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Comment Re:no exceptions for wireless! (Score 1) 254

But the majority of Verizon's wired infrastructure (i.e. FiOS) can handle a HUGE amount of data

I seriously doubt fios is the majority of Verizon's infrastructure, since I have yet to stumble across one of these mythical residences covered by fios in my numerous travels.

i'm pretty sure fios is actually a social experiment to see how many people can be led to believe it exists, but not in their area.

Comment Re:Not necessarily a wack-job... (Score 1) 222

do you think a skin tattoo or glass chip under the skin will still be visible/readable after the body is burned or mutilated? this is as opposed to the current dog tags which are cheaper and more resilient.

that said, a passive chip which would be charged by and respond to a certain radio frequency would be a godsend in the event I was shot down and/or captured behind enemy lines.

Comment What did she do to get to that point, we can learn (Score 2, Insightful) 222

This proves that the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

This woman must be doing something right for them to write up a bill specifically for HER to get her to "stfu and gtfo already" about the government planting chips in her body.

I can just see it now "thank you, ok aye votes? motion passed" *she leaves the floor* *some legislators laugh into their sleeves* "NOW, on to real issues".

Comment Re:A Completely One Sided Law (Score 1) 205

It is not a "law", it's a draft treaty. It must still be ratified/implemented before it becomes law. I'd like to note that canada has yet to implement the wipo treaty which calls for the DMCA.

Perhaps this "Pre-crime" garbage can be used to get the dingbat-libertarian-right teamed up with the far-socialist-left to kill it on the legislative floor.

Comment "neutral search engine" is an oxymoron. (Score 1) 203

You use a search engine to pair down listings based on arbitrary criteria, and you want those results to be relevant. This means intelligent algorithms which are by their nature non-neutral.

Given that the internet is 99% porn, I think its a very, very bad idea to ban such relevance sorting. I'm sure parents will be happy with their congressman after their kid enters "jupiter" for a science project and gets 10 pages of XXX to sort through.

Google

The Need For Search Neutrality 203

wilsone8 writes "The New York Times includes an op-ed today arguing for Search Neutrality: 'Today, search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's new Bing have become the Internet's gatekeepers, and the crucial role they play in directing users to Web sites means they are now as essential a component of its infrastructure as the physical network itself. The F.C.C. needs to look beyond network neutrality and include search neutrality: the principle that search engines should have no editorial policies other than that their results be comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance.'"

Comment Re:The ballot screen is Europe only (Score 3, Funny) 169

The bad news is that, the screen is to appear only for users in Europe. I hope the US anti-trust takes hint a from their European counterparts and mandate in the US too.

I believe deliberate, artificial market segmentation is a violation of the sherman anti-trust act. It merely needs to be actually pursued by the justice department.

Debian

Shuttleworth To Step Down As Canonical CEO In 2010 163

LinuxScribe writes "In a blog announcement today, Canonical Founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth revealed he will be stepping down from his CEO role to be replaced by current COO Jane Silber. Both execs do not see major strategic changes on the horizon. Silber's official blog and Linux.com each have more details on how the change will be implemented."

Comment Re:Mplayer OSX Extended (Score 1) 398

What's the quality like? VLC uses a lot less CPU than QuickTime on my Macs, but the quality is a lot lower - it doesn't do the same amount of postprocessing as QuickTime and so things like the BBC logo in the corner are crisp with QT and covered in macroblocking with VLC.

I have a keen eye and often notice visual inconsistencies others miss. I consider VLC to be overall smoother in motion scenes and better in overall image clarity. Though, results will vary from setting to setting.

Comment Re:I'll help! (Score 4, Informative) 398

I submitted the story. I'm not a member of the dev team, but give the popularity of VLC on this platform it absolutely astounded me this issue had not appeared on a major news site yet.

The forum thread linked from the article suggests you present yourself to the developer mailing list.

here is a list of all the videolan project's mailing lists - I believe the one they want you to contact them through is vlc-devel

Thank you for offering, i'd do so myself if i were not utterly sub-novice.

Comment Re:Does VLC really have any advantages over Perian (Score 1) 398

Seriously, with Perian you can pretty much play any video that plays in VLC in QuickTime, which also means that you can integrate it into all the other OS X apps(such as iTunes, iDVD etc). With VLC you are pretty much stuck using the VLC video player, which has a horrendous interface....

try opening any large matroska file in quicktime, call me in a few days when it loads under perian. Until the perian team can hack their way around that little problem their plugin will not measure up unfortunately.

It's a great idea, but it's not quite there yet, even though it performs admirably for smaller files and I do have it installed : )

Comment Re:Mplayer OSX Extended (Score 4, Interesting) 398

Sad to see VLC struggling, but there's always Mplayer OSX Extended for the mac. Get the extra codec pack and it can play anything!

Compare 1080p H.264 matroska playback in vlc to mplayer:

on my macbook pro (exactly a year old at this point) vlc plays it without a stutter, mplayer extended will drop frames like an epileptic. Im sure they both drop frames, but VLC does so much more gracefully, resulting in no noticeable distortion, while mplayer extended makes it obvious (and incredibly annoying) to the viewer. Nothing like watching blade runner final cut and being slowly infuriated by those epic scenes being subjected to massive chop and screen tears.

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