This is a private forum. Our purpose is to talk about things which interest each other. People who post things which do not interest us should be driven away by any convenient means which does not compromise the value of the forum. If people get their feelings hurt, tough. They were jerks to step in where they aren't wanted. And if people are offended by the normal level of hostility to competing arguments, that's just too damn bad for them. That's the nature of this community, and you can take it or leave it.
Slashdot is doing just fine the way it is (except for the top-level posts, which honestly seem to be becoming trolls for the purpose of generating ad revenue). We are dealing with trolls and offtopic posts in precisely the correct manner: ignoring them and helping each other to ignore them efficiently (while a significant minority checks for abuses of the mechanism for this).
Free, anonymous speech in the big picture is worthwhile. I hope there will always be public forums where anyone can speak their mind and never face consequences. But it is perfectly acceptable to have private forums with enforced topics and rules.
BTW, I find it very amusing to hear all this from the guy who said he'll never use "shut up software".
Let's see, you can't use a cell phone on an aircraft taking off in case it screws up the electronics and everybody dies in a big fireball.
People are killed every day while talking on the damned things in their car.
There is still a controversy over whether holding a long-distance broadcasting antenna against your scalp for hours each day might cause some statistical increase in brain tumors.
Now we're not only going to have cell-phones that carry (and must be refilled with) little cannisters of flammable fluid, but poisonous fluid that smells, looks, and tastes like some really wicked vodka.
Would I be taking it a step too far if I added hypertension leading to heart disease from not being able to ever get out of earshot of the office?
I think natural selection will favor those who communicate through smoke signals and hollerin'.
...they're just not optimized for it (I am speaking, of course, about emulating an instruction set).
I can't wait until we get real software chips: imagine a grid of tiny computational elements that can be set to perform one of several functions (like, xor east and west inputs and output to north, inverted to south). There are some really cool ideas for this out there, like making the data and configuration lines the same, so you have to start programs at the edge and make them worm their way inwards.
Imagine being able to rewire all the transistors in a modern chip into parallel vector crunchers for graphics apps! Even if you wasted 90% of the transistors in switching, you'd still probably have 20 to 100 times faster calculations.
This sure is a step in the right direction, though. The big problem with current designs is that only one tiny portion of the chip is working at any one time. The hardware needs to be split up and made more versatile so more stuff can be run in parallel.
Re. the so called "apology": people aren't pissed at the suggestion that there might be a problem with the GPL, they're pissed because they've heard this before and don't care. They're also pissed because the posted article makes it sound like the GPL may be totally broken, when in fact the linked discussion only talks about a possible minor exception.
So you can take your "apology", turn that sumbitch sideways...
Re:The real way to cheat GPL (and why it will fail
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
·
· Score: 2
I'm not objecting to anything, except the declining value of top-level stories in slashdot. The front-page story sounded big and new and important, and it turns out to be something that practically everyone has already heard of.
I'm talking about how you can create proprietary modifications to a GPL'd program, in violation of the spirit of the GPL. You take the parts of the GPL'd code that you want to use, put them in something like a daemon, and access them from a proprietary program.
Kernel modules are not the same, largely because they are used by the kernel, not the reverse. Also, because they are connected with a general-purpose interface that has valid uses. Someone making a crippled kernel that only works with certain proprietary modules is closer to what I'm talking about.
Basically, I'm talking about ways to cheat the GPL into being an LGPL, so you can use GPL'd code in your proprietary software. You can even weaken it more than the LGPL because you could get away with checksumming the daemon binary (you can't checksum LGPL'd shared libraries because of the licence term that states that you must not prevent the user from replacing the LGPL'd code).
The real way to cheat GPL (and why it will fail)
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
·
· Score: 4
Slashdot stories really are getting worse in the way they misrepresent minor stories as major disasters or breakthroughs. This is a rather trivial issue that has been kicked around for ages, and can't really be resolved without a legal battle (after all, you can make all the logical arguments you wish, but nothing is certain in court).
I thought someone was finally going to bring up the possibility of reducing a piece GPL'd software to a sort of daemon which acts as a shared library. If the interface is designed rationally (i.e. code for it can be written from scratch easily), there would be no need to reuse headers or other GPL'd files. Then proprietary additions to the software could be made through the creation of a proprietary client program.
I don't think anyone could make a case for communicating with a daemon being a creation of a derivative work. It is the same as the way you can make a script that runs programs which may be (and, in fact, are) GPL'd, without releasing the script under the GPL.
The fact is that there is no way to freely distribute and freely allow modification of software while forcing all later modifications to be released to free. Programs can interact, yet be seperate. There are many examples of programs which would be useless without the existance of another program (ex.: anything that isn't it's own operating system...), but they are clearly seperate and the copyrights are held by seperate people.
The GPL will not be upheld by legal threats, but by PR and competitive threats. Violation of the spirit of the GPL in this manner will create immense hostility from the Free Software community. Massive numbers will jump onto the hijacked project to duplicate the functionality of the proprietary additions, while eliminating annoying bugs and (of course) giving it away for free.
I fully expect that some company will try this trick some day, and be brought to their knees as a massive grassroots PR campaign paints them as evil corporate monopolists demanding money for an inferior product.
In fact, as I said in my original post, I don't think anyone would bother with it unless it looked like a hot chick.
We're talking about a fundamentally useless, even counterproductive, program. It does nothing but slow down the rate at which you get news (and probably a very limited selection of news). Given that it has no utilitarian value, the value must be aesthetic.
However, I wish they'd be a little more honest/clueful about their product's appeal. There are more aesthetically appealing things for a virtual babe to do than read news...
...to the holy grail of the porn industry: the virtual slut. Instant and perfect sexual frustration, facing a drop-dead gorgeous chick who acts like she wants you, and not being able to touch her.
Nobody is going to find a chick that reads news to you very useful, but if they make her hot enough you'll try her out (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), won't you? At least I'm guessing a fair proportion of the population would.
In all seriousness, I don't think anyone would give it a second look if it wasn't for the bored horndog factor.
People are mostly looking for dark matter within galaxies. The biggest problem right now is that given the rate that galaxies are spinning, they should fly apart if the only mass in them is the stars we see (assuming that we're doing a good job of calculating the mass of stars).
IMVHO, the "dark matter" is mostly a bunch of sub-stars like Jupiter (these are known as the Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects, or MACHO, a term which covers all big dark matter, like black holes and brown dwarfs), which would have to be about a hundred times more common than stars to explain it. I believe in small MACHOs because small stars are much more common than large stars; a lot of people like to believe that black holes are common, but if matter tended to group together that much you'd expect larger stars to be more common than smaller stars.
Think of it, they can go up there and air-drop (airless-drop?) thousands of Linux discs!
They can spray paint their logo on the side of Mir, so whenever you go outside on a clear night, and see Mir shining up there, you'll see the TurboLinux logo!
Or they can just send up the first mated pair of space penguins, in the hopes that they will be fruitful and multiply, creating a meat-and-blubber industry to make space travel profitable.
The point was that overclocking is a result of intentional under-rating for marketing purposes. There may still be some stuff out on the market for which it is practical, but now the chip makers are clued in to the fact that they can't get away with just underrating their own chips in the documentation. Someone will catch the lie.
The reason they would make it hard for people to overclock is that they would rather sell you the more expensive chip. Courtesy to customers is in damn short supply, which is why low profit margin cars are built to disintegrate in time for the new model to come out ($6000 construction cost for a $10000 car that lasts 5 years, or $10000 construction cost for a $50000 car that lasts 50 years: looked at as individual jobs, the latter is much more profitable, but to a long-term industry, they are close to equal; fairness doesn't even come into it). In theory, competition is supposed to wipe out these tactics, but industries always have these little understandings that member companies will follow even to their own demise, like a daimyo refusing to arm his troops with modern guns and change the face of Japanese feudal society even when he'll be defeated otherwise.
Overclocking, today, is pretty silly. It's rather expensive and doesn't really provide that great a benefit. It's mostly an exercise in macho tinkering, done to brag about the top speed more than to actually run the thing.
However, it was entirely sensible when Intel released a whole pile of Celerons which were perfectly capable of running at half again their stock speed, with no special cooling hardware.
It didn't make sense not to to overclock, in that case. Intel's marketing department decided to lie to everyone about what these chips could do so they wouldn't cut into their high-margin market.
However, chip manufacturers have now learned their lesson: a few people will always test to see if their chip is really as slow as the spec say, and if they learn otherwise they'll tell everyone else over the internet. So they will build their chips to run slower if they want a slow chip to sell at a cheap price, and make damn sure that there is no cost-effective way to run it faster. The golden days of overclocking are over.
The degree to which this is not silly is the degree to which it is evil (okay, that's a harsh word for "profit-oriented", but we use it freely enough that way when we talk about MS).
Red Hat does include non-free software with its distributions (on a seperate disc I believe), including demos of commercial software and full versions of commercial software which are seeking to establish themselves as some sort of standard (REBOL, for example).
This is exactly the same as what MS or Apple does when they give away free copies of their software to educational institutions. They are trying to hook people on their proprietary stuff while they're young (give away a few copies at practically no cost to the class of 20 today, sell 20 copies a few years from now).
Furthermore, they seem to be looking to set up support contracts with the schools. This could end up being simply a back door into their traditional profit model.
Don't be too quick to dismiss this either as an innocent act of charity or a meaningless gesture. They might be setting themselves up as the next Microsoft.
Good point. I didn't know they were bundling WordPerfect etc.
Still, most of the CD is GPL'ed. So long as you don't install the non-GPL'ed bits you can install Red Hat Linux on as many systems as you want from one copy.
This makes me wonder if they have to pay a royalty to Corel for every copy they give away to these schools.
Great excitement was heard around the world as the great philanthropist known as TheDullBlade provided schools across North America with free access to RedHat Linux.
The ceremony was simple, with TheDullBlade meeting an eager member of the local high school's computer club. "Here you go," he said, handing the kid a CD-ROM he bought from CheapBytes and a printout of the manual on the disc, "install it on your school's systems and pass it on to the next school." Then he opened the floor for questions from the gathered press.
When asked why he would make such an amazing act of charity he replied, "Hey, I'm not in this for the money. I was done with the disc; actually, since I got a cable modem I don't order the CDs any more, so I thought it would be nice to hand it to someone who could use it. Of course, I'm pretty good with Linux, if one of those schools wants to hire me to get their systems working, they can do it at my standard consulting rate of $50/hour."
TheDullBlade, truly an inspiration to us all. Give him a hand, folks!
The only thing they are selling is the physical media and a support contract (and a pretty box). They have absolutely no legal hold over the data on that CD.
...since I almost put in a disclaimer about how I don't want to lump logic in with the rest of it. Now I wish I did.
However, aside from logic, philosophy (as it is studied in courses bearing that name) is about nothing but unanswerable questions (unfortunately ones to which people often have to choose arbitrary answers to go on with their lives).
Nobody needs to be taught about philosophy. By roughly age 12, just about everybody has already had most if not all the "great thoughts": "I think therefore I am (but how do I really know anything else 'is'?)", "why would it be evil to send people to eternal bliss, but good to send people to eternal damnation?", "does a consciousness exist after death?", "do I really exercise free will, or just experience intention as I experience a sight or a smell?", "if I'm going to die anyway, why bother living even another day?", et cetera, ad nauseum.
Philosophy classes are about labels. They're about communicating meaningfully about these questions which every mind produces. How efficient to just say "solipsism" and express the great uncertainty of whether anything exists outside of your own mind!
The Matrix doesn't contain any of those labels, and really doesn't cover many ideas. Let's face it, it doesn't even make sense. What, was he supposed to have had some sort of psychic power over the computer? He wasn't hacking into the system in any way we'd recognize; the fact that the world was computer simulated in no way explained Neo's ability to break the rules at will. It has about as much philosophical value as Star Wars' mystical babble about the force: the purpose is not to inspire deep thought, but to produce a momentary awe to enhance the entertainment through deeper emotional involvement, and promote the suspension of disbelief in a representation of the eternal struggle of good against evil as primitive hand-to-hand combat (no really, this isn't pro-wrestling! they have strange psychic powers that will determine the fate of the universe!).
Of course, every once in while, exceptional pop culture can provide us with deep philosophical insights. ^_^
In all seriousness, you could cover all this stuff with dozens of different popular movies and such, but just singling one out for the focus of an entire course is silly.
As if it was that much more expensive to make a reprogrammable decoding unit.
We get along pretty well on the internet with several video, graphic, and audio "standards", because we need only download a new plugin. It could work the same way with HDTV.
Anyway, I think the big problem right now is the price of the display itself. An HDTV is a television-sized display with computer-monitor resolution. Given the price of even a tiny 21" monitor, is it any surprise that HDTV is still too damned expensive?
The color signal was not set up as simple RGB for precisely this purpose of working with old B&W TVs. You make it sound as if it's a coincidence that B&W TVs can watch color broadcasts.
It is probable that color TV would have taken an extra decade or two to show up if it wasn't for this backwards compatibility.
(...and, I suppose, non-nebulae and non-everything-else-we-already-see-up-there)
Dark matter is merely that which can't be seen on the telescopes.
Some theories of what the dark matter is are (and as a certain 6-limbed, 4-eyed bearlike thing once said, may the humans who chose to use these stupid acronyms be made to swim in a river of piss):
MACHOs: Massive Astronomical Compact Halo Objects; a bunch of sub-stars like Jupiter wandering around on their own (seems likely to me; since smaller stars are more common than larger ones, why shouldn't sub-stars be even more common?)
WIMPs: Weakly Interacting Massive Particles; stuff like neutrinos that have a rest mass but you'll have a hell of a time seeing because they can pass through planets without affecting them (I can't really believe these would hang around in the galaxy for long enough to matter, but you never know)
black holes: we'd probably be seeing them from the gravitational lensing and the particles screaming as they fall in (they have a lot of energy at that bottom of that gravity well, and they dump it as X-rays and such before they reach the event horizon), so these aren't too likely
Slashdot Mirror
This is a private forum. Our purpose is to talk about things which interest each other. People who post things which do not interest us should be driven away by any convenient means which does not compromise the value of the forum. If people get their feelings hurt, tough. They were jerks to step in where they aren't wanted. And if people are offended by the normal level of hostility to competing arguments, that's just too damn bad for them. That's the nature of this community, and you can take it or leave it.
Slashdot is doing just fine the way it is (except for the top-level posts, which honestly seem to be becoming trolls for the purpose of generating ad revenue). We are dealing with trolls and offtopic posts in precisely the correct manner: ignoring them and helping each other to ignore them efficiently (while a significant minority checks for abuses of the mechanism for this).
Free, anonymous speech in the big picture is worthwhile. I hope there will always be public forums where anyone can speak their mind and never face consequences. But it is perfectly acceptable to have private forums with enforced topics and rules.
BTW, I find it very amusing to hear all this from the guy who said he'll never use "shut up software".
Let's see, you can't use a cell phone on an aircraft taking off in case it screws up the electronics and everybody dies in a big fireball.
People are killed every day while talking on the damned things in their car.
There is still a controversy over whether holding a long-distance broadcasting antenna against your scalp for hours each day might cause some statistical increase in brain tumors.
Now we're not only going to have cell-phones that carry (and must be refilled with) little cannisters of flammable fluid, but poisonous fluid that smells, looks, and tastes like some really wicked vodka.
Would I be taking it a step too far if I added hypertension leading to heart disease from not being able to ever get out of earshot of the office?
I think natural selection will favor those who communicate through smoke signals and hollerin'.
Muahahaha! KIllustrator can replace either of these and leave them totally in the dust.
Okay, I'm kidding, KIllustrator is still in a pretty early stage, but it's an interesting project. I'm keeping an eye on it.
Here is the product page.
...they're just not optimized for it (I am speaking, of course, about emulating an instruction set).
I can't wait until we get real software chips: imagine a grid of tiny computational elements that can be set to perform one of several functions (like, xor east and west inputs and output to north, inverted to south). There are some really cool ideas for this out there, like making the data and configuration lines the same, so you have to start programs at the edge and make them worm their way inwards.
Imagine being able to rewire all the transistors in a modern chip into parallel vector crunchers for graphics apps! Even if you wasted 90% of the transistors in switching, you'd still probably have 20 to 100 times faster calculations.
This sure is a step in the right direction, though. The big problem with current designs is that only one tiny portion of the chip is working at any one time. The hardware needs to be split up and made more versatile so more stuff can be run in parallel.
Re. the so called "apology": people aren't pissed at the suggestion that there might be a problem with the GPL, they're pissed because they've heard this before and don't care. They're also pissed because the posted article makes it sound like the GPL may be totally broken, when in fact the linked discussion only talks about a possible minor exception.
So you can take your "apology", turn that sumbitch sideways...
I'm not objecting to anything, except the declining value of top-level stories in slashdot. The front-page story sounded big and new and important, and it turns out to be something that practically everyone has already heard of.
I'm talking about how you can create proprietary modifications to a GPL'd program, in violation of the spirit of the GPL. You take the parts of the GPL'd code that you want to use, put them in something like a daemon, and access them from a proprietary program.
Kernel modules are not the same, largely because they are used by the kernel, not the reverse. Also, because they are connected with a general-purpose interface that has valid uses. Someone making a crippled kernel that only works with certain proprietary modules is closer to what I'm talking about.
Basically, I'm talking about ways to cheat the GPL into being an LGPL, so you can use GPL'd code in your proprietary software. You can even weaken it more than the LGPL because you could get away with checksumming the daemon binary (you can't checksum LGPL'd shared libraries because of the licence term that states that you must not prevent the user from replacing the LGPL'd code).
Slashdot stories really are getting worse in the way they misrepresent minor stories as major disasters or breakthroughs. This is a rather trivial issue that has been kicked around for ages, and can't really be resolved without a legal battle (after all, you can make all the logical arguments you wish, but nothing is certain in court).
I thought someone was finally going to bring up the possibility of reducing a piece GPL'd software to a sort of daemon which acts as a shared library. If the interface is designed rationally (i.e. code for it can be written from scratch easily), there would be no need to reuse headers or other GPL'd files. Then proprietary additions to the software could be made through the creation of a proprietary client program.
I don't think anyone could make a case for communicating with a daemon being a creation of a derivative work. It is the same as the way you can make a script that runs programs which may be (and, in fact, are) GPL'd, without releasing the script under the GPL.
The fact is that there is no way to freely distribute and freely allow modification of software while forcing all later modifications to be released to free. Programs can interact, yet be seperate. There are many examples of programs which would be useless without the existance of another program (ex.: anything that isn't it's own operating system...), but they are clearly seperate and the copyrights are held by seperate people.
The GPL will not be upheld by legal threats, but by PR and competitive threats. Violation of the spirit of the GPL in this manner will create immense hostility from the Free Software community. Massive numbers will jump onto the hijacked project to duplicate the functionality of the proprietary additions, while eliminating annoying bugs and (of course) giving it away for free.
I fully expect that some company will try this trick some day, and be brought to their knees as a massive grassroots PR campaign paints them as evil corporate monopolists demanding money for an inferior product.
I agree entirely.
In fact, as I said in my original post, I don't think anyone would bother with it unless it looked like a hot chick.
We're talking about a fundamentally useless, even counterproductive, program. It does nothing but slow down the rate at which you get news (and probably a very limited selection of news). Given that it has no utilitarian value, the value must be aesthetic.
However, I wish they'd be a little more honest/clueful about their product's appeal. There are more aesthetically appealing things for a virtual babe to do than read news...
...to the holy grail of the porn industry: the virtual slut. Instant and perfect sexual frustration, facing a drop-dead gorgeous chick who acts like she wants you, and not being able to touch her.
Nobody is going to find a chick that reads news to you very useful, but if they make her hot enough you'll try her out (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), won't you? At least I'm guessing a fair proportion of the population would.
In all seriousness, I don't think anyone would give it a second look if it wasn't for the bored horndog factor.
People are mostly looking for dark matter within galaxies. The biggest problem right now is that given the rate that galaxies are spinning, they should fly apart if the only mass in them is the stars we see (assuming that we're doing a good job of calculating the mass of stars).
IMVHO, the "dark matter" is mostly a bunch of sub-stars like Jupiter (these are known as the Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects, or MACHO, a term which covers all big dark matter, like black holes and brown dwarfs), which would have to be about a hundred times more common than stars to explain it. I believe in small MACHOs because small stars are much more common than large stars; a lot of people like to believe that black holes are common, but if matter tended to group together that much you'd expect larger stars to be more common than smaller stars.
Think of it, they can go up there and air-drop (airless-drop?) thousands of Linux discs!
They can spray paint their logo on the side of Mir, so whenever you go outside on a clear night, and see Mir shining up there, you'll see the TurboLinux logo!
Or they can just send up the first mated pair of space penguins, in the hopes that they will be fruitful and multiply, creating a meat-and-blubber industry to make space travel profitable.
Muahahaha! No, it is you who have gone mad!
The point was that overclocking is a result of intentional under-rating for marketing purposes. There may still be some stuff out on the market for which it is practical, but now the chip makers are clued in to the fact that they can't get away with just underrating their own chips in the documentation. Someone will catch the lie.
The reason they would make it hard for people to overclock is that they would rather sell you the more expensive chip. Courtesy to customers is in damn short supply, which is why low profit margin cars are built to disintegrate in time for the new model to come out ($6000 construction cost for a $10000 car that lasts 5 years, or $10000 construction cost for a $50000 car that lasts 50 years: looked at as individual jobs, the latter is much more profitable, but to a long-term industry, they are close to equal; fairness doesn't even come into it). In theory, competition is supposed to wipe out these tactics, but industries always have these little understandings that member companies will follow even to their own demise, like a daimyo refusing to arm his troops with modern guns and change the face of Japanese feudal society even when he'll be defeated otherwise.
Overclocking, today, is pretty silly. It's rather expensive and doesn't really provide that great a benefit. It's mostly an exercise in macho tinkering, done to brag about the top speed more than to actually run the thing.
However, it was entirely sensible when Intel released a whole pile of Celerons which were perfectly capable of running at half again their stock speed, with no special cooling hardware.
It didn't make sense not to to overclock, in that case. Intel's marketing department decided to lie to everyone about what these chips could do so they wouldn't cut into their high-margin market.
However, chip manufacturers have now learned their lesson: a few people will always test to see if their chip is really as slow as the spec say, and if they learn otherwise they'll tell everyone else over the internet. So they will build their chips to run slower if they want a slow chip to sell at a cheap price, and make damn sure that there is no cost-effective way to run it faster. The golden days of overclocking are over.
The degree to which this is not silly is the degree to which it is evil (okay, that's a harsh word for "profit-oriented", but we use it freely enough that way when we talk about MS).
Red Hat does include non-free software with its distributions (on a seperate disc I believe), including demos of commercial software and full versions of commercial software which are seeking to establish themselves as some sort of standard (REBOL, for example).
This is exactly the same as what MS or Apple does when they give away free copies of their software to educational institutions. They are trying to hook people on their proprietary stuff while they're young (give away a few copies at practically no cost to the class of 20 today, sell 20 copies a few years from now).
Furthermore, they seem to be looking to set up support contracts with the schools. This could end up being simply a back door into their traditional profit model.
Don't be too quick to dismiss this either as an innocent act of charity or a meaningless gesture. They might be setting themselves up as the next Microsoft.
Good point. I didn't know they were bundling WordPerfect etc.
Still, most of the CD is GPL'ed. So long as you don't install the non-GPL'ed bits you can install Red Hat Linux on as many systems as you want from one copy.
This makes me wonder if they have to pay a royalty to Corel for every copy they give away to these schools.
Great excitement was heard around the world as the great philanthropist known as TheDullBlade provided schools across North America with free access to RedHat Linux.
The ceremony was simple, with TheDullBlade meeting an eager member of the local high school's computer club. "Here you go," he said, handing the kid a CD-ROM he bought from CheapBytes and a printout of the manual on the disc, "install it on your school's systems and pass it on to the next school." Then he opened the floor for questions from the gathered press.
When asked why he would make such an amazing act of charity he replied, "Hey, I'm not in this for the money. I was done with the disc; actually, since I got a cable modem I don't order the CDs any more, so I thought it would be nice to hand it to someone who could use it. Of course, I'm pretty good with Linux, if one of those schools wants to hire me to get their systems working, they can do it at my standard consulting rate of $50/hour."
TheDullBlade, truly an inspiration to us all. Give him a hand, folks!
The only thing they are selling is the physical media and a support contract (and a pretty box). They have absolutely no legal hold over the data on that CD.
Neo wakes up, goes to work; everything is normal.
(or is that too "Outer Limits"?)
...since I almost put in a disclaimer about how I don't want to lump logic in with the rest of it. Now I wish I did.
However, aside from logic, philosophy (as it is studied in courses bearing that name) is about nothing but unanswerable questions (unfortunately ones to which people often have to choose arbitrary answers to go on with their lives).
Nobody needs to be taught about philosophy. By roughly age 12, just about everybody has already had most if not all the "great thoughts": "I think therefore I am (but how do I really know anything else 'is'?)", "why would it be evil to send people to eternal bliss, but good to send people to eternal damnation?", "does a consciousness exist after death?", "do I really exercise free will, or just experience intention as I experience a sight or a smell?", "if I'm going to die anyway, why bother living even another day?", et cetera, ad nauseum.
Philosophy classes are about labels. They're about communicating meaningfully about these questions which every mind produces. How efficient to just say "solipsism" and express the great uncertainty of whether anything exists outside of your own mind!
The Matrix doesn't contain any of those labels, and really doesn't cover many ideas. Let's face it, it doesn't even make sense. What, was he supposed to have had some sort of psychic power over the computer? He wasn't hacking into the system in any way we'd recognize; the fact that the world was computer simulated in no way explained Neo's ability to break the rules at will. It has about as much philosophical value as Star Wars' mystical babble about the force: the purpose is not to inspire deep thought, but to produce a momentary awe to enhance the entertainment through deeper emotional involvement, and promote the suspension of disbelief in a representation of the eternal struggle of good against evil as primitive hand-to-hand combat (no really, this isn't pro-wrestling! they have strange psychic powers that will determine the fate of the universe!).
Of course, every once in while, exceptional pop culture can provide us with deep philosophical insights. ^_^
In all seriousness, you could cover all this stuff with dozens of different popular movies and such, but just singling one out for the focus of an entire course is silly.
A "Custer's Revenge" clone for the N64.
...is only 12! Why would you suggest such a thing?!
As if it was that much more expensive to make a reprogrammable decoding unit.
We get along pretty well on the internet with several video, graphic, and audio "standards", because we need only download a new plugin. It could work the same way with HDTV.
Anyway, I think the big problem right now is the price of the display itself. An HDTV is a television-sized display with computer-monitor resolution. Given the price of even a tiny 21" monitor, is it any surprise that HDTV is still too damned expensive?
The color signal was not set up as simple RGB for precisely this purpose of working with old B&W TVs. You make it sound as if it's a coincidence that B&W TVs can watch color broadcasts.
It is probable that color TV would have taken an extra decade or two to show up if it wasn't for this backwards compatibility.
(...and, I suppose, non-nebulae and non-everything-else-we-already-see-up-there)
Dark matter is merely that which can't be seen on the telescopes.
Some theories of what the dark matter is are (and as a certain 6-limbed, 4-eyed bearlike thing once said, may the humans who chose to use these stupid acronyms be made to swim in a river of piss):
MACHOs: Massive Astronomical Compact Halo Objects; a bunch of sub-stars like Jupiter wandering around on their own (seems likely to me; since smaller stars are more common than larger ones, why shouldn't sub-stars be even more common?)
WIMPs: Weakly Interacting Massive Particles; stuff like neutrinos that have a rest mass but you'll have a hell of a time seeing because they can pass through planets without affecting them (I can't really believe these would hang around in the galaxy for long enough to matter, but you never know)
black holes: we'd probably be seeing them from the gravitational lensing and the particles screaming as they fall in (they have a lot of energy at that bottom of that gravity well, and they dump it as X-rays and such before they reach the event horizon), so these aren't too likely