What worked with music stores and DRM were customers complaining and significantly raising the stores' support costs. After some time this caused many music stores to put pressure on the music labels to remove the DRM, which took some time, but finally the labels agreed.
Except that causes the fuel consumption to rise significantly. Ural Airlines tried to fly from Moscow to Rome at low altitude, but didn't get farther than Vienna, where they had to land because the fuel tanks were almost dry.
Also they may have been 'further north' hence, closer to Iceland
Iceland is around 2000 km (1500 mi) from Finland. It's not a distance you fly during a regular training exercise, not to mention that you need to pass though either Norwegian or Russian airspace to get there.
The real worry is about idiot managers of incompetent airlines who want to gamble on this.
Sounds like Ural Airlines, which tried to fly from Moscow to Rome. They thought that they were being smart by flying below the ash cloud, but they forgot to consider the increased fuel consumption this would cause. While en-route they had to contact the Vienna air traffic controller to ask for an emergency landing, since there was almost no fuel left.
I'm just surprised they actually got their flight plan approved, since Austria (among others) had their entire airspace closed at the time. Or maybe they didn't file a flight plan, figuring they could fly by VFR.:)
but if you're a big juicy enterprise with lots of money to lose.. just not worth it.
Big enterprises usually have lawyers available. Any semi-competent copyright lawyer should be able to tell them what they can and cannot do. Besides, it's not like the GPL is hard to understand, it's much simpler than the usual EULA.
Crytek had me as a paying customer because of the free Farcry demo.
Crytek has me as a paying customer because I found Crysis in the bargain bin for $1 (no, I'm not joking). With prices like that, it doesn't matter if it sucks.
How do they swallow the fact that the Pirate Parties are now taking a legal and official route to copyright reform?
If it comes that far, they will just claim that copyright can only be strengthened, not reduced, because of international treaties with no expiration dates and no exit clauses, exactly as they were designed by the lobbyists. Just like our politicians like to blame bad stuff on the EU (despite the fact that new directives have required a unanimous approval in the Council of Ministers), yours will likely blame it on international treaties and international law.
take a look at crazy coalitions in some European countries where parties with 0.5% of the vote are actually represented in the government
That might seem strange and chaotic to someone raised in a country with a two-party system, but for people like me, raised in a country with proportional representation, two-party systems seem really strange. I think that it's just fair that a party with 10% popular vote gets 10% of the seats in the parliament. Two-party systems may promote "stability", since it is almost impossible for any new party to get elected, but it certainly does not look especially fair.
What I pointed out was that to most users the codec itself is called x264.
Well, the codec (the specific implementation) is called x264, the standard that it implements is called H.264.
The implementation used for encoding could have impacts on quality, despite the output format being the same, so I could see why they consider it important information.
Is it on par with Crytek and Unreal with post processing, shaders, motion blur, anisotropic filtering, AA etc? (Honestly curious, don't know the answer)
I suggest that you take a look at their feature list and find out. It has many features, many good tutorials, is free software and cross platform (Linux/OpenGL, Windows/Direct3D, Mac OS X/OpenGL).
If so, what's the major difference between a game and a graphics engine?
A graphics engine takes care of rendering graphics, nothing else. It could be something as simple as a 2D sprite library, to a full-featured 3D graphics engine.
But to write games, you need many other parts that are not provided by a pure graphics engine, such as input handling, AI, network access, physics, sound/music, etc, etc. If you combine a graphics engine with one or more such libraries/frameworks and/or tools, you get a game engine.
why they insist on Matroska when a standard mpeg4 container would work just fine is beyond me
Does the standard mpeg4 container have support for such things as chapters and multiple audio and subtitle tracks? AFAIK, Matroska has them all.
although a lot of them seem to think the codec is called x264 since that's what the releases tend to be tagged with
x264 is a specific free software implementation of H.264. The releases may be tagged with x264 because that codec implementation was used to encode the video.
Ogre I believe is strictly graphics (maybe stretching out a bit more than that, but definitely far from a complete engine)
There is a difference between game engines and graphics engines. Ogre is definitely not a complete game engine, but it does not aspire to be one. In my opinion it is a complete graphics engine. Why wouldn't it be?
The question is "did humans evolve from an earlier species" and so far we haven't found the missing link.
And there will always be "missing links", trust me. Because when we find the next missing link, the anti-evolutionists will find the next absent link and claim that evolution (or evolution of humans in this case) has no evidence because we don't have all the "missing links".
To find every "missing link" between any random human of today, and our primate ancestors, we would need to find each and every ancestor from every generation between now and then, and that isn't really possible, in practice. Fossilization requires a specific narrow set of circumstances to occur, and most generations will be missing as a result. Finding every "missing link" is thus effectively impossible (it is theoretically possible, if by some freak statistical accident every ancestor of every generation would in fact have been fossilized, but the statistical probability for this is really infinitesimal).
But this is really outside the scope of my original post, because I just wanted to rectify the misconception that scientific theories by some point in time become "proven".
I can see that now. I'll have to take it up with my colleagues. We had a discussion about this regarding digest authentication in SIP (which is essentially the same as digest authentication in HTTP), and I was told that storing a hash in the database would be impossible, because of the reason I mentioned in my previous post. Obviously this was because of a misunderstanding in how the digest authentication operates.
Why do you need validation by DTD/Relax-NG/etc.? Current HTML works without that. XHTML don't need to do that either.
Since the GP was discussing XML, so was I, and XML validation is an important part of XML. HTML isn't XML, so it is outside the scope of the discussion.
In fact you can make things worse by doing so.
Are you saying that XML validation is a bad thing, and that it should be avoided? Or are you specifically referring to HTML/XHTML validation? Anyway, why would validation "make things worse"?
It still suggests a certain unacceptable behavior towards children.
Many movies openly depict murder and excessive violence, which could certainly be classified as unacceptable behavior, but they seem to be completely legal. If depicting unacceptable behavior would be illegal, a lot of books, pictures, movies and video games would have to be banned.
So this cannot be about depicting or suggesting unacceptable behavior.
Are you seriously saying that you find parsing XML difficult?... Handling XML (and, by extension, XHTML) is a trivial task.
Depends on your point of view. Using an already existing XML parser in an application can be pretty easy. Writing a fully compliant XML parser is far from simple. If it would be so simple, why are most XML libraries fairly large and complicated pieces of software?
It is pretty simple to write a non-validating parser for a limited subset of XML, but if you include things such as namespace support, XPATH support, not to mention validation by DTD, Relax-NG and/or XML Schema, the parser suddenly becomes very complex.
Anyone who supports the "header" and "footer" elements, among several others, supports content mixed with presentation. It's a regression.
Very wrong. Header and footer elements denote document structure, nothing else. Of course they will have default styles, but that can be overridden like everything else. Actually header and footer elements are much more sensible than using divs with classes or ids. A header is specified to be used for certain parts of a document, and can be correctly interpreted by software such as screen readers and braille displays. How do you do that with divs? The id/class is an arbitrary string, not something that such software can rely on.
It is okay to use it for writing a single-line onclick handler. It does not, however, offer the language constructs to develop anything beyond that.
Who are you to assert what we can and cannot do with it?
We have far too many ignorant web developers who think that JavaScript is a good language
I can agree that much Javascript code is pretty hackish, but you can develop structured code with it. Sure, I'd prefer a conventional object oriented language instead of the prototype-based language Javascript is, but it's really just because I'm more familiar with the former. The more you use it however, the better you'll become in thinking about prototypes instead of superclasses.
Use C, C++, Python, Ruby, Perl, C#, OCaml, Haskell, Scheme or Common Lisp for even a week, and you'll immediately see how fucked up JavaScript is, and how pathetic of a language it is for development of code that exceeds two or three lines in length.
I don't agree. Like every language, it has its strengths and its weaknesses, but it's not like other languages does not have strengths and weaknesses of their own. Javascript surely has its share of quirks, but so has every other language out there. Care to explain what is so immensely shitty, pathetic and fucked up about Javascript?
There is one downside of Digest authentication compared to Basic authentication over SSL. Since Digest authentication generates a random salt which is hashed together with the password and sent to the server, the server must keep the password in plaintext in its user database. With Basic authentication, the password can be stored as a hash on the server, and with SSL the security issue with Basic authentication goes away.
From a strictly scientific viewpoint, neither of those have been definitively proven.
From a strictly scientific standpoint, no scientific theory has ever been definitively proven, in the mathematical sense of the word. Scientific theories can be disproved (falsified), but not definitively proven. For some theories, the mountain of evidence supporting it can be so big that it is essentially considered proven by laymen, but the scientific standards of proof are much higher.
And the theory of evolution is one such theory with a large mountain of evidence in support.
Slashdot Mirror
That pretty much explains their stance on DRM.
What worked with music stores and DRM were customers complaining and significantly raising the stores' support costs. After some time this caused many music stores to put pressure on the music labels to remove the DRM, which took some time, but finally the labels agreed.
they could fly lower than usual
Except that causes the fuel consumption to rise significantly. Ural Airlines tried to fly from Moscow to Rome at low altitude, but didn't get farther than Vienna, where they had to land because the fuel tanks were almost dry.
Also they may have been 'further north' hence, closer to Iceland
Iceland is around 2000 km (1500 mi) from Finland. It's not a distance you fly during a regular training exercise, not to mention that you need to pass though either Norwegian or Russian airspace to get there.
The real worry is about idiot managers of incompetent airlines who want to gamble on this.
Sounds like Ural Airlines, which tried to fly from Moscow to Rome. They thought that they were being smart by flying below the ash cloud, but they forgot to consider the increased fuel consumption this would cause. While en-route they had to contact the Vienna air traffic controller to ask for an emergency landing, since there was almost no fuel left.
I'm just surprised they actually got their flight plan approved, since Austria (among others) had their entire airspace closed at the time. Or maybe they didn't file a flight plan, figuring they could fly by VFR. :)
but if you're a big juicy enterprise with lots of money to lose.. just not worth it.
Big enterprises usually have lawyers available. Any semi-competent copyright lawyer should be able to tell them what they can and cannot do. Besides, it's not like the GPL is hard to understand, it's much simpler than the usual EULA.
Crytek had me as a paying customer because of the free Farcry demo.
Crytek has me as a paying customer because I found Crysis in the bargain bin for $1 (no, I'm not joking). With prices like that, it doesn't matter if it sucks.
How do they swallow the fact that the Pirate Parties are now taking a legal and official route to copyright reform?
If it comes that far, they will just claim that copyright can only be strengthened, not reduced, because of international treaties with no expiration dates and no exit clauses, exactly as they were designed by the lobbyists. Just like our politicians like to blame bad stuff on the EU (despite the fact that new directives have required a unanimous approval in the Council of Ministers), yours will likely blame it on international treaties and international law.
take a look at crazy coalitions in some European countries where parties with 0.5% of the vote are actually represented in the government
That might seem strange and chaotic to someone raised in a country with a two-party system, but for people like me, raised in a country with proportional representation, two-party systems seem really strange. I think that it's just fair that a party with 10% popular vote gets 10% of the seats in the parliament. Two-party systems may promote "stability", since it is almost impossible for any new party to get elected, but it certainly does not look especially fair.
You are mixing the concept of a codec and encoding/decoding facilities of it.
I'd rather argue that the term codec is ambiguous, and can refer to both the codec specification and the codec implementation.
What I pointed out was that to most users the codec itself is called x264.
Well, the codec (the specific implementation) is called x264, the standard that it implements is called H.264.
The implementation used for encoding could have impacts on quality, despite the output format being the same, so I could see why they consider it important information.
Is it on par with Crytek and Unreal with post processing, shaders, motion blur, anisotropic filtering, AA etc? (Honestly curious, don't know the answer)
I suggest that you take a look at their feature list and find out. It has many features, many good tutorials, is free software and cross platform (Linux/OpenGL, Windows/Direct3D, Mac OS X/OpenGL).
If so, what's the major difference between a game and a graphics engine?
A graphics engine takes care of rendering graphics, nothing else. It could be something as simple as a 2D sprite library, to a full-featured 3D graphics engine.
But to write games, you need many other parts that are not provided by a pure graphics engine, such as input handling, AI, network access, physics, sound/music, etc, etc. If you combine a graphics engine with one or more such libraries/frameworks and/or tools, you get a game engine.
why they insist on Matroska when a standard mpeg4 container would work just fine is beyond me
Does the standard mpeg4 container have support for such things as chapters and multiple audio and subtitle tracks? AFAIK, Matroska has them all.
although a lot of them seem to think the codec is called x264 since that's what the releases tend to be tagged with
x264 is a specific free software implementation of H.264. The releases may be tagged with x264 because that codec implementation was used to encode the video.
Ogre I believe is strictly graphics (maybe stretching out a bit more than that, but definitely far from a complete engine)
There is a difference between game engines and graphics engines. Ogre is definitely not a complete game engine, but it does not aspire to be one. In my opinion it is a complete graphics engine. Why wouldn't it be?
The question is "did humans evolve from an earlier species" and so far we haven't found the missing link.
And there will always be "missing links", trust me. Because when we find the next missing link, the anti-evolutionists will find the next absent link and claim that evolution (or evolution of humans in this case) has no evidence because we don't have all the "missing links".
To find every "missing link" between any random human of today, and our primate ancestors, we would need to find each and every ancestor from every generation between now and then, and that isn't really possible, in practice. Fossilization requires a specific narrow set of circumstances to occur, and most generations will be missing as a result. Finding every "missing link" is thus effectively impossible (it is theoretically possible, if by some freak statistical accident every ancestor of every generation would in fact have been fossilized, but the statistical probability for this is really infinitesimal).
But this is really outside the scope of my original post, because I just wanted to rectify the misconception that scientific theories by some point in time become "proven".
I can see that now. I'll have to take it up with my colleagues. We had a discussion about this regarding digest authentication in SIP (which is essentially the same as digest authentication in HTTP), and I was told that storing a hash in the database would be impossible, because of the reason I mentioned in my previous post. Obviously this was because of a misunderstanding in how the digest authentication operates.
Thanks for the clarification.
Why do you need validation by DTD/Relax-NG/etc.? Current HTML works without that. XHTML don't need to do that either.
Since the GP was discussing XML, so was I, and XML validation is an important part of XML. HTML isn't XML, so it is outside the scope of the discussion.
In fact you can make things worse by doing so.
Are you saying that XML validation is a bad thing, and that it should be avoided? Or are you specifically referring to HTML/XHTML validation? Anyway, why would validation "make things worse"?
the war picture of a small completely naked girl running toward the cameraperson in panic
Are you perhaps referring to this picture?
I don't think you have to be hysterical to see why having a paedophilia image category might not be a good idea.
Why not? It could contain an image of the Pope, as well as his cardinals and many Catholic priests.
It still suggests a certain unacceptable behavior towards children.
Many movies openly depict murder and excessive violence, which could certainly be classified as unacceptable behavior, but they seem to be completely legal. If depicting unacceptable behavior would be illegal, a lot of books, pictures, movies and video games would have to be banned.
So this cannot be about depicting or suggesting unacceptable behavior.
Are you seriously saying that you find parsing XML difficult? ... Handling XML (and, by extension, XHTML) is a trivial task.
Depends on your point of view. Using an already existing XML parser in an application can be pretty easy. Writing a fully compliant XML parser is far from simple. If it would be so simple, why are most XML libraries fairly large and complicated pieces of software?
It is pretty simple to write a non-validating parser for a limited subset of XML, but if you include things such as namespace support, XPATH support, not to mention validation by DTD, Relax-NG and/or XML Schema, the parser suddenly becomes very complex.
Anyone who supports the "header" and "footer" elements, among several others, supports content mixed with presentation. It's a regression.
Very wrong. Header and footer elements denote document structure, nothing else. Of course they will have default styles, but that can be overridden like everything else. Actually header and footer elements are much more sensible than using divs with classes or ids. A header is specified to be used for certain parts of a document, and can be correctly interpreted by software such as screen readers and braille displays. How do you do that with divs? The id/class is an arbitrary string, not something that such software can rely on.
It is okay to use it for writing a single-line onclick handler. It does not, however, offer the language constructs to develop anything beyond that.
Who are you to assert what we can and cannot do with it?
We have far too many ignorant web developers who think that JavaScript is a good language
I can agree that much Javascript code is pretty hackish, but you can develop structured code with it. Sure, I'd prefer a conventional object oriented language instead of the prototype-based language Javascript is, but it's really just because I'm more familiar with the former. The more you use it however, the better you'll become in thinking about prototypes instead of superclasses.
Use C, C++, Python, Ruby, Perl, C#, OCaml, Haskell, Scheme or Common Lisp for even a week, and you'll immediately see how fucked up JavaScript is, and how pathetic of a language it is for development of code that exceeds two or three lines in length.
I don't agree. Like every language, it has its strengths and its weaknesses, but it's not like other languages does not have strengths and weaknesses of their own. Javascript surely has its share of quirks, but so has every other language out there. Care to explain what is so immensely shitty, pathetic and fucked up about Javascript?
Better yet, use standard Digest authentication
There is one downside of Digest authentication compared to Basic authentication over SSL. Since Digest authentication generates a random salt which is hashed together with the password and sent to the server, the server must keep the password in plaintext in its user database. With Basic authentication, the password can be stored as a hash on the server, and with SSL the security issue with Basic authentication goes away.
From a strictly scientific viewpoint, neither of those have been definitively proven.
From a strictly scientific standpoint, no scientific theory has ever been definitively proven, in the mathematical sense of the word. Scientific theories can be disproved (falsified), but not definitively proven. For some theories, the mountain of evidence supporting it can be so big that it is essentially considered proven by laymen, but the scientific standards of proof are much higher.
And the theory of evolution is one such theory with a large mountain of evidence in support.
Perhaps the real conclusion to be drawn here is that americans are more prone to be skeptical of absolute assertions based on prevailing theories.
While being decidedly unskeptical of absolute assertions based on a 2000 year old fairy tale.