At 5000km from impact, you'd get hit with wind doing 978mph and get subjected to 54psi air pressure 4 hours after impact.
Not to disagree with the bulk of your argument, but can you have wind traveling faster than the speed of sound? At any rate, so very much faster than the speed of sound.
I've never really followed the arguments behind why everyone hates software patents. I'm not trolling here, please help me understand.
As I understand it, the idea behind a patent is to encourage an inventor to invest resources in R&D and then to share their new techniology with society, in return for a time-limited monopoly on exploiting that new technology. This is arguably a bit broken at the moment -- largely because patents seem to be overly broad and to last too long -- but the basic idea seems sound.
Enough suits like this, and we could stroll in and fire the board and all the executives, and turn it into something that serves the artists and consumers.
But, why bother?
I would be interested to know what value the record companies provide. If they were to cease to exist, would they be missed? This is not necessarily a hypothetical question, as there are strong indications that the major record companies may in fact cease to exist. That being the case, is it useful to examine what value they bring to:
The artists?
the consumers?
society as a whole?
(Depending on your political stripe you may or may not value the third item at all).
In the past a case could be made that the labels served a useful purpose, They smoothed out artists earning, so that they got paid regularly; they provided recording studios and producers and physical media and distribution when all of these were rare and expensive. They provided publicity and management that talent scouts that arguably did nurture new talent.
Is this the case today?
Does the economy or society benefit or not from the music industry (as presently constituted)?
By the way, if you wish to argue that point three has no value, and no consideration whatsoever need be given to any so called 'rights' of society in this private transaction between parties---then you had best recall that copyright itself is an unnatural right granted by society. A limited monopoly granted for the express purpose of encouraging the creation of works for the common good. If society has no interest in the transaction, then there is no basis for the transaction.
Note: while obviously taking a position to encourage debate I'm not trying to prejudge here. I'm not close enough to the industry to know the answers: do the artists actually benefit from the labels these days?
Yes, that would make sense. I'm remembering an article I read in an old Popular Science in my childhood, and more sophisticated techniques 'upcoming' were described then, including the metal detector.
I couldn't see how "just magnets" (as described in the comment I replied to) would work if only because there needs to be some way to sort by coin type. Every vending machine I use figures out the value of the coins I've fed it.
My understanding was that the coin falls into a balanced cradle that measures the diameter and weight. If it's the wrong size it is rejected (and can fall through to another cradle that tests for a different value coin---and so on). If it is the right size but the wrong weight the cradle tips too far or not far enough and deposits it in the reject slot.
If it's the right size and weight then the coin drops between two magnets onto a little anvil. If the metallic composition is right the coin will slow just enough passing through the magnets to hit the anvil at the right place and speed to bounce into the accept slot. Anything else and it misses.
The end result is a very quick, accurate but cheap analysis of the coin's weight, size and metallic composition.
I know that's the way it used to work. Have they dumbed down the machines recently?
No, not inefficient at all, because of the nature of ZFS.
When you write in ZFS, it does not do a write-in-place, overwriting what was there before. What it does is write a new block somewhere else, then mark the old block as free for garbage collection.
With de-dup, each block also has a reference count. When you write a block it notes that the ref count is greater than one, and does not mark the old block as food for the GC until the ref count decrements to zero.
Note that this is at the block level, not the file level. What means that de-dup is very efficient and has no particular performance penalty for writes. The performance hit only comes in identifying duplicate blocks.
In the above instance, ZFS needs to check to see if the block it just wrote already exists. It does this by calculating a block checksum (which it does anyway, so no extra overhead there), and then looking that up in a table to see if it already exists. If it does, then it changes the reference count of the exiting block.
Note there are two ways to proceed here: One delays the write until the pre-existence of an identical block has been determined. The other writes the block out then checks asynchronously for a duplicate and if found fixes the reference count (and recycles the just written block). I'm not sure which route ZFS takes.
You say "Ball-point pens are to blame", but that implies that you don't like the writing done with ball-point pens.
In fact, the style of writing depends, and has always depended, on the writing technology used.
From chiselling letters into stone, we got serifs. They look beautiful and help reading, but unless you are chiselling inscriptions, you don't tend to use them for writing. Moveable type brought them back for printing, just because they look good.
With a quill pen, you have thick and thin strokes, and you don't want any up strokes, because the nib judders and splatters ink everywhere. The reaction to this was the lovely uncial and half-uncial scripts. Half-uncial is what we now call lower-case. Another solution was black-letter, which was also a solution to the high cost of materials. Black letter is very dense, and quite pretty (in some respects), at the cost of being almost, but not quite, illegible. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read!
The Chinese took a different tack and used a brush rather than a pen. This in turn impacted on the shape of their glyphs.
Then came the steel pen. At first, just a metal replacement for the quill, it evolved with the addition of a rounded blob on the tip. This allowed upstrokes without splatter! But, if you are doing longer continuous strokes and not dipping your pen quite so often, then the nib tends to dry out. Now, enter the fountain pen. A reservoir allows for continuous ink. Other requirements required the development of something other than the thick and corrosive, black "India Ink" (which is a Good Thing if you are writing on vellum, but less so with a steel pen on paper). Blue-black ink became popular. But now it became more important to have as continuous a line as possible. Hence, 'joined up writing'. And once more, people found ways to make it beautiful, even though it gave up the light and strong emphasis of the quill and flat steel nibs.
Then, the ball-point. Special ink that does not dry out in the pen, so joined-up is not necessary. A natural writing angle that is more upright than a nib, which leads to a preference for slightly different letter forms. In other words, with a ball-point pen there is no need for a continuous line, and it's actually slightly more difficult to write in that particular style anyway, which was designed and tuned for a particular technology.
People can write illegibly using almost any technology. I've seen 19th century handwriting that was perfectly legible to my eyes, but I've also seen stuff that is a painful exercise in decryption. Likewise I see people who write, or print, at high speed with a ball point pen and produce beautiful handwriting
Points taken, but OTOH, the EC is fundamentally an economic community, and one with a common currency at that. The regulations that bind all states are mostly to do with commerce, and the EC functions as a more or less uniform economic bloc, and that trend is continuing.
I would argue that comparing the US economy to the Europe is more useful than comparing it to France.
Owing to the financial crisis (of which we are very much aware), our MCPs can't afford to pay us, so
If we insist on payment, they will declare bankruptcy.
If they go bankrupt, we don't get any money out of them.
If we buy back the unused contracts, we at least get some money.
In short, they can choose to have no money, or some money. They can't chose to have all the money though. Rationally, they should choose "some". In fact, they appear to have chosen "none".
Long and bitter experience has proven to me that functional names are a bad idea. Of course, CNAMES are fine, but when "IBM1" became first a Vax then a Sun; when the location names referred to buildings that no longer existed;... Sigh. Pain.
Having tried to get involved a few years back, I think I know why. While I don't deny the extree skill of some of the gnu programmers, GCC, Emacs and Gnuplot are ample evidence of this,
[snip]
Ah, gnuplot has nothing to do with GNU or the FSF.
From the gnuplot FAQ
Any reference to GNUplot is incorrect. The real name of the program is "gnuplot". You see people use "Gnuplot" quite a bit because many of us have an aversion to starting a sentence with a lower case letter, even in the case of proper nouns and titles. gnuplot is not related to the GNU project or the FSF in any but the most peripheral sense. Our software was designed completely independently and the name "gnuplot" was actually a compromise.
and
1.7 Does gnuplot have anything to do with the FSF and the GNU
project?
Gnuplot is neither written nor maintained by the FSF. It is not
covered by the General Public License, either. It used to be distributed
by the FSF, however, due to licensing issues it is no longer.
Gnuplot is freeware in the sense that you don't have to pay
for it. However it is not freeware in the sense that you would be
allowed to distribute a modified version of your gnuplot freely.
Please read and accept the Copyright file in your distribution.
Slashdot Mirror
The wind would be 14900 mph
At 5000km from impact, you'd get hit with wind doing 978mph and get subjected to 54psi air pressure 4 hours after impact.
Not to disagree with the bulk of your argument, but can you have wind traveling faster than the speed of sound? At any rate, so very much faster than the speed of sound.
I've never really followed the arguments behind why everyone hates software patents. I'm not trolling here, please help me understand. As I understand it, the idea behind a patent is to encourage an inventor to invest resources in R&D and then to share their new techniology with society, in return for a time-limited monopoly on exploiting that new technology. This is arguably a bit broken at the moment -- largely because patents seem to be overly broad and to last too long -- but the basic idea seems sound.
See http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2010/03/19/software-patents/
The software patent system may be in need of repair, but is it really worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
It's too broken, too fundamentally broken, to fix.
"The copyright claims are gone, but we have other claims based on contracts," Cahn said.
"it's just a flesh wound!"
"I'm invincible!"
"Come back here and take what's coming to you! I'll bite your legs off!"
I keep wondering when the SEC might start to care, in which case it wouldn't be champagne he'd be sipping, nor would the location be a yacht.
Great Cthulhu is invertebrate, no? Hmm... are we really sure about this explosion thing? Ia! Ia! Fhtagn!
You insensitive clod.
Enough suits like this, and we could stroll in and fire the board and all the executives, and turn it into something that serves the artists and consumers.
But, why bother?
I would be interested to know what value the record companies provide. If they were to cease to exist, would they be missed? This is not necessarily a hypothetical question, as there are strong indications that the major record companies may in fact cease to exist. That being the case, is it useful to examine what value they bring to:
(Depending on your political stripe you may or may not value the third item at all).
In the past a case could be made that the labels served a useful purpose, They smoothed out artists earning, so that they got paid regularly; they provided recording studios and producers and physical media and distribution when all of these were rare and expensive. They provided publicity and management that talent scouts that arguably did nurture new talent.
Is this the case today?
Does the economy or society benefit or not from the music industry (as presently constituted)?
By the way, if you wish to argue that point three has no value, and no consideration whatsoever need be given to any so called 'rights' of society in this private transaction between parties---then you had best recall that copyright itself is an unnatural right granted by society. A limited monopoly granted for the express purpose of encouraging the creation of works for the common good. If society has no interest in the transaction, then there is no basis for the transaction.
Note: while obviously taking a position to encourage debate I'm not trying to prejudge here. I'm not close enough to the industry to know the answers: do the artists actually benefit from the labels these days?
Then I take it GNU renders you apoplectic.
I couldn't see how "just magnets" (as described in the comment I replied to) would work if only because there needs to be some way to sort by coin type. Every vending machine I use figures out the value of the coins I've fed it.
My understanding was that the coin falls into a balanced cradle that measures the diameter and weight. If it's the wrong size it is rejected (and can fall through to another cradle that tests for a different value coin---and so on). If it is the right size but the wrong weight the cradle tips too far or not far enough and deposits it in the reject slot.
If it's the right size and weight then the coin drops between two magnets onto a little anvil. If the metallic composition is right the coin will slow just enough passing through the magnets to hit the anvil at the right place and speed to bounce into the accept slot. Anything else and it misses.
The end result is a very quick, accurate but cheap analysis of the coin's weight, size and metallic composition.
I know that's the way it used to work. Have they dumbed down the machines recently?
And a 255 byte filename limit. Not 255 unicode characters, 255 bytes. ReiserFS got this right. Btrfs alas gets it wrong. (Just call me picky)
When you write in ZFS, it does not do a write-in-place, overwriting what was there before. What it does is write a new block somewhere else, then mark the old block as free for garbage collection.
With de-dup, each block also has a reference count. When you write a block it notes that the ref count is greater than one, and does not mark the old block as food for the GC until the ref count decrements to zero.
Note that this is at the block level, not the file level. What means that de-dup is very efficient and has no particular performance penalty for writes. The performance hit only comes in identifying duplicate blocks.
In the above instance, ZFS needs to check to see if the block it just wrote already exists. It does this by calculating a block checksum (which it does anyway, so no extra overhead there), and then looking that up in a table to see if it already exists. If it does, then it changes the reference count of the exiting block.
Note there are two ways to proceed here: One delays the write until the pre-existence of an identical block has been determined. The other writes the block out then checks asynchronously for a duplicate and if found fixes the reference count (and recycles the just written block). I'm not sure which route ZFS takes.
You say "Ball-point pens are to blame", but that implies that you don't like the writing done with ball-point pens.
In fact, the style of writing depends, and has always depended, on the writing technology used.
From chiselling letters into stone, we got serifs. They look beautiful and help reading, but unless you are chiselling inscriptions, you don't tend to use them for writing. Moveable type brought them back for printing, just because they look good.
With a quill pen, you have thick and thin strokes, and you don't want any up strokes, because the nib judders and splatters ink everywhere. The reaction to this was the lovely uncial and half-uncial scripts. Half-uncial is what we now call lower-case. Another solution was black-letter, which was also a solution to the high cost of materials. Black letter is very dense, and quite pretty (in some respects), at the cost of being almost, but not quite, illegible. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read!
The Chinese took a different tack and used a brush rather than a pen. This in turn impacted on the shape of their glyphs.
Then came the steel pen. At first, just a metal replacement for the quill, it evolved with the addition of a rounded blob on the tip. This allowed upstrokes without splatter! But, if you are doing longer continuous strokes and not dipping your pen quite so often, then the nib tends to dry out. Now, enter the fountain pen. A reservoir allows for continuous ink. Other requirements required the development of something other than the thick and corrosive, black "India Ink" (which is a Good Thing if you are writing on vellum, but less so with a steel pen on paper). Blue-black ink became popular. But now it became more important to have as continuous a line as possible. Hence, 'joined up writing'. And once more, people found ways to make it beautiful, even though it gave up the light and strong emphasis of the quill and flat steel nibs.
Then, the ball-point. Special ink that does not dry out in the pen, so joined-up is not necessary. A natural writing angle that is more upright than a nib, which leads to a preference for slightly different letter forms. In other words, with a ball-point pen there is no need for a continuous line, and it's actually slightly more difficult to write in that particular style anyway, which was designed and tuned for a particular technology.
People can write illegibly using almost any technology. I've seen 19th century handwriting that was perfectly legible to my eyes, but I've also seen stuff that is a painful exercise in decryption. Likewise I see people who write, or print, at high speed with a ball point pen and produce beautiful handwriting
who constituted what they refer to as "people?"
Soylent Green
I would argue that comparing the US economy to the Europe is more useful than comparing it to France.
Germany, France and Britain are all lovely countries with economies just as strong (though obviously not as large) as the US.
Except that we need to compare with Europe as a whole, not just the states within the community.
According to Wolfram (this seems the sort of question it works well with), GDP for USA is $13.78T and Europe is $17.95T
Which is now dead---or at least in a persistent vegetative state.
</irony>
In short, they can choose to have no money, or some money. They can't chose to have all the money though. Rationally, they should choose "some". In fact, they appear to have chosen "none".
No 96 column cards either.
Long and bitter experience has proven to me that functional names are a bad idea. Of course, CNAMES are fine, but when "IBM1" became first a Vax then a Sun; when the location names referred to buildings that no longer existed; ... Sigh. Pain.
Arbitrary is best.
Having tried to get involved a few years back, I think I know why. While I don't deny the extree skill of some of the gnu programmers, GCC, Emacs and Gnuplot are ample evidence of this, [snip]
Ah, gnuplot has nothing to do with GNU or the FSF. From the gnuplot FAQ
and
I'm a fan of pushd/popd
Technically that's Linux only and not UNIX(tm) is it not?
I shall stand on the 'butt-ugly' platform. I'm a certain winner based on this research.
you insensitive clod!!