So patents last 15-20 years… regular Blu-ray patent has already expired I guess, but Ultra HD Blu-ray is the current patent, releasing in 2015… so another 6 to 11 years before consumers can do whatever they want with the technology.

Would be outdated by then by the next new thing though.

OMG, I’m dealing with a developer right now that is dealing with patient collected samples in several timezones, allowing the patients to either enter the time they collected, or use current time, and storing it in UTC time.

We do not receive any timezone data, patient collection data is showing different days than the patient could write on their samples depending on the time of day, and the developer said ‘just subtract X hours’ (our timezone)… for which not all patients would live in.

I suppose I could, if they’d provide the patient’s timezone, but they don’t even collect that. Can you just admit your solution is bad? It’s fine to store a timestamp in UTC, but not user provided data… don’t expect average users to calculate their time (and date) in UTC please.

Forums instead of social media, IRC/ICQ/AIM for chat, websites were much more static… unless using Flash, newgrounds full of Flash games.

FTP/IRC was source of media distribution until transitions to, bittorrent was new, and napster, limewire, kazaa were things. Newsgroups have existed for all time, but not really including them because less mainstream.

Windows would allow broadcast messages to just pop-up on your computer. Needed to implement your own firewall like Zonealarm, these things weren’t just default… computers kinds of just ‘directly’ connected to the internet without any appliance in the way at first.

Edit: Oh yeah, and Steam didn’t exist, so games were bought individually in boxes at stores, and valve games were like sharing your IP with friends, listing of servers… speaking of, early Counter Strike and stuff didn’t have any anti-cheat… if you added anti-cheat to your CS server when first coming out, people getting caught would be shocked, since they didnt know they could get caught, always in denial for ‘false positives’, and really find out who of your friends aren’t actually good and were just cheating all along.

This only makes me favor copyright reform more. Should really cut that down to 25 years or less; anything from before the 21st century should be public domain by now.