Your example assumes you called a certain known endpoint (a person, or an automated telephone answering system) and interacted directly with it.

BitTorrent downloads from, and uploads to, unknown endpoints that happen to have or want the file, respectively.

On the one hand, you authorise your BitTorrent client to communicate with these hosts on your behalf, and your goal is the same (to get and give the file); this may constitute a form of interaction.

On the other hand, you have no control over which hosts your BitTorrent client contacts. These people may be people you know or strangers; people in the same or another jurisdiction. The link may be difficult to establish.

Clearly all the Slashdot commenters are busy patching their bosses' JBoss servers against this vulnerability.

From TFA:

>> According to the slides, the Ceylon Project aims to create a programming language and SDK for business computing, designed with an eye to the successes and failures of the Java. It is built to run on the JVM

>>> the Ceylon Project is built to run on the JVM

Whoops!

"Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata went on the offensive today against his smartphone counterparts, arguing that the model pursued by individuals like Peter Vesterbacka is 'dying.' In a panel discussion at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Iwata said that innovation wasn't coming from independent game coders, but from large and established companies like his own. Iwata also pointed to the major concern over the price model for smartphone games. Compared to games on established consoles, which hover around fifty dollars, mobile titles like Angry Birds run for 99 cents and make their developers little money due to the policies of online app stores. At these price points, "there's no motivation [for] high-value video games," Iwata said. Still, the executive did admit that the business model for console games had yet to be completely figured out."

Okay, not exactly, but Iwata-san did say something against smartphones at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, a mere 13 days ago.

Mandate from CRTC disallows operation.
Decision from cabinet to overturn the mandate allows operation.
Ruling from court to reject the decision disallows operation.

Unscrambled as requested.

That is right, but if Google and Mozilla get their way, Google will have saved themselves $6.5 million a year by not needing to encode H.264 anymore for YouTube, and everyone else for not needing to put in support anymore. I seem to have tripped up in my explanations again.

The other side of that coin is that, if Google decided to include H.264 support in Chrome, other browser makers, without or with little money, could have been unable to pay the royalties needed to be paid to patent owners to support it in their browsers. Does Google saving itself $6.5 million annually pale in comparison to Google saving itself and everyone else up to $6.5 million annually?

The Web does not need H.264 to function, so if everyone drops support for it preemptively, then even the small browser makers (I'm thinking of Flock here, which is based on Chromium but has a user base of its own) won't need to pay royalties to anyone.

This is like the GIF patents by Unisys* driving adoption of the PNG format, except that the patents are being assessed now because we know of a few formats that are** suitable for the job but unencumbered already. For instance, WebM can, like H.264, be implemented by anyone, but in addition to that, WebM intentionally doesn't require that royalties be paid. It can become a standard, like PNG originally wasn't a standard but then became an ISO/IEC standard 8 years later.

________________
* = As well as other factors such as the lack of true-color support, alpha and ICC in a lossless format, but that's off-topic.
** = May not be for now, due to lack of hardware acceleration, but could become in the future. Some people don't really care about power usage or CPU usage, so it's already suitable for them.

Disable your ad blocker. Ding, instant shitload of ads.

That's because you can't really use HTML 5 to make an ad that is going to be served to users of IE below version 9, in all of which support for HTML 5 does not exist.

So what do you use to advertise IE 9? Either Flash, or Java, or HTML 4 + JavaScript, or some other solution.

Java is bulky. HTML 4 + JavaScript is not that fast in IE 8 and earlier, so it's liable to freeze IE up and disrupt page navigation. Other solutions may mess up even further. You're left with Flash.

And I thought Google TiSP was just a joke...