Which would be a valid reason to introduce a new international treaty on "Crimes against sentient AI" under which to prosecute those cruel enough to subject a poor AI to running on a Windows platform~

Because they are BSD licensed, various Xiph codecs like Vorbis are popular for storing soundtracks of video games.

FLAC is a popular audio codec in high-end HD-based digital autio players aimed at audiophiles.

Google did provide Thoera variants at some point in time (I don't know if they still do).

Nobody ever lost money following suit due on thr gound of these codecs.

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The reason that Theora isn't that popular, is that currently H264 does provide a better image quality for a given bandwith and as most of the target audience already have a hardware chip supporting decoding (e.g.: in the tablet they use to watch Netflix) licensing doesn't matter much for them.

By asking for more money, H265 / HEVC is losing part of its attractiveness to H264. It compresses video better / gives more quality for the same compression. BUT costs more money.

On the long term all these are argument in favour of Daala : not only will it eventually produce even better compression (simply on the ground of being based on technology even more advanced), but is not covered by patents.

Okay then...

...fixed the original post.

Is it okay now ?

Depends, if he lives in Europe: nearly every single last one of them, specially the asian no-name brands.

The practice of Microsoft regarding PlaysForSure in the US is an entirely different matter.

The bullying was done as part of the PlaysForSure program.

That was microsoft's attempt to counter music stores like iTunes and co. They had a platform for selling DRM-ed music in WMA format. OEMs had to undergo a certification to be able to advertise "Microsoft PlaysForSure". That mandated certain formats (support for DRM, support for WMA). It was worded in such a way that it basically forbid manufacturer to put any other codec on the device (see the "Criticisms" section. According to MS that was due to a junior employee who wrote it. Yeah. Sure.). It think the controversy was talked about back then here on /.

My opinion is that this probably started as an attempt to initially close loop-hole to avoid consumer playing non DRM-ed / unlicensed music (i.e.: pirated), but at the hand of MS executive quickly evolved as a way to attempt crushing competition.

That severly limited the spreading of non-WMA formats (free like Vorbis or FLAC. Or alternative licenses like Sony's ATRAC, etc.) because OEMs probably feared that including extra formats would exclude them from WMA certification and they would lose market share to manufacturer who didn't.
(Specially since back then, Vorbis didn't have any markets, it was mostly used for higher quality home rips. Whereas WMA had Microsoft's store and OEMs were hoping to have something against the iTunes behemoth).

Or mostly so in the US.

The rest of the world didn't give a damn fuck about microsoft's market (was is even available outside US ?) nor play for sure. People wanted mainly MP3 because that was the most widespread format, and adding extra formats was a way for OEM to put more tick box on their feature list. As such adding Vorbis was a win-win: it doesn't cost anything (and even had a BSD licensed integer implementation for embed available for free) and was one extra feature that they'll advertise to gain attraction. Every single asian no-name manufacturer did add it.

In Europe nearly every player I've seen in store did have Vorbis support.

That explains the dual ROM:
- one ROM to placate microsoft to get access to PlaysForSure in the US market.
- one ROM with as many features as possible cramed in to gain visibility everywhere else.

More than one way to do thing with compression.

Yup, your hand is tied behind your back, but just as you try to work anyway, standing in another corner there's this other guy with an hindu name asking you if you need a hand. or six.

It might not work as efficiently if you try to achieve the exact same thing but are restricted in the methods you use*. But you can obtain very efficient result if you try something completely different. Then the patents won't even matter.

The realm of DCT it a patent mine field? Try something else.

Dirac/Schroedinger by BBC has show that you can use wavelets instead.

Daala by Xiph is on the way of showing that lapped transforms + perceptual vectors + range coding work too.

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*:And even then in that situation, there might be efficient way to do the same thing while doing it differently enough to not be patented.
On2/Google/Xiph have repeatedly shown that with the various VPn codecs being close to the MPEG/H26x, with the patended bit swapped out.

Total number of lawsuits lost by Xiph for Vorbis, Opus, FLAC, Tarkin, Theora, etc.: 0

Yes, lawyer won't stop simply because it's different. They would dream to lawsuit Xiph into the ground. But so far they haven't found anything on any of the other technologies developed or taken over by Xiph.

The people at Xiph know their shit and if they say that a codec is using a non patented alternative technique, it is non patented.

And the Gnome guys promised to make a userfriendly GUI to help against that.
But they are still arguing about how to make it follow HIG, and how to adapt to the upcoming GTK4.

Yup. We're all the same specie. "Race" is just an arbitrary label used to make convenient distinction among a group of individual that would other wise mate together : e.g.: breeds of dogs, etc.

Short answer: Nope, it's not possible.

Not so short answer: Well depend on what you define as "races" i.e.: you'll need to constantly redefine your arbitrary "race" label along as the set of gene that you try to use to map it. With that definition of "race" drifting farther and farther away from what biggots with an agenda would like it to be.

Long answer: Remember that the only valid real barrier is *specie*. i.e.: between groups that *cannot* mate together. Inside that division, all individual can mate together. Humans are specially good at that "mating" (well, maybe except some basement dweller): because from our dawn we've been one of the most mobile specie, only bested by birds and some big aquatic animals. Humans do tend to get around a lot. As a result our specie is constantly under heavy genetic mixing.

You can put some arbitrary labels (hey, let's put together individual that have darker skin tone in one big arbitrary bunch and call them niggers!)
You can even find some labels that are actually convenient (statistically, people who typically come from Caucasian ancestry tend to have a bit higher probability for some disease and a bit lower for others).

But if you got into the details, it starts to get muddy, you'll find that some people that you put in one of your arbitrary categories come from completely different lineage that split quite some time before, whereas other that you wanted to put out of that label actually share much more recent ancestry.
(That white supremacist biggot over there ? He want to be put in a special category, aside "non whites" ? well on the surface it might look like some vague idea like correlating it with skin pigmentation. Except that among those non-white he'll probably put native american, but also african and north african. And his grand-dad happens to be from an italian immigrant family, and over the course of history southern european have had a lot of exchange with northern africa. See where I'm heading ?)

So, in short what works well to separate breeds of dogs (which are bred in very controlled manners and you can somewhat keep something like a breed more or less pure) absolutely doesn't work with human that fuck around a lot.

Same for the genetics.
You'll be able to spot a few marker (let's say: a gene that helps control the base amount of melanin in the skin). But once you start using this, you'll notice that a lot of the "wrong people" end in the "wrong category".

That specific list of markers you've assembled together, will consider some of the white supremacists as non white (because of the complex mixed ancestry most people have) while failing to cast aside one of their usual target.

An idealist (like me) would dream that this would help some of the biggots to realise that we aren't that much different under the skin, we're so much mixed that there's a high probability that the biggot has a bit in their blood what their usual target is.

Saddly, the reality will be that they'll be still endlessly tweaking around their genetic definition of "race", to constantly keep itt more or less matching their agenda. They'll never have a definite set of markers, they'll constantly need to patch them. And over time it will evolve to something that at the genetic level doesn't remotely look like what they pretend to be (by the time they manage to include all their friend and exclude all their targets, melanin-related gene probably won't be significant as much as some weird genetic disease that happen to be differently distributed between the groups they consider).

So overall, the the genetic make-up of the population doesn't conveniently split it into separate races. Due to the constant intermixing over time, it's more or less a complex continuum with a few blurry tendencies that you could make here and there. We do tend to fuck around a lot. We're not arbitrarily bred into separate breeds. (Well except maybe in some very isolated cases, like royal families. You could probably manage something to genetically sort royalty in a few categories. Probably based on the distribution of hemophilia :-D )

Cue in all the various genetics and statistic studies that get reported on slashdot about most recent common genetic ancestror, etc.

There are *other* things that can be determined using a composition of gene.

Using the kind of approach mentioned the slashdot entry, it would be possible to make a control code that only allows a category like "most of the people with anemia".

i.e.: you could use it as a way to filter people based on the few disease that have a very simple and very well known genetic composition. (some of the anemias, some of the hemophilia, some form pulmonary cystic fibrosis, most of dawn syndrome, etc.)
and guess what: these *are* routinely used as medical tests.

with enough work you could also design something that could detect the eyes of elisabeth taylor. as in the real eyes or the real cleopatra actress.
a genetic signature specially crafted around the genetic make up of a specific individual.

and then, even that will probably report a few positive match in complete random people spread across random places on the world (most of whom will propably have the same more or less general shade of blue), while still failing to detect a few people who have very similar eye, but have a different set of genes that happen to have mixed in a different way but ending up with the same shade in result.

eye colour are polygenic (lots of genes contribute to them) and complex. same situation for all the other characteristics that a biggot might want to split races. environmental factors are also in play.

You can't make a perfect "this is a nigger" or "lynch / do not lynch" genetic test. The whole idea doesn't make any sense.

And in some countries this *IS* considered a problem.
Medical Doctors are required to attend conferences, etc. just to keep up to date.

And its realistic, in that scenario, to expect that Uber is dispatching to drivers who have the necessary license and are enough covered by insurances.

How would you react if, when asking a hotel to book you a taxi, the receptionist call a shady thing (the boss' cousin's neighbours who just happens to own a car) instead of a legit and recognized company ?
I would similarily expect Uber to do a minimal check to make sure that the driver is following local rules.

Yup. Given his past success with both Linux kernel and with GIT distributed source management, I too think that out of anyone Linus Torvalds might be the only guy able to effectively solve the SPAM problem.

That's why most places (at least around here) also screen for behaviours which could end with blood borne disease spreading.

i.e.: You can't immediately donate blood after having a tattoo done.
Even if you are HIV negative, there might be another unknown disease that could have spread from improperly cleaned tools.
Need to way some time (1 year) before starting giving blood again.
By that time you'll have started showing symptoms and/or news of a new blood borne disease will have been heard.

Not exactly "So like every other prototype "hoverboard", then"

This one uses magnetic levitation. (Thus works only over a steel surface).

The one from the kickstarter project uses magnetic induction (Thus works over any conducting surface).

Get a bunch of engineers, split them into groups, and pack each group in a different room.
Ask them something awesome like an hoverboard, and they'll come out with probably a dozen of different solutions, each with its own advantage and short-comings. Including levitation solutions that explicitly work over water.

They more precisley said :

Which is true.

Except that, recent firmware fixes from Samsung (you know, the whole "speed decay on aging data" fiasco) had suddenly started to falsely report support for TRIM+NCQ.

So it might be possible that unkowningly to them, their Linux installation has suddenly started to issue queued TRIMs, even if the drive actually don't support them, because it trusts what the firmware told to do.