Right?

The people of a nation with a history of blatant human rights violations are taking to the streets in joy of their armed forces killing a man.

You meant "legislatively monopolized market", hope this helps.

1) The main point really is that you can now relatively easily deploy Web video in Theora without sacrificing much potential user base. (Cortado can fill in some gaps in native browser support already, but Java applet support is dwindling.)
1a) It might not yet be default(?), but MS is actively pushing Silverlight for Windows users, so the installed base is already fairly large and growing.
1b) Apple I hear has some at least semi-official Moonlight-based support, but this I know less of. Comments?
1c) Though not the best in quality per bit, you can make the quality of any codec better with more bits. Bits are only going to get cheaper. H.264 can potentially get much more expensive.

2) No, H.264 won't die a gruesome death now.
2a) Yes yes, we all know it's better technically, it doesn't matter, it still can't be a baseline Web codec.
2b) Yes, some players, especially those with vested interest in the MPEG-LA racket and excluding smaller competitors, will almost certainly use H.264 on the web for a long time to come.
2c) Isn't it nice though that a widely deployable option exists that probably has already played a hand in how much money the MPEG-LA can squeeze from you if you _do_ decide to go with H.264 anyway?

3) Using H.264 for everything won't be as unified as you think.
3a) Much of the material on the web incidentally doesn't use the very advanced features of H.264, because many decoders are limited in what profile or subset of H.264 they support (thus also reducing the quality advantage to Theora, but I make no claim of its elimination)
3b) Some material (like pirated stuff that doesn't care for copyrights or patents alike) will use all the bells and whistles, but then you may well still be stuck with having to transcode for different devices even if everything does "H.264".
3c) Such conversions can be relatively well automated when needed while keeping the original not to incur generation loss; I don't really see some need for transcoding persisting as a huge deal, except of course to the extent that anything you do with a patented format might be illegal depending on jurisdiction and circumstance.

4) Yep, no "hardware" (DSP) decoders for Theora abound.
4a) Mobile devices have enough oomph to decode it anyway in relevant resolutions (Theora is lighter than H.264, too)
4b) Yes, battery life will probably suffer somewhat, doesn't make it useless.
4c) Some DSP work has already been done on Theora decoding as already previously commented, though even when ready, deploying it would probably require user intervention and sufficient access unless shipped by the OS itself. ("Install this to improve your battery life with this site.")

Hope this summary will clarify things somewhat.

Now, I'm among the first to go "meh" about their use of Flash. But.

This SVG kludge certainly improves the chances of web sites deploying, where applicable, SVG solutions instead of going directly for Flash (which is SVG's main proprietary vector graphics competitor on the web). After all, if your SVG/SMIL etc will play in Flash, suddenly your installed base of capable viewers is at least that of Flash.

'course, more quality SVG tools are needed also but this is an important step towards more openness on the web.

While not being a fan (or a user) of Spotify for their DRM stuff (I'm sure it's all mandated by the media lobby, but regardless) and the opaque pricing which the boss of a large (by Finnish standards) local media company Poptori suspected doesn't really get distributed all that well to artists.

However, fact is that it's gotten pretty popular in pretty short time at least in some circles, and guess what: Vorbis. Presumably for royalty and quality per bandwidth reasons (over MP3, in any case).

Nnoo, that's not what that little comparison says. It only compares different Theora versions, and not very rigorously at that. Still, for a small casual comparison it's a okay. As the comments say, the sky isn't as good with the new encoder output, but in this comparison that output also happens to use 20% less bandwidth...

You might want to be less offensive when you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.

I wasn't replying to you, and neither was xiphmonth, as you might notice from the subject line "Re: Use your peepers" (and the fact that our comments aren't nested into your comment's box). The comment we _did_ reply to was merely modded down after we did so. Push the "parent" button of my comment to view it.

I'll grant you though that the slashdot UI is slightly confusing in this. I was also confused for a second or two when the original post disappeared and thought our replies had been reparented to yours (I wouldn't put such things past slashdot ;] ). Still, be more careful when frothing.

Yeaaah. First of all, let me just say that I'm not claiming Theora is better than H.264, or even on quite equal footing (as gmaxwell said, that isn't really even the point). So there, that's out of the way.

In any case, your suggestion to eyeball these comparisons that are just insanely old considering the improvements Theora has gone through is pretty clueless, more so with you even admitting to their datedness. (Sure, x264 has improved as well, but Theora has had the *cough* benefit of rather much more low-hanging fruit due to the not very high quality of the original encoder inherited from VP3.)

So I'm gonna ask _you_ to use your eyeballs and follow the link in this very article, 'cause there are before/after shots there of old and new Theora encoder output. Then come back saying that these ancient comparisons are representative of the performance of the current code. That is, after all, what this article is about.

Electronic Frontier Finland (Effi) has an English article on this matter as well.

Exactly, software patents are bad, period.

Therefore, every time a major pro-software patent lobbier gets significantly bitten by them, it's good, because it deincentivizes said lobbying.

There may be an uncomfortable PR side effect, though, in that the lobbier can then say "look, we're on the giving end also". However, as the patent system slowly makes things more and more difficult even to the pro-patent lobby, I believe this slight PR effect is outweighed by said disincentive.

(Of course, the disincentive doesn't apply to lawyers, who are a major driving force of the lobbying in many a company too, but at least it'll make the lawyers' job of convincing the rest of the company that swpats are a good thing a bit harder, with the ship sinking from the weight of all the unproductive lawsuits.)

The Finnish police have already censored the Wikileaks page on Finnish internet censorship; see my comment at the appropriate talk page.

Besides your astonishing lack of perspective, putting Qt under the LGPL was not a contribution to the free software community at all, hence not a consideration. It was already free software.

They just want proprietary companies to develop for their toolkit, presumably in great part because of their plans to leverage it on the Symbian platform as well.

Don't get me wrong, the LGPLing is all fine and okay, it's just not very consequential as far as liberty goes, and that is the axis which we're talking about with this law.