I suggest that from now on, articles about far-out piracy number thrown out by special-interest should include a link to Wolfire's excellent analysis of video game piracy. Choice quote:

It does not, however, say that Gibson approved it.

Considering the distances involved, I found it funny that the sentence implied simultaneity. Voyager 2 is about 92 AU out (according to WP), which is 12 light-hours and 45 light-minutes. So if they send the signal in the morning, the memory will be reset in the afternoon, and they can hope for clean signals the day after.

By and large, government just means worthless expense, and pointless obstruction.

So how's that broadband market going for you? How about health care?

(and that's just off the top of my head.)

this post written from Europe.

I've always envied their ability to maintain control over their brand and use it for appropriately portioned good and evil ;)

From what I've understood from their past posts and various interviews, they owe a lot to their business manager, Robert Khoo.

They like explaining how they actually sold their brand and rights away before Khoo came aboard. Luckily, the buyer disappeared into bankruptcy and nobody else has since claimed that ownership. I'm not too sure of the details and current veracity of this :)

picture it: In the living room, the Killer (SCO) is lying on the ground, dead. The Hero (Novell) can finally relax and embrace his Girl (the OSS community). But no, shocking twist! The Killer rises behind them, brandishes a knife, and...

the hardware support for h.264 is really just a programmable DSP in most case

Yeah, no. I work as an embedded SW developer on the U8500 chip. Which codecs we have to support is factored in very early in the architectural phase, specifically because we then decide what HW acceleration is cost and power-effective. Efficient decoding from a power perspective is vital in the mobile market, of course. A DSP is better than a general-purpose CPU but much worse than dedicated HW. Also, you can't hold the expected performance (1080p at 60fps!) in our frequencies without HW.

My company originally cornered the MPEG2 market by being the first to provide a hw decoding chip. Newer codecs are... more complicated.

I'm probably already saying too much. Just a second, there are a couple of guys in black suits at the door, let me s:JKSDG*E^N#NB-- NO CARRIER

"A multitude of browsers will make the web more standardised and easier to browse".

Hah, that made me laugh. As much as it pains me to say it, Microsoft Windows standardized the desktop, and Internet Explorer the Web. Sure, the quality of that 'standard' was terrible, but at least it was a standard.

Every week I see cool new features demonstrated. But they're all tied to disclaimers such as Demo works best in Safari 4.x and pretty well in Firefox 3.5. and use css properties like "-webkit-text-stroke". That is the opposite of a standard.

I hope browser diversity will pull IE kicking and screaming into HTML5, but I certainly don't expect standardization!

Seriously, no antivirus. But then, I only use Windows occasionally to play games. I'm surprised I only had one (1) virus problem over the last 5 years in Windows, which I fixed thanks to a targeted tool. Apart from that, I practice Safe Computing, and that appears to have kept me out of trouble.

However, for all that I know, my windows system may be part of a few botnets that don't cause me any problems :\

On my family's computers... I forced Ubuntu upon those I could, and left the others to fend for themselves.

you'll 'regenerate' yourself entirely full of tumors by age 20.

The article states: "In these mice without p21, we do see the expected increase in DNA damage, but surprisingly no increase in cancer has been reported."

Also, I suggest other /.ers read the article. It is high quality, not a random blog post.

I've always wondered: what was the difference, in DOS, between a .com and a .exe?

Those up high have understood that the USA's commercial future is not in manufacturing (they left that to China or Germany). If it's not physical goods, then what else is America selling abroad? IP, that's what. That's where the USA's commercial future lies, and that's what it'll have to defend at all costs, trampling their people's and other nation's right to defend that.

It's that or become insolvent. (look up the USA's trade balance over the last few 20 years. Think it'll improve? Think again.)

I've recently discovered the Fall From Heaven 2 mod for Civ4. It's the most sophisticated and complete mod for Civ4 out there. It's a fantasy mod set in a deep and well fleshed out universe
It brings much more new concepts and content than both commercial extensions, Warlords and Beyond the Sword (although it requires these to work).

I expect it to keep me busy enough well past Civ V enters the discount bins. Having the mod ported to Civ V, however, will make me switch in an instant. Hint hint, Firaxis.

This year's FOSDEM in Bruxelles had over 2400 unique MAC addresses and 3600 visitors a day(source). We enjoyed a 1Gbps pipe, and far from saturated it.

It was overall of excellent quality, though there was a glitch in at least one of the hacker rooms where the operators had to upgrade the AP firmware. The geographic setup was more broken out: FOSDEM happens at the Universite Libre de Belgique (how appropriate), with talks in lots of classrooms spread across a few buildings.

It would be useful for everyone if they could post a writeup of their infrastructure.

TFA already included that very XKCD. Its cultural embrace extends...