Yeah. I know little about aviation, but I seem to recall one of the last ditch efforts to restart the engines in the event they fail is to go into a dive. Imagine this attempt being made and then the ground link cutting out. Suddenly you have a plane in a dive and no one to bring the nose back up.

And what happens if the pilot has a stroke or heart attack and is unable to direct the plane to land. At this point, the airplane will simply fly until it runs out of fuel and with the new re-inforced doors on the aircraft even cross trained flight attendants would be unable to get in and take over the controls. The only option then would be to force the pilot to press a button to prove he's still with it ever so often, but then how do you design such a system to ensure it is robust in minimizing false positives such that the pilot doesn't spend half the time proving to the plane he's flying that he is still capable of flying it.

The problem now is that its not so obvious where one ends and the other begins. I'm pretty sure everyone can agree that the producers of the $1 knockoffs floating out of Asia should be nailed to the wall. On the other hand, modern technology has given p2p users the ability to mass reproduce films at the same rate as aforementioned Asian bootleggers.

I posit it would be largely useless. The Dept. of the Interior actually awarded Deepwater Horizon and award award for safe operation back in '09.

That's one of the reasons that I really like Alan Wake. The aiming mechanic is really easy since the flashlight that you need to use anyway gives you a good crosshair, plus, since the enemies attack from all sides, it would be particularly difficult to handle from a 1st person view.

Because, free software isn't a reference to price and said freedom loving developer would like to get paid while still sharing his code with the masses. This is a great thing for free software. All of the code can be completely free and the developers can still get compensated for their time. Its identical to the way sourceforge hosts open source projects but is add supported. This way, its the developer getting compensated directly instead of having to rely on a 3rd party charity to host their code. Sure, enterprising users could patch out the adds, just as enterprising users can find open source software at places other than sourceforge, but most won't bother and thats a good thing.

WebM was released like a month ago. Do you really think Apple is going to try and shoehorn it in when they have stated time and time again that they make sure they do features right.

I don't have an Android phone but doesn't this open platform tie in tightly with their online services to the point where you have to have a google account just to do something like store contacts.

He's actually using the royal we. King of the interwebs and all that.

Which is hilarious, since Firefox is now implementing acceleration through DirectX/Write stuff on windows. So, its ok to depend on OS services, except when its not.

They still have the fundamental similarity in that they are easily duplicated but require a lot of up front funding/resource to be sunk into their construction. Software requires either a lot of time and/or money to produce the first build. Music/movies require a lot of up front funding to produce the master copy. The investment has to be recouped somehow. Sure, in the case of small free software projects the authors have no desire to recoup the investment, but I'm sure they would be a little more interested in doing so if they had donated several million dollars worth of their time to something.

And how precisely does that work when svchost works by loading other .dll's and executing them?

I used to get the 6ish hours of battery use by carrying around a travel battery. I got a new Macbook. Now, I get the same battery life without an extra battery and I'm sure that I was a minority use case even carrying one spare battery around. I can't imagine many people carry 2 or more spare batteries around.

No it can't be forked. If you fork it, you've modified the standard making a new codec.

Consider the flipside, designing a codec is Really Hard Work. Google also has Really Deep Pockets. By doing this they have effectively dumped a codec that is good enough onto the market. While part of me is cheering that Google is taking one of the team in terms of opening their codec up they have basically ensured that only someone else with equally deep pockets has the time and money to engineer something so clearly better that they can recoup the time investment by surpassing VP8.