People tell me my Slashdot comments are repetitive. I'd appreciate some hints as to how to be less repetitive.

Sometimes it looks like I'm reminding other users of an unsolved problem, but the problem has in fact been solved. Perhaps the real problem is that the solution hasn't been well publicized. For example, one solution to a lot of problems with home entertainment is to put a PC in the living room, but almost nobody knows about this.

If it looks like I'm reminding other users of an edge case too often, consider that a solution that covers more edge cases will appear better thought out and more robust than a solution that covers only the common cases and leaves the edge cases unnoticed.

And sometimes I get confused as to which is the common case and which is the edge case. For example, h4rr4r has pointed out that whenever someone brings up Netflix as an alternative to cable television, I often bring up the fact that Netflix lacks sports. I try to phrase it like "Netflix is fine for people who aren't into sports", recognizing that both non-sports-fan and sports-fan markets exist but apparently putting undue emphasis on the sports-fan market. This goes back to discussions that I've had with heads of household in my survey sample. They tell me they don't see how Netflix would be worth an extra $7.99 per month on top of what they already pay for TV. So I try to make room for Netflix in their budget by suggesting how much they could save by switching from cable Internet+cable TV or fiber Internet+satellite TV to their current Internet+Netflix, and then they mention sports. I guess the survey sample of households in my extended family with broadband access must be a biased sample with more sports fans than the general population, and thus I have a biased view of the relative size of the sports-fan and non-sports-fan markets.

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Because I have a blog at http://fyngyrz.com/.

It kind of makes the whole journal thing redundant. If you really want to see what I have to say about random things, by all means, you're invited to the blog. If not, well, it seems you're in substantial company, if nothing else. :)

I've received at least three, now four replies to my current Slashdot signature:

USA already has other public options: public schools and USPS Priority Mail over private schools and UPS 3 Day Select.

My signature points out that the United States has a history of public and private sectors competing in a given sector. For example, an engineering student in Indiana can go to Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (private), or she can go to Purdue University (public). An online hobby store can ship packages to customers with United Parcel Service (private), or it can ship them with United States Postal Service (semipublic, funded by an exclusive contract with the US Government for mailing letters).

As of the third quarter of 2009, health insurance for United States residents under age 65 is mostly provided by employers, who make insurance available to their employees. But not all employers are large enough to qualify for group insurance plans, and some employers even restrict employees to part-time hours so that they don't have to offer coverage. Some insurers offer individual plans, but these are known for refusing to cover people with any of several sorts of preexisting conditions. Estimates of the number of documented U.S. residents without health insurance range from 8 million to 47 million.

The legislature of the United States, called the Congress, has recognized that the lack of universal coverage is holding America back compared to other highly-developed countries. Its members have been debating whether to form a public health insurer to compete with private insurers; this hypothetical insurer has been nicknamed "Public Option" or "Obamacare" in the news media. Some more fiscally conservative members of the Congress argue that any public option would distort the market, and people would leave their current plans and end up on Obamacare. Yes, some people will switch from their current insurer to Obamacare, but that's to be expected: people switched from UPS 3-Day Select when USPS introduced flat-rate shipping boxes.

And the so-called "death panel" is actually called iMac.

Discussion forked from here:

The elements of copying are access and similarity. The plaintiff shows some similarity between the works. Then the plaintiff shows that the defendant should reasonably have had access to the work because the work was on the pop charts. This creates a rebuttable presumption of copying. My question: how would one rebut this presumption?

CheapBytes distributes copies of free operating systems for a fee.

What's the difference between an FTP mirror and an HTTP mirror in this case?

Google failed me on SUP, but it found Background Intelligent Transfer Service. That uses only 20 percent of bandwidth anyway, and the article is about throttling to 33 percent (or, alternatively, letting HTTP burst to 300 percent).

Any encoder for MPEG-4 Part 2 violates U.S. patents if not licensed by MPEG-LA, and as I understand it, MPEG-LA's standard license terms are incompatible with the four freedoms that define free software.

Yes, the ISP is trying to do so.

I have played at least three Nintendo DS games over Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. Animal Crossing: Wild World copies the map from the server to any client that joins, but that's only 88 KB of data.

In this discussion, godrik and I were discussing the relative merits of web applications that use AJAX techniques compared to local applications. I brought up the advantage that web apps can run even on machines where the user isn't allowed to install new software, such as someone else's PC, a set-top web terminal, or a video game console.

Godrik countered that he'd never buy a machine that didn't let its owner install software, and that when he wanted a console to play games on, he bought a Wii and jailbroke it using Bannerbomb. He mentioned plenty of established PC titles that have been ported to libogc, the library used by Wii homebrew: source ports of Id Software's Doom and Quake, emulators such as FCE Ultra, ScummVM, and VisualBoyAdvance, and various Linux-original games that had been ported to about everything, such as SuperTux. These games had presumably recouped their costs of production entirely on the PC.

In general, there are four routes to being able to run code on a closed platform:

1. Make a web application that runs in the console's web browser. These browsers are usually severely limited in performance and in how much of the system's capability the browser exposes through the DOM. Some can't even read more than one gamepad at once, and they're impractical for playing handheld games away from Wi-Fi coverage.
2. Make a pay-per-download game and sell it through the console maker's online store. This is cost prohibitive due to various artificial overheads imposed by console makers such as Nintendo, such as the requirements of a separate office and a prior commercial title on another platform.
3. Make a native game that ships on a retail game disc. This is even more cost prohibitive than download.
4. Make a "homebrew" game that relies on a jailbreak. This is the solution that godrik appears to prefer, but it has problems.

First, jailbreaks break the console's warranty or worse. There are anecdotal reports that Nintendo charges more for out-of-warranty service, such as disc drive replacement after the first 12 months, if a jailbreak is detected than if not.

Second, Nintendo can break Bannerbomb at any time by fixing the defect in a new version of the Wii Menu and IOS. Nintendo would install the fix on newly manufactured consoles and require an update before people can connect to Wii Shop Channel (workaround: WiiSCU) or start newly manufactured Game Discs normally (workaround: Gecko 1.8+). It could take weeks for a new sploit to be developed and released on sites such as WiiBrew, just as it took weeks from Wii Menu 4.0 to Bannerbomb.

But finally, the homebrew community frowns on charging for anything, especially the jailbreaks (Twilight Hack, Bannerbomb) and the launchers (BootMii, Homebrew Channel). That doesn't look good for somebody who wants to feed his family but isn't rich enough to afford the overhead of a license to develop on a closed platform, or even someone who just wants a little economic incentive not to abandon his projects.

One could develop for an open platform such as the PC, but as I mentioned in my last journal entry, not all genres fit well on such a personal computer. For example, a developer might want to make a social game designed to be played with gamepads, a big screen, a sofa, and three friends, such as Nintendo's Mario Party series or Super Smash Bros. series. But four adults can't easily fit around a PC's comparatively small monitor, and a lot of PC gamers seem to be keyboard-and-mouse fanboys who would make other players take turns if they're not old enough to work and buy their own PCs and their own copies of the game. One could go the "home theater PC" route, running gamepads through a USB hub and a VGA or DVI-to-HDMI cable to an HDTV, but two-thirds of U.S. households still have an SDTV in the living room, most PCs don't come with an S-Video output, and the PC to TV adapter isn't sold in stores. Likewise, music games with key sounds, such as Beatmania and Guitar Hero, can feel unresponsive on PC sound cards with their much higher audio latency.

But then, godrik wasn't referring to free as in free beer but instead to Free as in free speech. One way an author can rely on Free is to make the game a massively multiplayer online game based on subscriptions or micropayments. This has its drawbacks: more complexity, requirement for lag-tolerant game play design, cost of administering the game server, need for a separate PC per player, generally no opportunity for children to play due to COPPA and foreign counterparts, failure to reach people who regularly game away from a reliable Internet connection (such as laptop users or people living in the country), and the fact that a lot of people prefer to buy rather than effectively rent their games.

Another way is to make the game engine Free but to charge for the data files, much like Doom and Quake after their GPL release. But are there any success stories of shipping a retail or pay-per-download game whose engine is free software from day one?

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Back on /. after a long absence. This is one of the few sites not blocked by my work's ornerous web filtering.

    In case anyone's curious, I'm an gun toting, pro choice, Barry Goldwater-conservative atheist. Anyone want to talk guns? Right now I'm eying a Steyr AUG replica made in the US. I just wish I could find an AUG that takes AR mags.

In this comment, nuzak wrote:

There are two kinds of real-time multiplayer video game. Some games require one machine and screen for each player; these are historically associated with personal computers controlled by a keyboard and mouse, connected in either a local-area network or through the Internet. Other games allow multiple players to share a screen. Incidentally, this can be done without splitting the screen, as seen in Midway's Gauntlet, Konami's Bomberman series and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (arcade), and Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. series. These traditionally run on arcade cabinets or on video game consoles with multiple gamepads. The historical reasons for this platform divide include the difficulty in connecting multiple gamepads and the difficulty in fitting four players' bodies around one 14- to 17-inch monitor.

But in the late 1990s, the line began to blur. At first, only consoles had hubs called "multitaps" to connect four gamepads to one machine, but starting with the popularization of USB in 1998, the PC has also had hubs that take multiple gamepads. In the early 2000s, more and more PCs have included composite and S-video outputs for a standard-definition television, and high-definintion televisions have included VGA-style video inputs, solving the screen problem. The rise of home theater PCs has led to demand for multiplayer games designed to fit an HTPC.

Yet even in 2008, this demand has not been met, and the stigma of one PC per player remains. A minority of PC titles, such as Serious Sam, Lego Star Wars, and Midway Arcade Treasures, allow two players on one screen, but not much more. Even cross-platform games whose console version works with more than one gamepad tend to need one PC per player. The landscape of HTPC gaming is so barren that some people have recommended loading up an HTPC with emulators to run unauthorized copies of console game ROMs.

Much innovation in software comes from microISVs, or small businesses that develop software and distribute it on the Internet. These are often home-based businesses and in some cases are run more as a hobby or moonlighting enterprise than as a profit-seeking day job. Some microISVs make their money by developing proprietary software, distributing a trial version at no charge, and selling copies of a version with more features. Others, especially developers of free software, just take donations and advertisements. But the console makers have consistently excluded microISVs from the market. For example, from Nintendo's developer qualifications for Wii and WiiWare: "In addition, an Authorized Developer will have a stable business organization with secure office facilities separate from a personal residence ( Home offices do not meet this requirement )".

Imagine that the head of a microISV has written a design document for a video game intended for two to six people in one room looking at one screen. His team has developed a playable prototype that runs on Windows. For which platform should he and the rest of his team develop and market the final version?

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I will roll my eyes SO HARD at all the Apple rumor sites. With the iPhone, Apple proved that they can defeat rumor people by showing off demo units and prototypes to many different people. The conflicting rumors will increase buzz and increase surprise at the same time, even if some of the rumors were legit.

A while ago, an Apple patent surfaced for an ultra low-profile optical drive underneath the keyboard that requires sleeping the laptop, turning it over, and changing optical discs while it is upside down.

Since then, rumors have been about laptops with no optical drive, and now recently there's a rumor about an external optical drive. This ignores the fact that leakers could look right at a device with the upside down optical, and think that it has no internal optical drive.

Just saying.

In this comment, sethawoolley wrote:

Tip 1: Be sure to quote the parts of the comment you're replying to. Quote multiple levels to recap the discussion from the original article to Slashdot's summary through parent comments if you feel it necessary.

Tip 2: If a comment is far enough off topic, and you can't tie it back to the article somehow, put it in your journal. Then, under the original comment, reply "See my journal" without bonus so that it at least shows up in the other user's messages.pl.

In Leopard Mail & a bunch of the iLife apps, you can open up a Photo Browser that lists Apple apps & the photos they contain. I know that Aperture, iPhoto, and Photo Booth show up there, and I'm not aware of any other potential sources.

Is there a documented or known-but-undocumented API for becoming a source in that photo browser? I know that any app can open a photo browser. I want to know if my Lightroom photos will ever, ever appear there. An extremely preliminary googling turns up nothing, so I assume the answer is no.

Slashdot did it years ago with zoo.pl, but now the Foes List is finally coming to Facebook. It's about damn time!

18th October, 2007, we lost a dear old friend, a (mostly) Siamese cat yclept "Gwai-loh." Gwai was quite vocal, as are many Siamese; he also had some strange characteristics, for instance you could hold him upside-down on the ceiling and he would walk around - inverted - for as long as you were willing to hold him up there. For years, we kept him around the office, and he had a habit of coming up for affection when whoever he was approaching was on the phone. So he'd come up to you, get right up to your face (and the phone) and let loose with a really loud meow. Which you would then have to explain to the customer. One time I was on the phone with a rather famous Hollywood special effects dude when Gwai let loose with this, we had a good laugh over it. Eventually, we put up a web page on our site with a .wav of Gwai's signature meow, and a picture of him staring at a screensaver on a ginormous (for the time) monitor. A surprising amount of the code in WinImages was written with Gwai warm and settled either in my lap or across my arms.

Well, eventually, the old boy's liver failed, and I put out a rather startling amount of money to see if we could get around that, and amazingly enough, it worked. We got two more years of Gwai, all of it of quite high quality, before he finally laid down for the last time. His last couple of days were spent purring and head bumping while all the while refusing to eat or drink... finally, he just didn't wake up.

I miss him terribly. Sometimes it hits me right between the eyes and I can't even think straight. I can't dig over a decade and a half of unconditional love and affection out of my system with any amount of rationalization or any other flavor of self-bullshittery. Here's to my grizzled old friend. I only hope he knew how much I loved him in return.

Is anyone else as annoyed as I am by words and phrases in web articles that pop up boxes because my mouse pointer happened to cross them, temporarily hiding the content I was reading in the first place? I didn't click on anything, and consequently, I don't want a context change. I find these annoying to the point of noting what the site is and not going back. Anyone else feel the same? Anyone have a defense of the practice?

I went to this article today to read it in response to a slashdot posting, and managed to accidentally activate the wireless mouseover / popup as I was reading. Bam. Content hidden, thought stream interrupted. Isn't this essentially popups, revisited?

So I wake up this morning, and Putin has dissolved his government.

Then, same morning, Russia announces a bomb with nuclear-level destructive capability. But they say they're not escalating.

Then, later the same day, the US announces they have a matter-antimatter (proton/positron) annihilation laser, which, they say, is to normal lasers as nuclear weapons are to normal bombs.

At the same time, Bush, old "We'll never pull 'em out", is about to announce a troop pullback in Iraq.

Oil's hovering around $80 a barrel. The dollar is in the outhouse, and we've basically had many of our civil rights eliminated or made irrelevant.

Did I miss something here?

Pumping carbon into the atmosphere may not be the cause of Global warming, but it's absolute insanity to beleive we can continue to pump millions of tons of carbon into our atmosphere without consequences. Even if you subscribe to the belief that cyclic changes in the sun, or the earths orbital plane, are the causes of global warming, it's irrelavant - because our, and future generations, will still have to deal with global warming. This can only be achieved by having a sustainable energy infrastructure policy. I note that most of the people in that documentary are old enough so that if they are wrong they won't have to deal with the consequences. Global warming is happening, no matter what the cause, dealing with carbon emmisions are the first step. People may try to ignore the science, but it doesn't change the fact that is is happening.

The carbon emissions of industry that generates energy for society illustrates the much larger issue of externalities. Externalities are the waste and by-products of corporations, and they are not legally obliged to factor these into the cost of production of their goods or services. The cost of these externalities are offset to the community, because in theory, the community should have the resources to deal with the externality. Of course this was before we had corporations with economies the size of countries. Externalities can be anything from the toxic chemicals dumped into a river, the destruction of ecosystems, human rights violations from the abuse of cheap labor in third world countries, nuclear waste and of course carbon emissions from coal fired power plants.

Not factoring these externalities into the cost of producing a good or service reduces the cost. This reduction in cost forces the board of a company to take the lowest cost route available because, by law, the corporation is legally obliged to maximise the financial returns to the shareholder. Even if a board of a corporation agrees that it's is an undesirable course of action, morally wrong or clearly unsustainable environmentally, this fatal flaw in the design of a corporations legal structure prevents even the most environmentally aware directors doing what is right by the earth and ultimatley the human race.

Carbon trading is an attempt to put a cost on the energy industries externality (carbon emissions) so that a cost can be factored into energy production that burns coal. This very focused approach allows the issue of changing the law to force corporations to deal with their externalities, to be avoided. I'm not saying not to apply carbon trading, but this is the very layering of regulation that business complains about. The real issue is how much longer can we continue to destroy the very ecosystem that allows the human race to exist all because we allow this glaringly obvious legal flaw to continue.