In the Copenhagen Metro (driverless), there are emergency brake levers next to every door. However, it was considered dangerous for the train to stop in a tunnel (and have passengers exit through the tunnel). Therefore: If you pull the emergency brake, the train will continue to the next station, then stop. (If you don't pull the emergency brake, the train will continue to the next station, then stop...)

Anyway, this might still be the safest mode of operation. If there's anything rail automation has taught us over the last century, it is this: Whenever the human second-guesses the automation, odds are that the human is wrong. About time cars got to this point, too.

Exactly. Watermarks are useless against general piracy, since the burden of proof is simply too high to take the case against John Q. Public.

For instance, most people don't know that when you buy music on iTunes, Apple puts your e-mail-address in a metadata comment field in the file. But now that you do know, feel free to take a look at The Pirate Bay and start collecting e-mail addresses from AAC files.

Note that it's not a watermark - it's not in the audio data, it's plainly visible in the file and it's trivially removed. Yet the pirates don't even do that. And why should they? I've never heard of a person being even threatened with legal action over this.

There are more recent films that also lapsed into the public domain, due to a failure to register the copyright, "Night of the Living Dead" being perhaps the most well-known example.

The real reason why GOG doesn't include these films is three-fold:

1) There are already sites doing this (for free), e.g. the Internet Archive.

2) The quality of the original prints is often poor, restoring old movies requires great skill and is very expensive, and existing restorations are not public domain.

3) Most importantly, it's besides the point. GOG is trying to get the film industry to recognize the value of selling DRM-free movies, like the music industry did before them. Selling public domain movies would be plain counter-productive.

Here's hoping they'll succeed where others have failed before them.

Roughly "B-yarn-uh Straw-strop".

To be specific, the US incarcerates more people than any nation, first-world or not. That's not only by percentages, but also by absolute numbers. Roughly one in four prisoners worldwide sits in a US prison.

The NOAA source I linked can tell us that the 1990-2014 trend has been a rise of 0.14 C per decade, and that 2013 was already 0.78 C above the 1880 pre-industrial level. A simple linear extrapolation gives us a temperature of (2100-2014)*0.014 + 0.62 - (-0.16) = 2.0 C in the year 2100, coincidentally the same 2 C used as the critical limit beyond which global warming will have alarming consequences.

Some may contend that the 2000-2014 trend has been a rise of only 0.04 C per decade, to which I'll note that the 2012-2013 trend was a rise of 0.47 C per decade. Unsurprisingly, short periods make for bad statistics. But when you pick a longer period - whether you go back to 1990, 1980, 1970 or even 1960 - you consistently get ~ 0.14 C per decade.

(Please substitute "degrees celsius" for C above, since Slashdot apparently supports neither Unicode nor even Latin 1...)

I keep hearing this, but I really don't see it.

It's like the repeated statement that "there has been no warming [since the record-setting global average in 1998]". Nobody ever claimed that global temperature would rise monotonically year-on-year; fortunately, we are allowed to look at the trend line across years and draw the quite obvious conclusion that yes, temperatures have been rising in the last two decades as well.

(You'd think the 1998 argument would lose steam after the 2005 and 2010 global temperature anomalies actually surpassed the 1998 record, but I guess it was never an argument made in good faith.)

I see what you did there. Let's take it one at a time, thanks. ;-)

Hm, my fault then; I really was aiming for "+5 insightful", not "-1 rub the wrong way". :-)

There is a benefit to stating the obvious, it's just not a very big one. The problem with the Laffer curve is that it really just states two things: 1) At 0% taxation, there will be no tax revenue, and 2) At 100% taxation, there will be no tax revenue. And as mentioned, the latter of those two postulates, while "obvious", is also demonstrably false. This leaves postulate 1, which I can't disagree with, but which is also completely useless.

This is off-topic, but you brought up the Laffer curve and Jevons paradox, so here comes the rant.

Both make for some nice economic theory, and like much economic theory, it's mostly speculation.

The Laffer curve, for instance, is a nice "sciency" sounding name for the idea that at a 100% tax rate, there will be no tax income, since nobody will be doing any work if they have to pay all their income in taxes (thus the "optimal" tax rate must be somewhere between 0 and 100%, both excluded). Not only does the entire Laffer curve theory just state the "obvious" (it brings no insights as to what the optimal tax rate might be), but the premise is also demonstrably false, since people will actually do some work for free (but of course, volunteer work doesn't exist in mainstream economics; it's like wind resistance in introductory physics, you just ignore it).

Jevons paradox is the same; to quote the very article you linked to:

That's mainstream economic theory. Meanwhile, in the real world, using real observations, economists found that there was only a small rebound effect, and that energy efficiency improvements actually does decrease energy consumption. (But since reality conflicts with the theory, we'll just ignore reality.)

To get back on topic, I'm not saying all economic theory is bullshit (but there's lies, damn lies, and economics...), just that when people trot out economics, there's usually an agenda, and the invocation of economics is often part of an "appeal to authority" fallacy. (Like how the Laffer curve is inevitably brought up as an argument for reducing taxes, ignoring the fact that estimates of the "optimal" tax rate cluster around 70%(!), above even the highest income tax rates found anywhere in the world.)

Amazon is of course not above manipulating numbers for its own benefit; the most obvious flaw in their argument being that they (deliberately?) ignore how Amazon's price affects other sales channels.

Sorry to break it to you, but Coverity's free-open source scanning was originally funded by the DHS. :-)

After the DHS grant expired in 2009, Coverity continued the service pro bono.

This new program seems like a step back, though. Now, if the DHS was instead investing in improving the open-source tools, it would make sense.

Well, the book was pretty darn dystopian... (well, it was a Philip K. Dick book). Scott did throw out Fancher's original script, which focused on the envionmental themes of the book, to instead focus on the question of humanity; a good thing too, because it's a much more compelling theme.

Let's not forget the work of primary script writer, David Peoples, who also authored the Clint Eastwood western Unforgiven. Two very different films and yet sharing a surprising number of commonalities.

Then again, neither was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and yet Blade Runner is an example of a near-perfect adaptation, even if the film, taken literally, retains almost nothing of the original book. (As PKD said, "The two reinforce each other, so that someone who started with the novel would enjoy the movie and someone who started with the movie would enjoy the novel.")

It could work. Although Ridley Scott's later work has been quite uneven, in my opinion. But fingers crossed.

You don't know what you're talking about. Netflix's "Super HD" 1080p is 7 Mbit/s. A single-layer two-hour BluRay movie can be 18 Mbit/s and still leave room for an hour of extra material. The codecs are the same.

Sure, I don't mind the quality of a 10 GB H.264 BluRay rip; I wouldn't be able to tell the difference compared to the raw BluRay rip... which clocks in at 25 GB or more. But I can certainly tell the difference when I compare with the 6.3 GB Netflix "Super HD" version!

As for 4K, what's the point, when most movies are still mastered in 2K (Full HD)? Iron Man 3, Noah, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, every bloody Transformers movie... they're all mastered in 2K!

Fair enough (though your Wikipedia reference doesn't really support your claim), but in much of Europe, the passenger trains do have right of way, even if they're running late. Any freight trains on the way are literally sidetracked to allow the passenger train to run at full speed.

I've only noticed this once; the train had been behind schedule and running slowly for a little while, and the driver came on the intercom to apologize, noting that we were just waiting for the freight train to get out of the way, so the passenger train could overtake. A little later, we sped up and drove past the cargo train, which was just sitting still on a shunting track in the middle of nowhere, allowing the passenger train to overtake on the main line.