the trouble is, theora does meet the requirements, and it's the only halfway modern codec which does. however the requirements for accepting a video tag for html from apple seem to be that it cannot be a royalty-free codec because that would allow firefox to continue to exist, which would slow market share growth for safari. instead, a patent-encumbered codec will make it impossible for free-software to implement html5 and manufacturers of proprietary software will have another string in their monopoly.

no, no. totally wrong. computers were expensive because they were big and manufacture was less automated than nowadays. nowadays i'd wager just as high a proportion or even higher goes into r&d at hardware manufacturers.

also i doubt many important advances in car technology come because of F1. there's no reason why they should do. you could probably argue that F1 gives the r&d department of car manufacturers a hobby, but you'd be pushing it to say that any advance came specifically because of F1. F1 may give manufacturers a chance to show off the advances they have made, though modern rules make this rather dubious.

i'm sorry, whose source code?

oh, i think i would blame microsoft for this. instead of using their clout to standardise connections and drivers, they've often tried to do the exact opposite. the result? every printer needs a driver, every scanner needs a driver, every mobile phone needs a driver, etc. microsoft has dug its own grave here.

this one's pretty easy to answer and i thought about it when i wrote my first post. 2 points:
if you don't hit anybody and nobody notices you're shooting in their direction, i can see the case for revoking your gun license
if you don't hit anybody but people notice and are scared then you have caused them to be scared and that's worse.

can you think of another example? at the moment i can't see much wrong with the basic idea i posited above.

i don't get it. if i write a text and don't kill anybody or drive drunk and don't kill anybody, society may see fit to revoke privileges (for example my driving license) but it shouldn't be able to throw me in prison or fine me because i haven't actually caused anybody any harm.

if however i do hit someone and hurt them, then the law can punish me for it.

not quite. as already posted here, AAPL/GOOG have an obligation to do what the shareholders want. however the shareholders have a moral duty to be good people, just like we all do. being a shareholder in a company does not give you the moral right to behave badly.

the only problem i can think of is wine itself. if i remember correctly, wine has lots of assembly code for x86 in it. it is really one of the very few free software projects to have this.

i'm just looking at the history of this article on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DarwiniusDarwinius

it's incredible how much work is being done here to correct vandalism.

this argument isn't particularly convincing. i find it hard to believe that a larger company couldn't make the product more cheaply if they wanted to. it is more likely that the larger company just thinks the market isn't lucrative enough to bother with.

stupid question. but if your question is how do you make money being a photographer: you go to whoever may want to buy the photograph with a copy (or you send them a low quality copy) and ask them if they want to buy it.

Fiat justitia ruat caelum :)

yeah. you know, i live in a mountainous area and there aren't any roads and until someone makes a car that can fly they're just totally unfeasable and no one will buy one.

i think we can remove 'total' from the list of possibly beneficial copyright terms. if copyright lasted infinitely long, shakespeare for example, wouldn't have written anything, disney would have been unable to make half of their films, beethoven would have been unable to compose etc. etc.

in some ways this is analagous to the software patent situation. 1 million patents, at any time a further 100 thousand you aren't allowed to read. does you software impede on any of them? good luck finding out.