Party D uses Party A's code, but locks it up a la TiVo.

Party E uses Party C's version instead of Party D's version because Party E gets more rights that way. (Party F, G, H, etc. ad infinitum keep more rights that way, too.... and that's the important part!)

The grandparent AC was trying to say that "allegation" has a negative connotation compared to "assertion," so the latter would be fairer to say.

You mean, limited to writing for any platform that uses something other than a web page as its UI (including embedded development, server-side development, regular PC applications, mobile, video games, etc.)? I think I can live with that limitation!

(Actually, even if you do write things that use web pages for their UI, unless you're the "UI guy" you still might not have to know much CSS!)

Ah, thank you. I knew the rule for "words ending in s" but failed to apply it in the case where the letters before s were NULL...

No, like so-called "pirates." Modifying the content of the site and redistributing it is copyright infringement.

So what they're doing is infringing the copyright of the allegedly-copyright-infringing website by modifying and redistributing it.

The hypocrisy is think with this one!

Indeed it hasn't, because the correct corrections would have been to write "I have VMs that run..." and to capitalize Windows since it's a proper noun.

No. ESPESCIALLY for free games. Why add copy protection to free stuff anyway? It's free to begin with! No one needs or wants to "pirate" it. Unless of course you need a "pirated" copy of the game to keep the negative SecuROM effects from your system.

This is the difference between "free as in beer" and "free as in speech" / copyleft. In the former case, maybe the company offered the program "free" for a limited time or "free" to a certain group of people or "free" as long as some other particular condition were met, and would object to people distributing the program outside of those conditions.

I'm not saying it's a legitimate reason -- far from it; SecuROM is malware and everyone who conspired to produce or distribute it should be in federal prison-- but it is a "reason."

There aren't any "s" (how do you write the plural form of that? "s's" just looks stupid...) in any greek root, because the greek language (ancient or otherwise) didn't use the latin alphabet to begin with.

The fact that someone bothered to make uPnP suggests that there's a need for this capability for average users.

There's also a "need" for antigravity and wish-granting genies. They're just needs that may remain unfulfilled due to impossibility.

I assume since you bring up uPnP without citing it as a viable solution, you're aware that it's disasterous for security. I think at least some of that is due to inherent problems in the concept, not just a poor implementation.

Granted, we seem to have gone down that path already (perhaps driven in no small part by the prevalence of NAT), and these services may have a place, but do we want it to be *all* there is to the internet?

I agree that we want people to not be reliant on centralized servers... however, the way to accomplish that would be to upgrade the "average" technical expertise of users to the point where they'd be competent to configure a firewall. That may be practically impossible, but I think developing a technical solution capable of saving them from themselves would be even harder.

I accidentally left my Windows box connected to the internet without an external firewall for a few months with no ill effects.

...that you know of!

Only when they are designed to rule out those groups...

In other words, "only" 100% of the time.

But was that before or after the Supreme Court decided corporations had free speech rights? If it was before, then the situation has probably changed (in the current Court's insane opinion, anyway).

Can you explain in more detail?

If you have a multi-dimensional set of factors of things and you design a metric to collapse them down into a single dimension, what you're really measuring is a combination of the values of the factors and your weighting of them. Since the "correct" weighting is a matter of opinion and everybody's use-case is different, a single-dimension metric isn't very useful.

This goes for any situation where you're picking the "best" among a set of choices, not just for compression algorithms, by the way.

Like, if you're trying to compress a given file, and one algorithm compressed the file by 0.00001% in 14 seconds, another compressed the file 15% in 20 seconds, and the third compressed it 15.1% in 29 hours, then the middle algorithm is probably going to be the most useful one.

User A is trying to stream stuff that has to have latency less than 15 seconds, so for him the first algorithm is the best. User B is trying to shove the entire contents of Wikipedia into a disc to send on a space probe, so for him, the third algorithm is the best.

You gave a really extreme[ly contrived] example, so in that case you might be able to say that "reasonable" use cases would prefer the middle algorithm. But differences between actual algorithms would not be nearly so extreme.

Well shit, if you're so worried about the viability of the platform that you're delaying it, then of course you're going to have a hard time attracting developers!

In theory, voter tests would rule out the gullible. In practice, voter tests would rule out the black / gay / poor / jew / undesirable-group-du-jour.