Except the "defendant" may be your hosting company that will "acquiesce" immediately. A guy tested this a year or so ago, put up several sites with public domain text (hundreds of years old), then sent a complaint claiming he was the copyright owner. Most of the ISPs just shut it down.
Exactly, if the lawyer of those parents were worth his money he wouldn't have sued the US Wikimedia Foundation anyway but instead notified Disney that wikipedia.org is infringing on their Tron trademark/copyright/patent/whatever. The cool thing about such cases in the US is that even if Disney had lost the case Congress would just have made a new law, the "Consumer Protection and Freedom Liberation Act", making it unlawful to do anything Disney doesn't like.
Btw. Funny fact, heise.de reported that the injunction against the US foundation was first sent to St. Petersburg, Russia instead of St. Petersburg, Fl.
I'm not really sure but I think the Cell chip is mostly the work of Sony (at least the basic idea).
The whole design screams "Emotion Engine 2". Having a central core with 8 (7) attached vector units that do most of the work is the next logical (well, or stupid, coding for the VUs on a PS2 was a PITA) step after the two units on the EE.
The site is actually down, which is a shame; it would have been a nice oppurtunity to see if we could get Zonk thrown in jail for posting it on the Slashdot front page.
No, because it comes down to plausible deniability. If Zonk claimed he didn't actually read his post before posting it who wouldn't believe him?
Sorry, I'm bitter about the DVD thingy because I liked high quality cutscenes in PC games when they still existed. Nowadays the presentation of PC games is shit compared to console games and it's not just the fault of the budgets. Also I'm glad that I no longer (I assume/hope/pray that Civ4 isn't just an exception) have to pay 10 EUR more just to be spared the usually dreadful translation.
I doubt that aside from a few Japanese RPGs and some very extensive simulations (GT4 iirc was a tight fit and it uses a dual layer DVD) we'll see many games over the next 2-3 years that really needed a Blu-Ray, but texture size is gonna go up drastically with the new consoles and procedural textures mean less cpu time for polygons so unless there's a bandwidth bottleneck as with the PS2 (don't know, haven't done any calculations) developers are going to find ways to use up those 25 Gigs.
But you're right, I think for some current uses (especially video) BD is necessary (HD needs a lot of space despite the claims by some "experts" on/. how they fit 20 hours of super-high-for-real-definition on a CD with that new age246 thingy; some new games too; TV series are taking up too much shelf space;...) but I think for those uses HD or BD will be what the CD is for music i.e. everything most people will ever need. While I also won't be so stupid and imitate Bill Gates, I think only new forms of content (say 3D, that could blow up movie sizes by an order of magnitude or two; or perhaps visual books - an audio book with machinima for illustration purposes =) will create demand for an eventual successor to BD/HD.
At around 120GB I just gave up caring because I have never managed to fill a 120 GB drive on a personal machine (on a server it's a different matter).
"The Next Big Thing" are entertainment centers, a field where you can still use every additional Gig you can get. BD seems to have included mandatory managed copy. Let's say 20Gig a movie, 300MB for a FLAC encoded CD, and suddenly those 500Gig disks come in handy. WinFS will lead to a new approach to storage and you're probably going to delete less and archive more. Of course none of this is necessary and you could save a lot of space with some house (or disk)-cleaning and/or reencoding but why go through the hazzle when you can buy a terabyte for $80.
Eh? What is this guy going on about? The number of pieces of media, excluding films, that come in DVD format is tiny.
Apart from a few hundred million PS2 and Xbox games sold over the last 5 years.
I admit that I haven't bought many games recently but I don't own a single one in DVD format and I don't remember seeing any that did.
Part of the reason could be that you're living in the US. e.g. from what I've heard Civ4 ships on 2 CDs in the US and 1 DVD in Europe (well at least I've got a DVD and I didn't buy some sort of special edition). There are 2 reasons for this:
a) If there's only one publisher for all of Europe, they don't have to print different editions for different languages.
b) US customers are morons. Sorry but at least it seems that way. I've read dozens of posts on/. from otherwise reasonable people that ended with "and I've no interest in spending all that money just to be able to play a game" (yes, those $15 are gonna kill you), once someone even brought up the classic "why should I pay $20 to buy a 16x DVD if I can have a 52x CD for the same price" (head, meet wall)
I think the cookie management is one of the major flaws of Opera.
I really like the browser but why oh why can't they simply copy Firefox, Konqueror or half a dozen other browsers?
If they'd only change the fact that the cookie dialog always defaults to the same value, not the one you chose the last time. So most times you have to use the dropdown menu (in itself slower than bullet points) and most times you also have to disallow both cookies and third party cookies for any given domain because somehow the first doesn't include the second (even if I've heard people say differently, it never worked that way for me).
That means the only workable way to manage your cookies in Opera is to start with a fresh Opera installation, allow all cookies, visit all sites from which you need cookies, disallow all new cookies. Stupid.
Not only is Alexa's sample biased, they're also sloppy. T-Online.de, which is the world's second largest ISP iirc, is listed as "In Form Design, Inh. Katrin Voigt"...
So let's say Ian Kershaw wants to edit the Hitler article. Should he really be barred from doing so, just because he didn't edit some of wikipedias extensive pokemon articles first?
Yes, he could edit some other articles about the 3rd Reich or whatever but it nevertheless defeats the purpose of a collaborative encyclopedia where everyone can contribute his/her specific expertise.
No, it IS stupid, because those laws aren't in any way reasonable.
Most countries have anti-trust laws. They've been passed for a reason.
They'd be reasonable if indeed the vast majority of EU voters were in favor of heavily regulating Microsoft -- of course it's obvious that all of this regulation is totally on a whim, just because MS is big.
Most voters simply don't care. Otherwise they'd vote for a party that's for abolishing the anti-trust laws. And don't start about how undemocratic the EU is. The commission does its work with the support of the EP and the EC. If the voters in the member States decided that they no longer want monopolies curtailed we'd have a different commission.
IF the voters want this regulation, why the hell don't they simply refrain from BUYING MS's software? Yes, that's BUYING, as in paying money in a voluntary exchange between two trade parties. It's about *choice*.
You don't understand. It's not illegal (and MS is not fined for that) to be a monopoly. It's illegal to use a monopoly in one field to achieve an unfair advantage in another.
What they really want, or what in any case the EU wants, is to FORCE MS to produce the kind of software THEY want.
No, they want to stop MS from using their monopoly on the desktop to achieve a monopoly for server software.
Forcing other people into doing what YOU want by putting a gun to their head (or asking for a few million bucks) just isn't civilized, it's Mafia methods.
Unless you're a State or have some of the powers of a State and the things you want are codified law.
Sony seems to be in deep shit (fingers crossed that they don't simply buy TX to stop the lawsuit), MS gets fined $2.5M a day. I thought Christmas was supposed to be Sunday?
[...] and you've already ruled out logical impossibilities [...]
He's done nothing of that sort, you're building a strawman here.
His argument was, that you're building a strawman (i.e. a being that "can do anything" becomes able to do anything that's logically possible while your argument to disprove it implies that it should be able to do things that are logically impossible) which you then proceed to burn down to prove something else. If an omnipotent being is bound by the rules of logic or the laws of nature there are things it can't do which by definition makes it not-omnipotent.
Also your "proves" against omniscience either don't account for the possibility that the many-worlds interpretation is correct, that the omniscient being needn't be omnipotent or that it could answer but the answer would take infinite time to tell you.
Argh. It ain't enough to make me switch to KDE -- I *like* Enlightenment, dammit --
You *can* use a different WM with KDE. Just set the KDEWM (iirc, do a grep on/usr/bin/startkde) environment variable to whatever WM it should use. Additionally, you might want to kill off kdesktop to get access to enlightenment's desktop menus.
erm, Debian provides all KDE progs (most of them) in nice seperate packages. If, instead of installing the meta-package "kde" you'd installed just kde-core and then whatever prog you actually use, your installation would be a lot less bloated.
That said, [X|K]eyes is an essential part of every X11 desktop. (Oh and xsnow, at least during this time of the year)
Stupid question but if the pits are 6 times on HD the length why doesn't Blu-ray offer 6 times the capacity? Are they longer but thinner? Does Blu-ray waste three quarters of the disc for something else?
You need to get permission every time you play a disc
This would require a mandatory, permanent Internet connection for your BD player and I doubt we'll see stuff like that in consumer electronics in the next 10 years.
and your discs are permanently mated to your player. You can't play your disc at a friends house or in another room in your house, and if your player breaks, you lose your whole DVD collection.
I assume you refer to Sony's patent for such a mechanism. That patent was issued in 1999. They didn't put it in the PS2, they didn't put it in the PSP, now a few months ago it resurfaced and suddenly everyone assumes they'll use it for the PS3. IMHO Sony's too afraid of losing to MS to try something harebrained like that
blah, blah, blah. All your big theories, matrices and dimensions do nothing to refute the GP (which said that they're not looking for the perfect model but an honest fan). Putting an everyday face up there as a thank you to their community would do much more to differentiate them and draw attention than beautiful, perfectly-styled model #2355567. The very fact that they'd stay true to their roots would have the side effect of being a pretty good publicity stunt.
IOW, most of what you said is correct but it's orthogonal to the GP's argument not diametrically opposed =)
Oh, and another problem is that it can lead to over-optimization. Many PAL versions look like crap with black borders. Why? Because PAL has about 100 lines more than NTSC. It also runs at 50Hz instead of 60Hz like NTSC so in the end there should be no problem in terms of cpu time etc. But it doesn't work that way with memory/cache*. In the end many companies just released the NTSC version in PAL/60 (i.e. lower resolution, therefore the black borders, but 60Hz)
* I don't make much of a distinction between memory and cache because in this case it's pretty much the same anyway. Also note, that while the VRAM is one problem, the small caches of the vector units are also a nightmare to program. But in this case it's mostly a question of how much effort you want to put into a game to squeeze out a few more polygons/effects. IIRC Squinter Cell had a whole development team, almost as big as all of the others combined, dedicated to adapt it for PS2. The results were quite impressive.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, if the lawyer of those parents were worth his money he wouldn't have sued the US Wikimedia Foundation anyway but instead notified Disney that wikipedia.org is infringing on their Tron trademark/copyright/patent/whatever. The cool thing about such cases in the US is that even if Disney had lost the case Congress would just have made a new law, the "Consumer Protection and Freedom Liberation Act", making it unlawful to do anything Disney doesn't like.
Btw. Funny fact, heise.de reported that the injunction against the US foundation was first sent to St. Petersburg, Russia instead of St. Petersburg, Fl.
The whole design screams "Emotion Engine 2". Having a central core with 8 (7) attached vector units that do most of the work is the next logical (well, or stupid, coding for the VUs on a PS2 was a PITA) step after the two units on the EE.
Well, well, if they did manage that wouldn't that be the hack of the century...
If they're not DRMed convert them to pdf. (For example with print-to-pdf, that's possible on every platform)
No, because it comes down to plausible deniability. If Zonk claimed he didn't actually read his post before posting it who wouldn't believe him?
I doubt that aside from a few Japanese RPGs and some very extensive simulations (GT4 iirc was a tight fit and it uses a dual layer DVD) we'll see many games over the next 2-3 years that really needed a Blu-Ray, but texture size is gonna go up drastically with the new consoles and procedural textures mean less cpu time for polygons so unless there's a bandwidth bottleneck as with the PS2 (don't know, haven't done any calculations) developers are going to find ways to use up those 25 Gigs.
But you're right, I think for some current uses (especially video) BD is necessary (HD needs a lot of space despite the claims by some "experts" on /. how they fit 20 hours of super-high-for-real-definition on a CD with that new age246 thingy; some new games too; TV series are taking up too much shelf space;...) but I think for those uses HD or BD will be what the CD is for music i.e. everything most people will ever need. While I also won't be so stupid and imitate Bill Gates, I think only new forms of content (say 3D, that could blow up movie sizes by an order of magnitude or two; or perhaps visual books - an audio book with machinima for illustration purposes =) will create demand for an eventual successor to BD/HD.
At around 120GB I just gave up caring because I have never managed to fill a 120 GB drive on a personal machine (on a server it's a different matter).
"The Next Big Thing" are entertainment centers, a field where you can still use every additional Gig you can get. BD seems to have included mandatory managed copy. Let's say 20Gig a movie, 300MB for a FLAC encoded CD, and suddenly those 500Gig disks come in handy. WinFS will lead to a new approach to storage and you're probably going to delete less and archive more. Of course none of this is necessary and you could save a lot of space with some house (or disk)-cleaning and/or reencoding but why go through the hazzle when you can buy a terabyte for $80.
Apart from a few hundred million PS2 and Xbox games sold over the last 5 years.
I admit that I haven't bought many games recently but I don't own a single one in DVD format and I don't remember seeing any that did.
Part of the reason could be that you're living in the US. e.g. from what I've heard Civ4 ships on 2 CDs in the US and 1 DVD in Europe (well at least I've got a DVD and I didn't buy some sort of special edition). There are 2 reasons for this:
a) If there's only one publisher for all of Europe, they don't have to print different editions for different languages. /. from otherwise reasonable people that ended with "and I've no interest in spending all that money just to be able to play a game" (yes, those $15 are gonna kill you), once someone even brought up the classic "why should I pay $20 to buy a 16x DVD if I can have a 52x CD for the same price" (head, meet wall)
b) US customers are morons. Sorry but at least it seems that way. I've read dozens of posts on
I really like the browser but why oh why can't they simply copy Firefox, Konqueror or half a dozen other browsers?
If they'd only change the fact that the cookie dialog always defaults to the same value, not the one you chose the last time. So most times you have to use the dropdown menu (in itself slower than bullet points) and most times you also have to disallow both cookies and third party cookies for any given domain because somehow the first doesn't include the second (even if I've heard people say differently, it never worked that way for me).
That means the only workable way to manage your cookies in Opera is to start with a fresh Opera installation, allow all cookies, visit all sites from which you need cookies, disallow all new cookies. Stupid.
So that means an end to "boycott Sony!!!"? Now it's "buy Sony BMG stuff like mad for the good of all geekhood!!!"? =P
Only recently discovered it and it's great. Unfortunately now I've caught up and both BSG and Veronica Mars are on halt until mid-January. =(
Not only is Alexa's sample biased, they're also sloppy. T-Online.de, which is the world's second largest ISP iirc, is listed as "In Form Design, Inh. Katrin Voigt"...
Yes, he could edit some other articles about the 3rd Reich or whatever but it nevertheless defeats the purpose of a collaborative encyclopedia where everyone can contribute his/her specific expertise.
Most countries have anti-trust laws. They've been passed for a reason.
They'd be reasonable if indeed the vast majority of EU voters were in favor of heavily regulating Microsoft -- of course it's obvious that all of this regulation is totally on a whim, just because MS is big.
Most voters simply don't care. Otherwise they'd vote for a party that's for abolishing the anti-trust laws. And don't start about how undemocratic the EU is. The commission does its work with the support of the EP and the EC. If the voters in the member States decided that they no longer want monopolies curtailed we'd have a different commission.
IF the voters want this regulation, why the hell don't they simply refrain from BUYING MS's software? Yes, that's BUYING, as in paying money in a voluntary exchange between two trade parties. It's about *choice*.
You don't understand. It's not illegal (and MS is not fined for that) to be a monopoly. It's illegal to use a monopoly in one field to achieve an unfair advantage in another.
What they really want, or what in any case the EU wants, is to FORCE MS to produce the kind of software THEY want.
No, they want to stop MS from using their monopoly on the desktop to achieve a monopoly for server software.
Forcing other people into doing what YOU want by putting a gun to their head (or asking for a few million bucks) just isn't civilized, it's Mafia methods.
Unless you're a State or have some of the powers of a State and the things you want are codified law.
Do you really think the EU would fine joe sixPACK Inc. $2.4M *a* *day*
Sony seems to be in deep shit (fingers crossed that they don't simply buy TX to stop the lawsuit), MS gets fined $2.5M a day. I thought Christmas was supposed to be Sunday?
He's done nothing of that sort, you're building a strawman here.
His argument was, that you're building a strawman (i.e. a being that "can do anything" becomes able to do anything that's logically possible while your argument to disprove it implies that it should be able to do things that are logically impossible) which you then proceed to burn down to prove something else. If an omnipotent being is bound by the rules of logic or the laws of nature there are things it can't do which by definition makes it not-omnipotent.
Also your "proves" against omniscience either don't account for the possibility that the many-worlds interpretation is correct, that the omniscient being needn't be omnipotent or that it could answer but the answer would take infinite time to tell you.
Kopete?
In the year 1936 Adolf Hitler was the person of the year on the time magazine '[...] being named for being a "Good Samaritan" who made a difference.'?
You *can* use a different WM with KDE. Just set the KDEWM (iirc, do a grep on /usr/bin/startkde) environment variable to whatever WM it should use. Additionally, you might want to kill off kdesktop to get access to enlightenment's desktop menus.
Blu-Ray: 25GB per layer
(25/15)/6=0.28
That leaves about three-quarters for whatever they're using to waste said space.
That said, [X|K]eyes is an essential part of every X11 desktop. (Oh and xsnow, at least during this time of the year)
Do you have any link about that?
This would require a mandatory, permanent Internet connection for your BD player and I doubt we'll see stuff like that in consumer electronics in the next 10 years.
and your discs are permanently mated to your player. You can't play your disc at a friends house or in another room in your house, and if your player breaks, you lose your whole DVD collection.
I assume you refer to Sony's patent for such a mechanism. That patent was issued in 1999. They didn't put it in the PS2, they didn't put it in the PSP, now a few months ago it resurfaced and suddenly everyone assumes they'll use it for the PS3. IMHO Sony's too afraid of losing to MS to try something harebrained like that
IOW, most of what you said is correct but it's orthogonal to the GP's argument not diametrically opposed =)
* I don't make much of a distinction between memory and cache because in this case it's pretty much the same anyway. Also note, that while the VRAM is one problem, the small caches of the vector units are also a nightmare to program. But in this case it's mostly a question of how much effort you want to put into a game to squeeze out a few more polygons/effects. IIRC Squinter Cell had a whole development team, almost as big as all of the others combined, dedicated to adapt it for PS2. The results were quite impressive.