Do the MechWarrior games work well with a PlayStation-2 style controller? (I have a Logitech USB controller which is basically a PS2 controller). Or do you need some other type of joystick to work well with the MechWarrior games? I don't really like the idea of having to plunk down $20-60 for another HID if I can avoid it.
"The cost per unit energy produced for this plant is somewhat higher than with conventional plants."
Why is that? Is it an inherent problem, or just something which could be resolved with further refinement of the design? Just how much more expensive? A little bit, or a lot? How does it compare with coal/oil/natural gas?
"Another small issue is that a few important components of the reactor have never been shown to be commercially viable at a large scale."
Weren't those remaining issues the ones they were about to work on when the project was cancelled? Seems to me we should at least re-start the DoE research on this, and get final answers to these questions. It may or may not be commercially viable at a large scale, so *why don't we try to find out*?
"If nuclear power plants had to pay for waste disposal in proportion to how long the fuel takes to decay, that would almost certainly offset this."
That, or once we have enough re-processing plants, just put a ban on refining any new enriched uranium, and shut down all the old reactors that required enriched uranium. (You would, of course, have to publish such a plan out with a timeframe so that investors in current plants and enrichment facilities would have 20 or 30 years [or however long is appropriate] to re-coup their investment, but refuse to license any new enrichment facilities or non-reprocessing nuclear plants. It's pretty easy to be cost competitive with power plants that aren't operating or were never built. It's pretty easy to justify investing in building newer, slightly more expensive power plants if you can't get a license to build the cheaper plants, and you know that all of the old style plants are going to be shutdown in 20 years. Even if you are more expensive, *right now*, if you are a power company, you will build the more expensive plants anyhow so that you are up and running before the old plant is shut down.
Parent is right. PBS has a decent interview which talks about this in language most people should be able to understand. The person being interviewed was the head of a project called the Integral Fast Reactor which was a new approach to recycling the 'waste'. Apparently the project was extremely successful in just about all of its goals (one of which was a focus on creating a new generation of significantly safer nuclear reactors), then canceled at the 11th hour by the Clinton administration in order to win brownie points with anti-nuclear factions of the Democratic party.
Interestingly, the article puts the blame on not being able to build the transmission lines he had planned (the article doesn't go into any detail as to why not). So, he *has* a place to put the turbines, technically, but doesn't want to put them there because he can't get transmission lines built.
Part of me wonders if this 'announcement' is just a tactic to put political pressure on other parties that T. Boone needs to get concessions from in order to site his transmission lines.
Yes, but you are not completing the conversion. You converted km to miles, but not liters to gallons. So, you are correct that it would be 300ish miles per 1 liter, but NOT 300ish miles per US gallon (there is also a UK gallon, which is different, so be wary when converting to know which you are converting to). Once you figure in the fuel conversion, you get the answer of 1336 mpg. There is another thread I posted the formula in to show how the conversion is done, if you care to look for it.
That's a very interesting link (although, it would have been nice if you'd made it clickable). I've been wondering for awhile if anyone had ever developed any techniques to synthesize gasoline using input energy, water, and CO2 from the air. The only things I'd been able to find for 'synthesize fuel' were processes that turned coal into liquid gasoline. I'm gonna seriously look into this dotyenergy company, when I get a chance.
If it's not snake oil, that might be a brilliant idea. I mean, we could have 'carbon-neutral' fuel, without changing our cars at all (I mean, increased fuel efficiency isn't bad, but it would be good to be able to still use gasoline, if possible).
Wait, I've got it - add the RTG to produce electricity, to automatically recharge the batteries in your electric car. Self-recharging vehicles. Park the car over night, in the morning you're ready to drive 10 miles. Yay! *grin*
"(How many kilos of coal were burned to generate the energy to generate the hydrogen?)"
How do you know that *any* coal was burned? There are lots of hydro-electric damns around the world - maybe the electric generation they ended up tapping to generate the hydrogen was hydro? Or maybe solar.
I think research in hydro cars, for long-term, is great. It's not a good shorter term solution, but long term, I think it's perhaps viable. Here's why: 1) There are multiple ways to generate hydrogen, and new ways are still being discovered that are more efficient/cheaper. 2) I expect that, over time, we will be gradually moving away from coal as our primary energy source - but, generation of hydrogen doesn't depend on coal, except to the extent that coal is our primary energy source currently. Wind, Solar, Hydro-Electric (dams), Ocean Tidal, Ocean Current, Geothermal, Fission, and Fusion can all be used as primary energy sources in the future, without needing to change any hydrogen technology.
So, maybe today, if we start building hydrogen fueling stations, the hydrogen will be generated from electricity which itself is generated primarily from coal, which we say is bad. However, that begins to build the hydrogen infrastructure, and fleet of hydrogen vehicles. Meanwhile, solar farms and wind farms are being built around the world, and new nuclear plants are, perhaps, coming online (or not, we'll see - nuclear fission is, of course, still pretty controversial, and nuclear fusion is always 50 years in the future; but, I heard recently about Duke energy in the US seeking licensing to build a new nuclear power station in Ohio, here in the US, so it may be that nuclear power is starting to move forward again, despite the controversy and fear).
"How dangerous is a fast-moving vehicle with a liter of hydrogen?"
How dangerous is a fast-moving vehicle with a liter of gasoline? Gas is pretty flamable, explosive, dangerous stuff, yet we've managed to make gas vehicles pretty safe - in my 12 years of driving, I've only seen vehicles on fire 2 or 3 times, and outside of television or the movies, I've *never* seen a car explode.
Oh, and you are almost right - you've gotten one step closer to the right answer than the grandparent post, who totally neglected to convert the liters to gallons, but yet you've somehow managed to still get a wrong answer. I think maybe you divided when you should have multiplied. (That is, since the original ratio assumes 1 liter, and we want a ratio that assumes 1 gallon, you have to multiply your answer by the 4.54609 liters per gallon, but to get 77 you must have divided by that amount, which is wrong). Also, you are apparently using a non-US Gallon (UK gallon)? I guess that's ok, but it's probably good to make that explicit, but by using a UK gallon, you get an *even larger* answer: 1604.49172 mpg.
X * (km/L) = X * ((.621371192 miles/km) / (0.264172052 gallons_US/L)) = X * 2.35214584 miles/gallon
So 568 km/L = (568 * 2.35214584) mpg = 1336.01884 mpg, which is the answer given in the article.
I wonder if a lawyer could comment on this. . . if Microsoft *tried* to sue me in court after making this promise, could I hand this to a judge and ask the judge to throw out the lawsuit on the basis of this promise? If so, then this is as good as a license from Microsoft, isn't it?
Here's an idea - not sure if anyone's tried it out (it's sort of a hybrid approach). . .
1) Have your imported character gimped a little bit (say drop from level X to level X/2 or something - still pretty powerful though). You could explain this as a result of any number of things - from simple inactivity (not been any crises for a few years, so the character got out of shape), or an illness, accident, or some other trauma, or perhaps a result of a magical curse from an enemy or angry god.
Coupled with:
2) Allow the character to be imported, but not played until later on in the game. For example, maybe your PC from the previous game acts as an NPC during the beginning of the new game - training your new PC, giving him a quest, etc. Later on, when the new character has progressed to a point where they would be closer to the level of the imported char, the import joins your party or something along those lines. That way, you don't gimp the character all the way back to level 1.
3) You could then allow the imported character to eventually become more powerful than before the import (raised level cap, etc).
The question then becomes what to do for players who don't have a character to import? Maybe provide a couple pre-fab import characters to fill that role.
I gotta ask - what the *hell* are you doing taking over the counter pain killer when you are *already* on a much stronger prescription pain killer? Also, people need to use a little common sense - if you are on *any* kind of prescription medication, you should ask your doctor or pharmacist whether it's safe to *also* take an over-the-counter medication at the same time - often times, it'll probably be safe, but you never know when there will be drug interactions, so you should ASK. That's part of what the pharma's are there for.
I think part of the problem is too many people have this idea that, well, if it's OTC, it must be harmless (which is mostly true, but drug interactions are always a potential problem - heck, if I wanted to take more than one over-the-counter medicine at a time, I think I'd ask a pharmacist just to be sure it's safe).
I can tell you where this is all going. The end of over-the-counter drugs as there are too many idiots and too many potential drug interactions.
I think that this is what you're looking for. Well, sort of anyhow. The problem is, that amateur radio is only supposed to be used for non-commercial purposes, so people can't access the 'general' Internet via Ham Radio (adverts, commercial sites, etc). Also, that link is, I think, somewhat dated - it discusses tcp/ip as a totally seperated system from the O/S. I think there are now Amateur TCP/IP implementations that integrate with the native O/S TCP/IP stacks, so that you could use any program that you would use with the 'commercial' Internet, with the Ham Internet.
But, my point is, the technology to do TCP/IP over radio has, of course, been there for a long time. Shortwave radio, I'll warn you, is only good for very slow (think modem speeds, and even slower, depending on the band - 300bps to maybe 9600bps (I suppose if you were operating outside the Ham bands, in your own chunk of shortwave frequencies, you could maybe go faster, but dont' expect broadband speeds).
However, I think setting up WiFi-based 'grid networks' in developing countries is a great idea, but as others have mentioned, what those countries really need is a lot more basic than WiFi. If you address the problems of warlords/dictators and ethnic cleansing, corrupt governments, etc, those countries will build their own Internet infrastructure. It's just a matter of having a stable economy (it might take a few years, while those countries are developing the more basic parts of the economy -bfood, transportation, clothing and other basic manufactured goods, resources like timber, coal, concrete, etc, but once enough people have enough 'disposable' income, then Internet services should have no problem in those countries - I expect that 'the Internet' for developing countries will first come in the form of digital cell phone networks, then expand from there.)
Ok, I've been wondering this for a long time. IBM contributed JFS to Linux years ago, but no one ever seems to give it a thought as to using it. I used it on my computer for awhile, and I can't say that I had any complaints (of course, one person's experience doesn't necessarily mean anything). When I looked into the technical features, it seemed to support lots of great things like journaling, Unicode filenames, large files, large volumes (although, granted, some of the newer filesystems *are* supporting larger files/volumes).
Don't get me wrong - some of the newer filesystems (ZFS, Btrfs, NILFS2) do have interesting features that aren't in JFS, and which are great reasons to use the newer systems, but still, it always seems like JFS is left out in the cold. Are there technical reasons people have found it lacking or something? Maybe it's just a case of, "it's a fine filesystem, but didn't really bring any compelling new features or performance gains to the table, so why bother"?
People like to classify all financial crimes as non-violent. But, the lost money (my understanding is a lot of charities, particularly Jewish charities lost a lot of money to Madoff) can have VERY real, very BAD consequences for people who otherwise would have been helped by those charities with that money. If someone who needs medical help, medicine, food, clothing, or shelter, or other emergency assistance is unable to get it because of Madoff, isn't it the same as if he robbed them of those things? If someone who was supposed to go to college/university on a scholarship from one of those charities cannot, is that any less of a violence against them just because you didn't beat them up or stab them?
Saying a crime is non-violent is a whitewash when it devastates people's lives.
"But the real question should be, in my opinion: Why is this legal? If the law allows companies to forbid running free software on their platform, the law needs to be changed."
It's a little more complicated than that, if I understand correctly. Nintendo isn't forbidding free software from running on their platform, per se.
Instead, if I'm not mistaken, any software running on the Wii platform requires the use of the Nintendo Wii SDK, which includes source code which will get compiled and statically linked into your Wii binary. In order to get the SDK from Nintendo, and to distribute the resulting binary which is a derivative of the SDK, you have to agree to a contract/NDA/License Agreement with Nintendo in which you agree to not disclose the source code for your program (because releasing your source code would reveal information about the APIs implemented by the SDK, which apparently Nintendo is trying to keep a trade secret).
So, what we have is a product (these two Atari games) which are at the same time a derivative of the Nintendo SDK, and also a derivative of the ScummVM. Since it is a derivative of both products, in order to distribute, you have to follow the licenses for both products. However, in this case, the two products have terms which are mutually exclusive. So, there's no possible way to legally distribute the Atari software.
Of course, if someone were to somehow figure out/reverse engineer the Nintendo API's without signing any NDA or contract with Nintendo, they could maybe create an open-source SDK which is 'compatible' with the Nintendo SDK, at which point third parties could start creating GPL programs for Nintendo (although you might not be able to get the software to RUN on a Wii without hacking the wii with some sort of modchip or Bios-flash or something. . . several posters have mentioned that software won't run on a Wii if it's not cryptographically signed using a key from Nintendo.
I don't think film is exactly going away yet. It's true for a lot of home-stuff digital is becoming 'the standard', but isn't a lot of/most professional work still done on film? I think Kodachrome is going away simply because other, newer 35mm have won in the market? Someone had a link to a wikipedia article on Fujifilm Velvia as an example of another popular film which is still being sold. I imagine Kodak themselves probably have come out with a newer film type? This page at the kodak site shows about 8 different types of 35mm film which Kodak is marketing.
Why not send your mother and father some CD's of the digital photos you want to restore? "Offsite backup" can really be as simple as that - send some discs or USB flash drives with stuff you want preserved to family or friends who live in a different building. Put some in a safe-deposit box in a bank if you have no one to send them too (or just want additional offsite copies).
In my experience, the real biggest 'problem' caused by digital photography is people don't tend to throw away the dreck. My parents have several thousand of photos -and they've only had a digital camera for 3 or 4 years. I want to try to get them to go through them and delete stuff that isn't really their best work or very important.
I heard someone on the radio once joking that the difference between a good photographer and a bad one is that the good photographer throws away their bad photos.
The key thing is to develop a thick skin about being shot down. On the one hand, you may want to evaluate the success of different approaches, but remember, lots of women will shoot you down, but there's a few billion more out there. . . Just keep trying. Don't get discouraged and give up (but do learn from mistakes).
Not only that, but his little 'editorial' at the end of the summary strikes me as completely ludicrous. Unless this type of violation became the rule instead of the exception, why would good Free/Open Source Software developers stop contributing? I hardly see this sort of thing as being the rule.
When problems like this arise, they are identified, then dealt with, and everyone moves on (at least, that's been the pattern so far, from the various GPL violation stories I've seen over the past several years).
I hate it when people take one small case, then make some grand statement about what "all" people/developers/businesses/etc will do. The person who submitted this story to/. comes off looking like a fool, at least to me.
Taking your analogy a step further, however - if I had an LP with some songs I like, I can record the songs onto tape, or digitize them and listen to them on my MP3 player. Even the 'protection' of physical objects isn't absolute. I can legally backup my CD, so that if it breaks, I can still listen to the music.
Heck, even a book, I could photocopy (not sure about the legality of that, but if I'm just photocopying it to make a backup for myself, I really doubt anyone is going to care, but in any case, there's nothing which actually stops me technologically from copying the book).
The concern people have (at least, some people, myself included) is mostly that DRM doesn't attempt to preserve the status quo as you suggest. DRM tries to make things MORE RESTRICTIVE than it has EVER BEEN BEFORE.
With regards to DRM, I believe that most (all?) of the music on iTMS is now available as unencrypted AAC files (Apples calls them "iTunes Plus" files). I've bought a small number of them as a test, and was able to easily transcode them to other formats (mp3 and ogg vorbis). So, in that regard, Apple is leading the way in giving customers music which isn't encumbered with DRM.
Given that, I don't think it's reallly appropriate, at this point, to lump Apple in with MS and Sony.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought it was *published* by Microsoft, but developed by someone else? Isn't that how Microsoft usually does games?
Do the MechWarrior games work well with a PlayStation-2 style controller? (I have a Logitech USB controller which is basically a PS2 controller). Or do you need some other type of joystick to work well with the MechWarrior games? I don't really like the idea of having to plunk down $20-60 for another HID if I can avoid it.
"The cost per unit energy produced for this plant is somewhat higher than with conventional plants."
Why is that? Is it an inherent problem, or just something which could be resolved with further refinement of the design? Just how much more expensive? A little bit, or a lot? How does it compare with coal/oil/natural gas?
"Another small issue is that a few important components of the reactor have never been shown to be commercially viable at a large scale."
Weren't those remaining issues the ones they were about to work on when the project was cancelled? Seems to me we should at least re-start the DoE research on this, and get final answers to these questions. It may or may not be commercially viable at a large scale, so *why don't we try to find out*?
"If nuclear power plants had to pay for waste disposal in proportion to how long the fuel takes to decay, that would almost certainly offset this."
That, or once we have enough re-processing plants, just put a ban on refining any new enriched uranium, and shut down all the old reactors that required enriched uranium. (You would, of course, have to publish such a plan out with a timeframe so that investors in current plants and enrichment facilities would have 20 or 30 years [or however long is appropriate] to re-coup their investment, but refuse to license any new enrichment facilities or non-reprocessing nuclear plants. It's pretty easy to be cost competitive with power plants that aren't operating or were never built. It's pretty easy to justify investing in building newer, slightly more expensive power plants if you can't get a license to build the cheaper plants, and you know that all of the old style plants are going to be shutdown in 20 years. Even if you are more expensive, *right now*, if you are a power company, you will build the more expensive plants anyhow so that you are up and running before the old plant is shut down.
Parent is right. PBS has a decent interview which talks about this in language most people should be able to understand. The person being interviewed was the head of a project called the Integral Fast Reactor which was a new approach to recycling the 'waste'. Apparently the project was extremely successful in just about all of its goals (one of which was a focus on creating a new generation of significantly safer nuclear reactors), then canceled at the 11th hour by the Clinton administration in order to win brownie points with anti-nuclear factions of the Democratic party.
Interestingly, the article puts the blame on not being able to build the transmission lines he had planned (the article doesn't go into any detail as to why not). So, he *has* a place to put the turbines, technically, but doesn't want to put them there because he can't get transmission lines built.
Part of me wonders if this 'announcement' is just a tactic to put political pressure on other parties that T. Boone needs to get concessions from in order to site his transmission lines.
Yes, but you are not completing the conversion. You converted km to miles, but not liters to gallons. So, you are correct that it would be 300ish miles per 1 liter, but NOT 300ish miles per US gallon (there is also a UK gallon, which is different, so be wary when converting to know which you are converting to). Once you figure in the fuel conversion, you get the answer of 1336 mpg. There is another thread I posted the formula in to show how the conversion is done, if you care to look for it.
That's a very interesting link (although, it would have been nice if you'd made it clickable). I've been wondering for awhile if anyone had ever developed any techniques to synthesize gasoline using input energy, water, and CO2 from the air. The only things I'd been able to find for 'synthesize fuel' were processes that turned coal into liquid gasoline. I'm gonna seriously look into this dotyenergy company, when I get a chance.
If it's not snake oil, that might be a brilliant idea. I mean, we could have 'carbon-neutral' fuel, without changing our cars at all (I mean, increased fuel efficiency isn't bad, but it would be good to be able to still use gasoline, if possible).
Wait, I've got it - add the RTG to produce electricity, to automatically recharge the batteries in your electric car. Self-recharging vehicles. Park the car over night, in the morning you're ready to drive 10 miles. Yay! *grin*
"(How many kilos of coal were burned to generate the energy to generate the hydrogen?)"
How do you know that *any* coal was burned? There are lots of hydro-electric damns around the world - maybe the electric generation they ended up tapping to generate the hydrogen was hydro? Or maybe solar.
I think research in hydro cars, for long-term, is great. It's not a good shorter term solution, but long term, I think it's perhaps viable. Here's why: 1) There are multiple ways to generate hydrogen, and new ways are still being discovered that are more efficient/cheaper. 2) I expect that, over time, we will be gradually moving away from coal as our primary energy source - but, generation of hydrogen doesn't depend on coal, except to the extent that coal is our primary energy source currently. Wind, Solar, Hydro-Electric (dams), Ocean Tidal, Ocean Current, Geothermal, Fission, and Fusion can all be used as primary energy sources in the future, without needing to change any hydrogen technology.
So, maybe today, if we start building hydrogen fueling stations, the hydrogen will be generated from electricity which itself is generated primarily from coal, which we say is bad. However, that begins to build the hydrogen infrastructure, and fleet of hydrogen vehicles. Meanwhile, solar farms and wind farms are being built around the world, and new nuclear plants are, perhaps, coming online (or not, we'll see - nuclear fission is, of course, still pretty controversial, and nuclear fusion is always 50 years in the future; but, I heard recently about Duke energy in the US seeking licensing to build a new nuclear power station in Ohio, here in the US, so it may be that nuclear power is starting to move forward again, despite the controversy and fear).
"How dangerous is a fast-moving vehicle with a liter of hydrogen?"
How dangerous is a fast-moving vehicle with a liter of gasoline? Gas is pretty flamable, explosive, dangerous stuff, yet we've managed to make gas vehicles pretty safe - in my 12 years of driving, I've only seen vehicles on fire 2 or 3 times, and outside of television or the movies, I've *never* seen a car explode.
Oh, and you are almost right - you've gotten one step closer to the right answer than the grandparent post, who totally neglected to convert the liters to gallons, but yet you've somehow managed to still get a wrong answer. I think maybe you divided when you should have multiplied. (That is, since the original ratio assumes 1 liter, and we want a ratio that assumes 1 gallon, you have to multiply your answer by the 4.54609 liters per gallon, but to get 77 you must have divided by that amount, which is wrong). Also, you are apparently using a non-US Gallon (UK gallon)? I guess that's ok, but it's probably good to make that explicit, but by using a UK gallon, you get an *even larger* answer: 1604.49172 mpg.
X * (km/L) = X * ((.621371192 miles/km) / (0.264172052 gallons_US/L)) = X * 2.35214584 miles/gallon
So 568 km/L = (568 * 2.35214584) mpg = 1336.01884 mpg, which is the answer given in the article.
"Except that few of the European diesel cars can pass the tough relatively new US emission standards at a price point that competes with gasoline."
Is that still true if you use Bio-diesel instead of petroleum-diesel, or even a mix like 30/70 or 50/50?
I wonder if a lawyer could comment on this. . . if Microsoft *tried* to sue me in court after making this promise, could I hand this to a judge and ask the judge to throw out the lawsuit on the basis of this promise? If so, then this is as good as a license from Microsoft, isn't it?
Here's an idea - not sure if anyone's tried it out (it's sort of a hybrid approach). . .
1) Have your imported character gimped a little bit (say drop from level X to level X/2 or something - still pretty powerful though). You could explain this as a result of any number of things - from simple inactivity (not been any crises for a few years, so the character got out of shape), or an illness, accident, or some other trauma, or perhaps a result of a magical curse from an enemy or angry god.
Coupled with:
2) Allow the character to be imported, but not played until later on in the game. For example, maybe your PC from the previous game acts as an NPC during the beginning of the new game - training your new PC, giving him a quest, etc. Later on, when the new character has progressed to a point where they would be closer to the level of the imported char, the import joins your party or something along those lines. That way, you don't gimp the character all the way back to level 1.
3) You could then allow the imported character to eventually become more powerful than before the import (raised level cap, etc).
The question then becomes what to do for players who don't have a character to import? Maybe provide a couple pre-fab import characters to fill that role.
I dunno, it's a thought, anyhow.
I gotta ask - what the *hell* are you doing taking over the counter pain killer when you are *already* on a much stronger prescription pain killer? Also, people need to use a little common sense - if you are on *any* kind of prescription medication, you should ask your doctor or pharmacist whether it's safe to *also* take an over-the-counter medication at the same time - often times, it'll probably be safe, but you never know when there will be drug interactions, so you should ASK. That's part of what the pharma's are there for.
I think part of the problem is too many people have this idea that, well, if it's OTC, it must be harmless (which is mostly true, but drug interactions are always a potential problem - heck, if I wanted to take more than one over-the-counter medicine at a time, I think I'd ask a pharmacist just to be sure it's safe).
I can tell you where this is all going. The end of over-the-counter drugs as there are too many idiots and too many potential drug interactions.
I think that this is what you're looking for. Well, sort of anyhow. The problem is, that amateur radio is only supposed to be used for non-commercial purposes, so people can't access the 'general' Internet via Ham Radio (adverts, commercial sites, etc). Also, that link is, I think, somewhat dated - it discusses tcp/ip as a totally seperated system from the O/S. I think there are now Amateur TCP/IP implementations that integrate with the native O/S TCP/IP stacks, so that you could use any program that you would use with the 'commercial' Internet, with the Ham Internet.
But, my point is, the technology to do TCP/IP over radio has, of course, been there for a long time. Shortwave radio, I'll warn you, is only good for very slow (think modem speeds, and even slower, depending on the band - 300bps to maybe 9600bps (I suppose if you were operating outside the Ham bands, in your own chunk of shortwave frequencies, you could maybe go faster, but dont' expect broadband speeds).
However, I think setting up WiFi-based 'grid networks' in developing countries is a great idea, but as others have mentioned, what those countries really need is a lot more basic than WiFi. If you address the problems of warlords/dictators and ethnic cleansing, corrupt governments, etc, those countries will build their own Internet infrastructure. It's just a matter of having a stable economy (it might take a few years, while those countries are developing the more basic parts of the economy -bfood, transportation, clothing and other basic manufactured goods, resources like timber, coal, concrete, etc, but once enough people have enough 'disposable' income, then Internet services should have no problem in those countries - I expect that 'the Internet' for developing countries will first come in the form of digital cell phone networks, then expand from there.)
Ok, I've been wondering this for a long time. IBM contributed JFS to Linux years ago, but no one ever seems to give it a thought as to using it. I used it on my computer for awhile, and I can't say that I had any complaints (of course, one person's experience doesn't necessarily mean anything). When I looked into the technical features, it seemed to support lots of great things like journaling, Unicode filenames, large files, large volumes (although, granted, some of the newer filesystems *are* supporting larger files/volumes).
Don't get me wrong - some of the newer filesystems (ZFS, Btrfs, NILFS2) do have interesting features that aren't in JFS, and which are great reasons to use the newer systems, but still, it always seems like JFS is left out in the cold. Are there technical reasons people have found it lacking or something? Maybe it's just a case of, "it's a fine filesystem, but didn't really bring any compelling new features or performance gains to the table, so why bother"?
People like to classify all financial crimes as non-violent. But, the lost money (my understanding is a lot of charities, particularly Jewish charities lost a lot of money to Madoff) can have VERY real, very BAD consequences for people who otherwise would have been helped by those charities with that money. If someone who needs medical help, medicine, food, clothing, or shelter, or other emergency assistance is unable to get it because of Madoff, isn't it the same as if he robbed them of those things? If someone who was supposed to go to college/university on a scholarship from one of those charities cannot, is that any less of a violence against them just because you didn't beat them up or stab them?
Saying a crime is non-violent is a whitewash when it devastates people's lives.
"But the real question should be, in my opinion: Why is this legal? If the law allows companies to forbid running free software on their platform, the law needs to be changed."
It's a little more complicated than that, if I understand correctly. Nintendo isn't forbidding free software from running on their platform, per se.
Instead, if I'm not mistaken, any software running on the Wii platform requires the use of the Nintendo Wii SDK, which includes source code which will get compiled and statically linked into your Wii binary. In order to get the SDK from Nintendo, and to distribute the resulting binary which is a derivative of the SDK, you have to agree to a contract/NDA/License Agreement with Nintendo in which you agree to not disclose the source code for your program (because releasing your source code would reveal information about the APIs implemented by the SDK, which apparently Nintendo is trying to keep a trade secret).
So, what we have is a product (these two Atari games) which are at the same time a derivative of the Nintendo SDK, and also a derivative of the ScummVM. Since it is a derivative of both products, in order to distribute, you have to follow the licenses for both products. However, in this case, the two products have terms which are mutually exclusive. So, there's no possible way to legally distribute the Atari software.
Of course, if someone were to somehow figure out/reverse engineer the Nintendo API's without signing any NDA or contract with Nintendo, they could maybe create an open-source SDK which is 'compatible' with the Nintendo SDK, at which point third parties could start creating GPL programs for Nintendo (although you might not be able to get the software to RUN on a Wii without hacking the wii with some sort of modchip or Bios-flash or something. . . several posters have mentioned that software won't run on a Wii if it's not cryptographically signed using a key from Nintendo.
I don't think film is exactly going away yet. It's true for a lot of home-stuff digital is becoming 'the standard', but isn't a lot of/most professional work still done on film? I think Kodachrome is going away simply because other, newer 35mm have won in the market? Someone had a link to a wikipedia article on Fujifilm Velvia as an example of another popular film which is still being sold. I imagine Kodak themselves probably have come out with a newer film type? This page at the kodak site shows about 8 different types of 35mm film which Kodak is marketing.
Why not send your mother and father some CD's of the digital photos you want to restore? "Offsite backup" can really be as simple as that - send some discs or USB flash drives with stuff you want preserved to family or friends who live in a different building. Put some in a safe-deposit box in a bank if you have no one to send them too (or just want additional offsite copies).
In my experience, the real biggest 'problem' caused by digital photography is people don't tend to throw away the dreck. My parents have several thousand of photos -and they've only had a digital camera for 3 or 4 years. I want to try to get them to go through them and delete stuff that isn't really their best work or very important.
I heard someone on the radio once joking that the difference between a good photographer and a bad one is that the good photographer throws away their bad photos.
The key thing is to develop a thick skin about being shot down. On the one hand, you may want to evaluate the success of different approaches, but remember, lots of women will shoot you down, but there's a few billion more out there. . . Just keep trying. Don't get discouraged and give up (but do learn from mistakes).
Wow, those are some great links to very credible studies you provided to support your claim.
Not only that, but his little 'editorial' at the end of the summary strikes me as completely ludicrous. Unless this type of violation became the rule instead of the exception, why would good Free/Open Source Software developers stop contributing? I hardly see this sort of thing as being the rule.
When problems like this arise, they are identified, then dealt with, and everyone moves on (at least, that's been the pattern so far, from the various GPL violation stories I've seen over the past several years).
I hate it when people take one small case, then make some grand statement about what "all" people/developers/businesses/etc will do. The person who submitted this story to /. comes off looking like a fool, at least to me.
Taking your analogy a step further, however - if I had an LP with some songs I like, I can record the songs onto tape, or digitize them and listen to them on my MP3 player. Even the 'protection' of physical objects isn't absolute. I can legally backup my CD, so that if it breaks, I can still listen to the music.
Heck, even a book, I could photocopy (not sure about the legality of that, but if I'm just photocopying it to make a backup for myself, I really doubt anyone is going to care, but in any case, there's nothing which actually stops me technologically from copying the book).
The concern people have (at least, some people, myself included) is mostly that DRM doesn't attempt to preserve the status quo as you suggest. DRM tries to make things MORE RESTRICTIVE than it has EVER BEEN BEFORE.
With regards to DRM, I believe that most (all?) of the music on iTMS is now available as unencrypted AAC files (Apples calls them "iTunes Plus" files). I've bought a small number of them as a test, and was able to easily transcode them to other formats (mp3 and ogg vorbis). So, in that regard, Apple is leading the way in giving customers music which isn't encumbered with DRM.
Given that, I don't think it's reallly appropriate, at this point, to lump Apple in with MS and Sony.