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Comment Re:I would change browser out of protest (Score 1) 272

I don't see that Opera has done anything particularly protest-worthy here. Maintaining proxies to circumvent oppressive regimes' firewalls, admirable as it might be, is not in my default expectations of a browser company, and I can't help but notice that neither the Mozilla Project, Microsoft or Apple provide such a service, leaving you with few places to turn if you're going to boycott everyone who isn't in the trenches fighting the CPC.
It's regrettable that the government of China chose to operate this way, but Opera merely chose to follow the local law by restricting access to a service, much as every search engine of note has done, in China, Germany, the US and elsewhere.
If we as a society really don't want to economically aid a state employing political censorship, we should stop pussy-footing around and enact a proper embargo. Yeah, that won't happen.

I differentiate between not actively resisting, and actively aiding, though. If, for instance, Opera released the internet browsing history of individuals on request, that'd be a serious breach of trust in my eyes, and I'd do my part to name and shame.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 164

Well, to be fair, while clearly not as pristine an art form as games with the direct involvement of the peruser they command, there have been movies made that may be said to possess some degree of artistic merit.
While not what Nintendo is doing here, a movie that you can optionally interact with isn't per se a bad idea.

Comment Re:Why not ZFS? (Score 5, Interesting) 510

Huh. One of the interesting things things about Reiser4 from an end-user perspective was Hans Reisers plans for file metadata. From what I can find about btrfs, it currently doesn't even support normal extended attributes. There was also talk about making it easy for developers to extend the filesystem with plugins that could add e.g. compression schemes.
I can't really recognize anything from Hans Reiser's ramblings in the btrfs documentation that isn't standard file system improvements already seen in e.g. ZFS. does anyone have any specific examples of the ZFS-leapfrogging features referred to?

Space

Submission + - U.S. Billionaire Heads to Space Station

TurnAround writes: A Russian rocket carrying the American billionaire who helped develop Microsoft Word roared into the night skies over Kazakhstan Saturday, sending Charles Simonyi and two cosmonauts soaring into orbit on a two-day journey to the international space station. Climbing on a column of smoke and fire into the clouds over the bleak steppes, the Soyuz TMA-10 capsule lifted off at 11:31 p.m. local time, casting an orange glow over the Baikonur cosmodrome and dozens of officials and well-wishers watching from about a mile away.
Sun Microsystems

Submission + - Father of VR considers open source development

destinyland writes: "The father of "Virtual Reality" asks whether an open source movement could realize the original vision of VR. "A really low-res system that's sort of manageable by a small group of people could be done that would be much more exciting and bring out more of this feeling of transcendence," urges Jason Lanier in a just-published interview. He challenges today's Free Software programmers to show imagination and ambition, and discusses what went wrong with earlier incarnations of VR. ("A decent software standard platform didn't happen.") Ironically, Sun Microsystems ended up owning VPL, though "It's hard to keep it running on the new generations of machines... How do you keep a twenty-year-old piece of software running without re-compiling?" He's ultimately arguing for a new way of thinking, suggesting that "Instead of making bigger and faster things, you make more intense experiences and more interesting forms of human connection.""

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