The last Brit sci-fi I remember that was any good was Red Dwarf back in the '80s, and that was Channel 4.
Nope, was BBC 2 in fact. Later, Dave.
It's been downhill with science in general at the beeb since Tomorrow's World was canceled...
Yeah, because corrupting the ISO process was soooo 1990's... no wait!
Unfortunately it's going to be harder for Free software going forward. Try writing an opensource point-of-sale or e-commerce program that can directly process credit cards. You can't without spending around $20,000 for PA-DSS auditing. And I see more of these types of industry barriers to entry popping up.
It won't be harder, it will be impossible - it destroys the mechanism of Free / Open Source software. The way you put it is as if the rise of FOSS is just some kind of unfortunate minority part of the computing world that will be affected, rather than one of the most important, game changing event in the recent history of computing.
It seems an obvious requirement now to me that any 'international standards', as H.264 is described in TFA, should not be written by a consortium that have a collection of patents on the only possible implementation of the standard!
I'm not sure how this would be ensured - maybe the same consortium that pool the defensive patent pool for Linux could start a standards body based around this simple idea.
...seriously? Will USB 6.0 be super-hyper-megaspeed USB?
http://www.techdirt.com/blog/entrepreneurs/articles/20100518/0844299463.shtml
"The other interesting tidbit, as many noted, is that despite suggestions from some that the "open source" world are folks who "just want stuff for free," the average amount paid by Linux users ($14.52) was significantly higher than those paid by Mac ($10.18) or Windows ($8.05) users."
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