Hearing half a conversation is worse than hearing a whole conversation.

So how should I lose an election yet make a statement about copyright and patent policy that the election's winner ends up accepting?

Mostly for downloading updates to software that runs on the server. Besides, Android Browser on Android 2.2/2.3 still doesn't support SNI.

Nor have I met a set of Libertarian candidates who got elected to the House or Senate in large enough numbers to counter the MPAA's sway on the big two parties. I don't see how Libertarians in local and state office count when software patent reform, the topic of the featured article, is exclusively federal.

Exactly my point. With the Winamp SDK gone, there won't be a go-to ABI for input plug-ins anymore.

Just because software may be obtained without charge from the publisher doesn't mean that the publisher allows the software to be obtained without charge from other parties. The publisher might have good reasons to count downloads, such as if the product contains royalty-bearing technology (such as AAC or AVC or MP3 decoding) and the publisher is using the product as a loss leader.

The novel part might have been the application of an underdamped second order linear system to the task of representing the edge of a scrollable area. User interfaces in the prior art had typically done so numerically (0% or 100%) or by having a box in a scroll bar reach the start or end of a range.

In the two-party system predicted by Duverger's law, there is rarely a viable candidate other than the easily-bribed Republican and the easily-bribed Democrat. What should one do instead?

PSF is for PS1 music, PSF2 is for PS2 music, and USF is for Nintendo 64 music.

You do when the vast majority of "interesting" articles are semiprotected, or when you share an IP block with someone with a history of vandalism.

That will work until AOL sends a notice of claimed infringement.

I've got a task to do here: play music encoded in a format not anticipated by the developer of the player included with the operating system. This format happens to include a music sequence and bytecode for an 8- or 16-bit virtual machine to interpret it, and it has been shown to fit half an hour of music in well under 100 KiB. Make it so.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

That solves some the original problem I posed. Two problems remain: I imagine that these plug-ins' installers are looking for an installed copy of Winamp into whose plug-in folder to install the plug-in. How will they recognize XMPlay as a plug-in host compatible with plug-ins made for Winamp? And once the Winamp plug-in SDK disappears, how will developers of new input plug-ins for XMPlay ensure that the XMPlay team approves their request?

The only reason I've used Winamp in the past few years is that most of the players for music formats related to classic game consoles have been released as input plug-ins for Winamp. Does XMPlay support NSF (NES), GBS (Game Boy and Game Boy Color), SPC (Super NES), SGC (ColecoVision and Sega), GYM/VGM (Sega logged), PSF (PS1), USF (PS2), GSF (Game Boy Advance), and 2SF (Nintendo DS)? On the XMPlay page, I see "Game Music Emu input plugin", which covers the NSF, GBS, SPC, SGC, GYM, and VGM, but not PSF and friends. What worries me more is that the page also states a policy of making the input plug-in SDK available only to approved developers: "The input plugin SDK is currently available only on request. If you would like to create an XMPlay input plugin, please get in touch."

How should one make sure a particular model of SSD is not broken before buying it? I was under the impression that by the time all the bugs got shaken out of a product, it ended up close to EOL.