Centimetre accuracy can be achieved with Real Time Kinematic (RTK) corrections (either from a local base station or delivered remotely by some kind of long distance connection, e.g. GPRS). Neither option is free, but subscribing to a correction provider is a hell of a lot cheaper than buying your own base station.

What's `a hell of a lot cheaper'? It's possible to use a smartphone as an RTK base station. That's pretty cheap--and shorter-range Wi-Fi GPS devices are even cheaper (the most expensive part in a smartphone is the `phone' module). Even if the recurring fees to subscribe to someone else's service are technically less than the cost of cheap-o base stations, I wonder if the availability of cheap-o base stations may mean that any cost-difference is too small to matter--e.g., a single-digit number of dollars saved or spent over the course of a year is insignificant enough to `get lost in the noise'.

It doesn't matter to Netflix, it matters to media companies, and if you want to make their content available you have to play by their rules.

Netflix was the one demanding DRM for `Sita Sings the Blues', which ultimately kept the film out of the `on demand' line-up even though it's in Netflix's DVD-rental library.

When Netflix approached the author (and copyright-holder) and asked for a streaming deal, the response they got was `yes, but only if there's no DRM'. Netflix wouldn't budge.

How does Vash work for color blind or other visually impaired individuals?

Despite its visually striking and distinctive impact, color plays only a small role in differentiating between Vash images.

Rather, it shows that the intent is right but the execution has failed: that no two images are differentiated only by being coloured differently is good, but that the shapes composing a given image are defined entirely as borders between colourfields is extremely problematic: because two adjacent colours may or may not even actually be distinguishable for the viewers--as someone who's protanomalous myself, I have difficulty even seeing any of those shapes that are defined purely by boundaries between fields of red/green or blue/purple; and some of the gradients actually make things even worse.... It's like the joke about the `drawing of a polar bear in a blizzard'. So, you've ended up making colour a much more important aspect than you think :) A couple of my favourite references on colour vision, and how to work with it:

• Color Universal Design (CUD) - How to make figures and presentations that are friendly to Colorblind people -
• Color Vision, Color Deficiency (an intro/guide for UI-, web- and other graphic designers)

There's one particular issue that's mentioned in the Firelily article, though only briefly, and it deserves being brought to attention--as a Slashdot commenter did some years back:

blue & red should not be placed next to each other, generally. Since they fall roughly at opposite ends of the visible spectrum, the eye's focal power differs the most between those colors. As your eye/brain tries to focus properly on two colors that require slightly different adaptations, you can perceive a "vibration" -- the boundary between the red & blue will have a high-frequency shimmering or vibrating appearance.

It may also be useful to read `Rainbow Color Map (Still) Considered Harmful'; there are some applicable lessons in there, though they're harder to find.

I'll try to put together some specific thoughts on *why* I think VisualIDs did it better, and what the issues with Vash are, in the morning. For the time being, I guess I'll just throw that out there as a conversation-seed and let people Google it....

There's no economic incentive for individuals and small to medium-sized businesses to invent things when a big company can just take the idea and easily outcompete due to greater resources. And without the patent system, there's no incentive to release inventions into the public domain rather than try to protect them as trade secrets.

cf.: http://mimiandeunice.com/2011/06/08/status-quo/

Which is why I use 320Kbps VBR mp3. Not only is it proven multiple times to be not distinguishable from the CD in double-blind tests, it also saves a lot of space over FLAC and actually works in pretty much any audio player anywhere that plays anything more than just straight CDs. Compatibility is more important to me than a purely theoretical difference in sound quality.

I can tell the difference between mp3 vs. Ogg Vorbis or FLAC, regardless of bitrate: mp3's inability to indicate what data is actually audio vs. junk used to pad-out a frame leaves glitches between tracks --because there's no way for players to identify the padding as such, they just play it to completion of the frame. Ogg and FLAC don't have that problem.

It's not the code, silly. That's easy. It's having some sort of official database of legal music that is the problem... which the poster was apparently hoping existed. I doubt any such thing does exist.

The database of who has paid whom for what is currently being built--it's called "Bitcoin".

Can anyone recommend a few states where these taxes are unlikely, preferably also a place where I have multiple choices of ISP?

New Hampshire.

'The development of a legal online market is impossible in Finland if illegal services like The Pirate Bay are freely allowed to continue their operations,' said Lauri Rechardt, a spokesman for Finland's branch of IFPI.

That sounds backward: isn't it difficult-to-impossible to get an illegal trade under control unless there are legal alternatives competing with it?

It sounds good..., but anyone not familiar with whatever `universal' iconography the designer chose would disagree.

The whole `office desk' metaphor, for example, is completely lost on people who've never either experienced an actual office-like setting (with desks, file-folders, documents, etc.) or been trained on the metaphor itself. Red means `something bad' in America, `something good' in China, and nothing in particular to the 10% of people worldwide who just can't see it. For a blind user interacting via a screen-reader, custom text is likely to be infinitely better than custom icons.

Sometimes none of these things matter, sometimes they all do. Sometiimes your users are literally illiterate, and any kind of iconography is more learnable than textual labels, but that's also a minority case.

Of course, if what you meant was `not localising is a way of cheaping-out', I'll agree with that.

What does that make me?

To answer your question: no, there's not much hyperbole in what I said.

I see 3G service depicted on that T-Mobile coverage-map as a few tiny black splotches located on major population-centres; and, going by that map, >99% of the US has neither `Fast Mobile Web' nor `Very Fast Mobile Web'--and about 50% of the country still has No Mobile Web.

Of course, the AT&T map looks pretty similar, as I recallâ"so the specific idea that iPhone users in one of AT&T's many and large `no 3G' zones would be bothered by the lack of 3G service on T-mobile is at least a little goofy.

What exactly are you seeing that you think contradicts what I'm saying?

3G service in the US is still pretty close to nonexistent outside of a couple of major metropolitan areas, anyway. If the network isn't there, it doesn't really matter what your phone supports.

And one of the most disturbing prospects of a merger between the two GSM/UMTS network owners is that it's actually going to reduce the incentives for any provider improve that situation with new infrastructure buildout, which is pretty dangerous when the existing incentive is already zero .

And we're not just talking about reducing the competitive forces (which ESR cites as being the only thing motivating new buildout) by a mere ~25%, we're talking about reducing the competitive forces in the international standards-based market by 100%, moving us into a situation where moving to a different carrier guarantees the hardship of buying a whole new set of phones--and, if you're moving away from `the GSM company', the additional hardship of giving up international roaming.

We may well see network-growth stop, as a result of this--or at least slow down a whole lot.

Maybe this is motivation for contributing to the Freedom Box project: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/721744279/push-the-freedombox-foundation-from-0-to-60-in-30