pushed to argue substantial non-circumventing use, making redistribution quite risky. In conclusion, I think libdvdcss2 users in Finland are safe, but redistributors may have a harder time. Other EU countries should be similar, as most of this legislation originates with the EU.
The win32 binary codecs are, in part at least, straightforward copyright infringment (unlicensed derivative works), but haven't been subject to any legal action I've heard of. Some of the codecs developed from scratch (e.g. some MPEG variants) seem to need patent licences in some areas; this is the primary cause of problems with MP3 (openSUSE circumvents this by using Real's Helix engine for MP3 decoding, which is licensed).
In conclusion, the situation is a mess and if you want to be safe, stick to what the major corps tell you is OK. If it isn't, they take the heat.
Why is the parent modded off-topic? The speech interface in ST:TNG is discussed in TFA!
My guess is that the answer is context-sensitivity: in a lift, you'd expect someone naming a possible destination outside a sentence to be choosing a destination. The same for standard lift control commands like "pause".
The longer the code, the easier it is to recognise plagiarism in programming assignments; the chance of 1000 lines being very similar between two students is a lot smaller than the chance of 100 lines.
Good warning flags include inability to explain how the code works, comments in a language the students can't identify, let alone speak (happened to me once!) and similarities in end-of-line whitespace (most cut-and-pasters don't notice this). If they're really lazy, you can catch them using the same identifiers.
Tyrian is a bit tricky, but doable. Gameplay (at Pentium detail, General MIDI music, Sound Blaster effects) is fine on my 1.8 GHz Athlon XP (running DOSBox 0.65 on Linux) with the dynamic CPU core at about 70000 cycles. Unfortunately, you have to turn the CPU cycles way down for the menus to work properly (7000 cycles on my machine; there's something weird with their idle loop!). Turning the graphics detail in Tyrian down to "Low" circumvents this problem entirely.
Assuming "modern" means 2003 or later, DOSBox should help you out (for both Tyrian and Tyrian 2000, which is still a DOS program despite its Windows installer!).
In fact, it's quite hard to find DOS games that don't run on DOSBox.
Sorry, that last one should be 1 Tb = 1/8 TB. The scary part is that I proofread that to avoid making a fool of myself.
FYI, right-clicking the OpenSUSE 10.2 SUSE menu and choosing "Switch to KDE Menu Style" changes it back to the way it was in 10.1 (as far as I can tell).
Or, in less confusing notation, 8 b = 1 B, therefore 8 Tb = 1 TB (or 1 Tb = 1/8 Tb if you prefer) and 300 Tb = 37.5 TB. The parent is apparently trying to say (x/Tb)/8 = (x/TB) or (1/Tb)/8 = 1/TB, which simplifies to what I said.
Slightly offtopic, but the emu10k1 driver in ALSA (as in the standard kernel) supports Audigy cards fine. alsaconf should pick it right up.
MPlayer and Kaffeine (and probably other Xine variants) play FLIs just fine.
For those of you who dislike YouTube's low-quality video, the original video files are available here (scroll down to the bottom of the page for high-quality downloads).