I like the Unix idea of programs that do things (complicated or simple) in a fairly standalone way, with well-defined interfaces, and that can be replaced, recompiled and debugged fairly easily.
unfortunately, all these componentized architectures that desktop environments use seem to be going in the opposite direction: everything depending on everything, hugely complicated APIs all over the place, and virtual DLL hell.
You need to make up your mind. Is code reuse good or bad? Is making complex programs out of simple components good or bad? Because the whole goal of component architecturs and desktop environments is to bring the concepts of specialized, optimized, single purpose components into the GUI era. The component architecture is designed to allow each GUI program to do one thing and do it well and call on other GUI programs for additional features if they're needed. Shared libraries ("everything depending on everything else") are a result of heavy code reuse; instead of each program designing commonly used features from scratch they use shared libraries.
That's not to say that things couldn't be managed better. It would be nice, for instance, if all of the commonly used components were packaged up into a single tarball for installation so that you only had to download a small number of packages to get the system working, and maybe even a single./configure; make; make install needed to get the whole thing working. But just as we expect that grep, bash, sed, awk, etc. will each be separately upgradeable, the individual packages still need to be separately available.
This result means neutrinos do have masses but we don't know what they are. We only know what the mass differences are (which determines the probability that they will have oscillated by the time they reach the detector) and that they must be small. What causes these masses to be small (new particles, extra dimensions...) is the next big question...
ISTR that they were able to put a fairly solid cap on the rest mass of the neutrino based on some observations made during the big 1987 supernova. They detected a neutrino "pulse" (IIRC they only detected 7 neutrinos, but that is a lot for an event taking place that far away) just a few hours after the supernova was first apparent. That let them calculate a lower bound on the ratio of kinetic energy to rest mass for the neutrino and hence (since they can measure the kinetic energy) an upper bound on the rest mass.
Over the long term, gold retains value (I make this statement by looking at history, not by predicting the future).
An couple ounces of gold, in Roman times, would buy a nice outfit for a roman statesman.
A couple ounces of gold today will buy you a nice suit.
You're using a poor standard for value because the relative cost of goods has changed dramatically over time. Take a look at the cost of labor instead of finished goods. In Roman times, an ounce of gold would hire a skilled craftsman for about 3 months or a soldier for 6 months. Today an ounce of gold will hire a skilled craftsman for a day or two and a soldier for maybe 3.
gold is about as "intrinsically valuable" as tulips.
Actually, gold does have a fairly high intrinsic value. It's a very useful material with a variety of highly desirable characteristics. It's nearly perfectly corrosion resistant, easy to work, has a wide range of useful alloys, is a wonderful conductor of heat and electricity, and is extremely reflective. A lot of people also think that it's very attractive. Its use is currently restricted to high-value applications because of its scarcity, but it would be an excellent material for a wide range of everyday applications if it were common enough.
For people who think that all high-end audio is bunk, I'll say that the difference between what you can get at Circuit City for $1000 and a high-end stereo store for $3000, even, is pretty considerable,
Actually, though, the really significant thing is the difference in quality between a $1000 system from Circuit City and a $1000 system from a high-end stereo store. It's real, noticable, and probably bigger than the difference between the $1000 system and the $10000 system at the high end place. The difference is between a system that was designed with good sound reproduction as its primary goal and one that was designed with features and raw power as its primary goal.
When I was in college, I got a stereo from a high-end store that cost about the same as the systems that several of my friends got from big chain stores. Mine couldn't shake the whole house the way my friends' could, but it sounded a whole lot better at reasonable listening volumes. At just about any price point beyond bare bottom you can get a better sounding system- often much better sounding- by finding one that focuses on quality over gizmos.
That depends a lot. There are probably genuine, if marginal, gains in theoretical sound quality all the way up the scale to that $100,000 system you mention. But my impression is that at just about any price point you can get further by careful comparison shopping than by throwing 2x more money at the problem blindly. It's definitely worth your time to go to the shop with your favorite music in hand and have the guys there hook up the different components you're considering for you to listen to. Even better is if you can get a home trial, since different set ups can sound different in depending on the environment.
Eventually, you'll find that the limit to your system is either your ears or (more likely) your listening environment, rather than your equipment. For most people that's going to be well before they reach the true high-end. Let's face it, most people don't have a place where they can listen to their music that would let them get anything close to the full available range out of a mid-range system, much less a super high end one. Unless you also have the money to invest in an anechoic room for your house, that $100,000 system is going to be money down the drain no matter how good your ears are.
I think that the question of what language to use in an introductory course depends critically on who you expect to be teaching. A lot of people here are suggesting that the first language taught should be a comparatively low level language in order to introduce students to low level concepts as early as possible.
That's great if you're primarily interested in teaching computer scientists, but that's not necessarily the case. Many people- and I might even venture to suggest that it's the vast majority- of people who want/need to learn prgramming concepts are not going into a pure computing career. Instead they're going into business, the sciences, or the arts and need to learn enough programming that they are not completely dependent on CS professionals to get their jobs done. There's a real need for an introductory programming course for non-CS students that teaches very basic programming concepts- data structures, algorithms, etc. Languages like Java, Python, and the like are very appropriate for that sort of introductory class specifically because they do free the programmer from worrying about low level functions so that they can focus on high level concepts.
Well, sadly, Stallman is probably right in this case. The problem is not that "only the bad laws propagate, and not the good" in some abstract sense. The problem is that the law of the place where the suit takes place are allowed to take precidence over those of the place where the alleged offense may have taken place. For a person or organization that is able to practice jurisdictional shopping (i.e. a multi-national corporation) or change the law to suit its purpose (i.e. a government) that will almost always mean the more restrictive law.
One other thing that's potentially very worrying about this is that it may open the door to real legal abuse of another type. If your web site offens a multi-national corporation, they may very well decide to sue you in every country where they do business. There's nothing in particular to stop them from doing this, and they would only need to win one of those suits to put you in a world of hurt. That's nasty.
Don't forget that laws about EULAs may be different in different countries. I personally think that it's quite reasonable to claim that a simple click-through agreement is not enough to disclaim legal responsibility for the contents of a site. If local law somewhere agrees with me on that point, I could sue there and avoid your EULA altogether.
That's the real danger of the situation; people who want to enforce their aims of can shop for a location where the law agrees with them. Want to sue for libel? Find a place where libel laws are very strict. Want to get by a strict EULA? Find a place where click-through EULAs are unenforceable. And, of course, if you're a government this is trivial because you can always re-write your laws in a way that lets you go after the people who are annoying you.
In practice, though, what would happen is that the two companies would come up with a cross-licensing scheme. In essence, each would agree not to pursue the other's infringement in exhange for having its own infringement ignored. It's not an unreasonable thing to do.
Solution? Two-finger mousing. Index finger on left button, middle finger on right button, and the index finget actually muves over to wheel. All problems went away.
Is three finger mousing the accepted way of using the things, then? I never even considered using the mouse any way other than the way that you wound up adopting because using the wheel with the middle finger always felt so awkward. I wondered why so many people complained about the wheel mice, but if they're using the wheel with the middle finger and not moving their index finger that may explain things.
Fortunately not a problem. The stuff works by pure reflectance, so when it's blanked it reverts to white rather than transparent. OTOH, I doubt that it would do too well in the wash or dry cleaners, so I'm not sure if I'd personally want to make clothes out of it.
The sad part is that AFAIK CD prices in the United States are actually lower than they are in Europe. That was certainly true the last time I heard anything about the pricing. I was acting as a guide for some visitors from England and they constantly wanted to go CD shopping because the cost in US dollars was the same as in UK pounds. That meant that CDs were something like 70% more expensive in the UK than the US.
Most people can't make out any detail smaller than a centimeter.
How small a detail you can make out depends pretty critically on how close you are to the detail in question. A human hair is only hundred microns (i.e. a few hundredths of a centimeter) wide, but people have no making out individual hairs at close range. I routinely work with tubing that's 140 microns in outer diameter, and I personally have no trouble seeing it- though it gives some of my co-workers fits. 60 micron diameter optical fiber is a bit tougher to see, but still doesn't require a microscope.
There are some limits, though. The shortest wavelength that the eye can see is about 0.35 microns, and the laws of optics say that you can't make out details much smaller than one wavelength. Light will just diffract around anything much smaller, so it's physically impossible to see something 0.02 microns across, even with a theoretically perfect visible light microscope. That's the exact reason that these kinds of features have been so difficult to make; the same rule that limits the resolving power of a perfect visible light microscope also limits the size of feature you can make with visible light lithography. To make something 0.02 microns across they have to use very short wavelength EM radiation.
Sure it's possible to make something without understanding it 100%, but that's not a very useful approach if the goal is understanding. That's the point. There are a lot of people working in AI whose goal is not AI per se but rather an understanding of the way that the human mind works. To them it's not particularly useful to make a human-level AI if it's nothing but a black box. To them, a lower level of AI is more valuable if it comes with greater understanding.
Quite frankly, I can see exactly where they're coming from. We're already surrounded by more human-level intelligences than we can find productive employment for. Why go out and create more artificial ones that are likely to suffer from exactly the same sorts of problems, only at much greater expense, unless we actually get something useful out of it in the form of increased knowledge?
The part that literally floored me is "where you're hoping you won't have to figure anything out,". All along I'm thinking that intelligence is so complex and intractable that the most plausible solution to the problem of making a human-level AI is one where we let the AI emerge, grow and learn. IOW, what we really need to understand is the learning process, which encompasses perceptual, motivational and motor learning.
Well, to some extent that depends on whether your goal is to make human level AI or to use AI to help your understanding of NI. A lot of AI researchers are really more interested in the second than they are in the first, so it's understandable that they're not too happy with neural nets. You don't get very far in understanding the mind if you simply copy it in silicon instead of carbon. It would be much more interesting and instructive to make an AI that didn't use neural nets, because doing so would necessarily imply that it was possible to abstract some deeper core of how intelligence works. Of course it's entirely possible that doing so is a false dream, and that what we think of as intelligence is deeply dependent on the structure of the medium in which it is encoded. But we can't find that out without trying to build minds in some way that is fundamentally different from neural nets.
The fact that spam has grown exponentially since then is proof that "the market" isn't capable of solving the problem.
Obviously you don't understand the situation. The market is perfect and will solve all problems as soon as they appear. Therefore anything that still exists must not be a problem, or the market would have solved it already. Since there are no problems, we know that the market is perfect at solving problems. Just keep repeating that mantra an you too can become a Randian Libertarian mush brain.
But you have the situation wrong. The law does not ban spam; the right of people to send spam is preserved. It makes it illegal to send spam if you:
use a third-party's domain name
without permission, misrepresent or disguise in any other way the message's point of origin or transmission path, or use a misleading subject
line.
IOW, it makes it illegal to send fraudulent spam. There is no constitutionally protected right to engage in fraud, so this is not an attack on free speech.
I wonder if it actually posisble to act evilly in an online RPG, as opposed to just playing an evil character? Evil behavior would be playing in a way designed to spoil the experience of other players -- to cause suffering, not of the character but of the player behind him.
Well, it's obviously possible to act evilly; the very act of suggesting it is evidence that such a possibility exists. More significant is that people are actually doing so. If you read the article, it's clear that people are meeting your definition of evil on-line behavior by doing things such as killing other people's characters to get revenge. What's even more important, and actually the point of the article, is that the on-line evil is felt strongly enough that it's spilling over into the real world. People who are weak in the virtual world but strong in the physical world are getting revenge by taking their grievances off-line.
I think most ISP's (like mine) will disconnect you anyway after enough dead time - I can't think I've ever seen the connection still up
in the morning.
It's not just dead time. I know that at the very least my ISP explicitly states that they will disconnect based on connection time, not on usage level, when they feel the need to disconnect people. I'd strongly recommend looking at your TOS to find out.
Music is our culture. Legal contracts are a simple mechanism of law, a means to an end. Music partially defines who we are. Contracts do not. We can
live without contracts, but we can't live without music.
Maybe music is a vital part of life (I suspect that it's perfectly possible, if a bit less pleasant to live without it) but the music under the control of the RIAA most certainly is not. Try as they will, they can't stop you from singing, whistling, humming, or playing your own instrument, so music will continue to be available no matter what the RIAA tries to do.
OTOH, contracts are a vital part of our lives, whether you want to belive it or not. They form a vital way of forcing people to keep the promises that they made, and that's a big part of what keeps our society afloat. Without enforcable contracts, business as we know it would come to a crashing halt. All financial instruments currently in use depend on contract law to survive, for instance, so there would be no banking, no stock market, and no currency without it. The whole world would operate on the kind of no-good-faith basis that is so prominent in gangster movies, where the only way of ensuring that people keep their deals is the threat of doing something awful to them if they break their word. Since the legal range of awful things is pretty small, that would make everyone very reluctant to do business.
This is incorrect for two reasons. One is that Linus explicitly give permission for non-GPLed programs to use system calls under Linux, so it's perfectly OK to write proprietary software that runs under Linux. More generally, this is not a problem because the GPL considers a work derived if and only if the program is normally distributed as a coherent whole. It's perfectly OK to write non-GPLed code that links to GPLed code if they are distributed separately. A good test of separate distribution is whether one can reasonably expect the GPLed code to exist on the computer already and hence not need to distribute it youself. Something basic like Qt or GTK is likely enough to be on the computer already that you don't need to distribute it with your binaries, so binaries that link against it are not considered to be derived works.
The problem in this case is that the GPLed and non-GPLed parts aren't being distributed separately, and the GPLed code is not something that one could reasonably assume to be present on the system already. The non-GPLed section is effectively crippled when you remove the GPLed stuff, which is a pretty good indication that the composite program is a derived work of the GPLed code. That means that Vidomi should have to follow it's author's wishes and obey the terms of the GPL, which they aren't doing.
I think that you're missing the bigger issue. Basically, Vidomi is turning a GPLed library into a dll and linking a proprietary program against it. They're releasing the code for the dll, but not the program that links to it. Since the GPL claims that work that is commonly distributed as an organic whole constitutes a derivative of any packages that make up the whole, that appears to be a GPL violation; the whole thing should be released under the GPL. If Vidomi wins, it will mean that the GPL is substantially weaker than people have generally believed, as it will be possible to make part-GPL/part-proprietary programs by isolating the GPLed part in a dll.
IMO, the real solution to this "problem" is to use intelligence in choosing how you use your file systems. If you are in an environment where performance is hyper-critical and you need to have rapid, accurate seeks, you just don't use a compressed file system. You only use it for file systems where that's not likely to be a problem. The whole advantage of a pluggable architecture is supposed to be that the various attributes like compression, encryption, etc. are optional, after all.
Of course there's also some question about the practical utility of compressed file systems these days. In practice, we're already using compressed file systems by using compressed file formats of various types. The big files that are going to use up all of the hard drive space for desktop-class users are things like pictures, music, video clips, etc. But those files are already compressed using JPEG, MP3, MPEG, etc., so a compressed file system isn't really going to buy you a whole lot anyway. Doing things that way also has the huge advantage that you can use highly optimized compression algorithms for each different class of data, rather than a generic one that won't work as well. People working on larger, more powerful systems are less likely to be willing to pay the performance hit for compression.
Part of the problem is that they're trying to hit a moving target. It's not as though the Win32 API is as stable as the IA32 instruction set, you know. Microsoft is constantly adding new functions, and they're not quite as eager and Intel is to tell everyone exactly how things are working behind the scenes.
Slashdot Mirror
You need to make up your mind. Is code reuse good or bad? Is making complex programs out of simple components good or bad? Because the whole goal of component architecturs and desktop environments is to bring the concepts of specialized, optimized, single purpose components into the GUI era. The component architecture is designed to allow each GUI program to do one thing and do it well and call on other GUI programs for additional features if they're needed. Shared libraries ("everything depending on everything else") are a result of heavy code reuse; instead of each program designing commonly used features from scratch they use shared libraries.
That's not to say that things couldn't be managed better. It would be nice, for instance, if all of the commonly used components were packaged up into a single tarball for installation so that you only had to download a small number of packages to get the system working, and maybe even a single ./configure; make; make install needed to get the whole thing working. But just as we expect that grep, bash, sed, awk, etc. will each be separately upgradeable, the individual packages still need to be separately available.
ISTR that they were able to put a fairly solid cap on the rest mass of the neutrino based on some observations made during the big 1987 supernova. They detected a neutrino "pulse" (IIRC they only detected 7 neutrinos, but that is a lot for an event taking place that far away) just a few hours after the supernova was first apparent. That let them calculate a lower bound on the ratio of kinetic energy to rest mass for the neutrino and hence (since they can measure the kinetic energy) an upper bound on the rest mass.
You're using a poor standard for value because the relative cost of goods has changed dramatically over time. Take a look at the cost of labor instead of finished goods. In Roman times, an ounce of gold would hire a skilled craftsman for about 3 months or a soldier for 6 months. Today an ounce of gold will hire a skilled craftsman for a day or two and a soldier for maybe 3.
Actually, gold does have a fairly high intrinsic value. It's a very useful material with a variety of highly desirable characteristics. It's nearly perfectly corrosion resistant, easy to work, has a wide range of useful alloys, is a wonderful conductor of heat and electricity, and is extremely reflective. A lot of people also think that it's very attractive. Its use is currently restricted to high-value applications because of its scarcity, but it would be an excellent material for a wide range of everyday applications if it were common enough.
Actually, though, the really significant thing is the difference in quality between a $1000 system from Circuit City and a $1000 system from a high-end stereo store. It's real, noticable, and probably bigger than the difference between the $1000 system and the $10000 system at the high end place. The difference is between a system that was designed with good sound reproduction as its primary goal and one that was designed with features and raw power as its primary goal.
When I was in college, I got a stereo from a high-end store that cost about the same as the systems that several of my friends got from big chain stores. Mine couldn't shake the whole house the way my friends' could, but it sounded a whole lot better at reasonable listening volumes. At just about any price point beyond bare bottom you can get a better sounding system- often much better sounding- by finding one that focuses on quality over gizmos.
That depends a lot. There are probably genuine, if marginal, gains in theoretical sound quality all the way up the scale to that $100,000 system you mention. But my impression is that at just about any price point you can get further by careful comparison shopping than by throwing 2x more money at the problem blindly. It's definitely worth your time to go to the shop with your favorite music in hand and have the guys there hook up the different components you're considering for you to listen to. Even better is if you can get a home trial, since different set ups can sound different in depending on the environment.
Eventually, you'll find that the limit to your system is either your ears or (more likely) your listening environment, rather than your equipment. For most people that's going to be well before they reach the true high-end. Let's face it, most people don't have a place where they can listen to their music that would let them get anything close to the full available range out of a mid-range system, much less a super high end one. Unless you also have the money to invest in an anechoic room for your house, that $100,000 system is going to be money down the drain no matter how good your ears are.
I think that the question of what language to use in an introductory course depends critically on who you expect to be teaching. A lot of people here are suggesting that the first language taught should be a comparatively low level language in order to introduce students to low level concepts as early as possible.
That's great if you're primarily interested in teaching computer scientists, but that's not necessarily the case. Many people- and I might even venture to suggest that it's the vast majority- of people who want/need to learn prgramming concepts are not going into a pure computing career. Instead they're going into business, the sciences, or the arts and need to learn enough programming that they are not completely dependent on CS professionals to get their jobs done. There's a real need for an introductory programming course for non-CS students that teaches very basic programming concepts- data structures, algorithms, etc. Languages like Java, Python, and the like are very appropriate for that sort of introductory class specifically because they do free the programmer from worrying about low level functions so that they can focus on high level concepts.
Well, sadly, Stallman is probably right in this case. The problem is not that "only the bad laws propagate, and not the good" in some abstract sense. The problem is that the law of the place where the suit takes place are allowed to take precidence over those of the place where the alleged offense may have taken place. For a person or organization that is able to practice jurisdictional shopping (i.e. a multi-national corporation) or change the law to suit its purpose (i.e. a government) that will almost always mean the more restrictive law.
One other thing that's potentially very worrying about this is that it may open the door to real legal abuse of another type. If your web site offens a multi-national corporation, they may very well decide to sue you in every country where they do business. There's nothing in particular to stop them from doing this, and they would only need to win one of those suits to put you in a world of hurt. That's nasty.
Don't forget that laws about EULAs may be different in different countries. I personally think that it's quite reasonable to claim that a simple click-through agreement is not enough to disclaim legal responsibility for the contents of a site. If local law somewhere agrees with me on that point, I could sue there and avoid your EULA altogether.
That's the real danger of the situation; people who want to enforce their aims of can shop for a location where the law agrees with them. Want to sue for libel? Find a place where libel laws are very strict. Want to get by a strict EULA? Find a place where click-through EULAs are unenforceable. And, of course, if you're a government this is trivial because you can always re-write your laws in a way that lets you go after the people who are annoying you.
In practice, though, what would happen is that the two companies would come up with a cross-licensing scheme. In essence, each would agree not to pursue the other's infringement in exhange for having its own infringement ignored. It's not an unreasonable thing to do.
Is three finger mousing the accepted way of using the things, then? I never even considered using the mouse any way other than the way that you wound up adopting because using the wheel with the middle finger always felt so awkward. I wondered why so many people complained about the wheel mice, but if they're using the wheel with the middle finger and not moving their index finger that may explain things.
Fortunately not a problem. The stuff works by pure reflectance, so when it's blanked it reverts to white rather than transparent. OTOH, I doubt that it would do too well in the wash or dry cleaners, so I'm not sure if I'd personally want to make clothes out of it.
The sad part is that AFAIK CD prices in the United States are actually lower than they are in Europe. That was certainly true the last time I heard anything about the pricing. I was acting as a guide for some visitors from England and they constantly wanted to go CD shopping because the cost in US dollars was the same as in UK pounds. That meant that CDs were something like 70% more expensive in the UK than the US.
How small a detail you can make out depends pretty critically on how close you are to the detail in question. A human hair is only hundred microns (i.e. a few hundredths of a centimeter) wide, but people have no making out individual hairs at close range. I routinely work with tubing that's 140 microns in outer diameter, and I personally have no trouble seeing it- though it gives some of my co-workers fits. 60 micron diameter optical fiber is a bit tougher to see, but still doesn't require a microscope.
There are some limits, though. The shortest wavelength that the eye can see is about 0.35 microns, and the laws of optics say that you can't make out details much smaller than one wavelength. Light will just diffract around anything much smaller, so it's physically impossible to see something 0.02 microns across, even with a theoretically perfect visible light microscope. That's the exact reason that these kinds of features have been so difficult to make; the same rule that limits the resolving power of a perfect visible light microscope also limits the size of feature you can make with visible light lithography. To make something 0.02 microns across they have to use very short wavelength EM radiation.
Sure it's possible to make something without understanding it 100%, but that's not a very useful approach if the goal is understanding. That's the point. There are a lot of people working in AI whose goal is not AI per se but rather an understanding of the way that the human mind works. To them it's not particularly useful to make a human-level AI if it's nothing but a black box. To them, a lower level of AI is more valuable if it comes with greater understanding.
Quite frankly, I can see exactly where they're coming from. We're already surrounded by more human-level intelligences than we can find productive employment for. Why go out and create more artificial ones that are likely to suffer from exactly the same sorts of problems, only at much greater expense, unless we actually get something useful out of it in the form of increased knowledge?
Well, to some extent that depends on whether your goal is to make human level AI or to use AI to help your understanding of NI. A lot of AI researchers are really more interested in the second than they are in the first, so it's understandable that they're not too happy with neural nets. You don't get very far in understanding the mind if you simply copy it in silicon instead of carbon. It would be much more interesting and instructive to make an AI that didn't use neural nets, because doing so would necessarily imply that it was possible to abstract some deeper core of how intelligence works. Of course it's entirely possible that doing so is a false dream, and that what we think of as intelligence is deeply dependent on the structure of the medium in which it is encoded. But we can't find that out without trying to build minds in some way that is fundamentally different from neural nets.
Obviously you don't understand the situation. The market is perfect and will solve all problems as soon as they appear. Therefore anything that still exists must not be a problem, or the market would have solved it already. Since there are no problems, we know that the market is perfect at solving problems. Just keep repeating that mantra an you too can become a Randian Libertarian mush brain.
But you have the situation wrong. The law does not ban spam; the right of people to send spam is preserved. It makes it illegal to send spam if you:
IOW, it makes it illegal to send fraudulent spam. There is no constitutionally protected right to engage in fraud, so this is not an attack on free speech.
Well, it's obviously possible to act evilly; the very act of suggesting it is evidence that such a possibility exists. More significant is that people are actually doing so. If you read the article, it's clear that people are meeting your definition of evil on-line behavior by doing things such as killing other people's characters to get revenge. What's even more important, and actually the point of the article, is that the on-line evil is felt strongly enough that it's spilling over into the real world. People who are weak in the virtual world but strong in the physical world are getting revenge by taking their grievances off-line.
It's not just dead time. I know that at the very least my ISP explicitly states that they will disconnect based on connection time, not on usage level, when they feel the need to disconnect people. I'd strongly recommend looking at your TOS to find out.
Maybe music is a vital part of life (I suspect that it's perfectly possible, if a bit less pleasant to live without it) but the music under the control of the RIAA most certainly is not. Try as they will, they can't stop you from singing, whistling, humming, or playing your own instrument, so music will continue to be available no matter what the RIAA tries to do.
OTOH, contracts are a vital part of our lives, whether you want to belive it or not. They form a vital way of forcing people to keep the promises that they made, and that's a big part of what keeps our society afloat. Without enforcable contracts, business as we know it would come to a crashing halt. All financial instruments currently in use depend on contract law to survive, for instance, so there would be no banking, no stock market, and no currency without it. The whole world would operate on the kind of no-good-faith basis that is so prominent in gangster movies, where the only way of ensuring that people keep their deals is the threat of doing something awful to them if they break their word. Since the legal range of awful things is pretty small, that would make everyone very reluctant to do business.
This is incorrect for two reasons. One is that Linus explicitly give permission for non-GPLed programs to use system calls under Linux, so it's perfectly OK to write proprietary software that runs under Linux. More generally, this is not a problem because the GPL considers a work derived if and only if the program is normally distributed as a coherent whole. It's perfectly OK to write non-GPLed code that links to GPLed code if they are distributed separately. A good test of separate distribution is whether one can reasonably expect the GPLed code to exist on the computer already and hence not need to distribute it youself. Something basic like Qt or GTK is likely enough to be on the computer already that you don't need to distribute it with your binaries, so binaries that link against it are not considered to be derived works.
The problem in this case is that the GPLed and non-GPLed parts aren't being distributed separately, and the GPLed code is not something that one could reasonably assume to be present on the system already. The non-GPLed section is effectively crippled when you remove the GPLed stuff, which is a pretty good indication that the composite program is a derived work of the GPLed code. That means that Vidomi should have to follow it's author's wishes and obey the terms of the GPL, which they aren't doing.
I think that you're missing the bigger issue. Basically, Vidomi is turning a GPLed library into a dll and linking a proprietary program against it. They're releasing the code for the dll, but not the program that links to it. Since the GPL claims that work that is commonly distributed as an organic whole constitutes a derivative of any packages that make up the whole, that appears to be a GPL violation; the whole thing should be released under the GPL. If Vidomi wins, it will mean that the GPL is substantially weaker than people have generally believed, as it will be possible to make part-GPL/part-proprietary programs by isolating the GPLed part in a dll.
IMO, the real solution to this "problem" is to use intelligence in choosing how you use your file systems. If you are in an environment where performance is hyper-critical and you need to have rapid, accurate seeks, you just don't use a compressed file system. You only use it for file systems where that's not likely to be a problem. The whole advantage of a pluggable architecture is supposed to be that the various attributes like compression, encryption, etc. are optional, after all.
Of course there's also some question about the practical utility of compressed file systems these days. In practice, we're already using compressed file systems by using compressed file formats of various types. The big files that are going to use up all of the hard drive space for desktop-class users are things like pictures, music, video clips, etc. But those files are already compressed using JPEG, MP3, MPEG, etc., so a compressed file system isn't really going to buy you a whole lot anyway. Doing things that way also has the huge advantage that you can use highly optimized compression algorithms for each different class of data, rather than a generic one that won't work as well. People working on larger, more powerful systems are less likely to be willing to pay the performance hit for compression.
Part of the problem is that they're trying to hit a moving target. It's not as though the Win32 API is as stable as the IA32 instruction set, you know. Microsoft is constantly adding new functions, and they're not quite as eager and Intel is to tell everyone exactly how things are working behind the scenes.