Because virtual shooting changes far more rapidly than physical shooting. Strategies that work in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare may fail in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Even if you standardize on one particular iteration of a series, there's no guarantee that the game's publisher will still be willing to sell copies of the old iteration. And the demise of GameSpy has shown that multiplayer won't even be available in older games after a service provider hardcoded into the game pulls the plug.

A standard TV can't present 100 frames per second. The tradeoff becomes whether to improve realism by adding more detailed lighting (which takes longer to compute) or by simplifying geometry and lighting to hit 120 fps, rendering twice, and combining them into a 60 fps picture for the TV.

You don't claim that. Others have accused you of claiming that, and that's where they pick up misconceptions. The hosts file is one layer, and in-browser policy add-ons are another layer to pick up anything bad that slips past hosts.

This use of hosts essentially treats it as a DNS cache. But you still have to make DNS requests after the cache period expires to see if the record has changed. Otherwise, after the site you're trying to access has moved to a different IP address, you'll likely end up hitting the server of the attacker who has snagged that same address.

Exactly my point. How things "are" is entirely dependent upon what your own challenges and successes are, and whether they are increasing or decreasing.

Nothing I said in any way denies the advance of technology or the shift of cultural values. My point is, what that means is relative to the individual. Your world view is not mine, and vice-versa. It's just ridiculous for me to say the world is better, or worse, for you. Only you can say that.

One person will rave about the positive aspects of kids having cellphones. Another will mourn the childhood exploration and freedom that the face-in-device, helicopter-parented youth culture has lost. One will rave about television, next person points out that the "gift" of Fox News and the rest is no favor to accuracy, education or sanity. A hundred years ago, the pledge of allegiance hadn't been suborned by the religious in violation of the 1st amendment. A hundred years ago, female and male roles were very different. Some of those changes may seem positive, some quite negative. A hundred years ago, you could buy a home on the wages of pretty much any job. Today, it is difficult to do without very, very expensive loans from third parties. 100 years ago, one could make many personal choices that are forbidden today. Marijuana, cocaine, etc. Just over a hundred years ago, the state began interfering with the choice to enter into a polygamous relationship, and we're still stuck with that coercion. You mentioned jury nullification, and you did so as if less of it was a good idea -- but to me, it's about the only power remaining that can save citizens from an overzealous and out of control justice system.

Many things have changed, and everyone can have an opinion on every change. It's all very much relative and personal. There's no way to say "things are much better overall" because you can't obtain or synthesize an "overall" viewpoint.

Yes, some things are improving. But others are not. And to say that the things these people picked define "the world" is nothing more than hubris.

There are many things that are not improving. Some of them bode extremely poorly for the future. Climate may be one of those (or not... we will see.) Loss of privacy is another. Militarization of police is another. Constitutional erosion is another. A continuously increasing burden of badly crafted and anti-liberty legislation is another. The US justice system is a horror show from one end to the other. We're presently building a mostly unemployable permanent lower class by the continuing and increased implementation of never forgive, never forget social patterns and supporting technology. The vast majority of wealth has become concentrated in the hands of a very few people and corporations, and those same people and corporations have assumed de-facto control of our political system everywhere it does something that matters to them.

Depending on where you sit in regard to these issues, and others, your world may be sucking harder on an ever-increasing curve.

The world is what it is. Happy-assed optimism isn't called for outside of your own situation, and only then if that's how you see it.

A person's property is their property. No committee should be able to decide how much a patent (or any other property or possession) is worth and force a sale.

I reject the entire concept that an idea can be your property. The only thing about an idea that is of personal significance is that you might have it first. You can't prevent someone else from having the same idea, even if you never open your mouth about your idea. Because it's not inherently yours; it's just a product of thinking. Property can really only be physical.

This is exactly the same as you liking chocolate, and then telling me I can't like chocolate for X years because you liked it first. Ideas are a product of the mind, and that's about all you can say about them in terms of where they come from. That doesn't lead to "property", in fact, since we all have minds, it leads precisely the other way. But the reason that monetizing ideas is encouraged is because some of them have the potential to advance society enough that it is thought that a period of monopoly is enough to justify everyone having access to that idea a bit down the road. The whole point is to make that idea available to everyone.

Right now, society grants temporary monopolies for the one who seems to have been first to describe the idea (although they're not very good at determining that, they can't be.) You'll note that even under the current system, society does not create a situation where the idea is "yours", that is, it's not your property. All they're doing is saying, you lay out the idea in detail, we'll let you have a limited time to monetize it. After that, anyone can -- so it's not your property. What you get is an opportunity, one that comes at everyone else's disadvantage, and which can (and does) lead to zero progress at all if you sit on it. In which case, thanks for retarding progress we could have had, eh?

I think offering a monopoly was a poor choice. If you have an idea, you should be able to do whatever with it. If I have or use the same idea, same thing. Being first shouldn't be worth much -- not a monopoly. Just enough to incentivize having ideas. Actually selling ideas -- that's where they have real value. So to maximize value to society, we should let anyone sell who feels they can make money doing so.

There are lots of opinions on this. Now you know mine, that's all.

The main thing wrong with software patents is the nonobviousness bar.

It's bloody obvious you can write just about anything you're competent to write and that is possible to implement. That's the whole point of a generally programmable architecture. To then say, "look, ma, I wrote an algorithm!" and THEN expect that no one else is allowed to write the same thing... the only thing obvious about that is that it is stupid.

Digital hardware is not very different software

That's one case of doing digital hardware, and it doesn't address the 99% of the realm of other hardware. See, the problem here -- unlike software -- is that you don't get to make a very effective choice about the amount of resources thrown at the problem. I can attack the same software problem as a large corporation and even come out ahead, and faster. With hardware, that's not true. There are all kinds of limits from certifications (FCC, UL, etc.) to lab equipment to mechanical design, assembly, testing, prototyping, packaging, distribution and so on; patents exist in order to encourage the investments required to address those costs. For software, such encouragement is unnecessary. It doesn't face the same problems unless you choose that it does (mainly by hiring less effective programmers and/or constraining programmer options (like choice of language) and/or putting layers of management in the way of progress.)

doesn't the current patent system already do that?

No. The current patent system enforces a monopoly, and then you get to earn whatever. I'm suggesting that if the invention is found worthy, the government immediately pay the inventor based on an initial estimation, and then revise that upwards if called for when presented with sales and social data ten years later, and anyone can use the invention. So the inventor gets rewarded; the risks of commercializing land equally on everyone's shoulders. If the invention is worthy, that is, it can be sold at a profit, that'll probably happen. If not, well, phbbbt.

That's stupid, because customers will always low-ball what they want to pay

That's why the revisit. Show the data, get the pay.

The price of any goods/service should be set by the seller, not the buyer.

This isn't about the buyer or the seller or the manufacturer. This is about the inventor. We want things invented. We don't want monopolies. So if I invent a widget, I get paid for inventing it. Anything from $10 to whatever they think it's worth. After ten years, it turns out this thing was used *everywhere* (say it's in cellphones) then I get more. But that more came from legit sales of the device (taxed), a tax that is built into its cost and doesn't make it any harder for one little guy to make it , or a big corporation. Given that the sales are known, so is the recompense.

nobody knows how much a patent is worth beforehand.

Estimates can be made -- we do that kind of thing all the time -- and the revisit can ensure that the actual worth is eventually related to the reward.

It could be worthless, or a few bucks, or billions.

No invention is worth billions. Monopolies on inventions are worth billions. And we should get rid of those. Then if you can make billions off of sales of devices, fine. But everyone gets a chance at it, and the inventor is already compensated.

You just want to create a system where the patent holders are royally screwed and you can get their ideas for cheap.

No. That's nonsense. Use your head. I want the inventor(s) paid well, and I want it to be related to the actual value of the invention. What I want to eliminate is the monopoly, because that's an albatross around everyone else's neck, a huge, hemorrhoidal, bleeding, infected open sore on the ass of progress.

especially the open source folks, who think everything should be free

The software types are entitled to value their work product at zero. Open source hardware is tougher to address within the bounds of my idea, but frankly, so few people actually build open source hardware for their own use I just don't think it's a serious issue. If they're building it to sell, then the sales get taxed based on inventions used, no problem.

There are several ways to apply temporal antialiasing or "motion blur", each of which is analogous to a well-known spatial antialiasing method. One is to render the scene twice at a slight time offset and average the two; this is the temporal counterpart to FSAA. Or find the motion vector around the frontmost mesh in each 8x8 pixel section of the screen and add a local blur filter; this is more like MSAA. But in the march from 240p (PlayStation and Nintendo 64) to 1080p (current consoles) and higher (PC master race), the preference has been for more detail in each frame rather than a better illusion of motion within a frame.

Correct. It's an ISP that offers an option for censorware as a service to its customers. When you first sign up, or when the ISP first rolls out censorware in your area, it captive-portals all packets until the householder completes the setup of the connection. In this case, completing the setup includes deciding to turn censorware on or off. Some parents will want it; other subscribers won't. Public Wi-Fi hotspots do something similar to ensure that each user has seen the acceptable use policy.

I'm a bit more "stateless" (in the computing sense) than some other Slashdot users. This means I'm not disposed toward ad hominem attacks; I instead take each post on Slashdot as I see it. And you've shown yourself to be reasonable, even if you're a little verbose, and even if at times you've appeared to claim that the hosts file is a panacea.

This was the standard price for caller ID on a POTS line from Frontier Communications, the ILEC around here, if not bundled with any other "calling features".

So where should someone who's underemployed come up with the money to pay for all these recurring expenses to keep up with the Joneses? One has to buy a cell phone and cell phone service because voice mail users are annoying, one has to buy a car, insurance, maintenance, and fuel because cyclists are annoying, etc.

The only reason they throw up this page is because in their mind, you haven't finished ASKING FOR service. Until they know what specific kind of service you prefer, namely a filtered service or an unfiltered service, they don't provide any service.

In a lot of areas, it's either the monopoly cable ISP or expensive satellite Internet with a far smaller monthly data quota.

The server knows which subscribers have expressed a filtering preference. It also knows which modems' MAC numbers are associated with each subscriber's account. So packets coming from a modem on a "don't know whether to filter" account don't go to the Internet at all. There's no "client-side scripting" about it; the closest thing is how the server intercepts requests on port 80 to all addresses, so that when you open your browser to the start page for the first time on this connection, you get an HTTP response whose Location: header points to the filtering preference page.

Depends on where you live, what taxes and unfunded mandate compliance costs they tack on, how much your long distance carrier charges, etc. Plus the cost of a phone.

True of smartphone service. Dumbphone service can be far cheaper, depending on how long you spend on the phone every month.

Software patents are utter bullshit from word one. They should just go away and stay away.

Hardware patents are something else, but it's pretty clear they are being *very* poorly managed. I don't even like saying it, but I'm afraid I agree with you: they do more harm than good now.

We need an entirely new model of encouraging invention. Trade secret is useful in providing a reasonable profit window and establishment of precedence in the marketplace (the only way to go with software, as far as I'm concerned) as the window you get correlates well with the complexity of what you've done, but has its limits when we're talking hardware.

Perhaps a way for society to pay for an invention, and once that's been done, it goes right into the "available to everyone" pool. Panels of experts setting perceived value and an immediate payment being made, followed by a revisit ten years later to determine how it all went, with extra reward possible if the invention's impact was underestimated?

Look at me, suggesting government committees. Oy. I should go bang my head on a table.

But damn, we *really* need to clean out the drains. Patents are the disgusting glop that are making the system run slower and slower, while getting legal sewage all over everyone involved. The only consistent winners here are the plumbers (lawyers.)