When the movies are sent to you, do they arive in any type of packaging that indicate what type of movie you are getting?

Netflix sends movies in a Tyvek sleeve with a label with the title, plot synopsis, and a few other details. This, in turn, goes in a paper envelope that hides everything on the label, except a barcode. I don't know what is encoded in the barcode; if I had to guess, it's a unique identifier Netflix uses for inventory purposes. Without a way to tie that to a movie title, the only way someone's going to know what you're ordering from Netflix would be if someone intercepted your mail and pulled out the movie.

Make a game based around tanks, rogues, and wizards, each countering the other, each with limited self-healing capabilities and very limited AOEs. Blur the lines by allowing tanks to use crossbows, rogues to use bows, and wizards get to create awesome light-swords that cut through everything.

That's just one approach. Another is to allow some classes to deploy "mines" or create temporary "walls" (think necro from diablo creating a wall of bone).

Anyways, that's a couple off the top of my head that don't involve being just one in the crowd.

-Jeff

People still need to buy a 3D capable TV and I expect for a good while yet they will command a premium for a relatively useless feature. Furthermore, even if the PS3 does support 3D, it will probably do so in non-optimal way. After all, the PS3 doesn't strictly support HDMI 1.4 and is probably bandwidth & chipset constrained. I expect if Sony do offer output might have to output 2D + z buffer or some crappy side by side output, neither of which is optimal. The PS3 might also be able to output anaglyph for people on older TVs (red / cyan).

It's certainly a nice freebie to get in a PS3 and it will certainly accelerate the format, but 3D is still strictly early adopter for a few years yet. There are too many standards to implement (and iron the kinks out of), gen 1 TVs with rudimentary support and a large price, much user confusion and a dearth of content. Once some of these issues are addressed I believe it will become a popular medium.

How about we look at military history? Infantry, cavalry, artillery? Pikes, Muskets, Cavalry? And so on. There are many models we could use that provide interesting tactical arrangements without forcing groups to spend hours waiting for a healer.

-Jeff

If they pass a law requiring resale royalties, I doubt anyone would obey it. People will continue to buy and sell like they always have, and public media campaigns will have zero effect on it. The used book industry would go out of business overnight, and libraries would lose a significant source of new material, as well as the ability to sell books that they need to clear out (once you add several dollars to the price of a book of common logarithms, who will buy it?).

In the worst case scenario, when you need to get rid of books, you'll have to call the firemen.

If Monty wants it back I'm sure the 1Billion he got paid can be used to pay to redevelop the code.

Oracle has no incentive to kill the MySQL ecosystem, it's going to be their low end competitor against MS and SAP products. It has more value to them as a working system than a dead one. If that had been their intention to kill MySQL they could have done immense damage when they acquired INNODB, at least temporarily. Yet they continued to develop and improve INNODB just like they will with MySQL.

Oracle's bread and butter is support contracts, not license revenue. MySQL buys them another market to sell support into. Just speculating but they also will have the ability to make it possible for MySQL to use Oracle for it's engine, bringing some heavy advantages to high availability LAMP stacks where customers are already using Oracle on the backend and replicating into mysql for the LAMP application. Monty's big fear is he's built a company (MariaDB AB) doing the same thing with the MySQL code as he had with MySQL AB and he's worried that Oracle will shut him out or kill the ability of commercial forks and force everything GPL. As they have used the GPL as a marketing threat (they told all their customers using the GPL branch would force them to GPL their databases) and now he's scared he will have to operate in the GPL ecosystem knowing he has nothing to offer by reselling the same code anyone else can.

Monty is a liar, Groklaw caught him in the lie and he shouldn't be trusted. Let him use all that money he got paid to redevelop a closed source DB if he wants to have a proprietary product. He's abusing the EU approval process for personal gain.

Actually, it doesn't. LEGO is an adjective, there are no "legos" or "leggos", they're LEGO bricks:

Woosh.

There is no photoshopping either: http://www.adobe.com/misc/trade.html

leggos are any bricks that snap together. LEGO is a trademark for a subset of these connecting blocks that has lost true trademark status because people use the word in the generic. That the owner of the trademark asserts something different doesn't surprise me. Though they are still fighting it, which is why I used them and Adobe in my example.

I vote with my Mute button. It's really quite easy.

I don't think it's surprise so much as it's excitement: "We always thought they were there, and now we know they're there! Friggin' awesome!" I imagine scientists having this reaction, typically followed by chest-bumps.

"Most London streets have "look left" and "look right" painted on the road at the crossings."

Well yeah, but it's a foreign country so he might have trouble reading the signs.

"When you go to Dell and click through as a home user vs a small business, the prices are different for the same machine!"

Yeah, and my residential phone line costs $25.00/month while my business line costs $120.00/month. There is no discernible difference in service level between the two.

WTF Verizon?

in life, the world, the universe. In everything actually...

but we already know the answer is always 42.

Always.

... but there was another PKD story that portrayed the same tech first. Of course, that one was turned into a crappy movie starring Ben Aflac!

If only it had had Cuba Gooding Jr. in it - he's much better than Ben Affleck...

(did I say that out loud?)

"I fail to see how the cable companies are double dipping but this seems to be a very common misconception around here."

Sigh. I'm old enough to remember when cable TV was first rolled out. There were NO commercials. It was touted as a subscription-based alternative to over-the-air, advertising-supported programming.

Didn't take too long for greed to take over. Now, the only non-commercial channels are the premium ones, like HBO, Showtime, etc. - and they're all busy advertising themselves between shows.

I see the same thing eventually happening to satellite radio. The siren-song of advertising dollars is just too strong to resist.

My favorite button on the remote control is 'mute'.

While I prefer my coffee like I like my women... cold, and bitter.