The most depressing thing about Drupal is that http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ , a website devoted to discussing the latest in programming languages research, is a drupal site. How on earth can a site that decries the unsoundess of C code, and can discuss the relationships of monads to any of three different effects calculi use PHP to run their site? Mind boggling.

As an emacs user I'm looking forward to a new level of complicated chording commands. I won't have to use my nose to hit keys anymore!

Right, but if they become 47 states, they will dominate the senate by adding 94 new senators. I don't think that solves the problem.

VCD is still popular in international markets. VCD just never made it here in the States.

That's a total fallacy. If no one innovates anything, there's nothing to scoop up. Innovating always yields at least short term advantage. Everyone will develop their own solutions and guard them jealously. There has never been an industry where no one innovates. You can't fight human nature.

So what you're saying is that without patents your company wouldn't bother to develop new techniques? Wouldn't you be left in the dust by those that did? It seems like the "insider" scenario could easily be mitigated by background checks and the like. It works for the Intelligence community.

Don't you see? This is a brilliant strategy. By coming out in favor of ACTA, the Republicans now have to rail against ACTA for destroying America's freedom. Then Obama can "concede to political pressures" on the issue and ACTA is withdrawn, thus protecting America from this crap for another 4 years. It's pure genius.

I wonder how many of the technical objections are workarounds for where the "obvious" choice is already covered by software patents. One of ogg's selling points is that it isn't covered by any patents, and we know there are a lot of lame software patents out there.

I would've gone with PCLOADLIVER, but I think on saw that a few years ago last time slashdot talked about this technology.

This is awesome! Now I don't have to sort through all the FoxNews crap in search results.

Maya, for example, often gives different results between versions. It's also been owned by 5 companies in 6 years. What do you figure the odds of your work rendering correctly in 50 years? On the other hand, blender supposedly is still able to open first edition .blend files, but my point is you won't be there to spot check the consistency.

But remember, on numerous occasions Joel has stated how much he disagreed with the plan to rewrite mozilla from scratch. For example: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

I agree. I've been less than thrilled with Microsoft's behavior pretty much since windows 98, but this software patent nonsense needs to be reigned in. To me it seems like they should just abandon the Eastern Texas market. Without Word, either the court will cease to function or maybe they'll adopt Open Office, learn about Free Software, and cease being patent troll heaven. Oh wait, I suppose I should wake up now.

Maybe the baby boomers, but I don't know anyone in the 20-35 age group that pays for cable unless they want to watch sports. We all have internet access, hulu, and netflix.

Why do people always discuss National Energy Independence, when the oil is just going to be harvested by a multinational energy corporation and sold at whatever the market will bear?