1) WebM/VP8 probably infringe on several MPEG-LA patents (I don't agree with software patents, but U.S. courts do) 2) Google has not offered to indemnify anybody who uses WebM.
H.264 infringes on a patent I own. When adoption is sufficient, I will sue everyone who uses it (MPEG-LA doesn't indemnify its users against outside patent claims either).
People who insist that voting doesn't matter aren't just part of the problem, they're the entirety of the problem. If they all voted, we'd have more than enough votes to toss out anyone who didn't respect the people.
People who realize that voting doesn't matter are a tiny minority of the population. We are outnumbered 100 to 1 by the ignorant masses who buy into the phony conflicts between Democrats and Republicans, and don't even know what the actually important issues are (i.e. the ones where both parties always stand together against the public interest).
Like it or not, IP is a significant contributor to much of the world's economy.
It may be a huge contributor to the world economy, but it's a huge drain on the domestic economy, if you can't stop other countries from becoming free riders on it. China has no reason to pay for American IP when they can just take it and not pay. We can't do the same to them, because they make actual physical products. If things continue as they are, the unidirectional money flow is going to destroy the US.
Really? How about places where file sharing isn't illegal? There's still such a thing as national sovereignty, much as the US would like to think otherwise.
I wonder how the DHS would like it if, say, Iran decided to start killing people in America who violate Sharia law.
is it possible to make a (let say textual) file that contains correct md5sum of itself! (kinda recursive)
It sure is. Here's the file:
00000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000001 (a few lines trimmed to fit within Slashdot's post size limit) FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFE FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
Right, China is completely incapable of producing food by itself; they would have all starved to death if American corporations hadn't come in and given them our manufacturing jobs.
I wonder how they managed to exist for thousands of years before the US was even founded?
Why do companies think they deserve to sell the same product to Americans for 10 times the price it sells for in the third world? Once you start talking about products rather than jobs, suddenly all the bullshit rhetoric about "free trade" disappears. It's obvious that the purpose of "free trade" is to screw over the average American for the benefit of the few rich - we're forced to compete with third-world wages, but don't have the option of paying third-world prices.
Besides, the whole concept of "deserving" a certain standard of living is bogus. A medieval peasant had a shitty standard of living. How do we "deserve" a standard of living so much higher, just for being born a few centuries later? We don't "deserve" it, but we take it anyway, because we can. The rich are already taking this line of thinking to its logical conclusion... the working class would do well to do the same.
The developing world will keep developing and net flows of capital and standards of living are going to flow from more developed to less developed.
If I live in a more developed country, why the fuck should I tolerate this? Being a sovereign nation means having the ability to regulate trade up to and including stopping it completely. Since, as you freely admit, foreign trade is utterly screwing us over, that sounds like a pretty good idea right now.
Chances are it has security flaws just like almost every other complex piece of software written by humans. As long as it's only used by the few of us who are somewhat security-conscious, malware authors probably won't bother to figure out how to exploit it when there is plenty of exploitable software out there that everybody uses. They'll pick the low-hanging fruit and ignore Sandboxie users as not worth the effort. If Sandboxie becomes popular, that's over.
Again, let's just look at the history. Computers are about 1000x faster than they were in 1980. What does software have to show for it? It's often more of a pain to use (I hate it when software tries to be "smart". Don't second-guess me, just give me an easy way to express what I want to do), and it's buggier than ever.
Seriously speaking, 1000x faster starts getting near the level of human brains in raw power, so it should be able to run a real artificial intelligence on it.
Even if this were true, we would have no clue as to how to write one. I have yet to see anyone satisfactorily define "intelligence", let alone propose a plausible algorithm for it. As far as AI is concerned, don't hold your breath.
Only if you look at the release of each in a different country.
July 1983: NES (actually, "Famicom") released in Japan September 1985: Super Mario Bros. released in Japan October 1985: NES released in US March 1986: Super Mario Bros. released in US
Not only that, but "select, start" isn't really part of the code. The full code is just up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A - once you've done that, you can press anything you want and you'll still get 30 lives once you start.
"select" switches to 2-player mode (not necessary - the code works in either 1- or 2- player mode), "start" starts the game"
we just don't visit shitty sites in the first place
Really? You never click on URLs with non-obvious destinations? And even if you don't, are you sure that no site you visit will ever have a security hole allowing people to post arbitrary HTML?
Anyone who's taken basic microeconomics knows that economic efficiency is maximized when price = marginal cost. If two goods are manufactured the same way with the same machines, their marginal costs are equal, so if there's a price difference there must be at least one inefficiency there. It's not just that the consumer is getting screwed, there is less wealth in total to go around then there should be. The proverbial pie is being shrunk.
They wouldn't have sold the crippled CPU to you if $200 wasn't a fair price for at least the full quad-core CPU, since that's what they had to manufacture. Whether you keep it as single-core, or pay extra for the upgrade, you are with absolute certainty being ripped off.
Please be more specific - what exactly will fail if we just start setting computer clocks by solar time? And why have these things not failed already, given that computer clocks are often off by a few seconds anyway?
This is as daft an idea as making each day 1/365th of a year, damn the consequences. We'll be catching lunch in the dark.
I'd be all in favor of redefining the day as 1/365 of a year, if not for, as you said, that it has physical significance in our lives. That's the only reason why we should tolerate this incommensurability in our calendar. The same argument cannot be made for the second.
Every single one of the things you mentioned are already inaccurate by a far greater margin than the difference between atomic time and solar time anyway. We're talking about differences of a second every few years. My computer probably loses about a second per day without nist.gov to keep it honest.
Of course it's impossible to calibrate a crystal timer to match solar time exactly, because it's impossible to calibrate a crystal timer to match anything exactly. My clock is already 4 seconds behind time.gov and that's with it being synchronized periodically. Computer clocks don't need to change a bit, because it wouldn't do any significant amount of good anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
H.264 infringes on a patent I own. When adoption is sufficient, I will sue everyone who uses it (MPEG-LA doesn't indemnify its users against outside patent claims either).
(sure, I'm probably lying, but can you prove it?)
You call this a "single vendor"?
People who realize that voting doesn't matter are a tiny minority of the population. We are outnumbered 100 to 1 by the ignorant masses who buy into the phony conflicts between Democrats and Republicans, and don't even know what the actually important issues are (i.e. the ones where both parties always stand together against the public interest).
And despite doing things like this constantly, China is still the darling of all the so-called "free trade" advocates.
It may be a huge contributor to the world economy, but it's a huge drain on the domestic economy, if you can't stop other countries from becoming free riders on it. China has no reason to pay for American IP when they can just take it and not pay. We can't do the same to them, because they make actual physical products. If things continue as they are, the unidirectional money flow is going to destroy the US.
As opposed to a non-neutral net, where it'll just get throttled down to one packet per hour.
Really? How about places where file sharing isn't illegal? There's still such a thing as national sovereignty, much as the US would like to think otherwise.
I wonder how the DHS would like it if, say, Iran decided to start killing people in America who violate Sharia law.
It sure is. Here's the file:
00000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000001
(a few lines trimmed to fit within Slashdot's post size limit)
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFE
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
What if the attacker is brute forcing it in a random order? That time could be under a second if he's very lucky.
Did you know those burglars back in 1950 or what? Things have changed since then...
Men aren't ready for the responsibility of not having children? WTF?
Considering the prevalence of "deadbeat dads" today, I'd say that's precisely backwards.
Right, China is completely incapable of producing food by itself; they would have all starved to death if American corporations hadn't come in and given them our manufacturing jobs.
I wonder how they managed to exist for thousands of years before the US was even founded?
Why do companies think they deserve to sell the same product to Americans for 10 times the price it sells for in the third world? Once you start talking about products rather than jobs, suddenly all the bullshit rhetoric about "free trade" disappears. It's obvious that the purpose of "free trade" is to screw over the average American for the benefit of the few rich - we're forced to compete with third-world wages, but don't have the option of paying third-world prices.
Besides, the whole concept of "deserving" a certain standard of living is bogus. A medieval peasant had a shitty standard of living. How do we "deserve" a standard of living so much higher, just for being born a few centuries later? We don't "deserve" it, but we take it anyway, because we can. The rich are already taking this line of thinking to its logical conclusion... the working class would do well to do the same.
If I live in a more developed country, why the fuck should I tolerate this? Being a sovereign nation means having the ability to regulate trade up to and including stopping it completely. Since, as you freely admit, foreign trade is utterly screwing us over, that sounds like a pretty good idea right now.
Chances are it has security flaws just like almost every other complex piece of software written by humans. As long as it's only used by the few of us who are somewhat security-conscious, malware authors probably won't bother to figure out how to exploit it when there is plenty of exploitable software out there that everybody uses. They'll pick the low-hanging fruit and ignore Sandboxie users as not worth the effort. If Sandboxie becomes popular, that's over.
Again, let's just look at the history. Computers are about 1000x faster than they were in 1980. What does software have to show for it? It's often more of a pain to use (I hate it when software tries to be "smart". Don't second-guess me, just give me an easy way to express what I want to do), and it's buggier than ever.
Even if this were true, we would have no clue as to how to write one. I have yet to see anyone satisfactorily define "intelligence", let alone propose a plausible algorithm for it. As far as AI is concerned, don't hold your breath.
If history is any indicator, then the next version of every software program would then be 1000x slower.
Only if you look at the release of each in a different country.
July 1983: NES (actually, "Famicom") released in Japan
September 1985: Super Mario Bros. released in Japan
October 1985: NES released in US
March 1986: Super Mario Bros. released in US
Not only that, but "select, start" isn't really part of the code. The full code is just up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A - once you've done that, you can press anything you want and you'll still get 30 lives once you start.
"select" switches to 2-player mode (not necessary - the code works in either 1- or 2- player mode), "start" starts the game"
we just don't visit shitty sites in the first place
Really? You never click on URLs with non-obvious destinations? And even if you don't, are you sure that no site you visit will ever have a security hole allowing people to post arbitrary HTML?
You're not nearly as safe as you think you are.
Anyone who's taken basic microeconomics knows that economic efficiency is maximized when price = marginal cost. If two goods are manufactured the same way with the same machines, their marginal costs are equal, so if there's a price difference there must be at least one inefficiency there. It's not just that the consumer is getting screwed, there is less wealth in total to go around then there should be. The proverbial pie is being shrunk.
They wouldn't have sold the crippled CPU to you if $200 wasn't a fair price for at least the full quad-core CPU, since that's what they had to manufacture. Whether you keep it as single-core, or pay extra for the upgrade, you are with absolute certainty being ripped off.
Please be more specific - what exactly will fail if we just start setting computer clocks by solar time? And why have these things not failed already, given that computer clocks are often off by a few seconds anyway?
I'd be all in favor of redefining the day as 1/365 of a year, if not for, as you said, that it has physical significance in our lives. That's the only reason why we should tolerate this incommensurability in our calendar. The same argument cannot be made for the second.
Every single one of the things you mentioned are already inaccurate by a far greater margin than the difference between atomic time and solar time anyway. We're talking about differences of a second every few years. My computer probably loses about a second per day without nist.gov to keep it honest.
UT1 is as good a definition as any.
Of course it's impossible to calibrate a crystal timer to match solar time exactly, because it's impossible to calibrate a crystal timer to match anything exactly. My clock is already 4 seconds behind time.gov and that's with it being synchronized periodically. Computer clocks don't need to change a bit, because it wouldn't do any significant amount of good anyway.