Two things that are being glosses over here:

The first is that PNG is a superior image format to GIF... GIF is a 256-color image format, which made sense in the late 80s when it was created due to VGA being the standard back then.

When PNG came out in 1995, SVGA was the current video standard and GIF was already looking obsolete.

The second thing that needs to be mentioned is that H.264 (which is the real loser in Wikimedia's vote here) is controlled by a consortium and not just a single entity. So unlike Unisys, which could arbitrarily change royalty prices, the MPEG LA doesn't have nearly the freedom to do that.

You're running ~340 web browser tabs and you think it's the web sites that are the problem?

Actually, I'm glad my account wasn't one of those forced into the new beta to see what horrible new discussion system they introduced in the beta seeing as how the last change to the discussion system made it an unreadable mess.

Pro-tip to Slashdot UI designers: I don't want to have to click on the title of every discussion post to read it.

I don't know, it sounds a bit like this one, too, except with businesses instead of government.

Incidentally, you can get the English versions of the two MSX games with Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence (it's on Disc 2), the Metal Gear HD Collection, or the Metal Gear Legacy Collection. I know they're in the MGS3 game menus in the HD Collection, I'm not sure about the Legacy Collection.

I think the fact that English-speaking audiences didn't get to play the real Metal Gear or play its sequel at all is why those games were included.

Sure there is. One has had hardware decoding in nearly all graphics processors released in the last decade and the other hasn't.

In fact, considering h.264 has been the de facto accelerated video codec in graphics processors since 2005ish, why are we even having this debate in 2014?

That would be why I said "in their right mind." :P

Since JavaEE is a server application standard, cutting old stuff means that you can no longer run apps that still use said older features on a newer JavaEE server. So, expect everyone to continue using the crusty, old versions of JBoss (for example) or to have the server manufacturers outright ignore Oracle's changes to JavaEE 8.

I know this is a parody, but...

That sounds suspiciously like a complaint about Oracle's database product, not Java. No one in their right mind actually licenses Java stuff from Oracle, which is why Oracle constantly has shit-fits about it.

You do know ASP was introduced in 1996, before PHP became popular? That was during the PHP/FI 1.0 days, which were followed by PHP/FI 2.0 before it became PHP 3 and started resembling the PHP we know today.

No, ASP was introduced to unseat Perl, which was the defacto language for CGI scripts at the time.

I'm so glad you decided to use the US as an example here.

Title 17 section 117 (part (a)(1) specifically) is worded quite broadly and gives you the right to make any copies as long as it's "an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine". Not anywhere in the text is a limit of one copy mentioned. Software requires installation to a hard drive or it won't run? Then that's an essential step and would be covered. Software needs to copy itself into RAM to run? Also an essential step. As much as I sometimes think Congress is stupid, by wording it vaguely and not specifying that it only applies to copies in RAM, they made it so it could be applied in this manner.

You mean other than the DRM on DVDs/Blu-Ray which was explicitly introduced to prevent copying?

Before the dark times. Before the Actpire.

ps -A | grep -i nsa

returned no results!

Sony claims to be looking into the media playback formats issue... they claim they didn't think there would demand for playing mp3s and the like. We'll see if they patch it in with a later firmware update.

From what I've heard, PSN Plus is required for online play on the PS4. much like XBL Gold is for the XB1.

From all the reviews I've read, they really aren't working out-of-box. Or at least Blu-Ray support isn't. That's one of the reasons there's a 300MB firmware update available on launch day.

Well, technically it was available several days before launch day, so you could download it and stick it on a USB drive so you don't have to wait for their (apparently) massively overloaded PSN service to download it from the PS4.