As an author of an intellectual work, you realize that your work serves to enrich culture. You are not producing a product, such as a chair. You're producing an expression of thought.
The market for thought, such as it is, will not expand beyond those that are ready to pursue it. E-media only serve as another distribution channel, with considerable downsides that can only be enhanced by DRM.
Copyright is granted to you as a financial incentive for you to enrich the bodies of work and the cultures they affect.
I think this is the crux of the Product vs Progress debate: Those who support DRM believe in the right of restraint; "I have produced a product, and you have a right not to purchase it." Those who distain it understand the unyeilding power of Copyright. An expression can not be aquired by another means, from another source, or be duplicated outside the scope of the law. You may never experience Minority Report within your lifetime, or possibly your children's lifetime, if you have any problem with the defective DVD.
Now, you can disarm the arguement I've presented -- the basic presumption which placed copy rights in the Consitution -- with bashings of greed, and regexing "s/I/society/g". I hope you present it in original language, at least.
Fair use is soemthing else. The DMCA enshrines digital media that abolishes all unregulated use. The MPAA/RIAA want to do this because the technology allows it. What they want to do is impossible to do with traditional media.
The entire picture is distorted by the prevalence of this "us vs them" battle. These laws dictate proper use of any creative work. The DMCA itself dictates the proper use of any digital distribution, creative or not. The RIAA/MPAA make up a very, very, small portion of the subject being regulated.
On the "Us Vs Them" front, the RIAA/MPAA want to monopolize the American source of Culture. This is a very lucrative proposition. The RIAA/MPAA demonstrate a flagrant irresponsibility as steward of the culture they currently control, and they want to own more. They do this by bleeding off the Unregulated areas of Copyright. The goal is to abolish The Commons, so that you must buy your heritage from Universal Music Group, et al.
For me the dividing line has always been commodity vs non commodity.
Ah! Commodity for whom? Photoshop/FilmGimp isn't a commodity for most people, but it is for film studios that do touch-up work. So, five studios developed FilmGimp independantly, discovered they were all doing it, and pooled their efforts.
For resource mining companies (oil, gold, diamonds, dinosaur bones), applications like MagicEarth will probably be a commodity one day. Right now, MagicEarth appears to be the nVidia of tera visualization, so there's no pressure.
Drivers are funny. The tend to have hardware specific portions. I think nVidia has internally found what would turn most drivers open source. Nintey-five percent of all their video products share the same pool of code. The rest are model-specific registers.
Right now, nVidia's got the advantage by sharing all that code among their products. They won't open source as long as that is an advantage.
Probably the most tedius and possibly the grandest hack Open/Free Source could produce would be a Grand Unified Driver Architecture for Video, Audio, and NIC. This would reproduce nVidia's internal advantage. Hardware companies could scrap 9/10 of their internal driver development, because the GUDA would have covered it. ATI would be given a large advantage if they could plug their entire video line-up into the GUDA.
Help us to sue every spammer than sent mail to you and get $9.95 disount on your next bill:)
They could offer a small bounty for every spam header you recieve on their network that you forward to their legal department. A small percentage of any legal reward from spam you recieved could be awarded.
Like the lottery.
Maybe not such a good idea.
Can anyone come up with a community-centric constructive idea? Something that will combat spam and encourage good ettiquite. Like recycling, getting five cents back for every bottle. I used to do that, when I could get that bounty back. I was a kid, so I'd go around picking up bottles and asking neighbors for their bottles.
Organized sports are not that expensive and the communities that tend to be poorly performing are also the ones with the lowest levels of participation in sports.
This isn't my experience. Klein Highschool in Houston Texas, for instance, has a truely massive campus. It's the size of six football fields. The only trouble is that it has three football fields, a soccer field, and a baseball field. There are typically 35 students to a classroom.
The real emphasis on sports over education actually comes from grading system. There are four levels for most classes: Basic, "normal", Advanced, and Honors.
Basic classes move at 1/2 the pace of the normal classes, requiring two semester to complete the same material. These classes usually feature up to 2/3 of the class sleeping, heads on desk, because the pace is so mind blowingly slow. One assignment per day, maximum, in a two hour course. Doing homework in class is punished. Homework counts 60% of your grade. Test count 10%.
The normal class is just that, normal. These classes are usually 40 or more to a class, so many students are bumped to basic to make room. Homework counts 40%, test 30%.
Advanced and Honors are basically the same. Usually "Advanced" is what colleges call "honors-option" courses, where extra work is given to Advanced students in a normal class. Advanced courses are usually reserved for students that participate in extra-cirricular activities. Namely, sports. Varsity are usually given Honors classes. Both of these classes count Homework as 10% of the grade, and tests as 40%. Class participation, including in-class assignments, is 50%. Doing homework in class is encouraged as productive, even during instruction.
Students who take certain extra-cirricular activities are also rewarded with an improvement to their gradepoint average. Klein Highschool typically graduates around ten students who have a 10.0+ gradepoint average. Yes, this is on the 4.0 gradepoint scale. Klein says that this tells colleges which students went "the extra mile" with school activities. About a third of the entire student body (over 5,000) graduate with greater than a 4.0 average. Those who do not participate in after-school activities can not surpass 4.0.
He didn't say it well. His tirade was laced repeatedly with statements to "shut up," and "stop whining." I understand the moral sentiment you see, but his motivation was less noble.
I can hear the emotion when both the AC and the asswipe wrote. The AC clearly rings of a "What The Hell? O_O" reaction. Our mutal aquaintance, Sir AssScratch above, is clearly spewing forth a flame. The nobler component of the flame is a wish that people would stop complaining, and apply that energy to better themselves (or at least make money). This is just a prop, however. The author's (Sir Scrotum's) motive is to convince himself and us that he is superior than the AC. The author percieved a flaw in the AC, and latched on to it like a lamprey to draw on every drop of ego he was able.
I'm glad you saw the softer side. I don't think the author had benign intentions. If his mission was the truth, it wouldn't have been laced with derisiveorders.
because it is illegal? because the music industry makes less money? because we won't have as nice music if the music industry struggles? because someone is making money doing things that are illegal?
I have come to the point in my life where (right and wrong) and (legal and illegal) are now completely separate, and surprisingly, not even aligned completely.
Good and bad need to be quantified. They're inarticulate words for such maters. Let's substitute those for moral and amoral. Let's also consider "copying" to mean "propogating of idea or art", as this is the subject being discussed. We'll also ignore the fact that every action a computer takes is a copy.
Immediately with this defintion, most slashdotters will think "copying is good!" The reasoning is that all sciences and arts benefit when their practicioners are exposed to new ideas. Programmers and engineers are intimate with this notion, as their occupations firmly rooted in and built upon the idea. The paradoxal result is that value is attributed to information; information becomes valuable. These are seperate things.
So, here we have the two sides of the coin: Scientists and Artists can further their crafts by being exposed to new works. On the other side, the copyright side, Science and Art is furthered when its practicioners are given incentive to create and explore. Copyright, and Copyleft; Only one of them has federal backing.
The copyright side says that any copying diminishes the incentive to create new works. The RIAA says this penalize artists and society, but the RIAA also calls decreasing profit growth rates (market saturation) a loss. The first part is true, but only some times.
And there is your answer. Copying is "bad" as long as it removes the incentive to create new works. The great divide is between the letter and spirit of the law. The letter leaves interpretation open that the incentive for new works should come from the author, while the spirit is simply that "new works" be incented (not a Bushism). Progress is the spirit, and the spirit doesn't give a damn about ancestral authors, so long as they are given their due.
Society always builds on the works that came before. Cultural progress is retarded when access to previous works is restrained. Because these new works are built upon previous works, they compete with the ancestral work. Because this competition diminishes the author's incentive over time, the past always tries to control the future.
I feel this is evidence of a strong imbalance in the current system. The drive for survival is normal, but when it is given force over the struggling newborn, something is sick. Free societies must restrain the past from controlling the future.
I consider 3rd Edition to be kind of middling. I consider Bioware's implimentation of 3rd Edition D&D (especially spellcasting) to be extremely "lite".
History? You mean the half-dozen Linux releases of big titles that came out one to twelve months after the Windows releases?
Most Linux-using gamers have access to at least one Windows machine, or dual-boot. There is a social preasure to aquire the games at release to play them with your friends. Nobody except a die-hard supporter with cash to burn will buy the same product twice.
I've tried hard, but I can not justify spending double for a product that yeilds a diff less than 365kb. Quake3's only difference between Win and Lin was the binary executable: 884kb Win, 895 Lin, less than 176kb difference. Granted, this speaks of Carmack's skill, but that 176kb is a ridiculous reason to pay US$49.99.
On Bioware's defense, it doesn't appear that Infogrames/Atari gave much liberty to Bioware in their development course. The Mac and Linux ports drifted behind as soon as the publisher shift occured. Miles and Bink provided plug-in solutions for them. There are oodles of pretty tiles and placables in screenshots that weren't in the final game, and it appears that Infogrames/Atari want NWN to be a massive franchise.
Not off topic in the least. Slashdot uses antiquated HTML and CSS. It has no reason to use javascript on the front page. It uses tables for layout, when paragraphs would serve, and <img> when background-image would serve. Contextual markup would make the page more accessible to every sort of device, including PDAs and cellphones. Slashdot should move to XHTML 1.1, which is an application of XML.
There's more, but I thought "for slashdot?" would be quite succinct. If nothing else, slashdot could cut its bandwidth usage in half, and serve the exact same HTML for the "light" and full-bloat^Hn themes.
Unfortunately not very well known, you can easily override all CSS, effectively disabling as much as you want. Customizing Mozilla, completely applicable to Phoenix. This page covers a lot. Place overriding CSS rules on userContent.css, with '!important' after the rules, before the semicolon. Opera provides for this mechanism very well.
Mike McCune writes
"The "Linux Journal" has a nice article about the switch from Irix to Linux at Digital Domain and the use of Linux in 'Star Trek, Nemesis.' I guess this means that Linux is finally ready for ------[Pun censored, humanity saved]."
Do you remember when the Aqua Mozilla themes were pulled? Apple didn't want skins that LOOKED like Aqua but didn't ACT like Aqua. The real concern was Mozilla on MacOS behaving inconsistently with the GUI it imitates.
Mozilla on MacOS X now has a custom front end, native to Aqua. Chimera is dependant on the Aqua front of Mozilla. If or when Phoenix ports to MacOS X, they and Apple will want Phoenix to have a native Aqua interface.
It's kind of stinky, but it's the best name brand policy both for Apple and Phoenix on MacOS X. However, I agree with you. Phoenix is leagues ahead and above of Mozilla, Chimera, IE5.5:mac, and Omniweb, in order of 0wn4g3. MacOS X needs Phoenix.
Slashdot uses antiquated HTML and CSS practices. Slashdot specifies font style and size explicitly. You can change font size with text zoom, which is CTRL + mwheel[up,down] or CTRL + [+,-].
In Preferences|Fonts and Colors, you can also specify minimum font size and DPI. Small fonts will not remain proportional if they're page-specified smaller than your minimum. Changing DPI will alter the number of pixels occupied per point size. Be wary of this, as most pages make the bad assumption that your browser renders fonts at either 72dpi (Mac) or 96dpi (PC). Slashdot is among these.
Font sizes have been the bane of W3 design since the <font> tag appeared, largely due to it. Calculating point size for monitors is convoluted to begin with. A point is 1/72 of an inch. Apple simplified this by making 1px equal 1pt. Pixels are, everywhere else, one-dimensional coordinates with color value, with no intristic dimensions or aspect ratio. So, on a PC, it's anyone's guess how many pixels per inch your screen is.
With CSS, we gain the ability to specify anything, including font sizes, in pixels, points, percents, millimeters, ems, exs, "absolutes". Most of them are out the window when DPI isn't knowable. Percentages, "absolutes", ems, and exes are relative, so they are usable. Ignoring Netscape 4, which got everything wrong: Percentages were fucked up by IE, absolutes by Opera, leaving ems and exs. One em is the height of the capital letter 'M'. One ex is the height of the lower case letter 'x'. Clear as mud?
I hope that was helpful and educational. I hope slashdot moves to XHTML 1.1. It's embarrassing that such a prominent site, proponent of standards, bemoaner of poor implimentations, should itself be guilty of poor HTML and CSS practices.
This is false. The sets were scheduled to be chainsaw. Because of fan response, Sci-Fi decided to put the sets into storage for the interum. Even if they had, however, Moya's biggest expense was design. They've got blueprints and better ideas now, so rebuilding Moya would be materials and labor.
Almost correct. The subtitles are stored as text, but DVDs can and often do supply their own fonts. I'm unsure of the format for this, but I have seen different fonts (not just colors) among the DVDs I own in the same player. The most prominant difference is usually the lack of black outlines on letters.
In WinDVD4,
Lain: stylized borderless yellow, black-bordered white courier
Gundam Wing: Arial-ish green and yellow with black border
There are three distinct fonts here. One has serifs! These may be part of the DVD spec, like the CSS font families, but even if so the DVD disc is specifying the color of the text. It would have been less expensive for Disney to make the text off-white (changing an integer) than to scrap most or all of the work put into the DVD transfer. Even creating off-white bitmap fonts for the English subtitles would be far preferable for them.
We have the same frame from two different sources, one of which is a screen capture of Windows' mplayer2 playing a DivX with captured subtitles (artifacts around text edges). Both show the same tint in lettering. It seems that the color is intionally specified by the DVD in some manner.
If I could pour water in this thing and have it make hydrogen for itself, that might increase its usefulness.
Or if I hooked up a dehumidifier to it, and put it on top so the water would run into the fuel making tank....OMG!
That's actually not a terrible idea, but the recirculation isn't necessary. If you own your own building, you could cover the roof in solar panels to provide the energy for separation. You could collect a huge amount of hydrogen between power outages, even if the solar panels were powering the refrigeration.
You need to quantify "good", as there are many ways, all with their own ups and downs.
Harvesting Jupiter or the solar corona has been tossed around theoretical and fictional deep space missions. This is a great way to obtain massive amounts of hydrogen. It's also out of most people's budget, so I assume you mean terrestrial means.
Though you can't "create" hydrogen unless you've got a matter-energy converter in your back pocket, there are lots of ways to obtain it. The most readily available form to anyone is also one that used to be a common high school lab experiment. It is seperating hydrogen and oxygen from water by applying electrical current. Solar energy is freely available for this purpose. Essentially, you bottle the harvested electrons in hydrogen and oxygen atoms, removing the covalent bond that holds those two gasses together as water. The Fuel Cell's PEM then does the reverse, stealing electrons while bonding the gasses.
There are other terrestrial sources of hydrogen, but I love this one. Oil companies typically burn off hydrogen with other gasses as "waste" while they're drilling oil out. You wouldn't believe how much they burn off. Imagine if just ONE of those oil companies had had the foresight to BOTTLE that stuff, instead of burning it.
This is significant, because the LOC also archives art, music, microfilm (part of which could be considered text), and films. The LOC in its entirety is certainly much larger than 20TB.
Slashdot Mirror
As an author of an intellectual work, you realize that your work serves to enrich culture. You are not producing a product, such as a chair. You're producing an expression of thought.
The market for thought, such as it is, will not expand beyond those that are ready to pursue it. E-media only serve as another distribution channel, with considerable downsides that can only be enhanced by DRM.
Copyright is granted to you as a financial incentive for you to enrich the bodies of work and the cultures they affect.
I think this is the crux of the Product vs Progress debate: Those who support DRM believe in the right of restraint; "I have produced a product, and you have a right not to purchase it." Those who distain it understand the unyeilding power of Copyright. An expression can not be aquired by another means, from another source, or be duplicated outside the scope of the law. You may never experience Minority Report within your lifetime, or possibly your children's lifetime, if you have any problem with the defective DVD.
Now, you can disarm the arguement I've presented -- the basic presumption which placed copy rights in the Consitution -- with bashings of greed, and regexing "s/I/society/g". I hope you present it in original language, at least.
Fair use is soemthing else. The DMCA enshrines digital media that abolishes all unregulated use. The MPAA/RIAA want to do this because the technology allows it. What they want to do is impossible to do with traditional media.
The entire picture is distorted by the prevalence of this "us vs them" battle. These laws dictate proper use of any creative work. The DMCA itself dictates the proper use of any digital distribution, creative or not. The RIAA/MPAA make up a very, very, small portion of the subject being regulated.
Lessig's presentation. (mirror)
On the "Us Vs Them" front, the RIAA/MPAA want to monopolize the American source of Culture. This is a very lucrative proposition. The RIAA/MPAA demonstrate a flagrant irresponsibility as steward of the culture they currently control, and they want to own more. They do this by bleeding off the Unregulated areas of Copyright. The goal is to abolish The Commons, so that you must buy your heritage from Universal Music Group, et al.
Ah! Commodity for whom? Photoshop/FilmGimp isn't a commodity for most people, but it is for film studios that do touch-up work. So, five studios developed FilmGimp independantly, discovered they were all doing it, and pooled their efforts.
For resource mining companies (oil, gold, diamonds, dinosaur bones), applications like MagicEarth will probably be a commodity one day. Right now, MagicEarth appears to be the nVidia of tera visualization, so there's no pressure.
Drivers are funny. The tend to have hardware specific portions. I think nVidia has internally found what would turn most drivers open source. Nintey-five percent of all their video products share the same pool of code. The rest are model-specific registers.
Right now, nVidia's got the advantage by sharing all that code among their products. They won't open source as long as that is an advantage.
Probably the most tedius and possibly the grandest hack Open/Free Source could produce would be a Grand Unified Driver Architecture for Video, Audio, and NIC. This would reproduce nVidia's internal advantage. Hardware companies could scrap 9/10 of their internal driver development, because the GUDA would have covered it. ATI would be given a large advantage if they could plug their entire video line-up into the GUDA.
Of course, IANAP.
They could offer a small bounty for every spam header you recieve on their network that you forward to their legal department. A small percentage of any legal reward from spam you recieved could be awarded.
Like the lottery.
Maybe not such a good idea.
Can anyone come up with a community-centric constructive idea? Something that will combat spam and encourage good ettiquite. Like recycling, getting five cents back for every bottle. I used to do that, when I could get that bounty back. I was a kid, so I'd go around picking up bottles and asking neighbors for their bottles.
This isn't my experience. Klein Highschool in Houston Texas, for instance, has a truely massive campus. It's the size of six football fields. The only trouble is that it has three football fields, a soccer field, and a baseball field. There are typically 35 students to a classroom.
The real emphasis on sports over education actually comes from grading system. There are four levels for most classes: Basic, "normal", Advanced, and Honors.
Basic classes move at 1/2 the pace of the normal classes, requiring two semester to complete the same material. These classes usually feature up to 2/3 of the class sleeping, heads on desk, because the pace is so mind blowingly slow. One assignment per day, maximum, in a two hour course. Doing homework in class is punished. Homework counts 60% of your grade. Test count 10%.
The normal class is just that, normal. These classes are usually 40 or more to a class, so many students are bumped to basic to make room. Homework counts 40%, test 30%.
Advanced and Honors are basically the same. Usually "Advanced" is what colleges call "honors-option" courses, where extra work is given to Advanced students in a normal class. Advanced courses are usually reserved for students that participate in extra-cirricular activities. Namely, sports. Varsity are usually given Honors classes. Both of these classes count Homework as 10% of the grade, and tests as 40%. Class participation, including in-class assignments, is 50%. Doing homework in class is encouraged as productive, even during instruction.
Students who take certain extra-cirricular activities are also rewarded with an improvement to their gradepoint average. Klein Highschool typically graduates around ten students who have a 10.0+ gradepoint average. Yes, this is on the 4.0 gradepoint scale. Klein says that this tells colleges which students went "the extra mile" with school activities. About a third of the entire student body (over 5,000) graduate with greater than a 4.0 average. Those who do not participate in after-school activities can not surpass 4.0.
Ahh! So this is why a federal tax (routed to RIAA) should be placed on all burners! A big tax! A tax proportionate to the burning speed!
I'm sure that'll be a great way to recoup money lost to those who can afford piracy studios, namely pirates.
And I'm sure it'll increase demand for cheaper, pirated, copies of data and audio.
I'm ready for my Prozium.
Does that mean we can't pay them to be honest? Then why are we paying them $290,000 a year?
Constructive.
He didn't say it well. His tirade was laced repeatedly with statements to "shut up," and "stop whining." I understand the moral sentiment you see, but his motivation was less noble.
I can hear the emotion when both the AC and the asswipe wrote. The AC clearly rings of a "What The Hell? O_O" reaction. Our mutal aquaintance, Sir AssScratch above, is clearly spewing forth a flame. The nobler component of the flame is a wish that people would stop complaining, and apply that energy to better themselves (or at least make money). This is just a prop, however. The author's (Sir Scrotum's) motive is to convince himself and us that he is superior than the AC. The author percieved a flaw in the AC, and latched on to it like a lamprey to draw on every drop of ego he was able.
I'm glad you saw the softer side. I don't think the author had benign intentions. If his mission was the truth, it wouldn't have been laced with derisive orders.
Good and bad need to be quantified. They're inarticulate words for such maters. Let's substitute those for moral and amoral. Let's also consider "copying" to mean "propogating of idea or art", as this is the subject being discussed. We'll also ignore the fact that every action a computer takes is a copy.
Immediately with this defintion, most slashdotters will think "copying is good!" The reasoning is that all sciences and arts benefit when their practicioners are exposed to new ideas. Programmers and engineers are intimate with this notion, as their occupations firmly rooted in and built upon the idea. The paradoxal result is that value is attributed to information; information becomes valuable. These are seperate things.
So, here we have the two sides of the coin: Scientists and Artists can further their crafts by being exposed to new works. On the other side, the copyright side, Science and Art is furthered when its practicioners are given incentive to create and explore. Copyright, and Copyleft; Only one of them has federal backing.
The copyright side says that any copying diminishes the incentive to create new works. The RIAA says this penalize artists and society, but the RIAA also calls decreasing profit growth rates (market saturation) a loss. The first part is true, but only some times.
And there is your answer. Copying is "bad" as long as it removes the incentive to create new works. The great divide is between the letter and spirit of the law. The letter leaves interpretation open that the incentive for new works should come from the author, while the spirit is simply that "new works" be incented (not a Bushism). Progress is the spirit, and the spirit doesn't give a damn about ancestral authors, so long as they are given their due.
Society always builds on the works that came before. Cultural progress is retarded when access to previous works is restrained. Because these new works are built upon previous works, they compete with the ancestral work. Because this competition diminishes the author's incentive over time, the past always tries to control the future.
I feel this is evidence of a strong imbalance in the current system. The drive for survival is normal, but when it is given force over the struggling newborn, something is sick. Free societies must restrain the past from controlling the future.
I consider 3rd Edition to be kind of middling. I consider Bioware's implimentation of 3rd Edition D&D (especially spellcasting) to be extremely "lite".
You and me both. ----- Daelin Teluial
History? You mean the half-dozen Linux releases of big titles that came out one to twelve months after the Windows releases?
Most Linux-using gamers have access to at least one Windows machine, or dual-boot. There is a social preasure to aquire the games at release to play them with your friends. Nobody except a die-hard supporter with cash to burn will buy the same product twice.
I've tried hard, but I can not justify spending double for a product that yeilds a diff less than 365kb. Quake3's only difference between Win and Lin was the binary executable: 884kb Win, 895 Lin, less than 176kb difference. Granted, this speaks of Carmack's skill, but that 176kb is a ridiculous reason to pay US$49.99.
On Bioware's defense, it doesn't appear that Infogrames/Atari gave much liberty to Bioware in their development course. The Mac and Linux ports drifted behind as soon as the publisher shift occured. Miles and Bink provided plug-in solutions for them. There are oodles of pretty tiles and placables in screenshots that weren't in the final game, and it appears that Infogrames/Atari want NWN to be a massive franchise.
Not off topic in the least. Slashdot uses antiquated HTML and CSS. It has no reason to use javascript on the front page. It uses tables for layout, when paragraphs would serve, and <img> when background-image would serve. Contextual markup would make the page more accessible to every sort of device, including PDAs and cellphones. Slashdot should move to XHTML 1.1, which is an application of XML.
There's more, but I thought "for slashdot?" would be quite succinct. If nothing else, slashdot could cut its bandwidth usage in half, and serve the exact same HTML for the "light" and full-bloat^Hn themes.
Phoenix has this.
tu slashdot?
Unfortunately not very well known, you can easily override all CSS, effectively disabling as much as you want. Customizing Mozilla, completely applicable to Phoenix. This page covers a lot. Place overriding CSS rules on userContent.css, with '!important' after the rules, before the semicolon. Opera provides for this mechanism very well.
Allow me to present this as timothy should have.
Do you remember when the Aqua Mozilla themes were pulled? Apple didn't want skins that LOOKED like Aqua but didn't ACT like Aqua. The real concern was Mozilla on MacOS behaving inconsistently with the GUI it imitates.
Mozilla on MacOS X now has a custom front end, native to Aqua. Chimera is dependant on the Aqua front of Mozilla. If or when Phoenix ports to MacOS X, they and Apple will want Phoenix to have a native Aqua interface.
It's kind of stinky, but it's the best name brand policy both for Apple and Phoenix on MacOS X. However, I agree with you. Phoenix is leagues ahead and above of Mozilla, Chimera, IE5.5:mac, and Omniweb, in order of 0wn4g3. MacOS X needs Phoenix.
Slashdot uses antiquated HTML and CSS practices. Slashdot specifies font style and size explicitly. You can change font size with text zoom, which is CTRL + mwheel[up,down] or CTRL + [+,-].
In Preferences|Fonts and Colors, you can also specify minimum font size and DPI. Small fonts will not remain proportional if they're page-specified smaller than your minimum. Changing DPI will alter the number of pixels occupied per point size. Be wary of this, as most pages make the bad assumption that your browser renders fonts at either 72dpi (Mac) or 96dpi (PC). Slashdot is among these.
Font sizes have been the bane of W3 design since the <font> tag appeared, largely due to it. Calculating point size for monitors is convoluted to begin with. A point is 1/72 of an inch. Apple simplified this by making 1px equal 1pt. Pixels are, everywhere else, one-dimensional coordinates with color value, with no intristic dimensions or aspect ratio. So, on a PC, it's anyone's guess how many pixels per inch your screen is.
With CSS, we gain the ability to specify anything, including font sizes, in pixels, points, percents, millimeters, ems, exs, "absolutes". Most of them are out the window when DPI isn't knowable. Percentages, "absolutes", ems, and exes are relative, so they are usable. Ignoring Netscape 4, which got everything wrong: Percentages were fucked up by IE, absolutes by Opera, leaving ems and exs. One em is the height of the capital letter 'M'. One ex is the height of the lower case letter 'x'. Clear as mud?
I hope that was helpful and educational. I hope slashdot moves to XHTML 1.1. It's embarrassing that such a prominent site, proponent of standards, bemoaner of poor implimentations, should itself be guilty of poor HTML and CSS practices.
This is false. The sets were scheduled to be chainsaw. Because of fan response, Sci-Fi decided to put the sets into storage for the interum. Even if they had, however, Moya's biggest expense was design. They've got blueprints and better ideas now, so rebuilding Moya would be materials and labor.
Check the Save Farscape website for more details
Almost correct. The subtitles are stored as text, but DVDs can and often do supply their own fonts. I'm unsure of the format for this, but I have seen different fonts (not just colors) among the DVDs I own in the same player. The most prominant difference is usually the lack of black outlines on letters.
In WinDVD4,
There are three distinct fonts here. One has serifs! These may be part of the DVD spec, like the CSS font families, but even if so the DVD disc is specifying the color of the text. It would have been less expensive for Disney to make the text off-white (changing an integer) than to scrap most or all of the work put into the DVD transfer. Even creating off-white bitmap fonts for the English subtitles would be far preferable for them.
We have the same frame from two different sources, one of which is a screen capture of Windows' mplayer2 playing a DivX with captured subtitles (artifacts around text edges). Both show the same tint in lettering. It seems that the color is intionally specified by the DVD in some manner.
That's actually not a terrible idea, but the recirculation isn't necessary. If you own your own building, you could cover the roof in solar panels to provide the energy for separation. You could collect a huge amount of hydrogen between power outages, even if the solar panels were powering the refrigeration.
You need to quantify "good", as there are many ways, all with their own ups and downs.
Harvesting Jupiter or the solar corona has been tossed around theoretical and fictional deep space missions. This is a great way to obtain massive amounts of hydrogen. It's also out of most people's budget, so I assume you mean terrestrial means.
Though you can't "create" hydrogen unless you've got a matter-energy converter in your back pocket, there are lots of ways to obtain it. The most readily available form to anyone is also one that used to be a common high school lab experiment. It is seperating hydrogen and oxygen from water by applying electrical current. Solar energy is freely available for this purpose. Essentially, you bottle the harvested electrons in hydrogen and oxygen atoms, removing the covalent bond that holds those two gasses together as water. The Fuel Cell's PEM then does the reverse, stealing electrons while bonding the gasses.
There are other terrestrial sources of hydrogen, but I love this one. Oil companies typically burn off hydrogen with other gasses as "waste" while they're drilling oil out. You wouldn't believe how much they burn off. Imagine if just ONE of those oil companies had had the foresight to BOTTLE that stuff, instead of burning it.
Wikipedia says that the LOC has 20TB of text.
This is significant, because the LOC also archives art, music, microfilm (part of which could be considered text), and films. The LOC in its entirety is certainly much larger than 20TB.
I'd like to keep a personal copy of the Library of Congress. Maybe two, so that I can have one version to make notes in. Can I do that?