Or why do they even sell DVDs at all? Why aren't these media companies providing timely streaming or download options?
They are. Availability for purchase on iTunes Store on the same day as DVD release has been around for years. See Apple's eight-year-old press release. DVDs are still made available in the first place because parts of the United States still have satellite or cellular at $5 to $10 per GB as the cheapest home Internet option.
A conclusion that perfectly renewable energy does not exist would be consistent with the laws of thermodynamics.
But the earth is not a closed system; it receives energy from the Sun at a power that has varied little over human history. "Renewable" in practice refers to means of turning this power, called "insolation", into industrially usable power within a human lifetime. It encompasses direct methods (PV and solar thermal) as well as methods tied to insolation's effect on climate (wind and hydroelectric) and photosynthesis (biofuel). Petroleum and coal are not "renewable" because though they originate in biofuel, the process to produce them takes far longer than human civilization has been around.
it started out from the platform for Valve to gather income for a mod of a mod of a mod of HL (Counter-Strike)
Which wouldn't have existed in the first place had Half-Life not been moddable.
nobody else makes community mods of HL without getting a cease and desist from Valve/Steam or going through their very stupid channels to produce a steam-bound mod that can only be played using their platform.
On PS4, by contrast, there exist no "channels to produce a [PSN]-bound mod".
Did I mention this platform is from a game-maker who monopolizes the editors of games that get in the platform so people like EA have to create their own platforms for selling/validating their online games?
Is it "have to" as much as "can"? I don't see much "monopolizing" going on when Steam, GOG, Origin, and Windows Store all exist. It's not like PS4 where PlayStation Store is the monopoly.
Im gonna pop that Netflix and go straight to the stuff I want to see for 12 bucks
Fortunately, Netflix works on PC, just as it does on PlayStation 4.
Good point; that even appears to simplify things. An external downloader tool is not "the provided functionality of the Service". Thus any downloading outside "the provided functionality of the Service" is prohibited.
Perhaps a nicer way to express it might have been "As of right now, this language is too unstable for me to use in production. I'll let others be the guinea pigs until it matures."
So you are saying my PDP11 ML knowledge isn't obsolete?
Different people define "obsolete" in different ways. I might feel justified in calling my 6502 assembly language knowledge not obsolete because just last year I found work as lead programmer for a project using it.
it is a warning to avoid languages controlled by a single corporate entity.
Which non-retro ISA isn't controlled by one company or a small handful thereof? ARM is controlled by ARM Ltd., and x86-64 is controlled by the Intel/AMD cartel. This leaves what? An older version of MIPS that Loongson processor adopted?
C++ relies on the C preprocessor, which is very limited, on doing macros.
C++ has type-safe and/or scoped alternatives to a lot of things that used to need C macros.
Thanks to this you don't have scoped macros for example.
C++ has namespaced templates.
In rust the macro system is done much later in the process, so that you can declare a macro inside a function, and after the } closing brace the macro scope ends!
In modern C++, you can likewise declare a lambda inside a function (example). This could replace the C-inspired use of macros as ghetto inline functions.
I wonder if you will see gaming phones as a niche market?
I wonder what can be extrapolated from the Xperia Play phone's underwhelming sales toward answering that. I know companies don't make QWERTY sliders anymore. Would a "gaming phone" have a directional pad and action buttons on its main face like a PlayStation Vita or JXD's tablets?
For the avoidance of doubt, "that old" refers to consoles with a 15-16 kHz analog video output and no HDMI output, which includes all pre-Xbox 360 consoles as well as the original Wii.
You suggest emulation as a workaround for PCs' failure to support older consoles' video outputs. But that fails for any game marked as incompatible with your emulator. An original console is usually cheaper than hiring the emulator's publisher (for proprietary emulators) or anyone else (for free emulators) to add support for a particular game to a particular emulator.
In addition, lawful emulation requires you to make a copy of the game from your own authentic cartridge or disc to the the computer pursuant to 17 USC 117(a)(1) and foreign counterparts. Just owning an authentic cartridge or disc and downloading a cartridge or disc image from a ROM site isn't enough.* And for cartridge formats not supported by Retrode (such as NES) or for discs with a nonstandard sector format that common USB optical drives for PCs cannot normally read (such as Dreamcast, GameCube, and Wii), the original console can be easier to find than a dumping device. The same is true of extracting the BIOS from an authentic console for use with an emulator, for those platforms whose emulation requires a BIOS. Not all consoles with a BIOS have it high-level emulated the way the GBA BIOS traditionally is.
Finally, emulation requires putting the PC in the same room as a 32 inch or larger monitor, and previous Slashdot discussion over the past eight years or so has uncovered the existence of plenty of people unwilling to do that for reasons that include installation complexity, maintenance complexity, and spouse acceptance factor. I can provide more details if you wish. Or should emulator users just buy a Steam Link device and add the emulator to Steam as a non-Steam game?
* UMG Recordings v. MP3.com. Some Slashdot users mention that it's possible to ignore this ruling, but if I'm setting up a media center PC for someone, I don't want to be held liable for inducing infringement.
You appear to have two objections: "What's a download?" and "Notice of terms below the fold is inadequate."
If it wound up in my browser cache, it downloaded to durable storage. [...] the browser, set to empty the cache on exit
Is it durable enough to survive cache purging when you close the browser?
The video playback page you visited also contained a link to the terms of service in a place where it is standard practice to place legal notices.
Assuming you're referring to the page footer, when I load a YouTube link I never even scroll down far enough to see a link there.
Going forward, could YouTube cure this by adding a notice above the fold to all logged-out video views and periodically to logged-in views? "Use of the YouTube service is subject to the YouTube Terms of Service. Read the Terms"
Under the TOS, users may not "download" a file. But given the sort of ephemeral "downloads" that web browsers automatically do when the user views a video as YouTube intends, a judge could preserve the intent of the provision by interpreting "download" to mean moving a file from cache storage to more permanent storage. See blue-penciling and rectification.
Fair point, but there is a market called "the video game console market"
This market tends to lack community-made mods of games. In addition, more games are PC-only than PS4-only; official websites end up with notices like this:
PC with Windows or Linux
Buy Now on Steam
Android Tablets
Buy Now on Google Play Store. A Bluetooth gamepad or keyboard is strongly recommended.
Mac
Coming soon. Subscribe for news about $TITLE for Mac.
Other Platforms
If you represent a licensed publisher interested in bringing $TITLE to consoles, contact us.
Thus PS4 gamers are stuck with the vanilla version of whatever games Sony Computer Entertainment chooses to allow them to have.
Smart TVs do not require an Internet connection to use HDMI, to connect to cable, or to connect to an antenna.
Unless the manufacturer artificially requires them to.
What do you think an SSID and a password are?
An SSID identifies an access point. A password is something your neighbor neglected to require, or something your modem's integrated public hotspot (with an SSID like xfinitywifi) may not require.
I've been cataloging such examples. But as far as I can tell, the difference is that songwriters and performers in the mainstream music industry can avoid expensive lawsuits because they have the connections needed to negotiate cross-licenses. Someone writing background music for a hobbyist short film or an indie video game trailer may not have that option.
Register it with the Copyright Office. That's what it's there for.
I agree that it's a good idea, and I imagine that Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams registered "Blurred Lines" with the Copyright Office. But to my knowledge, the Copyright Office's registration service doesn't include a search for similar works that might have raised a red flag about possible claims by the estate of Marvin Gaye.
Until video streams start requiring a valid "TV Everywhere" username and password issued by your participating cable or satellite provider.
What are the ads paying for that I haven't already paid for?
Since the days of newspapers and magazines, the deal is that advertisers and subscribers split the cost of creating the work of authorship and distributing it either as copies or as a broadcast. Neither advertisers alone nor subscribers alone can sustain it at a competitive price.
But I disagree with one point of your terminology:
The concepts we're discussing here are so simple you have to either be an idiot or a troll to not get them.
At least you proved you weren't trolling; I guess that only leaves one other possibility.
You don't have to be an "idiot" (person with severe intellectual disability) to happen not to have learned about the finer points of long-haul Internet peering negotiation.
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why bother buying a movie where the plot matters (i.e. not directed by Michael Bay) when I know beforehand how it's going to end?
I thought spoilers increased enjoyment as well as aerodynamics.
Or why do they even sell DVDs at all? Why aren't these media companies providing timely streaming or download options?
They are. Availability for purchase on iTunes Store on the same day as DVD release has been around for years. See Apple's eight-year-old press release. DVDs are still made available in the first place because parts of the United States still have satellite or cellular at $5 to $10 per GB as the cheapest home Internet option.
Those of you on Lollipop have the choice to port Marshmallow to your phone, unlock its bootloader, and install your port of Marshmallow.
But some 6502 assemblers had a BGE macro, IIRC. It translates to BCS (Branch on Carry Set).
Furthermore, the datasheet for the WDC 65816 encouraged assemblers to include this macro.
They are already beating us at chess and go
Chess yes, Go no. Pocket Fritz beats a human watt-for-watt. AlphaGo does not.
A conclusion that perfectly renewable energy does not exist would be consistent with the laws of thermodynamics.
But the earth is not a closed system; it receives energy from the Sun at a power that has varied little over human history. "Renewable" in practice refers to means of turning this power, called "insolation", into industrially usable power within a human lifetime. It encompasses direct methods (PV and solar thermal) as well as methods tied to insolation's effect on climate (wind and hydroelectric) and photosynthesis (biofuel). Petroleum and coal are not "renewable" because though they originate in biofuel, the process to produce them takes far longer than human civilization has been around.
it started out from the platform for Valve to gather income for a mod of a mod of a mod of HL (Counter-Strike)
Which wouldn't have existed in the first place had Half-Life not been moddable.
nobody else makes community mods of HL without getting a cease and desist from Valve/Steam or going through their very stupid channels to produce a steam-bound mod that can only be played using their platform.
On PS4, by contrast, there exist no "channels to produce a [PSN]-bound mod".
Did I mention this platform is from a game-maker who monopolizes the editors of games that get in the platform so people like EA have to create their own platforms for selling/validating their online games?
Is it "have to" as much as "can"? I don't see much "monopolizing" going on when Steam, GOG, Origin, and Windows Store all exist. It's not like PS4 where PlayStation Store is the monopoly.
Im gonna pop that Netflix and go straight to the stuff I want to see for 12 bucks
Fortunately, Netflix works on PC, just as it does on PlayStation 4.
Good point; that even appears to simplify things. An external downloader tool is not "the provided functionality of the Service". Thus any downloading outside "the provided functionality of the Service" is prohibited.
What corporations control Python?
I can think of two possibilities: Python Software Foundation Inc. and Dropbox, which employs Python BDFL Guido van Rossum.
Perhaps a nicer way to express it might have been "As of right now, this language is too unstable for me to use in production. I'll let others be the guinea pigs until it matures."
Apple could discontinue Swift tomorrow and you would by out of luck.
Unless someone else takes up maintainership of a fork of Swift under the Apache License.
So you are saying my PDP11 ML knowledge isn't obsolete?
Different people define "obsolete" in different ways. I might feel justified in calling my 6502 assembly language knowledge not obsolete because just last year I found work as lead programmer for a project using it.
it is a warning to avoid languages controlled by a single corporate entity.
Which non-retro ISA isn't controlled by one company or a small handful thereof? ARM is controlled by ARM Ltd., and x86-64 is controlled by the Intel/AMD cartel. This leaves what? An older version of MIPS that Loongson processor adopted?
C++ relies on the C preprocessor, which is very limited, on doing macros.
C++ has type-safe and/or scoped alternatives to a lot of things that used to need C macros.
Thanks to this you don't have scoped macros for example.
C++ has namespaced templates.
In rust the macro system is done much later in the process, so that you can declare a macro inside a function, and after the } closing brace the macro scope ends!
In modern C++, you can likewise declare a lambda inside a function (example). This could replace the C-inspired use of macros as ghetto inline functions.
One possibility is to switch to free apps that are actually free software. One store specializing in such apps is F-Droid.
I wonder if you will see gaming phones as a niche market?
I wonder what can be extrapolated from the Xperia Play phone's underwhelming sales toward answering that. I know companies don't make QWERTY sliders anymore. Would a "gaming phone" have a directional pad and action buttons on its main face like a PlayStation Vita or JXD's tablets?
For the avoidance of doubt, "that old" refers to consoles with a 15-16 kHz analog video output and no HDMI output, which includes all pre-Xbox 360 consoles as well as the original Wii.
You suggest emulation as a workaround for PCs' failure to support older consoles' video outputs. But that fails for any game marked as incompatible with your emulator. An original console is usually cheaper than hiring the emulator's publisher (for proprietary emulators) or anyone else (for free emulators) to add support for a particular game to a particular emulator.
In addition, lawful emulation requires you to make a copy of the game from your own authentic cartridge or disc to the the computer pursuant to 17 USC 117(a)(1) and foreign counterparts. Just owning an authentic cartridge or disc and downloading a cartridge or disc image from a ROM site isn't enough.* And for cartridge formats not supported by Retrode (such as NES) or for discs with a nonstandard sector format that common USB optical drives for PCs cannot normally read (such as Dreamcast, GameCube, and Wii), the original console can be easier to find than a dumping device. The same is true of extracting the BIOS from an authentic console for use with an emulator, for those platforms whose emulation requires a BIOS. Not all consoles with a BIOS have it high-level emulated the way the GBA BIOS traditionally is.
Finally, emulation requires putting the PC in the same room as a 32 inch or larger monitor, and previous Slashdot discussion over the past eight years or so has uncovered the existence of plenty of people unwilling to do that for reasons that include installation complexity, maintenance complexity, and spouse acceptance factor. I can provide more details if you wish. Or should emulator users just buy a Steam Link device and add the emulator to Steam as a non-Steam game?
* UMG Recordings v. MP3.com. Some Slashdot users mention that it's possible to ignore this ruling, but if I'm setting up a media center PC for someone, I don't want to be held liable for inducing infringement.
You appear to have two objections: "What's a download?" and "Notice of terms below the fold is inadequate."
If it wound up in my browser cache, it downloaded to durable storage. [...] the browser, set to empty the cache on exit
Is it durable enough to survive cache purging when you close the browser?
The video playback page you visited also contained a link to the terms of service in a place where it is standard practice to place legal notices.
Assuming you're referring to the page footer, when I load a YouTube link I never even scroll down far enough to see a link there.
Going forward, could YouTube cure this by adding a notice above the fold to all logged-out video views and periodically to logged-in views? "Use of the YouTube service is subject to the YouTube Terms of Service. Read the Terms"
Under the TOS, users may not "download" a file. But given the sort of ephemeral "downloads" that web browsers automatically do when the user views a video as YouTube intends, a judge could preserve the intent of the provision by interpreting "download" to mean moving a file from cache storage to more permanent storage. See blue-penciling and rectification.
Because a dedicated PC can also play games.
Fair point, but there is a market called "the video game console market"
This market tends to lack community-made mods of games. In addition, more games are PC-only than PS4-only; official websites end up with notices like this:
PC with Windows or Linux Buy Now on Steam Android Tablets Buy Now on Google Play Store. A Bluetooth gamepad or keyboard is strongly recommended. Mac Coming soon. Subscribe for news about $TITLE for Mac. Other Platforms If you represent a licensed publisher interested in bringing $TITLE to consoles, contact us.Thus PS4 gamers are stuck with the vanilla version of whatever games Sony Computer Entertainment chooses to allow them to have.
Smart TVs do not require an Internet connection to use HDMI, to connect to cable, or to connect to an antenna.
Unless the manufacturer artificially requires them to.
What do you think an SSID and a password are?
An SSID identifies an access point. A password is something your neighbor neglected to require, or something your modem's integrated public hotspot (with an SSID like xfinitywifi) may not require.
I've been cataloging such examples. But as far as I can tell, the difference is that songwriters and performers in the mainstream music industry can avoid expensive lawsuits because they have the connections needed to negotiate cross-licenses. Someone writing background music for a hobbyist short film or an indie video game trailer may not have that option.
Nothing prevents you from creating your own original copyrighted works.
Other than being unsure of how original they are.
Register it with the Copyright Office. That's what it's there for.
I agree that it's a good idea, and I imagine that Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams registered "Blurred Lines" with the Copyright Office. But to my knowledge, the Copyright Office's registration service doesn't include a search for similar works that might have raised a red flag about possible claims by the estate of Marvin Gaye.
on CNN I get free news
Until video streams start requiring a valid "TV Everywhere" username and password issued by your participating cable or satellite provider.
What are the ads paying for that I haven't already paid for?
Since the days of newspapers and magazines, the deal is that advertisers and subscribers split the cost of creating the work of authorship and distributing it either as copies or as a broadcast. Neither advertisers alone nor subscribers alone can sustain it at a competitive price.
Thank you for clarifying and providing the sources.
You mention Tata. That reminds me of a previous Slashdot article from five and a half years ago describing Comcast's habit of refusing to upgrade links that are clearly congested.
But I disagree with one point of your terminology:
The concepts we're discussing here are so simple you have to either be an idiot or a troll to not get them.
At least you proved you weren't trolling; I guess that only leaves one other possibility.
You don't have to be an "idiot" (person with severe intellectual disability) to happen not to have learned about the finer points of long-haul Internet peering negotiation.