The fact that you think that plutonium is somehow intrisnically immoral bothers me.
It's like if somebody in 1750 said that "crude oil will always be intrinsically immoral" because it was poisonous, smelled bad when you burned it in a lamp, and caused a stack of black, smoky pollution. There are reactor designs that exist right now which are capable of turning that plutonium into heat and short-lived decay products.
_Nothing_ is intrinsically immoral except for man perpetrating force or fraud against his fellow man.
Not only that, but 232U and 233U are far more difficult to separate in a centrifuge than 235U and 238U are, by virtue of being far closer together in mass.
Besides, given how much hard radiation 232U kicks out, i'd be surprised if your average centrifuge could use it as an input without premature, costly failures. 235U isn't a particularly hard emitter of anything, it's just fissile. 232U is fucking nasty.
Feel free to explain how GPLing their driver (which is support code whose sole reason is to drive the hardware that generates their revenue) is going to cause them any pain whatsoever?
People give Nvidia (and ATI/AMD, and whoever else) money for graphics hardware because of the hardware's capabilities; Nvidia wouldn't suddenly make any less money overnight if their driver code was out in the open.
Fuck off. The guy committed a "crime" in the UK, and was neither physically present nor controlled assets in the US.
What you're suggesting is directly analogous to the UK home office extraditing someone to Saudi Arabia for talking shit on a UK website about Muhammad (PBUH.)
Now is not the time for voxels. At current hardware specs, the computing time:image quality tradeoff comes out so far in favour of rasterizing (or whatever) polygons it's insane.
These guys had a tech demo floating around a few years ago, and to my eyes, not a lot has changed.
The reason that the "core" bits of NX were always Free is because dxpc (and, thus, mlview-dxpc, from which NX sprang) is only available under the GPL.
If i was involved in dxpc (or mlview-dxpc, really, although I'd imagine most of those changes are owned by the NX folks) development I'd be lawyering up at this point, if only to get some kind of proof that I wasn't being ripped off.
That's NOT going to be your average user. That's going to that same class of idiot that randomly sticks ram modules into their motherboards without regard to whether the motherboard will accept that particular speed or configuration. The kind who tries sharing his printer by plugging it into the usb port on his PVR, the kind who has his entire living room plugged into a bar plugged into a power bar plugged into a power bar. The kind who have their cable modem plugged into a LAN port on their router, the kind who plug their TV into their PVR using an HDMI to DVI adapter and wonder why their is no sound only to then plug in a set of composite cables and watch everything on the composite input "in HD".
Nice examples, but there's no reason that audio won't work over DVI equally well as over HDMI. There are no HDMI "audio pins", audio is sent during the video VBI, and works equally well over DVI-DVI, DVI-HDMI, and HDMI-HDMI, assuming the source device supports HDMI audio.
Here's the catch. When its a company faced with punitive damages, no one seems to have a problem. When its someone of wealth, no one seems to have a problem. But when its their pet illicit act, suddenly everyone is upset about how broken the system. In fact, you could actually argue that your reaction actually validates the system is "blind" and working properly in this specific detail.
No. People have a problem because the damages awarded are thoroughly disproportionate to the act committed. I'm amazed you can't grasp this, I really am.
In the interest of fairness, it's worth noting that I have no involvement in this whatsoever besides being thoroughly unimpressed with burst.net's behavior. As a result, my opinions above are just that, opinions; not grounded in any first hand experience whatsoever.
My rage upon finding out what:actually happened: made me somewhat intemperate in my earlier post, methinks. I still think you'd have to be mad to give them money, though.
So, the Burst.net guys get a request for information about a machine they host which has ~70k users, give or take. Instead of asking the box's sysadmin (who's their CLIENT), they pull the pin, then go on to mutter vague conspiracy-minded commentary such as "getting a refund is the least of his (the site owner/sysadmin) problems" on fora such as WHT (see http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=05a61aabdfcacdb369e1582aff4686a1&t=964013 ) Apparently the fact that he _received_ abuse complaints in the past was grounds to terminate his service; never mind the fact that he had SEVENTY THOUSAND USERS and acted on DMCA notifications and other abuse requests in a timely fashion, which is better than can be said about a lot of sites.
Had burst.net forwarded the request to the site owner (or even simply given the feds his name, and explained how he fit in) instead of disconnecting the machine, making borderline slanderous statements (such as 'he'll never get his data back' and 'a refund is the least of his worries right now',) they would have come out of this looking reasonably good. As it stands, you'd have to be completely brain-dead retarded to even think about giving them money.
The fact that VP8 is incredibly SIMILAR to H.264 (but has several almost arbitrary differences in key places) suggests that it was written with the intent of avoiding specific patents in the H.264 pool. If you don't match all claims of a patent, you're not infringing that patent.
It's unlikely that VP8 would be as similar to H.264 as it is if its authors hadn't set out to deliberately NOT infringe H.264's patents.
When the reaction hit the point of being self-sustaining, one of his colleagues would take an axe and chop the rope, dropping the control rod back in place to absorb the excess neutrons and halt the reaction before it was too late.
Leading to the term "SCRAM", short for "Shit! Cut Rope, AxeMan!"
Spying because you have a sense of responsibility about the activities of teenagers that you can't control, because you're acting on a sense of right and wrong that has been taken to extremes, is more forgivable.
No, it's not. Get your inflated sense of right and wrong out of my house.
IMEIs are not used at all in the call routing process, and are, ultimately, pretty easy to forge convincingly. Granted, this will stop everybody whose handsets have totally bogus IMEIs, but as long as the first 8 digits (type allocation code) and check digit are correct, then there's very little India can do without impacting legitimate customers.
The problem, as I understand it, isn't that 3D hardware is difficult to handle in a VM (it's not, really, you simply paravirtualise calls to the 3D hardware and translate them into libGL calls in the VM host software). The problem is that doing so in Windows is practically impossible, because of MS's licensing terms for the DDKs you need. Smart move on their part, of course, if Paravirtual D3D was considered a first-order citizen of windows in the same way that NVidia or ATI D3D was, then nobody would have any really compelling reason to use windows as any sort of on-the-metal OS.
While this holds true for both directx lower-level drivers and ICDs to suit MS OpenGL, it's possible to simply REIMPLEMENT OpenGL, as everything (barring perhaps the "WGL" parts specific to windows, i'm honestly unsure about that) is nicely standardised. This doesn't help with DirectX, so the approach to date has been to replace d3d8.dll and d3d9.dll with mingw-compiled versions of the Wine D3D dlls, which simply wrap DX in OpenGL.
Despite what supporters of OSS believe Should or Should Not be allowed or done, Nintendo still has the right to decide what software is acceptable to link with their SDK.
Fixed that for you. The end user owns the hardware and is legally entitled to run whatever the fuck they want on it.
If you are using the (closed source, free) Citrix XenServer, the "Xenserver Guest Additions" ISO will install paravirtualised disk and network drivers, which handle IOs through a hypercall interface instead of qemu-dm's emulated devices (which, I'll grant, is hideously slow.)
If you're using GPL Xen, then the drivers at http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenWindowsGplPv (that page points at source code, there are MSIs floating around, ask your distributor) accomplish the same ends. I've used them in the handful of cases I've needed to virtualise Windows at home. They're on par throughput-wise with the Citrix stuff I use at work.
Either way, such an approach gives IO performance on par with ESX, and the ability to mix and match this sort of VM with paravirtual Linux and Opensolaris guests on the same cluster of hosts buys you a shit ton in flexibility (IO performance in paravirtual guests exceeds anything that fully virtualised Xen or ESX will ever achieve, period, end of story.)
You've purchased (i.e. now own) one copy of an OS, which is yours to do with as you see fit (copyright law notwithstanding.) You could run it on your toaster if your toaster had a 32-bit HAL.
This 'it's illegal to run OEM windows on anything but the CPU it was sold with' line of reasoning is something that microsoft haven't exactly gone out of their way to discourage (and, in fact, their EULA says exactly that), but the force of EULAs is legally questionable at best in most jurisdictions, being trumped quite squarely by thousands of years worth of precedent for first-sale rights.
Conversely, of course, the OEM has no reason to include any given HAL, and is obviously not required to by any law or regulation. If you can't legally get your hands on the HAL you need, that's your concern. That said, a straight-down-the-line reinstall would most likely work; OEM install media isn't appreciably different (volume ID notwithstanding) from retail or volume media.
I own a Sony CD transport. I also own two Pioneer DVD-RWs which are good at reading red book CDs. My fiancee owns a portable CD player made by some yumcha brand or other, and we both have CD players (manufactured by different manufacturers) in our automobiles. If the fancy took me, I could trivially, using the technology on hand, assemble SOME device which could play red book PCM audio. Even if Sony and Philips both went bankrupt tomorrow.
Similarly, I have, lying around at home, about 15 devices which are capable of playing MP3s, manufactured by a large number of different entities (although quite possibly all made in the same dragons' breath factory in china.) Were every single MP3-player manufacturing entity in the world to disappear overnight, it would not impact my ability in the slightest to play MP3s. Worst case, i've got a copy of the mpg123 source code and the handful of technical data about the format I could find when I was writing a tool which needed to understand the format on some level. The various MPEG standards are quite well documented and implementable by anyone who gives a fuck. If the Fraunhoefer institute (or whoever claims to own those patents this week) goes broke, it impacts my life exactly 0.
I don't own anything that can (trivially) play an iTunes.m4p file, excepting the one iPod that was purchased several years ago and has since suffered chronic, irreversable headphone jack damage. If Apple go away, it doesn't matter how much effort I exert, I am not going to be in a position to play a.m4p file. This is the very DEFINITION of platform lock. Simply being tied to a format is NOT platform lock-in, because you're always going to have, at the very least, some way of reimplementing that format.
Go home, and write "Itunes tracks are platform locked. MP3s are not platform locked. Red book audio is not platform locked." 1000 times. I want it on my desk first thing in the morning.
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The fact that you think that plutonium is somehow intrisnically immoral bothers me.
It's like if somebody in 1750 said that "crude oil will always be intrinsically immoral" because it was poisonous, smelled bad when you burned it in a lamp, and caused a stack of black, smoky pollution. There are reactor designs that exist right now which are capable of turning that plutonium into heat and short-lived decay products.
_Nothing_ is intrinsically immoral except for man perpetrating force or fraud against his fellow man.
If the voter isn't a lazy idiot, they DO decide their own preferences for the Senate, and ALWAYS decide their own preferences for the house.
http://www.belowtheline.org.au/
Not only that, but 232U and 233U are far more difficult to separate in a centrifuge than 235U and 238U are, by virtue of being far closer together in mass.
Besides, given how much hard radiation 232U kicks out, i'd be surprised if your average centrifuge could use it as an input without premature, costly failures. 235U isn't a particularly hard emitter of anything, it's just fissile. 232U is fucking nasty.
Feel free to explain how GPLing their driver (which is support code whose sole reason is to drive the hardware that generates their revenue) is going to cause them any pain whatsoever?
People give Nvidia (and ATI/AMD, and whoever else) money for graphics hardware because of the hardware's capabilities; Nvidia wouldn't suddenly make any less money overnight if their driver code was out in the open.
Fuck off. The guy committed a "crime" in the UK, and was neither physically present nor controlled assets in the US.
What you're suggesting is directly analogous to the UK home office extraditing someone to Saudi Arabia for talking shit on a UK website about Muhammad (PBUH.)
Now is not the time for voxels. At current hardware specs, the computing time:image quality tradeoff comes out so far in favour of rasterizing (or whatever) polygons it's insane.
These guys had a tech demo floating around a few years ago, and to my eyes, not a lot has changed.
The reason that the "core" bits of NX were always Free is because dxpc (and, thus, mlview-dxpc, from which NX sprang) is only available under the GPL.
If i was involved in dxpc (or mlview-dxpc, really, although I'd imagine most of those changes are owned by the NX folks) development I'd be lawyering up at this point, if only to get some kind of proof that I wasn't being ripped off.
That's NOT going to be your average user. That's going to that same class of idiot that randomly sticks ram modules into their motherboards without regard to whether the motherboard will accept that particular speed or configuration. The kind who tries sharing his printer by plugging it into the usb port on his PVR, the kind who has his entire living room plugged into a bar plugged into a power bar plugged into a power bar. The kind who have their cable modem plugged into a LAN port on their router, the kind who plug their TV into their PVR using an HDMI to DVI adapter and wonder why their is no sound only to then plug in a set of composite cables and watch everything on the composite input "in HD".
Nice examples, but there's no reason that audio won't work over DVI equally well as over HDMI. There are no HDMI "audio pins", audio is sent during the video VBI, and works equally well over DVI-DVI, DVI-HDMI, and HDMI-HDMI, assuming the source device supports HDMI audio.
May I respectfully suggest you read up on CPRM, and note that the SD spec implements it and MMC (from which SD was, in fact, derived) does not.
Here's the catch. When its a company faced with punitive damages, no one seems to have a problem. When its someone of wealth, no one seems to have a problem. But when its their pet illicit act, suddenly everyone is upset about how broken the system. In fact, you could actually argue that your reaction actually validates the system is "blind" and working properly in this specific detail.
No. People have a problem because the damages awarded are thoroughly disproportionate to the act committed. I'm amazed you can't grasp this, I really am.
Holy fuck you're stupid.
Why do you think that was?
Actually, PLEX can be used from anywhere. You don't need to be docked in the station where the PLEX is.
Ugh, replying to my own post:
In the interest of fairness, it's worth noting that I have no involvement in this whatsoever besides being thoroughly unimpressed with burst.net's behavior. As a result, my opinions above are just that, opinions; not grounded in any first hand experience whatsoever.
My rage upon finding out what :actually happened: made me somewhat intemperate in my earlier post, methinks. I still think you'd have to be mad to give them money, though.
So, the Burst.net guys get a request for information about a machine they host which has ~70k users, give or take. Instead of asking the box's sysadmin (who's their CLIENT), they pull the pin, then go on to mutter vague conspiracy-minded commentary such as "getting a refund is the least of his (the site owner/sysadmin) problems" on fora such as WHT (see http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=05a61aabdfcacdb369e1582aff4686a1&t=964013 ) Apparently the fact that he _received_ abuse complaints in the past was grounds to terminate his service; never mind the fact that he had SEVENTY THOUSAND USERS and acted on DMCA notifications and other abuse requests in a timely fashion, which is better than can be said about a lot of sites.
Had burst.net forwarded the request to the site owner (or even simply given the feds his name, and explained how he fit in) instead of disconnecting the machine, making borderline slanderous statements (such as 'he'll never get his data back' and 'a refund is the least of his worries right now',) they would have come out of this looking reasonably good. As it stands, you'd have to be completely brain-dead retarded to even think about giving them money.
The fact that VP8 is incredibly SIMILAR to H.264 (but has several almost arbitrary differences in key places) suggests that it was written with the intent of avoiding specific patents in the H.264 pool. If you don't match all claims of a patent, you're not infringing that patent.
It's unlikely that VP8 would be as similar to H.264 as it is if its authors hadn't set out to deliberately NOT infringe H.264's patents.
When the reaction hit the point of being self-sustaining, one of his colleagues would take an axe and chop the rope, dropping the control rod back in place to absorb the excess neutrons and halt the reaction before it was too late.
Leading to the term "SCRAM", short for "Shit! Cut Rope, AxeMan!"
Spying because you have a sense of responsibility about the activities of teenagers that you can't control, because you're acting on a sense of right and wrong that has been taken to extremes, is more forgivable.
No, it's not. Get your inflated sense of right and wrong out of my house.
IMEIs are not used at all in the call routing process, and are, ultimately, pretty easy to forge convincingly. Granted, this will stop everybody whose handsets have totally bogus IMEIs, but as long as the first 8 digits (type allocation code) and check digit are correct, then there's very little India can do without impacting legitimate customers.
GREAT idea.
The problem, as I understand it, isn't that 3D hardware is difficult to handle in a VM (it's not, really, you simply paravirtualise calls to the 3D hardware and translate them into libGL calls in the VM host software). The problem is that doing so in Windows is practically impossible, because of MS's licensing terms for the DDKs you need. Smart move on their part, of course, if Paravirtual D3D was considered a first-order citizen of windows in the same way that NVidia or ATI D3D was, then nobody would have any really compelling reason to use windows as any sort of on-the-metal OS.
While this holds true for both directx lower-level drivers and ICDs to suit MS OpenGL, it's possible to simply REIMPLEMENT OpenGL, as everything (barring perhaps the "WGL" parts specific to windows, i'm honestly unsure about that) is nicely standardised. This doesn't help with DirectX, so the approach to date has been to replace d3d8.dll and d3d9.dll with mingw-compiled versions of the Wine D3D dlls, which simply wrap DX in OpenGL.
Despite what supporters of OSS believe Should or Should Not be allowed or done, Nintendo still has the right to decide what software is acceptable to link with their SDK.
Fixed that for you. The end user owns the hardware and is legally entitled to run whatever the fuck they want on it.
You are woefully uninformed.
If you are using the (closed source, free) Citrix XenServer, the "Xenserver Guest Additions" ISO will install paravirtualised disk and network drivers, which handle IOs through a hypercall interface instead of qemu-dm's emulated devices (which, I'll grant, is hideously slow.)
If you're using GPL Xen, then the drivers at http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenWindowsGplPv (that page points at source code, there are MSIs floating around, ask your distributor) accomplish the same ends. I've used them in the handful of cases I've needed to virtualise Windows at home. They're on par throughput-wise with the Citrix stuff I use at work.
Either way, such an approach gives IO performance on par with ESX, and the ability to mix and match this sort of VM with paravirtual Linux and Opensolaris guests on the same cluster of hosts buys you a shit ton in flexibility (IO performance in paravirtual guests exceeds anything that fully virtualised Xen or ESX will ever achieve, period, end of story.)
That's a complete load of crap and you know it.
You've purchased (i.e. now own) one copy of an OS, which is yours to do with as you see fit (copyright law notwithstanding.) You could run it on your toaster if your toaster had a 32-bit HAL.
This 'it's illegal to run OEM windows on anything but the CPU it was sold with' line of reasoning is something that microsoft haven't exactly gone out of their way to discourage (and, in fact, their EULA says exactly that), but the force of EULAs is legally questionable at best in most jurisdictions, being trumped quite squarely by thousands of years worth of precedent for first-sale rights.
Conversely, of course, the OEM has no reason to include any given HAL, and is obviously not required to by any law or regulation. If you can't legally get your hands on the HAL you need, that's your concern. That said, a straight-down-the-line reinstall would most likely work; OEM install media isn't appreciably different (volume ID notwithstanding) from retail or volume media.
I own a Sony CD transport. I also own two Pioneer DVD-RWs which are good at reading red book CDs. My fiancee owns a portable CD player made by some yumcha brand or other, and we both have CD players (manufactured by different manufacturers) in our automobiles. If the fancy took me, I could trivially, using the technology on hand, assemble SOME device which could play red book PCM audio. Even if Sony and Philips both went bankrupt tomorrow.
Similarly, I have, lying around at home, about 15 devices which are capable of playing MP3s, manufactured by a large number of different entities (although quite possibly all made in the same dragons' breath factory in china.) Were every single MP3-player manufacturing entity in the world to disappear overnight, it would not impact my ability in the slightest to play MP3s. Worst case, i've got a copy of the mpg123 source code and the handful of technical data about the format I could find when I was writing a tool which needed to understand the format on some level. The various MPEG standards are quite well documented and implementable by anyone who gives a fuck. If the Fraunhoefer institute (or whoever claims to own those patents this week) goes broke, it impacts my life exactly 0.
I don't own anything that can (trivially) play an iTunes .m4p file, excepting the one iPod that was purchased several years ago and has since suffered chronic, irreversable headphone jack damage. If Apple go away, it doesn't matter how much effort I exert, I am not going to be in a position to play a .m4p file. This is the very DEFINITION of platform lock. Simply being tied to a format is NOT platform lock-in, because you're always going to have, at the very least, some way of reimplementing that format.
Go home, and write "Itunes tracks are platform locked. MP3s are not platform locked. Red book audio is not platform locked." 1000 times. I want it on my desk first thing in the morning.
Hope not.