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Comment Control of Secure Boot via the Windows copyright (Score 1) 82

Microsoft has no control over secure boot. You can even load your own custom keys for the Windows boot process

Microsoft has control over distribution of the copyrighted Windows operating system. It has used this control to dictate whether or not makers of devices that include Windows are allowed to let users load their own custom keys. For example, Microsoft required makers of devices that come with Windows RT (the port of Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 to ARM architecture) to block end users from turning off Secure Boot and block end users from loading their own custom keys, as conditions for a license under copyright to distribute Windows RT on those devices.

Comment Re:Slot machines... (Score 1) 82

Thinking further, it seems like it'd be impossible to separate things because commodities future trading is in fact a kind of gambling. When you buy a futures contract, you're betting that the price of the commodity will go above the contract price. The seller is betting it won't. The only difference is what you get if you win the bet. dollars or eg. corn. Once you allow intangibles in, even that distinction disappears. The dissent has a point, but I think the majority is correct as to the law and if people don't like it then the law needs to be changed to restrict what can be traded on a commodities market.

Comment Tap or click to view article (Score 1) 43

No video (or animated image) should ever load/autoplay unless the user interacts with that element, indicating he/she wants to play it.

How granular would the permission be? If web browsers start blocking all animation and post-load layout shifting by default, including CSS transitions and animations, this would encourage website operators to structure the page to coerce permission to animate in each document. For example, a website operator could make each page load blank other than a notice to the effect "Tap or click to view 'Title of Article' on Name of Site."

Comment You have no IP address. Your neighborhood does. (Score 0) 35

How are you going to host a game server on a home computer if you share your IPv4 address with other subscribers to the same ISP in the same neighborhood,[1] and the combined modem and router that your home ISP requires all subscribers to use lacks an option for port forwarding? Both of these are true, for example, of T-Mobile US Home Internet.

[1] Many home ISPs apply carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) to conserve IPv4 addresses since the worldwide exhaustion.

Comment Re:Good but they 'summarized' al the science. (Score 1) 71

I didn't miss the jr. high "figure out what g is" stuff in the beginning of the book. I was kinda bummed at how much the selective breeding was glossed over as they had to cram a line into the movie to explain the disaster at the end. But a the same time the movie is two and a half hours long. While there are a handful of other cuts I think they could have gotten away with (the extended Karaoke scene maybe), there wasn't a ton of fat to trim to keep the runtime reasonable.

Comment Re:Has Anyone Here Seen It? (Score 1) 71

I don't think Xenonite is made of Xenon exclusively, but it is strange enough that handheld spectrometers can't deal with it. Maybe it offgasses xenon when bombarded by charged particles? One thing the movie glossed over is how Rocky's species is in many ways much less technologically advanced than Humans. Their materials science is outstanding due to the hellish nature of their home world, but they don't have electronics. Their math and science are back in the early 20th century. They went interstellar before discovering relativity. Mostly due to the fact that the astrophage is basically magic. In the book one background character mentions offhand that the astrophage is a miracle that will solve countless problems and everybody just glares at him angrily because even though he is right it's also killing them. On the other hand, while reading the book I had thoughts of an interstellar ferry service that collects astrophage and brings it back to Earth where it is tricked into releasing its energy into the atmosphere to warm the planet and light up cropland. Spin drives open up the entire solar system to exploitation and the astrophage is the perfect energy storage medium.

Comment Non-commercial use only (Score 3, Interesting) 97

Maybe the legal experts could sit down and work out how to modify licenses (including the GPL/LGPL) to be for non-commercial use only? As long as an entity wasn't making money using FOSS, it could use it just like now. Individuals and non-commercial projects wouldn't be affected. But if you're a business making money using FOSS? Not without paying for it you're not. Yes, this would go against the free-software principles. But principles don't pay the bills every month, and none of these changes would prevent anyone from staying with the existing licenses if they wanted to.

The first thing I think of as a problem would be a company setting up a separate entity that wouldn't make money, just make services available to the company using FOSS to get around the fees. The trick to preventing this would be to phrase the terms so that that entity truly had to pay it's own bills without having the company using it's services pay anything either directly or indirectly. Not even by doing things like providing hosting "free". I'd have to sit down with a bunch of rules lawyers and game out all the ways to funnel money into that entity and how to block them, but what's life without a little challenge?

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Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true. -- Bertrand Russell

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