It won't make some of the extremely long low level dungeons themselves fun though. Hopefully this is remedied in the next expansion.

While your post contained interesting information, it wasn't really relevant to the grandparent (try reading more than the first line, i.e. the part where he mentions that he does not use CB anymore). I also find it amusing that you immediately categorized him as "one of the guys screwing up communications on the amateur bands". You also forgot to end your post with "get off my lawn".

Thank you.

The parent post would of course sound less stupid if I actually used the word lossy instead of lossless. My proofreading skills seem to have atrophied a bit due to the lack of posting on slashdot.

Audio CD's do not contain .WAV files, they contain audio in the CD-DA format. That the Audio for Windows format (.WAV) usually is used to contain uncompressed audio has no bearing on the fact that WAV files can even contain losslessly compressed audio (e.g. mp3). ;)

So therefore the average users, or the people who provide the majority of votes, would never vote for DRM.

Have you tried speaking with said average users? The ones I have talked about the matter with have all been on the side of DRM/stringent copyright because "otherwise everyone will pirate and there will be no more music/movies/software". Some might even invoke the "Amiga theory", which is that Commodore died because of rampant piracy (even though it died because the Amiga was no match for consoles in the gaming front and no match for PCs on the software front).

No, in a true democracy people will get precisely what they want, which is why we are all suffering and will continue to suffer in the future due to all the nice things our predecessors wanted.

This isn't possible, as the guest OS cannot get more memory allocated to itself than has been assigned to it. Let's say you have five guest machines that "share" all their memory through this new feature. If you gain access to one of the machines and completely rewrite all the memory it has inside it, you still have only doubled the memory usage as the host os allocates the new memory for the guest os. Rewriting in the same memory multiple times will not increase memory usage any more than that as it will still be writing in the same memory area the host os allocated. Even if the attacker was able to gain access to all five machines and rewrote their memories, the host os would still only have five times as much memory usage as in the beginning (which is pretty much the way it is now without KSM).

So worry not, this should not be exploitable. *knocks on wood*

How much memory did the images use in total before the change (i.e. how big was the savings in %)?

Of course, every byte is precious as long as it doesn't affect performance, but it would be interesting to know how much more images one can expect to run on one computer. :)

Don't be ridiculous, America wasn't even discovered when elected representatives were running around in fear giving up liberties to their dictator here in Europe. This has been going back and forth for millennia and mankind is just too stupid to permanently break the cycle.

And you seemed credible until you dismissed his argument due to presentation.

Sharding or instancing is the only possible solution to this. Less updates = lag. When you get to somewhere like Ironforge, the lag gets unbearable. If you don't display some characters, mobs would be dying for no apparent reason (perhaps even ones you attack). Players might pop in and out like Christmas lights. That just won't work.

I don't see why the lack of horsepower/bandwidth on the client's side can only be rectified through game design. Of course, a game can't use infinite amounts of bandwidth but most MMO's these days seem to be designed with 56k modems in mind...

Well yes, but that really isn't a server problem and shouldn't be used as an excuse to limit games to smaller shards. If the client hardware isn't up to it just don't render all the player characters and if the network connection isn't fast enough tell the server to send less/smaller updates. Still much preferable to limiting the design of the game world itself.

I can't mod you any higher or I would, but this is true.

Well, you replied to his post so you didn't actually mod him up at all... :P

And then turned into a way of sueing other farmers because their fields where next to someone who had the terminator corn - also causing that person to not have enough for the next year.

That makes no sense. How can infertile terminator crop spread to neighboring fields? Are the moderators completely lacking in reading comprehension?

After re-reading my post it comes off as overly hostile. Apologies, but the points it makes should still be valid.

Having an armored transport car cracking open and leaking in the middle of the city would make the city uninhabitable for a quarter of a million years.

That is the most ridiculous thing I've heard this week. Is your definition of a city 10x10 meters or something? Even so, with a city that small, you could just dig up all the polluted land and shove it in another barrel.

And why the hell would an "armored transport car" even a) transport nuclear waste and b) transport nuclear waste through a city!

And to top it off, if the American "documentaries" (with periodic action sequences, scary narrator and annoying background music) that I've accidentally been exposed to are any indicator, I'd say you're better off reading wikipedia or something. Hell, I'll even copy paste a section for you:

In the United States, the acceptability of the design of each cask is judged against Title 10, Part 71, of the Code of Federal Regulations (other nations' shipping casks, possibly excluding Russia's, are designed and tested to similar standards (International Atomic Energency Agency "Regulations for the Safe Transport of Radioactive Material" No. TS-R-1)). The designs must demonstrate (possibly by computer modelling) protection against radiological release to the environment under all four of the following hypothetical accident conditions, designed to encompass 99% of all accidents.:

* A 9 meter (30 ft) free fall on to an unyielding surface
* A puncture test allowing the container to free-fall 1 meter (about 39 inches) onto a steel rod 15 centimeters (about 6 inches) in diameter
* A 30-minute, all-engulfing fire at 800 degrees Celsius (1475 degrees Fahrenheit)
* An 8-hour immersion under 0.9 meter (3 ft) of water.
* Further, an undamaged package must be subjected to a one-hour immersion under 200 meters (655 ft) of water.

So in the future, please refrain from opposing/supporting something just based on what you've seen on some television show. It's called the boob tube for a reason and that reason is not because they have female breasts on it.