> Some developers like liberal copyright licenses too.

Sure. The greedy ones that have a toddler's mindset.

> If OpenGL is important to you,

Then you avoid Macs entirely so that you can buy a better GPU that won't cost you an arm and a leg.

Apple is the richest company on the planet. They don't need Intel's help. They have the resources to reverse engineer Intel silicon with an electron microscope. They can hire any talent they like in any numbers they like.

Even if Intel is not cooperating, Apple really doesn't have a good excuse for lagging behind anyone.

Then Jobs declared that Flash was uncool and that his platform wasn't going to support it. The same argument that would have earned derision from the Linux camp was lauded by a loud cabal of fanboys and media shills.

So at what point aren't "matched pads" repeats of the original pads, or devices which would repeat the results of the original pad?

This is my point - these pads aren't "random", because if they were they'd perform differently in two different devices. In which case, their results are surely trivially capturable and, thus, reproducible if you digitally capture the performance of a single example?

It's the old "if you can read it, so can anyone else with the same equipment, and so can you 'fake' it with sufficient knowhow" DRM problem

But to be a useful one-time pad, don't you have to be able to repeat the results to decode the message?

You've been reading too much XKCD.

The problem is that to be accepted in an area of science that's basically nothing more than a consequence of the maths, you have to show the maths that generate the results you expect.

I'm a mathematician. I don't claim to understand 1% of 1% of quantum mechanics at all. But it comes from a mathematical model that happens to have real-world consequences that are weird and wonderful. When we then tested for those consequences, we found out that they exist in nature. Which, to a scientist mind, kind of hints that the maths must have been at least somewhat correct (or at least on the right lines).

I have my own understanding and theories, but I would also have to state, quite clearly, that quantum physics isn't really "physics". This isn't Newton seeing an apple fall and realising there's a force at play. This is someone (probably THE most famous genius) sitting down for decades with almost unsolvable equations that make absolutely no sense until they realise that it works if you have 11 dimensions, or if space and time are two different elements of the same thing, etc. And that was back in the 1900's when quite a lot of physics and maths we enjoy now didn't even exist.

Then you go out and measure in real life and you find that, actually, it turns out that your theory fits what happens in the world, not the other way around.

As such, I don't for a second think that I can just posit a hypothesis (theory is a slightly stronger word in any science) and have any concept of if I'm talking gibberish or not. The maths of quantum mechanics is horrendous and complicated and quantum theorists spend more time in front of the blackboard than they do the LHC.

If you wish to contribute, even if you don't intend to be taken seriously, it's only proper to get yourself a decent grounding in not just "hey, there's something smaller than an electron and weird stuff starts to happen at that scale, I bet I can guess what else happens", but in WHY that's so and HOW we got to that point. And in anything quantum, that means understanding the maths behind it.

As someone with a degree in maths, I tell you now, you're going to need a decent grounding in quite a lot of basic physics and huge amounts of maths and that "real world intuition" will basically be next-to-useless until the very end. That's not to mention the level of things like calculus and linear algebra you'd need to even get close to learning how we got to all of the old "wrong" models, let alone the newer ones.

This doesn't mean that wild ideas and theories have no merit, it's just that you're theorising about something that you probably don't understand the basics of. I know I don't. And I *can* read the mathematics and, given enough time, understand it.

It just comes across to any mathematician or physicist as someone who is looking at a car for the first time and saying "You know, I bet if you made the whole thing ten times bigger, it would go even faster" or "If it goes that fast with four wheels, imagine what it'll do with 10!".

In a way it reminds me of the Moon conspiracy theorists. They can come up with a million weird and wonderful things that intuition says "must be wrong". But it turns out that a few simple tests or bits of maths show them to all be nonsense. "The shadows are wrong" - fine, go out into the street on a sunny day and try hard to replicate them. If someone can replicate something that's "wrong" in the space of ten minutes, then maybe you are reading far too much into the image, or commenting on something you just don't understand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_quantum_mechanics

Seriously, just on that page there are some 16 equations, and that's not even a millionth of what you need to understand where those equations come from.

Honestly, I DON'T understand quantum mechanics at all. I believe it, because it's accepted as the best self-consistent theory we have that has made verifiable predictions, and I use its results every day (GPS, computer processors, etc.). But I don't understand even the bare minimum of it, past a handful of experiment names and a brief summary of what their results should mean for physics. I don't understand work that was done on it over a hundred years ago (and, hell, that predates most of graph theory, which I consider a particular fascination of mine whose first textbook only arrived in 1936 - whole areas of mathematics have sprung up and matured in that time and STILL I don't understand how people arrived at those equations for quantum theory at that time). I don't understand even the bare foundations of it.

Thus, simple statements and assertions over how I think it works? They - rightly - mean nothing at all.

And the bigger problem? Because quantum theory is a result of some very high-end mathematics, the real truth is probably MUCH, MUCH too weird for us to contemplate at the moment. Chances are, anything you can think of to add to quantum theory just won't be weird enough and will be far too "logical" and grounded in an intuition that was taught Newtonian physics from the start.

Quantum theory sprung up because we hit a mathematical dead-end on quite a simple question (relatively speaking) and it took people who believed the maths had to be right even when it looked like they were going wrong, and they bent their minds in knots trying to find ways to make the maths work in reality. In doing so, they truly thought so far out of the box that they were laughed at for decades until others could get their head around it. And then they'd invented a whole new era of science (at some point in the future, there will no doubt be a reference to "The Quantum Age" as an entire era of science).

I don't intend to say "don't have an opinion" or "pssh, without a maths degree, you're nothing". But if you wonder why you don't get taken seriously, you should just take a quick course in quantum theory, starting from what we were learning in the late 1890's / early 1900's. Otherwise you come across as, say, a shaman from the Egyptian times trying to tell a modern neurosurgeon that "you have this fabulous idea about the brain".

Not really. Work in a garage for a month, you see all kinds of weird damage come in.

And this wheel is basically a cut-open barrel. Punch it on the outside and it makes a dent on the inside. It's rolling across a rocky landscape, after being basically dropped onto the planet. It probably bumps down a lot more rocks than you realise and even more than NASA ever plan, the chances of finding a level surface to wander over that doesn't have a hidden 10cm drop onto rock for at least one of the wheels hidden behind is slim. And it weighs quite a bit. Not to mention loose things getting inside the wheels and basically being inside a small tumble-dryer.

A dent in the wheel would be the least of my worries, to be honest. And there's no way you can actually tell that the dents go from inside-out or outside-in, it's an very common optical illusion. And even if the dents go "the other way", there's no way to tell from the photos that they line up - those wheels are basically taking the shape of whatever they roll over so you might find the dent going "in" is right next to a similar bend in the metal going "out".

But never let the facts stand in the way of some mad conspiracy theory, eh?

Backwards. The party with a vested interest in keeping people dependent on professionals who dole things out to them is the Democrats. That's the backbone of their entire constituency and the framework within which they describe everybody: needing a handout, or needing to be used to pay for handouts. Without playing middlemen to that one-way street, there would be almost not power in that camp. And so they seek to preserve it at every turn.

One could argue that the OS is Debian (or Fedora or Ubuntu). All of which use the Linux kernel, and the GNU tools.

Does this mean I will have to buy special gloves that have my fingerprints on them?

And does this mean that if my wife wants (or, more importantly, needs) to grab and use "my" gun that she'll also need gloves with my fingerprints on them, and I'll need a way to emulate her fingerprints?

This is all entirely nonsense. The bill is a stealth approach to making guns cost more, akin to those feckless plans to tax ammo at 1000% in order to attempt to change human behavior among psychopaths and dedicated criminals.

I am entirely for gun manufacturers making and offering such guns to those who want them if they think there's a market and they want to serve that market. Requiring such is complete BS.

> I'm speaking globally, not US-centric. And why does it have to be 1080p? Lower resolutions don't exist?

Lower resolutions and bitrates are certainly less satisfying.

If you are talking "not US-centric" then you have the problem of alternate language tracks and subtitles. This is an area where streaming services tend to fall down rather badly.

It's not just the low quality video stream.

$5? Are you kidding? The retail cost of some BluRays is that low now. Even at $10, you're not leaving a lot of room for other things like retailer markup or the studio actually making some money.

NOBODY streams nowadays. Despite the hype, the numbers are still pretty low. They just get a lot of attention because most people have no grasp of numbers.

They have a staggering lack of perspective as well as extreme narcissism and a tendency to think they represent everyone.