V2V is coming whether it's a good idea or not, but on the plus side it will produce a lot of data which would be useful on a HUD. It could tell you which vehicles are braking even when the sun is in your eyes and you can't see their lights, for example. It could also guide you to one side of the lane or the other (or to another lane entirely) in order to dodge a pothole or other road obstacle that you can't possibly see, well ahead of time. So yeah, there's a whole lot of data coming which could well be useful for the driver. Night driving is another place where the HUD could be amazingly useful, alerting you of invisible obstacles outside the sweep of the headlights.

No, there is substantial debate on this subject still. There are two camps: red light does not affect your night vision, and blue light helps you stay awake. Actually, night vision is regularly impaired while driving anyway, so that's a dumb argument. Get a car with good headlights, use them.

A problem that solves itself if you permit anyone to perform as a taxi.

That actually seems useful. Could better be served by handicapped-specific public mobility services, however.

That must be nice. No taxi I've ever been in has been clean. Some have been not too nasty.

False everywhere in the world.

Basically worthless

Everyone should have these based on mileage

A scam to produce revenues

Study shows that when you misuse HUD, it can distract drivers.

But if you're showing them an alert about something they're clearly not aware of, then are you making them more or less aware of their surroundings?

If they don't have to look down to see the next navigation instruction, are you making them more or less aware of their surroundings?

Bullshit story is bullshit. Welcome to Slashdot!

Because moving from one proprietary language/library ecosystem to another proprietary language/library ecosystem is somehow an improvement.

Fuck them both. We have truly open ecosystems like C++, and I would encourage any sensible developer going forward to move away from the likes of Java and the .NET ecosystems, now that the Supreme Court has essentially turned them into perpetual litigation machines.

But cleanroom implementations are meaningless if copyright can be asserted over the API. Clean room implementations only work because it has been generally understood that an API itself is essentially a directory listing, like a phone book, that in and of itself does not constitute some sort of creative work. Before the Oracle case, it was assumed that it was the code itself that constituted the intellectual property. But that is now apparently no longer true, and thus the Win32 API has gained the same level of protection as the source code.

If this stands, and is not corrected either by a lower court or by Congress, no one will every try a clean room implementation of any non-free library again, because there's a real likelihood that you would find yourself sued into oblivion for breach of copyright.

Wine may be safe because MS is being constrained by future potential anti-competitive suits, and of course Samba is protected because of a deal cut with the EU. But from this day foreward, clean room implementation of proprietary APIs, and I assume any other software spec (document format, communications protocol, etc.) will have absolutely no protection under the law.

Only constitutional courts can do that (because their rulings can become laws). Generally, German judges are only subordinate to the law, this is why precedents aren't binding.

Would you contribute to a future project like Samba or Wine now?

I seriously don't care if polls are in the main story stream. I seriously think that the people complaining about it must have something wrong with them. Just skip over it. Whogivesashit.

Also, while I'm ranting, Slashdot polls have always been lame. So what if this one is also lame?

The one valid complaint about these polls... CowboyNeal Option

It certainly is looking that way, but there is the whole notion that what amount to call tables can be copyrighted. What the supreme Court has done here is basically unravel the common understanding of the difference between spec and implementation, and if Java is the most obviously vulnerable, in a very real way it means any number of APIs that have been re-implemented (like the standard *nix set of system calls) could suddenly be plunged into a purgatory-like nether world. I made vulgar jokes about using stdio.h in C programs, but that's the real question. Considering that in many cases header files and libraries whose origins go back decades in many different languages and on many different architectures could become low-hanging fruit, and since copyrights are in most industrialized countries are essentially perpetual now, big software houses now have a far better club to beat competitors with than patents.

Do you think another Samba or Wine project could happen if the lower courts rule for Oracle? Who would be crazy enough to even try?

Fucking hell, I guess I'm utterly fucked, because pretty much every C program I've ever written includes #include <stdio>. Here I thought I was invoking a free and open set of library functions passed on down since the 1970s, and now it turns out I've been stealing someone's hard work in creating a standard set of functional calls. I'm dirty fucking thief.

If specifications alone can be copyrighted, then the software industry is in for a world of hurt.

It will also breed further contempt for Java. Has Oracle thought this one thr- OK, sorry, stupid question

A function name and parameter spec is now "someone's shit"? Oracle's position is about as sensible as SCO's was.

All the early games I played were very "crunchy"; D&D, AD&D, Palladium, Twilight 2000 and Traveler 2300. The inelegance of such systems really began to drive me nuts, and I ended up going with Fudge and its variants like Fate. I never really played Gurps very much, but as I recall it was the middle ground between the kind of ultra-loose systems like Fudge and the very complex systems like AD&D. Now, I run a couple of PBeMs; a Palladium Rifts one and a home-brew heavily narrative game in the Harn universe, and dice are rarely used in the Palladium game, and not even part of the Harn game