Suppose Arkansas and Oklahoma decide to secede and the U.S. sends in troops to put the country back together again by force. Most people would consider that to be a civil war, assuming it drags on as long as it probably would, but your definition would require wiping out the entire population of Arkansas in the first year, and almost the entire population of Oklahoma in the second. That's a nonsensical number.

The worst civil war in the history of the world in terms of the casualty rate was probably the American Civil War. Only about 0.6% of the population died during each of those four years, on average. And that was in an era when wars were somewhat messier, because people tended to die from what would be considered relatively minor injuries today. Now that we have antibiotics, modern surgical techniques, etc., there's just no way a civil war in the modern era could possibly hit 1% of the population dying every year, even in a third-world country, much less a first-world country. You're at least an order of magnitude too high for a hypothetical second American civil war, and realistically, probably two.

For comparison purposes, the Syrian civil war, which almost nobody would rationally say was not a civil war, given that it ultimately led to the government being overthrown, only killed about 0.27% of the population each year. And the Chinese Civil War that resulted in the establishment of the PRC killed about 0.1% of the population each year on average (though I did not check individual years for any of these wars, and there probably were years with much higher and lower numbers of casualties).

So the problem is not that the definitions I provided are too weak, but rather that your definition is laughably unrealistic, and would mean that in the entire history of the modern world, there has never been a civil war.

gPhoto predates Canon's software. This has already happened long ago. Like I said, you're paying for a software upscaler, nothing more.

Actually, gPhoto has supported Canon cameras since at least 2016, which is four or five years before Canon released their webcam software.

The only thing you're paying for that can't be obtained through open source is their software-based upscaler. And you'll get much better quality output with a $15 4K USB input dongle than you will from their upscaled 576p software.

Like I said elsewhere, I'm pretty sure this is Canon just trying to find a way to slightly reduce their losses from the software not becoming available until after everybody returned to their offices post-COVID, at which point nobody cared about using DSLRs as webcams anymore.

That's not what's happening here. During the pandemic, all the camera manufacturers rushed to try to push out firmware so that their DSLR and mirrorless cameras could be used as a webcam. Unfortunately, Canon cameras don't have a very fast CPU, and for maximum webcam quality and minimum latency, they were pushing MJPEG over USB 2.0, which resulted in just 1024x576 resolution, so nobody wanted to use it, but they felt compelled to release it anyway so that they wouldn't be the only company that didn't provide that option.

The problem, of course, is that because of the resolution limitations, the software didn't produce the expected sales bump that they probably hoped for, so because most of their cameras were stuck with the hardware they already had, they decided to put in a high-quality upscaler and extra remote camera control features. Unfortunately for Canon, by the time they got it released, people were mostly back at work, and nobody cared about using DSLRs as webcams anymore. Presumably realizing that they probably still wouldn't get a bump in sales from fake full HD, I guess they decided to charge money to cover the cost of developing the software.

The problem is, the feature doesn't really have much (if any) value. The cameras can only be connected by USB, which means you're likely to be close enough to change the settings by hand, so unless you have only a single camera that's live on the air all the time or something, there's very limited utility to the camera control features. And if you want higher video quality, you'll just use the HDMI output, an HDMI cable, a mini-HDMI to HDMI adapter, and a $15 USB capture dongle, because it is cheaper than even one year of their service.

And if you only have one camera that's live on the air all the time, adding a low-end USB camera costs the same as a year of service and gives you way more flexibility, so the software really doesn't make sense.

And I'm pretty sure the camera control features are supported by gPhoto for free, so if you have to use an actual hardware video capture device anyway to get decent video quality, that route likely makes more sense.

So I would describe this as them trying to squeeze a tiny bit of money out of software that they felt compelled to create under pressure from the rest of the industry that otherwise provides minimal value to both users and to Canon. This isn't really charging money for a feature of the camera in any meaningful sense, but rather charging money for a piece of add-on software that really isn't all that interesting to make up for at least a little bit of the money they spent building it unnecessarily.

Of course, what they should have done is use MPEG, but maybe there's some reason they couldn't easily move the bits around the hardware. Or at a minimum, they should have pushed up the resolution on cameras that have USB 3.0 ports. But they didn't, and at this point, it's several years too late to bother with. It would make more sense to add a USB-C port and support for Ethernet streaming, because at least that would be generally useful.

I don't think that definition is broadly accepted:

• The Correlates of War data set classifies it as 1,000 deaths per year or more.
• Red Cross defines it based on the existence of a formal revolting group that acts like a government, has an organized military force, and is recognized by the legitimate government as an enemy of the state, which has seized military control over some portion of the territory sufficient to compel a response from the legitimate government, beginning after that conflict has been reported to either the UN security council or general assembly.

Either of those definitions could easily happen in the U.S. All it takes is a state deciding to secede (or maybe even a large city or county), and as soon as the U.S. government sends in military forces to fight and notifies the U.N., you have a civil war.

Or he could just rename it to Y and call himself the founder of that.

I think Broadcom got really burned by not having fabs during the pandemic, because a lot of their chips were build on old processes, where demand for the processes had dropped off, and a lot of the manufacturing had shut down to maintenance levels, and suddenly there was demand for those old processes again.

So buying at least Intel's older fabs might not be a terrible investment for them.

The funny thing is that the EU eliminated that extra tariff way back in 2019, but Canon never bothered to unlock the feature. So at this point, if you still have that limit on your Canon camera, it is because Canon wants you to pay more money to buy one of their video-oriented cameras, not because of any legal compliance reasons.

I'm pretty sure this isn't new. They added the upscaler a couple of years ago.

It also isn't useful. Anyone remotely serious is going to buy a $15 HDMI to USB capture dongle and use that instead of upscaling 1024x576 from the camera.

The ironic thing is that I have at various times been part of their core audience, having spend at least $50k on Canon gear over the years, and the only reason I *can't* use EOS Utility is because the resolution for video sucks. I was one of the folks trying to get them to fix that during the pandemic, but in the end, I bought NDI capture hardware and optical HDMI cables.

For me, a subscription, even if it provided real 4K output (it doesn't), would be a hard pass. A 4K USB HDMI capture device costs $15. In the long run, it is way, way, way cheaper and easier to just throw hardware at the problem:

• For the cost of three months of this feature, you could get the functionality permanently with a cable.
• It's a lot easier to do HDMI over long distances than USB, so high-end amateurs aren't likely to be interested.
• And on the pro side, for as little as $160 per camera, you can buy HDMI to NDI converter hardware and run it over Cat5.

Factor in the added cost of running USB over any distance, and this basically wouldn't make sense for almost anyone even if it actually provided higher resolution.

But the best part is that it doesn't even provide higher resolution. It is an upscaler. You're paying money to use an upscaler that takes 1024x576 input from the camera and upscales it to 1080p. Exactly nobody should seriously consider paying for this. Apart from the limited remote control over aperture and focus (which are really not that interesting either, in practice, given the limited realistic range of USB), this is basically a "dupe the people who don't know any better" feature.

Getting actual higher resolution would require new camera firmware that takes the output of their hardware encoder and streams it over USB, and I get the impression that if the CPU were fast enough to do it reliably, they would have, so I wouldn't expect this to ever happen, realistically, which is why I was surprised to see this. But sure enough, it's just the upscaling feature that they announced a couple of years ago, which is just as uninteresting now as it was then.

If you want to be mad at Canon for something, be mad at them for not providing clean HDMI output on many of their cameras without turning off the on-screen display. That does far more harm than charging money for this largely uninteresting piece of software.

In general, I can't tell the difference unless I'm sitting way too close to the screen. Of course, I like to *shoot* in 4k so that I can crop it in post if needed and still get better than 1080p on the output, but for consumption, 1080p really is good enough for most real-world use, IMO.

Heck, 720p is pretty much good enough. It is basically twice the resolution of the content portion of a letterboxed 16:9 DVD in both directions. 1080p is overkill 90% of the time. 4K is overkill ~100% of the time unless I'm cropping at least 2:1. That's why Netflix forcing us off of the cheap 720p plan was such a bad thing from my perspective. I have yet to notice the difference on anything I've watched. But I'm using a whole lot more bandwidth now for the privilege of those extra pixels. [:rolls eyes:] At least I'm saving money now that I switched from a standalone basic plan to an add-on account. But I digress.

Does anyone actually own UHD Blu-Ray discs? 1080p is plenty good enough for me. Spending several times as much for 4K wouldn't make sense even before you factor in what a nightmare it would be to back up UHD discs (both because of the nastier copy protection and because of the ridiculous amount of storage required).

Actually, at least in the U.S., making a copy as a necessary step in running a piece of software is per se legal (17 U.S.C. section 117) as a black-and-white fair use exception. There's no rational reason to believe that this doesn't apply to copying ROMs from a cartridge that you own to execute them on an emulator; the law does not specify that such a process must be automated to qualify for the fair use exception.

What likely isn't legal is downloading a copy of those ROMs from someone else. (This is likely true even if you own the original, although I don't know if that theory has actually ever been tested in court. To be completely safe, you need to use some sort of tool to extract the ROM image yourself.)

It's not the total cost that matters anyway. What maters is the *marginal* cost of adding gaming to what you already do.

The PS5 is a one-trick pony. Nobody buys that to do word processing. So if you want to add console gaming to your life, 100% of the cost of the PS5 counts towards that marginal cost.

Your computer does many things. Most people don't buy a computer specifically for gaming. They buy a computer and they use it for gaming. If you care a lot about gaming, you might add more RAM or a better GPU, though a lot of people will just get by with whatever it comes with. So the marginal cost of doing PC gaming is the difference between what you would have bought as a non-gaming machine and what you instead bought as a gaming machine, which may be as little as zero.

So yeah, PC gaming can be way cheaper hardware-wise — potentially infinitely so.

It is entirely possible for drone owners to register their drones, file a flight plan, and obtain permission to fly in controlled airspace. I doubt that DJI's software has any way to know whether you have permission from the FAA (there are multiple ways to get that permission, including prior written agreement with the ATC by snail mail), so lockouts likely prevented a lot of authorized flying and not-authorized-but-clearly-safe flying, too, not just legitimately dangerous behavior.

The FAA rules for restricted airspace are cover a relatively large area within many miles of an airport. For example, the special use airspace for SJC and SFO cover literally the entire Bay Area from mountain chain to mountain chain, from San Francisco and Richmond down, with only a few tiny exceptions, and the only significant exceptions I see are the Presidio district and the salt marshes at the south end, where drone flying is prohibited by local ordinance.

The generally drone-restricted areas cover at least half of that special use area, which means you need prior permission to fly a drone in a rather large geographical area near any of the Bay Area airports (including Moffett, various minor airfields, etc.).

When you're talking about something as small and slow as a drone, locking out a third of the Bay Area is massive overkill, and unnecessarily limits the use of drones, and thus unnecessarily reduces the potential sale of drones. Realistically, aircraft don't fly at low altitudes except in a few areas in the landing path of the three airports. If you're flying at fifty feet off the ground, you're approximately guaranteed to not come close to any aircraft unless you're really close to the airport.

This is doubly true if you are flying inside an enclosed building or stadium. Yet those might be in controlled airspace, where you can't be off the ground at all, and a GPS-based system would flag that and lock it out even if you're flying, for example, inside a school gymnasium. That is, of course, utterly absurd.

Ultimately, whether you are in the aircraft or are flying it remotely, pilots have to know the regulations, understand what is and is not reasonable, and file a flight plan when it is legitimately necessary (read "outdoors in Class C airspace"). And if you do that, then drone hardware manufacturers have no business preventing you from doing it.