And the Internet has since come full friggin' circle, with dedicated mobile applications to access particular services.

Sony uses permissively licensed free software, such as *BSD operating systems. The X-series MPEG-4 video encoders (Xvid, x264, and x265), on the other hand, are copylefted. Console makers in general ban copylefted software on their platforms because allowing game publishers to distribute "Installation Information" (GPLv3) or "scripts to control [...] installation" (GPLv2) would allow other publishers to circumvent licensing.

The same was true of MPEG-2 hardware (DVD players) and MPEG-4 ASP hardware (DVD players with DivX). It took Blu-ray and smartphones to get AVC hardware into users' hands. People replace smartphones regularly. And just as Blu-ray Disc with AVC replaced DVD-Video with MPEG-2, whatever optical disc format replaces Blu-ray Disc is likely to include HEVC as an option for 4K video.

Does "hardware support for H.264" refer to dedicated silicon that does nothing but AVC decoding, or does it refer to implementing AVC's inner loops in a programmable digital signal processor such as a GPU? If the latter, it may be reprogrammable for HEVC. In fact, with HEVC increasing opportunities for parallelism, it might be easier to bring the GPU in.

Ideally, you added multi-format support to your HTML5 applets when VP8 came out, and plugging in support for VP9 and H.265 won't be too hard.

Just a guess, but the "x" in x264 comes from it being the H.264 counterpart to Xvid, which is DivX spelled backward, and DivX is named after an experimental time-limited counterpart to DVD-Video that Circuit City was pushing.

Dual licensing permits the x264 maintainer to dual license the x264 code to clients unwilling to accept the GPL. The agreement permits the x265 maintainer to do the same with pieces of x265 that were borrowed from x264.

There's also a concept of angular density: the pixels per radian at the expected viewing distance. For example, a 7" Nexus 7 tablet with a 720p-class display has the same angular density as a 28" 720p-class TV or a 42" 1080p TV at four times the seating distance. The CSS 'px' unit, for example, is defined as a unit of angular density: 1/2688 of the viewing distance.

The fact that 17 years after grant (or 20 years after filing, which is in practice the same thing given how long a patent takes to issue) has stood for several decades is a large part of why there isn't likely to be a Cher Act any time soon.

I thought one of the selling points of Netflix and foreign counterparts was older films.

Even in the Bible continuity, that's still true. God forked the chimp genome and made it perfect, producing Adam and his opposite-sex clone Eve. Prior to the flood, H. sapiens hadn't been around for so many generations, ergo fewer harmful mutations, ergo no inbreeding depression. Consider, for example, that the lifespan was eight times longer.

That sounds a bit presumptive. I understood "the shine of digital-only gaming (especially in the console arena)" to include demand for games that wouldn't be developed in the first place if there weren't a market for bite-sized games on download stores. Other Slashdot users have complained about the dominance of "snack" games over full-length "meal" games on Apple App Store, Google Play Store, and OUYA Store; I mistook your position for theirs. Please don't be tempted to confuse "mistaken" with "male genital".

Anyone who pays taxes is already buying Internet at a public library. Facebook requires an additional service.

Including companies that develop and self-publish bite-sized sub-100 MB budget games? I don't see the point of using an entire 7000-8000 MB DVD-ROM and all the attendant retail overhead for a 40 MB game.

It makes money selling peace of mind to advertisers that 1. each account represents a unique cell phone subscriber, and 2. users are rich enough to afford a personal cell phone. And I don't know whether Facebook owns a position in one of the major carriers or vice versa, but if so, it'd make money when more people sign up for a cell phone.

Facebook requires users to have access to a computer with an Internet connection, but it requires each user to have exclusive access to a mobile phone. One of several members of a household who share a POTS line, PC, and Internet connection has access to a PC but no unique mobile phone number. This is especially true in areas where the only wired broadband ISP includes a POTS line at no extra charge to DSL customers, like where my mother lives. Likewise, someone who accesses the Internet at work on break or at a public library has access to a PC but not necessarily a unique mobile phone number.