Given the amount of effort that the pop recording industry puts in to ensuring that all that talent doesn't get paid, their position would appear to be that yes, it is worthless.
I'd have a lot more sympathy for arguments like yours if the money actually went to those people who did the work, but it doesn't. The money all goes to executives, and the "talent" gets thrown a few crumbs from their table. You simply can't build a moral argument when they're doing that.
It's definitely not in any way necessary for things to be like this, because most of the rest of the music industry is nowhere near as bad. Interestingly enough, those sections of the industry have also shown little interest in abusing their customers. I find it likely that these two things are related.
I imagine that 99% of the folks at Microsoft have their heart in the right place. Certainly most of the ones I meet do.
My own observation of their employees has been that the problem is, by and large, not one of intent. Microsoft is a textbook example of how you can pave roads with good intentions. Much of the harm they do isn't deliberate, it's a mixture of bad planning, worse execution, and generally being oblivious to the idea that they aren't perfect (at least until it's too late to do anything about it).
Unless your contribution consisted only of small, isolated bits, which as I understand it was not the case, even if there is nothing left that is recognizably your original code, BusyBox as a whole is still a derivative work and you therefore retain rights in it, no?
The legal theory of homoeopathic copyright (ie, derivative works that don't contain any of the original content) is one that has been often proclaimed by lawyers but never firmly decided in court. So realistically, no (unless you have the time and money to push through a case that would set a precedent in this area).
I wanted to point out that when I tried ClamAV on mac it worked piss poor.
and it did all sorts of screwy stuff with my system including making it so slow it was unusable
clamav is a signature-based virus scanner for files. You feed it a file or directory, and it compares everything in it against its database of signatures. That is all that it does, and all that it can do. It cannot "do" anything to your system, because all it does is read two files and compare them; it does not alter anything. It does not even scan any files until you explicitly tell it to.
I don't know what you ran, but it was not clamav. My bet is that you downloaded a trojan.
The problem is actually erase time - writing data to an erased block is fast (although not as fast as writing to a hard drive sector that is already under the write head), but erasing it ready for writing is extremely slow. The upcoming solution is to maintain a buffer of pre-erased blocks ahead of time; this is somewhat tricky to implement because it means data has to keep moving around the chip (a series of random writes to the same logical address has to be remapped so that it actually writes to a different physical block each time). There is no difficulty with erasing blocks in parallel, so it is merely a problem of managing all this, not a performance limitation of the underlying technology.
Also, the block sizes in the current generation of technology are too large. This is merely a production problem, which should go away in a generation or two.
Simply put: writing to a hard drive sector is faster than writing to a flash block, which is much faster than seeking to a hard drive sector, which is much faster than erasing a flash block. This part is unlikely to change. The other flaws in current flash products are likely to change.
Flash media is considerably slower than hard drive media at the same price point. This is mainly due to economies of scale: there is a huge demand for low cost, moderately high performance desktop and laptop hard drives, while the demand for flash is for dirt cheap, low performance usb fobs. This is likely to change over time, but it will take years. Production methods for low unit-cost, high performance flash chips have to be developed, fab plants have to be built, all the usual problems.
Flash media (NAND-gate type) is fundamentally slower than hard drives for sustained serial write behaviour, where the seek penalty does not apply. This is not likely to change, since performance for both technologies should increase at roughly the same rate; so long as NAND-gate technology is the best we have, hard drives are still going to be around for those workloads that need that kind of thing (various forms of audio/video work, some database stuff, scientific applications). It's faster for the other major operating modes (all read modes, random-access-write, latency, etcetera), so is likely to give overall better performance for desktop computing workloads. There are experimental technologies in the labs that can outperform hard drives in the sustained serial write mode, but those aren't on the market yet, and may never be. They've been promising us MRAM for twenty years now, and still haven't come up with a product.
Limitations in current flash products mean that everything on the market is also slower than hard drives in the random-access-write mode. That's a problem with a known solution, there just isn't anything on the market that does it yet. This should change in the next generation or two.
So what you have is a list of the 500 biggest operations who think it is important to brag about what platform you are running. That's quite different from the 500 biggest operations (I'd be surprised if the two lists overlap at all).
I know that if I were running one of the largest, most sophisticated computer systems in the world, I wouldn't be going around telling my competitors how I did it.
And furthermore, we're already losing large amounts of low-grade uranium every year - in the sense that we had it, and now its whereabouts cannot be accounted for. Some of it is lost from the processing and refinement facilities, and a whole lot more is smuggled out from the obscure countries where it is mined.
Anybody who wished to proliferate already has access to more uranium than they could possibly want, with all this stuff supplying the black market. There is no proliferation threat any more, because it happened years ago.
The barn door is open, the horse is gone. Can we get on with putting our technology to use now?
That's hogwash. Any number of real people I talk to could easily be simulated by some non-intelligent machine. Especially over the phone, to tech support etc.
Yes, I have on several occasions thought that the problem could be easily solved if, rather than trying to create a machine that would try to chat you up, you instead create a machine that will act like an arsehole corporate drone and try to screw you over.
The rules don't say you have to create a machine that's nice.
Are carriers allowed to treat packets differently without the explicit direction of their own users?
A neutral network quite obviously cannot be used to enforce the will of some third party against the will of the network's users, so yes, it does explicitly prohibit ISPs from doing the MPAAs dirty work. That is what it is supposed to do.
(Buying a faster/slower/cheaper/more expensive/whatever service is explicit direction from you to the ISP to treat packets differently. Being told by your ISP that you must accept this new set of rules or be disconnected is not)
blackjack (again, the only game with odds not in favor of the casino, but you have to know how to play to get your money)
There's a popular theory that smart people play game X or Y or whatever because it has the best odds against the house. It's bunk. There are real professional gamblers in the casinos, and most of them play the same game: poker.
Successful professional gamblers (and they do exist) don't play to beat the house. They know that they can't. Rather, they sit down at the table and milk the tourists who are sitting next to them. To them, the house is just a tax on their income; they know they're going to lose some money to the house, but they're going to be raking it in hand over fist from all the people who think they know how to play. The casinos love them, because they're a nice steady income.
They play poker because its natural system of betting rounds tends to extract money from marks faster, and because it is simultaneously the most widely known and least understood of all the casino games, so the fish factor is much higher at the poker tables.
Lot of the time you're going to have to settle for some people who are bright, young, and inexperienced. Mix them up with some more experienced workers, and they'll do okay.
Most of the time, they're going to do really badly. Just because somebody is bright, young, and inexperienced doesn't mean they are capable of learning how to be a skilled IT worker - and most of the ones who come along just aren't.
The trick is to find the handful who actually do have the potential to learn. And that's really hard.
We are quite capable of filtering or destroying this stuff if we wanted to; while our understanding of chemistry is limited in many respects, this is not one of them.
There is no financial motive for doing so, hence a capitalist society will not do it.
poppy seeds from regular bread will trigger a positive drug test for opiates I think
Which is not really surprising, since poppy seeds are opiates, along with everything else in the poppy plant. Morphine is nothing more than poppy extract, including the variant diacetylmorphine that is commonly known as heroin. It's not a false positive, it's a true positive. The test is detecting exactly what it is supposed to detect.
The problem with trying to ban certain chemicals is that it's hard to find chemicals which don't appear all over the place. Hence, the rules are inconsistent to the point where they make little sense.
Or are these water companies just really bad at keeping sewage out of people's taps?
The water companies are just that: companies. When you apply capitalism to the supply of fresh water you get exactly the same thing that you do when you apply it to anything else.
You can make the water as clean as you want by spending more money on cleaning it. The water companies, driven as they are to consider only the bottom line, compute the maximum amount of sewage that can be permitted in people's taps, and commit all their effort to making the water exactly that clean and no cleaner. In this way they maximise their profits.
What! no LSD yet? When will these lazy hippies finally get to it?
The mildly amusing flaw in that old tale is that LSD is actually quite unstable, and if you put it in the drinking water it would break down long before it got anywhere near anybody's houses. It has to be carefully stored if you want to keep it for more than an hour or so.
Also, the dose required for LSD to function is so minute compared to most drugs that it would be quite obvious if it was there. Even in small numbers of parts per million, you'd likely be tripping.
And up to that word, I did not really get what "JZ" wanted to say anyway, it sounded more like an incoherent ramble by TFA's author. Anyone care to elaborate?
It's the old "we have to kill ourselves before they kill us" argument, as it is usually applied to the internet, that's all. Nothing new under the sun today.
Although experts may disagree, and there is the occasional fraud or corperate shill in the science community, at least they are more likely to use the scientific method and choose facts over opinions.
While there is some truth in that, the problem here is more subtle. Stated simply it is:
How do we tell that this person is an expert? What actually distinguishes them from another user?
This is a serious problem because there are a whole lot more people who claim to be experts than there are who have anything useful to contribute. The "wisdom of the crowds" never really existed - crowds are quite stupid - but Wikipedia 'solves' the problem of finding the experts by building a system where you don't need to bother, and (here's the important bit) nobody has ever come up with anything that works better. Nothing will change until/unless somebody does come up with a better solution.
Is it wrong to walk into a gym where you dont have a membership and start exercising just because they dont bother to check ID's at the door? Yes
How about walking into the office of a TV station and asking the receptionist to give you a free copy of all the day's content, which she promptly does without asking any questions?
That's their own damn fault.
If you drop your wallet on the ground outside your house and leave it there overnight, you do not have moral (or legal, in most of the world) grounds to complain if somebody picks it up and walks off with it. You are responsible for taking basic care of your own stuff if you want to keep it.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the amount of effort that the pop recording industry puts in to ensuring that all that talent doesn't get paid, their position would appear to be that yes, it is worthless.
I'd have a lot more sympathy for arguments like yours if the money actually went to those people who did the work, but it doesn't. The money all goes to executives, and the "talent" gets thrown a few crumbs from their table. You simply can't build a moral argument when they're doing that.
It's definitely not in any way necessary for things to be like this, because most of the rest of the music industry is nowhere near as bad. Interestingly enough, those sections of the industry have also shown little interest in abusing their customers. I find it likely that these two things are related.
My own observation of their employees has been that the problem is, by and large, not one of intent. Microsoft is a textbook example of how you can pave roads with good intentions. Much of the harm they do isn't deliberate, it's a mixture of bad planning, worse execution, and generally being oblivious to the idea that they aren't perfect (at least until it's too late to do anything about it).
The legal theory of homoeopathic copyright (ie, derivative works that don't contain any of the original content) is one that has been often proclaimed by lawyers but never firmly decided in court. So realistically, no (unless you have the time and money to push through a case that would set a precedent in this area).
clamav is a signature-based virus scanner for files. You feed it a file or directory, and it compares everything in it against its database of signatures. That is all that it does, and all that it can do. It cannot "do" anything to your system, because all it does is read two files and compare them; it does not alter anything. It does not even scan any files until you explicitly tell it to.
I don't know what you ran, but it was not clamav. My bet is that you downloaded a trojan.
The problem is actually erase time - writing data to an erased block is fast (although not as fast as writing to a hard drive sector that is already under the write head), but erasing it ready for writing is extremely slow. The upcoming solution is to maintain a buffer of pre-erased blocks ahead of time; this is somewhat tricky to implement because it means data has to keep moving around the chip (a series of random writes to the same logical address has to be remapped so that it actually writes to a different physical block each time). There is no difficulty with erasing blocks in parallel, so it is merely a problem of managing all this, not a performance limitation of the underlying technology.
Also, the block sizes in the current generation of technology are too large. This is merely a production problem, which should go away in a generation or two.
Simply put: writing to a hard drive sector is faster than writing to a flash block, which is much faster than seeking to a hard drive sector, which is much faster than erasing a flash block. This part is unlikely to change. The other flaws in current flash products are likely to change.
Flash media is considerably slower than hard drive media at the same price point. This is mainly due to economies of scale: there is a huge demand for low cost, moderately high performance desktop and laptop hard drives, while the demand for flash is for dirt cheap, low performance usb fobs. This is likely to change over time, but it will take years. Production methods for low unit-cost, high performance flash chips have to be developed, fab plants have to be built, all the usual problems.
Flash media (NAND-gate type) is fundamentally slower than hard drives for sustained serial write behaviour, where the seek penalty does not apply. This is not likely to change, since performance for both technologies should increase at roughly the same rate; so long as NAND-gate technology is the best we have, hard drives are still going to be around for those workloads that need that kind of thing (various forms of audio/video work, some database stuff, scientific applications). It's faster for the other major operating modes (all read modes, random-access-write, latency, etcetera), so is likely to give overall better performance for desktop computing workloads. There are experimental technologies in the labs that can outperform hard drives in the sustained serial write mode, but those aren't on the market yet, and may never be. They've been promising us MRAM for twenty years now, and still haven't come up with a product.
Limitations in current flash products mean that everything on the market is also slower than hard drives in the random-access-write mode. That's a problem with a known solution, there just isn't anything on the market that does it yet. This should change in the next generation or two.
So what you have is a list of the 500 biggest operations who think it is important to brag about what platform you are running. That's quite different from the 500 biggest operations (I'd be surprised if the two lists overlap at all).
I know that if I were running one of the largest, most sophisticated computer systems in the world, I wouldn't be going around telling my competitors how I did it.
And furthermore, we're already losing large amounts of low-grade uranium every year - in the sense that we had it, and now its whereabouts cannot be accounted for. Some of it is lost from the processing and refinement facilities, and a whole lot more is smuggled out from the obscure countries where it is mined.
Anybody who wished to proliferate already has access to more uranium than they could possibly want, with all this stuff supplying the black market. There is no proliferation threat any more, because it happened years ago.
The barn door is open, the horse is gone. Can we get on with putting our technology to use now?
Yes, I have on several occasions thought that the problem could be easily solved if, rather than trying to create a machine that would try to chat you up, you instead create a machine that will act like an arsehole corporate drone and try to screw you over.
The rules don't say you have to create a machine that's nice.
No. Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough.
Net neutrality all comes down to this question:
Are carriers allowed to treat packets differently without the explicit direction of their own users?
A neutral network quite obviously cannot be used to enforce the will of some third party against the will of the network's users, so yes, it does explicitly prohibit ISPs from doing the MPAAs dirty work. That is what it is supposed to do.
(Buying a faster/slower/cheaper/more expensive/whatever service is explicit direction from you to the ISP to treat packets differently. Being told by your ISP that you must accept this new set of rules or be disconnected is not)
There's a popular theory that smart people play game X or Y or whatever because it has the best odds against the house. It's bunk. There are real professional gamblers in the casinos, and most of them play the same game: poker.
Successful professional gamblers (and they do exist) don't play to beat the house. They know that they can't. Rather, they sit down at the table and milk the tourists who are sitting next to them. To them, the house is just a tax on their income; they know they're going to lose some money to the house, but they're going to be raking it in hand over fist from all the people who think they know how to play. The casinos love them, because they're a nice steady income.
They play poker because its natural system of betting rounds tends to extract money from marks faster, and because it is simultaneously the most widely known and least understood of all the casino games, so the fish factor is much higher at the poker tables.
Most of the time, they're going to do really badly. Just because somebody is bright, young, and inexperienced doesn't mean they are capable of learning how to be a skilled IT worker - and most of the ones who come along just aren't.
The trick is to find the handful who actually do have the potential to learn. And that's really hard.
The GP was not complaining about problems experienced on any platform other than Windows, and the problems on that platform are caused by Microsoft.
Those are fundamental flaws of Windows, not PCs. Don't blame the hardware manufacturers for Microsoft's blunders.
Southern Water Services Limited, registered company number 2366670, which you can look up on the online Companies House database.
Your one might be. I know for a fact that mine isn't.
We are quite capable of filtering or destroying this stuff if we wanted to; while our understanding of chemistry is limited in many respects, this is not one of them.
There is no financial motive for doing so, hence a capitalist society will not do it.
Which is not really surprising, since poppy seeds are opiates, along with everything else in the poppy plant. Morphine is nothing more than poppy extract, including the variant diacetylmorphine that is commonly known as heroin. It's not a false positive, it's a true positive. The test is detecting exactly what it is supposed to detect.
The problem with trying to ban certain chemicals is that it's hard to find chemicals which don't appear all over the place. Hence, the rules are inconsistent to the point where they make little sense.
The water companies are just that: companies. When you apply capitalism to the supply of fresh water you get exactly the same thing that you do when you apply it to anything else.
You can make the water as clean as you want by spending more money on cleaning it. The water companies, driven as they are to consider only the bottom line, compute the maximum amount of sewage that can be permitted in people's taps, and commit all their effort to making the water exactly that clean and no cleaner. In this way they maximise their profits.
The mildly amusing flaw in that old tale is that LSD is actually quite unstable, and if you put it in the drinking water it would break down long before it got anywhere near anybody's houses. It has to be carefully stored if you want to keep it for more than an hour or so.
Also, the dose required for LSD to function is so minute compared to most drugs that it would be quite obvious if it was there. Even in small numbers of parts per million, you'd likely be tripping.
It's really quite a strange chemical.
It's the old "we have to kill ourselves before they kill us" argument, as it is usually applied to the internet, that's all. Nothing new under the sun today.
Self-policing communities means that he's making the decisions. Anarchists means that somebody else is.
While there is some truth in that, the problem here is more subtle. Stated simply it is:
How do we tell that this person is an expert? What actually distinguishes them from another user?
This is a serious problem because there are a whole lot more people who claim to be experts than there are who have anything useful to contribute. The "wisdom of the crowds" never really existed - crowds are quite stupid - but Wikipedia 'solves' the problem of finding the experts by building a system where you don't need to bother, and (here's the important bit) nobody has ever come up with anything that works better. Nothing will change until/unless somebody does come up with a better solution.
How about walking into the office of a TV station and asking the receptionist to give you a free copy of all the day's content, which she promptly does without asking any questions?
That's their own damn fault.
If you drop your wallet on the ground outside your house and leave it there overnight, you do not have moral (or legal, in most of the world) grounds to complain if somebody picks it up and walks off with it. You are responsible for taking basic care of your own stuff if you want to keep it.