Yeah, and because of that Shakespeare, while alive, refused to actually publish his plays. There's a reason that some of his plays are lost for good. A lack of copyright has a lot to do with that. As for classical composers, they were basically paid by the government to do their work, which amounts to the same thing, copyright just makes your subsidy of a public good more direct and lets you (instead of some government official, for those who like to continually complain about anything the government does) decide who's worthy of getting money.

Pakistan has had nukes for quite a while now and we still don't actually know if Iran has them.

If you're getting blacks out of any of those, you should really go see a doctor.

You violate the terms of your lease and you are fined. What's your point here?

I don't know about Netflix, but Apple's service is south of 600mb for what would roughly be a hour long show (40-45 minutes) which works out to 416 "hour" programs a month (or a bit over 300 hours). +10 hours of TV a day is a god damn lot of TV.

Netflix is poorer quality and I would suspect much smaller and given theirs, YouTube's, and Hulu's success it doesn't look like many care about the visual quality of broadcast TV in it's current state.

I would also suggest that if your kids and yourself are pushing "double digit" TV viewing daily (no matter how you divide it) that you should just finish the job and give them up for adoption.

30% this time is less than 30% the last time they showed a speed increase.

Start off with 100%, 30% faster gives you 70% of the original time. Take off another 30% and now you're doing it at 49% of the original time. Now remember, we're on the 5th iteration of XX% faster, since the original chrome was XX% faster than (whatever they were compare it to).

Its not likely most people will notice a 30% increase on most pages, especially Googles own pages.

When you're talking about taking 30% off of something that already loaded in 1 or 2 seconds, no one notices, you get more delay from your overloaded cable modem than from the browser.

GIMP is C/C++ code loaded in a compiled state. The majority of Firefox's functionality is in the form of JavaScript that has to be compiled at some point.

GIMP is compiled and then run, Firefox is run (and of course the core is compiled) but then it has to unzip a bunch of files and read a bunch of XML, JavaScript and other resource files, turn them into something usable in memory and then do its thing.

FireFox is FAR more flexible than GIMP, but that comes at a cost of speed.

You can actually speed FireFox up with a custom build (an option to configure for FF actually) or by uncompressing all the chrome for firefox before hand. In theory it shouldn't matter as FF caches it, but it does make a difference.

The main thing is that they aren't shooting for the same targets. Chrome is trying to be as fast as possible so Google's webapps run fast and feel more like native apps. FireFox on the other hand is trying to be far more flexible.

I have an AMD processor that is roughly equivalent to a P4 that can run Windows 7 easily on a gig of RAM.

What is with people whining about AdBlock all the time? OH NOES TEH ADZ@!1!One. Is it really that big a deal? Thanks to my Slashdot obsession and excellent karma, I have the option to disable ads on Slashdot natively, but I don't even use the option. Why do people care so much about little images trying to sell things?

That's not a problem with the architecture but with the protocol. Have you ever used FreeNX? It's amazingly fast in comparison to VNC and even RDP.

Actualy, they probably don't have the rights for a show in Canada. For exmample, CBC might own the rights to broadcast Heroes in Canada, while NBC owns the rights to broadcast it in the US. Therefore, Hulu needs to pay money to CBC to show Heroes in Canada. (It's a terrible outdated model, I know, but its very difficult to undo the hundreds of already existing licensing deals.)

I don't think that anyone would argue with that, bud adopting laissez-faire principles in all situations is at best silly and at worst destructive. Adam Smith's analysis only works with private goods in an actual market. There is no market for research. The government creates one to ensure that research happens. Within the context of this market, a laissez faire approach would allow actors to do whatever they wish with their property, which in the case of this artificially created research market, consists of patents.

What's rather ironic is that you kind of just made a case for PARC to enforce its patents (or for it to have patented more stuff.) If PARC had been able to show a revenue stream stemming from patents for these innovations, it probably wouldn't have ended up becoming the shell of its former self that it has become today. The folks who did that much to change the world do actually deserve a crapton of money, not just the guys who decided to manufacture millions of mice.

The point of a patent is to account for the fact that ideally, the stuff you are patenting is a positive externality. A free market would likely lead to no invention or investment in R&D as there would be no way to recoup that cost. Either that, or it would lead to the excessive use of trade secrets, which would be even worse than the current occasional patent troll.

Am I the only one who doesn't think that software patents are universally bad? It seems to me like software is an algorithm which solves a specific problem. Take as an example, the relational database. The very concept of applying relational algebra to the organization of physical data was a pretty big step, which IMO, deserves more than a copyright. Simply arguing that software is just math is as absurd as saying that fancy new electronic device is simply the patenting the existence of the appropriate laws of physics that lead to working of stuff. I'd have to agree that right now prior art and obviousness is ignored far too often, but that doesn't mean the software patents shouldn't exist.