There is a reason they are charging you only $130 for the student version.
It's like a drug: after you have spent many hours getting familiar with
Mathematica, you will then buy the full version
for $1880 rather than spend more time learning another system. Matlab
is even worse: last I checked, the full version costs upwards of $3000 in
any reasonable configuration. And you'll end up paying that every time
you change jobs. Matlab and Mathematica packaging may be convenient,
but they are not technically that much better than the free alternatives
to justify that kind of hassle and expense (in fact, I would argue that they
are technically worse than the free alternatives, but that's a different
argument).
Do yourself a favor and don't invest much time in "student versions". View
the use of Mathematica and Matlab in the classroom for what it is: a carefully
orchestrated marketing program designed to get students hooked. Spend
your time learning something that is open and that you can add to your personal
toolbox without having to pay some company large amounts of money again and
again.
Distributed and grid computing is older than that. PVM itself, for example,
came out in 1989, and people were using networks of workstations for large
computations before that.
Keep in mind that scientific computing, workstations, object-oriented programming,
GUIs, GUI designers, and similar ideas predate NeXT and Apple by a decade,
in some cases, many decades. While Jobs did an excellent job selecting
and integrating good, pre-existing technologies into the NeXT, I can't think
of a single case where they developed something really new (but if you can,
please share it).
Maxima is also used occasionally as a rapid prototyping language, but it's proprietary and it has a lot of rough edges.
Oops--I meant:
Mathematica is also used occasionally as a rapid prototyping language, but it's proprietary and it has a lot of rough edges.
Maxima is non-proprietary, but you probably wouldn't want to use it for programming either... you can drop into CommonLisp for programming when you have to in Maxima.
For interactive symbolic manipulation, Maxima is an excellent
open-source alternative. For numerical applications, Numerical Python and its associated
packages beat both Matlab and Mathematica in my opinion. For 3D visualization,
you can get VTK, which also
has Python bindings.
Maxima is also used occasionally as a rapid prototyping language, but it's
proprietary and it has a lot of rough edges. You are probably better off using
one of a number of open languages with similar features, like Scheme, OCAML, SML, Prolog, or Haskell.
Don't forget about C++, however. In many ways, C++ nowadays allows
you to write numerical code more naturally than any of these other languages
(yes, better than Matlab and Mathematica), it has by far the best libraries
available for it, and it gives you excellent performance. And you can
even do symbolic mathematics in C++, with the right libraries (though it's
not interactive, of course).
I think for numerical computation, that's technically actually a better environment
than Mathematica. And, while I'm not usually one to harp on the fact
that free software also doesn't cost money, given the steep price of Mathematica,
in this case, the money saving aspect really does matter as we..
This is not a robot, it's teleoperation. "Robot" generally refers to a mechanical device that carries out complex functions on its own, without human guidance. Teleoperation seems like a really good idea for surgery, but robotic surgery would be premature given the state of the art.
I am an individual. I do not have resources to press CDs, ship them,
market them. I make a deal with someone who does. There we go.
By your reasoning, fascism and communism are all about individualism as well--after
all, you interact with the state as an "individual". You always have
the choice of, say, committing suicide, after all.
Individualism can only exist if individuals have realistic choices. Many
forms of libertarian government are antithetical to individualism because
it destroys the conditions under which individualism is possible. Individualism
can only flourish in a legal system that gives the highest precedence to
individuals, not governments and not corporations.
The balance of copyright is indeed the ultimate balance between the individual
and society.
Maybe to you. In the Constitution, however, copyrights and patents
are not individual rights, they are incentives created to encourage certain
behaviors. You have no more individual, intrinsic rights to a copyright
than you have to a tax break on your home. That's different from land
or personal effects, to which the Constitution gives you intrinsic rights,
independent of any act of Congress.
Socialism is in fact at its base the communal ownership of all property,
which *isn't* very far from what definition Cambridge provides.
It is completely different. The goal of socialism is that everybody
has about the same amount of personal property, not that all property is
communally owned. Many European nations are socialist.
First off, I am not some two-bit slashdot poster who throws that word around. Communal ownership of all property is socialism.
No, it's not. Come on, that's a pretty basic. I suggest you at least help yourself to a good dictionary.
The balance between contract law and fair use exceptions is indeed the balance between individuals - ie contract law trumping all others and socialism - ie fair use removing private property for the good of the community.
And where exactly is the "individualism" when an corporation makes a contract? Corporations are about as anti-individualist as you can get. And the Constitution defines copyrights as limited rights that Congress may grant for the promotion of the arts; you don't own a copyright in the same way you own other private property.
It sounds like your political ideas come straight out of Ayn Rand alone; I suggest you broaden your reading a little...
You can get a Dell Axim A5 for $199 and a lot more PocketPC hardware for less than $300. Of course, the PocketPC software sucks, but porting the Simputer software environment to such hardware shouldn't be too hard. The new low-end iPaq might be another good target and might be supported fairly soon by handhelds.org.
For a fraction of the price, you can get a bicycle and keep in shape. If you need something that stowes away more easily than a bike, get a folding bike--smaller, lighter, and cheaper than the Segway. Or, you can get a scooter. And for $5000, you can already get a pretty nifty motorcycle. All of those will get you to your destination faster.
Contracts can waive just about any right, actually. Most any. I mean, the fundamental ones, no. But your employer can restrict your speech via contract, your employer can restrict your associations by contract, etc.
Employers can restrict some of your speech and some of your associations, and others, they can't, no matter what they write into the contract, and no matter how often you sign it.
Fair use has been routinely restricted in analog media sources by contract.
Routinely among certain players, yes. If you are a cable channel and you negotiate a written contract with a content provider, you can agree to many different things. However, contracts between companies and consumers are generally not established by negotiation and are subject to significantly different rules.
That decision is coming in the future, and I think clearly contract should and likely will trump copyright law.
There isn't just one kind of contract. Written contracts between economic equals are and should be almost unrestricted. The kinds of contracts that exist between my cable company or a publisher and myself need to be tightly regulated by the government because I'm simply not in a position to negotiate a fair contract.
Its a fair balance between individualism and socialism.
Ooooh, SOCIALISM. I see, when arguments fail you, you just bring out the bugaboo of socialism.
This has nothing to do with "individualism" or "socialism". It has to do with legal rules that allow a fair and free market to exist. Regulating contracts so that consumers retain choices and rights is of fundamental importance to capitalism and free market economies.
The bottom line is that if you are bothered by DRM, you must exercise your capitalist duty and deny profit to those who promote it.
The bottom line is thatif you don't like the fair use provisions people decide on, you can exercise your capitalist right not to produce under conditions that seem unfavorable to you. Frankly, I think we'd all be better off if many of the current content producers would exercise that right right now.
"We're moving to an optical-centric world in which the computers are the slow things and you reluctantly add them in," Dr. Smarr said.
When it comes down to it, the computers do the work. You can do useful supercomputing with almost no networking, you can't do useful supercomputing with blindingly fast networks and no computers.
(Somehow, the quote reminds me of people who think that managers and lawyers are the important part of a company, and engineers and customer service are a nuisance to be minimized.)
Which is exactly what Apple is talking about with their "user experience"
line.
I'm not so sure. I suspect that if, for example, Quicktime was
the standard video format on PCs and set top boxes, Apple would be happy
with the user experience even in the presence of DRM--after all, almost everybody
could view the stuff almost everywhere.
Fair use means that I can convert the content into formats that Microsoft,
Apple, or Hollywood may not like, as long as I don't redistribute it.
If someone can come up with a rights management system that doesn't interfere
with fair use, I'm sure that Apple (and some of the folks around here) will
be all for it. The question is : is this a technological problem, or a social
one?
There is no such system. Fair use means that I should be able to
convert the video into formats of my choosing, and that includes non-DRM
formats. It's logically impossible to have what one might traditionally
consider "fair use" and DRM co-exist. They can only co-exist if you
limit the meaning of "fair use".
Roughly, that you're free to copy it for personal use: backup copies, conversions
into formats that are more convenient. There are also additional rights regarding
research and educational use. For example, I should be able to use
short video clips from a movie to illustrate some points about graphics or
image processing in a research paper.
For a more detailed explanation, take a look here:
Now, if you buy something and agree to a supplemental limitation of rights,
than you in fact have no non-explicit rights (ie, not defined in the contract).
[...] You buy DRM'd content and you agree in fact to waive your fair use,
first sale, and other consumer rights. Its basic contract law.
It's not supposed to work like that for copyrights, and for good reason: publishers
would collude to eliminate fair use if they could. For books,
we warded off that threat, but for on-line movies, it is happening.
More generally, you cannot waive arbitrary rights in contracts; many rights
are guaranteed to you no matter what the contract says. Fair use has
traditionally been such a right, and it should continue to be for digital
media.
If DRM bugs you though, the obvious answer is not to buy into it.
That's a free market argument. The problem is that there is no free,
competitive market in movies. I don't have a wide choice of sellers for equivalent
products and I can't negotiate conditions with individual sellers. It's
a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.
You can justify any monopoly with your kinds of libertarian platitudes. But
the fact is that if we want a free market, we need to regulate things like
copyright and fair use carefully.
P2P distribution is a hassle and selection is limited. On-demand movie services just need to become cheap and convenient enough that consumers are willing to pay for the convenience. Then DRM isn't needed.
They do not support DRM, they support the right of artists to get paid for their work.
Please stop mindlessly repeating the PR party line of movie studios. This isn't about artists, this is about the profits of big corporations.
Judging by what we have seen so far Apple promotes fair use but expects people to not steal things.
What about consumer rights? If I pay for a piece of copyrighted content, I have a right to fair use of that content. DRM keeps me from that.
Re:who cares about "the lead"?
on
Mesa 5.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The OpenGL 1.* which is going to be supported by what hardware in five
years?
By whatever well-documented graphics hardware there is going to be in
five years.
It's a losing battle. Just like with DRM enabled hardware. Open Source
operating systems can only be run on pre-DRM hardware which will become obsolete
in a few years.
Come on, wake up. The world doesn't work according to Bill Gates's
pipe dreams. First of all, DRM-enabled hardware doesn't exclude open
source software: you can either run it without DRM, or you can sign it. Even
if it did, there is going to be plenty of non-DRM hardware going to be out
there.
Open source is going to be here decades from now. I wouldn't be so
sure about Microsoft, however.
Re:in the long run, that will change
on
Mesa 5.0 Released
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Open source development is design-by-committee by its nature.
No, it's implementation-by-contributors, which is very different.
Design-by-committee is what happens in many companies: a lot of people who
don't have to do any of the real work sit around and talk a lot, then dump
some non-sensical specification on their programmers. Design-by-committee
is bad. Implementation-by-contributors is good.
It takes a long time and if it ever finishes it's a compromise.
Making a good game or good piece of software always takes a long time--because
it requires extensive feedback from users. Open source is actually
better at that because the users are the developers.
As for being a compromise, of course it is. However, if it's a compromise
a substantial number of people can't live with, the project forks. This,
again, is good. Closed source doesn't have that option: just because
many people think MS Office sucks doesn't mean they can take it, split it
off, and fix it.
who cares about "the lead"?
on
Mesa 5.0 Released
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
i agree. OpenGL lost the lead a long time ago.
So? Who cares? I'd much rather use an open API than some
snazzy, proprietary thing.
Wait for 2.0 to come out. MS is going to lock Linux out of 2.0 as some
of the api's are based on dx9
Again, who cares? If MS has the power to lock Linux out of OpenGL 2.0
(through patents?), then open source will just not use it and instead evolve
OpenGL 1.* in a different direction.
in the long run, that will change
on
Mesa 5.0 Released
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
A good game generally needs a good budget to back it.
A flashy game with a lot of graphics may need a big budget. But
those games are not necessarily good, nor do good games necessarily need flashy
graphics. For example, many of the movie-tie-in 3D games are financed heavily
and anywhere from mediocre to horrible. On the other hand, excellent games
like chess or go are of utmost graphical simplicity, and they have been refined
over centuries and millenia in a process akin to open source. Furthermore,
there are quite a few excellent open source games with minimal graphics and
excellent gameplay.
Closed source, heavily financed games satisfy a yearning for novelty. They
spend a lot of money on eye candy and pushing technology to the limit. But
really good game design is a long-term, open process. For computer games,
that has barely begun. I suspect that in another few years, you are
going to see open source games whose graphics is simpler than Doom but whose
gameplay beats anything commercially available. And closed source games
won't be able to compete with that because they simply can't have thousands
of game players contributing directly to the evolution of the game.
Open source is slow--but eventually, it gets there, and it usually ends up
doing a better job.
Re:How does it compare on windows?
on
Mesa 5.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It's interesting for another reason: some graphics cards only support Direct3D, but Mesa can be used as a wrapper around Direct3D to give you an OpenGL interface. Past examples of such wrappers have performed reasonably well, and since Direct3D has improved, it should only get better.
Re:Oh, the fees you'll pay!
on
Add-Ons Add Up
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
[...] Then there's the %50 fee on gas, that you never see because its
built into the price- but is all tax [...]
You seem to have a problem with taxes that are included in the prices. I
absolutely don't. I don't care what fraction of my gas money goes to the
government when I buy gas; I care about that only when I go to the election
box (and then, I think that gas taxes are actually too low).
And the value of the services you get from the government? Less than
%10 of what you pay in taxes-- thats how much you're being ripped off.
Yes, and do you know where most discretionary spending is going? It's
going into the defense budget. Those supposedly fiscally conservative
Republicans are outdoing themselves in spending money. I agree I'm
being ripped off by this, but what can I do?
At least let us invest our own social security money if we choose to--
there's no acceptable reason not to, unless it really is just a fund for
the congress to raid whenever they want a raise.
Social security is not a retirement plan, it's a fall-back. It doesn't
make sense for you to invest it yourself.
All fees and taxes that are unavoidable should be included in the listed price so that people at least have some idea of how much they are going to pay. Anything else is some weird propaganda move--if you are going to factor out taxes, why not factor out CEO bonuses, campaign finance contributions, etc.?
For many services like car rentals, hotels, etc., you can buy "vouchers"--prepaid "tickets" that include a well-specified set of services: insurance, all fees, etc. Read the fine print and make sure that they state that they do include all charges that you care about and that they give you the coverage you need.
In general, people should have the option of negotiating specific, binding contracts with sellers or service providers, be it in the travel industry or anywhere else, with full disclosure of all fees ahead of time, and with a well-specified duration. On the other hand, doing business under contracts that give companies the option of changing their contractual obligations unilaterally at any time should simply be outlawed. Until it is, do business with companies that make commitments.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a reason they are charging you only $130 for the student version. It's like a drug: after you have spent many hours getting familiar with Mathematica, you will then buy the full version for $1880 rather than spend more time learning another system. Matlab is even worse: last I checked, the full version costs upwards of $3000 in any reasonable configuration. And you'll end up paying that every time you change jobs. Matlab and Mathematica packaging may be convenient, but they are not technically that much better than the free alternatives to justify that kind of hassle and expense (in fact, I would argue that they are technically worse than the free alternatives, but that's a different argument).
Do yourself a favor and don't invest much time in "student versions". View the use of Mathematica and Matlab in the classroom for what it is: a carefully orchestrated marketing program designed to get students hooked. Spend your time learning something that is open and that you can add to your personal toolbox without having to pay some company large amounts of money again and again.
Distributed and grid computing is older than that. PVM itself, for example, came out in 1989, and people were using networks of workstations for large computations before that.
Keep in mind that scientific computing, workstations, object-oriented programming, GUIs, GUI designers, and similar ideas predate NeXT and Apple by a decade, in some cases, many decades. While Jobs did an excellent job selecting and integrating good, pre-existing technologies into the NeXT, I can't think of a single case where they developed something really new (but if you can, please share it).
Oops--I meant:
Maxima is non-proprietary, but you probably wouldn't want to use it for programming either... you can drop into CommonLisp for programming when you have to in Maxima.
For interactive symbolic manipulation, Maxima is an excellent open-source alternative. For numerical applications, Numerical Python and its associated packages beat both Matlab and Mathematica in my opinion. For 3D visualization, you can get VTK, which also has Python bindings.
Maxima is also used occasionally as a rapid prototyping language, but it's proprietary and it has a lot of rough edges. You are probably better off using one of a number of open languages with similar features, like Scheme, OCAML, SML, Prolog, or Haskell.
Don't forget about C++, however. In many ways, C++ nowadays allows you to write numerical code more naturally than any of these other languages (yes, better than Matlab and Mathematica), it has by far the best libraries available for it, and it gives you excellent performance. And you can even do symbolic mathematics in C++, with the right libraries (though it's not interactive, of course).
You can get a copy of Numerical Python and run PyPVM or PyMPI with it for distributed computing.
I think for numerical computation, that's technically actually a better environment than Mathematica. And, while I'm not usually one to harp on the fact that free software also doesn't cost money, given the steep price of Mathematica, in this case, the money saving aspect really does matter as we..
This is not a robot, it's teleoperation. "Robot" generally refers to a mechanical device that carries out complex functions on its own, without human guidance. Teleoperation seems like a really good idea for surgery, but robotic surgery would be premature given the state of the art.
I am an individual. I do not have resources to press CDs, ship them, market them. I make a deal with someone who does. There we go.
By your reasoning, fascism and communism are all about individualism as well--after all, you interact with the state as an "individual". You always have the choice of, say, committing suicide, after all.
Individualism can only exist if individuals have realistic choices. Many forms of libertarian government are antithetical to individualism because it destroys the conditions under which individualism is possible. Individualism can only flourish in a legal system that gives the highest precedence to individuals, not governments and not corporations.
The balance of copyright is indeed the ultimate balance between the individual and society.
Maybe to you. In the Constitution, however, copyrights and patents are not individual rights, they are incentives created to encourage certain behaviors. You have no more individual, intrinsic rights to a copyright than you have to a tax break on your home. That's different from land or personal effects, to which the Constitution gives you intrinsic rights, independent of any act of Congress.
Socialism is in fact at its base the communal ownership of all property, which *isn't* very far from what definition Cambridge provides.
It is completely different. The goal of socialism is that everybody has about the same amount of personal property, not that all property is communally owned. Many European nations are socialist.
No, it's not. Come on, that's a pretty basic. I suggest you at least help yourself to a good dictionary.
The balance between contract law and fair use exceptions is indeed the balance between individuals - ie contract law trumping all others and socialism - ie fair use removing private property for the good of the community.
And where exactly is the "individualism" when an corporation makes a contract? Corporations are about as anti-individualist as you can get. And the Constitution defines copyrights as limited rights that Congress may grant for the promotion of the arts; you don't own a copyright in the same way you own other private property.
It sounds like your political ideas come straight out of Ayn Rand alone; I suggest you broaden your reading a little...
You can get a Dell Axim A5 for $199 and a lot more PocketPC hardware for less than $300. Of course, the PocketPC software sucks, but porting the Simputer software environment to such hardware shouldn't be too hard. The new low-end iPaq might be another good target and might be supported fairly soon by handhelds.org.
For a fraction of the price, you can get a bicycle and keep in shape. If you need something that stowes away more easily than a bike, get a folding bike--smaller, lighter, and cheaper than the Segway. Or, you can get a scooter. And for $5000, you can already get a pretty nifty motorcycle. All of those will get you to your destination faster.
Employers can restrict some of your speech and some of your associations, and others, they can't, no matter what they write into the contract, and no matter how often you sign it.
Fair use has been routinely restricted in analog media sources by contract.
Routinely among certain players, yes. If you are a cable channel and you negotiate a written contract with a content provider, you can agree to many different things. However, contracts between companies and consumers are generally not established by negotiation and are subject to significantly different rules.
That decision is coming in the future, and I think clearly contract should and likely will trump copyright law.
There isn't just one kind of contract. Written contracts between economic equals are and should be almost unrestricted. The kinds of contracts that exist between my cable company or a publisher and myself need to be tightly regulated by the government because I'm simply not in a position to negotiate a fair contract.
Its a fair balance between individualism and socialism.
Ooooh, SOCIALISM. I see, when arguments fail you, you just bring out the bugaboo of socialism.
This has nothing to do with "individualism" or "socialism". It has to do with legal rules that allow a fair and free market to exist. Regulating contracts so that consumers retain choices and rights is of fundamental importance to capitalism and free market economies.
The bottom line is that if you are bothered by DRM, you must exercise your capitalist duty and deny profit to those who promote it.
The bottom line is thatif you don't like the fair use provisions people decide on, you can exercise your capitalist right not to produce under conditions that seem unfavorable to you. Frankly, I think we'd all be better off if many of the current content producers would exercise that right right now.
When it comes down to it, the computers do the work. You can do useful supercomputing with almost no networking, you can't do useful supercomputing with blindingly fast networks and no computers.
(Somehow, the quote reminds me of people who think that managers and lawyers are the important part of a company, and engineers and customer service are a nuisance to be minimized.)
Which is exactly what Apple is talking about with their "user experience" line.
I'm not so sure. I suspect that if, for example, Quicktime was the standard video format on PCs and set top boxes, Apple would be happy with the user experience even in the presence of DRM--after all, almost everybody could view the stuff almost everywhere.
Fair use means that I can convert the content into formats that Microsoft, Apple, or Hollywood may not like, as long as I don't redistribute it.
If someone can come up with a rights management system that doesn't interfere with fair use, I'm sure that Apple (and some of the folks around here) will be all for it. The question is : is this a technological problem, or a social one?
There is no such system. Fair use means that I should be able to convert the video into formats of my choosing, and that includes non-DRM formats. It's logically impossible to have what one might traditionally consider "fair use" and DRM co-exist. They can only co-exist if you limit the meaning of "fair use".
For a more detailed explanation, take a look here:
http://www.eff.org/cafe/gross1.html
Now, if you buy something and agree to a supplemental limitation of rights, than you in fact have no non-explicit rights (ie, not defined in the contract). [...] You buy DRM'd content and you agree in fact to waive your fair use, first sale, and other consumer rights. Its basic contract law.
It's not supposed to work like that for copyrights, and for good reason: publishers would collude to eliminate fair use if they could. For books, we warded off that threat, but for on-line movies, it is happening.
More generally, you cannot waive arbitrary rights in contracts; many rights are guaranteed to you no matter what the contract says. Fair use has traditionally been such a right, and it should continue to be for digital media.
If DRM bugs you though, the obvious answer is not to buy into it.
That's a free market argument. The problem is that there is no free, competitive market in movies. I don't have a wide choice of sellers for equivalent products and I can't negotiate conditions with individual sellers. It's a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.
You can justify any monopoly with your kinds of libertarian platitudes. But the fact is that if we want a free market, we need to regulate things like copyright and fair use carefully.
P2P distribution is a hassle and selection is limited. On-demand movie services just need to become cheap and convenient enough that consumers are willing to pay for the convenience. Then DRM isn't needed.
Please stop mindlessly repeating the PR party line of movie studios. This isn't about artists, this is about the profits of big corporations.
Judging by what we have seen so far Apple promotes fair use but expects people to not steal things.
What about consumer rights? If I pay for a piece of copyrighted content, I have a right to fair use of that content. DRM keeps me from that.
The OpenGL 1.* which is going to be supported by what hardware in five years?
By whatever well-documented graphics hardware there is going to be in five years.
It's a losing battle. Just like with DRM enabled hardware. Open Source operating systems can only be run on pre-DRM hardware which will become obsolete in a few years.
Come on, wake up. The world doesn't work according to Bill Gates's pipe dreams. First of all, DRM-enabled hardware doesn't exclude open source software: you can either run it without DRM, or you can sign it. Even if it did, there is going to be plenty of non-DRM hardware going to be out there.
Open source is going to be here decades from now. I wouldn't be so sure about Microsoft, however.
Open source development is design-by-committee by its nature.
No, it's implementation-by-contributors, which is very different. Design-by-committee is what happens in many companies: a lot of people who don't have to do any of the real work sit around and talk a lot, then dump some non-sensical specification on their programmers. Design-by-committee is bad. Implementation-by-contributors is good.
It takes a long time and if it ever finishes it's a compromise.
Making a good game or good piece of software always takes a long time--because it requires extensive feedback from users. Open source is actually better at that because the users are the developers.
As for being a compromise, of course it is. However, if it's a compromise a substantial number of people can't live with, the project forks. This, again, is good. Closed source doesn't have that option: just because many people think MS Office sucks doesn't mean they can take it, split it off, and fix it.
i agree. OpenGL lost the lead a long time ago.
So? Who cares? I'd much rather use an open API than some snazzy, proprietary thing.
Wait for 2.0 to come out. MS is going to lock Linux out of 2.0 as some of the api's are based on dx9
Again, who cares? If MS has the power to lock Linux out of OpenGL 2.0 (through patents?), then open source will just not use it and instead evolve OpenGL 1.* in a different direction.
A good game generally needs a good budget to back it.
A flashy game with a lot of graphics may need a big budget. But those games are not necessarily good, nor do good games necessarily need flashy graphics. For example, many of the movie-tie-in 3D games are financed heavily and anywhere from mediocre to horrible. On the other hand, excellent games like chess or go are of utmost graphical simplicity, and they have been refined over centuries and millenia in a process akin to open source. Furthermore, there are quite a few excellent open source games with minimal graphics and excellent gameplay.
Closed source, heavily financed games satisfy a yearning for novelty. They spend a lot of money on eye candy and pushing technology to the limit. But really good game design is a long-term, open process. For computer games, that has barely begun. I suspect that in another few years, you are going to see open source games whose graphics is simpler than Doom but whose gameplay beats anything commercially available. And closed source games won't be able to compete with that because they simply can't have thousands of game players contributing directly to the evolution of the game.
Open source is slow--but eventually, it gets there, and it usually ends up doing a better job.
It's interesting for another reason: some graphics cards only support Direct3D, but Mesa can be used as a wrapper around Direct3D to give you an OpenGL interface. Past examples of such wrappers have performed reasonably well, and since Direct3D has improved, it should only get better.
You seem to have a problem with taxes that are included in the prices. I absolutely don't. I don't care what fraction of my gas money goes to the government when I buy gas; I care about that only when I go to the election box (and then, I think that gas taxes are actually too low).
And the value of the services you get from the government? Less than %10 of what you pay in taxes-- thats how much you're being ripped off.
Yes, and do you know where most discretionary spending is going? It's going into the defense budget. Those supposedly fiscally conservative Republicans are outdoing themselves in spending money. I agree I'm being ripped off by this, but what can I do?
At least let us invest our own social security money if we choose to-- there's no acceptable reason not to, unless it really is just a fund for the congress to raid whenever they want a raise.
Social security is not a retirement plan, it's a fall-back. It doesn't make sense for you to invest it yourself.
All fees and taxes that are unavoidable should be included in the listed price so that people at least have some idea of how much they are going to pay. Anything else is some weird propaganda move--if you are going to factor out taxes, why not factor out CEO bonuses, campaign finance contributions, etc.?
In general, people should have the option of negotiating specific, binding contracts with sellers or service providers, be it in the travel industry or anywhere else, with full disclosure of all fees ahead of time, and with a well-specified duration. On the other hand, doing business under contracts that give companies the option of changing their contractual obligations unilaterally at any time should simply be outlawed. Until it is, do business with companies that make commitments.