Yeah, that's kind of obvious. Nobody's abandoning ipv4 anytime soon.

Well done for defeating your own point, smartass. AAC is superior, but people still want to use MP3. That's exactly what the GP was talking about.

And AAC isn't exactly a new codec either like you're implying, which even more emphasizes the fact that old codecs are still used even when better ones are available. There are better alternatives to AAC, and the only reason it's is still used is because alpha geeks like you can't "get their finger out their ass" and switch to modern codecs.

c) a company buys all the competitors

Of course you won't find perfect examples of that because we do have some regulation preventing that. But even with regulation, that's the direction we're going towards. Each year top 100 companies in the world make up a bigger and bigger part of the world economy. And the entry barriers in pretty much any business today is so high, that new competitors don't just magically appear out of nowhere.

Have they managed to improve the quality of the VP8 codec? Last time I saw a comparison, VP8 was way behind H.264.

And don't even give me that crap about "it's free, it doesn't have to be as good" or "it's only a web codec so who cares". If there's a number of big companies supporting the project and they plan on making WebM some kind of industry standard, anything less than state of the art is unacceptable. We'll be using this for years to come, so doing it right is in everyone's best interest.

If they previously didn't consider the rising of the crust, but now they are considering it, then my logic says that the estimates for melting rate should have increased. Ok, it says in TFA that in some places the ground is actually subsiding, but it seems weird that this would happen in more places than rising of the ground.

None of the DirectDraw games I've tried have worked correctly in VMWare (6.5). I know it's supposed to support DirectX, but in practice there are all sorts of graphical glitches and everything runs slow as hell.

I'm also willing to bet that people in hard sciences, like physics, chemistry etc are far more likely to be atheists than for example sociologists or historians.

That doesn't sound right to me. Must be at least ten times that.

Those 276 bytes are quite useless, because they cannot (at least to my knowledge) be used for correcting errors in other sectors. So, all you need is one sector that is totally unreadable, and the whole disc might become useless.