The practice Mr. Carr is seeking to legalize is called "gotcha capitalism". The term may have first been used by Bob Sullivan in a 2005 article, and he then published a book by that name in 2007.

We need a browser written in a "safe" language, or at least a language with builtin automatic memory management. Not C++. I'm tired of browsers leaking memory and needing to be updated every other week to patch yet another set of (mostly memory-corruption) vulnerabilities that have been lurking for a long time but only recently disclosed.

Servo is supposed to be that, but I'm not convinced (and it's not finished).

HotJava (anyone remember?) was supposed to be that. It was a good idea, but maybe Java itself wasn't ready yet because HotJava segfaulted more often than Netscape Navigator, the mainstream browser at the time. I gave up on it and I guess so did everybody else. The web has changed so much since 1996 that if you were writing a browser in Java, you might be better starting from scratch than forking HotJava.

Does anyone know anything about Lobo?

... on the original googleblog post. If you submit one, "Your comment will be visible after approval" and they obviously haven't approved any.

Maybe they don't want anyone calling BS on their video upscaling. They specifically claim "...be on the lookout for ... videos as they transform from SD to HD", but actual remastering in HD would require videos to have been shot on film, for that film to still be available (see PostPhil's comment), and to re-digitize it in HD and re-apply any postproduction effects, which all seems unlikely to happen for most of these videos.

That's a pretty big claim. Can you provide any info or links to back it up?

Could you elaborate on what didn't suck about the cinema you went to?

From A Deepness in the Sky (1999):

The Podmaster took a small case out of his shirt. He opened it, and held something that glittered in the lowering sun. It was a small square, a tile. There were flecks of light that might have been cheap mica, except that the colors swept in coordinated iridescence. "This is one of the cladding tiles from the satellite. There was also a layer of low-power LEDs, but we've stripped those off. Chemically, what is left is diamond fragments bound in epoxy. Watch." He set the square down on the table and shined a hand light on it. And they all watched....And after a moment the little square of iridescence floated upward. At first, the motion looked like a commonplace of the microgravity environment, a loose paperweight wafting on an air current. But the air in the room was still. And as the seconds passed, the tile moved faster, tumbling, falling...straight up. It hit the ceiling with an audible clink-and remained there.

No one said anything for several seconds.

There is an open source version of the guest tools, at least for Linux guests

I'd like to know where to find this?

If I had a newfangled TV with motion interpolation I would probably turn it off too, but not because I don't like smooth motion! The ones I've looked at in stores seem to produce inconsistent results which I find distracting - they are good at interpolating camera pans but not much else.

This is because in general you can't recover information that's been thrown away (or not captured in the first place), and interpolating motion is always going to give slightly dodgy results, especially when your processing is limited to what you can do in real time.

I hate interlace for the same reason. In the days of analog transmission it was a good compromise between resolution, frame rate and bandwidth. In the era of digital however, it can be thought of as the worst lossy codec ever, assuming the source is 50 or 60 FPS. 25/30 FPS material isn't harmed if decoded correctly, but interlace seems to have a unique ability to confuse programmers / hardware designers, resulting in anything from "combing", to horrible jittering caused by displaying the fields in the wrong order.

How about "high frame rate"? (whether that is 48, 50, 60 or higher)

If you want video to look "life-like" you need a better frame rate than 24 FPS. Every gamer knows it (and I wish that every movie-goer knew it too).

Is this new format going to support higher frame rates? Each of color depth, frame rate, resolution and 3D independently multiplies the required bandwidth, so current blu-ray can't even do full-HD @ 60p, never mind 3D at the same time.

It would be nice if there was a format compatible with the Hobbit trilogy as it is meant to be seen (and hopefully more films like it in future).

(and BTW, a motion-interpolating TV is *not* the answer!)

It's the damn auto-refresh on the main page. It was bad enough when it used AJAX to load new content - any new story would push down the one I was reading the summary of, causing me to lose my place. But for a while now it's been reloading the whole page (http://slashdot.org/?source=autorefresh), which is even worse. I've found no way to disable this "feature".

A crippled cipher can be used to read your private data. A crippled hash function can be used to substitute bad data for good.

You'd cheat someone if you could with a fraudulent sale

Actually that part was humor. You might want to look that up.

For any given model, these uncertainties can be calculated in a Bayesian sense.

My feeling, as a non-cosmologist, is that we don't even know the correct model. What was the nature of the inflationary epoch, for example?

...is known to 3 significant figures, I'll sell you a bridge.

You are correct. Even though in infinite time the bubble would expand to infinite volume, this would only affect a volume that was initially finite, if very large. The "edges" (cosmological horizon) of the affected volume would always outpace the bubble's expansion. (This is assuming the expansion of the universe continues. Its apparent acceleration might be just an artifact) However, there doesn't have to be just one bubble, nor does it have to arise in "billions of years". Nowhere and nowhen is safe... unless the Many-Worlds Interpretation is true. (to see why the MWI helps, see quantum suicide and quantum immortality)

not to sue / prosecute you - if they conclude that your disclosure respects and meets all their guidelines. Oh and the program is "subject to change or to cancellation at any point without notice".