Well first of all Linus has never been overly concerned with market share, just building a technically damn good kernel so I doubt this will have much practical influence on his work. It's got to be frustrating though, Linux works on massively huge and complex servers. It works on the smallest mobile and embedded devices. But a regular desktop that from the kernel's side is rather simple, one CPU and usually one GPU and pretty much no exotic devices (from the kernel side all USB devices look the same, for example) and no absurd limits being pushed in any direction.
I think the last real significant desktop feature was when they increased interactivity by changing the default time slice from 100 Hz to 1000 Hz and that was in 2004 or so. Heck, I would say it was at least as ready as the BSD kernel was when Apple created OS X in 2001. It's quite telling that the one thing Google did not want to rewrite when they made Android was the kernel. All else they ripped out and replaced with Apache licensed code, but not that. Well that and a bunch of Google proprietary APIs, but that's another flame war. I think I'd feel just the same in his shoes.
Sure, but they're not hosting anything. Links to infringing content are pretty solidly in the realm of the legal. It's actually kind of weird that they rolled over on that one.
They're solidly in the realm of the legal in the US because of USC 17 512(d):
(d) Information Location Tools.- A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, or, except as provided in subsection (j), for injunctive or other equitable relief, for infringement of copyright by reason of the provider referring or linking users to an online location containing infringing material or infringing activity, by using information location tools, including a directory, index, reference, pointer, or hypertext link, if the service provider: (...) (C) upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material;
If they don't respond to DMCA notices they fail condition (C) and become liable. This has been established legal history since way back when web pages used to link to illegal MP3 files, perhaps longer. It's not true in the general case, just because you point them to other website that might contain something illegal won't get you into trouble. But pointing directly to infringing content and claiming you aren't liable because you're not the one hosting it doesn't fly.
If that is so, then I find it abhorrent that the OSS movement prioritizes the freedoms of killing, censorship and persecution above the right to life and live.
What drugs are you on really? You make as much sense as saying that because this knife didn't come with an EULA not to behead unbelievers the manufacturer supports what the Islamic State is doing in Iraq/Syria. I've never to my knowledge bought or owned anything that has a political agenda as condition for use and newer will. I do care how they were produced (no child labor, animal testing, destroying the rain forest, social dumping or so on) but I'd never buy a car that had the gall to tell me where I could and couldn't drive in the EULA. So are you nuts, a troll or just trying to kill OSS? Because you make RMS look pragmatic.
Overage fees are nothing but pure evil. They did use to offer capped DSL and my cell phone data usage is still capped, I ran into it this summer as I was watching videos at the cabin but it doesn't have overage. What happens is at 80% I got a text that I'm getting close on my cap. At 100% I got a new text saying my quota is now up, I'll now either get very, very slow internet connection the rest of the month like enough to check email and barely browse the web, or I can pay up for additional quotas. Back when they offered capped DSL it was the same there.
The biggest benefit to a flat rate connection is that it's flat rate. And particularly today when you got phones and tablets and laptops and consoles and smart TVs and whatnot that all like to go online keeping track of your aggregate data usage is not easy. Overage fees are like the credit card model offering you 30 days free credit. How to do they make money off giving people free money? Because people slip up, get unplanned or unwanted expenses and then they nail the suckers. It's just begging to exploit the people who think they can save a few bucks a month.
Why not just bump the signage by that much, and make the signs themselves the hard limit?
To avoid arguments. If the cops say 11 km/h over an artificially 10 km/h low limit then you weren't speeding just a little, if they said 1 km/h over the limit people go all "waaaaaaa it was only 1 km/h" and "waaaaaaaa your equipment must be off I went 1km/h under". "I wasn't speeding that much" holds a lot less sway than "I wasn't speeding".
Like OCZ which bumped theirs up to 5 years before they imploded? Here's the thing, 2014 was a big year for consoles, both the PS4 and XBone sold many millions of consoles all with AMD semi-custom chips. Yet despite this AMD is barely floating with a small operating income and a tiny loss overall. In 2018, what consoles will be selling? Still the PS4 and XBone but a whole lot less of them.
Two vital quotes from their last earnings call "In the desktop space, demand for our desktop APUs was strong from our OEMs. However, the desktop component channel was softer than we expected." "Inventory was $960 million, up $91 million, primarily driven by increased level of our latest 28-nanometer microprocessor products and lower shipments to channel distributors." Read: APUs go unsold. Either they need to lower production or prices or both.
To be fair, they're hanging on better than I expected but their traditional business still points downwards and breaking new ground is hard. And unless they can turn the trend, it needs to grow a lot and fast to make up for the business that we can see slipping. I wouldn't exactly be sure that AMD will be around to honor that warranty in four years.
At my company (125 users) a while ago we moved to OpenOffice to save money. Users were not happy and started to call it "BrokenOffice".
Which is the real issue in doing an office migration. That and replicating Outlook, I don't know about the whole kitchen sink but at least the whole mail/calendar/meeting bit. Somehow I'm amazed that in the last decade open source hasn't managed to pull it off, what the average office worker does is not rocket science. I guess it's just nobody's itch.
Well when the First Mayor is making statements like "Linux is limping after Microsoft" and the Second Mayor says the "employees are suffering [under Linux]" then I have a fairly good bet on how the "independent" committee to review their OS policy is going to turn out. And maybe finally we can stop flogging this dead horse, because I'm tired of hearing about Munich as the beacon of light that will usher in a new era of Linux on the desktop. It's been rather obvious to all but zealots that they weren't convincing anyone else to make the switch.
Somehow, I still fail to see the point... I can search for "cat" in Google Images, then if I'm not happy then "siamese cat" and finally "siamese cat jumping" because I'm probably looking for one useful picture, not a blurred mess as I'd expect trying to average what a "jump" looks like. And if you ask what an average face looks like, they mean the average feature size and location not a mathematical average. I'm trying to think of one single purpose where the results of this "average browser" is what I'm looking for and I'm coming up blank.
Someone is, yes. Building overpasses or tunnels for pedestrians on every street is not nearly realistic. If you sprint out a doorway you'll cross the sidewalk and hit traffic in less than 0.5 seconds, even with zero reaction time physics won't let a car stop that fast or they'd have to drive a lot slower than cars today. And while their might be auto-only cars, for most the autopilot will be the new cruise control. It will have an off switch. So yes, somebody here is detached from reality.
Valuing people by their number of direct or indirect reports makes a lot of sense. If I am one of a group of ten people and I'm 20% more productive than the others, my extra contribution only adds about 2% to the total. If I am a good manager my staff might be 5% more productive than an average manager's. Think about it.
I wish that would be equally applied on the lower half of the scale, a poor manager who makes his staff 5% less effective than average kills half a year's worth of productivity. Probably even less since poor management often means you end up doing things that are meaningless or inefficient. It doesn't matter that it was done well, because the deliverables won't ever be used.
I think you're trying very hard to avoid seeing the point though. The point is to enable regular people to mine coins using their ordinary GPUs, either benevolently to have a democratic currency or as the cynic in me suggests get buy-in from many enough people. After all, an altcoin that only a few with specialized equipment can mine effectively is likely to never get off the ground. Bitcoin was different because it was first and everyone pulled together to create a cryptocurrency. It's very easy to create an algorithm that uses 1% of a shader's features and that makes a custom ASIC orders of magnitude faster. The other extreme is to build an algorithm where all the bits and pieces and functionality that goes into a shader is needed, if you tried building a custom ASIC you would essentially end up with your own GPU. That's the meaning of ASIC proof.
But not enough credibility for merchants to hold/keep the bitcoins they receive from customers.
I think you're confusing credibility with volatility because their business is making a profit on margins, not playing with currency speculation. Most of the value flows through them as they buy from suppliers and sell to customers, even a relatively small change in value can wipe out their margins. I'm assuming that when I buy something in another country with my VISA then 99.99%+ of the time the store is paid in its local currency, not my currency.
I hereby award you the Hermes Conrad award for meticulous technical correctness. It may be collected at the Central Bureaucracy upon reception of a properly filled out, signed, stamped and notarized Award Reception form.
Then things like allowing execution of arbitrary code in images, another case of MS fucking up in a truly astonishing way - how the hell do things like that end up as anything other than SF novel plot points in a large corporation that is supposed to be competantly managed?
Blame C, zero-terminated strings and strcpy(). That you can copy a string into a buffer that can't hold it with no sanity checking is a disaster waiting to happen. Same that you read beyond the buffer waiting forever for a terminating \0 that'll never happen. Because you don't have objects you don't have sanity checks, even with the "safe" versions you have to make sure to pass the same buffer size twice. No doubt there's code like this where you haven't defined the size through a constant:
char *dst[512];// used to be 1024 strncopy( dst, src, 1024 ):
"High level" programming languages don't let you do that. There's no way to read from a QFile to a QByteArray in Qt/C++ that can cause a buffer overflow. There's no way to read from "beyond the end" of a QByteArray unless you deliberately get the internal pointer and use that directly, all the functions are safe. The C model is that everything is really little boxes in memory that you can store bits and bytes in and the rest is interpretation. You can do stuff like this with no casts or converts:
int a = 5; char *b = &a; b = "abcd"; // value of a is now something entirely different
I know there's a very few low-level, high performance scenarios where this may be useful. But I'd say for >95% of developers, >95% of the time it's only an easy way to shoot yourself in the foot.
It's something of a prisoner's dilemma. I'm feeling quite safe here in Norway without a gun because getting hold of illegal guns is fairly hard. Not extremely hard, but enough that your petty pickpocket/mugger/burglar won't bother. And your victims won't have a gun so it's overkill to rob people at gun point, it just attracts a whole lot of unwanted attention and will put you in jail for longer.
Now if criminals had to assume the regular victim might have a gun he'd have to arm himself, no good robbing your victim at knife point only to be shot dead once you try leaving. Likewise, once you have to assume quite ordinary criminals have guns I'd want to arm myself, so I could shoot them before they'd shoot me. It's also a value issue that can't be definitively answered, do you want to defend your property with your life?
I know that personally I'd rather not put my life on the line if I can help it, between the police and insurance companies I'd rather let them deal with it. Things are just things, they're not my life. That's just me though, others might be of the opinion that the only real defense that doesn't rely on forces beyond your control is self-defense. That you, personally, have to stop him from robbing your wallet and if you get hurt or killed in the process well that's the price.
E-mail is a standard, e-mail is universally used. How else are you going to activate your IM account or contact a business or notify a wide range of customers about your product updates? E-mail is not going anywhere.
The management of my apartment building seem to have two ways of communicating:
1) Facebook group 2) Posters/notice in my mailbox
Sure you can reach them by email and they'll reply by email. But my impression is that this is a "legacy" method compared to a Facebook message. If it's not important enough to warrant physical notices, it's Facebook or not at all.
Smart people can make a lot of money in fields that don't advance human civilization much, particularly not in science and technology. I don't think they're mutually exclusive, Henry Ford wanted to give the average American a car and turn a nice profit on doing it. Pardon me for saying so, but I think those are far more well deserved than developing another high frequency trading algorithm for Wall Street or something like that.
If it came through the warranty period alright, I don't see that there's any problem. Tesla has probably just figured out this hits relatively few but heavy users and ambassadors who'll be happy to get a new battery instead of being hit with a $15,000 bill and continue driving sales. After all, 125,000/8 = 15,625 miles is more than the average US driver goes per year (13,476 miles) and Teslas have probably not been bought by those making regular long hauls.
It does create a rather perverse incentive to drive your Tesla to battery failure before the warranty is up though - say a coast-to-coast supercharger road trip or three on free electricity. I don't know if they'll replace it with a brand new or a refurb but either way it'll be worth more than with a 7.5 year old battery. As long as they're in massive growth sales 5-8 years ago are so much lower that it might not matter though, right now it's all about expansion.
That there's tribes living in the Amazon that aren't part of the economy aren't a drag on anyone else. If you fall out of the economy, that's more your problem than the economy's. In reality it won't come to that though, because the rich will want to have personal assistants, luxury housing, goods and services. They'll get a dress from a famous dress designer no matter what computers and robots could do. Those servants will again put money into a worker's economy. It might be severely diluted by the time it reaches you, but even in a third world African village there's a working market.
However, labor in general is like everything else in capitalism subject to supply and demand. Too much supply, too little demand and wages spiral downwards. The people who have capital may find that they're becoming richer and richer simply by doing nothing, while the workers find that labor pays less and less. On the other hand, that means those with money can hire other people to do things for them cheaply. And that's where I think his horse analogy fails, we prefer service by cars instead of service by horse. While I like some self-service, in many cases I'd prefer talking to an actual human being. It's just that personal service is expensive and so not worth the cost.
I think you're the one with too narrow a definition, for example I can very well imagine Democrats trolling Republican websites and vice versa. Not to make anyone go emotionally overboard, but to sow discord and disrupt their campaign. I can imagine people trolling Scientology forums to stop them recruiting members for their wacky sect. Competitors might go trolling in review sections posting false reviews and rumors.
Debating, even if you're playing the devil's advocate is not trolling as it's taking on a position that's not yours to enhance the debate. Preaching is also not trolling, even if your impervious to counterarguments or changing your mind that's your contribution to the debate. Everything else, everyone looking to disrupt, derail, destroy the forum or alienate individuals I consider a form of trolling, including abusing it for other purposes like spamming.
I'm not sure why you say trolls can't be contrarian then go on to show an example of a troll taking on an extremely opposite position compared to everyone else. What they won't do is play by any civilized or even rational rules of debate. But they will taunt you with bizarre, illogical points of view often with a side of personal snark to make you write a long and fiery diatribe pointing out all the flaws. And then keep baiting you until you catch on.
Or the TL;DR version: Trolling is the noise in the discussion's signal-to-noise ratio.
Slashdot Mirror
Well first of all Linus has never been overly concerned with market share, just building a technically damn good kernel so I doubt this will have much practical influence on his work. It's got to be frustrating though, Linux works on massively huge and complex servers. It works on the smallest mobile and embedded devices. But a regular desktop that from the kernel's side is rather simple, one CPU and usually one GPU and pretty much no exotic devices (from the kernel side all USB devices look the same, for example) and no absurd limits being pushed in any direction.
I think the last real significant desktop feature was when they increased interactivity by changing the default time slice from 100 Hz to 1000 Hz and that was in 2004 or so. Heck, I would say it was at least as ready as the BSD kernel was when Apple created OS X in 2001. It's quite telling that the one thing Google did not want to rewrite when they made Android was the kernel. All else they ripped out and replaced with Apache licensed code, but not that. Well that and a bunch of Google proprietary APIs, but that's another flame war. I think I'd feel just the same in his shoes.
Sure, but they're not hosting anything. Links to infringing content are pretty solidly in the realm of the legal. It's actually kind of weird that they rolled over on that one.
They're solidly in the realm of the legal in the US because of USC 17 512(d):
(d) Information Location Tools.- A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, or, except as provided in subsection (j), for injunctive or other equitable relief, for infringement of copyright by reason of the provider referring or linking users to an online location containing infringing material or infringing activity, by using information location tools, including a directory, index, reference, pointer, or hypertext link, if the service provider:
(...)
(C) upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material;
If they don't respond to DMCA notices they fail condition (C) and become liable. This has been established legal history since way back when web pages used to link to illegal MP3 files, perhaps longer. It's not true in the general case, just because you point them to other website that might contain something illegal won't get you into trouble. But pointing directly to infringing content and claiming you aren't liable because you're not the one hosting it doesn't fly.
If that is so, then I find it abhorrent that the OSS movement prioritizes the freedoms of killing, censorship and persecution above the right to life and live.
What drugs are you on really? You make as much sense as saying that because this knife didn't come with an EULA not to behead unbelievers the manufacturer supports what the Islamic State is doing in Iraq/Syria. I've never to my knowledge bought or owned anything that has a political agenda as condition for use and newer will. I do care how they were produced (no child labor, animal testing, destroying the rain forest, social dumping or so on) but I'd never buy a car that had the gall to tell me where I could and couldn't drive in the EULA. So are you nuts, a troll or just trying to kill OSS? Because you make RMS look pragmatic.
I pick C++ as the weapon!
Since that's not actually a license, I pick lightsaber. Not as clumsy or random as C++. An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age.
But the wheels aren't failing. The skin on the wheels is failing but the wheels will work fine with structure alone.
If that is true, why do the wheels need skin in the first place? I doubt anything on that mission is there for decoration...
Overage fees are nothing but pure evil. They did use to offer capped DSL and my cell phone data usage is still capped, I ran into it this summer as I was watching videos at the cabin but it doesn't have overage. What happens is at 80% I got a text that I'm getting close on my cap. At 100% I got a new text saying my quota is now up, I'll now either get very, very slow internet connection the rest of the month like enough to check email and barely browse the web, or I can pay up for additional quotas. Back when they offered capped DSL it was the same there.
The biggest benefit to a flat rate connection is that it's flat rate. And particularly today when you got phones and tablets and laptops and consoles and smart TVs and whatnot that all like to go online keeping track of your aggregate data usage is not easy. Overage fees are like the credit card model offering you 30 days free credit. How to do they make money off giving people free money? Because people slip up, get unplanned or unwanted expenses and then they nail the suckers. It's just begging to exploit the people who think they can save a few bucks a month.
Why not just bump the signage by that much, and make the signs themselves the hard limit?
To avoid arguments. If the cops say 11 km/h over an artificially 10 km/h low limit then you weren't speeding just a little, if they said 1 km/h over the limit people go all "waaaaaaa it was only 1 km/h" and "waaaaaaaa your equipment must be off I went 1km/h under". "I wasn't speeding that much" holds a lot less sway than "I wasn't speeding".
Like OCZ which bumped theirs up to 5 years before they imploded? Here's the thing, 2014 was a big year for consoles, both the PS4 and XBone sold many millions of consoles all with AMD semi-custom chips. Yet despite this AMD is barely floating with a small operating income and a tiny loss overall. In 2018, what consoles will be selling? Still the PS4 and XBone but a whole lot less of them.
Two vital quotes from their last earnings call "In the desktop space, demand for our desktop APUs was strong from our OEMs. However, the desktop component channel was softer than we expected." "Inventory was $960 million, up $91 million, primarily driven by increased level of our latest 28-nanometer microprocessor products and lower shipments to channel distributors." Read: APUs go unsold. Either they need to lower production or prices or both.
To be fair, they're hanging on better than I expected but their traditional business still points downwards and breaking new ground is hard. And unless they can turn the trend, it needs to grow a lot and fast to make up for the business that we can see slipping. I wouldn't exactly be sure that AMD will be around to honor that warranty in four years.
At my company (125 users) a while ago we moved to OpenOffice to save money. Users were not happy and started to call it "BrokenOffice".
Which is the real issue in doing an office migration. That and replicating Outlook, I don't know about the whole kitchen sink but at least the whole mail/calendar/meeting bit. Somehow I'm amazed that in the last decade open source hasn't managed to pull it off, what the average office worker does is not rocket science. I guess it's just nobody's itch.
Well when the First Mayor is making statements like "Linux is limping after Microsoft" and the Second Mayor says the "employees are suffering [under Linux]" then I have a fairly good bet on how the "independent" committee to review their OS policy is going to turn out. And maybe finally we can stop flogging this dead horse, because I'm tired of hearing about Munich as the beacon of light that will usher in a new era of Linux on the desktop. It's been rather obvious to all but zealots that they weren't convincing anyone else to make the switch.
Somehow, I still fail to see the point... I can search for "cat" in Google Images, then if I'm not happy then "siamese cat" and finally "siamese cat jumping" because I'm probably looking for one useful picture, not a blurred mess as I'd expect trying to average what a "jump" looks like. And if you ask what an average face looks like, they mean the average feature size and location not a mathematical average. I'm trying to think of one single purpose where the results of this "average browser" is what I'm looking for and I'm coming up blank.
Mental Masturbation
Someone is, yes. Building overpasses or tunnels for pedestrians on every street is not nearly realistic. If you sprint out a doorway you'll cross the sidewalk and hit traffic in less than 0.5 seconds, even with zero reaction time physics won't let a car stop that fast or they'd have to drive a lot slower than cars today. And while their might be auto-only cars, for most the autopilot will be the new cruise control. It will have an off switch. So yes, somebody here is detached from reality.
Valuing people by their number of direct or indirect reports makes a lot of sense. If I am one of a group of ten people and I'm 20% more productive than the others, my extra contribution only adds about 2% to the total. If I am a good manager my staff might be 5% more productive than an average manager's. Think about it.
I wish that would be equally applied on the lower half of the scale, a poor manager who makes his staff 5% less effective than average kills half a year's worth of productivity. Probably even less since poor management often means you end up doing things that are meaningless or inefficient. It doesn't matter that it was done well, because the deliverables won't ever be used.
I think you're trying very hard to avoid seeing the point though. The point is to enable regular people to mine coins using their ordinary GPUs, either benevolently to have a democratic currency or as the cynic in me suggests get buy-in from many enough people. After all, an altcoin that only a few with specialized equipment can mine effectively is likely to never get off the ground. Bitcoin was different because it was first and everyone pulled together to create a cryptocurrency. It's very easy to create an algorithm that uses 1% of a shader's features and that makes a custom ASIC orders of magnitude faster. The other extreme is to build an algorithm where all the bits and pieces and functionality that goes into a shader is needed, if you tried building a custom ASIC you would essentially end up with your own GPU. That's the meaning of ASIC proof.
But not enough credibility for merchants to hold/keep the bitcoins they receive from customers.
I think you're confusing credibility with volatility because their business is making a profit on margins, not playing with currency speculation. Most of the value flows through them as they buy from suppliers and sell to customers, even a relatively small change in value can wipe out their margins. I'm assuming that when I buy something in another country with my VISA then 99.99%+ of the time the store is paid in its local currency, not my currency.
I hereby award you the Hermes Conrad award for meticulous technical correctness. It may be collected at the Central Bureaucracy upon reception of a properly filled out, signed, stamped and notarized Award Reception form.
Then things like allowing execution of arbitrary code in images, another case of MS fucking up in a truly astonishing way - how the hell do things like that end up as anything other than SF novel plot points in a large corporation that is supposed to be competantly managed?
Blame C, zero-terminated strings and strcpy(). That you can copy a string into a buffer that can't hold it with no sanity checking is a disaster waiting to happen. Same that you read beyond the buffer waiting forever for a terminating \0 that'll never happen. Because you don't have objects you don't have sanity checks, even with the "safe" versions you have to make sure to pass the same buffer size twice. No doubt there's code like this where you haven't defined the size through a constant:
char *dst[512]; // used to be 1024
strncopy( dst, src, 1024 ):
"High level" programming languages don't let you do that. There's no way to read from a QFile to a QByteArray in Qt/C++ that can cause a buffer overflow. There's no way to read from "beyond the end" of a QByteArray unless you deliberately get the internal pointer and use that directly, all the functions are safe. The C model is that everything is really little boxes in memory that you can store bits and bytes in and the rest is interpretation. You can do stuff like this with no casts or converts:
int a = 5;
// value of a is now something entirely different
char *b = &a;
b = "abcd";
I know there's a very few low-level, high performance scenarios where this may be useful. But I'd say for >95% of developers, >95% of the time it's only an easy way to shoot yourself in the foot.
It's something of a prisoner's dilemma. I'm feeling quite safe here in Norway without a gun because getting hold of illegal guns is fairly hard. Not extremely hard, but enough that your petty pickpocket/mugger/burglar won't bother. And your victims won't have a gun so it's overkill to rob people at gun point, it just attracts a whole lot of unwanted attention and will put you in jail for longer.
Now if criminals had to assume the regular victim might have a gun he'd have to arm himself, no good robbing your victim at knife point only to be shot dead once you try leaving. Likewise, once you have to assume quite ordinary criminals have guns I'd want to arm myself, so I could shoot them before they'd shoot me. It's also a value issue that can't be definitively answered, do you want to defend your property with your life?
I know that personally I'd rather not put my life on the line if I can help it, between the police and insurance companies I'd rather let them deal with it. Things are just things, they're not my life. That's just me though, others might be of the opinion that the only real defense that doesn't rely on forces beyond your control is self-defense. That you, personally, have to stop him from robbing your wallet and if you get hurt or killed in the process well that's the price.
5) Cops knocking down the door - WTF what have my kids done now?
E-mail is a standard, e-mail is universally used. How else are you going to activate your IM account or contact a business or notify a wide range of customers about your product updates? E-mail is not going anywhere.
The management of my apartment building seem to have two ways of communicating:
1) Facebook group
2) Posters/notice in my mailbox
Sure you can reach them by email and they'll reply by email. But my impression is that this is a "legacy" method compared to a Facebook message. If it's not important enough to warrant physical notices, it's Facebook or not at all.
But hey, you can chuck a cup of coffee over the keyboard then beat someone to death with it and it'll keep on truckin'.
Not sure about the coffee, but the rest is has been a killer feature of IBM keyboards ever since the model M.
Smart people can make a lot of money in fields that don't advance human civilization much, particularly not in science and technology. I don't think they're mutually exclusive, Henry Ford wanted to give the average American a car and turn a nice profit on doing it. Pardon me for saying so, but I think those are far more well deserved than developing another high frequency trading algorithm for Wall Street or something like that.
If it came through the warranty period alright, I don't see that there's any problem. Tesla has probably just figured out this hits relatively few but heavy users and ambassadors who'll be happy to get a new battery instead of being hit with a $15,000 bill and continue driving sales. After all, 125,000/8 = 15,625 miles is more than the average US driver goes per year (13,476 miles) and Teslas have probably not been bought by those making regular long hauls.
It does create a rather perverse incentive to drive your Tesla to battery failure before the warranty is up though - say a coast-to-coast supercharger road trip or three on free electricity. I don't know if they'll replace it with a brand new or a refurb but either way it'll be worth more than with a 7.5 year old battery. As long as they're in massive growth sales 5-8 years ago are so much lower that it might not matter though, right now it's all about expansion.
That there's tribes living in the Amazon that aren't part of the economy aren't a drag on anyone else. If you fall out of the economy, that's more your problem than the economy's. In reality it won't come to that though, because the rich will want to have personal assistants, luxury housing, goods and services. They'll get a dress from a famous dress designer no matter what computers and robots could do. Those servants will again put money into a worker's economy. It might be severely diluted by the time it reaches you, but even in a third world African village there's a working market.
However, labor in general is like everything else in capitalism subject to supply and demand. Too much supply, too little demand and wages spiral downwards. The people who have capital may find that they're becoming richer and richer simply by doing nothing, while the workers find that labor pays less and less. On the other hand, that means those with money can hire other people to do things for them cheaply. And that's where I think his horse analogy fails, we prefer service by cars instead of service by horse. While I like some self-service, in many cases I'd prefer talking to an actual human being. It's just that personal service is expensive and so not worth the cost.
I think you're the one with too narrow a definition, for example I can very well imagine Democrats trolling Republican websites and vice versa. Not to make anyone go emotionally overboard, but to sow discord and disrupt their campaign. I can imagine people trolling Scientology forums to stop them recruiting members for their wacky sect. Competitors might go trolling in review sections posting false reviews and rumors.
Debating, even if you're playing the devil's advocate is not trolling as it's taking on a position that's not yours to enhance the debate. Preaching is also not trolling, even if your impervious to counterarguments or changing your mind that's your contribution to the debate. Everything else, everyone looking to disrupt, derail, destroy the forum or alienate individuals I consider a form of trolling, including abusing it for other purposes like spamming.
I'm not sure why you say trolls can't be contrarian then go on to show an example of a troll taking on an extremely opposite position compared to everyone else. What they won't do is play by any civilized or even rational rules of debate. But they will taunt you with bizarre, illogical points of view often with a side of personal snark to make you write a long and fiery diatribe pointing out all the flaws. And then keep baiting you until you catch on.
Or the TL;DR version: Trolling is the noise in the discussion's signal-to-noise ratio.