The GPL covers the software x264, not the output produced by x264. Nevermind the fact that said logic is extremely dubious (the Software Freedom Law Center, as does basically everyone except the FSF, disagrees with that interpretation).

I like the way some DVD players can play DIVX. So are you claiming that patents are good or bad? DivX is also known as MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile... which is heavily patent-encumbered.

It's exactly the same as with any other encoder that you use for Blu-ray authoring.

The main change in the past year has been the psy optimizations that were added; before the psy optimizations, x264 was roughly on par with Mainconcept, one of the better commercial encoders. The psy optimizations--adaptive quantization and psy-RD (both on by default)--put x264 way over the top. Recently, the new MB-tree algorithm (also on by default) has boosted quality quite a bit as well. The main catch with psy optimizations is that they're nearly impossible to measure mathematically, and in fact, unless you disable them, they will make the "mathematical" measures of quality (mean squared error/PSNR) much worse.

It's always nice when free software solutions trash the commercial alternatives.

If person A and person B both contribute significant code to a program, and person B decides that he wants to sue Company C for infringing his copyright, how does Person A have the right to stop him? Even if Person A doesn't care about Company C infringing his copyright, Company C is still infringing Person B's copyright, and Person B can still sue them. (IANAL)

I find that music is fine as long as your mind doesn't focus too much on it. If I listen to similar music long enough it becomes a bit like breathing; it's there but I don't really notice it. It's actually quite odd; if my mind is properly defocused, I can listen to a mix containing 10 songs, all of which I know, and then be unable to pick more than half of them after the fact!

As for benefits, I'm not sure; I think it keeps me from going insane, which is probably a good enough reason.

Though sometimes when I have to focus really hard on something very difficult to visualize, I end up having to turn off the music.

There's been an enormous improvement in the Linux scheduler in recent months--in some cases the performance improvements are as high as 60-80% with simple multithreaded apps like video encoders. The instant 2.6.32 comes out officially, expect to start seeing some completely absurd results in stupid "comparisons between Linux distros" like these, where the distros that happened to update to .32 trash the ones that haven't yet.

But those people aren't Googling for things; they're heading to the Fox page directly.

Murdoch seems to think that people use Google to search Murdoch's sites.

By Murdoch's logic, clearly if he withdraws his sites from Google, people will stop using Google to search his sites. But hardly anyone using Google has the intention of "searching his sites". People just want information--most people don't care which site has the information as long as it's good information. If Murdoch pulls out of Google that just means fewer people will visit Murdoch's sites. Nobody is going to give a toss about the fact that Fox won't show up on Google. This entire strategy suggests that Murdoch misunderstands his own readers.

Japanese amateur (doujin) artists have been self-publishing professional-quality albums for years now. No RIAA, no middlemen: they set up a booth at a convention and sell it. And then, afterwards, they sell extra copies from their website. It seems to work well enough: some single fandoms have produced hundreds if not thousands of albums.

Isn't it amazing what you can do when you prioritize actually making music over trying to get rich?

And don't think that the Japanese have it easier with regard to music copyright enforcement: the problem is actually so great there that file-traders have been forced to use anonymous P2P systems like Share and Winny.